Gaia always kept odd hours. It was sort of part and parcel of her line of work. The ally entrance to her apartment was quiet and dark, and she was glad.
It was easy to be the party girl in public. For the most part that was who she was. Ballsy, brash, out there, kicking ass, taking names, and laughing all the way to the bank. Pretty much every cliche that you could think of for that particular type of person Gaia was it. Not very many people had gotten past that facade, and she liked it that way. Logan was really the only exception to that rule that she could think of in the last fifty years.
She took a deep breath as she pushed the door open and climbed the stairs. When she reached the top, the door to her flat was gaping open. Gaia's head buzzed a little as she looked around the front room. Her couch had been slashed and her chair over turned. The drawers to her desk were all open and emptied and her computer was smashed. Pictures and frames broken and scattered around. Glass from the broken fire escape still glittered on the carpet around the window.
Somehow, the destruction of her home didn't seem to touch her. She walked down the short hall, trailing her fingers idly across the wall as she did. She noted with some absent amusement that they hadn't bothered to trash the bathroom. But her bedroom was an even bigger mess than the front room was.
The drapes were cut to ribbons and the mattress of her king sized bed had been turned and cut open. So had her pillows. The drawers were again open and empty. The closet door was hanging off the hinge and her clothes were flung out everywhere. No method, no reason. Just destruction for its own sake.
Gaia walked quickly over to the closet and reached up to the shelf, feeling blindly. There was nothing up there. She looked around frantically and saw what she was looking for on the far side of the wall and before she could stop it a sob ripped from her throat. It wasn't enough that they had kidnapped her brother's family and broken into her home. It wasn't enough that they had kept her drugged and totured those kids and their teachers for days. They had to wontonly destroy everything just because they could.
And yet, mutants were the monsters.
She knelt next to the shards of the wooden box and bits of torn paper and started sifting through them. She pulled out a handkerchief, edged in lace, that had the initials GJ embroidered in the corner. There was a small tear in the middle of it, but it was otherwise unharmed. She folded it carefully and set it next to her.
She reached for the bits of paper next, her chest feeling tight. The paper was yellow with age and the ink on the back with the dates and names had faded, but she knew what it would say if it were whole. She turned it over and looked at the handsome smiling face, dressed in military dress blues. A white clad arm was slid through his before the picture had been torn in half. She didn't even realize she was crying as she stared at it until a tear blotted onto the paper.
She took a deep shakey breath and kept going through the bits of paper. She knew what the pictures were, even though most of them were torn to bits and pieces, and seeing each one destroyed made her feel at once angry and broken.
Gaia picked up a ring. A small tarnished silver thing with a pink stone in a jeweled setting. It wasn't real, but it hadn't mattered. She curled up on the floor and held it in her fist as she sobbed.