Asunder
The bed is cold and the room is filled with sunlight when Clarice wakes up. It's only after grudgingly sitting up and idly wondering how long John has been awake that the previous day's events come back to her. Blearily, it occurs to her that John's side is cold because John never went to sleep. She didn't recall when she'd fallen asleep, but the fact that she woke up in bed rather than on the couch was a rather clear testament that John was back to his masochistic tendencies of trying to do everything by himself. She frowned at his pillow and rolled out of bed.
By the time Clarice came downstairs, most of the mutants in the house were awake and milling about. She plucked an apple from the kitchen as she tried to catch a glimpse of John and took a bite when he was nowhere to be found. She tried, only in the slightest sense of the word, to temper the anger that was starting to well up in her. If he and his brother had left on a rescue mission without her – without so much as waking her to tell her they were going – she was going to give him several pieces of her mind.
Halfway through ravaging her apple, she spotted Kitty in the seat James had occupied last night, painstakingly searching the internet for any crumb of information on Alison. For the moment, Clarice decided to let her be. If Kitty was still here, perhaps they hadn't snuck off alone on a kamikaze mission. Then again, John and James were brothers, and it was entirely possible that John would make an exception. Feeling uneasy, Clarice made her way to the front door and stepped outside for some air.
The sight that greeted her was surreal: there lay, scattered in splinters all around the property, remnants of what must have been a very large tree at one point, broken chain links bigger than her wrist flung in every direction, and Clarice was pretty sure that when she'd gone to sleep last night that there wasn't a gigantic concrete cylinder in the yard and yet there it was. The sight should have reassured her, knowing from the look of it that the Proudstar men were surely still around, but it troubled her more than the empty bed.
She went walking.
The further she walked, the more debris she found and the more she wondered how she'd slept through so much destruction. Over a mile away from the Underground, Clarice could hear the deep rumble and thuds of heavy objects being moved; some of it she could even feel shaking the ground. In the distance, she could see the silhouette of one of the brothers, something large hoisted over his head.
"John?"
She couldn't hear an answer but she knew he'd heard her. Ahead, she saw the figure put down his load and a second figure appeared climbing up out of the ground. One of them waved, and she took that as her cue and opened a portal to shortcut the distance. Crystal clear in front of her, Clarice suddenly had an eyeful of sweat-slicked hair, bronzed skin, and the greatest pair of abdominals she'd ever seen in her life. She blinked.
"Not to be a third wheel, but what are you guys doing?"
She could see now, thanks to the portal, a hell of a gaping hole in the ground behind them. Around that were sledgehammers, shovels, a huge plank of plywood, two more concrete cylinders, and their shirts.
James bent to grab his shirt and wipe the sweat from his face. John stood panting and looking parched.
"We're building an escape tunnel for the Underground. Just in case."
"….Okay."
She gave him the This is weird face and John smiled and told his brother to take a break. James didn't protest, stepping through the portal and passing by Clarice, heading straight to the house. Surprised, Clarice walked through and let the portal close.
"Is he not grounded anymore?" she ventured, shoving her hands into her back pockets and looking around again.
"He's too exhausted to run."
"Ah. All-night building project to wear him out. Smart. Kind of."
"Kind of?" John asked, turning to retrieve a bottle of water off of the ground and chugging it in one gulp.
"Well, look at you. You look trashed. It's one thing to not sleep all night; it's another to not sleep and start a construction project."
"The task served it's purpose and we have an alternate escape route now. Win-win."
Clarice stared at him with an expression that said Really? and John tapped his bicep with two fingers, just under his Semper Fi tattoo. "Bootcamp is 20% physical training and 80% mental reconditioning. They drill it into your mind that the simplest solution is the best one. There's a reason we're called Jarheads."
Clarice relented. All things considered, John's middle-of-the-night construction idea wasn't bad as far as late night, last minute thinking went.
"You still have to sleep, at some point."
He looked at her and Clarice could almost hear the words on the tip of his tongue – I'll sleep when I'm dead – but he was smart enough to change the subject. He set the empty bottle on the ground and stepped closer.
"Last time I checked in with Kitty, there was still no news on Alison. I've been thinking-" he said, his hands loosely touching her upper arms, "how do you feel about some more training? Just a little fine tuning?"
He said it gently enough, giving her the option to decline, but she knew he was hoping she would agree. She looked away, fighting the desire to roll her eyes because she didn't need to be babied but he was running on fumes at this point and he was trying so hard to be that guy – the Leader with all of the answers. When she looked back at him, she made sure to frown just a little just so he'd know she wasn't totally forgiving the change of subject.
"Now?"
"Why not now?" He countered, dazzling her with that smile again that made her forget why she was protesting.
"I don't know, because you're sleep deprived and probably starving and that's a recipe for disaster?"
"Perhaps if I was the one training, but I'm not, I'm just giving guidance. Any other excuses?"
Damn John and his skill at rationalizing everything. Clarice shrugged and relaxed her arms to her sides, bracing her feet in what had become her Ready position. John rubbed his hands together.
"Alright. We've worked on portal size and locations before, today let's focus on efficiency. That creek two miles from here we passed yesterday, can you make a small portal there?"
She nodded, flexing her hands and pulling open a portal the size of a basketball in front of her chest. Through it, John could see woodlands and a muddy bank.
"Good. Let it go."
Clarice released her hands and the portal snapped closed.
"Okay, this time, the landfill down the street from the original Atlanta hideout."
Again Clarice made a portal in front of her, and again he told her to close it after a few seconds.
"The old Sears building off of Madison Avenue where we found Natalie and the others."
Open. Closed.
"The treehouse Marcos built in Florida."
Open. Closed.
"The bomb shelter we hid in in Tennessee."
