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━━ ...AND OTHER BROKEN THINGS
I HAVEN'T BEEN DOWN HERE in over five years.
The bright fluorescent lights assault my vision, the sleek cerulean tiled floors click under my shoes. Along the walls, modern paneling of greyish blue reminds me of all the time Hank, Charles and I spent working down here. It was a large project, one which required even the student's help sometimes.
I had learnt to harness my abilities with the dark matter, and was able to lift large objects that Charles and the kids could not. Hank was ecstatic when Charles had first proposed the idea of an updated Cerebro. He spent three days and three nights devising the plans, and would not sleep until it was finished.
Those few weeks were the first time a light had shone behind his eyes. Ever since Raven, they'd been dull, lifeless, as if all the energy had seeped from him, leaving a corpse behind. But that day, that day when Charles proposed the idea, he came alive again.
It was beautiful. It made me think goodness could last, at least for a little bit.
I was wrong.
When the children were drafted, and the school closed, Charles sealed up the basement, closing Cerebro and the hidden corridors beneath the manor away for what felt like forever. He'd locked the door, then screamed and slumped down, voices groping at his mind. Hank had only watched.
So had I.
I watched as Charles descended into near madness, thrashing and pleading with me to make the voices stop. I watched as Hank's life fell off him once again, and a shell of a man replaced it. I watched as my world crumbled into darkness, me along with it.
"Kid," Logan's gruff voice jerks me back to reality, as he always seems to do now. "You all right?" I look ahead and see that Hank and Charles —now seated in his old wheelchair— are going up ahead to Cerebro. I must have stopped walking at some point, looking around me in a half-conscious daze.
There's a dull ringing in the back of my head, a singing at the neck, and in my veins, my serum-less blood pumping through the thin walls. It's nothing new. With the added weight of the dark energy, I can lose feeling in my hands or my arms sometimes. It's as if the energy is draining me of my strength to fuel its own. While I've gained control of being able to manipulate it, to pull emotion from thin air and convert it to dark matter, sometimes it still feels like the energy is controlling me.
"Yeah." I speak out loud, turning away from Logan to follow after the others. "I'm fine." I've become good at lying.
Logan and I catch up with the others, standing side by side in front of the familiar round door. In the center sits what appears to be a large hazy blue stone, with markings surrounding it to form an X shape.
