Chapter Twenty Three

Return

Fortunately for my parents, the snow that fell when Dinah had dropped me off stopped after about an hour and melted slightly. I played a good ten rounds of UNO with Uncle Leonard, and got this feeling of glee from him. I was surprised when I lost seven out of ten of those games. Of course, he tricked me by claiming he was a beginner and didn't know how to play and leading me on by letting me win the first round, then beating me five times in a row. After our UNO-athon, we watched TV, some crime show. I'd lost interest in the first few minutes, but zoned in and out at the good plot points. When the show was five minutes to being over, the phone rang. I jumped up faster than if a bee had stung me in the ass to go answer it. My mother sounded happy to hear from me, but exhausted by the flight. "I'm just calling to say we've landed and we shouldn't be more than an hour and a half give or take the traffic in the snow."

"How was your flight?"

"More turbulence than I was comfortable with, but we'll talk about all of that when we get there. We'll see you in a bit."

"Okay. Bye Mom, I love you."

"You know I love you too. Bye Sweetie." I hung up feeling like a kid. I really did. As far as I could remember, I hadn't been away from them that long, and it was weird to me. My uncle and I spent that hour watching another crime show and I watched it all the way through because the main suspect was a well known vigilante' who thought it was in his right to kill this guy who had raped this girl in the streets. Turned out that it was not the vigilante', but some other chick, his step sister or something, who he was taking the fall for. He still had to be locked away for the two or three other murders he claimed were just. The whole episode reminded me of my friends in the Clocktower, and I wondered if the snowy weather was enough to keep the bad guys inside for the night. I imagined Dinah and Ms. Gordon at their little kitchen area with mugs of tea while Helena looked in the cupboard for some animal cookies or some other tasty treat she'd stashed away, sending Dinah a look of death just in case my friend had filched them. I smiled at that thought, then wondered what a family night was like for them. Did they rent movies (or stream them over the Delphi) to watch? Did they have their family time during dinner?

When the door to the house opened almost forty-five minutes later, I shook the thoughts away. Both Uncle Leonard and I got up to greet them with the thought of 'that was quicker than we all thought', Leonard grabbing my mother's bag (which was new and probably bought in Vegas) and hugged her, while I hugged my dad. "I missed you both so much," I said, close to tears. I was almost shaking with relief.

"We missed you too Sweetheart," my dad said. Then I hugged my mother, who brushed hair behind my ear and seemed to see me for the first time. She smiled at me and a tear fell down her cheek. Seeing her cry made what tears I tried to fight back fall.

"You're becoming a very beautiful woman, Gabrielle," she said, pulling me towards her again. The tears continued to stream down my face. It was physical proof that they were in fact okay. I looked over my mother's shoulder at my father, who nodded and smiled his small smile in agreement.

"Thank you," I whispered, to who, I wasn't sure, but I was grateful to them all. My mother backed away, and Uncle Leonard cleared his throat.

"We have so much to talk about."

"Is it about..." I was afraid to say the exact words I wanted to say, so I chose instead, "the past?" I looked down.

"Yes," my father said, his voice as soft as mine.

"Uncle Leonard, will you stay?" I asked, which I am sure surprised everyone, if I'd read their looks correctly. I felt I needed them all there to tell me what happened. He looked to my parents again, who nodded at him before he nodded as well. Then he went to the kitchen and made sandwiches and filled up the water pitcher. I joined him and got four glasses and plates out and put them on the table. My uncle nodded his head towards the living room and I set them on the coffee table instead. After the sandwiches were eaten, and after Uncle Leonard had refilled the water pitcher for the second time, there was silence. My parents looked at me, but I had closed my door a few minutes after they said they had much to discuss with me. I wasn't sure why I did, really. I was afraid to see the exact images of whatever it was that had happened to me. I didn't want to hear what I wasn't supposed to. I wanted to prove to myself that their word would be enough, and that I trusted them enough to tell me everything. I could tell that my parents were trying to find the strength to talk to me.

My mother finally looked at me, her eyes deep, seeming to find my secrets within me, and she shook her head. "I don't know where to begin."

"Well, maybe..." I said, taking a deep breath, "maybe I should start. I can... tell you what I know and you can fill in the rest?" I asked. I almost regretted asking, they went so still, but after an exchange between them, my parents both nodded. I sighed, feeling more relief, then I told them all I could without naming anyone but those present at the time and my grandparents. When I was done speaking, they seemed at a loss for a reply. I could tell they were surprised by how much I actually knew, but only through stringing bits and pieces together. Once I had told them that I had leaned to use my powers only when I wanted to, and that I preferred to keep it closed because I didn't want to see more than I had to, Uncle Leonard seemed more comfortable around me. I saw stiff shoulders relax instantly after I'd said that. "I wish the Institute wasn't destroyed," I said.

