MX Sn4: Perseverance

Three days after Mutant X's fruitless mission to the Dominion's Nevada compound, the stresses Eve was facing had not abated in the slightest. Owen's mental condition, Kevin's instability along with his drowning scare and Josh's own fatigue trying to care for him, Lexa's oncoming expiration date, the potential of Jamie, Chris, and Josh also going through evolutionary "growth spurts", the search for Adam and the Dominion, the fact that every New Mutant other than Jesse was going to die young... All these things and more were weighing heavily on Eve's mind and shoulders.

Although Owen woke a few hours after the team returned, fully healed, Eve was worried by the fact that he seemed to be mentally healed, as well. He was his normal, easy-going self, nightmare-free. . .but Eve couldn't help feeling that meant something else was wrong. Physical recuperation wouldn't do anything to rectify the psychological trauma that had caused his problems in the first place. Was it denial, forcing himself to act normally, even moreso than he had been doing since his capture by the GSA? Owen had grown up with an alcoholic mother and a manic-depressive father; he had long experience at acting as if everything was fine when in reality he was at the end of his rope. Eve sincerely hoped that wasn't the case currently.

Kevin's confrontation with his drowning phobia in the Dominion's complex had been absolutely terrible timing; he was now having almost as much difficulty sleeping as Owen had been the week before, and Kevin needed his rest to adjust to his evolving genetic sequences. He looked like death warmed over, his eyes sunken and hollow, and he wasn't going to get any better if things kept going the way they were. Josh was at his wit's end trying to care for Kevin, perpetually frustrated by the fact that there wasn't actually anything he could do to help, other than make Kevin as comfortable as possible.

Josh was running himself ragged trying to find something that would help, getting even less rest than Kevin was. Their tempers were growing short, but they couldn't stand to be apart from one another, either. Both of them were walking on eggshells to avoid snapping at each other, neither of them wanting an emotional flare to trigger one of Kevin's instability attacks, but that only drove their frustrations higher. The irony of it would almost have been funny, if it weren't so disheartening, not to mention how difficult to live with the two of them were getting.

Despite their difficult emotional states, they had both allowed themselves to be subjected to genetic testing, at least. Actually, Josh had been insistent Kevin get tested again, worried that the emotional trauma of his drowning scare would trigger more instability attacks, and Kevin had grumpily said he wasn't going through another battery of tests if Josh didn't also. Since Josh had no intention of being anywhere other than at Kevin's side, it was a simple matter to give him the tests as well. Simpler than it had been to get Chris and Jamie to go through with them, but since Eve had them in the medical lab to take care of their injuries from the Dominion's gauntlet of traps, it hadn't been too difficult.

Lexa had reported she could feel the tremors in her nervous system were getting worse. . .they weren't causing actual shakes in her limbs yet, but she could feel them intensifying. Eve's tests had revealed strain on Lexa's nerve tissue; in time, that strain would lead to a systemic collapse, causing the failure of her heart, lungs, and every other organ. Lexa's expiration.

Chris found Eve asleep in her chair that evening, her cheek slightly pillowed on the arm slid halfway across the top of her desk and one corner of her mouse making an imprint in her chin. He had gently shaken Eve's shoulder to rouse her; she had murmured something indistinguishable and turned her head the other way, revealing wrinkles from her labcoat's sleeve imprinted on the side of her face.

Chuckling softly, Chris had picked Eve up in his arms, where she murmured again, grumpily, and hid her face against his neck. Chris had smiled just the smallest amount and shushed her, singing quietly as he carried her to the Majestic's elevator and up to her bed.

The next day, Chris had set his alarm for slightly early, getting up and arranging for a room service delivery of half the restaurant's breakfast menu at eight-thirty. He went over to the living-suite's intercom and punched in the code for Haven's main workstation, expecting to have to leave a message. Chris was hoping whichever member of the original team got up first would check it before making their own breakfast preparations, but he was pleasantly surprised by Jesse's scratchy voice answering, instead.

"Dude, when do you sleep?" Chris asked with a frown. "Nevermind. Anyway, glad you're up, Nerd Wonder. I'm plotting breakfast for the whole team at eight-thirty, so cut your people off if they make for Haven's kitchen and tell 'em to put pants on, instead."

'Will do,' Jesse answered with a snort of amusement. 'You might have to page Lexa's room with one of your power shouts to wake her up, though.'

"Hah, fine," Chris answered with a smirk. "But I'll tell her you told me to do it. See you guys then."

Chris puttered around the living area of the penthouse while he waited for eight-thirty to arrive, straightening up the place and making sure there was seating available for all ten of them. He had to clear the dinette table and all the stuff piled up on one end of the sofa, but it needed doing anyway, so that was fine. A good chunk of it was mail that hadn't been sorted yet, and most of that was junk anyway. He threw out everything he was sure was junk mail and sorted the rest into piles on one end of the kitchenette counter, Eve's pile four times bigger than anyone else's. They really needed to get one of those mail-sorting tray-thingies, maybe a goofy cat one, just to annoy Josh.

After he had rearranged the furniture in the living area so everyone would be able to see and speak with one another as they ate, it was only just past eight, not quite late enough yet. Frowning, Chris decided to move the dinette table into the middle of the area he'd cleared between the seats, so breakfast could be set up where everyone could get more of whatever they liked. There was one chair left over even after moving the stuff from the table and sofa to two of the dinette chairs, which Chris realized with a pang would have been just right, a seat for Adam if they had managed to rescue him. Well, they would. And they'd have a nine-course dinner to celebrate when they did, and another one after Adam had stabilized them all, dammit.

It was finally a quarter after eight, close enough for Chris' purposes. Grinning, he made his way to the back of the sofa, turning to face the doors to everyone's rooms. He couldn't quite face Josh and Kevin's door and Eve's suite at the same time, but he figured it would work out. Kevin's hearing would be more than sufficient, much less Josh's Feral senses.

Still grinning, Chris drew in a deep breath, filling his lungs.

"GOOD MORNING, MUTANT X, BREAKFAST WILL BE SERVED IN FIFTEEN MINUTES!!! WE'VE GOT COMPANY COMING, SO TAKE YOUR CURLERS OUT AND PUT ON SOMETHING WITHOUT HOLES!!" he shouted extremely loudly, grinning all the while.

"AW, BUT I JUST PUT MY CURLERS IN!!" Owen hollered back through his door. Chris chuckled at the idea of curlers in Owen's eighth-of-an-inch-long hair, and with his sonic sensitivity, he felt both Jamie's and Josh's laughter in response, then something else from the direction of Josh and Kevin's door that was probably Kevin asking Josh what was funny. Chris grinned, hoping the original team would be up to join them within the next ten minutes or so, because the Majestic's restaurant and room service were surprisingly punctual.

A minute later Chris nearly fell off his perch on one arm of the couch laughing; Jamie had come out of her rooms wearing a tee shirt and cotton shorts that looked positively moth-eaten, they were so full of holes, her hair wrapped up around a half-dozen or so bright pink curlers sitting on top of her head. Jamie just smirked as Chris turned red with hysterical laughter, turning around and going back into her rooms to change. Chris waited for his giggle-fit to end as he wondered why in the world Jamie even owned curlers, then went to put on the coffee.

The original team arrived only a few minutes later, Brennan and Jesse in sweats, Brennan wearing a tee shirt, and Shalimar wearing a loose top and capris, her hair in its normal windblown state. Despite Jesse's declaration Lexa would sleep in, she had somehow managed to have her hair carefully brushed, all of her makeup applied, and donned a svelte outfit of shimmering black silk.

"Hey, everybody, grab whatever seats are left; breakfast should be here any minute," Chris declared, waving a hand at the living room sofa and the chairs arranged around it. Josh and Kevin were curled together on the loveseat, Kevin looking like he was ready to fall back asleep any moment and Josh watching over him incessantly, ready to grab whatever Kevin might need as soon as he requested it. Jamie was seated in one of the two recliners, farther from the sofa, and Owen was straddling the back of the dinette chair next to it. Eve was sitting in the other recliner, and Chris had set one of the dinette chairs next to it as well, in the gap between the recliners and the end of the sofa. The sofa itself and the dinette chair next to the loveseat were unclaimed, though Chris wouldn't care if anyone chose his chair instead.

Greetings were exchanged all around as the original team took their seats; Shalimar turned the chair next to the loveseat around backwards and straddled it just as Owen was doing next to Jamie's recliner, leaving Lexa and the boys to sort out the sofa. Lexa settled on the end of the sofa next to Josh's end of the loveseat; just as Brennan took the sofa's other end and forced Jesse into the middle, there was a knock at the door.

"Aaaaand, breakfast!" Chris declared happily, changing his path to swerve away from the sitting area in front of the entertainment center and crossing where the dinette table normally sat to return to the front door. Chris opened it, beaming at the bellhop with the well-laden cart. Chris led the young man into the suite, past the doors to Josh and Kevin's and his own rooms and around the end of the loveseat to where he had set up the dinette table. Shalimar jumped up to move her chair out of the way, smiling at the young man and the delicious smells wafting out from under the covered trays on his cart.

"Just set everything up here; we'll serve ourselves," Chris told the bellhop, nodding in return when the crisply uniformed man nodded in confirmation, then hurried to get the coffee. Chris carried over a tray with mugs, sugar, and creamer on it and the coffeepot in his other hand, pouring for the members of the original team and refreshing the California team's mugs. Josh scrunched his face up in distaste as Kevin eagerly accepted more steaming-hot caffeine; Kevin smirked at Josh with one corner of his mouth before deliberately taking a sip and then pecking Josh's lips, making him recoil and stick out his tongue in disgust. Chris smirked as Shalimar helped the bellhop set out the trays of food on the table, and Lexa chuckled at Kevin's drowsy antics and Josh's expression.

"What, you don't drink coffee, either?" she asked. "No booze, no coffee, just the Diet Coke?" she finished, noting that he had an open can in the hand he didn't have across Kevin's shoulders.

"Nope, no coffee. Ew," Josh answered, shaking his head. "My parents drank it black, and so did my aunt, uncle, and cousins. Tastes like licking the underside of a car, bleh. I'll drink water, juice, I like tea. . .but I'll only drink coffee if it's got so much cream, sugar, chocolate, and Italian stuffages in it that it doesn't even taste like coffee anymore," he finished as the bellhop finished putting all the lids back on his cart and set a stack of ten plates on the corner of the table.

"That's not even coffee," Shalimar said as the bellhop produced a stack of ten lap-trays with ten sets of silverware and napkins on the top tray from under his cart's tablecloth.

"Exactly," Josh answered. "So, no, I don't drink coffee," he smirked at Lexa as Chris saw the bellhop out and handed the uniformed young man a hefty tip before closing the door.

"Milk? Or just cream, with your whole cat-thing?" Lexa asked with another smirk as Chris and Shalimar passed out eating trays, plates, and silverware.

"Ick, no," Josh said with a frown, then flashed a grin at Kevin when he snickered. "When I said juice, I meant orange juice, maybe pineapple. As a kid, I had apple juice in my lunch at school every freaking day, and milk with dinner every night. Can't stand either one of 'em, now. 'Sfar as cream goes..." Josh smirked at Kevin once more, and Kevin grinned back. "..Well, there's only one flavor I like, unless it's whipped and on ice cream, or something," he finished with a smug smile.

" 'Or something,' " Kevin repeated, laughing softly under his breath. Josh's eyebrows rose, then he snickered as realization dawned on him, leaning his head into the side of Kevin's neck.

"Hey, chocolate syrup's good for that, too..." he murmured to Kevin, who grinned more.

"Mmmmmm, dessert..." Kevin muttered back, his hollow eyes still glinting with amusement at Chris' scowl and Owen's sputtering on his coffee, Josh grinning beside him. They were both slightly more relaxed than they had been while waiting, leaning back into the loveseat and nodding in thanks as Shalimar handed them each a tray with a plate and silverware on it.

"Anyway," Chris said sharply, glaring fondly at the patently false expressions of innocence Josh and Kevin were beaming his direction. "Breakfast is served; everybody help themselves. We've got fruit salad, ham & cheese omelettes, veggie omelettes, pancakes, waffles, French Toast, muffins, bagels, toast, and actually more than enough ham, sausage, and bacon for the Feral Boys here, so hopefully that's enough for Shalimar and the rest of us, too," he finished, waving everyone toward the food-bedecked table.

"That is a lot of meat, actually," Shalimar conceded as she stepped forward to help herself to one of the ham & cheese omelettes, trying to decide how much meat she wanted to supplement it with. She took some fruit as well, just to deny being a complete carnivore.

"You like ham, Shal?" Owen asked, smiling at her over Eve and Jamie's heads as he waited in line for his turn.

"Um, sure?" she responded with a slight frown of confusion. "I mean, I don't dislike it or anything, yay Feral protein, but it's just as good as the bacon or sausage. Why?" she asked curiously.

"Well, 'cause we've got three Ferals here to finish off the extra protein, and Josh has an unholy love of bacon, while I like the sausage," he answered, still smiling.

"Oh," Shalimar answered with an amused frown. "Well, like I said, ham's fine by me." She turned to smirk at Owen over her shoulder, flicking her gaze from Jesse and Brennan over to Josh and Kevin as Josh stood, taking Kevin's tray as well as his own. "..But I thought Josh liked the sausage."

Jamie cackled as Owen's mouth dropped open, laughing all the harder when Josh proudly proclaimed he liked meat in general and Owen's blush rose all the way up from the collar of his tee shirt to his hairline.

"Mmmm, sausage," Jamie said to Owen "hungrily", laughing all the harder when Owen threw a fairly hard punch into the shoulder Jamie had wisely rendered elastic.

Just over half an hour later, breakfast had been devastated.

Kevin had confessed he wasn't particularly hungry at first, and Josh had admitted he wasn't either, but everything smelled so good... They had managed to coerce each other into eating, and once they'd gotten started, both realized how hungry they actually were. The rest of the team hadn't been far behind; fruit, eggs, breakfast breads and skillet-fried meats had all quickly been consumed over teasing jibes and light conversation.

The idle chat had continued as all ten of them picked at the leftovers, Brennan and Owen comparing stories of their delinquent lives on the streets in their later teen years, Chris and Jamie sharing tales of times they had spent on the wrong side of the tracks, and Lexa and Josh comparing their Army Brat histories, even if Lexa had been more of a lab rat and then became a secret agent by the time she reached the age Josh had become an Army Brat. Jesse and Eve confessed that money most certainly did not bring happiness, and Shalimar smiled, declaring that no, family did. True family, that accepted and stood by one another, regardless of bloodlines.

"Hear, hear," Kevin said, struggling free of where he was leaning back into Josh's embrace on the loveseat to sit up straight and raise his glass. Josh straightened as well, one steadying hand on Kevin's back, the other holding up his own glass as he echoed Kevin's response.

Glasses were raised and calls to hear were repeated around the room, Shalimar blushing and smiling with pride at the same time.

Kevin drained his glass, then set it on the tray in his lap and carefully moved to set the whole thing on the floor next to the loveseat, giving Shalimar a weak smile of thanks when she took it from him and saved Kevin the effort of moving and leaning over the arm of the loveseat to reach. He slumped back into the warmth of Josh's one-armed embrace, leaning to rest his weary head against the side of Josh's neck.

"You goin' back to sleep?" Josh asked his lover quietly. Kevin made an affirmative mumble and nodded slightly, curling into Josh more. Josh smiled, pleased Kevin was going to start catching up on the rest he needed. Shalimar waved silently at him, offering her hand, and Josh gratefully passed over his own tray, smiling his thanks to Shalimar as he slid his left arm under the backs of Kevin's knees and stood, picking his only barely-conscious lover up. He gave a nod of acknowledgement to the rest of the team, returning Eve's hopeful gaze that Kevin would sleep and smiling slightly when Jamie waved.

Josh managed to open the door to their rooms with the hand he had under Kevin's knees, turning sideways to step into their rooms. Kevin roused slightly when Josh laid him down on the bed, wrestling awake enough to remove his shirt and kick his slippers off and over the foot of the bed. Josh took his own shirt off and toed off his sandals as he took Kevin's shirt and lay them both over the back of a chair. When he turned back, Kevin had moved to put his head on the pillow, looking up at Josh with unspoken desperation behind his half-closed, heavy-lidded eyes.

"Stay with me?" Kevin asked, the grip of his hand on the bedsheet white-knuckled, worried anticipation of the drowning nightmares that would come audible in his quiet voice.

