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INTERLUDE
The small blond boy presses himself against the leg of his foster mother as she tries to get him to walk over to his parents. He shyly blinks up at the couple beaming down at him, standing in front of a big ranch with seemingly never-ending fields of wheat surrounding them. The man is big and beefy, with a big wide grin on his face. The woman is no less beefy, and Mark can already tell from the way her face is pinched that she’s the one not to be messed with. But she is smiling so very warmly, and they look so inviting.
He tentatively steps forward, one foot in front of the other, until he is suddenly enveloped in a bear hug. The man lifts him up and presses a cowboy hat on his head.
“Why, howdy there, son!”
Mark is five years old when he is adopted.
***
It does not take them long to become a family.
Ma is strict and demanding, but she ruffles his hair and cooks the best food in the whole world, always urging him to eat more so he’ll fill out a little and grow big and strong to one day take over the farm. Pa is always laughing, a big booming sound, and starts teaching Mark everything he knows, from taking care of the animals to fishing to what it means to be a man.
Over time, the lilt in their voices becomes Mark’s, and his childhood becomes one filled with happiness.
It falls apart when he turns 13 and things start exploding around him.
***
Mark is not crying.
He is a man and men do not cry and he is most definitely not crying in the corner of some foster home for freaks.
“Hey.”
Mark glares up, blinking at the blurry image of the black-haired boy gazing down at him. He looks to be around his own age, tall and gangly in the way of teenagers who’ve only just started hitting puberty.
“Fuck off,” he growls, and his Ma would wash his mouth out with soap for language like that, except she’s not going to do that ever again because she sent him away for being a freak and no, those are not more tears threatening to spill over.
“I’m Stephen,” says the boy, and sits down next to him.
“Are you deaf, Stephen? I said fuck off.”
He doesn’t seem to hear, and simply stares at Mark. No, not at Mark, at something beside him. Then he reaches out, and Mark jerks back – there will be no hugging, if there are hugs, he will blow this place sky-high – but Stephen isn’t actually trying to touch him. Instead, he grabs a fistful of air and makes a weird tugging motion, and somehow that knot in Mark’s throat eases, as does the hollow ache inside.
He blinks, confused.
Stephen smiles. “Sorry. Not sure what I just did, but I hope it feels a little better.”
And then he just gets up and walks away.
***
Stephen is okay. For a freak.
Knowing that he can hear what Mark is thinking makes Mark squirm uncomfortably, even though Stephen apologizes for it constantly and tells him how many feet away he has to be standing to be outside his immediate radius. After a while, Mark just gets used to it, and if Stephen ever slips and answers a question before Mark even asks it out loud, well, he lets that slide.
Just like Stephen ignores the scorch marks all over their room.
***
There’s a new girl in their class and Mark can’t stop thinking about her. She has dark ebony skin, yet her hair is so blond it’s almost silver and she has curves that do things to him and it’s an empirical fact that she’s the most beautiful girl to ever exist.
Her name is Dawn.
His hormones keep telling him to go talk to her, but his hormones are kind of morons, so he doesn’t.
Mark is watching her at cheerleading practice from the edge of the football field, sitting on the benches, all casual-like.
“Just think, one day you might even say two whole syllables to her.”
Mark cranes his neck up, and then flips his friend the bird.
Stephen grins.
Every time his thoughts trip all over themselves when he sees her Stephen gives him that knowing smirk, the bastard.
And then Stephen’s eyes suddenly go wide and he leans forward, watching Dawn with narrowed eyes.
“No way,” he whispers.
***
Dawn has powers! She’s like him, like them, just like them.
They wait for her after school and at first she seems a little confused as to why they would even approach, as far apart in social standing as they were. But when Stephen, in that gentle, carefully calculated way of his, lets it slip that they’re mutants, she is so relieved to have someone to talk to.
Mark did not think Dawn could be any more beautiful, but then she shows them her powers and he quickly needs to find something to hold in front of him. She has wings and they shine like the sun itself, and when she moves, they shimmer with all the colors of a rainbow.
