A/N: I mean… I was graduating. And starting my first year of grad school. Like. That's my excuse. I think that's a pretty good excuse, you know?
… god, that excuse is even funnier now because I've actually graduated from grad school AND am now starting another graduate degree. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If you're still reading this: how, why, I love you.
Chapter 9: December 17
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…
Remy is nowhere to be found when they all troop out to the woods to cut their Christmas tree and Rogue is visibly sulking about it.
Kitty doesn't have time to deal with that though, because she has to crack the stoic wall that is Piotr Rasputin's composure and secret keeping. She tugs her earmuffs down and straightens them so they aren't like, squishing her cheeks all weird and not keeping her ears warm at all, and then leaves her room and goes downstairs to meet everyone else. Rogue greets her with a sulky look.
"He's not here," she says unnecessarily. Kitty gives her a sympathetic look and a pat on the arm.
"We'll figure this out, Rogue," she says. With renewed purpose, she skips ahead and grabs Piotr's arm as they stroll out the door. He looks startled but not displeased when she pulls on him, so she smiles widely and says, "Walk with me?" as sweetly as she knows how.
It must be sweet enough, because Piotr smiles down at her and says, "Of course, Katya," in his deep, manly voice.
Kitty pauses internally, taking stock of her motives here. This is for the mission, she tells herself sternly. Not an excuse to feel Piotr's muscles and admire how strong he is.
They are very nice, though, and he is very strong.
The tree choosing is an X-Men tradition that goes back at least a decade to when Professor Xavier was just starting the school and only had Storm and Jean as his pupils. Even Logan hadn't been around then, at least not much. For all of its history though, there's nothing formal about it. Other than being mandatory by unwritten rule, there isn't a lot of ceremony. Everyone just wanders through the woods surrounding the mansion until someone finds a tree they like and shouts for the rest of them. The shouting isn't exactly necessary, due to the telepaths in the group, but it seems like no one remembers that in the excitement of tree finding.
There's usually a brief squabble over who gets to chop the tree down, which Logan always wins, on account of being the only one having actual real-life Lumberjack Credentials. Every year, Kitty thinks that maybe if Logan would let someone else cut down the Christmas tree, then maybe they could get some of those Lumberjack Credentials, but she never says it out loud, because she doesn't care who chops the tree as long as it gets chopped.
"Piotr," she says, as an opening statement, "do you want to cut down the tree this year?"
Piotr smiles demurely, which is not something Kitty had known he could do. Not that guys can't be demure, but Piotr is the literal definition of Stacked ™, so she just hadn't been prepared for the lowered eyelashes and the softness of his mouth when the corners turned up like that and his eyelashes.
Seriously, the man's eyelashes are going to give her a complex or something.
"Nyet, Katya," Piotr says, shaking his head demurely. "I'm not challenge Logan for honor of chopping tree. Take my hands out of gloves for this? How does Remy say? 'Cold is enemy fo' t'ievin'. Fingers freeze an' t'en where we be?'" He laughs at his own horrible attempt at Remy's Cajun drawl and Kitty delightedly seizes upon the opening he just handed her, practically gift wrapped.
. . . Stop thinking about unwrapping Piotr, Kitty, now is not the time.
"Speaking of Remy," she says, not as subtly as she wishes, "do you know where he is? Rogue has been looking for him all day and he's never around anymore."
Piotr's face becomes very suspiciously inscrutable. "Remy?" he says, like he wasn't the one to mention him just a second ago. "I do not know exactly where he is, no."
Ah, Piotr. Kitty smiles as his reluctance to lie to her becomes his undoing. Remy has no qualms about lying directly to your face, which makes him much better at secret missions than Piotr. "Exactly?" she pounces. "So, you do have a general idea?"
Piotr stops walking and Kitty stops with him, letting the stream of teenage mutants flow and part around them. Ahead, Kitty sees Emma holding onto Logan's arm, bundled up in white fur that Kitty hopes is fake. Somehow, Logan is tolerating the clinging much better than Kitty had expected. Maybe he's actually been reading and practicing from the book of meditation exercises Kitty gave him last year for Christmas.
"Kitty," Piotr says seriously, and Kitty turns around to look up at him. He is staring down at her with an expression she doesn't quite understand. "Why are you asking about Remy?"
