Author's Notes: I really couldn't get over how Not Okay what Maverick did to Barnaby was. This fic is another look at it, and how much Kotetsu actually helped him and will help him, moving forward.
Possibly a little heavy-handed on the symbolism, but hey. The Ouroboros is tempting.
A Snake Eating its Own Tail
Barnaby is three years old, lying on his stomach on the floor of his father's study.
He likes this room; the air is cool and smells like old books, and the lamp on his father's desk doesn't have the harsh neon glare of the lights in the city. The bulb lets off a warm, yellow glow, and it shines through the leaves on the stained glass shade to make shapes play along the floor.
Barnaby likes to try and catch them with his fingers, even though he knows by now that he never will. There's something that draws him to those ghostly snippets of light in distorted green ovals.
He has his own books here, on the bottom shelf beside the thick, heavy ones that belong to his parents. Barnaby's books have titles like "Each Peach Pear Plum" and "Would You Rather Be a Bullfrog?" He can't read them by himself, yet, but he knows a few words by sight. His mother has been showing him what the letters mean, and how to put them together.
He's lying with a book open on the floor in front of him now, finding the words he knows, lips mouthing the names of the letters, eyes darting to the pictures to try and find where in the leaves Cinderella might be hiding.
It's past his bedtime, but neither of his parents seem to have noticed.
His father sits at the desk, scratching notes into an empty book covered in lines. His mother leans against the cushion of the plush brown chair, feet tucked up beneath her.
It's not often that his mother and father both come to this room – not often that he sits with them in the silence, the warm light of the lamp and the dry rustle of pages filling him with a sleepy sort of contentment. Barnaby is very quiet, and very still, except when it's time to turn pages of his own.
He has a vague sort of notion that if they notice him there, they'll realize how late it's gotten and send him off to bed.
So he keeps quiet, and he reads until his eyes grow heavy and he forgets to turn the pages at all. He puts his head down, just for a moment – but the next thing he knows, his father's hands are on him, strong and sturdy, lifting him up from the carpet.
Barnaby blinks into his face – into the face of his mother, who stands near at hand, smiling fondly.
He says, "I'm not tired," but the words run together, and they break in the middle with a yawn that splits his mouth wide open.
They bring him to his bed, carry him down the hall half asleep.
When they lay him down, his mother smooths his hair back and kisses him on the forehead. His father pulls the blankets up to his chin.
Barnaby tries again. "I want to stay up."
His father tells him, "Tomorrow's another day, kiddo. Get some sleep."
Barnaby is four years old, and the rain is very cold.
It runs down over his hair and his face. It makes his suit stick to him, and every place it touches is like ice.
He can't stop staring.
If he looks for long enough, he'll realize that what he's seeing can't possibly be real. That particular curve has to be a scrap of burned-out furniture; it's not his father's arm, charred black and unrecognizable.
That square of burnt fabric has to be from the closet; it's not the dress his mother was wearing when he left this morning. It's not covering up her legs, which are red and runny where the fire ate them away.
It's like the picture puzzles in his books. If he looks hard enough, the real meaning will come clear.
He's still staring when someone holds an umbrella over his head.
Mr. Maverick's arm is around him, chasing away the chill. He's speaking, trying to get Barnaby to come away, but Barnaby can't move. His throat feels like it did the time he got sick with strep throat, raw and hurting and too, too thick.
He swallows, and it makes a dry clicking noise.
He wants to say something, but the words won't come. Nothing will come, he thinks – but that's not quite true. The tears do, slow and hot, making trails down his cheeks.
Barnaby is five years old, and he has a room to himself in Mr. Maverick's house.
It's a very nice room, with a very nice closet full of clothes that Mr. Maverick bought to replace the ones that are gone. It has a grown up sort of bed, with sheets in deep navy and little stripes of grey. The bed has a sleek metal headboard, and it's much bigger than the bed he used to have before.
(He can't bring himself, most days, to think about before what.)
There are no books in the room. There are no toys, except for a single robot with grasping pinchers and a row of buttons. It's the only thing he owns that survived the fire.
He asks Mr. Maverick for a set of crayons and some paper, and he lies down on the floor on his stomach, the way he used to lie in his father's study. He uses the black crayon to draw a snake eating its own tail, again and again and again.
He folds them up, very carefully, and he puts them into the drawer in his bedside table.
When Mr. Maverick asks if he needs anything else, Barnaby tells him no.
Barnaby is eight years old, and Samantha sends him cake for his birthday.
She calls him on the vid-phone, and he sits at the table and eats his cake, legs crossed carefully at the ankles. He lets her ask about how school is going, and whether he's made any friends, and how he likes living with Mr. Maverick.
