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It takes twelve days, four hours, and forty-three minutes for Scott to snap.
It’s 1:43 AM when he decides he’s had enough of the school, of teachers, of students, of the fact that the world nearly ended twelve days ago, of everything and everyone, because there is nothing he can engage with now that doesn’t make him feel like someone’s dragging his brain across a slab of concrete.
He packs a bag, throws everything that fits into it, and leaves around three that same morning.
[---]
He walks.
It’s pitch-black out. The glasses don’t help. He stumbles more than once, narrowly managing to catch himself on his hands before face-planting into the dirt on the side of the road.
For a time, he isn’t one-hundred percent sure where he’s going. All he’s been working on at this point is “I need to get out”. His parents sent him some money to use while he was at school; he thinks it’s about enough to use for a bus ticket, if he can find a stop.
The night is mostly quiet. Scott’s not crazy about quiet, preferring the background hum of music or talking or something, anything but the silence that gives him way too much time to think and reflect. He’s always been like that, but even more so since… Since Alex had…
Since. Just ‘since’, alright?
So Scott focuses on his footsteps and the chirping crickets and not on anything that’s going on in his head until he finds a bus-stop.
[---]
Alright. So there’s a possibility he didn’t think this through.
Scott’s not from New York. He knows nothing about this state, never mind New York City and its layout. Every street looks about the same to him, and he’s pretty decently certain that he doesn’t have enough money to so much as eat a couple of meals here, never mind rent a motel room.
Scott finds a Burger King, orders some fries, and tries to gather his thoughts. He doesn’t want to go back to the school; going back after leaving without warning would mean facing Jean and Jubilee and Kurt and everyone else, but especially Professor Xavier’s disappointment in him.
He’s used to people being disappointed in him and the shit he pulls, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.
Home is out of the question too. His parents will either send him back to New York, or send him back to his old school. And there’s no way he can go back there, not when everyone and their mother will know why Scott wears sunglasses all the time; making him the only known mutant in the school. It won’t take long for his stuff to get stolen, locker vandalized, there will probably be some choice words about what a total freak he is.
There’s no family he can go to that won’t send him back to his parents, no friends either, so really… He’s on his own on this.
Boy, have I fucked up.
[---]
He sleeps in an alleyway that night.
It’s not actually something he intended to do; he only meant to sit, because he hasn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours, but he nods off. When he wakes up to the soft light of dawn starting to reflect off the windows of the nearby buildings, he realizes he slept through most of the night.
In an alley.
Where anyone could have come and cut his throat, because he’s fucking seventeen and not exactly a football player, if you get his meaning.
Get used to it, stupid, a voice in his head sneers. Because this is what you signed up for.
[---]
“Want a ride?”
A car has pulled alongside him. Scott opens his mouth to tell the guy to fuck off, he’s not a hooker, he doesn’t get into cars with strange older men and he’s not that desperate for money just yet-
-and then he realizes that he’s looking at Erik Lehnsherr.
“Oh, you are fucking with me, right?”
“That would be rather illegal, I think,” Lehnsherr says sleekly. “You’re, what- seventeen?”
Actually that is legal in New York, but Scott doesn’t dignify the question with an actual response. Lehnsherr may be old, but he’s not stupid, no doubt he knows exactly what Scott meant.
“Go away.” Scott starts walking again.
Lehnsherr keeps pace with the car. “Ch- The Professor is worried about you.”
“He’s not the first,” Scott remarks without feeling, although there is a small stab of guilt for worrying the Professor. He destroyed the guy’s favorite tree and he still took him in, for cripes’ sake. Xavier was a really decent guy. “Go away. Tell him I’m fine.”
“Are you coming back to school?”
“No.”
“Are you going home?”
“No. You’re Polish, right? How do you say ‘fuck off’ in Polish?”
“German, actually, and the phrase you’re looking for is 'Ich muss meinen Dickschädel aus meinem Arsch kriegen.'”
“That sounds wordy.”
“It gets the point across.”
There’s an alleyway coming up on his right. “Well, thanks for the German lesson, I’ll be going.”
“Scott-”
The brisk walk turns into a run.
There’s not nearly enough metal on Scott’s body for Lehnsherr to drag him back- safely, anyways, because it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Xavier would have a cow if Lehnsherr accidentally hurt him. Spry or not, Lehnsherr is still racing against a boy some thirty years his junior.
