Who: Caylie Gwynn & Cal Barton When: Thursday, February 26 Where: A park between NA and X-Factor What: Cal rescues Caylie from her powers and saves the city! Complete.
Caylie had been there for an eternity. The cold didn't bother her; you can't lose heat if the heat itself is time-locked to a single, infinite moment. Her muscles weren't stiff or sore; the blood feeding them hadn't moved in hours, days, centuries, but neither had the impulses from her nerves. The only thing that stirred was her consciousness. Caylie's mind was at the center of a temporal whirlwind, where the moment she'd created raged on for eons, tearing her apart with its stillness.
Caylie had been there for a second. She could still feel the chilly morning air, still see the puff of steam that was her breath. She had been straining, was still straining, is straining. Caylie's moment had just begun, her dust just now fading into the aether, her powers rearing up to shock the world into stillness. Any moment now it would sink in what had happened, what she'd done by trying to get her powers back. In the next moment, she would start to panic, start to wonder how to undo this and put things back the way they had always been. The next moment that would never come.
Caylie had been there for hours. Within the time bubble, it was still early morning, the sunlight itself frozen on its journey to Earth. But she'd been sitting there on that damned bench, unable to move, unable to rouse her body from its stupor, while she could feel the temporal disruptions that lay within the bounds of her power surge. She could feel time shifting outside of the bubble, feel it lurch and writhe in small pockets across all five burroughs, but mostly she could feel it still, quiet, a dead thing, as it trapped this tiny pocket of the universe in a temporal wasteland.
Caylie was having a really bad day.
It was amazing how active a city frozen in time could be.
The uneven nature of it meant that people were taking advantage of places where time had stopped, where opportunistic looters were taking time to root through purses as they passed statue-still bystanders. Others were more aggressive, professional criminals who took advantage of the time freeze to target banks or hash out personal vendettas against people who couldn't defend themselves.
The city's heroes were on alert, and Hawkeye was no exception — but Cal had a more specific priority.
No one had seen or heard from Caylie since all of this started, and while everyone else seemed relatively content to let that go for the time being, Cal wasn't going to shrug his shoulders and assume she'd turn up. The time freeze might have been her fault, some kind of accident, or she'd been hurt in the way she'd been hurt when her powers interacted with Gale's.
And now she was missing.
So Cal broke off from the Sentries and he went looking. Caylie wasn't the type to just wander, which gave him a relatively narrow strip of perfectly still space to go searching, unless she had unexpected plans that he didn't know about. Along the way he got into a fight after following a man into an apartment that belonged to his ex-wife, so he could take to all of her possessions with a baseball bat. The baseball bat got taken to Cal a few times, and the guy's fists made pretty good contact with his face, but Cal managed to drag the guy out by his ankles and tie him to a lamppost with a sign that said Please arrest me, I'm a dick before he moved on.
When he found her, he had an arrow nocked and ready to fly, but whoever he'd been chasing was long gone — and immediately forgotten the moment he saw a flash of pink hair.
"Cay? Caylie—" He ran to her, skidding to a stop on his knees in the snow, and immediately dropped his bow.
Caylie heard the echoes of a voice with no body, chasing itself in an endless loop through time.
Caylie was about to think about Cal, to wonder if he'd come for her; the thought was just a moment away.
Caylie felt an interloper; the area directly around her was alive with its stillness to her senses, but something was moving through it. A person, a man, Cal. He flashed into her awareness and out again as time strained against the impossibility of being frozen for her and alive for him, the energy starting to surge again. Get away, Cal. Get out of here. It's not safe.
"Caylie—?" Cal lightly touched her face, sifted his fingers through her hair to get it out of her eyes. "Cay. Caylie." He grasped her shoulders, gave her a little shake. "Caylie, look at me." She was frozen, not asleep. He'd been dealing with frozen people all day, but seeing her like this sent a panic through him.
He looked left, then right, searching the street for some kind of movement, but he was entirely alone in this section of stillness.
Caylie touched him on the shoulder — from behind. Caylie ran up to him from his left side. She leaned over from her position on his right and rested her head against his stomach. She looked up at him with the biggest smile on her face. She remained perfectly still on the bench.
Now that he had touched her, his time had merged with hers and Cal could see all the different temporal echoes that had been shattered into existence by the massive power explosion. They faded out in a heartbeat sometimes, never overlapping. None of them were real, because all of them were real. Caylie was lost somewhere among her countless selves and still sitting right in front of him.
Cal tugged his hands back away from Caylie, scooting back. Shit, what did he do? Break her? This stuff was above his pay grade, way out of his realm of understanding. He didn't know if she was dead or lost. "I… fuck. Fuck, I gotta call Vic. I'm gonna call Vic. Franklin, how about Franklin, he knows time, I should call Franklin. Even Gale, I'll… Cay, I've got this, I'll find someone who gets this—"
He dug into his pocket for his phone, wiping blood off his chin from a split lip.
Cal was in her time now, the time that was no time, and his cell phone wasn't quite skilled enough to get through that. Caylie put her hand over his, covering the phone for the second before she faded away again.
Caylie waved her hands at him frantically. Caylie looked right through him. Caylie sat on the bench.
Cal didn't know which version of her to look at. Every time he tried, she disappeared. Just when he thought he knew he was looking at the real Caylie, he knew he was wrong. "Cay. Talk to me. Please — please talk to me, tell me what to do, tell me how to fix this, I … I don't know how to fix this."
He couldn't shoot an arrow and save the day. He couldn't just pull her out of there and drag her to safety. He couldn't be clever or charming or even just foolhardy and stupid.
"What do you need me to do?!"
