With thanks, as always, to Hoodoo for beta-reading.
And to Booster2051, Anonymous, Ellie, whylime, Sanseru, Voodoo, and VampirePrincess156 for reviewing. I hope the story lives up to your expectations!
Not even nine o'clock in the morning and already the sun poured in like it had melted the windowpanes, leave square puddles of bright heat on the floor. Light caught every mote of dust. It made the still air seem that much heavier.
An open window might have helped, but it would have interrupted the quiet. Even the grating sound of a slow breath seemed too loud.
Scott Summers, fifteen years old (near as he could reckon) and a mutant (whatever that meant), sat at the piano and wished all the tiny noises would stop. Couldn't they give him five minutes alone? He needed to concentrate! There were so many distractions.
An occasional rustle of wind.
The bench creaking slightly as he sat up straight.
His heartbeat.
He forced another slow breath. Then, carefully, he began to play. He no longer remembered how to read musical notation or which key corresponded to which letter. He knew the timing was off as he played through the notes, thinking them only as he knew how: pinkie, thumb, index, ring, middle, thumb…
He only knew the first nine notes. The ninth felt wrong, like the edge of something. The whole song felt off and Scott knew it was, the notes stilted, like speech without inflection. And even those were tough to recall when he thought about it.
A shot in the dark: pinkie for ten.
Scott shook his head. This shouldn't be so hard! He knew the song, could hear it in his head when his thoughts went quiet… but apparently he only knew it well enough to know when he hit the wrong notes. He sighed and pressed his head against his hand, not sure if he was angry or frustrated or just plain tired.
Well, he knew he was tired.
He once more shook his head. It did not dispel his thoughts or make any of the tiredness slip away, just brought more hair down to obscure his face. Why he kept his hair so long, even Scott didn't know. He supposed he didn't see the point in cutting it.
After another halting attempt, Scott took a pen and scribbled the numbers on the back of his fingers. Then he returned his attention to the piano and started again: pinkie 1, thumb 2, index 3, ring 4, middle 5—
Take care of your brother, Scott.
He hit a sour note. It all jumbled together in his mind: the words, the song, the fear whose cause he no longer recalled. Even that broken promise was not the worst.
How could it possibly not be the worst? Scott knew what he had promised. He said he would take care of his brother. Now his brother was gone. His brother was gone, and Scott no longer remembered his name. Ethan, maybe?
Yet even worse was that pause. Like the song, the memory ended too soon. He wished it would go away wholly, not haunt him in his nightmares, that moment of silence so heavy with the knowledge of what came next.
It was knowledge Scott did not have.
That was the worst part. Out of everything, nothing hurt more than waiting for those words, for the last thing his father—
Scott rushed through the notes, music drowning his thoughts for a few seconds. It still sounded wrong, this time the notes too fast and too close together rather than the monotony they had been before. This time it sounded more like noise than music.
A burst of anger shot through him. Scott whirled away from the piano. It wasn't uncommon, that anger. He whirled away and buried his face in his hands. That wasn't uncommon, either. Nothing made this place feel less like home than remembering that he could quite easily break anything, and none of it was his to break.
Scott.
At the orphanage, someone would have shouted for him. That had been an adjustment, and the sudden voice in his head at a particularly inopportune moment made him think something obscene—and, a moment later, that he really hoped the Professor hadn't heard that.
It didn't matter. Barring those fractions of a second spent on cussing, Scott responded immediately. He bolted down the hallway and skidded into the kitchen.
"I'm sorry." He didn't pause to speak, just grabbed a tin of cat food and a plastic dish. Artie was whining. "I remember."
This was directed at the Professor, a term of address on which they had compromised because the older man didn't like being called Mr. Xavier and really didn't like being called 'sir', and Scott couldn't call him Charles.
"I know you do."
That had been the condition of keeping Artie: she was Scott's responsibility. He fed her, cleaned up after her, and kept her out of the house as much as possible. Scott met those expectations. Mostly, anyway.
He set Artie's food under the sink. She gave a mewl that he generally interpreted as you finally did something right, human. While Artie lit into her breakfast, Scott washed his hands and did likewise—substituting peanut butter for cat food.
The kettle whistled. The Professor poured himself a cup of tea and stirred it, the spoon clacking against the mug. "You're still having the nightmares," he remarked mildly.
Scott glanced over, then focused back on his sandwich. Sandwiches were much simpler. They didn't ask questions, they just got eaten. "I'm too old for that stuff." Whether 'that stuff' meant having nightmares or talking about them, Scott didn't specify.
"You're only fifteen."
"I'm nearly sixteen. Actually, when will we say I'm sixteen? Since I don't have a birthday."
"I suppose you can pick one and we'll say you're sixteen then. And you are changing the subject."
"It doesn't matter," he murmured. "I don't wanna talk about it." What would talking accomplish? The whole point in being awake was not having nightmares.
Artie finished her breakfast and whimpered at Scott, winding figure eights around his feet. He picked her up with one arm. He scrunched his fingers in her fur, half petting her, and she responded with a half purr that told him he really could do better. She also responded by digging in her claws and kneading his chest.
"Fuck a flying duck!"
"I'm sure I misheard that…."
"Yeah—I'm sorry—she…" Scott trailed off. Artie's claw had done enough in a sensitive area to justify cussing, in his opinion, but saying 'fuck' was bad enough. 'Nipple' wasn't going to help. "Won't happen again."
Cats were like that, though. They knew well their own superiority, but they were so generous with those below them it was difficult to resent the occasional lapse in courtesy. According to Hank and the Professor, Artie was a light gray cat with green eyes. She was red to Scott, just like the rest of the world, but he didn't care what she looked like.
He didn't care. He still wondered. It made him think about the extent of the others' abilities, sometimes. His eyes destroyed buildings. Hank was strong, but did he know the limit, did he have one?
"Could someone make you stop reading their mind?" he wondered.
"Another telepath could."
"But not somebody like me?"
"You couldn't force me out of your mind, but if you asked me not to read your thoughts, I wouldn't."
Scott shook his head. He knew that usually the Professor wasn't reading his thoughts, so it did not bother him.
"I was just wondering." After a moment, he asked, "What about someone really far away?"
"Farther with Cerebro, though Hank might be better able to answer you about that. You've got a lot of questions today."
There was an implicit question there, as well, a request for an explanation. Scott shrugged. "I'll ask Hank," he said, rather than admit he could not remember green. "Do you ever…"
"Do I ever what?"
Scott looked at Artie. It had taken a long time for him to manage a conversation with the Professor. After a while, rather than pretending Scott had not said anything, Professor Xavier started doing that, asking what he wanted to say. By now Scott knew better than to say 'nothing', although 'I don't want to talk about it' was usually okay.
Instead, he asked softly, "Do you ever read Moira's thoughts?"
Silence answered. Last year, the government began threatening Moira to reveal the mutants' location. To protect both Moira and Scott, the Professor erased her memories. He had tried to hide how much this bothered him.
"Sometimes."
"Is she okay?"
"She's fine."
Scott nodded. He wanted to believe that. He had been afraid of Moira and believed she would send him to prison or the Foundlings' Home back in Omaha, but still felt badly about what had happened. That was one of three reasons he cared about her. He also cared about her as a friend of a friend, and because she had been the one to recognize that he was a mutant and call the Professor—and, in doing so, she had probably saved his life.
Neither of them really liked talking about Moira. Occasionally, though, it seemed they had no choice: she had forgotten them, but they had not forgotten her.
To be continued!
