![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
st_aurafinaAuthor: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
st_aurafina
Title: So Much Water, So Close to Home
Recipient:stubbleglitter
Disclaimer: Not mine! Never were!
Warnings/Rating: PG
Summary: The Summers boys head into the mountains to follow up reports of a mutant sighting. Set shortly after Scott is reunited with his brother.
Recipient's request: I adore Alex (bruvvers!) and Jean (onetruelove omg!!), slice-of-life stories, snappy dialogue, and references to food.
Notes: Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
summers_fling ficathon. Thank you to lilacsigil and likeadeuce for beta reading. Title from Paul Kelly's "Everything's Turning to White"
Scott's hands were numb. Clasping tight to the branch that spanned the open mouth of the sinkhole, he reached out tentatively with one foot, feeling for the wall. He'd opened his eyes for less than a second; focused on finding his target through the fog, he hadn't seen the ground fall away from him. The branch, greasy with mold, sagged under the weight of his body, so he carefully stilled his swinging legs, tightening his shoulders and bringing his centre of mass closer to his hands. A bullet zipped through the fog, embedding with a pulpy noise into the mud to his left, and he fought the urge to open his eyes, concentrating on his breathing instead, keeping it regular, in time to the drone of frogs and crickets in the humid darkness. More shots, further away this time, then the ground shook in response – the familiar aftershocks of Alex's plasma blasts. Scott looped one forearm around the groaning branch as his legs dangled over open space, and prayed that his brother would keep his head down.
"Keep your damn head down!"
Standing on his seat, shoulders above the sun-roof, Alex laughed and deftly dodged Scott's arm as it batted around his knees. Sighing with exasperation and steering one-handed with his eyes squinted into the sun, Scott finally found purchase against Alex's jeans, and pulled him down into his seat with a bounce. The sleek SUV barely swerved on the winding mountain road.
"Jesus, Alex, decapitation is a great way to start a mission. Sit down! I don't want to have to bring your head back to Lorna in a bucket."
Alex propped his feet on the dashboard. "Lorna'd be fine, at least she'd be getting some head, and…" but stopped short at Scott's horrified look. "Ah, you better watch the road, dude." He grabbed the mostly-empty bag of corn chips, and shuffled lower in his seat, tipping his head back so he could pour the crumbled remains into his mouth.
Scott pressed his lips together, and forced his hands to remain on the wheel. This is what brothers are supposed to do, he reminded himself, we're supposed to be comfortable with each other, eat junk-food on road trips and joke about our girlfriends. That's what this mission was really about, a chance for him to know his brother outside of strategy meetings and battle training. Scott glanced sideways at the man he barely knew, yet had fought beside for some months now. This was his brother, grown up and a stranger, and it still elicited waves of elation and misery in him. Not for the first time, he resisted the urge to pull the car off the road so he could alternately pummel and hug this infuriating person. Instead, Scott adjusted his posture to mimic Alex's relaxed slouch, but pushed his baseball cap further back on his head so he could still see over the steering wheel - there was no sense in crashing Warren's car by trying to look cool. Beside him, Alex was fidgeting absently, playing with the map Scott had spent an hour working on last night – the route marked in red and readings from Cerebro in green. Scott reminded himself that this trip was precious – it was a rare chance to get to know his brother again, learn what sort of person Alex had grown up to be, without the rest of the team endlessly observing and making comment. He wasn't going to waste the opportunity by being petty about tiny details, so he restrained himself from tugging the map out of his brother's hands to stop him rolling and tearing at the edge of the paper. Instead, he reached over to the back seat for the manila folder of photos and newspaper clippings.
"So, do you think these photos are for real?"
"Maybe." Alex flipped through the blurry photos, lining up a few enlarged snaps of the amorphous shapes across the dash where they flapped lazily in the breeze from the sun-roof. "I don't know where the Professor gets these leads; I really hope it isn't Weekly World News."
The image of the Professor, decorously sipping tea while engrossed in a neatly folded paper that screamed "Mutant Frogman Lives" across the front page was so absurd that Scott laughed out loud.
Alex grinned. "I guess I don't need a mind reader to see what's so funny about that."
"I don't need a mind reader to see that you're here to cause trouble." The sheriff leaned against the charred door frame of the burned-out trailer. Behind him, backlit by the headlights of the patrol car, a deputy moved nervously from foot to foot, shining his flashlight at every rustle that came from the trees nearby. The trailer was the dwelling nearest to the chain of readings the Professor had plucked from the ether with Cerebro, and they found it at dusk by following a plume of smoke. The doors were torn from the hinges and trampled into the muddy ground by many feet. The plywood walls and floor were swollen with damp, so the mattress hadn't burned enough to disguise the dark stain in the middle, studded with bullet holes. There were no bodies, but worst of all was the plastic crib at the end of the bed, deformed and buckled with heat. Squatting beside the ashy remains of the mattress, Scott remained still, arms casually propped on his thighs, hoping that Alex would pick up on the cue to keep his body language calm and slow. They had met the local lawmen earlier, and not had the most enthusiastic of welcomes – in fact this was the most excitement Scott had seen anyone in town show all day, despite the fact that there had obviously been a brutal attack of some kind in the last twenty-four hours, and on a local family. He held the bullet casings loosely in the curl of his fingers to stop them from jingling together, while Alex took two slow and careful steps into the rectangle of light that cut though the smoky air from the open door.
