Author's Note: I. SAW. NIA. NAL. IN. CRISIS. AND. I. CRIED.
I'VE MISSED HER SO MUCHHHH D: D: D:
But then of course my writing brain picked up on that teeeeeny little bit of inspiration and was like FANFIC!
Summary: Post the events of Crisis Part 1, Brainy worries about where Nia ended up
Spoilers: Major MAJOR MAJORspoilers for the first episode of Crisis! I don't want to ruin it for anyone so pleeeeeease don't read if you haven't watched.
Brainy was pacing nervously in a back hallway of the Arrow Cave, one hand fiddling sightlessly with his phone and the other clenching and unclenching at his side. He had just made his 72nd about-face when he almost smacked straight into Lois.
She wasn't carrying her baby, which meant he had to be with Clark. Brainy didn't understand that. If he had his... person back, he wouldn't be letting her go for a very long time.
"Brainy?" Lois asked, eyebrows furrowing in concern.
"Hm?" Brainy replied absently. She was in the way of his pacing so he forced himself to stop his jittery movements.
"Are you alright?" Lois continued, tilting her head a little. "Did you... know Oliver well?"
Oliver. As awful as it was, Brainy had almost forgotten about the fact that a member of their team had just died in front of them. "Uh, no, no," he muttered, waving away her question with his hand. "We we're... barely acquainted."
"Oh." Lois seemed at a loss. "Is... something else the matter, then?"
Brainy let out a breath. It would be nice to let his worry off his chest, and to someone who wasn't grieving at the moment. It didn't seem like Lois knew Oliver very well, either, so he wouldn't seem so selfish sharing his worries. "I've been... calling," he began, holding up his phone as if to prove the point. "And calling and... calling."
"Okay..." Lois said slowly. "And... who have you been calling, exactly?"
"Nia," Brainy answered. "Nia- Nia Nal- my Nia Nal."
Lois frowned slightly. "Was the... was the 'my' put in there to clarify that she wasn't a doppelgänger, or...?"
"No, no, we're- we are dating. We're together." Those words always felt so trivial. They didn't capture that whole love-of-my-life, center-of-my-world spot that Nia occupied in Brainy's heart. "She is a- a superhero but she is not... here."
"Oh," Lois repeated, but now it was sounding like she understood. "She was on our Earth? When it... disintegrated?"
Brainy nodded. Just hearing someone say those words out loud made his legs shake. He clenched his hand tighter around his phone. "She was. Along with Alex, and Kelly, and J'onn. No one has heard from any of them since the Earth was destroyed. We know they saved 3 billion people but I- I know Nia. She never would have boarded that ship if it meant someone else could be- could be saved."
His breathing shuddered, and Brainy felt familiar wetness on his cheeks. Lois melted into mother-hen mode and her eyebrows creased with sympathy. She stepped forward and put her arms around his shoulders, Brainy standing very stiffly in her embrace. "I'm sorry," Lois said. "I'm so sorry. But you can't lose hope, Brainy. There's always a chance that she got on one of those ships and that she's safe. That all of them are."
Brainy felt another shudder ripple through him. "Then why-" His voice broke. "Then why won't she answer her phone?"
Lois winced, pulling back a little. "Uh... no reception in space?"
Brainy gave her a look, unamused, and Lois winced again. "I really don't know, Brainy. But, as much as a it pains me to say this, we really can't worry about them right now. If they- if Nia- really did... disintegrate, then... there's nothing more we can do. J'onn, Alex, Kelly, Nia- they're all capable people. They'll be able to help themselves. So worrying about them... it's not going to help them, and it won't help us, either."
Brainy nodded, but he wasn't really listening. Pep talks were what superheroes were supposed to give and respond to. Nia loved them. But for Brainy... it was all just words, smushed together in a way that might have been intended to lift spirits.
It didn't lift his.
Across the room, through a sea of people, there she was.
"NIA!" Brainy yelled, her name tearing from his throat as his face burst into a grin.
Her head lifted and a smile bloomed and she flew through the crowd toward him.
