Freya's Heir

DISCLAIMER: This is Whateley Academy fanfiction. I am not a canon author and neither is Buggycas.
Author’s Note: Many thanks to my beta and co-author, Buggycas.

Chapter 1
On New Year’s Day, there was an attack on the Nilsen Family Estate. The guests were all asleep, drunk or sober, and the only guards active were the perimeter guards. Fortunately for those inside, one of those guards lived long enough to sound the alarm, and the other guards of the Nilsen family came awake and were moving seconds after.

The floodlights were shot out, but the backups clicked on. In the resurgent light, the attackers were visible despite their camouflage as they climbed over the wall. It was required to be decorative and functional, so it was not as much of an obstacle as security would have liked. The attack was assumed, correctly, to be a reaction to the news story on the Nilsen family that had recently aired, where it had been revealed that they hired mutants for their company and were even shown stating that they considered some mutants such as teleporters to be preferable to baselines for some jobs.

Mutants had been around for several generations now, but it was only relatively recently that there were enough of them to affect everyday life. The past had seen the formation of a government agency specifically devoted to them in the United States and the other countries where they were most populous. There were papers published full of theories on why certain countries had conspicuously larger numbers of them than others and where they all came from in the first place. It also saw the formation of hate groups directed at them. One of these hate groups is named Humans First, and H1 buttons and bumper stickers have been showing up all over the nation.

A “regrettably violent splinter sect” of Humans First, their euphemism for the deniable group that carried out their more illegal goals was the group attacking. Not just to punish the Nilsens in retaliation but in an attempt to show the world that they could and would remove anyone too openly pro-mutant.

In this second endeavor, they failed, but in the first, they succeeded. The limited nature of their success was ironically due to the mutant-friendly hiring policies of their foes. Many of the in-house guards were mutants, primarily Exemplars and other physically enhanced mutants, but a few had more exotic abilities. Despite the surprise, months of planning, and a few ringers carefully placed both as guests and as guards of those guests, the intruders did not manage to make it inside the actual building, and only one managed to do significant damage before being overcome. Unfortunately, one had a grenade launcher and hit the bedroom window of the owner’s son and heir, collapsing the wall of the room and starting a fire inside.

Outside guards who saw the hit rushed to stop the attacker, and the inside guards rushed forward with fire extinguishers and first aid kits. The inside guards were confronted with an unusual sight when they reached the kid’s bedroom.

There was a bubble clear of fire and rubble, and two people lay in it, badly burned but still alive. On top was Sarah Lavender, assigned bodyguard for the fourteen-year-old Fredrik Nilsen. She had burns and cuts all across her back as if she had been sheltering him from something, but nothing lay near. Beneath her lay her charge, also burned but not where she covered him. As they quickly put out the flames, they noticed young Fred Nilsen’s eyes open. They were glowing softly golden. Once all the fires were out, he stood up in a stiff, unnatural fashion and spoke in an eerie voice far higher than his normal tones, “Do not worry, the boy will heal. I will see to that as part of my end of the bargain.” Fred gestured, and both he and Sarah floated out the hole in the wall and down into the hands of the newly arriving paramedics. Then, he collapsed and did not wake for two days.

Sigrun Nilsen Memorial Burn Unit - 2 days later

Fred awoke with a peculiar floating sensation and opened his eyes to see a white ceiling and the tops of pale green walls. After a bit, he decided he must be on painkillers and that they were why he felt so odd and was taking so long to complete a thought. He tried to say something, but his mouth was too dry.

“Oh, you’re awake? I’ll summon the nurse,” a female voice said. Fred was still trying to place the voice when he heard the door open, and the voice spoke again. “He’s awake and needs some water.”

Fred tried to look at the door, but something was stopping him from turning his head that far. Eventually, a pretty nurse leaned over and put a straw to his lips. He drank several thirsty gulps before she took it away again, saying, “You mustn’t drink too much yet. I’ll let Dr. Wang know you’re awake come morning. Are you in any pain?”

“N-no,” Fred managed to get out. Then more clearly, “Doped?”

“Yes, you are on painkillers. If you’re not in pain, I’ll just check you both out, then go back to the desk,” The Nurse said. Fred heard her moving around, then shortly after, he heard the door again. He managed to turn his head enough to see that he was in some sort of tank rather than a hospital bed and that there was another tank next to him.

“Sally?” Fred asked, recognizing his personal bodyguard. Her head was sticking up out of her tank with something horseshoe-shaped around the neck. She turned toward him and memories of that night started to come back to him as she spoke.

