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The day aliens come to New York is the day you break your favorite pipe while futilely trying to clean it. The replacement one broke during the Ultron Incident. What larks.
Both times you are determined to stay lucky. Both times you are sure that things were going to turn around, and both times you looked across the horizon at the incoming storm and thought, shit. So much for today.
In real life, you don’t get Charles Xavier coming to your house and offering you a room. You don’t get a big “You’re a Mutant!” coming-out ball thrown in your honor. Basically, it’s your friend staring through the smoky haze and saying, “Bruh, what the hell is that?!” at the hole you just made in the universe when you realize, oh hey, you’re a mutant. Lucky you.
You, like a number of girls living in Washington Heights, are brown, and thus no closer to being the new poster-child of mutantkind than you are being the president of the United States. Your friend Alex is English and brown; she comes out as a mutant to you after the whole tearing-an-interdimensional-hole-in-the-apartment thing happened, and demonstrates her powers by blowing up your cactus. No, like making it huge, not disintegrating it. You’re still simpatico, and nothing changes except now except now you enjoy chucking huge eggplants through doors to other dimensions.
Life is almost irritatingly normal from there. You still smoke your buddies out. You still work your shitty job as a receptionist at the local gym (you hate mopping up after the moms who come in for Yoga Booty). You still sing sometimes at dive bars with your friend’s band (all you do are Queen covers; you can belt it out like Freddie on a good day. On a bad day, not so much). Everything is astoundingly normal for you.
Until the Battle of New York, that is.
A number of things happen from that point.
- Your apartment building is destroyed. (Good riddance, you were getting priced out anyway.)
- Silver Linings Playbook, though, you manage to salvage your computer and your stash. All your favorite clothes were at Alex’s, anyway.
- You get relocated to Williamsburg, and the price is doable as long as you room with Alex again for the first time since college and also beg your parents for some spare cash. You spend your nights talking about superhero dick sizes because
- Captain Fuckin’ America was the one to evacuate your building, and he’s the finest white man you’ve ever seen. You want on that geriatric dick and you want on it now.
Alex is unconvinced, and she laughs at your Cap obsession. You catch the Captain America movie marathon in Manhattan, and you read up all you can on the man in stripes (you find biographical information on Peggy Carter disappointingly scant, and though the gossip is too good to pass up, the whole tragic Achilles-and-Patroclus angle historians take on Bucky and Steve is 2 much).
Then (fuckingshitgoddamnit), Ultron happens.
Afterwards, all you can think is, why. Why are these guys still allowed outside. Why hasn’t Tony Stark (who, as Alex likes to remind you, made money off the Iraq War) been hauled before a court of law for his crimes. How could the internet (so innocent! So reliable!) be used for evil? Why hasn’t Captain America come to your door on a white horse and ravished you silly?
Nothing coming out of the Ultron incident makes much sense, so you do what you like to do most when your life is threatened: smoke a fat blunt. You never think that maybe the scales are tipping in a way you never saw coming. You never anticipate the future after your next meal. How could you? You’re not the hero of this narrative. You’re not even a bit player. That keeps you safe. That keeps you sane.
Until a hole opens in the sky and you crack your third pipe, again.
Sometimes you talk alone with Alex, and you talk a lot about the Avengers, most of which is not fit to print (which Avengers dude has the biggest D? Who’s the gay one? When will someone rescue Black Widow from this sausage party?), and Alex wonders what it would be like, being one of them. You snort; the two of you are too degenerate, too brown, too blunted out to be Avengers. What if aliens came before 10am? Neither of y’all would wake up for that shit. And like, what are they being paid? You’d have to rely on Tony Stark, the war profiteer. He seems really cool, you admit. Though the minute your extracurricular activities came about (smoking weed, buying bootleg designer handbags), you’d both be finished. And you both cackle. You think about it, secretly; doesn’t everyone? You’d look good in spandex.
You want things to be simple. You want things to be easy. You want your problems to float away like the cloud of smoke billowing out of your mouth and nose and dissipating into the sky over your balcony. But you’re a mutant, sweetie. You don’t get normal.
Some other stuff happens. That prick Tony Stark backs the Registration Act, and your life becomes like a Cold War-era spy movie. No one is allowed to know about the whole you’re-a-mutant thing. Your patriotic whiteboy is now a fugitive, and you were never into politics, but it looks like you’ve got to take a stand. You try to keep your head down and lay low.
You should’ve known life wouldn’t let you.
The day Steve Rogers has his ill-fated meeting with the criminal they call Bullseye, you are eleven feet away; a stroke of providence. You scream. You scream so loud you don’t even hear the rip in the space-time continuum that you’ve made, violently turning back the clock and changing your world forever.
When you come to, it’s Cap––Steve—who looms over you, cool palms cradling your face. He asks if you’re all right. You ask him what his stroke game is like before you pass out completely.
When you awaken, you’re in a hospital uptown, and you are mortified. Alex fills you in on the gory details; apparently the good Captain refused to leave your room until he was sure you were okay and your vitals were fine. She brings up the stroke game question and nearly busts a gut laughing. Your face burns.
It isn’t until later that you look in your purse and find a small notecard tucked away neatly in one of your hidden pockets. You look it over, and it’s a business card made out to Stark Industries. Written on the back in hurried-but-elegant longhand is a phone number.
You drive yourself crazy over that number. Should you call it? Alex says you should, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but still, you persist. This is too much, too soon.
You never think about being a hero. I mean, just because you have powers doesn’t mean you have a duty to the world or anything. You were just born like that.
But that’s the thing; and you turn it over and over in your head at night, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that dot your ceiling. You were born like that; isn’t that your duty right there? What’s the point of being special if you don’t do anything about it?
To make a very, very, very long story short, the X-Men/Avengers feud comes and goes like last season’s Versace, and the Avengers now publicly endorse the mutants. This is, like, a big thing. Even Alex is amazed. You bake brownies to celebrate, and sit on the balcony watching the clouds float by.
And, eventually, you call the number. A female receptionist-type voice answers. Shakily, you say that Cap––Steve––gave you this number. Before you can protest, she connects you to him.
His voice is deep and calming; you could listen to him speak forever. You tell him your name and stumble over your words, and you ask (voice small and stupidly earnest to your own ears) if you could speak to him sometimes, about stuff.
You can practically hear his smile. He says it would be a pleasure.