Chapter Two: Skeletons in the Closet

Disclaimer: Still don't own Mutant X, but I do claim rights to giving Adam a hobby in this story. Poor guy needed something other than genetics to occupy him. I also don't own the verse in here (you'll know it when you see it): it's a verse from the song "Wash it all Away" by Evanescence.

Warning: A/M relationship, just mildly PG (there's too much tension between the two for them to have just been co-workers ;-))

If Adam Kane had taught the members of Mutant X one valuable lesson, it was to hope for the best but to expect the worst. When they woke in the morning (with the exception of Shalimar, who had stayed up with Adam all night) they discovered neither extreme. In fact, there had been very little change at all. When they had all gathered, Shalimar gave them the brief update. "The brain waves changed at about two hours ago… it looks like there is more activity, but I don't know what it means. This isn't really my thing," she apologized.

"It's amazing: we need Adam's technical expertise to find out what's wrong with him," Brennan pointed out wryly, stifling a yawn behind his hand. "Emma how's your head?" he questioned.

She nodded. "It's much better. I probably just strained myself to hard," she explained. "Nothing a good sleep couldn't cure," she added brightly.

Jesse smiled back. "At least that's good news. Look, I'm starving. I'm going to go get some breakfast. I'll be back in a bit," he told them.

Brennan perked up at the idea of food. "That sounds like a good idea, I'll come with you," he declared.

"Nice job with the concealer. I can hardly tell it's there," Shalimar told Emma once the boys were out of earshot. She had heard Emma pacing the hallways last night. "Did you sleep at all?" the blonde asked.

Emma sighed. "Not very well, but yeah. And my head does feel better," she assured the feral. "Shalimar, can I ask you some questions about Adam? You've known him the longest," she explained.

"Sure, Emma. If you think it will help," she said seriously.

"How much did Adam tell you about his time at Genomex?" she started.

"Not a lot. He worked there for about twenty years, starting as Dr. Breedlove's assistant and he moved up from there," Shalimar explained. "He said the research he was doing was supposed to help cure genetic problems: MS, neurological disorders, stuff like that. He told me he didn't know how the research was being applied until near the end of his time there."

Emma furrowed her brow. "Didn't it ever strike you as odd that it took someone as smart as Adam almost twenty years to figure out what his research was doing? He can usually tell when someone isn't telling the truth," she offered. She had often wondered if Adam had some natural psychic tendencies; he always seemed to know when something was wrong.

Shalimar scowled at her. "Are you trying to imply something?" she asked in a challenging tone.

Emma sighed, noting the feral's sudden behavioural change. "I'm just wondering why he always gets so evasive when I ask him about it. And last night I saw something in his mind, like a memory… or a nightmare…" Emma paused and shivered, remembering the brief image she had received. "I'm sure it was a Genomex lab, but there were shelves full of jars. In each jar there was something that resembled a fetus, but they were somehow… changed. Like they were early attempts at creating ferals; some had scaly skin, others seemed to have fur. The odd thing was that I didn't notice any shock, horror, nothing! It didn't seem like him at all,"

Shalimar looked down at Adam, then back at Emma. "Are you sure of what you saw? You did say you had overextended yourself," she offered helpfully. "I'm sure Adam would have told me if he had seen something like that. Or maybe it was just something his mind put together on its own, like imagining the worst possible thing that could happen at work."

Emma nodded carefully, biting her bottom lip. "Did he ever say anything to you about his old love interests?" she asked, blushing at having to ask.

Shalimar snorted. "I have wondered that myself, sometimes. Do you think that the woman who did this is an old love interest?" she asked quickly.

"Right now I have no clue. I'm going to try to get through to him telepathically again. Maybe his brain function means he's aware in there," Emma suggested hopefully.

Shalimar smiled. "Right now, anything would be better than sitting around doing nothing." She paused and looked into Emma's dark eyes and added softly, "I don't need to tell you how helpless I feel right now… and how terrifying it is for me to be helpless."

Emma rubbed Shalimar's shoulder. "Everything will be fine, Shal, we've all made it through worse," she assured her blonde friend. Without another world, she reached out to connect with Adam. Touching his mind today felt like being filled with ice and she mentally cringed, unbearably chilled from the contact. There was more function, definitely. It wasn't the blackness of yesterday; it was more like vivid torture. She 'saw' Adam being forced to watch something, something he didn't want to see. He struggled against it, but couldn't seem to get away.

"Adam, can you hear me?" she prodded his mind, trying to get him to recognize her presence. She felt a strong barrier pushing its way up and a chilling androgynous voice screamed, "GET OUT! You don't belong here!"

