Chapter Thirty-Five - Drowning
Eleven year old Mikaela would be horrified by her. Eleven year old Mikaela would have barely noticed the scene, let alone felt the need to intervene and protect. Eleven year old Mikaela knew the horrors being done to mutant children, knew about the struggles they all faced, knew about the team of adult mutants working against their evil brethren and working to better their relationship with humans, and eleven year old Mikaela couldn't have given less of a shit.
Current Mikaela - what is she now, seventeen? - wonders what her eleven year old self would have to say to her, if the apathetic child could see her now. She wonders which of them is better off, in the grand scheme of things - the lone wolf without a care in the world, or the young woman who would do anything to protect those she cares about?
"Who are you?" a voice calls out.
Mikaela lifts her chin to try see the speaker, but they're lost in the small crowd. "I'm Mikaela," she tells them.
"No, she means what are you?" someone else snaps.
Mikaela rolls her eyes. "A miserable bitch, what are you?"
"Micky," Kitty says gently - but Mikaela can sense her quiet amusement.
"You're giving off a bad vibe here, guys," Mikaela says, listening to her friend's warning.
"Like you people haven't been doing that for years?" someone calls from the back of the crowd.
"Do you hold mankind responsible for all the murders that some of you commit?" Mikaela challenges, crossing her arms.
"We're not freaks!" someone shouts. A few people cheer.
Mikaela makes an exasperated expression. "Aw, for fuck sake, man, get a new insult!"
"You're not even American!"
Mikaela unfolds her arms to rub her face, groaning loudly. "The world has gone to shit, and you want to argue about which country people belong in? Are you fucking kidding me?"
Kitty puts a hand on Mikaela's shoulder that tells her to stop talking. "Listen," she says, commanding the attention now, "We aren't doing anything wrong. We're staying away from your town, we're keeping to ourselves here on this estate - we don't want to upset you anymore than you already have been."
"Then get away from here! Pack up and leave!"
"Go off planet, for all we care, just leave our town alone!"
"We are leaving you alone," Mikaela retorts. "You guys are the ones marching like a mob up to our front gates!"
"Someone has to take action against you," a man at the front comments darkly.
Mikaela stares him down. "Why? What's the reasoning behind that mentality?"
"You all walk around like you're a bunch of heroes," he spits out, "You act like you're better than us, superior to us, because you can do some fancy things. But, when all is said and done, you weren't good enough to stop Thanos. You weren't heroic enough to save my family."
With that, the anger in the crowd seems to morph into grief and sorrow, and they slump into themselves, deflating. Mikaela can only gape at the man.
Kitty takes her by the shoulder and turns her away from the crowd, saying gently to the man, "I'm sorry for your loss."
They walk back through the gates onto the driveway, Pyro emerging from under the trees to close the gates behind them.
"You shouldn't let them say those things," he says, glaring at the humans through the bars.
Mikaela glances over her shoulder to see the crowd slowly dispersing, some crying now, others comforting them. But that man still stands there, still glaring her down, as if it's all her fault.
She nips the guilt in the bud before it can overwhelm her.
Where are Tony and Peter?
"They're grieving - anger and blame is a natural part of that," Kitty shrugs, letting go of Mikaela.
"So are we," Mikaela mutters bitterly, pulling the tip of her baseball cap down lower.
xxxxxxxxxxx
Mikaela presses the bandage more firmly against the girl's wound, wincing at her pained whimper. "Sorry," she mumbles. The car goes over a bump in the road and they're jostled again, making tears rush to the girl's eyes. "It's okay. We'll be there soon."
The girl nods, biting her lip. "Okay," she whispers.
"You should have let me burn them to ash," Pyro grinds out from the driver's seat.
"And made things worse for us?" Mikaela snaps back at him. "You wanna set the rest of the human population against us?"
Pyro sends her a glare in the rear-view mirror.
Mikaela expands her mind and reaches out for the school, finding Storm's phone. The mutant picks up in one ring.