Barnaby smiles his politest smile – Mr. Maverick taught him all about keeping a polite face – and tells her what she wants to hear. He's doing well in school, and of course he has friends, and Mr. Maverick is great company.
He couldn't be happier.
Barnaby is eleven years old, and he's out on the streets of Stern Bild for the third night running.
The drawing clasped in his fist isn't done in crayon; it's in precise, accurate lines of ink. Every night, he draws it again, just to be sure. He can't forget it.
He has to learn the lines of it as well as he knows himself – the curve of the snake, just so, mouth open to devour its own tail – the sword that runs it through, skewering the creature even as it tears itself apart.
"Have you seen this symbol before?" he demands of the lady running the newspaper stand, and the man walking his dog, and the girl his own age, who giggles and blushes when he talks to her.
It's past ten when he returns to Mr. Maverick's house.
The light is still on in the study, but Barnaby knows better than to interrupt. Mr. Maverick will be busy with work; and anyway, he knows where Barnaby goes in the evenings, after school. He says to be careful, and to call if there's any trouble, and does not try to stop him.
Barnaby appreciates that.
He puts the snake away in the drawer beside his bed, which has plain navy sheets, now, with no grey stripes to mar the cool, solid block of color. He sits down at his desk, tucked into the corner, and takes out his pen, and his books, and his homework.
He works through the equations his math teacher assigned, and he writes a paper titled "The History of Justice Day," and he gets a chapter ahead in his assigned reading for English.
Mr. Maverick does not try to stop his nightly excursions – but once, at the beginning, he sat Barnaby down and told him that if he wanted to stay out until all hours of the night, there was one rule to follow: whatever he does, it mustn't affect his school work.
And so Barnaby doesn't let it. He studies for every test, and he turns in every paper in immaculate handwriting, and he has a 4.0 grade point average on every report card.
He goes to sleep at 1 am, and when his teacher asks him in the morning why he looks so tired, Barnaby puts on his polite face and tells her what she wants to hear.
Barnaby is fifteen years old, and he's watching the heroes on tv – listening to Mr. Maverick on the phone, trying to arrange a meeting with a new sponsor for his latest.
The news announcer sets the scene: a collapsed bridge, a woman in danger. TopMag has a rookie on today, a clumsy man with dark hair and a ridiculous beard. He almost lands himself in the ocean getting to the woman he's trying to rescue, but in the end he pulls her from a burning car. She thanks him, and sobs, and thanks him some more.
Mr. Maverick ends the call and falls silent – and it's a moment more before Barnaby looks away from the tv and realizes he's being watched.
When Mr. Maverick speaks, his face is thoughtful and composed. He says, "You know, heroes have access to more information about criminal activity than the general public does." He waits a beat, then adds: "Maybe more than the police."
The man on the tv is scratching the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. "Well," he's saying. "I just wanted to help, you know? That's why I'm here."
Barnaby's mind is racing ahead, doing the calculations. His fingers close on the edge of the table and tighten there. He leans forward, suddenly intent. "Do you think it could help?"
Mr. Maverick sets a hand on his shoulder. "You're a powerful NEXT. Your ability could open up doors you didn't even know were locked."
Barnaby looks back to the screen, where the woman is crying again, clinging onto TopMag's new hero, saying that she can go home tonight and see her daughter now.
His chest is unaccountably tight. "Yes," he says, a little breathless. "You may be right."
Barnaby is twenty-two years old, the star of Hero Academy.
He masters his lessons, and at the end of every school day, he packs his bags and drives to the gym across town, where he's taking combat lessons from a black belt in kickboxing.
When he's done, he walks the street with an Ouroboros in the back of his school notebook, asking questions. He comes home well after midnight to begin his assignments.
On weekends, Mr. Maverick coaches him on how to comport himself once he lands a spot as a hero – on the best way to gain sympathetic ears and open the doors to the information he really wants.
Climb the ladder; earn the points; excel. Wear your polite face, and tell them what they want to hear.
It's nothing new to Barnaby.
Barnaby is twenty-four years old, and he's sitting cross-legged on the floor of his apartment. In the other room, Pao-lin is asleep in bed with the mayor's baby; across from him, his idiot of a partner is pouring him another drink.
Barnaby takes it with a hand that's shaking just a little – sips at it, and finds the courage to keep talking.
The words, now that they've started, won't stop.
It's like an ancient well overrun by flood season. The still, dark waters at the bottom, so long undisturbed, hid something rotten, and now it's all floating to the surface.
He tells Kotetsu about standing in the rain, and the umbrella, and the way his father's arm looked, blackened so badly it didn't seem human. Tells him about lying on his stomach, using a crayon to draw a snake that eats its own tail. Tells him about the nights walking the streets of Stern Bild, stopping anyone who would listen – making the people who wouldn't stop listen anyway.