"It's like we told you in the general store, sir," Alex's voice was calm, and the friendly, round vowel sounds he retained from his West Coast upbringing helped convey the impression of an honest, well-intentioned student. "We're environmental science students – you can call our professor, he'll confirm everything. We probably shouldn't be in here, but Scott, he studies soil pollution in domestic fires, he was really keen on getting some soil samples. I'm really sorry if we've done the wrong thing, if this is a crime scene or something. We didn't see any tape or signs."
Scott took another shallow breath and watched expressions flit across the sheriff's face like clouds. That's right, we're a couple of harmless, bumbling students. We don't know anything about your dirty little lynch mob, we can't see that you're covering up something ugly here.
There was one breathless moment, and Scott let his shoulders sag a little; they were going to walk out of this one. Then the deputy, a skinny man with brown hair that the misty rain had plastered against his forehead, stepped into the doorway and whispered in the sheriff's ear, and the sheriff's face set into a wary sneer.
"Son," he gestured with one meaty hand towards Scott, "Take off your glasses." Scott sighed, and got to his feet slowly, his hands held far away from his body.
"You all stand still!" The deputy had drawn his weapon, covering first Alex, then Scott with sharp, jerky movements that would be lucky to hit either of them. Scott schooled his expression to mimic Alex's – bland, incurious, over-fed and harmless. Where had Alex learned to do that – to manipulate people, make them see what he wanted them so see?
Alex took another step forward, raising his hands in a placating gesture that did little to allay the deputy's unease, and Scott slowly tensed himself, ready to launch forward at the nervous, skinny man, as Alex kept talking in that soothing voice. "My friend has sensitive eyes – the glasses are medical, he wears them to protect his eyes from bright light."
The sheriff scowled. "Sunset's long past – why's he got to wear them in the dark?" He didn't tell the deputy to put down his weapon, and his right hand was drifting towards his own holstered sidearm.
"It's okay, Alex." Scott stood up, and brushed one hand clean on his knee. "I'll take them off." Standing slightly behind Alex, Scott watched as his brother's shoulders tensed.
"You don't have to do that, Scott. The sheriff understands…"
"Don't you go putting words in my mouth, son." The sheriff's voice was sharp, but his hand stilled over the button on his holster.
Scott pulled the glasses over his nose, and screwed his eyes up as though squinting into the light. The room seemed to exhale in release, and he breathed out with it. Then the floorboards creaked, the frogs stilled, and Alex's body shoved hard against him as two shots zipped through the space where Scott had been standing. His glasses scudded in the opposite direction. His ears were ringing but he could still hear the deputy screaming.
"Freaks! They're freaks! They're here sniffing around after their freak friends!"
Alex hauled Scott to his feet, and they rocketed into the bulk of the sheriff's body, scrambled down the steps and out into the darkness. With arms linked, they ran for the nearest cover; a scrubby forest of bent and twisted trees. The rain had almost stopped; a misty veil of water hung in the air, clinging to Scott's eyelashes as he kept an even pace at Alex's side.
While Alex caught his breath, one hand on the twisted trunk of a tree, Scott prowled around the area, stepping carefully through the tangled undergrowth, listening for the sheriff and his men.
"How do you do that – walk around blind?" Alex's breathing was still a little ragged. Scott made a mental note to work on building endurance in training when they got back.
"Practice. I didn't always have the glasses. Plus they're a target in a fight – people think I'm going to be vulnerable with my eyes closed." He picked his way back to where Alex stood, and leaned against the trunk with him. "I can't hear them – but they know the terrain better."
"They killed someone back there." Alex's voice was quiet, and as angry as Scott had ever heard it. "And they were so smug. Like they can do that, and get away with it, because there's nobody to stop them, because they think nobody cares."
"There's us," said Scott. "The X-Men don't just fight the villains in capes."
Alex stood back from the tree; Scott could hear him swinging his arms around like a batter stepping up. He jumped when Alex's hand touched his face – his fingers were cold against Scott's eyelids. "Keep them closed – I'll track back around, see if they've gone, maybe find your glasses."
Scott caught Alex's shirt, and pulled his brother into a hug, swift and fierce. "Be careful. Don't get shot." He was glad that he didn't have his glasses, so he didn't have to wonder about the expression on Alex's face at the uncharacteristic sentiment. It was nice just to let it be.
"You couldn't just let it be, could you?" The deputy's voice was thin and nasal, and his breathing rapid. Underweight and well-armed – just the kind of over-compensating nobody that likes to rant from a position of power. Scott turned slowly, his limbs stiff after waiting in the cold and the damp for Alex to return. He kept his eyes closed, following the direction of the man's voice, hands raised as if in surrender. Right handed, he remembered, picturing the man waving his gun around in the burned-out trailer, roll left and forward.
