So Happy Together
As you might figure from the fact that this is an Olhado fic and Olhado has no sense of humor other than a sick and wrong one which no right-thinking person would care to experience, this is really not a cheerful-fic-containing-gentle-irony-and-quiet-romance.
However! This is my first slash fic. I guess. So, that in and of itself might make you happy. Except, Nai changed her mind and has decided Morwen will kill me. Look, I didn't do anything to Lance. On screen. His lifestyle choices are not my fault.
Also, that which Morwen and several others were afraid I was going to do to Scott didn't happen. Scott is whole. Mostly. He'll recover!
I did kill the continuity again. Apologies.
Um, and Forge and the toaster . . . well, I was going to follow Morwen's suggestion, but I decided the fic would simply reach over the limits of voyeuristic (hee hee! I said voyeur!) if I attempted that particular pairing. However, Forge does appear, sorta, and, if you squint at it, the toaster may appear in this fashion:
"No one is hotter than the Scott . . . ster."
If you rearrange several of those letters, you get toaster.
I'm trying to be funny, okay?
Anyway, this is rated PG-13 for sexual references and dementia.
The night is thin and moldy -- the stars seep through rotten holes in a jagged sky. There is a marked lack of moonlight -- the moon itself is a vaguely circular blotch somewhere over the horizon. I run my eyes over it once and don't bother placing it again.
There's a hollow silence to certain hours of darkness, assuming the wind is not in a howling mood and you're far enough from highways and loud high schoolish parties to hear nothing but the sounds that darkness makes. It's hard to describe. Not quite a ringing of the ears, not quite a decompression, but an active coolness rubbing against the tympanic membranes and, with a change in the air hailing the beginnings of morning, it sighs and withdraws, dying, into the embryonic heat.
I feel so much myself when the sun is down and the world is quiet that I have to wrap my arms around my chest to keep myself from overflowing the rim of my collarbone and dribbling lost into the grass, enlivening the soil underneath, but leaving me a drained-out body. Of course, the drained have no particular yearning over hopeless, amorphous needs, so maybe it'd be a fair trade-off.
It's the whole amorphousness of my longings that make them so frustrating. If I had something in particular to focus on . . . like a possible B grade I'd want to fix or a spat with Jean or anyone, really . . . it wouldn't be so bad. I wouldn't have this idea I have to crouch over my knees and pull them against my rib cage until the desperate, inexplicable fluttering in them melts away with the dawn . . . or perhaps the next dawn. Or the next. It wouldn't particularly matter. I am patient. But if I had somewhere to focus my energies, I wouldn't need to be patient.
A light flares up in the near distance, a thin, wavering light. All things are drawn in variations of grey, so the light could be, in reality, any color, but it dances like a flame, poised momentarily again the darkness, before it is contained, smothered into a mere spark -- a spark that broods in the trees while whatever carries it slowly approaches.
I am gradually aware of footsteps. They had doubtless been there before, but I wasn't paying attention to such concrete things as actual sound. They are somewhat heavy footsteps, but not oppressively so, probably only because whatever their owner is treading on is not gravel or steel, but grass, which crushes so carefully when pressed, almost as if afraid to make too much of a fuss about dying.
I am perhaps in a morbid mood, but not an antsy one. I straighten my back to full in-charge position, glasses tilted high on my cheekbones and expression serious, and wait.
The bearer of the spark ends up being familiar, when he emerges from the red-grey washed-out shadow of the trees and into the starlight. I don't have the form of manic, tense energy that allows me to be surprised, so my stare might rank as intrigued and confused instead, but if I had a suprisable state, I probably would have jumped.
The bearer of the spark is Duncan -- a Duncan rolling a cigarette back and forth between the pads of his fingers with a slyly meatish expression that is nothing new, but has an edge of menace in the night, when the slight illumination of the cigarette throws stark shadows over the dull face and makes the eyes glitter.
"What are you doing here?" I ask, efficiently skipping over Duncan's apparently new nicotine addiction.
"Had to talk to you," he answers, leaning back on the balls of his feet and taking a long, casual drag. "It's of some importance."
Some importance? Duncan usually sounds like he's faking a caddish form of cleverness, but never serious and stark. I give him a probing look. And, just then, another pair of footsteps comes clattering over the long, apartment pavement. I can hardly help but look over my shoulder.
And, what else could I guess, it's Taryn, slim, a little steely-eyed, but with a bland, non-threatening face that belies the flashes of bitterness I caught every once in a while. Funny -- I haven't spoken to Taryn for months. Or . . . to Duncan, for that matter.
Duncan waits for Taryn to reach his side before speaking again. "We both need to talk to you."
"About what?"
Duncan jerks his head toward the road. "We'll treat you to a late dinner. What do you feel like?"
"I'm not hungry, Duncan."
"I suppose we could talk here," Duncan says with obvious regret. "If you promise not to raise some hue and cry and wake up your fellow apartmenteers."
"What do you want?" I press.
"To convey information."
Duncan's meatish face suddenly seems to break open as does Taryn's slimmer one and I am definitely surprised this time and leap back about a foot, trying not to look at the caved in faces that take on a skullish white in the blasted starlight. I could have sworn I'd be out of reach - I feel like I've jumped back that far -- but boned fingers clutch at my arm and, as I try to jerk away, leave long silvered streaks on my skin, like the mark of broken moth wings.
"Get away!" And Duncan grabs my other arm and they're so close I can smell the dust of decay and then they're gone in a spray of moth leavings that swirl and pile into my nose and mouth until I choke . . .
"Yaaaah!" The back of my hands smack against my knees - I'm sat up, eyes wide open before I'm actually awake. Dawn is a wan grey line leaking through the curtains and it can't be later than five. I'm no stranger to nightmares, but they don't usually wake me up so violently - and I've had worse. Even in the throes of the darkest images, I don't usually kick the sheets halfway across the room.
