trans_9 | Melting Clock: Quarantine

"How long do I have to stay in this bubble?" Marco said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm so bored right now that I'd even read a textbook."

"That can be arranged," she said with a small smile, saving the answer to his first question for last. Out of two questions, it meant he didn't have to wait all that long. "Though I'm guessing you'd prefer something with more pictures."

She glanced around the bubble, keeping her tone light. "If all goes well, not too much longer. We're pretty sure what you all have isn't something that just anyone can catch. If it's not infectious, then it means you get out again."

"Woah, does that mean you guys have comics?" Marco said, suddenly more interested. "Like, what about Spider-Man? You have them? Unless they've locked all them away cause he's on the ship...oh man, do you know how awesome that is? Spider-Man! He's like, totally the coolest superhero, hands down."

He still couldn't beleive that he actually had Spider-Man's autograph, back at Cassie's house. For real! "Hey...you know, if it turns out we can't get out of these bubbles and everything...do you reckon Spidey would like, do visits and whatnot? I mean, not that he has to," Marco added on quickly. "I mean, he's probably way too busy, right?"

At least she knew what superheroes were, thanks to Kon. Sakura waited through his barrage of questions, figuring he didn't expect an answer to most of them. She could try, for those she knew.

"We do, I think, though you're probably right about things being locked away." She thought there were some occasional exceptions, if none related to this Spiderman came to mind. Had she seen a name like that on the active crew roster?

"I'm sure he'd be happy to, if he's as cool as you say he is. What kind of superhero wouldn't come say hello to someone who appreciated his hard work?" She smiled, tamping down her confusion. "I don't think anyone is too busy to spare some time to do that."

Marco grinned, feeling giddy. "Man, that would be just seriously awesome. You wait till Jake hears about this..." Marco trailed off, his enthusiasm waning. Jake wasn't here though, was he? He was gone, sent back to the pods.

Talking to Spider-Man wasn't so fun if he couldn't talk to Jake about it.

"Well, I'll just tell him when he wakes up again," he mumbled.

Jake? One of his friends? Someone who had been here before, based on how he referenced waking up again. Not waking up for the first time.

Sakura hesitated, making a calculated gamble. He'd been emphatic about Eva not being his mother -- his free mother -- a few years older than this. Yet he was Academy aged, and liable to get younger as time went forward. The logical choice for who would be taking care of him boiled down to the person Kaya and Kang had both been concerned about, a woman Sakura herself had never met.

If Quarantine was going to end, they'd need to know where every person was heading. No one should be allowed to leave on their own, not without a support network to watch over and take care of them should things continue to get worse before they got better.

"What about Rachel? You could tell her, if she might not think it's as cool as Jake would. Or Eva. You could always tell your mother in the meantime, couldn't you?"

Marco froze. Tell Eva?!

It had nearly been two years, back before he woke up here. Two years, since she'd disappeared into the ocean. Two years since she'd died. He couldn't talk to her, not now, not ever again.

"That's not funny," he said flatly. "My mother is dead."

Marco froze. Tell Eva?!

It had nearly been two years, back before he woke up here. Two years, since she'd disappeared into the ocean. Two years since she'd died. He couldn't talk to her, not now, not ever again.

"That's not funny," he said flatly. "My mother is dead."

My mother is dead. She was building an incomplete understanding about how someone's home life collided with a different kind of war, and it wasn't entirely intentional. Eva was clearly alive on ship, and from what little else she knew from Marco and circumstance, that implied her death as he referenced it now had either been an assumption made by her family or cover until a later point in time, when the Yeerk she was host to brought her back into the public eye.

Secondary realizations, if in a way this was kinder. Not that Marco was being set up by outside forces to meet his deceased mother, but that in doing so, his first thought wasn't yet her years spent as a prisoner in her own mind. "That'd make a pretty poor joke," she said, "If I was kidding."

There were different ways to broach the topic, but one of the simplest boiled down to the very ship they were on. If he didn't remember his mother from before, on ship, it was also an indication that he was suffering greater memory loss than before -- or maybe that the conflicting memories were being repressed by his own mind. Making the situation make some semblance of sense when it was already confusing enough.

