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It doesn’t take long for Mark to miss his dad, which is total bullshit. He shouldn’t. Like, he really, fucking obviously shouldn’t. His dad’s a genocidal fascist who thinks of his mother like a pet.
Debbie Grayson — Grayson because she still hasn’t gotten around to changing back to her maiden name and neither one of them talks about that for obvious reasons — isn’t a fucking pet. She’s the best woman in the world. Probably in the whole universe, since Mark hasn’t been impressed by the aliens he’s met.
Everything Nolan had ever done, ever said, had been a lie. All of it. He’d wanted to create the next generation of Viltrumites and tough shit to the species already on the Earth.
He’d hurt Mark. He’d hurt Mark worse than he’d ever been hurt in his life. Not just with his hands—
punch and punch and punch and please Dad stop please I love you
—but with his head. His heart. The truth of how he’d really seen those humans—
they’re crashing right into him and it doesn’t hurt but he can hear the screams and feel the wetness all over him from how he’s holding his arms out so he can make this stop just stop no more Dad
—that Mark shares his DNA with. Not half, not like he’d always thought, but enough. Even if it’s just 1%, it’s enough for him to love them, fuck-ups and all.
Still.
Late at night, he thinks of the good times. The times he’d thought were good, at least. He doesn’t need a lot of sleep, so he’s got all the time in the world to dwell on it.
He thinks about his dad’s arms around him. He thinks about his face pressed into his dad’s chest, heart beating loud and steady. He thinks about his dad smiling at him.
“I love you, Mark,” his dad says in the memories. “More than anything.”
When Mark finally gets to sleep, he dreams about his dad beating him to death. His dad reaches into Mark’s chest and pulls his heart out, leaving him with his blood pouring out onto the mountaintop beneath them.
“You never should have had this,” his dad says in the dreams. “It’s what ruined you.”
When he wakes up, he focuses on breathing. He feels his chest, feels the unbroken skin and bone and the racing pulse beneath them. He’s not dead. His dad hadn’t killed him.
He misses him more those days. It’s…
It’s fucked up, honestly.
He doesn’t talk about it with his mom. He’d have to be crazy to talk about it with his mom. It especially sucks because he’s pretty sure she feels the same. She might be too proud to show it, but Mark’s not an idiot. One parent can lie to him, but not both.
She misses his dad as much as she hates him, too. She cries when she thinks Mark isn’t around. He doesn’t know if she spends more time with a creased, old photo of her and his dad on the night he proposed or with a glass of wine. It’s not like it matters, not when she’s got both of them more often than not.
Him and Amber, they don’t talk about it. She says she loves him, says she’s there for him no matter what. He doesn’t know if she means it. Hell, he doesn’t even know if it’s lying to keep all those tangled feelings about his dad locked up in his chest.
He doesn’t even know if it’s a deal-breaker that he lies anymore. Maybe she pities him now. She’d seen how he’d looked after his dad had damn near killed him. A lot of people had.
Even Mark, once he’d been well enough to sit up. He hadn’t recognized himself in it. He’d seen the shape of his body in parts of it. His hand, shattered. His nose, concave. His teeth, scattered.
Is that why his dad had left? Had he stopped seeing Mark in that mangled body? Would he have felt guilty at what he’d done, or would it have been what he needed to satisfy him? No more Mark meant no more failure. Maybe he’d been trying to beat the Viltrumite out of Mark. He nearly had.
Eve tries to talk about it. She says she knows how it feels to fail at the hero gig, to hurt the people you’re trying to protect. She’s there for him.
She doesn’t know. She can think she understands him all she wants, but she doesn’t know. Mark always makes a few non-committal sounds, always tells her that he’s just not ready yet.
He doesn’t know when he will be. That, or else he doesn’t know how to tell her the truth that he’s been ready. That maybe, after everything that’d happened, he’d forgive his dad if he came back and ruffled Mark’s hair just right.
William, now he doesn’t let Mark duck out of the conversation.
“Just talk to me, dude,” William tells him in the parking lot of Tacos Forever, “and stop telling me you’re fine. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you’re not. Like, who would be?”
“William—” Mark starts.
“No ‘William,’” he interrupts. “Absolutely none. My name is hereby verboten. That’s German for ‘I don’t want to hear it anymore, Mark.’ No more excuses. I want my best friend to be okay.”
