Sorry its taken me so long but I'm here now as is chapter 2. Its a little less funny than the last one (I'm glad to hear you all seemed to enjoy the drunken Shalimar scene so much) but hopefully I'll still get some feedback from everyone. As per usual you're gonna get my plea for reviews so please, make me happy.
***
'Brennan?' The voice broke through his subconscious and gradually pulled him out of the sleep he had drifted in and out of throughout the night. He opened his eyes and looked around but to no avail. There was no one in his room and he figured he must have dreamed it.
'Brennan?' He started at the sound and looked at the com ring on his finger. He rolled his eyes at his own retardness as he raised his hand to his mouth.
'Yeah?' he said groggily, his voice still getting used to its own sound.
'Sorry to wake you but its noon and if you're planning on getting round the rest of the safehouses today you're gonna have to leave pretty soon,' Jesse said.
'Give me half an hour to get ready and then I'll leave. Is Shalimar up?'
'Not yet, but you know how ferals like their beauty sleep. Lexa's gonna go out with you today,' Jesse replied.
Brennan frowned at the statement. He wasn't so sure that it was a good idea for Lexa to be tagging along. It wasn't that he thought she would piss people off or anything like that. He was sure that she would do fine with the other new mutants. And it wasn't that he didn't trust her. Well, not entirely. But he didn't know if the new mutants in the safehouses, after being left alone to fend for themselves for so long would welcome a new face, one which was so unfamiliar.
Jesse could tell from the silence that Brennan was mulling the idea over. 'She's gotta see the safehouses sooner or later,' he said.
'I know,' Brennan answered, knowing how Jesse felt about Lexa and knowing that she wasn't the evil bitch she had been made out to be. Plus Jesse had a point. If the team was going to face the Dominion they had to teach Lexa the ropes. 'Half an hour,' he said before cutting the link.
***
Jesse slid open the door, the wood silently moving along the runners and saw Shalimar, lying on the bed in the fetal position. The covers were strewn around, one end touching the floor, the other lying underneath her still body. Her blonde hair looked bedraggled and it concealed half her face from view. He slid the door open a little wider and walked in, the steaming mug of coffee in one hand. He placed it on the bedside table and sat down on the edge of the bed. She hadn't stirred till that point but feeling the tugging on the bedcovers beneath her she rolled over in a stretch which showed just which kind of feral she was. Her eyes opened and she stared at him for a while as they focused. Once the blurriness had gone away a sleepy smile appeared on her face.
'Hey,' he said quietly, knowing she would probably kill him if he spoke any louder.
'You brought coffee?' she asked as she sat up.
He chuckled before handing her the cup. In all his time at Mutant X he had only ever seen Shalimar with a hangover a few times. She could handle her drink well but he figured it was something to do with her feline DNA. As wasted as she got she would hardly ever wake up with a headache or the urgent desire to vomit. She had always healed quicker than most people and Jesse guessed that her body dealt with the after effects of the alcohol while she slept instead of when she woke up. It was one of the few things that annoyed him about her especially when she waltzed into his room the morning after a drinking session and acted way too chirpily for someone who had drank everyone under the table the night before.
After she had gulped back a few mouthfuls of the warm liquid she leant back against the wall behind her bed.
'I hope you don't mind but you're on computer duty with me today,' Jesse said. He looked at Shalimar as she smiled in acceptance. He turned and walked across the room, picking up items of clothing which Shalimar had thrown there in the course of the week. He smirked at her inability to be tidy. They had always looked after each other, the closeness coming from the lack of any family figures in their lives except Adam. Since his death they had both clung even more to each other.
He heard Shalimar's feet touch the floor next to her bed and turned just in time to see her walking into the bathroom. He heard the sound of running water and saw steam coming from the open door. After he had finished picking up all the clothes which were littering the room and had restored them to Shalimar's closet he picked up the empty coffee mug and walked out, sliding the door to after himself.
He walked through the halls of Sanctuary to reach the lab where the computers were already up and running, on an automatic search for the Dominion. The team had made the decision not to tell any of the other new mutants. They all had enough on their plate and what they didn't already know couldn't hurt them. Small warnings were all the team was handing out. They had all gotten together the other night, before Shalimar and Brennan had decided to go and get wasted, and had decided to keep the Dominion sweet. They couldn't afford to be fighting them as well as helping all the random mutants who were in trouble. And plus they needed to find the people most in danger and the Dominion were the best way to do that. Any information which they garnered from them would go into the file and be used to help others. The teams real intentions were to be kept secret for as long as possible until they had gained enough strength to take the Dominion on. The risks were massive but they were all used to living dangerously. This was nothing new, just another Genomex.
