Authors' notes:
-Life-of-L.A. & Silverwolf: First off, we are absolutely elated that Seta Kaede has accepted our invitation to do a collaboration work. We both admire her writing greatly and it must be repeated that Seta Kaede rocks. Secondly, she's been magnificent at coming up with ideas for the plot, and writing the prologue- cheers to her and a salute. Thirdly, Silverwolf would like to state, in all her narcissistic glory, that we rock And Life-of-L.A. agrees. We're all very excited to have this new series initiated, and can't wait to write more. Lastly: the Brotherhood rules! And without further ado, we give you the renowned Scary Lady... er Seta Kaede.
- Seta Kaede: Thank you girls, or should I say Narcissistic Lady and Scary Lady #2? Anyway, let me say that I was thrilled that Life-of-LA & Silverwolf wanted to write a story with me; I highly recommend their writing to anyone who asks! We have come up with excessive ideas and I am already hoping for them to want to continue our lovely partnership, or perhaps it is more similar to a conglomerate? Anyway, Life-of-LA & Silverwolf are responsible for the next chapter so don't bug me for updates, go pester them! I hope that everyone enjoys the story and I have to completely agree that we rock and the Brotherhood shall forever reign supreme!
Don't Look Back
Lance's POV
I've heard it said that only cowards run.
That is perhaps the biggest load of crap that has ever been said. Cowards are those who stay when every muscle is saying run; cowards are those who stay when they know that they will die, because they are too afraid to try.
We are not cowards, but we are running.
We are running not only from our pasts but also from what we have become. Not one of us is over 18 and yet every time I look into the other's eyes I can see souls ages older than our mortal shells. Teenagers should not have eyes like that; THEY should not have eyes like that.
We are sitting at one end of an empty bus terminal and I can hear the clock at the other end begin to chime midnight- the witching hour. A new day of looking in corners and over our shoulders as we run.
I have no idea where we are or how far we have to go, and I cannot bring myself to even pretend to care about it. Pietro was insistent that we come through this route, this direction; he had been willing to separate from us to continue this way.
There is no way any of us would let him split off from us now, especially since one of the most powerful mutants on Earth is on our tail. I chuckle darkly in my head as I finger the thing around my neck; how ironic it is that us four, the losers, the rejects, the fools, the hoods, could now be considered some of the most powerful mutants on the planet. Provided with the removal of this thing, which is highly unlikely to happen.
So we humored him, and yet I have never seen him so serious or so intent about one thing the entire time I have known him. It is frightening the way he is single-minded in his pursuit; as to what we are pursuing he will not tell us.
The only thing we hear is that this is the way we must go because there is something he must do. I trust him, as I trust all my adopted family; we are together not because of merely a genetic link but a connection beyond that. We are a family by choice, necessity, and circumstance- not by merely the similarity of blood.
Blood bonds mean nothing; they are a matter of a few strands of DNA that just happen to be the same. This doesn't inspire loyalty, love, affection, and it certainly hasn't gained any of us a family. Hell, all of us seem to have been hurt the most by the ones who share our DNA, the ones who were supposed to care for us the most.
I drag myself back to the present as I look at the three others who are sitting with me. Todd is asleep, nearly curled entirely against my side, his arms wrapped around my waist tightly. It's times like this when it hits me again that he is only 15; he looks so innocent and childlike. Innocence and childhood... two things that he has been denied his entire life. Even in sleep his brows are furrowed and a frown mars his face.
My eyes drift away from him over to Pietro who is struggling to stay awake even as he is stubbornly dragged down into sleep. I know why he is fighting, just as I know that in a few hours he will wake screaming from a nightmare that we can't drive away, no matter how hard we try.
Finally I look over at Tabby, she looks as exhausted as I feel; the dark circles under her eyes look stark against her increasingly pale skin. Pietro's head rests on her shoulder and I can see her hand coaxing him into sleep; she knows whatever sleep he can get is vitally important.
We look at each other and I nod subtly indicating that I would take the watch for the next few hours and for her to sleep. We have become rather adept at silent communication and this was one of the times where I was grateful we could understand each other without words.
