fandomhigh | Living on the Outskirts, Friday, Period 2

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living on the outskirts

Living on the Outskirts, Friday, Period 2

"Once upon a time," Jono said, speaking without preamble as he walked into the classroom looking fairly well-rested, even if he smelled a little like Mr. Clean, "there was this bloke who didn't stand a chance in hell of fitting in, back home. He was, on top of being a little antisocial to start with, a mutant, hated and feared by humanity because his genes were a little different. And, beyond that... Well..." He held up a photo of himself in his X-Men days for the classroom to see, face unwrapped and fire twisting violently around him. "... Frankly, he was a little terrifying. Even other mutants, people with the same problems as him, shrank away from him as though he was a monster."

He managed to deliver that line in a fairly cavalier sort of way. It still stung, but the point was mostly moot, these days.

"And then, through an accident of fate or by the power of Fandom or after tripping into some strange sentient mist - don't ask - he found his way here. Here, surrounded by humans, aliens, mutants, fairies... So many people who were other, it was probably absurd of him to assume that they'd consider him all that different in the first place. He continued to be standoffish, continued to assume that there was no way anybody here could come to accept him as anything but what the people back home made plainly clear they saw him as.

"And then he found love. He found love twice, actually, both times with people who weren't quite normal themselves, and both times with young women that only cared to see him for who he was, not what he was. He had a hand in saving the day right alongside people that he's still proud to this day to have known as friends. Hell, he was even voted Prom King the year he graduated, and he's still half-convinced that the entire senior class had been drinking the spiked punch a little early when that decision came about."

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

"The point is, even when he went home, he held on to that. He was still a mutant, still different in a way that wasn't going to ever let him really fit in, but he wasn't entirely so hesitant to let himself be happy, either. And if, to this day, the only regrets he really has are the result of things that are well beyond his control, well... then his time here wasn't a complete waste, and it's really no wonder he ultimately chose to come back here to teach this class, is it?"

Come on. Like you didn't see that one coming, kids.

"So, how about you lot? Any 'oh, I'm actually not as alone as I thought I was' stories to share about this place since you came here? You don't have to go quite as in-depth as I did. I hardly expect visual aides or anything. But I suspect I'm not the only one in this room who was surprised to find that I belonged somewhere, after being so resigned to the prospect of spending the rest of my life hated, feared, and hunted for what I was."

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Sholeh had no words for that. None at all. She had open-mouthed gaping and some flailing and even the odd noise or two from her mouth, but no actual words.

Zhahar's voice was tentative. *He...kind of knows about us.*

::?!??!?!::

=We met in a park months ago now. We tried not to give anything away, but he's pretty smart.= Even Zeela sounded ashamed of that.

::!!!!!::

*Sorry,* they chorused.

"WHAT?!" Sholeh finally managed to screech and it was only half directed at Jono.

Jono was vaguely aware that he was probably missing out on some sort of internal dialogue, there. He was going to just smile wryly and stick a finger in his ear.

Ow.

"Met your sisters in a park a few months ago. Had an interesting talk with... Zee?" A beat. "Though I'm fairly certain that wasn't her actual name. And the other one."

Zhahar and Zeela, he knew. From Sholeh's own name. But he was kind of trying to keep the other two out of too much trouble, at this point. Even if Zeela had called him a freak.

"For what it's worth, I'm fairly certain I can keep a secret better than you can."

Oh, he was defintitely missing out on something, all right. Namely a furious interrogation and chastisement of her sisters that most people in Fandom would doubt Sholeh capable of. Angry tears stood out in her eyes, eyes that would sometimes change color if Jono was paying attention, flipping from Sholeh's green to a pale blue to a dark brown and back again within moments. Her features shifted ever-so-slightly as well, becoming indistinct before snapping into sharp definition again.

"And you!" she snapped, finally turning her attention on Jono. All concern about him being a teacher, being an adult gone in the blistering heat of anger and hurt and betrayal was gone. It probably wouldn't even occur to her to worry about it for several hours yet. "So if you've known all this time, then why did you dance around it, huh? Why did you pretend to care whether or not I said something? You've already known for months and didn't say! What--is this some kind of joke to you?!"

Yup. Little Sholeh actually had quite the temper when she was provoked. Who knew?

