Disclaimer – X-Men: Evolution and all characters therein are the property of KidsWB and Marvel Comics. This story is written for fun, not profit.
A/N – There is actually some basis for this in the comics, but I only realised after I'd finished writing. It was a one-sided crush, anyway, so I'm not sure it counts. This was written after I launched a fanfic contest, and if anyone would like details on said contest would they please email me.
-------------------
'Shadow of a Ghost' By Scribbler
June 2004
-------------------
For the first year, he had quizzed her about his father.
He could have just skimmed her mind to get what he wanted, and the first time she mentioned living at the Xavier Institute he had done just that. Afterwards, however, he had relied on more mundane techniques. It became a sort of game – seeing how much information he could make her give up without probing her thoughts.
Life in general was a sort of game to him.
Since the unification he'd been able to breeze through most everything that ordinary people could not. He finished school because he wanted to prove he could, but absorbing information from teachers' brains instead of textbooks made the whole thing far too... painless. School was meant to be a chore. It had always been a chore. But not for him. Not anymore.
He supposed that was why he'd gone on the 'rebel without a cause' kick in his late teens – more so than when he had to fight David and Ian for control. Parties and cliff-top raves gave way to blowing up garden sheds from two and three miles away, and seeing how far out he could get while parting the sea. He tested himself, pushing his limits, placing himself in danger just for the thrill of trouncing it.
He ignored his mother and her mooning over old photos of David, throwing himself into relentless training for no other reason than he wanted to be the best – better than he already was. Some part of him didn't want things to be effortless – it wanted his powers to run up against a wall, to work and sweat and strain to overcome obstacles. Effortlessness meant no challenge, and no challenge meant boredom.
He despised boredom over everything else.
Boredom was stagnant. It was the sign of an inactive mind – a tedious existence. If he was bored, he grew destructive. Hours spent telekinetically lifting individual grains of sand into a detailed replica of the Taj Mahal were lost if he was bored. A single swipe and the whole thing was gone. He lashed out, venting without thought or consideration. Why did he have to consider what he did? He was powerful enough that nobody could threaten him. He had no enemies worth bothering about, only old rivals cowering in their homes and boltholes.
Once, he'd blown the huge front doors right off his mother's house. It wasn't his house, nor would it ever be, with its endless pictures of David, the chosen child, the favoured form. Not that belonging there would have stopped him lifting his hand and crumpling the intricate oak panelling into splinters, but there was something satisfying about destroying David's last home. He did it piecemeal, eroding the place away and taking great pleasure in each small victory over his predecessor's memory.
His mother had stood there each time, watching him and trembling. He had felt her fear and disgust and coldness like a blanket around him. She just couldn't reconcile him with her precious little David. He was a stranger, an impostor she couldn't bring herself to get rid of because she'd convinced herself there was a chance that someday David would return.
Stupid bitch. She never was the brightest of people.
He supposed that was why he'd left. The satisfaction he got from obliterating pieces of David's life was spoiled by her eyes always on him. Even when she wasn't around he'd felt like she was watching, her emotions swirling in an ever-tightening knot around his midriff.
He sensed the remnants of David's love for his mother at the back of his mind, and that was the only thing that stopped him from removing the problem altogether. The night he left, he'd stood over her bed, watching her sleep. He'd got as far as raising his hand to make the sheets smoulder, before turning on his heel and marching out of her life forever.
He told himself the grief of knowing her David was gone for good was better than killing her.
Of course STRIKE, SHIELD's British counterpart, had played a large role in him leaving, too. They knew him by reputation and had approached with caution, surprised when he accepted their offer to join a newfangled task force of what they termed 'meta-humans' – people with abilities beyond the norm, some mutant, others something else completely. It had been three years since the unification, then. Three years of honing his abilities to perfection. He needed challenges beyond those he could provide on his own. STRIKE had enemies – powerful enemies. They were the reason behind the commission of this project. The chance to take them on practically made him salivate, and he overlooked the proviso of working in a team to do it.
She was his opposite in almost every way. Where his nature was wild an unpredictable, hers was quiet and understated. Which wasn't to say she couldn't fly into rages, just that she kept a better lid on her temper than him. He had sensed that much the first time he met the little team melodramatically named 'Excalibur'. They were Britain's answer to the X- Men, and she was the link from old to new, standing towards the back and letting the louder personalities drown out her own.
She had intrigued him because he didn't know her, but not enough for more than a light mind scan. It was no more than he spared for any of the other unknowns in this motley little collection.
Her brain was divided into two parts – one discreet and calm, the other brimming with anger and destructive impulses. There was a fine line between them, but there was a line. For someone like him, who had worked so hard to merge the rigidity of training with the volatility of self, this was an utterly foreign concept. It was like more than one psyche in one skull – and that much he understood better than anyone else – but the notion of /keeping/ them separate was stupid. It was a step backwards.
Their powers were opposites, too. He valued perfection. His powers were the one part of his life he had rules for. Or rather, they were the one part of his life where he had rules and /kept/ them. Excalibur was more of a hobby than anything serious. He held no loyalty towards them; he just needed them to get at worthy opponents. He just needed them for the challenge.
By comparison, she seemed to lose all control when she used her powers. Each time, he sensed the rage in her surge to the surface, ripping through her like barbwire along her veins. She let go of her inhibitions, following orders but always with more wild abandon than they deserved. Though she denied it afterwards, she loved the change from demure to wild thing and exploited the freedom it brought. When she used her power, there /were/ no rules.
He watched her in those first few weeks of training, when they were still getting their bearings as a team. He saw how she slotted into things, feeling for her place and then settling into it. She was peacemaker and warm arms and mischievous puppy, while he stood on the sidelines, sneering at them all and only participating when absolutely necessary. She summed up all that he loathed about teamwork, and he scorned her for it, not deigning to speak to her until her overheard her mentioning a brief tenure in the X- Men when she was thirteen.
She didn't snub him when he latched onto this information. She didn't refuse to tell him what he wanted to know, even though rudeness was among her pet peeves. His STRIKE file made it common knowledge who his father was, and it detailed the history there, so there was no chance of her not knowing why he'd decided she was suddenly worth his while.
The others resented him for it. They had a soft spot for their little 'mascot', and he, the wild card, threatened her innocence with his untamed and offhand ways. Brian once tried to sit him down and have the 'man to man' chat, but his efforts met with a wall of silence and a hard stare. Nobody told him what to do.
He watched her during training sessions, wondering how much of what she knew was due to the X-Men. How much of her control was due to his father? He wanted to resent her – she was one of the freaks Xavier had preferred to his own flesh and blood – but he needed her to learn more about the man who had driven David and Ian into the recesses of his brain. He needed the games he could play with her; that she walked willingly into every single time. So he suppressed his resentment, leaving it to simmer while he operated.
He pretended to be her friend, and then he dropped her. He cultivated warmth between them, making her think she was reaching him with her lofty morals and idealism. Then he would disappear for days and not so much as look at her when he returned, claiming she nauseated and crowded him. He picked her up, put her down, and changed the façade of his personality as it suited him. He was both her ally and her worst enemy, and could switch from one to the other within the space of a few minutes. And each time he came back to start the game afresh, she let him. He felt the kindness behind her eyes, and saw the idea squatting in her brain that he was just confused, and that the bits of information she had about his father and the X-Men were helping him steady himself. He laughed at her naïveté and strung her along again and again and again.
Betsy took her aside for a girly chat about men and not making mistakes. He saw the memory later in both their brains, even though Betsy's shielding was formidable. She'd told Betsy that she had no intention of letting him get away with anything she didn't want him to. They were not involved, and she had nothing to lose by telling him what he wanted to know. Besides, it made her feel better for having someone to talk to about the X-Men.
Betsy thought her a kindly fool. He was inclined to agree.
Brian talked at him, warning him off. He replied with a snigger and a vanishing act for the next two weeks. When he returned, she'd left a note under his door that she'd been invited to a reunion in Bayville and would he like to go with her?
He stormed to her room, throwing open the door with a burst of telekinesis. There was a suitcase open on her bunk, half filled with slacks and warm sweaters. His eye found that first, snagging on the way each item was neatly folded and tucked into its proper place. She didn't go out of her way to look dowdy, but she had no flair for fashion like Betsy, whose room resembled a nuclear testing ground and whose shapely hands had never held an iron. Outright sensible was only avoided by a love of tight jeans and novelty socks.
She was standing by the window and looked up when he battered his way in. Surprise tobogganed across her face. Then it lit up with a smile at his safe return.
He ignored it, brandishing the note. "What the hell is this?"
"A piece of paper."
He threw it at her, telekinetically sliding it through the air to land in her hand. She'd slung a thick red sweater, just the thing for life on the tip of Scotland, across one forearm. It billowed like a pennant in the breeze he created.
"Okay, it's a piece of paper with my writing on it. What of it?"
