A/N: I don't own the X-Men. And never will.
This story is a sequel to my previous one, "The Art of Conversation", although I wrote it so that it could stand alone. Please review. I only got 3 reviews out of 100 hits on my last story, so a lot of you are lazy. If you are reading this, I AM talking to you. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to get 100 reviews for 100 hits (although I know that is unrealistic). Anyway, enjoy the story!
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X-23 looked around the white, sterile room. Nothing out of the ordinary, just white tile, plastic, and stainless steel. The small 8-year-old tried to sit up slowly. Head spinning from the sedation drugs, she realized that her arms and legs were manacled to a reflective metal table. X-23 had been examined enough to know that she wouldn't have a chance of escaping. So she waited. She started to look at the tools on the low table next to the table, but the possible uses of a few of the more dangerous-looking ones quickly made this worse than staring at the ceiling. So she stared, imagining a map of HYDRA was there, with the grout between the tiles being the hallways. The cracks were secret passages, and the tiles themselves were the never-ending underground rooms housing whatever plethora of nefarious schemes the terrorist organization was cooking up. X-23 had only been in a handful of them herself, even though she had been in the facility for all of her 8 years. She wouldn't be surprised if the facility was really as expansive as the tile "map" on the roof. The door jerked open suddenly, jolting her from her thoughts. Three HYDRA personnel marched in, each clothed in a white coat and mask, the last one pushing a large cart topped by six identical rectangular chambers. Wires ran from each chamber to a large battery on the bottom of the cart. X-23 thought about asking what was going on, but she knew they wouldn't answer her anyway. She lifted her head nervously as a man took position on either side of her.
"You sure she can't escape?" one of the HYDRA guards asked.
"Positive. These cuffs are strong enough to hold the Hulk," replied the guard on X-23's other side, forcing a chuckle.
"Right."
The guard directed his attention to the helpless girl.
"Extend your claws."
X-23, startled at being spoken to, hesitated. The guard struck her in the face. The small girl screamed as a white flash and wave of pain enveloped her consciousness. Reluctantly, she extended her sharp bone claws. Why did the guards want HER claws? Didn't they have their own...
"OW!" she screamed, shocked into attentiveness by a blast of pain.
She glanced at her hand, which now had a scalpel protruding from it. The HYDRA guard grimly began to slice her hand, exposing the root of one of the claws.
"STOPITSTOPITSTOPIT!" X-23 screamed, in agony.
The guard jumped back as she started twisting her wrists in the manacles, but the other two quickly jumped in and immobilized her hand. Fighting back tears of pain, she gritted her teeth until one of them chipped. Not that she noticed. Her hand felt like it was on fire, and being fried by a thousand tasers. Suddenly a new pain, much worse than the first, stung her brain.
"GAAAAAAAH!" X-23 screeched, much to the annoyance of the guards.
Forcing herself to look back at her hand, she saw it flayed open, with one claw missing. The guard with the scalpel was holding the missing bone up to the light, examining it.
"Well, that's one down, five to go," the guard announced.
"NO! STOP!" X-23 sobbed before she began slipping into unconsciousness.
"Well, there she goes, fainting again. Looks like SHE won't be eating for another couple days," the guard chuckled. Struggling to stay awake, X-23 heard the loud hum of the machine in the cart.
"I wonder how she'll handle the reinsertion," the third guard remarked.
The strain was too much, and X-23 was out like a light.
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X-23 awoke with a start. Grabbing her pillow, she extended her claws reflexively, impaling the cushion and sticking it to the bed. Bed? She suddenly remembered where she was. This was the Xavier mansion, not HYDRA. She was 15, not 8. Her name was now Laura, not X-23. And her claws were still made almost completely of metal, not bone. Just like they had been for just under half her life. She glanced at the clock, which read 5:28 AM. Officially Day 5 of her stay at the Institute. She slowly peeled back the silk sheets and swung her legs out of bed. Peeling off her monogrammed pajamas, she walked over to her closet. Picking out what to wear seemed like such a big hassle for the other girls, but Laura couldn't understand it. Not that that meant she wouldn't try. As Kurt had told her two nights ago, she should try to fit in. She glanced from shirt to shirt, not seeing how the style affected it's usefulness as a garment. Finally settling on one, she picked out a pair of pants to go along with it. Slowly making her way downstairs, she noticed a few other early-risers at the kitchen table, most of them doing last-minute homework. She recalled their names instantly: Jean was the redhead with a bemused look on her face as if her homework was too easy, Scott was the one with the scowl. Laura wondered how two minds could not comprehend the same material from what was probably the same teacher. The one they called "Kitty" was sitting alert in her chair, meticulously studying a cookbook.
"Oh, hey Laura," Scott called, forcing a grin. Obviously half-asleep, he looked unintentionally oblivious to everything but his immediate surroundings. Kitty and Jean echoed his salutation.
