A/N: Please leave a review, I hope you enjoyed this story as much as enjoyed writing it. I will be posting a sequel, I am just not sure when. Probably in October. -MOTH (Maiden of the Heavens)
Chapter 18
Thirteen-year-old Laura Howlett sat on the floor outside of Doctor Henry J. McCoy's office, the royal blue furred X-Man was now doctor to all of the institute staff and students. And he was the only mutant that Laura and Logan trusted. She could hear her parents, Ann-Marie and Logan speaking as clearly as if they were beside her, rather than being behind a shut door and walls that were papered with sailboats and seagulls. Laura was supposed to be occupying her seven-year-old half-sister, Sybil Jean with her favorite book, A Wind in the Door. But her concentration was elsewhere, her father had not hidden the symptoms well even though he tried very hard too, which Laura was really grateful to him for, she just wish they would have told her the truth. She was old enough to handle it, even though he had been beginning to deteriorate after Sybil's third birthday.
Laura heard his coughing fits in the middle of the night, and she found the bloodied handkerchiefs when she helped Rogue with laundry. The four of them had moved to a quiet three-bedroom house out in the country. There was a large amount of woods and fields for Laura and Sybil to explore together. Laura tried not notice that wounds that her father earned while fixing up the barn that was on their property: a broken finger, a twisted ankle from when he fell off the roof, foolishly trying to patch it up during a rainstorm. All of these wounds were agonizing slow to heal even with Logan's rapid healing factor. His mutation could not be killing him…it had to be the adamantium, there was a high possibility that it was peeling off of her father's bones and into his bloodstream.
Laura shuddered at the thought that it would probably happen to her next. She took Sybil by the hand and led her to the lounge area of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Laura did not want to hear anymore of Doctor McCoy's explanations through the door. They had traveled from their home in her father's rusted up pickup truck to the school because August was slowly losing to September. The leaves had started to change color, the days growing shorter and nights growing longer.
During the school year, Laura and Sybil stayed at Xavier's. Laura stayed with her old roommates and now best friends: Jubilation Lee, Rahne Sinclair, and Talia Wagner. While Sybil, used to living on the farm with all the freedom she could desire, would be starting her first year at the institute so Rogue could go back to working as a social worker for children with the X gene.
Laura plopped herself down on the plush carpeting and placed the backpack she had brought in with them. The oldest Howlett sister busied herself with plaiting Sybil's pearl-white hair that floated down her back into a fishtail braid. Sybil's Mauveine eyes were drawn to the next chapter in A Wind in the Door. If Laura had not been fretting so much, she would have put in a movie to distract her, but instead she grabbed a binder from within the depths of the backpack, it was also packed with teriyaki beef jerky, coloring books and colored pencils. Laura's sketchbook and her case for her very important art supplies. She wanted to pull out her copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and get to chapter eight, but she knew that finding out where her classes were going to be was far more important.
She scanned down the list of her classes and let out a groan of annoyance. Why had she decided to sign up for German? She did not realize she had said it out loud when a voice that she instantly recognized brought an excited grin to her face.
"Guten Morgen, Cousin."
Laura launched herself into her cousin's arms and relief washes over her as she buried herself into the fabric of his We Came As Romans t-shirt. "I missed you, Ivan."
He set her down as Sybil came up to be squished into a pick-me-up bear hug next. Ivan certainly had his father's build and at eleven years old, he was taller than Laura and would probably tower over her once puberty hit. For now, Laura reached his chin. He had his mother's green eyes, but instead of the haunted doll-like glaze that sometimes-clouded Aster's eyes, Ivan's were clear, on high alert, and kind.
Laura had nearly forgotten that Ivan would be starting at Xavier's this year. His mother Aster had taught him how to control his Mutation to the best of her ability. Ivan could creepily control other people's blood from within their skin, he could even hear people's heart beats from fifty feet away. He could also see in the dark, it as if he was wearing night-vision goggles. When his claws were, out and elongated from his fingernails, they were hard as diamonds and as could tear through someone's flesh like a hot knife through butter.
Laura smiled softly as Sybil abandoned her book and dragged, Ivan to the kitchen. She followed after them, and found her Aunt Aster in the kitchen with Vervain, Ivan's four-year-old little sister. Her dark chocolate hair hung loose down her back as she played with her favorite stuffed animal rabbit, her eyes were the color of ice, sharp and almost silver. When she smiled up at Laura and wriggled out of her mother's arms to her, Laura happily picked her up and hugged her close.
Aster only smiled softly and let out a sigh when her mobile rang in her hand, causing the pictures she had been showing Vervain of Ivy's children, Amaryllis, who was five, and Jean-Luc who was three. They both had their mother's dark and curly hair, but Amaryllis had Gambit's eyes, and Jean-Luc had Ivy's.
Aster looked hesitant as she answered the phone, and when she did. It was in sharp and harsh words in her mother tongue of German.
Laura's blood ran cold and she could feel it draining out of her face as well when Ivan stopped dead and his face became dark and grim. Laura bolted out of the kitchen seconds before Rogue started screaming and crying. The kind of sobs that wrenched a person's heart. Laura let her claws loose and broke down the door. She stopped dead and dropped to her knees.
All she could do was stare at Logan's body, her chest hurt too much to breath. He had just made them French toast and bacon for breakfast this morning. They had just been out taking care of the Silkie and Bantam chickens together before they clambered into the pickup truck and sang along, loudly and out of tune to Sexy and I Know It by LMFAO.
Laura hesitantly crawled toward him, tears were stinging and burning her vision. "Daddy…." his name came out in a whimper.
She roared until her throat burn and sobbed until her eyes were sore. She watched in a numb haze as her mother, Ann-Marie allowed the paramedics to take his body away, to be put into a morgue, until they could plan his funeral.
Laura slept beside Sybil, holding the little girl so tight that she could feel her sister's heart beating in rhythm with her own. She held Sybil until the seven-year-old and finally cried herself to sleep and she stayed with her, unable to fall asleep herself.
What were they going to do without him?
Laura sat in front of her father's grave wearing ragged blue jeans and one of his old hoodie's over the red t-shirt that she wore. It had a white circle and the yellow lightning bolt going through it, the symbol for her favorite Justice League member, The Flash. She told him about how her meds needed to be upped in dosage again because she was going through puberty. How embarrassing it had been when Rogue had to take her shopping for bras. How excited she was that she had finally finished reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with Sybil, and how the eight-year-old was excelling in her math and science classes, and that Sybil was even taking ballet lessons.
But Laura bit her lower lip and dug her own foot claws into the soft earth below as she struggled on whether or not to tell her father's gravestone about how Deadpool had brought over a filthy six-year-old Amaryllis and a four-year-old Jean-Luc. Their house had been nothing but rubble on top of them, Deadpool had to dig them out.
All Amaryllis could tell them was that it was Gambit, who had caused the house to be nothing but dilapidated stone and wood. He had caused the house to collapse in order to protect Amaryllis, who had taken Jean-Luc down into the basement like she had been told.
Uncle Remy and Auntie Ivy were missing, just like how Uncle Victor had gone missing before Ivan was to start at Xavier's last year. Laura swore silently, she wished that the adults would allow her to help search, but of course, it was considered to be far too dangerous.
As if she would let them stop her, she placed the flowers that Sybil had picked for Laura to leave for Logan, and stood up to go back to where Talia was waiting in the shadows of a tree beside her own father's stone, Ivan was standing beside her picking imaginary dirt from out of his claws out of boredom.
They had research to do and evidence to find.