Running for Home - 68. March 27, 2022

March 27, 2022

It’s snowing today. A late March rager, going out like a Lion. I haven’t written here since Bobby’s birthday because I just didn’t feel like it while we were relaxing, holed up in his Manhattan condo. We made love a lot the past week, alternating roles, learning and adapting to this new chapter in our sexual connection. It was so good, so fucking right that it makes me feel like crying just thinking about it. There is a part of me that just doesn’t understand how everything can feel so right with him. I’ve never been one to believe in fate, and Irene disabused me of any last thoughts of its relevance, anyway. Fate is an illusion. Perhaps we have destinies, though. Things that are more likely to happen, paths that are more comfortable and harmonious with the universe. Or something like that. Being with Bobby now, it sure as hell feels like my universe is starting to function properly.

But today? The snow wasn’t the only thing heavy, swirling around us, bewildering.

But I will get to that in a bit. First I want to talk about some of the shit we got up to last week, record it for posterity. We spent a lot of time in bed together, yes, but we also did things. Bobby took me to the New York Public Library Main Branch and let me borrow a few things to read during our week away on his library card. I was kind of surprised that he had bothered to get one while he was living in Manhattan since he was never much of a reader beyond what we needed to do for school when we were younger. But he took out a couple of books too - one on some baseball heroes of the past, another a short thriller from the LGBTQ section.

We went out for dinner a few times, which was nice. He took me to his favourite spots, and I have to say his taste has definitely improved since his pizza-and-hot-dogs loving days as a teen. I guess that’s par for the course, working for some fancy high-end accounting firm. He must have had to do some swanky work dinners at least some of the time. We took turns paying, even though he said he felt guilty taking me to places that were a little expensive for my budget considering the fees I was still working off from Evangeline Whedon winning my case when Dom sued me. Whatever, it’s not like I’m saving up to live on my own anymore. Just for retirement, whenever that is a possibility in twenty-five or thirty years. But Bobby cooked for me, too, and he was surprisingly good at it. Maybe he was just making things he was confident in, but the gnocchi in tomato-basil rosé sauce he made Friday night was outstanding.

We went to some museums too - the MoMA, the Met, and the Natural History Museum. I was looking for a bit of inspiration, and I guess it worked. I managed to write a prospectus for a new novel, a stormy gothic gay romance. Bobby thinks it’s amazing, and insists that I should send it to my publisher. I’m… well, it’s been a long time since I felt good enough about my writing to consider getting another novel published.

But maybe this is it?

At least I will have time to really work hard at it over the summer, if they bite. Or, I would have, if today’s bomb drop hadn’t happened. Now I’m not so sure.

We drove back to the school Sunday morning so we could both spend some time prepping for class this week. On the way back, Bobby talked about asking Emma if we could have a bigger room together, about him getting rid of his room that he wasn’t using except as a bit of storage now, anyway. We went to bed a little early, and we both woke up feeling well-rested this morning. I didn’t have any nightmares, and no insomnia either. Fuck, I think I only remember having one nightmare this entire week off and it was about my parents, not even about any of the shit with Dom or the shit in Iraq. Well, I’m sure glad we were both well-rested because we needed it.

Emma called us both down to her office halfway through the first period. Bobby and I ran into each other in the hallway in front of her office, confused as to why both of us were being called down at the same time and having no clue as to the reason. Well, the reason became immediately obvious when we walked into the door.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

A blonde, blue-eyed boy came barrelling at us as soon as we walked in the door, latching onto Bobby. Jesus Christ, did the kid ever look like Bobby, other than the blonde hair and blue eyes - they had the same face, the same ears.

Bobby was gobsmacked, utterly beside himself. So was I. He’d told me weeks ago he’d only ever slept with one girlfriend back before he realized he was gay, and they’d used condoms. Besides that, Opal was a dark-haired, brown-eyed Asian American and this kid didn’t look remotely like that.

