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Chapter 2

On her night table, a framed picture of Stephen smiled at her. To Kennie with all of my love, it read, scrawled in her boyfriend's... ex-boyfriend's endearingly haphazard hand.

She would not cry. Not an option to let the lump in her throat win the war, or let the sting behind her eyes spill out in wet droplets that were threatening to spatter on the coverlet on her bed.

She gave her eyes an angry wipe with the back of her hand and set to packing her duffel bag with seam-bursting vigour. So caught up was she in manhandling clothes into the bag that she was startled by a rap on the door frame.

Dylan walked in, Lux on his shoulders, her tiny hands firmly fastened in his black hair like she was holding the reins of a particularly stubborn mustang. As usual, the child was laughing at apparently nothing more than the joy of being alive but her sunny expression turned solemn at the sight of her big sister.

“Hey, Monkey,” Dylan said softly and leaned against her dresser, dislodging Lux from her perch and setting her on the bed.

“Munn-key,” Lux said precisely and giggled to herself.

“You come to tell me off too?”

“Nah. Don't know which of them's more pissed,” her brother said quietly, picking up one of the bracelets on her dressed and handing it for the toddler to inspect. There was a moment of silence broken only by the sound of Lux sucking enthusiastically on wooden beads. “Think you've really upped the ante on the whole parental explosions front. Fuckin' near thermonuclear.”

“Watch your language,” Kendall said absently, trying in vain to hunt down a pair of hole-less socks from the dresser's drawers.

“Pfft. Bringing home the next report card should be a cakewalk compared to this,” he said glibly, too glibly. “Math is kicking my ass out of the window this year.”

“Dylan!”

“Alright, defenestrating my delicate derrière. Sheesh! You think she hasn't heard all of the fancy words from Dad yet?”

The siblings took a moment to snicker together. Some things you didn't need to learn at school from your friends.

“I thought he would've taken this better,” Kendall said quietly.

“I know, right? It's pretty cool that they have a custom-tailored position ready for you.” There was awe in Dylan's voice.

“I thought so too,” she said and shook her head. She sat down on the bed and picked her baby sister up, wondering what Lux would look like when she saw her the next time. If there was a next time. Kendall sighed and kissed the girl's forehead. Would the two-year old forget her big sister in time, would they be strangers when their paths next crossed?

“I thought they would get it,” she said to Lux, watching the toddler frown at her in confusion. “I wanted to have something for myself, you know? To be wanted because who I am, not because I'm daughter to two X-Men and happened to inherit their mutations in a merry cocktail of claws and thunderbolts.”

“I know,” Dylan said with all the sullen air a fourteen-year old boy could muster. “So you really are leaving at the crack of dawn?”

“Yep,” said Kendall and bounced Lux. “Dunno when I'll be back again.”

“Don't probably hate go, though,” Dylan snorted.

“And no-one's wedding ring to wear when I get back either,” she said quietly, sliding the bracelet, doubled up, on Lux's arm. The girl laughed her delight. “I hate that song.”

“Yeah, and I'm Elvis. I used to think you'd wear the CD out.”

“Brat,” she said but there was little fire behind it. The damned lump was back in her throat.

“Stuck-up bitch,” Dylan countered in an oddly strained whisper. “Gonna be in permanent nirvana once I see you take off.”

“Liar,” she said and this time the tears did come, falling on befuddled Lux, who got awkwardly squished between her older siblings as they hugged each other.

For a moment they weren't the constantly bickering sister and brother who had found it hard for years to be in the same room without scratching each other's eyes out. Instead, they were the two kids who used to walk to the school bus together, the siblings who were inseparable friends in the face of the evil old world. Kendall wasn't the quickly hardened youngest leader of the X-Men's newest team, Ecru, and Dylan wasn't the slouchy, short teenager just beginning to come to grips with the power surging through his veins. For a few breaths, they were the short little boy who got bullied in school and the older sister that was his avenging guardian angel always watching his back.

Kendall straightened gruffly and wiped her eyes again, purposefully not looking at her little brother as he did the same. The Howlett-Munroe genes came with a touchy pride.

“Got you something," Dylan said shakily after a moment, digging something flat out of the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie. “Meant to give it to Mom to put it in her office, but I figure you're gonna need some target practise material.”

