Filicide
Disclaimer: I am not profiting in any way from the creation of this fan piece.
A/N:
First, I fully intend to finish the other works in progress attached to this account.
Second, I apologize for any typos. I don't have time to edit sufficiently, unfortunately.
Lastly, this isn't really an "origin" story… I'm just exploring a concept...
"If it was a haunting it followed them everywhere… If it was a demon, she was losing badly… It was killing her family… [Pyro story]."
Warning: Some readers might find this work upsetting. This is a dark story.
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She clutched the medium's hands… the way she had clutched the demonologist and the exorcist…
And she begged…
She was at the end of her rope…
"You have to believe me, please! This thing in my house… It's killing people! And it wants my SON!"
The compound was isolated.
There were signs everywhere banning open flame. The rules were very strict. No staff was hired that smoked or had ever smoked in the past.
The place was made of COPPER to minimize any chance of accidental sparking.
They had contingency plans for lightening. And a number of other things. Or at least they said they did to discourage him. He had no idea really…
For a time it had been believed he needed to SEE flame to control it. But clearly those he'd known more intimately – probably Bobby – had made sure the authorities knew otherwise.
Showing off so much certainly hadn't left him any trump cards.
"You could help, you know." Marie chastised him. She and Bobby couldn't get the fire going. And the whole thing was ludicrous considering he could have started it ages ago if he had wanted to… Instead he was staring off morosely…
He didn't even look. He made a point of growing the fire without turning around or acknowledging them at all.
Now it was understood that the flame needed to be within proximity. Though in reality - no one was exactly sure how his power worked… And privately he was equally uncertain…
The frustrating bit was that he distinctly remembered a time when he'd been capable of a bit more. In the earliest years – before any preconceived notions or experiences interfered – he had been able to do things he couldn't figure out how to do now…
He wasn't imaging it. It wasn't wishful thinking or vanity. He had genuinely been able to do things that he couldn't seem to do now.
He knew it to be true because terrible, life altering things had happened because of that extra little bit…
And it was maddening because tapping into those extra facets would make all the difference right now. He could escape. But it seemed hopeless… he had very limited range now… He couldn't REACH…
He'd expected a swift execution off the books. But then it turned out they had uses for him.
He was the most powerful criminal they'd managed to recapture once it became clear the original formula was not permanent. They needed to fix the formula as quickly as possible. They needed a remedy that actually worked.
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"No, no, no – please don't hang up! Nobody will talk to me, PLEASE!"
Click.
She had been pacing in the kitchen on the phone. Now she stopped in her tracks.
And she tried to muffle her tears with her hand. She succeeded.
Her son in the next room had no idea anything was wrong. He had been frightened enough by whatever it was that was following them from home to home… He was clearly in the most danger of all…
She covered her mouth and tried to weep as silently as possible as she stood there in misery and desperation.
She started to dial again… and then stopped… she couldn't call the detectives investigating her husband's death anymore. She knew they'd written the whole thing off as a freak accident… They had ruled out homicide and didn't want to talk to her anymore…
She couldn't fight this through legitimate channels. She would look unstable. CRAZY. Authorities would take her son away from her. They'd lock her up.
She had to figure this out on her own somehow…
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They usually kept him in darkness…
He hated silence. There had been a deadly silence with his mother as a toddler that left him jumpy now.
He spent every free moment of imprisonment trying to project… or probe…
As a toddler he had been able to reach… he'd sensed flame very, very far away from him…
For all the painful, miserable experimentation that went on… he kept sane by trying in every waking moment to send his mind far away…
But it never worked. Not at all.
And instead he ended up thinking and remembering.
He found himself replaying the past over and over again…
He only meant to prove to himself the memories were real and that his power had functioned in different ways in the beginning…
But he couldn't help but get lost in the whole ugly nightmare… And once he went down that rabbit hole there was no turning back… He relived the whole ugly, awful thing REGULARLY…
And he didn't hate her. He would never hate her.
He understood her better all the time.
She had been so frightened… so confused… and the progression had been so natural…
The unspoken stand-off between them had gone on for months…
…warped and charged with terror and desperation…
He would never hate her for it. There had been no malicious intent… She wasn't really a murderer…
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She put the pieces together very slowly. And never fully understood what was happening or why.
It was all so hard to believe.
But gradually her life became the plot of a horror movie... the slow build towards her inevitable death…
She treaded carefully when approaching doctors and the church for help.
