JMJ

Chapter Sixteen

Breaking Ice and Curses

Alex

I was still shaking when Shelby opened the door to the tank.

I felt good. In fact, I felt great even if unsteady in the limbs like I suppose a person feels after a tough message. I sure hadn't felt good just seconds before, though. I had felt so sick I'd almost puked. I'd felt so shaken that it was like being struck by lightning. Like a battle just surged in a final duel to the death through my heart. I think my heart literally skipped a few beats and it was sure making up for lost time now, pounding crazily in my ears. I was staring wildly into the wall, and panting like a dog. My hands still clutched my chest.

"Ace!" cried Shelby.

She was so freaked by my show that she'd let the usual old name get loose. I almost forgot I told anyone my real name as I looked at her in some brain-dead way. I blinked. I gulped. The shaking was subsiding but only slowly.

"I…" I started; then clamped my mouth shut.

"Are you okay?" Shelby demanded.

Beside me in a panic she forgot all about the "no touch" rule. She didn't have gloves on. It was really only if I broke through anyone's skin anyway that I was really contagious, but you know when people feel they need to take precautions. I shoved her back before I could stop myself, anyway, but it wasn't all that hard, and she didn't take offence.

"I'm…" I breathed like for the first time since I was born as I took in my new condition. "Perfect."

"No. No, you're not!" Shelby scolded— just like a mother, I caught my mind hinting, and inwardly I just laughed. "Let me get a doctor. You look so flushed. You look… not yellow?"

She blinked.

I blinked back at her.

Those must have been some vitamins, huh? Utonium had been acting like there was some wrench in the works with my curing. He also acted like he had some secret ingredient to the mix of that drink. Was something as simple as a few more minerals enough to boost my own strength against the S? Probably not, but I didn't care how I was better if I really was better.

"Am I… cured?" I asked.

You know I could have been hallucinated too. But Shelby looked like she was wondering the same thing, so I doubted it.

"We can check how you're doing," said Shelby quietly. "Just a sec."

She looked over my gage outside the tank. She double-checked. Then she left and came back with a pulse reader and some other quick medical things to look in my mouth and in my eyes. I had no real choice in the procedure. She was doing everything, and I was too stupefied myself to stop her now. She wiped my spit off the inside of my mouth with a Q-tip and had it in a scanner before I knew what she was doing with it.

"I don't believe it!" she said to herself, not me. "There is no sign Chemical S. What happened overnight?"

Meanwhile, I was rubbing my tongue along the spot where she gouged the inside of my cheek.

"Le Pwlofeltho?" I suggested in some sort of pseudo-French.

"Of course," she laughed, and swung to me real jittered now; then stopped. "Your father!"

"What?"

"He's waiting for you!"

"Oh, yeah," I laughed, almost unwilling after this sudden change to go see him right away.

I hadn't recovered from my cure myself much less ready for my dad to see it, but Shelby already was urging me along.

For the last time I exited that tank.

Surreal, like sleepwalking over a highway bridge and somehow not falling into traffic or the angry black water below, I woke up on the other side with that realization and shuddered. What I saw was that old man I used to know. He didn't look much different except his eyes swollen with surprise when he bolted upright in his chair. He almost spilled his coffee he had been nervously pretending to sip.

The suddenness of his motion stopped me too, though. I'd been walking bold for at least a few paces, but it was all lost to me again.

"Uh… hey, Dad," I said.

Okay, nailed that.

"Alex."

I supposed since I probably looked different from when he last saw me at thirteen or fourteen, he saw more of his own reflection than he'd noticed before. Maybe some of my biological mother too. I remembered being told I had her eyes. I closed them now in disgust.

"You look so normal," Dad said.

I blinked. Then smiled.

"I just started feeling better today. They told you I looked pretty bad, though, huh?"

"Well!" Dad flushed red as a tomato. He'd always been good at changing color. I guess I must have taken that from his side; I've been literally ice blue before, you know. "You're not green!"

"Green!?" I repeated.

As in 'Gangreen'?

Duh!

Dad didn't answer, though.

"They told you?" I pressed.

When Shelby had called him (all in my presence) first with intros she hadn't said a word about the Gangreen Gang.

Dad's color went back to normal; he shook his head.

"I was the leader of the Gangreen Gang," I answered before he could.

He opened his mouth and clamped it shut again. "I know."

"The papers?" I asked shuffling a little; my shorts had pockets. I shoved my hands into them.

"The news. Everything." The old man shrugged.

"Oh." Pause. "How long?"

"Just this past year," said Dad a little dodgy. "Then I had to make sure and all, and then I…"

His face told me all I needed to know. He was like Sanford that way. The knowledge might have made some people go seek out the black sheep that I was, but for my dad it had just been the end of all things. It had killed him.

A wave of illness washed over me again, but as I had no S and I was perfectly healthy according to the Warden there, it was all guilt and nothing else.

I could picture it now pretty easily. In a world where your dream girl dumps you, your son runs away, and with all the monsters, the crazed monkeys and such, seeing his own son leading anarchy and destruction with vampire fangs and green as a bamboo chute joining the darkness chewing through the city with cancerous molars? Well, some angry waves beneath a bridge probably started looking more homey than home for a guy like my dad, if you know what I mean.

"I don't even know why you want to see me," he said gloomy enough as it was now even with us both alive and well.

"Cuz…" I began with a voice still corroded with grief at my sudden realization of how lucky I was even to have him at this point.

He lifted a basset brow.

"I need my dad," I told him.

He nodded somberly.