If I still lived in the Institute, Jean or Xavier would already be knocking on the door, expecting me, how could I do otherwise, to open up and quickly explain that it was nothing. Of course, they wouldn't believe me and Jean would sit me down in the hallway, pigeonholing the flashes of unhappiness concealed in my unconscious psyche until I was thoroughly confused, then shove me toward the St. John's Wort.
Instead, the hallways is silent and I slowly relax, my arms easing down into my stomach and my eyes blinking back to normal tired slits. In a moment, I'll either collapse back to the pillow and sleep until eight or I'll have to get up. There's a rawness at the back of my throat that suggests sleep - perhaps sleeping in past the eight o' clock alarm and taking the day off altogether. You can have a certain air of responsibility that makes teachers and employers forgive this inevitable lapse or that. It wouldn't do any harm to stay in bed this once . . .
I get up, giving the clock a cursory look as I turn the alarm to "off" as unnecessary. 5:25. Not all that early. In my "X-Men" days, I was usually up earlier. I'm doubtless spoiled by independence.
After all, at this hour, I can take my leisure over getting dressed and taking breakfast and perusing homework, what with class not until 8:30. Indeed, I have a nice, full three hours.
6 AM and if my throat still hurts, I'm bored - efficiently bored, but bored. With a sigh and a creak-back of my shoulders, I leave the apartment (after rinsing the dishes and checking the locks) and my footsteps make hollow tones on the stairs on my route to the parking lot. There's always a moment of comfort in seeing the red, white streaked, cropped-oval of car that happens to be mine. I might be renting a place to live, I might have to borrow spare furniture from the Institute, but the car is mine.
Even if those are Xs embossed on the hubs.
My hands are strangely unsteady on the wheel, and I wonder quickly if maybe a quick nap wouldn't be amiss. But the moment passes and I rev the car into life, carefully backing out, although there's hardly going to be traffic in the lot at this hour. I'm not sure where I'm going - I'm driving in the vague direction of the Institute and I'm about to make a turn in possibly the opposite direction when a glinting new, black-green SUV comes sliding around the corner. Even if I couldn't recognize the car, the tinted windows can never quite dampen the full vibrant redness of Jean's hair. I pull over to the curb. I have no doubt that she's sensed me already. Sure enough, she makes a U-turn and parks behind me.
I wait in the car, listening to the almost soundless door-open-door-close and the clack-clack of her heels on the pavement, finding no reason to move or even look over my shoulder. Why bother acknowledging someone who already knows your every thought?
"Scott! Are you all right?" The click-clack thuds next to the car door and she's leaning right in my face, her elbows balanced on the interior of that door.
"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?" Blink. Blink. Completely unconcerned and not at all unnerved by the green eyes boring right into mine.
"You had a really traumatic dream. I could hear your mental distress all the way from the Institute and I had to come. What was it?"
"Um . . . something about the X-Files. I was up too late last night."
"You really should take better care of yourself," she pontificates, one hand suddenly on mine, squeezing it for my comfort, I suppose.
"I try."
"Where are you going so early?"
"Just . . . around." Her hand is still squeezing mine. The pressure brings the edges of my palm off the steering wheel and, for the first time, I notice an odd, dusty sheen to the plastic. That wasn't there before . . .
Like a moth rubbed its wings against it . . .
"Oh! I was meaning to ask you! Bayville High's doing a benefit concert for some of the elementary students in town. You've got to come to rehearsal today."
"I'm not a high school student any more . . ."
"But you have such a good tenor voice and we need tenors. Duncan practically begged that I ask you."
And I somehow don't think it has anything to do with my voice. "I do have class and work and . . ."
"It's only a half hour - during lunch! Come on, Scott, we need you."
I can't think of any immediate excuse not to go, save for that big looming honest reason I don't want to. That one reason that it's never polite to give. ÍI guess I could try it out."
"Of course you can. I expect you then . . . oh! And Taryn will be there!"
Both she and Duncan, dead and crumbled between my fingers. How morbid. "Really."
"Yes! You just have to talk to her, Scott. You and her made such a couple."
"Hmmm."
"I'll expect to see you there! I know you'll be on time, right?"
"Yeah."
Wait! She didn't tell me where it was! I can wander around Bayville with my eyes closed or just claim I couldn't find . . .
"It's in the auditorium." She gives me a knowing smile. "You'll love it. You really will." And she withdraws herself from my car and clatters back to hers. I guess I'll be going to that practice.
I used to have a computer, chips degraded by age and the abuse of younger housemates, memory spliced and fuzzy, that would toss up an error message every time I turned it on. It would inform me, with the same bored urgency regardless of how many times I'd already seen it, that there was a file missing and the name of this particular file happened to be "Shine." I never knew what that was supposed to mean or what relevancy it had to the computer's performance, but, if I thought about it too much, it served as a dark, self-pitying metaphor for my role in the Xavier Institute. Whatever other components I might have been lacking, possibly the largest and most obvious one was "Shine" (although, without the error message, I wouldn't have ever referred to it as that).
I'm talking personality-wise. After all, genetically the big thing I was missing (and am still missing) was the gene that bound everyone else together, that X-gene. But that wasn't so important to me - who wanted the hassle of having odd and socially extravagant things pop out of as easily as hormones, or sweat? No, the real thing I lacked was, I guess you could call it charisma. While everyone else I knew seemed to be glowing with themselves, with a certain internal attractiveness that caused people to like them on the first level and fascinate some poor soul irresistibly on another, I just didn't seem to have that. Jean could always slip in and out of the social strata without missing a dance and even Kurt-with-a-tail had (still has) a steady and unbelievably faithful girlfriend, but I had . . . Taryn, briefly.