Jesse sat down in the chair that had been his home for the past couple of hours. The documentation of everything wasn't difficult but it involved him reading everything and then putting it all in order which was taking a lot of time. Shalimar was a skim reader and her eyes were a hell of a lot less tired than his were so maybe they would get along a little bit quicker once she turned up.
***
Shalimar felt the hot water beat down on her bare shoulders. She tipped her head back so that all of her hair was shoved under the forceful spray coming from the shower head. She closed her eyes and felt it all wash over her, rinsing the smells of the last night from her skin.
She rubbed at her eyes. She hadn't slept too well the night before. She had drifted off easily enough but once again the images had floated back to her while she slept. The blood splattered across the dirty floor in patterns which wouldn't have seemed out of place in a piece of abstract art; the neck of Lucy, bent at an odd angle with bone shoving itself through the skin; the look of pure horror on her face, frozen there for eternity. The people sent by the Dominion must have beaten her to within an inch of her life before killing her. Shalimar wished she could stop picturing all the ways Lucy was tortured before she died but her mind couldn't move away from the morbid thoughts. It was at times like these that she especially wished Emma was alive. She would have known what to do or say to make Shalimar feel better. She would have told her that everything was going to suck for a while and that even then everything might not be okay, but Shalimar had always appreciated that kind of honesty. Everyone in her immediate vicinity was kidding themselves that this was a new beginning. And she had tried to make herself believe that too. But things were always harder than they seemed and Shalimar, although sure that Mutant X was ready for whatever fight was thrown their way wasn't sure that the team were prepared for the extent of that fight.
She picked up the bottle of shampoo and tipped it upside down, watching the liquid drip from the lid of the plastic container. It oozed through her fingers, some of it falling to the watery floor below, some of it caught in the palm of her hand. She raised her hand to her head and felt the coolness hit, in amongst the heat of the water.
Water was a cleansing experience for her in more ways than one. Everything that she went through in a day could be alleviated by a shower, or atleast she could get a chance to think about it all for a little bit. She wished it was really that easy.
***
'And this is Gerry,' Brennan said, gesturing towards a tall blonde man. Lexa looked across the length of the room and smiled at the man Brennan had pointed out to her. She was feeling a little overwhelmed. So far that day they had visited five safehouses and she had been introduced to atleast 27 new mutants whose names she had given up trying to remember at safehouse number two. She turned and walked into the kitchen as Brennan started a conversation with the other six people in the room. She could hear the faint murmur of their voices as she moved away from them. She poured herself a glass of water and thought back to the night before. She had never felt the way she did about Jesse before. She hadn't been prepared for it in the beginning. The whole relationship thing had always seemed slightly beyond her because she worked so hard and had so many secrets that she couldn't tell anyone. There was so much mystery surrounding her life and she couldn't ever risk anyone finding out about any of it. But with Jesse it was very different. He knew who she was, what she was and he knew who she had previously worked for. And despite all of that and despite all of the baggage that she brought with her he still wanted to know her, he still wanted to be close to her. She smiled at the thought of how amazing he was. He was allowing her to get lost in this magical moment without having to worry about what came next because she knew that whatever it was he would have her back and he would support her and he would fight for her. She had never trusted anyone that much.
She turned as she heard someone walk in behind her. She looked up at Brennan's face. There was still a moderate amount of tension between the two of them but things had been better since the whole team had decided on their current mission.
'How you doing?' he asked as he pulled open the fridge and lifted a bottle of water out of it. He placed it on the table in front of Lexa and reached for another one before closing the fridge door behind him.
'I'm okay. A little in awe of the system you seem to have going here,' she replied.
'Yeah,' Brennan said as he looked around him. He had been a little in awe of the underground world of new mutants. If he had have known it was there when he was a teenager his life probably would have been very different. Crime would have been a far off world to him. But without his criminal past he might not have happened to run into the Mutant X team as it stood then with Adam and Shalimar and Jesse when he did and then he wouldn't have joined. He blinked himself back to the real world as peals of laughter strayed in from the other room.
'So where do we go now?' she asked, unscrewing the cap from her bottle.
'No other safehouses and I don't know about you but I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night so I wouldn't mind heading home.'
'I know what you mean,' Lexa said with a knowing smile mostly directed at herself. Last night sleep had not been her first priority.
'Really?' Brennan replied with a smirk and raised eyebrows.
She rolled her eyes before walking past him. She waved a goodbye to the other people in the room and jogged up the stairs leading out of the safehouse. She heard Brennan follow her and knew she was not going to get away with telling him nothing.
