Author's Note:
Greetings.
Don't bother me about characterization. There is a method to my madness. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the story. And leave reviews. Non-profit fanfic authors thrive on the buggers. Since we obviously don't charge for these, we settle for basking in reader reviews.
No, really. We do. I swear.
Synopsis:
While Professor X and most of the staff and students at the Institute are gone for the summer, Jean and Hank stumble on a sinister plot revolving around Magneto and his son. A/U: Just forget about that whole Apocolypse storyline. The kids are too young to handle world threats like that. Just pretend the Fantastic Four or the Avengers have it covered. Please.
General Warning:
I'm a HUGE fan of Kurt and Pietro, so they will probably get more 'screen' time. Probably together. Heh. Heh. Heh. Pun fully intended. If you don't like the idea of the speedster and the elf falling for one another (eventually), hit the back button quickly and forget you ever read this.
Disclaimer:
I don't own any of these characters. If I did, it wouldn't be a cartoon. It'd be a WB show starring a hoard of really attractive people with a special guest appearance by Patrick Stewart as Xavier. And I'd also be rich, as X-Men is a big franchise.
Instead, I'll settle for borrowing these folks for a little action, adventure, romance, drama, comedy and the rest. Seems only fair.
Cheers.
---------
It was a dark and, for summer in Bayville, rather calm and balmy night.
You see, Ororo was out of town.
For that matter, most of Xavier's students and staff were gone for the summer. Jean found herself riding herd on the two or three that were left, assisting Mr. McCoy in the upkeep of the huge mansion and generally enjoying the peace and solitude. It was about an hour after midnight on a quiet night in June and Jean was curled up on a couch with a well-worn copy of 'Wuthering Heights,' losing herself in a romance novel that had an actual plot.
Or rather, she was trying.
Something nagged at the back of her mind. After realizing that she'd just read the same sentence four times in a row, she groped for a bookmark and closed the book. Before she could figure out what was bothering her, a familiar sound echoed through the sitting room.
[Bamf!]
"Jean!" she heard Kurt's voice behind her. It had to be Kurt. No one else pronounced her name with a soft 'j' in it. The sulfurous odor creeping through the room was another good indicator. She stood up. The lanky blue guy was dressed in his nightclothes - a faded pair of shorts and a t-shirt that read, 'got fuzz?' - and more than a little wild around the eyes.
"What's wrong?" she asked him.
Kurt opened his mouth a couple times without saying anything and instead just pointed to one of the portraits on the wall over the fireplace.
Jean blinked and looked at the picture. Oh, right. One of the Professor's new computer thingies. She took the control from the mantle and passed it to the younger mutant. Kurt fiddled with the control mechanism for a moment. As Jean watched the picture change to one of the security cameras covering the front yard, she wondered what had spooked Kurt so much.
She took a second glance at him while she waited for him to finish. Ah. He must have seen something on the kitchen monitors or out the window. She hadn't noticed it when he popped in, but there were crumbs on his facial fur and a large spreading milk stain on his shirt. Hm. What could possibly have startled Kurt during a cookie run? Wait, no, better question. What startled him enough that he'd be shaking like a large, blue rabbit?
Placing her hand on his arm she asked, "Are you all right?" The boy visibly jumped, looking up at her with huge eyes.
"Ja. Nein. Ach, ich weiß nicht." Kurt busied himself with the control, absently wiping at his face with a trembling hand. Oh dear. Jean shook him firmly enough to get his attention.
"What? Kurt, you look like you've seen a ghost." She had to strain to listen to his reply.
"Nein, nicht ein Geist. Dieses war schlechter als ein Geist."
"English, Kurt! English!"
"Sorry, Jean. It vasn't a ghost. It vas vorse than a ghost," he told her. "Here, see for yourself." She turned back to the painting, which was actually a high-definition computer screen. What on Earth was that? She could barely make out anything on the screen, to be honest. She could see the front gate in the background, and the fountain in the middle, but the rest was a black and blue blur with a lighter patch on the top. Hmm.
Closing her eyes, she quested out with her mind.
Kurt registered immediately. A little further out was Mr. McCoy in his basement lab. Bobby and Kitty in the rec room on the second floor. She made a mental note to tell them off for staying up late. Where.? Oh, right, Scott was in Hawaii this weekend.