Oh, really, it's not as though I thought the entire purpose of my high school years was to get hitched. There are plenty of very single people who are perfectly fine with it, who save the whole mess until college. Maybe I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about something more essential. I'm talking about just that basic aura that everyone else seems to have that makes them noticeable, if only to one person at a time. I could blend so well into the background that I had to take charge any time I could just to stand out a little. I didn't even have the appropriate frustrated angst that's supposed to come from being ignored and misunderstood. See, if I'd had that, at least, someone would have looked at me just by instinct -- I wouldn't have to yell in their ear to get their attention.
This is even why Jean mothers me so hard, because she can read this in me and she's constantly trying to make me feel included and wanted and needed in that deep-friend sense that I'm supposed to crave. Come on, Scott, you want to go to Duncan's party, meet new people! Come on, let's go to a movie. Come on, come on, come on. But she's got to know that I can only see it as forced, an overcompensating attempt to make me feel whole, when I'm really mostly happy on my own, as long as no one makes a big deal of it. Why should I care what anyone else thinks or does? What business of mine is it? Therefore, I should likewise be left alone.
Still, I'm pulling into the school parking lot as if I have absolutely no choice on the matter. Either I'm the weakest-spined peon in the known history of the city or . . . I'm the weakest-spined peon. I take my hands of the steering wheel, in a flash of panic remembering the grey moth marks I'd left on it this morning. But . . . assuming they were ever there, they're gone now. I'm just letting an odd dream go to my head, of course. I suppose something has to go to my head.
Lock the car, stuff the keys in my pocket, and go walking up the long, arched sidewalk toward the main doors. I'll have to sign in as a visitor, odd as that is. Wasn't too many months ago I was pacing these halls, barred with the sunlight streaming in from the windows, and all metallic lockers and incomprehensible chatter. Come to think of it, I didn't like high school much.
I get a slip of thick paper that acts as a Visitor's Pass, although the uninterested nonchalance of the girl behind the office counter belies exactly how important such a pass is. Or maybe it's just me. The halls, as I stride as purposefully as I can through them, are crowded with extended legs and spread out lunches - what self respecting student eats in the cafeteria? The auditorium is right where I left it, one door ajar and emitting somewhat painfully atonal mutters of sound. I never understood what use a benefit concert was if the only people who wanted to give it couldn't sing. Whose benefit is it anyway?
I enter, trying to keep an easy, flat smile on my face. The concerters are bunched together on a high set of risers, shoved to one side of the stage. The rest of that stage is taken up entirely by music stands and formatted chairs - left for or from the orchestra practice, hard to tell out of context. There's a director figure in the middle of the stage, near the front edge, a college student, maybe a year older than I am, male, looking irritated, but trying to hide it. I ascend the stage from the riser side, which means I end up next to the altos. Rogue, firmly covered up and gloved, gives me an automatic glare, always the first to strike down stupid prep incompetence (prep defined as "anyone who gives the remote impression of being better adjusted than her"). Jean, further off in the sopranos, gives me the reinforcing smile presumably necessary to bring me back again. Taryn beside her, trying not to look at me. Duncan, on the farthest edge of the tenors, grins nastily and motions beside him to the empty space. Wonderful.
I scoot behind the risers, my back aggravating the black curtains lining the stage, and slip up next to Duncan, trying not to acknowledge that I'm standing by him any more than absolutely necessary. He's smiling widely out of the corner of my eye, his footballed jowls pressed up taught against his cheekbones and all I can think of is that his face just . . . caved in. It's not like me to be so unduly affected by a dream like this, but my usual active dislike for Duncan is colored by nothing less than horror.
The conductor raises his hands with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, leading the makeshift choir in "God Bless America." His lack of enthusiasm is justified. About half the choir can't sing at all and the other half has the sort of expression that screams "when is this going to be over?" I expect I'm wearing that one myself. And Jean, well, Jean's a nice girl -- could hardly know a nicer or more willing to drop everything she's doing and is to help you out, but she really . . . can't . . . sing. And she's loud about it.
Duncan keeps smiling and now that large fist of his is grinding into his palm. Don't ask me why, although I never had any doubt that Duncan was out to get me when he told Jean to invite me to this. Duncan and I are just not friends. It might be because he still thinks of me as a rival, despite the fact that he and Jean have been going steady for years now. It might be because Jean did take me on a casual date earlier this week. I mean, very casual. We went to see a movie and then went to our respective homes afterward. I suppose that Duncan might have heard of it and deep in the cockles of his muscle-bound heart, he felt an unbearable surge of jealousy and just had to have words with me about it. Stay away from my property, Summers.
This might all explain why he's making that threatening "I'm going to beat you up" motion with his hands. Hopefully, he gets over it. I'm not in the mood.
"Summers . . ." he hisses under his breath, that fist still pounding and that grin still wide and predatory. "I'm gonna kill you . . . "
All right, back up. Duncan is a clod and a fairly violent clod at that, but what on earth would make him so angry about this now? Jean possibly breaking up with him? Because I've dated Jean in tiny, nothing spurts for a while and he's usually not quite this mad. Scowling, yes, but usually forbearing on the death threats. And with him exploding into sheets of dust last night, after acting very out of character, I don't trust this at all. I try to keep singing.
And then I get clipped right under my jaw, between it and the beginning of my spine and I'm off the risers and my head's banging hopelessly against the very hard stage before I black out for what feels like a second.
When my brain finds my body again and wakes it up, my glasses have landed somewhere off my face and although my eyes are open, I can't see anything more distinct than a general blur. I flail for the frames that can't have scooted too far and a booted foot plants itself on my wrist.
"You're dead, Summers!"
"Ow!"
"Duncan, what's wrong with you?"
