theshcdowman​:
The pain that came with the catharsis in talking about Jules, is still one that threatens to swallow him whole. Even a century later it stills pains him just as badly as it did all those years ago, if not more somehow now, now that he’s lived long enough to see the effects of Jules’s decision play out generation after generation. Jules’s decision, and the impact it had on both of their lives, had always been the main source of his pain. It wasn’t losing Jules to death, that he managed to come to terms with, and had hoped that wherever the rest of himself was out there, he managed to find Jules there too.Â
After taking another step forward his eyes land on an old stone bench, nestled amongst the trees, and its another remnant of a life long gone. Taking a seat on it, he spots his own phantom version of Jules again, staring back at him from a tree across the way. There wasn’t a lot of evidence left of the true life the two of them lived together, outside of this small grove of trees, but he figures they could have done worse than leave this behind- something beautiful rather than painful.Â
“He was…” he draws out as he looks over to the phantom, almost wanting to ask him how he’d want to be described. “I lot like you, frankly. His father was a general, and had enough sway and political power to make sure his children who were born with powers didn’t have to go to the state-run schools like everyone else. But that didn’t make their lives any better, just a different kind of hell.”Â
“His father was the first one to bring forth the idea of utilizing the oldest of us to fight in the next war- and that was the early makings of The Guardian Program. I along with a couple dozen others were drafted into our own specialized unit, when it became clear we were to go to war with the Spanish. He wasn’t drafted,” he adds, glancing from Jase back to Jules where he was still standing a few yards away, the phantom’s features slipping into a weak smile, encouraging him to go on, “he volunteered, I think partially to prove his worth to his father, but also for the chance to get away from him and the rest of his family. Even if getting away meant going to war.”Â
He huffs a weak laugh at the first memory he has of Jules, all green and clearly not knowing what in the hell he’d signed himself up for when he walked into the den of neglected beasts that was the Superhuman Unit. “I hated him at first, thought he was just some spoiled brat of the general, who was there to play soldier. But that changed after a while, he was different than I thought he was, he looked after us in a way he didn’t have to. He wasn’t a fighter, even though he was a hell of a good one, but he made sure that we were actually treated like human beings for once- made sure we got the supplies and rations we needed, but made a point of not letting the others know he was doing it. That was when he and I became friends, and eventually more.”Â
He could honestly sit there all afternoon, and go over everything from the first time when he saved Jules out in the battlefield, taking a musket ball through his calf in the process, and when Jules saved him when he came down with yellow fever and had nearly died himself. He doesn’t though, figuring there could always be time for those stories later should Jase want them.Â
“He tried to do what you managed to do in the end- to leave, and make a life of his own here. And for a good while we did just that,” he’s mad at his younger self for how naĂŻve he was back then, to think they would actually get away with it, and how often he tried to downplay Jules’s own fears, until they eventually became a reality. The phantom’s smile wanes then before what he says next, and shifts back into the all too familiar weight of grief he’d grown so used to seeing Jules wear in their later years. “He had a sibling, much like yours, that through threatening my life managed to get him back into the fold. The rest would become history, and eventually what came before would fall victim to that history as well, to better fit the narrative of the Courtney name. And as for me… well, every story needs its monster.”Â
He watches as Mathias seems to get lost in his own thoughts, his own memories, as he summons the memory of the man he’d loved, of their story together. And none of it is entirely what Jase was expecting, but none of it feels unexpected, either. In fact, it feels strangely familiar, the mix that comes from understanding, instinctively, what it must have felt like to want to badly to run away that you joined a war in order to do it, and from hearing the facts he’d heard told in other stories all of this time. Of the early days of the Guardian Program, how closely tied the Courtneys had always been to what would eventually become the Guardians as they were today. A legacy that was theirs by birthright, his dad had always told him and Clint: they were born to be Guardians, to be heroes.Â
And it makes his chest ache, a little, to hear Mathias talk about him. With all of the love, and longing, the deep sadness that comes with it, threaded through even the best of the memories Mathias seems to have.Â
   “He went back?” Jase says, surprised, and confused. Because while everything else, every other minor difference between Mathias’ story and the stories he’s heard makes sense—details seen different ways from different sides, the fact that Mathias spent so much more time with him than anyone in the family would have, especially after he left, that some of the facts might have been twisted over the course of being told dozens of times, passed down from Courtney to Courtney—this one he can’t reconcile. In the stories Jase had always heard, he’d died. Killed by Mathias, which wasn’t something he still believed, once he met Shadow, once he heard the first pieces of this story from Mathias himself.Â
But now he can tell he’s missing more pieces than he thought he was, about all of this. That there are too many gaps, spaces that don’t add up, between the story Mathias knows from experience and the one that had been passed down the Courtney line.Â
   “I thought— I mean, the way my dad told it to me...” Not that he would have any reason to believe Robert over Mathias, not that he does, but something isn’t adding up. And he probably should never have had this much of a chance to get the real story that happened, but since he has it, he wants to know every piece, wants to get it right. Because someone should remember it, how it really happened. The truth, and not whatever story the Courtneys had decided would fit their image best.Â













