#darcy's wacky extended family (drama) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

amusewithaview · 7 years

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blood tells (a tale all its own)

Darcy looks a lot like her mother.

Most of that is by nature, some of that is by choice.

With a name like “Current Events,” she thought she’d be safe taking the class. News and stuff, right? She could handle that. Darcy really should have known better. She should have considered that ‘current’ could have variable definitions depending on perspective. Unluckily for her, the professor took a long view encompassing most of the past fifty years. The syllabus was the only warning she had, the outline told her that on week six they’d focus on assassinations that shaped society.

She clicked on the corresponding link to find the assigned reading and felt her stomach do a dip and roll. “The President Who Wasn’t - Friend or Foe of Humanity?” was the title that jumped out at her. She debated dropping the class, but eventually settled on skipping week six.

It had been five years. It was still too soon.

She knows she’s lucky. She knows.

1. Her mutation is easily hidden. She can pass. 2. Her family loves her.

But she still wonders about the other side of her family. Her father was a foundling, albeit an oddly well-funded one from what her grandparents’ investigators could turn up. They never found anything on his family though, in spite of the money they poured into the endeavor. It’s a mystery, but they’re almost certainly the ones she got her x-gene from.

She knows that her father hated what she was. She knows. There are entire youtube channels devoted to his fiery speeches, preaching hate against her and others like her. Sometimes she can’t help but wonder what if. Would he have changed his mind if he knew about her? Probably not. She’ll never know for sure, but she wonders. She tries not to let it eat at her.

Sometimes she succeeds.

When Darcy was twelve years old, she woke up with buttery-gold eyes and blue freckles scattered like a thick coat of midnight stars on her otherwise fair skin. Her first thought was cool and then can I keep them? It didn’t occur to her to be scared until she smelled the fear on her mother.

Of course, she didn’t realize what she was smelling until Heather Lewis was well into the throes of a panic attack.

Her mother kept patting her hair and crying. “Oh baby, baby, it’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, we’ll figure something out,” she kept whispering it, over and over like a mantra. “It’ll be okay, we’ll figure something out.” Heather’s hands were shaking and tears were pouring down her face unacknowledged.

Darcy was terrified.

That was how her grandparents found them: Heather clutching Darcy close to her, shaking so hard she was near to swaying back and forth. Darcy holding her mother just as fiercely, crying just as hard in confusion and fear.

Grandpa took Darcy and grandma took her mom, in two hours they reconvened in the parlor. Darcy learned three things that day:

1. Her father’s name was Graydon Creed. 2. She was a mutant. 3. If either of the first two became well-known, she could be in danger. If both of the first two became known, she could die.

They danced around the ‘death’ thing, but even as a child she could read between the lines. Her father had been making a name for himself over the past few years, making waves in the political sphere with his group, “The Friends of Humanity.” He was making a campaign off of anti-mutant paranoia and if it ever got out that he had a daughter, out of wedlock, who was a mutant...the damage to his image would be catastrophic.

It was nothing but old money snobbery that had kept Graydon out of her life up to that point. Her grandparents had given her mother an ultimatum: keep her boyfriend or keep the child. If she’d chosen the former, they would have quietly arranged for her to have an abortion but allowed her to continue at her elite boarding school in much the same way she had, considering it a ‘warning’ of sorts. Heather chose the latter and allowed her parents to withdraw her from school and squirrel her away to a more remote estate where they could pretend that Darcy was her little sister.

That was the story they told. One of those polite society fictions that stood up as well as a tower of cards, remaining intact only as long as others were kind enough not to blow on it. It helped that Darcy’s grandmother was a society dame, the kind who could make or break reputations with a single word because she knew all the dirt and wouldn’t hesitate to use it. It helped even more that Darcy’s mother was quiet about her indiscretion, didn’t flaunt it or step out of the line her parents had drawn in the sand.

Heather chose her battles carefully and, nine times out of ten, she fought for Darcy rather than herself.

Darcy had been home-schooled by her mother’s choice up till the age of twelve. After the manifestation of her x-gene it became a necessity. She learned to metamorph away her more outlandish outward traits (the blue freckles and yellow eyes she got at twelve; the pointed canines and elongated ears she grew at thirteen; the retractible claws on hands and feet she sprouted at fifteen; the tail which she never told anyone about at seventeen) enough to go to high school.