Barnaby finishes the drink, and Kotetsu pours him another one.
At some point, he starts crying. His cheeks are sticky, and his eyes sting, and Kotetsu's got a hand on top of his.
Barnaby should start packing away the secrets again, back into the bottom of their well. He should move his hand, and clean up the bottles from the floor, and put a stop to this – whatever this is.
He doesn't need it.
But Kotetsu's looking at him, eyes bright with so much sympathy, and attention, and – he doesn't even know. Can't even begin to parse what that look means. But something in the expression makes him scrub at his cheeks, and take a deep breath, and keep talking, after all.
Barnaby is twenty-five years old, and he stands on live television, the camera boring into him like an eye that sees everything.
He listens to Mr. Maverick's words, every one of them true, every one of them like sandpaper on an open wound.
His mouth is very dry. His palms are slick with sweat.
Every person in Stern Bild hears as his personal nightmares are laid out neatly in a line. Every man, woman, and child who has access to a tv set is staring straight into his private pain.
When it's Barnaby's turn to talk, he closes his eyes, just for an instant. When he opens them, he tells everyone what Mr. Maverick wants them to hear.
His parents' murderer has a face that's mild and lined, pale blue eyes unconcerned. It's the face that lives in every one of Barnaby's childhood memories.
That calm, kindly voice is a voice he's heard a thousand times before.
The hand that's clasped his shoulder in encouragement, that's demonstrated how to tie a shoe lace, that handed him the pen to sign his contract with Hero TV – it's the hand that pulled the trigger.
Barnaby is twenty-five years old, and his partner is dying.
He can't stop staring.
If he looks for long enough, he'll realize that what he's seeing can't possibly be real. Kotetsu has been a hero far longer than he has. A little issue of timing won't be what finishes him off.
He has a full minute left. He does – Barnaby counted it down. His timer tracks Kotetsu's Hundred Power just as well as his own.
Kotetsu is saying something stupid about his eyelashes, and Barnaby thinks: There, see? He can't die. No one's last words could be about something as stupid as eyelashes.
But Kotetsu stops moving, and he closes his eyes, and Barnaby's throat feels raw and hurting and too, too thick.
He swallows, and it makes a dry clicking noise.
He wants to say something, but the words won't come. Nothing will come, he thinks – but that's not quite true. The tears do, fast and hot, making trails down his cheeks.
Barnaby is twenty-eight years old, lying on his stomach on a full-sized towel with a snake on it. Beneath the towel is an expanse of grass, plush and green; before him, the pages of his book are spread wide open.
The sunlight lets off a warm, yellow glow, and it shines through the leaves of the trees to make green shapes play along the ground.
Kotetsu is sprawled beside him, half asleep on a towel of his own, eyes heavy-lidded and staring off vaguely into the small swatches of blue sky visible through the branches. Away down the hill, Kaede shrieks with laughter where she's playing with her friends, and Barnaby catches the way his partner's mouth twitches up at the corner, almost unconsciously.
He smiles himself at the sight of it, and turns the page with a dry rustle. Beside him, Kotetsu's eyes slip closed.
It's not long before his partner shifts, mutters something in his sleep, and begins to snore.
Barnaby pauses in his reading to look over at him. He's summery today, in a tank top and checkered shorts that reach his knees; his skin seems smooth and golden like sand on a distant beach against the white of the towel and the green of the grass.
Barnaby has a vague sort of notion that he's not quite sure how this became his life – how this grew from the isolated boy with a driving obsession and nothing else.
He has a vague sort of notion that he is very, very lucky. In large part, that luck is down to the selflessness and devotion and sheer persistence of the man lying asleep beside him.
Someday, he'll work through the reluctance that knots his tongue and makes his chest peculiarly light whenever Kotetsu is around – will bring it into magnifying glass focus and determine what it means. But Barnaby has never been good at introspection. He's never been good at picking apart what he needs, and someday is not today.
So he keeps quiet, and he reads until his eyes grow heavy and he forgets to turn the pages at all. He puts his head down, just for a moment – but the next thing he knows, the sun has gone down, and the book is crumpled beneath him, and Kotetsu's hand is on him, sturdy and strong, waking him.
"Bunny," he says. "If we miss dinner, my mom's never gonna let us hear the end of it."
"Right," Barnaby says. "Sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep." But the words break in the middle with a yawn that splits his mouth wide open.
Kotetsu laughs at him, and teases, and of course he doesn't mention that the towel's left creases on Barnaby's face until after they've returned to greet his mother.