***
'So, are you going to tell me exactly what you meant by that 'I know what you mean' comment earlier,' Brennan asked as the Helix took off of the ground. He looked across at the brunette in the passenger seat. She looked quietly happy, an emotion which was usually replaced on her face by suspicion or fear or anger.
'Why should I tell you what you already know?'
'Because it'll make you squirm for a little bit longer,' he offered.
She turned to him and smiled when she saw the mocking glance he threw her.
Her eyes suddenly widened as a huge booming noise ripped through the Helix. She felt the jolt run through every part of her body and her head slammed against the window next to her. She looked across at Brennan who looked equally shocked. They both turned just in time to see the flash of sparks shoot out from the side of the plane. Brennan pushed himself out of his seat and over to Lexa to try and protect her from any shrapnel from the planes interior. They both felt their stomachs fly into their throats as the plane plummeted to the ground below. Brennan felt his windpipe constricting as he watched the ground get closer and more real. He forced himself back into his seat as he tried to override the planes natural desire to follow the laws of gravity. He pushed buttons and pulled levers but nothing seemed to be working. Whatever it was that had caused the fireworks display had probably taken out the central control system.
He couldn't believe this was it. There was no way to fix what was wrong with the plane in the short amount of time he had left. He couldn't believe he was about to die. It was the inevitability of it all that really got him. For so long he had been placed in situations which would have signaled death for him but he had escaped, he had worked his way out of them. But now, at one of the few points when he felt like he didn't have to worry about anything he was actually going to die. His thought raced towards Shalimar and he wondered what her reaction would be. He hated leaving her after everything that had happened. He knew she wouldn't be able to handle losing him and Lexa. She had already watched Adam, Emma and her own father die in front of her and this would finish her off. He closed his eyes and saw her face staring back at him.
Lexa looked around her. Everything was moving too fast and she couldn't process any of it. The ground was hurtling towards them but she wasn't thinking about her imminent death. Jesse was on her mind even then. She had never felt like that before. Whenever she was in a relationship she had always been able to turn it off so she could concentrate on something else, it was one of the benefits of having thick walls all around her. But she had opened up, she had let him in and she was now facing the consequences. When she was about to die, which should have been a completely self obsessed moment she couldn't stop thinking about him. It would have been funny if she wasn't so terrified.
As the ground grew closer and their fate became more unavoidable they both looked at each other, breath held tight within their chests.
***
'Brennan?' The voice broke through his subconscious and gradually pulled him out of the sleep he had drifted in and out of throughout the night. He opened his eyes and looked around but to no avail. There was no one in his room and he figured he must have dreamed it.
'Brennan?' He started at the sound and looked at the com ring on his finger. He rolled his eyes at his own retardness as he raised his hand to his mouth.
'Yeah?' he said groggily, his voice still getting used to its own sound.
'Sorry to wake you but its noon and if you're planning on getting round the rest of the safehouses today you're gonna have to leave pretty soon,' Jesse said.
'Give me half an hour to get ready and then I'll leave. Is Shalimar up?'
'Not yet, but you know how ferals like their beauty sleep. Lexa's gonna go out with you today,' Jesse replied.
Brennan frowned at the statement. He wasn't so sure that it was a good idea for Lexa to be tagging along. It wasn't that he thought she would piss people off or anything like that. He was sure that she would do fine with the other new mutants. And it wasn't that he didn't trust her. Well, not entirely. But he didn't know if the new mutants in the safehouses, after being left alone to fend for themselves for so long would welcome a new face, one which was so unfamiliar.
Jesse could tell from the silence that Brennan was mulling the idea over. 'She's gotta see the safehouses sooner or later,' he said.
'I know,' Brennan answered, knowing how Jesse felt about Lexa and knowing that she wasn't the evil bitch she had been made out to be. Plus Jesse had a point. If the team was going to face the Dominion they had to teach Lexa the ropes. 'Half an hour,' he said before cutting the link.
***
Jesse slid open the door, the wood silently moving along the runners and saw Shalimar, lying on the bed in the fetal position. The covers were strewn around, one end touching the floor, the other lying underneath her still body. Her blonde hair looked bedraggled and it concealed half her face from view. He slid the door open a little wider and walked in, the steaming mug of coffee in one hand. He placed it on the bedside table and sat down on the edge of the bed. She hadn't stirred till that point but feeling the tugging on the bedcovers beneath her she rolled over in a stretch which showed just which kind of feral she was. Her eyes opened and she stared at him for a while as they focused. Once the blurriness had gone away a sleepy smile appeared on her face.
