Disclaimer: I don't own any of the original X-men, Acolytes, Brotherhood, or other characters. I just act like I do. I do own my OC's. MINE.

A/N: You may notice random things popping up from the comic verse, just because I need them or want 'em.

Moi

"Um, Alexis?" A voice accented in German asked quietly.

At first, the unfamiliar name jarred. Only recently I had gotten over stopping to look around. My right eye flickered in annoyance, not at Kurt really, but at being held up. "Yeah?"

He shifted his backpack uncomfortably, almost nervously. "About our project, do you have any ideas?"

"Not really. Kurt, uh . . ." I shifted looking at the sky. "Alex."

"Vut?"

"Call me Alex. Anyway, do you mind, I need to get home. It looks like it's gonna rain and I have to walk a ways."

"How about I valk with you? We can talk that vay."

No! No! No! Panic swelled in my chest. But I simply closed my eyes. "Okay, for a little. My father would have a heart attack if he caught me with a boy though."

At least that was partly true.

"I promise I won't get you in trouble." He grinned.

I doubted that, but I couldn't help smiling at him. "All right then. Let's see. We have three weeks to do a project for European History. And I get to work with an actual European."

Kurt smiled a little. "See how lucky you are?"

Allowing a minute smirk to appear on my lips, I continued. "We should brainstorm some ideas tonight. That way tomorrow, we could, do something."

Kurt nodded. "All right." He glanced around. "Vere do you live?"

"In the middle of nowhere," I replied. Once again, sorta true.

He nodded congenially. Just as large, fat drops of rain began to fall from the sky. I looked up. "I'd hate to make you walk any farther. So I'll see you tomorrow, kay?"

Kurt waved and I returned the gesture before dashing out across the busy street barely missing a Ford four by four whose driver honked loudly. I turned and gave the driver a wave, of the one finger variety.

"If Gambit's late, I'm gonna kill him," I muttered, shivering as the rain turned from cool droplets to icy strings that stung my face and hands as they touched down.

My life sucks.

Another shiver racked my body. I was freezing! Therefore Gambit would die. I was running through maybe the third murder plan by the time I finally heard the motorcycle.

"It's about time," I growled, annoyed. This evil tone of my voice was lessened by the fact that the punctuation of that sentence was the sound of my teeth chattering.

Gambit chuckled and moved forward to let me have a slightly more comfortable ride. "Aw, p'tite, Gambit sorry."

Yeah, and someday I will find a rhino jumping a trampoline with Magneto.

He passed me a helmet and gave five second to put it on before roaring off to Magneto's lair.

I buried my face in Gambit's trench coat, partly to protect it form the rain and partly 'cause, well, he smells good. Right, like you've never imagined what the Cajun smells like.

Yep, Gambit's one sexy beast, but I do not have an feelings for him. He's like my brother. All the acolytes are . . .except Sabertooth, I just want to send him to the great litter box in the sky. And Pietro, but he's usually playing Mag's pet spy over at the Brotherhood house.

Gambit stopped the bike in the garage and got off. "So, petite, 'ow was school?"

"Er . . ." I answered, yanking off the helmet and throwing it to Gambit. "Rather not talk about it."

He nodded in understanding and placed the two helmets on a shelf. I stepped into the entrance hall. It was filled with enough boxes to make it look like a second storage room.

Piotr was calmly transporting a stack of ten boxes from the entrance to the actual storage room.

Did I mention he was shirtless?

Yes living with three attractive guys has its advantages.

Mmmm, eye candy.

I shook my head. "Piotr, ya nuts?"

He gave that. I am very busy; Go away look. But I went on anyway. "It's twenty degrees outside, and you don't have a shirt on."

He sighed and glanced at me. "This vould go much faster if I had some help."

I picked up two boxes that would have toppled over most girls my age and height and trotted after Piotr.

After about half an hour of toting crates, I pushed off for my room, but stopped on the way to knock at St. John's door. "Come in!"

Judging from the smoke and blackened pieces of paper, Pyro was working on a new book. Every time he gets the first page done and if he doesn't like, he can't just delete it, oh no, he has to fry it.

"'Ow was school?" He asked.

"Boring," I yawned. "Can you take monitor tonight?"

"Sure, Sheila," he agreed amiably.

"Thanks," I can't see why some people think the only thing Pyro's interested in is fire.

