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The Misadventures of Jonny Quest	By : RoseOSharon Category: +M through R > New Adventures of Jonny Quest, The Views: 2466 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Nothing associated with Jonny Quest or the Real Adventures thereof is mine, nor likely to ever be so. I make no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 6
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There were three photo albums that had been carefully put together, a few photos that had obviously been tossed in haste into the box, and one badly dented, dried-blood covered, battered camera that seemed to bear signs of charring. There was also a manila envelope in the box, and out of curiosity, Benton opened that first.
He poured out the contents, and for a moment gazed at it in confusion. There seemed to be several cut up bank books, bank cards, and credit cards in there, as well as several ATM receipts.
He frowned, squinted as he read the faded dates on the receipts, and almost choked. The receipts were dated only a couple months after he had closed and canceled all of Jonny’s accounts and credit cards in a definitely misguided attempt to get Jonny to realize his mistake and force his son to call on him for any needed moneys.
However, that had never happened, and even though he had restored all of Jonny’s accounts the moment some semblance of sanity had returned to his mind, Jonny had never accessed any of them. And now he knew why. It also explained why Jonny had taken passage aboard a cargo ship to come back to the US.
Jonny had no money of his own to use.
Benton decided he would deal with both the physical loss of money to Jonny, and his own guilt later, as there really was nothing he could do about it at one o’clock in the morning, and certainly not knowing where Jonny was. However, the very moment he discovered his son’s whereabouts, he vowed that Jonny would never be without any finances ever again.
Benton looked at the bloody, battered, charred camera, and for some reason, his stomach churned. He actually had a really bad feeling about that camera, and he hated it on a level that he usually didn’t associate with mere objects. Carefully, not touching the thing with his bare hands, he set it aside, and picked up the first photo album.
The album was labeled, ‘Jonathon and School’, and Benton refreshed his coffee, and then opened the book. The very first photo in the book was a long shot of Jonny as he stood on a platform at a train station, a duffel bag in one hand, and a translation guide for French in the other. That puzzled Benton to no end. Jonny knew French as well as half a dozen other languages, so why did he have the translation guide? Benton shook his head and made a mental note to ask his son when he saw him next . . . and he was determined he would see his son again. He gazed at his son, and saw that his hair was being blown around his face, and that he looked, for want of a better word, completely lost, as if he wondered exactly what the hell he was doing there, and how the hell he could escape.
The photo next to it was a close-up on his face, and Benton knew it had been taken only a few seconds after the first. He studied it carefully, and read every emotion in Jonny’s eyes. He saw a lot of anger and hurt, but his heart leaped into his chest when he also recognized fear, and he bowed his head. His son was strong and courageous. He’d faced down things and enemies that most people would have run screaming away from, and yet, there he was, on a train platform of a very expensive school, looking for all the world like he’d like to do nothing better than run screaming for the nearest hole, and dive into it.
Benton almost banged his head on the table as frustration with himself hit. His son had been nothing but belligerent the entire time Benton was forcing him to prepare for the school, and he finally realized, far too late, that Jonny had been using the only outlet he knew to express the one emotion that was completely foreign to him: fear. Why, oh why hadn’t he realized that back when it may have done some good?
Slowly, he continued to turn, and to study, each and every page. He witnessed the struggles, up to and including being the victim of some of the meanest pranks that Benton had ever seen played on anyone, his son went through to gain acceptance, and to try and fit in with people that Benton finally realized Jonny had no hope of ever fitting in with. He witnessed, again, far too late for it to do any good, how his son changed drastically from a gregarious, outgoing boy, to an almost complete recluse in two short years of boarding school. Once more he wanted to kick himself for not keeping better track of his son.
His son.
He shook his head and had a hard time equating the sad, obviously awkward boy in the photos with the cocky, confident boy he remembered putting on the plane for Paris, and couldn’t escape the fact that sending his son away, had been one of the worst mistakes he’d ever made in his life.
He looked up at the wall, where he kept the professional school photos that he had received, dutifully, once a year for four years, and as he compared them to the photos in the book, he suddenly hated them, and had the sudden irrational urge to rip them from the wall, shred them, and then burn the pieces.
Compared to the photos in the book, the ones on the wall were cold, completely devoid of any real feeling or meaning. For the first time, he realized that the pictures on the wall contained absolutely no life in the eyes at all. It was as if Jonny had walked up to the camera, sat, not even bothered to attempt a smile (Benton had thought at the time, that it was his proof that Jonny had become the serious student he knew he could be) and then left the seat, no part of his soul (what was left of it at any rate) touched by the flash.
Yet, the photos in the book held nothing but life, even if it was a sad one, and he realized that, more than likely, since most of the photos seemed to be candid shots, and ones in which Jonny didn’t know he was being photographed, Artemis had taken them on the sly.
Still, despite the stalker-like qualities of the pictures, Artemis had been a very talented photographer. He’d managed to capture every nuance of Jonny’s mercurial personality in a way that spoke volumes about the subject. However, it wasn’t until the last few pages of the book that he’d managed to capture Jonny looking anywhere near remotely happy, and even mildly relaxed. Benton knew that those last few pages had to have been after he and Jonny had gotten together.
Gingerly, he put the book down, and picked up the next one.
It was labeled ‘Travel’, and slowly, he flipped through the book. It was absolutely filled, almost to overflowing, with pictures of Jonny and Artemis together in various places throughout the world – at the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Pyramids, Mount Rushmore – the list was virtually endless.
They had apparently taken a world tour of some sort, and Benton’s hand trembled as he turned page after page, and recognized some of the more remote places that weren’t exactly normal tourist destinations.
However, it wasn’t until the photo of the monastery in Khumbu, that Benton realized what he was actually looking at. Jonny had taken Artemis on a tour of all the places, with a couple of notable exceptions due to the classified nature of them that Quest Team had visited over the years.
Jonny was sharing his life with Artemis, and that spoke more about the relationship the two of them had, than any words ever could.
Benton inhaled, set the book aside, and picked up the last one. ‘Our Life Together’, it was labeled, and Benton took a moment to refresh his coffee before he delved into it. He wasn’t sure what he’d see, and steeled himself for whatever was to come.
He opened the book, and sighed as he flipped through the book. There wasn’t anything unusual in it. Not really. Oh, sure, there were a couple pictures where he and Jonny were kissing under some mistletoe, embracing on a birthday, and things like that, but other than those slightly intimate moments, the book looked exactly like one you’d find anywhere in any house in any country in the world; birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas’, New Years, Valentines’ days and so on and so forth.
Benton frowned suddenly, as he noticed something odd about the book. For each holiday of each year Jonny and Artemis were together, each holiday had two pages of pictures dedicated to it. Yet, when Benton looked at the dates, he noticed there seemed to be a year missing in it. It was the third year they would have been together, and he frowned as he continued to flip through the book. It was clear, by the time he reached the end of the book, that something had happened to Jonny and Artemis during that year, and for some reason, Benton needed to know exactly what it was.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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The Misadventures of Jonny Quest