Disclaimer: I don't own seaQuest DSV/2032 as I am unfortunately not that lucky or creative. This is just for fun!
Author's Note: Okay, SO! It's been a while since I've touched anything remotely Brody-related since writing "Forever" so here's a kind of follow-up/companion story to it. I know a few people wanted me to write something more, so hopefully this will go over well and be a welcomed addition to "Forever".
**Also, just real quick, I don't ever recall there being a name for Brody's son. There might have been one mentioned in the tape Lonnie and Tony found in his quarters and I'm just not remembering it. I'll have to watch that episode again and check but for now, I just named him Charlie and made up a last name altogether. Oh, and the platypus venom is a real thing—nasty sounding stuff. Ran across it for the first time when doing random research for my NaNoWriMo 2007 novel. Completely random, but oh so useful, find. Wikipedia = love. **
On It
"Alright probies, let's get this show on the road!" Lieutenant Piccolo shouted at the group of "fresh meat" as they'd been called by the crew members already used to being aboard seaQuest. "Move it along, come on, come on! We don't have all day! Hey Lucas, come here and look at the newbies!"
Cheshire grin spread across Lt. Wolenczak's face, he joined his old friend and glanced down at the clipboard Tony was holding. "Damn that's a long list."
"Seriously, you're tell me," Piccolo agreed. "Who's been the one standing here directing cattle for the last three hours."
Lucas shrugged. "Obey orders next time?"
"You know, I try and I try but I just can't seem to shake the image of Ford drunk off his ass at Bridger's island that one time twenty some-odd years ago, and somewhere in the back of my head something screams, 'Don't listen to that drunk! He'll sink the boat one day!'"
Lucas let his head hang with a smirk still on his face. He was only barely eighteen at the time, but that was a night he was not going to forget in his lifetime.
He clapped his roommate on the back before headed off toward the Bridge to report to the Captain, saying, "Hey, he hasn't sunk it yet, has he?" as he took a few steps backwards.
"Yet!" Piccolo exaggerated, smiling and clearly joking the whole time.
"You've just jinxed us all," Lucas shouted back as he headed off toward the Bridge.
Tony shook his head. Something never change, of that he was sure.
He went back to his job of pointing new recruits in the general direction of their quarters for about ten minutes before he saw another bright, familiar face amongst the sea of new ones. He waved Lonnie over but she was preoccupied at the time, directing one of the men—or in the very least talking to him, Tony wasn't sure. He waited til their conversation was done before he called her over loudly.
"Hey, Tony," she beamed, but she was covering something up. He noticed that immediately.
"What's wrong?"
"Did you see that kid I was just talking to? The recruit who looked like he was fresh out of the academy?"
"The sandy-haired one?" he asked.
Lonnie Henderson nodded. "Yeah, him."
"Okay, sure, why?"
"He looks familiar and but I can't place him."
"Seriously?" Tony asked. "Look, they all look the same or they all look like people you know or knew. They're new. Ford and Lucas probably thought the same about us when we first got on seaQuest and you know it."
"No, it's more than that."
Okay, so she was serious. That meant, to Tony at least, that there was no way around this one.
"Different how?"
"I think that's…" she looked to the ground for a moment before returning her eyes to his. "I think that's Brody's son."
"No," he said. "No, no, no. No way in hell, Henderson."
The two of them were now in Lonnie's quarters and she was attempting to persuade him that she was right.
"Look, it's been ten years. It's totally possible that—"
"You're losing, okay? Mid-life crisis or something, I dunno. Maybe just plain losing it."
"Tony! Look!" she said, pointing to her desk, where she started up the tape they had found nearly ten years earlier, just days after their good friend James Brody had died. Woman appeared, talked and then a young child came into view. Lonnie paused the tape and Piccolo took in the sight.
Okay, so maybe she was right after all.
"You women," he said, his head shaking from side to side. "You're all going to be the death of me."
She punched his shoulder lightly. "We've got to tell Ford."
"Why, so the kid gets singled out?" he asked her. "No, let's wait and see how long it takes everyone else to work it out."
"This isn't a game, Tony!" she exclaimed, hitting him again.
"I see no harm in it!"
"Piccolo!"
"Shit, fine. Go find the Captain then and you tell him."
She glared and he sighed.
"Fine, I got Bridge duty in twenty anyway."
Lonnie smiled. "Awesome. Bring the disk."
"You what?" Captain Jonathan Ford asked again for seemingly the hundredth time.
"Exactly what it sounded like, sir."
"Okay," he said. "Forget for a moment that I'm your Captain."
"Anytime sir."
"Piccolo…"
"Jonathan, it's him," Lonnie said.
"She's right, sir," Lucas said from his station. "I've pulled up his file and background check information. There's no doubt."
"And here we thought his woman was just sadly mistaken," Tony said.
