Disclaimer: I own none of the characters within.
Author's Notes: This chapter was tough to write. It might feel a bit disjointed and rough around the edges, but hey, he's supposed to be insane anyway, right?
From Johnny's POV.
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What will be, will be.
Que sera, sera.
You can say it in any language and it still sounds the same. All of eternity is wrapped up in that one sentence; birth, suffering, shame, redemption, glory, death. Doesn't matter what happens or how, because what will be, will be.
Looking behind me, I see a single trail of footprints across a vast and empty desert. Looking ahead of me, I see that the desert continues on into forever, and I guess I just have to keep walking and walking and walking until I fall off a cliff or just drop dead in my tracks.
The pain gets worse every day. It didn't hurt at first, but now my bones ache, my head hurts, my skin crawls with a zillion prickly stings. I'm so sick. Sick people should be resting in hospitals, getting green Jell-o brought to them on plastic trays, having their pillows fluffed and watching TV all day. That's where I should be. I should be resting, please, let me rest because I'm so tired and sick and I don't think I can make it through one more day.
But I keep waking up every morning. Heart still beating. Body still aching. Sweat pouring down my back and vision starting to get blurry.
What will be, will be.
And I just feel so lonely sometimes because no one understands. I'm crazy, I'm insane, I'm a complete nutcase so maybe it's better off if I die and spare them all the stress and annoyance of having to deal with me. Yeah, I'm crazy, I want to say to them. But you'd be crazy, too. Think of it this way; maybe you're all crazy and I'm the only sane one left. Is that a little too Catch-22? Am I getting ahead of myself? Is there anyone who even cares?
You know, I think there's only two other people in the world who can come close to grasping this situation.
One of them lives here in this mansion. His name is Wolverine and he has big shiny claws that come shooting out of his hands. I've heard that he doesn't know where these claws came from or who gave them to him. He doesn't remember. Isn't that funny? Because I don't know who gave me this disease and I don't remember much, either. We're almost the same, except his mad scientists gave him a new and wonderful weapon, and my mad scientists gave me a death sentence.
Funny old world. Que sera, sera.
The other person is Pietro. And that's funny, too, because not only is he one of the two people who can come close to grasping the situation, but he's also my friend. Now, Pietro was never strapped down to a table to be a mad scientist's pincushion. Or maybe he was. I don't know. He is a living secret. A walking, talking secret, except that he doesn't talk much. Mostly he just listens to me when I talk. Anyway, anyway, anyway!
Pietro understands lots of things, including me. He is very good at seeing things. I'm not saying that he has like telescope vision or can see stuff that's really far away. No, Pietro sees important things. He reads people like books. Reads them like the newspaper. There are sentences and words written all over people's faces and on their voices, and Pietro can see those words, or he feels them like Braille, and he keeps what he reads all locked away inside of himself, a secret forever.
I wonder what is written on me. I'll bet it says something like: Hi! I am very sick. I am also a little bit crazy, but don't worry, I don't bite, ha ha. Will you listen to me, please? I need someone to listen to me or I might go all-the-way crazy. Maybe you can even try to understand, which is the most help anyone could ever give to me. Thank you.
I wish I could read people. I've been practicing. I have been learning from Pietro. He hasn't actually taught me anything, but I'm a quick learner.
Do you know that I lost all of my words while I was strapped on that table? I don't know how long I was down there. But they wouldn't let me talk at all, and little by little, my words started to slip away from me. I couldn't talk and I couldn't think. There were no words down there on the table, just feelings. If I felt pain, I knew only pain. If I felt hunger, it was my whole vocabulary. And when I was pulled off the table and carried up back into the real world, I had no words. I remember that much. I remember because Magneto said, "What is your name, boy?" And I tried to answer, but all I could do was make this stupid choking noise, like an animal, and I was more ashamed of that than my naked, skinny, dying body.
Anyway. I only told that story because I wanted to tell you how I'm a quick learner. Because, see, Magneto had to teach me all my words again. Let me tell you, I was more hungry for that than I was for any food or water. I gobbled up those words like a feast, like a banquet of talking. I never thought I would get enough. Some of my favorite words are: bottle, curb, fantastic, bubble, splash.
So I am trying to learn from Pietro the art of reading people. The words are there, the sentences are there, but you have to be a true artist to read them. I'm trying to learn by watching him, seeing how he does it. What he does is, when people are talking to him, he looks at them with both of his eyes, and he uses his eyes all the way. Sometimes when people are talking, they only look at each other with half of their eye power, because they don't really care. Pietro looks hard and steady and carefully, and as he listens his eyes will make tiny, tiny glances over that face, always coming back to the eyes, but sweeping over the entire face to look for the clues and the details. And suddenly, the words appear. I can always see when that happens because once he sees the words, Pietro will lean forward just a little bit, so he can read everything there is to read. And he memorizes what he sees and locks it away in a secret place deep inside.
I tried it today on Magneto, on Macavity. I looked at him with both of my eyes, and I used my eyes all the way. I looked all over for the clues and the details. And guess what? Guess what? You'll never guess what happened next. It worked! I swear it worked! I saw words! Here is what the words said.
Hello. I am very sad. I am also very guilty (or maybe it was lonely, but they are almost the same thing) and I need someone to be with me or I will give up forever. Will you please just stand here next to me and let me know that I am not alone? Thank you.
So I did. I tried to help him the way I wanted someone to help me. And who knows? Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn't. I might never know.
