Hi, everyone!
This is my first time trying to write fanfictions in English, which is my second language. Nevertheless, as I find the theme (cough cough, AQUALOVE) very appealing, I promise to be extra-careful and fulfill all of our dreams.
Good reading!
Kaldur had got the call from the League with suspicion. M'gann's voice was too vague and calm to match the urgency to his presence at the Young Justice HQ.
"Meet us as soon as you can", and that was all of it.
From his hew retiring home, at Atlantis, he got dressed in his old red and black uniform, kissed Tula's portrait in the table near the front door and started to think while heading to the nearest zeta tube to surface.
Since that confront during the Reach invasion, where she had ripped his mind and uncovered forcefully his double-agent disguise, his relationship with Miss Martian was not ever the same. She finally understood how invasive, how much of a monster she became whenever she took those baby, innocent-like steps into one's mind to harvest information. And although she and Connor were now back together and forgiveness showered on M'gann after her change of mind, the martian never got to look or talk to Kaldur, not even in a telepathic link, the same way as before Tula's death. There was always a guilty tone in her voice, a sense of debt in her acts.
Until now, Kaldur felt like part of that broken communication was his fault. He assumed telling her he didn't resent her acts wasn't enough, and every time the team had a meeting, part of his mind kept repeating "it's fine, I'm fine, you have no need to worry", just in case she would take a peek at his thoughts and search for rage, resentment, and trauma.
"Aqualad, 018", the reconstructed headquarters's security voice said in a monotonous and familiar voice, just to uncover the place empty. Kaldur brought his hands to his back, ready to weapon up and protect himself from a trap when M'gann's face appeared from the corridor entrance to the basement floor.
"Over here", she called, waving her green hand with an eerie air around her features. Kaldur followed, eyes narrowed, for the first time in forever not appearing absolutely calm and stable around her.
"Where is everybody, Miss Martian?", the atlantian asked when he reached the colleague.
"Oh, nobody from the team's here", she answered, while typing the password for one of the stashes of the new headquarters, where the most fragile evidence and souvenirs were moved to. "I mean… almost nobody", she corrected herself, and that eerie air Kaldur had noticed just seemed to thicken.
"Then, why the urgency?"
"I guessed you'd like to be here as fast as possible, regarding the circumstances", M'gann kept avoiding a direct answer.
With a depressurization sound coming from the sealed stash, the metal doors opened. The martian turned just some of the lamps on - just enough to lighten their path to a table in the center of the room, where a known piece of antique atlantian lifeform rested in a cryogenic capsule.
"I reckon you remember this fellow here", M'gann pointed out to what always seemed to her during briefings like an amputated starfish arm.
"I certainly do. This is a Starro", Kaldur assented with a sigh.
It was a day he remembered with mixed feelings at the moment. He used to regard it as the definition of failure - failure in love when he discovered Tula has given up on waiting, failure in duty when they let that ancient starfish be robbed. However, it came to be one of the brightest, most vivid memories he had of Tula, her voice, her presence and her arms around him, and so those failures were given a special place in his heart.
Even after all these years - 8, to be precise -, Kaldur had not moved on from Tula's death. Maybe it had to do with how he used Aquagirl's end as a fake motivation to deceive Black Manta, and how he continuously ruminated her voice, her ways, her essence on his mind to anger himself when he needed to keep up with the disguise. Maybe it had kept her near his heart for longer than it should, and now it was tattooed in his flesh forever. That would explain how he found himself unable to engage in long, lasting, trustable relationships with the men that crossed his way since then, and how he was unable whatsoever to engage in relationships with any women that appeared in his life.
They all reminded him of Tula, and the longer he took to notice that, the more he suffered. Furthermore, Kaldur tried not to think of his dear Tula too much - allowing himself to keep a portrait of her early days at his own place, and kiss the image's cheek once in a while, in a sort of blessing.
Kaldur only noticed Miss Martian kept herself quiet during all of his thinking when he left out another sigh, and it echoed alone around the walls.
"Well, what about it?", Kaldur asked, gazing at her.
"Hello, Megan!", she patted her head, along with saying that classic line. "Get a little bit closer. Tell me if you feel anything… different".
The atlantian obeyed, approaching the frozen creature. It had tripled its size since he last saw it and his muscles moved slowly, in a breathing pattern. Watching now, more intently, Kaldur got a glimpse of a light - as if it was trading little rays of atlantian magic between its cells, and those rays were somewhat familiar, already known by Kaldur like the back of his hand…
"It has a bit of the magic I used to feel from Tula", he said, looking at M'gann with curiosity.
"Aquagirl had some little bit of curative talent, didn't she?", the martian asked, wanting to be sure before dropping the bomb.
"Although never fully developed, she did, yes", Kaldur nodded. "Why are we talking about Tula?"
"Well…" Miss Martian bit her lower lip, nervous. "I just came back from a solo mission to retrieve this capsule… But I didn't find just it", she said.
M'gann tapped a button below the table, and another capsule, not cryogenic this time, but taller, bigger, started to grow from the ground, filling the empty space illuminated by a single column of light, with a size enough to support a human - or atlantic - body.
Kaldur felt his heart stutter, then stop.
"It turns out Aquagirl wasn't killed", M'gann whispered.
Not that Kaldur could hear. A single, burning phrase, almost insane to his senses, occupied his mind entirely:
"Tula is alive".
So, how was it? Is the pace good enough? Too short of a chapter? Too much of a cliffhanger?
I promise this story is supposed to give baby Kaldur some happiness, so don't worry.
Chapter 2 already on the making. I'm trying to be loyal to the canon, includingly the videogame and comics canon of how Tula died, however I just want Kalder to be hAPPY AS NO ONE EVER ALLOWED HIM TO BE so if something don't match the canon, I tried my best shut up and enjoy Aquaship, aquakisses, aquamakeouts.
This is going to be cheesy.