Oh, and she can blow stuff up with energy blasts, but seriously, those wings.
***
“We should be heroes.”
Dawn’s eyes are shining. Literally. They glow sometimes when she gets excited.
Stephen tilts his head as he contemplates the idea.
Mark doesn’t need to think long.
He likes the sound of hero much better than freak.
***
“You think of a name yet?”
It’s night and they’re lying in their cramped little room. Mark turns over the cowboy hat in his hands, one of the few belongings he brought with him from home.
“…yeah.”
Stephen waits politely for Mark to tell him, even though he probably already knows. He’s getting rather good at pretending he doesn’t know everything.
“Texplosion.”
“That’s an awesome name!” Stephen grins widely, firing off his compliment before Mark even finishes saying it. He must have been impatient to share his opinion. “Makes me want a pun-ny name as well.”
He pauses for dramatic effect.
“PsyKick!”
“…psychic? I don’t get it.”
“No, Psy. Kick.” He enunciates the syllables separately.
“Oh!” Awkward pause. “But, you suck at actually kicking things.” His friend’s aptitude for sports of any kind is, to put it politely, below average.
Stephen huffs, offended. “Well, I can learn!”
He doesn’t.
Fails at trying rather spectacularly, in fact.
But then, he can lift cars with his brain, so what use would he have for martial arts anyway?
***
They are an excellent team.
Psy is the tactician, figuring out their battle plans and projecting them into their minds. Dawn is their air support, scouting out the area and blinding their enemies with her blasts. And Tex, well, Tex is the heavy hitter.
Sometimes things get a little dicey and an older hero swoops in, which usually results in a lecture, explaining at length that they are too young for this. They nod and solemnly promise not to be so reckless anymore, and then do it all over again the next night.
Mark is having the time of his life.
Over time, they run into other heroes their age and their little group starts growing.
But the core will always be the three of them.
***
One night, after an exhilarating battle against their first villain above Threat Level Six, Tex cups Dawn’s face and kisses her.
At first she kisses him back, but then it gets all unbearably awkward, and the next day she slinks up to him, apologetically telling him she just doesn’t feel the same way.
Tex smiles as if it doesn’t hurt to hear that and assures her everything between them is fine.
And it is.
Somewhere along the way the Tenacious Teens have become his new family.
***
Before Mark quite knows what happened, High School is over.
He’s a little lost, not really knowing what to do with himself now.
Psy, being scary smart, has scholarship offers from the most prestigious universities in the country, though he chooses to stay in Paragon. Dawn’s parents are paying her tuition. Tex does not have those options, and would rather not take on a mountain of debt.
He’s floundering, but Psy assures him that’s completely normal.
“No, really, I see it in almost everyone’s mind at university.”
So Tex just focuses on being a hero for now, working some crappy job on the side to make rent for the apartment he shares with Psy.
Dawn introduces them to her new boyfriend.
Mark does not want to be That Guy, that creepy, clingy dude who insists that his longstanding crush’s boyfriend is a jerk who’s not good enough for her and she should love him instead.
But Shade really is no good.
He is their age, but it’s hard to tell with that stick up his ass.
Dawn tells him Shade is mature, and that’s apparently a euphemism for fucking psychotic. Even Stephen agrees, and the mindreader should know.
***
Dawn is crying on his shoulder, and he pats her hair awkwardly.
He is not happy to see his friend in pain, but some small, vindictive part of him can’t help but be incredibly smug at her realizing he’d been right all along. She broke up with Shade doing the whole ‘Let’s still be friends’-bit and now he treats her the way he treats the rest of them, barely deigning to growl two words.
And then Dawn, apparently also somewhat vindictive and more than a little tipsy, tells him what Shade confessed to her before she broke it off.
It’s all Tex can do to keep a straight face.
He tells Psy when he gets home and they both just about die of laughter.
