Title: Missing You 3/?
Author: sharonmjl47
Rating: NC-17
Category: Movieverse.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, and no one. Sad, isn’t it!
Feedback: Please, bad or good. If no one tells me it’s bad, I won’t know!
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Logan looked at his son and gave a bitter chuckle. “Nothing was worth it.”
Xavier sighed and then spoke to them. “Rogue and Gambit’s mission was a success, but it was kept a secret by the government, only letting a basic amount of information out to the general public, but thanks to a few contacts we managed to get full details. The Clemency virus was destroyed along with the research and the lab. Documents, evidence of certain government officials’ involvement were presented to Congress and the President. The virus’s creator, a Dr. Martin Crawler, was found dead. How or why was never discovered, and I doubt many cared. That’s where it ended, really. The government members involved were sent to prison, apart from one who committed suicide. The Mutant Registration Act was forgotten, and the President had all Civil Rights Act’s and Discrimination laws amended to included mutants, as you probably know from school it took four years, but it was done. Soon after, other world leaders followed suit, and now we have a very tolerant society.” As he finished speaking, Xavier wheeled behind his desk. “There is, of course, the Friends of Humanity, but they have been less active the last three or four years, and we hope that they are silently bowing out of the situation.”
“If the mission was a success, what happened to mom and Gambit?” Liam glanced at his sister, then at Logan, who was still looking at his feet, obviously thinking about Marie.
Scott stood up and leaned on the Professor’s desk. Logan rolled his eyes as the ‘I’m-the-fearless-leader’ look appeared on his face. “Remy/Gambit was shot, several times. His body was found in the main foyer of the facility they raided. My guess would have been that he held off as many guards as he could so that Rogue could get through to the main lab. She took out as many people as she could and set fires around the building, destroying research and equipment. But she had a complication in the lab itself and was infected with the virus before she escaped.”
“So the one thing she was trying to destroy killed her?”
Louise watched as Jubilee and Logan exchanged guilty glances, and Scott frowned and turned to Xavier. “Sir, I thought you would have….”
“No, Scott. I afraid I haven’t explained.”
“Explained what?” Louise uncrossed her slim legs in the chair and leaned forward, staring at Xavier with a gaze that matched her father’s for intensity. Liam stood right behind her, his hands on his hips waiting for Xavier to carry on.
“Your mother contracted Clemency, she was wearing a bio-hazard suit inside the main lab, but dropped several glass virals containing a concentrated form of the virus. The glass ripped her suit and the virus directly entered her bloodstream via a cut in her palm. Luckily she was able to put on another suit inside the lab stopping the spread of infection, she had a car and was able to get from Washington to here without passing on the virus.”
“Wait a second…” Liam looked around at the people in the room. “She came here?”
Xavier face remained calm. “Yes, she did. She called us for help, when she was on her way. Hank, our resident doctor, Dr. Hank McCoy, he’s a genius geneticist and biologist. She hoped that he might be able to help her, but he wasn’t able to.”
“So she died here?” Louise hoped that there was a headstone or some kind of memorial that they could visit.
“No.” All heads turned to Logan.
“Logan, I’m not sure that now is the time…”
“So when is the time, Chuck? They are her kids. Christ, they’re… my kids, and they need to know - everything… they need to know everything now. You can’t keep this from them.”
“What the hell is going on?” Louise stood up and faced Logan. She reached behind her. Liam took her hand giving it a squeeze to try and reassure her. “What do we need to know so badly?”
“Your mother, she, she’s… she’s not dead.”
“WHAT!?!” Louise’s hand flew to her mouth, muffling her gasp, and Liam sat down in the chair.
The Professor drew their attention back to him and spoke softly to them. “You have to understand, we didn’t know about the two of you. Otherwise we would have contacted your guardians immediately. Your mother’s condition…”
“She’s alive. Is… is she here? Is she all right? What…? I don’t understand!”
