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Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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Chase Meridian typically enjoyed her job.
She liked people. She liked -understanding- people.
Becoming a therapist had just seemed like a natural progression of that.
She worked with a lot of difficult cases. People who were abused. People that were delusional. People that were neuro-divergent.
The last group was especially interesting. She'd grown used to hearing complaints that such individuals were either stupid, delusional or just simply didn't make sense! She disagreed, sometimes quite vocally.
These individuals operated on a system that was internally consistent, even if it didn't match what the people around them expected or considered normal.
She'd found the experience working with them to be -incredibly- helpful when she received her first metahuman patient.
Alchemist. Alias of Tracy Whittaker. Not that he'd made any effort to hide the connection.
'A secret identity takes a lot of work and I'm too busy to play that game.'
He was not actually a metahuman. According to him, he wasn't even from this -reality-!
He'd been handpicked by a deity to be a plaything... Which was something that gave her nightmares!
He was magical and amazing and, somehow, still incredibly mundane.
(She wouldn't admit it, but when he'd arrived one day in a completely different body, she'd had to accept that whatever doubts she'd still had were forced to die.)
He was listless, out of his depth and constantly overwhelmed. He'd gone out of his way to contact Batman of the Justice League because he literally had no idea what his other options might have been!
'Crime would've been easy. Sure. A gun or a knife and I could rob someone... Until I do that to the wrong person. Then what? Get arrested, go to jail if I'm lucky? Bleed to death in a ditch, nobody able or willing to help? What about the victims I'd build up on the way? Leave them homeless or hungry for my convenience?'
She felt it was strangely humanizing, listening to a man who had power beyond her comprehension talk to her about fantastic things and the very relatable feelings he had about them.
'How do I feel about my wife? I love her. Or loved her... Not sure about that part. She's not here and I don't want her to have to go through all of this... But I also resent her, at least a little bit. The woman lived and breathed stress, it kept our family from being able to grow and ended up killing me. I know she didn't intend on any of that. We had a lot of good to go with the bad. Overall I was happy with things but that didn't mean there weren't bad parts. Things weren't perfect and I was okay with that.'
Chase Meridian felt it was quite likely that she had the most in-depth understanding of Alchemist out of anyone he knew. He kept secrets, of course, as part of his job and simply as part of the culture he'd found himself in...
'If anyone ever threatens you to get information on me? Just tell them what they want to know. I'd rather deal with cleaning up a mess instead of finding out that you've gone missing. Or worse.'
Which brought them back into today. Her office hours extended into the weekend, though she did take two days off during the week just so she would be better available to people who worked a typical schedule or had school.
The fact that she charged more for the weekend hours had very little to do with things.
"And how have things been for you and Yuffie, Tracy?" Alchemist always brought coffee with him during his meetings with her. It helped make things more personal and helped him to unwind if he felt like he was contributing something.
The fact that he was paying for her time had little impact on the matter.
"Alright so far." The man in question was sitting in one of the normal chairs in her office. He avoided lying down during their conversations because it 'Just felt weird'. His left leg was bouncing up and down, a nervous tick she'd picked up on back whilst he'd still been stuck in young Leslie's body. "Had a bad run in with Chicken Pox but she's recovering alright."
"That must have been uncomfortable. Do you think it's related to her coming from a foreign reality?" Chase herself was sitting across from him, notepad open on her lap and filled with observations from his previous sessions.
"Probably. I've gotten things scheduled with an immigration doctor in New York to get her updated on the local vaccines." It was unfortunate that it took him a few weeks to get that figured out, but at least he was acting on it as soon as he realized it was needed. "I had to promise to take her to China Town afterwards or she wouldn't agree to the needles at all."
And that was one area that he was struggling with.
The man did not quite know how to raise a child and he'd saddled himself with caring for one who was already about eight or nine years old. As such he was often resorting to bribery... But at least it seemed the girl wanted martial arts training or magical lessons rather than objects.
"I can't imagine that you'll be able to keep plying her with lessons or trips for everything." She told the man.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, likely already aware of the issue.
"I know. But she's successfully run away from her home in the past and lived for months with no supervision or help. I don't know how much I can expect her to listen before she decides I'm too... Is stifling the right word?"
"In this case, I believe so."
"Stifling. And runs away again. I know I'm reinforcing bad habits but she very literally will run off if I'm too restrictive." Chase understood his concerns. She could empathize with them, even.
Being a parent was neither easy nor simple.
