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Hank knows they’re discharging him today. Well—perhaps that’s not true. “Discharge” implies they’re a hospital that’s letting him go home. The Justice Society is releasing him, and the real home they’ve built for him is waiting with open doors.
He briefly considers trying to make a run for it. But they have the Flash here. Not the fastest one, no, but he can’t outrun any speedster. He can barely outrun a normal person, and right now if he stands up too fast the room pitches sideways and he can’t read no matter how big the letters on the paper are. He probably wouldn’t even make it to the end of the hallway.
He can feel the buzz of nervous thoughts around him. The doctor typing something into the file Hank has always known they have on him is full of detached concern for his other patients. In the hallways there are heroes anxious about any number of things, from the fate of the world to lives lost in Kahndaq to a math test that’s due next Tuesday. Most of them have grounded thoughts. Scurrying ideas so different from the ones of the people in Kahndaq always looking at the sky for their flighted protectors, and so different from the thoughts of those same protectors—Hank hasn’t flown in a long time, but he was never especially swift and it took too much concentration to enjoy without help staying aloft, but Northwind and his people could’ve brought starling murmurations to shame.
He tries to savor the thoughts while he can still feel them even though they make his head hurt. The overstimulating rush of people around him is better than the empty nothingness that comes from the needles. He’s in no rush to tell them that the last injection they gave him has already worn off. They already gave him more of his regular medications anyway. They don’t need to know that the emergency one that makes him nearly-comatose (the one they’ve had him on for a week) isn’t what’s keeping him docile anymore.
“Your guardian will be monitoring you three times a day while you take your thiothixene,” Doctor Mid-nite says. This isn’t the one Hank’s met. That one was Dr. McNider. This one is Dr. Cross. His thoughts are different. More… sharp? More colorful? It’s hard to say. Some of it might be the language barrier—clearly, he’s fluent in English, and language doesn’t matter to a man that can read minds, but Hank’s noticed that the thoughts of people raised in other cultures are always subtly different from each other. He actually kind of likes that.
“They were already monitoring my medication,” Hank says. He tries to stop his words from slurring. It’s difficult. Making sure the words come out of his mouth in the right order is easier, but not by much. It’s gotten better, at least. He couldn’t make things sound right no matter how hard he tried for the first two days. “Sixty milligrams per day. Am I taking more?”
“Exceeding that isn’t recommended,” Doctor Mid-nite dismisses. “And you aren’t returning to a facility that already failed to hold you.”
Hank shifts nervously. Maybe he should make a run for it. There aren’t many places worse than where he was, but he’s heard enough about Arkham to know he doesn’t want to go there. He’ll be dead by tomorrow if that’s where they send him. If he’s going to die, he doesn’t want it to be long and slow at the hands of some Gothamite with a grudge against anyone who used to wear a cape. He’ll take his own life before that.
“Where am I going?” He asks cautiously. One of Mid-nite’s louder, more disdainful thoughts flickers below the surface of his mind. Hank tries not to read it, he really does, but it’s too difficult, and the impression of the words “nowhere secure enough” sends a metallic tang down his prefrontal cortex.
That could still mean Arkham. But maybe it’s just going to be one of the prisons that aren’t expressly psychiatric institutions… Iron Heights has a metahuman holding facility underneath it. That might not be too bad. Haven Security Village is supposed to be okay, too. He could live with that. Four walls and a roof and meals and drugs that keep him disoriented and stumbling and inmates and guards who could do whatever they want to him but no restraints and no testing to see how he reacts to whatever substance they want to put in him now. It would be better than anything before. Although at least before there were no other patients to harass him.
“Your mother will be here soon to pick you up,” Doctor Mid-nite replies.
The glass of water one of them brought for him cracks on the table next to him, a reflex that he’s usually able to keep under control. Without even thinking, Hank scans his thoughts, searching for dishonesty and coming up empty-handed. Does he just not know? Is there someone coming who claims to be his mother? Wouldn’t the goddamn Justice Society of America be able to figure out when someone was lying to them? “...My mom’s dead.”
Doctor Mid-nite pauses. For the first time, his fingers stop typing. Hank can feel the shock that pulses through him, taking them both on a wave that sends ice cascading through Hank’s chest when it breaks. “Of course,” he says to himself. “You haven’t seen the news.”
“What news?” Hank demands. His fists automatically clench. His heart is hammering and he knows his own anxiety is setting Doctor Mid-nite off, because that’s the way his powers work— which is a great way to get himself dosed and tied down and locked up, but his breathing is too fast and shallow for him to bring himself back under control.
“Old Justice,” Mid-nite says grimly, like Hank’s supposed to know what that means. “Your mother was involved.”
“My mom’s dead,” Hank repeats. The glass cracks further. He’s stressed and he can see them, see his parents standing behind Mid-nite with a bruise on his mom’s cheek as blood drips down onto the floor and a nosebleed running down his dad’s lip. “She died. I was there. I was there.”
“She’s alive.” Mid-nite’s voice is firm. “She’s coming today to take you home and monitor your recovery. You’ll have one of us as a parole officer of sorts. If you don’t keep taking your medication…”
His voice fades into the background as Hank watches the image of his mother hug herself, blood dripping down her arms. He knows it must be drying in the lines of her palms. He can feel the tackiness of it on his own skin. He’d felt it when he’d found her in the pool of blood. He’d pressed his forehead against her chest and listened to her slowing heartbeat until the police dragged him away. She’d died. He’d been there. She’d died and left him alone with his father and he’d been there and he can feel it, he can see it, he can taste it, and he knows he must be making Doctor Mid-nite feel and see (maybe not see?) and taste it too which is going to get them to drug him again and—
“Henry,” his mom’s voice says, and it doesn’t come from the mouth of the woman standing just over Mid-nite’s shoulder. “You look… tired.”
“You’re dead,” he says, refusing to turn his head. The vision of his mom cries into her red stained hands. “I was there. I saw you die. I was there. I was there.”
“Henry,” the voice repeats. Someone puts their hand on his shoulder and Henry twitches to try to shrug it off with little success. “Look at me.”
He drags his gaze away from the people across the room and they smear and blur at the corner of his eye, one of the tell-tale signs of his less concretely-manifested hallucinations. The woman who cannot possibly be his mother and Mid-nite wouldn’t be able to see these ones. Not in the way he’s cast things into the minds of other people before.
