Ladies And Gentlemen, Listen Up Please: Tina (8/29)
Title: Ladies And Gentlemen, Listen Up Please: Tina (8/29)
Pairing: Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce, minor Artie Abrams/Tina Cohen-Chang
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: AU
Summary: “Sometimes, people are born a little different.”
Mandatory presentations should be illegal.
Tina Cohen-Chang doesn’t care about much when it comes to school-she likes reading just fine, has absolutely no problems with math, has never smashed a Bunsen burner or blown up a beaker in the chemistry lab. At fourteen years old, she mostly cares about vampire novels and fishnet stockings, and also that boy down the street who keeps falling off his bike whenever she walks too near. Everything else kind of pales in comparison to the basics; she doesn’t see a point in worrying like all the other girls her age do, about stupid things like being allowed to wear make-up or date.
As teenage girls go, Tina likes to think she’s pretty laid-back.
Except where public speaking is concerned.
She can’t explain it, or rationalize it, or wish it away: she is violently, absolutely, unutterably petrified of forming words in front of other people. It doesn’t make a lot of sense; she has friends, and she can talk to them just fine. She doesn’t struggle too much when it comes to small group work, and though meeting new people will never be on her list of ‘Things Tina Jumps For Joy Over’, she feels like she does okay with it. At least, the work friends her parents bring home for dinner every once in a while don’t stare at her like she’s some four-headed freak.
She’s okay with the basics of socialization, right up until she’s placed at the head of a classroom-and then, with a predictability reminiscent of the calendar, Tina Cohen-Chang falls completely and utterly to pieces.
It’s bad when she’s blindsided, but somehow, even worse when the event is planned out. She’s left sleepless, lacking in appetite and unable to focus even on the very best season of Buffy. It’s like the worst cliché of a romantic craving, except in this case, there is no fluffy-bunny endgame to look forward to.
She mostly just hopes she doesn’t pass out this time.
It’s not a book report, because ninth grade goes a little beyond the age of summarizations, but Tina has to admit it’s just about the same concept. English class, curled up in the back row with her feet propped on the empty desk in front of her, chewing her lip so hard in contemplation that she’s damn near bleeding, and all she can think is, I do not care nearly enough about The Color Purple for this.
Ms. Jackson is particularly fond of alphabetical arrangements, which usually leaves Tina loving and hating her last name. It’s nice that the C’s get this nightmare over and done with early, but more often than not, Tina can’t get past the terror long enough to appreciate this blessing. This is the case now; staring down at a sheaf of notes, caught in the desperate fear that she will forget a crucial character’s name, or mispronounce a word, her mind races to find a way out.
As usual, there is nothing. She could feign illness, but she’s already used that tactic twice this semester. There are only so many times one can claim plague-level flu-symptoms before the villagers start making accusations of crying wolf.
She could also whip the protractor out of her backpack and try her hand at battling her way out, but for all her doom-and-gloom demeanor, Tina doesn’t really think of herself as a violent person. Plus, prison orange? Would totally clash with her skin tone.
The teacher’s eyes are flickering her way, and, in a fit of utter desperation, Tina considers throwing herself face-first from the second-story window. Broken bones suck and all, but she’s confident any doctor of sound mind would understand where she’s coming from, and-
“Tina? Are you ready?”
The voice is perfectly kindly, practically dripping with all-too convincing compassion. Tina suspects Ms. Jackson is a Russian agent sent to destroy promising teens via overwhelmingly traumatizing assignments.
Chancing a glance at the clock, Tina decides twenty minutes shouldn’t be all that hard to kill without actually forming articulate sentences. It’s probably possible to take out the first five on the way up to the podium, as long as she drags her feet extra slowly and maybe stops once or twice to tie her shoes-
“Tina? We’re waiting.” The cheer is slowly seeping out of Ms. Jackson’s tone, replaced inch by inch by pure secret-Russian ice. Tina sighs.
It’s going to be bad. It always is. She might as well accept it.
“Tina. Now.”
The walk to the front of the room feels like a death march; in her head, mournful trumpets echo as the gazes of her peers drink her in. Ms. Jackson sits behind her desk, fingers steepled against her chin, dark eyes somber. Tina thinks she’s going to throw up.
It would be entirely preferable to what follows.
She takes her place behind the podium (thinking all the while on how stupid podiums truly are-all pretentious and overwrought with false meaning and what ninth grader has something that important to say anyway?) and shuffles her papers against the woodgrain a couple of times. She breathes. This is good; this is the part she usually forgets about. Breathing-in, out, in again-restores a little of her sanity.