"Jean?" she heard Kurt say as though from a distance. She waved him off, pushing beyond the mansion walls.
Five minutes later, Jean opened her eyes. Her mind had skittered across something out near the gazebo, but she hadn't recognized it as a known threat and so had dismissed it. Otherwise, the grounds were clear.
She looked back at the monitor, thinking. Let's see what happens when we slow this down a bit, she thought. Taking the control box from Kurt, she punched in a couple commands.
The computer obediently started cycling through the different cameras. Hm. Whatever or whoever this was had moved toward C-09 for a few seconds. She switched over to that camera and moved frame-by-frame through the occurrence. Fourteen frames in, she found a good image and ordered the computer to enhance it
"Mein Gott. Is that Pietro?" She had almost forgotten Kurt was in the room.
"I.I," Jean took a deep breath and ordered her stomach to calm down. "I think so."
At least, she was pretty sure it was Pietro. It was difficult to tell, actually. She'd never actually seen the white-haired boy with anything other than a sneer of contempt on his face. Raw terror was a new look for him. The fact that he was covered in gore was a little more upsetting, though.
Just a little.
[Bamf!]
Kurt materialized on top of the gazebo, clutching the little wooden cupola with all five limbs. He squinted into the darkness, balancing on top of the structure like a furry blue gargoyle. People always underestimated his night senses. It had to be more than 100 meters to the swimming pool, but he could almost make out the buttons on Herr McCoy's coat at this distance. Jean wasn't any less difficult to spot in the front yard.
He turned around completely, straining his eyes and ears for any sign of Pietro. Just thinking about what he'd seen on the monitor made him shudder. Herr McCoy hadn't helped either. "There's a little over five quarts of blood in the human body. If I had to guess, I'd say more than one person bled out on him." Exactly why the older mutant had decided that knowledge would be helpful was beyond him.
A noise caught his attention and he stiffened. Something.eh? There it was again - a light squeaking noise. Not a mouse, Kurt decided. This sounded metallic. A thought occurred to him and he leaned over the edge of the roof to look into the gazebo, hanging onto the cupola with his tail.
Aha! There was a body on the swing, which was rocking back and forth slightly in the light summer breeze. Silvery-white hair. It had to be Pietro. Kurt reached out a tentative finger and poked at the other boy. No response. He swung down, flipping with practiced ease to land on his feet, and crept around to the front of the little wooden structure. Sure enough, it was Pietro.
"Hallo?" he said softly. "Pietro?" Well, the other boy wasn't dead. He was breathing rapidly, if shallowly. Kurt reached out to shake Pietro, whose eyes were wide and staring. No response. Again.
In his defense, he'd never encountered anyone in a state of shock before. Nor had he ever been in the presence of quite that much blood at one time. As luck would have it, however, he had stayed up late the previous weekend to watch the really bad horror movie marathon on TNT. Twelve b-grade American horror flicks, dozens of flesh-eating zombies, hundreds of victims, veritable buckets of blood and gore, and one blue- furred, very creeped out adolescent mutant at the end of the whole thing. Jean had had to coax him off the chandelier in the kitchen with a plate of cookies and a promise to smack him if he ever thought of watching something like that again. And so, with that marathon leaping to the front of his mind, he did what anyone would do given the situation.
Kurt started to panic. He'd heard of zombies, of course, but figured them to be a Caribbean fairy tale. Now he was face to face with one. Ach! He jerked back a step and slipped on the step, falling out of the gazebo. Scrambling to his feet, he looked around wildly and ran for the backyard, figuring that Herr McCoy would be the biggest and best thing to hide behind in case the Pietro-zombie tried to gnaw on someone's face.
'The pool and patio is clear,' Hank thought at Jean. 'No sign of him.'
'He's not out here in front, either,' she thought back at him. Hank turned at the sound of scrabbling claws on concrete, a sound marginally higher than nails on a chalkboard in his personal list of least favorite things to listen to. 'Wait,' came Jean's thought. 'I think Kurt may have found him.'
"No kidding, lady," Hank muttered under his breath.
Kurt looked spooked by something and the only nasty thing - other than Hank - on the property at the time was Pietro. According to the cameras, anyway. Perhaps he'd make a point of prowling around for an hour or two after they figured out what was wrong.
