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When Jaime finally collapses, three days after his father’s funeral and two days after his wounds from his run in with Victoria Kord have finally healed, it is with enough force to bring him to his knees. He goes down hard, the full weight of his burnt out home seeming to fall upon his shoulders, and all the air in his lungs goes right along with him. Before him, Alberto Reyes’ grave swims in his tear-blurred vision. The dirt is still fresh, the ground damp from morning dew, and Jaime buries his hands in the upturned earth just to feel the way the grit finds its way beneath his fingernails and coats his skin. It is better than the blood that he feels would be there, should be there, if he looked down.
“Your heart rate is elevated,” Khaji-Da intones in their robotic voice, “you are distressed.”
Jaime laughs, bitter and choked and wipes roughly at the tears that begin to spill down his cheeks with the sleeve of his Gotham Law hoodie. He cannot think of a way to explain to the disembodied voice in his head that it feels as if he is drowning on land. This is the first time he’s visited the grave by himself – without Millie clinging to his arm with enough force to leave bruises, or Rudy keeping him pressed firmly against his side like he thought Jaime would float away if he let go.
“I advise we leave, Jaime. This place is hurting you.”
“No,” Jaime forces out, digging his fingers deeper into the ground as if he’s afraid Khaji will disobey him and rip him away anyway. He forces himself to look at the grave, at the tiny metal plaque that has his father’s name stamped across it in clean bold letters, because the headstone is still months away from being complete. Below him is the body of a man who only a few days before had told Jaime they were on a journey, who had hugged him and looked upon him with pride.
He shouldn’t be gone. Jaime should have been there.
“Jaime-,”
“Don’t. Khaji,” Jaime warns, because he knows what they’re going to say. They share the same brainwaves now, and he’s sure they can hear the self-loathing that’s been steady building within him since he first looked around the bug ship and realized his dad wasn’t there. They’d say the same thing his mother had told him the night before the funeral.
“There’s nothing you could have done mijo.”
It would be a lie.
The damp of the earth is soaking the knees of his sweatpants, he can feel the chill of it against his skin. He tries to focus on that instead of the steady rising part of him that is clawing its way up his throat and trying to find it’s way out. If he had only listened to Khaji, if he’d been stronger, faster, smarter, better. He could have fixed everything. He was supposed to fix everything. It wasn’t supposed to all be burnt to an ash so thick that he could taste it heavy on his tongue.
In the early morning light, Jaime sobs, and Khaji tries to regulate the tremors that wrack his body.
“I’m sorry,” Jaime cries. There is only the wind whispering through the trees to answer him.
“I’m so sorry apá.”
“You are hurting yourself Jaime,” Khaji-Da warns, and he isn’t sure what they mean until he looks down and feels the sting of dirt against an open wound. He’s scraped rock, enough to leave small cuts against the pads of his fingers. It’s such an insignificant wound, easily fixed by Khaji-Da that he knows it isn’t the only injury they’re speaking of.
He wonders if they can feel the raw open ache of his heart, the way it feels like he’s been ripped open, all of his insides spilling across the dirt. It isn’t a physical injury, but Jaime figures they do share a brain now. He can feel them if he focuses hard enough, not just the scarab along his spine, but the tendrils that are wrapped around every part of him. Muscle, bone, sinew, neurons, all of it entangled and intertwined with Khaji-Da. All because they chose him, because this is who he is now. This is his purpose.
This time when he claws his way further into the ground, he tries to make it hurt. He presses until there’s pressure against his nails and keeps pressing until there’s the warning pain of losing the nail entirely. He scrapes his palms along the uneven surface of the ground until he hits jagged rock and keeps going until he feels the skin split. His blood mixes with the dirt piled upon his father’s grave and it feels right. It feels, for a moment, like atonement.
It’s short lived. Khaji-Da’s directive takes over and he finds himself encased in the protective shield of his suit. Tar like tendrils wind their way up his arms and wrap around his shoulders, everything from the elbow down is fully covered.
“Stop it,” Jaime grits out, already feeling the cuts on his palms closing.