"Do you really think I want to see him?" he seethed, hair crackling with unspent energy. "Do you /really/ think I want to spent hours risking DVT on a 'plane, just to be confronted by that bald old coot and his band of merry misfits?"
She shrugged, as if she didn't notice his furious expression. "A simple 'no' would have sufficed." She folded the note up and placed it on her dresser, shaking out the sweater to put in her suitcase. "So, where did you get to in your wanderings this time? Anywhere interesting?"
For some reason, her composure irked him. Though she never had before in this form, he wanted her to be incensed enough to yell at him. He wanted to see something other than compassion on her human face. "You're going crawling back to him," he said, nodding at the case. "He still has you wrapped around his little finger, even after all these years."
"I'm going to go visit some old friends," she replied, placing the sweater on top of the others and going to her wardrobe to pull out a pair of corduroys. They were burgundy, and clashed horribly with her hair. "They said I could bring a friend, so I picked you."
"I'm not your friend."
She gave him an odd look. "So you say."
"You sicken me." He folded his arms, fringe flaring over his forehead. "You're the most pathetic creature I've ever come across – and that includes my Mam. Look at you, with your patronizing principles and never- ending moralising. You're Xavier's echo – his little lapdog, who'll spout his rhetoric if it kills you. You make me want to puke, much less be your -" he nearly choked on the word "-/friend/."
She didn't take the bait, instead casting aside the corduroys in a momentary swell of colour coordination. "If there's nothing else, I'd quite like to finish packing now. My train to the airport leaves in a couple of hours and I'm already behind schedule because I spent too long on the phone to America."
The telekinesis burst from him like a bomb going off inside his skull. To the naked eye the only indication of his powers was a slight narrowing of his eyes. That, and the fleshy thump that signalled his pinning her to the wall.
His voice dropped to a dangerous murmur. "I could crush you," he said softly. "I could snap every bone in your body with a thought. I could rupture your internal organs and let you bleed out in a matter of seconds. I could stop up an artery in your brain, or cook your liver from the inside out, if I wanted."
For the first time, he saw fear in her eyes; felt it sweep and eddy around him. The games never involved his powers. It was more fun to play her for a sap the old fashioned way. This was new territory, and she didn't know how to respond to it.
He noticed how small she looked, suspended there against the plaster. STRIKE weren't the best at interior design, so Excalibur headquarters were boxy and emphasised necessary over the aesthetic. The whiteness of the wall highlighted the dichotomy of her hair and skin; milky white and burnished red. She typically wore her hair tied back, often in plaits or bunches that made her look much younger than her eighteen years. Her small stature and tiny shape didn't help, either, giving the impression of a little girl instead of a young woman.
It was one of the reasons the games were so much fun. Picking on her was like picking on a child – an easy and enjoyable target. If only she went running for Betsy's apron strings, the entire image would be complete.
Yet she never went running to anyone. She stood her ground, shrugged, and got on with life. She accepted him like a prodigal friend whenever he felt like acknowledging her again, and acted like it was no skin off her nose whether he stuck around or not. He was not precious enough to her for the kind of welcome the Braddocks got when they'd been to London for the weekend. He got a warm reception, but not the same puppyish joy that made her bound to their car and hug the stuffing out of them. It had never bothered him before. He'd always had the games, the one-upmanship. He didn't need her delight, just her brain to bat around, like a cat with a mouse.
But this was not a game.
And she was no mouse.
When she spoke, her canines had grown and her eyebrows were crowding each other. Her irises flashed; green to gold, green to gold, as she wavered between forms. "Lucas, put me down, please."
"I'm not Lucas. I'm Legion."
{PING} "You're a spoilt little brat, is what you are," she snapped; eyes completely gold, pupils thinning to lupine slits.
He walked slowly towards her, increasing the pressure. She flattened against the wall, bare feet sprouting fur like a hobbit's. She liked to go barefoot instead of wearing shoes in Summer. Her toenails elongated, curving around and then sucking back into their hidden compartment of fatty tissue.
"Don't talk to me like that. I'm stronger than you, faster than you, cleverer than you – you're a nothing. A little fairytale reject." He clenched a fist and she squirmed. He couldn't prevent her shifting, but he could make it hurt like hell. "I could kill everyone in this building if I felt like it."
She flinched. It was all the indication of pain she gave. She met his gaze coolly, and though he could still feel her fear, there were sparks in her eyes. "I'll talk any way I want. You're a bully, Lucas. We all knew it before you signed up. You can't intimidate me with your fancy tricks. You forget – your father trained me and I'm a hell of a lot more scared of him than I am of a wee toughie with delusions of grandeur like you."
She brought his father up first. That wasn't the way the game worked. "Leave my father out of this," he snarled.
"Put. Me. Down."
"Make me."
A pause. He reached for her emotions absently, without any real thought to it. Her other side was rising, all hot fury and short temper. Yet it didn't rise fully, instead lurking just the other side of the dividing line. Likewise, the changes stopped and she stayed in that strange transitional stage of mostly human and some wolf. Her eyes flickered, reverting to green. They were strange and distant and, suddenly, profoundly sad.
"I feel sorry for you, Lucas," she murmured softly. He heard the thoughts she didn't put into words: because he'd always believe he was in his father's shadow, even when he wasn't. Because he was living in David's memory, eating up a life that wasn't wholly his. Because he had to hurt others to justify being here. Because when he lost David and Ian he'd lost pieces of himself, and would continue to lose pieces until he accepted who and what he was.
He lashed out without thinking, burying a fist in the wall next to her head. She blinked, eyes widening.
"You pity me," he said, equally soft, "and I'll break your neck." There was a breathy quality to his voice that spoke of ultimate truth. "You have no right to pity me. You..." he found himself fumbling for the words. How dare she pity him? This little scrap of a person with no more claim to this Earth than a beetle or a slowworm. How dare she? How dare she! "... Have no right," he finished lamely, seething too much to verbalize it.
She was staring at him with those great green eyes. She wasn't gorgeous, wasn't ugly. A dusting of freckles spattered the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other small-town girls, except for two things: she wore no make-up, and her eyes were the biggest he'd ever seen, like deer's eyes caught in headlights. He couldn't remember them being that big before, but now he realised that they dominated her face.
His fist was still having a conversation with the wall. He removed it, shaking out his knuckles. Her eyes never left him, never wavered. He met their unrelenting gaze and felt like she was staring right through him. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, and he pushed his face into hers, invading her personal space with a growl.
"What are you staring at?"
"You," she replied simply, and before she could say anything else he covered her pert little mouth with his own.
He wasn't quite sure why he did it. Afterwards he told himself it was to shut her up, ignoring the fact that he could just have telekinetically sealed her lips. Whatever the reason, he did it, stealing the kiss from her while she could do nothing to stop him.
It was short-lived. He felt Betsy's thoughts blossom down the hall a few seconds before she appeared at the open door. By the time the other telepath materialized, he'd sucked in all his telekinesis and dropped the tiny shape to stand flush against the wall.
"Everything okay in here?" Betsy's voice entered the room, followed by her. "Rahne – oh." Her eye fell on him. "Lucas. You're back." He could feel her disapproval burning a spot between his shoulder blades.
"Yeah. Got tired of Edinburgh bars."
It was the truth, but still he sensed Betsy's psychic antennae up for any sign of deceit. She trusted him even less than her brother, Brian being prey to second chances and benefit of the doubt. Telepathy bred suspicion, and Betsy was no exception.
He turned to face the other telepath, ignoring the smaller girl totally.
Betsy was tall and willowy, with marble-pale skin and a dancer's grace. Her black hair was short in back and long in front, falling over one eye and obscuring it. The other eye, midnight blue, gleamed at him with a hint of challenge, as if daring him to try something.
He allowed himself to gleam back, just a bit.
"You all right, duck?" Betsy asked, clipped English accent snaking around him to the figure beyond.
There was no pause, no hesitation. "Fine and dandy."
And so it started. She never said a word to anyone about the kiss; even him. She didn't pretend it hadn't happened, but there were only subtle changes that could be traced back to it.
Outwardly, her attitude towards him did not change. She spoke to him, worked with him when he bothered to go to training sessions, and was still the first to greet him when he returned from his roamings. Yet there was something different to her behaviour – something delicate and faint. Her smiles were Duchennes smiles, her touches lighter, more transient, and when she tackled him away from danger in battle she didn't wait for the unforthcoming thanks as she had done before.
He told himself it didn't matter. He told himself it was a good thing. She'd frayed his nerves, always acting like he was redeemable, that he could and would change for the better if she just persevered. He liked being the way he was. Hadn't that been why he summoned Xavier and had him banish David and Ian? Even the world's most powerful telepath hadn't been able to change him after the unification. He didn't need some persistent pup thinking she could do what Xavier couldn't.
However, despite all he told himself, the games stopped. They didn't tail off, they just stopped. He knew all he needed and wanted to know about his father. He had no need of her anymore.