"Herr McCoy!" Kurt exclaimed, voice cracking. "He's in das Gazebo!"
Hank nodded and lumbered toward the other side of the mansion.
'I heard,' Jean thought at him. 'I'm on my way.'
Telepathy, Hank decided, needed some sort of off switch.
[Bamf! Bamf!]
He looked down at the smaller mutant, who was now carrying a baseball bat.
"What's that for?" he rumbled.
"I found Pietro, but it's not Pietro," Kurt told him in all seriousness. "It's a zombie."
Hank pinched himself. No, he wasn't dreaming. Sighing, he continued to the side yard.
As it turns out, Kurt was wrong. Jean and Hank weren't able to convince him of that, however, and so he insisted on standing guard outside the door to the little medical clinic with that same aluminum bat. Jean wondered just how he expected to stop the 'zombie' if it was able to take out both of the older mutants, especially Hank. She wasn't up for an argument, however.
Pietro looked wretched. It wasn't hard, considering he was covered head to toe in blood. Hank hadn't been able to get him to move and ended up carrying him inside the mansion, muttering something about a shower. Once they'd gotten the younger boy into the clinic, Jean had peeled off his sodden shirt and made to throw it away.
"No, don't. I want to run some tests on that," Hank had said.
Fine by her. All she wanted to do was wash her hands afterward. Repeatedly. Pietro had let them scrub off the blood that had soaked through the thin t-shirt without so much as blinking. He just continued staring at whoever was in front of him at the time. Or through them, actually. Jean had gotten a reaction out of him when she'd scrubbed hard at a crusted clot on the boy's side just under his ribs. He'd winced in pain, but still looked through her.
"My God," she whispered. Hank leaned over her with a fresh rag.
"Those look rather deep," he growled. He handed her a little spray bottle of alcohol.
"Remind you of anyone?" she asked him.
"Sabretooth."
The cleaning alone took over an hour. At the end Pietro was carried, the side wound freshly bandaged, into one of the spare bedrooms. Hank slipped him under the blanket Jean provided, then lifted the end of the bed with one hand and slipped a couple telephone books under the end.
"What are you doing?" Jean asked him.
"Keeping his feet elevated."
"Oh. I didn't know you were supposed to do that. Where did you learn this sort of thing, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I was a Boy Scout a long time ago," he said. Oh. Well, that made sense. She had no idea if high school teachers were trained in first aid or not.
They had decided to take turns watching Pietro through the night, in case he took a turn for the worse. Left alone with the boy, Jean couldn't help but wonder what worse could possibly be. He was already cold and clammy, despite the thick blanket. She had insisted on getting something for him to wear under the covers, though. Hank had said that clothing would just restrict the flow of blood, but Jean drew the line at babysitting a naked teenage boy. They had compromised. She dug up a really long t-shirt (her winter pajamas, actually) with Winnie the Pooh on the front and back and let Hank slip it over Pietro's head. Scott had given her that shirt as a joke. She wondered what he'd say if he knew where it was now.
Jean smirked to herself.
Between the cold skin and the grayish cast to the boy's thin features, she found herself worried enough to attempt to read his mind. This surprised her, considering the fractious relationship between the Brotherhood and the kids at the institute. On the other hand, she thought, it also reassured her that she was doing the right thing. Even if she didn't particularly like the person she was helping at the time.
She laid her hands on his cold temples and closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind. She recoiled almost at once, jerking back into the chair. Pietro's thoughts were chaotic enough that she could feel a headache coming on. Flashes of Sabretooth and Magneto shot through her mind, but she couldn't make head or tail of them. She drew in a deep breath, trying to settle herself and looked down.
Pietro looked up at her, eyes rimmed with shadows.
"Oh! You're awake?" she squeaked, kicking herself for stating the obvious. "What happened?"
Pietro swallowed and blinked slowly. Jean had to lean close to hear him as he whispered, "Dad.is.pissed."
Before she could respond, he closed his eyes and faded. Alarmed, she reached into his mind and found him to be asleep - deeply, but normally.
Hm. Dad is pissed? Magneto must be up to something, but what? Jean looked up at the clock on the wall. Nearly three in the morning. She shook her head. No, this couldn't wait.
'Professor,' she mentally called across three time zones. 'We have a problem.'
