“Do you think he's got to report to the neighbors?” Fir asked, swinging around on the roof-bar of the trolley. He let the lurch around a turn swing him uncomfortably close to Seth's face. “You know, like they make pedophiles do these days. Which, personally, I think would be counterproductive in the case of pedophiles.”
Decon reflected privately that Seth had either taken a fistful of valium before undertaking this mission, or had prepared this morning by drawing deep of a bottomless well of patience. And still, her eyes narrowed at Fir.
“Hello, I'm a genocidal maniac. Won't you be my neighbor?”
“No, I don't think so,” she replied.
Touche, said the rise of Fir's eyebrows. He let his gaze sweep to Decon, who sat watching them, bottom lip gripped firmly between his teeth so his incessant smiling wouldn't reveal how amusing he thought this tête-à-tête was. Looking guilty, he let his lip loose only to barely manage a restrained grin.
“The cat that ate the canary,” Fir mumbled at him, then let loose a grin of his own. The effect was unsettling. Only a week or two ago he'd been a vegetable. Now, while it was clear he had a sense of humor, no one was really quite certain which part of the jokes he thought was funny. To say that his behavior was 'erratic' was to impart to it more regularity than it deserved. Two days ago, he'd sat stock still in the window seat of their living room for the entire day, neither eating, sleeping, nor blinking.
In a fit of desperate worry for the state of his eyes, Decon had thrown a cup of water at his face. That only made his head turn. Decon still got the shivers thinking of it.
“What do you think of our charitable mission to the meek, St. Francis?”
Decon opened his mouth to respond first to the nickname, then to the metaphor, then to the confused combination of the two, only to come up silent. Better part of valor, benefit of the doubt, turn the other cheek, and all that. Fir had just stopped being inert. “I don't know, man – the World Court says he's paid his dues, the dude has assassins going after him, I don't know what to say.”
“Ha! World Court!” But taking a look around when he's nodding as if everyone knows what he's talking about reveals that nobody does. He finished in a resigned mutter, “Where were they in '78?”
They stared at one another as the trolley clacked on.
“Uh, ruling that the UK wasn't guilty of torture in Northern Ireland?” Seth tried, head cocked to the side.
“...I'm not so good at history,” Decon muttered apologetically. His cheeks reddened. “Get all the dates backward.”
“The recall of the Pinto,” Wes said. They stared at him. It was the first time he'd spoken all morning. Decon had obviously forgotten he was there, since he jumped like someone had popped a paper bag behind his head.
“Um,” Wes said, while everyone was staring at him. If it were possible to will himself out of existence, Wes would've chosen that moment to do so. Then again, that described many moments in his life.
“My– uh, the... he... really liked the Pinto.”
Since they all knew 'he' was Wes' father figure, and the person currently serving time for kidnapping, along with every category of child abuse, Wes received a range of looks from shock to disgust to a crippling amount of pity.
Abject and uncomfortable silence fell over them. Though he kept it to himself, Wes was pleased to have a moment of his status quo.
“Well, fuck this guy, is all I'm saying,” Fir said to Seth.
“Not your kind,” he added to Wes, with a look somewhere between horrified and apologetic, “but fuck him.”
Wes stared.
“What happened for you in '78?” Decon asked, praying that everyone forget that avenue of conversation was opened, or possible, or even a grammatical and comprehensible construction of the English language, may it please God.
“I don't know,” Fir said, a moment of familiar, disembodied confusion passing over his face. “Wasn't I dead by then? Annie Hall over Star Wars is all I can think of. Like I want to see an asshole jack off over a person he made up for an hour and a half. I'll take space shit over that shit any day.”
Like the intense awkwardness that embodied Wes' moments of clarity, these moments where Fir did or said things he didn't understand were passed over with uncomfortable recognition marked by polite refusals to look at him.
Fir shook his head like a dog.
“I remember, though, guys,” Fir shook his head again, but this was an entirely human gesture, “and girl... lady.” He nodded to Seth, uncomfortably. “Woman. People. I remember, everybody.”
