PART ELEVEN: Media Darlings

Thanks to everyone for their endless patience and reviews. Especial thanks to Kittie La Rue for motivating me to get off my derriere and do some serious ficcing. If you have anything remotely resembling taste, read something else. That said, how did you get this far if you have any taste, I mean it's only a comedy of manners with added slashiness, transvestism, and National Enquirer . With added melodrama, angst and very low comedy. If you don't have any taste, please read and review.

Asterisks indicate telepathy. I don't do telepathy, it makes you go blind. ;-)

Everyone in the rec room froze as Jubilee TV hit the view-screens. Paige wanted to be somewhere else and was on the verge of husking into the same tasteless floral chintz as the sofa, Annie wanted to find out if Kurt was going to face his demons and come out as a bisexual transvestite with a pretty-much-everything fetish, and Jubilee had a strange faraway smile on her face hypnotised by her own genius.

But the eyes of everyone in the room weren't on them, it was on the now not so merry trio sitting on the white leather sofa. Martha had borrowed Sophie's eyes to have a look and was wondering how the gay men had managed to pick the most tasteful and stylish chair out of all the mismatched furniture in the room and whether they would advise on what colour she should get her new bottle in, she rather fancied pink but was that all too much?

Bobby didn't know what to do; he knew he ought to freeze Jubilee's perky little ass for doing this to his friend but he couldn't help but admire her pluck, he'd never attempted a stunt like this and never would. Snowballs, ice-slides, buckets of water over doors; all this wonderful things had, in Bobby's mind one thing in common, none of them were going to hurt anyone's feelings for more than five minutes, none of them were going to leave somebody scarred for life with only selling their story to the National Enquirer to look forward to.

Jean-Paul was desperately thinking with his swift mind, to try and find a course of action that would not result in his dismembering Miss Jubilation Lee and her cohorts. Not, he would have to admit, because he had any particular moral qualms about that course of action, but rather because it would get him kicked off the team and then how would he see cher Robert again? He was a man of the world, he knew long-distance relationships never worked, and without the wonderful light that Robert bought into his life, how would he drive away the darkness of fear and doubt that preyed eternally on his mind…

And what of Kurt Gainsborough Wagner? What of him, the Elf, the Crawler of the Night, the Bogie, known by so many names and so many guises to mankind, and by Blueberry Muffin to certain select young ladies? What of his mind, his soul, the centre of his being, cast cruelly adrift on the seas of self doubt and loneliness?

Kurt felt the ropes holding him to the safe harbour of identity being cut. He watched reality grow smaller and smaller in the distance as he floated away on an ocean of sound-bites and flim-flam. He was a sole survivor cast adrift by a mutinous crew, cast out upon the wine-dark sea. He could hear the gulls and cormorants circling overhead, waiting for that moment when they could scavenge his blue-furred flesh from his bones. He could just see, almost beyond sight, the dark shadows of sharks following in his wake as the foaming waves grew ever higher.

He was Captain Bligh of The Bounty, he grasped that identity in the midst of the storm, as the winds of rumour drove the cutting rain into his face. And yet he stood there proudly, at the prow of his boat, as every wave drenched his clothes and began to fill the unprotected lifeboat that was without oars without supplies and without hope. Still he stood there, looking back at his distant tormentors, the treacherous curs, who had left him to the vagaries of the elemental ocean, rather than face him in an honourable fight. And he laughed at them. Laughed at the hand that fate dealt him as a dangerous light glinted in his almond-yellow eyes. He would defy them all, or die trying, felled by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The laugh caught everyone unawares, there was a collective intake of breath as they all looked at Kurt and saw him standing there, sword in hand, laughing in the face of Destiny and trashy tele-journalism. Most saw that dangerous, electrifying look in his eyes and tried desperately to break their gaze but could not.

Gaveedra7 the warrior of the Cadre know to all men who know fear (and his substantial fan club in an alternate dimension) as Shatterstar, at last looked away from the television screen with bold and gargantuan effort, and beheld with shining eyes, that man, the Nightcrawler, and something grew bright in his hearts. Here at last, was a real man, a man the worthy equal of any of the Cadre; and he without turning spoke in a soft voice that only his paramour could hear and in a language that only his paramour, the seismic Rictor, could understand, "Now that truly, is a man, do you think he would enjoy the honour our company? And then we could teach him the ways of warriors and the pure love of comrades in arms. Would he like MTV?"

At that moment the ground began to shake with a jealous lust-tinged fury. And still Kurt laughed. And stood there, steady, with his eyes focused on some ethereal distance. Martha, for the first time since she had come to live in a jar through the callous manipulations of John Sublime, felt desperately sick and the white matter of her attenuated nervous system tried desperately to wrestle with a phantom stomach and ghost limbs. This was not helped by the fact she had patched her way into sweet Ernst's eyes, too, so that she might better judge the contents of Kurt's kilt. As a result, the world jarringly swung this way and that, as if she was looking through a broken stereoscope. She could feel her absent/not absent eyes water and spin and she began to sink beneath the psionic feedback flooding in the room.

And then everything stopped. The feed to the view screen cut out. And Julio Esteban Richter heard in his mind, a cooly seductive voice whisper, O Julio, I think you should keep your passions in check in the future. My, my, isn't he big and of course, he's all yours isn't he? Why should I be embarrassed, tell me? I'm a qualified sex therapist. I kept the certificate by my bed. And a copy in my Louis Vuitton, in case of emergencies. Frankly, you're an amateur. Not that I have anything against amateurs, they can be quite creative sometimes. Oh my, do you really think a sweet, gentle, church-going boy like Kurt Wagner could do something like that? It's not as if you're ever going to find out. He's straight. Well, I think he's straight…

All those words wrote themselves indelibly on Rictor's mind, and left a few handy sex tips and a quadruple-x video from Amsterdam's X-Corps Chapter, in a fraction of a pico-second.

And then, WHAT IN ALL THE CIRCLES OF HELL INCLUDING THE ONES DANTE DIDN'T PUT IN HIS FRANKLY OVER-RATTED POEM IS GOING ON? KURT/JEAN-PAUL/BOBBY/KITTY/ANNIE/PAIGE AND JUBILEE COME TO MY OFFICE AT ONCE! And, Miss Jubilation Lee, you have a lot of explaining to do.