"Just the woman of the night?" Ford remembered. No. That wasn't Brody's style at all.
"Do we tell him?" Lonnie asked.
"What? That his father served and died aboard the very same sub he just boarded?" Ford asked back. "What's the point in that?
"Assuming that he knows about Brody at all…" Lucas pointed out.
"Gotta wonder if Hudson knew," Tony said. "And pulled some strings. He is still pretty young to land a gig here on seaQuest."
"There's been some exceptions," Ford said, eyes darting to Lucas.
"Yeah, well, special case," Wolenczak responded quickly, uncomfortable with Ford calling him out like that. He was smart and his dad was rich, end of story. Well, the official one anyway.
"I feel like I should," Lonnie continued. "Tell him, I mean. Given everything… you know?"
The room fell silent. No one could forget what Brody had done but Lonnie had seemed to take it the hardest—and with good reason. Still, ten years later and in the midst of war… was it their place to even acknowledge the relation? If he even knew about it at all?
"What's his department?" Ford asked of Lucas. "Or rank, even? Station? Anything on him at all?"
He typed a few keys and let out a surprised sound before answering, "Science, actually… surprisingly."
"Never figured Brody for the science type," Tony commented.
"Maybe his mother was," Lucas suggested.
"That means he'll be under you, Lucas," Ford said. "Talk to him, befriend him. See what he knows or… what he doesn't. Either way, I'm sure he'll be a great addition to the crew."
"Yes sir."
"And Tony?"
"Yep?"
"That's yep, sir, and stay away from him."
"Oh, you're playing Captain again, now?"
Ford eyed him wearily, wondering briefly why he even kept Piccolo onboard in the first place. But then he remembered.
He kept him because Piccolo deserved to be there.
Lt. Wolenczak set a vial onto the table before his science team, having had the new recruits take a seat up front. Initiation time, Lucas had joked with Tony some day prior, but really he just wanted to get to know them better.
"Alright, who wants to tell me what I've just placed before you?" he asked of the group. None of them went to move closer, to take a better look, though a few appeared to want to. Lucas turned behind him, grabbed a microscope the way Doctor Westphalen would have cringed at, and placed it beside the vial.
"If you've got no ideas, by all means come take a closer look."
Again, some seemed to want to take a peek but none made the attempt to follow through with the desire.
"This isn't a game, folks. It's just a vial of liquid and a microscope—this is your job."
"But, sir, we were assigned to this team to manufacture weapons to use against the Alliance," one of the new recruits said from the back of the room. Lucas immediately recognized him as the man Lonnie had insisted was Brody's long, lost son.
"You're point being?" he shot back.
"Well… it's got to be a poison of some kind, right? And if the UEO's got you lookin' after it, then it's got to be fatal. I would personally understand if no one wants to get close to it."
Lucas smirked. "And so you've so kindly volunteered to be the first? Wonderful. As you make your way up here, would you be so kind as to announce your name and rank to the class?"
"Lieutenant, junior grade, Aaron, sir."
"No first name?"
"Charlie. I prefer the last name."
Lucas nodded. "Higher rank than I was, standing in your shoes."
"Shoes, sir?"
"You know, being on the seaQuest during wartime. I was just an Ensign. But here you are, Lieutenant," he said, gesturing to the vial. "Take a sample and tell us what it is."
Aaron did as he was told without question, but he couldn't keep his hands from shaking as he prepared the slide. He'd heard all about the great Lucas Wolenczak, alright, who was now a Lieutenant aboard the UEO's flagship, fighting a war that never should have happened. But people were stupid and trigger happy, and here they were.
Developing bioweapons to use against the enemy.
Aaron's eyes widened when he looked into the microscope, immediately identifying the substance but not why the UEO would chose this particular toxin.
"Platypus venom, sir?"
He'd seen his fair share of that stuff, and it wasn't pretty.
"Are you familiar with it, Lieutenant?"
"Yessir. I was part of a research group before this," Charlie answered. "We studied its effect on humans and tried to…"
"So that's how a young kid like you made Lieutenant, albeit JG, and landed a spot on seaQuest so quickly," Wolenczak said, as if it explained everything.
Aaron grew red in the face under the recognition. "Yessir, I just… didn't know it's applications were going to be used to readily."
"Did you lead the group?"
"No sir, but the man who did lead it was my thesis advisor at Cambridge… it's how I got on the team to begin with."
And so another kid genius takes the stage? Lucas asked himself. "And how long ago did you get your Doctorate?
Aaron looked downward, still uncomfortable with the accomplishment. "Three years, sir."
Lucas was taken aback with his answer, as it confirmed his suspicions. "He could've fooled me, unless you got it from your mother."
"Excuse me, sir?"
"N-nothing. Uh," he waved in the general direction of his science team. "You're all dismissed for now, just try to read up on the venom for tomorrow."
