1
Jean pulled Scott into her room. The door closed by itself behind him. "Jean wait."
"Don't worry.", she told him. "It feels like the professor is on the other side of town, talking business over coffee."
2
Paige opened the door to quell the knocking. She took a step back when a flush X-23 and Rogue were discovered on the other side. "Oh.", Paige let slip.
"Can we come in and talk, shug?", Rogue asked. Paige stepped aside.
X-23 sniffed. She walked past Rogue and Paige to Rhane who was on the bed behind the dresser. She turned back to Paige. "Can we come in and talk to just you?", she rephrased. "Alone."
"um, sure.", Paige allowed.
Rhane simply looked up at X-23 from her book and then looked back down at it. X-23 nodded. She walked to the window and opened it. The she walked back to the bed and reached for the laying girl's ankle. Rhane snatched away from her. "Cripes, I was just noting my page. No need to hurt me." She rolled away and walked out the room, closing the door behind her.
X-23 stood stock still for a moment. She sharply turned her head. "I wasn't going to hurt her. She can shift in mid-air and withstand a fall from this height, particularly onto soft grass." Seeing that no one was accepting that, she deflated. The girl tucked herself into a ball on the bed, nearly hiding in the corner between the dresser and the wall.
Rogue frowned. She turned to the window and reached to shut it, but just left her hands there. She nearly turned her head and X-23 assured her that only Jean and the professor could possibly hear them. Rogue nodded and let the breeze wash over her for more than a moment.
Paige regarded the two. She reset her feet and obviously pulled herself up to her full height.
Rogue started. "You asked if you could date our boyfriend. No use denying it, we were right there after all. Did you seriously ask that?"
Paige lifted her head. "So what if I did? Todd can be polyamorous with you. Why can't he be polyamorous with me to?"
"There isn't a reason.", X-23 said from between her knees and under her folded arms.
Paige's hair fluttered as she turned on the other girl. "Well, I'll tell you...wait. What?"
Rogue hung her head. "Guthrie. Bring it down a notch. Please?
"Now, can you do me a favor?", Rogue produced a medical waste bag. "Something non-organic, if you will."
Paige's hair was beginning to come undone as she whipped her head between the girls.
"I'll take it as a favor as well.", X-23 told her. "Because you don't have to if you don't want."
Paige took up the bag and brought it over her head. She pealed away her skin and hair with one fluid movement to reveal the mobile aluminum girl hiding inside. Rogue approached her, placed her hands on both sides of the metal head. Leaning in, she kissed the statue on the nose.
"Well, if you were both dating him, I should have expected.", Paige's voice rang out.
Rogue took a step back. "No, it's not like that. At least, I didn't think so." She spun to X-23.
X-23 looked up. She gave her a quick shake of the head before turning in on herself once more. "You're just as much an uncooked steak as everybody else. I'm sorry."
Rogue nodded and finished her turn to the window. "Why do you like him?", she asked.
Paige furrowed her brow. "Really?"
X-23 shrugged. Rogue clasped her gloved hands behind her back.
Paige hugged herself with one arm, and rubbed herself. A full length glove of skin and nails partially slid off her arm. She pulled it loose to slide it in the bag. "Do you mind?", she asked. X-23 didn't bother to even gesture this time. Rogue's reflection in the window nodded at her. The girl then kicked off her shoes, shimmied out of her jeans and pulled her shirt over her head. Large rips could be heard for the next few seconds.
The shiny form sat down in the chair to the desk across from the bed. "I know what it's like for people to find you disgusting because of your power.", Paige started. She flopped the bag of body onto the desk. "Not just humans. I see the cringe in the Danger Room when people hear way more than just 'snikt' when I rip away at my own flesh. And Kitty turns away and hides, just because her clothes come with her powers. But Todd never accepted being put in his place, he always lifted his head when sometimes the most impossible thing to do was holding his nose high. Not like me.
"Everyone points to how he cowers away: when he's going to get hit, or when our fellow students were going to blast him through a car on the street or something. But he still goes to school with all the 'cool kids' that spit in his general direction. He still lives in that boarding house with them and nobody even questions that. Here I am, doing exactly what my brother did because our daddy told us. I'm not even living in my own home any more.
"Life, real life is hard. And it can turn a man hard. Todd, he gets hit with it full force, every time. But he's ready with a joke afterwards, ya know. It's...kind of poetic in a way."
Paige looked up to Rogue.
The girl's reflection showed her pursed lips. She took in a breath before informing. "Todd's powers...they allow, well, not touch touching but something real close with a real man for me. But that doesn't mean I couldn't kill him.". She looked out the window even more: half distancing herself, half reliving the experience. "I shouldn't have but wasn't thinking - I slept next to him. Sure, we were all wrapped in blankets an' a duvet and sheets an' stuff. But if had made one wrong turn or fateful twist while I was unconscious and dreaming then I would have waken up with a corpse.
"Shug?"
X-23 nodded from within her pseudo-coccoon. She looked the aluminum form in the eye. "I'm super-sensitive. Because the old man couldn't have just one ability could he? And Todd is simply irresistable: the way he doesn't smell like food, his every pore is another adventure instead of the oil and dirt and...gunk that fill everyone else' while they insist they're clean 'because I showered' and 'I rubbed myself with a bar of talow under a stream of city water'. He does things to me, way before it becomes what it could be between us.
"And then I could lose control. All control. And you've seen me...slip, if just for a moment. And then with Rhane- I get that I was wrong to think about throwing her out of the window. Now. And I get that even though Quicksilver is fucking his sister that she doesn't want to hear me tell her that she's fucking her brother. After the fact.