"Of course," Josh insisted back, trying to tell Kevin without words that he didn't even need to ask. Josh leaned in to kiss Kevin gently but deeply, then slid his shorts off, Josh's hand sliding over Kevin's ass in a caress as he went. Josh stripped his own shorts off and added them to the pile of clothes on the chair, then slid into bed behind Kevin, spooning up against him protectively, reassuringly, and snugging the covers over both of them.

He laid his hand over the back of Kevin's, squeezing it methodically, repetetively, until Kevin relaxed. "You're fine," Josh murmured into the hair behind Kevin's ear. "You are absolutely fine; I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere until you get some sleep, Mister."

"Hmkay," Kevin answered thankfully, falling asleep even as he tried to say the words "Love You." No sound came from his slumbering vocal cords, but Josh's Feral hearing heard the whisper of breath pass his lover's lips regardless.

"Love You, too," Josh whispered into the dim light of their curtained bedroom, kissing Kevin softly behind his ear before settling back and drifting into much-needed sleep himself.

Eventually the breakfast leftovers had also been consumed and idle conversation had wound its course, leading back to the unpleasant reality that they had things to do. Eve and Jamie joined the original team as they left the penthouse, entering the Majestic's elevator and descending to Haven.

"So, any news?" Lexa asked Eve as they waited to arrive at the access tunnel. She asked casually enough, just inquiring if there were any further progress, but Eve could see the carefully guarded hope behind Lexa's eyes. Eve just hoped it wasn't a desperate hope, because she did not yet have any great news to offer.

"Well, I just wish no news was good news," Eve answered with an apologetic shrug. "But unfortunately, I don't have much of anything concrete to tell you right now. I'm making progress; I've managed to rule a few possibilities out, but..."

"..But that's not the same as getting closer to finding the one that works," Lexa finished, nodding soberly to express that she understood. "You don't know what Adam did to Jesse, so you can't guarantee that a process of elimination will help you find the answer."

"You're right; I can't make that guarantee," Eve admitted, but she was shaking her head in denial of Lexa's statement at the same time. "But that doesn't mean I'm not getting closer or that I can't at least begin to help you. We know that the strain of imminent collapse is appearing in your nervous system first, but I can counter that. There're medicines or treatments that can relieve that strain, once I've determined its source. I'll only be treating the symptoms, not the underlying problem, but it will keep you stabilized," Eve explained, trying to reassure Lexa that she was confident in what she was saying.

"You mean, I won't get any worse," Lexa asked cautiously, wanting to make sure before she got her hopes up. "Or at least, my nervous system won't; I won't get any worse until something else starts breaking down."

"That's pretty much it," Eve nodded back. "I'll have to keep testing you, make sure we catch any other symptoms as they develop, but as long as we do, medical science should be able to keep you going in the meanwhile, until I can figure out Adam's work or we rescue him and he does it himself."

"Okay," Lexa nodded eagerly, smiling with relief. "How much more testing will you need to do before you can treat my shakes?"

"Not too much more," Eve smiled back. "There's only so many things that generate the sort of strain your nervous system is under; I just have to figure out which one it is that your genetic breakdown is causing."

"Ah, so process of elimination will work, for this part," Lexa responded with a smirk.

"Sure will," Eve said with a nod as the elevator doors opened to Haven's access tunnel. "Let's get started," she said, briskly leading the way to Haven's medical lab.

Shalimar turned off to her room to change into a sports top while Brennan continued on toward the Dojo at the rear of Haven to set up a workout for them both. He paused at Haven's main workstation in the middle of the subterranean bomb shelter's main expanse, where Jesse and Jamie also stopped.

"Keep at it, Jess," Brennan said, giving Jesse's shoulders a quick knead and rub as Jesse dropped into the chair behind the workstation. "You can do this. I know you can," Brennan encouraged him, giving Jesse's shoulders one last squeeze before turning away.

"Thanks, Bren," Jesse said to Brennan over his shoulder, thankful both for the vote of confidence and the acknowledgement and appreciation of his efforts. He had been trying to crack the Dominion's encryption codes on the files and databases Eloy had copied onto the Double Helix's systems for the past few days, but so far he hadn't made much progress.

"So. Hacking?" Jamie asked curiously as Jesse called up the files he had most recently been working with.

"Not quite," Jesse answered with a rueful frown, suggesting he would much prefer for the work ahead of him to be hacking, instead. "Decrypting. Eloy copied all the data he could from the Dominion complex's systems, but it turns out his Telecyber abilities only operate existing programs and electronics. He can turn things on or off, run a program that's in a computer. . .but he can't bypass security measures just through sheer force of will; he can't access secured information or activate dormant circuits that require any kind of security verification before they come online," Jesse explained as he began poking away at the file, opening various other programs to attempt to decode the file's security.

"So, Eloy stole the treasure chest of the Dominion's information for us, but we still have to pick the lock," Jamie said, nodding his understanding.

" 'Fraid so," Jesse replied with nod and a disappointed frown.

"Huh," Jamie said with a frown of his own. "I've done a lot of hacking, bypassing security and such, passwords, but once I was in, stuff was clear. No decoding." Jamie peered curiously over Jesse's shoulder for a moment, watching the techniques he was using, then turned and dragged over the desk chair from the neighboring workstation.

"Show me?" Jamie asked Jesse hopefully, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. "Maybe two heads'll be better than one; I can come at it from another perspective kind of thing."

"Why not?" Jesse asked with droll smirk. "I'll be going slightly slower if I'm explaining to you at the same time, but it'll drive me less crazy," Jesse said wryly, then smiled. "And hey, maybe showing you will remind me of something I'm overlooking, or you'll spot it, and we'll crack this sooner instead of later."

"Let's do it," Jamie grinned, leaning in to take in everything Jesse demonstrated, eyes alight with eager fascination.

Once everyone else had left after breakfast, Owen helped Chris stack all the used dishes on top of two of the trays and stack four of the empty trays beneath the two filled ones. They carried the stacks of dishes out to the penthouse's elevator landing, then returned to collect the emptied serving dishes and add them to the stacks in the hallway. Owen began returning the living area's furniture to its normal positions as Chris called down to Room Service to inform them they'd need a cart for the pickup on the penthouse level.

Chris followed Owen with the last dinette chair as Owen carried the table overhead with one hand, putting it down in its place between the other five chairs. Chris put the last chair in place, then went to get the vacuum cleaner as Owen moved to the kitchenette corner of the living area and wet a washcloth to wipe down the table with.

Owen paused as he returned to the dinette table, watching curiously to see if Chris would remember that Josh and Kevin were sleeping before he turned the vacuum cleaner on. He obviously didn't, plugging the vacuum in and rolling it over in front of the entertainment center. Owen opened his mouth to warn Chris to stop, then paused in startled surprise when no sound came out as he tried to quietly get Chris' attention. Chris turned on the vacuum cleaner, its lamp lighting up brightly and its bag inflating as he began to vacuum the carpet, all in complete silence.

Grinning to himself at the domestic application of Chris' powers, Owen set to wiping down the table.

Once he had finished, Owen rinsed and wrung out the washcloth, leaving it draped over the kitchen sink's faucet to dry. He picked up his small stack of mail from the end of the counter where Chris had left it and took a seat at the dinette table to go through it. There were a lot of credit card applications, considering Owen's sole credit representation was a small checking account Eve paid his monthly allowance stipend into and having his name on the title of his Jeep. He hadn't even made payments on the Jeep to establish a credit history with; Eve had simply bought it outright. Owen was just wondering at the number of credit card applications one person with no credit history could get when the damp washcloth he had left at the sink plopped onto the top of his head and fell over his eyes.

" CHRIS! " Owen cried out, worried for a split second that he'd accidentally woken Josh or even Kevin, but he realized at the same time that his voice was still muted along with the rest of the sounds in the suite's living area. He leaped out of his chair and spun around, watching the chair bounce silently against the carpet before snapping his gaze up to spot Chris.

Chris had already dashed away, probably the instant he had dropped the wet washcloth on Owen's head. He was leaping over the back of the couch as Owen turned and spotted him; Owen grinned when Chris froze after ducking out of sight, obviously thinking Owen wouldn't immediately find him. It was true that Chris' scent was present throughout the entire living suite and thanks to his power the suite was silent as well, but that didn't do Chris much good when Owen saw him duck out of sight. Chris had underestimated Owen's Feral speed, how quickly he could snatch the cloth off his eyes and turn around.

Owen ducked as well, dropping into a crouch before springing across a third of the living suite's space. He wasn't sure how Chris' sonic sensitivity worked, if he would be able to feel the vibrations of footsteps while his power was silencing them or not. Owen figured a leap made almost no noise and twisted in mid-air as he went, still grinning as he landed just a few feet in front of the sofa, almost directly on top of Chris. Owen grabbed Chris as he landed, feeling Chris' flinch and cry of surprise through his back, even though his power was still keeping things silent.

Chris attempted to leap to his feet, to throw himself onto the sofa and climb over it to get away because Owen's reach could easily cover what little space remained between him and the sofa if he tried to bolt to either side. Of course, the problem with that plan was that Owen had already grabbed Chris, and Chris' attempted maneuver wasn't enough to break Owen's hold. Owen simply hauled Chris back in as he tried to scramble away, fisting one hand in the back of Chris' shirt and dragging him closer so Owen could wrap his other hand over the back of Chris' neck.

Owen picked Chris up by the neck with one arm, wrapping his other arm over Chris' chest as he was lifted to give Chris something to hold on to, to prevent Chris from injuring his neck struggling. Chris' arms latched onto Owen's as he kicked and flailed his legs wildly, until Owen released Chris' neck and reached across him to grab the front of Chris' far knee. Owen hoisted Chris bodily up into the air so that he was facing the ground, his face twisted in a silent laugh as well as a cry of surprise to suddenly find himself six feet off the floor.

Still grinning, maliciously now that he had Chris at his mercy, Owen began to spin in place, leaning back and extending his arms as he gained momentum. Chris ended up clinging to Owen's left hand and elbow and slinging his free leg around Owen's right forearm, trying to hold on as centrifugal force tried to fling him across the room. Owen spun faster, his Feral strength and dexterity enabling him to whirl Chris in a circle the full reach of his arms, over and over and over. Owen was strong enough he could keep it up for quite a while; he'd get dizzy before his arms grew tired enough he'd have to put Chris down.

Tears of laughter were streaming from the edges of Chris' eyes, rolling back across his temples and disappearing into his sideburns from the momentum of his whirling through the air. After a few moments of flying around in circles Chris' ability to focus on his power was broken, his shouted laughter gradually becoming audible as his focus dwindled. Owen let go of Chris and shook off the grip Chris had on him in return, sending Chris flying into the sofa, which Owen hoped would silence him before he got any louder.

" AAAAAAH-HAHAH—!" Chris cried out and laughed as volume returned to the room, his voice cutting off when he crashed softly yet bodily into the sofa. Owen took a step forward to clap a hand over Chris' mouth if he continued laughing, but he didn't. Which was just as well, because Owen had managed to get himself dizzier than he thought, dropping to one knee and almost falling into the sofa himself. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and grinned at Chris.

"Dude, you wake Josh up, he's gonna kill you. He and Kevin haven't been getting any more sleep these past couple days than I was the week before that," Owen cautioned Chris quietly.

"Well, duh," Chris gasped back breathlessly, also grinning. "That's why I was muting the vacuum in the first place. But Josh wouldn't kill me, he'd just maim me a bit. He'd kill me if I woke Kevin up." Chris propped himself up on one elbow, peering at Owen curiously. "That brings up another thing, though. . .you weren't sleeping, after the GSA had us. I mean, I saw you there, man; you were in bad shape." Owen shifted uncomfortably but didn't say anything. Everything Chris had said was true, after all. "So you weren't sleeping, to the point you almost got yourself killed doing your workout," Chris continued seriously, carefully meeting Owen's eyes. "And I'm glad your new healing hibernation thing took care of that, but..." Chris paused, still meeting Owen's eyes and looking at him like he was trying to figure something out. "Well, that's great for catching up on your sleep, but how did a healing nap take care of the nightmares that made you need sleep in the first place?"

Owen chuckled, then shrugged, returning Chris' gaze and looking like he wished he knew.

"Dude, I have no idea," Owen said, shaking his head to verify he was clueless. "I'm just glad it did. The nightmares..." Owen made an odd pause as he stopped to contemplate his sleep terrors, more like he was trying to put the feelings into words. There was no tension to him as he considered, just the frustration of being inarticulate. "..Well, they just sucked, y'know?" Owen asked rhetorically with another shrug. "Like, while we were in there. . .that was a flashback, to the first time the GSA had me. A really bad one, because, y'know, they had me again. But the nightmares after were. . .were worse —the nightmares were worse, because they'd turn out for the worst, worst case scenario in my sleep, every time, y'know? So it got to the point my mind wouldn't go to sleep because it didn't want to deal. That morning, before. . .before my groin tried to freakin' kill me, I remember lying there in bed being frustrated that my body was exhausted but my brain wouldn't let it sleep. 'nough to make you crazy, y'know?"

"Crazy like trying to work out like an insane person when your body's ready to drop, crazy?" Chris asked with a smirk.

"Yeah, like that," Owen answered with a rueful smirk as his cheeks turned pink. "So then my not-a-hernia almost killed me, and I got a little rest when Eve put me out for the surgery. . .We talked a little bit when I woke up after; I remember her telling me I needed to work through my issues before the next accident got me or somebody else killed, and I knew she was right. But my head was all fuzzy, low blood sugar 'cause my body was prepping for the healing-coma thing, so I don't really remember it very clearly. I remember. . .no, I dreamed Emma was there, helped me deal with– –with the trauma, like she did when Mutant X first rescued me."

Owen frowned in confusion for a moment, considering.

"I think I relived most of my memories of Emma while I was 'hibernating', all the therapies she helped me with. I think 'cause Anne was there, instead of Eve. Anne kinda reminds me of Emma, actually. And she was playing Kansas in the medical lab while I was out; I've told Anne about the ways Emma helped me, so I guess she was trying to do what she could." Owen paused with another frown, then shrugged. "Eve must have told her what had happened, how I got myself in that situation. Anne played my therapy song, same as you were singing in the GSA's cells, what calmed me down in the first place. I guess it made me remember how Emma helped me back at first, and I haven't had a nightmare since."

Owen gave Chris an apologetic shrug, obviously wishing he could be more certain of what had happened.

"I dunno, man. I wish I did, so we could do it for Kevin, too. I mean, his drowning scare was when he was sixteen, like, eight years ago. I was caught by the GSA not quite two years ago, way fresher trauma, not so built into my character the way Kevin's phobia is into his. I don't know if he can work through his like I did mine, even if I'm not sure how I did it," Owen finished, regret clear on his face.

"Hmmm," Chris nodded in reply, considering Owen's points. "Well, Kevin's had longer to deal with his phobia, too. I mean, heights freak me the hell out, but hey, we live on top of a skyscraper hotel in LA. I'll admit, I don't look out the windows much, but I've gotten used to it. The Majestic's got a pool; I know Kevin swims sometimes. I don't think he goes in the deep end, but at least he gets in. It's his way of facing his fear, same as I do if I actually go out on the balcony. Heights and open water, those are things you can gradually expose yourself to, build up your tolerance. It's not like you can get gradually captured or tortured by the GSA, right?" Chris asked with an apologetic smirk. "So maybe Kevin can get through his easier than you did yours."

"And he's got Josh," Owen nodded back. "Josh's so overprotective, he lies there and doesn't sleep, makes sure Kevin does and soothes the nightmares away before they wake him. He'll be good, 's long as he gets through this instability thing."

"Yeah, what's that about?" Chris asked with a frown. "I mean, it sucks that you didn't sleep for a week and nearly dropped a weight machine on your chest and everything, but then you had a shaky hunger attack and boom, spiffy new power. I guess we don't want to smash you up a second time just to see if you go healing-coma again, but Eve's pretty sure that's what would happen. It almost seems like your 'growth spurt' was conveniently timed, with no side effects, but poor Kev just seems to have issues with no benefits. That kinda blows," he finished, tossing his hands up in exasperation.

"You're right," Owen replied with a shrug. "The original team took Jamie and me in just after they went through their spurts; I guess it was different for everybody. But they did all get new abilities out of it, so maybe Kevin's just isn't done yet. And mine might have been going on before we realized it; Eve said Kevin would probably feel the strain of his body adapting to his new gene-codes, need more rest. . .maybe that's part of why I was in such a weird headspace after the GSA, not just reacting to my issues. Maybe I wasn't sleeping right, even what little sleep I did get, because my body was gearing up for super-sleep, or something. Maybe I had my drawbacks, too, but didn't notice them because I was, uh, a little preoccupied with my other issues."

