Sköll Howlett.
Tiny, vexing, ADHD Sköll Howlett. The little mischief miscreant was going to be the death of him.
She was off again, zipping through the air like a little ball of uncontained energy, wreaking havoc all over his Laboratory. The Beast was having absolutely none of it. The fact that she would recover from any and all injuries within seconds both reassured and infuriated him. He kept trying to remind himself that she was just a small five year old child-cub, and that he shouldn't, under any circumstances, harm the infuriating brat…but the Beast was not particularly known for his stellar patience. Needless to say, he finally snapped, snatching her out of the air faster than she could blink.
Literally.
"Awwww, Uncle Haaaa-aaannnk…but you promised you would help me control your abilities toodaaay, I been all off balance and wobblyyy," she whined in a high pitched nasally voice, which served only to further grate on his patience. Worse still, she was fully aware of it and the tell tale smirk on her face made him want to shake it off her face.
So he did.
Roughly.
Now grinning down at her scowl with sharp teeth, he set her down on the floor unceremoniously in a heap of gangly limbs and wild black hair. "You're really mean," she whined sulkily as she slid into a very animal-like crouching position on her haunches. He crossed his arms in an ill attempt to conceal his guilt for being short with her at the familiar sight.
Sköll was Logan's self-imposed adoptive child, and while she had claimed the Wolverine so stoutly and soundly as her guardian, she was also a ward of the Institute and most of the team couldn't help but see her as a niece of sorts. The Beast especially, because his ability/skill set was the second she had mimicked and the first she had done so by choice. He really was quite honored and duly flattered that she thought so highly of him that she wanted to literally be like him. In her own words.
"Stop your whining, and now…claws out. We're going to train running and hand to hand today, and I don't have the patience for little girls in the training room," the barb hit its intended mark masterfully of course and her childlike features reddened as she bristled in anger, claws coming out instinctively.
"I'm not a fucking girl!" she growled, bearing her new fangs at him and glaring.
The Beast gave her an once-over and snorted in unrestrained amusement.
"We'll see then, won't we?"
"James…you can't possibly let her choose her own name. It's a rather big and permanent decision to give a three year old child," the exasperated tones of Jean Grey followed him through the house, as she shadowed his steps two at a time to keep up.
Wolverine snorted, pulling out a packet of reds from his worn left front pocket. "She's been living here for a year already, and two with me…I can't keep calling her Little Mischief anymore, and she can read…if she wants to name herself something ridiculous like Yoghurt or Willy Wonka…I'll intervene".
Jean suppressed a howl of frustration, vowing to take it up with the venerable Professor instead. He had to make Logan see reason.
As it was the small child was propped up by a nest of pillows around Logan's coffee table in the middle of the room, a steady pile of mythology books scattered around her. She had short purple hair that was so dark it was almost black that fell to her collar bones, pale arms long and thin with dark violet diamond markings on the inside of her wrists, with wide calculating gray eyes.
It was hard to believe the girl had once been bright eyed and fair-haired, but Logan's adaptative regeneration wasn't the only thing she had mimicked in that horrible episode last week. It had been a nightmare, but it had ultimately achieved its intended purpose…no one would try to pry the child from the Wolverine now.
"Miss Grey? Do you need anything?" if a child could manage a flat cold tone, it was definitely Wolverine's kid. Though she rather deserved it, she supposed. She'd tried to impose her guardianship (and Scott's) without her consent on the child, claiming the Wolverine wasn't fit to care for a child. The Professor had suggested she ask the child when she wouldn´t let it go, she hadn't thought so much as to "ask" but rather to "inform" her. She had meant well, ultimately….but you know what they said about good intentions and the road to hell. She didn´t think in all for her years of knowing him that she had ever seen James so utterly enraged at anyone, let alone her.
The kid, usually quiet and soft spoken, had challenged the limits of her lungs in a screech that could have rivaled Sean Cassidy himself. Jean had half expected her to shoot up to the ceiling with the sheer force of the howl.
"So you see, with Logan going out on so many missions…he won't have that much time to care for a child…it only stands to reason that someone more suited to it would stand in to take care of you…" Jean explained with a reassuring smile on her face.
