Chapter 10: What Now?
Author's Note: I'm sorry, I have been rather slow in my writing. What follows is the first of two chapters (the next one will be posted soon) that I just felt I had to write together. So be prepared for lots of...well..writing.
Disclaimer: I got nothin'
.............
When you're a leader, you try to keep everything under control, but sometimes you just lose it.
This was one of those times.
I watched as my teammate and friend was publicly exposed and humiliated at lunch today and there was nothing I could do. I would have given anything to save him from such a situation, including being outed myself. If it would have done something, I would have blasted every guy wearing a football letter jacket off the face of the earth.
But there was nothing I could do.
I did manage to catch him as he ran toward the street. He looked so sad, huddled up in the front seat, staring at the dashboard. He immediately went up to his room while I went and talked to Professor X.
The Professor already knew what had happened; Jean had told him. I informed him where Alex was, and he told me that I did the right thing, considering the situation.
"There was nothing you could do, Scott," he said.
Damn, I know he means well, but it just makes me feel like shit. What am I doing here if I can't stop stuff like this from happening? What am I doing here at all?
I found myself in the boy's hallway. At this time of day, it was eerily quiet; all I could hear was the hum of the heaters. I walked up to Alex's door and knocked.
"What do you want?"
At least he wasn't ignoring me.
"Do you want to talk?"
There was no answer. I took this to mean yes, and so I slowly opened the door.
He was lying on his bed with the lights off and the drapes pulled. His glasses were off; his face was shiny with tears. I shut the door and the room went completely dark.
I would've handed him some tissues and sat next to him, but without any light, all I could do was find a clear spot on the floor.
We sat in silence for a long time. "Do you want to talk" is not a sentence I utter often, so I really didn't know where to go from there. I finally got up the courage to say something.
"I can't imagine what it must be like to be in your situation, but I want you to know that the entire team is there for you." It was a good start.
It got no response, though. I took some more time to figure out what to say next. It was then that he finally spoke.
"My sister's birthday is October 31st and every time he has an election, he has spent it in Washington, giving out Halloween candy in homeless shelters or something. We always got around to celebrating it--after the first Tuesday in November--but it was never the same. Nora and I would pretend to make a cake when we were little, and even light pretend candles and sing 'Happy Birthday' because when you're little, your birthday is the most important day of the year."
So that was the most upsetting part about all of this, that his father outed him on national TV, not the football team incident.
"The past few years, he's been too busy to even call home. His life revolves around reelection." I heard him sigh.
I thought about my parents, what few memories I actually had of them. I was probably not the best person to be in this situation. I have no idea how my parents would've taken the fact that I'm a mutant. I tried to think of how I'd seen other parents take it. Kurt's weren't surprised, but why would they be? Kitty's were in denial. Bobby's parents were scared, Amara's confused, Rahne's just wanted to figure out what was going on.
Mr. McAllister was all of those things, but above all he seemed concerned with his public image. Alex told me he was confined to his house for the whole summer because his dad didn't want him to "be found out," as if people just walk around with mutant detectors. And yet in the end, it was his father that told the world, as a publicity stunt, I suppose. He's become the mutant hater who cares.
I drew my mind back to Alex when I heard him sit up.
"Scott?"
"Yeah?"
"How the hell am I even gonna go back to school?"
I'd been thinking about that. I had no idea how Principal Kelly would respond to this kind of thing. I knew he didn't like mutants, last year's soccer game had been proof enough of that, but now that he actually knew he had one in the school, what was he going to do?
Maybe we could explain that Alex doesn't exactly have dangerous powers. Seeing through walls isn't exactly going to kill anyone, now is it? I just hoped we wouldn't have to keep an angry mob away or something. I've seen the Friends of Humanity protests in the city, they can get quite rowdy when they know there's a mutant around.
I realized I hadn't answered his question.
"I don't know, Alex, but we're going to make sure you'll at least be safe. We're a team, and that means we stand up for one another." It sounded trite, and we both knew it, but what else could I say? I don't know what'll happen.
................
"I just don't know, mutants creep me out."
I have come to the conclusion that life is shit. Not only is the glass half empty, but it's dirty and chipped, and when you drink from it, you're gonna get cut and die.
