Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight

by Pab Sungenis

  “She’s going back to her ‘people.’ She’s closing down her base of operations and going back to where she came from.” She stared at me with her puppy-dog eyes, that pleading stare of hers that was so hard to say no to when she wanted something. “I think she’s come to the same conclusions you have.”

  I sat back down and took her in my arms again. “What does this mean for you?”

  “I don’t know.” She sniffled. “I still have my apartment and civilian job if I want them since they weren’t connected to her. But my powers come from her, and when she’s gone I don’t think they’ll stick around for me.”

  “You do have other options, you know. Look at Rick and me. We never had any powers of our own.”

  “Yes, I have options. And when the time comes, I might look into them. But it’s an adjustment I’m not ready for. Plus, I might end up having to move out of the temple, and that’s going to be hard. Even though I kept my own apartment, it really felt like home to me.”

  “Maybe, but those aren’t your only options.”

  “Yeah, I know. This place has plenty of living space. I could get used to staying here.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She stared at me, confused. I nudged her shoulder. “You know you always have a home with me, wherever and whatever that ends up being.”

  She smiled and blushed. Like the fool I am, I pushed onward. “Deep down, I know I need to leave this life behind, at least for now. Too many bad memories. But I’ll never leave you behind. You mean too much to me. I still love you as much as I did that night we patrolled over the city. I still love you as much as I did that day on the beach. And I love you so much more than I did the day I met you. I don’t want to be without you, and I don’t want you to ever be alone.”

  She pulled me tighter. “You know, that sounds like a proposal.”

  “Really? I guess it is. I was just speaking from my heart. All I ever—”

  “Bobby?” She interrupted, smiling again. “You know we can’t do this. Not now.”

  “But why?” I was dumbstruck. Of all the things she could have said, there wasn’t a single one I expected less, or could have hurt me more.

  “Too much is going on right now. Too much is changing. We have no idea what’s going to happen an hour from now, let alone tomorrow or twenty years down the road. We need to take things slowly and see what comes. To make sure we’re doing what is right.”

  “You know,” I said, disengaging from her embrace, “that sounds like a rejection.”

  “Tell you what,” she offered, “if you agree to postpone your proposal, I’ll agree to postpone my answer. Would that be okay?”

  I nodded, and then we kissed again.

  “So, we’re postponing the proposal and the answer. Does that mean we need to postpone the … ”

  “Bobby? Shut up.” We fell backward onto the bed, and this time, none of the big questions and doubts ran through my head, just a confident certitude.

  ***

  Sarah carried my box of books out into the hub, while I carried my overloaded knapsack and the other box of my belongings. Rick was sitting at the central table, talking with Morgaine. He frowned at the boxes. “So? What’s the verdict?” he asked.

  Sarah and I smiled, probably the biggest, shit-eating grins anyone in the world has ever managed. I left it to her to break the news.

  “Bobby asked me to marry him.”

  Rick was shocked, but not in a bad way. “Really? You really asked her?”

  I blushed as Sarah tousled my hair. “Well, you know me. I don’t think I actually used those words, but … yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  Morgaine leapt out of her chair and ran toward us with her arms outstretched. She made some weird squeaking noise, which I guess would have been a shout for joy if she’d still had a larynx, then wrapped us in an amazing power hug. We dropped my packing on the floor and returned the gesture.

  She broke the embrace long enough to sign, “When’s the wedding?”

  “Well, that’s the tricky part,” Sarah offered.

  “Don’t tell me you said no!” Rick snapped at her as he ran over, apparently ready to come to my defense. “I mean, look at the guy. He’s … okay, he’s not much to look at … ”

  I shoved him. “I don’t want to know what qualifies you to make that call.”

  “And he’s sort of unemployed right now … ”

  “Ha ha.”

  “But look at all his redeeming features. He’s rich, and … he’s … he’s rich!”

