Well, I'm sorry for the long hiatus. I did a little work on my other story, and then I discovered a new anime and…well.. Sorry! But I promise I never forgot about you or this particular adventure and I will not leave you hanging forever! So, without further ado…
Oh, wait, there's some ado left. I don't own Static Shock or the characters except the ones I invent, legal blah blah, etc. There. Now, on to the main event!
Richie's face felt hot and he knew the blood pulsing in his ears was affecting the appearance of the pigmentation of his skin. Even brilliant, he still felt inadequate when he made a mistake and got laughed at by the class. But it isn't my fault, his mind rallied itself, trying to restore some semblance of his dignity, even as he wanted to crawl under the proverbial rock and die. Richie's brain was getting better, or worse, depending on how you looked at it, and once again, it had landed him in trouble.
It had been a week since the attack on the bookstore, and Richie was no closer to figuring out who had been behind it or why the place had been attacked at all. His frustration made his mind even more chaotic, even harder to control, especially in class, where his attention wandered the most. This time, it was history that had lost his attention so thoroughly. While the teacher had been talking about the events leading up to World War I, Richie had started wondering about the "Nature versus Nurture" argument and was trying to track the aggression of mankind in relation to possessing territory back in time to a point where he could distinguish it from the territorial tendencies of animals. He was really starting to get somewhere, and even enjoying the pursuit of understanding, when the teacher had woken him out of his contemplation of a dozen different interpretations of the evolution of human beings and the rise of civilizations with the question, "So, Richie, what exactly was the catalyst to World War I?" Contemporary history was far from his mind. So his brain blurted out, "Man's ability to create fire whenever he wanted it which could drive animals and other men away from his…" His mouth finally caught up to his brain and he floundered, blushing.
Hunching down into his hooded sweatshirt, Richie watched the teacher frown disapprovingly and walk off, asking Daisy instead, who correctly identified the assassination of the Archduke as the most obvious and sudden catalyst of the war. Before Richie's mind could wander off into the various eye-witness accounts of the shooting and determine the exact angle of the fatal shot, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to out-shout the chaotic rush of facts, figures, and computations in his mind. But nothing worked. His brain seemed to have two goals in life: to drive Richie crazy with an overflow of thought, and to override his good judgment in search of that thought.
Richie blinked in surprise at the new idea as it flashed through him: his mind wanted to be heard. It wanted to shout out all the random things floating through it, to tell other people everything it now understood. Somehow, his brain had turned sharing knowledge into a craving, almost an addiction. His mind needed to people all the things in his head, sharing all the insights he had gleaned about every possible subject, explaining and teaching all the things that had fallen into place for him. He needed it with the kind of desperation that kept people hooked on drugs. But why? Richie demanded of his mind. Why do I need to tell people everything I know, like some kind of parrot? Why does my brain crave it? What is so important about sharing all this crap! Two things happened at once, two things Richie never expected to happen again in his head.
First, there was silence, utter silence. All his brain's active and passive thinking, processing, and analyzing stopped, leaving him with an instant of inarticulate, blissful peace.
Second, his mind answered him. Richie's brain gave him a straight and simple answer as though someone else entirely were in there, answering questions at some kind of press conference. But Richie knew down to his core that he was answering his own less-aware self.
Because then I feel good about myself.
Richie thought about that for a moment, relishing the silence his mind had finally decided to share with him. It did make sense, in a way. Richie's self-esteem was pretty low to start with, and even now as a hero/genius he still felt largely like an outcast. He was neither popular, nor athletic. He was a nerd in the truest sense, not much more than your basic, run-of-the-mill geek with too much trivia stored up inside and no social life. And gay to boot, he thought ruefully, although he kept that secret almost as compulsively as he did his identity as Gear. Richie's mind started to whirl again, but now in one straight line, and he was actually controlling it!
"I guess I do feel pretty rotten most of the time. I mean, as Richie, I'm as boring as they get. Good grades. No real trouble at school. It's expected I be a certain kind of nerd and I am exactly that. I don't pay a whole lot of attention in class but still do well most of the time. I don't have a huge group of friends and I don't party. I'm the most stereotypical geek in any sitcom on TV, minus the whole genius thing. And the gay thing.
"And as Gear, then I'm the nerd-hero. Same stereotype. I'm not physically tough, I don't have any cool powers, and I don't do a whole lot. But I'm smart and I back up the 'real' hero. And yeah, that does kind of get me down, I guess. But why does telling people things make me feel better?"
He worked on it for a while, not really thinking but just letting his mind work on the problem. He knew that by not focusing on it, his mind would come up with the answer all on its own. Richie had learned long ago that his subconscious was a lot smarter than his conscious brain, and that sometimes the best way to solve something was to let the other half of himself plug away at it without interference. But this time it wasn't his mind that answered him, not exactly.
