I own nothing-that is to say, the recognizable characters are unowned by me. This plot totally does belong to both me and my co-author, Chicaalterego.
Marie struggles upright, stunned, staring, before she doubles over and starts to vomit, shivers seizing her body, and her nose starts to bleed. Every part of her body burns, and a headache rages. She, too, loses consciousness as the night guard rushes towards them, yelling and barging in.
…
He knows the culprit's identity. There is no doubt who the enemy is: humanity.
The humans are the reason he has been made to teeter on the edge of death.
The humans are the reason Marie hovers in a coma between life and death, and Kitty remains unconscious , perhaps from some parting shot.
The humans are the reason Mr. Williams' blood leaks into the ground, a cold death the only repayment for saving their lives.
And so, with fire burning into his soul, Jamie gives a firm step toward darkness.
Chapter 35: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Soft hands wield a shiny spoon clumsily. Chubby cheeks puff as lips close around another bite of cereal. Eating cereal is something she has done many times, but as she stares at the sweet flakes floating over milk, she scrunches her eyebrows. Eating cereal feels wrong somehow.
"Princess? Does your head hurt?"
Marie chokes on cold milk and cereal, straightening like a tweaked spring. Words move from her mouth without permission. "No, ma'am." With these words, her hand moves towards her mouth once more.
Across the room sits her mom, Irene, leaning forward as though the proximity will allow her ears to detect what's wrong.
"Are you sure? You've been awful quiet."
"I-I-" Marie breaks off, unable to even begin to express her hopeless confusion. The light reflected in the polished spoon makes her feel uneasy, as though the steel utensil is something other than what her eyes detect. Phantom sounds of bangs and thuds momentarily clog her ears and cloud her vision, and her hand jerks.
The bowl of fruit loops hits the floor and shatters, the cold milk pouring across her lap. She shrieks, the shock of the bizarre day-vision rippling pain through her more than the tiny pricks of broken porcelain, piercing her soft slippers when she jumps away from the dripping table. Irene starts upright, a sudden, looming menace.
Marie flees the room, sound swelling until she hears nothing but the screaming and the crying, slamming the door to her own room and locking the door.
Slumping across her bed, she picks at the pink coverlets. Pink, so very pink. That color is wrong, just as everything else seems out of place. Pink is not her color. Brown hair tied into a ponytail, a bright smile and warm eyes; pink belongs with a girl she feels she should remember better. But she doesn't. She should, but she cannot remember, and the world feels more wrong than ever before.
Snippets of flashes of happy times, warm kisses, and bedtime fairytales come to mind but they are blurry, faded. They happened so long ago... it had been so long since life was simple and happy. Suddenly, Marie realizes she's in the midst of a hallucination, a reenactment of the past brought up by the drugs of some sadist scientists in the lab.
After all, wasn't she a prisoner the last time she woke up? There's no alternate explanation for this trip down memory lane. She must have been captured again, after all, one minute she's trying to get away from her suicidal teacher, the next in a safe place-as safe as living with a shapeshifter and a prophet can be.
Marie rolls over, enjoying the feeling of a warm bed and an unmarred body. She wants to stay there forever, keeping the real world at bay until she forgets everything bad she has gone through. If she went back to that hell...she would rather die in a dream. And yet, giving up is not an option; she needs to go back. She forces meditation.
Voices, a crowd of haunting whispers, fearsome screams pounding on her eardrums... she breathes deeply: 'I am alone' and the screams muffle down to a low buzzing. Her panic tones down and she feels her muscles relaxing, limp, supporting no weight. She needs to remind herself that nothing around her is real before sinking into the mattress. She stares at the creamy ceiling with butterfly stickers. She had forgotten about those.
Maybe she should try to enjoy the illusion for as long as it lasts. After all, the world in her head is a much-needed reprieve for her soul.
The world turns hazy for a moment and she feels her body move itself forwards like a message-bottle on the waves of the sea. Muscle memory makes her collect clothes and change out of ragged pajamas. Then, naked, she steps into the shower, hand reaching for a rose scented soap she knows is there even when she doesn't remember it. She pours some shampoo out of a smiling pink bottle, runs her hands together until bubbles form, and washes all the mental dirt away with warm water. She feels cleaner and more relaxed than she has been in ages.
Stepping out of the shower, she turns around to a set of blindingly pink curtains, previously unnoticed in her dazed state. They tickle a memory from the back of her head, long forgotten.
"This one, Mommy, this one!" she tugs the blindingly pink curtains in a big shop, "This looks just like a pwincess window!"
"Now, Marie, we can't get that right now. We're looking for the magical carpet merchandise designed to give us great credit scores or put us in jail for overdrawing," Rachel Addler mumbles.
