Chapter 6: Memories
Amy awoke to the soft sound of falling rain. She lay with her eyes closed for a moment, unwilling to get up. Her bed was so comfortable, and warm, and she wanted to stay in it, but she knew the staff would soon be waking the kids up for another day of work in this awful house. She twitched her thumb with her eyes still closed, to see if the welt felt any better. She felt something strange; a bandage over her whole hand. Surprised, she lifted it, staring stupidly at the soft white gauze. Then sleep fled her mind as she remembered where she was, and she sat up.
Beside the bed, an exotic-looking, statuesque African woman with long, pretty silver hair looked up from the book she was reading. Amy found herself staring into the ice-blue eyes of someone she'd always hoped to meet but never thought she actually would; the X-Man the newspeople called Storm. Still sleep-befuddled, she said the first thing that came to mind. "Wow. You're Storm!"
"Ororo Munroe," said the woman, chuckling a bit and putting down her book, "but most of my friends prefer calling me 'Ro. It is shorter." She pushed the book aside on the low table beside her and pulled forward a covered tray. "It has only been a half an hour since we had breakfast, so I trust the food should still be warm." She lifted the cover, and a cloud of steam rolled off the huge plate of eggs, sausage, warm oatmeal, and toast. Amy stared at it all, her mouth watering. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten like this!
"One moment," Ororo said as Amy reached for the eggs. Amy snatched her hand away, suddenly fearful that she had done something wrong, but Ororo put a cup of warm milk in her hand and a small plastic cup with an assortment of pills in it in her other hand. "Hank informed me you were to take those first," she said.
Amy stared at the blue, white, brown and yellow pills in the cup. "What are they?" she asked suspiciously.
Storm picked up her tea and cradled it in her hands as she watched the girl eye the pills in the cup. "The yellow and blue pills are vitamins, I believe," she said. "The brown is an iron supplement, and the white, I think, is aspirin for your pain."
"Pain?" Amy put the milk down, and flexed her hand. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
"He believed that your throat and stomach might still be sore from being sick the night previous," Ororo said.
"Oh." Amy took a deep breath, and winced as sore stomach muscles made themselves felt. "Yes, they are." She obediently swallowed the vitamins. "Look, um, this isn't going to make me ill, is it?" she said anxiously. "I heard that large doses of vitamins all at once can make people sick, and I almost got in trouble yesterday because I kept throwing up. If I throw up while I'm working today Mr. Fry will really be upset."
"The doses are not sufficiently large to cause your stomach to become upset," Storm said, outwardly calm, though she tensed inwardly as she chose her next words carefully. "And you will not be returning to the orphanage. Charles has forbidden it."
"But I have to go back! The State made them my legal guardians! I have to go back!"
"There are ways around the red tape, child. Charles will find a way. All he needs to do is bring up before a review board your current physical condition and living arrangements, and you will not have to go back."
"You don't understand! I have to go back--"
"Why?" Ororo regarded the girl calmly. "Why must you go back? You cannot wish to return there, given your untenable housing and inadequate nutrition."
"I …I don't know," Amy blinked, confused. "I just got this feeling that they need me there for something, that I have to be there. I don't know why."
The door opened, and Jean's head poked around the door. "'Ro, if that breakfast sits there any longer it'll get cold—oh, Amy, you're awake! Good, Charles needs to talk to you. No, no, don't get up, stay there, he's coming down here." She sent a thought questing through the mansion to Charles, got an affirmative answer, and sat down in a chair beside Storm. "Now go on, eat up," she said. "It's nice to see you awake."
Amy took a bite of the warm, steaming scrambled eggs, savored the taste with her eyes closed as she chewed and swallowed. They vanished in short order. The sausage followed, and she was nibbling on a piece of toast when Xavier came in.
"Good morning, Amy," he said, smiling as he saw her wide-eyed gaze take in the hovering transport he used in the mansion. She stared for a long moment, and shook her head.
"Grandfather would have loved to have something like that," she said with a touch of sadness.
"What was his name?" Xavier asked, figuring that was as good a place to start as any.
"Howard. Howard Ferguson," she said. "Why?"
Xavier didn't answer her, looking down at the sheets of printout he'd brought down with him. "Did anyone ever ask you if you had any other relatives?"
Amy looked puzzled. "No."
"Did anyone ever tell you if you have any other relations?"
Amy shook her head. "If I have any, then they don't want me," she said quietly, putting down the toast. "Why are you asking?"
Xavier handed her the article about the accident, the car fire, and her rush to the hospital. Amy read the article silently, eyes wide. "It's not me. Oh, God, it can't be," she said with the air of someone sinking in a bog trying desperately to believe they were standing on firm ground. "How could I have forgotten my own name?" She looked at Xavier with tearing eyes.
"That's what I'd like to find out," he said. He leaned forward. "Amy, Jean and I…we are both telepaths. If you will allow us, we can enter your mind, find the memories that you may have forgotten in shock, or trauma--"
He stopped, because she was shaking her head violently, looking terrified. "No," she whispered, "Please, no," she said.
