Running for Home - 58. February 20, 2022

February 20 2022

I made Bobby cry today.

It sucked. It massively sucked. I didn’t want to make him cry, not at all. But I can’t control his reactions to shelter his feelings. And when he asks me a question, I’m going to tell him the truth. If there is one thing I am not, it is a liar. My father instilled that value into me at an early age, both with talks and with a couple wallops when I did try to lie when I was really young. I deserved those smacks, and they came back in the day when they were a very rare thing that only happened when I was truly bad. Back when he still had a job. Back when our family was still normal. It sucks that sometimes telling the truth can hurt the most.

So what did I tell him?

Well, we were having a lazy Sunday. We slept in, made love, showered together and then had a late breakfast in the faculty kitchen. After we headed back up to my room, we changed the bed linens. I was feeling too much inertia to want to do some prep work, so I kind of just fell back onto the bed with a big sigh. Bobby smiled that smile at me, his eyes twinkling with a touch of amusement as he moved to pick up a sweater he’d discarded on the floor by the bed yesterday. I grabbed his arm and pulled him down onto the bed next to me and kissed him. It was gentle, sweet, but long. Bobby manoeuvred himself into the crook of my arm, pressing his front all along my body, his head resting on my chest as his left leg tangled with mine. We lay there quietly for a few minutes, just enjoying the contact. And then, suddenly there was a change.

“Why did you get on that helicopter?”

Bobby was tense, holding me tighter as if I would disappear, would run away while he was waiting for my response. He didn’t need to elaborate. I knew exactly what helicopter he was referencing. It was the one at Alkali Lake, the one on which I left my life at Xavier’s to journey forward with Magneto.

“I got on the helicopter because the dam was about to burst and I’d die if I stayed any longer. That’s what he told me, anyway.”

“Why didn’t you come back to the plane?”

“I got lost, Bobby. Between the blizzard and the disorientation from Xavier’s mental assault, I was lost. I didn’t know where I’d come from. I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice at that point.”

“But you stayed with him.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Why?” Bobby whispered.

“Because he gave me a reason to live.”

“How… how the fuck is that even true?”

I sighed, bending my arm to idly stroke the hair on back of his head. “I was having a really tough time, Bobby. Emotionally. All that last year, things were building up inside me. I couldn’t see how good I had it, see all the great things I had in my life. All I could see was the anti-mutant drama, the way our teachers hated me and treated me like I was a nuisance, that I’d never amount to anything but a dangerous-”

“That’s not true, John.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Bobby. Not all of them did, sure. Xavier didn’t. Dr. Grey didn’t. But some of the others... It wasn’t always an obvious thing. I just took everything too seriously. Every slight. Hell, even things that probably weren’t slights that I just took to far. So there was that… and then there were my feelings for you.”

“Yeah…” Bobby took a large breath, breathing it out slowly. “You think you had depression?”

“Probably. But none of that in and of itself was enough. Maybe even Stryker’s attack wouldn’t have been enough, if things had gone differently.”

“How so?”

I didn’t answer him for a minute. I needed to collect my thoughts.

“I think… I think if I’d stayed with Pete and helped evacuate the students that evaded capture, none of this would have happened.”

“You’d never have made that choice, though.”

“Yeah.”

We were silent for a moment.

“That wasn’t all you meant, was it? Things that could have gone differently?” Bobby pressed.

I sighed. “No, it wasn’t,” I conceded. “I… I fucked up bad, Bobby. In Boston. We were all in trouble, but I made everything worse. I thought we were going to die and I just made everything worse.”

“It was self-defense, John.”

“I know, Bobby, I know. It’s… that’s not what I’m stuck on, here. There’s something disturbing that happened with that, something that Marie probably has a clue about since she drained me right then, but that’s a discussion for another day.

“After Magneto saved us and we set up camp, I finally had time to start coming to terms with what had just happened. Our home, our school, was invaded in the middle of the night. We fled to your family. Your brother called the cops on us. They shot Logan point blank in the forehead and I almost got us killed trying to defend us.”

“We were all fugitives at that point, John.”

“No, Bobby. I was the one that blasted the cops away from us with fireballs. I was the one that blew up those cop cars and started roasting another one that still had cops in it. I was the one that did the damage. You and Marie did what you were supposed to do like good little citizens and obeyed the big bad coppers, and I didn’t. Thank God Marie stopped me, because if she hadn’t I probably would have had murder on my hands right then and there. It didn’t matter, though. No matter what else happened, I had just made myself Public Enemy Number One.”

We were quiet for a moment. I tried to swallow down the thick emotions that were catching in my throat. It had been a no-win situation. No matter what I did, we would have been in serious trouble. Maybe if I’d cooperated longer, Storm and Dr. Grey would have arrived and gotten us out of there without too much damage done. Hell, that Nightcrawler guy probably could have teleported each of us out of there and onto the plane, no harm done to anyone other than the massive headache Logan had after he healed up from being shot.

