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Apr. 24th, 2012 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in_the_blueTitle: Fathers and Sons
Canon: X-Men (old-school, as always)
Characters: Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler)
Rating: G
Word Count: 397 (way too long for tumblr's ASK feature).
Like father, like son, they say. He hardly knew his father, but he can thank him for his agility, he supposes.
Like mother, like son. His own mother threw him away at birth, literally. Well, people do what they must and he knows that now just as he knows that being different isn’t easy. It’s just that some people learn to deal with it in more productive ways. He will thank his mother for his dashing good looks. It’s not every day that someone gets to be blue.
Family, he knows, is not what you were born with but what you create. The circus served as mother and father to him, as the only family he knew. As long as he stayed there, he was loved and welcomed and accepted. Let the rest of the world call them freaks, outsiders still paid handsomely to see them. When he was young he heard a mother telling her small child nichts davon ist echt, mein Liebling, nicht weinen. None of it is real, my darling, don’t cry.
Why would anyone cry at the sight of another child? Why would someone say he wasn’t real? He didn’t know, but Margali grabbed him out of the way before he could ask. Am I that scary? he wondered, but no reassurance was forthcoming and in that, he found his answer. He learned to stay away from the normal children, the outside ones. Yes, the circus was his family, and while he was there, he was safe.
While he was there, he was loved and while he was there, he fell in love. While he was there, he could pretend he was as normal-looking as anybody. It’s just a disguise, he heard people say. Just a disguise. Was his so very different from theirs, he wondered?
He wonders it still. The safety and acceptance he felt as a child in the circus is not something he ever expects to find again but when he looks around at this place, this school, this brotherhood of those so far beyond normal they have nowhere else to go, he knows that the potential exists to once again feel as if he belongs. Schiller said it best: Es ist nicht Fleisch und Blut, sondern das Herz, das uns Vätern und Söhnen macht.
It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
