What is and is not according to Izan Paik

A great advantage of being reinserted into society at the age of 16 was that he had skipped the entire process of mandatory education. A huge headache, in Izan’s opinion. Whether it was compulsory or elective subjects, science or humanities, AP courses, reinforcement lessons, hybrid models, or intelligent algorithms that adapt to students, it didn't matter how much Cisco tried to explain it, Izan was perfectly content with his general knowledge and basic arithmetic skills... Military doctrine aside. But the teenager had been stressed about the issue for days, and at this rate, it seemed like if he didn't make a decision, the whole world would end.

"Can't you change your mind later?" Izan questioned as he lit the stoves to have them ready when the orders started coming in.

"No!" the boy whimpered. "Last semester, I chose advanced mathematics because my mother wanted me to, but if I switch to the humanities course now, it will have been for nothing, and I'll be completely lost in Neo Mandarin class, and then my average grade will drop. So I won’t make it into a good college."

Izan could sympathize with the stress of not getting the best grades in class. Back in the black-walled classrooms of the rebel base, it was a reason to cry hidden behind the shower curtains. However, now living a normal life far away from that pressure, the mediocrity of not being the best in class seemed comforting to him.

"You still have time to make your decision. Choose to do whatever makes you happy. Regardless of the options placed in front of your eyes" Izan spoke from experience and hoped his words would be helpful.

But Cisco's dilemma continued throughout that week. More and more university advertisements popped up on his Meta-pad, and billboards on the surrounding streets advertised reinforcement classes and school counselors as he passed by. The boy missed a couple of days of class, claiming to be sick, but both Izan and Mr. Flint knew that was a lie because instead, he spent the morning hiding in the pantry of the bar-restaurant, drawing.

Cisco wanted to be an artist.

Neo Mandarin or advanced mathematics couldn't matter less to him. He didn't want to choose science or humanities. He wanted to draw. That was the decision he wanted to make. Maybe he was making it right at that moment when a middle-aged woman entered the establishment shouting as if she were in a badly AI generated soap opera.

"Francisco! Where is Francisco?! Tell him I want to see him right now! Make him come out!" The woman bore an unsettling physical resemblance to the part-time teenager. Izan immediately assumed that Cisco must have been one of those science-born children, born in a laboratory without the need for a father.

Cisco had been raised solely by that frantic woman who was currently trying to enter the kitchen. Fortunately, Mr. Flint was managing to stop her without much effort. He might have been an old man, but he was also considerably big and had a habit of forcibly making leave those customers who occasionally crossed the line.

Izan paused in his task of cutting a lemon when he felt hands grab the sleeve of his shirt and pull on it.

"It seems like you're caught up in quite a mess, huh?" Izan commented. The teenager looked up at him with wide eyes and tightly pressed lips, trying not to cry. "She's not going to get into the kitchen, don't worry."

Cisco nodded. He took a deep breath and seemed to calm down a bit. Izan resumed his task with the lemon.

Outside, the shouts had subsided, and Mr. Flint's firm voice was the only thing audible as he tried to reason with the woman. Cisco had told him before what his fights with his mother were like, but they had never reached the extreme of happening in the restaurant. Usually, the teenager would return home by tram at night, except for a couple of exceptions when Izan had kept him company while waiting for a taxi because it had gotten too late for public transport. So, this was the first time his mother had entered the restaurant.

Izan would be lying if he said he wasn't startled when the shouts resumed. But Cisco was keeping his cool because he was, so he had to conceal his own unease. The authoritative shouts and pounding on the door became an echo of something too close to his childhood, and he could almost feel the electric shock coursing through his body as punishment for disobedience.

He glanced at his wrists, the knife and lemon trembling in his hands. There were no metal bracelets emitting electric punishments, only scars. He wasn't at the HIVE base, just at Mr. Flint's bar-restaurant. He wasn't a test subject, just-

"Izan Paik!" Her voice called out his name. Izan dropped the knife and lemon as he moved away from the counter. "I demand to speak with him too! That man who's putting useless ideas into my child's head!"

