'I like it.' Said Jubilee. 'It's very... tight. Slutty.' She smiled. Faith twisted smoothly and feinted a high kick, causing the brand new leather pants she was wearing to creak alarmingly.
'Need breaking in.' She said, and then glanced over to where Rogue was stroking one half of a particularly nice pair of suede gloves. 'She got a glove fetish, or something?' She asked, only slightly more quietly.
'Rogue's skin kills people. She's got, like, the worst mutation on the planet.' The shorter girl whispered.
'So what happens when she does touch someone?'
'They pass out, go into a coma, and die.' Jubilee told her soberly.
'Shit.' Faith muttered.
'Yeah, I know. We try not to talk about what she's missing.'
'Can't touch at all?'
'Any kind of skin to skin contact, but I get a couple seconds first.' Rogue had somehow come up behind them without either of them hearing her. 'I drain your energy. Powers, strengths, memories, talents – and then you die and I'm stuck with you in my head.'
'Jeez, Stripe, less of the sneaking.' Faith told her, startled.
'You gonna buy those pants?'
'Yeah. You want some?'
'Go for it, Rogue. You've got the legs for 'em.' Jubilee grinned.
'So . . . you wear a lot of leather?' Rogue asked half an hour later as they ate a slightly early supper. Her new trousers were chafing a little.
'Or didja just buy five brand new pairs of leather pants 'cause your new-found wealth is going to your head?' Faith smiled along with the other two, and then frowned.
'Wealth.' She muttered to herself. She'd inherited the money off the Mayor, because she had let him down. He'd left it to her because she'd turned evil. It had come – at least in part – from his crooked dealings in Sunnydale. It was blood money.
But hey, it was still money, and it wasn't like she was going to use it for evil.
'What about sex?' She asked Rogue suddenly.
'Like I said, I only get a couple of seconds.'
'Yeah, I got that. But those look like wicked fine gloves you're wearing. Give your boyfriend a pair, buy a pack of rubbers and some split-crotch pantyhose, and enjoy hours of kinky fun.'
'Uh...' Rogue blushed. She wasn't sure how to react to this.
'Sorry if I embarrass you, Stripe. It's just, you remind me of this guy I know.'
'How do you mean?' Rogue was intrigued, despite herself.
'If he ever has sex he'll go schizoid and turn into a crazed psycho killer in leather.' Faith explained. 'Which isn't quite the same, but it's fairly close. He's scared of getting close to people.' Rogue's interest subsided; nothing that could help her. Jubilee's didn't.
'So how'd you find that out?'
'Apparently it happened once, before I got into town.' Faith shrugged. 'Not my story.' She really didn't think these two girls were ready for the whole 'chosen one' spiel. 'Never thought it could suck to have super powers.'
'Yeah.' Said Jubilee. 'You ever wonder what you'd be like without?'
'No.' For different reasons, neither Faith nor Rogue wanted to go any further with that.
'Luke. Wake up!' Veronica was prodding him.
'Lucas.' Bishop mumbled, coming awake. 'How long?'
'There's another two hours until we land.' His partner told him, and then lifted herself in her seat and craned back to look along the length of the plane to where their new companions sat, side by side. Wesley had his headphones in, and Cordelia was asleep and drooling on his shoulder. 'Listen, I did some checking up.'
Bishop glanced at the screen of her laptop. She had at least a dozen windows open.
'How did you manage that without access to the database?' He asked.
'Something Chase said rang a bell. I went back over some of my old case files.' She brought up a window.
'Sunnydale? That was never a case of yours.'
'This is a list of pupils graduating in the class of '99. The ones highlighted in red were confirmed dead over the course of that year, the ones highlighted in blue are still missing, two years on.' There was a lot of red and blue on the list. 'Almost none of these were ever solved.'
'What colour is Chase?'
'Neither.' She pointed to the girl's name on the list. 'Now, if you remember, she mentioned an individual named Buffy as an old associate of Faith Wilkins.' She scrolled down, and pointed to another name.
'Buffy Summers.' Read off Bishop. 'What do you have?'
'Not much.' She admitted. 'However, here –' she brought up another window. '– We have a selection of witness statements taken in the aftermath of the explosion. Most of them weren't much help; none of them were ever acted upon. Look at this one here, Aphrodisia Carter.'
Bishop read silently for a few moments, but was interrupted by Veronica.
'"... and Cordelia was still going on about the graduation robes being the wrong colour, but what would she know, all the time she spends hanging out with that psycho Summers? Did you hear she was wanted for murder once?" I actually did some checking there. A Buffy Anne Summers was briefly wanted for the murder of a still-unidentified teenage girl in 1998, but all charges were dropped.'