"She's alive, here, on ship. Do you remember?" She paused, giving him the chance to respond before continuing on. "Stacy rescued people from all points in their timelines. All living points in any one person's life, or any one world's history."

"Stop it," Marco said, starting to sound agitated. "I said that's not funny, alright? I think if my Mom was here, I'd remember it. And she's dead. She's not coming back."

He hoped that she would come back, back when she had first gone missing. Except she never had, and Marco had known that her miraculously surviving somehow just wasn't realistic. Better to just accept it. It hurt less, then.

Definite memory loss around events happening on ship. She could hear the agitation in his voice. It wasn't in his best interests, nor hers, to make this worse on him than it already was going to be. Someone should contact Eva.

That wasn't a conversation she looked forward to. "I understand," she said simply, letting her voice soften. "It's never funny to make light of someone's death. It's disrespectful. I'm sorry."

She bowed, if she wasn't sure it meant anything to him at this age. Or any age, really. Out of the times she'd bowed to Marco in the past, one had been out of politeness, the other out of something approaching irritable (almost) spite. This time it was to apologize. Something she further illustrated, as she said, "I hope you can accept my apology."

Even if it was an apology for not knowing what to do, or to say, when the reality was that his mother was alive. Apologizing because he'd have to re-learn that, too, and she knew it wouldn't be easy. How would Sasuke have reacted, being reintroduced to a member of his family he believed had died? At this age?

Maybe even before he left the village?

Marco bristled a little, ready to snap at her the moment she showed even the slightest hint of pity. Except then she didn't, even while she was apologising, so he just ended up hovering awkwardly.

He didn't say anything for a minute, before relaxing a fraction. "Alright," he said grudgingly.

Sakura straightened up. "Thank you." It was her last word on that subject. Pity didn't occur to her -- sympathy, sure. Pain, a kind of empathy, definitely. But not pity. She felt sorrow, but it was misplaced and inappropriate. Naruto refused to accept any on his behalf from Sakura; Sasuke was as incapable of accepting that she cried for him and his losses and the changes that had led to him being as willing to kill her as his own self-proclaimed teammate.

Pity was a strange word in a shinobi context.

So she shoved it to the side, putting on her smile that's not quite as sincere as it could be. The one that says, It's all right, even when it wasn't. "Outside of getting Spiderman to visit, is there anything I can do for you? Actually find you one of these comic books you like?" She paused. "What exactly are they about, anyway?" Eying him with slightly exaggerated curiosity, Sakura waited to see if he'd explain.

She knew what they were in the broadest sense. Probably similar to illustrated novels back home, though their content was apparently different. Superheroes were a little more upstanding than the heroes she was used to from back home.

Or they at least had a smaller chance of being ninjas, if Kon's word was to be believed.

"They're like, about superheroes mostly," Marco said, eying Sakura. It was...weird, talking to her. He had the bizarre feeling that the way they were talking now wasn't anything like how they'd talked before. Was it because he was younger now? Was that it? Did she think he was just a kid?

Or was he different, when he was older?

Marco shifted, unsettled by the thought that everyone else knew what he'd be like in his future, but he didn't.

"They're the guys who keep the supervillains under control, right?" Kon had explained his career in more or less those terms, if the super seemed more relevant to potential capable destruction (in the case of the villains) than actually being super at pretty much anything.

Then again, that made the heroes super just for handling these particular villains.

She had to blink as she realized, yet again, this kind of terminology was accepted across multiple worlds. "Superheroes. I wonder how many of them ever set out to be that way, or how many fell into it."

"Mostly, though they have stories with other plotlines too," Marco said. He might have met a few of them while on the ship, but he still couldn't help but reflexively think of comic book superheroes as just characters in a story. "And I'd say most fall into it. Who's crazy enough to decide they want to save the world without something to push them into it? Plus otherwise the origin stories would get boring."

