The Authority
The Worst Time Travel Fic in the Fandom
They’d been with Jenny when it’d happened; not that he knew at first what it had been, asides from soul-destroying. One moment they’d been walking down one of the Carrier’s endless hallways — Apollo and Jenny talking animatedly about something on some TV show he didn’t watch and couldn’t identify — the next Apollo had been bent double from pain and howling. He’d instantly been at his husband’s side, holding onto broad shoulders with a ferocious determination, cursing his uselessness and mouthing empty reassurances when Apollo had uncurled slightly, turned his face towards Midnighter’s own and said, “I’m sorry.”
Midnighter had been about to tell him to shut up when he vanished, and the platitude — ‘shut up’ had always a platitude, for them at least — had turned into a howl.
And then Jenny had said, “Something’s wro— get away from him!” And her eyes had burnt with the blue of infinity and he’d felt that power crackle across his skin as it pulsed outwards, pushing something as it went. Something that almost felt as if…
“We need to find the others.” There was a hollow clop as Jenny’s shoes hit the ground once more, though her eyes were still burning and the air still smelt like ozone. “Someone’s messing with time.” He hadn’t liked the sound of that.
He’d liked it even less a moment later when they’d run full-tilt into the map room and the chips in his head had started shrieking. The others had jumped to their feet when they’d entered, gasping and snarling his name and looking all the world like they were ready for a fight. His meat-brain was still stuck on the feel of Apollo’s powerful back fading to nothing in his hands and wasn’t quite abreast of this new situation, which cumulated when Jack had shouted, “Get away from her you bastard!”
He'd been about to ask what the fuck Jack was talking about when Jenny said, “Ah, looks like you get to be evil in this timestream, dad.” And it had all started making sense.
“Fucking wonderful.” He really hated being evil.
So Jenny had explained it, using small words even Jack could understand. Midnighter had listened too, since if truth be told he wasn’t exactly 100% down with the exposition either. As far as he could tell, at some point parties unknown had gone back in time and managed to kill Apollo before he'd been in any position to stop them. This event had, as these things tended to do, caused a cascade effect that had lashed back across the rest of the timestream and booted them off into the proto-alternate reality they were currently inhabiting. Jenny had sensed it when it’d approached them in the corridor, and had shielded them both from it — Midnighter didn’t even want to think about the sort of universe they must’ve been living in for that to make any sense whatsoever — which is why they were both okay and everyone else was acting crazier than the old Doctor on a bad day. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep it up. Midnighter didn’t particularly want to think about what would happen if she couldn’t.
Shen had asked the obvious question. “Wait, so you’re saying someone went back in time and killed this ‘Apollo’, turning Captain Happy here into his psychopathic self?”
“More importantly,” Angie had added, “why are you calling him ‘dad’?”
“Because he is my dad,”— which had made him feel a little bit better, though overall today was still looking fairly shitacular —“and so is Apollo.” Jenny waited a little bit for it to sink in.
Jack had figured it out last. “Wait, wait… is she telling me Midnighter’s gay?”
“So someone likes to tell me at least once a day.” He wanted less talking, and more hitting. Definitely more hitting.
Jack started to say, “That explai—” but had been cut off by an elbow to the ribs care of Angie. Midnighter had resisted rolling his eyes through sheer weight of practice alone.
They got to the hitting part about ten minutes later. Jenny and the Doctor had managed to locate a window of about forty-eight hours during which time had been damaged in a very localised and artificial way. The plan, such as it was, involved sending Midnighter back to look, kick heads as appropriate, and hopefully return at the end of two days to the place the universe had been as of an hour ago.
“Why him?” Shen had asked, eyeing him in a way that made his skin crawl and the back of his mind start wanting to chant apologies.
Instead, he’d said, “Don’t make Jack explain it to you again,” and felt like an asshole. So he made himself remember the way Apollo’s sad smile had been eaten up by the floor until it was nothing but an after-image on his retinas, and anger and loss had replaced the shame.
“Also,” Jenny had added, “I hate to state the obvious, but he’s the only one who currently remembers who Apollo is.”
“Other than you,” the Doctor had pointed out.
“For fuck’s sake I’m not going to kill my own husband,” he’d finally snapped. Everyone had stared. He’d stared back.
Seven minutes later he was in the past.
If there was one thing that Midnighter hated, more than almost anything else, it was time travel. It was never a good idea. No-one ever said, “Hey, you remember last Thursday afternoon when we went to get ice-cream? That was really great; let’s go back in time and do it again.” Oh-no. By the time anyone got around to time travel, it meant that something had gone seriously wrong. Not just a little bit; catastrophically, planet-smashingly, incalculably, crap-where-are-the-paddles wrong.
So Midnighter hated time travel, and as far as he could tell, Time agreed with him. It hurt. Not a physical pain, exactly, but something far deeper and far more sinister; a quintessential feeling of wrongness, of danger. An unscratchable itch, a million ants crawling just beneath the soul. He hoped he never had to get used to the feeling.
His fingers were moving the second his feet hit the carpet, and he fell out of the horror of the previous hour and into the numbing reflex of death. His body moved with only minimal input from his brain, which watched the scene unroll around him like a film. Jenny had dumped him in exactly the right place at exactly the right time; four black-suited figures were immediately identified as hostile and two had throwing stars embedded in their foreheads before the others could even process what was wrong. The head of the third all-but exploded on impact with his night-stick, and the fourth had barely shouted an expletive — gun half-pulled — when a boot to the chest sent it crashing out a window and plummeting four stories into the alleyway below.
“Holy fucking shit!”
His brain caught up. Forty-seven minutes ago he’d watched in useless horror as Apollo had vanished under his fingers. Somehow, what was behind him was infinitely more terrifying.
Midnighter turned.
The kid had black hair. Barely out of his teens and cowering in the gap between a desk cluttered with pre-med textbooks and a bed that hadn’t been made since circa 1975, one hand covering his mouth and another held out in front of him in a gesture Midnighter had seen a thousand times before from a thousand different people… but never Apollo.
Because it was, and he could tell from here using senses both natural and unnatural, and he’d been fooled before but oh God he had to believe or there’d be nothing to go back to.
“Christ fucking Christ don’t kill me Jesus fucking—”
And this was another problem. Ten minutes ago his entire plan had consisted of finding this proto-Apollo and protecting him whatever the cost. It had never occurred to him that, well, maybe the kid would have other ideas. Being comforting wasn’t exactly his strong suit.
So he said. “There’ll be more.” Which was true. “We have to move.”
“Holy fuck this isn’t happening fuck fuck…”
Okay, change of plan; stop thinking of the kid as Apollo and start thinking of him as just an objective. He could do that, and it didn’t matter if an objective was near-catatonic in terror because he was still functionally alive.
“Get up.” His boots were thunder on the floorboards and he stepped around the bodies and the PlayStation to loom above the kid’s hiding place; a grim, black herald, little different from the things he’d just destroyed so easily. The boy flinched, stifling a scream when Midnighter’s gloved hand closed around his shoulder — and a part of his mind raged that how dare he treat this man of all men so callously — and pulled him roughly to his feet.