'So Chase was a friend of Summers who was a friend of Wilkins.' Bishop said thoughtfully.
'It gets better.' She went on. 'In 1998, shortly after the murder, the librarian of Sunnydale High, one Rupert Giles, checked in to the hospital. He had broken bones, burns and lacerations, all of which had clearly been done to him over a period of some hours. He'd been tortured, rather brutally. This would seem irrelevant, except that the dead girl was found in the Sunnydale High library, which was reported to be a favourite hang-out of the prime suspect, Buffy Summers.'
'A possible connection?'
'Here comes the best part. You're never going to guess which part of Sunnydale High the explosion centred on?'
'You think Chase had something to do with the destruction of her own High School?'
'Briefly? Yes.'
'Sawyer, has it occurred to you that this obsession of yours could be dangerous?'
'I'm not obsessed.' She was glaring at him. He held eye contact for a moment, and then reached under his seat for his own briefcase. He removed an old file.
'1988.' He read out. 'Westerburg, Ohio. A series of incidents in Westerburg High school culminates in three incidents comprising the suicides of four pupils. All of them known associates of one Veronica Sawyer, also briefly rumoured to have killed herself.'
'Where did you find that?'
'I checked up on you.' He was unapologetic. 'It seemed sensible to me to find out your motivations.'
'This has nothing to do with . . .'
'Sawyer, you watched your boyfriend blow himself in half on the front steps of your high school, after laying dynamite charges below the main building, and you expect me to accept that this has no link to your current obsession with similar incidents in other schools?' She was glaring at him once again. 'Sawyer, there are over a hundred names on that list you've got there. Probably two-thirds of them could be somehow connected to the explosion that, if I remember from your files, was concluded to be due to a leaking gas main in the caves under the school. The central point of the explosion may have been the library, but it was also very definitely the epicentre of a recent earthquake.'
'Two years isn't recent.'
'It's two years since this case was closed. It was a tragic accident that killed a number of innocent teenagers and a corrupt local politician. It just so happens that two of the people involved in our current case are peripherally linked to this accident. That is all.'
'She looks kinda cute when she's asleep.' Jubilee was turned around in the front passenger seat of the car.
'You used to live on the streets, didn't you?' Rogue asked her.
'For just over a year.' The younger girl replied. 'Hey, you hitch-hiked from Rednecksville to Canada, remember.'
'Yeah, but you lived on the streets in a big city.'
'It wasn't so bad.' Jubilee told her. 'There was this gang leader, Gunn, used to look out for the kids in his neighbourhood. He was a good guy, when he wasn't on one of his crusades.'
'Crusades?'
'Yeah. Against – other gangs. He could be kind of ruthless. He gave me some tips in dirty fighting a couple of times. I was friends with his sister. Then Cyke and Bobby came to town and asked me to head east. I was kinda reluctant, but Alonna reckoned it had to be a step up.'
'Did they know you were a mutant?'
'Gunn and Alonna? Yeah. They were cool with it, but we didn't bandy the fact around.'
Rogue paused.
'Jubilee?'
'Yeah?'
'Did you ever hear of any . . . weird stuff back then?'
'What makes you ask that?'
'Faith says she isn't a mutant.'
'So she's swimming in the Egyptian river. In denial.'
'What if she isn't?' Erik and Logan both have memories, she could have gone on. Parasites with twisted faces and a terror of the sun. Monsters neither mutant nor human. She didn't, though.
She'd known Jubilee more than three months, and she still didn't know if she'd be laughed at.
When they woke Faith up for the official evening meal of the mansion, she seemed as refreshed by the one-hour nap as most people would be by a full night's sleep. Carrying two hundred pounds of shopping bags without apparent effort, she followed the other two into the mansion, where she stopped dead.
'Rogue?' She said.
'Yeah?' The younger girl replied.
'Did I just see a blue-skinned demon with yellow eyes walk into the kitchen?' Jubilee giggled.
'That's just Nightcrawler.' Faith was told, before Jubilee interrupted.
'Yo, Kurt! Get your fuzzy blue butt out here and say hi!' The kitchen door was pulled open once more, and the pointy-eared face of Kurt Wagner peered around.
Faith used to kill things similar to this, with great frequency and enthusiasm. There had been blue demons, and black-haired demons, and demons with yellow eyes, and demons with tails, and demons with ritual scarring on their faces, and at least two demons who had worn chinos and button-down shirts. There hadn't been any that combined all of these factors. There hadn't been any who had bowed low in greeting and introduced themselves politely.