“You look tired,” the woman says again. She doesn’t look like the visions of his mother. That woman—the woman he can now see behind her instead of behind the doctor—had hair that was on the chestnut side of red and big eyes with an unending sadness in them. She wore the clothes Hank can remember her wearing the day before she died, not the day-of. This woman has short grey hair pushed back from her face and shrewd eyes that look at him through black-rimmed glasses set on a nose Hank recognizes from looking in the mirror.
There is no blood on her hands or anywhere else.
“Mom?” The word sounds distant to his own ears.
“You’re taller,” she says. Hank can’t tell if it’s the pounding of blood in his ears making her sound far away or if she’s just speaking faintly. “I didn’t realize you’d be taller.”
“It’s been twenty years,” he says. He doesn’t understand how he’s able to carry on a conversation when his brain is firing on all cylinders and making colors pop and burst and pinwheel behind her. “Why wouldn’t I be taller?”
There are tears in her eyes. In his mother’s eyes. His dead mother who Doctor Mid-nite is acknowledging as real and not just another hallucination is standing there and he can’t make himself move. He doesn’t think he’s taken a breath in the past forty seconds.
“I think there are some things we need to talk about,” she says.
All he can do is nod.
They manage to hitch a teleportation ride back home. It’s been a long time since Hank’s done that, but he remembers the trick Jennie told him about once and keeps his eyes closed and his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth to keep the nausea at bay. His mom—Merry. Her name is Merry and she doesn’t have much of a right to call herself his mother—doesn’t seem bothered by it in the slightest.
She says the Justice Society has her address if they need to find her, but the beam dropped them a few blocks away so she’ll have a chance to stretch her legs. Hank doesn’t say anything as she moves them along at a brisk pace. He’s still trying to make sense of this. Merry’s not supposed to be alive. He was there when she died. He was there. He… How…
He knows that for a lot of people in the cape world, death is just a brief interference, nothing more. A pit stop in their career. He’s seen people like the Wizard come back from what should have been a fatal wound and a pronunciation of dead on the scene, and he’s heard of it happening to countless others. Even Superman died once.
But he never would’ve considered any of them important enough to return. His father hadn’t. Sky hadn’t, and he’d been famous. If Hank himself had died, he can’t imagine he’d come back. Sometimes, underneath the haze of drugs and the oppressive bright lights and the cheerful pink walls painted to try to sway their only occupant into submissiveness, he’d prayed that the next attempt would work and he wouldn’t be forced by whatever higher power decided who to restore to life to wake up back in hell.
“Your room’s been set up for you,” Merry says. She points out a house that looks exactly like the rest of the ones around them. It’s almost too plain—soon Hank’s able to pick out that unlike almost every one of its neighbors, there’s no political signs in the front yard, no flags hanging on the porch, and no children’s chalk drawings adorning the sidewalk. The only personality it has comes from the cat in the window watching the bird feeder in the neighbors’ front yard with interest. “You can have your privacy. You don’t even have to eat with me if you don’t want to. The only requirement is that I see you take your meds, and that order comes straight from the top.”
Hank doesn’t bother responding. If he reaches, he can feel the thoughts of the people in the neighborhood. Children coming home from school. Parents arguing. There’s someone waiting for the bus on the corner. If he strains, he can feel the faintest whispers of animal thoughts, too. He can’t tell what they’re saying, exactly. That’s not how his powers work. Or how animal brains work. But he can feel them. The cat in the window and the birds on the feeder and the squirrels in the trees and the mice in the walls.
He can also feel someone behind the door of the house Merry is taking him to. But that’s all he can feel. Their thoughts are blocked from his viewing. Not… Not the way they often are around other telepaths. It’s not like—it’s not like what his dad could do or anything. It’s more like trying to read the mind of someone just out of his powers’ reach, even though they’re certainly well within it. Something about it sets Hank on edge.
“There’s someone in there,” he says as Merry pulls out a key with several extremely gaudy keychains on it.
Merry’s lips purse. “I told her not to come over until tonight. Come on, then.”
She opens the door and Hank doesn’t have any choice but to follow her inside. Hopefully she’s right about knowing this person and it isn’t a supervillain trained to shut their mind off from telepaths waiting to kill him. (Or… No, no, he always forgets… Now it’d be a superhero trained to shut their mind off from telepaths waiting to kill him, wouldn’t it?)
“I told you I’d call you when it was time for dinner,” Merry snaps to the woman sitting at the dining-room table. She huffs. “Henry, say hello.”
“...Hello,” Hank says cautiously. He can’t exactly do anything else, including try to leave. Merry’s holding his bag, which contains the only things he owns. All of them came into his possession over the past week except for a little bracelet he got in Kahndaq before that. He supposes the Justice Society didn’t deem it dangerous enough to take it from him.
The woman stands up, giving Hank a good look at her. Her hair is mousy brown and when she leans forward across the table like she’s waiting for him to cross the room and shake her hand her nails are painted bright red. Before he lowers his gaze, he notices that her eyes are exactly the same shape and color as his own.
“So,” she says, lipstick staining her teeth matching the scarlet of her nails, “I guess you must be my brother.”
The empty vase on the table she was just sitting at cracks. Hank’s voice comes out thin and reedy. “Brother?”
“I’m Jacqueline,” she says. Hank can hear her thoughts jumping, but when his mind presses against hers—a telepath’s hello, that woman Maxima called it ages ago when he’d been unable to tell which of the two psychiatrists was real and which was fake without extending his powers toward them—there’s nothing but nothing. “Jackie’s fine too. I heard you’re, like, an international terrorist now. Great to meet you.”
“Jackie,” Merry reprimands. Just like when he was sitting in front of Doctor Mid-nite, Hank feels like he’s far away from them. His mom’s alive. He has a sister. A sister that’s barely younger than him. He tries to cling to something real, but it’s impossible when reality is so—so—wrong. It’s all wrong.
Maybe this is fake. He made things up when he was institutionalized before. Sometimes he was in a normal house with Jennie, her face warped and her voice like shards of glass scraping on each other. Sometimes he was a kid again, his father’s face distorted on the walls as he looked down at him, fear filling Hank’s every vein. Sometimes they were based on the children’s programs they’d play for him on that tiny television. None of it was this vivid, but he’s had delusions that were before, hasn’t he? And every time, the most foolproof way to check was to feel for the thoughts of whoever or whatever was in front of him. If he couldn’t feel those, it couldn’t be real.
He can’t feel Jackie’s mind. So—this might not be real. It might not—
“Henry?” Merry takes his elbow and his whole body shudders. Two of his mental touches rub against each other inside his forehead and he tosses his head to try to shake them.
