Title: Standard of Living

Rating: PG-13. A few curse words, but mostly just for stuff that might squick you out, like rampant self-destruction and one slightly graphic scene. Jono's a messed up little boy, what can I say?

Notes: ...Youch. Dark, dark piece, that's all I can say. Read at your own risk.

Continuance Note: Set roughly a year after the Psi-Wars. Other than that, continuity took a dive out the window.

Disclaimer: They're Marvel's. Chapter header lyrics are marked appropriately, and the title is from a lovely Jewel song called Deep Water. The entire line I wanted to use is "our standard of living somehow got stuck on survive" - but the chapters had something else in mind.

******

Maybe I'm all messed up...

This is the only time I really feel alive.

-- Nine Inch Nails, "The Only Time"

I've never been one for irony. Sarcasm, yes. I live off it. But irony is usually cruel and always negative, so I try to stay as far from it as possible. So why am I babbling like this? Because I've finally realized just how I feel about a certain blonde angel from Kentucky and I want to tell her that I care for her so much that it hurts, something I've been much too scared to admit all along. The whole beautiful irony of it all is that now that I've finally come to terms with my feelings and decided I should share them with Paige, I can't. Literally. I have no voice to convey my words, and paper isn't good enough. I have so much I want, need to tell her, things I never would have dreamed of saying a year ago, and I can't. I'm stuck in this voiceless, faceless pit with the dirt coming in on top of me and no way to get out. It's amazing how suddenly brave you are with your emotions once you're left with no way to get them across.

So, I stay down here and play.

No one looks for me down here. Oh, they used to, I suppose. Up until I saw Everett poke his head through the door and ask if I wanted to go catch a movie with him and Jubilee. Thankfully for him, my nine hundred page English book nailed the wall behind him. That was pretty much the last time they tried to get me to be normal again.

Sean's stopped worrying and stopped fussing over me. The poor bloke's been run crazy between me and Emma and Monet all having a few loose screws, but being the good man that he is, he tried for longer than I can remember to help us out of the funk we'd gotten ourselves into. I think Monet was the first, and Emma's still coming around. Sean eventually gave up on me, and I can't blame him. How can I? I gave up on myself months ago. He's even stopped worrying over my grades now, and he doesn't insist on seeking me out when I don't come to class. I'm glad for that much, since English Lit is the only class I still try to attend on a fairly regular basis.

When I'm not dodging teachers or would-be friends, I sit down here in the basement and play my guitar, and sometimes it helps. Fingers run up and down the neck of the guitar, unplugged so no one else has to hear my misery. I don't want them to. It's my misery and mine alone and I don't need some halfwit down here telling me that everything is going to be okay when I know it won't. I can feel it, feel the misery as surely as though it's truly manifested itself into solid matter, into the blisters on my hands from playing this guitar, into the blood that isn't really blood at all dotting the frets.

It's all I have now. My pain, my hands, and my guitar to play a song for the world that I want it to hear and pray it never does. I want it to feel how I feel and yet I hope for sanity's sake that it doesn't. No one should have to deal with this - it's destroyed me.

I pause for a moment, frustrated because I can't remember the next part of the song. It's a haunting, angry piece with intricately woven melodies and harmonies that form a beauty only a musician could possibly know. It's also hard as hell to learn; I've been trying since I was sixteen. It's harder still to imagine someone so hurt and broken they could write something like this, but they did and it's become an obsession with me to learn how to play it. I have a feeling that I'll never know how it's supposed to sound until I get as hurt and broken as the tortured soul who wrote it. That might not be too far from now.

Unfortunately, the songbook is across the room on my bed, and I can't seem to find the motivation to get up and get it. I can't seem to find the motivation to do much of anything these days, even live. My powers have seen to it that I needn't worry about that, though. So I sit here and stare at the songbook like I think it's going to walk over here. Considering I paid almost sixty pounds for it, it should bloody well do it and fold my laundry on the way over.

It's silent here, leaving me free to listen to what's going on overhead. The rec room is directly above my head, conveniently enough, and there are loud noises coming from it. Jubilee's screeching. Angelo's swearing. Paige's laughing. And as much as I'd like to say I wish I was up there, I can't. I don't. I want to be left here alone, in the dark, with nothing to hold onto but my guitar and what's left of my sanity and oh God, someone help me . . .

But no one hears my unspoken plea, so I go back to the guitar and use it to give the misery a voice I wish I could.