“Yes,” Sally replied, “It’s me, and we’re making lots of people happy. The doctors are happy because they have both of their burn patients together. We’re easier to treat if we’re in the same room. It seems the main problem with burns is infection once you get past the first day, and this room is set up to be easy to keep us clean and hydrated. We’re both floating in sterile saline with added medicines that are exactly the pH and salinity of our bodies, which keeps us from losing or gaining too much water. It also helps keep raw burned skin from touching anything for which I’m happy. Your father is happy the new burn unit he donated was up and working but empty. Both your parents are happy you’re alive, of course, but hard as I tried, I can’t take credit for that one. Security, in general, is happy because they can close the burn wing off without disrupting the hospital routine. We have men outside the door, and I have a button in here that I can reach to summon security as well as the nurse if we need it, but with a little luck, security won’t be necessary.”

Fred’s mind was still very foggy, so he was slow at processing all that information. “Uh, okay, what are these things on our necks then?”

Sally started to laugh then groaned in pain, “Laughter may be the best medicine, but it hurts right now. These things keep our heads above the saline, so we don’t drown.”

Fred floated a bit more, marshaling thoughts that slowly regained their accustomed speed and clarity. “So the best this State of the Art facility can do for us is let us float in big bathtubs until we heal?” That didn’t sound right to him.

“There were complications.” Sally admitted, “First, burns are tricky even for modern medicine when they are as widespread as ours, and second, we, neither of us, can take grafts. We’ll just have to regrow the skin the slow way, and the best way to do that without undue pain or chance of infection are these ‘bathtubs.’ It sucks, and it will take time, but we will be healed completely by the end with no scarring. That’s worth the time, right?”

“Yeah, but …” There was something else, and soon he had it, “Why did you say you couldn’t take credit for saving me?”

Sally looked over at him, her blue eyes wide, “How much do you remember about that night?”

“Well, I’m still pretty foggy, but I remember it,” Fred said, before he was forced to add, “I think.” He described the night of the attack from his perspective, “I woke up to the whooping alarm and got out of bed to see what was going on. I looked out the window and saw people attacking the house! I was still standing there wide-eyed when you burst into the room and screamed something at me.”

“I was telling you to get down,” Sally said.

"It was good advice but I was too busy trying to process my surroundings to hear it," Fred admitted.

Sally continued, “Yeah, the one guy who got a shot off inside the wall, and he had to have a grenade launcher. I knocked you away from the window, but the wall fell on us, and something started the curtains burning, which ended up with the whole room burning. I am an Exemplar, as you know, so when the wall fell on us, I was able to hold it up, but the fire would have killed us. Do you remember what happened next?”

“It hurt,” Fred said with a chuckle.

“Black humor aside, I’d really like to know,” Sally said, looking him in the eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me what you remember while I order my thoughts?” Fred asked, trying to cover that he didn’t quite remember.

“I passed out from the pain. I’m ashamed to admit it, but you stayed conscious longer than I did,” Sally read the look in his eyes and answered his unspoken question. “Because I’m your bodyguard, and when you’re a female in a mostly male profession, you have to be even more competent than most to get respect. I’ve tried hard to show I’m as tough as any man, and then my charge, the teenage boy I’m supposed to be protecting, turned out to be tougher than I am.”

“Well, you were also trying to hold up a fallen wall! It would have crushed me. I’d be dead without you regardless of what happened after,” Fred said before remembering something.

Sally noticed, “Okay, you’ve remembered. I know you have, now tell.”

“You’d think I was crazy,” Fred murmured, “I must have been hallucinating from the pain.”

“Maybe if I told you what everyone else saw,” Sally replied, “you’d open up.”

“I thought you didn’t know?” Fred accused.

“Well, I wasn’t awake, and nobody but you knows some of it,” Sally admitted, “but there were several witnesses who saw something unusual, and I’ve heard from them while you were out. Would you like to hear what they said?”

“Yes!” Fred said eagerly.

“Then tell me what you remember first,” Sally said.

Fred sighed, “Okay, if you answer one question first.”

“Okay,” Sally replied, “What is it?”

“You said neither of us could take a skin graft. Why is that?” Fred had thought of a reason, but he was hoping he was wrong.

“Everyone with my mutation has an enhanced immune system and enhanced healing to go with the more obvious strength and reaction time increases, but this also means that transplants and even the smallest grafts are rejected,” Sally explained

“Ouch,” Fred said. “That has to suck.”

“Well, it sucks now, but being an Exemplar has ups as well as downs. I may not be able to get a transplant, but I’m less likely to need one, and I can regrow a limb or even an organ if I live long enough without it. Other mutants have different problems and different pluses,” Sally looked over at him, “You are in the same boat. They have confirmed the presence of the metagene complex in your cells, and since they can't be sure of your powers you’ll be stuck here along with me. Now tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you the reports I’ve heard while you’ve been unconscious.”

