cantilevers | Inbox (Etraya)

[Vander's other arm moved off of Kirk's shoulder so he could wrap it around the other man's front in an act of support in the form of a one-armed hug. He nodded his chin against Kirk's head, considering the words and appreciating that the other man was trusting him with this information.]

Did you take issue with the husband taking up old habits?

[Ah yes, he had heard Kirk mention Gotham and it was not the first mention either. Jason Todd also mentioned Gotham, but it was different from Kirk's. Still, he imagined there were certain similarities in the make up of the city.]

Full scholarship, really? That's a massive opportunity.

I threw him through a diner window when he tried.

[The way Kirk plainly responds and in his usual monotone strongly suggests he still doesn't regret that]

Moving to Gotham opened up a lot of possibilities for me. It was a fresh start. Suddenly, I wasn't the town freak anymore because there were plenty of others who wanted to explore what the sciences can do.

Edited 2025-07-02 04:28 (UTC)

Good, I'm glad that you did.

[Vander had thrown more than his fair share of people through windows and doors. That was the kind of neighborhood he had grown up in where keeping the peace often required stern action when people wouldn't back down.]

And you had other students with similar goals as you did. Suddenly you had people who didn't require sports to be popular.

Precisely. I was still far from being the life of a party but I didn't stick out as much anymore. Plenty of us wanted to intensively study, research, and experiment for our scientific interests.

[Kirk just very slightly tightens his grip on Vander]

It's where I met Will and Tina.

That must have been very freeing to be around similar academics for the first time. Maybe not a social butterfly, but it must have felt like the future was open to you.

[He wondered if that was Viktor had felt like being pulled up from the undercity. He wouldn't be the first either, but mostly they worked across the bridge on and came back to the undercity and did not live in the golden city of progress.

He couldn't even imagine it honestly.]

Your future friends. [He could guess this was where the story was going based on the grip.]

[Kirk nods]

I met Will first. Brilliant and was charismatic in a way that made it easy for anyone to like him. Another thing that was unlike me was he specialized in machines and engineering. He became my best friend.

[After Will betrayed him, Kirk wonders if Will ever saw him the same way. Or was it a lie the entire time the men knew each other]

Tina came later. I first knew her Will’s girlfriend. Also brilliant and charismatic. She was also always so kind and strong-headed.

[And should’ve been saved if Kirk had paid better attention]

The three of us became close.

[Vander nodded his head again to impress on Kirk that he was following along, drinking in the provided details about Will first then Tina. He wondered what Kirk's definition of charismatic was, and he then wondered if he and these two fell close enough that Kirk saw some aspects of them in him.

Likely not if this went sour and Kirk was flushed and sweet with him.]

Sounds like you three were thick as thieves.

We were.

[Kirk goes quiet as grief begins to rise up in him again. He let goes of Vander’s hand, gets up, and then walks over to a drawer sitting in a dark corner of his lab. He then opens it, pulls out a photo, and offers it to Vander]

From my university days with them.

[He was empathetic enough to feel the grief from Kirk, and he released the other man without a fight as Kirk rose and moved away from the computer terminal. He trailed behind at a respectable distance in case Kirk needed more direct support for this difficult conversation.

He reached out and took the photo. He ran his thumb over the one that was clearly Kirk, noting the other two. He experienced a difficult pang of pain as he was reminded of a similar photo from his past.]

Quite the handsome group you three made. I can see what you mean about the charisma. [He glanced up from the photo.] You've aged well. Still handsome.

[Kirk softly huffs. Kirk is still attracted to charismatic extroverts]

Probably has less to do with good genes and more to do with the vampirism.

[Kirk almost feels like he was an entirely different man back then, both physically and mentally. So much of him changed, even down to his eyes and hair color]

Edited 2025-07-02 18:15 (UTC)

You know what, I would have hit on you back then just as much as I do now. So, you're still a winner.

[Would Kirk consider that winning? Who knew! Vander thought that his attentions were warranted regardless.

He offered the photo back after a few more seconds of examining it.]

I assume you were friends with them for your entire education and perhaps beyond some time?

[Kirk takes back his photo and carefully puts it away. A corner of his lip twitches when Vander flatters him. He’s sure he would’ve been flustered by him back then. Not that he was much smoother now]

Yes. Around the last year of my education, I started getting sick. My diagnosis was terminal lymphoma. Blood cancer. I was dying. At the time, I was already studying vampire bats and how their venom could treat blood conditions. Suddenly, my research had a new sense of urgency.

[As Kirk put away the photo carefully, Vander considered if Aurora could provide him the one that he had from his youth. It had once been in the safe in his office, yet another point of shame for his own actions. Still, it was probably the only image of his dead dear friend.]

I expect you had particular timelines that were accelerated. Did your friends help you in this research, or did they have projects of their own?

At first they knew I was sick but I didn't tell them that it was terminal. Thought I could take care of it myself. Then I passed out in front of them and had to be hospitalized. That's when they found out. After that, Will agreed to help me.

[Kirk begins to tense up again]

My bat venom formula kept breaking down too fast to eradicate the cancer. Will's specialty was nanotechnology. He developed machines so small that they were invisible to the naked eye. My serum could be the brick. His nanites could be the mortar.

[Vander could only listen at this point in the story because he was not science minded except where Powder had lectured him about some mechanical switch she wanted to try or Claggor shyly asking about certain types of plants that topside had.

However, by this point, he liked to think he knew Kirk well enough to read the other man. They were clearly arriving at the hardest parts of the story if the way that Kirk was tense all over. He could see the potential lines of betrayal, but he had no solid guesses which way it would go just yet.]

