FM June Topic: Reunions
[OOC: Inspired by this picture.]
The first time Warren’s parents took him to Reunions, he was 2 years old. He doesn’t remember anything about it, but his father would tell him, later, how he cried in his stroller every time his parents, linked arm in arm in their matching jackets down the P-Rade route, shouted the cheer: “Hip, hip, rah rah rah tiger tiger tiger sis sis sis boom boom boom ah…. ‘73! ‘73! ‘73!”
To be a Worthington man was to be a Princeton man. Seven generations of Worthingtons had attended the institution before Warren’s father, stretching all the way back to Revolutionary War hero John Worthington, who graduated with Aaron Burr in the class of 1772. In 1975, Warren Worthington II extended the tradition by marrying his college sweetheart, Kathryn, admitted with the first class of women in 1969. A year later, Warren Worthington III was born. When he visited his grandson for the first time, Warren Worthington I brought him a black and orange onesie.
Princeton is the place where you find out who you are, his father explained, as he loaded the family into their Mercedes and drove down the New Jersey Turnpike from their Long Island home. A place to feel safe, a place you can always return to. It was 1983, the year of his parents’ 10-year reunion, and 7-year-old Warren still didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He’d been told there would be tigers - though not real ones - and lots of jackets with funny designs, plus snacks and carnival games. Warren played with the other kids in the 10th reunion area, climbing over big inflated playsets as his parents mingled with their former classmates, and in the evenings he stayed in his hotel room with his nanny, watching TV and building model airplanes while his parents danced the YMCA in a tent under the stars. It was all fun enough, but nothing compared to the P-Rade on the third day. Warren couldn’t remember when he’d ever seen so many people, all of them yelling and singing and marching and holding signs. There was a jazz band playing music right in front of them, and smiling, cheering crowds on both sides, and when Warren sat on his father’s shoulders and watched his mother carrying a banner with the words “Coeducation Begins!” blazoned across it, he decided that Princeton really was the coolest place in the world.
When Warren’s parents returned for their 15-year reunion, he was 12 - nearly a man, his father said - and everything seemed much more serious. This time, there were no inflatable playsets. Instead, his parents took him on a tour of the campus (“This is the economics building, Warren,” his father said, pointing to a building behind and to the right of the big fountain. “You’ll want to know that one.”) and brought him to lectures and plays and let him visit their “eating club,” a sort of co-ed fraternity and dining hall called Cap and Gown. They wanted Warren to get a taste for “Princeton life,” they said, with all its traditions and unique features. When it came time for the P-Rade, they explained, for the first time, how it worked: how the 25th reunion class led the parade as it snaked through campus, and how alumni from every year from oldest to newest fell in line in order after them, wearing their class jackets. After the 25th reunion class had passed, Warren's mother pointed to an old, waving man in a golf cart. The sign on the front of the golf cart said Class of 1905. “That man is 104 years old,” his mother said. “And he’s still coming to his college reunion.”
“One day, that’ll be you, son,” his father cut in, smiling and patting Warren between his shoulder blades, an oddly sensitive spot. “You’ll be leading the P-Rade, waving your cane from a golf cart.” Warren nodded, allowing himself to be mesmerized by the passing golf carts and orange-painted cars and blaring marching bands and steaming calliopes and thousands and thousands of alumni. Yes, he thought. One day, that’ll be me.
There was no reason for his parents to attend their 18-year reunion. It wasn’t a special year; there’d be no priority meals and dances. But his father wanted to see an older classmate who was celebrating his twentieth, so off the family went to New Jersey. By then, Warren had become a petulant 15-year-old, uninterested in “stupid” school spirit exercises and watching his parents schmooze, and he begged his parents to let him bring a friend to entertain him. They agreed, and Warren and his boarding school roommate Cameron Hodge had a grand time conning wristbands off of agreeable alums and filling up on illicit liquor at every bar on the campus. Much less grand was the scene on the second night, when Warren’s parents came back from late-night partying to find Cameron Hodge on his knees in the hotel suite, giving their son a blow job.
