Tommy and Laura Backdated

[ax_x23]

Tommy accidentally almost runs over Laura and they get to talking about the Labs and power limitations.



Laura was exhausted, which was odd considering she could run four miles without breaking a sweat, but she was at her absolute limit mentally. Meeting so many new people with so many different mutations all in a week was draining and she just wanted to sleep. Unfortunately, Megan was in their room and she'd get no rest with her loud humming and chatty personality.

So, instead she sat in front of a tree and leaned her head back against it, letting the quiet sounds of the outside ease her tired mind.

Restless, the professor's speech rattling around in his brain, Tommy had gone for a run to try to burn some of that energy away. It didn't help nearly as much as it used to, even close-to-sonic speeds coming easier, these days. He should probably start going to the gym instead, learn to use the weights or something as a way to get rid of the nervous tension building up inside.

He wasn't paying attention to his route and came close to tripping over someone -- one of the new kids, sitting against a tree on the grounds.

She didn't know if it was because she was tired, but she hadn't quite noticed the strange buzzing sound until it was far too late, when a person going inhumanly fast almost tripped over her. Laura jumped to her feet in a heartbeat, claws coming out of her hands-on instinct as she bared her teeth at the other, a boy she could tell now that he had stopped.

She took a few heavy breaths through her nose as she watched him. He had white hair like Ororo, but he was lighter in skin and smaller, but still taller than her. She needed to calm down, he was probably another student, the chances of that were very high and he would most likely not try to attack.

"Claws? Sweet mutation!" Tommy had skidded to a halt in order to apologize, or check out the new kid, or whatever, but her reflexes were about as good as a non-speedster could get and he held up his hands to demonstrate his harmlessness. Not that empty hands meant a whole lot at a mutant school, but there was only so much a gesture could cover. "Sorry about that. I didn't see you there."

He held up his hands in the sign of surrender, which wasn't right since they hadn't fought, but she understood and moved to stand up straight. She let her claws slide back into her hands and shook them out a little as she continued to watch him. "Many would say you should watch where you are going, but you were going so fast I can see why you didn't see me."

She tilted her head to the side and frowned. "Can you even see going that fast?"

"It's not easy," he admitted, his eyes fixed on her claws as she slid them home. "Sunglasses help, but I keep losing 'em, and goggles are dorktastic. Are the claws your thing, or are you another shapeshifter? It's getting tough to keep up with everyone's deal around here."

"Dork...tastic." She repeated slowly, the word was something she hadn't heard before, but he kept talking so she would focus on it later. Laura shook her head at the shapeshifter question, the realized he wouldn't know so she voiced it. "No, I am not a shapeshifter. My mutation was my bone claws and my healing."

She let one claw extend half way on her left hand before turning to let it slice along her right forearm. The skin didn't even have a chance to bleed as the cut started to knit itself back together at rapid speed, leaving her arm as it had been before.

Tommy flinched back when she went for her own wrist -- dude, hardcore -- and then watched in morbid fascination as the skin sealed itself back up again. "So, if I'm gonna trip over anyone around here, it's better if it's you," he replied with a growing grin. "Nice. I'm Tommy."

Unless he was going at such a fast speed that her legs were ripped off by the force, but then Laura wondered if she could reattach them or if they would just grow back. Laura pursed her lips, not sure if that theory was something she wanted to try and focused back on the boy. "Tommy. My name is Laura."

She slid her claw back in and gripped the hem of her shirt, wondering what would be the right thing to say next. "Have your pants ever caught fire due to the friction?"

He'd been about to make some comment on her claws, but her question caught him off-guard. "I like you," Tommy announced, grinning. "No-one's ever asked me that before. And no, not even when I'm lying through my teeth."

Laura frowned, thoroughly confused. "I am unsure as to what lying has to do with your pants catching fire, is that another one of your mutations?"

He hesitated before chucking another joke right back at her, his expression softening a little. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"You are correct. I am from the state of Arizona." She replied matter of factly.

"And here I thought 'liar liar, pants on fire' was an insult in Arizona as well." Tommy dropped to sit next to where she'd been sitting, sprawling easily on the ground. She didn't look like she was about to run him through with her kill claw, and she was infinitely less boring than any one of a number of other things he was supposed to be doing right about now. "How'd you end up here?" As if he didn't have a good idea.

She watched him sit and debated on if she should sit as well or continue standing, then compromised as she moved into a crouch in front of him. Easier and faster to get up if need be. "My mother told me about this place. She said it was where I would be safest."

