Memories

Guilty Conscience

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Eva hated The Lion King. That was odd, because previously, she had loved it, singing along to all the songs and bouncing up and down. But now, every time she tried to watch it, she would scream and run when Scar told Simba to wait in the gorge. Because Mufasa would die. She couldn't even skip that bit, to when Mufasa came back, because that meant he had died and wasn't just sleeping.

Maman could have been sleeping. Should have been sleeping. Eva shouldn't have even been there to see her, but she had crept out to see Maman, to try and wake her up. Maman looked so peaceful but when Eva climbed up to hug her, when she placed her hand on Maman's chest to shake her awake, her hand had gone right down. She had tugged the sheet back and seen the soft padding in place of Maman's stomach and chest, stuffed between the shiny metal bones. Maman had not stirred as Eva screamed, had not leapt up to hug her and whisper "All will be well, ma petite cherie." She was gone, the warm arms were cold and what made Maman Maman was no longer there to hug her and laugh and let her sleep in her arms when a film got boring.

Uncle Hank had to pull her away and cursed with words that normally only Daddy said before hugging her close and telling her he was sorry, so very sorry. He had tried to cheer her up by putting on a film, and picking her favourite, he put on The Lion King. Eva screamed and screamed and screamed.

She wasn't even like Simba, completely innocent of his father's death. Maman had died because of her. Because she hadn't stayed in her room like she'd been told. She had gone out and been hurt and she remembered Maman cradling her in her arms before everything was right-wrong and so simple. Maman was not sad anymore. And then they were back home and Aunty Kitty was running with her in her arms, telling her that they would get to safety, not to worry and they lay shivering in the little cave under the school, with no entrance or exit, just Aunty Kitty and solid rock. And then Maman was dead and never coming back and it was all Eva's fault.

All Eva's fault…

She sat quietly in her room, not playing with her toys or reading her books or pretending to be an X-Man –always an X-Man, never an Avenger or a Fantastic Four or Defender. Always an X-Man.

Maman was dead. Eva knew that, but couldn't really understand it. All she knew was that Maman was empty and gone and was not going to come in the door to play Heroes and Villains with her, not to happily sit down and pretend to be Dr Doom –she did a great Dr Doom impression.

Maman would not come in and read her a book. Maman would not spend hours learning to sew to try and make her a superhero costume that didn't fit properly and made Eva trip up when she tried to walk. Eva loved it, even if it was awfully tight in some places and too loose in others. Maman had made it for her, sitting in the big armchair struggling to get the thread to go through the needle, muttering curses under her breath when she ripped the cape. Sat there with a little light and lots of thimbles –one on almost every finger- and reams of cloth and Eva's drawing and a book on how to sew and tape measures that Eva played with all the time.

She pulled it out of her dressing-up box. It was bright yellow with lopsided blue triangles and a funny EL on it, with the L in blue and the two upper lines of the E in black on the upright of the L. The cape was silky soft and the same blue as Daddy's eyes.

Eva dragged it into Maman's office. It was like it always had been, left so Daddy could sometimes go and sit in it. It didn't smell quite right. It should smell of freshly ground coffee beans and crushed mint and warmth. Instead it smelt like Daddy and the amber drink he was drinking lots of these days and the horrid smell of the brown cylinders he'd brought home one day and leant out the window to set fire to the end. Eva had a feeling Maman wouldn't approve.

She opened the bottom draw in the desk, where Maman had kept the big scissors she used to cut the cloth to shape. Pulling them out, Eva sat down on the floor, back against the desk drawer and began cutting the cape up into little bits.

When blue shreds littered the floor, Eva looked at the top and trousers. The top was too tight under the arms and the trousers too big about the waist. But Maman had spent hours trying to get them to fit, had been so upset when they weren't so Eva said they were perfect and watched the tender expression on Maman's face blossom and Maman hugged her and laughed and whispered "what did I do to deserve you, my perfect little Canucklehead?" before ruffling her hair and pressing a kiss to her forehead. But Maman was gone and would never come back.

The scissors snipped and soon yellow was scattered across the blood-red carpet, mixed with blue.

Tora screamed in pain, wanting to tell Eva "Put those scissors down, you'll hurt yourself!"

But she was gone, gone away, leaving a little girl not sure who she hated more –herself or her mother.

"Eva could never forgive her mother."

"They had a rocky relationship. Tora herself never got on too well with her mother and it showed. She was better at helping the older girls –Zillah and Laura and Jubilee and Cia. She couldn't work out what to do with Eva."

Jamie knew he was meant to be a genius. He'd been told it often enough. He didn't like that term. He was a fixer. He fixed things, made them better with maths and science and sometimes a hug. A hug usually worked with Maman. A hug and a carefully made cup of coffee in the mug he'd painted. On it were the words "The Best Mother in the Multiverse". All of him had been careful to present the mug to all of her at exactly the same time on her birthday. He wondered about that. Why had Maman got her birthday three days after Christmas? It made getting presents rather difficult. Uncle Kurt had once told him how it was funny that Maman's birthday was Innocent's Day. Jamie had gone and pulled down the big Encyclopaedia Britannia that once belonged to Aunt Etana and looked up Innocent's Day. He admitted he could see the parallels between Maman and the boy children killed in Bethlehem. Maman's eyes were so heavy when she thought no one was looking. But Jamie had got good at pretending to not look and actually seeing a lot. He sometimes thought she must have once been like the babies. Not sure what she had done wrong to be hurt so bad.