***
It’s when META invites Texplosion to speak to a number of the mutant teens in their care about being a hero that Mark realizes what he wants to do with his life. Some of these kids carry the same anger and despondency that used to weigh him down. Mark knows anger very well. He likes to tell himself he’s made peace with what happened when he manifested his powers, and he thinks that maybe he can help other kids do the same.
And so Mark starts working toward a certification as a META counselor.
***
Psy hasn’t come home in a couple of days.
At first, Tex doesn’t really worry all that much – Stephen’s been spending a lot of time with his girlfriend and it’s really not Mark’s job to keep track of where exactly Psy spends his nights.
But he’s not picking up the phone, and when Tex asks around, nobody else has seen him either.
***
The ground to his feet is torn open by a golden glow, and he barely keeps his balance when dodging the car flung into his direction. A piece of debris is flying toward him and Tex desperately jerks his hand up. It explodes before it touches him. The tiny shards digging into his skin still hurt like hell.
“Psy, stop!”
He is smiling at Mark, looking like he is enjoying this.
“Stephen, please! It’s me.”
“I know who you are,” PsyKick replies in a pleasant voice, and raises his hand.
Dawn tackles their friend, and she gets thrown back by a psychic shockwave, cracking the ground where she crumbles. She doesn’t get back up.
In the end, it takes an entire taskforce of heroes to subdue PsyKick, and even then he still manages to take out several of them, including a Nine.
***
Mark isn’t quite sure what he expected to see when he walks into the hospital room, but the sight of his best friend sitting on the bed in a straightjacket hits him like a punch to the gut.
“Stephen.”
Psy slowly raises his head, meeting his gaze. And then he smiles in what appears to be relief. “Tex.”
Mark tentatively sits down on the chair not far from the bed. The doctors told him to keep a distance because he’s supposedly prone to sudden lunging.
“It’s so good to see you,” Psy rasps, eyes wide and shining. “I’m sorry for hurting you but I had no choice.”
Hope blooms. Psy is clearly shaking off the brainwashing, he will go back to normal soon, everything’s fine. So Tex makes a dismissive hand gesture, his face lighting up with genuine happiness.
“Forgotten. I mean, it’s Paragon. These things happen, right?”
Psy nods and relaxes a bit. Had he actually worried Mark would hold that against him? Idiot, he thinks affectionately.
“Right.” He’s nodding still, and the motion looks a little manic. “I’m glad you understand. I mean, Mistress told me to do it and it’s my purpose to serve her, you know?”
Mark’s smile freezes.
***
The Tenacious Teens fall apart.
Everyone is always intensely aware of who is missing and why, putting them on edge. Frictions that used to be mediated by their unofficial group therapist come to the surface. It just gets too painful to bear, and Tex walks away.
So does Dawn.
***
Mark tries, he really tries to visit Stephen regularly.
But seeing his friend reduced to this is so goddamn hard.
“Tex, please,” he whimpers and strains against the straps holding him down. “Please, please help me escape, I have to serve, it’s my purpose, it’s eating me, please!” Stephen is crying and Mark tries to calm him down but he’s impossible to talk to when he gets like this.
Stephen used to be able to hold normal conversations, more or less, with the occasional reference to his fucking Mistress, before he would inevitably start either begging or yelling. But those times of lucidity are getting shorter and shorter.
Other psychics can do nothing. Several of them tried to pry open his mind by force, but apparently his defenses are just too strong. A heroine named Psychic Silk tried to assess the damage, opening her mind to his, only to end up in a three day coma when he lashed out. She declined to try again after that.
With every passing visit his condition gets worse, and never better, and Tex can do nothing but watch.
***
Stephen is subtly banging his head against the wall as he rocks back and forth.
“Please,” he whispers.
“No.” Mark’s answer is dull and tired. They have had this conversation a hundred times.
They don’t really have any conversations other than this one anymore.