She tries to look innocent for a moment before giving up and telling the truth. "I want to know what's going on! I hate it when people keep secrets. From me," she adds, because sometimes secrets are fine and even good to keep, like how she and everyone else they know are keeping it a secret from Rogue that Remy is in love with her. Those two can figure out their own relationship as far as Kitty is concerned at this point.
Piotr's eyes crinkle when he laughs. "Christmas present secrets," he tries.
"It's December 17th," she says. "Are you seriously telling me that Remy is out Christmas shopping a week before Christmas?
Piotr nods slowly, and Kitty gives him a look that's a cross between hurt and judgmental. It's a great look. Piotr sighs heavily.
"He did not want us to tell," he says.
Kitty squeezes his arm gently and smiles at him. "I won't tell anyone else," she offers, even though it will be really hard. "I know it's silly," she admits, "but I just really hate not knowing what's going on. And usually around this time of year Remy is super into the whole Christmas, holidays thing. But this year he's been AWOL for like, a week!" She shrugs. "He's my friend, you know? If there's something wrong, I want to help." She bites her lip, suddenly truly concerned. "Is… is there something wrong?"
It hadn't been on purpose, but the lip thing does the trick. Kitty watches Piotr cave right before her eyes and half-triumphantly, half-guiltily thinks, Gotcha!
000
Unbeknownst to Kitty, the other girls actually are indeed taking their mission seriously, at least seriously enough to recruit more help.
"You want me to do what?" Ray asks incredulously.
The recruitment pitch could use some work probably.
"We're seducing information out of all those boys," Tabby repeats, "and we need your help."
"Uh," says Ray.
"You take Bobby," Jubilee orders.
"Uhhhh," says Ray.
"Find out why they all keep sneaking off and what Remy's up to!" Tabby says, and then she, Amara, and Jubilee all sprint off ahead to catch up with, Ray cranes his neck to see, the Brotherhood boys, which to be honest, he didn't see coming.
Bobby trudges up alongside of Ray and says, "What's up, bud?" and Ray resigns himself to an awkward Christmas.
"I don't want to make out with you," he tells Bobby, who blinks really slow.
"Well," he replies, "nobody said you have to."
"So, you'll tell me what's going on with you and Remy and all the other guys?" Ray asks hopefully.
"Will you tell Tabby and Kitty if I tell you?" Bobby asks back.
"Well, yeah," Ray admits. "That was kind of the point."
"Then no dice, bud, sorry." Bobby claps him on the back cheerfully and stomps on ahead to look at the trees.
000
The Brotherhood resist all of the girls' attempts to either seduce or interrogate them. Surprisingly, none of them even bend, all of them dedicated to the cause.
Or at least dedicated to not really caring about the cause.
Wanda's sole contribution to the interrogation is catching her brother by the wrist when he jogs back to the group after taking a few laps around some promising tree specimens and asking, "Hey, are you okay?"
"What?" Pietro asks. "Of course!" Wanda lets go of his arm and sticks her hands back into the pockets of her red winter coat. All of her coats are red, but this one actually looks like a winter coat, and Pietro is kind of proud of her for remembering that being warm is better than looking badass sometimes.
Sometimes.
"You'll tell me if you need my help with anything," she says. It's not a question.
"Uh, sure," Pietro agrees. Wanda nods and waves him off. Pietro thinks for a minute and then swears quietly before speeding back towards the Institute and beyond into Bayville. He'll be quick. It'll just take a moment. He can check on the compound without anyone ever seeing him, and then he won't have any kind of pesky attacks of conscience while he's trying to drink hot chocolate later tonight.
"Hey everyone!" Jean shouts, and the straggling group finally comes together around a seven-foot spruce with branches extending in a four-foot radius. "Good?" she asks, and the Professor beams.
"It looks good to me! What do you all say?"
A general cheer of agreement sweeps through them all and Logan lumbers up to chop down the tree. He even uses the ax this year instead of his claws, which is nice of him. Jean leans her head on Scott's shoulder as Warren steps forward to help Logan steady the log to trim the base of the trunk down to living room size.
"This is nice," she says happily. Scott leans over to kiss her head and she send out a gentle thought to wrap him in the warmth and contentment and happiness she is feeling right now.
000
Remy wakes up cold. Hmm… bad, he thinks vaguely. His brain feels fuzzy and it's hard to capture any one thought, but he's definitely cold and he definitely doesn't like it. His head is resting on something that is neither soft nor hard but is exactly the texture and consistency of a stale marshmallow.
