Sure, that Lilac girl could heal pretty nicely. But I still liked to remain in my room, with no one to bother me. All day had passed like that, and it suited me just fine. Now it was probably about 2 am, and the rain was pouring down on our little house, pelting against the windows upstairs. I could hear it perfectly, along with many other sounds. My little secret, I guess, that I had ridiculously good hearing and sense of scent. Hey, every mutant has to keep some secrets to themselves. Can't be putting everything on blast all the time. But it was in this moment, that those disgustingly familiar clinks two floors above made my heart sink. Instantly, my head rejected it. Wanda was healthy now. Well, healthier. She hadn't touched that stupid box in almost four months. She was recovering! So why now, would those repulsive metal jingles come wafting down to torture me? Maybe it was something I did….? Either way, it made my stomach churn to hear the scrape of wood as she opened it, and the soft clank of the metal blades clashing against one another as she sought one to bring out. Thu-ump as she gently set the box down; she had selected one. I felt like I was going to puke, and I cast my eyes towards the small window at the very top of my wall. It was a window well, and my only access straight outside since I was in the basement. It didn't take me long to decide. Within seconds, I had squeezed outta there, and up the side of the house. She had left her window open, as she always did during a rain storm, and for a moment I hesitated on the roof just beneath it. But then the sounds of her pulling cloth away from her own flesh decided my actions for me, propelling me up, over and in before I could think better of it. She was so zoned out, she didn't even notice me, soaking wet and standing in the shadows of her room. The glint of light against the repulsive steel that she had in her hand made my chest tight, and my jaw clench. For a long time, she held still, looking at the blade and thinking God knows what. For a moment I thought she was just testing herself, until she put the blade to her skin.
"Wanda." That one word, the name that belonged to her, was pulled out of me out of agony, my tone was purely pleading and desperate. Instantly her eyes snapped up and landed on me, though they were so empty she couldn't even glare at me properly.
"What are you doing here?" What usually would have been a harsh demand was now a soft whisper that hung in the air. I took one step forward, and she tensed up so I stopped, but my eyes never left her.
"Wanda, please." I begged her, my vision flicking to the razor pressed against her wrist, then back to her face. My stomach was in knots, seeing her like this. She didn't even have enough humanity in her to be angry at me, like she usually was. She was breathing slowly, still trying to process my presence and what it meant. Finally, it clicked. A flash of fury lit her eyes, and her mouth pulled downward.
"What do you know, Toad? Get out of here." But I couldn't. I made no move either towards her, or the window, I just kept staring at her, imploring silently for her to put the razor down. When I didn't move, she scowled deeper. "I said get out!" Her shout should have brought the attention of the others, but they were long passed out by now. I guess whenever I'm around her, I get stupid, because I started walking towards her, slow with my hands out to show her I meant her no harm.
"Wanda, just put it down," I pleaded. "You don't need that." I got close enough to her to touch her, but stopped. Instead, I chose to sit down on her bed beside her, keeping my hands where she could see them. All the while she was glaring daggers at me.
"Leave Toad," she hissed acidly at me, but I didn't even flinch. "Now."
"I won't. Not when you're like this." I told her softly. She didn't hex me on the spot, which was a good sign to me, so I kept going. "You're better than this, 'n if you don't know it by now it's time someone showed you." She was quiet for a long time, then her arms drooped and she looked away.
"You talk different now." She observed in a dead voice. At least she was talking to me now, never mind that it was off topic. I'd take what I could get.
"You said my slang made me sound like a gutter bum." I reminded her with a failed attempt at a smile. "I figured I'd attempt to clean it up for you." But she didn't seem to hear me now, she just stared listlessly out the window at the pelting rain. "Wanda?" I tried, but she was unresponsive. She had been like this ever since Magneto had messed with her mind. After wiping the memories of her past, she had been happier, but it was fake. When she regained said memories, she was worse off than ever before, and was thrown into bits just like this. Honestly, they scared the hell outta me. I hated to see her so lost, so depressed, to the point she had to inflict pain upon herself. She had been healthy for her longest streak yet, and I would be damned if I did nothing to keep her from going back. Finally her dull eyes pulled back to me, and seemed to drill into me.
