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ShoshanaFlower
Author of 8 Stories |
House of W
Family Trees
Part II
. Maximoff-Toynbee Residence .
“Crystal, I ... I wasn’t expecting you.” Wanda stood, wide-eyed at the sight of her sister-in-law, who looked as young as when the two had first met. After having seen so many altered faces and forms recently, Wanda momentarily wondered if longevity ran among the Inhumans.
“I’m sorry to come by unannounced like this, Wanda,” Crystal said civilly, interrupting Wanda’s thoughts. “Are you busy?”
“No, please come in.” She stepped aside and held open the door. “Is anything wrong? Is Luna alright?”
“Luna’s fine,” Crystal said, stepping over the threshold with her usual grace. “I was actually looking for Pietro.”
“Oh,” Wanda closed the door and followed Crystal into the living room. “He isn’t here. I’m afraid I haven’t heard from him for a few weeks.”
“He’s the one who gave me your new address. I thought you might be able to reach him.”
“I don’t know where he is now. He didn’t leave me any way to contact him. The only place I can think of would be Genosha, with our father.” Wanda moved the cat off of the other side of the sofa and offered the seat to her sister-in-law. “In fact, our half-sister just left for Genosha today. If he knows about her arrival, I’m sure he’ll be there.”
Crystal hadn’t sat down. “Wanda,” she said, stopping the current conversation, “are you pregnant?”
“Oh,” she blushed slightly. “Yes. I suppose Luna will have a cousin in another few months.” She left the room and walked into the kitchen to clear away the dinner that she’d kept warm until then, and to hide the sincere, ashamed blush that was now creeping over her face as she wondered what Crystal was thinking. Did she too wonder if the baby was real?
“Congratulations,” was all the Inhuman said. “I had asked Pietro about you, but he’s as laconic as ever with me.” Wanda noticed the scowl in her sister-in-law’s voice.
She though of filling Crystal in; telling her about her marriage and life so far, but that would also involve an explanation about her MIA husband. So she stepped lightly over the subject. “If you like, I could give you my sister’s contact information.”
“No, that’s alright. I’ll just head over to Genosha and see for myself.” She began walking toward the door, but paused and turned back to Wanda. “Pietro ... did seem concerned about you, Wanda,” she said. “Are you alright?”
She smiled. “I’m fine. Mostly. Pietro is always worried about me. Anyway, I knew he’d been spending time with Luna. Is that going well?”
“As well as can be expected, I suppose,” she said, but her tone indicated that she was not pleased. “I know he’s your brother and that you want to defend him, but the way he raises her hopes is cruel. She thinks he’s going to suddenly become an attentive father, but he always disappears on her.”
Wanda looked away. “I’m sorry to hear it, Crystal. It must be terrible for Luna.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry to have dropped in on you uninvited. And Wanda?” Crystal waited until Wanda looked at her. “No matter what goes on between Pietro and me, you’re still my friend. I’m just sorry that we met again under these circumstances. Perhaps we should plan a time to get together again, just to talk.”
Wanda smiled her first sincere smile that day. “I think that would be wonderful.”
“Goodnight, then.” Crystal left, and Wanda stood in the doorway. She’d assumed Crystal had her own transportation, and sure enough, there was Lockjaw sitting obediently on the front lawn. She watched then leave and then went inside, locking the door behind her.
- - -
. The Next Day .
. New York City .
. 6:09 AM .
Mort woke up feeling like he was experiencing a major hangover. And worse than that, he soon realized that he was in a gutter. He sat up slowly. There was the alley in front of him. He remembered the two kids, the one kid hitting him ... Had he been knocked out? He shook his head and reached into his pocket for his shades, but found only smashed pieces of them. He stood up and noticed the plant, still on its side, with much of the dirt spilled out onto the grimy sidewalk.
It was morning, he realized, and Wanda might be worried about him. He picked up the plant and tried to slide some of the dirt back into the pot. Then, groggily, he climbed up the two-story building in front of him, one hand still holding the rim of the plant. Thankfully, it wasn’t too late in the morning and so the sun wasn’t too bright. Even so, the mysterious hangover effects plus his natural - or was it developed? - sensitivity toward light made his head hurt even more. He walked to the edge of the roof and glanced down at the alley where he’d tried to intercede for the young racist the night before. He shook his head once and jumped to the next roof. When he landed, even though it was a small leap, his head spun. It would be a long journey home at this rate. Rather than try to make it back to the house in Somers by rooftop, Mort decided that this was a perfect opportunity to re-acquaint himself with New York’s underground.
