Chapter Twenty-Nine - Memory Lane

Mikaela stands in the freezing rain, her hair sticking to her cheeks and neck, blinking away the drops that fall into her eyes. A sense of dull surrealism clogs her mind, distorting her perspective of the town centre around her. It is strange to her, coming back here after all this time, having grown and changed so much since she last laid eyes on the grimy streets and miserable people.

She still fucking hates it as much as she did back then.

"Aw, man, what the hell?" a disgruntled voice exclaims behind her.

Mikaela turns to watch Pyro linger in the doorway of the chip shop, clutching a package wrapped in thick, beige paper to his chest. He is staring around him with a scowl, apparently offended by the weather.

"It was sunny when I went in there!" he continues, glancing at Mikaela incredulously.

Mikaela shrugs her soaked shoulders. "Welcome to Scotland," she says.

He groans loudly, his eyes rolling at a man trying to squeeze past him into the shop. "Fine," he mutters, stomping out into the rain to stand next to her.

"What did you decide on?" she asks him, nodding at his warm package. The smell of it wafts up to her nostrils, answering before he can, and her mouth twitches at the faint nostalgia the smell awakens.

"Uh, a fish supper?" he replies, quickly looking back at the shop to see if he's right.

Mikaela nods, hiding her smile. "Good choice."

Pyro sniffs and scowls at the rain again. "Let's get out of this shit. I don't want my fries getting wet."

"Chips," Mikaela corrects. She pinches the package, feeling several thick chips between her fingertips. "These bad boys are chips."

Pyro snorts. "Whatever, dork."

"This American thing you've got going on, you need to tone it down," she smirks, gesturing at his entirety. "You're gonna get battered if you keep this up."

"Isn't that what they did to my fish?" he retorts, quirking an eyebrow.

Mikaela rolls her eyes and starts walking down the pavement, Pyro following after her. She can see him attempting to stuff the package under the left flap of his leather jacket, but it's so tight he's having a very difficult time.

"Don't worry, the paper's too thick for this kind of rain to get through. It'd need to be pouring to get to the food," she comments.

"You don't consider this pouring?" he demands, holding his palm out into the rain. His hair is now plastered to his forehead, drips trailing down his scrunched up face.

Mikaela just smirks again and keeps walking. She and Pyro manage to get on sometimes, like this - mostly when he isn't torturing potentially-innocent humans. He has a similar kind of dark humour that can only evolve after living a somewhat hard, painful life, and he tends to treat everything with that humour, as Mikaela does when she wants to cover up or repress an emotion.

And she has plenty of emotions to repress.

She still has nightmares about her time held in captivity by her father. Now, she also has nightmares about the people she is helping to eradicate off the face of the Earth. She is angry at Magneto, at her father, at herself. She is scared almost all of the time - likely another product of her father's capture and torture of her. She feels unnervingly out of place with a group of murdering mutants, and is determined to ignore the voice in her head that says she belongs with them, being a murdering mutant herself. But, more than anything, she wants to repress the bone-deep, draining, horrifying, confusing, depressing ache inside her chest that does nothing but long for New York and the people she holds dear.

She wants to see Tony's warm eyes, hear his voice, feel his hand ruffle her hair; she wants to drink until she passes out with Wade and Vanessa; she wants to feel Xavier take her hand comfortingly, feel Logan slap her on the back and grunt at her incomprehensibly, see Storm and Jean smile kindly at her.

She wants to see Peter. The way his entire face lights up when he smiles, the way his eyes reflect the sunlight, the way he smells like fresh air, the way his hands touch her so gently, the way he exudes purity and optimism as if he hasn't been through tough times himself. Mikaela used to hate his optimism, hate the way he greeted everything with warmth and friendliness, because she knew she couldn't do it, because she would have expected him to be like her, and he wasn't. But now..

Now, she looks upon his optimism and warmth with admiration. Now, she knows that he isn't some idiot who hasn't processed his own traumas. Now, she knows he isn't repressing his traumas with a faux friendliness. Now, she knows that he has processed these things, he has dealt with them, and deals with them every day, and she knows that his optimism is a sign of his strength, and she admires him for that more than she admires anyone else in the world. He faced grief, faced self-blame and self-loathing, and he came through it all, deciding to make the most of his life and deciding to not let depression and guilt consume him. Now, Mikaela knows that he made a much more difficult choice than she did. She took the easy route, of cynicism and coldness and distance; he did something she never could, by choosing love and happiness and life, and she truly admires him for it.

"So, what's the deal with you and this place?" Pyro's voice bursts through her thoughts, and suddenly she remembers she is soaked to the bone and so cold her fingers are numb.

She glances at him, but his chin is lifted so that he can look around at all the stunted buildings lining the street. She wonders how weird these short buildings look to him when he's been used to the towering buildings of America.

