I own Jani-Ca, the Constable, and quasi-anonymous characters. And various members of the flashback.
I may rewrite that flashback eventually, maybe as a side-story the way I did Liaison. But for now, it's just a flashback.
Over the next couple of weeks, the doctors continued to run tests on Jani-Ca and Sojourner alike.
Until, finally, they agreed that the pair was ready to go home.
Home to one of the centers the Council had given them, home to the crew, who fussed over the baby.
Some of the Brotherhood visited to look in on her and the baby. If Tobor was among them, he never came in. Jani-Ca didn't care; the crew resented him, and would have refused him if he'd tried to visit.
Sojourner was a year old before his father was allowed to come home. But when he arrived, he was changed.
Subdued. He barely touched her, or his son. When he did, he was so careful that she wanted to scream. Hawking told her that new fathers were often so nervous, and she didn't expect Spectre to be reckless with his son, but this was ridiculous!
A week after he'd returned, she'd asked one of the crew to put Sojourner to bed, so she could have Spectre alone for the night. She pushed him into a chair and wrapped her arms around him, pulling herself closer to him, kissing him deeply.
He returned the kiss with as much passion as she gave...but he firmly kept his hands to himself.
Even when he had relaxed enough to make love to her, he was clumsy, awkward. The passion...was gone.
When she tried to speak to him about it, he suggested that one of the crew might satisfy her better. She took him at his word, but the crew quickly proved him wrong. For they were afraid of him; not one dared to touch Spectre's wife, not even with permission to do so.
And it was no wonder. She'd been watching the news. She'd seen what kind of displays Spectre had done since the Brotherhood let him return to his duties. The passion their marriage had lost was in great evidence in these attacks. If she didn't know how much he loved her, didn't see just how afraid he was to be with her or his son, how afraid he was that he could hurt them, she would be as terrified as his enemies.
Three weeks after he'd returned, they were just laying down for another attempt, when she heard a knock on the door.
She growled, but she got up and yanked the door open, not even bothering to throw a robe on.
And found herself facing the Constable.
"I—I—um," he stammered. He stared at her.
"Getting an eyeful?" she asked, leaning into the doorframe. His eyes widened as they followed her shape.
Jani-Ca flicked her gaze down, then back at his face. She lifted an eyebrow.
He swallowed. He realized what she'd just seen, and his face turned redder than his fur.
"You want her?" Spectre asked from the bed. "You can have her, if she wants. You can probably do better with her than I can." He hung his head. "Couldn't possibly do any worse," he muttered.
The Constable's face turned even redder, and he pointedly looked away.
Jani-Ca frowned. The Constable's embarrassment would have been cute, and she might have tried convincing him to take Spectre up on the offer...if her husband wasn't being so damn serious about it.
She finally took pity on the poor man and put a robe on. "Oh, go sit down," she snapped, guiding him back to the living room.
Spectre followed, with Deo on his shoulder.
"So about that offer—" Jani-Ca said to her husband, flicking a finger in the Constable's direction. "Tell me you weren't being serious."
"You need someone who isn't afraid to touch you," Spectre whispered.
"Gods be damned, I'm not a piece of china! I'm not going to shatter if you look at me, show your feelings once in a while."
Spectre sank into the couch, looking completely miserable.
"So how are you two doing?" the Constable managed to ask. Jani-Ca gave him a look, one that suggested he might be dense. "Right," he mumbled. "To be honest, I'm not sure if I should be relieved about that, or worried."
"Why?" Jani-Ca asked.
The Constable flicked his gaze to Spectre, but the Guardian pointedly ignored them. "Well, considering the way he's been behaving everywhere else lately... I was half expecting I'd see you a mess of bruises. Or worse."
Jani-Ca closed her eyes. Spectre had never raised a hand to her, even before that accident. He was terrified of touching her now. But she had seen the news. She could not deny the Constable's fear.
"But I suppose you didn't come to talk about my love life," Jani-Ca said.
"N—no," the Constable stammered. "We—we've had an anonymous tip about what might be wrong with—" He flicked his eyes to Spectre again, and he cleared his throat. "That is, we think we have an idea what might have happened."
"Our tipster gave us a file," Deo continued, "that gave us the structure of a very unusual plant. One that he said only grew in the Dragon Kingdom. And this plant matched an unknown chemical that the doctors had found in your system."
Jani-Ca glared at him. "And this has what to do with my husband?"
"Patience, Lady, I'm getting to that," Deo replied. "The tipster informed us that the chemical from this plant has a rather...unusual effect when exposed to certain types of energy. On its own, it was perfectly harmless. But when you were exposed to the Chaos Energy, it became very much like a poison."
