#guess i have no room to talk tho im frequently up late reading fics

[thetomorrowshow]

in a ship of glass - ch 2

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the second chapter of scott's prequel for my empires superpowers au! many apologies for the next chapter of poisoned rats not being out today, i am stuck on it and want to work a bit longer.

cw: brief violence/blood, mentioned past life in a cult

~

Scott’s nineteen, and he’s just been accepted to Empires City University.

Aeor cheers, pours himself a glass of champagne and pours Scott some sparkling cider. They toast, and Scott’s so excited that both glasses freeze.

He goes to apologize, but Aeor waves him off.

“No need, Scott,” he says genially. “It’ll melt, and be better for it.”

Scott looks at the acceptance letter again just to feel that flip of his heart, grins. Then a thought hits him.

“Aeor, I’m—I’m going to be away at school, in a dorm. What if. . . .” he trails off, not sure if he wants to finish his sentence. He still has bad days, days where he can’t help but feel he shouldn’t exist. Part of him wants to have those days, screams that those are a sign from God, that he needs to do what he needs to do and rid this world of another devil. 

He ought to tell someone about those thoughts in particular, but . . . he’s afraid. He’s afraid that if he shares, Aeor will think he’s not well enough to go to school. But that terrible part of him also doesn’t want to warn Aeor, doesn’t want him to ruin everything again.

Scott shakes himself. He’s passive. He’s passive, not active, and if he ever becomes active again, he’s got a support system and a plan in place. Besides, his therapist thinks school will be good for him.

“It’s hardly ‘away’, ECU,” Aeor says gently, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “A two hour drive or a twenty minute flight. And you can always call. As long as I’m not fighting crime, I’ll always pick up.”

Scott clenches his fists, then closes his eyes and runs through a breathing exercise—in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. Empires City University. He’s excited. He genuinely is—he’d managed to transfer his credits from those two semesters at Milford, so freshman year’s out of the way and he can hone in on a major.

ECU has an insane amount of options to choose from. He’s not sure what he wants his major to be quite yet—before, he’d always planned on ministry but he just can’t stand the idea of that now. Maybe computer science, or music, or chemistry! No, not chemistry, he’s too volatile for that. He can't imagine what would happen if he spontaneously froze some fluid that should under no circumstances be frozen.

He wants to ask Aeor if he ever went to college, and if so, what he majored in. The question that bursts out of his mouth, though, is, “Can I dye my hair?”

Aeor chuckles. “You don’t need to ask me permission, Scott. But of course you can.”

“Red,” Scott says instantly. “Natural red. My hair’s pretty much blond at this point, anyway. It won’t be hard. And I’ll buy the dye, too, you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I’ll handle the dye, it’s not a problem,” Aeor tells him. He runs a hand through his own hair. “I’ve been thinking of covering the grey myself. What say you to green?”

Scott snorts in spite of himself. “Please no. How about a highlighter shade of yellow? That neon look.”

Aeor laughs as well, takes the acceptance letter from Scott and sticks it to the fridge, right next to both the ECU magnet they’d received in the mail and Scott’s antidepressant prescription. He ought to draw something to be pinned on the fridge, like a child bringing home a school project. Anything to make it less depressing.

“Maybe I’ll be an art major,” he murmurs as the thought occurs. He’s always liked drawing, and painting even more. Aeor smiles, opens the fridge.

“What are you feeling for dinner?”

Scott almost answers with what he usually does—whatever you want, it doesn’t matter to me, etc. But for the first time in a long time, he wants to celebrate.

“Can we . . . maybe, er. Have breakfast for dinner? Like, bacon, and eggs, and all that?” Before he’s even finished speaking, Aeor has pulled the eggs out of the fridge.

“Pancakes or biscuits?”

Scott thinks for a moment. “Pancakes.”

Aeor reaches up onto the kitchen shelf, pulls down a cookbook. “There’s a breakfast food section, find the pancake recipe you like and get to work,” he says. “Just pull your hair back and wash your hands first.”