- - -
Nothing like a little web-slinging before work to clear the mind, the red-and-blue-costumed New Yorker thought. Most of the pre-dawn criminals would have crawled back to their hiding places, so it was just him and the open skyline.
Out of the corner of his eye, he catching sight of someone moving toward the edge of a roof. Probably just someone who lived there, he reasoned, but better to check and make sure it wasn’t anything more dangerous. As he neared, he could see the guy swaying as he staggered along, making a beeline for the edge.
“Hey, pal, don’t do it!”
With a whoosh of webbing, the wall crawler caught the man by the collar and jerked him back to the roof. He was instantly rewarded with a sock to the mouth.
“Hey!” he looked up to see the man, fist still clenched, standing over him. “Look pal, don’t get mad at me. I just saved your life, whether you like it or not.”
The man didn’t say anything. The only change was that he started to look at the wall crawler as though a man in blue and red spandex wasn’t quite a reasonable sight. Carefully, Spider-Man stood up.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on, but there are always solutions. A little detox and you’ll be seeing things a lot more clearly.”
Squinting against the sunlight, Mort dumbly stood, trying to figure out what his former foe was rambling about. Suddenly, the situation seemed eerily familiar. “You think, you think you saved me from committing suicide? Again?”
It was the “again,” that caused Spider-Man to take a closer look at the man standing in front of him. Not tall, not well-groomed, not at all good-looking. Still, he didn’t really recognize him from anywhere ...
The man turned away from him and stumbled toward the edge again. “I’m just on my bloody way home. So leave me alone. I’m not doing any damage to anyone.”
Wait. The sour-looking guy couldn’t possibly be ... Well, if it was, he’d lost some weight. Spidey decided to play dumb and see if the man said anything to reveal himself. “Um, sorry. Are you saying we’ve met?”
The man grunted. “Forget it. Just pretend we never did. Now if your genetically altered highness wouldn’t mind excusing me, I need to be going.” Not giving Spider-Man time to respond, he squatted on the ledge.
It had to be him. “Morty?”
Mort grit his teeth at the sound of the hated nickname. He turned on his heel. “It’s Toad, Spider, not ‘Morty.’ Although I guess I should be flattered that you remembered me at all. But like I’ve been saying, I have to get the hell home now.” He turned around again and jumped over the side of the building. Spider-Man took a few steps after him and leaned over to watch The Toad brush past startled people and head into the subway station.
So The Terrible Toad King was living in New York. ‘Great,’ he thought. ‘One more nut job to watch out for.’
- - -
. Hammer Bay Beach, Genosha .
. 2:35 PM .
Lorna walked over the debris of metal, cement, and bone that paved the city. It looked like a street from the underworld to her. Strangely, though, the sight didn’t upset her as much as she’d been afraid it would. There were several mutants outside in the cool morning, she noticed, and except for the weird surroundings, their interactions looked completely normal. Several people were talking, some were cleaning up the area around the shelters that served as their houses, and one man was even hanging laundry. Several people looked at her as she walked by. A couple of them waved. She waved back and wondered if any knew who she was. No one stopped to talk to her, though, so she assumed they must have taken her for just another fresh-off-the-boat mutant.
She came to the dunes of the coast and walked down to the shore. The day had already grown warm, so she rolled up her jeans and waded out into the water. Faintly, she remembered the few summers when her parents, or rather, aunt and uncle, had taken her to the beach for a few weeks. Even then, she’d liked to watch the tides and listen to her uncle explain how they worked. Lorna stood for a moment, calf-deep in the bay, and felt the tidal force pulling and pushing her as the tide ebbed and flowed.
She’d arrived in Genosha an hour earlier. She’d seen her father, who looked older to her, but no less dignified. Still, she’d been aware of the awkward tension between them, and so excused herself to go see the shore. Now, lost in thought, Lorna didn’t notice another woman on the beach until she called out.
“Good morning,” the newcomer said.
Lorna turned around and saw a small, older woman with a pinned up skirt and a pail in her hand.
“Oh, good morning,” she replied.
“It seems a little strange to say ‘welcome,’” the woman continued, “but it’s encouraging to see a new face here.”
“Thank you,” she said, uncertainly. “My name is Lorna.”
“I’m Aglaia.” The woman walked closer to her. Lorna felt that she was examining her. “What brings you to this island?”
