This one's a lot shorter, but it's also filler.
6 hours. That's how long I waited outside of Tacy's room in the medical bay. 6 hours spent worrying and biting my nails down to mangled stubs. A bad habit, I know, and one that my mother had tried to force out of me for years, but there was no stopping me whenever I felt nervous or afraid. And I was afraid. I felt like everything around me was breaking: my control, my reality, the fragile family that I had set myself up with, Tacy at its core. And there was nothing that I could do to stop it.
My memories of the fight between myself and Tacy - Harmony, rather - were broken and disjointed, like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle that just wouldn't fit. I could remember the sounds of screaming when the fire started, ringing the school in a searing, leaping trap. I remembered running out of my room to find the blonde bitch standing there, a wicked grin on her face as she basked in the terror around her. I remember feeling angry. There was pain, too, but mostly there was just a black, burning anger that rolled off of Harmony in waves and settled into my skin. Things got even fuzzier after that.
Logan told me that he had regained consciousness on the floor outside of his room, just in time to see me walk through a wall of fire towards Harmony. Apparently I looked really bad ass while doing it too. I talked her down, or used my ability, or something. Then Tacy was on the ground and I crumpled to my knees beside her. Logan carried us both to the medical bay, while the other X-men put out the fire around the school. Rogue told him that I was mostly fine, just tired and in shock. Then she retreated into Tacy's room and locked the door.
"Kid?" Logan's gruff voice forcibly removed me from my reverie. "Carmen? You all right?"
""M fine," I mumbled, leaning my head back against the wall. The metal was cool against my scalp, soothing the itching first degree burns that covered a good deal of my body. Badass or not, you can't walk through a wall of flames without some consequences. Logan snorted in disbelief.
"You want to talk about it?"
"Not really." We sat there for several minutes in a silence that was as tense as it was awkward. I could feel Logan's eyes on me, dark and brooding as he searched my face. More importantly, I could feel him there beside me, and I could feel his concern rolling off of him in waves. Concern for me, concern for Tacy, I couldn't tell. I was just grateful for the remaining amounts of my energy that let me block the emotion from entering my mind. I had enough to think about already. "Hey, Logan?"
"Hmm?" It was more of a grunt, but at least he was listening.
"Have you ever killed anyone?"
It took him by surprise, for sure. Logan blinked, reeling back from me a little bit. His jaw worked for a minute, and his features settled into their typically stoic expression. "More than I can count, kid." There was the pain again, but I pressed it back.
"How does it feel?" I must have been tired, because my brain - mouth filters didn't seem to be functioning anymore. I couldn't stop the questions from rolling off of my tongue. I just knew that I needed the answers.
"Before?" Logan spoke slowly, carefully tasting each word on his tongue before he spoke. "There's a lot of anger. Sometimes when you kill someone, it's because they've done you wrong, and all you can think of is that they deserve it. Desperation too. The need to survive."
"And after?"
Logan turned his face towards mine, and his gaze was so broken it was all I could do not to reach out and take his pain away from him. "You learn to harden yourself after a while," he explained quietly. "Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing anymore. Somewhere along the way, though, you just stop caring." I paused, considering this.
"I wanted to kill her." The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. "Harmony. Before, when I met her for the first time, I hated her. Because of what she does to Tacy. All I could think of was that if I ever met her again, I would stop her, somehow. But now?" My voice cracked. "She hurts, Logan, just as much as any of us. Maybe even more. And I felt it, and it made me want to tear myself apart. And I turned it all back on her!" My voice rose in volume and I felt tears threatening in my eyes. I choked them back, a little sob escaping my lips. Logan frowned, leaning towards me.
"Hey, kid -"
He was cut off when the sliding doors to the medical bay opened and Rogue stepped out, looking haggard and depressed, but somewhat relieved. I jumped up to my feet tears forgotten as I searched Rogue's face desperately. To my relief, she caught my gaze and smiled. "She'll be okay," Rogue said. "There's a lot of damage..." she bit her lip. I pushed past her into the medical bay. I heard Logan and Rogue follow me, Logan with a somewhat exasperated sigh.
