"God damnit," Sid chuckled and then hissed, grabbing her side as she tried to quell her laughter, "You're making my ribs hurt, Ororo." She had to appreciate that Ororo could make her laugh, especially with the knot in her gut that just wouldn't go away.
With her sly smile, Ororo replied and broke Sid from her thoughts, "Well, stop trying to be a martyr. You're hurt, you can have a few more days off for recovery." She allowed Sid to lean into her as they made their way out of the infirmary.
"How's Logan? I know I scared the shit out of him." Sid sobered slightly, her body sore and weak after days of straight training and studying around the clock, which came to an abrupt halt when a simulation with Wolverine and a surprise visit by Cyclops went intensely wrong.
"You zigged when you should have zagged." Ororo added blithely and Sid shot her a reprimanding glare with just the hint of amusement behind it.
"Yeah." Sid chuckled softly, "The ribs will heal, I'm more worried about the hair."
Ororo clicked her tongue at Sid, "I told you not to leave it down when fighting with Cyclops."
Sid groaned dramatically as they made their way back to her room where she would hopefully rest. She was staying in a shared common area used by a few other guests and recent arrivals, and for the last few days she'd been holed up and forced to rest, held captive from the outside world by the stern looking, but ultimately lovely, red head she knew as Jean Grey. Sid hadn't met Jean during her scattered timeline with the X-Men. However, Sid's reasons for getting to know her now were a little bittersweet.
Learning to operate the defensive techniques of her powers and being able to reign in the anxiety and fear that plagued her was a very challenging feat. It took intense concentration and trust in herself that was only slowly starting to build. When she wielded her powers for parlor tricks and minor injuries, it was nothing compared to the moments where her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest and everything seemed to be on the line. She knew that if she had been given these powers, she needed to take up the responsibility of understanding them. That meant learning to use them and therefore controlling them.
She had been heavily entrenched in the Morlock culture when she first met Ororo and Xavier. She remembered them offering her a chance at their institution when she was closer to the age she looked, but it wasn't something she had entertained much at the time. She was in love and her heart was telling her to stay with those who became her family. During the passing years, they never offered it up again, but were sure to maintain contact with Sid, who was charming and sincere and had a great eye for helping people. She'd done more than just go between Halloram Shelter and The Alley; she'd been a sort of mutant concierge, pointing people in certain directions, offering safe housing and alternatively, escape, in the very few times Xavier's school needed her assistance. She had appreciated the fact that during her stay, Xavier remembered the particular scared children that Sid had helped and had taken it upon himself to mention where they had gone after their time at his school. It took some effort and a little bit of pushing from Xavier for Sid to start to acknowledge that she was capable of doing something right.
She cared deeply about the people she walked away from, but as she was wandering around the nearby cities, getting herself closer and closer to invisibility, she felt a nudge towards Xavier's school. When she arrived, she'd taken it upon herself to fulfill the flighty white lie of why she left Avenger's Tower in the first place. She hid away for many reasons, most of them driven by fear of the burgeoning feelings metastasizing in her body, a lot of selfishness really, but she did it nonetheless.
Sid had changed greatly since meeting Xavier the first time, but she never lost her interest in knowledge. After her relationship with Callisto changed, she threw herself into a patchwork education, learning whatever she could from the people in The Alley and eventually those outside of it.
She'd never have what the children at Xavier's did but she'd be damned if she didn't want to try it on for a little while. With the permission of Xavier and the other professors, Sid sat in on every class she could manage between training sessions. She'd gotten to see a little glimpse of a new world and she was extremely grateful for the opportunity.
An itch at her scalp brought her back to the moment and as she itched the hell out of the space above her ear, she was at least half-thankful that the skin was healing over and that her hair hadn't singed all the way down to the roots. She knew she could pull off short hair, but it had been sometime since trying. She huffed her way over to one of the common mirrors and fingered at the different lengths trying to imagine something artful to do with it. Sighing a bit heavily at the very limited length to work with, she hoped that whoever did Ororo's hair was free very soon, because the untamed, singed mess on two-thirds of her head was not a fetching look for this season.
She stomped to her bed this time, grumpy as all hell and itching at the bandages on her side. Logan had stuck her pretty good, purely by misstep and bad timing. He could have easily avoided landing the blow, but Sid had the fortuity to slip and almost get herself fully impaled. Though she was at least comforted by the moment of horror in Logan's eyes as he managed to mostly evade instead of completely eviscerate. But it was the unintentional blow from Cyclops in concert with her artful misstep that she was completely unable to deflect, bleeding as she was and still mid fall. It all happened in the blink of an eye and then she was covered in blood and her hair was on fire. It was painful, embarrassing, and most of all infuriating.
