Post by thecurtain on Nov 14, 2011 17:17:54 GMT -5
When Mac entered his 7th grade classroom that day, late, with a bandage wrapped around his forehead and bruises in many more places than were visible, no one said a word. Even if they had found the situation unusual--which they didn’t, it wasn’t--Mac couldn’t remember the last time anyone had shown him any sort of concern over his injuries. Everyone knew, if not what had happened specifically, where they had come from. Why they were there.
He sank into his seat, doing his best to ignore the unabashed stares from his classmates, the disinterest of the teacher to do anything to recapture their attention. His injuries were nothing unusual, and Mac’s missing class was a common occurrence by now. At first, it was his own fault, or so his mother told him in an increasingly hysterical voice. His powers, the magnetic field that seemed to always linger around him, would flare up at the slightest change in emotion--embarrassment at not being able to answer a teacher’s question; anger when his parents tried to force him to eat the carrots he so loathed; hurt when the other children began to tease him.
Metal, he soon came to realize, was everywhere. The desks at school were made out of metal, as were the chairs and many bookshelves. The edges of chalkboards were cheap metal, but they responded to him nonetheless. Pushpins in corkboards could be particularly painful if they managed to turn the right way on their path towards him. Screws and nails were ubiquitous, hiding even in innocuous-looking plastic and wooden furniture. And that didn’t even start on the bits and bobs his classmates and teachers had on them, by which they could be dragged towards him or pushed away, depending on how his field decided to react.
He tried to control it, and when he was calm, he normally succeeded. Even now, with the unwanted, judgmental attention of his classmates on him as the teacher continued her lesson, only his desk and the zipper of his hoodie were close enough to respond to him, and they offered only the merest signal at the outskirts of his awareness.
No, it was the emotions that made it difficult to focus. And the difficulty focusing made more emotions.
Mac held on until lunchtime--not terribly impressive, considering he had arrived just an hour before, but every moment without a flare up gave him that much more hope. Lunchtime was always hard, though. There were no assigned seats in the cafeteria, and he had never quite gotten used to sitting alone. He sat and slowly, carefully, ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, blue eyes sullenly watching his classmates socialize around him. He felt like a prisoner at the core of a spherical wall, a tangible embodiment of his magnetic field, which no one could pass through. Sometimes that deep loneliness would be what set him off, and the lunch table and benches would shudder and the wall would widen, pushing everyone further away lest they get caught inside.
But, he supposed, it was better than it used to be. In first grade, when his powers had first manifested themselves, their understanding was no better than his own, and they feared what they couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t predict. They feared that sometimes just sitting near Mac meant a rain of thumbtacks one day or a tipped-over chair another. The further they were away, they discovered, the safer they were, so they distanced themselves. And when Mac would try and follow, try to close the gap, they shoved him away with words some of them heard their parents mutter sometimes at the news: Dirty NEXT. Filthy mutants. Monsters. And when the words lost their potency, fists began to pick up the slack.
It was rare, these days, when he made it to recess. Today was one of those days, but it was small comfort. On one hand, that meant two hours without a significant surge of his powers at school. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine a lonelier time than recess.
Mac prodded the bandage on his forehead gingerly from his seat on one of the benches. Most of his class was engaged in a game of kickball, which had always been his favorite, and today, with two precious hours of success sitting like a king in his chest, he felt a little braver. When he approached the game organizer, their class representative, the ball rolling towards the pitcher for the next pitch went past him, suddenly unnoticed. The players had all stopped to watch him.
“Hey,” Mac began, reaching up to tug surreptitiously at a lock of blonde hair. His zipper stopped rattling with the distraction. “You guys have uneven teams.” They had been friends, once. Before his powers had shown up six years ago, Mac had had a lot of friends. Those six years didn’t mean he forgot how to act as if he still did.
“Yeah, so?”
“So?” echoed the other players.
Mac clenched his teeth, tugged harder. “So. That means you have an opening.” Was this brave or just stupid? he had to wonder.
“Ain’t no opening for you,” called the catcher from nearby.
“This ain’t NEXT-ball,” sneered one of the kids waiting for his turn at the plate.
“He’d probably cheat somehow!”
