Welcome to the first revamp of this fic, and it is a major revamp! This is the new Chapter 1, to provide what I feel are some necessary parts of the story.
To rehash the relevant opening comments:
This fic starts on the tail end of An Extraordinarily Merry Christmas, and is basically an AU of Season 3 from Yes/No onward. It's not technically a crossover, but is like the MCU in that there are such things as superpowers and agencies that employ/empower/exploit powered people in this universe. However, as there has yet to be the equivalent of an Avengers incident, superpowers are not yet openly acknowledged. Yet.
I don't know whose family Sam is supposed to be staying with. I'm sure the Hudson-Hummels have all the goodwill in the world, but if Finn and Kurt have to share a room they probably don't have space for another 'temporary son', plus they're probably a bit occupied with Burt running for Congress. In this fic I have Sam staying with the Abramses.
I can't ascertain how long it would realistically take for a middle-class Irish family to all get visas to come to the States, or if they would be qualified for emergency visas. I've heard it can take all of a week, and I've heard it can take 60 days or longer. I don't think Rory's is the kind of situation where he would need to go home early, but I do think his family would probably want to come and put their eyes on him - in person.
I don't know about the shelter in An Extraordinarily Merry Christmas, but when I went to Pacific Garden Mission with a group three years ago, we couldn't just randomly walk in. I and my entire group had to be given handwritten name tags (which we weren't allowed to remove) and buzzed in at the front door. And when we were finished we had to all be counted up and let out through the same entrance we'd been buzzed in by.
Anyway, all rights belong to Ryan Murphy, much as I resent the mess that he and the other writers have made of the show. Warning for some family fluff, and for one choice word dropped.
It had all begun on the night of the meal at the homeless shelter (and the filming of the PBS Christmas special). The accident had left people startled and shaken, though nobody had been killed or even obviously hurt.
The only people who had been in the confirmed danger zone were the McKinley High School glee club (the New Directions by name), who'd been checking out of the shelter, and none of them were visibly injured. Nevertheless they had all been rushed to hospital, where they were first quarantined for a solid week and then carefully examined and tested. The results were varied, and in some cases rather startling . . .
Snap!
Finn Hudson gaped in astonishment at the needle that the broken pieces of the needle in the nurse's hands. He looked at his mother, and saw that she was staring too. Okay, so it's not just me. "Uh, is that normal?" he asked the nurse tentatively.
The young man in scrubs was visibly flummoxed. "Er, no," he said uncertainly. "No, that's no normal, I - let me just get another one, okay?" And he darted to the counter to dispose of the broken needle, change his gloves, and pick out a fresh needle. "Here we go!" he said, and for the second time attempted to pierce Finn's arm. And for the second time, the needle stopped with the point not quite touching the skin, going no further. Most amazingly of all, the same tiny dot of brilliant bluish-white light surrounded the point of the needle - Finn stifled a gasp, for he felt a little prickle of warmth along his arm. The nurse pushed harder on the needle - it bent, and broke with another snap.
The nurse looked equally embarrassed and confused. "I'm really sorry," he said. "Let me just try to do this one more time."
"Or you could get a doctor," said Carole, eyebrows still arched.
"Yeah, I'll do that," said the man, and practically fled the hospital room.
Finn looked beseechingly at his mother, who could only throw up her hands. "I don't know, Finn," she said.
"Am I gonna be okay?" asked Finn in a small voice, trying not to sound as scared as he felt.
Carole bit her lip, unable to speak. It had been far too recently that she'd nearly lost both her sons.
"His BMR is how fast?" asked Maia Puckerman sharply.
"Three times higher than what it should be," reiterated the doctor, a tall man with glasses by the name of Graham. "For a young man his age and weight."
Maia's son Noah - Puck to all friends and associates - looked blank. "So?"
"So you now need to consume a bare minimum of seven thousand calories every day, and more is better," said Dr. Graham.