Scott gets away.
Once there’s enough silence and some thoughts creep in, he wonders if maybe he’s just made another mistake.
[---]
Tonight, he sleeps in an alley on purpose. Well, actually, tonight it's more of a vacant lot.
He looks for and finds one near buildings that appear to be apartments, so that if on the off chance an axe-murderer decides to go after him, at least someone might hear him scream for help.
It’s one thing to sleep on cement when you’re too exhausted to feel anything; it’s another to do it intentionally when you’re not ready to fall over anyway. It takes him maybe three hours to fall asleep, and he does so to the sound of cars passing on the street nearby.
[---]
“Hey Scotty, ease up!”
Scott held on a minute longer, and then let go.
Alex was grinning down at him. “It’s good to see you, dude! How are you?”
Scott bounced up and down. “We went to the zoo last week!”
“Did you? Come on, get up- you can tell me all about it.” Alex knelt down and let Scott climb onto his back. He was still wearing his fatigues, and boy did he look cool.
“How soon until you have to go back to the army?”
Alex laughed. “You trying to get rid of me that fast, little guy?”
“No!”
“Well, don’t worry, I’m not going back. I’m here to stay.”
[---]
“Hey, dude! You alright?”
Scott jerks awake, then jumps to his feet. “What? What?”
“Wut? Wut?” There’s a big guy standing before him, two more behind. Scott almost groans out loud; he knows what this means. “Why the hell are you sleeping outside, dude? You homeless?”
“No.”
“Then why are you sleeping outside? You pass out?”
“No.”
“Dude, you dumb? He asked you why you were sleeping outside.” One of the other guys says. He’s wearing a baseball cap.
The word ‘dumb’ is like a lit match getting thrown into the fireplace that is Scott’s legendary temper. “You woke me up, dude. I’m tired.”
“Ooh! Someone’s mad!” The third guy says. “What’re you gonna do, dude? You gonna, you gonna…” And he actually stalls there, like he can’t possibly come up with a short bullet-list of things people do when they’re angry on the fly. Scott internally labels him ‘Dumb-Ass’.
“Cool specs, man.” Big One steps forward and reaches up to, presumably, take off Scott’s sunglasses.
Alarm bells go off in his head, and he immediately slaps Big One’s hands away- in retrospect, with a little too much force. “Don’t.”
“Why not?”
Scott fumbles for an excuse. “I need them. I have… Eye problems.”
“What, you jack off too much, bro?”
What comes next is, without question, the single dumbest sentence that could possibly come out of his mouth at this moment. But Scott’s not going to realize that until much later.
“Yeah, to your mother’s Playboy spread.”
[---]
Some of the greatest revelations of Scott’s life have come in the midst of getting the crap kicked out of him.
The one that comes to him now as Big One lays into him (aside from the usual ‘I need to learn to keep my mouth shut’) is ‘Wow, maybe running away was a horrible idea that I should have never gone through with’.
These guys are professional bullies: After the initial punch thrown by Big One, Dumb-Ass and Baseball Cap shove him back and forth, pushing him from one to the other, then against the wall, then dragged back, then they shove him towards the street, then they yank him back again.
Scott thinks about taking off his glasses. But the memory of Anthony* getting blasted into the wall, however much of a complete dick the guy was, made him sick. Besides, blasting Anthony was an accident; this would be on purpose, and he’s smart enough to know what it would look like for a mutant kid to be attacking a bunch of humans, however badly they mean to knock the crap out of him.
“Y’know, I was gonna let you walk away,” Big One says, pounding a fist into his hand, “But after that smart-ass line, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you, and then I’m gonna take your glasses, just on principle.”
Scott’s figures he’s already in the belly of the beast, so why not: “Come on man, I don’t know what you’re so upset about- if it’s good enough to jack off to, it’s a pretty good spread, right?”
WHAM.
His glasses go flying off, and he quickly squeezes his eyes shut. Scott hits the ground, and then Big One is on top of him, grabbing him by the neck and shoving his face into the sand and dirt and gravel, which hurts like a mother-
“I’d ask if there’s a problem here, but I think that’s a given, hm?”
It takes a moment for Scott to recognize the voice as Lehnsherr’s.
