Midnight Shadows

There was a specific pace to her steps. It wasn’t hurry-to-get-out-of-sight fast, but it wasn’t stop-and-smell-the-flowers casual either. It was direct. She knew where she needed and wanted to be, and she made it her objective to get there. She wanted away from the city central that lay some miles behind her and had made decent time without needing to glance at her watch.

The black jacket she had secured around herself earlier in the evening was gone, having been abandoned in the need to vacate the premises after she’d removed it to husk her left arm. It had been necessary as the industrial door handle hadn’t been willing to budge and she had refused to seek help. She was capable on her own, the presence of a shadow was pointless. Entertaining the idea of even commenting on it was useless.

She briefly scanned her surroundings as she approached the school, the sun having sunk beyond the horizon offered enough raspberry light to paint the western side of the building. Enough to see by, enough to draw from the map she had once memorized to bring her around to the double gymnasium doors. The door she reached for wasn’t locked, there was no need to be. Very few people used the area, and no humans that she had seen in years ever even glanced in the general direction of the school. No reason to keep it sealed shut. Best way to avoid suspicion just as well.

Her boot soles were quiet against the wooden floor. She didn’t glance at the half folded away bleachers, or at the net that barely hung to the rim by a thread. She had seen them a hundred times before and all they ever did was slowly decay. Once upon a time she had imagined the children that had littered the expansive space, the sound of shoes squeaking against the once waxed floor, the laughter that ricocheted off the walls. She had wondered how many of the student body had been human, and how many had been mutant.

Now it was just a building, left behind.

Through a hallway, beyond several overturned empty classrooms, she finally stepped into the dusty library. She didn’t bother to glance around at the neglected room, she simply moved beyond the central tables and into the book stacks. Twelve steps to the end of the physics shelf and she drew one of the textbooks free, flipping to the false back and drawing a silent tablet into her hand. She replaced the book on the shelf and fluffed some dust and cobwebs back over the spine.

Circling back around towards a set of tables, she onto one of the stools and turned the tablet on. She waited for it to boot, finding the battery reserve at twenty-three and mentally logging away the necessity to set it on the solar charger in the morning for an hour before she left for Queens. She drew the mini flash drive from the left heel of her boot and slid it into the tablet’s port.

Paranoid. He was so damn paranoid. Ever since his escape he had turn it on a notch and it was because of that, that he was now circling the building he and Paige needed to check on the intel they had gathered. He knew this was a safe house but he just didn’t trust it. He needed to check it for himself and make sure there were no ambushes and that they wouldn’t catch him again.

He just needed to find Laura. Make good on his promise.

Nightmares. She was in his nightmares and even though he had bad dreams, these couldn’t compare to those. They were horrible, horrifying and they made him relive ever single moment he had spent in captivity. In their hands.

These little missions though, they kept him busy but they were making him grow weary as well. When would they finally cut a break and find one of those facilities they were keeping mutants? Part of him was itching for a fight too. He was craving for some violence, he needed an outlet and he wasn’t getting any.

Victor moved inside the school and made his way to where Paige was, the library. She would be in the library. “Everything clear.” He grunted, making sure she wouldn’t shoot him. He easily sniffed her out and found her at one of the tables. “You?” He was really a man of few words. He had given up on trying to get her into his bed. She wouldn’t budge and he wasn’t one to force himself onto women. Not anymore. Not after…

What she would give for a caramel macchiato. She’d likely give her left eye and kidney, to be honest. One of her greatest ‘miss’ items was caffeine. Old cans of soda, expired stale coffee, they tasted bitter and less than desirable. The random conjurations that Wanda managed during a clean break in her crazed rambling and giggles were often beautiful enough to convert her religious views to the worship of the coffee bean. Yet as amazing as they were, the witch rarely managed any length of sanity these days to warrant getting excited over.

With the lack of any random cups of caffeine magically appearing, she rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes, noting the ever so quiet steps of her shadow.

The tablet’s main screen fritzed for a moment, threatening to darken and she simply sat unmoved, staring at it, as if daring it to cave beneath the protective coding that seemed to be woven through the information they had ‘stolen’. That would be the argument the humans would make once they realized their system had been breached, regardless of how briefly. They’d tout it as mutant theft. Even when the information pertained to mutants they had stolen from.

She was aware of Victor moving into the room because he allowed her to be so. There was no point is claiming she knew he was there simply because. She was exceedingly aware of how quiet he could be, and how unnoticeable be could move. It was one of his perks.

