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This is how it starts:
They’re at breakfast. Pa reads the newspaper and Ma flicks away idle crumbs from the tablecloth that the dogs will be most eager to lap up. Clark stares at his plate, eyes blown wide, like his overeasy eggs have just tried to murder him.
He’d been acting weird, watching them with guarded eyes all morning after Ma came in to wake him up for school and found him instead on his knees in the corner of his room, trembling violently. She asked him what was wrong but he’d simply stared right through her and stood to get dressed for the day, movements robotic and heavy.
“I know you’re not real,” Clark whispers finally, not looking up from his eggs. His voice carries an edge to it—a shiver runs up Ma’s spine. “You died months ago. They tore this house down, but even if they hadn’t, it’d be long gone by now. Nothing escaped that blast.”
Pa sets his newspaper down and studies his son, brow furrowed in confusion.
Her first thought is when, exactly, did Clark go insane?
“Do you have a fever?” Ma says instead, slipping a hand to feel his brow. It is perfectly cool to the touch—it always is.
Clark meets her eyes with knowing, empty eyes that look somehow more empty than if they’d been weeping. He grins, too, and his grin cuts glass. It is too sharp a thing for her boy.
“I know what my parents are really like,” he continues. “You’re just a cheap copy and I won’t be taken in. I won’t.”
“Clark, wh–” Pa begins.
“You probably think I’m crazy, right?” A spark has lit his eyes again. He is the most animated he’s been all morning. He sits back in his chair, hands curled to fists. The picture of defiance. “Want to take me to the doctor, get my head checked? Better yet, I should just stop talking. I should accept my wonderful life and not go down the rabbit hole, not try for anything else. I bet Lois is about to walk in and kiss me, like she didn’t… like she didn’t…”
He stops, and in an instant, Clark’s fire collapses in on itself. Years-old grief wells like a tidal wave on his face. Too much for a seventeen-year-old to bear. Too much for her Clark.
“Who is Lois?” Pa asks, voice quiet–if not with understanding, at least treading with caution.
“She’s–” Clark falters at that. “She’s Lois. My wife. She broke her wrist punching me the first time I asked her out. She jumps off buildings to get a story.”
It doesn’t make any sense. Any other parents would haul their child off to the insane asylum, but Ma takes one look in Clark’s eyes and somehow–somehow–she knows.
He’s telling the truth.
Impossibly, he’s telling the truth.
“Okay. Okay.” she whispers, testing the words carefully on her tongue. “What if you told us everything? Start from the beginning.”
He starts. His gaze flickers from Ma to Pa, panicking–searching for answers. Searching for one flicker of doubt on their faces so Clark can call their bluff and zip out of the house with legs faster than a speeding bullet.
Whatever he’s looking for, he must find it, because understanding breaks across his features and he bursts into tears.
—
It comes out in bits and pieces, but eventually Ma learns this:
Her baby boy is not so much a baby any more. He is–was, will be–a husband. A father. A leader. His powers save countless innocents, because in the future he is a hero. He fights, he dies, he comes back, and then finally–one last, terrible battle and an icy wave sweeping across the Earth, devouring everything with it if it weren’t stopped. Except Clark wasn’t even there to watch the end. He was the first to die, saving his friends from certain death.
That’s what he says, anyway, and against all odds, Ma believes him.
“I need a uniform,” Clark tells her urgently. If Ma ever had any doubts, they’re all erased by the weight in his voice when he speaks. “I need to train. I need to be ready this time. Keep everyone safe.”
That night, she slips out his baby blanket–the one he’d come to them in, sixteen years ago, a yearling red and crying. Tears slip down her cheek, but she cuts it anyway and sets to work with needle and thread. When she presents it to Clark, he runs his fingers over the fabric softly, reverently. Like he’s greeting an old friend.
His smile is full, when he finally looks up at Ma again, and it softens the pit gnawing at the pit of her stomach. Whatever this is, she will stand by the side of her son as long as he will have her.
He will not be alone again.
This is how it starts:
Hal won’t talk to her. Not like he used to, anyway. She’s tried everything–tried threats, blackmail, grounding, even bribery. He hadn’t talked–really talked–since his father… since Martin…
Well. He doesn’t talk.
Instead, he fights. His words cut deep and his smiles are all jagged edges, broken glass. He sneaks out at night, coming back only when the first hints of dawn hit Jessica’s windowsill. She catches military recruitment pamphlets in discreet corners of the house.
And then, as sudden as his descent had been slow, it stops. He stops fighting, sneaking out, even hiding alcohol behind the bathroom sink.