"I'm guessing that's super high?" asked Puck cautiously.
"And that's not all," continued Dr. Graham, addressing Maia rather than Puck. "He also seems to have a similarly heightened cellular regeneration rate - he heals very quickly, among other things," he amended when the woman arched her eyebrows. "Actually, it looks as if all of his body's systems are running three to four times as fast as they should be."
"What does that mean?" asked Maia with not a little apprehension.
Dr. Graham pursed his lips. "Mrs. Puckerman, can you be discreet?"
"You guys didn't have to come all the way up here," said Sam Evans a little thickly through his mother's relentless hug.
"Yes we did!" insisted Stacy, the baby of the family. "You got hurt, Sammy! We were scared."
"You're our son," said Sam's mother Mary into his hair. "Of course we had to!"
"I wasn't scared!" said kid brother Stevie indignantly. "I knew you were gonna be okay all along!"
"He kept saying that," put in father Dwight. "Said his big brother Sam doesn't get hurt by anything." His smile was tremulous. "I wish I had that kind of confidence, because for a minute there I sure did think we'd lost you."
Mary, having finally released Sam, took a step back to look him over properly - and when she did she got a horrible shock. "What is that on your arms?!" she cried sharply.
For starting about halfway up Sam's forearms and circling entirely round each arm were tattooed patterns of brown-and-white feathers.
Sam began protesting. "Mom, I don't know how all that got there, I swear!" he said earnestly.
"Really?" snorted Dwight. "You don't know how you got tattoos all over your arms?"
There was a cough from the doorway, and a nurse who was too young to really be middle-aged and too old to really be young advanced into the room. "Mr. and Mrs. Evans?" she said. "We don't believe the markings are tattoos."
"Oh, they're not?" said Mary disbelievingly. "What are they, then?"
"We don't actually know," came the surprising reply. "The markings started appearing out of nowhere the second day after the accident."
Dwight and Mary looked at each other. Then they looked at Sam, and back at the nurse. "You're not kidding, are you?" said Dwight.
Tina Cohen-Chang first began to hear the voices the third day after the accident.
They were like little ghostly wisps of conversation, floating indistinctly around her head. She thought they were her imagination at first, and tried to ignore them. But the wisps became threads, and the threads became longer and began to intertwine, and soon multiple streams of near-endless chatter were buzzing in her ears.
She wondered if she was going crazy, but took a sliver of comfort in the fact that the voices never (well, very rarely) actually seemed to address her directly. They just chattered away about work and school and home life, little grievances and little joys and shocking secrets, funny (or stupid) YouTube videos and all manner of things both mundane and outright strange. They spoke about ten times as fast as even swift-tongued Rachel could say anything aloud, but this only occurred to Tina gradually - she was still mainly concerned that she couldn't seem to stop hearing the voices at all.
Or maybe 'voices' wasn't the right word - they didn't sound quite like human voices should, and they never seemed to properly 'talk out loud.'
"Do you hear people talking?" she asked cautiously of her mother the day after she was released from quarantine and permitted to have visitors.
"No, honey," said Rita Cohen, peering anxiously at her daughter. "Why?"
"No reason," said Tina, now certain that nobody was hearing the voices except for herself. She wondered again if she was losing her mind, and if so, whether it was a worse idea to speak up about it (and thus be subjected to the inquiries of a shrink) or to go raving mad in silence. She ended up keeping quiet - no reason to borrow trouble, she told herself.
"So there's nothing wrong with me?" asked Rachel Berry, nearly in tears with relief. "I can go home now?"
It wasn't that Rory Flanagan wasn't glad to see his family - he was, for he had missing them sorely. But he was already sick to death of being hovered over, and Dad, Mam, and Marie had only arrived two days ago.
They'd all got themselves emergency visas in double quick time as soon as they'd heard of the accident, and Rory had barely got out of quarantine before they all arrived, nearly frantic with worry. Most of their fears were assuaged when they saw for themselves that he was physically (to all appearances) uninjured, and was only being held in the hospital for testing. All the same, he had a hard time convincing them to let him finish his year in America.
