Chapter Text
He couldn’t help but watch Birdie. Held tightly by Toro, to whom she had latched onto at some point Jim missed, she was a vision of utter defeat with her face hidden in the space between his neck and shoulder. An attempt to hide her shame in a room filled with SHIELD agents and a few remaining heroes assisting with them. But her efforts to disappear were undone by the wet, hitching sound that escaped her on every inhale.
Thankfully, Toro knew how to make himself useful in moments like that. Call it the upside of being the sidekick. One couldn’t spend years being left alone with a civilian in over their head without figuring out how to manage them. And Toro, Jim realized, had seemingly mastered the skill. From the idle way he rubbed her back, to the murmured words that mustered up little nods from her, Tom had made a great deal of headway in calming her. Always keeping her attention on him and not the S.H.I.E.LD. agents that had turned the room into a crime scene or even Jim, as he stood there watching.
Not that Birdie tried to look at him.
When the initial shock had died down—with the Fantastic Four acting quickly to usher everyone out—he noticed she couldn’t stop staring at him while he stood on the stage between the animatronic Horton and his charred doppelganger. Lord only knew what she was thinking as Steve rushed to the stage, ready to take command while Reed began the initial inspection of the body. But he could feel her wide eyed stare boring into him until the reality finally hit her. From then on she seemed to go out of her way to avoid looking at him.
He half thought that maybe there was something about off putting about himself.
It would make sense. He certainly felt off-putting as he stood there with his hands shoved in his pockets, the sleeve of his suit burned away to his forearm thanks to his earlier heroics. But then, perhaps he was over thinking it because, like her, he was trying to avoid something he couldn’t bear to involve himself in.
The only reason he found himself watching her was because he was too much a coward to be on that stage again. Once was too much for a lifetime, he realized only after the second time he found himself there. Caught between Horton and—god, he couldn’t think of that replica as himself—the body during his conversation with Steve and Reed, he felt the weight of those thoughts, those memories, pulling him toward a spiral he couldn’t afford to go down. It must’ve been apparent because as soon as S.H.I.E.L.D had arrived, Steve suggested he go help Toro while he handled the agents.
Forcing himself to look over at them all, where Reed, Steve and Maria Hill stood going over everything under Horton’s mechanic stare, he felt his eyes drifting back toward the agents surrounding the body—a male about his height and build, charred beyond recognition—and then quickly squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head.
He was breathing too fast. His pocketed hands balled into fists so tight his nails dug into palm. It wasn’t him up there. It wasn’t his fault. But Horton…
Jim inhaled too noisily for his own liking then opened his eyes.
Toro was watching him. His jaw clenching slightly as he continued to rub Birdie’s back. “You ok there?” He asked, his voice steady even as his brows were lowered in concern.
It didn’t make sense lying to the man. They knew each other too well for that. When Jim managed a small upturn of his lips in a modest smile as he nodded in the affirmative, Toro’s could easily see the way it didn’t manage to reach his eyes. Just a show for anyone who wasn’t his son and hadn’t grown up with his particular brand of lies meant to comfort.
Because Toro wasn’t comforted. Granted, he didn’t question them. Just nodded tightly despite the thin press of his lips. But Jim knew that the man wasn’t likely to question it in a room full of strangers. It would be a talk for later, which was fine. He was almost certain that in the time until then he might be able to make sense of his emotions—or at the very least, make Toro forget to check in on him.
And frankly, Jim had been banking on that when he lied in the first place.
“To think, even in death Horton still knows how to throw New York into a panic.”
Jim startled before turning toward Hill as she made her way over to their little group. Steve was still at her side, but moved with the purpose that told everyone around that he was on a mission. A mission that had Jim standing a little taller in response, though he still shifted closer to where Toro held a teary eyed Birdie in an effort to close ranks around her.
Birdie, who had managed to put on a brave face between dabbing away at her eyes with what had once been Toro’s pocket square.
Maria looked them all over with an undecipherable gaze. From the bare portion of his arm to Toro, who rubbed at Birdie’s arm as she sat up as well. Everything quietly up for inspection until she settled her attention on the teary eyed woman behind the museum. Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, “I know it’s been a long night, but I have a few questions I need answered before I can let you go. You understand.”
“Of course,” Birdie agreed readily. Her eyes just as locked on Hill with equal intensity. “Ask anything you need to.”
“I heard this whole museum was your brainchild, Ms. McCarthy?”
