Chapter 2: Warren
Warren yawned and switched off the TV. "Hey, Betts," he said quietly. When he didn't get an answer, he said again, "Betts?" He looked down.
The purple-haired woman lying in his arms was sound asleep, long dark eyelashes lying against pale cheeks. Warren smiled. "Sleep well," he said, easing his arm out from under her head and laying it back against the pillow. He slid nude out of the bed, climbed into his clothes, and stepped out of the bedroom into the hallway beyond.
Much to his surprise, he found the kitchen occupied by two other mansion residents that couldn't sleep. Jean and Charles (who had gotten back early that morning due to business in New York that caused him to need to leave the conference early) were sitting at the kitchen table talking, and paid him no attention as he went to the refrigerator and made a sandwich.
"I was telling 'Ro that now that Hank's gone, she can't hide behind him any more," Jean was saying as she stirred the hot chocolate in her cup. "If she wants something to eat, she's going to have to come up here and get it herself, and thus meet us at some point. I hope she does; it's not right for her to be down there by herself all the time. I tried to tell Hank to make her come up here and interact with the rest of us, but he said she would come up in her own time, and not to hurry her."
Xavier shook his head. "It's generally a bad idea to force someone into doing something they're not ready to do," he said, staring into his cup absently as he played with the tag on the tea bag. "Jean, you of all people should know that; you're a telepath. Is there some other reason why you're in such a hurry to see her?"
"I'm curious," Jean confessed sheepishly. "I haven't really had a chance to meet the woman who's captured Hank's heart. I want to know what she's like. Though, judging from her outburst earlier, she doesn't really like me."
"She barely knows you. Why would she not like you?"
Jean sighed. "She said I was 'too damn perfect', Charles. She told me I have the perfect body, face, hair, and marriage."
"Well, you do," Warren carried his sandwich over to the table and sat down across from Jean. "Even Betsy says that. You do seem perfect to people who don't know you well. And the way Scott drools over you can be positively sickening sometimes." Jean looked at him and sighed when she saw the teasing smile on his face. She swatted at his bare arm. Warren's grin got wider as he continued, "Not that we didn't all drool over you when we first got here."
Jean stared at him. "Huh?"
Warren grinned wickedly as he took a big bite of his sandwich. "Come on, Jean. You were the only girl in a house with four boys. What were we supposed to do, walk around with our eyes closed?" His grin sharpened. "Remember that time Bobby hooked the water in your bathroom in reverse and you got doused with an ice-cold shower? You ran out of the bathroom screaming at him? We all knew what he did, which was why we were all standing there watching you when you came out. He told us what he was going to do."
Jean groaned. Out the corner of her eye, she could see Charles looking very interested indeed. "I had not heard of this particular story," he said.
Warren grinned. "You were away on a business trip, Charles," he said. "Suffice it to say we all found out then and there that Jean was undoubtedly a natural redhead."
Jean made a strangled sound halfway between a laugh and a shriek and lunged at Warren across the table. He grabbed the plate with his sandwich on it out of her reach, stood, and jumped backward out of her grasp. She pursued him halfway around the table, grabbed him with her telekinesis, and held him still while she tackled him. Her fingers flew around his ribs, poking and tickling, sending him into helpless giggles. "Enough!" he howled finally.
Jean stopped, breathing hard, face flushed, and Charles raised an eyebrow. "Are you two quite finished?"
Warren's chair slid out from the table; his plate, with the sandwich on it, sailed from the kitchen counter to the table, and then with a grin she plunked him down in his chair. He resumed eating his sandwich as she took her seat again, smiling sweetly. "Quite done. For now. But I'm going to get Bobby for that, and Hank when he gets back."
"What about Scott!" Warren looked offended. "He knew, and yet was there staring right along with us!"
"Hmm. Yes, I'll have to come up with something for him too…" And Jean was obviously far gone in her plans as she got up, put her empty cup in the sink, and wandered off up the stairs.
Warren watched her go. "Poor Scott," he said. "I don't want to know how she gets him."
Warren? Came a sleepy voice in his head.
He tilted his head up toward the ceiling. Yes, Betts?
If you're in the kitchen, I'd love a cup of hot chocolate. And I'd also love it if my lover came back to bed. Warren blushed. Xavier probably had heard that.
Be right there, he thought. He felt a sleepy affirmative from her, then she withdrew her psychic tendrils from his mind. He got up and began fixing a cup of hot chocolate for her as he said to Xavier, "I don't know why women get so upset about the way they look in front of others. Jean has a wonderful body. And I haven't seen much of Amanda since she went through the transformation, but from what I've seen she doesn't look that bad."
Xavier shook his head as he drank down the last of his tea. "Women are not the only ones," he said. "If I remember correctly, when you came back to us after Apocalypse transformed you, you were quite reluctant to face the rest of us for a while."
