Persistence of Memory

Persistence of Memory Chapter Fifty Seven (NC-17)

Disclaimers Apply

 

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST
WOMAN ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta…because I’ve neglected
to say this in a while: Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!! InterNutter, TC, and Maxwell Pink (and soon to be Dracena) are
super wonderful sparkley lovely people for archiving! ProPhile is smutastic.
Readers/Reviewers: The
ducks! They’re swarming! Arrrrrgh!
*ahem * Aside from that, thank
you!!!!!!!!

 

 

 





Rogue
lunged first. Her bare hands came into
contact with Scatterbrain’s temples and they both bowed and arched with the
draining sensation. With a gasping cry,
she fell free and landed on her knees as he slumped to the floor. “Go!” Jean screamed. Rogue spun and lurched into the heart of
the machine, followed by Kitty and Amara.
Jean and Wanda traded scared glances as everything swung into chaotic
motion.

“Block the door,” Wanda ordered.
“Hold it closed until they’re done.”

Jean nodded firmly, her mind
snapping the sliding door to the chamber and Cerebro shut with a sharp slamming
sound. She was just in time, too. A hard thump dented the door they had just
come through, a roar barely muffled by the metal. “Sabretooth,” she breathed. “Unless your father’s keeping lions.”

“Not last I heard,” Wanda
muttered. “Damn it. I can’t bind him well.”

“Don’t worry about him. Keep Scatterbrain down.” Jean gritted her teeth and exerted all her
effort to keep the doors sealed.

“Right,” Wanda said. “I hope this doesn’t take long,” she
muttered. “I hate waiting.”

 

Kitty and Amara each supported
Rogue by the elbow as they helped her position herself to use the machine. “Are you sure…” Kitty began.

“Positive,” Rogue responded through
gritted teeth. “I can do this. Just…need a sec…” She closed her eyes and
forced Scatterbrain’s personality and powers to the fore. She did not know how
long this would last and dreaded the headache coming. “Okay.” It was such an
odd feeling, this willful projection.
She could see and feel so many people, so much activity…It was a great
effort not to panic and give into the urge to run from the chamber. Instead, she let Scatterbrain do the work
for her. Nascent ideas were nipped at
the root, dead before they could take form.
Instead, bland nothingness took it’s place, a blank slate to be filled
in later by the Professor. Any and all
knowledge of mutants, as far as she could reach with Magneto’s flawed Cerebro,
was gradually being erased thanks to the fatal error in the programming that
sent rather than received.

Kitty winced at a resounding thud
from beyond the metal doors. “I hope
that wasn’t us.”

Rogue slid to the floor and
shuddered. “I think that’s it.”

“Good,” Amara breathed. “Now, Kitty.”

Kitty braced herself, not sure of
her powers after the uncontrollable phasing of mere days before, but she forced
herself onward. With a barely felt
whisper of sensation, she passed through the main control center of Cerebro,
the resulting electronic shorts plunging the room into darkness as one circuit
after another flipped. “That went
quicker than I thought,” Kitty breathed, patting herself convulsively to check
her solidity. “Amara?”

“On it.” She became as fire in the dark, an eerie sight even for those who
knew her. She pressed her hands against
the shorted controls, the smell of burning wires and melting metal filling the
air with acridity. In short order,
Magneto’s Cerebro was destroyed.

Rogue managed to her to her feet
without help, but she swayed dangerously.
“Let’s go,” she muttered thickly.

Kitty phased them out into the main
room and nearly stumbled over Sabretooth, laying a few feet from the door. The door to the hallway was torn open like
so much foil and Wanda was bleeding from a cut on her forehead. “What happened?”

“Don’t ask,” Jean groaned. “Come on…”


 

Nothing. It had all come down to nothing.
If he had been a lesser man, he would have thrown a fit like a
child. Instead, sat on the front porch
of his old house and stared out into the darkening night. The deep ruts left by the Blackbird were
virtually hidden in the velvet dusk but he could smell burning rubber even out
here. He knew without being told what
was happening in Bayville. He knew that
Charles would be “cleaning up” after the messy mind wipe by one of his students
and he knew that, come morning, almost no one would remember ever hearing about
the mutants at Bayville. There would be
some question should anyone decide to look through backlogs of newsreels, but
he was fairly certain Charles had his fingers in those pies, too, and it would
all disappear neat as a pin within days.
It was sad, really, he reflected, the lengths to which they each would
go to protect their precious mutations, to ensure a future for their kind. His experiment was destroyed thoroughly, the
saving grace being that the structure of the lab was such that the house was
saved. Sabretooth was sulking as was
Mystique, but he had sent them both to Bayville with Pietro to continue with
the Brotherhood there. “Like nothing
happened?” Mystique demanded.

“Just like that,” Magneto replied.
“We persevere.”

“We’re dumbasses,” she muttered as
she stalked to the waiting car. Magneto
pretended not to hear. Instead, he
ordered Evan and Piotr to go with the departing trio mad made himself a cup of
tea. Saint Anna performed her final
healing and was summarily dismissed, her pockets heavier for her efforts. Scatterbrain had apparently departed in
shame after, as Sabretooth had put it, being beaten up by teenaged girls.

Magneto’s tea was now stone cold and
abandoned beside him on the creaky Adirondack chair, hosting several gnats of
dubious swimming skills. “There is a
time for everything…” he murmured to the night sky. “A time to sow and a time to reap.”[1] He picked up his tea and considered it
thoughtfully. I’ve sown the seeds,
Charles. Will you survive the
winnowing?

 

Professor Charles Xavier, Headmaster of the Xavier
Institute for Gifted Youngsters in Bayville, New York, is pleased to announce
the formation ful full time boarding school in addition to the part time
option available to students and parents.
With the new program, students will have the option to take intensive
courses on campus and develop their natural talents as well as the option to
take classes for half days at the local high school and more intensive classes
in the afternoons at the Institute.
Professor Xavier would also like to announce the addition of several new
faculty members including Ms. Emma Frost, deputy headmistress of the
school.

“Does that sound too…too?” Storm
asked, folding the paper back to show Logan the blurb.

“It sounds like a damned travel
brochure,” he snorted, pushing it back to her.
“Why the Hell did he do that?”

“Head ‘em off at the pass,” she
murmured, mildly amused. “He thinks,
and I’m inclined to agree, that making us less of a mystery is going to go a
long way to head off any lingering suspicion.”

“I thought he did one of those mind
wipes or something. That’s why he’s
still in med at ten in the morning, isn’t it?”


“He did, but you know as well as I
that he could not get every person in the world. Sooner or later, someone who was not…wiped…will come forward with
accusations. If we appear to be an
upper class boarding school with no secrets, we are less likely to have
problems.”

“I’d rather think we ain’t gonna
have problems.”

Storm fixed him with a quelling
look. “You know as well as I that isn’t
true. The world may not be ready to
know of us yet but there will be a time when it is inevitable.”

“Let me have my little illusions.”

 

 

A/N One more chapter… I cut this in
half because it would have exceeded 4000 words and that’s just too much for one
email, lol. So tomorrow, you get all
the aftermath and prep for the next story.
G Oh, and SMUT!



[1] Ecclesiastes.