It's been a year since I was cleared from the medlab. A year and a week since my world - what remained of it - came down about my ears. I'd prayed to a god I barely believed in for weeks after my powers manifested to kill me and make everything go away. When the world around me exploded one day many months later, I thought I'd finally been answered. Everything burst into a white light, so glorious and terrifying and gorgeous I thought I was about to meet the Creator my parents taught me to believe in long ago. Then came the flurry of broken images - Cable, Phoenix, Nate Grey, Emma, Monet - all disjointed and not making a bit of sense. Then we were all simultaneously pulled onto the Astral Plane. The proximity of it all, being so close to every telepath on Earth, was intoxicating. While I had no idea what was happening, I knew I wanted this feeling of powerlessness, of being held slave to a . . . something more powerful than I could ever hope to be, of still being more in control of myself than ever. I touched every mind on this planet in rapid succession, and felt more heartache and joy in a moment than I could in a million lifetimes.

And just as I came down off the frightening, unnatural high, I realized we were all about to change.

We stood, more or less, in a cluster inside the very heart of the plane, the crux that every telepath dreams of touching. Doing so would lead to certain death, a sort of mental electrocution, but damn, it's a way to go. Psylocke stood just outside, and some shadow creature stood behind her, taunting her, and before anyone could stop her, she struck a blow deep into the heart of every telepath in existence.

I watched, one by one, as others fell around me, all by milliseconds but seeming like a lifetime. If I had to compare it to something, I would say it is a feeling very close to dying and being reborn at once. So many thoughts tore through my head, emotions on a level non-psis can't understand, and I staggered under the weight. I wanted to laugh, cry, murder someone and have a child, sing, ask who was reaching orgasm at that moment. I wanted to stay in that insane rut, just quietly lose my mind and live forever as a mindless, soulless being caught in eternal rapture.

And then it ended.

All of it happened in the span of one second. One second was all it took to show me what was mine for a moment and what would never be again, and then it was over.

I woke up a week later.

I don't think I felt anything, just. . .emptiness. I knew something precious and deeply personal had been taken from me, but I didn't know what exactly it was until I tried to speak. I felt a horrible pain in my head, and then nothing. No one else's thoughts, no psychic impressions, nothing. I would have cried if I could.

Angelo was in the room when I woke, and as soon as he saw me moving, he was hanging halfway out the medlab doorway, screaming to Sean or Emma that I was awake. Then he was back at my side, smiling that idiotic smile of his that would have been welcome any other time.

"Hey," he greeted with his usual casual manner. "Glad to see you're still around, amigo."

I grabbed his shirt collar and yanked with so much strength I heard threads tearing. Hearing, unfortunately, did not equal caring. 'Where is it?' my mind demanded, but for some reason the words weren't traveling along the temporary mental link I established with everybody when I tried to talk. Angelo just blinked like a deer in headlights and I shook him angrily. 'Where?' It was asked loudly enough so that, if the word did get to his mind as it always had, it probably would have given him a mild concussion. Imagine my surprise when he didn't even blink that time, just pried my fingers off his shirt and went in search of something I couldn't see.

That something was square and flat with spiral along the edge, and it took a moment for it to register that it was his biology notebook. With a bit of advice - "Write it down." - he pushed his pencil into my hand. Shock subsiding, I obliged him and wrote my question down, then all but threw the paper at him. "Where's what?" he asked after a minute, and I could do nothing but point to my head. I half expected him to give some bloody smart remark like "on your shoulders" or something to that effect, but Angelo is smarter than that, which is good. Otherwise, I probably would have used the pencil still in my hand and jabbed it into his throat.

"It's gone, hombre," he replied rather unnecessarily. My hand tightened around the pencil. "No one knows what happened, just that the Astral Plane shut down or something. Monet just came around, an' Emma's . . . well, going loca, I think." He shrugged sympathetically. "Near as we can tell, telepathy's pretty much dead right now."

Like me. I stopped caring what he said then, drew my arms around myself and tried to come to grips with this. My powers had taken my life from me and replaced it with something else, and I'd just started to get used to it when even my powers were taken from me. I always thought I'd be happy when that day came, but goddammit all, those were my powers and should not have been taken like that. Just . . . stolen. It was a violation that angered me to the core, and scared me just as much.

Angelo, being the friend he is, could just about guess what my little internal row was about, and he hugged me in a way that would have raised suspicions from those who didn't know us. We're both loners by nature, but damned if we're not horribly clingy with each other. "I'm sorry," he whispers against my hair. "I can't even think of what you're goin' through, but I'll - we'll help, okay?"

No, it's not okay, because hugs aren't enough, but I let him hold me for a while anyway.