Fir clenched his fists, momentarily surrendering himself to the trolly's lurching as he put them up to his mouth with eyes scrunched shut. “I fucking remember... what it... was like. To live... back then... we all knew it was coming, for fuck's sake,” Fir said, throwing his hands back up just in time to stop himself from falling – though this didn't affect his expressions in the least. “They'd fucking killed people for wanting to eat lunch in a different place a decade before. We were all waiting for them to fucking... for everyone to turn on us. Kill us. You think we wanted to be lab rats? You think we volunteered for the government because it was fun?”
Fir grunted, pulling himself about on the bars. Again, Decon was stuck looking sympathetic, but little else. He at least squirmed with his ignorance of history, whereas Seth, secure in her knowledge, didn't budge an inch. Wes was Wes.
“The stipend and retirement package was quite good.” Wes said, mostly so there wouldn't be that silence. And, yes, Wes was Wes was Wes was Wes... He glanced up at them, expression perpetually peeping out from under the shadow of uncertainty. “Reversion to private enterprise has caused agent compensation to suffer, somewhat.”
He waited, but nobody said anything. “Ours is, of course, comparable to the government's in the 70s. Taking inflation into account.”
“Jesus Christ, kid,” Fir said. “You are so goddamn weird.”
Wes' eyebrows went up. Fir grimaced. Repartee acknowledged, Fir swung himself on the trolley bars as if yearning for derailment.
“And, contrary to your lunch counter example,” Seth said, “you were given such visible governmental support precisely because your powers could be hidden. No member of your team suffered obvious physical mutation.”
“A feature it shares with this team,” she added as an afterthought, though something in the way her eyes narrowed and the way she turned to watch out of the front trolly window made Decon certain it was getting filed away somewhere much more vital than the average afterthought.
“I dunno,” Fir chuckled, “that old commie Geza always had an odd smell of borscht about him.” Immediately after saying so, however, a look of grave concern passed over his face, as if he'd only heard the words for the first time, then crushing embarrassment. He had to raise a fist to lips to keep them from moving, uttering other words that had no cause.
For the millionth time they (including Fir) shared the thought that perhaps they ought not have invited Fir out into public. All except Wes, who kept a running tab on the quickest ways to disable Fir and prevent use of physically-cued powers.
None of them were particularly gentle.
That he wasn't keeping a running tab on killing Fir was, he noted to himself, a vast improvement. Dr. Hardwell would be pleased. He congratulated himself, though, as he was certain no one else would. They needn't have his history of causing death and debilitating injury to malefactors rather than capturing them to worry about.
“I don't know, I can see the point Fir's getting at,” Decon said, even though he didn't, as Fir dealt with himself. “Not that it precisely runs contrary to our mission of rehabilitating young Islanders, but... uh... he's a 30 year old man convicted of genocide against Islanders. Like, the... uh... Islanders... who lived on the Island.”
“All of which he pleaded guilty to – in part due to extended and severe brainwashing – and served his time for, and performed under the duress of having been raised as a child soldier in the first place,” Seth said.
Seth said it, but her lip curled, a millimeter above neutral. They didn't know each other well enough to know what it meant when Seth's lip curled like that. Decon was beginning to suspect, though.
Wes noted it and logged it the first time she'd set a criminal on fire. It meant, in part, that Seth had a very highly tuned sense of duty, and wouldn't let her emotions override the performance thereof. But mostly it meant Seth wasn't to be fucked with, because when people fucked with her, she felt less than ambivalent about setting them on fire, and that was enough for him.
Fir fucked with her. “Yes, so the best plan is to take him to a home for young Islanders and other fucked-up crime-fighting-people-types,” he nodded at Wes, “and try to suggest to him that there's a vast conspiracy against them that he should help with, because surely we'll all get along like a gangbusters.”
Seth turned to look at him.
Wes winced.
“What was your relationship with your parents, Firmament?” she asked.
