Just a really sad little oneshot. I don't even know, I just started thinking about how hard these kids lives actually are.
Disclaimer: All rights to rightful owners who are not me etc.
Jeremy stood before his mirror, shirt off. He polished his glasses, and tried to ignore Albert Einstein who was making faces at his bare torso. He traced an invisible line from his navel to collarbone.
XANA had taken control of the police, one of whom had broken into the factory, attacking Jeremy. But that was all in the past now. Or the future. Or wherever that yesterday that was once today is now.
Jeremy shoved his glasses back on his nose and placed his palm on his shoulder. He winced as he remembered falling on it. There should be a massive bruise there, deep and purple and swollen.
He removed his hand. A pale, white, painless shoulder glared back at him. He looked into the mirror and fingered a strand of his hair. It looked more white than blonde and he sighed.
All the pain. All the fear and adrenaline. Sometimes it seemed like the rest of them just forgot, just because it was in the nonfuture/past didn't mean it hadn't happened.
The tall lanky figure that stood before Jeremy was not the same one that he had known. He had aged. In little pocket universes of time and pain that had never happened. He cringed, but he remembered. He remembered all the times a polymorph had lifted him and thrown him, or electrocuted him. By all rights he should have died.
He traced another line from the base of his pelvis halfway to his armpit. Another imaginary scar. He thought of Aelita, and how he loved her and how he would always say that it was all worth it for her. It was.
But here he was. Remembering war stories that no one would believe. Remembering sacrifices that meant nothing. Remembering death. And coming back.
But there weren't any scars. There weren't any lines for him to trace. Each attack would fade away. And no one would know that he was there, that he had bled.
No matter how many times you're rammed into a wall, how many times you're struck. It doesn't make the pain go away. And a return to the past is only a return to the past if you weren't there. He could still feel the broken bones and bruises. Even if they didn't exist anymore. Even if they had never actually happened.
Had any of it actually happened?
Or was everything just imaginary scars?