by Drucilla
Author's Note: I don't own Mutant X, any of that. I own Angelique and all her horses. Thanks to Sllea and Kristen, glad you enjoyed it! I love that sort of ambiguous morality dilemma and character development and history, and I'm really depressed that Mutant X doesn't do more of it. Oh well, that means I can do it instead! Thanks also for the kind compliments about Shalimar; always glad to know I can stay in character. :) More coming up! Many thanks to Sllea for asking questions that lead to ideas.
When Emma got up at six the next morning out of sheer sleeplessness, Angelique was already up. Bleary-eyed, foul-mouthed, and walking around barely missing things, but she was up. The empath watched as the older woman poured herself a huge glass of orange juice, drank it down in two gulps, and grabbed what looked like a protein bar from a suspiciously large box. Emma made a face. How could she eat those?
Emma followed her out to the barns, where Angelique began loading hay into a wheelbarrow. Though she'd never really done it before, Emma stepped forward, grabbing a bale and setting it down where Angelique had done. The older woman raised an eyebrow.
"When I was your age, I never got up before noon if I didn't have to."
"And how often was that?" Emma retorted, thinking of the hours Adam kept. Angelique chuckled.
"Not very," she admitted, pulling down another bale. "There. That ought to be enough. Now some of this." She reached up and over, pulling down a bale of some other sort of plant. Emma thought it was alfalfa.
"Couldn't you just as easily do this later in the day?" Emma asked finally, after the fourth or fifth yawn from Angelique.
"Force of habit," she replied wryly. "I did this for so long… Now I wake up at 5:30, 6:00 am whether I need to or not. It's actually kind of nice."
Emma snickered and shook her head, doubting that. She tossed over the hay and alfalfa into the food baskets as directed. It actually was relaxing, ambling through the corridor between stalls, even if the one horse did decide it liked her fingers better than the hay. She could see why Angelique preferred to spend time around them. Another horse, two stalls down from the first, tried for her fingers. It whinnied in protest as a fist descended rapidly on its nose.
"You have to react quickly," Angelique explained, "Because they don't have a very long short-term memory. If you wait long enough to go 'ow' and rub your hand, then that's long enough for them to forget what they did." Emma nodded, rubbing her hand unconsciously. "If they keep it up…" Angelique had been scratching the horse on the nose and it tried to bite her again. The first time she simply moved her hand away; the second time she swiftly grabbed the horse's nose and pinched it shut. "You know better, donkey," she told it. "You know better. Ah…" she said as the horse attempted to twitch its head away. "Keep that up and I'll send you off for glue, Storm Chaser."
They moved on. Storm Chaser, as though retorting, nickered as they passed.
"Storm Chaser?"
Angelique chuckled. "He's a sweet horse, but he has a tendency to go looking for trouble. Pushing the envelope. Chasing the thunderstorms."
"Oh." Emma paused, not sure how out of line it would be to say what she was thinking. "Why do you love him?" she blurted out finally.
"Storm Chaser?" Angelique blinked. "Well…"
"Eckhart."
"Oh." Angelique sighed heavily. She moved across the gap between buildings, to her beloved black Friesians. She didn't say anything for a long time.
"When I was at GenomeX, it was primarily just the three of us. Yes, they had thousands of scientists on staff, but we were some of the few who stayed very long on our project. The only ones, in fact, who stayed as long as we did. Mason was intensely cynical, jaded, and bitter even then. Adam was as… hopeful… then as he is now, and I wasn't nearly as tired. He didn't understand, I think, our stubborn optimism. It flew in the face of everything he'd grown up with. The death of his brother, the suicide of his mother, an absentee father, ostracized for being highly intelligent and no good at anything physical. And then, he's never had any patience with average intelligence, which made him even more antisocial and sullen."
"At the same time, though, I think he wanted to be happy. We all had several traits in common… we were all highly intelligent, very driven, eerily creative. He wanted, I think, to be as optimistic as we were, but he couldn't manage it so he tried to be even more withdrawn. And we… well, I, at least… wouldn't let him. I tried to make friends. I don't know what happened. Maybe it was because I was as happy in relative solitude as he was that he tolerated my presence. After a while we just got used to each other. And… I think it was a novelty to him, someone who cared about who he was, what he thought… who didn't go away, and was always there."
It wasn't a direct answer, but Emma was already getting embarrassed with all the personal secrets spilling from the woman she barely knew. But she was still curious about one thing. Finally she worked up the courage to ask, "Did he know?"
Angelique sighed. "In retrospect… I don't know. I doubt it. At the time, of course, I thought he didn't know and didn't care. Which is, really, pretty unfair. He's not unperceptive, just uncaring. But no, I don't think he ever really guessed, not completely. I… was careful. If he had known, I think he would have … gone away."
Emma made a mental note not to ask any more personal questions of Angelique for a couple hours after she'd crawled out of bed and moved on to another topic. This one she was on more certain ground. "So, he had nothing to do with your…"
"Biokinesis?" Angelique smiled slightly. "No. That was my doing. Adam and Mason never knew. Two years after I'd arrived the persons in charge of the project approached me about doing some more intensive studies… I wanted to try it out on a known quantity first, and named myself. They were fairly shocked, and I told them that if they wanted my help they would have to play by my rules." Her smile turned grim. "After two years they didn't know me well enough to know what that meant, or that it was a singularly bad idea."