The others dispersed quickly, heading back to the whatever they were working on before Lieutenant Wolenczak called the meeting.
"Why do you treat them like a class of students rather than a team of scientists?" Aaron asked as he stayed behind.
Lucas laughed once. "Funny you phrase it like that when this boat hasn't been a research vessel in years."
"It is now," Lt. Aaron pointed out.
"But only because the UEO thinks we can pump out a new bioweapon every week," Lucas said, rubbing a hand across his tired face. "I don't know what they were thinking in the first place, putting me in charge of it."
Charlie didn't know what to make of that confession and so left it otherwise untouched. Instead, he asked, "Platypus venom, though?"
Lucas shrugged. "Don't ask me. I mean, it's not really even that effective if you think about it. It just incapacitates more than anything else, and it surely doesn't kill humans. Other, smaller animals sure, but not us."
"Maybe they're trying to make things more humane."
The Lieutenant laughed again. "Nothing's truly been humane about them since they threw McGath out of office." He took a deep breath. "But you didn't hang around here to talk politics or morals, so why did you?"
"What'd you mean about my mother, sir?" Aaron asked. "About how I must have gotten something from her but not my father?"
"Nothing," he waved the question off. "Seriously. I was just thinking aloud. You'll find that happens a lot."
"Sir."
"What?" Lucas snapped. "I told you it was nothing."
"I never knew my father, sir. Still don't know him. I know he was in the UEO Navy, though, and if you knew him like I'm only led to assume you did, that means he served here, onboard seaQuest."
"You can't put that puzzle together that fast, Lieutenant."
Aaron shrugged, smiling. "I had a little help."
"Oh?"
"The former Captain helped me out," Charlie said. "A lot, actually. He was the one who got me the space aboard seaQuest, sir. He said you'd appreciate the parallels."
"Me?" Lucas asked. "You can't be talking about Hudson then."
"No, sir. Nathan Bridger."
As Lucas stared at him in disbelief, Aaron pulled a slip of paper from his back pocket. It was folded up a bunch of times, like it had been opened, read, folded up and opened again multiple times. He handed it over to Lucas, who took it carefully and began reading.
As he read, Aaron explained a little of what had happened. "It's one of those, 'If you're reading this, I'm gone' letters you write before you set sail for a tour. It was written by my father two months before the seaQuest disappeared for ten years. There's two there, actually," he said pointing in the general direction of the letters, which Lucas was still reading. "The first is from one tour, written to my mother, and the second was written sometime after you guys came back… or at least that's what my mother told me. Supposedly she sent him a tape that had the two of us on it to him right when you got back but… he never responded, either because he never got the tape or just didn't want to handle it. And then some short amount of time later, two seaQuest officers—including the Captain—came to my mother's door and told her he was dead. The second letter, written both to her and me is all we had of him."
"And Captain Bridger?" Lucas asked though the feeling of swelling threatened to seal his vocal chords off.
"He came to me at Cambridge when I was studying there for my undergrad degree. He told me that if I went for the Doctorate early, he could get me a job aboard the seaQuest. And that there I could learn about the father I never had the luxury to know… whether because he didn't want to know me or because he just simply never got the chance."
"It's the latter, believe me," Lucas said firmly, coming to the defense of his long-deceased friend. "Definitely. Seriously. Those first few months we were back were crazy, hectic… we suddenly lost ten years of our lives… I can't expect you to know what that was like. But I did know Brody, he wouldn't have just ignored you if he had the choice."
"He knows?"
The voice coming from the doorway to the lab Aaron and Lucas were startled the both of them.
Lucas nodded to Lonnie. "Yeah."
She made her way farther into the room slowly. "He was a great man, truly."
"I wish I'd known him like you two seem to."
Lonnie struggled to keep her composure, and Lucas recognized a familiar aura come about her that, ten or so years ago, haunted the Lieutenant for weeks following Brody's passing. "I have no doubt that he would have come home after the current tour had ended."
"What… happened to him?" Aaron asked slowly, cautiously.
"He was killed in action," Lucas answered for Lonnie, afraid she'd spill the more classified information regarding the incident. Even as he thought that, Lucas felt disgusted at himself.
It's his son, dammit. Nothing should be classified.
"Saving my life and those of other innocent people," Lonnie added. "And I could never thank him enough for that. He always did the right thing."
Aaron smiled. "Mom always said he used to mutter some saying all the time when she saw him right before he'd leave for a tour. She said it used to make her angry and sad but… right after he died she it made her proud. She used to say to me, 'He came home on it, Charlie, he came home on it.' Took me years to figure out what she meant, but…"
He trailed off and kept going, but Lucas wasn't looking at the letters anymore. Instead, his gaze was set on Lonnie's who, despite the tears he could see forming and daring to fall, smiled.
Yeah, he said in his head. On it.
Is this the end of Lieutenant Charlie Aaron's story? Who knows. Should I write more?