Disclaimer: Mutant X and its associated characters, locales, etc. are the property of Tribune Entertainment et al; my thanks to them. No copyright infringement is intended. Non-canon characters are my own, but feel free to use them. :)

Author's Note: Sorry, I forgot to include this with the last part. SparksJSH was right: the name Siobhan is pronounced like shuh-vaahn, rhyming with "the lawn". For any of you who are interested, the i after the s palatalizes it to a /sh/ sound, and the h after the b softens it into a fricative/v/. Ask a linguist a pronunciation question, you get an answer. :D

Due apologies to Queen.

Four Mutants and a Baby

by Deichtine

Nestled into her carrier on the floor, Siobhan regarded her tall guardian with wide-eyed trust.

From his spot, crosslegged on the floor several feet away, Brennan stared right back, his eyes not nearly so trusting. They had been sitting like this for almost fifteen minutes, since she woke up from her brief nap.

Brennan shifted in place on the floor. His instinct was to get up and pace around the room, to move. He couldn't sit still with those eyes on him. They made him nervous in a way no GSAgent had ever managed. But he didn't want to chance it. What if he freaked her out? What if she started to cry?

Just sit still, he told himself, and maybe she'll go back to sleep. It's just an hour or two, then Emma or Shal will take over. It's just an hour or two. She's just a baby, for heaven's sake.

He couldn't take the silence anymore. Clearing his throat, looking around to make sure there was no one in the hallway to hear him, he began to speak.

"So. Here we are, then." Siobhan, whose gaze had finally begun to wander from his face toward the light fixture in the ceiling, looked back at him again. He winced. Not a promising beginning to a conversation. He tried again.

"Must be tough being a baby, huh?" Siobhan smiled, burped at him. He smiled back in spite of himself. "You know you might as well enjoy having full license to burp whenever you want. This is the only time in your life people are gonna think it's cute." She gave a little laugh, and one arm reached out towards him, waved a little. "Ba...ba?" she said.

He raised an eyebrow, resisted the urge to back away a little more. "No way. Uh-uh. I'm not picking you up. I, for one, know better than that."

A long few minutes passed in silence, broken only by the occasional sigh from one or the other of them, and Brennan noticed that her eyes often would swing from his up to the light fixture, then back again. More time passed. She shifted in her carrier. Shifted again.

Suddenly he noticed that the gleam in her eye was fading, her lower lip trembling slightly.

"Oh no. Please, don't!" The chin trembled more violently, the eyes squeezed closed. And Siobhan opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and began to cry.

Had Brennan had a mirror in front of him, he'd have been shocked and disgusted at the panic in his eyes. He moved closer to the carrier, crouched down. "No, no, don't cry," he pleaded, keeping his voice soft. Hesitating, he took her hand, held it. It was so tiny; looking down at it, Brennan thought how her hand in its smallness, smoothness, made his look huge, dark, and hairy.

Siobhan continued to cry: a thin, heartbreaking wail punctuated by tiny hiccups.

Oh, no. Brennan thought. Oh, God, no.

-----

In the work area, Shalimar looked across her computer desk to where Jesse was working at another, identical one. "Anything yet?" she asked, stretching in her chair.

Jesse looked up and rubbed his eyes. "Nothing. The three couples Brennan picked up in his initial search we can rule out from their DNA. Not even close to Siobhan's. I ran an image search from Adam's record of their conversation, and I'm still searching, but so far it looks like this woman just appeared from out of the blue. Not a record of her anywhere. And I mean anywhere. You?"

Shalimar shook her head. "I've gone as deep as I know how - and as you know, that's pretty deep - and there's no trace of Nichole Page after the fall of Genomex. Federal records have her presumed dead." She ran a hand through her blonde hair and sighed. "How can two people disappear so damn thoroughly? No one's that good. I mean, at the level I searched to, even Sanctuary would have been laid bare."

Jesse dropped his hands from his eyes and held them halfway to his lap, forgotten, as an idea occurred to him. Shalimar thought she could see the wheels turning in his head.

"Wait a minute," he said finally. "What if that's the connection? They've both been hidden so far underground they should be in China or Australia, right? So deep it should be impossible. So how many people in the world could do that?"

Shalimar nodded, catching his thought. "The same person disappeared them both."

He mimed firing a gun at her. "Bingo. But the question is, who? Who has the resources? The motive? The knowledge? The access?"

"Eckhart did," Shalimar said.

Jesse thought for a moment, shook his head. "He never found Sanctuary, did he? Plus, he's been in a pod since before Page's disappearance - before Siobhan was born. I think we can rule him out."

She chewed absently at the end of a lock of hair. "What about a telecyber psionic, like Michelle Bigelow?"

Jesse's lips turned down slightly, and he nodded. "Could be. They'd have to be really, really good, though. They'd have to know exactly where to look, exactly what data to erase."

Shalimar stood up. "Let's go talk to Adam."

----

"Hand me that petrie dish, would you, Emma?" Adam asked absently. She complied, and stopped to watch him work for a few moments. His skill with the tools of his trade was fascinating. Delicately, he extracted a sample from the culture in the dish, transferred it to a slide, set it under the red beam of his laser microscope, peered into the viewer.

