Gifted.
Hey, there! First post to this community, and also, first X-men fic I've actually finished.
Apparently, I am the world's only Ronny Drake fangirl.
Author: AJ Silverberg (ether_circuit@yahoo.com
Title: Gifted
Rating: PG-13 for naughty words
Archive: Yes to xmmff, ask/email for anything else.
Feedback: Please.
Disclaimer: All X2 characters belong to Marvel; alchemist!Ronny was my idea, though. (As far as I know; has anyone else even written Ronnyfic? If so, SHARE!)
Summary: Who says Ronny Drake is a human supremacist, anyway?
[Edit: Some fangirl I am. That's what I get for not checking the cast list on imdb before.]
It had been the one thing Bobby couldn't touch.
Bigger, faster, older, better. Smarter, stronger, a better student. Bobby did more extra-curricular activies, played more sports, got better grades, had more friends. A lot more friends.
Ronny couldn't even take satisfaction in it when Bobby'd fucked off to that snotty prep school, because they'd recruited him. His mother gushed on and on about how grateful she was for this opportunity, practically wetting herself in front of that Doctor Grey bimbo.
They wouldn't even let Ronny use his room while he was at school. Three years of cramming all his stuff in closets and his mom threatening to sell off his comic collection, while Bobby's room just sat there across the hall, like a shrine. Because it would have made Bobby feel like he wasn't at home in the house if they did.
Bobby didn't even live there anymore, but Ronny was the one who had to live away from home.
It had been hard, so hard, not to go bragging or showing off. Not to call him up at that stupid school and gloat, or better yet, to reach over, during one of those painfully boring "welcome home dinners" they had every three months, and turn Bobby's soda to sulfuric acid. Or pick up a charcoal briquette at another family barbecque and turn it to diamond.
But Ronny knew what that would have gotten him, and it was somehow sweeter as a secret. Let Bobby turn himself into a trophy child, a show-pony person. None of that meant anything, because there was *nothing* he could top Ronny with, now. Nothing.
He'd just snickered to himself when she'd acted like he'd won the Nobel Prize just for bringing home an A in chemistry. If you only knew, ma... It cut the embarassment, a little, made the way she had to make such a big deal out of one damn A less annoying. She made a big deal out of everything he did, like he was some kind of retard who deserved praise just for taking a shit on his own. Like he couldn't have gotten better grades than Bobby, if he'd wanted. Or cared. Just because he didn't buy into the stupid system, he was shit. Just because he didn't play their little games.
But he was outside the system, now. He was better than the system. Every time he walked the halls, he'd finger the hunk of diamond in his pocket and grin to himself, savoring the knowledge that the idiot sheep who crowded past him couldn't even begin to comprehend what he was.
He signed up for AP Chemistry and spent a lot of time on the net, looking up chemical formulas for acid and meth. Toothpaste held a lot of potential as soruce of components, he'd decided, and so did a bunch of his mother's makeup. Diamond was a sucker's game, he'd found out early on. Ronny knew more about African war diamonds, cartels, the commodities market, and modern advertising and marketing practices than any other fifteen year old on the planet. He even started looking into the latest research on pheromones, and protein-folding. Life was looking up.
And then Bobby had to come home and ruin it.
What kind of lameass power was freezing things, anyway? Big fucking deal. There was no profit in that (although for a few seconds, he'd seriously wondered whether Bobby might make a good lab assistant, for a cut of the take...) What was Bobby going to do with that, become a sno-cone vendor? What a fucking stupid power. What a totally lame thing to freak out over.
He could hear her over the balcony, ass still glued to the couch across from Bobby. She probably wouldn't have noticed him if he'd stripped the paint off the railing and choked them all with the gas.
"Have you tried... not being a mutant?"
Like she would have even given him that much. "Have you tried not being a fucking favoritist BITCH, mom?", he'd wanted to scream.
On the way to his room, he'd realized that this school had picked Bobby anyway, and he knew what he had to do.
Bobby's girlfriend was right. His brother was "gifted".
They'd "given" him everything Ronny deserved