Interpretation
Interpretation
a New X-men: Academy X story
by June Whitfield
Copyright 2006
PG-13
Summary: Sooraya does not believe herself to be pretty.
Disclaimer: So very not mine.
Notes: Pre-House of M madness. Spoilers for the Hellions mini series.
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Sooraya does not believe herself to be pretty.
Noriko is pretty. She wears tight clothes that are too small and dyes her hair a bright, overbearing blue that Sooraya is half-way sure one could see in the dark, but that she hasn't the energy to stay up late enough to greet her roommate and see. Noriko is pretty, with her wide, shapely eyes and her stable hips.
Sooraya does not believe herself to be pretty at all, and wonders how anyone else could believe so, when she wraps what she has in thick, black cloth. To cover her from the eyes of men, she'd told her mother. To cover her from being betrayed again.
She didn't tell Cessily, about what had happened before. The acknowledgment alone that she'd uttered to the silver girl had been more than she'd ever uttered before: that she'd been taken from her home, and sold. Sold, like a bag of rice. She didn't know how much they'd paid for her, and no one had told her.
No, she hadn't told Cessily. She hadn't told Cessily of the things that they'd done to her that first night, that she hadn't been fed, that the men had been awful men, the dark men in the stories that her Dadi had told her late at night. That her voice had scattered away from her throat like pieces of the ground. She hadn't told Cessily; it is for this reason that Sooraya does not believe herself to be pretty.
She wraps herself in black cloth to keep the nightmares away. It is the garb of her culture, the tradition of her people. Her mother acts as if this is a surprise, that she should still wear the cloth. Sooraya tells her what she tells the shocked younger girls of the Institute who look at her out of the corner of their eyes, and what she tells Noriko: that she wears it to protect her from men. This is her life, now. She makes the best of it.
After a year of studying in the dark, without the Professor's solid, kind glances, and without Xorn -- Mag-net-o -- haunting her dreams, she believes that she can speak the English words softly and without stumbling when she needs to. She is the only student from Afghanistan. There are mutants all over the world. She remembers her father's horrified face as he stared at her when she changed for the first time, and she remembers her mother's face, pained and terrified, but she can only write the foreign letters down on the white, lined paper in quiet desperation. A, B, C.
Her squad work is dignified, quiet, moral. The Kingmaker probably did not realize what he did to her, to all of them, and if he had stated that he did, she wouldn't have believed him. They are closer -- closer, like lines drawn together. They listen. They compromise.
Her hope has been restored. She can not hope to recover from that.
Eating amongst them is another matter. "I can't," she says to Julian, the first time. "Maybe," she says to Brian, the fourth time. By the fifth time she is sitting across from them, turned away, her lunch tray in her lap; by the seventh, she chews quietly on the edge of the table, her face turned down, and that is the way that it will remain. She has already breached enough.
They don't know her culture; they do not know her people; and although they think they know her history, they really know nothing at all.
They don't know that her engagement to a distant cousin of the nearest neighboring village occurred two weeks before her twelfth birthday. They don't know that her older brother had been married at nineteen and that she had been the one to hold her sister in law's hand in childbirth. Their hands have never been callused or worn down with work.
They've never had to run over sand dunes and slather mud and dust on their legs and faces to keep hidden from monsters who call themselves men.
Sometimes she wakes from her dreams sobbing, but she doesn't make sounds. Her voice is still gone in places, still rubbed clear from her throat. Her teammates make her nervous, with their loud talk and tight clothing and bright smiles. She is, nonetheless, transfixed: how can people walk about so naked, and yet so closed, with so many layers? Layers and layers and layers, like the layers of dust that make up her skin and her hair and her mouth and her feet and her womb.
She knows she is not the only one among them who has suffered. Sometimes she can hear Noriko crying in her sleep, and she knows that Jay Guthrie is broken. He is not broken like she is, but broken in deep ways all the same, like someone reached into his chest and broke his heart into three clean pieces, and then scattered them on the ground to trample them to more dust.
And she knows that they try to know her. Cessily paints her nails, one day, under an oak tree behind the school. She only paints her thumbs, because Sooraya is nervous and shakes under the tiny brush. It is clear polish and when she takes her hands back her nails shine like mirrors, which Cessily shines more light into with her skin and smile. Cessily tries to know her, because they are the only females on their squad. Sooraya does not welcome the attempts, but she does not push them away, either, because Cessily's loneliness is stifling, like a flood.
Julian tries as well, but he is frightening with his anger and his raw words, and she shies from the excursions that he invites her to. They fight alongside each other because he is their leader, and he is a good one, and when it is required she follows him and sometimes even when it is not. Brian is soft and quiet and offers to help her with her writing. Santo does not understand her at all and nor she him, but they are united in their need to follow, and that is good enough.
Kevin does not try at all, until one afternoon when she comes to watch him sculpting after Cessily's enthusiastic encouragement, and he mentions his father to her without realizing what he is saying. After she responds with a story about her own Dadi and his fears, they sit in quiet silence for the rest of the afternoon; a sad silence, but a relatively friendly one.
Sooraya does not believe herself to be pretty, but to have Jay Guthrie ask her to the dance is a step further. To sit and watch Kevin awkwardly take Cessily's hand and press it against cooling copper metal is a step further. To spar with Julian and have him burst out laughing in the middle after falling over, prompting her own tentative laughter, is a step further. To ask Santo shyly what the rules of soccer are, and to be given a simple, good explanation in response that leaves her in complete understanding is a step further. To trace the English words behind Brian's patient hands -- fight, sing, team -- is a step further.
She does not believe herself to be pretty, but she now has a team whose hands grip at hers in the dark months later when everything begins to fall apart, and they are her friends, and she could not hope for anything more beautiful to be recieved.