"But he's still Alex, and while you don't know him, I can vouch for him. He's a perfectly nice guy." I was trying to convince my friend Cooper that mutants aren't bad, scary, weird, or even abnormal. It wasn't going well.
"But look at the way he beat up Duncan. What if he loses it and does it to someone else?"
"I could beat the crap out of you right now, but are you afraid of me?"
"No."
I so desperately wanted to follow with, "I could encase you in ice right now, how about that?" but I had a feeling I might not get the desired response.
"I just don't see what the big deal is. He's not a different person."
"No, that's the problem, Bobby. You just don't' see it. It IS a big deal. I don't know him that well, and now there's this unknown factor. What if he suffers from uncontrollable rage or something? He might just lose it one day and take it all out on us."
I sighed and turned to my other friends. "Come on you guys, this is not that big of a deal."
The only person I got a positive response out of was Jubilee.
Well, duh, of course she agreed with me. You'd think we would hang out with some more mutant-friendly people, though. I shuddered when I thought what Cooper and co. would do if they knew they were friends with not one, but two mutants.
The rest of them all just shrugged as the bell rang for the last class. We all went off in our separate directions, except for my friend Greg, who was in my English class.
I was a little peeved with my friends' response to the whole mutant thing, so I didn't talk much as we got to class. Greg was pondering something, so he didn't notice really. We were waiting for our teacher to arrive when he finally spoke up.
"So it, like, doesn't bother you at all that he's a mutant?"
I thought we'd been through this, but hey, why shouldn't we at least restate the obvious? "Not a bit," I said, sounding quite frustrated. "He's no different than he was yesterday."
Greg was silent for awhile, and then he said, "but what if one of your friends--"
"Alex IS one of my friends." How hard was this to get?
"Yeah, I know, but I mean one of our friends, like Annie or Cooper or Jubilee or me or something, what if one of us was a mutant?"
"It still wouldn't matter." I could tell he was really hung up on this. "Look, Greg, whether or not someone's a mutant is not something they can control, it may affect what they look like, or what they can do, but it doesn't change who they are. If you turned to me right now and said, "Bobby, I'm a mutant," I wouldn't care because you're still the same person you were five minutes ago. You'd still be the same Greg Anderson who wants to be a molecular biologist, has had a crush on Annie Wilkins since the third grade, and who I thought was the coolest kid in school when I met you last year because your dad has a box for the Yankees games."
That actually got through to him, I think. He nodded and seemed to be fine with that answer, but we didn't get to talk because the teacher came in right after that.
.........
My best friend Katie found me after orchestra and we talked about it. She was more afraid than I was, but I think that was because she doesn't know him as well.
"Just think about how much time you spend alone with him" she said, "what if he just wants to take advantage of you because he thinks you're inferior or something? I read the papers, there are a lot of mutants who think that way."
There are a lot of mutants who think that way; that's what I was worried about.
But then again, why would he even bother to go out with me if he was like that?
It was all so confusing.
I'd like to think of myself as a tolerant person. As a member of a minority group, I've been treated with, well if not outright discrimination then blatant ignorance by more than a few people, and I'd prefer to stop perpetuating that kind of situation. My group of friends might as well be on a "diversity is good" type poster for crying out loud, so why was I obsessing over this?
It was a subject I'd never thought about before. I'd never expected to actually meet a mutant, and now I was dating one. It was a whole new experience for me.
But it's not like I didn't know him, we'd been sort-of-maybe-dating since the beginning of the year, and I liked him fine until now.
Why didn't he tell me?
Well, I know perfectly well why he didn't tell me. His own father wants to fingerprint his kind for the sake of national security, that's why. But still, it's like...well, I can't even describe it. It's just weird.
Was I a ruse to appear normal? Well, he seems pretty normal anyway, so I don't think he needed a human to make him that way. And besides, if he wanted to be "normal," he should be going after someone like Jean Grey, only without the dumb, overprotective jock of a boyfriend.
So I gave up trying to answer the endless questions and tried to concentrate on class while still avoiding contact with him. I don't know why I was avoiding him, but I knew I had no idea what I'd do if we started talking.
And then lunch came, and what was a wild rumor for so many all morning became unavoidable fact. We had a mutant in our midst.
