Morning Rituals
Who: Chase and Clarice
What: Buying breakfast. Again.
Where: Sweet Lady Jane
When: January 8th, 2012, mid morning
Why: Having a pet raptor with a donut addiction means you spend a lot of time in bakeries
Rating: Chase's mouth, so PG-13 at least
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What: Buying breakfast. Again.
Where: Sweet Lady Jane
When: January 8th, 2012, mid morning
Why: Having a pet raptor with a donut addiction means you spend a lot of time in bakeries
Rating: Chase's mouth, so PG-13 at least
( Read more... )
"Good morning," she answered with a small smile, as she always did, moving to start collecting his order. "Are you sure you wouldn't, um, like to try something different? I don't know if you saw, we have these cranberry walnut muffins this morning - they're new." She lifted the lid off the sample plate and pushed it toward him a bit, and went back to filling his order, not wanting him to feel pressured.
But she paused again a moment later when he asked about her skin. Not because his curiosity was surprising; what was surprising was that he would know anyone with even a passing resemblance to her. That made two now, with Damien, and she wondered suddenly whether Chase, also, was from a similar world.
"Mm." The reply came after a moment, and she got her hands moving again. "It is - I was born this way. Do you really know someone else with..?" She gave a little wave of her hand, placing the box with his donuts on the counter. "Is she... a mutant? A, um, metahuman?" Or a demon? An alien? She'd learned plenty of words for beings who looked like her. The ones who were considered inhuman were the ones who seemed to have races of their own, others who shared their peculiar appearance, like Mr. Lorne. The ones who were human were like her... unique. Which category did Chase's friend fall into?
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"Mutant, no, alien yeah. Majesdanian. I thought you might be half because Karolina sorta...glows, in her natural form. Wait..." And Chase looked up, suddenly grinning broadly. "you know what metahumans are? Where are you from? What year?"
It would be very, very hard not to hug Clarice if the Avengers had anything to do with her answer.
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And besides dinosaurs, aliens. And metahumans. Chase's world was sounding even more, er, diverse than Clarice's. And his bright grin was frankly alarming. She shrank back a bit. "Um, 1994?" It sounded like a question. "Miami? I-- they didn't really talk about metahumans there. We were called mutants. I think - it's about the same thing, though." 'Metahumans' was a phrase she'd picked up from Damien. "There are metas where you come from?"
And aliens and dinosaurs. Mustn't forget those.
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'Oh you've got to be fucking me.'
"Mutants, yeah!" He exclaimed, not caring if he wasn't exactly using his inside voice. "The x-gene right?" If she knew that Chase would be certain--he wasn't alone!
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The X-gene. He- he-
No one, whatever experience they may have with people with appearances similar to hers, no one had ever yet recognized that term. Clarice's eyes had widened until they threatened to swallow her face, her hands fisting in the fabric of her little ruffly apron.
"The- the X-gene," she agreed finally, her voice shocked into near-inaudibility. "Chase, do you - do you come from the world with... the X-Men?" He had to, didn't he?
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"YES!" A beat later he hoped back onto his feat and was climbing over the round glass display to get behind the counter. "And the Avengers. And they're all jerks, but you Clarice, you are amazing!" He hugged her, at a complete and total loss of what to do with the pure elation he was feeling.
It was like Gert breathing air back into him after he'd nearly drowned, realising that even here, he wasn't totally alone. Chase never knew how much he needed to understand that until he did; that there was some thread tying him back to where he belonged, with Molly, Klara, Nico, Karolina, Vic and Xavin.
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The X-Men. The Avengers. Probably the Fantastic Four too. Mutants.
"...you're from my world." She whispered it into his shoulder, but then her voice finally gained a little strength back. "You're from my-- the same world. The same one." Her heart was pounding. Long ago she'd given up on ever finding anyone from her own world. She'd been thrilled just to meet those few, like Mr. Zane and Damien, whose experiences were similar.
But now, here was Chase, and he brought with him a tiny connection that had been severed for her four years ago. A link to the world where Paige and Monet and Angelo lived, with Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Sabretooth... the world of her parents, and her grandmother. With her arms still pinned to her chest by Chase's embrace, Clarice felt tears pricking her eyes.
"What year?" she asked - begged, almost. "Chase, what year?"
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Clarice was a stranger, but that hardly mattered at all. Here, in the town of the isolated and displaced--as awesome as meeting Uther and the twins was--whether he knew Clarice personally from his own--their own--world was neither here nor there.
"You're from the Right Coast though?" He held her at arm's length a moment, looking playfully disappointed. "Ah, the fuck, I'll forgive ya this this time. But uh, when's your lunch break because you got a bit a history to catch up on."
Clarice didn't know about the Mutant Registration Act, the Civil War, of that insane Skrull invasion.