Maybe he can be a culinary major. He likes cooking, has liked it ever since Aeor introduced it as a way to keep his hands occupied.

Scott cries over dinner, of course. The bacon isn’t quite as crisp as his dad makes it, but the differences only serve to remind him that he’s not welcome at home and never will be. His parents probably wish him as dead as he sometimes wishes himself.

Maybe he can major in psychology. Become a therapist, help others like him.

Despite the tears, for the first time in a long time, Scott feels like his world is full of opportunity.

-

Scott’s just turned twenty, and he’s an architecture major. He’s not sure what he’s going to do with it, but he remembers the book of unusual building designs from the Milford public library, and he remembers the moment of awe he’d had staring up at the skyscrapers and how he’d almost put off his plans just to look at the buildings.

It’s a lot more math classes than he cares for, but the design classes are right up his alley and he goes home one weekend after a big design project exhausted but pleased. Aeor hugs him and offers to celebrate, and the powers that Scott’s been working on taming with Aeor prove useful, for once, as he drops ice cubes in both of their drinks.

Scott’s also just having a good time at school. At his therapist’s recommendation, he attends an ex-cult activity group (he’d been surprised one even existed, but the school’s big enough for a jousting club so why not). It helps immensely—he still has problems accepting that he was raised in a cult, but finding others with similar (and in one case, the exact same) experiences is so comforting. They develop into one of his main friend groups, all there to push each other when the world feels forbidden.

He also bonds with his roommate Jack (who is always up at insane hours of the morning doing computer science stuff), and Scott often finds himself hanging out in Jack’s circle. The tech majors are loud and nerdy, but sometimes that’s just what Scott needs, and he genuinely enjoys it.

He works in the theatre department, as the assistant student set designer. It’s good, hard work, and the woodworking professor doesn’t mind that sometimes when Scott’s excited or anxious or hits his thumb with a hammer ice explodes out of him. She never asks questions, just takes it in stride and sits him down and gets him a cup of coffee.

Most important to him, though, is his boyfriend.

Being queer was as taboo as being powered back home, and maybe it’s the liberalism of college or just the newfound freedom, but Scott buys four different pride flags within his first semester, cycling through bi and ace and pan only to settle, eventually, on gay. As soon as he decides that, he asks out Marcus from his ex-cult group of friends and the rest is history.

Marcus is funny and fiery and jaw-droppingly hot, and within a week of their first kiss Jack is voluntarily leaving the two of them alone in the room with a call of “Use protection!” thrown over his shoulder, as Scott laughs and locks the door and dims the lights.

It’s so freeing to have this control over himself and his body, and there are days when he thinks about calling his therapist and lowering his Paxil dose because for the first time since before that first day in the library purchasing a HiSET ticket, Scott feels overwhelmingly happy.

He never does—Aeor had advised him a year ago to track his moods daily and find the weekly average, and there’s still too many panic attacks and days of just going through the motions, brain fogged, that he can’t justify reducing his antidepressants. He doesn’t want to be suicidal again—he’s far too busy.

But otherwise, college is just as good for him as his therapist thought it would be. He’s passionate about his work, has made more friends than he could ever imagine having, and is dating a man he loves.

Everything is as perfect as it can be.

Until it isn’t.

Marcus has been working on a project for a while now. He's majoring in chemistry, so Scott spends a lot of late evenings reading chem books in the mini library outside the lab, waiting on his boyfriend to be done doing whatever. Marcus is a senior and a TA, which grants him special access to the labs. Scott doesn’t initially question the amount of time he spends there, nor the strange hours. He does begin to question, however, the failing grades that Marcus begins to receive, the anger (that’s always been there, that Scott loves because it makes him so passionate) that’s closer to the surface—and the thing that really tips him over the edge is when, while waiting outside Marcus’s dorm building one night for a date they’d planned, he sees a dark shape fly overhead and circle down onto the roof. When Marcus lets him in, his hair is windswept and the small of his back is sweaty.