Then she looks up, meets the eyes of the kid in the first row, and feels the bottom drop out of her stomach.
That settles it. She’s moving to Alaska the first chance she gets.
She tries to tell herself they aren’t judging her-that, in all honesty, they probably don’t even care. Most of them have never even heard of Alice Walker or her lesbian angst-fest of a book, and finding more than one student who can bring himself to care is unlikely beyond reason. They won’t even be listening to her when she speaks; their minds will drift far away, to television programs, newly-purchased CDs, uncomfortably hormonal dreamscapes.
They.
Don’t.
Care.
But she does, as much as she hates it-she cares very, very much. She cares about the way her stomach feels, like a boatload of sparrows have been launched inside her intestines. She cares about the quaver to her soft voice, twitchy and ineloquent. She cares about the pity in the gaze of her teacher, and the sharp distaste in the snort from That Kid on the other side of the room, the one who exists in some incarnation or another in every single classroom. The one with the power to tear down what tiny shred of self-esteem this podium hasn’t already dragged out of her.
Tina opens her mouth, feeling unsteady to the point of dizziness. Her fingers are cramping around the sides of this stupid box in front of her, the papers forgotten and dismal atop it. She has notes. She read the book. She even has opinions about it all. Last night, she was ready.
Now, she’s falling apart.
She wishes Ms. Jackson would say something-tell her off for her silence, or usher her cautiously back to her seat upon noticing her ghost-white complexion-but of course the woman only waits. Her educating style is based on patience and compassion, neither of which have ever done Tina much good, since that compassion does not extend to distressingly shy students with a vague penchant for stuttering under stress.
“I-“
It shouldn’t be this hard, she thinks with frustration as her knees crack together with all the subtlety of cannon fire. It’s a three-minute presentation. It should take…well, three damn minutes.
Just start, she commands herself, willing her voice to perk up and do its duty. Just-throw something out there. The title. The title’s easy. There’s a color and everything.
“M-my report is on-“
Never start that way, she berates herself, voice tremulous and pathetic. Never start with something so obvious. There’s supposed to be a hook-she wrote one for herself. She just can’t remember it right now, and though she knows it’s in her notes, her eyes appear to have forgotten how to translate those archaic symbols into words and phrases.
“A-Alice Walker’s n-novel-“
This is awful. She can see it in the boredom of her peers, in the uncomfortable shuffling of papers and pencils. Secondhand embarrassment is slowly killing Anna in the third row, and Tyler behind her keeps casting nervous glances at the ceiling, like he’s willing it to fall and end their torment instantly. Tina cringes.
“I-“
It’s too late to save this; her voice is failing her completely, her throat gone scratchy and useless, and she’s just realized, yep, she has forgotten the protagonist’s name. It’ll be a D, if she’s lucky, and her mother will give her that look again.
Her stomach rolls over on itself at the thought.
Ms. Jackson is staring at her with open disappointment, Tina’s heart is attempting to beat directly through her breast and flee the scene entirely, and her hands-
God, something’s wrong with my hands.
They don’t…hurt…exactly. It’s more of a tingle, the spastic needle-deep desperation reminiscent of a slowly waking limb. It would make all the sense in the world, except her hands are flat on the podium, blood flow as excellent and uninhibited as ever. They just feel weird.
She wonders for a beat if this is what dying of humiliation feels like. Hands first, and the body will follow, until she is one teeming, blushing mass of misery and poor vocalizations. She won’t be able to move, then-maybe she’ll fall over, stiff as the podium responsible for holding her up, and have to be rushed to an ambulance, only to be declared dead on the spot of some heretofore unknown disease of the nervous system-
“Tina?” Ms. Jackson’s voice cracks through her racing thoughts, equal parts anxious and curious. Tina bites the inside of her cheek. “Are you all right?”
She’s not all right, not even a little bit. Her hands are beginning to genuinely, honest-to-God burn-and it still doesn’t hurt, by the normal definitions of pain, but Tina is still extremely unhappy with the sensation. The skin of her fingers feels like its going to unwrap from the bones and inch away, eliciting screams from the huddled masses as it crawls to a freedom not tethered by shrieking, boiling discomfort and-
Maybe she’s crazy, but Tina does hear a scream. A loud one. From ten feet away.
