That armor you wear, amor
By,
Aestivate
Rating: T
Characters: Bart Allen/Impulse, Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle
Summary: "Well, I better get in character." If only he'd known what 'getting in character' would entail. Second-person. Bart Allen contemplates murder for the greater good of mankind. Experimental piece. Unabashedly Bluepulse.
Author's Note: I have this head-canon that we don't actually know what Bart's real personality is and that everything we've seen from him so far is his projection of a well-guarded façade. And then this head-canon manifested itself in writing. I'M SORRY.
Word count: 1,577
Before you left, you said this:
"Well, I better get in character."
If only you'd known then what 'getting in character' would entail.
Is there a word in the English language for how despicable you are? How utterly shameful and selfish?
You're not entirely sure. After all, in your future, culture is, understandably, lacking. Scholars of language that would have been able to help you describe how you are currently feeling were either few and far between or long gone, killed off without fanfare. The Reach, as it were, is not a fan of human culture. Not when and not now.
Thus, you can ponder your self-loathing with only the company of your own vicious thoughts.
Then again, you don't mind the façade as much as you think you should. Not minding the façade means that you actually feel comfortable in it... and this is dangerous because it robs you of your objectivity. But you can't take off the armor either, because there's a certain safety in the façade. You're not sure when it became this way, but it's abundantly clear to you at this point: You've become the armor; you wear your secrets on your sleeve. The lies you tell yourself have become an impregnable shield. (Nowadays your lies have become your truths. But you still think yourself capable of completing your mission even though that's a lie too.)
You're incredibly guarded (not that anyone suspects you), so with every sunrise, without fail, you slip seamlessly into the mask – because even if it's not real, even if it's merely temporary, happiness is comfortable. Happiness imbibes you into its grasp and try hard as you can to wrest yourself free, you can't bring yourself to. The blue skies above you are far too inebriating to ever want to give up. And as each day passes to bring a new blue, you find yourself slipping farther into the name that Gar inadvertently created on that fateful day in February. (You've been moded since the second you arrived.)
You've decided that dual identities aren't such a retro idea after all – you ended up realizing that you much prefer being 'Impulse' to Bartholomew Allen II. Because being Bart Allen means you're still a man with a mission (even though you're really just a boy) and that you need to press on. Being Bart Allen means you're a (child) soldier that needs to end a planet-wide massacre, a galaxy wide-no man's land. It means you have to stop the world from ending, because from when you come from, it's just a cloud of ashes. But just because you're from the future doesn't mean you can predict it. In your timeline it's every man for himself. You know what it takes to survive. You know what sacrifices you have to make, what pieces you have to take to mate. (Victory without self-sacrifice? You know better than that.)
Victory entails you have to kill the person you've inadvertently fell in love with (goddamn miscalculations). So why don't you, when based on pure history, how you felt never mattered before?
Until now, of course.
In all actuality, you love being called Impulse. You can't get enough from the word, the alias. It actually surprises you how easily you can get lost in the identity. Sometimes you catch yourself getting too caught up and then you just feel this horrible, gut-wrenching guilt for losing your sight. But then time and time again you fall right back into it, because you love being attributed to a name that captures spontaneity, optimism, and freedom. Because it means you're fooling them into thinking you're actually spontaneous, optimistic, and free, even though these are all the things you're not. (Except maybe, it means you're starting to fool yourself, too.)
Tied for the fastest man on earth (it's only tied because you freaking saved that other guy, your grandfather, the man known as Flash), you have the uncanny ability to contemplate whole lifetimes in the span of mere hours. Your racing thoughts tend to keep you awake in the dark of night, during the deep twilight hours when only the bats leave the safety of their havens to play. It's only at night when you're alone to contemplate how it all went wrong: You know exactly how Jaime slipped into your life as seamlessly as you slip into the mask every morning. (It was the shy laugh, the compassion, the simultaneous strength and gentleness, the unshakable desire to do good, among so much else.)