Because then I don't feel all alone.
Richie felt a cold shudder run through him. Thoughts and realizations were one thing, but the kind of emotional response he had just received from his brain was not only unprecedented, it was uncomfortable. Richie felt himself squirming internally. Heroes weren't supposed to feel lonely. They weren't really supposed to have feelings at all. They're also not supposed to be gay, his mind thought at him. Richie pushed it aside. He didn't want to think about feeling lonely. It was an isolating thing, after all, being a genius that no one could ever really understand. Richie had to admit that more than once he would have traded his new-found mental abilities for something more satisfying in a deeper way, not that he could even identify what that would entail. As he found himself comparing his childhood with the different psychological models for emotional development, Richie was not remarkably surprised to find how closely he correlated to the "distant, harsh parents, uncomfortable adolescence with peers, low self-esteem, low self-awareness, etc, equals emotional insecurity and discomfort, inexperience with expressing or understanding emotions, socially and emotionally isolated" camp. It was certainly true. He was lonely. He wasn't comfortable with emotion. Rational thought was so much more, well, rational! It never turned on him and reminded him that he had a heart, not until now. And he really didn't know what he would have preferred out of his life, except maybe the impossible love he kept farther back than the brightest light could penetrate, spoken only once and never again.
Richie decided not to pursue it anymore. He consciously forced the feelings and ideas creeping forward back into the iron cage he had built and relinquished control of his mind to whatever caught his momentary attention. His brain returned to the anthill configuration and the powerful emotion faded, but somehow he could not forget the shadow of lonely isolation that he was now painfully aware of somewhere deep down inside.
--==OOO==--
The Abandoned Gas Station of Solitude was hardly living up to its name. In the first place, wasn't really a gas station anymore, as the pumps outside had been empty for a long time. In the second place, it was neither abandoned, nor a place of solitude. At least, not on a Friday afternoon.
Virgil, looking like Static on laundry-day, was bouncing around the station like a maniac. The Static t-shirt and long coat were fine, but he had forgotten the mask and goggles completely and was still wearing his school jeans and sneakers. Virgil was dancing like he was on speed and weed at the same time, headphones clearly blocking out reality. Richie sat at his table and watched, already changed to Gear himself minus the helmet, trying to hide his smile. Fridays do weird things to V, he thought to himself. The sometimes-electric hero had rushed into the AGSS and had managed to get halfway changed into the Static costume before the urge to rock out to his music became overwhelming. It had been about a half hour and he was only getting warmed up. Although the dancing was new, Virgil's random outbursts of energy on Friday afternoons were as predictable as his appetite.
Born of long experience, Richie knew his partner would be completely spastic, and useless, until he ran out of energy doing whatever popped into his head for a while, so he turned back to the table. He was running some information between his brain, Backpack, and his helmet on the recent attack, trying to tie down any evidence found at the scene to identify the possible motives, identity, and abilities of the Bang Baby who was behind it. It wasn't going particularly well, as most of the evidence had disappeared with the burning bookstore and the Bang Baby hadn't really left anything behind. Trying desperately to ignore the fact that now Virgil was actually singing along with his dance mix, Richie delegated a part of his mind to remember to kill his friend later for his taste in music and tried to go back to work, ignoring the less-than-silent music behind him.
Not that V has a bad singing voice. Although, he found himself thinking, that stuff he's listening to wouldn't have been considered music until…Stop it! Richie shouted into his mind as the definition of "music" from the early Renaissance through the Romantic period swept through his mind as he compared style, theme, and a dozen other musical signifiers from more classical eras to modern radio pop, jazz, rock, rap, and country. Richie took a deep breath and tried to concentrate solely on his work as Gear, the things that mattered, like protecting people from a maniac who apparently had no motives. His mind whirled, and slowly settled back down into a more steady rhythm, although he couldn't stop the internal computations that were still distracting him from his real work. Then Richie made his mistake: he found himself wondering idly about the rhythm of his own brain in comparison to Virgil's dance behind him. Virgil's dancing to something either a fast 4/4 or a slow 2/2, with heavy syncopation, while my brain, if thought could be converted into a time signature would be an pattern of alternating 16/8 and some kind of signature that could capture the speed of human thought, which, calculating…
"Stop it!" Richie shouted at himself, clapping his hands to his head. His composure was cracking and he knew it. This wasn't the first time he had been unable to even think about something in passing without sending his brain off on a fishing expedition to explain everything. In fact, it happened all the time. But this time he could not seem to derail it in any way; his mind seemed intent on analyzing and explaining everything, all possible connections between everything and everything else, and anything else that it left out. He cursed the natural curiosity he had been born with, and the new super intelligence that drove him to interrupt whatever he was doing and consider new things at every turn. It was worse than trying to live with a three-year old who had just learned the phrase "But why?" Richie was tired of having to compromise with his own brain like it was another person entirely. "Just stop it, please. I can't take living like this any more!"
