Beyond Evolution

To be perfectly honest, Vanessa never had any intentions of staying through the entire melee with the X-Men. Contrary to popular belief, crazy did not also come with an automatic predisposition for stupid. Based on the time the Brotherhoood had lived under the same roof as them, Vanessa generally found the lot of them to be ridiculously sentimental. So no doubt there were a certain number of them all worked up into some rage or another, ready to exact revenge for the noble sake of their loved ones. And she got a fresh manicure yesterday. So fuck that shit.

Though she soon followed Essex in making her own hasty exit, she did take the time to leave a little parting memento for the invading forces. It seemed only right considering her history with them. When they did manage to plow their way through the outside defenses and the Brotherhood members she and Mystique had deemed canon fodder to get to the lab, they would find every screen in sight ticking seconds away on a very conspicuous self-destruct sequence. T-minus two minutes and counting, folks. Better haul ass back to that pretty stealth jet of yours, because the whole place is rigged, it is going to blow, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Just in case there was any doubt as to who left out the welcome mat, taped to the main console in the lab was a piece of paper torn out of a laboratory notebook with a note scrawled in Vanessa’s erratic but somehow still feminine writing.

XOXO
-V

Thanks for the memories, guys. She’ll catch up with you next time.

[narrative, closed]

It really wasn’t fair how quickly it had all come unraveled. All of his brilliant work, the months of planning and preparation coming down around their ears. Yes, theirs. Even though he was not the only piece in this puzzle, in Essex’s opinion, he was the most important. They had all played their little parts in this but without him, it wouldn’t have happened at all in the first place. He was the one who’d developed the ‘cure’ and found a way to suppress the X-gene for a limited amount of time. And he was the one who’d figured out how to take that breakthrough and turn it into something so much more. You see, Essex was one of those scientists that sometimes operated not with any specific goal or objective in mind, but often did things just because he could, because he knew he could succeed where others couldn’t. The technology was the stuff of science fiction, things that were discussed as one day being plausible but not yet possible. But Essex had taken it upon himself to prove that assumption highly wrong. And really, coming up with functional, working nanites had just been a little bit fun.

( Really, it was beautiful in its simplicity. )

Belle wasn't about to say it where any of the resident could hear, but that had actually been kind of fun. Sure, there'd been a lot of death and destruction and children getting limbs broken and faces burned off, but she'd be a liar if she said she actually felt badly that they'd been hurt. She didn't want them injured, but if it happened it didn't exactly make a dent in her emotional armor. That sort of reaction had been burned out of her long ago, and what was left of it was reserved largely for persons who didn't live here, with the exception of Remy. And the start of an exception for Emilie. It simply wasn't practical for someone in her line of business being able to be brought to tears of emotional states by the sight of pain and anguish.

That said, however, she also wasn't an evil bitch. Just because she didn't really care about the people who had gotten hurt didn't mean that she was going to go make sarcastic comments at them, or be blase about the attack. She did have some tact, which was more than could be said for a few of the residents on the journal system. She also wasn't stupid, and knew that they'd be able to tell how little she cared if she was actually down there looking at the bodies with her impassive blue eyes. Between that and still having some of that residual adrenaline and energy in her, she'd opted for patrolling the grounds more. She stayed away from the front of the building, avoiding those cameras. She might have been an attractive woman, but she had a blessed few number of pictures with her face on them. Dangerous, for people to know her face.

She stuck to the back of the school instead, going into the woods and then back up, inspecting the damage further. She knew there weren't any more attackers out there, but it was an excuse to be out on her own and in motion. She was trying not to focus on the fact that she still wasn't sure where those two people she did care about were. She was itching to try and call Remy, but if he was in the middle of something, or on the move to get away from people wanting answers, or trying to get hold of someone on his team, she didn't want to bother him. So it looked like she was stuck pacing like a restless tiger until he actually came back.

Which he would, of course. He might not be entirely whole when he did, but Belle honestly didn't question whether or not the Cajun would show back up eventually.


(Open to Remy)

It wasn't hugely easy to transport Kevin Ford somewhere when he wasn't conscious enough to sit up and take care of himself, but they'd managed it. Luce's punch had finally done it, one more blow to the head to seal the deal and slip him into a solid unconsciousness, promising to last a good long while. Or it would have naturally, at least, but with the healers there it took decidedly less time. None of his injuries were serious enough to gain much attention at all, but he'd gotten enough of a stop-by to pull him back into the land of the living, the concussion disappeared and leaving him unlikely to pull a Natasha. The injuries themselves were still there, though. A bruise on his left cheekbone, compliments of Luce, a rather long and ungainly cut on the right side of his forehead from the cement Tobias had thrown, and a knot on the back left side of his head -- which continued leaving its mark in the form of a long bruise across his jaw. It was hard to really put things on injuries of Kevin's, considering the number of things that he would simply dust if they tried, and so those things were all left bare for now. Maybe a healer could get to him before they started to scar after a few weeks.

He wasn't thinking about any of that, though. He was pretty solidly focused on the fact that his powers were back. Adrien's emotions were mixed up with Kevin's, but Kevin didn't know about that connection yet, and simply thought that slight mismatch of his thoughts with the ones he wasn't expecting were a result of the head injuries. It almost hadn't completely sunk in, yet. It was like he was still caught in one of those numerous dreams he'd had since taking the cure, where he'd think his powers had come back to him. He always woke up from those, though. And he wasn't waking up from this.

Unlike a majority of the others who had been dosed with the Cure, Kevin wasn't apologizing to the people that he'd hurt (most of them were dead, anyway), and he wasn't acting ashamed or embarrassed. When he'd woken up in the medlabs and been told, he'd simply gone silent. He could feel that wave of emotion, of his mind shouting that it was too much, held just at bay. It would crash down sooner or later, but at the moment he was feeling mostly blank when splashes of panicked depression weren't hitting him. He didn't know what to do. He'd been sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes on the floor, when the person helping him told him something that caught his attention -- Laurie was in here too. She'd been hurt. His heart went into his throat, immediately assuming that he'd hurt her. But when he got to her bedside, he couldn't see any signs of that painful withering on her. She was bandaged instead. He heard someone vaguely, saying she'd been attacked by Wolverine in the Danger Room.

He sat down in one of the chairs available, no longer paying attention to anything else going on in the medlabs. Laurie. His hand started to move and then jerked to a stop. He couldn't do that anymore. He'd wanted to take her hand, squeeze it, see if she was able to squeeze back. But he couldn't now. He had gloves on, but he couldn't bring himself to touch her with them. With his elbows on his knees, his head went to his hands, another shot of helpless anguish aching in his chest when the synthetic material touched his skin. It probably wasn't safe at all for him to be here right now, but no one seemed willing to go over and tell him that. He'd had everything, and now everything that he had was laying on a bed in the medlabs. It was all his fault.


(Open to Laurie)