Disclaimer: I own none of the characters within.
Author's Notes: Still breathing. Guess who's gonna meet Edward Albee? Mwah. That's right. ME. Rock on, Great Plains Theatre Conference-style.
I like this chapter a lot. I hope you all do, too.
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Lots of good ideas come to people in the shower.
Hank McCoy was not one of these people. Being completely covered in fur made showers a not-entirely pleasant experience, and he was usually so focused on just getting through the torture that he didn't have time for any of those I-was-shampooing-my-hair-when-suddenly-eureka! moments.
However, he was quite prone to breakfast revelations. Munching on a bagel, he could at any time be struck with a lightning bolt of inspiration. It had happened twice while eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts. These could be good ideas great or small, important or irrelevant, but they always came during his morning meal.
He was slicing a grapefruit for himself that morning when the knife slipped and nicked his finger. Holding the paw to his mouth and instinctively sucking on the wound the way injured children do, he tasted the bitter copper of his own blood. It stung from the citrus, but that also gave the blood a strange sweet aftertaste.
And it was then that he had his I-was-cutting-a-grapefruit-when-suddenly-eureka! moment.
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Wanda woke to the distinct sense of someone watching her. The urge to sit bolt upright and cover herself with her blanket didn't even occur to her. She simply rolled over slowly, settling onto her side to sleepily observe her observer.
"I dreamed of fire all night," Johnny whispered to her in the static air of a bedroom at sunrise. "Fire running through my veins."
"There's fire in my veins," Wanda whispered to him as the air became lighter and lighter from their speaking. "Pietro's fire."
"You remind me so much of him," he sighed from where he sat in a chair he had pulled up to her bedside while she slept.
She crooked her arm under her head to prop herself up just a little bit and prevent her from dozing off again. The window shade was still drawn but sunlight was fighting to get into the room, creating a white halo around the shade and filling the room with muted shadows. Johnny was staring at her. No, that wasn't the word; he was gazing at her. His eyes ached, and that pain was as visible to her as a bloody bandage around his head would be. The green of those eyes was lost in the strange twilight so that they looked black. It was a death's head crowned with red fire, and it made Wanda wonder if she were still dreaming.
"Are you real?" she spoke in a low, curious voice.
"I think so," he shrugged, and it was so human and confused that she knew at once it was no dream. "I'm starting to wonder, though."
"Me, too."
They laughed together in hushed, breathless tones like children staying up past curfew who fear the entrance of an angry parent. Then the pain jumped out of his eyes and went to his mouth, so that even though he frowned, the agony in his gaze had faded away.
"I miss your brother," he confessed softly. "And you remind me of him so much."
"I miss him, too." It went without saying, but she said it anyway because it felt good to do so.
"I want him to come back. I need to see him again. He's the only friend I ever—" he raked a hand through the fire around his head, and she realized drowsily that it was just his hair. "I don't have much time."
"Are you leaving soon?"
He smiled, and the pain jumped back up into his eyes, his cheerful mouth not a sufficient disguise for the great sorrow that hid behind it.
"Maybe. I came here to see your brother again before I..." he paused, turned his eyes away from her. "Leave."
Her eyes followed his hands as they scratched his knees with great anxiety. They were ghost hands, white and thin and poetic in their movements, and she became hypnotized by them. She was startled to notice a blemish; a strange dark lesion on the back of the right one.
"What's that?" she pointed to it.
"The mark of the beast," he laughed, a fake laugh. "I found it this morning. It's a new one."
"Oh," she tilted her head, puzzled, even though she somehow understood. "That's too bad."
"It's a damn shame," he nodded. "You know how everyone always has big plans for the future? Gonna go out there and be somebody. I was like that. I was going to be a famous something or other. Now I can't even remember my last name and I'm on my final lap around the track. Funny how things work out, huh?"
"Isn't life a bitch?" she sat up now, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders for warmth. "I mean, did we ever ask for this? Did you ever wake up one day and say, hey, I think I'd like to be a complete outcast from the human race and have mutant powers that could eventually take over my life? No? Wow, that's funny, because neither did I."
"I want my life back!" his voice burned with injustice. "They took it all away from me and left me, what? This bag of bones with no warranty. I wish I could sue somebody, but I would settle for shooting them in the face."
