It had been several days since Matty and Gaia had gone out. The bar fight had been cathartic for her, giving her a chance to rid herself of the tension in her body. She hadn't seen much of Logan, however, but not due to avoidance on either person's end. It wasn't exactly as though she had sought him out, either. Perhaps he had been giving her somespace, letting her deal with her issues without feeling pressured.

Either way, Matty had decided she had waited long enough. He wasn't there when she walked into his room, but she hadn't expected him to be. She got comfortable on his bed, guitar in hand, and began playing some soft, nameless tune. She hummed quietly underneath her breath, slowly beginning to sing without words. There was an almost mournful note to her voice, but she wasn't crying.

Gaia had gotten back to the school somewhere in the realm of four, but hadn't gone inside yet. It was starting to get dark, but she couldn't bring herself to care too much about the passage of time.

She wandered, getting angrier and angrier as she thought about what she'd gone home to and the torn pictures. Those animals! She wanted to throw things to hit people and get pissed out of her fucking skull.

Now who to go with her? Because that sort of evening demanded an accomplice.

About then she heard the strum of a banjo. Not Gaia's favorite instrument, but whoever was playing it was pretty damn good. She followed the music and it took her to a wide and tall tree. She looked up and smiled. Well, it was one way to meet Logan's girl.

"Hey, Matty! Wanna get pissed?"

He was going to have to hire new contacts. Damien hadn't received word that his sister was in danger until too late. He had already caught a plane to the States, and by then, she had already been rescued. Part of him was pissed because he had missed out on taking down her captors. He may have something of a chivalrous streak to him at times - it was well-hidden but it liked to rear its ugly head from time to time - but he still loved him some well-meaning violence. Still, she was safe, so far as he knew.

But he was already here, so he might as well drop by and see her, right? After all, he hadn't seen her in nearly a year. He hated to think of the flight as a waste, especially as he hated flying - well, he hated the other passengers and just everyone, really.

The wall surrounding the outside perimeter of the school was nothing. He had scaled it in all of maybe two seconds, and moved through the darkness of the woods. They didn't have any sort of security within the trees, probably because too often they'd find themselves chasing deer or rabbits. At the treeline, he stopped and climbed several feet up into an oak tree, crouching on one of the higher branches as he surveyed the area.

She lay in the infirmary, having a little bed in one of the tiny rooms all to herself. There was an IV attached to her arm that she was fairly certain was completely useless by now. She wasn't sure how long she had been laying here, days, maybe. But it was home, and whatever panic she had felt when she awoke was chased away by Logan's lingering scent. He'd been here, with her, and that was enough.

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((OOC: This takes place directly before the rescue mission. :D))

Laura had refused to leave the relative safety of Matty's arms since the moment she had launched herself into them. Matty would rock her and quietly sing to her. The girl would sleep fitfully, whimpering as she tried to escape whatever nightmare plagued her dreams, and Matty would pet her hair, murmuring soothing words. When their meals were brought to them, Laura wouldn't eat until after Matty had taken her first bite, and then she'd stuff as much of the food into her mouth as she could. Matty figured the girl had been on her own for some time. She reminded Matty so much of the scared little girl she had been once upon a time.

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Who: The X-Men, abductees, NPC!Guards, NPC!Labcoats, Sentinels
What: rescue mission
When: Friday night
Rating: Gonna make this a strong R
Status: Open
Warnings: Rating is for violence, you know that'll happen in spades. It's going up now but don't feel like you need to tag in right away, while the action will only take place in the space of hours this'll be open all week to make sure everyone can get in and get their shit done.

Any questions? Shoot 'em our way.

