Cait Kincaid (miss_mercury) wrote in age_of_miracles, @ 2008-02-10 22:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | mercury, remora |
Log: Mercury and Remora
Who: Cait Kincaid and McKenzie Fitzroy
When: backdated February 6th, 2008; evening
Where: The Lair, Kitchen
What: Cait is doing her usual random thing in the kitchen, and apparently makes the mistake of not being normal around a telepath who can't be bothered opening his eyes. Introductions and attempted murder follow, not necessarily in that order.
It was odd, in a way, being back. Most familiar faces were gone, and of the people who were still around, the majority of them seemed to be out for one reason or another, pleasure or business or worse. Cait couldn't really say very much about the new faces either, having spent most of the day sleeping, and the rest of it wandering the obscure corners of the Lair to make sure that she still knew where everything was. Still, it was strange feeling like a newcomer in a place that she had considered almost like her home a year ago.
The kitchen was still the same, though. She'd attempted cookies last night, and was back again this evening doing her best to pull meatloaf out of the eclectically stocked fridge. People might have come and gone, and Cait wasn't really sure what she was doing here or whether she was even wanted anymore, much less what her official place was or how life would turn out - but as long as she had an oven and a wooden spoon, she'd be fine.
The door flashed in the light as it opened, casting a sudden beam across the kitchen. A small boy stepped through it, his eyes shut and his very posture indicating that this was far from an unusual method of travel. Remora knew the layout of the Lair as well as he knew himself, and he could sense when someone was approaching -- could hear more than enough of their brain pattern to get out of the way. There was no likelihood of someone leaving a rollerskate out for him to trip over; in fact, someone leaving ANYTHING out in the hallways would quickly be disciplined for it. This wasn't like the school (and, in Kenzie's view, was all the better for it), and small things like that weren't punishable with a pat on the head. People got in a lot of trouble for a lot less.
He sauntered through the kitchen, moving quietly around the room -- he was an adult, speaking purely in mental terms (well...sort of), but physically he still resembled a 15 or 16-year-old: the years in the dark had stunted his growth. Combined with eyes that had much larger pupils than normal, it made for a look that was alternately off-putting and somewhat attractive. Certainly he'd perked up in the last few days -- now that he didn't have to push his body to the limit, now that the blood had been cleaned from him, now that Remora was making more of an effort to look normal...he was succeeding. In some places, he might have even been a catch. Physically speaking, that was: mentally speaking, he'd retained every ounce of cruelty he'd been utilising over the past few months.
Remora headed for the fridge, certain that there were ice pops in the freezer compartment: if there was flavoured sub-zero water on offer? McKenzie was in like Flynn.
It took Cait a moment to realize that there was someone else in the kitchen; the only pan that would be even remotely the right size for the concoction she thought she might be making had somehow made it up to the top shelf, only reachable through some interesting and potentially dangerous balancing on the countertop. By the time she registered the faint sound of - what, humming? - too much attention was needed to keep herself falling flat on her back. Besides, anyone she knew would have probably said something, and anyone she didn't could wait half a second.
So it wasn't until she landed lightly on the floor again with a slight squeak of her sneakers that Cait actually bothered to look at the newcomer. Whoever this kid was, he'd arrived since she left; there was nothing familiar in the young face, from what she could see of him from the angle she was currently watching him from, nearly directly behind him. Probably one of the newer Children, she'd figure him out soon enough.
Though not quite as quickly as she'd expected - Cait just opened her mouth to speak when she realized that not only was the kid humming to himself, he was doing it with his eyes closed. In the fridge. Her eyebrows climbed; she'd been known to do some strange things with food, occasionally counting on the fact that she couldn't be poisoned as a fallback, but considering the amount of care some of the people around here - used to - put into their food, going in their blind was like having a death wish.
Which was what made her keep quiet; crazy people who were surprised could be dangerous, especially when they were mutants, and anyone who was willing to risk a blind dive into the fridge had just made that qualification. Setting her tin down on the counter, Cait shook her head and crouched down to look for spices.
