#xmevent2

She starts down the hallway, knowing she needs to find Alex and Jean. Then she needed to find this Charles Xavier and find out what he planned to do about this problem. Hearing footsteps behind her, her hands flex at the wrist while she turns on her heel to confront them. 

Instead she sat there wondering if she should go back to the mall and get those shoes she saw in the window. Played with her hair. Read the graffiti on her desk, scrawled in a few choice phrases of her own. Having grown tired of mooning over her manicure, she leaned over to the person beside her. “Do you have any gum?” She really wanted a cigarette but she’d already excused herself once during the lecture. Gum would have to do. Unfortunately she’d just run out of her pack of Bubble Yum. “I wouldn’t ask, but, you know, dire circumstances.” 

She looks to the person beside her suddenly, her braids bouncing as she leans back in her chair like a machine that randomly turned on. Holding up the paper, she doesn’t bother talking quietly. It’s not like Deadpool heard anyone else over himself. “I feel like this is missing something, what ya think?” She looks around the paper to stare at the drawing, eyes squinting in contemplation. 

“I’m getting out of here,” he said, eyes raking the room to find the best exit point.

In her frazzled state, she felt her body collide with someone she hadn’t even seen in front of her. She flew back, landing on her bottom. with a grimace, she looked up. somehow she could phase through things and she managed to run into someone? Really? “Sorry,” she muttered, her heart still racing.

He was reckless. 

A grunt leaves Pietro’s mouth as knuckles meet his center, his own turning white as he grips the other man’s shirt at his shoulders and tosses him at the wall. There’s too many of them, and it’s been awhile since Pietro has been worried about something as trivial as odds. But his eyes find Lorna every second he gets the chance to spare a glance around the room they’ve been backed into. She’s holding her own, just as he’d expect her to, but he can feel her exhaustion from here. She never should have followed him, into the belly of the beast. But what was he supposed to do? Turn her away in front of the entirety of the Clan? They would have known he was a mole right away.

He was reckless.

And that’s what family did to him, didn’t it? But it also made him deadly. Circling his next attacker, Pietro grips him around the neck from behind and crushes his throat with a force he knows he shouldn’t be capable of exerting. All that experimentation had paid off in the end, but not in the way the scientists had intended. Fingers slick with blood, he moves smoothly across the room to hook them in the eyes of the mutant advancing on Lorna. She’s sweating, her dark hair plastered to her forehead but she’s furious, and he knows it’s keeping her alive. But a brief once over tells him what he fears, she’s been injured. 

She’ll scar, she’ll look in the mirror and see the men she’s killed, she’ll become you.

He was reckless. He should have let those filthy men say what they wanted, what did it matter anyway? He’d gotten them into this mess with his temper, his stupid temper that left him scarred and Wanda in tears time and time again. Is that how it would proceed with Lorna then? Would he care for her helplessly more and more every day, and only succeed in creating a mess for her to weep over? It’s that thought that stops him, just in front of her, hands reaching out to lift her into his arms. To take them far from this place. It’s that hesitation that gifts their attackers with an opening, and they take it. 

Pietro’s yell is guttural, and instead of holding his sister he’s holding the pipe they’ve shoved through his body just below his collarbone. As he pulls it, they kick the back of his knees til he’s kneeling before her. He stares into her eyes, hard and determined. “You’re okay,” he tells her, and there should be no doubt in her mind that he means it. “You’re okay.” He can feel the blood gushing from the wound as he pulls the pipe, hot and soaking the front of his shirt. It’s a familiar feeling, and he doesn’t try to place it because when he does a static fills his mind that is an unwelcome distraction. 

Lorna. He thinks. Max. He pulls it free. Wanda. 

With Pietro’s and Lorna’s lives hanging in the balance, and the looming threat of Phoenix’s rage in mind, Professor X decides to agree to a trade. He sees the members of Clan Akkaba trapped in the mansion out of the barrier safely while Laura Kinney manages to bring Pietro and Lorna safely in. The Clan retreats for now, and the headmasters gather their wounded.

How will the students and staff recover from this second hit from Clan Akkaba? Will they be able to rebuild their school and again find peace with what they’ve had to do in order to stay alive? 

“He’s dying.”

“He’s not dead yet.”

The second voice is unfamiliar, but he’s heard it before. He’s sure. In the dining hall. He sifts through the memories, the day he broke the nose and wrist of the man trying to touch Lorna. Focus, Pietro. Look around. So he does, revisiting the memory in a dream like haze. There she stood, her hand outstretched to the group of men waiting to pounce on Pietro for injuring their friend. She didn’t let them. Why?

“Lift his arm. There. He’ll be fine.” Pietro had let out a grumble at the way his body had been jostled, the two of them carrying him from the wreckage of Lorna’s rage. Miles and miles it felt like, before they’d stopped and leaned him against a tree. “Is he still breathing?”

Now he turned his face upwards to the sky, and it felt like the sun was too hot for this time of day. It was still morning, wasn’t it? His breath is shallow, and he wonders if he’s actually stopped bleeding out. If he was empty now, running on fumes and sheer will. Fingers in the dirt beneath him, he scrapes it to feel it pile up beneath his fingernails. Feels the damp and the grit. Needs to feel something, anything other than all consuming numbness. You need her.

“Wanda,” he isn’t aware he’s saying it out loud until their voices hush. “Wanda.” He’d promised her he’d make it back. He promised to see her in that red dress. His eyes, unfocused, find the two women standing feet from him. “What are we waiting for?” he asks hoarsely, digging his whole palm into the ground as he pushes himself up. He teeters, leaning his shoulder against the tree and letting out a rough cough. Wiping the blood that follows from his lips, he grinned at his sister. “Fucking slow poke.”

Turning from them, he trudged his way through the leaf blanketed ground. Four minutes. He could be at the school in four minutes if he ran. But his body, though moving, feels reanimated like he’s something out of a horror movie. Dread fills him at the thought, a nagging memory. Remember, Pietro. Don’t. Remember. Don’t, please. Her gasps, wet with tears. She’s above him, her hair like a curtain around their faces. He touches her lips while she sputters, cries around something that sounds like his name. That static, it’s nudging at his mind again. Creating a feeling like cotton between his ears.