Madin and Hope, Christmas Morning
Dec. 25th, 2023 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsMadin, still working on the initial mansion repairs, gets some help from the damage's instigator.
It was Christmas morning. It was cold. And Madin was on their hands and knees, pulling up carpet around the main stairs so they could figure how fucked they were and where the fire damage was. (Also, it stank of smoke, wet wool and plaster.)
It turned out that there were two levels to cleaning up something like this. There was scooping up all the debris, the plaster dust that had rained off the walls, the pieces of chandelier, the fancy vases, that shit.
Someone else had done that over the last day or so while Madin had worked on sealing the windows and shifting the fucked up kitchen outside piece by piece with April.
And then there was the day after all that, when you realised that the carpet had to go, too. Hence, this.
The girl who approached was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a sweater that was patently too big for her 5'1" frame, with the sleeves rolled up several times. "Madin?" the girl asked, a little hesitantly. "They said I could come and help you clean up if I wanted. I'm Hope."
Madin stood, stumbling slightly on the folded carpet. "You're the one that fucked everything?"
The girl winced but took it on the chin. "Um, yeah. I didn't really - I didn't mean to do all that." Her chagrin, looking at the mess, was obvious. "I don't wanna say it was an accident but it was, um . . . kind of like an accident. That I did on purpose."
"Uhuh." Madin grunted. "I don't get it, but. Like, this is not how I'd attack this place, especially after I learned how many powers live here, even without knowing that they're trained. Like, not on my own. You came through the literal front door. Didn't even blow up the outbuildings to draw attention there first."
"I wasn't trying to attack!" Hope said indignantly. "I would never attack people. I was trying to sneak in."
Madin began to laugh. "With what? Explosives?" The damage was really extensive.
Hope flushed. "That was - well, there was a lady at the door, and I kind of panicked, because I didn't want to hurt anyone. And then there were people everywhere. And I thought if I could just get down there fast enough, I could find Dad, and he would - um - " It was obvious that the thought process leading them to this Christmas morning DIY duty had not gotten too far past 'twelve seconds after now'. "And if I'd known that boy's fire was so hard to handle, I wouldn't have tried it," she added, regretfully.
"Hang on. What? Your dad's here?" Madin latched onto that detail out of all of it.
"No, he's - um, he's missing," Hope said, her voice wavering a little. "He disappeared when we got here. I just - I never thought the X-Men wouldn't have Cerebro. I was just going to borrow it for a minute to find him. That's all I wanted." Her voice got a little small, at the end of this.
"What's Cerebro?" Madin shook their head, adding, in an attempt to be kind, "That's fucked that your dad is missing. Um. After all of this, want me to introduce you to Quentin? They might be able to find him. They're a detective." Madin looked down for a moment, unwilling to say it. He's probably gone. Dumped you and ran because he couldn't deal with a mutant kid. They'd seen it in the Underground. Heard about other cases. It happened.
"You don't know Cerebro? Well - I guess if they don't have it, you wouldn't. It's, like - it's a machine that, um, enhances psionic abilities and allows the user to detect neuropsychic imprints." This had the ring of a direct and well-worn quote, but she clarified anyway: "It lets you find mutants. Well, or anyone, but especially mutants. If you have good telepathy, anyway."
"What?" Madin held up a hand. "No, no, I get it. You can find mutants. Damn. Imagine Department H, or the Australian government getting that. Or Hydra or. Damn." It was horrifying. Imagine if Magneto had known about it and what he could do with something like that.
"It's so useful," Hope agreed, sighing; it was obvious that she lacked whatever context was needed for the organizations mentioned. "So I was just trying to get to Dad. And I didn't know if - there are worlds where the X-Men aren't, um, aren't good, and - and I thought it was better if I could just find him and get back to the mission."
There was a lot here that was clearly above Madin's paygrade. So much. What stood out was mission. The Brotherhood had. Well. Yes. This wasn't exactly the first time Madin had encountered the concept of child soldiers. There had been active recruitment of teens at various points, even if they weren't typically funnelled into the org's mercenary supporting groups or the Underground, where Madin had largely been. They adjusted their mental picture of the kid's dad from a deadbeat who dumped an inconvenient mutant to absolute bastard. "Your dad's your CO?" they asked quietly and held out a hammer and chisel. "Talk while you're levering up these carpet strips, yeah? They have these shitty pointy nails that stick up and you wanna be real careful of your fingers."