She tried not to think of this as some sort of cosmic karma for being such a vapid asshole with no regard for her own mental health and the health of others. She was a selfish creature, it was true, but she was trying to do what was right with the choices that she made. All in all, it came down to the sincere hope that her absence would give Steve and Bucky some time to focus on each other. She glanced at her bedside table, where her burner phone laid. It was a shitty little thing, but it had a manageable calendar and she hadn't been able to break it yet and with her luck, it was not for lack of trying. She grabbed it and clicked on the phone, checking the date and swallowing heavily as she counted the days since she had been gone. It hadn't been long, but it hadn't been short either.
She was having a difficult time trying to come to terms with what she had done and been through. Her time with the Avengers had been enlightening to say the least and not all in good ways. By either chance or destiny, she wasn't sure which caused these people to gravitate into her path, but she was shocked by the influence they made in such a short period of time.
Bucky had captured her heart in a very abrupt way. He came into her life like a thunderstorm and with as much damage, but there was something distinctly healing about her relationship with him. Even when plagued by his own healing mind, there was a part of him that was so aware and occasionally concerned with the people around him. He played it off pretty well to most people, but Sid saw something in his actions that she immediately recognized in her own soul. She couldn't figure out why she felt compelled to reach out to him, but she quickly came to realize that he had needed it or he wouldn't have accepted. She got to see glimpses of the man he was or was becoming and she was enamored with him. When he did eventually relax, there was such an easy charm in his eyes and something genuine behind even the smallest twitch of a smile. It didn't hurt that he was absolutely gorgeous. It'd be disingenuous not to point that out, but by the time she finally saw the lines of his jaw after his first real shower, it was really just an added bonus. There was something inherently beautiful about him, as chaotic as he was.
And falling for Steve was something of a romance in itself. Meeting him was an honor, but becoming his friend was an adventure. He was a difficult person to get to know at first, a carefully crafted image keeping himself distant from the world around him. Chipping away at that exterior took some effort, but it was well worth the wait. It wasn't that he wasn't just as impressive as his alter ego, but rather so much more than a caricature. There was a rawness to who he was behind the mask, beautifully complex and eager to be as good as he possibly could be. He was a thoughtful person, assessing, observing, and processing, more out of instinct than necessity, but what he observed drove his devotion to kindness and fairness in every aspect of his life. He was not consumed by his pride, though it often reared its ugly head in varying degrees of stubbornness. Sometimes, that sort of devotion to doing what was right made it difficult to love him, the feelings of inadequacy in the face of such a paragon were powerful and difficult to face. There was so much about him that she admired, so much she feared. There was an odd sense of home that anchored her to him. Leaving that sense of safety caused Sid to feel more than just desperately lonely.
Sid felt her chest swell with emotion. Namely regret, but alternatively a most desperate longing for home. She stared down at the phone again, contemplating just punching in a few numbers and seeing what happened. She sighed heavily and knew that it would be brash and messy if she did it that way. Her furtive regret and desperation to return to them seemed like one of the most selfish things she could imagine. So instead she opened up a text, typed in a different number and wrote a simple message: I'm at Xavier's. I'm sorry I'm a shit head. She knew out of anyone, Natasha would understand the cowardly first attempt at contact. She'd still be pissed, but she'd understand.
She stood herself up and stretched a little crookedly before feeling a heavy rumble in her gut. She tucked the phone back into her bed and focused on what she could do right at this moment, hoping that she could devote herself to something instead of immediately succumbing to the panic caused by sending that message. She decided to head to the nearest common area and find herself something to eat.
Counting her steps towards the commons was a soothing experience and when she got into the kitchen, she had to wiggle her way through a throng of teens and young adults surrounding the TV while she whipped herself up a quick bowl of some cold pasta dish.
After her first bite, her attention was finally caught by the TV when the kids surrounding it hushed each other and turned up the volume. She caught the words "Tony Stark" and chewed through her curiosity, knowing there was plenty good reason for Tony to be on TV. But with the mention of "disaster" her eyes widened, and then she choked a little bit at the mention of "Steve Rogers" and "Bucky Barnes." She got right up with her injured grace and shoved her way to the front with little civility, her heart just about exploding in her chest as her gaze settled on the screen and she felt the cold burn of terror as tears formed in her eyes.