When Cameron had fled to the next room of the suite, Warren’s father cleared his throat and spoke. “We don’t care what you do,” he said, and he meant it. He had liberal credentials to uphold. He couldn’t be seen as homophobic. “But keep it discreet. As long as you keep to the privacy of the bedroom and, you know -“ He shared a significant glance with Warren’s mother - “get married, eventually, nobody needs to know about this.” Worthington men, after all, had to produce more Worthington men. Warren nodded meekly, his intended teenage defiance melting under his father’s moderate reaction. He liked women just as well, if not more. He could follow his father’s rules and be what he needed him to be. And as he marched in the P-Rade the next afternoon, standing next to his parents, Warren stared out at the sea of black and orange and willed himself to accept that predestined future and not think about Cameron, who’d been placed on a train back to his home in Manhattan that morning.
By the time his parents’ own 20-year reunion rolled around, Warren was already a student at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and he’d lost all his remaining interest in parades and almost all his remaining interest in facades. His parents gave him a call, asking if he wanted them to buy him a Reunions ticket, but he said no. Scott had arranged extra Danger Room sessions for the weekend, and Magneto wasn’t about to halt his plans for world domination to accommodate a college reunion, even if it was the biggest college reunion in the world. And the wings that had grown on Warren’s back, the wings his parents still didn’t know about a year and a half after they’d emerged, were becoming harder and harder to hide. His parents didn’t need to know just how corrupted and imperfect that pure Worthington DNA had become.
Later, Warren would regret not going - but there was no way he could have known, at the time, that it would be the last Reunions his parents would be alive to attend.
Xavier’s wasn’t a highly-regarded (or even legally accredited) school, but the Admissions office at Princeton University never would have turned down a Worthington, even a mutant Worthington. When he turned 18 and Xavier unofficially pronounced the team graduated, Warren could have sent in an application and been accepted immediately. But beyond a week-long stint at UCLA that Bobby talked him into, Warren never wound up going to college.
There was a whole world beyond his parents’ beloved black and orange bubble, after all, and Warren had more important things to do in it.
The first time Warren’s parents took him to Reunions, he was 2 years old. He doesn’t remember anything about it, but his father would tell him, later, how he cried in his stroller every time his parents, linked arm in arm in their matching jackets down the P-Rade route, shouted the cheer: “Hip, hip, rah rah rah tiger tiger tiger sis sis sis boom boom boom ah…. ‘73! ‘73! ‘73!”
To be a Worthington man was to be a Princeton man. Seven generations of Worthingtons had attended the institution before Warren’s father, stretching all the way back to Revolutionary War hero John Worthington, who graduated with Aaron Burr in the class of 1772. In 1975, Warren Worthington II extended the tradition by marrying his college sweetheart, Kathryn, admitted with the first class of women in 1969. A year later, Warren Worthington III was born. When he visited his grandson for the first time, Warren Worthington I brought him a black and orange onesie.
Princeton is the place where you find out who you are, his father explained, as he loaded the family into their Mercedes and drove down the New Jersey Turnpike from their Long Island home. A place to feel safe, a place you can always return to. It was 1983, the year of his parents’ 10-year reunion, and 7-year-old Warren still didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He’d been told there would be tigers - though not real ones - and lots of jackets with funny designs, plus snacks and carnival games. Warren played with the other kids in the 10th reunion area, climbing over big inflated playsets as his parents mingled with their former classmates, and in the evenings he stayed in his hotel room with his nanny, watching TV and building model airplanes while his parents danced the YMCA in a tent under the stars. It was all fun enough, but nothing compared to the P-Rade on the third day. Warren couldn’t remember when he’d ever seen so many people, all of them yelling and singing and marching and holding signs. There was a jazz band playing music right in front of them, and smiling, cheering crowds on both sides, and when Warren sat on his father’s shoulders and watched his mother carrying a banner with the words “Coeducation Begins!” blazoned across it, he decided that Princeton really was the coolest place in the world.