They were about to collide, about to smash into each others arms, and-
Brainy woke up, his arms reaching for something invisible. He felt his heartbeat slamming against the side of his neck and forced himself to relax and to drop his hands back down to his sides.
He was in one of the side rooms in the Arrow Cave on a cot that had been previously used on a medical gurney. It was thin as paper and Brainy could feel every roll of his spine against the cement floor, but he supposed it was better than actually lying on the cement floor.
It had been almost two days since they had lost 4.5 billion people from Earth 38, and it had been almost two days since Brainy had heard from Nia.
She still hadn't called or texted. And it wasn't just her- none of the Superfriends left on Earth 38 had contacted anyone. But Brainy felt like he was the only one worrying about the members of the team they had left behind.
Granted, everyone else was pretty occupied with worrying about different matters, like the multiverse being destroyed planet by planet, so he supposed it made sense.
Brainy slung his legs over the side of his cot and buried his face in his hands. He missed the bed in his and Nia's apartment, the way the sun shining in through their too-thin curtains made everything look a little blue. He missed watching Nia's slow wake-up process after her alarm went off, her hair mussed from sleep and the first thoughts on her mind going Brainy, Food, Instagram. She was a little like clockwork, but Brainy liked the regularity and the schedule. He was struggling with this change more than he'd expected he would have.
It would have been easier if Nia was there with him, a spot of warmth pressed against his back on the freezing cement floor. But no. He'd been chosen by the Monitor, and she hadn't. And so now they were separated by who-knew how much space... a space that was even more massive if she was dead.
Brainy shivered, reaching around to pull his thin blanket over his shoulders. He was surprised that he hadn't been dreaming about watching Nia disintegrate in front of him. As hard as imagining reuniting with her only to wake up without her was, it was better than watching her die.
Worried he had jinxed it, Brainy laid back down on his cot and tried to sleep again.
Brainy wished he could talk to Kara.
Instead, he was stuck sitting in the Arrow Cave with Lois across from him, poking at whatever Sara had managed to scrounge up for dinner without setting the whole place on fire. That wasn't to say the food wasn't completely burnt... but at least they weren't.
Lois had her baby, Jonathan, in her arms, and she was rocking him gently back and forth and cooing to him softly under her breath. "We're you aware," Brainy spoke up, because it was awkward just sitting and watching her. "That parentese is a language spoken by all parents? So if your child somehow ended up in a different country, he would still be able to differentiate soothing tones from angry ones."
"Huh," Lois replied, choosing not to comment on the idea of her kid ending up in a different country without her. "I didn't know that, no."
"Indeed," Brainy answered, before he went back to jabbing the tines of his plastic fork (single use... both un-environmental and impractical) against the browned skin of what he was pretty sure was supposed to be an omelet.
Lois glanced up from Jonathan, raising her eyebrow in Brainy's direction. "You alright? You've barely eaten since we got stranded here."
"I'm..." Brainy searched around in his mental thesaurus for a suitable word. "Coping."
"That doesn't sound too good."
"Maybe not," Brainy agreed, shrugging a little. "But it is the best I can do."
Lois nodded, kissing Jonathan on the forehead before setting him very carefully into the makeshift crib she and her husband had shlepped together from supplies found in the Cave. Brainy watched the movement, and as her hair fell across her face and obscured it, he tried to imagine that it was Nia sitting across from him. Of course, Lois was much more petite than Nia, her hair was lighter, her shoulders less broad... the switch wasn't working.
Which brought him back to why he needed to talk to Kara. He wasn't sure how, but he felt like Kara would know what was going on with the rest of their friends. She always knew what was going on. At the very least she could help him figure it out.
But Kara was busy. The multiverse was at stake. Brainy really didn't understand why he couldn't get his priorities in order like everyone else.
"It's because you love her," Lois said.
Brainy jumped a little and looked up to find her staring at him. "Did I..." He mentally replayed the moment. "I said that aloud, didn't I?"