Pulling a long frozen treat from the icebox, Remora smiled -- it didn't really matter what flavour it was, given that they were all tasty, one way or another. He slammed the fridge door, humming cheerily as he went: though Cait wouldn't know it, he hadn't been this happy in a very long time, hadn't felt as good in a very long time, and now he was celebrating it. The boy skipped slightly, his mind buzzing with the various things he could try out once Magneto had built the new Cerebro...controlling people from any distance? Heads of state, influential businessmen, celebrities, news figures. Hell, he could kill people who were half the world away and barely bat an eyelid. He could definitely go in and teach the crippled old coot a lesson, even if the Big Boss Man didn't seem all that keen on doing it himself. What Magneto didn't know wouldn't hurt him, and Magneto didn't have to know that McKenzie Fitzroy was planning to kill Charles Xavier ten minutes after he got his hands on the new Cerebro.
He stepped around Cait purely by accident, reaching into the drawer where they kept the scissors. "Liz Taylor is not his style," he sang quietly, entirely free to be himself when he was -or so the young man thought- alone. And part of being alone was enjoying stupid old songs. "And even Liberace's smile...is somethin' he can't see..."
The boy's Scottish accent had faded now, replaced by an odd transatlantic burr that sounded more New England than anything else -- a sure sign that he was feeling better. He was stood less than a foot from the new girl, and so it seemed odd that he hadn't greeted her yet: he was a telepath, and had to have sensed her the moment he arrived, but either he was being outstandingly rude, or something was up.
After watching the boy reach around in the drawer for a moment, Cait frowned. So it wasn't just that he could see without his eyes like that one girl she'd known back in Texas - vision from the tips of her hair, really fucking weird - but for some reason he liked going blind? Which would explain why he hadn't noticed her, and if the singing was covering up the noises she made ....
It was almost temping to leave him alone and watch how long it took him to figure out that he wasn't alone in his own personal little bubble. But, she thought she had an idea of what he was looking for, and it seemed kind of cruel not to mention the fact that she had taken the scissors a few minutes before he'd gotten in to get a lose fibre off of her jeans. Not that she couldn't have made her own, but too much time living with sapien parents had all of the values fuck-backwards in her head, and she was still trying to get them back in the right place.
So, regardless of the risk of surprising some mutant with scissors, Cait leaned back against the counter and extended a hand, scissors in her palm. "I think these might be what you're lookin' for?" she offered, an amused smile on her face as she waited for a reaction.
To prophesy that surprising Remora might not go well for her was hardly of the Oracle at Delphi-level premonition. He'd taken up the scissors almost automatically after hearing her voice, so shocked by the fact that someone had got close to him without him even half-realising that the reaction was entirely instinctual. Self-preservation had kicked in and, without even bothering to think about it, Remora had plunged the scissors deep into what he assumed was the attacker's throat. Admittedly, 'attacker' was entirely too strong a word for a person who had, so far, simply offered him the very pair of scissors that he was looking for, but the rational part of his mind barely fired properly at the best of times; right now, he might as well have been barking at shadows.
Opening his eyes, Kenzie allowed himself a second or two to react to the sight: his first thought being 'hmm, she's pretty cute' and was followed almost immediately by 'I really shouldn't have stabbed her like that'. Remora smiled apologetically, and popped the end of the icepop into his mouth. He bit through the plastic, having little desire to use the scissors now and spat the end into the dustbin. There wasn't really much to say at a time like that, and the boy was simply waiting for her to keel over. She really was a beautifully distinctive shade of silver, though...
"Whoops."
Suffice it to say, it wasn't the reaction Cait had been expecting.
There was a second or two of stunned silence, as the cool feeling of metal exploded into pain so intense it nearly paralyzed her. Silver blood poured from the wound, dotting the countertop and the floor almost festively while Cait gaped in utter shock. Then instinct kicked in and her body collapsed in on itself, a puddle of liquid mercury with a pair of scissors lying in the middle of her clothing.
The drops of spattered blood were moving now, independent of gravity or logic, flowing back to the central puddle which was already beginning to rise into an amorphous silver column. Within a second it had taken on enough shape that a head could be distinguished, mouth and eyes and then a torso, though not quite as realistic as she had been a moment ago; she might be furious, but Mercury wasn't inclined to forget that she couldn't just be wearing clothing, and so her body looked more like armour than actual flesh again. Except for the face, and her hands, one of which was once more holding the pair of scissors, the other gesticulating madly as soon as it was formed enough to do so.
"The fuck?!" she exclaimed, taking a step back to slam one hand against his chest. "Seriously, are you out of your fuckin' skull?"
The force of her (albeit justified) attack forced Remora up and onto the counter top -- he was a slight boy, and not one for coming out on top in a fight. Given that the girl was made of metal, it wasn't likely that he would ever emerge victorious from some kind of altercation with her, and so he allowed himself to fall backward, into a sitting position atop the side.
