Six Seeds, pt. 3

By Mice

-1-

Persephone made it a habit of visiting all of the Underworld to pass the time. Today, she was in a garden where a little boy was gardening. She smiled as she went to join him.

Soon, it grew hot and the boy loudly proclaimed his hunger. He went to a pomegranate, opened it, and began to eat the seeds from it. With his face stained with a rich, magenta color, he offered it to her.

Persephone was quite hungry. She had been so upset after she was torn away from her mother that she refused to eat or take delight whenever Hades was around. But pomegranates were her favorite fruit and the kid looked trustworthy. Soon, images of the food that Hades had prepared for her saturated themselves in her mind, and no matter what she did, she couldn't get them out of her head and she knew she had to eat something.

She popped six seeds into her mouth. She didn't even stop for water.

-2-

Annie Peckenpaugh took a long drink of water to force down the pills she had just taken. Bobby Drake watched with admiration and care. "Are you sure you should be taking these, Annie?"

Annie wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her pajamas. "They're my benzodiazepines. It's to help me sleep while my hormones are still trying to find some balance."

Bobby grabbed the pill bottle with interest. "Clay-Poole wrote out the prescription...are you sure this is wise?"

"I asked Hank about it the other night. Nothing in my own research suggested that it was overtly bad. I got the prescription at the drug store. And Hank told me just to be careful about what I take them with."

"Still..."

"I'm not Marilyn Monroe, Bobby. I'm not taking pills like M&M's and downing them with pink champagne. I'm taking a sedative because sometimes my body can't sleep. It refuses to sleep." Annie let out a satisfying yawn as she got in the bed. "I don't know if it's because of my hormones or because I have this fear that something else is going to happen to me." She patted a place beside her. "Are you going to join me?"

Bobby's eyes lit up. "You want me to sleep with you?"

"If by sleep you mean actual sleep, yes. I would like nothing more." Annie lifted her hand to point at him. "But don't think for one moment that you're going to get me out of my Strawberry Shortcake flannel pajamas."

He climbed into bed and kissed her head. "I love eating strawberry shortcake."

Annie flinched and shook her head. "That sounded way too much like a child molester."

"Does that mean I'm out of your bed tonight?"

"No. I need someone to protect me from the other child molester's out there." She cuddled up to his nice, cool body.

"Well, you have all five feet and eight inches of me to do just that."

"Why is everything you're saying sound remotely sexual to me tonight?"

"Tonight? Just tonight? Man, am I ever bad at this..."

Annie giggled into his chest. "Thank you, Bobby."

"What for?"

"Being here. Being patient." Her right hand found his left and her fingers became tangled in his. "You stay up and listen to me until I fall asleep and you're just so patient about it, especially with everything you're going through. Thank you."

Bobby kissed the top of her forehead as he felt her breathing slow down and a soft snore coming on. He looked at the book that was on the nightstand, a gift from his Uncle Jacob. It was a handsome leather bound blank book that his mother used as a journal. In it were her thoughts, some recipes, and her insight. All of which he could have lived a better life without knowing.

This wasn't what started the insomnia, though. That had started almost a month ago after Annie had broken up with him. It didn't have much to do with Annie, but something about it triggered something in his mind. The image of his aunt, Hollis Lubbock, beating him black and blue with a belt, kept him from wanting to sleep. Bobby had talked to Jean about it, but wasn't able to say whether or not it was a memory or real after doing so. In fact, he didn't have much of a memory of what happened for the next six months after he caught his father and his aunt having sex.

Bobby had tried many things to deal with the insomnia; the ineffective blue pills bought at the grocery store, warm milk, warm milk with brandy (his grandmother's suggestion), reading until his eyes couldn't take much more. Then he tried staying up for twenty-four hours, hoping that it would make him tired enough to want to sleep.

It didn't.

At one point, he tried to freeze himself into a sleep. For anyone else, they would have ended up with hypothermia. For Bobby, it was just a way to have his sheets frozen stuck to his legs.

Then, illuminated by the moonlight, Bobby saw the bottle of his girlfriend's benzodiazepine.

-3-

"Danger Room? Billions of dollars or a lot of Shi'ar nookie. Cup of coffee: two dollars. Watching Annie Peckenpaugh in skin tight spandex just after the break of dawn? Priceless."