Marie spoke for Mam and Dad when she said, "Look here, we just came within a hair's breadth of losing you, and we aren't none of us keen on leaving you with an ocean between us again."
"At least we're staying for Christmas," Dad insisted.
"All right, then," said Rory, flopping back in concession against the tilted-up hospital bed and in so doing striking the hand control by accident.
There was a little white spark like a shock, and the controller was left blackened on one side and making a vague sizzling noise.
Rory snatched his arm back in surprise, staring at his hand. He was sure he had felt a current run through his arm that was like and yet entirely unlike a normal electric shock.
After being released from quarantine, Santana Lopez was always asking for water.
She would say that she was thirsty, because the truth would have been so much harder to explain. The first time anyone had brought her an actual cup of water after the accident (in quarantine she'd had an IV), a weird little rush had surged through her body, making her skin tingle and her eyes sharpen and her head feel clearer. She'd given a little gasp of surprise, prompting an inquiry of "Is something wrong?" from the woman who'd brought her the meal tray.
"N-no, I'm fine," Santana had stuttered.
When she'd cautiously begun drinking the water, everything felt perfectly normal, and gradually the rush had faded away.
Her first shower was even stranger. The rush of energy was stronger this time, and she was reminded of that time she'd gotten hopped up on 'Vitamin D' back in sophomore year. But this rush was different - it started in the left side of her chest, and flowed along her arms and down her legs and up the back of her head. The water droplets did strange things around her body as she moved, clumping themselves into odd little shapes that hovered and twitched in the air far longer than they had a right to before splattering on the floor.
After that, Santana asked for water whenever she could get it, prompting some funny looks from the hospital staff. Having it nearby would always leave her feeling rejuvenated and refreshed (and often restless). Whenever she drank, the 'buzz' would eventually fade away, though it always left her feeling relatively normal and never weak or shaky.
She told her parents nothing of this - why worry them? - and even kept her little oddities hidden from the hospital staff. The only thing that they evidently noticed was that her vitals looked very good - unusually good, in fact. For her own part, Santana had had enough of hospital gowns and hospital meals to last her a decade, and she waited impatiently to be released to go home.
"How do you feel?" asked Julia Chang of her son. Young Michael had recently been released from quarantine, and she and her husband had spent the previous days getting every detail they could about Mike's condition.
"I feel -" Mike paused, and a smile tugged at his lips. "- like I wanna get out of this bed, for starters -"
Neither Julia nor Michael Sr. could quite hide their grimaces, and Mike saw. "Just a figure of speech," he went on hastily. "Seriously though, I feel great, like nothing ever happened."
"That's good to hear," said Dr. Graham, who had just walked in with a clipboard. "Because there's something that all of you need to know right away."
"Meanwhile, our local community is only just recovering its breath from the scare at the shelter last week, in which a number of visiting teenagers were believed to be the victims of an unknown airborne chemical," Andrea Carmichael was reporting. "We are now happy to report that the kids are apparently okay, with no discernible ill effects. . ."
Two men sat in an office cubicle in front of the screen of a desktop, watching the news segment with grim faces. "How did this happen?" asked the elder accusingly of the younger.
"I don't know, sir," said the younger man stoically.
"You don't know?" the older man, who seemed to be the other's superior, flung up his hands. "You were supposed to end to a possible threat. Instead you manage to activate a ticking time bomb, and you don't know how it happened!"
"It won't happen again, sir," said the subordinate.
The superior stood up, scowling his displeasure. "It damn well better not!" he growled as he left the room.
The younger agent waited until he was alone, and then picked up his phone and sent a text which he promptly deleted.
PROJECT 271-C5 ACTIVATED.
Once again, this is actually the first chapter (I don't know how FFN will initially display it).