Quentin & Alex, Monday night

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Quentin and Alex are reluctantly on a case to track a wayward teen but find their job compromised when they discover just what the kid has been doing.


The case Quentin was assigned to work on with Alex was a sham, and Quentin had loudly and repeatedly made it known to anyone who would listen. And also those who didn't want to hear it. But that might have been what sealed his fate, as he'd been ordered to do his job or, as it was so eloquently put, go fuck himself somewhere else. Assholes.

So Quentin and Alex were trailing Larry Olsen, sophomore at Norman Thomas High School, to discover where he was going every night without telling his parents. Larry had traveled far from his home in Murray Hill, the east midtown neighborhood known for typical bourgeois boringness, down to East River Park. There, in the shadows underneath the Williamsburg Bridge, Larry joined a trio of other nervously excited teenagers.

"He's probably just scoring coke," Quentin said telepathically to Alex from their vantage point on the other side of FDR Drive. "What's the big deal?"

Alex couldn't say he particularly agreed with this job, even if he had been a bit less vocal than Quentin (who had hollered about it more than enough for both of them). He could appreciate parents being worried about their kid, but when had "hire a PI firm to follow the kid around" replaced actually talking?

Of course, two minutes of talking to his mother had cemented Alex's suspicion that the Olsens didn't care half as much about their son's well being as they were their own image. If it turned Larry was indeed here to score coke, he'd surely be secreted away to some high-end rehab in the country.

But the powers that be said trail the kid. So they trailed the kid to the park, watching him meet with the group of teens.

"I dunno, I don't see any drugs..." Alex tilted his head around to try and get a better look. "I don't see any drugs--"

He cut off abruptly as one of the boys threw his hood back -- and revealed an extremely real pair of cat ears. "Uh.....either I'm doing drugs or that kid's a mutant."

That got Quentin to look up and actually pay attention. "Well, fuck me," he verbalized. "Mutant drug ring or . . ." A second kid held out a hand and a small golf ball-sized flamed ignited an inch above her palm. Her golden hair shined in the light of the fire. "Shit. They're all mutants." He switched back to telepathy so they wouldn't be spotted. "What the hell are they doing down here?"

"Practicing probably." Alex watched as another lifted a stick with telekinesis. "Can't exactly go home to their parents and say 'hey guys guess what, I'm a mutant!' None of them look particularly destructive so it's easy enough to hide."

Cat ears, pyrokinesis, and telekinesis. That just left Larry himself. Quentin hesitated. Though his skills had improved considerably since manifesting, he still didn't have the lightest touch with his telepathy. Scanning the kids' minds without alerting them, especially if one of them was a telepath, too, would be very difficult. He'd end up revealing them and maybe put them all in danger.

His curiosity was sated when a moment later, Larry vanished from sight, only to reappear five feet away, behind cat ear boy. The group all laughed as Larry disappeared again and reappeared next to their bikes.

"Short-range teleportation?" Quentin guessed. Minor powers, maybe, compared to the living nuclear weapons housed at the Xavier Institute, but no less his brothers and sister. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck."

Alex ran a hand through his hair, blowing out a long breath. "So Mommy and Daddy Olsen probably think their kid is doing drugs and here is a mutant." That'll probably be worse in their eyes, he couldn't help but think a bit bitterly. "Shit."

"This is bullshit," Quentin spat. "See, this is exactly why I told everyone we should've thrown those flatscans out on their asses when they first came in. We do our job, these kids are gonna get locked up, at home or at some institution. Their lives are over because of us. We don't tell them, they just go find some other PI who doesn't give a shit and the same thing happens. They're fucked."

Alex sighed, leaning back and running a hand through his hair again as he watched the kids. They weren't doing anything wrong. They weren't causing trouble. They were just young mutants, they weren't getting into trouble, they weren't even messing around too much all things considered. "We may need to talk to Larry," he said after a minute.

Though Quentin's first impulse was unsurprisingly to disagree and call Alex all manner of names, he actually took a moment to consider the suggestion. "Give 'em all a heads up so they know their folks on on their tracks. It's not terrible. I don't really like it, either, but." He shrugged.

"Maybe help him cook up a cover story," Alex added. "We can tell his parents he's....I dunno, volunteering in secret or something. Something that'll get them off his case and make sure they don't hire anyone else to look into it."

Jean and Chuckles would hate it, but a little mental nudge from Quentin would surely seal the cover in the Olsens' heads. It was ethically justified, as far as the telepath was concerned. So he nodded in agreement with Alex's plan. "So, what, are you just going to walk over to them and introduce yourself? 'Hi, I've been watching you from the bushes for the last fifteen minutes because your parents hired me. 'Sup?'"

"Pretty much," Alex said easily. "No point in playing coy or fucking with the kid, just be straight up. Your parents hired us to find out what you're doing when you go out at night, we want to make sure they never find out.."