"What happens when he touches me just the right way, looks at me just the right way, smells better, sounds just... I could be the one not just waking up with a corpse but blinking and finding him without my ability to heal, betrayed just like I do to you guys every day without even realizing...
"I won't hurt him.", X-23 said between sniffles. "I'm not going to give him up and and I'm not going to hurt him."
Paige raised an eyebrow. "You two want me to be a buffer so you don't kill your boyfriend?"
Rogue somehow managed to turn her head even further away from Paige.
"His entire harem needs to be a team.", X-23 told her. "Rogue can express with tact and subtlety and style and all the things I may be conditioned to not consider."
"She can be spontaneous while I need to ask him for prep-work he shouldn't have to do.", Rogue admitted.
The metal form looked back at the girls reflected in her smooth form. It crinkled as she laughed. As she rubbed her eyes, the sound of tearing foil sounded as Paige pealed herself out of her previous covering.
"You'd have to cover for me too, ya know.", the southern drawl sounded. The other two girls turned to her as she stuffed the much sharper metallic skin into the medical bag, hoping there was still room for it all. "When I'm metallic, I'm a cold hearted bitch. When I'm gem, it feels like I want the pressure a diamond was forged in. And I'm still young and inexperienced: I don't know how it's going to be if I turned into, I dunno, memory foam or god-forbid head-to-toe adimantium."
"Adimantinum.", X-23 told her. Paige cocked her head. X-23 extended her claws on one hand and instantly withdrew them. "Adimantinum. It's not al-u-min-i-um."
Paige continued. "My point is that sometimes my, as Professor Xavier calls it, Material-Polar Disorder stays for a bit. I've been getting up on Sunday's earlier and Kurt for church for a session with him. And Kurt's one of them Catholics."
X-23 asked, "One of them? Isn't Catholicism the largest sect of the largest religion on the planet?"
"But in this house, between me and the Guthries and Bobby an...well, let's just say Kurt's in the minority. Now with Magneto, him and Kitty might out number him.", Rogue assessed.
Paige continued. "With any guy, he might end up thinking that I'm feeling one way when in my heart of hearts I'm the other. You'd have to assure Todd that I didn't mean anything about it."
Rogue cracked a smile. Then laughed. And it proved infectious with X-23. The other girl admitted, "I get it now."
"What?", Paige asked.
"Todd has very low self-esteem it seems.", Rogue answered. "And if we're going to have to reassure him that you still like him, then he's going to be the only guy besides my brother that has three girls after him and thinks he's unattractive."
Paige smiled. "What, you don't find the fuzzy elf attractive? Because he looks like your mom?"
Rogue rolled her eyes. But at least she turned back to the room now that the mood had changed.
"Do you think Todd will even like me?", Paige asked.
X-23 raised and eyebrow at her. "You're blonde, blue eyed, have boobs and the girl abs we all have from practicing in the Danger Room." She considered Rogue's more voluptuous form. "Well, most of us. Of course he'll want you in his harem. Just wear something tight on our first date."
Rogue pointed to the naked girl's nudity. "Just not that tight."
Paige pulled out a particular foil shard from the medical waste bag and held its exact form fit up to her chest, waggling her eyebrows.
3
Todd opened the door to a cackle of "Look what slimy thing the cat dragged in."
Todd held his backpack, and the two contracts within to his chest. "You know what, Wanda?"
"Why have I been so vicious to you these past weeks?", replied.
The boy was taken aback. "Well, yeah, yo."
The room grew silent as Wanda spun on him and came within the reach of his tongue.
"Because the cosmos needs balance. And a happy toad, leave alone one with two girl friends, is an abomination to that.
"There are the powerful. There are the good. There are the dedicated, hardworking, try agains. There's even the lucky. You are not any of them.
"You're the fool that falls at the feet of Guthrie's little sister until she kicks your ass while you're fighting her on behalf of the X-geeks. You're the barely named thug thrown off the Statue of Liberty and electrocuted by Storm while she makes a bad joke about your death. You're accidentally kidnapped by aliens because you were too busy sucking up to Magneto. Most universes would forget about you if they could.
"Do you know what that does to a chaos mechanic? To be forced to endure your flailing attempts at being something other than a punching bag, like you somehow deserved it? The nausea that I experience just knowing you aren't being put through a wall for perving out again."
Todd looked thoroughly confused. "You want me to flirt with you?"
"I want you punched in the face for thinking that!", Wanda screamed. She looked introspective for a moment then cocked back her fist.
The boy ducked and covered in the face of her wrath.
"See, that!", she yelled. She turned to the other members of the Brotherhood. "I'm not insane. Don't you feel that? Isn't his fear and hopelessness in front of a superior force the way it's supposed to be? His only hope being the lackey to an actual strength that doesn't really care about him."
The girl turned back to Todd. "Doesn't this feel right? To know that you're slime beneath my boot?"
Todd continued to cower.
"I asked you a question." The light switch behind him sparked.
"Yeah, sure, whatever you say, sweetums!", he cried.
"Call me 'sweetums' again and I'll hex you. And tell the poor losers that think they're your girlfriends.", Wanda warned. "Don't, and I have no idea what terrible thing I'll need to do to you as the universe calls for its price. Understand me?"
Todd did not hesitate to nod furiously at the absurd threat.
"Then get out of my sight."
Todd scrambled up the stairs to his room.
Wanda exhaled and visibly relaxed. She walked back to the couch, slid into Pietro's lap, and draped his arms around her. She turned her attention back to the TV. "So, what did I miss?"
Todd lay in bed shivering. And clutching the bag with his contract in it like a drowning man grasping a rope.