Devourer of Sins

DEVOURER OF SINS CHAPTER TWENTY ONE (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, am I mistaken or did I see Joris ng ang around last night? InterNutter, TC and Mll Pll Pink get oodles and heaps and tons of thanks for archiving! Readers/Reviewers: The Killer Kitties'(tm) robot has run amock! The platypi have fallen back for cover and left me and the ducks surrounded...this won't be pretty.


"Is that all you're gonna wear?" Remy asked with a note of amusement in his voice.
"Why not? You gave it to me..." Jubilee toyed with the silver necklace and smiled slyly up at him. "Is it too much? I can take it off, too..."
"Remy!" Jamie's voice filtered through the wooden door to the Cajun's room. "Come play this game with me and Scott!"
"Kinda busy, homme!" Remy answered, not taking his eyes from Jubilee's scowling face. If looks could kill, the door and Jamie would both be a smoking heap of ash at that moment.
"C'mon!" the younger teenager said plaintively. "You promised! Jubilee can play, too! C'mon, Jubes!"
"Where's Rahne? Why don't the two of you go play?" Jubilee snapped, ignoring Remy's attempt at hiding his snicker.
"She said she wanted to go for a run," Jamie said, his sigh audible through the door. In truth, he was still a little bothered when he saw Rahne in canine form and her beloved runs in the snow were something he could not join in without a fight resulting. "C'mon!"
Jubilee pulled her sweatshirt over her head and gave Remy one hard glare before pasting a smile on her face and flinging the door open. "Sure, Jamie...I'll kick your ass," she chirped. Remy was not sure if she meant on the game or in general so he followed quickly. Jubilee seemed to lose her annoyance with her friend as Jamie set up the game, even running to the kitchen to steal some snacks despite Storm's edict that anyone who ruined their dinner would have dish-duty until Valentine's Day. "Hey, Kit. What're you doing skulking?" Kitty surprised Jubilee, her quiet presence unnoticed until the Asian girl turned with her arms full of food and saw her sitting there, chin propped on her hands and staring out the window at the white landscape.
"Oh...I'm just thinking." She smiled, bright and false, and turned towards Jubilee. "Jamie found someone to play that game with him?"
"Yeah, he sort of harassed me an' Remy into playing." Jubilee shrugged. "Too bad for Remy. He'll just have to get the rest of his present later."
Kitty giggled. "Kurt, too. He and Logan are in the Danger Room."
"On Christmas morning? Does that man ever let up?" Jubilee sighed, rolling her eyes at Logan's persistence.
"Actually, Kurt wanted to this time," Kitty stood and forced herself to follow Jubilee into the rec room even though she wanted nothing more than to go back to bed and feel sorry for herself. "Probably has a lot of stress built up..." she trailed off, remembering belatedly that the others had no real idea about what happened and was happening to three of their friends aat vat very moment.
Jamie snorted. "The way you two are, he should be the most relaxed guy in the Institute."
"Jamie!" three startled voices chorused.
He snorted. "Oh, come on! I'm not three years old! Grow up!"
Kitty smiled, a genuine smile this time, before breaking into gales of laughter. She leaned against Remy as she whooped at Jamie's surprising statement, laughing for the sake of laughing. Remy raised an eyebrow at her, his slight smirk the only acknowledgement of the humor of the situation, Jubilee's bubbling giggles joining Kitty's rolling laughs. "Homme," he said to Jamie, "I dunno what be in dat eggnog, mais I be tinkin' we need ta go get us some o'it..."

The rec room was crowded with mutants by the time Logan entered. Jamie and Remy were in a death match over the video game, Lance and Todd leaning over the back of the couch to cheer on whoever was winning. Jubilee, Jean and Rogue were doing something involving earrings, from what Logan could see, and Kitty was hunched over near the pool table, an expression of extreme concentration on her face, eyes tightly closed. "Half Pint," he murmured, squatting next to her, "you okay?"
"Head hurts..." She had high hopes that morning, her seemingly enhanced senses not as acute as the previous night. Being in the rec room with all the others, though, sent her into overload. She could hear each rustle of fabric, each inhalation of breath. The smell of Remy's cologne was overpowering to her now-sensitive nose as was the scent of Bobby's lust, wafting from his skin like cloying perfume.
"Come on, we're gonna go see Chuckles. He can show you some...methods...for filtering out this stuff." Logan drew her to her feet, all but frog-marching her from the room.
"Can't you show me?" she asked plaintively. Professor Xavier was scaring her with talk of the murders, about mutilated sacrifices. _Would that have been us if Jean hadn't had that weird god thing going on? _ Kitty hated questioning her own mortality and she found that the increasing frequency with which that was happening did nothing to soothe her dislike.
"I've had forever to deal with this sort of thing, Half-Pint. You're not made for this; this isn't your mutation. It's something...something else. The Professor can show you some mental exercises to block out all this crap." _I hope...don't make me a liar, Chuck. _ Kitty sagged against his grip a little as they neared the Professor's study and Logan turned her to face him. "Listen to me, Kitty. You're gonna be fine. This will all blow over soon and this time next month, it'll be like nothin' ever happened, got it?" He offered what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
Kitty sighed. "Logan, don't lie to me. Ever." He was left staring after her as she let herself into the study.

