Homeworks

[Freight Train]

Little Chelsea sat in one of the big, fluffy recliners in a common room, sinking into it. She was covered with a blanket from nose to toes, only her slate grey eyes showing. She was spending more time this way lately, quietly alone with her thoughts, rather than out and about.

She'd suddenly stopped calling everybody by strange nicknames, and no longer corrected people who called her "Chelsea" with a spirited yell of "FREIGHT TRAIN!" The basketball courts were seeing less of her, and while most students and teachers didn't miss her dominating the boom box with her electronica, they missed the energetic youth with her hard defense and accurate free-throws. The tvs in the common areas and mess hall were quieter, too, without her around to shout at the people on the programs who she felt were lacking in guts or brainpower.

She sighed and wiggled her toes out from under the blanket, looking aside at the table where her schoolwork rested. She was doing as well as ever, except in Professor Chandreshekar's math class. She wouldn't look at him, and wouldn't look at the whiteboard in case he was standing there. She'd begun to wear her headphones under her hair to keep from having to hear him, and she was totally lost on all the assignments. Reluctantly she reached over and pulled her math book into her lap.

"I hate you," she whispered to problem 1.

[Stern]

Stern had been wandering around the Cullen's campus for nearly two hours and had searched everywhere. He had discovered that he could in fact light jump behind locked doors as long as light could get in around the cracks.

So far he head searched the library (twice!), the faculty quarters, the lunch room, the gym, and every classroom, study room, and common room he could find. He looked into the next room--the last one he had the patience for--and saw a little girl wrapped in a blanket with a large text book in her lap. She did not look happy.

"Excuse me?" he asked while keeping the annoyed edge out of his voice, "Is Ms. Florence anywhere around?"

He hadn't heard from her in days and it was starting to get to him. Oh well, maybe it was his turn after suddenly disappearing on her for several days on end.

[Freight Train]

She recognized him from his previous visit, but couldn't remember his proper name. She'd called him Goggles, and had subsequently come up with a slew of other silly names for the college boy. Glowbug. Nightlight. Streetlamp. She chose not to address him by any name.

"No, I haven't seen Ms. Florence," she grumped, glowering at her wonky algebra. She tore out the page of her notebook that she'd been writing on with sudden fury and threw it into the garbage. Her arm swung around in the follow through and upset the table with all her stuff on it, her power sending it flying backward behind her chair. She crossed her arms, face burning red with embarrassment at the scene. She'd only meant to throw out her faulty work.

[Stern]

Stern lifted an eyebrow. "Homework getting to you?" he asked.

Homework. Stern hadn't done a scrap of homework since that finals paper on the Fool in King Lear for his English class. That was so long ago it seemed.

"What subject?"

[Freight Train]

"Math," she answered hesitantly. She finally sighed and threw the blanket off, hopping down and padding around to pick up all her stuff. "And no, it isn't getting to me," she said, a little more indignantly than was necessary. "Homework isn't an issue. Its just a stupid chore."

She lifted the heavy table with an audible grunt and apparent strain, restacking her books one at a time until she'd set it all back the way it was. She stood and stared at the stack, looking tired and sad and aggravated. "I'm okay," she snapped without any prompting.

[Stern]

Stern would have folded his arms if he could have: his right arm was still out of commission and pinned to his side until his shoulder healed. With luck that would come mercifully soon.

"No, you're not. I don't know what's got you going, but if it's not math, then it's me. And if it's not me, then I won't take the attitude."

Stern was maybe mildly upset with the little girl but the time away caused him to get his hackles up more quickly than usual.

"So, care to enlighten me about what's going on? Or do I just need to get out of your hair?"

[Freight Train]

"No, I don't!" she shrilled, throwing herself back into the chair, feeling it sway dangerously before settling properly. She mashed her palms to her eyes and leaned forward, elbows rested on her knees, and screamed her frustration at the plushy cushion underneath her. A minute passed before she looked up at Stern. "This guy just busted in here," she said hoarsely. "He attacked one of the labs."

