Alicia Drabbles
Feedback to Alicia
First Set
~*~
The kitten and the toddler had been having a staring contest for the last fifteen minutes. There was some deep and complex communication going on between the red-haired little girl and the big-eyed tabby kitten, something that bore with it deep significance, to judge by the intent look on Rachel's face and the almost-hunting-crouch of the kitten.
Finally, Rachel broke eye contact. She blinked at a silver bowl sitting on the counter, well above them both, where her mother had left it to answer the phone. The kitten mewed, pawing at the air as the bowl with his dinner came floating down towards the floor.
It had several inches left to go when it upended suddenly, flinging wet cat food everywhere and landing on the kitten's head. The kitten shrieked and bolted for its already well-known sanctuary behind the bookshelves in the living room.
Rachel giggled, smugly. "Not purple!" she pronounced.
Eliane Courchesne, Ororo Munroe.
~*~
"Explain to me again how this happened."
Eliane Courchesne slouched further into her seat, more cowed by Ms. Munroe's absolutely calm, almost gentle voice than she would have been by any amount of shouting and yelling. She was used to the shouting and yelling, after all. Her family liked the shouting and yelling.
"I was... upset," she finally said, knowing just how weak that sounded. "Sophie... or Esme? I cannot tell them apart."
"It's not an uncommon problem," Ororo said, brushing a stray lock of silver hair back behind her ear. The quadruplet telepaths encouraged the confusion, as well. It made it far easier for them to get away with the often nasty practical jokes they played on their fellow students. "What happened?"
"I had a small accident. I burned a textbook. I was frustrated! Math is not my best subject. And then they mocked me," Eliane said, aggrieved. "They told me I would never gain control over my powers, but I am trying!"
"So you set fire to their lunch?"
"I didn't mean to!"
"I believe you," Ororo said soothingly, rising and coming around her desk so that she could sit down beside the distressed young pyrokinetic. She reached out and laid a hand over Eliane's, the girl's skin hot to the touch. "You see all the snow out there?" she asked, tilting her head at the window. Eliane paused, then nodded. "I could melt it," Ororo said. "Within an hour. I could melt it, create a beautiful spring day... some of the early flowers might even respond to the warmth, begin to bloom." She smiled. "I don't like the snow," she confessed. "Sometimes I am very tempted."
"But you don't?"
"No. I keep my chin up and endure the gray days," Ororo said, "because I know the spring days will come eventually. Just as I know that you will eventually gain control over your power." She smiled, a bit mischievously. "And when that day comes, you will be able to look back on days like today and laugh."
Eliane looked sheepish. "The looks on their faces... they were very amusing."
"I can only imagine."
~*~
"There is to be no more setting of the lawn on fire."
"Check."
"Or Cain will eat you."
"... check. I think." There was a long, paranoid pause. "Not really?"
"I wouldn't put it past him. He's very protective of the lawn."
"It's under a considerable blanket of snow at the moment."
"Point. But pretend it's peacefully sleeping, waiting for him to awaken it with loving attention come spring... oh, God, pass the bottle, I need more Scotch."
"Is Scotch generally the lubricant of choice for your welcome-to-the-staff conversations?"
"... your phrasing is as bad as my phrasing. And no, only when I've just mediated a roommate dispute between the boy who shapeshifts into a giant coackroach and the one who sweats acid."
"... this is going to be an interesting job, isn't it?"
---
~*~
"So how does Lake Baikal taste?"
Domino sputtered, pushing wet hair out of her face and glaring daggers at the entirely too smug leather-clad X-Man who'd just fished her from the drink and deposited her neatly on the shore. "Bite me," she growled at Haroun.
Haroun merely grinned back at her, a grin that perhaps showed a little too much of his teeth. "Those were interesting tactics," he complimented her. "Fall out of the tree onto the mutant terrorist, and thwart his evil plan by letting him chuck you in a Siberian lake."
"The branch broke!"
"Piece of bad luck, no?"
Oh, that was it. Domino lunged at him, landing a solid fist to his jaw and then tackling him to the ground as he staggered. "Joint training exercise my ass!" she railed. "Someone cheated!"
- Of course I did,# Nathan's voice said placidly in her mind. Haroun's too, from the way the bastard laughed.
"Asshole!"
- You know you love me because I have no scruples.#
"AUGH!"
~*~
"What," was Scott's immediate reaction upon blasting the warehouse door open and getting his first look at the scene inside, "the fuck?"
Alison sighed and rolled her eyes, looking supremely aggravated. And also quite stuck. She was standing on... yes, Scott thought, that was indeed a makeshift pedestal, and there was blue... stuff all over her. Like tendrils of turquoise mud, almost, but it was clearly holding her in a... rather suggestive pose.
"It's a long story."
"And here I thought you were in trouble."
"GAH! Just get me out of here before he comes back!"
"He...?"
