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He is born in a rush to a man and woman who are delicately, tenuously connected by a shotgun marriage and a joined sense of apathy. They conceive him, carry him, give birth to him - but Tommy is as much a stranger to them as they are to each other. He slides out in one slithering, glistening mass, and Mary screams. The nurses soothe her, the doctors peel back the filmy covering, and they say: look, Mary, it's ok. Tommy's crying now, free from the membrane, and they say: it's good luck to be born in the caul. (Tommy will call bullshit on this sixteen years, a vaporised school and a few alien invasions later. Mary, on the other hand, thinks of spelling bees and silver medals. She smiles nervously.)
They wipe him down and wrap him in blankets, handing him to a shaking Mary. She looks down at the tiny, silver-haired stranger they have placed in her hands and feels completely terrified.
"Are you sure he's mine?" She whispers, and she feels even sillier when the nurse laughs indulgently.
"Hard to believe, isn't it?" She says fondly, "That you made something so beautiful." She smiles down at Mary placidly, in the way she reserves for all new mothers overcome with emotion. Mary stares down at the infant that has none of her features, that she conceived, that undoubtedly grew in her womb, and thinks with a sudden, unshakable resolution: he is not mine. It makes no sense, absolutely none, and she feigns tiredness just so they will take him away.
The name Thomas isn't on the list she and Frank carefully compile at the kitchen table. It slips from her mouth suddenly and unexpectedly, and her husband pulls a face. Neither of them like it, but it sticks. They find themselves calling him Tommy, no matter how hard they push for the planned David, or Jonathan. Thomas, somehow, is his name, already was his name, however little sense that makes. She whispers it in his ear as he screws his face up and shrieks and shrieks - and his eyes open, his screaming stops. It unnerves her.
*
Many of his early memories are of hospitals. He can't count past ten, but he knows words like 'melanin' and 'albinism'. He also knows that these words have nothing to do with him.
They draw more blood and they draw more blanks, and his mother looks angrier and angrier. Tommy's no expert in appropriate maternal reactions, but anger isn't quite what he expected. Eventually, they concede defeat, and tell a furious Mary that there just really isn't anything wrong with her son. She marches him home without a word, and that's the end of that.
He perches at the top of the stairs, feeling proud of his band-aid, sticky fingers clutching at the chocolate the doctor gave him. He was brave.
"It's just not normal," he hears his mom snap, and then the kitchen door slams closed, and he's left wondering what he did wrong.
*
Contrary to popular opinion, Tommy wasn't always a delinquent. At school, he is quietly average. He listens when it interests him, and chews his pen when it doesn't. Any problems with this approach lie in the syllabus, and not his attitude. (He gets through pens at a rate of knots.)
*
His parents argue a lot. They don't shout. They don't scream. They argue as listlessly as they do everything else together, which is to say: very.
Tommy almost wishes they were explosive. A couple who have the passion to scream and throw things might also have the capacity to also like each other. That's the basic problem, he thinks; his parents just don't like each other very much. He wouldn't bother losing sleep over it if he didn't feel like it was a little bit his fault. Again, he wouldn't bother losing sleep over that if he didn't feel like it was hugely unfair.
All he's done is have the audacity to be born without looking much like either of them.
It's not the sort of domestic misery Tommy can ever articulate clearly. He can't point to a bruise on his hip and say, look where he hit me. He can't plant a hidden camera to catch her saying, you're a worthless human being. What he can say is: my parents don't like me but we all pretend they do, but it sounds ridiculous even to him.
*
There's talk of another baby, and his mom speaks wistfully of wanting a girl. She says this to spare him, but he knows, she just doesn't want him. Tommy doesn't do feelings, but this sort of stabs somewhere vague inside him. Strangles, a little.
There's no sign of a baby, but there's plenty of raised voices, and he presses his ear against the walls more times than he'd like to admit. They do that snarling whisper thing that's supposed to stop him from hearing, but forget that fourteen years has made him a master interpreter. He likes to think he couldn't give less of a shit, but it's hard to feign nonchalance when you're pressed against the wall, craning your neck desperately to catch a single, hissed sentence. Even so, he does, because he doesn't care - he's just curious, that's all.
Mary's ovaries aren't doing their thing, and Frank's little guys couldn't help even if they were. Their reproductive organs are as ineffective as they are, Tommy thinks, somewhat venomously. No one mentions the miracle of Tommy, the improbability - impossibility, maybe - of his birth. They don't feel like they have been gifted a son, but robbed of a daughter.
If he had to pinpoint the exact moment he gave up on them, it was probably then.
