A beta-reader, if you please!

The apartment was all upper New York lush and plush. From the white: carpets, wrap around sectionals, to the minimalistic metal and glass that was supposed to be the height of fashion but felt cold and impersonal. So unlike the warm oak paneling of the mansion so many years ago. The afghans and throws and quilts thrown over the backs of well worn couches, foot of soft beds and the occasional chandeliers if any of them were feeling particularly creative. 

It wasn’t the alien place to Scott. He had spent the greater part of his youth with a billionaire’s son, a chunk of his adult’s life in real alien home-worlds and then with Emma Frost as his lover. But it didn’t fit like a second skin or third skin. Always out of place in the landscape of who Scott Summers was and where he belonged. 

It was a familiar feeling. Similar to the one he had after he regained his sight, when the mansion wasn’t just made out of a symphony of sounds and textures. The day he opened his eyes to red tints and dark shades, it was like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. This whole new world where nothing matched and everything was an askew vision of the images in his head. 

So no, here in the very pinnacle of luxury that New York city had to offer, Scott Summers didn’t feel out of place so much as a man coming into sunlight after years underground. Blotches of black dancing in his eyes and everything too bright and dark by turns. 

He stood at the threshold and couldn’t make himself take those first real steps into a new life. And that was it, wasn’t it? New life, new beginnings.

A new start. 

Somehow unfair, really. How easily everything seemed to come and go. How often he was forced to pick up the pieces and start over again. To rebuild: the school, the dream, a mutant safe-haven, broken relationships, life. And shouldn’t there be a rule about that? A kind of limit to the times you got to watch your entire life burn down, of having to start all over again? 

Four, maybe. 

That would be a good number. A decent number. Instead of this never ending cycle he seemed to be trapped in. That futility of purpose that never reached its mark and always, always ended in failure. Like Sisyphus, cursed to roll a boulder up a hill over and over again. Knowing that no matter how close he came to the summit, he would never, ever reach it. 

He stood there in arrested indecision, wondering, not for the first time, if he had it in him for another new start. Once more unto the breach. Somehow the thought left him feeling tired and older than his twenty seven years. 

A heavy weight settled on his shoulders as he peered into the room. There was a crowd there. To celebrate. As if any of what had happened was cause for anything but a funerary progression. Scott certainly felt like something inside was decaying. The rot spreading inwards and outwards towards anyone and everyone that he came into contact with. 

Why couldn’t you just have left it alone? He thought not for the first time at Matt Murdock, who stood to his left, like he had since day one. Matt, who was an Avenger on occasion and a vigilante always. Lawyer to the destitute and disenfranchised and thought that Scott was worthy of his time and effort. Scott wanted to hate him and some days he thought the man was every bit the demon he masquerade about.