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And thank you all for the reviews. You don't know how excited it makes me to see people interested in my stories.
Chapter Nine –"What were you doing in the restroom – hiding like a little girl when your car gets smashed to pieces?" Lance asked, smirking slightly at the humor of the entire situation.
"I was only avoiding a fight, Lance," Pietro defended himself as they headed out of the Burger King. "It's not like I was scared or anything. What if she got hurt, huh? Ever think about that? No, you didn't. You just jump to conclusions!" Sure, Pietro had been a little scared about this place for a while there, but he wasn't about to tell Lance that.
"Oh, of course," Lance said, opening the door to his junker of a green Jeep.
The others joined him, but when Lance jammed the key into the ignition, Brianna realized that she had forgotten all about her cell phone, once again. That cell phone was her child, and it held important information. If she lost that phone, she would lose the numbers of all the people she wanted to keep in touch with, and she would also lose all of those pictures she had taken of herself, and that would just be horrifying.
"Wait!" she said, opening the door and dangling her legs outside of the car, ready to hop out. "My cell phone's still in that thing. Come with me to get it!"
"No!" Pietro replied, reaching to move her legs over, and from there, shut the door.
"Pietro!" Lance growled, actually bearing his teeth. Pietro was getting on his nerves beyond belief. "What's wrong with you tonight? You've never acted like this before, but, oh, I get it. You're trying to play Mr. Sensitive or whatever so Brianna will bat her eyelashes. Get over it, and stop wussing around!"
"Like Lance said, we need to stop wussing around and get my cell phone. You even said so before, Pietro, we're mutants – we can take anything they throw at us, and come back with something twelve times worse. Besides, if I don't get my cell phone, they can implicate me for stealing the car, and I'm bringing you right down with me."
"Yeah, besides, you don't have to hide anymore – the big, bad meanies are gone now!" Lance laughed at himself.
"Okay!" Pietro snapped, and they all got out. He made sure to close the door as hard as he possibly could, causing another argument between him and Lance to surface.
"If you chipped the paint, pretty boy, I'm going to slam your head against the concrete so many times that you—"
"Wait, Brianna!" Pietro grabbed onto her, swatting away Lance's words like a pesky bug. "I'll get it. No use wasting time." He zipped into the car at his usual exceptional speed, all in a blur, but after a while of looking through the car for the thin silver device, he slowed down, in defeat.
"Where is it?" Pietro asked no one in particular, impatiently. When he looked up to tell the others that it was nowhere to be found, he noticed the ground tremble beneath him.
He was ready to rip Lance's head off for fooling around, probably trying to impress Kitty, until he saw that the people that had been trashing the vehicle previously had come back for more.
There had to be at least five of them – all wearing the same grim expression, that clearly stated that these dumb kids in front of them were going to die for even thinking about coming near the vehicle that they had claimed as their's, with all of the tags and what not. Pietro knew this was going to happen – nobody ever bothered listening to what he had to say. Shouldn't they know by now that Pietro Maximoff was always right?
"Hey, listen!" Kitty said as they approached. "We're, like, not looking for a fight, okay?"
Pietro shook his head at Kitty's X-Men-esque ways. What did Lance see in her? Didn't that girl know that acting like a good guy wouldn't get her anywhere in this situation? Those guys were going to try and beat them all into bloody pulps no matter what she had to say. The group only laughed at her stupidity.
"Oh, that changes everything," croaked a particularly dirty-looking man in his early twenties, with sarcasm seeping through every single syllable. He then pulled something out of his tattered jean jacket. It shined in the moonlight, and they could plainly see that what he was holding was a knife.
Brianna felt like running for her dear life, but when she saw the others standing their ground, she forced herself to stand tall, as well. Sure, they had no problem with this – they had control, and although Brianna was getting better with all of this, she wasn't sure if she could take this on just yet. Didn't Lance tell Pietro that they were gone? Because of that idiotic mistake the longhaired boy had made, she was going to get knifed by these druggies. It was true that she was the one that wanted to get her cell phone in the first place, but she surely wouldn't have felt the same if Lance had actually bothered checking things out before running that mouth of his.
How dangerous this situation was didn't seem to register in Lance's dense mind, because he wasn't hesitant about getting them all fired up. The two parties had just been staring each other down until he decided to make a move – causing all hell to broke loose. Brianna couldn't help but think that she was going to be reduced to a corpse because of this moron.
Their enemies were quick to react to Lance's ground shaking, the majority of the gangsters setting off for him, opposed to the other mutants. He was pretty decent with keeping them away, knocking them down like bowling pins before they had the chance to get near. The only problem was that their endurance was great, and they always got right back up again, and his head was throbbing violently.
