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sophia_catherine in dctvgeneventsDay 1: I’ve Got Your Back.
Many thanks tothette for beta reading this!
“Telling your story doesn’t change what happened. You know that.”
He looks back into the light of the time stream, his face still cast in shadow. “It’s not… stuck inside you anymore,” he says, slowly. “You bring it out into the light. Maybe it still haunts ya, but it can’t hurt so much.”
She grabs another donut, passing the box back. “Yeah,” she says softly. “And not just for you. For everyone who hears it, too.”
ZARI
She’s in the kitchen with Mick. Editor’s pen in hand, brutal red tarnishing the new white of his rewritten manuscript. Mick glances over her shoulder occasionally, grunting at each new red mark, but not complaining.
“The changes are good,” she says, scratching a line through another section. “Just a bit too much, sometimes. You write best when you keep it snappy.” She grins up at him. “Your words, not mine.”
Mick grunts. “Guess I did say that.” He waves at the manuscript. “Well? Keep going.”
He’s quiet while she scribbles. Smiley faces for sentences that work. A line through purple prose that doesn’t. A scrawled ahhh! of delight, here and there, when he’s damn near perfect.
“Why d’you care about this stuff so much?” he asks, shattering the comfortable silence.
Zari pauses, page half-turned. It’s not like she hasn’t been expecting that question. But it’s Mick. He has trouble expressing what he wants to. He tries to do the friend thing, in his own way, but misses the mark a good fifty percent of the time.
She shifts in her chair, folding her legs underneath her. “I’ve done some writing.” She’s hedging. But she looks up into Mick’s curious face, and she can’t lie to him, not about this. “I used to write anti-ARGUS zines.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Real zines? On paper?”
“Yup. Internet was monitored, and I was on their most-wanted list. So, yeah, paper.” She purses her lips. “A friend did a lot of the work, but I wrote too. Discussion articles, intelligence info... Even lighthearted stuff sometimes. To give the troops a break, you know.”
“Nice,” he says, watching her for more.
A memory twists her mouth into a proud half smile. “Why Is ARGUS Afraid of Metas? It was my pièce de résistance, literally. People in resistance movements all over the world were talking about it for, like, a year.”
He takes a swig from his drink, eyes narrowing in real interest. “A friend, huh?”
She feels her smile soften. “Yeah. Claire was... pretty cool. Meta.” At the tiniest of raised eyebrows from Mick, she adds, “Empath.” Zari’s fingers trace red lines etched into the manuscript. “She wrote fiction too, under a pseudonym. I helped her out with publicity and stuff.” She feels her shoulders shake with a little laugh. “Even her ghost stories were political. She had a lot of fans among the dissenters.”
“You still in touch?” His eyes shift away. He already knows the answer.
Not everyone on the ship... gets it. They don’t all have insight into life on the run, the fucked-up system, how it takes people from you. Mick, from his very different but strangely familiar perspective, sometimes does.
“She died,” Zari says quietly, pretending to focus on the manuscript again. “ARGUS raid on the resistance.” She forces her voice into her regular snarky tone. “Nothing more dangerous to mundanes than a meta who knows what’s going on inside their heads.”
Claire. Zari hasn’t said that name aloud in a long time.
She’s drifted so far from 2042 and the resistance and ARGUS. Sometimes, life on this strange ship, surrounded by these cheerful freaks with their chore wheels and their bathroom schedules and their irritating, irrepressible joy… It makes the past feel like a dream.
No, not the past—the future. It all still has to happen.
Or maybe it doesn’t, just as long as she doesn’t say their names out loud.
Claire. Neela. Jacob.
…Behrad.
Mom.
Don’t break the illusion. No one here needs to know how those short, precious writing sessions with Claire became the highlight of Zari’s weeks—an escape from brutal reality, something good that wasn’t tainted with terror. How, together, they wrote a better world into being.
How she was too afraid to tell Claire how important she was. How she didn’t, and then it was too late.
Mick’s expression has shifted. “Ah,” he says, a simple note of understanding. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. This is still Mick. There’s a glint of something in his eye, though.
There’s a moment of quiet while he gets up, and she splays a hand out across his manuscript. “You should share it.”
He’s already got his head in the fridge, of course, but he looks back over his shoulder. “Huh?”
“The novel. You need to put it out there.”
He scowls at the beer in his hand. “Why? Didn’t even put my name on the last one. And this one’s… no good.”