The class representative looked at Mac grimly. “We only got an opening ‘cause Harry’s still sittin’ there with a broken leg,” he reminded--everyone--pointing to the student in question. He was sitting on the bleachers, crutches by his side, glaring over at Mac. “The leg you broke!”
Mac’s scalp burned with the strength of his fingers on his own hair. “It was an accident!” he claimed hurriedly, sparing a glance over at Harry. He was one of the biggest guys in their grade, and only two weeks ago he had cornered Mac after school for the way the NEXT boy had made his desk rattle with nerves during a math test. Harry had gotten away with a broken leg and some bruises; Mac had gotten away with a cut lip, a black eye, a week’s suspension, and, as always, the blame. The nearby lamppost had gotten away entirely unscathed, aside from being uprooted. “I didn’t mean to--”
“Sure you did!” one of the more outspoken girls shouted from third base. “D’you ever see Rock Bison lose control of his powers and hurt anyone?!”
It was their favorite argument to make, and one Mac had no answer to. He had no idea how Sternbild’s Heroes managed to keep their abilities in check, but he envied them deeply for it.
“Problem is you don’t care about hurting anyone!”
“That’s not true!” Oh hell, this had been a bad idea.
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying!” Mac’s knee twitched with involuntary but desired movement away from the growing crowd of kids. Lately, his urge to run before situations could get worse had been getting stronger, since his control over his powers had barely improved.
“You’ve always been a liar, Mac,” the representative asserted, still grim-faced.
No amount of tugging on his hair now could keep his zipper from rattling in that peculiar way it had when he got upset. He was losing his grip on his field, faster and faster as some of the boys stepped threateningly towards him, as if trying to push him away. Oh no, no, why couldn’t they learn, why couldn’t they leave him alone?! Someone was going to get hurt again if they kept coming after him, kept making that old fear build up in his chest, drowning that kinglike feeling in mere seconds.
Maybe he was the one who needed to learn. Maybe he really should have left them alone.
“Stop! Stop, please stop!” he begged. He took off, but still they kept coming, chasing him, and shouting, accusing, their words blurring in his ears.
The approaching boys were still a yard or so away when the chain-link fence around the kickball field shuddered and the metal bleachers lurched; scrambling with his crutches, Harry limped as far away from them as quickly as he could. Mac had the fingers of both hands in his hair, pulling desperately, trying to calm down, but they kept chasing him, and the metal all around him responded as obediently as a rabid dog.
It was a cycle, really, a horrible one. Their anger fueled his fear, and his fear fueled his powers, and those got people hurt. Only one or two boys managed to get trapped, tangled in the fence as it tore screeching from its concrete roots, but their cries of terror and their pain fueled the others’ anger all over again. The bleachers were better cemented in place, so blind rage had plenty of time to nip at the boys’ heels as they overcame Mac, ignoring his cries for them--his powers, everything--to stop, just stop. They wouldn’t stop, though. Their fists and feet were rain, pounding and kicking and merciless, and he was quickly soaked in them before he could push them all away.
---
After Mac’s third time in their local hospital, bleeding from the head where some kid’s bike had struck him after crashing through a classroom window, he began to overhear his parents discussing him. At his mother’s suggestion of sending him somewhere else, Mac’s entire hospital room rattled, the instruments monitoring his vital signs nearly knocking him back unconscious. After the fifth time, the hospital began to set up a special metal-free room for him.
And his mother began complaining about the hospital bills, loudly, to his father, who just wrote more and more articles as if desperately trying to make up for it all.
In his first year with his powers, Mac missed fifty-six days of school and left early an extra forty-three. He only moved up to the next grade thanks to a good deal of begging and what he later suspected to be a good deal of money exchanging hands. The money, if it had existed, had lasted him until that day on the kickball field, but apparently it couldn’t purchase an excuse large enough for sending himself and a decent portion of the Hermes Junior High School NS class of NC 1970 to the hospital.
His expulsion meant a new school, and his new school meant moving. And Mac would have been okay with that--not like he had any friends left at this school, anyway--except that the walls were thinner in this new house; the pipes felt…stronger, more exposed, and he was constantly aware of the ventilation system.
