Chapter Text
Five years.
Five.
Years.
David kept his eyes on the road ahead, still trying to wrap his head around it.
When he and Sarah had...whatever’d...back into their house, they hadn’t even known that anything had happened at first. There might have been a moment of dizziness, but he wasn’t even sure of that anymore, and they’d been a good couple minutes further along in a conversation started five fucking years ago before either of them had clued into the not-so-subtle wrongness around them.
It had been the silence from upstairs that had registered first.
In retrospect he wasn’t sure why, not when the refrigerator two feet away had gone silent as well, the light coming in through the window had changed, and there was a thick layer of dust on everything.
Their confusion when the kids hadn’t responded to their calls had turned into panic when they’d realized that not only were the kids themselves missing, so were plenty of their things, the phones that should have been on the kitchen counter were nowhere to be found, and none of the house electrical was running either.
Soon enough they started hearing noises from outside, neighbors coming out of houses up and down the block calling for their own kids, spouses, and parents. Sarah had gone out to see if any of them knew what was happening, but David wasn’t a genius for nothing. The emergency phone in his desk had somehow been completely drained of charge, but the backup battery had still held enough power for him to get that phone up and connected to a satellite.
A satellite that wasn’t anywhere near where it should have been.
And then he’d brought up the local news.
He flexed his hands against the wheel.
Their neighborhood had been one of the ones deserted after ‘the snap,’ which he supposed was marginally better than whatevering back in to find some other family living there. But the insanity that he’d come across—five years? Sarah had been back inside by then, and she hadn’t been able to believe it either, even if she’d said that their neighborhood now looked like some kind of ridiculous wildlife refuge with grasses and trees and who knew what encroaching everywhere—hadn’t answered where their kids were. And while they’d gotten lucky and the in-case-of-emergency generator he’d set up once upon a time had been enough to bring at least a minimal power back to the house, that had been cold comfort at best.
And then he’d gotten a call.
His hands flexed against the wheel again. His initial calls out hadn’t gone anywhere, probably because everyone had been trying to make calls at that point. But the incoming one that had finally gotten through….
Leo, at least, had sounded like Leo. Mostly, anyway. Even if she was apparently a freshman at Columbia these days. A nineteen year old freshman.
And then Zach had managed to reach them as well, and that had been a whole lot worse because he wasn’t twelve any more than Leo was fourteen. He was now a high school senior with a voice that had changed and settled and a confidence that David didn’t even recognize.
They were living down in New York City, now. In Hells Kitchen which wasn’t somewhere that either David or Sarah would have wanted them to end up. Then again, David couldn’t say that Frank Castle was the person he’d have chosen to be the long-term guardian of his children, either, and somehow that seemed to have worked out. Or at least neither Zach nor Leo had sounded particularly traumatized when they’d talked, although neither conversation had been all that long. And he had no idea how the ‘Matt’ who’d said that New York’s streets were packed and that Frank and the kids had no chance of getting out of the city anytime soon even if they could find another car fit into anything.
Waiting for the generator to charge the car battery enough for it to turn over had been an exercise in frustration, and David had been more than half expecting even the gas in the spare tank to be worthless when it did, but fortunately the two emergency gallons had been enough to get them to a still-running station. And if this Matt had been right about the streets out of the city proper, they had been able to make it a respectable distance in.
A respectable distance in while every damn radio announcer on every damn channel had repeated over and over that five years ago the Avengers had lost, five years ago half the world’s population had disappeared, five years ago—
Sarah had been the one to finally shut it off, but he hadn’t objected.
Five years.
Five fucking years.
Eventually traffic ground to a halt going into the city as well, and after three times through a cycle of lights and no movement, he’d shoved open his door and stepped out for a quick look.
“Anything?” Sarah asked as he ducked back in.
“No.” He checked the cross street. “Find somewhere to pull off and walk from here? It’s only a couple more miles.”
“If you can find a place to pull off.”
Even if he couldn’t, he’d be fine just abandoning the car right about now. But before it came to that he found a spot in an alley and didn’t pay much attention to the paint job as he swung in behind a dumpster.
It took some time to reach the address Leo had texted them, the people packing the sidewalks making it slow going to say the least. Especially since a fair number of them—probably half—were dealing with the fact that the buildings around here had not been abandoned at any point in the last five years, and all the conflicts and confusion that went along with that.
When they did reach the building, he had to double-check the address, and Sarah’s expression didn’t indicate any enthusiasm on her part, either.
“They live here?”
He shrugged, and the fact that there were six flights of stairs to walk up rather than an elevator didn’t exactly improve his impression of the place.
The door to the sixth floor looked different than the others, with a lock and a doorbell rather than opening onto a hallway, and David was reaching for the bell when the door flew open.
“Dad? Mom?”
David’s mouth moved but no sound came out, and Sarah didn’t fair much better. He’d known it had been five years. That refrain had been running through his head since he’d linked with the first satellite, reinforced about a thousand times over by that damn radio.