She doesn’t argue. He already knows what she thinks of his novel. She answers his question, instead. “Because writing can change the world.”
He snorts. “Not mine. Not my shit.” But he stands up slowly, and his gaze is intense, as though he can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.
Zari closes the manuscript, holds it out. Offering it back to him. “You don’t have to share it with the team, but you should let someone see it. You never know whose world you might change.”
“Huh,” he says, again, regarding his manuscript with narrowed eyes for a minute. Then he gently reaches out and takes it from her.
He’s nodding slightly, his eyes distant, as he heads for the door.
A gun in his hand, a bullet in another man’s head. A brown hood and the crackle of a cattle prod. A scream over the noise of shattering ice. A flash of red lightning. A blast of blue at the edge of time. A single spark, tiny and beautiful in the dark, that lights the fire that will end his world.
He wraps his blanket tighter around himself and gets up. Heads for the corner where, lit up bright blue by Gideon’s low-rising lights, his typewriter waits.
The only place where the monsters always lose.
---
He goes to see her in the engine room.
“Why?” he demands.
Zari emerges, blinking, from under the engine. “Why what?”
“Why do you want me to tell everyone?”
She pulls herself up, frowns at him. “You’re even more chatty than usual today, Mick. At least give me a clue.”
He sighs. Loudly. “About my book.”
“Oh.” She turns back to the engine, does a distracted wave at her work instead of answering.
After a minute, she turns around again. “You gonna keep standing there?”
Mick shrugs. “Yup.”
“Then you can pass me the wrench.”
He reaches down to the toolbox for it. Keeps it tight in his grip as he holds it out to her. She meets his eye with a question in hers.
“It’s shit, Zari. Monsters and spaceships and alien queens with three jugs,” he blurts out, all at once. “Who fucking cares?”
She smiles, a touch of sadness to it. “Mick, I’ve told you it’s good. Why don’t you believe me?”
“When was anything I did ever…”
He ducks his head as his grip on the wrench goes slack. She grabs it from him, raising an eyebrow at his comment. But he just shakes his head, and she goes back to her work.
Through the next stretch of quiet, the echoes keep playing out in his head.
He remembers to breathe when Zari’s voice silences the noise inside. “Why do you do it?” She’s leaning on the side of the engine cylinder, watching him.
“Writing, yeah?” he asks, and she nods. She never complains if it takes him time to figure anything out. It’s kind of nice. “Lots of reasons.”
And I no longer have to fear what was locked inside my head.
He pauses, eyebrows cutting furrows into his forehead. Words are hard. Two novels later, and he still can’t say what he wants to.
He turns away.
Freezes at the hand on his shoulder, a spark of old rage inexplicably catching light inside him.
“Mick,” Zari says.
“You even know how long I’ve been doing this?” he snaps. He sees her face fall, and regrets it. He shrugs her off, but not hard. Starts towards the door—
“Mick,” she says again, and fuck it, why can’t she just leave him alone? Why does she have to… care?
He whirls around. “More than thirty years. That’s how long I been writing. You know how many people I ever told about it?” He holds up one hand in a mockery of a salute. “Less ’n I can count on here.”
Aiden, with his shaggy curls and delighted smile at his big brother’s stories. “You gotta write these down, Mick.”
Len, looking up from a page to give his partner a rare smile of approval. “Still think it’s a waste of time you could put to better use, but you got a true Romeo ’n Juliet tale here. Just the kinda crap people’ll lap up. You’ll make money like—” A snap of cold fingers.
She shakes her head. “How’s that even possible? You’ve published—”
“Rebecca Silver’s published.” The anger’s flaring down as fast as it sparked. It leaves emptiness in his gut, an old companion. “Not me.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, softly, like she really wants to.
He lets go of the fists clenched at his sides. “Just leave it, Zari.” He slips out through the door, silent as his ghosts.
“Peace offering.” She slides the tray of donuts across the window seat.
He takes one without looking at her. She’s reassured by the grunt, one of his friendlier ones. She’s learned to tell them apart by now.
She wriggles in next to him, crossing her legs. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Mick snorts. “Nah.” In the shadow of the window frame, the lines on his face stand out like inscriptions on a page, fragments of stories he’ll never tell. “It’s a war zone. A—”
She folds her hands together, leans her head against the edge of the window, giving him time.
“A nightmare,” he finishes.
