Seeking Mutant Flatmate with Good Sense of Humor

“What the hell are you doing?”

Remi’s eyes were all that moved when Lucien came through the door. They rolled slowly, apathetically away from the page to peer at him over the edge of the comic. With her eyes fixed now her arm began to move reaching for the soda that lay comfortably close as did a phone and a sleeve of crackers. She brought the can to her lips, closed her eyes, tilted her head back slightly and took a thoughtful sip. Her eyes opened as she pulled the can away and they settled once more on him. She had already formulated her response but she decided to make him wait until she had put the can down before she spoke. The can hit the table with a nowhere near hollow sound and Remi’s words fell with the same solid quality as she said unblinkingly, “I will not destroy them.”

Lucien grabbed at the strap of his bag and lifted it up as he ducked his head underneath it and bent his body sideways before dropping it so that it would not land on his foot. He then kicked the bag into a corner and strode across the room to stand about a foot away from where Remi was sitting. He let out an audible grunt that tapered off into a sigh as he crouched down among the mess of comic books strewn carefully about the floor and began to pick them up. Remi watched him with the eyes of a predator. “I’d like to see you try to burn them.” Her voice had more of warning than of challenge in it.

Lucien never looked up from his task. “I’m not going to burn them, Remi. I know how important they are to you.” He paused to stare thoughtfully at the brightly colored cover of the comic in his hand. “I just wish you would hide them a little better.” He looked shifted his gaze to Remi’s face and said, “And by ‘a little better’ I mean at all.” Lucien’s eyes were sympathetic and soft though his tone was firm. Remi relented. Rolling her eyes in exasperation she shut the comic in her hand and began helping Lucien gather the others into manageable stacks.

“I shouldn’t have to hide these. We shouldn’t have to hide anything.” She growled under her breath.

Lucien nodded patiently. They had had this conversation many times before. “We’re lucky though. Many people like us can’t hide.”

Remi stopped stacking comics and stared at him her eyes wide, her nostrils flared with rage. “Lucky? Lucky that we can blend in? Lucky that as long as the government doesn’t know what we are we can live a fake life, forever looking over our shoulders? Lucky that because we look like them they allow us to live?” As she said this her voice grew louder and there came a sound like metal under pressure from within the walls.

“Remi!” Lucien whispered. “You are upsetting the pipes again. It’s getting hard for me to hold them together.”

Remi took several deep breaths and the noise slowly abated. “We are not lucky, Lucien. We’re not even free.”

“What do you want me to do?” Lucien pointed to the stacks of comics. “We’re not X-men! We don’t have a sanctuary. There is no Professor Xavier and no institute.”

Remi looked around the small flat for something to reignite her fast dying hope. The tiny space that they called the kitchen though there was not a clear separation between it and the so called “living room” where they now sat offered no comfort. Two doors, one leading to her room, the other leading to Lucien’s, were the only branches, apart from the bathroom and one small spare room, that came off of the central room. None of them held the slightest spark of inspiration. Tears welled up in Remi’s eyes as she stood to leave. “I’ll hide the comics.” She whispered.

It was agonizing for Lucien to watch Remi take her paper daydreams and hide them away in a box. Putting her down was the hardest thing her ever had to do but he had to do it. He knew that it would be far worse to let her get caught, to watch the police drag her away, to know that he would never see her again or if he did, she would really be herself anymore. That was a thing he simply could not do. He waited until Remi had picked up her box and left the room before allowing any of these thoughts to show on his face. At last he exhaled as though he had been holding his breath for a century and buried his face in his hands. He knew that life was about to get a lot harder very soon. With some difficulty, Lucien got to his feet. His left leg had fallen asleep causing him to walk with a kind of limp as he approached the spare room where Remi had gone to hide her comics. He raised his hand slowly as if hindered by some invisible force. His fist stopped just a hair’s breadth short of the door at the soft sound of crying that came from within the room. Lucien lowered his fist. He would tell her tomorrow. It would be better for all involved if she had a chance to calm down first.

***

“What the hell are you thinking?” Remi screamed.

Lucien flinched. Today had not gone at all to plan. Lucien had made breakfast, had let Remi take the car to work and walked to work himself, had left work early to come home and make dinner, had sat through three episodes of Merlin while Remi squealed about how precious Colin Morgan is, all in vain.

“It’s bad enough that we have to hide who we are out there,” Remi pointed to the street outside the window, “but now you want to rent the spare room to a human so that we have to hide who we are in our own home!” Remi was on the verge of tears as she always was when she felt particularly strong about something.

Lucien tried to reason with her. “Look, I know it’s not fair but we can’t afford the rent anymore.”

“But why does she have to be human?” Remi shouted so loud that Lucien feared the neighbors would hear.

