Post by Pyro on Nov 29, 2006 16:29:34 GMT -5
"Hey, Lucas."
The voice came from about ten feet behind him, and it was easy enough to recognise. Pyro was passing by, his arms full of books and papers that he'd gotten from somewhere and was lugging down the hallway. After he and Dom had come in from the beach, he'd been and picked up a few more research books from Magneto's old area in the underground cavern, the one that he'd locked up and all but treated as a shrine since the loss of the Brotherhood's leader.
"Would you do me a favour? Open the door to that office over there?" He nodded his head towards the door of his own self-made office. "I seem to have run out of hands."
Lucas smirked- it seemed more a default expression than one of annoyance- and nodded, stepping forward with broad steps and opening the door. He nudged the door open rather than stepping in, allowing the shorter man to walk into the office.
Books. Well, not everyone on the street was opposed to reading. And this kid had never really seemed right for the life he’d led. Lucas had only seen him in passing but even then- particularly then- Allerdyce hadn’t seemed like the sort that would have survived long on his own. It was likely how he ended up with Dom and Gracie’s gang. Those mutant kids stuck together pretty well. It had made Luke’s job a little easier.
But he’d stepped down from the position of de facto supplier to New York City’s disadvantaged mutant youth. Now the little scrub of a punk Lucas had looked over was in charge of one of the world’s most notorious “terrorist” organizations. He still couldn’t quite get his head around it.
Rather stupidly, he muttered “…a little light reading then?”
John grinned as he deposited the books on the desk (metal) and began putting them away on one of the shelves (metal). "Books take the edge off the coldness in here," he said, more to himself than to Lucas, "but yeah, I'll be working my way through quite a bit of this stuff. You can never have too much knowledge."
He glanced over at the coffee machine which he'd set to brewing before he'd gone undergrond. "Want a cup of the ol' brown stuff? That's a particularly potent blend - comes from over on Madagascar. Pretty damn impressive - Gill introduced me to it when I first got here. Help yourself, there's always plenty of it."
John put away a few more of the books and arranged some of the papers on his desk. "How you settling in?" he asked.
Lucas looked over at the coffee machine, and nodded, walking himself over. “You… want a cup yourself?” He said, pouring some into one of the plain white ceramic mugs nearby.
“Gotta say, this was pretty damned far from what I’d expected when I signed up.” He didn’t chuckle where there should have been one. Lucas just wasn’t prone to it. “The rooms remind me of the Y.” The YMCA, where many young men on the streets went to pay a small fee and get a decent night’s sleep without the fear of their shoes being stolen, was so dingy and cold in its sterility that it tended only to reinforce the harshness of the street, in spite of their being a solid roof over your head. Neither of the men in the room were strangers to the place.
“Outside though… man. Pretty fucking impressive. That mountain ever let go with lava or anything? Got any reason to think we’ll be swimming in fire someday?”
"Yeah, please," he said in response to the offer of coffee. He finished fiddling with the papers and crossed over to take the offered mug. "Yep, it's got definite hints of the ol' Y. Only ever went there a couple of times - found myself work in a hotel for a while and the girl there let me kip in the staff room instead of outside in the alleyway. Shelley her name was."
It was another one of those rare moments when Pyro filled in the blanks on part of his life that few people knew about.
"As for the mountain - unlikely. Gill says that it probably was once a volcano, but it's been inactive for thousands of years. This whole island was formed as part of its original eruption, or so he tells me. It's an incredible place. I actually think of it as home."
He crossed back to his desk and sat down, indicating that Lucas was welcome to do the same if he wished. "I want lots of mutants to see it as home, too. That's part of the plan, y'know?"
Lucas did sit, and raised an eyebrow at Pyro. “You think the Brotherhood will get that big, huh.”
The younger man gave one of his one-shouldered, non-commital 'uni-shrugs'. "Maybe, maybe not. But this isn't just about the Brotherhood as an active organisation. This is about the Brotherhood in the true sense of the word. A community. A place for mutants to come where they can feel safe from the humans out there. And yeah, if in time they want to join the active movement, so much the better."