"Mikaela?" she guesses.
"Hey, get Hank to clear a space in the medical wing," Mikaela tells her.
"What happened? Are you okay?"
Mikaela can tell from the phone's location that Storm is already moving to carry out her instruction. "We picked up a girl," she explains, "A bad group caught her."
"Oh, god," Storm mutters, quietly seething. "How bad?"
"One of them sliced her with their knife, but it's not deep, it's just bleeding a lot."
"When will you get here?"
Mikaela looks away from the girl to observe their surroundings as they rush by the car. "Not long. A few minutes at most."
"Okay. See you soon."
Hank and Kitty are waiting with bandages and a blanket for them at the front door. Mikaela transfers the girl over to them and watches the three hurry into the mansion. As soon as they're out of sight, Mikaela stumbles and nearly loses her balance from a sudden impact.
She whips round, eyes blazing, mouth opening to shout at Pyro for shoving her, but his fist is already flying. Mikaela lifts her hand, dodges to the side, and the nanotech moves faster than she can think, forming a thruster to blast Pyro away from her.
"Hey!" Storm shouts, hurrying out the front door towards them.
"What the shit are you doing?" Mikaela demands, ignoring the woman. Anger burns in her chest.
"What am I doing?" Pyro repeats indignantly, glaring up at her from the ground. "What the fuck was that?"
"You were gonna punch me, you fucking baffoon!"
"Not that," he growls, angrily pushing himself up onto his feet again. "You saw what those monsters did to her, and you just let them go!" he rages.
The nanotech retreating to her bracer again, Mikaela threads her fingers into her hair and pulls, infuriated. "I didn't let them go!" she shouts back. "I have everything I need on them to find them again! I just didn't want that girl to watch us beat them half to death after everything she's been through!"
"No one's beating anyone half to death!" Storm cuts in, her voice loud and sharp.
"But-" Pyro starts.
"Hey!" Storm snaps, and her eyes go grey in her anger. "You said you knew what you were sacrificing, coming here! We don't kill people! We help them!"
"Exactly!" Mikaela agrees.
"And you!" Storm continues, turning on Mikaela. "What are you doing? You think the kids want to see you attacking our own? You think that gives them any hope? Any happiness?"
Mikaela's words die on her tongue. She stares wide-eyed at Storm, wondering if she's ever been chastised like this before.
"We are all stuck in this shitty situation together, and no one's going to benefit if we all start attacking and killing each other! We're trying to sow peace, not conflict, not violence! So get your shit together!"
With that, Storm goes back inside, slamming the door behind her.
Mikaela continues to gape at the closed door. "Huh," she mutters curiously.
Pyro marches up to her, eyes blazing, voice quiet and deadly. "How long do you think this can last? You think the humans will just settle down? You think they won't eventually come for you?"
Mikaela lifts her eyebrows. "Oh, so it's not 'us' anymore?"
"Don't be naïve," he spits. "Some point down the line, they're gonna storm this place with their pitchforks and torches, and you better pray we're there to protect you."
Mikaela resists the urge to demonstrate her lack of need for his protection. "You'd really just leave these kids to fend for themselves?"
Pyro straightens, his face hardening. "They'd have the same choice you guys turned down when you had the chance."
Mikaela laughs bitterly. "What, 'join us or we won't protect you'? Real fucking noble, man."
"At least we'd succeed in protecting them. Could you say the same?"
He storms away before she can answer. She stares after him, her mood sinking, hopelessness creeping up on the edge of her consciousness.
Where are Tony and Peter?
She thinks she might just feel like she's drowning.
Where can she find hope in this world?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mikaela sits in a heap at the foot of the grave, staring at the engraved name and kind words below it.
"I wish I could have met you," she mutters, picking at the grass between her legs. "I think Pete is so pure and good because he uses you as his beacon, his guide."
She pauses to take a deep breath and squint up into the sunlight. She doesn't even feel the warmth of the sun anymore. She just feels the pain as it sears her sensitive eyes.
