Chapter Text
Things were going well for Alex Summers, really, really well. He was making enough money to not bleed cash everywhere he went. He liked doing field work, and was relieved to have found a job working in clean energy, not mining or an oil company. The Blandings had finally gotten off his back about not coming home for Christmas. Installing geothermal HVAC systems might not be his lifelong dream, but if he stuck it out for 18 months he’d be eligible for tuition reimbursement, and then he could start applying to grad school for something way more exciting. Life could be worse.
Especially since he hadn’t had an accident in weeks.
Things were going so well he swung by the local bar, the one and only thing to do outside of work in Flores de Artemisa, New Mexico. This is the trouble with working for a geothermal systems company. They lure you in with the trendy bars and scenic hiking of Santa Fe, or at the very least Albuquerque, where their headquarters are. But once you’re on the job, you find out that the field office you’re assigned to is in the middle of nowhere, serving all of southern New Mexico. Just far enough from the White Sands missile range that it doesn’t occur to you to worry about the noise from the missile tests, until you spend a sleepless night listening to whatever the hell they did over there. Missiles. Nukes. Maybe shit that would excite a quantum theorist, but he was into the geo part of geophysics.
The bar in Flores—in the same property as the gas station and the grocery store—was about all there was to do after work, if you didn’t want to go down the highway to Alamogordo. So on this day, he settled in and scrolled his phone with one eye on the bar’s lone TV. Nothing but the usual. Something about the budget in Congress. A celebrity had said something embarrassing on the internet and now she was both cancelled and getting cast in things because she was cancelled (kind of…didn’t feel like that’s a real cancellation?) Then it switched over to their main story for the night. Mutants.
Great.
It flashed a scary headline, and then launched into the story.
Angel. Storm. Marvel Girl. They are calling themselves the X-Men, after the gene that caused their violent abilities. No longer content to live quiet lives away from regular humans, these mutants are asking the public to take their needs seriously.
He did his best not to look like he was watching. They went on to talk about New York and how it had so many mutants, people wondered if there was something in the water. Then, the X-Men, who were a bit like an Avengers squad, except all mutants. They were calling for mutant rights and were using their powers to stand in solidarity with any vulnerable population. Sure.
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” the chyron said SCOTT SUMMERS: CYCLOPS, LEADER OF X-MEN and he gave up trying to pretend this was casual background noise.
Scott Summers?
The camera cut away and back to the talking heads. One of the panelists called the leader of this group out again, Scott Summers. Though the live captions read Somers, because those things are always a bit off.
“You OK?” one of the regulars asked. He looked back at the man, watching him with curiosity. Scrapyard Darryl. So named to differentiate from the Darryl who sometimes worked at the gas station, and because this Darryl owned the scrap yard that was the primary reason anyone bothered to stop in Flores, if they didn’t already live here.
“It’s nothing.”
“Because you look like you seen a ghost.” He looked up at the TV, now showing footage of the group in action. The Angel, huge white wings silhouetted against a building. Iceman, swooping through the shot, spraying a white coating over everything he touched. And Cyclops, who was apparently their leader. Alex stared at him again. He stood tall and firm against the military, or maybe it was just the NYPD, all kitted out in riot gear and everything. Saying that the X-Men were standing up for innocent mutants, but also for the right of everyone to go about their lives.
“You scared of those muties?” Darryl asked.
He tapped his glass. The story was going long and he needed a reason to stay. The bartender took his empty to replace it with a fresh one.
“No.”
Darryl took that as an invitation to keep going. “They have no damn place here, if you ask me.” He meandered into conversation about how they should all be registered, like a dangerous weapon. And that the Air Force base was getting detectors, but what he really wanted to do was get one of those squads together. The Mutant Response Division.
But Alex sat and watched, rapt, at the TV as the story continued. Talking heads were now discussing the mutant threat. The group in New York had recently grown from five members to eight, they thought. Were we going to have mutant gangs in every city? Was X-Men Chicago next? San Francisco, probably. Those people gathered in San Francisco, too.