She opened it and John bent down, picked up a rock and launched it at her. Clarice instantly let the portal shut and ducked out of the way.
"John?!"
John sighed and scooped up his empty water bottle.
"The landfill, again."
Quicker than before, Clarice opened a portal, but this time John was looking at his own back. He canted his head to the side and Clarice smirked before closing it.
"That's good! That's exactly it. Open another one."
Clarice opened another small portal to an empty area and John threw the bottle. She closed it and he launched another rock that she portalled away before it could hit her. In her mind, his words to his brother came back to her: You and I will be fine when the bullets fly, but they aren't going to bounce off of Blink.
"This isn't about my portals, is it? This is about the gunfire."
John settled onto the ground, his arms resting on bent knees and Clarice dropped down beside him.
"We don't have any flak jackets, this seemed like the next best thing. There's always going to be somebody shooting at us, whether it's a Sentinel firing bullets or a mutant firing lasers. I do everything I can, but I can't be there every time."
He choked the words out, as if it hurt him physically to admit it. Clarice saw where he was going with that train of thought – if he'd let Alison take the kid, then he could have been the one to hang back and stop the attack and maybe nobody would be missing right now.
"John, this wasn't your fault. We got out of there as quick as we could and nobody got shot."
John went on as if he hadn't heard her. "If we can get you to where the portals are second nature, where you can open them on reflex and still be in control, that could be a game changer. A total shift in control on the field."
Clarice thought back to when she'd woken up on a cot the day after she'd overworked herself. The damage to the Underground. The way some of the other mutants had looked at her, as if she were a walking catastrophe waiting to happen.
"Do you really think that's a good idea? To just make portals, all the time? Do you hear yourself?"
"That's what the training is for, to build up your stamina. Portal away the projectiles like grenades and bullets and half-portal anything bigger. Now, you were the last person in the room with Alison. The only one to see her use her power. Was she still using her ability when she stepped into the portal?"
Clarice almost wished she never showed John what happens when she doesn't know where she's sending something. The image of amputating armed opponents with her portals flashed in her mind and Clarice told herself that John didn't realize what he'd just suggested. She hoped things never really came to that. Instead, she replayed the memory of their last mission in her mind: John bolting with the kid, the Sentinels busting into the room, the shower of lights, the whip of Alison's hair as she brushed past her.
"I think so. Why?"
"James said Alison's ability has something to do with light particles and sound. Yours involves connecting and separating atoms. I'm thinking-"
"That maybe our abilities had a synergistic interaction?" He looked at her in surprise. This time Clarice did roll her eyes. "I cut school a lot but I still aced chemistry."
"Basically. James also said he knew of another mutant who made portals. I was thinking we could check with him."
"What, to see if they ever vaporized someone with their portals?"
"Come on," John stood up in one swift motion, extending her a hand, "let's head back."
Clarice and John returned to the Underground to find the first floor sparsely populated, the noticeable lack of energy in the room akin to being in a library long after closing. Clarice looked at John and watched as he closed his eyes and focused.
"Forty-seven people, everyone's here." He opened his eyes a beat later and gazed at the basement door. "The rest are in the training room. There's a sparring match going and I've got to get down there before that idiot hurts someone."
He rushed to the basement door and took the stairs three at a time and Clarice tailed him, keeping close to his back once they reached the bottom and he began sifting through the crowd. Clarice couldn't see much thanks to John's bulk, but she could hear the crowd's reactions and she'd picked up from John's mood that James was likely one of the fighters. When they reached the front, John moved to the right and Clarice was able to get a look at James and Kitty circling each other. James swung at the petite brunette with a perfectly aimed right hook – that went right through her. It was the second strange thing Clarice had seen that day, Kitty's body going translucent and ghost-like. The moment his fist was clear of her body, Kitty became solid again and caught James with a wicked uppercut. Out of the corner of her eye, Clarice saw John relax just a fraction before he gave Kitty the signal to stop. She dropped her stance and the crowd began to break away as James turned to John, more than a little annoyed.
"She's not in any danger."
"No, but you're supposed to be sleeping."
"You going to order me to my room, Master Sergeant Proudstar?"
His brother brushed past him and John followed behind him. Clarice looked at Kitty.
"Does he always get this grumpy when he's tired?"
Kitty shrugged and rolled her shoulders.
"Not really. He usually just passes out whenever, but when he came back half an hour ago he just looked so haunted. So when he asked me to spar I just went with it. I took it easy on him, but don't tell him that."
Clarice turned to look for the brothers again and found them on a sofa in the corner. James was crying into his hands. Clarice took a breath and headed over.
"-didn't know she was a mutant back then, you know? She was just this hot chick moving around the club like she owned it."
As she got closer, Clarice could hear James talking between choked sobs. John was patiently listening, one hand carefully set on James's shoulder.
"After 7/15, I met her again at the Philly Underground. She'd only been there three days before me and she was already putting together a defense team. She was Salim's right hand from then on."
Clarice strategically slid into the space on James's other side. James inhaled sharply, suppressed a sob, and sniffed.
"I can't track her and I can't talk to her and I don't even know if she's okay. I would do anything for her."
John and Clarice shared a look and John leaned forward, elbows to thighs to be eye to eye with James.
"We've been thinking. That mutant you mentioned the first night, the one who makes portals like Blink. We want to talk with him, pick his brain, get his help if we can. Do you have a way to contact him?"
James lifted his face and peered at his brother, one hand towards his pocket, his phone.
"The Philly Underground has a chat group on Discord. There's usually at least a few of them on there."
Clarice nodded, belatedly wondering why their Atlanta group hadn't done the same thing, at least when they still had Sage to safeguard it. Kind of a good thing to have in case of emergencies – which seemed to come up far too often.
John exhaled and gave James's shoulder a pat.
"It'll have to do. Log in."