22 reviews! Wow! Thanks so much, all of you! *feels so loved* Guin...what do y'all say instead of pants? Totally agree with you on syntax and slang, tho. I'm still real wary of using a lot, since Gambit's horribly stereotyped accent scarred me as a child... Um... Poor Toad and his nightmares... The ****** are used to indicate a section in italics, since it's a flashback. And Toad and X-men are (c) Marvel (*sigh*)

Hot Showers and Surprises

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When Toad woke up the next morning, he felt refreshed somehow. He had a vague memory of something happening last night, but only knew that he felt much better about whatever had been troubling him. He sighed happily and smiled into his pillow.

"Hey. How ya feelin'?" He felt a tap on his head and grumbled irritably. Gabby's voice was /much/ too cheerful this early in the morning.

"Mrmph." He raised a hand to swat her away. And stopped, eyes wide as every muscle in his arm and shoulder was caught on thousands of tiny hooks of pain. "Owww......" he managed to gasp. He lowered his arm and groaned. Gabby had been right, d*mn her. An experimental attempt to shrug his shoulders confirmed it.

"Sore?" He cursed very expressively in response, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain. The last time he had been this sore was right after Magneto had taken him in. In desperation to prove himself a worthy soldier for his savior, he had spent weeks doing nothing but hard training. And the time before that...

******

"Come on, Mortie. Ready for a quick jog?"

"Oww...I can't move, Sensei..." A soft empathetic chuckle.

"I told you to cool down before you went to sleep. You're body's not used to training. Is this any better?"

"Ah?...Mm-hm...."

******

"Here." Toad's eyes snapped open. Hands on his back, firmly pressing against his aching shoulders. "Does this help?"

"What are you doing?" he croaked. She continued kneading the kinks out.

"It's called a back-rub. Works best when you relax," she added pointedly. Toad bit his lip. In the past three days he'd been touched more than he had been in the last ten years and it was still new enough to scare him. To hurt. Every time her fingers brushed against his skin without a hint of fear or repulsion stabbed a knife through his heart in a way he couldn't understand. And now...before it had been a methodical touch while tending to wounds, like --and he had to sneer at this-- like any decent human being would do. Or business-like, posing him like a wooden mannequin. Now it was tender, a gesture of friendship. She didn't have to do this; given a few minutes, a half hour at the most, he would be able to rub the worst of it out. But there were her hands, rubbing up and down his back.

"Why--?" he started, feeling a hot pricking at the corners of his eyes. He turned his head angrily, muffling his face in the couch so that the cushions would absorb the tears without Gabby seeing them. If she heard or saw, she gave no sign, but pressed down harder, working out the stiffness.

"Mmph...You've got a lot of knots, boy,"she observed. "Too much stress in your life." He felt himself smiling bitterly through the tears. Stress? She had no bloody idea. He stifled a groan as her knuckles dug into one particularly sore spot below his shoulder.

"Howsat? Better?"

"Urng...mmph...oh, God, yes," he mumbled into the cushions. Her hands moved to the other side.

"Told ya this would happen. You can't just sit around for three days then do the stuff you did and not expect it to hurt like hell in the morning."

"It was--" A short gasp as she worked at another knot. "--just stretching." She chuckled and said nothing, just kept kneading. Toad felt tears slipping from his eyes and didn't know why, but hated himself for it. Even through all the pain before his burns had healed, he hadn't let himself let out so much as a yelp ('What about that first night?' whispered a treacherous part of his mind. 'You cried then. She helped you then.' 'Shut up!').

"I'm not kidding about those knots," said Gabby after a while, not noticing, or pretending not to notice his tears. "You think you'd take better care of yourself than that. Tension like that, it can really mess with your muscles in a fight."

"You try getting hit by lightning and see how bloody tense you are," he muttered. Gabby's hands stopped halfway up his back, his shirt bunched around them.

"You were hit by lightning?" she asked, stunned. Toad grimaced and set his jaw. He'd said more than enough right there. There was an expectant pause until Gabby realized he wasn't going to continue. Growing used to his sudden silences she began massaging his back again. 'I wonder if I'll ever get to really know him,' she thought with a rueful grin. Despite his wariness, Toad found himself relaxing under her hands. 'A bloke could get used to this,' he thought before he caught himself.