Chris chuckled, leaning forward to mock-punch Owen's shoulder.

" 'Preoccupied', huh? That's a good one," Chris laughed. "Could be, I guess. I just hope Kevin gets through the rest of this quickly. It's been going on long enough, and he didn't need the drowning scare on top of it."

"Too right," Owen nodded in agreement, also hoping for their friend's troubles to be ended soon.

Josh had slept through the last of breakfast and its attendant conversation, passing out just as deeply as Kevin had. Both of them were suffering from ongoing sleep deficits, which meant they dropped off quickly, but the cause of their lack of sleep soon disrupted his rest yet again. The two of them hadn't been asleep for even half an hour when Josh was roused by tension returning to Kevin's sleeping form.

Kevin hunched his shoulders as a nightmare began, a frown creasing his forehead and drawing his full lips down in a grimace. Spooned up behind him with an arm across Kevin's chest, Josh felt his lover grow tense, and his vigilantly protective nature roused him. Blinking awake, Josh automatically held Kevin closer, whispering hushing reassurances in his ear even as Josh shifted to slide up the bed slightly and free his other arm. Still murmuring to Kevin just to provide the comfort of the sound of his voice, Josh stroked Kevin's forehead, brushing the frown lines away until he relaxed back into restful sleep.

Josh tensed as something like a cramp went through his stomach, stilling his hand where it was still stroking Kevin's forehead until the sensation passed.

Ow. That's what I get for mostly not eating for half a week and then stuffing myself... Josh thought with a wince, exhaling his held breath as his midsection finally relaxed. I just hope Kev's breakfast agrees with him better, Josh thought as he laid back and tried to relax back to sleep once more. Evolving system needs the fuel, hopefully it'll accept the nutrition it needs.

After only a few moments of lying there Josh knew he wasn't going to go back to sleep. Breakfast had been pleasant enough to get him to relax, so he could fall asleep, but now he was awake and tense again. His stomach groaned in protest once more, and Josh carefully extricated himself from the bed, making sure not to disturb or rouse Kevin. Quietly, he slipped into their bathroom, hoping a hot shower might relax him enough to get back to sleep.

Silently growling to himself after a fruitless trip to the bathroom, Josh returned to the bedroom to dress. His stomach was still complaining even after he had used the facilities, and his thoughts were alternating between chasing themselves in circles and being distracted by his protesting stomach, so Josh's shower hadn't really done anything to relax him, either. Quickly and silently donning a pair of biker shorts and a sleeveless spandex tee shirt along with his running shoes, Josh grabbed his phone and his keys, then turned to check on Kevin before he left.

Having heard Owen and Chris quietly talking in the living area as he dressed, Josh leaned in to kiss Kevin's cheek, hoping his fresh-from-the-shower scent would make Kevin's subconscious relax a little more, keep the nightmares at bay and let him sleep properly just a little longer. Smiling softly down at his lover as he straightened up, Josh hoped for the best and turned to leave their suite.

Chris and Owen looked up in surprise when Josh and Kevin's door opened, hoping they hadn't woken either of them after all. Josh quietly closed the door behind himself, his hair still wet from his shower and obviously having been awake for at least a little while, not in response to Chris and Owen. Josh turned away from his door and looked hopefully in Owen's direction.

"Hey," Josh said quietly by way of greeting, his expression suggesting he wasn't even thinking about what he was saying, already contemplating matters he considered more important. "I'm gonna go for a run, I gotta. . .I gotta clear my head some, wear myself out enough to sleep. You keep an ear on Kev for me, Big Guy?" Josh asked, his shadowed eyes bright with concern, worried about leaving his suffering lover alone.

"Sure thing," Owen nodded in response, reassuring Josh that Kevin would be looked after in his absence. "You want me to wake him up, if he starts having a nightmare? Not like I don't know how that is."

"Uhm, not if you can help it?" Josh said with a concerned frown. "I mean, he needs his sleep, and if he wakes up, he won't go back. . .not til I'm back, at least, and probably not then." Josh shook his head in frustration. "Just, um, just try to shush him back to sleep? Before he wakes all the way up, I mean," Josh explained with a frown. "Just– –tell him he's okay, maybe a hand on his shoulder, not to shake him awake but just to let him know he's not alone, y'know?" he asked worriedly.

Owen couldn't help the small grin he offered in return.

"No problem, Josh," Owen said, standing and giving Josh a reassuring squeeze to the shoulder of his own. "Go on, go take care of yourself. You can't help Kevin if you're falling apart, too," he finished, pushing Josh toward the door.

Josh smiled back gratefully and nodded, then left.

"You're not a super-scientist," Lexa muttered as she lowered the rolled-up sleeve of her blouse to cover her bandaged elbow. "You're a freakin' vampire."

Eve smirked at Lexa apologetically, looking back over her shoulder as she labeled and filed Lexa's samples.

"Mmm, a vampire after blood and nerve tissue," Eve said with a laugh. "Kinky."

"That wasn't funny," Lexa pouted with a scowl, resisting the urge to rub at her poked and prodded left elbow.

Eve's eyes sparkled with laughter as she smiled at Lexa, not saying a word.

Lexa frowned for a moment, wondering why Eve thought it was so funny, then rolled her eyes as she realized the joke.

"Yes, you just sampled my humerus, ha ha ha," Lexa said in her most deadpan voice.

Eve cracked up giggling.

"Ohhh, I'm sorry," she snickered, "It's horrible anatomy-geek humor, and I even fail at that, because the humerus is actually the upper arm-bone!" Eve flailed a dismissive hand, still chuckling. "I'm sorry, that was so unnecessary, but it was worth it to see the look on your face when you figured it out," Eve told Lexa with an apologetic smile. "You're free to go, go catch a movie or something. It'll take me a few hours to run all the tests and comparisons, to make a solid determination of your nervous system's strain, but once I do, we can start treatment right away. Go relax, get some lunch, and when you get back we'll see about stopping those tremors of yours before they turn into outright shakes."

"Thanks, Eve," Lexa replied with a grateful smile.

"Not even a problem, Lexa," Eve said warmly, waving a dismissive hand. "It's what I'm here for, really."

Lexa smiled again and left; the warm reassurance and confidence on Eve's face faded as she turned back to the medical computer and got to work.

Josh took the Majestic's elevator all the way down to Haven's access tunnel, intending to cross it to the parking garage's elevator. He planned to drive out of downtown LA to a residential area for his run; it would be quieter, and Josh wanted solitude, space to either work through his stresses or the privacy to let his mind go blank as he ran. It was the same reason he was taking the tunnel instead of exiting the Majestic and crossing to the parking garage; he didn't want to deal with people.

Already wrapped up in his thoughts, Josh was caught off guard when Haven's doors opened as he walked by them, jumping in surprise as Lexa exited.

"Oops. Sorry?" she offered, smirking as Josh twitched and nearly dropped into a combat stance before straightening up again.

"Meh, no biggie," Josh muttered, flapping a negligent hand. "I was a million miles away, and it's just my normal freaky luck that you opened the doors the exact moment I was walking in front of them," he said with a roll of his over-tired eyes.

"That kind of thing really happens to you a lot?" Lexa asked with smirk of amazement.

"Constantly, actually," Josh answered with a sigh, shaking his head. "Keeps life interesting. Where you headed?"

"Killing time while Eve does some tests," Lexa shrugged back. "Maybe do a little shopping; we still don't have much, lost everything in Sanctuary when the Dominion attacked."

Josh's face wrinkled in a frown of sympathy.

"That sucks. I mean, even when I got kicked out of my uncle's house, my cousins got the job of packing my room up. They dropped everything off at my bud's house. I can't imagine losing everything like that," Josh told her, still frowning as he tried to figure out what he would do in that situation.

"Hey, I'm just glad we all made it out, that they rescued me and Jesse. Stuff's nice to have, but replaceable. Like Shal said at breakfast, family –the people in our lives, that's what's important," Lexa replied, smiling when Josh nodded earnestly in agreement. "So hey, where's good for lunch? –I'd love some good Italian."

"Hah," Josh smiled at her, amused by Lexa's request. "Benedetti's. That's where I was working when Kev and I met, excellent food. Just off Valley Boulevard and the 710, totally Mediterranean decor inside and out, can't miss it. Or did you want a ride? There's plenty of shopping in the area, too."

"No, no, I'll just have the front desk call a cab," Lexa answered, waving Josh on toward the parking garage's elevator as she turned toward the Majestic's. "You're on your way out, don't let me keep you. And thanks for the lunch tip."

"No prob. And Thanks, Lexa," Josh told her, turning to proceed on his own way.

One-two One-two One-two

Half an hour later, Josh's feet were pounding the pavement of a residential sidewalk in a steady cadence.

One-two Left-right One-two

He had driven for fifteen or twenty minutes, slowly working his way clear of downtown, then through Hollywood, and finally pulled over on a residential street in West Hollywood. Josh liked running in WeHo, feeling more like he fit in there than most anywhere else in LA. Hollywood was fun, but stuntwork aside, Josh was no movie-maker, even if he did like to act. The Majestic was ritzy, and Josh certainly enjoyed living like that, but he couldn't see himself living in Beverly Hills or Bel Air or the Hollywood Hills, either.

Left-right One-two Left-right

Eve had the money and graciously kept the members of the Mutant X team as dormers, or technically dependents, actually. She paid for everything, after all. Josh supposed it was good for her taxes but wondered what the IRS thought of her having five grown men with no incomes living with her, but oh well. They did and she provided for them, so they were her dependents; maybe that was all the accountants cared about. And that was fine, but Josh couldn't see himself living in areas like the Hills, even if he had that kind of money himself. Living in the Majestic was nice, but downtown LA didn't really feel like home, even if it was.

One-two Left-right One-two Left-right

Josh liked WeHo, though. Boystown was sort of over-the-top even for him, but he could appreciate it in small doses. Or from afar; it was amusing as hell to watch. But West Hollywood in general was great, laid back, open minded, hell, it was gay supportive. Rainbows on every block. Josh didn't really see sexuality as anything to get worked up about one way or the other; it was just a part of who people were, just like if they were creative or strong or insightful or good at math or whatever. Not a big deal. But the way society treated it was a big deal, and there wasn't really a lot to be done about it, other than banding together to support each other the way WeHo and other "gay villages" across the country did. Not to mention the fact his penchant for skin-tight clothes didn't draw any negative attention there.

Left-right One-two Left-right One-two Left-right One-tOW!

Lurching to a halt, Josh clapped one hand over the sudden cramp in his stomach and prodded the stitch in his side that had just as abruptly sprang into being with the point of one knuckle from the other. He moved off the sidewalk to lean against a streetlight and panted for breath, suddenly finding his wind hard to draw when his torso seized up.

Jesus, I am wiped out, out of shape if I've got a stitch already. . .I haven't even been running for ten freakin' minutes yet... Josh broke back into motion, not wanting to add muscular cramps to his woes as well because he failed to cool down. He walked swiftly to keep his heart rate elevated, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth like he was still running. He knew muscles were more likely to cramp when they weren't well rested, and his certainly weren't, but he hadn't thought that he would wear out so much faster than normal, either.

Okay, you're a giant wuss, Josh told himself. It's just runners wall, push on through to the other side and go. It's just your overstuffed stomach bothering you, and the tired weighing you down. Move, CatBoy.

Josh forced himself back into a steady jog, intending to push it up to a full run once the stitch in his side had passed. His stomach snarled at him, and Josh growled back, pushing on and focusing on his stride and breathing, trying to ignore his body's ongoing complaints.

Eve sighed miserably.

Scowling, she jabbed at the power button of the computer's monitor, shutting it off as she shoved the keyboard back under the desk. She leaned forward to rest her elbows on top of the desk, hiding her face behind her hands and breathing deeply, trying not to give in to the distress that was clawing at her mind.

Lexa's nervous system was going to be a lot harder to treat than Eve had been anticipating.

"I'm starting from scratch!" Eve moaned behind her hands, shaking her head back and forth as far as she could with her elbows planted on the desk. There was no discernable cause for the strain Lexa's nervous system was under. Eve knew it was being caused by Lexa's oncoming expiry date, the collapse or burnout of her genetic sequences, but that didn't give her anything concrete to work with. She had only found out about New Mutant expiry dates less than a week ago; Eve certainly hadn't worked with or documented a New Mutant going through their expiration, so she didn't know what she was looking for in Lexa's genes. She had no record of Lexa's genetic code from before her system started breaking down, so Eve had nothing to compare current results to. She was starting from scratch on any number of levels.

"Ummm, I'm good at scratching, can I help?" Shalimar's voice said immediately behind Eve, causing her to jump slightly in her chair. Eve pulled her hands away from her face as she straightened up and turned to look over her shoulder at Shalimar. Shalimar was giving her a small, apologetically sympathetic smile and offering Eve a steaming ceramic mug. "Coffee?"

"Please," Eve sighed emphatically, gratefully accepting the mug and inhaling deeply of its scent before taking a sip. "I was wrong in the elevator," Eve confessed quietly, bowing her head and hiding her face behind her upraised mug of coffee.

"Wrong about what?" Shalimar asked calmly, perching on the corner of the desk.

"When I told Lexa I could counter the strain to her nervous system. I just assumed I would be able to, once I'd figured out the cause." Eve frowned bitterly, shaking her head. "Well, that might actually still be true. But what I assumed was that I could find the cause of the strain, and I can't."

"You said there were only so many things that could cause Lexa's symptoms," Shalimar said with a frown. "It's not any of those?"

"It's not even remotely like any of them," Eve said with an exasperated sigh. "I don't understand it. I don't understand what's causing the strain, so I can't do anything about it!" she snapped harshly, pounding the bottom of one fist into the arm of her chair. She was angry with herself for not being able to help, particularly when she had already promised Lexa she would, that they could start treatment later that afternoon. Eve took a shaky breath after her outburst, trying to rein in her emotions and regain a measure of self-control.

"Whoa, take it easy, Eve," Shalimar cautioned her, gripping Eve's shoulder with one hand and shaking it back and forth softly. "Lexa knows you're doing everything you can. Even if it's not as simple to fix –or to find what needs fixing, whatever– as you thought, you already know the sort of strain Lexa's system is under. You identified that, so can't you just treat that part? Like you said, relieve the symptom while you're still trying to figure out the actual problem?"

Eve frowned in thought, staring ahead through the steam rising from her coffee.

"You know, you might be right," Eve said, nodding slowly. "It. . .it won't be half as good as what I was expecting to accomplish today, but it's a start." Eve blinked back to the world around her after her contemplations ended, looking up at Shalimar gratefully. "Thanks, Shal. This still sucks, but at least now I've got a direction to proceed in. Thank You."

Shalimar shrugged one shoulder in response as she slid off the corner of Eve's desk and onto her feet.

"Happy to help," she said as Eve turned her monitor back on with one hand, ready to face the work ahead of her again as she gulped at her coffee with the other.

"Ow, Jesus, hot..." Eve muttered as Shalimar left, making her smirk.

An unfortunately short amount of time later, Eve brushed an errant lock of hair away from her forehead with a trembling hand. She hung her head, not even bothering to shut her monitor off. The truth was on her screen in undeniable electronic colors; Eve couldn't deny the facts by turning off their display. Hanging her head meant she couldn't see them, but just because Eve couldn't face them didn't make those facts go away.

She couldn't help Lexa.

Eve understood the strain Lexa's nervous system was under: the nerve impulses generated by her neurons were growing weaker, forcing each neuron to work harder to generate the same signals they always had. The signals were weaker because they were having greater difficulty leaping the gap junction between one neuron's terminals and the next's dendrites. The question was why was the gap becoming harder to jump, and Eve couldn't find any explanation whatsoever.

"Okay," Eve told herself, pushing her chair back from the desk and getting up to stretch her legs, to walk and think and stop looking at a computer screen for a while. "Question isn't why is it happening; the question is: what can I do about it?"

Eve paced a few steps away from the medical computer, staring at the various medical supplies on the storage racks to one side of the lab without seeing them, worrying her lower lip between her thumb and one finger. She was trying to devote all her energy into finding a solution, to not allow distraction and worry to drain effectiveness from her work, but the fact that it was a losing battle was betrayed by the fingers of her other hand drumming ceaselessly against her thigh. The more she tried to force her thoughts to turn in a productive direction, the more they chased each other in circles of worry, instead.

