Chapter Text
Bass was whistling as he made his way up the steps of the capitol building. That turned more than a few heads. He'd been a known asshole on the battlefield. He was, at times, short tempered and lacking patience with politicians, giving rise to questions on how he'd managed to hold the Republic as long as he did. He was seldom, however, so obviously happy.
He'd been tied up with the Rangers, going over plans for their proposal for turning the three top Ranger units into the basis for a Texas Special Forces. Blanchard was optimistic about their chances on the grounds that Texas and the Senate were all still high off their victory over the Patriots and would be a little more slack with the purse strings. He'd gotten up early to have breakfast with the men, then stayed around to talk with the officers through the morning and lunch. Now it was almost four and he had just enough time to see if he had any messages that needed immediate response before heading home.
He opened the door to his office to find Miles seated at his desk, his feet propped up on the polished wood and a slim book in his hands. His friend's brow was furrowed. “What's up?”
Miles looked up at him, a disconcerting glare in his eyes. He held up the book. “Did this really fucking happen?”
He was holding A General Temptation.
Shit.
“No. Well, the throw down with Sarah/Rachel/whomever is almost exact, but the part of me coming on to her is all fiction.”
Miles' glare darkened.
“It's fiction. I swear!”
“How long have you known about this?”
Bass closed the door to his office as he shrugged. “Since I was laid up with that injury. I got some books to keep me from going stir crazy.”
His brother rubbed his eyes. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“It's artistic license. Don't make such a big deal out of it.”
“I don't particularly care for the idea that you've been jerking off to my niece's adolescent fantasies about you.”
“She was at least twenty-two when she started writing those. Hardly an adolescent.” It would be some time before he realized he failed to deny the 'jerking off' part.
“Does she know you know?”
“Nah. I figured if she wanted us to know about it, she'd have said something.”
“Right.” Miles pulled his side drawer back open and took out the other two books.
“Hey! Not the third one! I haven't had a chance to read that one yet!”
“You're not reading any more of them. Your ego is big enough as it is. I'm not letting you fuel it with Charlie's wet dreams. I don't even want you to know she has wet dreams. I don't want you thinking of her in a sexual manner at all.” He got up from Bass' chair and started walking to the door.
“You're blowing this out of proportion.”
“I don't think so.” Miles walked out and went across the hall to his office. He grabbed his jacket and his flask. “I'm calling it a day. Charlie promised fried chicken tonight.”
She made the best fried chicken. Somewhere someone taught her to put a bit of cayenne pepper in the breading. Not a lot, just enough to give it a bit of heat. And the summer squash and tomatoes in her garden were ripe.
Bass locked up his office and followed.
Miles didn't speak to him during the ride to Charlie's. He just slouched in his saddle and occasionally took a pull from his flask. Bass' well developed instincts told him that his friend might be unhappy with learning that his niece may harbor sexual fantasies about him. He'd just have to give the man time to roll it around in his thoughts until he was ready to address it.
They put the horses up, brushing them down and making sure they had fresh oats and water before going into the house. The aroma of fried chicken and fresh bread assaulted them as they walked in, to which Bass smiled. He was pulling off his dusty boots to set by the door as Miles stomped towards the kitchen. “Charlie!”
Crap.
“You're just in time.”
Bass hurried after Miles as the taller man stormed up to Charlie, pulling the books from his jacket as he did so. “What the fuck is this?”
Charlie's mouth dropped open for a second. She recovered quickly. A little practice and she'd be one hell of a poker player. “It's those books the girls like so much. Didn't know you were into that sort of thing, Miles.” She pushed him gently to get him to move so she could put the plate of chicken down onto the table.
“Don't play dumb with me, Charlie. You wrote these.”
“What? No!”
“Don't try to sell me on that. There are entire conversations you and I had in here. Verbatim.” He shrugged his shoulders, hands going up in the air. “You're writing smut books? How the fuck did that happen?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “And why the fuck is this moron the leading man?”
