Unadulterated
Jan. 9th, 2018 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasRating: PG
Warning(s): none
Pairing(s): OMC/OFC
Summary: You start getting suspicious of your s/o when they start coming home late and have a feeling they might be cheating on you, one night you decide to follow them and find out they are one of the best superheroes of the century.
Author's Notes: Written in response to this prompt.
*~*~*
I cleared my dish from the kitchen table and loaded it into the half-empty dishwasher. From the living room, a few news anchors talked about how Blue Lightning and some supers with the Society of Freedom were dithering about an underwater submarine rescue off the coast Thailand. I wasn’t really listening. I was more worried about where Ben was. It was starting to feel more normal eating dinner without my husband than with.
Okay, so it was an impulsive marriage. I’m kind of a boring person. I work a boring job. In an office. In my spare time, I write books. I’m not a super-model, I’m just…normal.
Apparently he was dying for some normal. Because Ben came barreling into my life and he’s…well, he might as well be a super-model. He’s drop-dead gorgeous. And he tells some outrageous stories. Rappelling down a cliff into a river onto a raft was one of them. Apparently for fun. He was a little fuzzy on why he did that.
I hadn’t noticed that when we were dating. How he’d be fuzzy and vague on important details. I’d just noticed how he was thoughtful. He noticed things. Tiny things. Stuff nobody ever noticed. Stuff that I didn’t even notice. I have always avoided dog people on account of my family all making fun of me for being a cat person growing up. Turned me off of dog people really hard. I had never made that connection, though. I just thought I was being shallow. Felt guilty about it, even. He was the one who figured it out. (And convinced me that maybe dog lovers weren’t so bad if they were him.)
Stuff like that. It was nice. We only dated for four months before he proposed and I said yes and married him that day. I was so sure.
We were five years in, and…I was starting to think he might have had enough of normal. I would definitely give him credit that when he was here, he was here. We’d been on a lovely vacation a couple months ago. We went to the Grand Canyon, and he talked me into actually rappelling down the side of it. (He really liked climbing in basically any form at all.) It had been amazing. We’d camped in the bottom by the river, hiked back up the next morning, it was great. I was crazy sore and he was barely winded, of course, but he hadn’t looked like he minded. Just winked and said it gave him an excuse to give me a massage.
I had felt marvelously relaxed when he was done with me.
So when he was here, he was here. But he wasn’t around very often. He’d taken to staying away, sometimes for days. And he’d come back with weird injuries that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain very well.
In a way, I wasn’t all that surprised. He spent half his life climbing mountains and rafting rivers. I…wrote books and tried not to gain any more weight so I wouldn’t feel (more) inadequate standing next to him. I had asked him a few times if there was anything he wanted to do together more often. To give him a chance to speak up if he was bored or wanted to change anything. Last time, only two weeks ago, he’d looked at me and he’d seemed sad.
“I wish work wasn’t so busy, Sweetheart. I wish we spent more time together. I honestly miss just washing dishes and mowing the lawn.”
I’d laughed and said I could make up some chores if he wanted to do them. And then, to my absolute astonishment, he’d not only wanted to but spent the entire afternoon going down the list and sticking as close to me as he could.
And then he’d been nearly invisible since then. Maybe he was just super attentive when he was here out of guilt? Wishing he wanted to be close to his wife because that was what he was supposed to want?
And he knew I wasn’t happy. He was way too observant not to. I had been quiet and withdrawn for months, and he’d picked up on which of my quiets meant what about two weeks after meeting me. He knew this was a Chronic Unhappiness Quiet. He’d started bringing gifts home, when he came. Little things. Flowers. Chocolate. New books. He even looked guilty. I mean, I wasn’t him, but I’d figured out his tells eventually.
He had actually been home last night. We hadn’t fought. We’d barely spoken. I’d made dinner and he’d eaten it, miserably, and we’d let a few episodes of NCIS run on Netflix while I worked on my next book and he read over some notes for work. We hadn’t spoken except to decide to turn off the TV and go to bed.
Tonight, I went to bed alone. Ben slunk in late, after midnight, and got into bed quietly. There was a long moment where he just lay there, not speaking. I knew he knew I wasn’t asleep. He really did notice everything about me. But he didn’t say anything and neither did I.
Finally, he just brushed his fingers along the edge of my hand where it lay under the covers, before turning to face away from me. He was asleep in another breath.
Okay. Fine. Maybe I was too boring for him. Maybe he shouldn’t have married me. But he did marry me and I would rather he actually got a divorce and left than he cheated on me. So, tomorrow, I was going to find out where he was going, once and for all.
Ben being himself and noticing everything meant I couldn’t just follow him out of the driveway. I’d ordered a little GPS tracking device off of Amazon that was linked to an app on my phone instead. I dropped it in the compartment beneath the seat of his motorcycle while he was in the shower (because of course someone as addicted to extreme sports as he was would drive a motorcycle), and when he left in the morning, I followed where he went on my phone.
He…didn’t go where I expected.
I had thought he’d be actually at work for the day and then head off to whoever it was he was seeing. Instead, he went to…a self-storage place.
Okay. Weird. Officially weird. Officially very, very weird.
I called work and told them I wasn’t coming in, made sure Baxter and Sadie had food and water, let Baxter outside so that he could pee if he needed to, and then got in my truck—an old pick-up that would be as subtle following someone as a brick to the face—and set off across town.
Lazy Bear Self-Storage was…not entirely “run down,” precisely. I was just glad that my truck was pretty old and didn’t look flashy. It was 100% reliable, and well-serviced, but it was clearly an older model.
Not a hot target for car thieves.