It had never before occurred to Faith that a German accent might be considered sexy.
'So you're a mutant?'
'Indeed.' Kurt had long ago given up on reassuring smiles; having inch-long fangs tended to ruin the intended effect. Instead, he ducked his head diffidently, before looking back up at her. 'And you are the latest charming addition to our little group, fraulein…?'
'Faith.' She replied. 'Yeah. Just flew in this afternoon.' He was holding out one hand. On it there were only two long, thick fingers and a thumb. Slightly awkwardly, she reached out to shake; to her surprise, he bowed instead, kissing the back of her hand. As he did so she could see, behind him, Scott Summers stepping out of the kitchen. He was wearing a white apron and holding a wooden spoon.
'Chicken casserole.' He said, somewhat nonsensically.
'Thanks.' Put in Rogue. 'But we ate at the mall.' Kurt, his back safely to the leader of the X-Men, smirked very slightly.
'Need anything, we'll be in the TV room.' Jubilee put in. 'Introducing Faith to Velvet Goldmine.'
'Okay.' Mr Summers replied, and stepped back. 'I… don't think we'll need anything.'
'Delightful though it would be, I am afraid I will not be joining you.' Kurt bowed again, and stepped back. 'The duties of an X-Man, alas, take precedence.' He spun on his heel, and returned to the kitchen.
'If he wasn't blue he'd be kind of cute.' Faith commented.
'He is blue, and he's very cute.' Jubilee replied, steering her towards the TV room.
'Kinda short, though.' Rogue put in.
'What was all that crap about duty?'
'He's gotta go eat with the team.'
'I could have gone for some more food.' Faith said as Jubilee closed the door behind them.
'Not Cyke's chicken casserole. That should be a punishment.' The shorter girl told her. 'So, I guess if you've been in prison you've never seen…'
'Screw movies.' Faith said. 'I've been locked up with a movie a week for the last year. Let's go to New York.'
'It's an hour and a half away.' Rogue pointed out.
'Not if you let me drive.' Interrupted Jubilee. 'Where d'ya have in mind, Faith?'
'I know this club.' Faith grinned. Of course, she'd last been in the city three years previously, on her way west, but she had an instinct for finding these places.
'We've got a curfew in four hours.' Rogue pointed out.
'Rogue.' She was told. 'We are going to town, we are going to have fun, and you are going to wear those new pants Faith got you.' Rogue looked from one girl to the other.
'Just 'cause you're too young to get laid doesn't mean you can't inspire lust in everyone else in the place.' Faith told her, grin wider than ever.
She was beginning to like it here.
If there was one thing the men of the X-mansion all agreed on, it was engines.
Of course, Scott led the field. Since Jean's death, he had spent all his spare time tinkering with the Blackbird, when he wasn't busy customising a new motorcycle to travel at speeds that would have given Steve McQueen a heart attack. Hank and Remy did their parts as well, though; Hank restored classic American cars, while Remy liked to play with a motorcycle of his own.
Because he was unashamedly, undilutedly macho, his was a Harley-Davidson.
He was crouched down beside it, peering at a strangely shaped fragment of metal that had just dropped into the oil pan, when the girls of the X-Mansion clattered in.
Rogue, he noticed, was wearing skin-tight leather.
Remy shot upright, dropping his spanner and snatching a rag. Wiping his hands, he stared at the three young women, who stared back. This was no surprise to him; he knew he was attractive, and in his current combination of tight jeans and a hacked-off T-Shirt he could be accurately described as 'Tasty'.
'Tasty.' Said Faith, smiling at him. He smiled back. Faith was wearing a tank top, leather pants, and a leather jacket, he noticed.
'Could say de same about you, Fait'.' He drawled. Behind her Jubilee, wearing a dress only millimetres away from illegality, pouted, and he added, 'All t'ree of you.'
Faith grinned, looking like a shark with sex appeal.
'You're not that lucky, French boy.' She told him, and moved towards the car they had used earlier. Jubilee grabbed her sleeve.
'We're taking the jeep.' She said.
'I'm not a jeep kinda girl.' Faith argued.
'This is Scott's jeep.' Jubilee was insistent.
'So?'
Jubilee grinned. Behind them Gambit was persuading Rogue to allow him to 'tag along'. He grabbed his trenchcoat and climbed into the back of the vehicle.
Thirty seconds later Faith found out what was so special about Scott's jeep, and why Rogue had been so reluctant to let Jubilee drive.
They were doing eighty. And that was before they reached the gates.