"I know what you did with her!"
Duncan's voice climbs up higher than I'm used to hearing it as I struggle to get out from under his weight. If I could only see . . .
"What are you talking about?"
"I know everything! You did it! You and Scott had it -- everyone knows!"
"Everyone knows what?"
Taryn's voice climbs in. "Everyone knows you did it. Everyone knows!"
Two voices sound an awfully lot like a crowd. What's this about? Since when are Jean and I an item? I finally extract my arm from Duncan's heel and go flailing again, my fingers closing over my glasses. Convenient. I push the lenses over my eye just in time to see Duncan's fist plummeting toward my face. I could have dodged it on my own, but I catch a slight transparent wavering around that fist and know that Jean is doing her thing. I get out of the way nevertheless.
"This is nuts," I bark, as the college director goes pattering off down the stage to get some kind of authority. The risers have spread out into curious clumps of students, making a semi-circle around me and Duncan. They really should be chanting "Fight, fight!" If nothing else, it would add to the mood. "Listen, I haven't done anything and even if I did, you'd have no way of knowing, huh?"
"Everyone says," Duncan grits, his fists released and up and ready to pummel.
"Well, everyone is stupid. I'm leaving." I get to my feet, brushing my pants off and not even bothering to hide a scowl. I'm halfway across the stage before someone shouts a "What's that?!" and, being stupid myself, I have to look around.
Where I fell has been outlined and loosely filled in by grey -- fine grey particles that have already been smeared and disturbed from my little conflict with Duncan. I'm suddenly dizzy.
"Scott, are you all right?" Jean queries loudly, stepping toward me. There are a few snickers. Why don't we just make it worse?
"Great." And I make my way off the stage by holding the banister. There's the clack-clack of her following. I wait until we're in the hall to get really annoyed.
"Scott, I know you're upset, but I don't know how any of this happened and . . . "
"It's all right."
"No, it's not. Scott, it's . . ."
"Stupid to lie to a telepath, I know."
"I am sorry. But now you're going to go off and brood, aren't you?" There's a sulk in her tone.
"I am going to class."
"How does your head feel?"
"Fine." Yes, it's throbbing a little like those fake tom-tom drums we played in elementary school together, but I did just hit it.
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"I wonder how that rumor got started."
"Look at the meathead and his new accomplice."
"Could you try not to sound so bitter about it? It was obviously just a misunderstanding."
"I had a crappy childhood. I hate everyone." Turn the hall, keep striding.
"Scott . . . "
We're almost to the outer door and she still hasn't gone away. "What?"
"I'm worried. The grey powder . . . "
I draw myself up to my full height and fold my arms. "What about it?" Play big and she might not sense how much it freaks me out.
"It's a bit . . . late to be manifesting mutant abilities."
"You think it's that? I can emit dust? Whooosh." And have cheerful hallucinations.
"Scott . . . maybe you should return to the Institute for a while."
"I'm moved out, Jean, and I'm not sick. Why?"
"Just for . . . observation." Her large green eyes plead with mine. And I'm not interested with dealing with her at the moment. I sigh, turn on my heels, and head toward the parking lot. Her shoes clack-clack after me, and she probably says something or the other, but I pay her no attention because, otherwise, I'll be in Bayville High all day while she explains to me why I'm a fragile flower of a human being that needs nurturing. It is nice of her to move out of the way when I back up the car.
Supposedly, I was going back to school. I'm not quite sure how I ended up at home and sprawled out on my couch, no less. I'm not the type to skip class, really, so it all doesn't logically add up. Me on the couch . . . not in class . . . having no idea what time it is or whether or not I missed a quiz or three given by sadistic teachers . . .
That and feeling really nasty. I mean, it's the edge of spring-summer and I'm shivering, while my eyes burn silently behind my eyelids and I honestly don't feel like opening them. I honestly don't feel like doing much of anything. Usually I'm more than capable of rousing myself and doing something, anything, even if just restlessly cleaning up the kitchen and picking up stray bits of lint on the carpet. Maybe washing out the bathroom a few times and . . .
Perhaps my thoughts wander somewhat far afield, but that's normal, after all, I haven't achieved quite the control over myself that would let me sift my thoughts along set pathways, already ordered and organized and flying off to the correct conclusions and then fizzling out, not to bother me again. If only, but things keep coming up and coming up and coming up and pressing through what I should be thinking about, like getting myself off the couch and moving around until my muscles are warm again, yes, things keep coming up and distracting me and trying to make me think about things that don't matter in the slightest and . . .
There's someone at the door. Whoever it is isn't knocking, but I can hear it shuffling around and messing with the doorknob. Well, hah, I lock the door. As if I'd leave it unlocked for random tramps to come busting in and stealing whatever isn't nailed down or welded down or maybe glued down, because college students don't have excesses of money . . .
The floor is shaking under the couch, a little wooden tremor, and I hear the door click angrily and swing open. So the tramp and the Bayville fault (is there a Bayville fault, there must be, yes, although it probably wouldn't be called a Bayville fault) are working together to break into my apartment. Well, very well, they can have a chair if they want, but they can't have the couch, sorry, because I glued that down very solidly and besides, I'm on top of it, and no one wants me, so they'll just have to deal with it . . .
"There he is," a coarse female voice whispers and she must be wearing quiet shoes and not clack-clacks like Jean because I didn't hear her come in. Although, now that I listen, I can hear her moving and I can hear someone large moving, because the someone's wearing boots, I think.
"'e's wasted, man," a male voice says uncertainly and I think I hear them around the couch now, breathing.
"Whaddya expect? 'Course he's wasted. You takin' the front or 'm I?"
"Which is 'eavier?"
"Doesn't matter. Look, since I'm near the 'ead, I'll take it, you grab the legs."
