by Drucilla
"I'm not so sure this is a good idea…"
Brennan glanced over his shoulder and gave Jesse a half-hearted dirty look. "Well we can't exactly go back now and tell Adam that we snuck out to see this woman and then chickened out at the last minute." Next to him Shalimar bounced from one foot to the other, eager to confront the woman she had decided was on Eckhart's side. Emma just stood behind and between the two of them, pensive. Finally Jesse shrugged, and they walked forward.
"…what would your old friends say, if they could see you now…" The dark-haired woman looked up, her song trailing off as her hands stilled on the guitar. "Yes?"
"We…" Brennan started, only to realize that Shalimar, Jesse, and Emma were all hanging behind him. He looked back, suddenly feeling very unsupported. "Hey, come on, guys." Angelique's slight chuckle didn't help any. "Uh…"
"We know you're a mutant," Shalimar burst out finally, though she had at least enough sense to keep her voice down so that no one would overhear. No one was paying attention anyway; everyone was concentrating on getting ready for the next event, making a fair amount of noise as they did so.
If the four of them had hoped for a reaction they were quite disappointed. Angelique only raised an eyebrow, and went back to plinking on her guitar.
"When did it happen?" Emma asked quietly. Angelique sighed, set her guitar to one side, and leaned her forearms on her knees. "The unexplained genetic… mmm… expression?" She asked. Nods all around. "Are you sure you really want to know?" she smiled slightly. From their expressions that hadn't been an answer they'd expected, and they all looked at each other uneasily, as though expecting to be ambushed at any moment by either questions or GSA agents.
"Look, we…" Jesse trailed off as Angelique stood up. She was tiny, but she had a presence about her that made all the Mutant X'ers feel very, very young. The older woman looked them over measuringly.
"You really aren't ready for this," she concluded, and held up a hand to stop their protests as she shook her head wryly. "Adam. I swear, sometimes that man doesn't think to even open his eyes before he leaps. And now he's taken you all and thrown you into a world of… what? Fighting crime? Playing super-heroes? Without even training you for the emotional and mental requirements that that takes?" Brennan opened his mouth to object, shut it, and looked thoughtful. "Ever wonder why Batman couldn't have a successful love life if his career depended on it?"
"We knew what we were getting into when we signed on," Shalimar said, stung by what she saw as accusations and slights against a man she highly respected, from a woman she deeply mistrusted. "We're not stupid…"
Angelique shook her head. "I'm not saying you are. And I'm not saying that Adam is either, I'm just saying that he has a tendency not to think about certain sides of the equation he's working."
Emma nodded slowly, and Shalimar stared at her teammate as though she'd sold them out to the GSA. "You're not saying you're…"
"She's got a point, Shalimar. Think about it. We're not commandos, we weren't trained for any of this until we got into it deeper than we could get ourselves out of." Now Brennan was nodding, and Jesse was looking dismayed.
"Look," Angelique turned to her guitar case and pulled a set of keys out from it. She extracted a small rectangle of plastic from the jingling bundle and held it out to Brennan. "Take that. It's the key-card to the private box I keep in reserve in case I get some unexpected guests. Go up there, sit through the rest of the show. Then when the show's over, you can help me get everyone into the trailers, we'll go back to my place, and I can explain some certain facts of life to you. In exchange I'll tell you everything you or Adam might want to know about what's been going on."
She spoke with such authority that Brennan and Jesse were nodding before they realized they'd agreed. Emma looked thoughtful and agreed, dragging Shalimar along with her as the latter woman gave Angelique threatening glances over her shoulder.
"How much do you really know about Adam and Mason?" Angelique asked as she set out glasses and
an assortment of drinks, including Coke, Sprite, coffee, water, and some bizarre combination
fruit juice that never occurred in nature.
"Enough," Shalimar said before anyone else could, "to know whose side to choose."
"Ahhh…" Angelique said delicately, settling down in an overstuffed black leather armchair. She cupped in her hands a mug of hot tea, and sipped from it as she decided where to begin. "Did you know that his mother committed suicide when he was twelve? Or that his father worked for the army, in the position of chief medical officer specializing in the care of mentally unstable Marines and Marine vets?"
"Your point?" Shalimar asked, but Emma nodded thoughtfully, and Jesse looked slightly disturbed.
Angelique shrugged. "For now, no point. Except that one of the basic rules of hunting is to know your prey. And that, even if you aren't actually hunting him, if you and Adam are going to try and stop Eckhart in whatever delusional scheme he's worked up, you need to know more about him than just 'He's evil.'"
"It's not a delusion," Emma broke in. "It's real. He's out to… I don't know what. But he's capturing mutants and putting them in stasis pods…"
The older woman nodded. "I know. I didn't mean to imply that his scheme wasn't real, I meant that whatever reasons he has for it are probably based on delusions of persecution, grandeur, inadequacy, or something else equally ludicrous."
"Does it really matter why he's doing it?" Jesse wanted to know. "I mean… whatever his reasons, he's doing some really bad things. It doesn't make him any less evil if he's …" the young man trailed off, not quite sure how to say what he meant.
"Jesse, think about what you're saying here. Evil's a pretty strong word, are you sure you want to go around using it like that?" Angelique cautioned. "But I do know what you mean. He's doing horrible, cruel things, and whatever his reasons are he needs to be stopped. But reasons are as important as actions, perhaps even more so. Ends and means, you know that saying? The ends don't always justify the means? If you're attacking Eckhart just because you've decided he's evil… who will the next person be who's 'evil?' The big burly guy who beat up that skinny kid the other day? But what if that skinny kid was blackmailing the bigger guy? Or threatening his family?"
