Chapter 5

While Richard seemed hesitant, at first, to talk to Adam, they hit it off quickly enough. It's the first chance Richard has had to truly discuss his work with a peer and he's clearly eager to do so. Shalimar can't really blame Richard for heading off to the labs with Adam to analyze his serum and talk science.

And, if she's being honest, it lifts a weight off of Shalimar's shoulders. At Donna's apartment, Shalimar had kissed him because she liked him... but also to distract herself from thoughts of Emma. Afterwards she'd felt guilty because he deserved better than to be just a distraction.

She considered heading to the gym, but Jesse intercepted her and led her to Adam's quiet little Zen garden instead.

"So," Jesse said, "tell me all about this Richard Saunders guy. I hear you've got a yen for him and I have to make sure he's good enough for our Shal."

Shalimar snorted in amusement. "Well he's got a PhD and he's come up with a serum to suppress the genes responsible for creating feral mutants," she told him. "And... he's taking it himself."

Jesse frowned. Not his judgmental frown, which he totally had despite what he said. Just a thoughtful one. "Does he want you to take this serum too?"

"He... he's implied I could take it if I wanted," Shalimar said carefully. "He hasn't tried to pressure me or anything like that."

"Good." Jesse sat down on one of the room's two benches. "Mind if I ask what he said to imply you could use the serum?"

"Just... he asked... if I got tired of being special, I guess." Shalimar shrugged. Like it was no big deal. Like it hadn't felt as though she'd been hit with an armor piercing question.

"You know, I don't think I've ever met anyone who loves being a New Mutant as much as you do," Jesse told her. "I found it kind of... inspiring when we first met, to be honest. Still do. The way you're just so unapologetically yourself... but I know how tiring and frustrating it can be to feel so proud of being myself and having society itself battering at me with every slur under the rainbow and then some. It's enough to get even someone like you down. But it also makes me think that this Richard guy asked you the wrong question."

"Then what's the right question?" Shalimar asked, feeling vaguely like a fraud. Jesse admired her for being unapologetically herself? Yet here she was, clinging to the closet door like her life depended on it.

"Do you get tired of being special or of a society that tells you being special is a bad thing?"

"I'm not as good at being unapologetically myself as you think," Shalimar said, collapsing onto the bench beside Jesse. "I... there's something about myself I've always pretended wasn't there. It used to be so easy. I could dismiss what I was feeling because it was never strong enough to be worth acting on. There was no one I cared about enough to even consider..."

"Shal?" Jesse gave her a concerned look.

"I might not... I might not be..." Shalimar took a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. "I might not be as straight as I've always said I am."

Jesse's expression was startled for a moment before morphing into something sweetly proud. "Am I the first person you've told this to?"

She nodded.

"I'm so proud of you," he told her. "Even when you know you're safe, it can be so hard to come out."

"Everyone else makes it look so easy," she admitted softly. "You've been out to me almost as long as I've known you. Emma came out to me a few weeks ago. Adam was telling me just today that he found a new label recently that helped him make sense of himself and not feel so alone. And I feel so awful because when it comes to myself I want it to go away. I want to be normal. I'm scared of what it means to... to explore this side of me. And Richard is such a safe option because I am attracted to him. I really am."

"But being with him won't make any other attraction you're feeling magically go away."

"No, it won't. And... and the longer I'm aware of my feelings for... for Emma, the more I start to realize this isn't the first time I've felt attracted to a woman. She's just the first woman I've wanted to take the risk of... of being with her."

"So you're faced with the safe option of Richard or the scary options of acknowledging that you're capable of being romantically and sexually attracted to a woman and telling Emma how you feel."

"Surely she already knows," Shalimar whispered, ducking her head and feeling ashamed.

"I think Emma knows you care about her, but I don't think she realizes in what way. And that, as her friends, she wouldn't presume to make assumptions or try to play fill in the blank." Jesse hummed softly, then added, "I think you already know what you really want deep down, Shalimar. When it comes to being part of Mutant X, your feelings for Emma, your feral connection to Richard, and the question of the serum, you already know what you really want. And when it comes time to start making decisions about it all... I know you'll make the decision that's right for you."

"You've got more faith in me than I do right now," Shalimar admitted, leaning against Jesse's side.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "What are best friends for?"

Richard was administering himself a shot of his own serum by the time Shalimar went to find him in the guest room. She watched quietly from the doorway, wondering if she'd feel their connection slowly diminish over the next few weeks, trickling away until he was merely another handsome face without the electric crackle of their shared instincts to bring them together.

Would she even like him as a person when the... what did Adam call it? Limerence? A shift in brain chemistry made stronger by their shared mutancy. When that faded away, did they actually have anything in common? She didn't know anything about him. Not really. Not enough to form an opinion on him one way or another.

