Chương 115: Interlude I

2104: 04: 19: 19: 25: 02 One moment Pierce was running for cover with his daughter, the next he was in the heart of a half-collapsed, underground server room next to a steam engine centuries out of date. Even in all the weirdness he'd seen as a nurse, an EMT, and husband to a superhero, this sight was still out there. But before he could question how he wound up wherever the hell this place was, a cry of despair echoed throughout the room.

"Sammy!" the voice, a very familiar voice, yelled.

"Please, Sammy, please-!" Kati's voice cracked and broke. Never before in his life had Pierce ran a ten-meter dash around an old steam engine in the middle of an underground server room as fast as today. And on the other side of the machine, Pierce saw a group of heroes standing around his wife dressed in full Peakstar, collapsed to her knees and bending over their daughter. The heroes were trying to pull her away, likely in order to examine her condition, but Kati refused to let go.

He ran over and crouched in front of her.

"Kati," he said through dry lips and drier throat, voice like cushioned iron – a poor imitation of Kati's, he thought, but needs must. Her visored gaze snapped up and met his, and only then did he realize he'd said her real name. But when he saw his daughter unconscious in her arms, he decided there were more important things than saying her name in front of a bunch of heroes.

"Kati." He only barely restrained the quiver in his voice this time.

"Lay her down, Kati. Let me see her." Her mouth hung open in disbelief.

"P-Pierce? What's- how-?" Pierce grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Focus. Our daughter." Then, as fear threatened to overwhelm, he pleaded, "Please, Kati. Set her down." A second passed, then she jolted into awareness. He could practically see her mind whirl as it reactivated, assessed the situation, and immediately lay Sam down on the ground. They examined her together like a well-oiled machine, performing the routine like he taught her decades ago, then re-learned and re-re-learned together every year since.

Panic and fear were set aside as they immediately settled into work mode. Kati pulled Sam's chin down.

"Airway's open," Kati said, then put ear next to her mouth.

"She's breathing." Pierce measured her pulse.

"About 70," Pierce said.

"Stable rhythm." Kati pulled Sam's eyelids back and, summoning a light from her fingertip, examined their daughter's eyes.

"Pupillary reflexes working."

"No visible injuries," Pierce said. He looked up at the group of heroes, finding they'd taken a step backwards as he and Kati did their work. He only recognized two of them, but the one was enough.

"Jauntiste; medical personnel?" If this was some kind of heroic operation – which it all but had to be, right? – then surely… The Warden grimaced.

"I tried. I can't- huh. Seems I can." He unceremoniously popped out of existence.

"There was a boundary before," Knowinner – the other hero Pierce recognized – offered by way of explanation. Pierce didn't care.

"How long-" Before he could even finish the sentence, Jauntiste returned with two EMTs carrying medical bags in tow. Kati and Pierce stepped back and the EMTs quickly went to work, going over what Kati and Pierce had already checked before setting her on a gurney and having Jauntiste teleport her out. And with that, Pierce's control broke. His breathing turned heavy and frantic; his heartrate, already high, spiked in an instant; his vision grew fuzzy and his legs felt like jello.

Before he could collapse however, Kati wrapped him up in one of her signature bearhugs. Immediately the sensation steadied him and he hugged her back just as fiercely. He could feel her tears landing on his shoulders- Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. He only now realized he was completely naked.

"Kati, what-" Her grip tightened to beyond-uncomfortable levels, squeezing the last breath out of him. Then she created some space between them and looked him straight in the eyes (or so he figured; there was a visor in the way).

"God, I missed you so much…" she said, tears leaking underneath her mask, following trails that had already been there. Pierce didn't know what was going on, but her words and the emotion in her voice, her smile and the tight grip she kept on him told him enough. He swallowed the lump forming in his throat.

"So much that I'm not even allowed to get dressed," he teased hoarsely. She half-sobbed, half-giggled before hugging him again. X The ride to the hospital had been a revelatory one. It started with the strange comment from one the helicopter crew – "Like father like daughter," he'd joked, earning himself a glare from his female colleague – and ended with a deluge of information told to him by Kati.

Essentially: like his daughter, he'd been temporally displaced – or achronally, but they quickly figured all his memories were intact, so temporally it was. As he'd figured, it'd had happened when the villain Chronomaniak – a man who'd had been in a strange, one-sided feud with his wife – 'coincidentally' went to the mall he and his daughter were shopping at and froze them both in time.

In a horrible turn of events, one of Peakstar's (Kati's, but there were other people with them, so Peakstar it was) beams struck the bubble they were in and they vanished from the face of the earth, seemingly for good. That had been nearly eight years ago. Eight. Years. A span of time wholly comprehensible to him in normal situations, like 'hey, remember that thing we did before our kids became moody teenagers?', but was not-at-all comprehensible to have simply passed him by without noticing.

Just the fact that he was still thirty-eight and his wife forty-six all of a sudden was difficult enough, but for his son to be a fully grown man enrolled in a university in Hawaii of all places? Incomprehensible. For better or worse – and definitely for worse once they got some privacy in the hospital and Kati told the rest of the story – his daughter was still the same age as she'd been when he last saw her… give or take eight months.

