UPDATE: I now find the ending much more satisfactory than before. But to get it there, I had to add a whole other element to the story, so it's really not the same as the first version I posted.
Fang, who never speaks more than a few words at a time, is asked to be a guest speaker at a high school.
One-line summary of this little one-shot I cooked up at approximately three in the morning a few days ago. I've edited what used to be a pile of nonsensical ramblings about hell and life and rebirth and feelings into this little one-shot for you all, since I found this idea to be very interesting in how it played out.
The dark-haired man sat on the edge of the green cloth armchair. Upon a single glance, which was what many of the students were giving him as they rushed past him on the way to their various classes, his eyes appeared to be following one of the many cracks in the white linoleum flooring. However, upon closer inspection, he was actually found to be watching the door, as if waiting to make an escape.
Years of being on the run had given him that ability –to size up a room for threats and escape routes in a matter of seconds, and to always be at the height of awareness even when threats seemed low.
Of course, it had been ten years since the destruction of the Doomsday Group, and threats had never been lower. But still, he kept glancing at the office door, ignoring the flirtatious stares from the receptionist who had handed him his name tag sticker.
It had been ten years since any attacks had been launched. Even longer since he had been trapped in the horrible place of nightmares called the School. Yet, he was the only one who still woke up at night, clenched in the throes of fear, shivering in a cold sweat, eyes filled with the image of a feral Eraser about to rip his throat out.
The others had moved on beyond recognition. Iggy and Ella had twisted the knot (couldn't really be considered tying) and had opened up an Italian restaurant (since Iggy's specialties were lasagna and chocolate cake. Angel and the Gasman were both in college, the former studying marine ecology and the latter studying chemistry. Nudge was an on-site reporter for a national news channel and frequently dashed all over the country as a result.
And Max… his Max… she wanted to try for a baby.
His toes curled up inside his sneakers at the thought. How could he even consider bringing a child into this cruel, twisted world? After what he had been through? He'd have to be beyond nuts to willingly force an innocent child into the kind of lifestyle a bird kid would inevitably have. Of course the baby would be born with wings. How could it not, when its parents were two of the most powerful mutants in history?
The door to the principal's office opened suddenly and the dark-haired man gave the tiniest of starts before composing himself into the rock of emotions he wore so well.
"Hello, Fang," The principal smiled warmly at him and held out her hand. "I'm Dr. Parcher –we talked on the phone earlier?"
"I remember," Fang said quietly, standing up and shaking her hand. She had a firm grip, which added to his generally benign first impression of the high school principal.
Dr. Parcher gave him a pleasant smile as they walked down the school hallways. "I'm sorry about the short notice, but things haven't exactly been smooth-going, what with the Spring Fling coming up, the musical, standardized testing, AP exams… it's a lot to juggle."
Fang looked at Dr. Parcher's long brown hair tinged with gray, so few gray hairs that he could count them on his fingers if he wished. She also smelled distinctly like chocolate chip cookies. Who did she remind him of? "It's no problem. Lucky I was in the area." After all these years, he still talked less than everyone else in the Flock, yet he was the one expected to deliver a lecture to a senior class of some sixty students in about two minutes. Because Pine Heights High School had contacted the Flock looking not for Nudge, the most talkative, nor Angel, the most charismatic, nor Iggy, the funniest, nor Gazzy, the most relatable, nor Max, the leader.
They had asked for him. He, Fang, the silent shadow who had been an integral part of saving the world without ever being directly in the limelight. Fang, the nobody whose claim to fame was in the form of an Internet blog that required almost no direct contact with anyone. Fang, the recluse, who spoke, on average, three words a sentence (Nudge had tallied it one day).
And he had said yes.
"You'll be in Room 1113," Dr. Parcher said, stopping outside the classroom he was to enter and deliver his monologue of what he was sure would be fifteen minutes of awkward silence, followed by five minutes of clearing his throat, followed by another ten minutes of silent staring contests. Yes, Fang had a strong belief that he would manage to give this lecture without uttering a single word. After all, if he wasn't quiet, then what was he? Absolutely nothing. "Are you ready?"
Fang nodded. "Yes."
He left the principal standing outside the classroom and entered the room slowly, doing his usual sweep of the double classroom. If it came to it, the windows in the back looked highly breakable… in case one of the half-dozing students slouching in their seats happened to be an Eraser. He smirked at the thought. In any case, he hadn't done an up-and-away in years, and he wasn't sure he wanted to start now.
