Disclaimer: I do not own the X-Men or T.J. Please don't sue me or steal my story!

The Storming of the Bastille

by Rowena

"All right, that's enough, class!" Mrs. Maxwell said sternly, projecting her voice to be heard over the chatter bouncing around the cramped, windowless classroom. "We've wasted enough time already!"

The conversations slowly petered off as the eleventh graders reluctantly sighed and turned their attention to the teacher. T.J. Wagner made a face from her seat at the back far corner. It was far too late in the day to think seriously about World History. Especially as taught—or rather, droned—by Mrs. Maxwell.

"Well," Mrs. Maxwell huffed, "now that I have your attention, would you all please open your Merriman History of Modern Europe to page 507. Since I know you all completed the reading I assigned for last night—"

The class gave off something like a collective snort. The teacher shot them all a knowing glare, and continued. "I'm going to give you the chance to lecture for today. We'll start with you, Anita," she said, pointing to the girl in the front right corner, "and travel up and down the rows. Anita, please read the first two paragraphs, if you would—and don't forget to speak slowly and enunciate your words. No mumbling."

Anita seemed to shrink in her chair, but she nodded. Taking a deep breath, she began to read as slowly and as carefully as she could.

"The Bastille was stormed only a few weeks after the representatives of the third estate led by their president, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, took the Tennis Court Oath demanding defined limits be placed on the authority of the king," she said. "On the morning of July 14, 1789, thousands of people—small tradesmen, artisans, and wage earners for the most part—seized weapons stored in the Invalides, a large veterans' hospital. Early that afternoon, the attention of the Paris crowd, now numbering perhaps 80,000 people, turned towards the Bastille, where the crowd believed powder and ammunition were stored…" (1).

T.J. rolled her golden eyes, the tiny words in her heavily highlighted and marked-up book losing focus as she shook her fuzzy, blue head. This was even worse than having to put up with one of Mrs. Maxwell's tedious lectures! Who wanted to listen to a bunch of bored eleventh graders reading out of some dry old textbook? Certainly not T.J. Wagner! She had better ways of spending her time—like being unconscious.

"The Bastille was a royal prison built circa 1370 as part of the fortifications of the city's eastern wall," Anita plowed on. "For most of the eighteenth century, the Bastille had been renowned as a symbol of Bourbon despotism because some prisoners had been sent there by virtue of one of the king's letters de cachet, summarily and without trial…" (2).

Only half-listening to Anita's weak monotone, T.J. rested her head on her indigo arms and closed her eyes. More than twenty kids separated her from Anita. If she was lucky, the bell would ring before they even got to her row. In the meantime, T.J. fully intended to catch up on the sleep she'd missed watching Arachnophobia IV: The Arachnids' Revenge on the SciFi Channel the night before. Yet, even though her eyes were closed, Anita's voice still droned in her pointed ears…

(1) and (2) paraphrased and in part quoted from pages 505-507 of the textbook A History of Modern Europe Volume Two: From the French Revolution to the Present by John Merriman, published by W.W. Norton & Company, New York, copyright 1996—for that authentic 'textbook' feeling. ;)

The first thing T.J. noticed was the smell. The noise and the oppressive heat were tied for a close second. Wrinkling her nose, the young mutant opened her eyes only to jump to her feet with an alarmed gasp. Wherever she was, it certainly wasn't anywhere near Westchester, New York!

T.J. was standing in a narrow, filthy alley that shot off from what looked like a broad, cobblestone square. Across the way, she could just make out what seemed to be a turret from a massive, stone fortress through the glare of the afternoon sun. The square was crammed to bursting with dusty, angry people in strange, old-fashioned clothes. Some wore wigs, many more wore hats, and almost everyone seemed to be armed. Thick rifles, gleaming swords, sharp bayonets, and even a few pitchforks and kitchen knives poked up from the teeming crowd like a deadly forest.

"What the—where the heck am I?" T.J. stared, thoroughly disconcerted and starting to get frightened. She took a few steps back, trying to blend into the shadows of the alley, only to yelp in alarm at a sudden shout from behind her.

Spinning around, she came face to face with a rather short, balding man. His clothes were threadbare, but very well cared for, and there was what appeared to be flour dust on his shoes. He gasped when he saw T.J., his blue eyes widening in unconcealed terror in the face of what he clearly believed to be a blue-skinned demon. T.J. was also terrified, but not for the same reason.

"No, please don't scream—it's all right!" she tried to calm him, holding out her three-fingered hands in what she hoped would be a pacifying gesture. Unfortunately, her words seemed to have the opposite effect. The terrified baker pulled a knife from his pocket and began jabbering in what sounded like French, although T.J. couldn't be sure. The only European language she was familiar with was German, and even then all she really knew were a few swear words and introductory phrases. Figuring it wouldn't help matters to begin swearing at the knife-wielding baker in German, T.J. did the only thing she could think of. As the Frenchman rushed at her, T.J. held out her hands and zapped him with a hex bolt. The man slammed against the alley's brick wall and slid slowly to the ground, unconscious.

