Shades of Green (Part 5/?), A:tS/X-men
Aug. 12th, 2005 05:46 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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crossoverficTitle: Shades of Green
Author: Gaeriel Mallory
Fandoms: Angel the Series/X-men (movieverse)
Rating: PG for this part, PG-13 overall
Warnings: None
Character(s): Kurt, Lorne, Bobby
Summary: Lorne finds himself involved with a new group of Champions.
Sorry for the delay in updating. This summer has been more hectic than I originally had planned.
Kurt’s POV
Breakfast is usually a quiet affair, with most everybody – students and teachers alike – struggling to wake up. Cyclops usually has to inhale two cups of coffee before he’s able to hold a decent conversation. Professor Xavier prefers tea, black. The Wolverine piles his plate with bacon and sausage; sometimes, if Rogue or Storm makes a comment, he might add some fruit as well to the mix. Me? I am one of those most despised types: the morning person. I learned early on not to take the grunts that they gave in response to my morning greetings personally.
I wasn’t too surprised when Lorne, the newest addition, proved to be as taciturn as the rest of the table when he joined us for breakfast. However, when I ran into him again later in the day, just after lunch-time, and he was still deep in contemplation, I paused in my wanderings and placed a hand on his shoulder.
He looked at me, red eyes blinking in confusion. “Kurt, right?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Ja. And you are Lorne, the demon who reads minds.”
He smiled. It was small and I didn’t see any teeth, but it was still a smile. “Not quite mind-reading, though I suppose it’s close enough.” He shrugged.
I studied him. It was mostly curiosity but a part of me stared at Lorne with skepticism and a hint of resentment that I quickly pushed aside. Having grown up being thought to be a demon by those around me, the sight of a real demon confused me. “How can you be a demon?” I asked. “I have always been taught demons to be evil, the workers of the Devil.” My own looks followed traditional concepts of the demonic more than Lorne’s amiable green face and light purple suit.
“Demons are just a label for non-humans.” He frowned and the skin between his eyebrows wrinkled. “It’s true that a fair number of what we call ‘demons’ are not good, but there are also some that are neutral. We don’t tend to call those with good intentions ‘demons,’ though the term could still be used.”
“So what do you call the good demons?” I asked, curious.
“Balance,” he said simply.
I said nothing in immediate response. He seemed content enough to stand there and let me think. I had been raised religious; it was hard not to be growing up in a monastery. I had never questioned my faith despite hostile villagers, skeptical audiences, and my unwitting servitude to Stryker. My appearance and my teleportation skills had always marked me as different, even at birth. It was no wonder that my mother had abandoned me if she had carried the same prejudices as the superstitious inhabitants of rural Eastern Europe.
Yet, I was special – that is what I had been taught by the kind monks, and later by the circus folk who took me in. The idea that my specialness was not unique and that there were thousands of mutants across the globe was intriguing and overwhelming. What kind of God would grant us these powers amongst regular human beings who were at best indifferent to us? At worst... well, I had seen the worst in Stryker and his master plan to commit genocide.
“If there is a good and a bad,” I said finally, “then there must be beings greater than us controlling each side. Right?”
“Not controlling. There’s the whole free will thing, after all.” Lorne’s mouth twisted and he grimaced. “Though free will is relative. Most people go through life without ever having being touched by the Powers that Be, lucky for them.”
“The Powers that Be?” I was confused. Yet even I could hear the capitalized letters. “Do you mean God?”
He shrugged. “God, Allah, Jehovah, the PTB. Whatever you want to call them. But yeah, they’re there and they’re a pain in my backside.” He glared up at the ceiling. “I am so sick of being a damn pawn in their games.” Glancing over at me, he snorted in frustrated amusement. “Do you know how hard it is to find out that things you thought were true were actually false and that your memories aren’t your own? Hell, that what you thought were your own decisions were actually taken away from you and the past few years of your life were a finely orchestrated dance between the Powers and a brooding vampire with a soul?”
I watched in horrified amazement as Lorne seemed to deflate. He slumped against the wall and started shaking. I reached out and held onto his shoulders so he wouldn’t pitch forward. “No, I do not know,” I answered softly. “It is not easy, to have God reach out and choose you. All of His Chosen had to pass obstacle after obstacle. Look how he treated his only Son – why should he show us any leniency?”