"The bit about you getting your priorities in order?" Lois confirmed. "Yeah, you said that out loud. But seriously- whether or not you meant me to hear that, my answer still stands. You can't see saving the multiverse as more important than knowing if your girlfriend is alright because you love her." She shrugged. "It's as simple as that."
"It is- it is not simple!" Brainy scoffed. "I don't believe you understand... I am a 12th Level Intellect! I can compartmentalize my brain so thoroughly that I can make myself forget things under the harshest of tortures. I should be able to see logic in this situation!"
Somewhere in the course of his rant Brainy had put his fork down on the table and gotten to his feet. At the sound level of his voice, Jonathan woke up and began to cry. Lois sighed and picked him up, and Brainy immediately felt guilty.
"I apologize," he muttered, chagrined. Watching Jonathan wailing in Lois' arms brought an unexpected stinging to the backs of his eyeballs. "I did not intend to awake your child."
"It's fine. Totally normal," Lois said, bouncing Jonathan in her arms. "Shhh... it's okay... mommy's here... shhhh..."
Once Jonathan had calmed down a little, Lois looked back up at Brainy. "Love isn't simple," she said, getting back to their previous discussion like they had never been interrupted. "And it's definitely not logical. I think almost anyone can agree on that. My point is, you're not alone in thinking you have your priorities out of wack. But Brainy, love is what keeps us grounded and keeps us fighting. Clark has told me a hundred times over that it's his love of me and his family that keeps him going. Don't look at your love of Nia as- as clouding your judgement in any way. Look at it as something to give you strength."
Lois was good with words; Brainy would give her that. He leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh, looking down at his still-burnt eggs.
He wasn't hungry. And he wasn't okay- he was still worried sick about Nia. But maybe he could use that.
The worry, that was. Not the lack of appetite. Though he supposed even that gave him an excuse not to eat Sara's disgusting cooking.
The universes were starting to come back.
It had been a close shave, though. Too close for comfort. Earth 1, where everyone was apparently hiding out (though none of the heroes knew exactly where because they still hadn't heard from any of the extended Superfriends team), had been seconds away from being decimated when the Antimonitor had been stopped and the multiverse had been restored.
From Brainy's perspective, it was a little anticlimactic. One moment he was watching over Jonathan upon Lois and Clark's request, the next Kara was running in, beaming, and crying that they had done it, they had saved Earth-38.
Then the moment after that Brainy was reaching for his phone and calling Nia. Because if she had been disintegrated... she'd be back now, right?
But the call still went to voicemail, and Brainy's quick message joined the other twenty-six he had left over the past few weeks. Kara looked at him sympathetically. "I don't know where they are, Brainy," she said, and for the first time he realized that maybe she had been worried, too. "But we're going to find them. Okay?"
"Understood." Brainy nodded, responding to it like he would an order. "And how shall we go about this?"
"I don't... know. Yet," Kara replied hesitantly. "Maybe... do you think you can contact your ship and get everyone heading back to Earth 38?"
His ship. For a 12th Level Intellect, Brainy really was an idiot. How could he have forgotten to try communicating with his friends through his ship?
He stood up quickly. "I will need access to whatever technology this Arrow Cave holds," he said, and Kara nodded, leading him to the array of monitors Felicity had set up across various tables.
In mere moments, Brainy was connecting himself to the network and working out a few kinks in the systems. It wasn't long before he had connected the insufficient technology in the Arrow Cave to the video messaging system in his ship.
It was grey for a little while. "Nia Nal?" Brainy called, hoping that the microphone would sync even if the video part of the call hadn't been picked up. "Hello? Is anyone there?"
A couple seconds later, the feedback vanished and Nia's face popped into the viewfinder. She was way too close; all Brainy could see was the strip of mask covering her eyes and a sliver of pale skin above it. She squinted. "Brainy? Brainy! Ooh, boy, too close. Where's the camera on this thing?"
A gloved finger suddenly loomed into the screen and poked at the camera, making the picture go dark and fuzzy again. After a little bit of rustling, Nia came back into the frame, standing a more appropriate distance away. "There we go. Hey, Brainy! I'm so glad to see you!"