Just before the barrier blocked her from Adam completely, she thought she heard Adam howl, "Mason, I'm sorry!"

She took a long gulp of air as she exited Adam's mind. She looked over where she had left Shalimar, only to notice that Jesse and Brennan had returned. Weary from trying to fight Adam's mind she groaned, "How long?"

"Only ten minutes this time," Shalimar replied. "Still too long if you ask me," she added protectively. She didn't want to say it, but sometimes Emma scared her. The other members of Mutant X had powers you could see and feel, but the psionics abilities were different; no one could be sure of what was going on inside Emma's head.

Emma blinked a couple times, looking again at Jesse and Brennan, knowing it took them longer than that to eat. "You screamed, Emma. We heard you halfway across Sanctuary. What the hell is going on?" Brennan asked in a no-nonsense manner.

Emma looked at the monitor displaying the brain wave scans again, finally noticing a pattern she could recognize. "Memory…" she murmured, barely loud enough for even Shalimar's sensitive ears. "Someone is forcing Adam to relive his memories…" she stated slowly, but with certainty.

"I think I lost you there, Emma," Jesse told her, "because that would make no sense at all. Why would anyone do that to Adam?"

Emma shook her head in disbelief. "We know next to nothing about Adam's life before Mutant X, we don't know if he was disliked by anyone," she reminded them. Suddenly it made more sense. "You said that he looked like he had seen a ghost… he didn't expect to see her again. And if it's someone from his past, that would explain why the long-term memory centers are being activated. Memories of her…" No, that didn't make sense. "What would Adam be telling Mason Eckhart he's sorry for?" she murmured, too low for even Shalimar's sensitive hearing.

Emma wheeled around to leave the room, everyone staring after her in shock. "Where are you going?" she heard Jesse call to her.

"To find some clues…" she murmured, well out of earshot of the others.

Brennan found her half an hour later, going through the contents of Adam's quarters. "You know we're not supposed to be in here," he admonished from the doorway, hoping to startle her.

"And a former thief is on such high moral ground when it comes to breaking and entering," she replied without as much as a turn of the head. "Besides, I don't think Adam will mind if it helps us pull him out of it," she added. Sighing, she sat on the narrow bed and looked around the sparse room.

"So, he's not a material man," Brennan noticed. "Going top to bottom?" he asked. She was right that he had committed the same crime, but on perfect strangers. He knew how to be fast and thorough.

"Actually, left to right," she replied. "Brennan, it's not just the lack of things, it is the lack of… personality that gives me the creeps. I mean, he lives here, doesn't he? I don't know how anyone can function like this!" she moaned. "He's a scientist, he writes everything down. I've seen him write down how many cups of coffee he's drank that day on data sheets as a margin for error. All of those," she gestured to a large bookshelf, filled with thick books, "are handwritten journals. They date back as young as seven years old. But there's a gap here," she pointed out.

Brennan noticed that before the gap the journals were different sizes, colors, and textures; after the gap, however, they were all identical brown leather covers, all the same size. "So his tastes changed," he conceded.

Emma shook her head. "Look what separates the two sides of the time gap," she suggested. Sitting directly where she said the gap occurred was a group photo of Mutant X, everyone smiling for the invisible camera.

They had given him the silver-framed photo as a birthday gift from the whole team… it was the only one they had managed to take without some sort of silliness showing up in the pictures.

"So what? Lots of people keep pictures on shelves. Hell, I have the same picture on my bedside table. Emma, why do you find it so suspicious?" Brennan asked, getting irritated.

She sighed, knowing Brennan had not received the strangest information yet. "It's a twenty year gap that fell specifically during the time he was at Genomex. And a bunch of pages ripped out at the back of the journal just before the gap. Isn't that just a little strange for him?" she asked.

"How did he start the next journal? The first line?" Brennan asked with keen interest. He had always been curious about Adam's past and this presented an interesting time for him to find out.

Emma's eyes met his as she repeated the strange message on the first page: "It was all my fault… Now, I am forced to start again in a life I don't want. I have to put certain… things… behind me," She shook her head in disbelief. "It just didn't sound like his writing voice at all, but after that it went back to normal, with some major additions to his vocabulary and none of the people he knew from before the gap. I know that there's more here, another clue."

Brennan looked at her gently. "Maybe you should get something to eat and come back with some fresh ideas," he suggested as his stomach growled.

Emma laughed. "You just don't want to miss it if I find something interesting," she scolded playfully.