Mark feels his throat get tight, then his eyes get hot. Shit, he’s crying in William’s car and there’s a taco in his hand that’s getting ready to spill all over William’s rank-ass upholstery. It’s embarrassing, but not surprising. Feels like the only things he’s got these days are apathy and tears.
He’d say which he prefers, but they both suck absolute balls. No offense to William, obviously.
“I’m not okay,” Mark blubbers.
He can’t catch his breath to make it sound better, which probably goes to show that he’s definitely telling the truth. He says it again and again and again.
William hugs him then. Mark lets him because there’s not much else he can do. He’s still crying, still trying to catch his breath. He’s never gonna be okay again.
He doesn’t hug William back. William is the same stuff as him when you get down to it. He’s skin and muscles and bone and blood. It’s just the stuff, though, not the material. Mark could never hug him back for real. His arms would crush William, skin splitting and muscles tearing and bones crushing and blood spurting.
Mark keeps his hands in his lap, his jeans taking the brunt of his spilled taco. That’s the limit of what he can do.
William takes him home after that. Mark gets it together enough that he’s not weeping when they pull up. He gives William a watery smile and thanks him. William gives him one back. They both know nothing’s changed.
Mark goes inside and avoids his mom crying in the laundry room. She probably found another of his dad’s shirts. There are a million little things like that in the house. Land mines waiting for her to step on them so they can remind her that her life was worth absolutely nothing to the man whose life meant absolutely everything.
Mark doesn’t need those. He’s his own reminder. He’s got his dad in his veins, in every twisting little staircase of his DNA.
He lies down in bed and imagines his dad is there with him.
“I’m sorry, Mark. I was just kidding around.” They’d float over the Sahara together. Words with one of the first people he’d ever loved. “I’d never leave you. I’d never hurt you.
Life goes on, though. The world keeps turning and the universe keeps expanding and the hits keep coming.
“Unidentified object reached the edge of our solar system early this morning,” Cecil is saying. Mark’s in his uniform-that-feels-like-a-costume and trying to care. “It’s fast. Within the hour, it was somewhere near Mars. It’s been there ever since. Seems like it’s waiting.”
His mom is in the room with him. She doesn’t let him go to the GDA alone when she can help it. She squeezes his hand.
“And what is Mark supposed to do about it?” she asks.
She sounds put-together. Looks like it, too. Honestly, you’d never know how their family had broken apart like a fucking apocalypse. Catastrophic, like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. Could his dad destroy a planet like that?
Could he?
“We need him to perform recon on it,” Cecil answers. He’s got a hand in his pocket like he’s talking about the game last night. “No fighting, not unless there’s no choice, but we can’t have unknown factors this close to Earth.”
Mark thinks about space. The feeling of nothing, of total silence around him. The vacuum pulling at him from every angle, the cold that could kill but only gave him goosebumps. The air sitting stale and heavy in his lungs because he’s got to hold onto that same, single breath.
That’s the neat thing. You don’t.
“What is it?” he asks.
Cecil meets his eyes. Calm and collected. He’d kept his cool in front of Mark’s dad, there’s no reason for him to sweat during a conversation with the new and inferior model.
“That’s what you’re here to find out.”
So it is.
His mom’s scared of losing him. He understands a little bit. She doesn’t have anybody else. She doesn’t have another seventeen years to make a new one.
He doesn’t have it in him to comfort her. A hug is the best he can do.
“Be back soon,” he tells her.
Three-day trip to Mars, three-day trip back. Mark has millions of days in his future. Does Mark mean the same thing as his mom when he says soon?
What will you have after five hundred years?
He leaves. He’s got a rebreather that he probably doesn’t need and a paste that’ll give him calories and not much else.
He hopes it’s Allen. He’s… Allen’s cool. He’s the only cool person Mark’s ever met that isn’t from Earth. It’s probably just selection bias or something. The cool aliens all stay on their planets because what does Earth have that they’d want?
It’s not Allen.
He knows that before he really knows it. He’s not psychic — not unless there are even more secrets about Viltrumites — but he still knows it.
He’d sort of known it even before he’d left Earth. Cecil’s practical. If it was recon, there are satellites they can send. For fuck’s sake, the government has robot-zombies just sitting around. A couple hundred million dollars to see what’s just around the galactic corner is nothing.
