A/N: Movie!Doom is lame. Very lame. I'm winging it here with a version of Comics!Doom who is much younger than Erik. Hope you like.
"Asssk him why he ssstole the peachesss for the little girl." The dragon coiled up her arm again, across her shoulders and down the other side.
"What?" Rogue glanced at Doom, who had turned to look out the window.
"Assk him."
"Sir, Ah'm sorry, but the dragon says I should ask you why you stole the peaches for the little girl. Ah guess you'll know what he's talking about."
"Stole the…That was so many years ago. What can it matter now? She was ill, and there was no baby aspirin or children's cough syrup to be had. I stole the peaches to make a drink that would mask the taste of the medicine."
"Whhhy did he do it?" Feeling the dragon's scales slide against her skin was sensual; sensual and strange at the same time.
"The dragon still wants to know why." she hesitantly offered.
"Because she wouldn't shut up! Her crying was annoying me." He sounded annoyed all over again just remembering it.
The dragon laughed, snerk, snerk, snerk. "That is what he tells himself."
"Um…Thank you. Ah guess that was what they wanted to know. Ah'll just make that call now." She stepped back into the hall and pulled Grace's phone out again.
Magneto answered his phone. Once again, it was Rogue. "How is she?" If she loses the child, what then? I don't want to have to deal with that…She'll be devastated. Certainly I'm very fond of her, but what I want and need isn't so much a wife as a future for mutantkind. If she isn't Maeve, if she isn't the answer—well, I can't say this past month has been a waste of time, precisely, not since my relationship with Wanda and Pietro has improved so much.
Confound it; I have committed myself and my people to this, and there's no easy way of getting out of it again. Wanda and Pietro would say they knew it all along…If she does lose it, I shall have to console her and support her through it. I sincerely hope that won't be necessary.
"She's in severe but stable condition, they say—."
"They say? Who says?" What can have happened?
"That's why Ah'm calling. You see, we wound up on Doctor Doom's property—."
"Doom?" Doom was an unknown quantity; Magneto had never fought him. He had never even met him. Practically no one had heard of him before the Fantastic Four had burst upon the scene, but in the five years since then, Doom had opposed them, sparing little of his attention beyond that and his pocket-sized country, Latveria. He was entirely a normal Sapient, dependant upon a suit of armor, which for all its features and technological advances, was still a suit of armor. Metal armor. Erik anticipated no trouble in dealing with Victor Von Doom.
"It's all right! He says he gives you his word he won't detain or attack any of us, because of Grace and the baby. She's gonna have to stay in bed for a week at least, though."
It is well that I am wearing my helmet, all the same. He had not put it on his head for weeks, not since the day they rescued Grace. Never before had he noticed it had a distinct psychological effect on him—it wasn't so much that he was thinking more clearly, but he was thinking more objectively. He had permitted himself to become quite sentimental about someone who, although very attractive and a charming companion in every way, was still only another piece on the chessboard, to be played and sacrificed as needed.
"Thank you, Rogue. We'll be there shortly." He hung up, and explained matters to Charles, who had insisted on coming along.
"Do she know what happened to Jean?" Charles asked again.
"No—she made no mention of her." Charles and his sentimentality—I must be catching it off him.
As one of the doctors swabbed Rogue's scrapes with a wad of antiseptic-soaked gauze which stung and burned, her bare forearm came into contact with Rogue's nose—and with a gasp, Rogue realized she could turn off her powers as easily as closing her eyes.
"I'm sorry," the woman apologized, misinterpreting. "I'm afraid it can't be helped. You have a lot of dirt in these scratches, and it must be cleaned out."
"It's all right. Ah can take it." Rogue assured her, so happy she wanted to get up and jump around—to fly, even. She went into Grace's room with a smile so radiant Grace had no trouble interpreting what it meant.
"I take it they kept their word to you." Grace said, returning the smile with one of her own, only somewhat weaker.
"Sure did. And Ah called up to let our folks know whose house we're in, so everything should be all right. Ah hope. How're you doing?"