“I cannot. My purpose is to protect you. Even from yourself.”
“Khaji,” he warns.
They ignore him.
“Khaji, quit it!”
“You are being reckless, Jaime. You should go home.”
“What home?” he demands, it’s too loud in the quiet of the cemetery, “What. Home?!”
There is something bitter building at the back of his throat, like bile and rage. He wants to scream, to claw at his throat, to dig his hands into his own body and rip out every rotten part of himself. He wants to close his eyes and not see fire, and death, and the way the flames had caught in the tears on Milagro’s cheeks.
Khaji says something, but he doesn’t hear them over the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears. The plaque with his father’s name is blurring in his vision, distorted by his own tears. With the suit covering his hands like a protective set of gloves, Jaime cannot injure himself further, but he doesn’t stop digging his hands into the earth. A part of him is caught on the sick fascination of going deep enough to reach the coffin. Maybe if he could splinter the wood, crack through the hard surface, maybe he would find his father waiting for him the way he had when Jaime had nearly joined him in death. Or maybe he would face a rotting corpse.
A sound escapes him, something keening and low, and it grows until Jaime is wailing. He collapses forward, head falling onto his arms, kneeling like he’s in some grotesque form of a prayer. His father’s necklace falls from where it had been tucked under Jaime’s shirt, pendant knocking against his chin in time with each sob that wracks his body. Jaime wants to rip it from his neck and throw it halfway across the cemetery, he wants to grab it in his fist and squeeze until the gold digs into his skin. In church, when they had spoken of retribution, Jaime had imagined it as something divine and holy. The wicked shall be punished, while the good prosper, and Jaime had believed that. He had accepted anointment, sworn himself, and spoken his saint name with so much conviction that the word had felt sacred on his tongue. But when Jaime had sat in that same church for his father’s service, nothing but bitter rage had simmered within him. It was only because of his mother’s hand in his, grounding him to the pew, that he did not blast through the roof and take off into the stratosphere.
His mother is not here now.
“Khaji,” Jaime says from where his face still hovers above the dirt, his voice is clogged with tears, “take me up.”
“I do not think-.”
“Take me up Khaji Da. Now!”
The suit envelops the rest of his body. It singes his skin, burns away his clothes, and hurts for only a second before he is encased in the protective shell. The boosters at his back flare to life, and then Jaime’s hands are being ripped from the earth and he is rocketing away from the grave with a force that he can feel on his body. The pressure on his ribs aches, and Jaime tells Khaji to go faster just so he can feel the weight on his chest pressing down further.
They climb as Khaji ticks off the altitude. They only stop once they break past the atmosphere, and Jaime opens his eyes to the wide expanse of space spread before him. Khaji cuts off the thrusters, and then he is floating, listlessly. When he breathes, deep and careful, he can already feel Khaji repairing the damage done to his ribs in the violent liftoff.
When he screams, it is loud in the confined space of the helmet.
He screams at the stars, at the endless spread of black before him, at the sun that he can spot in the distance, he screams until his throat hurts and then he keeps going. If Khaji removed the helmet, he knows no sound would escape him, it would be swallowed by the empty nothing before it even fully left his lungs. The thought only makes him scream louder.
Jaime thinks of his sister clinging to him at the funeral, both of them watching as their dad’s body was lowered into the ground. Milagro had been crying, her tears soaking through the fabric of his button-up. Jaime had stood, frozen and dry-eyed, feeling nothing but a cavernous hole within him. When his uncle had hugged him after the service, holding Jaime like he was still a small child needing comfort, Jaime had not been able to hug him back. He could not look at the open casket, could not make himself face the image of his father still and unmoving, because that was not how Jaime had known him. Alberto Reyes was the sort of man who never stopped moving. Jaime had grown up watching him rotate tires, change out spark plugs, installing new alternators, all with steady hands but never slowing down. He would come home and help cook dinner, wash dishes, clean the kitchen, and it was only when he eventually let himself sit down in front of the tv in the living room that Jaime saw the exhaustion on his face. He’d always let Jaime curl up against him on the couch and they would watch whatever cartoon Jaime was fixated on together. Even then, he wouldn’t stop moving, not really. He’d have his fingers brushing through Jaime’s hair, or tapping on the remote in his hands, or the faded knee of his jeans. Jaime could not look in that casket, it would not be his father waiting for him there.