But no satellite would stand up to Nolan Grayson, the one and only Omni-Man. No Mark would either. Invincible’s just a catchy name.
Knowing and knowing and actually seeing are all different things, though. Mark knowing it could be his dad is a low boil of dread that pumps sluggishly along his veins.
Knowing it’s his dad when he sees a tiny speck of a figure floating against the red backdrop of Mars is another thing. It’s sharp panic and the beginnings of pleading. No, no, no. Anything but this.
Seeing him, though. Getting close enough that Mark can see the tiny blue specks of his eyes and the white on the sides of his head. That’s…
It’s everything all at once.
Mark stops. There’s space between them, but it’s not enough. His dad could fly across that in a second, could kill Mark before he could blink. He’s just that good. He’s incredible like that. A hero.
He still looks like one. He’s changed into a white suit and lost the cape, but that doesn’t change it. It goes deeper than an outfit. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest and his jaw set and his feet pointed beneath him like he belongs in the heavens.
Mark’s rebreather is tucked into his belt. He’s been holding his breath since Earth. He lets it out into nothing.
He makes no noise. The only thing he hears is the blood pumping in his ears. Maybe it wasn’t ever meant to make a sound. Maybe it was supposed to be a gasp, or else his mouth just fell open.
Doesn’t matter. It takes his air, and then there’s nothing in Mark’s lungs. There’s fear and panic and gut-churning anticipation building in him. They take their chance.
Mark’s suffocating. He doesn’t really need to breathe, not like before he’d gotten his powers, but that’s a different problem. That’s logic against instinct. He’s dying.
He’s dying.
His dad’s here. His dad’s here and he’s going to kill him. Mark’s going to die and he can’t breathe and it’s going to hurt again and can he not catch a fucking break just once in his life?
He forgets how to rocket himself away from his dad, forgets how to be. It’s just another reason his dad had beaten him. For all he’d pretended, his dad had never been anything but a Viltrumite. He didn’t just have it in his veins, he had it in his brain.
Mark’s human. Standing at the beginning of thousands and thousands of years alone, he’s still human. He remembers scraped knees and losing baby teeth and the burn in his lungs from holding his breath too long.
His dad is there. Not there like before but there. Close enough that his hands are on Mark, close enough that the only reason Mark can’t smell his aftershave is that they’re in space.
Mark doesn’t even know how Viltrumites shave. Maybe space isn’t the only reason, then.
His dad’s gripping his shoulder with one hand and has the other on his hip. He’s reaching for something, Mark might think if he could think. If there was anything other than blind, animal terror, he might know what.
There isn’t, though, so he doesn’t.
Those hands are so hard. So vicious. They can curl into fists and tear through stone like nothing. They can tear through him even easier.
They’re his dad’s.
Nolan Grayson is and isn’t. He was, had been, but will never be again. Time isn’t the same for him and his dad, or so his dad had said. They operate on a scale of millennia.
It’s already started. The past is the present is the future. Mark skates along it all, cracking and breaking in ways that are so new and so familiar.
he’s being picked up and thrown down and held and hurt and loved and loathed
He reaches for his dad in turn. ‘Help, help, help’ and ‘please, don’t’. He doesn’t know which it is, which he needs. His dad, gone forever and right in front of him.
The man that once was takes Mark’s rebreather off his hip. He exhales a short breath into it then presses it against Mark’s face. It cycles.
The air comes.
Mark breathes.
He’s clutching at his dad. He’s holding him close like he’s not too old for this, like he still doesn’t know about the disdain between them.
He only knows he’s crying because he’s looking through frost. That physiology that keeps him alive out here doesn’t extend to tears. They freeze nearly as fast as he can make them.
He’s a man now. On Viltrum, he might have already been told to kill his dad. Who fucking knows what they want out there? But here in the void, he presses himself against his dad’s chest and squeezes his eyes shut.
There’s no sound in space because there’s nothing in space. There are rocks and chemical reactions Mark’s too dumb to understand and that Eve has sitting at her fingertips.
There’s something between Mark and his father, though. A link that’s blood in their bodies and on their fists. He hears his dad’s heartbeat when the vibrations travel through his forehead. It sounds like his own.
“Dad, please,” he says into his rebreather like the contact can get that across, too. “Dad, why? Dad, don’t. Dad, I love you.”
He’s scared and angry and heartbroken.
