Sidekick: The Misadventures of the New Scarlet Knight (22 page)

As he fell, I kicked my own anti-gravs into high gear and dove toward the ground. He kept working his legs, desperately trying to vibrate out of the boots, but he wasn’t having any luck. Something about the artificial gravity forces at work in the boots was preventing him from phasing the molecules of the boots around his own molecules.

He was trapped.

The others caught up with us, stunned at the way I’d managed to bring Tommy back down to Earth but still wary of getting too close. After all, he
was
still armed, and a cornered animal is always the most dangerous. I’d thought about being cautious myself, trying to keep my distance, but someone had to confront him. Besides, what I had said up in the air moments before was still true. He didn’t want to kill me. I could tell by the look in his eyes.

It also didn’t hurt that I was the key to him being able to move from that spot ever again.

“It’s over, Tommy.” I tried to sound as compassionate and friendly as I could under the circumstances. “It’s all over. You’re not going to be able to run away from this one.”

“No?” That horrible, cold laugh was back again. “You forget, I’m very good at running.”

“Tommy, I’ve got you trapped. You can’t move. There’s no way out. If you promise to come with me, I’ll turn the boots off. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal—”

“You know as well as I do there are no deals.” He started to cry. “There are never any deals for people like us. We’re all freaks that the world tolerates because we clean up their messes and keep them safe in their beds. But when we screw up, there’s never any kind of mercy. If we’re lucky, we wind up out on that island where they stashed Painmonger and Madame Madness and the other powerful bad guys. If we’re unlucky, or we’re seen as too much of a threat … ” He didn’t complete the sentence, but he didn’t need to. We’d both heard whispers about what had really happened to some of the worst villains we’d faced after the battles were over.

“Tommy, we’ll be there for you. We’ll see to it that—”

“No you won’t. No one ever will. But you’re right about one thing. It’s over.” He opened his fist to reveal Prism’s necklace again. “It’s all over. It all ends here.”

The necklace! How could I have been so stupid? I should have grabbed it while he was trying to work his way out of the boots. Now here was a boy who could move faster than me, was much smarter than me, and he was holding the most powerful weapon in the universe. Yeah, I had him trapped, but even trapped he was still a mortal threat to all of us. And for all I knew the anti-grav control would end as soon as my helmet was blasted into tiny little pieces, so maybe he wouldn’t be trapped for all that long, either.

I was about to scream to the others to get as far away as possible when I caught a glint in Tommy’s eye. Something told me I had it all wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Tommy smiled at me, and somehow I suddenly knew what he was planning. I screamed for him to stop, but I was helpless to intervene. I can’t move faster than light. I don’t think Tommy could, either. Even if he could, he didn’t seem to want to as the same impossibly white light that had obliterated Paragon washed over him, leaving nothing more than a wisp of smoke in its wake as the necklace dropped to the ground, landing next to what was left of the now-empty boots.

Housecleaning

I’ve come to the conclusion that stuff breeds. When you put stuff into an area, then add stuff to it, some night when you’re not looking, the two stuffs are going to get it on and have a litter of baby stuffs you didn’t have before. I realized that when the time came for me to pack my stuff at Justice Federation HQ, and I needed considerably more boxes to take it out than I did when I brought it in.

I hadn’t brought much with me when I’d set up the room. I hadn’t spent too many nights there, either. So when did so many of my things find their way to this little room? When did it get to be a proper home away from home? The only answer I could think of was my stuff had been fruitful and multiplied when I was off doing other things.

As I was clearing off the shelves, I came across what certainly had to have been stuff spawn since I couldn’t remember ever bringing it with me. It was a little framed photograph of the four of us at the beach: me, Rick, Sarah … and Tommy. I remembered the day it was taken, but for the life of me I could not remember having the picture taken. Who had I gotten to hold the camera? And when had I gotten it developed? Or bought a frame for it? So many necessary steps to create the little memento in my hands, but I couldn’t remember taking any of them. Yet, here it was. Had I really considered all those things that I must have done to be so unimportant as to not remember them? Had I considered bringing a photo of my best friends in the world, a permanent physical reminder of how much they meant to me, with me to HQ to be so unimportant it wasn’t worth taking note of?

