In His Smile

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

"Stupid Lance, stupid Pietro, stupid Mystique, stupid stupid stupid..."

Todd Tolansky dragged his worn out sneakers against the sidewalk as he made his way down the road that night. His unruly brown hair hung in his face, shielding his pale yellow eyes from view. People on the street tried their best to avoid him, but he didn't seem to mind. He understood completely, after all, he did look like he lived in a dumpster for a year or two.

Todd stuffed his hands in his pockets in aggravation. Sometimes he hated his mutation. He hated how it made his skin so pale that it looked green. He hated how he had given up on showering because of the constant secretion of slime from his pores. He hated the abnormal color of his eyes, and how they glowed in the moonlight. And he absolutely hated how he was treated because of his so called "gift."

Even before mutant kind was exposed he had been treated differently. He was pushed around and looked at as if he were a nuisance, an annoyance, trash. They looked at him as though he was not worthy to be in their presence, like they were better than him. Of course, he wouldn't fool himself. They were better than him. He knew that - after all, he was told that all of his life. He remembered his father telling how horrible he was before the dirt-bag walked out of his life, and he remembered being kicked out of his own house because he wasn't good enough.

The pale teen ran his skinny fingers through his dirt-brown hair. Why was he thinking about this again? Oh, right. The Brotherhood were being jerks again.

It wasn't at all surprising. After all, he had broken into Mystique's room again. And accidentally slimed the fridge. And the bathroom. But that didn't mean that they had to kick him out for the night.

He continued his muttering. "Stupid Lance, stupid Pietro, stupid Mistyque, stupid stupid stupi-"

He was interrupted by a figure knocking into him.

"Oh man, I'm real sorry, ah..."

The figure was completely hidden from view. It was as if the shadows clung to him... or her. They surrounded the figure completely, making him unrecognisable. It seemed as if, for a moment, the strange and mysterious figure would turn and run away, but instead he leaned closer, and Todd suddenly noticed the pale yellow eyes that were so much like his own.

Eyes that were owned by only one other person in the world.

"Kurt?"

=*=

Kurt didn't know how it happened, and he didn't think that Todd knew either. It seemed like one minute he and the Toad were worst enemies, glaring at each other and throwing insults every chance they got, but now they sat with each other in the park soully lit by the moon, talking with each other as if they had been friends for their entire lives. Somehow, after their collision on the street a conversation was conceived between them. The topics, at first, were trivial. Favorite foods, t.v. shows, video games, and similar things. They soon escalated however, and more serious topics, such as rejection and the mutual feeling of isolation were brought up.

"They just don't understand what it's like, you know?"

Todd nodded in response, his brown hair bouncing around his babyish face. "Believe me, I know exactly what you're talking about. The rest of the Brotherhood are lucky. They got to know what it's like to be normal. To actually be treated like a person. They don't have to walk around, knowing that people are going to judge you based solely on how you look."

It was Kurt's turn to nod, as he didn't quite know what to say. It was true that both the X-men and the remainder of the Brotherhood had the luxury of feeling normal, but then again, so did he. After running for his life for years, he had been blessed with his holographic image, and he was lifted from the burden of constantly looking over his shoulder. Todd didn't have that luxury.

As he listened to Todd talk, he couldn't help but notice that something was different. He wasn't exactly sure what it was, but he knew that there was something about him, something about how he was acting, that was noticeably different from how he normally acted around the Brotherhood and the X-men.

He suddenly became aware of exactly what it was.

"Hey, what happened to you saying 'yo' after your sentences? I haven't heard you use a single slang term all night!"

Todd blushed, his eyes choosing to focus on the ground instead of looking into the curious yellow eyes that seemed so much more innocent and warm towards him than they had the day before. "Well... ah, that's a bit hard to explain... I guess you could say it's kind of... an act...?"

Kurt rose a blue, fuzzy eyebrow. "An Act?" he repeated, the words tasting strange on his lips. "You mean that every time you ever said 'yo' or 'dog' or any other ridiculous slang terms, you were acting?" Todd nodded in response. "Why would you want to pretend like that?"

"Well... You see, it's like this." He ran his fingers through his hair nervously. "I mean, I've been living on the streets for a while, and if you wanna survive on the streets, you gotta look tough. You gotta be tough. And I'm obviously not... So one day, I figured out that people like a funny guy. They wanna keep them around for the laughs, so I became the funny guy. It actually works pretty well. I mean, I got to stay in hotels because of it, get food, clothes, a couple bucks here and there." He shrugged suddenly a lot more comfortable now that he shared his little secret with someone. He was actually glad that, that someone was Kurt.

Kurt understood. He really did. In a way, he supposed that his holographic image and Todd's frequent use of slang were virtually the same. They were both disguises, something to hide their true selves from the world, for protection. But there was still something that Kurt didn't quite understand.

"But wait, why do you still act that way after joining the Brotherhood?"

Todd scoffed. "Because they're just like me: fresh off the streets with the same attitude that kept them alive all these years. It's still kill or be killed, and it probably always will be. To be honest, living in that house isn't too different than living out here."  He gestured to the sidewalks and alleyways that surrounded them.  "It's pretty much just us fending for ourselves. I mean, it's not like Mystique actually does anything besides yell at us all the time and put a roof over our heads - and even that is a bit of an exaggeration. She doesn't pay the bills, that's Lance's job. She doesn't fix anything around the house, I do that. Pietro does the groceries most days and Fred does a lot of the cooking. That blue-skinned dragon-lady doesn't do a single thing except show up whenever she feels like and throws another problem in our face that we have to deal with."

Kurt nodded, understanding yet not quite liking the reasoning behind Todd's ridiculous facade. Todd's eyes burned with raw passion and something that could be described as nothing but Todd, the real Todd, not Toad, the obnoxious, selfish, cocky, and overall disgusting boy that used ridiculous terms to make himself cool. No. There was no way that he was sitting in the park with his arch enemy, because that person didn't actually exist. He wasn't real. But Todd was real, and that made him smile.

=*=