“I’ll give ‘em hell if they dare set foot in Flores,” Darryl muttered. Alex just nodded along. The segment finished and he cashed out, not even bothering to finish his beer.
He gave himself a moment to calm down before he started the car. It was a short drive back to his house, a corporate-owned manufactured home in a park on the outskirts of Flores. Depressing, but cheap and convenient to his field office. And he could pick up the wifi from the fast food joint across the street.
Which also furnished his dinner. He didn’t want to spend more money on data this month, so he relished the stint in the dining area. He pulled up article after article on his phone, anything he could find about these X-Men. Then he went home and kept going.
The X-Men. Active in New York for two or three years. Cyclops was their leader. Tall, usually wearing a mask and an eyepiece that emitted laser beams or something, but they said it was his mutant power, “optic blasts.” Mostly they ran around the city and took on the Mutant Response Division militia, claiming that they were defending mutants from harm. Last fall, though, there had been a bigger confrontation. A lot of what appeared to be NYC-local news had covered them, and one of the members had had his secret identity blown and there was coverage because he was just a college student. And just a week ago, they’d had another confrontation in a trendy downtown neighborhood. They’d taken out an out-of-control robot that was about to fire on a crowd of bystanders.
They had half a dozen members or more, and while some of them liked to hide behind masks and code names, their leader was unequivocally a man named Scott Summers, just like Alex’s brother. Codename Cyclops.
Cyclops was 26, also like his brother. He had been living in Nebraska before moving to New York, according to the mutant conspiracy websites Alex found. He looked so much like Alex’s father it hurt.
Scott was dead. That’s what they’d told him when his new parents took him home. A tragic accident, and Alex the lone survivor, as if God had saved him for a higher purpose. Which, if you asked the Blandings, might have started and stopped at replacing their dead biological son.
But Scott, at least this Scott, had been right there in Nebraska all along. While Alex was screaming and fighting off social workers and foster families because nobody would believe him when he said his brother was alive, he was right. There. And because this Scott Summers was a registered mutant, his ID and address had been searchable in a government database for the last decade.
He should have been looking. How could he have been so stupid as to stop looking?
He could feel tears start to well up and he was about to have a good ugly cry when something deeper changed in his body. The vibrations. The energy. He hadn’t been out to the desert in four nights and he could tell it was going to come now, an explosion. He made sure everything he’d opened on his phone was saved for offline reading, and got in the car.
He was so tired, it was only the danger that kept him awake. Thirty miles out of town, he turned down a dirt road, and shortly after that, onto the flat plain of the desert. He felt bad for driving his car out here; you definitely weren’t supposed to. Not just because of the law, but because the desert was a fragile ecosystem and car tires didn’t help.
But this was not a situation where he could afford to be near people, not even the chance of people passing by. He walked, taking a moment to strip down and get a safe distance from his car. And then he exploded.
The discharge of energy was coupled this time with a primal scream and the knowledge that his brother, his only brother, had been alive this whole time. Had no doubt been somewhere near him, at least when the Blandings came to pick him up and take him away. He felt exhausted, spent when he was done. He put his clothes back on (relieved it was finally above freezing at night again) and then he sat in his car, taking a moment to warm up and then read more of the articles he had saved before turning back to his house.
Scott Summers, registered mutant. Could shoot laser beams out his eyes or something, which he seemed to do with great skill and dexterity, which both gave Alex hope and also made him worry that whatever was going on with him was never going to be fixed. A few years ago, Cyclops had moved to New York City and not long thereafter he had gotten together with some other mutants and started asserting that people like him had rights.
His big brother, always looking after the vulnerable. That was Scott.
