So, since I've been suffering from such awful writer's block with all of my other "serious" works, I decided to venture back into the world of fanfiction. All involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended – fanfiction just makes for wonderful literary exercise.
As previously stated, this is an AU fic, fashioned in the same vein as Marvel's What If? series. Here, our X-Men are the first generation of mutants – there is no Magneto, no Xavier; Rogue was never adopted by Mystique and Cyclops was never manipulated by Sinister, etc. The vast majority of society has no knowledge of genetic mutation, including those who experience it. For me, is just a sort of way to explore (a bit more realistically than in the comics) what would have happened to some of our favorite characters if they had been on their own from the start. My initial relationship with continuity is going to be a loose one before I head out on my own – it's no fun rehashing events/conversations that you can read in the comics.
I'm very tentatively starting this fic out with a T rating, though that is more than likely to change to M in the future due to adult themes. If anyone feels uncomfortable with this initial rating after reading this chapter, I'm more than happy to bump it up.
Happy reading!
"Stefan?"
That little breath of air, barely a whisper, tears from his throat and cuts the awful silence that presses down on the courtyard, the moon-kissed cobblestones of the street. They look like dead fish, those little children, floating in the fountain water, wrapped in their own sopping clothes. Blood blackened water breaks on their pale, vacant faces, on open, pallid hands that bob in the gentle current contained within the fountain's concrete basin.
"Stefan?" He's so heavy, all of a sudden, so heavy that Kurt can hardly hold him, and they sink to the ground together. Like a heavy flower on a broken stem Stefan's head rolls bonelessly to rest on Kurt's shoulder, his dark eyes full of surprise and even fear, maybe, but empty of light. There's almost no blood, just a little trickle that escapes Stefan's nose, pattering down to those smooth stones as Kurt sinks with him, cradling in one hand the neck that had – no, no, he hadn't meant it; Stefan had always been so fragile –
"Stefan?" As much as Kurt doesn't want to admit it, his brother has grown increasingly strange over the past few months – distant, nervous. Stefan's fingernails are bit to bleeding and tense smiles are quick to cut his features when he does make public appearances, which are becoming increasingly rare - he laughs too long and too loud or broods, alone, indefinitely. Regulated to the caravan during the lighted hours, Kurt finds himself watching too much TV, and when the children start disappearing he tells himself that Stefan would never, could never . . .
Yet, when, hours after the final show was spent, Stefan still hadn't returned home, Kurt had crept into the sleeping village with a nervous trepidation only outweighed by fraternal fear. Now, looking at the spouting water that haloes his brother's lank figure, a limp body clutched to the young man's heaving breast, Kurt can only selfishly wish he had not come looking for him, after all.
"What are you doing?" But he can see well enough, despite the feeble light from the smattering of streetlights.
Stefan looks up slowly, his eyes wide, his mouth fractured into a rictus grin, lips dribbling spittle. "I'm doing baptisms, Kurt." He gestures to the bodies – how did he get so many here, without someone seeing? – to the red lines that break open their throats like obscene grins. "They needed saving, Kurt. They had bad things in them. Bad things that needed cutting out." With the red-drenched knife in his left hand he traces graceful characters into the night sky. Kurt raises his hands.
"Stefan . . ." His voice breaks, and he takes a cautious step forward. "You're . . . you're sick. You need help. Put down the knife and—"
"No, no, Kurt. The sickness is gone now. I cut it all out. I—"
Not all the bodies are in the fountain, Kurt sees too late – there are a few draped around its periphery, and Stefan has not been thorough in his gristly work. A little hand, a shoulder shift from where they rest against the fountain's lip; there's a little, sobbing sigh that might have been the wind, somewhere better. Kurt hopes for a brief instant that Stefan doesn't notice, but fate - with a startled, enraged shout, the limp body in Stefan's arms drops with a cataclysmic splash as Stefan turns and Kurt leaps; in two steps he feels the warmth of his brother's neck in his hands-
"Nein, nein . . ." A dream, surely. The night is clear but there's a fog, somehow; the lights from the sparse streetlights run into together in a yellow smear. He can feel the cold crispness of the breeze, the smoothness of the stones under his knees but they seem otherworldly – his own heart is moving too slowly for him to be real, the sound of it filling his ears in a metronome, accompanied only by his ragged breathing and the clouds of smoke the cold air steals from his body. His vision feels crushed, haloed in darkness. A dream, he thinks, this sort of numbness can't be possible except for in a nightmare. And the body in his arms – impossibly small, impossibly still, cooling and stiffening even as it leaches the warmth from Kurt's own – can't possibly be that of a murderer. There's no evil in those dark eyes that reflect the moonlight, like pools of dark water; the limp hands, smudged with blood, had never before this night been cruel. So Kurt buries his face into his brother's shirt (it stinking of the drying blood of children), waiting to awaken with the pensive, drugged tension of a soldier waiting for a call to arms.
