A/N: The background for parts of this is in my previous story, The Secret of BioSynth.
Silver Hills, 2015
“Look, there they are,” Wes said as they topped a small rise in Silver Hills Park and spotted a blonde woman and a boy approaching on the path that wound down through a scattering of trees to the expanse of lawn below. “Man, that kid gets taller every time I see him. How old is he now?” He raised an arm and waved.
“Must be eleven or twelve. I can’t keep track.” But Eric’s casual tone was belied by the eager way he quickened his pace.
“Hey, Uncle Eric! Uncle Wes!” The boy’s voice drifted up to them followed by Sky himself, at a run, as Lyn waved and followed at a more sedate pace.
“How come I’m always second?” Wes grumbled.
“‘Cause I’m more fun?” Eric answered with a faint smirk.
“In your dreams.” Wes raised his voice to a normal level as Sky trotted up to them. “Hey, Junior! How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine, how are you?” Sky regarded him with a quick smile and then turned to Eric. “Hey, crap-face!”
“Hey yourself, shrimp.”
“Barf-bag.”
“Numb nuts.”
“Ass-wipe.”
“Rug-rat.”
“Shit for brains.”
“Sky!” Lyn exclaimed as she got close enough to hear. “What have I told you about your language? And you...” she rounded on Eric, “Didn’t I ask you not to teach him that kind of vocabulary?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Eric said, looking completely unrepentant. “But he learned that stuff in school from the other innocent little kids, not from me.”
“Hmm.” She crossed her arms. “You could at least try to set a good example.”
“I’ll try.” Eric held up the baseball bat, ball, and gloves he was carrying. “Wanna toss a few, kid?”
“Yeah! C’mon, over here!”
Sky took off towards a clear area of lawn with only a scattering of people walking or exercising their dogs. Eric looked after him and sighed. “Man, wish I had that kind of energy.”
“Getting old?” Wes asked with a snicker.
“Sure am. And you’re creaking right along with me, partner, especially with that birthday you’ve got coming up.” With a grin and a pat on the arm for Wes, he trotted after Sky.
“Yeah, thanks a lot for reminding me!” Wes called after him.
“Birthday?” Lyn asked. “Dare I ask which one?”
“The big four-oh,” Wes said lightly, trying not to show that the idea dismayed him. He and Lyn headed for a bench in the shade of the trees surrounding the open area where Eric and Sky were starting to throw the ball back and forth. “Amazing the way those two get along,” he said as they sat down.
“Is it?” Lyn smiled, brushing back the hair that drifted across her face in the gentle breeze. “Eric seems to me like he’d make a great father. You both would. It’s too bad you two never... adopted or something.”
“Yeah. I’d like to have kids.” Wes shrugged. “But you know how hard it still is for gay couples to adopt, or even keep custody of their own children.”
“I know.” Lyn sighed. “But maybe that’ll change before long, if your father has anything to do with it.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Wes frowned.
Lyn was watching him. “Aren’t you glad he’s getting involved in the gay rights movement?” she asked.
“Sure, I guess. It’s just - I dunno. Weird.” Somehow political activism and Alan Collins didn’t seem to belong in the same sentence - and that was just the beginning of the complex of what Wes felt about what seemed to have become his father’s latest mission in life. While he had to admit a part of him was deeply touched that his dad seemed so determined to stand up for his and Eric’s rights, another part was uncomfortable with the situation, for reasons he wasn’t entirely sure of himself.
“You’re his son and he’s trying to make things better for you, trying to do the right thing. I think you should be proud.”
“Well, I am. It’s just - I don’t like the idea of him doing all this because of me and Eric.” Moodily, Wes focused on his partner as he gracefully caught the ball and threw it back to Sky. “We can fight our own battles, you know?”
“You’ve both fought a lot of people’s battles, and you still do. That’s no reason to turn down help now.”
“Maybe.” Wes tried a smile to lighten the mood that seemed to have descended on them. “I never would have expected Dad to do something like this. You should have seen him when I first told him I’m gay, and that Eric and I were together.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“Well, let’s see. He blamed Eric for seducing me, and wanted to fire him. He wanted me to go to a shrink and get ‘cured’. Then he just sort of turned off, and refused to talk about it.”
Lyn had a half-laughing, half-disbelieving look on her face. “You’re kidding! He really said that?”
“Yep.”
She chuckled, and then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sure it wasn’t very funny for you at the time.”
“At the time, no. Not funny at all.” A hand touched Wes’s wrist as he stared at the ground, and he looked up into Lyn’s sympathetic face. “He came around pretty fast,” he continued with a smile. “That’s my Dad. I’ve given him a few shocks over the years, and - I guess he’s done pretty well with them, considering.”
