RANDOM SATURN - duality of natures; dark face, beast face/handsome prince. Self-control, tact, caution; disguise

"Only Saturn calculates his defense." - a symbol of an individual's greatest vulnerability, an area where he has been scarred.

Saturn fears the other side of his face.

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LEAVING LIZ Going back is not regression, because the lines of your life aren't drawn according to geography but following other stars like time and irony. He is practicing in preparation for it. It will change him like time travel. It will be as all-consuming and substanceless as air full of fear. He practices infrequently, and he never practices in the house (this, right this second, this is practice).

Equally as tricky as the practice of conjuring fire out of air is this backwards business: he thinks of fire, and he thinks of stars, then he thinks of black holes, and the thing is, paradox hurts. But if this is the way he wants it, then this is what he has to do. Keeping all the newness of himself, but pressing reset. Everything becomes a sign of soon, soon, soon. He's been waiting so long.

"She's sad," the girl (he can't think of her as her) says thoughtfully, on target but never ever quite hitting the mark because, because. That hurt. "Would you like to fly?" She'd asked, and it's terrible but all he can think is that he never thought he'd ever kill anyone Irish which is fucking retarded but it's true. "She comes back," Professor Gray (who wasn't a professor at all) had told him casually, full to the brim with alien fire he can feel but could never in a million years control (consumed -- he's never feared that before) and he has no idea what his face looked like because he'd been focusing everything on suppressing terror. "More than you know." The walking biohazard had told him laughingly, and gave him a beer.

After the fight, he'd only waited long enough for Ronny to be out of sight before leaving, head crowded full of arguments. The way he feels startles himself. He wants to shake Ronny, knock all those bizarre ideas out of his idiot head, make him understand that it's more than being abandoned that all of them have been abandoned that Bobby is probably a ridiculously good brother, the kind who remembers your birthday and gives you Christmas gifts that make you almost guilty, you like them so much. But he can't. He can't even talk, he's so far from the role of truth teller. And Ronny has his own decisions to make, ones he has no right to criticize given the path he's taking because even if he believes and owes loyalty he already knows himself to be a mess of imperfections -- he doubts because he doubts, because he'll falter when put to the test (green smile, silibant precise heavy words).

The curse is the one thing he's trying to leave behind, not because he's afraid (although he is) but because if he lets Magneto down it's going to be on his own troubled terms, not because of some haughty bitch back in a place he doesn't think of anymore.

His jaw is bruised, but Warren hits much harder than Ronny; this is the kind of pain that's penance, ignorable but everpresent in the background. Sometimes John wonders if his real death is going to be choking on all the lies he tells. Not that he even bothers to differentiate anymore (this is also practice). He can barely pick out the lies from the truths and exaggerations and twistings in all of what he told Ronny. (Another reason why there'll be no shaking and epiphanies: it's not even possible, John lies when he breathes.)

But for every moment he feels sorry for fighting dirty and telling Ronny all that shit, he also remembers standing on Bobby's porch. Frozen, because Bobby's house is nice, really nice, the kind of nice commercials try to imitate, but it's also kind of cold; and frozen because he's not really Pyro yet, he's John Allerdyce, 16, runaway, vandal, and thief, facing more cops than he's ever seen before in his entire fuck damn life. And no one has to tell him what happened, he can see Ronny's tight expression, stiff disgust at his brother and his weirdo friends. At the time he thought he understood, just like he thought he understood back in the lobby with Ronny long-haired and bleeding. He thought, yeah, I can get it -- Bobby's like, disgustingly good sometimes, a real boy scout ... but he's a goof too, and he puts up with me (practice, practice, practice) and writes dumb essays, and dates a girl he can't even touch let alone make out with. But it's not just that, and John still doesn't know what the fucking problem is and he doesn't care, damnit, he does not fucking care because this is not his problem and he doesn't have time for this and he fucking hates Ronny anyway and there's nothing he can do to help.

