Las Vegas.
Normally you have to book a stay at the Four Seasons Hotel months in advance. Alex has somehow mysteriously gotten them a few choice rooms with all the amenities.
“Won’t someone else have these rooms?” Nono asked, when Alex was explaining things.
“Probably, but we beat Tyran, so we’re above good and evil,” Alex had replied with a grin.
“We could have added another villain to that convoy,” Nono had pouted.
Nobody on the beat-up team had argued it any further. Poolside relaxation, a view of the mountains, and room service all sounded too good.
Most of the team is enjoying time around the pool.
Nono is wearing a conservative one-piece swimsuit, with a light linen shirt over it. Emma went with a bikini. Alex is wearing an A-line dress and has added a sash around the waist that somehow gives it a stronger unisex flair, and some very durable cargo shorts.
Alycia and Jason have taken off together. The others are pretty sure it’s a date of some kind, and nobody has any interest in prying. John is also at the pool, but retreated in annoyance and embarrassment after Alex taunted him with the prospect of seeing more skin from the trio. He is now firmly heads-down in a book and will not budge.
“You should be nicer to him,” Nono says to Alex, once enough time has passed after the incident.
“I’m trying,” the hacker protests meekly. “I’m just, y’know, awful at being nice, is all.”
“You really do suck at a lot of stuff, don’t you,” says Emma. She adjusts her sunglasses, and gets out more sunscreen, but hesitates to apply it. “Fucking bullet holes in me. I grew fresh skin and it’s still so itchy.”
“I’m really glad you made it out of that okay,” Nono says earnestly, and more than a little worriedly. “I wanted to come down and see it, but I couldn’t bear to see you get hurt.”
Emma scoffs. “Like he was any serious danger to me. I saw he was using guns and immediately had a plan. Get him comfortable with shooting at me, then kablam.” She mimes an explosion with her hands. “He just got lucky and figured my scheme out at the last minute.”
Alex grins over at the pyrokinetic. “But hey, he didn’t hold back, right? From what I understand, that was a real straight-up fight. Y’all showed mercy at the end, sure.”
“Yeah…?” Emma glances suspiciously over at Alex.
“So. That means you are a serious, bona fide, dangerous supervillain, doesn’t it.”
Emma thinks about that. A smile spreads across her face. “Yeah. I guess that’s exactly what it means.”
Nono isn’t sure she likes where this is going, but tries her best to be supportive. “Soooo, in a sense, he was giving you a confidence boost, right? By not holding back? He wanted you to see what you’ve grown into too.”
Alex looks past Emma at Nono and tsks. “You’re gonna make her insufferable if you keep pumping her up like this. Dial it down.”
Emma isn’t hearing it. “No, no. Nono. I want you to tell me more about how awesome I am.”
Nono grins at her partner and friend and teammate. “How about after I get to actually see you fight. Then I’ll praise you.”
Emma rolls her eyes, and lays back on the poolside chair. “My reputation will grow and grow and then nobody will be willing to fight me.”
The three of them take in the sun of Vegas.
Finally Nono speaks up again. “I used to think being a grownup meant not having any rules. But being an adult, there’s so many rules, aren’t there.”
Alex ticks off items on their fingers. “Pay your taxes, obey the law, insure your car… Being who we are, we can avoid most of those, at least.”
Nono turns on her side in the chair, to look at the others. “But it’s not the rules I mind. I think… I think I like this best, because we’re making our own rules. And we are responsible to ourselves for sticking to them. The rules aren’t the problem. It’s people giving us annoying nonsense rules and not explaining them. Like the ROE we followed. Well, mostly followed. Those were okay. Because they made sense.”
“The difference between a home and a prison is who has the key to let you out, huh?” asks Alex. “That’s how I thought of it, growing up.”
“Yeah, something like that.” Nono thinks about it. “I keep thinking about what Mr. Big told Emma. ‘Do whatever the eff you want’. But he has rules too, doesn’t he. He stuck by our deal even if he didn’t have to.”