"What? Destroyed?" My mother asked, looking baffled. "Was the branch in Bludhaven destroyed when the city... went crazy?"

"I heard it- the entire organization was destroyed." I said, mimicking my mother's look. Maybe it was then someone could say we looked alike.

"No, there are branches all over the US, and who knows? Possibly in other countries too," my father said, and my gaze went to him. "Only one branch of the Institute is gone now, and that was the one you had gone to, but that will all be explained." My parents exchanged another look while I thought about this. Why would Ms. Gordon lie? Did she know about there being more than one branch? She had to. How else would her Metahuman Database get to be so big? She's certainly not stupid. Did she think I was? Did Dinah and Helena know that Ms. Gordon was lying to me when she told me it was destroyed? Why would they go along with that lie? When my father spoke again, I forced my hurt feelings away, and focused on his words. "I might as well continue, since I'm already on a role. I guess... everything began really the day I was born, but I won't go into that. It was when I had gone off to college that the story- our story picked up.

"I've always been in love with the water as a kid. Anything that had to do with water- swimming, surfing, water sports- I did it all. I was a swimming champion in high school, which was how I got my scholarship to UCLA. When classes got a little rough, I noticed odd things would happen, mostly when I went to the pool. The water would seem to ripple and make waves even if I hadn't put any limbs in yet. No one else would be there. In the shower, I'd see water part in two directions, and on my really stressful days, it would flow around by body, but never touch, even when I moved my arms and legs to try and reach it. I never told anyone about it, but in my third year, I met your mother, and I fell madly in love." At this, he looked at my mother, who blushed. It made me wonder why Uncle Leonard seemed to think they weren't still in love with each other. I saw it even then, and looking at Leonard, he seemed surprised as well. Maybe he didn't know. Or maybe he did, and when they went to Vegas and got married again, it all changed, and they realized (after agreeing to tell me everything) that they did love each other, and that whatever happened shouldn't change that. "I brought her over to meet my parents, and we were both so nervous. Your grandmother was always a little overprotective of me, being an only child, and she never approved of some of my previous dates. No need to worry, my mother loved her the moment they met, and everything was good. Until the conversation turned to majors in college and what I was planning, which I still wasn't sure then. I got anxious, and suddenly the water in everyone's glass- including the ice- floated out of the cup, and stayed in a sort of orb above the table. It scared me, knowing that I had done that, and it was then that your grandma told me. She'd always known that this strange gene would pass to me but didn't know when I would show the signs of it."

My uncle leaned forward and tapped my knee with a smirk on his face. "Sound familiar?" He got a small slap from my mother, who was right next to him.

"Hush. Go on, Jason."

"I was sure that your mother would run away screaming, but she told me calmly as she held me later that she'd just found out not long before that that her brother's new boyfriend could produce and manipulate electrical currants from his hands. He had just told Leonard about it." My father looked at my uncle. "You sure you want me telling her about this, man?"

"I won't be able to, and she needs to know everything now." My father nodded.

"Mark worked for an upcoming organization for metahumans, a new term then given to us by some organization or another claiming we were dangerous and so on. Mark wanted a PhD in child medicine but his main interest was always anything dealing with metahumans. Anyway, we all graduated, your mom and I moved in together, got married, and almost two years after the honeymoon, we had our first child... A boy..." He tried to swallow the imaginary bricks in his throat, but couldn't seem to continue.

"Avery Jason Andrews," my mother said, continuing for him. "You were right when you assumed you had a brother. Avery was constantly moving; even before he was born, he would kick and punch and move about. As a baby and toddler, he would get into everything, even more than some of the other kids we'd been around. That changed when he was about three weeks away from turning four. That was when you were born. When Avery first saw you, I think it was love at first sight. He'd set it upon himself to make sure we were taking care of you correctly. We knew as well as your grandmother did that you were both going to end up with the metahuman gene, but what surprised us was how quickly Avery's power had showed up. One night, Avery came into the room telling us that you needed us. He wouldn't say why, or maybe he didn't know exactly why, but right as we got to your crib you had started to cry. Then he just said for us to hold you, and you would be okay, so we did, and sure enough, you were back to sleeping within a minute or two. He was so in tune to your emotions, and sometimes ours as well, but he read you the best. You did everything together. As soon as you could talk, his name was your first word that wasn't just baby babble."

"It was?" I asked, surprised. I was told it was 'Da-duh'.

"Well, 'Avie' was. That was what we called him from then on, and he didn't mind it. I remember Avery's first day of school. You cried all day, and I didn't know what you wanted. All you knew to say was 'Avie', and that was all you did, cry and scream for 'Avie'. Only when you saw Avery did you stop. All he said was 'She missed me,'. That was a no brainer." My mother smiled weakly. "Because your birthdays were so close together, we would pick a day in between the two and celebrate them both. It was on you guys' sixth/tenth birthday party at the beach that it... happened."