Greetings.
Don't bother me about characterization. There is a method to my madness. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the story. And leave reviews. Non-profit fanfic authors thrive on the buggers. Since we obviously don't charge for these, we settle for basking in reader reviews.
No, really. We do. I swear.
Synopsis:
While Professor X and most of the staff and students at the Institute are gone for the summer, Jean and Hank stumble on a sinister plot revolving around Magneto and his son. A/U: Just forget about that whole Apocolypse storyline. The kids are too young to handle world threats like that. Just pretend the Fantastic Four or the Avengers have it covered. Please.
General Warning:
I'm a HUGE fan of Kurt and Pietro, so they will probably get more 'screen' time. Probably together. Heh. Heh. Heh. Pun fully intended. If you don't like the idea of the speedster and the elf falling for one another (eventually), hit the back button quickly and forget you ever read this.
Disclaimer:
I don't own any of these characters. If I did, it wouldn't be a cartoon. It'd be a WB show starring a hoard of really attractive people with a special guest appearance by Patrick Stewart as Xavier. And I'd also be rich, as X-Men is a big franchise.
Instead, I'll settle for borrowing these folks for a little action, adventure, romance, drama, comedy and the rest. Seems only fair.
Cheers.
---------
It was a dark and, for summer in Bayville, rather calm and balmy night.
You see, Ororo was out of town.
For that matter, most of Xavier's students and staff were gone for the summer. Jean found herself riding herd on the two or three that were left, assisting Mr. McCoy in the upkeep of the huge mansion and generally enjoying the peace and solitude. It was about an hour after midnight on a quiet night in June and Jean was curled up on a couch with a well-worn copy of 'Wuthering Heights,' losing herself in a romance novel that had an actual plot.
Or rather, she was trying.
Something nagged at the back of her mind. After realizing that she'd just read the same sentence four times in a row, she groped for a bookmark and closed the book. Before she could figure out what was bothering her, a familiar sound echoed through the sitting room.
[Bamf!]
"Jean!" she heard Kurt's voice behind her. It had to be Kurt. No one else pronounced her name with a soft 'j' in it. The sulfurous odor creeping through the room was another good indicator. She stood up. The lanky blue guy was dressed in his nightclothes - a faded pair of shorts and a t-shirt that read, 'got fuzz?' - and more than a little wild around the eyes.
"What's wrong?" she asked him.
Kurt opened his mouth a couple times without saying anything and instead just pointed to one of the portraits on the wall over the fireplace.
Jean blinked and looked at the picture. Oh, right. One of the Professor's new computer thingies. She took the control from the mantle and passed it to the younger mutant. Kurt fiddled with the control mechanism for a moment. As Jean watched the picture change to one of the security cameras covering the front yard, she wondered what had spooked Kurt so much.
She took a second glance at him while she waited for him to finish. Ah. He must have seen something on the kitchen monitors or out the window. She hadn't noticed it when he popped in, but there were crumbs on his facial fur and a large spreading milk stain on his shirt. Hm. What could possibly have startled Kurt during a cookie run? Wait, no, better question. What startled him enough that he'd be shaking like a large, blue rabbit?
Placing her hand on his arm she asked, "Are you all right?" The boy visibly jumped, looking up at her with huge eyes.
"Ja. Nein. Ach, ich weiß nicht." Kurt busied himself with the control, absently wiping at his face with a trembling hand. Oh dear. Jean shook him firmly enough to get his attention.
"What? Kurt, you look like you've seen a ghost." She had to strain to listen to his reply.
"Nein, nicht ein Geist. Dieses war schlechter als ein Geist."
"English, Kurt! English!"
"Sorry, Jean. It vasn't a ghost. It vas vorse than a ghost," he told her. "Here, see for yourself." She turned back to the painting, which was actually a high-definition computer screen. What on Earth was that? She could barely make out anything on the screen, to be honest. She could see the front gate in the background, and the fountain in the middle, but the rest was a black and blue blur with a lighter patch on the top. Hmm.
Closing her eyes, she quested out with her mind.
Kurt registered immediately. A little further out was Mr. McCoy in his basement lab. Bobby and Kitty in the rec room on the second floor. She made a mental note to tell them off for staying up late. Where.? Oh, right, Scott was in Hawaii this weekend.
