Adam learns a little more about his ability and himself

Peter sat in the back of the class.

I tried to enter his mind. I figured I’d try and get the MJ thing over with as soon as possible. I didn’t like the way he was glaring at me. Maybe it was guilt, perhaps from the knowledge that Peter had done nothing to deserve what I’d done to him.

I activated my power, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sure what I expected. I’d never just tried to use my ability without immediately being immersed in someone’s memories. Their mindscape. Whatever it was. I was surprised there wasn’t any feedback. No weird pulsing in the back of my brain to tell me something had gone wrong. Was Peter too far away for me to get inside his head? Were superpowered people like Spider-Man innately immune to my ability? God, I hoped not.

I tested my power on MJ again and immediately found myself in her memories. My girlfriend’s mind was pretty familiar to me at that point, but still I managed to get distracted when I crossed one where she was playing with her pussy in bed while moaning my name and stayed there a lot longer than I probably should have. It was one of the memories I’d made. It was kind of surreal seeing it there. From afar, it was difficult to tell that it was different at all from her natural memories. It was as if it had been fully accepted into her mind, like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that had been painted over and made to fit and then somehow blended in with the rest of the pieces despite being radically different from what had been there before.

Oh. While I was in MJ’s memories, I thought of a good way to test if range was the reason I couldn’t alter Peter’s memories when he first got here. I left MJ’s mind. The gorgeous redhead noticed my glance and smiled at me, showing perfectly white teeth. Her green eyes twinkled smugly. And damn, I couldn’t blame her. She was breathtakingly hot, and that tight green shirt she wore showed more cleavage than was probably allowed by the dress code. And those jeans… fuck. They practically hugged her toned legs like a second skin. I couldn’t wait to see her again at my place tonight.

I was getting distracted again.

Taking a deep breath, I glanced backward and saw Henry Martinez sitting at his desk about halfway across the room between me and Peter. Henry was an average-looking guy with light brown hair, olive skin, and dark eyes. He looked a bit like me and Peter. We had to be between ten or fifteen feet away from each other. I don’t think I’d ever gotten inside someone’s head from this far away. I concentrated.

Pain danced across my vision. A man with salt-and-pepper hair drew his fist back. It was dotted with blood. His cold brown eyes stared into mine, radiating malice.

“Next time you steal money from me and go hang out with those loser piece of shit kids I’ll do a lot worse to you. You understand? Huh?” The man grabbed me by the ear and yanked.

“Ow! Dad, stop! I-I’m sorry! I won’t do it again!” I screamed. I put my hands on his arm, but I didn’t dare try to push him away. That was a good way to get a beating. Across the table, Mom watched us impassively, dark rings under her gray eyes. The light had gone out of them a long time ago.

My father sneered at me. His breath reeked of ****; it usually did late in the evening. I could remember a time not too long ago when we’d been happier, when Dad still had his job at the Port Authority. Mom worked as a public school teacher. Still did, but Dad had fallen in with bad people after losing his job. Some guy named Fisk or whatever. At least that was what the rumor was. I’d heard about him from some of my friends who worked the corners. It was said that whoever crossed Fisk lived just long enough to regret it.

As I stared up into my father’s eyes, I started wondering if it was time I stopped pretending to be a fucking high school student and see if James’ offer to help him on the corners was still open.

“I don’t know how I raised such a weak, lazy, entitled brat. It’s probably your mother’s fault. But I’ll set you straight, Henry, don’t worry.”

Henry.

Time froze just as Gerald Martinez released his son Henry’s ear. I wasn’t really here. The sneering, hateful visage of Gerald Martinzes was nothing more than a memory inside Henry’s troubled mind.

I sighed mentally and tried to get my bearings. That was... unexpected. I’d thought I’d gotten a hold on not letting a person’s memories and personality subsume me, but apparently I’d been very wrong about that. There hadn’t been any time to really do anything. One moment I was looking at Henry, the next I was feeling his father’s ****. I could feel echoes of it across the breadth of his memories, rail-thin scars criss-crossing across time like spiderwebs. That was another thing I was beginning to understand. Time wasn’t real here. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t. I could pause it. Rewind it. Fast-forward.

It wasn’t like watching a movie or TV show. It was more like pausing it and having a snapshot of every frame in the show all at once, and at the same time being able to feel, to know instinctively when something major happened or if something in the past affected events in the future. I felt a lot of pain and **** here. I wanted to leave.

I felt bad for the guy, though. In a way, he reminded me of myself. Sure, Mom had never raised a hand to me. At times, I think I might have welcomed that. Sometimes, when you were alone, the worst possible thing was to feel like you were being ignored by the people who were supposed to care about you.

Thinking back, Henry had had some scuffmarks on his face. Dark bags under his eyes much like his mother’s.

A quick mental query told me the night I’d experienced had happened four days ago. Henry had gone to bed alone after that, his mind set on pursuing a life that would get him out of the house and out from under his father’s thumb. His mother hadn’t said goodnight to him. I decided to change that. I had Henry remember his mother knocking on his door, her eyes wet. He asked why she was there. I made her tell him that she was sorry and that she loved him. And then she hugged him.

Already I could feel the memory echo throughout the past four days. Henry was happier. Had more hope, more confidence in himself. It wouldn’t change how his family dynamics worked. I wondered if I should pay their family a visit. Make adjustments in their minds to something healthier.

Did I have the right to do that? Could I really just barge into people’s lives and remake them the way I thought they should be?

I’d done that with Misty and MJ, and Mom and Rebecca Andrews to a lesser extent, but that had been to satisfy urges I’d felt. I hadn’t meant to help any of them, just make myself feel better. I really wasn’t in a position to be judging what a healthy mindset was when mine was probably as bad as it got. I should have cared. It should have bothered me, remaking people, but it didn’t. Sure, I hadn’t completely reshaped anyone’s personalities, or at least, I hadn’t intended to, but what were people if not the summary of their memories. Even changing one memory in Henry’s mind a few days back affected who he was now. I could feel it.

