Time and Tide (5/5)
a Justice League Unlimited / Batman Beyond story
by Merlin Missy
Copyright 2006
PG-13
Shayera was in Ops when John showed up for his shift. Normally, he tried to ignore or avoid her. Okay, sometimes he tried to ignore or avoid her, and other times he couldn't make himself not write his own name under hers for a shift. So much for willpower.
This time, he merely studied her.
He'd been to the future a year ago on that mad dash with Batman and Diana. He hadn't known how to react when Rex had called him "Dad," how to deal with the then obvious revelation of who his mother must have been. When they'd returned to this time, everything reset and no one remembered but Batman. John had spent too much time wondering what it all meant.
Bruce had told him not to think about the future, that too much foreknowledge would drive him insane. Virgil had seen his own future and was trying to live his life anyway. Funny that some teenaged kid was managing what John himself was finding nearly impossible.
Part of him wanted to live his life as if he'd never known, thinking that was the only way to stay sane.
Part of him thought that if he'd met Mari first, his life would be a lot simpler and a lot happier and that simple and happy were still in the realm of possibility if he kept her close.
Part of him wanted to run up to Shayera and grab her by the arms and kiss her until the past and future were brushed away like bad dreams.
Part of him wanted to forget his trip to the future, and a big part of him wanted to forget everything starting from the day he met Shayera.
Part of him wondered what it would have been like, to teach Rex how to walk, how to swim, how to ride a bicycle and play football and read.
Part of him wondered who the little boy had been, that Rex would have offered his life in exchange without thinking about it, that he would have jumped off a cliff for the kid even without his wings. The boy favored the Atlantean woman who'd been shot, and she had called Rex something that John was almost certain was Thanagarian.
Part of him had no doubts about where Rex had learned how to be a father.
Which was why it hurt so much to realize John himself was not prepared to jump off a cliff for a maybe-child, not yet.
"Hey," said Shayera, finally noticing his presence. She straightened up from what she was doing.
"Hey," he said.
"Did you interrogate those guys?"
He shook his head. "Whatever's short-circuiting the brains of the bad guys got them before we could ask anything. Batman's got some cop friends who can make charges stick on them enough to keep them incarcerated for now."
She frowned. "They grabbed two kids. They need to be locked up for the rest of their lives."
"You liked those kids, didn't you?"
A shrug. "They were okay. Duckboy was pretty good at chess."
"Duckboy?"
"Not his real name. I'm pretty sure, anyway. You didn't say what happened to him." She caught his glance and added, "I'm sure Aquaman would like to know."
"He went home. He and his family, they went home."
" ... they went home." came the tinny sound from the image.
"Dad?"
Rex didn't turn from where he stood, watching. He waved Arthur over. The two figures stopped talking and turned to their tasks for the evening. That was back when they weren't talking much anyway, when Dad was still with Aunt Mari, and the world was a different place. Even so, he was pretty sure it wasn't his imagination how his parents worked together without speaking, the movements of one flowing easily into and against the other.
"Like I said, we didn't have time to see her. While we were there."
"Time machines are bad," Arthur said, standing a careful distance away.
"No. They're just machines. We're the ones with the bad. Too many temptations."
So tempting, and it had been so easy to change the setting on the belt, just enough to find the room where they were. He could go back. Hell, with this thing, he could go anywhere, anywhen. He could go to Galtos a week ago, he knew it, if he could adjust the belt properly.
She was right there, pushing her hair behind her ear just so, looking younger than Rex could ever remember. That line on her face was familiar, the one that bespoke of her responsibility for too many deaths. She'd never lose that; he'd seen it etched deep even as he'd kissed her cool, still forehead not a week ago. But Rex knew what the woman in the image couldn't, that she would be forever marked too by lines from smiles, from laughter. Rex would be the cause of many of those, and Arthur even more, and the sum of her life would not be measured solely by the destruction she'd wrought, but also by the lives she'd saved, and touched, and caused to be.
