Our current 'state' is the dictatorship of evil. We know that already, I hear you object, and we don't need you to reproach us for it yet again. But, I ask you, if you know that, then why don't you act? Why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you, in public and in private, of one right after another, until one day nothing, absolutely nothing, remains but the machinery of the state, under the command of criminals and drunkards?
-White Rose Leaflet 3, 1943
SunG0d: nice quote
MissJazz: thanks, I know ur a fan of the White Rose
SunG0d: now Asim's gone, the Jasmine Brotherhood should do something
don't u think so?
MissJazz: I think that name is stupid. Because, clearly we are not all dudes
SunG0d: you could suggest a better one
No ideas?
Ok, then
MissJazz: :-p
SunG0d: the Aisteiada is talking about reinstating the Constitution and elections and all that
we should be there to represent the youth
I mean, the Constitution was written in like 1978, it could probably use some updates
I'd go, but…
MissJazz: ur in jail
It is so bogus that ur mom is still keeping you on house arrest after everything you did at the Palace
SunG0d: right?!
wait
who still says "bogus"
ru really a 45-year-old man
MissJazz: *eyeroll emoji*
Don't change the subject. You saved her life.
SunG0d: I did, didn't I
MissJazz: ur not a kid anymore, ur, like, a hero
Amon blushed. It wasn't like he wanted a parade or anything, but it was nice to hear somebody say it - well, to see somebody write it on a private Discord server, which was as close as he got to having real friends.
He kept having flashes of what had happened that night at the palace. He'd be listening to music or picking rubble out of the streets with Karim and suddenly - Bang! - there he was again. Seeing that man aim at his mom. Pulling the trigger. Watching him jerk and fall down. It gave Amon an edgy, nervy feeling he didn't like. But seeing it in writing made it real - he was a hero. He had done the right thing, and at least someone was proud of him.
MissJazz: so how are you passing the time in lockup
SunG0d: babysitting my uncle
MissJazz: Karim?
SunG0d: Different uncle. Mom's uncle.
He's from some tiny village in Pakistan
MissJazz: what's he doing here?
SunG0d: his house got destroyed in the floods
MissJazz: out of the flood, into the revolution
SunG0d: Yeah, he's got great luck. Hope it runs in the family.
he barely speaks English
I'm supposed to keeping from setting the house on fire trying to make tea or something
MissJazz: Flush the toilet. Blow. His. Mind.
*exploding head emoji*
Amon laughed softly in spite of himself at the thought of introducing Adam to indoor plumbing, but sobered up real quick when he realized he'd probably have to do that at some point today.
Dragging Adam behind his back made Amon feel like a douchebag, but this…human Adam, he guessed you could call him…was so different from regular Adam that he really did feel like some weird old relative he'd been saddled with. Human Adam didn't even look like the same person - he and Amon were almost the same height. It had been extremely disorienting for Amon when his mom had dumped human Adam at the apartment, meeting those dark, unreadable eyes right in front of his face.
SunG0d: he's ok, he's just quiet
And kind of weird
MissJazz: weird how
SunG0d: he just…stares
MissJazz: 0_0
SunG0d: exactly
Maybe it's because he never had a phone, or a tv or anything
MissJazz: he's thinking those quality Deep Thoughts (™)
SunG0d: right now, he's thinking about how to clean up all the superhero damage in this apartment
MissJazz: You're having your ancient uncle clean? For shame!
SunG0d: he likes it!
MissJazz: ur a bad host
Amon looked up to check on human Adam's progress. The man had taken his borrowed shirt off at some point - probably because in his time shirts hadn't been invented - which made Amon only slightly less uncomfortable than Karim taking his shirt off. Human Adam had surprisingly good abs for an old guy, probably from all the unremitting slave labor. He also had long scars down his back from shoulder to hip, layers of them criss-crossing each other. Probably from the unremitting slave labor.
He'd been sweeping up all the plaster and brick dust in the living room, moving with the deliberate, steady pace of a man who'd worked construction his whole life. Some of Karim's friends were like that. They could go all day at that pace, never hurrying. One of those friends had taped some thick construction plastic up over the largest of the holes in the wall, and the misty light coming through them gave the room the look of an overexposed photograph.
Human Adam reached a shelf that had fallen down, braced himself and hefted it back to vertical with a grunt. The man was tough - maybe not car-lifting strong, but that shelf was heavy. He bent to pick up a picture frame that had tumbled face-down to the floor…and cut his thumb on the glass. Adam was staring at his hand, at the blood, forehead wrinkled as if in confusion.
"Oh, shit," Amon said.
SunG0d: cleaning accident, brb
MissJazz: told you so. Bad. Host.