Big One is off of him so fast it’s not even funny. Scott hears three sets of feet take off down the alley. His eyes are burning the way they did the day his powers manifested, but this time he’s pretty sure it’s because those assholes shoved his face into the ground and he might have a bit of dirt in his eyes.
Another set of footsteps walk over to him. “Good to know it’s not just me that you enjoy mouthing off to.”
[---]
Lehnsherr helps Scott up, and brings him to a wall.
“How did you find me?”
Lehnsherr snorted. “Son, ask Charles to tell you about our days tracking down mutants sometime. I know how to find people who don’t want to be found.”
There’s the sound of shuffling fabric, and then crinkling plastic. It’s only when he hears water sloshing inside of it that he realizes it’s the plastic bottle of water he had tucked into his bag.
“Hold still, and make sure your eyes stay shut.” Lehnsherr says.
Carefully, he presses what must be a handkerchief wet with water against Scott’s eyes, gently wiping away the grit pressing into his eyelids. Scott feels a little sick when Lehnsherr tries to dislodge the grit stuck into the seam between the top and bottom lids, knowing that if he so much as cracks his eyes it’s going to end so, so badly.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No.”
“Do you feel anything trapped in your eyes?”
“Not sure. Everything feels scratchy right now.”
“Hm.” The handkerchief disappears, and Scott feels Lehnsherr’s hand on his chin, gently guiding him to turn his head. “That’s going to bruise.”
“Where he punched me? Nah, it’ll be fine. I just absorb the energy and turn it into snappy comebacks.”
Lehnsherr snorts and continues his assessment. Everything’s manageable until he gets to Scott’s right shoulder, which makes him almost speechless with pain when he tries to move it.
“Not dislocated,” Lehnsherr mutters, “But it might be wrenched. Come, we’ll see if Hank can’t fix this.”
And what choice does Scott have but to hold on to Lehnsherr’s arm and follow?
[---]
It’s only once they’ve been driving for a few minutes that Scott realizes the depth of how shitty this is.
He’s run off without a word, he got beat up by a bunch of assholes and if Hank can’t help he might have to go to the hospital, he scared the crap out of Xavier as well as all his friends (oh boy is Jean going to be hard to face, with or without his ability to see her), probably his parents too since he’s still a minor and Xavier probably had to call them, and wow, isn’t that a great message to find on the answering machine when you wake up in the morning, “Sorry Mr. and Mrs. Summers but your only remaining child may or may not have disappeared last night-”
Scott’s throat becomes thick, and his eyes start burning again.
He doesn’t want to think about Alex. He doesn’t want to remember how Alex came home that one time when Scott got caught breaking into the school at night so he could mess with the football players’ lockers, how even if Scott mouthed off to him and tried to minimize what he did, his big brother’s criticism was a thousand times harder to take than his parents’, or anyone else’s for that matter.
But he wants it. He wants that criticism, he wants that “Jesus, Scott, what were you thinking?” He wants the exasperation and the eye-rolling and the annoying ‘I’m your big brother and I know better’ shtick. He wants it now more than he ever did when Alex was alive, and it hurts because he knows he’s never going to get it again, and now it feels like someone’s sitting on his chest and he’s having trouble breathing and all he can do is squeeze his eyes shut even tighter so he doesn’t lose it and destroy the car and kill them both-
“Scott? Are you alright?”
“No! No, I’m not fucking okay! My brother’s dead and I can’t even open my fucking eyes to cry like a normal fucking person!” Scott bursts out, voice shaky and cracking. He curls in on himself, hunching over and pressing his hands against his eyes to hold them shut.
This sucks. Every single thing about this just sucks.
A tentative hand comes down onto Scott’s back. After a moment, it starts rubbing in slow, soothing circles. The motions of it all, to Scott, implies an adult unaccustomed to offering comfort to emotionally unstable teenagers.
But Lehnsherr says nothing, and neither does Scott.
[---]
Scott cries himself nearly to the point of exhaustion over the next forty-five minutes or so. Lehnsherr is quiet, keeping his hand on Scott’s back the whole time.
Not long after he’s managed to quell the last of his whimpering, Scott feels the car slow and come to a stop. His stomach twists; now comes the confrontation, the explanation for why he did what he did.