"That chippy was my favourite Saturday night dinner, when I was little," she says, repressing a sigh as her gaze falls to her shoes, splashing along in the puddles on the pavement.

She hears him chuckle quietly and murmur, "Chippy."

She doesn't share his amusement. "I'm kind of disappointed that there's anti-mutant organisations here," she continues, "In Scotland, I mean. I thought we were a bit more laid back than most people."

Pyro shrugs in her peripheral vision. "Assholes are universal," he says matter-of-factly.

Mikaela smiles bitterly. "Yeah."

They keep walking, crossing roads and following pavements away from the town centre. Mikaela looks around at the dull, grimy buildings, eyeing their fellow pedestrians warily.

"The last time I walked these streets," she says dryly, "My name was Carolyn. My family was still intact. I had a home."

Pyro makes a noise in the back of his throat. "And now?"

They stop at another crossing, waiting for the green man to let them know it's safe to cross. Mikaela looks sidelong at Pyro, at his somewhat disinterested expression. Suddenly, she feels embarrassed for speaking so much about her previous life. Her embarrassment mixes with frustration at Pyro's lack of empathy.

She thinks of Peter's face, brow creased ever so slightly in concern, comforting words on his lips.

"Now," she sighs, staring at the red man on the lights across the road, "I'm just another asshole."

Eventually, they come to the abandoned building at the edge of the town. Checking no one's watching, they climb over the mouldy fence and wade through the thick, uncontrolled vegetation in the garden. They walk round to the back of the house, and Pyro calls out to the mutants waiting inside.

Mikaela walks into the dusty, leaky house, her feet eliciting loud groans and creaks from the wooden floor beneath her. She strolls past the kitchen and living room, where the majority of the mutants linger impatiently, and lets herself into the small study at the front of the house.

The bookshelf is empty, save for the dust and cobwebs, several of the shelves hanging squint. A three-legged chair sits awkwardly in front of an old desk, the legs of which have been nibbled at for years by mice and other animals. Mikaela moves to the window at the side of the room, reaching out to flick at the dust-covered, tattered curtains, and scrunches her nose at the particles that launch into the air after her attack.

She holds back a groan of misery and lets her chin drop to her chest. Her fingers slip into her pocket to pull out her phone. Being a technopath, she doesn't need to physically check her phone like this; but, she wants to see if she has any texts, and she wants to see it with her own eyes. She expected the blank screen, but she feels disappointed anyway. Opening up her conversation with Peter does nothing to magically conjure a new message either, so she sighs and shoves her phone back in her pocket, her other hand lifting to rub her forehead.

There's no point putting it off. She has work to do.

Stealing herself, Mikaela moves to the old chair and desk and sits down, crossing her arms and leaning them on the chipped wood. She blinks, and launches herself into the mass of the internet. Pyro told her that they had heard of several mutants going missing around this area, and instructed her to investigate every adult in the town. It is tedious work, and digging around in people's personal lives, here, in this town, threatens to bring up some old memories, but she pushes through. The faster she finds the organisation, the faster they destroy them, the faster they move onto the next job, the faster she starts to feel less like she owes Magneto a debt, the faster she can get back to New York. It is a long, complicated journey she wants to speed up, but if she wants to see Peter and Tony and everyone else again, she has to do it.

Weeding out suspicious adults with mysterious employers and interesting bank accounts allows her to make connections between them. She can then dive into their technological footprints, following wherever they go, finding common destinations and routes. Her mind moves effortlessly fast, leaving no room for distracting thoughts and emotions. She is consumed by the hunt, and she welcomes it.

"Well, Ghost," Pyro's voice drawls from her right. "What you got for me?"

Mikaela blinks again and comes back to the dusty old room. She looks round at him.

"I've got a mutant kidnapping in process and a potential location," she replies.

Pyro's eyebrows lift. "Can you follow the kidnappers and check out the location?"

Mikaela nods, turns back to the blank wall, and blinks again, jumping back in.

It doesn't take her long to reconnect with the van of the kidnappers. She stays with it, monitoring its progress along narrow, winding roads. It's a little bit more difficult keeping track of a moving vehicle here, unlike in American cities, because there aren't as many traffic cameras, so she has to align herself with satellites like a GPS and concentrate on the distance between her and the van.

"Okay, they've confirmed the location," she says distractedly, keeping Pyro in the loop. "Just going to have a look from above," she trails off, focusing on the coordinates. Then she blinks and returns to Pyro. "Yeah, it's a repurposed farm - looks abandoned from the outside. I think they might have the majority of the facility underground."

Pyro nods with a sinister expression. "We'll scope it out for a couple days."

"Sounds good," Mikaela says, hoping he won't continue.

"Then we'll incinerate everyone."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mikaela stands under the bus shelter of a street, her hands plunged in her coat pockets, her black cap covering her hair. Her shoulders are hunched over slightly, a hard expression on her face as she strives to stop her foot tapping.

