The really really good thing about having these stories finished ahead of time is that I have time to go back and tweak them if I need to. Case in point: I was reading over Formation the other night and I realized that I had completely dropped a sub-plot without even a hint of a resolution and now I have go back and fit it into the story or the main sub-plot for Adamantine is going to look like it came out of nowhere. I think it's only going to be an additional two chapters, maybe three, so ideally it shouldn't take too long.

Chapter Ten: L'chaim

The funeral came and went.

Rather than hold three separate funerals and tax the SCU's emotions more than necessary, the city had opted for a single mass in the corner of the cemetery yard sectioned off for police and firefighters. Three graves, three coffins, and one body.

It had been a big stately affair, with a funerary procession that had been more of a parade and the mournful wail of the bagpipers echoing across the damp field of the cemetery. Twenty-one gun salutes, the posthumously awarded medals, and the flag-draped coffins as though they were war-heroes come home to rest.

The Marzan and Pittarese families had made their way up from their respective locations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, almost four dozen strong between them, all clad in black with sniffles and tissues, exchanging consolatory handshakes with each other and finding some sense of solidarity in that their children had been very good friends. They clustered around Captain Jase's lonesome widow, the rest of the family stuck on the icy Mackinac Bridge behind a several car pile-up.

Though with only one body to lay in the ground, the whole thing came off as ostentatious and unsuitable.

Captain Jase would have hated it.

Or at least viciously disliked it.

Captain Jase had hated his dress blues and any event that required him to wear them instantly became very disliked indeed.

Maggie understood that. Her own dress blues never came out of the closet often enough to be considered 'broken in'. Still a little too stiff around the hems and seams. The heavy wool twill didn't like to bend. She took some comfort in the fact that the rest of the SCU looked just as stilted as she did.

Turpin had itched and pulled at the wool clothes, trying to stretch the choking collar and shifting about like his shoes no longer fit properly. Certainly the uniform strained a little around his mid-section and upper arms. He hadn't worn the uniform in three years and he had put on some weight and muscle since then. By the time he had realized the blues no longer fit the way they used to, it had been far too late to go in for a re-fit.

James Harper handled his stiff dress blues with a grace that none of them had yet managed, but with an expression that suggested he was doing everything in his power to forget that he was actually wearing them.

Colletta couldn't stand at attention for longer than a minute, constantly poking a finger up under her peaked cap as though she was stopping hair from escaping. She had quite a lot of hair. They had weaved the whole mass into a braid just to stuff it under the cap, despite the resulting somewhat lumpy and inelegant appearance.

If anyone came close to looking vaguely comfortable in the formal uniform, it was Jim Gordon. He stood at attention with an envious stillness, but walked like a long-legged shore-bird, like he was trying to avoid thigh-chafing.

Frankly, they all looked a little ridiculous.

Between the eulogies, the presentation of medals and the salutes, the laying of the flowers, and the hymns, the otherwise non-denominational ceremony lasted just over two hours. The bagpipers struck up Nearer, My God, To Thee and the crowd started to show signs of dispersing. Maggie glanced around to make sure that no one was expecting her and reached under her seat to retrieve the bouquet of lilacs.

They weren't for Captain Jase, though, or her two detectives. Not this time. She didn't come to the cemetery very often. It was far enough south out of the city that she could never quite justify to herself why she should make the trip. But as long as she was here, she might as well pay her respects.

Her movement away from the funeral caught only Detective Jones's eye. Maggie froze for an infinitesimal second, half-expecting a mild reprimand for walking away. At the current moment, she was the senior-most officer in the SCU and there was likely going to be a line of people who wanted to talk to her. Funerals always seemed to bring out the chatty side in people.

But then Jones tilted his head and mouthed 'go', and Maggie hurried off before anyone else could notice her.

She made her way down a gentle slope, down the path that wound between the grave sites. The headstones bore the names of policemen and firefighters, and some paramedics who had particularly distinguished themselves. Those headstones were marked by Rod of Asclepius. The late police officers had the six-pointed star that looked like a sheriff's badge, and the firefighters were given the Maltese Cross.

Maggie didn't have to go too far to find the grave she was looking for. All deceased members of the SCU had been buried in roughly the same radius. The headstone was a solid block of white marble, the name, dates, and epitaph hardly worn down even after three years. She brushed away the dried-out and months-old stems already there and placed the lilacs, then stood back and tried to remember the prayers from her Catholic upbringing.