Fang paused in the front of the room, halfway between the door and the teacher's desk, unsure how to begin or how to introduce himself. He cleared his throat and one of the girls in the back gave him a low wolf whistle. Fang pushed his black hair out of his eyes and looked at the class appraisingly. There were about fifty students in the double classroom, less than he had expected, but their spacing throughout the room gave the impression that there were more. Only half the students' eyes were trained on him –the other half's eyes were closed, trained on their phones, or as glazed as a fresh Krispy Kreme which he craved suddenly, along with a nice hot black coffee.
No point daydreaming about food now. He had to get this over with. Fang kept his eyes trained on the windows in the back, and he opened his mouth to speak.
"What d'you want to talk about?"
The words flew out of his mouth before he could control what his lips had created... but even as he said them, he knew he couldn't have said anything else. A girl in the front with curly blonde hair raised her hand. Fang merely pointed at her; learning the names of all these students was a waste of brainpower.
"Do you really have wings?" she asked.
The heads of more students perked up as they stared at their visitor, the elephant in the room –or rather, the bird in the room, Fang thought wryly –and they waited for his answer.
Fang nodded. "Yes."
Another hand, this time from the side. A boy with dreadlocks reaching his elbows stared interestedly at Fang as he said, "Can you show us?"
Fang pondered the question. Yes, in a physical sense, he could show them… but did he want to? The Flock had been outed more than a decade ago. There was no hiding the wings any longer, but it was still a personal matter. But if there really was no other way to ensure that these kids didn't fall asleep on his watch…
Fang removed his black leather jacket and set it on the empty teacher's desk. Feeling fifty pairs of eyes on him, he carefully unfolded the extra appendages that had been the bane of his existence for his entire life. The reason why he had grown up, lived, and experienced life the way he did –the sixteen-foot-long dark wings sticking out of his back. He took note of the awestruck expressions of the class. All eyes were trained on him now.
Another hand from the front. "Can you actually fly?" an Asian boy asked.
"Yes. But I won't." Fang said, as the students goggled at him.
The questions began to come then, faster and faster, like snowballs hitting Fang in the chest because he hadn't built up a proper fort to shield himself from the onslaught. Lesson learned –never have a snowball fight with Iggy, because even though he was blind, he was ruthless.
"Are you the one with the blog?" Yes.
"Are you single?" No.
"What hair products do you use?" 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. And a comb.
"Chocolate or vanilla?" Obviously chocolate.
"Is the blonde chick you were flying around with your girlfriend?" No –she's my wife.
"We were told you had a lecture prepared for us," the same blonde, curly-haired girl in the front asked. "Do you actually have one, or are we just supposed to ask you stupid questions and get even stupider answers in return?"
Fang blinked at the question. The girl… she reminded him of Angel at her worst. Abrasive. Controlling. A know-it-all. "I do have a lecture."
"Then lecture away… sir," the girl said primly, looking at him.
Fang nodded. "Well put. All right. Well, today we're going to talk about hell."
A stunned silence flowed through the classroom. It was an unprecedented topic, but the only one Fang had found he could talk about freely without closing up or sounding like a robot. He continued, undaunted by the crushing quiet.
"It's interesting how each culture has its own representation of the worst place in the universe. That being hell," Fang said, looking at the others in the room. "Tartaros. Niflheim. Dante's Inferno. Samsara. On and on and on."
He waited for one of the students to raise their hand, and one did oblige after a tense silence in which Fang paced the room, not willing to remain stationary for even half a second longer. "Sir… what defines hell as the worst place in the universe?"
Fang looked at the young girl, who looked so much like Angel, with her curious expression, that it sent a jolt through his heart. He felt so much older than everyone in this room all of a sudden. "You want to know why hell is defined as the worst place in the universe?"
She shrugged, unperturbed by his unblinking gaze. "I think it's a highly debatable topic, so, yes."
Fang turned around, unwilling to look at her face –or any of their faces –for a second longer. He spoke to the wall in a quiet voice. "Because I've been there."
A hushed, tense, shocked silence followed, with each of the students' faces ranging from shock to sadness to disbelief. "What d'you mean, you've been there?" another student asked, this time a boy with shaggy brown hair –reminiscent of the long hair Fang had had before he received access to a haircut every other month (even though Max still said he needed one every other week).