"What's wrong?" Richard asked, looking up at her.

"I can almost feel you slipping away from me already," she admitted. She kept to herself that she wasn't certain she wanted to hang on.

"I know what you mean," he told her. "But if you wanted... we could change that. I know it isn't a permanent solution yet, but I think with Adam's help... we could truly have a normal future together."

"A... white picket fence, two-point-five children, and a dog?" Shalimar was aiming for levity, but her tone fell a little flat. A normal future was... her as his wife, maybe running a self defense class while he was in a lab all day. And that assumed that giving up being a feral mutant didn't strip her of her love for martial arts too.

"Something like that." Richard cocked his head to the side, looking at her intently. "I know we could be so happy together."

Shalimar shook her head. "I... what we have is intense, Richard. But I don't want to give up everything that I am just to find out that we can't sustain that connection in the long run. We just met yesterday and you're already talking about the rest of our lives together. But what do you even know about me really? That I'm good in a fight and damn sexy?" She shot him a sultry grin to offset the harshness of her questions and he smiled back softly in response.

"And that you have great courage," Richard replied. "We could always get to know each other. Slow things down and see where it takes us."

What he was asking for wasn't unreasonable in the face of her questions. But ultimately, she knew he'd eventually expect her to take the serum and settle down with him.

Could she do that? Could she walk away from Mutant X?

Shalimar walked over to sit beside him and picked up a vial of serum from his case. She gazed at it, at what it represented. A 'fix' for all her fears, which wasn't a state of being she was used to experiencing. She was used to confronting her fears head on. Or kicking them in the face. Whatever worked best at the time.

Accepting she was a New Mutant had been so easy and though she'd been confused by her emerging abilities, she'd loved them from nearly the start. Her feral mutant instincts and strength had made her feel powerful and... sexy. Her enhanced senses gave her a clearer view of the world around her.

Was she really considering throwing all of that away to make it easier to hide from her attraction to Emma? The wasn't her. Not really.

The serum went back in the case and Shalimar smiled ruefully at Richard. "I know this serum of yours is going to be a godsend for a lot of people. But it's not for me. I don't think... I don't think normal is the kind of future I want for myself."

"I understand," he replied. His mouth opened to say something else, only to frown and touch his face just above his mouth.

Shalimar smelled blood. But she still didn't understand something was wrong until Richard slipped off the bed to hit the floor, his body shaking uncontrollably.

"Richard!" She dropped to the floor too, carefully touching his arms but not trying to move him in case this was some kind of seizure. The last thing she wanted was to make things worse.

"S-something's wrong, Shal." There was fear in his voice and his eyes as he looked up at her.

"The serum?" she asked.

"I don't... I don't know..." the shaking was getting worse. "It hurts..."

Adam's hair was in disarray, he'd run his hands through it in frustration so many times that a picture of it could probably go into the dictionary next to the definition of a rat's nest. He was crunching numbers and analysis on Richard's serum, trying to determine what had gone wrong. Trying to save one of the New Mutants he felt so much responsibility for.

Minutes after Shalimar had rushed Richard to Adam's lab, Emma had brought to them news of the report from Proxy Blue of the dead 'savage woman with rabies' that she believed was their missing Donna Morse. While Adam had begun his deep dive into the serum, Shalimar and Emma started pulling information from the city morgue. A Jane Doe from Hoyt Park, not far from Hartwell Brokerage. Preliminary analysis had revealed her DNA appeared to have been altered. Her body had been claimed by agents from the CDC... a clear GSA cover up.

It was Donna. It had to be.

Richard's not quite a seizure eventually ended and he fell asleep in the biobed, which Shalimar knew from experience was quite comfortable from the many times she'd lain there while Adam scanned her DNA to ensure she remained stable.

New Mutants were prone to melt downs if their powers - rooted in their DNA - destabilized. Epigenetics played into it as well, though Shalimar didn't totally understand that part. And certain types of mutants were more prone to destabilizing than others. Brennan's electrical powers, for example, could overload him if he lost control. Feral mutants, in contrast, were particularly stable. But since they often used their powers in high stress situations... Adam liked to keep his scans for all of them, up to date. Just in case.

But Adam didn't have any scans of Richard to fall back on in this emergency. And any data Richard had was locked up in Genomex. His lab would've been cleared out by now...

"I'm sure Adam will find a solution," Emma offered, patting Shalimar's shoulder and joining her on the floor of the room.

Shalimar leaned into the touch and curled against Emma's side. "I hope so. I don't... I don't want the normal life he does, but I want him to be able to have it. And he's got to live to do that."

Emma seemed to relax a little. "So we're not losing you to his pretty smile?" she teased.

"Nah. I mean... I can't say I wasn't a little tempted by what he was offering. But I like who I am. And I love the people I work with. So I'm not going anywhere."