"But that was different," Warren said quietly. "Apocalypse changed me from a normal mutant to a killer one. He took my mutation a step farther than Mother Nature intended it to go. All Amanda has is the mutation coded in her genes."
"Brought out by a virus that was forcibly introduced into her body. It wasn't a willing mutation, and Warren, think about this; if Amanda's mutation were a natural one, she would have mutated at puberty. Nature never intended her to be a mutant. She would have gone through her whole life as a carrier only if she hadn't been injected. And the process of mutating, normally a slow, gradual process over the course of a few years, took place in a matter of a day, in a traumatic, extremely painful manner. Think of it as a…think of it as an identity rape, Warren. Magneto took away the appearance she has had her whole life and replaced it with something so different she's having trouble reconciling herself to it." Xavier stared into his empty teacup, thinking. "When Erik and I became friends all those years ago, I never thought he would go to such lengths to ensure that his dream of mutant superiority would succeed."
Warren said lightly, "I doubt that Magneto dreamed of the lengths you would go to in order to ensure that your dream of coexistence would be possible." He waved his hand to indicate the mansion and all it contained.
Xavier smiled thinly. "The sword does have two edges, does it not?" He brought his hoverchair over to the sink and placed his empty cup in it. "I had best get to bed, and you had better get that to Betsy before she becomes impatient. You really don't want her mad at you again."
"No," Warren gave a theatrical shudder. "The last time I pissed her off she chased me around the Danger Room with her sword threatening to cut off my wings! Not that she'd ever do it, but--"
"It's still never wise to anger a woman with a sword," Xavier smiled. "Good night, Warren. Or morning, as it happens." He left the kitchen.
Warren put the cup on a saucer and turned off the kitchen light. His bare feet made no sound on the hardwood floor, and he only sound to mark his passing was the quiet susurrus of his feathers against the floor. He twitched his wings up a little higher to clear the floor. Thus silent, and with the mansion's silence, he clearly heard the sound of soft crying when he passed Amanda's door.
He paused, irresolute for a moment. Should he leave her alone, or should he go in and comfort her? Hank had told him Amanda sometimes had bad dreams about her experience, and that she calmed down quicker when he was with her, but would Amanda mind if it was him? Hank was out of town, after all.
He quickened his steps until he reached his room, one door further down, and walked in. Betsy was sitting up in bed, wearing a negligee of scarlet Chinese silk and looking very desirable indeed. He completely forgot about Amanda, put the cup of hot chocolate on the night table, and jumped into bed beside Betsy. She held him off with one hand as she listened. "What's that?"
"What's what?" he nuzzled at her neck.
"That sound…" she gently nudged his face away from her neck as she tried to listen.
"It's Amanda," he said. "She's having bad dreams again."
Betsy shuddered. "Well, no wonder," she said softly. "After all she's been through, first getting beaten up, and then mutated…Too bad Hank isn't here." She turned to him. "Why don't you go and check if she's all right?"
"Me? Isn't this sort of thing yours or Jean's department?"
Betsy sighed and reached for her cup. "Normally I would say yes, but Jean is sleeping, I am hardly dressed, and for some reason, I think she would respond better to you. You do have the wings, after all." She kissed him. "Go on. I'll wait for you."
He gently opened Amanda's door. The soft lighting in the mansion's hallway dimly outlined the figure huddled on the bed, shaking with sobs under the blanket. As Warren had guessed, she was still asleep.
He reached out to her, hesitated a moment, then touched her shoulder lightly. "Amanda?"
She rolled over on her side, and Warren winced as one of her wings got crushed under her body. "It hurts…oh, please, make it stop…it hurts…"
He knew she meant whatever dreamscape she was wandering down at the moment, but it was making his shoulder muscles cramp looking at the awkward angle of her trapped wing. He reached under her and eased the membrane out from under her body, marveling at its feel. His own were feathers; nothing unusual about them; but Amanda's wings felt different. He had never had a chance to feel them. They felt like layers of plastic wrap wrapped over and around thin, flexible, unbreakable wire, but it was plastic wrap without the clinginess, like transparent silk, and apparently just as strong. It was a good thing that they were strong, because if they weren't, they'd probably have ripped by now, like the wing of a butterfly he had seen once who had just escaped a bird. There had been a ragged hole where the bird's beak had punctured the wing's surface, and he knew that the rip wouldn't heal. He hoped nothing would ever happen to Amanda's; it would be a shame to ruin such beautiful things.
