Chapter 7
(Angela)
We made the trip home in silence, all of us with our own thoughts about what we'd learned. To say we were dumbstruck is an understatement. However, considering our past history with the guy, I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. And by that, I mean mutants in general. I could still hear the words he spoke on the television, all those years ago…
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"My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I address you today. A tragedy has befallen us, without rhyme or reason, without warning. The loss of the President and Vice President has shaken all of us to the core, leaving us to wonder, why did this happen? Although the incidents are still under investigation, we have evidence that indicates this may have been a terrorist plot, masterminded by those within our own population who have the powers to sow the seeds of chaos without leaving any trace of their involvement. I speak to you of the mutants.
"Only the mutants could have succeeded in undermining the security of both the President's entourage and the Vice Presidential motorcade. Only mutants could have caused the exact circumstances that led us to where we are today. So on this day, I make you a promise. I will deal with the mutant problem once and for all. I promise that I will do all that is within my power to ensure that the Unites States of America will be cleansed of this disease and we will once again know peace. Thank you."
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I had always wondered how Project Wideawake had been greenlighted, then hidden so far away that even the best hackers in the world had not been able to find it until it was almost too late. I had wondered how Weapon X could still be active after all this time, feral mutants like the three of us being rare enough amongst our own kind. Charles had said it before when we first discussed hitting the BCI offices. Where do you hide something you don't want anyone to see? In plain sight. The Director had been right in front of us all along.
I was broken out of my reverie by the sound of the jet making its final approach to the mansion. Kyro set it down gently in the hangar and as soon as the ramp opened, I dashed out of the plane and down to the Danger Room. I accessed the file archives and instructed it to create a doppelganger of our ex-President, so I could look into its eyes and see how I could have missed something so obvious. It didn't help.
I wasn't aware that anyone had followed me until I heard the sound of a throat clearing behind me. I whipped around and there was Logan, leaning casually against the doorframe. "Hey darlin'. You comin' to bed?"
I shook my head. "Logan, how could we have been so blind? We should have known, when the Sentinels were out there, after Des Moines. We should have fucking known!"
"You said it yourself before, angel. You ain't psychic. Neither am I, neither is Kyro. That guy Maxwell's been doin' what he did for a long damn time to keep that guy's secret." He walked over and looked closely at the doppelganger. "But now we do know. An' we can take him out, once an' for all."
"I have the strangest feeling he'll find out anyway. You know that Maxwell had to be giving him regular reports, updates. When the next one doesn't come, he'll know and he'll rabbit faster than we can catch him."
"You forgot somethin'. I've been right next to the man, I got his scent. He can run, but he can't hide, not for long. We'll get him, you mark my words."
"I hope so." I looked back at the doppelganger and sighed. "I really hope you're right."
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The next day, we met with the Professor and gave him a run down of what we'd learned. He too was shocked to learn that the Director was the guy who almost succeeded in taking out mutantkind completely. We know that he'd stopped his persecution shortly after the DC Metro incident, we were pretty sure Bennington had something to do with that, but that was only his public face. In secret, he'd continued his work and the possible ramifications of that boggled my mind. We had reason to believe that Wideawake wasn't dead, simply slowed down. We knew Weapon X was still alive and well. How many other black projects did that man have going that we hadn't learned about? Maybe some of them weren't all bad, but those weren't the ones I cared about.
"…an' that's about it." Logan finished his report. "Now we know who he is, we just gotta find him."
"Logan, that won't be nearly as simple as you make it sound." Charles replied, taking a sip of his tea. "He'll have Secret Service protection, security systems. And we still don't know where his main base of operations is."
"I have Buzz running the data right now, Charles." I said. "The Director might have been hiding in plain sight, but I doubt he'd trust something like the bulk of Weapon X to something as simple as that. Not to mention Wideawake." I frowned in thought. "No, he'll want that as far off the grid as he can get it, somewhere that no one would ever even think to look."
"And yet he still does not try harder to get us back." Kyro pointed out and we all looked at him. "We may be listed as failures in his files because we are not under his control, but in truth we are the best he ever created."
"Hell, it ain't like we been hidin' or anythin'." Logan said. "I was right there in the train with him an'…holy shit!"
"What?"
He growled and ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up more than it already does. "I was in the goddamn train with him an' I shoulda realized it then, but everythin' was goin' so fast." He looked up at me. "Angela, he recognized me. He knew me. I jus' thought it was shock that he was right there with a mutant, but I was wrong. Damn it!" He stalked over to the window and leaned against the frame. "I shoulda let Magneto have him."
"Calm down, Logan, please." Charles said mildly. "You can not blame yourself for this. You never met the man before that night, true?" Logan nodded. "You had no way of knowing who he was or how he was involved with your own past. This is not your fault."
"Like hell it ain't. If I'd paid better attention…Chuck, he smelled like fear, but I thought it was cuz of the attack. But now, I'd bet it was cuz o' me."