A whimper breaks him from his reverie. He looks up with tired eyes at the little girl who had lived, who had moved at such a terrible moment. In a somnambulist torpor he reaches out to her as if in shared grief, "Mädchen . . ."
Her pale, watery eyes meet his. Her small lips tremble.
And she screams.
It fractures the silence like a crack of lightning. She screams, and the windows of the looming houses surrounding them promptly flicker to life with glowing light. There are so many people, suddenly, bedraggled and half-dressed, pouring into the street, their hair in hurricanes and feet bare or quickly booted, wrapped in blankets or improper coats. The flood of them fills the previously silent street with a cacophony of shouts and murmurs.
"Was ist passiert?"
"Was ist das?"
Startled gasps and screams mingle with the girl's ambulatory shriek as the unkempt people gather, and charge as one towards the sound.
"Die Kinder!" A woman's tortured howl cuts above the other wails of grief and shock. "Mein Gott, die Kinder! Er hat die Kinder getötet!"
As the crowd approaches him Kurt stands, dragging his brother's body up with him, his vision distorted by anguished tears. "Bitte, bitte, mein Bruder . . ."
"Dämon!"
A thunder crack, and a sharp pain slices Kurt's cheek, startling a tear from his eye. Raising one hand he brushes his face absently, looks at his fingers. Blood.
"Monster!"
A second, sharp blast, and the face of one of the fountain's gargoyles beside him explodes into concrete vapor.
"Töten Sie es!"
Kurt drops his brother's body, and runs.
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BlacKat71 Having some weird symptoms . . . am I cracking up?
I've been having really bad migraines for the past couple of weeks, so bad that I can't do anything but lay around and want to die. But the past couple of days,
and I know this sounds crazy, but . . . I think I've been walking through things. Like walls and stuff. I'll go to sleep in my room and wake up in the basement. Is
this normal? I'm only 14 and I've just started my girly stuff. Am I going crazy? What should I do?
3 hours ago Report Abuse
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I don't feel like I can talk to my parents, they've been fighting a lot. Please help!
Harry M.
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
BlacKat, it sounds like you might be having some serious neurological problems if you're having headaches with visual hallucinations (walking through walls.) As
a doctor, I would recommend you make an appointment with your family doctor immediately. I don't want to scare you, but this could by symptomatic of a
serious medical condition.
2 hours ago Report Abuse
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Bibbityfob
Hey Blackkat! I think maybe your sleepwalking, Ive been doing it since I was in a kid and its nothing to worry about, just try locking your door at night so you
cant go anywhere which is what I do. My doctor told me I would grow out of it but no luck yet. Your headaches might be from stress because of your parents. I
hope stuff gets better for you!
2 hours ago Report Abuse
Jerzyboi
Wlakin thru walks would be effin cool
3 hours ago Report Abuse
The world, to him, has long since become a dark, tactile place. The bandages over his eyes have been in place for years – though not the same ones, of course; he changes them with obsessive regularity, and while he does, he wonders what his eyes must look like – lids smooshed, eyelashes stunted, the skin around them white, like the negative of a thief's mask – and maybe betraying a little crimson light around the edges. It was hard, at first, to resist the urge to open them, and he had blown holes into the walls of enough foster homes that he'd become the modern equivalent of a leper – cast out from even the outcasts. Destructive, delinquent, depressed, disabled. Why shouldn't he set fires, punch holes, they commiserated, as family after family packed his suitcases and sent him somewhere where he couldn't bother them any more. Now it's easy – it is as if the skin of his eyes and the skin of his cheeks have simply grown together.