Jean said, "Amy, we won't hurt you. You won't feel a thing. All you have to do is let us in--"
"That's what he said," she whispered, terrified.
He who? And why was she so afraid? Xavier sent Jean a puzzled look. "He who?"
"I…I don't know," Amy said, frowning. "I don't remember. I just think…just know…that I don't like telepaths. I'm scared. Please don't," she said, beginning to sob.
Ororo sat on the bed behind the weeping child, hugging her tight. "They will not enter your mind without permission," she assured the girl. "But Amy, there is nothing to be afraid of. They have done so to me many times in the past, when necessity demanded it, and it has never hurt me."
Amy turned to look at the lovely black woman. "Are you sure?" she asked. Her tear-stained face looked so pathetic, Storm hastened to reassure her. "Quite sure," she said.
Amy looked uncertainly at them. "I guess I'll try," she said bravely, pushing her fear deep into herself. "What do I have to do?"
"Relax," Xavier said, "And close your eyes. Try to imagine a door in your mind. Open that door, and we'll be able to come in."
Amy closed her eyes as she was instructed, willed herself to relax. After a moment, she felt something brush her mind, a light, gentle, tentative touch. She 'opened' that door in her mind, felt Xavier and Jean 'walk' through.
Xavier had always thought of a mind as being like a long corridor, with memories hidden behind doors. He and Jean wandered through, looking through the memories. A home, with two loving parents. Birthday parties, school days, the basic disagreements between parent and child, a happy life. Then the terrible fire.
Amy's mind grabbed that memory, looked at it again, and Xavier and Jean watched it too.
They stood in a corner of a child's pink and white room, watching the little girl sleep. A sudden noise roused the girl, and she sat up, in time to see flames erupt from the wall around her pink nightlight. She stared at it, shocked, as it climbed with surprising rapidity up the walls and crept across the floor, surrounding her in a ring of flames. She smelled smoke.
"Mommy! Daddy!" she screamed, but they didn't answer. Terrified, the child climbed into the pants and shirt that had been set out at the foot of her bed for school the next day and faced the fire. A look of concentration crossed her face, and she held her hand to the fire. It didn't move.
Flames engulfed her bed, and she jumped back. She screamed in terror as the fire ate up the intervening space in between the walls of flame, and closed in on her. As a tongue of fire licked at her pant cuff, she turned and ran through the fire behind her, not even noticing that the flames parted for her.
She had to control them, or die herself, Jean observed to Charles silently. So that's how she learned to work with fire.
Too much, too early, Xavier agreed. They watched as the little girl held the fire away from her as she woke her parents, but as her mother was in the bathroom getting a blanket wet in the tub, more flames broke out in the canopy over their bed. She couldn't hold it all back. Flames engulfed her father in the bed The child looked at him, anguished by the screams, and diverted her attention to the flames on the bed. Then her mother screamed as fire erupted in the bathroom. She stumbled out, on fire, and the child, seeing her mother as the only way out, doused the flames as the blanket was wrapped tightly around her. Unable to see anything in the wet folds, she had to go by memory of what the house looked like as the screaming, badly-burned mother carried the child out of the house.
Amy was lost in an agony of guilt and self-recrimination as she watched herself let her father die. Xavier and Jean both knew as soon as the flames swallowed the bed there was nothing anyone could have done to save him, but it was small comfort for the child who felt it was her own fault. The fourteen-year old watching the memory knew it wasn't her fault, but still felt guilty. Jean soothed Amy's agitated mind as Xavier told her firmly that it wasn't her fault, and planted that assurance around the terrible memory. That done, they went on until Xavier found a blank spot in her memory.
When he and Jean looked closer, they found it wasn't really a blank spot, but a shadow-shrouded area of her mind locked away from her. It had a strange psychic signature to it, one they didn't recognize, but it had been inexpertly done. Xavier broke the 'lock' easily and they saw what was inside.
Amy opened her eyes, to see a huge, burly man in a white lab coat standing at the end of her bed, beside a boy some few years older than she. They were blurry and indistinct, due to the damage to her eyes, but she knew this wasn't her doctor, Doctor Graves. "Who are you?" she said to the hazy figures.
"My name is Harvey Gilmore," said the man. "This is my son Greg. We need you."
"Huh?" she said, confused.
"I'm going to rob a bank," the man said. "I need you to create a fire after me, to cover my tracks. I need you. You're going to let Greg here alter your thoughts, because I can't have your father's parents coming here to get you. You're Amy McCarly now."
"No!" the girl on the bed struggled, but she was too weak and in too much pain from the accident to fight. Greg fastened his hands to her head, to her temples, and her mouth opened in a cry of pain, denial, and anguish. Then she went limp, and Greg took his hands away. "Okay, Dad," he said. "Her name's changed. She won't remember anything about her parents or her former life."
Xavier watched. It was a terrible violation of all the mental ethics he'd set in place for himself, the mental rules he tried to instill into all his X-Men gifted with mental abilities. To invade someone's mind, alter their memories and their very identities, all against their will…it was a violation of everything he believed.
Amy closed her mind, suddenly, and Xavier and Jean both found themselves back in their own bodies, blinking at the suddenness of it. "Amy," Jean said, "I know this isn't easy, but you have to let us back in. We need to find out why he did it."
