The League

Chapter 17 - Nameless

John and Helen Anderson's faces appeared on the screen, looking younger than how Phoenix remembered them. He lowered his eyes to the timestamp in the corner; on that day, he'd only been alive for a year. Alexa was around four. The background of the video was the living room of the Rochester house, the one that burned to the ground in the middle of the night and was never rebuilt. All that was there now was damaged land that no one wanted.

John extended his arm and adjusted the camera angle. He mumbled something that the microphone didn't pick up, and when he was done fixing the setup, Helen took a deep breath.

"Hello, Lex, hello, Nick," she said with a small wave. "In our time, you're both asleep upstairs. In your time...wherever you are right now, I hope you're happy and well."

"There's no way to ease into what we're about to tell you," John continued. "All I can say is that I hope this doesn't change your life for the worse, but you have or had two older siblings."

Have or had.

"Their names were Eleanor and Jack." Helen took another deep breath, shakier this time. "Twins. I had them two years before Alexa. One day, when they were four months old, we came home to find the babysitter tied up in the closet. She had no idea what happened, and the kids were gone."

Her voice was getting progressively tighter, and John squeezed her hand.

"We'd been on an extended leave of absence from work," he explained. "We hadn't yet told our supervisor, Hazel Diop, that we had children, and after they were kidnapped, we decided we weren't going to. If we asked the League for help, news of the search might've reached the kidnapper's ears and prompted them to hurt the twins, so we looked for them on our own. We were the best agents at the time. If anyone was going to find them, it was us."

There was a long pause. Phoenix felt his heartbeat drumming in his ears.

"We didn't find them," Helen said softly. "We didn't find even a single clue. And that meant...I can't be certain what it meant, but it wasn't anything good. And when Alexa came along, we had to make a choice. We knew that the work we did as agents, the lives we led and the enemies we made were why Jack and Eleanor were gone, and we couldn't risk it happening again. We quit the League permanently and left it all behind us to settle down."

"I don't know if we'll tell you any of this when you're older. We might not. This recording is a precaution in case we never get the chance to tell you ourselves. If we lead long, happy lives, and everything goes right, you'll never see this."

It went wrong. It went so, so horribly wrong.

"I'm sending this to my friend, Jacob Walker," John continued. "If anything happens and you need the truth, I have faith that this video will find its way to you."

Helen leaned forward to look directly into the camera, her eyes glassy. "Though I truly hope you're not, if you are watching this..." She smiled and blew a little kiss. "We love you."

The screen went dark. Phoenix stared at it for a long time, and then he blew a kiss back. I love you, too.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get this to you earlier."

Phoenix turned around. Walker was still sitting at the desk, balancing his glass of orange juice on his knee.

"My father died abruptly," Walker explained. "He never got the chance to tell Sofia about the video or leave behind instructions. I found it five years ago, and I did watch it, but I had no idea who you people were or what I should do. So I did nothing."

Phoenix shook his head. "It's okay." Somehow, he found it in himself to smile. "I'm glad you were drunk last night. You probably wouldn't have brought me here otherwise."