Letonia - 3/10

Letonia
3/10

When Dana Scully first started to drift out of the swamp land of dreamless sleep, she was completely alone in the strange pale room. Had she been aware at the time, she would’ve noticed one of the machines that sat around her was set to watch her sleep patterns, and it sent an alert through the halls of the building which housed both it and her at the first signs of her awakening. This brought the four people currently within the building’s walls hurriedly towards her bedside.

However, she was still in the nether lands between sleep and waking when this took place, so all she knew was that when she opened her eyes, she was somewhere she had never been before, and there were three people that she had never met, yet who seemed vaguely familiar staring anxiously down at her, like figures from a barely remembered dream waiting for her to return from the realms of real life.

“Well, I be darned, Stormy. Da canuck was right,” The tall man (Gambit, something in the back of her mind whispered to her) said.

The black woman looked at him reprovingly, then turned her complete attention to Dana. “Ms. Scully, how are you feeling this afternoon?” she asked.

So if that was Storm, and the brown-haired man was Gambit, then the one sitting ever so quietly by her bedside had to be the Professor. Dana was still disoriented, still trying to put things into place. She wondered how long she’d been out. The last thing she remembered was the ground rushing up at her and a squealing filling her ears. But there had been something else. Something important.

*A little girl? *

The man she had pegged as Gambit spoke then, introducing the three of them. If she’d been paying attention, she would’ve heard him confirm their names, but the memories were flooding back in. She’d gone to get diapers. She’d walked because she thought that it might cool her down. There’d been a girl in the middle of the road, and a car. Then she’d been dreaming.

Something about a blue man, and then she’d dreamed about these three people, snatches of what was going on around her mixing with her subconscious. After all, wheelchairs don’t float, and people with their eyes full of blood don’t walk around as if nothing is wrong with them.

“I’m fine. Where’s the little girl? Is she all right?”

*Wait a second, did she ask me how I was feeling this afternoon?* It had been evening when she’d left for the store. That would mean that she’d been out for at least a day. There wasn’t any natural light in the room, and it felt as if it should be afternoon, but Scully’s internal clock told her that it had been much more than a day.

Had she been in a coma?

A sudden wisp of terror filled her. *Do I have brain damage?* But she’d been dreaming, hadn’t she? Did people in comas dream? Storm (for some reason, she thought that this woman was Stormy to Gambit alone, and even then only when she wished to be) still hadn’t answered her.

“Where’s the little girl? Is she all right?” She repeated. “And where is my son?”

Storm looked at her sadly, her softly accented voice full of warmth. “The girl is safe, thanks to you. She had only a few scrapes and bruises. You have no idea the risk you took.”

Dana smiled at the other woman. “I appreciate your concern, but I seem to be fine now. I couldn’t have been hurt badly.” She wasn't just trying to speed things along by saying that. She felt curiously well, somehow more here, and stronger than she could remember in a long while.

Although she didn’t remember feeling quite this good, even back when she was younger. If she had been in a coma, it couldn’t have been for long. “Is my son here? Or one of my partners?

“And, by the way, where is here?”

They were all looking at each other then, and their faces were telling Scully something that she didn’t think she wanted to know. They were trying to find a way to break bad news to her. The Professor was still sitting quietly by her bedside, his posture reflecting an uneasiness that he had long ago schooled his face to conceal. Gambit was looking at Storm with pleading eyes. Eyes that asked her not to make him be the one to speak.

Eyes that were red and black.

Feeling a little panic creep into her, she glanced back toward the man in the wheel chair, her gaze being drawn downwards, despite a sudden, irrational fear of what she’d see.

She hadn’t been dreaming before, or she was still dreaming now. The man wasn’t really in a wheel chair. He was floating a few inches about the white tiled floor. Just to make sure that this was real, she pinched herself in the arm once.

Hard.

All she got for her trouble was a sore arm. She scrambled into an upright position. Storm started to reach for the FBI agent, as if to support her, but stopped when Dana showed no signs of weakness. They’d stopped their unspoken discussion, the answer to the question of who was going to break whatever was wrong to her answered when Storm had moved forward to brace her.

Dana surveyed the odd collection of people gathered around her, standing in their broken circle around her bed, waiting for her to make the first move.

She looked Storm right in the eyes (which she noticed, oddly enough, were blue) and asked the only question that she could think of.

“What the hell is going on?”

