A/N: Written for tptigger for Yuletide, based on a request for a story about Irene Quinn. As always, questions, comments, critique, and squee are all welcome. The title comes from the song "99 Red Balloons." Thanks to htbthomas for the extensive help with everything from brainstorming to cheerleading to beta reading.

ninety-nine decision street

by LadySilver

Of all the places she thought being a Tomorrow Person would take her, this was not it. This was so far from being on, or even in the general vicinity of, the list; Irene had to pinch the tender skin on the inside of elbow to make sure that she wasn't having the nightmare again. She used the hard tips of her nails, and jumped from the spark of pain. The skin turned red, then faded back to white, and she still questioned what the evidence told her- which wasn't like her at all. From through the scratched wooden door in front of her—a relic of the worst of the 1960s if ever there was one—she heard the murmur and jostling of a crowd of people. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck.

"Now would be a good time to get that telepathy back, Quinn," she murmured to herself. "Now would be a really, super good time." She shot a glance up and down the hallway that was empty now, though someone was bound to come around the corner any second and see her standing outside the door with a sheaf of papers tucked under her arm, a pen clenched tight in her other hand, "and talking to myself," she concluded out loud. "You really need to stop talking to yourself. Just because people can't hear your thoughts anymore, that's no reason to let them spill out of your mouth. You're—" She sucked in a deep breath and stamped her foot, as if the action could tamp down the nerves that made her want to turn around and skitter away before something really awful could happen to her.

The stirring inside the room had an unmistakable tenor of restlessness, and Irene knew that if she didn't face what was on the other side of that doorway soon, she'd have some hard explaining to do. And this was from the person who had been shot and had to come up with a cover story for the doctors and nurses in the ER while bleeding to death and in agonizing pain. It hardly seemed comparable.

She'd faced worse. She knew she had unobjectively faced worse. In fact, if anyone here knew the levels of worse she had faced down, they would think she was an exaggerating liar because here she was chickening out in front of a freaking closed door. Sucking in a breath, she gave one last glance at her slacks and shirt to make sure that she hadn't spilled anything on them in the last twenty seconds, and opened the door to her section of Biology 101.

Forty kids were crammed into the room. OK, not kids because most of them were probably older than she was, even if only by a year or two. All the seats were filled. The rustling of impatience picked up a strain of confusion as the students twisted and turned in their seats, looking for an empty one that the late arrival could take. Irene hesitated in the doorway several seconds longer than she should have, taking in the giant blackboard that spanned the front of the room (a blackboard? Really?), the stained and chipped Linoleum floor, and the cinder-block walls painted in Institutional Yellow. This had to be a joke, someone's warped idea of a prank on the new hire. Every classroom she'd ever been in as a student had nothing less than a smartboard. She'd had computers and teachers who were wired to microphones so that everyone could hear them. Here she had… was that a VCR in the corner? Mounted to a rolling stand with a tube TV on top?

It was just for one semester, she reminded herself. One semester while she got herself back on her feet. Then she could apply for real jobs, ones in research laboratories where she could interact with people who already knew the difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Clutching her papers tighter, she crossed to the front of the room and to the table in the front that was obviously supposed to serve as both her desk and her lectern. Holding the now slightly damp papers to her chest like a shield, she turned to face her class for the first time.

"Hello," she started. The first syllable squeaked, but the second came out more-or-less the way it was supposed to. "I'm Irene Quinn. Welcome to—" The rest of the sentence fled as she looked out at the rows of students sitting before her.

And saw Stephen, sitting dead-center in the front row, grinning back at her. He touched two fingers to his forehead in a casual greeting that also happened to cause the papers in her hand to ruffle as if a strong breeze had just passed through them.

[Stop it!] she thought, as hard as she could. She might not be telepathic anymore, but she knew that he could still read minds just fine.

Clearing her throat, she tried again. "Welcome to Biology 101. I'm your instructor for this course…"

"No way!" someone yelled from the back. "What're you? Like, twelve?"

Irene peered through the sea of blue jeans and baseball caps. The heckler was a lanky guy with pasty skin, a patch of wiry hair hanging off the end of his chin, and a Rangers cap tilted sideways on his head. She already didn't like him. She also wasn't going to let him get to her.

A black girl seated next to him—her hair dyed a bright red and heavy gold hoops dangling from her ears-snickered.

"So, syllabus," she said, choosing not to rise to the bait. She handed the stack of papers to the corner-most desk and started in on her carefully practiced summary of the course and her expectations while the papers made their way around the room. She knew that most of them would end up in the garbage before the hour was out, but at least the students couldn't claim that she hadn't given them one. Well, they could, and someone probably would, but she'd already thought of that and had posted a copy on the course website and had emailed one to each of the students on her roster.