I parked in their lot out front and headed out to the storage units trying to pretend I knew exactly where I was going and following the little map on my phone for dear life. The GPS beacon was only accurate to about ten feet, which was good enough for a house—where I had thought Ben was headed—but might not cut it with a storage unit.
I got lucky. The unit in question was one of the wider ones. It had a big garage door, and a separate, human-sized door on one side. The human-sized door needed a key. The garage door, however, had a combination lock with four rollers.
I frowned at it. Four digits. Maybe I could guess it. I tried Ben’s birthday. Nothing. My birthday. No good. Anniversary. Our house number. The last four digits of our dog’s tracking chip. The last four digits of our cat’s tracking chip.
Nope across the board.
I scowled. And then it occurred to me. Every year, on the day we met, Ben made sure we would go out on a date. It wasn’t anything big or expensive. Just…he marked the occasion. Said that was the day he’d found the best thing in his life.
I tried it.
The lock sprang open.
Okay. Maybe he wasn’t cheating. So…what was he up to?
I opened the storage door.
Oh. Oh boy. Well, at least he wasn’t cheating.
In a fit of inspiration, I closed the storage door behind me. Because I did not want any random passer-by to see any of this. I wasn't even sure I wanted to be seeing it.
Along the right-hand wall was a set of display cases that all had variations on a costuming theme. A very, very, very famous theme. Rich royal blue, with jagged white lightning at the shoulders and the hem of the top. Gold piping separated the two colors. Above the costumes were domino masks seemingly hanging in midair. There was one costume obviously designed for very cold temperatures. One with muted colors, probably for stealth. A sleek one, that looked like it was for formal occasions. One other, the function of which I couldn't quite figure out. And one case that was empty.
Blue Lightning.
Everybody knew Blue Lightning. He wasn’t just a superhero who rescued submarines sometimes. He was the superhero. He, Astra, and Ghost Soldier had founded the Society of Freedom. Ben had always said he liked Ghost Soldier and Astra more than Blue, though. He said Blue made too many mistakes, especially considering how powerful he was. That he needed to be more careful.
I always said he was probably too hard on the guy, but he’d never agreed on that score. So to find a shrine to Blue Lightning that was this intense didn’t track with what Ben had told me.
Ben’s motorcycle was neatly parked near the big garage door. There was a big desk close to one of the walls with a few pictures of me, in frames, on it. In the center was a file with various papers bearing notes about various things that Blue Lightning was working on, with observations written in Ben’s handwriting. And these were current. They weren’t news clippings, they weren’t past cases, they were things happening now. In fact, there was a little scribbled note about the submarine rescue from last night to review underwater procedures? There were a few news clippings in frames along what looked like a trophy wall, but those were all from Blue-Lightning-saved-the-world things. Not that international trafficking thing he was chasing now. And then there was a crime board, just like any procedural show, with crime scene photos (Oh! Ick! Don’t look at those!), a hand-drawn timeline, and post-it notes attached here and there.
This wasn’t just extreme fannish devotion. This was… This was… My mind flat refused to make the leap.
A loud bang startled me out of my thoughts and I turned in shock. The human-sized door had just slammed open and there was Blue Lightning himself, hands crackling dangerously with the blue energy that gave him his name.
“Tell me your name!” he demanded angrily, fists raised and eyes flashing.
“It’s me! It’s Judy! It’s your wife!” I shouted, throwing my arms up over my face, and shrinking back in fear. My mind had made the leap now, this was definitely Ben, and holy smokes, he was scarier than I had ever seen him.
Blue Lightning lowered his hands. “Judy? What? I… You should not be here.”
I stood up straight and glared at him. “We should really talk. About a lot of things.”
And if he looked scary a moment ago, I now had the extremely gratifying experience of seeing Blue Lightning look scared. Of me. Ha!
He raised his hand to the edge of his mask and said, “BL to GS.”
There was a moment of silence and then he said, “I’m out for the day.”
Another pause.
“My wife found my office.”
The pause that followed was much shorter.
“Yup. I’ll check in with you later. BL out.” He stripped off his mask. And there it was. Ben’s face. Oh wow. My husband. Blue Lightning. Whoa.
And he looked white as a sheet. “Look. Just…please don’t file for divorce until you’ve heard me out. I know things have been…not so great lately, but…I love you.”
If it were possible, that actually made me angry. “Divorce? Are you out of your mind? You don’t get off that easy, you big jerk! I am way too angry right now to do anything but make you deal with every last second of it.”
He swallowed. “You never yell at me.”
“You’ve never pissed me off this much!”
The little shed was ringing with my voice.
An intercom on the wall that I hadn’t noticed earlier started ringing. Ben walked over and pressed a button.
“This is Renee at the front desk. Is everything all right, Blue?”
I crossed my arms in irritation.
“No, Renee, but it’s not an emergency and I’m not in danger,” Ben answered her. He sounded exhausted.
“Please state the all clear code.”
“Halcyon. Mellifluous.”
“Thank you. Have a nice day, sir.”
Ben turned back to me. "Let me change and we'll go home."
He tugged off his costume and put it on the chair of the desk. He pulled the clothes he'd left the house in out of the bottom drawer of the desk and turned back to me in a few moments, looking just like the man who'd left that morning. In fact, he was wearing nearly the same outfit he had that day we'd rushed to the courthouse to get married.
I felt like I had never met him before in my life.
He left his bike in the storage unit. We drove home in my truck. The drive was absolutely, utterly silent. I turned in to our driveway and parked in my usual spot. Baxter came trotting over to greet us, and then gave us the once over. And apparently he was a pretty smart dog because he turned and went back out to the back yard, where there would be absolutely no dramatics. I unlocked the front door and Ben followed me, both of us in a dead silence. Sadie came eagerly down the stairs and started trying to wind around my legs. I ignored her.
