***
DISCLAIMER: I do not own the X-men, I just obsess over them. I do own the characters of Alexia, Zydane, Luke, and all other OC's.
***
Sorry it's taken me so long to post again, my life's been hectic the past few weeks. I'm leaving for New Orleans on Saturday, but I'll try to post as much as possible by then.
Enjoy and PLEASE R&R!!
--EBTS
***
(Thoughts are represented as *blah*)
***
Alexia stared in horror at the sight before her. She had never thought that a human being would be able to function in such high levels of filthiness, but the bathroom shared by Evan, Bobby, and Jamie was proof that it was possible.
With a sigh, Alexia pulled on her heavy-duty rubber gloves and began to bombard every possible surface with disinfectant.
This was her punishment for leaving the Institute without telling anyone: She had to clean the entire Mansion, top to bottom, for the next two weeks. Even if she finished before the two weeks were up, she still had to maintain the level of cleanliness for the duration of the punishment. Kurt was to help keep the Mansion clean, but she had to do all the really horrible primary work.
She took a sponge out of her bucket of cleaning supplies and began to scrub vigorously at the sink. She had been told that all the sinks were once white, and she was expected to get them that way once again. There were several layers of grime in this sink, and it looked as though its more natural state of being was some where in the dark-gray-going-to-black range. *How can they live like this?* Alexia wondered.
It was three days after she and Kurt had returned to the Institute with Zydane and Luke. She had spent most of the first two days home in her bed asleep. Her hands still had bandages on them, but she could bend her fingers, and Doctor McCoy had given her painkillers to take if the pain from them became too much. Alexia had accepted the painkillers with no real plan on taking them - after all, she had lived without complaining several times after bruising her ribs dirt biking. Pain was nothing new to Alexia, and she had learned how to "suck it up and deal," as Zydane often said.
However, the gash on her scalp was still tender, and she still had a bandage around her entire head, as well as her hands. Several of her classmates had asked her during school earlier in the day what had happened.
"Oh, I just had an accident while I was out dirt biking on Saturday," she had told them. "Silly me, not wearing a helmet or gloves."
*Silly me, not thinking about what I was doing,* Alexia thought as she scrubbed the bathtub. She hated working like this. Not that she didn't like house cleaning - she kind of enjoyed it really. It was how she had earned the money to buy her new dirt bike, and it was how she was planning on putting herself through college. She was actually very fast with cleaning, knowing about how long she had to let certain cleaning agents sit on certain surfaces, and she could fit it together so that she applied all the chemicals, then cleaned them in order. A bathroom in this condition would normally take her around forty minutes, but with her sore hands and throbbing scalp, it took her closer to an hour.
But she wasn't being rewarded at the end of this with a new toy. Instead, she would have a reminder that breaking the rules at the Institute did not go unpunished.
"Hey Alexia, vhat's up?"
Alexia turned and smiled at Kurt who was standing in the doorway. He did not have his image inducer on, and his tail was lashing around playfully behind him.
"Hi Kurt," Alexia greeted him. "What can I do for you?"
Kurt shrugged and leaned against the doorway. "I vould be rescuing you from your time of slavery, but the Professor has forbidden me to do so, under penalty of a vorse punishment than yours."
"What could be worse than cleaning every bathroom in the mansion?" Alexia asked as she finished scrubbing the tub and rinsed it out with the shower.
"Cleaning the X-Jet."
Alexia shuddered at the thought. She had heard about the time Kurt had been under probation and had had to wash the X-Jet and do other menial tasks around the Institute. He often said he still had nightmares about the X- Jet's muddy landing gear.
"Alexia, do you think that you could teach me how to ride a dirt-bike?" Kurt asked after a few moments.
Alexia turned to him, with a puzzled expression on her face. "Why do you want to learn how to ride?"
Kurt shrugged. "Vell, it looks like fun, unt maybe I vould not need Scott to drive me to school if I learned," he said.
"Well, I guess I could teach you, but Zydane would be better at it," Alexia replied, throwing her cleaning supplies back into her bucket. "He taught me after John left home."
"But he von't be here much longer," Kurt told her. "So it vould be better if you taught me."
