Disclaimer: I do not own Sky High or its characters, settings etc, all of which belong to Disney. Original characters and concepts belong to me.
Epilogue: Choose Your Battles
Barron Battle didn't get many visitors.
It was one of the side effects of being in solitary that people needed special permission to visit him, not that many people bothered. But now this hero called 'Knight-Fire', who had succeeded in destroying the great super villain family, had no doubt come to rub his nose in it. Cocky little upstart, whoever he was. Hadn't he overheard some rumor that the guy was dead or something? Apparently not.
He didn't even bother turning around when the door of the interrogation room opened to admit his visitor and then closed again.
"So, the great superhero who crushed the Battle family," he said caustically, "Come to gloat, have you?"
"Actually I'm looking for information," came the reply.
"If you're trying to find my son so you can tie up all the loose ends, you won't get any help from me."
The response was laced with both amusement and sarcasm. "Your paternal concern for me is quite touching."
The super villain turned around in disbelief. "Warren??"
"Hello, dad." He couldn't believe how calm he was feeling. In fact, it was weird. He had spent a lot of his youth imagining this moment with varying degrees of bitterness and self-pity. He'd expected to feel anger, hurt, betrayal, as he finally faced his father the notorious super villain after all these years, but the strange thing was that he felt nothing.
The villain snorted. "Yeah, that figures. My own son destroys my family."
"Just keeping a little promise my mom made," replied Warren, but again, saying those words didn't bring the feeling of triumph he had expected. It was almost as if the man standing opposite him was a stranger, of no personal connection to him, either positive or negative. He could have been any super villain Warren had faced since becoming a hero.
"I thought you weren't here to gloat," Battle reminded him.
Warren took off his sunglasses and settled himself in one of the chairs, forcing the question of his feelings aside for the moment. "I have it on good authority that you were the mastermind behind an escape attempt from this facility yesterday, and for obvious reasons we need to know how you organized it."
"What makes you think I would tell you anything?"
"Perhaps we can make some sort of deal."
"Can you get my sentence reduced?" Battle challenged with obvious disbelief.
"Not my call," responded Warren, and he ran a hand though his hair in an apparently casual gesture that drew attention to his multiple red streaks. "No, I was thinking more of a trade of information."
There had been some very colorful suggestions about how to extract the answers they needed from the man in a (relatively) legal manner, ranging from Chinese water torture to poison ivy to Vogon poetry. However, as Ethan pointed out, with an intelligent super villain like Barron Battle, they would get a lot further if they could offer him something to make it worth his while than they could with threats. And there was one particular fact Warren was pretty sure his father would be prepared to offer a great deal for.
The super villain sat down as well and gave a snort, purposefully not looking at his son.
'Doesn't look like he's taking the bait,' commented Magenta on the comm from the central control room, where the others were all watching the scene play out.
Not yet, but he will thought Warren The whole fire elemental breeding business was far too important to the Battle family, and to Barron in particular, for him to be able to resist the temptation for long. Plus, Warren still had an ace up his sleeve.
"What makes you so sure I had anything to do with some escape attempt anyway?" the villain argued.
Warren took Hypnotic's spiked ring out of his pocket and pretended to be examining it curiously. "A small confession from the person you used for the job," he replied as he fiddled enticingly with the ring. "You know what they say about hell having no fury like a – "
He was cut off by Battle making a sudden lunge for the ring. Without even looking up, Warren made a 'come-here' gesture with his fingers and a flame construct appeared, apparently out of thin air, and swooped down to defend him. His father backed away quickly but with an expression of incredulity as he gazed at the fiery phoenix.
"How stupid do you think I am?" Warren asked, trying his best not to smirk as he ordered the construct aside with a gesture. The ring had, of course, been drained of Hypnotic's drug so he'd never been in any danger.
"Worth a try," replied Battle, obviously awestruck as he stared at the construct which took up residence in the corner of the room near the ceiling. "How can you even use your powers in here?"
"What makes you think I would tell you anything?" Warren responded, mimicking what his father had said earlier.
Battle understood what he meant straight away, and spent a few long moments looking between Warren and the flame construct, obviously struggling with himself before agreeing reluctantly. "Deal."
'Yes!' came the exclamation from the control room.
It took Warren a lot of self-control to maintain his best poker-face. "You first."
"How about we take it in turns? You heroes are big on fairness, after all."
"Fine. You're still first."
"Whatever. What's your first question?"
"How did you make contact with Hypnotic?"
This was their biggest concern. Prisoners in solitary confinement had only extremely restricted communication with either the outside world or with one another, the Dangerously Violent ones for obvious reasons, and the Dangerously Intelligent ones for fear of what they might plot together. No letters were allowed in or out because of the danger of secret codes, and visits were only by special permission and were heavily monitored. If Barron Battle had found a way around these restrictions, that would be a serious breach of security.
"She made contact with me," answered Battle shortly.
"And?"
"My turn." The villain nodded at the phoenix hovering in the corner. "Tell me about that thing."
"It's a flame construct," replied Warren equally unhelpfully.