“Stop,” he says. Merry pulls her hand back immediately. The vase on the table rattles. Hollow glass and ceramic like that is easy even with his extremely limited telekinetic ability. He needs to break it. He needs to get out of here. “My name’s Hank. Mom would know. Who are you?”
“She’s our mom,” Jackie says. She crosses her arms. “Can’t you just read my mind or something and see that we’re telling the truth?”
“Jacqueline—” Merry hisses under her breath, but Hank’s already taking a step back and shaking his head.
“Can’t,” he says hoarsely. Talk it out. They liked it when he talked it out. How do you know this isn’t real? How do you know we aren’t actually your doctors? How do you know where you really are? “I can always feel it when it’s a real person. I can’t see your thoughts.”
“You can’t?” Jackie asks, interested. Hank can see his father again. Behind her this time. Glasses broken and blood on his face in thin, neat lines like they’d been painted on. The effect of a fatal mind-convulsion in limbo. He crosses his arms just a second after Jackie crosses hers. Like the mix between a smear frame and a shadow.
Merry takes his arm again, and this time she doesn’t let go when psychic shivers jump down Hank’s skin. “We’re both real,” she says firmly. “I’ll take you to your room.”
He only manages to make it a step before his legs go out from under him. He tries keeping himself upright but his socks (they never gave him shoes, he now realizes. Maybe that’s why his feet hurt) can’t get proper purchase on the floor and he’s pulling Merry down with him when he tries to use her to keep his balance. Not even his powers can get a cling. It must be the illusion rebounding on itself. Breaking apart. He’s probably still with the Justice Society—hell, he could still be at that facility, with everything that happened in Kahndaq and the agonizing pain in his head just a delusion he’d created to live in with his powers.
“Henry—Hank?” Merry says, clearly alarmed, before cursing under her breath. “When was the last time you ate something? Jackie, will you go get a banana or something from the kitchen?”
He is hungry, now that he thinks about it. Doctor Mid-nite was making sure he ate three times a day whenever he had to take his meds, but he can’t remember eating today… or the day before. The last meal he ate that wasn’t a sandwich with a small portion of fruit was over a week ago back in Kahndaq, if that even really happened. Norda had alighted on the balcony he’d been leaning over with some hawawshi to share. And that had been the first food he’d eaten that hadn’t tasted like plastic in… Well. He doesn’t remember how long.
“You’re probably starving,” Merry grouses. “I’m sure they didn’t give you anything. Well, that changes now. You don’t have to like it, and like I said, you don’t always have to do it, but we’re having family dinner tonight.”
“What?” Hank rubs his forehead. He managed to slump against the wall instead of entirely sitting on the floor, but he’s close enough that he can feel the grain of the wood with his other hand. Physical stimulation can ground him, a psychiatrist said once, although that same psychiatrist also said that he could—on rare occasion—have tactile hallucinations alongside his usual visual and auditory ones.
“Eat your banana,” Jackie says, shoving a half-peeled one into Hank’s other hand. “And don’t get too excited about homemade meals, Mom’s cooking is terrible.”
Hank obediently eats the banana. It’s still halfway unripe, but it’s better than the browning apple slices Mid-nite would give him with his sandwich, and both of those things are better than the food at the institution. He doesn’t say it in case it sparks an argument, but he’s sure Merry’s food will certainly be better than that.
“Feeling better?” Merry asks. Hank notices that the dining room chairs and table are pushed back much further than they were before, all crowded into each other like someone shoved them. The vase is now on its side, mouth gaping at him. He must’ve pushed all of it away by mistake. Made a subconscious rudimentary force field…
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says. “I didn’t…”
“They’ve seen worse,” Merry says. She glances at Jackie. “I raised her in this house. Now come on. We’re going to your room, and I’m going to have a word with Dr. Cross about how much he was feeding you.”
Hank pushes experimentally against her thoughts before letting her take him anywhere. They’re… shielded, but not the same way. Lots of capes learn how to shield their minds. Jackie’s thoughts are a dead zone with life barely glimmering through on the bottom, while Merry’s are easily legible behind the wall she’s built. He doesn’t push past it—that’d be a violation of boundaries, and he’s already done that one too many times for other people’s comfort—but he does skim the surface. She’s real, even if Jackie isn’t. And if she’s seeing and interacting with Jackie…
“Knock it off,” Merry snaps, moving him along and planting him in front of a door at the end of the hallway. “Rule number one if you want to stay here is no reading my mind. No projecting anything, either. Stay out of my head and stay out of Jackie’s.”
“Sorry,” Hank says numbly. He doesn’t repeat that he can’t do anything inside Jackie’s head. He supposes he can understand why she’d be worried. Why she wouldn’t want anybody rooting around in her brain. Most people didn’t, but they also didn’t have the skills to recognize it unless whatever telepath was orchestrating the investigation wanted them to. But she’d been married to… him. The original Brain Wave, with two words and everything.
“This is your room,” Merry says. She opens the door for him when he makes no move to do it himself. It’s small, but the bed is… Hank’s not sure what it’s called, actually, but it’s bigger than a twin and therefore far bigger than the one at the facility. (He doesn’t remember sleeping in Kahndaq. He knows he must have. He’d been given a room, hadn’t he? Norda roosted on the roof… Eclipso and Nemesis stayed in the palace… Al, he’d—he’d been meant to share a room with Al, hadn’t he? And then Al had given it to him and said he’d find someplace else. He just can’t remember actually sleeping in it. But everything’s so fuzzy…) “Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. Everything’s… Well, it’s just how your sister left it.”
Hank half nods. Clearly, the room used to be Jackie’s. His sister’s. He has a sister and all of this was once hers, which he can see in the purple curtains on the big windows—windows, he loves windows, he used to be ambivalent and then he met the oppressive darkness of the institution—and the few books that remain on the sparse bookshelf; classic children’s fare like Nancy Drew mixed with adult thrillers and mystery novels. There are faded glow-in-the-dark stars and moons on the ceiling and dents in the wall like someone scraped off paint moving the bed around. It looks lived in. Like the apartment he used to have.
“Thank you for giving me a place to stay,” he says. There’s more he wants to say. Why didn’t you come sooner? Why did you leave me with them for so long? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive? Did you even remember I existed? How long have I had a sister? Why did you leave me at all? But he doesn’t want to break this. Bring it all crashing down around his ears.
Merry may be real, but Jackie still might not be. This could all come crashing down around him. But whoever came up with this is smart. They knew he’d be so much less likely to leave a trap baited and guarded by his mother.