"You muties are all the same," the voice rose in pitch until it competed with the shrieking frogs, "You're all freaks, you and that freak trailer-whore, you're animals, you just don't know who you're dealing with…"
I'm dealing with an easy target, thought Scott, and blinked once. He aimed just short of where he calculated the deputy was standing, hoping to knock him off-balance long enough that he would be able to get hold of the gun. The after-image of the deputy's splayed form glowed red on black against his eyelids as he dived for the man's gun hand. Expecting to hit muddy ground, he was surprised to be falling into empty space. His hands, scrabbling frantically through the air, caught hold of a branch, which slid for a few sickening seconds, then lodged and held. The deputy's panicked footsteps faded as the man fled through the fog. In the surprised silence that followed, Scott's breath roared loud in his own ears.
There was a strange tranquillity to the moment. Hanging suspended above a sinkhole of unknown depth, Scott reviewed the events of the day in his mind. Something didn't fit. They took the body away, why didn't they take the trailer? The sheriff could have had that trailer towed and hidden forever in a cave or mine-shaft. He and the deputy had shown up so suddenly, it was as though they were waiting for someone. Rabbit hunting, he thought, they were waiting for a kid. Or kids. He shifted his grip on the branch – how far out from the wall was he?
The forest was coming alive again – angry shouts and snapping branches mingled with the chorus of frogs and crickets. He heard a shot, and then another, and Alex's answering retort shook the earth. Scott's fingers, cold and numb, were slipping, the branch was sliding away from the mouth of the sinkhole. He fanned his legs out into the void, already planning his descent, and the best position in which to hit the ground. He wasn't afraid to fall.
He wasn't afraid to fall. His mom buckled the parachute on, and pressed the ripcord into his palm, folding her fingers around Scott's, squeezing his hand closed. Scott had never seen his mother's eyes look so beautiful; bright and focused, pupils sharp. Alex, still warm from sleeping, wriggled and whimpered as his mother, swift and co-ordinated, buckled the two boys together. It was all over before Scott had time to process it – he held his brother, he held the ripcord, he was falling away from the plane. Alex's hand was warm against his forearm.
Alex's hand was warm against Scott's forearm, and his grip was sure. The weight of Scott's body pulled him flat to the ground at the edge of the sinkhole. Scott snaked his other arm up to his brother's shoulder, and scrabbled for footing against the wall. They balanced there together on the edge of the precipice, and Alex pushed a pair of glasses back onto Scott's face, awkwardly hooking the arms over his ears, fingers fumbling in the cold. They flopped together onto the marshy ground beside the crevasse and lay on their backs.
"The sheriff's gone back to town for reinforcements. He'll be a while lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks." Alex made an evocative jabbing movement with his hands. "We should be able to slip away and get in touch with the Professor."
Scott shook his head. "No, there's a kid here. The sheriff was waiting for the kid to come home, so he could finish the job. I think that kid's watching us now, trying to figure out what to do next."
Alex sat up with a squelch and looked around wildly. "Watching us? Where?"
Scott propped up on his elbows. "Somewhere out there. They just have to figure out whether they think we can be trusted."
There was a slipping, sucking noise from far below, then a roar. A fountain of muddy water spouted upwards from the sinkhole, snatching at their bodies, pulling them down. In the few seconds that it took to fall to the bottom, the fog rolled back from the stars, and in the eyes of the universe, Scott felt very small.
Scott felt very big. He sat in the chair next to his mother's bed, and kicked his legs expectantly, holding his arms in the position demonstrated by his dad, like he was carrying folded towels on laundry day. He knew the baby was small; he couldn't see anything in the bundle of blankets tucked into the fold of his dad's arm. He didn't know that it would be so heavy, the warm, damp mass pushing him backwards in the chair. He gave an oomph, and hoisted himself forward with some help from his dad, so he could peer into the yellow flannelette blanket. His brother looked kind of gross. He looked back at his mom, leaning gingerly down from her hospital bed, and she smiled encouragingly.
"You're Alex's big brother now, Scott. You can teach him so many things."
Scott chewed his lip; he didn't really know how to be a big brother, but he could talk to his dad about that later. He dipped his head towards the bunched up little face, and found that his brother was watching him with milky blue eyes.
"Hi, I'm Scott," he said, politely. Then, pleased with the reaction this exchange had evinced from his mother, he planted a kiss on the baby's head. Damp curls were beginning to stand up from Alex's head, and Scott sputtered as they tickled his mouth.
Scott sputtered; his mouth was full of Alex's hair, damp and gritty. The two of them were folded semi-upright against a muddy wall of wooden planks in a tangle of limbs and debris. The frog song was all around them, insistent and shrill. Grimy water swirled in anxious eddies around their legs, lapping at their shoes, and Scott understood why the trailer had burned so poorly.
