The Last American Hero

by Nicole Field

  "You can do what you like," Bruce said, teeth gritted. "No one is worth being trusted anymore, isn't that right? That's the person you've become. Well, I can't fight against that." He was breathing heavily. The argument had taken more out of him than he'd considered, but he tried not to let that show.

  Finally, Leo was the first one of them to look away. "No," he said, his voice very low. "Some people are still worth being trusted. I trust you."

  "Well, you have a funny way of showing it," Bruce groused, not wanting to show immediately how much it lightened him just to hear that.

  The two men were still at a standoff several moments after that. Leo picked up the chair and sat down in it again, all without speaking. Bruce looked behind him and saw, to his relief, the chair hadn't made another hole in the wall.

  When a nurse came in to check on Bruce, Leo surprised him by saying to him, "Would you mind getting a doctor to come in as soon as he becomes available? I'd like to consider using the cure that's working so well on Bruce."

  *~*~*

  At every sound of footsteps approaching his hospital room, Bruce looked up hopefully. It was never Leo, and rarely did any other person come into his room.

  He was… well. Not feverish. Not anything. Hourly blood tests had shown his results to be clean. So it didn't help that impatience to get out of the hospital bed, to be discharged, were also heightening his mood.

  He had no idea what face of Leo's he'd meet when they saw each other again. Would Leo despise him for pushing him into this? Would he be grateful for seeing something that he couldn't? The not knowing and the waiting were just as bad as each other.

  When Leo finally entered his hospital room again, he looked beaten.

  "I've told them I'll do it." His face was drawn and he was hardly able to make himself look Bruce in the eye. That answered those questions, then.

  Bruce had crossed the room to meet him, but he didn't think reaching out to touch him would be good for either of them right then. "Okay," Bruce said, trying to put no inflection into his tone either way. Sounding like he was willing to back down would be no better than crowing at this point.

  Leo nodded once. "I've signed all their waivers. They're going to take me in now. I just wanted to see you… before…"

  True to his word, there was a nurse waiting behind him, just outside of the hospital room.

  Bruce tried, and failed, to get Leo to look at him. His words would just have to be enough. "I will be right there for you as soon as you are ready," he said. "Just like you were for me."

  Another despondent nod.

  "I'm going to go now." Leo's words sounded horribly distant.

  Bruce tried to swallow around the dryness in his throat as he wondered how much of Leo's distance towards him was fear.

  The nurse accompanying him looked to Bruce even if Leo wouldn't. "We'll take good care of him," he promised.

  Bruce acknowledged the comment, but didn't reply. He wandered back to the bed feeling dejected. Now for more waiting. Within twelve hours, the cure was meant to work. But what if it was different because it had been longer in Leo's system? What if it didn't work? What if…?

  He was discharged before Leo was able to see him. Bruce sat in a waiting room, feeling quite thoroughly sick of hospitals by now. His leg jiggled on the chair until a nasty look from the lady sitting next to him forced him back into stillness. He glanced up at the clock that was on the wall. Four hours had passed. Surely they were done with administering and some of the signs of reversal were starting to show?

  He couldn't find any of the medical staff that he recognized. Whether they were on breaks or off shift or whatever, Bruce was finding it hard to just keep on wondering without any notice coming out to him. Was he supposed to find his own way into the room they'd gotten Leo into? Was Leo right then wondering what was taking so long or seeing his absence as a betrayal?

  It was the last that motivated Bruce up to his feet and to the nearest nurse station. "Excuse me. Where is Leo Hart being kept?"

  The administrative staff typed in a few letters, clicked the mouse button a couple of times until something showed up on her screen. From where Bruce was standing, he could see the room number and was heading off in that direction before she answered.

  "Excuse me. Excuse me!" came from behind him, but Bruce didn't turn around.

  Nobody else came to stop him before Bruce found himself outside the half open door of the room where Leo was being kept. He took a deep breath. Whatever he walked into, he told himself, it was going to be all right. He wasn't going to react negatively. He was still going to love him just as much.

  Love.

  Bruce pushed at the door, not letting that realization pause his step or keep him from Leo a moment longer.

  There must have been something on his face that showed the direction of Bruce's thoughts as Leo met his eyes.

  A nurse made her way towards him, interrupting his line of sight before Bruce could open his mouth to say anything. "He's not up to seeing visitors," she said, in a kind but firm voice.

  "I'm not a visitor," Bruce started to say, before realizing he didn't really have a statement to end with there. "I'm—"

  The nurse shook her head without concern for whatever he'd been about to say. "He's asked for no visitors," she said. She was a large woman. Her arms were outstretched and she didn't stop walking towards him so that Bruce had no choice but to step backwards and out of the room.

  "No, wait." Leo spoke as Bruce was level with the doorway again, and it was that, nothing else, that caused the nurse to pause. "I've… changed my mind."

  The nurse inclined her head towards him, before giving Bruce a stern look. She walked past him and out of the room.

  Then it was just Bruce and Leo.

