Memories

Honour Guard

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If you want to use Tora, or any of my other characters, PM me.

Curt crouched down and picked up the blue cat bowl with "Jeanne" painted on it in slapdash grey letters. He'd made it for Jeanne's first 'birthday', a year after she had been created. The cat had wound around his ankles and thanked him in her precise, clipped tones. He missed Jeanne, almost as much as he missed Maman. Jeanne was always there for him, quietly comforting whenever Maman was away. Jeanne had howled as her body had ripped apart, which is how Curt had known. Jeanne would not have left him unless Maman was dead.

"Bye, Jeanne."

He hugged the bowl to him, trying not to see Jeanne's death, the way she began to unfurl at the edges, the spray of water as her body unravelled. She screamed and howled and tried to control herself by shifting between her three forms but nothing could help and she burst, splattering water everywhere as Curt screamed.

"I miss you."

And he slid the bowl into the box of stuff he was taking into storage.

Because somehow, seeing the empty bowl in the corner of the kitchen hurt more than seeing the empty space on the staff wall.

"Why would anyone think that?"

"Why? Because a photograph you walked past everyday without seeing means less to you than the object you picked up everyday and you knew your loved one used will never be touched by them again?"

"One. Two. Three. Four."

Steve and Logan looked down at Laura and Zillah, who were slowly going through the motions of a sparring match below. Akira was perched on a wall next to them shouting out the count, her eyes still bound with bandages although it was more in deference to other's sensibilities than the risk of infection. Beast's surgery had done wonders but the flesh and skin were still discoloured and ragged. Her eyelids had been declared beyond recovery. The sight of the wrecked face with the scars around the eye sockets and cutting into the nose tended to put people off, so she wore the bandages. Hank was preparing her a set of blacked-out glasses to allow her a hint more normality for going out and about with. They'd also had her legally registered blind and were working on teaching her Braille and other methods of coping. Slightly redundant with her ability to observe photons but would be helpful in case anyone tried to take her powers from her or there was a repeat of M-Day.

"Kai!"

Zillah twisted her arm, sending Laura –who had been trying to pin it- flying. Without losing her count, Akira's arm reached out and Laura slowed down before being lowered down to be deposited on the ground with feather-lightness. Steve whistled through his teeth.

"Okay, I'll swap another Avengers Academy kid for her."

Logan let out a barking laugh.

"Not going to happen. Do you know what she freaked out most over when the Hellfire Club kidnapped her? It was because she'd hurt one of her captors. Not that she'd had her eyes gouged out or that no kid her age should have to endure what she did. No, she was upset because she hurt someone. We can't even put her on combat training, she gets upset."

"What?"

"Hank reckons it's some kind of safeguard mechanism. She sees people as clusters of atoms. Violence could lead to her losing control and forgetting that those clusters of atoms are alive."

Steve paused.

"Yeah. I can see her problem. Is she…?"

"Adapting? Quite well. She can tell us apart, but she is awful at reading expressions. Too delicate. Hank's working on it."

Steve looked down in time to see Zillah spread her wings to slow herself down after Laura kicked her.

"I thought they were just going slow?"

Logan glanced down.

"Trust me, for those two, that's slow."

Steve whistled through his teeth.

"Etana trained her well."

"Have you seen her with a sword?"

"No. Why?"

"Put it this way, if Taskmaster got a look at her, we'd be shot."

"That good, huh?"

"You saw Etana with swords. Zil's nowhere near the double-handed sword stage yet but she's handly with the light blades and you should see her with a wakizashi. She's a bit clumsier with the longer blades, but that'll come with time."

"I thought the whole point was them going slow."

"They tend to forget that. Wait for it…"

Akira's hands moved and both girls were slammed into the mats.

"Slow. And again. One, two, three, four."

Zillah and Laura pulled themselves, getting used to a gravitational field strength of one and a half Earth's usual. It pushed the odds slightly in Laura's favour, as Zillah lost her aerial advantage and made her more clumsy, with her wings dragging behind her.

They seemed alight with some sort of inner fury, as they lashed out at one another. And then Akira's hands moved and the two others froze, as if sealed in a moment in time.

"Our session is over. We should depart."

The girls all picked up their various items –Laura's jumper, Zillah's bag of assorted sharp pointy things and Akira's tome of Mathematical Physics- and vanished, with a surprising speed and ease. Akira kind of faded away, by bending photons around her, Zillah by stepping into the darker corners of the room and Laura… Well, Laura by whatever creepy genetic thing she'd inherited from Logan that allowed them both to hide in plain sight, simply by standing still.

Steve looked at Logan.

"She's grown on me, just as fast as her mother did."

Logan nodded.

"She's like that."

He didn't say who 'she' was. Did it really matter?

Phoenix leant back.

"Okay, you said something about drinks?"

Death glared over.

"Are you really suggesting that we should be drinking while watching an interesting history of one of our peers?"

"I thought we were just being nosy?"

Silence span outwards from Zillah, as she pulled her hand away from the stinging cheek of the boy opposite.

"You stay away from me, you don't talk to me, you don't even look at me!"

And she turned and marched off, leaving a white-skinned boy whose blue eyes to turn away sadly, the awkward, fumbling words still half on his lips.

"I… I just wanted to ask if you'd go to the dance with me…"

And with her sightless eyes, far on the other side of the canteen, Akira felt a stab of pity for Evan Sabahnur.

"Am I the only one who found it slightly creepy? That after Apocalypse and Etana; Evan was as obsessed with Zillah as his predecessor was?"

"They were not the same. They never were. And to suggest such a thing is disrespectful to all their memories."

A.N. Okay, so here's the thing. I am an absolute idiot. Because I decided that no, just preparing for some horrific interviews and keeping on top of coursework wasn't enough for me, oh no. I had to volunteer to be stage manager for a panto. Of course, my interviews are slap bang in the middle of rehearsals, I have tests before and after and I haven't got a clue how to work the pyrotechnics. My only excuse is being a complete moron, but I hope you'll stand by me with this –my life's really hectic and Memories can't take priority over pretty much anything right now. I hope you all understand, S-99

P.S. Memories is now also being posted on Archive of Our Own, in its new, updated form. I'll eventually get round to sorting it out on Fanfiction, but as you can see, I'm pretty busy.