Your Ex-Lover is Dead (closed)

((ooc: Title is a reference to a song by the Stars; interested parties can listen to it here.))

It was a week after Isabel Duskmoor's trial. A week. That made it well over a month since the breakout--nearly two.

It was nearly a year since Rupert had vindictively flipped open his cell phone, and deleted Raina's number. He had ended up in church that day. It hadn't helped. He'd been to church every morning this week, and he honestly couldn't say whether that was helping or not. What he could say was this: it gave him an aim. He knew why he was getting out of bed each morning; to go to church. He'd been helping with the children's summer camps, and with organizing next week's bake sale; he'd been talking with his pastor, rather a lot. No, he couldn't say if it was helping; but it was an aim.

There was a little park half-way between his own apartment and Xavier's Institute for "Gifted Youngsters". Neutral ground. Rupert sat on a park bench, his arms stretched out along its wooden back. It was a nice day. The sun was blazing with the first fiery licks of a New York summer, but there was a wind off of the ocean that was whispering cooler thoughts. This park was little compared to its older cousin Central, but it had its fair share of shade trees. There were just a few benches, a flower garden--marigolds and pansies, mostly--and a slide and swing set over woodchips. Traffic careened past on the four streets that marked its border; a woman was on another bench, reading a book and paying far too little attention to her two children as they trampled the flowerbed and leapt the benches and climbed the slides and tried to get the swings to go all the way over the top of the swingset. Rupert kept track of the brats out of his peripheral vision. As long as they didn't take their juvenile-delinquent-in-training behaviors too close to those busy roads, he was content to mind his own business. One of them, the girl, had discovered how easy to climb the trees were, to a natural monkey. Her brother wasn't nearly as skilled. He was still holding onto the lowest branch with terrified glances back to the ground three feet below him when his sister proudly claimed her seat in the tree's crown. Were either of them mutants? There had been children that young in the Camps. Not many, but a few--the ones unfortunate enough to have had their powers manifest far earlier than was usual. Looking at them, Rupert couldn't tell. It was strange to think that they probably didn't know, either. Not even their own parents would know.

Would his child with Raina have been a mutant, or a human?

He leaned his head back to the sky, and squinted through the branches up at the sun, just like eye doctors always tell you not to do. He'd gotten here early. He'd wanted some time to think before she arrived, though the only thing he could think about was how dim of an idea that had been. Why drag this out? He wasn't exactly a thinker on the best of days.

Raina was coming. When he'd deleted her number from his phone, he'd forgotten to delete it from his call history. Looking it up again after all this time had been easy--too easy, really. She should be on her way now. At the Camps, during the breakout, he'd given her his jacket. Damned if he could remember why. Because she looked cold, or some other stupid reason or another. He'd promised then that he'd see her again, to get it back. That's what he was waiting for. To get it back, and go on his way. He had no reason to see her after this. It was the last aim they shared.