Brainy was feeling things. Relief... love... things. He realized there were tears on his cheeks and he tried to wipe them away before Nia noticed, but he hadn't moved fast enough. Her face darkened in concern and she tilted her head a little. "Hey... what's wrong? Is everyone okay? Is Kara-?"
"Yes, yes, everyone's... everyone's fine," Brainy said quickly, shaking himself out of his stupor. "It is only... you. That is to say- my relief at seeing you."
Nia's mask-ringed eyes softened. "I missed you, too. Sorry I wasn't able to text to let you know I was okay... the WiFi on this Earth isn't compatible with my phone, and eventually it just died. I wasn't sure if I could plug it in anywhere on the ship or if it would, like... explode, or something."
Brainy smiled faintly and shook his head. The motion cleared his Nia-fogged mind for a moment, and he remembered his task. "My reason for calling is to let you know that you are safe to return home," he said.
Nia let out a groan. "Oh, seriously? Thank God. I was starting to really stress about how we were gonna fit 3 billion people on another planet, and find them jobs and places to live and everything. And that, like, 4.5 billion people died because we couldn't get them onboard."
Her face fell at the thought and Brainy felt his heart clench. "You did the very best you could," he told her seriously. "And you did very well. There would have been no calculable way to save the entire 7.5 billion person population of planet Earth. I was... I was concerned that you would have known this but you... would have tried to save just one more by giving someone your place on the ship."
"I would have," Nia replied with a shrug that was too offhanded for what she was admitting to. "But Alex, Kelly and I had completely cleaned out Central City. There was no one else to put on your ship without moving to a different area, and we didn't have time for that. So we got on. But either way, it would have worked out fine! You saved everyone. Can you... can you come home, now?"
Brainy nodded. "Indeed," he said. "I am sure that we will have to remain for a little while to finish up on this Earth but... by the time everything has gotten settled on Earth 38, Kara and I shall be back. I will be back... to you."
Nia smiled at him, her eyes softening even more. There were a few unintelligible noises behind her and she glanced over her shoulder. When she looked back she gave Brainy a wince. "I should go."
"Can you stay?" he blurted before he could stop himself. "Just a bit longer?"
She hesitated. "I really want to, Brainy, I just... we want to get everyone back as soon as possible, right? I need to tell Lena to start prepping the portal and we need to make sure everyone is on the ships and then we need to travel all the way back and-"
"I understand," Brainy interrupted. He felt stupid for having even suggested that she keep talking with him. "That was a selfish plea. Go fulfill your duty, Nia Nal, and... I will see you soon."
His finger wasn't responding so Brainy couldn't make himself end the call. He watched with a strange warm weight in his chest as Nia poked around the screen for a moment, looking for the button that would hang up.
Eventually she found it and the call blinked out. Brainy fell back into his chair and let out a sigh, already aching to see her again.
Soon. He'd be home soon, and back with his Nia.
Contrary to Brainy's belief, Barry told him and Kara to head home much sooner than anticipated. After saying goodbye to the rest of their extended Team, the two of them were jumping through a breach and finding themselves back on their planet.
It was completely deserted. National City was as empty as a graveyard, not a single sound emanating from the streets. Traffic lights changed colors unheeded, almost all of the storefronts left unlocked in their owners haste to escape. The DEO was as silent as the rest of the city, without a single agent at their desks.
It was unnerving, to say the least.
"It's completely to be expected," Brainy said to Kara to fill the ringing silence as they walked into the main room of the DEO. "If you take into account the time it would take Lena to open her portals, and the time needed to make sure everyone was onboard their ships, as well as the actual travel home... they should be here any minute."
Kara sent him a sidelong glance. "Nia's going to be here soon, Brainy," she said softly, exposing him for the truth that he'd really just been saying all of that to reassure himself.