Momentarily stunned by the simplicity of the question, Birdie looked at Jim and Toro in equal turn as though they had the answer. With another dab to the corner of her eyes, she finally nodded. “Yes. I worked on it for years alongside my partner Finn James. I used my name and family history to get funding and Finn… Well, he made the machines and displays. The interior may as well have been his doing.”
“Finn James,” Maria repeated slowly. “And where is he?”
Birdie’s mouth opened as she inhaled to answer, but nothing audible followed. Just the confused way her gaze drifted from side to side as she replayed the evening for the last time she had seen the man. She reared back slightly as it hit her, at first disbelieving as she looked around the room searching him out. When that failed, she looked to the three members of the Invaders, seeking a reassurance that none of them could give as they reached began to reach the same conclusion she had.
Certainly the last time they had seen Finn couldn’t have been the last time anyone had seen the man.
Jim looked to Steve, who was looking around the room, himself, with knit brows. But when their eyes met, he could only give a small shake of his head.
Maria, having noticed the ping pong of looks between them all, pinched at the bridge of her nose. “Well, seems like we have a clear suspect.”
“No!” One could see the immediate regret sink in as Birdie noticed all eyes fall to her with the outburst, but she didn’t back down. Meeting Hill’s arched brow head on, she said, “Finn wasn’t responsible for this. He wouldn’t do that. This museum and even this evening meant everything to him. I just haven’t seen him since the cocktail hour.”
“And what were you doing when you last saw him?”
“They were talking with us and he…” Jim ran a frustrated hand through his hair as he sighed. “He said he had to check on something in here.”
“No!” Birdie scowled at him then looking back at Hill, she continued in a calmer tone, “I mean, yes, he did say that, but it wasn’t insidious! He spent the whole day checking and rechecking everything. He wanted it all to be perfect from Horton’s voice to the flames. Dr. Horton was Finn’s idol. Everything that man did to advance living machinery was like gospel to him.”
It was funny, Jim noticed, how the words hit others harder than him. The subtle twitch in Steve’s jaw. An open scowl crossing over Toro’s face for just an instant;—not that Birdie saw anything beyond her concern for her friend. Even Hill looked to him with an slightly raised eyebrow. It was as nice as it was nauseating.
“I don’t know about the Horton portion,” he said, forcing the conversation forward. “But he was pretty excited to meet us. A little annoyed Namor didn’t show, but…”
“Namor was never going to show,” Steve finished with a roll of his eyes.
“If that’s the case, where is he?” Maria gestured vaguely around the room. “What happened to him during the first exhibit? If he was excited to meet you, seeing you in action sounds like it would’ve been a dream come true.”
“He didn’t do this,” Birdie said, growing annoyed with Maria’s implications. “Maybe he just slipped out with the rest of the guests when things got… scary. Did you ever consider that? There was a lot happening very quickly, after all.”
She looked to the three men with a furious desperation for them to back up her claims. The fact that they all gave each other quick glances, quiet throughout, had to look horrible. Birdie couldn’t make sense of what those careful glances said, but she could look almost stricken by their silence.
Finally, Toro nodded reluctantly. “She’s not wrong. The room was fairly dark with all the focus on the stage and there were enough heroes here that a tall brunette with glasses wasn’t exactly going to stand out. Not with everyone in eveningwear instead of costumes.”
Taking his words with a bit more consideration than that of a desperate friend, Maria nodded. With a glance back at where her agents seemed to be wrapping up their evidence collecting, she said, “Even if that’s true, we have a missing man. Best case scenario, he ran when things went south.” She held up a hand, silencing Birdie’s complaints before they could begin. “Worst case, he’s involved, willingly or not, and we need to find him in order to figure out how his display killed someone.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to do.” The words spilled past his lips before Jim even realized what he was saying. The urge to shut up quickly followed, but with how everyone suddenly focused on him, that wasn’t an viable option. He nodded toward the display tube. “Everything a person would need is part of the display. You have the supports to keep a person upright. Oxygen that gets piped in and…”
“And what?” Maria questioned.
“Horton cells.”
“Horton cells?” Steve jumped in. “That’s not something easy to come by. I mean, that’s basically what makes you up and if that’s the case… The guy shouldn’t have burned. You don’t burn.”
Jim shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know what happened. I just know that I felt it when… When I went to put it out.”
“Which you did because?” Maria asked in a leading tone.
