By late afternoon nerves were frazzled at the mansion, especially after the fire. Scott told John it wasn’t his fault, not really. Storm had just over-reacted when she found the greenhouse environmental controls stuck at 30 degrees and her prize orchids in danger of dying. She’d dragged Pyro from the basketball court by the scruff of his neck and shrieked at him to raise the temperature in the greenhouse that instant. Rogue and several other people who’d been outside in the late day sun watched the scene unfold. John protested, a bit too weakly the commander in Rogue thought making a note to drill him on better acting in the future, that he couldn’t control the temperature.
“Storm, fire is fire! It’s either hot or its like really…really…uh hot! I can’t-”
Storm was practically in a frenzy, darting from plant to plant, almost crying as her prize-winning blooms began to shrivel before her eyes in the frigid air of the malfunctioning greenhouse. This malfunction was, of course, a direct result of Iceman tampering with the controls and dumping some mutated muscle power into the Freon in the A/C unit that kept the indoor arboretum from becoming unacceptably hot in summer. She screamed at Pyro “JUST FUCKING DO IT! NOW!” and the air in the greenhouse whipped into almost gale force winds, damaging her beloved flowers even more than the cold. When a goddess start swearing like a sailor in 3 languages and threatens to fry you with 50,000,000 volts of lightning you’d be nervous too. With Storm hovering over him, hissing invectives at him to heat up the space pronto, Pyro lost control (truly accidentally, even he hadn’t meant to cause so much destruction) and blew out the glass in the walls with an inadvertently large fireball, then melted half the ceiling, causing everyone to flee for their lives from the molten silica falling like acid rain around them.
Hank spent the better part of the afternoon being badly tended to in the infirmary by a distracted Jean who kept levitating unconsciously while singing “Tweedle-lee-dee-dee-dee, tweedle-lee-dee-dee.” Beast was suffering from intensely uncomfortable armpitis. The unscented Bengay Kitty had liberally smeared on top of his Speedstick created a most unpleasant burning sensation that forced him to wear a wife-beater borrowed from Logan, which was stretched ludicrously tight over his furry chest, allowing blue hair to sprout from neck and armholes in an extremely hilarious fashion. In addition to the unfortunate outfit, Beast had to walk around with his arms bowed out to his sides to minimize the stinging in his pits, which made him look even more like a royal blue orangutan than he usually did.
Scott and Logan wasted 3 hours in the garage ripping apart Logan/Scott’s motorcycle to determine the source of the mysterious oil puddle that had appeared under it after Logan’s morning ride. Their inability to find the source of the leak, despite oil liberally smeared all over the casing by Jubilee after her nap to recover from 12 hours of Bobby Day mental karaoke for Jean’s benefit, was causing both men to snap at each other more viciously than ever.
Their sniping came to a head when both men were in their rooms across the hall from each other, changing out of greasy garage clothes for dinner when Kitty tied their doorknobs together a length of industrial strength cable. She banged on both their doors and phased through the floor. Shortly thereafter half the mansion could hear the combined and infinitely creative profanity of the two Alpha X-men as they struggled to open their own doors while simultaneously slamming the door of the other man working equally vigorously to exit his own room.
Logan was already in a foul mood b/c his favorite belt buckle wasn’t anywhere to be found and someone had sewn underwear, tighty-whiteys of all things, to the inside of all his jeans. He’d shredded two pairs in his haste to claw out the offending undergarments before he’d finally salvaged a pair to wear commando. His piss poor attitude was evenly matched by Scott’s, who’d just discovered a stash of mutant porn magazines in Jean’s underwear drawer with pointy hair and muttonchops drawn onto the naked male models with the most body hair and bulging muscles and oversized schlongs.
Just as Logan popped his claws to slice down his door and deal a deathblow to Summers who was screaming death threats at him from across the hall, Cyclops lost his temper utterly and, wrenching off his swim goggles, unleashed a full power optic blast through his own door and Logan’s…and then Logan himself, flinging the big man through the back wall of his room and out onto the gravel driveway 25 feet below.
Dinner in the staff dining room away from the student body was not much better, with Jean absent mindedly floating objects around her head like miniature satellites while babbling about “Jaybird street.” Hank was making even Logan’s iron cast stomach gurgle unhappily as he repeatedly scratched at it burning armpits then sniffed his fingers.
Logan has never had an upset stomach in his life, but his manure shake earlier that day made him seriously ponder driving 27 inches of adamantium into his gut and ripping the organ out for something better to do. He did not know how normal people survived all the embarrassing noises and emissions his GI tract was currently making. And oh god, the smell. It was like something crawled up his ass, resurrected after 3 days, then died again after visiting Taco Bell. He had to breath through his mouth and hoped to God no one knew it was him. Too bad they didn’t have an X-dog he could blame it on.
Scott was feeling his way around the table and his plate, making an unholy mess of his meal, hands, and clothes as he fumbled blind-folded for his food. Having broken his goggles by accidentally stamping on them when he blasted Wolverine out of the mansion, he was reduced to tying one of Jean’s scarves around his eyes. It was a quite pretty purple paisley print with burnt orange piping. He couldn’t see what he doing. Sue him.
Hank apologized many times between unmannered scratches at his pits for not having fixed Scott’s visor yet. He tried to explain that something was went wrong in the lab, as evidenced by a bright yellow streaks of chemically burned hair along his forearms that was the result of mixing one of Kitty and Rogue’s mislabeled beakers into a rather volatile compound. But his long-winded monologue on the hazards of chemistry was lost on everyone at the table, absorbed as they were in their own torment.
Logan was still moodily picking gravel out from between his knuckles where it had embedded after his claws retracted upon hitting the driveway with enough force to create a decent sized crater. If Scooter hadn’t been defenseless at the moment Wolverine would have served minced Fearless Leader as an aperitif. As it was, Logan settled for merely moving Scott’s glass too close to the edge of the table so Cyclops knocked it into Jean’s lap. She bounced a floating salt shaker sharply off her husband’s head then resumed her one-sided conversation with her third glass of wine debating how a raven could out-bop a buzzard and an oriole.
Storm had refused to come out of her room, still too shaken by the destruction of her greenhouse. No one had yet seen her hair. Even the Beta team wasn’t so cruel as to put permanent hair color in her shampoo bottle, but she wasn’t about to let anyone see her like this until she could get all the sky blue color out, specially picked out by Bobby as it was his favorite shade.
The Beta Team From Hell sat quietly at the other table, aware that being only feet aware from the senior x-men was dangerous as this point in the operation and they could not afford to slip into the gales of laughter that were threatening to consume them all. They settled for a series of kicks to each other’s shins and pinches under the table each time Hank raised his arm to sniff at the underside or Scott stuck his hand in the mashed potatoes or Logan cursed while working another stubborn piece of quartz out of his skin. Jubilee and Pyro keep an arm each on Kitty to prevent her from phasing through the floor in hysterics; she was dangerously close to losing her game face and spoiling the coup de grace that would commence later that evening.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
tell me i am evil.
Chapter End Notes:
Last chapter coming up.