Blueshift

Blueshift Chapter Two (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta… I didn’t think it was possible but I think I finally caught up on my sleep, lol. InterNutter, TC, Maxwell Pink and Dracena are loverly and wondermous for archiving/hosting. :) ProPhile: *pats *There’ll be more… Morgan: *gloke *Readers/Reviewers: Danke, thank you, mille grazie, merci!


“Um… February second… Um…Damn it…” Jamie shut off the voice recorder and fiddled with the telescope. “Where the hell is the latitude and longitude on this thing?”
Rahne sighed and stretched out on the floor, obviously bored and not afraid to show it. “Jamie, just leave it. Beast isn’t demanding something detailed… Just a ten page paper…” She yawned and rolled onto her back. “And it’s cold up here!”
He sighed again and fiddled with the telescope, wondering if Rahne could tell he had no idea what he was doing. “Well, you have a built in fur coat…”
“Don’t make me bite your ankles,” she grumped, sitting up. “Jamie, come on… it’s almost ten o’clock… I thought we were going to… you know…” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully, trailing her fingers down the v-neck of her sweater almost languidly.
He nodded, still fiddling with the telescope. “We are… I just want to get this done first. I thought I saw something last night that wasn’t on any of the charts I have from the college and I wanted to see if it was an anomaly or if it’s still there tonight.” He narrowed his eyes, trying to see the tiny numbers better, and hisses a breath through his teeth as he delicately adjusted the telescope. “It was amazing, really… it looked almost like a shooting star but slower…”
“It was probably an airplane,” she sighed in agitation. “We’re under the flight path for a lot of international flights…” She stood and stretched her arms, popping her shoulders and sighing again, this time pointedly. “Come on, Jamie… bed?”
“It wasn’t a plane,” he said, distracted. He found the slice of sky he had been looking at the night before and smiled broadly. “It was way too slow for a plane… it was like it was moving just inches an hour across the ‘scope…”
“Right. Well. Fascinating. Night.” She paused for one long moment, waiting for him to turn around or at least, at the very least, ask her to stay and wait just a moment longer. When all she received in response was a distant “night…” She swore under her breath and stormed down the stairs, making sure her booted tread was hard and loud enough to make the thin window glass rattle in the attic room.
Jamie winced as the door at the foot of the stairs slammed but in truth, he did not realize Rahne had actually gone. He was so focused on the tiny, pale blue light moving almost imperceptibly across his line of vision. When he first saw it, he was sure it was a mistake, his tired eyes causing him to see things that were not there. He had chosen to do this project to get more science credits and maybe skip a semester or two, hoping to catch up with Rahne in the classes at the Institute, but since last night, he had stopped caring about *why * he was doing the project and even the project altogether. He was far more fascinated with the small light now an eighth of an inch further to the west than it had been an hour before. Jamie had been tempted to mention it to Beast but he was afraid he might somehow make it less special by telling someone, make it more a spectacle than something he could call his own. He knew he should tell *someone *… it was important, he knew, especially if it was something new in the field of astronomy. _Someone at the state observatory probably already knows, _ he reasoned. _Or one of the federal ones… _ “After all, “ he muttered to himself, “why should I be the one to do something earthshakingly important like discover a comet?” The sound of footsteps crunching across frost-covered grass carried in the still night air to reach his ears through the open attic window. He frowned and leaned around the telescope to see who was walking out in the cold, fully expecting to see Storm on her now-familiar nightly rounds of the property, walking as she did until the wee hours of the morning. She never spoke of missing Logan or even of looking for him. In fact, she rarely spoke at all unless she had to since the incident with Magneto. Every once in a great while, when some news paper would call or a television station would show up with a camera, she could be counted on to fix them with an icy silence which intimidated them into leaving. Other than that, she seemed to be in her own world. But it was not Storm he saw. Lance and Amara were walking quickly across the silvery landscape, recognizable only by their disparity in height and Amara’s brilliantly white coat. Jamie stared, still frowning. They were heading towards the lake side of the property, going very quickly, and Lance seemed to be mildly struggling with the weight of the backpack giving his shadow a hunchbacked outline. “What the Hell?” Jamie muttered. “Sneaking off to use the boathouse while Scott and Jean are gone?” He leaned further forward, almost out of the window, careful of the telescope, to see which way they went. They passed the boathouse in short order and he lost them to the shadows of the tree line. _Maybe I don’t want to know… the mental image of those two having sex on the freezing cold ground might scar me for life… _
“Jamie?”
“Huh?” He jumped, Rogue’s voice unexpected and loud in the small room. “Sorry!” he gasped, clutching at his chest. “I didn’t even hear you come in!”
“Yeah, well,” she raised a brow at the telescope. “That explains what Rahne was bitching about… Anyway, Storm thinks she’s found Logan. She and Banshee and Warren are going to go look…” She smiled, seemingly against her will. “I’m not supposed to tell you that yet. But you’re wanted downstairs for a quick meeting with Professor Xavier about what’s going on…”
He nodded. “Okay. Right…” He glanced back at the telescope and felt it almost pulling him back with the promise of undiscovered secrets. “But…”
“But nothing. The stars have been there for billions of years. They’ll wait half an hour!” She rubbed her hands over her mesh-covered arms and stomped her booted feet. “Jesus, Jamie… it’s twenty degrees outside! How can you stand it in here?”
“It’s not too bad once you go numb,” he shrugged. “And we’re just seeing starlight… chances are the stars themselves burned out ages ago1…”
“Less talk, more walk, Poindexter. Come on…” She grabbed his elbow and tugged him towards the stairs.
Jamie sighed. He glanced one more time at the telescope and let himself be led down the stairs. _Not like it’s going to go that far in half an hour… _
1 A very common and widely used theory is that many of the stars we see actually burned out or shifted to dwarf status ages ago and the light has taken this long to travel down to us across the universe/galaxy. Not all stars but just many.