New York City, Monday Evening Fandom Time

[not_a_parakeet]

To say the protests had dispersed would have been something of a misnomer. The protests had been dispersed, through force, courtesy of the giant machines that had been sent to do just that. The fires had been put out, as well. And most of the bodies had been hauled from the wreckage. Leaving visible mutant corpses just laying around would have been tacky, after all.

It was dark. Warren had figured that much out, had at least managed to scrape together a vague awareness of that fact, early on in his struggle back to consciousness. It was dark, and everything hurt. There was a pressure on his chest, and pinning down one of his wings. The other wing was...

He wasn't going to think about that. The pieces that were just flat-out gone would grow back. The rest of the pieces of him that seemed to be missing? Those would, too. His healing factor didn't work as quickly as some that he'd seen, but the fact that he was breathing now (again) was testimony to the fact that it did, in fact, work. And it had served him well enough over the years, at the Battle of Alcatraz, in Rapture, in Panem. Of course it would pull him back together now.

He wasn't going to think about just what shape he had to have been in as he pushed some of the rubble off of himself and took in his apparent state of undress, either. Most of his clothes were gone. His phone was gone. His everything was just a little muddled, right then. And home was... that way?

That way. It was going to be a hell of a trip to make by foot, but his father had an office nearby, and even if he had no legal say in the business end, he kind of hoped that somebody would actually be there to let him in. Maybe give him a band-aid and a pair of pants.

Everything hurt.



Warren Worthington, Jr.
Warren Jr always watched the news. Always. The news was the lifeblood of commerce, after all. He was probably single-handedly keeping several floundering newspapers afloat, too. Kids these days might get all of their information from Facebook and websites, but he'd been raised that a folded newspaper was just as much a mark of a serious businessman as a crisp suit and shined shoes.

Today, however, he'd been watching the news with a fervor that hadn't been matched even in the days of obsessively watching his stock plummet in the wake of the cure fiasco. His son was out there, joining the protest. The cameras had leapt at the chance to film the Worthington scion (if no longer Worthington heir) flying overhead and then joining the march towards the park.

Junior had no reason to be worried, of course. This was a peaceful protest in America. There were cameras and journalists everywhere, covering the story with whatever spin their news programs were known for. In front of so many eyes, broadcast over so many televisions across the country, nothing bad could happen, right? And so he shuffled papers back and forth across his desk, just so he could tell himself he was 'working' while he watched the news with a kernel of dread low in his belly.

He clung to that hope until the parade hit Zuccotti Park and the camera feeds died. Some reporters, further back, were complaining that their helicopter pilots had been warned away from the airspace by the FAA. Some people reported that there was some kind of mutant terrorist threat in the park. Others said that the feeds had been shorted out by some new mutant power. Others said that the feeds had been shut down by an EMP pulse from the center of the park. Still others were babbling about giant robots coming down from the sky.

In short, it was chaos, even from as far away as the few working cameras.

This branch of Worthington Labs was several streets away from the park, on the other side from where the protesters' route. The vicinity to the park might have been a contributing factor to Junior's decision to work there, today, rather than in his own office downtown. Frustratingly, it was too far to see anything other than the tops of trees once the feeds shorted out, but it was close enough to hear the explosion when it came.

And close enough to hear the screams that followed.



Warren Worthington, Jr.
It took several hours for Junior to fight his way through the throngs around the park. The first hour of that had been stuck in traffic, his town car unable to move more than a few blocks. Eventually, his chauffeur had been waved down a side street and told to turn around--the police were trying to clear the roads for the National Guard.

Not for ambulances. Not for fire trucks. Not for emergency personnel. But for the National Guard. And when they drove by in their camouflaged Humvees, all Junior could see was their layers of body armor and assault rifles.

By that point, he'd used his tablet to find an unofficial feed, shot by someone inside the park. Someone with purple arms was videotaping the...the massacre and uploading it directly to the internet. Junior was watching when one of the machines turned directly towards the phone camera. Was watching when it opened fire. Was watching when blood gouted and the phone dropped to the ground, still filming the empty sky.

Was watching when a pair of red-streaked wings filled that sky. Was watching when they, too, were shot down.