Her jaw dropped open, her skin flushing an interesting shade of red. Bass made a valiant effort not to crack up laughing.
“I mean, it couldn't be Jason or Connor? At least someone your own age? You gotta pick this guy?”
“Oh, God.” She covered her face with her hands briefly before shaking her head. “Can we just...sit down to dinner and not talk about this? It's not like I expected you to find out. That's why I use the pen name.” She tried to urge Miles to sit down at the table.
“This is got to stop. Do you know what this could do if it got out? Fuck, what if Frank found out? There's no telling what that old pervert would try if he caught wind of this.” Miles noted the slightly uncomfortable pitch to her expression. “What?”
Bass coughed. “I think Frank already knows.” When Miles glared at him in question he nodded his chin at the books still in his hand. “Check out the publisher.”
Miles opened the front cover. “Tamsin-Blanchard Publishing?”
Charlie shrugged. “Carolyn is his sister-in-law.”
“The sister-in-law who helped find this house?”
“Yeah. The money from Texas only covered half of it. The rest of it came from my royalty earnings.”
That pulled him up short. “They sell that well?”
“According to the guy at the book store, she brings him in all kinds of new business.”
“I didn't ask you, you dick.” He sighed. “Charlie, please stop.”
Now she was getting angry. “No! You can't tell me what to do, Miles. Besides, I'm under contract for another four books. My readers want to know what happens to General Lee and Anna now that they're fighting the Regulars.”
Bass perked up. “Is that what you're calling the Patriots?”
“Yeah. It was that or Minute Me...” Her eyes grew round. “You read them?”
He grinned. “Just the first two. He took them away from me before I could read the third.”
Charlie groaned and turned away from them, muttering something about hiding bodies. Bass wasn't sure whose bodies she was talking about, but he figured he and Miles might want to sleep with one eye open. At least for tonight.
He would have preferred to string things along for a little bit more. Miles was really fucking up his time line. The jerk.
Deciding that someone had to break the tension, he dropped himself into one of the chairs at the table and started filling his plate. She'd fried the summer squash as well as the chicken and had peeled and sliced the tomatoes. This was probably his favorite time of the year, as far as fresh produce went. There was even gravy for the mashed potatoes. “This looks amazing, Charlie. Thank God you took after Ben in the cooking department.”
She accepted the out gratefully. “Yeah...for a woman who can cook up deadly gas from basic chemicals I never understood how my mom can burn water.” She sat down across from him.
“Oh, don't think you're gonna...”
“Miles, book discussion is over. Eating now.” She pointed to the other chair. After a second, Miles scowled, stalked over to the cabinets to claim a bottle of whiskey and sat down to join them.
Charlie made inquiries about the progress in winding the Rangers down from war time and the work in creating a special forces branch. Bass answered most of the questions with an occasional grunt or addition from Miles. He was still stewing over finding out that his niece had been feeding the fantasies of most of the woman in Texas with steamy tales based on his best friend when Bass volunteered them both for kitchen duty in exchange for the meal.
“Don't get any ideas,” he growled after Charlie had left the kitchen. “Just because she writes about you without your clothes doesn't give you leave to try and get out of your clothes.”
“Kind of hard to take a bath with them on, Miles.”
“You know what I mean!”
He grinned. “What if Charlie shows up in my room without her clothes?”
“Bass!”
He grinned wider and was about to needle Miles some more when there was an insistent pounding on the front door. Charlie called out she would get it and a bit later they heard the unmistakable sound of Rachel's voice.
“Uhm...did you make your mind about her, yet?”
“Don't start.” Miles didn't look happy about his maybe-girlfriend being here. He wiped his hands dry on a towel and tossed it to Bass before heading towards the living room. Bass followed.
“I didn't know you were coming to town.”
“I got your letter saying you weren't coming back to Willoughby. I was concerned.”
“What's there to be concerned about? I was offered a residence here in Austin and there are more opportunities here.”
Rachel's brow furrowed slightly, her mouth turning downwards with disapproval. “I thought you'd come back home once the war was over.”