She wasn't nearly as feral as Inu-Yasha, and nothing as nasty, but she was definitely up there on the 'skittish' side of things. Tommy nodded. "It's not bad, as far as places go. It's probably the best I've ever been in, in terms of food and shelter and all that useful stuff." In terms of megalomaniacs putting together armies of superpowered children, on the other hand, it was pretty unique.

Laura turned her head to look in the direction of the mansion and nodded. "Yes. They have better beds and it is not nearly as cold as it was back in the labs."

Warmth was something she didn't need, but she loved having it.

Tommy's world didn't slow so much as screech briefly to a sudden and painful halt. Was Laura another survivor? Kitty hadn't said anything about it when she'd shown him the files, but then he hadn't wanted to read them. He relived it enough without seeing the words on the screen as well.

"Which labs?" His voice was quieter as he asked. "The Right's lab out here? I didn't know anyone but me had been in there." She'd said Arizona, but he knew damn well that if a stranger had started asking him questions without a hint that they'd known something similar -- and she was a lot more skittish than he was. With, apparently, seriously good reason.

She noticed immediately his change in attitude and she shifted her weight back a little in case he tried anything. She frowned at the question, not knowing what or who The Right lab was and tugged at the sleeve of her shirt uncertainly. "I do not understand what you are talking about. The lab I came from was a facility in Arizona where I was raised."

She then tilted her head at his last words and watched him carefully. "You are a clone?"

That... was actually a question Tommy didn't know the answer to yet, though his immediate response was to insist that he wasn't. A1 original, right? He compromised on "not officially. There's another guy here like me and we have the same genetic code, but it's more likely that we're twins. It's a long story." And a stupid one.

"The Right is a group out here on the east coast." And probably elsewhere, though what did he know? And since she spoke like Tessa with half the vocabulary, he tried to keep it simple. "They like to experiment on mutants. I was one of their experiment subjects for a while. Not because I wanted to be," he added firmly. "Are you a clone?"

The Right. They sounded like what the facility had done, after all Weapon X had been kidnapped and experimented on against his will, which seemed awfully similar. Laura let out a quiet sigh, disliking that there were more out there other than the one she had destroyed, but blinked when he asked her a question and nodded. "Yes. I am."

"Damn," he said reflexively, for lack of anything immediately better. "So, how many of you are there?"

"Only one." Laura replied, feeling a little proud that she was the only clone to have worked and survive the facility. She moved to sit down, pretty confident that Tommy was not going to attack, but kept on guard in case. "I destroyed the others while they were in the embryo stage, like my mother ordered me to."

And Tommy was forced to re-evaluate again, moving Laura from 'weird but interesting' to 'potential psycho' in one quick adjustment. Not that that was an immediate write-off -- if he' d been raised by the Right rather than brought in later, the shit he might have had to pull could easily have ended up being described along similar dispassionate lines. "Harsh," he commented instead of saying any of that. "I always figured the point of building a clone army was the 'army' part of it."

"No, my mother was not-" Laura had to pause as she thought about that, Kinney had been a part of the project and Facility, but had been the entire reason Laura escaped. "My mother was not in charge. She was a geneticist, the one who made it possible to create me. She did not like what the men in charge were having me do, so she came up with an escape plan, which involved destroying the other clones before they could be born."

She took a deep breath and let it out slow, that had been the longest she had spoken in a very long time. It was tiring.

Okay, that took it back to 'completely understandable,' and Tommy nodded along. "Nuke the research and get the hell out? Excellent plan. Glad to see you made it here in one piece." And man, that opened up a whole lot of other questions. "Do you know if your project was the only one? Or were they working on guys as well?"

"Mmm." Laura mulled his question over, she had seen the other tubes, but they had all been marked female. "My donor was male, which is what they wanted me to be, but the sample's Y chromosome had been badly damaged. I did not see any other projects that Rice may have been working on at the Facility and there were no other male clones."

"So much for that theory," Tommy grumbled under his breath. "You said Kinney was your mom? I'm guessing you don't mean your 'donor,' then. Did she get out with you?"

Laura grew quiet at that question, hunching her shoulders and almost physically curling in on herself at the memory of Kinney before everything happened. How she still reached for Laura even after everything Laura had done. "No," She replied quietly. "She did not make it."

Ah, shit. He probably should have known that answer before he'd even asked, considering where she was. "I'm sorry," he offered. "That sucks."

Laura watched the ground for a while, doing her best not to think of that time, and took a deep breath before looking back up at the white-haired boy. "It is in the past. How did you escape your lab?"