Also just like his daughter, he'd been fetched from his jail-outside-of-space-and-time by a machine that might or might not have tried to brainwash him into heroism for the good of… one thing or another. Luckily, his 'RAT', if it could be called that for how little of the test they'd ran on him, had gone much quicker than his daughter's.

All the equipment had already been there, they already knew what they were looking for, and the licensed mentalists – a man named Marcel Dulang and his enthusiastic apprentice, LieSpy – were willing, even eager to be called back to the hospital despite it being past dinnertime. Only then, after he was cleared, did he and Kati get some privacy. There came the full story, and despite technically having to break the Treaty, Kati held back nothing.

Nothing about their little boy and his anger leading him to vigilantism, villainy, and finally court-ordered heroism was left unsaid. Nor about their vigilante daughter's many trials, tribulations and accomplishment as Jester (why, of all the options out there, that name and costume?), about the city embroiled in war, Kati's own struggles during all of the years he was gone – heroic, personal, relationship-wise – and every other little thing she could think of in between.

Pierce had to admit that after a certain point, it became too much to bear. Too much information, too much emotion, too many twists and turns and complications upon complications; his mind shut off. But that was fine. For all the trouble he had adjusting and the issues no doubt still to come, Kati had been having a more-than rough go at it these past years, and these past months especially. Let her get it all out right here and now before his own issues with all that happened would make itself apparent fully.

It was past midnight when the story stopped and them simply enjoying each other's presence began. Despite the RAT-in-miniature already done and over with, they were still in the hospital for, allegedly, an overnight stay. In reality, they'd been allowed to stay overnight because Sam was being passed first from test to test, and then into surgery. An issue with the brain, they'd said. Some kind of overloading that, apparently, had happened before, albeit that it was a lot more serious now.

This time there had been actual, visible damage to the brain, though not one that technically couldn't be fixed by a healer. Yet she was being treated by a reanimator instead, one teleported in by the Guardians as they'd been the ones to expressly call for it. Not because Sam needed it, but because of the information she potentially possessed. A reason he'd accepted if only because it meant their daughter would get better help, and get it quick.

So, after Kati's stories ended, they waited in the same hospital bed, Kati as characteristically as ever sprawled over him like some kind of oversized cat looking for warmth. Not that he minded of course; he liked the feeling just as much. And yes, he liked playing with her hair, sue him for loving his wife. Pierce felt her shift after a prolonged period of pleasant silence.

"Pierce?" she tentatively began. He looked down, staring her into her beautifully-deep, grass-green eyes.

"Hm?"

"Do you hate me?" He raised his eyebrows.

"What for?" Kati glared. Right, stupid question, but then hers had been stupid as well.

"No, of course I don't hate you," he said with an easy, loving smile. She raised her eyebrows.

"Really? Not even a little bit angry?" He felt many things regarding the situation, but angry?

"Nope, not angry." Kati frowned.

"Sam was quite upset when I told her." She sighed.

"Or the other-Sam was; I'm still confused about all of that."

"Ah, well," he said, mirroring her sigh.

"Mothers and daughters are different, I suppose. Or maybe it's the mask that makes the difference, hm?" She pinched him in rebuke, but he'd long since become immune to that tactic.

"I knew you before you were a hero, and you know I've never been the type to get angry or hold a grudge quickly." It was something he simultaneously prided himself on, and liked the least about himself. In this case it was good, yes, but just as it prevented him from truly feeling the worst mankind had to offer – the anger, the hate, jealousy and spite; the dark, bottomless depths of humanity's worst impulses – it prevented him from feeling the best of them at times, too.

And instead, these greatest of emotions could and would often linger, and if not resolved got stretched out into low-level resentment or happiness, and even temporarily blossom into either depression or manic joy.

"You're not… disappointed or anything?" she asked, huddling closer.

"I mean, I'm supposed to be a hero. What kind of hero all but kills their family?" Her voice cracked at the last part. He looked up at the ceiling, knowing how Kati didn't like appearing insecure even to him.

"You know how I feel about the masquerade." Despite marrying one, Pierce wasn't and had never been much of a fan of heroes. He preferred the good of people over the good of masked.

"And it was an accident, baited out of you by a villainous maniac going on some kind of… personal, Treaty-breaking vendetta. We're all just people, in the end – and people are allowed to make mistakes." She hummed. It was a hum Pierce knew wasn't quite agreement, but was one that told him she'd let things lie for a bit. But there was one more thing he could do to lift her spirits. He looked down at her again, met the gaze of those wonderful gems and said, "I love you."

Her eyes grew slightly moist and he watched as Kati blushed, actually blushed. God, how long has it been since I've seen her blush, he thought. Years at least. Not since well before their marriage, and it hadn't lasted long enough for him to enjoy it. That smirk though, shaky as it was, was one he knew all too well. A second later and she went in for the kiss, one he eagerly reciprocated.

As they broke apart again, her smile had transformed, looking radiant and lovingly, achingly familiar despite the difference eight years made.

"I love you too."