It took me less than three minutes to get from my room to hers. Before I could even lift my hand to knock, a voice from inside stopped me, "It is open, yes."
I raised an eyebrow in return. Well, she could have either seen this conversation coming through precognition, or she could have read my mind while I was headed there, so it wasn't a surprise that she knew I was about to show up.
I opened the door to find Ruth sitting on her bed on her side of the room. The semester before, she hadn't had a roommate, but at the start of the new school year, she'd gotten Laura to share a room with. That had to be the most silent pairing of people in the entire academy.
She was fidgeting with her hands from the very moment I walked in. Not a good sign. To try to get her to loosen up, I tried to make some small talk, "You know, I'm glad they roomed you two up this year. You're both good girls, and I really doubt you'd bother each other much."
I gestured to sit down, and she nodded, so I pulled a chair from her desk and tried to make myself comfortable. No matter how disarmed I made myself to be, Ruth still seemed tense, "Are you okay?"
Ruth's hands continued wringing her hands in her lap, her head down, "No. Pardon. You are upset with her."
Man, she was prepared for a scolding. I didn't know how to play this. Nothing I did could chill her out. Anything I thought, she could see. She knew why I was there. Eventually, I just decided to plow right ahead into it, "I'm not mad. Actually, I don't even know if I'm mad or not. Are you doing something to me now?" A casual accusation that had the effect of making her wince, "Okay. Sorry. I just had to ask."
I had no idea where I was going, but there was something to this. She wouldn't have seemed so downtrodden if there wasn't.
I felt bad. But I had to soldier on. If I didn't, if I backed off, did that mean I had been conditioned? I had to know, and the quickest way to get a response was to be direct, "I'll just pull the band-aid off now. Did you do anything to my head?"
There was no dancing around the truth, or stalling.
"Yes, she did," Ruth admitted. I felt a flash of anger, but more disappointment than anything else, "She was scared, so scared, when the Reavers attacked. She was scared, and Bellamy was scared, and she just wanted someone not to be scared!" I waited for her to get herself together and keep going, "…So, she took Bellamy's fear away. She did it so he could save us. She didn't mean to."
All of a sudden, everything made sense. It all lined up. Before then, when everything started, I was piss-my-pants scared of running from idiot militia townies. But somewhere in that hole Ruth and I were held captive in, it just clicked. I thought about all of the things that should have sent me screaming and crying in fear. Armed, racist terrorists. A cyborg who wanted to harness my powers and turn me into a battery. An A.I. built to kill mutants with a chainsaw in his back. THAT was when I should have been scared!
I dealt with all of that shit within hours of each other, with everything piling on, and I'd only been frightened up until I got to Ruth. Then I mellowed to being healthily afraid of what was going on around me and started thinking. And it never stopped from that moment on. I never went back to being terrified to the degree that I couldn't do something in return.
In the grand scheme of things, it helped me. She altered the way I thought and went about doing things, but without it, I likely would have been killed by then. Even then, I was still using it, trying to think instead of letting the anger I felt move me. However, it was causing problems, and it would cause more problems further down the line if what we'd been dealing with was any indication.
I revealed to her as much, "Ruthie, you didn't just turn off most of the fear. I think you turned off a lot of my empathy too, which isn't good, because I was enough of a prick to start with," Now, if I figured it was necessary to shoot somebody, well, that was it. I wouldn't give it a second thought. It was that way with a lot of things. Think it out, act quickly and decisively, regret next to nothing, "Apparently, in the future, I'm enough of one that my own son wanted to go back in time to kill me even though he knew I didn't destroy the world on purpose,"
Every time he'd come across me, I just made it worse. This time, in the brig, I might have just turned it into an outright blood feud... with my own flesh and blood.
"Did you mess with anything else?" I asked. She shook her head silently, keeping her face turned away from me, "Seriously, I need to know."
Ruth doubled down on her response, "Quentin would just tell you if she was lying. He wants Bellamy to be angry with her."
"I know he does," I admitted. And goddamn it, part of it was working. I didn't want to ask these questions. I didn't want to be a hard-ass with her, "This is... this is really messed up, you know."
"Sorry," Ruth mumbled, "Fixing it may be possible, pardon. That is, if Bellamy wants her to do it. Yes?"
"Fix it?"
Ruth had hopes that I would go for it, that she could make everything okay, "She believes if she has the time, she can do it. It's so deep though, yes. She can't undo it as easily as she did it in the first place," Ruth said, "She will try. She will do anything Bellamy asks of her. Just... please do not hate her."
"I can't hate you. And it's not because of any head stuff, I know that. You're the first person I met here, and you've always believed in me. I'm returning the favor."
Ruth leaned forward, reaching out to put her hands on the sides of my head, "Then she will-," The hope left her voice when I grabbed her hands and moved them away, "No?"
"No," I repeated. Trying to change things back now would do more harm than good. It was better to try and work with what I had, "You don't have to do anything. Keep it the way it is."
My hold on Ruth's hands was as gentle as I could make it, and even then, she still shook. She shook like she was a wrong syllable away from crying, "She didn't mean it."
"I know you didn't," I didn't say it was okay, because I didn't know if it would be or not, but I could give her that much at least.
"She never did it again, thank you. No matter how scared she was, no," The more she talked, the more her voice broke. If she'd have thought to throw herself at my feet, she might have, "She didn't realize she had done anything until long after everything was over. She couldn't change it, and she didn't know what to say."
That made two of us. I opened my arms and she clamored across the little space there had been between us. Had I been any less ready for it, she'd have knocked me out of my chair going for a hug, "Come here. I've got you."
Her arms squeezed around my neck for all she was worth, "Sorry... sorry... sorry..." She just kept repeating herself. If her eyes had been like everyone else's, my shoulder and my chest would have been soaked.
If she wanted me to not be mad, she could have made up my mind for me. She didn't have to do anything else, let alone cry. The fact that she didn't struck a chord with me deep.
Quentin Quire could go fuck himself with all of his shit-stirring. Ruth wasn't some malevolent mind witch, working some kind of shady angle to get an edge. She was a 16-year-old girl who reacted involuntarily one time, and it screwed up the only person in-range when she lost it – me.
She fucked up and lost control. It happens to literally all of us. I've seen my own team use their powers without meaning to. I've done it.
We're all just stupid kids. No matter how much we train, no matter how intelligent your powers are supposed to make you, no matter how responsible we have to try and be, we're just a bunch of dumbasses. We're going to do the same dumbass things human teenagers do, only there's a chance that our consequences will be greater when we inevitably screw something up. Some powers require more responsibility than others.
You might be a pyrokinetic showing off, and then you start a fire that winds up burning down a building by accident.
You might be a telepath who got mad or scared and accidentally think about something that alters someone's fundamental way of thinking forever – maybe give them brain damage.
You might not pay attention to how you're flying and get sucked into a jet turbine – then you die and a plane full of people goes down. I could make this point all day.
Some people liked to argue that Mutants were like everyone else, but they absolutely weren't. Things worked differently for us in tons of ways, and getting your powers as puberty set in was probably the very worst time to get them. For Christ's sake, figuring things out was complicated enough in your teen years when you didn't have the added pressure of potentially dangerous superpowers attached. That's why we have a fucking school.