“Thanks.” She replied without looking up from the tablet when he informed her the premises was clear. It was habit for him, she knew that, some need for control on his part. Some need to be sure they were alone and not sitting in wait of capture. He wouldn’t ever divulge the full scope of details in regards to his capture, but she imagined she could guess at some form of them, even in their simplest complexities just by the way his eyes would sometimes seek emptiness. She was lucky to have not ever yet been taken. They didn’t have her mutation. Their having Mystique’s was bad enough.

As he moved about the room, she let her eyes travel up to follow his steps. “If we’re clear, then relax for once.” It wasn’t her intention to be rude, her words simply came out that way rather regularly. “Close your eyes for ten minutes.” She continued. “Ah can watch for that long.” It wasn’t as if she’d be letting fatigue win her over any time soon, she had a screen to stare at until the code peeled open, which it did as if by mental command. “Fancy.” She murmured.

They both wanted something different, yet the exact same. They both wanted to find someone. They both sought a woman. But that was where the similarities ended. She wanted a telepath free to take her from human hands and attempt to shift the weight of power. He wanted free a girl that he had once despised based solely on her genetic makeup. Something had happened while he had been held, something that related to Laura even if he chose to remain silent on the matter. The rare moments he allowed himself to sleep in her presence, she had managed to catch the girl’s name on his lips at least twice. She would be lying if she claimed she didn’t want Laura’s extracted. She had been her friend once.

Her eyes shifted back to the screen that was drawing up half formed blueprints and photos of concrete hallways. “This looks underground.”

Victor grunted at her statement, right him and relaxing. Had she met him? Yet she made a compelling argument about him getting some shut eye for just a few minutes. More than that he couldn’t manage anyway without getting a full blown nightmare. So he grunted some more but sat down in a chair, kicked his feet up on a nearby table and sat back.

He closed his eyes as Paige suggested to him and he knew he would regret it the moment he did. Flashes of needles and scalpels ran through his mind. Cuts on his skin, opening him up while he was still awake because no sedation would keep him under due to his healing ability. He shuddered, not wanting to relive the scene of seeing himself being opened up.

Victor willed himself awake, he came too with a start and he noticed he had started to sweat. Damn nightmares.

He hadn’t been out more than five minutes, and he cursed himself. Yet he didn’t need much sleep to begin with but part of him wondered how long he could go with these short naps before he would collapse of sleep deprivation. Only time would tell.

Paige caught his attention when she mentioned something about it looking underground. He got up, moved to stand behind her and peered over her shoulder. “It does.” He stared at the blueprints and photos and squinted his eyes. “Looks like one of those facilities.” He recognized the layout, even though it wasn’t where he had been kept. No that one had been cleared out after he had escaped. Yet for some reason most of these facilities looked like one another.

“Where is it?”

Her fingers worked with little in the way of mental command to slide across the screen countless times delving further into the files that waited to be opened. Part of her wanted to tell him to sit back down and try again, that shuddering in a half sleep and waking up in a sheen of cold sweat had gained him little in the manner of rest. Likely she’d earn little more than a disapproving grunt in reply. He of little words, she often wondered if he had ever growled at the post man. Pointing that out would start him on some tirade about his healing factor being so perfect that his tired cells simply regenerated themselves. Sure.

His figure behind her cast a faint shadow across where she sat as well as the lit up screen, bt she kept any comment her mind could conjure abut it to herself.

The agreement that it appeared underground had her shuffle further, but his comment that it looked like one of ‘their facilities’ had her pausing and tipping her head to look at him. His prompting or a location had her mind skimming through the last few minutes of investigating. “There were photos of the Potomac River taken from about a quarter of a mile away.” Which gave some direction. Not exactly a clear ‘hey we’re over here’ or anything like that, but at it would draw them towards a region and the Atlantic Coast rather than the Pacific. But, who knew how many places the government kept underwraps and what all was kept at each?

She sighed and tried to keep her frustration and exhaustion in check, even as she pressed the heels of her hands once more against her closed eyes. “That river runs just over four hundred miles long.” If she stared at the photographs better and tried to take in every aspect of each one, perhaps she could attempt to narrow location. That was a job suited for others. There were mutants better equipped to survey landscapes that her. She was good at camouflage and being sneaky. Especially when she had his nose and ears at her disposal.

With most people she would have approached the subject with a little more care and a little more tact, but Victor had asked her on several occasions flat out if she wanted to be screwed in every creative way she had never imagined. “Did they keep you underground?” She asked, genuinely curious because he had never confessed such, but neither had anyone asked, that she knew of. Lowering her hands back at her sides, she turned once more to look up at him. It struck her odd and out of place that anyone had ever managed to hold him at all. She was overly familiar with the fact Victor Creed was not a man to be cornered, and she would admit her familiarity with the strength he possessed in spades. “Ah still have trouble picturing you in a cage, so enlighten’ me that much.”