The kid’s name was Liam - after his Grandpa Drake, his mom told him, even though he’d never met him. Well, Bobby’s dad’s name was William, so that checked out. Emma stepped in and told Liam that the adults needed to have a talk and someone was going to come and take him to the games room to play for a while. Well, Jubilee showed up at the door to take him, and when she saw him she looked just as stunned as the two of us felt. It took a bit of convincing, but the kid eventually went with Jubilee with the promise that we wouldn’t take very long.

Emma laid it out for us. The mother had dropped the kid off at the front door and then peeled the fuck out of there. The kid was holding on to a long letter explaining things, at least. The kid wasn’t Bobby’s son, after all. He was Bobby’s dead brother Ronnie’s son. That wasn’t a complete surprise, because we knew Ronnie’s wife was pregnant when she left him before he committed suicide. But his wife’s name, that really shook us both.

Joanna Allerdyce-Drake.

My cousin. My fucking annoying little cousin who I hadn’t seen since I was ten when my grandfather and aunts and uncles had renounced my family, she had married Bobby’s bastard brother and they had a kid together. A kid who, now that I thought about it, looked an awful lot like me as well. Like Bobby and I had somehow had a kid together. What the flying fuck?!

We asked Emma to send someone after her. She said she’d already sent Neal out to try and track Joanna down, but with the weather and everything he probably wouldn’t have any luck. Emma would check in Cerebro over lunch to locate her because the situation was clearly unacceptable. Regardless, the letter Joanna had left explained a lot.

The reason Joanna left Ronnie was that their stupid bullshit Church had forced all its members to be tested for having a non-wildtype X-gene. They started shunning anyone who wasn’t wildtype because of their Purity doctrines, even if the gene wasn’t active and they weren’t mutants. Well, Ronnie’s test came back positive. No fucking surprise, considering that his brother is an Omega level mutant. That in and of itself wasn't actually why she left him, though. She loved the bastard through and through, and beyond that she was pregnant with his baby and she didn’t believe in divorce. Joanna knew that their kid had a 50/50 shot of being X-gene positive too and even the very risk of having a kid who could grow up to be a mutant would be unacceptable to the Church. Thankfully they hadn’t told their pastor they were pregnant yet.

The thing was, Ronnie and Joanna had noticed a lot of those Church members whose tests came back positive were disappearing from the community in Medfield, not just being shunned. Ronnie and Joanna were suspicious, but Ronnie being a macho Republican shithead dismissed it as nothing he couldn't handle. They started getting suspicious phone calls, problems with their cars, problems with their house, problems with their debit and credit cards, the works. It started to get to them, put a strain on their marriage.

For the sake of their unborn child and her own mental health, Joanna needed a break from all the craziness and she went to visit her parents in Michigan. Ronnie was messaging her every day they didn’t have a phone call, but then one day the messages stopped coming. He wouldn’t answer his phone. Then the police called, telling her he’d committed suicide. Joanna knew it wasn’t that. She knew it was just staged to look that way by the Church.

Her parents suddenly found out about Ronnie’s test somehow. They were members of the same goddamned church, the fucking Church of Humanity. They had gotten Joanna into it in the first place back when she was a kid. They knew she was having Ronnie’s baby and they kicked her out. Joanna was scared about what was happening to her. She moved across the country, changed her name, changed her look, got a new job in a different field, everything. She gave birth to Liam, and raised him on her own.

But somehow, the Church had finally found her. She realized a week ago that she was being followed one day on her way home. She drove around trying to lose them and eventually did, but when she got home there was this new car with tinted windows in the neighbourhood. She asked around discretely and none of her neighbours seemed to know whose car it was. She freaked out, knowing that they were coming for her and her son. That they would do something, something horrible to them. That they’d end up dead like Ronnie.