Mac’s new school was all the way on the other side of North Silver, where no one knew him and any hint that stories of him had reached ears here were opposed by the fact that those rumors had insufficient details to implicate him.
“My dad had to move, because of work,” he lied to his eager seventh-grade classmates. He hated lying, hated stupid lies like this because it was obviously false. His father generally wrote his articles at home, why in the world would they have to move? Mac tugged at blonde wavy locks to keep his powers under control, but still he felt pings of metal all around the strange classroom. “I hope--” he added hesitantly, nearly not finishing his sentence “--I hope we can be friends.” He missed having friends.
The kids in the seats in front of him all nodded enthusiastically, beginning to talk at once, until the teacher laughed and calmed them down and showed Mac to his seat. With his powers a secret and his own eagerness for companionship, Mac had little trouble getting on with his classmates here.
But his mother looked more harried than ever. Like clockwork, every morning two or three angry letters would be waiting in their mailbox, and during dinnertime the phone rang with the voices of furious parents whose children were still injured. When Mac arrived home the Friday at the end of his first week at his new school, his mother collected the letters together and sat him down, reading each one out loud to him in a strained voice.
Mac’s chest tightened, hearing them call him awful things, slurs that hadn’t been heard in public since before the time of Mr. Legend, hearing their fury at him for what he had done to their children. There were threats of having him punished, arrested, beaten, and Mac’s mother continued reading even when he hid his tear-stained face in his folded arms; the pipes and vents and furniture screws hummed threateningly even as he tugged and yanked at his hair.
“Do you see, Macbeth?” she demanded, nearly in hysterics herself, when she was done. “Do you see now how sick you are? Do you understand?!”
He didn’t, though. He just felt awful.
On Sunday night she made him answer the phone calls himself. Monday morning Mac came into his new school with a fresh bandage wrapped around his stomach under his shirt and a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the dinner forks he hadn’t quite been fast enough to avoid. With the words shouted at him last night reverberating around his head, the world around him trembled that morning, from the moment he woke up, as if he were a moving earthquake epicenter. All it took to set him off was one of the other kids suddenly and accidentally falling into Mac’s desk on his way to the front of the room. And all it took for the friends he’d made just last week to leave him a wide berth were the pair of heavy file cabinets that threatened to crush him and those around him as a result.
With the fear and suspicion they cast in his direction from then on, he almost didn’t mind transferring to a third school.
He sank into his seat, doing his best to ignore the unabashed stares from his classmates, the disinterest of the teacher to do anything to recapture their attention. His injuries were nothing unusual, and Mac’s missing class was a common occurrence by now. At first, it was his own fault, or so his mother told him in an increasingly hysterical voice. His powers, the magnetic field that seemed to always linger around him, would flare up at the slightest change in emotion--embarrassment at not being able to answer a teacher’s question; anger when his parents tried to force him to eat the carrots he so loathed; hurt when the other children began to tease him.
Metal, he soon came to realize, was everywhere. The desks at school were made out of metal, as were the chairs and many bookshelves. The edges of chalkboards were cheap metal, but they responded to him nonetheless. Pushpins in corkboards could be particularly painful if they managed to turn the right way on their path towards him. Screws and nails were ubiquitous, hiding even in innocuous-looking plastic and wooden furniture. And that didn’t even start on the bits and bobs his classmates and teachers had on them, by which they could be dragged towards him or pushed away, depending on how his field decided to react.
He tried to control it, and when he was calm, he normally succeeded. Even now, with the unwanted, judgmental attention of his classmates on him as the teacher continued her lesson, only his desk and the zipper of his hoodie were close enough to respond to him, and they offered only the merest signal at the outskirts of his awareness.
No, it was the emotions that made it difficult to focus. And the difficulty focusing made more emotions.
Mac held on until lunchtime--not terribly impressive, considering he had arrived just an hour before, but every moment without a flare up gave him that much more hope. Lunchtime was always hard, though. There were no assigned seats in the cafeteria, and he had never quite gotten used to sitting alone. He sat and slowly, carefully, ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, blue eyes sullenly watching his classmates socialize around him. He felt like a prisoner at the core of a spherical wall, a tangible embodiment of his magnetic field, which no one could pass through. Sometimes that deep loneliness would be what set him off, and the lunch table and benches would shudder and the wall would widen, pushing everyone further away lest they get caught inside.