“I’m ... here with family.” Standing near the woman, Lorna could see that her bucket was full of seashell fragments. “Do you collect shells here?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes. I lived along the sea when I was little, and my sisters and I liked to look at them. We always put them back, though.” She must have picked up on Lorna’s look, because she added, “I know, they’re all broken along this shore. But the pieces are still pretty. Besides that, it’s always exciting to find that rare, perfect shell. That means that there is new life along the shore here.”
“I suppose.” Is that what she was here, Lorna wondered. New life?
“I hope I see you around here again,” the woman said, continuing her walk.
“Yeah, thanks,” Lorna replied, and turned back to the ocean.
- - -
. Maximoff-Toynbee Residence .
. 6:45 AM .
Wanda was calling the morgue when Mort came in the front door. “Where were you?” she asked sternly, hanging up the phone.
“In a gutter,” he said, setting the badly shaken plant on the counter.
Her crossness almost gave way to concern, but she noticed that he immediately began making coffee. “Where you out drinking?”
“No.”
“Then what -”
“Look,” he snapped his head around to look at her. “I’ve had a bad night and a horrible morning. Will you stop asking me questions?”
He was instantly sorry he’d said it. Wanda didn’t say anything. She just walked away. A moment later, Mort heard the bedroom door close. So much for trying to do the right thing, he thought.
- - -
. Genosha .
. 2:55 PM .
“Do you think it’s good for her to be here?” Xavier posed the question while he and Magneto were playing a game of goh with pebble-sized pieces of metal and concrete on top of chalk lines drawn on the table.
“What do you hope to gain from my answer?” Eric counter-questioned. “You’d have her kept in a white room, Charles. But sometimes it doesn’t help to run from the things that frighten us.” He added a black stone to a line that was slowly snaking around a single white one . “If she wants to be here, then it’s good for her to be here. You think she’d be better protected at your school, but The Avengers tried to ‘protect’ Wanda, and look at what that’s done to her mind. Lorna may act timid, but she’s strong. She only needs someone to show her that she is.”
“And you think I’ve held her back?” he asked, placing a stone next to the one under attack.
“You haven’t pushed her hard enough. Look at her potential. Your X-Men never forced her to live up to it. You never forced her to master her abilities, and that’s why she’s this way now. You’ve always let her fear herself.” He added another stone, connecting the advancing stones to an existing line. “And I can’t help but wonder if it was because you feared her yourself.”
“Eric, you know that’s not -”
Magneto lifted his hand to silence him. “How many of your students can come close to your strength? And how many of those who can are still alive? Don’t tell me that you didn’t see my power in that careful, young student of yours, Charles. Don’t try to tell me that you didn’t see where it could take her if she learned how to use it properly.”
“Stop this. I won’t listen to any more. You know that isn’t true - You know I’ve always tried to help Lorna. But she wasn’t ready -”
“Who is ready?” Magneto yelled. “The time come for children to learn, whether they feel ready or not. Why else do you think starlings have to be pushed from their nests? A teacher cannot wait until his student feels ready to learn something. He must give them tests, assign them work, and expect them to complete it. I did that for Lorna, and look at how she faired. Did you even recognize her as your uncertain student, afraid to use her own gift?”
“The difference in her skills was remarkable,” Xavier conceded. “But she returned to my school with more than just new talents.”
“Say what you will. You can’t disagree that the means were worth the end. If she can control her powers, she can control herself. She won’t look to you for guidance anymore.”
“She hasn’t for some time.”
Their conversation was stopped short by a scream from within the building. Magneto ran to Lorna’s room, scattering the playing pieces as he pushed away from the table. Without pausing when he reached her room, he swung open the door. Lorna was sitting up in bed, pushing her sweaty hair away from her forehead.
“I’m sorry,” she sputtered when he came in. “It’s nothing. I just had a nightmare. I didn’t mean to wake anyone.”
Eric relaxed when he saw that she wasn’t under attack. Behind him, Xavier wheeled himself to the scene. “It’s nothing,” Magneto said, stepping into the room and closing the door in front of his friend.
“You don’t need to stay,” Lorna insisted. I’m really fine. I get these all the time.”
Eric looked to the ground. “So you do,” he said sadly.
- - -
. Maximoff-Toynbee Residence .
. 8:11 AM .
Mort sat in the garage, packing potting soil around the battered plant he’d dragged back home that morning. It had lost more dirt than he’d realized; the thing couldn’t even stand up straight. With one hand on the thin middle of the plant and the other scooping handfuls of soil, he tried to steady it enough to keep it from dying. Having something to keep his hands busy took the greater part of his focus off of the fact that, once again, he’d behaved like an ass towards Wanda.