"Jean?" she heard Kurt say as though from a distance. She waved him off, pushing beyond the mansion walls.
Five minutes later, Jean opened her eyes. Her mind had skittered across something out near the gazebo, but she hadn't recognized it as a known threat and so had dismissed it. Otherwise, the grounds were clear.
She looked back at the monitor, thinking. Let's see what happens when we slow this down a bit, she thought. Taking the control box from Kurt, she punched in a couple commands.
The computer obediently started cycling through the different cameras. Hm. Whatever or whoever this was had moved toward C-09 for a few seconds. She switched over to that camera and moved frame-by-frame through the occurrence. Fourteen frames in, she found a good image and ordered the computer to enhance it
"Mein Gott. Is that Pietro?" She had almost forgotten Kurt was in the room.
"I.I," Jean took a deep breath and ordered her stomach to calm down. "I think so."
At least, she was pretty sure it was Pietro. It was difficult to tell, actually. She'd never actually seen the white-haired boy with anything other than a sneer of contempt on his face. Raw terror was a new look for him. The fact that he was covered in gore was a little more upsetting, though.
Just a little.
[Bamf!]
Kurt materialized on top of the gazebo, clutching the little wooden cupola with all five limbs. He squinted into the darkness, balancing on top of the structure like a furry blue gargoyle. People always underestimated his night senses. It had to be more than 100 meters to the swimming pool, but he could almost make out the buttons on Herr McCoy's coat at this distance. Jean wasn't any less difficult to spot in the front yard.
He turned around completely, straining his eyes and ears for any sign of Pietro. Just thinking about what he'd seen on the monitor made him shudder. Herr McCoy hadn't helped either. "There's a little over five quarts of blood in the human body. If I had to guess, I'd say more than one person bled out on him." Exactly why the older mutant had decided that knowledge would be helpful was beyond him.
A noise caught his attention and he stiffened. Something.eh? There it was again - a light squeaking noise. Not a mouse, Kurt decided. This sounded metallic. A thought occurred to him and he leaned over the edge of the roof to look into the gazebo, hanging onto the cupola with his tail.
Aha! There was a body on the swing, which was rocking back and forth slightly in the light summer breeze. Silvery-white hair. It had to be Pietro. Kurt reached out a tentative finger and poked at the other boy. No response. He swung down, flipping with practiced ease to land on his feet, and crept around to the front of the little wooden structure. Sure enough, it was Pietro.
"Hallo?" he said softly. "Pietro?" Well, the other boy wasn't dead. He was breathing rapidly, if shallowly. Kurt reached out to shake Pietro, whose eyes were wide and staring. No response. Again.
In his defense, he'd never encountered anyone in a state of shock before. Nor had he ever been in the presence of quite that much blood at one time. As luck would have it, however, he had stayed up late the previous weekend to watch the really bad horror movie marathon on TNT. Twelve b-grade American horror flicks, dozens of flesh-eating zombies, hundreds of victims, veritable buckets of blood and gore, and one blue- furred, very creeped out adolescent mutant at the end of the whole thing. Jean had had to coax him off the chandelier in the kitchen with a plate of cookies and a promise to smack him if he ever thought of watching something like that again. And so, with that marathon leaping to the front of his mind, he did what anyone would do given the situation.
Kurt started to panic. He'd heard of zombies, of course, but figured them to be a Caribbean fairy tale. Now he was face to face with one. Ach! He jerked back a step and slipped on the step, falling out of the gazebo. Scrambling to his feet, he looked around wildly and ran for the backyard, figuring that Herr McCoy would be the biggest and best thing to hide behind in case the Pietro-zombie tried to gnaw on someone's face.
'The pool and patio is clear,' Hank thought at Jean. 'No sign of him.'
'He's not out here in front, either,' she thought back at him. Hank turned at the sound of scrabbling claws on concrete, a sound marginally higher than nails on a chalkboard in his personal list of least favorite things to listen to. 'Wait,' came Jean's thought. 'I think Kurt may have found him.'
"No kidding, lady," Hank muttered under his breath.
Kurt looked spooked by something and the only nasty thing - other than Hank - on the property at the time was Pietro. According to the cameras, anyway. Perhaps he'd make a point of prowling around for an hour or two after they figured out what was wrong.
