Someone's been sitting in my chair [Angie, Pyro]

[Nightingale]

"So touch me please, I cannot stand the way you tease, and I love you though you hurt me so, I've got to pack my things and go..." She sang along quietly to a live version of 'Tainted Love' by The Living End. Angie had been glad to find the computer - it was in a room marked 'Office' on the maps stuck to the walls, and she'd found a note taped to it that told her to use Guest for the login and password. Though she wished that she had her laptop, with all of her settings and things, that was back in Australia - and hopefully in Read's care, rather than sold or given away by her mother. There were ways and means, though, and Angie looked down at the little USB hard-drive that carried her life in it. She hadn't plugged it into anything since she'd left her home country, wanting to be careful about viruses in net cafes, but now that she was settled down in one place again she wanted to hear some different music. If she could have, she'd have burnt the 30 tracks that she'd been stuck with on her mobile phone - in the destroying sense, that was. In fact, if she'd had her own computer, she would have burnt them onto a CD and stomped it in a little ritual. But she wasn't on her computer, so she contented herself with deleting them from her usual playlist and was happily singing away to other music as she surfed the 'net.

The song changed as she replied to an email from Babs, which was half in French, by the looks of it. Dude, English, remember? I'm glad to hear that you've met a hot French boy, but seriously... I don't do languages, remember? Miss you love. ~NG She'd stopped studying any languages when she moved to Queensland, and it had turned out fine when she'd met Nat - or Babelfish, as they called her, after the creature in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As it was, she could count to ten in German, and say 'Bless you' when someone sneezed, but that was about it. Babs always took care of them if they needed to know anything that wasn't in their native tongue.

"And when I touch your hand, it's then I understand, the beauty that's within, it's now that we begin... You always light my way, I hope there never comes a day, no matter where I go, I always feel you so... Cause you're everywhere to me..." Her volume had increased, because she didn't think anyone was around to hear, and she tapped out a blog entry as she sang away.

So I'm finally settled in somewhere, thankfully, and I can tell you right now that mum's never going to be able to stick me with any of her medicines here. Won't say too much, but hopefully I'll chat to you kids sometime soon. Get on trillian, will yas - what, people are actually sleeping these days? What have you turned into without me there?

As the song changed to 'Pretty' by Korn, Angie sat back. Her voice wasn't unpleasant in a certain range of notes, though it wasn't the kind of thing people would pay to hear. The way that Jonothan Davis sang, though, was not in her good range, and she simply enjoyed listening to it as she checked out her regular sites.

"Why is nothing going on? Ungh." She was talking to herself. That had to be a bad sign. Firing off another email to Read, checking up on whether he'd gotten her stuff, she was surprised to see an instant reply. Her own reply was a bit snippish - Why the hell aren't you on any of your messengers? - but she was awarded with an IM screen popping up for her.

They had a quick conversation, in which he told her that it was 4am and he was heading to bed, and Angie found herself back on her own. He'd gotten her stuff, though, and she was hoping that she'd be able to visit sometime and get it off him. And not just get her stuff, but actually see him - Read was her best friend in the whole world, and she'd been away from him for far too long.

Sighing and thinking about whether to just go to bed and try to sleep, she tapped on the metal desk in time to the next song that had come on - MXPX's 'Move to Bremerton' - and tried to resist the urge to hit refresh for the five-hundred-and-sixth time.

"I'll change the street signs you drive down, so you end up in my town... I'll redraw the maps all one by one, so they all lead to Bremerton... Drop out of school and run away... Quit your job, you've got a place to stay. Pack your bags and hitch a ride, Bremerton's a good place to reside..." She did a little seated dance during the chorus. "If you own a brain and use it too, you've gotta know I have a crush on you... I'm a sucker for a level headed girl with a pretty smile, she gots to have ideas, yeah, and she gots to have style..."

She couldn't help it. She hit 'refresh' again.