Lucas took a drink of coffee, looking at Pyro with one of his trademark deadpan expressions. “So you want a mutants-only commune. Don’t the Jews have something like that? Israel I think it’s called?”
He pulled a cigarette out of his pack, then thought better of it and stashed it behind his ear. “How’d you get stuck with this job anyway, Sparks? Not like you, last I heard.”
Pyro didn't rise to the bait at all. "Magneto had a vision, Lucas, and that was simply that we, as mutants, take our place in society where we belong. At the top of the pile. And I didn't get 'stuck' with the job either, I took it over because there was nobody else left who believed like I do."
He sipped on his own coffee.
"What was the last you heard, anyway?"
Lucas disregarded the question, his eyes focused on Pyro. “You do everything your Daddy tells you to do, Sparks?” He nodded to the books. “You’re a smart guy, but you sound like you’re fresh outta church. Ain’t no one from our line of work gonna buy a line like “Magneto told me to”. Magneto got a lot of our friends killed not so long ago, ‘less you’ve decided to forget. So maybe try tellin’ me how John Allerdyce thinks- not Pyro the Puppy.”
The slur on his idol caused a slight scowl to pass across John's face.
"If you never met Magneto, then don't consider yourself able to comment on what he was or wasn't like." He took another pull on his coffee.
"He was right, Lucas, don't you get it? We're better than the humans. We're gods amongst insects, all of us. And they treat us with fear and hatred. If that's what they expect of us, then that's what we'll GIVE them. What the fuck did the human world ever do for me? For you? For Gracie and Dom?"
Lucas shook his head and lifted a hand. “Slow down. Slow down. I’m not askin’ you if our cause is right. I signed into this, didn’t I? That’s not what I’m sayin’.”
“What I’m asking you to do is drop the emotional propaganda, and talk to me like a man, not a megaphone.” He sat forward.
“Now I didn’t say –anything- about Magneto. If that’s what you heard, you’re not listening. Don’t broken record me Allerdyce, I’m too smart for that shit- and so are you. Might work on stupid kids ripped from Callisto’s bitch claws, but it ain’t gonna work on the people you REALLY need working for you.”
Lucas set his coffee on the desk, folded his hands and rested his elbow on his knees, looking John in the eye. “Big guy ain’t here anymore from what Dom tells me. So tell me what Pyro’s Brotherhood is about. Got a right to know what I’ve bought into, after all.”
Pyro stared at Lucas for a few moments after he finished speaking, then got up and fetched the coffee pot, refilling both of their mugs, but not sitting down again. He paced over to the bookcase.
"The basic principle is the same," he said, and there was a lot less of the former zeal in his voice. "To make sure that the human population know we mean business and we won't kow-tow to them." He ran his fingers along the row of books. "I'm twenty years old, Lucas, and I would like to think that by the time I'm thirty, mutants will be in positions of power in this world, not being treated like animals in the zoo."
He took a book from the shelf and tossed it over to Lucas. "Fatherland," he said. "Robert Harris. Makes you question things. How different could the world be if things work out differently from the way they seem to be headed."
Sitting back down again, he stared into his mug of coffee.
"The human world has a large proportion of the mutant population running scared, Lucas. It's oppression. And I spent enough time in my life being oppressed and bullied. I won't sit by idly and let it happen when I could do something about it."
Lucas caught the book- feeling the spine crack a little as it collided with his hand. He swung his arm to lessen the blow, and let it fall open in his hand.
That was a thick book. It was going to take forever to read.
Snapping it shut again, he looked up at Pyro as he finished
speaking. “Think it’s really gonna go that fast?” He looked skeptical, then shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
“One thing I learned- people like an example. I think if nothin’ else, even if you’re not able to change how things are run, you’re gonna give other people the courage to give it a try. I mean, Magneto had to impress you, right? Think you’da made the same decision if you hadn’t met him?” Lucas of course knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding John’s escape with Magneto and Mystique, but had to assume their meeting had changed John’s life significantly. It was in the way he spoke about the famed mutant terrorist.