"When Avery...?" I asked, and my parents both nodded. There was silence for a moment, then I looked at my dad, willing him to meet my eyes. 'Look at me,' I thought, but not directly to him, 'Look at me and tell me what happened.' My father nodded his head to the ground, then looked up at me, and then he nodded again.

"Yes. Everyone was there with us that day. We'd set up an umbrella. Both sets of grandparents, Uncle Leonard, and at the time, Uncle Mark, all set up the party while you, Avery, your mom and I all played in the water. We all had the cake and ice cream, you two opened up presents, and then you and Avery went back into the water while Grandpa Andrews watched over you. I'm not exactly sure what got Avery out so far. I think one of your toys had floated away, and he'd gone after it. I heard my father shouting for Avery to get back in, but he was struggling to swim. I ran into the water, but in my fear, my powers caused the water to ripple and make waves, which only made it harder for him to swim back. I used my powers to move the water around him, to lower it enough for him to swim better or even walk along the bottom, and for a few seconds, it worked." My father stopped talking, and the guilt and grief was there. I could feel it strongly then. He looked at his hands and played with his wedding ring. Quietly he said, "Something happened. I lost my concentration. The water crashed down on him and he... he-" His shoulders shook, and I knew what had happened.

"I tried to get to him, even when Jason had moved the water, but I couldn't get to him in time. It was too late," my uncle said, then he looked me in the eyes. "Unfortunately, there is more, but if you want, we can stop now and tell you more in the morning." I shook my head.

"If you can tell me now..." I said, getting uncomfortable at the sight of my father's tears. "I've waited for a couple of months now for the truth, and..." I looked away from my uncle. "And I think you've been waiting a while to tell me the truth."

"True," Uncle Leonard said. These seemed to be the magic words, and my mother caught my eye.

"Nothing stayed the same after that. For days we all cried for our loss, but you... It broke my heart to see you acting the way you did. You didn't ever want to sleep, and when you did, you had nightmares. You never let go of this green toy boat, which was the toy Avery had gone out to get for you. It had washed up by itself later when the ambulance had come, the irony. You were so afraid of water that you refused to go near the bathtub. We had a half bath with a sink and toilet, but the only way you would get clean is if I had a small bowl of warm soapy water and a wash cloth. You wouldn't let your father near you, and it hurt him so bad." I looked at my father, and felt horrible. Though I didn't remember that, thinking of how I would feel in his shoes made me feel hurt, too. Feeling this, I knew that the memories were hurting him. He tried to save Avery, and that guilt of failing him must have tore him up then, but me being afraid of him must not have made the guilt go away at all.

"It was real bad," Uncle Leonard said, and nodded to emphasize his words. "Your parents tried everything, but nothing helped. Then one night when I was living with you to help out around the house, you woke up screaming, and I mean, it was loud. The Boogey Man, Bloody Mary, Freddy Kruger, Jason and the Easter Bunny were all after you. You wouldn't speak, not for a long time, but when you did, you kept saying, 'I killed Avie,' " I saw that my father had gone completely still, and I stared at him. He was tense again, and I knew he didn't like this part, but I sensed something else from him, the sense that he wasn't saying something. "Your powers started to show then, and the fact that you could see everyone else's memory of that day was making it worse. So all of us adults got together. You were asleep on the floor, the first time you slept more than a couple of hours since before Avery drowned. We told everyone not to think about it in your presence, so you didn't have any nightmares. It appeared that when we thought about it when you were asleep, you woke up with the nightmares. If we thought of something else, your sleep was almost peaceful. Together we came up with the idea of possibly repressing the memory of what happened through hypnotherapy. Well, Grandma and Grandpa Cook didn't like that. They didn't think it would work, but we convinced them that it would if we got rid of anything that would remind you of Avery. So we set a plan in motion. The week after that was spent slowly remodeling your grandparents' houses, rearranging furniture, taking down pictures of Avery, getting rid of toys you used to have over there... You stayed with each of your grandparents for a few days at a time while we did the same to the condo and got rid of anything with significant memories attached to them. Well, they're in storage now, right?" My parents murmured their agreement.

"When all that was done, it seemed to help calm you down. We took a few days to train ourselves not to think of Avery or anything like that. It was rough, but we wanted you to be happy again. We went to a friend of Mark's, who had turned his power of hypnosis into his career, and he could repress anything for a long time. He did this for free as a favor to Mark. You went home that afternoon happier than we'd seen you in almost three months. You still had your powers, and you were good controlling what you could or couldn't hear, something I think you taught yourself, but we still kept songs in our heads, even the really annoying ones we knew would be stuck there for days, just to keep you from reading something that you weren't supposed to. Your grandparents, the Cooks, moved away not long after that, and Mark got a transfer from the San Diego branch of the Institute, to a new branch in a small city I'd never heard of before then called Bludhaven, and I went with him. I don't know much else except for the fact that the repressed memories lasted about three years, when it was supposed to be longer than that."

