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Being perpetually between jobs means getting up at all kinds of weird hours to check in the back doors of all the little places where Lucy's found work before. It's getting cold, she needs work to pick up some more clothes for winter. Why didn't anyone tell her the East Coast was so cold? Being poor in a warm place is a whole different experience.
Battered backpack with lunch and a book slung on her back, a cup of coffee in hand, Lucy comes forging down a side street in Chinatown — she'll probably end up at Wing Sing, they can usually use an extra hand. Someone's second cousin is always skivving off to the ponies or cards. The only problem Lucy has down here is that it's also prime territory for boys.
That's not just young people of the male persuasion. That's the roving, feral packs of boys who get by on dumpster diving, day work, gambling, and small crimes. Apparently they're also ripe picking for Humanis First and their ilk.
"Jimmy says to get in you gotta jump one," a skinny kid with hair like a haystack reports to the little knot of his bretheren.
"Heh, I'll beat on a mutie for nothin'," a bulky boy boasts. He spits tobacco juice at Lucy as she passes and, honestly, she was already arguing with herself about these assholes…but she needs to get to work.
"We got one good last week."
"Fuckin' freaks, oughta do more than just beat 'em."
"They put down stray dogs, right?" That gets laughter and Lucy turns on her heel.
"You're talking about people!" she bursts out before she can reconsider, given their numbers. "You can't do that to people. We're people!" That part just slips out at the end because she's shouting and angry and that was a mistake.
*
It's been a rough night for Sean. It started out well enough, a beer or two at a bar but then things started going all strange. A flirty encounter at the bar turned into an actual conversation, which spooked him enough into actual drinking. And that turned into serious drinking and Sean fleeing before things got any more real.
So he retreated, back to somewhere that he can separate all that out. The only problem is he can't show up to SHIELD sauced and the hour long walk wasn't nearly enough to get him into a sober enough state of mind. So he's in the alley, smoking a cigarette contemplating either finishing off the night drinking alone or trying to sober up enough to go do whatever work he suddenly remembered was pressing enough to flee that cute blond.
As the group of boys start up their harassment Sean narrows his eyes and pushes off the side of the wall with one shoulder. When she turns to confront them, Sean takes a few more steps towards them helpfully suggesting "Why don't ye wee lads run off b'fore ye get yer asses beat by a girl? She looks might pissed."
*
"Get bent, old man!"
"Go on, ya fuckin' alkie!" One of the boys flicks a cigarette butt at Sean, laughing. "Before we beat your a — "
The sentence ends in a heavy thump as Lucy takes him off his feet with a powerful right hook for someone so skinny. There's a very weighty pause, and then the boys turn on her like a pack of apes, hooting and braying. There's at least one flash of a knife. Lucy grabs a bottle out of a cardboard box by someone's back door, putting her back to the wall and smashes one boy in the head with it, then throws the broken remains in someone else's face before snatching another from the box.
Someone's learned to fight even dirtier these days. She might look like a little Tinkerbell but she's a proper brawler.
*
Is Sean drunk? Yes. Does that stop him from being surprisingly quick and agile? No. That's his secret, he's always drunk. Okay, maybe not so much nowadays, but certainly in the past.
In a few steps Sean is upon the boy with the knife and has his hand twisted unnaturally high above his shoulder, and now Sean has said knife in his free hand. He is a little less fluid with his movements sure, and that might be a problem against a real threat, but little boys with little knives are hardly a threat to Sean.
"Now then. Before ye get hurt, ye all need t'heed the advice of this ol' drunk, an' Feck. Off." Twisting the boys arm at the end to punctuate his seriousness.
*
The boy Sean strips of his knife squawks with rage, kicks backward without any real aim or skill, then declines rapidly into whining and trying to get free and "you're breaking my aaaaarm!"
There's already blood flowing but none of it is Lucy's or Sean's, at least. Lucy cracks the base of the bottle on the doorframe, shattering the end with an unusual amount of skill. Almost as though someone had stood her by a pile of empties and made her practice breaking them to use as a weapon. If one doesn't have one's own blades in one's hands, well. One must improvise.
"I don't need any damn powers to ruin your day, dipshit," Lucy says, staring the biggest boy in the eyes. "Step up or get off."
There's a moment of evaluation and then the boy spits at Lucy — again — before grabbing the boy she punched by the back of the shirt to haul him off. "Christ, Jimmy, you're a fuckin' embarrassment. Stop cryin'."
Slowly the knot of them dissipates, snarling threats and spitting and cursing. But, they are leaving.
*
With a shove and a kick to the rear Sean encourages his new best friend to go join his idiot pals. He think about calling something after them but decides it's better to focus on the girl who was nearly assaulted.
