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The night that the Superhuman Registration Act goes live, Rebecca Kaplan visits her son’s bedroom with the desperate hope that he will be there, so she can attempt, one last time, to convince him to sign up. When she finds the room empty – and Teddy’s, as well – she wants to weep.
She doesn’t – she is a strong and stubborn woman, after all, as one would have to be when one accepts the undertaking that is raising three (four, now) boys. But she wants to. Instead she sends her two youngest to bed, shushing their protests, and goes to sit with her husband in front of the television as the news reports begin to filter in. Some superheroes lining up to register, others being arrested. There are protests, petitions, celebrations and tears. The reactions very from person to person, unique as the individuals from which they come.
Rebecca does not support the registration, but she does not condone it, either. Her son is a hero, and for that he deserves more than handcuffs.
He comes home roughly an hour later, shuffling nervously into the apartment with Teddy behind him, looking like he expects to receive a verbal lashing for breaking curfew again, for being out and about on such a dangerous night to be wearing a costume.
She’s tempted – sorely tempted, actually – to do just that, but the sight of his face almost makes her cry again, so she hugs him tightly, then Teddy as well, and banishes them to their rooms for a good night’s rest. In the morning, she tells herself, they will get the lecture of a lifetime, when she can think clearly beyond her internalized mantra of “thank goodness, thank goodness they’re safe.”
This is the last time that she sees either of the boys for a long, long time.
They’re gone in the morning, a scribbled note on the kitchen table with an apology and a promise to be home for dinner. That promise is broken, and neither boy answers his cell phone well after the meal is finished. The worrying begins anew. Just over 24 hours after the SRA goes live, she receives a single text:
Won’t be home for a while. We’re safe. Sorry.
He still won’t answer his phone. It’s another three days before she receives any word, and this time it’s in the form of a parcel containing two cell phones – Billy’s, and Teddy’s – with another apology note and a request to hold on to the phones for a while. The package comes from Pennsylvania, but considering her son can teleport, she doubts that location has anything to do with where he’s hiding.
Safe, he says. With Captain America’s “Secret Avengers”. Where, instead of being arrested, he could just get himself killed.
She doesn’t sleep well for days, weeks, even, but there is one particular night when she wakes suddenly, a strangled scream in her throat, and Jeff has to hold her for an hour straight before she can bring herself to lie down again and try to get back to sleep. The nightmare is a blur of fading memories, more emotion than any kind of coherent thought or recognition, but she remembers two things in particular: the cold laughter of a man she has never seen nor heard before, and the voice of her son, calling for her in a voice that carries more pain than she has ever witnessed him feel before.
Rebecca Kaplan feels a cold, empty pit in her stomach for some time after that, and it only gets worse when she receives a letter in the mail from Stark Industries. The letter, from Tony Stark himself, tells her several things: one, that her son has been captured; two, that, as an unregistered superhuman, he is to be detained without sentence, bail, or trial; three, that she can neither know where exactly he is or visit; and four, that he is very sorry for her misfortune.
The phone calls, letters, and visits to Stark Industries begin that day, and they do not stop until the war is over. Bastard didn’t even have the decency to look her in the eyes and tell her she’d never see her son again. But no one takes away the son of Rebecca Kaplan and gets to live a quiet life afterwards.
There is one small comfort, one tiny balm to her rising panic, fear, and horror: the next letter she receives is unmarked, found on Billy’s bed when she enters the room to dust, fuss, fidget, and cry a little over the son she misses more than air. It is handwritten, personal, half-crumpled, with one corner torn by what she suspects, upon reading it, was claws. It is Teddy’s handwriting.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect him. I’m going to bring him home, I promise. No matter what.”
Bless that boy. She holds the letter close to her chest, trembling, and hopes with all her heart that it will be true, and that it will be soon.
She visits his room often, after that, to see if more news will arrive, unlikely as that may be. She’d gone in occasionally beforehand, to clean up, or to make a mess that she could use as a placebo that he’s still there. Like any teenage boy, Billy’s room is in a constant state of change: one day she might find it pristine, another it appears to have experienced a small tornado. She recreates this effect on occasion, to try and fool herself into believing that he’s still here. Still home, and still safe.
It never works. And never, not even once, does another letter appear mysteriously on his bed.
She’s at work when the area around the Baxter Building goes to hell, on her way home when it’s announced that Captain America – Steve Rogers – has surrendered. And she is waiting in the living room, watching the news yet again with her hands clasped together so tightly they’ve gone white and practically bloodless, when a bright blue light shines from beneath the door of Billy’s room, and she finds them there, Billy and Teddy together, dirty, bloody, exhausted, and utterly devastated. But alive. Alive, and safe.
She cries then, loudly and for a long time, hugging the boys – her boys, by birth or blood or love – and scolding them for leaving her for so long. She watches her son’s face for the telltale signs of what he might have experienced during this war, his imprisonment, perhaps even beyond that, and what she finds in his eyes makes her very, very afraid and very, very angry. But he smiles at her and tells her they’re okay, and Teddy agrees, accepting her embrace and the extra kiss on his cheek for bringing Billy home safe, just as he’d promised. She doesn’t believe them, either of them, for a minute, but she accepts their answer anyway, burying her questions for now.
Whatever they’ve seen is not something they’re willing to share with her right now. Maybe not ever- her son is stubborn, and his boyfriend’s ability to hide his pain is downright unnatural. A Skrull thing, she thinks, and then scolds herself for it, because she’d told herself not to think such things. Teddy is Teddy, Billy would insist.
Billy. Billy, on the other hand, can’t hide much from her, and it takes a great deal of willpower not to march him right to the couch to talk about it. It takes just as much willpower not to find some sort of weapon and march herself to Stark Industries and show Iron Man just what she thinks about giving teenagers the kind of trauma she sees in the eyes of her son. Negotiation, it seems, has failed.
She does neither of these things. She kisses Billy, long and hard and nearly disbelieving, squeezes their hands, and tells them to get washed, changed, and rested. Tonight they would celebrate, as a family. All of them, together. They didn’t look like they wanted to celebrate much, but that’s exactly why she decides that they need to. She babbles on about something related to growing teens, and the need for proper sustinance and social interaction, and god-only-knew the sort of food and company they’d been getting since they disappeared. She bullies them to the washroom, for once not lecturing them on keeping separate and appropriate, pressing two towels into their arms and shutting the door behind herself, promising the best dinner in the world within the hour. It’s all very rushed, familiar, as if they’d only returned from home or a team practice and not the very forefront of a war in which children had no place.
She does not leave immediately. She turns, leans back against the door, and waits. There is silence for a while, rustling clothes, incoherent murmurings, and then, then. Only then does she hear soft, muffled sobs, shuddering breaths, the low thunk of knees hitting the tile floor.
She listens, fists clenched against the wood,teeth gritted so tightly it makes her jaw ache, as her children cry.
When the noise subsides, when whatever they say or do is drowned out by the sound of running water, Rebecca Kaplan moves away from the door and goes to the kitchen to make dinner, as she had promised. Her husband finds her there a little while later, weeping silently over a boiling saucepot, and when he asks her what’s wrong all she can think to respond is that familiar mantra of “thank goodness, thank goodness they’re safe.”