"Rich…?"
Richie sat bolt upright, causing his shoulders to ache at the sudden, tense movement. He had been speaking aloud! Feeling himself flush, and his mind run off to figure out how much extra blood was being diverted to his face, he turned. Virgil was standing in the center of the station, still looking ridiculous in his half-costume. He had turned off his music and was staring at his friend with a look of real concern. Richie groaned and felt the walls of secrecy he had been depending on crumble around him.
"Man, you okay?" Virgil asked hesitantly. He had wanted to tell Richie something and had taken off his headphones in time to see the boy's shoulders hunch like some kind of Quasimodo and hear him shouting at nothing. This was not normal behavior for his usually calm and controlled best friend. Staring at him now, Richie's eyes looked so harried, and Virgil was sure he had never seen his partner look so worn out. He took a step forward. "What's going on, Rich?"
Richie turned away and picked up his helmet, wishing he could pull it on, become Gear, and forget he ever had anything besides a brain. He slammed it down on the table next to Backpack while automatically calculating the amount of force he had used and comparing it to the endurance of the helmet and various other similar impacts he had received fighting. He turned back, feeling like his head was swimming, and not really caring what it figured out without him anymore. He found it hard to meet Virgil's concerned eyes. Some of those things he had locked away were breaking loose and sneaking to the surface.
"Nothing," he mumbled, trying to get around the chaos in his mind and the escape attempt going on in his heart.
"That's not nothing, bro," Virgil said, moving towards Richie. "You've been keeping stuff from me all this time, and I can see it's bugging you! Why don't you just tell me what's wrong?"
"I can't," Richie found himself answering. Can't? Why can't I? Where did that come from?
"Why not?" Virgil echoed.
Richie thought about it for a minute, even though he didn't really want to THINK about anything, or feel anything. He wanted peace in his mind again. Richie felt like he had been watching his brain like some kind of deranged movie, a documentary gone bad about the history of the world, the intricacies of all science, and everything else in human history and knowledge, crammed into a half-hour program. It was exhausting. Why can't I tell him I'm losing control?
And then it came to him as his mind, once again, went quiet: Because I'm scared.
It didn't take a genius to dissect that one, but it did take a couple of minutes of silence before he admitted it. The only thing Richie and his brain agreed on was that it was time to tell Virgil what was going on with him. His brain provided a dozen reasons to be honest, but the only ones that mattered were evident in the concern in Virgil's face. He's my friend. He deserves to know. We still have that much, I hope.
"Look, V," Richie said, finding that as he spoke his mind unclogged and began to run again, "it's just that I think I'm getting too smart."
"Huh?"
Richie launched into an explanation of how his mind had started to run out of control, nearly blocking his very ability to think and reason at times, starting at the very first time he had noticed its chaotic workings were not what they had been before. There was so much he had been keeping to himself, he found it flowing out of him like water from a dam that had broken. His brain left him alone to go through the explanation, even sometimes helping clarify and reword the things he was trying to express. As he spoke, it became easier to regain control over himself, and he locked down the escapees from his heart, this time trying to wall them in to keep them from sneaking out again. Stealing glances up at his partner, he watched as Virgil's face shifted again and again, mostly between worry for his friend and annoyance that he hadn't been told sooner, but he said nothing. Richie hoped his truth wasn't too little, already too late.
"So that's it. Maybe as I get smarter, it gets harder for me to keep up with myself or something. I haven't really wanted to try to figure it out, and interestingly, it's the only puzzle my brain WON'T work on. Anything I see or hear during the day will start a full-blown scientific inquiry in there, but when I actually wonder why it's so hard to control and why it's getting worse, my own brain practically ignores me! It's like living with Sharon in here," he said, smiling weakly.
"Dude…" Virgil tried to figure out what to say first. He could see so much in Richie's face. He realized with a start how isolated his best friend had been the past few weeks, maybe how closed they had been towards each other. The blank looks and tight lines around Richie's eyes were fading into exhaustion, but at least it was a real, genuine expression. Virgil remembered with guilt a few things he hadn't been telling Richie either, although none of them were this big. Pushing aside all his rants about trust between friends, he reached out and put a hand on Richie's shoulder.
"It's alright, bro. We'll figure it out."