He reached out, wanting to touch her face one more time, to reassure her that the world was going to move on, to have just one last moment with her. And then he turned the switch off, and with a few quick movements, yanked out the power supply, crushing it in his fist.
"Come on," he told Arthur. "Your mom will be waking up soon. We should be there."
She was in fact already awake, and Cerdian was in the room with her.
"Arthur," she breathed, and then grunted a little as he flung himself at her. "Watch it," she said gently, brushing his face with her fingertips. "Are you all right?"
"I'm okay," he said, fighting back tears. "Mom, I'm so sorry."
"Don't be. I'll be fine." Her eyes drifted to Cerdian. "Arthur, I want you to meet your father."
"We met," Arthur said.
"Kind of a surprise," Rex said in what he pretended was a friendly voice.
Merina's gaze settled on him, and a smile lit her features. "Thank you for bringing him home." That was odd. He hadn't expected an immediate declaration of affection or anything, but "thank you" was a little cold.
"Anytime," he mumbled.
"We should probably get this over with," she said to Cerdian.
Get what over with?
Merina turned back to Rex. "Do you trust me?" Rex nodded. "Good. Don't duck."
"Why would I ... "
The punch came out of nowhere, landing squarely on his jaw. Pain shot through his teeth as they crunched together. Instinct made him raise his own fist, but Merina stopped him.
"Don't."
Cerdian held one hand with the other, flexing it and grimacing. "You have a chin like an iron block."
"I could have told you that," said Merina. "You should have hit him in the eye."
"Why did he hit me at all?" Rex moved his jaw around, refusing to give Cerdian the satisfaction of rubbing it. He paused, seeing their matching expressions. "Okay, other than the obvious."
"It's an Atlantean honor thing," Merina explained. "It's a ritualized way of declaring that we're seeing other people. On paper, we're still married, but in the eyes of our people, we just broke up."
"Not yet," said Cerdian. He moved his own jaw around, made a sound in his throat, and spat on the floor beside Merina's bed. "Now we're broken up."
Arthur looked down at the spittle on the floor and then up at his mother. "You told me that if I ever spit on the floor, I'd be grounded for a month."
"And now you know why," she said, before Rex could comment on grounding. "Get your things. You're going back to Atlantis with your father."
"What?" asked Rex and Arthur at the same time.
"It's for a week," said Cerdian. "Your mother and I discussed this. You need to meet your brother and sister, and your stepmother would like to see you, as well."
Arthur took his mother's hand. "I want to stay here."
"You'll be back," she said. "I need to rest, and so does your dad." Rex was pretty sure he didn't imagine her emphasis on the last word, and was positive when he saw the quickly-covered glare from Cerdian.
Arthur composed his features into a scowl. Rex couldn't blame him.
"Are you sure?" Rex asked her, his eyes on Cerdian. Do you trust him?
"I'm sure."
Rex said to Arthur, "Just a week. And if he doesn't have you home on time, I'll come get you myself."
"Think of it as going on vacation," said Merina. "Especially since as soon as you get back home, you're grounded for the rest of the summer."
Arthur's eyes widened, and he turned to his father. "So, what are their names?"
Cerdian smiled. "I'll introduce you. Come and show me your room, and we will pack together. You can say your good-byes later."
Arthur gave his mother's hand a squeeze. "All right." He led Cerdian out of the surgical bay with a last look back.
The hum of the instruments in this room was familiar, and Rex let their noises fill the silence between them as Merina settled back against her pillows, paler and more tired than she'd seemed just a minute before. He felt the throb in his shoulder and chest, the minor angry pain in his jaw. But they were alive, and they were together, and there were worse things.
"I'm tired," she said after a long time. "And everything hurts."
"I know."
"I want to start over. I want to start us over."
"We keep doin' that."