"Yeah, he made an impression," said John, softly. "He cleared the funk in my mind. I always knew that what we could do was special, important...and he made it crystal clear for me. He encouraged me to develop past what I'd been taught, to bend the rules of my abilities to suit myself. He predicted the coming of the Cure before it was announced. Months before it was announced."
The young man closed his eyes briefly.
"Right now, I'm keeping the dream alive. And to me, it's important that someone does. Callisto ran off like a scared jack rabbit after Alcatraz. Apart from Gill, who stays here anyway, it was just me, Juggernaut and Python. That was it Lucas. From the hundreds who formed that phalanx in San Fran - to us."
Lucas nodded once. “That’s my point. Pyro.”
“The people that are here? They’re not fodder. Where’s your regret for what happened. I saw the footage, man. I saw those people go down like they were nothing. Wasn’t there any way to stop that? To prevent it? What’s gonna stop YOU from doing something like that again.” And there lay the anger that had been lurking beneath Luke’s calm surface.
"He warned them, Lucas." A stirring of Pyro's own anger. "He warned them quite simply to get rid of the Cure or face the consequences. Every one of the mutants who joined up with him for that battle knew what they were getting themselves into. Hell, I went into battle not expecting to come out. Do you think I don't have difficulty reconciling every one of those deaths? Because if it puts your mind at ease, I suffer every day over what happened. I've been carrying the weight of that around with me for over a year, now. Without Mystique..."
He broke off. He didn't want to talk to Lucas about Mystique. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he was feeling almost oddly possessive about her. He didn't want Lucas to do what Lucas did and somehow muscle in on her. He knew Mystique wasn't his to possess, that she did what she did because she chose to do it, and because it suited her purposes, but he couldn't deny the feelings he had for her. Yet he knew he should give her the credit she deserved.
"Without Mystique, the Brotherhood would have sputtered and died. She's probably the single best asset we have on our side now - apart from all of us working together."
He steadied his anger. There was no point in falling into the trap of aggression; things would just get progressively heated and no sense would come of it.
"Baltimore was a blood bath, but it wasn't intended to be that way. I...there was someone who semi-betrayed us. A psychic who messed with more than one mind and things got out of hand. She's not in the picture any more. From here on in, we control our own destinies."
Lucas didn’t know who Mystique was. In reality, he’d seen some reports and heard a lot of shit from the many, many friends of the people who had died. Magneto had split the environment of mutant society at Luke’s level straight down the middle. Either you were with him, or you weren’t. People had died in arguments over the subject, let alone in Alcatraz, or Baltimore. Luke had done what he’d always done- stood in the background, in the shadow, and waited.
Maybe he was a wolf that smelled fear. A shark that smelled blood. He wasn’t sure. He just knew he wasn’t about to be anyone’s god damned fodder.
Lucas leveled his gaze at John for a long moment, the two men playing that silent game of sizing one another up.
“Well. Gotta respect your spirit anyway.” He picked up his coffee, the tension between them slowly dissipating. “Let’s hope you have better luck next time, right? One of these days, your people gonna get real tired of dying and having nothing come of it.”
He took a drink, gesturing his cup in a sort of toast to the man who was now his “boss”.
"It's not about 'luck'," came the retort, although the tension had definitely lessened now. "It's about learning. And I've learned a lot."
He had, too, he realised. He'd learned one hell of a lot. For a few moments he suddenly found himself weary of the whole thing. Tired of having to bear the guilt of other people's deaths, tired of being tired. For the briefest of brief moments, he seriously considered just standing up, giving Lucas the keys to the office and walking away. Then he smiled, amused by his own moment of weakness.
"I'm glad you're here," he said. "It's good having people like you in the ranks." Challenges my behaviour. And I appreciate it.
Lucas chuckled. He wasn’t prone to it.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that.” Now it sounded like he felt Pyro was giving him a line, but there was something in the slack line of his shoulders that said he didn’t mind all that much.
"Another entrant in the dick waving contest," came the instant reply, and Pyro exchanged the first real grin he'd ever exchanged with Lucas. "I'll get kind of sick of constantly beating Dom."