He felt Brian's approval when he started leaving her alone. It countered with Betsy's suspicion of his motives, but when a month and a half passed and he spoke no more than three words to the little redhead, the other telepath gradually eased up. She even let him pick a training simulation or two. His favourite was Night of the Sentinels, where he could blast everything in his path with the ease and proficiency of some god of destruction.
The other members of Excalibur fell into the two camps and followed the brother and sister tag team practically to the letter.
Sheep.
He didn't care what they thought. He was just after the thrill, the ultimate adrenaline rush. They were all just surplus to requirements.
He did care that he started thinking about her more, though. Before, spare minutes were filled with plans for the next stage in the games. He contemplated his next move, what he was going to say to win back her trust so he could bat it away again.
Now he contemplated just her, and it didn't sit well.
He excused himself from headquarters just to go visit Castle McFadden, where he did his best thinking. The teenagers had all cleared out when he started setting fire to the place out of boredom. He frightened them. Even those who used to be his cronies had fled in fear from this new version of their leader.
He perched on the blackened battlements, staring out to sea and sometimes throwing himself in to clear his head. What should have been a deadly plunge instead became a refreshing dip. The sea caressed him like a lover, easing his frenetic mind with a numbing touch. When he was done, he levitated himself to shore and called all the driftwood within range, setting up a bonfire to dry himself. Only then would he return to base.
Her extraordinarily large eyes haunted him. Their caught-in-headlights quality gave her a look of perpetual astonishment he never remembered seeing before. He found himself turning and looking back over his shoulder when she passed, wondering what he was missing.
What had been a game piece became an enigma he wanted to puzzle out so he could put it away and forget about it. He watched her more intently than before, trying to figure out why she wouldn't leave his superior brain in peace. She became the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last he wondered after at night. Where some people skimmed stones, he used boulders, counting the syllables of her name with each beat and cursing when the rocks sank too soon.
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the childlike pleasure of a crayoned picture and the adult sadness of time running too fast. He had thought he understood her, but now he realised he had only understood her place in the games. Outside them, he didn't know what to make of her. In his mind he tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin always went through and she flew away.
He grew irritated. She both intrigued and repulsed him. He reminded himself that his father had chosen her and her brethren over him, but the recap melted into an image of those impossibly large eyes and he was back to square one again.
She was a pawn, a useless little weakling. She had no right to look at him the way she did – lips smiling but eyes full of compassion. It infuriated him, yet he never took her up on it. Instead, he either went to blow things up or left the complex altogether.
But he always came back.
He'd joined to challenge himself. He'd stayed for the thrill. And now?
Now...
Now what? He didn't need her. He didn't need any of them. He was his own property, answerable to nobody. Even STRIKE knew that. That was why they didn't confront him about his sudden absences. He was the strongest in their artillery. They needed him more than he needed them. He could leave anytime he wanted and never look back.
And he would, if only those damn eyes would stop haunting him.
Four months after the Bayville reunion he vanished for six days. As usual, he didn't tell anyone where was going, or when he'd be back. When he finally did turn up, it was the morning of her nineteenth birthday. He landed in the courtyard of the Excalibur complex and walked the rest of the way to the kitchen, where a cluster of minds were gathered.
They looked up as he entered. One or two nodded a greeting, others looked disapproving at his interruption of festivities. He was the spirit dampener, after all, and they wanted to enjoy themselves.
Cards and bits of shredded wrapping paper were strewn across the large table. It surprised him a little that someone usually so neat and tidy would mince paper like that. Yet another thing he didn't understand about her.
She was staring at him with those damn eyes again. They only broke away when he dropped something in front of her on the tabletop.
It was a small velveteen box, unwrapped, which trailed words like 'expensive' and pricey' behind it. She blinked, and then looked back up at him.
He didn't nod, didn't tell he hoped she had a happy birthday, because he honestly couldn't give a rat's arse cheek whether it was happy or not. He watched as she picked up the offering and gently prised it open. His expression never heaved from the quicksand of sullen.
It was a small gold necklace - the kind with a stupidly fine chain and fiddly clasp. It flashed in the halogen lighting, and the tiny wolf dangling from it, head thrown back in a howl, seemed to bare its teeth at him.
She stared at it for a long while. Then she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans.
"Aren't you going to put it on?" asked Brian.
"No," she said quietly. "I'm not."
She thanked him along with everyone else, but he didn't indulge himself by thinking that her gaze lingered on him a moment longer than the others. He later found out that even though she never wore the necklace, she carried it everywhere, but even that meant nothing. It was just a trinket he'd picked up because it took his fancy. Coincidence alone had dictated he grow tired of it at just the right moment to make it a birthday present. There was nothing more to it than that.
Three days later, he was down on the rocky shoreline, at the bottom of the cliffs on which sat HQ. He was tossing boulders again, selecting them based on size and shape.
It's said than nobody can sneak up on a telepath, but he was so engrossed with telekinetically flinging the rocks as far as he could that he was psychically blind. That his thoughts were already snarled up with her meant it was doubly unsurprising he didn't sense her particular signature's approach.
The light tap on his shoulder made him whirl around. Instead of skimming, the boulder plopped into the water fifteen feet out with a loud splash.
"I was wondering where they were all going," she said with a faint smile, nodding at the huge hollows where boulders used to sit.
He stared impassively at her. She had climbed over the stones wearing the kind of plastic flip-flops you can buy from tacky seaside shops. Hers were green, with a large fake sunflower head by each big toe. Her jeans were streaked with dirt, as was her plain white tee shirt. Her hair bobbed in the breeze, scraped into pigtails again, and the only thing close to make- up was a smudge of soil on her cheek. He surmised that she'd been in the garden – a rectangle of grass bordered by sickly flowers next to the courtyard in the middle of the Excalibur complex.
"What do you want?" The question came out more tired than he intended. He'd spent so long trying and failing to banish her from his mind, it was almost a relief to have the real thing beside him.
She stared out to sea. "I wanted to thank you for the bauble."
"No you didn't."
"All right, then, I didn't."
Silence. He followed her gaze to the horizon, letting his eyes drift in and out of rust-coloured cloudbanks. A gull flew across the setting sun, shrieking loudly.
"I knew you were playing games with me."
Her statement caught him off guard. "What?"
"I said, I knew - "
"I ken what you said," he snapped. Then, softer, he said, "How?"
She shrugged. "I watched you. I was the easiest target. Plus, you aren't exactly subtle with all the questions after your Da. You ken I never talked to the X-Men about you before you got here? They told me you hated him. I wanted to see it for myself before I believed it. I still don't."
"You're an idiot. I wish he were pushing up daisies," he said spitefully, but she shook her head.
"No, you don't. Maybe you did once, but I don't ken you do now. I'd bet my back teeth you understand him more now than you did when you first met him."
For a second he considered tearing out her molars and claiming them as his winnings, but he dropped the idea almost as soon as it arrived. Whatever his feelings were towards Charles Xavier, they were no business of hers, and he told her so.
She shrugged again. "You'll admit it when you stop feeding your pride Baby Bio. Perhaps not to me, or anyone else for that matter, but you'll admit it to yourself. You'll see."
[Idealistic bitch]. But the thought had less venom than usual. He was tired of lashing out where nobody could hear him unless they burrowed through his telepathic shields. So instead, he sat down on a boulder he'd been planning to skim and watched the sun go down.
She hunkered down on the pebbly ground and watched it, too. Part of him wanted her to leave, but another part wanted her to stay. The part that wanted to hurt and manipulate her had faded, and he noted this with some surprise because he hadn't realised it before. It was just that there was no fun once she knew it was a game, he told himself. There was no satisfaction to a predestined outcome.
He allowed himself to absorb some of her quiet calm, sighing as it spread through his nervous system like a salve.
After the sun had touched the ocean's surface and sizzled away he rose to his feet. On impulse, inexplicable even to himself, he offered her a hand. She seemed surprised, but took it regardless, foolishly trusting him not to use her as a skimming stone or pin her to the cliff face like he'd done with the wall in her room months before.
Bizarrely, he felt himself cringing at the memory, and his fingers became uncharacteristically gentle as he helped her up. She brushed herself off, then stooped to peer at the ground and pick up a pebble.
"What are you doing?"
She held it up. It was perfectly round, perfectly smooth and a colour caught somewhere between purple and dark blue. "Pretty," she said, like that explained everything. "I always keep pretty things. It's a habit. Ooh..." She bent down and picked up an identical one. "Bookends."
"You're very strange." It wasn't really a compliment, but it was closer than anything else he'd ever managed before. Compliments were David's territory. David was the sensitive one. He just destroyed stuff.
"Thank you," she said sincerely. "I try."
That night, she was not the last thing he thought about as he fell asleep. Instead, he pondered the image of a small purplish-blue stone, and again when he woke the next morning. When he went down to the kitchen to fetch his customary black coffee, she was there at the table spinning one of the stones like a coin, her hair loose and messy around her shoulders. For the first time in months she greeted him with a smile that reached her eyes, and though he openly scorned her there was not quite so much malice to it as usual.
