A Simple Plan

By Persephone

AN: I'm not sure about what to say about this. It's odd. That's about it.

It all started with a simple plan.

He still wasn't sure how the whole thing had gone wrong, in fact. He had thought the whole thing through, several times. Very thoroughly, in fact. Attention paid to every single detail. No stone left unturned, and all that jazz.

It had been a very simple plan.

He had only wanted one thing, after all. No overabundance of goals for him. Just that one, sparkling jewel on the horizon. All he wanted, packaged neatly into one box.

They had to go and ruin it. They always did. It seemed to him that their entire existence revolved around raining on other people's parade, just because they didn't have any floats of their own. They were the kind of people that in the real world, the place that none of them really lived anymore, would fight for unwanted ordinances, and sue over hot coffee, and call the cops whenever anyone else tried to have fun out of pure jealousy.

They thought they were better than he was, he could tell. They lived in their fancy house and played at being the hero, while looking down on him and his kind. They were snobs of the worst kind, the kind that looked down on people for the same reason that people looked down on them. They were the kind of people who lived in a double wide in the country, and made fun of the people in the single wides in tightly packed parks. The fact that they all lived in trailers was lost in the eyes of the country dwellers, who considered themselves much better because they were in high class mobile homes.

They never thought about the fact that the people living in tightly fitted suburban neighborhoods thought the same about them, or that the people in large homes in the country looked down on the suburban dwellers. They just looked at the fact that they were higher than one group, and focused on them, forgetting completely about the rest of the world that was looking down on them.

They also hated him.

No, they didn't hate him for the same reason the rest of the world hated him. They didn't look down on him because his genes had played a nasty trick on him. They looked down on him because his gene's nasty trick was somehow nastier than their gene's nasty tricks.

Of course, they would never ever admit that.

But a person only had to look at them to see the truth in the statement. They were all of the beautiful people. They were intelligent, attractive, and perfect. Even their most disfigured member, the blue boy, was still intelligent, and was by no means disgusting.

None of them had truly horrible experiences. They were all young and fresh and innocent as an ad for facial cleanser.

They were perfect.

Shining hair, clear faces, crisp clothing, and happy smiles.

Every single one of them.

Were there exceptions? Only one, really. But she didn't count. She had never been truly part of them, just as she had never truly been part of his group. She was a loner, and he knew that she would drift away from both groups as soon as she understood that the bald man was never going to help her.

From what he'd heard, she had not even fit in before she became a freak.

The concept of freakiness was another way that he differed from the perfect ones.

They refused to acknowledge the fact that they really were freaks of nature. They were anomalies, abnormalities, anachronisms. Freaks. Monstrosities. Lusus naturae. Miscreations. Malformed beings. Failures at achieving humanity. Had he been born a hundred years earlier, a demon, a fiend, an ogre, a devil.

They were not natural.

The perfect ones refused to acknowledge this. They thought, they truly thought deep in their heart of hearts, that they were normal. They were human.

They were wrong.

They refused to realize what they truly were. They were living lies, in complete denial.

And they had ruined his plan.

His plan had been simple. All banking on one fact.

The perfect ones always left for school early.

Come rain or shine, hell or high water, they were out the door with plenty of time to spare.

Always!

But, as Murphy's law decreed, the one time that had been depended on, it didn't happen. Because that would make things to easy. There would be no point in doing anything else, at all, ever again, if this one thing had gone right. Right. He glared at the red sports car that dared to be still sitting in the driveway. It was supposed to be gone already! They couldn't be late! It would ruin his whole plan.

And, by the way, that was the single silliest sports car he had ever seen. It wasn't quite a Shelby, and it wasn't quite a Porsche. It couldn't be a Corvette, they definitely didn't have back seats. So what was it?

He had no idea.

It wasn't like he didn't know anything about cars, either. His father had taught him more about cars than about women. Probably because he knew more about cars than women, but that really wasn't the point here. The point was that One Eye drove a poncy off brand sports car. A sports car that was not gone already, like it should be. Like it needed to be.

He briefly considered running up and wrecking the car, denting its sides and breaking the windows, but decided not to. That wasn't very subtle, and his plan called for subtlety.

He'd take revenge on the tiny convertible and its light-in-the-loafers owner later. After his simple plan had ripened to full fruitation.

He waited. Until the car and its passengers had gone, there was nothing more for him to do. So he waited.

Finally, an agonizing ten minutes later, the perfect ones left. Finally. Late. Like they were never supposed to be. But now they were gone, now he could do what he had come here to do.

He lumbered slowly to the porch of the mansion where the perfect ones lived, and looked around. Where was it? He knew it had to be here, it was the third Tuesday of the month. It always showed up on the third Tuesday of the month! Always!

But his one heart's desire was not there.

The box was not there.

He wailed, forgetting about subtlety.

How could it be? How? There was no way that they could have known about his dastardly, fiendish plot. No way at all! He had planned so carefully, and it had been such a brilliantly simple plan...

Fred sighed, and made his way off the X-men's front stoop. He made it home rather quickly, as he walked much faster than one would think that he would be able to.

He got home, and sat dejectedly on the couch. There was no real point now, anymore. His wonderful plan had failed horribly.

"What's wrong?" came a voice from his left. He barely heard through his daze of depression. He only looked up as the voice came at him again, snapping for him to say what was wrong.

He saw Wanda, scowling down at him, unhappy with his unhappiness as she had the monopoly on unhappiness here.

"It wasn't there," Fred bemoaned, thinking evil thoughts towards the perfect ones.

"What wasn't there?"

"The delivery of Black Angus steaks that the X-Men get every month. I looked and looked, but it wasn't there. They knew about my plan! The steaks always show up on the third Tuesday, but they weren't there!"

"Freddy?" Wanda said gently. "It's Monday."

fin.
Thanks for reading!

Persephone