Fang's toes curled up inside his shoes, but he did his best to hide his discomfort. But he had to tell them. They had a right to know. So he spoke, in a deep, quiet voice, so as not to wake up the horrible memories stowed away deep inside of him. "Imagine being in a cage. No room to stand, or move, or anything. Days filled with experiments. Injections. At night, you're plagued by nightmares of being put on the operation table, forced to watch as the scientists pull out your intestines while you're screaming with horror, begging it to stop. You begin to dream of dying, which has to be better than the torture you're in. But they won't kill you. You're their prize. They don't care what they do to you in the name of science. They want to cut your limbs off and your eyes out and your brain open and observe what makes you who you are. But you don't even know who you are, because they only refer to you as it. Or Subject X-YKB. You don't have a name, a family, a birthday… you don't even know your damn age. All you have is your sanity, which you're slowly losing day by day, and with each injection and experiment you start to slip into the endless pit of despair and hopelessness. That's hell."
It was the most he had ever spoken in one go, in his life. But it didn't feel that way.
He looked fiercely at each of the interns. A few of the girls were tearing up silently, the boy with the shaggy hair stared at him dumbly, and the blonde girl who had asked the first question was looking at him… not sadly, but curiously. "How many years?" she asked.
Fang blinked. "Huh?"
The girl set her pencil and binder down and looked into Fang's eyes. "How many years did you spend there?"
Fang felt foggy all of a sudden, and sank down into the nearest chair, behind the teacher's desk. "I…"
"How many?" The girl's voice cut into his thoughts like an arrow through a tree trunk, and Fang winced at the sharpness of her voice.
"Ten years," he forced himself to say.
"Why? Why didn't you escape? Why didn't you at least commit suicide, if that was so much better than the life you were living? Why did you let yourself become a puppet of the evil side?"
Fang felt a tear come to the corner of his eye. He frowned at the alien feeling –he had only cried a maximum of twice in his life. "I am not a coward, to give up so easily, to succumb to death."
"But you are, because you didn't even try, did you?" the girl asked, her voice rising passionately. "Courage is taking the risk even though you know there's a greater chance you might die than survive. It's believing in yourself to the point that you know you can overcome the odds, that you can –"
"Shut up," Fang growled at her, standing up.
"But you're talking about the School like hell when it didn't have to be –"
"SHUT UP!" Fang roared, slamming his hands onto the desk right in front of her face. She flinched and stared at him, almost angrily. But it was nothing compared to the lava boiling up within Fang's body, coursing through his veins, turning his tears of weakness into pure steam. "This isn't a damn cross country race you can force yourself to run even with a twisted ankle! This isn't a test you can cram for the night before and pass! This is my hell! This is my torture! And you don't know anything about how horrible it felt to wake up every day to the smell of formaldehyde, or to the feeling of another damn needle sticking through your skin! So if you think I'm a coward –you're damn right I am!"
The bell for the end of class rang and the students all filed out of the room, giving Fang side glances and whispering amongst themselves.
He sank back down into the chair, burying his face in his hands. Maybe he'd succumb, for once, to tears. But nothing came. Whatever lava had been coursing through his veins a minute ago had vanished as soon as he had admitted defeat.
Ten years. Ten years in that hellhole.
He had bottled up the rage, the emotions inside of him for so long he had forgotten they existed. He had turned into a rock, unfeeling, unresponsive, only there to serve as a shoulder to lean on. Boulders never cried. Boulders never snapped. Boulders stood in the same place for thousands of years, slowly being eroded by natural disasters, until all that was left was a small handful of dust.
Fang could feel himself floating away, lighter than the wind.
"Excuse me," a voice said above him. Fang looked up to see the same girl standing before him, a concerned expression on her face. "Are you all right?"
He stood up shakily, slipping his jacket back on. "Fine," he mumbled.
"You don't talk much, do you?"
"Guess not."
The girl smiled sadly. "Well, you were wrong that I don't know what you've been through, Fang."
Fang looked at her. "What do you mean?"
She set her books down on the desk and slowly rolled up the right sleeve of her sweater. Fang frowned, wondering where this was going, but then she turned her arm over.
And Fang's eyes widened slightly at the hundreds of tiny red dots he knew so well –puncture marks. "What…?" he trailed off, staring at the horrible sight. "Who are you?" Fang asked the girl.