Merry puts his things on the floor. “Well. Get yourself settled in. I’m going to make dinner.”
And just like that, the door is closed. Hank’s alone in a room he’s never been in before. His mouth tastes like bananas and his vision is still a little fuzzy. His mom is alive and he has a sister and this is his room and if they created all of this just for him Hank’s going to make sure he takes at least one of them down with him.
On the other side of the wall, Merry and Jackie are having an argument, but Hank can’t quite make out what they’re saying.
He supposes he should probably get used to that.
The only part of dinner that feels normal is Merry watching him take his medication.
Hank’s never had a family dinner before. Dinners with—around?—his father were few and far between. Maybe they happened before his mom disappeared, but if they did he doesn’t remember them. The group he was with in Kahndaq shared food, but they certainly weren’t a family. Sometimes he and Sky would get food together, and that sort of counted, didn’t it?
Really, the closest thing was probably eating with Jennie and Todd. Watching them bicker and joining in on Jennie’s side and pretending it didn’t make his ears go pink when Todd sneered at him and called him “pretty boy” while he prayed as hard as he could to anybody listening that he wasn’t projecting his thoughts. It hadn’t really been family. But back then, he’d known where he stood with both of them. It’d been as easy as breathing.
He pokes at his second helping of slightly burnt but not inedible lasagna and watches Merry and Jackie glare at each other. Despite the shields she’s put up, Merry’s thoughts are currently so easy to read at the surface of her mind that Hank has to restrain himself from skimming them. Jackie’s stay locked behind that wall. Maybe she’s like Red Tornado. Mostly an android, but with some kind of human processing ability underneath. That’d make more sense than her being entirely one of his own illusions, since there’s definitely something alive there. The thoughts are too complex for a non-sapient mammal, too. But maybe something in between? He’s not sure.
“So, Hank,” Jackie says, drumming her nails on the table. Despite complaining about Merry’s food, she still ate all of it. “How’s Kahndaq? Hot and sunny?”
Merry looks like she’s about to snap at her daughter again. Hank shrugs slowly. She’s not going to learn anything new. The Justice Society already thoroughly interrogated him. “I don’t remember it very well,” he says. “But I think it was hot.”
“Where were you living before that?” Jackie asks. Merry’s face pales and she opens her mouth to interrupt, but Jackie glares at her until she averts her gaze. “Nobody tells me anything.”
Hank’s mouth feels dry. He grips the napkin in his lap so tightly his knuckles go white. “Hasting’s House.”
Jackie frowns. She looks just like Merry when she does it. “Where’s that?”
“It was a mental institution,” Merry says so Hank doesn’t have to. “Dr. Cross told me about it when he first called me about taking you in. Apparently, their treatment wasn’t particularly effective.”
“Oh.” Jackie looks uncomfortable. “I’m… sorry.”
Hank fidgets with his fork some more. It’s hard not to think about that place every time he takes his medication. They had him on more than just the one Doctor Mid-nite told him to take. He said that while some of the fogginess and slurring and difficulty placing words in sentences came from schizophrenia and the new traumatic brain injury he’d just sustained on top of a half-eaten tumor, some of it could have also been from the combination of different medications causing side effects that Dr. Quinn from the institution had been reluctant to report and from suddenly quitting all of those medications at once. He said they might introduce more later if the thiothixene didn’t do its job, but for now they’d just focus on getting him on anything again.
He eats some more lasagna as an excuse to avoid looking at them, shoulders hunched.
“As you could probably tell, I don’t live here anymore,” Jackie says. When Hank peeks at her he can see she’s inspecting her nails, almost like she’s doing the exact same thing he is in trying to avoid eye contact as much as possible. “I’m downtown. Got my own place. Perfect timing, right?”
“It’s a nice apartment,” Merry says. “I’ll take him to see it.”
Hank almost drops his fork. “They’re going to let me leave the house?”
Merry looks at him, eyes narrowed. “Well, they never said anything to me about a house arrest. And if they think they can stop me from doing anything, they’ve got another thing coming. You’re my son. You can do what you want.”
“Yeah,” Jackie says, thorns in her voice. Hank feels the attitude in the room shift as the words come out of her mouth. “God forbid superheroes do anything for the good of the public. We’d have to shut down the whole world out of protest.”
“Your brother isn’t a criminal,” Merry dismisses, and Hank doesn’t need his powers to feel the guilt radiating from every inch of her. He also doesn’t need them to know that she doesn’t believe what she just said for even a second. “He’s family.”
Something about it makes Jackie stand up so fast her chair screeches on the wood floor. The terse peace of seconds ago is long gone. Jackie’s hackles are all the way up. It’s like a switch was flipped. Hank isn’t even sure what lit the fuse. He just suddenly knows he’s about to be caught in between two halves of a very old argument. One about superheroes.
“Yes, he is,” Jackie snaps. “He’s both. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, and I’m not saying he should be locked up. I don’t care if he—” She looks at Hank. “I don’t care if you started a civil war halfway across the world, or lit Booster Gold on fire, or whatever. I just think it’s interesting that now—”
“Not now, Jacqueline,” Merry says, looking pointedly at Hank. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“You always say that,” Jackie says, bristling. “Like I just said, I don’t care if people think he’s a bad guy. As far as I’m concerned, bad guys are what keep the superhero game running. But it’s really convenient that you get to pick when superheroes are allowed to tell people what to do. If he wasn’t your son, you’d probably want him in Arkham. You’d be protesting outside the Hall of Justice right now.”
“Not in front of your brother,” Merry hisses. Hank has entirely set his fork down now. This is almost… He doesn’t really mind the arguing that much. He’s only been on two teams before, but the first one bickered constantly. And when he’d slip up with his powers and project images for himself and others that weren’t there, they were never able to bring the realism of people arguing. The little imperfections and old fights that would set them off. This feels… real. Like he might actually be in a room with his mother and sister instead of part of some imprisoning diorama orchestrated by the Justice Society. “He’s still getting settled in.”
Jackie glares across the table at Merry. Her eyes burn with anger, and for a moment Hank expects her to reveal powers her locked-away mind has kept hidden from him and attack her mother. But there’s no burst of psychic energy shattering flesh and rending tissue. There’s no… anything, really. After a few seconds, she just looks like she’s about to cry.
“Maybe I just want him to know what he’s in for,” Jackie says icily. She looks at Hank. He doesn’t need to read her mind to know she’s about to start crying. “Have fun with her. Great dinner, Mom. Thanks.”
