Chapter Text
“Are you sure you want to do this, love?”
Dan shifts in the passenger seat, his legs pressed up against the dashboard of the tiny car. There’s a suitcases and a backpack in the backseat, and in his hands is the acceptance letter that came in the mail a month ago. He can’t stop fiddling with it, not as the countryside twisted and turned outside the window, not as the greens and browns of fields and villages morphed into the flat, grey espouses of the city, and especially not now that his mum has finally pulled the car into park outside the large, square building.
“I’m sure,” he says. His fingers find the worn corner of the envelope and begin their frantic rubbing once more. Just a little while longer, he thinks, despite the heat of worry bubbling up in his stomach. Just a little while longer and this will all be done. He pushes his face into a smile and turns toward his mum. Her hands are still on the wheel, and she’s staring up at the building with a look of concern on her face.
“Alright, well, you’re an adult now,” she says, “You make your own decisions. But I really don’t think this is at all necessary. You haven’t even done anything. You’re completely under control.”
“I know,” Dan says. “I just…” he trails off, leaving the rest of the sentence where it sticks in his throat. His mum glances over.
“Alright,” she says, “like I said, it’s your decision. But if it’s terrible, please call me and I’ll drive right down again to pick you up.”
“The program’s six months,” Dan says, “We can’t leave unless it’s an emergency.”
“Then make one up,” his mum says, “tell them I’m dying. Or climb out a window.”
“Mum!”
She glances over and half-smiles.
“Kidding, love. But in all seriousness, I’ve heard things about this place, and I promise I won’t get mad if you need to, you know, find your own way out, okay?”
“Okay,” Dan says.
He pulls open the car door and takes a deep breath. The air is crisp against the grey of the sky and smells faintly like soot.
“Do you want me to walk you in?”
“No, I’d rather - I’m fine, no thanks.”
“Have it your way,” his mum says, stepping out of the car to stretch her legs. “One of these days you boys will stop being too cool to walk next to your mother, and I look forward to that.”
Dan says nothing to this, just grabs his suitcase out of the back and slings his backpack over one shoulder. He hugs his mum and watches as she climbs back into the car and waves. He pulls the tight-lipped smile across his face one more time as he turns toward the building, where it quickly fades.
It’s large a square, with a minutia of small, square windows cut into it. There’s a small trickle of people filing in the double doors, mostly older teenagers around his age, some accompanied by parents, some alone, several escorted by pairs of large, blue-suited men. Dan shivers slightly and looks up at the large, blocky letters above the door that read:
STEPHEN J. YOUNG MEMORIAL CENTRE
for
SUPER-POWER TREATMENT & MANAGEMENT
Beyond the glass doors is a lobby full of people, many wearing the same bright yellow t-shirt. Dan’s stomach curls inward, thinking about all the horrible ice-breakers and team bonding activities that a place like this surely encourages. He bites his lip, and then slings his backpack further across his shoulder. It’s six months, he thinks to himself, six months, one purpose, that’s it. He doesn’t need to make friends. He doesn’t even need anyone there to notice him at all.
He glances once more back at the car, to his mum who waves through the windshield, then turns and steps toward the building, pulling the suitcase behind him.
Inside the lobby is a cacophony of noise. There’s plenty of shouting, both positive in tone (“Queue here for registration! Surnames that start with A-N to me, please,” a tall girl in a yellow shift shouts) and negative, (“This is is such bullshit, I’m not staying, I’m not —“ a blond boy yells toward an indifferent blue-suited guard, the edges of his fingertips crackling light blue in warning). There’s several different queues going, snaking through the middle of the room and standing in them are mostly teenagers and young adults, some crying, some scowling but most just staring dead ahead.
Someone bumps into Dan’s side, causing him to stumble.
“Oh, sorry mate,” a boy with short-cropped ginger hair says, and then pushes his way in between three girls carrying large duffel bags.
“Sorry,” Dan says, a half-second too late, and then grips the handle of his suitcase and begins moving towards the shouting girl at the registration desk.