Annie turned her attention to the control room and snarled. There were other places she'd rather be at seven a.m. in the morning and more clothes she'd like to be wearing as well. "You forgot one, Bobby."

"Oh?"

"Running a tired marketing gag into the ground because boyfriend can't come up with his own joke? Ridiculous."

"Someone's cranky!" Bobby sipped his coffee comfortably in the control room. "I got to tell you, Annie, I like being up here a lot more than I like being down there."

Annie glared at the control room, which she then re-dubbed, "The VIP Lounge". Bobby, Professor Xavier, Scott and Jean Summers were all there, along with Hank. "You don't know how much I wish right now how badly I wish I could wipe that smirk off your face, Bobby. Preferably with sulfuric acid." The early hour loosened her tongue to talk freely around the two she feared most in the school.

Hank grabbed Annie's attention, while maintaining a safe distance away from Bobby. "All right, Annie. You've seen past training videos of Danger Room sessions. We're going to see how much you've retained. Are you ready?"

Annie took a breath. "I'm ready."

The simulation began.

-4-

Bobby knocked slowly on the door, hoping to disguise his knock, which was usually a mass barrage of thuds.

"Come in."

The door creaked open very slowly and Bobby slid a hand in the crack and waved.

"The rest of you may enter as well."

Bobby reluctantly stepped through the doorway. "Am I disturbing you?"

-5-

Annie threw rocks at nothing. She desperately needed something to do with her hands before trying to strangle herself to death from the embarrassment that had just occurred. Sitting up on a grassy knoll seemed to be the thing.

"Stupid," she swore at herself. "You know how to move, Annie, you can see it so clearly...why can't you do it?" She threw another rock. The worst part of the exercise was the look on Xavier's face. You did not need to be a mind reader to figure that one out.

She got up and glared at the stupid blue and yellow thing they had made her wear. "I'm a Jane Fonda work out video!" she cursed.

"At least Jane Fonda can move right," a deep voice snarked from behind her.

Annie froze. She felt her toes curl. "Mr. LeBeau."

"Don' give me no authority, girl. Call me Remy." She turned around to find Remy eying her. "Nice body," he complimented her.

She said the first thing that came to her mind. "Nice ass."

"Havin' a nice ass will come in handy some of de time, but not all." He took her arm. "You're the one who played baseball, right?"

Annie nodded.

Remy smiled as he began to walk away. Annie watched him begin to move away, confused, until it became all to familiar.

He's going to pivot slightly when he gets to the seventh step and throw it at me, her mind told her.

Annie caught it easily, despite the sharp velocity it was thrown, as well as to the naked eye, Remy was just waving at her. On instinct, Annie threw it right back at him, which landed sharply on his chest.

"What was that for?" He rubbed his chest.

Annie tried not to become too mesmerized by this. "If Gambit throws shit at you, you do not keep it lingering in your hands."

Remy smiled. "It wasn't charged."

"It could have been." As Remy began to smirk, Annie rolled her eyes. "By the way, copying training maneuvers by the way of Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie is not cool."

"Look, Annie, I saw you in the Danger Room---"

"Damn it, how many of you were watching me?!"

"Most of us. There's a closed circuit channel that shows this sort of thing."

"Swell."

"Annie, the point is that as much as I respect Henry, he went about this part of your training wrong. No matter how many times you saw those tapes, you wouldn't have been prepared for today any better." He came back to her. "Fightin'...it's not somethin' you can learn from a book, n'est pas?"

"I feel like the training sequence in Dirty Dancing."

Remy growled. "Do you want me to help you out or not?!"

Annie pointed at him. "The question is: are you going to wear tight pants and a wife beater?"

"What does that have to do with anything?" Remy was doing something he wasn't all that good at doing; being oblivious.

"Like you said, Remy, having a nice ass comes in handy some of the time. Think of it as a motivation technique."

Remy's eyes casually drifted to the side of his had, as if to try to see his ass. He liked thinking of his ass as a motivational tool. He just wondered if--

"You have the best ass of the mansion," she answered his mental question. "I'll stand by that statement. I'll even say it casually among the men ."

"What good will that do?"