'Hey,' he said quietly, knowing she would probably kill him if he spoke any louder.
'You brought coffee?' she asked as she sat up.
He chuckled before handing her the cup. In all his time at Mutant X he had only ever seen Shalimar with a hangover a few times. She could handle her drink well but he figured it was something to do with her feline DNA. As wasted as she got she would hardly ever wake up with a headache or the urgent desire to vomit. She had always healed quicker than most people and Jesse guessed that her body dealt with the after effects of the alcohol while she slept instead of when she woke up. It was one of the few things that annoyed him about her especially when she waltzed into his room the morning after a drinking session and acted way too chirpily for someone who had drank everyone under the table the night before.
After she had gulped back a few mouthfuls of the warm liquid she leant back against the wall behind her bed.
'I hope you don't mind but you're on computer duty with me today,' Jesse said. He looked at Shalimar as she smiled in acceptance. He turned and walked across the room, picking up items of clothing which Shalimar had thrown there in the course of the week. He smirked at her inability to be tidy. They had always looked after each other, the closeness coming from the lack of any family figures in their lives except Adam. Since his death they had both clung even more to each other.
He heard Shalimar's feet touch the floor next to her bed and turned just in time to see her walking into the bathroom. He heard the sound of running water and saw steam coming from the open door. After he had finished picking up all the clothes which were littering the room and had restored them to Shalimar's closet he picked up the empty coffee mug and walked out, sliding the door to after himself.
He walked through the halls of Sanctuary to reach the lab where the computers were already up and running, on an automatic search for the Dominion. The team had made the decision not to tell any of the other new mutants. They all had enough on their plate and what they didn't already know couldn't hurt them. Small warnings were all the team was handing out. They had all gotten together the other night, before Shalimar and Brennan had decided to go and get wasted, and had decided to keep the Dominion sweet. They couldn't afford to be fighting them as well as helping all the random mutants who were in trouble. And plus they needed to find the people most in danger and the Dominion were the best way to do that. Any information which they garnered from them would go into the file and be used to help others. The teams real intentions were to be kept secret for as long as possible until they had gained enough strength to take the Dominion on. The risks were massive but they were all used to living dangerously. This was nothing new, just another Genomex.
Jesse sat down in the chair that had been his home for the past couple of hours. The documentation of everything wasn't difficult but it involved him reading everything and then putting it all in order which was taking a lot of time. Shalimar was a skim reader and her eyes were a hell of a lot less tired than his were so maybe they would get along a little bit quicker once she turned up.
***
Shalimar felt the hot water beat down on her bare shoulders. She tipped her head back so that all of her hair was shoved under the forceful spray coming from the shower head. She closed her eyes and felt it all wash over her, rinsing the smells of the last night from her skin.
She rubbed at her eyes. She hadn't slept too well the night before. She had drifted off easily enough but once again the images had floated back to her while she slept. The blood splattered across the dirty floor in patterns which wouldn't have seemed out of place in a piece of abstract art; the neck of Lucy, bent at an odd angle with bone shoving itself through the skin; the look of pure horror on her face, frozen there for eternity. The people sent by the Dominion must have beaten her to within an inch of her life before killing her. Shalimar wished she could stop picturing all the ways Lucy was tortured before she died but her mind couldn't move away from the morbid thoughts. It was at times like these that she especially wished Emma was alive. She would have known what to do or say to make Shalimar feel better. She would have told her that everything was going to suck for a while and that even then everything might not be okay, but Shalimar had always appreciated that kind of honesty. Everyone in her immediate vicinity was kidding themselves that this was a new beginning. And she had tried to make herself believe that too. But things were always harder than they seemed and Shalimar, although sure that Mutant X was ready for whatever fight was thrown their way wasn't sure that the team were prepared for the extent of that fight.
She picked up the bottle of shampoo and tipped it upside down, watching the liquid drip from the lid of the plastic container. It oozed through her fingers, some of it falling to the watery floor below, some of it caught in the palm of her hand. She raised her hand to her head and felt the coolness hit, in amongst the heat of the water.
Water was a cleansing experience for her in more ways than one. Everything that she went through in a day could be alleviated by a shower, or atleast she could get a chance to think about it all for a little bit. She wished it was really that easy.
