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The officers finally manage to drag her out, kicking and screaming—well she’s just yelling at him, really—and he lets out a sigh, whether of relief or something else, he’s not really sure. He knew she wouldn’t take being asked to step down well. She’d been incredibly proud of being the CEO, and she’d been a damn good one, too. But after what she did, after Pinnacle, he couldn’t let her continue abusing company resources and potentially make a monster of their name.
The last thing he hears her say, just before she’s too far out of earshot, is “I’m never going to give up fighting for humanity, Ted.”
And just like that, the clock rewinds two decades, and he’s not in his boardroom anymore, but a castle somewhere in the Swiss Alps instead. He’s still alone, and he’s dressed as the same bug he is now, but the lenses of his goggles are shattered and he’s been forced to his knees and he’s choosing to be shot in the head over joining a madman’s operation to enslave the human race.
“All I want is to put Earth’s destiny in the hands of humans, not people pretending to be human, Ted.”
His hands catch his weight when he falls against the table, the realization of just how similar she is to the man that killed him washing over him like a tidal wave. He breathes in for four, holds for seven, out for eight, like his therapist taught him, but he doesn’t stop shaking like a leaf, even after he’s taken too many deep breaths to count. He’s edging towards panic, and—God, God.
She knows he’s the Blue Beetle, obviously. He showed up to the board meeting in costume, for God’s sake. She was actually one of the first people to figure it out. Kinda hard to hide it from someone as smart as her. She was the one to pay for his gravestone, but as a result of whatever timey-wimey bullshit is involved with the universe rebooting itself, she doesn’t remember him dying, just that he disappeared for a time, and he’s never corrected her. It technically never even happened—thanks, Barry!—so why should he?
But maybe if she knew about Maxwell Lord, she wouldn’t have built something that would have been a second OMAC Project, had he and Jaime not stopped her when they did. Maybe she’d not think of non-humans as threats to the human race.
He can’t dwell on the what-ifs, he knows. It’s not healthy. She didn’t go insane like he did, and even though she said he doesn’t have a sister anymore he’s still going to make sure that she won’t, and that in itself is enough.
He remembers something Jaime told him, then, something he’d told him she’d said when she unveiled pinnacle. She’d said, “My late Uncle Jarvis would have been so proud of me today, achieving his vision of self-reliance for the human race!”
It’s only then that he starts to sob.