“Fair enough,” Fred said, “I’m not sure you even noticed, but I was trying to help you support the debris. I could see the strain on your face, and I was trying to help, but once you passed out, I couldn’t support the weight for even a full second, and it looked like we might get crushed to death even before we burned. Just then, I heard a voice in my head asking if I was willing to bargain for the power to save my life.”

“Did you ask the voice who it was?” Sally asked, concerned.

“I accused the voice of being the devil,” Fred sighed, “The voice said she had once been worshiped as a goddess but was neither a god nor a devil in truth but merely a powerful force in a time of superstition long ago.” He swallowed nervously, “I wanted to question her further, but there wasn’t that much time, so I just asked what her price was for saving us both.”

“Both?” Sally asked, “I really hope you didn’t pay too much for me. I mean, I’m grateful, but I’m your guard. My job description includes taking the bullet for you. Not being saved by you.”

“I couldn’t just let you die while I saved myself,” He tried to shrug and couldn’t, “Anyway, it was two for one night in the spirit world or something because the price was the same either way. She stated that she’d recently come back to our world. Actually, she called it ‘our dimension’ after being trapped elsewhere for a long time.”

“Do you know where and how long?”

“No, I asked, but she said that she couldn’t describe where it was and that she was in what sounded like some kind of suspended animation.” Fred explained, “Unaware of time passing until suddenly back on Earth, but now that she was free, she had nobody, and apparently, her life force was ebbing a little each day.”

Sally gasped, “What did you do?”

“I’m coming to that,” Fred said defensively, “And it must have worked because we’re alive.”

“What bargain did you make to save us, Fred?” Sally demanded.

Fred closed his eyes as he answered, “She said that she had been looking for a descendant of hers who needed her help for over a year. That she needed a human body to house her spirit and that she refused to just take one but had wanted to provide fair value.” Fred heard a gasp from Sally but continued, “I said yes, but only if she saved us both.” He opened his eyes and looked in her bright blue ones, “I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up here. I don’t feel her in me anywhere either.”

“Thank you for telling me, but I’d advise you not to tell that story to anyone else, at least for a long while. We’ll need to get PR in on it so they can lay the groundwork. Hopefully, we can spin this positively if it gets out,” Sally frowned then sighed. “Okay, it’s my turn now. I’m told that when they reached us, we were in a bubble of light that was protecting us from further damage by the fire and the fallen wall. After they put the fire out and removed the beam, your eyes opened and glowed gold. Then you stood up with me in your arms and spoke about yourself in the third person. You said something like ‘the boy will heal’ and then flew us both out the hole in the wall to the paramedics. Once there, you passed out and stayed out until two days later.”

“Wow, that’s so weird,” Fred stayed silent and thought for several minutes. “Thank you for telling me. I agree not to tell anyone. I’d probably end up in a rubber room if I wasn’t burned at the stake. I hope you’ll help me keep it quiet? If she, whoever she is, comes back, I’ll explain it to her too.”

“Are you sure she’s not still in you? She might just be exhausted by saving us,” Sarah said. Unspoken was her worry that since it was a female spirit, it might have moved to her instead. She tried to search herself for a presence and found none, but she knew that wasn’t conclusive.

Fred tried to mentally shout, #Yoohoo! Anybody home?#. He was still shocked when he got a reply; it was more of a sleepy mumble than anything intelligible, but it definitely wasn’t him, and yet it came from inside.

He looked at Sally with wide eyes, “There was a response! Not in words, at least not yet, but a response.”

“Wow, well, if she wakes up, tell her to keep her mouth shut if anyone other than me is around,” Sally replied, “That and tell me everything she says when we’re alone. That is if you still want me as your personal guard.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Fred asked.

Sally snorted, “Because you had to save me instead of the other way around.”

Fred snorted in return, “I wouldn’t have been alive to do it if you hadn’t saved me first and gotten horribly burned in the process. You are the perfect bodyguard."

They spoke for a bit more before falling asleep again.

In the morning, the doctor came as promised. In fact, Fred remembered him from the opening celebration when the ward was donated; this was the head of the new burn unit himself.

“How are we feeling today?” Dr. Wang asked with an obviously forced smile.

Fred always hated people who smiled like that, so he frowned in what had become a reflex response, “We are hoping you’ll answer my questions. The nurse last night refused and said to wait until you were here.” Dr. Wang’s face was an interesting sight as it kept shifting from arrogance to fear and back. “My questions should be obvious, but if you cannot imagine what I would want to know after waking up in the hospital, then, by all means, feel free to ask. Only please do so in the proper person as bad grammar from someone as supposedly educated as yourself annoys me greatly.”

