Persistence of Memory
folder
X-Men - Animated Series (all) › General
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
57
Views:
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Category:
X-Men - Animated Series (all) › General
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
57
Views:
7,459
Reviews:
68
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own X-Men Evolution, or any of the characters from it. I make no money from from the writing of this story.
38
Persistence of Memory Chapter Thirty Eight (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply
A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN
ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta…one month and six days till
Yule! Whoooo! InterNutter, TC Max Maxwell Pink are groovy sparkley people for
archiving. J ProPhile gets…hmmm…ah!
An armadillo-wrangling muse!
Readers/Reviewers: I know the mistake about Artie. Damn.
I’ll see what I can do.
Secondly—HUGE thanks and glomps and happy dances for reading and
reviewing!
“We, uh,
have a little problem,” Forge murmured just above Storm’s ear.
Her smile
stretched to the breaking point, she asked through gritted teeth, “What do you
mean?”
“I can’t
find any of ‘em.”
“Any of who?”
“Jean,
Scott, Rogue, Amara, Lance, Todd…
Kurt’s looking for Logan right now and I know where Kitty is…”
“Jubilee?”
“Uh…”
“Remy?” she
asked desperately, her smile slipping.
“Um…”
“Goddess,
grant me strength!” Smoothly, she
stepped away from Forge and crossed to Stevens, the reporter from Channel
Four. “Excuse me for a moment,” she
interrupted his conversation with a very stilted Banshee. “I need to steal him away from you for just
a few minutes before we get the interviews underway.”
“Sure,”
Stevens smiled. “Mind if I look
around?”
Forge
stepped up. “I’ll show you the main rec
room and the downstairs library…” He
led off the reporter, who was not sure if he should protest or not.
“What is
it?” Banshee asked sotto voce.
“Something’s wrong…”
Storm
relayed what Forge had told her. “We
can give him and the photographer the tour first, and hopefully Jean and Scott
will turn up by then…” At least
those two, please!
Banshee
sighed painfully. “Okay. You deal with the tour. I’ll get Warren and we’ll see who we can
turn up.”
Storm
pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes.
“Bright Lady, let this go well…”
“What the
fuck…”
“Scott,
traffic on the bridge shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“How can
you be so calm about this? We’re almost
an hour late!”
“There’s
nothing we can do about it, so why worry?”
“Jean!”
“Scott,”
she sighed, sinking lower in her seat, “I just had a huge, massive, painful clinical
where I had to insert a catheter into some poor guy. It broke. Into three
pieces.”
“Eeeeesh…” He looked faintly sick at the notion.
“So you can
see that being late is the least of my worries,” she continued. “At any rate, they still have the others,
except Kitty. They’ll be fine! We’re not even students there anymore
anyway…”
Scott shook
his head, inching the car forward another two inches. “I hate being late.”
Jean made a
noise somewhere between a snort and a sigh.
“Scott, they’ll be fine. It’s a
simple interview and they had the questions written out beforehand.”
He fell
silent for a few minutes, hissing under his breath when someone in a too-large
SUV tried to cut between them and a panel truck. “Did anyone…notice you today?”
It took
Jean a second to realize he had changed topics. “No, not like that.”
“Not like
that? Like how then?”
“Mr. Green
noticed when I broke the catheter…”
“Ah. So no one noticed you’re one of the people
plastered all over the news?”
“That shot
of me on Dr. Reyes’s office security tape is from the back. You can only see the side of my face for,
like, a split second. No one
noticed. And my name wasn’t made
public, though I guess anyone who wanted to look it up could. It’s just me and Tabby working for Dr.
Reyes.” That thought seemed to make her
more sober, less flippant. “Have you heard names on the news?”
“Just the
ones from Bayville High,” he said tersely, honking the car’s horn as the SUV
came dangerously close to broadsiding them.
“Things
aren’t going to be fine,” she sighed.
It was not a question so much as a statement. “Things won’t be fine ever again, will they?” She did not expect or receive and answer.
Tabby
jostled Lucas on her hip, trying to dig his pacifier out of her jacket pocket
and failing miserably. “Wanda, could
you take him?”
Wanda
glared at her girlfriend but took her nephew all the same. “Hey, Luke.
You probably don’t know it yet, but your mom doesn’t love me.”