"But Moommyyy! It's pwetyfuw!"
"Rug or curtains?"
Marie is devastated. She needs the rug so she can go places but the curtains are so pretty. She decides to be like an adult and reason things out… "But Ween won't mind! She wikes when I get pwetty stuff!"
"She's blind," Rachel points out. "Which one do you want?"
Marie's eyes fill with tears and she sniffles for extra effect.
"Fine. But no toys."
Marie shakes herself loose. Her brain had designed her own room consistent with the age of six? Those drugs must've been pretty powerful to put her this far down and make her choose these ugly decorations. Her moms must've been really nice to let her destroy a perfectly good room like this. It needs more…darkness. And a lot less pink.
Marie, not willing to look like a little princess, searches for the dullest, least sparkly clothes she can find in the closet. It's no wonder she forgot about all this-being exposed to such horrid decorations must have made it a necessity for her psyche to block the memories away. She definitely doesn't like the look in the wooden dresser's mirror, either. No matter the clues, it still gives her a shock to see such a babyish face staring back at her. She delivers a sharp poke to the baby-fat cheeks and closes her eyes.
She's in her head, so she should have some power over the events.
"Make me older. Make me older. Make me older!" she chants, pouring her will into changing the world outside. When she opens her eyes, the same face stares back at her. Of course her brain won't let her change stuff. This is a torture trip, after all. She rolls her eyes and pulls on the only dark shirt in her entire wardrobe, baggy and stained with orange spaghetti sauce. At least it looks better than the rest, especially the post-shower sparkly unicorn shirt.
That done, she turns to the curtains; her little hands itch to tear them away. Good thing Irene always let her have alone time (within reason). She scoots the chair under the window and tries to pull down the stupid accessories. If her brain won't let her do it, at least it lets her body do it. A riippp resounds throughout the room and she crashes with an alarmed cry as the entire window rod comes down. On top of her.
She moans dramatically as she sits back up, contemplating giving mental alterations one more try. Steps echo across the floor outside her room as she begs the pinkness of the room to go away, giving up as Irene' white cane taps the door and a key fiddles in the knob.
Before Irene can ask, Marie yells, "I'm alright!"
Ignoring her protests, Irene opens the door. "What was that bang?"
Marie mumbles, "The curtains fell down."
"They did? Or were you swinging on them?" Irene's suspicion is clear and she leans forward with amusement, touching the fabric spread across the floor, confirming that fact, at least.
"I sort of swung a little bit…" Marie admits. "Didn't you know?" she asks innocently to the prophetess. The expression on Irene's face is absolutely worth hinting at mutant abilities.
"How could I know?" Irene seems indulgent, entertained by Marie's comment.
Marie snorts. "You know practically everything," Marie lets bitterness creep into her voice. The woman in front of her, her mother, would push her down a path that would bring, that had brought Marie so much grief. "Destiny, remember?" she mocked. It felt incredibly therapeutic to face this woman and let out some of the poison corroding a place deeply buried in her heart, even though the two years after Apocalypse had been defeated alleviated the blistering anger she'd felt towards the two manipulators of her early years. Mystique choosing to stay with the X-Men from time to time had allowed plenty of time for Rogue to make sense of things.
It helped that she'd felt guilty about murdering Mystique's statue/Mystique. They still didn't know how any of the Four Horsemen had survived.
Of course, there is a teensy-weensy prick of guilt when Irene suddenly appears to be swallowing a lemon. She knows she shouldn't make mommy ('Crap, where are the stupid mommy thoughts coming from?') unhappy.
"Wh-what do you mean, Destiny?"
Marie pushes the guilt away. That guilt is something Irene barely deserves after everything she had done. "Um, prophetess of impending doom and all that jazz, y'know?" She shakes her head, "That codename was waayyy better than Magneto, though. Who chose your name and can you get Mr. M the card?"
Huh? Marie hadn't meant to say that.
Irene hesitates, "How do you know about he and I?"
"I-?"
Irene frowns and suddenly becomes forceful: "How do you know?"
Marie has never seen so fierce an appearance ascribed to the woman standing above her but doesn't flinch. The scientists of the past few weeks were way worse. "You're just part of my imagination!" she declares firmly, in a loud tone. Her head pounds, the voices are absent, but her ears are ringing. "You should know the answer to this one even without being a prophet!" Marie declares while she grips her own head in pain.
Irene hesitates, starts to open her mouth, and appears to think hard. "Your imagination?" Marie can swear she sees the thought form: 'Is this her mutation?' She wishes it were so. This is much more interesting. Except that the only clear thought-people in her head aren't clear at all. A few words make a garbled passage from their minds. It was much easier when she could use them to advise her.
