I in no way own or claim to posses the rights to any of the X-men:Evolution characters, only the writing itself and my characters, Lucy, Carson, and Sigma.

"Talking."

Thinking.

"Cason talking through Lucy."

Carson in Lucy's head.

Vorbind / Gânduri în limba română. (Speaking / Thinking in Romanian) -- English translations at the bottom of the page.

Demon Blood: So strange

Chapter Two -- Splitvision

Lucy lay back on the cold metal table of the medical bay she had found herself in when she first came to. The hands on either side of her face were cold, and she resisted the urge to push the man away, despite the innocent nature of his touch. She didn't particularly want him in her head, but he was trying to help and after he had gone to all the trouble of getting her inside, clean, and having someone set and cast her arm she figured she owed him at least a little explanation.

And because she and Carson always ended up arguing whenever they tried to tell a story from their collective past, it seemed easiest to let him see for himself.

She just hadn't realized that involved mind probing until he settled behind her and asked her to lean back her head.

Oh well. Carson thought, her unspoken words heard plainly in her sister's head. No turning back now.

True that.

-----

The sky was red.

That was the first thing.

Red sky, orange clouds, landscape blackened beyond recovery.

Sigma watched from the dark, brimstone smoke clogging the air as two girls fended off the small army of helper demons he had sent ahead of him into their world. They were doing a rather good job too.

Interesting.

He smiled as much as a formless cloud of smog can smile and spiraled lower to the lifeless ground. It had taken more energy than he liked to use on any one endeavor to create the blast that had drawn these two out of the relative safety of the nearby city, but if he was correct in his prediction of their identities it would be well worth it. A flash of silver metal drew his attention to the girl closest to the center of the brawl.

Ah. Intriguing fighting style. She uses her body as a weapon just as much as she employs that fancy, oversized, butcher knife of hers. She must be the one. But the other… I could have sworn it was meant to be HER.

Sigma blew past the girl nearer to the edge, whose movements only barely kept pace with those of the hellspawn surrounding her. But it was enough. Every strike; countered. Every hit; blocked. Every blast fired; taken down before it got within a foot of its target. Nothing could touch her. No weaponry necessary and she hadn't even broken a sweat. Each step and kick and punch perfectly timed and carried from the last, as opposed to the erratic, juggernaut slamming-headfirst-into-her-opponent-to-disarm-them thing her counterpart was riding on.

Carson launched herself off one of the should-have-been trees and landed her broadsword squarely between the ears of the last Helper, watching in satisfaction as it screamed with two halves of what used to be one mouth and its soot-grey blood flowed out of its head to join the multicolored puddles of gore already dampening the ground. Lucy picked her way around the bodies to join her sister in the middle of the battlefield. She placed a hand on the brown-haired, crimson-gazed girl next to her. "Carson."

"Yeah yeah, I didn't have to kill all of them, I know." The broadsword in her hands disappeared in a dull gold spark of light and she wiped the blood splatter off her face, grinning. "I was just getting into the swing of things is all. And I-"

"And you had to protect me." Lucy rolled her eyes and sheathed the dagger she was carrying in her belt. "I've heard that excuse before."

Carson laughed, her eyes sparking and reflecting the hellfire in the sky above them. "It's not as true anymore is it?"

"Not since you started letting me train with you."

"See? I'm good for something after all."

Lucy smiled at her sister's words. Carson liked doing that. Pretending she didn't know how perfect her powers were for her personality, or how well she had mastered them. It was what she did whenever they had to fight someone or- Lucy glanced at the inhuman carnage around them- someTHING. It helped her focus, and took her mind off the fact that her sister was not in any way invincible, unlike Carson herself.

"Besides," Carson hooked an elbow around her sister's neck and pulled her into a one-armed hug. "I've still gotta look out for my little sister!"

Lucy shook her head, grinning, and her dark, rust-red bangs escaped the confines of her headband to fall into her carnelian orange eyes. "We're twins you dork!"

"And I'm the oldest!"