Okay, so most of the time it's his number one interest. But he's not always completely obsessed.

I opened the door to my room. I had told Magneto that if planned on keeping me here, he better do something about all the metal which would explain why my room did not quite seem to fit into the design of the rest of the base.

We put up fake regular looking walls for me, so it looked normal and it had color which if you say the rest of the base you'd think color had been banned.

I collapsed into my desk chair and stared at my wall, puzzling over my newest problem.

Kurt was an X-men. Although, he didn't know that I knew and half the kids didn't even suspect him as a mutant. And since I had gotten here after all the mutant hype it wasn't hard to find out who was who.

Of course it was easy to see who was who.

I placed my head on the desk and groaned. This would, to say the least, be interesting.

Tense I drummed my pencil against the side of the desk. "Ah!" I shrieked into the desk to muffle the noise.

"Well, one things for sure, don't tell Mags. He'll just pervert the whole thing into a training exercise and quite frankly you need this grade!"

Groaning even more, but silently, I picked up my backpack and rummaged around to pull out my geometry book.

Talk about massive confusion!

My old school had had me in Algebra two due to some messy scheduling and when I had gotten stuck in geometry I was so far behind after having close to twenty-seven weeks of something different that it was funny.

I was busy sucking the end of my pen and staring at the formula on the page trying to mentally will them to make sense. "If I'm already stuck with Kurt maybe he can help me."

I wasn't sure what his grade was but he had to be doing better than me. All right so he could have a D too but that was unlikely since unlike me he paid attention usually. At least he looked like he did which had to account for something.

I'd ask him tomorrow or whenever I got up enough gall.

I gave up on geometry and headed out for the training room. I loaded up a barbell with twenty pounds. I could handle more, but it's good to start out slow.

I'd been training for about twenty minutes when Remy entered. "Hey petite."

I racked the weight and sat up. He tossed me a bo staff. "Pra'tice time, petite." He told me.

I positioned my hands on the staff. "I already know how to use a staff, Remy," I reminded him.

"Pra'tice make perfe't."

Over looking the fact that that was my power. I thought slight offended. We traded blows. As I wielded the staff, I felt all the worries and tension of the day vanish into the rhythm of my body. My body glided to the beat easily like it was dance.

I wasn't even thinking, just reacting. It felt good, just shutting down my brain.

Time passed in a whirl of movement and pulsing. Finally Gambit hooked my staff and forced me to let go of my own staff, lest my wrist be sprained at the very least.

Gambit picked up my staff. "Petite, gettin' good."

"Almost as good as you?" I dimpled sweetly at him.

"As lon' as petite don' tell no one. Den Gambit'll admit dat y' are."

I wiped a few flecks of sweat from my brow. "Thank you." I bowed deeply in a mock bow. "I'm gonna shower."

Still brushing out droplets of water from my hair, I followed my nose to the delicious spicy smell that floated from the kitchen. Obviously, Gambit was cooking.

I shook my head sending water flying around the kitchen.

"Hey, Sheila!" Pyro exclaimed indignantly, looking up from his Zippo flame that I had just extinguished.

I grinned at Pyro and began braiding my hair and then twisting it up into bun.

"So what's cookin' Cajun?" I asked.

Gambit took whatever he had made and poured it into a bowl. "Some down home cookin'," He grinned.

"Which translate into we won't have a roof to our mouths when we finish," Piotr threw in.

John cackled a laugh that bordered on hysteria. "It's not that funny," I told him.

I swear, he'll laugh at anything.

I shook my head and helped myself to a heaping portion. Whatever it was, Piotr was dead on right. I slowly felt the roof my mouth been peeled off. "HOT!"

"By da way, petite it still warm," Gambit warned me a second too late.

I glared at him as I chugged my milk. "I can't feel my tongue," I grumbled, blowing on the bowl. "Sheesh, ya couldn't have warned me or something."

"Gambit did, petite," Gambit tried to defend himself.

"After I fried my tongue," I glared at him

I stirred it around as the others ate. Pyro and Gambit were arguing over . . .something. Probably what was better bright orange hair or demon eyes.

After I was sure that there was steam rising from the food, I dug in again. I'd give Gambit this, he was a good chef.

I poured more milk and drank it. Swirling it around gently, trying in vain to think of something for my project. Have I mentioned in the last twenty-four hours that my life sucks?