"Imagination. Not mutation." She corrects. All of a sudden, Marie is fed up with the drug-induced childhood tour, "Now can you please go away? I have things to do... like make this room green and you aren't being helpful."
Irene looks puzzled. "How do you-and why green?"
"Why do you care? In fact, I never understood why you bothered to hide everything important from me. I mustn't have been all that important to you, not as important as Mystique and Magneto at the very least."
"M-Mystique? Who're you talking about?"
She's lying, Marie knows. And the lies, old and familiar, make her snap. "Rachel, shapeshifter, serves Magneto in her spare time, tried to make me join the Brotherhood? Ringing a bell?" The confusion and horror only seems to grow as Irene stares. Marie shifts uneasily-even in her imagination, she can do things wrong.
"Marie, I think we need to have a talk."
…
The talk Irene threatens Marie with is truly awkward, a mess of nervous movement on her part and confused amusement on Marie's. It's pretty entertaining that she finds it so hard to talk about known facts. She doesn't call Mystique into the conversation until supper, long after debriefing her on the situation.
The skin-stealer walks in with confidence thinly veiling worry, blue in all her glory, prepared for anything. She wears normal, human clothes, though she doesn't use them to hide her body, rather with the minimum of coverage considered decent. Her golden-green eyes judge the situation as if deciding whether she really should be so bold as to use this form.
Marie doesn't start when she enters, too used to life at the mansion. Were a mutant to come, pink with purple stripes and burgundy eyes, covered in scales and spikes like a flail, she would wouldn't so much as blink. Instead, she barely glances away from the book she's absorbed in. Something seems a little off about the situation but she dismisses it. The book is far too interesting to set down, Macbeth in glossy-illustrated beauty.
"Marie, are you alright?" Mystique enquires, forcing Marie to pay attention.
"Yeah. Gonna have a talk about me? She sure seems upset 'bout me knowing." Marie tilts her head in Irene's direction.
The seer inputs, "She won't tell me how she found out. She insists I know because I'm a hallucination." She sounds annoyed and tired. 'At least neither of them is hiding their true natures-besides being figments,' Marie thinks. 'They aren't pretending to not be mutants'
Mystique frowns, "How do you know?"
Here we go again, Marie thinks. "Mom-Irene just told you why."
"I can assure you we're real," Mystique uses a calm tone with underlying exasperation.
"That's what hallucinations say, y'know. Besides, I haven't got a good reason to believe you." Marie offers a smug smirk. These versions of her moms are consistent with what she remembers, not open, but at the same time not closed off completely. They had always treated her more like an adult than most people. She knows it's a sign of trust, which they'd always appeared to give her.
"I can prove it," the scale-skinned mutant tells her.
"Go for it," Marie shoots back.
"Read me a paragraph of the book you're holding."
Marie complies: "It will have blood: they say blood will have blood: stones have been known to move and trees to speak; augures and understood relations have by magpies and choughs and rocks brought forth the secret'st man of blood. What is the night?"
"Read it again," Mystique orders.
Marie once again obeys, wondering what the point is until it suddenly hits her as she reads the final sentence. The words are the same and she remembers something she read years ago, "How to Know if You are Dreaming." One of the tests was to read something and then read it again. The words would be different because it was so hard to keep things stable in a dream. But this…this isn't possible, not unless she never experienced any of this in the first place, and it's too real for her to have never experienced it.
She scans the words again but they remain the same. Perhaps this is what the professor calls a safety mechanism. Maybe it's a dream thing that remains the same, but she can tell that isn't true. If the past three, nay, eleven or twelve years were but a dream, she couldn't have predicted the shapeshifter and seer's abilities unless it really was her mutation, but that was incredibly unlikely, like the possibility of finding a fifth of a needle in a huge haystack. Her mutation was supposed to be absorption, not prediction, and the chance of two unrelated seers existing in the same family without intent is low. Maybe she has two?
'Phantom'
The word floods her brain like water from leaking sewers and she suppresses it quickly. Mutations don't show themselves until the age of thirteen or later, typically, so why would she be different? Maybe there is a good explanation that she hasn't thought of yet. She screws herself into a knot trying to find it.
Her memories are real... but maybe this world is as well.
With a sudden grimace, she realizes that if she is a seer, she still lived through experiments-Jamie, if he exists, is lucky to be alive after all that, assuming he is, in fact, (or will be) still alive.