T.J. winced and bit her lip with a sharp fang. "Erm, sorry," she said, crouching down quickly to scoop up his knife from where it had fallen.

"This reeks," she sighed, and she didn't just mean the festering alley. "This place is crazy! I've got to find out where I am and what's going on—but there's no way I can leave this alley looking like I do…"

Glancing back at the unconscious baker, T.J. narrowed her eyes, a sudden thought occurring to her. Normally, she didn't like using her power to possess other people's bodies unless it was absolutely necessary. However, in this case, it didn't look like she had much choice. She needed a disguise if she was going to get answers, after all…

"I'm sorry about this, mister," she told the baker as she activated her power and slid into his mind. "But believe me, this situation is way more awkward for me than it is for you. If this works out, you won't even remember being possessed!"

After spending a few minutes getting used to controlling the baker's body, T.J. ventured carefully out of the alley to join the raging crowd. To her surprise, possessing the Frenchman's body had an unexpected side-effect. Even though her mind was still hearing French, she found she could now understand what the rioting mob was shouting. It was a bizarre sensation, like listening to two radios simultaneously playing the same tune in two different languages.

"Jacques! Jacques, over here!"

T.J. looked around, trying to spot the man who was calling over the crowd. As she did, a thick-set man with wild, greasy hair and a butcher's apron slapped a hand on her shoulder, nearly knocking her over. There was a cut over the butcher's right eye, but his round, pouchy face was flushed with adrenaline. Looking down, T.J. saw the heavy meat-cleaver he held was slick with fresh blood.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed, thinking the words in English, but feeling the baker's tongue form them in French.

"So, Jacques, you've decided to join us after all!" the thick-set man grinned, his dark eyes gleaming with the near-madness of battle. "We've captured the fortress! A few members of the garrison are still putting up a fight, but the commander is dead! He was going for old Michael, but I stopped him with this here meat cleaver! Knocked his head clean off!" The butcher's raspy laugh sounded slightly wild as he added, "Jean-Phillip stuck it on a pike—they'll be carrying it through the streets now: a symbol of our triumph!"

T.J. blinked, struggling to process what she'd just heard. There was no way this could be real. Butchers decapitating men with meat cleavers, people parading impaled heads down the streets— What kind of a crazy nightmare was she having?

The butcher was still talking, too excited to notice T.J. was starting to look somewhat ill. "Come along, Jacques," he said, pulling on T.J.'s flour-dusted arm. "You must meet the prisoners. Finally, after all these years of oppression, the Bastille belongs to us! The revolution has begun! Old King Louis will have to listen to our demands now!"

"Wait—did you just say the Bastille?" T.J. exclaimed, ducking and dodging elbows and rifle butts as the butcher dragged her across the cobblestone street and into the smoking fortress. "What year is this?"

"Have you gone daft, man?" the butcher frowned, pulling her towards a dark stairwell. "What kind of a question is that at a time like this? We're making history here—us, the regular citizens of Paris! We're proving to all the rich knobs that the common man can make a difference in this world, and you go and ask what year it is?"

"Sorry," T.J. shrugged. "I was…well, knocked unconscious, you see, and I guess I'm still a little disoriented…"

"Oh, yeah," the butcher grunted, stopping for a moment to note the swelling lump at the side of his friend's head, which the baker had gotten after slamming into the wall. "Well, it's 1789, my friend—July 14 to be exact! A date that will forever live in the annals of history!"

"You got that right," T.J. smirked, hardly able to believe her ears. Could she really have traveled back in time? But how—and why to revolutionary France? She didn't have much time to ponder those questions, however, because just then the butcher came to a stop in the middle of a bright courtyard.

Seven men were standing there, looking rather hot and confused. The butcher walked over to them with a proud sweep of his arm.

"My friend, allow me to introduce you to the men we have liberated this day," he said grandly.

"Where are the rest of them?" she asked, looking around. The butcher shot her a look.

"This is all of them. They may not look all that impressive, but symbolically they are worth a thousand men!"

T.J. looked skeptical, but she walked over to the prisoner who was closest to her. "Hi," she said. The man looked up at her with a strange grin.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked in soft, rather high-pitched voice tinted, surprisingly, with an unmistakable Irish accent.

"Erm, no I don't," T.J. said. The Irishman nodded a bit sadly.

"I'm not surprised," he said. "I have been locked in this dark tower for many, many years. But once, I was known by all as Joan of Arc."