After that Scott pays closer attention. He finds a red mask in Marcus’s closet on top of a shoebox, a shoebox that has a green supersuit folded neatly within it. He finds strange lists of locations in Marcus’s notebook, most of which (when he looks them up) appear to be government buildings. He watches through the glass windows at the lab, checks again and again against the books he’s become quite familiar with and comes to the inevitable conclusion that Marcus is building chemical bombs.

He’s not sure what to do at first. He spends a day or two trying to act like everything is normal, but he can’t help but think of what Marcus is doing behind the scenes and that tends to kill the mood a little bit when they make out.

Then he comes to an interesting thought: what if he just . . . goes with it? 

He doesn’t really advertise that he’s powered, and Marcus has merely observed that Scott's hands are always cold and hasn’t noticed anything else. If Marcus is shaping up to be a supervillain (and it’s becoming clearer every day), maybe it’s time to reveal to him his own super-tendencies. Scott thinks maybe he wouldn’t mind being the boyfriend (or even accomplice) of a supervillain. It’s a heck of a way to rebel, what with Aeor being the primary protector of the city and practically his guardian. With Marcus’s flight powers and his ice powers, they might be unstoppable. 

He’s very passionate with Marcus after that conclusion, because evil mastermind looks good on Marcus and it’s so very hot that Scott just can’t resist him. It’s taboo, it’s thrilling, and he can’t get enough of it.

Then Marcus comes home with blood on his shoes, the night that Scott had been planning on telling him that he knows everything and is with him to the end. And Scott doesn’t know whose it is, but making out on Marcus’s bed that night turns into more and when they lie in bed after, Marcus snoring lightly with his arm over Scott’s chest, Scott stares at the shoes and wonders who it belongs to. He doesn’t tell Marcus anything.

Then the next day on the news, there's a report of a woman who was murdered by her boyfriend and Scott’s suddenly so very scared because his boyfriend is capable of murder and has plans to commit mass murder and likely has murdered already.

He doesn’t want to tell Aeor. He’s embarrassed—both of the fact that he’s dating a man (he’s pretty sure Aeor’s not homophobic, but he hasn’t asked) and of the fact that he’d been willing to be a supervillain if it meant he could stay with his college boyfriend.

He can take care of this himself.

Scott sneaks into the theatre costume shop after hours—he’s got a key to the building, so it’s not really against the rules or anything, but it’s probably something he shouldn’t do so he makes sure to avoid both security cameras. From there he gets a black leotard along with a blue hooded cloak and a similarly medieval-looking silver top (he thinks it’s left over from last year’s production of Something Rotten). These he takes back to his dorm, where he already has black leggings, a dark blue mask that will cover most of his face, and a beanie to cover his hair.

Then he waits. He tracks Marcus's progress, keeps an eye on the news, practices his ice powers in secret whenever possible. Jack doesn’t ask questions when Scott asks if he knows what radio station is the police airwave, which, after a quick google search, Jack shoots the link to him in an email. There he hears definite mentions of Marcus, who has apparently named himself Kelvin (which is just about the lamest villain name Scott has ever heard. You have your pick of anything to strike fear into the hearts of your enemy, and you pick Kelvin? Science majors) and has three confirmed kills, two of them politicians and one an unconnected bystander.

Scott’s not picked up nothing working in the theatre, and he thinks he deserves an Oscar for his performance as the role of Marcus’s boyfriend, because to all outsiders apart from Jack, nothing has changed about their relationship. His friends still roll their eyes and pretend to vomit when Scott cuddles into Marcus during study sessions, he still gets catcalled by the guys when he impulsively leans up to kiss his partner, still gets the girls cooing at him about how cute they are when Scott gushes about his partner.

Nobody knows that he’s building a secret superhero identity.

He decides to call himself Major, for several reasons. For one thing, Major had been the last name alias he’d put on his Milford library card (at the time meaning Major Sin, a phrase popular in his church). The hospital Aeor had taken him to when he’d found him unconscious that fateful night had been Major Upper Empires Medical Center. But mostly, he becomes Major because it’s the name scribbled on a piece of peeling painter’s tape stuck on the tag of the cloak.