Hope took the tools and went to work, displaying a better than adequate handle on the task. "What's a CO? Dad's just . . . Dad, I guess. I mean, he's an X-Man, but he's usually doing Askani stuff, so he isn't around that much. This was the first time I was allowed to go with him. But I sometimes do missions with the team back home." This was added proudly, though she didn't look up from wrenching carpet nails out of the floor, developing a rhythm to the work as she talked. "Not the big ones or anything, but sometimes they need my powers. And it's good training for later."
"Your dad who leads you on missions," Madin muttered. "And trains you for bigger ones." Madin pulled up some more carpet, damp and burned and took out some emotions they couldn't really name slicing it with plasma blades. It was as unnecessary as it was satisfying. "Your CO is your... team leader? The boss in charge of the op, you know?"
"Oh, I guess that'd be Grandma, for most missions," Hope said, "But Uncle Charles is like - don't you guys have Uncle Charles? You are the X-Men. X for Xavier, right?"
"Wait, is that where they got the name? He's the old fuck-- old guy they sent off to Muir a while back, I think?" Madin shook their head, adding a few other people to the shit list once they were identified. "I"ve never been an X-Man. Never going to be. I was in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, but I changed my outlook on that."
"You don't wanna be an X-Man and you're not an evil mutant - so something in between, I guess?" Hope bit her lip, avoiding scraping herself as she discovered an area that had been enthusiastically over-nailed. "Is this still Uncle Charles's house, though? That's why I came here. It's a lot nicer than at home, though." The fact that she said this perfectly seriously while stripping burned, reeking carpet out of the floor said something about that home.
"We were never, like, fully evil. It's more just that this is a human centric society and you need to fight to maintain mutant rights and sovereignty against people who want to oppress us." Madin sliced at more carpet and moved the conversation away from that to something safer. Weirder. "Where are you from? You keep talking like you know this place."
"Oh, yeah," Hope said, "Sorry. I should've - I'm from another dimension? Everyone said they already know about them, but maybe that's just X-Men. They didn't say it was a secret or anything, though. So, it's kind of like, I am from here, except where I'm from the world kind of almost ended? There was this big war with Apocalypse. And then the dimensional barrier got damaged somehow, so it also gets attacked a lot. So now Uncle Charles's place is called New Liberty, and it's - like, kind of like the base of operations for the X-Men while they try to fix the world. And also a safe haven for people who can make it there. And also where I grew up."
Madin began to laugh. "That's a good one, eh? Crazy dimensions and shit. I'm real sorry, but. I guess I've been here too long - I used to know better than to ask people that kinda personal stuff." They paused for a moment. "You don't have to tell me where you're really from, okay? You don't owe me that."
"You don't - " Hope's hands actually stilled, as she turned her head to look at Madin. "I - uh, well, it doesn't really matter, I guess." To Hope, it mattered deeply and personally, but she realized that her dad had never actually covered 'convincing someone you were an interdimensional traveller' and she truly had no idea how to go about it. She searched for a different conversational tack. "Is the knife thing your powers?"
"Yeah." Madin kicked the last of the horrible carpet away and, once they weren't touching anything regrettably flammable, a pair of pair of flickering purple plasma blades arced out from their fists. "I call them knife hands. I can throw them, stab and stuff, make them really tiny..." They demonstrated, shrinking them to the size of a needle and then throwing one into the air where it fizzled out. "Cool, huh?"
The only thing that would have made Hope's expression more obvious was hearts in her eyes. "That's so cool," she said, abandoning her work area to lean over for a better look. "Is that light, or maybe TK projection - ooh, or plasma? Do you control the temperature? Can you change the shape beyond the size?"
"It's plasma," Madin replied. "I can control the heat, I guess? It's still hot but like, less? If I try?" The uncertainty Madin felt about the mechanisms surrounding their powers showed.