"Are ye okay? Sorry I sh'd a jumped in sooner." In fairness to Sean it could have been a non issue if she had kept walking, but still he feels bad.
Idly folding the knife back up, Sean takes a step towards the girl, maybe a little unsteady but not stumbling.
*
"You know," Lucy says with some dignity — and, to be fair, a little sniffle. "I used to be a cheerleader?" She drops what's left of the bottle back into the box and straightens her ponytail, gives herself a shake to recover, exhales sharply. "I'm fine. Maybe a little disappointed, but fine. Thanks, though. You were quick on that guy with the knife."
Then, Lucy actually looks at Sean. First, the man is clearly drunk. Second, she recognises him. She's not sure he's okay.
"Um, I could use another coffee, since I had to ditch mine to punch that scrub. Can I buy you a cup?" Back down the alley, there's a little bodega with a coffee maker. She's not so broke she can't herd Sean down that way and get him a cup.
*
Blinking as she talks about being a cheerleader, Sean has to look up to the side of his head to see if that makes sense. No. He decides that he has no idea why she's telling him this so he responds instead to his quickness "I sh'd 'ope that I c'd take a few punks even on my worse night."
As she sizes him up, he leans forward and narrows his eyes to do his same, albeit less surreptitiously. "I.. know you."
"Coffee?" Yea, he's a bit drunk and easily sidetracked. "No. But I'll buy you a cup. Unless y'r drinkin.. er .. uhm, yea, coffee. I'll buy you a cup of coffee." He realizes he was about to offer to buy her a proper drink, but that's hardly appropriate. He does let her lead him to the bodega though.
*
"Yeah, you were in Mutant Town," Lucy says, once she's got Sean parked at one of the two tiny tables at the front of the bodega and secured a couple coffees for them. A proper drink would not be appropriate, not from the look of her. She looks maybe sixteen, however old she really is.
"You're one of us," she says quietly. "Well. Close enough," she adds, shrugging one shoulder. "Thanks for then, too. The guy with the fire — " She gestures to her face and chest. That one is definitely not forgettable. " — is a friend. I'm Lucy."
*
Fumbling with his wallet, Sean hands over a couple bills, more than plenty for the coffees. "Here yer hardly old enough t'drink coffee, let alone pay f'r mine." He places it on the table in front of her.
"Aye, Mutant Town. I am.. I mean, I belong wit' ye." He notices the shrug but just files it away. "Lucy. I'm Sean. Is yer friend okay? He seemed like he c'd look after himself, but I was worried about him. It's been crazy lately.. for us."
He is finding it odd to have a mutant community around. There has never been an 'us' for Sean before in that sense. After a beat he adds "Ye did really well the other night, keepin' the groups separate. Sorry f'r cussin' ye out.. " He smiles at that mock rubs his shoulder as if it still hurts, it doesn't.
*
"I was grumpy about that." Lucy gives Sean a narrow look, then laughs sheepishly. "But not really with you. I'm not very good at this kind of thing and I hate being bad at anything. Sorry I banged you up. I only found out I could do all that this summer. My friends are trying to teach me useful stuff but it's easier to learn fist fighting than powers. I'm kind of…obvious. So it's hard to practice. And it's so weird, how there's so few kinds alike, yeah? It's not like I can look up someone like me, one way or the other."
Lucy does accept the money with a flash of a smile and a murmured "thanks". She's not proud. Well. Not about money, not anymore.
*
Sean smiles as she laughs about it. He laughs a bit too and says "Ye hardly need t'apologize. 'm just used t'working wit' a team, where we're on the same wavelength. It's a bit of an adjusmen' otherwise."
As she explains her trouble he nods and takes a small sip of his coffee. "I c'n imagine. I always had t'go out way out t'a deserted beach where m'loud mouth w'd get drowned out. Have ye.. tried workin' with someone? I mean I c'd help ye.." He has after all taught himself his own powers, including a lot of various fine control and large scale uses. It's odd how often he finds himself offering to help others with their powers, but he feels himself very drawn to it.
*
"You do fly," Lucy says thoughtfully. On the other hand, she is a very young woman contemplating accepting help from a man who was drunk in an alley first thing in the morning. But, beggars can't be choosers and Laura will gut him, big mouth or no, if he does anything untoward. Tony was pretty cool. Strange men who she meets slugging it out with some bad guy or another are, weirdly enough, not on Lucy's red flag list. "I mean, if you don't mind? What is it you do that you work with a team?"
Lucy's mind catches up to that idea and her eyes brighten with enthusiasm — in spite of the bracelet, something in her sparkles. "That would be really cool. Working with people like that for real. I've teamed up with people a few times but it's almost never the same people except for Laura. But we live together, so, we're in the same place together a lot. She doesn't mind that I'm a hazard sometimes."
