A Once Crowded Sky (34 page)
It was perfect. There was even a part for Prophetier to play, some nudges in the correct direction to help everything proceed, one last heroic moment where he gets to save Pen. The boy saw it in The Blue. He
would work with Pen; help Pen achieve his sacrifice just as Pen had once helped him when the sidekick was only an ember in the light, an ember that saved the boy, let the boy know that though some of us pass away, all of us, eventually, fly.
At the edge of The Blue, Pen’s sacrifice playing out before him, the boy bowed his head.
We are the word undrawn.
As he never did for his parents, the boy wept.
Soldier of Freedom Annual #11
A few sustained beeps, a few messages passed, another mystery solved, another sacrifice ready to be made, another comeback to another adventure, a flag outside again dripping, a soldier sitting on a couch, his pistols scratching into his side.
It’s been a week since Ultimate showed himself and then flew off, and there hasn’t been an attack since. No one knows where Ultimate went, who has control of him, when he might strike again. Another great mystery. But not to worry. It too’ll be solved once the powers come back. They’ll all fight again, and everything will be solved. Everything will be easy. The mysteries. The flags. The cracks. The friends. The villains. All of it. The simple lines bursting with color.
The phone rings.
“Hey, it’s Pen.”
“What can I do for you, son?”
“You’ve heard about this thing I have to do? Everyone’s been talking.”
“You got to kill yourself to bring back all the powers.”
“Yeah, yeah, I told Runt, and he’s working with Proph, y’know, organizing it, inviting people. Kind of like a party.”
“Why you calling?”
Pen hesitates. “I know what you did with the villains.”
“All right.”
“I mean, you did what you had to, right? Like Ultimate did. And that was big, I mean, it was bad, but it was big too, you know what I mean?”
“No, son, don’t think I do.”
“You were willing. Like Ultimate. You did what you had to. Even Star-Knight.” Pen pauses. “You know he’s in the hospital now, after what I did. And, y’know, it wasn’t even him. He didn’t do anything. He was trying to protect me. That’s all it was. He didn’t want me to know. He was trying to save me.”
“I know.”
“Jesus, Soldier, I can’t do anything right.”
“Son, listen, why you calling me?”
“You were there, okay? At The Blue. And you gave everything. But before, when there were hours left and you couldn’t think of anything . . .”
“PenUltimate, what do you want?”
“I’m doing it, Soldier, I’m bringing back the game. Tomorrow at the graves. And everyone’s coming to see. But now. Soldier, what do I do now?”
Again, you can’t stop him. It’s a matter of destiny. It’s how the stories are told; the young following the old. You’ve taken him this far. And now he’ll go on, and so will you, Soldier. It’s destiny. It’s written in the book. It doesn’t matter that he’s dying for the wrong cause, that we’d all be better off if those powers stayed away. It doesn’t matter that he won’t be sacrificing himself for something with meaning, for something with an ending. No, nothing can stop this destiny, nothing can stop the boy.
Soldier knows. He’s heard this one before, this hallelujah climax; Soldier’s spent his whole life worshipping at these notes. And it’s all just a bit ridiculous. He’s spent his whole life in this story, and it’s
all getting a little tiresome. His father had a destiny; his mother had a gun.
There’s always a destiny. There’s always Pen. He’ll always be there to bring it back. But, of course, there’s always that gun too.
“Soldier man, what should I do? What should I do?”
“I’m sorry,” Soldier says, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”
The Blue, Vol. 2, Giant-Sized Special #1 of 1
The sun is posed to rise on the Villains’ Graveyard. The dew has settled, gilding the spurts of grass that poke out here and there, bestowing them with a weary shine in the falling moonlight. The cool air should hint at the field’s steady rot, but instead its smell is clean, refined, and it flows pleasantly over and around the rows of stone markers.
