Mechanisms of Revenge - Reciprocity

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

Garrison, Pete, Dani, and Jay are ambushed on the way into New York, and Adrienne and Kyle are left trying to piece together what happened to them.



The police had roped off the scene, and already, FBI and state forces were trying to determine what had happened. The X-Men had responded to the alarm, and found the scene of carnage, only to have to back off while official law enforcement began to arrive. However, one call to Fred Duncan had been enough to get access to the scene, and Adrienne Frost found herself called into the first job for the feds since the deal she'd cut with them to avoid prosecution. Shock still gripped the mansion, and they were counting on her to find some answers to what had happened less than an hour ago. Kyle's presence was back up. The young man's senses could fill in a lot of details, especially this close to New York, where Apocalypse's attack still roiled the astral plane and occasionally made psionics unreliable.

A state trooper checked in with the scene commander, and then ushered them past the line. "Car's over there, ma'am. Once they've finished photographing the exact position of the body parts, they're going to take them back to the coroner for identification and DNA testing. Bureau says if you need anything, you just ask."

What I need, Adrienne thought vehemently, is to be far away from here. Very, very far. She hadn't thought anything could be worse than the task she'd been asked to perform in India, but her horizons for the disturbing seemed to be expanding since arriving at the mansion. A part of her- the sensible part- kept chiding that she should have said no, that she couldn't cope with this, that this would break her. But that was also the part of her that she'd come to loathe since arriving at the mansion. She was slowly quashing the ruthless self-preservationist who thought she was so fragile, who didn't care about the man who worked with Amanda, the sweet girl who was such a great baker, the broody, winged country singer.

Garrison. She wouldn't run from learning what had happened to them. She would face what the crime scene had to tell her and deal with the nightmares later. She owed Garrison that much. The people at the mansion deserved the truth she could give them, no matter how gruesome.

And besides. She figured if she asked, Amanda would be helpful in sharing the contact info for her psychiatrist.

"Shoeless Joe," she addressed Kyle with false bravado, "think you can come with me and stand close? I may fall over once I start, and I really, really don't want the CSI jerks to see me knocked on my ass."

"Gotcha. No letting you fall on your ass." Kyle's tone of confidence sounded fake to him, and he wasn't sure he really even cared if it did to anyone else. Normally he would've commented on the nickname, but he was a little busy trying to concentrate on what felt like eleven things at once. Not freaking out first on that list, but also keeping an eye on Adrienne, and trying to identify the more subtle smells under 'smoke' and 'gasoline' and 'blood', all of which were so strong to his senses that he could practically taste them as well as smell them.

As she spoke she moved to the car, steps hesitant, while pulling a package of wet naps out of her purse to wipe the coating off one hand, thankful she hadn't eaten in a while so there would be nothing to throw up later. She also dug out her silver lighter and held it in her other hand like a security blanket. Once one hand was clean she set it, trembling, on the shell of the wrecked car.

~"It doesn't even have an iPod dock or USB slot. I told you this thing was made in 1997, designed to hold a police radio and computer." Kane said, shaking off the offer of an iPod to replace the sound of the local radio. It was a cold morning, crisp, and surprisingly bright out for a late autumn day. Kane was dressed in his normal suit, on his way into the field office in New York, which Fred Duncan had just reopened, and asked for some help setting back up before the rest of the agents came back to work. He was glad he had a healing factor, because a night out with Wisdom before had been a bit of a bash. He wasn't exactly sure why the man had made the trip back to the mansion so soon after resettling back into their Manhattan office, but he enjoyed his old friend's company, and wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak.

He'd offered to give Pete a lift back into the city in the morning, and had found both Dani and Jay asking if they could tag along as well, presumably having their own errands to take care of. The Crown Victoria was a big, roomy car, and he'd said yes. Now about thirty minutes outside of the city, he and Wisdom were chatting back and forth and enjoying the ride.

"Yes, well done, you drive an antique. I'm sure it's good for the soul, and I can see where it would feel personally rewarding. But what I *don't* understand is why you feel the need to listen to country fucking music, you strange and frightening man."

"It's the only local station up and running with the traffic reports."

"Hey," Jay quipped from the back and pulled his gaze from Danny and their small game of rock, paper, scissors, annoyed that a dig was put in on country. "Ah'm still here yanno." As if that explanation alone should be sufficient for them to not cut up country.

Pete glanced back with a grin. "Mate, I yield to no-one in my admiration for Johnny Cash, and I heard some of your stuff when Mark was working on it. I'm not having a go at good country music, and that includes yours. But that DJ has just played a song called 'You're The Hangnail In My Life, And I Can't Bite You Off' without any irony. There's something wrong with that, and you know there is."

"Ain't so bad," Dani piped up. She liked country music too, "Everyone in my old high school liked 'She Thinks my Tractor's Sexy,'' she didn't include that she had liked it too. She even could line dance and whatnot, though she had never been that good at it, "I was thinking maybe Garrison finally found good music to listen to."

