I stepped into the Pentagon and everyone was shocked, confused, and even scared. Just another day. Cecil stood there, arms crossed, looking like he had aged ten years. As soon as our eyes met, he uncrossed his arms and rushed to me, embracing me so hard that I felt my ribs crack.
"You're alive." He sounded… relieved. It was a tone I hadn't heard him use in years. "Omni-Man and Invincible said that Thragg tore you in half. That you didn't even stand a chance."
I almost chuckled. Almost. But the way he was holding me told me this wasn't the right time to do so. Cecil wasn't a man who hugged people. Seeing him like this was somewhat of a shock.
"Yeah, well," I said, pushing him back enough for us to look at each other. "I guess I'm harder to kill than Thragg's pride." He examined my face, my hair, still white and standing on end, for any signs of injury. I was perfectly fine. Even better than fine.
The people of the Pentagon were still in a state of shock behind Cecil, but I could feel their emotions like an electric current in the air. Shock, amazement, and even a few pinpricks of fear. Then his grip on me returned. "I was afraid that Diana would…" He trailed off. He didn't have to say anymore. I could feel his heart racing against my fingers. There were very few people in the world who could make Cecil Stedman pause. Wonder Woman was one of them.
"She's not going to declare war," I assured him, tapping his shoulder with my thumb. "Unless someone gives her a reason to." And I certainly didn't plan on giving her one. The last thing I needed was for her to come here, sword swinging, asking questions later. "You didn't tell her, did you?" The lack of an answer was an answer in itself. Good. Things were back to normal.
Cecil blew air through his nose and took a step back, composing himself. Shoulders back, jaw clenched, any sign of emotion hidden away once more like a state secret. "Only three people knew. Omni-Man witnessed the fight. Mark confirmed… how you died. Myself." He paused, calculating his next words. "I see," I said, folding my arms over my chest.
"Good," I shrugged, rolling my neck until it cracked. "Saves me a trip." Truthfully, I wasn't looking forward to hopping on a plane to tell all my allies that I was actually alive. Then I remembered, three people knew (the last one being Cecil), but there were others who damn well had the right to hear it from me. My girls.
I pushed out through the reinforced glass doors of the Pentagon. A shaft of sunlight fell on me as I walked away. I could feel Cecil's stare behind me. I didn't need to turn to see him. I could feel the intensity of his glare like an unseen laser dot on my back. With each pace I took away from him the sensation grew fainter, until the heavy vibe of the place faded into background noise. You could pick up emotions like radio channels. Some were distorted, some were clear. They all overlapped. You learned to ignore them.
Cecil, on the other hand, always operated on the "shit scared" setting. I snickered to myself, shifting my shoulders, wondering how many secret detectors had already gone off the moment I stepped off the drop. Thermal, bio, maybe even a psychic jammer – all the way to a shape and clone detector.
Would've been offensive if I didn't respect the hustle. Dude had made it this far in life for a reason, and "trusting people" wasn't on that list.
###
Back in the penthouse, we got the hairdresser to come up. And as the expensive clippers buzzed against my skull, Diana's hands worked them like an artist with a chisel. I'd kept the Clark Kent look for too long, the elegant sweep of the too-tame lock across the forehead, not so much a disguise, as a mask of forgettability. Let them remember the waves.
"You're squirming," Diana whispered into the back of my neck. The knife was so close to my throat I felt the flat edge of it quiver the hairs at the base of my neck. Few men would have stood for that. I'd rather have her holding a knife to my throat than I would trust my own pulse. "I should bind you up for this."
"Promises, promises," I said, shifting my shoulders just so I could feel her thighs grip me from behind. The smell of her—olive oil, steel, and the faint crackle of the lasso she'd discarded onto the couch—hung in the penthouse's atmosphere more heavily than the whine of the clippers. She had her sleeves rolled up, one arm pressed against my crown while the other moved with a surgeon's skill. I didn't need a mirror to know that every hair was bending to her command, my former self shedding away in long, snowy ringlets.
She turned off the clippers. The quiet felt heavier than our fight. Diana ran her hands over the fade, stopping at the defined edge of where my dark flesh gave way to my white hair, a juxtaposition that had freaked out my barber in Chicago.
"Better?" she asked, though her heart gave her away. It thudded like a war drum beneath her golden skin.
"Perfect," I told Diana, meaning it. The feeling of the air on my head was strange but refreshing, like I had been able to rid myself of an unwanted layer, and the clippers had buzzed away not just my hair, but the last of the costume.
Diana's hands rested at the nape of my neck. I heard the slightest catch in her breathing. A pause. Yet she didn't ask. And I didn't tell her. There were some things you had to learn by yourself.