“Her hands! Tina, what’s wrong with-“
Anna doesn’t get a chance to finish her question, because the building heat within her fingertips suddenly explodes outward. Tina cries out, wordless and horrified, as bright blue streaks of-oh my God-electricity go firing across the room. A desk is nearly vaporized in a heartbeat; the boy sitting behind it scrapes his chair swiftly backwards, a hair early enough to avoid getting singed beyond recognition as well.
Horrified, Tina gawks at her own hands. Thin blue bolts zip from one finger to the next, forming a sort of supercharged webbing, and this just doesn’t make any sense. She’s heard stories, of course-as everyone has-about people who can do strange things like this, but for the sake of all that is Anne Rice, she’s Tina. She is a normal (relatively speaking) girl who loves beef jerky and her brother’s baseball cards, and owns no fewer than fifteen Hot Topic t-shirts. She does not, in short, glow in the dark.
“Tina,” Ms. Jackson is saying, gingerly standing from her desk with her own hands outstretched warily. “Tina, lower your hands, please.”
“I-I’m n-not,” Tina tries to explain. Her wrists twist instinctively in punctuation; a stray bolt leaps free and smashes the nearest window. Ms. Jackson jumps.
“Tina,” she says again, more firmly. “Hands. Down.”
“I’m n-not t-trying to-oh God!”
She hasn’t meant to do it-she feels that should go without saying overall, but especially at this point. Her intention was just to move her hands into the hollow cavern of the podium, out of harm’s way-except she forgot to take into account the flammability of wood.
Apparently, lightning will take to any conductor at all.
The thing goes up in flames before she has time to register it’s even smoking.
“For Christ’s sake, Tina!” Ms. Jackson cries, too alarmed to do anything. Tina kind of feels the same way.
“Put it away, you freak!” Brad-otherwise known as That Kid-shouts, head ducked under his sweatshirt as if the thing might do a shred of good when it comes to protection from illogical lightning bolts. For a second, Tina debates throwing something at him on purpose, just to watch him squeal like the idiot he surely is.
Instead, she jams her hands into her oversized pockets, praying her pants won’t catch fire (they don’t) and making a mad dash for the door. She’s halfway down the hall before anyone cries out for her (Ms. Jackson, still trying to do some good, or possibly capture Tina for her secret Russian black-ops lab), too terrified and far gone to care.
Someone touches her shoulder before she can reach the stairs, and she doesn’t mean to, but her hands fly free of her pockets anyway. A bolt zips from her palm, miraculously missing the person’s head, sizzling against the nearest locker. Tina moans in shame.
“I’m s-sorry, I j-just w-w-want to-“
The man-a janitor-backpedals, shaking his head like he can’t believe what he’s just seen. Frustrated by the insanity, as well as her lack of control, Tina grasps her head in her hands and mirrors his action.
Another bolt jerks upwards, joined by a second from her other hand, and together, they meld with a brutal screeching sound, sliding into the light fixture above her head.
Twenty seconds later, the hall goes pitch-dark.
By the sounds of the shrieks and laughter, she’s taken out the entire top floor-maybe the school’s whole grid, even. Tina groans and runs, half-blind, in the direction of the staircase.
It’s a miracle she doesn’t go fishtailing down them head-first-as it is, she misses a couple of steps near the end and has to fling out a hand in search of the railing, which lights up immediately like the world’s strangest Christmas tree-but eventually her feet land on flat tile. She takes off again, tearing towards where she thinks the front doors are, desperate to get out into the dim, drizzling afternoon and out of the hellhole her life has suddenly become.
Her plan is derailed the second she collides with a warm, soft body, all tight muscles and easy breaths.
“D-don’t!” she shrieks when his-she can just barely make out his features, Asian-American and calm-fingers close around her biceps. “Don’t t-touch me, I’ll-“
“Breathe,” he instructs gently, easing her towards the doors. “You’re fine. Come with me.”
“I’m n-not fine,” she snaps, clenching her fists until they glow like a flashlight pressed flush against a bedsheet. “L-look at me!”
“I’m looking,” he says with a small shrug. “You’re pretty.”
It’s enough to shut off the stammer, at least, leaving Tina gaping gracelessly up at him. Under the weight of the shadows she’s brought down, he grins.
“Enough flirting, Chang,” a high voice squeaks. “We’ve got to get out of here now.”
“Kurt has a point,” a third person-a girl, this time-observes. Tina can faintly make out the outline of both people-kids about her age, one tiny, the other lanky and thin.The smaller of the two darts a glance over her shoulder, clearly impatient.