What did I want to do? What was I supposed to do? Did any of that even matter? I thought about MJ and Misty, how amazing it had been to spend the night with them. It was the first time in a while I’d felt not alone, but in gaining that, I’d ruined MJ’s relationship with Peter. He hadn’t deserved that.

Yet I couldn’t wait to have MJ in bed with me again. To feel her lips against mine. To touch her and have her touch me. Did that make me a bad person?

Yes, a voice in the back of my head told me. It sounded a lot like my father’s. A flash of his face burning as he screamed. I shut it away.

Maybe I was evil, but… I didn’t have to be cruel. I could do a little good, here and there, minimize damage wherever I could - my father’s burning visage stared at me accusingly, his irises flickering between blood-red and fire-orange - and rewrite those who deserved to be rewritten. Like Henry’s father. Like whoever had killed mine and destroyed my family. Like the countless murderers and rapists Misty had brought to justice.

I’d made a promise to undo the damage I’d done to Peter, and so I would. I could affect someone midway across the classroom, but not all the way across. After class, I’d do it, and make things right.

The world was consumed in blackness.

I blinked my eyes open. I was at my desk again. Mrs. Andrews was cheerily teaching her lesson. The busty blonde noticed me staring at her and her lips quirked ever so slightly upwards.

I glanced back. Henry was still sitting at his desk, only now his brows were furrowed as he studiously took notes. He hadn’t been doing that before. His eyes had been glassy and distracted, but there seemed to be more life in them now, and for some reason that made me smile.

Peter’s glare drew my eyes to him like hostile magnets. His light brown eyes were a furious mirror of mine as he glowered at me darkly. MJ’s foot scooted underneath my desk to touch mine, and Peter tensed. I tried entering his mind again, but nothing happened. I tried the person directly in front of him, a chubby girl with large breasts named Hannah Ackerson. Nothing. Well, I was pretty sure Hannah wasn’t secretly a superhero, so that at least confirmed people with powers weren’t necessarily immune to me. I just had a set range for my ability.

Hannah’s face scrunched up and I noticed I’d been staring at her like a creep.

I tore my gaze away from her and found MJ again. Her brilliant emerald eyes stared into mine.

“You okay?” she mouthed.

I nodded and nudged her foot back. The way her eyes lit up and her lips smiled rushed past any justifications I’d made for what I’d done and buried them. God, I wanted to kiss her.

I must have been staring too long because her freckled cheeks turned bright crimson and she nudged my foot again.

“Ms. Watson, everything alright?” Mrs. Andrews asked, her blue eyes flashing sternly.

MJ sank into her seat as everyone in class stared at her. I could feel Peter’s eyes digging holes into the back of my skull.

“Yeah, I’m good. Just feeling a little jittery thanks to the coffee.” MJ held up her thermos for emphasis, pushing her lips into a smile in a way that would have seemed completely natural to me if I hadn’t spent so much time in her head.

It certainly worked on Mrs. Andrews.

“Happens to the best of us,” the teacher said with a wink, and continued with her lesson.

I don’t think MJ and I paid much attention. We kept sneaking glances at each other. MJ caught me admiring the back of Mrs. Andrews’ tight pencil skirt and chewed her lower lip, her eyes burning with lust. I suspected I was probably going to be ambushed sometime before the end of the school day.

When the bell rang, I searched for Peter, but practically everyone was rushing out the door at once and I lost sight of him.

“Looking for someone?” MJ asked as she claimed my hand with hers and pulled me from my seat.

I shook my head after a long moment.

“I wasn’t.”

MJ shook her head, her lustrous red hair cascading in waves. She leaned towards me slightly, presenting me with an eyeful of the tops of her pale breasts. She caught me looking immediately, but of course she’d meant to show off.

“You’re a bad liar, Tiger,” she said and squeezed my hand as we exited the classroom with the tail end hourly student exodus. Her voice softened as she leaned against my side, her breast pressing into my arm. “You were trying to find Peter, weren’t you?”

She must have taken my silence for a yes. She squeezed my hand again.

“Don’t worry about him, Tiger. It’s sweet that you feel bad for him, but… breakups happen, you know? And I wasn’t happy with him. Eventually he’ll come to realize what we had wasn’t working. He’ll find someone else. That’s how breakups work. We weren’t married, Adam.”

MJ made it sound so simple.

“Would you say the same thing if you were the one getting dumped?” I asked.

Her green eyes found mine.

“Hell no,” she said immediately, a flicker of worry in her eyes. Her lips twitched unpleasantly. “I’d be hurt and angry. I’d wonder what I’d done wrong and…” She stopped walking. The hallway we were in had mostly cleared out, and soon it was just the two of us underneath the pale fluorescent lights.

“I love you. Maybe that’s how Peter feels about me, but that doesn’t obligate me to stay with him. Just like… it shouldn’t obligate you to stay with me. Because that’s how relationships work. You only stay in them if you feel like it’s the best thing for you. Not because you feel like it’s the best thing for the person you’re with.”

“That sounds selfish,” I said, not unkindly. I knew a lot more than most now about doing what made me happy.

She grinned. Her eyes twinkled with amusement.

“That’s because it is, as cliche as that sounds. Now, we should probably be getting to our next class,” she said amusedly.

“I have study hall,” I pointed out, a tad defensively.

MJ’s eyes lit up. Her lips curved into a salacious grin.

“Oh, it just so happens I study hall, too. Hey Adam?”

“Hm?” I raised my eyebrows. What was she thinking?

She leaned in and told me. I grinned.

We never ended up going to study hall.

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