He watches her with haunted eyes, tiptoeing around her with every interaction. His words are so neutral and diplomatic she wants to choke, because that’s not her son. That’s not Hal.
Jessica knows how to respond to his words with needles of her own, but now she can only watch her son withdraw into himself, watching the world through glazed eyes. She’s losing her son all over again and the thought is a knife lancing through her heart.
She’s angry at Hal for tearing apart every bridge she’s labored hard to build, angry at Martin for leaving them, angry at the life for all it took from them.
“You can talk to me, you know,” she says one night in a rare display of weakness. “I promise I’ll listen.” She can’t promise that. Every time she tries to listen, the words get lost in the ringing wails of a shattered life, blazing through her head on repeat. Jessica just doesn’t have the luxury of fulfilling her promises anymore.
”I wish I could,” Hal whispers with a softness she didn’t know he had.
The next day, of course, her son is gone, his window swinging open and his bed neat and tidy, for once. Not even a note on his desk, because apparently somewhere along the line their relationship had deteriorated so far that she is no longer worth one.
She calls the police, spends the next three hours snapping at anyone who tries to tell her it’s going to be okay, and hunts down every snot-nosed kid her son’s ever talked to. It’s futile–all they can tell her is Sorry, Mrs. Jordan, I haven’t seen him. She promises to herself that when Hal is home, he’ll wish he was never born.
Anger is easier than fear, after all. It enables her to hunt him down with all the passion of a scorned mother, because the alternative is to curl up in her room and cry until she has nothing left to give.
Hal may not talk to her any more, but that cannot be the end. Jessica will not–she will not–lose him now.
This is how it starts:
A teacher grabs Alfred’s arm on his way out of the school after picking up Bruce.
“I appreciate all the work you’ve done on the homefront to help Bruce,” she begins, a real smile shining through the haze of exhaustion and cynicism Gotham breeds in all its citizens, given enough time. “He’s really pulling it together this year. He hasn’t gotten in a fight in three weeks now. I’ve even caught him de-escalating fights between his classmates. You should be very proud of him.”
Alfred mumbles some thanks, extricates himself from the teacher, and takes his stone-faced boy back to the car, but the incident weighs on his mind.
Bruce? De-escalating a fight? Was it even possible?
He plasters on a soft smile and turns around to meet his lad’s gaze. Today, he is Bruce’s father, and fathers tell their children they care, don’t they?
“Miss Stillwell says you are doing well. I’m proud of you, Master Bruce.”
Bruce shrugs. “I don’t have time for school fights. So inefficient.”
Which is a strange thing to say for an angry, grieving teenager with a habit of using his fists instead of his words.
He doesn’t have time to think of it, of course. Something comes up–a smuggled pack of cigarettes hidden under a loose kitchen tile or some other trial of his patience. Bruce starts hiding food, and last Alfred checks that isn’t a normal habit for an incredibly wealthy, isolated teenager to pick up. Another day, another war to march off to. Some he wins, some he doesn’t.
As the days march on, he gets the sense of waiting. Nothing has really changed in Bruce’s behavior, but there’s a certain sense of hesitation in the way he speaks, and tenseness in the way he moves. He tries so hard to mask it with the typical teenage clumsiness, but nothing can hide the way he refuses to sit with his back to the exit, or the way his barbs sound just a bit too thought-out.
Alfred notes it with a vague sense of unease and moves on. He doesn’t have time to think too hard about it, really, because he’s hanging on by a thread as it is.
So he marches on, clinging to his dignity and the firm, dogged belief that everything will be alright, because it’s all he knows how to do. As a spy, he’d solved problems–how much more does he do that now.
Bruce comes to him in the kitchen one night, staring him down with his mother’s sky-blue eyes and his father’s heavy, mourning brows. Then a pair of arms slip around Alfred, wiry and hesitant and strong like a teenage boy’s arms have no right to be. He hugs fierce, like all the forces in the world couldn’t separate them. Like he’s given up trying to be proper.
“Thank you,” the lad whispers and slips away, leaving him floundering in the kitchen.
He doesn’t come home from school the next day and Alfred, for the first time in years, is lost.
This is how it starts:
Barry goes out during storms.
Cailee wants to say that’s a natural response to trauma, that all the medicine bottles missing around the house and the lights she spots in the shed on at two in the morning are just his own way of grieving. That the needles and hydrogen peroxide and laundry detergent swiped from their pantries are just familiar objects he takes to keep close to home, wild as the thought is to her. She seems to recall him being really into science, back when he was five and they saw him during that family reunion.