"The Professor is right, Logan-san." Kyro added. "You can not hold yourself responsible for saving his life. What you did that day helped all mutants more than anything else you have done."
"Yeah, I s'pose you're right. But he ain't the President anymore an' I ain't lettin' him get away again."
"We won't let him get away." I said. "We'll find him and we'll show him what he created when he made us what we are."
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Now, promising to kill the Director was easy. Finding him proved to be a much trickier project. About a week after our excursion to the BCI offices, the former President announced that he was going on a "goodwill mission" to South Africa. On the way there, his plane crashed into the sea. I was not surprised when no bodies were found in the wreckage and it was assumed the ocean had taken them. I didn't believe a word of it.
The X-Men even went out to assist with the search just a few hours after the crash, but even we didn't find anything with all of our fancy equipment and various mutations. Storm stayed out there with a team for two days and came up with nothing, which was disappointing to the government, but good news for us. Our quarry had gone to ground. It was a shame we'd been unable to take away all the ground he could have gone to; it would make finding him that much harder.
So, life returned to what passed as normal around the mansion. Seth and Simon, the twins that had shown up years before, had progressed in their powers to the point of being almost scary. Seth could still only transform solid materials into metal, but the transformation lasted much longer than when he first showed up here. In fact, Sam had a chunk of wood that he'd transformed more than a month before and it was still in a metallic state with no signs of reverting back to wood. His brother had learned extremely fine control and could take a one foot cube of any metal and flatten it paper thin, spin it into miles of wire or compress it until it was so dense that Logan couldn't pick it up. Sam had no problems and we're pretty sure Piotr wouldn't either, but they were the only ones we could think of right offhand. However, unlike Magneto, Simon couldn't lift metal objects or in any way move them about. As he'd told us when he got here, he simply told the metal what to do.
We also received confirmation that Evie's mutation was definitely manifesting early. Rogue came to us one day after her morning kindergarten class to tell us about it. Logan and I were in the strategy classroom going over that day's assignments when she found us. "Hey you two. Gotta minute?"
"Sure darlin'." Logan replied, pulling up an extra chair for her. "Whatcha need?"
"I was wonderin' if either of you ever noticed that Evie knows things." She began.
"She knows all kinda things, Rogue. That ain't nothin' new."
"No, what I meant was, she knows things before they happen."
Now she had MY attention. "Well, nothing concrete, that's for sure. Why, what happened?"
"You know I took her class on a nature hike today, right?" We nodded. "Well, we were goin' down the path to the stream, since there's some plants just comin' into bloom over there that I wanted them to see. We were just passin' under that tree that Angela here likes to climb all the time and outta nowhere, she pushes Wendy Oliver off the path. Not two seconds later, a huge branch comes crashin' down right where Wendy was standin'."
"Holy shit! Are they all right?"
"Yeah, they're both fine. But I asked Evie why she did that and she looks me right in the eye and says 'I saw Wendy gettin' hit an' I didn't want that to happen'."
I covered my face with my hands and sighed. "Well, we didn't know what her mutations might turn out to be. We asked Hank before she was born about it, because Emma'd had precognition and I had that one dream about the Sentinels that came true while I was pregnant with Evie. The only other true dreams I ever had were when I was pregnant with Emma."
"Is there a history of it in your family or somethin'?"
I shrugged. "A little, I suppose. Remember, I was born way before the word 'mutant' was part of the vocabulary. But my mother always knew where to find things, no matter where they'd been lost and she said her grandmother always knew things before they happened. So I guess it skips a generation."
"What about anythin' else?" Logan asked. "She got anythin' like us?"
Rogue shook her head. "Not that I've noticed, but it might still be too soon to know for sure."
"Still, we'll have to get her into the Professor's gift classes now." I said. "She'll have to learn how to control this."
"That's my next stop. I just thought you guys should be the first to know."
We thanked her and she left on her errand. I glanced over at Logan and the look on his face was unreadable. "What's wrong lover?"
"Evie, she had that dream, the one you had too. You think she might have some telepathy too?"
"I don't know, but I'm sure Charles will find that out soon enough. Why?"
"I'm thinkin' that maybe she sent that dream to you without realizin' it." I gave him a confused look. "Think about it darlin'. You're her mom, she already sent you other stuff before she was born, so she already knows how to do that, even if she doesn't know she knows. She has the dream about the 'bad men' an' her instincts tell her to send it to someone else that she knows is strong enough to make it not happen."
I chewed on my thumb claw thoughtfully. It made perfect sense, really. No matter how much of a daddy's girl she was, I still had the advantage of having carried her within my body for nine months. Mutant or no, any mother will tell you that they have a kind of bond with their children, no matter how old they are. I nodded slowly. "You might be on to something there. We'll talk to Charles and Hank after dinner, see what they have to say."
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Logan let me handle most of the conversation that evening, contenting himself to smoking a cigar and looking worried. I explained what we'd come up with after Rogue left our classroom to the two smartest men on the planet, then waited for their reaction.
