Running for Home - 80. April 30, 2022

April 30, 2022

Last night, Dom, Mystique and I got together to talk about Magneto. Piotr didn’t end up joining us. He’s still too beat up from the fight with Nimrod to leave the medlab, but beyond that he told me yesterday that he had said his goodbyes to Magneto long ago, when he left the Acolytes, and didn’t want to revisit his time with him, to revisit the emotions that had driven him there.

Fair enough.

We sat out by the lake, Dom and I passing back and forth a bottle of scotch to refill our glasses. Mystique declined to drink. She isn’t a teetotaler, but I’ve only ever seen her with a drink in hand a couple of times, back when Destiny was still alive. Mystique’s a control freak, so perhaps it isn’t that surprising that even when confronting tough emotions like the ones we were dealing with these days she wouldn’t want something to help her loosen up.

We talked about how we each met Erik Lensherr, what we thought of him at that time. We talked about his larger-than-life personality, the grandness of his dreams and ambitions, the short-sightedness of his methods and timelines. We talked about all the things we loved about him, and the things that drove us away from his camp. We were all, in one way or another, abandoned by Magneto when we were no longer useful or just not worth the effort of saving. We had all loved him, in our own way, and we all had been betrayed by him, left to rot at the hands of the government.

It was bittersweet, and it was helpful to process out the emotions we were all feeling.

You know, when I first proposed doing this, I didn’t think either Dom or Mystique would bite. Dom is such a toxically masculine pig most of the time that I didn’t think he’d want to talk and Mystique likes to play her cards close to her chest. But then again, Mystique had over the years slowly let me into her and Destiny’s closed world, and she had briefly confided in me after Destiny had died. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. But Dom? Well, from what I could tell since he left that holding cell to help with the Purifiers, he has been changed. Whether it was due to the eradication of the telepathic virus, the neurological stem cell treatments, the realization he had a daughter, the change in our relationship, or maybe a little of everything, I guess it doesn’t matter. He was doing something psychologically healthy - actively grieving with friends. Maybe all of the horrors I endured would end up turning into something good in the end. Maybe he could turn over a new leaf, after all.

I was a little tipsy when I returned to our room. Bobby greeted me with a sweet kiss. Liam was already in bed. I’d already talked my feelings out with him the other night, so I didn’t really need to say anything else. We took an intimate but chaste shower together and then curled up in bed together. I fell asleep in his arms, feeling safe, content, loved, and ready to move on from yet another piece of my past.

I was thinking this morning about how that has become a theme over the last year - returning to the past, and then moving on from it. Everything has changed so much, and despite all the trials I feel like I’m finally starting to stand on my own two feet and walk out into the sunlight. There’s still one thing in my past that still lurks darkly behind me, however. I still have to confront my parents. I’m going to go see them the day before Mother’s Day; we have it planned now. Bobby and Liam are going to come with me, but they are going to hang out doing some touristy stuff in Detroit while I do my initial visit. If things go well, they can meet my parents on Mother’s Day. If they don’t? Well, I’m ready for that.

Fuck, who the hell am I kidding?

I’m not ready for that. Not at all.

I don’t know how to prepare myself for this. The mixture of hope and cynicism, the sheer ambivalence between positive possibilities and negative expectations, it’s so fucking overwhelming. I want to think the best - that my parents managed to turn their lives around after Xavier helped them, and they were able to continue living well even after I ran away with Magneto. But I dread going to them and seeing that they haven’t changed, not really. And even more so, I dread confronting them and seeing how they have changed for the better and being rejected for my mistakes, even though I have changed as well.

If I am just going to lose them all over again, wouldn’t it be better for our relationship to just stay lost? Stay lost, and just live knowing that they loved me enough to change their ways and try to get me back?

I can’t fucking do that, though. Can’t leave it alone. If they loved me enough to try to change, I need to have the balls to see if they can still love me now. I need to give them a chance, give us a chance to be a family again. I need them to see the man that I’ve become now. I need them to see that I’m not a fucking failure, a fucking criminal, that I’m doing something good with my life and that I have someone who loves me more than I ever fucking deserve and we are raising an awesome kid together, a kid who would probably love having another set of pseudo-grandparents.

I need to be loved.

Fuck, do I ever need to be loved. I have Bobby, but to be honest, there is still something missing. I need to feel my parents holding me, one more time. Just one more time, and it will be good enough.

