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To be honest, Jaime doesn’t think much about what Peacemaker does in his spare time. He comes by to give him information on any Reach technology still left behind on Earth and wakes him up in the middle of the night for surprise training. That’s enough for Jaime. He doesn’t even know where Peacemaker’s been living. For all he knows, the guy vanishes off the face of the planet in between when they see each other.
The only other thing that matters is that they have each other’s contact information in case of emergencies, which they do. Not that Jaime’s planning on using it unless they have need for his very particular skill set—yeah, Peacemaker’s definitely effective in his methods, but if there’s a world-ending scenario, he’s more likely to call, say, Guy Gardner or even Booster Gold.
Still, Jaime’s not surprised when he sees him talking to his parents. His dad is barbecuing, and that’s literally the only other thing that consistently draws Peacemaker out into normal society.
What is surprising is when Paco frowns deeply and nudges Jaime’s arm with the still-cold bottom of his bottle of cream soda.
“Dude,” he says, “I think Peacemaker is hitting on your mom.”
“What?” Jaime whirls around so fast Khaji Da chirps something about whiplash injuries. “He’s not—oh my God.”
There’s nothing to obviously show that that’s what they’re doing, which is a massive relief for Jaime. But Peacemaker is definitely smiling at his mom, who’s laughing at what can’t possibly be one of his jokes. Jaime’s dad is right there, too, since Peacemaker is standing by the grill, which should be a good thing because his dad would never let someone try to make the moves on his mom. But still, it’s super weird.
“He’s really scary when he smiles.” Paco says to Jaime like he’s confiding some great secret and not a known fact of the universe.
“I don’t think he’s hitting on your mom,” Branda decides to comment from her slightly different angle on the situation, which is about six inches away. Jaime nods along with her at her reasoning, which is the same as his own. “There’s no way your dad would be chill with it.”
Paco sees the wisdom in this because he thinks it over for a few seconds before holding up one finger. “Maybe he’s hitting on your dad?”
Jaime almost drops his grape soda. “No way.” For some reason, the only rebuttal that will come out of his mouth is, “Peacemaker’s not gay.”
“That has the same problem as before,” Brenda says critically. “Now Jaime’s mom is the one who’s right there. So he can’t be hitting on either of them. I think he’s just… smiling.”
“I don’t think he could ever be ‘just smiling,’” Paco objects. “He doesn’t have that kind of whimsical soul. I’ve only ever seen him smile after hurting someone.”
“Well, maybe he did that on the way over,” Brenda suggests. She waves her straw. “I don’t know what he does in his spare time, he probably killed a mugger or something.”
Jaime strongly resists the urge to defend Peacemaker with a “he wouldn’t do that.” He doesn’t want to justify how he’s so sure. It’s not like he’s never killed anyone. Jaime knows he has. But being inside of his head was a weird experience, and probably would’ve been even without the scarab-induced psychedelic effects. He knows Peacemaker now in a way he never wants to know anybody ever again. Which is also partially how he’s certain Peacemaker isn’t gay, but whatever. If he was, that’d be way less of a problem than the “trigger-happy, legally dead, gun-toting vigilante” thing.
But hey, if Peacemaker’s happy and smiling, that means he’s not making Jaime run drills or catch bullets or fistfight him or whatever, and that’s a turn of events Jaime can get behind.
He tries to put Paco’s observations out of his mind. They’re stupid. There is no way on Superman’s Earth that Peacemaker is trying to hit on either of his parents.
Absolutely no way.
Jaime does his very best to put the thought of whatever Peacemaker might be doing in proximity to his parents for any reason out of his mind. It’s not his business, and there’s no way what Paco thinks is happening is actually happening. It’s not often he finds himself hoping for some kind of emergency just so he can get his mind off the wretched suggestions his brain keeps making—and, to be clear, he’s hoping for a very minor, non-life-threatening emergency.
Of course, that means that saying keeps ringing in his mind after Khaji Da alerts him to several armed men inside the shop. Be careful what you wish for.
Khaji Da can fly him faster than any aircraft on the planet, but somehow Jaime only breaks through the window after the gunshot.
No. Please no. Not again. Jaime was already too late once, months too late, he can’t let his family go through that again.