He treated the other team members exactly the same. Brian despaired at ever making him a team player, while Betsy's disapproval was a constant mantle around his shoulders. He shrugged them off as he had always done, but indulged their whining by not only turning up to training sessions, but participating in them, too.
It continued this way for several weeks. Each morning he would rise, thinking of a small purple stone, and there in the kitchen it would be. And where the stone was, so was she; untidy and muzzy with a hot chocolate by her elbow. In the evenings, when they weren't working or off on a mission somewhere, he would go down to the shoreline to watch the sunset. Sometimes she was there before him, sometimes after. Sometimes they would talk, sometimes just sit in silence as the sun set fire to the sea.
She never found another purple stone, and something in him was glad for that, though he was at a loss to explain why.
It wasn't a hearts-and-roses situation. He found a gentle comfort in her presence, and after the time of distance she warmed to him again. The caught-in-headlights expression softened to just plain surprised, and he no longer had to turn around to see what he was missing when he passed her in the corridor. They were learning each other.
His destructive tendencies were still there, and he still took off from time to time, but the periods away were shorter, and he found himself arriving back just in time for either breakfast or sunset. And then... there she would be, waiting, as if she were the telepathic one and had known he was going to be back at that exact moment.
She took him shopping, once. He resisted the urge to sneer at the surrounding flatscans, absorbing some of her joy to be out in public, in the hustle and bustle of a Saturday afternoon market. Betsy was there, too, but she barely talked to them. She still didn't fully trust him, and watched him like a hawk with their youngest teammate.
She showed him trinkets on stalls, bought him a bag of traditional seaside rock, and dragged him into the clinch of a clothing stand for a new shirt. He let her, concentrating on her mind instead of the flotsam around him. He was a proficient enough telepath to block out psychic white noise, but old habits die hard, and he tried not to use their mental babbling as an excuse to blow up the odd cardboard box of wares.
It was not for her sake. No. He answered to nobody. He did it because he wanted to. And he only ever did what he wanted to.
They made love for the first time by the light of the setting sun. It was a tender thing, as much unlike his previous exploits as fur feels compared to dried-out scales. Afterwards they lay on the rocks as the night air turned cold, and he lit a fire to warm them both.
When he fell asleep that night he thought of neither impossibly large eyes nor small purple stones. Instead, he was suffused with the kind of contentment he later realised David had enjoyed from simply knowing his mother loved him – that there was another person on this planet who was glad he was alive.
He had not known love before, only the echo from David's memory. Nobody loved that boy's replacement. David was kind and good and treasured, whereas he was just the impostor. He could not live in a ghost's shadow. He could only hurt and destroy and be David's opposite in as many ways as possible, to emphasise that he was /not/ David, and that the prodigal son was /not/ coming back.
She cared for him, though. He'd driven so many away, but she'd stayed, even though she knew what he had done – what he was capable of. She hadn't wanted David, and though he'd tried for a very long time to deny this, laying there with his arms around her he could no longer refute that she had chosen Lucas, the replacement, over David, the original.
When she gave him one of the purple stones he kept it on his bedside table and took it to breakfast with him in the mornings. It was her way of saying 'I love you' without actually having to say it. Whenever he looked at it he remembered that first time she had come down to the beach and found both him and it there. He remembered what she'd said in that high-pitched voice of hers, and depending on his mood he either turned away and forgot about it or picked up the phone receiver and put it down again.
He was still playing games with himself, it seemed.
And then one day there was a knock at his bedroom door, and when he opened it he didn't see bobbing red pigtails, but sleek black hair and an eye of midnight blue.
Betsy didn't bother with an introduction. She just said, "If you hurt her in any way, shape or form, I shall personally lead the charge to carve up your behind and donate it to the local pound as dog food."
He didn't need to ask whom she was referring to. He didn't need his telepathy, either. He flirted with the idea of slamming the door in her face, or creating a ring of flames around those expensive leather boots she loved so much. Then he rolled his eyes, leaning on the doorframe for a more articulate response than a hotfoot.
"You ken you can order me around lassie? I thought your brother was the leader around here."
"Brian wouldn't know an emotional faux pas from his own arse after a curry," Betsy retorted. She folded her arms, ridiculously long legs made even longer by a chic black micro-skirt.
At one point, he would have chased a woman like her. True, she was Grade A Bitch material, but she also had a body to die for and a sense of fashion that set it off to greatest effect. He'd never been much fussed about personality when a catch looked like that, but now he looked at her with more tolerance than lust. He preferred small and understated to tall and flash.
[I'm going soft], he thought, and resolved to go disintegrate a training sim or two before supper.
Betsy was looking at him with hard eyes, having pulled her hair aside to reveal both. It was a momentous action, and she obviously expected him to treat it as such.
He let out a long breath. "You want me to say some solemn oath or something? We're not in the Boy Scouts, lassie, and we're a little above secret handshakes."
"Just promise me that you understand the consequences, then, if you won't promise not to hurt her."
He felt like he should be spitting something caustic at that, but he just couldn't summon the energy. "I'm not going to hurt her," he said simply, and though he didn't let it to his lips, for once he didn't fight off the end of the sentence. [I care too much about her to hurt her].
Betsy seemed satisfied and left.
He watched her go, musing on his own behaviour. Not so long ago he would have had no compunction about setting her on fire for speaking to him like that. Now, though...
Now...
He shut the door and went to the phone on his bedside cabinet. It was a private line, so he didn't have to wait for anyone to finish before he could use it, or worry about anyone listening in on his conversation. Hesitantly, he dialled a very long number he'd forgotten he'd memorised until thirty seconds ago. It was sitting there in his head, like it had been waiting for him to come and use it.
There was a sequence of clicks, followed by an echoing tone. It rang twice, and then someone picked it up.
"Hello?" said a somewhat sleepy voice. "Xavier Institute for Higher Learning."
He checked his watch. It would be about ten o' clock at night over there. "Can I speak to Charles Xavier, please?"
"Who shall I say is calling?"
"Just tell him it's bloody important, laddie," he snapped, irritated with the formalities before they'd even begun.
The speaker squeaked and the receiver creaked as it was hastily put down. He still had enough fire in him to scare people long distance, then. Good.
A minute ticked by. Then another. It wasn't in his nature to worry about what the phone bill would look like, since STRIKE took care of that sort of thing, but he felt something stir in the pit of his stomach as time marched on. He wasn't the one Xavier wanted to talk to, David was. The old coot was staying away from the phone because he'd figured out who was calling and couldn't bring himself to talk to the impostor...
The line clacked noisily. "Hello? Charles Xavier speaking."
He sucked in a breath. "It's me. Lucas."
"Lucas..." There was a loaded pause. "To what do I owe the pleasure? Is Excalibur in some kind of trouble?"
"No. Just me."
"Excuse me?"
"I was thinking... I thought... I don't know you."
Another pause. "Lucas, I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
"It's been a long time, hasn't it? A long time since... David and Ian."
To his credit, Xavier didn't waver. "Yes," he said, like this was a repeated conversation. "It has. Almost five years."
"Are you sorry?"
"About what?"
"Me." He spiralled a hand, settling on the words, "Creating me."
"What do you want me to say?"
"What I want isn't really an issue anymore. It took this long and a few bashes to the head to give me courage enough to ring this number. What I /need/ is some kind of answer from you."
Charles sighed. "I'm not sorry about creating a life, Lucas. But David..."
"Was your real son. I know." The receiver was hot in his hand. He transferred it to his other ear.
"If you'd let me finish; I was going to say that David was someone I never really got to know. I didn't know he was there. You... I have known about for nearly five years. I've known about you, but I haven't really /known/ you."
The old guy certainly didn't pull his punches. "Would you like to?" Crunch time. Time to prove her wrong or treat her to something nice for being right.
"I gave you this new number in case you ever asked that question. Is that a sufficient answer?"
Warmth. Not the searing heat of a pyrotic birthing flame, but the steady glow of being proved wrong and actually being grateful for it. "Aye. I suppose it is," he allowed. "I suppose it is."
"Lucas... you do realise I don't resent you, don't you?"
[No. I never realised. You never told me, you bastard. You just upped and left when Mam started crying that night]. "Good to know." The resentment of his mother for denying David contact with his father for almost two decades was not red hot, but it had not fully cooled, either. However, it was tempered by the question: if she had allowed contact, would today still be as it was?
A pair of large green eyes rose up in his consciousness, and despite everything he felt a surge of gratefulness towards Gabrielle Haller. David and Ian, too. Threads of the past always led up to the whole of the present, and without each strand of them the life of the son of Gabrielle and Charles would be a very different story.
For the very first time he let himself think the words, [I'm sorry] at the essences of David and Ian. And he was. He had this life, now, but it had been theirs, too. Only now was he beginning to realise what pushing himself as the dominant consciousness had done.
"Lucas?"
"Aye?"
"If I may ask, what prompted this sudden change?"
A smile ghosted across his face. "Not what, Da. Who."