“Jaime,” Khaji says, as his screams fade back into sobs and then silent tears. They say his name like they are trying to remind him of it.
“What, Khaj?”
“Let me take you home. To your family. They can help you.”
He knows they could, that’s precisely why he does not want to go. If Jaime were to see his mom right now, he knows he’d collapse in her arms. He would crumble until there was nothing supporting him but her arms around him, and she would let him break. She would hold him as he sobbed against her, brush his hair back from his face and kiss his temples until he had exhausted himself. He’s seen her do it for Milagro. But Jaime is not his sister, he cannot let himself breakdown anywhere but in the safety of his own company. Jaime has spent so long imagining himself as his family’s rock, that he does not know how to be anything else. He can crack in front of them, let enough spill out that they know he is grieving, but they cannot know that he imagines digging into his own skin with a violence so strong it nearly overwhelms him. They cannot know he is screaming himself hoarse in the vastness of space, just trying to escape the guilt and shame and hurt that consumes him.
“You are injured, Jaime. And I cannot heal you,” Khaji says, sounding upset at their own failure. Jaime knows the feeling.
“It’s not something you can fix, Khaji.”
“I do not understand that concept. I am meant to heal any wound.”
“Not this. This stays broken.”
He cannot begin to explain the concept of grief to Khaji, it would take more energy than he currently has. He wants to stay here, let himself float, and pretend that the world below him does not exist. His escape has always been the stars. On nights that he couldn’t breathe because he’d get so lost in racing thoughts that they would overwhelm him, Jaime would climb unsteadily to the roof of his house and collapse onto his back. The stars would always be waiting. They would blink steadily at him until he managed to reign back in the panic about his future, his family, the F he got on a math test that would snowball into him flunking out of school and then failing everyone he ever loved. Jaime had always had the habit of getting ahead of himself, and it had resulted in nothing but anxiety over every move he made and a heaviness in his chest that he had grown accustomed to. But the stars helped.
Now, they were closer than ever, and Jaime still felt so insignificantly small.
He is scared that this feeling will never leave him, scared that without his father to tell him things will be okay, that he will drift away from himself and lose all sense of who he is.
“Khaji, can you-,” he starts, trying to voice what it is he’s trying to ask, Khaji waits patiently, “You can access memories right? Can you- can you access mine?”
He thinks of how real it had felt to be in Ignacio’s mind, how when the heat of the bomb that took his mother from him washed over his face it had felt so very similar to the fire from Jaime’s own home.
“I am not sure what you are requesting, Jaime.”
“Can you take me to my dad?” When he asks his voice comes out small.
Khaji answers haltingly, “I am not sure that will help, Jaime.”
“But could you do it?”
“I do not know.”
“Could you try?” he pleads, “Please Khaj. I…I need you to try.”
He can feel Khaji weighing it in his head, can feel their discomfort at the idea, “Will it help you heal?”
“Yes. Yes, I swear.” He does not know if it will or not, but he’d promise just about anything if it meant when he opened his eyes next his dad would be standing in front of him again.
Jaime blinks, and then he is home. Orange from the streetlamp spills across the asphalt and into the yard where Jaime sits in a rusting lawn chair. His fingers are picking at the chipping paint, flaking away even more of the white color. Before him is the cactus that his father has tended to since he was small. Jaime has vivid memories of him kneeling in the dirt, picking at weeds, until the sun was setting, and Jaime’s mom would have to coax him back inside with the promise of good food. Sometimes Jaime would help, the two of them covered in dirt and sweat by the end of the day, and Milagro wrinkling her nose at the stench of them. Now, it is night, and his father is not kneeling in the dirt, but sitting in the plastic chair beside Jaime.