The bed you currently share with him is soft. He doesn't really snore but he still does this funny little breathing thing while he sleeps that if you think about it for too long, your heart will get a weird, suffocating ache. You just want to reach out and stroke his bare chest, and you can't seem to ever stop yourself when you catch yourself thinking about more intimate, secret thoughts. Even now, as personally familiar with what he'll end up becoming as you are (you still have the scars on your body and on your mind and you carry those like you carry everything else), you still can't comprehend how someone as kind as Jaime whose only ambitions in life are to pay his parents' mortgage and send his little sister to college could end up to be a murderous traitor. (Another lie you can't seem to admit: you can't sleep as well as you'd like to because Blue Beetle haunts your every dream in addition to your every thought and every memory because he is so mind-blowingly frightening and evil.)
The hilt of the knife in your hand is cold, so impossibly cold. If you hold onto it any longer you feel like you'll get frostbite so the only solution is to plunge that son-of-a-bitch as deep as possible into Jaime's body. Sooner or later the jig will be up and you'll be found out and it doesn't matter if they hate you, it doesn't matter if they consider you a traitor because you'll have saved all of them. They can't complain about still having the skin on their backs and dignities preserved, now can they? Nothing should matter as long as Blue Beetle is dead. (But it's Jaime, Bart! The boy you kissed, Bart! Jaime!)
(You might have resigned yourself to save the world, boy, but you're irreparable.)
Logically, it makes sense for you to do it. The JLI and the Team are starting to grow desperate. Some more of their own have been lost, but there's no time to mourn them now. No time to honor them. Unless it ends, here and now. You could give them time to bury their dead, to nurse their wounds. You could give Earth the turning point it deserves to win this horrible war. (So do it. What are you waiting for?)
Your fingers are trembling; better to do it now while you still have the nerve. You grip the hilt tighter, but you're still shaking. You take your other hand to help you steady the other. You have all the power to end it. Right here. Right now. Put some extra speed in it and you could do it even faster than Khaji-da has time to react. Jaime sleeps supine, with his body splayed in certain angles that gives you easy access to multiple, key arteries. You could sever as many as 5 in half a second. A tenth of a second for each one. Brachial. Carotid. Subclavian. Femoral. Ulnar. Too many for the Scarab to successfully fix at once. Too much blood lost at one instance; it would overwhelm the heart. You'd end up covered in it (his blood, and blood stains) but you can't think about that now. You can't allow yourself to think at all. So, you take a deep breath to steel yourself. Go, just go. (But what makes now so different from every single time before that you've ever spent alone with him?)
His eyes are still glued together from sleep, but his voice registers in your ears. "Bart?" Fuck. Jaime's voice breaks your resolve every single goddamn time. "What are you doing up?"
You hiccup once and choke down a sob. In the time it takes Jaime to rub the grogginess out of his eyes, the silver blade of the knife is already well-hidden, out of sight. "B-bad dream," you manage to stutter, and there is enough panic coloring your voice to make it believable. (Or maybe it's because it's mostly true.)
"Come here," says Jaime sleepily, gesturing towards the crook of his arm.
You shouldn't. But you do. You do each time.
Slowly, you lower yourself back next to him. And you hate yourself for the swoop of the stomach, for the feeling of elation, of giddiness. You think, I'm so sorry for being so selfish.
But you're not exactly sure who you're apologizing to. Dad? Aunt Dawn? Terry? Nathaniel? Or are you really just apologizing to Jaime? Dick? Tim? Garfield? Cassie? Virgil? The rest of the Team, your new family?
Jaime is so warm. The fluttery, ecstatic feeling in your chest belies any notion that you were capable of doing what you were contemplating doing.
This is what the mask you wear is worth.
Maybe it's worth fooling yourself over, because you've grown to care about him too much – and you pray to God that that won't be your downfall and cost this present its future.
Fin.
Notes:
The line about victory and self-sacrifice comes from the Animorphs book, The Familiar. It's from the scene in which Jake thinks he's talking to Elfangor but it's actually Tobias trapped in Andalite-morph. I actually think that there are a lot of similarities between Animorphs and the second season of Young Justice, especially the later books. Two series about intergalactic war with brainwashing aliens and child soldiers are bound to have similarities, I suppose.