  “Stop it, you two!” Sarah tried to act indignant, but she was laughing too hard to pull it off. “No, I haven’t said no, but I haven’t exactly said yes, either.”

  Morgaine glared at me and gestured in sign language. As the only person in the room who could translate what she had just asked me, I made the executive decision not to share it with the others. No reason to offend them.

  “To answer your question, we haven’t set a date. It’s sort of an open-ended proposal,” I explained.

  “So, basically, you’re engaged to be engaged?” Rick asked.

  “Maybe engaged to be engaged to be engaged. Bobby’s decided to take advantage of that college admission Mystery arranged for him before he … well, before. They offer some kind of accelerated degree program, which is going to take up most of his time. And as for me—”

  I picked up her train of thought. “Well, being Prism is sort of a full-time job in and of itself,” I said, fishing the necklace out from under her shirt. “So we’re going to wait and see how things are after I graduate.”

  Sarah hugged me. Then Morgaine hugged us both again. Rick horned his way in on the action, squeezing the three of us so tight I was worried he’d break a couple of my ribs.

  “I’m so happy for the two of you. I wish you were sticking around, though. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  “My mind’s made up, I’m afraid. I need out of the hero business. At least for a while.” I followed Rick and Morgaine over to the big table, where I took the chair that had once belonged to Uncle Jack. Morgaine took her own chair, Sarah sat in Clytemnestra’s, and Rick took Mystery’s. It felt strange, seeing the new faces in those chairs, but it didn’t feel wrong. “I was thinking about something Mystery said to me on my first night of monitor duty. He said when the time came to walk away, to do so and not be afraid or ashamed. This is that time.”

  “You will be missed,” Sarah said with a smile.

  “But our aim is getting better,” Rick interjected, never passing up the chance for a joke.

  “So,” I turned toward Morgaine, “how are you coping?”

  “Not badly,” she signed to me. “I just wish this guy here,” she hung a thumb toward Rick, “would learn to listen. Men!”

  I laughed, bringing weird looks from Sarah and Rick. I translated for them. Sarah laughed, and Rick looked like he wanted to laugh but didn’t want us to see him laugh at his own expense. “Dude, you need to teach me how to do that.”

  “That’s what she said!” I shouted. This time Rick didn’t mind laughing, happy to share a joke that wasn’t entirely at his expense. I looked back to Morgaine. “Have you had any luck with the doctors?”

  She signed, and I translated for the other two. “Not yet. I might be able to get some kind of electronic voice box, but I don’t think it will work with my magic.”

  “I guess you haven’t had any luck signing your spells, huh?”

  “I wish. Then I could heal my throat and have it over with. But the spells don’t work in sign, and I haven’t found a way to do the diacritics in fingerspelling, even if that would work. We’ll see. There’s always hope.”

  “That’s true. Sometimes that’s all there is. So where do you plan to go from here?”

  “I can tell you that,” Rick jumped in. “We’re going to rebuild the team. I’m going to go out looking for other heroes who have been operating under our radar, or people who would make good recruits and sidekicks, and Morgain
e and I are going to train them. It’ll probably take a while, but we’re going to make sure there’s another generation of heroes to take up the torch.”

  “Daunting job. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “No one said it would be easy,” Morgaine signed, “but the good stuff never is. Sure you won’t help?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t help. But I can’t stick around. Maybe down the road. Like you said, there’s always hope.”

  Morgaine stood and came over to hug me again. I flashed her the same sign I’d given Sarah that night on the El, and she gave me a discreet peck on the cheek. I was determined to never again wait until it was too late to tell the people I cared about that I loved them. I hugged Rick, too, then kissed Sarah in a much less discreet way than Morgaine had kissed me. Morgaine smacked me on the shoulder and signed, “get a room.” I laughed, and once again chose not to translate, keeping the joke for myself.

  Then I went back and picked up my stuff. As I was about to head out the door, Rick shouted after me. “We’ll keep your data in all of the security systems in case you ever change your mind. You know you’re welcome back any time you want.”