The professor looked at Storm significantly, and Dana was left with the certainty something unspoken was passing between the two of them. Storm nodded her head slightly at the bald man, then she turned back to Dana and began to speak.

“Miss Scully, what would you say if I told you that for almost every X-File, there was the same explanation?”

“I’d say that you were trying to change the subject.”

“Humour me, Miss Scully. I promise you that this is leading to a full explanation.”

Scully took a good hard look at the trio, then sighed. They really believed that this was the quickest way to convey things to her.

Either that, or she was about to get treated to the world’s biggest run-around.

“Well, I’d say that you didn’t know what you were talking about. There’s no way, for example, that a man who claims to see people’s deaths has anything to do with another who has X-Ray vision, or some one who can kill people in their dreams.”

“That’s where you’re wrong Ms. Scully. Those people, they’re like us.

“They’re mutants.”

“You do realize that this isn’t making things much clearer?”

The Professor broke in then. “If you’d allow Miss Monroe to finish.....”

Scully bit her tongue and nodded her assent.

“Mutants are people who's genetic make-up is different from that of normal humans, to the point where they aren’t technically considered to be homo sapiens. They’re known as homo superior.”

“What if I don’t buy this?” Scully probably would’ve continued to protest her disbelief for awhile yet, but something the woman had said a little bit back had just sunk in. “Hold on a second. Did you say like us ?”

There were a few seconds of silence, and Scully was yet again left with the feeling that she was missing some important conversation.

“Ms. Scully, I’m afraid that you were very badly hurt in the accident.”

“What are you trying to say here?” Scully heard her voice rising, and she didn’t care. She really didn’t like where this seemed to be going, and she found herself almost wishing that they’d go back to refusing to talk about the accident.

Almost.

“Chere, what Stormy tryin to tell you is dat everyone thinks dat you’re dead,” Gambit said.

“Oh.” Scully leaned against the wall behind her, the shades of dismay dripping off of her. This was a dream. This wasn’t real. People who pinched themselves just didn’t always wake up, that’s all. He must have seen her eyes go glassy or something, because he continued to speak to her.

“You don’t believe what me and Stormy tellin you?” He asked, reaching for something in an interior pocket in his trench coat. “How ‘bout I prove da mutant thing to you?” He pulled a deck of cards out.

“You’re going to prove it to me with a deck of Tarot cards?”

“Dese aint Tarot cards.” He flipped the top open and slid a card out. They weren’t Tarot cards, but a cheap looking deck of regular playing cards.

“Now I really don’t get it.”

“Just you wait.” He closed the box, and slipped it back into his coat. He held the one card out to Scully. “Take a look at it. Make sure enough dat you believe dere aren’t no gimmicks in it.” Scully took the card, a Jack of Spades, and looked it over. Finding nothing wrong with it, she handed it back to him. He held in his palm where she could see it clearly.

The Professor spoke as if he knew what was to come. “Try not to damage anything.”

Gambit only smiled roguishly at the older man. He turned back to Scully. “Now, watch closely.” Scully, intrigued despite of herself, leaned forward.

In Gambit’s hand, the card began to glow bright pink.

Scully scrambled back on the bed again. The glow intensified until it hurt her eyes. The others didn’t even blink. With a practiced movement, Gambit tossed the card into the air, away from them. At the height of its arc, it exploded. A piece of ash drifted down to land on Scully’s hand. It just sat there, a fleck of grey against skin that had grown pale.

They were looking at her expectantly, or at least with some modicum of expectancy in their eyes.

“Nice trick,” she said after a second. It was the most likely explanation, and she didn’t feel particularly inclined to trust these people right now.

Gambit was reaching for Storm’s head even as Scully spoke, and to her confusion, plucked a couple of hairs from the woman’s head. Storm merely raised an eyebrow at him.

He held his hand and the hairs towards Scully, gesturing for her to inspect them. She turned his hand over, searching for any sort of wires or contact points, pushed the sleeve of his trench coat up to make sure that nothing was hidden up his sleeve. The hairs, she ignored, because unless they had Storm’s entire mane rigged to explode, then there likely was nothing wrong with the hairs themselves.

She released his hand, and he stepped back from her with a smile. She watched as the white hairs took on a pink tinge, and began to glow. Gambit didn’t fling them from himself this time, likely due to the fact that a thrown hair doesn’t tend to fly strait. He released his grip on them a bare second before the soft bamf that accompanied the flash of light. Scully could feel the heat from the blast on her skin slightly.

