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PACIFIC OCEAN
March 31, 2016, 0:16 HAST
In hindsight, they really should have sent the rescued civilians to another area of the ship, but they were too busy dealing with the injured to think about that. Except for the newest batch of civilian captives, only Nightwing and an out-of-costume Batgirl had no need for any sort of medical treatment, as literally everyone else had been experimented on, gotten beaten unconscious by the enemy, or been subjected to both.
So, when Blue Beetle eventually regained consciousness and immediately retracted his armour upon awakening, some of the kids were in the room to see it. “It’s me! It’s me!” Jaime gasped, looking to be almost in a panic.
Impulse, who had been hovering over him worriedly, gave him a calm smile, all of the aforementioned worry seeming to vanish in a blink. “‘Course it is.”
Nightwing was about to ask what they meant by that exchange – and order Jaime to get his face covered – but it quickly became apparent that they had far more pressing concerns regarding the kid.
“No,” Jaime gasped, “No, it wasn’t. Not before. I let it take over, I couldn’t fight, I gave in. I let it!” He reached up and grabbed his head, clutching it as if in pain, as his breathing grew shallower and more rapid. “You warned me, and I let it!” He was panicking. About what, though, Dick wasn’t sure.
Bart seemed to have an idea, as his worry was clearly back. Conner also moved forward. Dick knew the half-Kryptonian had been spending some time with Jaime lately, so of the senior Team members, he was probably the best to handle this.
“Blue, calm down. It’s okay.”
“N-no! The sca-scarab, I let it win! I- I- I let it-” Tears were starting to pour down his face, now, and from Dick could see of him, his shoulders were shaking violently.
Meanwhile, Babs took the obvious hint and started ushering the various civilians to another part of the Bioship. However, when a blonde girl in a purple jacket stood up and walked away, she cleared the line of sight between Jaime and a dark-haired boy with an orange headband.
Earlier, Dick had been too preoccupied with actually completing the rescue mission to do more than give each rescued civilian a passing glance. Now, however, he got a good look at this boy. And he knew that face. It had only appeared on his screen every time he could spare a moment to help Jaime in his desperate search for his missing best friend.
“Jaime?!” Tye Longshadow gasped.
Tye still wasn’t sure of everything that had happened in the past… he wasn’t even sure how long it had been since he’d hung up on his best friend at the bus station. All he was sure of – okay, maybe sure of – was that he was finally getting out of there. He’d been pulled out of that godforsaken pod by some new captives who weren’t really captives but undercover superheroes, and now he was on some kind of weird submarine or spaceship with them, his fellow prisoners, and a bunch of other superheroes – some of whom he recognised from the news, some of whom he didn’t. The last one on board, who’d arrived unconscious and in the arms of the green guy who looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, was one of those Tye had recognised. Blue Beetle, El Paso’s own local hero.
Tye had been sitting down, with other people blocking his view of said hero, when Blue Beetle had woken up and apparently started having some kind of mental or emotional breakdown – and there was something about his voice that sounded really familiar – but when a bunch of the other kids started getting up and moving to another room, he got a good look at him for the first time.
And once again, Tye recognised him, but not as Blue Beetle.
“Jaime?!”
He blinked once.
Twice.
Yes, that was Jaime Reyes, his best friend, sitting there amongst the superheroes in nothing but his favourite pair of jeans, and looking like he was only an inch away from a full-on anxiety attack.
Jaime looked up at the sound of his name, and it actually took a few seconds for his own recognition to creep into his eyes. Tye didn’t think he’d seen Jaime so scared since… ever.
“T-T-Tye?” the other boy breathed, staring at him like he was a figment of his imagination.
Tye pushed through the crowd, trying to reach his friend, until one of them – the redheaded undercover superheroine – grabbed him by the arm. “Hey! Let go!”
“It’s okay,” the muscly guy in the black and red Superman shirt told her, “Let this one through. That’s Blue’s missing friend, remember?”
The hands gripping Tye’s arm released him, but he didn’t even look back as he lunged forward and skidded to a stop right next to his best friend. “Jaime, what happened? What- How are you-”
The short, skinny kid in the red and off-white bodysuit grinned shakily. “That’s a long story, and it gets longer the further back we go.”