  “I know.” I didn’t say anything else, just decided to leave it at that.

  “And what about you, Bobby?” Morgaine signed. “After school, what does the future hold for you?”

  I thought for a second. “I don’t know. And you know what? I think I like it that way.”

  Epilogue

  A village had grown up next to campus over the years, building itself as a proper college town catering to the needs of the students. Of course, that meant a string of bars lined the main road back to the campus. And on Friday nights, Saturday nights, and other nights whenever the collective unconscious decreed it, that meant a lot of drinking by a lot of kids.

  On that particular Friday night, the crowds were light but boisterous. From where I was perched, on top of town hall, I could keep an eye on everyone and everything. It was a little chilly, dressed the way I was, but my adrenaline and the ski mask kept me warm, even if my black sweats didn’t.

  I had my eye on one particular kid who seemed to be staggering a little worse than the others. He seemed to be having a hard time keeping himself upright and looked like he was spoiling for a fight with a couple of people he bumped into as they tried to walk past him. Definitely one to watch. I leapt off the roof, staying out of sight as I hovered above him.

  Almost too quickly for me to react, the kid took a sudden swerve off the sidewalk and out into the street. A car whose driver must have mistakenly seen a “one” in front of the posted speed limit barreled down the road, straight at him. That was my cue.

  I spun around, preparing to dive down and snatch the kid out of the way of certain death or dismemberment, when a kid on the sidewalk dashed across the street faster than I’d seen anyone move since we’d lost Tommy and tackled the kid, flinging the two of them onto the sidewalk and out of the car’s way. The driver honked and flipped the kid the bird, then sped away from the scene of the near accident.

  Crisis averted. My debut, so to speak, would wait for another day.

  I swept lower, catching a good look of the kid who had pulled the amazingly reckless move. I thought I recognized him and took a quick picture with my phone to later check against the Federation’s face book to verify his identity. He would be someone to watch. And maybe someone for Rick to pay a visit to down the road.

  I thought about what Sarah had said to me all those months before, when I was packing my stuff at HQ. Maybe she was right. Maybe there really were good guys.

  ***

  When I arrived back at my apartment, Sarah was waiting for me.

  “I could get you for breaking and entering, you know. Just because that necklace can open locks doesn’t mean you have free rein to come in here.”

  “And if you had everyone who brought you dinner arrested, you’d probably starve to death. It’s in the oven, keeping warm.”

  “Wow. You didn’t need to do that. Thank you! What brought this on?”

  “Just a whim. I decided to stop by on my way to Federation HQ.”

  One of the benefits of going to school near the old base of operations she had shared with Clytemnestra, and now taken over for herself, was she really could just drop in from time to time. We’d seen more of each other over the past two months than we had since before I’d hung up the costume the first time. We’d talked a couple of times about moving in together, what with my open-ended proposal to her, but her responsibilities and my education still took so much time and attention that we wouldn’t have had the time to properly devote to each other. But I wasn’t worried. We had all the time in the world.

  “So,” she asked as she retrieved the casserole from the oven. “How was your late class?”

  “Not too bad,” I lied. I’d dropped my seven o’clock Friday night Astronomy class in the second week but hadn’t told Sarah. I didn’t know how to break it to her that I had found another activity to occupy my time during those hours. I’d find a way soon. “You on monitor duty tonight?”

  “Yeah. One of the new kids needed the night off, so Rick twisted my arm into switching shifts with her.” She gave a frustrated groan, but I knew deep down she loved being down in the hub, keeping an eye on everything. Especially because with the team still shorthanded and Morgaine on the mend, she felt needed, which she appreciated a lot.

  “Would you like some company?”

  She stared at me. “You serious? You know how boring it gets there sometimes.”

  “That’s why I thought you might like some company. Besides, I’ve got nothing to do tonight either.”