One wrong statement and she would be finished. They'd take her toddler away. They'd lock her up.
She started medications in the hope these strange ideas would go away. Strange ideas she didn't share with anyone at first. She was vague and she got medicated and she hoped for the best.
Surely this was just the trauma of the death of her husband. And then the death of a neighbour. Surely.
But the strange happenings continued…
Half the time she thought she was delusional and half the time she knew it was real. The entire time she was frightened.
For a long time she thought something was AFTER him… trying to get him…
And then at some point it clicked. And she realized that he was already lost. It had him.
She loved him the entire time. She swore she loved him until the very end.
But her love gradually became broken. It came and went.
Their bond steadily shifted… she detached from him… she pulled away…
She stopped using his name. She stopped calling him anything at all.
It was unperceivable to anyone watching. But she didn't love him the way she was supposed to. Not anymore anyway.
Sure, she hid it well for a long time… but she became silently terrified of him…
She detached… and the bond was not right…
She didn't realize how apparent it was to the toddler. How broken they were.
And gradually things escalated…
They became unspokenly terrified of each other.
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He remembered his third year of life with an unusual clarity. There was so much trauma that it stayed with him in detail.
There were some fragments from that second year, though…
He was in a car seat screeching and bawling with a pacifier in his mouth as the SUV was almost totally engulfed in flames.
A man he somehow inherently recognized as his father was utterly crazed in trying to get him out of the car.
But the more frightened the toddler became the more the fire spread. And it engulfed them.
He couldn't remember anything else about that.
But later in life it would really resonate with him when he learned how spark plugs worked…
Spark. Spark. Spark.
And he would really struggle to travel in vehicles without some distraction… sensing the constant sparking over and over again…
Knowing that one wrong thought could… well… BOOM.
"I hate awkward silences." He turned on the car radio abruptly.
He found combustion engines maddening in this respect.
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The strange little things kept happening. Flames, in particular, were acting strangely.
And without entirely realizing it she stopped having flame in the house.
The car fire had never been adequately explained. Nor had her son's miraculous survival.
And then little mishaps with fire started happening. Inexplicably. Like a haunting.
So they moved to a little apartment on the 6thfloor with a balcony. More medication… a new therapist… a new life in a new town…
She planted pretty flowers in boxes on the balcony and got to know the young man who was always hanging over the edge of the balcony directly next to hers.
But the strangeness started again. It took a few weeks… but it started up again…
It felt like a haunting.
It followed them everywhere. Even out into the world… to the park… on holiday…
At the 4thof July fireworks her sparkler nearly killed her… her hair was on fire and then suddenly it all stopped…
And then the fireworks themselves malfunctioned or something… a lot of people were hurt and a few were even KILLED…
And it felt like a message to her directly… from whatever the hell it was…
She found her anxiety escalating rapidly.
If this was a haunting it followed them everywhere.
If this was a demon… well, it was WINNING…
She started phoning mediums and physics and all these phony people came into their home. She even had people in their home who claimed to have been formerly somehow associated with the church. But they weren't associated with the church. They were all frauds.
And the flames never danced for any of those frauds. Not once.
She vaguely alluded to the issue with doctors, therapists, her actual minister… but everyone was dismissive. Some tried to be nonchalant or kind about it… but they were all very dismissive…
She naturally would have an aversion to fire and be preoccupied with ghosts… Her husband had recently burned alive…
It was normal to seek mediums shortly after the death of a loved one. No one questioned her behaviour.
She pushed as much as she DARE through legitimate channels… but it was way too risky…
Sometimes she went home sick to her stomach wondering if she had overstepped. Had she set off red flags? What would happen now?
She dabbled with tarot and those scary boards for a while… but they seemed to make everything worse…
She spooked herself. And she threw all that crap in a dumpster far away from home…
She didn't want that scary stuff in the house anymore. It wasn't helping. It was possibly part of the problem. Things seemed to be getting worse!
When strange things happened she would quickly pray. She would sometimes fall on her knees with her little son and pray… And sometimes that worked. But sometimes it didn't work at all… Prayers weren't magic, after all…
"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?"She screamed up into the corners of the roof, clutching her son as tightly as she could."JUST LEAVE US ALONE!"
Medication wasn't helping. The occult wasn't helping. Prayer wasn't helping.
Nothing was helping.