"Maybe I should have put in a new stereo, because this conversation is sucking away my will to live." Kane groused, although it was clearly a joke. "So, Pete, office right? Where am I dropping you two off?"

"Ah need to go to the music store. And just for the record, Mark n' Ah are gonna clean up country. We're setting a trend that'll make you eat those words," he grinned at Dani, giving her a wink.

"Yeah, the office. Actually just drop me at the coffee place. I need something caffeinated in me before I have to face Jubilee." He turned in his seat slightly to, apparently genuinely interested in the conversation.

"You know that Tammy Wynette and Bill Drummond started doing a similar sort of dance/country stuff back in '91, right?" Pete paused. "Oh god. You're about to tell me that you hadn't been born, or something equally horrible, aren't you?"

"If you keep setting yourself up like that, Pete..." Garrison said mostly to himself, as he pulled off on to the feeder lane for the exit.

"Close," Dani agreed, "I was born in '87 but I was going to say that Tammy Wynette was one of my favorite country artists as a kid. When she died, I begged to go to Nashville for her funeral, didn't happen of course, but I wanted to," not with the money they didn't have at the time or ever, but Dani had played her records for days after that. It had been horrible.

"There's a frightening--" Garrison started, and suddenly the world erupted in noise. The car slewed as the front end crumpled and burst into flame, shattering the windshield back on the passengers and tossing them hard against their seatbelts, as the airbags inflated. It skewed back the other way, as Kane's foot jammed the brakes instinctively, and the burning car full of stunned mutants slid to a stop.~

Because she was still unable to speak while using her powers, and she didn't want to move too quickly lest she forget something important while she repeated the story, Adrienne disconnected her hand from the car and turned to Kyle. "They were fighting over the radio station in the car," she explained, in case that was at all useful. "Then something hit it." Her brow furrowed. She was already having trouble relating what had struck the car to Kyle. "The front end. I... don't know what hit it. But it caught fire. The front end of the car, I mean."

"Front first, then back?" Kyle asked, unnecessarily. "Explains why I'm getting smoke, oil and gas, but not too much, uh..." He passed a hand over his face, and swallowed back bile. "No burning people. It... stands out." He didn't think he'd -ever- forget the smell of Forge's prosthetics burning the flesh that Masque had covered them with. Or Marius's chemical burns. Or the lingering reek of his own burned hand. Especially his own hand.

"No burning people," she replied, giving him a weak smile. "That's good."

Realizing that she wasn't being very helpful, she took a steadying breath and put her hand back on the mangled metal.

~Kane stumbled from the car like a drunk man, reeling from the impact and bleeding from where the safety glass had cut his face. The Canadian staggered, trying to regain his balance and give his healing factor a chance to catch up to him after the explosion.

There was a crack, and Garrison spun around like a rag doll, his shoulder spitting blood from a gunshot that threw him to the ground. He screamed, tried to stop the bleeding as he fought to clear the cobwebs and pain from his head and fight back. There were more shots sounded, although none at him, and he groped for the car to pull himself to his feet when a heavy weight smashed down on his back, leaving him gasping, immobilized.

"Take care of this one." From his vantage point, Kane couldn't see the person pinning him, but the man giving the order with his snarling voice was clear; Sabretooth. The feral mutant went past him, obviously other targets in mind. Kane screamed again as his arm was grabbed by superstrong hands, twisting it up on the injured shoulder. A blow to the wounded joint left him blind from pain, as they shattered the bones. With a sickening sound of tearing meat, they leveraged the arm away from his back, and tore the limb clean from Kane's body.~

The psychometrist staggered backwards, ripping her hand away from the car, legs collapsing beneath her as her head spun and bile rose in her throat.

Kyle had kept his promise to not go far, or let her fall on her ass - he had his arm around Adrienne's waist before her knees buckled more than a few inches, keeping her upright until it felt like she was trying to stand on her own, and even then, obviously unwilling to move away. He glanced at the burnt wreck of the car, and back at Adrienne, in a silent question.

"Shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit." Chanting was the only thing that was keeping her vomit reflex in check. Half-panicked, she struggled out of Kyle's grasp and gulped in air greedily. The blood rushed out of her head and she went down on her knees before she could pass out completely, head jacknifed down towards the ground. So much for not being embarrassed in front of the crime scene investigators. "Kane's arm," she gasped when the stars had cleared from her vision, head still down. "There were... gunshots. One hit Kane. Didn't see the shooter." Her mouth felt like it was filled with sawdust, and she felt like retching. "They... Kane's arm," she repeated, raising her head to look at Kyle. "I saw it... ripped off. Kyle, I heard that... thing. The creature. From New York. With the bomb. I... I heard him. He told someone to rip off Garrison's arm..."