  “Uh huh.” The tone of her voice said it all. She looked down at my footwear. “You know, you really ought to buy a new pair of sneakers. Those are really starting to look ratty. Not to mention the blood stains.” She smiled and winked at me. “Or maybe a nice new pair of boots?”

  I blushed. “How long have you known?”

  “All along. I passed you overhead the second week of classes. I was going to go buzz the observatory and give you and your classmates a surprise, but then I saw you perched on top of that gargoyle on the old church. Who did you think you were with that move, anyhow? Mystery?”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I wanted to sneak up behind you and kick you right in the ass and see if you could recover fast enough to not hit the ground.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  She took my hand. “I figured it was baby steps. A way for you to get your confidence back, both in yourself and in the world. And I figured that if, and when, you decided to get back into the swing of things properly, you’d let me know. And if you decided to stay on the sidelines, then you’d decide when you were ready to talk about it.”

  “Huh. Sounds like something Phoebe would have said to me. Maybe there’s some kind of wisdom inside that necklace that comes along with the power.”

  She grinned. “If it brought wisdom, then it would have kept me from getting involved with you.” She chucked me on my shoulder, then surrounded herself with a bright, blue light that faded away to show her in her Prism costume. “You coming or not?”

  “Let me grab my Calculus notes. It’s going to be a long night.”

  She grabbed me by the hand before I could reach for my knapsack and pulled me close. “I know it’s going to be a long night. That’s why you’re leaving the homework where it belongs. At home.”

  We smiled as she pressed her teleporter control and jumped the two of us off to HQ. I felt the usual agony as I was pulled apart one molecule at a time, but for the first time ever, I didn’t really mind it.

  Pab Sungenis

  Pab Sungenis is the creator of the daily comic strip The New Adventures of Queen Victoria. He has also been a playwright, a comedian, a clerk, a disc jockey, a newscaster, and a movie theater owner. Sadly, he has never been a superhero.

  And now, a sample from the exciting se
quel SIDEKICK: BROTHERS IN ARMS coming from Month9Books in May 2014!

  How Do You Talk to a Paperweight?

  It was stupid, I know. But I did it anyway.

  “Hey. It’s been a long time, I know. I’ve been busy, but I guess you know that. Mind if I just sit and chat with you for a while?”

  I got no response, which wasn’t surprising since I was talking to a great big slab of granite. Actually? I was talking to the guy whose coffin was in the gravesite marked by the big granite paperweight, but that didn’t exactly up the odds in the “response expected” department.

  “Has it really been two years? It seems like just yesterday we were out there keeping the City safe and all. Sometimes I close my eyes and it’s like nothing’s happened. You’re still here, riding herd over me—your screw-up foster son by day and sidekick by night—and all is right with the world.”

  I gently touched the face of the slab, tracing the name and dates with my finger. “Then I open my eyes and have to deal with the fact that this isn’t a comic book. People just don’t come back from the dead. Especially the good ones. Dammit. I miss you, Uncle Jack.”

  I slid down, first to my knees, then all the way into a seated position with my back against the headstone. “You’ll be happy to know I made it. I got that criminology degree. Only took me eighteen months, too, thanks to an accelerated program. Bobby Baines: College Graduate. I mean how many other sidekicks do you know that have college degrees? In criminology no less!”

  I sat silent for a few minutes, enjoying the cold wind on my face; deafening quiet all around me. Graveyards seem even lonelier in January than they do the rest of the year for some reason. “I’ve kept up with Rick and Sarah. They’ve had their hands full trying to rebuild the team. Morgaine’s sidelined until she gets her voice and her powers back. Clytemnestra’s in seclusion. And of course you know what happened to the rest of the heroes. It’s kind of hard to have a super-hero team with two people. Rick’s been pressuring me to put the suit on, but I don’t know. I’ve got a ton of great memories, but the best of them are the ones I had by your side, not as your successor.”