"Herr McCoy!" Kurt exclaimed, voice cracking. "He's in das Gazebo!"
Hank nodded and lumbered toward the other side of the mansion.
'I heard,' Jean thought at him. 'I'm on my way.'
Telepathy, Hank decided, needed some sort of off switch.
[Bamf! Bamf!]
He looked down at the smaller mutant, who was now carrying a baseball bat.
"What's that for?" he rumbled.
"I found Pietro, but it's not Pietro," Kurt told him in all seriousness. "It's a zombie."
Hank pinched himself. No, he wasn't dreaming. Sighing, he continued to the side yard.
As it turns out, Kurt was wrong. Jean and Hank weren't able to convince him of that, however, and so he insisted on standing guard outside the door to the little medical clinic with that same aluminum bat. Jean wondered just how he expected to stop the 'zombie' if it was able to take out both of the older mutants, especially Hank. She wasn't up for an argument, however.
Pietro looked wretched. It wasn't hard, considering he was covered head to toe in blood. Hank hadn't been able to get him to move and ended up carrying him inside the mansion, muttering something about a shower. Once they'd gotten the younger boy into the clinic, Jean had peeled off his sodden shirt and made to throw it away.
"No, don't. I want to run some tests on that," Hank had said.
Fine by her. All she wanted to do was wash her hands afterward. Repeatedly. Pietro had let them scrub off the blood that had soaked through the thin t-shirt without so much as blinking. He just continued staring at whoever was in front of him at the time. Or through them, actually. Jean had gotten a reaction out of him when she'd scrubbed hard at a crusted clot on the boy's side just under his ribs. He'd winced in pain, but still looked through her.
"My God," she whispered. Hank leaned over her with a fresh rag.
"Those look rather deep," he growled. He handed her a little spray bottle of alcohol.
"Remind you of anyone?" she asked him.
"Sabretooth."
The cleaning alone took over an hour. At the end Pietro was carried, the side wound freshly bandaged, into one of the spare bedrooms. Hank slipped him under the blanket Jean provided, then lifted the end of the bed with one hand and slipped a couple telephone books under the end.
"What are you doing?" Jean asked him.
"Keeping his feet elevated."
"Oh. I didn't know you were supposed to do that. Where did you learn this sort of thing, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I was a Boy Scout a long time ago," he said. Oh. Well, that made sense. She had no idea if high school teachers were trained in first aid or not.
They had decided to take turns watching Pietro through the night, in case he took a turn for the worse. Left alone with the boy, Jean couldn't help but wonder what worse could possibly be. He was already cold and clammy, despite the thick blanket. She had insisted on getting something for him to wear under the covers, though. Hank had said that clothing would just restrict the flow of blood, but Jean drew the line at babysitting a naked teenage boy. They had compromised. She dug up a really long t-shirt (her winter pajamas, actually) with Winnie the Pooh on the front and back and let Hank slip it over Pietro's head. Scott had given her that shirt as a joke. She wondered what he'd say if he knew where it was now.
Jean smirked to herself.
Between the cold skin and the grayish cast to the boy's thin features, she found herself worried enough to attempt to read his mind. This surprised her, considering the fractious relationship between the Brotherhood and the kids at the institute. On the other hand, she thought, it also reassured her that she was doing the right thing. Even if she didn't particularly like the person she was helping at the time.
She laid her hands on his cold temples and closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind. She recoiled almost at once, jerking back into the chair. Pietro's thoughts were chaotic enough that she could feel a headache coming on. Flashes of Sabretooth and Magneto shot through her mind, but she couldn't make head or tail of them. She drew in a deep breath, trying to settle herself and looked down.
Pietro looked up at her, eyes rimmed with shadows.
"Oh! You're awake?" she squeaked, kicking herself for stating the obvious. "What happened?"
Pietro swallowed and blinked slowly. Jean had to lean close to hear him as he whispered, "Dad.is.pissed."
Before she could respond, he closed his eyes and faded. Alarmed, she reached into his mind and found him to be asleep - deeply, but normally.
Hm. Dad is pissed? Magneto must be up to something, but what? Jean looked up at the clock on the wall. Nearly three in the morning. She shook her head. No, this couldn't wait.
'Professor,' she mentally called across three time zones. 'We have a problem.'