Tex knows that he is the last one who even bothers. The others have given up, and tell him Psy is just never going to recover. Mark doesn’t believe that. Yes, they haven’t found a way yet, but new heroes appear in Paragon every day. And he has to believe that one day there will be a psychic strong enough to break into Stephen’s mind and fix him.
After two years of waiting for that someone to miraculously appear, his optimism is waning.
“Tex. Tex, why are you doing this to me? You don’t understand, I have to –“
“I understand,” he snaps. How could he not after Stephen kept endlessly repeating it? “You have to serve because your fucking purpose tells you so. Tell me something I don’t know.”
He instantly regrets his outburst.
Psy is silent for a long while.
“Okay.”
There is cold fury in his voice.
“You are cruel.”
Mark rubs the bridge of the nose. “I told you why I won’t help you escape, Psy, it’s not cruel, it’s for your own –“
“No, you are cruel. Inside. You think it’s okay to mock and belittle those you don’t like just because you’re nice to most people. That the things you say to them don’t matter because you are a good person. A hero.”
Tex’ lips part and he stares at his best friend. Stephen’s eyes are narrowed into hateful slits, a feral intelligence shining within.
“You’re not a hero.”
Stephen’s lips curl back in a sneer.
“You are a freak.”
Mark mutely shakes his head, eyes wide.
“And that’s why your parents couldn’t stand the sight of you.”
***
Mark is breathing heavily, slumped against the inside of his apartment door, and buries his face in his hand.
Psy…
Psy would never say something like that. Ever.
Psy is kind and empathetic; it’s not in his nature to say something just for the sake of making it hurt.
Tex finally sees what the others saw before him and what he has been too stubborn to accept.
That thing in the hospital is not Stephen. Hasn’t been Stephen in a long time. It’s just an empty shell with his face and voice.
And Mark starts crying because his best friend is dead.
Of Heroes And Villains:
The Ties That Bind By Minikisa An assassin. A fallen hero. An unlikely meeting. The road to redemption is long and hard and filled with explosives. |
 |
The small blond boy presses himself against the leg of his foster mother as she tries to get him to walk over to his parents. He shyly blinks up at the couple beaming down at him, standing in front of a big ranch with seemingly never-ending fields of wheat surrounding them. The man is big and beefy, with a big wide grin on his face. The woman is no less beefy, and Mark can already tell from the way her face is pinched that she’s the one not to be messed with. But she is smiling so very warmly, and they look so inviting.
He tentatively steps forward, one foot in front of the other, until he is suddenly enveloped in a bear hug. The man lifts him up and presses a cowboy hat on his head.
“Why, howdy there, son!”
Mark is five years old when he is adopted.
It does not take them long to become a family.
Ma is strict and demanding, but she ruffles his hair and cooks the best food in the whole world, always urging him to eat more so he’ll fill out a little and grow big and strong to one day take over the farm. Pa is always laughing, a big booming sound, and starts teaching Mark everything he knows, from taking care of the animals to fishing to what it means to be a man.
Over time, the lilt in their voices becomes Mark’s, and his childhood becomes one filled with happiness.
It falls apart when he turns 13 and things start exploding around him.
Mark is not crying.
He is a man and men do not cry and he is most definitely not crying in the corner of some foster home for freaks.
“Hey.”
Mark glares up, blinking at the blurry image of the black-haired boy gazing down at him. He looks to be around his own age, tall and gangly in the way of teenagers who’ve only just started hitting puberty.
“Fuck off,” he growls, and his Ma would wash his mouth out with soap for language like that, except she’s not going to do that ever again because she sent him away for being a freak and no, those are not more tears threatening to spill over.
“I’m Stephen,” says the boy, and sits down next to him.
“Are you deaf, Stephen? I said fuck off.”
He doesn’t seem to hear, and simply stares at Mark. No, not at Mark, at something beside him. Then he reaches out, and Mark jerks back – there will be no hugging, if there are hugs, he will blow this place sky-high – but Stephen isn’t actually trying to touch him. Instead, he grabs a fistful of air and makes a weird tugging motion, and somehow that knot in Mark’s throat eases, as does the hollow ache inside.