Izan turned to look at Cisco, who was huddled in a corner against the counter, avoiding eye contact at all costs.

"Cisco, what have you done?" His voice wasn't particularly harsh; the need to comfort a scared child outweighed any intention to scold him.

The boy shrugged, shifting uncomfortably in his place. Izan moved closer to the door to listen to Mr. Flint's conversation with the woman. She seemed calmer now, at least enough to not start shouting again. Izan caught snippets about "education" and "bad influence," but little else.

"If I tell you, please don't get mad," Izan returned his gaze to the boy, softening the expression on his face and shaking his head. He had never seriously scolded Cisco before; he was young and inexperienced and sometimes made mistakes, but he had good intentions and a lot of eagerness to learn and improve. "I've dropped out of school."

"What?"

It was his fault. He had encouraged Cisco to make a decision outside of his options. And clearly, within the wide range of specialized studies and universities, dropping everything to pursue art was that option.

“I informed the school this morning and went to the vintage store on the First Floor for supplies. I'm going to sell my digital drawings, and maybe one day I'll have my own space in an art exhibition," the boy argued. But Izan heard it only as background noise.

It wasn't fair. He had ruined that kid's future. It wasn't fair at all. Izan didn't have an education because he didn't have the opportunity to have one in the first place. None of his peers had. But that kid had just given it up because of him. Because he was the closest thing the boy had to a father figure, and he had encouraged him to follow his example.

"You have to fix this," Izan muttered. Cisco stood frozen in place. "You have to change your mind. Cisco, that's a bad decision."

Was it a bad decision to survive in the HIVE base? To endure abuse, learn combat, handle weapons, kill people, and kiss Noah that first time in the showers. To cling to life, train his powers, distance himself from his peers, and push away Kail when he was seeking for a shoulder to cry on. Did good and bad decisions really exist? They were just decisions in the end. It wasn't fair. He was just trying to survive. 

It wasn't fair that his decisions were judged by people who didn't know the whole story. It wasn't fair that his thoughtless words had affected Cisco's decision. Decisions weren't right or wrong. The only wrong thing in that kitchen was Izan.

"Xan, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'll fix it, I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me, please don't..." Kail was crying. He wasn’t. Kail wasn’t there. Cisco was crying. He had dropped to his knees on the floor, hugging himself to try to calm the tremors caused by his tears. Izan could feel the wet sensation on his own cheeks and his ragged breathing.

He intended to approach the boy to hug him. To stroke his hair and promise him that he wasn't angry and that everything would be okay. Izan could vaguely recall the times he had comforted his former companions in the rebel base in that way. In the blink of an eye Kail was there, crying right in front of him. Noah was motionless on the floor, Izan felt guilty over the fact that it should have hurt more, he should have taken another second to mourn himself, but his first instinct was to comfort the crying kid. However, before he could even open his mouth, someone tried to enter the kitchen.

Izan, who was still glued to the door, felt the movement behind him and jumped back. Acting on muscle memory, he rotated himself instinctively as he grabbed the knife from the counter. Cisco startled and recoiled, hitting his head on the cutlery shelf.

The door creaked open. The furniture teetered forward, cutlery cascaded toward the teenager. Then Izan made a decision. In the deafening silence that engulfed the kitchen, Izan heard his heavy breathing. The air entered through his nose, burned down his throat, and somehow diverted anywhere but his lungs. His whole body was tense, his arm extended forward but unable to touch the shelf with the tips of his fingers. And yet, there was no impact. Just silence. His ragged breath. More silence and a:

"Holy shit! Izan, what... H-how... How the hell are you doing that?"

It was Mr. Flint. But Izan was too distracted by his thoughts to process that information. He still felt the air enter through his nose and burn down his throat, but before reaching his lungs, it dispersed somewhere else, becoming a magnetic impulse screaming to be released. It was being released for the first time in many years.