After around seventeen games of knocking them down, and then getting back up once again, he knew what he had to do, and that was create a remarkably large seismic wave. Then, they would have fallen pretty hard, earning him enough time to pack the others up and then they would make their get away. But, he was already drained, and when he let the huge tremor run through the ground, he relied on Kitty to phase him through the bat the guys began whacking him with. The guys didn't stay down as long as he though, and he couldn't fight for himself any longer.
"Lance!" Kitty said, shrilly, once she saw that he had collapsed. She saw three of the guys closing in on his body, and tried to get over to him as quickly as she could, but they had already commenced to thrashing into him, without any trace of a conscious.
Lance was weakly 'defending' himself by raising his arm into the air, as if it could be used as some sort of shield. It wasn't working. She could hear him letting out a grunt every time he was hit, but, luckily, she was able to pick his limp body up, and drag him away before an life-threatening damage could be done, managing to phase long enough to get herself and Lance into the Jeep. As they made their way, the thugs had tried to hit the couple, but gave up when they realized it was no use, with Kitty's phasing and all.
They didn't let them get into the car without a scratch, however, busting one of the headlights of Lance's 'baby.'
Kitty searched Lance's pockets for the key to his car, which was extremely difficult because he was lying in the backseat, refusing to move out of the position he found most comfortable. There was a slur of profanity when he heard the shattering of some glass, but it ceased when Kitty found the key and drove away. She was so glad to see that the guy with the knife had went after Pietro, instead of Lance, because if he had went after Lance, there was a good chance that he could be dead.
She knew that Brianna and Pietro were still out there, left alone with those creeps, but she firmly believed that they could take care of themselves. Pietro actually seemed to be enjoying his chance to show off for a bit. At first, he was reluctant about the whole fighting thing, but he soon shoveled those feelings and started having a jolly good time. Pietro wouldn't let them get a hold of Brianna, would be? He was fast enough to keep them off of her. And, Lance could be seriously injured – he certainly made it out that way, so she had no choice but to leave Brianna and Quicksilver to themselves.
"Should I, like, wait for them?" Kitty inquired, after already starting down the street.
Kitty knew what Lance's answer was when he groaned out of agony, so she kept on driving, though she bit onto her lip, in a worried manner. She knew that she had told herself that they could fend for themselves, but what if she was wrong?
Brianna was shocked to see Kitty leave, without even warning her. Wasn't Kitty supposed to be her friend? Even if she wasn't her friend, no one should treat a fellow human being that way… especially not Brianna.
She could hear Pietro going on with his tormenting.
"Wow, look at me!" Pietro exclaimed, standing on top of the smashed sports car. He had a bat, that he had taken from one of those attackers, in his hands, and he was striking the windshield with it, much like they had done before. "I'm so cool!"
They tried getting him down from there by stabbing into his shins, or trying to grab onto them, but he swiftly moved out of the way.
One even climbed on top of the car with him, and swung his beefy fist towards Pietro's face, but, with his reflexes, Pietro ducked and toppled him off of the roof by pushing his midsection, powerfully.
"Listen, you mutated freak, if you don't get down, that girl is mine." This was the one that carried the knife, and he didn't look like the type of guy to break his word, so Brianna gasped. Before, she had been able to slink into the shadows and they didn't seem to pay her much attention. She didn't know why they didn't attack her with the rest of them, but she figured that they were saving her for later. She didn't even want to think about what they might be saving her for, because it sent shivers down her spine.
Pietro just stood in silence for a quick second, and, as if this guy was proving that he wasn't joking around, he hastily grabbed onto her, threatening to run the knife in his hands deep into her throat.
Pietro instantly knew what he was going to do, and that was take Brianna away from him before he could even have enough time to cut into the skin of her neck. But, when he lifted his foot to get off of the car and onto the ground, things complicated.
Two of them, coming from either sides, had grabbed onto his slender legs midair, and thrust him onto the ground, and his back audibly cracked with their force. They made him stay put, and Pietro wasn't even able to start up his feet, seeing as he was on his back and all, and help Brianna. He tried breaking free of their strong hold, but it wasn't working, for they had at least two hundred pounds on him.
Meanwhile, Brianna let out a whimper as the blade tickled her soft skin. Great – now Pietro was out. If Kitty didn't leave her, this wouldn't have happened in the first place. Kitty could get her out of this situation with ease. Kitty would pay. Oh, how Kitty would pay.
She snapped back to her present state, and realized that she did have an upper hand on the guy that was frightening her into believing that he would take her life. Brianna possessed the X-Gene, as she had heard so many people dub it, and if she tried, this guy was over with, or, at least, she could make him scamper off.
Brianna started up an illusion, first with difficulty. The stinging of her eyes had never been this dreadful before. It had been reasonably easy to create some useless illusion of a driver's license two hours ago, but now that her life was on the line, she had problems with it? Of course, that's just how things went for her.
She cried out, for she had felt the sharp pain of him starting in on her throat, and at that very moment her cry filled the night air, the man bringing pain upon her had seen his buddies transform into large, demonic wolf-men – she had seen this scene plenty of times in cheesy, werewolf films.