Alexia looked up at Kurt sharply. "What do you mean, he won't be here much longer?" she hissed.
"He vas talking to Ororo earlier today. She vas asking him about taking classes here, unt he said he vill be leaving in the next few days, so he von't be taking any," Kurt explained, surprised that Alexia did not already know this.
Alexia could not believe what she was hearing. Zydane was planning on leaving, and he hadn't told her yet? How could he do that to her? She was furious with him, for she had thought that now he was at the Institute, he would stay. At least until Alexia was totally over the events of the last weekend, which were not helping her nightmares any. She had been hoping he would have stayed longer than that.
"Kurt, would to be so kind as to go inform Mr. Maylor that when I'm done cleaning at six, I want to have a little tête-à-tête with him?" she seethed, trying to ignore the swirling energy around her.
Kurt nodded vigorously and backed away from the door. "Ja, I'll go tell him right now," he said quickly, and with a *BAMF* and a puff of smoke, he was gone.
Alexia snatched up the bucket off the floor and marched off to the next bathroom, trying to keep tears from running down her cheeks. --------------------------------
At six-fifteen, Zydane approached Alexia's room, knowing what she was upset about, and if he knew her, he was going to have to handle it gently, or face the consequences.
Her bedroom door was open and he stopped at the doorway to watch her for a moment. She was sitting at her desk, her back to the door, scribbling something down on a worksheet. Her left arm hung at her side, and she was flexing her bandaged fingers slowly, wincing every once in a while. She didn't seem all that mad, but Kurt had said she was very upset at the idea of Zydane leaving. He figured that since he couldn't see her face, he would have to go with Kurt's interpretation of her mood. Finally, after a moment of watching her, he knocked on the wall just inside the door.
Alexia turned, and stared at him with an unreadable expression on her face. Then she said, "Just a minute, let me finish my journal entry for French class. Come on in." She turned back to her desk as Zydane flopped down on her bed and played with her stuffed tiger as she dictated to herself what she was writing in her notebook: "Mon ami, Zydane, est juste arrivé, et je dois le tuer maintenant. Merci de l'écoute, et ne répétez pas ce que j'ai dit."
Zydane winced at what he was hearing. He knew French fairly well since he had taken it for three years in high school, and the fact that Alexia was talking very calmly about killing him didn't exactly thrill him.
"They teach you how to discuss murders in language class nowadays?" He joked as she put her books away, careful not to hurt her hands too much. "Back in my day, you were lucky if you left the class knowing how to ask where the bathroom was."
Alexia turned to him, fighting a smile that sparkled in her eyes. She didn't want to be mad at him, but she had to be. "Why are you leaving?" she asked him.
*Leave it to Alex not to beat around the bush,* Zydane thought to himself. "Alex, I have a job. Mr. Patterson will be missing his head mechanic."
Alexia's eyebrows screwed up on her forehead as if she was trying to figure something out. "So why don't you just call Patterson and tell him that he needs to find another mechanic?" she asked.
"It doesn't work that way, Alex," Zydane sighed. "He can't find a new mechanic just like that."
"What about Phil O'Conner, that kid that you used to ride with when you were in High School?"
"Who, you mean Mister-I'm-Going-To-Some-Over-Priced-Ivy-League-School? He wouldn't be caught dead working there. He's got some summer internship thing out in Rome."
"There has to be someone who can fix stuff as well as you can, Zydane," Alexia stated, walking over and leaning against her bedside table. She lifted up a picture of her family and examined it.
Zydane pushed himself up into a sitting position, so that his head was almost level with hers, and looked at her for a long moment before saying anything. He could see desperation was clouding in the back of her eyes, but he didn't know what was causing it. "Alex, I need the money. I need to support myself now. I'm an adult."
"If you stayed here, you wouldn't need money. Professor Xavier takes in anyone who comes and is willing to follow the rules," Alexia argued. "He took me in when no one else wanted me, including you."
