One Battle at a Time

by Northlight

Scott bristled under the suspicious gazes covertly directed at him. His sense of dozens of eyes firmly planted on his back from beneath slited lids was more unnerving that facing the super villain du jour. Moving slowly in a casual stroll designed to look as normal as possible, Scott advanced down the frozen food aisle in Ptarmigan Creek's largest grocery store.

He absently picked up several frozen TV dinners, dropping them into the basket without bothering to look at them. They had been living on the stuff for weeks now, and though the very thought of another dinner consisting of a lumpy pile of dry mashed potatoes made him queasy, he didn't complain.

Since the loss of her psi-powers, Jean hadn't displayed the faintest interest in cooking. Nor eating, for that matter. In a desperate bid to cheer his wife up, Scott had drawn upon all his culinary skill to offer Jean the most appetizing meal his talents would enable him to concoct. Jean had listlessly pushed the noodles around her plate with a fork for several long minutes before pushing back for the table and proclaiming that she wasn't hungry. After that, Scott had stuck with the frozen blocks of food.

The thought of his wife sent Scott out of the frozen food aisle in hunt for aspirin. Jean still suffered from debilitating headaches often enough that pain killers were a must in their household. At first, he'd stocked up on the pill bottles, until discovering that in her pain, Jean could easily take more than half the bottle during the day without even realizing it.

The wary eyes followed his progress. Scott fought back the urge to round on them and demand that they stop treating him as if he were about to go insane and slaughter everyone in sight. They had come here to live. They had wanted to be normal, if only for a little while. He believed in the Dream, even as his own variation of his mentor's vision brewed in his mind, but sometimes, it seemed as if his entire life had revolved around his place in the team.

'We came here to be normal, to recover, to belong!' Scott silently railed as he found the small white bottle perched near the back of the store. 'You knew us. We saved you!' What hurt the most was he knew that none of that mattered. Every good thing that these people had known about them had faded into insignificance beneath the revelations of their mutancy.

He hadn't realized how very much that could gnaw at a man. He had faced hatred before. He had stared it straight in the eye before blasting it back with a well aimed optic blast. Every hard earned victory against the unreasoning prejudice all mutants faced seemed so very far away at that moment.

As an X-Man, hatred was something he fought against with all of his heart and soul. And yet, safely tucked away behind the walls of Xavier's mansion, that hatred faded away into a distant background noise. He could tuck away his spandex, toss off his codename, and walk freely down the streets without attracting the immediate suspicions of those around him.

Here, there was nothing to hide behind. The fear, the hatred, was a constant in his life. Even his home wasn't the sanctuary Xavier's had been. Everyone knew who he was, where he was, and they weren't adverse to using that knowledge. The memory of the rock flung through the window of his home still made Scott grit his teeth.

Sometimes, his heart just ached. He wished with a desperate longing that he could just wave his hand and make everything all right.

"Oh!" the startled exclamation shocked Scott out of his reverie. A woman was standing in front of him, so close that he would have run into her within seconds had the sound of her voice not stopped his progress.

Scott squinted behind his ruby quartz glasses, attempting to place her vaguely familiar face to a time and place. The name was slow to come to him. Connie, he remembered - she of the impossibly wide smile and bubbly voice. She'd been their waitress on an aborted night out - before things had erupted into a flurry of violence, crows and revealed identities.

"Oh!" Her eyes went incredibly wide as she realized who she had just nearly run into.

Almost automatically, Scott slipped into his new routine. 'Be as charming and non-threatening as possible, and win them over!' as he thought of it rather optimistically. So far, his carefully friendly smiles and replies hadn't managed to win over many of the townspeople. 'Even Chris, someone we considered a friend suddenly isn't all that friendly anymore. Melissa is the only one who doesn't look like she's about to have some sort of fit when she sees us.'

"Sorry," Scott said, a friendly smile plastered on his face. Sometimes, it felt like that frozen smile would crack his face open.

"Uh..." Connie mumbled, carefully inching around him.

Scott distantly wondered what would happen were he to attempt to strike up a neighbourly conversation with the girl. He rather suspected that she'd start screeching and make a run for it. Scott's smile wavered and he quickly continued onwards.

~End~

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