ax_main | Simon and Fatale | Backdated 12/11/17

Pam comes to Simon with a request for his help. They both get more than they bargained for.

Pam - because she was very definitely Pam right now, for better or for worse - glanced around before raising her hand to knock on the door she'd scoped out for the past few days. It was the right one, she knew- and considering she was currently invisible, glancing around wasn't going to draw any more attention than anything else she did that didn't make noise.

There was no one in evidence, though, so she knocked on the door, and waited for it to open. Plenty of time to turn visible once she knew if he were actually even there.

Setting his laptop aside, Simon pushed up and moved to open the door, with only a token, 'Yes?' as he did. After all, it was likely Warren, so what was the point, really?

At first glance, it would have appeared there was no one there, but Pam shifted the light, and a short, blue, fifteen year old girl fuzzed into existence. "Hey. Are you Simon? The guy who does the DNA thing?"

Simon took a step back, clearly startled, but almost immediately, he recognized her as one of the Brotherhood members. The teleporter? He hadn't known she could make herself invisible. After a moment, he gave a slight nod. "I am Simon Tam. And I do a lot more than 'DNA', but yes, I can see an organism's molecular structure."

"Cool. Umm," she glanced behind her, then gave him a hopeful look. "Can I come in for a minute? I promise, not a knife on me." Well, one, maybe. But it was sheathed, and she wasn't planning on going for it, so it came to the same thing, right?

"That's...good?" Simon answered uncertainly, stepping back to allow her into the room. Which was, for a boys' room, kind of pristine, actually. Neither he, nor Jean-Paul, liked things lying around. A small couch and ottoman sat beneath a loft bed on one side. On the other, a regular bed and desk were neatly arranged. "And you are?"

Pam was busy looking around the room in wonder - it definitely looked a lot more lived in than the one she'd been assigned, but she supposed that made sense - but turned and blinked as she realized he'd asked a question. "Oh, sorry. I'm Fatale." She smirked. "Figured the blue gave it away, but I guess that's not all that weird here, huh? There's Kurt, and Wanda's new kinda-daughter."

"We do have a lot of different mutants here. I recognize you as Brotherhood, but otherwise, I have not been keeping up. I've been watching over your leader in the infirmary most of the time," Simon admitted.

"Yeah, I know." Fatale grimaced. "I mean...we appreciate that, don't get me wrong. A lot. Just...I've been trying to catch you, and it's been hard." She took a deep breath and exhaled. "I heard someone say you can tell what someone's powers are by touching them. Is that what the molecular structure thing means?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that." Simon closed the door, then leaned against Jean-Paul's desk. "I can read a person's body. I can tell how their physical traits are different than a normal human's - such as organs, brain function, and bone structure. Sometimes, if a person has a mutation that affects these things, I can determine how their mutation works. With a telepath, I can feel that their brain works differently than others. With speedsters, I can register the changes in their cells and metabolism. When I read DNA...the most I can really tell is whether you have the x-gene or not."

He took a breath. "But yes, I've learned to pick out the symptoms of certain powers - so I can determine the power based off of the symptoms I read in a person's body. A shapechanger, for example, has a uniquely malleable cell structure."

Pam nodded slowly, letting what she understood of that sink in, then met his eyes. "I want you to read mine. I can pay for it if you want - I mean, I know it's gonna be a pain in the ass and I'm not asking you to do it for free. But I want to know what they all did." Because...much as she tried to pretend it didn't matter? It did. A lot.

"You don't have to pay me. But honestly, I'm not really sure I feel..." then he trailed off, frowning. "They?"

"The Right." Pam frowned, wondering for the first time whether the school's rumor mill was completely non-existent. News like that got around the Brotherhood, fast. "You know, the bastards who had Tommy. I'm one of their former lab rats."

Simon frowned more deeply. So that's why Shepherd skirted around him so much. He'd hardly ever even seen the other teen. But if he was understanding her correctly, he had been in an experimental facility. He'd heard a little bit about it, mostly from Jean-Paul, but no real details. He hadn't known that there were others in the Brotherhood too. "You'll...have to forgive me. I've been something of an outsider at this school until recently." One could argue he still was. "I didn't know."

"No big deal." Pam shrugged. She'd figured it was all in the info the Boss had given their Kitty Kat girl, but maybe not. Either way, it didn't actually matter. She frowned at his observation about feeling like an outsider though. "Didn't anyone take you on as a newbie? Or do they not do that here?"

How to explain without alienating her? Simon sighed. "I was one of the first people here, but I hid that I was a mutant because I didn't want my family to find out. So most of the student body thought that I was a human researcher attempting to steal their secrets...or something."