The house sits across the street from her. She can see that some lights are on inside, but the curtains are drawn. The sight of the building makes her chest tighten.

"Fuck," she mutters, and she walks out onto the street.

She rings the doorbell with a shaking finger, which she hastily returns to her pocket. She barely has enough time to gather herself before the door swings open, and a middle-aged woman lifts her smiling face to look at her.

The smile is swept away as dawning recognition breeds a cold, burning, hatred. An unpleasant wave of nostalgia hits Mikaela.

"What are you doing here?" the woman hisses quietly, pulling the door closer to herself as if already trying to shut Mikaela out.

Mikaela smiles bitterly. "I was in the neighbourhood; thought I'd drop by," she replies in a casual, carefree tone.

The woman frowns. "Last I heard, your dad had run off with you to America."

She glances behind her after she says this. Mikaela's eyebrows lift and her smile widens, leaning around the woman to peer into the hallway.

"You got respectable guests you want kept ignorant of your dirty little secret?" she taunts.

Mikaela notices the odd items in the hallway. A man's jacket hanging by the stairs, children's toys lined neatly against the wall-

"Not guests," her mother spits at her. "My family."

Mikaela feels a surge of emotion in her chest, and frowns in response.

"Huh," she mutters quietly, lifting her palm to press against her chest, which has tightened again. "A new family."

"My only family," her mother retorts, eyes blazing.

Mikaela recovers herself, throwing her hands up in mock defense. "Hey, it's fine, I've repressed our messy memory too."

Her mother scowls and glances over her shoulder again. A child's laughter bubbles from the living room through the hallway.

Mikaela wonders if it ever reminds her mother of when she was little.

"What are you doing here?" her mother snaps again.

Mikaela shakes herself. "Family catch-up?"

"If you think for one second that we're going to-"

"Here's a funny story - you'll like this," Mikaela interrupts, chuckling to herself. "Dad - you remember Archie, right? - dad kidnapped and tortured me recently, isn't that hilarious?"

Her mother looks torn between confusion, rage, and satisfaction. "I don't know how he put up with you for so long."

"Oh, it's because I'm good at making money," Mikaela replies, shrugging. "You could have been rich by now, you know."

"I don't care about money," her mother retorts quickly, shaking her head before glancing over her shoulder again. "I have a family now and I am happy. Aren't you happier? Away?"

Mikaela gives her a look. "Of course I am."

"Then why are you here?"

Mikaela shrugs, glancing around the garden for a moment. She doesn't have a real answer for her mother, but she is enjoying making her squirm like this. A small part of her acknowledges that her mother didn't immediately close the door in her face, and she feels something akin to hope. Mikaela knows any positive emotions here are just the lingering results of a young girl having her family torn apart and not really understanding why, but she feels them anyway.

"I've met a boy."

It takes Mikaela a moment to realise the words came out of her own mouth, and she frowns at herself, slightly alarmed.

"Fucking woop-dee-doo," her mother snaps quietly, throwing up sarcastic jazz hands.

It actually makes Mikaela smirk with amusement - that's something she would have done.

"Susan, who is it?" a man's voice calls from the living room.

Mikaela's mother's face goes slack with shock, her mind working slowly to figure out what to do. Mikaela stays where she is, on their doorstep, smirking - though her stomach lurches when the man's figure slips into the hallway.

"Nobody," her mother replies quickly, giving Mikaela a hard look that says: "Fuck off now."

Ignoring her thumping heart, Mikaela smiles brightly at the man as he moves towards them.

"Hi," he smiles.

His face comes properly into the light, and Mikaela's heart suddenly stops its thumping.

"Is everything alright?" he asks, glancing between them.

Her mother smiles tightly up at him. "Yes, everything's fine."

He looks unconvinced, his smile growing awkward as he looks from Mikaela's mother to her.

"Are you okay?" he asks Mikaela.

Mikaela struggles to keep her emotions from betraying her. Her hands, safely tucked inside her pocket, clench into fists. She resists the urge to attack the man standing so nonchalantly before her. She wants to scream at her mother - she can see it in her face that her mother knows what's going on.

"Yes," Mikaela manages to answer. "I got the wrong house. Thought my friend lived here."

The man smiles and raises his eyebrows expectantly. "Right then," he says, glancing at Mikaela's mother again.

Mikaela bites back her rage, looking at her mother. "Yeah," she says distractedly.

"You know where to go now, then?" the man says, trying to coax her away.

"Yes," Mikaela says, not looking away from her mother. "You told me," she goes on, directing her words at the woman who gave birth to and later abandoned her, "Because you know, don't you?"

Her mother's face hardens so that Mikaela can't read it, but she lifts her chin proudly next to her new husband. "Yes, I know."

