Note: This is the start of a series of oneshots exploring Rick and Beth’s dynamic in Jeff Lemire’s new JSA run. Meaning, Rick, Beth, Jennie, Todd and Yolanda are adult members while Courtney and Jakeem are still teens.
~.~
It’d been a few months.
Beth was…doing okay. She’d never been excellent with personal change, only others’ crises. No one expected her to thrive through this. And, at one point, a crisis was no longer one.
She wrestled with this second chance at life. Sometimes quietly, looking a moment too long at her reflection, feeling cosmically misplaced. Other times, this chasm felt too loud. Nightmares that woke her with cold sweats and screams. Unexplained shortness with her patients, especially the self-sacrificial ones not understanding they took their lives for granted. Beth was always at war with the unfair guilt that lingered in the back of her mind.
The JSA replaced her with a student she used to know. Her parents grew bitter and old. Old enough to be buried in the same plot she vanished from. Her brothers grew apart without their sister. Matthew wasted away to heroin abuse while Mark succumbed to his weak heart. Luke blew up in the army. And young John…John’s demise was too painful to think about. His story was just a blot of ink on a faded Orangeburg newspaper.
Her family deserved to be grieved by her. All of them. But how could she? She’d barely begun to grieve her old self.
Yolanda understood, though. And that was a blessing. Truly, a miracle. Who of death’s few victors could say they were brought back not alone? Another person who felt it all and truly got it. A companion who carried the same double-edged sword in her back pocket, cycling between euphoric joie de vivre and crippling bouts of existential depression.
Desire comforted her on days that felt like too much. Like pauses to blink back tears of gratitude over the simple pleasure of the sun shining on her face again. There were even days she forgot she wasn’t supposed to be alive. Hopefully, somehow, that feeling might stick.
As long as evil’s handprint still held onto the world, there would be a place for her at work. Maybe that’s what held Beth and Yolanda together for so long. Their deaths might’ve felt senseless, but their extended lives were purposeful. Yolanda’s renewed sense of justice was staggering, always near ravenous for a fight.
As for Beth, New York needed a meta-specialist.
Shift work always suited her. Weeks blurred by. JSA’s roster required her assistance. Jen practically begged Beth to return to medicine and mentoring as soon as they’d cleared her fit to return. The older members must’ve exaggerated her bedside manner because even Superman brought his son to her clinic’s door.
Beth learned to adapt, not day to day but disaster to disaster. That might not be any better than Yolanda’s fight-first, feel-later attitude, but it’s what worked so far.
~.~
Jakeem’s heart monitor beeped steadily, reassuring Beth she had not yet failed him. The goggles illuminated what she already knew for certain by touch and feel; his weak body swimming in adult-sized sheets and the pallor in his face mentioned by every visitor. It troubled Beth enough as a friend and a teammate, nevermind his doctor. She couldn’t lose Jakeem. He reminded her too much of John.
“He looks better than yesterday.”
Beth tensed, clipboard tight in hand. It didn’t take a backwards glance or fancy goggles to guess who that was. She knew that voice anywhere. Even now. Older, deeper, more self-assured. He leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, observing her work in a tee with jeans and that old hourglass slung around his neck. He was the man she’d avoided as much as she could. The one Jen placed beside her at the round table as though that might help her.
“I took a peek when you were having lunch,” he filled in, addressing the elephant in the room. Not only that she hadn’t seen him in her med lab the day before—She’d never seen him here, ever. She wondered how often he had been in, and why. If this room was a joy or a ghost. Technology and medicine has changed since she last worked here. The world had changed…Rick had earned his edges. Somber, serious. No longer young. Beth, where was she? Still floundering, still adjusting, still wearing the goggles like a mask.
Sometimes, when she needed a break, she’d find a wall and let her legs give out, just like old hospital days before the explosion. The break-room. A closet. Dr. McNider’s office. A stall in the bathroom. For a bleak desperate minute to catch her breath or sleep between crises. Now, that wasn’t enough. More times than not Beth found her face tipped towards fluorescent hospital lights, sliding the green goggles from her eyes, and numbing out three more working senses. That’s when her fingers would crawl up her neck, making sense of the impossible and searching for the scar that should be there, would be there, if she still lived in a grave.
Rick’s solid frame filled the leather seat beside the cot. He held the boy’s hand like he loved him.
Dread sunk into Beth’s stomach, coming back to herself. She let the fingertips at her neck slide to her side as though they were never there. Of course Rick loved Jakeem. The boy’s health was what brought him here to her clinic, breaking their unspoken agreement. Jakeem didn’t have parents to look after him like Stargirl did. Without the JSA, he’d be here alone.
“Well, he’s not improving. And if he dies, it’ll be my fault.”
“He won’t die,” Rick said. They might’ve been the harshest words he’d said to her in nearly ten years. Beth welcomed it—She’d rather this over indifference.
“How do you know?”
“You’d never let that happen.”
Jen pretty much said the same, but Rick’s assurance brought on a thicker wave of anxiety. How many times had she brought Rick back from the brink of death? Too many to count. Too many nights she’d spent debating with herself about how to keep him both sane and healthy. Strong and independent from the drug his dad’s parting wish was to save him from.
“You have a lot of nerve saying that to me.”
“What?”