Lucas just grinned.
The voice came from about ten feet behind him, and it was easy enough to recognise. Pyro was passing by, his arms full of books and papers that he'd gotten from somewhere and was lugging down the hallway. After he and Dom had come in from the beach, he'd been and picked up a few more research books from Magneto's old area in the underground cavern, the one that he'd locked up and all but treated as a shrine since the loss of the Brotherhood's leader.
"Would you do me a favour? Open the door to that office over there?" He nodded his head towards the door of his own self-made office. "I seem to have run out of hands."
Lucas smirked- it seemed more a default expression than one of annoyance- and nodded, stepping forward with broad steps and opening the door. He nudged the door open rather than stepping in, allowing the shorter man to walk into the office.
Books. Well, not everyone on the street was opposed to reading. And this kid had never really seemed right for the life he’d led. Lucas had only seen him in passing but even then- particularly then- Allerdyce hadn’t seemed like the sort that would have survived long on his own. It was likely how he ended up with Dom and Gracie’s gang. Those mutant kids stuck together pretty well. It had made Luke’s job a little easier.
But he’d stepped down from the position of de facto supplier to New York City’s disadvantaged mutant youth. Now the little scrub of a punk Lucas had looked over was in charge of one of the world’s most notorious “terrorist” organizations. He still couldn’t quite get his head around it.
Rather stupidly, he muttered “…a little light reading then?”
John grinned as he deposited the books on the desk (metal) and began putting them away on one of the shelves (metal). "Books take the edge off the coldness in here," he said, more to himself than to Lucas, "but yeah, I'll be working my way through quite a bit of this stuff. You can never have too much knowledge."
He glanced over at the coffee machine which he'd set to brewing before he'd gone undergrond. "Want a cup of the ol' brown stuff? That's a particularly potent blend - comes from over on Madagascar. Pretty damn impressive - Gill introduced me to it when I first got here. Help yourself, there's always plenty of it."
John put away a few more of the books and arranged some of the papers on his desk. "How you settling in?" he asked.
Lucas looked over at the coffee machine, and nodded, walking himself over. “You… want a cup yourself?” He said, pouring some into one of the plain white ceramic mugs nearby.
“Gotta say, this was pretty damned far from what I’d expected when I signed up.” He didn’t chuckle where there should have been one. Lucas just wasn’t prone to it. “The rooms remind me of the Y.” The YMCA, where many young men on the streets went to pay a small fee and get a decent night’s sleep without the fear of their shoes being stolen, was so dingy and cold in its sterility that it tended only to reinforce the harshness of the street, in spite of their being a solid roof over your head. Neither of the men in the room were strangers to the place.
“Outside though… man. Pretty fucking impressive. That mountain ever let go with lava or anything? Got any reason to think we’ll be swimming in fire someday?”
"Yeah, please," he said in response to the offer of coffee. He finished fiddling with the papers and crossed over to take the offered mug. "Yep, it's got definite hints of the ol' Y. Only ever went there a couple of times - found myself work in a hotel for a while and the girl there let me kip in the staff room instead of outside in the alleyway. Shelley her name was."
It was another one of those rare moments when Pyro filled in the blanks on part of his life that few people knew about.
"As for the mountain - unlikely. Gill says that it probably was once a volcano, but it's been inactive for thousands of years. This whole island was formed as part of its original eruption, or so he tells me. It's an incredible place. I actually think of it as home."
He crossed back to his desk and sat down, indicating that Lucas was welcome to do the same if he wished. "I want lots of mutants to see it as home, too. That's part of the plan, y'know?"
Lucas did sit, and raised an eyebrow at Pyro. “You think the Brotherhood will get that big, huh.”
The younger man gave one of his one-shouldered, non-commital 'uni-shrugs'. "Maybe, maybe not. But this isn't just about the Brotherhood as an active organisation. This is about the Brotherhood in the true sense of the word. A community. A place for mutants to come where they can feel safe from the humans out there. And yeah, if in time they want to join the active movement, so much the better."