“Oh crap oh crap I’m gonna die I’m go—”
“You aren’t going to die.” He hated how cold his voice sounded. “It’s my job to make sure you don’t.”
The kid relaxed, ever so slightly. There was hope. “Then wh-who’re those guys?” He made a hesitant gesture towards the bodies on the floor.
“Don’t know.” Which was a good point, so he crouched down next to the nearest body and tried looking for something familiar. There wasn’t anything; the tech, while advanced, was as generic as white bread.
“Oh… who’re you then? Or do you not know that, either?”
He shut his mouth on the first thing that came to mind, instead answering, “I’m the Midnighter.” The black suits were definitely a kind of exoskeleton, similar to Angie’s but nowhere near as versatile. Something that looked like a join ran from the base of the suit’s neck down to the small of the back.
“‘The Midnighter’? What kind of a name is that? What’re you supposed to be; some kinda superhero?”
“Something like that.” A knife appeared in his hand and he ran the razor-sharp tip ever-so-carefully down the join…
“No fucking shit… so what’s your, like, super-power?”
“You’ve seen it.” The suit peeled back ever so slightly; there was nothing underneath but raw muscle. Cyborgs; probably bio-engineered clones. He hoped they were bio-engineered clones. The wires under his skin itched.
“I’ve seen you kill people… is that it? You kill people? That’s your ‘super power’, killing people?”
He looked up. “… uh.” And it was stupid, but this was — or would be — Apollo and he’d never needed validation from anyone before except… “I’m very good at it,” he managed eventually, while the version of himself that lived in his head died horribly in embarrassment.
The kid seemed thoughtful; the talking was putting him at ease a little, if nothing else. Midnighter thought the trade-off was worth it. “I guess,” he said after a moment, “that makes sense… Yeah, okay that’s kinda cool. It’s like… efficient. Yeah.”
Midnighter turned back to the body, returning the knife to its sheath and running one last scan. It occurred to him that it really shouldn’t matter who these people were; he just had to kill them for the next forty-eight hours. Shouldn’t matter, unless it was Bendix. Never mind that he’d ripped the bastard’s spine out; if it were Bendix…
He decided it wasn’t Bendix. He could live with that.
The kid was still talking — moving out of catatonic and into terrified babbling — when he stood up. “It’s like all that other stuff, you know? All the flying or shooting fire out your ass or whatever, I guess in the end it’s really all about killing people. Might as well, you know, cut the theatrics.”
As gently as he could, he said, “We need to move; there will be more.” It still sounded like a threat, and the kid turned big, summer-sky eyes to him.
He was going to say something when the universe decided to prove his point and he felt the static charge of another portal opening up. He turned with a growl — weapons already in hand — the implants showing him the tear before his human eyes did and when they came through again, he was ready for them.
They were ready for him, too.
Then it was all numbers.
He shouted for the kid to get down — had a vague memory of his hands enforcing the request — before the room erupted in a hail of plasma. He pulled it away from the kid, across the other side of the tiny space, before launching himself back into the group; all fists and fury. They’d taken precautions this time — raw numbers, heavier weaponry, tactics — but the odds still weren’t tipping 97% and climbing with each one he took down. The chance of the kid getting hit was 18.495%; dropping, but still uncomfortably high and that was motivation. His hand breached a stomach wall and that was six. A spray of blood from a slashed artery was five. He got down to three by just jumping through crossfire, disgusted as always at how often such a cheap trick worked; especially this late in a fight when panic set in. Two was another boot to the face; and old favourite. One a snapped neck. Zero slid off the end of the night-stick and hit the ground with a wet thump, upright in a grotesque parody of submission.
“We go. Now.”
The kid emerged from underneath the bed, shaking hard and wide-eyed from the carnage; torn between fascination and revulsion at the gore.
“I—”
Numbers screamed again as another portal started pulling apart time and there were way too many dead bodies in here and way not enough space. He grabbed Apollo again; this time bodily, and before the kid could think to protest at the handling they were out the window and fast approaching the street. He caught himself against a fire escape, slowing the descent slightly, but the ground still hit hard enough to crack the concrete. The kid stumbled out of his grasp, looked like he was about to scream or vomit or both but they didn’t have time for either as the wall behind them turned to rubble in a flash of sick blue light. Midnighter made sure they weren’t in front of it when it happened, but it was a close thing.
The kid was still human, after all. Midnighter couldn’t bring himself to hold it against him.
He pulled them out of the alleyway and into another, running on instinct and not much else; not even sure where he was, let alone where they’d be safe or where they should go. They didn’t have long; the kid wasn’t built for it and he was tiring fast, but it was dark and cold and the neighbourhood was bad and the thrill of the chase was back again. It’d been a long time since they’d done this, not since—
He was suddenly holding dead weight and he skidded to a halt to avoid dragging the kid along the pavement. He’d tripped. Or simply collapsed, perhaps, but either way Midnighter knew he wouldn’t be getting up again in a hurry. He cursed slightly, but the alley was clear and they didn’t seem to have been followed. Maybe they wouldn’t be; maybe his presence was making the whole exercise unworkable. Maybe they had other things on their mind. Like Jenny.
“W-why… why is this… happening?” It took him a moment to realise the kid was speaking again, voice near-incomprehensible underneath the wheezing and the thunder of his heart. “I— I’m just some d-dumb kid. Why are they…?”
Now that he was thinking about it, the explanation sounded kinda weak. He tried it anyway. “They’re from the future.”
“W-what?” Pseudo-Apollo turned to him again, eyes huge and incredulous. “You’re nuts!”
Midnighter didn’t really have an answer for that.
“You’re telling me I’m being targeted by assassins from the future?”
“Uh… yes.”
“Let me guess, they’re trying to kill me off to prevent me from… from I dunno; overthrowing their evil robot empire or something.”
“Er… maybe.”
“Maybe? You mean you don’t know?”
Midnighter’s faced itched from a splash of someone else’s drying blood. He scratched it nervously. “Well, no,” he admitted. “It, uh, didn’t seem important at the time.”
“At what time?”
His mind flashed again; an older, stronger face super-imposing itself over the kid’s, but eyes just as fearful and cut by the texture of the floor beneath fading skin. “When you… when we figured out you’d been killed. In the past.”
“So you’re from the future too? Is there any part of this crazy story you didn’t steal from The Terminator? I mean, do you have skin under that mask or are you a cyborg as well?”
“Uh…”
“Oh fucking Christ. I don’t fucking believe this.” He had pulled himself to sit, back against the wall and face buried in his hands. Midnighter was somewhat glad his Apollo’s memories of his pre-Apollo days were next-to-non-existant, because he could imagine the lecture he’d be receiving otherwise when he got back. The phrases ‘scarred for life’ and ‘decent cover-story’ featured prominently.
He was still trying to come up with something comforting to say when the kid beat him to it.
“You’re from the future, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Prove it.” the kid looked up, a new kind of determination creeping into the corners of his eyes and it made something inside Midnighter ache for the familiarity of it. “Prove that you’re from the future and I’ll believe your crazy story and do whatever you say.”
