1Rose and Nickoli
Disclaimer: I do not own any characters from X-Men except the ones that were from my own mind. But one of these days, when I rule the world, I will.
Pinky: What are we going to do tonight, Brain?
Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Plan to take over the world!
Author's Note: Thank you very much Jennifer for reviewing my story, I was beginning to give up hope and stop writing it, but this just goes to show people that I really do respond well to people who comment! THANK YOU! To answer your questions, yes there will be an action seen coming very soon. Hopefully, in this chapter. I have most of it written, if not all, and if it isn't in this chapter, it will most definitely be in the next. As to who 'Peter' really is, that will remain a mystery until later in the story, in the next couple of chapters, so stay tuned! Also, for those who are into Harry Potter, I am probably sometime in the very near future will be putting up a test chapter for a story. If I get five reviews, then I will write the next chapter.
Chapter 4
Twelve hours later, Rose awoke, refreshed and somewhat happy. She folded up the blanket in her obsessive compulsive manner until it was perfect, not a crease in it, and laid it on the seat next to her, placing the pillow gently on top. She did not feel any remorse for scaring the girl, it would just be another name to add to the list of people who were scared of her when one day (and she was sure) her powers would come into the light and everyone would know she was a mutant.
There was a movie playing on the screen at the front of the plane that made her roll her eyes. Of every movie that they could have played, they had to put on Napoleon Dynamite, the most talent less movie of the century. Instead, she opted for checking her emails. She stood to get her Apple notebook computer out of the overhead compartment and set it all up as the flight attendant came around.
"Oh, you're up. I was just about to wake you, you've been out for at least twelve hours." A kind smile graced her aged features.
"Well, the last few days have been quite hectic for me and I needed the rest, but thank you for caring." Rose smiled back.
"You're such a pretty young woman. Gosh, I can't get over it." Her hand fluttered to her cheek as she gasped at Rose, who smiled politely back. The attendant realized she must be making her nervous. "I'm sorry, did you want anything to eat or drink? I can bring you some pasta." She leaned over and picked up the blanket and pillow, tucking it neatly into her cart.
"That would be fine, thank you, and would you happen to have a diet ginger ale?" She suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty she was, not having had anything to eat in almost twenty four hours. The woman wheeled the cart away and within moments, she was back with a plastic tray of pasta and her diet ginger ale.
"Thank you." Rose opened the can and drank half of its contents in one swig.
She snacked on the cold Alfredo pasta as she checked her inbox. A surprisingly low amount of emails greeted her, not that she was complaining, she was on what she viewed as a sort of vacation. Her inbox only held three emails, as compared to the normal twenty some odd. Everyone was always emailing her asking for something and what did she get in return, a pat on the back and the occasional, 'You're so smart, Rose, how did we ever get along without you.'. She opened the first one and saw that it was from her criminology lab back in New York. It said that there was a case she needed to work on. They tried to leave her out of it to give her a break and they knew that she was thousands of feet in the air, but they had exhausted every possible piece of evidence and every other criminologist in the country had tried a hand at it, and they couldn't figure it out, so she gave it a try. This case was all about a murder that happened a few days ago. This particular murder looked like the work of an infamous mass murderer who left the victims bodies lying in the same way. The only problem was that the murderer had a reliable alibi, that being in jail for life at the time. She examined every aspect of the crime scene, down to the very last measurement, comparing it to those of the serial killer. They were both very similar, but she found that even though both victims died of asphyxiation due to strangulation, the mass murderer used a telephone cord to strangle his victims before stabbing their chests in the shape of a triangle, from left collar bone, to right collar bone, to the belly button, the suspect used a small piece of rope to kill his victim, leaving striation marks around the neck different from those of the serial killer, and the wounds were in the same pattern, but the last wound to the belly button was slightly above the belly button, which meant that these were not done by the same killer. She made note of this in an email she was forming as she went. The second piece of evidence she found was that the markings done in the victims blood on the hardwood floors were the same in every way, but that the way the lines crossed over each other, as if someone wrote a 't' and then another person wrote a 't' they might write it both very differently. These lines were crossed in separate directions when she compared it to the killer and the suspect. Who were now not one in the same. Also in the design on the floor, she noticed that the serial killer was right handed, so the thickest side of the line of blood would have been his left. The most reason one, the thickest side was on the right, meaning that the suspect they were looking for was left handed, and so it couldn't have been the infamous murderer who would have had to escape from jail just to commit this murder, it was a different man who had created this scene; and it was definitely a man, she was sure of that because of the thickness of the lines of blood, they were too thick to be drawn with a woman's hand. She made note of this as well in the email and sent it to the lab.
