Wow. I was expecting one review, perhaps two at the most. Thanks guys, you doubled my expectations! Hopefully this chapter will warrant a similar response! The plot bunnies are quite content... at the moment, anyway... But why does it say that I have 51 "hits" on my stats? Is it so bad that 46 people couldn't bring themselves to end the starvation of the plot bunnies? Oh, that makes me sad... sniff

ahem

Thanks for reading!

Kathryn Worthington shot out a hand, gripping onto the stair's railing in a desperate attempt to steady herself. She clung there for a few seconds, breathing heavily, before she felt confident enough to push herself back onto her feet. Although she righted her balance with relative ease, she left both hands coiled around the cool wood in case a wave of weakness should hit her again. The entire time, the knocks at the door kept reverberating through the entrance hall and up the steps to her ears.

"Coming," she muttered weakly.

It would be the one time Sally's on errands and Amelia's at school. The one time a week I'm by myself for a window of thirty minutes and someone comes to bang impatiently on the door.

The matriach of the Worthington family was approaching thirty-two years old, but she was as frail as if she was forty years older. She suffered the same strange, genetic abnormality that induced weakness as her mother and maternal grandmother before her. They had lived to be forty and thirty nine, respectively. Kathryn was beginning to fear her time was nearly up. The only solace she could take was in the fact that she didn't appear to have passed the hereditary curse onto her young daughter.

She was so pale that her skin was little more than a transparent layer covering networks of blue and red blood vessels. It was the type of pale that only years worth of bed-rest can bring. Generally speaking, the only sun she saw came through windows with the blinds closed. Her hair, normally a graying, light brown, had been dyed to a darker shade in an attempt to hide her aging, but this accentuated the ivory of her skin even more. In addition, her mouth looked too pink and her eyes too big and blue for her face. All in all, she bore a remarkable resemblance to a life-size porcelain doll.

Her foot, encased in a fluffy white slipper, trembled as it reached for the next step. Luckily, she had convinced her husband years ago to get rid of the rug that had lined the stairs and carpet them completely. The thick red carpet gripped her small slippers as she stumbled along, where a mat would have slipped and sent her tumbling down the stairs. After what seemed like a life-time, her descent of the stairs was complete. The double-doored entrance to the house was about 15 feet away from her, across a floor of smooth white marble.

Maybe I should get a rug for in here, she thought as she tottered nervously across, it looks a little austere. Entrance halls should be welcoming, and yet all we have is plain marble and some showy, antique furniture. It saddened her that she lived in something that was more of a show-house than a home.

On either side of the double doors were hatched-glass panels. Behind them she could see fuzzy outlines of people, the same people who had been impatiently waiting for her come down to answer their summons. She twisted the key that hung in the lock, hearing the click as the mechanism released. She opened the right-side door carefully, making sure she kept her balance and didn't go sprawling on the shiny floor in front of these strangers. To help stay stable, she continued to hold onto the door handle even when it was fully open.

In front of these people who had come calling, Kathryn suddenly felt self-conscious, aware that she looked like a classical example of an invalid. She was wearing flannel red pyjamas and a white dressing gown that matched her slippers, with dark hair spilling out of a rough bun. As if that wasn't bad enough, her eyes were irritated today and were red-rimmed in her pale face.

The man and woman on her doorstep took in her appearance at the same time as she was taking in theirs. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties. Her hair, which was pulled back into a tight ponytail, was dyed black and then streaked purple. She had a silver nose stud which had a purple gem in the center gleaming above her left nostril, and hazel eyes. She wore black knee-high boots on the outside of her jeans and a tight white shirt.

"Mrs Worthington?" she asked.

"Yes. Can I help you?"

"My name's Theresa." The girl sounded foreign, but also polite. Kathryn was a little taken aback by that, assuming from her clothing that she would be crude. Later, Kathryn would see the foreigner had the design of the Union Jack embroidered on the back pocket of her jeans. The girl indicated her partner. "This is Chris. We work with your husband."

Chris was older, early thirties probably, Kathryn guessed. He was also wearing jeans, but these were of a baggier variety than the girl's, and a loose black shirt. His hair was wild, and obviously he hadn't shaved in a while.

After looking at the both of them and comparing them to her mental representations of her husband's colleagues, Kathryn Worthington was one hundred percent certain that the duo weren't researchers at Alcratraz Laboratories.

So what are they doing here? For the first time in her life, she began to think that perhaps being as rich as they were could be a bad thing.

Eyeing them nervously, she replied, as polite as ever, "He's not here." She gripped the round doorknob in her hand a little tighter, and felt her palm begin to sweat. The colour began to bleed out of the surroundings, as if some Almighty Being had put the contrast up too high, until only white, black and gray were left. Her head began to feel exceedingly heavy, and shooting pain pulsed above her right eye.

Oh no... not now... these attacks always hit at the most inopportune moments...

She blinked and grit her teeth until the colours returned and the pain subsided, and tried not to sway on the spot. The entire incident must have taken less than a second, because she was tuning into Theresa's reply without having missed a single word of the conversation.

"Oh." Theresa sniffed and dabbed quickly at her nose with a white handkerchief. Kathryn wondered dazedly what would happen to the nose stud if the girl sniffed really hard. "Well, that's okay. We just came by to deliver him something. Can... could you pass it on to him? Please."

