A Second Chance

Part 66 - Nostalgia

I couldn't say I was completely shocked.

Charlotte showing her lightning already planted the seed, and if I'd had five quiet minutes to actually sit with it, I probably would have gotten to the conclusion quite easily. 

But five quiet minutes wasn't something the last few hours had offered me, and so the confirmation landed with full weight anyway.

My biological mother was standing right in front of me.

"J-Jay?" Libber's composure broke completely. She looked like someone who had just watched two completely separate parts of her life collide in real time. "What? When? How are you here?"

"Okay, wait." Charlotte looked at her mom, then at me, then back at her mom. "What is happening right now? I thought he was some weird detective guy! Are you seriously telling me he's my brother?! How is that- when did- what?!"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

There was genuinely too much sitting in my chest to pull a single coherent sentence from. Every mission, every year, Cliff Gordon, the banishment, the desert, Chicago, The Vipers, all of it was right there at the surface and none of it was going to come out in any order that made sense to anyone in this room, including me.

I took a breath and did a move that one does when everything else is too big to handle.

I focused on the problem.

"There's a serious situation," I said, keeping my voice as level as I could. "The people who grabbed us tonight are planning to take over this city. I don't know if it connects to your current case, but whatever you're working on, this is bigger. These aren't small players and they're already more organized than the city's current defenses can handle. If you ignore it, this city's gonna become a sh*thole."

"Jay-" Libber started.

"I need you to contact your husband and get the GCIA, police, everyone in on this," I said. "Every resource you've got. That's what matters right now."

She looked at me for a moment with an expression I didn't let myself read too carefully.

"Please," I added, and then I walked out.

The corridor outside was quiet and long and I put one foot in front of the other and kept moving until the sound of the office was well behind me.

I found a bench near a window at the far end of the floor and sat down, and for the first time since this whole evening started I just let myself be still.

I wasn't even angry at her. 

I wanted to check that first, because it was the obvious thing to feel and I wasn't entirely sure what I felt. But no, it wasn't anger. I didn't know the full history or how any of it had happened, and without that I couldn't be angry in good conscience. 

Ed and Edna were good people, genuinely good people, and it was a good choice to leave me with them. I'd told Unagami that day at the rooftop that the life I'd ended up with was a good one, and I'd meant it then and I still meant it now.

But that didn't make it simple.

My whole timeline came up at once in a way I wasn't prepared for. 

The junkyard first, always the junkyard, the smell of it and the sound of it and the version of me that used to spend entire afternoons building things out of scrap just because the building itself felt good. 

The billboard crash... a.k.a. the day everything changed and I became something I'd never expected to be. All the missions and all the chaos and all the moments I'd have relived a hundred times over if someone gave me the option.