((this post is extra-long because I tacked Brenna's torture scene on)

~~~~~

There had been no missions since the school had been rebuilt. It was almost unspoken that the X-Men needed to focus solely on their own after a time when so many of them had been lost inexplicably, and Logan had been loathe to break the status quo. Not really his usual state of being but his actions no longer affected just him.

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( Oh, was he begging? )

There were few things that could piss Matty off as much as being captured and thrown into a cage. It had happened a few times, and it never ended pretty, at least not for her captors. They had a tendency to wind up dead. Matty didn't like being locked in cages.

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Brenna had always had a thing for history, she was a bit of a nerd in that respect, so a trip to the history museum actually sounded like it might be fun. Granted, she'd have to keep an eye on some of the kids, but that was okay. And she actually enjoyed it when they asked questions and she found she could answer them; maybe there was something to this teaching thing after all? She'd never really been interested in that or kids before but a lot of things had changed since she'd come to Xavier's Institute.

The place was almost echoingly empty on a Friday afternoon, there weren't any other school groups exploring but theirs. It was rather nice to basically have the place to themselves.

She ended up taking a group of kids that weren't in Ororo's classes off to view the Egyptian exhibit. “Why did they wrap the bodies up like that?” Sarah asked, all but pressing her nose up against the glass to stare in at the sarcophagus. “And what's with all the weird pictures?”

“They wrapped the bodies to preserve them, the Egyptians believed in an afterlife where they'd need their bodies just like they did in life.” Brenna stepped up alongside the girl. “The pictures are their written language, they're called hieroglyphics. Each picture represents a word or a concept, usually related to the gods in some way; the Egyptians were deeply religious and included that in their every day lives.”

“I heard they stuck hooks up the dead guys' noses to squish up the brain so they could get it out,” Luke said, making a scary face.

Sarah wrinkled up her nose at him. “You're gross, Luke.”

“He's right, though,” Brenna told her. “Either that or they cut a hole in the back of the skull but they much preferred to leave the body otherwise intact. They also removed the internal organs and put them in canopic jars,” she said, pointing to a row of ceramic jars with various tops depicting gods like jackal-headed Anubis.

She looked around to do another swift head-count and immediately noticed two of the children, one being Jubilee, missing. “You guys seen Jubes or Frankie?” The other kids looked at each other and then at her, shrugging. “Go se,” she cursed in Mandarin. “Alright, let's go see if we can't find them.”

It wasn't until she turned as Sarah's hand was forcefully jerked out of hers that she realized something was terribly wrong. Her TK blossomed in her hands, crackling blue energy that was always there below the surface, but she didn't get a chance to use it. A cold metal collar clicked into place around her neck and the TK died along with the whisper of voices that was always shimmering just out of reach.

She felt the sharp prick of a needle and the last thing she saw before she went under was Sarah's pink hair, the little girl draped over the shoulder of a man dressed in black.

~~~~~~~~~

Jubilee had sneaked away with Brenna's group rather than pay attention to the Westward Expansion exhibit. American history had always bored her to tears, especially because she didn't consider it her history; even though thousands of Chinese immigrants had worked on the rail system out west, none of them had been her ancestors and she was much more interested in cool dead bodies.

After exploring the room with the Egyptian exhibit she'd hung around by the door, arms crossed over her chest while she blew bubbles with her gum. A hand tapped on her shoulder and she turned to find no one there. When she looked out into the hallway her eyes went wide but before she had time to shout or make another move she was already slumping down under the influence of some kind of sedative.

((You can either tack your posts onto this or make your own, it doesn't really matter.))

The boathouse on the edge of Spuyten Dyvil Cove was crudely but fully furnished with a couch, tables, chair, a queen sized bed, and a small kitchen. Most of the time it stood empty but Logan had taken to using it as a refuge from the chaos of the Institute; he'd done it after he'd returned from Alkali Lake, and he'd actually lived in it during the entire time the Institute had been rebuilt. At times he'd entertained the thought of just living there full time, almost a full mile away from the school, his own little piece of not-civilization.

The arrival of Scott and that whole blowout had renewed his sense of urgency to get out, even after Ororo had smoothed things over in her usual way; the anger and rage he'd felt only served to remind him he was a wild being who occasionally found it difficult to maintain his grip on his humanity. He had the discipline and the sense of responsibility that Scott had accused him of lacking, but sometimes ... he just needed to be himself.

It hadn't been difficult to convince Matty to stay the night with him out there. She could play her guitar to her heart's content in the warm weather that had finally come to stay, she could sing in her clear alto voice that he'd come to love hearing, come to need to hear.

And that was another reason he wanted to get away. He'd come to the realization the other night while out with Tony (and what a night that had been) that he loved her. The heretofore unfelt emotion was something he wasn't sure he could keep contained because it filled him to bursting, made him have the insane urge to shout it from the rooftops, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to hide it from the handful of telepaths and empaths that lived in the mansion.

So after his strange email conversation with Gaia he'd asked Matty if she'd come with him, and now she was playing some bluegrass tune on the small boathouse porch and he was lighting a cigar, listening to the song of his lover melting out into the bigger song of the woods and the water surrounding them. Life couldn't get much better.

"Hey, Matty, how would ya feel about goin' to a strip joint?"

Then he had to go and say something strange like that.

One of the few places Brenna loved to be was in the garage, working on her Chevelle. The poor thing still looked like it had been through a minor war, at least on the outside; she was waiting on the paint job until the rest of it was in working order. For now it was primer gray and would remain so.

She had the radio on to a hard rock station as she was bent over the open hood, hands buried in the innards of the engine she had recently repaired, the V6 more than worth the effort. Her hand slipped on a bolt and she cursed. "Son of a bitch!" She pulled her hand back out and stuck the injured finger in her mouth, heedless of grease (her face was already liberally smudged anyway).

"Ah, goddamn it," she muttered, shaking her hand as if that was going to make it stop hurting.

((This is insanely long, I'm warning you. It clocks in somewhere around 1,300 words. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, either. This post is one part narrative, one part threading between a much-needed conversation between Matty and her X-Man.))