He cocked his head. “What? I didn't have one. You know that. My father gave me up after birthing me killed my mother.”
“And you surely felt responsible for her death, didn't you?” Seth asked. Though Fir recoiled, she didn't give him time to react more thoroughly before moving on. “Well, his were exploded to pieces before his eyes by an uncontrolled telekinetic when he was four. This left him alone in a violent and highly mutated jungle warzone until he was picked up several months later by a genocidal warlord who taught him murder other children in exchange for love and approval.”
She pulled up her watch to see the time, briefly checking the station map on the roof. “So when the world nuked the entire landmass that was his home into non-existence, killing the man who stood as second father, who – by the way – coached him into confessing he was responsible for a genocide that he, as a twelve year old, hardly understood the scope of, before shoving him onto a Red Cross helicopter, I suppose some survivor's guilt came into play. Some might say, a unique form of survivor's guilt.”
Now Decon was sitting frozen like stone, while Wes, familiar knot of unbearable awkwardness turning his guts into a solid lump of heated steel, simply resigned himself.
Seth stood up, as their stop was next, grabbing the rail and swinging about to face Fir down with the impenetrable and shifting eyes of someone who could burn you to death out of sheer irritation.
“Some might even assume that someone who blew up his own mother, and may or may not have blown up his old team, then spent thirty years in a completely inexplicable unaging coma, only to be welcomed onto a new team of young Islanders roughly equivalently-aged to the ones he may or may not have blown up, might feel uniquely sympathetic to a person – a person technically younger than him, but for the unaging coma situation – with such similar-yet-extremely unique circumstances. One might even suggest that the uniqueness of their mutual situation is precisely why they should be brought together, though one would be a fool to expect such a suggestion would've occurred to someone in that unique mutual situation. So, please, Fir, take a moment to imagine how someone who has gone through such unique circumstances might deserve some special consideration, okay?”
She checked her watch again, while Fir's open jaw swayed with the trolley coming to a halt.
And Wes could see it – her knowledge that she shouldn't say what she was going to say next – in the too-long-for-time-telling glance at her watch and the way her lips twitched, before she looked up at Fir again, fire-eyes boring into crazy ones.
“And if you can't manage that, just keep your fucking mouth shut and carry out the mission.”
Stretching an arm out, she swung from one bar to the next to, Tarzan like, swing herself out of the trolley. Decon stood up, eyes still wide, checking on Fir.
He wouldn't say anything, but he wasn't sure he was precisely behind emotionally assaulting Fir, who'd only begun speaking again a few weeks ago. Much less assaulting him with the guilt he obviously harbored for being unable to remember what happened to the rest of his team, in the disaster that killed them, which bore the tell-tale marks of his powers all over it.
Mostly, he wasn't sure it was the smartest to badger a guy who had the uncanny ability to fucking destroy whole city blocks with a few gestures and the exercise of a certain amount of willpower. But hey, Decon just took apart electronics, nobody asked him the big questions – all he could do was hope one of their two team members who'd actually been committed wasn't going to lose his shit a second time. So he waited, hoping he could stop Fir if he did.
Turning slowly to face Decon, Fir put knuckles up against bared teeth, shaking his head.
“Good goddamn, St. Francis,” he said, “I'd follow her into Hell.”
He swung off the trolley – echoing Seth in form if not attitude, as the gleeful smile betrayed him – and there was Wes. It took a moment for Decon to realize there was Wes, on account of how perfectly he’d shadowed Fir, like the cutout left behind Fir’s paper doll.
“Decon.”
Decon was still staring after Fir.
“Decon the trolley,” said Wes.
“Yeah?” Decon replied, shaking himself to wakefulness about the time it lurched into motion again.
“...is leaving,” Wes said, then looked pointedly out the door.
“Oh,” Decon said, then, “Oh, crud.”
Decon scrambled out to Fir’s raucous laughter while Wes stepped out behind him as if the damn thing were holding still. But, hey, even Seth was smiling a bit, so Decon could consider it a victory.