Carne Vale

CARNE VALE CHAPTER FIFTY TWO (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply


A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, how's Joris feeling? Still have a cold? And when dragons sneeze, do they scorch things? InterNutter (congrats on the new domain!!!), TC and Maxwell Pink are spiffy. :) They archive and have supercool sites...*g* Readers/Reviewers: One annoyed authoress, coming up...I had to do field day with some special ed kids this week and I forgot sunscreen. Well, part of the fun of field day (allegedly) is painting of faces...I had a peace sign on my forehead and hearts on my cheeks like some strange rag doll. Now, I have a sunburn everywhere except where the paint was. Just bad enough to show the white clearly...*sigh* The Killer Kitties (tm) and their Killer Minions (tm) are laughing...loudly.

"Yo, dude...wake up..."
"I don't wanna go to school, mom..."
"Lance, you freak, wake up!" Rogue punctuated her words with a shove to his shoulder. Lance groaned slightly and opened his eyes to see Rogue, Todd, Jubilee, Remy, Beast and Doctor Reyes staring down at him. "Told ya he wasn't dead."
"I think," Beast said with the barest of smiles, "we had already established that fact... Lance, can you tell me what happened?"
Lance closed his eyes again and exhaled noisily through his nose. "How'd I end up in the med lab?"
Todd spoke up, sounding confused. "It was fuckin' insane, man... you came downstairs holding one of these dohickeys," he held up a package wrapped in plastic sheeting, "said we had to go, then fell out right in front of me."
"Fell out?" Cecilia questioned, sounding as if she were comparing information.
"Boom. Flat on his back. Out cold. Drooled and everything."
"How'd I get here though?" Lance said, his mouth feeling as if it had been scrubbed with cotton wool.
"Dragged ya to the car and drove home." Todd sounded mildly proud of himself.
"Dragged me?"
"Yeah."
"To the car?"
"Yeah..." Todd wisely stepped back the moment before Lance swatted at him woozily. "What was that for?"
"No wonder my ass hurts...you dragged me fifty feet you twit."
Rogue felt moved to defend her boyfriend. "Stuff it up your ass, Lance. At least he didn't leave you there..."
"Children," Beast intoned, feeling more like a referee than a doctor, "now that you see he is fine, I would like a word alone with the patient. Pardon me...we," he corrected with a significant glance at Cecilia, "would like a word..."
Lance tried to sit up but fell back, his headache making him think twice about movement. "No," he said finally. "I need to talk to them...to the Brotherhood."
An uncomfortable silence fell immediately. It had been a long time since any of them had considered themselves to be Brotherhood, even Lance and Todd had not used that name in reference to themselves for a while. "Chere," Remy said lightly, "why don' you go upstairs an' wait fer me?"
"Scuse me?" she said, incredulous. "I'm not soiftiifties housewife you can send outta the room when the talk goes over my head!"
Lance put in sharply, before Jubilee could gain a full head of steam, "Incubus."
Rogue's eyes narrowed. "Who?"
Todd had taken on a sick pallor as he shook his head, partially in denial of Lance's assertion and partially to Rogue. "It was after you left...right around the time Wanda first blew through town..."
Jubilee's brows quirked. "Incubus? As in a sex demon?"
Cecilia cleared her throalicalicately. "Actually, an incubus is thought to be the male version of an ancient spirit known as a Watcher or Elohim, angels who loved humans so much they were banished to earth and..."
Beast coughed and Cecilia ground to a halt. "Yes, a sex demon, in simple terms...an incubus is male, a succubus is female."
Cecilia sighed. "I was getting to that..."
"Anyway," Jubilee said, rolling her eyes, "I'm not leaving."
Rogue, a little less defiantly but just as firmly, said, "Me either..." If it bothered Todd enough to make him revert to his former, twitchy state, she definitely wanted to know what this Incubus was, exactly.
Lance scowled. His headache was receding, unlike his foul mood. "Fuck it. Whatever. Incubus is back and he's got Pietro tied up somehow...Quicksilver was all...weird. Weirder than usual...like he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal."
Beast seemed interested. "How do you mean, weird? Was he twitching? Did he move slower than usual?"
"Just...weird," Lance sighed, already exasperated. "Look, long and short of it is, Incubus is back and Pietro was talking about new recruits...my old room was all fucked up, like it was a prison cell."
Remy shifted from one foot to the other, lost in thought for a moment. "I only talk ta Incubus one time...Magneto, he call me an' him an' some gens from his...varied operations..." For the first time most of them could remember, Remy looked shaken. "Dis homme, he not right. I mean, all us a little off, eh? Mais...he powerful strange. You never be knowin' what he look like...Magneto tol' us it were on 'count o' his mutation. Seem he kin warp what you be seein'. He kin hide in plain sight..."
"Why the name Incubus? Wait," Rogue said, "let me guess...he has sex a lot?"
Todd snorted. "He said he gets his energy from sex and blood."
Beast raised both shaggy brows. "Actually, there is a psychological condition of vampirism, where people believe they need to consume blood to survive or it becomes a replacement for sex or other physical affection..."
Cecilia nodded, her mind flipping into doctor-mode. "And some people engage in pranic vampirism ,which is a form of energy exchange akin to deep mediation that involves sexual energy."
Jubilee stared at the adults. "Do you two ever watch anything that isn't on PBS?"
Rogue made shushing motions at her friend. "What I want to know is what the Hell is so creepy about this guy that the entire Brotherhood was running scared and we've never even heard of him?"
Lance, Todd and Remy exchanged uneasy glances. Once again, Remy became spokesperson for the group. "He the boogey man dat scare de boogey men."
Jubilee felt her expression slide to disbelief. "You mean this joker had all of you afraid of him?"
Beast frowned deeply. "Okay, that's enough for now. Lance, you rest here for a few hours. The rest of you, upstairs. And this, needless to say, goes nowhere. Got it?" There was a round of nods, but Beast homed in on Jubilee. "Got it?"
"Got it, got it!" she snapped, scowling.
Remy was the last one to leave, lingering as Rogue hooked her arm through Todd's and led him from the infirmary. Beast and Cecilia pretended not to notice the Cajun speaking in low tones to Lance for a few minutes before sliding a look their way and leaving as if he had not a care in the world. Lance seemed to be dozing off when Beast said, "The package Scott brought seems to be the same thing Todd had...the X rays showed nothing and additional analysis showed powder of unknown origin and seemingly benign."
"I leave tomorrow to go back to the city...do you want me to take a sample and see if I can get more information from the hospital's equipment?"
Beast nodded. "That would be wonderful, Cecilia. As it is, I need to see Charles immediately..."
"Lance! What happened to you?" Amara's voice preceded her.
Cecilia smiled ruefully. "I'll deal with her...you go see Charles." Turning from Beast's shy smile, she strode towards the fretting Nova Roman. "Please let go of his heart monitor!"