Jamie was a fixer. But there were some things he couldn't fix. He wished he could fix this. Dad was drinking excessively again and had restarted smoking the vile-smelling cigars he'd stopped smoking after Maman had thrown them all out and made him sleep on the sofa for a week, insisting she didn't like the taste of tobacco in her mouth. Jamie knew it wouldn't hurt Dad, not medically. But he also knew it wasn't healthy emotionally. Without Maman there, Dad was just…slipping away.

Jamie had seen this before. In another world, Maman had been killed by Doom, unable to cope with the stresses of all the multiverse flooding through her mind. Dad had killed Doom then taken Jamie and left the X-Men. Jamie grew up in a squalid flat, trying to clean up after a father who had an unhealthy amount of survivor's guilt but wouldn't contact his old friends for help. Dad had gone from menial job to menial job, often fired for aggression and inability to take orders. Traits which made him an excellent superhero weren't so good shifting boxes down at the factory. "That Logan" became the town bogeyman and Jamie was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and pity. At eight, he was capable of washing his own clothes and cooking his own meals, doing the housekeeping and accounts while still keeping his grades up. When social work came round, they found the house perfectly clean and a quiet but attentive boy doing his homework. There was poverty but of the scrubbed would-rather-go-hungry-than-appear-filthy kind. Jamie had worked out they were coming and spent hours cleaning. When Dad had worked out that his last link to Tora was about to be taken, he managed to pull himself together long enough to make the social workers think it was him looking after Jamie and not the other way around.

This wouldn't happen here. The ties were stronger. If Dad tried to disappear, the others would find him. But Jamie still worried. If Dad decided to take Eva and run, what would it do to his baby sister? Jamie found Eva irritating and a little backwards –or maybe she was just normal- but she was his baby sister and he would never let anything happen to her.

He looked up as he finished working on the final lines of coding. He'd hacked into Maman's private computers –it hadn't been hard. She'd used a compilation of his birthdate, Eva's birthdate and the day Curt took as his birthday –the day he had been reunited with his family. Maman was great with computers –all he knew about programming and hacking she'd taught him. But she was awful with passwords. It had been the work of a few moments to get into her profile –and the work of a few hours to download the necessary files. A quick scan over the entire program, including making a few changes to one of the sub-programs another version of him had written.

He pressed the button to compile the program and then the screen lit up. A 3D mesh of Maman's face. Jamie cleared his throat.

"Hello, Maman."

"Hello, darling. How are you?"

It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing…

The real Tora was so tempted to take over the computer, but thought better. It was a risk being here anyway. Far too great a risk. She slid away, regretfully avoiding the array of sensors that Reed had set up to detect if any surges of Dragon were spotted in the solar system.

"Please tell me it didn't go insane and try and kill people?"

"No. It was the barest of AIs, with access to Tora's memories and responded to queries based on previous recollections of how she should respond."

Logan slumped further into his seat. Harry just slid another beer down the bar for him. The bartender had quietly managed to wall off Tora's favourite seat, the one tucked into the corner nearest the fire exit, with a view over the whole bar. When Etana, heavily disguised under the image inducer, had come for her first and only visit to Harry's, she'd made a beeline for that chair, only for Tora to get there first. Etana had enjoyed the evening out, but apparently she preferred the British pub to the American bar and used her teleportation to go to one in Glasgow she'd once invited him to. A mutant pub. Logan had to admit, Etana seemed much more comfortable without the image inducer on and she was obviously a regular. She'd been given at least three free drinks.

He saw a woman walk towards him with purpose in mind, saw Harry pull her aside in warning. Big tip today then. He didn't want to have to deal with people throwing themselves at him, recognising him as Wolverine. He didn't want another death on his hands.

The woman hadn't paid attention to Harry and sat next to him.

"Do you want me to buy you a drink?"

"Go away."

He tried to ignore her but she was making it difficult, shifting her stool along to be closer to him, so the sickly chemical smell of her perfume wafted over him. Tora would never use perfume. It was too sensitive for them both. Instead she had smelt of coffee and mint soap. The smell of early morning training, followed by her storming off to shower muttering about "sweaty males". The smell of lazy days when they got a rare lie-in and Eva didn't come running in to jump on the bed.

The woman kept on talking and he turned to her.

"The woman I loved died in my arms less than a year ago. Leave me alone, okay?"

He turned back to his drink, trying to bury his sorrows. The woman wasn't getting the hint, leaning closer and closer in. And then her chair was flung the length of the room, her still on it. For a second, Logan caught the scent of mint and then it was gone.

Tora vanished as fast as she could, knowing that she'd have set off sensors with that little loss of control.

"Tut, tut. She really needed to get her anger management sorted out."

"Jean, you can't talk."