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"Listen. We've seen 157 people in your profession now. If you think you can fool me with a few facts you memorized from the news about my husband's death… well, get the HELL OUT…"
He watched her slam the door on the fraud loudly.
She'd been angrier at past shysters. But she was losing steam.
She was getting better at identifying within 60 to 90 seconds if someone was wasting her time…
He'd watched this process over and over again…
He remembered one old woman in particular though…
She looked directly at him and said to his mother: "He knows something."
But he was two or three years old and hardly talked.
The moment came and went. His mother hadn't even noticed… But he thought of that often.
He wasn't really sure what he'd known or not known at that point. He hadn't really made much sense of things yet he supposed.
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And slowly her mind formed patterns…
And she began to vaguely sense causation. She had no evidence at all… but she sensed causation…
She'd originally thought he was being TARGETED… but…
No. NO.
And she actively tried to ignore the connection she was inevitably drawing. She refused to even allow herself to THINK IT…
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He vaguely remembered the colourful cast of characters who passed through that apartment… back when she was still fighting against something external…
The supernatural loomed large in her mind… it was their undoing…
Deep down she saw the patterns, but she did not WANT to see them.
And then when she did… everything slid out of control…
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It abruptly and unexpectedly happened:
It had always given her a little jolt in her stomach the way the young man sat on the edge of the balcony, hanging his leg over. Her neighbour was very nonchalant about it every day and she joked a few times he should be careful or he would fall…
He just laughed and strummed his guitar. Or maybe smoked a cigarette.
And then one day his cigarette burst into flames. Startlingly him.
And he fell to his death in an instant.
Her mind immediately asked: Where's Johnny?
She instantly turned to check and there he was… barely visible through the gray screen of his bedroom window… watching the whole thing…
She wondered for days how she had known he would be standing there…
But deep down she knew she'd always had a feeling about this…
She just hadn't allowed herself to even THINK IT…
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The incident with a dog in the park likely cemented things in her mind…
A vicious dog charged at him, snarling and all teeth… He could vaguely recall it being a huge shepherd.
The second it dove onto him…
The BBQ the man nearby was using erupted into huge flames and very badly burned his face…
The eruption and the screams startled the dog away from the child entirely.
But his mother hadn't missed the timing there. She hadn't missed it at all.
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She startled so easily. She seemed frightened all the time.
And there was an unspoken tension between them he didn't understand.
They moved again.
And they stopped knowing people. She made excuses here and there to pull away from the world and no one person noticed the larger picture. No one realized what was happening.
He gradually stopped seeing people entirely.
His third birthday cake had no candles.
She was kind to him… and she loved him on some level… but everything felt wrong…
Looking back now he recalled all the pill bottles and the fact that she almost never went outside anymore…. She barely dressed… She was surely on social assistance of some kind in those final months... Or maybe she was just spending the last of her savings…
But everything felt unstable.
She had no energy to cook anymore.
So she gave him soup in his bedroom every day that tasted funny.
The taste got worse and worse… and he started vomiting…
So he started secretly dumping the soup in the back of his closet.
He would eat it occasionally out of desperation. And he still vomited sometimes. So she didn't seem to catch on to his trick…
He now saw how cowardly and flimsy these early attempts were. He saw the progression now.
He kept dumping the soup in the back of the closet…
All the cupboards were locked and he was badly starving.
So he took to secretly eating the cat food… a tiny bit here and there so it wouldn't be noticed… sometimes directly from the closet it was stored in if he got the opportunity…
He was getting very ill. But they never went to a doctor.
And they stopped going outside to play. They stopped going anywhere.
He never left the house anymore. Ever.
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She hadn't noticed it was a propane stove when she rented the place.
She woke up to use the bathroom one of their first nights there… and noticed a blue glow in the dark kitchen…
Blue flame around one burner.
Her stomach dropped and she was nearly sick.
She didn't turn it off. She didn't dare. She knew somehow he would know. He always knew.
So she silently made her way down the dark hallway…
And saw a bright orange glow coming from under his closed bedroom door.
Silently and very, very carefully she opened his bedroom door a crack…
His back was to the door. He was facing the wall intentionally casting shadows.
There were flames in both his hands.
He seemed entranced staring at glow and shadows.
Her heart skipped a few beats painfully in her chest. She had never been so terrified in her life.
She foresaw him turning around slowly and staring at her. That chilling, emotionless stare he sometimes had. And that would be the end.