"Remy?" I poked him. "Remy?" Poke. "REMY! Wake-up! You have to take me to school!"

Remy grunted and rolled over. "Ya promised to take me to school!" I whined, pawing at his shoulder. He flopped over, his sheets tangled over his body. I wondered how his circulation could still function after a night like that.

I sighed, annoyed. My bangs lifting off my face as the air rushed past them. I took this to look around Gambit's room. It's dark, obviously. I couldn't find the light switch.

"Gambit!" I yelled. "You have to get out of bed. School!"

"Gambit don' wan' go t' school," He murmured sleepily.

"Not you! Me! ME! I go to school! You? You lay around all day! Gambit equals loaf. Now get up!" I grabbed one arm and dragged him out of bed.

"Ow!" He grunted. "Petite!"

"Gambit, if you don't drag your sorry ass outta bed now then I'll just take your bike myself!" I warned him.

He rolled over on the floor and snuggled deeper into his blanket. Okay something was wrong. I had threatened his bike. "You were drinking last night weren't you?"

"Non, petite," he mumbled. I turned on my night vision and scanned the room. There were several bottles scattered around the room. "Yep. You have. I think that it'd just be safer if I took myself," I murmured, snatching up his keys and exiting. I stuck my head back in the room, "Oh, and by the way, you don't need to pick me up. And don't expect me home until around seven. I have a project due. So I'll be at the library."

I rolled the motor out of the garage and shut the garage door. "Yeehaw!" I whooped happily, gunning the engine.

I barely had pulled into the parking lot when the bell rang which technically made me officially late. I ran in and was stopped by . . .Kelly. He glared at me. "You're late, West!"

He doesn't even know that I'm a mutant and he hates me. What's up with that?

No matter that I wanted to retort that he was bastard and that he was in fact holding me up, I just smiled sugar sweet at him. "I know. I'm sorry. Uh, my brother wouldn't get up. He's the one that takes me to school, so I had to find his keys to take myself. And then I couldn't find the keys to his car, so I took his motorcycle, but then I couldn't find my license, so I had to look for that . . ." I was babbling like any another teen in my shoes.

Kelly rolled his eyes and waved away my explanation. "Just get to class, West."

I trotted away quickly, stopping at my locker to grab my books and then to class. I obviously wasn't late to class since we were all waiting outside. "Hey, Kurt." I greeted.

"Hi, Alex," He grinned. "Think of anything?"

I grimaced, "Not really. How 'bout we skip gym for the library?"

"Can we do that?" Kurt asked.

"Unless you want to skip gym for Cheesy's," I offered.

"The library vorks," Kurt grinned.

I gave Kurt the thumb's up just as Mr. Normans arrived. He apologized for being so late and unlocked the door and we flooded in.

Mr. Normans was one of my better teachers, probably the best. He's neutral on the mutant front which raises my respect of him tenfold.

School passed quickly as time has a tendency to do when you want it to go slow. Personally I was dreading Library with Kurt.

"Okay . . ." we sat at a table in the center of the room and the two of us had been silent for fifteen minutes. "So any ideas?"

"Nein," Kurt sighed.

I flicked through the atlas. "How about something from Germany?"

"Vut?"

I shrugged. "There's a lot of icons in Germany. How about . . ." I tapped my pen against the table. "the autobahn?"

"The autobahn? Can we get a five page report on that?"

"Yeah," I thought then nodded. "I bet we could. And we could get some pictures of the autobahn, do research, compare it to America's own speed limitless highway. See how you're able to survive et cetera."

Kurt arched an eyebrow. "So ve're going to a report on a highvay?"

"Yes."

"And vere are ve going to find all of ze information?"

"Encyclopedia, internet, we gotta have somethin' on it." I wiped my hands on my jeans since they were slippery with sweat.

"Yeah . . ." I was thinking out loud now. "I bet we could find some technical designs somewhere which would look sweet."

Kurt shook his head. "If you say so."

I blew one bang out of my face and picked up my pencil and glanced at the clock. "Gym's almost over," I commented. "are you free after school? We can hit the library after the school. If not that's okay."

Kurt shook his head. "Nein, zat's fine." He began packing up his stuff. "So I'll see you zere zen?"

I nodded and slung my book bag over my shoulder just as the bell rang.