-------------------
FIN.
-------------------
A/N – There is actually some basis for this in the comics, but I only realised after I'd finished writing. It was a one-sided crush, anyway, so I'm not sure it counts. This was written after I launched a fanfic contest, and if anyone would like details on said contest would they please email me.
-------------------
'Shadow of a Ghost' By Scribbler
June 2004
-------------------
For the first year, he had quizzed her about his father.
He could have just skimmed her mind to get what he wanted, and the first time she mentioned living at the Xavier Institute he had done just that. Afterwards, however, he had relied on more mundane techniques. It became a sort of game – seeing how much information he could make her give up without probing her thoughts.
Life in general was a sort of game to him.
Since the unification he'd been able to breeze through most everything that ordinary people could not. He finished school because he wanted to prove he could, but absorbing information from teachers' brains instead of textbooks made the whole thing far too... painless. School was meant to be a chore. It had always been a chore. But not for him. Not anymore.
He supposed that was why he'd gone on the 'rebel without a cause' kick in his late teens – more so than when he had to fight David and Ian for control. Parties and cliff-top raves gave way to blowing up garden sheds from two and three miles away, and seeing how far out he could get while parting the sea. He tested himself, pushing his limits, placing himself in danger just for the thrill of trouncing it.
He ignored his mother and her mooning over old photos of David, throwing himself into relentless training for no other reason than he wanted to be the best – better than he already was. Some part of him didn't want things to be effortless – it wanted his powers to run up against a wall, to work and sweat and strain to overcome obstacles. Effortlessness meant no challenge, and no challenge meant boredom.
He despised boredom over everything else.
Boredom was stagnant. It was the sign of an inactive mind – a tedious existence. If he was bored, he grew destructive. Hours spent telekinetically lifting individual grains of sand into a detailed replica of the Taj Mahal were lost if he was bored. A single swipe and the whole thing was gone. He lashed out, venting without thought or consideration. Why did he have to consider what he did? He was powerful enough that nobody could threaten him. He had no enemies worth bothering about, only old rivals cowering in their homes and boltholes.
Once, he'd blown the huge front doors right off his mother's house. It wasn't his house, nor would it ever be, with its endless pictures of David, the chosen child, the favoured form. Not that belonging there would have stopped him lifting his hand and crumpling the intricate oak panelling into splinters, but there was something satisfying about destroying David's last home. He did it piecemeal, eroding the place away and taking great pleasure in each small victory over his predecessor's memory.
His mother had stood there each time, watching him and trembling. He had felt her fear and disgust and coldness like a blanket around him. She just couldn't reconcile him with her precious little David. He was a stranger, an impostor she couldn't bring herself to get rid of because she'd convinced herself there was a chance that someday David would return.
Stupid bitch. She never was the brightest of people.
He supposed that was why he'd left. The satisfaction he got from obliterating pieces of David's life was spoiled by her eyes always on him. Even when she wasn't around he'd felt like she was watching, her emotions swirling in an ever-tightening knot around his midriff.
He sensed the remnants of David's love for his mother at the back of his mind, and that was the only thing that stopped him from removing the problem altogether. The night he left, he'd stood over her bed, watching her sleep. He'd got as far as raising his hand to make the sheets smoulder, before turning on his heel and marching out of her life forever.
He told himself the grief of knowing her David was gone for good was better than killing her.
Of course STRIKE, SHIELD's British counterpart, had played a large role in him leaving, too. They knew him by reputation and had approached with caution, surprised when he accepted their offer to join a newfangled task force of what they termed 'meta-humans' – people with abilities beyond the norm, some mutant, others something else completely. It had been three years since the unification, then. Three years of honing his abilities to perfection. He needed challenges beyond those he could provide on his own. STRIKE had enemies – powerful enemies. They were the reason behind the commission of this project. The chance to take them on practically made him salivate, and he overlooked the proviso of working in a team to do it.
She was his opposite in almost every way. Where his nature was wild an unpredictable, hers was quiet and understated. Which wasn't to say she couldn't fly into rages, just that she kept a better lid on her temper than him. He had sensed that much the first time he met the little team melodramatically named 'Excalibur'. They were Britain's answer to the X- Men, and she was the link from old to new, standing towards the back and letting the louder personalities drown out her own.
She had intrigued him because he didn't know her, but not enough for more than a light mind scan. It was no more than he spared for any of the other unknowns in this motley little collection.
Her brain was divided into two parts – one discreet and calm, the other brimming with anger and destructive impulses. There was a fine line between them, but there was a line. For someone like him, who had worked so hard to merge the rigidity of training with the volatility of self, this was an utterly foreign concept. It was like more than one psyche in one skull – and that much he understood better than anyone else – but the notion of /keeping/ them separate was stupid. It was a step backwards.
Their powers were opposites, too. He valued perfection. His powers were the one part of his life he had rules for. Or rather, they were the one part of his life where he had rules and /kept/ them. Excalibur was more of a hobby than anything serious. He held no loyalty towards them; he just needed them to get at worthy opponents. He just needed them for the challenge.
By comparison, she seemed to lose all control when she used her powers. Each time, he sensed the rage in her surge to the surface, ripping through her like barbwire along her veins. She let go of her inhibitions, following orders but always with more wild abandon than they deserved. Though she denied it afterwards, she loved the change from demure to wild thing and exploited the freedom it brought. When she used her power, there /were/ no rules.
He watched her in those first few weeks of training, when they were still getting their bearings as a team. He saw how she slotted into things, feeling for her place and then settling into it. She was peacemaker and warm arms and mischievous puppy, while he stood on the sidelines, sneering at them all and only participating when absolutely necessary. She summed up all that he loathed about teamwork, and he scorned her for it, not deigning to speak to her until her overheard her mentioning a brief tenure in the X- Men when she was thirteen.
She didn't snub him when he latched onto this information. She didn't refuse to tell him what he wanted to know, even though rudeness was among her pet peeves. His STRIKE file made it common knowledge who his father was, and it detailed the history there, so there was no chance of her not knowing why he'd decided she was suddenly worth his while.
The others resented him for it. They had a soft spot for their little 'mascot', and he, the wild card, threatened her innocence with his untamed and offhand ways. Brian once tried to sit him down and have the 'man to man' chat, but his efforts met with a wall of silence and a hard stare. Nobody told him what to do.
He watched her during training sessions, wondering how much of what she knew was due to the X-Men. How much of her control was due to his father? He wanted to resent her – she was one of the freaks Xavier had preferred to his own flesh and blood – but he needed her to learn more about the man who had driven David and Ian into the recesses of his brain. He needed the games he could play with her; that she walked willingly into every single time. So he suppressed his resentment, leaving it to simmer while he operated.
He pretended to be her friend, and then he dropped her. He cultivated warmth between them, making her think she was reaching him with her lofty morals and idealism. Then he would disappear for days and not so much as look at her when he returned, claiming she nauseated and crowded him. He picked her up, put her down, and changed the façade of his personality as it suited him. He was both her ally and her worst enemy, and could switch from one to the other within the space of a few minutes. And each time he came back to start the game afresh, she let him. He felt the kindness behind her eyes, and saw the idea squatting in her brain that he was just confused, and that the bits of information she had about his father and the X-Men were helping him steady himself. He laughed at her naïveté and strung her along again and again and again.
Betsy took her aside for a girly chat about men and not making mistakes. He saw the memory later in both their brains, even though Betsy's shielding was formidable. She'd told Betsy that she had no intention of letting him get away with anything she didn't want him to. They were not involved, and she had nothing to lose by telling him what he wanted to know. Besides, it made her feel better for having someone to talk to about the X-Men.
Betsy thought her a kindly fool. He was inclined to agree.
Brian talked at him, warning him off. He replied with a snigger and a vanishing act for the next two weeks. When he returned, she'd left a note under his door that she'd been invited to a reunion in Bayville and would he like to go with her?
He stormed to her room, throwing open the door with a burst of telekinesis. There was a suitcase open on her bunk, half filled with slacks and warm sweaters. His eye found that first, snagging on the way each item was neatly folded and tucked into its proper place. She didn't go out of her way to look dowdy, but she had no flair for fashion like Betsy, whose room resembled a nuclear testing ground and whose shapely hands had never held an iron. Outright sensible was only avoided by a love of tight jeans and novelty socks.
She was standing by the window and looked up when he battered his way in. Surprise tobogganed across her face. Then it lit up with a smile at his safe return.
He ignored it, brandishing the note. "What the hell is this?"
"A piece of paper."
He threw it at her, telekinetically sliding it through the air to land in her hand. She'd slung a thick red sweater, just the thing for life on the tip of Scotland, across one forearm. It billowed like a pennant in the breeze he created.
"Okay, it's a piece of paper with my writing on it. What of it?"
"Do you really think I want to see him?" he seethed, hair crackling with unspent energy. "Do you /really/ think I want to spent hours risking DVT on a 'plane, just to be confronted by that bald old coot and his band of merry misfits?"