It’s been hard, raising a boy they should barely know. At least in the first year or two, when he alternated between literally biting Cailee in his rage and tearfully clinging to her like she’s all he has left in the world. He is a mismatched puzzle piece, so impossible to fit into the carefully-crafted home of her and her husband.
She pretends she doesn’t notice the way Barry frowns when they tell him to pack his bags for a new camping trip. She pretends he doesn’t glower during their long hikes in the woods–the very hikes designed to force him out of his mind, to give him something to take pleasure in after Nora’s death. She pretends she can’t hear his quiet, trembling sobs in whatever wooded glade they’ve staked their tent in that night.
There are a lot of things that she pretends not to notice when it comes to her teenage cousin, the one she should never have ended up with but the one she tries to love anyway. A lot of things are strange, but none compare to the past three weeks, and at this point, Cailee is desperate.
“Give him time,” Lorenzo told her once, day, when she voices her concerns. “It’s probably just, um, puberty. Or school. He’s only fifteen, you know.”
She thinks it might be getting better when they stop seeing his lights on late at night, even if his bed is still unruffled in the morning and his eyes are heavy on the way to school. She wants so bad to believe it’s just a phase and not some deeper problem in their patchwork attempts at parenting. So perhaps that’s why she lets it slide–accepts Barry’s flimsy excuses and doesn’t comment on the haunted look in his eyes, or the way he trips over his own feet and glares at the floor for seconds, minutes, hours at a time. The way his eyes slip closed whenever Lorenzo talks plans for their newest trip like he’s wishing madly–desperately–he were anywhere else, listening to any other conversations.
He was drowning then, but she didn’t know, because for as long as she can remember, she has never been able to be still and simply listen.
Then she’s called to the hospital one night because Barry’s in a coma, struck by lightning. A girl had found him behind the gym at school the morning after a storm, strapped unconscious and burned to some horrific metal contraption, shattered glass all around him.
That’s what they’re told when they blast through the doors of the hospital. The nurses’ gazes trail them, judgment in their eyes. Cailee only wishes the judgment was unwarranted, because then, maybe, she’d be able to forget the way Barry’s eyes widen when they see him.
“It didn’t work,” Barry hisses softly. He looks so small in the hospital bed, swathed in white bandages with a thousand different machines hooked to his body. “It was supposed to work.”
“You meant to get struck by lightning?” The words are spoken as a joke, but the humor gets lost somehow before it reaches him.
“I have to. ‘S why I’m here.” The words are whispered in a delirium of pain meds–so blurred she almost doesn’t hear them. They are yet another in a long-growing list of Barry’s secrets. She doubts she will ever understand him.
“I brought the, uh, Power Rangers,” Cailee holds up the DVD case. She seems to recall him enjoying the show before this—anything to avoid addressing whatever it was he’d just said.
Barry smiles–thin, watery, and a tad pitying, but allows her to start up the show and slink into the chair next to his bed, stiff as a board.
Cailee does not understand Barry. She thinks perhaps this is far worse a sin than she knows.
(He disappears the day after he comes home from the hospital. It was only a matter of time, Cailee supposes. She still calls up every contact she’s ever made–they’ll bring him home, or at least die trying.)
This is how it starts:
Diana treats boundaries like suggestions, has never met someone she hated, and does not know how to hide her heart from the world. It makes Hippolyta exceedingly proud and terribly exasperated in turn.
So it is a surprise when she rushes to respond to screams from her daughter’s bedroom and is greeted by cold eyes and the point of her daughter’s blade.
“Speak, ghost.” Diana’s eyes look straight through her. “Tell me who has trapped me in this poor imitation of my childhood.”
Hippolyta freezes.
“Diana, calm yourself.” She speaks with the same tone she uses with a spooked horse. “You are in your room in the east wing of the palace. It is just past the sixth hour. I am your mother, Hippolyta of Themsycira.”
“The palace has long since been closed off to me,” comes the answer. “I have not stepped foot in my homeland for years on end. Now speak, demon, or release me from your wretched games.” The blade pushes harder against her throat, and Diana mutters something–a curse? a demand?–in a harsh language Hippolyta does not understand.
The gods tell you about your children attempting to murder you. They don’t tell you about children who cannot recognize you. The thought feels distant, divided from the here and the now where her little daughter is threatening to cut her throat.
“There is no game, Diana. It is only me.”
The sword wavers. Slowly, Diana pulls away.