"You tried to put the fire out." He didn't know who he was talking to, exactly, but life around telepaths had honed his sensitivity to being wordlessly watched. The chirping grew more urgent, staccato chirrups ending with clicks. Scott squinted into the darkness, where patches of phosphorescent lichen clung to the rotting wood. Was there a figure crouching there, as mottled with glowing green speckles as the wall behind it?
"I was too late. They still killed her." The voice came out of the humid darkness, a too-sibilant throaty burr punctuated by a familiar pubescent squeak at the end of the sentence. A silhouette peeled away from the facing wall, a rangy, long-limbed figure, covered with splotches of glowing green. At his feet, a small bundle of muddy clothes and limbs uncurled from his ankle and tipping its head back at an improbable angle, issued a melodic series of warbles. "She says you shot the deputy, with your eyes."
Beside him, Alex snickered. "No, 'swrong. Song goes, I shot th'sheriff, I din' shoot the deputy." He moaned, and pressed his knees up to his head. Scott tilted his brother's head back to see a spreading bruise painting a livid stripe over one closed eye.
The boy obviously saw it too – he cringed, and scooped the toddler into his arms. "Sorry. I did that. I'm not very good at this stuff yet."
Scott pulled himself upright, watching as the water at his feet hissed nervously then sank into the sandy soil. "You'll get better with practice. You've done a fine job so far." He peered at the two of them: the boy was a teenager, no more than fifteen, and the girl a child of perhaps three, with widely spaced, bulbous eyes that gleamed merrily at him in the eerie half-light of the tunnel. She opened her mouth impossibly wide and warbled a lyrical stream of sound, gesturing enthusiastically with her hands. The words were indistinct, but Scott thought he understood: it's good to be alive. It's good to be with family. He smiled back, and the girl put both her hands in her mouth with delight.
The boy's shoulders relaxed a little. "Most people think she's a freak."
Scott shrugged. "This is a pretty small town, I wouldn't count their opinions as those of most people. I have friends who have dedicated their lives to learn more about people like us. Myself, I'm glad that you're both alive."
The toddler climbed nimbly up the length of her brother's body, and wrapped her arms around his neck. The boy peeled the long-fingered hands off his skin with a sticky noise and held her out for Scott to take.
"She trusts you. Will you take her? I have to go finish things with the sheriff." The boy's voice cracked a little as he spoke. Muddy water was seeping down from the roof of the tunnel and rising up through the sandy floor.
Instead of taking the child, Scott looped Alex's arm over his shoulder, and dragged him to his feet. "Well, I can't stop you from doing what you've got to do." He took a few tentative steps, and Alex, his eyes half-closed, stumbled along obediently. "I mean, I imagine revenge is pretty high on your priorities, but would your mom want that? It'll probably get you killed, unless you're bullet-proof?" He raised an eyebrow at the boy, who shook his head, and scuffed at the mud. "Or maybe she'd want you to get your sister somewhere safe."
"She knew! She knew they were coming for us, when they got out of the cars. She made me go. I could have stopped them. She made me take the baby and run, while she kept them busy." The boy flushed, the colour a lurid purple on his pale skin. "Why'd she do that?"
"Moms have a kind of super-power that way. They'll do anything to keep their kids safe." Scott shifted his weight – Alex was getting heavy on his shoulder. "She gave you your life; you have to respect that, treat it as something special. Don't throw it away on those animals. Look after your sister, make sure she understands what her mother did."
The boy scowled, but dragged the little girl down from his shoulders. "It's not fair. She'll never remember her mom."
Alex pushed the hair out of his eyes, and peered at the boy blearily. "Don't bet on that. She'll remember more than you'd expect." Then he leaned forward, and threw up noisily on the muddy ground. The little girl cooed in amazement, and waved her arms.
It was a long hike through the mineshaft, and the light was pale and rosy when they emerged from a boarded up entrance on the other side of town. The sheriff and a group of burly men were waiting by Warren's car, all armed. The sheriff leaned casually against the hood, cradling a shotgun in one arm. As Scott and his party emerged from the mine, mud-encrusted but upright and defiant, the men slid nervous gazes at each other. Scott raised one hand to the frame of his glasses, and smiled as Alex relaxed control of his own power enough to set the air ahead of them shimmering. The sheriff and his men shifted uncomfortably as the grim line approached. When a foamy wave of muddy water reared up and hovered before them, the men broke as one and ran for their cars. The squealing of tires followed the spray of gravel and mud down the road, then Alex slumped against Scott and groaned.
Watching everyone pile into Warren's car, flaking filth on the carpet and grinding mud into the upholstery, Scott didn't wince, not even at the child-sized smeary hand-prints that were soon painted all over the inside of the glass. They'd seen worse crimes today, and walked out intact.
"I think you might have a concussion," Scott helped his brother into the passenger seat.
Alex leaned back against the headrest and winced. "If I have to hurl, can I throw up in your hat?"