He’s almost too late to stop Marcus the first time. He manages to catch wind of a possible Kelvin situation at a political office building over the police airwaves, and he skips out on class to run to his dorm and shrug on the costume he’s built. Then he texts Jack that he’s taking Jack’s car and takes off, off toward the sound of sirens and in the direction of news trucks.

Sure enough, Marcus is there. Scott hops out of the car two streets down and books it for the incident, feeling his face heat as various members of the crowd gasp and point at him.

The fight is long, longer than he’d hoped it would be. Marcus is good at flying, has clearly had practice at dodging, and none of the ice spikes he throws hit their mark. Scott’s not got experience, not really, and he’s starting to wear out quickly and Marcus is laughing at him but with that irritated tone that tells Scott he’s having a bad day and even though he’s fairly sure he’s fallen out of love with him, he just wants to comfort him and pepper kisses all over his face until they’re both giggling.

He’s emotionally compromised, but he’s the only person who knows Marcus’s weaknesses. One can imagine the problems that creates.

The fight ends in a standstill, Kelvin knocking Scott to the ground before flying off and Scott slipping into the shadows before he has to answer any questions about his identity. That night he winces when Marcus’s fingers accidentally press against a bruise he’d unknowingly caused.

Two days later they have another fight that ends the same way, and news stations have begun to refer to him as the Mute Marauder and he just won’t stand for that, so he creates a Facebook page for himself under the name Major and reaches out to several news outlets anonymously to let them know his name and mission—to defend Empires City from the threat of Kelvin.

The next day is another fight and another standstill, and Scott’s watching the news footage over Jack's shoulder with an ice pack pressed to his lip when Jack turns around, meets his eyes with a serious gaze.

“Dude, you don’t have to tell me anything,” he says, “but you need to stop pulling your punches. It’s pathetic. Put that guy in prison or the hospital, whichever comes first.”

And. Well. What else can Scott do after that?

Their fight on Thursday of the next week is their last one.

Scott, as Jack recommended, does not pull any punches. He’s not sure how he manages it, but he shoots ice from in front and below Kelvin at the same time, crystallizing the ice around his leg in the spike coming up from below when he dodges the one in front of him. From there, Scott pulls him down to the ground, strides toward him with ice gathering in his fist, pulls him up by the collar (he thinks of all the times he’s kissed those lips, all the times he’s unbuttoned his shirt, all the times he’s laughed at the gleam in those eyes), and smashes his fist into Marcus’s jaw.

Kelvin’s eyes roll up into his head as he slumps, the only thing holding him up the encroaching ice on his back. Scott shakes out his wrist and shakes off the ice, watching it fall in crystals on the ground.

The cops load up the unconscious Marcus and promise that they won’t treat him badly when Scott asks. Then he’s crowded by press members and he’s forced to answer a few questions—mainly his name, how he knew Kelvin, and what he’s going to do next.

“You can call me Major,” he says, more than a little unsure of himself. “I knew Kelvin years ago and heard about him on the news. I don’t know if I’ll continue fighting crime, I’m a busy man. I won’t be taking more questions.”

Then he goes home, curls up in bed and cries his heart out.

Jack comes in at some point when he’s still huddled under the blankets, stands awkwardly in the middle of the room for a moment.

“They announced his identity,” Jack says, quietly, as if he’s not sure if Scott’s awake or not. “So. I’m sorry, bro. There’ll be a lot of people asking if you knew or whatever. So if you wanted to hang out here for the rest of today and tomorrow, I can bring you food.”

Scott sighs, pulls the blanket down. He knows he must look pretty bad from Jack’s wince. “Thanks. I think I need a day off, honestly. Might ask my da—er, my guardian to come pick me up and just come back next week. Take a long weekend.”

Jack nods a bit too vigorously. “Sounds like a plan. I get the room to myself for the next three days, you get some time away from all this. Sounds great. Especially the having-the-room-to-myself part.”