“I guess so.” Lyn watched him for a moment more. “Maybe that’s part of why he’s doing this now. Trying to make up for the mistakes he made in the past.”
“Yeah. Meanwhile, he’s gone half the time, lobbying in Sacramento or Washington or wherever, and Eric and I have been running Bio-Lab more than ever.”
“Well - Alan’s not young anymore. Maybe this is his way of phasing out of the company.”
“I... You think so?” Wes blinked at her as the realization hit him that she could be right. His father was - how old now? Almost sixty-five. Was he thinking about retiring? Somehow the idea seemed impossible, and yet - it made sense. There was no doubt he wasn’t putting as much time into Bio-Lab as he did only a few years ago. Unwilling to follow that line of thought, Wes let his eyes return to Sky. “Anyway, maybe it’s just as well we never tried to adopt. We’re both pretty busy. Not much time for kids.”
Lyn accepted the change of subject without comment. “You make time for Sky.”
“Yeah, well. We don’t do the hard work, taking care of him every day.”
She acknowledged that with a nod, and then looked out at the clearing again. “Still, I’m grateful for the time both of you have spent on him. The last five years, since Nick died, haven’t been easy for either of us. Sky needed a father figure - or two. He hero-worships both of you, and Eric...” Her face softened. “Maybe Sky takes after Nick in that way. He admires Eric’s drive. He likes it that Eric expects a lot from him. And he wants to be like him.”
“Not a bad goal for a kid.”
“No.”
For a few minutes they sat in companionable silence except for the sounds of Eric’s and Sky’s shouts, carried to them on the cool air. When Wes looked at Lyn again, her head was bowed and she was studying her own hands as they fidgeted in her lap.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Not really. Well, not anything immediate.”
“I was wondering why you came up to Silver Hills this weekend. I suspect not just to go to the park with us.”
“Well, no.” Her shoulders lifted and sank in a sigh. “Eric once said that if we needed anything, both of you would help us.”
“And now you do?” Wes reached to touch her arm and take her hand in his.
She looked up again at her son. “Yes. Now I do.”
Eric tossed a high one, meant to sail over Sky’s head and make him run for it. With a satisfied smirk, he watched it fly, dead on course, and then scowled as Sky moved a raised hand in a quick arc above his head. The ball stopped abruptly in midair with an almost invisible flash of the force screen it had run into, and dropped neatly into the boy’s glove.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to do that!”
Sky shrugged. “My mom said it’s not a secret anymore.”
Eric glanced around them. The kid was right, Lyn and the parents of the other two ‘gifted’ children of SPD had agreed it would do more harm than good to force Sky, Bridge Carson, and Sydney Drew to hide their natural abilities. But still... those few people who had seen the boy’s stunt were staring. “You know the rules, Sky. No showing off in public.”
“Aw...”
“There’s reasons for rules, and you know the reason for this one. Not everyone is going to understand. Use your power only when you need to.”
Sky pouted. “I don’t care! Why shouldn’t I do stuff I can do?”
Eric sighed. Like every ability - and every natural tendency - it was unavoidably going to come out. The trick would be to get Sky to respect his power, and use it with restraint and for the right purposes. “Fine, force-field boy,” he said, “but that’s cheating. You gonna do that in a game? When other kids can’t, and it’s not fair?”
“Well... no.” Sky didn’t look very happy about it, though.
“Good. C’mon, throw it back already.” He caught it and tossed it in return, this time an easier throw. “Look, you can use your power when you play with your friends Bridge and Syd, can’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Sky squinted at him in the sun. “But Bridge is weird. And Syd is just a dumb girl.”
Eric grinned. “What, you think girls are dumb?”
“Well, they are, aren’t they?”
“Your mom’s a girl.”
“Aw, Mom’s not a girl. She’s a woman.” Sky straightened, preparing to throw the ball again. “Besides, you don’t like girls either!”
Startled, Eric almost missed his catch. “What are you talking about?” He tossed it back.
Sky had a suspiciously sneaky grin on his face as he explained. “I mean you’re gay. You must think girls are dumb, too!” As Eric frowned in surprise, the boy fired a hard pitch which almost caught him in the chest.
“Hah! I’m on to you!” Eric exclaimed as he fielded it. “Distract the enemy, and then attack.” He nodded. “Not bad.”
“Thanks!”
“But let’s get one thing straight.” He pointed in emphasis. “Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I don’t like women, or girls. I like them fine; I just don’t want to - uh - do certain things with them.”
“You mean sex!”
“Geez, you don’t have to shout it like that. Yes, I mean sex.” He stopped in mid-throw, struck by a horrible thought. “Uh - your mom told you about that, right? Or they told you in school?”