It’s the last thing she says before she storms out of the house, leaving Merry calling after her with frustration in her voice.
When the front door bangs shut, Hank reflects that this really is like eating with Jennie and Todd. Somehow, despite how everything ended up between him and the two of them, it’s a comforting thought.
Hank dreams of shredding minds and causing fatal brain hemorrhages under the moon with the bodies of dead children at his feet while Al gathers the few left alive up in his arms to protect them and wakes up curled around one of the pillows with his fists bunched in the sheets when the children’s faces turn to Jennie’s.
It’s the only nightmare he remembers. The ones that come from Merry’s room down the hall and wriggle their way into his mind are long gone by the time she wakes him up in the morning so he can take his medication with breakfast. The only part that stays is the sound of a child crying.
The house is… nice. Cozy. There’s not much to explore that first morning. Just his room, the bathroom he’s already been inside of, the kitchen, the dining room, the door to the backyard and the small grass and dirt contained therein, and a mostly unfinished basement that holds storage space next to the washer and dryer. The cat, whose name tag tells Hank he’s named Otto, evidently owns the small living room. Merry seems to have gone out of her way to make the entire place as uniform as possible.
The most interesting thing he finds is the photo album.
He finds the other one, first. The thicker one. He flips through it after making sure Merry’s still in the backyard trying to plant tulips. It’s all photos of Jackie, starting from around age five or six. She looks just like the pictures of a younger Merry that Hank had glimpsed so many years ago. There are photos of her doing just about everything, from swimming to a dance recital to elementary school graduations. Most of them are dated, but that’s the only description they’re given. The album ends a few photos after Jackie’s fourteenth birthday party.
There are years of Jackie’s life here. The life of a sister he didn’t even know he had, pressed between the two covers of an album in his hands. A real sister.
He wonders what his life might have been like if he’d grown up here with her. If they would’ve shared a room when they were younger. If they would have been close or if they would’ve bickered. If he would’ve been happy to have a little sister or if he would’ve resented her. There are so many things he’ll never get to know.
Maybe if he’d grown up with them none of this would’ve happened. He’d still have his powers, but his father probably never would’ve had the opportunity to give him his. He’d still have schizophrenia, but maybe things would be less vivid without the addition of his father’s powers to make everything he saw so much more real. And he certainly wouldn’t have had the same injuries to his head throughout his life from things like bullets and weapons fired inside his brain.
Hank touches the back of his head with one hand while he closes the album with the other. The tumor would still grow without anything to stop it. But maybe it would’ve been caught earlier. Maybe he never would’ve had to go to Hasting’s House but instead to a real doctor who could’ve noticed in time and done something about it. Maybe there’d be someone other than his original jailers willing to treat him.
Maybe he’d be happy. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d be dead.
It’s while he’s putting that album back that he notices the second one. It’s slimmer, tucked directly behind the place where he’d taken the first one. It’s still in the middle of all the other books on the shelf in the living room, but it’s so thin it almost entirely escapes notice even now that its hiding spot has been revealed. Just like the album of Jackie, it doesn’t have a title. He picks it up, curious. Could it still be of his sister, just from later or earlier in life? He thinks he’d like to see Jackie as a baby, and this one might include photos of Merry with her daughter—the other one didn’t.
Hank opens the album and his heart skips a beat.
It’s a newspaper article about the return of the Star-Spangled Kid. The headline and accompanying photo have been cut out and carefully slipped into the thin plastic sleeve, while the rest of the article is safely folded up in the pocket below it. Hank suddenly feels like he’s intruding on something deeply private. A miniature catalog of his uncle’s—Merry’s brother’s—life. That doesn’t stop him from continuing to turn the pages.
A photograph of him stares back the first time he does. It, too, was clearly cut out of a newspaper, and he knows it’s from that first press conference by the background and the sliver of Jennie’s arm left in the frame. Hank touches his own face. He can barely recognize it, and not just because the words are illegible (he can’t read much, anymore, not since the tumor; he only knows the first headline was about Sylvester’s return to the limelight because it was framed in his uncle’s apartment). He just looks so… young. He’d only just lost his father then. He’d only just become an orphan and been given powers so far beyond what he’d used before. And now…
Hank keeps going so he won’t have to think about that. He and Sky share the entire album, although Hank isn’t surprised the vast majority of the pictures are of Sky and not him. He never really liked being the center of attention, and it was all too easy to let Syl have a chance to do his favorite thing and smile for the cameras. Just about every photo that features him is cut from the background, and Merry’s evidently gone through and highlighted any passing mention of him in every article she could find for want of anything directly about him. He can imagine her doing it, in between taking photos of Jackie—how old would she have been when he was first getting started and thought he could make it as a superhero? How old would she have been when Sky was murdered? How long could it have been after that last photo of her in the other album was taken?
The back door opens and closes, and Hank isn’t quick enough to put the album back on the shelf when Merry looks through the dining room and sees him. The shields she’s tried to erect do nothing to stop the tide of guilt he feels swell through her. Thoughts he can’t help but pick up on dart around the barriers—ones of self-hatred, mostly, but also anxiety, fear, and anger.
“Any reason you’re rifling through my bookshelf?” She asks stiffly when he doesn’t turn around to look at her.
“You kept these?” Hank asks, holding the album a little closer. He hasn’t gotten to the end of it yet. He hates himself a little for wondering if she put the reports on Sylvester’s murder in with everything else.
“I’m your mother,” she says. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“Actually be there,” Hank says, partially because he’s tired and partially because—because she kept this. She knew he was out there. She knew what he was doing. She knew where to find him. If she’d actually wanted to see him—or Sky, before his death, since he’s right there on the page about him debuting as Skyman in the first place—she could’ve called or showed up on his doorstep or something. Instead of staying here with a girl who apparently hates her.
Merry makes a bitten off noise in her throat. There’s silence for a moment before she begrudgingly says, “I suppose I deserve that.”
“You said we could talk,” Hank says in a low voice. He tries to take deep breaths in through his nose and ignore the way his mind wants to turn this to a rotting room in the back of an old house built to keep him inside. (Isn’t that where he is anyway?) “But we haven’t.”
“Then let’s talk,” Merry says in a brusque tone. He can feel her shifting and crossing her arms behind him. Maybe she just forgot to lift the shields back up, because he can hear her mind whispering sorry, I’m sorry. “I know we haven’t. I just didn’t know where to start.”
Hank looks down at the album in his arms. “Why did you leave?”