“Wanda!” Tabby brandished the slightly linty pacifier
at the Scarlet Witch and frowned.
“Don’t talk like that in front of him!”
“I’m very,
very mad at you…”
“Wanda,”
she sighed, ta a h a huffy Lucas back from her, “what I said last night came
out the wrong way…Look, can we just forget it?”
The
dark-haired girl’s glare softened at the pleading look in Tabby’s eyes. “Okay. We’ll talk about this later. Let’s just enjoy the few hours freedom.”
“We’re
grocery shopping. How is that
freedom? I miss our apartment. I miss
our turtle.”
“It’s a
fake turtle, Tabs.”
“But he’s
cute!” she sniffed, pocketing the car keys Wanda tossed her. “He reminds me of you?”
“I’m so
ignoring that,” she grumbled, taking Tabby’s hand as they walked up the block
to the grocery store, leaving the station wagon behind them. The street was relatively deserted at that
hour of the afternoon, too early for teenagers but too late for moms to be
shopping or cruising. “We can stop by
the place on our way home, if that makes you feel better.”
Tabby
frowned and looked past Wanda. “Does
she look familiar?”
“Who?” Wanda turned and hissed a curse in
Russian. “Not her…”
“Who is
it?” Tabby asked as Wanda pulled her into a stationary store. Lucas began snuffling and whimpering,
gearing up for a good, loud cry.
“Pray for
Gays.”
“Er…”
“That’s not
the name of her group but that’s what everyone calls it. She’s one of those people who thinks gays
can be ‘cured’.”[1]
“Well,
that’s stupid,” Tabby snorted as Lucas began whining around his pacifier. “How do you know that?”
Wanda’s
features darkened. “Don’t ask.”
Tabby made
a mental note to do just that some time.
“Well, it looks like she’s going into that store so can we get out of
here now? The smell of potpourri makes
me gag.”
Wanda
looked edgier than Tabby had ever seen her, wavering before answering. “Okay.
But let’s go fast…”
Lucas chose
that moment to begin a strange cooing sound, dove like in quality odd oddly
sweet. “What the…”
Wanda
smirked faintly. “Kitty got him doing that… in fact, he’s only ever
done it for her.”
Tabby
frowned and looked around the mostly empty street. “But Kitty’s in the hospital.”
Wanda
shrugged. “Well, maybe he just likes
making the noise…” The clatter of a
trashcan lid made them all jump and Lucas shouted a cry before resuming the
cooing noise.
“Rats,”
Wanda said succinctly.
“There’s no
rats in Bayville.”
“You haven’t
eaten at that place by the interstate, have you?”
The clatter
sounded again and Tabby shifted a practically purring Lucas to her other hip
and produced a handful of plasma balls in her free hand. Wanda had no choice but to follow, pushing
Tabby behind her at the first possible moment.
“Wanda!”
“You’re
holding a baby, for fuck’s sake!”
“She’s
right, you know,” came the barely voiced rejoinder.
“Fuck me…Kitty?”
Kitty was
half-laying, half-sitting next to one of the trash cans in the narrow alleyway
between the stores. The hospital gown
she wore was dirty and more than a little bloody, but it all looked dried. She was pale and shaking and looked like she
might faint. “Take me home, please.”
“What
happened?” Tabby demanas Was Wanda rushed to Kitty’s side.
“Not now,”
Wanda snapped. “Shit…Kitty, stop
phasing!”
“I can’t!”
she mewled. Since the incident at the
hospital, she had not been able to control her phasing, randomly passing in and
out of the state for longer and longer periods of time. She was deathly scared she would not be able
to remain solid at all very soon.
“Okay…Tabby,
go get the car and pull up as close as you can…I’ll try and get her to her feet
or something.”
Lucas
burbled happily at the sight of Kitty as Tabby nodded frantically. “Damn…shit’s always happening to you, girl.”
Kitty
sobbed. “Just take me home!”
I don’t
like this, Charles.
I
have to go alone, Emma. You know as
well as I do how he views any weakness.
Besides, he can’t read me. He’ll
not know about the…gaps.
Emma sighed
and tightened her fingers on the steering wheel. This is juvenile.
Neener
neener neener.
She blinked
in surprise, then laughed. One
hour and I’m coming in.
