It's a world where mutants are considered sub-human vermin at worst, and useful lab rats at best. The first step then for a mutant is to reject that way of thinking, and the second is to realize they're not alone.
This is a non-authorized spin-off and missing bits fic for "Searchlight" by Red and "Methods of Deduction" by Tawabids over at AO3. Go read first, otherwise my fic will probably make little sense to you. Those fics are both brilliant, if somewhat disturbing. I bow to Red and Tawabids both, and shall be eternally grateful for the inspiration. Nevertheless, the ending left me with a strange taste in my mouth, therefore, this fic. A fanfic of fanfic. Meta-fanfic? I dunno.
Easiest way to find the fics is using the AO3 search function and entering "searchlight" or use the links I provide in my profile. (Because, you know, not even using spaces and replacing a freaking dot with a word in parantheses works here. Talk about paranoia. *grumble*)
Consider this also a warning that the disturbing subject matter continues herein, even if I'm low on the details.
I consider this an ensemble piece. There will be some middling-important OCs and some pairings of the het, femslash and slash variety, with no lemons. It's AU, I'm playing mostly with First Class and otherwise am borrowing from the rest of the movie cannon and teensy bit from the comics.
Proof of Sentience
Part 1: Of Vague Plans and Exact Places
On a Saturday in August 1954, dawning bright and somewhat humid over Vancouver despite the thunderstorm during the night, Yuriko Oyama rose at six thirty in the morning. Her parents were already up and preparing for their day at their little tailor shop. As it was a weekend, and the holidays, Yuriko didn't have to help out, so she collected a book, a blanket, a bottle of water and cookies to go read in Stanley Park.
"Don't climb the trees, love," her mother said. "Promise me."
Yuriko tried her hardest not to roll her eyes. Her mother worried far too much. "I promise."
Because Stanley Park was more than two miles from home, Yuriko took the bus, then hastened to find her favorite maple tree in a secluded spot. For all that she was a good daughter – she studied hard, always kept her curfew, and practiced playing the piano every day for at least half an hour without being told – she had one weakness. Yuriko loved climbing trees.
Taking a length of string from her bag, she bound one end around a small rock, tied the other to the bag, and tossed the rock over the bough she usually sat on for reading. Then, she began climbing. Approximately sixteen feet from the ground, there was a bit of a gap which required her to hang onto the next branch with both hands and pull herself up.
There was a creak, the wood moved under her hands, and Yuriko knew she would fall. It seemed an infinitely slow process as the branch tilted with more creaking, then snapped.
Yuriko was aware she should do something, try to grab a hold, maybe scream for help, but she found herself utterly frozen, unable to even blink. It was like she was floating outside herself, watching the teenager with the tidy black braid and the pink skirt fall in a riot of tearing leaves and a rain of little twigs knocked loose by her descent.
She hit the ground with the feet first, something cracked in her left leg with blinding pain, her knees impacted, sending jolts of agony to her hips, and finally, she came to in a heap on the ground, weeping silently, because it hurt. Eventually, she roused herself enough to push the faulty branch off of herself with raw hands, or at least, with her right hand, because her left elbow wouldn't move without causing more pain. Yuriko braced herself and struggled to sit. Her left leg lay at an odd angle.
Broken.
There was a burn in that leg, as if she were walking through fire. The same went for the damaged arm, so there was no way Yuriko would be able to find help. She'd have to call for someone.
She sighed, and raised her hands to – wait. Her palm had been bleeding a moment ago, hadn't it. And she most definitely had not been able to move her left hand.
For a moment, she could only stare at a scrape that sealed up right before her eyes.
This wasn't natural. Not at all.
Yuriko bit on her knuckles to keep herself from making a sound. Bloody… bloody hell, she was one of those mutated beasts. It was the only explanation making sense.
And yet. As she carefully tried to move her left leg and the bones realigned themselves, she didn't feel particularly beastly. Just hurting, and thirsty, and hungry, and uncomfortable, with all the dirt sticking to her.
Despite the increasing thirst and hunger, Yuriko sat at her crash site a long time, unable to move even once.
What to do? If… if this healing was the extent of her curse, then she wasn't all that different from normal humans, was she. She could go undetected, if she were careful. If anyone found out, the Mutant Control Board would come for her, and take her to some research facility or maybe even put her down like some rabid animal. Most Homo deterior that were useless for science or too dangerous were killed. Euthanised, as the newspapers called it.
Still, considering the task at hand, maybe Yuriko should turn herself in. She'd have to keep herself from injury in a home that lived off needlework, after all. And what about PE in school? She couldn't skip those classes. And if, by some miracle, she managed to keep her parents and friends in the dark, she certainly wouldn't be able to fool a future husband.