He blinks, confused.
Stephen smiles. “Sorry. Not sure what I just did, but I hope it feels a little better.”
And then he just gets up and walks away.
Stephen is okay. For a freak.
Knowing that he can hear what Mark is thinking makes Mark squirm uncomfortably, even though Stephen apologizes for it constantly and tells him how many feet away he has to be standing to be outside his immediate radius. After a while, Mark just gets used to it, and if Stephen ever slips and answers a question before Mark even asks it out loud, well, he lets that slide.
Just like Stephen ignores the scorch marks all over their room.
There’s a new girl in their class and Mark can’t stop thinking about her. She has dark ebony skin, yet her hair is so blond it’s almost silver and she has curves that do things to him and it’s an empirical fact that she’s the most beautiful girl to ever exist.
Her name is Dawn.
His hormones keep telling him to go talk to her, but his hormones are kind of morons, so he doesn’t.
Mark is watching her at cheerleading practice from the edge of the football field, sitting on the benches, all casual-like.
“Just think, one day you might even say two whole syllables to her.”
Mark cranes his neck up, and then flips his friend the bird.
Stephen grins.
Every time his thoughts trip all over themselves when he sees her Stephen gives him that knowing smirk, the bastard.
And then Stephen’s eyes suddenly go wide and he leans forward, watching Dawn with narrowed eyes.
“No way,” he whispers.
Dawn has powers! She’s like him, like them, just like them.
They wait for her after school and at first she seems a little confused as to why they would even approach, as far apart in social standing as they were. But when Stephen, in that gentle, carefully calculated way of his, lets it slip that they’re mutants, she is so relieved to have someone to talk to.
Mark did not think Dawn could be any more beautiful, but then she shows them her powers and he quickly needs to find something to hold in front of him. She has wings and they shine like the sun itself, and when she moves, they shimmer with all the colors of a rainbow.
Oh, and she can blow stuff up with energy blasts, but seriously, those wings.
“We should be heroes.”
Dawn’s eyes are shining. Literally. They glow sometimes when she gets excited.
Stephen tilts his head as he contemplates the idea.
Mark doesn’t need to think long.
He likes the sound of hero much better than freak.
“You think of a name yet?”
It’s night and they’re lying in their cramped little room. Mark turns over the cowboy hat in his hands, one of the few belongings he brought with him from home.
“…yeah.”
Stephen waits politely for Mark to tell him, even though he probably already knows. He’s getting rather good at pretending he doesn’t know everything.
“Texplosion.”
“That’s an awesome name!” Stephen grins widely, firing off his compliment before Mark even finishes saying it. He must have been impatient to share his opinion. “Makes me want a pun-ny name as well.”
He pauses for dramatic effect.
“PsyKick!”
“…psychic? I don’t get it.”
“No, Psy. Kick.” He enunciates the syllables separately.
“Oh!” Awkward pause. “But, you suck at actually kicking things.” His friend’s aptitude for sports of any kind is, to put it politely, below average.
Stephen huffs, offended. “Well, I can learn!”
He doesn’t.
Fails at trying rather spectacularly, in fact.
But then, he can lift cars with his brain, so what use would he have for martial arts anyway?
They are an excellent team.
Psy is the tactician, figuring out their battle plans and projecting them into their minds. Dawn is their air support, scouting out the area and blinding their enemies with her blasts. And Tex, well, Tex is the heavy hitter.
Sometimes things get a little dicey and an older hero swoops in, which usually results in a lecture, explaining at length that they are too young for this. They nod and solemnly promise not to be so reckless anymore, and then do it all over again the next night.
Mark is having the time of his life.
Over time, they run into other heroes their age and their little group starts growing.
But the core will always be the three of them.
One night, after an exhilarating battle against their first villain above Threat Level Six, Tex cups Dawn’s face and kisses her.
