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Post by Pyro on Aug 21, 2006 18:58:51 GMT -5
After John had eaten his fill of pancakes (a surprising amount: he was particularly hungry), he had gone back to his room to grab a power nap. He needed to catch up on sleep, but was too wired after his session with Emma to sleep properly.
He slept for maybe two hours, totally dream-free and woke feeling decidedly refreshed.
John washed his face, splashing cold water to fully wake himself up and checked his reflection in the mirror. He didn't look so tired now, and his eyes had lost some of the exhaustion he had come to expect when he saw his reflection.
Moments of his sesion that morning kept flashing to the surface of his mind like a salmon breaking the surface and catching the noonday sun on its scales and, like the fish, too slippery to catch hold of.
He let the memory sink again and dried his face.
The next stop was his office: not to work, but to deal with the unfeasibly inexplicable urge to tidy it up. Emma's initial suggestions into John's tangled and befuddled mind had been simple ones: simple tasks to keep him busy and occupied - and one of those had been the desperate urge to tidy his office.
A task from which everyone would undoubtedly benefit.
So it was that the young leader of the Brotherhood wandered down the corridor, greeting Gill briefly as he passed, and entered the chaos that was his office.
Twenty minutes later, he was ferrying armfuls of old print outs to the bin and singing cheerfully to himself as he worked.
"Aww, marry him or marry me, I'm the one that loves you baby can't you see? Ain't got no future or a family tree, but I know what a prince and lover ought to be I know what a prince and lover ought to be....
Said, if you want to call me baby just go ahead, now And if you'd like to tell me maybe just go ahead, now And if you wanna buy me flowers just go ahead, now And if you'd like to talk for hours just go ahead, now..."
He felt uncharacteristically happy.
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Post by Nightingale on Aug 22, 2006 6:34:36 GMT -5
Tapping away at the keyboard, Angie was distracted from the email she was composing by the sound of someone singing as they wandered through the base. The volume increased, and she could make out the words. Who is that? Whoever it was had a pleasant voice, and she poked her head out of the door to see if she could see them. Nothing yet. It sounded like whoever it was was wandering through the base, and the young Australian couldn't quite decide if she was curious enough to go looking for them or not. Maybe it's Pyro. She quickly replaced the thought with a mental kick. Seriously. As much as she thought of herself as a total tool for doing it, she trotted off toward the sound anyway. It was Pyro, which she realised when she rounded the corner and ran into him. This situation was only made worse by the fact that he was carrying a stack of papers. "Shit! Oh, uhm, I'm sorry John!" Blushing furiously, Angie dropped down and started picking up the sheets again, hoping that she hadn't disturbed some great manuscript that was carefully compiled and didn't have page numbers. Cause that would be just her luck.
He had been startled out of singing by bumping into Angie, but regained his composure fairly swiftly.
"Not a problem," he said. "I was just taking this lot down to Gill to see if there's anything in there he reckons is worth keeping. Thought it was time to clear the office out."
He seemed faintly obsessive about it, fairly intense, but then from what she'd gathered, that's pretty much how the young man was about everything.
"Oh." She smiled up at him as she picked up the last of the scattered papers. Straightening up, Angie looked down at them shyly and then pushed the pile toward Pyro. "That's probably a good idea. You know, room to move and all that." She was still blushing. "So what was that about flowers? I'd buy you some, but I don't think we've exactly got a florist open for business around here. Jane, maybe." Apparently, there was no connection between her brain and her mouth. She blushed again, though her cheeks were still pink from before so it was hard to tell. The image of little businesses and essential services all over Genosha made her smile, though. I'd be the Doctor. What would Pyro be? Fire department!
He accepted the papers and started shuffling them a little absently back into some sort of order - not that they'd been in any to begin with.
Angie is a good person for you to talk to.
The implanted suggestion swam briefly into focus before wallowing back down gently again.
"Flowers?" he said, a little confused. "I'm sorry, you'll have to forgive me; my memory is a bit thrown at the moment. Hopefully things will improve as I work through these problems." Another half-smile. "Hopefully."