I pushed the penthouse balcony doors open quietly and took in the darkness and the smell of exhaust fumes and ozone, the smell of a coming storm on the wind. I didn't pause, I didn't look back. I took a deep breath and leaped. For a moment, I could see the penthouse, and then it was just another set of lights among all the other lights of Chicago. I felt the rush of the air, the pressure of the fall, but it didn't really affect me. My body compensated automatically, and my power thrummed through my veins.
I had rehearsed this trip in my mind a thousand times. A nice little penthouse in Bronzeville. Third floor. They leave the windows open because Tyrone's mom gets asthma in the AC. Normally takes 23 minutes to drive, but I sliced through the sky in less than two. My heart was pounding even harder than when Thragg had been pounding me. The irony that I would be more nervous about having to tell two old people in a living room what just happened than I was facing a Viltrumite trying to kill me.
The drapes were translucent, and I could make out the shape of Mom limping to the kitchen to get some water, or Dad sitting in his armchair, like a king in his palace. I should have knocked on the door. I could have knocked. But I just walked through it. I ended up between the couch and the television, where they watched Wheel of Fortune. Dad dropped his puzzle book, and Mom spilled her sweet tea.
"Jesus Christ, boy!" Dad roared, halfway out of his seat, fist already swinging — then arrested. He drew his knuckles back just short of my chin, his trembling not from anger, but understanding. The eyes that had faced down punks and thugs in the 90's narrowed, taking in my eyes, my hair, the way the light from my eyes cast a golden glow in his glasses. His Adam's apple bobbed once, twice, and then, rough, he whispered, "…Tyrone?"
She didn't say a word. She just grabbed me by the arms, her arthritic fingers digging into my muscles with a force that would leave fingernail marks on a human. She touched the scar above my eyebrow, the one Tyrone got when he fell off his bike at the age of seven. Then her legs gave way. I grabbed her before she sank to the carpet, her body featherlight, her pulse racing like a bird's as she hugged me to her chest.
That truth was was that I didn't love them. I never did. Tyrone, however? He had been perfect. As sharp as a knife, with those pearly whites and a future so promising it burned the eyes— my parents', too. While I? I was nothing but the backup. The silhouette on Tyrone's wall. Except for the night he bolted me to the basement table, the buzzing of the electrodes resembling the furious buzzing of a hornet nest, and snarled through clenched teeth that it would "correct" the flaws that made me the inferior.
The blast ripped through the house, casting everything in a dancing orange glow—and after the smoke had faded, Tyrone was gone. There were just pieces of lab coat, a lingering smell of burnt pork—and I was standing up from the rubble unbroken. Enhanced.
See, neglect wasn't just a matter of them not speaking to me. It was Mom looking past me at breakfast, and Dad placing his hands firmly on Tyrone's shoulders to talk to him, and just patting me on the back. When Tyrone died, I inherited his identity like an older brother's worn out clothes. It fit awkwardly, but well enough to fool anyone who wasn't paying attention. And they didn't pay attention. There was no protest, no resistance, just a chilling sigh of relief that their golden son was still alive. Even more so now that I had abilities – it was simple to fool everyone else into thinking I was still Tyrone.
This time, it was Mom's hands shaking as she placed them on either side of my face, her fingers tracing the tear paths that cleansed my dirty cheeks. "We thought—" she began, but Dad hushed her with a violent motion of his hand, his teeth clenched so hard I could almost hear them grinding like sand. The crossword had been left on the coffee table, the pen still leaking ink across the puzzle where it had been dropped.
He swallowed and there was a clicking sound in the back of his throat. He looked over at the picture on the mantelpiece of Tyrone in his graduation gown, smiling and tall, the world having yet to leave its mark on him.
"You should sit down," I said—not a question—and walked Mom over to the couch with fingers capable of crushing steel that made only the slightest impression on her flower print dress. Dad remained standing with his shoulders squared as if preparing to absorb a blow. What I was going to say was a bombshell to all of us—well, at least to them—and I was done dancing around the subject.
"You look different," my mom whispered, her fingers brushing the definition of my cheekbones, something that Tyrone never had. Her touch danced across the orange filaments beneath my skin from my kinetic absorption that pulsed like wires. "The superhero business changed you."
My dad just grunted and continued to glare at my hair. "You didn't have that white streak the last time you came by." The last time. Five years ago. When I came to Thanksgiving dinner looking like Tyrone, moving like Tyrone, smiling like Tyrone. They didn't even second-guess it when their darling son now possessed Viltrumite-level strength and didn't eat my mom's candied yams.