"Come on you slow piece of...ha!" Kitty bounced in her seat and clapped her hands. "Got it!"
"Got what?" Kurt asked, looking up from the tedium of math. Kitty had persuaded him with very little effort to stay and do his homework in her room while she did some work on the computer. "And can you get rid of it?"
"Goof. Your girlfriend is a genius." She grinned and tapped her feet happily on the floor. "A certifiable genius!"
"Proud much, Liebes?" he asked, though smiling, as he shut his text book and slid off the bed, crossing to her in one stride. "What the..."
"This, my favorite blue fuzzy elf, is the website Duncan had my picture on, my heavily doctored picture, at that. With one small change, though..." She scooted to one side to give Kurt a better view of the screen. Kitty had, through some carefully hacking and covering of her tracks, turned it into a shrine to Duncan and women's underwear. "Oh, wait! Let me turn up the volume..." She fiddled with the speakers and Kurt was blasted with "I'm Too Sexy," by Right Said Fred.1 The picture of Duncan in the lace thong panties, taken not so long ago on the night of the ill-fated dance, was wreathed with dancing figures, female bodies topped with Duncan's head.
"Katzchen," he said after a stunned pause, "I think I'm a little afraid of you."
"It's pretty crude, actually...and I know it was Duncan because I was able to find out who paid for the domain...his name's all over the credit card."
"You can find that sort of thing out?" Kurt let out a low whistle. "You're more into this computer stuff than I thought."
"Love me anyway?"
"Always." Kurt found the image on the screen horribly transfixing. "Kitty, could you make that stop...I think I'm going cross eyed..."
Kitty giggled and shut down the computer, turning in her chair to face Kurt. "I think that things will start looking up soon."
"Because you're burning Duncan?"
"Well, that's a factor..." she smiled almost slyly. "I just have a good feeling about Miss Blau being so helpful. I mean, yeah it's weird, but I've been thinking and maybe it's only weird in relation to Kelly. Maybe she's just nice..."
Kurt frowned a little. "I don't know, Schatz...something about her just doesn't seem right to me. And her name is just the tip of the iceberg."
"So what about her name...it's no worse than Pryde, really. Or LeBeau!"
Kurt sighed. "Never mind, Liebes...I'm probably just overreacting!"
Kitty raised a brow. "Okay, then...if you say so..." she shrugged and stood, forcing Kurt to step back or risk her running into him. "Before I forget..." she reached into her desk drawer and produced a cross made of a palm frond. "You left your frond on the kitchen table Sunday..."
Kurt took the cross from between her fingers and blinked in surprise. "Danke...I've never been able to get this right. How do you know how to do it?2"
"Yaya had a Catholic neighbor who used to come sit with her when she was really sick. I was over one Sunday and she showed me how to do it. I guess it'll come in useful if I ever have to pass for a Catholic, huh?"
"The fact you can't make the Sign of the Cross will tip off the Vatican Police, Liebes," Kurt sighed, teasing her with a sad shake of his head. She stuck her tongue out at him and poked him in the chest. "Is that any way to treat your boyfriend, the one who roughed up Ferret Boy?"
"My hero," she deadpanned, fluttering her eyelashes at him. "Does that mean you're going to beat up every guy at school who calls me a slut tomorrow or who's seen those pictures? What about the ones who get on Todd's case? Are you going to jump them, too?"
"First off, I didn't jump anyone! I just...shook him down. Second, if I have to, I'll knock the hell out of anyone who so much as looks at you wrong!" he said defiantly.
Kitty sighed. "Kurt, that'll just get you in trouble and you know it. We just have to let this go. Sooner or later, someone else more interesting will come along..." she nodded towards her computer. "Hopefully sooner rather than later. Part two of this little plan involves Lance, so next time you see him, send him my way, would you?"
"Lance? What's he got to do with this?"
"Lance has been seconded to the yearbook committee in the Professor's efforts to keep us involved in school activities. It'd be a shame if this picture wound up in the Bayville yearbook, wouldn't it?"
"Pure evil, Liebes...pure evil..."




1 Take the bad music away, I'm begging you!!!!
2 Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter. A popular practice is to make a cross of the frond you get at Mass, but I've never been able to figure it out, even when I was Catholic.