"It is certainly possible, I'll admit." Charles said. "I know she won't be happy to add an afternoon class to her schedule, but I will see that she's included from now on."
"Also, don't forget that we talked about this possibility before she was born." Hank pointed out and I nodded. "I will admit that I wasn't prepared for any part of her mutation to manifest this early, but it is certainly not unheard of."
"Yeah, Logan and I talked about that earlier, too." I said, lighting a cigarette. "But I think it may have been at least slightly active much longer than this." I explained the dreams I'd had to them and how Evie had told us about the same dream after the North Korea mission. "But she's older in the dream than she is now, a lot older. Maybe nine or ten."
"Well, tomorrow is Saturday and I believe you had an outing planned with her if I'm not mistaken." Charles replied with a smile.
Logan grunted and rolled his eyes. "Yeah, don't remind me. Why the hell she wants to go to that noise factory is beyond me."
"It's not a 'noise factory', Logan." I said. "It's Chuck E. Cheese's. And she wants to go because she likes the pizza and the ball pit."
"An' it's full o' screamin' kids who think a giant singin' mouse is entertainment." He stubbed out his cigar and tossed it into the sand bucket. "Don't know why she can't go to the park like normal kids."
"She's not three anymore, lover." He scowled at me and I giggled, then turned back to the Professor. "Yes, we have an outing planned. We'll ask her about it on the way home."
"If I survive that long." Logan grumbled and we all laughed.
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Later that night, before everyone went to sleep, Scott Summers sneaked past Logan and Angela's suite to the lower levels. Just as he expected, Buzz was still hard at work on some project or another, probably relating to the vengeance trail the two feral mutants were on. He tapped lightly on the door and the blue-haired hacker looked up. "Hey Summers. 'Sup?"
"Buzz, I have a mission, should you choose to accept it." Scott replied with a little-seen smirk on his face.
"Oh really?" Buzz replied, clearly curious. "And what might that be?"
"You know that Logan and Angela are taking their daughter to Chuck E. Cheese's tomorrow, right?"
"Yeah, poor guy. Feel sorry for him. Saturday afternoon in that place, it'll be a madhouse."
"Exactly my point." Scott said and took the chair next to Buzz. "How funny would it be to see someone as supposedly as hardassed as Logan playing Whack-a-Mole? Skee Ball? Rolling around in the ball crawl with his daughter?"
"Hey man, I get what you're saying, but I have a serious need to be breathing tomorrow. I'm supposed to fly out for a visit with Jubilee!"
"Don't worry, I'll take full responsibility!" Scott promised, his smirk now a full grin. "Come on, Buzz. I know you have something down here that can record this!"
Buzz thought for a minute, then turned to a cabinet in the corner next to a long table covered with electronic equipment. "Well, I do, but…"
"What you got?"
Buzz sighed. "Angela asked me a couple months ago for a micro camera, something that could be easily hidden on anything. I've been having trouble with the resolution, it's pretty dirty. But I suppose I could clean it up on the computer…why do you want to do this?"
"Let's just say that I'm sick of Logan always saying I have a stick up my ass. I just want to show him what happens when I loosen up."
"You swear he won't kill me? Cuz I gotta say, that's the last guy I want to piss off ever."
"If he so much as waggles a claw in your general direction, he'll have to answer to me."
"Not much of a threat." Buzz mumbled under his breath.
"What'd you say?"
"Oh…uh, I said I'll see what I can get." He went to the cabinet and took out a small box. Shaking his head, he turned to Scott and handed it to him. "This is a prototype, the only one I've got."
"Great! Um, we'll have to plant it somewhere, someplace he won't find it or even think to look."
Now it was Buzz's turn to grin. "I know just the place."
AN: Before anyone asks, the answer is no, i don't give the Director a name...he was never (as far as i've been able to find) given one in the comics and i see no reason to change that here...now, if anyone out there DOES know if he was given a name, i will gladly edit further chapters to reflect that for the sake of accuracy...AND i will post the next chapter as a reward to the person who gives me the info...:) Special thanks to my beta readers, Zac and Turiel Tincdaniel for being so awesome...Extra Special thanks to DBK(tm) for his undying love and devotion...Super Special thanks to my readers for sticking with me and Super Swanky Special thanks to my reviewers, who were sela103, theNightEnchantress, reeltreble1031 and levanna...sela: what do you think i'm planning, hmmm?? theNightEnchantress: Good to see you, as always...:) reeltreble: Keep plugging away, it'll eventually come together...:) levanna: Sorry you had a crap week, but i'm glad i could help cheer you up...:)
Now, for the record, the next chapter is nothing but fun and amusement, mostly because i was starting to feel like the story was too heavy for too long and needed a break...so if anyone or anything seems ooc, blame my beta reader Zac...the funniest part (to me, at least) was ALL his idea! I just ran with it!
Now, all you readers who haven't reviewed, please do! I don't bite (much) and would love to hear from you, even if it's just to say hello! You can do that, can't you? Click the little button and just type "hello"? I know you can!
