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Ray reached the base of the mountain as the first light of sunrise hit the ruined Swellview sign and the first siren cut through the silence of the morning.
He could tell even from that far away that it was bad, that it was something he shouldn’t be running into, especially without his invincibility, but his brain couldn’t make the message reach his legs. It would normally take him half an hour to reach the sign. That day it took him 20 minutes.
He climbed until the smoke and heat were unbearable, until he could hardly take a breath around all the ash and dust. The blimp was unsalvageable. It would take days to remove all the wreckage. The odds of finding Henry alive were slim to none and with the intensity of the fire, by the time they did find him there might not be enough left to give to his family. But he had to try. It was the least he—
“Ray?”
He froze, breath caught in his throat. He was hallucinating, he told himself, the smoke had to be cutting off the oxygen to his brain and making him hear things—
“Ray.”
He turned around.
It was impossible. It was entirely impossible, but Ray couldn’t stop himself from taking a step and reaching out his hand. Henry looked exactly the same as he had atop the blimp, clean and whole except for the torn mask, what looked like a blossoming bruise on one cheek, and an odd green glow encompassing his body. He definitely didn’t look like he’d just gone down in flames on a crashing blimp.
“Are you real?” Ray heard himself ask, voice hoarse. “Are you—?”
Henry gave him a weak smile. “Ray, it’s me. I’m okay.” He took a step closer, but the green halo of light surrounding him collided with Ray’s hand and rippled, pushing his fingers back as if they'd touched a solid wall. Henry frowned, and the glow faded.
Henry took half a breath before being wracked with a violent cough, and hallucination or not, Ray couldn't watch him suffer without doing something. He darted forward, catching a collapsing Henry under the elbows, keeping him upright.
For a hallucination, he was surprisingly solid.
“Henry?” Ray whispered, hands shaking. He could feel Henry slipping and he tightened his grip far too tight, but he couldn’t make himself let go.
“We gotta go,” Henry gasped. As if Henry had summoned it, Ray was suddenly aware of the sound of the sirens being far louder than they had been before. “Ray, you don’t have your mask, we can’t be here when the police come.”
He nodded, lifted Henry’s arm around his shoulder, and carefully walked them away from the wreckage.
Alive.
---
The Hart home was trashed and dark when they arrived, but it was quiet.
The second Ray deposited his exhausted sidekick on the bed up in his bedroom, the kid was out like a light with barely a word, and the silence of the room crushed in on Ray like a fog. He knew he should go downstairs, look for a phone, try to call someone, anyone, but he couldn’t make himself let Henry out of his sight. So he climbed up the ladder to the small loft area and sat on the ledge, head against the front of the couch, and let himself be alone with his thoughts for just a moment.
The parachute gently lowered him to the street somewhere in downtown Swellview.
It took every last ounce of Ray’s will to not release the cords high above the ground, to just let himself fall a few hundred feet and let nature work itself out, because now he was vulnerable, and a fall from that height would have killed him instantly and he needed to be alive in order to—
As his feet hit the ground, the sound of an explosion just briefly preceded the vibration of the blimp hitting the nearby mountain.
He came back to his senses to find that the natural light in the room had almost magically become brighter. He must have dozed off.
Henry was still where Ray had left him, unconscious. Still real. Still there.
He still needed to call someone. Charlotte or Jasper or Schwoz, or even Henry’s parents. Someone had to know they were there and safe.
His cell phone had died hours ago, and though Henry still had his, Ray couldn’t bring himself to wake him. There was a landline somewhere in the house, Ray remembered, not that he knew anyone’s number by heart. But his entire body felt restless, legs aching to move, hands itching to do something, so he forced himself up onto his feet. There was a throw folded up on a nearby chair, and he grabbed it, draping it across Henry’s prone form. He didn’t wake, but Ray could see the steady rise and fall of his chest.
A plume of smoke billowed up from what he could see of the Swellview sign, and the pain in his chest radiated through his body even as he started running. An explosion that size, no one could have survived; even the mountain itself wouldn’t ever look the same, but maybe if he got there in time, he could do something, even if it was—
Even if it was just to find the body and bring it back to Henry’s family.
The body—but he couldn’t really be sure that Henry was dead until there was a body, right? Maybe he had taken Ray’s advice and grabbed the parachute and jumped off at just the right moment. That could have happened, right? The parachute took two minutes to put on and there were at least five minutes that Henry had to steer the blimp into the mountain, so maybe he took the time. Maybe he was alive. Maybe he was okay. Maybe...
Maybe the silence in his earpiece wasn’t because of anything.
Downstairs, the house really was trashed. It seemed as though not a single object or piece of furniture was in the condition it should have been. The railing of the stairwell was completely gone. The bookcase was a lost cause. The couch seemed to be intact, but it was covered by a thick layer of dust and debris, and he’d had to stop Henry from collapsing in it when they’d arrived.
He didn’t know where the phone was, but the kitchen seemed to be the most logical place to start, and it was the area of the bottom floor that seemed to have the least amount of mess. He got to work shuffling aside everything he could find in search of the phone.
For a few minutes, he worked in silence.
“Ray?”
He froze, chipped vase in one hand and broken flower pot in the other. Henry was gingerly making his way down the rail-less stairs, stepping over the larger chunks of broken plaster and splintered wood.
“Hey,” he said. “You should be resting.”
Henry made it to the bottom of the stairs without incident and shrugged. “I got a few hours. What are you doing?”
“Looking for a phone,” Ray told him. “Mine is dead. You still have that landline, right?”
“No,” Henry told him, frowning. “We got rid of it a couple weeks ago. We never used it anyway and I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse for my parents to keep it.”
Ray tossed the items in his hand aside. So much for that plan.
“I should have a charger upstairs,” Henry continued. “At least, if my sister didn’t steal it. I—”
He was cut off by the front door slamming open. Both he and Ray’s hands immediately, instinctively went to their belts.
Standing in the doorway, chest heaving and eyes wide, was Charlotte. For a long moment, they all just stared at each other.
“Henry?” she breathed. She stepped forward toward him, hand outstretched. It collided with his shoulder and she snatched it back as if she’d been burned. “But—but you were—”
“Hey,” Henry murmured back, reaching out. “I’m fine, I’m here.” His hand curled around her upper arm and every ounce of tension seemed to rush out of her at once, and she collapsed against his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist.
After a moment, her entire body started to shake, and she buried her face in his shoulder as she began to sob. Henry reached up and gently brushed her hair aside to press a soft kiss onto her forehead and squeezed her tighter.
Tears sprung up in Ray’s own eyes and he blinked them away.
After what seemed like hours, the two finally pulled away from each other.
“I’ll head upstairs to get chargers for me and Ray and then we can work out a plan, okay?” Henry told her softly, giving her one last squeeze as she nodded, then headed back up the stairs. She rubbed at her bloodshot eyes with her sleeve as he went.
Ray dropped onto the couch as carefully as he could. The tiny nap he’d taken upstairs hadn’t done a whole lot to rid him of exhaustion, and now that his hands had nothing to do, he could feel the urge to sleep creeping into his bones, making his eyelids heavy. Charlotte collapsed onto the couch beside him. For a moment, they sat in silence, the only sound being Henry moving around upstairs.
Charlotte’s voice, though quiet, nearly made him jump.
“Everything’s gonna change, isn’t it?” she whispered.
Through half-lidded eyes, he stared at the shattered remains of the Hart’s coffee table at his feet. He could still hear sirens in the distance.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think it is.”