“If you don’t keep it down the landlord will find us out and we won’t have a room to live in much less rent out. Besides, I couldn’t exactly put out an advert with the words ‘Seeking mutant flat mate with good sense of humor’ written on it, could I?” Lucien was becoming exasperated. This was already a difficult situation and Remi wasn’t making it any easier.

“You might as well have!” Remi lowered her voice. “If a human moves in with two mutants, that human will eventually figure out that she has not moved in with two humans.”

Lucien tried not to be insulted by the redundancy of Remi’s retort. “You haven’t even met her. You don’t know if she would mind having mutant flat mates.”

Remi’s mouth fell open in shock. “Did you even think about that before you said it? Of course, she would mind, Lucien. The government views anyone harboring a mutant as equally guilty.”

Lucien took a shot at humor. “Technically, we would be harboring her.”

Remi was not amused. “As soon as she figures it out, she will rat us out to save her own skin and then where would we be?”

“In a cage in a laboratory,” Lucien responded without missing a beat, “but only if one of us can’t figure out how to control her mutant rage and stop getting her mutant ass in trouble.”

Remi took a deep breath and held it as she allowed the weight of that last verbal blow to sink in. “We can find another way. I can take another job or get a loan from the bank. We do not have to sacrifice what little freedom we have.”

“You are already working three jobs and taking out a loan makes you more visible to the government.” Lucien’s voice softened. “Remi, I would not be doing this if I hadn’t already considered every other option.”

Remi avoided Lucien’s eyes and stared angrily at the floor. “I need to drive.” She said snatching the keys off the wall and racing for the front door. She barely caught Lucien’s parting words as she closed the door behind her.

“She’ll be here tomorrow at eight.”

***

It was a nice night out. With the sun out of the sky the temperature drifted down to a comfortable sixty five. Traffic wasn’t bad either. Not that Remi had anywhere to go or any time limit to obey; all the same she hated the idea of stopping the car for any longer than the traffic lights demanded. As long as she kept moving she could keep her emotions at bay. With the windows down and the radio blaring, she created a hostile environment in which only the most instinctive thoughts could survive. The problem is pain is instinctive.

Lucien would never understand. He had never seen firsthand what happened to mutants who were discovered. He knew that they would take you away to a laboratory somewhere and keep you in a cage except when they took you out to experiment on you. He heard that most mutants did not survive but he had never seen the unmarked graves. He had never lost a loved one to the government’s hate and ignorance.

She had been so careful, so diligent. Yet how long could one hope to hide a boy who looked like a dragon? Remi turned off the radio and rolled up the windows and started searching for a deserted place to park. She could no longer hold back the memory and she didn’t want to be on the road when the tears blurred her vision. In the back lot of an abandoned warehouse, Remi broke down and returned to that junk yard two years ago just after the start of the crusade against mutants.

“Rory, what did I tell you about hunting in the daytime?” Remi wiped the blood from her brother’s scaly face.

“I was hungry.” Rory whined as seven year olds often do.

Remi tried to be firm but a sympathetic tone crept into her voice despite her best efforts. “I know but it’s dangerous for you to be out while it’s still light.”

“It’s not fair!” Rory pouted. “Other kids get to play outside and go out in the daytime and go to school.”

“You are not other kids.” Remi spoke a bit more forcefully than she meant to.

Rory folded his arms over his chest and stared at the ground. “I wish I were someone else.”

Remi picked up her little brother and set him in her lap. “Well, I don’t.”

Rory looked up at his sister. “Why not? If I were normal, we wouldn’t have to run all the time.”

Remi held Rory more tightly and said, “I love you just the way you are and I would rather run for the rest of my life with you than be stuck with a normal little brother.”

In the present, Remi’s shaking body lay draped over the steering wheel. The tears were flowing freely now and Remi could not restrain the anguished sounds that tore at her throat. She pleaded with her mind to stop, to forget but it would not. She would never be allowed to forget that day, to forget the way he screamed as they dragged him away from her. She would never be able to erase his horror stricken face. It was there every time she closed her eyes and it would never ever go away. Some days she wished with all her heart that they would have taken her away with him but at that time they thought that mutations were always accompanied by a physical manifestation. At that time, they would not punish those who helped mutants.

Now, more than ever, Remi wanted to die. She had stayed hopeful for so long. She had searched for six months until she traced the men who had taken her brother and found the cage where he had been kept. Even after she saw his death confirmed in the facilities records, she still hoped for the sake of hope that things would get better. Hope had left her now and she saw no way forward. Nothing would ever change. The people she knew and loved would always betray her or be betrayed by someone else themselves and never seen again. Humans would always hate and fear mutants and mutants would never be free. An hour passed before her eyes ran dry of tears. Only then did she dare to start the car and head for home.