He fought his way through the crowds on foot towards the perimeter of the park, only to be stopped by a police cordon, manned by officers in riot gear.

"Sir, you can't go in there," one of the officers told him. "It's not safe."

"But my son is in there!" he screamed. "My son!"

"Is your son human?" the officer asked.

"What?" Junior looked at the man, confused. What did--? "No, no he has wings. He--"

"Then I'm sorry for your loss," the officer said, and turned his attention to a preteen girl trying to slip past the barricade.



Warren Worthington III
Hours later, the crowds had dispersed. Warren picked his way through what was left of the park, vaguely thankful that his eyesight wasn't keen enough in the dark to give him a particularly clear look at whatever he was stepping in. At least for a few steps, he could be relatively positive that some of those things were himself. He could handle that.

But only for a few steps.

He reached the police tape in the dead of night, trudging through a part of the park that led to a lesser-used roadway, where only a few people seemed to be lingering nearby, some holding one another and sobbing disconsolately, one lighting candles under a scorched street sign, already cluttered with flowers, stuffed animals, photos set in frames that had been knocked over, broken, picked back up again...

Memorials for mutants never tended to last long.

They didn't pay any attention to the one figure that made his way from the park, walking silently on bare feet. He didn't pause to bother them, either. One wing was dragging on the ground behind him, but as stained with blood and ash as it was, the usual stark whiteness of it was hardly going to call attention to it in the dark, either.

It was a five minute walk to the Worthington Labs office in the area, taking the main roads, on a good day. Warren had even made the walk from the park to the office with his mother once or twice as a little boy, holding her hand and chattering about nothing of any importance, well before she'd left and longer still before he'd grown wings. Tonight he wished desperately for a hand to hold as he crossed the street to one of the backroads. The walk was far, far longer than five minutes, and every step was wracked with pain.

Never in his life had he been so relieved to see a light on in a Worthington Labs office so late at night. He didn't so much knock at the locked door when he got to it as lean up against the wall next to it, and then paw pathetically at the glass window with... well, it was more or less a hand equivalent, by this point. Good job, healing factor. Well done.



Junior
Junior was alone in the office. Everyone who had still been there when he'd dragged himself back had been sent home, the janitorial staff had been told not to come in, to take the night off with pay. Because why not pay them to stay home? Why worry about finances or the bottom line anymore? Why not just bankrupt the entire company?

It wasn't like he had anyone to leave it to, anymore. Two Warren Kenneth Worthingtons had owned the Labs. It should have been three. Might have been three, if things had changed by the time he'd felt like stepping down.

If he'd known what was going to happen when he'd called his son home, he would have just handed the entire company over to Trask in a goddamn bow and counted it good. He would have done it gladly to save his son. After all, Worthington Labs had cost him his son so many times over.

His devotion to business had been the reason he'd lost his wife. She'd packed her bags and left, saying she was done competing with his damn company, that she'd have had more of his attention and love if he'd had a harem of mistresses. It was only a pack of lawyers and a nasty battle in court that had kept him from losing Warren, then, too. Then had come his search for the cure, which had kept him at the board table or behind his desk instead of at home. How many birthdays had he missed? Father's Days? His business had kept getting bigger and bigger even as his son got smaller and smaller, shrinking into himself as if to keep from being noticed by anyone.

The cure's breakthrough had sent his boy careening through a window. Its implementation had sent him to another world entirely. And it wasn't that world, with its magic and swords and war that had killed him. No, it was the bigotry and hatred of his own world.

Between grief-stricken crying jags and long pulls from his bottle of scotch, Junior tried to imagine what their lives would have been like if he'd given up Worthington Labs years ago. If Warren had grown up with a family, instead of the cold comfort of an inheritance he hadn't even wanted.

It wasn't the soft tapping on the glass that had Junior staggering into the front office. Red-eyed, tear-stained, and very drunk, he had been on his way to the receptionist's desk. She'd have Portalocity's number somewhere--his own phone had been lost in the chaos of the streets. Lost? Stolen? Did it matter?

But he had to call Portalocity and set up a portal. Because Karla needed to be told that Warren had been shot out of the sky, that his healing factor hadn't been enough to stand up to whatever the hell had happened in the park, that there had been a line of survivors--all human--that had been marched out into custody and a robotic voice that had issued the blanket statement of No mutant survivors.