No. The answer had to be stuff reproducing. That was it. The alternative was too sad to consider.

I was still staring at the photograph when I heard the door open behind me. Sarah came in, sat down next to me on the bed, and put her arm around me. Without taking my eyes off the photo, I returned the gesture. “I remember that day,” she said softly.

“Yeah. Happy days and all that.” We sat for a while, holding each other and looking at the picture before I worked up the energy to speak again. “Would you believe me if I said I miss him? Even after everything he did, I wish I had him here with us.”

“So do I. I don’t know why.”

“I do. He was our brother.” Thinking about Tommy and all the havoc he’d wrought, all that he’d destroyed, made me cry again. I couldn’t help it. I kept seeing the look on Paragon’s face as Tommy burned him away, then the bodies of Mystery and Phoebe, one after the other. But then my mind would skip back to chasing after him on the beach, and the sound of him screaming on the big rollercoaster at the amusement pier, and the stupid conversations he used to pull us into during late night bull sessions when we’d all get together. Yeah, he wasn’t going to hurt anyone else anymore, but he wasn’t going to bring any more joy into our lives either, and trying to reconcile those two facts was frustrating. Sarah cried, too, but her next words suggested her reasons for crying were different from mine.

“Bobby, please don’t go. We need you right now.”

“I’m sorry. I have to.” I put the picture back on the shelf, not wanting to pack it, but also not willing to dispose of it. Much better to leave it behind, just a little bit of both him and me, staying in HQ for all of eternity. Or at least until the next hero moved in. “When I started out, it was all so simple. You knew who were the heroes and who were the villains. I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong, who was good and who was bad, and you could do something about it. But the last few days, hell, the last couple of
months
have shown me how naive I was to think that. Look at what some of the people we thought we knew were capable of. Especially Tommy, who always seemed the most innocent of us all. He was the purest of heart, and look what this hero business did to him. It isn’t good guys against bad guys. Hell, I don’t think there are any good guys anymore.”

“You know that’s not true, Bobby.
You’re
a good guy.”

“Am I? When I was talking with Tommy that day, and he kept on bragging about what he’d done and how he’d done it, then watching him cripple Morgaine and … ” I choked up. It hurt to think about Paragon; I’d see the expression on his dying face in my dreams the rest of my life. “I wanted to kill him, Sarah. And if I could have found a way to do it, I might have.”

“But that’s the difference between you and him,” Sarah pleaded. “You
didn’t
. Even when you had him at your mercy, you tried to bring him in alive. You didn’t kill him; he did it himself.”

“Yeah, I didn’t kill him.” I went back to packing, the sooner I got away from HQ, the better off I would be. “This time. But what happens next time? What happens when some Big Bad comes after Rick? Or, God help me,
you
?
What if it had been you who tried to tackle him that last time instead of Paragon?” I didn’t want to say,
what if it had been you he’d incinerated
?
“
I don’t know if I could control myself. Hell, I know I wouldn’t be able to.”

“That’s the hard part. You never know if you’re going to live up to your better nature until you have to. But I really do know you, Bobby. You’re too good to not pull yourself from the brink. Besides, you’ve got the rest of us to help pull you back when the time comes. We’ll always be there for you.”

“I know. I would’ve said the same thing to Tommy. But I wasn’t there for him, was I?”

“He never trusted us. He never told us what he was thinking or feeling. He never asked us for help.”

“He shouldn’t have had to. He was my friendHe was my brother. I should have known.” I packed the last of my books into the box and folded the flaps shut. “I should have known.” That was all there was to say about it in the end, and I was determined to make it my last word on the matter.

Sarah sat watching me pack for another minute or so. “Clytemnestra’s leaving too.”

“What?” That took me by surprise. With the possible exception of Paragon, she had been the one to take her commitments to the Federation, and to the rest of us, the most seriously. For her to quit would have been unthinkable just a couple of days before. “I can’t believe she’d quit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded, and then we kissed again.

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

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

***

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

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

“Bobby asked me to marry him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ha ha.”

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

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

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