"By ten minutes!"

"Still the oldest!"

Lucy laughed, knowing there was no winning this argument. They had had it countless times before, although this would been the first time they had it while surrounded by dead bodies. Speaking of which… "Come on Carse, we'd better get going. Won't be long before the police show up demanding an explanation that we can't give."

Carson chuckled and shoved Lucy away playfully, striding across the deadened land without a thought for the shredded demon-innards she was most likely trampling. "Good call. Where did these things come from anyway?"

"No freaking clue."

"And there's my cue!"

Lucy shot her sister an exasperated look. "Sis, we've been here for three hours. It's a little late for an entrance."

Carson just stared at her, confused. "I didn't say anything."

"Then who-"

"TADAA!!!" a swath of thick black smoke blanketed the girls, making them cough and gag for breath. Sigma grinned and tutted softly. "Now really, what kind of a response is that?"

Carson, ever the spaz, chose to ignore the fact that they had NO IDEA what was talking to them. "It's the CHOKING kind of response you jerk! Turn off the fog machine so we can breathe already!"

"Carson!" Lucy said sharply, trying to keep her twin's sharp tongue in check.

Sigma chuckled and the smog cleared, leaving a towering, deep-space-black dragon-looking thing towering over them, its tail curled lazily around the two girls below it. "Now aren't you a fast one. Pity I'll have to edit that out, I could use the banter every now and again. Helpers are so dull in that regard."

Carson pulled a long, two-pronged meat fork out of nowhere and poked at the tail. "What the hell are you? Are you made of smoke? Shadows?"

Lucy glared at her. "What the hell, Carson. What. The hell."

"You are both correct!" he trumpeted, much to their confusion. "I am smoke, shadows, and the hell! And you, my sweet, are coming with me." He reached down and snagged Carson between his claw-like digets and the air of surrealistic comedy vanished. Carson instantly shifted back into battle mode, unsheathing a rapier from inside her left arm and bringing it across and down in one swift movement that severed the fingers at the knuckle and dropped her twenty feet to the ground. She hopped back up without hesitation and with not a scratch to be seen and darted forward, Lucy following and balancing out her moves, their combined attack startling the large demon momentarily and giving them the impression that they had the upper hand-

Until Sigma's tail whipped Carson out of the air in mid-leap and his right hand closed around Lucy's upper torso, slamming her into the rock-covered ground below. Lucy blinked, the sky suddenly blurry. Her ears were ringing. "LUCY!!" Carson was calling her name from somewhere nearby.

"'s alrigh'. 'm fine…" She mumbled. Her sister's eyes burned and she flung herself at the demon, hacking a chunk off of his right shoulder with a katana and embedding several ninja stars in his chest before he smacked her down into the dust again.

She was screaming now, her overriding instinct to PROTECT erasing all semblance of the pain caused by the impact from her body. "Let her go!"

Lucy crashed into an outcropping of rocks some thirty meters away and was lying face down in the dirt before she even realized he had left the dragon-thing's hand. "Tri-pp-ee…" she stuttered, her mind deciding to go AWOL and let the rest of her body light fireworks in her nervous system. Sigma scooped her back up and they repeated the process several times, each attack by Carson leading to Lucy ending up somewhere on the blackened ground ten-to-fifty yards away from where she started.

Sigma plucked her from the blood-covered earth and set the tips of his claws to either side of her windpipe. "It's a pity, I hate to waste such perfectly good energy. But then again, I suppose if your sister keeps this up there's really no helping it…"

"NO!" all the weaponry Carson had produced vanished and she launched herself at him, barehanded.

The demon's grip tightened and Lucy felt herself flicker. "You- will… let g- g-" she tried to get out a lie. To convince him to drop her and leave in as few words as possible. Her head was cloudy. It was hard to speak and there was no power behind her words. Sigma smiled as gently as a dragon could.

"No. Stop- just- please…" Carson was crying, but her sister realized it too late to trick her back into that insane, insatiable anger that had gotten them this far. "I'll do whatever you want, just let her go."

