masterofmidgets | Shut up, I Know This Isn't NaNo

But I can't work on NaNo at work, and this...just sort of happened.

Shel Carter is Booster's sister who was dead and now is not because of time travel. This is moderately Boostle-y. Duh.

It’s not like Michelle is trying to eavesdrop. What she’s trying to do is find her brother, because they’ve got a however-brief lull in things to fix in the time stream and Rip said they could go for ice cream. But approaching his room, she hears the soft murmur of speech and – call it sisterly instinct – she hangs back at the door, just out of sight, in hope of overhearing something she can tease him about later.

“—so then I had to ditch the Batsuit and disguise myself as Elvis. Man, I wish you could have seen it – I made that pantsuit hot. Even white polyester can’t take away from this ass,” Booster snickers. There’s no answer, she can’t hear another person moving or even breathing, just the faint creak of the mattress shifting under her brother, and she supposes he must be talking on the phone.

But when she moves a little closer, so she can see through the narrow crack of the door – she’s a Carter, manners and morals are always going to take second seat to curiosity – there’s no phone in sight. Just Booster, sitting cross-legged on the bed and talking earnestly to his bedside table. Which is just a little worrying – Rip has a whole list in the kitchen of signs of mind control or incipient supervillainy, and talking to empty space is right up at the top, just under abusing the black hair dye and growing a goatee—until the blue plasticky corner of a frame catches her eye, and she realizes her brother is in fact talking to a photograph.

“You’d have been proud of me, though,” Booster says, and there’s a little catch in his voice now, none of the casual cheerfulness of before. “Well, actually, you’d have cracked up over me almost getting shot by a crazy old guy and driving the Batmobile dressed like Elvis, Mister Mature, but I’d have known you were anyway. If you could have been there—”

Michelle bangs on the door loudly, like she hasn’t been standing there for the last five minutes, and Booster jerks and spills to the floor in a swearing heap. If, in the ensuing attempt to detangle his limbs, she catches him take a swipe at his eyes to brush off a glittering dampness, she doesn’t mention it.

But later, when Booster is watching some sports event in the living room with Rip and Skeets, she quietly excuses herself and sneaks back into his room to see whose picture her brother had been all teary-eyed over, since as his sister it’s her right to know this kind of thing.

She recognizes her brother, of course, though Booster’s a few years younger and wearing the most abominably hideous shirt she’s ever seen, but she doesn’t recognize the other man. He’s a short brunet, an athlete’s body but a little bit of a paunch, and he’s grinning broadly, one arm slung companionably across her brother’s shoulders. There’s sand behind them, and palm trees, and they both look ridiculously happy with themselves.

It’s easy to forget that there are years between her and her brother now, all that time she just skipped right over between that fight that almost (did) kill her and when she saw him in Rip’s bunker. And then something like this happens and – it drives her crazy, that she doesn’t know when Booster had this picture taken, or who the brown-haired guy is, and why her brother looks so happy to be with him, or what happened to her brother that he’s having conversations with a photograph. She can guess, from what Booster’s told her about the last few years, about Ted, but it’s not the same as knowing, as having been there for him.

Michelle doesn’t like realizing that she doesn’t really know her brother anymore.

Shut up, I Know This Isn't NaNo

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