Warren
Warren closed his eyes and pulled in a few pained breaths, quietly trying to will his healing factor to do more than it had. Of course it would, of course it was, but the going was slow.

A shifting in the shadows on the pavement at his feet alerted him to the presence of somebody moving inside, and he waited for a moment to see if maybe the door would open.

Of course it didn't.

He was loathe to move, but he couldn't stand out here all night, either. With a muttered curse under his breath, he pushed himself away from the wall again, and then fell with a heavy thud against the office door, shoulder first, content to lean there for a bit.

Just a bit. He could see his father's back at the desk. That... was his father, wasn't it? He looked so... small. Smaller than Warren remembered ever seeing the man who had been so much larger than reality for so much of his life, some sort of untouchable entity sitting high above anything a small boy - even one with wings - could reach. He followed up his shoulder thump with another soft thud, this one from his forehead.



Junior
Those thuds were enough to pierce the cloud of grief and alcohol that was surrounding Junior.

"Go 'way!" he slurred. He was alone for a reason, dammit. He didn't want anyone else to intrude on his mourning. Soon enough, he'd have to be out there, making statements about the death of his son, more the face of his company than a father facing unimaginable loss. Tonight was just for him and his emotions, however he chose to express them.

The thought of burning down the office was tempting. Everything good in his life was going up in smoke. Why not make that literal as well as figurative. What would they do? Arrest him for arson?

Compared to the loss of his son, what was that, really?

"Just fuck off!" he called again when he heard another noise at the door. "You'll get your fucking soundbite in the morning!"



Warren
Warren was actually taken aback by that reply. He'd never heard his father speak that way, never heard him so... outside of himself, for that matter. He frowned, and then licked his lips, making a face and spitting a mouthful of blood and ash and dirt onto the ground.

He cleared his throat and attempted to speak, but could barely manage more than a bare murmur.

After a slow inhale and an even slower exhale, he decided to go the other route. Thumping on the window again with his somewhat less mangled hand, once, twice, and then, mustering everything he had in him for the third...

Just putting his hand through the glass.

He stood there for a moment just marveling at that. Not at the strength it took to break glass with a fist - he was adapted for flight, he had no small amount of upper body strength even when he was dragging himself around with a wing in the dirt and the other mostly unaccounted for - but at the fact that his fist, now studded with even more shards of glass than before, really didn't feel any worse off.

"That's never a good sign," he murmured, barely audible at all, as he gingerly pulled his hand back through the broken glass to cradle it across his chest.



Junior
When the glass shattered, Junior whirled around with a shrill scream, holding the desk phone in front of him like a weapon. "I will call 911! I'm warning you--I play golf with the mayor!"

Or, at least he had, at least until Alcatraz. After that, the mayor had suddenly stopped taking his calls.

"If you're looters, I'll have you arrested so fast--!" He stopped, blearily peering at the body behind the glass. It was hard to see straight, but that looked like...was that a wing? Could it be?!

"Warren!" he cried, voice breaking. He ran to the window, pressing his hand to the glass, ignoring the smeared blood to drink in the vision of his only son. "My boy, my boy, my darling, sweet boy..."



Warren
It was never going to stop being weird, hearing his father talk to him that way. It was doubly weird that he sounded exceptionally drunk while doing so. Warren actually had a brief deer-in-headlights moment in processing that, before forcing a smile that went nowhere near his eyes and nodding.

"I'm also your horribly injured and mostly naked boy," he pointed out, voice rasping as he tried to speak up. "I don't suppose you could let me in, Dad?"

He'd appreciate it. A bit.



Junior
Oh! Right, right. Yeah, getting Warren off the streets was probably a great idea. Even if he'd been completely fine and totally dressed, being a mutant on the street tonight was a dangerous proposition.

Junior all but ran to the door, unlocking it and wrenching it open, all but yanking his son inside. "My boy," he kept murmuring, slamming the door closed once more and hugging Warren close. Blood and filth smeared across his thousand dollar suit. He didn't even notice. "God in heaven, Warren, I thought you were dead. It was on the news. You were dead!"