Hippolyta breathes. Lets herself hope that maybe Diana is starting to come to her senses–
The sword strikes out again, and it is only by the reflexes gifted to her and her own long years of training that prevent Hippolyta from losing a finger. Her hand suddenly stings, and the blood bubbles up from a gash across her hand.
Hippolyta looks at her hand, cut by Diana’s blade. At her daughter, staring at the blood with wide eyes.
“Mother?” Diana’s voice is small, so small.
“It is only me.” She keeps her own voice steady. Perhaps this is what breaks through whatever haze has captured her child’s mind. The blood is a small price to pay for such a revelation.
The sword clatters to the ground. Diana staggers backwards, looking like she’s seen a whole new type of ghost.
Carefully, Hippolyta grasps her by the shoulders and guides her to sit on her own bed. Diana follows her lead like a colt, staggering drunkenly to the edge.
“Was it a bad dream?” Some dream it would have to be to cause a reaction like that, but she has seen stranger things.
“Not a dream.” Her daughter’s voice wobbles. “I remember, Mother,” she says, eyes watering. “I remember my journey to Man’s World. I remember the war my friends and I fought, and I remember–”
The words break off. She turns her head away, mumbling words in that language that Hippolyta does not know.
It has been a long time since Hippolyta offered comfort or Diana accepted it, but still she feels she must try. The arm that wraps around her daughter’s shoulders is unnatural, unpracticed. She has forgotten, she thinks, how to be gentle.
“False memories and visions are not unknown to our loremasters.” It is a small comfort, but Hippolyta grasps for it nonetheless. “Perhaps there is–”
Diana’s face twists into something raw and furious that Hippolyta has never seen on her before, and she practically growls: “Do not speak of falsehoods to me, Mother. I know what apparitions of the mind are like.” Then her face crumbles. Once again she burrows into Hippolyta’s side, like the girl she is. “Please believe me.”
And Hippolyta does want to believe her, if only to wipe that horrible look off her daughter’s face. But the story does not align with what she sees. She has not been trained thoroughly in such arts, but she knows them well enough to pass judgement. Diana’s story requires some meddling by the powers that be, and neither of those have left their telltale marks on Diana’s body or spirit. Not the right kind, at any rate.
And yet, her daughter had pointed a blade at her and spoken like a grown warrior.
There is nothing she can do except awkwardly try to comfort Diana. In the morning they speak with the healers, and they confirm what Hippolyta herself noted. Nothing physical has changed, and there are no recognizable magic remnants hanging about that would suggest some foul play by outside actors. Save for the fact, of course, that Diana herself has clearly been changed.
She still runs away, but there is a new creativity to the attempts. One day they find her scaling cliffs barefoot, another day she hides in plain sight for three hours in the city streets. Her movements are all wrong – the first time she returns to the sparring fields, she falls flat on her face while attempting a leap she should have known was impossible for a girl of her size. She suddenly shows an astounding knowledge of politics, offering suggestions at the dinner table that would be expected of a well-seasoned advisor, not a youth. At late hours Hippolyta sometimes spots her daughter pacing the halls like a caged animal, and no matter what she says or does, she’s only ever met with those same cold eyes and a careful “I am sorry, Mother.”
It is enough to make Hippolyta assume that some form of possession has occurred, were it not for the fact that it is so painfully clear that her daughter is still Diana. It is still Diana who curls up in bed with her stuffed animal, who tries to pet the frogs by the pond, who is fearless and daring and kind. It is Diana, just…warped. Old and furious in a way that she’s only ever seen in the most worn warriors.
After one particularly bad attempt, when her guards corner her in a cove with a boat and she bites one hard enough to draw blood, Hippolyta intervenes. Lays out to her quite clearly exactly why this behavior is unacceptable, and scolds her up and down until those old eyes change from furious to accepting to perhaps even contrite.
“I cannot tolerate such behavior, Diana,” she says, pleading and hoping that her daughter understands. “Not merely for my sake, but for yours. Please. You are only destroying yourself.”
The escape attempts stop.
Diana carefully sits at the dinner table, exercises caution and courtesy with her peers, and chatters Phillipus’s ear off with questions about the artifacts and weaponry held within the depths of the palace vaults. She is, in all outside respects, a perfectly tamed princess, with a healthy curiosity for the past and only a passing interest in the future. The palace guards breathe easier.
The turn of events does not comfort Hippolyta. This new Diana is cunning, and she knows with a queen’s intuition that this period of peace is but preparation for another strike.
When the barrier dividing Themsycira from Man’s World snaps in the middle of the night and the guards come racing with reports of stolen artifacts and a missing princess, Hippolyta is ashamed that her first thought is of course Diana planned this.