Memories
Dirty Secrets
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If you want to use Tora, or any of my other characters, PM me.
Zillah looked at Laura and smiled weakly.
"I'll see you soon?"
Laura looked awkward.
"I… I am planning to leave to the New Xavier School."
Zillah bit her lip.
"Oh. So on paper, we are then on opposing sides?"
Laura nodded. Zillah grinned.
"If we catch you, I'll let you go."
"If you do so, I will never forgive you."
"Okay, I'll give you the best fight you've ever had."
Laura smiled and held out a hand and they shook.
"I'll see you around then?"
Laura nodded.
"And Zillah?"
"Yeah?"
"Evan's a good guy. I mean, he thinks he's Superman, but he's a good guy. You should stop punching him."
"I'll stop if he stops asking me out."
"He likes you."
"His genetic model stalked Ima. Forgive me for having misgivings."
"For all he looks like him, Evan is not Apocalypse."
Zillah's eyes went steely.
"Did you ever meet Apocalypse? I doubt you can give an accurate response."
She picked up her bag and then prepared to walked away, before firing one last parting shot.
"And Ima was friends with En Sabah Nur for close to three centuries before he tried to force her to marry him and she broke his nose."
Laura had no answer.
"Wait? Apocalypse and Etana were friends?!"
"They did meet during a Brood invasion and they met up every few decades after that. I rather think he had a crush on her from the beginning. Then she found out about the whole mutant supremacy thing and broke his nose. You honestly think she'd have gone to a meeting with him if she didn't trust him?"
Greer and Hank sat down, looking tired. Three days. Three days was all it had taken for Zillah Rogers to get into a fight. And a fight that resulted in her knifing someone. She had only gone for the thigh, missing any major blood vessels, but still…
According to Ava however, Zillah had been provoked with anti-Semitic comments, which was unacceptable with an Avengers Academy student. There had been that awkward moment when they asked how many lethal weapons she had and she had paused for a moment.
"Conventionally lethal, or lethal in my hands?"
"Both, please."
"Twelve weapons classified as lethal, eighty-eight lethal in my opinion, including my fingernails."
At that point, the facility gave up. They took the knives, blow-darts and the miniature crossbow she had smuggled in, but couldn't do anything about the packet of paperclips, the box of erasers and all ten fingernails.
"Why did we ever say we'd take her? Logan warned us she was worse than Laura."
"Steve asked. And when Captain America asks, you tend to find it hard to say no."
"She's a walking death trap!"
"Greer, did you ever meet Etana?"
"No. I heard she was hellish to work with."
"I think a better term would have been 'single-minded'. She tended to get a little over-focussed, and she had her own way of doing things. Admittedly, her way of doing things was a little…outdated, but she was set in her ways."
"Didn't she once rip someone's head off?"
"No, that's just a rumour. Well, she might have done, but not when anyone was there. Although I did see her once… Put it this way, you know how Doom now wears plate armour around his groin? He didn't before he met Etana."
Greer couldn't help it. She had to giggle. Hank grinned.
"She was actually okay, if you got her when we weren't working. Had a hell of a sense of humour. According to her, she invented sarcasm, but I think she was being sarcastic about that."
"Is it true that Steve and…"
"I mean, I never saw anything, but… but Steve said he thinks he fell in love with her back in the Forties."
"And her?"
"Well, after… After the whole Tora thing… Steve managed to get very, very drunk. He… He said that they kissed a few times and she didn't try to stab him."
They sat in silence and looked down. Zillah had been sitting in the detention room for the last three hours, doodling. Greer twisted her head.
"Is… Is she drawing human anatomy?"
Hank turned as well.
"Yep. Looks like… She's highlighting all the major organs and annotating how easy they are to stab. Damn! Steve is going to kill me!"
"Why?"
"He asked me to try and make her a little less stab happy."
"Hank, I've known her for four days. Nothing will make that girl less stab happy."
Below them, the girl looked up and gave them a big grin. Hank groaned.
"I'm going to call Steve."
Phoenix couldn't help it. She managed to hold it in for a few brief seconds before laughing like a hyena and rolling around on the floor. Death looked unimpressed.
"You see, this is why people stopped respecting cosmic entities."
Wanda was sitting in Logan's chair when he entered the office. He just looked unimpressed. Wanda smirked.
"You do realise, I can't keep babysitting for you?"
"Seeing as the nanny's gone back to Santo Marco, the country you helped annex-"
"I was fifteen."
"You still helped annex it."
"Okay, I made dodgy life choices. You're one to talk. Anyway, I found something. Something very interesting indeed."
"What?"
He may not like the Witch, but she brought good intel to the table.
"I was doing some work in balancing… Wait, your magical knowledge sucks. I was poking around in some odd dimensions and I found something interesting."
"What sort of interesting?"
He pointed over to the armchairs he brought in for the more private discussions. Wanda span around in the big chair once more just to annoy him then moved over. She looked nervous.
"There was… There's a small pocket dimension. It's only of any form of interest because of its properties. It's a…bridge, as it were, between alternate realities. But… There was an energy signature there that wasn't there before. A very familiar energy signature."
Logan sat back, suddenly feeling a trickle of coldness down his spine. Whether fear or anticipation he wasn't sure.
"You think…?"
"We've never really found a trace of Dragon's signature after all that, and you can't wipe out something like that. Not without ripping a huge hole in reality."
"That's bad, right?"
Wanda just looked at him. He sighed.
"Look, I've just spent three hours trying to get kids interested in the California Gold Rush. They mostly ask whether or not I was there."
Wanda closed her eyes.
"Unfortunately, I was with Stephen Strange at the time, who's gone and put a lot of locks and alerts on the pocket dimension. We'd have a gap of less than five minutes to get in; bring Tora out, as an incredibly complex energy pattern that could collapse at any second; and close the dimension off to avoid bringing every single Avenger down on our heads."
Logan whistled through his teeth.
"So, not going to be easy?"
Wanda shot him a look.
"Logan, please at least pretend to respect me. It's easy. But can't be done here. It would be a very bad idea."
Logan nodded.
"I know a few places."
Wanda nodded sharply.
"You should probably… you know… Do it when no one else could be around?"
Logan sighed and scribbled an address down.
"Here? Oh-one-hundred hours, tomorrow?"
Wanda looked, nodded and then the paper returned to its original pristine condition in a flash of red light.
"I'll see you then."
And like the writing, Wanda was gone in a flash of red light.
Phoenix frowned.
"I don't remember that."
"It was considered a minor embarrassment on all sides."
A.N. My apologies. Life seems to have suddenly picked up. The gap was mainly due to me being far too busy to do anything else but work/pack/get ready to actually live a relatively normal life. Memories has not been abandoned, I promise!