Title: Morgan's Run
Author: LadyElaine
Rating: R
Disclaimer: The X-Men comics belong to Marvel and Stan Lee. X-Men: The Movie belongs to 20th Century Fox. I'm just playing in the sandbox. Oh, and Mulder and Scully belong to Fox and Chris Carter. (Keep your pantyhose on, I only mention the dynamic duo briefly.)
Archive: Ask first, I doubt I'll say no.
Feedback: Comments are appreciated. Constructive criticism is adored.
Summary: Remember that UN summit at Ellis Island? When Magneto's machine was destroyed, the shockwave carried the radiation right up to the edge of the island...
Morgan's Run
I. Porcupines and Elephants and What-ifs, Oh My!
People ask me what my mutation is, as if this is casual conversational fare--standing there, looking me straight in my slit-pupil eyes; me with me my thick black fur, cat's legs, prehensile tail, and webbed dorsal quills. They look at me and say, "So, what's your mutation?"
I tell them I have great digestion.
I do, too. I can eat damn near anything organic. Can't taste much of it, though--food dissolves too quickly in my mouth. It has to do with my killer T-cells, my dad once told me. I didn't understand what he said then, and I'm still not quite sure about it. All I know is that pretty much all of my bodily fluids--blood, saliva, sweat, you name it--are rather corrosive when it comes to living things. Or dead ones, for that matter. Tell you one thing, though: I don't have to worry about fleas. It's kind of neat to watch them--and mosquitoes, too--melt from the inside out. Cool, in a gross sort of way.
I used to be normal. Okay, okay, I used to think I was normal. I was fourteen when it happened.
My dad was a geneticist. Bet you saw that one coming, didn't you? He used to be just a regular internist--you know, your run-of-the-mill family doctor--until I came along. Then he began to study gene therapy. If I ever thought to ask him why, I can't remember what he answered. If he answered. He was always pretty aloof. You know, way out there, living in his head, writing papers in his sleep, stuff like that.
Mom was a professor of sociology at the city college. What city, you ask? Sorry, but you'll just have to wonder. I'm not giving out that information. Like it really matters. The feds think I was the one that "disappeared" my family. Sure. Of course, I know it was them all along. Damn it, where's Mulder and Scully when you really need 'em?
Anyway, back to Mom. She could have had tenure at damn near any school she wanted, but that's Mom for you. Wanted to teach as many minds as she could reach, and there are plenty that can't afford the rich-bitch colleges. She wrote, too. Got two books published. The first one was Lilith's Legacy: The Outcaste from Prehistory to the Present Day. I suppose you can pretty much tell from that mouthful what it's about. The other one was The Mutation of Society. That one's not hard to get, either. Three guesses as to which side of the mutant debate she was on. So, two books, plus a double handful of articles published in scientific and popular magazines. She was starting to make a dent in societal thinking. Maybe.
Is it my fault their careers--maybe their lives, too--got cut short? I don't know. I used to ask myself that every day. Not every teenage girl has that question on her mind.
I'm guessing right now I ought to go ahead and tell you my name. I mean, jeez, eight paragraphs here, and I still haven't mentioned my goddamn name. Okay, so it's Melody Morgan. Like I said, I'm a runaway and a mutant. Boy, am I ever a mutant. I'm not one of those lucky bastards who can go have a nice house, get a good job, live a fucking normal life with no one the wiser. I gotta live in the sewers and the woods, for chrissake. At least Dad gave me some good lessons in wilderness survival. More on that later.
So if you ever have the good fortune to run into little old me, this is what you can expect: I'm about five-foot-four, with yellow eyes, and I have black fur all over my body. And I do mean ALL over my body, which is a good thing, too, because I haven't really found anything to wear since this all happened. My legs are kind of like a cat's--you know, bent at the knees and ankles, and I walk on my toes. (Man, was it ever hard to learn to walk again afterwards!) I have a long tail, which is prehensile. Comes in handy in a pinch. I think I mentioned a set of webbed dorsal quills. I have six of them in a column down my back, and they're the main reason clothes don't fit anymore. They look kind of like porcupine's quills, except they're longer, thicker, and hollow. And webbed. I think the skin between them is about the only skin I've got that's not furred over. I guess it's supposed to be a natural air conditioner; that's what I use it as, anyway. Try living inside a pelt like mine; you'd get pretty hot, too. I raise my spines, skin open to the breeze, and voila--instant AC unit. Elephants do it with their ears--the African ones, anyway. Asian ones don't have to worry about the heat so much; that's why their ears are smaller.
Okay, can we say rambling?
If you were to touch me--and I don't recommend it, you'd wind up with a rash--you'd notice little coin-sized bumps under my skin. Those are actually bone disks growing in a layer of cartilage. Most people--human and mutant both--have a layer of fat underneath their skin. Yeah, even those supermodel babes. They've got it, too. Lucky me, I get natural Kevlar instead. I bet you're pretty jealous of me now, right? I can eat anything I want, and I don't have much fatty tissue to worry about. Go ahead and be jealous, then. I can starve to death in two days flat. Life's a bitch. Why don't you try being on the run, having to survive on bark?
The really killer thing--literally--is my claws. Come on now, you didn't think a cat-woman-thing like me wouldn't have claws, did you? Claws on my fingers, claws on my toes. It's the ones on my fingers you've got to worry about. Scratch that (har, har). I've got to worry about them. They're venomous. My dorsal spines, too. My claws are pretty much under control now. These days, I can scratch something without the venom glands in the tips of my fingers going off. My quills, though, have six little minds of their own.
I wake up sometimes to find the leaves--or rags, or newspapers, or whatever the hell I'm using as bedding that night--eaten through as if from acid. Talk about a wet dream.
So anyway, there I was, a fourteen-year-old kid, with two genius parents. Did you hear about that UN summit at Ellis Island a few years ago? You know, the one where that Magneto guy set off some sort of machine? They still run the footage of it every now and then; if you catch it again, watch carefully: When the radiation bubble burst, the shockwave from it carried a little bit of that radiation right up to the very edge of the island.
Yeah, I know you know what's coming, but I've got to tell it anyway. Mom and Dad had both made names for themselves in their respective fields, and they'd been invited to speak about the mutant issue at the conference. And as we lived in Tennessee at the time, it was quite a trip. They wouldn't let me stay home for the week, so I got to come along. They were good parents, but I resented the hell out of them. I still do, a little bit. Maybe if Dad hadn't been so worried about leaving me home alone...
Screw it. I don't want to think about what-ifs any more.