Love and Rockets
Aside from the giant nerd-fest going on, other groups of heroes are meeting, talking shop, bouncing ideas off each other, and generally hanging out.
“You dying was the best thing that ever happened to this group,” quips Leo, when Jason is around.
Jason grins. “Think so? I’ll have to do it more often. How does it compare to going walkabout?”
Leo shrugs. “Can’t recommend it. Getting good with throwing knives, though.” He pulls out a thin steel blade from a belt holder and tosses it casually, spearing a red Solo cup yards away. “Good for wildlife management.”
“Rusty showed me a trick,” Jason offers. “Here. Raise your arm… okay, fingertips here and here… now, again.”
Again Leo tosses a knife, and again it hits its mark.
“Lighter to hold that way,” he observes. “Easier to control. I get it.”
Leo nods slightly in the direction of several of the girls, Alycia among them. “Unrelated. You and me got things sorted with our love lives. Each of us with our ultimate childhood friend. How do you think the others are doing?”
Jason observes too, and thinks. “Harry and A10 are close. But there’s a vibe going on there I can’t read. Adam’s back from his latest launch, and who knows what green-skinned space babes he met along the way. Charlotte? Ehh. I don’t know anyone’s ever going to court her properly enough to make it past the chaperone of protocol.”
He turns to Leo, and smiles. “What makes you ask that, anyway?”
Leo grins. “Just, y’know, thinking of the future, like I always do. We’re young men, but we’re men now. Just wondering, ten years from now, if we meet like this, who’s gonna have their kids along with them.”
“Kids, huh? You think they’ll turn out like us?”
“Hope to god we don’t fail them that badly,” Leo says with a broad grin. And both men have to laugh at that.
Charlotte has her own contribution to the ongoing technical discussion. She has Resister’s notes on his memory-negating technology. She has advised the gathered community that this will not be copied or incorporated into other work without the crown prince’s express approval. There’s some grumbling, particularly from the MIA team (“God, this would be so useful”), but everyone assents to these restrictions.
Her extended team includes a Resister from an alternate reality, and a younger Jason Quill, no slouch as an inventor himself. But this must work. She must get this right. And the more people who scrutinize what she’s attempting, the better. Particularly when it must interact with Leah Snow’s time-tunnel system, something only the Leo here can explain.
And while they’re working on building new Resister suits, Charlotte finds Adam staring up at the sky.
“Do you miss it?” she asks, curiously. “Being up there…?”
Adam startles, and turns, and smiles. “Huh? Oh, in space? That’s… that’s a hard question.”
He gives it some thought. “There’s so much potential. And so much wasted. There’s war, because people can’t get along. And there’s people who let it happen, because it’s easier to run away than to stand and fight. It’s a riddle I don’t know how to solve.”
Charlotte can feel Adam’s concern, and smiles at him. “I too am facing a cosmic problem. Worlds are falling under attack by a mysterious enemy. Our inventors are helping me make a tool to understand that enemy better. But… it too is a riddle. Perhaps a different one. So I think I understand your plight.”
Charlotte is gratified when Adam makes the same offer Harry had - and indeed, any other hero who’s heard her story. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“We have many people, many Menageries really, already on the problem.”
Charlotte takes note of Adam’s worried expression, and decides to try something more positive. “They include someone who claims to be your child from years in the future, relative to us. Is there someone special you’ve been keeping from us, Adam?”
Adam chokes in surprise. “Child? What? Someone…? No! I mean, um…”
Charlotte will not share her private amusement at how red his face is becoming. It wouldn’t be proper. “Well. These are parallel realities, where others made their own decisions. Perhaps…”
For some reason, something has tripped inside Adam’s brain, and he’s gonna be talking about this for awhile. “Like, for awhile the Ponies were hanging off me a few years ago, and I kinda made myself hard to find until I figured that out. And I had a talk with Leo that kinda helped, and a talk with Keri that really helped, and now she’s on the spaceship with me but right now she’s over there grilling stuff for people–”
He points to a knot of folks working on food over a fire. Keri, now known as La Cordera, is smiling and laughing along with the others.
“–and I mean, she seems like she’s happier now, but we’re not, you know, together together, it’s more like I’m her little brother, but I can sense that she’s sometimes wistful, and I guess since that time I’ve kinda grown up. I mean, I am a teenager, hormones are a thing, there are some people I think are pretty hot, and some of them are here–”
He realizes that he’s babbling, and forces himself to stop speaking with an act of will.
Charlotte listens intently, and studies his face, with a subtle smile playing over her lips. “I see. So while you may not be in a relationship as such, perhaps there’s someone who interests you…?”
Adam makes a keening noise that sounds like “eeee”. He glances back up at the sky. “Maybe I should go back to space, huh? I think that might be easier.”
Charlotte makes the last teasing comment she has. This has been good fun, and too much more would be unkind. This last remark will be the final blow.
“Perhaps the one you’re destined to meet is waiting for you somewhere up there.”
The “eeee” becomes more pronounced.
Adam finds himself examining old friends with new eyes. His time around Somber, and his growth in response to the mysterious alien’s “mentoring”, may have cost him a bit of his innocent notions, and he hopes it’s given him some wisdom in trade.
For example, here at the outing, William Eddison isn’t wearing his usual knight’s hoodie, but a tank top. The hoodie did a good job hiding it, but here it’s clear that he’s built like a Hercules. That fact has drawn a few appreciative stares. That, in turn, has caused Jaycee to feel a surge of strong emotion that Adam can detect.
Now, he probes that, while Jaycee and Summer are swapping out barista duties for the party.
How does she feel about William? She’s attracted, she’s interested, she’s frustrated and annoyed and many other things. If emotions were the spectrum of visible light, the link between Jaycee and William would be a shimmering rainbow.
But what about the other direction? Oddly, what he feels from William is what he feels from Keri toward - well, toward himself. A yearning, sublimated into something else, a burning fire placed into a lantern to become a comforting light.
“What’s on your mind?” asks a voice.
Adam snaps out of his contemplation and realizes it’s Keri asking him.
“Uhhhh. Just - uh.”
Keri follows his eyes to where William and Jaycee are talking. “Those two, huh?”
“Yeah.” He turns to the young woman and gambles on a question. “Do you think they like each other? I mean, they have complicated feelings…”
“I think their relationship is their business,” Keri says coolly.
“I–”
Adam realizes he wants to fight this fight, argue for helping the two realize and understand whatever is going on with them, promote some kind of happy ending - but he also realizes that Keri is talking from experience, and that what she says is fair in its way.
Maybe that’s an important lesson Somber has taught him, Adam thinks. Before acting, first reflect on when it’s wise to interfere in someone else’s business, and how.
Somewhere in the swirl of his attempts at formulating a reply, words come out.
“You’re worth loving, Keri, no matter how you feel.”
Without another word, she walks away. He wants to chase after her, convinced at first that he did something wrong. But as that impulse tries to galvanize itself into action, his sense of what she’s experiencing comes to him as well.
She’s not hurt or angry at what he said. She’s scared of it. Scared of accepting it.
Like William and Jaycee, maybe this is a feeling she has to sort out.