Chapter Text
The voice cut through the calm and quiet like a knife whistling through the air.
"Amy Dallon?"
Amy just barely managed to restrain her jolt of surprise.
When was the last time someone had called her by her name here?
She opened her eyes, slipped her noise-canceling headphones to the side, and finally noticed the man sitting in front of her in the opposite chair. He was was surprisingly young, maybe in his early twenties, eyes a calm ocean blue, the same shade as her sisters, hair black and slightly curly, slicked back save for a few stubborn stands near the nape of his neck and ears. There was a thin, practiced smile on his lips, and he was wearing an expensive-looking blazer, and when she saw the binders and notebooks he was clutching in his right arm, she almost groaned aloud, brow subtly twitching.
Another fucking med student, she thought tiredly, and Amy almost wrote him off then and there, except there was something...off in the way he looked at her. His eyes had flicked up and down her form in a way they might flick from side to side whilst looking down at something through a microscope, at something lesser, inferior, to be studied and understood and categorized, then disposed of into a biohazard container. She caught the way his own left brow had furrowed slightly, noticed the tiniest of twitches near the corner of his mouth, like he was suppressing a bemused or disappointed smirk, the way he seemed to be judging her internally just as harshly as she'd judged him at first glance.
She swore she could see that same trace of disappointment in his eyes already, from just that one look. Like he'd already written her off the way she had almost done vice-versa.
It intrigued her almost as much as it pissed her off.
"Can I help you?" She said, and all traces of that disappointment and...coldness evaporated in the face of the heat his sudden and rather frightfully sunny smile generated. He extended a hand in her direction with a chuckle that was maybe supposed to sound disarming. "I'm Alexander, Alexander Mercer. Alex to friends." He winked at her, and she about rolled her eyes. "I'm working on my doctorate over at Columbia University." He paused, smiling wider, almost preening, like she was supposed to know where that was or what that meant for him or if she was supposed to care at all.
"And?" Amy queried. She made no move to reach out towards him
There was a flash, a gleam, this time of something darker in his eyes. He withdrew his hand, and his smile became a lot smaller, a lot sharper, and only a little bit more genuine. "I'm working on my dissertation, titled 'Inducing Adaptive Evolution in Viruses: Implications for Pathogen Resistance and Viral Engineering'. I've almost completed it, but three weeks ago, I heard about you from my Sister back in New York and knew I just had to meet you." The fervor in his voice didn't shock her. She'd met many 'superfans' of hers over the years.
'Alexander' rolled his shoulders, leaning forward toward her so she no longer had to crane her neck to look him in the eyes. "I was hoping you could answer some questions of mine, so as to refine it even further."
"Not perfect it?" She couldn't help but ask. That was the wording most used when pitching this kind of garbage to her, like she was a living encyclopedia on top of everything else people expected of her, wanted her to be.
He shook his head. "It's hard to improve on perfection, but I wanted to see if you could try."
Amy was already shaking her head back. "I can't."
Alexander tilted his head at her. "Why not?" His voice carried that same false cheer. Amy was looking forward to crushing it.
"Because I don't actually know anything about 'Inducing Adaptive Evolution in Viruses'." She scoffed. Her power did, and so, by extension, so did she. But try and have her write down or explain how to actually go about it to someone?
Way out of her range.
She told him as much.
And something in him seemingly stirred to life.
His smile fell away, in its place a disbelieving grimace. "What do you mean you don't know anything about it?"
"My understanding of biology is intuitive. I only 'know' what I'm doing when healing someone because my power is telling me how to the entire time."
The grimace disappeared. His face smoothed over completely, but his eyes were sharp, alive and alight with curiosity.
Then, he said something unexpected.
"Don't you want to?"
Amy raised a brow. "What do you mean?"
His eyeballs flicked to the right the same way hers did when she suppressed an eye roll. "I mean, don't you want to understand these things? Understand what it is you're actually doing to people?"
She knew. She knew all too well what she could do.
Amy feigned a shrug. "I heal people. That's it." She lied.
Alexander sputtered in disbelief, almost rising up out of his seat in his rather sudden agitation. "You do so much more than that. You have to. Healing could be construed as returning to a baseline state, how the body thinks things are supposed to be, but I read up on you before arriving here in town. Growing heart valves, curing Cystic Fibrosis, adding missing ligaments- These are things the body doesn't naturally do because it does not think anything is wrong. Every aspect of your body, down to your toes to the top your head and everything inside inbetween, is decided by your Genes and DNA, flawed or not, and flawed DNA cannot recognize its own supposed flaws, so for you to-"
"Miss, is this man bothering you?" A hospital security guard she hadn't seen approaching interrupted Mercer's rather loud and animated rant. He ground his jaw shut, glancing at the rent-a-cops' badge and nightstick in poorly hidden disdain as he leaned back into his chair. People inside the rest of the hospital cafeteria were staring at them, and she looked back at Alexander, who had crossed his legs and folded his hands politely in his lap.
His stare was heavy. Challenging.
Am I? It seemed to ask. Am I bothering you? Are you so easily cowed?
Amy hesitated a moment.
Was he?
Was she?
Lots of people had come to her about things like this, other doctors, other med students.
But he was the first one in a long time to use her real name first, instead of her title. Her job.
Her only use.
She waved the guard away. "He's fine."
The portly man hesitated a moment before walking away back towards wherever it was he'd been waiting, and Alexander leaned forward again, this time much quieter. "That premise is simply unbelievable to me. You must have some sort of understanding, some comprehension of what it is you do."
"A little." She admitted. "Lots of easy fixes. Like I said, my power shows me-"
"-Unbelievable." He rather rudely interrupted again. "Have you never described the processes involved aloud, to someone with a vested interest in listening whilst doing so, whilst you still retain that understanding?"
She'd never wanted to. Amy shook her head.
"Unbelievable." He muttered one final time, and the look of judgement on his face scalded her like hot water. "You could be doing things that actually matter-"
It was her who lost her composure this time. "The fuck does that mean? I bust my ass here every day-"
"For what?" He said cooly, and all the wind left her sails, because she couldn't even count the amount of times she'd asked herself that question.
"You slave here daily, without pay, without compensation, all for what? A few thank you's a day?" The disgust in his voice at the mere idea had her reeling. "If I had your powers..." He began, and then he trailed off in thought. He seemed to catch himself almost, his face twisting a moment before it went back to its now feigned, she realised, default state of boredom and amusement, the mania she'd witnessed prior vanished away like it had never been there.
"What?" She asked quietly, after a moment's hesitation. "You'd do what?"
Alexander pursed his lips in thought for a moment. Those lips twitched upward, and he looked back at her, eyes gleaming. "I'd make sure everyone in the world knew my name. In my university's lab, with access to all the cultures I needed, I'd cure every cancer there is in a year."
"Then what?" She asked.
He smiled. "Then I'd move onto something fun. Challenging."
She laughed despite herself. "God damn your cocky."
He laughed back. "I'm smart. You could be, too."
Most of her levity wilted away. "Could be?" She emphasized, more than a little insulted.
"If you applied yourself. If you went to school, read some textbooks, quit your friends, quit your studies, quit this bullshit, in ten years, you could be working for me."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "What makes you think it wouldn't be the other way around?"
His eyes narrowed, and something dangerous flashed in them, darker than even before.
He extended his hand out to shake once more.
Alex Mercer grinned at her, all teeth, teeth she could almost imagine pointed.
"Wanna bet? I'd get you started."