He'll kill me if I startle him. He'll kill me if I try to stop him… He'll…
Time was running out. She had to close the door and get away.
Somehow she slowly and silently closed the door without him catching her.
And then she walked silently down the hallway and into the front foyer.
But instead of leaving she ended up sliding down to the floor and sobbing silently.
Her body was racked with silent sobs for hours.
Later she would catch him turning the stove on and off in the middle of the night…
And shortly thereafter she would have the stove switched out at her own expense without discussing it with the landlord…
But he started trying to draw flame in other ways…
And her preconceived notions and fears did not allow her to see any naive innocence and experimentation there…
She just knew she couldn't let him know that she knew.
She had to take him by surprise… before she died like the others…
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He was very excited at the prospect of leaving the house.
He didn't speak much… but he actually remembered asking, "Am I going to the doctor now?"
She lied that he was going to the doctor.
A lot of that memory was blurry.
She put him in his car seat and started the car without ever climbing in. The garage was closed. And she simply walked back into the house without even looking at him. All the car windows was closed. The garage was all closed.
He didn't notice how strange this was because he had no frame of reference. They never went anywhere. He wasn't used to the car.
It smelled gross. The smoke was everywhere.
Looking back he wished a neighbour had noticed. He wished someone had intervened and actually looked at the inside of their house. That someone had noticed how disturbing he looked.
If someone had seen any of the red flags maybe things would have ended differently from them both…
She was very, very lucky he hadn't realized what was happening…
That he hadn't panicked and blew up the entire car!
But he was oblivious and he was coughing and getting sleepy…
Suddenly she rushed back into the car… she was sobbing…
Only later in life would he understand she had lost her nerve.
This was back during the half-hearted attempts… the half measures… when she would lose her nerve…
She still couldn't really go through with it…
Everything was indirect… she couldn't watch… the poison wasn't strong enough and she couldn't watch him taking it… She couldn't follow through…
Years and years later he still had nightmares about the being locked in a running car in a garage.
He was banging and banging on the windows, screaming for help…
And sometimes if it was a lucid dream, he might remember he could escape by blowing up the car. And he would wake up just as he hit the spark…
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He would come running fast for cookies. He still trusted the cookies. And he was starving.
So she loosened the carpet at the top of the stairs.
She'd chickened out last time. Not this time. She had to do it this time!
And then she called him loudly and cheerfully for cookies.
He flew down the upstairs hallway and turned to rush down the stairs…
And she unperceivably shifted the rug so that he fell down the stairs violently.
CRACK.
She waited to see if she'd successfully killed him this time.
But he was looking up at her silently.
And she was terrified.
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He lay on his back looking up at her.
Fortunately his neck and back were fine. It was his arm that had snapped like a branch.
It hurt so badly he couldn't make a sound. He just stared up into her face.
And he somehow knew she had done this too him intentionally.
Her face didn't read like someone concerned for him or scared for his well-being. Her face looked like someone who had failed to kill a wasp and was now expecting to be badly stung… The terror on her face was for HERSELF…
Blood pooled at his head… he felt something wet but didn't understand…
His head was screaming in pain and his vision blurred as he blacked out…
He dreamed that she was curled up in a ball in the corner sobbing loudly… And later in life he realized that probably wasn't a dream at all… That was likely real…
Later he woke up in his bed. His injuries untreated.
She kept him alive for a few more days… he couldn't remember that time very well at all… He had been in too much pain…
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She had smelt something awful in his bedroom. Something coming from the closet possibly.
And then she'd discovered his secret.
She stood in the open doorway of the closet and realized something terrifying…
He knows.
And then she sensed him standing behind her. Like in a horror movie.
And she slowly turned around.
There he was staring at her in the doorway of his bedroom… his expression chillingly blank…
HE KNOWS.
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He distinctly remembered walking into his bedroom and seeing her standing in his closet doorway. She was looking inside his closet with her back to him.
His heart sunk.
She knows.
She slowly turned around and realized he was there.
There were both terrified.
"Honey, why aren't you eating?" She asked kindly. It sounded hollow and wrong.
He couldn't remember how he answered her. He tried hard to remember.
Everything was fragments.
Maybe he never answered at all.
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She had only loosely thought about demonic possession and other terrifying things like that…
It was overwhelming and unreal and she had never actually tried to sort things out logically in her mind.