“So there I was, Bobby, alone with my thoughts at our makeshift camp, thinking about how I’d just destroyed my life. About how I’d never be able to return to civil society. About how even Xavier with all his money and the strings he always seemed to be able to magically pull, even he wouldn’t be able to fix this. And you know what? You didn’t give me the time of day. You barely said a word to me, other than to glare at me. I saw it in your eyes. You blamed me for us being set upon by the Air Force and shot down. You blamed me for escalating things on your front porch. You blamed me for fucking up any possible chance you may have had for your family to accept you as a mutant after the spectacle I put on. You blamed me, and you were too worried about poor little Miss Marie to even consider what kind of hell your best friend was going through.”

“I’m sorry, John, I-”

“Save your sorries for another time, Bobby. I’m not finished yet,” I interrupted, shaking my head. “It hurt a lot, but I could deal with it. I could deal with the rejection in that moment, just barely, but when we landed at Alkali Lake and the adults left us behind on the plane… That was when I broke. They were gone for so long. We were just sitting there doing nothing, but why? Why were we not helping, after all the training they gave us? You and me, Bobby, why were we not helping? And with everything that was already weighing on my shoulders, I needed to do something. I needed to prove that I could use my powers to help. To do battle in a good way, not in a way that would make things worse and get us killed. So I asked you to come with me. Even to bring Marie along, because I knew you weren’t going to leave her behind. But she insisted on staying. She insisted and you listened. So I sat there, longer, waiting. And then I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t sit there with the two of you doing nothing, with you not paying any attention to me, and with Marie sending me those glares because she drained me to stop me from going too far and killing those cops and she saw it, Bobby. She saw it.”

I closed my eyes tight for a moment, swallowing. “I said I wasn’t going to tell you about this, but fuck it. I might as well. My powers, Bobby, they have a hunger. A need to be used. A need to burn. It’s part of the reason I was so destructive when we were younger. It wasn’t because I didn’t care. It wasn’t because I just didn’t give a fuck about controlling myself like all the teachers wanted. It’s because it was a struggle. A constant fucking struggle against myself to not give in, to not use my powers. If half of them knew anything, understood anything, they’d have known that I was winning against myself more often than not. I’ve outgrown it, to an extent. I still feel it, still feel that hunger, but it’s nothing like it was when I was a teenager. It left me in the early days of Freedom Force. When I got out of jail, I was surprised because I didn’t need to be using my powers as often as I used to. I could if I wanted, of course, but there wasn’t that pervasive need anymore. And the moments when it built up to feeling like I’d explode if I didn’t use them… that became less and less frequent.

“But when Marie drained me, Bobby, she drained me at my worst. She drained me in the midst of that chaotic emotional turmoil, where we were being attacked for the very act of being alive, where you were with her and not with me, and where even your perfect white picket fence family had turned their backs on us. She drained me when my powers’ hunger was out of control. Everytime Marie looked at me after that, on the plane, at camp, at Alkali, and every time I battled against the X-men thereafter, I could see it in her eyes. She knew what kind of a monster I am, deep inside.”

“Oh God, Johnny, you aren’t, you just-”

I shushed him. “I know I’m not. But it sure didn’t feel that way at the time.

“So there we were, Bobby. Me, you and Marie, sitting in that barely-repaired plane, waiting for the X-men to return with the captured students and Xavier. There we were, with you barely able to look at me, and Marie looking at me with a mixture of contempt and fear. And I hated it. Hated how I felt, how stupid and small I was. But you were my best friend. You were my best friend, my partner in crime, and even if things had changed since Marie came around, and even if I was in love with you and you were with someone else, I knew you would have my back in the end. I knew us. I knew what we could do. I knew we could make a difference in that fight. And I asked you, asked you to come with me, and you didn’t. You stayed on the plane, Bobby. That moment, that one single moment changed everything.”

Bobby shuddered against me, and that’s when I felt it. That’s when I felt him let out that choked sob, when his tears started to soak through my shirt. I turned my body and pulled him tighter against me. A few tears of my own slid down my cheeks as I held him.

I don’t know what to say at this point. Was I right to go there? Was I right to dig down that deep into the past, to bare it all? Or should I have just told him something more factual, some reasoning he could understand objectively but not have…

I don’t know. I was real with him. I told the truth. He wanted the truth. It just sucks that the truth hurts so much. Hurts both of us. But it’s the path to healing, isn’t it? Sharing our subjective truths with one another, we can see each other’s perspective. We can take ownership of our own feelings and share and sympathize with those of another.

And when all of it was said and done, I kissed Bobby and said the words that probably mattered the most:

“I forgive you.”

And I do forgive him.

I really do.