“We’re getting,” the boy with his hand on her arm replies serenely, steering her left to avoid one of the pillars set in the middle of the lobby. “Watch us get.”
“Faster would be better,” the second boy snarks. As her eyes adjust more fully, Tina can see his hand resting on the door, his body poised for escape. The girl doesn’t look much happier.
“This all would have been much easier,” she complains, “if you’d been correct about her control, Kurt.”
“You’re blaming me?” the squeaky voice demands incredulously. “Sweetheart, please. Without my vision, you wouldn’t have even known she was here to begin with. You should be scraping your forehead upon my immaculate Pradas.”
“You are perfectly absurd,” the girl sniffs.
“Do we really have time for this?” Asian wonders, tugging Tina right up to the door. “I vote bail first, bitch later.”
“Legitimate prioritizing, Mike,” the girl praises, pushing against the handle with her entire body. The door flies open, casting a sickly gray light on them all; Tina can see Squeaky Voice is a cherub-faced boy wearing a haughty glare and a way-pretty scarf, while the upset girl has brown hair and a camel splashed across her sweater.
“Do you guys even go here?” Tina demands. The haughty boy scoffs, tossing his head and stepping out the door. He strides off down the street, barely waiting for the rest of them to catch up.
“Are we positive we need her? I wouldn’t say no to ignoring a couple of these skull-crushers.”
“We’re positive,” the girl snaps, running a hand through her hair and smiling tiredly up at Tina. “My name is Rachel Berry. I apologize for the distress. I had been under the impression you knew of your ability, and would therefore be much easier to-ahem-collect.”
“Collect?” Tina repeats uneasily. A blue bolt twitches in the palm of her left hand. The small girl glances at it, apparently pleased.
“Well, this is rather impressive, I have to admit. Having a second offensive figure on the team can only help our case.”
“Team?” Tina hates sports, and really doesn’t do the whole rely-on-others thing well, unless RPGs are involved. This girl seems nice and everything-if a little bossy-but she can’t say the idea of being on any team with her is alluring.
Still, Asian Kid-Mike-is smiling, and that Kurt kid doesn’t look so entirely pissed off now that they’re out of the school, and her hands aren’t vibrating with as much intensity now. She supposes things could be worse; she could have fried her teacher on the spot, instead of simply scaring the living daylights out of the woman.
“We’re working on this whole Marvel kids diatribe,” Kurt informs her almost boredly, though something shifts in his piercing blue eyes. Tina cocks her head.
“What, like the comic books?”
“Let’s not trivialize it,” Rachel begins. Kurt cuts her off with a shrug.
“In short.”
“Oh.” Tina thinks about all the comics she’s read, all the movies she’s seen about people like her-and, mostly importantly, the stories she’s heard. Awful things, involving senseless violence from both sides and a general sense of emotional aggravation. She sighs.
“I don’t suppose you’ll share with us your thoughts?” the small brunette asks hopefully. Tina shakes her head.
“I can’t go home, can I?”
“Of course you can,” Rachel replies, surprised. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
Tina shrugs. “I’m a mutant freak with electro-spirit fingers. Isn’t that, like…a one-way ticket to a government facility or something?”
The brunette stares at her, looking more amused than Tina feels the girl has a right to. “I suppose it’s a possibility,” she says slowly. “But it’s more likely that someone, somewhere in your family line also has such a gift.”
“No need to board the grumpy train,” Mike adds helpfully. Tina’s eyes widen.
“Well, then…what are you three doing here looking for me?”
The brunette looks almost embarrassed. “You can go home, of course,” she says sheepishly, “but we would really prefer you didn’t. Kurt’s vision suggests you will grow to be a powerful ally in the fight against a great evil. If you come with us, we’ll help you hone that ability of yours so you can use it to protect the innocent.”
“And,” Kurt drawls, “you’ll learn much in the fine art of theft and the nomadic skills of sleeping in shady motels without checking in.”
“It’s fun,” Mike chimes in. “Sometimes.”
Tina frowns, tilting her head until raven hair cascades across one side of her face. She contemplates the options: go with these rag-tag teens on a suicide mission she doesn’t quite comprehend, or walk back into the school whose generator she just demolished and face down her principal, parents, and an eventual return to The Color Purple.
“What are we waiting for?” she asks brightly, tripping off down the street until she’s ahead of them all.