"And it keeps not working." She'd said whatever had happened with Cerdian meant they were finally broken up. He wondered suddenly if that meant she was breaking up with Rex, too, if sending Arthur away was just an easier way of softening that blow.
The compression bandages on his ribs were too tight. His lungs were crushing closed. She was going to leave him again, and this time it would be forever.
"I want us to live in the house together," she said.
"What?" He was sure he'd misheard her.
"I'm tired of going between the house and the Tower. I'm tired of Arthur not having one place to grow up. I want us to be a family."
"We are."
She closed her eyes. "Yes. I know. But we're also not. And you know that, too. You don't trust me."
"What? Of course I trust you."
"You don't. You worry when I'm here with Batman, just a little. You were worried when you found out Cerdian was here, weren't you?" He said nothing. "You don't trust me, Rex. A part of me doesn't trust you, either."
That hurt. "I'm not going to leave you or fool around on you."
"But you could. You could find someone else and get married. That was our deal, way back when."
"I could also go join the Iniquity Collective. Ain't gonna happen there, either."
She laughed, and he could hear how short her breath was. He stroked the hair from her face.
Merina said, "I want your father to come live with us. He's our family, too, and if he was at the house, Arthur wouldn't have to stay at the Tower so often."
"I already asked him. He kicked me out."
She made a noise in her throat. "Give him a little time. You're the biggest reminder he has of your mother."
"When I thought I lost you," he said, touching her again just to make sure he hadn't, "I couldn't think of anything but getting Arthur back. Dad doesn't even want to see me."
"You and John aren't the same person."
"No kidding."
"I think I know how to get him over his objection to living with us."
"Magic spell?"
"Not quite. When I'm back on my feet, and Arthur's back ashore, I want to go by that store across the street from the Aquarium."
Rex tried to think about the stores in that district: a bunch of touristy places, restaurants, collectibles, and tucked away between a German café and a t-shirt shop, one lonely little jewelry store.
A vision of his future stretched out. Their home, their family, cobbled together from spare parts but just as strong as anyone else in the League had. They both were aging more slowly than humans, plenty of time to build a real life together, to watch Arthur grow into the extraordinary man he was surely going to be, to live.
He saw himself older, maybe a little wiser, saw Merina there with him, saw grandkids who looked a lot like Arthur and a bit like a girl none of them had even met yet, who spoke Thanagarian with heavy Atlantean accents and who thought everyone knew basic drill formation as a matter of course. He saw a ring on his own finger, wide gold with an emerald for preference, and a pair of pearl earrings at her ears, and the people who understood would know, and no one else needed to understand.
"I think that's the best idea I've heard in a long time," he said, and then to emphasize the point, he bent over and kissed her. Her mouth was dry, but she moved her jaw gently beneath his and her eyes sparkled like sunlight glinting on the sea.
The End
Again, I'd like to thank my betas, and also everyone who's been commenting. I've been working on this story in one form or another since February of 2004, and I'd reached the point where I was sure nobody was going to read it.
Now here's the thing. I track the statistics on my stories, and I can see that hundreds of people click through to the last chapter on multichaptered fics, indicating people are reading the whole stories. In other words, I can see you. I can also see that I'm averaging about five comments per story unless I do the passive-aggressive thing by only posting one bit at a time and waiting for comments.
I had originally planned for this to be my last post in this fandom on and to post everything else to Livejournal and JLA Unlimited. However, I've decided instead to open this to the floor. Call it curiosity if you will. If you read this and don't normally comment, please consider this a free pass to not comment on the story at all, but instead to tell me why you read but don't review. I'm not saying anyone should feel obligated to comment ever, but I'm honestly baffled as to what makes people decide not to review something they've just spent an hour reading (and thus found interesting enough to finish --- if it was simply the pairing or the topic, no one would click through past the first chapter).
So enlighten me. Review the story if you'd like, but if you don't intend to review, please at least let me know why you won't. Thank you.