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Pairing: Jon/OFC, mentions of Jon/Jennifer
Summary: Fifteen years after the war, Jon thinks back on the woman he loved and lost one Christmas.
A/N: I wrote this fic more than three years ago, deciding to explore what it would be like if Pilot never came back from the dead, and Jon moved on. I was too lazy post it until now. Enjoy and please leave a review.
The buildings were too tall and the drills were too loud and that was what Jon thought when he got out of bed that morning.
He could hear the chatter of the construction workers all the way through his bedroom window and it was irritating him.
Leave it be, said his inner voice. They know how to do their job.
But nightly visions of bombs falling, bricks tumbling and people running would plague him. And then he would wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat, breathing hard until a soft soothing hand reached across the clean, white pillows and the clearest voice would say, "It was just a bad dream, Jon. Go back to sleep."
This was probably the only thing that he resented about her. Did she never have nightmares? Or had she become to used to Dread's reign of terror because once upon a time, she used to be his prized weapon?
No. Even she had nightmares. For instance, once he had woken up from a deep sleep to find her crying in the corner of the bed they shared. She'd been afraid. She'd been afraid to losing they life they were working to hard to build together.
"Oh, Maya," Jon had said. "I'll take care of you."
But Jon had been afraid, too. He had been afraid that Dread might actually win the war and then, he'd never see tall, safe buildings again.
Now, a part of him was glad to have been proven wrong. And another part was just disapproving. The construction workers were already at the site. Maybe he would go and have a talk with them later.
Jon stepped away from the window and stepped into the shower. He turned to watch the warm water trickling over the scars left by a zealous lover on his back.
Yes, life was good after the war. He just wished sometimes that Pilot were still there to see it.
He got dressed and went downstairs at a leisurely pace. Maya had already left a mug of coffee on the dining table for him. He was grateful for that and at the same time, it amused him to no end because never in a hundred years could he have imagined that a former Bio-Dread commander would be doing wifely duties for the notorious Captain Power.
Then again, he could never have imagined himself to be so hopelessly in love with someone who was actually related to Dread.
There were sounds coming from the kitchen. One was Maya. The other was Ranger. He frowned. What was she doing here so early? He moved closer to the kitchen door to hear what they were saying.
"I don't know why he has to be so difficult," Ranger was saying (she was obviously talking about Tank). "Last night, he wouldn't even have sex with me! I mean, there I was, all hot and bothered..."
Jon grimaced. The last thing he needed to imagine was Ranger all hot and bothered, trying to seduce Tank. He craned his neck a bit. Maya was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Ranger in a most sympathetic manner.
But was it really sympathy, he wondered? Or was it just concealed irritation and hostility? It was hard to tell with a former Dread commander since they were so good at hiding their emotions.
But then, she turned to look at him. And she smiled. There was kindness in her soft, grey eyes that were usually cold and concealing. And with the power of her mind, she sent him a message.
I'm sorry you had to hear that. Hawk took Stuart on his XT-27 – they should be back any minute.
Telepathy. A rare ability (one trained by Dread for years). It put him at ease and at discomfort; it made him feel connected to her in ways inconceivable. And it was this same ability that had made Dread think of her so highly and made her such a large threat to the Power team.
Jon stepped outside and breathed deeply. He could never tire of this – stepping out of a small house enclosed in white picket fences, looking at a safe world outside, a world that had clean air and water, and green, green trees and most important of all, no Dreadheads. In the early years following the downfall of Lord Dread, green had become Jon's favourite colour. The memory of trees was now no longer a memory, but reality.
If only his other memories could become real.
He shook his head to clear it. What was it that his father used to say? Oh, yes. "Always look forward."
He noticed his ten-year-old daughter in a corner of the front yard, working on a complex puzzle with full concentration. She looked up at him and smiled.
"Hello, daddy," she said.
"Hello, sweety," he walked towards her. "What do you have there?"
The girl Lene pointed at her puzzle. "It has a thousand pieces," she said solemnly. "Mum got it from the basement. She thinks it used to belong to you."
Jon looked down. It took a while for him to recognize it. Yes, it did indeed use to belong to him. He remembered that his father had given it to him one Christmas. Dr. Power had been arguing with Jon's mother, Morgana, about what they could get him. Morgana had wanted to get him a puzzle. Dr Power wanted to get him a computer. And the outcome of their argument was right now in front of him.
(She always knew how to get her own way.)
He was overcome with emotion for a moment but then he smiled at his little girl. "Yeah, it did. Need any help?"
"I'm good so far, I think," she replied, looking confused. "I just don't know what it's supposed to look like."
"Hmm." Jon sat on the grass and gathered her in his arms. "As far as I remember, it's supposed to be a picture of Venice – rivers, bridges, gondolas..."
"Venice?" she asked innocently.
"Venice," he repeated.
"Where's that?"
"In Italy?"
"Where's Italy?"
He had to smile. "It's in Europe. About twelve hours far."
"Does it still look like that, daddy?"
"Like what?"
"You know...what you just said. Rivers, bridges...gondolas are boats, aren't they?"