Lorne leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I didn’t ask for this,” he whispered. “I just wanted music and laughter – a life that wasn’t Pylea. Damn you, Angel.” His green hands gripped his temple and despite my grip, he sunk down onto the floor. “We were fighting the good fight, remember? How could you do this to us?”
His eyes were unfocused and I realized that he wasn’t talking to me but to this Angel, who had inflicted Lorne with some horrible wrong. There was nothing I could do except bow my head and pray for guidance, my hand on the demon’s head. I’m sure that someone was laughing at the irony, whatever that someone’s name was.
* * *
Lorne’s POV
The last thing I wanted was to have a breakdown in the middle of a hallway. Kurt stayed with me until I had regained enough control to walk without falling on my face, though I was not sure just how long that control would last. After my visitation from Cordelia last night and her giving back my memories, I seemed to be walking in a heavy fog, the kind where you couldn’t see five inches in front of your face. Any moment and I could trip on a loose cobblestone or walk into a lamppost. I knew his intentions were innocent enough but I did not thank Kurt for wanting to start a theological discussion in my current state.
I was not oblivious to the fact that my conversation with Kurt could have been a continuation with the one I had with Scott late last night. It seemed that my subconscious (or someone else, a part of my mind whispered) wanted me to dwell on the issues that bogged me down. If I could find someone I could trust, I might have even gone to a psychologist, though it would have to be a fairly open-minded one.
“Well, Doc, one of my friends who also happened to be my boss messed around with my head and rewrote an entire year of my memories and I only just found out about it from another friend, who had died recently,” I said to the air. “In addition to that, I got plunked right into the laps of a group of vigilante mutants that have more than enough of their own issues to deal with without adding an empathic demon from another dimension to the mix.” I snorted. Yeah, that would go over well.
Lacking anything better to do with my time, I explored the mansion. The kiddies were in classes and I accidentally interrupted more than one lecture poking around the building. I finally wandered outside and sat down on a bench in some formal gardens. I breathed in the smell of roses, a little heavier than I would have preferred – I liked lilac myself – but it added to the surrounding calm.
Well, the first step would be to break down everything. Angel. Connor. Jasmine. Wolfram and Hart. Fred. Illyria. Lindsay. I took a deep shuddering breath. When did my life get so complicated? “I should have never left Caritas,” I said to a passing butterfly. “Karaoke and mixed drinks were so much easier to deal with.” The tiger swallowtail, oblivious to my plight, continued flapping its wings and eventually flew behind a wall and out of my sight.
Angel was too big to deal with first, as was Connor. I turned to Jasmine and frowned. She had deceived everybody and it was only Fred’s quick thinking that made us see the truth. Jasmine had blinded us all – just like Wolfram and Hart’s offer had blinded us? We didn’t see the ugliness until it was too late. False promises. Gilded offers.
Which led to the evil law firm. God, we were so easily manipulated. So naïve. Why did we ever think we could change everything from the inside? The corruption had been so deeply rooted that instead, we were the ones who had changed. We made compromises with the dark side. Thought that if we only got our feet wet in the river, we would not fall in.
Why would Angel accept Lilah’s offer in the first place? Control of the LA branch in exchange for what? I remembered Connor’s new family coming to see us for help, though I had no clue then that Connor was Connor. They seemed to care about him and he seemed content; innocent. I sighed. “My God, Angel. You traded us for your son’s happiness. Who would have thought that a well-adjusted teenage boy with no idea of who he really is would be the price for Angel’s soul?”
Resentment still bubbled deep in my stomach but I couldn’t hate him too much for his choice. What I could hate him for was his deciding without our input. Memories wiped and rewritten and we walked into Wolfram and Hart minus one miracle child. “You had no right, Angel. You might have sired him but I was the one who sang him to sleep. I changed his diapers. I fed him and bathed him and I loved him too, damn you.” Maybe somewhere, Angel’s spirit could hear me. “You had no right!” I shouted. “They were my memories, for good or for bad, and hell if they were yours to just take away!”
