Charles Xavier stared at the monitor as the girls were loaded onto stretchers. The assignment had been a distasteful one all around; he could taste the horror and disgust of his X-men from here. No doubt, what they had experienced had come from both his worst fears about being a mutant and their worst nightmares.
But... that wasn’t what concerned him. What took him by surprise was the teenaged youth, the only one of their guests who walked out under his own power. His eyes were like those of a thousand other mutants he’d seen - haunted, hunted, confused - but there was more there, a rare light among darkness.
He knew what he had here. The newest generation of mutants had run into problems because, put simply, there wasn’t a leader among the group. Everett had been the closest thing the group had to a leader; with his death, something died in this generation.
Leadership - true leadership - wasn’t an easy characteristic to find. It was more than vision or organization; it was a deep conviction, something unbendable beyond all reason. It meant taking all the rocks the world had thrown at you and making a cornerstone out of them. Scott Summers had taken the pain of his orphaned childhood under Sinister and formed the cornerstone of the X-Men; Ororo Munroe, another orphan, had taken her tragedies and built a foundation of her own.
Xavier turned to his computer screen and looked at the file on Ranma Saotome. The similarities were uncanny. Sketchy schooling, occasional run-ins with the authorities... it seemed that his father had taken him on a long training trip, away from his mother or any friends. The more detailed entries chronicling the past year revealed more; if the information he’d found were accurate, Ranma’s past year was a perfect primer course for life with the X-Men.
What he saw from the boy’s mind said more than any computer screen could. This kid was more than a rock; if handled properly and delicately, this child could heal both those the X-Men had brought in and those that had been under his care. With a little smoothing of some rough edges, he could be the perfect leader for this generation.
“You like him, don’t you?” Emma Frost whispered.
Charles Xavier turned away to the young man on the monitor, and smiled. “Emma... what would you say to some new students?”
Emma raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure they’d agree to it?”
Charles touched the picture on the screen. “No. But... is there any other place for them to go?” He wheeled back from the screen. “Come. It's time we see just who this Ranma Saotome really is.”
See other episodes by Nightelf
(Posted Sat, 26 Oct 2002 08:25)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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