"...good morning..." Laura slowly replied, unsure as to what was so great about it. Last time they had said "good morning" she had ended up being told that she was to be enrolled in school within a week, and had later gotten a lecture about teamwork from Logan. She didn't know why, he just seemed to get angry. It was his stupid game of "Baseball" or whatever it was called that was messed up, not her. After all, if the intention was to be fun, why did she have to stand on a little white pad and wait for the ball to come to her, which it never seemed to do? All the stupid rules came back to her, like the one about having to run on straight lines between the bases. She'd only broken that one once, and the tree WAS practically beckoning to be climbed. She was running from an adversary, and she performed an evasive maneuver. Not that Logan would understand. All this new information was confusing.
"So, what are you, like, doing up so early?" Kitty questioned.
Laura's mind raced, as if to come up with a convincing story about how... no. She wasn't being interrogated, the girl was just curious.
"I always get up this 'early'," she replied. "It was part of my conditioning," the former assassin-in-training added casually.
"Wow. If I had to get up this early every day, I would, like, DIE of tiredness!" Kitty exclaimed.
"That's 'exhaustion', Kitty," Scott corrected. "'Tiredness' isn't a word."
"Whatever. You know what I meant," Kitty responded defensively.
And so the conversation went, with an small debate over word usage or trivial detail every so often. Scott was definitely preparing himself for an english quiz of some sort.
At 6:40 exactly Rogue trotted down the stairs.
"Morning," she remarked, more as a statement than a salutation.
The others responded in kind.
The other X-Men stumbled down the stairs soon after, all in various states of drowsiness. The non-morning people had arrived. All were clambering to get breakfast.
*BAMF*
Kurt teleported into the midst of the fray, picking a pear out of a basket casually.
"Geez, Kurt. You trying to ruin our appetites with that disgusting smoke?" Logan growled.
"Heh, sorry," Kurt responded, grinning as if he really wasn't.
Laura sat in her chair, unmoving. She hated loud noise, and crowds. She didn't have to go to school yet anyway, so why rush?
*BAMF*
Kurt popped into existence in the seat next to her, right as Spyke was about to sit down in it. Shrugging, the skater went to find another seat.
"Hey, X, er, Laura! I noticed you were just sitting there, so I made you breakfast," Kurt loudly announced, pushing a bowl of cereal towards her.
Startled, Laura felt her face inexplicably getting hot.
"Ooh, look who's blushing!" Spyke exclaimed gleefully. "Kurt and Laura, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S..."
"That's enough, Spyke." Jean interrupted, with just a hint of mirth in her voice. "Kurt was just getting her some cereal. It's no big deal."
"Yeah, what's the big deal?" Kurt joined. "Geez, can you give a guy a break?"
Laura looked at her "breakfast soup" unsurely. Wasn't it obvious that Kurt was just getting her some food? What did they THINK he was doing? He even said it out loud.
Her musings were silenced by her stomach growling. She dug into the cereal.
"You're never going to keep that figure if you are always eating so fast, ya know," Kitty scolded.
Laura was confused.
"What 'figure'?" she asked, mystified, inadvertently causing everyone to die laughing.
These people were so confusing. It was like they came from another planet. Luckily, everybody started leaving for school at once.
*BAMF*
Kurt teleported next to her as everyone else left the kitchen.
"See you tonight, Laura," he grinned.
Clamping her in a tight hug, he teleported again.
*BAMF*
Startled as much by the hug as Kurt's ability to appear out of nowhere, Laura slowly walked back up the stairs, glancing back to see her fellow mutants leaving in various vehicles and on foot. Returning to her room, she sat on the bed, staring at the floor for a few seconds. Nobody had complimented her clothes, like they did with Kitty's. She must have done something wrong. She did a quick calculation. If there were 8 shirts and 8 pairs of pants, then there were 64 permutations. If she wore one combination at breakfast and one when everyone got back from school, it would take her about four and a half weeks to discover which ones got the most compliments. Of course, it could be that the fact that nobody noticed her clothes at all was a good thing. The first day she tried to pick her own clothes... But she quickly stopped thinking about that. At least the humiliation was from people who were now her friends. They had probably forgotten all about it. Taking everything off, she stood in the door of the closet, studying the clothes and trying to find a pattern between the combination that had been received with hostility and the other possibilities. She was interrupted by a knock at her door. She walked over and opened it.
"Laura, I..." Professor Xavier began as the door opened. "Oh my!" he exclaimed, turning his head away. "You should probably put some clothes on," he more ordered than suggested.
Laura sighed. She'd forgotten that clothing was mandatory in "normal" places. So much was different than HYDRA. There nobody seemed to care whether she chose to wear clothes or not. Of course, they kept her locked up like an animal, so they weren't expecting anything human from her. Still, the guards didn't seem to mind...
"Anyway," the professor continued when Laura was finished, shaking off his embarrassment, I was just hoping to find out how you like it at the Institute."
Laura sat on her bed, expressionless.
"It's good," she stated. "Just confusing."
Xavier chuckled.
"That's good. Don't worry, we'll make a teenager out of you yet!" he added, leaving.
Laura was puzzled. Wasn't her age all that mattered? Was their another requirement? Maybe being able to choose clothing correctly? Oh well. She was learning. Besides, when she thought about it, she really liked the Institute. She could get used to it here. It might take a while, but she could handle it. She would just treat it like another daily training session: observing how to be normal. She smiled. She would be the world's most normal girl before she started school. And she would enjoy every minute of it.