Shibby. 31 reviews. You people all rock. Thank y'all so much.

Gah...it's been almost a month that all but the last few paragraphs of this chapter has been sitting on my hard drive, waiting for me to finish it. Bad me and my LotR obsession. Let's see, what needs explaining... The chapter title is a Beatles song. It doesn't quite fit, but it works well enough, I guess. "Katas" are a set sequence of karate techniques, an imaginary fight, of sorts. "Tekki" are a type of kata that involve only moving side to side, while always facing forward, so they don't take up a lot of space. I guess Toad's finally getting kinda antsy (he doesn't seem like the kind who would take being confined very well).

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Once he could no longer hear Gabby's footsteps as she walked to the elevators, Toad let out a deep breath and swore eloquently in every dialect he knew for several minutes. Seeing Senator Kelly had been a surprise, seeing Mystique still alive was something akin to an electric jolt ('Don't think about that, don't bloody think about that...'). So she'd survived. That meant that the Brotherhood still had two--three, if he counted Magneto, which, after a moment's thought, he did. How likely was it that Mystique would leave her leader and lover in prison? Not very, he reasoned.

'So there ya go,' he told himself. 'Just get back to the Lair, wait fer Mystique and Magneto, and it'll be just like old times. Minus the cat, of course. Good bloody riddance.' He stood up and waited for a moment, testing to see if he was naucious or woozy. Hmm...just a little bit, sort of. Kind of wobbly. Then he frowned. He was looking for an excuse to stay. That wasn't right, not at all. Not to mention Magneto would have his slimy green hide if he found out that Toad had been taking his sweet time getting back to base because he'd been camped up with a human that he happened to like--er, tolerate the company of! Toad amended quickly. So he'd better hurry.

But then again, what about Mystique? What was she doing parading around as Senator Kelly? Presumably, the good senator must be dead, or else she had re-captured him. No, Mystique wasn't one for captives; if she'd found the person she needed to mimic, odds were that he'd be dead. So the Senator hadn't suffered any sudden, dramatic change of heart. Toad smirked. Well, so much for that plan, boss.

But what if she'd been caught? Found out? What if he wasn't the only one who had noticed her eyes? After all, it looked like she'd been hurt badly, since, as Toad remembered it, her focus never wavered for anything short of a hard kick to the groin (which, Toad had discovered, worked almost as well on women as it did on men, despite the "Great Equalizer" crap). So she could have had a relapse, or been discovered. Hell, even now, there could be some huge lynching going on, right? Toad sat back down and turned on the television, scanning channels for any news of "Senator Kelly."



"Hey, Gabby. Are you alright?" Gabby jolted out of her reverie and turned to see a sandy-haired young man with intense blue eyes looking at her, smiling.

"Hm? Oh, y-yes, fine, Jacob," she stammered awkwardly, running a hand through her hair and dragging green paint through the blonde. He chuckled and took her hand from her hair.

"You've been staring at that canvas for almost thirty minutes now." Gabby stole a glance at her primed canvas, the first background coat of rich green long since dry, and blushed.

"Just waitin' for inspiration to strike. Little tired, that's all." She avoided looking at him.

"Too tired to come to the Asylum with me tonight?" The Asylum was a local club.

"What?" Gabby's paintbrush fell from her limp fingers and she scrambled to the ground to get it. Jacob waited patiently until she sat on her stool again. To her left, Zoey paused in her painting and looked at them with interest.

"I'm headin' out to the Asylum tonight for my birthday, and I wanted to know if you'd come with me." Gabby could only stare at his grin and nod.

"S-sure..."she managed, after remembering how her vocal cords worked.

"Great. See ya there about seven, then!"

"Yeah...seven...."



"Can you hear me now?...Good!..."

Toad fidgeted through another set of commercial. During a day of channel surfing for news on Senator Kelly's new stance on Mutant Rights, all he'd learned thus far was that allegedly, Senator Kelly had been found by the Coast Guard after his helicopter had crashed almost a week ago (Toad felt mildly affronted. He'd been Senator Kelly's pilot for a few months now, and he certainly didn't think anyone would believe that he'd been so careless as to crash). His assistant and pilot had not survived --Toad snickered at the irony of /that/ statement. Mystique/Senator Kelly offered no explanation for his sudden change in policy other than: "Floating around, wondering if I was going to die, gave me a lot of time to reflect on my actions. The more I did so, the more I realized how horribly wrong I had been." Bollocks. As to his stances, the Senator was now a staunch fighter against Mutant registration, and who knew what else eventually. 'Hell,' thought Toad. 'She might actually do what Magneto couldn't...get us half-decent lives. Ch'yeah, right.' After deciding the news was crap, he had tried checking on the internet, only to be dismayed by the abysmally slow connection. 'Guess I'm jaded by the computers back at the base,' he mused while tinkering furiously with the machine. In a half hour he had cleaned up the hard-drive, found a minor virus and stopped it, re-set up her woefully out of date virus scan, and some how resisted the ever-present urge to overclock it. 'I've done it to every machine back at the Lair...couldn't hurt...' The computer ran smoothly, but the internet still didn't tell him any more than the television had, unless he counted the conspiracy-theory sites with headlines like: "Senator Kelly father of Mutant!" "Senator Kelly in torrid love-affair with fish-woman" and so on.