She didn't understand what was happening or why.
Maybe it was still some kind of haunting or possession… maybe it wasn't…
All she really knew deep down what that it had gone from an external problem to an INTERNAL problem…
And he was at the center of it all…
At some point it stopped being delusions and became entirely real…
Her life had become a horror movie… her son was like the child from The Ring… or maybe evenThe Omen…
She was spiralling towards doom…
People always shouted at the characters in those scary movies to take this or that action… Everyone thought they knew best and would do things differently and survive…
Living it was an entirely different thing altogether.
This wasn't a movie. This wasn't SIMPLE…
She was spiralling towards doom…
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He couldn't remember what led them to the bathroom.
She was trying to act normal, but she was panicky underneath it.
He couldn't remember exactly what she said to him… maybe something about cleaning him up…
His broken arm was untreated. He was still bloody. He remembered that.
But the water was overflowing from the tub… it was spilling out of the room…
He started to question… He opened his mouth…
But in a very sharp instant he sensed what was coming.
And she sensed that he was about to run and scream.
So she grabbed him violently.
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As an adult he had tried to block out those traumatic moments…
Even when the old professor entered his mind… claiming he wanted to help…
Nothing helped.
He had struggled and struggled and struggled. He'd fought like hell.
And she screeched and sobbed…
He could barely hear what she was saying through the water… but he struggled up enough to hear sometimes: DIE! PLEASE DIE! WHAT WON'T YOU JUST DIE?
Something like that anyway.
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That's when his mind starting reaching out beyond the house.
His desperate probing in those fateful moments happened to find a BBQ a few streets away. Someone was cooking meat in their backyard and there was open flame…
The explosion was enormous.
The house was GONE.
She was gone.
His three year old body was found entirely unscathed in the rubble… and the authorities knew exactly what he was then…
It was hard to recall what immediately followed her death…
The house wasn't the only thing demolished in that moment. He was never, ever the same.
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At some point at the school in his teens John had become fixated on finding of picture of her… He searched old Austrailian newspapers hoping maybe they were the type of people who announced their engagement or marriage or graduation or something… Maybe he'd see his father's face too. He didn't remember it very well.
But her face he remembered in precise detail. Every line. But he needed to see it. To confirm it.
Everything had been lost in the blaze. He hadn't seen her face since the moment she died.
And then he unexpectedly found his birth announcement.
Her face hit him like a ton of bricks. He'd remembered it PRECISELY. His memory was exact.
The announcement wasn't a traditional one. It was a picture of her holding him at the hospital and gushing about how much she loved her little Johnny.
JOHNNY. He'd forgotten that entirely. She had called him Johnny. How had he forgotten that?
She had stopped using a name once she detached. But when she fully loved him he was "Johnny"…
He scarcely noticed his father was in the picture too. And that he was actually learning his father's NAME for the first time. That barely registered.
The man who had died trying to save his life didn't register. He stared obsessively at the woman who had spent months trying to murder him.
He realized that truthfully… after all of these years and even though he'd been very young… he still somehow knew all her facial expressions perfectly in a way he didn't know any living person's.
He knew this woman so intimately. He knew every line on her skin and every fraction of a facial expression she might make. Every tone of her voice. Her smell as she held him so tightly.
And he stared at the monitor for an eternity…
"You ok?"
He jumped out of his chair, spilling his drink all over the place.
Jubilee was standing over him looking at the computer screen.
His instinct was to immediately turn off the monitor and run away. To freak out in utter mortification.
But he was an old hat at repressing things…
Instead he nonchalantly chastised her for startling the life out of him.
"Who's that?" She motioned to his mother.
And then he surprised himself by feeling defensive and proud: "Best damn mother in the universe."
What hell? How screwed up was he?
"Did she send you here to keep you safe? I hear it's way worse in Australia."
A thousand lies flashed across his mind…
He could roll with that… and say she wrote him every single day…
The other kids talked to their parents regularly. He could pretend his mom was obsessed with him. She was the best mom in the entire universe. The coolest mom ever.
OR it might be better to pretend she'd died trying to save him… when they took him away… Something melodramatic like that might work…
It hurt him very badly how so many of the other students saw their families regularly… or at least for holidays… It hurt him that they got phone calls and letters and emails…
But he would never, ever let anyone see how much it hurt him not to have a family. To have a broken mother that tried to murder him.