Sometimes we don’t get what we want, though. And I need to be realistic. I need to be prepared for the worst. What if my aunt and uncle, Joanna’s parents, have gotten my own parents involved with the fucking Church of Humanity?

I feel sick even contemplating that.

I took a walk outside to clear my head after that thought struck me. Bobby was hanging out with Liam somewhere in the common rooms, and I was supposed to be working hard on my new book, but my thoughts were a complete mess and I wasn’t focusing worth shit. A walk seemed like a good idea. I was almost out to the lake, enjoying the sun just peeking through the clouds, enjoying the spring breeze.

But then it happened.

This kid, he starts screaming from across the yard near the basketball court. Just uncontrollably screaming. I ran over to him, and he’s just holding his head, curled up in a ball on the ground, eyes wide and staring. It was Gerard Cooper, one of the 10th graders. Calls himself Pinpoint because he has telescopic vision and super accurate aim.

I asked him what was wrong, what was going on, but he just kept screaming and shaking his head. I tried to reach out to Emma with my thoughts, but then I remembered she was out for the weekend. I pulled my cellphone out and called Cecilia. I told her what was going on, that I really had no clue what was wrong with this kid. She said she’d be right there.

A crowd of concerned students started to gather, but I told them to stay back and give us some space. Gerard just kept on screaming and shaking. He was completely unresponsive to me, even though I tried to get him to calm down. He couldn’t even look at me, whatever was wrong with him. His eyes were just staring off into space. Even if I stood right in front of him, even if I waved my hand in front of his face he wasn’t focusing on me.

Cecilia arrived, panting from running across the campus. She examined him, tried to get him to calm down too, and then when that didn’t work she pulled out a syringe and sedated him. After a few seconds, his screaming stopped and he slumped down on the ground, unconscious. I helped Cecilia carry him down to the medlab. She ran a bunch of tests, but everything was coming back normal except for the electrical activity in his brain being out of whack and his heart rate and blood pressure being a little high. He wasn’t seizing, but Cecilia said the patterns weren’t anything normal. She took a blood sample to run toxicology and then moved on to do some nasal and throat swabs.

I asked her if there was anything else I could do, starting to realize I was probably just in her way. She shook her head and thanked me for taking care of Gerard before she got there.

I was a little shaken by all this. One minute things are fine, and the next a kid is completely fucked up for no reason we could decipher. I hoped Cecilia would be able to help him. She was a fucking top-notch doctor, as far as I was concerned, so she must be able to do something for Gerard once she figures this out.

Confronted with the fragility of life, I decided I would visit my friends recovering in some of the other medlabs from the fight with Nimrod. I visited Jean-Paul and Piotr first. Jean-Paul’s sister was there too, up and about from the medlab where she was supposed to be recovering. She had suffered a concussion and a broken arm, knocked unconscious by one of Nimrod’s blasts. Jean-Paul, on the other hand, had a broken arm and a broken leg from hitting the ground awkwardly after being knocked out of the air by a blast. Piotr had broken ribs, a broken shoulder blade and a concussion, having taken a shot head-on and been knocked through a wall. Those blasts would have had to be ridiculously intense to cause Piotr to break bones in his organometallic form. They all had a variety of other contusions and traumas on their bodies that must have hurt like a bitch.

We talked about a whole lot of nothing, really, though I got Jean-Paul and Piotr laughing as Jeanne-Marie and I traded some barbs after she flirted with me for a few minutes before Jean-Paul let her in on the fact that I’m gay and very much so spoken for. Poor Piotr, the laughing must have hurt. I spent a good half-hour hanging out with them before I decided I should probably look in on Rachel and Sam.

As I made my way down to the intensive care unit, Xi’an walked out. I could tell she was barely holding it together. I pulled her into a hug before even greeting her. She burst into tears, just sobbing into my shoulder for a minute before she recovered herself. She apologized to me. I shook my head and told her there was nothing to apologize for. I said that if it had been Bobby unconscious and barely alive in there, I’d be a wreck too.

Xi’an sighed, shaking her head. She asked me if I regretted not telling Bobby how I felt about him until this year. That was a good question. Did I regret not telling Bobby?

I honestly am not sure.

If I told him back when we were sixteen, how would he have reacted? He was oblivious about himself, and later in denial, so how could he have reacted to the news that his male best friend was in love with him?