"Why?" she croaked after a long stretch of silence. I knew she wouldn't believe me, but I had to tell her the truth.
"Because….well. I love you." Something flickered through her eyes, but it couldn't live long when she was so lost in her own despair like this. The hand holding the blade moved slightly, and her eyes were pulled to it. I was losing her, and I could think of nothing else to do. Slowly, I moved my hand between us, and went to take it from her. The zombie-like state she was in allowed me, until some part of her brain recognized what was happening. Like lightning, she snatched it back, and threw me to the floor, standing as she did so.
"Get out! You don't know ANYTHING, and don't you dare pretend to! Get out! GET. OUT!" she screamed, finally letting her rage boil to the surface and burn away the darkness that had held her before. Which could have been good, I suppose, if she wasn't glowing red. Suddenly a hex was thrown at me, and the second her power touched me I was filled with pain, then was levitated and hurled out of her window and into the storm. The hex released me when I was about 15 feet away from her window, and still two stories up. My powers allow me to do many things, but flying isn't one of them. I plummeted like a rock, hitting the ground with a sickening crunch I could hear and feel from several different bones. I could pinpoint that most of the pain was coming from both of my arms and shoulders, but from there everything else was aching. Most of my thought process halted then, my brain freezing where it was and refusing to compute. Guess that was the shock.
Hours later, some part of me noted the lights that ran over me for a second, and the sounds of a car. Sometime later, there was a figure over me, and voices filled my muted ears. Someone was talking to me….was I talking back? I was aware of my lips moving. Trying to focus, I squinted upward through the rain. Slowly my brain made sense of what my eyes observed. Pink sky, round peach and gold…..Tabby with a pink umbrella. She was talking to me? Or was it someone else?
"….usta been her, who else?"
"Why does he keep sayin' her name? Can't he see she's bad news?"
"We gotta get him outta here, before he catches pneumonia or something."
"Can we even move him? Ah don't think that's such a good idea…." that's when concentrating became too much for me, and I lapsed back into numbness, unaware of almost anything around me. Sometime later, I became aware of something cool flowing through me, causing my mind to sharpen and the numbness to ebb away slowly.
"Wanda?" Was she ok? Did I help? Did she go back to hurting herself? Did she need me? As soon as my brain could handle conscious thought, these questions filled my mind.
"Toad? Can you hear me?" Tabby was at my side, looking down on me worriedly. I tried to move, and yelped in pain. Both my arms were wrapped, and one of my knees as well. "Don't move, just answer me." I looked up at her with my head pounding, but nodded.
"What-" I was looking around, noticing I was now in my room again, when my eyes found Rogue collapsed on the floor next to my bed. "Rogue! Is she ok?" I asked, and went to move again only to be greeted by an unpleasant reminder telling me that moving was not an option. Tabby looked at her, and sighed.
"Yeah, she'll be fine. She tried something stupid, but it helped save you." Taking in more of my surroundings, I noticed blood soaked tissues had filled an empty can brought in from the kitchen and more were scattered around Rogue.
"What happened?" Tabby was looking at me from head to toe with something strange behind her eyes. "I mean to her, not me." I mumbled. I remembered all too well falling two stories out of Wanda's windows, and the circumstances that created that situation.
"How about you fill in the beginning of this story, and I'll tell you the end." She really wasn't going to budge on this. I sighed, and looked away. She didn't seem too worried about Rogue, which meant I was in worse shape than she was.
"I slipped and fell off the roof." We both knew it was a lie, and a pathetic one at that, but I didn't want to sell out Wanda's dark secrets. Tabitha rolled her eyes.