[Stern]

Suddenly it was all clear. She had witnessed something horrendous. Kind of like him.

"Yeah?"

Stern was suddenly gentle. He found a spare footstool and sat close by the chair where the little girl was huddled up. He waited a moment. He'd let her do her thing a while.

"What did he do while he was there?"

[Freight Train]

"I don't know," she whimpered, drawing the blanket over herself and hugging her knees. "It was way late and I was wandering around being bored, because this place is a hole, and I heard this noise from down the hall, on the ground level. And when me and this other kid went to look, this huge bald guy was threatening Professor Chandreshekar." Her throat tightened up and she wiped her eyes to clear the tears that were trying to get out. "Stupid butthole, being up at 1am working. Why'd he hafta do that?"

[Stern]

Stern nodded. "Yeah? The professor was probably working on something he couldn't do during the day He teaches you guys and has to make time for his own projects when he can."

He idly checked the seal on his goggles. "It's not like he would know someone was going to break in. So what happened to the professor?"

She was like him, in a way. Witness to a horrible event and it was changing her. Probably forever. Stern could relate to that. Of course, what happened to her was not nearly at the scale of the ESU bombing, but it certainly seemed to just as traumatic, if not more so. She was a little girl, after all.

"Is the professor still ok?"

[Freight Train]

"HE DIED!" she screamed, folding into a ball and tipping over on her side. "He died eight times in the fight that followed!" She hid her face deep in the blanket, speaking so fast and so quiet that Stern had to lean in and really listen to catch it. "He can clone himself and he brought in a ton of clones to help me and this other kid and this random ninja guy fight the burglar who had stone powers and the boulder guy stabbed eight of his clones and there was blood and I threw up all over my bedroom slippers."

[Stern]

"I see," he said at last. "That's awful."

Stern sat there in silence and let the little girl cry. It was odd because he hadn't done it in so long, but he found himself patting Chelsea on the head and clearing the hair from her eyes.

"It's not fair, is it? People without restraint do horrible things. I've seen a lot of awful things too."

[Freight Train]

She uncurled, sitting up with a fresh burst of anger.

"He's still alive! One of the clones lived through the fight, and every day I get to see this dead guy in class and I have to hear him tell me about how to find X and calculate angles and stand there and write like his chest wasn't caved in and his arms weren't broken and I have to look him in the eye when I give him my crappy homework that I can't do because I don't wanna be in the same room with the guy who got killed and then carried me out to safety..." She deflated through the tirade until she was slumped in the chair again. "I don't know what to do."

[Stern]

Stern took his hand back and rested it on his knee. "Well, I think that maybe you should ask him how he copes with all that. After all, he did die. Like you said, he died 8 times. At once. No doubt he felt all that. Imagine how it must have been for him to have to go through that so many times. He still manages. He's living and continuing on with his life."

Stern looked about until he found a box of tissues across the room. He stood and got them, pulled one from the box and handed it to Freight Train. "Here. That'll help you."

[Freight Train]

She blew her nose so forcefully that it tore the tissue. She accepted another and wiped at her nose a little more before tossing them into the bin. "I know, and I wanna talk to him about it...settle up, y'know? I don't even remember what happened after we left the scene of the fight. I just kinda spaced out."

[Stern]

Stern nodded. "You know, I've been through similar things myself. A month or so ago, my college got blown up by a guy who had nothing better to do with his time. The whole place was filled with people who had a lot to live for. I was there to see my friends graduate. I fought the guy. As hard and as strong as I could."

Stern chuckled despite the serious nature of the conversation. "He kicked me out of the nosebleed section of the basketball stadium and into the court. He detonated his bomb and as a result of the stress of the situation I found myself with the ability to travel at the speed of light. I woke up almost a week later in a small house in the Middle East healing from broken everything and a serious burn on my left arm."

He tugged his sleeve up with his teeth and showed her the scars from Neutron's nuclear grasp.

