Beyond Evolution

There was nothing familiar or comforting to Gemma at Xavier's. She hadn't been at the school all that long -- only a few weeks -- but she felt horribly alone and adrift without a point of reference so far. A few people had been very nice, even kind, and at first, that had distracted her from the reality of her situation. It was easy to pretend everything was normal and fine when she was at the movies with a couple of new friends, having ice cream at the mall, or flipping through the pages of her new textbooks, but in the end, it was inevitable that something was going to rip away the thin blanket of pretend that she'd tossed over the truth so that she could ignore it a little longer. She was a mutant, albeit a cured one, at a mutant school. Filled with mutants. Far away from home. And no matter how many messages she left her brothers and eventually her father, no one seemed to believe that it was as bad as she kept trying to tell them. There were seriously crazy people here who had the potential to really hurt others. She wasn't kidding.

It was kind of like realizing that she'd been tossed into a snakepit and that nobody cared.

Every morning, she woke up thinking she was in her own bed at home, and every night, she fell asleep wishing it were true. Never in her life had she felt so completely, utterly abandoned, vulnerable to the abrasive social attacks of the student body at her new school. Gemma had missed her brothers so much this past week that sometimes, she felt nauseous with the overwhelming waves of sadness. It was hard. On this particular afternoon, she'd been driven to the clinic in the city to get the second injection of the cure at long last. A steady headache had been haunting her since then, but once she got back, she hadn't gone to her room. Instead, she'd settled outside on the back porch, where things were quiet. She wasn't really aware that it was usually used as the smoking deck, so it seemed like a reasonable enough assumption that she'd probably be left alone for a while, because it was plenty cold. No reason for any sane person to sit out there on the bench, wrapped up in a blanket stolen from the common room couch, unless they were Gemma -- horribly homesick and wanting nothing more than to get away from the people who kept telling her that everything would be fine soon.

It wouldn't be fine. Nothing about this place was fine. Couldn't anyone but her see that?

[ OPEN ]

Warren hadn't come back to the school straight away, even after finding out the truth from Lorna. He wasn't refusing to come back -- in fact, he told her that he would on Sunday. But given the timeframe, and the fact that he needed to be in a clinic nearer to where he was than the school on Saturday morning, he decided that it would be easier to just stay put. He needed the time to think through what he'd been told, anyway.

Annelise was his kid. His daughter. He still didn't even know what she looked like. She was his daughter, from the future, who had come back to the school. Also, her life was terrible and she wanted to kill him, but he needed to focus on one bizarre thing at a time. He wasn't really sure how he was supposed to deal with it. He wasn't freaking out, and he didn't know if it would suddenly ~hit him~ in a few days and he'd start spazzing or what. He had questions, more than anything else. He wanted to know if she looked like him, if she had his last name, if he and her mother had been married. If he'd been a bad father and that was why she hated him, if his family had been involved in the things that had gone on (and if so, why she wasn't protected from them by the people the Worthingtons were financing), all those kinds of things. And then other things as well, more relating to the present day. Like if he was supposed to take care of her now, if she was going to be around when his parents were and -- if so -- how he was supposed to explain it all, and what she wanted from him. Beyond dying, apparently.

And he didn't know how to ask any of those things either, so he was sort of glad for the excuse of staying a couple more days at the hotel. He'd been back from the clinic for a few hours now and was just laying on his stomach across the bed, while the television yammered something meaningless in the background. The treatments hadn't been easy on him. Emotional issues aside, he'd been experiencing a large number of the side effects, and for some reason the injections themselves made him feel incredibly dizzy for the rest of the day. Ridiculously large hotel suites were good sometimes, but right now he was wishing his was as small as the others so that it wouldn't be a trek to find a glass of water.

He turned his head away from the television, already starting to doze, trying to remind himself to find his phone and message Ali later. He wanted to apologize.


(Open to Annelise!)