He dropped the knife and ran off in the other direction, just as she suspected he would. Anyone would, even the leader of this fierce gang, because those werewolves looked much less than friendly.
Tears flowed from her black orbs, because of all the irritation that had come to her eyes. Her eyes began clearing up, and she touched her neck to see how much damage had been done. It was just a scratch. It was bleeding, yes, but at least she was all right.
His followers scurried off after him. Their plan couldn't be fulfilled if they were short one very important person, and there was no telling what those mutants could do to them after their leader left.
"Wow," Pietro breathed, dusting himself off and staring at Brianna.
"Take me home!" she said, sounding upset, thumbing away her own tears.
And when she had arrived to her 'home,' everyone seemed to have smoke circling out of their bright red ears, like they were in a cartoon or something like that.
Professor Xavier had even told her that since she had disobeyed, that he was going to postpone her becoming of an X-Man even further, more specifically, until she learned the importance of the rules. Logan had made a snide remark about how he predicted that to be a very, very long time.
Brianna stood before her mirror, and her reflection angrily glared back at her. Brianna was fuming, not only because her make-up had drizzled down her cheeks because of her crying, making her appear to be some sort of drowned rodent, but she was going nowhere here at Xavier's Institute. She was never going to be an X-Man, and that was that, so why even stay any longer?
She knew there was room for her at the Brotherhood house – Pietro and Toad would welcome her with open arms, wouldn't they? There was also always the option of returning home, to Orange County, but she didn't feel like she could face her mother again. Her mother would gladly take her back, yes, probably saying something like, 'Oh, my doll has finally returned to her mama!', but there wasn't a doubt in her mind that she would try and cover up her mutation again, after all the progress she had made.
Whatever. Brianna would think on this later, but she knew that she was not going to serve an additional two months of probation as she had been told. She would simply refuse.
There was a more important issue at hand, and that was the hickey that stained her otherwise flawless skin. It was the size of New York itself, she swore, and it was pretty dark, as well. No concealer anything short of extraordinary was going to be able to hide that puppy, so she decided on wearing turtle necks until it dissolved, though it was nearing the summertime and turtle necks were no longer in style. This was horrible, but at least the bruise had engulfed the scratch she had received from the knife, making it barely noticeable.
Someone knocked on the door, and she grumpily granted them access.
There was Kitty, an apologetic look spread across her face. "Brianna, like, let me explain."
"Let you explain?" Brianna roared. "You know, you have other places to be. You should be down in the infirmary with that moron you risked my life to save!"
"Like, I thought Pietro had you covered, Brianna! It's not, like, my fault… you should've seen Lance! He was perfectly miserable! He, like, needed to get out of there before he died!"
"That's no excuse – leaving me there, defenseless," Brianna coldly replied, her eyes showing no emotion whatsoever. "Besides, I saw him down there, and he wasn't dying or anything! All he had was a couple of bruises and some swelling. It was no big deal! What could've happened to me was, though – they were going to slit my throat! You could've helped me!"
"You weren't defenseless," Kitty fired back. "You had Pietro, and yourself. You're just, like, so selfish sometimes! If you saw Lance, then you should, like, know that they got him pretty good!"
"And he'll be returning to the Brotherhood tomorrow morning," Brianna finished for her. "He can't be that bad, Kitty."
Kitty sighed, and placed a hand on Brianna's tightened shoulder. Someone had to be the first to break, and it might as well be her. Brianna was too hardheaded. "Listen, I'm, like, so sorry, Bre. Won't you forgive me? You know that, like, I didn't think anything would happen to you… I promise."
Brianna just nodded, slowly. No, she hadn't forgiven Kitty, but she was itching to tell someone about her date with Pietro, so she softened her blow for a while, knowing that no one besides Kitty would be interested.
The next morning, as Toad and Blob glued their eyes to the television screen, and Wanda did whatever freaky things she did, all locked up in her room, Pietro and Lance talked. Pietro had come to tell Lance how pathetic he looked, having to stay in bed so his wounds could heal, but the conversation evolved, surprisingly.
"So, Pietro, what madeyou act like such a puss last night?" Lance wondered.
Pietro couldn't believe what came spilling out of his mouth. The only time he ever got all vulnerable like this was when he was trying to talk Wanda out of one of her breakdowns.
"I just… was afraid that she'd get hurt," he admitted. He braced himself for the laughter that was soon to come.
"And these feelings came before, or after, you gave her the giant hickey?" Lance chuckled, but stopped immediately, because just shaking in the slightest bit made pain run down his body.
Pietro sobered, getting back to his usual self. "After, of course. You can't start really feeling for a girl until you see what she's got, if you know what I mean. Besides, you don't think it was that big, do you?"
"You could see that thing from outer space, I swear."