He probably would have doubled down on his relationship with Marie. It probably would have driven a wedge between us, one greater than the one in my head over the fact that I thought he was straight and completely unattainable. If I’d told him how I felt, would we have even still been friends before Alkali Lake? Would I have still ended up going with Magneto?

But even if I hadn’t gone with Magneto, who knows how long it would have been before Bobby came to his senses. I probably would have made damn sure I was going to a different college than him. I probably would have eventually met someone else, settled for someone else, and that would be the end of things.

Back in the present, I shook my head. I told Xi’an that it was unlikely to have been a good thing because we were stupid teenagers, not reasonable adults who knew themselves better. Xi’an sighed, wondering aloud if we really were all that reasonable as adults. I put a hand on her shoulder, and asked her if she’d even said aloud to herself that she was in love with Rachel. Xi’an squeezed her eyes shut, taking in a shuddering breath. She shook her head, a couple of fresh tears falling. She told me that she hasn’t allowed herself to think about it, to contemplate it. After the hell she went through pining after Kitty for all those years, even following her to Chicago for college in a pathetic desperate attempt to see if things could be different somewhere else, Xi’an wasn’t willing to put herself through that again.

I sighed and told her Rachel was not Kitty, and I thought that if anyone would understand, Rachel would. Even if she couldn’t reciprocate, she would understand and it would be okay. Xi’an nodded and said I was probably right.

I asked her how Rachel and Sam were doing. Xi’an took a deep breath and looked away. She said they are both still unconscious, but it’s because Cecilia put them into a medical coma to help them heal, not because of any sort of major brain injury. They both had taken blows to the head, but it was the injuries to their bodies that were more concerning. Rachel had broken so many bones, Cecilia wasn’t completely sure what to do. Once she had the internal bleeding under control, she’d positioned Rachel as best as she could and was consulting with experts in car accident trauma and blast injuries to see what she should do next with her. Sam was maybe in a bit better shape - or at least Cecilia had a better idea of how she should be treating him. He had fewer fractures to his limbs, but one on his skull. It was his chest that was the big problem for him - he had flail chest due to multiple rib fractures, chest wall punctures, and had some hemorrhaging in his lungs that Cecilia had gotten under control. He had a few chest tubes inserted to drain the blood and the air from around the lungs so they could fully inflate again, and the bleeding inside the lungs seems to have mostly stopped.

Both of them were improving, but it was going to be a long process. Xi’an said that Cecilia was going to get Josh Foley to help speed things up, but she didn’t want to overwhelm him. I could understand why. Treating my scars was one thing, treating complicated trauma victims was something else entirely. Xi’an told me she was going upstairs to take a long walk. I nodded, and then turned and entered the medlab.

It was quiet in there, other than the heart monitors beeping away. It was hard to look at them, look at my friends so grievously wounded. Rachel and Sam, they sacrificed so much to make the operation against the Purifiers a success. I am so glad they made it back alive.

I spent a little bit of time at each of their bedsides, talking to their unconscious forms about a whole lot of nothing. I’m not sure if I was supposed to do that - they were in medical comas, not brain-damage comas, so… I don’t know. I guess I should have asked Cecilia what is and isn’t appropriate. I know you are supposed to give people with concussions a low stimulation environment, but… well, this felt a bit different than that.

I was there for a while, but then Dani returned from wherever she’d been to renew her vigil at Sam’s bedside. She gave me a hug, thanking me for visiting them. But fuck, of course I was going to visit them. They were my friends, and as much as it hurts to see them like this, I needed to be here supporting them through their recovery. They saved us all from whatever hell the Purifiers were trying to render us into, whether it was a bioweapon’s disease or a mutant-hunting super robot.

I went back upstairs and hunted down Bobby and Liam. They were outside on the basketball court. Bobby was teaching Liam how to dribble the ball. I walked up and pulled the two of them into a hug. Bobby gave me a knowing look - he could tell I was upset, but didn’t want to ask in front of Liam. We played basketball together for a while.

As we played, I felt everything go back in perspective. Liam, and other kids like him, are the reason we are doing all this. The reason this school exists, the reason the X-men exist, the reason we have done the actions. Sure, there were costs, but they were worth it in the end. We are changing the world for the better, slowly but surely.

The fact that I am a part of it, and that my efforts, now, are making change in a positive way and not in the damaging way of my teenage and early adult years… Well, it means everything to me. I have a path now, a true path, and I can make a difference.