"Yeah, that's all good." She frowned a little though, a fleeting expression that would only have been noticeable if he'd been concentrating. "It's just, you know, what you were singing. You have a nice voice." She looked down at her hands for a moment. "D'you... Did you want some help?" Angie was the kind of girl that would have made a perfect fifties housewife. She liked to cook, liked being in a clean environment, liked decorating. It was a bit weird, actually, for someone raised by a single mother who worked to support them. But maybe that was just the way of it - someone had to keep the place tidy.
"I was singing?"
He seemed faintly surprised by this, but grinned bashfully when she said he had a nice voice. "Spin Doctors. Two Princes. Got stuck in my head for some reason. I like my music. I have a pretty eclectic taste. Got a little of everything going on."
His music tastes, like his thoughts, were ever-changing and oft-times strange and unusual. He liked, he used to tell Bobby, who despaired of his choices sometimes, what he liked. His collection of music ranged from 50's rock 'n' roll all the way through more generic pop and rock, even classical.
Pyro rubbed his nose.
"Yeah," he said. "I wouldn't mind a bit of help."
Angie's a good person for you to talk to.
So far, things were going well. Well, they were going well with the talking to him bit. Not so well with her idea that she should probably try not to spend too much time around him if she was to continue being a functional human being and not a completely idiotic tool with an obvious crush, but what could you do? "Why limit yourself to just one type of music?" She was of the opinion that if it was good, it was worth listening to. This did mean that she had the occasional teenybopper teen princess music in her collection, which got her a bit of a ribbing when she'd bought it, but it was all in good fun. Oddly, for someone who had never thought she'd be interested in boys, who'd been a cynic on the subject of love, there were a lot of mushy songs in her collection. "Well, did you want to head up to Gill first and I'll meet you down at your office?" Maybe a few minutes on her own would let her get her head in order. Probably not, but it was worth a try.
"OK," he said, cheerfully. "Be about five minutes."
Without another word, he sauntered - yes - sauntered - there was no other word for the jaunty spring in his step - down the hallway and disappeared around the corner.
* * *
It actually took him ten minutes to return and the pile of paper in his arms was much smaller. He dumped the remainder in the by-now overflowing bin.
"As I walk along I wonder what went wrong with our love... A love that was so strong... And as I still walk on I think of the things we've done together... When our hearts were young..."
It was almost unnatural cheerfulness.
As suspected, her head hadn't managed to get sorted out in the time he was absent, though she'd gone hunting around in the nearby rooms and had managed to find a couple of archive boxes and one of those in/out filing trays. Never ceases to amaze. The amount of stuff that could be found in the base was surprising, but then Angie supposed that when the base acted as a permanent home for some people - namely Gill - it made sense to have all sorts of things lying around. He was singing again as he returned to the office, and she looked up with a smile from the stack of paper she'd been eyeing warily for the last few minutes. It was poised, ready to fall over at any moment, and she hadn't wanted him to return to an even worse mess than he'd left. "I found some things in another room down the hall, office supplies. Figured if you're going to all this effort to clean up, you might want to make some kind of system to keep it that way." Her hands played with the seam at the bottom of her t-shirt, pulling it out from her stomach in an unconcious gesture. "You know, make it easier to keep track of stuff, I guess." She was careful not to tell him what she thought he should do, in case he was still in a bit of a bad headspace of his own. She was still a bit wary, remembering the things he'd said and done while he'd been in the cell.
"I," he said, in that same oddly cheerful tone he'd used before, "have the organisational skills of a dead chipmunk." He grinned infectiously at her. "I need all the help I can get."
The cheerfulness faded briefly. "In more ways than one," he added, so softly it was barely audible.
Angie's a good person for you to talk to.
There was more to that memory, he was sure, but he couldn't quite get it to form coherently in his mind. What, exactly, was it he was supposed to talk to her about?
He rubbed his nose.