"It'll become a part of you," the other Mystique had said to him, confusingly talkative, yet the same sinuous blue that looks bare but reveals nothing. He'd argued, but now he agrees. It will become part of him, just as, through practice, he will become a Pyro that Magneto can use. And he can see Bobby's confused sad look, but he also hears Bobby's silence, the same as when he first walked out on them both; and once, maybe, Marie would've argued and cried but now (preliminary practice) he doesn't think it would reach that point because he doesn't play fair. He breaks the rules, it's who he is. It's only lately that he hasn't enjoyed it. The Theresa Cassidy he knows is petite, softly built, and freckled. The Theresa Cassidy he backs away from awkwardly is tall and willowy, and has a pleasant lilt to her words as she offers to take him flying and it strikes him to say yes (they would laugh, Mystique little more than a smile and Magneto an indulgent chuckle) but suddenly he just fucking can't do that, he can't have her touching -- or jesus fuck, no, holding him when somewhere in her universe there's another him waiting to kill her.

But why balk? That's who he's planning to become. For a while, he always, despite the futility, adds. Only for a while. When it's done -- whatever 'it' is, he'll know when it happens, the something he has to complete so he won't have two of him pulling at his insides -- then he can turn himself rightside out and go home. This, if he is vigilant and quick and ruthless, this is what he will do. (Practice.)

Before he falls asleep at night he says under his breath,
what I tell you three times is true.
What I tell you three times is true.
What I tell you three times is true.

THREE CONVERSATIONS JOHN NEVER HAD ONE. Days pass, and the new Liz is a profoundly silent creature like some half-dead thing in a coccoon. She can only let the machine talk for her. Steady beats. Still alive. Still lost in here, John. Henry's looking and he's lost too. Her body's interior is hollow and dark but she keeps pressing the telegraph lever, tapping out their names. The movement is inside. There's nothing of that showing now. John understands that.

Liz, he would say, for instance: I loved you the first day in the Bureau.

The fact that he doesn't say it, isn't saying it, never said it, means nothing; Liz isn't here. He might as well be talking to a plastic plant. With the door closed, the hospital room becomes Schroedinger's box. What does or doesn't get said is an entire open sky. John may or may not be holding Liz's hand, though her hand is representative only of the part that is absent. His eyes are fixed on a far flaw in the wall, but slide down to her wan face; his mother, the unquestioned absence who forms the space Liz occupies and whose remnants remain only in name and manner, taught him to look people in the eye when you talk.

Liz. (Understandably, she doesn't respond. He, if somehow given the choice, wouldn't have either. His voice sounds strange, hinting of hoarseness and more unruly routes. Not talking is cheating. It is rude. He has never deliberately been rude to Liz.)

Liz, if you wake up after, don't be mad. (He's bluffing. He feels certain she wouldn't be mad, if he came back and if she were there to see him. But neither of those things are certain, so what else can he say?)

All the things they never say (representative and definitive on the paper he puts in her hand, like the cut places of the snowflakes kids make at Christmas) forcibly make space inside him, pushing between organs, softening what he's worked to make hard. He doesn't mind: he's grateful for the understanding of that obscure pain, and even given the chance will never say those things because Liz already knows those things even in whatever strange place she is now. He's glad to have this silence. It will help now that his time is up. It may be the only thing that will carry him home.

TWO. Charlie crosses the road and the change is palpable, heavy and metallic in the air. This is her agenda, and he's never been offended to have to follow behind. The kids -- fucking kids, giving him more of a shiver than he'd care to admit, so like and unlike those at the mansion. He has a soft spot for hurting kids, but these aren't hurt like that, especially not that little fucker with the open wound eyes: he's all cold and burnt out, professional when daddy's watching, gleefully malicious when not. John can almost see himself in those bland black eyes. Dead pools, drowning pools. That's a movie. He and Charlie watched it last night at the motel, lying on the bed. They're the same height, probably the same weight. They must cancel each other out, because when they fucked, the bed hardly squeaked. Slow and together, both lost in thought while careful and intent. Charlie's skin is smooth and dry. Her lips crack in the desert heat. They aren't cracked now. If he touched her -- she'd smack him, but what he meant to focus on is the sheen of sweat, from terror and adrenaline and now the fires blazing around them so strong John can hardly think.

More, and more. This is really why he loves Charlie, and the thing is, he never denied he could be a superficial jerk. She has fire. She has more fire than anyone he's ever met. Familiar fire. It gives him a taste in his mouth when he hasn't eaten all day: a taste of himself, but a taste of her moreso. She lets him in. They push and push and push and if there's anything of this government-run town tomorrow, it'll be fuckin modern art.