"Huh." Pam thought that over for a moment, then shrugged. "Kinda fucked up that they didn't just ask, but whatever." One more way the Brotherhood was obviously better. No surprise, there. "Anyway, you were saying something about not being sure? I'm pretty sure the old bald guy won't kick up a fuss, but if you've gotta check, it's okay. I just really don't want anyone on my team to know."

That was an interesting nugget. But Simon shook his head. "I decided to take a break from reading people for a bit. I had a bad experience with one of the girls here, and it's...I don't know."

Pam stared at him, clearly confused and more than a little annoyed. "Lemme get this straight. You're pissed at one of your teammates, so you're what? Going to go back to pretending you're a flatscan? How does that even make sense?" She shook her head. "Pyro's right; you guys are a bunch of self-centered assholes. Forget I asked." She turned to leave.

Simon gaped, watching her turn away. And...some part of him got angry. Really angry. "I never said I was pissed," he told her coldly. "But I am now. If you really need my help, I'll give it. If you don't want my help, then leave. But don't judge me by a two minute conversation and the rumors you've heard secondhand. I am not self-centered when it comes to the health of another mutant."

Pam spun on her heels, her eyes narrowing. "Make up your mind - you just said you were 'taking a break'. But If I didn't need your help, I wouldn't have come in the first place. Any clue how much I love the idea of a medical exam?"

"It's not a medical exam! Not..." and Simon backed down a bit, "not like you understand it."

"So? I'm not a fucking idiot. Explain it to me." She crossed her arms over her chest defensively, her jaw still set. .

"So, I touch your hand and I basically absorb all of the information about your body. You don't have to take blood tests or sit under an MRI, or have brain scans done - I do it all in a minute or two. Sometimes shorter. It's easier, and usually painless, but it does mean that I may see things you don't want me to see. It's like...a telepath looking into your mind, but your body instead. It's invasive, and a couple of the girls have reacted badly to the fact that I know things about them that could be...uncomfortable," Simon sighed.

Pam's eyebrows rose. "That's it? Seriously?"

"I'm...not sure which part you're surprised by," Simon told her, finally taking a weary seat on the nearby ottoman.

"Well, you said it like it was a big deal," Pam replied, her arms falling to her sides. "You're not talking about anything that hasn't been done a few million times, except without strapping me to a table, pumping me full of drugs, and taking a fuckload of samples. And I get the results - I do get the results, right? Even if they're fucked up?" Especially if they were fucked up, she meant, but yeah. He'd find out soon enough, if he agreed to actually do it.

"Yes," Simon told her, his stomach turning a little at the thought of what she must have experienced. "As well as I can interpret them."

"So," she shrugged. "Not a big deal. If I'd known that was all it took, I'd've asked sooner."

"May I ask why you want to know?" Simon queried, motioning for her to have a seat on Jean-Paul's desk chair.

Pam sat down on the chair and studied her hands in her lap, chewing at her lip for a moment before answering. "I want...okay. This is going to sound fucked up, and I know it, because everyone says it sounds like bad science fiction. But...I don't know how much of my DNA is even mine. Or what my powers are, exactly, or what they would've been." She looked at him, her eyes shadowed. "When they got hold of me, I could turn blue. That was it. I could fucking turn blue. I can't turn not blue anymore, not since round two. But I can teleport. I can bend light, and make myself look like...like Freddy, if I wanted to. I can go invisible, and my hand/eye is fucking brilliant. But none of that's me, or if it is, I don't know how or why it is. Everyone else they tried it on died." She grimaced. "Does that make sense?"

Simon sat back, frowning. “Well, they could not change your DNA, that’s for certain. But... if they have found some technique for activating certain mutations with gene manipulation...” he trailed off, truly horrified. That would mean that these people were either worlds ahead of him, or were carelessly experimenting with science they couldn’t possibly understand. And killing children in the process.

As reactions went, Simon's wasn't the worst she'd ever seen - she was pretty sure Eileen held that honor, considering she'd damn near fucked up the power grid in response. In any case, Pam was pretty used to it by now, and just shrugged. "Maybe? A lot of things are kinda fuzzy from back then. One of the assholes used to talk about DNA re-something or other, anyway, and they picked and chose what they wanted me to be able to do. It didn't all take, though." She swallowed hard at the vague memory of one of those failed attempts - she couldn't remember which, but she remembered feeling as if her body were trying to turn itself inside out, pain coming not in waves but in floods, and the almost wistful conviction that at least it would be the last time, because nothing could hurt like that and not kill you. Except she'd been wrong about that, hadn't she?

Simon stood, reaching for her out of instinct to comfort her like he would River, then pulled his hand away, brushing it over his mouth, breathing out in horror. "My god."