Crap. It was an obvious question but for the life of him Midnighter couldn’t think of a way to answer it; he didn’t even really know what year it was, let alone anything else. “I can tell you who the President will be in 2005,” he suggested. The kid just looked at him flatly, and he sighed; started patting down his pockets and he carried so much crap surely there was something in here with a date on it… “A-hah. Here.”
He handed a small piece of cardboard out and the kid took it hesitantly. After a moment he said, “This is a movie ticket…”
“With a date on it.”
“… to go see How to Lose a Guy in Another 10 Days?”
He winced, maybe answered a little too quickly. “I have a daughter.”
“Right. Because heaven forbid anyone think a big, tough guy like you would voluntarily go and see a film so obviously lacking in large explosions.”
“… I like explosions.” The phrase, and so do you, died before it could get very far. His internal self attempted to sink through the concrete and it was stupid, really, but it would have been nice if his future husband didn’t think he was a total freak.
The kid sighed, and Midnighter noticed the way his breath hung in the air. Coming down off the adrenaline rush and he’d started shivering somewhere along the line. It was going to get colder before it got warmer; he had to get them somewhere inside.
“Okay, Future-Guy, I believe you, if only because your cover-story is so lame that it just has to be true. So. What happens now?”
“We wait. I kill people, you stay alive. In forty-seven hours I go home.”
“That’s it?”
“More-or-less.” The kid’s temperature had started to drop; it wasn’t a problem now, but it was going to be, sooner rather than later. Midnighter took off his coat, “You’re cold. Put this on.”
The kid looked at him oddly for a moment before standing up. “Thanks,” he said and then, after taking the coat, “Oof! This thing weighs a ton!” It also covered him from nearly neck to toe; somewhere between now and later the kid had gained fifteen inches up and almost two shoulder-widths again out. It was decidedly odd, Midnighter realised, seeing someone who was so obviously Apollo yet so obviously human; complete with all the frailties that implied. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant thought; proper Apollo was exquisite in every way but there was also something about his younger self that was… appealing. Like Pandora’s Box.
Midnighter forced himself to stop thinking about it; instead turned to deeper investigation of their surroundings.
“Jesus man there’s like ten thousand throwing stars in here! And seven, eight… twelve knives! Why the hell would anyone need twelve knives?”
“One for throwing, one for stabbing, one for slicing, one for sawing…” The neighbourhood wasn’t exactly the most illustrious in town, which was good. Midnighter was used to bad neighbourhoods; knew what to look for, a place they could hole up in. He still wasn’t sure whether or not the kid’s bio-signature was being tracked, or whether their faceless enemies had just pulled his address as a drop point. They hadn’t been jumped yet, which might have suggested the latter… or might have just suggested someone, somewhere, was getting some bigger guns.
“Um, hey… can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“Why you? I mean, not that I’m not grateful or anything, but… why go to all this trouble?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Re-thought, and said, “That’s classified.”
“Don’t give me that shit.” The venom in the kid’s voice made him turn, the confusion evident on his face. “I’ve got one lot of people trying to kill me, and you trying to stop them. And like, no offence, but you don’t exactly look like Captain Upstanding Citizen and I just…” He stopped, staring intently at where he was picking at the too-long cuffs of Midnighter’s coat and something about his expression was not comforting at all. “Before you arrived, when those other guys first showed up, they said something… Something like, ‘For the preservation of the future, cut the heart from the authority’. What were they talking about?”
And what Midnighter’s brain said was, Oh crap…
His mouth was slightly more glib, “You’re listening to a bunch of trash said by a guy who was about to off you?”
“So? How is it any different than listening to you? I don’t know you, I don’t know them.”
“They’re trying to kill you!”
“And you won’t tell me why! What if—” He bit his lip again, some of the anger fading out of his eyes. “I kept thinking, like… yanno, when Hitler was my age, right, what if someone had appeared trying to kill him. Is that me? I mean, do I do something so horrible… You’re trying to save me, but what if you shouldn’t be?”
It hurt. A rail-spike straight through both hearts, and when he spoke his voice was dark. “That is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”
“Then who are you? What’s going on here?”
The edge of the dumpster started to look very interesting. Midnighter suddenly wondered why bad guys never seemed to show up at moments like this. Moments where he needed a distraction. “You… might not like the answer—”
“I knew it!” the kid started to back away, but Midnighter held out a hand to stop him.
“But not in the way you think.” And this was the real heart of the matter. He’d been telling himself in his head that it was better if Apollo didn’t know who he was to preserve some kind of temporal continuity. But really — really, really really — he was afraid. Because what if the kid didn’t like it? If he freaked out, or worse… then what?
But, at the end of the day, it was still Apollo and he couldn’t bring himself to lie. So he said, “I’m your husband. That’s why I’m here; because someone killed you as a kid and you have no idea how much that fucking shits me off.”
For a while there was nothing, and then the kid said, “Oh come on. That’s the stupidest fuck—”
There were a lot of things Midnighter liked about Apollo. A lot of things; every one catalogued numerically and filed away in the back of his mind, pulled out every now and again when things were dark and grim and he needed something to keep him sane between the blood and the screams. One of the big things — right up there, not quite #1 but pretty goddamn close — was that Apollo was incredibly easy to kiss. Was warm and smooth and responsive and there was nothing in the world that made Midnighter feel quite as alive as kissing Apollo.
He’d thrown the kid against the wall before he’d really realised he was doing it; pinning him expertly and Apollo struggled on instinct but he was still only human and he might as well have been trying to break steel. Midnighter’s mouth was hungry and desperate, and he felt the body fold beneath him and soft, painfully-familiar lips split open with a surprised moan at the none-so-subtle urgings of his tongue. Apollo tasted like Apollo and never mind the physical differences — the slight shift in DNA — because his body responded like Apollo and that was proof, right there and Midnighter knew that this time he wasn’t wrong.
It didn’t last long; just enough to feel the boy relax and to sate his own ache and he’d pulled away again, the taste of sunlight on his lips and a terrible weariness in his heart.
“… sorry,” he muttered. It had been a long day.
The kid just blinked hazy eyes, one hand going to his mouth in disbelief, the other still flat against the alley wall. He swallowed hard, Midnighter tried not to notice the flush across his cheeks had spread to other areas as well and tried not to be too pleased with the knowledge. It was unfair, really, because if there was one thing Midnighter had made sure to get a lot of practice at, it had been kissing his lover.
Eventually, some of the pleasure-daze lifted and the kid said, “Wow. Oh… wow. Okay. Um… I don’t know what—”
Midnighter shook his head. “Just stay alive; that’s all I want. Something to go home to.”
A slight nod.
A half-second later, the portals opened again and talking time was over.
They spent the next six hours running; moving from place to run-down place every time they were rediscovered. After the third attack, Midnighter had estimated it took their pursuers roughly thirteen minutes to relocate and send a new group. He wondered why they still bothered; it was a war of attrition and they weren’t going to win it. The squads got bigger and better armed but there seemed to be some kind of limit on how much raw mass they could send through at any one time, and that made his job almost boring. It would have been difficult if the kid hadn’t been co-operative, but after their kiss he’d gone eerily quiet. He wasn’t upset or afraid or angry, and when things got rough he stuck close and did what he was told. What also did was watch; Midnighter could feel the kid’s eyes all-but devouring him while he fought, could hear the quick-step of his heart and see the heat in on his cheeks and his palms. Of course, when things were quiet the kid did a good job of not letting on, so Midnighter politely didn’t mention anything.