Something warm and wet dripped down into Lucy's eyes from her hairline, obscuring the red-eyed girl from her vision. "Carson, I'm fine. I'm fine, see? You need to keep fighting. Don't worry about me. I'm fine." No power there either. Her fogged over mind was disrupting the feed.

Her sister's choked voice tingled her hyper-sensitive eardrums. "Lu- Lucy you're bleeding. I can't let him hurt you."

"He won't."

"Mincinos.(1)" Carson choked out, the Romanian word tripping off the tip of her tongue.

"El nu va durea-mă, soră.(2) He won't hurt me."

The demon with his fingers curled around her neck laughed, amused by the sisters' contradictory conversation. "My dear, I'm afraid you are incorrect. I have every intention of ripping your soul out of your body and using it for a flashlight once I'm finished placing your lovely sister under my control, I make no illusions about that."

"Why?" she whispered, close to blacking out from the strain on her body.

"Because, my sweet," he struck out lightning-quick with his tail and ran Carson through her forehead. "Your sister has something I want."

Lucy was dimly aware of a light being dispelled from her sister's body when everything faded to black.

--

Lucy sat up and rubbed her head, a sick, dizzy feeling rushing through her every time she moved. She looked around at the dead landscape and wondered where the hell all the bodies had gone. And Carson-

Oh shit.

Carson.

"Aw man, what hit me?" Hearing her sister's voice, Lucy spun around too quickly and landed hard on her rear. "Ow!"

"Carson! Where are you?"

"Where am I? Where are you?! I hear you but I can't see you!"

"Same here! I-" she struggled to stand, only to immediately fall over again. "-am landing on my face. Ow."

Carson frowned. "What are you talking about? That was-" she stiffened and looked down at herself for the first time, Lucy's head making the movement instead of her own. "-me." She finished quietly. Oh shit.

My thoughts exactly. Lucy replied without speaking.

-----

Professor Xavier withdrew his hands from the girl's temples, sitting back in his chair and regarding her silently. Such a strange case. "Thank you, child. That was most enlightening."

"By which you mean that you can now see why this girl is just a hair more freakish than the ones you're used to dealing with."

"Shush, Carson." Lucy chided, turning her attention back to the man in the wheelchair. "We appreciate your concern-"

"I don't."

"-But I think we would both prefer if you would stay out of our heads from now on. It's bad enough having one extra person in there all the time. I, for one, do not need two."

Carson grinned. "Aw, you know you love me."

"Love you, hate you, same thing."

She laughed lightly, obviously used to this conversation, then addressed the Professor. "Thanks for helping us out and everything, but we really need to get going soon. We've had an angry mob chasing us since Brightsdale and I would hate to see them show up on your doorstep demanding our release into their-" she cleared her throat and readied her air quotes. "'Tender loving care.'"

The man folded his hands and brought them up in front of his mouth, indicating that he was pondering her words. "I see. And Lucy?"

"I'm with Carson on this one. We wouldn't want you to get hurt." She sat up on the bed she had woken up on and swung her legs over the side, gingerly stepping down onto the cold tile floor. "Besides, if we leave now we can probably get the jump on them and be out of the state by sundown."

Xavier shook his head, bringing his hands down to the controls of his chair. "They won't be following you anymore."

Carson's eyes lit up and she grinned deviously. "Ooh, did you eat them? I'll bet you ate them. Or got one of your friends to eat them. You probably have a friend who ate them because they were hungry and then got sick because everyone knows angry mobs never sit well with mutants unless they eat them with milk."

Lucy smacked a hand over her eyes. "Carson, do us both a favor and shut up."

He chuckled. "No, I took the liberty of altering their memories of you. They think you escaped and have gone home to their families, no harm done."

"No harm, eh?" Carson said incredulously, crossing her one free arm and going into 'overprotective sister' mode.

Lucy turned it into a defensive stance. "Come on, it's not that bad…"

Carson was having none of it. "They broke. Your arm. And they tried to set you on fire! Again! Your pain receptors were all over the place!"