Yes, Remy has laid his head on stale marshmallows before. There was this job he and Henri did for Père where. . . well, never mind. Whatever. Where is he? That's the most important thing to figure out right now, not why whoever has captured him has such poor taste in pillows.
Because he has most definitely been captured. There's just something specific about the grey paint on these walls, something that makes a statement like, "We both know you're not here of your own free will." Magneto's metal dome base had walls that were similar in color, though Remy and Pete had tried their best to make it homier by putting up posters and stuff like that. The posters tended to get ripped up by Sabertooth or burnt up by Pyro, though, so eventually they had just given up and pretended the silvery grey color wasn't driving them all into a serious depressive episode.
Point is, these are definitely the walls of a megalomaniac who has kidnapped Remy in order to use him for their vague nefarious purposes.
Why does this keep happening to him?
Granted, he thinks, quietly sitting up and rolling out of bed to run his hands over the walls, searching for cracks that might indicate a false wall, it probably doesn't count as kidnapping when you stroll directly into their house and they just happen to catch you. That's just… bad luck.
The big metal door has a glass window in the top half, which makes it look kind of like the door to the infirmary in the Institute, because Dr. McCoy thinks having a door with no window makes the place look unwelcoming or something.
Remy pauses in his search of the walls, frowning in consternation. He hasn't seen Dr. McCoy in a month. Where is that big blue nerd anyway?
A whirring noise from directly above the door reminds him that there are other, more immediate problems at hand. He puts a mental pin in the Dr. McCoy thing and inches over to the door to stare up into the beady eye of a camera, which rotates to follow him as he moves.
Bad guys are always such voyeurs, he thinks without a hint of irony, and just because Remy used to follow people around and watch everything they did does not make him a voyeur. He never planted cameras to watch people while they sleep. That's just creepy.
The door opens while Remy is trying to figure out how much of the wall he needs to charge in order to blow a Remy-sized hole in it. There's so much that goes into using his powers that people like that puffin probably never even have to think about. Things like how dense is the material he's charging? What's it made of? How much charge will create what size explosion, and does he need less energy or more if the molecules of the material are already vibrating enough to make it warm?
All Warren has to worry about is whether or not his wings will fit under his perfectly tailored overcoat.
It's possible that Remy is panicking, which always makes him petty. Well, pettier than usual.
"Mr. LeBeau, I presume?"
Wow, amazing how panic could be setting in one second and utter disgust come flying in to take its place in the next.
The man standing in the doorway is wearing a grey pinstripe suit. It, like his salt and pepper hair and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, makes him look like the CEO of some kind of middle-level production company. He looks like the guy who owns Walmart. Probably. Remy doesn't actually know who that person is, but he bets they look more or less like this guy.
"You presume right," he says, because that's basically his line now. "Who are you?"
"Alexander Pierce," the man says, smiling. It's terrible and Remy hopes he doesn't do it again. "I'm in charge of this little project here."
Remy raises one eye brow and sticks his hands in his pockets. "You mean the little project where you kidnap mutants and experiment on them or whatever?"
It's Pierce's turn to raise his eyebrows, and he does it while clapping his hands, apparently in genuine appreciation for Remy correctly guessing his purpose. The condescension makes Remy grit his teeth.
"Very good," Pierce says. "I admit that I didn't have high hopes about your intelligence when Commander Rumlow informed me that he had detained you, seeing as you had decided to throw yourself directly into our arms, so to speak. But now that you're here, I see you might have a different idea of how this encounter is going to go."
This is true, so Remy ignores it. He looks over Pierce's shoulder, eyeing the corridor outside of the room. There are three commandos, armed with guns and wearing thick armor. He's probably not getting out that way, not with only –he feels around the edges of his pockets again –Xavier's eyeglasses and four pieces of gum which he could have sworn he hadn't had in there when he left the Institute. They had taken everything, every deck of cards, his bo staff, even Jean's ring (oops). Clearly, the commandos had learned from their first meeting with Remy, and had taken everything they thought he could use as a weapon.
Which made him wonder why they hadn't taken the glasses, since Remy most certainly could charge those up and throw them, but maybe they thought he needed them to see or something and didn't want his supposed nearsightedness to disrupt whatever tests they wanted to run.
Pierce is saying something and Remy should probably pay attention, even if it's only so he knows when to pretend to gag.
