The Things He'll Tell Her
Summary: Chase doesn't remember the first time he saw Gert, or the first time he spoke to her. Written for billys-green-soup, who asked for Runaways, Gert/Chase, Discovery.
Disclaimed.
Chase doesn't remember the first time he saw Gert. He was about three at the time, and Gert maybe six or seven months old at most. Their parents dump them in the playpen together, cooing about how they'd be the best of friends, along with Alex, who's already reading Nate the Great by himself and ignoring Chase's attempts to play dump trucks at the age of two, and little blonde Karolina, and shy Nico, who Karolina refuses to leave alone but she just smiles at her and goes back to the plush dragon she carried around since she was born.
Gert doesn't do much of anything. She can just about sit up by herself, and roll over, and can imitate some sounds if she feels like it, but she doesn't seem much inclined to attempt any of these maneuvers, so mainly she just lays on her stomach in her fuzzy footie pajamas with little clocks and watches everyone else with her giant green eyes.
Chase thought she was even more boring than Alex. Now, she's about the only thing that he thinks is worth fighting for, except for Molly when she feels like letting Chase pretend that she's the little sister he never had.
He doesn't remember the first time he spoke to her. He must have been six or so, smack dab in the middle of his dino phase that came sometime after the dump trucks and sometime before the Legos. She has his plastic Velociraptor, which even now he remembers is his favorite after T-Rex and Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus, even if he can't pronounce it and he only has four anyway. It doesn't matter. He wants it back. He starts by trying to tug it away, but it's deeply ensconced in her chubby little fist and even three years younger than Chase, she has a surprisingly strong grip. So he yells at her: give it back, give it back, GIVE IT BACK IT'S MINE, until Karolina manages to lure him away with Nico's Malibu Barbie, which he rips the head off of and throws at Alex, but Nico doesn't seem to mind because he's left all of her neatly organized (well, neat for a four-and-a-half-year-old) outfits intact, and by that time Gert has lost interest in Velociraptor and has moved on to baby Molly's peculiar teething ring, which for some curious reason is attached to her stocking cap and Chase thinks makes her look like she's eating the hat.
He called her a poopyhead when they left, an insult reserved only for the most poopiest of heads, but now there is no one he would rather share his entire life - everything he ever had and ever will have - with.
He's slightly ashamed to admit that the earliest memories he has of her, the first true memories, where she is Gert and not some dumb girl his parents make him hang out with every year, do not emerge until high school. It's not until high school that he notices that Gert isn't dumb at all (although she most definitely is a girl); it's not until high school that he notices that she may in fact be a lot smarter than anyone could guess.
His high estimation of her intelligence isn't just because of her sudden appearance in his Algebra 2 class, skipped up a level from geometry because she was too far ahead of the curriculum. Two weeks into the school year, and she's too far ahead, while he's dropped so far behind he can barely see where he's supposed to be.
He doesn't talk to her much for the first semester. They sit on opposite sides of the room, and even when he passes her on the way to the pencil sharpener neither give any indication that their parents are the best of friends and that they've been having play dates with each other literally their whole lives. When it gets cold, as cold as it gets in Southern California, out comes the purple cashmere scarf that she doesn't even take off for classes. She wears it every day from mid-October through the end of February, and a week after she puts it away, she shows up to school with her formerly brown hair dyed the exact same shade. Chase realizes that she should be fourteen by now, but he doesn't leave her a card.
She doesn't pay attention in class. Mr. Cramer is young and enthusiastic, but none of it rubs off on her, and she just sits, chin in hand, staring blankly at the board. Chase thinks of the photographs his parents have that are at least a decade old, where she'd lay on the other side of the playpen from the rest of them, apart from their toddler squabbles and hair-pulling and fights over the best snack. She used to read, a thick hardbound book with a red star on the cover, but after being chastised for not paying attention one too many times, she leaves it in her backpack and only takes it out in the five or so minutes at the end of the period where everyone is packing up their books and chattering to each other over Mr. Cramer's attempts to quiet them down.
Despite this, she consistently scores the highest on all the tests and quizzes, and when Mr. Cramer posts the semester grades (listed by school ID number, not name so as to allow the students some modicum of privacy), Chase sees that the last entry, right about where "Yorkes" would be, has ninety-eight-point-nine-four percent. Mr. Cramer occasionally calls on her to participate, and though she always has the right answer, she also has a witty comment about how if finding the exact position of a stranded ship on the coordinate plane is so vitally important, you'd think they'd have better people to figure that out than a bunch of high schoolers.