"Well, pretty much." His voice was calm now, perhaps with a small laugh behind it. "Been a wee bit busy just recently, and it sent me a couple of notches doolally. But they've given me a bit of time off, so I'm back to my old self...kind of. Still a bit jumpy, but I suppose you know that just as well as I do now." He gestured over to the scissors, which were (and he was quite impressed when Remora actually noticed) completely clean. It made sense, but then he had no idea how her mutation worked -- other that it allowed the girl to survive normally deadly attacks. He pressed gently against the edges of her psyche, gauging her strength. The fact that he hadn't sensed her AT ALL suggested either massive psionic abilities, or power-nullification. But she was metal, and he could hear her thoughts now, he was sure of it. He smiled brightly, dazzling both in its sudden appearance and how it changed Remora's demeanor.
"I hope you realise," he said personably, "that your thing then was the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen in my whole life."
Mercury eyed the kid for a moment, before taking her hand off of his chest. The arm stretched backwards to reclaim the pile of clothing from the ground where she had left it, though Cait didn't take her eyes off of the guy who had just tried to kill her.
Really fucking cheerfully.
"So wait," she tried, disbelief and skepticism fairly dripping from her tone. "Lemme get this straight, you're 'a wee bit jumpy', so you walk around with your fuckin' eyes closed and stab people in the neck when they say hello?" Truth be told, it wasn't really as surprising around this place as it would have been anywhere else, and with the pain already a distant memory, Mercury was beginning to drift down from murderously retaliatory to somewhere between seriously pissed off and confused as all fuck. The enthusiastic compliment at the end hadn't really helped with that.
Mercury frowned, gaze still hostile. "Not that I trust you as far as I could drop-kick your corpse, but if I put these down and get my clothes back on, are you gonna go psycho-killer on me again?" She indicated the scissors she was holding. " 'Cause bein' in a kitchen with the guy who just tried to murder you with your own fuckin' scissors's bad enough, but I'm not exactly keen on bein' naked on top'a all that."
"No no," he said, taking a few happy sucks on the icepop. "You've nothing to fear from me, I can promise you. Not that my promise will mean much, since I just...you know...stabbed you in the neck. But you get what I mean. I'm Remora. Did I already say that?"
Now that he was calming down a little, Remora could hear the thoughts bubbling around in her brain -- fairly similar to everyone else's, if truth be told, although he wasn't concentrating TOO hard. As a teenage boy, he'd just discovered that the girl in front of him -liquidy and metallic as she was- was naked, and that was occupying a large portion of his thought processes. Of course, technically speaking, all the boy would have to do would be to access the memory centres of Cait's brain and pull up any of the many billions of memories she would have of changing...or bathing...or whatever the hell she did, being made out of crazy silver stuff. Maybe she did nothing like that. That would have been a shame...one of Kenzie's favourite pastimes was stealing into peoples' heads, and finding out what they did when they thought they were alone. Pyro. Avalanche. Deathstrike, on the rare occasions she surfaced.
Magneto. Which was impossible these days, but had been cool back when he'd first arrived.
"So who're you, then?" he said innocently, as though nothing had happened. And perhaps, in his mind, it hadn't. "I'm guessing...new girl."
It wasn't really as hard as one might have imagined, changing without taking your eyes off of someone else. The scissors were set down on the counter - away from Remora, whoever the fuck he was, and Cait pulled on her clothes as quickly as she could without removing the suspicous gaze from the boy who had just attacked her. Whatever he might claim about not coming after her, it wasn't - as he'd pointed out - particularly convincing in the light of what had just happened.
When she had jeans and shirt back where they belonged, Cait crossed her arms across her chest and allowed the undistracted force of her glare return. "Remora." Wasn't that, like, the fish with the sharks? Which turned into a codename how, exactly? She decided not to ask, the last thing she wanted right now was to give him another reason to attack her; not that she had any doubts as to her ability to survive, but because it might just make her retaliate, and she'd rather be back for more than a day before killing one of the kids.
"I'm Mercury," she said with a vague guesture at her skin, which did about as much as anything else to explain where she got the name. "And chances are, I've probably been here longer than you have - comin' back, not joinin' up." There was still no warmth in her tone, although his continued lack of killing her again was earning him points.