I watch as her eyes shutter and finally close, falling immediately into some much-deserved rest. Finally I am the only one left awake and even now my eyes look for the fifth member of our group. The one who would be impossible to miss in a crowd, let alone an empty bus terminal.
This is the moment where reality comes back to slap me in the face.
He's dead. Fred. Slow, fiercely protective, kind Fred is gone, and is never coming back. I wish this was only a nightmare that I could wake up from but I know that this is my life in all its brutal clarity.
The truth of the situation continues to torture me in my head, taunting me in the loss of one of the few people who actually means something to me. I have always been so cautious about letting others inside the walls around my heart and yet four people managed to worm their way through. Now the number is down to three and I can feel the void inside my chest, screaming for what can never be brought back.
My arm tightens around Todd as I hear him whimper softly in his sleep. He was closest to...to...Fred, and his eyes seem to carry a new glassy blankness that was never there before, not even during the worst of our times.
There is nothing I would not do to remove that look from his eyes, and yet I know I can't, none of us can. All we can do is be there for him, and hopefully he will come back to us. Honestly, Todd has always been the one who has always made us smile, even when our lives couldn't get any worse, and we were at the bottom of the bottomless pit.
I had failed my family once by not protecting Fred; I swore that I would not let anything happen to any of them and yet now he is dead. My failure mocks me inside my head as I listen to the eerily ticking clock at the end of the terminal.
A double chime rings out again; it is now two A.M., the official start to a new day of running. Sitting here in the dimmed corridor I am left alone with my thoughts, and they continue to run in circles around me. Again and again I wonder if I could have done anything differently, if somehow I could have prevented what has happened to our family.
I cannot fix the past but I can work for the future; screw the future of mutants and mankind, all I care about is the future of these three people beside me. As long as the four of us are alive and together the rest of the world can go to hell for all I care.
It is not as if the rest of the world has done much for us. We are the outcasts, the hoods, the losers- the ones who weren't good enough to save. I can feel my mouth thinning as I think of the one person who made the decision that we were the lower ones.
Charles Xavier.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the man; but unlike the X-geeks seem to think, he is only human and that means he is therefore fallible. Proven by his decisions based around the five...four of us.
It's not like any of us believe the crap that Magneto spouts off about being a superior race and all; if you ask me it sounds vaguely Nazi-esque. Now there is an irony that I'm sure our esteemed leader wouldn't appreciate in the least.
Then again we never actually had to believe in what we were doing, we just followed orders. At first it wasn't all bad, and it was a lot better then most of us were used to. Xavier misses that, even as a telepath he can't understand the fact that we did what we did for survival, not for some grand vision of a different future.
Why should we care about a time far ahead when we're worried about living until tomorrow? Honestly, I really don't care about the future, because eventually it will happen and a few misfits now aren't going to make much of a difference.
When I'm honest with myself, and the others, we know that we would love a world like the one Xavier wishes for; but we're not naïve enough to believe that it will happen by being tame. There are always scapegoats and for now the four of us seem to have taken on the role; Xavier pinning it on to us just as easily as the rest. His actions of the past only prove that even a telepath can have the wrong idea about what a person is, and who they are. Who we are.
When he came to town and snagged Kitty, did he ever once approach me? Did he ever once give me any other option other then to go with Mystique? Hell, it wasn't exactly like I had a lot of options; and at that point the promise of a roof over my head sounded a lot better then living on the damn streets again.
Tabby lived at the institute, but she was an outsider in an insider position; she told us about what happened when her father showed up. The guy had a fucking restraining order against him! That has to say something about what he could pull, and yet with a threat he still got in to see his daughter and to twist her again into helping him. To therefore, further screw her over more then he had already.
She's a lot like me, and that was the moment that she realized that the great Charles Xavier and the rest of the older X-men are as human as any of us can hope to be. They are just as prone to mistakes and errors as the rest of us. Just because someone can read a mind doesn't mean that they understand it.
I'm more than sure that he knows Pietro is Magneto's son; and nearly as sure that he wrote him off for that reason. No one seems to realize that if Pietro had been given any sort of choice he would never go with his father; he gave up on the dream of a real father a long time ago. He is left with a master commander instead.