[Kirk finds himself avoiding eye contact again. Even now, there are still parts of the story that are painful to recollect and uncomfortably ambiguous]

Normally, a project this ambitious and drastic requires years of work. Years of trial and error. Time that I didn't have. We significantly condensed the timeline. Tina was worried and thought it could be too dangerous working like this. Will... didn't really protest and worked alongside me.

[Was Will thinking about betraying him by then?]

Our new serum seemed ready. But at the last moment, I started to have doubts. I was intimidated by the moment of truth.

[Kirk tries to take a breath before resuming]

Will saw how shaky my hand became as I held the syringe. The needle hovering over my skin. He took it out of my hand and injected it into my vein. For a long time, I had no doubts that Will was trying to help me in that moment.

Edited 2025-07-03 02:54 (UTC)

[Vander took the cue of Kirk's avoidance to step in closer and set his hands lightly on the other man's hips to draw Kirk a little closer to his body as if the size of his frame could momentarily protect the other man from the pain of those memories. And he listened, keeping all of his attention on Kirk to read what he could in the other man's body language.

He hummed softly at the story, wondering himself about Will. He didn't have a sense of the pair's dynamic yet to make a judgment, but he expected that injection was the moment of truth for Kirk.]

Was that the injection that changed you into what you are now?

[Kirk nods, though still reluctant to look at Vander. He welcomes the larger man's embrace but his body is still clearly tense. Even now, he still hasn't emotionally unpacked everything Will's betrayal caused]

That was over a decade ago. The combination of my serum and Will's nanites are still swimming in my bloodstream. For so long I thought it was an accident.

[He didn't try to capture Kirk's eye, letting the other man decide when and how that would happen. He did not feel bad for pressing for this information, knowing how important it was to Kirk.]

What makes you think it wasn't an accident now?

[Kirk quotes Will in a monotone that suggests an attempt at keeping emotional distance]

"I always knew that she loved you. Even back in college, she was only ever really happy when the three of us were together. Even after I turned you into a monster. Even after that, she still wanted you."

[How well Kirk remembers Will's confession hints at how traumatic it's been]

Those are some of the things he told me years later after he revealed his true colors. By then, he had secretly murdered some of the world's top scientists and then tried to frame the Justice League. The military was right at our doorstep and ready to execute us.

Hernan and Bekka were trying to keep the military at bay while I was in the tower, monitoring. Will then ambushed me. Earlier, someone had tried to kill him and we took him to the tower for medical treatment. That turned out to be a ruse. He needed to get into the tower to use the power core.

[Kirk forces himself to keep going despite how tense his body now was. Vander was going to ask more questions anyway]

That moment when he restrained me was also when Will confessed that he killed Tina years ago. He claimed it was an accident when she kept talking to him about how he needed to keep helping me find a vampirism cure. According to him, her death made him realize that free agency is the root of evil and that it should be eliminated. If even a brilliant scientist like him is capable of killing, then what chance does humanity have?

[Even recollecting it now, Will's madness still feels monstrous]

For several years after Tina's death, he secretly prepared a bomb that could unleash billions of nanites to take over every human mind on Earth. Take down the Justice League and no one could stop him. We also had the right power core to support his bomb.

[Kirk looks away. Bitterness and self-loathing rising to his throat]

While Will plotted all of that, I never put all the pieces together. The Tina I had been talking to for the last several years was one of Will's machines and meant to fool me. Will kept on a mask that I never knew was even there.

[Half the time there was an aspect of jealousy, wasn't there? People attracted to other people, and then it became messy in the meantime. It was a shame that Kirk perhaps hadn't noticed the eyes that Tina had been interested in that way, but then again, he could see it. Kirk wasn't on the look out and once there was the illness, no doubt it sucked all attention.

He shifted to stand next to Kirk, leaning their shoulders together as the other man continued to weave a sad and complicated tale. No wonder the other man didn't want to talk about it.]

It sounds like he had taken a bad path long before he came and captured you and put you at such risk. You know that her death isn't your fault, right?

[He wouldn't know what it was like being fooled by a machine. The bots here were the most high tech entities he had encountered, but he knew that wasn't the same for other people.]

What happened?

[Kirk has a hard time believing it wasn’t his fault. He was supposed to be a detective and he had considered Will and Tina his closest friends. But Will turned out to be his blind spot the whole time]

An outside source managed to dissuade the military and told them and Hernan and Bekka what was really happening. He was the last scientist Will tried to kill but it turned out he had escaped just before the explosion.

[Who knew it would be Lex Luthor who would save the Justice League?]

Will’s ruse also meant he got to benefit from the tower’s impenetrable shield. While everyone outside tried to storm in, I tried to break free from the Metal Man who was restraining me. Hernan’s punching was powerful enough to shake the building and gave me enough momentum to smash my capturer. After that, I deactivate the tower’s shield. Even then, Hernan and Bekka just barely got to me in time. Another one of Will’s Metal Men pinned me down again and was ready to rip my throat out until Hernan punched it in the face.

[Kirk really did owe Hernan his life many times over]

Hernan fought most of the Metal Men and took his fight outside. Bekka fought the machine that mimicked Tina. I had Will, right in the power core room. Will had enhanced himself with more nanites just in case. His strength, durability, and stamina were almost as good as mine and he could quickly heal.

[Kirk goes quiet, still not looking at Vander in the eye]

Will accused me of “loving only my bats and test tubes. If only she hadn’t wanted you.” They were the two people in my life that I loved.

Edited 2025-07-03 11:11 (UTC)

Inbox (Etraya)

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CW: mention of domestic violence

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