Richie looked up. Virgil was smiling at him in that easy, brotherly way he had always smiled. The hand on his shoulder was comfortable too, not the awkward "supposed to touch" gesture they had been sharing since Richie accidentally outed himself. The light in Virgil's brown eyes was sincere, and something in the belabored genius relaxed. We're okay again, I think. I missed this, Richie realized with an internal sigh, unconsciously relaxing a bit into the touch and the friendship it conveyed.
"So now what?" he asked, noticing that his shoulders didn't hurt for the first time in days. Richie hadn't realized how tense he had been feeling until suddenly some of it was released. He rolled his shoulders and cringed at the "pop" that echoed through his sockets. Virgil smiled.
"Well, I've got an idea. We could…" But Backpack's beeping interrupted whatever Virgil had been about to suggest. Richie whirled in his chair instinctively, pulled his helmet back on and scanned the incoming information, a chaotic mix of alerts pulled from police radio, overheard cell phone conversations which he could tap into, on-site video security information, and even some real-time satellite information hacked from the government.
"It's happening again!"
--==OOO==--
This time it was a coffee shop downtown, and by the time they arrived, Virgil finally all the way Static and not Static-with-no-hero-pants, the scene was a full-blown disaster on wheels. The popular hang-out was on fire, and it was burning quickly to the ground, causing billowing smoke to obscure the sky and half the street downwind. There was plenty of panic as people milled about, trying to be close enough to the fire to dare their own courage, yet far enough away to satisfy their fear. The crowds of suffering people from the last incident were not to be seen; in fact, there was only one knot of people standing nearby, all focused on a young woman sitting on the curb, holding her head in her hands and crying. Static moved quickly over to the nearest fire-hydrant and began using his powers to warp the metal so it would spray directly into the shop. Gear broke off and moved towards the only witnesses in the vicinity, figuring his partner could handle the danger on his own.
"What happened here?" he asked. The group of people, obviously the young woman's friends, looked at him with anger and hurt in their faces, and more than one of them stepped forward as though to prevent his approach. But the young woman looked up and waved them back.
"He-he asked me if I was married, and when I told him I don't believe in marriage, he…" here she broke off and turned away from the hero's gaze. A friend put his arm around her shoulder and looked at Gear, caught between distress and anger.
"This weird kid came up to us and asked if we were all married or engaged, as if it were any of his business. Elena answered him, like she said, and then he, I don't know, did something to her. Everything just started to hurt her. She said she couldn't see and couldn't feel her legs, and then she stopped breathing." He turned back to the distressed woman, gesturing with his hand for the others to fill in the gaps.
"He ran off, and we chased him, but he was fast, too fast. Disappeared around the corner there," put in another of her friends angrily. "And when we got back, the place was on fire and Elena was startin' to breathe again so we got her out of there. Everybody else ran off, I guess."
"Did he say anything else?" Gear asked. He was trying to gather all the information coming in from Backpack's readings, the various sources he pulled or hacked electronically, and most importantly, from the witnesses at the same time. Static had managed to subdue the fire enough that it would not spread to other buildings and he was busy clearing the immediate area for the firemen, so Gear was on his own as investigator this time.
"He…" Elena looked past her friends and up at Gear with anger and shame written in her eyes. "He told me that I deserved to die. Right before it started to hurt. And he called me a…"
"Something not nice," interrupted the first friend in a very firm tone of voice. The others nodded. Gear wanted to press them, to find out the specifics, but all their faces said "closed for business" and he had the feeling they wouldn't tell him if he asked. Even physically, they closed ranks around her, circling her and forming a wall of friendship to block Elena from the stares of the gathering crowd watching the fire. Gear said something he hoped would be taken as sympathy and moved off, brain racing to pull all the new information together, but one of the girls in the group detached herself and caught his elbow. Gear found himself looking up into the face of one angry woman, probably in her mid-twenties, and she definitely had a few inches of height on him.
"You find him, whoever that guy is. He's short, like you, with crazy brown hair and his face, well, he looks like a pretty unhappy kid, get it? Never saw him before, but we don't hang with kids. Find him. Tell him if he keeps on sayin' stuff like that to my friends, I'll make him hurt, too. Stop him, hero, okay?" and with a rough shove, sent Gear off from their little crowd. Must be pretty awful, to make them that mad, he thought. Gear was just as glad his helmet was only partially transparent, blocking the red rush to his face and the unconscious fear he betrayed when he felt threatened. He had no intention of letting on that he was intimidated by her. Shuffling the new information through his mind, he moved towards Static, who had stepped back to watch the firefighters now on the scene in action.
He was halfway there when the world exploded.