Are those kids even breathing? Is there enough oxygen? They're tiny things, like clever little sparrows with their little powers. The boy who knows the truth. It must piss him off to know he'll always be a tool and never be able to make his own way. Charlie finishes with the miniature sociopath, and he tanks. The other kids don't even know what to do. John moves forward, past Charlie whose chest is heaving (yeah, believe it, John noticed that), flips the kid over with his toe.

"Get the fuck out of here," he says low and quiet to the others, and they don't even know who he is or what the fuck he can do to give them orders but they go, dragging their fallen and unloved leader behind them.

He turns to Charlie, who's upset, angry tears lingering in the wings of her weirdly slanted eyes. It makes her look exotic, even though everything else is familiar. She comes from some place cold. Her fire comes from some place cold. Even though she has it, she's never warm. He'll fix that.

She lets him have their kiss, here in the center of a burning town. She lets him push her fire: she's stronger than him, she's just as skilled as he is, but nine times out of ten, she doesn't have the heart for it. She won't push it all the way. She wouldn't kick that little shit in the head with her black chucks. But John would, and he does. He has a hard quick heart and the viciousness to go through with it. They'll go together until he alienates her, well-matched but perhaps only too much so. What happens after he helps Charlie destroy everything that destroyed her little life, one that would've been normal? People like her crave normalacy like seabirds crave the water on their wings. They can't stay down there forever.

One thing John does know is that he's going to miss her smile.

THREE. "So this is it."

He and Warren are the same age but it's like they grew up on different planets. Something about the world bothers him today. He feels itchy, out of place, aggravated. Warren looks at him uncertainly.

"Looks all right," he makes himself say, taking a cursory glance around the cafeteria.

"It is," Warren admits, shuffling onwards like he doesn't suddenly and secretly love the place, or rather, showing it to a stranger. Adults here aren't so laidback about kids cutting hooky, as it turns out. The zippo's been stowed in his pocket ever since somebody nearly froze his foot to the pavement. That too, that pissed him off in a way he wasn't ready to explain.

Warren moves around, dropping funny stories, a little gossip, letting him know what's what -- he's the kind that would know. It's late afternoon, and the halls are practically empty. John looks down the locker-lined hallway, unwillingly filling it with the kids from the mansion.

"So where'd you move from?" The question's not as casual as it sounds. He's pretty sure Warren managed to overhear the part where he has no parents.

"Massachusetts." In his head, his middle finger divides the mansion neatly in half. It occurs to him he has no idea where the fuck he is anyway. He doesn't want to ask.

"Nothing like this, huh."

The short bark of laughter escapes before he can control it. He is, he has to admit, a little out of control right now. He looks right at Warren, who doesn't back up but John can see the line of his stomach move in with his breath like that will keep a safe distance between them. "Nah. Real different."

Now they're at the end of the hallway, and through the windows it's incredibly bright, sunlight filling the street without any little bit leaking through to where they are. John eyes the fire alarm sourly and, since Warren is watching him uncertainly instead of leading on, crosses over to the end of the lockers and sinks down against them. Someone's written "blow me" on the wall next to his eye. Subtle.

Warren leans against the door.

With the shelter of the lockers John wiggles his zippo out and snaps it a few times, eyelids low like an addict. Sometimes he hates how he acts when he knows he's being watched, but what the fuck does it matter.

"Different circumstances, I could really hate your guts." He says conversationally, keeping his eyes on the flame.

"Uh," the door creaks as Warren straightens off of it. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

John snorts, shutting his lighter and looking up. "Means," he mocks gently, though that too is another little sliver, "I think you got it easy, when I got it hard. Means," he pushes up, back, uncurling sliding into standing against the wall. "if I was really gonna have to go here for the next two years, I'd make every day of your life fucking miserable."

"Easy." Warren's voice is flat and drawing, a knife turned sideways. "Yeah. I had it easy all right."

Smiling, John ignores that. "But I'm not staying. So thanks for the tour."

O, great clamity
dish of inequity and tears
how I abhor this place!

Moving forward smooth and unconcerned, every muscle in his back is waiting for Warren to clock him as he pushes the door open and takes a step outside into the more accustomed open air. He pauses.

"Hey," he waits patiently until Warren deigns to give him attention, "you should give some thought to it yourself."