But there’s no blood on the floor when he smashes his way inside, and Khaji Da runs a couple thousand diagnostics on Alberto Reyes that come up negative before Jaime even has to ask, plus a dozen on Paco where he’s kneeling with his hand out like he’s imitating Piñata. Jaime stops in midair, wings humming to keep him aloft as the thrusters shift into a quieter mode.
Even if there’s no gunshot wound and no blood, his family is on the floor because of these people, whoever they are. They look like normal gun runners (or as normal as that could possibly look), but Khaji Da holds a display up in Jaime’s vision showing that they have traces of ammonium sulfate and copper sulfate on their boots, which means they’re probably from that new pesticide plant outside town. Why they’re here specifically, Jaime doesn’t know, and he doesn’t need to know. What matters is that they’re going to leave.
“You guys just made a very big mistake,” Jaime says, biting back a snarl. He’s not good at threatening banter, but this time he doesn’t have to try to make it sound commanding. They hurt his dad. They’re gonna pay. “You have five seconds to get out of here so I don’t have to kick your ass in front of—Mr. Reyes.”
The lead guy has a skull painted on the front of his bulletproof vest. He also has a gun longer than one of Jaime’s arms. He grins, megawatt teeth that wouldn’t be out of place in a commercial for whitening beaming out from underneath a pair of sunglasses.
“Blue Beetle,” he says, and his east Texan accent is so clearly forced it makes Jaime’s ears feel like they’re bleeding, “I’m sure you’re a fine young man—”
“You used up your seconds,” Jaime says, and uses a staple to hurl him out the front door in perfect sync with Peacemaker kicking it down.
The fight doesn’t last very long. Jaime’s first priority is shielding his dad and Paco, so he actually doesn’t see the majority of it, but he knows Peacemaker is breaking bones and teeth while he readies a sonic wave that’ll put the rest of these guys on their asses. Peacemaker flattens as soon as Jaime fires, which leaves them with a nice pile of potentially brain-damaged goons.
“What happened?” Jaime asks worriedly as soon as Khaji reassures him they’re all down for the count. He lowers the shield. His dad is breathing heavily and Paco’s eyes are wide, but it seems like all of Khaji Da’s previous assessments are still true. Neither of them are hurt. Still, though, “Are you—are you okay?”
“Fine,” Paco says, relaxing a little. “I’ve had worse. Uh, I think I knocked the wind out of your dad while I was tackling him.”
“I’m alright,” Jaime’s dad says stiffly. He takes Jaime’s hand and gives it a squeeze. The armor isn’t quite giving enough for such a subtle gesture to come through, so Jaime feels it half a second later when the scarab translates the touch for him. “Just knocked the wind out of me, like he said. I would have been a lot worse if Paco hadn’t been here.”
Peacemaker’s boots thud as he makes his way over. Jaime can’t help but notice that they seem to be the same brand as what the gunmen were wearing. Peacemaker crouches down and looks at the back of Alberto’s head even though he must know Jaime is wearing a living triage kit that’s better than any nurse except probably his mom.
“What were a bunch of security guards for Daggett Industries doing here?” Peacemaker asks. Daggett, that’s right. That’s the name on the plant.
Paco shrugs, mystified, but Jaime’s dad winces. “One of them wanted a friends and family discount on a tire change that I wouldn’t give him.”
“That’s it?” Jaime says, outraged.
“They tried to shoot you because you wouldn’t give them a freaking discount?” Paco says at the same time.
“Heh,” Peacemaker huffs with what looks like the edges of another smile. He stands up. “If they’re bold enough to do this, they’re bold enough to go after other people. Bianca”—it actually startles Jaime to hear his mom’s first name come out of Peacemaker’s mouth—“and Milagro may be next.”
“Over a discount?” Paco’s voice is high-pitched with outrage.
“No,” Peacemaker says. “This is something else. Beetle, have you…”
Jaime shakes his head, already anticipating that Peacemaker’s next question will be about if he’s noticed anything weird about the new company on the block. Honestly, he doesn’t know anything about it. His dad says that it’ll create more job opportunities, and hey, everybody could always use more of those, but Jaime’s not feeling real charitable toward Daggett right about now. Sue him.
“I’ll go—” He starts before faltering. He’s fast. Fast enough that, once, he was able to be in two (technically three) places at once with a little dimensional blipping on his side. But that’s not a trick he can repeat twice. And if Peacemaker thinks they’re going after his mom and Milagro, he needs to prioritize.