She shrugged, as if she didn't notice his furious expression. "A simple 'no' would have sufficed." She folded the note up and placed it on her dresser, shaking out the sweater to put in her suitcase. "So, where did you get to in your wanderings this time? Anywhere interesting?"
For some reason, her composure irked him. Though she never had before in this form, he wanted her to be incensed enough to yell at him. He wanted to see something other than compassion on her human face. "You're going crawling back to him," he said, nodding at the case. "He still has you wrapped around his little finger, even after all these years."
"I'm going to go visit some old friends," she replied, placing the sweater on top of the others and going to her wardrobe to pull out a pair of corduroys. They were burgundy, and clashed horribly with her hair. "They said I could bring a friend, so I picked you."
"I'm not your friend."
She gave him an odd look. "So you say."
"You sicken me." He folded his arms, fringe flaring over his forehead. "You're the most pathetic creature I've ever come across – and that includes my Mam. Look at you, with your patronizing principles and never- ending moralising. You're Xavier's echo – his little lapdog, who'll spout his rhetoric if it kills you. You make me want to puke, much less be your -" he nearly choked on the word "-/friend/."
She didn't take the bait, instead casting aside the corduroys in a momentary swell of colour coordination. "If there's nothing else, I'd quite like to finish packing now. My train to the airport leaves in a couple of hours and I'm already behind schedule because I spent too long on the phone to America."
The telekinesis burst from him like a bomb going off inside his skull. To the naked eye the only indication of his powers was a slight narrowing of his eyes. That, and the fleshy thump that signalled his pinning her to the wall.
His voice dropped to a dangerous murmur. "I could crush you," he said softly. "I could snap every bone in your body with a thought. I could rupture your internal organs and let you bleed out in a matter of seconds. I could stop up an artery in your brain, or cook your liver from the inside out, if I wanted."
For the first time, he saw fear in her eyes; felt it sweep and eddy around him. The games never involved his powers. It was more fun to play her for a sap the old fashioned way. This was new territory, and she didn't know how to respond to it.
He noticed how small she looked, suspended there against the plaster. STRIKE weren't the best at interior design, so Excalibur headquarters were boxy and emphasised necessary over the aesthetic. The whiteness of the wall highlighted the dichotomy of her hair and skin; milky white and burnished red. She typically wore her hair tied back, often in plaits or bunches that made her look much younger than her eighteen years. Her small stature and tiny shape didn't help, either, giving the impression of a little girl instead of a young woman.
It was one of the reasons the games were so much fun. Picking on her was like picking on a child – an easy and enjoyable target. If only she went running for Betsy's apron strings, the entire image would be complete.
Yet she never went running to anyone. She stood her ground, shrugged, and got on with life. She accepted him like a prodigal friend whenever he felt like acknowledging her again, and acted like it was no skin off her nose whether he stuck around or not. He was not precious enough to her for the kind of welcome the Braddocks got when they'd been to London for the weekend. He got a warm reception, but not the same puppyish joy that made her bound to their car and hug the stuffing out of them. It had never bothered him before. He'd always had the games, the one-upmanship. He didn't need her delight, just her brain to bat around, like a cat with a mouse.
But this was not a game.
And she was no mouse.
When she spoke, her canines had grown and her eyebrows were crowding each other. Her irises flashed; green to gold, green to gold, as she wavered between forms. "Lucas, put me down, please."
"I'm not Lucas. I'm Legion."
{PING} "You're a spoilt little brat, is what you are," she snapped; eyes completely gold, pupils thinning to lupine slits.
He walked slowly towards her, increasing the pressure. She flattened against the wall, bare feet sprouting fur like a hobbit's. She liked to go barefoot instead of wearing shoes in Summer. Her toenails elongated, curving around and then sucking back into their hidden compartment of fatty tissue.
"Don't talk to me like that. I'm stronger than you, faster than you, cleverer than you – you're a nothing. A little fairytale reject." He clenched a fist and she squirmed. He couldn't prevent her shifting, but he could make it hurt like hell. "I could kill everyone in this building if I felt like it."
She flinched. It was all the indication of pain she gave. She met his gaze coolly, and though he could still feel her fear, there were sparks in her eyes. "I'll talk any way I want. You're a bully, Lucas. We all knew it before you signed up. You can't intimidate me with your fancy tricks. You forget – your father trained me and I'm a hell of a lot more scared of him than I am of a wee toughie with delusions of grandeur like you."
She brought his father up first. That wasn't the way the game worked. "Leave my father out of this," he snarled.
"Put. Me. Down."
"Make me."
A pause. He reached for her emotions absently, without any real thought to it. Her other side was rising, all hot fury and short temper. Yet it didn't rise fully, instead lurking just the other side of the dividing line. Likewise, the changes stopped and she stayed in that strange transitional stage of mostly human and some wolf. Her eyes flickered, reverting to green. They were strange and distant and, suddenly, profoundly sad.
"I feel sorry for you, Lucas," she murmured softly. He heard the thoughts she didn't put into words: because he'd always believe he was in his father's shadow, even when he wasn't. Because he was living in David's memory, eating up a life that wasn't wholly his. Because he had to hurt others to justify being here. Because when he lost David and Ian he'd lost pieces of himself, and would continue to lose pieces until he accepted who and what he was.
He lashed out without thinking, burying a fist in the wall next to her head. She blinked, eyes widening.
"You pity me," he said, equally soft, "and I'll break your neck." There was a breathy quality to his voice that spoke of ultimate truth. "You have no right to pity me. You..." he found himself fumbling for the words. How dare she pity him? This little scrap of a person with no more claim to this Earth than a beetle or a slowworm. How dare she? How dare she! "... Have no right," he finished lamely, seething too much to verbalize it.
She was staring at him with those great green eyes. She wasn't gorgeous, wasn't ugly. A dusting of freckles spattered the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other small-town girls, except for two things: she wore no make-up, and her eyes were the biggest he'd ever seen, like deer's eyes caught in headlights. He couldn't remember them being that big before, but now he realised that they dominated her face.
His fist was still having a conversation with the wall. He removed it, shaking out his knuckles. Her eyes never left him, never wavered. He met their unrelenting gaze and felt like she was staring right through him. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, and he pushed his face into hers, invading her personal space with a growl.
"What are you staring at?"
"You," she replied simply, and before she could say anything else he covered her pert little mouth with his own.
He wasn't quite sure why he did it. Afterwards he told himself it was to shut her up, ignoring the fact that he could just have telekinetically sealed her lips. Whatever the reason, he did it, stealing the kiss from her while she could do nothing to stop him.
It was short-lived. He felt Betsy's thoughts blossom down the hall a few seconds before she appeared at the open door. By the time the other telepath materialized, he'd sucked in all his telekinesis and dropped the tiny shape to stand flush against the wall.
"Everything okay in here?" Betsy's voice entered the room, followed by her. "Rahne – oh." Her eye fell on him. "Lucas. You're back." He could feel her disapproval burning a spot between his shoulder blades.
"Yeah. Got tired of Edinburgh bars."
It was the truth, but still he sensed Betsy's psychic antennae up for any sign of deceit. She trusted him even less than her brother, Brian being prey to second chances and benefit of the doubt. Telepathy bred suspicion, and Betsy was no exception.
He turned to face the other telepath, ignoring the smaller girl totally.
Betsy was tall and willowy, with marble-pale skin and a dancer's grace. Her black hair was short in back and long in front, falling over one eye and obscuring it. The other eye, midnight blue, gleamed at him with a hint of challenge, as if daring him to try something.
He allowed himself to gleam back, just a bit.
"You all right, duck?" Betsy asked, clipped English accent snaking around him to the figure beyond.
There was no pause, no hesitation. "Fine and dandy."
And so it started. She never said a word to anyone about the kiss; even him. She didn't pretend it hadn't happened, but there were only subtle changes that could be traced back to it.
Outwardly, her attitude towards him did not change. She spoke to him, worked with him when he bothered to go to training sessions, and was still the first to greet him when he returned from his roamings. Yet there was something different to her behaviour – something delicate and faint. Her smiles were Duchennes smiles, her touches lighter, more transient, and when she tackled him away from danger in battle she didn't wait for the unforthcoming thanks as she had done before.
He told himself it didn't matter. He told himself it was a good thing. She'd frayed his nerves, always acting like he was redeemable, that he could and would change for the better if she just persevered. He liked being the way he was. Hadn't that been why he summoned Xavier and had him banish David and Ian? Even the world's most powerful telepath hadn't been able to change him after the unification. He didn't need some persistent pup thinking she could do what Xavier couldn't.
However, despite all he told himself, the games stopped. They didn't tail off, they just stopped. He knew all he needed and wanted to know about his father. He had no need of her anymore.
He felt Brian's approval when he started leaving her alone. It countered with Betsy's suspicion of his motives, but when a month and a half passed and he spoke no more than three words to the little redhead, the other telepath gradually eased up. She even let him pick a training simulation or two. His favourite was Night of the Sentinels, where he could blast everything in his path with the ease and proficiency of some god of destruction.