Almost before he finished speaking, Caylie's voice called out to him. It was a hundred different echoes from a hundred different conversations, all slipping and sliding together, over each other, crashing into a wave of sounds that sank and rose across the never-ending moments.
The next version of Caylie to appear looked frustrated. The next looked hopeless. The next looked angry and furiously kicked the Caylie still sitting on the bench. That one showed up more often than any of the others and it was the only one that never moved. The next one walked with a limp.
Cal held his hand out to the Caylie who'd kicked, but she'd already vanished. "Whoa! Whoa, we don't fucking kick..." He scrambled up onto the bench, to sit next to the Caylie who didn't move, the one who seemed the most lost, the most trapped.
"Cay, look at me. Hey, you." He took her hand, giving it a squeeze. His hands were dirty, his knuckles bloody and scraped. "I don't know what's going on or how things got … like this, if it's your fault or not, but I need you to come back to me. I need you to wake up and see me." He shifted to get in front of her, giving her shoulders a little shake. "Cay, come on."
A dozen Caylies ran at Cal at once, some of them shouting his name; some of the sounds of those shouts came to him, though none at the right time. A few waved their arms, some nodded, and one looked at him the way she did when she wanted to drag him into the bedroom.
On the bench, Caylie started to blink. It would be finished in a moment.
Cal didn't know why he thought this was a good idea. Years of fairy tales, of watching movies, of paying attention to childhood stories all came crashing back and even though it wasn't a solid plan of action, he did the first thing that came to mind.
He took her face in his hands and he kissed her.
And Caylie kissed him back. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and cried. She wrapped her arms around him and laughed. She grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him passionately.
But this time these weren't echoes. Caylie, only the one Caylie, was doing all these things. They were still in a pocket of abnormal time, but Caylie had finally synched up with him. His persistence had reached her and helped her find her way. "Cal.."
Had Cal honestly just gone all Sleeping Beauty on her?
Seriously?
He pulled back to look at her, shoving her hair back out of her face. "Hey? Hey. Holy shit, hey. Hi." He laughed faintly, bowing his head. "Okay, so. I got you, you're okay, you're all right, that's good." He squeezed her shoulders, and when he looked back up to her face he winced.
"That's… gross, I'm sorry." He reached out to wipe a little bit of his blood off the corner of her mouth. "I got punched in the face. Like, a lot."
She hadn't noticed until he said something, and then she cringed - not at the thought of his blood, but at the recognition that he was hurt. She inhaled sharply like she did whenever she saw one of his wounds, a quick intake of strength to steady herself against a thing she didn't want to see. She touched her thumb to the area just beside his swollen lip - she was generally good at avoiding the wound itself when she did that.
"Cal, I can feel everything that's gone wrong. I.. I can feel the frozen time and the fast time and the slow time. And I can feel where those places are broken. People are moving through areas where time isn't moving and it's making it worse, I can't—" She looked at him and it was clear she was scared. Caylie didn't look scared all that often. Never, really.
"Hey, shh." Cal smiled, touching her cheek. "It's cool. It's okay. What happened? Do you know what happened?" His warmth was calming, and he somehow made it seem like nothing else existed except for this bench — at least for the time being. They could take the time to talk this through.
Caylie closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against him, breathing in the smell of him. It wasn't a great smell, considering how dirty and bloody and sweaty he was, how hard he'd been working. But it was his smell, and it meant the world to her that she could smell it again. Smell anything again. She wasn't trapped for an eternity (and the memory of it was rapidly fading).
"It was… me. I.. I was trying so hard to get my powers back and.. I did." She opened her eyes again, looking up. "I broke time.. I didn't mean to, it just happened."
Cal let out a breath. Caylie could do that? Caylie?
He tried to push that disbelief down and just nodded. "Okay, so. You broke time," he said with a little grin. "Now what? How do we unbreak time?"
"I don't know!" she cringed. "I don't know how I did it. I think it's because my powers were… so messed up from Gale's and.. I just.. Tried and it came out." She shook her head and put her hand on his chest. "Cal, what if I can't undo it?"
"Are you kidding?" Cal was remarkably cool under pressure. Vic said it was because he couldn't take anything seriously, and maybe he was right. But right now, he was an anchor for her, something to ground her. That had to be worth something. "Of course you can undo it. Just try and it'll come out again."
She looked at him carefully. He had to be kidding. It wasn't that easy, she couldn't just do something like that and then undo it just because she wanted to. But the way he looked at her… Cal believed in her. She could see it written plainly on his face. Cal wore all his emotions so plainly and she was getting to be an expert at them.
She clasped her hands in his, tightly, and closed her eyes. She felt the borders of her time bubble, felt how it shivered and seized with all the disturbances shaking up its delicate, twisted borders. It wasn't just one bubble, but dozens, hundreds, all stacked in on themselves like air bubbles trapped in a ball of frozen ice. And all through it, little tunnels of normal time.
Caylie took hold of one of those tunnels in one mental hand, and in the other, she reached for the edge of the time distortion, feeling its curve against the real time of the outside world. And she pulled them together, dragging time inside out, pulling the distortion apart. It was the same thing she did when she wanted to cancel one of her familiar, smaller temporal effects. And just like then, the air filled with a shimmering pink dust as time collapsed back into its normal flow. All over the city, the air sparkled pink for an instant and then resumed its normal routine.
To their left, a brave (or foolish) winter bird chirped in alarm at the sudden shift between morning sun and late afternoon.
Cal glanced warily toward the bird. "...Are we good?" he asked. "Is that… are we good?" Because things looked good, but he wasn't sure whether he wanted to call it.
She nodded slowly, smiling a little. She was so tired. But she smiled. "We're good."