Pairing: Rachel Berry/Quinn Fabray, Santana Lopez/Brittany Pierce, minor Artie Abrams/Tina Cohen-Chang
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Nothing owned, no profit gained.
Spoilers: AU
Summary: “Sometimes, people are born a little different.”
Mandatory presentations should be illegal.
Tina Cohen-Chang doesn’t care about much when it comes to school-she likes reading just fine, has absolutely no problems with math, has never smashed a Bunsen burner or blown up a beaker in the chemistry lab. At fourteen years old, she mostly cares about vampire novels and fishnet stockings, and also that boy down the street who keeps falling off his bike whenever she walks too near. Everything else kind of pales in comparison to the basics; she doesn’t see a point in worrying like all the other girls her age do, about stupid things like being allowed to wear make-up or date.
As teenage girls go, Tina likes to think she’s pretty laid-back.
Except where public speaking is concerned.
She can’t explain it, or rationalize it, or wish it away: she is violently, absolutely, unutterably petrified of forming words in front of other people. It doesn’t make a lot of sense; she has friends, and she can talk to them just fine. She doesn’t struggle too much when it comes to small group work, and though meeting new people will never be on her list of ‘Things Tina Jumps For Joy Over’, she feels like she does okay with it. At least, the work friends her parents bring home for dinner every once in a while don’t stare at her like she’s some four-headed freak.
She’s okay with the basics of socialization, right up until she’s placed at the head of a classroom-and then, with a predictability reminiscent of the calendar, Tina Cohen-Chang falls completely and utterly to pieces.
It’s bad when she’s blindsided, but somehow, even worse when the event is planned out. She’s left sleepless, lacking in appetite and unable to focus even on the very best season of Buffy. It’s like the worst cliché of a romantic craving, except in this case, there is no fluffy-bunny endgame to look forward to.
She mostly just hopes she doesn’t pass out this time.
It’s not a book report, because ninth grade goes a little beyond the age of summarizations, but Tina has to admit it’s just about the same concept. English class, curled up in the back row with her feet propped on the empty desk in front of her, chewing her lip so hard in contemplation that she’s damn near bleeding, and all she can think is, I do not care nearly enough about The Color Purple for this.
Ms. Jackson is particularly fond of alphabetical arrangements, which usually leaves Tina loving and hating her last name. It’s nice that the C’s get this nightmare over and done with early, but more often than not, Tina can’t get past the terror long enough to appreciate this blessing. This is the case now; staring down at a sheaf of notes, caught in the desperate fear that she will forget a crucial character’s name, or mispronounce a word, her mind races to find a way out.
As usual, there is nothing. She could feign illness, but she’s already used that tactic twice this semester. There are only so many times one can claim plague-level flu-symptoms before the villagers start making accusations of crying wolf.
She could also whip the protractor out of her backpack and try her hand at battling her way out, but for all her doom-and-gloom demeanor, Tina doesn’t really think of herself as a violent person. Plus, prison orange? Would totally clash with her skin tone.
The teacher’s eyes are flickering her way, and, in a fit of utter desperation, Tina considers throwing herself face-first from the second-story window. Broken bones suck and all, but she’s confident any doctor of sound mind would understand where she’s coming from, and-
“Tina? Are you ready?”
The voice is perfectly kindly, practically dripping with all-too convincing compassion. Tina suspects Ms. Jackson is a Russian agent sent to destroy promising teens via overwhelmingly traumatizing assignments.
Chancing a glance at the clock, Tina decides twenty minutes shouldn’t be all that hard to kill without actually forming articulate sentences. It’s probably possible to take out the first five on the way up to the podium, as long as she drags her feet extra slowly and maybe stops once or twice to tie her shoes-
“Tina? We’re waiting.” The cheer is slowly seeping out of Ms. Jackson’s tone, replaced inch by inch by pure secret-Russian ice. Tina sighs.
It’s going to be bad. It always is. She might as well accept it.
“Tina. Now.”
The walk to the front of the room feels like a death march; in her head, mournful trumpets echo as the gazes of her peers drink her in. Ms. Jackson sits behind her desk, fingers steepled against her chin, dark eyes somber. Tina thinks she’s going to throw up.
It would be entirely preferable to what follows.
She takes her place behind the podium (thinking all the while on how stupid podiums truly are-all pretentious and overwrought with false meaning and what ninth grader has something that important to say anyway?) and shuffles her papers against the woodgrain a couple of times. She breathes. This is good; this is the part she usually forgets about. Breathing-in, out, in again-restores a little of her sanity.