Lucy glared at the ground. "I thought I told you to stop monitoring my vital signs!"

"Girl, I'm in your head! It's what I do!"

Professor Xavier watched them argue with interest. Every time one of them spoke Lucy's body and facial expressions shifted into their control. He would have suspected her of schizophrenia if not for the slight change in inflection whenever Carson was in control and the two distinct mental readings that the girl was emitting. It was as though someone had taken one of their minds and simply transferred it to the other's body without removing its previous inhabitant. It wasn't a split personality, it was two distinct people. And one of them was-

Well.

Distinct didn't quite cover it.

The body they had ended up in reminded him very much of that of a certain teleporter he had recently summond to the medical wing, asking him not to pop in on them as it might startle the two girls further. She gestured with gloved, four-fingered hands as they went at it as well as with her tail, which was tipped by a three-pronged, claw-like appendage as opposed to a flat spade like Kurt's. Her pointed ears were the same deep red as her skin and the two horns that protruded from either side of her head, countering the bright gold color her eyes glowed whenever Lucy was speaking. Whenever Carson took over, they shined deep crimson. Lucy hissed her forked tongue over her fangs as she sparred words with her sister, seemingly not bothered by the fact that she looked like the devil incarnate.

A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts and her from her verbal duel. He smiled as the familiar thought patterns registered. "Come in, Kurt." Lucy/Carson spun away from the door and, moving faster than the eye could follow, darted behind the examining table and pulled her hood down over her face. She was putting as much space as she could between herself and the unknown. Because the unknown was bad. The unknown was usually trying to kill her or maim her or-

Or steal her sister's body and leave her soul behind to inhabit the nearest living thing in the middle of a desert where the equivalent of a small nuclear warhead had just wiped everything else out.

Yeah.

Lucy and Carson were not on good terms with the unknown.

A pale-skinned German boy walked in, catching sight of her and smiling slightly. She was still wearing the large hooded trench coat she had been hiding in for the past six years and he couldn't see her face, but the overzealous coverings reminded him of himself when he had first come to the institute. "You vanted to see me, Professor?" He asked, not taking his eyes from the girl's shadowed face.

"Yes. Lucy, Carson, this is Kurt Vagner. He's one of my students here at the institute. I called for him when I was under the impression that you would be staying with us for a while."

"Cool. So now he can leave."

"Carson, don't be rude."

"Why not?"

"'Cause it's not nice."

"So? I'm not the nice one here, that's your job."

"Um…" the girls turned their attention to the very confused boy in front of them. "Are you talking to yourself?"

"Uh, no. I'm actually-"

"Yes I am! I'm insane and schizophrenic and you very much don't want me to be here so I'll be on my way now bye!"

Carson started to move forward but Lucy stopped her in mid-stride. "Actually I'm talking to my sister. My homicidal, blade-crazy, won't-shove-it-even-if-it's-not-a-good-time-to-be-bringing-this-up twin sister. Who happens to be, y'know, in my head."

Kurt blinked at her. "Seriously?"

"No, I'm lying, I really am crazy, and I'm just trying to gain your trust so I can murder you all with forks later tonight. Lucy, can we leave now? Please?"

Lucy sighed and shook her head. "If they let us. I'd like to get out of here before you embarrass yourself further."

Carson grinned and Kurt caught the glint of fangs from under her hood. "You mean before I embarrass yourself any further."

"Shut up, Carson."

The Professor cleared his throat to catch their attention. "Lucy, Carson, if you really wish to leave than it is quite within your rights to do so. However, I would greatly appreciate it if you would consider sticking around for a while. At least until your arm was better healed." The girl lifted her arm and looked at it as though she had never seen anything so fascinating before. "I had Ororo prepare a spare room for you when you first arrived in case you needed a place to stay. Kurt can show you there if you're willing to remain with us a few more days."

