An alternate X-S tale set in the AOA
By Kielle
NOTES & DISCLAIMER: I've placed all the legal/explanation stuff at the end of this story to avoid giving away the plot. But I will say here that this was written for Darqstar...who said about it on her page, and I quote, "This story absolutely blew me away." Wow!
She didn't acknowledge their ragged chorus of thank-yous; she was completely absorbed, her eyes tracking ceaselessly across the sun-drenched playground. She was a nondescript woman, a college student perhaps. Her mouse-brown hair was an unremarkable length, streaked haphazardly with blonde and caught back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Her top was brief and sleeveless, but that was her sole concession to the summer heat -- she was the only person in the park wearing slacks rather than shorts or a skirt, and she carried a bulky bomber jacket slung over her shoulder.
The young woman drew to a halt before a complicated tangle of bars and plastic tunnels and slides which towered at least ten feet above her head. Her eyes narrowed and her head tilted as she examined the structure minutely, a small frown creasing her plain features. It was the frown of someone who has no idea what they're looking at, of a foreign person in a strange land. Then, belatedly, she seemed to abruptly focus in upon the myriad boisterous children which swarmed over the bizarre candy-colored construction. For a moment her expression smoothed out into something wistful...
She shook herself and started forward again, skirting the playtower and the accompanying swingset.
The green grass was littered with running youngsters and crushed styrofoam cups and old plaid blankets spread out for the benefit of weary parents. She easily navigated the bedlam and stopped at the edge of a small sandy expanse beyond the swingset. Here it was relatively quiet, for the only attractions in this particular arena seemed to be four gaudily-painted plastic creatures mounted on rusty springs, a huge concrete turtle, and the ruffled white sand itself.
To the observer, however, only one feature of the sandy playground mattered in the slightest
The woman stood perfectly still for a moment, hardly appearing to breathe. Then, resolutely, she thrust her hands into her pockets and stepped off of the concrete curb. Sand scrunched under her cheap tennies as she walked over to the cement turtle and sat down upon its clay-inlaid back.
"Hello," she said quietly.
The lone child playing in the sand looked up and back, blinking. "Are you talking to me?"
"Yes, I am."
"Oh. Daddy says I'm not supposed to speak to strangers."
"Your daddy sounds like a very smart man."
"He is," the child pronounced unselfconsciously, with the absolute certainty that could only be summoned up by a person of her unique age.
Which is probably about three, the woman thought as she smiled down at the child. She stole a precious moment to memorize what lay before her eyes. The solemn little girl was surrounded by cups, buckets of water and mud, and plastic shovels, all of which were an integral part of her...well, perhaps in her imagination the woeful pile of wet sand before her was a castle. The sturdy girl-child was quite pretty, round-cheeked and blue-eyed. Her bare arms and her rugged denim coveralls were dusted with flecks of damp dirt (to the elbow and to the chin, respectively), and the knees of said overalls were a complete loss.
Wordlessly, the woman looked around until she spotted a fallen pine cone. She retrieved it and handed it to the child, who eyed it for a moment and then accepted the peace offering and planted it firmly at the crown of her tallest "tower." Which promptly slithered flat. With a surprisingly mature sigh, the girl picked up a cup and began to tamp wet sand into it once more.
After a long silence the woman cleared her throat and asked, "Are you in school yet?"
The child shook her head, not looking up. "Not yet. But I want to go. Daddy says maybe next year. He's teaching me everything first."
"How's the rest of your family?'
"Okay, I guess."
The woman's brow furrowed with frustration. She herself had been a chatterbox at that age. Was something wrong with the kid? Then it struck her: of course. Surely this child had been taught quite strictly to NOT talk to strangers. More strictly than most children. Still, she herself remembered what it was like to be little, and to be treated like an adult and asked about the things -- or people -- she loved. She knew that if she just kept patiently asking, maybe...
A shadow fell over her shoulder. "Can Ah help yuh, Miss?"
She stood right up, almost cracking the tall stranger's chin with the crown of her head. "No, I...I was just talking to..."
She trailed off when she looked up square into his puzzled, ever-so-slightly wary eyes. The flash of deja vu was so strong that her hands instantly clenched into hard fists at her sides.
"Ya'd understand if Ah got a mite nervous t'see a stranger talkin' to mah niece here," the young man explained easily. The suspicious glint behind his gaze had already been veiled by a smile as wholesomely homey and sunshiney as his thick Southern accent. However, with an unpleasant rush she recalled a different expression on an identical face. She backed a step away, rubbing her arms as if suddenly cold.
"Of course I understand. I'd be worried too," she replied smoothly, covering her obvious start of recognition. "She just looked so much like my little sister, and I'm so homesick..."
He blinked, astonished. Unbidden, his glance flicked over to the child still playing contently in the sand just a few feet away. "Yoah sister looks like mah niece...?"
She laughed and nodded, as friendly and as natural as you please. Twenty years of pretending to be other people had made such things childishly simple. If she'd dared, she would have gone into theater...
She snapped herself back to the here-and-now, only losing an instant of reality to the grasp of faded dreams. "Yes, very much so. Small world, isn't it? I'll have to tell my Jenny all about your little one here when I next see her. Sorry to bother you, I'll be on my way now."