So he sits and waits for attack in his dark corner of the crowded world, blind-stick in hand, which he uses to thrash the kids who come close to him with their stifled giggles and outstretched hands, trying to play tricks. They want to snatch his bandages off – they think he has wounds, or maybe terrible scars, and he's been tempted more than once to let them see what he's hiding. He can't, of course . . . no, it's safer to sit and wait, to be wary for every potential attack; there are too many kids that are miserable and mean, with tripping feet and pushing hands even the benevolent ones regularly change the terrain with their toys and games, and he is always stumbling and falling . . .
"Hey."
"Hey." She won't let him touch her face so he doesn't know what she looks like, but he knows her smell well enough – the chalky smell of deodorant and the false flowers of shampoo masking the ever-present odor of Thunderbird wine. He had asked her about it one time and she had laughed, said, "it's a southern thang," in that slow, sad drawl of hers. She touches his hands sometimes but he doesn't know her that way either – she wears gloves, slippery smooth and impersonal.
"How come you're so far north, then?" He had asked her once.
"Ah thought maybe it'd be differn't."
"What did you think?"
Tartly, "Ah'm stuck here, ain't Ah?"
He doesn't like her – she's too loud and brash and rude and more often than not just drunk enough to be pissed off at the world, and people have a bad habit of passing out while she's around. She fights, she wins. He sits and waits for attack, and loses more often than not.
But she's different today, and not just because she smells like Jack Daniels (must have come across a hidden stash of some other kid's money, or maybe she lifted a wallet from a passerby); she feels different. He hasn't always been in the black exile of blindness so he knows colors, and, to him, sometimes people feel like floating dyes. Mostly, she's a hot, molten red that blackens at the edges with despair – he sees too much of himself in that, and maybe that's why they don't get along. Today, though, she feels maybe blue, a calm color as she touches his shoulder with those gloves that squeak when her fingers curl.
"Ah'm leavin'."
"You eighteen yet?"
She laughs. Her laughing never sounds particularly joyful. "You first." Ah, eighteen, eighteen, the age of emancipation . . .
"Where are you going?"
"Away." Of course, she can see; she's young, she can dream – though her dreaming doesn't sound particularly joyful either. "Ah dunno, hop a bus somewhere – Ah've got some cash. Maybe head back home." Not home home, but he knows what she's talking about – back to the sultry heat and the salty air of the Gulf of Mexico, the souse of every southern girl's heart. "You want to come?"
He's touched, a little. "I've only got a few months before the state turns me out." He shrugs sadly, feels his lower lip tremble a little, pulls it into a tight grimace to make it stop. "Guess I should get all the free meals I can until then."
"Ah'll send you—" A postcard, he finishes mentally even as she breaks off, embarrassed. He laughs.
They should paint this place another color. Perhaps with white they are trying to evoke a feeling of emptiness – peace, calm, tranquility, cleanliness. But white isn't the absence of all things, after all, but the combination of them—it is the white spear of light that pierces the prism to be divided into all the hues of the rainbow. So it comes to no surprise that in this place of so much whiteness she is everything – she is Gunter down the hall, who likes comic books
(but only the Flash and Green Lantern, and mom brought Batman, of course, she always brings Batman even though I tell her EVERY TIME that I don't even LIKE Batman but it always makes her so upset I shouldn't be so mean, I shouldn't be so awful she's doing her best)
who thinks that the fillings in his teeth are transmitters for a more advanced time and that he can thus tell the future, though this future seems completely restricted to the area of horse races (where he is almost always wrong) and post-apocalyptic futures (where his expertise is still pending confirmation.) Here, in this place of white pillow-softness, she is Annette in the room next door, no education beyond the basics, no family to speak of, whose mind is a great white void of overstimulation through which coherent thoughts only dubiously cross, and then only in vague questions. Here she is Doris, lowest third of her class and worried that she'll be alone forever, who smothered her little baby boy to death with more white softness because she was afraid that he needed something she couldn't bear to give, and Jean finds her the most disturbing because Doris isn't supposed to be crazy at all; she's one of the sane ones, in her crisp white uniform and white, rubber-soled shoes. Even the smell of her is white, some store-bought perfume without a brand, one that comes out of a plastic bottle in a spritz, rather than from glass carafe in a cloud.