He stretched cautiously. While watching tv, he had done all of his stretches at least twice, and then gone through several of the smaller katas he remembered--the tekki's, mostly--to re-condition his body. The bo in the corner was tempting, but he knew that there was no way he could do more than one move without breaking something. He paused, holding his foot sideways above his head, and smiled, hearing Gabby coming up the hallway. Easy enough to tell it was her; her portfolio was whacking against everything around it and she was humming happily.

"Hel-LO Todd," she bubbled, opening the door and dropping her things. He raised an eyebrow at her.

"You're in a bloody good mood." She nodded, sweeping off to her room.

"Yup." More inane singing. He shook his head with a smirk and went back to stretching. Gabby came out suddenly, holding two tops.

"Red or black?"

"Huh?"

"Red," she held up the first. "Or black?" Toad looked at her as if she had sprouted another head.

"For what?"

"I'm meeting a friend at the Asylum tonight." He blinked and cocked his head, squinting. Interpreting his look as questioning, she explained. "It's a club. Don't go much, but he asked, and it's his birthday...and he's got a great smile..."she added under her breath with an embarrassed grin. Toad stared at her, an unreadable expression on his face, then turned his back and went back to stretching with a shrug. She cocked her head and pouted. "Oh, come on, I need help...." She thought for a moment. "You wanna come?" He turned back to her, very slowly, his face barely hiding disgust and anger.

"Wha'the hell d'you think?" She blinked, taken aback, and frowned.

"I think you could be a little more civil, and that you might just have a nice time. It's just drinks and dancing."

"Oh, yeah, they'll let me in, won't they? An' I'm sure I'll fit right bloody in." Now she looked angry.

"Y'know, you're so busy being bitter about the hand you got dealt that you never let yourself have any bloody fun. Why don't you pull your head out of you @ss and stop worrying about what people are going to think?"

"Oh, I'll tell ya why," he growled, getting up and striding towards her. "Because every time I stopped worrying about what you flatlines think, I got the sh*t beaten outta me. Every time I thought that maybe I could have a decent life, like I was a normal, or something, one of you humans comes along and snatches it away, or tries to lock me up, or brand a number into my skin or something. It's always the bloody same! I've learned my bleedin' place, and it's not with you stupid normals! So just go and enjoy your feggin party, but leave me th' hell alone about it!" He broke of with a snarl to rival Sabertooth's and stalked off to the kitchen, leaving Gabby, who had grown dangerously still, standing in the doorway.

"Fine," she said icily, then whirled around to her room and slammed the door. In the thick silence that followed, the tenet below could be clearly be heard telling the "darn kids" to keep the noise down.

Toad sucked down half a beer angrily and nursed what was left of the bottle, shaking with fury. What the bloody hell was she thinking? And how dare she tell him what he should do? She had no idea what life was like for him. She thought she was so bloody righteous. 'Oh, look at me, I'm helping the horrible, ugly mutant that nobody loves. That makes me a good person,' he mimicked bitterly in his head. 'Yeah, that's bloody right. Just keep acting nice, right? Prove to yourself that you're not a bad person like all the rest. I don't buy that shyte...' He was having difficulty thinking of any more coherent insulting thoughts, so he settled for wallowing in loathing and self-pity. 'And besides...' part of him whispered before he could squash it down. 'She'd be there with someone else, so it's not like I would be...'

A loud knock on the door interrupted his sulking.

"Gabs? Open up!" Zoey's voice called through the door. Toad hesitated, not really wanting to deal with the hyperactive red-head, but she kept banging on the door. With an angry sigh, he got up and opened it.

She gasped when she saw him glaring at her from the doorway, paling a little before she recovered her questionable composure. She offered a smile which was answered by a surly grunt as he turned away and walked back to the counter where he'd be sitting, dismissively motioning for her to come in.

"Hey Todd. Gabby ready yet?"

"How th' bloody hell should I know?" he muttered into his beer.

"In a minute," Gabby called from her room. Toad frowned. Her voice sounded...off. Ah, screw her anyway. Zoey flopped down on the couch and craned her head towards Toad.

"So, Todd, how goes?" she asked pleasantly. He glared sullenly at her and grumbled something into his beer. Zoey blinked and turned around to look at him more intently. Toad squirmed, uncomfortably with the sudden, uncanny shrewdness that had entered her eyes. Maybe she was more perceptive than she let on. She opened her mouth, about to say something he knew he didn't want to hear when Gabby walked in.

"Hey, 'm ready." Despite himself, Toad looked over at her. She'd chosen the red top, he noted absently. Her eyes looked...funny. He turned away quickly. Had she been crying? He glared at the wall; he didn't care if she had been. What the hell was there for her to cry about anyway.

There was a perceptible tension between them as Gabby stared at the back of Toad's head, looking as if she wanted to say something. After waiting expectantly for nothing to be said, Zoey jumped up and bustled her friend towards the door.

"'Later, Todd. I'll bring her back tonight, kay?" He jerked his hand dismissively over his shoulder and she shrugged. Gabby stopped at the door.

"Look, Todd..." she paused and he held his breath, eyes shut. "I'm sorry," she said at last, before Zoey yanked her out. As he heard the key click in the lock, Toad let out a shallow breath and opened his eyes, feeling something damp on one cheek.

"Yeah," he muttered to the shadows on the wall, and drained his beer.





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Hmm...what's Gabby sorry for? Her really stupid advice? Getting into a fight? Going out with somebody else? I'll bet she doesn't even know. Maybe all of the above. Her advice really was stupid tho. More camp-counsler than what I'd tell a green terrorist who's been hated on all his life, but *shrug* Anyway...

Next chapter: In Vino Veritas (props to anyone who knows what that means)