"'ll right." Two hand grip my thighs, I think, more tightly than necessary. I'm sure the proper procedure is to kinda ease the arms under the knees or something, not squeeze the legs together. That's just not comfortable for the patient or the abductee. There's two other hands at my back, high around my shoulders, and they move down under my arm pits and start lifting and that's really an inappropriate amount of touch, although it is all right form to thread your arms through the arm pits, you should really be more discreet about it.
"Stop 'oldin' 'is legs like that -- yer gonna wear yourself out carryin' 'im like that."
"What should I do?"
"Let your arms take some of the weight, y'know? We gotta get 'im down the stairs."
We go out the door carefully, with lots of little hitches in the way I'm being carried, and it'd be nice if I could pretend I was floating, because their skin and clothes keeps rubbing so roughly against mine and I really don't like that. Appreciate if they'd just . . .
"Should've brought 'ot pads, eh, Lance? Yow!"
"Yeah, 'e's all . . . burnin' up. Crap. 'Ow sure's the boss this ain't gonna kill 'im?"
"Whadda I know?"
"He's dropping dust all over."
"So, like, hurry up."
Clump clump down the stairs and I feel like I'm going to fall and crack my back on the concrete, but I don't, and then I can feel myself being set in a car before something slips away and I fall asleep.
I wake up feeling better, but a mattress creaks like a shot when I move back my shoulders and I remember that I might have been carried out of my apartment before I dropped off. Granted, it was just as likely a dream, but my own mattress doesn't do much more than groan no matter what I do to it. I half roll my body to one side, squinting open one eye and marking that I am indeed on a mattress and although it looks clean, there are patches of it stretched so thin by springs that if you should jostle it, the metal might shove right through and lance your back.
Not that my back isn't already sore. Sleeping on a bare mattress, you'd almost be better sleeping on the floor. And on that mattress is that fine layer of grey dust . . . With the back of my hand, I flick it off, quickly wishing I had a vacuum cleaner handy, since the dust is no doubt scattered on the floor now . . .
What the heck's going on?
I remove myself from the mattress proper, standing up and trying to get my bearings. I'm surrounded by glass. I don't mean it's pressing against me -- no, I have the space of a room to move in, should I move, the mattress in the center and a large margin stretching around it. To my back, the glass peters off into concrete, making a white frame around a door, which I test -- which opens into a small bathroom. A chute ends just inside my containment, but climbs outside into the ceiling. Below its opening is an unsavory looking lump of something in plastic wrap that's probably supposed to be food. On the opposite glass wall, there's a square fine mesh, wide enough to let in air and sound and nothing else.
It's like being in an aquarium.
No amenities otherwise. The floor is bare. The glass walls are sheer enough for me to see outside, but there's not much there. Clumps of machinery and wiring that flicker wanly if they flicker at all, too tired to look of any importance. Clumps of boxed darkness that could be anything and, to one side, surrounded by the most vital looking set of electronic readings and flat lines that beep with an incessant and useless chime, is a cylinder clouded by mingled clotted red and pussed yellow mist, and somewhere within the liquid mess is a muted figure, curled fetally over itself, its limbs vanishing into the depths of the filth it floats in as they taper off to where the hands and feet should be. Otherwise featureless and very nasty to look at.
There's a warmer, more immediate flicker of light out of the corner of my eye and I turn. There's one other thing in this warehouse that contains my glass room. A girl, her legs tucked under her and her feet arched so her heels dangle in the air, lighting up, the fire of her match turning her eyes a lurid and curious orange. Her hair might be blond and it sticks off to both sides as if it were laced with wire. She's uncomfortably thin and the shadow-muddied pink of her tank top is broken up by holes where a grey skin slips through and I'd look away had I anything else to look to. I adjust my glasses and prepare to be angry, pushing the last of the sleep-grogginess from my mind. Her eyes are fixed on me, still curious.
"Where am I?" It's not quite the snapped command of a question I was going for.
"Bayville's Center for Disease Control," she drawls, extinguishing the match with a careless swish of her fingers and inhaling on the already filthy looking cigarette. "Yer sick, yer contagious, so ya come 'ere right off."
"Sick with what?"
"Dunno. You'll 'ave to ask the boss if ya wanna know that. I'm just watchin' you."
If this is a Center for anything, than the Institute is an abandoned trailer park. No matter. There will be enough telepaths looking for me that it should hardly be a problem. "Understand, you can't keep me here."
"Can't we?" She looks amused.
"No. If . . . if nothing else, this isn't a proper facility. Any organization on the block would condemn this place as unhealthy -- like this mattress," I gesture back at it. "This mattress would be more likely to cause further damage to the patient than . . . "
"Stop whinin', you'll be just fine, y'know. Yer our only patient really and ya don't look that fragile, kid. Maybe we'll drag in somethin' proper later, but ya never can tell."
"What about that?" My eyes flick back toward the cylinder and its unseen occupant and wonder morbidly if I've somehow stumbled into the type of group that would eventually do that to me.
"Oh." She shrugs. "That's dead. An' it's been there longer than I've been 'ere. Dunno why the boss keeps monitorin' its life signs 'cause it ain't changed for years. Don' know who or what it is, we just call it the Thing and leave it at that. Don' worry about it."
Don't worry about a corpse just soaking there where I can easily see it any time I look up? "Look, who's this boss . . . "
"You'll meet 'im eventually, keep yer shirt on." She exhales, blowing smoke at the cylinder. "'e might tell you what's what or mebbe 'e won't, but you'll be real safe 'ere until yer better." The cigarette suddenly goes lax in her hand and she stares at it, her lips pursing with apparent concentration. "So yer name's Scott Summers."
"Yeah." I'm not even going to bother to ask how she knows that.