Then she looks up, meets the eyes of the kid in the first row, and feels the bottom drop out of her stomach.
That settles it. She’s moving to Alaska the first chance she gets.
She tries to tell herself they aren’t judging her-that, in all honesty, they probably don’t even care. Most of them have never even heard of Alice Walker or her lesbian angst-fest of a book, and finding more than one student who can bring himself to care is unlikely beyond reason. They won’t even be listening to her when she speaks; their minds will drift far away, to television programs, newly-purchased CDs, uncomfortably hormonal dreamscapes.
They.
Don’t.
Care.
But she does, as much as she hates it-she cares very, very much. She cares about the way her stomach feels, like a boatload of sparrows have been launched inside her intestines. She cares about the quaver to her soft voice, twitchy and ineloquent. She cares about the pity in the gaze of her teacher, and the sharp distaste in the snort from That Kid on the other side of the room, the one who exists in some incarnation or another in every single classroom. The one with the power to tear down what tiny shred of self-esteem this podium hasn’t already dragged out of her.
Tina opens her mouth, feeling unsteady to the point of dizziness. Her fingers are cramping around the sides of this stupid box in front of her, the papers forgotten and dismal atop it. She has notes. She read the book. She even has opinions about it all. Last night, she was ready.
Now, she’s falling apart.
She wishes Ms. Jackson would say something-tell her off for her silence, or usher her cautiously back to her seat upon noticing her ghost-white complexion-but of course the woman only waits. Her educating style is based on patience and compassion, neither of which have ever done Tina much good, since that compassion does not extend to distressingly shy students with a vague penchant for stuttering under stress.
“I-“
It shouldn’t be this hard, she thinks with frustration as her knees crack together with all the subtlety of cannon fire. It’s a three-minute presentation. It should take…well, three damn minutes.
Just start, she commands herself, willing her voice to perk up and do its duty. Just-throw something out there. The title. The title’s easy. There’s a color and everything.
“M-my report is on-“
Never start that way, she berates herself, voice tremulous and pathetic. Never start with something so obvious. There’s supposed to be a hook-she wrote one for herself. She just can’t remember it right now, and though she knows it’s in her notes, her eyes appear to have forgotten how to translate those archaic symbols into words and phrases.
“A-Alice Walker’s n-novel-“
This is awful. She can see it in the boredom of her peers, in the uncomfortable shuffling of papers and pencils. Secondhand embarrassment is slowly killing Anna in the third row, and Tyler behind her keeps casting nervous glances at the ceiling, like he’s willing it to fall and end their torment instantly. Tina cringes.
“I-“
It’s too late to save this; her voice is failing her completely, her throat gone scratchy and useless, and she’s just realized, yep, she has forgotten the protagonist’s name. It’ll be a D, if she’s lucky, and her mother will give her that look again.
Her stomach rolls over on itself at the thought.
Ms. Jackson is staring at her with open disappointment, Tina’s heart is attempting to beat directly through her breast and flee the scene entirely, and her hands-
God, something’s wrong with my hands.
They don’t…hurt…exactly. It’s more of a tingle, the spastic needle-deep desperation reminiscent of a slowly waking limb. It would make all the sense in the world, except her hands are flat on the podium, blood flow as excellent and uninhibited as ever. They just feel weird.
She wonders for a beat if this is what dying of humiliation feels like. Hands first, and the body will follow, until she is one teeming, blushing mass of misery and poor vocalizations. She won’t be able to move, then-maybe she’ll fall over, stiff as the podium responsible for holding her up, and have to be rushed to an ambulance, only to be declared dead on the spot of some heretofore unknown disease of the nervous system-
“Tina?” Ms. Jackson’s voice cracks through her racing thoughts, equal parts anxious and curious. Tina bites the inside of her cheek. “Are you all right?”
She’s not all right, not even a little bit. Her hands are beginning to genuinely, honest-to-God burn-and it still doesn’t hurt, by the normal definitions of pain, but Tina is still extremely unhappy with the sensation. The skin of her fingers feels like its going to unwrap from the bones and inch away, eliciting screams from the huddled masses as it crawls to a freedom not tethered by shrieking, boiling discomfort and-
Maybe she’s crazy, but Tina does hear a scream. A loud one. From ten feet away.