They’re both in crowded locations. It’d be hard to hurt them, right? But Jaime can’t ignore the voice in his head that sounds like Khaji Da’s saying “hard doesn’t mean impossible.”
“I’ll get Milagro,” Peacemaker says, which is not what Jaime was expecting.
Somehow, the first protest out of Jaime’s mouth is, “You can’t sign her out of school.”
Peacemaker raises an eyebrow at him before marching out through the now-broken door. Evidently he not only doesn’t care but knows how to get to Milagro’s elementary school.
Jaime’s dad gestures to the door and the window. “You’re going to fix those.”
“Yes, sir,” Jaime says dutifully. “But he really can’t sign her out of school.”
“He can,” Alberto says. He grits his teeth and hauls himself onto his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. Jaime and Paco both automatically leap to help him before he waves them off. “Your mother and I added his name to the list of registered pickups for both of you weeks ago.”
“Why?” Jaime asks.
“We also put Mr. Gardner on there,” his dad says.
Now Jaime properly buries his face in his hands. “Why?”
Jaime can’t see it, but the expression on his dad’s face is grim. “Because of situations exactly like this. Go get your mother, mijo.”
It isn’t the first war meeting held in Jaime’s kitchen, and with the Reyes family luck, it won’t be the last. They’re arranged in a loose ring—Jaime, Bianca, Alberto, Milagro, Brenda, and for some reason Peacemaker is still there—listening to Paco’s description of what the Posse had gotten into with Daggett chemicals as well as his profuse apologies for not knowing about it sooner and inadvertently getting Jaime’s father caught in the literal crossfire.
“I’m sorry,” Paco says miserably. “I didn’t know the Posse had been fu—uhh, messing with the whole thing, I just knew they’d told me not to go over there. I wouldn’t have come into work if I thought there was any danger, I swear.”
He and Jaime had both been delivered the news that Daggett was sniffing out Posse members by a very irate Thumper at the same time. According to him, nobody had actually been snatched thanks to some quick work on his and Bonita’s part, but a couple of younger, friskier members had almost been shot by one of the same people Jaime had blasted only a few hours later.
At least Peacemaker waits for him to finish before he stands up and slams his hands down on the table. “So you—”
“That’s enough,” Jaime’s mom says, voice icy, and despite the way Peacemaker’s face is turning red he immediately sits back down, fists clenching under the table. “If you can’t be civil, you’re free to go home.”
Jaime’s not unused to the effect that his mother can have on people when she’s being stern. He’s been on the receiving end of it more than a few times in his life. He’s sure it’s not even the first time it’s been turned on Peacemaker. But there’s still something satisfying about seeing it in action on a grown man. A little prideful “yeah, that’s my mom!"
“Alberto could’ve been killed,” Peacemaker says. Jaime feels the same rush of surprise now that he did when Peacemaker called his mom “Bianca.” When did he develop that kind of relationship with them? Jaime doesn’t think he’s ever been around them without him also being there, has he? There have been a few times when Peacemaker was waiting for him at the house after school, but… Jaime always assumed he wasn’t doing anything except sinisterly biding his time until Jaime showed up and he could ambush him with back-breaking training.
“But I wasn’t,” Jaime’s dad says, a little too calmly for Jaime’s liking. Why is his family so nonplussed by attempts on their life? “And Jaime’s going to report Daggett Industries to the Justice League.”
“I am?” Jaime blinks. Khaji Da helpfully informs him that the process has already been started thanks to some quick data compiling. “Oh. Yeah, I am. They’re not going to get away with this.”
According to Nadia and Hector, it’s apparently already one of Batman’s yellow-listed organizations. Red-listed ones are the ones like Lexcorp that nobody is supposed to mess with because they do a lot of supervillain hiring, and they’re the only ones that throw up flags in Khaji Da’s Oracle partnership database. They’re working to remedy that, but Jaime doesn’t want to be overwhelmed with alarms dancing across his vision every time one of their neighbors orders a package off Amazon.
“Nobody even got seriously hurt,” Paco says quickly. “Not in the Posse and not here.”
Right. Yeah. Despite all the heart attacks Jaime has been having today, everyone was fine, even his dad.
Maybe he does need to stop hoping for emergencies.
