#mecalledspeed

@mecalledspeed

It was a run of the mill day. Cause some mayhem, bring attention to the stark inequality between humans and mutants, encourage an open dialogue about the situation while also punching Shaw in his dumb smug face. The usual for a Sunday morning.

And then Wiccan had said uh oh.

Speed had turned to him, eyes wide - uh oh was his word, uh oh was what you said when things were about to go completely pear shaped and Uncle Pietro wasn’t around to blame.

Uh oh had come at him in the form of a blast of blue light, searing pain, and an innate sense of displacement that he had only ever experienced the first handful of times he shifted his molecules through a wall. A sudden sense of wrongness, of not being where you were seconds before.

Thomas Magnus’ first lucid thought upon waking was a simple one. Mother is going to have a conniption fit. His head hurts and he’s pretty sure his suit is in tatters, but he checks all his limbs and finds only a cut from where his head hit the pavement. It’ll heal fast.

The skyline is unfamiliar.  There are no sentinels in the sky.  No banners declaring the House of M the rightful monarchy.

Uh oh indeed.  Tommy’s run three circuits of the unfamiliar city, trying to find his way back to the palace -- but this isn’t Genosha. And when he finally stops to ask where he is and where in Doom’s name Genosha is, he only gets alarmed looks and people hurriedly walking away.

There are more humans than mutants.

He tugs the goggles off his face in the bathroom of some shop, strips down to his civvies and stuffs his suit in a plastic bag. He’s dressed way too nicely to blend in, and the more people stare at him, the more unnerved he feels. 

There’s not a physical mutation in sight. 

It’s one of those days. The days that remind Tommy that David’s been to hell and back (literally) and he has his own scars underneath it all.

But it’s the survivor's guilt that gets you. He knows. Because sometimes he still wakes up with nightmares of bodies crushed under rubble and the way Cassie had looked so small crumpled on the ground like that.

Maybe they should stop seeing David’s friends. 

It’s a cruel thought, one that he wouldn’t dare voice out loud because David loves his friends the same way Tommy loves the Young Avengers. But all of them are damaged. Well beyond repair, probably.  Elixir has the same thousand yard stare that Billy did after they found Wanda and found that the answers weren’t worth the cost. Anole smiles in the fake sort of way that tells him that he’s seconds away from heartbreak and he’s getting tired of playing at being strong. And though Hellion seemed to be the most in tact mentally, the startling lack of hands gets him every time. He plays wrangler, loud and boisterous to cover up the silence the other two exude.

There had been more of them last time. He thinks he should tell them to quit, but they won’t.

They can’t.

They’ve been browbeaten into thinking that they owe the world their blood, sweat and tears because it burdened them with some shitty powers that have only ever hurt them.

Elixir’s got to heal the world, Anole’s an X-Men which means his life is forfeit until this world ends, and Helion’s recovering from M-Pox and so he takes care of them both because their once enormous group has thinned to just these guys here. And some days are easier than others. Sometimes they engage David the way they must have when they were young (christ, tommy always feels sick when he thinks about it, it’s not as if they’re old yet) and sometimes it’s all silence and mourning.

And he once would’ve bailed on that. Instead he stays put, talking with Julian while he hears David try to cajole his friends into speaking more than a handful of disjointed words.

It’s been a hard day.

He doesn’t say much when David leans against him. Just slings an arm around him and draws him close, resting his cheek against the top of his head and pressing a kiss to it.

“I love you,” David says quietly, so quietly Tommy almost misses it. You would think after five years it gets easier to hear, it means a little less, but it never does.

“Love you too,” he murmurs even quieter. He rubs his arm, and the gesture is so sweet and subtle it would have made him panic at the start. But domesticity suits him, suits them, and the older he gets, the more broken people he sees, the less he wants to be on the streets throwing his fists at every problem like it’s doing any more than treating the symptoms of a terminal disease. “You wanna hit the hay early?”

“You’re not? Give me a chance to show you, gorgeous.” He laughed too, “Hey, at least I’m laying it on at all. I had to talk my friend in to going for it with a girl the other day. Though, to be fair, she was obviously interested. If you want me to back off, I can.”

“Tommmmmmmmmmmmmmyyyyyyyyy.”

mecalledspeed started following you

Sarah frowned as she looked up to the man who had very nearly run her over. The flash of annoyance annoyance died when she saw his face.

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