..Destroyed.. Chapter 9-Followed

X-Men Fanfic
Destroyed
Last night I lost the world, and gained the universe.
         -C. Joy Bell C.
Chapter 9: Followed



I didn't know where I ended up, but I was leaning on a railing somewhere, the locket clenched in my fist. I was glaring down at the image, positively horrified. More than that, however, my tears were falling, making the stone rail appear darker than it ought to. I hunched over more, letting the surprisingly cool summer breeze wash over me, causing my spine to shiver. At the same time, I gave in to the urge to cry and let the sobs wash over me. They racked my body, shaking my very bones.

"Hue?"

I shook my head, making no effort to stop my tears but holding my breath to stop the sobs. I couldn't talk, anyway, so what did it matter? I shuddered again.

"Hue, please, talk to me. Are you alright?"

"N…nnhh…" I tried to say. I failed, of course. I didn't even want to tell him what was bothering me.

"What's wrong?"

I held the locket to my right, closest to him. The open oval swung in the breeze, the image of smiling faces staring out at the cruel, cold, harsh world. I didn't watch him as he took in something that was both exactly the same as what I saw, and at the same time completely something else. He examined it for at least a minute, before leaning on the railing alongside me.

"Who are they? Other than you, of course."

"You can tell it's me?" I asked, voice bitter. I was surprised that I could speak through the sobs that were still tearing at my lungs, taken aback by the fact that Warren could recognise me in a picture, and still torn apart by the implications of the picture. I rested my hand back on the ledge, staring pointedly away from the image I had known by heart with just a glance.

My father, Cooper Smith, was thin and lanky and not much to look at. Of course he had glasses – what respectable business man didn't? – or rather, spectacles, covering his soft brown eyes. They were kind and soft, but I hated them. They were the eyes of the man who had abandoned his two children, one four years old and relying on the aid of a fifteen year old, because a mother with 'early stage' cancer spent all of her free time drinking was not fit to care for them. His arms were around a much shorter woman, her tired eyes the only sign that they belonged to a woman with a much different idea of what was necessary. In that image, not even the painted kindness could disguise the fact that Antonia Elentohr was the cruellest woman I had ever known and that she had suffered nothing compared to what she had put us through. I hadn't seen my sister Jess for seven years, but I knew that the smiling depiction of her brown eyes, cast down from Cooper, the soft waves of her dark brown hair – it was all fake. Not even my own hair, the exact colour and length that it was in reality, looked genuine in that portrait, and Xavier had been staring at my face.

"That's Antonia," I mumbled, jabbing a finger to the right of the locket. "Beneath her is Jess. The male is Cooper."

"What do they mean to you?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? But, if that's the case, why did the Professor put them in the locket?"

"I guess…you don't understand it. You wouldn't." I rubbed my eye, exasperated with the constant waterworks. "Your father doesn't know what you are, right? And your mother is gone, so she doesn't need to know. You've never had to face that.

"Well, when I was four, Cooper took off. I didn't mind so much, really. He was a business man, nothing but a source of cash for Antonia. He got sick of being used, that's why he left. That's something I never blamed him for. It was one of those things that would have been inevitable, no matter what happened. It was more that Antonia drank, that was the main issue. She did whatever she could do to get her hands on a nice, old fashioned can of beer. Because of that, Jess took care of me. And she was only fifteen at the time, not much of a caregiver, whatever Antonia and Cooper might do, whatever trouble I might get into. Of course I was a nerd. I would sneak out of the house, down to the library, to read. When Jess got a job later that year, it got even easier to get out. I was like Matilda from that Roald Dahl book, a little kid sitting in the corner of a room with a huge book on my lap. When I was eight, she bolted, too. Told me she 'couldn't take life no more'. She never was very good at talking properly… anyway, she cut loose, left me with Antonia.

"That led to more drinking, bloodshed – mine, ninety-nine per cent of the time – and me getting beaten way too regularly for the teachers to ignore. That went on for four years. I hit puberty early compared to most, age twelve, and with that came my power. I wasn't too impressed at first, but mother was thrilled. Antonia saw it as her little chance to get even with the world – or at least to get her chemo treatment. So she used me to blackmail one of the local moneybags – not Cooper, he was in Japan or something – and ended up getting the treatment she wanted, even managed to get her hands on one of those really nice doctors, the no-questions-asked kind. Meanwhile, we lost the house. Well. She did. I think she'd taken up gambling, something like that. It was more suffering for me, not so much her, who just took all her anger out on me anyway, never mind how useful I might be." He uttered a noise of complaint at that, which I ignored. Now that I had started, it was hard to stop, even though the description was actually very brief, at least from my mind. "It happened every two months for two years. Towards the end, the no-questions-asked doctor was replaced, and they began asking questions. She stopped getting chemo, but her resolution faltered less than a month later. She was balding anyway, so why not? That's how we ended up in D.C., that's how we ended up at the White House – that's how your lot found me. And that's how I got here."

There was a couple of minutes of silence between my words and his response. "She hung you out to dry. She forced you to do something that was not just illegal, but was also something you didn't want you to do. And then she abandoned you and hung you out to dry."

"I guess," I shrugged.

"Listen," Warren said, pulling on the locket. I loosened my grip and it came free, the charm open in the centre of his palm. "If you don't want to remember it, you don't have to. You can just…do…this," and, with his last word, he pulled the picture out of it's place, careful not to hit any of the buttons.

"What'll I put in its' place?" I asked, almost childishly, watching his hands as though it was a magic trick and I was enchanted.

"Whatever you want," he smiled at me, loosening his grip on the picture. Watching it drift away on the breeze, I finally felt free. I finally felt that, maybe, I could make a life out of what might actually turn out to be a decent hand.