She examined his expression. "You don't know?"
Fang shook his head, bemused.
The girl yanked her sleeve back over her arm. "You met me in Chad, remember? I'm Jeanne."
Fang's eyes flared in recognition as she picked up her books and walked out of the room, not even looking back once. "Wait," he called, just as she was about to enter the sea of rushing students, and he'd lose her forever. "Wait."
She paused, looking back at him.
"What's the worst place in the universe for you, if not the School?" Fang asked her, heart thumping.
She pondered it for a moment before answering in a single sentence. "My mind. Being trapped inside my own mind. You've had the nightmares, I'm sure. The mind can do funny things to the poor person who succumbs to it."
Fang looked at her. "But how…"
Jeanne shouldered her backpack and fiddled with one of the straps. "How do I bear it?"
Fang nodded.
Jeanne leaned in towards him. "Why do you think I am here? Not to just graduate this stupid school with honors and attend Berkley. I am here to move on. The world has been saved. It's hard to let go of the past, but it is possible. In the end, the worst place in the world isn't a laboratory somewhere in the Netherlands. It's right here." And she pointed to Fang's forehead. "You don't have to keep all your emotions on a tight leash, Fang. You don't have to pretend to be a rock. You're allowed to speak your mind. You've earned it. You saved the world."
Fang couldn't say anything… he felt a strange sensation in the back of his throat. Kind of like someone had shoved an invisible spoon down there and was trying to make him throw up. It hurt –the feeling was completely alien to him and he wanted it to go away. When he spoke, his voice was shaky, something it had never been before. He hated this, but he plowed on. "The School… affected me the most. I dunno why."
Jeanne looked at him, her face a mixture of understanding tinged with sadness and regret. "I think I do. You might be the strongest one of your Flock on the outside, but all those unreleased emotions have to go somewhere. And they're all inside you, Fang. Waiting to come out. Waiting to seize their chance. Are you going to let them, or are you going to trap them all inside of you until you burst?"
The spoon in Fang's throat dug a little deeper. He swallowed painfully. "I…"
"Don't trap yourself in Samsara, Fang."
Little claws were digging into the corners of his eyes, tugging on them.
Fang never cried.
But a teardrop fell onto the table anyway. A perfect circle on the dark, patterned wood.
And another.
And another.
Eyes brimming with freshly conjured tears, Fang finally looked up to find that there was absolutely no one there.
He wiped his eyes furiously, peering out the window in the door of the empty classroom to find that the hallways were completely empty –maybe the next period had started. But Jeanne was nowhere to be seen.
Ring.
Fang jumped as his phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered the call, clearing his throat to get rid of any evidence of tearing up. "Hello?"
"Hey, Fang. How'd the lecture go?"
Fang's lips twitched upwards at the sound of the dulcet tones of his wife. "Fine."
"Just fine? Nudge was freaking out when she heard about it. She said... what were her words exactly? 'Fang's finally coming out of his shell and talking to people! He's being a social butterfly!' Or something like that –"
"I've been thinking," Fang said, his deep voice cutting hers off.
"About what?" Max asked after a pause.
Fang rolled up a sleeve of his black jacket with one hand and stared at his own, tan, blemish-free arm.
Blemish-free.
Scot-free.
Free.
And his next few words were completely out of character for him. Granted, it was only one sentence, and it contained barely any emotion, but Fang felt his heartbeat get faster and faster as he uttered those life-changing words.
"I want to have kids."
Silence on the other end. Fang wondered if Max had died of shock or something. Nothing usually threw her off, but something like this… "You sure you want to have a kid?" Max asked him after a long pause.
"Not a kid. I want to have kids. Plural. Multiple. I want to fill a house with little Fax babies."
Max laughed. "You sure none of those high school kids slipped you pot, or something?"
"Yes."
Her tone became serious. "Fang. Are you completely sure?"
Fang glanced at his arm once again, completely healed from any scars from his past. If his arm could heal, so could he. He'd get through this. He'd move on.
"Sure as hell."
The original ending was bugging the hell out of me (pun intended) so I had to rewrite it.
Also, I'm pretty sure I took the 'Fax babies' quote from someone on this site, but I can't remember who. It just popped into my head while I was writing and I included it for the hell of it (man, I need to sleep). So thanks, whoever you are, for your contribution.
Thanks for reading. I'm eternally grateful (okay, NOW I'm done).