Amy was sitting up in bed, shaking, her fists clenched. "All I have to do is go ask him," she snarled.
"Don't, Amy," Xavier said. "I think he may have altered more of your memories. I need to find out what they were, and why."
She dropped her fists. "How do you know?" she asked.
"Did you ever wake up with an ache, pain or injury you couldn't remember getting?" he asked her.
She shrugged. "Lots of times," she said.
"While you were asleep, Hank did a full checkup on you, at my request. You have a number of injuries that we can't explain. Did you know you have a skull fracture? It's fairly recent. So are two broken ribs and a broken leg. How did you get those?"
"I don't know," she said, and dropped her inner barriers to let them in again.
This time Xavier knew what to look for. He found another of those disturbing locked spots in her mind and got into it.
They were standing on the pavement outside a bank, at night. The street was nearly deserted. Greg Gilmore, Harvey Gilmore, and seven other boys were watching Amy burn a hole through the side of the bank wall. "Make it larger," Harvey snapped at her, poking her in the shoulder.
"I can't," she gasped, perspiring from the effort of keeping up the flames for so long.
"I can't fit into it yet, dad," Greg snapped. Harvey Gilmore poked Amy in the shoulder.
"Get on with it. Don't tell me what you can't do," he snapped at her. Amy continued to burn through the wall until the hole was about waist high on her, and then collapsed. "I can't make it any bigger," she moaned. "Please. I'm tired."
"It'll have to do," Gilmore said. "Stefan, Lucas, get in. Stefan, phase Lucas through the wall. Pick up as much of the cash as you can; Luke, use your mass-shifting ability to lighten the load. You'll get more that way."
Shortly afterward, the boys came out, each carrying huge sacks of money lightened by Luke's power. Amy stared in helpless misery. "This is wrong," she sighed. "I'm not doing this." She got up to walk away.
Shawn started after her, grabbed her arm, and jerked her back. "You can't tell on us," he warned her, his fist clenched. "You'll be in trouble, too."
"Sure I can," she snorted, pulling her arm out of his grasp. "I don't care where I go, as long as I'm away from all of you."
He swung back his fist and hit her. As his fist connected with the side of her head, there was a crackle of power. She flew backward as his projectile power propelled her backward into the brick wall opposite the alley from the bank. She crashed into it, cried out as her head impacted with the wall, and she moaned in pain as she fell own the wall.
Xavier stared. So that was how she'd gotten the skull fracture. And that was the secret. Gilmore was using mutant children to rob banks! It was clever, ingenious, and terrifying. How many times had he done this so far, and had his son wipe Amy's memories?
Five times, Jean said. They've robbed five banks. I checked some of the other locked spots in her mind. Gilmore seems to be the ringleader of the group, but the boys help. Amy seems to be the only one not okay with this. They've been wiping her memory clean on a regular basis after one of these jobs…right before they move to find another location to rob.
There were considerably fewer locked spots when Xavier and Jean looked again. Xavier got into one of the last ones.
Greg Gilmore stood over her, grinning in the darkness as he shook Amy's arm "Wake up," he snorted. "We got a job for you. Some kid down at the corner drugstore made fun of me. You're gonna go set fire to his house."
"I am not!" Amy looked horrified.
"Do it or I'll beat you up," Stefan said.
Amy pulled the covers back over her head.
Greg yanked the covers off her and grabbed her arm, dragging her out of the bed. She hit the floor with a thump.
"Let me go!" she yelped.
Stefan's fist punched her face. She cried out in pain, stars exploding in her vision. Then he pulled his foot back where she crouched on the floor and kicked her hard. There was a sickening crunch, and she screamed in agony as two of her ribs broke. Her screams woke the rest of the house, and Headmaster Gilmore came running in. "What's this! What did you do, McCarly!?"
She pointed a finger at the boys silently, her ribs hurting too badly for her to speak. Gilmore reached for her arm, tried to pull her up, but she screamed as her broken ribs shifted in her body. Gilmore was angry. "Get Mr. Garber to bandage her ribs," he snapped to Stefan. "Greg, wipe her memory. Then I want to see you boys in my office."
Xavier broke off the link. So Greg Gilmore was wiping her memory not only to cover the crimes they were committing, but also to cover up the petty bullying and beatings they were giving her too.
"I think," he said slowly, "that I had better have a talk with Mr. Gilmore. Then I'm going to talk with the police."
Ororo sat, hugging Amy, who was crying into her toast and oatmeal. Jean got up, got a box of tissues off a nearby counter and handed it to her as she took the now-soggy toast and oatmeal. "Shall I call the police?"
Xavier shook his head. "As much as I'd like to turn him in, I seriously doubt they'll take our word for it. All we have is what I've seen in Amy's mind, and no one will take that as evidence. No, I'm going to tell him we've found out what he's doing and why, and tell him to return all the children he's collected. Amy will stay here until we've managed to trace her father's parents. Amy, you are not to go back to the orphanage, all right? Stay here. I'll speak to you after I talk to Mr. Gilmore."