But once the car’s been shut off, Lehnsherr says, “Do you want to talk?”
Scott sniffs. “I’d rather bite the bullet and go inside.”
“We’re not at the school yet.”
Wait- has Lehnsherr really pulled them over somewhere to have a heart-to-heart? Is that what’s happening right now? Is he going to get some ‘Your brother was a good man’ (he’s only just remembered that Erik knew Alex even before Scott was born) shtick, and how Alex would want him to move on? Because that doesn’t sound like Lehnsherr, and really, he doesn’t even know why the guy would get it into his head that Scott-
…Oh. Crap. That’s right.
It’s public knowledge that Lehnsherr’s wife and kid were accidentally killed by Polish police officers, semi-public knowledge that Lehnsherr spent a great deal of time getting poked and prodded by Sebastian Shaw at Auschwitz, and somewhat more privileged knowledge that all of the people Xavier and Lehnsherr collected for the original X-Men team are dead now.
So… He does actually have an idea about what Scott’s going through.
Scott mulls over this for a moment, wondering if there’s anything that Lehnsherr could tell him, anything at all, that might be worth remembering.
One comes to mind.
“Does it stop hurting?”
Pause.
“Would you like me to tell the truth, or would you like me to make you feel better?”
Scott represses the urge to groan. “Truth.”
“It hurts now, it will hurt tomorrow, it will hurt next month and it will hurt twenty years from now.” Another pause. Scott hated that he couldn’t see what Lehnsherr’s expression was. “How much it hurts depends on how you deal with it. Running away is not dealing with it.”
“Yeah, I hear you’re the authority on healthy coping mechanisms.”
“Consider me a cautionary example of what happens when you don’t deal with your problems.”
“I’ll lose it and help a lunatic mutant try to destroy the world?”
Lehnsherr doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes.”
[---]
Xavier is waiting for them
“Scott,” Scott feels the shame set in when he hears the relief in Xavier’s voice. “Are you alright?” He starts a little when he feels Xavier’s hand touch his arm.
Scott allows himself to gently be pulled down into a hug, wincing when it agitates his shoulder. In comparison, his eyes feel quite a bit better; whatever dirt was still there must have been flushed out from the crying. It’s silent when he pulls out of the hug, and he realizes Xavier wants an answer. “Arm hurts,” He mutters.
“How badly?” Scott shrugs reflexively, and flinches when his shoulder moves. “Hank’s inside, I’ll let him know you’re back.” A pause, and a hand squeezes Scott’s arm. “Scott, why did you leave? What happened?”
Scott’s throat closes up again, and he realizes that maybe he hasn’t gotten out all the tears yet. Maybe he never will. But he really doesn’t feel like pouring his heart out on the front lawn where everyone can see him.
“It’s only us here, Scott. You, me, and Erik.”
Scott frowns. “You read my mind,” He accuses.
“No, I saw you turning your head and listening for anyone else who might be nearby.” Xavier explains calmly, and Scott flushes with embarrassment. “Scott, it’s fine, I’m used to it. Besides, I may not be reading your mind right now, but I can feel a bit of what you’re feeling.” The hand squeezes again. “And it doesn’t feel good.”
Scott leans back against the hood of the car. His fingers hurt- he’s been clenching them way too tightly, a way of keeping a lid on any errant emotions. “Can’t you just… Look? You know?”
“I’d rather you talk about it yourself,” Xavier says gently. “Is it to do with Alex?”
It feels like getting punched right in the gut.
Especially since he’s standing right about where he was when he’d realized Alex might be dead.
Scott doesn’t respond, less because he doesn’t want to and more because he thinks he might start crying again and God damn it he is not doing that where everyone can see him.
Xavier seems to take it as confirmation anyway. “It’s alright. We can talk about it later. Let’s go see Hank about your arm, hm? Here- hold onto the back of my chair, you can follow me in.”
Scott knows the next couple of hours, days, weeks, months, are going to be unpleasant. He’s probably going to end up in a sling, he’ll have to face Jean and Kurt and Jubilee, he knows the professor probably won’t rest until Scott’s aired out some of his grief, he’ll inevitably have to talk to his parents too. There’s so much he’s going to have to do, and all of it is going to suck.
But… Well, at least he knows where he’s going.
-End