It's been a couple years since I've posted anything. I love Toad. He's my favorite fandom on this site. I love Xanychaos and Ed's Tomato and Nyltiak's stories about him, and I love finding the artwork that exists for him on deviantART.

This story came up last year, and I never got around to pursuing it. It is across-over to some degree and it is AU. Toad is a little older than most people make him out to be in other fanfiction, somewhere in his thirties, but I like to chalk it up to the idea that his mutation just makes him look youthful. This is set four years or so after the first movie, which I'm sure falls out of the timeline of the actual storyline, but, hell, it's fanfiction. I don't think anyone's going to mind.

I started working on this again a couple nights ago. I'm hoping to have another chapter up in the next few weeks, but no promises.

Glad to be back in the game. I've missed you all.

- BND

You wait long enough, and it turns out like this; cracked coffee cups, cracked computer monitors, cracked ambitions, cluttered on the floor. Ask Jim Jones. Ask the Mayans or the Spartans or the fecking Beetles. This is a fact, as real as all those little children they tell you about in Africa. As real as every fecking trench and pock-mark on my skin after the lightning hit.

I told you about those kids.

Y'see, there's a country in Africa. Ghana, I think.

In Ghana there's the fisherman, and for the fisherman there's the lake. The biggest man-made lake in the world, all full of trees and nets and tiny, decomposing bodies. The fisherman swears one day, because his net gets tangled in the submerged branches. He buys some wee girl from a destitute family who can't afford to feed her any more. Ties some weights to her wrists and a rope around her waist. Tells her to hurry. Tosses her in.

On the night Xavier's weather-whore fried me inside and out, I remember floundering there in the sky, watching her above me, her goddess-body fastened to the stars like a net to a rotting tree limb.

The fisherman tosses the girl into the lake. The girl hopes she can untangle the netting from the black, slimy tree-claws 'fore all the air's out of her three-year-old lungs. Only then will the fisherman pull her back up into the boat.

I didn't know about the Ghana children the night I swallowed the Witch's fire. The knowledge came much later, while I waited for the morphine to numb it all away. All my nightmares about the incident, though, taste like a man-made lake and decaying tree-bark. They feel like my fingers all tangled in fishing nets and not enough air to make it to the surface and praying to some distant god for a miracle.

I've waited good an' long for this.

I've waited years, meditating on the bastard who tossed me into that clusterfuck like an infant to the muddy, brown water. Waited because I've learned, and I know, and I've seen, that the more time you feed to something like Magneto, the more it rusts. The more it strains. I've waited, because days in a hospital, surviving off of the help of the deranged clots who pulled me out of the sludge of the Hudson put the whole fucking picture into perspective, and I finally have the balls to hate him.

When I enter the old lair, this is what I find; dust and grime and mold. Months must have passed since there's been a bucket or a mop, now that 'Tooth an' me've gone, and Mags's stopped recruiting. I tread down familiar passage ways, and already I can feel my fists traveling to my pockets as my shoulders fall into a hunch. Magneto's been out of the game for half a year, but the air's still heavy with him, and all the self-loathing the bastard leaves you with.

I never figured myself to be so romantically prone as the humans were, but I still feel the urge to follow my old path to the room I used to sleep in. In all likeliness he's given it to some someone else he's bought to pay for his mistakes, and I have no doubts that all the things I stitched into my illusion of security – my computer, my programs, my CDs, my stereo – have been stolen or pawned.

I don't remember much of what I was before Magneto bought me from the world and tied the weights to my wrists and dropped me under. What I do know is how I loved the man who erased the signs of malnutrition and the bruises and the broken ribs. What I know is that he was God. The beginnin' an' the end of my life. I wonder, now, how long the Ghana babies believe they've been delivered from their piss poor existences by the strangers in the fishing boats. What do their mums say when they nudge them into the filthy sods' hands?

"This is your father, now. He's going to feed you."

I remember I was ten when Magneto signed the papers at that god-forsaken orphanage. They told me to behave, because some old gent might take me home. Made me wash behind the ears. The old whore gave me a shove when I stood across from him. "This man'll be your father now, Mort. Go'won." The prick even held my hand when he led me away.

The day after he cut me loose – the day he didn't pull me back out of the water, I watched my life defined by the rise and fall of a line on a monitor, by charts and readings that told the doctors how close I'd come, and I waited. I didn't hate him yet. Like the stupid arse I was, I still believed he would come and pull me out of the water, back into the boat.

I hate him now, though, as sure as I hate all those beautiful faces and those pretty bodies and those fishermen over in Ghana – I'll go an' throw them in, one day – and I hate this place.

I'm almost convinced he's alone when I find him. This whole fecking place is falling apart and coated with failure thicker'n the dust. I remember, this office used to scare the shit out of me. This desk, that chair, those idiotic bouncing orbs. Now it's just some decrepit old scut hunched down in front of his chess pieces, and I could kill him with my thumb.

" 'Lo, Mags."

"Toad." Magneto's terrible eyes look at me from their prison in his skull, rimmed by darkened skin. His hair is disheveled; his shoulders hunched. I can't tell what it is he's wearing in the dimness of this musky shit-hole, but it looks threadbare. The old bastard's got nothing left. "I had wondered when you would return."

"En't here for you, Magneto." I've never approached him when he was seated before. You didn't approach a king if your head rose higher than his. Disrespectful. Now I'm looking at him, stone-faced and disgusted. I bend so that my palms spread on the top of his desk, my thumb sending one of his rooks skittering.

"I wouldn't dream of it." His ugly fecking eyes fasten on the lost chess-piece. "What then, old friend? You couldn't image I have any funds by which to compensate you." Not after Mystique had cleaned him out.

"I don' want your money, Magneto." The old geezer's so pitiful lookin' when he's not pinning you to a wall. I lean closer; put him beneath my shadow for once. He regards me with all that's left of the glare that used to put me in my place. I could snap his neck. Rip his jaw off. Crush his brittle old-man bones and leave him on the floor. Instead, I incline my head another inch, drawing too close to him for his comfort. He shifts. I adopt the tone of condescension I've been practicing for the last forty eight hours. "I want to know where he is, Mags." The old man's eyebrows raise, his lips hanging open with the slack-jawedness of the feeble. "Where's my fuckin' son?"