"Ok, we'll go with that. Is there a reason Wanda...helped you….off of the roof?" she asked, sharp eyes on me, letting me know she didn't want any more bullshit answers. I refused to look her in the face. Admitting out loud to someone else that Wanda had hexed me out of her window to fall two stories and lay in the rain for hours made it real, and I didn't want it to be. When my silence persisted, she sighed and sat at the foot of my bed, careful not to disturb my injuries. "Toad, this is twice in one day she's hexed the shit outta you, both times ending in a miracle healing. Before, it was iffy at best. Now she's downright murderous. I know you love her, but she's going to kill you if things continue at this rate." Now she locked her eyes with his, all playfulness gone from her face. "You need to keep a safe distance between you and her." The way she said it, wasn't a request. I nodded, but said nothing. I was drawn to Wanda, and maybe I needed death to get in the way of that, but to Tabby it looked like I was agreeing.
"Now will you tell me what happened ta Rogue?" I asked, looking again at the unconscious girl on my floor. Tabby sighed and knelt beside her friend.
"We found you on the lawn, in your own little crater, and you had probably been there for hours. Both wrists broken, right ulna snapped clean in half, both shoulders dislocated, kneecap shattered and bruised head to toe." I winced at the gory details. I hadn't known what shape I was in, nor had guessed how bad it had been. "Yeah, exactly," she replied to my grimace. "Rogue was dropping me by to pick up some of my stuff before we-…well we stopped by and found you." I couldn't help but smile. That's Boom Boom. Always up to something mischievous. "We wanted to get you out of the rain, you were already shaking like crazy, but we were afraid to move you. So Rogue went back to the mansion and tricked Lilac into touching her long enough to steal some of her healing powers, then came back. We didn't want Lilac knowing what we were up to, because she told the professor about last time, and I'm sure you didn't want that going on again." Gratitude filled me, and I guess it showed on my face because she smiled at me. "Gotcha covered Slick." She told me with a wink, then Rogue moaned slightly, and began to stir, but remained unconscious. We watched her for a time, then I looked at Tabby again.
"So how did she get all…" I gestured to her form and the bloody tissues surrounding her.
"Lilac is a powerful mutant. Rogue wasn't prepared for that type of raw power, with no training. That's also why you aren't healed as completely as last time. I actually had to use some of the stuff the x-men taught me to help patch you up. But anyways, once she got started, it's like she was locked to you. She couldn't stop, and the power was being sucked from her into you. Her nose started bleeding, so I got her some tissues. She went through a lot of them, and I had to keep changing them out. Then finally, when you were mostly healed, she could pull her hands off of you, and the instant she did, she passed out and has been like this ever since."
"Yeah, your dumbass needed som' s'rious healin'!" Rogue mumbled from the floor. "I could see everythin' that ah was doin' inside you, it was weird. But you had already gone 'n gotten some kinda sickness from bein' out in the rain that long, and what with you losin' all that blood, 'n the broken bones….. you owe me."
"Yeah, I know." I told her, already wondering what I could do to pay her back for all of this. Gingerly she sat up, rubbing her head and looking at Tabby and I.
"Man, my head is killin' me!" she closed her eyes again, and I felt a twinge of guilt. If it weren't for me, they would both be out having some form of illegal fun. Instead Rogue almost bled out trying to save my sorry ass.
"You two can crash here, yo. I mean if you're not up ta drivin' 'round in the rain storm out there, ya know?" Rogue's eyes snapped open, and she eyed me.
"K, I know what ya'll do together, 'n I'm not 'bout ta be a parta that!" she said, then closed her eyes again with a scowl as her head started throbbing again. Tabby laughed outright, and I let out a chuckle.
"I don't think that's what he meant," Tabitha told her with a smile.
"If you jus' wanna crash here, it'd be ok with me, yo." I told them, looking away again to hide the dark green that had started to color my cheeks. Tabby giggled at me, which only made the color that much deeper.
"Well, I'm not driving back in this, and you're in no condition to leave either, Bloodzilla." Tabby told Rogue, who only shrugged.
"Fine. But don't expect me to get all cuddly 'n shit with ya'll." she retorted as I handed her two of my blankets and a pillow. Tabby just smiled at me, and curled up with me like she used to almost every night. We were used to this routine already. Both Rogue and I were exhausted, and were out almost instantly. The last thing I remember was Tabby pulling my arm around her waist, yawning some form of goodnight to both of us, then…..
Wanda.