The next email was from Vladimir Putin. He had heard that she would be in Russia for a while and so invited her to attend dinner with him in his home. She politely declined his offer, as it was the same night as the reception for her friend, who was more important than politics by any standards. She wrote the entire email to him in Russian.
Finally she got to her third email, as there was only an hour left until the plane landed, she looked at the title of the email and read that it was from President Bush of the United States. Rose tried desperately hard not to shiver and roll her eyes, she hated Bush and had not the faintest clue as to why he would be emailing her. She decided to check that one on the train and opted to play games until it was time to get off.
She waited patiently in line for her baggage, getting shunted along like she was a tourist. After almost everyone else had left, she found her bags and began to hall them toward the desk where she would be renting a car. Before she got there, she sat at an abandoned bench area and unzipped her suitcase, pulling out a hair elastic to tie her messy hair up with so that she looked more presentable and her warm jacket. It was down feather black jacket with Russian writing sliding down the sleeves in a vivid red color.
She had to speak Russian the entire time with these men, to show them that she deserved respect, she was from here, and they could tell. She made arrangements for one of the employees to ride with her to the train station to take the car back to the agency after she left. The employee happened to be a happy, plump, middle aged man who entertained for the half hour drive to the station by regaling her with tales of his children. When she arrived at her destination, the man shook her hand, said, 'Dasvedanya' which, translated into English means 'goodbye' and left.
She entered the warm, crowded station that smelled strongly of urine and retrieved her ticket from the ticket master, finding that her train was making its last call that moment. With all her luggage in tow, she climbed the slippery steps of the train to her waiting compartment. She had hoped she would be alone, but her hopes were dashed when a figure wearing red lense, black framed sunglasses lurked into view in her carriage. She opened the sliding door and realized what an impression she must be making in her oversized gray sweat pants, and baggy, wholly blue shirt, her jacket hanging open around her shoulders. He apparently didn't seem to care.
"Hi" He said, not caring if she could speak English.
"Hello" she said back, hanging up her jacket and sitting down as the train began to roll and chug down the tracks, out of the well-lit station and into the darkness full of snow and flurries across the window.
"Good, you do speak English, otherwise, that would have made this trip a little boring." He smiled. "I'm Scott." He held out his hand.
"Rose." She shook his hand and took out her notebook again, mentally preparing herself to check that one dreaded email.
In that short span of time, she received another email from a scholar and relic hunter in Germany asking her to verify a letter that was found under an old abandoned temple floor. She carbon dated the paper and ink and found that it was written around 965 ce. She emailed all of this information back to him in German.
She clicked onto Bush's email and found that he wanted her to do his taxes for him. She managed a little laugh at this, and when she wrote back, she disinclined to accept his request: "I am very sorry Mr. President, but I refuse to do your taxes for you. If I were you (and I am thankful that I am not), I would get someone inside your inner circle to do them. I couldn't possibly figure out what I was supposed to do because I'm afraid all of your information would be full of holes. Do not force me, Mr. President, to remember the time that I caught you handing dirty money under the table to a member of your Senate. If I did happen to remember, I think I would be quite shocked, I think I would have to tell somebody, or a lot of somebodies; and how would the whole of the United States of America like to find out that the man they admire and look up to most, the man they adore, is also a man of trickery, forgery, lies and deceit, a man who is nothing more than a criminal. I do not think they would like that very much. So, to sum it up for you, your Most Highness, I will not do your taxes, and please do not ask me again, this little bit of information that I just displayed, is not all the dirt I have on you, I know more about you than you think, so do not take me for granted as you are now.
"In closing, have a lovely day, Mr. President, and go wash the blood off your hands before it stains more than it already has.
Sincerely,
Rose Sakharov"
Scott decided he wanted to talk more with her as she was writing this email and she let him.