He’s so, so heartbroken.
His dad only holds him close. The arms that could kill him stop short. A hug. Mark wraps him up as tight as he can. He can’t hurt him, not in any way that matters. He can hold him and love him and hate him.
He’s never been strong enough for anything else.
He knows he’ll die. Probably soon, before he knows it’s happening. His dad will tighten his arms, and he’ll tear through Mark like Mark can tear through anything on Earth.
He doesn’t want to die. He’s nearly as scared of it as he is of his dad. He’ll go and end up in whatever comes next, and what’ll be left is his mom with nothing. She’ll have two holes in her life, twice as many mines to step on in their house.
He’s beating his fists against his dad’s back. The angle is wrong and he’s probably not doing anything but soothing some of those muscles that have had thousands of years to build up tension, but he can’t stop. He has to do something.
Think, Mark.
He’s still crying. He tries to pull back, to put any space between them. He has to get back to Earth, to warn them who’s come back. It won’t do anything, he knows, but he has to try. He’d told his dad that he would, after all. Almost a promise.
His dad doesn’t let him get far. His arms are like iron when they hold him close. Mark wants to die and to laugh and to scream and to apologize.
Sorry for not being what you want, and for ruining your life, and for letting you get away with it, and for missing you, and for being sorry.
“Why?” he asks, which is what it’s always been about.
The rebreather is clear. His dad’s eyes watch his mouth make the move, that horrible attention settled on him. He’d punched that same mouth apart.
Mark watches his dad’s in turn.
“To see you,” his dad says soundlessly.
A dream and a nightmare. This is forever for Mark. He’ll have his dad forever. Long after everything he knows is gone, he’ll have his dad twisted up in his chest and making him burn with the need to claw him out so the pain can end.
“I hate you,” Mark says.
His dad’s smile is lost under the mustache, it’s so faint. Mark still sees it.
“Good,” his dad answers.
They’re talking and hearing nothing. It’s the same as it ever was. Mark’s so scared it hurts, misses him so badly it hurts worse.
“I will watch,” his dad says slowly enough Mark can keep reading his lips. “Do not come back.”
“I love you,” Mark says or begs or threatens.
He doesn’t know anymore. He never will. His dad’s eyes close like it hurts to hear. It can’t hurt him more than it hurts Mark. It can’t.
“You come back,” his dad mouths, “I will kill you. I love you, Mark.”
He pushes him away. He turns his back on Mark and it hurts like the first time. Mark wants to say something, to grab him and pull him back to Earth. They can make things like they were and watch how things will never be the same.
He doesn’t, though, because he’s always believed his dad. Lies and truth, Mark’s always bought it. His dad’s the best fucking person in the world. Every word his dad says, Mark believes. Maybe even more now that they hurt so badly. Only real things can hurt this badly.
His dad will watch. Whether for the other Viltrumites Mark is sure will come back one day, or else Earth, or else Mark himself: his dad will watch.
He’ll kill Mark. Maybe out of hate or of love. He could do it to save Mark from what will come when the Viltrumites come. He could do it because it makes him sick to look at the walking and talking mistake he created.
Mark doesn’t think about the last thing, the thing it would hurt to believe.
He only turns back towards Earth. He spends a whole day on the dark side of the moon. Not crying, not after the days he spent doing just that in space, but just floating.
This could be dying. Maybe it’s nothing but the endless sky and the endless silence and the endless hurt. He’ll know one day.
When he finally lands on Earth, it’s not at GDA headquarters. It’s in his backyard. He knows that Cecil knows. It’s a talk for later, for when he feels like he can speak without shaking into a million pieces.
His mom runs out of the house and sweeps him into a hug. She’s crying and fussing over him, holding him out so she can look over him for damage. He doesn’t know if she can see the hurt. He doesn’t know if she knows who’d done it.
“You were gone for so long,” she says later when she’s got a blanket around his shoulders and a cup of hot chocolate in his hands. “I was so scared that something happened to you.”
Mark wasn’t gone long. Only days. Days out of a month out of a year out of an eon. He loves her so much it hurts. He never wants to lose her.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “I’m back now.”
His dad will wait. He’ll wait and he’ll watch and, one day, he’ll be what Mark comes back to. In five hundred years, Mark will have him. Maybe the lies will hurt less and the hate will hurt more.
Maybe not.