Warren
Warren rocked a little and swallowed bile rising in his throat as he was pulled into his father's arms, wincing and biting back the urge to hiss between his teeth. He didn't even have a growl in him, tonight.

"Dead probably hurts less," he noted, wincing. He did at least make some sort of effort to hug the man back, though it was short-lived and involved jostling the glass that his flesh was already starting to heal around. "Maybe there's somewhere to sit down? For a bit? Dad?"

Please?



Junior
"Of course! Of course! Sorry, my boy. I'm just rattled."

And drunk. And emotionally compromised. And...

There were a lot of 'ands' tonight.

"You just stay there. Let me get you something to sit on."

He ran halfway across the office to fetch his own chair, then realized that the receptionist's chair had literally been within arm's reach and doubled back to pull it over for Warren to sit in. "Stay there," he repeated, not that his son looked as if he were in any condition to move at all. "Let me get you something to...to..."

Wash the dead off?

"Let me get you something," he settled on. "Why don't you take a drink of this. Maybe it'll...help?"



Warren
Warren still wasn't completely certain he could drink anything without also managing to swallow his own tongue, but he was reaching to take the bottle from his father all the same.

"Thanks," he murmured, holding it close to his chest. Maybe he wouldn't point out that his father had barely saved him a mouthful. "You're too kind, dad."

It wouldn't do him any good at all, but he was still taking the bottle and knocking back that last swallow anyway, if only because it meant his father would be out of booze for a bit. From that bottle in particular, at least.



Junior
He'd thought his son was dead! Drinking to excess over the brutal murder of your only child was a completely natural reaction!

"Sorry you have to see me like this," he said, mopping at his eyes with the underside of his tie. "You shouldn't--I thought--You were dead, son. Dead."

And, once more, he'd been powerless to protect him, relegated to the position of spectator at the sidelines.

"Let me get you something to help clean you up."

Junior came back minutes later, his face and collar still wet from the water he'd splashed on himself, carrying several rolls of thick, brown paper towels. One of the rolls had been completely soaked through so Warren could wash the blood and dirt away. "Do you...do you want to talk about what happened?"



Warren
Unable to lift his shoulders in a shrug, Warren just glanced up at his father, holding out one hand to accept the paper towel, and then slowly tearing some free, starting to clean himself off, starting with his left arm.

"I don't know where to start," he admitted. "We were just walking... And then there was fire, and chaos... I managed to get a few people to safety, I think..."

Huh. So that was what bruises looked like on his skin. They seemed to be lingering, probably because his healing factor had bigger fish to fry, here.



Junior
Junior looked on helplessly, once more wishing that Kavita had survived Alcatraz. He was a businessman, not a doctor! What was he supposed to do? Start pulling the glass shards out? Hold the torn flesh together while it kept knitting closed? Assure Warren that his toes seemed to be regrowing nicely?

"Can I...can I help?" he asked, feeling even more helpless than he had on the Golden Gate Bridge, watching his son hurtle towards a wall of water. "Is there anything I can do?"

Why wasn't this a problem that could be solved by throwing money at it? He was good at that!



Warren
Warren ripped off another length of paper, stared at it for a moment, and then tried to wash some of the blood from his face. With as much as was there, that was going to be quite the endeavor all on its own.

"Pants," he mumbled. "I'd really like a pair of pants that hasn't been on fire recently, if there's something like that around."

Warren asked for the little things in life.



Junior
"Pants!" Junior repeated. "Pants, I can do. Give me a moment, I can pants..."

It wasn't until he had returned to his small office in the back that he remembered that while he kept a spare suit in his proper office in the the main Worthington Labs building, he'd never bothered to do so here.

Which meant the only pants he could offer his son were the ones he was wearing.

"We should talk about what you should do next," he announced, returning with a pair of gray slacks over his arm. "That is, if you think you're capable of having that kind of talk right now. But New York isn't safe for you anymore. Even less so than it was before the riot. The National Guard has been called in and they've declared martial law."

Logical, reasonable words. Thoughtful. Suitable to a man used to power and authority.

Focus on the words, Warren, and not your father's pale and skinny chicken legs which you were probably seeing for the first time in...ever? Junior's idea of casual dress was a blazer instead of a suit jacket.



