Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

What ARE they?

Well, they’re mutants. That we know just by their being a part of this universe where being classified Mutant is a Thing. But, um, HOW, exactly? Is she his mutation or is he hers? Are they two separate mutants who’ve merged their mutations? Or are they one mutant in two parts? Are they even really twins?

That’s a place to start. The show never actually uses the word “twins” to describe them. The name “Loudermilk Twins” just kind of appeared in the discourse and everyone accepted it, because they were twins, weren’t they? Womb-mates! They were born together, developed together, grew up together-- one just grew up faster than the other. They’re conjoined twins. Except when they’re, you know, not.

So there could have been an instance of one twin— Cary, apparently— absorbing the other in the womb. That’s a thing that happens. Sometimes doctors find evidence of semi-developed twins inside people, it’s just, you know, they stopped developing long before birth and are long dead. There was an X-Files episode about one who stayed alive (although they had stopped developing), and was evil, of course, but that’s The X-Files. Oh, and there was another X-Files episode about a stillborn twin who was haunting the living twin WITHOUT having been absorbed (he was also, naturally, evil). But even in the X-Files nobody got absorbed then CONTINUED TO DEVELOP and can now exit and reenter their twin’s body at will as a complete person. Mutations! What amazing things they can accomplish!

OR— on the other hand— everything started out normal for one baby. Two X-chromosomes joined up to make a baby who would look like her parents, like everyone would expect, but Mom, being a member of a persecuted minority, can’t help thinking, Oh, life would be so much easier for this child if they were a white male! And the force of her prayers and past trauma are enough to activate that mutant-X gene into responding, “We gotcha, sweetheart,” and promptly building a white male shell around the developing Native girl like some sort of social armor. Course, it doesn’t quite work as intended, as the white-male armor is so weak and mild-mannered that the girl inside ends up protecting him, anyway….

Which leads us to the flip side, two Native parents just happened to have a little boy who looked white— I mean it’s not impossible, it wasn’t like their ancestors had been completely isolated from Europeans in the past couple hundred years, and blond hair and pale skin are recessive traits that could have slipped through in the background over a few generations. But now you have this small child who is keenly aware that he’s not who his parents expected him to be,* and maybe his Daddy would love him if only he was somebody else, and maybe the trauma of all this was enough for his brain to create that very someone he wished he was, as an alternate persona— a dissociative system, just like Legion, the name of the show! In real-life dissociative personality systems, the most common type of alter a child will develop is specifically a Protector… which is exactly the role Kerry claims to be in their relationship. Except YAY MUTANT-X GENE STRIKES AGAIN, and gives that alter personality a body of her very own!

I don’t think they themselves ever figured out exactly how they happened. Cary got into genetics in an effort to find answers, but couldn’t determine anything absolutely. And after awhile, it didn’t really matter. They simply WERE, and that was all that was important. 

*Let’s talk about this for a minute. Kerry claims their parents were expecting a girl. Now, time and technology are really nebulous things in the Legion TV universe, yeah, but even if the show took place TODAY, the Loudermilks would still have been born in the 1950s-ish, when today’s methods of determining a baby’s sex pre-birth were STILL not available, especially not to rural non-white mothers. So, were they really SURE the baby was a girl? Or did they base that expectation on superstitions or Old-Wives-Tale methods or dreams (which could have been accurate— a vision of Kerry, she just wasn’t THERE yet)? Maybe Cary and by extension Kerry added the surety in retrospect, in their own minds, I was SUPPOSED to be a girl. And supposed to look Native American is just common sense— they wouldn’t have needed an ultrasound to expect that.

How Do they WORK?

In my fic “The Personhood Hypothesis,” 8-year-old Cary comes to this conclusion: “Did you know there’s space inside atoms? Maybe all your molecules were just hanging out in the spaces between my molecules.” I mean, it’s as good an explanation as any. Perhaps he came up with a better theory when he was older, but my science background is only as good as an 8-year-old science nerd’s. I really don’t know the physics of it.

Maybe it’s something about parallel universes. The two possible children the Whiteclouds could have had are connected through the multiverse, and Kerry can walk into Cary’s universe whenever she wants. But there’s not any particular evidence for that theory— it’s just a possibility I literally just thought of right now. (Completely tangentially: It reminds me a bit of something that might happen in Carlos Hernandez’s Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, which is most likely my favorite Middle Grade book of the past ten years so I’m using this excuse to tell you to read it.  It’s quirky and trippy and weird; and you liked Legion enough to come looking for fanfic, so you’ll probably like Sal and Gabi too).

