InsaneJournal

Who: Jimmy Hudson and, hopefully, YOU!
What: Okay, I'm pretty sure that Nightcrawler guy is dead...
When: The night of 10/29/2011.
Where: Random street in a busier part of the city.
Rating: PG-13 for language?

You’d think being a superhero was cool, wouldn’t you? Well, according to Jimmy Hudson, you’d be wrong. Maybe if you were an Ultimate it was awesome, but for people like him, it was anything but. Apparently getting your powers by mainlining some super-growth hormone like an eight-ball of heroin was okay, but being born with them wasn’t. Who knew? It wasn’t like being born with your powers made you any worse than anyone else. Giant Man was a fucking wife beater and he still had a legion of fansites, but even the saintliest of mutants would never get so much as a smile or a thank you, even before Batshitneto flooded New York. These days you could be Mother fucking Theresa and it wouldn’t matter if you had that one little genetic marker, that one little X-Gene that meant you were a mutant. Hell, if Jesus Christ reincarnated as a mutant, Glenn Beck would put a bullet in his head and get hailed a hero thanks to Order 3144.

Thanks to Magneto.

Jimmy wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack by any means, but even he could grasp the irony there. Magneto fancied himself the greatest champion of mutantkind there ever was, but in one single act he’d done more to set their cause back than if he’d resurrected Hitler. Sitting up in his thrown on Asteroid M and dicking with the earth’s magnetic fields to flood New York as if he was some vengeful god might have made sense in his insanely fucked up mindscape, but out there in the real world, all anyone saw was a mutant killing thousands of innocent people, some of them even beloved heroes. That was all anyone ever would see now, when they looked at any mutant, Magneto laughing as he snuffed out thousands of lives. It was why no one was really challenging Order 3144, and why so very few people really dared to stand up against it. Even people who weren’t necessarily for the wholesale slaughter of mutantkind wouldn’t stick their necks out for a mutant now, all thanks to that one terrible act.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turned out that not only were they doomed to a slow extermination, everything mutants had been told about their origins was a lie. They weren’t the next stage in human evolution, some great and inevitable movement toward a posthuman world full of superpeople. They were a mistake, an accident, a lab experiment gone horribly wrong. It hit Jimmy especially hard, considering patient zero, or Mutant Zero in this case, was the mutant known as Wolverine, his own father. Not only were they little more than an especially contagious virus, it was his own father that had unwittingly spread it throughout the world. What that meant, Jimmy wasn’t sure, but he damn sure knew that it threw a monkey wrench into Jean Grey’s little “Tomorrow People” movement. That was a fucking joke, one he was pretty sure Jean knew all about all along. They weren’t the Tomorrow People. They were just freaks of nature. The worst part was that if it wasn’t for Magneto, this news might have been a godsend for mutants. People like the Fantastic Four and, as it turned out, Spider-Man had all gotten their powers by accident, and they were beloved heroes to society. If it weren’t for Magneto’s horrible Ultimatum Wave, society might have started to see mutants as being no different from them.

Or maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what they’d started out as. Maybe mutants were doomed no matter what. Jimmy wasn’t sure. Hell, he didn’t even know what being a mutant meant anymore. When mutants were the next stage of human evolution, he knew what he was. He was a new breed of human, a minority in a world that hated and feared him, sure, but he knew his place in the world. Now? Now he had no idea what he was, or what he was supposed to do. He wasn’t sure who he could trust or who he even should trust. He certainly couldn’t trust Jean Grey. Bad enough she was working with Nick Fury, but now this? There was no way she couldn’t have known about this. That meant she’d been lying to them the whole time, lying for no other reason than to manipulate them into helping her achieve her own political agenda. That was why he hadn’t waited for her to get back. She was a smooth-talker even without her telepathic powers, and would surely have had a whole host of plausible-sounding reasons why she had lied to her new little foot soldiers. Jimmy knew that and wasn’t going to stick around to get used again. It was why he’d packed his bag and hit the road before she got back, and why he was left hitching along the side of the road alone. He was tired of all these high-muckity-muck mutants trying to use them. If he was going to find his place in the world, it was going to be on his own.

It wasn’t any one thing that tipped him off. He didn’t have a little robot to shout danger, danger, danger Will fucking Robinson. There was no little tingling at the back of his neck. Jimmy couldn’t have described exactly what it was, but since he was a kid, he’d had a cold something that uncurled in his gut every time there was danger in the outing. Maybe it was some fight-or-flight thing. Jimmy knew his father had suffered from some kind of beastial side effect of his powers, and Sabretooth sure as shit had the same thing. Maybe that’s what this was. Either way, something deep in the core of his being was screaming at him to GET THE FUCK OUT RIGHT NOW and he’d stopped questioning that right about the time he saw his first Sentinel kill. The poor kid’s flesh vaporizing off his bones was something Jimmy still had nightmares about. Forcefully pushing his thoughts to the back of his brain, Jimmy devoted all of his focus back to his surroundings and, almost immediately, knew what it was that was tripping him out. This was definitely not the dusty old highway he’d been walking down a second ago. This was a city street, a city street at night when just a second ago it was day, but most importantly it was a city street with people on it. Maybe most people would have been more concerned about the sudden geographic displacement, but Jimmy was most concerned that, if any single one of these people decided to, they could pull out a gun and cap him right now and be perfectly within their rights to do so.

Not that that would kill him, with his organic adamantium coating his skull and his healing factor functioning again, but he was pretty sure the Sentinel they called in after that would do the trick. He wasn’t sure what exactly was happening, but he knew damn well that it was time to make a quick, quiet escape before anyone decided to get froggy. He glanced around for exit strategies and located a nearby bench that would suffice for now. He suppressed the urge to vault over the back of it and instead just calmly went around to the front and slumped down into it, letting his bag drop to the bench at his side. He also reached up to pull the hood of his gray hooded sweatshirt up, but almost immediately thrust his hands back down onto the bench, hard. He’d noticed, as he’d raised his hands, that his fists were clenched and his claws were pressing up against the surface of the skin at his knuckles. Shit. Since Sabretooth’s brutal surprise attack, Jimmy had been jumpy, and sometimes his instincts kicked in before his brain could catch up. The cold thing in his gut might have been beastial or it might have been his common sense, but the increasingly feral thing in his hindbrain was definitely a beast and it wanted to fight. Setting his jaw and closing his eyes, he took a few deep breaths and attempted to banish the horrible, deformed, fanged visage of Sabretooth from his mind. Slowly, ever so slowly, he felt his claws start to sink back into their sheaths in his arms with only the slightest, barely audible snikt. He didn’t release the breath until he was absolutely sure they wouldn’t pop back out, but when he was, he let it out and slumped in the bench seat, glancing around with a mix of curiosity and paranoia. While his face was easily read, his voice was harder to hear, especially over the noise of the street. “What the fuck is this?”