Who: Tim Evans [ION] and Alice Liu [KRAKATOA] Where: The Cafeteria When: Friday October 3rd, Afternoon What: Alpha Feels at lunch. Warnings: ALPHA FEELS.
Alice stood at the edge of the cafeteria holding her tray, wondering where to sit. She recognized the trope from high school movies, and she often imagined the tables sorting themselves into cliques: freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians… The difference was, people from all ages and all walks of life crowded the Facility 003 cafeteria. Add men and a little self-segregation, and the gathered metahumans might bear more similarity to Orange Is the New Black than Mean Girls. High school, after all, was only four years.
At a table in the corner, she spied one of the few other metahumans who wore a nametag like hers. Alice felt a certain kinship with the other Alphas, who understood what it was like, and she looked up to Tim Evans as someone who had made something of himself despite all their restrictions and his struggles with his powers (the opposite struggle of what she had). She strode over and nodded to the empty chair across from him.
"You're not, uh, waiting for anyone, are you?" she asked. By 'anyone,' Alice meant probably Lucy, or maybe another Operative.
Tim Evans had had his share of high school cafeteria feelings, both before and after finding out he was a metahuman. Always just that little bit awkward, he’d often found himself off in corners, alone, in his teenage years. He’d had grown used to it -- had taken it for granted, really, using that time to get homework done, and later as an adult using it to sort of team business, fill out his paperwork, write sappy notes to Lucy.
This time, though, he’d been lost in thought when she’d come up to his table, wondering about the mess going on. APEX everywhere, spies amongst them, Paul… it always came back to Paul. All this considered, her interruption was a welcome (and much needed) distraction, and a smile spread over his face as he looked up at her.
“Nope,” he said, nodding to the seat. “All yours.”
Alphas stuck together. He’d always believed that, had told himself that as a young metahuman when he felt alone and needed to remember he wasn’t the only walking disaster here. The older he got, the more Tim tried to take the younger ones under his wing, to try and make sure none of them ever had to feel that way. It took another Alpha to understand what it felt like, to have it shoved in your face every day: you were dangerous, you were a hazard, and you were never, ever, going to be free. That was the bottom line for all of them.
“How’s it going?”
"Alright, I guess." Alice sighed as she slid into the seat. She plucked a french fry from the pile on her tray and narrowed her eyes at it before popping it into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. She didn't mind the cafeteria fare, not having any other standard by which to judge her cuisine, and she could convince others to bring her food from the outside often enough, even if it was never fresh by the time she got it. "Kind of wishing this was Portillo's."
"Don't we all?" Tim said with a chuckle, albeit one that knew all too well how tiring cafeteria food could become after too long. "But it could be worse, right? Could be meatloaf day."
"Ugh," Alice groaned, rolling her eyes. "Meatloaf day."
She was quiet for a moment as she contemplated her tray. Then she looked back at Tim, glancing from his face, to his Alpha badge, then back to his face again. "Hey, actually, can I, um. Can I ask you something?"
“No, I don’t know why they make meatloaf when nobody in the history of ever has liked it,” Tim said, looking down at his plate of food as if he expected meatloaf to suddenly and mysteriously appear there, unbidden. “It’s like… the Nickelback of foods. No one asked for it, no one likes it, and yet it’s inexplicably everywhere…” His smile trailed off along with his voice as he saw the look on her face, recognized that whatever question was on her mind, it wasn’t one quite as easy as loafed meats.
“Of course you can,” he said softly, seriously. “What’s on your mind?”
Alice chuckled just a little, quietly, at Tim's meatloaf rant, but she didn't seem to feel the laughter. "So, you know, the first time you got to leave the Facility after you became an Operative?" she hesitated. "What was it like? What did it feel like?"
Tim bit his lip, looked back down at his plate again, shrugged.
“I don’t know. To be honest? I spent most of it a nervous wreck -- first time Operative in the field, wondering if I was really cut out for it, half afraid we’d run into rogues and half hoping for it. But…”
He paused, sighed.
“There’s… there’s something about fresh air. I mean, you know they’ve got ventilation here, that it’s really, technically the same -- hell, that the air in here is cleaner, if anything, since they probably filter it but... You step out there, and you take a deep breath and you remember there’s this whole world outside, full of people and… and trees. Birds -- birds. You do a patrol down by the park and you hear them and…”
He shook his head.