They sat there together, for a long while, waiting to find out what Adam would have to say. And, eventually, he arrived to give them the news.

"First, I need to know if you took any of the serum, Shalimar," was the first thing Adam said when he finally pushed away from his computer banks. He must've been too focused on his work to hear what Shalimar had told Emma.

"No, I didn't. I decided against it," she assured him, scrambling to her feet and offering Emma a hand up.

"That's a relief." Adam's hand wandered through his hair again, reorganizing the chaos it had turned into. "We should wake up Richard. He needs to hear his options."

Stepping forward, Shalimar gently shook Richard's shoulder and he came awake slowly, smiling at her so sweetly.

"Shal..." he murmured.

Feeling guilty again, Shalimar gestured to Adam. "We've got some answers for you, Richard."

"It's the serum, isn't it?" Richard asked. "I miscalculated somewhere and now it's killing me."

"It is, but I may be able to reverse the worst of the damage," Adam told him. "Thankfully your serum was only suppressing your feral mutancy, not rewriting your DNA altogether. I've come up with a counter agent that should bind with the suppressant and render it inert, though you'll need several treatments over the next few days. But you've sustained damage to your central nervous system that is likely to continue to deteriorate before stabilizing. Your enhanced healing may be able to slowly reverse some of that damage over time, but to what degree depends on how well your feral powers recover from the suppression."

"What did I miss?" Richard asked, sounding distressed. "The compound shouldn't have had any effects on my nervous system."

"It didn't. However, the enzymes produced by the genes you were suppressing are a vital part of your body's ability to self regulate. So while the lowered levels of those enzymes was causing your abilities to start fading as you'd predicted... you didn't account for the parts of your body which now require those chemicals to function properly." Adam hesitated, then added, "it seems likely Donna experienced a more extreme reaction than you did which caused her body to simply... shut down entirely."

Richard shook his head. "I was so sure it would work. And my overconfidence got her killed."

"Your heart was in the right place," Adam insisted quietly. "It'll take a few hours to synthesize the counter agent, so I'd like you to stay here in the lab for monitoring for a while longer. Once you've stabilized, there's a hospital in Nevada I'd like to send you to complete your recovery. Though there are other places I can arrange for you to go for recovery if you prefer. Nevada, however, would be my preference as I have a friend there who has been studying the genetics of New Mutants who, much like yourself, wish to mute or otherwise remove their abilities. She would benefit from having an assistant in her work with your insights and drive. Her work has been geared towards individually tailored retro-viruses capable of replacing target DNA which would also be able to rewrite the body's dependence upon chemical differences between a New Mutant's body and a baseline human's."

"So I'd be able to continue my work?" Richard asked quietly.

"Under Janice's supervision," Adam replied, "and so long as you stop trying to jump straight to human testing, I don't see why not." Which were, honestly, fair stipulations for Adam to place on Richard's work, as far as Shalimar was concerned.

It seemed Richard agreed. "Nevada sounds wonderful. I can find out if it really is true a person can fry an egg on the sidewalk during the summer."

"At least it's not Phoenix, Arizona," Shalimar teased, patting Richard's shoulder. "The trashcan's melt in the summer heat there."

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to go with me, Shal?" Richard asked.

"I... I'm sorry, Richard," Shalimar shook her head. "My place is here." There was no where else she wanted to be.

He took her hand in his for a long moment and then, with a quiet, sad sound, he let her go. "I think I'm going to get some sleep for now."

"I'll see you in the morning. Or, well, later in the morning," Shalimar promised, noting how late it was. Adam had already gone back to work, this time on synthesizing the counter agent he'd mentioned earlier. And Emma was no where to be seen, having apparently slipped out quietly while Adam had been speaking to Richard.

It was probably for the best. Shalimar had a lot of things to work out in her head before she made her decision on whether or not to tell Emma about her feelings.

Notes: I really wanted Shalimar's decision to stay to be because ultimately she really loves and believes in the work she's doing as part of Mutant X and doesn't want to leave that behind. Or to feel like she has to give up a part of herself to truly be with her lover as an equal. I didn't want her to be staying specifically because of Emma, though of course that Emma is there is definitely a bonus.

So while Shalimar doesn't want to give up her life to avoid the parts of herself she finds scary to face, she also recognizes that choosing not to be with Richard doesn't automatically mean she has to be with Emma. Of course, with the next chapter being the last chapter I can promise she does decide what she wants to do and chooses to be brave about it pretty soon.

And since Shalimar no longer needs a dramatic reason to remain with Mutant X, Richard no longer has to die like he did in canon. He's really messed himself up and he's going to have to live with the consequences of jumping straight into human trials with himself as the lab rat, but he gets to live to see another day. Poor Donna, though, she's still very dead and it's pretty much Richard's fault.