It only took two seconds for her to start feeling ridiculous. She had given up on religion years ago. During high school, when she had finally gotten up the courage to ask one of the least straight-laced nuns in the entire school what God thought about lesbians and was, without hesitation, told that all gays and lesbians would go to hell. Her own parents had looked her straight in the eye and said the same thing.

Maggie had given up Catholicism well before she had ever accepted her own orientation.

She still had faith, but not in the long-winded dissertations that her parents had so stridently recited. The ones they clung to with such desperation, like it was the only thing between them and a bottomless pit. She hadn't opened a Bible or set foot in a church since her divorce, when the circumstances had forced her to come out to every member of her extended family. Nearly every eye had looked away in disgust or shame, disdainful sniffs and muffled sobs from various corners of the room. In that second, it was like she had stopped existing. Her parents had looked at her sadly, mournfully, like they were attending her funeral.

Only her little brother Todd had held her gaze for longer than a second before he too had looked away, but only because he feared the same treatment, she'd later learned. Kicked out of the house by her husband and essentially ex-communicated by her parents, Todd had risked his own relationship with them to offer her the couch at his apartment until she could get back on her feet.

"Why?" she had asked him back then, still reeling from the emotional upheaval and the sting of betrayal and abandonment, and barely able to believe that she still had someone on her side.

"Because nothing is going to make me turn my back when somebody needs help, especially if it's my sister." he had replied, all while dragging her towards his car. "I'll go to hell with you, if it comes to that."

Maggie had faith that people could be good and decent and kind. That they didn't need to have God dictating a list of behavioral rules at them just to ensure that they acted with benevolence towards their fellow human being.

That was all she needed.

They had sun today -- a pale watery sunlight that was filtered through thin gray clouds. The lightest of breezes, just enough to stir the grass and the flower petals. On the not-distant horizon, Metropolis did not loom. It never loomed. The skyscrapers of New Troy rose stately and majestic into the sky, like silent watchful sentries that would always come to protect.

Away from the sonorous whine of the bagpipes and the rising murmur of the funeral attendees, Maggie heard someone approach her -- the rustle and crunch of the footsteps across the short-cut lawn, and muscles tightened along her spine. But it was no police officer -- their stride would have been different, more commanding. She caught a glimpse of auburn hair and smelled Lori's spicy perfume. The other woman came up not quite beside her, but just behind her and gently threaded her fingers through Maggie's.

"A friend?" Lori wondered, gesturing to the headstone.

"Barely. I didn't get a chance to know her very well." Maggie replied. "Alaina Pierce. Former detective of the SCU." she added. "I had a massive crush on her."

Lori smiled. "Oh?" she prompted.

"Yeah, she was gorgeous. Straight as a white suburban PTA house-wife named Helen and engaged, but gorgeous." Maggie replied, smiling, however faintly. "Curly chestnut hair -- I'm talking corkscrew curls here, so coiled they'd probably wrap right around your finger. This great smile that made my knees melt. Her eyes were this pale blue-gray, like the sky right now. And her voice... Ooh, that voice. Like dark chocolate. My first lesbian crush. It was horrible."

It felt a bit wrong to laugh, but Lori did anyways and got an elbow poked into her ribs for it.

"How was it horrible?" she asked rhetorically. "I know that crushes in general are kind of embarrassing, but I couldn't imagine them being horrible."

"That's because you didn't grow up with the God-fearing parents and tight-laced nuns for teachers." the lieutenant pointed out, poking her girlfriend in the ribs again. "I'm serious. By the time we met, I was mostly in a good head-space about being a lesbian. But those first few months, I was fresh off the worst of the divorce and I was still trying to rationalize my attraction to women. I was still in denial up to my neck."

She had thought the move to Metropolis would be a fresh start. Not that she had been wrong, but she might as well have regressed to being a teenager again for as often as her hormones had stood up and got the blood moving in the wrong direction. No longer forced to repress as hard, she had started noticing pretty girls all over the place.

'Just a phase I'm not that gay', she must have told herself a hundred times in her first week alone. Every time Detective Pierce had said even one word in that soft throaty purr of hers or when she took her hair out of its ponytail at the end of the day and those corkscrew tresses would cascade down her back, Maggie's heart-rate and horniness would jump tenfold. She couldn't count the number of cold showers.

Retroactively, Maggie felt very sorry for Detective Jones. Him being telepathic did explain why he had spent most of those first two months hiding behind a newspaper and refusing to look her in the eye.

Lori tightened her grip on Maggie's hand comfortingly. She hadn't grown up with the same oppressive religious denial and her acceptance of her own sexual orientation had been more of a slow easy slide. She had been raised by a single father who had worked sixty hour weeks and spent his weekends half asleep and he had probably never noticed his daughter bringing home girls rather than boys. Never around long enough to think anything strange of it.