  He looked… exactly as he had before any of this had happened. His hair, once again, was unchanged, but the shape of his face was rounded rather than square. He'd lost some of the definition around the jaw and there were subtle changes to his face shape. Even under the hospital gown, Bruce could make out faint lumps of breast tissue that hadn't been there before. When Leo swallowed, there was no Adam's apple, just a smooth expanse of pale skin.

  It didn't matter. To Bruce, he was still Leo.

  "I was wrong," Bruce said.

  "About what?" Leo's voice was higher pitched, though Bruce could hear that he was deliberately setting it as low as possible. He wasn't going to make this easy on him, regardless of the fact he'd let him into the room.

  Bruce slowly advanced towards the bed, keeping his gaze on his best friend's face and trying not to notice all the differences that Leo was probably already feeling self-conscious about.

  "I had no right to talk about testosterone injections like I knew anything about them. I don't. I was concerned for you, but I should never have shared that concern in a way that made you question the way I saw you."

  Leo was silent for a long time, staring across the few feet that separated them. And then his eyes filled with tears, before he covered them with both his hands.

  Bruce crossed the room and took Leo in his arms without even thinking of it. He gave no further thought to the orderly or any other patients in the room.

  "I'm here," he said, close to Leo's ear and just loud enough for him to hear it. "I'm here."

  Leo bit his lower lip, nodding his head against Bruce's chest. Bruce didn't have to wonder anymore why Leo had asked for no visitors. What he'd gone through must have been an incredible personal hell.

  "Dammit!" Leo's voice cracked as he ran the backs of impatient hands across his eyes. "Dammit."

  "You want me to go away after all. That's okay. I didn't mean to—"

  "No, I want this damned oestrogen to go away." Leo was still crying but, under the tears, there was fury. "You have no idea what this feels like. I feel like I'm losing myself. Like I've already lost myself."

  "But you haven't…" Bruce started, reaching across to him.

  "I have," Leo said, slanting a look acros
s his way. The tears weren't there anymore, but there was a horrible disillusioned look in his eyes. "It's like there was a wall between me and what I'd done before. I could feel it, and I remembered what I'd done. But it didn't get inside of me. I could live with it. But right now… the feelings go so deep, Bruce. I don't think I'll ever find my way back out again."

  "You will." Bruce tried to make his voice sound steady, and reassuring. "And even if it takes a long while, I'll be there with you. However long it takes."

  "You still…" Leo looked towards Bruce and away again, as if scared by what he saw there. "You still want to be with me? Even though I look like this?"

  "Of course I do," Bruce said, not even hesitating a second. "I love you for you, not because of anything to do with how you look."

  Leo gazed back at him, his mouth half open, shock all over his features.

  And Bruce realized what he'd said out loud. He hadn't meant to say it like that. Not in a hospital, not on top of everything Leo was already trying to deal with.

  "You… love me?" The word sounded as if it tripped off Leo's tongue like it was a foreign language.

  Bruce glanced back at him bashfully. Well, there was no graceful way to back out of it now. Truthfully, he didn't want to back out of it at all. "Yeah," he said. "I really do."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Leo lay on the farthest side of the bed, with Bruce curled up next to him, his arm rested against the back of his shoulders, feet hanging off the side of the bed.

  "Maybe it's time I actually did get a real job," Leo said, speaking up towards him. "A career. Something I could be passionate about, rather than just a day job."

  "I don't know what's going to seem interesting after saving America," Bruce said.

  One corner of Leo's lips quirked in a smile. "I dunno. It might be nice to let someone else save America for a while. You know. Someone who's actually qualified." If anything, the smirk on Leo's lips increased with his words.

  Bruce groaned to hear his own words spoken back to him. "I've been a bore," he said, making his apology with a kiss against the top of Leo's head.

  "No, you've been right," Leo said, and Bruce had to struggle a moment against his own tears. He blinked several times, before Leo said, "And you've earned the right to tell it to me how it is."

  Bruce didn't know what to say to any of that. He'd hoped and imagined those words or similar being said, but having them there in between them… Bruce pressed his lips together, then reached across Leo's body to envelope him in a hug.

  "I've missed you," Bruce told him simply.

  "I've missed you, too." Bruce felt encouraged by the way Leo pressed himself into him. It was only when Leo next spoke that Bruce thought he might need to hear encouragement too. "I hope, now that I look like this again, you won't change your mind about your feelings about the two of us."

  Bruce heard the careful way that Leo's slightly higher pitched voice made sure that sentence didn't lift in question at the end. But it was a question, Bruce was fairly sure; an insecurity that needed to be addressed right now.

  "Of course not," he hastened to say. He pulled his arm out from Leo so that he could lean forward and make sure Leo could see him as he said it. "I love you, Leo."

  Leo's expression slackened. It was clear that that was not what he'd expected to hear in answer to his statement.

  "I'm sorry," Bruce found himself saying, "if I spoke too soon. I haven't really done this before."

  "You love me," Leo repeated his words.

  To that, Bruce could do nothing more than roll his eyes. "God knows why," he answered.

  When he looked back at Leo again, he found his best friend smiling. Best friend? Surely they needed a different word for that now. Bruce smiled too.

  "I realized," Leo said, twining his fingers together with Bruce's and looking down at them on the hospital sheets, "my experience is still my lived experience, even without the powers."