“Yeah.” Sky looked superior. “They taught us all that stuff years ago. Why, you have any questions?”
“No, smart-ass, I don’t have questions.” Relieved to know he would not be called on for sex education, Eric eyed the bat. “How’s your hitting?”
“It’s okay, I guess.”
“Just okay? You want to be good at it or not?”
“Yeah, I wanna be good.”
“Not just good. You want to be the best?”
“Yeah! The best!”
“All right, then. Let’s do it!”
“Name it. If Eric and I can do it, we will,” Wes said, adding a smile as Lyn’s eyes rose to meet his.
“I don’t like to ask favors... And I wouldn’t, if it was something I could do myself.”
“I know. You’ve never asked for anything before. What is it?”
“Well...” She hesitated, looked down again. “It’s about my brother. Jake.”
“Oh. Jake.”
Involuntarily, Wes glanced in Sky’s direction. The boy, along with Bridge Carson and Syd Drew, had been the innocent and unwitting cause of Jake Walsh’s - ‘breakdown’ was a good way to put it, maybe. Lyn’s brother had moved in with her and Nick Tate, Sky’s father, temporarily when they all first came to Silver Hills. It had turned out that he was the author of a series of letters threatening Bio-Lab if it allowed Kat Manx to continue the experiments which had led to a genetic alteration in her team of scientists and lab assistants, an alteration which had become evident in their children’s special abilities.
So far all the mutations in the children - that they knew of - had been mostly benign. But at the time, no one had known if Sky, Bridge, and Syd would turn out with some kind of disability or genetic disease, or whether they would even live past infancy. Two of the team, Maria Delgado and David Landors, had simply left, unable to face the uncertainty of their future children’s fates. But Jake - he had tried to stop the experiments which eventually resulted in the development of the new SPD morphers. Tried and failed. When Lyn had heard him calling Sky a freak, she had kicked him out - he had lost his job - tried to blow up the lab and failed at that too.
“Yes,” Lyn was saying, her voice low. “He seemed to do all right at that job your father got him after... well, after. I spoke to him once in a while, and after the first few months he seemed fine.”
“Oh,” Wes said, for lack of anything better. He knew his father had gotten Jake a job in a laboratory in Sacramento, both to get him out of town and to encourage him to keep his mouth shut.
“But - he never got together with the family for holidays - didn’t want to be around Sky, probably - and after he didn’t come to Nick’s funeral, didn’t even call - well, I stopped talking to him.” Her voice spoke of the pain under her words, of feeling betrayed by someone she still loved.
“I understand.”
“Our parents kept in touch with Jake. But then... For the last year or so, they said he sounded... strange. Preoccupied. When they asked if anything was wrong he’d tell them he was busy, or tired, or worried about something at work. Then a couple of weeks ago his supervisor called and said he hadn’t come to work for a few days and no one’s been able to find him. They’ve been trying to call him every day. Nothing. Either he won’t answer or - something’s happened to him.”
Lyn turned to Wes, a hint of tears in her eyes. “My parents are frantic. Jake’s always been - a little unstable. They keep thinking he might have done something - you know, to himself.”
“I see.”
“We called the police in Sacramento and they went to his house. They said he wasn’t there and there’s no sign of foul play, and that’s all. A missing adult with a history like Jake’s isn’t a priority for them. We don’t want to push it; if he’s involved in something he shouldn’t be we don’t want to get him in more trouble. My father’s in poor health and my mother can’t leave him, so it’s up to me to find out what’s going on.” She looked at Wes anxiously. “You work with the Silver Guardians; you know about this kind of thing. What should I do? Hire a detective? Or just go to his house?”
Wes had already made his decision while she was talking. “We’ll take care of it,” he said.
“You will?”
“I’ll talk to Eric, and one of us will fly up there and see what we can find out.”
“Wes...” She waited for him to look at her. “I really don’t want to dump this on you two. But - I have to admit, I was hoping you’d offer.”
“We’re Uncle Wes and Uncle Eric, aren’t we? Family.” Wes offered a smile, and after a moment she returned it. “Lyn, it’s okay. If something’s really happened, you don’t know how long this might take or how much it would cost, and you’ve got Sky to think about. Besides, for our own sakes Eric and I should find out where Jake’s gone and what he’s doing.”
“Why? What could he do to anyone now?”
Lyn was right. Most of what Jake had found out and tried to blackmail them with ten years ago was public knowledge now - Kat’s work on morpher technology, the three kids and their powers - although the details of the accident had been kept quiet to protect everyone involved. Also the fact that Eric was gay, now that he and Wes were living together openly as a couple. And even something Jake hadn’t known - Kat’s being an alien.