*
Soon, they even give up on each other. Frank leaves - or is made to leave, it's tricky to tell - and moves just around the corner to a slightly moldy flat. Tommy goes there on weekends. There are two armchairs, and cable. His dad sips beer after beer, and maybe Tommy does too, because Frank thinks that it might just count as father-son bonding.
Tommy doesn't feel like they're bonding, vomiting in his dad's kitchen sink. He doesn't do that again.
At least, not that way around.
*
Puberty progresses at a nauseating crawl at the best of times; of course, for Tommy, it's even slower.
He grows into himself easily enough, grinning and running (literal) rings round his peers as they wrestle with their own gangly insecurities. He never gets acne. His voice doesn't degenerate into an embarrassing squeak. He's naturally lean and athletic. He even – much to his surprise – actually turns out to be kind of good-looking, weird hair notwithstanding. In fact, it’s kind of a talking point. The word ‘shy’ was never really in Tommy’s dictionary, so he latches onto this knowledge with enthusiasm. In a way, he is totally the luckiest teenage boy alive.
In another way, he feels completely wretched.
*
He accidentally runs round the block in two seconds flat and is forced to accept the inevitable.
Tommy is a mutant.
(God, lamest origin story ever. He forgot the milk and knew his mom was going to be mad. Scared the living daylights out of the corner shop assistant when he ran the door right off its hinges. They’ll never make a movie out of that.)
That aside, it’s undeniably awesome, actually. Not to mention that it makes so much sense he's tangibly relieved. So much to digest, so much to understand. He needs to learn his limits, understand his boundaries, figure out how he can help. He’d never use the term ‘superhero’, but it’s there from the beginning: a tiny, budding sense of responsibility.
He never gets a chance to come to terms with it in his own time. A week later Jake Johnston, class asshole, needles him one too many times about his dad after Tommy has spent a miserable weekend putting his dad in the recovery position and biting his nails. Jake doesn’t know that, but it doesn’t matter.
Tommy can hardly breathe he’s so angry. Later, he is glad they get everyone out before the chemistry lab crumbles around his unstructured outpouring of rage. Then, he can’t think at all.
*
They come after his school makes the front page. They don't pluck him from the street, or appear ominously in the middle of chemistry to whisk him away - they knock at his front door and invade the sanctity of his mom's living room. They sit, in their suits and grave faces, amidst the chintzy ornaments and floral patterned furniture.
"We have a facility," they say, "for boys like Thomas."
They feed her lies, and she knows they're lies, but she eats them anyway. They're good at telling her what she wants to hear. They make promises. She can't be expected to deal with a boy like Thomas all on her own. They don't blame her for struggling, they just want to help.
She signs the papers ultimately because she has no choice, but she won't look Tommy in the eye. He knows; he stares her down. She carefully contemplates the patterned wallpaper as her only son is forcibly dragged away by men who wouldn't give their names.
It's the last time Tommy sees her, but if he ever did meet her again, he'd say: you could've fought harder. And then -
- then, he'd still walk away, because he's bad for her and she's bad for him, and life isn't like a stupid movie where there's always something to say, something to get off your chest. Sometimes, you don't need to say it. Sometimes, things belong inside your brain.
He looks her up, years later. Remarried with two girls, a white picket fence, and a phone number with an area code for Millburn. He stares at the screen until the digits start to dance, but he never makes the call.
He won't find closure bothering a woman who finally got what she wanted. He's not quite a big enough person to feel happy for her, but he's big enough to leave her be.
*
No one asks him about juvie. What would he say if they did?
That yes, it sucked. That they hurt him and pushed him and stretched him to limits he never knew he had. That he lost a little bit of faith in humanity. That sometimes, he'd lie awake and ache and sort of maybe wonder if dying would be the easy way out.
But that's not it, that's too simplistic. He bled and screamed and hurt, but he reaped the benefits. Would he be this fast if they hadn't pushed him? Would he be able to destabilise his molecules if they hadn't first?
And then, there's Lisa, which is embarrassing, because he totally fell for her, and she's - well, she wasn't apathetic exactly, but she didn't really care either way. It's embarrassing because he did care, and it's embarrassing because she saw him at his lowest, and mostly - it's embarrassing because she knew exactly what she was doing.
She's kind of a cold bitch, actually, but he won't hold it against her. She's more of an observer than a participator, and in some kind of fucked up way, he's honored she allowed him in at all.
They deposit him after a somewhat brutal session in an equally brutal manner. He's all set to curl up in the corner and think about dying, but Lisa drags him to the bathroom and washes the blood off his face. She's not gentle; she slaps him when he moans. He calls her a heartless bitch and says he wishes they had segregation in this godforsaken hellhole. Lisa laughs.