Pam blinked, pulling herself out of the memory with some difficulty, and frowned up at Simon. "What? If my saying that is enough to freak you out, maybe we should just forget this."

His shock bled away to annoyance. "A person can be compassionate without having to be 'freaked out'," he told her. "I - you went through a lot. I'm sorry you had to endure that. I want to help you however I can, but it's possible that my power won't be able to tell the difference between what they did to you artificially and how your gene activated in the first place. Even still, I'm willing to try."

Pam paused. She could still back out on this, and just deal with not knowing. No one was going to judge her - no one was going to know, unless Simon was more of a dick than he seemed and told people. It might be better, in some ways - what good would having her worst nightmares confirmed actually do? Except...if she actually wanted to be more than what the Right had made her into, she was going to have to figure out just who she was.

If.

She took a deep breath, then looked up at Simon and forced an awkward smile. "Yeah. Can we do it here?" Because at the end of the day, Fatale was fucking amazing. But she wasn't sure any more that she wanted to be her full time.

Simon nodded. “Yes. Of course. Anywhere you like.”

Pam nodded, braced herself, and held out her hand.

Simon took her hand in his, then let his eyes close as the rhythm and pattern of every system and organ and nerve ending washed over him. It was...easier now, to witness the scars of abuse. He'd seen it before, and he understood its origin when it came to Pam. It was still sickening to notice small burn scars here and there from electrical shocks, or the remnants of surgery after surgery. She'd been through more than a person should ever have to endure, and it turned his stomach.

He breathed in through his nose, knowing that she wouldn't want him to 'freak out'; it would probably only make her genuinely upset. Steadying his own breathing and heart rate, he forced himself to look past all of the trauma. To look deeper. The odd cocktail of changes to her genome was mind bending - especially in just trying to keep track of what had been done, but as Simon focused less on the DNA itself, and more on the odd mutations she'd been given, his head began to ache, his vision blurring.

He took his hand away, sucking a sharp breath as he put a steadying hand on the desk beside him, silently urging the room to stop spinning.

"What's the prob - hold it, are you okay?" Pam's eyes widened and she got to her feet, grabbed hold of the chair she'd been sitting in and shoved it over behind Simon instead. "Sit." Fuck. Had she broken him? What the hell was she going to do if she had?

"Yes. Yeah. I'm okay, just." He took a seat, holding his head. "Different reaction - than usual."

"Because I'm that fucked up?" The question was out before she even realized she'd asked it, and Pam walked over to the window to stare outside, grasping for some of Fatale's "I don't give a fuck" attitude, but it seemed to keep slipping through her fingers. She flickered, though -visible/invisible - and was oblivious to it.

"No. No, it's not..." Simon tilted his head, blinking slightly at her shifting in the light from the window. "No, it's not you. I don't think it is, at any rate. I was looking at your power when it happened. Not your body. I think...I think I was using a different part of my abilities? That...was new."

Pam frowned and turned towards him. "New abiltiies suck. Are you sure you're okay? I can call someone. Or open a portal to the infirmary if you need to go..." Hopefully under his own power, because she honestly didn't think she could go down there without Alex.

"I'm fine," Simon told her, hoping that he was right on that account. "But we were talking about you, and your powers."

"Yeah, and then we were talking about your and yours, because mine made them go nuts. I was there for both parts." Much to her annoyance, Pam flickered again, but set her jaw and planted her hands on her hips with a trace of Fatale's usual attitude. "So, what did you find out?"

"Let's start with a brief explanation of the science they were trying to pull off, and what they actually did," Simon told her, reaching for a bottle of aspirin in his pocket. "First of all, all of your DNA is your own. The people experimenting on you - maybe they were just bogus scientists, or maybe they were lying to you, but they never added pieces of DNA to you. That's all you. What they did, whether they meant to or not, was incite your original x-gene to mutate your DNA in ways it was never meant to do."

"But..." Pam's forehead furrowed, and she shook her head, no. "No. Someone would die, and then they'd...do whatever they did, and I'd manifest something like what they'd done. How would that..." She flickered as she shook her head again, once, twice - then dug her nails into her left hand, hard. She could do this. She was fucking going to do this, because she needed to know. "I don't understand," she said in a low, measured tone.

"Are you okay to talk about this?" Simon asked quietly.

"I need to know," she said aloud, meeting his eyes. "Just...if I disappear, I'm still here. Just keep talking, okay? I'll show back up once I can."