Joanna knew Bobby was a mutant. She knew about his affiliation with the School, with the X-men. Ronnie had blabbed to her all about that, all these negative things about his brother over the years. Joanna and Ronnie had bought into all these terrible things about mutants for so long as members of that Church, but when push came to shove they both saw things differently when it was Ronnie himself who carried the gene and it was their own child that could be a mutant too. Joanna knew Bobby might be her only chance to keep her son safe. She did her research and found out he was working at the School again. So she had packed some minimal bags and left in the middle of the night, driving back across the country.

For some god-forsaken reason, Joanna told Liam that his daddy wasn’t dead, that she’d found him after all this time. That Bobby was his daddy. That they were going on a big trip to see him, that Liam was going to go to School where his daddy worked from now on. She filled Liam’s head with tales of how Bobby was a superhero, telling him about things the X-men had done that were public knowledge. And then she left him on Xavier’s doorstep, telling him she’d be back later.

Well, she didn’t come back. Neal found her car upside down in a ditch. She wasn’t inside, though. Emma has hired X-factor to investigate, but Bobby and I both know she’s likely dead.

But we didn’t know about any of that just yet. There Bobby and I were in Emma’s office trying to comprehend what had just been dropped on us. Emma said she’d had Cecilia do a cursory examination of Liam in her office already, and the boy seemed fine health-wise. She’d taken a swab to verify Liam’s relationship to Bobby and I, as if the kid’s looks weren’t enough evidence. We got the results in the late afternoon, confirming everything. The kid was a genetic match to both of us, though more distantly to me than to Bobby. And he was a mutant, that was certain. Liam didn’t have any powers yet, but that wasn’t all that surprising considering that the kid was only eight.

Bobby was looking at me with this completely bewildered look. I took his hand and told him everything was going to be okay, that we’d get through this. Together. He swallowed deeply, nodded, and then pulled me into a tight hug. He was shaking.

Emma told us that she’d already assigned substitutes to our classes for the rest of the day, and to go spend some time with Liam. We could reconvene later in the day to discuss what we were going to do moving forward and hopefully by that time she would have located Joanna. Which she didn’t, but I digress.

We found Liam and Jubilee playing video games. MarioKart. He got up and ran to us as soon as he saw us, clinging to Bobby again. Then he looked me up and down and asked me who I was. He said I looked kind of like his mommy and pictures she had of his grandpa. Was I his uncle?

How fucking perceptive was this kid, anyway? I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I answered with a ‘sort of’. I mean, I guess I was his second cousin, but Joanna didn’t have any siblings that I knew of so I was as close to an uncle as he would get from my side. He smiled, let go of Bobby and latched on to my leg. Jubilee was looking back and forth between the three of us, looking very intrigued. I could tell her gossip queen instincts had moved into high gear. I told her we’d catch up with her later and give her the low-down once we better understood what was going on. She nodded and told us to come and see her if we needed her for anything. She was the school’s counsellor, after all.

We took Liam on a tour of the school, showing him the common areas, the boys’ dormitory, the classroom area, and then the dining hall. He was taking everything in with wide-eyed delight, but when we got to the dining hall he said he was hungry. His mother hadn’t fed him breakfast before dropping him off here. Marilyn was nice enough to pause her lunch preparations and fire up the griddle again. She made the kid a waffle and some bacon, at his request. He’d been quiet for most of the tour, holding both of our hands, but once we were there in the dining hall the chatterbox in him came out and he was asking us a thousand questions.

And then suddenly he started asking Bobby about why he’d left Liam and Joanna alone. Why they hadn’t been living together as a family. Then the tears came. Bobby calmly told Liam that he wasn’t really his daddy, that he was his uncle. That he didn’t know why his mom had told him that Bobby was his daddy. His daddy’s name was Ronnie, and he was Bobby’s younger brother. That Ronnie had, in fact, passed on, but had loved Liam and his mommy very much. Bobby told Liam that he was sad that Liam had never had the chance to meet his daddy, or his uncle Bobby or his grandparents before, but he was glad that they got the chance to be a family now.