Brennan couldn't resist the taunt. "Hey, how often do you get to search your boss's bedroom for the skeletons in his closet?" Something nagged in the back of Emma's mind about the phrase, but decided to think about it later.

Instead of going right back to Adam's room after brunch, they decided to meet up and have a meeting in the medical bay. "We need to pick a leader in the interim," Shalimar declared. "I mean, if we all start giving each other orders, it will turn into complete chaos. We'll be at each other's throats in no time," she continued.

"Not me," Emma said quickly." If I'm going to help Adam at all, I need to focus on him. I can't have the welfare of you guys on my mind too. It would drive me insane," she informed them.

A harsh breath shocked everyone out of their discussion. Emma looked down at Adam and noticed how dry his lips were. "He's dehydrating. We have to get fluids into him," she said.

"I'll get the IV kit," Jesse offered. As they looked at what the kit contained, Jesse looked up and asked, "Uh… has anyone ever done this before?"

Looking at each other, they realized that no one but Adam had set up an IV before. "Brennan, are you okay?" Emma asked, noticing his nervousness.

Brennan shook his head. "I don't like needles…" he told them, turning a bit grey.

Emma sighed. "I've taken blood before. This can't be too different," she assured them. "So… we have a bag of saline and a saline lock. Can someone pass me gloves, an alcohol swab, and the rubber band thing?" she asked. Shalimar quickly procured them and Emma got to work. "Wow… he has huge veins," she marvelled once the tourniquet was on. "So the needle goes in… rubber band off… hang up the bag… and insert drip thing here," she said, more to herself than anyone.

Jesse was impressed. "You did that well… how did you know where everything went?" he asked.

Emma bit her lip. "Promise not to tell him when he wakes up?" she asked warily. After everyone had nodded she replied, in the simplest terms possible, "I guessed."

Brennan looked ready to pass out. "Um… good job?" he said, unsure whether she had done it right. Shalimar grinned at the elemental's reaction to the impromptu doctoring. "Have you seen it done before?" he asked. Emma nodded reassuringly as she taped the device more securely to Adam's arm.

"Okay… back to the leader thing. How do we pick fairly?" Shalimar asked. "I mean, Adam meant for us to work as equals; we're all indispensable on missions," she added.

Jesse looked up. "I would have picked Emma, but she won't do it. Sometimes Adam just seemed to know if we were about to do something stupid. Kept us from getting hurt when he warned us against ourselves," he reminded them.

"We'll just have to warn each other," Shalimar replied. As much as her feral side itched to be in charge, her human instincts warned her of the dangers. "Well, why don't we vote? We can't vote for ourselves, and since Emma won't do it, we can use her vote as a tie-breaker," she suggested.

Brennan, Jesse and Emma quickly agreed. After a minute of thinking, they declared a name.

"Jesse," Shalimar said firmly.

"Jesse," Brennan echoed.

"Shalimar," Jesse declared

"Jesse," Emma stated calmly.

Jesse was dumbfounded. "Can I ask you guys why?" he wondered out loud. "I mean, I just didn't see that coming.

Emma was the first to reply. "You think things through better. No offence, guys," she added quickly, "but you two a bit impulsive."

Shalimar chuckled. "A bit? Me? You must be going for understatement of the year," she quipped. "Anyway, Jesse, what should we be doing?"

"Well… um… Shalimar, you stay with Adam. I seriously doubt anything could persuade you to leave his side anyway," he said with an understanding smile. "Emma, Brennan, you keep looking for… well, whatever it is you think you might find," he said cautiously. No one had told Shalimar about their snooping through Adam's room. She would probably rip their heads off when she found out. For some reason Adam had suggested to her that his privacy was as important as his well-being.

"And what will you do, fearless leader?" Brennan asked. It had hurt his pride that no one thought he could lead the team.

"Well, Sparky," he started, using a nickname he and Brennan had laughed about, "I'm going to do what I do best: search the computers. Narrow down the list of possible psionics that could be doing this to Adam. Once I have a list together, we'll meet up here and figure out what the next step is," he told them. Everyone nodded and they parted ways.

"But why would Jesse vote for Shalimar? She is a feral, which means she's not always in control of herself," Brennan pointed out to Emma. "I understand you; Jesse is calmer than I am, but Shalimar?"

'Fragile male egos,' she mused to herself, knowing that his feelings about it would pass in time. "Well, there are two very logical answers. One: maybe it would hurt his pride to take orders from you, or two: he understands that Shalimar's feral side is hell-bent towards getting Adam through this. Both of Shalimar's sides see him as family," she reminded him.

