Who: Scott and Alex Summers What: A reunion When: Thursday, April 28th Where: Xavier mansion Rating/Warnings: none Status: Closed
"What does he say???"
"Uh, it's pretty clear. He's Alex Summers, and he's your little brother. He's here to see you, and he wants to see you as soon as we let him in." Scott just stared at the mutant who had the gate today, and shook his head. "Is he where the pickup can send up an image?"
The two worked on that forĀ moment, and then, there he was. Young guy... with...with... Scot felt dizzy. "I... think that's my brother. All grown up." And before anybody could stop him, he was running out into the hall, and to the main door He burst out of it at speed, jumped down the main steps and ran into the driveway, sprinting toward the gates.
They had been opened before he went around the last curve. Scott stopped quickly, just a half dozen paces from the guy at the gate. He looked a lot like mom. So much. "Alex? Oh my god. Alex!" He was almost unconscious from sprinting his world's best, and he shook his head to clear it.
Alex had been standing there looking annoyed and nervous, but seeing Scott break through the gates caused him to break into a huge grin. "Scotty?" he asked, rushing over and pulling Scott into a huge hug.
Scott could not have moved an inch if he even had his breath back. Suddenly, he held his brother again, for the first time in thirteen years. He could not have said how he knew for sure it was Alex, but he did, from the moment he saw him. There was that old resonance between them, and distance and years had not changed.
The "Oh God!"s and "Finally!"s distracted Scott from the sight of Erik's car pulling out from the far end of the driveway.
Scott was still speechless. He held on, and tried to breathe, managing a wheeze or two. "You... found ...me!"
Alex pulled back, whipping tears from his own eyes, "It was Erik. He found me living in Hawaii and told me he knew you. That he knew where you were."
"Erik?" Scott, his eyes glowing slightly from behind the visor, stepped back an additional half a step, looking Alex in the eyes and keeping a grip on his shoulders. "Not Erik Lensherr? He told you?" Scott was completely stunned by that.
"Yeah, Erck contacted me while I was still in Hawaii," Alex replied. "He picked me up from the airport this morning and just dropped me off."
Scott's jaw dropped. "You were in Hawaii? Oh man, do we have some catching up to do! Come on in, and let's get you something to drink, to eat if you need it, and find a quiet place to talk." He needed to know about Erik, but he needed to know about Alex even more. Later, he could talk to him about Erik. He would have to do that. "Come on."
He put his arm across Alex's shoulder, and they walked up the path toward the Mansion. A few of the others were out on the portico, wondering what was going on. Nobody had ever seen Scott bolt that fast, despite being a runner.
He stopped, Alex with him. "Folks, this is my brother, Alex. He... he found me. And that's most of what I know right now. I want to spend some time alone with him, before the rest of you get to grill him. So, how about just letting Charles know about this, and giving us a few hours to talk?"
Alex grinned slightly and raised a hand in greeting to the onlookers and then let Scott lead him up into the mansion. "Who's Charles? Your boss?"
Scott explained some of what actually went on here. If Erik had bothered with Alex, then Alex was a mutant, unless Erik was breaking his own rules of behavior. So, he explained a bit about that, as they made some sandwiches and Scott pegged four beers from the big cooler. "So, he's sort of a mentor and advisor. Those of us left here are all followers of what some of us call Xavier's Dream. For mutants and humans to find ways to live peacefully and in co-existence. Charles has made believers of a lot of us. But recently there's been a sort of schism." He grabbed a plate and led Alex back to the main stairs and up to the second story study, where, once Alex was in, he kick-pulled the door closed and set out the beers along with the food.
"Um, do you know why I wear these eyeglasses, Alex?"
His mouth full of sandwich--he hadn't eaten since really early that morning--Alex just shook his head no.
Scott wondered how to put this. Well, Alex already knew now that this place was full of mutants, people with gifts beyond the merely human. And he had not said a word about it. So, Scott decided to lay it out for his brother. "I'm a mutant, too, Alex. These glasses keep me from blasting you to Kingdom Come, because my eyes emit a continuous form of what one of us calls 'hard light', a weird form of energy that expresses as a wave front---. Never mind the physics or the physiology, because nobody really understands those. What I do is emit a form of light that pushes against things with incredible force. I can't shut it off, but one of the guys here figured out how to control it, built me a series of eyeglasses and visual control systems. So, I can control it, tone it down," and he moved his hand to the verniers at the right side of his glasses. They were pretty simple, but enabled him to demonstrate. An instant later, a slice of bread flew off his own sandwich, impelled by a red beam of dark light, and slammed against a window of a room, sticking to it. The sandwich itself was a mess, but Scott put it back together quickly. and stared eating it without the top piece of bread. "I can dial it up and blow the entire wall out, just as easily."