[Nightingale]

"You're sitting in my chair," came a voice from the doorway. Pyro stood there, leaning against the door frame, looking rather irritated at the fact that he'd come inside to find his office had been taken over. He was totally paranoid about the perceived power of what had once been Magneto's office and his mood wasn't helped at all by the fact that this...girl was sitting in his seat.

It was extremely rare that Pyro used his position as self-styled leader of the Brotherhood to demonstrate any sort of power over people, but then his head wasn't in a very good space right now and his next sentence was perhaps harsher than he meant it.

"I suggest you finish what you're doing. If you wanted access to a computer, there's others on the base, you need only ask. But this is my office and I don't appreciate people snooping about in here."


Freezing halfway through a line when she realised that someone was in the doorway, Angie looked up with a deep blush to see Pyro looking down at her. She hadn't been shown her way around the base yet, hadn't been told where anything was, and she'd been ecstatic when she'd managed to find a computer. John's rebuke made her face fall, though, and she shut down the music player and unplugged her hard drive, slipping it into a pocket.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't sleep and... This was marked on the maps, no-one's shown me around yet." She'd just been glad that she'd managed to find her room again - the base didn't seem to have too many distinguishing features. For that matter, Angie hadn't even seen what was outside, yet, she'd just been left to her own devices, high and dry in an unfamiliar place that she hadn't even been awake to see for her first arrival.

"I wasn't snooping, when I saw the note about the guest login I assumed that it was ok for other people to use it. Sorry Pyro." Standing up to vacate the seat, she wondered for a moment why he wasn't with Mystique. Her cheeks warmed again.


His mood switched almost instantly to one of guilt.

"Ah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound so harsh. I just have ... y'know. A thing about this office. I have days when it's like my protective armour, proof that I'm really here, that I'm really doing all this crazy stuff. Sit down." He waved her back into the seat and flopped himself down on the other chair, sending all the papers that had formed part of the NovaTeX research flying.

"Still a bit cranky from the journey," he lied, smoothly. It was feasible enough. "Couldn't sleep, so I figured I'd go out and get some air in my lungs. Nice thing about being here, at least the air is clean. Did you notice how foul the Baltimore air was?" He was rambling and was faintly aware of it. "I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn. Coming out here was like heaven."


"That's all good, everyone's got their thing." What hers was, now that her life had undergone a complete upheaval, was hard to say. She sat back down, feeling a bit awkward now that she knew this was his chair, and switched off the computer screen. As John sat down, papers went flying, and Angie had to smile at the state of the office. Maybe that was her thing - she was a bit of a minimalist. Didn't keep things that she didn't need, had places for everything and everything in it's place. That was why it was easy enough for her to live out of a backpack - she didn't need six pairs of shoes for every occasion, and as long as she had the essentials she could get by.

"I haven't been outside yet, actually, so I can't say I've really noticed a difference. Baltimore certainly got bad by the end of it, but I've always lived in cities, near the hospitals so mum could get to work quickly when they needed her." She wondered idly what had happened to her mother in all of that - she'd lost a lot of energy thanks to the stupid ice-boy who'd made her heal the bullet wound, and she wondered whether she still would have passed out if he'd never grabbed her. A faint redness was visible on her neck, the ice burn she'd received from his frozen hands.

"Where exactly is here, anyway?" She still didn't know much about the base, or even that much about the Brotherhood, though she was getting snippets here and there.


"'Here' is Genosha," he said, and there was fierce pride in his voice. "We're roughly forty miles south east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean. Pretty well fortified: only easy access is by air, although there's one sailor who can navigate the rocks. Magneto built it. Out here, we're relatively unbothered, unless you count the wild animals out in the jungle, but they tend not to come anywhere near the base. Provides us with a constant source of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. Gill deals with all that stuff. Python ships things in from the mainland from time to time. We're pretty self sufficient."

He picked up one of the sheets of paper and rather absently began folding it into a paper aeroplane.

"We have another base in Alaska as well, although we've not been up there for some time." He paused briefly and closed his eyes against a fresh wash of pain in his head.