Xavier raised his hands to stop Liam’s questions. “She is here, she is alive.” He turned to Scott. “Would you and Jubilee go and get Hank for us? He will be able to explain the…”
Louise stepped in front of Scott and leaned on the front of the Professor’s desk. “I want to see her, right now!”
“Louise, let Dr. McCoy come and talk to you about this.”
“No, she is MY mother. I thought she was dead! God, how could you not tell us the second we walked through that door? We want to see her right now!”
Logan walked to her and took her elbow gently. She spun on him, angrily wrenching her arm away from him, but once she saw the pain in his face, she let her anger fade. “Come on, I’ll take you.” Logan put his hand up to Xavier to stop him from saying anything. “You can’t keep them away. It’s not fair. Hank can explain everything while they are with her.” Xavier only nodded. Louise nodded at Logan, and Liam rose out of his chair to go with them.
They didn’t speak again until the elevator opened to the main corridor of the lower levels. Liam stepped out first and looked around. “So this is where the whole X-Men thing happens, huh?”
“Something like that.” He stopped in front of them. “Maybe later or tomorrow or whenever your ready, do you wanna - we could, you know, talk or something.” He rubbed the back of his neck, unsure of what else to say.
Louise smiled at him, recognising the gesture as one her brother did quite a lot. “I’d like that.” She looked at her brother.
“Me too. I - I mean we, well, no me! Before I watched mom’s video, with no one ever being able to tell us anything about you, I kinda just expected you to be a bit of a bastard that took off and left her with two kids…” He shrugged. “Sorry.”
Logan laughed. “Get to know me before ya apologise, kid. I ain’t a nice guy sometimes. Even though this whole thing has thrown me more than a little, I do want to get to know you two.” They nodded, and he took a couple of steps and then stopped again, looking at Liam. “What’s your mutation?”
“Um…” Louise almost laughed as Liam scratched the back of his neck.
“What? Don’t you have one?”
She nudged him. “Show him.”
“It’s kind of weird.”
“Can’t be any more weird than mine, so go for it.”
“Um… ok.” Liam put his hands down by his side and balled his hands into fists. Logan almost smiled when three pointy bone spikes appeared out from in between his knuckles, then frowned in confusion as they grew, weaved and spiralled around his closed fists and kept on weaving and spiralling up around his forearms until the points disappeared into his elbows.
“Ok, that is weird. Don’t mean to be rude, but what do they do?”
“Just *that* really. I mean I’ve hit stuff with them, bashed my way through a wall once, so I know they are pretty strong. I can control how far up my arms they go. The farthest point is in my shoulders. Pretty useful in a fight.”
“Not that you’ve used it, *have you*!” His sister ground out.
“No! No, not that I’ve used it.” He uncurled his fingers, and the spikes retracted back into his hands, the wounds healing over instantly.
“You heal!”
“Yeah, so does she.”
“You both heal? Really?” He sighed with relief, glad he could at least pass on something to help keep them safe. “What about your senses: hearing, smell?”
“Nothing extra, just the healing. Why?”
“That’s my mutation. I heal, from virtually anything, and I have enhanced senses, smell, hearing, touch the whole lot.” He didn’t want to tell them about the metal and the claws. He figured that he could go over that when they felt a bit more comfortable with him.
“Cool!” Liam beamed at him.
Logan chuckled again. “What about you? Is it only memories that you can project?”
She smiled. He smiled back; it was just like her mother’s. “Um, no, if I touch skin to skin, I can sense what a person’s feeling, like empathy and get the gist of their intentions, but I can turn it on and off. I can also, like, push emotions out in a wave, but I have to admit I haven’t explored that too much. It’s um, kinda scary, and I don’t really like the pain it causes.”
“I get it. Come on, it’s this way.”
He walked into the main med lab, and as usual, he found Hank sitting in front of a large microscope, looking over glass slides. “Hey doc, I gotta couple of people for you to meet.”
“Mmm… one second, my friend. This slide is an excellent sample. I think I might be another step closer…”
“Hank! It’s important.”