He sees her sometimes during the lunch period, enough to know that Mr. Cramer isn't the only one to encounter her razor-sharp wit. She hangs out with Nico, who at this point is your typical Asian nerd, aside from how she is making her own clothes and how surprisingly good at it she is. He passes their table on the way to a lacrosse team meeting and overhears a snide comment from one of the football jocks (Chase may be a jock himself, but everyone knows that football jocks are the biggest jerks), something like how Nico should really sue the thrift store for selling her such ugly clothes and how Gert should really get back to the Animal Farm, Piggy.
Chase is about to turn around and shove him, tell him that's not cool, because even if he doesn't talk to either girl at all, they've still known each other for forever and that has to count for something, and Gert beats him to it. She uses big words so he doesn't process most of her acerbic speech, but the little he can understand has him bewildered that she's not the scariest person in school by now. The jock, shocked that his prey would even think to fight back, slinks off with his buddies, and Gert just stares at Chase, her glasses making strange reflections over her steely green eyes, until he looks away first and skulks off to the locker room ten minutes late.
He tells her this - well, he will, just as soon as he's done practicing. He'll tell her about the first time they kissed, how he remembers it from behind the fog of water clogging his brain, the way everything, including her, was glowing with this soft, glittering light (although in retrospect, wasn't Karolina powered up at the time?), how that particular shade of purple in her hair and the way it framed her face, with her glasses pushed up over her forehead had him convinced that he'd never see anything more beautiful. He remembers how she comforted Nico when Karolina left for outer space to marry that creepy shape shifter, and how long she cried when Old Lace was killed by the New Pride. He remembers the expression on her face when the Avengers came to recruit her literally minutes after she stepped off the stage with her high school diploma (after they sorted out the aftermath of the Gibborim and Chase finally turned eighteen and became Molly's legal guardian and everyone else managed to emancipate themselves), and how she refused at first because she couldn't forget how they split up her family after the Pride debacle, but when they kept calling and filling up her answering machine with messages about having the power to make a positive difference in the world and Molly kept whining at her that they could finally be superheroes, she finally accepted. He remembers Captain America's perplexity when she showed up to the Avengers Mansion with three suitcases, a giant metal frog, and the rest of her team, and the way she shut herself in the command center for hours with a dozen of the world's most powerful humans and nonhumans and fought for them to stay. How she chose Heroine for her new callsign and the way she'd just look at Chase whenever he insisted on forgetting the e at the end; the seven-page complaint letter to Marvel Games and Entertainment about the objectification of women and the four days she spent writing it after she found out from Billy Kaplan they made her a playable character in their MMORPG.
He'll tell her about how he watched her transformation from the girl who pretended to hate everything to the girl - to the woman - who still pretended to hate everything but had the biggest heart of anyone he ever met, how she was the first to welcome Victor the Cyborg even after he admitted who his father was even though the rest of the Avengers took weeks to figure out that he might be trustworthy, her transformation to such a strong, confident hero and the outfit she and Nico designed together and Nico took a week to sew for her, how she finally stopped using the purple dye and went with black instead after getting attacked three times in one week in her civilian clothes when the super villains figured out there were only so many people with that hair color.
He remembers when Captain America finally retired and made her the leader of the Avengers, how she just stood there with tears in her eyes until the rest of her team mobbed her, and when Victor took her around the base and showed her all the security enhancements he made in her honor, including, of all things, a giant robot guard dinosaur with eyebeam lasers (they've come a long way from six kids hiding out in a cave with a bogus gamma radiation warning as their only protection).
He'll tell her all that. He'll tell her how much he loves her.
And, he thinks, as he gets to his knees in front of his full length mirror, he'll tell her, "We've known each other all our lives, but I've only just started to discover who you are. And if you'll have me, I'd like to spend the rest of our lives discovering who you will be. Gert, will you marry me?"
He tries to think of what she might say. A yes will be in there, hopefully, but will she have one of her trademark witty comments, or will she be at a loss for words?
Chase straightens out his clothes, and makes sure the little blue box is tucked safely in his pants pocket, and carefully combs his hair back.
He's just left their room when sirens blare and Molly runs by shouting, "Victorious is a &$%ing supervillain!"