*
Blinking heavily as Lucy contemplates his offer and asks a question. Sean easily dodges "Oh? I was in the military in Eire." Yea, no, but he lies so easily even his own wife believed her fair share of stories.
"But yea I can fly. And use it as a shield and as a weapon.. it's not the same as yer rainbow force, but I got a feelin' it's not so different in some ways." He was sizing her up in the fight, even without realizing it. "D'ye feel it? I mean.. " His eyes narrow as he tries to think of the words. "When ye use yer powers, can ye feel it when something bounces off it?"
*
Lucy nods so vigorously that her ponytail bounces. "As long as I'm holding it. As soon as I kind of let the punch go, whatever's moving is moving but I'm not feeling it. But sometimes, if I try hard, I can even make it small enough to wrap around things — but only once or twice. I can feel it, though. Where it touches the ground, where it touches people. I can feel the shape of it like it's my skin — it feels like it comes from my skin, kind of. It's not very nice sometimes. Like there was this jelly-undead-wobbly thing in the park?" Lucy wobbles demonstratively. "Ugh. It was like licking dirty jello. With zombies in it."
*
Sipping his coffee Sean contemplates her answer thoughtfully, maybe. He nods and says "I t'ink I know what ye mean.." He isn't sure what she means about wrapping around things. As she discusses it touching the ground he finds himself nodding eagerly. "Oh yeach, I think I know what ye mean. Those beasties in the park were… really the worst things of hell." Her specific example makes his lip curl in disgust though, very evocative.
"C'n ye fly…? Or have ye tried..?" She mentioned it earlier that he could and that seemed to be of interest.
*
"So fast!" Lucy clasps her hands together, radiating excitement. "I tried it once, out over the water, but I was kind of scared because I got tired really easy in the beginning, I didn't understand how to make it work, and I thought, 'wow, if you drown out here, you'll feel really stupid!' so I never found out how fast I can go. But it's the best. The problem is that I get really so shiny and there's all these rainbows that come out and it's like a Disney movie or something."
*
Breaking into a wide smile Sean replies "Aye. I don' know of anything that beats flyin.." Okay, he can think of a couple, but she's far too young for such talk. "Aye, but at leas' fallin' inta water hurts a hell of a lot less. It's probably not a bad idea. At least until it snows and ye c'n practice over tha'…"
Thinking about it a bit more he says "It took me a year or two t'really feel comfortable flyin. Tis great fun, but wind an' weather an' dropping and risin.. it takes practice."
Now he's curious though, "What else c'n ye do? Ye can fly, an' ye can use it like a force or extension of yer body. Right? Anything else?" It's rare that he has these conversations.
*
"Aside from being shiny and flying and making walls and stuff…Nothing ever really burns me. And I can make myself get super hot, like my skin, I'm like a radiator." Lucy ticks it off on her fingers. "Oh, and instead of the wall thing I can shoot kind of, out of my hands. Like pillars of energy or thin needles — I just have to think of the shape of it. But I'm not great at controlling it still and sometimes I get a firehose and sometimes I get a wrecking ball."
Lucy puts her face in her hands, remembering. Her cheeks are a little pink when she looks up. "When I started…" She starts giggling at the memory. It takes her a minute, some coffee, and a few tries to keep going.
"I would shoot something but I would go backward. Once I shot this tentacle monster thing, it was like twenty feet tall," she confides, still giggling. "But I went backward on my butt and left this huge divot in the grass like the world's worst golf swing. In front of people. It was so embarrassing. But not as bad as the time I crash landed in that zombie-jello-demon and ran right into the butt of that guy with the hammer and knocked him on top of some princess lady. But they were nice and invited me to lunch anyway so I guess that was okay."
Demons, crash landings, weird powers, bigoted mobs…doesn't seem to dim Lucy's shine, any of it. There's usually an upside. And she can always laugh at herself.
*
Laughing as she gets all animated in telling her story, Sean smiles broadly at first but then catches it fading and has to force it to stay in place. She is so honest. It's weird. He's so used to lying, at least keeping things back that it's almost unsettling to be faced with such bare faced naive honesty.
His eyebrows raise appropriately as she mentions touching someone's bum. "Oh? Tha does sound rather embarassin. But I assure ye, I've done my fair share of crashin, breakin shite and worst of all just flat out missing … Really my powers aren't visible an' it takes a while t'get the hang of aimin' yer voice."
