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Three Days' Grace II: You're One Of Us	By : AquilaLorelei Category: X-Men: (All Movies) > General Views: 1093 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the X-Men movies, or any of the characters from them. I make no money from from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Three Days' Grace II: You're One of Us
- 1
Three Days’ Grace II: You Are One of Us

Author: Logan’sSheWolf

E-Mail: (lpuhala(at)bgnet.bgsu.edu – replace (at) with @)

Rating: Hard ‘R’ for "strong language and thematic elements"

Continuity: "Rescue Me"/X2 crossover (You’ll see-I promise I’ll make it work!)

Summary: Tommy sees the dead. And can change emotions. Someone knows and wants to exploit his talents.

Disclaimer: Own no characters—in fact, own nothing except the storyline.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Third of three in the "Three Days' Grace" trilogy. The previous two (to be published later, as each is a standalone) are "Three Days' Grace I: Your Eyes" (X2 continuity only) and "Three Days' Grace II: You're Perfect" (X2 crossover with "nip/tuck")

It was somewhere near 2:30 in the morning and the crew was in from putting out a blaze in a dingy high-rise. Stupid kids and their weed, anyway.

Tommy pulled a bottle of Miller out of the fridge and popped the cap on the edge of the counter, then sat down at the table to brood. Ever since he blamed the kitchen for his family’s departure, he’d taken to brooding. Well, Tommy himself would call it something more manly, like "stewing" or "mulling over," or even "sulking," but still brooding it effectively was. He knew, of course, that there was no sense in wondering what might have been, but it’s not like he was anywhere near the point that platitudes would help.

He heard rather than saw Sean come up over his right shoulder.

"Hell of a fire tonight," the younger man said.

"Yeah—Shit, one of ‘em was so stoned I had ta’ pull ‘im out by his fuckin’ armpits—Fourth floor, too. All-the-fuckin’-way down. Man, never again." He shook his head ruefully, "Let the druggies burn. Less trouble on our goddamn streets, y’ know?"

"Well, yeah, but I’m just glad we got the little girl out safe, you know. She was so sweet. All blonde hair and blue eyes. Can’t believe someone would’ve just left her there."

"Well they were too stoned to care! Fuckin’ losers… But yeah, she was cute. Reminded me of my Colleen at that age."

"Hey, sorry to ‘ve—" Sean held up his hands and slunk toward the door as he realized Tommy had begun to simmer once again in his own vat of emotion.

"No, hey, no it’s okay—You didn’t do nothin’, just said the little girl reminded me of my own. Doesn’t mean y’ killed me ‘r anything. I mean, I can think about ‘em by now without—Aw, shit, no I can’t. Look, man, just…go away!" he growled, and then, more to himself than Sean he mumbled, "Man can’t get a moment’s frickin’ peace around here without somebody bustin’ in on it…Shit…"

He put his head in his hands and fell silent, resting for a moment leaned forward on the table. Sean had finally stepped through the door completely.

A few minutes later he heard Sean’s footsteps again. He raised his head as he felt Sean put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"You look like you could use some cheering up."

"Don’t even think about it, you upstart little punk! I just wanna’ be left alone—Is that too freakin’ much to ask of people here?"

Before Tommy even had time to think of another snarl that would be sure to get Sean to leave, the young man had him pinned to the chair by his shoulders and was straddling his lap!

"Hey, listen man I never for one second believed those rumors that you were a fag! I mean—!"

Suddenly—even more suddenly than the previous series of motions, Tommy felt Sean change somehow, felt flesh and bone shift, serpentlike, heard a scratching sound like the claws of rodents in the walls of old buildings, and in the young man’s place was a ravishing blonde woman! He jolted, she stilled him with a hand to his lips.

::Oh, that’s it, I will never have another fucking beer as long as I live! There is no goddamn way I ain’t dreamin’. Shit, if I can’t hold my beer for more than five minutes anymore, I’m just frickin’ done. Last drink. Ever!::

"I am so dreaming you right now, aren’t I?" he asked when she freed him.

She smiled, more a cat’s than a human’s, he noticed. He assessed the rest of her. Pink Cupid’s-bow lips. Eyes of cornflower blue, wavy hair maybe to her chin. Blue-scaled dress. And a knockout body.

"Is this how you’d dream me up?" she asked with a sultry laugh in her voice.

"Who are you?" he asked, one eyebrow asking the question as loudly as he did himself.

"Uh-uh-uh." She shook her head, mockingly. "All in good time."

"What are you doing here? How did you do that? I mean, one minute you’re Sean, and then the next you’re—You’re that! Either I’m on something and I’m hallucinating—which I haven’t done since college, thank you very much!—or you have one fucked-up talent that could make you an absolute killing as a circus freak!"

She simply smiled wider, shrugged a little. "I’ve been called worse. I’m actually here for a very specific reason. You."

He looked down at her, still in his lap. "Well I can see that!"

She actually did laugh this time. "No, no. Those dead you’ve been seeing? They’re not a product of your overactive imagination, they’re not some symptom of psychological overload. They’re every bit as real as you and me. No, the reason is infinitely more simple…"

The mystery woman leaned down close to Tommy’s ear and whispered tenderly, almost intimately, "You’re one of us…"

She drew back and waited for his reaction. Only confusion greeted her.

"One of what? Some kind of freak? Oh, hell no!"

"Well, there are many who would call us that, and yes, we are all "different" each in our own way. But no. We are mutants."

He vaguely remembered hearing something about mutation in his high school science classes. But it was sketchy at best. There were also snippets on the evening news about some black-clad mutant vigilantes that the law could never keep up with.

