Chapter Text
Michelle knows when her brother doesn’t sleep. He gets irritable, snaps at people. Doesn’t crack as many jokes as usual. Worst of all, he doesn’t smile . And it’s been… days? Weeks? Keeping track of time gets confusing when your job is literally keeping track of time, making sure it doesn’t cave in on itself. Either way, it’s been way too long since Michelle has seen Michael’s stupid grin.
Also, the walls in Rip Hunter’s time bunker… thing… are pretty thin. She can hear him pacing in his quarters, talking to himself when he should be in bed. Crying.
Michelle is worried. She knows she is, no matter how many times she tells herself, Michael’s an adult. He can take care of himself.
But, sisters never change. And she knows she has to step in before Booster Gold rips Rip’s head off.
“Would you shut up about that?” he snaps, whirling around to face Rip, tinkering on the Time Sphere. Booster’s goggles are off, resting on a table for repairs, and Michelle can see the dangerous glint in his blue eyes.
“I’m just saying,” Rip retorts. “If you hadn’t landed the Sphere on that suburban house, we wouldn’t have had to go back and seal the holes you made.”
It’s not the first time he’d said this today by a long shot, and, to be honest, Michelle is getting pretty tired of it, too. Not as tired as Michael, though – the exhaustion and resentment are coming off of him in waves.
But Rip must not have noticed, because he says, “You’ve done this long enough already, Booster. You should know better than to do something like that.”
Before Michelle could do anything, Michael had already stormed to where Rip was kneeling and yanked him up by the collar so hard his feet left the ground. When Rip regains his footing, Booster spins him around and grabs the front of his t-shirt, baring his teeth in a sneer.
“Mike, what the hell!” Michelle shrieks, while Skeets says, “Michael, stop!”
“I get it, alright?” he growls in Rip’s face, whose entire body is rigid and expectant. “I make one little fucking mistake and suddenly I’m a failure. I’m back to square fucking one, is that it? Back to Booster the joke, Booster the cheapskate, Booster who doesn’t goddamn know what’s good for him. Everything I’ve ever done goes flying out the window, right Rip?”
He flinches when Michelle puts a hand on his shoulder. “Let go of him,” she says, soft but stern, with a look of worry on her face when he finally turns to her. After a moment’s stalemate (Michelle had always won their twin telepathy psychic battles, and that wasn’t going to stop now), he drops Rip with a huff and stalks out of the room, down the hallway toward his quarters.
Michelle sighs, suddenly deflated. All Rip does is straighten his shirt and return to the Sphere. Skeets hovers over to Michelle. His engine sounds worried.
“Do you want me to talk to him?” he asks softly.
She sighs again. “No, I got it. Thanks, Skeets.”
“Of course.”
With one last glance at their resident Time Master (she can’t be sure, but his shoulders look a little more tense than usual), Michelle turns and stalks toward the hall her brother disappeared down.
Michelle’s quarters are right next to Michael’s. She uses the term “quarters” instead of “rooms,” because they’re so much nicer than just plain rooms. A queen size bed, an en suite bathroom, even a little kitchenette in case you don’t feel like heading out into the main room to eat. Michelle wonders how Rip had the resources to furnish his place so nicely, but she really doesn’t care.
The only thing she would add is windows , although that might be a little tricky in a sealed underground bunker.
Michelle shakes herself out of her wandering thoughts and knocks on Michael’s door. There’s no response. She knocks again, louder. When he doesn’t answer, she calls, “I know you’re in there, Mikey. If you ignore me again, I’m coming in.” Nothing, so Michelle opens the door and closes it behind her with a tiny click. Michael sits on the end of his unmade bed, his head in his hands. He’s shaking like a leaf, and when he peeks up to look at his sister, a perfectly timed tear falls down his cheek.
Michelle sits down next to him. He scoots over to give her room. “What’s going on with you, Mikey?” she asks, not in an unkind or judgemental way, but in a way that she knows will let him understand she’s genuine. He exhales, but it comes out more like a shaky sob. Michelle waits until his breathing calms down a bit more before prompting him again. “Mike, you know I love you, right?”
“Yes, yes, of course I know.” Michael’s voice is hoarse and thick with phlegm, and he coughs into his fist before continuing. “I love you, too.”