"'S nice name. Kinda got color in it. Like . . . Jean Grey, that's got color too, funny. Save, your name's all the bright green and red and warm colors and hers 's supposed to be all, y'know, grey and it don' make much sense, does it? Figure she's probably lookin' fer you, ain't she?" She looks back up, smiling thinly.
"Maybe."
"She ain't gonna find you. Nor's yer Xavier. The Boss's made sure of that." A yawn and a long stretch and she gets up from her perch on the boxes. "Think I've been doin' enough starin' at you fer now. Later then, Mr. Summer." She strolls off into a darkness that I can't see properly and a door swings audibly open, then shuts. I'm alone. I shove my glasses back up my nose and try not to look at the cylinder, thinking. Or trying to. If I'm stuck here in a glass room . . .
I pace backwards a few feet, then run at the barrier, right shoulder first. I hit hard -- hard enough that my shoulder does more than just press against the glass, it richochets back, sending me flying into the mattress and scooting it and myself into the far wall. When my head stops spinning, I squint over at the glass and, of course, it isn't marred at all. I try again, attempting to ram my opposite shoulder in the same place I did initially, and end up on my back again, bruised for nothing. Again and again and again, until the strength dies out of my body and I collapse on the floor.
"Really shouldn't 'ave done that," a male voice whispers just above my ear as I claw back into consciousness. I jerk my head off the floor, and there's someone practically pressed against the glass on the other side. At least, his ripped out knees are pressed and pale against the glass. The rest of him is naturally a bit back and shielded by the shadows of the warehouse. Like the girl, there's a sad filthiness to him -- his dark hair hangs lank and disregarded over his shoulders and his eyes are dull and withdrawn. His clothing is taut and patched, and while the girl was frighteningly bony, the boy is not -- he verges more toward the pudgy and the gloves gripping his hands seem to be constricting the undifferentiated wrists. At least, there's a faintly purplish tinge to the skin there.
"Really shouldn't 'ave done that," the boy repeats. "The glass doesn't break and you'll only 'urt yerself."
"I think I've learned my lesson," I mutter, too sore still to manage the sitting position I want to.
"Good. No use in gettin' 'urt. Won't change anything, 'cept the Boss might find some way to restrain you and no one wants that." His voice is tired and each sylabble drags the following ones out by force, but there's a certain openness in him that the girl didn't have, which makes me somewhat more willing to be probing.
"Who's the Boss?"
"Not supposed to tell you. He likes to come in 'imself, see." The boy glances over his shoulder as if expecting to see that Boss come striding out of the walls. "Won't be so long, really."
Actually, just then, a door somewhere does slam and the boy's soft body tenses in apprehension. But the figure lancing her way out of the shadows is a familiar one. Taryn. But why would she . . .
As I watch, Taryn's body elongates and fills out until a taller woman stands there, one with indigo skin and slit yellow eyes that rake over me and the boy with suspicious thoroughness.
I've seen her before as well. Mystique. As her eyes smile with recognition, there's no reason to exchange names in a heat of heroic frenzy. It's not as though I've personally fought her, anyway.
"So you're here."
Something gradually occurs to me. "Wait . . . you're the one who got Duncan after . . ."
"Yes, yes. Necessary. Had to confirm certain suspicions and since your disease is aggravated by physical touch, a punch is far easier to take than a kiss." There's no amusement in her expression as she says this -- the idea of playing such a game with my emotions as Taryn seems to have no appeal to her. I suppose I could be grateful.
"All right, what is my disease and why would you care?"
She shakes her head. "I only act as an extra limb for the one I work for. I don't know specifics, only my orders. Which is, likewise, the same reason why I care." Completely impassive throughout all this. The boy takes on her steeled expression like a mimic.
"Your boss wouldn't happen to be Magneto, would he?"
"Not your concern at the moment."
"Is this just an elaborate kidnapping?"
"Why would we bother with that sort of thing for you?" And there's a hint of contempt in that, the narrow smile-in-the-eyes. "If all we wanted to do was to push Xavier's buttons, I'd have just killed you and left your body out on the Institute's front lawn. You're here because you need to be for the safety of all of us."
Now I'm a little angry. "If what I have is so dangerous, why didn't you just kill me anyway?"
She shrugs, looking geniunely uncertain. "If it had been up to me . . . but as I've already said, it isn't. That certain someone needs you alive, so you are, for the time being."
I fire out the same question I did with the girl before, pointing over the silent boy's head and at the cylinder. "And what's that?"
"I'm impressed that you've taken such inventory of your surroundings." She sounds nothing so much as bored. "Don't worry, Scott, even if you become expendible, I promise not to stuff your mangled body into such an implement and put it out for display. Lance," and her gaze turns back to the boy. "Call me if he starts banging again. The boss does want his head intact for now." I'm surprised she doesn't take more pleasure in detailing all this, but she just walks off then, not even bothering with an appropriately malicious goodbye. The boy's eyes likewise follow her out before returning to me.
"She doesn't mean it all so much," he mutters, his hand idly playing with his shoelaces. "Really, you'll be okay. We won't 'urt you."
"Really."
"Really!" He's all so suddenly earnest, his dull eyes flashing like a child's. "Everyone's got these . . . appearances to keep up, but they ain't really that bad. We ain't really that bad. Me and Tabby, we never even went out wit' th'others to fight wit' ya."
"You're part of the Brotherhood." It's not a question.
"Yeah, 'course we are. Save, Mystique always makes us stay 'ome and we never do any fightin' like Todd and Pietro an' Wanda, we just sit 'ere." The pleading declaration of how he wouldn't fight the X-Men has turned sullen. So it's not like he had much choice. "We just sit 'ere and we never do nutthin' save watch TV and the Thing over there and none of it ever changes. Hey . . ." And his face brightens again. "Maybe we could 'ook up a TV in 'ere so you could watch somethin', 'cause I guess it's gonna get awful borin' in 'ere for ya."