Liam seemed to accept that and asked us when his mommy was coming back. Bobby didn’t lie. He told Liam he wasn’t sure what time she would be back, but he hoped she would be back before bedtime tonight. Well, that brought on the waterworks again. Somehow, we managed to soothe him and after about ten minutes he’d calmed down. He wanted to see where we lived, so we took him to see my room. Well, that led to questions about why we both lived in the same room with only one bed. Apparently, Joanna had never explained the concept of gay people to Liam. Well, she and Ronnie were religious zealots, so no big fucking surprise there.

Bobby explained to Liam that we were partners and that we loved each other like his mommy and daddy did, so we lived together. He asked us if we were married. Bobby said no, but he hoped we would be someday. He looked up at me and blushed, realizing he hadn’t voiced that to me before. Well, he hadn’t said it, but I felt it anyway. That he felt that way, that I felt that way. The past week at the condo in New York had only reaffirmed things - that I want to spend the rest of my life with this man. Bobby felt the same way. Things might be getting even more complicated, very quickly, but it changed nothing. My heart started beating faster, if only for a few seconds.

We had lunch together and then spent the better part of the afternoon playing foosball, air hockey and video games with Liam in the games room. One thing became apparent very quickly - the kid was smart for his age. He was in Third Grade where they had lived in small-town Idaho. We’d need to get some testing done to see where he was at with his education, but he would probably adapt fine to the classes in the Lower School. We had about fifty kids younger than twelve in the Lower School whose powers had come in early, or they had physical mutations. The classes were small - about ten kids for each teacher - so Liam would get a lot of personalized attention.

Jubilee came and found us just as classes were ending for the day. She said she wanted to introduce Liam to the kids his age who lived at the school. Liam was very excited about that. We met up with a group of nine kids, some of whom I recognized from passing in the hallways from time to time. Liam was a social butterfly. The other kids were kind and seemed happy to have a new kid joining them. But then the kids started showing off their powers, and Liam got a little quiet. He didn’t have any powers, and Bobby and I could tell he felt very unconfident and self-conscious all of a sudden. Bobby swooped in and saved the day - he told Liam he didn’t have any powers yet, but he would get them someday just like we did. Both of us had ours come in when we were around twelve, so Liam would likely have the same experience. That seemed to satisfy him, though he remained a little quieter and a little more hesitant after that.

After a while, Emma telepathically summoned us to her office again. We asked Liam what he wanted to do - Jubilee said she would be fine keeping an eye on him for a while if he wanted to stay and play with the kids his age. Liam wanted to spend more time with his new friends, so we headed back to Emma’s office without him.

The first thing on the table was that she hadn’t been able to find Joanna using Cerebro, and that Neal had found her car upended in that ditch. She’d already called Jaime Maddrox and given him the details she had. Monet and Terry were digging into things as we spoke. If anyone would be able to find Joanna alive, it would be them. I wasn’t going to hold my breath, not if she had the fucking Church of Humanity and the Purifiers after her.

Bobby and I sat down. We looked at each other and suddenly I realized how absolutely exhausted Bobby looked. He’d been keeping a pretty tight lid on things while Liam was around, but now that he was away from us Bobby looked like he was ready to break. I asked him if he was okay. He shook his head and said he didn’t know what to think or what to do right now. I took his hand, telling him I felt the same way. Bobby never thought he’d have a kid to look after, not after he realized he was gay. And not after spending so long being too unconfident and afraid to get into a relationship. He was almost forty now, it just wasn’t going to happen. Having a kid had never been in the cards for me, either. Not while I was with Dom. Bobby didn’t have the first clue about what to do, about how to take care of Liam, and neither did I.

Emma shook her head. She told us that most adults had absolutely no clue how to be parents, they just had what they did and didn’t like about their own upbringings to rely upon while they struggled their way through the experience. But it wouldn’t be just Bobby and I taking care of Liam. We had the whole School to help us raise him, from the educators to the house mothers and fathers who supervised the dormitories, to the dining hall staff who prepared our meals, to our friends. We weren’t alone. We had a whole community of great people around us to support us and to help us when we needed it.