Somehow she made it through the whole hour without completely giving away that she'd never stood in front of a classroom before. Even while working on her Master's degree and PhD, she'd done all of her assistantship work in the laboratories, in part because the schools weren't about to put a fifteen year old in front of a class. Since she'd never objected to the obvious discrimination, no one had felt the need to address it, which meant she'd gotten all the way to ABD status without having any more classroom experience than one gained simply from having sat in one her whole life.

While the class was shuffling out of the room, she snagged Stephen's arm. "What are you doing here?"

"Taking Intro to Bio?" he answered, too fast, and with an exaggerated innocent expression that gave away that he knew what she was really asking. Irene crossed her arms and stared at him. After a second, he relented, "I'm a student here. When I saw your name on the course schedule, I couldn't resist signing up. Why?"

"You know why. Ever since I left the—" She looked around the empty classroom and lowered her voice anyway, just in case someone was standing outside and listening in. "Tomorrow People. I haven't seen any of you or talked to any of you." She'd found a room to sublet from an elderly woman who didn't want to live alone and who couldn't bear to move out of the house she'd lived in for thirty years. The place was tiny and it smelled of bleach and moth balls—and it was all hers.

"That was your choice, Irene," Stephen said. "You didn't have to move out. You know you could have stayed in the Refuge for as long as you liked."

"I needed to get on with my life. Besides, you guys didn't need me around, taking up space that a new trainee could use."

"Are you seriously telling me that you walked away from having ULTRA's research facilities as your own private laboratory because you were afraid of taking up space?"

Irene's eyes dipped down before she could stop them. The world class, cutting edge facilities that the Tomorrow People had inherited when they took over the ULTRA facility were drool worthy. There was a time when she would have sacrificed anything to get to play in them. Then she found out that her willingness to sacrifice did have its limits and she had been forced to exceed them. And it turned out that hanging out in the place where her sacrifice had been dreamed up was not exactly the fun times she had hoped it would be.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Stephen said.

"Stop reading my mind!"

"Believe it or not, I wasn't. There are other ways to tell what a person's thinking, like body language? Come on, Irene, you now that this—" He waved a hand around the classroom with its buzzing fluorescent lights and windowless walls because it had been built during the height of the Cold War—"isn't the life you wanted."

"Yeah, well I didn't get to live that life, did I? Or the one that came after it. I figure the third time's gotta be the charm." Irene swept an abandoned syllabus off one of the front desks and crumpled it into a ball herself. As she expected, the garbage can by the door was overflowing with the paper. Didn't the students understand how long she'd spent over the last week crafting the work they had so casually thrown out? Why didn't they care? Was this going to be just the first in a long line of semesters where she watched all her effort get casually dismissed by people who thought that merely registering for a class entitled them to pass it? Her new colleagues had all warned her about the differences between the kids at MIT and the ones at a Ju-Co, only reinforcing prejudices she had only suspected she had.

"Do you want me to drop?" Stephen asked. "I can find another section to take."

It was on the tip of her tongue to say yes. Yes, she wanted him gone. Yes, she wanted all of them gone. If she couldn't be one of them anymore, she didn't want to be surrounded with reminders of them either. But when she opened her mouth, the word that came out was "Don't." She swallowed, tried to force her lips into the shape of the word she wanted, and then she was shaking her head in the negative. "No, don't. It'll…it'll be nice to have a familiar face in here."

For a second, Stephen looked like he was going to argue. With as many sections of the class as the school offered, finding a different one would not be a hardship. And maybe he'd be better off with an instructor who'd taught the class before and who had the slightest idea what she was doing. Junior college, she realized, was Stephens's attempt to get to the life he wanted to live, too. He smiled, his body relaxing. "OK."

Irene held up a finger. "But no powers. You are here to learn the material yourself, not to crib it from someone else. If I catch you reading anyone's mind, including my own, I'll—" She stopped, because she didn't know what she'd do. She scowled. "I'll flunk you. And then you'll have to explain the F to your mother, take the hit to your GPA, and pay to take the class all over again." She was gratified to see Stephen squirm and his face pale; she'd found the right threat.

"Academic honesty policy?"

"Academic honesty policy," she confirmed. "I don't have to explain how you cheated, just prove that you did."

"Right. No mind-reading. Got it. Anything else?"

Irene glanced at the clock over the door with its round face and hands that clicked off the minutes in sharp retorts. She had an hour to kill until her next class. "Join me for lunch?" Realizing that that could be misconstrued as an abuse of power, the instructor asking the student to lunch, she hastily tacked on, "I don't want to sit by myself on the first day; that's all."

"You know what," Stephen answered, "I don't either. Astrid went to NYU—traitor—and I really don't want to hang out with all the other losers I went to high school with. I kind of had enough of them in high school."

They both knew that Stephen could teleport over to visit Astrid any time he wanted, but the offer was nice.

And maybe Irene had missed the Tomorrow People. A little.