"I suppose your best option would be to do your best and make sure that the both of you communicate. Establishing your authority as her guardian is critical but that doesn't mean you have to ignore her complaints or concerns." Sadly, she understood it was a rather delicate balance and she really couldn't offer much better advice until the situation had progressed further in some fashion. "How have things been with your friend, Jinx?"
"I'm not really sure." He admitted, his leg freezing. "I haven't heard from her too much lately. The last I really know, she failed a Social Studies test and her guardian signed her up for some after-school tutoring. I guess a few months in another reality isn't really good for remembering trivia."
"That is... Unfortunate. Still, it's a good thing that her guardian is being responsible. All too many these days are completely unaffected by their wards struggling." Chase was well aware of Alchemist and his rocky relationship with Dinah Lance. The two simply did not get along on a personal level and, sometimes, there wasn't anything to be done for it but keep people apart.
They lapsed into a comfortable silence for a bit. She was reviewing her notes while Alchemist seemed to be thinking of something.
Finally, about fifteen minutes before the end of the session, Alchemist leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. Hunched forward in a defensive posture.
"Miss Meridian?" She set her pen down and focused on him fully as he began to speak. "During my last Instant Quest, one of the things I had to do... My options were pretty thoroughly limited. I had to..."
He exhaled slowly, the emotional exhaustion in his voice laid bare.
"I had to kill people."
-----
He wasn't even sure how to have this conversation.
He didn't know how to couch things, how to phrase them. He typically had enough experience to draw on to know how to say things in a way that he hoped communicated his intent. But this?
"Jinx and I were trapped, in the other reality. By the local iteration of the same deity that governs my powers. She demanded my help." So long as he focused on the facts it should be fine.
"And this led to your -needing- to kill people?" Chase asked him, stressing that particular word.
"I'll try to offer some context? Can you imagine a mega-corporation? Say Wayne Industries with full control of a city the size of Tokyo? With military police, super soldiers and an entire department of spies slash assassins?" Alchemist inhaled deeply before exhaling with an explosive sigh. "And that was all on the surface. It doesn't go into the human experiments. The animal experiments. The crossbreeding experiments or fetal procedures or..."
Honestly, even distilled like this Shinra was well beyond palatable.
"I..." The woman in the room hesitated. "Suppose I can understand taking issue with these things. Did you consider reporting the individuals doing these things?"
"The top level of government was owned and operated by the man in charge of the company that owned everything else. Saying he owned the city and everyone in it wasn't an exaggeration." Morally bankrupt didn't even begin to cover things. "He was directly profiting off of these activities. Experiments performed on prisoners, erasing villages off the map alongside all of the citizens. Hell, the strongest of his supersoldiers had all been designer babies with a life-span of maybe thirty years."
He pulled his PHS out of his pocket and cycled through the folders before opening one and handing it over to Chase.
Watching her throw up in her mouth at the sight of a Makonoid certainly helped vindicate his own reaction.
"Those things used to be human. After they were mutated into that, all they wanted to do is kill. Imagine something that's about three times faster than a person, easily a dozen times stronger and with so much endurance that they just don't stop. Those were considered failures, by the way." Frickin' Hojo, man.
"So..." She was looking for the right words... And didn't he know how that felt! "It was a matter of your life or theirs, at least in part?"
He nodded. The quest hadn't updated until after he'd dealt with Rufus. That didn't tell him who all he'd dealth with that had actually been necessary, though. It had all been guesswork based on his own knowledge.
"Yeah. The world we were in, high-magic and technology but it was all based on the one particular bit of phlebotinium called 'Mako'. Anyway, the magic part is connected to the planet and the planet had a sort of auto-immune system. Worked like garbage, literally did nothing to deal with the actual problems, but they would show up when the planet felt like its life was under threat." The WEAPONs had all literally gone in the opposite direction of most of the problems. "They showed up three times in the span of roughly ten years all due to the actions of the company and one man in particular."
God Dammit Hojo.
"Were there any other options?" Chase asked him, a tremor in her voice.
"Of course there were." There were always other options. "This world had a counter to my toad magic, so that wasn't one of them. I could have put the perpetrators in my inventory with a bit of work... But eternal imprisonment might actually be worse than death. I could have also dropped them off on some primitive world, hoping they didn't have enough knowledge to build up the infrastructure to get started on some other plot... But that would have made me responsible for them likely suffering a slow, torturous death at the elements and starvation."
Just... Not better options.
"I suppose I can see why you felt your options were limited." Meridian sounded uncertain, and that was alright. He wasn't telling her these things to get some kind of absolution. "And these... People... Represented a roadblock to..."