Amon closed his laptop and went to Adam's side.
"Let me see," he said, in halting Khandaqi. Being homeschooled by the founder of the Khandaqi Language Reclamation Project had its perks, although his accent probably sucked. Adam must have understood because he held out his hand. The blood was welling quickly. Soon it would drip on the floor.
"Oh, shit," Amon said again, in English, then "Come with me," in Khandaqi.
He led Adam to the bathroom sink, put his hand under the tap and turned on the water. Adam jerked back a little in surprise.
Flush the toilet. Blow. His. Mind.
Amon swallowed a laugh. He got the bandaids out from behind the mirror, dried Adam's hand with a towel before remembering that he shouldn't do that, and dabbed the cut with iodine before putting a bandaid gently on Adam's thumb. The cut wasn't as deep as Amon had thought. Adam watched silently through the whole process.
Staring.
"Good?" Amon asked.
Adam nodded.
"Back to work?"
He nodded again.
"I'll help."
Like you should have been already, Amon's conscience said, in his mother's voice, as usual.
They went back to the living room and worked in silence for a bit. Several pieces of furniture had been reduced to splintered wood, and Amon helped Adam break them into manageable pieces and haul them to the dumpster downstairs. The man could carry an incredible amount. Amon deflected his neighbors' inquiries on the way down with the "my mom's uncle, no English" line. They got back up the stairs for the third and final time, Amon wiping sweat from his brow and trying not to look out breath in front of the Amazing 5,000 Year Old Man, when Adam finally spoke.
"The man in the picture," he said. "Is he your father?"
Adam might have looked different, but his voice was exactly the same, which was a little unnerving. He pointed to the picture he's replaced on the shelf, the one that had cut him. It was Amon's father, with an embarrassing soul patch, young and happy, holding baby Amon as a little blue-blanketed lump.
"Yeah," Amon said, in English, then in Khandaqi. "Yes."
Adam's silence had the gravitational pull of a neutron star, and Amon couldn't help but fill it.
"He died when I was…when I had six years," Amon struggled a little with the unfamiliar phrasing. "He was killed. One day he didn't come home. My mother cried when she thought I was asleep."
Adam's face was very still, but his eyes seemed to….deepen, somehow. Amon suddenly felt his throat tightening.
"A few weeks later they found his body in a ditch. She didn't tell me, but I heard. He'd been shot forty-four times, and his hands…" Amon cleared his throat. "After that my mother wouldn't send me to school anymore," he continued in English "so that's why I don't have any friends."
He took a deep breath and went back to Khandaqi.
"The men who killed my father worked for Asim, so..thank you."
After that, Amon hauled the trash can to his bedroom to work on the chaos in there, and filled it with chunks of drywall while fiercely wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
"She worries." Adam's voice made Amon start. He spoke slowly so Amon could follow what he was saying. "Your mother."
My accent really does suck, Amon thought.
"It is the worst thing to lose a child," Adam continued softly. "Worse than anything. Forgive her for her fear."
Adam's disconcertingly direct gaze was, thank goodness, pointed away from Amon as he dropped that line. Amon took a move out of Adam's playbook and nodded silently in response. He remembered something Carter Hall had told his mother on the plane. Adam had lost his own son and destroyed the original city of Shirtuta in his anger. That's how he ended up locked under a mountain, which didn't seem entirely fair.
Adam had taken over cleanup while Amon was distracted, rolling up his rugs and taking them to the balcony to shake out the dust over the street. Amon looked up at his walls. The superheroes on them were battered - sliced by Hawman's razor-edged wings, punched through - in one case, singed by Adam's lighting. I could probably sell that one on eBay, he thought briefly, before chuckling to himself. By the time Adam returned with the dust-free rugs, Amon was taking all the posters down and stuffing them in the trashcan.
Adam put his hand over Amon's, saying something the boy didn't catch, then, more slowly, "They are beautiful."
Amon shrugged. "They're…for children."
Adam nodded, and helped him take down the rest, gently pulling out the thumbtacks and rolling the posters up with careful hands.
"Maybe," Amon said, before he really thought it over. "Maybe I'll put up a picture of you."
At that Adam let out what Amon thought might be a laugh, a quick "huh" like he'd been elbowed carelessly in the stomach.
Score, Amon thought, absurdly proud of himself. Maybe being stuck with human Adam wasn't so bad.
The door opened and Adam was instantly alert. It was mom, of course. Looking stressed, of course.
"Hi, mom!" He said, going to her. "Check it out. Great progress, huh?"
"Great," she said, distractedly, looking past him to Adam. She switched to Khandaqi. "Put your clothes on. We're going for a walk." She switched back to English. "I need to borrow Adam for a bit."