Lucy eyed the blue-haired boy curiously. Something about him wasn't quite right. His body didn't fit they way he held himself and there was a tickling in the back of her mind telling her that he was a lie. Which didn't make sense, because unless he was a figment of her imagination he couldn't be a lie, and even if she was imagining him then he was real enough in her mind that she could see him so he couldn't be a lie and trying to figure this out was giving her a headache.

Maybe he's a lie because your brain is lying about him being a lie. Carson put in oh-so-helpfully, sneaking the comment onto the tracks of Lucy's independent train of thought and nearly causing it to derail.

Dammit Carson, quit doing that!

Why? It's fun!

Because every time you do it makes me look like someone just hit me in the stomach with a sledgehammer! It's freaking annoying! Du-te puful ego-ul tău, vă smucitură!(3)

Sure enough, Kurt had seen her silently jerk partway forward, as if something heavy had just landed in her midriff. He started forward and reached out to steady her. "Are you alright?"

"Hm? Maybe." She looked over at the Professor, who was watching their interactions with interest. "I'll stay for the night, just because I really need the sleep and I stopped trusting Carson to watch my back while I'm out about two years ago."

Carson pouted, barely hiding the grin that was threatening to make its way onto Lucy's features. "Aw, are you still mad about that?"

"Yes."

Carson laughed, knowing she was driving her sister crazy with her nonchalance. Really all she wanted was to get out of the room they were in, preferably to somewhere where she could see the outdoors and breathe clean air again. The oxygen she was breathing tasted processed on Lucy's hypersensitive tongue and Carson did not like it one bit. There was always something wrong when the air started to feel manufactured, and for all this 'Professor X's calming words Carson had learned to trust her sister's instincts, even when Lucy herself chose to ignore them. "Fine, we can stay for one night, but after that I'm leaving, whether you want to or not."

Lucy paused, processing that information. "…You're going to kidnap me."

"Yes."

"By just getting up while I'm asleep and walking away."

"Yes."

Lucy rolled her eyes. "Fantastic plan. Pure genius."

"Hey, I'm still working on it!"

Kurt laughed and Carson shot him a look, crimson gaze burning a hole in his forehead. He quickly stifled his giggles, worried that he had done something wrong, but then Lucy broke through and burst out laughing. Carson wasn't really indignant; this was just something she did to distinguish herself from her counterpart. Like when they argued about something that, in reality, they could not have agreed on more.

Kurt gave a nervous smile. Mien Gott, she's confusing. But the 'nice' one, Lucy, she doesn't seem too bad. I vonder if she really is two people at once or if she's just playing the crazy card to get out ov here more qvickly. "Do you vant me to show you around?" he asked, offering his hand to the still-cloaked figure. She hesitated, then took his bare hand in her gloved one and let her lead him toward the door.

"Before you go, I have one more thing to ask our guest…s." The pair paused in the doorway and Lucy looked back, her golden eyes meeting the Professor's without hesitation. "I believe I have a pretty good understanding of Carson's gifts from the memory you showed me, but I cannot seem to pinpoint yours, Lucy. Would you mind telling me what it is?"

Lucy smiled, pointed canines catching the light and throwing her innocent grin into a demonic shadow. "Don't worry about it. I've got things to keep that under control,"

She let Kurt tug her out the door, still beaming. There was something evasive about the way she phrased her answer, but he could tell that she was telling the truth and let them leave without pressing the matter. Lucy waited until the door closed behind them to let slip the rest of her sentence; the part about the more passive aspect of her powers. The words were barely audible as she exhaled.

"Just don't lie to me."

Romanian-English translations.

--(1)-- Mincinos = Liar

--(2)-- El nu va durea-mă, soră. = He will not hurt me, sister.

--(3)-- Du-te puful ego-ul tău, vă smucitură! = Go fluff your ego, you jerk!

So yes, Carson has unbreakable skin and can spontaneously create anything that could possibly be used to stab-slash-cut a person from thin air. There will be more said about Lucy's power in the future. Here's looking forward to your reviews.

--Dotskip