"So, what are you typing?" He asked curiously. She did not look up from the computer screen.
"A letter to the President of the United States of America." She continued with her typing as if she hadn't been disturbed.
"Oh, I see." He laughed a little chuckle. "What are you campaigning for? Save the monkeys?" He suppressed another laugh. She looked up for the first time and stopped typing momentarily. She gave him a dirty look and then went on typing.
"He wants me to do his taxes." He was silent for a moment, but his curiosity got the better of him.
"So, what are you? Some kind of 'Super Genius'?"
"I prefer 'Intellectually Superior'."
"Do you have any degrees?"
"I have a PhD in psychology, and a masters in entomology, chemistry, biology, physics, among others."
"You can't be that old either, can you."
I'm eighteen. I finished high school when I was ten and completed university when I was fourteen. I've been working for the New York CSI's for a couple of years now."
"WOW! Like the television show CSI?" She looked up at him again.
"Yes, sort of."
"What do you do for them? Do you dissect the bodies?" He made a stabbing motion with his finger.
"No, that's what a pathologist does, I'm a criminologist and also an entomologist."
"What do they do?"
"A criminologist is the person who goes to the crime scene and picks up all the evidence and analyzes it, but if there is a hair or something with DNA or anything like that, they send it off to the lab to analyze. An entomologist is a person who knows the study of insects, if on a dead body, they find maggots, they can identify how old the body is by determining the growth stage of the maggots."
"Cool." Was all he said to this bit of information. "So does this brain thing run in your family?"He asked.
"I got them from my father if that's what you mean."
"What is your father's name? If he's as smart as you, maybe I've heard of him."
"His name was Andrei Sakharov." She paused a moment in her typing, letting herself remember his smell. It filled her nostrils, the soft sweet scent of tobacco and soap. She took a big whiff and then brought herself back to the present.
"Sakharov? Jeez, if I'd have known you were a Sakharov there wouldn't be any of this 'Are you a super genius?' stuff!" He marveled to himself quietly. "Didn't he get him and his wife killed?-" He paused, knowing he had crosse a line and wished he could take it back. "I'm sorry, those were your parents. I shouldn't have..." He let his voice trail.
"It's okay. Yes, he was killed, and so was my mother. He knew to much for his own good sometimes, and this one definitely got him into trouble."
"Did the police ever find out who murdered him?" Rose allowed herself a laugh, but it was cold and shrewd, on the verge of tears, she hated reliving it, but what was more, she hated people knowing that it got to her.
"The police are to stupid to figure anything out. That's why they have a stupid name like 'police'. At the time, I was working for CSI: New York, but only as an intern. I was twelve. When they refused to let me help them figure out the case because I wasn't finished my schooling yet and it involved my parents, I went in to analyze the scene in the middle of the night, when I knew there would be no one there. Then, I went into the lab and analyzed everything. I figured out who the killer was. I knew I was probably going to lose my internship but I now knew everything I wanted to know. They kept me anyway after that and hired me to become a full time criminologist even though I wasn't quite finished my degrees yet."
"So, who killed them, if you don't, mind me asking?"
"Have you ever heard of William Stryker?" She had now abandoned her letter and was talking straight to his face.
"Stryker? The Senate Stryker?" He didn't sound surprised, but maybe he thought Stryker was a bad man to begin with.
"Yes, he was the one who murdered my parents."
"Well, why isn't he in jail, why isn't this out in the open?"
"Mr. Stryker is protected by the law and one of the most powerful men in the world, the President of the United States. The American government controls the media, if they do not want something to leak into the public knowledge, then it won't."
"But, what about the mutants, they didn't want anybody to know about them?"
"There were too many witness to live down that one, but there are things about mutants that nobody but the President and selected others know."
"Yourself included?" He seemed skeptical.
"Yes."
As if to add effect, the power in the train went out, leaving everything in darkness, except for the light of her computer screen.
"What's going on?" She asked.
"I have an idea." Scott stood quickly. Rose's computer screen started to flicker and die.
"What?..." She asked herself more than him. People were screaming all up and down the train.
Author's Note: Sooo, what did you think? I applaud you if you got this far, I know, it was a little bit of a boring chapter, but now, we can get into the action bits. PLEASE R&R!