For a moment he looked as if he was going to try to stop her; the questions burning behind his eyes were almost audible. All the better reason for her to LEAVE, NOW, before any of his more "sensitive" cohorts showed up. His kind rarely travelled in anything less than packs.
The woman glanced up at her companion, suppressing a scowl of annoyance. After all, the teleporter HAD agreed to bring her here on this fool's errand, against her father's express wishes. She owed her one. So she kept her irritation in check as she answered, "Not really. I barely got to see her. You were right about her never being left alone. I only managed to catch a few seconds' worth...I suppose that will have to do." She rubbed one hand over her eyes briefly. "She seemed sweet enough. Still, I just wish..."
"It wasn't like you imagined? It never is." Fatale smiled, but there was no real malice behind it. She patted the other woman on the shoulder. "Look, all jokes aside, I know how long you've been wanting to do that. Maybe in a few years, when she goes to school? They can't watch her all the time."
"A few years. That's a long time."
"You can wait."
"I suppose I'll have to."
With that dull concession, the nondescript woman reached up and touched something at the hollow of her throat, something that wasn't there. Under her fingers, something glimmered and then WAS there. The faint sheen flickered over her body and faded away, leaving a distinctly different person standing in the pine-dappled shadows before the Brotherhood teleporter. She was still tallish, still female.
But she was certainly no longer nondescript.
As her hand fell away from the image inducer which hung about her neck, the graceful blue-furred woman looked back at the playground, absently shoving the forward edges of her thick cobalt pageboy cut behind her ears. Her eyes were as blue as sapphires, and about as keen. She peered hard and managed to capture one last glimpse of the equally blue-furred child, who was now clinging to her Uncle Sam's bony back and shrieking with glee as he galloped clumsily about on the sunny grass.
She shook her head, half-smiling at the misty memories the scene conjured up. When she'd been three years old, she'd been running loose in her Daddy's lab, begging to help carry this item or push that button or peek at that scan. At that age, she'd been the only creature in Apocalypse's Citadel which had feared neither the glowering Prelates nor the scheming Sinister.
Later, she'd learned better. Luckily, she'd learned only just enough to make her wise and wary, not enough to leave scars, before the world had ended in a shudder of crystal and her Daddy had caught her up in his massive shaggy arms and she hadn't been able to see or breathe and her tummy had twisted so bad she thought she was going to throw up and there were so much screaming and she'd been so scared that she'd cried and fought, fought her own Daddy, wanting out, wanting her own bed, wanting home...
But then they'd been Somewhere Else.
Which was here.
That had been twenty years ago. And after twenty years, this parallel world's version of her had finally emerged as a child in the care of -- of all people -- the X-Men.
She'd been so much looking forward to meeting her other self, ever since her father had captured his own other self. While this world's McCoy had been held captive under the streets, alone and hopeless, the only time he'd come close to breaking he'd begged her father to let him go for the sake of his own daughter. He'd mentioned just enough about her to pique her interest...to let her know that the child in question just HAD to be the mirrorself she'd dreamed of for so long.
As a little girl with a fugitive father, she'd been alone and friendless in the New York sewer system, banned from consorting with the Morlock children less than a mile away. Always a bright child, she'd been quick to glean enough details from her father's stumbling explanations of their new "existence" to understand that somewhere out there was another little blue-furred girl.
Someone just like her.
The other little blue girl never showed up, except in her dreams. Eventually, over the years, she'd grown up and put aside her imaginary friend. Of course. But when the X-Men's Beast had described his little "Siku" in his last vain effort to gain a reprieve from a fellow father...
It seemed that her freshly resurrected hopes were simply not meant to be. With all of those X-types around, there was no way on earth she was going to be able to get anywhere near the child Sikudhani Edna McCoy for a long, long time. Perhaps her own father had been wise to order her to stay away from Westchester -- as he'd promptly done the moment he saw the telltale gleam of intense curiosity in his adopted daughter's eyes.
As usual, he'd been right.
She sighed and turned away, her jacket still slung over one bare fuzzy shoulder. It was all quite immature of her, really. What was she going to do with a child, even if the child was technically another aspect of her own self? She was a grown woman now. She had no need of imaginary friends...even if they had finally become real. It was too late...far too late.
No. It's never too late.
"...hello? Anybody home?"
Her teammate's voice broke into her musings -- she merely nodded, preoccupied. "Yes...home. Please."
"Sure, coming right up. Don't forget to click your heels, Dorothy."
The blue-furred woman started and then grinned over Fatale, who'd called her by that nickname ever since she'd revealed the odd tale of her small family's arrival in that reality. It was, she grudgingly admited, quite appropriate...and it explained after all these years why she'd never been able to get enough of that movie as a little girl.
"Hmmm. Maybe in a few years, if we're still in touch, you could...you know, like you said? Here? Her? Just once more?"
Fatale snorted. "Can't make any promises yet. But remind me in a few years, 'kay?"
"Oh, don't worry. I will."
And then the two women were gone in an eldritch flash, leaving behind only a skirl of pine-needled wind and two sets of tracks whose scents would set Logan on edge for a week when he arrived on the scene two minutes later in answer to Guthrie's call for backup.
PS: I'm definitely planning a third story to round this "AOA Siku" thing out into a mini-trilogy, under the umbrella name "Shades Of Blue." I have this next idea firmly in mind and I already have the name worked out ("A Shadow In The Mirror"), but no guarantees as to when it'll actually happen...