"Once, in front of Warren, I said that Hank had the warmest smile that I had ever seen. For the next week, he kept giving me these really strange smiles and saying, "What about this? Huh? What about this!" I like messing with Warren's head. It's eerily easy."

"Do you have a particular color of wife beater's in mind?"

-6-

Hank and Bobby spent fifteen minutes just staring at each other. In the past week, they had slowly made progress, much like the Fox and the Little Prince who tamed him, but they had yet to say any word other than various forms of greeting.

"Hey," Bobby said for the third time.

"Hello," Hank followed respectively.

A few more minutes of discomfort followed. Bobby stared longingly at the door, not having anything else to say, until he found a polysyllabic that he used as a key. "Benzodiazepine."

Hank tossed off with a forgotten levity, "Yes, it's a real word. Who are you playing Scrabble against?"

Bobby took the bite. He didn't want to leave with nothing being accomplished once more. "Annie's taking it for her insomnia...is it safe?"

Hank scratched his ear before answering. "She isn't taking them every night, is she?"

Bobby shook his head no.

"That's good." Hank grabbed a sheet of paper from his desk and began scribbling on it. "It's a serious sedative, but I trust Annie with it, after looking at her history with medication."

Bobby's face went blank. "Huh?"

"After she tore her knee up, she was prescribed pain killers. Up until last month, she still had a valid prescription, but she was very responsible with the prescription. The first six months she was here, she's only been through one bottle." Hank folded the piece of paper over once and gave it to Bobby. "Annie's very cautious about addictions, given her family history."

"What do you mean by that?" Bobby asked, not yet opening the paper.

"Well, her grandmother's a recovering gambler, her aunt is an alcoholic, her cousins are stoners, and her mother was into speed. She's convinced that she's going to succumb to an addiction."

Bobby nodded his head in a defeat. "I should have known."

Hank put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm her doctor, I'm supposed to know."

Bobby smiled at him. "Yeah."

"And if you have any questions about her pills, I wrote down any side affects that could occur so you can keep a look out for them as well."

He opened up the paper and began reading. "Is this for post-menopausal women or for anyone?"

"Usually, it would be a hormone prescribed, but Emily injected her with this strange hormone cocktail that releases itself without the need of oral supplements. It will last her the next six months. It's really quite remarkable by design." Hank's comments were quick and uneasy, torn between the awe of her work and the awe of her work. "But it doesn't touch the insomnia, so she gave Annie these pills, explaining that she would experience uneasy rest because of the surgical procedure itself, as if that were the root."

Bobby nodded. "Have you seen her?"

"This morning at the Danger Room session--"

"No, Clay-Poole."

Hank shook his head "no" in embarrassment. "No one else in our circle of friends has, either. I am looking though, Bobby." Bobby nodded his head and turned to leave when Hank called out to him. "How is she?"

Bobby answered without turning. "I think she's pretty evil, actually--"

"Annie. How's Annie?"

A taste of why he and Hank weren't being Bobby and Hank came back to his mouth. He couldn't pass up the chance. "Happy."

-7-

Jean, Rogue, Ororo, and Kitty sat around the table as Annie dealt out the money. Annie was in sheer determination mode to get these women to like her or get expelled trying. Monopoly seemed to be the way that was agreed upon by all and Annie did not want to spend another night pretending that she liked some of the movies Bobby loved. There was only so many times a sane woman could sit through "Zapped!", starring TV's Scott Baio.

"I want the race car."

"We've been over this, Ororo, I'm the race car, you're the top hat."

"I do not wear hats, though, Jean. So I should be the race car."

"Patience, little Toto, patience. It may not be Kansas, but if enough people land on Park Place, we can buy Kansas!"

Kitty leaned over to Annie. "Know this now...Rogue is a fierce Monopoly player. Once, when it looked like she was going to lose to Warren, she said that Ororo was walking around topless behind him and left the room. She has a perfect record."

"Yes, little Toto, everything is going to plan..."

"And is really creepy when paper money is involved."

"The top hat does not even fit on my head, why should it be my designated piece?"

"You can't drive the race car, either, Ororo! And the race car is mine because I'm always the race car!"

"Maybe when you and Scott play, but you have no such sway over me, Jean. I do not take to redheads."