That, of everything, convinced her that this was real. The slap of warmth against her face, her arms.

“Fine,” she said, revising her view of the situation a little bit. “You can make things glow pink and explode. I’ll give you that, for now. It doesn’t make you some higher evolution of the human species.”

Someone sighed. Scully wasn’t sure who. None of them seemed like a sigher.

“Agent Scully,” Storm said. “I have something I would like to try and show you.”

Scully sat there in the bed, looking at Storm. When the younger woman was sure she had her attention, she smiled briefly, then her face took on a look of deep concentration. She held her hands out, palm up, and Scully thought she saw a spark. Storm frowned as Scully leant in closer, and the smell of ozone started to fill the air.

Gambit and the Professor were looking at Storm with a decidedly odd expression on their faces, but Scully didn’t really spend all that much time concentrating on them, because Storm’s hands suddenly burst into light.

Gold danced across her palms, cracking and straining at the air, seeming to ebb and flow around the edges. Scully reached out her hand towards it. The hair on her arms stood up as she drew closer to the energy, and all of a sudden the light went out, leaving behind only electricity in the air, and the smell of storms.

Storm’s hands looked exactly as they had a minute before.

This was starting to get really weird.

Which, when you consider what she did for a living, was quite a feat.

“What was that?” She asked Storm, though she had a sinking suspicion she already knew.

“Controlled lightning.”

It was something that was pretty damn well near impossible to fake, in this enclosed a space, affecting Scully when she neared it, but not Storm, who was actually in contact with it.

Taking a deep breath, Scully turned to the Professor. “So we have the Human Torch and Lightning Girl. Don’t tell me, you think you’re a nuclear furnace.”

“Actually child, I’m a telepath,” the Professor said. He paused for a second. “As well, the Human Torch would probably resent the reference, and a walking nuclear furnace happens to be residing in another location.” He ignored Gambit’s indignant glare and continued. “Gambit is capable of storing and creating bio-kinetic energy, and Storm controls all the weather, not merely lightning.”

“Oh,” Scully said. If these people were lying, they had completely deluded themselves as well, and if they weren’t, she was in way over her head. She was leaning towards the later.

Storm spoke again, bringing the subject back to the original path of conversation. “It’s interesting that you would have mentioned that man who could see people’s deaths. What was it that he said to you?”

The sinking feeling in Scully’s stomach intensified. “He told me that I wasn’t going to die. But that’s impossible. Everyone dies.” It didn’t seem quite so impossible right now, though. At this exact time, almost anything seemed within the realm of possibility.

“I don’t know about that. I’ve been around longer than we can figure out, and I should’ve kicked the bucket more times than I could figure out, even if you gave me a calculator.” A rough voice came from behind her and to the left, and a short, burly man stalked into the room through a door that she hadn’t noticed. Stalked was really the only word for the way he walked. Scully thought that he’d probably been standing there for awhile. He turned to the others then, and gestured at her. “What did I tell you Chuck?”

The Professor answered him in a low voice. “There was no evidence that she would be waking up, Logan.”

Well, at least one of them had a normal name.

“What about what I told you? I could smell it on her. What do you think would have happened if she’d woke up all alone?”

“Why didn’t you stay with her then?”

“I was, Chuck, at least until Jubes called. I asked one of you to sit with her till I got back.”

Storm placed a placating hand on Logan’s arm. Scully expected him to shake it off, but it actually seemed to calm him slightly.

Scully waited a few seconds for them to notice her, then her patience broke. “Excuse me, but I do believe that you people were in the process of explaining to me why everyone thinks that I’m dead, and what whoeverhewas has to do with that.”

The tension in the room dissipated slightly, shifting until if was focused on her.

“Miss Scully, I’m going to tell this to you like it is,” Logan said. “When you were hit by by the car, it was bad. Your skull was crushed, your brain rearranged. Almost every bone in your body was shattered or broken. Your internal organs were so much soup.”

Scully wished that the certainty that this was a dream would take over her again. But it had deserted her, leaving her only a growing nausea at odds with that feeling of curious wellness that she’d been feeling since she woke up. She knew that if her injuries had been as bad as he said, she wouldn’t be here now, but she couldn’t bring herself to disbelieve him.

