The usual disclaimer. I don't own any of the character, this story is not for profit, and please don't sue me. ^_^
(A note to readers of JLA . . . this is many, many years before General Eiling goes nuts and steals the body of the Shaggy Man. But it is the same guy.)
Father's Day became an official holiday in 1966. But for the purposes of this fanfic, I'm tweaking it up to 1968. Hey, what's two years? ^_~
So . . . anyway. Captain Atom. I love the character, but he always makes me so sad. But at least he gets to wear pants in this story, right? He doesn't have to steal bathrobes or anything like in Watching the Watchers and that's something, right? ^_^''
But enough of that!
This story is dedicated to my father, who wasn't always around when I was growing up, but always wanted to be, and who I know will never read this fanfic.
We can draw lessons from the past, but we must not live in it. - Lyndon B. Johnson
In 1960 and at twenty years old, Nathaniel Adam was the proud father of a healthy baby boy, seven pounds
six ounces. Randall, he and
Angela named him, after Nate's grandfather, but of course the name got shortened to "Randy"--or
"Randy-Wandy, who's Daddy's widdle twooper?" when Nate gave him his bottle. He had
his mother's nose and his father's eyes--well, Nate thought little Randy had his eyes,
but Angela just laughed and asked if Nate was going to demand them back, then.
Four years later, Randy was running around with the energy unique to four year olds and Nate was rocking a different baby, little Margaret, later to be nicknamed Peggy. He grinned when she cooed and grabbed at his hair, and more than once Angela threw a cushion at Nate after he sagely commented, "Ah, she has a big mouth . . . like her mother . . ." when the baby threw a crying fit.
Four years after that, Captain Nathaniel Adam embraced his wife in a tearful goodbye, clutching the letter calling him to Vietnam. He blinked back tears as he knelt to tell Randy (age eight) and Peggy (four) that he was sure the war--the "conflict", his superiors insisted on calling it--would be over soon, that he would return.
Return he did.
But not until eighteen years later, after being framed for treason, used as a human guinea pig in a secret military experiment, bumped forward through time, gaining bizarre quantum abilities, and being blackmailed into serving as a government-controlled superhero. His code name: Captain Atom. He was never sure if the military realized the phonetic irony of the name. Probably not; the military machine had no sense of humor.
Displaced from his own era by almost two decades, Captain Adam found himself dazed by a world that had progressed without him.
To him, Robert J. Kennedy's presidential run had just been announced.
Riots and protests were breaking out on college campuses across the country in angry reply to the Vietnam "conflict".
A few weeks ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated.
A few weeks ago.
A few weeks ago, give or take twenty years.
He felt lost. Where had his world gone, and what had it been replaced by? "Cell" phones. Computers. CDs. And what were those . . . noises . . . that people called music now?
But the ebb and flow of society's trends paled compared to the changes in Nate's family. Angela had died . . . after remarrying. Marrying someone else! His Angela! Peggy was twenty-three and had vague, wistful memories of her father. Randy was twenty-six, had begun a military career, and detested his father for the traitor he believed him to be.
Nate, thanks to his leap through time, was still twenty-eight.
He tried to reconnect with his children, but had difficulty even finding them, due to the fact that his commanding officer, General Eiling, was also Angela's second husband and the stepfather of his children. Nate did manage to renew his relationship with his daughter, to some extent, and she seemed happy to have him back. But Randy, when at last Nathaniel met with him, scowled and stared and called him "Captain Adam." That hurt . . . "Captain Adam", as if Nate hadn't been the one who had helped him build a tree fort and taught him to ride a bike.
But he kept telling his son that he was innocent of the treason charges, and that he would prove it. Somehow. He didn't know quite where to start, but Nate wasn't about to let that stop him. Once in a while he managed to wrangle a meeting out of Randy (although all too often under the watchful sneer of General Eiling) and update him on his progress, which was usually not much. No one remembered a twenty year old court martial. Memories had faded, records had been purged, and the few people who seemed willing to help him kept turning up dead, leaving Nate feeling guilty and depressed.
On this particular evening in early June, Nate flipped morosely through a file of tattered newspaper clippings, his fingers catching at the tattered edges of the yellowed, slightly asymmetrical rectangles of paper. There was nothing in the manila folder that he had not read a dozen times over, but he was faced with the double quandary of wanting to do something about clearing his name and not having the slightest idea how to go about it. So he sat in his apartment with the window closed on the sunset burnishing the maple trees, staring wearily at the half-memorized articles as newsprint stained his fingers.