"Yeah, you might want to rethink that," she says, and woah ok, he just bled all over her and called her a bitch and instead of killing him she's pulling his pants down and straddling him on the toilet seat. This is unexpected. This is very, very unexpected. (Who knew? All these years he's been doing seduction wrong.)
But hey, he's always been quick on the uptake.
She might have just been cheering him up, and it might have meant absolutely nothing, but she's smart and scathing and terrifying, and Tommy's still young, and stupid, and he falls for her in a way the young and stupid only can.
You never quite get over that, even when you're a little bit older and minimally wiser. Eli is right about Lisa, he's completely right, and Tommy knows, even through his disappointment, that he dodged a bullet when they part ways once more.
But, still - he never looks at toilet seats in the same way again, he never quite stops falling for girls who can beat the shit out of him, and no one ever asks about juvie. So, he asks himself: does he wish it never happened?
The answer isn't entirely surprising.
*
So, he has a brother - a twin, even. An honest-to-god-twin. It's like looking in a faulty mirror, and clearly, it's weirding them both out.
Should they be bonding? Hanging out? Comparing notes on being reincarnated lost souls? Hugging? Having feelings?
Whatever. It sounds like more fun to just keep trying his chances with Kate and pissing off Eli. He's got this part down, and it's best not to rock the boat. (But real boats, of course, actually do rock.)
Besides, sometimes - when he does edge towards Billy, thinks about extending some kind of brotherly olive branch - there's the small matter of Teddy. He's just… he's there. In the way. All smiling and being nice and wholesome and urgh.
There are spaces in Tommy's brain - his soul, heart, whatever - that feel a little bit empty sometimes. Billy doesn't seem to have them, and Tommy hoped… well, Tommy hoped a lot of things.
He's not jealous, because that would be totally ridiculous, he just doesn't like Teddy that much, that's all. He's big and green and admittedly a bit useful here and there, but he's stolen the limelight of Billy's life and done absolutely nothing to deserve it. Tommy would have liked a minor role, at least. A backstage pass, even?
Well, whatever. It's fine.
*
The thing about Kate Bishop is that she's awesome. That she could literally kick his ass all the way to Canada and still make it home in time for dinner. That she works really fucking hard and still sees room for improvement. That she could probably disarm him in ten different ways using a dessert spoon.
He might be in the middle of some weird, superhero love triangle, and he might be somewhat disadvantaged in that he's definitely the asshole of the trio, but can you blame him for giving it his best shot? (Pun intended.)
It's fine. It's totally fine, because you only have to look at Kate to know he isn't good enough for her. Neither is Eli, Tommy thinks, but he ignores that thought because Kate always calls her own shots, and that's important. He'd prefer it if she'd taken a chance with him, of course, but if Kate didn't do what Kate wanted, she wouldn't be Kate, and he wouldn't love her. But she is, and he does, and he wouldn't swap that for the world.
Besides, she smiles at him in a way that makes him believe they'll always be friends. He's good enough to be her friend, and that is actually, maybe, a little bit more awesome than he'd ever expected.
*
When Billy quits, Teddy nods, and Tommy glares at him for being such a stupid pushover. Tommy thinks he's going to explode. He can't believe this. He can't believe them.
Teddy's pointed looks and assurances in hushed tones are worthless currency when there are bad people doing bad things and Tommy has to sit and bite his nails while Billy grows a really shit beard.
Weeks turn into months, and Tommy's cuticles are in a sorry way. He's lying on the sofa, gazing listlessly at the ceiling and thinking about lunch. Teddy just gives him this look, and he's completely impassive, as always - stupid shape-shifters - but for a moment, Teddy looks a bit like Tommy. Sort of desperate, and a little bit hungry.
"Oh, come on," Teddy says, mildly exasperated, as if Tommy has just driven him to some kind of inexplicable course of action through no fault of his own. He grabs Tommy's wrist and drags him to the door, and before Tommy can really register what's happened, Teddy's turning green and starting to grin.
Oh, wow. Yes. This is totally, one hundred per cent the best idea Teddy has ever had, and Tommy is enthusiastically on board. He's suited up before Teddy finishes reminding him to, and they're speeding off (pun totally intended) to the other side of town in no time.
There's not much going on, but they find the little that is, and it's good, so very good.
Afterwards, they eat pizza on a roof, because it's sort of superhero prerogative.
"We shouldn't have done that," Teddy says cheerfully, "Billy's going to kill me."
"Um, no," Tommy says, "He's going to stare out the window like an idiot and say nothing."
Teddy rubs the back of his neck, and lets out an awkward laugh. "We need to do something."