How I made it through afternoon classes is a mystery to me, because not only was I caught up in the whole, "oh my god, it's a mutant," thing, but I had a lot of people going "Anita, you're his girlfriend, did he tell you?"
And then I got to be reminded once again that no, no he did not.
I was on my way to Spanish, (thankfully) the last class of the day, when who should approach me but the ever-so-perfect Ms. Jean Grey. Senior, yearbook editor, star soccer player and all.
"Um...Anita, can I talk to you for a minute?"
I must say I was a tad surprised. I know she's sort of friends with Alex, but she usually hung out with the "popular" crowd.
But hey, it's been a weird day, so why not just add to it?
"Yeah," I said. She lead me down a quieter hallway so it would be easier to talk.
"I'm sure you were shocked to hear that Alex is a mutant."
I make a point not to spill my guts with people I don't know particularly well, so I just nodded, but she certainly got that right.
"I don't expect you to confide in me or anything, but I want you to know that he's still the same Alex you knew before."
I'd been telling myself that all day, and yet somehow it still wasn't making me feel better.
"I know it's not much comfort, but it's true."
She had an uncanny knack for picking up on people's emotions. She needs to run a suicide hotline or something.
"I think he'd be happy to talk to you, and I think it'd be good for you to talk to him. I know that right now, you're probably more confused than anything else, and talking about it would help."
Oh boy, did I want to talk, and I wanted to talk to someone that would reassure me that it was all going to be ok.
Because it was, wasn't it?
I looked at my watch and realized I was going to be late for class. "I have to go," I told her, and started down the hall.
"Here, wait," she said. She handed me a piece of paper with Alex's address and phone number on it. I took it and shoved it in my pocket.
"I'll hopefully see you later" she said, as she walked to her own class.
.............
So that's chapter 10. I'll get to reviews after the next one. For the record, I don't think Jean is on the yearbook committee, and I have no idea how various parents' took the news that their child was a mutant.
Oh, and by the way, I'm looking for a beta reader. If anyone's interested in getting the dirt (and the alternate endings) of Shades of Darkness before anyone else, feel free to email me at musicnerd1685@netscape.net
'Til next time,
hnh
Author's Note: I'm sorry, I have been rather slow in my writing. What follows is the first of two chapters (the next one will be posted soon) that I just felt I had to write together. So be prepared for lots of...well..writing.
Disclaimer: I got nothin'
.............
When you're a leader, you try to keep everything under control, but sometimes you just lose it.
This was one of those times.
I watched as my teammate and friend was publicly exposed and humiliated at lunch today and there was nothing I could do. I would have given anything to save him from such a situation, including being outed myself. If it would have done something, I would have blasted every guy wearing a football letter jacket off the face of the earth.
But there was nothing I could do.
I did manage to catch him as he ran toward the street. He looked so sad, huddled up in the front seat, staring at the dashboard. He immediately went up to his room while I went and talked to Professor X.
The Professor already knew what had happened; Jean had told him. I informed him where Alex was, and he told me that I did the right thing, considering the situation.
"There was nothing you could do, Scott," he said.
Damn, I know he means well, but it just makes me feel like shit. What am I doing here if I can't stop stuff like this from happening? What am I doing here at all?
I found myself in the boy's hallway. At this time of day, it was eerily quiet; all I could hear was the hum of the heaters. I walked up to Alex's door and knocked.
"What do you want?"
At least he wasn't ignoring me.
"Do you want to talk?"
There was no answer. I took this to mean yes, and so I slowly opened the door.
He was lying on his bed with the lights off and the drapes pulled. His glasses were off; his face was shiny with tears. I shut the door and the room went completely dark.
I would've handed him some tissues and sat next to him, but without any light, all I could do was find a clear spot on the floor.
We sat in silence for a long time. "Do you want to talk" is not a sentence I utter often, so I really didn't know where to go from there. I finally got up the courage to say something.
"I can't imagine what it must be like to be in your situation, but I want you to know that the entire team is there for you." It was a good start.
It got no response, though. I took some more time to figure out what to say next. It was then that he finally spoke.