Zydane cringed at that. "It's not that I didn't want you Alex. Your mom just wouldn't sign the papers, saying it wouldn't be moral for us to share an apartment. And your mom does want you, Alex. She just doesn't know how to handle you sometimes..." he trailed off as Alexia began to mimic his talking with her hand. He sighed, and returned to his original argument. "Alex, Mr. Patterson needs me at his shop."
"Well, what about me, Zydane?" Alexia cried slamming the picture down so hard on the table that the glass cracked. "Did it ever occur to you that I might need you?"
Zydane felt the air begin to get colder. He had to calm Alex down some how. He looked up at her, confusion covering his face. "Alex, you have everyone here at the Institute. You have Kurt. What do you need me for? I'm a nothing; my only future is fixing dirt-bikes and four-wheelers in Patterson's Shop. If I stayed here, I'd only be holding you back--" He was cut off as Alexia raised her hand and delivered a sharp, painful slap across his face.
Zydane sat there for a moment, stunned. She had only slapped him like that once before, and that was when he was trying to break up with her gently after dating her for almost a year. He had said something that she took in the wrong way and she had left a handprint on his face for three days. His cheek stung, but he knew that Alexia hadn't really wanted to hurt him; he could tell by the way she was whimpering. *This is why your mother can't handle you Alex - you can't control yourself when you get really emotional. And she doesn't understand that your power makes it hard for you to concentrate on what you're doing when you get mad.*
"Don't say that, Zydane," Alexia was whispering in a pleading tone. "You're going to do something really great with your life. You're not a nothing, because if you were a nothing, then I'd be a nothing."
Zydane felt the weight of her statement settle on his shoulders. He wondered if she was drawing from one of her older brother John's favorite sayings, "Birds of a feather flock together" or if it was the Bible verse that told believers not to tie themselves to others that were less mature or didn't share the same dream as themselves. But he knew that she was saying that if he was a nothing, she would have to be a nothing as well to associate with him.
Not knowing what else to do, Zydane handed her the stuffed tiger, which she took and hugged to her chest. Then she did something she hadn't done since several weeks before their break up: she crawled into his lap and huddled against him, resting her bandaged head on her shoulder. "Please don't leave, Zydane," she begged quietly, and then began to cry.
Not knowing what else to do, Zydane wrapped his arms around her and rocked her slowly back and forth.
"I want you to stay Zydane," Alexia said between sniffles and sobs. "I'm scared and my hands hurt and my head hurts. And if you left, then no one would be here that understands me. No one knows how to deal with me, Zy, and I can't exactly tell them. And I don't know what to do now that people are after me. They killed David, Zydane. They killed David because they wanted me, and what if on your way back home, they killed you too? You'd leave me alone again, and that's not what friends do. You're not supposed to leave me behind. You're supposed to stay with me no matter what. Remember what God said? We need to stick together and support each other. Remember? Or has your precious job forced out that memory?"
Zydane hugged the younger girl tighter to him. She was not scared in the same way as she had been from the nightmare she had had at the Bungalow. This was deeper; she was scared that he had forgotten the oath they had made, before God, to always stick together. They were to watch out for each other, since they were really all they each had left. No wonder she was making such a big deal about this.
"Alex, I could never forget that. I'll never leave you, ok? I'll call Patterson and tell him that I can't work there anymore. You're too important to me - I can't just abandon you when you need me," he murmured. He wanted to say so much more than that, but he couldn't bring himself to say it, for it would only cause her more distress.
Alexia's tears finally subsided, but Zydane kept rocking her. The dinner bell rang, but neither of them moved. Alexia was scared that if she moved, Zydane might decide to leave again, while Zydane was scared that if he moved, he would worry Alexia.
Ten minutes later, Ororo entered the room, calling Alexia to dinner. Eyeing the two on the bed, Alexia with a tear-streaked face being held protectively by a pensive looking Zydane, Ororo had no idea what say. The two teens just looked up at her, as though trying to convey a message to her with their eyes.
*Let them be, Ororo,* Professor Xavier's thoughts sounded in her head. *They are fine together, and will do nothing inappropriate. They just need time alone.*
The white-haired woman nodded to the two. "We'll leave dinner out for you in the kitchen for when you're hungry," she said, and left the room, leaving the two best friends together
DISCLAIMER: I do not own the X-men, I just obsess over them. I do own the characters of Alexia, Zydane, Luke, and all other OC's.