If Kyle hadn't seen Adrienne's reaction first hand, if he hadn't known just what Sabretooth was capable of on a personal level, he'd have believed - forced himself to believe - that she was exaggerating. He balled his hands up into fists, unwilling to let anyone see the claws sliding out, and did not wince at the pain of them digging into the meat of his hands. They - the crime scene guys, Adrienne, anyone else, didn't need to see him out of control.

Though her empty stomach felt like it was flipping around madly inside her, keeping nausea at the forefront of her thoughts, Adrienne took a shaky step forward towards the car. With the lighter against her palm she groped at her saints medallion with trembling fingertips and thanks to Forge's substance, she could feel the strong, cold silver against her skin. The feeling of it steadied her slightly, and she took another step forward. She couldn't bear not knowing what had happened to Garrison, to all of them, after this.

~Pete fell sideways out of the car, scrabbling to get his feet back under him, doing his best to ignore the pain when he tried put weight on his leg.

"Gar, you still moving mate?"

There was a shadow in front of him, too big to be Garrison, and Pete took a shot at it with hotknives. The figure snarled in pain, but advanced through the energy, ignoring the attack, and as it did, the light from the burning car caught his face, and Pete started in recognition and tensed.

"Creed, you fuck..."

With a snarl, the bigger man launched himself at Pete, knocking him to the ground.~

"Wisdom fought," she told Kyle when she'd pulled her hand back again. Her voice sounded stronger than before. She'd had to stop so she could tell Kyle that Garrison's friend had fought. It was important. "He called the guy 'Creed.'"

"Fuck." All Kyle's control over his voice fell away, and the profanity came out as a half-understood growl. "That's Sabretooth. The psycho with the bomb." He explained, long after he'd run out of swearwords and had noticed the look on Adrienne's face, and the concerned expressions on the FBI agents. "There's too much other shit in the air, I can't smell anything besides the car." And blood. He didn't need to repeat that.

"Yeah, psycho with the bomb," she reiterated.

With the identity of one of the attackers confirmed, she reached out again, advancing the timeline a little.

~Whomever was attacking didn't feel fear, not of them. She had no warning as she was tossed bodily from the car against a heavy duty mailbox, the wind knocked out of her lungs. She lay slumped, gasping for air as the figure approached. Maybe he wasn't so big or scary if she'd been standing, if she'd been able to pull herself together enough to cut through his mind to find his deepest fears, no one was scary to her once she knew their fears, but she couldn't. She lay there, blinking dully as lights went off behind her eyes.

"That's it?" he asked, reaching down and picking her up like a rag doll by the throat, his claws slashing her skin like tissue paper.

A name flitted through her mind, Sabretooth. Vainly, she tried to struggle, but she was a secretary, not an X-Man. He tossed her again and she hit her head on the curb. Blackness.~

"Psycho with the bomb... slit her throat. The girl. Dani," Adrienne said miserably. She was already beginning to feel numb. Her head was too full of the images; they were starting to bleed into each other, the colours too bright, the sounds magnified. "Slit her throat and threw her away. She hit her head on the curb. I don't want to see anymore," she said stubbornly, shaking her head at Kyle. "I don't want to see what happens to the singer." Because she already knew what was going to happen to the wings. She didn't want to see it happening, she didn't want it to become real.

"Who else was there? With Sabretooth?" Kyle had to take a moment to keep from snarling the words out. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, waiting for the stinging in his palms to fade before trying to wipe off the blood from the tiny punctures he'd put into his hands. "I don't recognize any of the smells." Not that he could get much, he'd only recognized Sabretooth belatedly, after Adrienne had mentioned him by name.

"I-I don't know who else was there. I don't want..." it came out as a sort of whimper, and as she heard herself protesting Adrienne knew she had to keep going. Kyle needed to know. Everyone needed to know. Who else was there. What had happened to Jay. To all four of them. She noticed Kyle wiping his hands. They were bloody. This was as hard for him as it was for her. "Okay," she said finally, biting her lip. "Trying again."

~Jay took a sharp breath. The metal hinges screamed as his door was torn off. Claws bit into his tender flesh. Before he could break from shock, he was yanked from his seat and his body was tossed carelessly from the car. He grunted painfully as his body slammed helplessly into the pavement and skidded along the ground, skin stripping from his arms and face until he rolled to a stop, a clump of feathers and blood. Groaning, Jay slumped onto his chest, consciousness feebly holding onto the edge of his senses.

Somewhere from out of a fearful nightmare, a shriek split through his skull and fear coursed through his veins. Then came another unearthly scream, cut short by a blood-filled gurgle. It registered somewhere far back in his mind, but Jay couldn't comprehend what had happened. Confusion swirled through him, a dense fog mixed with fear and helplessness. He wanted to run. Every instinct hammered into him begged in vein for him to take flight.