Storm was already in the room, standing next to the cot that held the unconscious Tacy. I ran to her side, looking down at the sleeping form of my best friend. Her blonde hair fanned out over her pillow, looking so much darker and lifeless in her corpse-like state. Her eyelids flickered quietly in some kind of dream state. She looked tired, even in her sleep, and her pale skin had a sickly gray pallor to it. She was hooked up to several machines monitoring her heart and brain waves. I turned my attention to Rogue.
"What kind of damage?" I demanded. Rogue cast a glance at Storm, her clear superior in this scenario. They stared at each other for a long moment before Storm nodded an almost imperceptible movement of her head. Rogue turned to a random keyboard behind her and tapped a few keys. The wall opposite us flared to life as a giant screen, displaying blue and gray images of Tacy's bones, including a full x-ray of her skeleton.
"She was lucky enough not to sustain any physical damage from the incident," Rogue explained, walking towards the set of x-rays. "Tacy's in a sort of self-induced coma right now. When she wakes up, however, we could be seeing either one of her... personalities."
"Her name is Harmony," I explained. "Tacy's alter ego, or whatever you want to call it. I've met her once before. She's a bitch, really." Behind me, Logan chuckled. "She's the louder, stronger personality. Harmony has more control over Tacy's abilities than either one of them. And she's more... capable than Tacy, as it were."
"What do you mean by that?" Storm turned her steely gray eyes towards me.
"John had an obsession with Tacy," That seemed like a bit of an understatement, because John was more than obsessed. But it was the simplest way to describe it. "He gave her gifts and pampered her. He used to take her up to his rooms to be alone..." My voice faltered. "If she gave in to him, he would do anything that she asked for. Tacy couldn't do it, she was too good. But at Christmas time, I got really mad. I provoked Harmony, and she went to John. We all just assumed what had happened after."
I jumped a little as Logan growled ferociously from behind me. "Sounds like John. That asshole." I let out what was both a laugh and a sob all at once, and Logan enclosed a comforting hand on my shoulder.
"Sexual abuse is conclusive to what I found in my examination," Rogue grimaced, turning back to the x-rays. "I suspect that she's been sexually active, both consensually and non-consensually, since she was around twelve years old. That's not to mention the fractures, scar tissue, and other tissue damage." Rogue nodded to Storm, who pressed another set of keys on the keyboard. Small points of light appeared on the screen, mapping out all of Tacy's past injuries. There had to be at least a hundred of them. I gasped. Logan's hand tightened on my shoulder, almost to the point where it was painful.
"What the hell could cause so much damage?" he demanded, a definite snarl behind his tone. Storm's eyes widened, staring at Logan with concern that seemed to go beyond their professional relationship. If I hadn't been so shocked, I might have mentioned it to them.
"Years and years of abuse," Rogue had tears in her voice as she answered Logan's furious question. "Some of her scars are as old as she is. He bones have been broken and re broken. The damage overlaps, there's even significant scar tissue that suggests damage to her vital organs. I would guess that she's been abused since she was a small child, maybe 2 years old at the most."
"She never told me," I choked, whispering past the lump in my throat. "I thought that she trusted me, but she never told me. I knew, too," I laughed, and tears leaked out of my eyes. "I guessed it as soon as I figured out she had a second personality. No one would protect her, so she created Harmony to do that for her." The room was spinning and my voice was cracking and it hurt. God, it hurt. It pressed against my skull and echoed in my head, a thousand voices screaming and crying and burning. I felt a sharp pain as my knees collided with the cold linoleum of the floor.
"Carmen, it's not your fault." Logan had joined me on the floor, and he held my face with calloused but surprisingly gentle hands. "This isn't your fault."
"Isn't it?"
My whisper echoed around the now silent room, and I felt the dam around my thoughts break. All the pain came flooding out of me in the form of tears and I fell into Logan's arms, ruining his shirt as I cried salt water over his back, letting him hold me close and murmur soothingly in my ear. I cried for hours, and in my mind, I felt Tacy cry with me.
Mayeb it's just me, but I think that Carmen and Logan have one of the most epic father/ daughter - friendship relationships ever ;P
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