“Because a guy was on fire, Hill.”
“In a room full of heroes all watching the same thing as you. Yet you acted before anyone else, from what everyone said in our reports so far. Why?”
“I lived through it. After Horton’s… speech, he gave me air and—” A chill made its way down his spine. Or maybe it was better categorized as dread since Jim couldn’t recall ever being cold. Either way, he managed to take one deep breath and then another before forcing himself to carry on. “I remember the audience fleeing in anger and horror. The threats. But after they were gone, Horton didn’t just stop the oxygen. He… confided in me, I guess, about how they were all fools and they didn’t understand his genius or me. That he wouldn’t let them ruin his crowning achievement.”
Never mind that Jim couldn’t make sense of any of it at the time. His entire existence until that moment had been disjointed flashes of Horton’s face during tests broken up by samplings of death. And humans were simply these volatile animals who expressed everything in extremes. He didn't know how exceptional an introduction to life or had been until much later and by then it hardly felt as though it mattered.
Clearly he was as wrong then as he was now given the looks directed his way.
“I never heard mention of that before,” Birdie whispered in awe.
“Me either,” Toro replied in a far flatter tone. So obviously annoyed to learn about Jim alongside everyone else.
Jim’s mouth twitched to explain, but the words were big as the moon, taking up too much space inside him and moving with a force all their own. They churned up excuses and memories like a viscious tide, but only the words that found sound felt pithy and almost cruel to say. Not that that stopped him.
“Yeah, well, it is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being.”
There was that subtle shift to the temperature again as Toro opened his mouth to snap at him, but Maria jumped in before the moment could devolve further. “So which part made you—”
“He moved at the wrong times. I saw him breathing before the flames, briefly, barely. And then didn’t move at all once he was on fire, which is odd.”
The meaning of his words spread across them slowly, but hit them all in a similar fashion. First in the shocked look on Steve’s face as he remembered the warning he waved off. Then in Birdie’s quiet gasp, her eyes once again growing wet as she processed what they all witnessed. Toro’s mouth moved to question everything but no words came out between his frantic glances from Jim to the stage. Finally, swallowing down the unpleasant comfort of knowing that the man likely didn’t burn to death—simply burned—, Maria nodded.
“So, you act, you burn through the glass and then you… What?”
“Turned off the Horton cells.”
“And, crazy question—” She turned her attention back toward Birdie. “But was that the only way to get this display to work? Or was that more commitment to the bit from our missing man?”
“… It was Finn’s insistence,” Birdie ground out reluctantly. “Once he and his team got access to Horton’s diaries, he said that he realized the process wasn’t that hard to recreate. So they wound up making this…I guess a coating for the animatronics? Almost like a lotion, only one that…”
“Would turn a guy on and off like a light switch?” Maria gave another curt nod given the obviousness of the suspect.
“I swear, everything here was supposed to be a machine,” Birdie shot back. “Especially the Human Torch.”
She said it so plainly that th-e ‘duh’ may as well have been spoken. It was ludicrous that they would go through all the effort of making a robot Horton with a perfectly re-created AI voice just to make the Human Torch, the real machine at the center of it, a real person. One only had to look at her to know that thought rested at the center of her annoyance with Maria’s accusations. Maybe that’s why Steve and Toro didn’t look at her, eyes more focused on Jim, who encouraged their silence by saying nothing as well. Though, Toro visibly struggled to keep himself quiet judging by the way his nostrils flared with every angry breath.
Maria also didn’t take the bait found in Birdie’s tone, though she did arched an unimpressed brow at the woman. Slowly looking at the other three, she said, “Right. Well, I suppose our first step is to find this Finn guy. If we have any more questions, Ms. McCarthy, we’ll be in contact.”
Jim watched as Birdie watched Maria walked away. Her stiff upper lip lasting as long as it took the director to move out of earshot. As soon at it happened, Birdie’s pleading gaze was on Steve as she grabbed hold of his hand.
“He didn’t do it,” she said with the conviction of a zealot. “I know Finn. He wouldn’t… hurt people. He’s not that sort of man.”
Resting his hand over hers, Toro gently forced her to release her hold on Steve, instead settling both their hands on her lap as she looked to him in confusion. “It’s been a long night. Why don’t I take you home, huh?”
