Heroes: Book III

VII

"I know I left that paint can somewhere."

My grandma grumbled to herself, straining to reach the top shelves of a wooden cabinet. My little head returned to the enormous banner in front of me, and the strokes of red I was forming to from the m in "scum."

As in, Rid Mutant Scum.

I didn't know what any of that meant yet, or even that I would be one of them. I just blindly painted, eager for the approval of my grandmother and only family.

There was a hard thud and the flapping sound of paper as my grandmother knocked a file full of documents from the cabinet.
"God blessed," she swore, her bushy brows scowling.

I set the red-dipped brush down onto a newspaper. I bent down to my knees and began to help her scoop the papers back into a pile. My eyes curiously tranced over foreign words and pictures of the same man, repeated. I read his name aloud,
"Sebastian Shaw."

My grandmother's eyes went wide at the name.
"Give me those!"

I glanced at black and white Polaroids of him as a boy, riding a bicycle, playing with a model military plane, running through the front yard of the very house I was sitting in. My little finger pointed,
"Grandma, who is that?"

"He's a bad man. A very very bad man, sweetheart."

"If he's bad then why do you have photos of him?"

"I don't know. I'll have to store these away in a storage locker or something. Don't need them junking up the house."

"Why don't you just throw them out?" I pressed, oblivious to what I was prying open.

"Because before he was bad...he was my son,"
Her eyes went red, and glossed over. She took a deep breath, hesitantly adding in the faintest whisper, as if intended only for herself,
"your father..."

***

"Firefly...Firefly..."

My eyelids unsealed themselves, fluttering a bit as my vision cleared. The dream, or the memory I should say, stained itself onto my mind. I was caught in a daze.
Where was I?

Charged, metal walls. The low humming of propellers. Three strangers beside me.
Right. I was on a helicopter bound for a mutant testing facility. Fun.

Scott, I learned was the name of the sarcastic kid with the ruby glasses. He had an older brother, Alex, that had coincidentally just died in the spontaneous explosion that occurred a couple hours ago. I mean, with that considered he looked like he was doing pretty well. But I don't think his powers allowed him to really cry. Inside, though, I could sense everything. And he most definitely wasn't fine.

Kurt, the one with the blue skin and pointed teeth and blood red eyes, I guess was saved by Mystique from mutant cage fighting, then followed her like a lost puppy until he wound up in America.

And the girl, with those green, restless, fiery eyes. Jean.
Jean I couldn't put my finger on for the life of me. The second she glanced at you she knew you literally in your entirety. She was always half-present, half-stranded off somewhere else. Jean gave me the impression she was always seeing ten times more than what anyone else was. And that it took a toll, every single minute of her curious existence.

"I think we're landing soon," Scott noted, regaining my attention. Jean uncomfortably glanced to me and then back to the window.
I must have been staring.