All the while she watched her father’s support grow. She tracked his progress through papers and tv adverts, through her grandfather’s blustery remarks about his dim prospects to the very real fear behind her mother and grandmother’s eyes. If Graydon Creed won, the mutants, as a whole, would lose.

Her father’s success would be her people’s downfall.

It fucked her up.

Then, days after formally announcing his candidacy for president, Graydon Creed was assassinated at a rally in Ohio.

It fucked her up worse.

In college, Darcy meets her first out-and-proud mutant.

There had been none at the fancy private boarding school she’d attended. Even if there had been, she wouldn’t have been allowed to associate with them. Creed’s death might have made the world safer for mutants and, in a very specific sort of way, Darcy, but there were plenty ready to pick up his banner of hate and intolerance. The very last thing the Lewises wanted was for Darcy to come out of the closet and be hurt.

Darcy knows that that rule comes from a place of caring. She can literally smell it on them. That doesn’t make their active and aggressive denial of a very real part of her hurt any less.

So when she meets the girl called Lorna, it’s a revelation.

Lorna has green hair, and not just on her head: all of her visible body hair is green. She lives on Darcy’s floor and by the end of the first week of freshman year, they’ve swapped assigned roommates so they can live together. Lorna doesn’t say if her x-gene does more than give her awesome hair and Darcy never asks.

Darcy doesn’t tell her the truth, but it’s a near thing. The fear is just too deeply ingrained. She regrets it when the X-Men come for Lorna, halfway through sophomore year. She doesn’t even get a chance to say goodbye properly, stuck in class when Lorna up and leaves.

They still exchange emails though.

“Did you love him, mom?” Darcy asked, once, in that brief, awful period between finding out who her father was and seeing him shot on national tv.

Heather had shrugged, pulling her daughter closer to tuck under her arm. “Part of me still loves him,” she admitted quietly. “He gave me you.”

“But without me, you could still be with him,” she said, soft like a secret.

Her mother tilted her head to the side, thinking very carefully about Darcy’s not-quite-a-question. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I’d like to think that I would have left him when I saw how deep the hate ran, but...” She smiled a little wistfully, “Your father was - is a very charismatic man. You’ve got a little of that spark. No, really.” Her lips pressed together and a wrinkle formed between her eyes, “I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer. I don’t know what would have happened without you, but honey?”

“Yeah?”

“I chose you over him. I will always choose you.”

Her mother is a librarian and her father was a politician and Darcy...

Darcy is a perpetual student of life, or at least that’s how she tries to sell it to her grandparents. She manages six years at Culver, ends up with a double major in political science and biology, one minor in social justice. It’s unfortunate for her that Culver requires more diversity in certain fields. She still has six credits of science requirement to kill and two options:

1. Take Rocks for Jocks. 2. Intern with a crazy astrophysicist.

Darcy takes the internship and never looks back.

She learned control out of necessity. It was learn control or be confined to the estate. Her mother did most of the real work, teaching her to meditate, helping her figure out how to associate scents with emotions and physiological tells. But sometimes Darcy just felt so pent-up, so caged.

She learned to escape into her own head.

She fell into music and let it express all the emotions she couldn’t. All the things she wanted to say and ways she wanted to react and had to hold back every moment of every single day. Her body, the one natural to her, had claws and a tail and fangs and elongated pupils and heightened senses -

Sometimes she wondered, didn’t her family realize those manifestations were more than just cosmetic?

Sometimes she wondered, did they care?

Darcy knew, on some level, that her instincts weren’t wrong just different.

It didn’t always help.

Jane is the second person Darcy wants to tell.

Not so much because she epically trusts her on sight or anything, but, well, Jane has a tendency to get a little too caught up in science and forget things like showering or cleaning. It’s a problem. Darcy grew up in a house kept clean by a weekly service. Darcy has always kept her dorm room as clean as possible because her nose demands it.

Living and working with Jane is...an adjustment.

The Thor thing? That’s enough to send Darcy’s entire world out of alignment.

CAST LIST -

Darcy Lewis (Creed)