"I can see that. Care to elaborate?" But Warren just looked at him. "Oh, me first, I expect? Fine, she was using her powers to get information on the Battle family fortune."
Warren raised his eyebrows in surprise. "So she asks the person who's been out of the loop for years," he remarked, carefully not phrasing it as a question.
Battle shrugged. "She started with the current family leaders obviously, and then that moron who calls himself Hellfire told her that I have a private cache in a numbered account."
Warren was about to ask 'Do you?' but managed to stop himself in time before he wasted a question. "And then you turned the tables on her," he prompted instead.
"My turn first," replied the super villain with a Nice try look. "How are you able to control that construct in here?"
"I'm not. Well, not with my powers, at least. While I was outside of the neutralization zone I instructed it to obey visual commands instead of mental ones. Then I released it from my control, and it came in with me."
"But you can't have brought it with you," Battle argued. "It appeared out of nowhere. How did you do that?"
Warren countered with a question of his own. "How did you get Hypnotic under your control?"
The villain hesitated for a moment before deciding it was worth his while to answer properly. "Well, I had no idea what she was up to, but when she tried to inject me with that spiky ring of hers I caught her hand in time and shoved it down onto her thigh, which evidently gave her a dose of her own poison. Then, when I demanded she tell me what that was all about, to my surprise, she told me. Everything. She even told me how she'd 'influenced' the duty warden to halt the security tape recordings while she was here, so nobody would know about our little meeting."
'Well, that definitely proves that anybody can use her formula to control people,' Ethan commented.
'That might explain why the NCS private file on her is so well protected,' Maj realized. 'Imagine if that kind of intel fell into the wrong hands.'
"I think that answers your question," Battle continued. "Now, answer mine. How did you do that?"
In response, Warren snapped his fingers and the construct dispersed into sparks that spread out until they were barely noticeable in the air. After a few seconds he gave the 'come-here' gesture he had earlier and the construct re-formed.
"Like that," he said.
But his father wasn't going to let him get away with not explaining it. "That's just showing off; you didn't actually answer my question. I saw Hellfire practicing with his powers once, soon after he got his pyro-construction. When he dispersed a construct, it turned into an unrelated collection of sparks. It simply wasn't possible to make those same sparks re-form into a coherent entity again."
Warren shrugged. "I can't actually explain the mechanics of how I do that. It's something I discovered a few months ago I can just … do."
He hoped Kate wouldn't be too offended that he left out the fact that she could do it too. If she didn't understand, he'd have to explain later that he was just being discreet with what details he gave. If Barron Battle ever did escape or find a way to make contact with the outside world, Warren didn't want his friends to be endangered. It was only his own information he was prepared to disclose.
He added, "I'm sorry, I can't explain it any better than that." The villain seemed to accept his answer, so he went on to his next question. "What's with the immunity to pain thing? It was useful to us; that's how we figured something was up, but how did that fit into your grand plan?"
"I thought that was a nice touch, personally," Battle smirked. "Along with not fearing for their own lives, that makes the perfect soldier, don't you think?"
"Except when they fall down dead because they didn't know they were injured," Warren pointed out.
Battle just shrugged as if to say, 'What's one soldier more or less?', and then he leant forward, looking almost nervous in his anticipation as he asked the question Warren had been waiting for.
"Are you a fire elemental?"
"I am."
"A little more than detail than that?" Battle asked a bit impatiently. "I've given you more than one-word answers, you know."
"What do you want me to tell you?" Warren responded. "Yes, I'm classed as a fire elemental on account of having all four fire-based powers."
"Four?" the villain queried curiously. "I thought it was three."
"Yeah, well, a friend of mine's about to publish a research paper that claims that pyro-absorption is a separate power in its own right."
"Either way, it proves I was right all along," gloated Battle. "They all thought that marrying your mother would weaken the bloodline, but my experiment worked! I was right!"
"Actually, it's quite ironic," commented Warren, beginning to find the man's smugness a bit irritating, "That the fire elemental you people spent so long trying to create ended up being part of the family's downfall."
That certainly wiped the smug look off his father's face, and the arrogance was replaced by a closed-off scowl. Warren began to wonder if he'd maybe over-played his hand, and the super villain would stop cooperating. After all, he had answered the question his father wanted answered the most.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to try a final question, particularly one which could be seen as an open invitation to monologue. "Okay, last question: why such an elaborate scheme? She told you there'd be no evidence of her visit; surely she could get you out of here while she was at it?"
"That was my first thought too. But then it occurred to me, once I was out, what would I do? Thanks to you I didn't exactly have a family business to return to, but I supposed I could start out as a solo villain with little miss hypnotist as my sidekick, helping to pave the way for me. But why stop there, when all the human resources I needed were right here? Some of the most brilliant criminal minds and some of the most destructive powers, and they would all be under my control."
"Ready-made empire," Warren remarked. "Pretty ambitious."
"They didn't put me in Dangerously Intelligent for nothing, you know." The smugness was back. "And, of course, getting heroes to enact my prison break, well, I'm sure you can appreciate the beautiful irony there. Which brings me to my final question. You've felt the full extent of your power; can you really say that limiting yourself to the constraints of superheroism and devoting your powers to the service of others is more personally satisfying than using your potential for yourself?"