"Genosha." She repeated the word softly, to familiarise herself with it. When Pyro mentioned Gill, Angie smiled again."Gill, yeah, I met him - he's the one... that smokes a lot, yeah?" She'd been about to say 'He's the one with a head like a fish,' but that could have been rude. Sure, her mutation wasn't obvious to look at - although, long sleeves and mittens in the height of summer did sometimes provoke curiosity - but she had to remember that every mutant was different. Some more so than others.

As Pyro closed his eyes, a flicker of a frown flashed across his forehead, and Angie cocked her head to one side. "Got another headache?" She'd only touched him a couple of times, but each of them had revealed a headache that felt like it had been boring away at his brain for months, along with the rest of it. "I could..." She motioned to her own temple with her bare fingers. Though her mittens had slits in the palms that meant she could type in them, if she wanted to, it was easier to just take them off and put them in a pocket, which was what she'd done.


"Yeah, Gill does smoke a lot." The barest flicker of a smile crossed his face. None of them had ever really fully understood just what Gill's mutation was, apart from the very obvious fact that he looked like a fish. He claimed that he hated the water and didn't swim. But he was invaluable around the base.

When Angie suggested healing his headache, he shook his head. "No point," he said. "It'll only come back. It lifted when you healed my arms before, but came back about an hour later."

A shudder of anxiety ran through him.

"They've been getting steadily worse for about six months," he said, not knowing why he was telling her. "Some days they're not there at all, other days...I've been panelled to the floor by them."


His words made her frown, in concern and puzzlement. When Angie healed a physical problem, as long as she held on long enough, it was gone. Something that grew worse with time, like for example cataracts, would return if she didn't get rid of them completely, but from what she could tell when she was touching Pyro, there was no physical cause for his headaches. If it was a tumour, she'd have felt it, so it must be mental - and that was the kind of thing that she couldn't fix, even if she could feel that there was something wrong. She'd felt the oddness in Aurora that had turned out to be a second personality, and she could feel an oddness in Pyro that was no doubt the cause of these headaches. In her experience, though, most men didn't want to know about anything that was wrong with them, preferring to float along ignoring their symptoms until they got so bad that it was almost too late.

"Well, if it gets worse, I'm here - headaches are nothing, really. It's bullet holes and missing limbs and things that make me tired, so come see me anytime." Though if it was returning after only an hour, there was little she could do to help without being constantly by his side. For some reason that thought made her look down at the desk in a sudden bout of shyness.

She was going to suggest that he go and see someone about the pain, but that would involve explaining that it wasn't a physical problem that was causing them, and she didn't want to make his mood return by basically telling him that there was something not quite right in his head. No, no, that really didn't seem like a good idea. Casting her mind about for another subject, Angie's mouth moved too quickly for her brain.

"So are you and... Is Mystique ok now?" Nice recovery. The sarcastic thought accompanied another blush, a habit that seemed to be developing much to her dismay.


"She's fine," he said, in response to her question about Mystique. "She's sleeping now. I should be doing the same, but there's too much going on up here." He rapped at the side of his head. "Always been like that. Too deep a thinker. Maybe I should take up philosophy."

Rather absently, he'd taken his lighter out of his pocket and was flicking it open and shut in a return to his former state of near-permanent tension.

"How old are you, Angie?" he asked, suddenly.


Distracted by the lighter flicking open and shut, Angie didn't register Pyro's question for a few moments. When she did realise what he'd said, she blinked several times. Not only did she wonder why he wanted to know - it was kind of out of the blue, but she also wondered if he'd actually believe her, or if she'd have to get out her passport to prove it to him. Angie couldn't help how young she looked, she'd stopped growing before most people. It did actually come in handy sometimes, though it was usually an annoyance.

"I'll be eighteen at the end of July." Wow. Saying that made her feel like a kid again - I'm six and three quarters years old!


He nodded, seemingly unperturbed by her age. "I was about the same when Magneto brought me here," he said. "I turned twenty back in February." The irony had never failed to amuse him. He was an Aquarius. A water carrier.