“Funny thing about nightmares...” She keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the window, but she can just see him turn his head to look at her.
“You just gotta tell someone about them and they’re gone, right?” he says, on a weirdly sarcastic note, for him. “They were never real? You get your happy ending?”
There’s a sudden tremor in her hands where they sit in her lap. The view ahead blurs with tears.
He doesn't say a word, but she feels him shift a little closer to her.
“No,” she says, when she can speak again. “The monsters were always real, and they don’t go away.” She blinks hard, turns her head left to look at him. “Telling your story doesn’t change what happened. You know that.”
“Then what’s the point?”
Zari chuckles. “That’s what I asked you.”
He looks back into the light of the time stream, his face still cast in shadow. “It’s not… stuck inside you anymore,” he says, slowly. “You bring it out into the light. Maybe it still haunts ya, but it can’t hurt so much.”
She grabs another donut, passing the box back. “Yeah,” she says softly. “And not just for you. For everyone who hears it, too.”
Silently, he nods.
It’s all there is left to say.
---
The party is loud. Of course.
Nate gets up on a table at some point, while Ray helpfully bangs a spoon against it until the rabble shuts up. “Distinguished Time Agents and honoured Legends, I present to you, on the publication of his second novel…” Over Ray’s mock drumroll, he finishes, “The Legends’ resident author: Mick Rory.”
Mick graciously keeps his responses to limited grunts and no violence, while this goes on for a few minutes. Then Sara tells Nate to cool it before their pyromaniac explodes.
A few of the team find themselves loitering at the back of the galley. Zari’s eating a slice of cake the size of her head, so she’s as happy as she’s ever gonna get at one of these things.
“So,” Ray says, an oblivious arm around Mick, whose face is threatening a punch. But Zari’s never seen him actually throw one at poor, blundering Haircut, so he’s probably safe. “Are you going to show us the novel?”
Mick shrugs. “You know my pen name and where to find it,” he mutters. He shrugs harder, trying to shake Ray off, who just grins at him.
“We were hoping for, y’know, maybe…”
Mick gives him a shove. Ray lets him go and just manages not to fall over.
“Spit it out, Haircut.”
“Any chance of a public reading?”
Sara jostles past them on her way to the food. “Oh, hey, that’d be great, Mick,” she says, voice encouraging and fond.
Nate actually squees. “We can set you up a microphone in the lab. Maybe a stage…”
Zari lets the chatter fade out, frowning at Mick’s downcast eyes.
“Hey,” she says, interrupting Nate and getting a glare in return. “If Mick wanted to do something like that, he would have. Go read his novel somewhere else.” At Mick’s raised eyebrow she adds, “And maybe don’t talk to him about it after you do.”
Mick shrugs, grunting. But, as the conversation moves on to the Time Bureau and whether Ava would approve of some of the other Legends’ hobbies, Mick grins at her.
“I can’t write a word,” Ray is saying, his mouth full of gluten-free vanilla cake, baked by Mick for the occasion. “Even my PhD thesis made my advisor cry.” He grimaces. “A lot.”
“I love writing,” Nate says, spraying donut crumbs everywhere. “History’s basically just telling a story. I couldn’t do a novel, though.” He nods at Mick. Then he catches Zari’s eye, just as she’s trying to avoid his. “What about you, Z? Done much writing?”
She takes a quiet sip of her lemonade.
Glances up at Mick, who’s watching her.
“Enough with interrogating the new girl,” he snarls. “Get me a beer, Pretty.”
Nate sighs, but follows orders.
Zari smiles at Mick, aiming for a thank you.
He doesn’t quite smile back, but it’s close.
As Zari sits down with her coffee, he glances at her over the top of his glasses. She’s watching him with that determined glint in her eye—the dangerous one. “…Yeah?”
She gets a sly smile. “You know you don’t have to put your name on your books for them to matter, right, Mick? Rebecca Silver can change the world too.”
He sighs. “That right?” He doesn’t even bother to glare. Zari wouldn’t even notice. Pretty might still jump when Mick comes into a room, years after they first met, but New Girl was never freaked out by his grunts and glares.
She’s still grinning, and he sighs again, puts his book down. He waves at the manuscript lying between them on the table. “And whose world is this crap gonna change, huh?”
She hums, clearly enjoying herself. “Let’s see. Old man in sub-Saharan Africa. He never discovered sci-fi before he stumbled across your book on a friend’s shelf. He’ll be cosplaying Buck before the year is out.”