He sips from a glass of alcohol, and Jaime’s fingers twitch with the need to pull it away from him. He continues picking at the paint to quell the urge, and to distract from the familiar guilt that washes over him. He should have been here, they should have told him about his dad’s heart attack. Jaime knows it’s because they didn’t want to distract him, and he knows they were right, because he would have been on the first flight home if they had called him. He would have been there to hold a frightened Mili and promise it was all going to be okay, or to make sure his mom was drinking enough water while she sat by his dad’s side in the hospital. He would have easily returned to the role of dutiful son, willing and ready, and that was exactly why they had not told him. It doesn’t make him feel any less guilty.
“I feel like I failed you guys,” Jaime says, speaking both about his inability to land a job, and his shame at not being able to take care of them without them realizing that is what he is doing. For all of his overthinking and planning, Jaime had not fully considered the sense of loss he would feel in this moment. He had not thought his graduation would be followed by crushing failure, because he had followed all the steps, done all the work, and now things were supposed to be okay. He was angry that they weren’t.
“We’re on a journey, Jaime,” his father says, like a soothing balm meant to be spread on a gaping wound. Jaime let him apply it, let it wash over him like a comfort, because the alternative was to let the defeat win.
When his dad pats him on the cheek, familiar and scolding, Jaime huffs out a laugh because he wants to believe everything will be alright. His dad has always been good at pretending things were better than they really were. It was both a relief, and the cause of Jaime’s stress. The touch feels real, so real that when Jaime blinks again and is met with empty black, he chokes on another sob.
“Take me back,” he pleads.
Khaji’s voice grates on his ears when they reply, “You cannot stay there Jaime. It is not real.”
Jaime wants to scream that it was. It had happened, and it was real, and that it still should be. He should be able to go home right now, his real home, and find his dad waiting for him. He shouldn’t have to return to a cramped rental where he and Milagro are sharing a room, and where his mom has to sleep by herself in an empty bed. Everything is wrong, and broken, and Jaime has to fix it because he was always meant to. But it’s in too many pieces in his hands and he doesn’t know how to fit it back together.
“You cannot fix it Jaime,” Khaji says, “It is not something you broke.”
“I know that Khaji!”
“Then why do you keep blaming yourself?”
“Because I should have been there!” He doesn’t know if he means during his dad’s first heart attack, or his second, or for any moment in between. He does not know if he is on the right path anymore. He tries to listen to the voice of reason inside him, the thing in his chest that his dad told him would hold all the answers, but it is drowned out by his own suffocating failure. He cries, and in the suit his voice sounds muffled to his own ears.
Khaji feels heavy in his brain, like they are being weighed down by his grief as well.
“I scanned your father, Jaime. He was in cardiac arrest, there is nothing you could have done even if you had stayed. Your family does not blame you. Why do you?”
He sniffles, “Because it’s my fault.”
Khaji, who does not fully grasp the concept of emotions, approaches with nothing but practical realism when they say, “It was not your fault. You did not cause Alberto Reyes’ heart to fail.”
“You wouldn’t get it Khaji.”
“You could explain it to me.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Jaime says miserably. The words are too convoluted in his head, they hardly even make sense to himself. Instead, he tries to pass fragmented images to Khaji through their bond and hopes that they understand. His grief and his blame and his loss are so profoundly entwined together that they may as well be him and Khaji.
Jaime wraps an arm around himself just to have something to ground him. He is still floating weightless in space, and what had once felt like a relief is now making him feel unmoored. His fingers dig into his side, the suit giving as much as it can under the pressure. In the confines of the helmet, his tears and ragged breath have begun to fog up the eyes of the suit.
When Khaji starts to bring them back into the atmosphere, he lets them. It is different from the rapid fall of the test flight, they do it slow. Jaime does not catch on fire or have to grasp wildly for something to halt his descent. Instead, Khaji lets him acclimate, and by the time he lands back on the ground, outside of the cemetery and solidly on the sidewalk, he is no longer crying. He has run out of tears.