Hank turned in his seat and looked at Logan over the rim of his glasses. “Logan, I really must… oh! Hello, my apologies.” He rose from his seat and looked at Liam and Louise, smiling at their slightly shocked faces. “I’m guessing that you haven’t seen another mutant with quite such a pronounced mutation?” They both nodded silently. Logan smirked. “That’s alright. You get used to me in the end. What can I do for you? New students?” He turned back to the desk, picked up his coffee and turned back to Logan, taking a generous mouthful.
“Hank McCoy, this is Liam and Louise. They, um, they’re Rogue’s kids.”
“Spprruuuuffff! Cough cough… excuse… cough… me! Did you say Rogue’s children? Rogue has children?” Logan nodded as Hank frantically wiped coffee off of the front of his lab coat. “Well, I must say that is a bit of a shock!” He walked to them with his hand out. “Welcome, welcome. It’s a pleasure. Rogue’s a good friend and colleague.”
They both shook his hand and couldn’t stop themselves from joining in with his infectious smile. “You really are *blue*!”
She nudged him. “Liam!”
“What? He’s friggin’ blue!”
Hank laughed. So did Logan. “Your mother’s favourite colour, or so she always told me. I must say, young lady, you do look remarkably like her. Darker hair perhaps, but your features are very similar. And you, my boy, are… are…” His eyes darted from Logan and back to Liam again. “Oh my stars! Logan, why didn’t you say anything”
“I only found out about half an hour ago, so it’s… new.”
“Well, this is extraordinary. I must say. Congratulations, Logan, and I am honoured to meet the two of you, really I am, although I am quite surprised that Rogue kept you a secret. I had no idea that…”
“Hank, they want to see her.”
Logan and Hank stared at each other for a beat or two, and then Hank nodded, frowning and looking at his feet. “Yes, I would have thought that they would want to.” He put his coffee mug back on his desk and smiled at them brightly again. “There are a couple of things I should explain before you see her, because once there I doubt anything will sink in. I don’t know how much the Professor or Logan has explained, so I will start from the beginning. Your mother contracted the Clemency virus while attempting to destroy…”
“Hank, they know all about the mission. They just need to know her condition and what to expect…” He gestured to a large circular door behind Hank. “In there.”
“Right, yes, well. The virus attacks a specific gene marker, in this case the mutant gene. Rogue contracted it by touching the virus directly, which unfortunately accelerated its effects, and she was quite weak when she arrived here. Your mother was a very smart lady and managed to bring with her some research on the virus that might help me in finding an anti-virus or at least slowing its effects. Unfortunately, there was no time to analyse the data, even though I have done so in detail since. I made her as comfortable as I possibly could, pain killers and such, and performed as many tests on her as I could in the time. Blood samples for a full count, blood culture, blood chemistry, liver function. Also X-Rays, ultrasound, MRI, skin samples, urine, saliva, hair, cardiograms, etc etc, anything I could do.”
“Then what?”
“You have to understand that your mother had literally only hours before the virus shut down all her internal organs and she died. The tests took nearly three hours, and her blood results wouldn’t have been ready for 48 hours at least. She was unconscious for the majority of them, and other times, she was incoherent and babbling from fever. I guess that’s why she never said anything about the two of you. We were going to put her on a life support machine but that wouldn’t have stopped her organs from failing, so we placed her in an H2O Stasis Chamber.”
Liam frowned. “A what?”
“It’s a large, vertical cylindrical chamber filled with water. The subject, in this case your mother, is placed within that chamber, and we chemically induce suspended animation or hibernation. Certain chemicals are added to the water, filling her lungs and this decreases the core body temperature by several degrees Celsius. Her metabolism, carbon dioxide production, and oxygen use decrease 10-fold, stopping her bodily functions, thus *suspending* her life as well as the spread of the virus.”
“She breathes the water?” Louise looked horrified, but Hank smiled reassuringly.