Bobby swallowed and nodded, letting out a deep breath. He looked a little assuaged, his hand that I was holding relaxed a little.

Emma told us we had the option of Liam either rooming with us in a larger suite, or in the dormitory with three other children close to his age as roommates. Bobby started saying he wasn’t sure what would be best, but then he thought that if Joanna disappeared for any length of time or was found dead, it would probably be easier for Liam to have family close at hand, even if we had only just met this morning. Emma concurred. She told us we could move into the empty suite down the hall from Bobby’s unused room after dinner. She was going to give us both the rest of the week off to get Liam settled and get to know him. She recommended doing some fun things with him, perhaps going back into New York City to visit some kid-friendly tourist places since some preliminary questioning she’d done with him revealed that Liam had never left the small Idaho town where he and Joanna lived before.

We decided we would do that, but only after first asking Liam if it was something he wanted to do. Emma said he could start school next Monday with the class that had his age group, so we needed to get him some basic school supplies and more clothing than the three outfits that were in the overnight bag his mother left with him. I guess that was something else we’d need to deal with. Hopefully, Liam wasn’t as much of a brat about shopping for new clothes as I was when I was his age.

Emma told us she didn’t envy us this new challenge on top of everything else we had on our plates, but she was there to help. Liam would likely need psychological attention, depending on how everything with Joanna’s disappearance played out. Even if she did come back, Liam would likely have some minor abandonment issues. More likely, they would be a big problem moving forward. Emma was glad we were choosing to have Liam room with us, as it would assuage some of the more difficult challenges of these abandonment issues to have us just in the next room at night. She warned us to expect frequent nighttime visits from Liam, at least initially, until he could come to accept the reality of his situation and accept that he was safe and loved here with us.

Bobby asked Emma when she thought it would be appropriate to introduce Liam to Bobby’s parents. Emma thought it would be helpful to give him more people to connect with as a family, but not to take it too fast - he needed to get used to the idea of living with Bobby and me first and foremost. Introducing him to too many new people vying for his attention would be overwhelming and might lead him to reject them if it came on as too much too fast. Bobby wondered if waiting until Easter for a meeting might be a good idea, and Emma agreed. She said that a brief video chat or two starting a week or so from now would likely be okay, but to save an in-person meeting for Easter when we would have time to spend with them, depending on his reaction and acceptance of them.

We talked about a few other things, such as what testing Emma thought would be necessary to evaluate Liam’s educational levels and any learning difficulties. Jubilee would be handling that, which I thought was good because Liam seemed to be comfortable with her from what we’d seen. Better her than some random adult he’d never met before. We left things at that, and went to find Liam so we could have supper together.

Liam was very happy with the roast beef with horseradish and roasted vegetables we were served for dinner. Apparently, it was one of his favourites. At one point, he asked us if we were going to make him go to church like his mommy did. Bobby and I said that we wouldn’t force him to go, but one of us could take him if he really wanted. Neither of us go to church - Bobby’s parents were Methodists and mine were Episcopalian, but neither of us went to church much as kids beyond Christmas, Easter and the occasional other Sunday, and neither of us felt the need to go nowadays. Truth be told, we were both atheist-leaning agnostics. Both of us thought that the possibility for a god existed, but didn’t feel like a god was necessary for the universe to exist and work the way it did. We also didn’t see the point in worshiping some Divine Creator who left humanity to be in such shitty situations.