The kid was also pretty good at not letting on about how tired he was getting, but Midnighter didn’t need heightened senses to work that one out. It was well into the small hours and it was the kid’s first taste of such concentrated blood and death and adrenaline and he was dead on his feet, despite the tough act. Midnighter had had a lot of practice at acting tough; it was, in his opinion, highly over-rated.
They were deep up the back of an underground car-park — long since cleared out and locked up — when they caught their first break.
“Fifteen minutes since the last group. Maybe we’ve gotten lucky.”
The kid looked up from where he was huddled half-asleep against the wall of a corridor. He blinked, doing a passing imitation of looking alert, but he was pale and shivering slightly despite the coat. “You think they’ve given up?”
“Or Jenny and the others have tracked them down and kicked them halfway into the next dimension.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good.” He didn’t ask who ‘Jenny and the others’ were.
Seventeen minutes and Midnighter sat down against the wall facing the kid, who jerked awake again at the movement. After a while he asked, “Do you do this sort of thing a lot, then?”
“What part?”
“You know, getting chased, hiding in car parks in the middle of the night; that sort of thing.”
“On and off.”
More silence; Midnighter got the impression the kid was trying to think of more small-talk, and grinned slightly in spite of himself.
“Are you cold?”
He didn’t really know how to answer that. He was almost always cold, in a way, but he got the feeling that wasn’t really what he was being asked. Instead, he answered, “I don’t get cold.” And then, because of the look that earned him, “No body heat.”
Oddly, the kid looked a bit upset, though for the life of him Midnighter couldn’t work out why until, “It’s just that… ah, shit this is so dumb, but… um, it’s been a bit of a crazy night y’know and, um, you said we were… you know, in the future…”
And then he Got It, held out one gloved hand in invitation.
The kid didn’t need to be asked twice, scampering across the corridor and Midnighter collected him gently against his side. This he could do; words weren’t really his strong point, but just being here, holding the Before version of the man he’d been with for almost as long as he could remember was easy. The kid was shaking — part cold, part nerves, part adrenaline — and Midnighter held him, running strong hands up and down arms that were so much smaller than he remembered until some of the quaking subsided. His affections were accepted gratefully though not quite returned — the kid was a little too young, a little too unsure of himself and of Midnighter and of everything — but that was fine, he could deal with that. Was happy to just sit and wait and hold that lean form and soak up hidden tears with his shoulder because it really had been such a long day and he’d seen more experienced men crack under far less.
Eventually, when the shaking and the tears had stilled he said, “Better?”
A nod against his chest, a muffled sniff and the kid tried to sit up, though Midnighter held on just enough to let him know he wasn’t being mocked. “Y-yeah. Yeah, thanks, I just—”
“You don’t need an excuse. It’s been a shitty day.”
A deep sigh. “Yeah. Sorry; force of habit, you know? Wouldn’t wanna be a crybaby fag or whatever.”
Midnighter just snorted ruefully, thinking of his Apollo who was strong and confident enough to ignore that kind of talk. Even still, it had been a hard-won battle; for both of them. He was glad, in a way, that they’d both had so much of their old lives stripped away; had been remade anew from whole and god-like cloth. It was easier to ignore the jibes and the cruelty when it was so obviously ridiculous, when you could rip out a man’s heart as soon as listen to his bile and fear. And when — during the dark times — it had been just the two of them, there had been no-one to tell them that what they were doing was wrong or shameful and anyway it certainly hadn’t felt like that. Not when things had been good and they’d kissed and made love under the bright noonday sun. Not when things had been bad and they’d held each other to stop their worlds from falling apart.
He’d always thought it’d saved him, and now he knew; could sometimes feel the cold, numb monster that lurked in the wires under his skin. And it was useful, and terrible in its callous beauty, but it had been so hard to tame — even now was still a little wild — and that had all been Apollo; every last inch of it.
How could he be ashamed of that?
He wished he were better with words, could find some way to articulate the thoughts to his husband’s shadow-self; to tell him it was all right, that he was so incredibly strong, even in the parts that were vulnerable. As it was, he just held the kid a little closer and smiled slightly as a hand reached out to find his own and long, slim fingers began running along the ridges of his gloves. He figured out a moment later what the kid was looking for, and stripped the leather with his teeth, showing off the thick gold wedding band underneath. The kid twirled the band, running warm fingers along the surface of the near-frozen metal and the smooth, worn ring of skin underneath.
“Y’know, it’s ironic; dad would’ve really liked you, I think.”
Midnighter knew that guarded voice, and he didn’t press; instead let the words come in their own time.
“He was in the army, my dad; like his dad before him and all that. I guess that’s kinda where he always wanted me to end up, too.” A cruel sort of half-laugh, then, “There was this guy I used to go to high school with. One night dad caught us up in my room; just mucking about, you know? We’d snuck some beers up and were watching Die Hard and I don’t remember who but one of us kinda mentioned how we’d totally do Bruce Willis and it was, like, a joke, you know, but not. And was almost sort of like a dare, not really serious but… So then dad walks in and—” He sighed. “I was sixteen; walked out that night. Never saw dad or James again. Sob fucking story.”
Midnighter wasn’t sure what to say. So he tried, “I could go visit; beat some sense into him.” He was only half joking and they both knew it.
“Not much point, really. I got a letter, couple of months ago, from the bastard; he’s in the hospital. Prostate cancer; how fucking ironic and all that. Said he was sorry and he wanted to see me again, one last time, before he died.”
“But you don’t want to see him?”
The kid opened his mouth, scowled, shut it again and finally said, “I dunno what I want. What would you do?”
“I think,” he started slowly, “that I’d go. That I’d sit down, look him right in the eye and ask the cunt whether it was death that changed his mind or the feel of getting fingers and machines shoved up his ass every day.”
Apollo’s laughter was like the sun, even times like now when the edge of it was bitter and the light was tired. “Yeah, maybe.” A pause and then, “So what’s your family sob story?”
“I don’t have one.”
“A family or a sob story?” It was supposed to be a joke. He winced at his answer.
“Both.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He shrugged. “People like me don’t get families.” Which is what he’d thought for years; even though most of the memories were gone, that one had stayed with him. Families were dangerous. Families were targets.
The kid scowled slightly. “You said you had a daughter…?”
“Yeah, we do. Things changed; I got out, stopped believing the crap they fed us about liabilities. Started realising it was just another way to keep us from asking too many questions. You get close to someone, you have something to fight for, you maybe stop working like a robot and act like a human being for a change. The people that own you, they don’t like that kinda thing.”
“You talk like you were in, like, black ops or something.”
“I can eviscerate a man with my bare feet; where else do you think a guy like me learns that kinda shit?” He gave a dark little laugh; this was shaky ground, even with Apollo. They’d talked about it, of course, but it’d taken a long time for the whole sorry tale to come out, and it still wasn’t something he liked to think about much. That earlier, unnamed, version of himself had been killed off by a team of Stormwatch surgeons years ago and good riddance. “Here, look.” He picked up the kid’s hand on a whim, shifting them a little and running it under his shirt, looking for…
“What are you—?”