"I blew it up." It was an easy shorthand, anyway. Though she'd understand better than most the kind of trouble he'd actually gone into. "They kept me drugged a lot of the time," Tommy said aloud, the first time he'd talked about that since the first couple of days at Xavier's when his brain was still fuzzy. "But they got sloppy, and I burned off enough of the meds faster than they expected one day. So, I made some shit explode and I got the hell out. Xavier picked me up after that. When'd he find you?"

"That is impressive." She remarked quietly, giving his legs a once over, surprised that even with lean muscle those legs could generate enough speed to make something explode. She might have to reevaluate his threat level. "He did not find me. I was told in a letter from my mother that his school was here, so I traveled here by myself. Though, he did meet me at the gate, telling me he had been expecting me."

She frowned at that, still not quite sure how he knew.

Another one Xavier hadn't made the effort for. What did he do, just wait around for kids to show up? Maybe he was afraid of taking on the Right, in a way local cops didn't seem to bother him. Tommy wasn't sure if he was happy about that or not. (Not happy that Xavier was afraid, but that there might be a reason other than 'Tommy Shepherd wasn't worth the work' that had been dogging him for months.)

"And all's well that ends well," Tommy cracked, though his smile was twisted and wry.
"Mmm." Laura agreed softly, reached down to touch the grass before glancing back up at him. "If you are not a clone...you have a family? Or were you born in the lab?"

Weapon X had been brought in against his will, but maybe they had a way of testing if a baby in the womb was to be a mutant and made deals with expecting mothers. That was a bleak thought.

"I had a family. Parents, anyway. They signed me over to the lab when I was too much trouble to keep." He kept his expression as easy as he could. What did he care about Frank the asshole and Mary the weak, anyway?

"That sounds very drastic for a form of discipline." If she meant it as a joke it was hard to tell because her face remained stoic. Then she glanced off to the side, and offered something in return for his truth. "The head of the project was upset with my mother for making me female, so he refused to use anesthetic for my claw surgery."

"Owww, geez!" Tommy winced and flinched purely on principle, though given the way her healing thing seemed to work, maybe it wouldn't have been as bad? "So you do feel pain, even though it heals up fast? That sucks."

"Yes." She replied, turning back to face him. "Being shot or stabbed still hurts as much as it would hurt you, I just can't die from it."

She didn't want to think about if she could die. After being shot eighty-three times and still surviving left her with some terrifying thoughts of never passing. Change directions. "How fast can you go?"

The rapid subject changes didn't phase him at all, her thoughts seemingly bouncing around as much as his did on a regular basis. "Just me running? I can break the sound barrier," he replied matter-of-factly. It wasn't bragging when it was true.

She nodded slowly, letting it sink in that a person could go at that speed and not die without protection. She tilted her head to the side, pushing her long hair behind her ear and fixed him with an intent look. "Can you show me? The exploding talent, not breaking the sound barrier. I wouldn't be able to actually see that."

Like he'd say no to that kind of challenge? Tommy's grin spread. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he offered, and it was kind of a disappointment that she probably wouldn't get that joke either. "What can those claws of yours cut through, other than meat?"

At the tone of his voice and grin, Laura guessed what he said had probably been another reference to something she didn't understand. She raised an eyebrow, but nodded after a moment and stood up as she let her claws extend. "Anything. They are made from adamantium. Strongest metal in the world I'm told, so give me something."

He didn't exactly have much on him that was hard enough to be interesting against the strongest metal in the world (which he'd never heard of, but metallurgy hadn't exactly been a thing in junior high). On the other hand, there was all kinds of shit in the kitchen that would probably qualify. He vanished and reappeared a split-second later with a knife-sharpener rod thing from one of the kitchen drawers. It said 'steel' on it, anyway. He grabbed it by each end and held it out to Laura, his hands about eight inches apart. "Go for it."

She barely blinked before he was back with something and she almost wanted to smile at how easy it was going to be. She judged the distance of his arms, making sure that when she moved she would not accidentally slice his face open and moved into position. She extracted her claws from her left hand, raised it up and then brought it down against the sharpener quickly.

It sliced cleanly into three pieces, handle and tip still in Tommy's hand while the middle fell to the ground.

Tommy didn't flinch, but it was a damn near thing. Those claws came way too close for his tastes, and sliced through the knife steel like it was a cheese stick. "Damn. They must just love you going through the metal detectors at airports."

"I have never tried." She replied as she retracted her claws. "But I do not think they would like me if they made me miss my plane."