He nodded. "I don't know, sweetheart. But we'll find out, okay?"
She nodded and he kissed her dark hair. They both looked up at the sound of a roaring engine. A XT-27 started to land in their front yard. Jon went forward to greet Hawk and Stuart. He shook hands with the older man as they got down.
"Hey, there." he smiled down at Stuart. "Enjoyed the ride?"
Hawk patted the beaming boy on the head. "I let him drive today."
"It was great!" the boy gushed, blue eyes glittering. "I loved it! I want to be a pilot when I grow up."
Ah, there was that word again.
If Hawk registered a change on Jon's face, he made no mention of it. As Stuart went inside, Jon turned to him. "Do you think the buildings are safe?"
"Hmm?" the older man said. "Safe? Why wouldn't they be safe?"
Jon didn't know what to say.
Ironic that he should be afraid of the little things. He decided to change the subject.
"How's Vi?" Safe topic time.
"She's doing some construction work up north...in Boston," said Hawk. He declined Jon's offer of tea, saying that he needed to get back to Boston as soon as possible since Vi was expecting him.
"I wish your father could've seen all this today," said Hawk.
Jon nodded.
"And then, Jennifer."
Jon froze.
He never liked hearing that name. It was like admitting something to himself. As Hawk flew away, Jon kept his gaze fixed on the construction workers a few hundred yards away, trying not to see past images of decay and debris around him.
Stuart wanted to be a pilot.
...pilot.
Pilot.
Get a grip on yourself, Jon.
He allowed himself to think back to a time when Pilot had just died and he had nearly gone mad with grief. That had been one of the darkest periods of his life, not only because he had lost his beloved, but also he had no idea what Dread planned to do next.
He had never been so scared and confused in his entire life.
He and his team had fought the Bio-Dread armies as usual. And then, one night, something amazing happened.
It was Christmas Day 2148.
Pilot's one-year death anniversary. The Power team had flown to a human settlement near Chicago under attack. Soaron and Blastarr were nowhere near in sight but that was the least of their problems. Xenon was there, which was bad enough. Jon was urging all the civilians away from the place, shooting down troopers and trying to keep Xenon at a distance from where his power suit would remain protected.
And then she came, standing several feet away from the fleeing crowd, dressed in the usual overunit uniform, wearing a cap and pinning her hair beneath it.
She had looked so radiant in the darkness of the night – perhaps from the plasma flames of Xenon's body. Right then, he had forgotten to run. He had forgotten to be afraid.
It was only when Xenon had started shooting that he realized that he had to get away. The look on her face had been unnerving. There had been a set expression in her cold, grey eyes. And then she said, "Kill them all."
He'd had nightmares for days.
But eventually, Jon grew accustomed to those eyes. He'd even started looking forward to their tumultuous encounters. There were dozens of questions he wanted to ask her. Like, "What does Dread want with you?" and "Where did you come from?" and "Are you really twenty-five?" as though she had revealed her age at some point.
Dread Youth members usually did not know about their age. Such intimate details were concealed from them so that they would have no other sense of identity.
They found out soon enough what Maya's importance was to the Bio Dread empire. She was already a trained telekinetic and still working on her abilities to locate the Power Base and Eden II.
The irony was, whereas Maya did discover the location of the new Power Base and Eden II, Dread did not.
Now that was another story.
It started one morning when Jon and Maya had been trapped somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He couldn't remember what mission he'd been out on but it had had something to do with getting blueprints for a Dread power base in Ohio.
They were trapped in caves for three days. It had been enough time for them to get to know each other and although she had the chance to take him prisoner, she decided to let him go for once because he'd saved her life.
How hard it had been for her to reconcile what she'd seen of Captain Power and what she'd been taught about organics all her life. For the first time in her life, she'd been moved.
It hadn't been long before she came on his side, so eager to learn what Dread had never taught her.
And Jon was such an eager teacher. It wasn't easy being haunted by Jennifer's memories in all the wrong times. He couldn't help feeling, even to this day, that he was somehow betraying her.
Maya brought that up once. They'd just made love (this was almost fifteen years ago, when the war was still going on) and it was late at night inside the Power base. He'd been lying next to her, satiated, lips pressed against the ivory pillar of her neck, listening to the sound of her breathing. One pale arm was draped across her eyes. She would always do that, he noticed. She would always cover her face when she climaxed. Why?
"Why do you always so that?" he asked, breaking the silence. Her eyes met his.
"What?" she asked.
"Cover your face," he elaborated. "You always do that when you come. Are you ashamed of how you feel about this?" he made a simple hand gesture to show everything that was between them.
She'd fixed on him a silver steely gaze and said, "I could ask you the same question. Why would it bother you if I cover my face? Do you then see her face instead of mine? Are you afraid of betraying her memory when you take your pleasures with me?"
He'd never thought of it that way. He'd learned long ago not to compare Maya with Jennifer. They were too different. Jennifer used to have blond hair, blue eyes and tanned skin. Maya had black hair, grey eyes and a pale complexion. Jennifer had been warm, sweet and sometimes endearingly unsure of herself. Maya's confidence made him nervous, and there was a coldness in her that she couldn't help showing from time to time.