Front door closed. He locked it behind us. I hung up my purse on the peg and walked into the living room, trying to compose my thoughts. And my mind was racing. I couldn't think of a single thing to start with.
"Before we get underway," Ben said, "you need to know we'll have to come around to how you found this out sooner or later. But I have a feeling you're probably going to want to go first."
"How generous of you," I snapped, "to consider my feelings."
He winced. "Okay. I deserved that."
"Gee, you think? How much of what I know about you is lies?" I shouted. Oh, yes. That was where I wanted to start. With how I didn't even know what I didn't know.
"Nothing!" he said, holding up his hands. "I have never lied to you. Not ever. I've left things out. I've let you make some assumptions that weren't true, but never, ever a lie."
"Right, sure," I said, rolling my eyes. "All those things you told me about your coworkers were all true." I couldn't stop the sarcasm, even though I knew it wasn't constructive. Dammit. I'd worked so hard on good conflict resolution, too, but I was so angry all my old bad habits were coming back.
Ben raised his eyebrows, but he let it slide. "They were all true, Judy. I do have coworkers."
I froze. "The Society." Somewhere around this point, Sadie deserted me and moved over to Ben, hoping for a more attentive human.
"And all the staff we have to keep everything running. There's more staff than supers, really," he said. He knelt and picked up the traitorous cat, apparently happy to have an excuse to look away.
"And they all know your name, but you couldn't be bothered to tell me?" Okay. Better. There was still some sarcasm there, but I was moving back to just angry. Angry was very appropriate, under the circumstances.
"Ghost Soldier knows my name. No one else."
I blinked.
"I'm surprised it's stayed secret this long," he continued. "Secret identities usually have a much shorter shelf life."
"And why didn't you tell me?" I demanded. "Why didn't you tell me before we got married, and definitely why didn't you tell me after?"
"You wouldn't have married me if you'd known?" he asked, looking absolutely devastated.
"Of course I would have married you! That isn't the point! You should have told me! This is the kind of thing you should not keep from your wife!" And, okay, wow. I did not know I could yell that loud. Neither did Sadie, because she took a flying leap from Ben's arms and raced upstairs. But apparently the dam had broken because I wasn't done.
"You've been risking your life for years, and I didn't even know! That snake guy with the weird voice threatened to murder me last week! I didn't even know! Good grief, I didn't even know! What if he had come here? I wouldn't have even known I was in danger until it was too late!"
"I tried to get you to visit your sister!" Ben snapped back, finally pushed into loosing his temper, and for some reason that felt good. To know I wasn't the only one with something at stake here. "You've been miserable with me for ages anyway, I honestly can't figure out why you didn't? I'm obviously not enough for you anymore!"
"Trying to get me to visit my sister is absolutely not a substitute for giving me a heads up about a violent psychopath wanting to murder me! And I've been miserable because I thought you were having an affair!"
There. It was out. And I was…not really feeling so hot. My throat felt raw and I had a feeling I'd done something pretty not-so-good to my vocal cords. I was short of breath, my face was hot, blood thundering in my ears, and…oh, wonderful. My hands were shaking.
I hated this. I hadn't grown up in a household where I learned any good conflict resolution strategies, and sometimes I had literal panic attacks over having a fight. I absolutely hated when this happened to me.
Ben's hands grasped my shoulders gently. "Judy, we're going to move over to the couch and sit down now, okay?" he said. And slowly, making sure I didn't bump the coffee table, he walked me over.
"Can you still hear your pulse?" he asked me.
I nodded.
"Okay, repeat these numbers. 17, 5, 28, 2, 44."
I repeated the sequence, feeling the panic slip away a little. It was a trick we'd learned a while back, that the brain couldn't panic and focus on out-of-sequence numbers at the same time. The roaring in my ears started to go down. My skin felt too tight, and itchy, but I was okay. I could breathe. I was okay.
"I really should've told you, Sweetheart. I'm sorry."
"Don't you 'Sweetheart' me," I snapped, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. My anger was draining along with my panic. Ugh. And now my voice was raw. I had strained something. Great.
"Really?" he asked in surprise. Fair, considering I loved it when he called me Sweetheart.
"No, not really, I'm just…how could you keep this from me?"
Ben sighed. "At first, I wasn't sure I could trust you with it. I never tell anybody. Even Ghost Soldier only found out by mistake. Then, when we fell in love, I knew I could trust you, but I couldn't figure out how to bring it up. You were already kind of…skeptical that I actually liked you. I kept blanking on how to tell you where I wouldn't make you feel even more intimidated. It felt like it took forever to get you to relax around me."
I frowned. He wasn't wrong. I had always felt like I came up short next to him, and I was already feeling like this was putting me pretty much on my back foot forever.
"After a while, it got to the point where I knew I should've told you already and from there, the longer it was, the harder it got to say something. That basically brings us to now." There was a pause. "And I don't want to put you in danger."
"Okay, that is…not how to keep me safe. The Australian Cottonmouth, or German Rattlesnake, or Japanese Black Mamba, or whoever—"
I had to break off here because Ben had actually started laughing. "Oh, hell, I don't know why I never thought to call him by the wrong snake! Ones that aren't even real. He's going to turn colors!"
"Leaving aside the fact that you apparently do plan your insults to supervillains in advance," I said, "He threatened to kill your girlfriend on international TV last week. Is there any chance he could've made good on that?"
That wiped the smile off Ben's face entirely. In fact, he looked downright uncomfortable.
"Does he know who you are?"
"We don't…think so."
"Ben! I don't even know what his face looks like! I can't even throw a punch! You've talked me out of self-defense classes and buying a gun a thousand times and now a supervillain is threatening to murder me and your only response is to suggest I leave town for a few days? I was in danger and I didn't even know about it! At least, if I'd had some idea, I could've been a little more careful!"