He rarely mentioned his family to anyone ever. When asked he realized now that he always said some defensive, exaggerated praise of his mother… She was awesome. She was the BEST ever.
For reasons he could not explain he had automatically HATED Bobby's mother. He could hear her voice on the phone and it was like nails on a chalkboard. He wanted to scream. He HATED that woman.
He knew he likely was projecting onto her… He was very jealous of Bobby in every way. But none of that mattered in the end… He just hated that woman regardless…
He remembered once when they were all much younger… he'd almost lied outright to Bobby. He wanted to hurt Bobby's feelings, to insult Bobby's mother and to make himself feel better. So he'd very nearly said: "Crappy how your parents would never accept you, eh? My mom was really cool about it all. She thought my powers were bad ass."
But he stopped himself.Just like he stopped himself right now.
He never told any of those lies about his mother. He avoided talking about her for the most part, save some heartfelt praise here and there. As warped as that was.
So he answered Jubilee: "If she was alive… I wouldn't be stuck here…"And then he walked away.
And that was true. In their life and death struggle… if she won, he'd be long dead…
If he delved too deeply into the specific memories he felt sick enough to puke!
He refused to relive any of it too much… He preferred the fantasy affection he'd created over the years.
And as a result he printed off the little picture of his mother and carried it around in his pocket.
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He had arrived at the school as an older child. He'd already been in the United States long enough to have dropped his Aussie accent.
He distinctly got the impression the point of the place was to guide potentially dangerous mutants on the "right path"… to help them learn to control their powers and live safely and peacefully in society…
He was maladjusted and very rebellious, unfortunately. He didn't fit in at all.
He'd been through a lot since his "capture" in Australia and it had made him ornery at best… and dangerous at worst…
He could have worked his looks and charisma to win everyone over… but instead he actively went out of his way to be difficult with everyone all of the time… And he became the "resident jerk"…
He ran away several times and tried to live on the streets.
There were a lot of young mutants roughing it on the streets he discovered. Many had been cast out by their families. Or worse, their families had tried to kill them.
He pretended he wasn't like them. He would fiercely pretend that his mother was different.
In the end always ended up back at the school.
The old professor wouldn't give up on him for some odd reason. He kept bringing him back and trying to help him. Maybe because he was too dangerous to be left at large. Or just maybe he'd seen enough of the kid's warped memories to want to help… It didn't matter now…
The old professor tried to help him see those dark months differently.
But he would never see them differently.
Because deep down he knew: She wasn't wrong about him. She was NOT wrong.
"She was terrified I would kill her. And you know what? SHE WAS RIGHT."
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One day he and a few classmates were running an errand with a teacher.
And he sensed an enormous fire somewhere far away.
People were dying in the fire. He couldn't explain it, but he always knew what the fire knew. Well… that was the idea anyway…
Storm stopped everything and touched his arm. "John?"
He didn't answer. He didn't hear her.
And when she tried again he shook her off and walked briskly away.
When they exited the mall it was clear there was an enormous fire across town. They could see dark black smoke and the tops of the flames from where they were standing.
Without moving an inch or making a sound –
The fire was instantly gone.
And then he realized Storm was starting at him.
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And so began the period where they were convinced he was savable and they could make a firefighter out of him…
One night in particular stood out in his memory…
Scott ushered him half asleep into the car… and he grumbled and was indifferent…
And for a second it registered in his mind just how much he actually TRUSTED his teachers… He'd never trusted anyone like this…
They drove for a while in the dark.
And then he felt it before he saw it.
He opened his eyes and there was skyscraper in a massive, raging inferno along the horizon… It was far away but so enormous that it was visible from there…
And just as suddenly the fire disappeared from the sky. The sky was DARK. Nothing on the horizon.
Scott stopped driving and looked at him in surprise. As if he'd expected to have to drive closer!
"Can I go back to bed now?" John asked with a cool defiance.
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He shouldn't have been at all surprised by their strategy.
Since their very first conversation the old profession had talked to him about becoming a glorifiedfireman…
The man felt he was using his powers backwards.
He explained repeatedly that John could not create fire because he wasn't meant to use it. His power was meant to control and STOP fires. He could save countless lives. He could put out enormous fires in an instant.
The old professor was adamant that John's gift was one of the most USEFUL gifts he had ever seen.