“It was overwhelming, because I suddenly remembered how big it all is, and how little I ever get to see.”
Alice mirrored his sigh, giving it the weight of her ache to know that feeling for herself. "Do you think it makes it better or worse that you actually got to, like, live in it for a while? When you were a kid, I mean. Or do you think you maybe took it for granted because you never thought that you'd be, you know." She gestured towards his badge. "A metahuman. An Alpha."
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He poked at his plate with his fork, as if it’d somehow offer him the real answer. “I think I miss it more, when I think about the things I expected to do, that I can’t, now. College. Road trips. Honeymoon…” That was a sore spot, no matter how many times Lucy told him it’d be all right, and he sighed again. “But I think if I’d never had anything before, the curiosity would’ve driven me nuts, too.”
He followed her gaze to his badge, to the little Greek letter that meant so much, then looked at the one on hers. “What do you think?”
"I think you're absolutely right," Alice said, nodding solemnly. "It's not like I've never been outside of a facility, but even when I was --" Alice's voice hitched, and she looked down at her sad, non-Portillo's french fries.
"I think I must have been five or six when I realized I wasn't normal," she said. "When I was a kid, I guess I thought it was weird that, like, there weren't any Agents on Sesame Street, and Dora didn't have to get a pass to go exploring, but maybe I just thought it wasn’t real the same way Muppets and magic backpacks aren't real. So I guess I never had any expectation that I'd grow up and do all the normal things, especially when all the adults I knew were metahumans, and being here forever was normal."
She picked up a fry and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger for a moment before setting it back down again, uneaten. "But even then there weren't that many Alphas," she added. "Even when you grow up expecting you'll be a metahuman, you never -- what are the chances, right?"
“They say it’s five percent,” he replied softly, the statistic he’d put in his head, so long ago, so many times over. The number that made him and her prisoners among the imprisoned. He shook his head. “But that’s not nearly high enough for anyone to… expect it. I guess it’s always a surprise.”
"Yeah." Alice tugged at her badge. Ever since reading Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school, she'd thought of it as her own scarlet letter -- they were even both "A." "And even after I got my powers, it took a while for it to, like, sink in. Like I thought I'd be an Operative and get to go on missions and patrols like you, or maybe I'd get transferred somewhere like Hawaii, or the rules would change -- but the rules are never going to change, and I'm not getting transferred, and I got rejected..."
She paused to wipe her eye with the back of her knuckles. "I thought maybe I could try again, but I can barely do anything in training, so I'm not getting any better, and I don't think they'll ever let me be an Operative. I know you just said that what you get to see is only a tiny part of the world, but it's still so much more than I'll ever get to see, and you use your powers for things, and I wish I could be like you." Being an Operative and a team leader seemed to be as good as it could get, for an Alpha, even though that wasn't saying very much. Despite Tim's own issues with control, Alice envied him as much as she looked up to him.
"I'm sorry," she sniffled, choking back tears. "You were having a nice lunch by yourself, and then I came along and made everything depressing."
“Hey, hey,” Tim said softly, reaching out to put his hand on hers. “You never, ever have to apologize for how you feel. Ever. Especially not about this.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t fair, this. It isn’t. But you have to keep hoping, you know? Some day, things will get better. Someday, APEX will be gone and… they’ll understand that the rest of us aren’t a problem. You’ll get to see Hawaii. Someday, somehow, you will. You just have to hold on.”
At Tim's reassurance, Alice backed down from the verge of tears, taking a few deep breaths as she tried to restore her calm. He was right: it wasn't fair, and she could be upset about it if she wanted. She grabbed a paper napkin from her cafeteria tray and used it like a makeshift tissue to dab at her eyes. "Do you really think so?" she asked in a small voice like a child. He was an Operative and a Leader; surely, he could speak with some authority to the future of the DMS.
“I do,” he said, with more surety than he really felt. Once upon a time, it’d have been absolute, would have been without any doubt creeping in the back of his mind. But after Paul, after all of this, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be that confident again. Not in anything.
“Besides,” he added, a hint of a smile, a shrug. “It can’t get worse.”