‘She’s not going to stay with you,’ he warned himself. ‘She’ll find someone else to take care of her and leave your sorry hind in the dust. And you’ll deserve it too, you stupid Toad. Stayed out the whole night and all she does is worry about your well-being, then you go and snap at her like that. Lucky she didn’t kick you to the curb right then.’ He stopped piling dirt into the pot and started patting it down to get the air out. ‘First person ever cared about you when you didn’t come home, and you can’t even be respectful to her. Can’t even be decent to her. You know all those times when you hoped that she saw you for who you “really” were? Well what you really are is a complete jerk. If she saw anything else she was just imagining.’
He heard footsteps on the floor above him. He listened to them walk down the stairs, and then he couldn’t hear anything for the carpet. But a moment later the door opened. He sat still. For several moments there was silence, until Mort couldn’t outlast the tension.
“I’m sorry,” he said lamely.
“What is that?” was her only response. He turned around, still squatting, to see her.
“This?” he asked, touching the plant. “I don’t know what kind it is. It was just something I picked up for you last night.” There was another long silence, then Wanda walked to him and knelt down by the plant.
“It’s a rose bush,” she said. “I’d wanted one for the garden.”
“Oh,” he said. “Wanda, I didn’t want to make you worry. I got into a fight last night. Tried to save some snot-nosed, racist kid from the beating of his life. I should’ve kept going.”
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.
“Are you re-thinking things?”
“What?”
“I know I rushed you into this. I shouldn’t have been so -”
“Wanda, no. Please believe me. I’m done acting like a fool. I don’t want to be by myself anymore. I want to be with you, and even the baby. I’ve been teaching myself all about that, about the ... the ultrasounds and everything. I’ll know what to do when it’s born. I’ll be able to help you. I won’t leave. I promised I wouldn’t leave. I’ll make it up to you. You’ll want me here again.”
“I want you here now, Mort. But you haven’t been here.”
“I will be. I swear it. I’m sorry I haven’t been around, Wanda. It’s just, this house and the neighbors and everything ... I don’t know. It’s so different. It’s strange. It’s watching some stupid fake TV show except I’m in it instead of watching it.”
“You think this is fake?”
“No! That’s not what I meant. I meant that all of this just feels so fake. Living in a nice neighborhood, in a house, like we’re just ordinary people. I didn’t mean you and me were fake.”
Wanda seemed to put her attention into the cat, which had quietly followed her and was now tugging at her shoelaces. “I know what you mean, Mort. It’s never lasted for me before, no matter how hard I try. Things always fall apart as though they were never real to begin with.”
The conversation was not moving the way Mort had hoped it would. “But that’s over now, Wanda. I want the fake stuff. I’d rather live in this place with these gossipy, human neighbors and work for the X-Men than be anywhere without you. I won’t ever talk about leaving again, I mean it. And soon we’ll have the - the baby and you’ll be happy here.”
She smiled. “I’ll try.”
The other note I have is about the Spider-man appearance. Since this story doesn’t acknowledge anything in Marvel continuity after “Avengers: Disassembled,” Spider-Man probably hasn’t seen quite as much drama as he recently has in the current comics. So it makes sense to me that he’d still be out patrolling as usual.
Additional time and travel notes for anyone who cares (or cares to call out one of my probable mistakes):
According to the marvel directory, the top speed of the Blackbird is roughly mach 3. According to the distance from New York city to the capitol of Madagascar is 8706 miles
(presumably in a straight line). So, if Lorna and Kurt fly at maximum speed, they should be in Genosha within minutes. However, since they weren’t on any kind of mission (and since it always seems to take a little while to reach the desired location in the 90's animated series), I decided it would take about an hour. So if the Blackbird left the institute at around 12:30pm, EST, she should have arrived in Hammer Bay, Genosha by 2:00pm-ish, allowing for a realistic flight route at a decent speed. That would be 10:00pm-ish in Genosha, by my understanding. So, considering Lorna’s jet-lag, it seemed to make sense that she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night on her first day on the island, but would be dead tired by the following afternoon. When I first started mapping out this chapter, I was going to have her wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, but when I worked out the times, it just didn’t make sense. Not to mention, nighttime nightmares are so predictable, I thought an afternoon-mare would be less of a worn cliche.
I will be amazed (but happy) if anyone found that explanation remotely interesting.
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