  Leo shrugged, and Bruce didn't comment on the fact that there was still too much emotion in Leo's hooded eyes for Bruce to believe the feigned nonchalance right away. But he was still willing to listen.

  "But I'm still everything I've gone through. I don't need the powers to validate that." Leo looked up at Bruce. He looked fierce then. If Bruce hadn't quiet believed the opening statement from Leo, he believed this one now. No one could have looked at the fierce pride of self that Leo displayed in that moment and not have been moved.

  "No," Bruce murmured in wonder. "You really don't."

  Leo laughed, a low, self-deprecating chuckle that made Bruce want to laugh along with him even though he didn't know the punch line.

  "I punched a hospital wall," he said, causing Bruce to burst out laughing aloud.

  "You really did. Do you think they'll make you pay for it?"

  Leo turned wide eyes on him. "Do you think they know?"

  "I'm pretty sure—"

  Bruce cut off as the doctor came into the room. They probably looked as guilty as the teenagers they had once been together. All the doctor did was clear his throat.

  "Excuse me, I need to speak to Mr Hart."

  Leo lifted his chin. "Whatever it is, you can say it in front of Bruce."

  "Very well. We're going to write you a prescription for testosterone. Also, I've spoken with a colleague in Philadelphia, and she has an open date for surgery in two months' time. I know it sounds like a while, but it's a fantastically short waiting time. She's had a cancellation…" The doctor stopped talking when Leo didn't stop shaking his head.

  "I can't do it. I can't afford it. I don't have medical insurance," he told the doctor.

  At that, the doctor cracked a small smile that he covered with a brief hand motion and a clearing of his throat. "This sort of procedure isn't typically covered by insurance. However, we have instructions that all medical bills in this instance are to be covered by the state. Madame President says it's the least she could do."

  Bruce smiled, and looked at Leo.

  Leo looked too shocked to smile. His jaw had dropped slightly open as he looked from the doctor to Bruce. He exhaled, then leaned back against the pillows. "Well then," he said shakily. "Okay. What do I need to know to get ready for it?"

  The doctor nodded. "The surgeon is going to need to see front and side pictures of your chest to determine whether double incision or periareolar surgery is the way to go. These surgeries are what the trans community generally call 'top surgery'. She'll also need you to book an appointment for a phone consultation, and she'll send down the paperwork. Some people say that testosterone makes double incision easier, so being on that for the two months is good. Losing weight before the surgery will also help, but the testosterone will also reduce breast volume. Mostly it'll be important to stay healthy. We'll be keeping track of your progress on testosterone in the next two months as well as doing a mammogram and full body physical. And…" The doctor paused here, clearly going away from what was a more usual script. He cleared his throat again. "We also want to make sure there are no unforeseen side effects after, well, what was done to you by the aliens."

  "Do you think that's a possibility?" Leo's voice was low, like he was already preparing himself for the worst.

  The idea that what the Kath'lar had done to him could so easily stop him from properly transitioning struck them both. Bruce barely breathed while they awaited the doctor's reply.

  "Anything's possible. It's our job as doctors to make sure we keep those possibilities under reasonable control."

  It wasn't as reassuring as it might have been, but at least Bruce felt like he could breathe again.

  "Okay." Leo sounded shaky again. "Two months, huh?"

  "Two months. I assume you wish to book the appointment now?"

  "Yes." There was no lack of certainty in Leo's voice.

  "That's what I thought," said the doctor with another smile. "You need to know, however, that loss of sensation or cosmetically imperfect results are the biggest typical risks of this kind of surgery.
"

  Leo just nodded. "But the breasts will be gone?"

  "All breast tissue will be removed," the doctor confirmed.

  Bruce felt Leo relax against him. Despite the risks, despite the wait period they had ahead of them, Leo began to relax.

  Bruce smiled and tightened his arms around him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The two of them took a cab back to their place from the hospital. The news was on the radio. As ever, Bruce was quite sure the reporting was all over the place with regards to what had happened. Once they got home, he was going to outright refuse to turn on the television or any of the news feeds on his phone.

  They walked in through the living room, heading towards the kitchen. He stopped as his eyes caught sight of the back door. It was closed. That didn't stop Bruce from staring at it as though at any moment McCartney's men might run through it and abduct him again.

  Leo moved several steps ahead of him before realizing Bruce wasn't right behind him anymore.

  "What—?" he started, gaze followed the direction of Bruce's. He swore as he caught sight of what Bruce was looking at.

  "Hey," he said, advancing back towards Bruce with an arm held out. It was like he was approaching a wild animal, uncertain of how he was going to react. "You don't need to look at that."

  As soon as Leo touched him, Bruce started to shake. He couldn't help it. When Leo lifted his hand to Bruce's jaw, he started to fight it, needing to keep his gaze on the backdoor, needing to make sure McCartney didn't come. Only after he realised he was stronger than Leo now did he stop. Slowly, he turned his head until his gaze met Leo's.

  "That was… this was where…" Bruce could feel himself growing more wild as he tried to put his feelings into words. His bullet wound began to throb, but he needed to be able to tell Leo what had happened, needed to be able to explain so that Leo understood.