"It wasn't my place to say," Jono replied, giving his shoulders a shrug. He took the temper rather mildly, all things considered. He figured he probably deserved the yelling-at, in retrospect. "A secret of this magnitude is hardly a joke, Sholeh, and if and when it comes out, it won't be me that makes that decision for you. I danced around it because the last time the topic came up, I was called a freak before your sisters darted off into the night. I didn't want to frighten you the same way, not knowing if they'd mentioned anything to you or not."

Yes, Zeela. He was going to hold on to that freak comment until the day he died.

"Believe it or no, I do actually care. For all the reasons I've said before, and more. I don't know anything about your people, except that you think yourselves to be demons and you're afraid that people finding out about you will reflect back on and hurt them, but I know more than a thing or two about pretending to be something you're not."

=He was being freaky,= Zeela muttered defensively.

::I'm not even TALKING to you right now,:: Sholeh snapped. ::I'll just add 'insulting a teacher' on my list of reasons why I'm not!::

*Sholeh, please...*

::NOT. TALKING!::

"Your experience isn't my experience," Sholeh said stubborn. "When my sisters aren't deliberately making things worse, I can hide and pretend! No one ever has to know!"

"You slip," Jono replied. "You said yourself, Sholeh, it's obvious that you have a secret. And have you any idea how often you almost say 'we?' How many other times have Zeela and Zhahar been out and about? I'm not likely to be the only person here to know that they exist at all, am I?"

He tilted his head at her, looking more thoughtful than anything.

"My experience isn't yours, you're right enough about that. So perhaps sometime you might want to take a peek through the yearbooks in the library. See just how many of those faces aren't human. Watch the haunted looks fade from their eyes as they get closer to graduation. They're there, you know. People who have seen their people be slaughtered for simply being what they are. Systematically eradicated, pushed to the brink of extinction, from tens of millions to mere hundreds. That's my experience, luv. Not yours? Fair enough. But I see the faces of the slaughtered when I close my eyes at night, people who have been herded into death camps because of a quirk of genetics. I know first-hand that there's no such thing as a limit to humanity's cruelty. Don't go presuming that you're the only one here who's been given reason enough to be afraid."

"Then you should be more understanding of my desire not to say anything," Sholeh said, all stubbornness now. "Because you do know how terrifying it can be. Would you be so pro-tell everyone if you could have hidden?"

She'd wanted that to come out all accusatory, but there was a note of honest curiosity in there anyway.

"There was a phrase for people who were, whether they had the ability to hide or not," Jono replied, raising an eyebrow. "'Mutant and Proud,' they'd say. In my time here, I was... possibly the only one who couldn't hide easily."

What with the voice, and all. Even Kurt had his image inducer.

"That said, those who tried to hide nearly all wound up giving in and coming clean eventually. Some continued to tell themselves that nobody knew after showing what they were over and over, but we... let them cling to that illusion. It made them feel better, I suppose."

None of that actually answered her question, so he finally shrugged his shoulders and got down to it.

"If I could've hid, I might've. But not out of fear. I was never afraid for myself, or that someone would see me and run back to my world and start outing mutants by the score. I would've hid out of shame, I think. I had too many regrets, and this place was a clean slate where I didn't have to face them down unless I wanted to."

"I'm not ashamed," Sholeh said staunchly. "I'm proud not to be a one-face. I have two of the best sisters in the world. When they're not being jerks, I mean."

The silence in her head was tinged with shame and regret.

"But I'm not just going to break all our rules because of a...rousing speech," she continued. "They're trusting me. And if it comes out that I told people, I'd have to go away."

"Interesting way to put it," Jono mused, eyebrow still raised. "Proud to not be what we are, as opposed to telling me that you're proud to be what you are?"

He wasn't certain if she had meant that as some sort of attempt at rubbing it in his face that he was inferior, or if she hadn't even been aware that she'd phrased it that way, but she could be sure as hell that he was going to point it out.

"Nobody's forcing you to tell anybody, Sholeh. If I had any intention of taking away your choice, I've had more than ample opportunity to out you myself. Ask your sisters just how long ago I ran into them, sometime." He shrugged his shoulders. "If you don't want to tell people, that's completely your prerogative. But I'm going to hold by my previous assessment- You're absolute cack at lying about it. If you're not going to come clean, you're going to want to work on your acting skills, because the way you're covering it up is only going to rouse more suspicion than any self-respecting liar wants on their hands."

"I'm proud of that, too," Sholeh said. "But we're always surrounded by one--" a moment's pause, "--by the singly-aspected who can't ever fathom what it's like to be different from what they are. And I'm proud of being different."