“Uh huh?” he says doubtfully.
Her eyes twinkle at him some more. It’s irritating. “Ooh. Dyslexic teenager in Australia whose teachers are about to despair of him ever enjoying a book. Till he finds a dusty copy in the back of an old bookshop and can’t tear his eyes away from the cover art of Garima.”
“Yeah. I bet he loves her for her brain.”
“Mmm. Or maybe…” She leans in towards him, chin resting on her hand, and her eyes take on a tinge of something more serious. “Or maybe a little girl living in a near-future dystopian nightmare who already believes that there aren’t any heroes left in the world, and needs to learn that even the worst monsters can be defeated.” Her smile is so sincere, for her, that he has to take a breath. “But don’t worry. She will.”
He scowls, trying to work out if she’s joking. She’s still wearing that mischievous little half-smile, but she’s looking at him like—
Like she’s looking at her hero.
Well, that’s weird.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Am I?” Her smile broadens, dark eyes twinkling just a little more. “Was I a huge fan of Rebecca Silver growing up? Or do I just live to torment you, Mick? You decide.”
He stares at her. It doesn’t help. She just grins back at him.
At last he gives up, sits back in his seat and picks up his book again. “Guess I’ll never know.”
“Guess you never will.”
There’s an odd note in her voice that makes him look back up at her. But, no, she’s still not giving anything away.
“Well, this was fun.” She claps him on the back as she slides out of her seat. “And now I’m off to annoy our Dr. Palmer.”
“Yeah? Good.” Any torturer of Haircut is a friend of Mick’s.
“Think I might force-feed him candy while he complains about the sugar.” At the door, with a glance back, she adds, “There’s… something I want to tell him about.”
They share—not quite a smile, but something close, and then she’s gone.
Mick settles into the familiar, almost-imperceptible whirr of the engines. It’s just futuristic enough to make a good soundtrack to War of the Worlds.
As expected, the good guys win on the last page. That’s what he likes about a book. Things always end the way they should.
Sighing in satisfaction as he slams the book shut, Mick heads back to his room, and his typewriter.
Many thanks to
thette for beta reading this! Fandom: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow
Characters: Zari Tomaz, Mick Rory (other Legends briefly)
Words: 3048
“Telling your story doesn’t change what happened. You know that.”
He looks back into the light of the time stream, his face still cast in shadow. “It’s not… stuck inside you anymore,” he says, slowly. “You bring it out into the light. Maybe it still haunts ya, but it can’t hurt so much.”
She grabs another donut, passing the box back. “Yeah,” she says softly. “And not just for you. For everyone who hears it, too.”
ZARI
She’s in the kitchen with Mick. Editor’s pen in hand, brutal red tarnishing the new white of his rewritten manuscript. Mick glances over her shoulder occasionally, grunting at each new red mark, but not complaining.
“The changes are good,” she says, scratching a line through another section. “Just a bit too much, sometimes. You write best when you keep it snappy.” She grins up at him. “Your words, not mine.”
Mick grunts. “Guess I did say that.” He waves at the manuscript. “Well? Keep going.”
He’s quiet while she scribbles. Smiley faces for sentences that work. A line through purple prose that doesn’t. A scrawled ahhh! of delight, here and there, when he’s damn near perfect.
“Why d’you care about this stuff so much?” he asks, shattering the comfortable silence.
Zari pauses, page half-turned. It’s not like she hasn’t been expecting that question. But it’s Mick. He has trouble expressing what he wants to. He tries to do the friend thing, in his own way, but misses the mark a good fifty percent of the time.
She shifts in her chair, folding her legs underneath her. “I’ve done some writing.” She’s hedging. But she looks up into Mick’s curious face, and she can’t lie to him, not about this. “I used to write anti-ARGUS zines.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Real zines? On paper?”
“Yup. Internet was monitored, and I was on their most-wanted list. So, yeah, paper.” She purses her lips. “A friend did a lot of the work, but I wrote too. Discussion articles, intelligence info... Even lighthearted stuff sometimes. To give the troops a break, you know.”
“Nice,” he says, watching her for more.
A memory twists her mouth into a proud half smile. “Why Is ARGUS Afraid of Metas? It was my pièce de résistance, literally. People in resistance movements all over the world were talking about it for, like, a year.”
He takes a swig from his drink, eyes narrowing in real interest. “A friend, huh?”