"But I suggest ye start small. Make the tiniest, most fragile thing ye can. Like a wee snowflake. And get really good at controlling how thin it is.. how many branches it has … how wee ye can make it…" Translating his experience into someone else's power set is funny. Trying to think of how he even started or found out about half of his power tricks is all fuzzy now, but maybe that's the whiskey.
*
"It's hard to think small when you're in New York," Lucy says slyly, then she laughs again. "Especially with all those huge demons. But you might be on to something. It's so hard to feel it when it's big. It's just this whoosh! that comes out of me. I do get tired. I met this guy who…" She stops and bites her lip, looking pensive. Her expression is cautious, like a cloud coming over her, and she weighs what she knows about Sean.
He's sincere, so far. Drunk. But sincere. Whatever lies he's told are details to Lucy — she's lied enough herself. Again. Details. Lucy takes a breath and plunges in — backing up so she can go forward.
"I hate this. But okay. Here. I'm not a mutant," she admits with a heavy sigh. "Not really. I'm an alien and I know that sounds crazy but I swear I'm not the kind that are in the news. I guessed but I didn't know until I met another alien. I've met a couple — and we're not any of us like the ones on the news. I hate lying about it because I got lied to my whole life about it and I didn't even know until this summer when I worked it out. Mutants all think I'm another mutant and we're all kind of family but I'm not and it's awkward."
She shrugs one shoulder at Sean and gives him a little smile. "I figure telling you, I'm no worse off than before. People are already taking mutants in to make weapons out of them and do stuff to them. They're probably gonna do the same to aliens so you knowing — comme ci, comme ca. We're in the same boat. And if we're gonna be friends, I don't want to make friends with you by lying about something that actually matters."
*
Again with the unrelenting honesty, it's nearly the opposite to the world that Sean operates in. He of course is encouraging as she pauses in her story, implicitly but subtly encouraging her to continue.
His eyes open a bit wider as she reveals her true heritage. "Oh?" He kind of gives a small shrug and says "I've met weirder." Seriously between the faerie, sorcerers, whatever Wanda is, etc. "It's not terribly important. I mean not t'sound .. " blase? like a jerk? like a racist? ".. but we're not like other humans. An' I t'ink tha's what makes them fear us.. and makes us at least a bit, bond t'gether."
Oddly her not being a mutant simplifies things as Sean is actively trying to project himself a certain way around mutant town in order to gain interest of very pro-mutant military persuasion like the Brotherhood.
*
"Okay, good," Lucy exhales, then gives Sean that bright smile again. "I guess that comes up because I get tired if I don't have enough sunshine. Which. I guess that's why I liked the West Coast so much. So much more sun than here. So I have to be careful. I guess more careful. No offense, but you seem like a guy who doesn't give a shit about certain details and so why stress myself out by lying, right?" She turns her hands up and shrugs. "Do you live near us? We're in Byrne House down in Mutant Town. I figure you must be near us if you got caught up in that mess."
*
Ha! The thought of Sean not caring about certain details when all of his life seems to be carefully plotted out details, reports and nuances makes him smile. Personally, he could care less. Professionally, he lives and dies by the details. It's nice to be reminded that he had a personality and a life outside of his job once.
"I'm not someone ye need t'lie to.. no" Oh man, the number of people he's told that too, in some form or the other. But at least he means it with Lucy, so that's a plus. It's always nice when Sean can actually mean what he says.
"I'm around there a lot. I find it.. comforting t'be around there. B't no.. I 'ave a place in Brooklynn actually." He pulls a pen and notepad out of his jacket. He scratches down Sean and his phone number. "Really tho, if ye want help wit' yer powers or ye need help… call me." He slides the paper over and stands "An thanks.. the coffee was a good call." He does feel a bit more sober, not enough to head into the office yet, but soon.
*
"Thanks. I'd give you mine but we don't have a phone — Laura says we need one so we'll see." Lucy takes the paper and folds it up before tucking it away in a pocket. "Whatever reason you're drinking this early, I hope you work it out," she says rather affectionately, as though she's totally accustommed to people being drunk first thing. "I'd offer to help but, you know. I just got done being homeless so I'm a little useless. Come by Byrne House and ask for us if you're around, though. I'm a pretty good cook." She stands up and shoulders her bag.
"It's Lucy and Laura. Fourth floor. Someone will show you the way."
*
Sean laughs a bit to himself as the girl calls him out on the drinking. He shrugs it off and says "Yea, bad habit.."
He stands now and says "Well Lucy, it was nice meetin' ye. I might jus' drop by next time I'm around the neighborhood." Hearing that she was just recently homeless and obviously seeing that she is not exactly well off Sean is already making mental notes about how he can help her out.
Giving her a small half wave he heads out towards the street to find a subway station. Thankfully he can show up later and write up his reports.
*