"You know," he said after a moment, "I'd really prefer it if you didn't watch me like that. Do you have those probabilities calculated for me yet?"

She turned back to her screen. "Not yet. But I'm getting closer. Computer's doing the calculations. Have you got anything?"

"There's something about Siobhan's DNA. Since she's an electrical elemental, I've been running comparisons with Brennan's. There's a definite similarity; I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they were related somehow. But more than that, there's something...something different."

Emma furrowed her brow, moved in to look into the viewer as he straightened and stepped back. "What do you mean? It looks normal enough to me - for a new mutant, anyway."

He shook his head. "No offense, but this goes a little deeper than your experience. The only explanation I can think of is that she's evidence of the next step of the mutation - the next evolution. But what the effect of the change will be I have no idea."

Emma looked up from the viewer, green eyes concerned as they met his brown ones. "Do you think this might be why they're searching for her?"

He shrugged slightly, turned off the microscope. "I think it's a strong possibility. But what does it mean? Why would they want it?"

Suddenly, from down the hall, they heard the unmistakable sound of a baby's cry. Emma started immediately, turned towards the door. Adam smiled, noting that she didn't even seem to be conscious of what she was doing – it was simply instinct.

"Wait," he said, catching her arm.

She turned back to him, obviously confused. "But she's crying."

"Don't worry about her right now. Brennan's with her."

"Exactly. He won't have a clue what to do. You've seen him with her. He doesn't even like her."

Adam shook his head. "Oh, he likes her well enough. That's not the problem." He smiled fondly. "He's terrified of her. I'm surprised you didn't feel it."

"Terrified? Brennan?" Emma's face widened with disbelief. She allowed her face to blank as she lowered a mental wall to sense just the surface of what Brennan was feeling. She met panic.

Adam nodded. "He's never dealt with a baby before. Heck, most of his life was lived on the streets. He doesn't know how to handle it."

"All the more reason why I should go help."

He shook his head again. "No. Short of trying to tranquilize her with an electric shock, he can't hurt her, and crying a little won't have any ill effect on her. Let's let him learn."

The crying stirred something inside her, and she yearned to go and pick the baby up, fix whatever was wrong, but reason told her Adam was right. She turned back to the screen resolutely.

-----

Okay, why do babies cry? Brennan tried to focus his thoughts as he crouched over the crying Siobhan. Because they're hungry, sleepy, wet, frightened. So all you have to do is figure it out, and do something about it.

He reached gingerly down through the blankets to feel Siobhan's diaper. It was dry. He sighed with relief. "That's not it," he said aloud. The sound of his voice over the crying steadied him a little. He picked up the bottle of formula sitting nearby, shoved it experimentally into her mouth. She sucked, and for a moment his heart leaped, but almost immediately she pushed it away with her tongue and cried again, harder. "Okay, okay, no bottle!" he said, and set it aside. "You slept already, so you can't be tired." Distract her. Distraction is the key.

He tried toys. He tried shaking keys. Nothing he showed her, offered her, made any difference.

He stood up, checked the hallway to be sure it was clear, then closed the door and took his ring off for good measure, then crouched down in front of her. The first thing that came to his mind wasn't, he felt, exactly appropriate, but it was the best he could do. Lyrics came to him unbidden. Pitching his voice as high and soft as he could, he reached out and began gently rocking the carrier.

Baby you're a girl make a big noise
Crying all the time, gonna be a big girl someday
You got milk on your face
You big disgrace
Waving that diaper all over the place

We will, we will rock you
We will, we will rock you...

He felt like an idiot.

And Siobhan was unmoved. Her eyes were open, looking at him as she cried, and he felt her gaze like an accusation of incompetence. You don't know what to do. You've failed me, and I'm just a baby.

Suddenly inspiration struck. "You like lights, don't you?" he asked her. "Let's see what you make of this." He dimmed the lights in the room slightly, then held up his hand in front of her eyes and willed it to fill with electricity. Sparks shot from finger to finger, met in the air above his hand.

Immediately blue, dancing light filled his palm, crackling in the sudden silence. He looked from his hand back to Siobhan, and found that she was watching the light, eyes wide and rapt, her discomfort forgotten.

"Yeah, that did it, didn't it?" Brennan asked softly. "Bet your mommy never tried this." He brought up his other hand, allowed the current to flow in a web from hand to hand. "Pretty lights."

She squealed with delight, and her arms waved in the air in front of her. Brennan smiled. Maybe I'm finally getting this, he thought to himself.

Then his smile fell and his jaw went slack in surprise and shock. Between the baby's palms shot a tiny tendril of current. It fizzled, went out, came back. Held steady. She laughed in delight.

Brennan allowed his current to die, and, shaking slightly, engaged his com ring. "Adam," he said, his voice unsteady.

"Brennan. I don't hear any crying. Get her calmed down okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, that's not the problem. I need you to come in here, Adam. There's something you have to see."

End chapter 4.