Chapter Text
Liberty likes all animals, but she's always been more of a dog person. The only people that have ever been able to keep up with her ridiculous amount of energy have all been dogs. Except...dogs aren't really "people." Are they? It doesn't matter. They should be; they're better than people anyway.
"You're lucky, Sushi," Libber mutters, looking down at her border collie who's sitting next to her in the grass. "I wish I was a dog. You guys get me."
Sushi puts his head on Libber's lap and sighs dramatically, as if he fully comprehends what a tragedy it is that Liberty is not a dog and is sharing in her disappointment.
"Like, there are literally no downsides to me being a dog. I would get to run around and chase squirrels all the time. That sounds like a perfect life to me. No responsibilities, no super vague prophecies that have you bound to destiny with absolutely no wiggle room for fooling around or doing anything remotely interesting...plus, most people like dogs. Nobody would get mad at me if I was a dog. I wouldn't be able to talk if I was a dog. I suppose that could be seen as a downside, but if I can't talk, I can't say anything stupid that makes people mad at me. So that's another plus."
Libber sighs and lays down.
"I wonder if, if I just stayed here forever, if anyone would ever come looking for me. Maybe they won't care." She blinks. "Well. They would look for me. They need me because I can shoot lightning bolts out of my hands. But if I couldn't do that, they wouldn't care. I could just be here, for like, forever, and they wouldn't even wonder where I-"
"Who are you talking to?"
Libber yelps at the sound of Maya's voice behind her and accidentally shoots a bolt of lightning into a tree, setting it on fire. Maya puts it out with her water powers and sighs.
"Was that really necessary?"
"Well, I didn't do it on purpose! You startled me!"
"I wasn't trying to sneak up on you. I guess you just didn't hear me walk up because you were too busy talking to yourself."
Liberty clears her throat and gestures to her dog. "I was talking to Sushi," she announces.
"Right. Anyway, Lilly told me to come find you."
"Why didn't she come find me herself?"
"Uh, I don't know, maybe because she's pregnant and she has better things to do than wander around the woods looking for an idiot?" Maya suggests.
"You're pregnant, too," Libber points out.
"Not as pregnant as Lilly. I'm still in the first trimester."
"Okay, fine," Libber huffs. "What does she want?"
"She just wants you to stop moping around in the woods."
"No, seriously, what does she want?"
"No, seriously, her exact words were 'tell that idiot to stop moping around in the woods.'"
"Why does she care if I mope around in the woods?"
"Because she's your best friend and she's worried about you."
A look comes over Libber's face that sends a shiver down Maya's spine. "I told you there's nothing to worry about," Libber says in a low voice.
Maya bites her lip. "Right. Sorry. We just...don't want you to mope around in the woods all day. We miss you, you know."
Libber stares at her for a few more seconds before clicking her tongue. "Right." She lets Maya pull her to her feet. "I still would rather be a dog than a human, though."
Just like that, she's back to normal. Maya forces the uneasy feeling she'd had a moment ago out of her head. "That's fair. You'd make a good dog."
"Really?"
"Yeah. You're like a golden retriever."
"Oh, cool!" Libber chirps. There's a little hop in her step as she quickens her pace to catch up with Sushi, who always runs ahead. Maya chuckles. Technically she's about a year younger than Libber, but everyone always forgets that fact because the lightning master acts so childish. As annoying as Libber can be, she's still the "baby" of the team. She pretty much is a dog. She's ridiculously energetic and distractible, and, like she said earlier, would be perfectly happy doing nothing but run around and chase squirrels for the rest of her life.
Maya's face falls slightly. As one of the main four elementals mentioned in the prophecy, Libber doesn't really have a choice in what she gets to do with her life anyway. Despite how much she brags about how cool her powers are, Maya happens to know for a fact that if given the choice between keeping her powers or letting someone else take her responsibility, Libber would give them up in an instant.
Which is one of the reasons Maya is so wary about the new "trick" Libber showed everyone a few days ago.
Cole is exhausted.
This is not a new development. Cole is usually exhausted. If nobody woke him up he could probably sleep for over twelve hours straight. And even then, he'd probably still be tired.
Jay is never exhausted. The longest Jay's ever been asleep is maybe six hours. At the most. He has pretty much endless energy. Even when he does get tired, all it takes is a cat nap and a cup of chocolate milk for him to be bouncing off the walls again. Cole has no idea how he does it.
He wishes he had Jay's endless supply of energy right now, though, because in addition to his regular energy deficit, he's also gotten a whopping three hours of sleep in the last two days. All he wants to do is go home and sleep for at least a week, but he'd already promised his father that he'd help him clean out the attic, so guess what he's been doing for the last hour and a half.
He shouldn't be complaining. It actually hasn't been as boring as he thought it would be. Once he got past the fact that there were probably close to a hundred boxes they had to sort through that hadn't been touched since he was seven, Cole almost forgot how tired he was. A lot of the stuff up here had belonged to his mother.
A ghost of a smile appears on Cole's face as he flips through a scrapbook album full of newspaper clippings and pictures from all of his mother's performances.
Lilly was a singer. A really good one, too, according to all the critics. Cole almost didn't recognize her at first when he saw the pictures. He remembered his mom looking much more...tired. But these pictures were taken before she got sick. She looked dazzling, with her hair down and her face done up with make-up. Her face is full of a youth and energy that Cole doesn't remember ever seeing when she was alive.
He turns the page again. This page is full of newspaper clippings reviewing Lilly's performance as Fantine in Les Misérables, which Cole remembers his father telling him, had won her several awards.
There aren't very many pages after that. Just a few smaller gigs here and there that she had done. Judging by the dates, though, this was around the time she started getting sick.