"He's lucky that he had you from such a young age, and was so open to your guidance," she says, smiling somewhat bitterly. "When I met Tony, I was a little brat who couldn't be told what to do or how to do it. I couldn't even admit I cared about him for years. By the time I met Pete, I still wasn't ready for him. For his endless, ruthless optimism and warmth."
She wonders if that came across more as an insult than a compliment.
"He might have been my worst nightmare at first," she says, struggling to remember just how it felt to hate him. "But, now.."
She shakes her head and clears her throat.
"Well, it's been sixteen or seventeen days now, I'm not sure," she continues, subdued. "I'll give them a month, and then I'll have to go look for them and bring them home, cos they're out way past curfew."
She sighs quietly, rubbing her forehead. Her eyes close against the sunlight, seeking out the darkness, and she feels a familiar sense of numbness coming over her.
"Anyway," she says, standing up. "I hope you appreciated this edition of my forced companionship. I know I'm nothing compared to what Peter would be, but, you don't really have a choice. And you can't do anything about it anyway. No offence."
She turns and walks out of the graveyard, pulling her cap down a little more. People on the streets are either lost shadows of themselves, or scittery mice versions. No one came out of this thing without loss, without pain, and no one seems to be handling it well. How could they? Not only have they lost loved ones without any warning, but half the fucking population of the Earth has vanished too, and you can't not notice it, at this point.
Something that scares Mikaela is that they might have to get used to this emptiness - this massive, incomprehensible, indescribable hole left by those who vanished. It isn't something people should have to get used to - that's something she can't bear the thought of, and she's terrified that, at some point, it is going to become reality.
She finds Natasha, Steve, and Rhodes bustling around the facility when she gets back. Nobody ever seems cheerful to see each other anymore. She walks through them and out into the hallways. She passes a room with Bruce sitting awkwardly next to Thor, clearly uncertain of how to comfort his friend. She passes more empty rooms than she cares to count, ignoring the memories of them being filled with staff working with the Avengers.
She almost passes the room Rocket's taken as his own before she realises what it is he's watching on his TV.
"Really?" she asks, frowning at him.
Rocket doesn't look at her; he just continues to gape at the screen, shoulders slumped and hand loosely grasping the remote.
"I could always distract myself before," he mutters, shrugging limply. "I always had something else I could be doing. But now I don't got nothin' to do, so here I am."
Mikaela grimaces and walks into his room. "You could watch something else instead?" she suggests. "Literally anything else."
"So stupid," he groans quietly, ignoring her.
"They're not stupid," she counters, sitting down next to him and watching the screen with him.
"Can they talk?" he retorts.
"No, but-"
"Then they're stupid," he spits.
Mikaela notices the empty bottles lying on the ground. She reaches over and plucks the remote from his unmoving fingers. "Why don't you try to sleep, instead of watching videos of raccoons," she sighs.
Rocket finally looks at her, and she sees the same expression on his face as she does when she looks in a mirror. "Can you sleep?" he asks darkly.
Mikaela clenches her jaw, but she doesn't drop his eye contact. "No," she says.
Rocket shrugs and looks back at the blank TV screen. "Put the idiots back on."
Mikaela rolls her eyes. "I'll put a movie on instead."
She hears him mock her quietly as she moves to turn the artificial windows to dark, and manages a small smile. She sets him up with a random comedy, making him promise not to go back to the raccoon videos, and leaves him to it.
Her room waits for her at the end of the hall. She opens the door and stops, her hand on the door knob, her tired gaze lingering on the armchair next to the desks of monitors, the chair Tony used to sit in when he was waiting for her to come back.
She wonders what is worse: waiting for someone right in front of you to come back, or waiting for someone you can't see and have no idea where they are.
After a quick glance at the floor next to the bed, Mikaela feels her chest tighten and she shuts the door again, turning back on herself to go to one of the recreational rooms.
She can sit on a couch and stare out the window for a while.
Where are Tony and Peter?