Lucas took a drink of coffee, looking at Pyro with one of his trademark deadpan expressions. “So you want a mutants-only commune. Don’t the Jews have something like that? Israel I think it’s called?”
He pulled a cigarette out of his pack, then thought better of it and stashed it behind his ear. “How’d you get stuck with this job anyway, Sparks? Not like you, last I heard.”
Pyro didn't rise to the bait at all. "Magneto had a vision, Lucas, and that was simply that we, as mutants, take our place in society where we belong. At the top of the pile. And I didn't get 'stuck' with the job either, I took it over because there was nobody else left who believed like I do."
He sipped on his own coffee.
"What was the last you heard, anyway?"
Lucas disregarded the question, his eyes focused on Pyro. “You do everything your Daddy tells you to do, Sparks?” He nodded to the books. “You’re a smart guy, but you sound like you’re fresh outta church. Ain’t no one from our line of work gonna buy a line like “Magneto told me to”. Magneto got a lot of our friends killed not so long ago, ‘less you’ve decided to forget. So maybe try tellin’ me how John Allerdyce thinks- not Pyro the Puppy.”
The slur on his idol caused a slight scowl to pass across John's face.
"If you never met Magneto, then don't consider yourself able to comment on what he was or wasn't like." He took another pull on his coffee.
"He was right, Lucas, don't you get it? We're better than the humans. We're gods amongst insects, all of us. And they treat us with fear and hatred. If that's what they expect of us, then that's what we'll GIVE them. What the fuck did the human world ever do for me? For you? For Gracie and Dom?"
Lucas shook his head and lifted a hand. “Slow down. Slow down. I’m not askin’ you if our cause is right. I signed into this, didn’t I? That’s not what I’m sayin’.”
“What I’m asking you to do is drop the emotional propaganda, and talk to me like a man, not a megaphone.” He sat forward.
“Now I didn’t say –anything- about Magneto. If that’s what you heard, you’re not listening. Don’t broken record me Allerdyce, I’m too smart for that shit- and so are you. Might work on stupid kids ripped from Callisto’s bitch claws, but it ain’t gonna work on the people you REALLY need working for you.”
Lucas set his coffee on the desk, folded his hands and rested his elbow on his knees, looking John in the eye. “Big guy ain’t here anymore from what Dom tells me. So tell me what Pyro’s Brotherhood is about. Got a right to know what I’ve bought into, after all.”
Pyro stared at Lucas for a few moments after he finished speaking, then got up and fetched the coffee pot, refilling both of their mugs, but not sitting down again. He paced over to the bookcase.
"The basic principle is the same," he said, and there was a lot less of the former zeal in his voice. "To make sure that the human population know we mean business and we won't kow-tow to them." He ran his fingers along the row of books. "I'm twenty years old, Lucas, and I would like to think that by the time I'm thirty, mutants will be in positions of power in this world, not being treated like animals in the zoo."
He took a book from the shelf and tossed it over to Lucas. "Fatherland," he said. "Robert Harris. Makes you question things. How different could the world be if things work out differently from the way they seem to be headed."
Sitting back down again, he stared into his mug of coffee.
"The human world has a large proportion of the mutant population running scared, Lucas. It's oppression. And I spent enough time in my life being oppressed and bullied. I won't sit by idly and let it happen when I could do something about it."
Lucas caught the book- feeling the spine crack a little as it collided with his hand. He swung his arm to lessen the blow, and let it fall open in his hand.
That was a thick book. It was going to take forever to read.
Snapping it shut again, he looked up at Pyro as he finished
speaking. “Think it’s really gonna go that fast?” He looked skeptical, then shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
“One thing I learned- people like an example. I think if nothin’ else, even if you’re not able to change how things are run, you’re gonna give other people the courage to give it a try. I mean, Magneto had to impress you, right? Think you’da made the same decision if you hadn’t met him?” Lucas of course knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding John’s escape with Magneto and Mystique, but had to assume their meeting had changed John’s life significantly. It was in the way he spoke about the famed mutant terrorist.