He was about to give up for the night when the phone rang. Telephones, like everything else, had progressed to the point where Nate felt that he would never truly be comfortable around them again, and this one had a particularly piercing ring to boot. One day Nate had tried to lower the volume on it, but his experiment only succeeded in making it even shriller. As a result, he hurried over to the receiver so as to stop the damn thing as quickly as possible.
"Hello?" he said cautiously, half expecting to hear General Eiling bark out an order for "Captain Atom" to appear somewhere on the double to clean up the military's latest mess.
"Hello." It was not the General, although the voice had something of the Eiling's coolness and arrogance in it.
"Oh!" Nate sat up with sudden eagerness. Pinning the receiver between his head and his shoulder, he reached for the main body of the telephone and pulled it over as well, just to make sure nothing would disturb the precious call. "Hello!"
"Hello . . ." the caller repeated with less enthusiasm than before, which was saying something.
Nate realized he'd better get on with the conversation before he ended up talking to a dial tone. "So . . . Randy! You called!"
"Yes."
"On the telephone!"
A somewhat irritated, static-filled sigh. "Yes, Captain. On the telephone."
"Um . . ." His mind raced as he tried to think of what to say. Randy had called! He hadn't done that since . . . since . . . since 1966, when he had called the base crying to announce, through his lisp, that he had lost his first tooth. But he had brightened right up when Nate told him the tooth fairy would come at night to leave him a quarter and a new comic. Later Nate would learn how hard it was to stuff a comic under the pillow of a sleeping boy without crumpling all the pages. Randy was always very insistent that his comics be pristine . . .
"Captain? Are you still there?"
"Uh? Ah . . . yes. Yes! I'm here. And . . . you wanted to talk with me?" He couldn't suppress a rising note of hope in his voice. You wanted to talk with me? I miss you, Randy . . .
"Yes, well . . ." His voice was stiff, twenty-six going on fifty. "It was Margaret's idea."
Nate was on the verge of asking who Margaret was, but quickly bit back the question when he remembered it was what everyone called Peggy now. His daughter, at least, had welcomed him back. Even if she had regarded him with amused exasperation when he had given her a yo-yo. He didn't see what was so funny. She had always liked yo-yos . . . "Is Peg--Margaret--there?"
"Not right now, no."
"Oh."
"Did you need to speak to her?"
"No, no, not really," Nate said hastily, as it sounded like Randy would welcome any excuse to hang up.
"Oh. Well . . ." A fuzz of static as Randy drew a breath. "Margaret thought . . . that is to say . . ." A pause, then he spat out in an edged voice, "She wondered if you might want to . . . go out to dinner or something. With me. Next week."
"YES! I mean . . . yes. That would be . . . yes, I'd like that." Nate worked hard to keep his voice from trembling. "Next week. Any . . . any particular day . . .?" Still holding the phone, Nate stood and walked towards the kitchen, where a calendar with a bright picture of puppy dogs was tacked to the wall.
"Whenever," Randy said disdainfully.
"Ah . . . okay. Okay. Hang on . . ." The cradle of the phone had reached its limit, so Nate carefully set it on the floor as he tried to reach the calendar. Why on earth had he hung it at the far end of the kitchen? The spiraling cord connecting the receiver to the cradle s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d as Nate leaned forward, standing on tiptoe as his fingers brushed the month of June. With some effort, he managed to unhook it from its nail. "Next week. How about . . . Saturday? Or . . ."
"Saturday's fine," Randy cut him off. "Seven?"
"Seven--yes, seven is fine."
"Where do you want to go?"
"I don't care," Nate said truthfully. He would've eaten at the city dump if it meant spending time with his son. Besides, most of the restaurants he knew were gone anyway.
"Luigi's?"
"Okay. Sure. Ah . . . Randy?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
A long pause. "Thank Margaret." A longer pause. Then, more coldly than ever, "Goodbye, Captain."
"Goodbye, son," Nate said, a little bit sadly, but Randy had already hung up.
Still . . . he had called. Even if it had been Peggy's idea, he had called. So maybe . . . maybe there was hope. Nate replaced the phone and swept the time-frayed newspaper clippings back into their folder with an energetic motion. He was excited. He was afraid. What did the future hold?