"I spent the next two weeks traveling across Europe fighting random people and stealing to survive. The last maniac I fought broke my shoulder."

Stern pointed at the brace that held his arm from moving. "Now I'm legally dead, but not for much longer."

Stern drummed on his knee with his fingers. "Never mind."

He was no good at this kind of thing. He was not faring as well as he was. He was angry almost all the time. He was mostly bent on revenge and found himself in the middle of fits of rage at the drop of a hat and it was getting in the way of his life. He wondered from time to time if he was really going to be in the right mind to be a good man to her. Every time she touched him she was going to pick up on that. No matter what happened he was going to present that edge to her, even when all he wanted to do was show her that he cared or a gentle feeling or just let her know with a touch that he thought she was wonderful, she'd feel that anger.

"How do you feel about the whole thing? What's going on in your head? In your heart? What's the world look like to you?"

[Freight Train]

That sounded so much worse than what she'd seen. An ordeal over months, as opposed to her single night of terror. She felt guilty, though it was absurd for her to be that way.

"I feel worthless. Like, I used to feel really strong and stuff, like I was invincible and unstoppable, and now I just feel heavy. I can't think or focus as well, and I feel terrible all the time. I don't like the way the break-in just happened. I feel like there should've been a better defense, that he never should've gotten inside the fence. I feel like it's all the teachers' faults."

[Stern]

Stern nodded. "Well, Maybe the school does need a better defense. But you know, I'm sure it'll get taken care of. Now, tell me what you used to do when you needed to blow off some steam."

[Freight Train]

"I used to play basketball and dominate the gym's boombox with really loud, high-energy music. I can barely do that anymore...I'm there 10 minutes and I just feel tired, and a little sick. I don't even bother putting my music in the machine anymore."

[Stern]

"Ok." Stern sat back and ran his good hand through his hair. "What do you do now?"

Stern needed to find something to do to get the stress out. He was either luck or unlucky enough to be able to set several dead plants on fire along with the head of one Middle Eastern terrorist. Most of his pain and frustration he took out on the people looking to end his life.

Unfortunately for her, she had nothing like that. He'd come up with something. He needed to help her get it out with something aggressive.

[Freight Train]

"Sit around like a pathetic loser," she responded bitterly, eyes narrowing partly in spite, partly to try and prevent more tears. "I just hide out in common rooms and my bedroom." She shrugged. "I just don't want to do anything."

[Stern]

Stern rubbed his chin. "I see. Well, you're going to do something about that today."

Stern looked at the clock on the wall. "I'm going to be back in half an hour. And you're going to be outside at the front gate. Then me and you are going to take a short walk."

Then he disappeared in a flash of light and reappeared at the local dollar store. He needed as many breakables as he could get his hands on for ten dollars.

[Freight Train]

She was about to protest him. She needed to do her homework! But then he was gone before she could even say anything. She considered the situation for about ten minutes. If she didn't meet him, he'd probably just hunt her down and be obnoxious until she gave in. It's what she would've done. She sighed and went to change into something that could get dirty. She was at the gate five minutes early, dressed in overalls and a t-shirt, sitting with her back to one of the posts and staring at the dirt between her toes.

[Stern]

Stern walked down the sidewalk towing his newly found breakables behind him in a shopping buggy. Ten dollars worth of yogurt drinks, tea candle holders, porcelain figures, and even a couple of broom handles.

"Come on," he said when he got within range of the front gate and saw Chelsea sitting there.

"We're going to go have fun."

[Freight Train]

She blew her bangs off her forehead and stood, dusting the dirt off her butt and following a few paces behind. She eyeballed the stuff in the shopping cart; they weren't really things she'd consider fun, and she hadn't built the interest in the exercise enough that she would have put the plan together on her own.

[Stern]

Stern walked her out to a large area behind a closed up grocery store. No one rolled through there anymore. All there was was garbage littering the place and a large rusted dumpster in the corner.

"Here. I want you stand next to me."