"Well, sure," said Kathryn, relief flooding over her. So, the unlikely co-workers of her husband were in fact delivery people. Not some crook bent on taking their riches, or even some irate GE-free believer or animal rights activist who was under the mistaken belief that her husband tampered with the genetic makeup of animals. Not some one who wished her harm. "Is it dangerous, though? A hazardous chemical or something?"

The man reached into his pocket and drew out a small white paper-bag the contained something box-shaped. He turned it over in his hands before directing his gaze back at her. "Nah, not harmful. Just something for Doctor Worthington to take a look at." His voice was rough, as if he was suffering the same cold as the girl, but his eyes were sharp and showed no sign of illness. His companion seemed to flinch when he reached his hand past her.

"Okay, thanks." Kathryn took the parcel from his outstretched arm. "I'll tell him you stopped by."

"Yeah, okay." Chris turned on his heal and left. He coughed as he walked down the drive, a hacking cough like those that are associated with lung cancer or chest infection – must be sick after all. Annoying how if someone in the workplace gets ill, everyone does.

Theresa nodded, and murmured, "Thanks. It was good to meet you," before she followed her partner. The end of her long black-and-purple ponytail swayed over her back as she walked down the steps.

Kathryn watched them go, holding the small paper bag to her chest in her free had. When she was convinced that they were indeed leaving – and not nipping through the tidy gardens to the back, or something like that – she closed the door and locked it to its twin. She checked that both were properly closed, and then turned and leaned her back against them.

So jumpy, she scolded herself, closing her eyes. Two people deliver something for Warren and I assume they're hired muscle. She sighed tiredly. Maybe I should talk to him about upping my medication, or something.

Her hands balled around the white bag as soon as she thought of it, making it rustle and the box inside warp slightly out of shape. She hated the pills. She hated the way they looked, elliptical and smooth, and the way they felt and tasted as they wormed down her throat. She hated the feelings she got on days when she decided to skip the tablets in the morning – the shaking, the sweating, the nausea. But she utterly despised the way she acted when she did take them – mounting feelings of paranoia and despair. Staring at her daughter and failing to recognise Amelia's sweet, tearful face.

Sighing, Kathryn walked slowly to the stone pedestal to her right. It was an antique from Rome, probably only a few centuries old – positively modern in Roman terms – but beautiful enough. Around the ornately carved 'stem' were her children's shoes, neatly paired and pushed out of the way. On its smooth, flat surface sat her favourite plant, Maidenhair, in a bright yellow pot that seemed humorously out of place. She gently pushed some of the plant's long fronds out of the way, and set the white package down where Warren would see it when he got home later, after picking Amelia up from school and Warren Junior up from creche, and going back to the labs for the inevitable overtime.

She knew she had to get up the stairs, before another dizzy spell hit her. She'd been lucky before. That sudden burst of stress when she thought the duo had come for her or her husband had triggered something, and although that one hadn't caused her to faint, Kathryn knew from experience that her 'episodes' frequently come in three's. And falling onto the hard marble, with no one around to make sure she was okay, was not the most appealing notion. Slowly, cautiously, she wobbled over the steps and wrapped her hands tightly around the banister. She hoisted herself up one step at a time, muscles shaking with the effort and sweat beginning to appear on her brow. Upon reaching the last step, she hurriedly stumbled into her bedroom and sunk gratefully into the large armchair by the half-open balcony door. She breathed in the sweet smell of the garden air as her perception of colour faded again, and waited patiently for the spell to end.

Outside, 'Theresa' rubbed her nose, careful not to pull on the tiny glittering stud nestled in the fold of skin. Then, she tossed her ponytail around to inspect the ends under the light. She huffed. "That shampoo din't do jack. The purple's beginnin' to show through a'ready."

Her partner shrugged. "Can't help you there, Lisa. Maybe you should go bald, you know. Actually, that's a blimming fantastic idea, 'cos then I wouldn't have to hear you continuously whinin' about it."

"Yeah, you know what, James? Screw you."

Chris, or James as we know him to be, held a hand against his heart in mock pain. "I am wounded," he pronounced, and then proceeded to ruin the moment by coughing and spitting phlegm into a nearby bush.

Lisa snorted, flinging her dual-coloured hair over her shoulder. She pulled out a set of car-keys and walked over to a nondescript white Ford, the heels of her black boots clacking loudly against the concrete footpath. The car was probably only worth a few hundred. It was only ten years old, but the miles were high and it had seen its share of rough driving over the years. Lisa was quite attached to it, though, even when many her friends had long ago upgraded to fancier models. It was the first car she ever stole, and they'd seen some sights together.

"Good thing you have a healin' factor then, ain't it?" she retorted. She turned the key and the central-locking mechanism whirred. Shooting a glare at James, she opened the door. "Now git in the car. We got work to do."

Random Musing 2:

I checked out the Worthington's on an x-men comic sight before I wrote this (which is how I found out that they were actually in contact with Emma Frost - woo, gold star for me!) and found out that Angel's mother is indeed named Kathryn. I'm not sure what happened to her though, only that she appears to have fallen out of the picture by the time the Last Stand comes around. Anyway, obviously when she thinks about "Warren' she's referring to her husband, not her son. Sorry if that gets confusing, but it seemed contrived to do so any other way.

I wasn't going to introduce James into the story this early, but it seemed to go well. Three guesses as to who he is, or rather, who he turns into

Lisa is based on both a mutant from the comic series, and my friend by the same name. I'm not sure how that happened. Anyways, she would pop up from time to time as the story progresses

Please Review! Keep the plot-bunnies fat and content.