"How long am I going to be in here?"
And . . . now his face falls. "Well, I dunno, but the Boss, 'e always talks like you'll be 'ere forever, like yer so dangerous you can't ever get out, not even for a walk or a stretch. But maybe 'e always talks like that."
Forever. Well, that's all very well, but there's no possibility of me being here for more than a few days. No matter what Magneto, and it has to be Magneto, is capable of in the means of hiding things he doesn't want found, Xavier and the X-Men have to find me. They have no choice. It's just how they work . . .
"I won't be here that long."
"You really think the X-Men will find you?" And he sneers, although there's a reflexive, lazy quality to it.
"How obvious can a warehouse be?" I shoot back.
"This ain't no warehouse," he presses stubbornly. "Xavier ain't never gonna find you."
"So, where is it then?"
But he folds his arms and refuses to say anything more. He keeps his eyes fixed listlessly on me until I get tired of them and withdraw to the mattress for the sake of having somewhere to withdraw.
"You'll get bedsores," a new voice says calmly at my back on the third day. " . . . if you spend all your life on that mattress."
I roll over, by now almost used to the bad tempered spronging on the springs, to face this newcomer. And, again, I'm not surprised. Tall, almost regal, with well groomed white hair swept away from his face, this is Magneto. His feet are planted firmly apart, his elbows jutting out and his knuckles pressed against his waist. His smile is almost paternal. The starved gnawing in my stomach is too intense for me to have much reaction to it all.
"You're not well," he says simply.
"I don't think I'm sick anymore," I assert as strongly as I can while I'm still lying on an old mattress. "There hasn't been any dust lately and I don't feel feverish."
Magneto shakes his head, his steely eyes just soft enough to pass for sympathetic. "The dust only rises when you touch someone. Consider it a sort of perversion of Rogue's power-"
"But it's just dust," I snap, edging up off the mattress and on my knees. "It hasn't hurt anyone. Your own people . . ."
"The spores, and they are spores, not dust, within you had not yet come to full maturity. Before, you might as well have been dropping dust - the immature spores died as soon as they left your body. Now . . . you're dangerous."
"How?" And it sounds so pleading I want to break my own glasses as punishment.
"Scott, you're the only non-mutant in a house of mutants. You're easily used by outsiders. Remember the Power-8 fiasco?"
"Yeah." That had been a bad time. Evan had been laid up for weeks on the edge of death and the Brotherhood had taken advantage of the breach in numbers to attack . . . My eyes narrow slightly. "Not that you aren't an outsider yourself . . . "
Magneto bares his hands mildly. "The conflict between my people and yours is one thing. I do not have the hatred that the humans . . . other humans do," he amends. "Scott, what you've been infected with will eventually kill you. Eventually, like an AIDS or cancer. But any mutant you come into physical contact with would scarcely last an instant."
"How would you know that? I know . . . I know you set Duncan up to attack me before I emitted anything. How do I know that you . . . you didn't infect me yourself?" I'm on my feet now and actually yelling. This is . . . Magneto. He can talk as smoothly as he wants, but I know his ruthlessness and how very little he'd actually care about my welfare, as a human.
"I don't expect you to trust me, Scott, and it hardly matters. But I have no choice but to detain you until it . . . no longer becomes necessary."
"Why don't you just kill me then?" I wave at the chute. "Sift gas through that until I'm out of your hands?"
"What kind of man do you take me for?" Magneto asks with honest surprise. "I do not have, and have never had, any desire to hold you for the sake of harming you."
"I'm human, right?"
"You live among mutants." And he begins to pace in a highly controlled manner. "You are, in a sense, a prototype, a blue print for how all humans must live eventually."
"I'm a mascot, maybe." It's out before I've thought it over and the bitterness of it surprises me. Magneto smiles slightly.
"I never believed it was easy for you. How must it have been, to wake up after a coma of months and months to no family and a strange unwillingness of your more distant relatives to stand forward? And then, in the midst of your lonliness, as indifferent foster matrons fitted you with glasses and impatiently tolerated your incessant spoon dropping as your damaged motor skills struggled to heal, a bald man wheeled in and took you as his own. By no relations, by no tie that you've ever been able to discover, Xavier became your father. But so many other children has he gathered to him and you're doubtless a little overwhelmed."
It's such a pretty little speech, he probably wrote it down somewhere and memorized it. But, against my will, I find my head dangling against my fists, knuckles pressing hard against my glasses, the old emptiness threatening to brim over. I can't bother with asking Magneto how he knows this and everything - he'll only say what he wants to say and it doesn't matter. If no one finds me, I'll be trapped here and all knowledge will be useless. If someone does find me, there's the off chance that someone will actually believe Magneto - or won't, even if he happens to be right, and I'm not sure I could live with watching either option taken.
"So I'm going to die," I mutter at the floor.
"It looks likely. What the spores do is change your body to be more amenable to their reproduction. Your metabolism is off the scale, which is why I'm urging you to eat what we leave you whenever you're hungry and we'll merely drop more, and your temperature is hovering permenantly around 106. What all this entails is that your body will simply burn itself out faster than it would regularly. It's not built for such punishment."
"I suppose I was feeling a little twitchy."
"I'm also disappointed that, in my absence, a proper bed was no proscured for you. I'll see what I can do about a futon or something of the sort to make you more comfortable. If there's anything you need that we can drop down for you, please let me or one of the others know."
"I'm fine." Yeah. The eternal, all-purpose euphemism that no one buys. I raise my head and Magneto gives me a languid shrug.
"I'll take your word for it." He begins to withdraw. And with a sudden burst of irrational malice, I straighten to my full height and point at the misted cylinder (which is always glowing and serves as a nightlight if I choose to look at it).