A small pile of rocks sits near a grave, and next to that pile is a hole, and out of that hole shoots a stream of light, and in that stream of light small sparks of color blaze forward and then fall, as if attempting to fly and failing; and in these colors there are words and pictures, but these are hard to see and generally go unnoticed. From afar the eye can’t distinguish between each of the struggling images; instead, they all appear to be formed of the same substance, the same color: a blooming rose of blue sprouting from the dirt.
They’re arriving. Not all of them, but more than have been together since Ultimate’s funeral and before that the sacrifice, the first one. A while ago the sky belonged to them, and when they came to a place,
they traveled through the clouds. Now they arrive in cars, vehicles with not a mark on them to reveal that the person inside used to be such a miraculous marvel. Some of them are friends; some of them knew only the masks, pictures bland and faded in the morning paper, a hidden face waving at an amazed crowd while grasping the distended mauve collar of one of the men now seeded beneath their feet.
They greet one another cautiously, not understanding what motivated all the others to do all the practiced, irresponsible things they used to do, perhaps suspecting it was madness and not altruism that caused this one to risk his life to save all those imperiled days. Still though, they try to be polite. They shake hands, and some of them rather awkwardly lean into strangers and hug or kiss.
Having taken responsibility for organizing this little event, Runt had considered putting out chairs—just a bunch of folding ones, nothing that would’ve broken the budget or anything, not that they have a budget—but he’d abandoned the idea when DG noted its impracticality. Instead, after working with Proph to dig up The Blue, Runt just decided to mark where everyone should go by drawing his hand through the dirt, dragging out a line around the petals of light. When he was done, he wiped off his brown finger on his pants and then put the digit to his lips, kissing his own skin before placing his hand on his father’s nearby headstone. He hoped no one noticed, but DG had, though she hadn’t let on.
As the heroes approach Runt’s circle, they recognize the graves passing at their knees. David can’t help but tap his grandfather’s leg when he notices the words on Melancholy’s headstone. He reads them out loud, “Tomorrow will be better.” David laughs. Yeah, right, he wants to say, but when he looks up, Jules has already wobbled a little farther down the path, where he’s greeting Doctor Speed. Remembering what’s happened, David hurries over to them and offers his condolences to the obviously drunk man.
Felix meets them with at least some semblance of professionalism, and it’s not until he’s in the midst of speaking that he remembers he might, maybe’ve forgotten to comb his hair—he certainly forgot to shower. He flutters his fingers across his head and tries to use his nails to smooth down what he can. It’s so pathetic. He wishes he were invisible.
Herc walks quickly past the small crowd gathered around Felix, not seeing how he can help, how anyone can. As he nears the light, Herc
straightens his back and remembers to suck his gut in. How long’ll it take for the six-pack to again protrude out of his torso? He looks at his watch and laughs.
Before he reaches Runt’s circle, Herc feels DG’s familiar finger tap his shoulder. They greet each other as friends, though they never really were, but when you’ve crossed millennia together, it can be comforting just to meet again. Herc hunches over and kisses the girl on her cheek. Over all those years, he never forgot how beautiful she was, but at least he’d tried.
The sunlight comes: a drip at a time, it falls into the gray field and starts to fill in the outlines of the people who have arrived, pouring in spots of yellow, blue, and red. If anything, the approaching day seems more frigid than the night, but it might only be the spoiling of expectations rather than the observation of anything real; or it might be that they know that there really isn’t that much time left, that Pen will soon be dead. Maybe that spurs on the chills.
Pen arrives alone. Before, he thought he might come with Soldier or maybe even Strength, but he comes alone.
DG walks up to him, whispers in his ear that the next world is not so bad. Pen replies with some jokes, but he’s not sure if DG hears him or if he’s telling them the right way. He continues on regardless, just sort of rambling until he finds himself saying, “I don’t want to die,” for some reason he doesn’t understand.
“I know,” she says, and she wraps her arm around him and kisses his shoulder. They stroll forward together for a few steps until Pen releases her and stops—then goes again, faster now, so that he’s ahead of her, his body becoming a silhouette dividing the light ahead.