“Very kind
of you to see me on short notice, Eric.”
“Kindness
has nothing to do with it, Charles…more like concern.” Magneto sat down opposite Professor Xavier
and steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I
understand you’ve been ill…”
His smile
tightened. “I’m feeling much better.”[2]
“I
understand it was that virus nastiness you’ve had before.”
“Now why
would you think that?”
“A hunch.”
“Hmm. Psychic now, are we?”
“Hardly. Just…observant.” Magneto leaned forward and smiled like a shark. “Tell me, Charles, did they give you any
medication to help with the symptoms?”
“Eric, you’re
tiring me. I know what you’re about.”
“You’ve
known for decades, Charles. Decades.”
“I know you’ve
built another one. And you made the
same mistake.”
“What makes
you think it was a mistake?”
Professor
Xavier blinked. “Excuse me?”
“What makes
you think it was a mistake?” He stood
and moved around the desk to lean over the wheel chair bound man. “It’s high time we stopped hiding from the
world, Charles. It’s long past time, in
fact.”
“You’re
making a grave error…”
“Incubus!” Magneto grinned to himself in grim
satisfaction as he watched Professor Xavier buckle and fight against Incubus’s
onslaught. After a moment, the struggle
ceased and Professor Xavier looked up at him, blank-eyed. “Are you done?”
“I think
so,” the Professor answered. “I think
we’re all done here…”
Emma was
greatly bored. Bored to the point of
physical pain. “Hurry up,” she
muttered.
“Ma’am?”
Damn it. A slight, mousy-colored man with watery eyes
was peering in her car window. “What?”
“You’re
parked in a no-parking zone.”
She
frowned. “This is a private street.”
“My
mistake,” he smiled.
Emma had a
bare moment to find this odd before her mind felt like it exploded in her
skull, colors and feelings shattering and reforming into nothingness.
[1] It’s called
reparative therapy and is not only controversial and IMHO, dumb as a bag of
hair. It doesn’t always involve prayer
but it is always a movement to make gays straight. Like there’s a choice.
*snort *
[2] “Bring out
your dead!” “He’s not quite dead yet.” “He will be soon….Can you come back in ten
minutes?” “I’m feeling much better!” Or something similar. Holy Grail. If you’ve seen it, you’d
know what I mean…
Disclaimers Apply
A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN
ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta…one month and six days till
Yule! Whoooo! InterNutter, TC Max Maxwell Pink are groovy sparkley people for
archiving. J ProPhile gets…hmmm…ah!
An armadillo-wrangling muse!
Readers/Reviewers: I know the mistake about Artie. Damn.
I’ll see what I can do.
Secondly—HUGE thanks and glomps and happy dances for reading and
reviewing!
“We, uh,
have a little problem,” Forge murmured just above Storm’s ear.
Her smile
stretched to the breaking point, she asked through gritted teeth, “What do you
mean?”
“I can’t
find any of ‘em.”
“Any of who?”
“Jean,
Scott, Rogue, Amara, Lance, Todd…
Kurt’s looking for Logan right now and I know where Kitty is…”
“Jubilee?”
“Uh…”
“Remy?” she
asked desperately, her smile slipping.
“Um…”
“Goddess,
grant me strength!” Smoothly, she
stepped away from Forge and crossed to Stevens, the reporter from Channel
Four. “Excuse me for a moment,” she
interrupted his conversation with a very stilted Banshee. “I need to steal him away from you for just
a few minutes before we get the interviews underway.”
“Sure,”
Stevens smiled. “Mind if I look
around?”
Forge
stepped up. “I’ll show you the main rec
room and the downstairs library…” He
led off the reporter, who was not sure if he should protest or not.
“What is
it?” Banshee asked sotto voce.
“Something’s wrong…”
Storm
relayed what Forge had told her. “We
can give him and the photographer the tour first, and hopefully Jean and Scott
will turn up by then…” At least
those two, please!
Banshee
sighed painfully. “Okay. You deal with the tour. I’ll get Warren and we’ll see who we can
turn up.”
Storm
pressed the heels of her hands over her eyes.
“Bright Lady, let this go well…”
“What the
fuck…”
“Scott,
traffic on the bridge shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“How can
you be so calm about this? We’re almost
an hour late!”