"STOP!" shouted a reedy voice from the other side of the warehouse. Scott blinked as a skinny, rather weasely looking man came running over to Alison's side, immediately throwing his arms around her. His hands were coated in the blue mud, and more oozed out, seemingly from his pores, to continue covering Alison. "I'm not finished! Begone! I'm Pygmalion, and you're interrupting the creation of my masterpiece!"
"Scoooott? Make the crazy man stop groping me?"
"Oh, for the love of God," Scott muttered, and blasted him. Only half-strength, but it still knocked him out quite efficiently. Shaking his head, Scott came over to the pedestal, eyeing Alison critically. "How do you get yourself into these things?"
"The curse of fame?"
"And are you wearing anything under that mud?"
Alison turned bright red. "I think the mud's eating away at my clothes."
"So long as it's not doing anything to your skin."
"No, actually it kind of tickles."
"There are better ways," Scott said severely, using a thin-beam to cut away the hardening mud, "to fulfill Haroun's fantasies, you know." He made the mistake of freeing her arm first, and got soundly thwapped upside the head for the comment.
Domino, Miles Blaire and Marius Laverne
~*~
"DOWN!"
Perhaps it was a leftover memory from a movie he'd once seen, some military thing where some soldier had been shouting at a comrade to take cover, but Marius responded by diving to the floor at the distinctively feminine yell. It was just in time, as a yo-yo sliced through the air where his head had been.
"Sorry!" Domino caroled merrily. Marius looked up to see her sitting on the porch railing, Miles beside her. Both of them had yo-yos. "You shouldn't come around corners that fast. Never know what you might run into."
Miles was wearing a huge smile, and was manipulating his yo-yo with a commendable amount of skill. "Miss Domino? Will you show Miles that trick again?"
"Ant up the tree? Of course, young Padawan."
"Miles will get it yet!" was the boy's triumphant reply.
Marius got cautiously back to his feet, brushing off his clothes and eyeing the two of them. "Could you kill someone with a yo-yo?" he asked curiously, and only half-facetiously.
Domino batted her eyelashes at him. "I can kill someone with a toothpick. Or a stuffed animal. Or a hamster. A yo-yo is easy."
"... a hamster?"
"Oh, yes. Ask Nate about Claude the attack hamster someday. Funny story."
"... I bet."
~*~
"Izzy?"
Isabel Matsuda coughed on the smoke, then looked down at her partner, her eyes narrowing angrily at the almost peaceful look on Nash's face. "No, Gavin," she said hoarsely.
"You can get out of here," he said, the old burn scars creasing as he managed a faint smile for her, despite the pain he had to be in with both legs blown away and a gut wound that would have killed him even if it had been the only injury he'd suffered in the explosion. "Go on. We don't both need to die here."
"You're not going to die!" she railed at him, her hands reaching out almost instinctively to grab at his body armor, pull him upwards. "We haven't come this far for you to-" The groan he let out made her freeze, though, and she lowered him back to the ground, tears pouring helplessly down her face. "No. Gavin, no."
"Sorry, sweetheart... take the girl and go, okay?" His eyes unfocused as they flickered sideways to where the Secretary of State's daughter was huddled and weeping on the ground. Isabel glared at the girl with a dull sort of loathing. She was bruised and battered, but no worse than that. The little human girl gets off mostly unhurt and the man with the super-dense skin doesn't... how fair is that? "Hey," Gavin said with more force to his voice, reaching out to squeeze her wrist. "Take the girl. Finish the job. Tell Nate I'm sorry. And leave me the MP5."
"Gavin," Isabel hissed at him. "They're mutants." At least three or four other members of the Posthumans cell who'd grabbed their very high-profile hostage were energy-projectors, too. Not just the one she'd managed to kill, scant instants after he'd caused the explosion that had wounded Gavin.
"So? Bullets still do the job. We learned that a long time ago, Izzy."
Her eyes burning, she got the gun for him, closing his hands around it, and then bent to kiss him. "Damned martyr complex... you're going to haunt me for the rest of my life, you bastard," she said, her voice strangled.
"Like hell," he said with another ghostly smile as she drew back. "Just consider me your own personal angel."
"Can't see you in a halo."
"Me either. Love you, babe."
Wanda Maximoff, Moira MacTaggart and Rachel.
"Ye look traumatized."
Wanda swallowed, then gave Moira a bright, bright smile. "Me? Oh, no. I am not traumatized. I have truly enjoyed spending the afternoon with your daughter, Moira. As always."
Moira raised an eyebrow, then leaned slightly to the side, so that she could look around the taller woman. Her darling daughter was sitting on the floor, covered in what looked like foam from a fire extinguisher, and was playing happily with shredded, singed piles of paper.
"Oh, dear."
"Mama!" Rachel said gleefully, picking up fistfuls of paper. "Boom!"
Moira covered her mouth, looking at Wanda helplessly. After a moment, the younger woman cracked a smile as well. "It really isn't funny," she protested, nevertheless.
"Aye, of course not."
"That was an article I was about to mail off to a very well-respected journal."
"I'm sure it was."