She feels her smile soften. “Yeah. Claire was... pretty cool. Meta.” At the tiniest of raised eyebrows from Mick, she adds, “Empath.” Zari’s fingers trace red lines etched into the manuscript. “She wrote fiction too, under a pseudonym. I helped her out with publicity and stuff.” She feels her shoulders shake with a little laugh. “Even her ghost stories were political. She had a lot of fans among the dissenters.”
“You still in touch?” His eyes shift away. He already knows the answer.
Not everyone on the ship... gets it. They don’t all have insight into life on the run, the fucked-up system, how it takes people from you. Mick, from his very different but strangely familiar perspective, sometimes does.
“She died,” Zari says quietly, pretending to focus on the manuscript again. “ARGUS raid on the resistance.” She forces her voice into her regular snarky tone. “Nothing more dangerous to mundanes than a meta who knows what’s going on inside their heads.”
Claire. Zari hasn’t said that name aloud in a long time.
She’s drifted so far from 2042 and the resistance and ARGUS. Sometimes, life on this strange ship, surrounded by these cheerful freaks with their chore wheels and their bathroom schedules and their irritating, irrepressible joy… It makes the past feel like a dream.
No, not the past—the future. It all still has to happen.
Or maybe it doesn’t, just as long as she doesn’t say their names out loud.
Claire. Neela. Jacob.
…Behrad.
Mom.
Don’t break the illusion. No one here needs to know how those short, precious writing sessions with Claire became the highlight of Zari’s weeks—an escape from brutal reality, something good that wasn’t tainted with terror. How, together, they wrote a better world into being.
How she was too afraid to tell Claire how important she was. How she didn’t, and then it was too late.
Mick’s expression has shifted. “Ah,” he says, a simple note of understanding. He doesn’t say he’s sorry. This is still Mick. There’s a glint of something in his eye, though.
There’s a moment of quiet while he gets up, and she splays a hand out across his manuscript. “You should share it.”
He’s already got his head in the fridge, of course, but he looks back over his shoulder. “Huh?”
“The novel. You need to put it out there.”
He scowls at the beer in his hand. “Why? Didn’t even put my name on the last one. And this one’s… no good.”
She doesn’t argue. He already knows what she thinks of his novel. She answers his question, instead. “Because writing can change the world.”
He snorts. “Not mine. Not my shit.” But he stands up slowly, and his gaze is intense, as though he can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.
Zari closes the manuscript, holds it out. Offering it back to him. “You don’t have to share it with the team, but you should let someone see it. You never know whose world you might change.”
“Huh,” he says, again, regarding his manuscript with narrowed eyes for a minute. Then he gently reaches out and takes it from her.
He’s nodding slightly, his eyes distant, as he heads for the door.
MICK
A gun in his hand, a bullet in another man’s head. A brown hood and the crackle of a cattle prod. A scream over the noise of shattering ice. A flash of red lightning. A blast of blue at the edge of time. A single spark, tiny and beautiful in the dark, that lights the fire that will end his world.
He wraps his blanket tighter around himself and gets up. Heads for the corner where, lit up bright blue by Gideon’s low-rising lights, his typewriter waits.
The only place where the monsters always lose.
---
He goes to see her in the engine room.
“Why?” he demands.
Zari emerges, blinking, from under the engine. “Why what?”
“Why do you want me to tell everyone?”
She pulls herself up, frowns at him. “You’re even more chatty than usual today, Mick. At least give me a clue.”
He sighs. Loudly. “About my book.”
“Oh.” She turns back to the engine, does a distracted wave at her work instead of answering.
After a minute, she turns around again. “You gonna keep standing there?”
Mick shrugs. “Yup.”
“Then you can pass me the wrench.”
He reaches down to the toolbox for it. Keeps it tight in his grip as he holds it out to her. She meets his eye with a question in hers.
“It’s shit, Zari. Monsters and spaceships and alien queens with three jugs,” he blurts out, all at once. “Who fucking cares?”
She smiles, a touch of sadness to it. “Mick, I’ve told you it’s good. Why don’t you believe me?”
“When was anything I did ever…”
He ducks his head as his grip on the wrench goes slack. She grabs it from him, raising an eyebrow at his comment. But he just shakes his head, and she goes back to her work.
Through the next stretch of quiet, the echoes keep playing out in his head.