“There’s
nothing we can do about it, so why worry?”
“Jean!”
“Scott,”
she sighed, sinking lower in her seat, “I just had a huge, massive, painful clinical
where I had to insert a catheter into some poor guy. It broke. Into three
pieces.”
“Eeeeesh…” He looked faintly sick at the notion.
“So you can
see that being late is the least of my worries,” she continued. “At any rate, they still have the others,
except Kitty. They’ll be fine! We’re not even students there anymore
anyway…”
Scott shook
his head, inching the car forward another two inches. “I hate being late.”
Jean made a
noise somewhere between a snort and a sigh.
“Scott, they’ll be fine. It’s a
simple interview and they had the questions written out beforehand.”
He fell
silent for a few minutes, hissing under his breath when someone in a too-large
SUV tried to cut between them and a panel truck. “Did anyone…notice you today?”
It took
Jean a second to realize he had changed topics. “No, not like that.”
“Not like
that? Like how then?”
“Mr. Green
noticed when I broke the catheter…”
“Ah. So no one noticed you’re one of the people
plastered all over the news?”
“That shot
of me on Dr. Reyes’s office security tape is from the back. You can only see the side of my face for,
like, a split second. No one
noticed. And my name wasn’t made
public, though I guess anyone who wanted to look it up could. It’s just me and Tabby working for Dr.
Reyes.” That thought seemed to make her
more sober, less flippant. “Have you heard names on the news?”
“Just the
ones from Bayville High,” he said tersely, honking the car’s horn as the SUV
came dangerously close to broadsiding them.
“Things
aren’t going to be fine,” she sighed.
It was not a question so much as a statement. “Things won’t be fine ever again, will they?” She did not expect or receive and answer.
Tabby
jostled Lucas on her hip, trying to dig his pacifier out of her jacket pocket
and failing miserably. “Wanda, could
you take him?”
Wanda
glared at her girlfriend but took her nephew all the same. “Hey, Luke.
You probably don’t know it yet, but your mom doesn’t love me.”
“Wanda!” Tabby brandished the slightly linty pacifier
at the Scarlet Witch and frowned.
“Don’t talk like that in front of him!”
“I’m very,
very mad at you…”
“Wanda,”
she sighed, ta a h a huffy Lucas back from her, “what I said last night came
out the wrong way…Look, can we just forget it?”
The
dark-haired girl’s glare softened at the pleading look in Tabby’s eyes. “Okay. We’ll talk about this later. Let’s just enjoy the few hours freedom.”
“We’re
grocery shopping. How is that
freedom? I miss our apartment. I miss
our turtle.”
“It’s a
fake turtle, Tabs.”
“But he’s
cute!” she sniffed, pocketing the car keys Wanda tossed her. “He reminds me of you?”
“I’m so
ignoring that,” she grumbled, taking Tabby’s hand as they walked up the block
to the grocery store, leaving the station wagon behind them. The street was relatively deserted at that
hour of the afternoon, too early for teenagers but too late for moms to be
shopping or cruising. “We can stop by
the place on our way home, if that makes you feel better.”
Tabby
frowned and looked past Wanda. “Does
she look familiar?”
“Who?” Wanda turned and hissed a curse in
Russian. “Not her…”
“Who is
it?” Tabby asked as Wanda pulled her into a stationary store. Lucas began snuffling and whimpering,
gearing up for a good, loud cry.
“Pray for
Gays.”
“Er…”
“That’s not
the name of her group but that’s what everyone calls it. She’s one of those people who thinks gays
can be ‘cured’.”[1]
“Well,
that’s stupid,” Tabby snorted as Lucas began whining around his pacifier. “How do you know that?”
Wanda’s
features darkened. “Don’t ask.”
Tabby made
a mental note to do just that some time.
“Well, it looks like she’s going into that store so can we get out of
here now? The smell of potpourri makes
me gag.”
Wanda
looked edgier than Tabby had ever seen her, wavering before answering. “Okay.
But let’s go fast…”
Lucas chose
that moment to begin a strange cooing sound, dove like in quality odd oddly
sweet. “What the…”
Wanda
smirked faintly. “Kitty got him doing that… in fact, he’s only ever
done it for her.”
Tabby
frowned and looked around the mostly empty street. “But Kitty’s in the hospital.”
