Disclaimer: I own none of the characters within.
Author's Notes: Yes, this chapter's been a long time coming. I went to Disneyworld for a week, and then I spent the last week recollecting my angst-y muse, who went on a hiatus while I frolicked in the Magic Kingdom. Anyway, in this chapter we get our very first chapter told from a first-person POV! Yay! And it's… Todd. Obviously. So here it is. Each character will probably get a first-person eventually, but not all at once. Be patient, dear readers! Thank you all so much for your compliments and encouragement.
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It won't come off. It won't come off.
Shit, I feel like Lady Macbeth.
I remember studying that play in school… I always felt the worst for Banquo. Ordered dead by his own best friend! Just because of some dumb prophecy! Tough shit, man. That Shakespeare could think up some pretty depressing stuff.
Why won't this stuff come out?
Barricaded into the first floor bathroom, the taps in the sink turned up to the hottest they can be, I'm scrubbing furiously at the blood on my arms. The water is scalding, and it hurts; my skin turns a vicious red. But I gotta get this offa me…
Because the blood belongs to one of my best friends.
Not that I've ever had many friends. I think I've had a grand total of… three. Three friends in my whole damn life. No, four. Vague memories of the young face I knew… we were both four years old, I think.
Robert.
Suddenly he comes back to me full force. I can vividly recall something I didn't even know existed until two seconds ago. I remember the one year we knew each other… games of Knights and Dragons, and mud fights, and playing in the sprinklers…
He never saw that car coming.
Poor Robert.
That was the first time I was covered in the blood of my best friend. I was five years old. Five. And there was Robert with his head cracked open, the red stain spreading across the pavement. I can remember trying to wake him up.
No wonder I block these things outta my head.
Is it any surprise I turned into such a bastard? Just a sniveling, cowardly, useless bastard.
There were no more Roberts after that.
Now here I am covered in blood again. Only this time, I'm old enough to understand. Old enough to see that something is very, very wrong. I'm not some five-year old kid who wants his friend to wake up so we can go play Knights and Dragons.
Not anymore.
Not this time.
But what can I do? Is there anything I can do to help? No. Can I get you something? No. Do I have your permission to exist, sir? No.
I guess I've always been an outsider. Sure, they put up with me. When I was a spineless loser, they donated a backbone.
But when I was a heartless outcast, there were no donors available.
That's what always happens. Organ donations are few and far between. Most people die while waiting for theirs. So me, I died. Because who could spare a heart for a slimy little rat? Not them, that's for sure.
Not like any of them had any heart left to give.
It's a hierarchy. Lance is the boss. Freddy is the muscle. Pietro is the brains. And me…? Where do I fit in? Am I the jigsaw piece that got mixed up with the wrong puzzle? The one that doesn't fit anywhere and eventually gets thrown away.
Yeah, that works.
I saw "The Godfather" once. Great movie. But there was always a character that left an impression on me. See, in the movie, there are three brothers.
There's Sonny. He's the oldest. He's strong and honorable, and even though he loses his temper a lot, he still keeps his pride.
There's Michael. He's the youngest. He's smart and clever, and even though he doesn't look like much, it's in his brains where his strength is.
And then there's Fredo. He's the middle brother. And he does shit. The one chance in the movie he has to prove himself, and he screws up big time. He's a coward and a weakling, and everyone knows it.
So I watched this movie once, twice, and a third time, and every viewing left me thinking the same thing. Lance is Sonny. He's our guts and our glory, and he won't go down without a fight. Pietro is Michael. He's our brains and our scheming, and while he doesn't look like much, his mind is beyond reckoning.
Guess who that leaves me with.
I always felt a kindred spirit with Fredo. Both of us get shoved into corners and discarded. And both of us know what it's like to be surrounded by big shots and geniuses, all the while knowing inside that you'll never measure up.
Listen to me. I sound like a frickin' head case. Maybe I really have gone insane this time. I remember other times when I thought I'd lost my mind. It was fun; there was a sense of relief and power at the same time. But always, when push came to shove, I did something stupidly smart that saved my ass and proved I still had my brain in the right place.
Now here I am, tearing my skin raw trying to get the blood off and comparing myself to some secondary character in a movie over thirty years old.
Yup. Crazy.
Why does nobody ever pay attention to me?
As abruptly as this thought comes into my head, I stop scrubbing. I just let my hands rest on the edge of the sink, the steam rising and enshrouding the bathroom, the mirror, and me, just… thinking.
What makes me so unnoticeable?
Or am I just not worth anyone's attention?
I think I've been asking myself that question all my life.
I remember the early days. When it was just me, Freddy, Lance, and Pietro, and we had nothing to do but be bad and skip school and do all sorts of normal teenage hoodlum stuff.
Lance always liked to pick on the X-Men for no good reason. That was good enough for Freddy and me; we go along with whatever anyone tells us. So we bugged them for the morning, then we cut classes for the afternoon. Whoop-de-doo.
But Pietro was always… distant, I guess. Like his mind was somewhere else. I suppose it was; how hard must it be to stay in the present when your brain is going a million miles an hour? How hard does he work just to stay with us? He was always acting like he had to prove himself to some invisible force…
Now I know why.
Looking back on it now, it still doesn't make any sense. My greatest enemy and the person I looked up to the most… are practically one and the same. I think that hurt me even more than when Pietro turned his back on us that day. The very fact that he'd kept that secret for so long.
Not that the backstabbing had been nothing.
Ouch. That was cold. Just like Michael. Ice man. Didn't even bat an eye. Just spun on his heel and rocketed away like he didn't care about us anymore.
Like he didn't care about me.
And then he comes back, and he's an asshole. Soon as that French guy leaves, Pietro switches into a weirder gear. He was real twitchy and anxious all the time, and he was always trying too hard to be what he wasn't. To be who he was before.
But that face of Pietro was dead and buried long ago.
And now he's back. I don't know how, I don't know when, but he's back. He's normal again. It's such a relief I wanna cry. Seriously. Even though I'm a big tough man. And men don't cry.
But I'm not a big tough man. I'm just Fredo, sitting on the curbside, screaming and crying like a baby over something I never could have prevented.
It hurts.
Because as soon as Pietro comes back to us, he's leaving again. Harder and faster than before. And there's not a single thing I can do to stop him. He's breaking apart inside, like in those old sci-fi movies when the spaceship flies into a million pieces because of the strain on the warp engines.
Now there's a disturbing mental image.
Shuddering, I glance down at my hands. The blood is gone. I think it's been gone for a long time. But there's me, going all Lady Macbeth, scratching at the stain that wasn't there.
So, huh. I guess I've really lost it.
The mirror is all fogged up from the steam. I can't even see my reflection. So I turn off the hot water, lean forward, and draw a face in the fog. A smiling face. It's stupid, sure, but it's happy. That is one happy face. Sure.
Then, I draw a sad face. That's the real face. No one smiles as hugely as that first guy. But I've seen plenty of living faces with bigger frowns than this. And even if their faces don't show it, I've seen people who are crying like little kids deep in their heart of hearts.
Like Pietro.
And there's me, kneeling on the bloodied pavement, trying to wake him up so we can go play Knights and Dragons…
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