He remembers to breathe when Zari’s voice silences the noise inside. “Why do you do it?” She’s leaning on the side of the engine cylinder, watching him.
“Writing, yeah?” he asks, and she nods. She never complains if it takes him time to figure anything out. It’s kind of nice. “Lots of reasons.”
And I no longer have to fear what was locked inside my head.
He pauses, eyebrows cutting furrows into his forehead. Words are hard. Two novels later, and he still can’t say what he wants to.
He turns away.
Freezes at the hand on his shoulder, a spark of old rage inexplicably catching light inside him.
“Mick,” Zari says.
“You even know how long I’ve been doing this?” he snaps. He sees her face fall, and regrets it. He shrugs her off, but not hard. Starts towards the door—
“Mick,” she says again, and fuck it, why can’t she just leave him alone? Why does she have to… care?
He whirls around. “More than thirty years. That’s how long I been writing. You know how many people I ever told about it?” He holds up one hand in a mockery of a salute. “Less ’n I can count on here.”
Aiden, with his shaggy curls and delighted smile at his big brother’s stories. “You gotta write these down, Mick.”
Len, looking up from a page to give his partner a rare smile of approval. “Still think it’s a waste of time you could put to better use, but you got a true Romeo ’n Juliet tale here. Just the kinda crap people’ll lap up. You’ll make money like—” A snap of cold fingers.
She shakes her head. “How’s that even possible? You’ve published—”
“Rebecca Silver’s published.” The anger’s flaring down as fast as it sparked. It leaves emptiness in his gut, an old companion. “Not me.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, softly, like she really wants to.
He lets go of the fists clenched at his sides. “Just leave it, Zari.” He slips out through the door, silent as his ghosts.
ZARI
“Peace offering.” She slides the tray of donuts across the window seat.
He takes one without looking at her. She’s reassured by the grunt, one of his friendlier ones. She’s learned to tell them apart by now.
She wriggles in next to him, crossing her legs. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Mick snorts. “Nah.” In the shadow of the window frame, the lines on his face stand out like inscriptions on a page, fragments of stories he’ll never tell. “It’s a war zone. A—”
She folds her hands together, leans her head against the edge of the window, giving him time.
“A nightmare,” he finishes.
“Funny thing about nightmares...” She keeps her eyes firmly fixed on the window, but she can just see him turn his head to look at her.
“You just gotta tell someone about them and they’re gone, right?” he says, on a weirdly sarcastic note, for him. “They were never real? You get your happy ending?”
There’s a sudden tremor in her hands where they sit in her lap. The view ahead blurs with tears.
He doesn't say a word, but she feels him shift a little closer to her.
“No,” she says, when she can speak again. “The monsters were always real, and they don’t go away.” She blinks hard, turns her head left to look at him. “Telling your story doesn’t change what happened. You know that.”
“Then what’s the point?”
Zari chuckles. “That’s what I asked you.”
He looks back into the light of the time stream, his face still cast in shadow. “It’s not… stuck inside you anymore,” he says, slowly. “You bring it out into the light. Maybe it still haunts ya, but it can’t hurt so much.”
She grabs another donut, passing the box back. “Yeah,” she says softly. “And not just for you. For everyone who hears it, too.”
Silently, he nods.
It’s all there is left to say.
---
The party is loud. Of course.
Nate gets up on a table at some point, while Ray helpfully bangs a spoon against it until the rabble shuts up. “Distinguished Time Agents and honoured Legends, I present to you, on the publication of his second novel…” Over Ray’s mock drumroll, he finishes, “The Legends’ resident author: Mick Rory.”
Mick graciously keeps his responses to limited grunts and no violence, while this goes on for a few minutes. Then Sara tells Nate to cool it before their pyromaniac explodes.
A few of the team find themselves loitering at the back of the galley. Zari’s eating a slice of cake the size of her head, so she’s as happy as she’s ever gonna get at one of these things.
“So,” Ray says, an oblivious arm around Mick, whose face is threatening a punch. But Zari’s never seen him actually throw one at poor, blundering Haircut, so he’s probably safe. “Are you going to show us the novel?”
Mick shrugs. “You know my pen name and where to find it,” he mutters. He shrugs harder, trying to shake Ray off, who just grins at him.
“We were hoping for, y’know, maybe…”
Mick gives him a shove. Ray lets him go and just manages not to fall over.
“Spit it out, Haircut.”
“Any chance of a public reading?”