Brennan made a pensive noise and conceded the point. "You know that at least two of us would have voted for you," he casually mentioned.

Emma shook her head. "I'm not ready for that. Adam's mind is chaotic right now. It's exhausting just to see if he's still aware in that mental prison of his." She stopped abruptly as her foot hit something under Adam's bed. She bent down to retrieve it and noticed it was a pencil case, stocked full of pencils, erasers, and pencil crayons. "I didn't know Adam drew," she mused. Looking under the bed, directly in the centre, were two large stacks of drawing pads.

"Probably just doodles," Brennan told her. "He's always busy doing something else. Where would he find the time?" he asked.

"Insomnia," she replied. "He rarely sleeps more than four hours a day." She gasped as she opened the book. It was a lifelike sketch of Shalimar sitting at a computer. On the next page it was re-done in color and perfect detail.

"Whoa, I take it back. These are amazing. And there's his signature, next to the date," Brennan noticed. He paused for a moment, and then grinned wildly. "He may not have journals, but we may have pictures of the people he was around during those years!" he exclaimed.

They sat back-to-back, carefully looking through the books for the missing years of Adam's life. Emma found the time frame she was looking for fairly quickly, but soon discovered one face was repeated frequently throughout the book: Mason Eckhart. He looked much younger then: more muscular frame, no glasses, neat brown hair… she also noticed several of him in just shorts, exercising, and had to stifle a laugh. He didn't seem the athletic type.

"Wow, Emma, look at this one: Adam did a portrait of his mother. It's so detailed; she looks so peaceful. Where do you think these were drawn?" Three small letters, meticulously drawn onto the corner of the page, were like a punch in the gut. Brennan blanched as soon as Emma pointed to them: R.I.P. "He sketched his mother at her funeral? That is just plain morbid." He declared, closing the book and setting it carefully aside.

It was always Adam's attention to detail that she admired. In fact, she had noticed a small detail on each topless drawing of Eckhart, so she had to suppress a gasp when she found a full nude. Thankfully, his arm was over his face so he was unidentifiable when Brennan turned to see what had shocked her.

"Wow, Adam was a naughty boy in his youth," he mused aloud. To Brennan, all it was a drawing of was a nude man lying in a bed looking very satisfied and sleeping it off. To Emma, however, it was a complete shock: the very same scar as the other drawings, jagged on the left side of the rib cage. It was Eckhart; there could be no doubt about it. "So, were those the Genomex years?" he asked.

"They're the right years, but it's sort of… more personal drawings," Emma declared, blushing, as she flipped through the next few pages. She set this book aside, and picked up another. "These aren't just plain drawings…" Emma gasped. "These are technical drawings, drawings of lab layouts. It's from his early days at Genomex," she noted, looking at the dates. The diagrams soon became strands of DNA, color-coded in the normal way on the left page, but had distinctive color differences in what Emma realized were key base pairs. "He drew his research?" she marvelled.

Brennan turned around and saw the double helixes drawn perfectly on page after page. "Of course. Any written research would be carefully monitored. If they knew he always carried drawing pads, they would think nothing of it. Brilliant," he marvelled. "We should let Jesse plug these into the computer and she what it would give us as a translation," he suggested.

"Yeah," Emma agreed. "You do that, but I need a more personal insight into Adam. I'm going to keep looking, see if there are any red-heads in here," she suggested. He would occasionally write names to go with his drawings; maybe she could find her in one of the other drawings. That and she wanted to find out if Eckhart was aware he was being drawn by Adam.

Brennan left and Emma continued to search for more information. She could never be sure in the drawings if Eckhart knew of Adam's fascination with him. She gave up after a bit, and decided to go look at the group photo again. Something about where it was, the way there had been fingerprints on the glass; Adam wouldn't have touched the glass for no reason. It wasn't like him at all. She put her fingers over the smudged prints on the glass and nearly dropped it when the backing lifted out, exposing another picture hidden behind the group photo.

She lifted out the hidden picture carefully. It showed Adam and Mason, arms around each other's shoulders, grinning like idiots. She turned the picture over and noticed a short poem written there:

Lying beside you
Listening to you breathe
The life that flows inside of you
Burns inside of me
Hold and speak to me
Of love without a sound
Tell me you will live through this
And I will die for you
Cast me not away
Say you'll be with me
For I know I cannot
Bear it all alone

- All my love to my beautiful artist

He had signed his name below: it clearly read Mason Eckhart. Emma's mind reeled with this new development. 'What on earth happened between you two?' she wondered. Carefully, she put all but the photo and the one drawing pad back where they belonged. She quickly brought those two items back to her quarters. As she flipped through the last few pages, she knew she had found what she was looking for: the red-headed woman, with a more current-looking Eckhart glowering down at her disapprovingly. There were only two problems: Adam had chosen not to write down her name, and she was in a stasis pod. How had she gotten out of the stasis pod? It didn't matter right now; all that mattered was finding Adam, bringing him back to the waking world.