T.J. blinked, struggling not to laugh. "Joan of Arc," she repeated, with some difficulty. "I see…"

"I wouldn't mock him if I were you," a tall, rather haughty-looking man advised. "That Irishman is completely off his rocker. One day he thinks he's Joan of Arc, the next that he's Saint Louis! Once, I even heard him ranting that he was, in truth, the Almighty Himself." The aristocrat shook his head. "Such blasphemies I have never heard."

"Were you a prisoner, too?" T.J. questioned him. If possible, the aristocrat looked even haughtier.

"My own family requested I be locked up here, if you must know," he scowled. "But what I did was nothing compared to that demented Irishman—or that renegade priest," he added, nodding to the shorter man beside him.

"What did you do?" T.J. asked curiously.

"None of your business, baker," he glared. T.J. raised her hands and took a few steps back. "OK, OK, I'm sorry I asked," she said, turning back to the butcher. "I sure hope you're right about them being useful as a symbol," she told him, "because I've never met a nuttier bunch in my life!"

Just then, a riotous shout rang out in the square. The butcher ran to peer over the ramparts, with T.J. and the former prisoners close behind.

"The garrison is defeated!" a man was shouting from below. "The day is ours! The Bastille has fallen to the people of Paris!"

The mob at once raised their weapons to the sky, shouting and cheering for all they were worth. Beside her, the butcher was shouting with the rest of them, reaching over in his exuberance to shake her roughly by the shoulders.

"We've done it!" he cackled gleefully. "Tomorrow, we'll all wake up to a new kind of world—you'll see! We'll all wake up! Wake up! Wake up…"

"T.J., wake up!"

"Huh…what…the Bastille!"

T.J. jolted awake with a gasp, only to find Mrs. Maxwell was shaking her by the shoulder.

"Yes, Miss Wagner, the Bastille," she frowned. "And it's your turn to read. So, if you would please turn your attention to your book, we might just finish this lesson by the time the bell rings!"

T.J. looked around at the giggling class, completely disoriented. "Wait a minute—what about the baker? And the prisoners—what happened to them?"

"I don't know anything about a baker, Miss Wagner, but if you had been awake you would know that we just finished reading about the butcher and the prisoners. Now, if you would please continue from 'The Bastille's fall' at the bottom of the page?"

T.J. took a last look around at her snickering classmates, still struggling to convince herself that she was really there and that her experience at the Bastille had been nothing more than a dream. Straightening her shoulders, T.J. took a deep breath and began to read.

"The Bastille's fall would be much more significant than it first appeared," she said. "Louis XVI responded to the news of the fall of the Bastille with 'Is it a revolt?' Came the reply, 'No, Sire, it is a Revolution.' The crowd's uprising probably saved the National Assembly from being dissolved by force" (3).

T.J. looked up in surprise. "Hey," she smiled, "that crazy butcher was right! They really did make a difference!"

Mrs. Maxwell glared and the students looked at her in confusion. T.J. shrugged a little with an apologetic glance to the teacher, then continued.

"On July 17, the king came to Paris to be received by the municipal council at the town hall, accepting and wearing an emblem of three colors, red and blue for the city of Paris, and white for the Bourbons. By doing so, Louis XVI seemed to be recognizing what became the tricolor symbol of the French Revolution. Cool!" (4)

That last comment wasn't in the paragraph, but T.J. felt compelled to add it as she closed her textbook with a grin. The teacher looked like she was about to comment herself, but fortunately, T.J. was saved by the bell. Dumping her books into her backpack, she was halfway to the door when her friend Jackie cut her off.

"Good job, falling asleep in class like that," Jackie teased. "You're lucky it was last period or Mrs. Maxwell would have sent you to the principal's. Again."

"Yeah, well," T.J. shrugged, trying to get around Jackie to the door. Jackie, however, wasn't ready to let her go just yet.

"So, now that school's out do you want to head to the mall? Old Navy's having a sale on these really cute skirts, and—"

"Not right now, Jackie," T.J. said. "I'm going to the library."

This was such an out of character statement for the indigo mutant that it took a moment for Jackie to process. "Wait—you?" she blinked. "You're going to pass up a sale to go to the library? What for?"

"I'm curious," T.J. explained. "I've got to know more about those people who stormed the Bastille. Catch you later, OK?"

"Uh, yeah…sure…" Jackie said, watching in confused incredulity as T.J. stepped around her and strode out the door. As she stared, Mrs. Maxwell came up beside her, looking just as flabbergasted as her student.

"You know, Mrs. Maxwell," Jackie commented, "maybe you should let T.J. sleep in class more often!"

The End

(3) and (4) are also quoted/paraphrased from John Merriman's A History of Modern Europe Volume Two: From the French Revolution to the Present. The butcher and the three prisoners T.J. met in her dream were all based on real people.