“And do what, Mom?”
“Find someone to settle down with. Make a life for yourself.”
Bass refrained from rolling his eyes. Miles saw the problem right away. “Settle down with who, Rachel? Thanks to the Patriots, everyone in Willoughby her age is dead, now. She could wait another eight to ten years for some of the boys to grow up or settle for a widower looking for someone too help raise the kids he already has as well as give him more. Is that all you think she's good for? Not to mention she could kill any of the men in that town in her sleep.” He gave a shrug, one hand gesturing through the wall of the house towards where the city lay. “Austin has more to offer her. Not to mention she is respected and admired here. Hell, they just gave her three different awards and two commendations the other night. You should see all the requests that come in to my office for her to speak at one event or another. She could write her own check just about anywhere.”
Apparently the idea that Charlie might be able to stand on her own without her hadn't occurred to Rachel. Bass managed not to burst out laughing at the expression on the woman's face. Did she miss the part where her daughter had picked up, pulled Miles out of whatever hole he'd crawled into and walked over one thousand miles to get her brother back? Did she think Charlie had spent the last year acting as Miles and his secretary?
The extent to which Rachel undervalued her daughter's contributions was mindboggling.
About that time Rachel's eyes landed on him. “What is he doing here?”
“I invited him to stay, Mom. There's no need for Miles and Bass to pay for a hotel room when I have space here. Besides, it's easier to cook for three than it is for one.”
Miles shrugged again. “It's just temporary, until we decide where we want to live.” He glanced over his shoulder at Bass. “By the way, Frank says he thinks he can get us the place next door.”
That was good news. The property lined up perfectly with Charlie's. They could extend the garden onto the second property and maybe even get a milk cow to share. Perhaps raise a few pigs each year for ham and bacon.
“I don't like him being here, Charlie.” Oh, right. Rachel was here.
“It's not up to you, Mom. This is my house. He was invited.” Charlie enunciated the words carefully.
“Charlie, you can't trust this man.”
“I've trusted him for almost two years now. Trusted him at my back to keep me alive, and he's come through every time.”
Bass wanted to say something, but he couldn't find the words. Charlie was standing up for him. She'd done it before, in a way, but this was clear defiance. He wished he had a pre-Blackout camera, because the look on Rach's face was beautiful.
“Charlie, Monroe is a monster! He killed Ben. He killed Danny. He built a government that enslaved and tortured...”
Miles grimaced. “Rachel, let's not go over this aga...”
”Shut up!”
Everyone fell silent, looking at Charlie. She was pressing her fingertips to her temples as though trying to stave off a headache.
“You know, I'm getting really sick and tired of this.”
Rachel took a step towards her. “Charlie...”
She stepped back, her hands going out to block her mother. “No, Mom. I'm stick of you and your holier-than-thou manner. I'm fed up with how you talk down to me and to Miles like we're dumber than inbred dogs. And I am way past fed up with your selective amnesia!”
Charlie walked a few steps away, her hands making fists in repetition as she looked for the words to express herself. “You know, you go on and on about Bass and the Monroe Republic, but you seem to be willing to forgive Miles for all the same shit. They built it together, in case you forgot. Miles told me about a lot of the things he did. The conscription boats. Helping wipe out his pet drug lord's competition. He built the fucking Militia, Mom. I doubt they called him the Butcher of Baltimore because he could whip out some killer pork chops. And yet you seem ready to forget all of that.”
Rachel's chin lifted slightly in defiance. “Miles is remorse....”
”I'm not done!” Charlie took a deep, shaky breath. Miles and Bass watched. It was like a train wreck. They couldn't look away.
“Now, I'm all too aware that history shows scientists make things and the wrong people abuse them. I know that it may have been your nanotech, but the wrong people misused it and made the Blackout. I get that. But you and Dad? You knew what really happened. You knew where the Tower was. You knew what could reverse it. But what did you after the lights went out? You packed up me and Danny and you went into hiding. There were over seven billion people in this world, Mom. Billion. The estimates on how many died because of the Blackout in one way or another ranges from seventy to eighty-five percent, world wide. How many of them would have survived if on the day after the lights went out, you and Dad had started us out walking to the Tower to turn the lights back on?”