"So you’re saying I have some kind of…powers?"

"Power. Just one, as far as we can tell right now. As you have probably figured out, you can communicate with the dead, and they with you."

"But it’s only people I know—You know, my cousin, God rest his soul, or that one girl with—with the cat, you know? The burn victim, with the skin? The boy…"

"You just haven’t focused hard enough. Come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"To meet an…associate of mine."

"At this time of night? I mean, most people sleep, you know?"

"He made it a point to find you. He would tend to find your hostility toward the world…useful…"

The two walked outside the front door of the firehouse with barely a backward glance.

"Goin’ out f’r some air, Chief!" he called back over his shoulder.

"Me, too!" she called in Sean’s voice.

"Don’t frickin’ do that!" he whispered, sotto voce as he nudged her in the ribs.

"It’s really creepy!"

"Sorry," she answered.

The pair passed Lou on the way, and Tommy acknowledged his friend with a nod. Suddenly Tommy caught a glimpse of a tiny baby girl, wired up in an incubator. He felt a pervasive, abiding sadness there and realized the girl was his daughter and she was dead. He shook his head a few times to clear it and jogged back to catch Lou.

"Hey, man I’m sorry about your daughter…"

Leaving his incredulous superior in his wake, Tommy returned to the woman’s side.

They stepped out into the cool night air. Tommy lit a cigarette and took a draw from it, watching the smoke drift away on the cold winter wind. "Light?" he offered as he saw her draw out one of her own.

"Thank you. Ah, here comes my associate now…"

A distinguished, if unremarkable older gentleman in a khaki suit with hair the color of a leaden sky stopped in front of the pair.

"Ah, my dearest Grace…" he bent down and kissed her hand. She blushed faintly under his attentions. The tableau read like a scene from another age.

He turned to address Tommy. "And you must be…?"

"Tommy Gavin. What’s it to ya’?"

"What it is to me, dear boy, is I’ve discovered you to have a certain…gift that may come in useful to aid my cause."

"I can see the dead…" he confided furtively.

The old man just smiled.

"Yes, I know, dear boy, and you are also an empath. What do you see around me?"

Tommy felt the wave of grief hit him before he could see a single image. He collapsed to his knees on the sidewalk, half-sobbing in inarticulate pain.

"Shit," he ground out, "So much fire…She’s…God, she’s calling for you—Her clothes burned first. She suffered. She loved you. I’m so, so sorry…"

Tommy ducked his head and closed his eyes as if to block out the inrush of painful sense/vision/images, but he couldn’t. Not if he tried.

Older figures, then, revealed in kindly clothes ashen gray. They smoldered faintly from their heads and shoulders. Hollow-eyed and hungry and frightened and broomstick-thin. Sorrow beyond measure. No hope, nor even hope of hope.

Tommy began to weep outright, then. He saw numbers, inked in midnight blue. The color of sadness. Saw metal gates, one and another strangely warped, ovens and anger, experiments and change.

"I had no idea…"

His voice could hardly even have been called a whisper then, so quiet was it.

The older man was as a beneficent deity. He smiled faintly, shook his own head, put down a hand to help the younger man back to his feet.

"Most never do."

Bringing himself back into the current reality with a shake of his head for clarity, he asked, "So what good’s this gonna’ do you, the seeing the dead thing? I mean, it makes for an okay movie plot, but t’ have it in real life, it’ll fuck y’ up, man, trust me! It sounds good on paper, you know ‘Oh, look, I can talk to Grandma again’—Well, hell no, it ain’t like that. Not at all! All it does is cripple me emotionally, and then what use am I?"

"No, no, I would need your empathy. I would need to sense the enemy’s emotions—When they would strike, what they intend by their attitudes to do, that sort of thing… Do you ever notice that people around you become attuned to you emotionally? As if they are feeling what it is at the moment that you do?"

"Well, yeah, sometimes, but isn’t that the case with everybody? I mean, y’ve all just been through this big-ass fire, everybody at the station’s pretty much gonna’ be feelin’ the same way, you know?"

"But with you it’s…stronger than usual, isn’t it? You can turn an entire room to hostility in moments should you so desire. Then again, this in turn makes it easier for others to send emotional cues to you if you’re off-guard. In other words, you would be feeling what they are, rather than the other way around. Not to change the subject, dear boy, but if you ever decide you need to give this job of yours a rest for a while, I can provide you with a change of scenery. You only need let me know."

With this, the old man handed Tommy over a business card of ecru with raised lettering in metallic print reading E. Lensherr Ironworks. At the bottom was a phone number in small black print.

He tore up the card with great relish and threw the pieces at the man’s feet.

"Listen, pal, not to be a prick, but I am goddamn F-D-N-Y, and that ain’t never gonna’ change, you got it? So I guess I won’t be seein’ ya’ ‘round…"

The blonde—Grace?—palmed him a card as well, and shot him an lascivious wink, her eyes flashing blink-quick from blue to gold and back again.

"Now you I hope I’ll see again real soon—Oh, and, just f’r the record, you aren’t like some psycho-bitch who’ll throw a Molotov snowglobe through my front window if we break up, are you?"

She laughed at him, then, genuinely, showing all her teeth. "God, I hope not…"

Hooking one finger under his chin, she smiled and then melted away down the sidewalk.

He held the card up to the light from the stationhouse window and took a hard look at it.

Grace Adler, it read, Massage Therapy a Specialty

The phone number was on the bottom in white ink, as the background of the card was an evershifting blue iridescent shade, almost a holographic paper.

::I could use a little grace right now, ‘way my life’s goin’:: he thought.
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Three Days' Grace II: You're One Of Us