Until this morning, her life had been laid out in a straight path before her – she would get an education, marry a nice, successful man, have two or three children. And now, with this curse upon her, she would not only have to find a man whom her parents approved of, he would also have to be willing to keep this secret.
Yuriko didn't want to have to deal with this, she wanted to curl up somewhere, go to sleep and wake up in a future that would be more friendly to mutants.
And yet. Yuriko had never much thought about it, but now, now she knew the newspapers were lying. At least some mutants were just people with a bit extra. There would be no better future unless someone brought about change. Feeling sorry for herself would accomplish exactly nothing – she'd have to see that she would be in a position of influence, if she wanted to live, and live well.
A hazy plan at best, but better than nothing. Yuriko made herself get up, cleaned off as well as she could, and wolfed down the cookies.
xxx
Three years earlier, on another bright summer day, though not nearly as humid, because a nice breeze was blowing in from the lake, Salome Inez Richardson stared out of the window of her daddy's car and had a headache.
It was her eleventh birthday, her dad was taking her out camping and fishing, and on any other day, she would have waved at the people by the roadside and in the other cars. This morning, however, her parents had fought. Again.
After another quarter of an hour of silence, Dad said, "She didn't mean it, Sal."
Salome sniffed. Packed up in the rant about how could Samuel Richardson let his daughter run about in boys' clothes, it wasn't done, and everything else Isabella Gutierrez Richardson didn't like, she'd called Salome the devil's spawn, and said that she wished she'd never left her family in Florida to marry some writer who had his head in the clouds all the time.
"She did mean it, too," Sal said.
"She does love us," Dad said.
"Hmm." Yeah. It wasn't like Sal didn't her love her mother, and she desperately wanted to be a daughter her mother approved of, but Sal never seemed to live up to the standards. "Do you love her?", Sal asked.
Her dad was silent for a long while, his brow knitted, and he looked very, very sad. "Yes," he said eventually. "I do love her, but." A sigh. "I don't like her very much."
"Hm-hmm," Sal agreed. "I don't like her, either."
Dad sighed again.
Sal rubbed her temples. The ache was a bit better now, but it still felt as if there were ants crawling behind her eyes. "Are you, um, going to get a divorce?"
It wasn't something that happened often, Sal knew, and when people talked about it, they were never nice about the people who couldn't manage to stay married.
"I don't know," Dad said.
That wasn't really an answer, though Sal knew not to press.
The next bit of the trip went well. They found a nice spot in the forest to put their tent, and there was enough time to catch a couple trout in the nearby creek for dinner. Sal was oddly tired and turned in early.
She didn't sleep well, though, and woke up a few times, because her eyes were still itchy, and the ants had moved to her fingers to rummage around in there. At home, she'd have told Dad or her mother, but now, now she was afraid Dad would take her to the doctor, and then would bundle her up and take her home.
Sal didn't want to go home at all, because all she'd return to was more yelling.
As dim light from early morning filtered into the tent, Sal woke up hungry, as if the ants from earlier had gnawed a hole into her stomach, and she just couldn't fall asleep again. There was nothing for it, then, she'd have to get up and haul down the pack with the provisions from the tree, where they'd stored it to keep it out of the bears' reach.
Crawling outside, she accidentally kicked her dad, who said "ow", and sat up, blinking.
For a while, he stared at her, with a strange look on his face, so Sal didn't dare make a peep.
"Well, fuck," Dad said eventually.
"Bad word," Sal said.
He sighed. "I think, in these particular circumstances, I'm entitled to use profanities. Where's that little mirror of yours?"
And so, Salome got to see her own eyes glow like a cat's. This was odd, but it would be a nice kind of odd, if there weren't the m-word. Mutant. And, consequently, the Canadian Mutant Control Board.
"Nobody can ever know," Dad said, when he was done explaining.
Sal frowned. Obviously, her dad wanted her to be afraid, but all she could feel was a burn in her guts, and an overwhelming need to smash somebody's head in. You couldn't just kill babies because they were green, or lock up people just because they had odd eyes like Sal. "I shouldn't have to hide. It's not right."
"No, no, it isn't. Yet…"
"And how do we keep it from mother?"
"Breakfast," Dad said. "I can't plot on an empty stomach."
So they ate, and planned, and then found out that Sal could actually switch her night-sight on and off. Also, her nose was better than before, she had retractable claws instead of fingernails, and she could jump higher than she was tall.