But, he supposed, it was better than it used to be. In first grade, when his powers had first manifested themselves, their understanding was no better than his own, and they feared what they couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t predict. They feared that sometimes just sitting near Mac meant a rain of thumbtacks one day or a tipped-over chair another. The further they were away, they discovered, the safer they were, so they distanced themselves. And when Mac would try and follow, try to close the gap, they shoved him away with words some of them heard their parents mutter sometimes at the news: Dirty NEXT. Filthy mutants. Monsters. And when the words lost their potency, fists began to pick up the slack.
It was rare, these days, when he made it to recess. Today was one of those days, but it was small comfort. On one hand, that meant two hours without a significant surge of his powers at school. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine a lonelier time than recess.
Mac prodded the bandage on his forehead gingerly from his seat on one of the benches. Most of his class was engaged in a game of kickball, which had always been his favorite, and today, with two precious hours of success sitting like a king in his chest, he felt a little braver. When he approached the game organizer, their class representative, the ball rolling towards the pitcher for the next pitch went past him, suddenly unnoticed. The players had all stopped to watch him.
“Hey,” Mac began, reaching up to tug surreptitiously at a lock of blonde hair. His zipper stopped rattling with the distraction. “You guys have uneven teams.” They had been friends, once. Before his powers had shown up six years ago, Mac had had a lot of friends. Those six years didn’t mean he forgot how to act as if he still did.
“Yeah, so?”
“So?” echoed the other players.
Mac clenched his teeth, tugged harder. “So. That means you have an opening.” Was this brave or just stupid? he had to wonder.
“Ain’t no opening for you,” called the catcher from nearby.
“This ain’t NEXT-ball,” sneered one of the kids waiting for his turn at the plate.
“He’d probably cheat somehow!”
The class representative looked at Mac grimly. “We only got an opening ‘cause Harry’s still sittin’ there with a broken leg,” he reminded--everyone--pointing to the student in question. He was sitting on the bleachers, crutches by his side, glaring over at Mac. “The leg you broke!”
Mac’s scalp burned with the strength of his fingers on his own hair. “It was an accident!” he claimed hurriedly, sparing a glance over at Harry. He was one of the biggest guys in their grade, and only two weeks ago he had cornered Mac after school for the way the NEXT boy had made his desk rattle with nerves during a math test. Harry had gotten away with a broken leg and some bruises; Mac had gotten away with a cut lip, a black eye, a week’s suspension, and, as always, the blame. The nearby lamppost had gotten away entirely unscathed, aside from being uprooted. “I didn’t mean to--”
“Sure you did!” one of the more outspoken girls shouted from third base. “D’you ever see Rock Bison lose control of his powers and hurt anyone?!”
It was their favorite argument to make, and one Mac had no answer to. He had no idea how Sternbild’s Heroes managed to keep their abilities in check, but he envied them deeply for it.
“Problem is you don’t care about hurting anyone!”
“That’s not true!” Oh hell, this had been a bad idea.
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying!” Mac’s knee twitched with involuntary but desired movement away from the growing crowd of kids. Lately, his urge to run before situations could get worse had been getting stronger, since his control over his powers had barely improved.
“You’ve always been a liar, Mac,” the representative asserted, still grim-faced.
No amount of tugging on his hair now could keep his zipper from rattling in that peculiar way it had when he got upset. He was losing his grip on his field, faster and faster as some of the boys stepped threateningly towards him, as if trying to push him away. Oh no, no, why couldn’t they learn, why couldn’t they leave him alone?! Someone was going to get hurt again if they kept coming after him, kept making that old fear build up in his chest, drowning that kinglike feeling in mere seconds.
Maybe he was the one who needed to learn. Maybe he really should have left them alone.
“Stop! Stop, please stop!” he begged. He took off, but still they kept coming, chasing him, and shouting, accusing, their words blurring in his ears.
The approaching boys were still a yard or so away when the chain-link fence around the kickball field shuddered and the metal bleachers lurched; scrambling with his crutches, Harry limped as far away from them as quickly as he could. Mac had the fingers of both hands in his hair, pulling desperately, trying to calm down, but they kept chasing him, and the metal all around him responded as obediently as a rabid dog.