Jaime’s brushing his teeth when he spots Peacemaker in the front yard and almost chokes to death groaning.
“What do you want?” He mutters to himself, nearly unintelligible around his toothbrush. It’s a school night—he’s done with spring break on the exact same day Milagro’s starts because nobody who works for the school district bothered to talk to each other. School nights mean people shouldn’t be allowed to drive him to the middle of nowhere so they can show him how to throw a punch for the five millionth time.
It’s probably useless, but he turns the light off in the bathroom to at least partially obscure him from someone looking in. Peacemaker can’t drag what he can’t see, except for all the times he’s done exactly that.
He watches from the window as Peacemaker does a lap around the house. Then another, and another. Or at least he assumes it’s a lap, since he can only see him when he’s in the front yard, but Khaji Da says that’s what he’s doing and he’ll believe that.
“Maybe it’s stereotypical behavior. Like that thing with tigers in cages,” Jaime muses. Brenda had done a whole research project on it in middle school, trying to get a roadside “zoo” that used to have billboards along I-10 shut down. She’d been thrilled when animal control or something like it raided the place and had dragged Paco and Jaime (and an eager Milagro) to the actual El Paso Zoo so they could see how much better some of the relocated animals were doing. That’s the kind of thing they used to do before Jaime got a superweapon grafted to his spine.
Khaji Da burbles something about Peacemaker having an elevated heart rate but not being a potential threat. Jaime’s gotten good at describing Khaji’s various noises to people who don’t understand the scarab’s language. Chirps, whistles, burbles, beeps, clicks. It’s a little like having a dolphin in his brain. Khaji Da doesn’t think that’s quite as apt a comparison as he does, though.
On what looks to be Peacemaker’s seventh trip around the house, the front door opens and both of Jaime’s parents step out. His mom says something, but it’s too quiet for him to make out through the closed window. But what’s the use of alien technology if you don’t use it for eavesdropping on your parents?
“Khaji,” he says quietly as he crouches down, “can you give me a read on what they’re saying?”
Words start to scroll across Jaime’s vision, bright blue letters highlighted in three different colors—green like his mom’s scrubs, dark blue like his dad’s favorite shirt, orange like Peacemaker’s tattoos.
He listens—well, reads—for about one minute before he startles so badly he almost hits his head on the sink.
“Oh my God,” he whispers. “Peacemaker’s hitting on my mom.”
“You’re sure?” Brenda asks, leaning over the lunch table. Honestly, Jaime will forever be grateful her school's lunch period syncs up perfectly with theirs and gives her just enough time to get here. They usually try not to discuss Blue Beetle stuff where everyone can hear it, but this is an exception. Jaime’s not even mentioned. “Like, really sure?”
“I’m sure,” Jaime says. Khaji Da whistles. “Even the scarab is sure.”
“Gross. Well, now that we’re all on the same page, you owe me ten bucks,” Paco says smugly.
Jaime lightly kicks him under the table. “We never actually made a bet.”
“True. Five bucks, then.” Paco grins over his tray. “Seriously, Jaime, it’s probably fine. Your dad was there again, right?”
“Right,” Jaime agrees. He slumps forward, massaging his forehead with the tips of his fingers. Khaji Da can do this nice little vibrating trick that alleviates migraines like nobody’s business, but the last thing they need is a classmate looking over and wondering why Jaime suddenly has Blue Beetle’s hands. “That’s where it gets worse.”
“Jaime,” Brenda says slowly, “please don’t tell me your dad just let Peacemaker try to put a move on your mom.”
“No,” Jaime says bleakly. “He laughed at him and invited him inside.”
Paco and Brenda both stare at him. Paco scratches at a stain on the table Jaime really doesn’t want to know the origins of. Brenda smooths out the wrapper of the candy she packed herself for dessert, the bright silver packaging shining amidst the perfectly prepared lunch her aunt sent her with. Neither of them say anything for about thirty seconds.
“Hmm,” Brenda finally hums.
“Yeah, that’s really bad,” Paco says after a few more seconds of squinting. “Did he do it, though? Peacemaker?”
Jaime looks up at the ceiling and prays for strength. “He said ‘I don’t want to accidentally wake up the kids.’”