The other members of Excalibur fell into the two camps and followed the brother and sister tag team practically to the letter.
Sheep.
He didn't care what they thought. He was just after the thrill, the ultimate adrenaline rush. They were all just surplus to requirements.
He did care that he started thinking about her more, though. Before, spare minutes were filled with plans for the next stage in the games. He contemplated his next move, what he was going to say to win back her trust so he could bat it away again.
Now he contemplated just her, and it didn't sit well.
He excused himself from headquarters just to go visit Castle McFadden, where he did his best thinking. The teenagers had all cleared out when he started setting fire to the place out of boredom. He frightened them. Even those who used to be his cronies had fled in fear from this new version of their leader.
He perched on the blackened battlements, staring out to sea and sometimes throwing himself in to clear his head. What should have been a deadly plunge instead became a refreshing dip. The sea caressed him like a lover, easing his frenetic mind with a numbing touch. When he was done, he levitated himself to shore and called all the driftwood within range, setting up a bonfire to dry himself. Only then would he return to base.
Her extraordinarily large eyes haunted him. Their caught-in-headlights quality gave her a look of perpetual astonishment he never remembered seeing before. He found himself turning and looking back over his shoulder when she passed, wondering what he was missing.
What had been a game piece became an enigma he wanted to puzzle out so he could put it away and forget about it. He watched her more intently than before, trying to figure out why she wouldn't leave his superior brain in peace. She became the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last he wondered after at night. Where some people skimmed stones, he used boulders, counting the syllables of her name with each beat and cursing when the rocks sank too soon.
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the childlike pleasure of a crayoned picture and the adult sadness of time running too fast. He had thought he understood her, but now he realised he had only understood her place in the games. Outside them, he didn't know what to make of her. In his mind he tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin always went through and she flew away.
He grew irritated. She both intrigued and repulsed him. He reminded himself that his father had chosen her and her brethren over him, but the recap melted into an image of those impossibly large eyes and he was back to square one again.
She was a pawn, a useless little weakling. She had no right to look at him the way she did – lips smiling but eyes full of compassion. It infuriated him, yet he never took her up on it. Instead, he either went to blow things up or left the complex altogether.
But he always came back.
He'd joined to challenge himself. He'd stayed for the thrill. And now?
Now...
Now what? He didn't need her. He didn't need any of them. He was his own property, answerable to nobody. Even STRIKE knew that. That was why they didn't confront him about his sudden absences. He was the strongest in their artillery. They needed him more than he needed them. He could leave anytime he wanted and never look back.
And he would, if only those damn eyes would stop haunting him.
Four months after the Bayville reunion he vanished for six days. As usual, he didn't tell anyone where was going, or when he'd be back. When he finally did turn up, it was the morning of her nineteenth birthday. He landed in the courtyard of the Excalibur complex and walked the rest of the way to the kitchen, where a cluster of minds were gathered.
They looked up as he entered. One or two nodded a greeting, others looked disapproving at his interruption of festivities. He was the spirit dampener, after all, and they wanted to enjoy themselves.
Cards and bits of shredded wrapping paper were strewn across the large table. It surprised him a little that someone usually so neat and tidy would mince paper like that. Yet another thing he didn't understand about her.
She was staring at him with those damn eyes again. They only broke away when he dropped something in front of her on the tabletop.
It was a small velveteen box, unwrapped, which trailed words like 'expensive' and pricey' behind it. She blinked, and then looked back up at him.
He didn't nod, didn't tell he hoped she had a happy birthday, because he honestly couldn't give a rat's arse cheek whether it was happy or not. He watched as she picked up the offering and gently prised it open. His expression never heaved from the quicksand of sullen.
It was a small gold necklace - the kind with a stupidly fine chain and fiddly clasp. It flashed in the halogen lighting, and the tiny wolf dangling from it, head thrown back in a howl, seemed to bare its teeth at him.
She stared at it for a long while. Then she shoved it into the pocket of her jeans.
"Aren't you going to put it on?" asked Brian.
"No," she said quietly. "I'm not."
She thanked him along with everyone else, but he didn't indulge himself by thinking that her gaze lingered on him a moment longer than the others. He later found out that even though she never wore the necklace, she carried it everywhere, but even that meant nothing. It was just a trinket he'd picked up because it took his fancy. Coincidence alone had dictated he grow tired of it at just the right moment to make it a birthday present. There was nothing more to it than that.
Three days later, he was down on the rocky shoreline, at the bottom of the cliffs on which sat HQ. He was tossing boulders again, selecting them based on size and shape.
It's said than nobody can sneak up on a telepath, but he was so engrossed with telekinetically flinging the rocks as far as he could that he was psychically blind. That his thoughts were already snarled up with her meant it was doubly unsurprising he didn't sense her particular signature's approach.
The light tap on his shoulder made him whirl around. Instead of skimming, the boulder plopped into the water fifteen feet out with a loud splash.
"I was wondering where they were all going," she said with a faint smile, nodding at the huge hollows where boulders used to sit.
He stared impassively at her. She had climbed over the stones wearing the kind of plastic flip-flops you can buy from tacky seaside shops. Hers were green, with a large fake sunflower head by each big toe. Her jeans were streaked with dirt, as was her plain white tee shirt. Her hair bobbed in the breeze, scraped into pigtails again, and the only thing close to make- up was a smudge of soil on her cheek. He surmised that she'd been in the garden – a rectangle of grass bordered by sickly flowers next to the courtyard in the middle of the Excalibur complex.
"What do you want?" The question came out more tired than he intended. He'd spent so long trying and failing to banish her from his mind, it was almost a relief to have the real thing beside him.
She stared out to sea. "I wanted to thank you for the bauble."
"No you didn't."
"All right, then, I didn't."
Silence. He followed her gaze to the horizon, letting his eyes drift in and out of rust-coloured cloudbanks. A gull flew across the setting sun, shrieking loudly.
"I knew you were playing games with me."
Her statement caught him off guard. "What?"
"I said, I knew - "
"I ken what you said," he snapped. Then, softer, he said, "How?"
She shrugged. "I watched you. I was the easiest target. Plus, you aren't exactly subtle with all the questions after your Da. You ken I never talked to the X-Men about you before you got here? They told me you hated him. I wanted to see it for myself before I believed it. I still don't."
"You're an idiot. I wish he were pushing up daisies," he said spitefully, but she shook her head.
"No, you don't. Maybe you did once, but I don't ken you do now. I'd bet my back teeth you understand him more now than you did when you first met him."
For a second he considered tearing out her molars and claiming them as his winnings, but he dropped the idea almost as soon as it arrived. Whatever his feelings were towards Charles Xavier, they were no business of hers, and he told her so.
She shrugged again. "You'll admit it when you stop feeding your pride Baby Bio. Perhaps not to me, or anyone else for that matter, but you'll admit it to yourself. You'll see."
[Idealistic bitch]. But the thought had less venom than usual. He was tired of lashing out where nobody could hear him unless they burrowed through his telepathic shields. So instead, he sat down on a boulder he'd been planning to skim and watched the sun go down.
She hunkered down on the pebbly ground and watched it, too. Part of him wanted her to leave, but another part wanted her to stay. The part that wanted to hurt and manipulate her had faded, and he noted this with some surprise because he hadn't realised it before. It was just that there was no fun once she knew it was a game, he told himself. There was no satisfaction to a predestined outcome.
He allowed himself to absorb some of her quiet calm, sighing as it spread through his nervous system like a salve.
After the sun had touched the ocean's surface and sizzled away he rose to his feet. On impulse, inexplicable even to himself, he offered her a hand. She seemed surprised, but took it regardless, foolishly trusting him not to use her as a skimming stone or pin her to the cliff face like he'd done with the wall in her room months before.
Bizarrely, he felt himself cringing at the memory, and his fingers became uncharacteristically gentle as he helped her up. She brushed herself off, then stooped to peer at the ground and pick up a pebble.
"What are you doing?"
She held it up. It was perfectly round, perfectly smooth and a colour caught somewhere between purple and dark blue. "Pretty," she said, like that explained everything. "I always keep pretty things. It's a habit. Ooh..." She bent down and picked up an identical one. "Bookends."
"You're very strange." It wasn't really a compliment, but it was closer than anything else he'd ever managed before. Compliments were David's territory. David was the sensitive one. He just destroyed stuff.
"Thank you," she said sincerely. "I try."
That night, she was not the last thing he thought about as he fell asleep. Instead, he pondered the image of a small purplish-blue stone, and again when he woke the next morning. When he went down to the kitchen to fetch his customary black coffee, she was there at the table spinning one of the stones like a coin, her hair loose and messy around her shoulders. For the first time in months she greeted him with a smile that reached her eyes, and though he openly scorned her there was not quite so much malice to it as usual.