Izan opened his eyes, and he met Cisco's terrified gaze in front of him. The boy still had his arms protecting his head from the impact, but nothing had crashed into him because the entire shelf was suspended in the air, as if time had frozen moments before the catastrophe. Izan kept his arm stretched forward, tensing his muscles even more as the sensation of nausea settled in his stomach.

Mr. Flint quickly closed the kitchen door and entered the room. Izan watched him approach the shelf, inspect it, and grab one side to straighten it. Cisco slipped under the man's legs to get out of danger, never taking his eyes off Izan, not even when the latter collapsed to the floor and the cutlery floating in the air fell with him.

He was exhausted. A few years ago, levitating cutlery or holding up a shelf would have been child's play. But at that moment, his body was clamoring for lack of practice, and his lungs burned in such a way that Izan thought for a second he would die right then and there.

He coughed, on the verge of vomiting, and the sudden movement startled Mr. Flint and Cisco. There it was. Izan felt his stomach churn again. There was the reaction he had been trying to avoid for years: the pure terror in someone's eyes, as if he were a monster. The reminder that he, in fact, was a monster. That look brought back memories he had worked very hard to suppress.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, a lump in his throat preventing him from speaking louder. "It was an accident, I'm sorry."

As quickly as his legs allowed, Izan got up from the floor, untied the apron from his waist with trembling hands, and hung it on the metal hook in the kitchen. Then he ran out through the back door, hoping it wasn't too late to get away before they recovered from the shock and decided to do something about it.

For the first time since he had lived in New Celona, Izan took a taxi back home. Using his Meta-pad to call it was relatively simple; the hard part had been trying not to pass out while waiting for the vehicle to arrive.

He thanked the technology of self-driving cars as he reclined in the back seat of the driverless taxi. After the initial adrenaline, fatigue began to take over his body, and the nausea seemed to have subsided. He just wanted to sleep. He would get home, take a cold shower, lie down in bed, and wake up the next day to find that it had all been a nightmare. Izan still remembered when his nightmares were about bombs, electric shocks, or his comrades on the brink of death. At that moment, his scariest nightmare was losing his job.

He chuckled. The more normal he pretended to be, the more mediocre his dreams were.

But the taxi stopped in front of a building that was not his apartment block. Nausea churned his stomach again. And Izan decided that either this was a terribly long nightmare, or he was awake, and his life was about to take an even worse turn.

"Izan, follow me, quickly."

He chuckled again. What a long and convoluted nightmare. He thought Kail might appear in his dreams because of his resemblance to Cisco, or Noah because he had recently remembered their first kiss, or even Axl because he had mentioned him a few days ago in his therapy session with Aila. However, standing in front of him was Lisboa.

She was dressed elegantly, and her dark skin contrasted amusingly with her dyed blonde hair. Even more amusing was the look of urgency on her face as she forcibly pulled him out of the taxi and started pushing him into the building. It was hilarious. A laughable situation. Even more so when Izan thought he should be panicking. He was essentially being kidnapped.

As soon as Lisboa opened the door to one of the rooms in what Izan had just discovered was a motel, he couldn't help but burst into laughter.

"That's it, let it all out, but quickly, please," she pleaded with a smile. Izan laughed even harder, sitting on the bed to keep from falling to the floor.

Lisboa stood by his side, patiently waiting for him to finish laughing. And as soon as he did, the feeling of amusement disappeared completely, but neither fatigue nor panic invaded him again. He felt empty. An emptiness that Izan knew didn't belong to him.

Without the fake amusement, the room seemed darker and quieter. His breathing was heavy, Lisboa's too. Izan looked up to meet her gaze, and with not a hint of emotion in his voice, he declared:

"This emptiness is yours." Lisboa didn't deny it, so he continued speaking. "Are you on meds?"

She sank down beside him on the bed and sighed.

"Aren’t you?"

The room was too dark to see clearly, but Izan observed some curls falling just below her shoulders, longer than the short hair Lisboa had sported all her life. He imagined the girl's face as he had seen her last, by the beach. With dark circles impossible to hide, bloodied and crying. Her tears a mix of happiness and overwhelm.