Mikaela feels like she's had the air punched out of her lungs. She nods wordlessly, takes a step back, and the man she discovered to be the head of the anti-mutant organisation here takes the opportunity to close the door in her face.

She stares at the front door that used to belong to her house. She stands frozen to the spot, shaken to the core with rage and hurt, on the path she used to run on daily. The woman who had loved her so purely for the first few years of her life, before she found out what Mikaela was when Mikaela revealed her darkest secret, is inside the house Mikaela used to live in, loving a new family.

But, she chose to listen to what Mikaela had to say, and she didn't tell her mutant-murdering husband to take Mikaela to his horrendous facility, so maybe-

Mikaela blinks hard and feels her body become responsive again. She takes a couple of steps back, watching the shadows through the white curtains moving around, and turns her back on the house, marching out into the street.

She resists the young girl inside of her insisting her mother still cares about her, resists the feelings of hurt and jealousy, and thinks instead of the family she has chosen back in the States. Biology means nothing when she has Tony and Wade and Jean and Storm and Xavier, Logan, Vanessa, Pepper-

And Peter.

She winces at the voice in her head, remembering what she blurted to her mother.

"I've met a boy."

Embarrassment burns inside her. What a ridiculous thing to say. And to say it in front of the woman who kicked her out so young and has little to no interest in her?

She shuts the memory out and focuses instead on her mission. She now has a small fire in her stomach, an anticipation instead of a dread about the upcoming attack, a thirst to make these people hurt, to make her mother's prick of a husband hurt.

It should scare her. She knows it should.

But it doesn't.

Xxxxxxxxxxx

In the space of a few days, Mikaela finds her rage burning even stronger in the company of such cynical and cruel people, allowing Pyro to retire his expressions of irritated exasperation in favour of approval, which he usually only directs towards everyone but Mikaela. He even let her join the attack at the front, rather than hold her at the back where she usually keeps an eye on things.

Because of Pyro's generosity, Mikaela is able to kick the door down of the big bad boss and threaten him onto his knees in front of her.

The mutants who had followed her in work quickly to incapacitate the other so-called doctors in the room. She feels Pyro position himself behind her shoulder, watching silently. The man on his knees at her feet, her mother's husband, struggles to feign a defiant expression, terrified as he is of this sudden and violent intrusion. Mikaela watches his face, the beast inside her bellowing with disgust and loathing - even through his fear, she can see his resentment, his discrimination, burning in his eyes.

"Who are you?" he whimpers, looking up at her.

Mikaela shuts off the lights, blanketing them in darkness, and silences all noises around them. She leans down close to him and whispers maliciously, "I'm your step-daughter."

Her mutation surges within her. She feels her eyes go grey as the lights above them flare back into life, blindingly strong, and every alarm, desktop, laptop, and phone in the vicinity blares with horrible noise. She dives into his technological life, learning everything about him since his very first interaction with technology, taking such sadistic pleasure in his suffering, kneeling there before her with an expression of pure terror. He is hurting, and she is thriving.

"You know, I thought I might have shown restraint at this point," she says over the noise. "Mercy, even, for old time's sake, for my mother's sake." She cocks her head at him, frowning slightly. "I thought maybe a mutant would have killed someone you loved when you were younger, or nearly killed you, to inspire such murderous loathing."

She feels Pyro press the handle of a knife into her hand. She grips it firmly and moves towards her mother's husband.

"But, you," she continues, and she grabs the back of his head, pressing the sharp blade against his exposed neck. "Nothing happened to you to make you like this. You just hate us, for no goddamn reason. Do you think you're better than us? Do you really believe that, now, here?"

She grips his hair tighter and presses the knife harder against him. His eyes close, his jaw clenched, but he says nothing.

"I'm going to slit your throat," she says. "For all the people you've mutilated and murdered."

"I want to do it."

Mikaela blinks and look over her shoulder at the teenager standing in the doorway. She wears the filthy gown that marks her as a kidnapped mutant, her face flushed. She must have ran up to the office as soon as Pyro's mutants freed her.

Mikaela straightens up and takes a step back.

The teenager holds her hand out for the knife.

Mikaela does a quick check of the facility's footage and then smiles. "Use your power," she says. "It'll feel better."

The teenager moves over to the man who tortured her, and lightly presses her fingertips to his temples. His eyes snap open, his lips parting, gagging silently. Mikaela watches with fascination as tiny beads of water begin to surface on his skin, as the teenager draws them out of him.

Within seconds, he has shrivelled up like a raisin, devoid of all moisture. He never utters a sound, but his eyes tell them everything he can't.

And then he is dead.

Mikaela stares at him.

"Well?" Pyro asks, moving round her to crouch in front of the head of the organisation. He pushes the man's head, and the corpse tilts backwards and falls to the ground.

Mikaela lets out a contented sigh. "I feel better."