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.
Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.
⏮️ Previously, Marissa mentioned that she’s concerned about her alternate selves’ sense of morality, and the fact that The Matrix wasn’t acting alone; she later discovered, despite her horror at the idea, that Ignis’ parents were his timeline’s version of herself and Baz; and, overall, Baz seemed to be taking the whole situation far better than she has…
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Marissa couldn’t bear to look back and see if Sebastian was still standing in the door with those big blue eyes pointed her way. Instead, she slammed a toolbox closed and went back to her desk to sling it in a drawer before turning off the music she’d let Cade pick out. Behind her, she heard Sebastian’s footsteps on the tile in the silence, and the creak and rattle of the vacated spare chair as he dropped into it and rolled it across the floor. A hand appeared beside hers on the black laminate desktop, fingers tapping to ask her to look over. She didn’t.
“You knew all along that he was ours,” she said. It would make at least some of this stupid whirlwind day make sense. Ever since he’d met Ignis, Sebastian had been…weird. True, a lot of his behavior had been weird recently, but this was a noticeable escalation. All of a sudden, he’d become her shadow. He was switching between provoking and charming her on the scale of hours instead of months, and the little pockets of genuine softness she’d been catching in between were something she might normally see once in a good year. He’d even asked her…oh, no, that had been a date, hadn’t it? And he’d wanted to walk her home this morning, too. What would he have said if she’d let him?
A wave of heat clawed at her chest as she mentally fumbled the logic puzzle of everything The Matrix had let slip, her failed attempts to put it together overshadowed by the inescapable implication that Baz Grimes’ reaction to finding out that some version of him had loved some version of her was that sounds like a good idea.
“Yeah,” he said. “He got your sense of subtlety.”
Marissa pulled her hand back and turned to sit on the edge of the desk, arms crossed tightly against her waist. “I admitted you were right. What else do you want me to say?”
Sebastian edged into her view until he was unavoidable, half-draped across the low chair back as he leaned forward to look up at her. “I want you to tell me what had you so scared you couldn’t see it,” he said.
She hesitated. “You won’t understand.”
“Never stopped you before.”
“Fair.” She sighed, squeezing herself, and jumped in at the first place she could think to start. “Look, this whole multiverse thing is really freaking me out. I thought I knew who I was. I mean, I figured out what matters, and I made the choices that got me here. That’s me. That’s who I am. There’s not supposed to be some other me out there with different values, doing something else, like…that just shouldn’t even be possible, right? But they are out there, and they’re terrible. In Beetle’s timeline I’m a terrorist, in Ignis’ I’m a war criminal, in The Matrix’s I’m punching holes in reality, in Makaria’s…I don’t know, but it’s probably even worse somehow.”
“Oh, Jake said you’d already died by now in that one,” Sebastian said.
“I hate that that’s the better option.” A glimmer of memory worked its way out of the tangle. “…wasn’t I…no. We were married in that timeline too, weren’t we?” He nodded, a slight smirk curling across his face. It didn’t reach all the way to his eyes, though, and Marissa had to look away from the gentleness in his gaze before it pulled all the breath out of her. Her conversation with Cade had reminded her of something she’d have preferred to forget: she had once hoped Sebastian might look at her that way. Once. “I can see that,” she mumbled, before adding hastily, “But that’s the problem! When Cade was telling me about his mother, she didn’t feel like some other me. I understood her completely. And like—the more I think about this, the more I realize how long it’s actually been since I felt like myself. I thought I was just getting burned out, but what if it’s because I’m not supposed to have my life together? Like maybe it’s my default state to care too much and burn the world down. Like maybe this me only made it this far because I- I tried so hard not to care.”
He frowned a little at that. “You do care.”