“Oh, that’s worse. That’s so much worse,” Paco says, utterly horrified. “Dude, do you want to hide out at my place, or something? No, wait, hide out with Brenda. Maybe you’ll burn La Dama’s house down for the tenth time while you’re at it and we can score some insurance money.”
“Ix-nay on the A-lay Ama-day,” Brenda hisses. She sighs. “Jaime doesn’t need to go into hiding. He just needs someone to bleach his brain. Could you ask Traci to do it?”
“Probably,” Jaime allows, seriously considering the possibility before slumping. “But I think I’d have to tell her about this so she knew what to scrape out, and I want to relive this as few times as possible.”
“Oh, please, like you aren’t going to complain to her about all of this anyway.” Brenda rolls her eyes. “I think this is liveable, though. You don’t need them to give you the whole ‘the birds and the beetles’ talk. Just because your parents are maybe, kind of, probably hitting on Peacemaker…”
“No, no, I think he might need one,” Paco interrupts gleefully. He still seems horrified, but obviously recognizes this as a potential way to make fun of Jaime. “See, when a mommy and a daddy love a tatted up biker dude very much—”
“I am going to need to go into hiding if I kill you,” Jaime growls, miming a throttling motion. Khaji Da chirps an alternative method that involves poisoning Paco’s school lunch with something slow-acting so they can dispose of the body later in secret after he’s died at home. Jaime knows scarab-speak well enough at this point that he recognizes the nuances of the joke.
The bell rings. Paco grins. “Catch me if you can, bug boy.”
He takes off running like they don’t share classes for the rest of the day. Brenda huffs and grabs Paco’s tray for him to dump the remnants into the trash.
“Just talk to them, Jaime,” she advises. “Your parents are great. They’ll get… whatever it is you’re trying to tell them.”
Jaime frowns at the lunch table until Khaji Da tells him that they really need to go or they’ll be late.
Huh. What is he trying to tell them?
“Hey, Mom? Dad? Could we… uh… talk?” Jaime says hesitantly.
He knows he’s lucky. Milagro’s at a friend’s house for a birthday party, which means it’s just them in the house. If Peacemaker is nearby, he’s not within the scarab’s radius, so hopefully he’s not going to come barging in midway through the conversation.
(That raises the question of how he knew there were people at the garage, actually. Jaime knows he follows him around sometimes. But was he just… watching it? Waiting for something to happen? If so, he should’ve gotten there a whole lot faster.)
“Of course, sweetheart,” his mom says, immediately putting her computer to the side. She’d gotten a fancy new Wayne one when the house had been rebuilt. Apparently it was part of a promotion they were doing with hospitals around the country. Nobody in the Reyes family was complaining. “What’s going on? Is it school? Is it Traci? Is it about the scarab again?”
They always call Khaji Da that. “The scarab.” It’s not inaccurate, and Jaime says it too, but it’s interesting how they live with him and Khaji and still stumble over the words.
“It’s, um. It’s actually about Peacemaker,” Jaime says, sitting at the table. He doesn’t need Khaji Da’s help to observe the way both his parents immediately stiffen as a flicker of guilt crosses their faces. “Can I just… I heard you guys the other night, or Khaji did, I guess, and—can you just tell me what’s going on?”
His dad is the one who speaks, after a few moments spent rubbing his increasingly reddening face. “We didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“It’s a new thing,” his mom says. Her voice is doing that fluttering thing it does when she’s embarrassed. Way to go, Jaime. Embarrassing your mom is like the eighth deadly sin. “We’re just trying it. Seeing how it goes. We didn’t mean for you to find out this quickly. We wanted to tell you gently.”
“He’s running laps around the house at night when no one else is around,” Jaime points out. “He’s acting super suspicious. I was going to notice that.”
“I told him that was unnecessary,” Alberto mumbles, clearly not intending for Jaime to hear him. He raises his voice. “Since the incident at the shop, he’s been upset. He thinks he got there too late to be useful.”
“Can you please tell me what’s going on?” Jaime reiterates. “Like are you guys, uh… Are you…” He looks at them desperately with an expression that screams “please don't make me say it.” He’ll suit up and have Khaji Da ask if he has to, just please don’t make him do it. “Y’know, are you?”
His parents exchange glances. His mom’s cheeks are also flushing darker. Khaji Da helpfully informs him that she has an increased heart rate.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” his dad awkwardly ventures, “but probably yes. Please don’t tell Milagro.”