“You know.” Beth swallowed hard. It was never supposed to come out like this. Certainly not in this accusing-tone she’s whipped up as that haunting horror creeped up again. Cruel was how it felt to find out through old pictures. Beth roaming the brownstone, catching up on old JSA team composites. She’d walked along the framed pictures in the grand hall and sought out his face in the crowd. Not on purpose but by habit. The year before she died, when his arm wrapped around her waist and Yolanda’s claw tips touched his shoulder. The year after, his eyes sunken and mouth tight, no smile, only a third of the equation with both women missing on each side. The year next came after, the photograph glossy in mahogany and Beth convinced her eyes played a terrible trick. Rick stood, almost skeletal, leaning against the round table, weakened. The next year Rick was gone altogether. Hourman’s name off the membership list. “I have your oncologist’s file.”
“Oh,” he said. He glanced at her, finally pulling his eyes from Jakeem. “Wait, what? No. You don’t think…” When she didn’t give him words, he shook his head hard. “Beth, that wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” she asked lightly. “I don’t recall anyone else supplying you with untested drug patches.”
“I don’t recall anyone else being as adamant to me that I was an addict,” he argued, almost sarcastic. “I was responsible for my own cancer.”
“God. Don’t say that.” Beth bit out, turning from him. Her parents would’ve blanched at her using the Lord’s name in vain but she hadn’t felt very close to the Lord these days. “But, I…”
But you…what? You could have prevented it? Is it your fault he got that sick? That you died before you could help him? Or are you mad there was a chance he could have joined you in the ground? Both of you starting over at the click of Jakeem’s pen…
“Besides,” he continued gently when her words dried up. “That was a very long time ago.”
“No, not really.” Beth wet her lips. “Not for me.”
Healing was all Beth had to be sure of at the moment. The only real merit for her place and home here was how desperately metahuman medicine was needed. It’s what got her through today and tomorrow. And if she failed this boy and all who loved him she was scared she’d never bounce back.
“So,” she said at last. “I think we can agree to disagree that I’m no miracle-worker.”
“Fine.” Rick took Jakeem’s hands in his again. Gripping the boy like a lifeline. Beth set the clipboard down and pressed her knuckles against Jakeem’s bed. Finally, she let herself look at Rick. Really look at him beyond a clinical manner. Fit, healthy, and bodily strong. Distracting. She wouldn’t let her eyes linger before. Not in front of Jesse or their friends. She’d never forgive herself if she gave Jesse real reason for worry. So she missed the not-quite-right eyes and the heavy bags beneath them. The foot that tapped too restlessly on the floor without Miraclo in his bloodstream.
“Why are you here, Rick?”
“I don’t know.” He wrung his hands. “Can’t I just be allowed to sit?”
Courtney bustled in, cupping a hand over the left side of her face, dressed in a grey hoodie over her Stargirl suit. She shrugged her school bag off her shoulder, dumping it at the door of the clinic. The cosmic staff warbled in her free hand. “Hey Dr. Mid-Nite, can you look in my ear? It’s been bugging me all day. Mom thinks I have an infection and doesn’t want me anywhere near my sister until I can get that ruled out. Something about daycare rules.” Rick shared a long sideways glance with Beth as Courtney hopped onto the examination table.
“Hey Rick,” she said. “How’s Jakeem?”
“Still hanging in there,” he said, softening for the teen.
“That’s good. Have you been here long?”
“A bit.”
Glad for the excuse, Beth pulled on her latex gloves and grabbed the otoscope. “Rick was just leaving.”
Courtney glanced between Rick and Beth, watching closely. Honestly, Beth was screwed if even a teenager could grasp her discomfort. “I’ve never seen you two hang out before.”
“Hang out?” Rick laughed a little under his breath and stood up to go. “We’ve been doing that since before you were even born.”
“Have a good evening, Rick.” She tilted Courtney’s face to the left, letting her long hair block the view to the door. Hmm…She felt a little warm.
“It’s okay, you know,” Courtney said, still perched on the wax paper while Beth sat at her desk, writing out a prescription for antibiotics. “To let him in.” She pinched her thumb and forefinger together. “Just a bit?”
Beth raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“I can’t say I’d know how to act in your shoes, either. It must be really hard.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Courtney.”
The teen leaned back against the med cot, sighing at the ceiling. “Jakeem asked Rick about it last week before Kobra. Apparently, Rick misses you. He just wants to be friends again. ”
“It’s not that simple.” Beth scoffed as a telling flush threatened to spread. Was her rollercoaster life the topic of all the teens’ gossip? “Jakeem is known to be a romantic of sorts, isn’t he?
“Well, sure. But I don’t think he was wrong about this. Why can’t you two be friends?”
“We are friends.”
Courtney crossed her arms over her chest. “You kicked him out of the room.”
“To examine a patient.”
The girl stared at her, unsatisfied–Beth folded.
“We’re just…There are boundaries, Courtney. I’m still lost in the past, not caught up with the present. I need space, especially where and when I work. That’s all.”
“So how do you expect to get over him, then? If you’ll never talk about it?”
Tired, Beth snapped her fingers for Courtney to jump down, lucky she liked this girl enough not to raise her voice at her. “You have a fever, Miss Stargirl.” She picked up the backpack and handed over the slip of paper. “I think it’s time to go home.”
The fact that Ekko went back in time god knows how many times again and again to get jinx to not kill herself only to end up losing her again makes me INSANE
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