"The origin stories?" She understood the words, if the idea was interesting. Whatever echoes of peoples experiences that scattered across universes were even divided into portions based on when another world decided a person's life story had really begun. Or at least when a hero had started acting as a hero.

The origins of superheroes. She smiled. "As far as who's crazy enough to decide on something like that without a push, wouldn't it be the idealists?" Her smile faded, thoughts drifting to Naruto. Blind idealism came from some of the unlikeliest sources. "It's what keeps them at it after seeing some of the reality of the world they're saving... I guess that counts as your push. Saying you'll save the world, and then actually having to do it..." she trailed off. Sakura didn't save worlds. She waited and hoped and fought to make sure the one person who could have saved their world survived to save it.

And he didn't even have the decency to be awake and around when she needed some of that idealism to not fall back into the kind of thinking she wasn't always able to shake herself back out of.

Like what she was starting to do now. Sakura shook her head, aiming for some clarity. Focusing on now, and the problems people like Marco were facing, was a distraction. A difficult to understand one, but a visible, frightening one for the people going through it.

"I'm guessing you don't have one of the boring origin stories yourself."

"Yeah, you know - how they got their powers and all? Decided to fight crime?" He said, not bothering to respond to the bit about idealism. He wasn't an idealist himself. When it was just a story? Sure, idealism was fine. In the real world, it didn't work that way.

"Nah, not really," he said, snorting. "But it doesn't matter, anyway. If by some miracle we ever get home, once we get Ax back home? That's it, I'm done. That's my last mission."

Her eyebrows shot up. "Really?"

"We can't all be ninjas who were trained to kill from birth, you know," Marco said, sarcastic. "And you know...it's not like the comic books, where no one ever dies and the ones that do just come back later. It's real. We could all die, and if something happened to me, my Dad..." Marco trailed off. His dad was in the pods somewhere, right? Some day, he'd wake up. Marco needed to be there when he did.

Her eyebrows weren't coming down anytime soon. It was the only reason she wasn't narrowing her gaze at him for his blithe comment on shinobi training. "He'd be all alone." It's odd to hear any child thinking in terms of leaving their parents alone, and it's a guess on her part on the alone -- no mention of siblings didn't mean there were none. "How long has it been just the two of you? Have you been fighting that entire time?"

"Nah, we'd only got the ability to morph for about a month or so back home. My Mom..." Marco's voiced cracked a little - it always seemed to do that, when he talked about her. Her death still hurt. "She died two years ago."

A month ago? Had he been fighting in his war for all of a month? "Did you know about any of this before then?" As vague as her question was, she meant to be asking about the Yeerk infestation. There was falling into something, and there was falling into something.

Did he have any training whatsoever?

"It must have been hard," is all she found herself saying, not well equipped to deal with old loss. She couldn't say she understood, if she knew plenty of people who could. Single parent households had a fairly high occurrence rate in Konoha, like the rest of her world. Particularly the shinobi world.

Well. Thereabouts. Marco couldn't quite remember exactly how long it had been. "About the Yeerks? Nope. See, they can be infesting anybody, right? And they act just like their host, so you'd never even know that they were a Controller."

Marco didn't say anything about how hard it was.

"Then how did you learn? How did you end up being able to morph in the first place?" Without being chosen, without being prepared to fight? Certainly, training didn't mean you were prepared in the end. Sakura knew that much from personal experience. Knowing in theory what to do, practicing against peers over what to do, it meant nothing when faced with an actual situation requiring action.

She'd learned the hard way that she had only been prepared to die, back on their mission to the Country of the Waves. Ready to die defending their charge, but not able to fight for him. Not able to fight for months, even if she had the training.

And she'd almost always had an obvious enemy to face. Not hidden, not masked behind people she could know. There were only so many spies, and so many Orochimarus, in the world.

None of them had ever worn the face of someone close, let alone as close as family. Good friends.

Even thinking about it made her shudder, rubbing one arm like she'd caught a chill in this ridiculously consistent, humid, moist environment. Weirder things could happen.

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