Brainy wandered off to the balcony, resting his forearms on the railing and looking over the empty city. The streets were deserted save for the occasional car parked alongside the road, the tickets on their dashboards days overdue. The sun was just starting to set, and Brainy was surprised that the pink hues of the sky that he usually loved sent an actual shudder of fear through him.
Far off in the distance, a cloud flickered purple. Brainy squinted at the shifting color, before a black shape marred the space. "Kara!" Brainy yelled over his shoulder.
She was at his side and seconds, and he felt a surge of guilt for having sounded so urgent. Kara was just as on-edge from the events of the week as he was. "What's up?" she demanded, ready for more action.
"They're coming," Brainy said, pointing off into the distance.
She followed his gaze and a grin broke over her face. Together, they stood at the balcony and watched the flotilla of alien ships pour through the purple breach in the sky.
It took Brainy's ship a full twenty minutes to get through the portal. He wasn't sure exactly how he knew -whether he just felt Nia's presence or he recognized the silvery-white gleam of his favorite machine- but the moment his ship crossed from Earth 1 to Earth 38, he knew Nia was coming home.
Brainy watched the ship until it was out of sight, having landed somewhere in the street and joining dozens of others. By the time he got from the balcony to the sidewalk outside the DEO, people were beginning to fill up the empty spaces. He found his ship and watched as the boarding ramp lowered and people began to pour out. They looked shell-shocked and glazed, and Brainy felt for a moment that he should have joined Kara when she'd left him a few minutes back to help everyone get readjusted.
But Brainy was pretty sure that he needed to make it so his life wasn't falling apart before he helped the residents of National City feel that way.
What happened next was so close to Brainy's repeated dreams that for a moment he wondered if Nia's powers had been rubbing off on him. Through the crowd, he saw the blue and silver Dreamer costume he had 3D-printed two years ago, a head of wavy dark brown hair turning this way and that, eyes scanning.
"Nia!" Brainy yelled, loudly and aggressively enough that people around him turned to look. Nia's head spun and she let out a laugh of pure joy before barreling toward him.
Brainy was unable to resist taking a few steps in her direction as well, but he was terrified that the second they reached each other the whole image would shatter and he would wake up, back in the Arrow Cave.
Instead, Nia reached him and threw herself into his arms. Brainy let out a relieved sob and wrapped himself around her. She pressed her face into his neck, and the tip of her nose was as cold as it always was. Still, he wasn't sure if that was why he shivered.
"I was so worried," Brainy mumbled, hugging her so tightly that she was sure to be having difficulty breathing.
"You were worried?" Nia replied incredulously, pulling back a little. Brainy's stomach tugged at the loss of her proximity but he restrained the whimper he had almost let out.
"Yes," Brainy replied slowly. "Were... you?" The thought hadn't occurred to him before now.
"Yes, you genius idiot," Nia answered, still incredulous. "While I was sitting pretty in that ship you were, like, actually in the fray, almost dying. I had no idea who was alive or how to find out. Alex, J'onn, Kelly and I were freaking out."
Brainy let out a breath, his hands clamped on her waist just in case she tried to pull away more. "In reality, I spent most of my time in the Arrow Cave looking after Jonathan with Lois," he admitted. "I was rarely in harm's way."
"Well, I didn't know that," Nia said, rolling her eyes. Then she smiled, and suddenly Brainy felt warm and fuzzy. He leaned forward and kissed her, before pulling back and nudging his nose into her cheek and then down to her neck. Nia let out a soft sigh and tilted her head a little, one hand folding itself into the ends of his hair. They stood in that awkward sort-of-hug, mostly-just-closeness position for awhile, breathing each other in.
Brainy had his Nia Nal back. And he wouldn't be letting her go anytime soon.
Author's Note: Didja seeee how I brought it all full circle there?! lkajewrlkajerklj that was actually a pretty fun one to write. Lois is so dope :D
So believe it or not, I will actually be posting a few times during this break... for whatever reason I'm feeling really inspired to write them right now, but I also have some pre-complete stuff that I've been meaning to post.
One of those stuffs is ummm an episode tag for 5x04 lolll ooooops XD