(no subject)
He'd been feeling strange all day, an all-too-familiar strangeness that always heralded a change in his world. He hopes it won't be too bad this time, but there's no way to tell until the dust has settled... and by then, he can't always remember all the details.
Some days he feels like he's a puppet, being pushed around to suit someone else's whims, to play through someone else's scenarios. If his life can be rewritten with no warning, the fundamental details of his background and abilities and personality completely changed, well, what is there to depend on?
So he stays in his office with the door closed and the lights dimmed, to wait it out. The only one who might come in to check on him is Donna, and he has informed her that he isn't feeling very well and would rather not be bothered for a while.
It's only when the world is changing, when his life is changing, that he can look back on it as clearly as this. Even then, there's so much he can't remember or can't understand. It feels like his life is a loop, that he is rarely much younger or older than he is right now. He can remember being a child, but he remembers being a child so many times and in so many contradictory situations that it could just as well be a movie he has seen.
He remembers, once, being the child of ordinary suburban parents in middle America whose town had secretly become the dumping ground for radioactive waste; that time, he had been bitten as an infant by radioactive squirrels and become the mutant he is today. Or the mutant he had been that go-round, anyway.
He remembers another time, being the product of an unholy union between a shaman and a native trickster demigod. That time, he'd been raised by his tribe somewhere in the desert--he'd been a fox squirrel then, which had been strange in itself--and had a cult of vaguely paranormal criminals. It had been fun, he supposes, but he prefers being a gray squirrel.
Another time, his parents (avid naturalists) had been killed by logging activists while they were camping in the forest, and he had been taken in by the squirrels and raised as one of their own, a bit like a disproportionately-sized Romulus and Remus.
He still has nightmares about the time he had been the result of a secret scientific experiment. Whether or not it had ever actually happened to him, he remembers it, he can feel it as real and as visceral as if it were still happening to him.
But this time--yes, he can remember it already. This time, his mother had been a hippie in a trailer on a commune somewhere in the forest, and his father had been some one-night-stand who had probably been hiding his mutant features. The Squirrel himself, born a mutant, had been a source of disappointment and shame for his mother, who had never sent him to school with the other children for fear that other people would think something was wrong with their family. He had essentially grown up in that trailer with nothing but the television for company, until he turned five and she had sold him to the circus. Years later, as a teenager, he returned to the forest to look for her, but she had renounced her hippie ways, married some rich developer and turned the forest into a parking lot.
When he went to her mansion to look for her, she had refused to see him. So he had burned the place down and never looked back.
(Well, okay, only once. It had been a nice blaze.)
He feels meaner, this time. Not thuggish, not quite, but certainly less playful than he had been last time around. He's got a chip on his shoulder, and somebody's got to pay, etc. Standard villain scene.
He's disappointed. He'd hoped for something a bit more... something. Original, maybe? Less of a cliche? Who said that supervillains all need to have parent issues, anyway?
As far as he can see, the only difference between heroes and villains is that villains are proactive, heroes reactive. The villains go out there and do things, and then the heroes try to undo them. The rest is all a matter of spin. Why, there have been times when he has been heroic, depending on your point of view--
The earliest he remembers, back in the Golden Age, he had been a hero, sort of. He had been a brash, friendly Texan, tall and blond and well-built, with a lazy drawl and a smoking habit and a lot of guns. He had also been an American airman--with blatant disregard for the military's uniform standards, but supers can get away with these things--and had fought for the United States in the war in the Pacific.
He had been American then. His name had been Joe... Breckinridge? Joe something. It's all a little hazy to him. And he had fought the Beetle, as he always does, but the stories don't go all the way to the end of the war--
It seems that it was only later that he picked up an incongruously Japanese name, considering that he looks much the same as he always has, not the slightest bit Asian. He has always been American, including that time he had been a ninja.
(He doesn't miss being a ninja. The powers had been nice, but the mask squashed his ears uncomfortably against his head, and there was never an adequate solution to the tail problem. He could never blend into a crowd of other ninjas, if such a thing as 'crowd of ninjas' ever existed.)
He has a suspicion that this time, he will not live to be old enough to run for president before the world changes again. Whatever he does, whatever he manages to accomplish, eventually gets erased and he has to start over. He's twenty-six now, and--
--and then he isn't, anymore. He is thirty-two, the extra years tacked on at the beginning and his life stretched backward to fit. Well, that makes the hippie-mother part a little more believable, anyway. And it gives him a somewhat higher chance of being president, if he only has to last four years without the clock being set back again.
But it's not just his age. The ripples of consequences spread out from there, affecting the relationships he retains from the last go-round. He is older now, the first time he met Nutkin; no longer a gawky, awkward teenager who encountered an orphaned baby squirrel in the woods and raised her by himself. No, now, he head been a calculating young man who had helped her come into being. He had collected ordinary squirrels, in his travels with the circus, who had shown an affinity for him; four generations later, Nutkin is the culmination of the squirrel breeding program. They are inseparable.
And then there is Queenie. They are now only four years apart; he met her now when he was a respectable seventeen to her twenty-one. What a difference six years make--her first impression of him now was not as a clumsy nothing, but as a strangely literate bully. His years in the circus had honed him into a lean, graceful and dangerous creature, and when the fighting had broken out at the supervillains' convention--as it did every year--well, he had given better than he had gotten.