And now she knew his age as well.

There was a long silence between during which the only sound was that of his Zippo opening and closing, opening and closing.

"There's still time to change your mind," he said. "For some of us, there's never gonna be any going back. But you have the opportunity to get out of here. NovaTeX was just the start. It's gonna get bloodier, nastier and if we can't recruit more members soon, we'll end up wiped off the face of the planet. You've got amazing abilities and it's handy to have someone of your talent amongst our number - but can you use that power offensively? If it came down to the crunch, could you pull the trigger on a pistol and shoot one of the X-Men?"

He leaned forward and looked at her thoughtfully. "If you can't, it's fine. We'll get you somewhere you need to be without question. I just think everyone should realise the commitment that needs to made to the Brotherhood."


She was a bit surprised to learn his age - she knew he was young, but he was so young to be leading the Brotherhood. The clicking of the zippo might have annoyed some people, but she found herself starting off into space, lulled by the repetitive noise. February - that meant he was probably an Aquarius, but she didn't see the irony. She was thinking about star signs, and what they meant - she was a Cancer/Leo cusp, and she was supposed to be emotional and physical and caring and imaginative. It could all be complete bullshit, though. She was drawn out of her reverie when he spoke again. She nodded thoughtfully, letting him speak, but when he called her mutation 'amazing' felt a pang of embarrassment. There was nothing special, in Angie's mind, about what she did. She touched people, and they got her energy, fixing them up. Nothing amazing about it - not like what Aurora could do, or Pyro.

"I'm not going to take off." She spoke with soft determination. "I might not be able to use my powers for offense, but I can learn. I want to learn... One of them grabbed me, one of the X-Men." One hand gently stroked the ice burn without conscious thought directing it there. "Couldn't get out of his grip." She wondered what she would have done if she'd had a pistol, or a knife, or something. "I just don't know how to fight. But I want to."


John nodded. "I won't ask again," he said. "If you want to stay, you're with us now. If you leave, you're against us. Simple enough premise."

He opened the lighter and lit the flame, scooping it up into his hand and playing with it like someone else would play with a stress ball or any other executive toy.

"I nearly became one of them," he said, absently. "The X-Men, I mean. I was the Institute, anyway. For a while."


Nodding, Angie quickly became enthralled by John's playing with fire - literally. She couldn't keep her eyes off it - mesmerised by the flames. Now that is an amazing ability. The delighted expression, lighting up her features, remained when she looked up at his face.

"Why'd you leave?" That boy in Baltimore had been so insistent that the X-Men and the Brotherhood were different, and it seemed to her that they were - the X-Men only seemed to be there to get in the Brotherhood's way, and by fighting against the Brotherhood they condoned the cure. In Angie's mind, they were hypocritical - using their mutancy to support the cure, it was ridiculous. She thought back to something he'd said, though, and she unintentionally wondered out loud, "Would there really be anything they could do to help me develop my abilities?" If there was one thing that Angie did wish, it was that someone would teach her how to turn her powers off, so that she could touch people without being afraid. She couldn't imagine that there was anyone who could change her, though - her mutation was in her skin, from what she could tell, and there was nothing she could do about that.


The stream of flame that passed between John's hands flared slightly, responding to his instinctive irritation whenever he thought of the X-Men.

"I left because they were too idealistic," he said. "Magneto's vision was far better. We are the next stage in human evolution. The future is ours. Mutants shouldn't live in harmony with homo sapiens, we should be leading them."

A faintly fanatical gleam came into his eyes. "Magneto had that dream. And I'm carrying it on. No, Angie. They wouldn't help you. They'd just hold you back. They always held me back."