This was his life. Talking to an invisible person. But Simon nodded, and tried to explain. "The research that these people were doing - it was crude science. They had no idea how to stabilize a person's mutation. Indeed, they were manually forcing mutations that they were never meant to have, basically twisting a person's chemical balance like dough. It was too much for most people to endure - which is why so many of them died.

"As for why you would gain something similar to their powers, that's probably because in the process of experimenting on others, they figured out how to manipulate your x-gene to produce similar results. The implications of this are...frightening, to say the least. They're meddling in science that we still don't know much about, and the fact that so many perished at their hands is evidence of this."

Simon popped the aspirin in his mouth and took a swallow of water. "What my...my newfound knowledge showed me is this: you were never meant to be able to bend light or teleport. Originally, your mutation included the ability to shift the pigmentation of your skin to blue - and to heal yourself when injured. I theorize that it was the second ability that allowed you to survive through the forced mutation process when so many others died."

They'd...used what they learned from fucking up the others on her. New terms, same concept - Pam nodded her understanding of that, and waited for Simon to take his aspirin, wondering whether or not she should ask for one, herself. Her head was feeling pretty fucked up, but she wasn't sure an aspirin would help.

And then he kept going, and Pam tensed up and stared. "I don't heal," she said, shaking her head. "They tried that. Healing. A self-healing assassin would've been fucking amazing, right? It didn't take." But she would have, if it hadn't been for them. Pam lost the fight and let the light bend around her, then gratefully sank down to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. It didn't matter, right? It wasn't like he could see her anyway.

Right. Invisible. Simon kept talking to what might have otherwise seemed like an empty room. "It didn't take because they'd already damaged that gene. Their experimentation basically burned that out of you. It's possible that someday that ability may recover, or on the other hand, you may never be able to use it again. I can't say."

Pam let that sink in. Could heal up, maybe. Somehow, she doubted it. "Same with the blue?" she guessed after enough time that Simon had probably started to wonder whether or not she was actually still there. "They fucked that up, too."

Simon shrugged gently. "I can't say. They were fumbling in the dark - not performing real science."

"Yeah. Someone shoulda made them watch more episodes of Bill Nye. Or Beakman." Pam closed her eyes against the burn and dug her nails into her palms. "Anything else I should know?" She was tempted, almost, to ask if he knew whether or not she was ever going to get full control over the light bending, but decided that if the answer was no, she didn't want to know it.

He started to say something, then stopped himself. It probably wasn't relevant to a teenager in the Brotherhood, anyway.

Pam rolled her eyes and sighed. "Just because you can't see me doesn't mean I can't see you," she pointed out. Reluctantly, she unwound her arms from her legs and got to her feet. "You promised you'd tell me everything."

Simon swallowed for a moment, then stuttered out carefully, "It's...just that. All of the tests and strain. I'm. I'm fairly certain you can't-can't have. I don't think you can have children."

"Oh. Yeah. I knew that." Pam shrugged awkwardly and pushed her hand back through her hair. "They did that on purpose. Or they said they did. Whatever, right? At least Alex doesn't have to use a condom." She took a breath, and began flickering as she dispelled the light that was hiding her, revealing that her eyes looked far more haunted than her casual dismissal of his words would have suggested.

That look in her eyes - Simon found himself breathing a soft, "I'm sorry," anyway.

"Not your fault." Pam forced a quirk of a smile, then let it fade. "That's...not gonna fix itself, right? Even if anything else does?"

Simon shook his head, grimacing a little. "No. They...made sure of that."

Pam looked away for a moment and closed her eyes, swallowing hard, then nodded and turned back toward him. "Right. Probably better." She met his eyes. "Alex doesn't know. Or Tommy. You won't tell them?"

He gave a slight shake of his head. "Everything I saw - everything we've talked - about is between you and me."

That earned Simon an actual attempt at a smile - a little weak, but genuine. "Thanks. For all this. And...for what it's worth? I'm sorry I said you were a self-absorbed asshole. You're okay."

"Oh, it's a familiar sentiment," Simon smiled wryly. "But thank you."

"Welcome." Pam jerked her head towards the door. "I should probably go. Let you get rid of your headache."

"Right. That." Simon was going to have to break it to his boyfriends that he might have a new power. For the moment, he was going to take another aspirin and go to bed. "You know where to find me if you need me."

"Yeah, just stalk your room for a few days, eventually you show up," Pam grinned, a little, then said fuck it and stepped in and gave him a hug, careful to avoid touching his skin with hers so she wouldn't add on to the headache she'd apparently already given him. "I owe you," she promised awkwardly, then stepped back and opened a portal and stepped through, letting it close behind her.

For a moment, Simon just stared blankly at the empty space, too surprised to do anything else. Then, to no one in particular, breathed, "Yeah, sure."