“I don’t mean in general.” She’d tried to avoid the conclusion, but from the evidence she had, it seemed almost certain now. “What scared me is that I don’t think this is really The Matrix’ mission. I think it was mine…I had to keep Mheksos from killing you again somewhere, at any cost. Maybe our son, too; I don’t know, Nick won’t tell me…I know he’s been hiding something. I’m sure he thought his precious plans would work out better if I went on thinking I was a good person, letting him sacrifice you and Ignis if he has to, the conniving—” Sebastian’s hand was on her arm, and she shoved it away, blinking hot tears onto her cheeks. “No, you don’t get it, okay? I never thought it would be that bad, but I tried so hard not to love you because I knew I couldn’t handle letting you go. It was hard enough at first, but now you’re all-in on this stupid vigilante thing, and either way I know you’d get tired of me when I wasn’t a challenge anymore, I know you. You don’t want me, Sebastian. I’m selfish, and I’m jealous, and I can’t have you and lose you, I can’t. I can’t do it. Don’t do that to me.”
The torrent of words left an empty space under her heart that demanded a shuddering gulp of air to fill. While Marissa was brushing off the tears and trying to force her breathing back into a more dignified pattern, Baz was standing up and stepping in closer, one of his hands on the desk again next to hers.
“Hey,” he said. “Do me a favor, hit me on my left side. Right’s a little sore from all the shots.”
Marissa didn’t have time to express her confusion before he leaned in and pressed his lips to her cheek. The kiss seemed to soak all the way through her skin, burning as it went, the contact a buzzing in her nerves. She felt dizzy even after he pulled away—enough to reflexively smack him on the right arm, for maximum pettiness, before she remembered that she actually had injected the serum on the left and hit him on that side too.
Sebastian chuckled. “Now, that’s not fair. I only got you once.”
“Serves you—ah!”
He’d already put his hands over hers on the edge of the desk, holding them down, and kissed her other cheek firmly until it was tingling as well. “That’s better.”
“Did you hear anything I said?” Marissa demanded.
“Every word,” he said. “Rissa girl, you’re a lot smarter than people give you credit for, and I always thought that was their mistake, but you gotta work with me here. Exactly what part of that did you think was a problem?”
She could only glare at him. “All of it? Should I start by circling back to the ‘biological warfare decimating the population of Earth’ thing?”
“Oh, yeah, horrible. Knowin’ how far you’d go to try to keep our boy safe, that’s a dealbreaker,” Sebastian said flatly as he picked up her hand and pressed another burning kiss across her knuckles. “Listen: I do want you. I will not get tired of you. Even if I did, you’d get sick of me and my nonsense long before that.”
“Maybe,” she said, trying to ignore her heart fluttering. “What about Chained Lightning?”
“What about him? …oh, well, I’ll quit.”
“You’re having the time of your life. You won’t, and I won’t ask you to.”
“I will,” he said. “I wouldn’t even have started, except you won’t stay out of trouble.”
Marissa’s eyebrows flew up at that. “Oh, I won’t stay out of trouble!”
“Yeah, you, Dr. Controversial-Research-No-Security.” The smirk was fully back now. “I’ll cut you a deal, all right? I won’t get into any more vigilante stuff—no crime-fightin’, no secret identity or alter ego on the register—but you can’t complain if I still look out for you. I don’t care about the rest, as long as you’ll let me be your hero.”
Against her better judgment, but feeling herself blush, she settled her arms across Sebastian’s shoulders and let him step in closer. “And if Mheksos kills you tomorrow?”
“Avenge me,” he said, with evident relish at the thought.
Marissa shook her head slightly. “There’s something wrong with you.”
The smug side of his mouth quirked up a little further. “You like it.”
She looked into his eyes, clear and honest and somehow still wanting her exactly the way she was, and she smiled. “Yeah, I do,” she admitted.
Sebastian’s face crinkled into the warmest, sweetest smile she had ever seen from him, and as Marissa tilted her chin so he could kiss her, the rest of the multiverse no longer seemed relevant at all.
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⏭️ Next week, we’re taking a short break between Part 4 and Part 5. Mirai, Mirai will return on Monday, March 30, rejoining the Joneses and Makaria from Liam’s point of view…
Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.
their valentines day cards are gonna be WEIRD
If this get filmed, this song has to be the theme for that character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmrxL8iTV_Q