And inch and a half to the left of the scar and, “Unh, there. Feel it?”
He felt warm fingers come alive of their own accord, tracing the slim, hard line where it ran up and down his stomach. “What…?”
“Subcutaneous wire. You’ve seen what it lets me do.” The touch was intense; would have been violently unpleasant if it’d been anyone else’s hands. “That’s what they did; turned their soldier into a weapon.”
“That’s… that’s horrible.” The kid’s voice was a breathy whisper, fingers still tracing where the line of wire branched off across his lower abdomen with a kind of morbid fascination. “You hear stories sometimes; I always thought they were, like, urban legends. Covert government experiments to create post-humans to fight in secret wars. Underground labs, black helicopters, the works.”
Midnighter sighed. “Some days it feels like everyone and their retarded cousin has a programme; you can barely walk down the street without running into the results. Volunteers aren’t exactly hard to find.”
“Like you?”
Another shrug. “Serve your country, save the world; it wasn’t so bad.” Which wasn’t quite a lie; it hadn’t been, really, at the start. “I don’t regret it.” Which was also true; the pain and the fear and the humiliation had lead him here, to Apollo, and that was a trade he’d make again and again and again and again.
The hand stilled but didn’t quite withdraw; Midnighter could feel the heat in the kid’s palm and hear the whisper of his dilating pupils, though he still didn’t quite have the nerve to go where he wasn’t invited. Didn’t quite realise that he had a standing invitation and had done so for years. It was a bit of a cocktease for the kid and he knew it but couldn’t quite help himself; belated revenge for all the times Apollo would do it to him later on. He couldn’t quite bring himself to feel guilty about it, either; knew that free-fall feeling in the pit of the kid’s stomach wasn’t at all unpleasant, not when he knew there was someone to catch him.
Nine minutes later he felt the kid’s breathing and heartbeat slow as exhaustion claimed him. There was still no sign of hostilities so Midnighter let him go. It had been a long day.
It got longer. The car park opened at 6am and Midnighter shook the kid awake at 5. He blinked sleepily, slightly started at his position until the previous night’s drama all came home and he hung his head in his hands, groaning mournfully.
“Not a dream then?”
Midnighter extracted himself gently and stood up. “It never is,” he growled. “C’mon, we need to move.”
“More disposable ninjas?” The kid took Midnighter’s hand when he extended it, pulling himself tiredly upright.
“No, car-park’s opening. Gotta find somewhere else to camp.”
“Oh. So no more ninjas?”
Midnighter grinned bleakly. “No. The other’s must’ve stopped them.”
“Like, in the future?”
“Yes.” He began looking for a discreet exit, the kid close on his heels; coat wrapped tightly around his lean frame and looking even more tired than he’d been before he’d fallen asleep.
“So, like, what now?” He was nervous, Midnighter realised.
“Still got just under a day and a half of the disruption left. So we find somewhere a bit warmer and wait it out. Then we all go home.”
“Oh. That’s good.” He didn’t sound too enthused, but Midnighter had heard that tone before; the tone of someone who had just realised that their trip down the rabbit hole was about to end, and who wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. “There’s a, uh, motel about two blocks from here.”
He grinned; the pick-up line wasn’t exactly going to be winning any awards for subtlety, but it was a good idea and the kid needed sleep somewhere he wasn’t in danger of dropping dead from frostbite. So they went. The ‘motel’ was little more than a thinly-veiled brothel, which was fine by Midnighter since it assuaged the guilt a little when he pulled the kid up the fire escape and broke into a third floor window. The room beyond was grimy and smelt like blocked drains and old cum but a few kicks and the wall heater rattled wheezily to life and by the time he’d sorted that out the kid had already discovered the place had cable.
So he’d retrieved his coat and walked the edge of the room twice and jammed the lock on the door and when he’d finally run out of things to do, sat down on the damp couch next to the kid. The TV was telling the lurid tale of a man who’d found a mermaid, and Midnighter couldn’t tell if the grainy, fuzzy image was because the motel was cheap or if all TV was like that and he just couldn’t remember this far in the past. Suddenly the Carrier seemed a million years away but sitting here, next to Apollo, half-watching some brainless drama, he couldn’t feel homesick. Because this was home — not the Carrier, not their painfully trendy home in San Francisco — right here, with Apollo, was home.
The story had progressed to the man angsting over his desire for his mermaid to be a woman before Midnighter really processed that the kid had moved and was currently hovering a couple of inches away from his face. He turned slightly, not bothering to hide the faint smile that quirked the corner of his mouth. Before he could say anything he felt warm fingers trace the edge of his mask, a ghost-touch along his cheek with only the slightest of tremors.
“So, uh, do you, like, have skin under here or what?” He didn’t wait for an answer, instead pushing tentatively at the ridged edge of the leather. Midnighter closed his eyes and let the kid experiment. The whole thing was trickier than it looked and the kid was a little clumsy — nothing even close to the confident ease he would eventually master — but he got it in the end.
“Uh, oh… wow.”
Midnighter opened his eyes and stared directly into Apollo’s, which returned his gaze with a shy admiration. “Let me guess,” he said with a smirk, “you didn’t expect a redhead?”
The kid didn’t answer, instead traced the jump-cut line of the scar that tracked down from his temple to his lip and instead asked, “So do you have a name?”
The naive perceptiveness of the questioned startled him a little, and he could only manage the barest shake of his head in reply.
The kid seemed to get the message. “Oh. Well.” And then they were kissing again. Slower, this time; deeper and longer and absolutely aching with his need to get within that brilliant warmth. It was the kid who pulled away first, reluctant and breathing fast. “You’re really good. Really good at that.”
Midnighter smirked again. “I make sure to get a lot of practice.”
Another shy grin. “I bet.” Smooth, naked hands found his again and began to strip him of his gloves in that way he’d only ever associated with Apollo. The kid was watching the process with grim determination, biting his lip slightly and from the nervousness building under his skin Midnighter knew what he was going to ask before he asked it.
“Um, look I don’t really know how to… It’s just, I’ve never… not all the way you know? And I think— no, I want it to be you.” He sighed, chewing his lip, looking everywhere but Midnighter and his blood was racing and his palms were practically dripping but Midnighter recognised that hard set in his eyes and so let the kid finish his speech. “I mean, even if you’re not… even if this is some weird hoax or whatever, and we’re not really married in the future or whatever, you still killed all those dudes for me and, um, you’rereallyhot and, uh…” He exhaled, hard. Laughed. “It, uh, sounded a lot more eloquent in my head I swear.”
Midnighter just grinned in reply, reaching out again to pull the kid closer and God his hands looked huge. He supposed he knew that, in an abstract kind of way — taller than average and impossibly broad across the shoulders, a metabolism that left him with no body fat to speak of and heavy muscle packed with more technology than meat — but he also knew that between himself and Apollo, he was the smaller one, and living on the Carrier surrounded by embodied gods it just… didn’t come up much. Here, though, in this grimy room with the all-human version of his husband pulled against his chest he felt like a giant; all clumsy and awkward though the boy didn’t seem to mind, was instead running exploratory hands along his arm and his thigh while his lips and nose nuzzled gently against Midnighter’s jaw.