The suppressed eyeroll is audible in Warren's voice. "To what?"

its sweet and bitter taste
has left me wreched, retching on all fours

"Fucking off." John slides his hand down the metal of the door, thinking about the pained creaking sound it'd make as it bent inward and off its hinges before flying down the hall. Crashing against the lockers, before they too peeled off their concrete anchors to bounce deafeningly off the ceiling, the floor. He scratches a flake of paint off with his fingernail. "Different circumstances, we could probably be friends. Or whatever."

Warren doesn't say anything and John lets the door close as he sets off across the blacktop for the distant neighborhood and somewhere to hide. He hears the door open behind him before he reaches the street.

Los Angeles, I'm yours.

BACKSTORY: 5, 4, 3, 2... V.
He'll have stopped smoking by the time he's ready to leave because in front of that blank shuttered look all the crooked little gaps in him creak wide open. By the time he's ready to leave, he'll wonder how exactly Erik did it, that curious, distant and then disorientingly personal charisma. He'll take a look back to those moments he can't get rid of, blunt and unexpected as a knife between the ribs: he'll wonder how Erik got right up underneath his skin.

At the moment, the thought of quitting smoking has not crossed his mind. John has had enough family to know the dozens of ways adults fuck kids up. These evenings on the porch are a calm antithesis, unafraid to be different, incapable of disappointment. Everyone in the house smokes the way volcanoes try to keep themselves from erupting. Even Henry. Especially Henry. Winter doesn't deter them. They just bundle up and watch the ghosts stream away. It's no wonder he'll quit before he goes. There isn't any other porch in the world he could feel at home on anymore.

IV.
There was a time when doing simple, small fire tricks on the sidewalk was an okay way to get spare change. These days it's more likely to get him killed. So now this, which he's done before, warily and without disgust though he's not quite sure why. Somehow, the money seems more honest.

He does not, after all, have the face for this. He doesn't put on an act, unless you count the zippo, which personally, he doesn't. It's not so much a matter of dignity as it is lack of necessity. If the spark is there, he can control it with just a little attention. If he's loitering outside a bar and someone's watching him, all he does is stare back. Shame has its own peculiar language. All it needs to be fully expressed is a lack of judgment. In all honesty, John should probably be a little more grossed out. But it's ... funny. He has the feeling he and Mystique would've smiled. Because he hasn't lied once this entire time. He can practically see them watching now as he looks over at a man who's taking his time with a cigarette. (In a few months, Liz will ask him why he left and he won't be able to answer.) "Hey," John says, smiling a little. "Wanna see a trick?"

III.
Their apartment is high above the city, all wide windows, concrete floors, metal walls. If he's making up for the plastic prison, he couldn't have done much better.

John's always cold in there, but he's okay with that.

All the rooms are filled with machinery, plans, charts, graphs, and complicated technology only rivaled by stuff he's seen back at the mansion. They never tell him not to touch anything, they never tell him not to go anywhere, and if he asks them a question, they always answer. Sometimes he helps them build things, or goes on weird errands for them.

He's met Toad. They don't get along.

Here, John has his own room, which was bare for a while but has gradually filled up with things he needs although he never asks for anything. Leaving all his shit at the mansion doesn't faze him. For a while it's a mild irritation, the abandonment of recently acquired objects like the CD Kitty finally returned or his favorite t-shirt. But he's left favorite t-shirts behind before and more besides. Everything always gets replaced. He doesn't mind, even when he realizes the shirt Bobby lent him is gone.

II.
He's not allowed to have his lighter out in class. He makes do with a pen, slow, quiet taps against his bottom lip as he watches them instead of Professor Munroe.

Bobby, John decides, has the observational prowess of cotton fluff. This does not count against him. Nor does John blame him, exactly. Rogue -- and she will be Rogue to him for a very long time -- is a pretty distracting girl. You wouldn't think so at first. He didn't. Yeah, there's the hair and the curves and the smile, but nothing else. Empty, banal sweetness. That, however, is a defensive manuver she's used so long it's become as much a part of her as the white hair and gloves. Everybody's power ends up defining a part of their personality one way or another, John believes. The same way he knows just by walking past the boys' bathroom whether somebody's smoking in there or not, he knows there're sparks inside Rogue.

The question is, does Bobby know? They keep playing with that line, he can tell how much Bobby wants to touch her for real. John doesn't plan on pissing either of them off to find out what it'd be like to have his essence sucked out through her fingertips. And her big brown eyes would go wide with tears over it, even though they're wary of each other and not really friends at all yet. No, John doesn't want to find out what it feels like, but he'd bet anybody anything: he bets it feels good to her. Just like the time she steals from him, the time she eats up with Bobby: she'd look hurt if he ever said anything about it, but she liked it all the same.