The ringing of Eve's phone snapped her anguish-closed eyes open in surprise.

"Hi, Anne," Eve answered cautiously after checking the ID display, hoping Anne wasn't calling to ask any favors of Eve personally– –she didn't think she could take any more, really.

'Wow, Eve,' Anne replied, concern in her voice. 'Breathe. I was calling to ask how Kevin's growth spurt was going, how things were after all the stresses you were under the other day, but just talking to you is giving me enough of a connection to feel that you're worse. I'll be right over.'

"Oh, um, Anne, thanks, but that's not necessary, honest..." Eve stumbled to answer, worried about trying to find time to talk with Anne when she already had far too much to do.

Anne answered with a sympathetic chuckle, almost amused by Eve's scramble to find a polite refusal. It would have been amusing, if Eve weren't already in emotional turmoil and growing worse.

'I'm going to have to beg to differ,' Anne told Eve, sympathy in her voice. 'I'm only barely connected to your emotional state, Eve, and I can tell you're at the end of your rope. You don't have to make time for me, just let me help you. Run some tests, make some calls, whatever I can do. And if talking to me for just a few minutes anyway helps you relax, you'll be able to do all the things you need to do more efficiently, right?' Anne asked to make her point. 'So you'll actually be saving time, in the end.'

"Okay," Eve agreed with a sigh as she closed her eyes and hung her head again, but this time it was a sigh of relief. "Jesse and Jamie are on the main computer; they'll let you in."

'Okay. I'll see you soon,' Anne answered.

'Eve!' Anne's voice called from Eve's phone as she took it away from her head and was about to end the call.

"Yes, Anne?" Eve asked as she replaced the phone to her ear.

'Relax,' Anne told her in a voice that was both commanding and amusedly exasperated at the same time, then hung up.

Eve smiled as she ended the call, then turned back to her work, trying to come at it from another direction in the hopes of coming up with a different plan.

Lexa was enjoying herself shopping, picking out clothes and things for her room in Haven. The original Mutant X team had split the money from the New York Mutant Underground in half, then divided one half between the four of them to replace their belongings with and use as their own. They were saving the other half for collective team use and emergencies, knowing they could rely on Eve's funds as well if needed. The Underground had been quite generous; Lexa was pretty sure she could more-or-less replace her wardrobe and decorate her room as she wished and still have a touch of cash left over.

She had no intention of buying everything she was looking for right that moment, but she enjoyed having the plan in place. In the meanwhile, Lexa had already found two outfits she loved that were on sale, as well as her favorite brand of hard-to-find-on-the-East-Coast socks. Best of all, she could have her purchases delivered to the Majestic and simply pick them up at the front desk.

Smiling, Lexa arranged for her socks and a few other intimates to be sent to the Majestic, along with a set of black satin bedsheets. The beds in Haven were fine, quite comfortable, actually, but Lexa found the spartan room's blank white everything to be a bit much. Black bedclothes would be a great start at changing that, until she found actual décor she liked.

After another twenty minutes of shopping Lexa had found a floor rug and table lamp she liked and had also worked off the excess of breakfast she'd eaten that morning. It wasn't noon yet, but she was hungry enough for lunch anyway. Once she had stopped to notice, Lexa was surprised to discover she was feeling kind of shaky. It wasn't bad, wasn't scary like the tremors of her DXL exposure, what her upcoming expiry jitters felt like, but the sensation was close enough to make her nervous. She needed to eat.

Lexa left the store and headed up Valley Boulevard, toward Interstate 710 and Benedetti's Italian Restaurant.

Eve meant to spend the time before Anne arrived calming herself, trying to get herself into a better emotional state. She hoped that when Anne arrived she would be ready to share, to open up enough to Anne to relax a little, like Anne had described. Eve knew she wouldn't actually relax, but just easing the tension she was under would be enough to provide some relief, to help her work better.

Unfortunately, Eve was already too tightly wound for that plan to work. She was under too much pressure, too close to being out of time to help Kevin and Lexa and under too much strain worrying about Owen and the possibility of Jamie, Chris, and Josh having similar problems to let herself relax even the slightest. She had been planning to try to think outside the box concerning Lexa's problem, but her thoughts were scrambled in so chaotic a fashion she couldn't focus.

Eve knew she needed a break, needed to get away from the situation –all of the situations– long enough to calm down, so that she could regain her focus, but it just wasn't that easy. Her drive wouldn't let her leave a task unfinished, wouldn't let her move on to something relatively trivial when she knew perfectly well what the highest priorities were. Eve knew she needed to take a step back to do what she needed to do, but she couldn't force herself to take that step when stopping felt like a betrayal of her responsibilities and commitments. She knew that was illogical, that she would better serve her obligations by pausing, but just because she had intellectual understanding didn't necessarily mean Eve's heart, her emotional drive, felt the same way.

Clenching her teeth and pressing her lips together so tightly her face went pale except for two spots of color on her cheekbones, Eve decided to try something simpler. She turned back to the computer, calling up the genetic scans she had done on Kevin, Josh, Chris and Jamie three days earlier. Running comparisons on them was something simple, something Eve could practically do in her sleep, but she could tell herself that checking their genetic codes might give her insight into Lexa's. And even if it didn't, occupying the forefront of her mind with something that routinely simple might let the rest of Eve's intellect spontaneously come up with an answer she wasn't otherwise able to force.

Eve ran the checks on Chris' genetics and bloodwork and found nothing, as she expected. She had already taken special care with his results, checking them meticulously to be sure there were no lingering or genetic effects from whatever the gas he had been exposed to was. A part of Eve had been hoping to find an answer to Lexa's problem in Chris' results because they were both Elementals, but of course it wasn't that easy. She hadn't expected it to be, but she had been hopeful anyway.

Jamie's results also turned out normal, though perhaps less so than Chris'. His bloodwork was just fine, actually better than Chris' because he hadn't been gassed, which was as Eve had expected it to be. Jamie's genetic scan was pushing the upper end of the scale in a few areas, but nothing outside of acceptable norms. Most likely it was a reaction to his having been injured in the Dominion's compound; Jamie was very rarely physically injured to a serious degree, so it wasn't surprising his body would take notice. Besides that, his genetic structure was more flexible than the rest of the team's anyway, since he was a Molecular, and a literally flexible one at that. But at least he appeared to be a healthy one; even if that didn't give Eve any help in treating Lexa, it was still a relief that she didn't need to be worrying about Jamie at the moment.

Eve took care going over Josh's genetic scans, since she hadn't processed his results yet. She had only scanned him because Kevin had insisted, but now she could compare them to his routine check-up from a few months previous to see if he were showing any signs of instability or a "growth spurt" of his own. The original team had all gone through their spurts at the same time, and Josh was in constant contact with Kevin, so if proximity were a factor it was reasonable to assume Josh could be next. Admittedly, it seemed Owen had actually been next after Kevin, but Owen and Josh were both Ferals, so if Owen's spurt had been triggered, it was possible Josh's would be as well.

Frowning when she discovered anomalies in Josh's genetic sequences that hadn't been there less than three months ago, Eve attempted to isolate those sequences and analyze them. It was a painstaking process, almost enough to make Eve regret she had chosen to double check the rest of the team's tests, but if Josh's genes were also actively unstable, they needed to know about it. Her tension and worry rose as she worked; she felt like her worries were becoming manifest and simply adding more problems to her list.

Eve had only just managed to isolate the last anomalous sequence of Josh's scan when the computer finished analyzing the first one. She called up the results just to see what it had come up with, to see if it might suggest what had happened so she would know what to look for in the other discrepancies. Eve frowned when the results looked familiar, reminding her of basic genetics concepts, and she quickly opened a standard reference file, double checking to confirm what the computer's findings made her think of.

Moments later, Anne hurried into the medical lab, frowning with worry over the emotional turmoil she could feel coming from Eve. She had been able to feel Eve's sky-high concern far below when she parked in the Majestic's parking garage, but it had only grown stronger as Jamie lowered the elevator to give Anne access to Haven. When he met her at the entrance, Anne had felt Eve's emotional state spiral out of control and moved directly to the medical lab.

Eve had her arms folded on the desktop in front of the monitor screen, her forehead pressed to the backs of her arms as she shook her head back and forth, sobbing. She hadn't even pushed the keyboard back under the desktop before leaning into it, the lapels of her labcoat catching in the keyboard-shelf's track and making it stick. Her chest was pressed against some of the keys, gobbledegook and a long line of Vs stretching across the computer screen.

Not knowing exactly what was going on but positive that Eve needed to deal with it rather than remain in a traumatized stupor, Anne paused just inside the doorway and concentrated before Jamie caught up with her. A small pink starburst quickly formed on Anne's forehead, streaking forward to flash into Eve's mind. Eve needed to focus to deal with the problems she was facing; a temporary emotional cauterization would give her time to come to terms with her circumstances, to get herself back into a position where she could deal with them again.

"Eve!" Anne said sharply as she moved forward once more, up to Eve's seat at the medical computer. "Eve, hey, c'mon, you can do this!" Anne urged her in reassurance as Jamie poked her head into the medical lab to see what Anne's urgency had been about. Anne looked up from Eve's bowed head to shake her own slightly; Jamie nodded back and left, rejoining Jesse at the computer.

"Oh, god," Eve sighed brokenly, but her voice was absent of actual despair, like she was saying what she thought she should be saying but wasn't actually feeling it. Anne wondered if that was something like telling a little white lie to yourself, but it wasn't as if it were Eve's own doing in either case, really, so it didn't matter.

"Eve, what is it?" Anne asked softly, gently, as Eve raised her weary head and reddened eyes to meet Anne's concerned ones.

"It's just too much," Eve stated in a voice that was far too detached. "Owen's denial, Kevin's instability, Lexa's dying, and now something's wrong with Josh. . .or maybe not; I can't even tell anymore..." Eve shook her head, listlessly. "Some of his genetic sequences are shifting activity levels, some becoming more active and some becoming less, but I can't even determine if that's normal or not." Eve gasped the shortest of laughs, a dry, sarcastic sound that did not actually contain any humor. "It reminded me of something, and when I looked it up, it looks like Josh's genes want him to grow in his winter coat."

Anne frowned with one side of her mouth, her eyebrows folded into an expression of confusion.

"Well, he's a Feline Feral, right? So that might be accurate, couldn't it? Did he go through anything like that last year?" Anne asked.

Eve frowned for a moment in thought, then blinked.

"I'm not sure," she answered, a bit more life returning to her eyes as an intellectual question grabbed her attention. "It was mid-May last year when Josh and Kevin joined the team, so my initial records on him are from slightly after any seasonal changes would be completed, winter coat shedding..." Eve blinked again, looking up to meet Anne's eyes again, with surprise. "And his birthday's in mid-July, so I just did his routine check then and follow-ups every six months. That was February this year and then mid-summer again, always in the middle of the seasonal cycle..."

Eve turned away from Anne and frowned at her screen when she saw the gibberish on it, then cleared it with a single combination keystroke. Her fingers raced over the keys as she called up Josh's other three genetic scans and set the computer to compare the first genetic sequence she had isolated across all five scans.

"What else?" Anne asked, empathically feeling Eve's irritation and impatience that it would take several moments for the computer to compare all five sequences. "You said Owen's denial? Denial of what?"

"Of his condition," Eve replied with a mild sigh of concern. "You saw him the other day, after his crash. He woke up once his body healed, just like we thought he would. . .and since then, he's been acting like it never happened. Bright eyed, bushy tailed, his normal easy-going self, like nothing ever happened, at all. Owen's had..." Eve shook her head, cutting herself off. Anne empathically felt a flash of guilt from Eve, suggesting she had been about to say something she felt wasn't her place to share. "Owen has a history of denial, from before his first capture by the GSA, before he joined Mutant X. I'm afraid he's sublimating his emotions. . .his fears over his capture by the GSA nearly killed him the other day, so now he's pushing them so deep he's not even feeling them." Eve looked up at Anne, renewed worry growing in her eyes. "He can't keep that up forever, and the effects when he can't take it anymore are going to be even worse than last week was for him."

"Eve, Don't Worry About It," Anne told her commandingly, but Eve's conscious mind was too distracted by her returning worry to notice. That worry drained back out of her eyes as she turned to meet Anne's lightening ones once more.

"Like I said the other day, Owen's talked with me a little; I know how– –how Emma helped him at first. His Kansas song and all that, I played it while he was in his coma while you and Eloy were saving the team. I'll do a deep scan of him to make sure if you'd like, but I'm pretty sure Owen has recovered," Anne insisted. "I mean, he still has his issues; I don't think the GSA capturing New Mutants is ever going to not seriously enrage him, and I doubt he'd handle being caught again too well, but as far as his capture last week goes, I give him a clean bill of mental health, okay?" Anne asked earnestly, looking into Eve's eyes to make sure she understood, understood and accepted what Anne was telling her.

"Really?" Eve asked, her face scrunched into an expression of both hope and disbelief, like she wanted to believe Anne was right but couldn't bring herself to do so.

"Like I said, I can check to make absolutely sure if you'd like, but I'm willing to bet on it, okay?" Anne said, trying to give Eve a look that was both reassuring and a chastisement to lighten up at the same time. "As a matter of fact, I was originally calling to check on Kevin, remember? Maybe I can help him with his instability. Relax, Eve, let some of it go, for pity's sake." Anne frowned at the older woman. "You know you can't help your team if you worry yourself into an early grave or the hospital yourself. And you also know I can run the equipment here, so let me help you. You go back to Josh's genetic stuff, and I'll check his bloodwork. You can send that over there, right?" Anne declared as she pointed to the records computer on the far wall, next to the equipment racks.

"Oh, yes. Sure I can," Eve answered even as she did so, distracted from wondering when Anne had told her she could run Haven's medical equipment by Anne's question. Then again, she had run it a few days ago, watching over Owen. And Eve was so wrung out at the moment that she didn't feel like questioning anything. She was just glad Anne could help, that she was providing Eve with some of the relief she needed by lending a hand.

One-two Ow-ow Left-right Ow-ow

Josh was maintaining a light jog through a small, wooded section of the park, despite the blazing stitch in his side and roaring pain in his stomach. His face was hardened into a determined glare, scaring off any passers-by who might otherwise have made a friendly comment or eye-contact. In fact, a few of the other park-goers Josh jogged past before entering the trees gave him looks of concern as he went by with his breath whistling back and forth through his clenched teeth, but he was too far inside his own head to take any notice.

Ow-ow Ow-ow Ow-ow Ow-ow

Josh was stubbornly forcing himself onward, despite the fact the stitch in his side had only grown worse and his stomach's discomfort had blossomed into outright pain. He had come out to WeHo to run, to wear himself out so he could sleep properly when he got back to Kevin, and that was what he was going to do, whether he was drowning in sweat or not. No pain, no gain, and running with his middle complaining just meant he'd wear himself out that much faster, get back to Kevin that much quicker.

Nonetheless, Josh was happy to stop when his phone rang.

Josh frowned in surprise when he looked at his phone to see who was calling; the screen was displaying gibberish for the incoming number, then flickered and resolved into the face of the oldest man Josh had ever seen.

'Hello, m'boy!' the crazy-looking old man said, appearing delighted to see Josh. His eyes were bright, even if they were almost as sunken into his skull as Kevin's were of late. His skin was pasty, both stretched and wrinkled at the same time, and his grey and white hair hung past his shoulders in messy curls. Josh thought he looked like the Bride of Frankenstein's grandfather.

"Who the Hell are you?" Josh panted with a frown, trying to decide whether he wanted to use his free hand to massage his stitch or hold his stomach.

'Oh, forgotten me already?' the old man laughed. 'You just saw me the other day! Of course, it was at a distance, but what with your Feral vision that shouldn't matter, now should it?' he asked with a suspicious smirk.

Josh's hand froze in the middle of rubbing his abdomen as his eyes widened.

"You're the Creator!" Josh blurted in surprise, then frowned in anger when he realized he was speaking to the man who had nearly killed most of the team, the man who was responsible for Kevin's near drowning. "You put us through that maze of deathtraps, you psychopath!!"

'Indeed I did!' the Creator said, grinning maniacally. 'And you all survived quite impressively, I must say. But you've got another challenge to face at the moment, now don't you?' the mad scientist asked with a knowing smirk.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Josh growled, shifting his hand from his stomach to press between two of his ribs.