It was a photo, shot in panorama style, taken that summer on a family picnic. Dylan, a budding photographer, had managed to snap a shot of their unsuspecting family. Their mother was tickling Lux's nose with a stalk of grass. The child, as usual was laughing, seated on the chest of their father who was lounging on the picnic blanket a careless ear-to-ear grin on his face. His cowboy hat was on Kendall's head, and she was sticking out her rolled tongue at her brother who was puckering his lips at her in a mock kiss. Behind her stood Stephen, guitar slung rakishly across his back like a poor man's Johnny Cash, looking at her with adoration written across his face.

Kendall swallowed. It was a perfect moment caught on celluloid, and she folded the picture carefully and stuck it inside her wallet. “Thanks,” she ground out. “Wish I could give you a keepsake myself.”

“Could always sneak me out tonight to the tattoo parlour,” Dylan said hopefully, hankering for the Maori-style tattoo he'd been wanting since he'd turned twelve.

“Nah,” she said and rolled to her feet, setting her little sister on the floor. “Think I can do better than that.”

Dylan watched her fingers skim across the floorboards directly under the night table next to the bed and deftly pry a seemingly nailed-down plank up by the edges. She rummaged inside the floor a while and eventually pulled out an oblong bundle of cloth. She set it down across Dylan's knees and plonked the board back in its hole.

“It's no katana, but it's not half bad.”

Dylan unwound the heavy black fabric to reveal a curving ornate leather sheath with an even more ornate bone handle sticking out of it.

“Draw it out,” Kendall said softly. The blade slid out, and even Dylan knew a perfectly balanced blade when he held one in his hand. It was a kukri, curving in an angle of efficient, lethal beauty.

“It's yours, kid.”

“I can't take this, Kennie!”

“You can and you will,” his big sister said in her field commander's voice. “It's not just for your sake, you know.”

She turned to face the window and gazed at the rain lashing the glass, eyes fading white as she absently read the air before her. “Mom gave me that knife when you were born.”

“... But you were only five!”

“I know,” she said softly. “I was real jealous of you, see? You got all the attention I was used to gettin'. I wanted to be the baby again. And possibly murder you in your crib.”

“And this has changed how, exactly?”

“Har har. Anyway, Mom said that as much as I'd always be her baby, I'd need to be a big girl and hold my chin up because a big sister's job was to guard and guide her little brother. Set a good example, that sort of thing, and since I'd been begging Dad for a pocket knife for ages I got one on the grounds I would stop whining about you taking my place as the baby.”

“Pretty extreme knife for a five-year old.” Dylan was turning the blade this way and that almost reverently.

“You know Mom.”

“Be careful what you wish for?”

“Exactomundo.” Kendall turned back to watch her brother catch Lux as the toddler ran at him gleefully. The child had recently mastered the art of moving fast but had not yet found the brakes, and stopping was often a matter of collision, not slowing down. “And with me gone, you're gonna look after Luxie like I looked after you. No arguments accepted.”

“Wasn't gonna make any,” Dylan said. “Any other words of wisdom? Threats, demands, other hidden stashes of deadly weapons I should know about?”

“There are two hand grenades under that floorboard, too. Mom keeps a bottle of tequila under the sink in the mansion's loft, the spare keys to Dad's Speed Triple are in an hollow cut into the middle of War and Peace in the den bookshelf, and there are three emergency phone numbers of Mum's old boyfriends on the bottom of the earless coffee mug that she keeps pens in the kitchen. You get into a seriously big mess and no-one is around, you call one of them.”

“Woah,” Dylan said. “Can't I call you and have you come in guns blazing?”

“Just keep outta trouble an' you won't have to.” Kendall took the kukri from her brother's hand and sheathed it with practised ease. “Keep it sharp and learn to use it.”

“Yes ma'am,” Dylan said and saluted her, standing up and tucking the knife in his hoodie's pouch. Something serious was lurking under the light tone and joking, though, a new maturity blossoming in her kid brother's eyes, the first hints of adulthood hiding behind the softness of his boy's features.

“Man, I wish I had heard that from you more often growing up,” she grumbled half-heartedly as she ushered Dylan out of her room as Lux took off towards the hallway in a waddling sprint.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you love me 'coz you can butt heads with me, Monkey!” came a shout from the general direction of the stairs as her brother gave chase to the toddler at large.

“I do, don't I?” Kendall said softly to herself, turning back to her packing. The weight in her chest had shifted, somehow lighter and heavier at the same time, and excitement fluttered in the pit of her belly, rivaling dread.

Close your eyes and I'll be on my way...


A/N: A Triumph Speed Triple looks something like this.





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