I blew a breath out through my nose, tasting the lemon polish and Dad's bourbon. "About that." It came out like a mallet blow. Mom's fingers clenched around my wrist, her wedding ring biting deep into the skin. Dad's body went taut, his nostrils spreading—he'd never been slow, no matter how much he pretended to be.
"Tyrone's been dead for five years," I told him, observing how Dad's knuckles turned pale as he gripped the arm of his La-Z-Boy. "The basement that night." Mom let out a little mew, like I'd stepped on a kitten's tail, and raised a hand to cover her mouth with her fingers. I pressed on, no matter how cruel. "I'm Zandale. Your son. The one you hardly even glanced at when Tyrone was in the same space."
It wasn't really silence. I could hear Dad's teeth clenched tightly, my mother's ragged breathing as she sniffled and tried to catch her breath, the hum of the refrigerator. I could feel their sadness, like a sharp metallic flavor on the back of my tongue.
Her hand dropped from my face. Dead. "No," she whispered. Not no, that didn't happen. No, I can't believe it. Her gaze darted to Dad. He just shook his head. The pen in his hand broke. Black ink seeped into his fingers. But I could feel it. The ground had opened between us, an earthquake faultline that had been quiet for five years.
"You knew," I said, and this time the force of what I said was stronger than anything Thragg could inflict. A statement. Not a question. And with it, Dad's inability to look at me, Mom's curling shoulders, suddenly made sense. They weren't surprised. They were just… guilty. "You knew it wasn't him." I could feel the flames starting to flicker to life behind my eyelids, toasting my retinas orange.
She fidgeted with her hands, fingers wiggling like dying birds in her lap, and her wedding ring flashed in the light of the lamp on the side table. "We—we thought perhaps that Tyrone had... changed," she said, and her voice was like that paper they give you to wipe yourself with in the hospital. Changed. Not queried. Not even looked into. Just assumed their precious boy had returned to them with different fingerprints, different scars, a different goddamned soul.
It sunk in my stomach like lead—they'd picked the lie because the alternative was accepting they'd just lost their golden child.
I can picture it now, more precise than any vector sum: the other timeline unfolding in broken snapshots on the inside of my eyelids. Mom's refusal to believe collapsing into madness, Dad's clenched fists coming up, not in grief, but in betrayal that their spare son lived while Tyrone did not, that this boy, this Zandale, crawled out of that basement a veritable golden child.
It was what made the original Zandale to murder his own parents: the rough, cutting knowledge of knowing where their love truly laid. The image came to me like a Viltrumite's slap to the face: Carla's hands bloody, Mom's cries going from sobs to bubbling as Carla broke her head open with a frying pan, Dad's thigh-bone jutting out from his trousers as I threw him through the wall. When I "hid the bodies" I put them in their car and threw them into the lake, it was symbolic.
He told himself back then that it was their fault for picking a ghost over someone that's really there. But now? After seeing my mom's tears fall on to my boots? I was just exhausted. Obviously the reason why things aren't unfolding like they did the first time around was because I'm capable of adapting to whatever situation I find myself in — but I wasn't sure if I liked it this way. At least in the first timeline, I didn't have to see them suffer like that for their mistakes. A perfect example of what happens when I seek closure instead of blissful ignorance.
I grabbed one of Dad's beloved Rubik pens—the kind he'd been using for years, since I was six—and scribbled my phone number on the back of their cable bill. "You need something? Call." I said. The words felt like pebbles in my mouth. Mom took the bill from me with shaking hands, her nails a familiar gaudy pink, the kind Tyrone would always crack jokes on her for wearing. Dad didn't take his eyes off the numbers I'd written, like they were in some antlered type font.
"Cash. Food. You know... anything." I shrugged, willing my fists to loosen. "Not a big deal." It was. I didn't owe them anything after they sat me on the sidelines of Tyrone's existence. Still, here I was. Acting the good son, like I'd been programmed to do at conception.
It was a little too quick, a little too harsh, when I shook off Mom's hug like a bandage that had grown fused to skin. She whimpered, but I was half through their house's atrocious ivy print wallpaper before the sting of that got to me. It was a little chilly outside; there was a little bite to the wind, a little autumn, a little gasoline. I could hear the blare of music from the Bronzeville street parties as I rose up above it.
I'm sure Robot would have said I wasn't flying efficiently, that I was making too many pointless circles around the Sears Tower, that I was spending too much kinetic energy playing to the crowds. Shit, I didn't care. Some habits take a long time to kill, and flying like I had an audience was one of them.
I was approaching the Guardians' base, hidden behind rocks that made it impossible to detect without experience. In a way, it had become more of a home than that stifling sitting room.