Alex sat back, looking a bit stunned. "Huh," was all he said for a few breaths. "There are a lot of... mutants, you called them? Dose it generally run a the family?"
"Not that many. Charles said, there may be as many as 10,000 expressed mutants, that is, ones with gifts or other mutations that have shown up, as opposed to being what he calls latent, or unexpressed. Sometimes. It's carried by a gene from one or more parents. It's likely mom or dad carried the gene." Scott stopped to think about it. "Do you think you have some mutation or gift? Sometimes they're not obvious, or like mine, they can express at different levels, at different times. I first started to 'see' better when I woke up from coma, after we crashed."
Alex nodded slightly as Scott talked, almost as if his words explained something. Still not saying anything, he reached over and grasped Scott's wrist. He looked intently at Scott as if expecting some reaction. After a moment or two his expression changes to confusion.
"Don't you feel that?" he asked, as the cheese in the sandwich in his other hand melted and dripped onto the floor and the unpleasant smell of warm mayonnaise reached them both.
"N-noooo. But I see something now. What are you doing? It's like a haze across your whole body, and around the sandwich. I guess you DO have a gift... I hope it's a gift?" Scott looked at what was happening. It was as though a million or more little spikes or sparks were erupting. Even now, it was clear it wasn't really a visible phenomenon, but something that Scott's unique vision had just picked up. "Can you FEEL the optical beams behind my eyeglasses?"
"I don't know, you'd probably have to beam them on me, or whatever," Alex replied. "This is the low level version. I can control it like this, just letting a little heat radiate off me. The other option is a bright and concup...concus...ive force blasting out in every direction. I'm hoping to control it more after some practice. But it's hard to practice without hurting things."
"Holy crap! That's almost as scary as what goes on with me." Scott thought for a moment. "Look, I can fire my beam at you, about as hard as I blasted that sandwich -- that's as low power as I get, right now. It'll sting. But maybe you'll have something happen like what I do... sensing the power rising around you visually. You might see that in me, rather than just the red carrier beam, or feel something other than being slapped hard by the force of it. Do you want me to try that? Maybe slap your upper thigh with my beams? It sounds pretty lame, put that way."
Alex nodded, stood up and braced himself, wincing before anything even happened. Scott let loose a short blast, as low power as he could. Nothing happened. Well nothing except Alex's chest was bathed in red light. "Huh, Didn't feel a thing."
Now that the powers detection and the fact that they could not actually feel anything from each others' powers, at least at low level, had been established, Scott wanted to find out how Alex's life. The best way to do that, he decided, was to tell him about his own life, in brief.
So, eating sandwiches, they trades off stories. Scott told him about how he woke up months after the jump from the plane, his mind sort of mixed up, and with brand new visual ability. Nothing miraculous, just improved in every way. But he had lost his memories, and had some brain damage. It took months to get out of the body cast and exercise to the point where he could do regular things again, and almost nobody had believed he'd ever get that far, at the beginning. He also remembered more, about Alex, about their parents, about things close to home, but nothing else about family. Just about Japan and Germany. He'd tried to find Alex, but the adoption people said they could not tell him who had taken him. So, he had gone to an orphanage, which had been closed (no point with scaring his brother with the stories about the weird things that had happened there), and he had ended up in the foster care system in Oklahoma City. An Air Force officer who had know their father had taken him in, and cared for him, along with half a dozen other fosters.
Alex shared stores from similar times in his life. He doesn't remember the crash, but he remembers a long plane trip with some nice people, his "new" mom and dad. He talked about growing up in Hawaii, how everyone can surf, how it was being an army brat, even one that didn't move around ever.