After she had hidden the items away, Emma returned to the medical bay. "Having fun, Shalimar?" she called out, noticing the remnants of at least five heavy-duty stress balls scattered around the floor.

Shalimar growled. "They aren't relieving my stress, and now I've made a mess everywhere," she explained slowly, forcing herself back into control of her feral side. "I swear, when we find who did this to him, she is going to wish that I had taken pity and killed her," she fumed.

Emma sighed. "I need to ask you another question about Adam," she began. "What exactly happened between him and Eckhart? Why can't they tolerate each other, if they used to work together?"

Shalimar stared at Emma like she was crazy. "Gee, I don't know… could it be that Eckhart wants us destroyed, while Adam protects us from him?" The question was so full of sarcasm and venom that it didn't take a psionic to figure it out. "Do you think the GSA sent the woman?" she asked excitedly.

Emma shook her head. "It's not Eckhart's style. He would have made the attempt to capture Adam; Jesse and Brennan swore that she ran right after Adam collapsed," Emma explained. "Has there been any change in him?" she asked, putting her hand on his.

Before she could get an answer, her mind was pulled into whatever Hell it was that Adam was trapped in. Remembering what had happened the last two times she allowed her presence to be noticed, she had to force herself to observe.

She knew it was Genomex she was seeing by the architecture, but most of the equipment was unfamiliar to her. It seemed similar to an X-ray room, with a concrete wall, and presumably controls for the device (whatever it did) that hung pointing at the centre of the room. She placed herself in an unobtrusive corner, and watched as Adam and Eckhart walked in together, followed by… Adam? The older Adam, her Adam, came and stood next to her. "They can't see us," he told her.

"What is this place?" Emma asked. She averted her eyes as the younger versions of Adam and Eckhart began kissing playfully.

Adam looked sheepishly at Emma. "Genomex, in the year 1991. Can this…" he trailed off, gesturing at the now-groping pair, "be kept discrete?" There was a shame there that she felt, pulling under Adam's usually calm exterior.

"Stay right there, Mason. I want to show you something," Younger Adam gushed. Mason nodded and stood trying to catch his breath.

'A more informal time' Emma reminded herself. 'He probably became sterner after his accident.'

As Younger Adam moved behind the wall, and she could feel her Adam beginning to panic. "No! This can't happen again! Stop it, stop doing this to me!" he began to shout up into the air at nobody she could see.

She had never seen Adam this distraught before. "Adam, calm down! Tell what is happening!" she begged, hoping to get through to him. She realized something suddenly: she had no sense of the younger couple… couldn't sense them at all. It took her a minute to realize that they were just memories, not actual people. 'This feels like the Outer Limits or something!' she mused. 'Can you be physically hurt by a memory?' she wondered worriedly.

Unfortunately, Adam had seen this too many times and was beyond calming. She watched the Younger Adam step behind the concrete wall and activate some power sources. A low whine of machinery powering up filled the room. "Adam, are you trying to be clever? You don't need to impress me," the brown-haired Mason assured him. "What are you doing?" he asked, moving toward the control booth.

Emma watched her Adam mouth the words "Move… move… damn it Mason!" The 'damn it' came when his younger self quickly said "No! I can't show you properly if you move, love!"

Mason sighed and smiled indulgently at his excited lover, moving back to the middle of the room. "You know I can't deny you anything, sweetness. But at least tell me what you're showing me?" he pleaded playfully, pouting. 'He can pout? And he used to call Adam 'sweetness'?' Emma thought incredulously. No one would believe this.

Her Adam was in hysterics by this point. "Not again! No! I can't let you see this, Emma! Leave!" he screamed at her.

Emma was stunned. "But I don't know how I got here…" she tried to explain, but Adam wouldn't let her.

"You don't belong here!" he shouted at her. The humming got louder, but she barely noticed. Instead, she focused on the mind of an insanely strong psionic mind, careening towards her. As she was forced from Adam's mindscape she heard the same ambiguous voice in her head: 'I will kill him if you try it again. Stay out of things that don't concern you, childish brat!' Blackness surrounded Emma as her mind was ripped away from Adam's.