And maybe there are actually three people in the world who can come close to grasping the situation.
It was so hard at first. You get so used to those straps around your wrists, the cold metal under your back. It's your life, your whole world, and when it's taken away you don't know what to do. You wake up in the middle of the night and your arms can suddenly move freely, and instead of solid metal you can feel yourself sinking into something soft and foreign, and you're terrified that it's some new experiment and it's only going to get worse because it's been getting worse for so long that how could it possibly be getting better? So you start screaming because you can't remember who you are and you just want to die.
Then there's some kid with crazy white hair pushing you back onto the bed and telling you to shut up, stupid, you're safe now so you can just cool it, already, some people are trying to sleep! And you don't know who he is or where he came from but he could just possibly be an angel or maybe a demon but it doesn't matter because you're not alone. And as you start to breathe again, you become aware of the sweat on your back and the blankets over your legs and all of a sudden your brain catches up with the rest of you and goes, shut up, you idiot, your name is Johnny and you are in your own bed and his name is Pietro, he's not an angel or a demon he's just your friend, which is even better than the first two.
Pietro touches his fingers to my neck and says, "Geez, man, your heart's going even faster than mine!" And I sort of laugh and sort of cry because I was so scared two seconds ago and now everything is fine. "Relax, buddy," says Pietro. "You're all right." Then it's like every single bone in my body turns into jelly and I just collapse back on the bed, taking long deep breaths like Magneto taught me to do when I have a panic attack. That's what it is,but Pietro says, "Bad dream, huh?" I just nod. Panic attacks are stupid, because you panic at nothing. I just pretend I had a reason to be scared.
Then Pietro smiles and says, "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a notorious couple of cats..."
The poem is like a rope being offered down into the pit, and I grab it with both hands and start climbing. "As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tightrope walkers, and acrobats."
"Incurably given to rove," says Pietro, skipping a few lines but that's okay because he thumps me on the arm like we're really partners in crime. "That's us, buddy."
And he smiles at me in the dark, but it's not a real smile, not a happy smile. It's a sad, distant smile, like he knows something about me that I don't and he feels sorry for me. This is the first time that I catch Pietro reading me. I watch his eyes that shine in the dark like a cat's, and they're flicking back and forth across my face, scanning me, searching me, and then suddenly they stop and his eyes change. There's something in them that I don't really recognize. I think it might be affection, but also pity, and a little bit of... what? His eyes tell me that he understands, that he has suffered like I have suffered, and I wish I knew if that were true.
Hey, Pietro? Are you going to come back soon? Please? Because I really don't think I'm going to be around much longer. Of course, I thought I was done for last night, and here I am today, still hanging around. Maybe this will be forever, this aching creaking weak tired sick existence. Maybe I'll kill myself. But no, of course I won't. I'm too much of a coward for that.
But I'd like to talk to Pietro again. I want to say... I don't know. I just want to talk to him, because out of everyone I've ever talked to, only Pietro looks like he's really listening. He uses his ears and his eyes and he pays attention. He cares. He doesn't treat me like I'm crazy or speaking gibberish or whatever. He's a good guy and I want just one more time to have him listen to me.
Also, I can't remember all the words anymore. I can get up to "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer had a wonderful way of working together, and some of the time you would say it was luck, and some of the time..." Some of the time what? What does it mean? What happens next? I can't remember! I'm trying so hard to remember that my eyeballs burn and my head throbs and I think I'm going to explode but I just can't remember!
Oh, man, I'm really crazy. I'm crawling the walls. I'm chewing my own leg off. I'm so completely crazy because it's safer that way. I don't know how Wolverine does it, go on day after day full of questions and never finding answers and knowing that someone somewhere has done something terrible to you without your permission they went inside of you and changed everything around and there's nothing you can do about it except go on living and never knowing why, why did you do this to me? Somehow Wolverine has hung onto his mind, stayed human, and I know that every day it's a fight not to just give in.
I gave in. I'm a coward that way. So many questions, never going to be answered, that gnawing burning aching knowledge that not even my body belonged to me anymore, it belonged to someone I didn't even know who went inside and made it theirs. I just, I just, I just couldn't deal with it!
So I let go. I gave in to the insanity that let me be free. My body is just a shell, now, carrying around my wild and wonderful and unstoppable thoughts. All that matters is fire, don't you see? The fire keeps me alive, now. I feel it all the time, whenever it's near, whenever it's close enough for me to reach. I let the fire take away my thoughts, take me far away from my wretched useless corpse.
But now I don't even have that, do I? It's gotten so bad, I'm so tired and sick and everything, that I can't even, I can't even, I can't even do that anymore! I reach out for the fire, but I'm so weak that it just slips between my fingers. I try and I try and I try, but there's nothing left inside. This disease, this horrible virus that they wanted to kill mutants, well, it's done worse than kill me. It's taken away the only thing I ever loved, this power that for a little while made me feel like more than what I was.
Empty, now. Alone in the desert. No words. I'm scared my wordswill slip away again, taken by sickness that makes me dizzy and tired all the time. Soon I'll just be a gibbering crazy idiot running around claiming that once upon a time, he was powerful. Once upon a time, he rode upon a pillar of flames and had all fire at his command. Once upon a time, he was a creature of legend, a mighty and unstoppable force of nature.
And now he is just a sad, sick, crazy man.
Oh, well.
What will be, will be.
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