There were numerous seated, besuited people all talking at once while a B-roll of devastation played in the background. Artistic cuts between high quality news cameras and the terrified shaking of a camera phone pieced together a tale of absolute insanity that started with a distantly familiar mention about an accident in Avengers tower that very quickly hurtled into an international disaster involving a catastrophic infighting between two Avengers in Johannesburg, South Africa, a violent roadway battle in Seoul, South Korea, and culminating cataclysmically with an entire city, Sokovia, basically exploding in the sky.
Her knees immediately went weak and the people around her, having super powers and all, were able to catch her before she crumpled to the floor. Sid was dazed. The sudden and horrible realization hit her, that this was the first time The Avengers were really people to her. Before of course, her attention to the idea of superheroes was driven by a childhood delight in comics, they were stories, practically fairy tales in news reel form. As with all learning, she was wrong at first and never thought to apply personhood to a comic character she read about from magazines stolen from paper stands. It wasn't until she saw a real photo of Captain America in an actual history book as a teen and realized he wasn't some loosely-based cautionary tale from a desperate time. But now he was so much more than a grainy photo or some historical icon from a century ago, he was flesh and blood and loved and her entire body felt like molten tar, pulling her down, sinking her into the blinding heat of her desperation. Tony, Natasha, Bruce, Thor, Sam — all of their faces kept flashing by, and each glimpse of their bloodied forms was like the strike of lightning to the pain center of her brain. When Sid spied the glint of metal and a man in black fighting by Cap's side, she felt the food in her gut rise right back up, a weak hand rushed to her mouth, thankful her chest seemed to be clenching so tight she could hardly breathe and therefore couldn't puke.
Clips of Steve fighting off hoards of red eyed robots, Bucky not far behind, dispatching them with ethereal precision were dancing in her head and looping before her eyes. Interspersed with visions of screaming children and buildings falling from the sky, she saw Tony and probably Rhodey and Sam as pinpricks against the bright blue of the morning, flying through fire and shrapnel in order to keep the perimeter and solve the immense problem they faced. Faces she knew and loved, faces she didn't know but feared for, were flashing between every blink of her eyes and proving to be just too much for her brain to handle.
Sid was horrified. She was trying to tune into the discussion the news anchors were having, but she couldn't really process it. Every time she heard the word "dead" and the names of people she loved and people she didn't even know, she felt her heart skip a beat. "Mayhem", "death", "destruction", "playing God", words that extrapolated on this example of hubris and the danger that it poses human kind. She didn't know what really happened, she didn't know if everyone was okay. An entire city exploded and these assholes weren't doing anything but pushing their anti-powered people agendas. She didn't care about the politics, she needed to hear about the people. She had to find them. She had to hold Bucky's face in her hands and feel the warmth of his skin and the grit of his stubble beneath her fingertips. She needed to see him smile, just to prove that there was still beauty in the world. She needed Steve. She needed to hug him, to hear him laugh, she had to be able to see him and not these grainy, bloody images that reminded her of a time when he was supposed to be dead. She had to do something aside from laying there and imagining the funerals she'd have to attend.
Getting to her feet proved difficult, especially with cold pasta covering her and numerous people telling her to wait for someone to come help. She tried to mutter platitudes, assuring them of her ability to function, but it may have been garbled nonsense for all she cared.
"I'm fine, I'm fine." She finally managed to mumble when a single foot finally planted and led a chain reaction of stability in her frame. She nodded and waved, brushing off stray noodles and spinach, while she remembered how to breathe and her vision finally seemed to clear. She eventually registered the horrified faces surrounding her, looking at her like she might drop again any minute. "I pinky swear." She put up a pinky weakly, but at least her skin looked slightly less ashen.
She could see the disagreement in their eyes, but she persisted. There was this new, sobering feeling in her gut that she couldn't live her life like this. Heartbreak was just a news reel away and it seemed to shatter whatever weak resolve was telling her to run away from something that could be meaningful.
The overwhelming need to return to her friends, beg their forgiveness, and spend the rest of her life doting on them was tainted by a severe annoyance at the world's greatest empath who had been keeping her quarantined from the reality of near annihilation and the possible death of her friends. Her voice felt sharp, but not yet angry, "I just need to see Xavier, immediately."