Beast was on his umpteenth cup of coffee when the strangest thing happened. He became clumsy. With one errant slip of his massive hand, he sent the cup tumbling across his lab table, hot coffee soaking notes and texts, splashing onto microscope slides and one Petri dish. "Shit!" he said to the room at large, feeling remotely guilty for using vulgarity, his mother's voice echoing in his head ("Henry! Educated young men never resort to base swearing!"). With a resigned sigh, he scooped up the sodden papers and texts, moving to the dry surface of the countertop to try and save what he could. Most of his notes on the mystery powder were ruined, ink smeared and wet paper ripping at his very touch. The texts fared better, coffee stains marring only a few pages, making them stick in messy sections that he vowed to himself he would separate later, when they dried. _And _ , he added, _I'll cut back on how much sugar I use just in case this happens again. _ The slides were destroyed beyond all hope, samples and stain mingling with the coffee on his work surface. He set the dampened Petri sample aside and swept the remainder of the detritus on the lab table into a trash can, searching for the stack of towels he knew he had brought down just that morning but, much like anything you need desperately, had seemed to disappear at what could have been it's shining moment. "Damn," he uttered, feeling less guilty than before. He wiped down the table top with a dingy lab coat destined for the laundry anyway and, less than an hour after the spill, settled back before his microscope. The sample in the dish was less than half of the original amount, the scattered remains in Kitty's room having been vacuumed up before he could collect more. Silently cursing whoever had decided to become a clean freak that day, Beast set to salvaging what he could of the powder. "Gah! Sticky mess..." he whispered to himself, lumps of the coffee-soaked substance sticking to his fur. As he searched for the discarded lab coat to wipe it off, he noticed something singularly odd-the powder seemed to be moving. As he stared at his fingers, the white grains wiggled like lice, separating from the clumps to spread across his blue fingers before speeding in separate directions, diving and crawling through his fur like madmen. With a sudden realization that he had no idea if what he had on him was toxic or not, Beast leapt to his feet and, holding his arm out in front of him, rushed to grab a clean slide from the cabinet, scraping as many of the grains onto the glass as he could before dousing his arm in the sink, making sure the stopper was in place to catch the now-tainted water.
The first two level of magnification showed him nothing, just white, wiggly grains. The next, though, made the doctor fall back in his chair. The grains had tendrils, moving, writhing tendrils and they were linking to each other to make one long, solid mass. He was put strangely in mind of Barrel-o-Monkeys1 as he watched, mouth agape at the sight before him. Belatedly realizing he should be recording what he was seeing, Beast felt blindly across the table and grabbed a pad of paper and pen. He hardly looked at what he wrote as the sample seemed to pulse, it's color shifting from white to palest pink, then slowly to purple, going through every shade in between. The sample seemed to stop then, making him wonder if it had died or something similar, when it became a cerulean blue with a visual "pop." Blinking twice, Beast looked at his own hand and saw the same color, the sample matching his fur exactly. A skittering noise to his left made him look over and he saw the Petri dish rattle and slide like a top, moving towards the microscope. He could only watch as the dish spun, powder flying out in an array like a tornado, making him cover his eyes in anticipation of being blinded. When he realized that no such thing was about to happen, Beast peered out between closed fingers, slowly sliding his hands down his face. There, in front of him, was an exact replica of his own arm. Fingers wiggled experimentally, tapping the table top and stretching. "Oh, Gods...what fresh hell is this?"2

1 Little plastic monkey things that come in a plastic barrel. You're supposed to make 'em link arms and see how many you can pick up at once. Wahoo fun, huh?
2 Shakespeare, anyone?