Lawns ran down to a small lake with the morning moving on its surface, and across the open grounds, students were out playing.
Any ordinary New Yorker wandering in would have left at a dead sprint: a boy going up for a layup split into three identical boys mid-jump; a girl playing tag treated fences and tree trunks as rumors, running straight through them; a tall young man ambled past gleaming head to foot like polished steel.
Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Youngsters.
The mutant school.
“Bobby!
Look what I got.” John, the one they called Pyro, came across the lawn waving a magazine overhead, and dropped down next to Bobby, the one they called Iceman.
“You found a Shonen Jump?” Bobby sat up.
“Every store on my morning loop was sold out.” “Because I came prepared.” John’s smugness arrived a half-second ahead of him.
“Ran into a kid on the road and paid double to take it off him.” “That’s really not something to be proud of.” “Why do you care so much?!
Read it or don’t.
Fine, don’t, I’ll take it back and read it myself.” They read it together, obviously.
Both of them were hot-blooded kids, and both had a complicated file on comics.
They’d grown up around the medium like everyone else, and the heroism at the center of it had always sat wrong in their mouths, and the reason was simple: they were mutants.
Every kid at this school had arrived by one of two roads.
Either Professor Charles had found them himself, door by door, or their parents had felt something wrong in their own child, hadn’t been able to stomach turning them in, and had left them here instead.
Put plainly, most of the school had been given up on by the people who made them.
Growing up like that did things to a boy’s reading.
You opened a comic and there stood Captain Steve, righteous man out of scripture, cleansing evil and protecting the good ordinary folk, the same good ordinary folk who’d thrown you away, and honest to God, keeping a pleasant mood through that took work.
Underneath the resentment ran the older, softer thought, the one nobody said out loud: if only somebody like that would come for us.
Knowing nobody would.
Then One Punch Man happened, and Saitama killed monsters with no sermon attached, no sanctimony, no flag, just a man doing it because it was in front of him, and the two of them had converted on the spot.
“Man.” Bobby flipped a page back.
“Saitama’s still so strong.
If I had power like that, I could actually protect everybody.” “You haven’t noticed?” John’s voice slid sideways.
“There’s something in this book stronger than Saitama.” “What?
Who?” They’d read the same chapters shoulder to shoulder.
How had Bobby missed a character?
John produced a look loaded with meaning and pointed at a panel.
It was a mosquito.
Saitama, in the panel, was slapping at it in a flurried chain, and missing, and the mosquito escaped with an audible whine.
“…The mosquito.” Bobby stared at it.
“Why can’t he hit it?” Because that was genuinely strange, once you looked at it.
A man of that strength, with that speed, unable to track one insect?
It refused to add up.
“How would I know,” John said, already bored of his own joke.
Except Bobby didn’t laugh.
Bobby kept frowning at the panel, actually working the problem, turned it over twice without finding a thread, and finally shelved it somewhere in the back of his head, where it would sit and wait.
“New comics,” he said instead.
“Not superhero stuff, looks like.” They finished the whole magazine before the sun got high, and afterward John sat quiet for a while, which for John was an event.
Then he asked, out of nowhere: “You think Kaneki wants to eat human flesh?” Tokyo Ghoul had run only three chapters, and next to Attack on Titan’s opening massacre it barely moved: no war, no explosion, just one ordinary young man circling a single question, to eat or not to eat.
Held up against the other two books it looked plainly weaker, and the eating was the only hook in sight.
“Definitely not.
The comic makes that completely clear, right?” “Yeah.” John’s face darkened by shades.
“He doesn’t want to.
And in the end he eats anyway.” A beat, and then it came out of him with an edge.
“Bobby.
Doesn’t his situation look exactly like ours?” “Mutants don’t eat anybody either.
And we’re still painted as the great evil, and squeezed out to the margins, and in the end we huddle up with our own kind for warmth.” John had been sent here, not found.
The school’s gentle quiet had always chafed him; he moved through it feeling like a beast in a preserve.
John had never once wanted to be a mutant.
What he’d wanted was family.
Normal parents, a normal table, a normal life, and reading Kaneki he’d fallen straight through the page: the eating wasn’t appetite, it was necessity, the price of continuing to exist.
Becoming a mutant ran on the same bill.
That was just survival.
Bobby sat with nothing to say.
He hadn’t read it that way at all, hadn’t projected an inch, and hearing it now, it landed.
It landed hard enough to sting.
“John.
Is that truly how you think?” The voice came from behind them, gentle as the lawn, and both boys jolted around.
A red-haired woman was pushing a wheelchair slowly up the path, and in the chair sat the old man.
John, terror of hallways, picker of fights, loud on principle, went straight-backed and silent as a schoolboy at inspection.
“What you’ve said is fact, John.
That can’t be denied.” Professor Charles smiled faintly, and his eyes dropped to the magazine in John’s hands.
“But in the end, we will live in friendship with humanity.” A pause.
“Might I borrow that for a look?” John surrendered the magazine at speed, and at one small gesture from Jean, took off across the lawn like a startled rabbit, towing Bobby with him.
“The Professor’s not even scary,” Bobby managed, being dragged.
“Why are you like this?” “Okay, I lied earlier.” John patted his chest, breathless.
“It wasn’t double price.
I took it off the kid.
I paid cover, though!” “…You robbed a child.
I misjudged you, John.
Also, the Professor doesn’t read our minds, you know that.” Bobby’s disapproval had layers to it.
The everyday tyranny, fine, that was John.
But robbing a kid on the street, and then sitting on a lawn delivering the speech about how mutants don’t hurt anybody?
You’ll take a child’s comic and then philosophize?
Back up the path, Jean watched the two of them shrink into the distance, then bent to find Charles already turning pages.
“Professor.” In Jean’s honest curiosity there sat a small mystery.
“Since when are you interested in comics?” Comics belonged to teenagers and children; the older the reader, the fainter the pull, and a man of the Professor’s depth of years sat well past the far end of that curve.
The media noise around Shonen Jump had been real but shallow, and to adults it registered as one more magazine for kids.
Social elites skipped the category entirely.
A leader who had bent his whole life to the mutant cause shouldn’t, by rights, have known the thing existed.
“Nothing much.
Curiosity.” Charles turned another page, unhurried.
“There’s a mind behind these last two books.
This Tristan Moss.
I can feel the shape of what he’s thinking through them, and I confess I’d rather like to meet him.” Jean didn’t follow.
It was a comic.
What thinking?
Philosophy, in a comic?
“So, Jean.
Each time a new issue is released, buy me a copy, would you?” “Of course, Professor.” She answered easily and pushed the chair on up the path, and kept one thought to herself as she went: she might just read it too.