He treated the other team members exactly the same. Brian despaired at ever making him a team player, while Betsy's disapproval was a constant mantle around his shoulders. He shrugged them off as he had always done, but indulged their whining by not only turning up to training sessions, but participating in them, too.
It continued this way for several weeks. Each morning he would rise, thinking of a small purple stone, and there in the kitchen it would be. And where the stone was, so was she; untidy and muzzy with a hot chocolate by her elbow. In the evenings, when they weren't working or off on a mission somewhere, he would go down to the shoreline to watch the sunset. Sometimes she was there before him, sometimes after. Sometimes they would talk, sometimes just sit in silence as the sun set fire to the sea.
She never found another purple stone, and something in him was glad for that, though he was at a loss to explain why.
It wasn't a hearts-and-roses situation. He found a gentle comfort in her presence, and after the time of distance she warmed to him again. The caught-in-headlights expression softened to just plain surprised, and he no longer had to turn around to see what he was missing when he passed her in the corridor. They were learning each other.
His destructive tendencies were still there, and he still took off from time to time, but the periods away were shorter, and he found himself arriving back just in time for either breakfast or sunset. And then... there she would be, waiting, as if she were the telepathic one and had known he was going to be back at that exact moment.
She took him shopping, once. He resisted the urge to sneer at the surrounding flatscans, absorbing some of her joy to be out in public, in the hustle and bustle of a Saturday afternoon market. Betsy was there, too, but she barely talked to them. She still didn't fully trust him, and watched him like a hawk with their youngest teammate.
She showed him trinkets on stalls, bought him a bag of traditional seaside rock, and dragged him into the clinch of a clothing stand for a new shirt. He let her, concentrating on her mind instead of the flotsam around him. He was a proficient enough telepath to block out psychic white noise, but old habits die hard, and he tried not to use their mental babbling as an excuse to blow up the odd cardboard box of wares.
It was not for her sake. No. He answered to nobody. He did it because he wanted to. And he only ever did what he wanted to.
They made love for the first time by the light of the setting sun. It was a tender thing, as much unlike his previous exploits as fur feels compared to dried-out scales. Afterwards they lay on the rocks as the night air turned cold, and he lit a fire to warm them both.
When he fell asleep that night he thought of neither impossibly large eyes nor small purple stones. Instead, he was suffused with the kind of contentment he later realised David had enjoyed from simply knowing his mother loved him – that there was another person on this planet who was glad he was alive.
He had not known love before, only the echo from David's memory. Nobody loved that boy's replacement. David was kind and good and treasured, whereas he was just the impostor. He could not live in a ghost's shadow. He could only hurt and destroy and be David's opposite in as many ways as possible, to emphasise that he was /not/ David, and that the prodigal son was /not/ coming back.
She cared for him, though. He'd driven so many away, but she'd stayed, even though she knew what he had done – what he was capable of. She hadn't wanted David, and though he'd tried for a very long time to deny this, laying there with his arms around her he could no longer refute that she had chosen Lucas, the replacement, over David, the original.
When she gave him one of the purple stones he kept it on his bedside table and took it to breakfast with him in the mornings. It was her way of saying 'I love you' without actually having to say it. Whenever he looked at it he remembered that first time she had come down to the beach and found both him and it there. He remembered what she'd said in that high-pitched voice of hers, and depending on his mood he either turned away and forgot about it or picked up the phone receiver and put it down again.
He was still playing games with himself, it seemed.
And then one day there was a knock at his bedroom door, and when he opened it he didn't see bobbing red pigtails, but sleek black hair and an eye of midnight blue.
Betsy didn't bother with an introduction. She just said, "If you hurt her in any way, shape or form, I shall personally lead the charge to carve up your behind and donate it to the local pound as dog food."
He didn't need to ask whom she was referring to. He didn't need his telepathy, either. He flirted with the idea of slamming the door in her face, or creating a ring of flames around those expensive leather boots she loved so much. Then he rolled his eyes, leaning on the doorframe for a more articulate response than a hotfoot.
"You ken you can order me around lassie? I thought your brother was the leader around here."
"Brian wouldn't know an emotional faux pas from his own arse after a curry," Betsy retorted. She folded her arms, ridiculously long legs made even longer by a chic black micro-skirt.
At one point, he would have chased a woman like her. True, she was Grade A Bitch material, but she also had a body to die for and a sense of fashion that set it off to greatest effect. He'd never been much fussed about personality when a catch looked like that, but now he looked at her with more tolerance than lust. He preferred small and understated to tall and flash.
[I'm going soft], he thought, and resolved to go disintegrate a training sim or two before supper.
Betsy was looking at him with hard eyes, having pulled her hair aside to reveal both. It was a momentous action, and she obviously expected him to treat it as such.
He let out a long breath. "You want me to say some solemn oath or something? We're not in the Boy Scouts, lassie, and we're a little above secret handshakes."
"Just promise me that you understand the consequences, then, if you won't promise not to hurt her."
He felt like he should be spitting something caustic at that, but he just couldn't summon the energy. "I'm not going to hurt her," he said simply, and though he didn't let it to his lips, for once he didn't fight off the end of the sentence. [I care too much about her to hurt her].
Betsy seemed satisfied and left.
He watched her go, musing on his own behaviour. Not so long ago he would have had no compunction about setting her on fire for speaking to him like that. Now, though...
Now...
He shut the door and went to the phone on his bedside cabinet. It was a private line, so he didn't have to wait for anyone to finish before he could use it, or worry about anyone listening in on his conversation. Hesitantly, he dialled a very long number he'd forgotten he'd memorised until thirty seconds ago. It was sitting there in his head, like it had been waiting for him to come and use it.
There was a sequence of clicks, followed by an echoing tone. It rang twice, and then someone picked it up.
"Hello?" said a somewhat sleepy voice. "Xavier Institute for Higher Learning."
He checked his watch. It would be about ten o' clock at night over there. "Can I speak to Charles Xavier, please?"
"Who shall I say is calling?"
"Just tell him it's bloody important, laddie," he snapped, irritated with the formalities before they'd even begun.
The speaker squeaked and the receiver creaked as it was hastily put down. He still had enough fire in him to scare people long distance, then. Good.
A minute ticked by. Then another. It wasn't in his nature to worry about what the phone bill would look like, since STRIKE took care of that sort of thing, but he felt something stir in the pit of his stomach as time marched on. He wasn't the one Xavier wanted to talk to, David was. The old coot was staying away from the phone because he'd figured out who was calling and couldn't bring himself to talk to the impostor...
The line clacked noisily. "Hello? Charles Xavier speaking."
He sucked in a breath. "It's me. Lucas."
"Lucas..." There was a loaded pause. "To what do I owe the pleasure? Is Excalibur in some kind of trouble?"
"No. Just me."
"Excuse me?"
"I was thinking... I thought... I don't know you."
Another pause. "Lucas, I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
"It's been a long time, hasn't it? A long time since... David and Ian."
To his credit, Xavier didn't waver. "Yes," he said, like this was a repeated conversation. "It has. Almost five years."
"Are you sorry?"
"About what?"
"Me." He spiralled a hand, settling on the words, "Creating me."
"What do you want me to say?"
"What I want isn't really an issue anymore. It took this long and a few bashes to the head to give me courage enough to ring this number. What I /need/ is some kind of answer from you."
Charles sighed. "I'm not sorry about creating a life, Lucas. But David..."
"Was your real son. I know." The receiver was hot in his hand. He transferred it to his other ear.
"If you'd let me finish; I was going to say that David was someone I never really got to know. I didn't know he was there. You... I have known about for nearly five years. I've known about you, but I haven't really /known/ you."
The old guy certainly didn't pull his punches. "Would you like to?" Crunch time. Time to prove her wrong or treat her to something nice for being right.
"I gave you this new number in case you ever asked that question. Is that a sufficient answer?"
Warmth. Not the searing heat of a pyrotic birthing flame, but the steady glow of being proved wrong and actually being grateful for it. "Aye. I suppose it is," he allowed. "I suppose it is."
"Lucas... you do realise I don't resent you, don't you?"
[No. I never realised. You never told me, you bastard. You just upped and left when Mam started crying that night]. "Good to know." The resentment of his mother for denying David contact with his father for almost two decades was not red hot, but it had not fully cooled, either. However, it was tempered by the question: if she had allowed contact, would today still be as it was?
A pair of large green eyes rose up in his consciousness, and despite everything he felt a surge of gratefulness towards Gabrielle Haller. David and Ian, too. Threads of the past always led up to the whole of the present, and without each strand of them the life of the son of Gabrielle and Charles would be a very different story.
For the very first time he let himself think the words, [I'm sorry] at the essences of David and Ian. And he was. He had this life, now, but it had been theirs, too. Only now was he beginning to realise what pushing himself as the dominant consciousness had done.
"Lucas?"
"Aye?"
"If I may ask, what prompted this sudden change?"
A smile ghosted across his face. "Not what, Da. Who."
-------------------
FIN.
-------------------