Whatever it is, Kerry isn’t just a ghost possessing Cary, or some kind of mental projection— she is a solid, corporeal, real person when she’s out on her own: the world interacts with her, she interacts with the world. She is physically there.

And when they come back together, Kerry doesn’t simply vanish into Cary. They merge. Their bodies combine— most dramatically in the way they can take on each other’s wounds (I assume Kerry can also absorb Cary’s wounds if need be. It’s just that he tends to avoid situations in which he would get wounded). But their bodies also likely balance each other out in other ways upon merging— their heart rates synchronize, their temperatures balance, if one of them’s breathing harder their breaths will meet in the middle. If one just had a scare, or heard a laugh-out-loud joke, the other will feel those same emotions the moment they’re together (or before, if the emotion’s strong enough. I’ll get to that). Their body processes are one, and they share both germs and nutrients (the latter luckily for Kerry, who really has no interest in eating until forced into it in the middle of Season 2).

One thing there’s no scientific explanation for— aside from maybe the parallel universe theory— is where does Kerry get her STUFF? Why doesn’t she come out naked, aside from the practical matter of being on a TV show? Was Cary aware, for example, that he had a huge spiked bat inside him in Chapter 5? You could try to argue that maybe she’s getting whatever she’s wearing and carrying before she goes in, but the very first time (either of them remembers) that she came out, she was wearing pajamas— the same pajamas Cary was wearing, it appears. 

The headcanon I use when I write is that whatever power allows her to manifest will also manifest whatever clothing and/or accessories are appropriate to the situation she’s walking out into. The first time it was identical pajamas, because there was no reason for it to be anything else. During the day, if Cary was wearing school clothes, Kerry would come out in school clothes, but girl-school-clothes appropriate to a poor family in the mid-20th-century-or-whenever-it-was-they-were-growing-up. If Cary was going to a formal event, Kerry would be in a nice dress. And, at the time of the show, while Cary’s in work clothes, Kerry comes out in her work clothes— except that her work involves more butt-kicking than his does, so her clothes allow for that.

Of course, maybe she has a mental wardrobe/arsenal she chooses from before coming out, too, in her inner room— wherever she is, mentally, inside.

It’s Kerry’s inside existence that apparently most closely matches up with the theory that she’s a secondary dissociated personality of Cary’s, according to what little I know of DID and a few things I’ve seen written by people with DID who’ve watched the show (Legion him/themselves? Not so great representation. The Loudermilks on the other hand? Right on). She only ages when she’s out (I estimate that it averages about one year for every four actual years), and secondary personalities tend to only mature when they’re interacting with the world, too. She, as noted, feels she exists specifically to protect Cary. When he’s doing the “boring stuff” of day-to-day life, she’s completely tuned out, not even really living those moments.

Apparently secondary personalities have their own little world they can retreat to during these times— Legion has their childhood bedroom (it’s Versaphile who pointed that out to me, I can’t claim realizing that on my own)— in my headcanon that place for the Loudermilks is a field they loved to play in as kids, Cary doing science experiments, Kerry running free. I think Kerry has different stages of being present: “not paying attention” at all in that mental field; fully her own person in her own body in the world; and an in-between phase, where she can experience the world through Cary’s senses, and talk to him in his head. Notably, he can’t talk BACK in his head— he has to speak out loud— which makes for lots of awkward fun in public.  

How they relate to each other

I saw in interviews— two separate ones, notably— that Bill Irwin thought of their relationship as “father-daughter-like” and Amber Midthunder thought of it as “brother-sister-like,” and honestly, that juxtaposition brings it all to light. When they were kids, it was clearly a brother-sister relationship— playmates, self-contained friends, two kids exploring the world as one…or one kid exploring the world as two…or, well, at any rate, they were both kids. But as they got older, he grew up and she didn’t. Or, did much more slowly. He had always been the more responsible one, but now he HAD really become more of a father figure.