***
Sorry it's taken me so long to post again, my life's been hectic the past few weeks. I'm leaving for New Orleans on Saturday, but I'll try to post as much as possible by then.
Enjoy and PLEASE R&R!!
--EBTS
***
(Thoughts are represented as *blah*)
***
Alexia stared in horror at the sight before her. She had never thought that a human being would be able to function in such high levels of filthiness, but the bathroom shared by Evan, Bobby, and Jamie was proof that it was possible.
With a sigh, Alexia pulled on her heavy-duty rubber gloves and began to bombard every possible surface with disinfectant.
This was her punishment for leaving the Institute without telling anyone: She had to clean the entire Mansion, top to bottom, for the next two weeks. Even if she finished before the two weeks were up, she still had to maintain the level of cleanliness for the duration of the punishment. Kurt was to help keep the Mansion clean, but she had to do all the really horrible primary work.
She took a sponge out of her bucket of cleaning supplies and began to scrub vigorously at the sink. She had been told that all the sinks were once white, and she was expected to get them that way once again. There were several layers of grime in this sink, and it looked as though its more natural state of being was some where in the dark-gray-going-to-black range. *How can they live like this?* Alexia wondered.
It was three days after she and Kurt had returned to the Institute with Zydane and Luke. She had spent most of the first two days home in her bed asleep. Her hands still had bandages on them, but she could bend her fingers, and Doctor McCoy had given her painkillers to take if the pain from them became too much. Alexia had accepted the painkillers with no real plan on taking them - after all, she had lived without complaining several times after bruising her ribs dirt biking. Pain was nothing new to Alexia, and she had learned how to "suck it up and deal," as Zydane often said.
However, the gash on her scalp was still tender, and she still had a bandage around her entire head, as well as her hands. Several of her classmates had asked her during school earlier in the day what had happened.
"Oh, I just had an accident while I was out dirt biking on Saturday," she had told them. "Silly me, not wearing a helmet or gloves."
*Silly me, not thinking about what I was doing,* Alexia thought as she scrubbed the bathtub. She hated working like this. Not that she didn't like house cleaning - she kind of enjoyed it really. It was how she had earned the money to buy her new dirt bike, and it was how she was planning on putting herself through college. She was actually very fast with cleaning, knowing about how long she had to let certain cleaning agents sit on certain surfaces, and she could fit it together so that she applied all the chemicals, then cleaned them in order. A bathroom in this condition would normally take her around forty minutes, but with her sore hands and throbbing scalp, it took her closer to an hour.
But she wasn't being rewarded at the end of this with a new toy. Instead, she would have a reminder that breaking the rules at the Institute did not go unpunished.
"Hey Alexia, vhat's up?"
Alexia turned and smiled at Kurt who was standing in the doorway. He did not have his image inducer on, and his tail was lashing around playfully behind him.
"Hi Kurt," Alexia greeted him. "What can I do for you?"
Kurt shrugged and leaned against the doorway. "I vould be rescuing you from your time of slavery, but the Professor has forbidden me to do so, under penalty of a vorse punishment than yours."
"What could be worse than cleaning every bathroom in the mansion?" Alexia asked as she finished scrubbing the tub and rinsed it out with the shower.
"Cleaning the X-Jet."
Alexia shuddered at the thought. She had heard about the time Kurt had been under probation and had had to wash the X-Jet and do other menial tasks around the Institute. He often said he still had nightmares about the X- Jet's muddy landing gear.
"Alexia, do you think that you could teach me how to ride a dirt-bike?" Kurt asked after a few moments.
Alexia turned to him, with a puzzled expression on her face. "Why do you want to learn how to ride?"
Kurt shrugged. "Vell, it looks like fun, unt maybe I vould not need Scott to drive me to school if I learned," he said.
"Well, I guess I could teach you, but Zydane would be better at it," Alexia replied, throwing her cleaning supplies back into her bucket. "He taught me after John left home."
"But he von't be here much longer," Kurt told her. "So it vould be better if you taught me."