"I just want one thing in my life that isn't life-and-death!" he said, and now he was shouting. Not at me. He'd stood up and he'd turned his face slightly, so that he could still see me, but he wasn't in my face. "And here's you and you're…so perfect. So, absolutely perfect. And it's not that you're normal, because I am constantly in awe of you, but you aren't… This isn't… There's no strategy here! There's just…" He looked at me, clearly searching for the right word. And when he spoke next, he wasn't shouting anymore. "Us. We're just us. There's not any objective aside from being that married couple that loves each other and I…" Ben's shoulder's slumped, and he looked exhausted. Not the worked-hard-all-day exhausted. But the kind of exhausted you get when you have something you have to do and you don't want to do it and you know that even when you finish, you'll just end up having to do it all over again. "I'm so tired of everything being about saving the world. I just want to be married to you. I didn't want to let some psycho in a costume make me loving you about Blue Lightning too."
He said the code name with an awful twist in his voice that made my heart break. I frowned heavily, trying to word my response correctly. "Ben, we will never be anybody else and we are not going to stop being married. That's not a strategy, that's our…definition. And I do not want to put on a mask and fight crime. I'd make a terrible sidekick."
A tiny fraction of his exhaustion seemed to shift into relief.
"However, me being able to defend myself long enough to run away or help to arrive is a valid concern. More valid than I had realized. And that's not strategy, either. Bad things can happen to anybody. That's just life."
He looked down. "Promise me. No crime-fighting. It's not that I don't think you'd be good at it, because you're good at so many things." He looked at me, with a horrible sadness. "But, Sweetheart, it's eaten me alive. I'm never home. There's always some emergency somewhere, and somebody who's going to die if I don't save them, and some crazy idiot taking shots at me and… Half my life is insane. I've met aliens. I've nearly died on other planets. I've seen things that I can't describe because they didn't make any sense and I would never forgive myself if I dragged you into all of this. I swear, if I thought I could get away with it, I would quit. Right now. Today. There's good days, but there's bad days. And the bad ones are awful."
"I promise. If I see something that even looks like a hot check, I'll bring it straight to you," I said.
He sat back down with a rueful smile. "Hot checks should probably go to the police. They get mad if we steal too many cases out from under their jurisdiction." He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me in tight. "Look, I'll teach you how to throw a punch. Or I'll help you pick out someone else, if you'd feel weird learning it from me. We'll do some security upgrades. Get you a gun and we can have some dates at the range. You're right. I've been wrong about this. It's stupid."
"It isn't stupid. I understand. Not as well as I should have, but I do understand."
"And I'll talk to you about work more. That one will take some practice. I don't tell anyone about work. Not anyone at all."
"That…explains some things I'd wondered about Blue Lightning," I sighed. "You need someone to open up to. It doesn't have to be me. But it should be someone."
He sighed. "It does have to be you. But…I think it'll help. I want you to know. I have wanted you to know. I'm sorry you didn't. Dammit. I'm sorry you thought I was cheating. I don't…I would never do that. That's not a thing I ever wanted you to think. Not ever. Not even a little."
I nodded. We were quiet for a moment. Finally, I said, "Is that it? Are we done fighting?"
"Looks like it," he said. He paused and then said, "You scared the cat."
I laughed. "She'll recover."
“I didn’t even know your voice could do that,” he observed.
I rubbed my throat where it was feeling achy and uncomfortable. “I don’t think my voice actually can. My throat feels weird now.”
He brushed gentle fingers over where I was rubbing. “I’ll make you some soup later.”
I frowned. “And then I will make some edible soup afterwards.”
“I did feed myself before we were married, you know,” he protested.
“There was heavy use of the microwave involved. I know your tricks." I stopped suddenly and looked away. Because I had obviously missed some of the pretty important ones.
Ben sighed. "Yes, there was. You do know my tricks. I promise, everything I have ever told you about me was true."
"Ben, this is big. And I didn't even suspect. For five years and I didn't suspect. It's gonna be a long time before I stop feeling stupid."
"You are the least stupid person I know."
I huffed, but didn't answer. And then I remembered something that I had nearly missed in the middle of the fight. "Wait, what was this about you being in awe of me?"
"Judy, I explained rappelling to you once, we had one practice run on a climbing wall, and then you were off down the side of the Grand Canyon with no fear, like you'd been doing it all your life. You learned Japanese off of an app. You write books. You can cook. Of course I'm in awe of you."
"Huh." I had done all those things but rappelling just made intuitive sense to me when he explained it, and the others I did because they interested me. I'd never considered that they might seem…impressive. Maybe I wasn't entirely dumb. I felt pretty damn dumb, though.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called up the app. "I bought a GPS ping-thing on Amazon and it sends a location to this app. I put the tracker under the seat of your bike."
Ben looked at me in confusion.
"You told me we had to talk about how I figured you out. That's how. The tracker was in the storage shed and I guessed the combination to the big door."
He shook his head. "I may regret making you promise not to fight crime. That's…a really solid first effort."
"Oh no, you were very convincing. I will stick to epic vacations with you," I answered. "That is adventurous enough. I will consent to being a sounding board when needed, but that's as far as I go."
He smiled and kissed me. "Fair enough." Then he looked mischevious and the next thing I knew, I was hanging tightly to his arms as we were floating off the couch and into the air. "So, Sweetheart? Did I mention that I can fly?"
*~*~*
Author's Notes: "Unadulterated" is an SAT word that means "in a pure form" or "not mixed with anything." In this case, it also refers to the fact that the solution to the mystery is a marriage with no adultery occurring, or an "unadulterated" one.