But she’s much closer, developmentally, to their shared childhood: I wouldn’t say she’s stuck in the past, but it doesn’t FEEL as far passed to her. Even though she calls him “Old Man,” it’s in a teasing, taunting way, like a sibling would. He’ll always be the nerdy little boy she used to have to rescue from bullies, which makes for an interesting, kind of bittersweet irony: she still and always sees herself as his Protector— and, if she IS a physical manifestation of a dissociated alter, it literally IS her entire reason for being. But now he’s taken on these father-figure roles, making sure she’s properly fed and secure, teaching her manners, making plans for their future— and how that might not include him— all Protector roles, too. So now they both consider themselves the Protector of the other. (The “Placeholder” story in my Loudermilk Chronicles series is going to focus on this topic, if I ever get around to writing it).

If they were truly two separate people, they’d be unhealthily codependent. But they’re not. They really are one person in two parts. Look, I’m Roman Catholic, I already have lots of practice contemplating this particular paradoxical Mystery— maybe I can’t explain it to someone who hasn’t had that experience. Oh, wait, I’ll use St. Patrick’s simile: it’s like a shamrock has three leaflets but it’s all one shamrock! Except with two leaflets. Because we’re not talking about a three-part God, but a two-part person.

So while they are each unique, with their own viewpoints and experiences and feelings to some extent, still they’re aware that what happens to one happens to them both— not just sharing wounds, but sharing feelings, memories— even sensing what the other is experiencing from far away.

The empathy link between them, when they’re technically in separate bodies— it’s not constantly running full-blast. If it was, neither of them could do anything on their own without being forced into experiencing what the other is instead. Extreme situations— like Kerry getting ambushed in episode 4— will trigger extreme, physical empathy, but most of the time it’s more of a background sense of knowing the other is out there, an awareness of how the other is faring, like having one arm in another room, still feeling, but somewhere else. It’s more of a background sensation. But if something happens to that arm, you notice.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they always understand each other. No matter how much more united than two separate people Cary and Kerry may be, they have vastly different personalities, and their experiences will be different, empathy link or no. Think about it: do you ever get annoyed with yourself? Ugh, why did I say that? Why can’t I just do this? Why on earth does my brain insist on singing the Honeycombs cereal commercial from the late ‘80s for five days straight?! That’s all you in, statistically most likely, one non-dissociated brain. Imagine if those parts of your brain could split off and go have their own adventures without you!

So they will still need to talk things out, or even argue— frequently— and have a give-and-take relationship. But they know deep inside that no matter their differences, they are not whole without the other.

They love each other fiercely. You could argue that it’s not love so much as self-preservation— they only care about each other because what happens to one happens to both. But it’s too active to brush off like that. They do have to choose to try to understand each other despite their differences, and that’s what love is. Anyway, you’ve got to learn to love the annoying parts of yourself, too, don’t you? According to Whitney Houston that’s the greatest love of all.

Family Background

That love was modeled. I’m sure of this. Maybe their father didn’t love them right, but their mother made up for it. Now, I have written a whole essay about Irma Loudermilk before and I’m not going to rewrite it all here,* but the gist of it is, they clearly had a loving parent in childhood, and that was their struggling single mom. She wasn’t perfect, but she was an anchor for them, who did NOT reject them for being different despite their deadbeat dad. That’s why they can be so comfortable in themselves today.

They weren’t adopted by anyone else, either. “Loudermilk” is too obviously a play on their parents’ name “Whitecloud”— “C-loud the-color-of-milk”— to have been coincidentally someone else’s name. It was just another way of helping Cary to pass as white and escape the persecution his parents had suffered. I explained in my essay why I’m certain Mama— okay, Irma, sheesh, but don’t be surprised if I insist on calling her Mama as we go on here— was a Residential Indian School survivor and how that shaped how she raised Cary and reacted to the existence of Kerry and so on. The deck was stacked against her but she utterly refused to let her son be taken away from her— and if that meant changing his name to help him blend in with the oppressors, so be it.