"What do you want from me?"

Lisboa was an expert in emotional manipulation. When she had started to develop her power, she had quickly mastered the art of twisting hearts and calming minds. But with Izan, her bunkmate, the boy she had cried to so many nights because she missed her mother, she sometimes couldn't hide completely.

"Izan, I've messed up big time."

Barely a second of extreme panic, followed by artificial calm and Lisboa's hands pulling his arm to get him off the bed. The shift from shock to calm was so strong that for a few seconds it almost made him dizzy, but he quickly regained his composure.

"Believe me, not more than I have." Self-destructive jokes weren't exactly his trademark, but Izan found it hard to imagine a worse scenario than his own. He had just terrified his boss and his teenage coworker, exposing his powers while holding a sharp knife. He had lost his job, his friends, and the possibility of living a normal, peaceful life, all in one night.

"I work for the government," she muttered. Noah with their anarchist beliefs would make a scene right there, but Izan didn't bother to comment on it. "I've been accessing some classified information I shouldn't have access to… for months." Now that was something Noah would approve of, most likely. "I've been caught."

"What?!" Panic. Another injection of artificial calm. Izan fell onto the bed as if he had just been sedated. "Stop it, Boa."

"I need you to stay calm for this," the girl excused herself, placing a hand on Izan's chest to make sure that even if her emotional control failed, she could still hold him back. "HIVE has an active base."

Neither the hand on his chest nor the emotional control was necessary. Izan felt as if someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water over him, and his whole body froze.

It was impossible. He had made sure to destroy the rebel base, reduced it to ashes with his own hands. He had seen people die crushed by rubble, iron structures piercing through the bodies of the most unfortunate. HIVE couldn't simply recover from that in a few years. It wasn't fair. He hadn't recovered yet, when he was supposed to be the little prodigy most prepared to withstand a catastrophe.

"I don't know why the government knows about it. And I definitely don't know why they haven't done anything to stop it yet. But now I've made enemies on both bands," Lisboa said.

Izan nodded. He took a deep breath and rose from the bed, taking Lisboa's hand that was still on his chest. An active base meant children forcibly taken from the streets, a new generation of scared and indoctrinated little kids. Only they knew what was happening inside, and he more than anyone wanted to put an end to HIVE once and for all but...

"I'm sorry. I can't do this," Izan said.

Lisboa's face shifted from concern to blankness in dangerous seconds, and she quickly twisted her wrist to grab Izan's hand tightly. Not enough to break any bones, but enough to leave an unpleasant red mark.

"I'm not done," she warned, as Izan writhed trying to free himself. "HIVE is trying to create a neutralizer."

Lisboa said nothing more, just maintained prolonged eye contact, as if waiting for Izan to read her thoughts. Unlike Axl, he didn't have telepathy, but he didn't need it to understand what Lisboa meant. HIVE was seeking for a way to eliminate their powers, to get them out of the equation and start anew without leaving loose ends. Lisboa wanted to avoid the existence of that neutralizer at all cost. She probably thought Izan would share her concern. Izan, however, would kill to get rid of his telekinesis. Same means, different ends. It could work, Izan supposed. 

"What do you need me for?" Izan asked.

The girl smiled at him, loosening her grip on his hand.

"Rest," she instructed. "You're out of practice, you're a mess, Xan," she pointed out, and only then did the fatigue of the night's events hit him. He was exhausted, feeling like he might have vomited at some point during the taxi ride, and his headache was killing him. "Tomorrow, I need you to convince Noah to join our cause."

In his trance-like state, drifting between consciousness and the dream world, Izan barely processed the mission he had just been assigned. He didn't fully process it until the next morning when he discovered that all the events of the night had been real, that he was in over his head in trouble, and that if he ever thought he was going to live a normal life someday, he had actually just crossed over into something completely opposite.

Now he was part of a pathetic attempt at an off-brand Justice League trying to take down the rebel organization that turned him into a freak. And he had to locate and coerce his teenage rival-turned-crush into joining them.

Everything. Was. So. Unfair.