Charlie took a slow step towards her mother, who was now rooted in place. “Billions dead, Mother. They died from starvation. They died from unsafe water. They died because they could no longer get life saving medications and because the stronger, more violent people turned on and preyed on the weak. Everything fell into chaos and the militias were formed, warlords and their clans rose up and people started doing horrible, terrible things to one another just to survive. The United States fell apart and is now in various different Republics. Turning the power off didn't do that. Keeping the power off did that. And you and Dad were the ones who made the conscious decision not to turn the lights back on.”
Rachel swallowed. “Danny was sick. He needed....”
”Don't talk to me about Danny! Don't you dare talk to me about Danny!” Charlie's voice was shaking. Bass could hear the tears in her words. Her entire body was trembling. “You walked away from us. Left me calling for you on the side of the road so you could go play house with your husband's brother.”
Ouch. That had to smart. Bass studiously did not look at Miles.
“I took care of Danny. I know him far better than you ever could, and let me tell you about my brother.” Charlie got right into Rachel's face. Her voice was a cold, harsh sound now. “If he had known that all those billions died because the power was kept off for him, he would been horrified. He would have been sickened by that knowledge. And he would have been ashamed that you were our parents. Unlike you and Dad, my brother was a good, honorable and decent person. There is a monster in this house right now, Mom, and I'm looking. Right. At her.”
Rachel flinched back as though struck. Miles jerked and took a step forward. “Charlie..”
She ignored him and pointed past her mother to the door. “Get out of my house. Get out, and don't come back until you are finally able to own up to your own actions. Let me know when you're finally willing to admit you're not the perfect little flower that you seem to think you are.”
Rachel took a step back, then another. Her face had gone bone white and bloodless. Her hand fumbled behind her until she found the doorknob and she turned it, jerking the door open before turning and fleeing.
Miles sighed and headed after her. “I'm gonna make sure she doesn't do anything stupid. Don't wait up.” He shut the door behind him.
Charlie took a breath and sat down in a nearby chair. She was still shaking, her face wet with tears. She buried her head into her hands and started to sob.
Bass moved over and knelt down in front her. He reached out with one hand to rub from her shoulder to her elbow gently. “Charlie, it's all right. You're gonna be fine.”
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to see all that. I just...I just get so tired of her shit.”
“Hey, preaching to the choir here.” He brushed her hair from her face, smoothing it over her back. “It was a long time coming, and you're probably the only person who could have said it and she would listen to. You got nothing to be ashamed of.”
She sniffed a few times, her face going blotchy and eyes red rimmed. At that moment she was probably the most beautiful woman Bass had ever seen. “They made you, you know. You and Miles both. If they'd just done the right thing and turned the power back on as soon as possible, things wouldn't be so fucked up now. The government could have righted itself before it completely fell. You and Miles wouldn't have felt the need to build a militia and the Republic. The Patriots wouldn't' have had enough time to get their shit together for an attempted conquest. May have even avoided making the nano sentient.”
Bass nodded, still offering support. “All valid points, but they didn't turn the power back on. Now we have the world we got, and we'll have to make the best of it.” He offered her a slight smile. “You look like you could use a stiff drink. Come on. Let's polish off the rest of Miles' whiskey and see if we can't wake up with killer hangovers.” She gave a weak laugh in response. “If nothing else, it'll help you sleep tonight.”
“You think Miles is gonna leave with her?”
Bass shook his head. “Nah. He's pretty much figured out they're not gonna work. He's just making sure he's there if she decides to do one of her dramatic suicide gestures again.”
Charlie groaned. “I didn't even think of that.”
“Don't let it worry you, Charlie. He'll take care of her. Keep her alive until she comes to term with all you gave her to think about. You may have done us all a lot of good tonight.”