"That's your job," Tommy tells him. He takes another slice and grins; even thinking about Billy can't spoil this. Not entirely.
"I'll think of something," Teddy says, "but we shouldn't… you know," he gestures, encompassing both pizza and rooftop, and Tommy snorts. "- this."
"No?"
"Not behind his back, it isn't fair."
"Right," Tommy raises an eyebrow, "so do you want to tell him you’re superhero-cheating on him, or shall I?"
"I – er, well….”
They look at each guiltily, stuffing their faces with pizza in costume on a rooftop, and burst into laughter. They're saving lives and feeling bad about it, and it's so ridiculous and stupid and Tommy missed that kind of dilemma so much, he feels like he might just burst from an emotion he can't quite pin down.
They never do tell Billy, and Teddy never does stop, but it's ok, he thinks. Everything feels ok when you're breaking the sound barrier, because that's how he was made, and this is who he is.
Billy'll come around, eventually. It's who he is, too.
*
The first moment Tommy sees Billy, he has this intense sense of relief. He can't say why.
He finally figures it out, staring at Billy, the-boy-who-is-his-soul-twin-or-some-shit-like-that, and it's not a good realization.
He looked at Billy, just like him, and thought, thank god. He saw another anomalous boy was born to parents that weren't really his parents, and thought, another one nobody wanted.
The reality is different, and he wants to punch things. Instead, he shakes hands with Billy's dad and swallows. It's weird, being related, but… not. Billy's family is being disgustingly good about it. Welcoming him into their home and making dinner and jesus christ. It's honestly repulsive.
He doesn't want to play happy fucking families with some middle class asshats who wouldn't like him if they actually knew half the stuff he'd done. This is so stupid. He wants to leave.
He even tries, but Teddy grips him hard - super-strength hard - by the wrist, and shoots him a look. Mostly warning, but also a tiny bit sympathetic. Christ, he hates this whole stupid family. Future brother-in-law included. Understanding assholes.
He stays, though, and tries not to do anything too terrible. He plays some stupid video game with Billy's two not-quite-brothers, and wipes the floor with them. They think he's awesome. It kind of goes to his head, a tiny bit.
So they're kind of ok, as almost-brothers go. Maybe he'll come back next Sunday.
Meanwhile, Billy leans in the doorway smiling in this stupid, dorky way, Teddy watching him with an even more sickening expression. They're a good few meters apart - not even touching - and they still make Tommy want to retch. Or cry. Or something.
He pretends to throw up, making Billy's brothers howl with laughter and Billy flush pink and bury his face in Teddy's shoulder. Teddy, ever the affable giant, just looks sort of peaceful. For a guy with family even more problematic than Tommy's, he's really fucking zen.
Really, Tommy's just glad they're ok. Against his better judgment, he cares about these sentimental losers, and it must show on his face, because Teddy beams right back at him, sucking Tommy into their little bubble of happiness. He considers fighting it, but it's much easier to throw cynicism to the wind just this once, and enjoy - maybe - kind of having a family.
*
Billy’s back in uniform, magic crackling in his hands and grinning like he can’t believe his luck. Teddy is behind him, with one careful hand on the small of his back. Billy could probably lay waste to the entire state without breaking a sweat – if he wanted – so it’s a protective gesture of utter futility. Likewise, Billy glances over his shoulder sporadically, as if to check up on Teddy – you know, the half-Skrull-half-Kree, self-healing, practically invulnerable green bag of muscles with super-strength.
They’re going to be ok, Tommy thinks, they’re going to be absolutely fine. Which means, he suppose, that it’s time.
“I think,” he says, “I might leave you guys to it.” He grins, stretches, and gestures around him. “The world awaits, right?”
He half-expects them not to get it, to stare at him stupidly and ask far too many questions. Instead, Teddy smiles and Billy nods. Is this normal? For the depth of human understanding to keep surprising you, time after time?
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” Billy says. It’s not a question - not really.
“When I’m done.” Tommy says, and it’s the closest he’ll ever come to an emotional confession. When I’ve figured out where I belong. (Like they have.)
Maybe he’ll stop by Uncle P’s and pester him until he gets kicked out. Head up to see the Runaways, blow some stuff up for Molly. Have coffee with Wanda, and hope some of her unabashed repentance rubs off on him. (It won’t, but it’s worth a try.) There’s always the enticing possibility of tracking down grandpa Erik, which sounds deeply unadvisable, and therefore incredibly tempting. He could even hang out at the mansion, just because he can.
The world awaits indeed, and if he hugs them super, super quickly before he darts off, no one needs be any the wiser.