Victor grunted at her observation about there being some photos of the Potomac River. That didn’t really narrow it down but it helped them to figure out where to start looking though. “I know.” He answered her when she told him how long that River was. He looked at the photos and narrowed his eyes. It looked somewhat familiar but then again he had lived a long life. He had been places it could possibly be that he had been there in that long life.

He couldn’t remember though. Perhaps taking longer naps than those five minute power naps would be better. Especially on the brain.

Paige asked him then, flat out if they had kept him underground. He stood tall, taking a step back like she had slapped him in the face. They never talked about this, nobody even dared to ask him about his time being captured. They were scared of his reaction and rightly so. He didn’t like talking about it. Yet maybe he should.

Her next words made him snort out loud though. Yeah he couldn’t picture himself in one either and yet they had managed to do so for a while.

“They drugged me. Subdued my healing ability.” He said with a rumbling voice. “That way the sedatives worked better on me.” He sounded angry at that. And he was. For a guy like Victor, to feel that helpless was hell on earth. “But they kept me lucid enough while working on me.” He growled, making it sound more like an angry snarl. He turned away from her and kicked against a chair, making it fly through the room.

“It wasn’t underground though. More like a bunker.”

Respect your elders. The idea fluttered through her thoughts when he informed her he knew how long the river was. Obviously, with his super senior citizen status, she supposed he would know. She bit back the urge to tell him to go have himself another old man nap, but bit her lips together instead. No point irritating him now when they still had another couple of days to get back to New York. Unless someone with pretty fluffy wings happened to fall out of the sky in the next five minutes.

She watched him recoil from her, his features narrowing as he held her gaze. Paige sat waiting, unwilling to retract her question and simply waited for him to either answer or to tell her to piss off. At least citing that she couldn’t imagine him in a cage seemed to break his hard exterior some measure and she earned a snort in reply.

The imagery was strange. Big, scary Sabretooth locked up in a cage. Might as well tie a bell about his neck and a slap a pink ribbon on his head.

What he confessed, she had imagined. Inhibited mutation, for him, like a fair few others, a healing factor was central. Stop that up, it was likely somewhat easy to keep him in line with elephant tranquilizers. She smirked at considering the necessity for something meant for such an imposing creature. Then again, Victor possess the presence to be imposing. To some people.

That they kept him lucid while they ‘worked’ on him, chased any measure of amusement from her. Still, she refused to budge when he kicked a chair across the room and it passed within a foot of her before smashing against the opposite wall. Paige swallowed and lower her gaze briefly back to the tablet in her hands. Pushing him was like poking a hornet’s nest, maybe they weren’t home and you could walk away, or maybe they swarmed and stung you to death.

His slight change of subject had her looking back up at him. Bunker. So, still sort of underground. Sort of. Well, some could extend far underground. At least they sometimes did in movies. She wondered how often he had ever seen the sun, or its light while he had been kept. “More digging, then.” She said as she looked back at the screen waiting to be put to use. “Or just make for the coast, or the river to be more precise, and start looking.” She sighed. “Unless Megan can figure out how to access old government records from the old net that may show approximate locations of bunker like facilities.” She chewed at her lower lip. “That’s a long shot.”

Paige looked back up at him briefly before casting a glance towards the open doorway. “Too bad our naturally tech savvy sort are either dead or drowning at the bottom of whiskey bottles.” Her brows lifted. “Maybe some good ol’ fashioned looking with our eyes and you sniffing is in order.”

Yeah more digging, he didn’t like the sound of that. He was done with just finding snippets of hints of where they were hiding other mutants. His patience had shattered, where he once was a dedicated hunter and took his time to stalk his prey, he now didn’t have the time for this bullshit.

So Victor grunted, like he always did when Paige started to yap away with her ideas. She once asked why he didn’t talk much but he figured that she was talking enough for the both of them. And she did. Another thing he appreciated because it meant she distracted him enough to keep his mind away from his dark thoughts.

Megan was a good option but he figured they needed someone else, someone who was better with the tech and the computers and the investigation.

Yet Paige started to mention the guy he had in mind herself already. And yeah the guy was drowning himself in booze but he was still their best bet. “I think we should pay him a visit regardless.” Victor told her. “Then some sniffing.”

So back to New York it was.