Mirror, Mirror

Mirror Mirror Chapter Three
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta… Seriously, I’ll smuggle you over for Samhain in a pumpkin. ;) No one will ever know! InterNutter, TC, Maxwell Pink, Dracena and Greywolf are loverly and wondermous for archiving/hosting. J ProPhile: I’ll send some before tonight. Morgan: *waves* Readers/Reviewers: Thanks all for reading/reviewing as you can!


“Yes… yes, I understand. Thank you for calling and letting me know. I’ll have a word with him immediately. Friday is fine. Noon? No? How’s one o’clock? Yes, that’ll be perfect. Thank you.” Professor Xavier hung up the phone with an air of resignation, giving it a baleful glare before wheeling to the door of his study. He could hear Bobby and Jamie scuffling on the other side, jockeying for position, but they did not seem aware that he was off the phone. “You may enter,” he intoned in a firm, albeit not unkind, voice.
The door creaked open and Bobby stuck his head around the edge. “Um, hi.”
“Jamie, you come in, too.” Professor Xavier folded his hands in his habitual manner, waiting until the boys had shuffled in to the study and shut the door in their wake. “I just received a call from a Mrs. Spindleton over at the library. Do you know her?”
Jamie opened his mouth as if he were going to deny it, but he sighed and nodded. Bobby did not even bother with a response; he stared straight ahead, two high spots of color of his cheeks.
“It seems that her son, Francis, had a bit of a problem today with two teenagers at the library where she works. According to her, two of my students roughed Francis up in the A/V room…” he trailed off, spreading his fingers in an invitation for the youths to speak.
Bobby, still looking straight ahead, spoke in a tone of barely suppressed anger. “Francis,” he spat, “was being an ass. We ignored him until he started shoving up on Rahne and us.”
Jamie nodded, his eyes downcast. “Rahne just walked off, said it wasn’t worth wasting her energy, but Francis said something about her and I sort of got mad…”
“I’m guessing,” Professor Xavier said slowly, “that you did not get hit or otherwise suffer an impact, otherwise the tone of the phone call would have been less angry mother and more panicked and paranoid.” He glanced at Bobby. “Did you hit Francis?”
“What? You’re not gonna read my…”
“Did. You. Hit. Him?”
“Yes. In self defense.” Bobby finally slid his gaze to the Professor. “He called Rahne a slut and he said we were freaks.”
“That is shaky grounds for self defense, Bobby,” Professor Xavier said softly. “I would think you had better scrupples.”
“He…” Jamie’s voice wavered for a moment, but he pressed onward. “Francis said everyone knows about us being mutants. He said we’re…all sorts of horrible things.” His face was now entirely red and his fingers were twisting into knots in his lap. “Professor Xavier, he threatened us. He said his father was in Friends of Humanity and he was in it too and he said they were gonna do stuff to us and to the house and make us examples…”
Professor Xavier cut off the rush of words with a flick of his fingers. He did not have to be a telepath to know the truth behind Jamie’s nervous panic. “Bobby, Jamie, I do not condone your actions and you are requested and required to be present at the meeting with Francis’s mother on Friday. I am not going to ask you to apologize,” he said sharply, talking over Bobby’s threatening grunt of disdain, “but I am going to ask that you be responsible for your actions. You are dismissed to return to biology now. Storm has the class by the lake.” He pointedly turned away and began shuffling papers on his desk as the duo slunk from the room. After a long moment of silence, he mentally paged Emma, reluctant guest of the Institute, to come to his study.

Emma trudged up the stairs like a recalcitrant child. Her home was still in disarray after the Friends of Humanity’s initial attacks a bare month before and she had given most of the students an early fall break. Even as she thought of it, workers were repairing the mansion outside of Boston under Warren Worthington III’s sharp eye. She reached the door of the Professor’s study and sighed. This had better be good, Charles.
“Just come in, Emma. I am not going to play who’s got the bigger cerebellum right now.”
She rolled her eyes, pushing the door open without use of her physical form, and strode in, choosing the divan near the window on which to sprawl elegantly. “What is it now?”
“The Friends of Humanity seem to be riling up the students on a fundamental level… bullying them with teenagers.” Professor Xavier raised a brow at Emma’s disgusted expression. “Emma, we are not abandoning the issue at hand. We’re adding to it.”
“Charles, you can play ostritch all you want but it does not change the fact that, downstairs, you have some sort of a…a..clone of one of your students in cold storage. It does not change the fact that the Morlocks are growing ever more aggressive and it certainly does not change the fact that Jono and Paige are still missing. Do these things even register on your mental view screen or is it out of sight, out of mind with you?” As she spoke, her tone grew increasingly more edged but she did not change her relaxed posture. “Charles, I cannot do this.”
“Never speak to me like that again,” he said softly, his voice cool and sharp like a metal blade. “Life cannot stop for every tragedy, Emma. You should know this by now. The White Queen in her ivory tower is no more. Do not play that card here.” He leaned forward, his hard glare meeting her own gem-toned one. “Logan and Mark are setting after Essex even as we speak. Magneto is not within my reach and I fear he has returned to Essex’s fold in this matter. Tabby, the real Tabby, is as unaware of the clone as can be and it must remain that way. Her grasp of stability is very fragile right now…” he trailed off, huffing out a breath of pure frustration. “Emma, I apologize for snapping but you do not seem to grasp the universal gravity of this situation. It no longer affects us alone. There is an entire world of mutants out there, babies and elderly, teenagers and toddlers and everything in between, that is now enemy number one to a large group of people more than happy to destroy us for no reason other than the fact we are different…”
Emma stood, her long legs moving fluidly as she walked towards her old lover. “Charles, I am afraid it is you who does not understand. It will always be us and them. There will not be any cavalry riding to our rescue. We must be selfish in this matter or we will die.” She grasped his chin between her thumb and forefinger and held his gaze for a long moment before speaking again. “I will look for Jono and Paige myself. I am not afraid to get my hands dirty, as you are.”