The caught wing sprang back into shape, none the worse for its momentary bent position, and it caught the soft light from the hall as she rolled over on her stomach. Warren caught his breath. Hank had always loved beautiful things; it was why he loved poetry so much. Amanda's wings were sheer poetry, rainbows caught on transparent wings, an iridescent sheen that changed colors and patterns from minute to minute. Right now they were fluttering in agitation as the dream escalated.
"Magneto! No…you bastard!…" and she flailed out with her fists.
Warren caught them gently. "Amanda, come on, open your eyes. He's not here, you're safe," he said soothingly. She sat bolt upright, gasping, and he sat down abruptly on the bed, ignoring the tiny hard lumps under his backside as he pulled her shaking form to him. He held her for a while, shushing her, rubbing her bare shoulders and arms, stroking her arms as he'd seen Hank do once.
She finally quieted, and said sleepily, "Hank?"
"No, it's Warren." Her eyes flew open, and he was pinned by her silver gaze for a moment before she sprang backward in her bed.
"What are you doing in my room?" she asked warily.
He held up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "Easy. I was bringing Betsy a cup of hot chocolate from the kitchen when she heard you crying. She's not exactly…dressed…so I came in here to wake you up before going back to my bed." He lowered his hands and brushed irritably at the small hard objects littering the bed. "What is this stuff…do you booby-trap your bed to make sure no one gets in it?" he looked up at her, smiling that charming smile most women found so irresistible.
Amanda wasn't immune to that smile. She gave him a weak one as she slid off the bed, accompanied by a soft patter as whatever they were fell to the floor with her. "No." She switched on the light and reached for the wastebasket beside the bed. "Hank and I don't know how this happens, or why, but for some reason my tears dry out as crystals." She held the wastebasket beside the bed and started to sweep the tiny hard objects into it.
Warren reached out, felt for one of the hard objects, and picked it up. In the warm yellow light from the lamp he could see the small clear crystal. There was a tiny flaw running through it, a flaw that threw back rainbows like a crack in an ice cube. "They're beautiful," he said, awed. "You shouldn't throw them away."
"What would I do with them?" Amanda said with a bitter laugh. "They're pretty, but they're useless. Like me." She put the wastebasket down on the bed with unnecessary force as she pulled the blanket off her bed and shook it. A faint hail of stones hit the floor as she did, and she sighed and reached for a broom.
Warren tilted the basket so he could see inside. Among the other trash in it, he could see what looked like thousands of the tiny crystals. It obviously wasn't the first time she'd had to do this. "You're not useless," he said to her.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Hank says the same thing. He says pretty things are never useless, that beauty satisfies soul hunger."
"It does," he said. "And if you learned to use your wings, they wouldn't be useless."
"No," she said firmly. "Absolutely not."
"Why?" he asked her.
She stuttered for a moment. "Well…look at them! They hurt if I just bump them! How are they going to hold my weight up?"
"Excuses, excuses," Warren threw a pillow at her. "Sounds like you're just scared." He paused, seeing the way she had just flinched. "Hey. You are scared, aren't you?"
Very slowly, she nodded. "I don't like heights," she said. "And what if they don't hold me up? What if I fall and hurt myself?"
"I'll make sure you don't fall," he said.
Amanda shuddered. "Wait a minute. You're thinking of getting me to jump off of your balcony to see if I can fly?" When he nodded, she shook her head. "You're nuts. Absolutely not!"
"It's not that hard," he insisted. "And flying, when you get over the first fright of being so high up, can be wonderful. Look, Rogue and Ororo can fly, and Jean can levitate. Would you still be afraid if they were watching and they could make sure you didn't fall? Seriously, now."
Amanda thought about it. "Maybe not," she finally admitted. "But I'm sure you all have something better to do than baby-sit me." She put the broom back in the corner. "Especially after I've been practically ignoring everyone."
"Oh, believe me, no one minds," Warren said. "They understand. After all, it's not the first time something like this has happened."
"Really?" Amanda perked up.
"Yeah." Warren stood and flexed his wings. "When I first mutated I had a pair of white feathered wings exactly like these. Then one of our enemies, Apocalypse, kidnapped me and replaced the feathered ones with metal wings that could fire poisoned razor-edged metal shards." He shook his head. "Mine eventually grew back, though."
"Wow." Amanda sighed. "I guess that could be worse. Are you sure no one would mind?"
"Of course not!" Warren tucked his wings back against his shoulders. "Truth? Everyone's been dying to meet you. Ever since Hank came back from your place he's been talking of nothing but you. You have to understand something, Amanda, Hank doesn't go out with women much. He's picky about the kind of girl he goes with, they're picky about the way he looks, and so because of that it's been a really long time since he went out with a girl. So when he started going out with you it electrified the mansion's rumor mill. We're all dying to get to know the girl who finally stole his heart."
Amanda smiled, finally. "Well, when you put it that way…okay," she said. "I'll try flying."