And it was then, in those moments of nervous intimacy, that he first really looked at the kid; not through the calculating lens of his computer, that told him facts about height and weight and DNA, but with his own eyes, his own mind, and he was struck then by just how beautiful a canvas the Stormwatch surgeons had had to work with. Future-Apollo was beautiful too, though the elegant femininity in his face was tempered by the burning masculinity of the rest of him. His younger self, however, was all grace; thin and lean and coltish and Midnighter found himself caught up in the fascination of exploring those seductive differences. Because he worshipped Apollo and every inch of his sheer physicality — from the breadth of his chest to the power in his limbs — but there was something… interesting about this, too. Something he’d never really experienced before; something fragile.
Which is probably why he froze when the boy in his arms cried out in pain, panicked for an eternal few seconds until, “Ho’fuck your hands are cold!”
He exhaled, impossibly relieved, and withdrew his hands from where they’d worked their way underneath the kid’s thin jumper. “Sorry.” He knew it was true, of course; his Apollo occasionally told him as much, though he had enough body heat for the both of them.
The kid just chuckled, took Midnighter’s hands in his own and bought them up to his mouth to blow across rough fingers. “So why the no body heat thing?” he asked while he worked.
Midnighter shrugged, watching the kid’s actions with a kind of innocent fascination. “Don’t show up on infra-red, that sort of thing.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe they just took it out to get at something else and forgot to put it back in.”
Piercing eyes flicked up to study him briefly before returning to his hands. Another gust of warm, damp breath and they were around the kid’s waist once more. “Well, you warm up fast.” He smiled — a little shy, a little seductive — when Midnighter pulled him up to straddle his lap.
From there it was all tongues again; tongues and hands and muffled moans and the whipcord-thin torso felt so good in his arms. He could hear the blood pounding through the kid’s veins and could feel the hot hardness rubbing against his thigh. So he reached down to unzip battered old jeans and cup that straining cock through thin cotton and the kid’s breath hitched and turned into a slight mew. Which was good, so he held that body close and let the kid rub himself wantonly against his fingers; nothing elaborate or adventurous, just raw and innocent and brutally honest and he was young and horny and Midnighter was old and cunning and it wasn’t long at all before he heard the white-static burst of the kid’s orgasm and felt the warm wetness against his palm.
Almost as soon as he’d come the kid had frozen, pulled back; his expression humiliated and mortified in a way that would have been painful to see if its source hadn’t been so easy to quash.
“Ah, fuck, a-hah—”
“Sssh.” Midnighter leaned forward for a brief brush of their lips, pulling Apollo back against his chest. “Feel better? Take some of the edge off?”
He heard the kid exhale loudly, knew he was being given and out though Midnighter didn’t know how to articulate that it wasn’t, really. This was just… how they did things. How they always had, ever since their first frantic time together Back then, they’d been too raw to have any notions that either needed to ‘prove’ himself to the other by holding back. Stamina wasn’t an issue; the same tricks that let them fight for hours on end let them fuck for hours on end too, which, of course, they did and always had. They would come fast and hard and often and leave each other worn and wet and reeking of cum. Which worked for them; it’d only been much later that they’d had the presence of mind to realise that wasn’t necessarily how things were ‘supposed’ to be done. Not that they’d cared, really, what other people thought they were ‘supposed’ to be doing.
The fullness of that lesson would come in time, he supposed. Right now, kid-Apollo was still full of porn films and faux locker room boasting. Not quite dissuaded that there was no ‘competition’ here. Though Midnighter was going to make damn sure to try and teach him.
The kid said, “Yeah… yeah, thanks.” and Midnighter couldn’t help the decidedly wicked grin that split his lips as he stood up in one smooth motion. “Woah, wha—?”
The room wasn’t exactly palatial and he’d crossed them over to the bed in three long strides, dumping the kid down just a little shy of gently. Wide, liquid eyes looked up to study where he loomed — huge and hard and male — and widened even further still when he said, “Now is the fun bit.”
He got to work stripping the kid down with meticulous gusto; shoes and jumper and unzipped jeans and damp briefs all succumbing to his expert hands. And suddenly he realised he had a problem, because the kid was responding in kind and he would’ve thought he’d have grown out of it after so many years but he still couldn’t quite help the pang of horrified shame that cut through him at the thought of someone seeing him naked and no amount of telling himself that maybe he kinda shoulda thought of that before they’d gotten into this situation was helping the matter. Nor was telling himself that this was Apollo, and it wasn’t exactly as if Apollo had never seen him naked before because, well, this one hadn’t. And it was the one piece of vanity — of uncertainty — that he’d never quite managed to stamp out. Because the scars were all there — the lazy, drunken, ugly scars from where he’d been ripped apart and remade — and it was this moment, standing over someone as breathtakingly beautiful as Apollo, that he always felt like a monster.
His shirt came off. He let it go, heard the sharp intake of breath when it was halfway over his head.
And it was stupid, really, because he knew he was being precious about it and the breath turned into a low whistled and the kid said, “Fucking hell. I didn’t think anyone actually looked like that outside of, like, comic books.”
The shirt hit the ground with a dull thwap and he couldn’t quite help showing off. Just a little bit; stretching out in the ways he knew made his Apollo instantly rock-hard. Apparently some things didn’t change with age.
Warm hands traced muscles and scars with reverent awe. “It’s like dating fucking G.I. Joe or something.”
Which for some reason made him feel silly enough to say, “Let me show you my exciting kung-fu grip action!”
The kid squealed with undignified laughter as he rolled them over, ending up straddling slim hips and pinning long limbs expertly as they kissed again, deep and slow.
Eventually he pulled himself away with a growl, fingers working with clumsy haste at his belt. He was halfway done before he remembered his boots, cursed and changed tack to work on those while the kid laughed at his frustration and watched him with deliciously seductive, half-lidded eyes. Midnighter had made it to naked when the blanket came up around his shoulders, held cloak-like by the kid as he wrapped broad shoulders in a hesitant but determined embrace. He smiled as they tumbled back against the bed, this time rolling over easily as the kid climbed onto his lap, allowing himself to be pinned this time; savouring the submission as he always did, though the physical disparity between them was so great and there was no question he would be able to overpower the kid if he’d wanted to.
He didn’t want to.
Instead he simply watched as the kid studied him with an expression that was as innocent as it was terrifying. He was rock-hard, straining against a pale, slightly soft belly; jousting for position with the kid’s own as it made a fast comeback.
Eventually, the kid said, “I can’t imagine what I could possibly have done to deserve someone like you.”
He didn’t know how to answer that, really; at least not without giving too much away. He’d probably been reckless enough with the timestream as it was; not that he really knew how these things worked. But he owed Apollo an answer. He owed Apollo everything.
“Someone like me, it’s all about what you do. It’s about how many guards you can kill in a minute or how fast you can heal a broken spine or how many symptoms you show when they inject you with ebola.” He sighed, tried to find words to explain it that weren’t trite or cheap and came up blank. “I hated you; utterly loathed the thought of you. Some bastard with a knife had cut out the human in me and how dare you be all sunny and happy about everything all the time.