It was a cycle, really, a horrible one. Their anger fueled his fear, and his fear fueled his powers, and those got people hurt. Only one or two boys managed to get trapped, tangled in the fence as it tore screeching from its concrete roots, but their cries of terror and their pain fueled the others’ anger all over again. The bleachers were better cemented in place, so blind rage had plenty of time to nip at the boys’ heels as they overcame Mac, ignoring his cries for them--his powers, everything--to stop, just stop. They wouldn’t stop, though. Their fists and feet were rain, pounding and kicking and merciless, and he was quickly soaked in them before he could push them all away.
---
After Mac’s third time in their local hospital, bleeding from the head where some kid’s bike had struck him after crashing through a classroom window, he began to overhear his parents discussing him. At his mother’s suggestion of sending him somewhere else, Mac’s entire hospital room rattled, the instruments monitoring his vital signs nearly knocking him back unconscious. After the fifth time, the hospital began to set up a special metal-free room for him.
And his mother began complaining about the hospital bills, loudly, to his father, who just wrote more and more articles as if desperately trying to make up for it all.
In his first year with his powers, Mac missed fifty-six days of school and left early an extra forty-three. He only moved up to the next grade thanks to a good deal of begging and what he later suspected to be a good deal of money exchanging hands. The money, if it had existed, had lasted him until that day on the kickball field, but apparently it couldn’t purchase an excuse large enough for sending himself and a decent portion of the Hermes Junior High School NS class of NC 1970 to the hospital.
His expulsion meant a new school, and his new school meant moving. And Mac would have been okay with that--not like he had any friends left at this school, anyway--except that the walls were thinner in this new house; the pipes felt…stronger, more exposed, and he was constantly aware of the ventilation system.
Mac’s new school was all the way on the other side of North Silver, where no one knew him and any hint that stories of him had reached ears here were opposed by the fact that those rumors had insufficient details to implicate him.
“My dad had to move, because of work,” he lied to his eager seventh-grade classmates. He hated lying, hated stupid lies like this because it was obviously false. His father generally wrote his articles at home, why in the world would they have to move? Mac tugged at blonde wavy locks to keep his powers under control, but still he felt pings of metal all around the strange classroom. “I hope--” he added hesitantly, nearly not finishing his sentence “--I hope we can be friends.” He missed having friends.
The kids in the seats in front of him all nodded enthusiastically, beginning to talk at once, until the teacher laughed and calmed them down and showed Mac to his seat. With his powers a secret and his own eagerness for companionship, Mac had little trouble getting on with his classmates here.
But his mother looked more harried than ever. Like clockwork, every morning two or three angry letters would be waiting in their mailbox, and during dinnertime the phone rang with the voices of furious parents whose children were still injured. When Mac arrived home the Friday at the end of his first week at his new school, his mother collected the letters together and sat him down, reading each one out loud to him in a strained voice.
Mac’s chest tightened, hearing them call him awful things, slurs that hadn’t been heard in public since before the time of Mr. Legend, hearing their fury at him for what he had done to their children. There were threats of having him punished, arrested, beaten, and Mac’s mother continued reading even when he hid his tear-stained face in his folded arms; the pipes and vents and furniture screws hummed threateningly even as he tugged and yanked at his hair.
“Do you see, Macbeth?” she demanded, nearly in hysterics herself, when she was done. “Do you see now how sick you are? Do you understand?!”
He didn’t, though. He just felt awful.
On Sunday night she made him answer the phone calls himself. Monday morning Mac came into his new school with a fresh bandage wrapped around his stomach under his shirt and a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the dinner forks he hadn’t quite been fast enough to avoid. With the words shouted at him last night reverberating around his head, the world around him trembled that morning, from the moment he woke up, as if he were a moving earthquake epicenter. All it took to set him off was one of the other kids suddenly and accidentally falling into Mac’s desk on his way to the front of the room. And all it took for the friends he’d made just last week to leave him a wide berth were the pair of heavy file cabinets that threatened to crush him and those around him as a result.
With the fear and suspicion they cast in his direction from then on, he almost didn’t mind transferring to a third school.