Let’s make one thing clear: Cary is not white. Bill Irwin is white, sure, but Cary was born and raised in a Native American family, he’s a Native guy who passes for white. Effectively, to other people, in his interactions with the world, he’s white, and he’s not being raised much differently from white kids because if Mama made it through Residential Indian School intact it’s because she proved she could assimilate. But you can’t just deny his actual heritage completely, because all these factors, internally, are going to affect him and how he views the world. He doesn’t see The Other when he looks at Native Americans, he sees his family. He’s more aware of the issues and how his passing for white protects him than a kid who was actually white would be. And yes, after his mother’s experiences, he’s going to be particularly sensitive to genocide attempts— enough to overcome his basic non-confrontational nature to frickin’ co-found a top-secret very-illegal hidden commune complete with militia to protect a new persecuted minority from the same (with, coincidentally, another man of Indigenous heritage but from the other side of the world). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s make another thing clear: I AM white. Utterly and extremely white. I had ancestors on the Mayflower. I have lived my entire life in southwest Pennsylvania, which has basically no native-Native population— ie anyone of Native descent probably moved here from somewhere else, and I’m not even sure the tribes that DID live here once even exist anymore (if you’re Mingo, shout out and prove me wrong). In high school I knew a guy who’d moved from South Carolina, and when he said he was Cherokee I honestly thought “ah, descended from Cherokee. Nobody actually IS Cherokee anymore.” I was totally clueless. I am hardly a definitive voice on this issue. But I have been trying to educate myself to all the cultures I in my sheltered privilege hadn’t learned about properly in school, and when I found myself obsessively writing about a character— or two—or whatever— whose heritage was so different from my own, I knew I’d have to look into it further.

If I was going to be digging deeply into their backstory, I needed to root them in a specific culture, a specific place— a generic “Native American” label like a bad elementary school Thanksgiving lesson was not going to cut it. I had a gut feeling they weren’t from a warm climate—maybe it was something subconscious connecting to Noah Hawley’s Fargo that made me settle on the Northern Plains. I picked Sioux just because it was fairly common, and not so specific I’d be showing my ignorance with every word. Besides, I knew one thing about the Sioux— it was how they got that name, from their neighbors— they were ruthless warriors. You know, like Kerry. Or more appropriately, like Cary WASN’T. And if he somehow manifested the person he thought he SHOULD have been, and that person was a Sioux girl, obviously she must be a warrior, too. Being somewhat removed from the culture, Mama being a graduate of Turn-em-white-or-kill-em Academy, he’d probably gotten some broad stereotypes in his head about it as a small child, anyway (like, unaware that “warrior” was really a job reserved for Sioux men). So the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t possibly see them growing up anywhere else. I looked at a map of Sioux territory past and present and decided to get them away from Fargo just on principle, so plopped them into eastern Montana. The Lakota were the Sioux people that far west, so okay, Lakota then. Must have family based in the Fort Peck Reservation. Oglala is a big Lakota tribe in Fort Peck, that’ll be their people, then.

I swear on everything holy, that was how I settled on the Whiteclouds’ tribe (oh yeah, Whitecloud is a pretty Sioux name, too. They’ve got Redclouds, why not Whiteclouds). It was only after the fact, poking around the Wikipedia article on Fort Peck for something entirely unrelated, I finally discovered that Amber Midthunder actually is Oglala Lakota Sioux from Fort Peck.

It’s a sign, or kismet, or some junk.

So if I consistently refer to them as Sioux from this point forward, despite that not technically being canon, it’s only because it should be.

Another convenient piece of Sioux culture I discovered in my research: Sioux grandparents are very involved in helping to raise their grandchildren—specifically passing on their culture. This made so much sense for the Loudermilks— Irma was a single mother who didn’t want to rely too heavily on government welfare programs or daycares, in effort to keep Cary off the radar of people who might Take him Away, so she would have had to rely a lot on family to babysit while she was working and that. Enter the eager grandparents! Grandparents whose mission was to pass to their grandson (and the granddaughter they didn’t actually know was also listening in) the stories of the past! That’s how they learned about their heritage. That’s how they learned what had happened to Mama (because she didn’t want to talk about it) and why she could sometimes seem unreasonable in her fears of them being taken away. And that’s how they knew ANYTHING about the father who’d abandoned them at birth (because she didn’t want to talk about him, either).

Something in the way Kerry talks about Ray Whitecloud in Chapter 4 makes me think that she knew him better than she would had he just exited their lives completely when he left. I wrote “The Principle of Bygones” jumping off from this suspicion, giving him a little bit of a redemption arc. But even if he never redeemed himself, they still might have learned about him from either set of grandparents— and may have seen him around, while visiting with his side of the family. He definitely would not have had a good relationship with Cary (and wouldn’t have a relationship with Kerry at all) in at least that first decade or two. He’d effectively disowned the kid. And that was a real crap move on his part, no matter how hurt he was— even if he was right about Irma having an affair— he still left them alone in a time when it was harder for women to find well-paying work, particularly not single mothers, in a culture where he knew very well the government would take children from their parents for any excuse. UGH, Ray, you suck. And that’s coming from the only person in fandom, I’m fairly sure, who has EVER bothered to write you a redemption arc.