The girl scowled, light blue eyes flashing "If he goes…then I'll go with him," she replied with an air of finality.
"That would be too dangerous kid, but you'd still get to see him all the time…" Scott tried, trying to make her see reason from another angle.
"If I'm going to 'see him all the time'" she made air quotations with her hands "then what would I need the two of you for? Thanks, but no thanks." she shook her head in mild irritation, staring back at the T.V. behind them, and effectively ignoring them.
"Wouldn´t you like to have a normal family? A mom and a dad, who can dedicate all of their time to you instead?" Jean tried again.
That caught the girl´s attention, but in a completely roundabout opposite way. Her face flushed red in anger and she bristled like an angry cat at them, bearing her teeth and growling like a threatened wild thing. "I already HAVE a dad, and I want him NOW!" she grit out, barely contained rage dancing behind her eyes dangerously in a mulish expression that reminded the Phoenix and Cyclops both of the Wolverine so strikingly that they both froze in their attempts to placate the child for a moment.
Sensing their sudden hesitation, she let out a loud wail of pain crumpling into herself and sobbing over-dramatically. Jean and Scott made a move to touch her but she just screamed louder until they both backed away a meter off. She smirked at them nastily.
"DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADDDYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY YYYYYY!"
Sevral doors slammed open with a crash and the thunder of several sets of feet literally dashing through the house sprang into action; A loud thud and the skid of nails scratching over wood. Time seemed to stand shock-still for a fraction of a second, and then everything seemed to fast-forward on x250. Wolverine wrenched the door open, half off its hinges and scooped the child up in a swift motion combined with a barrel roll and scanned the room for the threat until it landed on the wary expressions of Jean and Scott.
The child itself was clutching his neck in a vice-grip, and suddenly Beast and Professor X were in the room as well, ambling more sedately through the torn door of the drawing room. "What the fuck is going on?" Logan ground out.
"They were trying to take me away, but I don' wanna don' wanna don' wah-aaah-nnaa," the girl started to explain, now falling into real slightly hysterical sobs, burying her face into Wolverine´s neck. Face turning steadily purple with rage, completely out of sorts with the gentle hand on the child´s head acting out in soothing motions, he glared at Cyclops first and narrowed his eyes at Jean lastly, fixing her with an ugly infuriated glower.
Everyone seemed to unfreeze at her noisy sobbed proclamation, and Scott tried to explain but even he couldn't get two words out without thinking how much of an ass he sounded like. Logan had been taking care of the kid for two years now hadn't he? Why did he let Jean talk him into this again?
Jean huffed up in self-righteous indignation, barreling over the noises in the room with a speech of how she was infinitely better suited at child-rearing and how she would prove it. She reached out to take the child from Logan's arms when the girl let out a high-pitched wail and shuddered.
Then just as abruptly, she went slack in Wolverine´s arms, staring wide-eyed and vacant at the ceiling and her face and body seemed to...flicker? He hair was turning darker, from the slight shockingly violet to a thicker almost black…face turning more angular…the blue in her eyes giving way to steel grey.
Alarmed, Wolverine tried to set her on the floor but she just kept flickering, arms tightening around him. He felt his energy levels drop, his eyelids growing laxer and laxer until darkness took her and she gave away in a dead faint within the safe cage of his arms.
She'd been in the strange self-induced coma for a week, and in that week both Cyclops and Jean had gotten such a thorough tongue lashing from the Wolverine and on occasion a burning scolding from the Beast that Scott didn't show himself for weeks thereafter at the manse, and Jean was still falling over herself trying to make up for it.
Once she was awake, the Beast had set fast through a number of tests and analysis that confirmed everyone's suspicions, and in Wolverine's case…his worst nightmare. Not only had she permanently absorbed some of his DNA into her system(thus the now similar bone structure and other features), but had mimicked his skills and abilities unto herself in a way reminiscent of her late father Calvin Rankin, further proving his parentage and her previously latent abilities were now active and stronger than her predecessor had been.