"What about you? I'm hearing TK from most of them but also fire?"
"I wonder if you could tune the heat up enough to cauterize a wound or something," Hope said, distracted, then shook her head, catching up to Madin's question. "Oh, I don't have TK. Well, sometimes I do, obviously. But my power is that I copy other powers."
"Probably. You could probably dial it down enough, maybe. Um. Meat is pretty flammable so it would be a really stupid way to manage first aid, though." Madin shoved rubbish into a bag. "So you could copy mine? Nope. Not going there. No time. I was going to cook some Christmas lunch in my suite so I need to get this shit done first."
Hope laughed. "Do you guys always have Christmas in March?"
Madin blinked at the teenager. "Huh? Babe, it's December. It's like, actually Christmas today."
Yanking up another piece of carpet, she gave them a look - half amused, half incredulous. "It's March, though? Because my birthday was almost three months ago. And my birthday is New Year's Day." She paused. "Oh, are you hazing me? To include me in your social group? Or just testing whether I have a concussion?"
Madin bit their lip, unaccountably sad for Hope. Man, her dad had sucked. "Um. No. Look, never mind, okay? Come have some pavlova with me and Illyana later? And I have a chocolate ripple cake." Arguing about what day it was just seemed cruel. Having Christmas alone was shit. How much worse would it be if you only just learned that it wasn't March on Christmas Day?
"Real chocolate?" Hope was distracted from the date conversation, eyes brightening. She paused. “Hey, Madin? Can I ask you - um, probably a dumb question? Are you a boy or a girl?”
"Only chocolate biscuits and they don't really have the right kind here." Madin shrugged. "I'm neither, okay? I'm non-binary. It's like, okay, male and female are here and here," Madin pointed at two spaces in the the air, "and I'm here," pointing at a space at right angle from the other two. "Gender is a human concept. We should be free to move beyond it and not be trapped in a strict binary."
"Oh, okay, thank you," Hope said, nodding. "Hey, have you ever thought about whether you can split your knives into two? Or four? Or maybe you could make them a circle like a saw, with little teeth? Ooh, or - "
It was Christmas morning. It was cold. And Madin was on their hands and knees, pulling up carpet around the main stairs so they could figure how fucked they were and where the fire damage was. (Also, it stank of smoke, wet wool and plaster.)
It turned out that there were two levels to cleaning up something like this. There was scooping up all the debris, the plaster dust that had rained off the walls, the pieces of chandelier, the fancy vases, that shit.
Someone else had done that over the last day or so while Madin had worked on sealing the windows and shifting the fucked up kitchen outside piece by piece with April.
And then there was the day after all that, when you realised that the carpet had to go, too. Hence, this.
The girl who approached was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a sweater that was patently too big for her 5'1" frame, with the sleeves rolled up several times. "Madin?" the girl asked, a little hesitantly. "They said I could come and help you clean up if I wanted. I'm Hope."
Madin stood, stumbling slightly on the folded carpet. "You're the one that fucked everything?"
The girl winced but took it on the chin. "Um, yeah. I didn't really - I didn't mean to do all that." Her chagrin, looking at the mess, was obvious. "I don't wanna say it was an accident but it was, um . . . kind of like an accident. That I did on purpose."
"Uhuh." Madin grunted. "I don't get it, but. Like, this is not how I'd attack this place, especially after I learned how many powers live here, even without knowing that they're trained. Like, not on my own. You came through the literal front door. Didn't even blow up the outbuildings to draw attention there first."
"I wasn't trying to attack!" Hope said indignantly. "I would never attack people. I was trying to sneak in."
Madin began to laugh. "With what? Explosives?" The damage was really extensive.
Hope flushed. "That was - well, there was a lady at the door, and I kind of panicked, because I didn't want to hurt anyone. And then there were people everywhere. And I thought if I could just get down there fast enough, I could find Dad, and he would - um - " It was obvious that the thought process leading them to this Christmas morning DIY duty had not gotten too far past 'twelve seconds after now'. "And if I'd known that boy's fire was so hard to handle, I wouldn't have tried it," she added, regretfully.
