Running for Home - 77. April 19, 2022

April 19, 2022

It’s been a tough couple of days, I’m not going to lie. Today was probably the hardest day of my life.

Yesterday was focused mostly on my recovery from the concussion. Vange actually took me to the same hospital that Joanna was in the ICU, so that made things convenient for Bobby and Liam going forward, moving back and forth between visiting me and looking in on Joanna when they were allowed. Liam was really down and struggling. He was in tears pretty often, meriting lots of hugs. Bobby and I tried to reassure him, but we were worried. The doctors told us Joanna wasn’t getting better. She was going downhill. We put on a brave face for Liam, and didn’t tell him whenever we received bad news updates, but I think he could tell that the writing was on the wall.

Bobby’s mother and father came back to the hospital as well, to support Liam. Well, mostly that. William and Madeleine visited me briefly while Bobby and Liam were out getting lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Madeleine didn’t say much. I think she is very afraid of me after seeing me incinerate the people pretending to be my aunt and uncle with only a thought. William, however, shook my hand and thanked me for protecting his family where he couldn’t. He told me the whole experience had given him a lot to come to terms with. He realized, now, how skewed his perspective had been, how he’d never really believed Bobby about how bad mutants had things - he’d thought all the business about the Purifiers was ‘fake news,’ and that the physical violence and harassment many mutants face wasn’t actually all that common. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

They asked me how I knew we were in danger, and I told them about the family connection I had to Liam. They were absolutely flabbergasted that Joanna was my cousin. If she hadn’t been my cousin, I wouldn’t have known the difference of who those people were, and those fakes probably would have caught us all by surprise. We might all be dead now. That was a disturbing thought, and I quickly tried to put it out of my mind. Madeleine seemed to think it was quite strange that both of her sons had fallen for someone in my family. I told her I thought it was pretty loopy, too, especially considering that Joanna and I were very different people who had lived very different lives. That brought a bit of uncomfortable silence since I accidentally reminded them of my terrorist history.

The awkwardness was interrupted by Vange arriving. She had two people I didn’t recognize with her. I asked Vange what was up, and she said they were a couple of reporters who wanted to run a story on my experience in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. She asked who Madeleine and William were, so I explained they were Liam’s grandparents, and it was their house where everything went down. The reporters asked if they were willing to be interviewed. They said yes, but they asked if they could go get lunch first. The reporters consented and handed William their cards and took down his contact information in case they didn’t manage to talk to them in the hospital.

I sighed, feeling a bit relieved when they left, even if I was about to face the Inquisition from these reporters. Even if Easter dinner hadn’t gone at all the way we had hoped, at least I could come away from this whole experience knowing that I had William’s respect and that he’d had a change in his perspective that might help him be more sympathetic to his son and grandson’s predicaments.

Then the grilling started. I told them everything - the background of Bobby’s brother and Joanna being harassed by the Church of Humanity, his death, her flight and hiding, her discovery and renewed harassment by the Church precipitating her leaving Liam with Bobby and I at the School followed by her disappearance. Then I told them everything that happened on Easter. I left nothing out, from how I knew the people posing as my Aunt and Uncle were fakes, to the crosses, to the cops' violence against me even though I’d done nothing wrong. Bobby and Liam came back partway through, but Bobby thought it was best if they step out and go for a walk in the city. Liam was already traumatized enough, he didn’t need to relive what happened so soon. The reporters could get Bobby’s perspective some other time when either I or his parents could take care of Liam.

The questioning took over two exhausting hours. At the end of it, they took some pictures of my wounds, and Vange asked them to send copies to her since the bruising looked much worse than it had the other day before when she took photos in the aftermath. The reporters thanked me for my time and then left. Vange asked me if I needed anything, but I just wanted to rest after unloading all of that, so she let me be and left to do some more lawyering.

Emma came to visit in the late afternoon. She told me to take my time recovering, and that Bobby and I could stay in Boston for as long as we needed while Joanna was recovering. Paige was covering my classes again, and they had Bobby’s classes divided between a couple of other subs. Emma told me not to worry about any lawyer fees or overhead over the course of the lawsuit with the Boston police. I guess Vange had filled her in on the plan to take them to the cleaners, and Emma was in full support. She was encouraging Vange to pursue getting the cop who knocked me out and anyone else who helped him beat me while I was unconscious terminated. She was in the city to visit me, yes, but also to do some telepathic reconnaissance to see if she could get some leads that Vange could pursue for evidence of exactly who else was involved in my beating so we could get the whole lot of them fired and banned from policing, along with adding them as defendants in the lawsuit. I thanked Emma for helping us with this. It was going to be a long, drawn-out process, and any help getting evidence would be wonderful.