And it was clear many in that faction believed his gift could be used to change the perception of mutants that the government and populace at large seemed to have…
And for a brief second he saw himself winning over opposition by hiding the dangerous side of his powers and just pretending he was a "fire extinguisher"…
He saw himself saving a bunch of people… He saw himself eventually shaking hands with the President of the United States who suddenly understood things differently…
And then he got very angry. The whole concept suddenly made him very angry.
It was all so TWISTED.
Why would he help humans after all they'd done to him? Why did he need to prove himself to them? Why did they get to just DO THIS CRAP?
Plus, he was jaded enough to recognize propaganda and pandering when he saw it…
And then it all got much worse when he realized nobody TRUSTED HIM to be their poster child.
Nobody had ever trusted him. Never. Not in his whole life. Not even his mother had TRUSTED him.
And he got even angrier. And even more rebellious. He got downright HATEFUL.
He had always resented humans… but now he also started resenting mutants who thrived while he struggled… He resented people who knew success and love and happiness…
It was all very complicated and he struggled to unpack it all in his mind.
In the end he ran away from the school for good…
And too many bad things happened that could never be undone…
And now he found himself imprisoned.
They had originally taken his powers away with their chemical concoction…
Only it hadn't been permanent. Everyone's powers were coming back now.
They experimented on him now daily in the hopes of finding a NEW remedy. And he was terrified they would really find it and his powers would be gone.
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He was defensive when questioned about his family.
He lied at every turn. He'd even lied to Magneto.
He could have leveled with Mystique whose family had also tried to kill her…
But no. He would go to his grave pretending his mother was awesome and supportive and hadn't tried to murder him repeatedly when he was a toddler…
Magneto could read people far too well, of course. He'd never believed it for a second.
"Why would you lie to me like that?" He asked the boy calmly.
Silence.
And nothing further.
Magneto was the only person he'd ever been truly respectful too. He had no idea why.
He was never ornery or rebellious with Magneto…
He felt cold and serious… deadly and mature…
Yet there were a few fleeting moments where he nearly let his temper get the better of him. He'd very nearly told the old man what he REALLY thought…
While his personal views were closer to Magneto's than Xavier's… he loved his mother… he couldn't help it somehow…
And he knew there was some truth to the humans fears… That HE was exactly the type of deadly mutant described in the media… The dangerous, deadly kind… The kind that couldn't control their powers... He'd killed his own family by accident…
He'd killed neighbours at age two or three…
He was literally exactly what the humans feared. And the thought filled with him hate.
"You know all those dangerous mutants you hear about on the news? I'm in the worst one."
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The Compound was eerily silent. It was around 2 AM and very dark…
He was becoming increasingly paranoid that his usefulness to his captors was fading.
Every injection they gave him… every time they came for him…
The paranoia was unhealthy…
So now, at 2 AM he was having a nightmare that they were killing him…
He was fast asleep but his blood pressure skyrocketed… his heart was racing wildly…
They were killing him… he was fighting like hell, kicking and struggling…
They were winning… they had him - OH CRAP, NO -
And then his eye opened abruptly.
And in that instant the entire world exploded into hot, orange flame.
He didn't understand anything that was happening just then…
Well, he knew ONE fact only.
He had reached very, very far…
That was all he knew.
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"JOHNNY." She whispered sharply. Barely able to swallow.
She grabbed for him in panic. She pulled him in close, scraping him accidentally in the process.
The whites of her eyes were wide with terror as she stared at it.
There was a flame floating in the center of the room.
"LEAVE US ALONE! PLEASE LEAVE US ALONE!"
She couldn't recall exactly what she'd yelled. But she typically yelled things of that nature.
The flame turned into a perfect orb.
And eventually it dropped unexpectedly and landed on the carpet.
It actually BOUNCED once. And then stayed on the carpet.
And it didn't spread. Nothing burned.
It stayed contained like a baseball on the carpet.
She barely noticed because she was clutching him and praying into his face and promising him she would keep him safe somehow…
But nothing burned. The ball was perfectly contained.
He was learning to control it. His precision – even as a toddler – was remarkable.
He would grow up to make beautiful dragons and tornados and all sorts of shapes in the flames. Nymphs dancing. He could draw anything in the flames.
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Things could have gone differently. So very, very differently.
It was a tragedy that he never told anyone.
Telepaths might steal it from him, perhaps…
But he never told anyone… and he never would…
Coz she was the best damn mother in the universe. And he'd never stop loving her no matter what.
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END