Subject: [OTL]: [Mother's Day Challenge ] EMPATH: Luz de Amor de la Madre 1/1 PG-13 Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 17:25:26 -0700 From: Tomato Soup Hi, me again. Another story about how the power outage affected another person with powers. And for the Mother's day thing too. I hope you like it. The characters with names all belong to Marvel Comics. The rest belong to me, Tomato. I don't have permission to use them but I use them as a fan for the sake of giving other fans stuff to read and be happy, so please don't sue. I don't have anything anybody wants anyway. Feedback would be loved a lot: minestra_di_pomodora@yahoo.com, but flames will be happily deleted. If you want to archive it, I will probably say yes, but it would be very nice if you would ask first. Thank you very much. It is almost, very nearly, too close to more than he can bear. Around him, everywhere around him, he's drowning in love and joy that are forever denied him. Since the return of the mutant power that he considers as much a curse as a blessing, he has tried to block it all out. But it's worse, now. The White Queen's mental imperative dissolved when his powers did. Or when hers did. He recalled seeing on the news that something had taken the powers from mutants all over the world, making them just ordinary people. He had laughed, envisioning his old enemies, the New Mutants, and how painful the death of their stupid, naive dreams of heroism must have been when they discovered their powers gone. Uncharitably, he hoped that Guthrie was soaring high on that stupid roaring flame of a power when the wave struck him normal. He prayed that the little wolf girl, Rahne, was stuck in her lupine form. He wished that DaCosta, damnable Sunspot, was showing off his solar-fueled muscle to some bikini-clad carioca when it happened, and that the stupid Brazilian was consequently crushed to death under the bus he had only moments before been lifting. If any of them could see me now, Manuel de la Rocha thought bitterly, they would be laughing. If any of the Hellions besides him survived, they would laugh too -- to see him, the princely, aristocratic, Empath lain low beneath the blinding onslaught of emotion that his powers flooded his brain with. Bad enough that he had lived in blessed silence -- knowing no emotions but his own, and having to guess like a normal man at what the people around him felt and desired. It was an odd sensation, and he missed his powers -- especially since it had been his powers that had kept him from a death borne of ignorance in a cold, cruel world he had never known before. It was Empath's powers that made him the new mogul of the drug world -- without drugs. He had lieutenants and bodyguards, molls, homeboys, and squeezes -- each willing to do whatever he asked just for another hit of what his power could do to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains. The police never got close enough to him to threaten his little cartel. He could tweak them from a distance, using the old Jedi mind trick. "This is not the Spaniard you're looking for." The practice had held him in good stead until the power had gone away. Fortunately, he had saved up enough money to flee the squalor of New York City when the supplicants came clawing at the door, begging for more of what he used to give, but could no longer. Spain was a welcome change of pace, now that he had the financial wherewithal to return home. The pace, the air, the whole ambiance of his native Madrid made New York and his days seem a distant nightmare. Acquiring his old family estate was simple, even without the support of his empathy to tweak anyone he dealt with. This led to its own sort of satisfaction. He had become Manuel de la Rocha in only a handful of weeks -- Empath was practically another person; an old friend he had lost touch with. But one night, the power returned. The crowds of New York had forced him to learn to filter out the feelings -- the greed and terror, distatste, lust, rage, fear, disgust, sorrow, grief and love that combined helter-skelter on his psychic palate to make a heady cocktail for his mind. It would have left him drunken and drooling had he not learned to distill the input and run the output through others. Now, though, in Spain -- where the pace was different but the emotions the same -- he realized he was sadly out of practice. Worse, the memories of his youth were coming back to pluck cruelly at his sanity like malignant spectres. The frightned thirteen year old who thralled his entire household staff out of pique and self-defense came back to him, screams echoing hollowly through the hallways of the house and the corridors of Manuel's mind. Empath's mind. Manuel had been a human man who could handle himself without the mutant powers. Manuel was gone, probably never to return. He packed, desperately, hands shaking. He could have lost himself in drugs and alcohol to dull the awareness, the empathic sensitivity. But he dared not do any such thing. Too much a risk to damage his abilities and cut off the only cash flow he had now that they were