Breathing slowly, he remained where he was, silently willing his muscles to function, demanding they work. Suddenly, muted hearing became crystal clear and his eyes snapped open, the fog of disorientation quickly clearing from his head. An instant of relief swept through him, control of his senses and his body had returned. Clumsily he placed both hands to the ground, and painfully struggled to push himself up. Just then his arms gave out and Jay dropped back to his chest. His cheek was pressed to the ground, stinging under the fierce pressure of an attacker's foot.

Someone else was walking towards him, the gravel crunching beneath their feet. A low, husky voice growled something, but he couldn't understand. A shadow crossed over his face and paused. He could see another body lying on the ground before him. A girl, her hair matted with blood, lay discarded to the side. Jay's hand crawled an inch, reaching out to her, opening his mouth to call her name. Something hard pressed into his back and rough hands jerked his wings up. Sharp, electric pain snapped down his spine and agony split through him, breaking any hope for reprieve. He opened his mouth to scream, but shock silenced his voice. Everything went black.~

Swooning again, Adrienne felt the greasy cold nausea attack her with renewed force. Her eyes closed of their own volition, the blackness a welcome relief to what she'd just seen.

Kyle was a half-second slower to react this time, distracted by confirming for one of the FBI agents that he was -very- aware of who the hell Sabretooth was. He caught Adrienne before she hit the ground, both arms under hers. "Sorry.." He apologized, not sure she was aware enough to hear him. "Lets get you somewhere to sit for a few. Psi-whatever-metry can wait a few until you're not gonna pass out."

"Thanks," she mumbled pathetically. "Don't be sorry. Ugh. I don't have to tell you what happened to the boy's wings, right?" There were no words she could think of. She didn't want to say, because then Kyle would see it, too; although maybe he already could see it- with the wings being left behind it was clear what had happened. But she didn't want anyone else to have to experience it. "I didn't see who did it. The girl- Dani- she was still there when they got him."

"Yeah, you don't..." Kyle cut himself off, he didn't need to explain. "I can guess." He didn't want to, but a part of him knew exactly how he'd do it, and looking at the limp ragged feathery heaps that had been Jay's wings made it harder to -not- think about it.

"I didn't see who else was there," she added ruefully. "But I think there's more. There has to be more." Holding tightly to her lighter, she reached out to touch the car again.

~Pete wasn't sure where Creed had gone - off fighting with Gar, maybe, and there was someone screaming behind him, but he couldn't spare the time for that now. Another shadowy figure was in front of him, and Pete blinked, trying to focus, making sure it wasn't a friend before pouring energy in a wide arc ahead of him. There was a scream as the figure fell.

"Right then--"

He was interrupted by a gunshot, and then another and it like fire for a second and then cold and suddenly he was on the ground and vomiting blood and trying to get back up, and thinking of the kids in the back of the car and jesus and fuck and where was the fucking backup and was Garrison still out there and why wouldn't his limbs work and come on get up you stupid fuck those kids and Creed is out there and I killed all those people and I owe them and please just this last time get up and Dad...~

"Wisdom kept fighting," she confirmed. "But the bullets got him."

She was feeling cold. So cold. Like she was never going to be warm again. And her head was getting light. "There's no more, Kyle. They took them away. I can't tell where. I don't know where they are." Her voice was wavering now, throat constricting. "I don't know what else I can do." She blinked rapidly, struggling to keep tears at bay. She couldn't cry. Not here. "We have to help them, but... I don't know how."

Kyle shook his head silently. Keeping calm was hard enough, he didn't have anything useful to offer. He shrugged off the fleece-lined jacket he'd worn and held it out to Adrienne. No sense in her getting sick or being miserable, and he was too busy keeping his anger in check to feel the cold. "I dunno either. I wish I did." He wasn't even sure if Scott would, or The Professor. As much blood as he smelled, with what Adri had said happened, Kyle wasn't sure anyone could live through that.

Adrienne sprayed Forge's coating substance on her hand and then burrowed into the jacket gratefully. She dropped her lighter back into her purse, since her hands were shaking too badly to be able to hold onto it anymore. "Can we go now? I don't... think I can stay here anymore."

"We're going. Even if they don't want you to." Kyle didn't think the FBI guys would really put up much of an argument. "This is shit nobody should have to deal with." It was easier to talk when he was worried about mouthing off at some FBI guys for Adrienne's benefit. Mouthing off at cops, that he could do, he'd been doing that for a long time.

Waving a shaking hand dismissively towards the FBI guys, Adrienne frowned. "I'm not here for them. We're not here for them." She would share what little she'd learned with Duncan because he was Garrison's friend, but Adrienne didn't have a lot of faith in the local authorities being able to bring the victims of the attack home. "We're here for Kane, and Pete, Dani, and Jay. That's all. And there's nothing more for us here."