She remembers the whirring shaver sliding through her dark hair, sees it fall-she couldn't move, fastened to the chair to prevent her movement as the man deliberately angled the shears against her head and left a minor gash, mumbling a sarcastic oops. She realizes her body has responded to the fear the only way a tiny child can, by curling against Destiny, pressing her face against the woman's chest as though it will force the memory-dreams away. The psychic pulls her tight against herself, not knowing why she trembles.
The feeling comforts her for no apparent reason, as though she actually believes the mutant can protect her. Her skin is soft, easily penetrable, no real help against death. She whimpers as her brain throbs, the thought pulling the hundreds of near-deaths to mind, the guns and knives and massive robots more real to her than her present life. The sounds she'd so easily suppressed a few hours earlier are all which exist of her suddenly, her mind empty against their painful inflictions. Her body bubbles over with weeping and screaming as the pain bogs her deep into a pitch-pit, her final fully aware moments a burst of blue light piercing through her eyes and skull.
…
The shaking and crying eases eventually, Marie too tired to sustain terror. Even a mind can grow exhausted, and for her it easily takes less than twenty minutes from beginning to end. No matter the pain she endures, bone-deep fatigue must triumph. She slips into slumber after a few minutes of near-normal consciousness.
…
The faint beginnings of astronomical twilight discovers her, still asleep on the couch, a pale blue blanket tucked tight about her, head propped on a pillow set down as the stars began to sprinkle the sky. She wakens uncomfortably, couch springs jabbing her back with hundreds of needles. It isn't exactly the most comfortable of beds, but moving her during the night might have woken her.
She creeps sluggishly out of the warmth of blanketing, into the icy cold of winter running full blast in her house. It feels like the house was caught in a tornado and instead of arriving in Oz, it came to Antarctica and couldn't be bothered to place her near any warm buildings, instead dropping her into the ocean. Mystique loves the cold. Destiny tolerates it. They forget that Marie is a full-blown southern girl, used to ninety degrees on a nice summer day and a hundred on worse ones. At least they let the humidity be. They moved from up north and wanted her to feel as at-home as she could-excepting the frost probably creeping up the windows by now. They'd homeschooled her for the longest time to keep her away from the others, just in case.
Future nightmares lie heavy in her mind and she pulls the blanket tight about her, sliding to the floor. After a bit, she gathers the willpower required to fight away the shadowed future and stumble, brain-habit taking over, down the hall and into the master bedroom where Mystique and Destiny lay, sleeping. She nearly halts her instinctive climb onto the bed but gives in easily to old habits, crawling across the sheets and nuzzling her small body into a cranny between the two. Their warmth eases the frosty chill and she pulls the blankets away from the two, over her head, releasing a yawn. The blue skinned shapechanger briefly stirs in awareness before relaxing once more, leaving Marie to lay in the dark twilight, comfortably warm and drowsy.
Unfortunately for an attempt at slumber, as Marie's eyes finally begin to drift shut, the scream of an alarm clock rattles her eardrums and very nearly the walls of the house. She shoots awake in a split second, jolted from near-repose. Destiny, beside her, shows no such signs of shock, rolling over. Mystique props herself up and turns off the alarm, peeling away the covers and sending an icy blast over Marie's goosebump-riddled skin. She resists the urge to show awareness by curling against the far-sighted mutant, instead lying still as a brick.
The clock turns off and leaves Marie wide-awake. She hears the form-stealer talking on the phone and recognizes the meaning of the words. Mystique is calling in sick. This leaves Marie doomed to a full day of intense mothering. She slides as deeply into her bed as physically possible, stealing the warmth left in the bedcovers from the abandoned spot. She snuggles tight and makes plans to change the air conditioner settings. They ought to be grateful when she does-they must spend a fortune on it.
The sizzle of bacon reawakens Irene, who slowly pulls herself out of bed, reaching to the right to prod Marie up, well-aware of her presence. Marie moans, but gets up anyways. It's not like she has much of a choice.
Still, even with the alluring scents from the kitchen, Marie can't eat. She props her head against the table with a sigh and picks at scrambled eggs with her fork tines, spreading each apart and shoving them back together.
"Marie, eat your eggs," Mystique demands.
Marie responds by setting the fork down and saying, "…not hungry." She would have seen the look her mothers exchange above her except that she is riddled with misery. She doesn't even touch the chocolate milk the shapeshifter had made for her, the truest measure of her mood.
There is an elephant in the room-no, not just sitting, tap dancing in neon leotards-and they have all decided to pretend it isn't there for several hours now. It's a relief to Marie, but even if she plays dumb, she knows the three of them know it's there.
Marie shouldn't have opened her big mouth.
"You don't have to eat. How do you feel?" Irene leads, her voice steady but careful.