'Well, dear boy —Josh, isn't it? I'm referring to the fact that you were the only Feral to enter that particular hallway. Thus the only one exposed to the Feral Fever.'

"Feral Fever?" Josh asked with a suspicious snarl, too angry to be concerned.

The Creator ginned, malevolently.

'Depending on your metabolism and constitution, it should be kicking in any time now,' the Creator told Josh pleasantly, still smiling all the while. 'It would actually take some time to build up to that point, probably causing a lovely combination of fatigue and insomnia. You look a bit tired, m'boy, could that be the case?' the madman asked with a derisive smirk. 'When the fever becomes active it creates intense stomach pains, as well as causing a low-grade fever. It then moves on to traumatize other internal organs, which may in turn cause a side stitch if the Feral is performing physical activity.'

The Creator cackled briefly, his mad eyes never leaving Josh's glaring ones even as his grey curls shook with his mirth.

'Enjoying your run, Feral? You look a bit peaked! And sweating nicely, you're flushed, as well,' the Creator said gleefully. 'I'm so thrilled with my timing! Physical exertion will cause the disease to progress much more quickly once it manifests. . .as it obviously already has.' The Creator grinned malevolently at Josh once more as Josh's arm began to shake and his vision began to blur at the edges.

'You will soon collapse,' the Creator said, still grinning. 'But don't worry, you're not going to die. Yet.'

Josh blinked and shook his head briskly, trying to get his vision to focus. He didn't know why he was bothering; he could still hear the madman clearly. Nothing wrong with his ears, even if his vision was fading. And God, his guts hurt...

'You will go into a coma. . .and then die, a few days later. In the meanwhile, however, now that the disease is active, it is highly communicable. And although it only affects Ferals, any New Mutant can be a carrier. You will be unconscious, and by the time anyone realizes what has actually happened, the Fever will have spread throughout your precious Mutant Underground. The death toll should be impressively astounding,' the Creator finished with another malicious chuckle. 'Oh, and don't bother trying to warn—'

Josh powered off the phone, guessing the madman had been in the process of telling him he wouldn't be able to end the call. Too bad for him Eve's phones had a manual power switch. On the other hand, they certainly didn't normally have video-talk transmission, so the Dominion had obviously done something. He switched the phone back on, intending to call Eve and tell her what had happened, that she had to pick him up in the Helix and not bring any of the rest of the team with her...

The phone didn't turn back on, but it swiftly grew warmer in Josh's hand. He frowned at it in feverish confusion, then gasped when he realized what it was doing and looked around wildly. Spotting a birdbath through the trees in the middle of a tiny clearing ahead, Josh broke into a run, almost instantly dropping back to a crippled walk when his stomach and sides protested the movement.

Embracing the adrenal surge as his instincts and subconscious realized he was in danger, Josh mentally shook himself back to a semblance of normal operation. He lengthened his stride, heading directly for the small glade as fast as he could without jarring his insides, going straight through the trees instead of following the winding path. Hissing as his phone grew too hot to hold, obviously no longer capable of functioning, of summoning help, Josh switched his grip to hold the phone by its stubby antenna. Even the antenna was warm, conducting heat from the main body of the overheating phone simply from being in contact with it.

Josh cried out in surprise and fear when his phone burst into flame; he maintained just enough presence of mind to rear his arm back and fling the blazing phone ahead into the birdbath, instead of dropping it into the grass at his feet.

With my luck, I'd pass out and fall onto the damn burning thing, start the park on fire... Josh thought to himself as he watched the blazing phone disappear into the birdbath's waters with a hiss. Gotta find somebody, call Eve... he thought as the blurriness reached the center of his field of vision.

Josh turned to find someone, anyone, another park patron, but he fell to his knees and collapsed onto his side before he had taken more than a step. The vertical pupils of his Feral green eyes clouded over as their lids sank shut.

Kevin had been sleeping soundly for the first time in days, relaxed to the point where he could sleep by the leisurely breakfast they had enjoyed and his loving boyfriend's tactile promises of reassurance. In fact, Kevin had been so deeply asleep that he hadn't noticed Josh's departure or his absence since that point.

But some portion of Kevin's sleeping mind was aware of his lover's plight. Perhaps an exhausted sleep was similar enough to his astral projection coma that his senses expanded, perhaps Kevin's ongoing evolution gave him perceptions he had not previously had, perhaps his bond with Josh was strong enough to sense something through that link alone, but whatever the reason, some part of Kevin was aware his lover was in danger.

Extreme danger.

That sudden emotional distress, catching Kevin's sleeping mind off guard and shocking him with its intensity, jolted Kevin awake with a cry of pained alarm. Worse yet, the emotional spike and resulting panic triggered an instability attack, one far greater than any Kevin had experienced before. Even as he collapsed back onto the bed after startling violently awake, Kevin's senses were spiraling out of control, to the point of no longer being connected to his body whatsoever.

Anne had just been calling up the standard blood test codes to check an odd result in Josh's bloodwork when she felt Kevin's alarm. The Majestic's penthouse was higher than the parking garage and not directly above Haven, but Kevin's distress was so intense Anne could feel it far more acutely than she had felt Eve's worry when she arrived.

"Eve, there's something strange with Josh's blood test results," Anne said, carefully not letting her alarm at Kevin's panic show in her voice. The last thing they all needed was for Eve to lose the focus she had managed to regain because something else had gone catastrophically wrong. If Kevin needed Eve, Anne would alert her, but she was hopeful she could help him herself.

Eve automatically called up Josh's bloodwork results on her screen, frowning almost immediately when they came into view.

"What the Hell is that?" she said with some alarm as Anne slipped out of the medical lab. "Looks like a virus," Eve muttered to herself as she moved to retrieve a microscope and one of Josh's blood samples.

"Jamie!" Anne called out as she dashed across Haven's main expanse. "Kevin's in trouble; send me up there and tell Owen and Chris I'm coming to help!" she explained as she ran right past Jamie and Jesse at the main workstation.

The Moleculars exchanged a worried look as Anne ran out of Haven, Jamie calling up the elevator override again as Jesse raised his commring to his mouth and told the system to dial Chris and Owen.

Chris had gone to his rooms to watch a movie, leaving the living area quiet for Owen to monitor Kevin. Owen was sprawled on the sofa leafing through a Sports Illustrated and hoping Josh got back before he got too bored when Kevin's shocked cry rang out.

Owen dropped the magazine on his chest and clamped his hands onto the sofa's armrest, on either side of his head. He threw his knees up to his chest, kicking his feet back above his head and past the end of the sofa, rolling backwards in a reverse somersault onto his feet. What the Hell? Owen thought to himself in alarm as he spun toward Josh and Kevin's door, dodging around the recliner immediately in front of him and sprinting across the edge of the living suite to their door. That was no nightmare; Kevin hasn't moved a muscle since Josh left, would've twitched, I would've heard his breathing speed up, at the least. . .what else besides a nightmare could have jolted him out of sleep like that, made him yell... Pain? Did his instability flare up?

It only took a second for the thoughts to flash through Owen's mind; he was opening Josh and Kevin's door even as Chris was opening his to see what had happened. Chris met Owen's eyes as he glanced over his shoulder at the sound of Chris' door opening; when Chris opened his mouth to ask what was going on, both of their phones rang in sync.

"Now's a bad time," Chris barked into his phone as he followed Owen into Josh and Kevin's rooms, frowning as he heard choked grunts of distress coming from the bedroom. "Scratch that, Kevin needs help. Where's Eve?"

'Uhm, Anne's actually already on her way up to help, that's why I was calling,' Jesse answered.

"Oh. Good deal," Chris said in surprise, spinning on his heel to head for the penthouse's front door as Owen went into the bedroom. "Thanks, Jesse; we'll keep you guys posted," Chris finished, then stuffed his phone back in his pocket and hurried to the front door. He flipped the deadbolt after opening the door so that it couldn't automatically close again, then dashed back to Kevin and Owen.

"Kevin? Kevin, it's Owen, can you hear me?" Owen was saying quietly when Chris hurried into the room. Owen was perched on the corner of the bed, up against the headboard and leaning forward to jostle Kevin's shoulder, gently trying to rouse him from—whatever was happening.

Kevin was lying flat on his back, twitching spasmodically, his fingers raking aimlessly at the bedsheet across his hips, and his wide, unblinking eyes were roaming the room blindly. His bare skin was flushed and covered in a sheen of sweat that thickened into droplets rolling down his face and chest even as Chris stepped into the room. Kevin didn't seem to take any notice of Owen's voice or touch, a sharp, clipped groan repeatedly coming from deep in his throat as Kevin twitched on the bed, unresponsive.

"What—?" Chris began to ask as he drew up short in surprise at Kevin's state, then shook his head and kept going, ducking into Josh and Kevin's bathroom. He threw a washcloth in the sink and turned the cold water on, then threw open the linen cabinet in search of a fresh hand towel. Grabbing the first (and only) one he saw, Chris dashed back to the sink without closing the cabinet. Tossing the towel over one shoulder, Chris turned the sink off and wrung the washcloth out briskly, then hurried back to Kevin and Owen.

"Nightmare?" Chris asked with a puzzled frown as he handed Owen the dampened washcloth. "With his eyes open? Is that like sleepwalking, or something?" he asked, worrying the towel between his hands as he watched Owen quickly, efficiently wipe Kevin down.

"No idea," Owen answered with a shake of his head, frustration evident in his voice. "I didn't hear anything until he yelled; I don't think his breathing had even gotten harsher. He just. . .cried out." Owen wiped Kevin's forehead and throat with the cold cloth, as well as his chest and wrists. Owen was wetting down Kevin's pulse points, still remembering the first aid techniques he had learned as a young teenager to patch up his battered mother after one of his father's rages.

"And now he's, I dunno, awake, but he's not here, either. Like the opposite of his astral coma, or something." Owen shook his head again, gesturing to Chris with the washcloth. Chris took it and gave Owen the towel; Owen grasped a corner with both hands, fanning Kevin with the whole towel, trying to cool him down. "It has to be an unstable attack..."

"It is. I can feel his mind, too active," Anne said as she came into the room, her worriedly frowning eyes fixed on Kevin.

"You can help him?" Chris asked, his voice and expression equal parts worried and hopeful.

"I can," Anne answered with a nod, her eyes never leaving Kevin's face until she looked up at Owen. "Owen, can you sit him up. . .maybe hold him still?" she asked. "I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen; I wouldn't want the twitching to go into seizure or something."

"Um, yeah, that's been known to happen, actually," Owen said with a frown. "When he pushed his powers too far with that Feldspar ass, he triggered a seizure..." Owen blinked, looking up to Anne and then at Chris. "Hey, do you think maybe that was the start of it? Could his instability have caused that, just been getting worse since?"

"Could be," Anne nodded, then motioned for Owen to continue, to get Kevin propped up. "Who knows where it started, but maybe we can end it. I had to learn how to control my psi-bolts when they first happened, so I'm hoping something similar will work for Kevin."

Owen nodded and handed the towel back to Chris, frowning unhappily when he realized Kevin was still sweating just as profusely as he had been. That couldn't be a good sign. Owen toed his shoes off and climbed up onto the bed, tossing Josh's pillows out of the way and sitting with his back against the headboard. He grimaced slightly as he slid one arm behind Kevin's shoulders, realizing Kevin was truly soaked.

"Hey, get him some water," Owen told Chris as he shifted his grip beneath Kevin's arms, then lifted Kevin up in front of himself. Owen slid Kevin practically into his lap, in between his thighs to hold Kevin upright and still for Anne to help. . .however she was going to accomplish that.

Anne squeaked in embarrassed surprise when Owen dragged Kevin up toward the head of the bed, Kevin's sweaty groin exposed to view as his hips slid out from under the sheet. Chris couldn't help laughing at Anne's sudden surprise and embarrassment; he laughed all the harder when Owen frowned at Anne's sudden noise and then Chris' amusement. Owen's face twisted in baffled confusion as Chris doubled over laughing, then he gasped in realization when he turned back to Anne and saw her blushing and averting her eyes.

"Chris!" Owen said sharply, frowning in annoyance at Chris' immaturity, but his eyebrows rose again an instant later when he couldn't help glancing down and confirming that Kevin was indeed not wearing anything to sleep in. "Gimme that towel, you dick!" Owen snapped at Chris, embarrassed on Kevin's behalf. Not that Kevin had anything to be embarrassed about, not at all.

"Dick!" Chris squeaked as he laughed so hard he lost all breath completely. Chris was shaking silently, his face shifting from red to purple as he tried to laugh without air; Anne also squeaked for an entirely different reason. Chris managed to flap the hand holding the towel in Owen's general direction until Owen could snatch its end, yanking it out of Chris' grasp. He laid it modestly over Kevin's lap, blushing almost as brightly as Anne was.

"Okay, Anne, he's. . .covered," Owen said uncomfortably, refusing the word "decent". Chris gasped a whooping breath, managing to struggle back upright even as he continued to laugh silently and hysterical tears rolled down his face. Anne gave Chris a dirty look as he left to go get the water, seriously contemplating creating the illusion that he was naked just to see how he liked it, but she decided not to. He actually might like it, and he was zany enough that he wouldn't actually be uncomfortable unless her illusion happened to be amazingly coincidentally accurate. Hell, knowing Chris, he might flash her just to prove he didn't look like whatever illusion she created of him.

Rolling her eyes as she shook her head at Chris, Anne turned back to face Owen. She sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed, crossing her arms and leaning forward to rest them on top of the mattress.

"Okay, this shouldn't take too awfully long. If Kevin will drink, that's fine; just don't move either of us until I come out of it," Anne told Owen. He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but she had already closed her eyes, and an incredibly bright starburst manifested on her forehead almost instantly, streaking forward to flash into Kevin's skull.

Kevin looked around at swirling, shifting colors and nothing else.

^''What happened, and more importantly, where the Hell am I?^''

Kevin muttered to himself, trying to decide if there was any difference between the sky over his head and the ground beneath his feet. Not that either one particularly looked like ground or sky, either.

^''You're on the astral plane,^'' a vaguely familiar voice answered from behind him. Kevin spun around to face the opposite direction, seeing a tall, statuesque woman, or maybe more like an angel. Or a demon.

Her eyes were an opalescent jet black, and her hair was a wispy nimbus of brilliant red that had never been seen outside of a special effects display. Her body was sheathed in tiny magenta-pink starbursts but glowing with an intense golden light. Kevin frowned at her, squinting, and realized that other than the bizarre colors and shifting light sources, her face was familiar to him.

^''Anne?^'' Kevin asked in confused surprise. ^''You look. . .so different. Why do you look like that?^''

Anne's bizarre image grinned, her gums purple and her teeth the glistening white of the highlight on the curve of her jet-black eyes. Which was ridiculous, since there was no individual point of origin of the light wherever they were, and it certainly wasn't anything like a white spotlight if there was, either.

^''So do you, silly,^'' she told Kevin, pointing at him.

Kevin looked down to discover his body was translucent pale blue, for the most part, but shimmering through a spectrum of color just like the apparent world around them. It was almost as if he were the inverse, his colors standing out against the background he could see, yet fitting in with perfect contrast. He was also enormous, more muscular than Owen, Chris, and Brennan put together.

^''The Hell?^'' he asked again, looking up at Anne in alarm. ^''Anne, what is this. . .the astral plane? That's Saturday morning cartoon stuff; what's happening? And why do I look like this?^'' he asked in distraught confusion.

^''You're seeing your psychic self, your "essence", if you want to call it that,^'' Anne told him. ^''Think about it, Kevin, you're a massively powerful telekinetic. That's like the physical strength of your mind; of course your mental self is buff,^'' she said, still smiling softly.

^''This is the astral plane. It's not a separate plane of reality, of 'astral existence' or something, of course not,^'' Anne agreed. ^''That is silly. If the astral plane was where you went when you astral project, it wouldn't do you much good, would it? No, this is just your perception of it.^''

^''Huh?^'' Kevin said, deciding that statement summed up his reaction appropriately, eloquent or not.

^''Your instability has been all about your senses, your perceptions, so far, hasn't it?^'' Anne asked. Kevin thought she sounded disturbingly like Eve when Eve would ask them to answer questions she already knew the answer to just to get the team on the same page of understanding with her. It worked, but Kevin thought it was frustrating as hell.

^''Okay, yes, it has...^'' Kevin answered with a cautious nod, hoping Anne would explain why that was important. He relaxed when he saw her empathically feel that hope cross his emotional being and smile; Anne's smile grew wider as she felt Kevin realize she could tell what he wanted. It was bizarre, almost like he could understand how Anne's empathy felt to her.