“Hi there, checking in?” She says, a bubbly tone.
“Yeah, Howell?”
She glances down at her computer screen and types a few words. There’s the sound of a printer whirring to life behind her. Her shirt is a blindingly obnoxious shade of yellow, with black letters that mirror the front of the building in both font and message. Pinned to the top left corner of her shirt are two buttons that read “Welcome new trainees!” and “Ask me about Section 13 of SCA!” Dan is slightly confused at that one, but he’s never before done what a pin asked of him and he isn’t going to start now.
“Alrighty then, Daniel?”
“Dan.”
“Okay Dan, you’re all checked in. Here is your program information, room key and ID card.” She slides a thick folder, a small key and a card bearing the terrible PhotoBooth selfie that Dan had submitted on his application. “It’s program policy that you keep the ID card on you at all times, and present it to a member of the staff whenever you are asked,” she chirps. “Now, the packet should have all the information that you need, just head back down here with your roommate at 3pm for our kickoff presentation!”
“Wait, roommate?” Dan asks, his hand outstretched toward the key.
“Mmhmm, we’ve found that this program is most successfully completed when all our trainees are able to keep an eye on each other! Your roommate is …” she taps a few more times into her computer “…already here! So just head up to the 7th floor and get settled in.”
“Okay,” Dan slips the key into his pocket, heart pounding. He can’t remember anything on the site or the application about a roommate. He’s never really shared a room with anyone else before, his brother doesn’t really count, and that was just when they were small.
“Oh, and before I forget, this is all written out in the student handbook” the girl says, pointing to the folder now clutched under Dan’s elbow, “but the most important rule of this program is that at no point are you allowed to discuss, demonstrate or reveal your powers to another trainee! Your powers are to exclusively be used or discussed during the one-on-one counseling sessions with our trained staff, no exceptions.”
“So we can’t even say what they are?”
“Nope! And you can’t ask, either.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“No problem!”
The weight in Dan’s stomach lessens slightly, maybe the roommate wouldn’t be such a big deal if they aren’t allowed to ask about his powers. He won’t even have to show it to more than one person. Dan turns away, pushing back through the crowd to get to the lifts at the back of the room.
As the lift eases up, the noise and clatter of the lobby fades, and by the time it reaches floor 7, the whole place is quiet. Dan steps out of the lift and heads to the right, stopping in front of the door to Room 14, as it said on his keys. He takes a deep breath. Surely his roommate wouldn’t even be in yet, registration only opened half an hour ago, and the letter said they could arrive anytime before 3pm. That wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks, he can have some time to collect his thoughts and get his stuff put away before dealing with a whole new person invading his space.
He puts the key in the lock, twists the door open and finds the room…occupied. Extremely occupied. The room is so colorful that for a moment he doesn’t even notice the guy in it, he’s distracted by a full-length poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the wall opposite, green and blue fairy lights criss-crossing the ceiling, posters plastering both sides of the walls and a combination of books and clothing strewn across the ground like some kind of bizarre and messy carpeting.
It’s then he notices the boy lying sprawled across a bed on the right-hand side of the room. He’s lying on top of a rumpled cover, holding a book open in one hand, and with the other hand he’s levitating two large bouncy balls to circle slowly around one another.
“Um,” Dan says, and then makes to back out of the room but trips over the edge of his suitcase and stumbles loudly into the door frame. The boy on the bed looks up at this, the bouncy balls falling out of the air and bouncing across the floor.
“Hello?” he says, “Who’re you then?”
Dan straightens up, blushing, and then meets the boy’s eyes and blushes even more. He’s fit, like really fit, with piercing blue eyes and shaggy, dark hair that falls over his forehead in a casual way that Dan has spent countless hours in front of the mirror trying and failing to achieve.
“I’m Dan,” he says, and horrifyingly feels his left hand spring up in some kind of mock salute. “They said this was my room but it’s probably a mistake.”
The boy’s eyebrows raise and then his face splits into a grin.
“Oh, is it newbie day already? I was wondering when they were gonna send a new roommate my way. I’m Phil, nice to meet you.”
