Generation Why Bother

When he saw Andy throwing himself at the pavement, Anthony skedaddled right over to the edge of the balcony and let out most pained scream I’d ever heard in my entire life. I rushed up behind him and caught sight of Andy’s shocked face – like he didn’t even mean to do it even though we saw him voluntarily jump – and heard the strained shout of inner pain coming from the man who drove him to do it.

When his lungs gave out, Anthony coughed himself into a sobbing fit, gripping the concrete lip like a lifeline.

The rest of us had rushed over as well and we were mostly peeking over the edge, save for Mick and Chuck, who were too weak-stomached to handle it. I don’t know why I was able to watch. I guess since Tegan had fallen from that height and turned out fine, I wasn’t so squeamish. Mick wasn’t the one to save the fallen one, though. He’d have been the only one actually able to save him, but making a tree sprout up in the middle of a busy street would’ve caused more accidents than it would’ve solved.

Another part of me had faith that Andy was gonna turn out fine.

It was the look on his face that gave it away for me. There was just too much there – shock, anger at himself and Anthony, terror, regret – for him to not be saved somehow. Andy had a lot of emotions boiling inside of him for a long time, but since they were on a constant simmer, nothing had happened. At the peak of his feelings, though, something definitely turned around.

We could all see that, especially when a huge gust of wind had propelled him upwards from the sidewalks about thirty feet from the ground.

Despite bystanders stopping to stare, gaining us probably the most amount of publicity in this whole ordeal, when Andy stopped falling and landed on a cushion of air that had drifted through pedestrians to rescue him, somehow I just knew tomorrow wasn’t going to be so bad.

He lay there for a second, paralyzed with his eyes closed.

Slowly, he blinked them back open, looking up at us from a few stories below.

Then he rose.

Still on his back, the air drifted him upwards, putting him back on his feet no matter how weak his knees were and how much we could all see his hands shaking. Though the wind was frosty and sifted through his fingers, biting all of us from a distance with a distinct chill, as he held out his hands and felt it, making fists and staying steady, he got a feel for it.

Looking up at us on the seventh floor, our faces all displaying our completely flabbergasted minds, he smiled. No, he didn’t just smile – he was laughing. Unlike the hopeless twitching he did earlier during the argument, it felt genuine.

He climbed through the air he was controlling. As he got closer to the balcony he’d just jumped from, we could all hear him breathing between chuckles, panting so heavily it seemed like all the air got forced out of him and forced into his hands to propel him upward.

He threw his arms over the lip, concentrating to throw one leg over, then the other.

Laughing the whole time, he stood on unsteady knees and all of us circled him as he fell to the ground on his back and gawked at his hands, rubbing them all over his face. The air still rippled through, lacing through us as a crowd and wrinkled our clothes up, Andy especially. His hood blew back against his head and even flung up the bottoms of his heavy jeans, and after a few seconds, his crazy laughter faded away and was replaced with a look of happy panic.

“Okay, if anybody asks, he was bungee jumping,” Chance spoke up quietly, already coming up with a plan.

Not even waiting for him to calm down, Anthony fell on his knees and for a moment it looked like he was going to beat the crap out of Andy, but that feeling was quickly dispelled when he threw his arms around his neck, holding him tightly and closing his eyes to keep any more tears from being noticed. He was still sobbing from when Andy fell in the first place; Andy didn’t bat an eyelash at that. He had to process it all, and then he held Anthony in his lap – not like nothing had happened, but like something big had happened and they were beyond it.

“What the hell just happened with you?” Anthony whimpered from his shoulder.

“I – I – I – d-don’t even know, m-man,” Andy stammered, closing his own eyes.

“Well, I don’t wanna jump to conclusions or anything,” Mick said with a tinge of joy in his voice. “But I’m pretty sure Andy was given the power of wind…”

Just hearing that seemed to alleviate a ton of pressure; not just on Andy, but on us in general. The smile he had was contagious, it was so huge, and as he made a “victory” signal with his arm as if to say “yesss,” I couldn’t even hold back a slight chuckle.

After suffocating him in his hug, Anthony finally broke away, pressing a big kiss against Andy’s forehead before he wiped his eyes and fixed his hair. “God…you have to promise me that you’re never gonna pull that fucking shit ever again,” he tried to threaten, while his smirk blew his cover.

Andy smiled at him so happily I thought he was gonna explode. “But…b-but I made it…I finally got it…”

“And you scared the living shit out of all of us in the process,” Anthony gibed, poking his side as he let go and hung an arm around his shoulders.

When I worry about something, most of the time it never goes nearly as bad as I expect it to be. I’ll come up with a bunch of scenarios where the worst possible crap goes down and I see myself basically crying as I come out of it shattered to pieces, though it hardly ever ends badly. That normally went for class presentations, huge tests, or meeting up with family I hadn’t seen in ages, though. The kind of stuff we were all dealing with at the moment had to do with universal conflict, and in the back of my mind I knew that my overactive imagination was bound to be at least somewhat true.

Along the way I had picked up a secondhand worry for Andy in his personal situations, and it certainly didn’t help when I found out he was Anchor – the man behind my childhood inspiration to make cartoons. Maybe he had the same tick I did, worrying about stuff that in the end would go a lot better than planned. And I knew we still had a long way to go, what with the hurtle of January 2nd. Still, one thing had gone right. Maybe the rest of our luck would fall into place and throw us a bone in the form of a good fight, or maybe all those years of me worrying to no avail would come back and bite me in the ass. Either way, nothing seemed too bad in that moment.

The guardians were finally unified, and that meant the world to all of us.