(The mutant factions are far more likely to work together than the mad scientists are. Mad scientists almost always want to rule the world on their own, while mutants take comfort in their fellow outcasts. Sure, there are plenty of mutants driven by dreams of solitary revenge, just as there are mad scientists who serve other gangs or factions among the villains--he himself had hired Doc Ness to build Hypnotron, after all--but the generalities stand.)
That doesn't make their engagement any less of a purely political move, but it does give her a bit more grudging respect for him, which in turn makes Doe more wary of the two of them. Doe has agreed, at least, that he will not run for reelection; after his single term, Queenie will run to succeed him, with the Squirrel himself as her running mate, provided he stays out of trouble with the law until then. They just have to make it that far.
The details of his new past start to fall into place. The man who had owned the circus, who had bought him from his mother, had been his biological father as well as his adopted one--a fact the Squirrel had not learned until the man was dying, following a territorial war with carny folk.
Great. More parent cliches.
And he had been responsible for the Squirrel taking on his Japanese name, theorizing--correctly, as it turned out--that the average American, only knowing about Japan from war propaganda and badly-dubbed monster movies, would not question his origins if they thought him an exotic foreigner. They grow 'em mutant over there. Radiation, you know. If you say anything convincingly enough, people will believe it. It's the most important lesson the circus had ever taught him.
The Squirrel still technically owns the circus. They send him money now and then, and he checks in on them when they are performing nearby. He doesn't care enough to micromanage them; the only reason he hasn't sold the circus is that he likes to keep a backup plan, and you never know when you might need somewhere to hide. Anyway, being a circus star is good for the ego, and the townie girls--
Townie girls. At least this time around he hasn't been such a loser when it comes to women. He'd had an awkward teenage romance with one of the Mexican aerialists, brief flings with a number of townie girls, and even, after he had left the circus, a live-in relationship with a woman that had lasted a few months.
She was a goth, a waitress, in Florida, not far from the town where the circus wintered. He had met her while he was still with the circus, and she had offered him a place to stay should he decide to leave it; she hadn't meant it entirely seriously but he had taken her up on it anyway. He was a fellow outsider, and more visibly freakish than her previous boyfriends, which she liked; he liked the fact that she cooked for him and wasn't ashamed to be seen with him in public. They had fun together.
But it wasn't destined to last. She wasn't dedicated enough to evil for his liking--not even his own, more chaotic than evil. Sure, not all evil has to be big and dramatic, and the constant public displays of affection and (at home) very loud sex did fit some definitions of evil, but she lacked ambition. And he, for his part, shed entirely too much grey fur for her all-black wardrobe. Also, they didn't have enough in common to talk about. And then there was the fact that her rats and his squirrels didn't get along. It was best for them both to move on.
He's not bitter about it. She was no Queen Faraday.
He stands, then, as the strange feeling comes over him that heralds a change in his wardrobe. He empties his pockets onto the desk as quickly as he can, and not a moment too soon; his business-casual shrinks and tightens and reshapes until he is wearing--
--God. Not spandex again. And a cape! Either one would be a bad idea with a tail, especially a tail like his, but both together? He'd call foul on it if only he knew who to talk to--
There are flight goggles, too, but he doesn't need them right now, so he pushes them up on top of his head. The rest, he is stuck with, at least for now. On the bright side, he's certainly got the body for it, he thinks as he studies his reflection in the mirror on the minibar. But it won't be easy to get out of it, and even harder to get back into it again. Further on the bright side, his rocket belt seems to be gone--he can feel it, another change. This time he can fly without it, on his own. That mostly makes up for the indignity of the spandex.
He is still admiring his reflection when there is a knock at the door. "Mr. Watanabe?" calls Donna, waiting a moment before turning the knob. "The man from the jewelry store came by with a package for you. He wanted to give it to you personally but I told him you weren't feeling well so he gave it--"
She stops, just inside the doorway, holding the bag from the jeweler's, and she stares at him.
"Um," she manages to say after an awkward silence. The silence that follows is even more awkward.
He takes the bag from her, and opens the ring box inside it.
"Feeling better?" she asks after another long pause.
"What do you think of this?" he asks instead of answering her, showing her the ring.
"It's beautiful," she whispers, stepping closer to get a better look. "Are you--you're not--"
"It's for Dr. Faraday," he says. "She's very... particular about her tastes. I hope she likes it."
"...congratulations," she says, blinking. "I didn't know you two were--"
"We were keeping it quiet," he says with a shrug, closing the box and setting it on his desk. "But it's more stress trying to hide it than it would be handling difficult questions about it on the campaign trail, so there's no point in hiding it."
"That makes sense," she says. "I made some coffee--do you want any? It might help."
"Sure." Mostly he wants her to leave, he wants to be alone again with his thoughts while things settle, he wants to try to remember; but even after she leaves again, it's no use. It's gone.
And he doesn't really want coffee, anyway. Something stronger is in order, and there is only one place that seems right to go get it. Pushing his cape back to untangle it from his tail, he heads for the door.