She turned and gave him an expectant look. "I showed you mine, now it is your turn."

Tommy grinned. "One explosion, coming up." What was around that he could annihilate? Terry'd taken out a dead tree showing off her scream, but there weren't any of those nearby. The path, on the other hand... Tommy found a rock about the size of his fist, and he bounced it in his hand a couple of times before flinging it up into the air.

Pop fly.

It went up, he reached for it with his mind, and started it vibrating. It started to come down -- shit. Make it go faster before it hit eye level -- the rock finally obeyed and exploded into a billion tiny fragments, about three feet above their heads.

Laura watched in fascination as Tommy was able to make the rock in the air explode without touching it, the rock nothing more than dust now. She quickly covered her eyes as she felt sand rain down on their heads, waiting until it was done before reaching up to feel the grit in her hair. "That was very impressive."

"It scales up easy," Tommy replied, pleased with himself and not caring about how much he showed it. "Rocks, buildings, whatever -- everything blows when you accelerate it fast enough."

"Even people?" She asked, briskly rubbing her fingers against her scalp in order to get the sand out of her hair. "Could you do it to a person?"

"I said everything, didn't I?" Tommy shook his head fast and sand and grit flew everywhere. "People are made of molecules, like everything else. I don't know exactly how it works - that's Kitty's department - but I can feel them. Make them go faster. When I do it to myself, it feels like... time stops. To everyone else I'm going fast, to me it feels like a glitched video game. When I do it to things that aren't me, the strain tears them apart."

Laura watched him for a while as she thought about what he said before looking down at her arms in thought. "I wonder who would be quicker. You or me."

Tommy cocked his head in confusion. "Unless you can run supersonic, that's a no-brainer. I'm faster than anyone here other than Jean-Paul. And he can only beat me in a sprint."

"No." Laura shook her head. "You do not understand. I meant, whether you speeding up molecules would be faster than my healing ability."

And that actually made him pause, and think. "Yes? Maybe. Your healing kicks in once something bad's already happened. And exploding you happens all at once, so your molecules wouldn't be close enough together anymore. Unless you're like a worm and each part grows back new parts. Then all the little bits of you would heal separately and we'd end up with like a million Lauras running around the place."

"If that happens, then the facility wasted far too much money on cloning." She looked at her hands and wiggled her fingers. "I wonder if I could come back from it or if that would be it."

Tommy shook his head. "And if you can't? We'll be picking meat off the lawn for months."
Laura shook her head. "The birds will eat it."

She gave a small sigh and looked down at the knife sharpener she had sliced, reaching down to pick a piece up. She looked at it for a while, then looked over at Tommy. "Are there any others here from the labs?"

He shook his head. "Not here, not that I know of. There are two others I've met, but they hang with a different crowd."

"The brotherhood?" She asked quietly, having heard that name around the school quite a bit after Xavier's announcement. "Others that were taken there like you?"

He wasn't giving too much away by mentioning them, he decided, especially if he didn't use their names. After all, Laura was part of the whole thing too. "Yeah. They were in a different lab, and they were there longer. A couple of years, I think. But they're not clones. Not that I know of, anyway," he amended. "One was part of an experiment like mine -- how to make our powers bigger, more explodey. And the other one was a DNA test site. They were trying to give her other people's powers."

The scowl that made its way onto her face was ugly as she thought about all the doctors’ impassive faces as Rice operated on her while she was awake and how there were now more of them out there who saw them as only things to be poked at or cut open. Laura tossed the small piece metal off to the side, feeling the need to rip something up until it was unrecognizable rise. "I have to go. It was nice to meet you, Tommy."

People's usual reaction to hearing about the labs and the experiments wasn't usually jumping for joy, but the look on Laura's face surprised him. He had a moment of concern that she was going to go hunting for Pam and Alex, but there was nothing he'd given her that could lead their way. So...? "What's with you all of a sudden?"

"I have to go. I-” She had been told she needed to communicate better, but the idea of telling him she need to go vent her anger physically did not seem the best. "I am mad." She tried to explain. "I'm mad and normally when that happens I-"

Destroy.

"Blow up?" Tommy asked, suddenly more interested. "Or get big and freaky?"

Laura glared at him, not appreciating his contribution at all and unsheathed her claws. "No. I slice things into thin ribbons."

"Okay, claws out, that's my cue to go." Tommy tossed off a half-assed salute and took to his heels. "Have fun with the slicing and dicing," he called back over his shoulder, right before he put on that burst of speed.