One of my favorite things about Warren in the movie was that he spoke Chinese with his boss at the Paper Lantern. I chose to have him speak Mandarin over any other language spoken in China because that's what most of my Chinese friends speak. I don't know what language he actually spoke in the movie.
Once again, thank you to everyone who is reading this story!
Disclaimer: I don't own Sky High.
They got together in the summer, and it's Christmas now. It's been long enough that she really shouldn't still wake up and look for him like he would have left in the night.
It's been long enough that she really shouldn't be surprised to find he is fluent in Mandarin.
"Since when can you speak Mandarin?" She's taken aback, and slightly annoyed, that he managed to keep this from her for so long. He grins at her, crooked and proud, and she shoves him a little.
"I learned from my grandma's family," he says, laughing and shoving her back hard enough that she stumbles a few steps over. She glares at him, huffing a laugh. "I worked for my great-aunt for a long time when I was younger."
"That's right," she says, remembering - "You worked at that Chinese restaurant out in the suburbs."
He nods, still grinning. It wasn't often that he could get away with something like this - sometimes, it feels like she is too observant for her own good.
"Well, damn, son." She looks him up and down. "Any other tricks I should know about?"
He leans down to whisper in her ear -
"I think I could show you a couple."
She snickers at his tone, hitting him on the arm.
"I don't know, buddy, I think I've seen everything you've got."
He grabs her hand before she can hit him again, and they end up holding hands as he introduces her to the rest of his family.
It's him and his mom, usually, but a few of his mom's cousins have come by for a Christmas gathering, from the Peace side as well as the Liu side. She meets one of the cousins, a lady who took over the restaurant after her grandparents retired, and another - someone she recognizes as Hypno-man, an older generation hero who must be from the Peace side of the family.
There aren't that many, and it's easy enough to walk a half step behind Warren, like his shadow, so she does not really have to talk that much herself. She likes seeing him interact with his family, especially the Chinese side. It's like seeing a different person in her boyfriend, this awkward young man who still gets scolded for having long hair and laughs uncomfortably at the well-meaning but off-color remarks of the older generation. And, she's not shy enough to deny that hearing him speak Chinese is hot.
She ends up roped into a debate on which superhero could defeat the Commander - an old party pastime, especially among the generation of contemporaries to the older superhero. Someone says Electroshock, but she laughs and shakes her head.
"Flicker, maybe, but never Electroshock," she says, meeting Warren's eyes as her conversation partner vehemently defends his chosen hero. She shrugs, unwilling to go any further, and is rescued by her boyfriend just as she is starting to consider blinking herself across the room.
It's an interesting mix, both heroes and civilians in the same room. Everyone is pretending to be normal, though, for the benefit of those who actually are.
It's a relief when the evening ends, and it's just her and Warren and his mom cleaning up and washing dishes and sweeping floors. There's something relaxing about doing housework with holiday music blaring from the speakers. Usually, she does all of her cleaning in the silence of a moment.
She likes his mom. She's beautiful, petite and strong with long dark hair only lightly streaked with grey, and her power is just as strong as it was twenty five years ago. She's an empath, one of the strongest in recent history, and she was a formidable hero in her prime.
It would be a shame to see her as a psychiatrist now if she didn't know exactly how it felt to want nothing to do with the superhero world. She looks at her boyfriend sometimes and wishes she wanted to give herself to strangers like that - but she can't give more of herself to people who would spit on her and turn her away, she just can't.
Lina Peace has a generous heart, but she, too, has felt the stings of fate, and she is not quite generous enough to let it have its way with her. She defied everyone when she fell in love with Barron Battle, even knowing what he did with his power. He, too, to hear Lina tell it, defied everyone to fall for her. He gave up his villainy when she got pregnant, she says, and really - who is there to contradict her?
The Commander found him only because he had stopped moving. There was no big heist, no final battle, just a knock on the door and a plea deal so that his lover and their three-year-old son could grow up free.
Warren never told his girlfriend any of this, but he does not stop his mother from telling the story after one too many glasses of eggnog. He loves his mother, and it shows.
It makes her heart ache, too, for reasons she does not really want to consider. It's no use dreaming of what could have been, for him or for her.