Kevin blinked in surprise when he realized the base pale blue of his body was shifting with his hope and relief, as well as the fact that the starbursts of the middle of Anne's forehead had shifted to match. He was seeing her empathy in action.

^''You're getting it, Kevin,^'' Anne told him with delight, the magenta-pink of her body's nimbus shifting to a warmer salmon color. ^''Everything has a psychic image, a psychic impression. That's what extrasensory perception is, perceiving those aspects of psychic energy in the normal world. But when you're projecting onto that plane, shifting to perceiving nothing but those psychic energies...^''

^''It's confusing as hell. I don't really have any frame of reference,^'' Kevin realized.

^''Something like that,^'' Anne nodded. ^''You do have reference, but you've never used it before, never paid any attention to it. Like your own heartbeat or scent. Of course you know it, but you never notice it until something about it changes.^''

^''I've always noticed the psychic when I project, but never saw it until my genes changed, my "growth spurt",^'' Kevin said, his eyes widening as understanding dawned. He wondered what his astral form's eyes looked like.

^''Exactly,^'' Anne nodded, smiling broadly. ^''I've always felt people's emotions, the psychic impressions of them. I can't project like you do, but I'm used to Psionically sensing things. I only sense emotions, you use all five of your normal senses in your astral form, but the concept of psychic perception is the same. I can show you how, catch your mind up to the new things it's realizing, if you let me.^''

^''Um, please,^'' Kevin replied with a wry frown. ^''What do I do?^''

^''Just relax, and open your mind to me,^'' she told him. ^''Let your thoughts go still, and just perceive.^''

Kevin did as Anne said, simply standing still. He figured if they were in the conscious world, or perceiving it or whatever, this was the part where one or both of them would be closing their eyes. But the only reason they would do that would be to focus on the psychic. . .and the psychic was all they were perceiving at the moment.

^''How are you here with me on the "astral plane" if you don't project?^'' Kevin asked as he felt himself stilling, the flowing colors of his psychic form moving more and more slowly while the colors of Anne's form grew in intensity as she gathered her strength, her focus and force of will.

^'' I'm not projecting, you are. I just linked to you, '^' Anne told him, her mouth not moving as her face thinned slightly and her hair went brilliant scarlet, getting slightly longer and straighter.

The glow of Anne's body intensified dramatically as an external starburst manifested on her forehead, swiftly growing larger than her head as it grew white hot, then flashed into Kevin's mind.

Kevin blinked the spots out of his psychic eyes, looking around his bedroom. He was standing in the middle of his bed, the head of his physical body in the middle of his psychic form's chest. Anne's Psionic image was standing over her own seated form, almost like her physical body was leaning forward to give her psychic self a piggy-back ride. Except her psychic legs were passing directly through her physical back.

He could still see the day-glo colors of the psychic plane in everything, almost like an aura that wasn't radiating, like an over-exposed photograph. He wasn't empathic, like Anne, so he couldn't see the concern coming from Chris and Owen as they tried to get his unconscious body to drink from a water bottle, but he could see their essences, regardless. He wasn't a Psychometric, he wouldn't psychically sense the emotional histories of the objects in Josh's and his room, even if he knew their stories already, but he could see different colors of auras hiding inside everything in the room, in the water bottle Owen was trying to feed him, in Chris' phone in his pocket...

Kevin closed his psychic eyes and grinned. He could still see everything in perfect detail; it was just all in its psychic aura colors now. Concentrating on the bedsheet pooled over his unconscious form's knees, Kevin telekinetically pulled it up to his waist, tucking it in behind his hips and against Owen's thighs. It didn't cause him anywhere near the strain using his telekinesis in astral form normally did; it just felt. . .different.

Frowning curiously in wonder even as Chris and Owen jumped in surprise, Kevin took a few steps forward, passing immaterially through the bed and his own physical body. He could feel his physical body though; it had never been like that before. Previously, if Kevin touched his comatose form while astrally projecting, he automatically flowed back into it, ending his projection and waking up. That didn't seem to be the case now, and when he reached down to touch his own ankle, to see what he felt like, Kevin blinked in shock when he actually touched the bedsheet again. Not just felt it, its temperature and texture as if he were touching it physically like he had always been able to do in astral form, but actually touching the sheet– –it moved under the nonexistent pressure of his fingertip.

Pausing in consideration, Kevin decided to test another of his old limits. He had never been able to telekinetically lift his own body –which sucked, because if he could it would practically be like flying, which would be awesome,– he had to fake it by moving the clothes he was wearing. Concentrating on his comatose form, Kevin scowled when he couldn't slide himself back down the bed into his normal sleeping position. Walking around his own body, still passing through the bed it was lying on, Kevin concentrated on touching himself and not Owen as he reached forward with both arms.

Kevin's astral arms passed through Owen, who didn't so much as twitch, and physically picked up his comatose body. Owen gasped in shock and scrambled off the bed as Kevin backed up a pace and sidestepped toward the foot of the bed, laying himself down so that his head was back on his pillow once more. An instant's focus had the bedsheet smoothing itself properly over his physical body, and another second's concentration had the hand towel sliding out from under it and floating over to drop into a laundry basket.

Kevin smiled broadly as he opened his astral eyes; his psychic senses were back in balance.

Which hopefully meant that intense emotion wouldn't trigger instability attacks anymore. If his abilities were now in sync with his mind, hopefully his body would catch up and adapt to the new genetic sequences that had given him the new aspects of his abilities in the first place. Or at least his mind was no longer getting in the way of that process, operating smoothly with his new genetic sequences, so his body could get there, too. It was like the martial arts principles Josh talked about, keeping both mind and body in harmony; lord knew Kevin's body could use some harmony.

Kevin's astral eyes widened as the thought of Josh crossed his mind; it was the sudden concern for him that had triggered Kevin's instability attack in the first place. He paused as the panic washed through him, the clinical part of his mind waiting to see if his senses would distort again or if his physical body would react negatively to strong emotion. Anne had adjusted his mind, but his body's genes were still unstable, would that imbalance still result in an attack?

He didn't feel anything, and his body didn't so much as twitch, much less enter a seizure, but Anne's psychic form looked up in concern.

^'' Kevin? '^' Anne asked, her psychic form's mouth not moving other than to shift with the rest of her altered face to an expression of worry. The calmly analytical portion of Kevin's mind wondered if she could telepathically communicate with him when she was Psionically connected to him if he wasn't in astral form. Or if she could connect to him when he wasn't in astral form.

^'' What is it? '^' she asked, apparently interpreting his calm analysis as emotional shock after the brief, intense burst of panic, which he supposed it was.

^''Josh is in trouble, big trouble, that's what hit me in the first place,^'' Kevin explained. ^''I have to find him; I'll be right back,^'' he finished, then flashed away through the walls of the Majestic, headed west.

Lexa stifled a small burp with one fist, glancing surreptitiously to be sure no one had noticed her blatant pig imitation. Or at least the sound effects of it; it would've been hard for anyone who looked to miss the fact that Lexa had rather thoroughly enjoyed her entree, most of the dinner rolls in the bread basket and two trips to Benedetti's superb salad bar.

Even though she had enjoyed a large breakfast, Lexa felt she had worked it off shopping; she had been hungry when she arrived at Benedettis and starving by the time her chicken alfredo was served, even with the salad bar. Josh had been right about the quality of the food at Benedetti's, it was excellent, and the service and atmosphere were very good as well. Lexa could see where it would have been an enjoyable place to work and how Josh would have fond memories of it, even without having met Kevin there.

"Can I interest you in dessert today?" Lexa's server asked, a smiling young woman whose hair was done in a complicated arrangement of miniature braids. Lexa smiled back at her, even with mildly unusual California hair being an accepted norm at Benedetti's, she still couldn't picture Josh in the black slacks and white dress shirt uniform of the wait staff.

"No, I think I'm stuffed," Lexa told the girl –Marinna, she had said her name was– with a regretful smirk. "Actually, I think I'm too full to move," Lexa went on, her smirk spreading into a smile. Her expression changed as a hopeful idea prompted her to ask: "Hey, you guys have gelato, don't you?"

"Hi, Benedetti's Italian Restaurant?" Marinna asked with a happy smirk. " 'Course we do. In its own forced-air freezer, right consistency every time."

"Strawberry?" Lexa asked hopefully, her smile spreading into a grin as Marinna nodded. "Great! Just a small one, please. I'll nurse it until my stomach decides it's going to let me walk again."

Marinna laughed.

"Sure thing," she smiled back at Lexa. "We're not super busy today or anything, take your time. I'll go get that for you, and I'll drop your check off with it."

"Thanks," Lexa smiled again, meaning it.

Lexa stared off into the middle distance as she picked at her gelato, her eyes minimally studying the Mediterranean decor while her mind was miles away. She was considering her morning's purchases and how they would look in her room, what else she would need to get to complete her redecorating.

Thoughts of contrasting blacks and whites and considerations of what she could do with chrome or silver accents were interrupted by Lexa's smearing strawberry gelato over one side of her upper lip. Sputtering and frowning, Lexa glared down at her errant spoon, wondering how on earth she had managed to come close to jabbing herself in the gum instead of spooning her dessert into her mouth.

Lexa's left hand stopped fumbling for her napkin when she saw the way her right hand was still trembling. Lexa's eyes widened in alarm as she watched her hand shake, the pale pink blob of frozen dessert sliding free of the quivering spoon and dropping to the tablecloth with a soft splatter.

She hadn't felt the tremors set into her arm, and she still wasn't feeling them.

Whatever was wrong with her nervous system, it was so far from normal she wasn't even feeling it happening.

Lexa dropped her spoon into the bowl of gelato, snatching up her napkin and clumsily wiping the remnants of the last bite off her face. She swore softly into the napkin as she realized her left hand was shaking as well, panic beginning to set in.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax, to get a grip before her mental state spiraled out of control.

"Jesse," Lexa said quietly without taking her hands away from her mouth, knowing her commring would pick up her voice and transmit it to her teammates. "Jess, Shal, anybody, come in," she whispered, but she knew her friends would hear that she was quietly avoiding freaking out in her voice.

'Lexa, what's wrong?' Jesse's voice said over her commring.

"Jesse. . .Jess, I'm at Benedetti's Restaurant, Valley Boulevard and 710, where Josh worked," Lexa answered, her voice shaking not quite as much as her hands, but still shaking nonetheless. "I'm. . .I'm losing it, like at Ceci Luca, when Milo slipped me the DXL," Lexa swallowed, audibly, trying to hang onto her control. "Jesse, my powers are going to go postal, and I don't think I can even move. If I try to get up, it could push me over the edge."

Lexa swallowed again, her fingers tangled and fisted into her napkin to keep them from trembling. She couldn't feel their urge to shake, but she could still feel the tingle under her skin that meant her condition was worsening.

"My arms are shaking badly, and I can't even feel them doing it. I'm not sure I can get up," she finished softly.

'Lexa, we're on our way,' Shalimar's voice came back, her fierce sense of urgency clearly apparent in it. 'Just relax, breathe, like Dr. Stanton showed you. We're coming, Lex, just hold on.'

Lexa closed her eyes and knotted her fingers tighter together, trying to do just that.

The world blurred past Kevin's astral form in a streak of rainbow colors, smoothly drawing to a halt as he neared his destination. Kevin's perceptions shifted from holding still as the world flashed past him to streaking forward as the world stopped, flying toward a place he recognized. The West Hollywood Park, which was a favorite of Josh's, complete with open space for running as well as a large public pool, tennis courts, and a baseball field.

Kevin's astral form swooped toward the edge of the park, into the trees and past a birdbath. He drew to a startled halt when he saw Josh's collapsed form, then flashed forward to his lover's side. Josh was flushed, sweating heavily, and gasping for breath, but he looked too weak to move.

Crouching down, Kevin laid his spectral hand against Josh's forehead, feeling that he was indeed feverish, not just warm, but burning up with fever. Josh's normal temperature was above 98 degrees because he was partially feline, but he was never that warm.

Josh turned his head slightly, and Kevin reflexively brushed Josh's hair back from his face. Josh's eyes opened the barest slit, Feral green and vertical-pupiled, looking to find what had touched him.

"Kevin..." Josh murmured in the barest whisper, and his eyes sank closed again.

"JOSH!" Kevin yelled as he bolted upright in bed, then collapsed back onto his pillow, gasping for breath with his eyes wide in surprise at his body's physical weakness.

"Oh, shit," Kevin panted, then pushed himself up on his arms, sliding back to prop himself up slightly against the headboard. He shook his head briskly to clear it, readjusting his sensory input to the physical world around him for the first time since he fell asleep after breakfast.

"Kevin, what is it?" Owen asked worriedly, reaching a steadying hand out to Kevin's shoulder. "Anne said you said Josh's in trouble, what happened?"

"Uhg, I'm still messed up," Kevin grunted as he continued to pant, then blinked as he refocused once more, looking up at the others with alarm. "Guys, quick, Josh is sick, collapsed in the park, we gotta call the others, take the Helix..." Kevin cut himself off when Chris winced and Anne and Owen exchanged startled looks of alarm. "..What!?"

"Lexa's sick, too, about to lose control of her powers in public. The original team just left to go take care of her, took the Helix," Owen explained, sadly.

"Shit..!" Kevin said despairingly as he hid his face behind his hands. He shook slightly, shivering both because of his body's reaction to the severe instability attack and the fact he was sitting up mostly exposed to the room's air conditioning, as well as from duress over being unable to provide his lover aid.

"Hey, Kev, take it easy, don't. . .don't set off another attack, okay?" Owen said worriedly, rubbing Kevin's shoulder gently.

"No, no attacks, not anymore," Kevin said with a weary smile. "Anne fixed that part. My powers're stronger, that's how I moved me, found Josh. He needs help."

"Wait, you said Josh is sick?" Anne asked with a frown. "I was just checking his bloodwork when I felt you panic, Kevin. There was something odd about it; I asked Eve to look at it– –call her, maybe she's already found something."

Chris yanked his phone out of his pocket, thumbing the first speed-dial even as he handed it to Kevin.

'What, Chris, I'm a little busy!' Eve snapped when she answered her phone.

"Eve, it's Kevin," he said quickly. "I just saw Josh in West Hollywood Park, collapsed, serious fever, short of breath. Anne said there was something in his bloodwork?"

'Crap, yes. It's some kind of virus; it must have been genetically engineered,' she answered frustratedly. 'I tried calling Josh to tell him to come home, but his phone's off-line.'

"Fuckin' whack-job Creator, you just know this is from his damn deathtrap labtest thing..." Chris muttered angrily, he and Owen using their New Mutant abilities to listen to Eve's side of the conversation. Owen nodded in agreement, his face downturned in an outraged scowl.

"Eve, we have to go get him, go help him, now," Kevin said urgently. "I don't. . .I'm not sure how much time he has. I touched him; his fever's really high, like, risking brain damage soon high," Kevin explained, pleading.

'I'm already working on a counter agent, a vaccine' Eve replied. 'I can tell the virus is attaching to the modified portions of Josh's DNA, so it's New Mutant specific, possibly Feral specific. Send Owen down here and I'll vaccinate him; with his Feral cellular-metabolism, he'll be immune by the time he reaches Josh.'

Eve stopped talking for a second while she focused on something tricky with the medical equipment. Kevin, Owen, and Chris could hear the beeping of various readouts displaying themselves, and Anne could feel Kevin's worry abating slightly.

'Okay, sorry, send Anne back down with Owen; she can help me get ready. Treating Josh is going to be harder, but I can get a stabilizing agent ready while she vaccinates Owen; he can get that to Josh to steady his condition, then carry Josh back to his car and get him back here.' Eve finished.

"Okay," Kevin said, nodding, the relief visibly washing across his face as he relaxed back down into his pillow. "Okay. Thanks, Eve."

'No problem,' she answered quickly, then immediately disconnected the call.

"Owen, Anne, Eve wants you in the med lab," Kevin said as he handed Chris' phone back to him, Chris and Owen both nodding because they had heard the conversation. "Owen, can you run to Josh, in WeHo Park? He's on the wooded trail, just off it, actually, near a birdbath– –that's gotta be five or six miles, even as the crow flies..."

Owen pulled the bedsheet back up over Kevin's shivering chest and left his hand there in reassurance as he nodded.