It was only when he answered that she realised she'd spoken aloud. She thought that perhaps her vision of what life should be like different from his in a fundamental way, but she knew that at the heart of it he was right. Homo superior was indeed the next stage in human evolution, and eventually they would be the only ones left. It was just in how they lived until that time that Angie thought her own viewpoint was different. King of the jungle, kill or be killed. She could understand the logic, but it still made her feel sad. She'd been poked and prodded all her life, scared of touching the Homo sapiens for fear of what they'd do to her. She knew that there were people out there who would chain her to a steel bench and make her heal their ills, use her up until she died and then move onto someone new. The humans were being moved past, evolved beyond, and she knew in her mind that they would never accept it, would never lie down peacefully and let the mutants have the world. In her heart, though, she wished that they could live together, treating each other well until the humans slowly died out. Eventually there would be no more born, that was just the way of it. And yet, for some reason, it still made her sad to think of the future they were creating. She'd contribute no genetic material to the next generation, she knew that. The only thing she'd pass on was words, if she was lucky; if she wasn't killed in battle. It was a battle, and the humans hit below the belt with their cure, their insistence that the mutants become like them.

"I just... sometimes I wish I could control it. It's not easy, sometimes." Knowing that you'll be alone all your life. She would always have friends, sure, but that was different. She thought she'd come to terms with it, thought that she could ignore it and it would go away, but there were times that she lay awake at night, mourning for the future she'd never be able to have.


"Mutations evolve as well," he said, shrugging. "I'm capable of much more now than I was two years ago." The flame he played with curled and took shape, an almost human form, dancing in the palm of his hand. "I couldn't do this even two days ago. But it's changed. It's evolved. There's every chance that you will be the same."

The tiny flame dancer in his hand twirled gracefully. "So delicate," he murmured, mesmerised by his own creation. "And yet so potentially destructive."


"It's beautiful." His power... his mutation at least had something you could look at, hers was the sort of thing you could only feel. And she hadn't felt any change in it over the past four and a half years. She'd learnt more about it, learnt that more skin contact meant quicker transferrance, learnt how to pinpoint the things she felt. She had medical knowledge from her mother's job, from the journals and the time spent in hospitals and what she'd worked out on her own, which allowed her to act as a diagnostician; but she had no control over how the healing worked - it fixed things in an almost random fashion.

"I don't know, Pyro. We'll see I guess. I don't really get much of a chance to practice - once someone's fixed, they're fixed." She had an idle thought about beating the crap out of someone and then healing them, and then starting over - somehow it didn't seem like that would work. With a sigh, she sat up straighter in the chair.

"I suppose I should let you get back to whatever it was you were doing." Patting her pockets to make sure she had everything, Angie gave him a small smile and stood up.

"Oh, was there any news broadcasts or anything?"


"I haven't had a chance to check yet," he said, truthfully. "And in fact, I haven't even taken a full debriefing off of anybody here yet. There's time. No point in keeping people awake after an event like that. You really don't want to see Cain Marko in a foul mood, it's not a pretty sight. I just need to check now, send a couple emails, play a game of Minesweeper..." He chuckled, snapped his hand into a fist and the dancer disappeared.

He got to his feet and crossed to the desk. "Listen, about the office thing. If I'm in here, it's cool. I just get a bit narked about people coming in when I'm not here. Stupid, I know, but there it is. If you need access to a machine, speak to Gill or Python - they'll fix you up. We have electrical equipment coming out our ears for some reason."

John stared at the desk for a moment. "Angie? Uh...thanks for listening. I can go on bit, I know."


"I'll see if someone can get me set up." She smiled. "If we're going to rob a bank again, can we make it in Australia next time? I know the exchange rate's pretty crap, but I'd love to get all my stuff sometime, then I'd have my own machine." She was only half joking.

She was still standing there behind his desk, and she moved out as he thanked her, stepping carefully to avoid the stacks of paper. The thought that it was a disaster waiting to happen, what with Pyro's... pyromania... was gone as soon as it came and she smiled up at him again. "Anytime, John." She fidgeted for a moment before bringing her hands up to hover a few inches from his cheeks. "Let me take care of that headache for you, and then I'll get out of your hair."


"OK," he said, after a pause. "Australia's good by me. And don't worry about your stuff - we have cash. Python can take you shopping anywhere in the world sometime." He gave her one of his brief smiles.