Bobby and I also managed to get some more information out of Liam. His full name was Liam Ronald Drake, after his grandfather and father. Clearly, after Joanna’s parents kicked her out, she had no want to name Liam after any of her forebears. Liam’s birthday was May 15th, so we would have to prepare a 9th birthday party for him. Hopefully, he would have successfully made friends with some of his peers by then. After we finished our dinners, Liam asked if we got dessert with supper. Bobby told him that he could have dessert on weekends, or on special occasions. Today sure as hell counted as a special occasion, so we asked Liam whether he wanted cookies, a slice of pie or some ice cream. Well, the kid shared Bobby’s passion for ice cream, asking for a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of vanilla with strawberry slices and hot fudge. The server, Marilyn, added a dollop of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry, much to Liam’s delight.

The rest of the evening was spent moving our things into the new suite. Piotr and Jean-Paul helped us move our things, so it didn’t take too long. Liam seemed to like his new room. I took him back downstairs to hang out for a while because Bobby wanted to call his parents and let them know what was up, and he didn’t want Liam to hear in case things didn’t go well.

As you can imagine, they fucking went ape shit. I mean, who wouldn’t, finding out that your lost grandchild had materialized. But they told Bobby that he should bring Liam to live with them, that he wasn’t equipped to handle raising a child, that a school for mutants was no place for a kid to grow up. Bobby was incensed and told them that Liam was a mutant just like him, and that this School was in fact the perfect place for Liam to grow into his powers and learn control and be supported along the way. That shut them up pretty quick. Bobby told them that if they wouldn’t be supportive of him and his partner raising Liam, they didn’t have to be part of their lives anymore. And then he came out to them, and told them that he was with me and we were in love. He told them that if they couldn’t accept this part of him as well, that he was done with them until they could get with the program. He’d already spent too many years tiptoeing around them over being a mutant, and he was tired of it. They could either accept him fully, or their time as a family was over.

When I brought Liam back upstairs an hour later, Bobby was laying on our bed and I could tell he was not happy with how the phone call had gone. His parents hadn’t said much after he laid down the ultimatum before saying some quick goodbyes. The ball was in their park now. Bobby thought that any discomfort they felt over him coming out as gay, and the fact that he was in a serious relationship would be outweighed by their want to be in their grandson’s life. I told him I would support him in whatever decisions he made regarding his relationship with his parents. I told him not to be quick to throw them away. Bobby nodded, and then apologized for not thinking about how I would feel considering I lost my family. I told him it was fine, that I was better off with my chosen family - him and our friends here - than I was with my own as a child.

We tucked Liam into bed and told him a bedtime story about a gallant knight who fought off a dragon. We were going to have to invest in some age-appropriate books to read to him. He seemed to fall asleep okay, but about an hour later as we lay together exhausted and talking about a lot but also about nothing, Liam knocked on our door. He had a nightmare. Bobby asked him if he wanted help getting back to sleep. Liam asked if he could stay with us. We told him he could, while he was getting used to being here with us, but it couldn’t be every night. That his uncles needed some private time too. He seemed to understand that, but crawled up into the bed between us. He asked us to tell him another bedtime story. This I told him the story of Jane and Michael Banks visiting their Uncle Albert from the Mary Poppins tales, something I remembered my mother reading to me as a child. He drifted off before I finished the story, curled up between us. Bobby looked down at him, then up at me and smiled softly. It was a special moment.

Bobby leaned over sleeping Liam and gave me a soft kiss and wished me good night. He shut off the light and lay back, closing his eyes. I sighed softly and lay back as well. Bobby was clearly exhausted, and he fell asleep rather quickly. I, on the other hand, couldn’t fall asleep. Not right away, anyway. My thoughts were running away, worrying about whether Bobby and I would be able to handle parenting Liam while still navigating our own issues and our relatively new relationship.

Sometime before dawn I had a colossal nightmare, about my parents again. Bobby woke me gently. I felt bad for waking him, but thankfully I didn’t wake Liam. Bobby managed to get back to sleep, but I didn’t have the same luck. All I could think about was how fucked up I was, and worrying about whether or not someone as damaged as I am could ever function as a competent and loving parent.

But one thing was for sure - I was going to do my damndest to be the best father figure for this kid that I possibly could.