At first she kisses him back, but then it gets all unbearably awkward, and the next day she slinks up to him, apologetically telling him she just doesn’t feel the same way.
Tex smiles as if it doesn’t hurt to hear that and assures her everything between them is fine.
And it is.
Somewhere along the way the Tenacious Teens have become his new family.
Before Mark quite knows what happened, High School is over.
He’s a little lost, not really knowing what to do with himself now.
Psy, being scary smart, has scholarship offers from the most prestigious universities in the country, though he chooses to stay in Paragon. Dawn’s parents are paying her tuition. Tex does not have those options, and would rather not take on a mountain of debt.
He’s floundering, but Psy assures him that’s completely normal.
“No, really, I see it in almost everyone’s mind at university.”
So Tex just focuses on being a hero for now, working some crappy job on the side to make rent for the apartment he shares with Psy.
Dawn introduces them to her new boyfriend.
Mark does not want to be That Guy, that creepy, clingy dude who insists that his longstanding crush’s boyfriend is a jerk who’s not good enough for her and she should love him instead.
But Shade really is no good.
He is their age, but it’s hard to tell with that stick up his ass.
Dawn tells him Shade is mature, and that’s apparently a euphemism for fucking psychotic. Even Stephen agrees, and the mindreader should know.
Dawn is crying on his shoulder, and he pats her hair awkwardly.
He is not happy to see his friend in pain, but some small, vindictive part of him can’t help but be incredibly smug at her realizing he’d been right all along. She broke up with Shade doing the whole ‘Let’s still be friends’-bit and now he treats her the way he treats the rest of them, barely deigning to growl two words.
And then Dawn, apparently also somewhat vindictive and more than a little tipsy, tells him what Shade confessed to her before she broke it off.
It’s all Tex can do to keep a straight face.
He tells Psy when he gets home and they both just about die of laughter.
It’s when META invites Texplosion to speak to a number of the mutant teens in their care about being a hero that Mark realizes what he wants to do with his life. Some of these kids carry the same anger and despondency that used to weigh him down. Mark knows anger very well. He likes to tell himself he’s made peace with what happened when he manifested his powers, and he thinks that maybe he can help other kids do the same.
And so Mark starts working toward a certification as a META counselor.
Psy hasn’t come home in a couple of days.
At first, Tex doesn’t really worry all that much – Stephen’s been spending a lot of time with his girlfriend and it’s really not Mark’s job to keep track of where exactly Psy spends his nights.
But he’s not picking up the phone, and when Tex asks around, nobody else has seen him either.
The ground to his feet is torn open by a golden glow, and he barely keeps his balance when dodging the car flung into his direction. A piece of debris is flying toward him and Tex desperately jerks his hand up. It explodes before it touches him. The tiny shards digging into his skin still hurt like hell.
“Psy, stop!”
He is smiling at Mark, looking like he is enjoying this.
“Stephen, please! It’s me.”
“I know who you are,” PsyKick replies in a pleasant voice, and raises his hand.
Dawn tackles their friend, and she gets thrown back by a psychic shockwave, cracking the ground where she crumbles. She doesn’t get back up.
In the end, it takes an entire taskforce of heroes to subdue PsyKick, and even then he still manages to take out several of them, including a Nine.
Mark isn’t quite sure what he expected to see when he walks into the hospital room, but the sight of his best friend sitting on the bed in a straightjacket hits him like a punch to the gut.
“Stephen.”
Psy slowly raises his head, meeting his gaze. And then he smiles in what appears to be relief. “Tex.”
Mark tentatively sits down on the chair not far from the bed. The doctors told him to keep a distance because he’s supposedly prone to sudden lunging.
“It’s so good to see you,” Psy rasps, eyes wide and shining. “I’m sorry for hurting you but I had no choice.”
Hope blooms. Psy is clearly shaking off the brainwashing, he will go back to normal soon, everything’s fine. So Tex makes a dismissive hand gesture, his face lighting up with genuine happiness.
