The title is from a song by Jonathan Coulton. I'm sure Hardison knows it.
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One day, Alec is going to wake up with superpowers. He is going to wake up in his twin bed in Nana's spare room, and as he is stretching and yawning off another late night on the computer, he's going to notice that the mutation has kicked in.
(Or a spider could have bitten him, but given Nana's housekeeping standards, that's unlikely. And the whole radioactive spider story is scientifically unsatisfactory. So definitely a mutation. A stray gene that makes him special suddenly switching on.)
It's not going to be invisibility. Alec's already been invisible. He's been nothing but, some years. A small, thin, black boy with no money and no Mom or Dad to make him even show up in the world. Now, granted, being invisible can be handy. But that's not going to be his big mutant power, for sure.
He doesn't want to be Wolverine. All the geeks he knows online want to be Wolvie, but not Alec. Okay, the fourth time in one day that some jock basically throws him into the lockers he thinks about the snikt of adamantium claws coming out, the red rage in his vision. He don't need Nana to tell him people are afraid of what's different. That's always been plain as the nose on his face. But she can't tell him, and neither can Marvel or DC, make it clear to him why that should be. Why are people afraid of what's different? Why is his skinny nerd ass a threat to a junior who's already hit his growth spurt and has a stupid half mustache and a lot of muscle to show for it?
So yeah, some days it'd so awesome to flash out that shining metal and just slice, just slice through "Nerd." "Fag." "Geek." and all the hate that radiates in a wave of untouchable stupidity from people that he's done nothing to, nothing.
But it's not Alec's style. He's too smart for that. Being able to see that they mess with him because he's different is enough to give him detachment, even if he wishes he knew why that bothered them so badly that they have to lash out and make it hurt him back.
Which makes telepathy or some kind of generalized psychic stuff a pretty tempting power.
(If he could fly he could be up over it all and seeing everything. That sounds like the best escape. Nana's had a lot of doctor's appointments lately. She says it's not his job to worry. It's his job to do well in school, to be a credit. Let her do the worrying. But if he could fly, just go on and lift up into the sky above it all where he could look down and everything he ever worried about would be tiny and he'd be free.
Free but couldn't do anything about anything. So that's out.)
Telepathy of some kind, for sure. He's not really into violence, perfectly reasonable revenge fantasies aside. Being smart is his regular person power, but he wants so much more. If he could just see and know what people wanted. He could fix things then, make things better for Nana, better for him. He'd know how to talk to girls, he'd know what makes the world run.