Then again, her father had never really had the time to take notice of her, not with his twelve-hour work-days and sometimes double shifts so they could make ends meet. It was the elder drag queen next door who had taught her all the domestic skills she had needed to learn and everything else a girl oughta know to get on safely in the world.

So Lori had gotten the freedom to explore her own sexuality on her own terms with the encouragement of a Stonewall-era veteran while Maggie had squashed it all down and denied it in order to fit in with a microcosm of society that wouldn't accept her otherwise.

After letting another moment pass in silence, Lori finally asked: "What happened?"

Maggie sucked in a fortifying breath. The last time she had talked about this had been three years ago, during the final debriefing. Then the file had closed and the case shelved and she hadn't had to think of it again.

"Do you recall those bizarre accidental deaths that some thought were suicides? The Rube Goldberg deaths." she prompted. So nicknamed for the completely impossible way each person had died.

"I remember reading about them." Lori nodded. "Lois Lane's first rodeo. I think she had the idea they were murders?"

"Yeah, Detective Pierce was completely convinced that they were murders and Ms. Lane was definitely smelling something the rest of us weren't." the lieutenant said. "I didn't believe her. Pierce I mean. None of us did. She didn't have proof; just a bit of information that didn't stack up. They really weren't in our jurisdiction anyways. We didn't develop the Code Veitch signal until a few months after."

"So she went out looking for more proof... And it got her killed?" Lori presumed.

"Probably." Maggie shrugged. "She didn't go home one night. Her fiance let us look around her home office. It took us two days, but we found enough evidence to suggest that she was heading to the Old Town docks. I found her just in time for a metahuman to kill her."

Lori gasped.

"Charade." Maggie growled out the name between gritted teeth. "That's what the bitch called herself. Charade. She could control people like shadow-puppets. Get into her line of sight, all she had to do was wiggle her fingers and you've lost control of your limbs. She had me pinned and..."

She couldn't finish, even with Lori rubbing her hands warmly against her own. Three years didn't make the events any easier to relate. It had been Pierce's own hand that had killed her, forced into motion by Charade's abilities and Maggie had stood witness to every single thrust of the knife, her arms and legs locked in place, unable to do anything but scream.

She had been standing too close to the arterial spray. In her darkest nightmares, she still felt Pierce's blood cooling on her skin.

"What about the Rube Goldberg deaths?" Lori wondered softly.

Maggie shook her head. "We never made any connection between them and that metahuman. Four of the seven victims were involved in Berkowitz's court case. The other three were completely unconnected to anything. I think... I think Pierce just got unlucky. Followed the right lead, but kicked down the wrong door and paid the price for it."

There could have been a connection, for as little as they knew. There had been no time to stall Charade and squeeze any kind of confession out of her (not that it was likely the bitch would have talked). Anything Pierce had known had died with her; her notes were incomplete. The situation had come and gone like a whirlwind, with hardly any time at all to gather information.

The deaths had been impossible. They had been ruled as accidents, but only because no one knew what else to call them. No human being could have done that to themselves on purpose, but Charade's shadow-boxing abilities would have ensured no trace of evidence to link her to the crime.

Sometimes, Maggie thought that Pierce had been on to something after all. That she must have learned something adjacent to the truth. Once discovered, Charade had had no reason to leave Maggie alive and yet the lieutenant had still walked away from that physically unharmed.

Pierce had died because she had learned something worth getting killed over.

Occam's Razor. The Gordian Knot Solution. The Pierce Protocol.

The simplest solution is the most likely. Don't make it more complicated than it is.

"Jones is hosting the wake." Maggie said, changing the subject completely. She didn't want to talk about Detective Pierce anymore. "I'm not sure when I'll home. Probably later than six. I'll text you before I leave."

"I'd say 'have fun'..." Lori trailed off with a shrug. "Just get home safe."

"I will." Maggie assured her.

Jones was the only one of them now who lived in a house. A single-story little bungalow style house near the very edge of Metropolis, where the suburban landscape gave way undeveloped fallow fields and a swathe of old growth trees that surrounded the cemetery.

The house wasn't much bigger than Maggie's own apartment and Jones didn't have guests over anywhere near at all, so the space wasn't really designed to entertain. But the couch seated four, the table seated five, and the two armchairs accommodated the rest of them.

More importantly, there was pizza. Chicken wings. Brownies. Soda. Anything that was fried, greasy, salty, fatty or sweet. Anything that would tempt their appetites into eating after a week of grief-related fasting.