“I’m Dan,” Dan says and then just too late remembers that he just said it three seconds ago. He pulls his suitcase fully into the room and shuts the door closed behind him, wondering if it’s too early to go back downstairs and catch his mum before she pulls the car away.
“You can have that bed,” Phil says unnecessarily, pointing towards the bed on the left-hand side of the room that’s currently covered in a small mound of books. “Sorry about the mess, I lost track of time.”
“It’s no problem,” Dan says, staring out over the sea of mismatched socks and internally groaning. Of course he has to have the roommate who apparently brought a barge of clothes along with him, fit as he is. He moves to grab the books off the bed but before he can reach them, they fly across the room on their own and stack themselves into Phil’s outstretched arms.
“Got it,” Phil says, grins and then leans forward and dumps the books down onto the floor next to his bed, making as jumbled of a pile as before.
“If cleaning’s that easy for you then why all the mess?” Dan finds himself saying before he can help it. Shit, too mean, too mean, he thinks. The roommate’s going to hate him on top of everything else, and now he’s probably telekinetically drop a stack of books on his head in the middle of the night.
But instead Phil just grins and shrugs, “I dunno, I think being messy’s just in my nature.” He scoots back to see cross-legged on the bed and stretches his palm face-up. The bouncy balls whiz back across the floor to restart their slow, hypnotic twirl.
“So Dan,” he says. Dan feels a small leap in his chest when Phil says his name. He tries his best to ignore it. “What can you do?”
The small fizzle of happiness suddenly dissipates.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
“We’re not,” Phil says, still rolling the balls slowly in the air next to him. “It’s a pretty stupid rule, though.”
“I dunno,” Dan says.
“What, is it something weird? Can you grow, like extra arms?”
“What? No, is that even a thing?”
“Probably,” Phil says. “It’s not invisibility, is it? Cause you have to tell me if it’s invisibility.”
“It’s not."
“Are you sure? Because I had this old roommate who could turn invisible, except it didn’t work that well and he would flicker in and out, and then I’d have to start, like conducting invisibility tests to make sure he wasn’t in the room every time I had a wank.”
Dan tries his best to ignore the comment on wanking, and instead latches onto the only other part of the sentence he remembers.
“What the fuck’s an invisibility test?”
“Oh, I pretty much just sent all the stuff here flying around the room and I’d hear if it hit him.”
“Explains the state of the place,” Dan says.
“Hah. That was months ago, he’s not still here. Or is he?” Phil suddenly glances from side to side, causing Dan to giggle.
“I guess we’d better watch out,” Dan says. “Don’t want some poor invisible bloke trying to climb into my bed in the middle of the night.”
“What if he was just lonely?” Phil asks, “You wouldn’t kick a poor, lonely invisible man out to the streets?”
“I guess not,” Dan says, “Are all your conversations this weird?”
“No, not usually this weird. But I’m not complaining, usually my roommates are pretty boring.”
“How long have you been here, then? I thought the program was six months.”
“Oh, it is,” Phil says. Dan sees the bouncy balls falter in their rhythm slightly, dipping down towards Phil’s hand before righting themselves. “I’ve been through it a few times.”
“Why?”
Phil ignores this question, looking instead at the bouncy balls in his hand and making them vault across the room towards Dan. He catches the first one, but the second one bounces off his forehead and down into his lap.
“So what’d you do?” He asks.
“What?”
“You know, how’d you get sent here anyways?”
Dan’s chest tightens a little.
“I didn’t,” he says. “I came voluntarily.”
Phil’s eyebrows raise at that.
“Seriously? What, did your parents make you sign up?”
“No,” Dan says, “they didn’t even really want me to come.”
“Huh,” Phil says.
“Well why are you here?”
Phil grins, “robbed a bank.”
“What?”
“Yeah, got caught right in the middle of it, bag of money and everything.” He laughs slightly, leaning back against the wall. Right above his head is a My Chemical Romance poster.
“Bullshit,” Dan says.
“No way, I’m very serious."