Scott laughed, and put the key in the ignition. "Sure. As long as you wear it all the way home." He started the car and turned tail on the sunrise, heading down the road ahead of the light.
st_aurafinaTitle: So Much Water, So Close to Home
Recipient:
stubbleglitterDisclaimer: Not mine! Never were!
Warnings/Rating: PG
Summary: The Summers boys head into the mountains to follow up reports of a mutant sighting. Set shortly after Scott is reunited with his brother.
Recipient's request: I adore Alex (bruvvers!) and Jean (onetruelove omg!!), slice-of-life stories, snappy dialogue, and references to food.
Notes: Written for the
summers_fling ficathon. Thank you to lilacsigil and likeadeuce for beta reading. Title from Paul Kelly's "Everything's Turning to White"Scott's hands were numb. Clasping tight to the branch that spanned the open mouth of the sinkhole, he reached out tentatively with one foot, feeling for the wall. He'd opened his eyes for less than a second; focused on finding his target through the fog, he hadn't seen the ground fall away from him. The branch, greasy with mold, sagged under the weight of his body, so he carefully stilled his swinging legs, tightening his shoulders and bringing his centre of mass closer to his hands. A bullet zipped through the fog, embedding with a pulpy noise into the mud to his left, and he fought the urge to open his eyes, concentrating on his breathing instead, keeping it regular, in time to the drone of frogs and crickets in the humid darkness. More shots, further away this time, then the ground shook in response – the familiar aftershocks of Alex's plasma blasts. Scott looped one forearm around the groaning branch as his legs dangled over open space, and prayed that his brother would keep his head down.
"Keep your damn head down!"
Standing on his seat, shoulders above the sun-roof, Alex laughed and deftly dodged Scott's arm as it batted around his knees. Sighing with exasperation and steering one-handed with his eyes squinted into the sun, Scott finally found purchase against Alex's jeans, and pulled him down into his seat with a bounce. The sleek SUV barely swerved on the winding mountain road.
"Jesus, Alex, decapitation is a great way to start a mission. Sit down! I don't want to have to bring your head back to Lorna in a bucket."
Alex propped his feet on the dashboard. "Lorna'd be fine, at least she'd be getting some head, and…" but stopped short at Scott's horrified look. "Ah, you better watch the road, dude." He grabbed the mostly-empty bag of corn chips, and shuffled lower in his seat, tipping his head back so he could pour the crumbled remains into his mouth.
Scott pressed his lips together, and forced his hands to remain on the wheel. This is what brothers are supposed to do, he reminded himself, we're supposed to be comfortable with each other, eat junk-food on road trips and joke about our girlfriends. That's what this mission was really about, a chance for him to know his brother outside of strategy meetings and battle training. Scott glanced sideways at the man he barely knew, yet had fought beside for some months now. This was his brother, grown up and a stranger, and it still elicited waves of elation and misery in him. Not for the first time, he resisted the urge to pull the car off the road so he could alternately pummel and hug this infuriating person. Instead, Scott adjusted his posture to mimic Alex's relaxed slouch, but pushed his baseball cap further back on his head so he could still see over the steering wheel - there was no sense in crashing Warren's car by trying to look cool. Beside him, Alex was fidgeting absently, playing with the map Scott had spent an hour working on last night – the route marked in red and readings from Cerebro in green. Scott reminded himself that this trip was precious – it was a rare chance to get to know his brother again, learn what sort of person Alex had grown up to be, without the rest of the team endlessly observing and making comment. He wasn't going to waste the opportunity by being petty about tiny details, so he restrained himself from tugging the map out of his brother's hands to stop him rolling and tearing at the edge of the paper. Instead, he reached over to the back seat for the manila folder of photos and newspaper clippings.
"So, do you think these photos are for real?"
"Maybe." Alex flipped through the blurry photos, lining up a few enlarged snaps of the amorphous shapes across the dash where they flapped lazily in the breeze from the sun-roof. "I don't know where the Professor gets these leads; I really hope it isn't Weekly World News."
The image of the Professor, decorously sipping tea while engrossed in a neatly folded paper that screamed "Mutant Frogman Lives" across the front page was so absurd that Scott laughed out loud.
Alex grinned. "I guess I don't need a mind reader to see what's so funny about that."
"I don't need a mind reader to see that you're here to cause trouble." The sheriff leaned against the charred door frame of the burned-out trailer. Behind him, backlit by the headlights of the patrol car, a deputy moved nervously from foot to foot, shining his flashlight at every rustle that came from the trees nearby. The trailer was the dwelling nearest to the chain of readings the Professor had plucked from the ether with Cerebro, and they found it at dusk by following a plume of smoke. The doors were torn from the hinges and trampled into the muddy ground by many feet. The plywood walls and floor were swollen with damp, so the mattress hadn't burned enough to disguise the dark stain in the middle, studded with bullet holes. There were no bodies, but worst of all was the plastic crib at the end of the bed, deformed and buckled with heat. Squatting beside the ashy remains of the mattress, Scott remained still, arms casually propped on his thighs, hoping that Alex would pick up on the cue to keep his body language calm and slow. They had met the local lawmen earlier, and not had the most enthusiastic of welcomes – in fact this was the most excitement Scott had seen anyone in town show all day, despite the fact that there had obviously been a brutal attack of some kind in the last twenty-four hours, and on a local family. He held the bullet casings loosely in the curl of his fingers to stop them from jingling together, while Alex took two slow and careful steps into the rectangle of light that cut though the smoky air from the open door.