"...Would it help if you could see some of these events and people as I did?" He knew that he wasn't going to do as good a job explaining things as well as giving her an opportunity to play the same games would.
Getting a Playstation Two and a few games was kind of needlessly expensive since he was paying the original price in GP, but it wasn't like he didn't have the cash to burn.
Chase Meridian didn't have much else to say immediately which was fine by him. He needed time to figure himself out...
And she needed time to play some video games.
-----
Connor was a terribly confused individual.
This was not a new state of being for him. Ever since a significant amount of artificially implanted and very specifically shaded knowledge had been removed from his brain, he'd been struggling to catch up with everything that he simply didn't know.
Everything was confusing and, worse, frustrating!
The team, including himself, had recently returned from a grueling mission to Gorilla City. A land filled with sophont, talking gorillas being besieged by even more Kobra Venom enhanced animals and the brilliant, powerful psychic named Gorilla Grod.
He was brilliant. Not imaginative.
After returning, exhausted and hurt, the team hadn't been allowed to rest! No! It was a schoolday, everyone had to shower, change and rush off.
It was grating.
He knew he was considered odd and surly by his classmates. His disposition throughout the day only made it worse.
It was why, as soon as he returned to base, he took over the lounge and had an episode of 'Mr.Roger's Neighborhood' turned on.
It was... Connor knew that they were supposed to be lessons for little kids. Things like interacting with other people, empathizing with them or their situations... But the man simply had a calm, soothing voice and he needed something like that to focus on so he wouldn't lose his temper.
"Hey, Connor?" Came Alchemist's voice from behind him, back in the kitchen. "I'm about to do some cooking. You hungry?"
The less-than-half Kryptonian sat up and turned around to see Alchemist standing in front of the fridge, a notepad in his hands and his ward sitting happily at the bar. Her little legs swinging back and forth merrily.
"...Yeah." The surly boy stood up and walked over, mindful of the girl covered in pink, blotchy spots. "What were you going to make?"
"Yuffie's not feeling so great so I was thinking grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Sound good?" Yuffie! Right!
That was the girl's name!
"Sure... Couldn't you just cure her?" Connor tried to shift a bit further away when the polka-dotted girl tried to poke him.
"Yes." Alchemist answered simply enough as he set ingredients on the counter. "But then her immune system wouldn't know how to handle Chicken Pox and she'd probably catch it again when I might not be able to fix it."
"It's super itchy!" The girl whined. "But the pink stuff he gave me really helps!"
"Oh. That's... Nice?" The girl grinned at Connor's answer and Alchemist just hummed as he got the gas burners heating up his pan.
For a few minutes they just sat there in a pleasantly companionable silence.
He liked that about Alchemist. The man was content to leave Connor to his thoughts, he trusted Superboy to talk to him if he wanted something.
He kind of regretted missing the magic lesson he'd offered a while back... But he didn't get as much time to spend with M'gann as he would've liked.
"Hey... Alchemist?" Something had happened during the last mission and he didn't quite know how to talk about it. Or who to talk about it with.
Alchemist might not have been the easiest person to work with, but he never just dismissed them out of hand.
"What's on your mind? Do you want some crackers with your soup?" What? Crackers?
"Uh, no... I just..." How did Connor want to say it? "Something weird happened on my last mission. We were dealing with a psychic and he got into our heads."
"Ah, yeah. That's always a risk. I know you guys try to stay open so M'gann can talk with you, but it means leaving the door open for others, too." Alchemist commented as he put the first sandwich into pan.
"Yeah. I mean, no. I mean... When he was connected to me, I could kind of see his mind, too." Which had been super weird! Grodd's mind was... For lack of a better term, Grodd's mind was ugly.
"Hmm..." Alchemist didn't answer right away, flipping the sandwich instead. "Might be how he makes the connection. Did you notice anything else?"
"Kinda?" He hadn't told the others about it yet because he didn't want them to feel even weirder around him, but- "I can kind of feel the other members of the team when M'gann connects us, and I couldn't do that before."
"Oh!" Yuffie practically bounced in her seat. "It sounds like you leveled up some kind of new power! Maybe you're super stronger, or-or-or can set stuff on fire with your mind or lift stuff by thinking really hard!"
"Maybe." Alchemist agreed, setting a plate with a golden-brown sandwich on it and a bowl of thick red soup in front of the girl. "Or maybe he's just gotten a bit more sensitive to mental connections."
"Connor." Alchemist turned to address him. "Genomorphs are potent psychics and are genetically flexible. They make up a significant part of your system."