"My sister's birthday is October 31st and every time he has an election, he has spent it in Washington, giving out Halloween candy in homeless shelters or something. We always got around to celebrating it--after the first Tuesday in November--but it was never the same. Nora and I would pretend to make a cake when we were little, and even light pretend candles and sing 'Happy Birthday' because when you're little, your birthday is the most important day of the year."
So that was the most upsetting part about all of this, that his father outed him on national TV, not the football team incident.
"The past few years, he's been too busy to even call home. His life revolves around reelection." I heard him sigh.
I thought about my parents, what few memories I actually had of them. I was probably not the best person to be in this situation. I have no idea how my parents would've taken the fact that I'm a mutant. I tried to think of how I'd seen other parents take it. Kurt's weren't surprised, but why would they be? Kitty's were in denial. Bobby's parents were scared, Amara's confused, Rahne's just wanted to figure out what was going on.
Mr. McAllister was all of those things, but above all he seemed concerned with his public image. Alex told me he was confined to his house for the whole summer because his dad didn't want him to "be found out," as if people just walk around with mutant detectors. And yet in the end, it was his father that told the world, as a publicity stunt, I suppose. He's become the mutant hater who cares.
I drew my mind back to Alex when I heard him sit up.
"Scott?"
"Yeah?"
"How the hell am I even gonna go back to school?"
I'd been thinking about that. I had no idea how Principal Kelly would respond to this kind of thing. I knew he didn't like mutants, last year's soccer game had been proof enough of that, but now that he actually knew he had one in the school, what was he going to do?
Maybe we could explain that Alex doesn't exactly have dangerous powers. Seeing through walls isn't exactly going to kill anyone, now is it? I just hoped we wouldn't have to keep an angry mob away or something. I've seen the Friends of Humanity protests in the city, they can get quite rowdy when they know there's a mutant around.
I realized I hadn't answered his question.
"I don't know, Alex, but we're going to make sure you'll at least be safe. We're a team, and that means we stand up for one another." It sounded trite, and we both knew it, but what else could I say? I don't know what'll happen.
................
"I just don't know, mutants creep me out."
I have come to the conclusion that life is shit. Not only is the glass half empty, but it's dirty and chipped, and when you drink from it, you're gonna get cut and die.
"But he's still Alex, and while you don't know him, I can vouch for him. He's a perfectly nice guy." I was trying to convince my friend Cooper that mutants aren't bad, scary, weird, or even abnormal. It wasn't going well.
"But look at the way he beat up Duncan. What if he loses it and does it to someone else?"
"I could beat the crap out of you right now, but are you afraid of me?"
"No."
I so desperately wanted to follow with, "I could encase you in ice right now, how about that?" but I had a feeling I might not get the desired response.
"I just don't see what the big deal is. He's not a different person."
"No, that's the problem, Bobby. You just don't' see it. It IS a big deal. I don't know him that well, and now there's this unknown factor. What if he suffers from uncontrollable rage or something? He might just lose it one day and take it all out on us."
I sighed and turned to my other friends. "Come on you guys, this is not that big of a deal."
The only person I got a positive response out of was Jubilee.
Well, duh, of course she agreed with me. You'd think we would hang out with some more mutant-friendly people, though. I shuddered when I thought what Cooper and co. would do if they knew they were friends with not one, but two mutants.
The rest of them all just shrugged as the bell rang for the last class. We all went off in our separate directions, except for my friend Greg, who was in my English class.
I was a little peeved with my friends' response to the whole mutant thing, so I didn't talk much as we got to class. Greg was pondering something, so he didn't notice really. We were waiting for our teacher to arrive when he finally spoke up.
"So it, like, doesn't bother you at all that he's a mutant?"
I thought we'd been through this, but hey, why shouldn't we at least restate the obvious? "Not a bit," I said, sounding quite frustrated. "He's no different than he was yesterday."
Greg was silent for awhile, and then he said, "but what if one of your friends--"
"Alex IS one of my friends." How hard was this to get?
"Yeah, I know, but I mean one of our friends, like Annie or Cooper or Jubilee or me or something, what if one of us was a mutant?"
"It still wouldn't matter." I could tell he was really hung up on this. "Look, Greg, whether or not someone's a mutant is not something they can control, it may affect what they look like, or what they can do, but it doesn't change who they are. If you turned to me right now and said, "Bobby, I'm a mutant," I wouldn't care because you're still the same person you were five minutes ago. You'd still be the same Greg Anderson who wants to be a molecular biologist, has had a crush on Annie Wilkins since the third grade, and who I thought was the coolest kid in school when I met you last year because your dad has a box for the Yankees games."