Warning(s): none
Pairing(s): OMC/OFC
Summary: You start getting suspicious of your s/o when they start coming home late and have a feeling they might be cheating on you, one night you decide to follow them and find out they are one of the best superheroes of the century.
Author's Notes: Written in response to this prompt.
I cleared my dish from the kitchen table and loaded it into the half-empty dishwasher. From the living room, a few news anchors talked about how Blue Lightning and some supers with the Society of Freedom were dithering about an underwater submarine rescue off the coast Thailand. I wasn’t really listening. I was more worried about where Ben was. It was starting to feel more normal eating dinner without my husband than with.
Okay, so it was an impulsive marriage. I’m kind of a boring person. I work a boring job. In an office. In my spare time, I write books. I’m not a super-model, I’m just…normal.
Apparently he was dying for some normal. Because Ben came barreling into my life and he’s…well, he might as well be a super-model. He’s drop-dead gorgeous. And he tells some outrageous stories. Rappelling down a cliff into a river onto a raft was one of them. Apparently for fun. He was a little fuzzy on why he did that.
I hadn’t noticed that when we were dating. How he’d be fuzzy and vague on important details. I’d just noticed how he was thoughtful. He noticed things. Tiny things. Stuff nobody ever noticed. Stuff that I didn’t even notice. I have always avoided dog people on account of my family all making fun of me for being a cat person growing up. Turned me off of dog people really hard. I had never made that connection, though. I just thought I was being shallow. Felt guilty about it, even. He was the one who figured it out. (And convinced me that maybe dog lovers weren’t so bad if they were him.)
Stuff like that. It was nice. We only dated for four months before he proposed and I said yes and married him that day. I was so sure.
We were five years in, and…I was starting to think he might have had enough of normal. I would definitely give him credit that when he was here, he was here. We’d been on a lovely vacation a couple months ago. We went to the Grand Canyon, and he talked me into actually rappelling down the side of it. (He really liked climbing in basically any form at all.) It had been amazing. We’d camped in the bottom by the river, hiked back up the next morning, it was great. I was crazy sore and he was barely winded, of course, but he hadn’t looked like he minded. Just winked and said it gave him an excuse to give me a massage.
I had felt marvelously relaxed when he was done with me.
So when he was here, he was here. But he wasn’t around very often. He’d taken to staying away, sometimes for days. And he’d come back with weird injuries that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain very well.
In a way, I wasn’t all that surprised. He spent half his life climbing mountains and rafting rivers. I…wrote books and tried not to gain any more weight so I wouldn’t feel (more) inadequate standing next to him. I had asked him a few times if there was anything he wanted to do together more often. To give him a chance to speak up if he was bored or wanted to change anything. Last time, only two weeks ago, he’d looked at me and he’d seemed sad.
“I wish work wasn’t so busy, Sweetheart. I wish we spent more time together. I honestly miss just washing dishes and mowing the lawn.”
I’d laughed and said I could make up some chores if he wanted to do them. And then, to my absolute astonishment, he’d not only wanted to but spent the entire afternoon going down the list and sticking as close to me as he could.
And then he’d been nearly invisible since then. Maybe he was just super attentive when he was here out of guilt? Wishing he wanted to be close to his wife because that was what he was supposed to want?
And he knew I wasn’t happy. He was way too observant not to. I had been quiet and withdrawn for months, and he’d picked up on which of my quiets meant what about two weeks after meeting me. He knew this was a Chronic Unhappiness Quiet. He’d started bringing gifts home, when he came. Little things. Flowers. Chocolate. New books. He even looked guilty. I mean, I wasn’t him, but I’d figured out his tells eventually.
He had actually been home last night. We hadn’t fought. We’d barely spoken. I’d made dinner and he’d eaten it, miserably, and we’d let a few episodes of NCIS run on Netflix while I worked on my next book and he read over some notes for work. We hadn’t spoken except to decide to turn off the TV and go to bed.
Tonight, I went to bed alone. Ben slunk in late, after midnight, and got into bed quietly. There was a long moment where he just lay there, not speaking. I knew he knew I wasn’t asleep. He really did notice everything about me. But he didn’t say anything and neither did I.
Finally, he just brushed his fingers along the edge of my hand where it lay under the covers, before turning to face away from me. He was asleep in another breath.
Okay. Fine. Maybe I was too boring for him. Maybe he shouldn’t have married me. But he did marry me and I would rather he actually got a divorce and left than he cheated on me. So, tomorrow, I was going to find out where he was going, once and for all.
Ben being himself and noticing everything meant I couldn’t just follow him out of the driveway. I’d ordered a little GPS tracking device off of Amazon that was linked to an app on my phone instead. I dropped it in the compartment beneath the seat of his motorcycle while he was in the shower (because of course someone as addicted to extreme sports as he was would drive a motorcycle), and when he left in the morning, I followed where he went on my phone.
He…didn’t go where I expected.
I had thought he’d be actually at work for the day and then head off to whoever it was he was seeing. Instead, he went to…a self-storage place.
Okay. Weird. Officially weird. Officially very, very weird.
I called work and told them I wasn’t coming in, made sure Baxter and Sadie had food and water, let Baxter outside so that he could pee if he needed to, and then got in my truck—an old pick-up that would be as subtle following someone as a brick to the face—and set off across town.
Lazy Bear Self-Storage was…not entirely “run down,” precisely. I was just glad that my truck was pretty old and didn’t look flashy. It was 100% reliable, and well-serviced, but it was clearly an older model.
Not a hot target for car thieves.