A throat cleared and I froze, embarrassed to have been caught unguarded twice today. A teenage boy, a little younger than Connor, sat down on the bench next to me. “Professor Xavier erased some of my family’s memories,” he said conversationally. “They had found out I was a mutant and reacted badly. My brother called the police and my best friend almost burned my house down. I wasn’t happy when I found out what he did but... it was for the best, I guess. I mean, how could my parents have lived with themselves knowing that their son was a freak who brought dangerous people into their home, and then knowing that their other son would willingly turn me over to the government?” He stared at his hands and didn’t look at me.
“What do you think your parents would say if they found out that their minds had been messed with? That a part of their life isn’t what they remembered?”
He shrugged. “I think it would be better if they never found out.” He looked at me, his eyes old in his young face. “Sometimes, I wish that the Professor would wipe my memories of that day. It’s hard to have a conversation with them over the phone, or to see them, without remembering how they acted and wondering just how much of it was the shock? If I told them the truth about my mutation, how much of their reaction before would I see again?” His hand twitched and a ball made of ice formed in his palm. He held it up and looked at it. “Seems kind of silly, doesn’t it? I mean, other kids have useful powers. I can make sure that my drinks stay cold all day in the summer.”
“Sounds pretty cool to me.”
He snorted at my unintentional pun. “Right.” He dropped the iceball and it shattered on the paved path. “Bobby Drake,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.
I took it. “Lorne.”
“So what about you?” he asked. “Who messed with your memories and why?”
“You sure you want to know? It’s a pretty long story.”
He grinned. “I have the period free so I don’t have anywhere I have to go. Besides, it sounded like it would be interesting, from what I heard you yelling at the sky.”
I laughed. “Well, it all started about three years ago – or was it four? Well, whenever it was, it seemed like a lifetime. There was this vampire who walked into my bar...” So I sat in a rose garden in New England talking to a teenager who could make ice about some vampires, a seer, and a child who should never have been born.
What were the chances that I’d end up in a place full of people who understood what I was going through? Perhaps we could heal together, and each other. If we were being shoved around by the Powers, at least they seemed to know what they were doing at the moment. I wondered what the final plan was for all of us – the Power’s Champions.
--End Part 5--
Author: Gaeriel Mallory
Fandoms: Angel the Series/X-men (movieverse)
Rating: PG for this part, PG-13 overall
Warnings: None
Character(s): Kurt, Lorne, Bobby
Summary: Lorne finds himself involved with a new group of Champions.
Sorry for the delay in updating. This summer has been more hectic than I originally had planned.
Kurt’s POV
Breakfast is usually a quiet affair, with most everybody – students and teachers alike – struggling to wake up. Cyclops usually has to inhale two cups of coffee before he’s able to hold a decent conversation. Professor Xavier prefers tea, black. The Wolverine piles his plate with bacon and sausage; sometimes, if Rogue or Storm makes a comment, he might add some fruit as well to the mix. Me? I am one of those most despised types: the morning person. I learned early on not to take the grunts that they gave in response to my morning greetings personally.
I wasn’t too surprised when Lorne, the newest addition, proved to be as taciturn as the rest of the table when he joined us for breakfast. However, when I ran into him again later in the day, just after lunch-time, and he was still deep in contemplation, I paused in my wanderings and placed a hand on his shoulder.
He looked at me, red eyes blinking in confusion. “Kurt, right?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Ja. And you are Lorne, the demon who reads minds.”
He smiled. It was small and I didn’t see any teeth, but it was still a smile. “Not quite mind-reading, though I suppose it’s close enough.” He shrugged.
I studied him. It was mostly curiosity but a part of me stared at Lorne with skepticism and a hint of resentment that I quickly pushed aside. Having grown up being thought to be a demon by those around me, the sight of a real demon confused me. “How can you be a demon?” I asked. “I have always been taught demons to be evil, the workers of the Devil.” My own looks followed traditional concepts of the demonic more than Lorne’s amiable green face and light purple suit.
“Demons are just a label for non-humans.” He frowned and the skin between his eyebrows wrinkled. “It’s true that a fair number of what we call ‘demons’ are not good, but there are also some that are neutral. We don’t tend to call those with good intentions ‘demons,’ though the term could still be used.”