The running theory was that either she was made stronger by having absorbed Mimic´s abilities unto herself, and therefore what had caused his somewhat sudden and mysterious death, or the mutant strain in her DNA was made stronger by a insertion of a trinucleotide repeat expansion mutation for the 'Mimic strain gene', or a combination of both. Beast was banking on the third option, and Professor X was inclined to agree.
Wolverine didn't care either way. The child he had been caring for, and saw as his own, was now cursed as he was. She would never grow old, or have a normal human life. He felt so helpless he could have cried, would have had been any other man. As it were, he felt like getting roaring drunk instead, but the soft steady exhalations and the thin ripples of that small chest's rise and falls stilled his hands and glued his legs to her bedside chair.
So, when the good Professor wheeled into the room, adoption papers in tow with his good intentioned meddling he couldn't find it in himself to turn him, or her, away. His own familiar features in her smaller child's face mocked him from across the room. He wouldn't dare deny her now. He didn't even try to fool himself any longer into thinking that he hadn't wanted to claim the child; in any case, it was a moot point now. The child had claimed him herself, and he'd be damned to hell and back if he even thought of letting her down or being unworthy of the trust that had been placed in him. A child's regard was a precious thing.
He'd been tailing Mimic for months now, catching glimpses every now and then, but he hadn't had a solid lead in weeks. It was like chasing a ghost. Logan wondered what the hell it was the Mimic was hiding that was worth all the subterfuge and the cloak and dagger bullshit.
It wouldn't have been the first time the Mimic had fallen off the map, or thought to be dead, but rather that this time he had all out defected a year ago without a backwards glance or even a reason as to why. So it had gotten into the goldenboy's head that Mimic had gone rouge again, and who better for covert ops really than Logan himself? Of course it had nothing at all to do with an impending wedding that was due to take place in his absence…surely.
Logan scowled darkly, pushing such thoughts away from the forefront of his mind and focusing on the task at hand. The Mimic had gone in to a rundown apartment building at noon sometime three weeks ago…and had never come back out. The building was scheduled to be torn down in two days. So either the Mimic was very well stocked until that time, or something had gone terribly awry.
Wolverine liked awry.
Made things for an interesting chase.
The smell of rotting human flesh assaulted his senses fully first, decomposing trash and food along with human excrement and urine permeated through the still air of the small run down two-room complex, making it stagnant and stale.
He choked down the bile rising from his throat, face twisting in disgust.
He traipsed through the collection of broken furniture and torn odd bits and ends. A thick layer of grey dust coated every available surface in the small loft, and he moved through the disordered madness with practiced feet, careful to touch anything. That's when he found it.
Mimic's straggly blonde hair was pasted to his forehead, his skin was pallid and had green sheen to it and the tell-tale signs of decomposition were evident. He wore an expression of shock in his death, arms and legs outstretched in a comfortable position.
Whatever had killed Mimic had caught him by surprise, that much was obvious. He looked around for signs of struggle, but found none. Scattered to the corner of the room he found enough supplies that would have lasted Mimic a week or two at most, but not enough for the camp-out he had previously envisioned. He had meant to stay perhaps a week at most. He had been dead for roughly two weeks, judging by the state of discomposure, but aside from food and clothing Wolverine found nothing particularly suspect that could shed light as to what Mimic was hiding…or perhaps he was hiding from someone?
A faint rustling motion in the edge of his vision caught his eye. He zeroed in on it with startling speed, knocking over a three legged square table, scattering the food stuffs that had been atop it all over the squalid paint-peeled walls.
The sudden movement was followed by the startled wailings of a small child, because there under a dissipating cloud of dust was a small infant girl, bawling her eyes out in fear of him. She had a dark violet diamond marking in the middle of her forehead, and dark violet diamond markings on her chubby shoulders, pointed ears peeked out of a nest of thin whispy silvery violet hair as she bawled her bright blue eyes up at him.
He sank to his knees on the floor in front of him, completely flummoxed.
A child?
Mimic had been hiding a child? A mixture of Mimic's blue eyes with Blink's fine features stared up at him in wild frightened wonder. What on earth was he to make of this now? What could he possibly do with such a young child?