Which brings me to what family life was like for the Loudermilks as children, but that’s really what the whole Loudermilk Chronicles series I wrote is about. So I’d be repeating myself if I went into all of that here. The tl;dr is: Mama’s the only one who knew their secret growing up, and even she had trouble accepting it, what with that dread fear of them being taken away; everyone else who saw Kerry around assumed she was Cary’s cousin or something; and later, once they were away from home, he’d start introducing her as his sister. And no one else knew the truth until they met Melanie and Oliver.

And Mama LOVED them. It bears repeating. Even if she didn’t always understand, even though her own trauma haunted her decisions— she supported them in all their uniqueness, so that no matter what their deadbeat dad thought, how the other kids bullied, or what society said about People Like Them, she believed in them, encouraged them, and helped them to grow into the best versions of themselves.

*Maybe I’ll add it onto the end, as an appendix.

Mannerisms, speech patterns, basic personalities

So who are we dealing with, as characters? They fill basic roles on the show: he’s the brains, she’s the brawn. He’s a scientist, she’s a fighter. If some sort of technology would be particularly helpful to the plot, Cary will supply it, if not outright invent it. And if somebody needs their butt kicked, Kerry shows up (although the show really has a problem with actually letting Kerry win battles on screen. Fight for fight she loses more than she wins, and that’s not a statistically fair sample. If you are writing Kerry, let her win more often. Says I who almost never includes a fight scene in my work period).

But neither of them is as simple as their archetype.

Kerry isn’t dumb. She just doesn’t care about anything that’s not Cary or fighting. She’s tuned out a lot of the details of Cary’s scientific endeavors, but she can’t spend decades with the guy without picking up some things. She knows the terminology, enough to be his lab assistant. They play word games together constantly- my theory is they started these games to help memorize data sets in school, and even if Cary’s the one with the degree(s), Kerry learned, too. And she can strategize on the battlefield and make split decisions in the heat of the fight. She figures things out. She picks locks. It’s a throwaway detail in Chapter 4, but as soon as I noticed it I said, “of COURSE she does. She’s Chaotic Neutral and lives inside a mechanical engineer.”

And Cary isn’t a one-dimensional nerd, either. Don’t get me wrong, he is most definitely a nerd, he’s just far more multifaceted than a stereotype. He’s multilingual. He loves dancing and trying new foods. He has a playful sense of humor, mostly focused on making Kerry laugh, and at some point has learned to do close-up magic tricks.

He is definitely a scientist, though, through and through— he thinks like a scientist, views the world through the lens of science: questioning, testing, theorizing and applying. Applying is key— he isn’t just interested in discovering for discovery’s sake, but jumps to how can we USE this? He’s an inventor. Applied sciences. He tells Switch in Chapter 21 that he has a “PhD in quantum mechanics and a masters in nuclear physics,” but this is in relation to her asking him what he knows about time travel, specifically. He also appears competent in Newtonian physics and electronics/computers and engineering of all of the above, and especially in biology/medicine —genetics, obviously, but also more practical medicine. He’s got more than one PhD, I’m certain, most likely in genetics or cellular biology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was partly Oliver’s idea— like Cary had been on track to just get a job inventing nanotech somewhere until Oliver came along with this idea to save mutantkind and said how can we apply your quantum physics to the microscopic goings-on of PEOPLE? And Cary was all for that, since he really did love ALL sciences, and genetics were of particular interest being that he, himself, was a mutant anomaly. And did I mention he’s a genius? Definitely a genius.

And Kerry’s world does revolve around fighting (and Cary. And sometimes fighting Cary, but only verbally, as she would never, ever, physically hurt him), but not out of a desire to hurt, but a desire to defend. And, honestly, simply a desire to be in motion. That’s why she’s more likely to use a sword than a gun— she wants to get her whole self into it. While Cary studied science, she studied martial arts— and movement, and exercise, and gymnastics, and dance “just to look cool.” My headcanon is that, in college, Kerry took all of Cary’s required phys ed credits (”I’m not a little kid! I’m 16! We-I graduated early!”)(This I ALSO plan to address in the Placeholder story I haven’t written yet), and also had some fun with electives like “History of Warfare” and “Theatrical Movement.” She’s graceful in a controlled, powerful way, and she hates, hates, to be still. The bigger the movement, the better. 