"Mercury," he replied, the slight trace of his Scottish accent (mostly suppressed now, given that he wasn't in any kind of mortal peril) rolling the 'err' sound across his tongue rather slower than he might have needed to. It was curious, the way his voice could sound so rich when his body was far from fully developed -- it was as though all the extra energy that he'd lacked growing up in the dark had gone into his vocal cords once he was out and using them; it gave him a soft, almost chocolatey baritone that got deeper, the softer he spoke. And he was definitely speaking softly now: after all, watching her dress had just underlined the fact that he'd been seeing her naked before, and even if she was made out of Silly Putty or whatever, that was still a memory you could take to the bank. "That's cool. Don't see many of your kind around."
He had to wonder why she'd come here, of all places -- Magneto could manipulate metal any way he liked, and that had to include her. Did she like giving up any iota of self-control? He didn't know, but it might be nice to find out. He WAS a telepath, and he knew all about taking away peoples' self-control.
"Yeah, you probably have," he said finally, looking down at his icepole suddenly, as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. "I was out doing more important things, after Xavier kicked me out. Frightened of me, he was...not that I blame him all that much. Just waiting, really. Magneto's going to build me one of his famous big round rooms, and then we're going to see how hard Daddy can dance." He shrugged. "He made me do that, too. Call him 'father', I mean. Didn't have much of a personality when he rescued me, but I took some of his, and some of Mom's, and here I am. We're a big, happy, psychic family that tries to kill each other every now and then."
He brightened suddenly. "Oh, and yeah. Like the fish. The fish that swims with a bigger fish. It gets protection, it gets food, it gets a free ride...and all it has to do is sing for its supper. It's what I've always done, so it's become my codename. It fits."
Cait raised an eyebrow. "My kind, like, the walkin' inorganic being' made of slightly unstable metallic compounds?" She snorted. "Can't quite imagine why that'd be." There was something odd about the way he talked that was making her re-evaluate things as she watched him; the fact that he was psycho remained unquestioned, but something about the idea of calling him a 'kid' was feeling not quite right, for reasons that she couldn't put a finger on. She had a feeling he was one of those people who could exploit how they sounded, though, like she could filter Texas through her voice or force back the softer Rhode Island sounds if she really worked at it.
No one ever said life was anything even remotely near simple. And if some pet project of Xavier - who she admittedly know almost nothing about - and Magneto - who admittedly scared the crap out of her now that he was more than some distant kidnapped figure, but hey - was running around gleefully talking about some sort of way to pay someone back ... yeah, not simple was about the beginnings of how Cait would describe that. Although, she was beginning to feel like as long as she didn't say the wrong and insult a goldfish, or something, he wasn't likely to have much of a grudge against her. Assuming whatever the fuck it was that prompted him to stab her didn't happen again.
"Hope you don't mind my sayin," Mercury drawled, eyebrow staying where it was, "you're just a little bit fucked in the head."
"Just a little bit?" he replied, with a laugh. "Just you wait, Mercury. "A little bit" doesn't even start to describe exactly how fucked in the head I am." Remora slipped down off the end of the counter, dropping the now-emptied plastic wrapper into the bin. Not entirely sure how to play it, he simply stood for a second or two, thinking. Cait knew he was odd, suspected something was up, but she couldn't have any idea just how deep the rabbit hole went. Kenzie couldn't decide whether or not showing her now was a good idea, or waiting until he knew her a little better. Finally, he smiled brightly and turned towards the door. "But, in any event, you think all that's the weird bit? Nooooo. My dad might be Professor Xavier, but my mother's Emma Frost."
Remora laughed, before heading for the door. "You'll see a lot of me around, Mercury. And you'll probably hear me even more, once I've figured out that weird thing you've got going on with your head. I think I like you -- sorry again for stabbing you in the throat."
Wierd thing? Cait's frown deepened, puzzled this time rather than angry. It was odd that a telepath who Xavier and Emma Frost - whose name she'd never heard, but had been said with a sort of ironic reverence, so she must be important - thought was special hadn't noticed her two feet away. But, something wrong with her head? If there was, she'd never noticed it, and no one had thought to point it out.
Well, it'd ether be relevant, or not ... much like this evening had been, apparently.
Rather spontaneously throwing grudges to the wind, Cait turned and actually offered Remora half a smile as he left. "Guess I'll see you around, then," she agreed, expression remaining almost cheerful. "Just lettin' you know, though - everyone gets one shot at me. You try that again, I'll kick you through a wall." God, she loved this place, where something like that was just a fact, like any other.