"So what you're saying is…" Brennan frowned slightly, trying to get a grasp on the enormity of the idea being laid before them. "You're agreeing that Eckhart's GSA and the stasis pods are bad," Angelique nodded. "You're agreeing that Eckhart needs to be stopped." Another nod. "But you're saying that we should think about what we're doing, and what he's doing, and what Adam's getting us to do, before we do anything?"
Angelique smiled slightly. "Dead-bang."
"But how can we get anything done if all we do is sit around talking about it?" Shalimar wanted to know. She sounded upset, but at least she was listening to the other woman.
"How can you get anything done if you run around trying to do everything at once? You should know that by now. A little preparation ahead of time can save a lot of fixing later. That's all I'm saying, not that you should sit around inventing a new morality system to justify what you're doing. In fact, don't justify it at all. Just think about what you're doing, where it fits into your personal morality, and figure out if you're satisfied with it and if you can live with the consequences."
She sat back and let the young men and women of Mutant X digest that for a while. She'd given them a pretty hefty morsel to chew on, and she wanted to be sure it went down at least somewhat smoothly. Brennan looked like he was handling it all right, as was Emma. Jesse looked troubled, as though he wasn't sure what he thought about it, but at least he was engaged in the process of thinking. Shalimar, of all of them, looked least receptive.
"You said," Emma started, drawing the older woman's attention. "You said that Adam wasn't teaching us right… what was he not teaching us? All this morality and ethics stuff?"
"Not… exactly." Angelique hedged. She wanted to be very careful at this point, wanted to get her message across without eroding their trust in their leader or each other. "He's been teaching you to react, and that's good. That's kept you alive for now, especially with the GSA and everyone else trying to capture you. But it's not enough to know how to react. You have to know how to think, and how to act as well."
"So that when we do act, we have the strength of our conviction behind us. We know what we're doing and why we're doing it…" Jesse said, getting it suddenly.
"… and you're that much stronger for it. Exactly." Angelique grinned, and Jesse looked particularly pleased with himself.
"And what does all this have to do with Eckhart?" Shalimar wanted to know. Angelique fixed her with a steady, relentless eye.
"Eckhart has the courage of his convictions. He knows exactly what he's doing, and he is firmly convinced that he's right in doing it. Which is why you've gotten no further than you have, among other things. You also don't know nearly as much as you should about him, or about Adam. And while basing your judgments on their current actions is a damn good idea, you should also know about where they're coming from, to know where they're going."
Brennan scowled. "That …" he stopped, trailing off. "I can't believe Eckhart ever had any redeeming qualities. At all. That guy was born a jerk."
Angelique chuckled. She stood up, moving over to a closet set below the stairs, and rummaged through it for a little while. "Most days I would agree with you," she said from behind the door. "Back then as well as now. But there were little things, occasional things, that changed my mind. I used to … a-ha!" She pulled back, pulling out what looked like a hat-box and dusting it off as she closed the door of the closet with one foot. "I knew I had these in that closet somewhere."
"Oh no…" Jesse groaned. "What are those, baby pictures?"
Angelique started laughing, and after a while so did everyone. The thought of Mason Eckhart as a baby was just too hysterical, especially since most of the people in the room were picturing a tiny, grumpy-looking, wrinkle-faced baby with white hair and big pink sunglasses. "Not quite," she said, still chuckling. "They're … well, some of them are pictures. Some… well, here…" she put the box on the table and opened it up. "Take a look."
They did. It had old pictures, sure enough, of various combinations of Adam, Angelique, and Eckhart in the labs and outside of them. It had a small but pretty card with a horse on it, with 'Congratulations, M.' written inside in elegant handwriting. "That was after my first stallion was approved by the breeding administration," Angelique said. There was a receipt inside from what appeared to be a fairly lavish dinner. No need to ask what that was about. There were a few dried rose petals, an old, faded blue ribbon, not the kind awarded for prizes but the kind someone might put in their hair. Each one, it seemed, had a story, and Mutant X heard all the stories, until Angelique finally decreed it was too late for story time and sent them all up to bed.
"You shouldn't hate her so much, Shalimar," Emma said as they got ready for bed. Angelique had
put them in the small double-roomed cabin she said she kept for weekends with 'her' kids. There
was one room of eight bunks for the boys, one for the girls. Shalimar had decided she wanted the
top bunk, and the empath was too tired to argue with her. "You'd do the same thing if you were
in her place, I'd bet."
"No I wouldn't," Shalimar said decisively. "I wouldn't be talking about a man like Eckhart like he was some kind of… I don't know. Misguided wandering child."
"She's not talking about him like that," Emma corrected patiently. "She's just saying that he had some decent personality traits, and for some reason he chose to be cruel instead. I don't think she wants to help him any more than Adam does. She still likes him, but she knows exactly what kind of a person he is."
"Then how can she like him?" Shalimar flopped her head and shoulders over the top bunk and looked down at her teammate, who was climbing under the covers. "How can she like a man like that? He's… evil."
"To us, sure. But she knew him back before he was completely mean and sadistic. And I guess she saw something in him that isn't there anymore. And she's like you, she sticks with liking her friends, even when they do hideous, horrible things. That's why it's almost worse for her, and for Adam."
"What are you talking about…" Shalimar growled. "I'm not like her."
Emma hid a grin in the shadows under the bunk. "You both stick by your friends. You're both stubborn in your opinions. That's probably why you don't like her. I don't think she likes you much either."
"Wha…"
"Go to sleep, Shalimar. And think about it. She's got some good points. And I bet Adam would agree," Emma stuck her head under the pillow. Shalimar watched her for a little while before pulling back and flopping down on her own bed.
"No he wouldn't," she muttered. "Adam would never agree with that."
"Go to sleep, Shalimar."