Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. In order to save their timeline from multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty, former TV superhero Lady Radiance and her friends must unravel the mysteries of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.
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⏮️ Previously, we saw a series of flashbacks from Ignis (Terra-86’s Cade Grimes) that covered some of his experiences at war, his family’s struggles, and the fact that he was never sure what his father thought of him—aside from being a lot like his very dangerous mother. This time, he’s agreed to give the full story to this version of Marissa…
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Marissa spent the rest of the evening listening to Cade patch together his memories while she studied the device grafted into his spinal cord like a vine. Neither task was easy. She’d heard a lot of tragic life stories in her line of work, but it wasn’t usually such a struggle to avoid identifying with one of the central characters—though she was pretty sure they’d both given up on that somewhere in the middle.
It hadn’t started out so badly. Cade remembered a chaotic but happy childhood, growing up very closely with Nick Harper and his sisters. His mother worked three days a week, and so did theirs, so for several years they traded off kids and sent everyone to his Aunt Christa on Wednesdays; when they got older, Nicky would walk home from school with him. They would play heroes and villains until they were so late his dad had to come looking, only vaguely aware then of the dangers that would later come to dominate their lives.
Marissa had mentally braced herself and asked point-blank if his parents were happy together.
“Yeah, they were.” (Here, that face-scrunching expression that seemed to be his way of externalizing a reluctance to tell the whole truth.) “I mean, they didn’t really get along…but I think they liked it that way, you know?”
Yes. She knew. Marissa could imagine that, under the right circumstances, it might feel very satisfying to successfully kiss the stupid smirk off Sebastian’s face.
“Except for that last fight,” he’d added, abruptly knocking the bottom out of the fantasy.
After nearly thirty years, Cade still remembered the towering, screaming fight between his parents that might not have literally delineated the turning point in his life, but was inextricably associated with it now: you can’t go versus you can’t tell me what to do, we need you here versus you’re not the only ones who need me. On the day his dad left to fight and didn’t come back, his mom had still been quietly furious as he tried to kiss her goodbye.
“I never saw her happy after that,” he’d said. “Not really.”
It had, of course, only gotten worse from there. He’d used as few words as possible to describe the chaos of war descending planetside and his slow realization, completed too late, of how unstable his mother had become. Her bioweapon, so promising at first. His and Nick’s adolescent guerilla warfare, still half play-acting even though they’d both lost parents already. Then the death of one of their friends in a moonlit cul-de-sac, torn to pieces by the centipedes in retribution. His partner never talked to him again; Cade turned professional, and never went back home. For years he got news only in bits and pieces, which grew fewer and further between as the retrovirus jumped to humans and the plague began to spread, turning the war into one of attrition. The fighting was brutal in every way. He hadn’t said it outright at first, but eventually admitted under her questioning that the aliens had learned to torment him with familiar faces.
Marissa had caught herself wondering, jaw clenched, if she could somehow wipe out this timeline’s Rigelians from here. Just in case.
The end of the war, when the grinding Pyrrhic victory finally came, brought little relief. Although relatively few people had ever encountered a shapeshifter, societal trust had been shattered by their invasion. There were plenty who believed that they were still out there, lurking undetected among decent human folks, no matter what the propaganda said—and, true or not, there was a lot of propaganda around. The peoples of Earth wanted to remember themselves as righteous victors, not cornered and desperate insurrectionists; for the sake of rebuilding, anything and anyone who complicated that narrative had to go. Offers to reintegrate the Glorious Terran Revolution’s veterans into society were graciously extended, but those who took them up tended to disappear. Ignis knew better, and had planned to ride things out in the former combat zones, avoiding the DNA checking and power suppression required to enter a protected area.
“Yes, I can see how well that worked out for you,” Marissa said, gently peeling a contact pad away from his skin. Nearly done now. “Is this the part where you explain why you had to get into prison?”
At her question, a little of the bitterness crept back into Cade’s eyes. “I didn’t say earlier? That’s where you were.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t. “Right. The war crimes.”
“Mhm.” He winced as she started on another pad. “I couldn’t do anything about it, but I wanted to see y-...my mother again, at least.”
She hadn’t even noticed the slip before he caught himself. “Did it…go well?”
“Well, apparently the civ authority only got Mom into custody by telling her I was dead. Plus she hadn’t seen me in almost a decade, so this was…” He motioned to his scarred face while seeming to search for words. “...no, it didn’t go well.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marissa said. For once, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Her whole heart ached to comfort him, but she couldn’t take the thought of accidentally hurting him any more.
Cade just shrugged. “I couldn’t have not. ’Course the whole thing was a trap for me anyway, so I had to fight my way out. That’s how I ended up stuck with this thing in my neck for the last…”
He stopped himself mid-sentence, pupils dilating as his sweeping gaze snagged on something over Marissa’s shoulder. She glanced back to see Sebastian in the doorway—how long had he been listening?—with his eyes fixed on Cade.
Baz cleared his throat, seeing he’d been caught. “Doc needs you back for a minute,” he said. “He wants to hit that with some stronger antibiotics, try to knock the infection out at least. The Jones clan’s splittin’ second and third shift and they’ve got me on call, so you can sleep it off once she’s done with you.”
“I am.” Marissa wiped the last bit of gel from around the implant site, as carefully as she could. Her stupid fingers suddenly wouldn’t stop shaking. “You go, hon. I’ll check on you in the morning.”
Cade nodded and got up onto uneasy legs, his chin held high and mouth tight again. He made to slip out, but Sebastian stopped him at the door with a gentle hand at the scruff of his neck.
A look passed between them that she had no hope of understanding: something serious, but not grave—a kind of recognition, maybe. One man to another. Baz gave a slow nod, and Cade slumped forward until his forehead hit his father’s shoulder and the rest of him collapsed into his tight embrace. For a long minute, neither of them seemed to move except to breathe. Then Sebastian ruffled “the kid’s” hair, sent him out with a clap on the shoulder, and looked back at Marissa.
She turned away sharply, looking for something else to examine. Her throat had become unbearably tight. “I thought I told you to go to hell,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said, in a tone that was almost solemn. “Been doin’ my best. Hades said I’m still your problem, though.”
“Wonderful,” she said, with a small, ironic smile. “Just my luck.”
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⏭️ Next week, there’s nothing for it: Baz and Marissa may just have to face each other honestly this time. It’s #33…The Talk.
Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.
I'm gonna need a minute
I'm gonna need a lot of minutes
Anyway I agree with Scoot this was very good
I dont know what the gasp line was supposed to be amid all these gasp lines but anyway this was good