“So what do you call the good demons?” I asked, curious.
“Balance,” he said simply.
I said nothing in immediate response. He seemed content enough to stand there and let me think. I had been raised religious; it was hard not to be growing up in a monastery. I had never questioned my faith despite hostile villagers, skeptical audiences, and my unwitting servitude to Stryker. My appearance and my teleportation skills had always marked me as different, even at birth. It was no wonder that my mother had abandoned me if she had carried the same prejudices as the superstitious inhabitants of rural Eastern Europe.
Yet, I was special – that is what I had been taught by the kind monks, and later by the circus folk who took me in. The idea that my specialness was not unique and that there were thousands of mutants across the globe was intriguing and overwhelming. What kind of God would grant us these powers amongst regular human beings who were at best indifferent to us? At worst... well, I had seen the worst in Stryker and his master plan to commit genocide.
“If there is a good and a bad,” I said finally, “then there must be beings greater than us controlling each side. Right?”
“Not controlling. There’s the whole free will thing, after all.” Lorne’s mouth twisted and he grimaced. “Though free will is relative. Most people go through life without ever having being touched by the Powers that Be, lucky for them.”
“The Powers that Be?” I was confused. Yet even I could hear the capitalized letters. “Do you mean God?”
He shrugged. “God, Allah, Jehovah, the PTB. Whatever you want to call them. But yeah, they’re there and they’re a pain in my backside.” He glared up at the ceiling. “I am so sick of being a damn pawn in their games.” Glancing over at me, he snorted in frustrated amusement. “Do you know how hard it is to find out that things you thought were true were actually false and that your memories aren’t your own? Hell, that what you thought were your own decisions were actually taken away from you and the past few years of your life were a finely orchestrated dance between the Powers and a brooding vampire with a soul?”
I watched in horrified amazement as Lorne seemed to deflate. He slumped against the wall and started shaking. I reached out and held onto his shoulders so he wouldn’t pitch forward. “No, I do not know,” I answered softly. “It is not easy, to have God reach out and choose you. All of His Chosen had to pass obstacle after obstacle. Look how he treated his only Son – why should he show us any leniency?”
Lorne leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I didn’t ask for this,” he whispered. “I just wanted music and laughter – a life that wasn’t Pylea. Damn you, Angel.” His green hands gripped his temple and despite my grip, he sunk down onto the floor. “We were fighting the good fight, remember? How could you do this to us?”
His eyes were unfocused and I realized that he wasn’t talking to me but to this Angel, who had inflicted Lorne with some horrible wrong. There was nothing I could do except bow my head and pray for guidance, my hand on the demon’s head. I’m sure that someone was laughing at the irony, whatever that someone’s name was.
* * *
Lorne’s POV
The last thing I wanted was to have a breakdown in the middle of a hallway. Kurt stayed with me until I had regained enough control to walk without falling on my face, though I was not sure just how long that control would last. After my visitation from Cordelia last night and her giving back my memories, I seemed to be walking in a heavy fog, the kind where you couldn’t see five inches in front of your face. Any moment and I could trip on a loose cobblestone or walk into a lamppost. I knew his intentions were innocent enough but I did not thank Kurt for wanting to start a theological discussion in my current state.
I was not oblivious to the fact that my conversation with Kurt could have been a continuation with the one I had with Scott late last night. It seemed that my subconscious (or someone else, a part of my mind whispered) wanted me to dwell on the issues that bogged me down. If I could find someone I could trust, I might have even gone to a psychologist, though it would have to be a fairly open-minded one.
“Well, Doc, one of my friends who also happened to be my boss messed around with my head and rewrote an entire year of my memories and I only just found out about it from another friend, who had died recently,” I said to the air. “In addition to that, I got plunked right into the laps of a group of vigilante mutants that have more than enough of their own issues to deal with without adding an empathic demon from another dimension to the mix.” I snorted. Yeah, that would go over well.
Lacking anything better to do with my time, I explored the mansion. The kiddies were in classes and I accidentally interrupted more than one lecture poking around the building. I finally wandered outside and sat down on a bench in some formal gardens. I breathed in the smell of roses, a little heavier than I would have preferred – I liked lilac myself – but it added to the surrounding calm.