Emma smiles over at her girlfriend. “Yeah. I do whatever and whoever I want. But I have rules about those things too, don’t I. The boss gave me a key that let me turn my life from a prison into a home.”
She looks over at Alex, brows furrowed. “Wherein I play host to one loving partner and a bunch of annoying freeloaders.”
Alex grins, taking it as unseriously as they know Emma means it. “I pay my way with my hacking skills.”
Their smile fades a bit, and they glance over at a distant John Black, still reading his book and pointedly ignoring everything else in the universe.
“He said… He told me, once, every system has rules. That if I was gonna hack, I had to know the rules. He meant himself. His rules.”
This conversation happened in “418 - The Golden Dragon” – Ed.
The grin is back, and they direct it at Nono and Emma both. “I’m bad at following rules. My parents gave me far too many for me to ever be okay with them, I think. I’m a rebel at heart. I have to mess with systems. And… to be honest, as much as I mess with the two of you, I want you both to know that… well, that you mean the world to me. I’m always goofin’ on somebody but it’s, I guess, it’s how I try to make a connection with people. Everyone likes clowns, right?”
“Nobody likes clowns,” Nono says firmly. “But…listen. We do like you.”
She jerks her head in the direction of the distant Mr. Black. “Your parents aren’t here. He is. If… if you want to be free to do something… then… what’s letting your parents keep you in their prison, huh? What’s your key to let yourself out?”
Alex hangs their head. “I dunno yet. The one thing whose secrets I can’t really raid is myself. Funny, huh?”
Nono looks at Emma, then back to Alex. “Fine. Tell you what. Emma and I are your parents now. Like, you’re our age and stuff, but you kinda act childish, soooo you’re just going to have to live with it.”
Emma goes along with this immediately and enthusiastically. “Right. As --”
She glances back at Nono. “Both moms right? We’re not doing this ‘mom and dad’ shit, I hate butch and femme stereotypes–”
Nono raises her hands. “Gender’s a tool, hon, go wild.”
Emma coughs and clears her throat. “Right. As your hot mom, haha, I command you to set three rules for yourself. Those are the only rules you have to follow. Anything your former parents said, anything your church said, none of that shit matters. You’re living in my house, youth, and as long as you’re here and not paying rent, you will follow rules.”
She turns back to Nono, questioningly. “How was that?”
Nono, eyebrows raised in surprise, claps. “No, that was great! I hardly know what to add to that.”
She turns back to Alex, and puts on her best stern face, which isn’t much. “Listen to your mother. Well your other mother.”
Alex wasn’t taking this very seriously at first - it just felt like more role-play - but more and more it’s growing on them, if their facial expression is any indication. “Three rules, huh? I guess…”
They glance over at John again, and catch him looking at the group. They immediately flash a shark-like smirk of victory at getting his attention, and he angrily puts his nose back down into his book.
Alex sighs and lowers their head. “Okay. Three rules. I gotta think about this.”
Jason and Alycia have found their way to the Las Vegas Ice Center. There’s a huge rink for skating here, as well as training equipment, classes, and more. Right now, there’s a small handful of tourists, an all-girl ice hockey team here for practice, and a pair of older couples all out on the ice.
The pair have plenty of recent experience with ice. Somehow, having it here, in a tightly controlled rink they can step out of at any time, is a million times more fun than Antarctica.
They’ve talked about silly little nothing topics, mostly to drain out the accumulated stress of the recent mission. But something is bothering Jason, and he’s slowly bringing the conversation around to it.
“John said he’d seen you once. When you were both younger, and your fathers had met for business. But you don’t remember it?”
Alycia nods, and frowns. She’s letting Jason lead, and his hands are around her waist, steering her. It’s a relaxing feeling, and she both needs and fears the relaxation. “I… I think perhaps that the memory damage you and I suffered at the hands of our fathers might have affected me. And that maybe I’m remembering wrong… I remember my father dealing for robots for a particular project, but I remember you being there. Surely you wouldn’t have been. So that memory can’t be accurate.”