I parked in their lot out front and headed out to the storage units trying to pretend I knew exactly where I was going and following the little map on my phone for dear life. The GPS beacon was only accurate to about ten feet, which was good enough for a house—where I had thought Ben was headed—but might not cut it with a storage unit.
I got lucky. The unit in question was one of the wider ones. It had a big garage door, and a separate, human-sized door on one side. The human-sized door needed a key. The garage door, however, had a combination lock with four rollers.
I frowned at it. Four digits. Maybe I could guess it. I tried Ben’s birthday. Nothing. My birthday. No good. Anniversary. Our house number. The last four digits of our dog’s tracking chip. The last four digits of our cat’s tracking chip.
Nope across the board.
I scowled. And then it occurred to me. Every year, on the day we met, Ben made sure we would go out on a date. It wasn’t anything big or expensive. Just…he marked the occasion. Said that was the day he’d found the best thing in his life.
I tried it.
The lock sprang open.
Okay. Maybe he wasn’t cheating. So…what was he up to?
I opened the storage door.
Oh. Oh boy. Well, at least he wasn’t cheating.
In a fit of inspiration, I closed the storage door behind me. Because I did not want any random passer-by to see any of this. I wasn't even sure I wanted to be seeing it.
Along the right-hand wall was a set of display cases that all had variations on a costuming theme. A very, very, very famous theme. Rich royal blue, with jagged white lightning at the shoulders and the hem of the top. Gold piping separated the two colors. Above the costumes were domino masks seemingly hanging in midair. There was one costume obviously designed for very cold temperatures. One with muted colors, probably for stealth. A sleek one, that looked like it was for formal occasions. One other, the function of which I couldn't quite figure out. And one case that was empty.
Blue Lightning.
Everybody knew Blue Lightning. He wasn’t just a superhero who rescued submarines sometimes. He was the superhero. He, Astra, and Ghost Soldier had founded the Society of Freedom. Ben had always said he liked Ghost Soldier and Astra more than Blue, though. He said Blue made too many mistakes, especially considering how powerful he was. That he needed to be more careful.
I always said he was probably too hard on the guy, but he’d never agreed on that score. So to find a shrine to Blue Lightning that was this intense didn’t track with what Ben had told me.
Ben’s motorcycle was neatly parked near the big garage door. There was a big desk close to one of the walls with a few pictures of me, in frames, on it. In the center was a file with various papers bearing notes about various things that Blue Lightning was working on, with observations written in Ben’s handwriting. And these were current. They weren’t news clippings, they weren’t past cases, they were things happening now. In fact, there was a little scribbled note about the submarine rescue from last night to review underwater procedures? There were a few news clippings in frames along what looked like a trophy wall, but those were all from Blue-Lightning-saved-the-world things. Not that international trafficking thing he was chasing now. And then there was a crime board, just like any procedural show, with crime scene photos (Oh! Ick! Don’t look at those!), a hand-drawn timeline, and post-it notes attached here and there.
This wasn’t just extreme fannish devotion. This was… This was… My mind flat refused to make the leap.
A loud bang startled me out of my thoughts and I turned in shock. The human-sized door had just slammed open and there was Blue Lightning himself, hands crackling dangerously with the blue energy that gave him his name.
“Tell me your name!” he demanded angrily, fists raised and eyes flashing.
“It’s me! It’s Judy! It’s your wife!” I shouted, throwing my arms up over my face, and shrinking back in fear. My mind had made the leap now, this was definitely Ben, and holy smokes, he was scarier than I had ever seen him.
Blue Lightning lowered his hands. “Judy? What? I… You should not be here.”
I stood up straight and glared at him. “We should really talk. About a lot of things.”
And if he looked scary a moment ago, I now had the extremely gratifying experience of seeing Blue Lightning look scared. Of me. Ha!
He raised his hand to the edge of his mask and said, “BL to GS.”
There was a moment of silence and then he said, “I’m out for the day.”
Another pause.
“My wife found my office.”
The pause that followed was much shorter.
“Yup. I’ll check in with you later. BL out.” He stripped off his mask. And there it was. Ben’s face. Oh wow. My husband. Blue Lightning. Whoa.
And he looked white as a sheet. “Look. Just…please don’t file for divorce until you’ve heard me out. I know things have been…not so great lately, but…I love you.”
If it were possible, that actually made me angry. “Divorce? Are you out of your mind? You don’t get off that easy, you big jerk! I am way too angry right now to do anything but make you deal with every last second of it.”
He swallowed. “You never yell at me.”
“You’ve never pissed me off this much!”
The little shed was ringing with my voice.
An intercom on the wall that I hadn’t noticed earlier started ringing. Ben walked over and pressed a button.
“This is Renee at the front desk. Is everything all right, Blue?”
I crossed my arms in irritation.
“No, Renee, but it’s not an emergency and I’m not in danger,” Ben answered her. He sounded exhausted.
“Please state the all clear code.”
“Halcyon. Mellifluous.”
“Thank you. Have a nice day, sir.”
Ben turned back to me. "Let me change and we'll go home."
He tugged off his costume and put it on the chair of the desk. He pulled the clothes he'd left the house in out of the bottom drawer of the desk and turned back to me in a few moments, looking just like the man who'd left that morning. In fact, he was wearing nearly the same outfit he had that day we'd rushed to the courthouse to get married.
I felt like I had never met him before in my life.
He left his bike in the storage unit. We drove home in my truck. The drive was absolutely, utterly silent. I turned in to our driveway and parked in my usual spot. Baxter came trotting over to greet us, and then gave us the once over. And apparently he was a pretty smart dog because he turned and went back out to the back yard, where there would be absolutely no dramatics. I unlocked the front door and Ben followed me, both of us in a dead silence. Sadie came eagerly down the stairs and started trying to wind around my legs. I ignored her.