“They had a closed casket funeral. Me, Storm, and Gambit were there. Your partner gave a beautiful eulogy. We paid our respects, we stood at the grave site. Then, the next night, we and two of our friends went back, and we dug you up.”

Scully just sat there silently, the nausea eating up her stomach and horror clogging her throat with a cold knot.

She felt like the floor had dropped out from underneath her.

“What I’m getting at, Miss Scully, is that you’re a mutant, a healer. If you weren’t, you really would’ve died, and if we hadn’t been keeping an eye on you, then you’d be waking up in a coffin right now.

“And whoever, when he told you that you weren’t going to die, could see that. He was a clairvoyant, although a limited one. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to die, it just means that you’re probably going to live a lot longer than most people, and he couldn’t see beyond that.”

“How long has it been since the accident?”

“Over two weeks. There was a lot of damage for your body to repair.”

Scully sat there, absorbing everything that had just been thrown at her. She became aware of an ache at the back of her head, and looking down at herself, she realized that she was sitting on blood red hair. Raising a hand to her head, she discerned that is was, in fact, her hair, although hers was shoulder length and a more washed out orange-y red. Her hair hadn’t been this colour since she was a very small child. It had faded when she was still an infant.

“It’s all right. Hair colour often changes when mutations manifest themselves.” Storm said, waving absently at her own hair. She’d seen what Scully was thinking in her face. “As for why it’s grown, your body has been very busy fixing itself, and a lot of energy has gone to your head, to repair the brain damage. The growth of your hair is just a side effect.”

Her hair wasn’t really what Scully was most concerned with. “If my body heals itself so well, why did I get cancer when I took that chip out? Why was I rendered infertile? Why have I recovered just like everyone else all the other times that I’ve been injured?”

“You recovered from your cancer, did you not? Mutations reveal themselves at different times in different people.”

“Storm, why don’t you find our guest some clothes, then show her to a room? I think that she’d rather not stay in our medlab, and she’s had enough for one day,” The Professor said. “She won’t need the constant medical supervision, but show her how to use the computer system so that she can contact us if she has any problems.”

And despite her best intentions, a fatigue swept over her, making it impossible for her to argue.

*

Scully followed Storm up the dark hardwood stairs. The medlab had been in the basement of a mansion. Storm, who had told her that her real name was Ororo Munroe, had been giving Scully a tour of the mansion, or at least, the parts of the mansion that were deemed appropriate for new comers. The mansion was known to the public as Xavier’s School for Higher Learning, but actually served as home base for Ororo, Logan, Gambit (who’s name turned out to be Remy LeBeau), the Professor (the school’s namesake, Charles Xavier), and several other mutants.

Scully hadn’t been able to drag a full explanation of what exactly the group did out of Ororo, but had managed to extract a promise of a full explanation in the morning. Scully was feeling worn out and drained, and all she wanted was to collapse in a bed. The depth of her exhaustion was over riding everything else.

Ororo stopped outside the door of a room halfway down the hall. She turned to Scully and smiled. “You’ll be staying here while you’re with us. If this room isn’t to your taste, then we’ll find you another one tomorrow, but I think that you’ll like it.”

She opened the door to expose a huge room painted in shades of white and navy-black. Dutch doors led out onto a small balcony which over looked what seemed to be woodlands. A pewter poster bed flanked by ebonwood book cases sat against one wall. Not to say that the room had no colour. There were splashes of it scattered throughout the room, made more intense by the simplicity of their backdrop. It didn’t resemble Scully’s home in the least. She wasn't’ sure if she would’ve done it like this if she was decorating.

She loved it.

She stumbled grateful over to the bed, pulling herself into the cotton pyjamas while Storm studied the corner. Scully sank into the bed, wanting nothing more than to bury her head in the pillows and sleep.

“Storm?” She called, stubbornly holding onto the last threads of wakefulness.

The other woman paused in the doorway. “Yes?” she asked.

“What about Evan?”

Storm looked at her kindly, her face full of something that Scully couldn’t identify when she was this tired. “We’ll discuss Evan in the morning as well, I assure you. You just rest now,” she said as she flicked off the light in the room.

Her last coherent thought was before drifting off was that Storm and the others also hadn’t given her a strait answer about her cancer or her infertility. As Storm closed the door to the room, Scully felt her consciousness drifting away.

She slept, her mind returning to the blue man in the room, while hundreds of miles away, her partner touched the world that had so firmly engulfed her.

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