Stern stood a good fifteen feet from the dumpster and faced it with a serious look. "Now," he said when she idled up beside him. "take this" he handed her a glass candle holder, "put all your frustration and anger behind it and throw it at the dumpster just as hard and fast as you can manage."

[Freight Train]

She slowly extracted her hands from the pockets of her overalls, sighing as she took the fragile object, and studied it. She could see her warped reflection in it, and she didn't like what she saw. Her eyes were red from crying, and they were tired looking from her lack of sleep. She looked pathetic. She used to look tough. Her eyebrows knit together, and with a loud yell she pitched the thing, watching it shatter into a thousand tinkly pieces against the dumpster, which rewarded her effort with a deep gonging noise.

[Stern]

"There we go," Stern said with a tone of satisfaction. "Here."

Stern gave her one of the plastic yogurt drink bottles. "Toss that next. I'm just going to feed you these until we run out of stuff or you run out of steam. But you just let it all out."

[Freight Train]

She tossed it lightly, feeling the weight of it shift as the liquid sloshed inside it. She threw it, and while the bottled dented in heavily, it didn't goosh its contents all over like she'd expected. Without any prompting from Stern she grabbed another, twisted the cap just a little bit, then threw it. That time it DID slosh out, and she smiled a little at spray of pink. She held her hand out for the next object when a thought occurred to her, souring her expression.

"Kinda like blood, huh?"

[Stern]

Stern nodded vaguely. "Pale pink, sure. Whose blood?"

Stern didn't really know how to help people, but he figured just breaking things would at least take the edge off. Clearly this was much worse than he figured.

He gave her a porcelain bauble. A piggy bank. "Here, throw like a maniac while you're talking."

[Freight Train]

"Blood gooshes all around like that when people explode," she said, feeling eerily calm and detached as she shattered the piggy bank. She took the next object and broke it on the dumpster with another hard pitch. "It's pretty sick. It just goes everywhere and gets on everything and even after you wash it up you can still kinda tell it was there." Already the sticky yogurt was starting to dry in the sun, leaving the area it spattered darker than the pavement around it.

[Stern]

Stern nodded. "So what happened?"

He handed off another piggy bank to her and decided to be more direct. "This has to do with why you can't stand to be around Professor whats-his-name."

[Freight Train]

"Yeah. I told you already, he made clones and they got butchered on these rock spikes. Sudden, quick, brutal." She threw the piggy bank, which didn't make the full distance. "And now I hafta see the dead guy all the time and get reminded of that. Our science class had a field trip down to the lab near the one where the attack happened. It was laid out exactly the same, and I could just see where the blood spatter was, like it was imprinted in my eyes or something. I threw up again and had to leave."

[Stern]

"Getting tired?" Stern asked.

The little girl had thrown maybe half the things Stern brought with him. Somehow he expected the anger and energy to flow with the first item she threw, but it did not. Clearly it was going to take more than breakables to break her dour mood.

"Do you want to keep on tossing stuff, or should we go back to the campus?"

[Freight Train]

"Let's just go back," she said, feeling drained and tired. They walked back in silence, Chelsea staring at the sidewalk the whole time. They were just in sight of the gate when she finally spoke. "Thanks for the effort." She looked up and rewarded him with a smile. "Best one I've had yet, to be honest."

[Stern]

Stern nodded and shrugged. "Now that we have all the steam blown out of this, there's only one thing left for you to do."

Stern dragged the cart along behind him. "Whatever happens you have to go to the professor and confront him about this. You need to find closure for this problem. Get things done about this. Otherwise it's going to hang over your head and haunt you for a very long time."

[Freight Train]

"...yeah. It is." They stopped at the gate, and she tilted her head up at the glowing man. "Well, thanks. You coming back in, or you going on?"

[Stern]

Stern shrugged. "I think I'm going to get going. But just one more thing," he said.

"Make good use of your gift day in and day out. Harness it, make it not just something you can do, but make it who you are."