He put another sandwich into the pan.
"It may well be possible that you have some measure of psychic talent that full-blooded Kryptonians don't. Or maybe your powers are just developing in a new and different way because of different stimulus. It's not a gift I have, I wouldn't even have time to try and train it if I did... But I could see about finding you some materials to look at, maybe see if anything speaks to you?" Alchemist flipped the sandwich over to cook on the other side. "Literally."
Connor spent a significant amount of time thinking about the offer.
It... Meant he wasn't a direct copy of Superman... And he kind of liked that.
He was halfway through his sandwich, which was gooey, and his soup which was not, when something Alchemist said really stuck out to him.
"Wait. Alchemist, what did you mean by things 'Literally' speaking to me?" Maybe he misunderstood? The wizard was prone to leaving a lot of statements incomplete, just expecting people to ask for clarification or otherwise understand him.
"Psionic Power Stones." Alchemist answered him after swallowing a bite of his soup. Which was full of so many crackers it may as well have been bread instead. "They're kind of like scrolls, except for psychics."
He set his spoon down and looked Connor directly in the eye.
"Some psychics put so much of their brains into 'em, they can even talk. If you know how to listen."
-----
Alfred was a rather simple man. He enjoyed his work, though he did not work for a simple individual.
Bruce Wayne was, in many ways, an absolute nightmare!
Constantly did he find himself having to clean out blood from Master Wayne's clothing. Or else assist the young Dick Grayson in finding a lost screw or nut from one of his little devices!
Alfred had learned a long time ago to do a thorough sweep of the boys room for whatever small, sharp objects he'd simply 'overlooked' before he could run the vacuum.
Regardless of these difficulties, however, he still enjoyed his work. He very deeply loved his family.
Not terribly long ago, he'd had a small encounter with Master Wayne's night life. A young man calling him for assistance with a young lady that had taken ill and he'd had nowhere else to readily turn to.
Alfred expected that to be the end of his dealings with this 'Alchemist'. The boy was oddly friendly with Bruce and terribly at odds with young Dick, but either way he didn't seem to be one to linger in the sanctuary of someone else.
A lesson the Flash could well use, sadly.
To Alfred's surprise, a few weeks back he'd gotten a package in the mail. A box, filled with clean white cloths and a single crescent wrench with a lovely little note attached.
'To: Alfred Pennyworth
I wanted to express my gratitude for your assistance in resolving a personal matter the other night. Enclosed you'll find some tools I've altered in ways that I hope will assist you in your duties. The cloths can clean anything they run across, I've yet to encounter something that will stand against them. The wrench is rather special, too. Using it, you'll find it can repair almost anything. I've found it's particularly satisfying to use it in the performance of Percussive Maintenance.
Again, I thank you for your time and patience. I hope the rest of your day treats you well.
Sincerely, A'
A thank you letter? And a gift?
How very novel these days!
In the present, Alfred was in the process of tidying up the Batcave when he heard the alert signal indicating that the Batmobile was coming in.
He checked his wristwatch and raised a single eyebrow.
Master Wayne usually preferred to be back from his nightly escapades -before- the crack of dawn.
Alfred placed a multitude of empty coffee mugs on a tray and went to greet the master of the house as he parked.
"Good morning, Master Wayne." The English gentleman did not comment immediately at Batman's condition on leaving the vehicle. "You're up early today."
"It was a... Rough night, Alfred." Bruce stopped long enough to try and grab a mug of coffee only to discover they were all empty.
As they would be! Master Bruce should know better than to stack empty mugs next to his computer!
Alfred noticed the way his cape sat as the Batman walked was a bit askew, as though it were anchored somewhere lower on his back than the nape of his neck.
"Shall I order breakfast be delivered for Miss Selina Kyle, then?" Alfred kept pace behind Bruce as he walked, just a step behind and to his side.
"No... No, Catwoman wasn't involved in the... Altercation, last night." Bruce tried to hedge his words to try and avoid the topic at hand, though sadly his efforts were wasted on the wrong person.
"Very good, sir." Which meant someone else had gotten to the Batman last night. Considering the other villains were unlikely to leave bloody clawmarks in his back, that left a rather short list.
Poison Ivy wasn't on it for a handful of reasons. Among them being her rather sapphic proclivities. Cheetah was not in Gotham, so she was likely out as well. Baby Doll... Well, the woman had turned her life around and, rather sadly for her, lacked the ability to have a physical relationship with her peers.
Which left a more recent addition.
"Shall I prepare a rabies shot, sir?"