He was embarrassed at how long it took him to write a letter. They don’t teach that kind of thing these days now, you know? But Cyclops. Scott Summers. His brother, maybe, didn’t have a social media presence. Didn’t have a linkedin or an instagram account or anything else he could find, just his legal address in the mutant registry. An apartment building in Brooklyn. Alex spent hours staring at the building on Google Maps, a cinder block structure that seemed better suited to a warehouse than residential living, trying to divine what this Scott Summers’s life would be like, based on the information he could find. It looked bleak (though who was he to judge? He lived in a trailer park.)
He was afraid to type the letter out. That would require finding a place to print it, and whatever this was, he wanted to keep it just to himself for now. Instead, he liberated a ream of paper from a supply closet at work and took it home one evening. Pages and pages of blank space awaited his thoughts. It took about a dozen tries before he came up with a letter he thought was worth sending.
My name is Alex Summers. Well, Alexander Summers Blanding, legally, but that’s because when I was 8, my whole family died in a plane crash and I was adopted. The plane crashed in Nebraska, and the news reports are saying that’s where you grew up. And they say you were an orphan. And now I’m trying to figure out if maybe what the social workers told me wasn’t true.
God, this was absurd. Dear sir, I believe we are long lost-relatives. Here is no proof whatsoever. Sincerely, A. Summers. What was he supposed to say that would confirm he was who he said he was? (if he was, indeed, writing to his not-actually-dead brother).
We lived in Anchorage. In a house with blue siding and a washing machine that rattled so loud it would wake us up if our parents tried to do laundry after we went to sleep. Dad would start a load on Saturday mornings, to get us out of bed.
Our father was a pilot and you wanted to be one, too. Were saving up your allowance so that you could take a class as soon as you were old enough. Dad promised to take you up for your hours.
I don’t know what else I can say to make you believe me. Before the crash, we were on vacation, camping in the Smoky Mountains because Mom had a thing about taking us to all the national parks. And around the fire on the last night, She told us that she knew we were destined to do something great. The Summers Brothers. And I was only 8, but I knew that whatever it was we were going to do, you were going to be the one leading the charge, so I guess what I’m saying is that as surprised as I am to find out that you’re still alive, I’m zero percent surprised that you’re the leader of a motherfucking superhero team. That, more than anything else, was what did it for me. Convinced me that they might have been lying when they said you were gone.
I don’t want to fuck up your life if there’s some strange cosmic joke going on and there are two Scott Summerses out there, with the same birth date and orphaned while in Nebraska (orphaned while flying over Nebraska, in my Scott Summers’s case, at least). But if you are Scott Summers, child of Katherine and Christopher Summers who died in a plane crash… well, I’ve been looking for my brother for 15 years so I hope cosmic joke isn’t where this letter is going to end.
I thought you were gone. They told me you were dead and I was eight and I had no idea it could even be another way. It wasn’t until I saw you on CNN a week ago that it even occurred to me that that was a lie. But you look so much like my father. Lighter hair, but the same chin. And tall, though I was 4’ tall when he died, so I suppose he might not have been that tall and I wouldn't have known.
A family adopted me, took me away almost immediately after I got sent to a foster home. That’s where the Blanding comes from, but I don’t use it anymore. They were nice, they meant well. But living family, birth family, would be nicer. If this is you. Please let me know.
He finished the letter, attempting to explain again where he’d been. Why he had gotten lost, when he was supposed to stay with Scott. Why he hadn’t gone looking for him earlier. It was all too hard; he hoped the man, if it really was his brother, would understand. He wrote his email out. Then he said that he’d take a DNA test or something if that’s what was needed to see if he was right.
He wanted to ask if it was weird that he was a mutant too. If there was a way to stop it, even, that Scott knew. Because whatever they said about Cyclops and the X-Men on the news, “periodically has to drive out to the middle of the desert to explode at a level that registers as seismic activity” didn’t appear to be on the list of things he had to deal with in his life.
But it seemed unwise to put that in writing. He sealed the envelope, stamped the letter and dropped it in the mail before he could change his mind.