"I ought to start looking into the aftermath of Baltimore," he said, cautiously. "I know we were talking only this morning about me taking it a bit easier for a while, but I can't keep putting this one off, can I?"
His soft sentence made her want to go over to him, to hold him and tell him that it would all be ok, but she didn't know if it would help, or even if it would be welcome. Friends on a beach. He'd asked for a hug one time - one time! - and it hadn't even really been asking properly. She wasn't going to throw herself at him on the off chance that he'd want another one. "Yeah, I suppose we have to deal with that one. But you need to take it easy, don't..." Don't go crazy? Ugh! "Just don't work too hard." The finish was a bit awkward, so she tried to distract them both with a new thought. "I can bring up that news report if you like, see who this doctor is that's making more of the cure?" She gave him a shy little smile and pointed to one of the stacks. "What are you wanting to keep?"
"I'll work through the piles of stuff in my room later. Figured if I did more away from the office, it might be easier." He seemed keen and eager to look at the news report and shoved some papers out the way on the desk. He lifted the spare chair over so that it was next to his own and powered up the computer.
"You're in the driving seat," he said, turning the monitor slightly and pushing the keyboard at her.
"Oh. Ok then." She wondered if he wanted her to help sort through things in his bedroom, but didn't say anything. Her cheeks warmed again, and she wondered if he'd start to think that she had some kind of disorder with the way she was going. Sitting down, and feeling a little awkward, Angie waited for the computer to finish loading and hit in the username and password Gill had set her up with for the network. She couldn't remember the URL of the video, but she'd been sent it in an email so she logged on to pull it up. There was an unread email from Read up top, but she bypassed it and went straight to the video. "Alright, here it is." They watched silently, and even though Angie had seen it a few times, she still had trouble believing what they were saying. A woman was speaking in front of the crater that had once been NovaTeX, telling the camera about the horrors that had gone on here. She pointed out a dead plant, one of the giant ones that Jane had made, and you could see blood all over the road around it. Then the video went back to the studio, where they mentioned an important broadcast that had just come from NovaTeX CEO, Edward Rawlins. His face flashed up on the screen, talking about the Baltimore facility, the Option and a Doctor Essex. A file photo of the doctor flashed up, nothing particularly revealing, and then it went back to inane prattle and a mention of Johnny Depp before the file was cut off. "This site is actually pretty good, they have a lot of mutant news." She wondered what Pyro would think of all that.
He had gone, she noticed, rather alarmingly pale at the sight of the destruction in and around the NovaTeX building. He stared at the monitor in what could only be described as haunted disbelief.
"I never meant..." he began, in a hollow voice, then he got out of his seat and crossed to the other side of the room. He began his all-too-familiar pacing.
"Essex," he said. "Doesn't ring any bells. Gonna have to research him, find out what we can..."
He paused in his pacing. "How many of us got named?" he said, quietly.
Several clicks accompanied her quiet reply as Angie pulled up the page that described the new Secretary of Mutant Affairs' speech. "Had footage of Juggernaut, Jane and Dead Man. Could only name you and Cain though." She wondered about what other footage they had, whether she was on any of it. Possibly. "You're the FBI's most wanted." She looked down at her hands then back up at him. "Guess you won't be checking into any hotels any time soon." A half smile accompanied the joke, though the news wasn't exactly conducive to a light mood.
"Most wanted?" He looked startled, then the startlement gave way to a rueful grin. "Well, there's an achievement. And before I'm twenty-one as well."
He paced a little more.
"I'll pull what few strings I have and work on damage limitation," he said, more to himself than to her. "No point in you guys getting hauled over the coals. If I'm leader of this group, then I gotta take responsibility for its actions. If they get hold of me, you guys have to stick together."
He paced some more.
"How many dead?"
"Twenty-five mutants, thirty-seven humans, and there's still some critical." She actually winced a little as she said the numbers. They hadn't quantified the wounded, but she knew from what little she'd seen that there were plenty of them, too. "We're not going anywhere, and neither are you. They don't even have footage of you there, that's why the reporter said in the press conference." She tapped the screen. "While we're looking people up, we should check out this guy. New secretary of Mutant Affairs, don't even know if he is a mutant."