"Hang on. What? Your dad's here?" Madin latched onto that detail out of all of it.
"No, he's - um, he's missing," Hope said, her voice wavering a little. "He disappeared when we got here. I just - I never thought the X-Men wouldn't have Cerebro. I was just going to borrow it for a minute to find him. That's all I wanted." Her voice got a little small, at the end of this.
"What's Cerebro?" Madin shook their head, adding, in an attempt to be kind, "That's fucked that your dad is missing. Um. After all of this, want me to introduce you to Quentin? They might be able to find him. They're a detective." Madin looked down for a moment, unwilling to say it. He's probably gone. Dumped you and ran because he couldn't deal with a mutant kid. They'd seen it in the Underground. Heard about other cases. It happened.
"You don't know Cerebro? Well - I guess if they don't have it, you wouldn't. It's, like - it's a machine that, um, enhances psionic abilities and allows the user to detect neuropsychic imprints." This had the ring of a direct and well-worn quote, but she clarified anyway: "It lets you find mutants. Well, or anyone, but especially mutants. If you have good telepathy, anyway."
"What?" Madin held up a hand. "No, no, I get it. You can find mutants. Damn. Imagine Department H, or the Australian government getting that. Or Hydra or. Damn." It was horrifying. Imagine if Magneto had known about it and what he could do with something like that.
"It's so useful," Hope agreed, sighing; it was obvious that she lacked whatever context was needed for the organizations mentioned. "So I was just trying to get to Dad. And I didn't know if - there are worlds where the X-Men aren't, um, aren't good, and - and I thought it was better if I could just find him and get back to the mission."
There was a lot here that was clearly above Madin's paygrade. So much. What stood out was mission. The Brotherhood had. Well. Yes. This wasn't exactly the first time Madin had encountered the concept of child soldiers. There had been active recruitment of teens at various points, even if they weren't typically funnelled into the org's mercenary supporting groups or the Underground, where Madin had largely been. They adjusted their mental picture of the kid's dad from a deadbeat who dumped an inconvenient mutant to absolute bastard. "Your dad's your CO?" they asked quietly and held out a hammer and chisel. "Talk while you're levering up these carpet strips, yeah? They have these shitty pointy nails that stick up and you wanna be real careful of your fingers."
Hope took the tools and went to work, displaying a better than adequate handle on the task. "What's a CO? Dad's just . . . Dad, I guess. I mean, he's an X-Man, but he's usually doing Askani stuff, so he isn't around that much. This was the first time I was allowed to go with him. But I sometimes do missions with the team back home." This was added proudly, though she didn't look up from wrenching carpet nails out of the floor, developing a rhythm to the work as she talked. "Not the big ones or anything, but sometimes they need my powers. And it's good training for later."
"Your dad who leads you on missions," Madin muttered. "And trains you for bigger ones." Madin pulled up some more carpet, damp and burned and took out some emotions they couldn't really name slicing it with plasma blades. It was as unnecessary as it was satisfying. "Your CO is your... team leader? The boss in charge of the op, you know?"
"Oh, I guess that'd be Grandma, for most missions," Hope said, "But Uncle Charles is like - don't you guys have Uncle Charles? You are the X-Men. X for Xavier, right?"
"Wait, is that where they got the name? He's the old fuck-- old guy they sent off to Muir a while back, I think?" Madin shook their head, adding a few other people to the shit list once they were identified. "I"ve never been an X-Man. Never going to be. I was in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, but I changed my outlook on that."
"You don't wanna be an X-Man and you're not an evil mutant - so something in between, I guess?" Hope bit her lip, avoiding scraping herself as she discovered an area that had been enthusiastically over-nailed. "Is this still Uncle Charles's house, though? That's why I came here. It's a lot nicer than at home, though." The fact that she said this perfectly seriously while stripping burned, reeking carpet out of the floor said something about that home.
"We were never, like, fully evil. It's more just that this is a human centric society and you need to fight to maintain mutant rights and sovereignty against people who want to oppress us." Madin sliced at more carpet and moved the conversation away from that to something safer. Weirder. "Where are you from? You keep talking like you know this place."