"Stabbing them in the guts." she agreed heartily.
"Breaking their nose with my fist."
"Running them over with my car."
"Strangling them."
"Setting them on fire."
"Fire!" At her mention of his beloved element, his back arched and his hands flexed open and closed, eyes closed in fond memory. But then he shuddered in pain. "My bones ache to think about it!" he rasped. "It's this... this thing inside of me, this—" he pointed to the lesion on the back of his hand. "It's taking away the only thing I ever loved."
"They're taking away the only thing I ever loved," Wanda said darkly, and she thought of Pietro so hard that she could smell that damn cologne and it stung her eyes so that they filled up with tears which was only because of that smell and not because she was crying because she refused to cry.
"I don't believe in anything anymore." Johnny said dully.
And she immediately wanted to agree with him, but it simply wasn't true. For all of her morbid pessimism and dark predictions for the future, there was still something she clung to, because she could still feel Pietro's heart pounding somewhere deep inside of her. In word and deed she had expressed nothing but despair, but for all of her efforts her heart was still stubbornly hopeful.
"I believe in something." Her voice was reverent, distant.
"At least someone does," he said sadly.
"Do you think that we can ever be healed?" she wondered, not really asking him but just asking herself. "I mean, yeah, I know, everyone says that time heals all wounds, but is that really true?"
"They say that love heals," he muttered. "But that means there's not a hope in hell for me, which is okay I guess because that's where I'm headed anyway."
"Hell." the word tasted foul on her tongue, and it made the hot water in her eyes overflow and spill down her face. "Say hi to Pietro for me. You'll be the perfect pair of devils."
"You have no confidence in him." he said, wounded.
Then he stood, marched over to her window, and threw open the shade. The room was filled with dazzlingly white light, just how she imagined at the end of that proverbial tunnel, and she threw up her hands to shield her eyes against it. Johnny was a blazing silhouette, his hair ignited by the sudden illumination, his eyes brilliantly green and burning hot. He seemed almost supernatural, his fierce posture coupled with the shock of the light on her ill-prepared eyes.
"Devils and angels," he said grimly. "Were all human once."
Then, either because her eyes adjusted to the brightness or his anger simply faded away, he looked human again, pale and sickly. There were dark circles around his eyes that she hadn't noticed earlier because of the dim lighting. His lip was bleeding; he'd been chewing on it through the whole conversation. He held out his arms, empty hands palm up, and whispered, "I was human once."
Suddenly he was gone. A great chill swept over Wanda; she had never spoken with a dead man before. The haunting was over for now, but the nightmares would remain, that much she was sure of. She heard the light step of Johnny's ghost descending the staircase and shuddered. For one insane moment she imagined him as a transparent fire demon, his flaming arms outstretched to meet Pietro's shivering white phantom as they collided on some forsaken level of the inferno.
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There's only so much one mind can take.
Pietro felt like a pencil sketch that someone was slowly erasing. Like in those old cartoons, the eraser started at his feet and worked its way upward while he hollered in protest. Without his legs he could only wave his arms and cry for help, but the Big Eraser From The Sky was deaf to his pleas. It was slowly rubbing out his torso, almost to his heart, and once he lost that he would be nothing!
What if the Eraser chose to leave him that way? Unable to run with his legs gone, unable to love with his heart removed. Nothing left to live for!
His head snapped to the side like an electronic toy with a fried circuit. All of his movements were jerky and unstable, his sanity now a mere puddle of consciousness that was still being mercilessly drained away. The thoughts that ricocheted through his head like pinballs were impossibly fast and difficult to catch, and once he managed to grab them they proved to be slippery, too. The only thought he could get a firm hold of was that it would be better to go quickly than slowly drift into complete madness.
So he went into the kitchen and found a big blue guy cutting up a grapefruit. Actually, he had left the grapefruit and was frozen in mid-run, a thrilled and excited expression on his face, a silent cry of "eureka!" that even a crazy person could understand. Well, goodie for him, he's had a happy thought. Happy thoughts are what help you to fly. That, and pixie dust.
What really interested Pietro was the knife left behind on the counter. He picked it up and even contemplated attempting to juggle it, but he only had one knife and everyone knows you have to have at least three to make a juggling act entertaining.
Since he couldn't juggle, he decided to kill himself instead.
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