“Jack.”

“Hm?”

“Don’t touch my side of the room.”

-

Scott’s twenty-one, and he’s somehow become a superhero.

He didn’t ask for this. He really just wanted to keep up with his education, hone his powers so that they don’t burst out of him randomly, maybe settle down with someone and have a kid.

Now, however, he’s attending class during the day and patrolling the city in the evenings with Aeor—as long as he doesn’t have homework. When he’s got to study, he turns on the police radio airwave in the background and responds when there’s an emergency.

His costume’s his own now, rather than made up of pieces stolen from the theatre. His hooded cloak is midnight blue, his bodysuit a lighter shade, a golden ‘M’ embossed on the chest in curling script. His mask is gold as well, as are his tennis shoes.

Aeor had been more than willing to train him in fighting crime, rather than just teach him to control his powers. Now he’s learning how to use his ice in combat, how to channel that energy into a fighting force rather than his usual passive outbursts. He also learns some fun tricks—he can shoot ice from his toes, if he really tries. He can also breathe out ice shards (or more commonly, breathe freezing fog). He wants to get to a place where he can ice skate or slide down a sidewalk by projecting ice ahead of himself while destroying what he leaves behind. It sounds fun, but every time he tries he’s knocked onto his butt.

It still gets out of control sometimes—one morning he wakes up with his eyes iced over and he panics for a solid three minutes trying to open his eyes while Jack laughs at him.

“Oh, sure, because you’re completely immune to ice,” Scott shoots at him when he can finally see, ice forming around his hand in an impressive imitation of brass knuckles. He raises his hand threateningly. “You want a taste of it yourself?”

Jack’s still laughing when he apologizes, but Scott starts laughing too and it’s all okay.

Scott isn’t quite able to justify his degree, anymore. He’s in his second-to-last semester (the architecture program usually takes a little longer than he’s done it in, what with the summer classes he took to keep himself occupied) and he doesn’t even pretend that he’s going to be an architect. The public already loves him, is already accustomed to seeing him traveling around the city with Aeor the Protector. Scott’s going to be a superhero.

-

Scott’s twenty-two and he’s graduating.

For a brief moment, he considers mailing his graduation announcement to his parents. He talks about it with his therapist, and together they deem it to not be a good idea. For one thing, he’s not sure of his own motivation. Is he sending it to brag that he’s fine without them? Is he sending it as one final attempt at validation? Whatever his intentions, sending a letter will do nothing. They’ll likely just throw it away.

His therapist recommends that, if he genuinely feels he needs closure and he thinks it would be safe, he can go visit them in person. Scott doesn’t like that idea, not yet. It’s still too early.

He doesn’t need them, anyway. He’s got Aeor. Aeor, who taught him to drive and helped him apply for college. Aeor, who helped him learn how to control his ice powers and use them healthily instead of repressing them. Aeor, who picks him up from school on bad weekends and refills his antidepressants prescription and buys Scott’s favorite candy on occasion and teared up when Scott tried on his cap and gown and saved him.

Aeor’s the only parent that Scott needs.

And when Scott walks across the stage to receive his diploma, his freshly-cut red hair tucked neatly beneath his graduation cap, Aeor whoops and takes a picture and Scott can’t help the tears that build in his eyes.

He’d never thought he would make it here. He’s twenty-two, and he’s got friends and family and a degree and a job, and he’s happier than he’s ever been. Jack flips him off from the crowd. Scott laughs right as his picture is taken.

Three weeks later, that photo is taped on the fridge in Scott’s new townhouse, right next to his antidepressants prescription and a newspaper clipping featuring a photo of Scott and Aeor in costume beside each other, the headline reading ‘AEOR ENDORSES POSSIBLE NEW PROTECTOR, MAJOR.’

Aeor hugs him hard when they move the last of Scott’s boxes into the house and whispers in his ear, “I’m so very proud of you.”

Everything is looking up for Scott.