***
'And this is Gerry,' Brennan said, gesturing towards a tall blonde man. Lexa looked across the length of the room and smiled at the man Brennan had pointed out to her. She was feeling a little overwhelmed. So far that day they had visited five safehouses and she had been introduced to atleast 27 new mutants whose names she had given up trying to remember at safehouse number two. She turned and walked into the kitchen as Brennan started a conversation with the other six people in the room. She could hear the faint murmur of their voices as she moved away from them. She poured herself a glass of water and thought back to the night before. She had never felt the way she did about Jesse before. She hadn't been prepared for it in the beginning. The whole relationship thing had always seemed slightly beyond her because she worked so hard and had so many secrets that she couldn't tell anyone. There was so much mystery surrounding her life and she couldn't ever risk anyone finding out about any of it. But with Jesse it was very different. He knew who she was, what she was and he knew who she had previously worked for. And despite all of that and despite all of the baggage that she brought with her he still wanted to know her, he still wanted to be close to her. She smiled at the thought of how amazing he was. He was allowing her to get lost in this magical moment without having to worry about what came next because she knew that whatever it was he would have her back and he would support her and he would fight for her. She had never trusted anyone that much.
She turned as she heard someone walk in behind her. She looked up at Brennan's face. There was still a moderate amount of tension between the two of them but things had been better since the whole team had decided on their current mission.
'How you doing?' he asked as he pulled open the fridge and lifted a bottle of water out of it. He placed it on the table in front of Lexa and reached for another one before closing the fridge door behind him.
'I'm okay. A little in awe of the system you seem to have going here,' she replied.
'Yeah,' Brennan said as he looked around him. He had been a little in awe of the underground world of new mutants. If he had have known it was there when he was a teenager his life probably would have been very different. Crime would have been a far off world to him. But without his criminal past he might not have happened to run into the Mutant X team as it stood then with Adam and Shalimar and Jesse when he did and then he wouldn't have joined. He blinked himself back to the real world as peals of laughter strayed in from the other room.
'So where do we go now?' she asked, unscrewing the cap from her bottle.
'No other safehouses and I don't know about you but I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night so I wouldn't mind heading home.'
'I know what you mean,' Lexa said with a knowing smile mostly directed at herself. Last night sleep had not been her first priority.
'Really?' Brennan replied with a smirk and raised eyebrows.
She rolled her eyes before walking past him. She waved a goodbye to the other people in the room and jogged up the stairs leading out of the safehouse. She heard Brennan follow her and knew she was not going to get away with telling him nothing.
***
'So, are you going to tell me exactly what you meant by that 'I know what you mean' comment earlier,' Brennan asked as the Helix took off of the ground. He looked across at the brunette in the passenger seat. She looked quietly happy, an emotion which was usually replaced on her face by suspicion or fear or anger.
'Why should I tell you what you already know?'
'Because it'll make you squirm for a little bit longer,' he offered.
She turned to him and smiled when she saw the mocking glance he threw her.
Her eyes suddenly widened as a huge booming noise ripped through the Helix. She felt the jolt run through every part of her body and her head slammed against the window next to her. She looked across at Brennan who looked equally shocked. They both turned just in time to see the flash of sparks shoot out from the side of the plane. Brennan pushed himself out of his seat and over to Lexa to try and protect her from any shrapnel from the planes interior. They both felt their stomachs fly into their throats as the plane plummeted to the ground below. Brennan felt his windpipe constricting as he watched the ground get closer and more real. He forced himself back into his seat as he tried to override the planes natural desire to follow the laws of gravity. He pushed buttons and pulled levers but nothing seemed to be working. Whatever it was that had caused the fireworks display had probably taken out the central control system.
He couldn't believe this was it. There was no way to fix what was wrong with the plane in the short amount of time he had left. He couldn't believe he was about to die. It was the inevitability of it all that really got him. For so long he had been placed in situations which would have signaled death for him but he had escaped, he had worked his way out of them. But now, at one of the few points when he felt like he didn't have to worry about anything he was actually going to die. His thought raced towards Shalimar and he wondered what her reaction would be. He hated leaving her after everything that had happened. He knew she wouldn't be able to handle losing him and Lexa. She had already watched Adam, Emma and her own father die in front of her and this would finish her off. He closed his eyes and saw her face staring back at him.
Lexa looked around her. Everything was moving too fast and she couldn't process any of it. The ground was hurtling towards them but she wasn't thinking about her imminent death. Jesse was on her mind even then. She had never felt like that before. Whenever she was in a relationship she had always been able to turn it off so she could concentrate on something else, it was one of the benefits of having thick walls all around her. But she had opened up, she had let him in and she was now facing the consequences. When she was about to die, which should have been a completely self obsessed moment she couldn't stop thinking about him. It would have been funny if she wasn't so terrified.
As the ground grew closer and their fate became more unavoidable they both looked at each other, breath held tight within their chests.