Birdie wavered for a moment. That Dean urge to see things through shining brightly, if briefly. Then, in the span of a breath, her shoulders sank a little and she nodded in agreement with a forced smile. “You’re too kind. And likely right. I’d be happy to take you up on your offer, if it’s not an inconvenience.”
Toro waved the comment off. “I’m a hero. We help people.”
Birdie tittered at the response, unaware of how perfunctory Toro’s kindness was after her earlier comments. Truly a master in the art of taking care of people.
Standing up, they both gathered their belongings before saying their goodbyes. Birdie, thankful, if not obviously annoyed as she shook their hands while Toro hugged Steve and Jim tightly. Then, with exhaustion beginning to win out over her ire, she let Toro lead her to the door, not even looking back as he gave a final wave to the two of them.
At his side, Steve took a deep breath, then let it out in a noisy huff. “You off as well?”
“I think it’s best.” He lifted up his bare arm to show off his burnt sleeve. “Hill knows how to reach me.”
With a tired laugh, Steve nodded. “Yeah. By sending me.”
“Yeah, well, you know where I keep my spare key.”
Steve rolled his eyes. Of course the smile he couldn’t fight gave away his affection while inspiring Jim to do the same. Pulling Jim into a tight embrace, they patted each other on the back like they wouldn’t see each other again—a natural response for men who had died before. “Get some rest, Jim.”
“You too,” he said, knowing neither of them would.
Not when Steve made his way back over to Hill as Jim made his way toward the exit.
He was a man on a mission and nothing was going to stop him seeing it through to the end.
In any other case, Jim would’ve been there with him, but as the chilly night air hit him, so did a wave of exhaustion that seemed to go to his very core. It was a small mercy that he managed to quickly call a cab, unwilling to deal with a busy subway or burn his clothes further by flying back to his apartment. Everything requiring more effort than it tok to stare out the window at the bright lights of the city felt beyond him.
Everything aside from the memories of Horton he’d been fighting all evening.
The man had created Jim with the ability to forget, like any other person, yet the blonde remembered his creator all too clearly. The excited smile on his mustached face as Jim came to life for the first time—only for it to fade just as quickly. The night he introduced Jim to the world. Perhaps it was natural that the man had imprinted on him in such a way when so many of his first moments of life were directly tied to him.
Or, perhaps, it was the horror of thinking he had killed the man in an infantile fit of rage when threatened with being nothing more than the man’s way to success.
Squeezing his eyes shut until the stinging in them stopped, Jim tried to think of something else, but all he could see was the lifeless stare of the animatronic Horton. It would’ve been easy to call it irony—the fact that the creator had become the machine—but Jim couldn’t delude himself of the truth. Horton was long dead and if he had to think of himself as many did—a machine given life—he was certain he was going to be sick in the back of the cab.
Thankfully, he managed to make it all the way to his apartment building without ruining the poor driver’s night.
Standing outside, he looked heavenward as he took a deep breath. The will to drag himself inside was there, he just had to find it. And if, in the mean time, he stood there in a partially burned suit looking toward the sky, there weren’t many people in New York who would think to question him for even a minute.
Chuckling to himself, he shook off the worst of his malaise and headed inside. Moving still took too much effort, but the will to get inside and lie down kept him moving through halls and up stairs. He undid he tie and shoved it into his pocket as he fantasized about crawling into bed and cuddling Niels until he fell asleep. Even managed to undo the first three buttons of his shirt, uncaring of who saw him, by time he reached his door.
Pulling out his keys, he tried to find the right one before getting distracted by the noise of a tv. Not normally something he would worry about given the relatively thin walls of the building, but the fact that it was coming from inside his apartment was strange. Flipping around the welcome sign hanging from his door, Jim let out an annoyed huff at the lack of spare key he kept hidden there.
With a deep breath that wasn’t enough to steel himself for danger or do away with his annoyance with the never ending nightmare that was that evening, he opened the door to his apartment and glared at his intruder.
An intruder that had made themselves at home in his absence for reasons Jim couldn’t fathom. There was an opened bottle of wine Jim knew he didn’t own along with a half filled glass sitting on his coffee table. Not to mention a bag that was meant to contain two bagels lying empty and partially clawed on the floor. But what really caught his attention, aside from the bracers and armor tucked into a corner almost considerately, was the barefoot king of Atlantis sprawled across his couch boredly watching the news as he stroked Niels’s back, his traitorous cat all too happy with the entire thing given the volume of his purring.
Turning to look at him, Namor smirked. “How was the event?”