Strange, that all those secrets which had seemed so vital ten years ago were all in the open now - and nothing terrible had happened. Since Doggie Cruger’s dramatic revelation of his and Kat’s real identities in his press conference after Nick had been killed, SPD had made amazing progress in bringing about public acceptance of aliens on Earth, with the help of Bio-Lab and liberal amounts of Alan Collins’ influence and money. And, contrary to Eric’s fears, there had been almost no reaction to Wes’s moving in with him - at least very little they had seen, and Wes found himself not caring what anyone said behind their backs.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “Jake doesn’t know anything that hasn’t come out anyway. Still, I’d feel better if I knew he’s not carrying a grudge anymore.”
Lyn was quiet, watching Sky and Eric for a few seconds before she said, “It’s my parents I’m concerned about, really. They’re getting up in years, and they’re worried.”
“And you’re worried too, aren’t you?” Wes asked, watching her face.
“I’m not sure I can forgive what he did. But - he’s still my brother.”
They stood in the same spot on the path atop that little rise as they waved for the last time, watching Lyn and Sky disappear around a bend on the way back to their car and to their lives in Newtech City. Wes sighed. “It was nice to see them again.”
“It was okay.”
Wes glanced up to see Eric still looking, as if trying to pick out their forms through the trees. “Admit it; you had a great time with Sky.”
“He’s all right, for a kid. You seemed to be having a real heart-to-heart with Lyn.” Eric turned his dark eyes on Wes. “What’s up?”
“What makes you think anything’s up?”
The corner of Eric’s mouth lifted as he slung an arm over Wes’s shoulders and started them towards their own car. “I know you. Something’s on your mind.”
“Okay, you got me. It’s Jake. Seems he’s pulled a vanishing act. Hasn’t showed at work for a while, and nobody can get him at home.”
“Jake, huh?” Eric frowned. “Good riddance, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, me too. But not to his parents - and Lyn. They’re all worried. Jake never had his head screwed on too tight. She was going to go and find out what happened herself, but I told her we’d take care of it.”
“Even in another city, the guy’s trouble.” Eric sighed. “I’ve got personnel reviews coming up, but they can wait a while. I can go check it out.”
“You don’t have to do it.” Wes frowned restlessly. “I can handle this stuff myself, you know.”
“I know.” Eric was watching him now. “Never said you couldn’t.”
“Sorry. It’s just that with Dad gone so much, I don’t get the chance to work in the field very often. I feel like...” Actually, as he had become more involved in the business end and Eric had taken over more of the Guardians work, Wes felt like he was losing touch with what he still considered his real job at Bio-Lab. “I’m the one Lyn asked. I want to do it myself,” he finished.
“Okay, if that’s what you want.” Eric lowered his arm and took Wes’s hand. “Why don’t we both go? Been a while since we took a trip, or worked on a case together. And your father’s in Sacramento now, isn’t he? Give us a chance to see him, too.”
Together? Despite his attempts to seem indifferent, Eric cared about Lyn and Sky a great deal. Naturally he would want to do his part. Plus there was the tempting image of the two of them sharing a hotel room, not to mention a hotel bed. While they had been living together for five years now, a change of scene was an appealing idea. Wes nodded and then hesitated. “Speaking of Dad...”
“Yeah?”
Wes stopped walking and they faced each other in the shade and relative solitude of the tree-lined path leading to the parking lot. “Do you think he’s going to retire?”
“He’s your father. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking your opinion.”
“Wes - he’s what? Sixty-five, or close? Still in great shape, but he’s interested in other things, like politics, now. Yeah, I think he’ll retire soon.” Eric’s face was unrevealing, but his fingers on Wes’s tightened reassuringly.
“Man. And I guess he’ll want me to take over.”
“Probably.”
Wes shook his head. “I’ve thought about it, you know? But it was always someday. Not - now, or soon. I’m not ready.”
Eric smiled ironically, but his voice was gentle. “You’re going to be forty in a couple of weeks. When are you going to be ready?”
“Hell, I’m not ready to be forty, either.” Wes sighed.
Eric moved closer, and leaned in for a quick kiss, something he would never have done in public only a few years ago. It was just another reminder that things had changed, and would keep on changing - but Wes smiled. Some changes were for the better. “You’ll be a hot-looking forty,” Eric murmured.
Lifted out of what had threatened to be a gloomy mood, Wes chuckled. “Yeah, you think so?”
Another fleeting kiss. “I know so.”
“Prove it.”
“Can you wait until we get home?”
“Just barely.”
They shared another kiss, a longer and more promising one. “Then what are we waiting for?”