“Her hands! Tina, what’s wrong with-“
Anna doesn’t get a chance to finish her question, because the building heat within her fingertips suddenly explodes outward. Tina cries out, wordless and horrified, as bright blue streaks of-oh my God-electricity go firing across the room. A desk is nearly vaporized in a heartbeat; the boy sitting behind it scrapes his chair swiftly backwards, a hair early enough to avoid getting singed beyond recognition as well.
Horrified, Tina gawks at her own hands. Thin blue bolts zip from one finger to the next, forming a sort of supercharged webbing, and this just doesn’t make any sense. She’s heard stories, of course-as everyone has-about people who can do strange things like this, but for the sake of all that is Anne Rice, she’s Tina. She is a normal (relatively speaking) girl who loves beef jerky and her brother’s baseball cards, and owns no fewer than fifteen Hot Topic t-shirts. She does not, in short, glow in the dark.
“Tina,” Ms. Jackson is saying, gingerly standing from her desk with her own hands outstretched warily. “Tina, lower your hands, please.”
“I-I’m n-not,” Tina tries to explain. Her wrists twist instinctively in punctuation; a stray bolt leaps free and smashes the nearest window. Ms. Jackson jumps.
“Tina,” she says again, more firmly. “Hands. Down.”
“I’m n-not t-trying to-oh God!”
She hasn’t meant to do it-she feels that should go without saying overall, but especially at this point. Her intention was just to move her hands into the hollow cavern of the podium, out of harm’s way-except she forgot to take into account the flammability of wood.
Apparently, lightning will take to any conductor at all.
The thing goes up in flames before she has time to register it’s even smoking.
“For Christ’s sake, Tina!” Ms. Jackson cries, too alarmed to do anything. Tina kind of feels the same way.
“Put it away, you freak!” Brad-otherwise known as That Kid-shouts, head ducked under his sweatshirt as if the thing might do a shred of good when it comes to protection from illogical lightning bolts. For a second, Tina debates throwing something at him on purpose, just to watch him squeal like the idiot he surely is.
Instead, she jams her hands into her oversized pockets, praying her pants won’t catch fire (they don’t) and making a mad dash for the door. She’s halfway down the hall before anyone cries out for her (Ms. Jackson, still trying to do some good, or possibly capture Tina for her secret Russian black-ops lab), too terrified and far gone to care.
Someone touches her shoulder before she can reach the stairs, and she doesn’t mean to, but her hands fly free of her pockets anyway. A bolt zips from her palm, miraculously missing the person’s head, sizzling against the nearest locker. Tina moans in shame.
“I’m s-sorry, I j-just w-w-want to-“
The man-a janitor-backpedals, shaking his head like he can’t believe what he’s just seen. Frustrated by the insanity, as well as her lack of control, Tina grasps her head in her hands and mirrors his action.
Another bolt jerks upwards, joined by a second from her other hand, and together, they meld with a brutal screeching sound, sliding into the light fixture above her head.
Twenty seconds later, the hall goes pitch-dark.
By the sounds of the shrieks and laughter, she’s taken out the entire top floor-maybe the school’s whole grid, even. Tina groans and runs, half-blind, in the direction of the staircase.
It’s a miracle she doesn’t go fishtailing down them head-first-as it is, she misses a couple of steps near the end and has to fling out a hand in search of the railing, which lights up immediately like the world’s strangest Christmas tree-but eventually her feet land on flat tile. She takes off again, tearing towards where she thinks the front doors are, desperate to get out into the dim, drizzling afternoon and out of the hellhole her life has suddenly become.
Her plan is derailed the second she collides with a warm, soft body, all tight muscles and easy breaths.
“D-don’t!” she shrieks when his-she can just barely make out his features, Asian-American and calm-fingers close around her biceps. “Don’t t-touch me, I’ll-“
“Breathe,” he instructs gently, easing her towards the doors. “You’re fine. Come with me.”
“I’m n-not fine,” she snaps, clenching her fists until they glow like a flashlight pressed flush against a bedsheet. “L-look at me!”
“I’m looking,” he says with a small shrug. “You’re pretty.”
It’s enough to shut off the stammer, at least, leaving Tina gaping gracelessly up at him. Under the weight of the shadows she’s brought down, he grins.
“Enough flirting, Chang,” a high voice squeaks. “We’ve got to get out of here now.”
“Kurt has a point,” a third person-a girl, this time-observes. Tina can faintly make out the outline of both people-kids about her age, one tiny, the other lanky and thin.The smaller of the two darts a glance over her shoulder, clearly impatient.