Maggie knew she wasn't going to be able to look at yohgurt or oatmeal again until at least the end of the summer.

Jones pulled the cork on two bottles of red wine and poured some into plastic Dixie cups, as they gathered around the dining table with a solemn air. There was one formality they needed to get out of the way first.

"Anyone have a toast they'd like to make?" Maggie asked.

"To the Met P.D. May they start taking us more seriously now." Sergeant Kesel said, albeit in a slightly bitter tone.

"To the awesome coffee people Capt'n Jase knew for keeping us supplied in really good coffee." Collette said, to a chuckling agreement. It would be a shame to have to go back to the generic coffee brands after so long with the good stuff. The coffee company in question had decided that the best way to honor Captain Jase's memory was to keep the good coffee flowing.

"To Aaron Jase, Leslie Marzan, Greg Pittarese... and Alaina Pierce." Lupe said, glancing at the lieutenant like she was making sure it was okay. "May they be the only names we ever put on the list."

The solemn moment returned threefold, though with a vague sense of confusion. Frowning, Maggie looked around at the assembled group and realized that none of them, save for herself, Jones, and Lupe, even knew who Pierce was. The late detective was just a picture on the wall to them.

But she was a picture on the wall, meaning they didn't need to ask after her fate.

"L'chaim." Turpin offered, raising his cup in the silence. "To life."

A ripple of movement followed, the red plastic cups looking almost ridiculous during such a moment.

"To life." they echoed.

To life and the way it kept on.

The mood lightened slowly after that. Funerals were a catharsis. There was a sense of finality to them and for the SCU, it was a good sense of finality. It meant that something was over and something else could begin.

Maggie tried not to feel like they had come to the end of an era.

The end of normal Metropolis and the beginning of a city she could only sort of recognize.

It didn't take very long for the stories to come out.

"--All of a sudden, I turn around and Pittarese looks like grape there was so much purple everywhere. I don't even know where the paint came from. I'm ninety-nine percent sure it wasn't a metahuman at all but kids with balloons full of paint, but we never actually found out for sure-- I think I have a picture--"

"Is that why he wore a grape costume to the job fair?"

"Y'know, I think so."

"--I mean, we were in the middle of Glenmorgan Square covered in entrails! We looked like we'd walked out of an abattoir and Marzan gives me this really bored look and says 'I've seen worse'- No, no, you're going to have to read the file on this one. I can't explain it. It's the most Veitch of all our Code Vietches--"

"Wait, wait, she just says 'I've seen worse'?"

"Yeah, well, she was born in Gotham right? So I bet she's seen worse than-- whatever that was. I still don't know. Year and a half later and I still don't know what happened--"

"--So Captain Jase takes me in and there's Jones... And there's Pierce. And I'm like 'where is everyone else?' And Captain Jase goes: 'Oh yeah, Lupe, get out here' and she comes out. But there's still only three people in front of me so I ask again 'where is everyone' and they're like 'this is it'. The only thought that goes across my head is 'I'm being fucked with'."

"You were being fucked with, Lieutenant. We were all being fucked with. I told you that. If you thought we weren't being taken seriously now, you should have seen us back then. Before we got the lieutenant. I don't think anyone could make eye contact without giggling--"

"--Yeah, they just walk in and there's powdered sugar all over them and all they would say was that a bag exploded on them and me I'm over there thinking they got attacked by a bakery chef--"

"Nah, nah, the real stories I'm gonna miss are the captain's. I mean, he was on the force for like thirty years and there must have been some wild shit he saw. I don't think he told us half the things that actually happened--"

But sooner than it seemed, the stories wound down and they ran out of words to say. As seven in the evening approached, it occurred to them that they oughta start getting home, to the families and friends and significant others. In ones and twos, the SCU departed -- usually with a Tupperware container of food to go -- until it was just Maggie, Lupe, and Jones left.

A tired kind of silence settled over the living area. Maggie slumped lower in the armchair, not quite ready to make the drive home yet. The day had just been an emotionally taxing cap on a long week. She was used to the SCU changing, but it had always grown. Another person added. Another success made. They had never lost three people in the space of a week, nor had they ever failed like this.

"Are we the old guard now?" she wondered out loud. "The last ones who remember the before?"

Lupe blinked. "Before what?"

"Before we took it seriously."

"Yes. Yes, I think we are." Jones said. He appeared unsettled by the notion.

"If that's what we are, then it's our responsibility to ensure that no one repeats the mistakes we made." Lupe declared, with a decisiveness that had been absent for the past week. "Not the ones now and not the ones from back then."