“The worst part was that you seemed to like me. I couldn’t work it out. You’d deliberately come look for me, hang around and chat at me for an hour or so while I snarled and pretended to ignore you, and then you’d smile and say bye and come back the next day for exactly the same thing. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t work.”
Midnighter sighed. Thinking of Those Days always bought within it a kind of stomach-lurching horror. He’d been so close, in retrospect, to just… losing it. Had hated himself and what had been done to him for so long that he’d all-but managed to shut out everyone and every thing that wasn’t absolutely vital to his function. Apollo had saved him and he knew now, years later, that in his own bizarre way he’d saved Apollo, too. Because they’d connected, even if it was just over his bleak schadenfreude at Apollo’s self-depreciating confessions. He’d made Apollo feel less like a god. Apollo had made him feel less like a monster.
“You treated me like a human,” he continued. And then, just because Apollo wouldn’t remember it by the time it mattered anyway, he added, “The timestream where you die — the one I’m trying to stop by being here — I… don’t turn out so well.” He still didn’t know what he’d done, exactly, or been, but the way the others had looked at him on the Carrier… he could take a guess. Had seen that cold, mechanical abyss too many times; had struggled desperately to keep it at bay when he’d been on his own those three years. Had felt it in his limbs and his head anyway when Bendix had controlled him.
Slender fingers stroked the length of his scar with infinite tenderness, though the kid didn’t try and reassure him. He was grateful for that, absentmindedly catching fingertips in his mouth; sucking and stroking with his tongue. He heard the kid gasp, felt him re-angle his hips slightly and start making deliciously shy thrusting motions; rubbing his renewed arousal along Midnighter’s own and the smooth ridges of his belly. He watched the kid for a while through half-lidded eyes — blissful in raw, indulgent sensuality — then, when he could feel his own burn build to painful levels, flipped them over once more, capturing soft, chapped lips in his own and drinking hungrily. He felt a shiver run through the body below him, and he knew the kid knew what was coming next.
He pulled himself out of the kiss reluctantly, leaning off the bed enough to snag his jacket from where it had been abandoned on the floor, re-emerging a moment later brandishing a small tube. The kid started giggling nervously when he realised what it was.
“You keep lube in there with, like, the knives and throwing stars?”
Midnighter just grinned. Future-Apollo had long since stopped ribbing him about it. After all, it certainly came in handy.
He put the tube down on the kid’s chest and let him be nervous for a few moments, savouring the jittery shyness tempered by wide-eyed trust. Midnighter wasn’t entirely convinced he deserved it. If he thought about it — which he was studiously trying not to do — he wasn’t at all confident in the moral appropriateness of this course of action at all, knew he was taking advantage of the situation but… just couldn’t really bring himself to feel terribly bad about it. Because it was Apollo.
“I… what do you want me to, uh, to…” The kid’s not-question trailed off. Midnighter grinned, warming a decent splat of lube on his fingers; for the kid moreso than himself, really.
“Just relax. Enjoy yourself.”
The kid started to say something but cut off abruptly into a sharp intake of breath when Midnighter’s slicked fingers began rubbing skilfully up and down his cock.
“Wha—?”
But Midnighter was in no mood for arguments; cut off the protest with another ferocious kiss, wiping his fingers on an unused pillow and repositioning himself slightly before pushing down again…
“Aah!”
It didn’t really matter who’d made the sound. What mattered was the whipcord flare of pain that dissolved into pleasure as he re-angled himself and started to move; long, slow thrusts getting slowly faster and deeper and the kid had gone almost completely incoherent underneath him, fingers scrabbling against his thighs, eyes rolled back.
It was bliss, of course, because it always was, and he groaned appreciatively when he felt warm hands curve around his own erection and start to clumsily stroke him in time to his movements. He guided the fingers with his own, showing them the ways he liked to be stroked and teased and the kid was nothing if not a quick learner.
The whole thing was over quickly; the kid’s hand stilling as his heart leaps and the temperature of his skin followed, Midnighter feeling the pulsing release inside him a moment later. He found his own shortly after — urged mostly by his own touch — sending a white arc of sticky cum over the kid’s pale, lean chest. As he rolled off and curled on the bed he couldn’t help a smile at the still-shaking form of the kid; at least it had been Earth-shattering for one of them.
After a moment, glazed eyes blinked open and regarded him muzzily. “That… that was…” He chewed his lip ever-so-slightly. “Thank you.”
Midnighter grinned, feral under the room’s naked, sickly yellow bulb. “I’m here for another twenty-four and change,” he said, “and I’m not even warmed up yet.”
It sounded like a threat but felt like a promise.
That was how it went, mostly. He got one more shuddering near-dry orgasm out of the kid before sleep swallowed him and Midnighter spent the next four hours just watching the flawed, beautiful lines of that youthful body; trying to match them up in his head with the godlike perfection in his own Apollo. It was all there, despite everything that was different — despite the height and the spread of his chest and the impossible sun-white of his hair — and he found himself running the transformation over and over in his head, marvelling at both the Before and the After and it was a stupid, incredibly sappy thing to think, but in that moment he knew that no matter where they were, what form they took, they belonged to no-one else. A hundred lifetimes on a thousand worlds, and Midnighter knew he would find his Apollo. Find him and offer himself to the sun — without question or hesitation — because anything else would be… unthinkable.
Not that he’d ever say anything so ridiculous out loud, of course. But he could think it; alone and safe in the deepest part of his mind.
The kid woke up a little before noon and a loud growl from his stomach announced his hunger. So they’d slipped out of the grimy motel room and found themselves a greasy pizza joint a few blocks down. He’d ordered without really thinking about it, and turned to find the kid staring at him with a kid of reverent awe.
“That… You know my favourite pizza.”
Midnighter had shrugged as if it were the most normal thing in the world — which, for him of course, it was — and had heard the kid’s heart leap in a way that could only be love.
After the pizza, he’d taken the kid back to his apartment. He’d felt a brief flash of paranoia as he’d ringed the building for any signs of interference — police, time-travelling assassins, nosy neighbours, whatever — but they’d encountered no surprises until the kid had turned his key in the lock and opened the door to find every last one of the bodies gone and not even the slightest hint of the fight. Except, of course, for the faint smell of ozone and the tickle of invisible butterfly wings against his cheeks. Midnighter decided now was not the time to be inspecting teeth, as it were.
They made love again — there in young-Apollo’s narrow student bed — and again and again until the kid was too exhausted and too sore to do very much except doze lightly against Midnighter’s chest, one eye on the time, another on the TV. He was a fast learner, and suspiciously enthusiastic. When Midnighter had called him on it, the kid has blushed scarlet and murmured, “Well, you know… for when we meet again. I want to, y’know, be… good.”
As if he could have argued with that. Especially over a strange feeling in his chest that felt suspiciously like his heart breaking. Not that that was even possible, not that he hadn’t been engineered to stop that, but…
The hours passed. Perfect, useless, lazy hours where there was nothing to do and no-one to save but the young man in his arms. The sky outside darkened and they ate once more — old take-away Chinese hidden away in a rattling bar fridge — and made out in front of the TV until the kid managed to convince him to pick up a game controller and laughed at him as he baffled over the buttons. It didn’t last long; the game involved shooting aliens and terrorists in the jungle. He made a point to be good at it.