"It's like we told you in the general store, sir," Alex's voice was calm, and the friendly, round vowel sounds he retained from his West Coast upbringing helped convey the impression of an honest, well-intentioned student. "We're environmental science students – you can call our professor, he'll confirm everything. We probably shouldn't be in here, but Scott, he studies soil pollution in domestic fires, he was really keen on getting some soil samples. I'm really sorry if we've done the wrong thing, if this is a crime scene or something. We didn't see any tape or signs."
Scott took another shallow breath and watched expressions flit across the sheriff's face like clouds. That's right, we're a couple of harmless, bumbling students. We don't know anything about your dirty little lynch mob, we can't see that you're covering up something ugly here.
There was one breathless moment, and Scott let his shoulders sag a little; they were going to walk out of this one. Then the deputy, a skinny man with brown hair that the misty rain had plastered against his forehead, stepped into the doorway and whispered in the sheriff's ear, and the sheriff's face set into a wary sneer.
"Son," he gestured with one meaty hand towards Scott, "Take off your glasses." Scott sighed, and got to his feet slowly, his hands held far away from his body.
"You all stand still!" The deputy had drawn his weapon, covering first Alex, then Scott with sharp, jerky movements that would be lucky to hit either of them. Scott schooled his expression to mimic Alex's – bland, incurious, over-fed and harmless. Where had Alex learned to do that – to manipulate people, make them see what he wanted them so see?
Alex took another step forward, raising his hands in a placating gesture that did little to allay the deputy's unease, and Scott slowly tensed himself, ready to launch forward at the nervous, skinny man, as Alex kept talking in that soothing voice. "My friend has sensitive eyes – the glasses are medical, he wears them to protect his eyes from bright light."
The sheriff scowled. "Sunset's long past – why's he got to wear them in the dark?" He didn't tell the deputy to put down his weapon, and his right hand was drifting towards his own holstered sidearm.
"It's okay, Alex." Scott stood up, and brushed one hand clean on his knee. "I'll take them off." Standing slightly behind Alex, Scott watched as his brother's shoulders tensed.
"You don't have to do that, Scott. The sheriff understands…"
"Don't you go putting words in my mouth, son." The sheriff's voice was sharp, but his hand stilled over the button on his holster.
Scott pulled the glasses over his nose, and screwed his eyes up as though squinting into the light. The room seemed to exhale in release, and he breathed out with it. Then the floorboards creaked, the frogs stilled, and Alex's body shoved hard against him as two shots zipped through the space where Scott had been standing. His glasses scudded in the opposite direction. His ears were ringing but he could still hear the deputy screaming.
"Freaks! They're freaks! They're here sniffing around after their freak friends!"
Alex hauled Scott to his feet, and they rocketed into the bulk of the sheriff's body, scrambled down the steps and out into the darkness. With arms linked, they ran for the nearest cover; a scrubby forest of bent and twisted trees. The rain had almost stopped; a misty veil of water hung in the air, clinging to Scott's eyelashes as he kept an even pace at Alex's side.
While Alex caught his breath, one hand on the twisted trunk of a tree, Scott prowled around the area, stepping carefully through the tangled undergrowth, listening for the sheriff and his men.
"How do you do that – walk around blind?" Alex's breathing was still a little ragged. Scott made a mental note to work on building endurance in training when they got back.
"Practice. I didn't always have the glasses. Plus they're a target in a fight – people think I'm going to be vulnerable with my eyes closed." He picked his way back to where Alex stood, and leaned against the trunk with him. "I can't hear them – but they know the terrain better."
"They killed someone back there." Alex's voice was quiet, and as angry as Scott had ever heard it. "And they were so smug. Like they can do that, and get away with it, because there's nobody to stop them, because they think nobody cares."
"There's us," said Scott. "The X-Men don't just fight the villains in capes."
Alex stood back from the tree; Scott could hear him swinging his arms around like a batter stepping up. He jumped when Alex's hand touched his face – his fingers were cold against Scott's eyelids. "Keep them closed – I'll track back around, see if they've gone, maybe find your glasses."
Scott caught Alex's shirt, and pulled his brother into a hug, swift and fierce. "Be careful. Don't get shot." He was glad that he didn't have his glasses, so he didn't have to wonder about the expression on Alex's face at the uncharacteristic sentiment. It was nice just to let it be.
"You couldn't just let it be, could you?" The deputy's voice was thin and nasal, and his breathing rapid. Underweight and well-armed – just the kind of over-compensating nobody that likes to rant from a position of power. Scott turned slowly, his limbs stiff after waiting in the cold and the damp for Alex to return. He kept his eyes closed, following the direction of the man's voice, hands raised as if in surrender. Right handed, he remembered, picturing the man waving his gun around in the burned-out trailer, roll left and forward.