“Forgotten. I mean, it’s Paragon. These things happen, right?”
Psy nods and relaxes a bit. Had he actually worried Mark would hold that against him? Idiot, he thinks affectionately.
“Right.” He’s nodding still, and the motion looks a little manic. “I’m glad you understand. I mean, Mistress told me to do it and it’s my purpose to serve her, you know?”
Mark’s smile freezes.
The Tenacious Teens fall apart.
Everyone is always intensely aware of who is missing and why, putting them on edge. Frictions that used to be mediated by their unofficial group therapist come to the surface. It just gets too painful to bear, and Tex walks away.
So does Dawn.
Mark tries, he really tries to visit Stephen regularly.
But seeing his friend reduced to this is so goddamn hard.
“Tex, please,” he whimpers and strains against the straps holding him down. “Please, please help me escape, I have to serve, it’s my purpose, it’s eating me, please!” Stephen is crying and Mark tries to calm him down but he’s impossible to talk to when he gets like this.
Stephen used to be able to hold normal conversations, more or less, with the occasional reference to his fucking Mistress, before he would inevitably start either begging or yelling. But those times of lucidity are getting shorter and shorter.
Other psychics can do nothing. Several of them tried to pry open his mind by force, but apparently his defenses are just too strong. A heroine named Psychic Silk tried to assess the damage, opening her mind to his, only to end up in a three day coma when he lashed out. She declined to try again after that.
With every passing visit his condition gets worse, and never better, and Tex can do nothing but watch.
Stephen is subtly banging his head against the wall as he rocks back and forth.
“Please,” he whispers.
“No.” Mark’s answer is dull and tired. They have had this conversation a hundred times.
They don’t really have any conversations other than this one anymore.
Tex knows that he is the last one who even bothers. The others have given up, and tell him Psy is just never going to recover. Mark doesn’t believe that. Yes, they haven’t found a way yet, but new heroes appear in Paragon every day. And he has to believe that one day there will be a psychic strong enough to break into Stephen’s mind and fix him.
After two years of waiting for that someone to miraculously appear, his optimism is waning.
“Tex. Tex, why are you doing this to me? You don’t understand, I have to –“
“I understand,” he snaps. How could he not after Stephen kept endlessly repeating it? “You have to serve because your fucking purpose tells you so. Tell me something I don’t know.”
He instantly regrets his outburst.
Psy is silent for a long while.
“Okay.”
There is cold fury in his voice.
“You are cruel.”
Mark rubs the bridge of the nose. “I told you why I won’t help you escape, Psy, it’s not cruel, it’s for your own –“
“No, you are cruel. Inside. You think it’s okay to mock and belittle those you don’t like just because you’re nice to most people. That the things you say to them don’t matter because you are a good person. A hero.”
Tex’ lips part and he stares at his best friend. Stephen’s eyes are narrowed into hateful slits, a feral intelligence shining within.
“You’re not a hero.”
Stephen’s lips curl back in a sneer.
“You are a freak.”
Mark mutely shakes his head, eyes wide.
“And that’s why your parents couldn’t stand the sight of you.”
Mark is breathing heavily, slumped against the inside of his apartment door, and buries his face in his hand.
Psy…
Psy would never say something like that. Ever.
Psy is kind and empathetic; it’s not in his nature to say something just for the sake of making it hurt.
Tex finally sees what the others saw before him and what he has been too stubborn to accept.
That thing in the hospital is not Stephen. Hasn’t been Stephen in a long time. It’s just an empty shell with his face and voice.
And Mark starts crying because his best friend is dead.
Comments
painful
but now we know why Tex stopped visiting.
Wow!
I mean, just wow!
What a chapter. I really love how you're using these little interludes to fill in the back story.
This has been really, really good.
Dallas
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
The best writing on this site.
And it's polished to perfection, too.
Ripples
From one action, Amelia has affected so many lives.