From across the field, Soldier rests his hands and his guns and watches Pen’s arrival. The cold of the coming morning has been captured in the pistols’ steel, and it pricks eagerly at Soldier’s fingers. For whatever reason, Pen turns—maybe toward Soldier—and Soldier looks away, finding himself trying to recognize a tall girl in a blue dress.
Strength’s got a dress on, and she’s fucking freezing. It’s the first one she’s worn in—Jesus, she doesn’t even know how long. The shape of it isn’t right, the way it hangs where it should cling, but the colors work, the pattern, floating pink stars overlapping on a sky-blue background. Somehow it’s all very dressy, and if you’re going to wear the damn thing, it might as well at least be dressy.
“How the fuck do people not catch hypothermia in this shit?” she asks the woman next to her, whose name used to be Mindy Mind-Reader, but whom Strength doesn’t recognize without her colorful tights: yellow and green stripes crossed over a skin-wrapped, purple leotard.
The woman hums a courteous agreement, finding it a little awkward to converse with Strength without being able to know her thoughts. She can remember the things that used to grumble inside this girl’s head, all that regret and shame. Even back then, Mindy hadn’t much cared for the experience, and now, not receiving what was actually underneath that dress, tucked well underneath such a thin dress on such a cold morning, well, it was frightening. Rather than respond, Mindy pretends to be distracted by a doll of a girl almost prancing around the graves, clearly aiming to reach a tall, bent man hanging toward the back of the crowd.
DG tugs at his shirt, forcing Soldier to look over and kind of almost smile. Without a word, she reaches out and wraps around him. Her nose rests into his cheek, scratching pleasantly against the smallest hint of hair. His smell is a man’s smell, the way a man’s supposed to smell: rough and deep. Her fingers drag down his arms, which used to be so defined and muscular.
“How are you?” he asks with his usual growl.
“I don’t know. Worried about Pen, I guess.”
“Didn’t know you worried.”
“Yeah, well”—she reaches down and takes his hand—“things change.”
“Suppose so.” He places her hand to his lips and kisses the tips of her fingers. She pulls away and, with an unconsidered sophistication, curtsies in the old style. They go on talking for a little while, until Runt calls her and she lets go of Soldier and skips away, not bothering to look back, having heard a bad story about that once.
The heroes draw closer to the line now, gathering around the blossoming light, and Strength sees herself in the colors—she’s younger, and she’s fighting Black Plague, and she looks so elegant, not a movement wasted, everything perfect. Strength moves in closer, but the light soon twists, and the figures tear and then evaporate. Strength squints and tries to pick them up again, place them again against the pumping blue background.
Soldier too looks into the light, and he sees himself lounged on Lincoln’s lap, giggling. Then the scene shifts, and he’s on a battlefield, and
it shifts again, and he and Pen stand a few feet apart and a gun fires, and another shift, and Mashallah is killed again as Soldier scratches at a pile of rubble. Distracted, Soldier doesn’t notice the man coming up behind him, and he startles when Prophetier touches his arm.
“Big day,” Prophetier says.
Soldier grunts, keeps looking at the light, watches Survivor die.
“Are you looking forward to it?” Prophetier asks. “To being good again?”
Soldier licks his lips. “I don’t know, Proph, you tell me.” Soldier grunts again and walks off toward other heroes.
In front of Prophetier, Pen reaches the line and contemplates the light, how it’s slashed open the exact amount that Ultimate left it open, the exact amount needed for Pen to pull it closed again. He thumbs the scar at his chest, hopes it’ll be enough.
When all you do is play the game, pain doesn’t really worry you. Pen returned from a thousand missions completely beat down, but the next night, some other evil plot always needed foiling, so up he went again, stretching out torn muscles, ignoring wounds that reopened too soon as he followed his invulnerable mentor into the fray. Pain came and went and came again. After a while, Pen learned not to think about it.