Wanda
shrugged. “Well, maybe he just likes
making the noise…” The clatter of a
trashcan lid made them all jump and Lucas shouted a cry before resuming the
cooing noise.
“Rats,”
Wanda said succinctly.
“There’s no
rats in Bayville.”
“You haven’t
eaten at that place by the interstate, have you?”
The clatter
sounded again and Tabby shifted a practically purring Lucas to her other hip
and produced a handful of plasma balls in her free hand. Wanda had no choice but to follow, pushing
Tabby behind her at the first possible moment.
“Wanda!”
“You’re
holding a baby, for fuck’s sake!”
“She’s
right, you know,” came the barely voiced rejoinder.
“Fuck me…Kitty?”
Kitty was
half-laying, half-sitting next to one of the trash cans in the narrow alleyway
between the stores. The hospital gown
she wore was dirty and more than a little bloody, but it all looked dried. She was pale and shaking and looked like she
might faint. “Take me home, please.”
“What
happened?” Tabby demanas Was Wanda rushed to Kitty’s side.
“Not now,”
Wanda snapped. “Shit…Kitty, stop
phasing!”
“I can’t!”
she mewled. Since the incident at the
hospital, she had not been able to control her phasing, randomly passing in and
out of the state for longer and longer periods of time. She was deathly scared she would not be able
to remain solid at all very soon.
“Okay…Tabby,
go get the car and pull up as close as you can…I’ll try and get her to her feet
or something.”
Lucas
burbled happily at the sight of Kitty as Tabby nodded frantically. “Damn…shit’s always happening to you, girl.”
Kitty
sobbed. “Just take me home!”
I don’t
like this, Charles.
I
have to go alone, Emma. You know as
well as I do how he views any weakness.
Besides, he can’t read me. He’ll
not know about the…gaps.
Emma sighed
and tightened her fingers on the steering wheel. This is juvenile.
Neener
neener neener.
She blinked
in surprise, then laughed. One
hour and I’m coming in.
“Very kind
of you to see me on short notice, Eric.”
“Kindness
has nothing to do with it, Charles…more like concern.” Magneto sat down opposite Professor Xavier
and steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I
understand you’ve been ill…”
His smile
tightened. “I’m feeling much better.”[2]
“I
understand it was that virus nastiness you’ve had before.”
“Now why
would you think that?”
“A hunch.”
“Hmm. Psychic now, are we?”
“Hardly. Just…observant.” Magneto leaned forward and smiled like a shark. “Tell me, Charles, did they give you any
medication to help with the symptoms?”
“Eric, you’re
tiring me. I know what you’re about.”
“You’ve
known for decades, Charles. Decades.”
“I know you’ve
built another one. And you made the
same mistake.”
“What makes
you think it was a mistake?”
Professor
Xavier blinked. “Excuse me?”
“What makes
you think it was a mistake?” He stood
and moved around the desk to lean over the wheel chair bound man. “It’s high time we stopped hiding from the
world, Charles. It’s long past time, in
fact.”
“You’re
making a grave error…”
“Incubus!” Magneto grinned to himself in grim
satisfaction as he watched Professor Xavier buckle and fight against Incubus’s
onslaught. After a moment, the struggle
ceased and Professor Xavier looked up at him, blank-eyed. “Are you done?”
“I think
so,” the Professor answered. “I think
we’re all done here…”
Emma was
greatly bored. Bored to the point of
physical pain. “Hurry up,” she
muttered.
“Ma’am?”
Damn it. A slight, mousy-colored man with watery eyes
was peering in her car window. “What?”
“You’re
parked in a no-parking zone.”
She
frowned. “This is a private street.”
“My
mistake,” he smiled.
Emma had a
bare moment to find this odd before her mind felt like it exploded in her
skull, colors and feelings shattering and reforming into nothingness.
[1] It’s called
reparative therapy and is not only controversial and IMHO, dumb as a bag of
hair. It doesn’t always involve prayer
but it is always a movement to make gays straight. Like there’s a choice.
*snort *
[2] “Bring out
your dead!” “He’s not quite dead yet.” “He will be soon….Can you come back in ten
minutes?” “I’m feeling much better!” Or something similar. Holy Grail. If you’ve seen it, you’d
know what I mean…