She didn't need to specify "back then".

Jones got up suddenly like a thought had struck him and disappeared into the kitchen. He came back with three glass tumblers and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and poured two fingers each.

"To us, the old guard." he proposed, passing the tumblers around.

"Cheers." Maggie murmured.

"Salud." Lupe agreed.

They clinked the glasses together and drank. The whiskey burned all the way down.

That was what they were now. The old guard. The last of the original line of defense. Founders in their own way. But they couldn't afford to be stagnant and resistant to change like an old guard often was. Metropolis was a little different even more every day and they had to keep up, or Jase, Pittarese, and Marzan would simply be the first to go, instead of the only.

Maggie set the glass gently down on the coffee table. "I should be heading home." she said. "I'll have to fight the Saturday night traffic as it is."

"I will walk you out." Jones offered, getting up from his seat as she did.

Lupe just waved a hand and reached for the whiskey bottle to help herself to a bit more. Her husband was coming to pick her up in half an hour, so her blood-alcohol level was a non-issue.

Maggie collected her coat and let Jones walk her out the door. The neighborhood had gone half-dark -- it wasn't a lively one to begin with. This close to the city limits and it was little better than a bedroom community. Instead, she stopped at the end of the front walk and looked upward towards the sky. The thin clouds from the day had since cleared away, but the stars were lost in Metropolis's urban glow.

"The one thing I dislike about living so near to a city is that you cannot see the stars." Jones commented, following her gaze.

"I've never lived out in the countryside." Maggie confessed. City suburbs were as close as she had ever gotten. Even then, the light pollution from Star City had been considerable.

And her parents had despised the idea of camping.

She had some vacation time coming up in July. Maybe she oughta grab Lori and go hit up one of the campgrounds on the other side of Lake Michigan. Get away from it all for a couple of days.

"I roadtripped from Midway City to here. It took me all summer and I cannot regret a second of it." Jones said. He must have spent most of that time up in the Rockies, where the wind was cool and the city lights couldn't reach and he had been able to walk freely for the first time in years.

"You ever think about it sometimes? Just hitting the road and not stopping?" Maggie wondered, half rhetorical and half curious. "When I was a teenager, I used to stare down the roads I couldn't go and wonder what was down that way."

Especially when she had been a teenager, when the expectations of adulthood had started to pile on too early and she'd had to push herself down even further and further. She had thought too often of packing a bag and sprinting away in the middle of the night, never looking back and never regretting it for a second.

"John," she started tentatively, turning around fully to face him. "Was Pierce telling the truth? About the deaths being murders?"

The tall man inhaled slowly and let it out in a resigned sigh, like he had been expecting this question for years. "I cannot differentiate between what the truth is and what the truth is believed to be." he said. "Alaina believed in her evidence. To her, it was the truth."

"So the truth is entirely subjective." Maggie muttered.

Jones shrugged. "A person's viewpoint defines their reality. But it is one piece in a greater puzzle. You know how this works, Lieutenant. Multiple viewpoints must be obtained in order to find what they all have in common." he explained. "Alaina's belief was just one such viewpoint. She may have indeed been wrong, but was too caught up in her own truth to notice."

Maggie bit back a grimace. She knew what Jones was saying; that Alaina had run headlong into her own death because she had been just foolhardy enough. Not arrogant or overly proud, but confident and forward with her opinions. However, by the time Maggie had been given command of the SCU, Alaina had been used to acting of her own initiative when necessary. Maggie had refused to let her investigate into something that didn't appear to have any real depth to it and the detective had been too confident that there was something more.

The Pierce Protocol was half a warning.

"She wasn't killed for nothing." the lieutenant declared. "Whatever really happened, her death didn't amount to nothing. It changed the SCU and that means everything."

A steady rise in numbers, somewhat better funding, a slight increase in overall respect, and a drastic change in their own approach to the unusual and the weird. Alaina Pierce's death had made the SCU into what it was today.

"Yes, it does." Jones agreed. "You should go home, Lieutenant. It has been a very long week and they're expecting us bright and early on Monday."

Of course, they got their new building on Monday. The ribbon-cutting ceremony was at eight in the morning and they were supposed to meet their new supervisor. She had no idea who they were getting.

"Good night, John." Maggie said.

"Good night, Lieutenant." Jones bobbed his head like he was bowing very slightly and then turned back up the walk.

Maggie glanced either way down the street for oncoming cars and then stepped off the sidewalk. She felt lighter, freer, like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She felt good.

Maybe she could tackle Monday for a change.

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