"You muties are all the same," the voice rose in pitch until it competed with the shrieking frogs, "You're all freaks, you and that freak trailer-whore, you're animals, you just don't know who you're dealing with…"
I'm dealing with an easy target, thought Scott, and blinked once. He aimed just short of where he calculated the deputy was standing, hoping to knock him off-balance long enough that he would be able to get hold of the gun. The after-image of the deputy's splayed form glowed red on black against his eyelids as he dived for the man's gun hand. Expecting to hit muddy ground, he was surprised to be falling into empty space. His hands, scrabbling frantically through the air, caught hold of a branch, which slid for a few sickening seconds, then lodged and held. The deputy's panicked footsteps faded as the man fled through the fog. In the surprised silence that followed, Scott's breath roared loud in his own ears.
There was a strange tranquillity to the moment. Hanging suspended above a sinkhole of unknown depth, Scott reviewed the events of the day in his mind. Something didn't fit. They took the body away, why didn't they take the trailer? The sheriff could have had that trailer towed and hidden forever in a cave or mine-shaft. He and the deputy had shown up so suddenly, it was as though they were waiting for someone. Rabbit hunting, he thought, they were waiting for a kid. Or kids. He shifted his grip on the branch – how far out from the wall was he?
The forest was coming alive again – angry shouts and snapping branches mingled with the chorus of frogs and crickets. He heard a shot, and then another, and Alex's answering retort shook the earth. Scott's fingers, cold and numb, were slipping, the branch was sliding away from the mouth of the sinkhole. He fanned his legs out into the void, already planning his descent, and the best position in which to hit the ground. He wasn't afraid to fall.
He wasn't afraid to fall. His mom buckled the parachute on, and pressed the ripcord into his palm, folding her fingers around Scott's, squeezing his hand closed. Scott had never seen his mother's eyes look so beautiful; bright and focused, pupils sharp. Alex, still warm from sleeping, wriggled and whimpered as his mother, swift and co-ordinated, buckled the two boys together. It was all over before Scott had time to process it – he held his brother, he held the ripcord, he was falling away from the plane. Alex's hand was warm against his forearm.
Alex's hand was warm against Scott's forearm, and his grip was sure. The weight of Scott's body pulled him flat to the ground at the edge of the sinkhole. Scott snaked his other arm up to his brother's shoulder, and scrabbled for footing against the wall. They balanced there together on the edge of the precipice, and Alex pushed a pair of glasses back onto Scott's face, awkwardly hooking the arms over his ears, fingers fumbling in the cold. They flopped together onto the marshy ground beside the crevasse and lay on their backs.
"The sheriff's gone back to town for reinforcements. He'll be a while lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks." Alex made an evocative jabbing movement with his hands. "We should be able to slip away and get in touch with the Professor."
Scott shook his head. "No, there's a kid here. The sheriff was waiting for the kid to come home, so he could finish the job. I think that kid's watching us now, trying to figure out what to do next."
Alex sat up with a squelch and looked around wildly. "Watching us? Where?"
Scott propped up on his elbows. "Somewhere out there. They just have to figure out whether they think we can be trusted."
There was a slipping, sucking noise from far below, then a roar. A fountain of muddy water spouted upwards from the sinkhole, snatching at their bodies, pulling them down. In the few seconds that it took to fall to the bottom, the fog rolled back from the stars, and in the eyes of the universe, Scott felt very small.
Scott felt very big. He sat in the chair next to his mother's bed, and kicked his legs expectantly, holding his arms in the position demonstrated by his dad, like he was carrying folded towels on laundry day. He knew the baby was small; he couldn't see anything in the bundle of blankets tucked into the fold of his dad's arm. He didn't know that it would be so heavy, the warm, damp mass pushing him backwards in the chair. He gave an oomph, and hoisted himself forward with some help from his dad, so he could peer into the yellow flannelette blanket. His brother looked kind of gross. He looked back at his mom, leaning gingerly down from her hospital bed, and she smiled encouragingly.
"You're Alex's big brother now, Scott. You can teach him so many things."
Scott chewed his lip; he didn't really know how to be a big brother, but he could talk to his dad about that later. He dipped his head towards the bunched up little face, and found that his brother was watching him with milky blue eyes.
"Hi, I'm Scott," he said, politely. Then, pleased with the reaction this exchange had evinced from his mother, he planted a kiss on the baby's head. Damp curls were beginning to stand up from Alex's head, and Scott sputtered as they tickled his mouth.
Scott sputtered; his mouth was full of Alex's hair, damp and gritty. The two of them were folded semi-upright against a muddy wall of wooden planks in a tangle of limbs and debris. The frog song was all around them, insistent and shrill. Grimy water swirled in anxious eddies around their legs, lapping at their shoes, and Scott understood why the trailer had burned so poorly.