“What, like with a little cartoon robber mask and everything?”
Phil grins at this.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
There’s a beat of silence as Dan looks down at his fingers, and his heart leaps up into his throat.
“What did you actually do?”
“Come on, I can’t give away all my secrets in the first conversation. How will you ever find me mysterious and alluring?”
“I can see literally all your clothes from where I’m sitting now, I don’t think there’s much mystery left. You’re dodging the question.”
“You dodged my earlier question,” Phil says.
There’s a pause, and a slight discomfort fills the air. Dan feels a little bad for even asking about Phil’s past earlier, and equally guilty for not diverging his own power. After a few seconds Phil breaks the ice, in a slightly flatter tone.
“So who do you have for Spem?”
“For what?”
“You know,” Phil gestures at the folder still clutched loosely in Dan’s hand, “Super-powered ethics and management. S-P-E-M. It’s the main course here.”
“Oh,” Dan says, opening the folder to look at his course schedule, “Davis, I think.”
“Ah shoot, I’m in the other section,” Phil says. “Davis is alright. Dead boring though.”
“The whole course sounds boring, honestly,” Dan says, leafing through the various sheets of paper in the folder. “I’m just interested in the one-on-one sessions.”
“Yeah, those are alright,” Phil says. “I think my counselor is fed up with me at this point, I usually just spend my time levitating my pen around the room while getting lectured about the whole covert confidentiality thing. Oh, speaking of, I should get going, I have a session in a few minutes.” He glances over at a red, ticking clock on his bedside table.
“Oh, okay,” Dan says. “But I thought we were supposed to go down for the meeting thing together.”
“Ah, that’s just orientation. And I’m oriented enough already.”
Phil gets to his feet, rummages around a pile of clothes for a second before revealing a pair of beat-up purple converse, and jams them onto his feet.
“Nice to meet you, Dan,” he says, “I’ll see you later then.”
“Okay,” Dan says, and watches as Phil leaves the room, the door shutting on its own behind him.
Orientation is as awkward and boring as Dan predicted it would be. There’s a long Powerpoint presentation about The Rules, several twenty-somethings in yellow t-shirts perform a truly horrendous skit about roommate etiquette and the head of the program makes a long-winded speech about accepting personal and legal responsibility.
Dan’s sat in the back row, as to avoid the guilt that comes with blocking someone else’s view, and thus spends the majority of the presentation studying the backs of his fellow trainee’s heads. There’s not that many of them, maybe fifty in all, and most are slumped in their chairs looking as bored as he is. Dan spots the boy who was shouting in the lobby. He’s tilted back in his chair now, arms crossed, and Dan swears he can almost still see a faint electric blue tinge surrounding his entire body. There’s a girl with long braided hair about three rows down sitting cross-legged in her chair at first glance, but as Dan looks closer he sees she’s actually levitating about an inch off the seat.
Other than that, though, people seem to be respecting the ‘no powers’ rule fairly well. Dan almost feels like he’s back in sixth form for a moment. This feeling is further exacerbated by the next event, a communal dinner in the large, slightly dingy cafeteria.
After being rotated through the line, he stands for a moment facing the now half-occupied cafeteria, a familiar feeling of dread bubbling in his stomach. Pretty much everyone else is at least with their roommates, but since Phil has not re-appeared despite Dan frequently scanning the room for his shock of black hair, Dan is alone. Thankfully, he spots an empty table near the door, and beelines his way there, scooting through the crowd of now chattering trainees. He’s just picking up his fork when two girls appear: the dark-haired girl that was levitating during the meeting, and another slightly taller girl with light blue hair.
“Mind if we sit?” The levitating girl asks.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Dan says.
“Thanks, I’m Angie. And this is my roommate Emma,” she says, gesturing at the blue-haired girl. She sits, or rather, she pulls her legs up into the air and floats down over the cafeteria bench. Emma gives a small wave to Dan and sits beside her.
“I’m Dan.”
“Nice to meet you. So where’s your roommate?”
“He’s not new, so I guess he didn’t have to come to orientation.”