That actually got through to him, I think. He nodded and seemed to be fine with that answer, but we didn't get to talk because the teacher came in right after that.
.........
My best friend Katie found me after orchestra and we talked about it. She was more afraid than I was, but I think that was because she doesn't know him as well.
"Just think about how much time you spend alone with him" she said, "what if he just wants to take advantage of you because he thinks you're inferior or something? I read the papers, there are a lot of mutants who think that way."
There are a lot of mutants who think that way; that's what I was worried about.
But then again, why would he even bother to go out with me if he was like that?
It was all so confusing.
I'd like to think of myself as a tolerant person. As a member of a minority group, I've been treated with, well if not outright discrimination then blatant ignorance by more than a few people, and I'd prefer to stop perpetuating that kind of situation. My group of friends might as well be on a "diversity is good" type poster for crying out loud, so why was I obsessing over this?
It was a subject I'd never thought about before. I'd never expected to actually meet a mutant, and now I was dating one. It was a whole new experience for me.
But it's not like I didn't know him, we'd been sort-of-maybe-dating since the beginning of the year, and I liked him fine until now.
Why didn't he tell me?
Well, I know perfectly well why he didn't tell me. His own father wants to fingerprint his kind for the sake of national security, that's why. But still, it's like...well, I can't even describe it. It's just weird.
Was I a ruse to appear normal? Well, he seems pretty normal anyway, so I don't think he needed a human to make him that way. And besides, if he wanted to be "normal," he should be going after someone like Jean Grey, only without the dumb, overprotective jock of a boyfriend.
So I gave up trying to answer the endless questions and tried to concentrate on class while still avoiding contact with him. I don't know why I was avoiding him, but I knew I had no idea what I'd do if we started talking.
And then lunch came, and what was a wild rumor for so many all morning became unavoidable fact. We had a mutant in our midst.
How I made it through afternoon classes is a mystery to me, because not only was I caught up in the whole, "oh my god, it's a mutant," thing, but I had a lot of people going "Anita, you're his girlfriend, did he tell you?"
And then I got to be reminded once again that no, no he did not.
I was on my way to Spanish, (thankfully) the last class of the day, when who should approach me but the ever-so-perfect Ms. Jean Grey. Senior, yearbook editor, star soccer player and all.
"Um...Anita, can I talk to you for a minute?"
I must say I was a tad surprised. I know she's sort of friends with Alex, but she usually hung out with the "popular" crowd.
But hey, it's been a weird day, so why not just add to it?
"Yeah," I said. She lead me down a quieter hallway so it would be easier to talk.
"I'm sure you were shocked to hear that Alex is a mutant."
I make a point not to spill my guts with people I don't know particularly well, so I just nodded, but she certainly got that right.
"I don't expect you to confide in me or anything, but I want you to know that he's still the same Alex you knew before."
I'd been telling myself that all day, and yet somehow it still wasn't making me feel better.
"I know it's not much comfort, but it's true."
She had an uncanny knack for picking up on people's emotions. She needs to run a suicide hotline or something.
"I think he'd be happy to talk to you, and I think it'd be good for you to talk to him. I know that right now, you're probably more confused than anything else, and talking about it would help."
Oh boy, did I want to talk, and I wanted to talk to someone that would reassure me that it was all going to be ok.
Because it was, wasn't it?
I looked at my watch and realized I was going to be late for class. "I have to go," I told her, and started down the hall.
"Here, wait," she said. She handed me a piece of paper with Alex's address and phone number on it. I took it and shoved it in my pocket.
"I'll hopefully see you later" she said, as she walked to her own class.
.............
So that's chapter 10. I'll get to reviews after the next one. For the record, I don't think Jean is on the yearbook committee, and I have no idea how various parents' took the news that their child was a mutant.
Oh, and by the way, I'm looking for a beta reader. If anyone's interested in getting the dirt (and the alternate endings) of Shades of Darkness before anyone else, feel free to email me at musicnerd1685@netscape.net
'Til next time,
hnh