Bobby and Liam came back with a take-out dinner for us to eat. We were pretty quiet, though Bobby did ask me how the interview went. I told him it went fine but didn’t bring up any specifics because I didn’t want to upset Liam. He asked me how I was feeling, and I told him I was feeling a bit better - the balance problems were gone, I just had a chronic headache and my body and face were very sore from the beating. Nothing I couldn’t handle. The meds they were giving me for the pain were doing more than enough. I told him that Emma had visited and was doing some digging about the cops who hurt me. Bobby seemed heartened by that.

Jean-Paul, Piotr, Xi’an, Rachel and Jubilee showed up at around 7. I guess they left the School as soon as classes finished and drove up. We had a good chat, mostly about unserious and School-related things until Jubilee took Liam for a walk down to the cafeteria to get a snack. Rachel told me things were progressing with Mystique’s project, and they were starting to come up with a plan. After what happened to us this weekend, taking down the Purifiers felt more urgent than ever to everyone. The mission was probably going to happen in a week or so, depending on what they could figure out.

It couldn’t be soon enough, in my mind.

They left by nine. I was feeling up to moving around, so Bobby, Liam and I took a trip to the ICU to look in on Joanna. Liam started crying, of course. He was so fucking scared. Rightly so. We managed to get him calmed down and headed back to my room. The doctors wanted me to stay overnight again, but they were pretty sure I’d be okay for discharge sometime the next day.

Bobby and Liam left for a hotel after that. Bobby’s parents were staying there too, in an attached suite. His parents’ house was a crime scene now, so they wouldn’t be allowed back in for who knows how long. A few days, at least. Bobby had told me that they don’t feel safe there anymore, and that they were talking of moving back to Long Island, maybe even to Floral Park where Bobby had been born. They still had friends there, and they would be much closer to the School for visits with Liam. They started talking about places even closer to the School, but Bobby cut them off and told them he wanted them to move somewhere comfortable for them, and it would be nice if they didn’t completely have to start over in a new community. Really, he just didn’t want them to be too close to the School and constantly in our hair.

I didn’t sleep well that night. My dreams were full of nightmares, nightmares about many different things. About the Purifier’s attack, of course, but also about Dom and Iraq, about me killing Bobby during the Cure War on Alcatraz instead of him knocking me out, about my parents telling me I was the biggest mistake they ever made and how they wished I was dead.

I woke up in the morning tired and in pain. The nurses got me something for that pretty quick, but my mood didn’t really recover.

Bobby and Liam came back around 10:30am. They hadn’t been there for fifteen minutes when Bobby’s cell phone rang. It was the ICU. It was time. Joanna was going to die. They had done all they could, but she wasn’t going to make it. She had terminal brain damage at this point and they wanted consent to take her off life support. We gave that consent, not wanting her to suffer anymore.

We sat Liam down on the hospital bed between us and explained that we were going to go see his mommy, but this time it would be different. It was time to say goodbye. She had fought hard, but the Purifiers hurt her too badly and it was time to let her go.

Liam broke down, sobbing in Bobby’s arms for ten minutes straight. I called William and Madeleine while Bobby was trying to soothe Liam and let them know what was happening. They said they would come right away. Eventually, there was a lull in Liam’s crying, and I told Liam that we should go to the ICU now, while we still had the chance. Liam nodded, tears streaking down his cheeks.

Taking Liam to say goodbye to his mother was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could prepare anyone for a moment like this. The doctors and nursing staff gave us our privacy. Liam crawled up on the bed and clung to her, but she couldn’t hug him back, couldn’t hold him and tell him everything would be all right. She was practically lifeless, her heart barely beating and her breathing sounding laboured as fuck and not right. Bobby and I were both brought to tears. We let Liam stay with her like that for seven or eight minutes, but her breathing was becoming even more erratic and stop and start and I knew it was time to go. I didn’t want Liam to be there the moment she passed. I didn’t want him to hear the heart monitor flatline or the alarms going off or any of that.

We tried to get Liam up, but he was inconsolable, refusing to move. Bobby and I looked at one another and relented. In the end, neither of us wanted Liam to blame us and resent us for not letting him stay with her till the end. It was another four or five minutes, and then she breathed her last. The heart monitor flatlined. The staff came in to do what they needed to do. We tried to get Liam to understand that it was over, that she was gone, but he wouldn’t let go. We had to drag him off her, apologizing. Bobby carried him out of the ICU. We went back to my room and tried to comfort him, not telling Liam that it was okay, but letting him know that it was okay to let all his feelings out, that we were there for him, and we would be there for him always.

William and Madeleine arrived, bringing on a new wave of tears and grieving. Liam seemed to take comfort in their presence, which I was grateful for. Liam wouldn’t eat anything at lunch. I was discharged late in the afternoon, so we moved ourselves to the hotel. Everything felt heavy, like it was moving in slow motion.

We let Liam stay with us that night, of course. He cried himself to sleep. Bobby and I just looked at each other when he finally fell asleep. We knew this could happen when Joanna had disappeared last month, but we’d hoped there would be a better ending. We knew this was the likely outcome, but still… There was just no way to truly prepare for this.

We had no fucking idea what we were going to do.