"Three and a half, and Dr. Sage had said that his hypnosis would last longer than that, even." Dad said, lifting his head. My mother slowly stroked his arm, and he seemed to draw strength and courage from the touch. It made me wish Dinah was there so I could be protected by her arms as I listened to this, knowing that the story was about to get worse. "You yourself had just turned ten, and in the first month of the fourth grade, your class went on a field trip to the San Diego Zoo. I was a chaperone, and together we'd gone to all of the exhibits. We were at the polar bear exhibit, and they were playing pretty rough. They got rowdy, and were splashing. About a cup or two of water got you, and- I don't know, your face went from happy to terrified. Again, the only thing you would say was 'I killed Avie.' You went right back to the way you were right after Avery died. For some reason though, you weren't too afraid of the water to take baths, as long as your mother was there. Mark's friend, Dr. Sage, had followed your uncles to Bludhaven, but had suggested we go to Dr. Alder at the San Diego branch. He had the ability to take memories from someone and restore it whenever they wanted it back. So we had gone to him in the Institute, and he had taken away the memories of Avery. He had a regular hypnotherapist hypnotize you so that you wouldn't ask any questions about your lack of a memory-"

"When did this happen?" My uncle was staring at my father in disbelief. Apparently, he didn't know about that. If that was the case why would my father keep that from him? Was he against it?

"That same day." My father didn't look at Uncle Leonard or me. No one said a word for the next minute or two. "Well," my father said slowly, "you went back to being happy, but the thing was, you lost your powers. You forgot completely that you even had powers. I stayed in the Institute for a while after that. I wanted to learn to control my powers, but I had no clue how to go about doing that, so I learned with a few of the children who were also trying to learn. I wanted to, in turn, teach you how to control your powers a little better than the way you had. So, while Dr. Alder stifled through your memories to get the one memory of your power back, I was in a different room trying to get better with my own powers. It was the strangest thing... It was as if he found that memory-or one close to it, but it was blocked off to him. I don't know why, but he had the memory inside his own head, he had taken it, but he couldn't access it once he had it. He could only hold on to it..." I frowned in confusion.

"We had planned to give you your memories when you turned eighteen, and I wasn't prepared to give this talk with you for another two years... but well... You never got your powers back because Dr. Alder wasn't sure if the memory hiding your powers was one of the memories that would trigger thoughts of Avery. So we left it. But Dr. Alder was fascinated by you. He couldn't figure out why he couldn't get to this memory. Why he couldn't see it as more than a blank piece of paper resting within his mind, which is how he described the memories. He was convinced that you still had your powers within you, and that what he had was merely a memory of having and using the powers, not the powers by itself, so he started up a series of tests with our permission to see if there was another way you bring your powers out. I was fine with it. We planned to go to these tests, erase the memory of the tests so the thoughts of the Institute won't scare you. All he seemed to do was give you small blood tests, 'do you see what I think you're seeing', sort of tests, but when I was gone... Gabby I'm, so sorry. When I left you in Dr. Alder's care, I didn't know what he was doing to you. The tests were... horrible, and he would simply erase the memory of that day.

"The main thing they were trying to do was to scare the powers out of you, or make some emotion strong enough that your powers would surface. That was the common way people started to notice that their powers were real." I saw both of my parents get a look of almost murderous proportions while Uncle Leonard's eyes got dark. It was silent, and I felt uneasy. What could have happened to make them this angry?

"Then he... He got the idea that you should relive the day Avery died. At least, I think that was what he was going for, because I was in my training when I felt this... fear. I felt I had to go to you. When I did, you were unconscious next to a large tank of water in a room they never had you tested in before. Your Uncle Mark was there, shouting at Dr. Alder and a few staff. I don't know, I lost it. I got so angry that they would use your fear of water against you without my permission or even supervision for protection if things went wrong, which, from the looks of it, they had. Anyway... The water in the tank sloshed about, and I made it leave the tank. I made it destroy a few things, computers mostly. I think a man or two were knocked around pretty good. I got out of there. I took you and got out of there. Not long after that, they closed it down. I am not sure why they didn't just keep it running after that, and I am sure they damage could have been fixed up, but they closed it down and destroyed the building. They must have rebuilt it or found a new location in San Diego, because a month ago, a doctor that I didn't recognize, a younger doctor from the Institute called about records they still had on you."

"What about Dr. Alder? Do you know if he lived?"

"I don't see why he didn't. I doubt anyone drowned that day." I looked at them all one by one before asking the one question that had been burning within me ever since my theory of having my thoughts taken, not repressed became a reality.

"Do you know what you would have said or done if this doctor had died before I turned eighteen, when you had planned for me to get my memories back from him?"