You might be tempted not to think of Cary in a physical way at all, with Kerry to compare to, but don’t forget that he’s played by a professional clown/mime. Cary has a unique physicality of his own that you ought to incorporate into descriptions of what he’s doing. It’s a rubbery quality, an ability to bounce back. Clumsy moments get caught and corrected with— well, something like grace. It’s ironic, when you have an actor who is so graceful in his portrayal of awkward clumsiness. So from an in-story perspective, Cary is not graceful, he’s just sort of buoyed up by luck. He’ll narrowly avoid spills and falls. The rubbery quality extends to his facial expressions, too, which can appear exaggerated and, well, funny. Kerry thinks they’re hilarious. And since no one else thinks he’s funny, and Kerry doesn’t normally find other things funny, Cary especially enjoys making her laugh and does it on purpose. That’s how the whole learning-sleight-of-hand thing started, too, though it now also occasionally comes in handy when, say, trying to escape the weird cult that kidnapped him or whatnot.

They both appear to be on the autistic spectrum— literal-minded, socially awkward, trouble verbalizing and reading people. Cary, while pretty much a textbook example of the what-used-to-be-called-Aspergers type, has learned to get by in society fairly well: he knows The Rules, and he spends a lot of time trying to teach them to Kerry, who doesn’t care. Since she can retreat from having to deal with people any time she wants, she’s never put much effort into developing social skills or trying to understand metaphor, so while less of an autistic stereotype, she’s a bit more autistic functionally.

She speaks her mind, and if that comes across as blunt, tactless, or outright confusing to other people, who cares? I often have to watch how I write Kerry’s dialogue, because I tend to ramble when I write (WHO KNEW?), and Kerry is terse. Can I say this in fewer words? is my Kerry-revision mantra, because Kerry will say what she has to say in the fewest words possible, most of the time. Longer speeches are most likely things she’s run through her head until they come out whole, like quotations, even if she might not understand exactly what they mean. The easiest way to explain her and Cary’s relationship to Syd was in the form of a third-person story, something she’d also probably filed away in her head as a whole at some point. When Syd had the nerve to ask her follow-up questions, she floundered for a bit. When she’s very comfortable—alone with Cary, that is— she can ramble, too, because she doesn’t have to think too hard about the words with him. So she has basically three modes of talking— the comfortable ramble (rarest), the blunt statement (most common), and a slow, considered attempt to try to verbalize something complicated that she hasn’t pre-prepared. I guess the longer pre-prepared statements are a fourth mode.

Cary’s trouble verbalizing is a lot easier for me to write, because it’s a lot more how I personally talk. He’s got a large vocabulary (several, actually, he is multilingual), and will often use complex words and phrases that make perfect sense to him but not necessarily to anyone else. He’s not showing off, it’s just how he thinks. (Oliver, on the other hand, definitely uses complex words to show off, but we’re not talking about Oliver right now). But many times the words he needs to actually communicate don’t want to come out, resulting in a sort of stutter— not a letter-level stutter, more of a dysfluent stammer on a word level, repeating words and using a lot of fillers. Like Kerry, his fluency is directly related to how comfortable he is in the situation— the more desperate he is to find the words, the harder they are to find.

His social awkwardness comes bundled with apologetic bashfulness, a stubborn optimism (no matter how much evil he’s seen— and he’s seen a LOT of evil— he can’t help focusing on the good), and a genuine kindness that makes him likeable to anyone who’s got the patience for bumbling nerds (I mean, some people don’t. Those people suck. But there are definitely a lot of them out there). Her social awkwardness is somewhat disguised under her bluntness and violence, so she comes off, to strangers at least, more intimidating than endearing. Which is just the way she likes it. No one dares try to make small talk!

Oh, I also have a headcanon that Kerry occasionally speaks in anachronisms. As if the show itself didn’t already have a nebulous sense of time, Kerry’s own sense of time is skewed, what with the whole being-simultaneously-in-her-twenties-and-sixties thing, and spending ¾ of her life tuning out in a place that can probably be considered part of the Astral Plane so who knows what is flowing around there. Sometimes modern phrases just sound right coming from her, no matter when the story takes place, and so I just lean into it. Random quirk, speaks in anachronisms due to being unbound by time.