"So you specified the treatment to give you biokinetic abilities… so you could keep a closer watch on anything else they did?" Emma guessed, from what she knew of the woman.
"Something like that. Also for purely selfish reasons; it would make it a lot easier for me to do what I wanted to do with my horses. It's turned out to be more useful than I thought… once I achieved a certain measure of control."
Emma shivered. "Just how powerful are you?"
Angelique stopped at the last stall, her hand buried in Tiny Dancer's mane. "You know, I'm not entirely sure. I imagine that, if I were to put my mind to it, I could probably rebuild someone from the ground up." She looked over at the young mutant, who was staring in wide-eyed near-horror. "Oh, not that easily. I'd be nearly comatose for at least a week afterwards, and I'd be completely helpless while I did it. I can heal cuts, purge toxins, mend bones… slow down some debilitating diseases. It depends, mostly, on the scope of what I do. How much change is needed, and how deep it goes. Altering anything on a genetic level requires a lot of concentration."
"Oh…" Emma said faintly, her mind reeling with the potential of the woman standing in front of her.
"How did Adam find out?" she asked then, and Emma blinked, caught by surprise.
"The eye-in-the-sky traffic camera caught the accident with the semi… Jesse noticed you, enhanced the picture to see if you were okay… and caught you doing your… trick. I don't think anyone would notice if they weren't looking for something in particular," Emma hurried on to say at Angelique's worried look.
"That's something, anyway," the older woman sighed. "You know, for the amount of neglect or abuse the kids I deal with get from their parents, I bet they would be yanked out of this program so fast their heads would spin if anyone found out."
"Probably," Emma nodded slowly, thinking of all they'd encountered. Mutants who wanted so desperately to be human that they'd kill themselves for it. Humans who were terrified of mutants. Mutants who denied their abilities to the point where they suppressed them, until later on everything went to hell in a handbasket and their powers raged out of control. "Definitely," Emma said after a bit.
Angelique shook her head, moving Dancer's head away from her shoulder where he'd started pushing after she'd stopped scratching. "One of the many reasons I prefer horses to humans," she said wryly, and Emma chuckled slightly in response. "Well. That's neither here nor there, and the rest of your crew probably isn't going to be awake anytime soon…" She looked at the young mutant speculatively for a long while.
"What?" Emma asked finally.
"You ever been horseback riding?"
Emma was a lot easier in mind after the hour and a half spent riding with the older woman, talking
and exchanging Adam stories and trying to teach the young mutant to ride. Angelique had give her
over to the care of her older Friesian mare, Black Rose VI, whose great-great-many-times-great
grand-dam had her name above the stable door. The mare was gentle, but big, and Emma was more sore
than she'd ever thought she'd be after they finally came back to the stables.
Shalimar was waiting for them, to both women's surprise. She had her arms folded across her chest and she looked very stern. The horses were pawing anxiously, but that could as well have been from her feral nature as from any sort of antagonistic feeling the young woman felt.
Emma paused on her horse, frozen in mid-dismount. She looked over at Angelique.
"Go on," the older woman said, not taking her eyes off Shalimar. "I think we two have something to discuss." Shalimar nodded once, tightly, and Emma dismounted. Despite her creaky, stiff walk through the corridor and up to the house, no one laughed. No one was paying attention. Angelique dismounted more smoothly and took the reins of both horses. She stared at Shalimar expectantly for a bit and then, when the other didn't say anything, she led the horses forward and clipped the tie-lines to Dancer's bridle.
"I don't like you," Shalimar blurted out abruptly, almost angrily. Angelique placidly led Black Rose to the next set of tie-lines and clipped her in. "I don't like how you think, I don't like who you hang out with, and I don't like the fact that we don't know you at all, and we're stuck in your house because somehow you convinced us to come along."
Angelique nodded. "Fair enough," was all she said. Shalimar looked slightly stung by that, but kept going.
"Emma says I should trust you. She says that you're just doing what I would do in your place, and that you have some good points. I don't trust you, but I trust her. And I trust Adam."
Hidden by the horse's flanks, Angelique paused in her currying and smiled slightly. "Adam is a good person to trust," she offered, neutrally.
"Adam is a good man," Shalimar said forcefully, and Angelique wondered just what was behind the vehemence in her tone. "And if Adam says you're okay, and what you say bears thinking about, then I'll trust you." She didn't say what they both knew, that she was thinking about what Angelique had said already. And that, most likely, it was going to take her to some very uncomfortable thoughts. "But not before," Shalimar added finally.
Angelique stepped out from behind Black Rose and looked at Shalimar. Tension sizzled in two straight lines between their eyes, but it was an easier sort of tension than it had been. Dominant female sized up dominant female, each acknowledging the other as a worthy adversary or ally, and acknowledging the fact that the status could change at any given moment. Also understood was the fact that their circles of people to defend were largely the same, their causes parallel. Shalimar nodded, and Angelique nodded.
"All right then," Angelique said cryptically, and went back to grooming her horses. Shalimar stood watching her for a long while, and then went back up to the house.