Tye took a deep breath and decided which question needed answering first. “What happened to you? Here, I mean. You look like hell!”
But it wasn’t Jaime who answered his question. Rather, it was the guy who seemed to be in charge, the one in the black suit with a blue insignia – Tye wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be (a bird of some kind?). “Those aliens had four of our teammates held captive, along with various civilians, including yourself. As for what they did, we were actually planning to debrief right about now.”
“They had me and Beast Boy in one room,” Red-and-White reported, “Away from everyone else. Probably because we had powers, and they didn’t? I mean, unless one of the others has any I don’t know about.”
The last part was more of a question, and he was looking at Tye when he said it, so Tye shook his head.
“But Blue was separated from the rest of us. Maybe because his powers are tech-based, and not, you know, his, precisely?”
“What powers?” Tye turned his attention back to Jaime, who was still shaking like a leaf and crying and breathing harshly. “What is he talking about? Since when are you the Blue Beetle?”
It took Jaime a couple of breaths before he could even try to answer. “The- the… M-m-my scarab…”
He wasn’t making any sense, but thankfully the Superman knockoff stepped in. “Jaime’s got some advanced tech that was accidentally fused to his spine in a freak accident last summer. That’s where the Blue Beetle armor and weapons come from.”
“Last summer?!” Tye thought back to that time, and was quick to make the connection. “You mean that explosion at Kord Industries? I remember, now; you were cutting through the parking lot when it happened, and you wouldn’t come out of your house for a week afterwards.” His eyes narrowed. “Come to think of it, you’ve been acting weird ever since.” The unexplained disappearances, the times Tye caught him muttering to himself, the lies that he sometimes caught Jaime telling about what he’d been up to… Most of that matched the behaviour of any superhero with a secret identity in any movie or TV show Tye had watched. Well, except for the muttering. Tye still wasn’t sure what that was all about.
Jaime started shaking even harder. “I’m sorry, Tye. I’m s-s-so sor-sorry. I- I couldn’t te- couldn’t- couldn’t t-t-tell any-” He gasped again, as if it was getting really hard to breathe.
Realising that this line of conversation was doing his already-distraught friend absolutely no favours, Tye decided to drop it, at least for now. “Hey, relax, man. Jaime, you need to calm down.”
But Jaime wasn’t calming down. In fact, he seemed to be getting more and more worked up. The tears flowed freely down his face, and his entire body was shaking violently.
Conner was getting really worried, now. Jaime’s heart rate was already concerningly high, and it wasn’t getting any better. Tye and Bart were trying to calm him down, but they didn’t seem to be succeeding.
“Jaime, c’mon, just- uh, just try and breathe, okay?”
Conner took that as his cue to step in. He came up to Jaime’s side, the one that wasn’t already occupied by Bart, and knelt down next to him. “Okay, Blue, I need you to listen to me. You need to get your breathing back under control. Try this: try inhaling for five seconds, holding it for four, and then letting it out for six. Can you do that for me?”
Jaime was trying, but he couldn’t seem to go slow enough, at least not at first. Tye moved closer, budging Bart out of the way to sit next to his best friend and put one arm over his shoulders. Jaime pressed the side of his face into his best friend’s shirt, his still-flowing tears creating a wet spot on Tye’s shirt. Conner absently noted the rest of the Team backing off, giving them some space (Dick seemed to be trying to restart the debriefing), but focused on continuing to coach Jaime through his breathing.
Eventually, Jaime got about halfway there, taking in shaky breaths while clinging to his best friend as if his life depended on it. Conner was still seriously concerned, but now it was more about what had caused Jaime’s distress, rather than the distress itself. What the hell had happened to him on that ship? He’d been a prisoner for a whole week, and a lot could have happened to him.
Conner ran a critical eye over the smaller teen; aside from some fresh bruises from the fight, he didn’t look injured, but there were other ways to torment someone. He was also still shaking, if less so, but Conner wasn’t sure if it was due to stress or the fact that he was sitting shirtless in the relatively cool interior of the Bio-Ship. It could easily be both.