In my more-supportable-by-evidence headcanon, the most troublesome autistic tendency Kerry has (from her point of view) is a tendency toward overstimulation— sensory processing issues. Being inside Cary tends to muffle sensations— when she’s out, everything feels more intense. This is a big reason why she prefers not to stay away from Cary for too long— it’s exhausting being out, being so exposed. But her hypersensitivity has a flip side, too— it’s hyperawareness, lightning reflexes. Being in motion gives her more control of the sensations, and she’s able to do stuff with them. It’s part of what makes her such a formidable fighter. I mean, this is all headcanon, but it’s headcanon that just makes a lot of sense to me, so I’m calling it truth.

They’re both on the asexual spectrum, too—which I guess is another headcanon that just makes so much sense I’m calling it truth. Cary can be a bit of a romantic, and not picky about gender, but isn’t particularly interested in much beyond a sort of chivalry. Besides, a relationship with another person has always seemed impossible with Kerry there— and wouldn’t be right, Kerry being effectively underage for most of their life. Kerry, on the other hand, has no romantic notions whatsoever, but does have a bit more of an interest in people physically— but being that she’s pretty much disgusted by bodily functions in general, she isn’t about to act on it.

It’s not like they have a place in their hearts longing to be filled by a companion anyway. They’ve always had a built-in life partner in each other. Though, if you want to say that they did have a polyamorous-but-asexual life-partnership with the Birds, that’s probably accurate, too. As long as you’ve got that “asexual” part in there. Though I betcha Oliver always harbored a bit of a curiosity.

I am not writing “Everything I know about writing Melanie and Oliver Bird,” but I’m going to have to write something, since that’s like “Family Background Part 2.” Whether you want to call it “Asexual Polyamorous Life Partnership” or not, the Birds and Loudermilks were effectively family for decades. Not mere coworkers, not even mere friends, proper found family! They built their whole lives into Summerland together.

*Ahem* Family Background Part 2: Everything I Know About Writing an Asexual Polyamorous Life Partnership with Melanie and Oliver Bird

We only get a hint of what Cary and Oliver’s friendship had been like in the show, since Oliver isn’t quite there anymore, but it’s enough to imagine how it used to be. And I LOVE this friendship so much y’all. More people need to be writing Cary-and-Oliver-hanging-out fics (more people need to be writing Cary and/or Oliver fics in the first place, but that’s beside the point). Writing it is so fun I created a whole alternate timeline imagining them as childhood friends just to have more friendship to write about. Canonically, they most likely met as young adults, in college probably— if only because a, Oliver has too strong of an accent to have come to America any earlier in life, and b, college is where like-minded people MEET. Undoubtedly Oliver recognized a fellow mutant— two minds in one body is probably going to stand out to a telepath!—but— okay I’m just going to have to quote the opening of one of my own fics here, “The Necessity of Relational Differentiation”: “Kerry suspected the reason her brother and Oliver Bird had hit it off so well was less because they were two mutant freaks with dreams of mutant liberation and more because they’d finally found, in each other, someone they didn’t have to dumb down their vocabularies for.” 

Neurodivergent attracts neurodivergent (I am of the completely convinced opinion that Oliver has ADHD, even pre-Astral Plane— this goes beyond headcanon, it’s just plain true), and proclamations that would make other people stare at them blankly are perfectly understood (or at least taken seriously long enough to get clarity)— and built upon— by each other. It’s a very “Yes, and—” relationship. They can keep up with each other’s speeding trains of thought, talk for hours about theories and concepts and full-on plans. Oliver is more of a dreamer, coming up with grand ideas, and Cary is more practical, figuring out how to put those ideas into action. They complement each other that way, “forming some kind of complete two-part super-genius,” as Kerry’s inner monologue puts it in my fic. “And if that put Kerry off a little, it was only to be expected. If anyone had already mastered the art of complete two-part super-personing with Cary, it was her.”

Do you realize that in the entire course of the show, Oliver and Kerry never once properly interact, at least not without one or the other of them being possessed at the time? It’s a shame, because they must have had an interesting relationship, sharing a best friend and all. Although— as I wrote— there was a little jealousy at first, once they accepted that they were each important to Cary in different ways and that he was important to each of them, I imagine their relationship becoming a little siblings-with-more-animosity-esque, growing more into favorite-uncle territory over time.  There would be much teasing between them. We know from his episode in season 3 that Oliver could be a pretty good father-figure, too, and I think we can conclude that he might have behaved with Kerry much the same as he did with Astral-Plane Syd. But on more of an equal footing, being that she’s technically not really that much younger than him. I have a feeling she probably kicked him in the shins a lot. 