But somehow he still expected the little boy he’d had to wake up for breakfast this morning, not a teenager who matched him for height and had the still-unfinished look of someone with another few inches yet to come.
“Zach?” Sarah asked, her voice breaking, and then Zach was somehow wrapped around both of them.
And then there was a sob and someone else impacted from the side. Leo, who at least hadn’t gotten any taller even if her hair was inexplicably blue, and she shoved one hand between David and Zach to grab her mother’s arm as well.
David wasn’t sure how long any of them held on before someone behind the kids cleared his throat, and he looked over Zach’s shoulder—his shoulder, damn it—to find Frank standing with his arms crossed. He looked older now too, not in the same way as the kids, maybe, but there was gray at his temples and scattered through the stubble on the lower half of his face that definitely hadn’t been there before. “You guys wanna come in and sit down?” he asked.
David wasn’t sure what he wanted to do right now, and he doubted Sarah knew either, but both kids turned. There was a door on each side of the hall standing open, but the kids followed Frank left, and David and Sarah followed them.
Like the building itself, the apartment had clearly seen better days. Surprisingly clean and clutter-free, with even their shoes lined up neatly on the stand by the door rather than piled in a heap as they would have been at the house, and when David and Sarah politely took theirs off as well, Zach stacked them quickly. Maybe it was just that Frank had been a Marine?
Regardless, the cleanliness didn’t do anything to hide the scuffs on the floor or the mismatched furniture.
David and Sarah ended up on a battered couch with Leo tucked between them while Frank and Zach took the smaller version along the wall of windows.
“So, uh…,” David started, only to trail off at a loss. On one hand he wanted to know what had been happening for the last five years, but at the same time he was still fighting to wrap his head around the entire concept.
“How did you end up down here?” Sarah managed.
The kids both looked at Frank, and he shrugged. “Well, when it first happened, I went up to stay with them at your place. Figured it made more sense that way, keep things consistent and all. But once we knew the whole deal….” He shrugged. “After a couple months there were more reasons to leave than stay so we moved down here and have been here ever since.”
“It seemed like the whole neighborhood had been deserted,” Sarah said. “Ours, I mean.”
“It probably had been,” Leo said. “There were still a few people living there when we left, but maybe not enough to keep it going. That happened a lot of places.” She turned to look back out through the windows behind her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
“A mess,” Frank said. “Not as bad as the last, probably, or at least the reason for the mess is a hell of a lot better, but we were real lucky that Matt was here when Kelly snapped back in and was able to not only put her in touch with her mother but convince her to head that way ASAP.”
“In your truck,” Zach said.
He snorted. “Small price.”
“Who—” David started.
“This was her apartment first,” Zach said. “Or her mom’s, I guess, and she was staying here for school. Matt lived across the hall then. But when Kelly got snapped her mom left, and then we got the place after they kicked us out of our first building so they could make a bunch of stupid renovations.”
Leo nodded. “It wasn’t until after Frank and Matt finally admitted they were dating that we combined the two and connected the whole floor so he didn’t have to keep pretending he was sleeping on the couch.”
“I was not—we did not—how is any of that relevant?” Frank asked.
“You've got a boyfriend?” Sarah asked, and to her credit she somehow avoided sounding completely astonished. David doubted he’d have been able to manage it, but since he'd apparently been rendered temporarily unable to speak by Leo's declaration, the point was moot.
“It should be husband by now, but they’re both too chicken to propose,” Zach said.
“Absolutely not,” Frank said firmly.
“Colleen thinks you’re stupid too. I mean, she’s offered to officiate like six times.”
Frank pointedly ignored Zach. “So Leo started at Columbia this fall, working on a business degree.”
“Business?” David managed to ask, just as glad to leave Frank’s love life behind.
“Business management,” she said. “But after undergrad, I’m going to go to law school.”
David couldn’t recall law having been a previous interest of hers, if he’d had to pick one of his kids to go into a career in argument, it would have been Zach, but she sounded very confident.
“And I’m a senior at the tech high school,” Zach said. “Even if they’re still saying I’ve got another history credit to finish.” He made a face, and that, at least was familiar, but David had no time to relax even a little because there was a light tap from behind them, and then another man stepped into the room.
A blind man, if the glasses and white cane were any indication.
What the hell?
“Matt, these are our parents,” Leo announced. “Sarah and David Lieberman.”
It couldn’t have been a very helpful announcement, but Matt nodded politely as he shrugged out of his jacket and hung it and his cane neatly on the stand by the door before adding his shoes to the collection.
That explained the lack of clutter, anyway.
It wasn’t until he stepped around into the sitting area, heading unerringly for the couch Frank and Zach sat on and sinking down on the arm beside Frank, that David recognized him. The lawyer—one of them, anyway—who’d represented Frank in his...well, it had technically been a trial, maybe, but even as a layman David had noted a ridiculous number of procedural discrepancies when he’d been gone looking.
“Nice to meet you,” David managed, even as Frank’s arm wrapped around Matt’s waist with unconscious ease.