Front door closed. He locked it behind us. I hung up my purse on the peg and walked into the living room, trying to compose my thoughts. And my mind was racing. I couldn't think of a single thing to start with.
"Before we get underway," Ben said, "you need to know we'll have to come around to how you found this out sooner or later. But I have a feeling you're probably going to want to go first."
"How generous of you," I snapped, "to consider my feelings."
He winced. "Okay. I deserved that."
"Gee, you think? How much of what I know about you is lies?" I shouted. Oh, yes. That was where I wanted to start. With how I didn't even know what I didn't know.
"Nothing!" he said, holding up his hands. "I have never lied to you. Not ever. I've left things out. I've let you make some assumptions that weren't true, but never, ever a lie."
"Right, sure," I said, rolling my eyes. "All those things you told me about your coworkers were all true." I couldn't stop the sarcasm, even though I knew it wasn't constructive. Dammit. I'd worked so hard on good conflict resolution, too, but I was so angry all my old bad habits were coming back.
Ben raised his eyebrows, but he let it slide. "They were all true, Judy. I do have coworkers."
I froze. "The Society." Somewhere around this point, Sadie deserted me and moved over to Ben, hoping for a more attentive human.
"And all the staff we have to keep everything running. There's more staff than supers, really," he said. He knelt and picked up the traitorous cat, apparently happy to have an excuse to look away.
"And they all know your name, but you couldn't be bothered to tell me?" Okay. Better. There was still some sarcasm there, but I was moving back to just angry. Angry was very appropriate, under the circumstances.
"Ghost Soldier knows my name. No one else."
I blinked.
"I'm surprised it's stayed secret this long," he continued. "Secret identities usually have a much shorter shelf life."
"And why didn't you tell me?" I demanded. "Why didn't you tell me before we got married, and definitely why didn't you tell me after?"
"You wouldn't have married me if you'd known?" he asked, looking absolutely devastated.
"Of course I would have married you! That isn't the point! You should have told me! This is the kind of thing you should not keep from your wife!" And, okay, wow. I did not know I could yell that loud. Neither did Sadie, because she took a flying leap from Ben's arms and raced upstairs. But apparently the dam had broken because I wasn't done.
"You've been risking your life for years, and I didn't even know! That snake guy with the weird voice threatened to murder me last week! I didn't even know! Good grief, I didn't even know! What if he had come here? I wouldn't have even known I was in danger until it was too late!"
"I tried to get you to visit your sister!" Ben snapped back, finally pushed into loosing his temper, and for some reason that felt good. To know I wasn't the only one with something at stake here. "You've been miserable with me for ages anyway, I honestly can't figure out why you didn't? I'm obviously not enough for you anymore!"
"Trying to get me to visit my sister is absolutely not a substitute for giving me a heads up about a violent psychopath wanting to murder me! And I've been miserable because I thought you were having an affair!"
There. It was out. And I was…not really feeling so hot. My throat felt raw and I had a feeling I'd done something pretty not-so-good to my vocal cords. I was short of breath, my face was hot, blood thundering in my ears, and…oh, wonderful. My hands were shaking.
I hated this. I hadn't grown up in a household where I learned any good conflict resolution strategies, and sometimes I had literal panic attacks over having a fight. I absolutely hated when this happened to me.
Ben's hands grasped my shoulders gently. "Judy, we're going to move over to the couch and sit down now, okay?" he said. And slowly, making sure I didn't bump the coffee table, he walked me over.
"Can you still hear your pulse?" he asked me.
I nodded.
"Okay, repeat these numbers. 17, 5, 28, 2, 44."
I repeated the sequence, feeling the panic slip away a little. It was a trick we'd learned a while back, that the brain couldn't panic and focus on out-of-sequence numbers at the same time. The roaring in my ears started to go down. My skin felt too tight, and itchy, but I was okay. I could breathe. I was okay.
"I really should've told you, Sweetheart. I'm sorry."
"Don't you 'Sweetheart' me," I snapped, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. My anger was draining along with my panic. Ugh. And now my voice was raw. I had strained something. Great.
"Really?" he asked in surprise. Fair, considering I loved it when he called me Sweetheart.
"No, not really, I'm just…how could you keep this from me?"
Ben sighed. "At first, I wasn't sure I could trust you with it. I never tell anybody. Even Ghost Soldier only found out by mistake. Then, when we fell in love, I knew I could trust you, but I couldn't figure out how to bring it up. You were already kind of…skeptical that I actually liked you. I kept blanking on how to tell you where I wouldn't make you feel even more intimidated. It felt like it took forever to get you to relax around me."
I frowned. He wasn't wrong. I had always felt like I came up short next to him, and I was already feeling like this was putting me pretty much on my back foot forever.
"After a while, it got to the point where I knew I should've told you already and from there, the longer it was, the harder it got to say something. That basically brings us to now." There was a pause. "And I don't want to put you in danger."
"Okay, that is…not how to keep me safe. The Australian Cottonmouth, or German Rattlesnake, or Japanese Black Mamba, or whoever—"
I had to break off here because Ben had actually started laughing. "Oh, hell, I don't know why I never thought to call him by the wrong snake! Ones that aren't even real. He's going to turn colors!"
"Leaving aside the fact that you apparently do plan your insults to supervillains in advance," I said, "He threatened to kill your girlfriend on international TV last week. Is there any chance he could've made good on that?"
That wiped the smile off Ben's face entirely. In fact, he looked downright uncomfortable.
"Does he know who you are?"
"We don't…think so."
"Ben! I don't even know what his face looks like! I can't even throw a punch! You've talked me out of self-defense classes and buying a gun a thousand times and now a supervillain is threatening to murder me and your only response is to suggest I leave town for a few days? I was in danger and I didn't even know about it! At least, if I'd had some idea, I could've been a little more careful!"