"No prob, Kev. I can run that in less than ten minutes," Owen told him, confidently. "Traffic might slow me just a little, and I might end up on the eleven o'clock news, but oh well," he finished with an acceptingly resigned shrug.

"Okay, Thanks," Kevin said weakly, weak with both fervent relief and renewed fatigue, feeling his body's condition. "Go."

Owen nodded and stood, he and Anne quickly heading for the elevator and Haven. Chris watched them go, hoping for the best, then turned back to Kevin and offered him the water bottle they had been trying to feed him just after Anne arrived.

"How you doing?" Chris asked, raising an eyebrow as Kevin gratefully accepted the water and chugged the rest of the bottle empty without stopping for breath.

"I've been better," Kevin admitted, but he looked up to meet Chris' eyes with confidence. "But I'm better than I was."

"Anne's thing helped?" Chris asked hopefully.

"Yeah," Kevin nodded. "She. . .got my brain settled with my mind, I guess. Or maybe vice versa, crap if I know," Kevin confessed with a shrug. "But my powers are better. You guys saw me move myself; I can touch things with my astral form now, move them, not just feel them."

"Whoa, nifty," Chris replied, suitably impressed. "Like, instead of concentrating on a rock to move it and giving yourself a migraine 'cause you're projecting at the same time, your astral self can just pick it up and throw it?"

"Yeah," Kevin nodded, smiling weakly. "Open doors, flip lightswitches, access files. . .I can do whatever just like I was there."

"Awesome," Chris said, nodded back. " 'Bout time you got something out of all this 'growth spurt' crap. Um, you need anything? You probably want to go down to medical to wait for Josh, don't you?"

"Uh, yeah. Crap," Kevin muttered, sighing at how exhausted he still felt. "I'll sleep when Josh is safe. Can you get me a Coke, and some clothes?" Kevin asked, then grimaced at the cooling sweat on his body. "Yuck. And that damp washcloth and another dry towel?" he finished hopefully. "As long as you're ransacking my bathroom anyway."

Chris laughed.

"Sure thing, dude. Just gimme a yell when you're set, and I'll drag a computer chair out into the living room. It'll be fun; we'll roll you into the elevator, and then see how far down Haven's hallway you can roll with one good push. No lame-ass wheelchairs here," Chris said as he went back into Josh and Kevin's bathroom for more towels. Kevin chuckled as he sat up again, trying to focus on getting ready and not worry about Josh.

Jamie glanced up when the override switch of the Majestic's elevator was triggered again, seeing Owen and Anne heading for Haven. Frowning, he switched the elevator camera to the main display, frowning more when he saw the tension on Anne and Owen's faces. He hoped Kevin was okay, but then Jesse and Shal and Brennan had dashed out after Lexa's call. . .Jamie hoped everybody would be okay, but really? He just wanted someone to tell him what was going on.

Trying to turn his attention back to the decryption techniques Jesse had been showing him when he was that distracted just wasn't working at all, so Jamie got up to go let Owen and Anne into Haven. If something was so wrong with Kevin that they couldn't move him and Owen needed to carry a big piece of medical equipment up to the penthouse or something, they didn't need to waste time typing in access codes.

"What's going on?" Jamie asked after opening Haven's door, turning to finish asking the question over his shoulder as Anne and Owen hurried right past him. He waited for a response, frowning, then sighed. Jamie tried not to let the hurt show on his face as he closed the door and re-armed the system, but then he decided no one was paying any attention to him anyway, so what did it matter if he was scowling?

Anne's step faltered as she felt the hurt and sadness wash over Jamie; she berated herself for appearing to ignore him when she knew better, knew better than anyone how Jamie's emotional dependency issues were affected by perceived abandonment.

"Answer him!" she hissed almost silently at Owen, but it was loud enough for his Feral hearing to catch it. Owen paused, blinking at Anne as she hurried on, then turned back to look at Jamie in vague confusion.

"Oh!" Owen muttered, realizing poor Jamie was outside of the loop. "Kevin's okay, or he will be. Anne fixed his sensory thing, but he said Josh's sick, collapsed in the park. The others took the Helix, so I've gotta run a stabilizer out to Josh, get him back here," Owen explained quickly, then turned back and dashed on to the medical lab.

"Well, crap," Jamie muttered to himself with a frown, heading back to the main workstation. "What the heck next?" he sighed as he sat down at the computer once more and got back to work. They needed to find Adam more than ever, find him before anything happened to anyone else, before Lexa's time ran out.

Jamie was so focused on trying to crack the Dominion database's encryption he didn't notice the way the keys were depressing beneath his fingertips, each squishing slightly as it was rendered elastic for a fraction of a second by contact with one of his fingers.

Valley Boulevard and the end of Interstate 710 was on the east side of LA, less than half a mile from California State University. It took only minutes for the original Mutant X team to fly there from the Majestic's parking garage, and after a bit of debate on the way over, Brennan agreed to simply hover the Helix over Benedetti's. There was no place open enough to land the Double Helix anywhere nearby, and if they parked it on top of a building, they would just have that much farther to transport Lexa before they could get her back to Eve for treatment.

Brennan expertly brought the Helix in to hover with the rear hatch over the edge of Benedetti's roof, cloaked from sight in its stealth mode. Passers by might wonder at the odd sound of the Helix's muted engines coming from the narrow alley to the left of Benedetti's, but it wasn't if it would give them away. Or as if Mutant X would care if it did, as long as neither the GSA nor the Dominion found out.

Jesse and Shalimar jumped out when Brennan opened the rear hatch, Shalimar easily dropping to the ground with her Feral abilities and Jesse massing as he fell, letting him ignore the impact with the alley's surface. The two of them hurried out of the alley and into the restaurant, Shalimar pulling ahead of Jesse long before they got to the front door and disappearing inside nearly a minute before he got there.

Shalimar strode up to the take out pick-up counter, glaring, and slammed her open palm down on the countertop with enough of her Feral strength to make a hollow BANG that echoed throughout the restaurant. The girl behind the counter took a step backwards, blinking nervously.

"I demand to see a manager, RIGHT. NOW!" Shalimar bellowed, breathing angrily and deeply enough to make her shoulders visibly heave up and down. "This place is hiring delinquent perverts, and I'm gonna have his job for it!" she snarled, pointing an imperious finger at the poor counter girl's face. Fortunately for everyone except the girl's boss, the manager was already rushing to the counter, hoping to curb the disturbance to his establishment before it got any worse.

"The freaking jerk, acts all nice like a normal waiter at first, I compliment him for it, and he tells me he's gay!" Shalimar went on, apparently not even noticing the manager she had requested approaching or every head in the restaurant turning to stare at her.

No one at all noticed Jesse coming in the front door and immediately phasing through the partitioning wall and into the dining area. Benedetti's business was still slow in the post-lunch pre-dinner lull, so there was no one seated in that corner to see Jesse emerge from the wall. He glanced around and spotted Lexa's table, hurrying over to it before the manager could bring Shalimar's distraction to an end.

"Lexa, Lex, I'm here..." Jesse said quietly as he slipped into the chair next to hers, reaching up to gently take her wrists beneath the napkin she was gripping tightly between her trembling hands. Lexa's head jerked up in surprise, but it was an awkward motion, a twitch that only continued into her arms, making them shake all the more.

"I've got you," Jesse reassured her as he plucked the napkin from her startled hands and dropped it on the table. "Just let it out, Lexa, let go and burn yourself out; we'll get you back to Eve," Jesse told her as he moved her hands to lay them against his chest, taking a deep breath and massing as he did so. He held her hands gently in position with his ultra-dense fingers, calmly meeting her eyes from behind the variegated orange haze of his power.

Lexa sighed a shaky exhalation and relaxed her control, letting her power laze out of her palms and blast harmlessly into Jesse's massed chest. She was terrified that using her powers in her condition would cause some kind of systemic failure, like when she had tried to cloak herself and Dr. Stanton outside her ex-boyfriend's drug lab. That hadn't gone very well. But the team had arrived in time to save her, and they were here to save her now. She could relax, could let go and trust them to take care of her.

Marveling at the fact that what she had just thought was true, that for the first time in her life she actually had people who cared for her and believed it, that she could trust them, Lexa gave one last push with her power and allowed herself to fall blissfully unconscious. Jesse immediately unmassed and shifted one hand from her wrist to her lower face, feeling for the passage of breath as he took her pulse with his other hand.

Breathing a sigh of relief as he found both Lexa's breath and pulse to be present and strong, even if not as steady as he would have liked, Jesse stood and looked to make sure no one was paying attention to them. Seeing everyone still looking at Shalimar yelling at the manager about the tall longhair who had said he was gay but pinched her ass, Jesse tucked a few fives into the billfold with Lexa's check on the table, hoping it made a decent tip. The poor waitress was going to have an abandoned table, since Jesse was leaving with Lexa before Shalimar was done.

Carrying Lexa to the wall, Jesse phased them both and stepped through it, into the alley he and Shalimar had come from.

Three minutes later, Shalimar had rejoined them and leaped with Lexa in her arms and then Jesse in turn up to the roof and then into the Helix. After making sure Lexa was comfortable and stable on the rear bench, Jesse sat back down in the cockpit next to Brennan. He didn't even bother to strap in, since they would be landing in mere minutes, and he turned to smirk at Shalimar in the rear seat.

"What were you carrying on about in there for your distraction?" he asked with a chuckle. "Was I hearing things, or did you strongly imply a former employee harassed you?"

Shalimar laughed.

"You caught that, did you? –I just hope there aren't any other long-haired gay guys working there since Josh left; I'd have them in big trouble." She grinned more, shaking her head. "The manager was looking at me like I was out of my mind and he had no idea what I was talking about though, so I'm hoping it's all okay."

Shalimar's face shifted to a pouting frown of disappointment as she looked over her shoulder at Lexa's unconscious form.

"Omigod, that place smelled fantastic, though!" Shalimar moaned. "Lexa SO owes me, I'm never gonna be able to set foot in there again! Wait, Bren, you said Anne made you see her as me, at Eloy's, when we met her? I wonder if she could make everybody see me as somebody else if we went to eat there..."

Brennan chuckled and shook his head as he prepared to land the Helix, the Majestic's parking garage only moments away.

"Seriously, the food smelled absolutely fabulous, and I'm never going to get to eat there!" Shalimar protested.

"Well, Lex said Josh used to work there, right?" Brennan asked rhetorically, still smirking as he prepped the Helix for landing. "I'll bet he can get special treatment on an order for pick up, get some extra goodies with it..."

"I don't want extra goodies; I wanna eat there!" Shalimar pouted. "Seriously, it's not just my Feral nose; the place smells good!"

"It did, actually," Jesse confirmed, turning to smile sympathetically back at Shalimar, who had her arms crossed in a huff.

"Well, we'll just have to make a fancy dinner party out of it," Brennan decided as they approached the Majestic's parking garage. "Everybody dresses up nice, you wear your hair up, nobody'll ever recognize you." Brennan shot Jesse a look and quick grin. "We can talk about your evil cowgirl twin sister where the waiters can hear us, if we have to."

Shalimar scowled, because she liked the dinner party suggestion, but the rest of Brennan's comment had her wanting to demonstrate her evil cowgirl tendencies on him. Which of course the boys knew, which only made them grin harder. Shalimar sighed.

Owen ran as he had never run before, certainly not in public, anyway. He ran like someone's life depended on it.

Josh's maybe did.

The Majestic was just under a mile from Western Avenue, practically neighbors with U of SoCal. Owen could run that in less than a minute and a half, then head north on Western to Venice Boulevard and take that west. Venice swung northwest toward West Hollywood and transitioned into San Vicente Boulevard at West Pico Boulevard, only half a mile from Melrose, on the east side of West Hollywood Park. It wasn't a straight line, but it was close once he was on Venice.

Owen pelted down the street at forty miles an hour, dodging sideways around people as others scrambled to get out of his way.

The traffic soon became a frustrating problem; it was even more dangerous for Owen to run across traffic through an intersection at forty miles an hour than it was for a car to drive through at thirty. Drivers were semi-prepared for other drivers to be idiots and get in the way; they were not ready for a pedestrian to do so, and it was even more surprising when the pedestrian was going faster than the cars. After the second time Owen had to stop to wait for the light to change or for a gap in the traffic, he decided he couldn't afford to lose speed slowing down for each intersection and then having to pick it back up again, much less having to stop.

Owen picked up his pace, knowing he would be exhausted when he got to Josh, but that would be fine. He would be carrying Josh slowly and gently back to his car, anyway, once he'd given Josh the stabilizer Eve had concocted.

He began leaping across the intersections if the traffic was against him, uncaring if people were startled or cried out in alarm at his leaping dozens of feet through the air. The route Owen was taking to reach West Hollywood Park was approximately five and a half miles; Josh might not have time for Owen to worry about the silly public's reaction. He didn't care if the public reacted wildly, anyway. Owen had a long history of always doing everything to the best of his ability, ever since he was young, to keep people's eyes on him and his accomplishments instead of his drunk mother and unstable father. He was running forty miles an hour at the very least, giving it his all.

Owen was determined to make the trip in less than ten minutes.

Jamie was frowning as he poked at the Dominion's database; he could see why Jesse had been complaining that decryption would bore him silly. It wasn't that it was boring; it was frustrating. They were looking at all the information they wanted, but it was stored in code. . .along with the rest of the information Eloy had copied, which was quite a lot. They were looking at gigs and gigs of data, with no idea which portion of it was what they were looking for, no idea where to begin narrowing their search. If they could crack the encryption on any of the database it would let them view the whole thing, but they couldn't even begin to guess what they were looking at in the first place.

Throwing ideas back and forth with Jesse had been mildly interesting, learning how things worked, but trying to complete the task all alone was aggravating Jamie to no end. He had tried every computer trick he knew, crossed them with the ones Jesse had spent the morning showing him regarding decryption, and come up with some ideas of his own to use hacking techniques for decryption purposes, but nothing was accomplishing anything. Jamie might as well be typing random letters from the ends of names in the phone book, for all the good his skills were doing him.

"Okay, okay, decryption and hacking aren't that different," Jamie told himself as he scowled at the computer screen. "A decryption key, a password, it's just something the program is looking for, electronic data security," Jamie told himself, trying to think of another way to figure out what the program wanted to hear, a way to trick it into revealing something about what it was looking for. At least that would give him someplace to begin, for pity's sake...

Jamie looked up when Haven's door opened, realizing he'd been so wrapped up in his going-nowhere work that he hadn't noticed either elevator in use. He blinked in surprise to see Kevin sitting in a desk chair just outside the door, then Chris stepped into view from just off to one side, where he had typed in the access code.

"Okay, all the way to Jamie, CHARGE!!" Chris declared as he grabbed the arms of Kevin's chair where they met the chair's back, behind Kevin's elbows. Chris was bent forward to reach, his head over Kevin's shoulder as he pushed the wheeled chair forward, shoving his legs to full extension and quickly picking up speed. The look on Kevin's face suggested he actually thought what Chris was doing was entertaining, but he didn't want to encourage Chris by admitting as much.

Chris cackled like the mad thing he pretty much was as he pushed Kevin into Haven, letting go after half a dozen steps and letting Kevin's desk chair roll on freely. Kevin had an almost-amused expression of "I can't believe he's seriously doing this, except it's Chris, so I'm really not surprised at all, actually," on his face. It was a commonly seen expression on the members of Mutant X's faces; even Lexa had picked it up in no time flat.

Kevin rolled steadily across the utilitarian tile surface of Haven's main expanse, headed for the primary workstation. He had been almost past the lounge when Chris let go, zooming past the day-to-day living storeroom and rolling smoothly on past Eve's office. The chair's momentum finally bled out as it and Kevin passed in front of the computer-hardware room, rolling to a stop still ten or twelve feet short of Jamie and the main workstation.

"AWWWWW!!" Chris called out from the entrance, where he had backed up to close it once Kevin's ride had finished. Kevin smirked, shrugging at Jamie when Jamie frowned in confusion at him.

"You're just lucky Eve had this place tiled, smooth surface all the way across," Kevin called back over his shoulder. "If there were still seams between the concrete slabs..."

"Hey, you're the one who's lucky there's no seams!" Chris called back as he re-armed the entry door's system. Kevin rolled his eyes.

Jamie suddenly realized Chris was hamming it up even more than he usually did to keep Kevin occupied, to keep his mind off the fact that Josh was in trouble. It made sense, Josh got kind of scarily focused on Kevin when Kevin was in danger, and other than Kevin being a Psionic instead of a Feral, there wasn't really any reason for things to be different the other way around.