"Took over from the Hairball, huh?"
John leaned in to look at the screen. "Doctor Kevin Sidney. Name doesn't ring any bells, but then there's not a whole heap of campanology going on in my head right now."
He sat down again, which was a merciful relief from the constant pacing.
"Sixty two people. Wow." He ran a hand over his jaw. "I wasn't expecting quite that result."
He was close enough that she could feel a slight warmth on the side closest to him, but Angie tried to ignore it as she nodded. Tried to ignore it and failed miserably - all she could think about was the smell of him and the feel of him when he'd had his arms around her. Stop it. "What... What were you expecting, John?" She turned to look at him, her face blank but her eyes betraying her sadness. It wasn't all them - the police had killed plenty, had injured plenty, but if the Brotherhood hadn't shown up, those people wouldn't have died. It was their fault, and she wondered just how killing other mutants fit in with the idea of mutant supremacy. "It wasn't like we were going in to protest peacefully." She looked down at her hands, wondering whether she'd said too much.
"I don't know what I expected," he said, his tone almost plaintive. "It's just..."
Angie's a good person for you to talk to.
"I just..."
Angie's a good person for you to talk to.
Rather absently, he swatted at the side of his head. "I take all those deaths on my own shoulders," he said, carefully, as though talking about something he wasn't used to speaking of. "Don't know why. But all those Brotherhood members who died at Alcatraz...everyone I've killed myself...I can't help it. I know that deaths are inevitable, but it's still never really sunk in that I'm the cause of them."
He didn't look at her.
"I'm not proud of what I have to do," he said, vaguely aware that he'd spoken those words once, some years before, to Professor Charles Xavier in defence of his life on the streets.
She couldn't defend the deaths of the people he'd killed himself, but she wondered about the people at Alcatraz. It wasn't all his fault, and he couldn't take responsibility for the lives of the Brotherhood. They knew it was dangerous, and if they thought that what the group did was going to be easy going, they obviously had issues. "It's not just you, John. We both know that they wouldn't leave us to live in peace if it was up to them." She could well remember all the talk about the mutant registration act. They might have a mutant rights bill now, but that could be removed just as easily. Without thinking, she reached out and put her hand on his knee. "The Brotherhood... We all die, Pyro. I know that I for one would rather die fighting for our rights." When her mind became aware of where her hand was, Angie blinked several times and tried very hard not to blush again. She managed to resist the urge to snatch her hand back, instead carefully taking it back onto her own lap - as if she could erase what had happened by moving gently away from him. Why do I do these things?
He didn't even seem to notice her hand on his knee. "I think I already did die for my cause," he said, softly. "John Allerdyce of two years ago has gone. Totally."
Did he regret that?
He didn't really know.
And he didn't care any more, either, he realised with some surprise.
In that brief moment, with a sort of cool and clinical calmness, had he but known it, he took a vital step forward away from his past, and into the future he had created for himself.
There were many links to sever.
"Can't be kids forever." She'd stopped being a kid when her mutation had kicked in, had stopped thinking and behaving like a child when she'd realised that she wasn't like all the rest of them. It had only been reinforced by their move, and her new friends. Things had certainly changed in the months since she'd left her mother, though - she'd had to fend for herself, worry about where to sleep and what she was going to eat and how she was going to survive. No, Angie might have looked like a child still, and in some ways acted like one, but she certainly didn't feel like it. "Hopefully we can do something, though, avoid too many people dying that don't have to. I mean... Maybe we could look at how we're doing things, see what we could improve." Angie was no strategist, but surely one of them would know more than her. She wasn't really sure what deaths she was trying to avoid - but she thought that maybe it was all of them. She'd said it that morning to Dharma, and she'd meant it - Angie really would have been much happier if her powers weren't needed. She knew that the fight was never going to be a peaceful one, though.
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