"We believe this 'poison' is the reason you did not recover as quickly," the Constable added, "when your dingoes were running around in a matter of hours. And why—" He glanced towards Sojourner's room and gave Jani-Ca a meaningful look.
She nodded. The Guardians all operated under the same assumption the doctors were; nobody had told them that Sojourner was not her son. They were certainly not about to tell Spectre that he had killed her unborn child.
She sat up straighter. "Then...then it was all an accident, right? Spectre hadn't put us in danger."
"No, not exactly," Deo replied. "After reviewing the effects of this chemical, we believe that Spectre had reacted in a way that was perfectly natural, that he had not unleashed a dangerous amount of power. Harmful, yes, so perhaps he had overreacted, but certainly not lethal."
"Well, there you go, then," she said, giving Spectre a triumphant grin.
He only sank down further.
"Spectre, it was an accident," she repeated. "You couldn't have known I was infected with this...whatever it was. You couldn't have known your power would have that effect on it. It wasn't your fault! You're not dangerous, you're not a criminal, and you're not crazy!"
"Why don't you tell her the rest?" Spectre mumbled.
Deo and the Constable looked around uncomfortably, but before they could speak, Spectre looked up. His eyes snapped open, and he stared at an empty corner. He started to shake.
"I think...I think I'm going to go lay down," he mumbled, and wandered off, casting frequent glances back at that corner as he went.
"And that would be our tipster," the Constable muttered.
"I'm sorry," a voice said from the corner. A young chameleon appeared where Spectre had been staring. "If I'd known the exile hurt him that bad," he said, "I wouldn't have tried sneaking in."
Jani-Ca jumped. "He can still see you? I thought...I thought Kancho's father—"
The chameleon shook his head. "Guardian Spectre's been over-sensitive since the fire, ma'am," he said. "He's always been able to see us since. Can't make him stop short of blinding him. The exile only made him think it's his brain seeing us, instead of his eyes." He sighed. "Would you mind, ma'am, if I explained in order? I didn't tell them everything, but I'm thinking maybe it'd help you understand the Guardian's condition better."
Jani-Ca nodded. "However you feel is necessary."
—
FLASHBACK
The Exile was mad at the Guardian; why wouldn't he be? He was Kancho's father, and the Guardian had been overstepping his boundaries, both of them ignoring our traditions, for months.
But when some of my people followed the Exile, they had no idea what he planned to do about it.
And they had no power to stop him, or correct it after.
My people reported the incident to the Bride of Constant Vigil. She called the Exile up and shamed him in front of the entire clan. She told him he'd had no right to do that to anyone, no right to use our traditions as an excuse to touch someone's memories, especially as the Guardian had suffered so much already.
The Exile insisted that the Guardian had agreed to it, that the spell wouldn't have worked, else.
She told him that she didn't care a scale how he'd gotten around the rules, it didn't hold with her 'cause he hadn't bothered to tell the Guardian what he was agreeing to.
Unfortunately, all she could do was tell him off. See, the Voices are like a clan of their own. They get their power from the gods; only a Voice would have the power to remove the spell, and the Bride didn't have the authority to even order him to do it, nor to tell his daughter to.
So she had us keep a closer eye on the Guardian, to see how badly the spell had affected him, but otherwise we tried to keep out of his way. And we thought that was the end of it.
Until the Exile discovered that Kancho was pregnant with the Guardian's child.
The Bride took her in before he could do anything, but when he demanded his daughter be returned to his care, the Bride had no choice but to relent, or to send the clan into a civil war.
Until he made his last mistake. He insisted that his daughter and the Guardian should have nothing of each other, and demanded that the baby be cut from her and destroyed.
The clan was furious, ready to go to war to defy him. Even the enemy clans were willing to join us. Children are sacred to the gods; our other traditions are nothing to that. But the Bride had a better idea.
"You are not the Voice of this clan," the Bride told the Exile. "You do not speak for the gods."
She couldn't really take away his magic, but those words had stripped him of every right he had with the clan. Even the right to speak for his own student, his own daughter. All without needing a war.
She kept Kancho in her care until the egg was laid, and we heard what happened with your own.
And she gave the Exile one chance to redeem himself: to bring the child you call Sojourner, to exchange him with your egg so that the Guardian would still have his heir.
Kancho went along, supposedly because she was the best hacker; the Bride wanted the records changed so the Guardians wouldn't realize the exchange had happened.
But I think the Bride wanted to give Kancho more time to say goodbye to her son, and maybe the chance to see Spectre again, to try to undo the spell the Exile had cast.
Kancho and the Exile came in with the baby. I...I didn't actually watch them make the switch. I only know that Kancho had laid the baby down, and the Exile had looked up the file on their computer.