"Oh, yeah," Hope said, "Sorry. I should've - I'm from another dimension? Everyone said they already know about them, but maybe that's just X-Men. They didn't say it was a secret or anything, though. So, it's kind of like, I am from here, except where I'm from the world kind of almost ended? There was this big war with Apocalypse. And then the dimensional barrier got damaged somehow, so it also gets attacked a lot. So now Uncle Charles's place is called New Liberty, and it's - like, kind of like the base of operations for the X-Men while they try to fix the world. And also a safe haven for people who can make it there. And also where I grew up."
Madin began to laugh. "That's a good one, eh? Crazy dimensions and shit. I'm real sorry, but. I guess I've been here too long - I used to know better than to ask people that kinda personal stuff." They paused for a moment. "You don't have to tell me where you're really from, okay? You don't owe me that."
"You don't - " Hope's hands actually stilled, as she turned her head to look at Madin. "I - uh, well, it doesn't really matter, I guess." To Hope, it mattered deeply and personally, but she realized that her dad had never actually covered 'convincing someone you were an interdimensional traveller' and she truly had no idea how to go about it. She searched for a different conversational tack. "Is the knife thing your powers?"
"Yeah." Madin kicked the last of the horrible carpet away and, once they weren't touching anything regrettably flammable, a pair of pair of flickering purple plasma blades arced out from their fists. "I call them knife hands. I can throw them, stab and stuff, make them really tiny..." They demonstrated, shrinking them to the size of a needle and then throwing one into the air where it fizzled out. "Cool, huh?"
The only thing that would have made Hope's expression more obvious was hearts in her eyes. "That's so cool," she said, abandoning her work area to lean over for a better look. "Is that light, or maybe TK projection - ooh, or plasma? Do you control the temperature? Can you change the shape beyond the size?"
"It's plasma," Madin replied. "I can control the heat, I guess? It's still hot but like, less? If I try?" The uncertainty Madin felt about the mechanisms surrounding their powers showed.
"What about you? I'm hearing TK from most of them but also fire?"
"I wonder if you could tune the heat up enough to cauterize a wound or something," Hope said, distracted, then shook her head, catching up to Madin's question. "Oh, I don't have TK. Well, sometimes I do, obviously. But my power is that I copy other powers."
"Probably. You could probably dial it down enough, maybe. Um. Meat is pretty flammable so it would be a really stupid way to manage first aid, though." Madin shoved rubbish into a bag. "So you could copy mine? Nope. Not going there. No time. I was going to cook some Christmas lunch in my suite so I need to get this shit done first."
Hope laughed. "Do you guys always have Christmas in March?"
Madin blinked at the teenager. "Huh? Babe, it's December. It's like, actually Christmas today."
Yanking up another piece of carpet, she gave them a look - half amused, half incredulous. "It's March, though? Because my birthday was almost three months ago. And my birthday is New Year's Day." She paused. "Oh, are you hazing me? To include me in your social group? Or just testing whether I have a concussion?"
Madin bit their lip, unaccountably sad for Hope. Man, her dad had sucked. "Um. No. Look, never mind, okay? Come have some pavlova with me and Illyana later? And I have a chocolate ripple cake." Arguing about what day it was just seemed cruel. Having Christmas alone was shit. How much worse would it be if you only just learned that it wasn't March on Christmas Day?
"Real chocolate?" Hope was distracted from the date conversation, eyes brightening. She paused. “Hey, Madin? Can I ask you - um, probably a dumb question? Are you a boy or a girl?”
"Only chocolate biscuits and they don't really have the right kind here." Madin shrugged. "I'm neither, okay? I'm non-binary. It's like, okay, male and female are here and here," Madin pointed at two spaces in the the air, "and I'm here," pointing at a space at right angle from the other two. "Gender is a human concept. We should be free to move beyond it and not be trapped in a strict binary."
"Oh, okay, thank you," Hope said, nodding. "Hey, have you ever thought about whether you can split your knives into two? Or four? Or maybe you could make them a circle like a saw, with little teeth? Ooh, or - "