"I just want one thing in my life that isn't life-and-death!" he said, and now he was shouting. Not at me. He'd stood up and he'd turned his face slightly, so that he could still see me, but he wasn't in my face. "And here's you and you're…so perfect. So, absolutely perfect. And it's not that you're normal, because I am constantly in awe of you, but you aren't… This isn't… There's no strategy here! There's just…" He looked at me, clearly searching for the right word. And when he spoke next, he wasn't shouting anymore. "Us. We're just us. There's not any objective aside from being that married couple that loves each other and I…" Ben's shoulder's slumped, and he looked exhausted. Not the worked-hard-all-day exhausted. But the kind of exhausted you get when you have something you have to do and you don't want to do it and you know that even when you finish, you'll just end up having to do it all over again. "I'm so tired of everything being about saving the world. I just want to be married to you. I didn't want to let some psycho in a costume make me loving you about Blue Lightning too."
He said the code name with an awful twist in his voice that made my heart break. I frowned heavily, trying to word my response correctly. "Ben, we will never be anybody else and we are not going to stop being married. That's not a strategy, that's our…definition. And I do not want to put on a mask and fight crime. I'd make a terrible sidekick."
A tiny fraction of his exhaustion seemed to shift into relief.
"However, me being able to defend myself long enough to run away or help to arrive is a valid concern. More valid than I had realized. And that's not strategy, either. Bad things can happen to anybody. That's just life."
He looked down. "Promise me. No crime-fighting. It's not that I don't think you'd be good at it, because you're good at so many things." He looked at me, with a horrible sadness. "But, Sweetheart, it's eaten me alive. I'm never home. There's always some emergency somewhere, and somebody who's going to die if I don't save them, and some crazy idiot taking shots at me and… Half my life is insane. I've met aliens. I've nearly died on other planets. I've seen things that I can't describe because they didn't make any sense and I would never forgive myself if I dragged you into all of this. I swear, if I thought I could get away with it, I would quit. Right now. Today. There's good days, but there's bad days. And the bad ones are awful."
"I promise. If I see something that even looks like a hot check, I'll bring it straight to you," I said.
He sat back down with a rueful smile. "Hot checks should probably go to the police. They get mad if we steal too many cases out from under their jurisdiction." He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me in tight. "Look, I'll teach you how to throw a punch. Or I'll help you pick out someone else, if you'd feel weird learning it from me. We'll do some security upgrades. Get you a gun and we can have some dates at the range. You're right. I've been wrong about this. It's stupid."
"It isn't stupid. I understand. Not as well as I should have, but I do understand."
"And I'll talk to you about work more. That one will take some practice. I don't tell anyone about work. Not anyone at all."
"That…explains some things I'd wondered about Blue Lightning," I sighed. "You need someone to open up to. It doesn't have to be me. But it should be someone."
He sighed. "It does have to be you. But…I think it'll help. I want you to know. I have wanted you to know. I'm sorry you didn't. Dammit. I'm sorry you thought I was cheating. I don't…I would never do that. That's not a thing I ever wanted you to think. Not ever. Not even a little."
I nodded. We were quiet for a moment. Finally, I said, "Is that it? Are we done fighting?"
"Looks like it," he said. He paused and then said, "You scared the cat."
I laughed. "She'll recover."
“I didn’t even know your voice could do that,” he observed.
I rubbed my throat where it was feeling achy and uncomfortable. “I don’t think my voice actually can. My throat feels weird now.”
He brushed gentle fingers over where I was rubbing. “I’ll make you some soup later.”
I frowned. “And then I will make some edible soup afterwards.”
“I did feed myself before we were married, you know,” he protested.
“There was heavy use of the microwave involved. I know your tricks." I stopped suddenly and looked away. Because I had obviously missed some of the pretty important ones.
Ben sighed. "Yes, there was. You do know my tricks. I promise, everything I have ever told you about me was true."
"Ben, this is big. And I didn't even suspect. For five years and I didn't suspect. It's gonna be a long time before I stop feeling stupid."
"You are the least stupid person I know."
I huffed, but didn't answer. And then I remembered something that I had nearly missed in the middle of the fight. "Wait, what was this about you being in awe of me?"
"Judy, I explained rappelling to you once, we had one practice run on a climbing wall, and then you were off down the side of the Grand Canyon with no fear, like you'd been doing it all your life. You learned Japanese off of an app. You write books. You can cook. Of course I'm in awe of you."
"Huh." I had done all those things but rappelling just made intuitive sense to me when he explained it, and the others I did because they interested me. I'd never considered that they might seem…impressive. Maybe I wasn't entirely dumb. I felt pretty damn dumb, though.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called up the app. "I bought a GPS ping-thing on Amazon and it sends a location to this app. I put the tracker under the seat of your bike."
Ben looked at me in confusion.
"You told me we had to talk about how I figured you out. That's how. The tracker was in the storage shed and I guessed the combination to the big door."
He shook his head. "I may regret making you promise not to fight crime. That's…a really solid first effort."
"Oh no, you were very convincing. I will stick to epic vacations with you," I answered. "That is adventurous enough. I will consent to being a sounding board when needed, but that's as far as I go."
He smiled and kissed me. "Fair enough." Then he looked mischevious and the next thing I knew, I was hanging tightly to his arms as we were floating off the couch and into the air. "So, Sweetheart? Did I mention that I can fly?"
Author's Notes: "Unadulterated" is an SAT word that means "in a pure form" or "not mixed with anything." In this case, it also refers to the fact that the solution to the mystery is a marriage with no adultery occurring, or an "unadulterated" one.