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Clarice still felt too stunned to move, forcing Chase to steer her out from behind the counter with a little help from her coworker. What sort of history did he mean? Early 2000's; that meant Chase had been around ten when Clarice had died. Had the Phalanx continued their conquest after all? If they had, they couldn't have found a way to assimilate everyone in the world, or Chase wouldn't be here. And he didn't seem like a person who'd come from a life of being trapped and experimented upon.
If he was a normal human from her world, it was remarkable that he was willing to touch her at all, or pleased to see her. On the other hand, he befriended aliens - and has a dinosaur, she reminded herself, don't forget about that - so he wasn't exactly normal. He called the nation's most famous superhero teams 'jerks' but didn't seem to feel any revulsion toward her.
By the time they reached the door, she was walking on her own. And one question had narrowed out the others in urgency. She gripped Chase's sleeve. "What history? It isn't... the Phalanx?"
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It still didn't feel like Chase was walking quite on the ground himself; he was still taken by the suddenness of it all, how he'd been buying his donuts for a week and hadn't bothered to ask until now. Most mornings he was too tired for more than the usual pleasantries.
He looked down when he felt Clarice grip his sleeve because there was a very real anxiety to the question. But the Phalanx had been a boogeyman of his childhood, one of the many monsters his mother had delightedly informed him was very real and would come to assimilate him if he did go to bed on time.
"Nah, that thing's ancient history." He pushed the door open for them, leading Clarice to where the Stein Bus idled--rather illegally--just in front of the bakery awning. "Recent history, like the Mutant Registration Act." In a way, Chase felt bad, because Clarice had been away so long, and here he was about to tell her that her home had basically gone to hell in a hand basket. "And yeah, it's as bad as it sounds." He motioned to the bus, "hop in, I'll take you meet Old Lace. This is gonna take a while to explain."
Chase took a deep breath, moving to slide into the driver's seat.
"First thing you should know is that to most people, to the 'good guys' in our world, me and my friends are just a bunch of stupid delinquent kids. So feel free to tell me I'm talkin' outta my ass. Especially if you think people like Iron Man and Captain America are cool..." He shifted a little more angrily than he meant, but managed to take a breath before they were properly on the road again.
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Clarice let her breath out. She'd never given much thought to the progress of the Phalanx after her death: she hadn't dared. But Chase's mention of history to catch up on had put an icy fist around her heart and flooded her head with terrible thoughts. When he called them 'ancient history', the relief came just as suddenly.
Ancient history. How strange. But that meant they'd left no lasting scars on the world, and Clarice closed her eyes for a moment in relief as she waited for Chase to reach the driver's seat.
"So they finally passed that. The Registration Act." That had been the source of raging debate for as long as she could remember, always seeming within a hair's breadth of succeeding. Many politicians had championed it. Some had based their whole Congressional or Senatorial runs around it. Clarice had been a child then; she'd never grasped the specifics of it. All that had mattered to her then was that no one needed a registry to know she was a mutant.
She was startled by the obvious anger in his voice as he spoke the names of familiar heroes. But as long as he didn't speak of the X-Men in that way, she could let it pass, for now. She wanted desperately to ask him about Paige, Monet and the others, but she set that aside for now too.
"Are you and your friends mutants?"
He had a dinosaur from the 87th century. That seemed to go a bit beyond mutant to her.
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"My folks were mad scientists. Molly's were both mutants, psychics. They had Molly tested for the x-gene when she was little, but the test was wrong. She developed super strength last year. There were a bunch more of us...Nico, her parents were dark wizards, Karolina's 'rents were both aliens, exiled from their home planet. Gert, my girlfriend's parents were time traveling psychos. And Alex...Alex was just an ass. When we found out what our folk really were the backstabbing jerk played us all. Almost got us all killed." The edge of anger returned to Chase's voice but faded a breath later. Alex was ashes in hell, he didn't matter anymore.
"We were the only ones who knew about our parents. The Avengers wouldn't help because no one believed there was any major super villain activity on the West Coast. We didn't bother with the X-Men. Figured if the great and powerful Avengers couldn't be bothered with us, we'd have to take care of the 'rents ourselves. And when we did, all good old Cap could think to do was throw us all into the foster system, lock Molly up in some super-orphanage for mutant kids. We broke out, left, been living on our own ever since. Then...then the Registration Act passed."
The Stein Bus bumped and rolled into the park, veering off of the main path onto a path he was slowly clearing for himself that lead straight to the castle.
"We were doing a grocery run one day when some whackjob starts screaming about facism and new world order or some shit. We'd dealt with him before, and fuck it, when it comes to a 'team' we're all the West Coast's got. So we take care of the jerk. Next thing we know we got a government attack jet on us, firing Teflon coated rockets. They don't give a fuck what side you're on, if your a mutant, you're a target."