After another few minutes, she pressed hard on his shoulders, then ran her hands quickly down his back, smoothing his shirt out and the last of the tension away. Standing up, she stretched and looked down at him.

"Well, a hot shower and a good breakfast and you'll be right as rain." He had to agree with her there. She dug around in her closet until she found a pair of jeans big enough to fit him and baggy enough so that he wouldn't look like a queen (she admitted, with some embarrassment, to having gone through a poser-punk stage her first year in college when he inquired about the pants) and tossed him a clean shirt, then went to fix breakfast.

Toad stood under the shower-head, basking in the steaming water that pelted his loosened muscles. 'Ahhhh... Does anything else feel this good?' he thought lazily. The memory of Gabby's hands on his back came into his mind and he shook his head vigorously, scattering water droplets. It didn't fade. 'Well, maybe that's a close second,' he admitted to himself with a grin.

The hot water felt like it was melting away his problems and sending them to swirl in the drain with the dirt. Hot showers had been one of the first and few pleasures he had discovered since meeting Magneto. He glanced warily at the soap and sighed. Herbal Essences. Of course. It wasn't that he would really mind smelling like a field of "Mountain Fresh Strawberries"--though he would. Very much so.--it was that he was allergic. Most kinds of soap dried out his skin and made it itch and burn unmercifully, and if there was one thing he didn't need right now, it was that. He remembered younger days of looking and feeling like he had a permanent, peeling sunburn--a green one-- before the brothers at St. Augustine had discovered the problem and bothered to amend it (and the latter had not followed the former with any great speed, he thought bitterly). Oh well. He'd have to make do with water and as much vigorous scrubbing as his newly-healed skin would allow.

Out of the shower, however, a whole new set of problems came at him.

'What am I still doing here?' he thought suddenly. 'I'm fine...just a little achy, and I get tired easily, but there's nothing stopping me from just leaving.' He sighed 'I should, anyway. It's about time...I don't belong here.' The idea of leaving was painful somehow, and he stopped and pondered this sensation curiously, like probing a wound. Why was it so bad? The treacherous corner of his mind whispered a word to him and he frowned. No, that was not right. He growled angrily to shake himself out of such thoughts and dressed quickly.

Walking out of the bathroom, still toweling his hair, he found Gabby staring at the television screen. Two plates of french toast were sitting neglected on the table.

"Todd...I think you should see this," she said, her voice curious and excited. He walked around to the back of the couch and nearly dropped his towel. On the television screen was Senator Kelly. Toad stared, half in wonder, half in fear. So the Senator had survived? When Sabertooth --stupid cat-- had let him fall, Magneto had pretty much given him up for dead and Toad had been just as happy. One last mutant-hating human to have to deal with. His hands twisted the towel angrily--How dare the Senator still be alive when Magneto was in prison and Sabertooth and Mystique were missing...dead? Automatically, his mind began working out assassination ideas, piecing together old plots Magneto had come up with that he had carried out enough times to know by heart. And then he heard what the man was saying.

"...Deeply regret what I have done. Mutants and mutant-rights should be embraced, not oppressed. They are as human as we are. And I will fight with all my power to see that mutants are treated equally." As the crowd erupted into questions, Toad felt his body go slack. He sagged against the back of the couch and felt a daft smile spread across his face. It had worked! Magneto's plan had worked! Even if the whole Ellis Island thing had gone up in flames--or lightning-- at least one thing had been a success. The senator was now an ally. Toad would never go so far to think of him as "Brother," like Magneto had called him, but now, not fully human himself, the senator could not--

On the screen, something happened that no one could have caught. That is, no one who hadn't spent years training against an opponent who could look like anyone. No one who hadn't landed a crucial, painful blow and seen his opponent's incredible control snap for a split second. For a brief moment, when a reported brushed up against his stomach, Senator Kelly's eyes flashed yellow. Toad's breath caught.

"Mystique..." he breathed.

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Mmph, awkward phrasing in some parts... I may go back and re-re-write this someday...just to fix a few things. The soap idea came from a Toad line in Evo: "Ew, I touched soap!" It was too cute not to play with.

Toad: So can I make out with Gabby yet? I'm tired of freaking out every time she touches me. I want some sweet sweet lovin'

Xany: No! *cracks whip* Angst, boy, angst I say! Or back in the playpen with Sabertooth!

Toad: ....alright...