Melanie is an interesting piece in this family, as the only apparently neurotypical non-mutant among them. But she’s open-minded and loves minds, and the sheer potential of mutant diversity has obsessed her ever since she got to know Oliver. Forgive Melanie if her first interests in the Loudermilks were mostly academic—enthusiastically so— I love you because you’re so different and I can’t wait to figure out what that means in the big picture! She has a knack for helping people to recognize and reach for their full potential, but the flip side is she can’t help viewing people through the lens of a psychologist evaluating patients! But as they got to know each other, she and Cary would have bonded over their shared practical, problem-solving natures and their love for the not-very-practical dreamer Oliver— they became a sort of keeping-Oliver-out-of-trouble team. Which worked for several decades, at least. After that they were keeping the shared dream of Summerland alive together. There’s a comfortable familiarity between them, a friendship low on drama (well, within their friendship, not within their general lives) and high on respect.

To Kerry, Melanie took on a big sister role. Kerry trusted her judgment, which is a pretty big thing for Kerry to do. I’m not sure how long it would have taken to develop that trust, but Melanie worked to earn it from the start. She always treated Kerry as her own person, not just Cary’s weird little tagalong, and with respect for her opinions, not just as the kid she would have appeared to be when they met. Kerry appreciated that, even if she didn’t always feel necessarily like her own person— Melanie encouraged her to be not just herself but her best self, and that felt good. So Melanie is one of the only people in the world Kerry truly looks up to.

The four of them together are the roots and the heart of Summerland. Yes, don’t forget Kerry— even if she appears to be a younger generation, she was still there from the very beginning!  They had built it from scratch—well, from horse ranch—together. It was a handmade utopia of safety and acceptance and personal betterment, from which they worked to change the world.

But Summerland was more than a vocation, it was their home. It was where they celebrated holidays and birthdays and good news, weathered sick days and quarrels and grief, slept and ate (okay, Kerry tended to avoid those parts) and relaxed (which she also may have appeared to avoid. She had her own way of relaxing, okay? It just involved punching things).

When they were forced to abandon Summerland between seasons 1 and 2 (and to add insult to injury, to team up with the very entity they’d spent most of the past few decades fighting), it had to have been traumatic. It probably contributed to Melanie’s terrible mental health in season 2. Why weren’t the Loudermilks as incapacitated over it as she was? Maybe they’d just been more used to rolling with things, coming from a rough childhood with a constant threat of being taken away. But mostly because they had just lost Oliver—again—and though they might have all been family, he’d been Melanie’s other half, so to speak. Cary and Kerry still had each other, whatever else had happened, and that, deep down, was all they needed for Home.  

Quick personality types

Zodiac sign is pointless, because they have the same birthday, and I don’t believe in astrology anyway because I was born under Aries and am the world’s biggest non-confrontational pacifist (besides Cary). That said in one of my fics I did give them a birthday in mid-June, which is Gemini— you know, the Twins. Hah hah. The description of Gemini is absolutely nothing like either of them, though. But I also have a headcanon that they celebrate Kerry’s Out Day as a kind of personal birthday just for her, and that’s in late December,***** ie Capricorn, which isn’t very accurate eith— oh wait, stubborn, pessimistic, extremely loyal yet undemonstrative, takes awhile to come out of their shell? Okay maybe she is a Capricorn. Cary seems closest to Virgo, but he doesn’t have a canon birthday.

*Really swaying just between S and N there. Would be S if he wasn’t such an innovative inventor. I hate MBTI’s insistence on dichotomies

**is the only one remotely close, and even it’s not that close

***Counterphobic 6s appear more like 8s than 6s, but Enneagram is more about motives than appearance: her inner motives stem less from a need for power and more from a need to Keep Cary Safe— hyper-vigilant and super-loyal to Cary while suspicious of everyone else? And resistant to change? That’s 6 stuff. My husband’s a counterphobic 6, I care about them. 

****This one was surprisingly hard to nail down. I took so many quizzes from Kerry’s POV because none seemed to fit perfectly, and I kept getting different results. But this one did come up the most.

*****There was a Christmas tree, and the train set seemed new, so likely a few days after Christmas.