Jon would never admit this but sometimes, he was actually scared of her. He remembered a time a long ago, when Pilot had just died and he had been so lost, so gone that he wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to make it out of the abyss he'd fallen into. He still had that tape Pilot had left for him. He still kept her clothes behind his in his closet. It was his way of saying, If we can't be together in life, let us be together in death.
Once, Jon found Maya drying those clothes in the sun in their back yard. "What are you doing?" he asked defensively. He knew it was unhealthy to keep holding on to Pilot's belongings like this long after her death, as though a part of him still secretly wished that she were still alive and it hadn't been her bones that they'd found among the ruins of the first Power base.
Jon squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and took a deep breath. He didn't like to think of her and how the rest of them had been given false hope that she'd been digitized instead of killed. They risked their lives to break into Dread's database and check Overmind's memory banks to find if her name was there.
Nothing.
The disappointment was still fresh in his mind after all these years. He still wondered what his life would have been like if he had ended up with Jennifer instead. He imagined her wearing a white dress in the garden, surrounding by children who were both blond and brunette. (Maya and his children were all dark-haired.)
But why must he feel this way? He had accepted how things had turned out. He loved his children; he loved May (too much for his own good) and he loved this raw, savage earth that refused to be defeated; for soon after the fall of the Bio-Dread Empire, he had seen a pretty yellow flower peeking its head out of the dark ruins.
The promise of a new day.
He wished his father could've been here to see this. Stuart Power would have been so proud. Without his contribution, this war may never have been an easy (well, comparatively easy) victory for the humans. His father's life's works had been those power suits (those things should be in a museum now) and the Powerbase (that should be turned into some kind of museum). He could visualize a world in the distant future, its inhabitants curiously stepping into the computer room, eyeing the high, rocky walls and high-tech computers with a tall, cocky town guide (doing this kind of job to pay his tuition fees, if course – could anyone become a tour-guide because he or she liked it?) saying something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the famous but secret Powerbase headquarters and home to Captain Power and Soldiers of the Future."
This was a fantasy but Jon had to admit that he liked the sound of it.
The tourguide would then proceed to give them a brief history about when the Powerbase had been built and who had built it. "Corporal Jennifer Chase was the youngest member of the team but she was martyred on Christmas 1947, when their first base was discovered by Lord Dread's forces. She died heroically by manually setting the base to auto-destruct while single-handedly fighting off the troops."
Was that a brave way to die, wondered Jon? Was it brave to remain inside the Powerbase to blow it up manually just to protect some information? He couldn't care less about the information now – she had been more important to him.
And would this be all that was left of Jennifer Chase's noble sacrifice? A silly tourguide introduction and a pathetic two or three pages in a history book?
He wanted to cry all of a sudden. He wanted to cry because history would remember only him simply because he used to be the leader of the resistance forces and had lived long enough to make a difference.
He took a seat on the chair, his little daughter working on the thousand-piece puzzle under his watchful eyes. He heard the door open, and Ranger walked out. She smiled brightly at him and saluted. He rolled his eyes but smiled back. It was nice to see fellow war veterans once in a while, no matter who they were or how weird they could be.
He watched Ranger walk away, her brown skirt blowing behind her. It looked nice.
"Hey," a soft drawl broke into his thoughts. He looked up to find Maya smiling at him. He looked at her as if he were looking at a stranger. And then he nodded. He touched her swollen stomach affectionately. He hadn't been too keen on Maya having another baby but then Hawk had said, "Don't be silly, Jon. Half the human race was wiped out in the war. Now is not the time for birth control.
Divide and multiply. Adam and Eve all over again.
"Had a nice chat with Ranger?" he asked.
She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. "It was all right," she said. They kissed lightly on the lips. Then Maya looked at Lene. "What's she doing?"
"She's working on the puzzle you gave her," chuckled Jon.
Maya looked carefully at Lene. "You know, she looks a lot like you when she's thinking hard."
"Really?"
"Uh-huh."
"I think she looks more Dread when he can't figure out what to do next," he said with dark humour and she laughed. The sound was soothing to his nerves and he felt a surge of affection for her.
"Ever wonder why things turn out the way they do?" said Jon suddenly. It was a silly question but he asked anyway.
"To teach us to deal with the unexpected, I'd say," she replied with a shrug. She met his gaze. "We have to accept how things turn out, Jon, and move on. Everything happens for a reason that we may or may not be aware of."
What a philosophical answer.
"Well-said," he nodded approvingly and reassured himself that he had accepted his life and liked it, too. He would no longer ponder on what could've been between him and Jennifer, on their unfinished talk.
"Daddy! Mummy! Look!" Lene was excited to have finally finished the puzzle. That girl was as smart as his father, he thought proudly. Or was it Maya's father?
He looked at the complete result, the blue sky, the ancient building, sparkling waters and wooden gondolas, and then he eyed Maya, who was impressed also.
It gave him an idea – a nice one.
"How would you like to go to Venice?" he asked.
A/N: Please let me know what you think :).