Alexia looked up at Kurt sharply. "What do you mean, he won't be here much longer?" she hissed.
"He vas talking to Ororo earlier today. She vas asking him about taking classes here, unt he said he vill be leaving in the next few days, so he von't be taking any," Kurt explained, surprised that Alexia did not already know this.
Alexia could not believe what she was hearing. Zydane was planning on leaving, and he hadn't told her yet? How could he do that to her? She was furious with him, for she had thought that now he was at the Institute, he would stay. At least until Alexia was totally over the events of the last weekend, which were not helping her nightmares any. She had been hoping he would have stayed longer than that.
"Kurt, would to be so kind as to go inform Mr. Maylor that when I'm done cleaning at six, I want to have a little tête-à-tête with him?" she seethed, trying to ignore the swirling energy around her.
Kurt nodded vigorously and backed away from the door. "Ja, I'll go tell him right now," he said quickly, and with a *BAMF* and a puff of smoke, he was gone.
Alexia snatched up the bucket off the floor and marched off to the next bathroom, trying to keep tears from running down her cheeks. --------------------------------
At six-fifteen, Zydane approached Alexia's room, knowing what she was upset about, and if he knew her, he was going to have to handle it gently, or face the consequences.
Her bedroom door was open and he stopped at the doorway to watch her for a moment. She was sitting at her desk, her back to the door, scribbling something down on a worksheet. Her left arm hung at her side, and she was flexing her bandaged fingers slowly, wincing every once in a while. She didn't seem all that mad, but Kurt had said she was very upset at the idea of Zydane leaving. He figured that since he couldn't see her face, he would have to go with Kurt's interpretation of her mood. Finally, after a moment of watching her, he knocked on the wall just inside the door.
Alexia turned, and stared at him with an unreadable expression on her face. Then she said, "Just a minute, let me finish my journal entry for French class. Come on in." She turned back to her desk as Zydane flopped down on her bed and played with her stuffed tiger as she dictated to herself what she was writing in her notebook: "Mon ami, Zydane, est juste arrivé, et je dois le tuer maintenant. Merci de l'écoute, et ne répétez pas ce que j'ai dit."
Zydane winced at what he was hearing. He knew French fairly well since he had taken it for three years in high school, and the fact that Alexia was talking very calmly about killing him didn't exactly thrill him.
"They teach you how to discuss murders in language class nowadays?" He joked as she put her books away, careful not to hurt her hands too much. "Back in my day, you were lucky if you left the class knowing how to ask where the bathroom was."
Alexia turned to him, fighting a smile that sparkled in her eyes. She didn't want to be mad at him, but she had to be. "Why are you leaving?" she asked him.
*Leave it to Alex not to beat around the bush,* Zydane thought to himself. "Alex, I have a job. Mr. Patterson will be missing his head mechanic."
Alexia's eyebrows screwed up on her forehead as if she was trying to figure something out. "So why don't you just call Patterson and tell him that he needs to find another mechanic?" she asked.
"It doesn't work that way, Alex," Zydane sighed. "He can't find a new mechanic just like that."
"What about Phil O'Conner, that kid that you used to ride with when you were in High School?"
"Who, you mean Mister-I'm-Going-To-Some-Over-Priced-Ivy-League-School? He wouldn't be caught dead working there. He's got some summer internship thing out in Rome."
"There has to be someone who can fix stuff as well as you can, Zydane," Alexia stated, walking over and leaning against her bedside table. She lifted up a picture of her family and examined it.
Zydane pushed himself up into a sitting position, so that his head was almost level with hers, and looked at her for a long moment before saying anything. He could see desperation was clouding in the back of her eyes, but he didn't know what was causing it. "Alex, I need the money. I need to support myself now. I'm an adult."
"If you stayed here, you wouldn't need money. Professor Xavier takes in anyone who comes and is willing to follow the rules," Alexia argued. "He took me in when no one else wanted me, including you."