However, even surviving under a master commander looked better than going to jail at the time, though he probably wishes now that he had taken the other option. I look across at him appraisingly as he takes shallow breaths and his eyes twitch in sleep. A bruise on the back of his neck seems to be making a noticeable appearance as he shifts.
I know there was a time where Evan and he were friends and I wonder what could have happened to split them into the enemies they have become today. Their competition was not always about who was better, but was the competition between friends to prove yourself. Now though...there wouldn't be much of a contest.
The one I understand the least is Todd; Xavier not only turned him away, but Wolverine scared him away. Though he would never admit it to anyone outside the three of us, I know that he is afraid of the older mutant. Hell, Wolverine and Sabertooth could be siblings in my book; though I doubt that the Badger could ever hope to reach the level of cruelty our feral has.
Todd had been used, abused, and twisted long before any of us came on the scene; he is the youngest and at the same time was the first member of our little home. Yet another thing the X-Geeks can never hope to understand; even if we tease him, we are the ones to wake him in the middle of the night when he screams, we are the ones who protect him from the asshole jocks, and we are his family.
Fear seems to be a part of all of us now and its different forms have held us imprisoned for longer then I would like to admit. Fear of being rejected if we asked for help because of what we are, what we have become, fear of what would happen to us if we rejected Magneto, and fear of ourselves, not knowing what Magneto has turned us into.
It took a combination of things, including Freddy's death to finally allow us to break free from the fear, and to run. Don't get me wrong, I know we are still afraid, every time I look into a dark corner or Todd shies away from a metal pole; but this fear is what is keeping us alive now. It is all we have to keep us alive.
We can never look back.
The clock chimes four and I think about what we have left; sadly, there is very little for any of us that we could possibly miss. Tabby seemed to enjoy Amara and Kurt, had even started to get along with Rogue; but they were not horribly close. She may miss them but it will not leave a hole that cannot be filled.
Todd certainly doesn't have anyone that he will particularly miss, the four of us seem to be the only ones who even give a damn whether he lives or dies. I don't know if he has ever had someone actually care for him before; that's probably why he was so damn loyal to Mystique for so long. At least she gave him the illusion of some sort of possessive control, which he took for what he desperately wanted.
Pietro really has nothing, he gave up the illusion of any possible future with his father; in some way I envy the fact that he has nothing that could possible hold him back. No ties that could make him think twice about never returning, about never contacting anyone he left behind.
This causes my mind to drift to a certain brunette...but I try to shake her from my mind. I care about her, so much in fact hat I want to protect her from the monsters of the world, including myself.
Another great irony to add to my life.
I love, and because I love, I left.
There are too many ways she could be used against me, too many ways that she could be hurt simply because it would hurt me as well. Perhaps that is what caring meant, I pushed her away from me and forced her to move away, even as I wanted to pull her closer.
We can never look back.
Sometimes I wonder what our lives would be like if we had made different decisions, if I had stayed with the X-men, if Pietro had refused his father, if Tabby's dad had never showed up...on and on the different scenarios flow through my head. I shake them away because as I look around at the three next to me I wouldn't give them up for anything.
We may have had to travel through the roads of hell to reach this point, but if I were to lose any of them again I don't know if I would be able to handle it. Loyalty is never to be taken advantage of, it's something rare, something we never give. Yet we seem it have it, to each other. Fuck the rest of the world because if we don't take care of each other it's not as if they will.
I can hear the clock chime six over my shoulder and across from me I can see Tabby begin to stir. I never woke her, but like me, she seems to have a natural instinctive knowledge of when to wake up. We need to wake the others so that we can get going again. The first bus heads out of here soon. That is the one that we are leaving on.
We thought about New York, but that's the first place he's going to look, so we changed our plans; we're headed to the opposite coast, we're headed to Seattle. Decent weather, lots of manual labor jobs, and lots of street kids, all we need to do is get lost in the shuffle.
As we wake the others I can only think of running, I can't think of the past, and the future is still to hazy, but for now we have what we need. I don't know if we're going to survive, or if we're going to die, but all I can tell them now is this.
Don't look back.