Sara jostles past them on her way to the food. “Oh, hey, that’d be great, Mick,” she says, voice encouraging and fond.
Nate actually squees. “We can set you up a microphone in the lab. Maybe a stage…”
Zari lets the chatter fade out, frowning at Mick’s downcast eyes.
“Hey,” she says, interrupting Nate and getting a glare in return. “If Mick wanted to do something like that, he would have. Go read his novel somewhere else.” At Mick’s raised eyebrow she adds, “And maybe don’t talk to him about it after you do.”
Mick shrugs, grunting. But, as the conversation moves on to the Time Bureau and whether Ava would approve of some of the other Legends’ hobbies, Mick grins at her.
“I can’t write a word,” Ray is saying, his mouth full of gluten-free vanilla cake, baked by Mick for the occasion. “Even my PhD thesis made my advisor cry.” He grimaces. “A lot.”
“I love writing,” Nate says, spraying donut crumbs everywhere. “History’s basically just telling a story. I couldn’t do a novel, though.” He nods at Mick. Then he catches Zari’s eye, just as she’s trying to avoid his. “What about you, Z? Done much writing?”
She takes a quiet sip of her lemonade.
Glances up at Mick, who’s watching her.
“Enough with interrogating the new girl,” he snarls. “Get me a beer, Pretty.”
Nate sighs, but follows orders.
Zari smiles at Mick, aiming for a thank you.
He doesn’t quite smile back, but it’s close.
MICK AND ZARI
As Zari sits down with her coffee, he glances at her over the top of his glasses. She’s watching him with that determined glint in her eye—the dangerous one. “…Yeah?”
She gets a sly smile. “You know you don’t have to put your name on your books for them to matter, right, Mick? Rebecca Silver can change the world too.”
He sighs. “That right?” He doesn’t even bother to glare. Zari wouldn’t even notice. Pretty might still jump when Mick comes into a room, years after they first met, but New Girl was never freaked out by his grunts and glares.
She’s still grinning, and he sighs again, puts his book down. He waves at the manuscript lying between them on the table. “And whose world is this crap gonna change, huh?”
She hums, clearly enjoying herself. “Let’s see. Old man in sub-Saharan Africa. He never discovered sci-fi before he stumbled across your book on a friend’s shelf. He’ll be cosplaying Buck before the year is out.”
“Uh huh?” he says doubtfully.
Her eyes twinkle at him some more. It’s irritating. “Ooh. Dyslexic teenager in Australia whose teachers are about to despair of him ever enjoying a book. Till he finds a dusty copy in the back of an old bookshop and can’t tear his eyes away from the cover art of Garima.”
“Yeah. I bet he loves her for her brain.”
“Mmm. Or maybe…” She leans in towards him, chin resting on her hand, and her eyes take on a tinge of something more serious. “Or maybe a little girl living in a near-future dystopian nightmare who already believes that there aren’t any heroes left in the world, and needs to learn that even the worst monsters can be defeated.” Her smile is so sincere, for her, that he has to take a breath. “But don’t worry. She will.”
He scowls, trying to work out if she’s joking. She’s still wearing that mischievous little half-smile, but she’s looking at him like—
Like she’s looking at her hero.
Well, that’s weird.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Am I?” Her smile broadens, dark eyes twinkling just a little more. “Was I a huge fan of Rebecca Silver growing up? Or do I just live to torment you, Mick? You decide.”
He stares at her. It doesn’t help. She just grins back at him.
At last he gives up, sits back in his seat and picks up his book again. “Guess I’ll never know.”
“Guess you never will.”
There’s an odd note in her voice that makes him look back up at her. But, no, she’s still not giving anything away.
“Well, this was fun.” She claps him on the back as she slides out of her seat. “And now I’m off to annoy our Dr. Palmer.”
“Yeah? Good.” Any torturer of Haircut is a friend of Mick’s.
“Think I might force-feed him candy while he complains about the sugar.” At the door, with a glance back, she adds, “There’s… something I want to tell him about.”
They share—not quite a smile, but something close, and then she’s gone.
Mick settles into the familiar, almost-imperceptible whirr of the engines. It’s just futuristic enough to make a good soundtrack to War of the Worlds.
As expected, the good guys win on the last page. That’s what he likes about a book. Things always end the way they should.
Sighing in satisfaction as he slams the book shut, Mick heads back to his room, and his typewriter.