When Warren’s parents returned for their 15-year reunion, he was 12 - nearly a man, his father said - and everything seemed much more serious. This time, there were no inflatable playsets. Instead, his parents took him on a tour of the campus (“This is the economics building, Warren,” his father said, pointing to a building behind and to the right of the big fountain. “You’ll want to know that one.”) and brought him to lectures and plays and let him visit their “eating club,” a sort of co-ed fraternity and dining hall called Cap and Gown. They wanted Warren to get a taste for “Princeton life,” they said, with all its traditions and unique features. When it came time for the P-Rade, they explained, for the first time, how it worked: how the 25th reunion class led the parade as it snaked through campus, and how alumni from every year from oldest to newest fell in line in order after them, wearing their class jackets. After the 25th reunion class had passed, Warren's mother pointed to an old, waving man in a golf cart. The sign on the front of the golf cart said Class of 1905. “That man is 104 years old,” his mother said. “And he’s still coming to his college reunion.”
“One day, that’ll be you, son,” his father cut in, smiling and patting Warren between his shoulder blades, an oddly sensitive spot. “You’ll be leading the P-Rade, waving your cane from a golf cart.” Warren nodded, allowing himself to be mesmerized by the passing golf carts and orange-painted cars and blaring marching bands and steaming calliopes and thousands and thousands of alumni. Yes, he thought. One day, that’ll be me.
There was no reason for his parents to attend their 18-year reunion. It wasn’t a special year; there’d be no priority meals and dances. But his father wanted to see an older classmate who was celebrating his twentieth, so off the family went to New Jersey. By then, Warren had become a petulant 15-year-old, uninterested in “stupid” school spirit exercises and watching his parents schmooze, and he begged his parents to let him bring a friend to entertain him. They agreed, and Warren and his boarding school roommate Cameron Hodge had a grand time conning wristbands off of agreeable alums and filling up on illicit liquor at every bar on the campus. Much less grand was the scene on the second night, when Warren’s parents came back from late-night partying to find Cameron Hodge on his knees in the hotel suite, giving their son a blow job.
When Cameron had fled to the next room of the suite, Warren’s father cleared his throat and spoke. “We don’t care what you do,” he said, and he meant it. He had liberal credentials to uphold. He couldn’t be seen as homophobic. “But keep it discreet. As long as you keep to the privacy of the bedroom and, you know -“ He shared a significant glance with Warren’s mother - “get married, eventually, nobody needs to know about this.” Worthington men, after all, had to produce more Worthington men. Warren nodded meekly, his intended teenage defiance melting under his father’s moderate reaction. He liked women just as well, if not more. He could follow his father’s rules and be what he needed him to be. And as he marched in the P-Rade the next afternoon, standing next to his parents, Warren stared out at the sea of black and orange and willed himself to accept that predestined future and not think about Cameron, who’d been placed on a train back to his home in Manhattan that morning.
By the time his parents’ own 20-year reunion rolled around, Warren was already a student at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and he’d lost all his remaining interest in parades and almost all his remaining interest in facades. His parents gave him a call, asking if he wanted them to buy him a Reunions ticket, but he said no. Scott had arranged extra Danger Room sessions for the weekend, and Magneto wasn’t about to halt his plans for world domination to accommodate a college reunion, even if it was the biggest college reunion in the world. And the wings that had grown on Warren’s back, the wings his parents still didn’t know about a year and a half after they’d emerged, were becoming harder and harder to hide. His parents didn’t need to know just how corrupted and imperfect that pure Worthington DNA had become.
Later, Warren would regret not going - but there was no way he could have known, at the time, that it would be the last Reunions his parents would be alive to attend.
Xavier’s wasn’t a highly-regarded (or even legally accredited) school, but the Admissions office at Princeton University never would have turned down a Worthington, even a mutant Worthington. When he turned 18 and Xavier unofficially pronounced the team graduated, Warren could have sent in an application and been accepted immediately. But beyond a week-long stint at UCLA that Bobby talked him into, Warren never wound up going to college.
There was a whole world beyond his parents’ beloved black and orange bubble, after all, and Warren had more important things to do in it.