Angie furrows her eyebrows.
“I thought everyone is new,” she says, “the program’s only six months.”
“Yeah, I dunno, he said he’d been here a while.”
“Wait,” Angie says, “his name isn’t Phil, is it?”
“Yeah, it is,” Dan says.
“Mate, you should request a new roommate. My brother went through here about a year ago and told me about him. He was the only one of their cycle who didn’t get approved to graduate.”
“Why?”
“I dunno,” Angie says, “but whatever he did, it must’ve been really bad, because like, they really want people to graduate through cause it shows the school’s successful, y’know? I mean, my brother still floats two feet into the air whenever he sneezes and they passed him anyways.”
“I thought the whole point was to get the powers under control here.”
Angie shrugs.
“That’s what they say, anyways. I’m just here cause some asshole called the cops on me for flying in public and I had to say I couldn’t control it.”
“Can you?”
“Oh yeah,” she grins, and thumps down into her seat, then levitates up again, “but I don’t want to actually go to jail, and this is much more fun anyways. So what’s yours then?”
There it comes again, the nauseous feeling in Dan’s stomach. It must show on his face, because a moment later Emma pulls a small notebook out of her pocket, scribbles on a page and pushes it across the table to Dan.
It’s ok if you don’t want to talk about it.
“Thanks,” Dan says, and looks over at her. “Er — can you hear me?”
Emma nods, then flips to the front page of her notebook, where it’s written neatly in large letters.
My voice can go into supersonic frequencies but I can’t control it.
I’m not speaking so I don’t accidentally hurt you.
“Oh,” Dan says. “Sorry, that sounds like a shitty power.”
Emma tilts her head and shrugs. She thumbs through a couple pages to show another pre-written page.
It’s ok. Could be worse.
Dan nods again, swallowing the lump in his throat. Him and Angie make polite conversation the rest of the meal, with Emma occasionally writing a response in her notebook. At the end of the meal, when Dan gets up to leave, Angie grabs onto his elbow.
“Nice to meet you,” she says, “but seriously, watch out for your roommate. I don’t even want to know what would cause someone to be stuck in here for over a year.”
“Okay,” Dan says, and leaves, mulling it over in his mind.
Phil seemed so nice earlier and, a part of Dan’s mind adds, extremely cute as well. And their conversation felt like it was bordering on flirty, and at no point did Phil ever mention a girlfriend. He didn’t mention a boyfriend either, another, more practical voice in Dan’s head chimes in. And besides, it’s not like you came here to date someone else with powers, you came here to be normal. And she’s probably right, anyone who did something bad enough get stuck in here for multiple cycles is probably not someone that you want around.
Dan pulls his course schedule out of his pocket. His first individual session is this evening. He doesn’t have any of his regular classes with Phil. And as for the whole room situation, well, he’s had no trouble isolating himself before. It’s six months, he thinks, it’ll be fine.
The counselor’s office is bare and grey. There’s two stuffed chairs sitting opposite each other, one of which Dan has been instructed to sit in. The counselor, who introduces herself as Mindy Davis, sits opposite him. She’s an older woman, with a streak of grey through her hair and thin glasses on her nose. She sits cross-legged, balancing a clipboard over her knees.
“So Daniel,” she says. “Checked in voluntarily? We don’t see many of those. I’m assuming you have a strong desire to get your power under control, then.”
Dan clears his throat, his fingers moving to fidget with the edge of his shirt sleeve.
“Actually,” he says. “I’m completely in control of it.”
Mindy raises her eyebrows. “I get a lot of students who come in here saying that,” she says, “but never the ones that volunteered.”
“Well, I am,” Dan says. “I didn’t come here to control it.”
“Then why did you come here?”
Dan swallows, feels the lump in his throat.
“I’m here to get rid of it,” he says. “I don’t want it anymore.”
Mindy nods.
“Alright, well, show me then.”
“What?”
“Your ability. Demonstrate your control, and we can continue our conversation.”
Dan takes a deep breath. He stands up from the chair. And then he shows her.