"Not your business," Marie groans, annoyed.
"It is. I'm your mom. I need to know these things. I need you to tell me how you know these things," Mystique responds. There it goes again, that protectiveness that makes her want to latch into her skirts again and find safety in her mothers' arms.
Irene asks, "Did you see something-something that hasn't happened yet?" Ah, they've already jumped to the same conclusion Marie has given thought to, the idea that she might be a seer herself.
"Dunno," Marie responds evasively. The next question arrives, a predictable "What did you see?" Marie closes up and gives them the silent treatment. She won't speak about the future until she has some idea what's happening.
They can't make her.
…
Time passes, but the illusion persists. Things are blurry those first weeks. Marie darts between childish behavior, clear understanding, and vague visions. Like the burst of light she'd experienced that first time, the light and the screaming, sounds and sights reach her from what she suspects is the distant future. Most disturbing are her memories. As time passes, what she remembers of the future fade until she barely recalls Phantom and forgets Fenton altogether. She is unsure if forgetting is for the best, but remembering hurts too much.
Yet, while the memories fade to little more than dust, the nightmares intensify. The voices tell her things she rarely remembers by the time breakfast is over the next morning, but the fear that wakes up every morning makes her sweat cold and scream in the nights until her throat burns sorely in complaint. Mentions of the others, especially Kitty, reach her and expose her to the double-edged steel of reality, shredding her mind to bits for minutes on end.
Then, when the one month mark approaches, the memories slam into her once more. She feels nauseous and brittle.
What takes the cake is that, after swimming in and out of a river of madness, Mystique, a woman with more issues than most newspapers, suggests Marie should get a therapist.
What the hell is Marie supposed to say to a human therapist? Still…
Maybe she's right.
...
Time slurs forwards. A day into a week, a week into a month and a month into three. Culture shock is gone a few months into the change, the nightmares almost nonexistent. There are moments the voices whisper to her, but they no longer scream. Life moves on and changes go deeper than a pucket of dark green paint on top of pink walls.
Then, one day, as she stares at the walls of the neighborhood school, something clicks in her head: there is something she has to do.
"I gotta go," Marie declares, the school building in front of her eyes reminding her of another school, of a home that she had lost.
"Go where?" Mystique asks to the adult in a child body that has so little in common with the child that had loved her and Irene like two mothers.
The six-year-old closes her eyes, then opens them back towards the sky, "California."
"California? Why?" The skin-stealer smiles without mirth. The Marie's eyes seemed to hold a shine that Mystique was most used to seen in her beloved Magneto's as he spoke of his dreams for the mutant race.
"There's someone that I need to meet!" She announces, fists clenched with determination.
"Marie, you won't be going, especially not on your own." Mystique declares swiftly, not allowing Marie to find an excuse.
"But-"
"No 'ands', 'ifs', 'buts', or 'ors'. Absolutely no."
Marie sighs and plops her bag on the floor, grabbing cookies from the cabinets and milk from the fridge.
Hallo! Remember…like, follow, review, comment, or PM. All's good by me! Yep, no good excuse for this one's time. To be perfectly honest, this is NOT a symptom of me losing interest. This is a symptom of distraction.
On the bright side, I am now officially publishing news articles for my school's newspaper!
Once again on the bright side, THE NEXT CHAPTER WILL BE UP IN TWO-THREE WEEKS TOPS! If possible, I would love to update so ridiculously fast I could take the world by word-storm.
Also, to those who have reviewed, liked, and/or followed, a big THANKS! To those who did Ectober, I forgot to. And to those doing NaNoWriMo, I hope I shall join your ranks someday. I have a marvelous idea, but it hasn't got a plot, so I probably won't really do it…yet, anyways. But I will be participating 'de facto' (I think I can use that term?) because I will try to write 50,000 words for all of my ongoing/new stories total this month.
Also, I have begun the first pages of VALKA, the graphic novel I've been raving about creating, so if you go to Tumblr, you'll see page-by-page updates. On DeviantArt, I will upload in sets of five pages.
Also, did you know that Danny Phantom may be added to? I'm not sure whether to be worried or happy. Honestly, I would love it if they did a movie more geared towards adults and teens with Danny and Sam married than them doing a cartoon. It feels like using a bunch of older guys in a cartoon for kids would be weird. It's ten years later, so Danny would be at least 24, most likely about 26. Imagine a ten-year-old watching that. This Danny Phantom movie would be for people whose childhood died when they took the show away.
Did you know that there are elections known as gubernatorial elections? Those must be for peanuts. I have a feeling America is doomed. I wonder what the other countries think about these latest elections.
-MiaulinK