A thought occurred to her then, deflating her a little. "Proud, even though I can't show it."

She wasn't going to dignify his comments about lying with a response. Mostly because it was true and she knew it.

"Bitter, innit? To feel pride about a difference that you have to hide away and pretend doesn't exist?" Weirdly enough, even Jonothon could comprehend that.

"You say one-face," he noted, after a moment's thought. "Are you saying it with contempt, I wonder? Because you say we can't ever fathom what it's like to be different from what we are, but the very nature of people like me is change. Not necessarily of everyone else that happens to be singly-aspected, granted, but of mutants, at least. If someone hadn't taken measures to ensure that my species would die out entirely as soon as the last of the current generation passes away, there would be people right this instant, waking up in bodies that haven't their entire lives been anything like their own. And it might scare the hell out of them, they might spend the rest of their lives wishing they could go back to being what they were, but they do know a thing or two about being different from what they are."

He smiled wryly at her.

"There are probably only a precious few who have any idea what it's like to be like you in particular, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that you can't fathom quite where we're coming from in some regards, either. And I dare say that there are some humans with no powers at all who are capable of grasping far more than you might think."

"Not contempt!" Sholeh mumbled. Just, you know, the casual disregard for a not-so-nice term that one had grown up hearing bandied about. "We can become one-faces, you know. It's just--" she shuddered and even as angry as she was, she brushed against her sisters, just to feel them and know they were there and okay. "--just kind of horrible to get there."

And why she could never, ever fall in love with a one-face boy.

"...Your people are dying?"

"My people," Jonothon replied, "are functionally extinct."

There was no way to rebuild a population on numbers like they had left. Mutantkind couldn't sustain itself on less than two hundred. Especially not while they were still being hunted. Especially when there were no new mutants being born into the world.

For better or for worse, so far as Jonothon was aware, that was... that.

"I wouldn't wish that on anybody, Sholeh."

"I wouldn't, either," Sholeh said softly. "Our home is dying. The landscape. That's why we're here. To try and keep it from dying completely, because if it does, we have nowhere else to go."

Jono bit the inside of his cheek while he listened to her words, while he absorbed what that meant.

"Do you know what's causing it?"

Because there were a countless number of realities that her people could potentially escape to if it came to that, but leaving home behind to die was something easier said than done.

Sholeh shook her head. "It's just all turning to desert. The water is drying up, lands that were once fertile farms turning to dust and sand. Every year we have less and less arable land. We've been trying to send people out, to anchor our landscape to another so we're not so adrift, but everyone we've sent out..."

She looked away, expression becoming cold. Shuttered. "They come back hurt and broken. If they come back at all. Because they trusted people."

*Are you sure you should be telling him all this?*

::Why not?! He already knows everything else!::

There was a lot of that story that seemed to hit a little too close to home for Jono. He frowned and nodded faintly, and then tilted his head at her.

"Anchor it to another? How do you mean?"

Jonothon suddenly suspected that her reality would be one heck of an interesting sight.

"Well, like Bridges," Sholeh said, trying to explain. "If you have people who can call both places home, they can create a bridge between them that links both places. And just having people who belong to both homes makes the links between them stronger."

"So... you're a bridge?" Jono tilted his head at Sholeh, looking her over thoughtfully. "And you were looking to... to tether your home to Fandom?"

He was trying to wrap his head around this one, yep. It was not the sort of solution that he was quite familiar with.

"I can't build a bridge that will get us there," Sholeh said. "But I'm an anchor. If I'm connected enough to this place, I can hold Tryadnea to it so it doesn't drift away."

"Well... then I have only one more question for you, Sholeh, and you can do with it whatever you will."

He lifted his chin a little, looking at her thoughtfully.

"How are you ever going to forge a meaningful connection like that with Fandom, if you don't even feel safe being yourself while you're here?"

Yes, back to that. But Jonothon wasn't expecting an answer, this time. It was hypothetical. It would give her something to chew on, perhaps.

Ouch. Way to make that questions a metaphorical punch to the gut, Jono. Wow.

For her part, Sholeh decided to make good on that clear exit out, gathering up her things and stumbling towards the door, heart too full of troubling thoughts for words.

In a few moments more, she'd be crying. She didn't want anyone to see that.

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Living on the Outskirts, Friday, Period 2

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