Scot then went on to talk about going to the Air Force Academy, and then training for fighter-bomber pilot. Decided to skip over the details of what had happened then. "So, I ended up the sole survivor i a second plane crash, under circumstances where I'd probably end up spending my life in a stockade. I was in bad shape with Professor Xavier and his people came to get me. They took me in, helped me. I was blind, that is, the continuous blasts destroyed anything I looked at, so for a year, I kept my eyes shut, until this guy Hank worked with me and some others, and developed these ruby glass lenses and a control system for my blasts. It's apparently the most expensive eye wear in the world!"
"Cool, I wonder if this Hank guy can make something to help me direct the blasts?" Alex mused.
With summaries done, he had to ask Alex about the family. Summers family in Alaska? Even as he thought about it, the images of Grandma an Grandpa occurred to him. "Alex, are you in touch with any of the family, in Anchrorage? I'm just now remembering them, for the first time in 13 years!" Scott was frankly stunned that he had never been able to recall any of them for all these years. And now, he was flooding with the memories. But, it didn't make sense. None of his records mentioned them, and nobody had tried to contact them about him. And the FBI investigation for him to be approved for the Air Force Academy, for sure, should have picked up on them. They had all of dad's records! So, what had happened. He decided not to bug Alex with all of that, but just let the first question stand.
"No, some how none of them were ever mentioned to me. And I guess they were never told about me, otherwise they'd have contacted me, right?" Alex said, sounding unsure.
"That sounds right. But even scarier, is that neither of us remember much. I didn't remember our grandparents, or Alaska! But we were LIVING there for almost a year before the plane incident. I didn't even remember that until a few seconds ago! That's just... not right. You didn't hit your head, and have any brain damage, or even a concussion, right?" Scott was beginning to wonder, had Charles been wandering afar in 1950? Because so far as Scott knew, only Charles and Vincent had that kind of power, and he was not so sure about Vincent. He began to think about some things, including what he knew about Jean and her telepathy, something that Charles had briefed him about. But why was Charles holding her back?
And how did Erik find Alex? "Alex, there's something you need to know. This Erik guy, I know him. He was working here, for years, up until last week, when he bugged out and took eight of the folks living here with him. He... asked me to join them. And I didn't. There's this... big fight developing between Erik and Charles. People are drawing up sides now. It looks like I'm on Charles' side. In fact, to some degree, it looks like I may be leading it. So... I need to know, how do you know Erik?" Wow, Scott thought, that is a lot to lay on my little brother before we've even really gotten to know each other again.
"He contacted me," Alex replied. "Um... like a few months ago? He wrote me a letter, explaining that he thought he knew my biological family was and that at least my brother was alive. We wrote back and forth a few times and then talked on the phone for a bit. Mom and Dad said that it'd be OK for me to to come visit not that I'm old enough to travel on my own. Though I should write them and let them know I arrived safe."
"Your adoptive parents. Wow." But Scott was getting bogged down now, thinking about what Erik had been up to. He could have mentioned Alex when he had tried to recruit Scott, even used him as a bargaining chip But he had not. He would need to think about that. But it also suggested Erik knew where the rest of the family was. Alaska. Was sending Alex to Scott some way of telling him 'I know who your family is', a sort of oblique threat. It was going to drive him crazy if he did not find out. "Well, I guess I owe Erik a vote of thanks, regardless which side of the dispute he is on. And you should let your... parents ... know. I'm sure a long distance call to Hawaii is going to be fine given the circumstances."
Alex shrugged, "It's like... really early there, so there is no rush. So do I get a tour of the place? Can I met any of your friends? I'm guessing you have some."
Alex shrugged, "It's like... really early there, so there is no rush. So do I get a tour of the place? Can I meet any of your friends? I'm guessing you have some."
Scott thought about that for just a moment. No matter how he had come here, Alex was his brother, and there was no way Erik had planted him here as a spy. So, he grinned. People would know Alex was Scott's brother. Rumor traveled around here at just under the speed of light. "Just about everybody still here is a friend of mine. And we all get along fine. So, let me introduce you around. There will be folks in the library and main living room. I'll want to talk to Charles to set up a time for you to meet with him, but I'll show you around first. Haylie and Kitty are right about your age, too. So come on. Um, after I show you around, I need to check in with Jean Gray about something important, and then speak with Charles, too, so you may not see me again until about dinner time. But somebody else can help you find your way around, and get you settled into a guest room."