Really, it would have been groovy, if not for the need to hide it.
xxx
The plan hinged on the Richardson grandparents, Marianne and Thomas, and the great-grandfather, Saul. Now that Thomas Richardson was retired from his job as an accountant for the logging company, he and Marianne had moved from their place in a backwater mountain town out to Saul Richardson's cabin in Shadow Creek Valley, which was a one hour hike from the town, and could only be reached by things that weren't wider than a man on a horse. The Richardson men tended to be loners who preferred reading over honest hard work, and Marianne swore she had no idea how any of them had ever managed to marry.
The fist thing she had done after moving in was repair the leaky roof her father-in-law hadn't minded, and fix the windows in the horse stable.
Under the ruse of visiting old Saul – one could never know how much longer the eighty-seven year old would be around – Samuel Richardson took his daughter there one week after they returned from the camping trip.
Samuel's sister fetched them from the train station, they stayed at her house for a couple days, so Salome could play with her three cousins, and then she drove them up the mountain as far as the logging road let her. From there, Samuel and Salome had to hike another ten minutes through the little canyon that named the creek.
In the evening, when Sal was finally in bed, the adults sat around the big kitchen table, Marianne made grog, and they did the catching up.
"How's the writing going?", Saul asked.
"So, so," Samuel said, "I've been thinking about doing something a little more contemporary." So far, he'd made a name and decent money by writing adventures and romances set in the 1800s out west. "I was thinking about tackling the mutant issue."
Thomas harrumphed. "Are you sure about this, son?"
Samuel blinked. "Well, I find it striking how much Nazi propaganda and the so-called information on mutants have in common." He would've grown angry even if his daughter weren't endangered by it, now that he had done some research.
"This could be dangerous," Marianne said, ever practical, and a worrying mother, too.
"Many worthwhile things are dangerous," grandpa Saul said.
"They may be," added Thomas, "but one has to know when to stick their head out, and when to lay low." He fixed his son with a calculating look. "This situation with mutants is a disgrace, I agree. However, I don't think you've developed that sudden interest quite on your own?"
And this was why Samuel and Salome Richarson moved to Alberta and Salome was home-schooled from then on, until she had a grip on everything she could do with her mutant powers.
xxx
Samuel made Sal write to her mother once a month, and she did, but she never got an answer save for her birthday and Christmas. She was surprised how much it didn't hurt.
xxx
Saul Richardson died the next February, but the population in Shadow Creek Valley started to grow soon thereafter. First, there was the entirely hairless third son of Albert and Josephine Whitman. It was entirely by chance Thomas heard about him when shopping in town with Salome, and there was also word that Mutant Control was on their way. Josephine Whitman apparently refused to have anything to do with her freak child, while Albert was busy trying to keep the little thing alive by using milk powder.
Sal never knew what grandpa Thomas said to Mr. Whitman, but they left the town only when it was dark, and little Leonard was sleeping, securely tied to her, making contented baby sounds.
Marianne scolded her husband for just adopting a kid, but, well, there was nothing for it now. As if to spite her dire warnings, Lenny Whitman survived the milk powder diet with surprisingly few bellyaches and grew, while Mutant Control came and went, accepting the explanation that Albert Whitman had left his child outside, and a bear must have taken it. That way, it could be called an accident, and the family buried an empty coffin.
When Lenny caught his fist cold, it turned out that he was some sort of chameleon, who changed his skin color to fit the surroundings.
The next ones, in late summer the same year, were Quebecois twins a couple years older than Sal, who'd run away from home to join a circus once they realized they could go so fast they could fly. Samuel had taken Sal to the circus a couple towns further down the mountains as a treat, even borrowing his brother-in-law's car for it, but she had been thoroughly distracted from the show, on account of two people who smelled similar to little Lenny. They hung around, under the pretense of finishing their popcorn, until Sal was sure about whose smell it was.
However, Jeanne-Marie and Jean-Paul Beaubier were a little hesitant to join up, even though Sal showed them her claws.
"Don't you ever have accidents?", Samuel asked. "She messes up often enough."
Sal nodded vigorously.
The twins looked at each other, obviously remembering something.
"What's in it for us?", the boy eventually asked.
"A safe place," Samuel said.
"A cause, if you want one," Sal added.
The twins raised their brows.
"It's not right, isn't it? Us having to hide, because otherwise we'd get killed."
The twins smiled at that, thinly. And so Jeanne-Marie started to pack while Jean-Paul went to notify their boss of their leaving.
Sal remained blissfully unaware of the paperwork and the arguing with the twins' parents Samuel did in the next several weeks, but eventually he had custody and Monsieur Beaubier's promise to pay for any higher education the twins would aspire to.
It was then Marianne pointed out that one accountant's pension and Samuel's book royalties were not enough to keep four mutant children fed and hidden from view. That summer, they built a dam so they could raise trout in the creek, and two greenhouses for vegetables and fruit.