"I didn't want to," I butted in before he could open his mouth; with my sudden haste you'd think we were going somewhere in a few seconds. "I didn't want anything to do with you. I didn't want to be you, but I realize I was something worse than even what I thought you were. I was the person who ran away just like…"

My voice trailed off like someone cut the candlewick off my voice box.

Our eyes met. They had been darting round each other like eight-ball shot by a bad pool player. Tears welled again in my eyes, but I didn't really cry. Not because I held them back purposely, but they just sort of hung there as I stared. He stared. I didn't realize till just then that we were alone in this little room. Shelby had left us. Now that I thought about it, she had shut the door just after I came in.

"Why?" I demanded.

"What?"

"Why'd she leave!?" I snapped angrily. "Did she even ever love me!?"

How long had I been asking myself that even when I thought I'd left it all behind me? It felt so weird it coming out of my mouth easier than a gob of spit after all those years of never asking out loud— hardly letting myself think it.

I winced like I'd just puked, and I swallowed hard on the bad taste.

"I'm sorry…" Dad said quietly looking helpless like he always used to look when faced with confrontation. "I was a bad dad."

"I didn't ask about you," I said choking a little; then I moaned. I hadn't meant to bring up that witch, and I'd done it anyway.

I was a little kid all over again. It was a wave I couldn't control. I was five or something and hurt myself too badly to pretend I was some tough guy on TV. I had no mother to run to. I had nothing and nobody except…

I sucked in with all my might, and allowed the worst. I opened my arms and hugged that old man. He was a touch shorter than me, which surprised me despite myself. I wasn't even wearing my boots. Just some pair of socks. I freaked out my dad I think more than any amount of green or any amount of physical damage I'd ever done with that one hug from a punk teen who was not supposed to show love. Some punk that he barely knew except for some distant common ancestry and that banshee that haunted our dreams.

To be fair, though, that's when that man I barely knew as anything more than some alchemist or whatever lurking miserably in some Weathering Heights tower hugged me back. Embraced me like… well, a parent! It freaked me out more than any Powerpuff punch, any policeman, any scientist— even Form— ever had. I felt like I swallowed my tonsils as the embrace took me. Then the tears fell, and that gulp became a squeaky sob.

"I love you so much, Alex! I'm so sorry!" he said it all through his teeth like gnashing a huge bite out of that past he regretted so much than it panged me.

"I love you too!" I croaked.

I didn't even grasp till now how much I loved him once long, long ago. How much I wanted his attention in some past life. I even had some weird flashback of a hug that I forgot all about till this moment.

Some time when I had the chickenpox and I was crying so much from the pain, the embarrassment and just overall sickly feeling consuming me. He hugged me. It was such a shadowy memory. I was drenching him with my gobbing tears, but he'd picked me up with a bear's strength in his hairy arms. He held me close until my frustrated sobs were soothed and I clung to him like a leech as tightly as I could. My arms and legs wound round him like an octopus sucking the life out of its prey. He'd kissed my head with his prickly face, and I hadn't even cared. In fact I wouldn't have minded at that time if he'd've kissed me again— me nuzzling him deep into the folds of his shirt…

Funniest thing about that memory— I suddenly remembered this too— my dad had never had chickenpox. As soon as I had been well, he'd gotten it himself, and it was one of the first times ever I'd felt he'd sacrificed himself for my sake.

Back in the present, I found I wasn't wailing like a baby, sobbing like a little boy, or crying the screechy selfish whiny monster kind of crying. It was something that I never felt before. It was crying that was dignified— a thing I didn't think possible. Even when I relented to it, the tears suddenly had no reason for being. Just a hug was enough now. The sorrow was enough. The relief was enough.

Dad held my shoulder tighter than I thought his grip could flex. I'd always considered him a weakling, but I felt like the weaker one at that moment. And that was okay. In fact, I liked it that way. No. I more than liked it. It had nothing to do with whether I liked it or not. It just was right.

I smirked to myself.

When I opened my eyes and we fatherly and sonly parted, he was smirking too.

I liked that. I liked that quite a bit, actually.

I was under no delusion that anything after this would be easy, but I finally felt free to live my life in a way that leaving myself free to run amuck about the city ever gave me. It was a freedom from a cage I didn't know existed, but I felt blinded by the light on the outside only to see a much bigger space for me to roam than I could have pictured before.

I was ready to face whatever came. I braced for it. I felt like everything I did before that were the actions of a cowardly kid, a cowardly beast, a creature bound by to the belief that I was the freak spawn that was never loved by a mother because I was a conceived a beast to begin with, but not anymore! A curse I'd clung to my whole life was finally broken. I was not a monster. I was ready to be more than that. I was ready to be a son, a man, a human.

"I'm glad you're here," I told that man who was ready to be a human too and I gave him an extra teasing cock of my head. "Thanks, Dad."

"I'm glad you're here too," said Dad very somberly; he put his hand on my shoulder again as though just making perfectly sure that I wasn't a hologram. "More than anything. More than you can imagine, Alex. I don't feel like I even deserve it. 'Kay?"

"Nah! I get it," I promised him with a casual shrug. "After what I been through, I can imagine a lot more than I used to. You're not a freak unless you give into being one."

Although somewhat apologetic still, Dad gave a whole-hearted nod, and that was sure enough for me— at least for right now. The rest could wait till tomorrow. Two curses broken in one day sure wore a guy out.

"You remember how to play scopa?" I chirped. "Cuz I forgot. All that poker Grubber got me into. Meh!"

Dad blinked.

"I'm sure they got cards around here somewhere we can borrow," I added.

"Sure," Dad sneered.