Zydane cringed at that. "It's not that I didn't want you Alex. Your mom just wouldn't sign the papers, saying it wouldn't be moral for us to share an apartment. And your mom does want you, Alex. She just doesn't know how to handle you sometimes..." he trailed off as Alexia began to mimic his talking with her hand. He sighed, and returned to his original argument. "Alex, Mr. Patterson needs me at his shop."
"Well, what about me, Zydane?" Alexia cried slamming the picture down so hard on the table that the glass cracked. "Did it ever occur to you that I might need you?"
Zydane felt the air begin to get colder. He had to calm Alex down some how. He looked up at her, confusion covering his face. "Alex, you have everyone here at the Institute. You have Kurt. What do you need me for? I'm a nothing; my only future is fixing dirt-bikes and four-wheelers in Patterson's Shop. If I stayed here, I'd only be holding you back--" He was cut off as Alexia raised her hand and delivered a sharp, painful slap across his face.
Zydane sat there for a moment, stunned. She had only slapped him like that once before, and that was when he was trying to break up with her gently after dating her for almost a year. He had said something that she took in the wrong way and she had left a handprint on his face for three days. His cheek stung, but he knew that Alexia hadn't really wanted to hurt him; he could tell by the way she was whimpering. *This is why your mother can't handle you Alex - you can't control yourself when you get really emotional. And she doesn't understand that your power makes it hard for you to concentrate on what you're doing when you get mad.*
"Don't say that, Zydane," Alexia was whispering in a pleading tone. "You're going to do something really great with your life. You're not a nothing, because if you were a nothing, then I'd be a nothing."
Zydane felt the weight of her statement settle on his shoulders. He wondered if she was drawing from one of her older brother John's favorite sayings, "Birds of a feather flock together" or if it was the Bible verse that told believers not to tie themselves to others that were less mature or didn't share the same dream as themselves. But he knew that she was saying that if he was a nothing, she would have to be a nothing as well to associate with him.
Not knowing what else to do, Zydane handed her the stuffed tiger, which she took and hugged to her chest. Then she did something she hadn't done since several weeks before their break up: she crawled into his lap and huddled against him, resting her bandaged head on her shoulder. "Please don't leave, Zydane," she begged quietly, and then began to cry.
Not knowing what else to do, Zydane wrapped his arms around her and rocked her slowly back and forth.
"I want you to stay Zydane," Alexia said between sniffles and sobs. "I'm scared and my hands hurt and my head hurts. And if you left, then no one would be here that understands me. No one knows how to deal with me, Zy, and I can't exactly tell them. And I don't know what to do now that people are after me. They killed David, Zydane. They killed David because they wanted me, and what if on your way back home, they killed you too? You'd leave me alone again, and that's not what friends do. You're not supposed to leave me behind. You're supposed to stay with me no matter what. Remember what God said? We need to stick together and support each other. Remember? Or has your precious job forced out that memory?"
Zydane hugged the younger girl tighter to him. She was not scared in the same way as she had been from the nightmare she had had at the Bungalow. This was deeper; she was scared that he had forgotten the oath they had made, before God, to always stick together. They were to watch out for each other, since they were really all they each had left. No wonder she was making such a big deal about this.
"Alex, I could never forget that. I'll never leave you, ok? I'll call Patterson and tell him that I can't work there anymore. You're too important to me - I can't just abandon you when you need me," he murmured. He wanted to say so much more than that, but he couldn't bring himself to say it, for it would only cause her more distress.
Alexia's tears finally subsided, but Zydane kept rocking her. The dinner bell rang, but neither of them moved. Alexia was scared that if she moved, Zydane might decide to leave again, while Zydane was scared that if he moved, he would worry Alexia.
Ten minutes later, Ororo entered the room, calling Alexia to dinner. Eyeing the two on the bed, Alexia with a tear-streaked face being held protectively by a pensive looking Zydane, Ororo had no idea what say. The two teens just looked up at her, as though trying to convey a message to her with their eyes.
*Let them be, Ororo,* Professor Xavier's thoughts sounded in her head. *They are fine together, and will do nothing inappropriate. They just need time alone.*
The white-haired woman nodded to the two. "We'll leave dinner out for you in the kitchen for when you're hungry," she said, and left the room, leaving the two best friends together