"I've been better—but without you, I would be a lot worse. Thank you." If I lost the baby, after having waited so long, I don't know what I would do. I would just want to lie in bed and turn my face to the wall. I know I wouldn't be able to go on with the lawsuit. I wouldn't have the heart.
"You'd do the same for me, Ah know. Grace—what do you know about sibyls? Doctor Doom says that's what we are."
"Sibyls?" she repeated, startled. Mythology 120 had been a long, long time ago. "They were priests or priestesses of the Greek and Roman gods. In the stories, people consulted them about important things, and the sibyls gave them answers which were usually hard to understand, or deceptive predictions.
"Kind of like the three witches when they told Macbeth that no man of woman born could defeat him, and that he wouldn't be overthrown until Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane. Macbeth thought that meant he was undefeatable, when he should have burned down the wood and asked around about how his enemies were born."
"Ah remember—but priestesses? Ah don't believe in Zeus or Minerva or any of them! Ah may not go around hitting people over the head with it, but Ah'm a Baptist. Ah was born into the Name when Ah was thirteen, and Ah'm not giving up Christianity for our little friends, whoever they are, or anybody else."
"Relax. As far as I can tell, you don't have to worship anybody in particular for our little friends, not even them. You don't even have to believe. All you have to do is listen."
"You mean you don't believe in God?"
"I don't know what I believe, any more. Maybe God is the one who's doing the talking through the medium of animal images, I don't know. If He is, I'm glad he's never come out and said so. It would be hard to deal with. But since God always seems to make it very clear who He is, 'I am the Lord, Your God.', and all, I doubt it."
"Ah gotta agree. If it is Him, Sunday School sure got pretty much everything wrong."
There was a noise in the hall, and Callisto blurred into view. "There're here!" The Brotherhood of the X-Men (nobody was sure what to call the combined force, at least not yet) had arrived. It seemed as if half of those currently resident at the school had come; Scott, the Toad, Kitty, Jubilee, Pietro—and of course, the Professor and Magneto.
Grace raised the head of the bed a few careful centimeters as the group reached her. "Are you all right?" Erik asked her, sounding detached.
"I'm not at my best, but I'm still here. So is he." She touched her belly. "They let me listen to his heartbeat so I would relax."
"I'm glad." Erik looked like a cold stranger in his helmet.
"I hardly know you in that thing," she said to him, softly and privately.
He nodded, and took it off, holding it under his arm. Without it, his face was the face she knew, warm, concerned, and loving, albeit puzzled. He took off one glove as well, and touched her hand.
"Where's Jean?" Scott cut in, his voice tense with fear.
"Please," the Professor said, "I am glad as well that you are all right, but what happened?"
"Right before we went into the Angevins, the dragon told me to 'Destroy the firebird.' I didn't know what it meant, but…" She explained, with additional details given by Rogue.
"The last either of us saw of Jean was when she took off on great wings of flame. The plane didn't simply come apart, it disintegrated. Our landing—Rogue's and mine—might not have been a good landing in the 'Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing' sense, but we are alive."
"I no longer wonder that you were hurt—I wonder that you survived, but how?" Erik asked.
"My panther told me I knew how to get us down safely, that I just had to use my power over gravity consciously. There's nothing like being about to being about to die for sharpening one's powers of concentration." she said, tiredly.
He exhaled a sigh. "Your mutation is an unparalleled survival trait.."
"But what happened to Jean? Professor, do you know?" Rogue blurted.
"Unfortunately, I do. Jean has an aspect of her personality which I call the Phoenix. When Jean first came to the school, I put intensive blocks in her mind to suppress it. It was a purely instinctual creature—pure joy, pure rage. No middle ground."
"You crippled her, you mean." Erik said. "If she had learned to deal with it when she was young, she might not have had such difficulties now."
"No. He's wrong." said the panther pendant. "It latched on to her when she was very young. He didn't suppress it. He locked it in with her."
"Professor, I'm sorry, but the panther disagrees. He says, and I quote, 'It latched on to her when she was very young. He didn't suppress it. He locked it in with her.' "
Someone behind Erik coughed. "Sir, his Excellency requests the favor of a word with you in private, if you would be so kind."