Annie smiled as she motioned to the out of character argument. "If you two don't quit it, we're going to play it by Bobby's rules."

Jean groaned. "But I don't want to be an Oreo cookie!"

"Would I have to be an Oreo cookie, too?"

"A Nilla Wafer."

Ororo's face showed slight disgust over having to be anything vanilla. "Then I shall accept the top hat. Annie, what would you like to be?"

"The Paul Revere looking thing." Annie cleaned up the bank and soon, everyone was counting their money. "So, do we play where Free Parking is also a lottery, or...?"

Rogue took time out of her paper money stupor to answer. "How else am I going to be the most powerful woman in Atlantic City?"

Annie grinned even more. She looked up to see a figure looming in the hallway. Using her powers of deduction and likelihood of who would be looming over a game of Monopoly, she smiled at Remy. During their private training session, he had tipped her off about Rogue's love of Monopoly and that she would force every person she could find to play, if asked. He told her after Annie confided in him about how she felt left out in the mansion, especially among the women.

Remy nodded and began to leave, but not after a slight hand gesture near his backside, signaling her. "Hey," Annie began. "Is it just me or does Remy have just the most perfect ass?"

The women remained silent until Rogue spoke up. "Honey, that ass is so great that everything else is just the icing on the cake!"

Excellent, Annie thought. Everything is going to plan.

-8-

"Are you still reading that book?" Annie motioned to the leather book in Bobby's hands.

"It's fascinating."

"What is it?"

"The most terrifying and scary book since "The Shining" or "The Baby-Sitters Club"." Bobby sat the book down at the nightstand. "Where were you all day? I tried to find you to get some lunch."

Annie smiled as she changed into her night clothes. "I spent some time with Remy, actually." She saw the sad look on his face from the reflection in the mirror. "Not like that. He was just showing me some skills. After the catastrophe in the Danger Room this morning, I needed them badly." She turned to him, wearing barely anything. "I made him wear tight pants and a wife beaters and then I lived a fantasy of mine since I was first exposed to Patrick Swayze."

"I see."

"Then I played Monopoly with the girls."

"Girls?" Bobby began to chuckle. "Dear Penthouse...I thought my world was over when my girlfriend spent the afternoon ogling another man's behind when I learned that she spent the rest of her night playing strip Monopoly with a group of young, nubile girls and my wildest fantasy was realized..."

Annie jumped on the bed to kiss him. "Bobby, please. Your wildest fantasy includes a Nintendo, hot wings, Electra Women and/or Dyna-Girl."

"Note to self, do not tell girlfriend fantasies ever again." Bobby turned her over to pin her. "You know, it's dangerous, mentioning the stuff my dreams are made of."

"Like a life size Lego house?"

"Mmm."

"A reunion of Duran Duran with John Taylor?"

"That's it. Talk dirty to me."

"Nah. If I wanted to talk dirty to you, I'd say something like, "Wonder Twin powers, activate!"

Bobby went back to his side of the bed. "You know, I'm more than just a pop culture fiend. I have other things that turn me on that have never had a cereal franchise linked to them!"

Annie rolled over and placed a hand on his chest and the other to switch off the lamp. "I know. I just want you to turn off the light so I can do them."

Bobby stopped her. "Are you okay to do this, Annie?"

Annie didn't need to make a sound to let her approval known.

-9-

Bobby kissed the point on her neck where it connected to her shoulder and relished in the softness of it. He loved the feeling of someone so tiny and delicate compared to his size beneath him. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something about this that was so wrong about it. Knowing that his size was hurting her, knowing how self-conscious she was, knowing that he was in the process of fucking Jubilee's brains out was--

Bobby woke up. He wasn't aware that he had even fallen asleep. He quickly looked to his side to make sure Annie was still asleep; she was.

He got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. He felt sickened by the images and how they seemed to linger. Even worse was the knowledge that he knew these images were created by thoughts he had been harboring after Jubilee telling him that they had kissed when he was drunk.

Bobby went back to the bed where Annie was sleeping soundly. She hadn't taken her pills tonight, and they laid on his nightstand faithfully, there if they were ever needed.

He couldn't get the images out of his mind. He popped three in his mouth, in addition to the three he took last night. He didn't even stop for water.