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"My parents were... normal. Human." It seemed lame after the list of Chase's friends, but she couldn't help but feel incredibly lucky when she thought about it. If she had been forced to stop her parents... "How did you all find each other? How did you even know?" She and the other obvious mutants at her school had clung together for safety, of course, at least until The Incident. But Chase was no obvious mutant, or even a mutant at all. And would so many metas and nonhumans really send their children to an ordinary school?
Clarice didn't know anything about the Avengers or Captain America besides their names - and that they were superheroes, of course. She couldn't refute what Chase was saying, though it bothered her. She couldn't help contrasting it with the X-Men. They had been keeping track of her and the other young mutants, even though they had never known. "I think... the X-Men might have helped. They came to help us." Not that that did much for Chase and his friends now.
The last part of his story worried her. There had to be more to it. He made it sound as if the man had been doing nothing but yelling, and that they'd used their powers on him. Not that that meant they deserved to have rockets fired at them. Though if it had looked to the government like they had a gang of super-beings (and a dinosaur?) attacking one lone human... She shook her head. "They shot at you?? That's horrible!" They were rolling into the park now, and Clarice wondered where he was taking her. The castle was this way, wasn't it? She'd never had much to do with the residents there, except in passing. Merlin more than the others. "What's the Registration Act? I mean - what actually got passed? What does it do?"
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He wasn't likely to forget the way her body fell, a hapless victim of gravity, arms twisting strangely, and her mouth still open in a terrified scream.
" The Registration Act is pretty straightforward tough. If you're a mutant, or have any notable power at all you register as a 'living weapon of mass destruction' so Uncle Sam can keep an eye on you. This includes 'users of exotic technology' where I fall in, and extraterrestrials, like Karolina and her fiancee Xavin, who was a literal illegal alien...a Skrull...so that woulda been a double whammy for our little family." Chase downshifted frustratedly again. "It also made things like firing Teflon-coated heat seeking missiles at an seventeen year old kid like our friend Victor perfectly legal because hey, he's a cyborg and they don't feel anything." He growled, one hand wringing the steering wheel until his knuckles were white.
"They have this thing called a sympathy rating when they attack you. It's calculated based on age, power type and what you are. We had to escape, but the cloaking device on the Frog was on the fritz. Vic could patch in from the exterior control panel. They fired on us and...if it weren't for the Young Avengers...we would have lost him."
He still remembered that...sound Vic made when the missiles hit--a high pitched mechanical scream that reminded Chase for the first time in a really long time that Vic wasn't human, but a clever sort of quasi-Terminator. Looking at what was left he'd never been so afraid in his life, because he wasn't his father, he wasn't sure if he could fix it.
Chase scrubbed at his eyes for a split second with the back of his arm, took a deep breath and settled again.
"And all the X-Men care about is protecting themselves. We thought...bringing Molly to the school would be a good idea; it'd be safer for her there, but she didn't want to stay and we couldn't just...leave her there. She trusted us."
And the X-Men had let them go. As much as as he didn't trust the Super Nannys, they had let them go.
"There's home." Chase said suddenly as the castle came into view. He pulled the van right next to a tall brick stable, squeaking it into park. "Uther was nice enough to let Lace and I bum a room when we first got here."
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If he could ever bring himself to trust superpowered adults. After hearing his story, she wondered. Anyadults, she corrected herself, wincing at the description of what had happened to his friend Victor. Even if the cyborg had survived, it had obviously hit Chase very hard.
"Ah." It was all she could think of to say as he parked the car. Well, not quite all. "Chase..." She reached over, hesitated, then finished the gesture, laying a hand on his arm.
"...I'm sorry."
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"It's alright. They're probably doing fine without me, as long as Nico and Vic are around. I feel like a jerk telling ya all this, really, you probably got a hell of a lot better memories of home than I do." He smiled again, all hints of his previous frustration vanishing. "Come on, girlie, lemme give you the grand tour." Chase winked and slipped out of the driver's seat, taking a long look around the grounds as if waiting for something.
"Always gotta be careful, even with a psychic connection to her, when it's Bakery Day Old Lace still finds a way to sneak up on me and get the first--
Something' large and reptilian, about the size of a yearling horse careened out from hiding just around the southern part of the courtyard, wicked claws extended, barbed mouth wide open, heading straight for Chase. It moved so fast Chase was pinned on the ground before either of them could really react.
"--bites... Okay, okay here!" The blond burst into a laugh as a wide maul ripped at the paper bag and freshly baked doughnut bits flew everywhere. It took Chase a minute to get back up and dust dirt, paper and crumbs off his jacket. "Pig-o-saur," He grumbled lovingly.
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