"Is everything ok?" Amon asked. "How was the meeting? You know, I was thinking, the Jasmine Brotherhood…you know, my friends and I could help with…"
"I'm sorry, Amon." His mother cut him off, handing him some cash from her wallet. "I'll be back tonight. See if anyone's delivering. And don't…"
"Leave the apartment," he finished, sighing.
"Exactly." She gave him a quick kiss on the head and practically shoved the now fully-dressed Adam out the door. And she was gone.
As usual.
MissJazz: hey
hey
hello
hey
u dead?
hey
SunG0d: hey! Sorry
MissJazz: so…cleaning accident, huh
SunG0d: what?
Oh right. He's fine. Just got a cut
Then I felt bad so I helped him a bit
Mom's taking him somewhere so I guess I'm done
MissJazz: that's great, because I just got some primo information
SunG0d: primo? wtf
Who says that
MissJazz: i'm ignoring you
I got the addresses of the police captains
Amon felt like someone had cracked open his chest and poured a cup of ice water into it. Intergang didn't do everything in Khandaq, or even in Shiruta. There weren't enough of them. But there were enough people who would betray, harass and torment their neighbors for money and favors. Some of those people ran the secret prisons - the ones his mom really didn't want him to know about. Raja's cousin had been with the group that liberated Center 38, and he'd posted pictures to the Jasmine Brotherhood's Discord. It was sickening. The guards, local and foreign, had abandoned the "detention center" as soon as the rebels turned up - the people who had done those terrible things were still out there, in the city.
MissJazz: They're probably lying low, hoping for a general amnesty
You know that happened in Chile after Pinochet, right
Men who tortured and killed their own people were let off with no jail time, nothing
For "peace" and "stability"
Would the Aisteiada let that happen? Would his mother? He heard her voice in his head.
Remember the French Revolution Amon. A violent revolution can turn against itself and things end up worse than before. France ended up with an Emperor.
A violent revolution is 50% more likely to fail, Amon.
Politics involves compromise, especially democratic politics. You can't have everything you want all the time, Amon.
All of them meaning "The world sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it, so don't be so childish, Amon."
But she'd been as happy as he had when Adam woke up and started tossing those Intergang thugs off of buildings. Where was her "nonviolence" then? She'd been as happy as anybody else when he'd killed Asim so that bastard couldn't end up in some cushy exile.
MissJazz had attached a file, and when Amon opened it there was a list of four names and their accompanying addresses in the city. One of those names might have killed his father - tortured his father. His mother never told him but he overheard. His father's hands had been, in the words of his mother, "grotesquely mutilated" - every bone broken, every nail torn out. He felt hot, then cold.
SunG0d: this is incredible
What were you thinking
Protests? Put some pressure on the Aisteiada?
The Jasmine Brotherhood had tried things like that before - but when Intergang started shooting at protesters they switched to spray painting slogans, stealing and sabotaging equipment, even distributing old-school zines.
MissJazz: something more direct
I don't want to give people the chance to ignore us because we're kids
Osman got some stuff when they raided the police station
you have the key to your uncle's workshop, right?
Bombs. She was talking about bombs. Amon felt like he was floating above himself. Was this really happening? He knew what his mother would say about this…nothing good…but then Amon thought about Adam. He remembered a line from something he'd read "the wicked will be slain by the breath of God." That night at the Palace, all Asim's evil and wickedness had evaporated into smoke. That couldn't be anything but a good outcome. Adam had been…magically poisoned, or whatever…so he couldn't take care of this himself. But Amon could.
SunG0d: i do
and i've done some wiring with Karim
I think i could make a detonator - i've read up on it
MissJazz: i knew you'd come through
Hero
SunG0d: so…when do you wanna meet?
Would you believe this chapter was harder than the last? Which I guess means my mindset is closer to "5,000 year old" than "15 year old", lol.
Quick geographical note - I am aware that, in the comics, Khandaq is on the Sinai Peninsula. In the real world, I don't think the international community would allow such a complete shitshow to be going on with no US military intervention so close to Israel. Shitshows with US military intervention are allowed, lol. I have moved Khandaq to be between Pakistan and India. Many cultures and religions have met in that area - India has some of the oldest religions in the world - and the geography seems right, based on the scenery in the film. I welcome any hot takes in the comments, of course.
Disclaimer - I was very much trying not to make Amon a stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorist. I hope that I showed that what can happen to him can happen to anybody. In his situation it feels logical, and honestly, I might do something like that in his shoes. One thing I loved in the movie was the tragic inevitability of violence. Adam wakes up very disoriented, lashes out at the first person who touches him, and everything just escalates from there. Now Amon is himself being drawn in.