Fear seemed to win out on Dr. Wang’s face, “I do apologize for my inappropriate tone Mr. Nilsen,” he started, “You and your bodyguard were admitted after suffering second and third-degree burns and blunt force trauma in the attack on your family residence. You are currently in the hospital’s new burn ward. You may remember attending the opening.”

Fred rolled his eyes, “Is that a test to see if I’m concussed? I should hope so as the opening was less than a month ago.”

“Ah,” Dr. Wang said a bit nervously but also a bit defensively, “Yes, very good. These are state of the art for treating bad burns,” he said, gesturing to the tanks in which they floated. “They will keep you hydrated, as well as infection and pain-free until you heal and regrow lost skin. They even have state of the art sanitary facilities built in although the nurse will have to help with that.”

“Thank you,” Fred smiled. “Now, I believe there are some complications?”

Dr. Wang looked uneasy, “Complications?”

“Since you have made no mention of grafts, I assume there is a reason for that, and it wasn’t simply an oversight?”

“Oh, certainly! I merely thought you were aware of the reason already,” Dr. Wang replied.

Fred remembered a phrase he heard his father use fairly often when dealing with specialists, “Ah, I am indeed, but it is merely a layman’s knowledge. I would like to hear your expert opinion.”

“If I’m to give an expert medical opinion, may I examine you first?” Dr. Wang said with more forced joviality.

“Certainly,” replied Fred.

Dr. Wang put on gloves and gingerly inspected him, then moved to his guard and examined her burns as well. After finishing his inspection, he read both charts and had a quiet talk with the nurse. “Everything seems to be in order.” Dr. Wang said, then he squared his shoulders. “You will not be getting skin grafts for the same reason your bodyguard won’t. Apparently, the stress of the attack caused you to express inherent abilities that laymen such as yourself often call ‘mutant powers.’ With these abilities, you protected the both of you from further damage with a dome made of some golden energy and then levitated the both of you to the area set up for first aid. After which, you passed out and have been asleep for two days. You will get excellent care here, and with the number of security guards your father has in this new wing, I’m sure you will be completely safe.”

Fred smiled, “That was a good, concise explanation. Thank you. Now how will our condition affect our treatment?”

“As we cannot be sure what abilities you may or may not have, we are erring on the side of caution and not using anything known to be a problem for any of the known abilities. Therefore no grafts in case you are a physical exemplar.” Dr. Wang explained, “there are also minimal electronic devices as you seem to have energy projection abilities. Fortunately, those built into the tanks are well shielded because of the conductive and corrosive properties of the saline environment, so you need not worry about them. None of the other possible abilities require any special medical considerations. You may grow bored, but you will exit this facility in perfect health, I assure you.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wang.” Fred nodded, “Do you have a time frame on that?”

Dr. Wang said, “If everything proceeds with no unwelcome surprises, then about two months for an average person. The enhanced healing of exemplars will shorten that, although I can't say by how much and you will both heal more completely than anyone without your abilities. Your guard is more injured than you so you may heal before her, but I am confident in saying you will both be healed by the time two months have passed. Possibly much sooner, even as little as two weeks.” Dr. Wang put the charts back and stood up, “I’m afraid I have duties to attend that take me away, but the nurse on-call can get me if you need me. If you are ready for breakfast, I will have the nurse bring it to you.”

“Yes, I am feeling a bit hungry. How about you, Sal?” Fred asked.

Sally smiled, “I could eat, but I hope the food is as first-class as the rest. I’d hate to be stuck eating hospital food for two months.”

Fred grinned, “Good point. I’m sure dad will be by sometime today, and I’ll be sure to either praise or damn the food as it deserves. If it stinks too badly, he can always arrange to do something.”

Dr. Wang snorted and looked sour, but he turned to the nurse, “Bring them menus from the senior staff cafeteria. That should be the best we have and still be healthy to eat.” With that last instruction, he left, and the nurse followed him out.

Sally laughed once the door was closed, “So what did he ever do to you? I know you aren’t like that normally.”

Fred sighed, “It was that fake smile and supercilious tone when he came in. He was patronizing when we opened the place last month too. So I decided he needed a reminder. I wasn’t too heavy-handed, I hope?”

“No, I think you hit just the right note, but then that sort of thing isn’t my strong suit,” Sally chuckled.

Fred laughed, “So you’re the muscle, and I’m the brains?”

Sally laughed too, “Something like that.”