I'd taken the egg and began to place it inside my pack, so I didn't get to see what he was looking at.
The Exile started swearing; I'm not sure why I didn't notice that before, but I suppose he's always been angry about something or other. It just wasn't unexpected. But Kancho looked at the screen, and she looked spooked about something.
I asked them what was wrong.
"You're both taking too long, that's what," the Exile snarled. He continued to stare at the screen. "Don't bother with that trash. The hospital must have an incinerator or something, to dispose of contaminants."
"Dispose...?" I stared at him. Destroy the egg?
He laughed. "The egg's dead, boy. What do you think you're destroying?"
"Yes, sir," I muttered, and took the egg out.
After I had left them, though, I hid myself to think about his order. We had made the switch only so the Guardian could have his heir, and keep the child out of the Exile's hands, at that. What need was there to keep a dead egg? But something inside me continued to argue.
And while I waited, I heard him speaking to someone. No, not to Kancho. I heard a radio. I heard him address someone as a Guardian, said that they needed to talk.
He argued with the Guardian, said something about using flowers to control Spectre. I suppose they agreed to meet somewhere, because he listed off some address.
I didn't wait to hear more; I took the egg and met with other agents. I told them what I'd heard the Exile saying, and they agreed to look into this meeting while I brought the egg back to the clan.
The clan examined the egg, and found it infected from the flowers. The flowers we harvest for the Voices to use. Nobody else uses them, and we keep careful track of every harvest. No harvest was missing, but those flowers are what killed the egg.
And what nearly killed you, ma'am.
We figured you must have been infected somehow. And since these flowers work on energy, on magic, they got in, and infected your aura. We put that with what we knew of...of the attack, and we figured, when Guardian Spectre pulled his power back, that he must have infected himself, too. And that he'd keep on infecting himself, every time he even touches that power. That's why it's been affecting him that way.
Problem is, that's about all we know. Only Kancho would know how to siphon off the extra power, so Spectre wouldn't hurt himself worse.
And only a Voice would know enough to use the flowers right, let alone to cure the infection, if it's possible.
END FLASHBACK
—
The chameleon carefully did not look at them.
"He'd already told us about the flowers," the Constable told Jani-Ca. "And how they must have infected Guardian Spectre."
Deo nodded. "He wasn't insane," he said, "not then. But this infection has gotten into his mind. That's what we found in his brainwaves. And every time he uses his power, every time he so much as touches it, it eats at him just a little more." He sighed, and glanced towards the bedroom. "And he knows it, too."
"Every—?" Jani-Ca stared at him. "He depends on that power to survive. He can't just...not use it." Her eyes widened. "Then he...he is...going mad?"
Deo nodded.
She shook her head. "You said Kancho could cure him," she asked the chameleon. "Right?"
"If anyone could," the chameleon corrected. "None but the Voices would know if it's possible." He stared at the floor, waiting for her to ask the obvious question.
"And if her father...your Exile...has no say in what she does anymore, I'm sure she'd try to help." She stared hard at the chameleon, practically daring him to contradict her.
"She would...if she could."
Deo frowned. "If she could? Doesn't she know if she can? Or do your traditions—"
The chameleon shrugged. "Nobody's seen her since."
Deo stopped mid-rant.
The Constable narrowed his eyes. "What about this meeting your Exile set up with the Guardian? Do you happen to know which Guardian it was?"
None of the Guardians went off to meet with him, Deo thought at the Constable. Spectre's the only one who ever even knew about the chameleons. The Constable nodded. Either the young Shinobi was lying, or something was very, very wrong.
The chameleon shook his head. "I never heard the Exile say. And the agents who checked up on it said there was only a few echidnas there. That thug Joshua, some new guy called himself Luger, a few others. And one of your deputies watching the whole thing." He pretended not to notice that the Constable's eyes had narrowed down to mere slits. "But no Guardian, and no Exile. One of my agents tried to follow Luger and his people, but they vanished into some dark portal." He swallowed. "Nobody's seen hide nor scale of Kancho or the Exile since the switch."
Why the lack of a robe is a big deal, I have no idea. I mean, so many Mobians hardly wear anything, anyway, right? Seems like clothing is more a matter of personal choice of style or dealing with the elements, rather than a standard of society. (Which makes me wonder about that scene in Sonic Universe #16. Just where was that birthmark?)
But it was either that, or have the Constable walk in on them in the middle of it. And...well...
Oh, look, I made him blush again!
Speaking of which, there's a story that's absolutely refused to let me go since writing that. So we have "Liaison," an M rated rewrite of next chapter's section 1.