Merry takes a deep breath. “Your father and I never had the best relationship,” she says quietly. The chasm of emotions in her mind opens and Hank feels the pain in her words. He wonders if she lowered the barrier on purpose. Just for him. “He was more than twenty years older than me, and even though I was an adult when we met, I always felt like I was trying to catch up to him. It… Being with him, it was… I preferred it when he was gone and then hated myself for feeling that way once he was back, and then I’d question whether or not those were really my emotions. I felt like I couldn’t trust myself.”
“I know that part,” Hank says. He can feel her surprise as he turns around to look at her. He thinks about his last memories of his real father, not the shadow that keeps coming back to haunt him. He thinks about the emptiness of his childhood. All the time he had to speculate about what could’ve driven his mother to death. “I know why you would’ve left. I know why you had to convince the world you’d died. I just need you to tell me why you didn’t bring me.”
Merry looks away. “I was going to. The first time I considered it was while I was pregnant with you. I was more rational that time. That’s part of why I didn’t. I knew it would be better for you to grow up with both your father and I with you. And things were… It was all so much better after you were born. We were better. He was better.”
“So what changed?” Hank asks, and Merry’s thoughts turn to Jackie as she looks at the other album.
“I got pregnant again,” she says quietly. The next words make horror jolt through Hank’s body. “And this time I didn’t remember how. I still don’t. I don’t know it was him—I was slipping at that point, getting more paranoid every day. My memory of everything was fuzzy. And suddenly I was pregnant and didn’t remember it and I thought all of it had to be because of him. Especially because I knew he was operating as a supervillain again. I was desperate, Henry—Hank. It takes desperation to die, even if you come back.”
“He was never the same after they told him you were dead,” Hank says. Once again, he remembers the blood. The anguish. How one of the first responders called him “son” and sat with him on the porch while he sobbed into a shock blanket. He shudders the memories away.
“I paid them off,” she says. “Times were different, and I had money from my brother’s will. I could afford to disappear. I didn’t take any chances. I used my last name from my birth parents and made sure I didn’t stay in one place for too long before Jacqueline was born. I felt like the whole world was out to get me. Even if he wasn’t looking, it’s hard to hide from someone that can read your thoughts.”
Oh. Hank more than knows the truth in that statement. He can picture his father desperately searching, trying to find his wife, with cruelty instead of care on his face. He can see what it must have been like to be on the run from him. God knows he did it a few times.
“Jackie doesn’t know this,” Merry says, “but the night before she was born, I checked myself into a ward. I was scared out of my mind that something would go wrong. Whether with me because of my age or because your father would find me or because of… anything. Everything. I don’t think it helped much, but everything went fine. And I tried so, so hard not to think about you every time I looked at her.”
Hank’s mouth feels dry. “But you knew he was dead, by the time we formed Infinity, Inc.,” he says. “You have pictures of us. You knew I was out there trying to be a hero.”
“I don’t have a good excuse,” Merry says. She comes closer, holding out her hands. “But I was scared. You were becoming a man after a life without me and the older brother I thought was dead was suddenly alive and so much younger than he should have been and Jackie was starting to pull away from me and—it was all so much.”
Hank recoils a little. “I thought you were dead,” he says, voice creaking. “I went to your funeral. I was going to take Sylvester to your grave. I thought you were dead. Why did the entire world know you were alive before me?”
Merry avoids his gaze as she takes her glasses off and pretends to clean them. “Some other people like me, people who were heroes when we were younger… We got together and decided to do something about the new generation of child heroes. We thought they were irresponsible—that was more Dan’s gripe than mine, although the new Star-Spangled Kid did… frustrate me. I thought they were going to get themselves killed or worse. I didn’t want what happened to my brother and I to happen to anyone else. We ended up trying to pass legislation to keep them off the streets. It didn’t go through.”
“Why did everyone know before me?” Hank reiterates. His face feels hot. There’s blood starting to trickle down Merry’s arm. He can hear Dr. Quinn’s clipped voice. Atypical manifestation of certain schizophrenia symptoms due to telepathic abilities. Less so the delusions and paranoia and disorganized thinking, because he experiences those just like everyone else, and more the visual and auditory hallucinations.
“I didn’t know where you were,” Merry says. “After Sylvester was—after he died and your team disbanded, I… stopped following things. I hoped you were safe. I hoped you weren’t a hero anymore. I thought about you when we started our campaign. But I didn’t think you wanted to be looked for. Especially not by me.”
Hank hugs the album because it’s giving him something to cling to. Bitterness bleeds through his voice as he says, “So I just had to rot waiting for you to notice something was wrong?”
“I didn’t know where you were,” Merry repeats. There are tears at the edge of her voice. “I only found out what was going on after Dr. Cross called me. He said either I could take you home or…”
“Or I’d end up in Arkham,” Hank says hollowly. The floor sways under his feet, but he’s not sure if it’s because he’s genuinely dizzy or because Merry’s just becoming more and more distorted in front of him and his brain is trying to trick itself.
“Arkham or a place like it,” Merry confirms. Now the tears are in her eyes despite how she tries to blink them away. She presses her knuckles against her mouth, gaze lowered. “Of course I had to bring you here. If the only thing they wanted was for me to watch you to make sure you were healthy and call them if anything started to go wrong, I had to do it. They could’ve asked me to do anything and I would if it meant I could have you back.”
Hank can’t think of anything to say. Not “thank you.” Certainly not “better late than never.” Not “I don’t believe you.” His stomach churns. Maybe he just didn’t eat enough breakfast when he took his medication.
“I know I told you—I said you shouldn’t read our minds,” Merry says quietly, “and you said you can’t read Jackie’s. But just this once.”
Hank can feel it when the shields lower. Exposing her thoughts to his. He doesn’t remember if he was ever able to dip into her thoughts when he was a kid. His telepathic abilities were less sophisticated then, and not just because they’d been lacking the boost they’d gotten when his father died in front of him. He’d been empathetic from the start, absorbing the emotions of the people around him and taking them on as his own—how many times had he done it when he was with Infinity, Inc.? When he’d felt Lyta’s past agonizing her, when he’d reacted to Todd’s pain and self-hatred, when the warm bubbles of Jennie’s happiness floated in his chest—but he doesn’t think he’d been able to properly feel thoughts when she… not died, not anymore, but left. This is almost certainly the first time.