Warren
The pale and skinny chicken legs were a little difficult for Warren to ignore. He was pretty sure his father had worn shorts once, on a family vacation, under duress. But that was twenty years ago by Warren's reckoning, and his father in his underwear was a different matter entirely.

He scraped his throat and looked his father in the eye, instead.

"What I should... do?" He seemed a little dazed, which probably didn't have anything to do with the chicken legs, at least. "Riot? We weren't rioting..."

He swallowed heavily, and then buried his face in another strip of paper towel. Maybe he'd just leave it there forever. That seemed like an excellent plan.

"Dad, we weren't rioting."



Junior
"No, I know," Junior said, sighing heavily. "But that's not how it's being reported."

...He didn't feel up to explaining. He couldn't look into his son's eyes and tell him just what they were saying, how they were framing this. So instead, he just turned on one of the flat screen TVs that hung in the office. It was already tuned to CNN.

"--rotest turning violent, Trask Industries sent in their mobile peacekeeping units, the Sentinels, to protect the human population. We go now to Trask Industries for an insider look at these new forces meant to keep us safe--"

Junior changed it to MSNBC. The protest in New York was dominating their airwaves, too. "--unable to be televised after one of the mutants unleashed some kind of EMP device to knock out the cameras of the reputable press--"

And then to Fox, where a snarling talking head was almost red-faced with fury. "--they were swarming nearby humans, including some of those who had just been marching with them! They turned on their own like dogs! Rabid dogs! Who knows how many humans died in that attack? Among the dead are at least several children, dragged their by their stupid, liberal parents to be attacked by these unnatural powers--"

With a trembling hand, Junior turned the TV off. "I know you weren't rioting, son. But by tomorrow, there won't be more than a handful of people who believe that."



Warren
Warren listened in silence, clutching his bloodied paper towel in one hand, eyes that had been focused on the television looking away before long, staring at nothing in particular while the words he was hearing rattled around in his head.

Rabid dogs.

He was going to be okay. He was. He'd be fine. There were faces screaming at him for help whenever he closed his eyes, and he could remember sharply the fear and horror and the desperation among the crowd as people were cut down for the crime of having opinions while mutant.

He wanted to say something in reply to the things his father was telling him. He wanted to have some sort of rational response, some semblance of a game plan, here. He couldn't think of anything. This was making him reel more keenly than anything he'd ever seen in Glacia, in Panem. He'd seen the result of a government turning against their people before, and had felt shades of it as a landen during Glacia's war, but nothing like this. Nothing as personal and as immediate and as suffocating as this.

Warren opened his mouth to give his father a reply, but he wasn't terribly surprised when, instead of words, he curled forward into himself, shoulders shaking, and realized that he was sobbing.



Junior
His son was crying.

Warren had managed to drag himself out of whatever hell had been left in the park and find his way towards somewhere safe, somewhere familiar. He was down body parts, had been mangled and broken and actually killed, but it was words that were gutting him now.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. He'd taught Warren to say that as a boy, long before his wings manifested, when the worst insults he'd have to face were about his wealth and parentage. How wrong Junior had been, so many years ago, how blind. What were sticks and stones or even knives and bullets against words that could turn whole populations against you, that could crawl inside your head and make you hate yourself for things beyond your control?

His son was crying.

And there was nothing Junior could do to fix what was wrong. The world was broken and there was no money, no scientific cure to fix it. Not all his wealth, his power, or his business acumen meant a damn thing in the face of this: his crying son.

There was only one thing Junior could do.

"Go home, my boy," he said in a ragged whisper. "There is nothing for you, here. The world thinks you're dead. Go home and let them keep thinking that."

Contrary to what Warren had believed for years, Junior loved his son with a fierce intensity that almost scared him, a man of few and placid emotions. And right now, the only way he could show that love was by letting go and saying goodbye.

"You deserve better than I can give you. Maybe Karla can."

[OOC: NFB and NFI for distance, and once again, this dystopian fiction AU is far, far too reminiscent of current reality. If you've been giving the news a pass this past week for your own mental/emotional health, you might want to give this post a pass, too. Many thanks to glacial_queen, who plays a spectacular WWJr. OOC commentary is welcome, if you feel so inclined.]