Seth was sitting in the kitchen, cup of coffee in front of her, steaming slightly, and presumably being drunk between long intervals of stillness. Her eyes had that wide open stare of someone who has retreated entirely inside her own mind. It was near dawn. She watched the sunrise with bleary contemplation.
Briefly, Julie walked in, having never gotten to bed; she said something, stared disdainfully at Seth, and walked out without having been replied to. It was just another thing on her list to be disgruntled about.
Once the sun was thoroughly rising, Seth was feeling herself again. At least, she blinked, and briefly, a passing bird outside had the chance to see her actually drink out of her cup. Decon stumbled in at some point, asking where the microwave sausages were. He dug in the freezer, making a comment about always waiting to see when there would be some girl in there and he could assume thereby that he had finally scored in the superhero business (Wonderfully inapt as usual. Seth obligingly laughed). She had also taken the box and warmed up a set of sausages for him, letting him juggle them as he put the box away and stumbled off again to finish his waking progress.
Bosh wouldn’t wake until noon. Wes was probably awake a long time ago and trying to be quiet, even though he wouldd be hungry. She was going to put a minifridge in his room, rather than try to fix the psychological problem. She just couldn’t stand thinking about him like that.
She didn’t tend to think of Firmament as a person, so she didn’t think of when he would wake. She did briefly wonder about the role of women in the superhero business, wondering whether she was mothering Wes too much, talking down to Bosh, antagonizing Julie because she was competition. All these soon passed out of her mind having hardly creased her brow. She took a sip of her still-hot coffee. People were people, acted as people. Decon didn’t mother, but big-brothered Wes (and would have mothered if he thought it would be more effective) but he was the only other one capable of making that choice. Bosh was an emotional four-year-old in a sixteen-year-old body. Julie was a bitch.
And Seth was a bitch, when she had to be. Everybody did what they must. They, the children who had decided to form this team, did more than they must, but in doing that, did what they must. There was no contemplation to be had thereof. She shut her eyes and took a sip of coffee, while outside the sunrise brimmed over the ocean view, obscuring the city with gravitationally twisted light.
Shadow passing over her closed eyes let her know that someone was there, opening them let her know that it was Firmament, walking about in his old patient scrubs from the hospital. He apparently slept in them, if he slept. She would think he wouldn’t want them around to remind him...
He paused briefly at the left edge of her sight, seeming stuck, then moved on, shuffling to the kitchen to get coffee. He muttered something akin to ‘shut up’ to whatever symptom was bothering him today and sat down heavily beside her a moment. They both stared out the window, though Seth’s side ran with up and down tremors of tenseness as she alternately let her emotions get the better of her and tried to calm them down with reason. Fir weirded her out.
She didn’t calm down, either, though they sat in silence until he finished his coffee. When he stirred to get up she berated herself for it. She was leader; she should be able to handle this, to calm down. She had learned he was good to have the team, though a cold thought buried so deep she didn’t even recognize it told her it was because she pitied him.
He was only half standing, again getting that position as if he were stuck there, halted in time like an old woman with osteoporosis pains, or a tripping film. The voice that issued out of him was a light tenor, and early morning matin bell: “You looked away. You let that robber be buried under debris so that you could help potential bystanders. There happened to be some, and so you saved them.”
She started, only a little, aware that sudden movement wouldn’t be good. She hadn’t been thinking about yesterday. True, she still had raspberry runs up her arms from being scratched across destroyed pavement, but, still. She thought about turning, but when his voice started again, it was like telling her to stop.
“You didn’t decide one life over another; you decided the potential of one life over another. Nobody’s sorry but a set of parents over children they couldn’t control. Nobody but them and you.”
He slid the mug off of the table, becoming unstuck as if by magic. She could imagine it dangling at his side, her eyes the same width as they were when she stared, so long, out the window at dawn. His voice was different, deeper.
“Don’t bother being sorry. Get used to killing people. It’s only the romantics who say that we don’t.”
He washed his mug and shuffled back to his room, ‘patient’ glaring mustily out over his back and trailing the cuff of one leg of his pants. She tightened her grip over the coffee mug and let her mind grown dull to the image of herself crying, where she let the emotion be vented. Moments passed until she was calm enough to think again, and glad that Bosh hadn’t woken up. That fore part of her mind reminded her, ‘Of course he’s right.’
He’s been in the game much longer.
He’s crazy.
She looked down at the black moon of coffee in her mug. She’d let it grow cold.
She tossed it out, rinsed it, refilling as Bosh stumbled in, “Fucked up dreams, man... like.... pterodactyls eating marshmallow people out of primeval forest and we were all plants....”
She smiled at him benignly, “My, My, what would Freud say?”
Bosh shot her a sharp frown and looked in the freezer. “Fuck Freud.”