"You tried to put the fire out." He didn't know who he was talking to, exactly, but life around telepaths had honed his sensitivity to being wordlessly watched. The chirping grew more urgent, staccato chirrups ending with clicks. Scott squinted into the darkness, where patches of phosphorescent lichen clung to the rotting wood. Was there a figure crouching there, as mottled with glowing green speckles as the wall behind it?
"I was too late. They still killed her." The voice came out of the humid darkness, a too-sibilant throaty burr punctuated by a familiar pubescent squeak at the end of the sentence. A silhouette peeled away from the facing wall, a rangy, long-limbed figure, covered with splotches of glowing green. At his feet, a small bundle of muddy clothes and limbs uncurled from his ankle and tipping its head back at an improbable angle, issued a melodic series of warbles. "She says you shot the deputy, with your eyes."
Beside him, Alex snickered. "No, 'swrong. Song goes, I shot th'sheriff, I din' shoot the deputy." He moaned, and pressed his knees up to his head. Scott tilted his brother's head back to see a spreading bruise painting a livid stripe over one closed eye.
The boy obviously saw it too – he cringed, and scooped the toddler into his arms. "Sorry. I did that. I'm not very good at this stuff yet."
Scott pulled himself upright, watching as the water at his feet hissed nervously then sank into the sandy soil. "You'll get better with practice. You've done a fine job so far." He peered at the two of them: the boy was a teenager, no more than fifteen, and the girl a child of perhaps three, with widely spaced, bulbous eyes that gleamed merrily at him in the eerie half-light of the tunnel. She opened her mouth impossibly wide and warbled a lyrical stream of sound, gesturing enthusiastically with her hands. The words were indistinct, but Scott thought he understood: it's good to be alive. It's good to be with family. He smiled back, and the girl put both her hands in her mouth with delight.
The boy's shoulders relaxed a little. "Most people think she's a freak."
Scott shrugged. "This is a pretty small town, I wouldn't count their opinions as those of most people. I have friends who have dedicated their lives to learn more about people like us. Myself, I'm glad that you're both alive."
The toddler climbed nimbly up the length of her brother's body, and wrapped her arms around his neck. The boy peeled the long-fingered hands off his skin with a sticky noise and held her out for Scott to take.
"She trusts you. Will you take her? I have to go finish things with the sheriff." The boy's voice cracked a little as he spoke. Muddy water was seeping down from the roof of the tunnel and rising up through the sandy floor.
Instead of taking the child, Scott looped Alex's arm over his shoulder, and dragged him to his feet. "Well, I can't stop you from doing what you've got to do." He took a few tentative steps, and Alex, his eyes half-closed, stumbled along obediently. "I mean, I imagine revenge is pretty high on your priorities, but would your mom want that? It'll probably get you killed, unless you're bullet-proof?" He raised an eyebrow at the boy, who shook his head, and scuffed at the mud. "Or maybe she'd want you to get your sister somewhere safe."
"She knew! She knew they were coming for us, when they got out of the cars. She made me go. I could have stopped them. She made me take the baby and run, while she kept them busy." The boy flushed, the colour a lurid purple on his pale skin. "Why'd she do that?"
"Moms have a kind of super-power that way. They'll do anything to keep their kids safe." Scott shifted his weight – Alex was getting heavy on his shoulder. "She gave you your life; you have to respect that, treat it as something special. Don't throw it away on those animals. Look after your sister, make sure she understands what her mother did."
The boy scowled, but dragged the little girl down from his shoulders. "It's not fair. She'll never remember her mom."
Alex pushed the hair out of his eyes, and peered at the boy blearily. "Don't bet on that. She'll remember more than you'd expect." Then he leaned forward, and threw up noisily on the muddy ground. The little girl cooed in amazement, and waved her arms.
It was a long hike through the mineshaft, and the light was pale and rosy when they emerged from a boarded up entrance on the other side of town. The sheriff and a group of burly men were waiting by Warren's car, all armed. The sheriff leaned casually against the hood, cradling a shotgun in one arm. As Scott and his party emerged from the mine, mud-encrusted but upright and defiant, the men slid nervous gazes at each other. Scott raised one hand to the frame of his glasses, and smiled as Alex relaxed control of his own power enough to set the air ahead of them shimmering. The sheriff and his men shifted uncomfortably as the grim line approached. When a foamy wave of muddy water reared up and hovered before them, the men broke as one and ran for their cars. The squealing of tires followed the spray of gravel and mud down the road, then Alex slumped against Scott and groaned.
Watching everyone pile into Warren's car, flaking filth on the carpet and grinding mud into the upholstery, Scott didn't wince, not even at the child-sized smeary hand-prints that were soon painted all over the inside of the glass. They'd seen worse crimes today, and walked out intact.
"I think you might have a concussion," Scott helped his brother into the passenger seat.
Alex leaned back against the headrest and winced. "If I have to hurl, can I throw up in your hat?"
Scott laughed, and put the key in the ignition. "Sure. As long as you wear it all the way home." He started the car and turned tail on the sunrise, heading down the road ahead of the light.