The apartment was dark when she entered but she didn’t bother to turn on a light. She didn’t care when she banged her shins against the coffee table or when she knocked over the kitchen chair which wasn’t even in the kitchen. She walked into her room, dropped the keys on the floor, shut the door behind her and at the edge of her bed she gave her body over to gravity and did not move again until morning.

***

“Remi!” Lucien’s fist upon the door sent vibrations through the wall. “Remi, she will be here any minute! Get up.”

Remi slowly lifted her face out of the puddle of drool on her pillow, a thin thread of saliva still clinging to the corner of her mouth. The pain she had felt the night before had matured into a persistent ache, which ranged all over her body in varying levels of intensity. Her jeans were damp with night sweat and her legs felt stiff within them. Rather than trying to stand, Remi dragged first one leg then the other to the edge of the bed and let their weight pull the rest of her body onto the floor. Lucien was getting impatient. “I’m coming in.” He shouted as he was turning the knob. Before Remi could stop him, he had swung the door open not realizing that Remi’s head lay within the door’s radius of rotation. Thunk. “Ouch!”

“Sorry, Remi.” Lucien knelt down to inspect the area of impact.

“It’s fine.” Remi waved him off but placed her hand over the spot as if to protect it from further injury.

“Come on, get dressed. She’ll be here soon.” Lucien made mad gestures flapping his arms up and down trying to coax his flat mate into motion.

Remi sat up and groaned, “I am dressed.”

“You look like hell.” He said before he could stop himself.

“Thanks for that.” Remi pulled herself to her feet. She opened her mouth to say something else but just then the buzzer rang.

Lucien spasmed. “Oh god, she’s here. You go get dressed. I’ll let her in.”

“Just act natural,” Remi called after him mockingly as he rushed out the door. Once he was gone, she turned around to look in the mirror. Lucien was right. She did look like hell. With a heavy sigh, she began peeling off layers of slightly damp clothing leaving them in a trail behind her as she headed for the bathroom. The hot water eased away the tension in her muscles somewhat. At least she would look dignified when she met the bringer of her eventual ruin. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of a confession and rehearsed a few different scenarios in her head. Of course, she knew that she could never do that to Lucien. He would have to learn about betrayal the hard way.

When she turned off the shower, she could hear Lucien’s voice out in the hall. “So there’s only one bathroom but it’s not to difficult to get in when you need to.”

Remi cringed a bit when she heard a female voice respond. “That’s okay. I had to share a bathroom with two teenage boys growing up.”

“My sympathies.” Remi rolled her eyes as she pulled on a fresh pair of pants. The voices moved away from the door while Remi finished dressing. When she emerged from the bathroom she found Lucien in the kitchen making iced tea.

“Where’s the girl?” She asked leaning against the counter nonchalantly.

Lucien didn’t look up from his work. “In the spare room.”

Remi’s elbow slipped off the counter, as her eyes grew wide. “She’s where?”

“The spare room.” Lucien looked at her. “What are you-” He drew his breath in sharply and whispered, “Are the comics-” Remi nodded.

They both froze in horror as the girl’s voice drifted out into the hallway. “Oh my god!” it said.

Remi and Lucian lost control of their limbs, which flailed wildly in every direction as they rushed toward the door of the spare room. It was open but still they hesitated to look in until another exclamation forced their curiosity to act. It was as they had feared. Valkyrie, their would-have-been flat mate, was sitting in the middle of the room in front of the box of very illegal, fatally incriminating comic books.

“I am so sorry, Lucien.” Remi hung her head to hide the tears welling up in her eyes once more. Lucien said nothing but wrapped his arm around her shoulders and brought her close to his side.

Valkyrie watched them with surprise. “Are you two okay?” Neither Lucien nor Remi spoke. They could only stare in utter confusion at the girl who had the power to end their lives as they knew them and yet didn’t seem to realize it. “Seriously,” she said, “your starting to worry me.”

“You-. You know what those are, don’t you?” Remi asked helplessly.

“Of course,” the girl said brightly, “what I don’t know is how you managed to get them. I thought the government had them all destroyed. I could never find them anywhere.”

Lucien’s mouth fell open. “W-what?”

“Oh,” a look of comprehension came over the girl’s face, “of course, sorry. I meant to bring it up, it’s not really easy to talk about it anymore.”

“Talk about what?” Lucien asked.

“I’m a human ally like you. You are allies, right?” Valkyrie started to look worried.

Remi tried not to sound too ironic. “You might say that.”

Valkyrie relaxed. “Good. You have no idea how much trouble I would be in if you weren’t.”

Remi nodded. “I think I have a pretty good idea.”