It was a rare, rainy day in Genosha. Damien sat perched on his windowsill, his forehead against the cool glass as he stared outside, watching the rain fall. His ribs still ached from where his father had broken them, and there were still the faintest signs of bruises across his cheekbone. His ribs were healed, but sense memory was a bitch, and had always been a far better liar than he ever was.

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Damn, but Matty was happy to have the quiet and the solitude of the mountains. She loved her family, but with as many cousins as she had now, family gatherings were nothing short of chaos. Her aunts and uncles had all eyed her and Logan, scrutinizing every little interaction between the two. Her family knew she was a mutant, and were accepting of her in varying degrees. She could act like any normal, average person around them, and they could forget that she was anything but baseline.

But Logan? Logan had thrown most of them for a loop, with wild hair and dark features. Matty was only thankful they had managed to hold their tongues, and not say anything. Well, everyone except for her Aunt Susie, who insisted it was high time that Matty find a good man and settle down and have children.

Yeah, Matty was thankful for the solitude. As of that moment, she watched Logan as he played handyman around the cabin, replacing boards in the walls, fixing the ceiling. Hell, he'd even fixed the wiring, even though they didn't need electricity. She figured it was probably his way of paying her parents back for letting them stay here. And for not asking awkward questions neither he nor Matty would be able to answer.

She didn't know what they were. Lovers, maybe. He had marked her as his, in a way she would never be able to explain to someone who wasn't like them. She chewed on a strip of jerky as her eyes followed him. Had she marked him, too? she wondered. Was he hers, just as much as she was his?

Matty spent many of her nights sleepless. Maybe it stemmed from spending so many nights in dingy motel rooms, where the scents of those who had slept in the bed before her kept her awake, or from learning to sleep lightly, because she never knew when she would have to hit the ground running.

Now, though, it seemed she couldn't sleep until she had wandered the school several times over, making sure the students were in bed, that they were safe. Maybe it was the animal restless inside of her, the instinct to verify that everything and everyone was safe. That her pack could sleep soundly. That thought always gave her pause. It was strange to think of having a pack again. It was strange just to think about having a pack to begin with. And yet, there she was, with twenty-plus people comprising what she thought of as her pack. People instinct had made it her duty to protect.

Sometimes, she really hated being a feral mutant. Scratching her head and sighing, she wound her way back toward her bedroom. Some nights found her in Logan's bedroom, when both of them were still too keyed up and needed some release. What they had wasn't just sex. Matty wasn't sure what it was, nor was she too eager to identify what lingered between them when their bodies were spent, yet they still couldn't drag themselves away from each other.

Matty felt that, for however long they could, they would blame their feral natures. They hadn't talked about it. Matty had tried her damnedest just to keep from thinking about it.

And she wasn't thinking about why she felt disappointed when he wasn't in his room that night, or why, when she stretched out on his bed, the smell of him in the sheets and on the pillows comforted her so. Or why she smiled as she dug her head into his pillow, inhaling deeply.

No, this wasn't just about the sex.

Thread is now rated NC-17.

There were times when the animal part of her got the better of her, and Matty just had to get away from everyone else. This was one of those times. She had passed quietly through the hallways, guitar in hand, ignoring anyone who spoke to her. Those who knew her well enough just shrugged it off, but there were those who had flashed her hurt or confused looks, or who had looked at her as though she had greatly offended them.

Still, she ignored them. They could get their panties in a knot, for all she cared.

She had stopped once outside the doors, long enough to take a deep breath of air, and to admire the way sunset had painted the sky in a range of pink, orange and purple. She headed across the grounds and into the woods barefoot. It took several minutes for her to find a place that suited her, nice and secluded. She sat against a tree, setting her guitar across her lap as she dug her toes into the dirt. Moments later, her fingers were moving swiftly, expertly, across the strings. Her father had taught her this song when she was young. It was comforting to play now, and reminded her so much of home. She felt the tension slowly draining from her body, felt her muscles relaxing, bit by bit.

Some people had exercise, some had yoga, some had meditation. Matty had her guitar.

Though she had a room all to herself, she didn't like it. Well, she didn't like being cooped up in it. Not when there were so many noises around her, people laughing, people pacing the length of their rooms, people reciting lines from plays or stories or whatever over and over again, trying to memorize them.

Quite frankly, it was enough to drive her a bit nuts.

So she had settled into one of the sofas in the rec. room, her guitar set on her lap. Quietly, she picked at the strings, playing something easy and nothing in particular at all. She had things on her mind. A lot of things, really, and that was just a bit too much. She didn't like to think, not when it left her this damn confused. And curious. Oh, she was curious.

What was that they said about cats and curiosity, and why they don't mix?

She sneaked in through a second floor bathroom window. The bedroom it led into was empty, and Matty stuffed her hands into the pockets of her hoodie as she stopped to glance around a moment. It didn't seem like anyone lived in this room yet. Silently, Matty wondered how many people occupied the mansion altogether, though she knew the sum was nowhere near the population of the Massachusetts Academy.

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