“I suppose you, like, do this sort of stuff for real,” the kid said thoughtfully as they moved their swaggering, 2D commandos around the screen.
Midnighter shrugged. “Less barrel rolls usually.”
Once he had the controls down, they beat the game easily — which pleased the kid to no end — and moved onto something else involving one-colour, blocky professional wrestlers and horrible English. That one deteriorated pretty quickly when the kid realised it was easier to win by playing dirty than by skill. Midnighter didn’t mind; ‘playing dirty’ involved a lot of rolling around on the floor, laughing and kissing and rubbing against each other.
The time went quickly.
“How does this work, exactly?”
Forty seven hours almost to the second since he’d stepped through the Door and out into the past, and for once Midnighter had no idea how things were going to go, only that they were almost gone. He told the kid as much. They were sitting together on a bench in a now-deserted park. About an hour ago, a man with rolling eyes and the stench of three-day-old vomit had demanded their wallets. Midnighter had quickly convinced him that this course of action was unwise, and they’d been given a wide berth ever since.
A few more moments of companionable silence and the kid said, “I’ll miss you.”
Which was… nice, so he said, “You’ll see me again.”
“When?”
He just grinned a wolfish grin and the kid rolled his eyes. “Right right disrupting the time stream and all that.”
Midnighter didn’t have the heart to correct him.
The feeling had hit him a few moments later; the itching underneath his skin, the static in his wires and and weightless feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He turned to the kid and had to squint through the static in his vision. Young Apollo’s expression was woebegone, and on an impulse Midnighter leant forward for one final, chaste kiss. It wasn’t good bye.
Time caught up with him.
This transition was easier than the last, though he’d always found that to be the case. You could always go home. It was odd, though, because while the noise in his head had cleared the ghost-touch kiss against his lips hadn’t. In fact, if anything it felt more real than it had when he’d started it; warm and familiar and solid and maybe he was going crazy but that sure as hell felt like a hand against the back of his head.
Midnighter opened his eyes.
“So,” said Apollo, “I hear you like explosions.” His grin was wicked.
“… Uh.”
Apollo leant back, shining and godlike in the afternoon sun and for a while Midnighter could do nothing but stare in awe at every inch of that incredible body; as if seeing his husband for the first time, all over again. In a way, he supposed, he was.
“Jenny told me I reappeared about ten minutes after they’d sent you back.” It took him a moment to realise Apollo was providing him with the exposition. He tried to pay attention, though suspected he was only half-successful. “Turns out it was some two-bit group working out of the Ukraine. Probably sponsored by the CIA but…” he shrugged. “Angie fried the time machine; trying to trace down the origin of the tech but it’s pretty generic. Might be a dead end.”
Some part of Midnighter’s brain said, “We’ve made a lot of enemies.”
Apollo’s grin turned rueful for a moment, before breaking out into something far softer. “Funny thing, though; everything I did with you, in the past, I remembered. In real time. The Doctor had some techno-spiritual babble explaining it, for all the sense that made.”
Midnighter was hit by the horrible realisation that he was blushing, though that wasn’t the only reason he found himself wished he hadn’t decided to leave his mask off for once. Instead, it was the uncomfortable realisation that the whole time he’d been in the past he’d been expecting to come back to find Apollo none the wiser for it. The thought gripped his heart like a vice, and the seams in his gauntlets had never looked so fascinating. What had seemed joyful and innocent mere hours ago was starting to feel an awful lot like that absolute worst kind of infidelity; made all the more difficult because of the blazing way Apollo was smiling. He should be smiling, Midnighter thought; he should be horrified.
But, even after all these years, Apollo still managed to surprise him. Always; the only one who did.
When he next spoke, Apollo’s voice was inscruitable. “Midnighter, you had two days. Why not ask me my name?”
He looked up at that, meeting sun-bright eyes wide with honest curiosity and not an inch of recrimination. He hesitated; not because the answer was hard, but rather because it was so infinitely obvious. “It didn’t occur to me. I know who you are.”
Apollo’s kiss tasted like the dawn.
“C’mon,” he said when they finally broke away. “It’s been a long day. Let’s get you home.”
And this is the part he doesn’t remember.
The hospital is cold and bright and smells like bleach and vomit but at this time in his life he finds the experience comforting rather than terrifying. It’s what he wants, after all; to live and work in corridors exactly like this, scrubbed down and tired as hell but all the while knowing that he’s doing good, he’s making a difference. Although, after last week he’s starting to think of a different way to get there. One even his father would approve of.
Which is why he’s here, in a way, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the sage-green Lino.
When he enters the room he barely recognises the thing in the bed; all tubes and wires and parchment-gaunt skin. Not the images he associates with his father at all, who will always loom larger-than-life in his mind with ham-sized fists and a gut full of beer. A product of his times and the last of a dying breed. The Man’s Man; a beast of football and Hooters and greasy food and overblown machismo, a thin veneer over terror at the changing century. Terror that had, ultimately, proved fatal; by the time the doctors had discovered the cancer it had spread. A couple of months earlier and they could have caught it in time, but he knew his father well enough to know the old bastard would never, ever have consented to the examination. And this was the price.
Milky eyes half-blinded with pain and drugs make a last ditch effort to focus as he sits next to the bed, and he takes the shrivelled claw in his own hand when it clutches weakly in his direction.
“I’m here,” he says, and when all he gets in reply is the hiss of the breathing tubes he knows this isn’t exactly going to be a conversation. Which is fine; he’s not here for that. “I wasn’t going to come. When I got your letter all I could think was, ‘Fuck, serves the old bastard right’. But I got talked into coming. By my boyfriend; he said I should, just to tell you what a cunt you are. So… dad, you are a cunt.”
The hand in his twitches. He ignores it.
“It’s funny, ‘cause you’d like him, I think. Ex-military, since moved into stuff that’s more exotic and less legal. Built like a brick wall, decapitates terrorists with a single glance; y’know, your kinda guy. Apart from the whole ‘queer as a three dollar bill thing’, I guess.” He sighs. “So, that’s what I came here to tell you. That and on Monday I applied to the MSC; gonna be an army doctor, change the world and all that.”
Another twitch, and it’s hard to tell but he thinks he can see the edge of a smile.
“There’s gonna be a change, old man,” he says, and there’s a hardness in his voice he almost doesn’t recognise. But he will; not long from now, that edge will have set in for good. “Your generation’s had it’s chance and guess what? You fucked up. So now it’s our turn — the fags and the freaks and the feminists. Everything you’re afraid of. So see you, dad. Hurry up and die so the rest of us can get on with living.”
He stands up, turns to go and is halfway out the room when a sound like a dying cat fills the room before a voice, so cracked and whispering that he almost misses it.
“W-what makes… makes you th-think you’ll… do a bu-better job, boy?”
He pauses, don’t look back when he gives the obvious answer. “Because. We can hardly do any worse.”
He leaves.
A couple of years and he won’t even remember it happened at all.