back. Spain was too different. There was not this hunger, this desperation that had served him well in New York. Spain was, and would always be home, but New York was where his road was paved with gold, and his sanity could be saved by selling insanity to others through his mind and eyes. So it was a simple decision that he made to return where his powers were more boon than burden. The night he flew back to New York and the palatial apartment, he fell into an uneasy sleep, lulled uneasily by the undercurrent of empathy from the other first class passengers. And the dream came to him. A woman, more beautiful than any he had known -- more beautiful in a way that made Illyana Rasputin and Emma Frost seem like hags, like scarecrows, like bony viragos. So beautiful, it reaved a fracture in a heart Manuel had long believed inured against pain and grief. Better by far, he had long decided, to make others suffer than to suffer himself. But tonight, this angel -- this harbinger of beauty and joy -- held him in her arms and wept tears of sorrow onto his cheeks. "Niņo, my hijo, what have you become?" Her voice was sweet as music, warm as the breeze from Madrid, and filled him with a warmth no amount of sangria could match. "You are a monster. You are an abomination. You are my son." Manuel snapped back at the glowing phantasm, "Si, mama, but what choice did I have but to become a monster? You *left* me! You left me alone, with these powers, this pain! You abandoned me to this fate and I did what I had to to survive. Are you not proud of my strength, mamacita?" "You have done what you needed to survive, mi corazon. Every mother wishes her child to survive, no matter what. But you have done harm in your fight to live. And I raised you better than that, ninņo." "I had no other choice!" Manuel railed into the arms of the shining entity that embraced him with a warmth he felt even though there was no weight of her limbs around him. "Yo se, yo se," his mother murmured lovingly. "But you have survived, and endured. You have even managed to make it through without the powers you so jealously and pridefully cultivate. You are a man now, and a man does not leave destruction in his wake when he has the power to repair it." "What are you saying?" "I will love you no matter what choice you make, mi amor. Can you look yourself in the mirror, every day, and say you have done right by yourself?" By your memory, Manuel thought, tears welling hot in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks -- two streams of molten grief. It had been years since he had allowed himself even to think of his mother, let alone to wonder what his mother would think of him now. He had allowed anger at being abandoned by her to convince him it didn't matter what she thought. "You were the only one who ever loved me," Manuel whispered to the fading glow that spoke in his mother's sweet voice. "And that will always be so, dulce Manuelito," his mother promised him. "This dream only shows you what you should always have known. Even though I cannot be with you, my love is. Por siempre. Forever. You have never been alone, Manuel. And you never will be." The shudder of the landing gear extending jarred Manuel awake from his dream. His collar and armpits were damp with the sweat of his nightmare, and his head throbbed with pain. Around him, though, his empathic senses were still telling him of the feelings of the rest of the passengers. And he realized what it was about the empathic influx that had triggered this sudden series of memories. By the American Calendar, it was Mother's Day. It had been a holiday he usually forgot, and disdained when he could not manage to forget. The atrophy of his self-defense in the time without his powers had allowed a ray of light into his heart he had worked so hard to keep out. And it had burned away a lot of the pain and rage that made Empath the manipulative bastard he once had been so proud to be. As the beautiful twinkling vision of New York by night hove into view on the plane's final approach, Manuel allowed himself to drift into a pensive reverie. No mother could be proud of a son like me. But she loves me still. I should be worthy of that love. He reached into his Armani jacket and pulled out his celphone. A few phone calls needed to be made. First he would set up his apartment. Then he would begin to undo the damage he had done -- free the hearts and souls of the inner city from his carefully cultivated addiction. And then, Manuel thought with the first stirrings of hope lighting inside him, once that weight was off his soul, he could perhaps begin to be the sort of man he knew his loving mother would be *proud* of. "Para ti, al cielo," he whispered, as the plane flew into the last night of Empath's life and the first moments of Manuel's new existence. the end "Luz de Amor de la Madre" means Light of Mother's Love in Spanish. Sort of. ===== minestra_di_pomodora@yahoo.com ================[~]================ feeling a little mischievous? we have a soup for that. =================[*]=============== Tomato, tomato, let's call the whole thing off.