Jason smiles gently. “Yeah, I’m quite certain Rossum isn’t my father. So maybe some memory conflation? Perfectly normal, very human and all that.”
Alycia looks up at Jason, and her eyes are uncharacteristically searching. “It was… well, I suppose I had a hope that somehow I’d met more children with fathers like ours. Would life had been less lonely for each of us, if we’d known each other, and a young Leo Snow? If-- if a Chin and Rossum partnership had happened, had lasted, would-- would I, would he–?”
At one time in his life, Jason might have envied Leo after hearing questions like this. He just shakes his head. “It’s hard to say and I hope you forgive me for saying it, but if giving up our relationship had let you be happier as a child in some retroactive, time-travel way, I’d seriously give it some thought.”
Alycia scowls, and elbows Jason gently. “I’m not trying to push you out, you goof. I’m just wondering…”
She turns pensive again. “I think… it’s yet another reason I’m wary of a deeper relationship. You and I were both isolated by our upbringing. Now we live in a literal secret base in Antarctica and we think that’s a good idea. Can I, myself, be trusted not to repeat the mistakes of the previous generation?”
This gives Jason the opening he wanted. “It wasn’t just our primary father figures that influenced us, was it? I had Rusty. Leo didn’t have his biological mother Ji-a, but he had a succession of foster families. What about you? I never hear you talk about a mother.”
Jason learned the truth of Alycia’s parentage in “418 - The Golden Dragon” – Ed.
Alycia shudders in Jason’s arms, and pushes away from him to ice skate on her own. Jason doesn’t contest it at all. Even now, she often needs her distance from him. Perhaps I pushed too far, he tells himself, and watches her for a reaction.
“I… I know, objectively and rationally, that I had a mother… after all, I was born, yes?” She leaps lightly, spins in place, lands moving backward on one skate, raising her other foot off the ice to balance, and clasps her hands behind her back.
She looks carefully at Jason. “What makes you ask this now?”
He smiles easily. “Well we’ve been talking about parents this mission, haven’t we. It just sort of came up and it lingered as a point of conversation.”
Alycia frowns, and looks away as she skates backwards. “I don’t know anything about any mother. I expect that my father took a wife or concubine, conceived me, and having no further use for her discarded her, as he discards everything and everyone who do not align with his aims.”
Jason can hear the uncertain quaver in her voice. This topic is something he’s dredged to the surface from a lightless depth in her subconscious, and she’s struggling to cope with it. He does his best to push it away with a light comment.
“It’s fine. I didn’t learn about my biological mother until my father disappeared. You might just be a late bloomer there. But since I know you’re keeping score, it’s my two dads to your one. Unless like Byron and Rusty, he and Hector Callado…?”
Alycia actually laughs at that, and Jason feels relieved. “Oh my god, I can not picture my father and his bodyguard like that, in any sense.”
Jason allows himself a brief gloating grin. “Hah. My two to your one then. How are you going to make up this deficiency?”
Alycia spreads her arms in a wide shrug, moving one arm aside at the last second so as to not collide with a fellow skater she can sense but not see. “I can’t, so you have got me this time. That’s quite annoying of you. You are, as they say, ‘on thin ice, pal’.”
Both laugh at the joke as they skate through the ice rink.
Alycia grows more serious, once the pair are out of earshot of other skaters. “It still scares me. Maybe… I’m scared to know, because I’ll doubt myself even further.”
She need not elaborate on what she’d learn about. Jason brought up her mother, and left it alone once he saw it was difficult.
He tries for something reassuring. “Supposedly, a woman asked the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin a question after the Constitutional convention. ‘Do we have a republic, or a monarchy?’ His answer was ‘a republic, if you can keep it’.”
He smiles. “We’ve all declared our independence from our parents, the old ways of doing things, everything. So now what do we have? A relationship - and a team - if we can keep it.”
Alycia’s eyes warm again, to Jason’s relief. “I’ll fight and win as many wars as it takes to keep both of those things,” she declares.
She skates back into his arms, and the pair glide together across the ice.