Warren stared at his father for a long moment, trying to gather his thoughts before answering.
The question had hit awfully close to the bone considering his dream about going dark side which he'd been so paranoid about, and he could imagine Layla, Will and the others sharing glances in the control room.
At first he was tempted give some kind of sarcastic response about his mom having given him a proper upbringing in morals and ethics, but then he felt an intense rush of pity for his father that he had never known what it felt like to truly be a hero. All the time he was masquerading as one of the good guys, he'd had to close himself off to those kinds of emotions which might compromise or interfere with his assignment for the Battle family, and Warren couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He suddenly realized that he was on his way to forgiving his father. Not because the man deserved it or even wanted it, but because he wasn't worth the bitterness and anger that holding a grudge caused. That was a lesson Warren had learnt the hard way from seeing how his resentment towards the Battle family had sent him awfully close to the edge.
Feeling oddly liberated by that revelation, Warren took a deep breath and answered the question as best and honestly as he could. "I agree, powering up is an incredible rush, I can't deny that. But then it's over. It will never provide the ongoing emotional fulfillment of knowing you've really made a difference; saved someone's life or made their world a better place."
He put his sunglasses back on and stood up. "I wish you could know that feeling," he said sadly.
His father just looked at him without showing any overt response, but his expression was not openly hostile either.
Warren snapped his fingers at the construct to instruct it to disperse and then gestured to the cloud of sparks to follow him as he walked out of the room, leaving his father, he hoped, with something to think about.
It was amazing how fast things returned to normal. Then again, there's nothing like sharing two weeks' worth of facing mad scientists with doomsday devices, natural disasters, rampaging giant robots and super villains plotting world domination to help Warren to fit back into his place on the team again.
The Guardians were all gathered in their headquarters for their annual Star Wars marathon, apart from Kate and Layla who had gone to get the food and snacks for the occasion. There was nothing sexist about this; they'd offered, in fact. Warren privately suspected it was one of those female bonding things.
Maj and Zach were arguing over whether they should start watching at Phantom Menace, being the beginning of the series, or A New Hope, because last time everybody had fallen asleep at the end of Episode III so it was only fair to start at Episode IV this time. At the same time they were playing Uno with Will and Warren, but none of them seemed to be really paying attention or they would have noticed that Zach had only one card left.
Ethan and Denise were playing chess. After some pointed encouragement from the rest of the team, Warren in particular, Ethan had finally gotten up the courage to ask her out, and after the whole Hypnotic incident she was practically one of the group already. She'd also helped them with a cover story to inoculate the whole of Maxville with the antidote just in case Hypnotic left any 'hypnotized' minions around that they didn't know about.
That pretty much took care of the fallout from that incident, apart from the issue of Warren's forfeit, although strictly that was earned earlier that day. When the team had been heading back to headquarters after Hypnotic's confession, they'd happened to see the news report of Warren's, or rather, Knight-Fire's big comeback. Even though the outcome had been exactly what everyone needed, they were less than impressed with the danger he had intentionally placed himself in.
When they got back to headquarters, and Zach saw his gadget collection spilled all over the floor, it seemed only appropriate that Warren's punishment should be re-packing the cupboard. At the time he'd been too tired to argue terms and conditions, and he'd only discovered later that the fine print gave him the chore of re-packing it every time it had to be opened when Will brought home something new, for a whole month.
Oh well, it was a small price to pay for the sake of being one of them again. Not that he'd let them know that he felt that way, of course. Wouldn't want anyone to think he'd gone soft.
Suddenly his attention was brought back to the game by Maj calling, "Hey, Hothead, focus!" while studiously ignoring Zach's sad attempts to use Jedi mind tricks on her to get his way. Of course, at any moment the Red Telephone could ring, and the question of where their marathon should start would become quite irrelevant, but that was all part of the job in this business.
At that point Zach played his final card and won the game, a momentous event which apparently deserved a victory lap around the headquarters.
Layla and Kate arrived just then. "What's with him?" Kate asked as she put the food down on the table.
"He won," replied Will, looking as surprised as everyone else. "It must be the first time in years."
Layla came up and stood behind Warren's chair, hugging him from behind. Under the pretense of tucking his hair behind his ear, she asked very quietly, "You didn't let him win, by any chance, did you?"
"Actually, no, believe it or not," replied Warren, catching one of her hands and giving it a quick kiss before gathering up the cards to shuffle them. "Give him a little credit, huh?"
At that point, Zach knocked Ethan and Denise's chessboard off the coffee table, slipped on one of the chess pieces and landed in an undignified heap on the floor.
Warren and Layla shared an amused glance and then he went back to shuffling the cards.
Things were definitely back to normal.
The End
A/N: That's all, folks! For now, at least. I have some plans for a shortish sequel, but I'm not making any promises yet...
So, thanks to everyone who has been reading, and to those who have put this story on their favorites, and very special thanks and appreciation for all the reviews and PMs, they've really kept me going. :D