“Bart,” the half-Kryptonian whispered to the speedster, “Fetch us a blanket, will you?”
Clearly desperate to help in some way, Bart was gone and back in maybe half a second, a blanket from the ship’s emergency supplies in one hand. Connor took it from him, and he and Tye slipped it over Jaime’s shoulders. This hopefully would have the benefit of getting him warmed up – and maybe calmed down a bit – as well as cover up the Scarab, which Jaime didn’t like to leave exposed when other people could see it.
Fully aware that he had to be careful, lest he send Jaime into hysterics again, Conner tried to gently pry some answers from the younger hero. “Blue, is there anything you can tell me about what happened to you?”
To his surprise, Bart butted in, a slight edge of panic in his tone as his heart rate accelerated from hummingbird speed to excited hummingbird speed. “Ah, maybe that can wait until later, right? I mean, the guy just basically had a panic att-”
“They made the Scarab.”
The simple statement shocked everyone who heard it into silence for a couple seconds.
“What?” Conner finally managed to ask.
“The aliens. The Scarab was their creation. It was supposed to latch onto the first person who found it, or something, but it was damaged, probably when it first landed on Earth. I guess whatever happened when Kord was killed fixed it – partly.”
“Partly?”
“Well, you don’t see me going around trying to k-k-kill you all right now, do you?” This was said in a tone that somehow managed to be both bitter and just the slightest bit hysterical at the same time. “The aliens were talking about how it was supposed to put me under their control. They were going to reboot the Scarab and see if that worked, and if it didn’t… I- I think they were going to kill me.”
Tye visibly tightened his arm around Jaime’s shoulders at the thought.
Conner felt his blood run colder the more he thought about it. Jaime had already been afraid of the Scarab, and of the carnage it could cause without his restraining influence on it. Now he’d been introduced to the very real possibility of it being a whole lot worse. And now some of his earlier words made more sense. He talked about ‘letting the Scarab take over’, possibly during the fight, despite this knowledge, and now he was freaking out over the ‘what if’s of the whole situation.
Footsteps – inaudible to anyone without his super-hearing – alerted Conner to the fact that someone was coming up behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder to see Dick standing there, still a respectful distance away, but clearly wanting to talk to them.
Conner quietly excused himself, hoping that Jaime would be okay in Tye and Bart’s hands for a little while, and made his way over to the Team’s leader.
“How’s he holding up?” Dick asked quietly, keeping his voice down so that neither of the other groups could hear him.
“He’s pretty shaken up,” Conner replied, also keeping quiet, “Short version: The aliens we just fought were the original creators of his armor, and they were trying to hijack control of him, and possibly planned to kill him if it didn’t work.”
Even with the mask, Conner could still see Dick’s eyes widen in initial surprise at the news, then narrow in thought as he processed it. “I take it they weren’t successful?”
Conner narrowed his own eyes. “If you’re asking if he’s already under their control and acting as a mole, he’s not. Heartbeats don’t lie; he was genuinely freaking out over everything. Trust me on this, Dick; Jaime’s still Jaime.”
Dick didn’t look one hundred percent convinced, but that was only natural for the Bat-protegé, so Conner didn’t feel too offended by that. Then he looked over Conner’s shoulder to the trio still sitting together, Jaime now firmly squeezed between the other two in a weird three-person hug. “We’ll be dropping most of the civilians off with the police when we get back to the States,” he said, changing the subject, “The newer captives, anyway. And we should contact S.T.A.R. Labs and get them to look at the other four; Gar and La’gaan were talking about a lot of experimentation going on.”
And that included Tye, which explained why Dick was looking in his direction. “I don’t think we should separate him and Jaime for a while,” Conner advised, “Jaime’s obviously been through a lot, not just this week; you know he’s been driving himself crazy worrying about his best friend going missing. Having solid proof that Tye’s okay might be the only thing holding him together, at this point.”
Dick tilted his head to the side in consideration, no doubt having already taken note of how the two friends were practically clinging to each other, and then nodded. “Agreed. I’m just about to call the Watchtower; they’ll need to hear this.”