"I suppose you're the boss, so I suppose you'd know what and who that is? It's been driving me crazy." I want him to hedge or look uncomfortable, but he just laughs.
"It's an old friend come on hard times. Don't pay any attention to it and it won't pay any attention to you." I disallow myself to take that as anything like a threat since he seems to be joking and he leaves. So.
"Y'know," Tabby muses as she eyes me upside down from where she's draped herself on a crate. "If you weren't all contagious and in there an' stuff, I'd probably wanna have sex with ya or somethin'."
"Shut up." I'm on the mattress, my rear too calloused to react to the pricks of the springs any more. I don't even know how long I've been here at this point.
"I wouldn't be the only one either. Lance is that kinda boy, y'know."
"Shut up, please."
"See?" She rolls over until she's propped against the floor with her elbows. "Yer still so polite. 'Ow can we resist?"
"Obviously, you can. Since I'm still here and you're still there."
"Gotta keep my job. Yer cute, but the job's gotta come first. I don' got no nice apartment to live in if I left. I don' even got pocket money." One shoulder presses petulantly against her ear as she sulks.
"Why not? If the Brotherhood isn't doing anything for you, why do you stick around?"
She narrows her eyes slyly. "Now, tha's a story fer ya."
"Tell me. It's not like I don't have all day."
Her hand pulls a cigarette out of her pocket as she continues to eye me. "Y'know that Rogue chick?"
"Yeah. We're not close, but I know her." Weren't close, let's amend that. We're not anything at all now.
"Ya know much 'bout fairy tales? Or do they make you sick, 'cause they're girly or sommat?"
"Um . . . I'm fine with them." This is typical. One has to string Tabitha out sentence by sentence. She thinks it's dramatic.
"'Kay, then, 'cause this is a fairy tale. Right. So one day, there was this noble lady, and that's Mystique, see, she's the beautiful lady. Anyway, there was this beautiful lady and she had two children. One was pale and pretty, and that was the girl. And that's Rogue. The other was a monster, all limbs and claws and fangs, and that's Kurt, 'course. But, anyway, the Fairy King -- and that's Xavier, I mean, you believe me, he's not human or even mutant, right? Ya gotta believe that for this to make sense. Right, so anyway, the Fairy King all promised 'er that 'e'd take the monster away, but 'e'd 'ave to take the other twin, too, 'cause 'e had two fairies 'e 'ad to drop off somewhere, y'see. And that was me and Lance, we're kinda the unwanted things. Y'know, Xavier's all crippled, 'cause all fairies got something wrong with 'em and Lance an' me are all sick in a different way 'cause we're real fairies, y'know. An' we're mastered, see. We belong to Mystique and Magneto and we can't cross the threshold wit'out permission and we can't do nothin' they tell us not to. Otherwise, we disappear."
I stare at her. "What the heck?"
"It's all true."
"No, it's not."
I thump my knee in exasperation. "You're not a fairy. Nor is Xavier. Now cut it out."
She sticks her tongue out. "You only say that 'cause you ain't got an open heart and a believin' mind."
"Oh, shut up." I mean it this time. She's so . . . incessant today and she knows I don't believe a word of her nonsense. Still, someone to talk to, hi ho.
"You're only tellin' me to shut up 'cause it makes you all uncomfortable that I know somethin' ya don't." She dangles the cigarette, still unlit, looking strangely sorrowful.
I curl up on the mattress, away from her, and try to go to sleep. I can't stand this. I really can't.
Happy birthday to Scott. I'm not sure it actually is my birthday as such petty things as hours and weeks have slipped by in a blur and I know I'm losing weight despite the "special stuff" they feed me. But I'm going to pretend it's my birthday. If I'm not quite creative enough at the moment to paint a pink and white cake like you always see in the cartoons with nineteen candles shimmering overhead and, I don't know, a birthday ditty chinking like water-drops from the ceiling, you will have to forgive me.
"Scott." The voice is soft and uncertain and I sit up, leaning my elbows on my knees and looking at Lance, who's pressed up almost against the glass as usual and is holding something indistinctly wrapped in his hands. "You kinda all mentioned yesterday that today might be yer birthday and I guess it ain't much, but I got you somethin'." He ducks his head. "I guess I'll 'ave to drop it through the chute 'cause I can't exactly push it through the glass, but I wanted ya to know that it was me, see, I don' write so well."
". . . Thanks." I stare at him, differently than I usually stare at Tabitha, who just doesn't make a crap of sense. Not that this makes a crap of sense either. Lance scarcely ever "Uh, why?"
"Uh, I dunno, just thought you might want somethin'. Since it's yer birthday an' all. Not yer fault you're sick."
And abandoned. Xavier must have found me by now. Is Magneto that horrifically powerful? Not, again, that it matters.
"Well, Lance, thanks. I . . . I don't know what to say."
"Don' gotta say anything. It's all my pleasure or sommat." He blushes furiously and grips the package as if it was the only thing keeping him earthside. I'm suddenly reminded of the fact that I've caught him sleeping next to my aquarium from time to time . . . . "Scott, um, um, if I was allowed to and I could figure out 'ow to get in, I'd go in there with you, even if it meant I'd die!" And he runs off, his sneakers making long, frantic squeaks against the concrete until a door slams far, far from what I can see.
I lay back on the mattress and press my glasses up against the high bridge of my nose. On second thought, that didn't make any sense. Who am I for such promises to be made to?
Still, I can't help but smile a little and if I'm not sure what's replacing it, a little of the emptiness seeps out of me. Maybe to escape the prison and live in the filthy cylinder with the corpse. I don't need that fraction of it any more.
Whatever it'll mean, I seem to have a friend.
Happy Birthday.