When she offered to take care of his headache, he hesitated. "Alright," he said, uncertainly. "But don't wear yourself out on my behalf, 'k?"


"It's ok, I have someone trustworthy taking care of it. And it's all worn in and comfy, you know?" She gave him a grin. Hopefully they would get out to Australia sometime, even if it was just a quick trip with Python rather than a whole group deal. Might be interesting to show Pyro some of where he came from - having their own plane left them with plenty of open possibilities.

"I'll be fine, honestly. As long as no-one gets cabin fever and starts trying to kill everyone, doesn't seem like there's going to be much for me to do 'til our next tussle." She grinned again and let her fingertips connect with his skin, her cool hands immediately warming up from his increased body temperature. She could feel the headache, and she flattened her hands so that her palms were cradling his face, feeling the softness of one earlobe where a fingertip had extended past his cheeks.

It was the same kind of headache as the others - the kind that shouldn't develop after only an hour, and even after it was gone she left her hands on his cheeks to search for the answers, to search for the cause. It definately wasn't anything physical - he'd started just fine, so after a few moments of her touch he was as healthy as he could be, and refreshed as though he'd had a full night's sleep - and she felt a rising frustration when she couldn't pinpoint the mental problem. There was... an oddness, a chaos, but she didn't know about dis-order within the brain, simply didn't have the knowledge to be able to say what it was, even though she could feel that there was something that wasn't right. A small frown marred her brow, and as her frustration rose at her inability to even say what it was that was wrong with him, let alone fix it, Angie realised with a start that she was still holding his face in her hands. She flinched, breaking the contact as if she'd been burned, and her eyes met his with a look of embarrassment.

"I... I'm sorry."


"What?"

He seemed oblivious to anything remiss, but the look of concern on her face did very little to alleviate the paranoid suspicions he already had concerning his headaches. "What? What is it?" He caught her wrists in his hands and his eyes were filled with fear.


The frown returned as he caught her wrists in his hands, and she still couldn't express what was wrong. Seeing the fear in his eyes, though, she smoothed her forehead and tried to look calm. "Nothing, physically - you're healthy as a horse. I just... spaced a little is all. Didn't think I should be standing around grabbing your face, you know, since..." Since you've got Mystique. She could feel the warmth of his hands around her wrists still, could remember the feel of his cheeks, the feel of the light stubble and the softness of his skin. Oh, god. Her eyes were locked on his as though she couldn't tear them away, and she wished for a moment that she was someone else, someone who didn't have her mutation.

"John." She breathed his name, so quietly that it was barely a whisper, hoping that he'd realise that he was still grasping her wrists but at the same time hoping - irrationally, she knew it was never going to happen, knew that he had Mystique and she had no-one, and that was the way it was destined to stay - that he'd never let go.


He was confused by the look in her eyes and when she spoke his name, he seemed to snap back to the present. "Oh, right, sorry." He released her wrists and she realised how tightly he'd been holding them. "Healthy as a horse, eh? That's good to know. Maybe I just need glasses or something. Sit in front of that thing way too much."

That brief smile lit his face again, not helping her cause. He was an attractive boy when he smiled.

"If you find Gill, he'll give you a tour of the base," he said, trying to be helpful.


Feeling a little lightheaded, and realising at some level that not all of it was from the energy she'd given him, Angie flashed a brief smile back. "Maybe I'll go looking for him in the morning." She sidestepped around him so that he could get to the computer, tired enough now that she'd be able to fall asleep once she made it to her room - hell, if she got lost she was likely to fall asleep in a hallway somewhere.

"I'll... um, I'll see you later. Night, John. Sweet dreams." Looking visibly weaker than when he'd first walked in to find her at his desk, Angie wandered out of the office and tried to remember the way back toward her room. Oh, god. She put one hand to her head, twining her fingers into her hair as if she could pull out the rapidly increasing attraction and get rid of it. She'd older, smarter, she's beautiful... God, get it together, girl! She couldn't help it. In spite of everything, she couldn't help but think of him and smile.