". . . And it's important to harness any potential source of power for our interests, so you understand, it's not personal –"
"Source of power?" Remy interrupts. "You think you can extract the X-gene and turn it into a weapon?"
Pierce's smile is self-satisfied and a gross disservice to canary-scarfing cats everywhere. "Yes," he says, "I do."
Unfortunately, Remy is starting to think so, too. He crosses his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits, carefully schooling his expression into a frown instead of a smirk. "Yeah well, good luck with that. Because you know what you need to extract mutant DNA?"
"What is that, Mr. LeBeau?" Pierce asks, eyes flickering like a snake's scales.
Remy aims his cockiest grin at Pierce and says, "Mutants!" and then flings the handful of loose threads he just pulled from the seams of the sleeves in his coat directly into Pierce's face, charged hot with glowing magenta energy.
Alexander Pierce stumbles backwards with a sputtering shout, and Remy takes a running start and leaps right over him, using the momentum to outpace the explosion and land feet-first on the chest of the first commando to step into his path.
"Sorry Remy can't stay!" he quips, and kicks another commando guard in the teeth, sending him reeling back into his friend, who fails to catch them both and goes down under two hundred plus pounds of soldier and body armor.
Remy tsks. That's why it's important to remember the nineteenth rule of Thievin'. Travel light.
He steps over the pile of bodies and runs, boots pounding the corridor. Behind him, the shouts of the commandos and the sound of their tramping feet spur him on, and he careens around a corner. This little excursion really hasn't gone the way he thought it would, and he's sort of regretting sneaking out without letting Piotr know where he was going.
"Stop!"
"No!" Remy shouts back, incapable of not responding, even when he should just shut up. He runs faster.
There's a door at the end of the corridor, and Remy could almost cry with relief. Except he won't do that, because that's gross and Remy didn't bring any handkerchiefs to wipe his nose, so he can't cry now. Also, because he needs to see.
He bursts through the door and into the moonlight. The cold stings his face immediately. Small white flakes drift down and dust his hair and shoulders. Remy is not fond of being cold, but he can't say the snow is unwelcome. Snow means hard to see, which means easier for Remy to avoid – something slams into his side, hard.
That.
"Don't move," a harsh voice orders, and something jabs Remy in the back. It feels like a gun. Remy doesn't move.
Commander Rumlow stands up, keeping his weapon trained on Remy. "Roll over, slowly," he orders. Remy wiggles around until he's laying on his belly, and then cautiously puts his hands on the ground to push himself up. A boot lands in the middle of his back and he collapses, breath knocked out of him.
"A commendable effort." Pierce's voice is like a snake slithering, catching in the middle like scales over rough ground. Remy shivers and looks up, just as the flood lights come on, blinding him.
Alexander Pierce smiles, eyes gleaming. "I think your powers will be very useful to us, Mr. LeBeau," he says. "Thank you so much for the demonstration." He nods to Rumlow, who fiddles with something Remy can't see. The next moment, pain explodes behind Remy's eyes and he feels the skin on the back of his head split open just before he sinks back into darkness.
He drifts in and out of consciousness as they carry him through the compound, waking up fully only once, when they put him in a roomy chair with a hard metal seat and strap his wrists to the arms with leather cuffs. One of the commandos pulls his head back by his hair, causing agonizing pain, and another clamps a metal headpiece around his temples. Remy pulls once at the cuffs, tries to move his head, fails, and then passes out entirely.
000
Pietro curses, stumbling away from the wall of the compound, fear making him clumsy. He gets his feet under him and then speeds out of sight and earshot of the compound. Inside, he knows the armor-clad people are taking Remy inside one of the buildings, followed by the man in the grey suit. The snow falls faster and thicker, though Pietro hardly notices, dodging between flakes absentmindedly.
He arrives back at the mansion, ignoring the splendor of the huge tree everyone is fawning over in the foyer. He spots Piotr, then Lance, then Bobby, then Kurt, and grabs all of them, going back for the other members of the Brotherhood of Super Secret Sub-level Ninjas.
"Guys," he interrupts their protests at being manhandled at 40 miles per hour, "we have a problem."
…nine ladies dancing, eight maids a milking, seven swans a swimming, six geese a laying, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS! four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree!
A/N: The contents of these chapters no longer jive quite as neatly with the song, but next chapter will match perfectly I promise.
Additional, No-Longer-A-Spoiler Disclaimer: I do not own Walmart.