Thoughts are funny things. No two people’s are alike. Merry thinks in emotions and the edges of images without many words. Hank can feel what she feels—old pains, like an ache in a previously sprained ankle when it gets too cold. Hopes and dreams and an anger stronger than Superman. He feels it all, everything she pushes at him, and he doesn’t need to move away to know that they’re springing to life all around him. Sylvester, dead in a way Merry never had to see him but Hank did. Jackie with tears running down her cheeks, chest heaving and skin burnt. That girl from the Justice Society who has Sky’s old belt with her adoring face cupped by too-large hands wreathed in lightning. Hank himself and his father, both multiplied a thousand times with their faces painted in simple emotions. Blood splattered across Hank’s face, his limp body held on thin strings like a broken puppet. And the fear. So, so much fear.
He tries not to linger. It isn’t polite. Especially not with someone who’s nearly a stranger even though she isn’t supposed to be. But just like how he couldn’t stop himself from skimming the surface at dinner and seeing thoughts he couldn’t read, it’s nearly impossible to drag himself back once he’s reached into her mind.
“I should have taken you,” Merry says, looking and sounding every bit her age. “You don’t have to forgive me because I didn’t.”
Hank doesn’t say anything. He just uses his sleeve to dab at the blood pooling in his ear, puts the album back on the shelf on top of the other one, and goes to his room.
He keeps the tears from falling until after he’s curled up on his bed, not even sure if he’s crying for himself or for Merry or for the family he never had. A hero would probably forgive her. Hank doesn’t know if he can.
What he does know is that—perhaps as a show of trust or perhaps as a simple mistake—Merry’s mental shields don’t go back up as she busies herself in the other room. Even though he knows he could rip through her mind without them, Hank doesn’t dare touch her thoughts again.
“Hey,” Jackie’s voice says, and Hank jolts as she sits down beside him on the back porch. Nobody’s been able to sneak up on him in a long time. He wonders if it’s their father’s fault her mind is so impenetrable, or if she’s just so stubborn she’s functionally immune. The former is more likely, but he wouldn’t put the latter past her.
“I didn’t think you’d be back so soon,” he says when she doesn’t prompt him any further and just stares like she’s waiting for a response. It’s evening now. Merry came to his room to watch him take his midday medication and said she was leaving to get things for dinner and he hasn’t seen her since. This is the first time he’s spoken since he went back to his room this morning.
“Didn’t want to leave you to face Hurricane Meredith by yourself.” Jackie grins. It looks forced and plastic. She fidgets with the collar of her shirt, scratching at something he can’t see. “And I guess I also wanted to apologize. Mom and I… We don’t get along very well.”
“It’s okay,” Hank says. He looks up into the sky. Once upon a time in LA, there’d been stars. Not anymore. Not for him. There’s too much light pollution to see any constellations. Just a purple haze that turns into a dull blue the color of a bruise. At the heart of Kahndaq’s capitol, it’d been the exact same way.
“I am sorry, though,” Jackie says. Once again, she looks at him expectantly.
“It’s okay,” Hank repeats, voice just as monotone as last time. He can feel the minds of everyone in the neighborhood from here. He tells himself it isn’t an invasion of privacy if he’s not pushing for things more intimate than what he can gather on the surface. The water tension of the brain keeps him standing above everything else.
Jackie looks up at the sky and pretends she can see stars. The moon isn’t even out—it’s hidden somewhere in the clouds generated by the smog of the nearby city. “You can read minds, right? Like, really read them?”
Hank glances at her. Once, Dr. Quinn had made him sit in a room with a mirror for what she’d called a meditation exercise. He doesn’t know how long he’d spent in there, but he’d psychically assaulted the person who’d hauled him out. They’d kept him drugged after that. The feeling of being locked into his own body sneaks up on him sometimes now. Jackie’s mind… it feels like what his own had felt like. Pressing his hands on the glass of something and being unable to break it even if it would’ve saved him. “Not yours.”
“But Mom’s?” Jackie presses. She scoots a little closer. Hank starts to doubt if she actually came here to apologize. “You’re able to read her mind, right?”
“She told me not to.” Hank doesn’t bring up what happened that morning. Jackie shouldn’t have to hear about their problems with each other when she clearly already has her own, and Merry… Merry doesn’t deserve that.
“You could, though. If you wanted to.” Jackie’s eyes gleam as she takes out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She doesn’t offer him one.
He leans away instead of answering. If he’s honest, yes, he could. Especially now that her shields are down, although if he really put everything he had into it—well, they wouldn’t have been enough to stop his dad. And Hank’s stronger than him now. Much, much stronger.
Jackie rests her elbows on her knees and props her chin up on the heels of her palms. He noticed it when he first met her, but they really do look alike, especially with how the light from inside falls across her face. Before, he wondered what his life would’ve been like if Merry had taken him with her. Now, he wonders how things could’ve been if she’d stayed or only left after Jackie was born and taken neither of them. If they would have been close. If she would’ve followed him to Infinity, Inc. like Jennie and Todd followed each other, or if she would’ve lived the normal, powerless life he never got the chance to have.
Her and Uncle Sky probably would’ve tried to strangle each other on a daily basis. For some reason, that almost makes him smile.
“If you do read her mind,” Jackie says, voice low like they’re co-conspirators, “could you find out if she hates me?”
Hank jolts at the words. The word comes out as half a laugh before he can stop himself—“What?”
“Could you find out if she hates me if you read her mind?” Jackie keeps looking at him, unblinking. He can see his father— their father—on her face. Not a hallucination or a psychic illusion. Just plain familial resemblances.
“She doesn’t hate you,” Hank says. He knows why Jackie doesn’t believe it. The small window he’s been given into their lives tells him they’ve probably been having friction with each other since the day Jackie was born. But even if he hadn’t seen into Merry’s head—although not in the way Jackie thinks he should try to—he’d still know she loved her. That album is proof enough, and if it wasn’t, it’s also clear in the look on Merry’s face every time Jackie crosses her mind. “She loves you. She’s your mom.”
“She’s your mom too, and you think she hates you,” Jackie retorts, blowing out smoke.
“No, I don’t,” Hank says. The words make something deep in his chest ache, and he tears his eyes away from the ember on the tip of her cigarette to look back at the stars. He rubs his hand down his face. His eyes burn with secondhand smoke and he tries to rein in his powers before they can show Jackie what Merry showed him. “I know she loves me. I think that makes it worse.”
“Do you hate her?” Jackie asks. She smiles grimly. “Sorry. Trying to cram all this sibling bonding in before she bans me from the property for good.”