“But?”
“But… It's just hard. To talk about, I mean. Just… everything that’s…” His words break off as he chokes down another sob. Michelle drapes her arm over his shoulders, rubbing his arm up and down the way their mother used to. She waits patiently until he’s able to speak again. When he is, he turns his head slightly to look at her with the corner of his eye. “Did you know I was homeless for a while?”
Michelle starts. She wasn’t expecting the subject change. “I mean, I knew you were crashing at Daniel’s, but–”
“No. I mean, really homeless. Wandering the streets, sleeping in doorways, that kind of thing.” Michael grimaces. “My face was plastered on every other billboard and I still couldn’t figure out a way to make a disposable income. Or any income, really.” He laughs bitterly. “Nobody knew, of course. I had to keep my persona up somehow. Not even my best–” he freezes for a moment, then continues as though nothing had happened. “Not even the people I trusted most.”
“You… kept that from everyone?” Michelle asked.
“Yeah. Or, most of it, anyway. There was one person, though. One person I felt comfortable knowing the… financial straits I was in, at least.” Michael chuckles. “That dumbass gave me free reign of his credit card.”
“Well, at least he trusted you,” Michelle points out, a smile on her face.
Michael shifts so that he’s turned fully toward Michelle, one leg beneath him and one leg dangling off the side of the bed. His face becomes serious, hell-bent on holding back the next wave of tears. But his mouth trembles when he says, “He was my best friend, Michelle. And I–” his voice finally breaks. “I should have been there when he died. I couldn’t have stopped it then – I know that now, with this gig and everything – but I was given a second chance! Do you know how rare those are for me? I could have stopped it, the second time around, but Ted’s stubborn, stubborn ass–”
Michael breaks down. The sobs are louder now, now that he’s not self conscious of Michelle hearing him through the wall. Or perhaps now that he’s gotten to the root of it all. Ted. Michael’s best friend. Michelle wraps her other arm around her brother and holds him tight, letting him wipe tears and snot on her shoulder, drawing small circles on his back with her palms. Michael had always been an ugly crier, even when they were kids. Probably because he didn’t have a chance to do it very often, what with how much responsibility he had on his shoulders.
When he’d calmed down and began to breathe relatively normally, Michael lets go of Michelle and stares down at his hands in his lap. Sniffling, he shakes his head. “There’s so much I didn’t get to tell him, Michelle. So much. I just wish I could get another chance. A second second chance.”
Michelle grabs one of her brother’s hands and grips it tight, even as she smirks and says, “Do you mean a third chance?”
Michael’s smile is small but genuine, and Michelle nearly falls apart at seeing it again. How long has it been? “Yeah. That.”
They both sit in silence for a moment, breathing and getting used to the feeling of not being weighed down by worry or secrets. Michelle opens her mouth to say something about going back to the main room, when a familiar voice crackles through the intercom. Because of course there’s an intercom.
“We’ve got another chronal anomaly,” Rip says. “Meet me by the Sphere, now.”
Michael and Michelle meet each other’s eyes, with twin expressions of exasperation. Then, they both break down into immature giggles.
“Come on, Booster. Let’s go see what this is all about,” Michelle says, then goes to stand up. Before she can, though, Michael grabs her arm and says, “Thanks, Michelle.”
“What for?”
“For… being there, I guess. For listening.”
Michelle smiles. “Well, it’s kind of hard not to when all you do is talk.”
“Hardy har,” Michael says, smiling wider now.
Michelle goes to leave for real now. Michael follows her out and into the main room of the bunker, where Rip stands, tapping his foot impatiently, and Skeets flies around the Sphere doing some last-minute diagnostic checks.
“What’s going on, Rip?” Michael asks. He’s back to his old, affable self, but Rip is still eyeing him warily. Michelle’s going to have to make Michael apologize at some point.
Rip says, “There’s a tear in the timestream. Paris, 2005.” He turns on one of the many computer screens in the room, and pulls up an image of a dark, hooded figure walking out of a post office.
“Who is that ?” Michael asks, walking closer. His eyes are still bloodshot and his face is still a mottled red, but Rip doesn’t notice. Or he’s pretending not to.
He responds, “I don’t know. But we’re about to find out.”