Cole exhales sharply in frustration. "Sick" is as far as anyone had bothered to go while explaining to him what had happened. In all fairness, he now knows that nobody else really knew what was wrong with her either, but someone could have at least told him that.
He sets the scrapbook back in the box it had been in and moves onto the next one.
As much as the idea of getting rid of any of his mother's stuff kills him, Cole knows that there really is no rational reason for them to keep most of the things in these boxes.
Her old guitar with three missing strings that's beyond repair, a really creepy-looking broken china doll, and the set of very dried up watercolor paints can all be thrown away. There are actually several sets of paint, but Cole figures the acrylics at least are salvageable enough that he doesn't have to get rid of them.
The last few boxes are pretty boring—baby clothes from when he was little that his dad for some reason still has, a stack of dusty textbooks on various types of dance styles, a preposterous amount of ancient sheet music that looks like it's about to disintegrate, and a ton of other useless junk.
He's almost done clearing everything out of the attic when he notices he missed a box.
"Well, Terran and Ezra are both stupid names. You should take those off your list."
"Okay, those are bold words coming from someone named Liberty Castaspella Gordon," Lilly says, rolling her eyes.
"Wait. Your middle name is...Castaspella?" Maya blinks.
"Shut up! I know I have a stupid name. I'm trying to save Lilly's baby from succumbing to the same fate," Libber says earnestly, taking the pad of paper out of Lilly's hands and crossing off the only remaining names on the list.
"What about my baby?" Maya asks.
"We'll give your baby a name after we've named Lilly's," Libber says, waving her hand dismissively.
Lilly sighs. "You've shot down every one of my ideas so far. What do you think I should name the baby?"
Libber hums. "If it's a girl, I think Phoenix would be a really badass name."
"Libs, a Phoenix is a bird with fire powers."
"So?"
"So, that would be a stupid name for an elemental master of Earth to have."
"Well, I like bird names. You should name it after a bird."
"Don't call my baby an it."
"But you don't know what gender it is yet."
"The correct pronoun is 'them.'"
"But that makes it sound like there's more than one. Oh my gosh, Lilly, what if you have twins?"
"I don't think I'm having twins. I'm pretty sure it's a boy, anyway."
"How do you know?"
"I don't know. I can just tell."
"Ugh, whatever. You can name him whatever you want."
"Wow, really? Thank you for your permission to name my ow-"
"Guys, cut it out," Maya interrupts tiredly. "How do you manage to turn everything into an argument?"
Libber attempts to say, "it's just our thing," but she only gets the first two words out before she abruptly stops and slams her hands down on the table.
It's silent.
Nobody misses the tiny sparks emitting from the tips of Libber's fingers, or the brief look of panic that comes over her face before she shuts her eyes and quickly reels it back in before she looses control and shoots lightning all over the place.
After a minute Libber exhales and the lightning goes back into her. She shudders, but then looks up like nothing happened. "What are you looking at me like that for?" She laughs. "I have it under control. I just lost focus there for a second. Once I get more used to it, it won't be a problem anymore, okay? It's nothing to worry about, I promise."
Nobody believes her. But nobody says anything either.
Libber clears her throat. "Okay, so what do you think of the name Cassian?"
"It's...okay," Lilly blinks. "A bit too old-fashioned for my taste, though."
The box is shoved behind a few loose planks in the wall, almost like he was supposed to miss it; like it had been hidden for some reason.
It looks like it's been taped shut several times. The label on the side is really faded and it takes Cole a few minutes to work out what it says. When he finally does, though, the does a double take.
"'Lightning's stuff?'" Cole says indecrulously.
He needs to use a pocket knife to cut through the thick layer of duct tape sealing the box shut, otherwise it would take forever to get it all off.
Technically, it's not that far-fetched—Jay's biological mother had been an elemental just like his. Cole had never really thought about it before, but they probably did know each other.
He opens the box, half expecting there to be something terrible.
There isn't, though. There's a blue gi with a pattern of lightning bolts on the overcoat, a few rather extravagant-looking shurikens, a music box that doesn't work, a journal with handwriting that's by some miracle even worse than Jay's and...
Cole lets out a soft gasp. At the bottom of the box, there are two matching necklaces. They're tiny stone dragons, one blue and one black, that when put together form a heart. The black dragon has a tiny sapphire gemstone as the eye, and the blue one's eye is made of onyx—they look like those friendship necklaces you'd find in a mall, except way cooler and by the looks of it, handmade. Handmade by his mother. Handmade by his mother for Jay's mother.
Cole doesn't know how to feel about that. On one hand, it's rather poetic that he and Jay ended up being best friends too, even though they didn't know that their parents even knew each other. On the other hand, something about that...doesn't sit right with him.
He doesn't remember ever knowing Jay's mom. He has no idea what happened to her. It's perfectly plausible that she left or died or whatever happened to her before he was born or when he was too young to remember. But no one ever thought to mention anything about her? Cole can forgive his father for not telling him about his elemental powers, because that part makes sense. Lilly had done some pretty dangerous stuff as the last master of Earth, and after losing her Lou didn't want anything to happen to Cole either.
But after Cole had figured out about his powers, his dad still never thought to fill him in on anything concerning his mother.
And Master Wu? Master Wu never tells them anything.
He waited almost two years after he met Kai to tell Nya that she had water powers. He never told Jay that he was adopted. He never mentions any of their parents unless they uncover some huge secret about them that he has no choice but to explain.
And then there was the thing about the box being hidden. Maybe there was something in here that he wasn't supposed to find?
But there's nothing that looks even remotely dangerous. There's no explanation.
Cole sighs. The adrenaline is worn off, and he's beginning to remember how tired he is. He'll worry about it later. For now, he just wants to go home and take a nap.