“We’re getting,” the boy with his hand on her arm replies serenely, steering her left to avoid one of the pillars set in the middle of the lobby. “Watch us get.”
“Faster would be better,” the second boy snarks. As her eyes adjust more fully, Tina can see his hand resting on the door, his body poised for escape. The girl doesn’t look much happier.
“This all would have been much easier,” she complains, “if you’d been correct about her control, Kurt.”
“You’re blaming me?” the squeaky voice demands incredulously. “Sweetheart, please. Without my vision, you wouldn’t have even known she was here to begin with. You should be scraping your forehead upon my immaculate Pradas.”
“You are perfectly absurd,” the girl sniffs.
“Do we really have time for this?” Asian wonders, tugging Tina right up to the door. “I vote bail first, bitch later.”
“Legitimate prioritizing, Mike,” the girl praises, pushing against the handle with her entire body. The door flies open, casting a sickly gray light on them all; Tina can see Squeaky Voice is a cherub-faced boy wearing a haughty glare and a way-pretty scarf, while the upset girl has brown hair and a camel splashed across her sweater.
“Do you guys even go here?” Tina demands. The haughty boy scoffs, tossing his head and stepping out the door. He strides off down the street, barely waiting for the rest of them to catch up.
“Are we positive we need her? I wouldn’t say no to ignoring a couple of these skull-crushers.”
“We’re positive,” the girl snaps, running a hand through her hair and smiling tiredly up at Tina. “My name is Rachel Berry. I apologize for the distress. I had been under the impression you knew of your ability, and would therefore be much easier to-ahem-collect.”
“Collect?” Tina repeats uneasily. A blue bolt twitches in the palm of her left hand. The small girl glances at it, apparently pleased.
“Well, this is rather impressive, I have to admit. Having a second offensive figure on the team can only help our case.”
“Team?” Tina hates sports, and really doesn’t do the whole rely-on-others thing well, unless RPGs are involved. This girl seems nice and everything-if a little bossy-but she can’t say the idea of being on any team with her is alluring.
Still, Asian Kid-Mike-is smiling, and that Kurt kid doesn’t look so entirely pissed off now that they’re out of the school, and her hands aren’t vibrating with as much intensity now. She supposes things could be worse; she could have fried her teacher on the spot, instead of simply scaring the living daylights out of the woman.
“We’re working on this whole Marvel kids diatribe,” Kurt informs her almost boredly, though something shifts in his piercing blue eyes. Tina cocks her head.
“What, like the comic books?”
“Let’s not trivialize it,” Rachel begins. Kurt cuts her off with a shrug.
“In short.”
“Oh.” Tina thinks about all the comics she’s read, all the movies she’s seen about people like her-and, mostly importantly, the stories she’s heard. Awful things, involving senseless violence from both sides and a general sense of emotional aggravation. She sighs.
“I don’t suppose you’ll share with us your thoughts?” the small brunette asks hopefully. Tina shakes her head.
“I can’t go home, can I?”
“Of course you can,” Rachel replies, surprised. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
Tina shrugs. “I’m a mutant freak with electro-spirit fingers. Isn’t that, like…a one-way ticket to a government facility or something?”
The brunette stares at her, looking more amused than Tina feels the girl has a right to. “I suppose it’s a possibility,” she says slowly. “But it’s more likely that someone, somewhere in your family line also has such a gift.”
“No need to board the grumpy train,” Mike adds helpfully. Tina’s eyes widen.
“Well, then…what are you three doing here looking for me?”
The brunette looks almost embarrassed. “You can go home, of course,” she says sheepishly, “but we would really prefer you didn’t. Kurt’s vision suggests you will grow to be a powerful ally in the fight against a great evil. If you come with us, we’ll help you hone that ability of yours so you can use it to protect the innocent.”
“And,” Kurt drawls, “you’ll learn much in the fine art of theft and the nomadic skills of sleeping in shady motels without checking in.”
“It’s fun,” Mike chimes in. “Sometimes.”
Tina frowns, tilting her head until raven hair cascades across one side of her face. She contemplates the options: go with these rag-tag teens on a suicide mission she doesn’t quite comprehend, or walk back into the school whose generator she just demolished and face down her principal, parents, and an eventual return to The Color Purple.
“What are we waiting for?” she asks brightly, tripping off down the street until she’s ahead of them all.