“I don’t,” Hank echoes. He wonders what stars there would be if he could see them. Orion’s Belt, maybe. Jennie would know. Her favorites had been Ursa Major and Draco, just because they were so big but so hard for some people to pick out.
(Well. Her favorites might have changed by now, just like everything else has. He doesn’t feel bitter or jealous about her new boyfriend. He wanted them to last but they were never going to, and there’d always been the fact that he’d wanted—he’d wanted—but that would never have even started. He’s not broken up about it. He just hopes someone still takes both of them to see the stars.)
“I would if I was you,” Jackie says. It’s not as bitter as he might’ve expected it to be. She taps out another ember. She’d started smoking after she’d moved out and gone out. Her counselor said she should try to quit so she can recover and stop going back there in her mind. Jackie told him he should put his head in a microwave and see if he still eats frozen dinners and hasn’t been back since.
Hank puts his head down on his knees. His stomach hurts. He can almost feel the blood on his hands again. He’d scraped his throat raw before his yelling had petered out into the shock blanket. What must it have felt like, to tear herself apart to leave him and escape? Why does he have to be the one to make amends? Why did he have to find out this way? Why couldn’t his father have just left her alone? Why couldn’t Hank have just died in the dark at Hasting’s House, tearing out his wrists with his teeth the way he’d sometimes wondered if his mother had done? “I don’t think I can.”
They sit in silence. Cars go by. Families move in their houses. Otto’s collar jingles as he trots by the screen door to the back porch behind them. The wind shifts, adding incoming rain and gasoline to the smell of Jackie’s smoke.
“I just wish she’d taken me with her,” Hank says finally. So quietly that at first he’s not sure if Jackie even heard him.
“It probably doesn’t help if I say this,” she starts after a moment, and Hank braces himself for something scathing, “but I think I would’ve liked having a brother, as long as we didn’t have to share a room.”
The tears come so quickly he can’t do anything except shake as he’s wracked with sobs.
He could’ve had that. He could’ve been a brother. He could’ve been his mother’s son. And he can’t even blame Merry that he wasn’t. It wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t his and it wasn’t Jackie’s. He doesn’t know how much of it was even his father. It’s all just stupid, inescapable fate. Henry King didn’t die a monster, he died in Hank’s arms. His mother didn’t die at all. He’s still alive, despite the best efforts of himself and the world and half the superheroes he’s ever met. Jackie’s clinging on to what she has with chipped nails and gritted teeth. But it’s all barely so—he doesn’t think he’ll ever be the same again. He already knows Merry can’t be, Jackie’s a stranger, his father’s dead, and Sylvester still died, ripped open at the hands of a domino effect.
It didn’t even have to be this way. They were all doomed to this the moment his parents met each other on the dreary day he saw tucked away at the back of Merry’s mind. Hell, they were doomed to this when Merry was passed from the hands of her family, put on a costume, and skipped out the door for the first time. The Kings and the Creamers and the Pembertons, all stuck dying together.
Hank wishes he could’ve at least spent all this time dying with his mother.
“I didn’t—shit. Sorry,” Jackie says, earnestly frustrated. She doesn’t make any attempt to physically comfort him. “I’m really bad at this.”
“It’s okay,” Hank croaks. He’s been saying that a lot today. He tries to get his breathing and his powers under control. The more his emotions get away from him, the more likely he is to do something by accident that the Justice Society or the Justice League or whoever is closest will make him regret. “I am too.”
“One more thing we’ve got in common,” Jackie says. She flicks her cigarette onto the back step and stomps it out even though she can’t possibly be close to finishing it. “That makes two. Never had a sibling before, and bad at being one.”
“I wish things had been different,” Hank says. Confesses, really. “I… I would’ve liked…”
“No,” Jackie corrects. She looks down at the smudge of ash on the concrete. “You would’ve hated it. Every minute of being my brother would’ve been excruciating.”
“But it would have been better,” Hank says. He wishes his voice was less empty and hollow.
It would have been. He knows it. It’d have been better than being with his father and then watching him die in his arms—saving him after all of it. Better than losing Jennie. Better than never having Todd. Better than his uncle’s blood under his nails. Better than knowing more than anything that what he was seeing in front of him was real only to have everyone else tell him it wasn’t. Better than Hasting’s House and the endless feeling of drowning that accompanied it and its walls. He claws at the back of his head absently as he thinks about how it would’ve been better than knowing that something was wrong and not being listened to about it. Better than having a person he’d once thought of as a friend allow someone to put a parasite inside him. Better than—
“Maybe,” Jackie allows. She keeps staring at the smudge—fuck, she really shouldn’t have put out that cigarette—as she slowly slides her hand in Hank’s direction. The wig is nice. It lets her hide behind a curtain of hair when it’s time to act moody and mysterious or when there are tears in her eyes. She wishes she had it. “There’s still time, though. For being siblings. If you really wanted to try.”
Crickets chirp. A little bit of wildlife in the endlessly cookie-cutter suburban landscape. Hank stares at her while she continues not to look at him. He can hear Merry’s car pulling into the driveway. How does he already know what it sounds like after only hearing it once? How is the life he was never able to have ingrained in him? He knows he wants to take Jackie’s proffered hand. He wants it more than anything in the world.
But why does she want him? He’s not the version of her brother that grew up with her. He failed to be a superhero. The only thing he was worse at was being a supervillain. He’s had his head cut open and rearranged. He’s hurt people and been hurt by them a thousand times over. He’s killed people. He still doesn’t even know if she’s real. He could kill her mother, if he wanted to. Or her. He doesn’t need to be able to read her thoughts to shut down her brain.
And he’s the only real version of a brother she’s ever had.
“I do,” Hank says, and brushes his fingers against hers. A regular hello, not a telepath’s. “If… if we could.”
Inside the house, Merry’s shouting for Jackie because she saw her car parked on the street. Otto meows like he’s asking with her. The thoughts all around them keep thrumming without a care in the world for the telepath in their midst.
Hank’s sister smiles, the first time he’s ever seen her genuinely do so. She smiles at him.
Jackie’s brother smiles back.
(Soon, this will all change. Henry King, Jr. will travel to the equator after frightened voices cry out in his dreams, and step out of the spotlight for good while tending to the children he was able to protect from everything he himself had been put through. But he leaves with two, and only two, contacts on the phone in his pocket. His charges—his “siblings”—will know his mother. They’ll know his sister, for however much time she may have left before her pipe dreams lead her to an empty desert.
They will never know their father.
Just this once, Hank will be happy.)