"Yeah, he made an impression," said John, softly. "He cleared the funk in my mind. I always knew that what we could do was special, important...and he made it crystal clear for me. He encouraged me to develop past what I'd been taught, to bend the rules of my abilities to suit myself. He predicted the coming of the Cure before it was announced. Months before it was announced."
The young man closed his eyes briefly.
"Right now, I'm keeping the dream alive. And to me, it's important that someone does. Callisto ran off like a scared jack rabbit after Alcatraz. Apart from Gill, who stays here anyway, it was just me, Juggernaut and Python. That was it Lucas. From the hundreds who formed that phalanx in San Fran - to us."
Lucas nodded once. “That’s my point. Pyro.”
“The people that are here? They’re not fodder. Where’s your regret for what happened. I saw the footage, man. I saw those people go down like they were nothing. Wasn’t there any way to stop that? To prevent it? What’s gonna stop YOU from doing something like that again.” And there lay the anger that had been lurking beneath Luke’s calm surface.
"He warned them, Lucas." A stirring of Pyro's own anger. "He warned them quite simply to get rid of the Cure or face the consequences. Every one of the mutants who joined up with him for that battle knew what they were getting themselves into. Hell, I went into battle not expecting to come out. Do you think I don't have difficulty reconciling every one of those deaths? Because if it puts your mind at ease, I suffer every day over what happened. I've been carrying the weight of that around with me for over a year, now. Without Mystique..."
He broke off. He didn't want to talk to Lucas about Mystique. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he was feeling almost oddly possessive about her. He didn't want Lucas to do what Lucas did and somehow muscle in on her. He knew Mystique wasn't his to possess, that she did what she did because she chose to do it, and because it suited her purposes, but he couldn't deny the feelings he had for her. Yet he knew he should give her the credit she deserved.
"Without Mystique, the Brotherhood would have sputtered and died. She's probably the single best asset we have on our side now - apart from all of us working together."
He steadied his anger. There was no point in falling into the trap of aggression; things would just get progressively heated and no sense would come of it.
"Baltimore was a blood bath, but it wasn't intended to be that way. I...there was someone who semi-betrayed us. A psychic who messed with more than one mind and things got out of hand. She's not in the picture any more. From here on in, we control our own destinies."
Lucas didn’t know who Mystique was. In reality, he’d seen some reports and heard a lot of shit from the many, many friends of the people who had died. Magneto had split the environment of mutant society at Luke’s level straight down the middle. Either you were with him, or you weren’t. People had died in arguments over the subject, let alone in Alcatraz, or Baltimore. Luke had done what he’d always done- stood in the background, in the shadow, and waited.
Maybe he was a wolf that smelled fear. A shark that smelled blood. He wasn’t sure. He just knew he wasn’t about to be anyone’s god damned fodder.
Lucas leveled his gaze at John for a long moment, the two men playing that silent game of sizing one another up.
“Well. Gotta respect your spirit anyway.” He picked up his coffee, the tension between them slowly dissipating. “Let’s hope you have better luck next time, right? One of these days, your people gonna get real tired of dying and having nothing come of it.”
He took a drink, gesturing his cup in a sort of toast to the man who was now his “boss”.
"It's not about 'luck'," came the retort, although the tension had definitely lessened now. "It's about learning. And I've learned a lot."
He had, too, he realised. He'd learned one hell of a lot. For a few moments he suddenly found himself weary of the whole thing. Tired of having to bear the guilt of other people's deaths, tired of being tired. For the briefest of brief moments, he seriously considered just standing up, giving Lucas the keys to the office and walking away. Then he smiled, amused by his own moment of weakness.
"I'm glad you're here," he said. "It's good having people like you in the ranks." Challenges my behaviour. And I appreciate it.
Lucas chuckled. He wasn’t prone to it.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that.” Now it sounded like he felt Pyro was giving him a line, but there was something in the slack line of his shoulders that said he didn’t mind all that much.
"Another entrant in the dick waving contest," came the instant reply, and Pyro exchanged the first real grin he'd ever exchanged with Lucas. "I'll get kind of sick of constantly beating Dom."
Lucas just grinned.
