Archive of Our Own ^beta

I was the perfect son-the scholar, the athlete, the All-American boy. In me, my parents found their ticket to being accepted. When they had a brilliant scientist for a son, it mattered less that they were immigrants, that they were brown, that they spoke with the heavy Guatemalan accent that they could never quite shake. They put me on a pedestal, and shoved my brother, Marco, into the shadows. And I quickly wearied of being the golden child; wearied of watching them turn on my younger brother when he dared to be average. Because we couldn't be average. Any failure wasn't a sign of immaturity or personal foibles, it was a reflection on our entire people and on the culture from whence we came. Mark wasn't the at the head of his class or the captain of the football and baseball teams like I was. No matter how hard he tried, he wasn't successful, so he had to be pushed to the sidelines. If he wasn't, what would the neighbors say? They would say that it was only what they expected. Mark wasn't special, and he was brown; if he had been their only son, he would have been used as proof of why the country was letting in too many "foreigners". Never mind that my parents spent thousands of dollars and worked through endless bureaucratic red tape just to get to the country, then worked hard to pay for and pass their citizenship tests. Never mind that my parents knew more about American history than all their neighbors. We were Hispanic immigrants; we couldn't be "real" Americans unless we did something great. 

Because of this, Mark was berated; treated like an embarrassment. My parents hardly noticed him except to criticize him for not being perfect; for not being me. In the end, they drove him away; he dropped out of school and ran away from home. And part of me wished that I'd had the courage to do what he had done. My parents had attached all of their hopes and dreams onto me, and the weight was exhausting. But because I was afraid of disappointing them, I stayed. I graduated high school as the valedictorian and made it through college in only two years. I had a degree in meteorology, and I was expected to change the world. 

While I was in college, I had dreamed up the idea of a device that could control the weather in a localized area. Most people dismissed me as a dreamer at first, but within only a few months of college, the academic community was hailing me as a genius; and so by the time I graduated, I was easily able to get funding for my project. I worked alone in a small cabin off of Big Water Lake for the next three years, utterly consumed by my work. I seemed to be on top of the world; my brother, meanwhile, was floundering. As a runaway and high school dropout, he was unable to find much work; worse, he soon picked up a gambling habit and lost most of the money he had taken with him when he had disappeared. As a result, he soon fell into a bad crowd and fell into a life of drinking and petty crime. I was extremely frustrated by this, because I knew that my brother had the potential to be so much more than that, but there was little that I could do to stop him. Little did I know that his poor choices would become my salvation. 

Just as my project, which I had nicknamed the Weather Wand in a moment of fancy, was nearing completion, my primary sponsor, LexCorp, informed me that they planned to use the Wand as a weapon for war. I, who had intended it for humanitarian aid, was furious, and I told them that I would not allow them anywhere near my invention. The corporation responded by cutting all of my funding and getting me blacklisted; worse, they used my status as an immigrant to do so (conveniently ignoring the fact that I had come to America at two years old). Worse still, since they had funded all of my earlier work on the Weather Wand, they planned to claim it for themselves. Determined to do something to stop this, I contacted my younger brother, Mark, and together we concocted a plan. He was to show up at my laboratory and claim that he was running from the police, a story that would hold some weight since he had twice been arrested and sent to jail for burglary. We would fake a fight, and then I would give him the Weather Wand and disappear; leaving the assumption that I had died in the scuffle. 

The plan went off without a hitch. With the Wand now safely in the hands of a supposedly dangerous criminal, LexCorp would be unable to steal it and use it as a weapon, and since I was "dead", they wouldn't be looking for me in the hopes of forcing me to make another one. What's more, since everyone thought I was dead, I could finally escape the pressure of being the perfect son, and my brother, by taking on the moniker of the Weather Wizard, was able to finally get the attention that he craved. 

I just wish that he hadn't decided to wear a green leotard to do it.