"Are you ready to be good, Jeanie?" White softness, white softness, and dust motes swirl in the light from the single barred window like fairy dust. Jean raises her head from the padded floor with a smile that causes Doris's to wither. The small action exhausts Jean; all her limbs are made of lead and she's leaking drool like an infant, like the infant that Doris smothered, like poor Paul in C-Wing
(two kids and an elderly mother MA in Accounting from the University of Texas kicked in the head by a horse on the stupid vacation the wife nagged endlessly for that bitch should be here, not me, why can't I THINK, why can't I THINK)
who, when not in cacophonies of aimless rage, leaks equally aimless sorrow from all of his orifices. And despite how much Doris loathes touching her patients
(catching, crazy might be catching)
she pets Jean's head tentatively, as if stroking a sleeping tiger, waiting for it to snap up and bite.
Jean struggles to string her thoughts together, and through the drug haze, it's like trying to arrange two-ton boulders into a line. "No." Her mouth is only connected to her brain through the most tenuous of tendrils, her tongue a dead, swollen creature nesting in the dry cavern of her throat; she floats, half-connected to her own flesh, but still feels Doris's anger and slight sorrow at the answer.
"Why not, honey? You have such beautiful hair."
Tyler the janitor thinks so too. The lush redness of her hair is always impossibly emphasized in his mind as thinks about ruining her creatively, thoroughly, eternally. She can feel him now, hear the gentle whish-whish of his mop, but he's thinking about Lori, who's just here because she's feeling a little "down" and hasn't told them about all those fires that she started.
"Lori is just hear for an evaluation, Jeanie, she hasn't started any fires."
Jean blinks sullenly; she's gone and done it again. Doris's face has that pinched look it gets whenever someone starts displaying visible signs of crazy – when they're quiet she can think of them as little broken things in need of glue; when they're vocal about it, she thinks they're being difficult.
"I don't think you're being difficult, Jeanie. I just want to know why you hurt yourself. I can't let you out of here if you keep hurting yourself."
Because, she says silently as she twists on the floor, kicking her foot out against the bare mattress (no sheets for hanging), turning away from that sour-grape face in a barrel roll and her elbows are beginning to get stiff from her arms' forced, awkward expression of self-love
(Ian, his name was Ian and it must have happened because I spend so much time here, I swear to God its catching like the flu, brain-flu, brain-fever, like in all those Victorian stories)
because in the moment of real, true pain, agonizing pain, like when you're shot
(Billy Room 14A shot in the hip in the war sees it every night sees the face of all of those goddamn gooks fall like blades of grass under a lawnmower and the sound of the machinegun rattle is frighteningly similar)
like when you're burning
(Lori Emerson with white scar tissue mottling every slender finger if they ask it's from a grease fire, a grease fire because I work in a kitchen yes and I'll never use gasoline again nearly burned off all my)
like when you tear your hair out in great chunks from the roots, everything else goes away. For a moment, when endorphins begin to flood your blood in the realization of attack, of injury, there's a moment of no pain, no noise, no color, nothing else in the world but you.
White hot silence.
I always love hearing from readers – comments and criticism are welcome!
German translations (I've studied German for about two years now, so I'm going to be terribly embarrassed if I got any of these wrong):
Mädchen - Girl
Was ist passiert? – What happened?
Was ist das? – What is that?
Die Kinder! – The children!
Mein Gott, die Kinder! Er hat die Kinder getötet! – My God, the children! He's killed the children!
Bitte, bitte, mein Bruder – Please, please, my brother
Dämon! – Demon!
Monster! – Monster! (Self explanatory, no?)
Töten Sie es! – Kill it!