There’s a lot of things Jaime should say. He should ask why the hell his parents picked this guy out of everyone in El Paso when there are surely hundreds of normal people their age to choose from. He should ask when they decided they were going to allow Peacemaker to hit on them as a unit. Maybe even if they’ve allowed this with anyone else even though the thought of asking makes him queasy.
But it does kind of… fit, he supposes. They’d protected his family while he’d left them defenseless while fighting the Reach. His dad still has the gun he says he took from Brenda’s aunt and Jaime has technically caught Peacemaker showing interest in it and talking to his dad about it before. Peacemaker had told him about his mom sedating him with no small amount of admiration, which had been weird in a different way before all of these revelations.
It’s undoubtedly extremely weird and something he doesn’t want to think about, just like how he felt when Milagro was born and Paco had whispered, scandalized by the knowledge that comes from being a nine-year-old looking at things on the internet you’re not supposed to, “Does this mean your parents had to have sex?” But it’s not the worst thing that could’ve happened. Even the choice in people isn’t the worst when he thinks about it. They could’ve gone for Guy Gardner. Jaime would’ve had to intervene in that case.
Maybe it’s just that he hasn’t been running Jaime as ragged lately so he’s more inclined to be charitable. But still—
“Aw, man,” Jaime says, gloomy. “I’m going to have to give the shovel talk to Peacemaker.”
Jaime doesn’t try to track people often. It feels like a massive invasion of privacy and the overload of information Khaji Da gives him when he asks for help finding somebody almost always makes his brain feel like it’s coming out of his ears. It feels like a step too far to track normal people and an invasion of privacy for any of his “super friends.” Sometimes he sees an explosion on the news and makes sure no one involved is a Titan or the guy with the matching counterpart to Milagro’s friendship bracelet, but that’s usually as far as it goes.
But when he does go hunting, the thing Khaji Da always finds the fastest is leftover Reach technology. And even if none of them are happy about it, Peacemaker technically qualifies.
Jaime finds him at a gas station in La Union. There’s hardly anybody around even though it’s a Saturday morning, just a bored teenage attendant who visibly does a double take when Jaime suddenly appears beside the guy glaring at his GPS while his motorcycle fills up.
“I thought you didn’t need gas,” Jaime says, perching sideways on the seat even though his weight almost tips it over. Peacemaker acknowledges his appearance and desecration of his vehicle with an annoyed grunt but makes no attempt to push him off. “Didn’t Intergang hook you up?”
Peacemaker raises an eyebrow and disconnects the pump. “Who told you that?”
“Um, I’m ninety-nine percent sure you did,” Jaime says. “You know, back when you were still telling us your name was Mitchell.”
“Why are you here?” Peacemaker asks. They’re both well aware—the three of them are well aware that if this was an emergency, Jaime wouldn’t have wasted time attempting banter. He’d have just grabbed Peacemaker under the arms and hauled him to the source of the chaos.
Jaime tries to sound intimidating. It’s difficult because he’s directing it at the person he usually mimics in these situations. “I want to talk to you about my parents.”
Peacemaker’s eyes flicker over to the gas station attendant, who’s back to reading while sitting just within view of the only security camera in the lot. He takes a slow breath in and lets it out through his teeth, visibly sizing Jaime up. It ends with an abrupt nod and a sudden dedication to averting eye contact. “It won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, that’s right, I—what?” Jaime stops short, blinking.
“It won’t happen again,” Peacemaker repeats.
“Sorry, what exactly do you think I’m here to do?” Jaime draws his feet up, arms crossed and elbows braced on his knees. Khaji Da hums a warning that if he tips backward by even a fraction of a centimeter, he’s going to fall on his ass in the dirt.
Peacemaker shrugs. “Not hard to guess you want to warn me away from your parents. You’re a good son, and they’re… good people.”
He somehow sounds shocked when he says it. Jaime’s the opposite of surprised. Of course Peacemaker thinks they’re good people. Everyone thinks they’re good people. They’ve been Paco and Brenda’s favorite since Jaime met them and quietly asked his mom for a little extra in his lunch to give to Brenda when her mom was too tired to do anything more than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. La Dama and the Posse think they’re good people. As far as Jaime’s concerned, they’re candidates for sainthood on the grounds of accepting his alien transformation alone.