Of course he never will say that. Bobby has the observational aptitude of a sea cucumber. Bobby is also the best (and first, if he's being honest) friend he's ever had. John will at least half-heartedly try not to piss him off. But he's not going to be a silent third wheel to this sad little scene. If he can make a little fire for them, then that's exactly what he's going to do.

I.
John's dad is not an idiot, although most people do take him for one, the same way they think of John. That similarity has never really endeared them to one another. The fact that John has just made his father's cigarette and thus the better part of his face burst into flames (the reasons why are irrelevant) will probably not help them bond either.

John will never feel the need to recount this, the story of the first manifestation of his fire manipulation powers, to anyone. He won't need to say a word to Professor Xavier, who will look at him with coiled iron in his eyes and tell him he can stay but that there are rules. He won't know what he looks like, expecting every adult's silence to be his father's wordless threat: go. Which, in time, he will appreciate, standing on the porch of Bobby's house and sitting on a roof in Vegas -- that at least his dad was completely truthful, that even if they never shared any relationship at all they shared that one moment of perfect understanding. Go. So John goes.

FIVE THINGS JOHN NEVER DREAMS ABOUT Freud talked a good game about the unconscious. He talked himself into the grave, grains of heroin still lodged firmly in his nostrils. There are things you want that you don't dream about. There are truths too complicated and stupid to be formed into a neat little penis symbol.

Five things John never dreams about: his life before the X-men, his family, Magneto, kissing Marie, and killing Bobby.

John was an only child (he doesn't dream about his family, so this is past tense). There are no songs in the top 40 about being brothers. He never wants to go back to the X-men, and he secretly dreads ever seeing Magneto ever again. These things are inextricably linked in his mind. To think about them would be to topple them all, the four peaks of a mountain range that ring around a little rose. If John had had a brother, it would be nothing like the way he feels about Bobby. If John had had a brother, he would never have gone to the X-men. He believes this the way people believe they are haunted. If John had never met Bobby, he never would have met Marie, and he certainly would never have met Magneto -- Erik, a name he never uses. "You are a god among insects," the old man said, handing him the zippo as if it was nothing. It was a promise.

People never even used to promise John anything. This is because he never had a brother.

As the sole disappointment to his mother -- but we can't go there. John doesn't dream about it.

He's never dreamed, either, of the green smile and a wicked way, every word overenunciated. But he will. He often dreams about approving laughter, a tolerant eye couched in elegant ambiguity, but that's the way Desire would have it; it's nothing to worry about. It's too early for these things to come to fruition, if they ever will. They'd make a wine out of his suffering. John doesn't have a brother. He won't have one, not anymore.

Gifts are curses, and curses are gifts. This particular tragedy is tiny, a long way from the kind of tree John would hang himself on. John has sisters. Sisters follow the shadows of wings for seven years without speaking a single word, and make shirts out of lotus blossoms until the very last second of consumption by fire. Liz will teach him how to make fire. John has friends. Warren will show him what it's like to have a team. Henry will be in time what a man is and should be. Distant, separated by necessity and by who they are, there's still Bobby, faithful, waiting. Between them, Marie, who can't remain there forever no matter what they try.

"You don't have to go," Liz says, ash crumbling from her cigarette to slip between the planks of the porch. "But I know you're going to." That isn't what she says, but it's what she means. He's begged and pleaded, but Magneto will never come to him. He'll have to return when the fire comes, because John lies and cheats and steals and betrays but he doesn't -- he can't -- leave anybody who first reached out to him. Because he doesn't have a brother. Because he can't turn his back on the substitutes that choose him, and because when he's chosen he can't help but choose back. He didn't know that until Marie taught him, with stars in her eyes. Bobby would kill him. Bobby should kill him.

John doesn't dream about this. There is no imagined final battle. He never tries to envision what it will all look like when he finally goes back and the world, which will have gone on without him, falls down. Circumstance and possibility are infinite: he has faith in this, but he also believes in gifts that are curses and curses that are gifts. In the way people believe they're haunted, he believes the fire Liz will give him and the fire the greenwitch will take away will be only gift he can ever give Bobby ever again.


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