Well, the first step would be to break down everything. Angel. Connor. Jasmine. Wolfram and Hart. Fred. Illyria. Lindsay. I took a deep shuddering breath. When did my life get so complicated? “I should have never left Caritas,” I said to a passing butterfly. “Karaoke and mixed drinks were so much easier to deal with.” The tiger swallowtail, oblivious to my plight, continued flapping its wings and eventually flew behind a wall and out of my sight.
Angel was too big to deal with first, as was Connor. I turned to Jasmine and frowned. She had deceived everybody and it was only Fred’s quick thinking that made us see the truth. Jasmine had blinded us all – just like Wolfram and Hart’s offer had blinded us? We didn’t see the ugliness until it was too late. False promises. Gilded offers.
Which led to the evil law firm. God, we were so easily manipulated. So naïve. Why did we ever think we could change everything from the inside? The corruption had been so deeply rooted that instead, we were the ones who had changed. We made compromises with the dark side. Thought that if we only got our feet wet in the river, we would not fall in.
Why would Angel accept Lilah’s offer in the first place? Control of the LA branch in exchange for what? I remembered Connor’s new family coming to see us for help, though I had no clue then that Connor was Connor. They seemed to care about him and he seemed content; innocent. I sighed. “My God, Angel. You traded us for your son’s happiness. Who would have thought that a well-adjusted teenage boy with no idea of who he really is would be the price for Angel’s soul?”
Resentment still bubbled deep in my stomach but I couldn’t hate him too much for his choice. What I could hate him for was his deciding without our input. Memories wiped and rewritten and we walked into Wolfram and Hart minus one miracle child. “You had no right, Angel. You might have sired him but I was the one who sang him to sleep. I changed his diapers. I fed him and bathed him and I loved him too, damn you.” Maybe somewhere, Angel’s spirit could hear me. “You had no right!” I shouted. “They were my memories, for good or for bad, and hell if they were yours to just take away!”
A throat cleared and I froze, embarrassed to have been caught unguarded twice today. A teenage boy, a little younger than Connor, sat down on the bench next to me. “Professor Xavier erased some of my family’s memories,” he said conversationally. “They had found out I was a mutant and reacted badly. My brother called the police and my best friend almost burned my house down. I wasn’t happy when I found out what he did but... it was for the best, I guess. I mean, how could my parents have lived with themselves knowing that their son was a freak who brought dangerous people into their home, and then knowing that their other son would willingly turn me over to the government?” He stared at his hands and didn’t look at me.
“What do you think your parents would say if they found out that their minds had been messed with? That a part of their life isn’t what they remembered?”
He shrugged. “I think it would be better if they never found out.” He looked at me, his eyes old in his young face. “Sometimes, I wish that the Professor would wipe my memories of that day. It’s hard to have a conversation with them over the phone, or to see them, without remembering how they acted and wondering just how much of it was the shock? If I told them the truth about my mutation, how much of their reaction before would I see again?” His hand twitched and a ball made of ice formed in his palm. He held it up and looked at it. “Seems kind of silly, doesn’t it? I mean, other kids have useful powers. I can make sure that my drinks stay cold all day in the summer.”
“Sounds pretty cool to me.”
He snorted at my unintentional pun. “Right.” He dropped the iceball and it shattered on the paved path. “Bobby Drake,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.
I took it. “Lorne.”
“So what about you?” he asked. “Who messed with your memories and why?”
“You sure you want to know? It’s a pretty long story.”
He grinned. “I have the period free so I don’t have anywhere I have to go. Besides, it sounded like it would be interesting, from what I heard you yelling at the sky.”
I laughed. “Well, it all started about three years ago – or was it four? Well, whenever it was, it seemed like a lifetime. There was this vampire who walked into my bar...” So I sat in a rose garden in New England talking to a teenager who could make ice about some vampires, a seer, and a child who should never have been born.
What were the chances that I’d end up in a place full of people who understood what I was going through? Perhaps we could heal together, and each other. If we were being shoved around by the Powers, at least they seemed to know what they were doing at the moment. I wondered what the final plan was for all of us – the Power’s Champions.
--End Part 5--
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