“Yeah, I know,” Jaime says, even if he would consider himself to be a mediocre son on a good day. “What does that have to do with you never talking to them again?”
“It makes you uncomfortable,” Peacemaker says. God, talking to him is like pulling teeth. “So it ends.”
“That’s not—I mean—yeah, I came here to threaten you,” Jaime admits. “Trying to live up to that ‘good son’ thing you mentioned. But I’m not trying to scare you away forever. I just wanted to… Here, let me do it, okay?”
Jaime holds out an arm and Khaji Da flows armor over it, fitting a claw at the end of his wrist and hooked tibial spurs up the length of his inner arm—although Jaime supposes that on him they’d probably be called radial or ulnar spurs. The tip of the claw rests against Peacemaker’s femoral artery, careful not to press hard enough to rupture the skin.
Only a few months ago, the movement would’ve gotten Jaime shot in the head. It probably wouldn’t have been fatal, thanks to the scarab, but it would’ve still sucked. Now, Peacemaker just stands there waiting for Jaime to get on with whatever it is he’s going to do.
“You’re gonna be nice to my parents,” he says. “Really nice. You’re going to do whatever gross stuff it is you like to do and you’re going to protect them with your life if anything happens to them because of your job. And if you ever hurt them, I’ll become exactly the kind of guy you thought I’d be just to get revenge on you. Got it?”
For a moment they just stare at each other. Then Peacemaker cracks a smile. It really is creepy. “Not bad, kid.”
“You don’t believe us,” Jaime accuses. The “us” slips out before he can stop it. Khaji Da likes his parents, too.
“No, I do,” Peacemaker says. He steps back, away from the edge of the blade. Jaime’s arm shrinks back to normal without a second thought. “Wasn’t that long ago I thought I’d have to be the one protecting them from you. But you’re a good kid.”
Jaime looks at him with bright orange eyes. “Promise us you won’t hurt them.”
“Don’t know if I can do that,” Peacemaker admits, and doesn’t flinch when Jaime clenches his jaw. “I can promise you it wouldn’t be on purpose. But I don’t usually get it right. There’s a whole reason I do my best work alone, and it’s not just because most capes”—he gives Jaime a pointed look—“won’t stop chattering.”
“But you like them,” Jaime says. He hops off the motorcycle and the Blue Beetle armor closes around him, Khaji Da’s displays regarding Peacemaker’s elevated heart rate again (just like when he was outside their house, just like how his mom had reacted when Jaime brought it up) growing more obtrusive. “And you’re going to make an effort.”
It comes out as an order. Jaime doesn’t think that’s the only reason Peacemaker actually nods.
“Did you fix it?” Paco asks, laying on his back in the Reyes family’s backyard. The swing he just helped them build for Milagro creaks as she cheerfully takes it for a test run.
Brenda flicks an ice cube at Paco’s head. “Fix what?”
“I was talking to Jaime. About that thing with Peacemaker and his parents,” Paco says, lowering his voice to a furtive whisper. Jaime’s glad. He doesn’t think they’ve told Milagro yet, and he doesn’t want to have to be the reason they try to break the news and find out she’s definitely already aware. Brenda flicks another ice cube at him all the same.
“Oh.” Jaime looks across the yard. His mom and dad are both there. So’s Peacemaker. Khaji Da could tell him what they’re saying, but whatever it is, it makes his dad smile and his mom light up despite the bags under her eyes from a few nights in a row of late shifts and too many patients. “I don’t think I’d go that far. I’ve kind of come around to it.”
“Acceptance is the last stage of grief,” Paco says sagely.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jaime says. He rests his chin on his hand, watching Peacemaker help his dad sit on the dying grass. “But I know he’s trying. And he knows what I’ll do if he hurts them. So I guess we’re cool.”
“If you say so.” Paco shrugs without sitting up.
Brenda nudges Jaime gently. “I told you they’d get it if you talked to them. You should know by now I’m always right.”
Jaime huffs before a reminder from Khaji Da about what he’d thought the other day makes him laugh. “Yeah. I mean, it could always be worse, right?”
“How?” Paco asks before lowering his voice when the three adults look over at them.
Jaime shrugs, unable to keep the smile off his face. “It could’ve been Guy Gardner.”