“Yes, of sorts. It’s a very complicated process that would, no offence, take thirty minutes to explain and a lifetime to understand. It is a little similar to a baby in the womb, this *water* works in the same way.”
Liam frowned a little. “So she’s been in a fish tank for eleven years?”
Hank chuckled, making his blue fur shake. “Hardly a *fish* tank, my boy! But yes, she has been there for the past eleven years. There are few studies in this type of life suspension. Long-term effects aren’t known, but I monitor her extremely closely, and her physical appearance is exactly the same. There is no deterioration in her body, bones, skin or muscles. Apart from the virus, she is in perfect health, and as far as her mental state of mind, it is simply as if she were asleep.”
Louise stared at the door behind Hank and his desk. “So, she’s just through there?” Her voice was quiet, and she chewed on her bottom lip.
“Yes. Would you like to go through now?”
She nodded, stepping forward, but Liam stopped her. “Wait… wait. I, um… is she, is she ever going to come out of it?”
Hank pushed his glasses slightly further up his nose and frowned. “I have been working on the virus, every day since your mother arrived. I have made progress in identifying how it was made, what was used, method, that kind of thing, and I have also been able to produce several serums that slow down its effects, the same way that doctors use anti viral drugs to help HIV suffers. Also, I have produced an anti-contagious serum to stop it spreading any further, so the threat is gone. But as yet, I haven’t found an anti-virus or vaccine. I’m close, very close. The ‘slow-down’ serums prove that I’m only a step away from finding it.” He looked around the notes and papers on his desk. “At the rate I’ve been going, another few months, maybe a year, and I could have it.” He sighed. “But you can’t put a time limit on these things, I’m afraid. After all, it’s taken eleven years to get to this point. You see, the madman that created this, and let me tell you, he *was* a madman, didn’t even consider trying to develop any kind of vaccine or counter virus. He simply made it to destroy.”
Logan moved towards the door at the back, he took a slim card out of his back pocket and slid it down a keypad slot. The pad beeped and a detached female voice spoke. “ACCESS GRANTED.”
He stood in the doorway and looked back at the faces of his new-found children. Both were pale, and both looked like they wanted to cry or run away or both. He felt for them. He remembered the first time he saw Marie in the chamber. He’d wanted to smash it, bang on the glass, scream, none of which he did. He jerked his head, and they moved slowly forward, Liam first and Louise behind holding his hand tightly. Hank followed after them, taking with him his clipboard and notes.
The room glowed blue from all around. Soft county music played quietly somewhere off to the left of them, but as they walked in, their eyes were immediately drawn to the enormous cylindrical column of water in the centre of the room.
It was at least eight feet high, five feet across and filled with perfectly clear blue water. Small delicate bubbles rose from the bottom and floated up to the top, which was sealed tight. Small circular lights fitted on the inside at the bottom illuminated the chamber, giving an angelic glow on the still and silent occupant.
Her eyes were closed, and her face was calm, arms by her sides, but carried slightly away from her body by the water. Her hair drifted around her, and the water made her white streak shine brilliantly white. The only clothes she wore were a black tank top and black shorts. She had a small tube going in her nose and heart monitor pads were on her chest, abdomen, and all other pulse points.
A large cable carried the heart monitor leads to a set of monitors and computers off to one side of the chamber. They beeped and chimed in time with the gentle rhythm of the bubbles, regulating them to keep the water temperature constant. One monitor had a virtual picture of a person, and it showed her heart, but no beat was present, she was still and silent and technically dead.
Logan walked to the chamber and ran his hand lightly over the glass, feeling its cold surface beneath his fingers the same way he had every day for the past eleven years.
Louise froze where she stood. “Oh my God!” She looked at her mother as she serenely floated in the centre of the chamber.
Hank put his large arm around Louise and rubbed her shoulder. Liam walked forward closer to the chamber, his hand hovering next to the glass. Logan could see he was shaking, but just didn’t know what to say to either of them. “Mom?”
***************END OF PART THREE
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