Quentin gestured for Alex to go first. "They'll react better to you," he explained, actually demonstrating some common sense. "Maybe flash some skin to really get them on your side," he added all so helpfully.

Alex snorted at that, rolling up the sleeves of shirt. "That enough skin for ya, Q?" He asked as he climbed out of the bushes and headed toward the group.

"Obviously not. Why would you even ask something so stupid?"

Quentin half-expected the kids to bolt when they saw Alex apparently materialize out of the bushes. Thankfully they didn't make the investigators' job more difficult and stayed put, although they bunched up as if they could Voltron self-defense against what they probably thought was an impending mutant bashing. The kid with the cat ears, the shortest and slenderest of the quarter, stood in front, baring his teeth to reveal canines that would have made a lioness proud. The approaching blonde had already seen them display their mutations, so clearly Cat Boy had no reason to pretend to hide.

"I'm come in peace, guys," Alex said, holding his hands up in a show of surrender.

"Who are you?" Cat Boy asked, understandably suspicious.

"My name's Alex," he introduced himself easily. "And I'm not here to hurt you, I promise. I'm a mutant too. My friend here--" he gestured back toward where Quentin was still hiding, "-work with a PI agency. Larry?" The boy in question perked up a little. "Your parents hired us to follow you. They think you're doing drugs or something and they wanted us to find out."

Larry shared an indecipherable look with his friends. "They think I'm doing drugs so they hired detectives to follow me," he repeated unemotionally, is voice cracking with pubescent inelegance.

"That's messed up," the pyrokinetic opined, and the other two nodded in agreement.

"Wait, why're you telling us?" Larry asked as the gears and wheels in his head started to move, haltingly at first, trying to understand the whole situation. "That's not, like, what you're supposed to do, right?"

"Because we don't particularly want to go back to your parents and say 'Good news your kid's not doing drugs but he's a mutant,'" Alex said honestly. "We're mutants too, we have an invested interest in not outing kids who don't think their parents will be able to deal with it. And that's obviously the case here or you wouldn't be sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet other mutants and mess around with your powers. We need to report something back to your parents though or they're just going to keep hiring people to find out what's going on and the next one might not be so kind. So we want to help you come up with a cover story."

Quentin stood back, visible in the flickering light of the street lamp, but let Alex do the talking. He schooled his face to keep a neutral expression, tapping down the rising anger and hatred he felt for these kids' parents. He knew well the terror of not feeling safe in your own home, having no sanctuary, no place to call your own, dreading what would happen if the secret were made public. No one should have to live like that. He hoped they would let Alex save them.

Larry shook his head, disbelieving. "I can't believe they'd do this."

"They would totally do this," the pyrokinetic offered, snorting. The other two nodded in agreement with her assessment.

"And then they'd tell our parents. Shit, if my parents find out, they're gonna call in the exorcist," Cat Boy hissed. "Send me to one of those camps like Megan's parents sent her to, to 'straighten her out.' That worked," he commented sarcastically. Perhaps he had not meant to think so loud, but the image flashed in Quentin's mind of the four of them, all dressed in black, standing in a park next to a freshly filled six-foot-deep hole, struggling to keep back tears.

"What do we do?"

Alex couldn't see what Quentin saw, but he could see the fear. And he was more grateful now for Alison and Kara than he had ever been. They weren't his biological parents, they had no reason to accept and love him, but they did anyways. They never treated him any different and they always made sure he knew he was loved.

Every kid, mutant or not, deserved that.

"Have you ever been interested in volunteering, Larry?" Larry gave Alex a weird look at that. "Like I said, you need a cover story. We take you to a local shelter, snap a few pictures of you handing food to homeless people and tell your parents you're an undercover volunteer or something. It's not perfect, but at least it's an excuse for why you're sneaking out of the house. And you know, helping people is good for the soul and all that."

"I know a place," Quentin finally said. The kids turned to him suddenly, as if startled to learn he was not mute. "There's a church. Lots of mutant homeless and runaways, few people willing to help. They could use more hands. You can keep the mutant part a secret, but it's a good cover, you'll do something useful, and you might even have a safer place to practice than out under a fucking bridge."

"And don't you dare tell Frost or Bowen I suggested this," he telepathically warned Alex, side-eyeing him. "Their smugness would literally suffocate me to death."

Alex smirked at that, filing this little tidbit away. Not that he would ever do anything with it. It was just more evidence that Quentin Quire actually did have a heart. "They're probably open now, if you want to go? We'll just take a few pictures of you and be out of your hair."

Larry looked a bit uncertain, but after a moment he nodded. "O-Okay. And you promise you won't tell my parents the truth?"

"We swear it," Quentin affirmed with all due sincerity. "Make the lie look good and they'll never know."