And it had to suck this time, because normally when things got bad, when Kevin pushed his powers too far or Josh got in over his head, it was out in the field, they were already together. Already there for each other, having each others' backs. Except last time, when the forcefields had split them up. Jamie couldn't imagine how frustrating, how scary that must have been, for both of them.

Jamie's eyes widened as another fact about their brief incarceration in the Dominion's bizarre maze occurred to him.

"Kev, you got your phone on you?" Jamie asked quickly, urgently, his eyes bright with hope.

"What?" Kevin asked with a frown of surprise. "Uhm, yeah," he answered, twisting awkwardly in his chair to pull the phone from his front pocket without getting up. "Why?"

" 'Cause mine got smashed in the Dominion's stupid basement," Jamie said, elasticizing his arm and flinging his hand across the dozen feet between him and Kevin, closing his fingers around Kevin's phone when he placed it in Jamie's hand. "But you scanned their frequencies while we were down there, too," Jamie explained as he returned his arm to normal, snapping it back to himself and using one thumb to quickly cycle through the phone's menus.

Jamie glanced up at Kevin with a hopeful smile.

"Don't worry, Owen will get Josh, no problem. He does loyal just as well as any Feral, y'know?" Jamie asked rhetorically as he clicked through the records in Kevin's phone, hopeful it would have what he was looking for. "But this just might give me the key we need to track the Dominion down and get Adam back," Jamie explained. "Take care of all these messes at once, if we can."

"Hey, go for it," Kevin said, raising his eyebrows in surprise as Chris came up behind him and grabbed the back of the desk chair Kevin was sitting in once more. "Hope you're right."

"Yeah, good luck with that," Chris said hopefully. "We could definitely use the breakthrough. In the meanwhile, we got someplace to be. Beep-beeep!!" Chris declared, turning Kevin's chair and pushing him to circle around the main workstation, then heading for the medical lab with an enthusiastic "Vrooom!"

Kevin snickered; Jamie thought he looked better than he had at breakfast.

Chris wheeled Kevin into the medical lab to find Eve both frowning and scowling at the main computer and Anne prepping practically every machine in the lab.

"Ummm, we could wait in the lounge until Owen gets back with Josh..." Chris offered hesitantly, not wanting to get underfoot.

"Or you could help, thank goodness," Anne said with relief as Eve snarled wordlessly at whatever her screen had just done to frustrate her further. She was focused and determined, so Anne wasn't disrupting her; Eve's emotions were no longer inhibiting her ability to work, but they were impairing Anne, their intensity keeping her from being able to concentrate. "Kevin, you're more directly familiar with all this stuff than I am, can you talk me through it?" she asked. "I'll do all the work, you just tell me what to do, and Chris can do the heavy lifting."

"Okay, there's something wrong when the Ferals are out and the giant Elemental is out saving the other Elemental, so the short one gets to be the muscle..." Chris muttered as he parked Kevin where he could see what Anne was trying to do, but he was smirking as he said it. Chris may have been short, but he was certainly no weakling, stronger than many men half a foot taller than he was or more.

Anne smiled at him, sensing the amusement behind his sarcastic smirk.

"Here, first we should inoculate you two," she said, moving to take a prepared hypospray from where it had been left on the counter. "Eve says the virus is nasty, so we want to treat you before Owen gets back with Josh. No need to take unnecessary risks, right?" Anne asked as she injected Kevin and then Chris in the inner elbow with the hypospray.

"I hate to say it, but this damned little virus is brilliant..." Eve muttered, frowning as she clicked away at the virus' test results and discovered more and more unsettling things about its capabilities. She glanced over her shoulder at Kevin, hoping he wouldn't notice. She was worried about whether or not Josh would be able to pull through his infection; the virus was one of the most virulent she had ever seen. Anne glanced from Eve to Kevin, feeling Eve's worry and the want to hide it, then realized her reasons when Anne clearly felt Eve's desire to avoid scaring Kevin.

Then Eve froze, eyes wide, staring at the screen.

"Eve?" Chris asked, frowning at her when he heard her go still, not even moving the mouse.

"What is it?" Kevin wondered, but he wasn't too sure he actually wanted to find out.

"Something good..." Anne said to reassure Kevin, perplexed by Eve's shocked expression but sudden emotional shift to hopeful, her hope changing to surprised happiness as she intellectually processed whatever had caught her attention, figured out whatever had initially prompted her change of emotion. Eve's slackened mouth came back to life and lit up in a grin as she turned to face them.

"I've got it!" Eve declared, excitement and confident hope clear on her face. "It's a modified rabies virus, crossed with an influenza virus, probably for the mutation factor— Anyway," Eve said, cutting her expository ramble off before it could gain momentum. "It's a neurovirus, operates through the nervous system instead of the bloodstream, and it's designed to bond with modified genetics, not baseline human."

"In other words, it's a New Mutant virus," Chris said with a furiously hurt look on his face, realizing they were pretty much looking at genocidal biological warfare pointed at New Mutants.

"Right," Eve said, nodding. "But that will make it easy to deal with; it's too customized to put up much of a resistance. It's deadly, but it's also vulnerable. If I can kill it off fast enough, and I should be able to, then it won't do Josh any lasting harm, but that's not the important part," she went on, shaking her head as she cut herself off once again.

"The thing is, it affects New Mutant nerves. With just a little modification, taking out its own code and swapping in the nervous portion of Lexa's, this thing can cure her current problem, easy!"

Kevin took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then exhaled slowly before looking up to meet Eve's eyes.

"Okay, you're talking about viral genetic manipulation, that's all you. Way over my head," he said, shaking his head sadly. "And if Lexa's exploding in public, she needs that treatment."

Anne blinked rapidly, suppressing the tears that Kevin's emotional distress was prompting. She was impressed by how well he was hiding it in his voice.

"But. . .what about treating Josh?" Kevin asked, the worry creeping into both his voice and his eyes. "Eve, you– –you didn't see, feel, how sick he is," Kevin said, his eyes pleading. "So sick, you have no idea..."

"Kevin, Kevin, hey, easy..." Eve shushed him, quickly getting up from the main medical computer and crouching next to Kevin's chair, cupping the side of his face in one hand. "It's okay. I only just figured out how to help Lexa with this virus. . .I've been working on countering it since Anne found it in Josh's bloodwork. Like I said, it's going to be easy to kill off; I already gave Owen a stabilizer to inject Josh with, that'll keep the virus from spreading any farther."

Eve stared into Kevin's eyes, her own flicking from one to the other of his large hazel irises, watching to see when he accepted her words emotionally as well as intellectually.

"Actually, looking at this thing, I do have an idea, Kevin," Eve told him sympathetically, still looking into Kevin's eyes. "And you're right, it's bad, but we can beat it. I'll show you the details later, but it looks like this thing was designed to hide, produce little in the way of symptoms until it's ready to propagate. Then it builds up, until it releases. It might be darn hard to deal with at that point, but if Josh went for a run, then he wasn't that sick yet. Owen will get the stabilizer into him, and then we'll have plenty of time to kill the nasty thing off and treat him properly."

Eve's other hand took one of Kevin's, sympathetically.

"He's going to be sick, probably very sick, for a while, but he'll get through it. Don't worry, Kevin."

"Okay," he whispered, closing his eyes before they got too wet and nodding his head jerkily. "Okay. I'm just going to wait. Help Anne while I do it."

"You do that, just be here for him," Eve advised, giving Kevin's hand a gentle squeeze of encouragement before she stood up again. "Even unconscious, I bet he'll recognize your scent, that'll help calm him down. We'll take care of him Kevin, I promise."

Kevin nodded without raising his head, staring at his fingers as he nervously twisted them together. Eve turned back to the computer and flinched slightly when she met Anne's eyes. . .she knew Anne could empathically feel that Eve wasn't nearly as confident about saving Josh as she had implied she was to Kevin.

Eve was confident in what she had told Kevin– –including the part about the virus being difficult to deal with once it propagated, not showing many symptoms until then.

Collapsing in the park with fever certainly qualified as symptomatic.

Josh's head was swimming, brain was whirling, so fast he was pretty sure it would make him sick. He didn't want to be sick, too sick, couldn't move, couldn't roll over, if he puked...

But no, he didn't actually feel like vomiting. His guts hurt too much for that. It wasn't cramps, like nausea or diarrhea or any other disgusting -eas; his guts just hurt. All through them, twisting, stabbing, burning pain, like somebody had threaded red-hot barbwire through his intestines, and now they were rotating its length, to make it spin in there.

Josh started to groan, but choked himself off, cut the noise short when it only made everything hurt even worse. He'd had no idea he could possibly be in this much pain and not pass out. Shouldn't he be going into shock from the trauma, or something? Because GOD this hurt, and fainting from shock sounded like a really attractive option right now.

Except no.

That's what that mad-scientist asshole wanted him to do, pass out so no one would know any better, and it would be too late.

Fuck that.

If he'd had the strength, if he knew of an abandoned spot his body wouldn't be found, Josh would have crawled there so that the virus would die with him and not infect the Mutant Underground. But there wasn't anywhere like that, and Mutant X would find him, would call Eloy and Anne and get the entire Mutant Underground looking for him. Just his luck, somebody would find him, and oops, Epidemic.

Besides, Josh couldn't move, so dizzy he didn't think he could even get up on his hands and knees to crawl without falling back over, even if he was strong enough. Which he wasn't. And just the thought of the pain that would be involved in trying to get himself even vaguely upright and then the even worse pain of flopping back down to the ground was almost enough to make him whimper. Except that would hurt.

Also, he couldn't see. That was because his eyelids were closed, because they were too damn heavy to hold open for more than a second, but even if they had been open, he couldn't see. Or rather, he could, but it was all blurry and indistinct and somebody had turned the contrast on his retinas too low, or something. He had felt something, something that wasn't just the breeze stirring his hair or something, so he'd cracked his eyes open a slit, but he hadn't been able to see anything more than some murky greens and browns. And a tannish-pink blob, but that was his hand. He could tell, because the blob moved when he twitched his fingers.

He'd whispered Kevin's name, didn't even use his vocal cords, just breath over his lips, hoping Kevin was there in astral form, had brushed Josh's hair off his forehead like he always did. . .but there was nothing there. Nothing telekinetically moved to let Josh know Kevin was there with him, and besides, Kevin couldn't brush Josh's forehead in astral form, duh.

Josh was having trouble thinking, too, but he figured if it was troubling him that he couldn't think, then he was still thinking clearly enough to be bothered by that fact, so that was good, right? Like crazy people never questioned their sanity, so if you were questioning yours, then you really weren't crazy, or something like that. Except Josh was pretty sure that was a fictional device, so maybe it wasn't as reassuring as he was thinking it was. Maybe. He thought, except it was too hard to think right now. What was the question again? And man it was hot; Josh wanted to take his shirt off, but it was too hard to move...

Oh yeah, fever. Hard to move 'cause he was sick, and weak, and it hurt too goddamn much. It was like when you pulled your shoulder or something, no position was comfortable, you never realized how your shoulder was part of every movement of your arm, even just your forearm, until you hurt it and it was screaming at you even sitting still. That's what his guts felt like, except your guts were connected to a lot more than your arm, connected to your torso, right in the middle of it, which was connected to fucking everything and oh goddammit it HURT...

Breathing hurt.

It wasn't like Josh could stop breathing, and he actually kind of really wanted a deep breath because he was feeling winded anyway, but it hurt too much...

Josh squeezed his eyes tightly shut in both a grimace of pain and an effort to clear his head, to focus his concentration. It didn't really work, but he rejoiced in the fact that scrunching his face and forehead up actually didn't hurt. It was a very small thing, and actually a pretty lame thing to get happy about, but Josh figured he was dying and was willing to take his last pleasures where he could find them.

He would never see Kevin again.

Never touch him, hold him, kiss him, make love to him, ever again.

He might even be found, Kevin might. . .might have to watch him die, and then Ferals all over would start dying.

All his fault, because he just had to be alone to clear his head, couldn't suck it up like an actual adult.

Tears fell from Josh's eyes as he snarled silently, savagely, both in pain and in fury. Furious with the Dominion and the Creator for doing what they'd done, with fate for putting Mutant X in this situation, furious that he'd never see Kevin again, that Kevin would probably have to watch him die and feel helplessly useless as it happened, furious with himself for condemning who knew how many Ferals, for not being able to do anything about it...

No.

No, he could do something about it. Unless someone found him in the next few minutes so he could tell them to call Eve and tell her to come alone, exposure was going to happen. But that didn't mean he couldn't try to keep the exposure contained. He could leave a message, the team was smart and Eve was a freakin' genius, so they'd figure it out.

He just had to write it.

Thankful he had fallen to his left side and wore his keys on his right hip, Josh slowly, slowly forced his right arm to bend, to reach his hand for the keys lying across the crease of his upper thigh. His breath came equally slowly, forced out through his nose in a pained whine as his face scrunched tighter against the agony of movement.

He couldn't really see anything anyway, but Josh's vision was growing black around the edges as he finally grasped his keys.

No, no, no, no, NO, can't pass out, have to leave message first... Josh chanted inside his head as he let his hand fall to the ground, fingers still gripping his keys. They were clipped to the elastic of his biker shorts and didn't slide their way free, merely sliding along his waistline and distending it until his hand reached the ground. Frowning at the sudden draft in a decidedly sensitive area, Josh tried to twitch his arm to free his keys, and nearly blacked out from the pain of moving.

Oh god Oh god Oh god Oh god Oh god...

Josh grit his teeth and held on to consciousness with every ounce of his considerable stubbornness, willing the black back from the center of his vision. It slowly receded, grudgingly, until the world was only grey again. Still not good, not good at all, but not on the very edge unconsciousness anymore. Maybe a quarter-inch away from it, hurrah.

Deciding moving his upper arm made his torso hurt too much and would likely knock him out, never to wake again, Josh focused on just moving his hand. Gripping the key to the Majestic's penthouse between his forefinger and thumb, Josh crabbed his hand forward with his other three fingers, dragging the heel of his palm away from his belly where it rested against the ground.

But it wasn't going to work.

He was in a freaking park; the ground was covered in grass. Fuzzy green grass that did not at all lend itself to having words drawn into it, like sand or dirt did. If he had collapsed on the path he might have had a shot, but Josh had cut through the trees in a direct line toward the birdbath. . .there was nothing but grass covering the ground around him. And he could barely move one arm, much less crawl back to the path or drag himself over to a tree to try to scratch his message into its bark.

Okay, then, Josh thought to himself resignedly as he steeled himself to cling to consciousness. Nobody'll miss it if I carve the word 'VIRUS' into my skin, at least...

Josh didn't lift his right arm so much as push his right hand along the ground, hissing a note of pain through his nose as he forced his arm to move. His face contorting in renewed pain as he went, Josh forced his right hand to reach for his left forearm where it was lying in front of his chest. He wasn't wearing his watch, had forgotten to put it on after his shower, and his left hand was palm up, the soft underside of his forearm exposed. The pain in his guts, from the top of his abdomen all the way down to his groin, it was so bad he wasn't worried about a few cuts. Wouldn't even notice them. He was more worried about staying conscious long enough to scratch the word into his skin, at least V-I-R...

"Josh!" Owen's voice came suddenly from behind Josh, along with the sound of his feet dashing across the grass. There was an instant of silence, then Owen landed in front of Josh's sprawled form, dropping into a crouch facing him after springing over his back.

"Hey, Josh, I'm here, I gotcha, easy man..." Owen panted as he laid one big hand on Josh's shoulder reassuringly, the other reaching forward with the hypospray Eve had given him. Owen pressed the hypospray to the right side of Josh's neck, over his carotid artery, injecting Eve's stabilizing medicine directly into Josh's bloodstream. In seconds it was carried to his brain, keeping the rabies-based virus from doing any more harm, and only a few seconds more had it cycled through his veins into his heart and on its way to the rest of his body. His nervous system was safe from further harm; the only question was how much damage the disease had already done, and could Josh recover from it.

" Owen. . .no. . .virus... " Josh gasped, looking up at Owen with feverish eyes and trying to mutely tell him to stay back, to get away. " Feral. . .virus " he panted. " Get. . .you, too... "

"No, man, no. It's okay," Owen insisted as he pocketed the hypospray again, then clipped Josh's keys to one of his own beltloops. "Eve found the virus in your bloodwork, gave me a vaccine. I'm immune already, no worries," Owen said as he slid one arm past Josh's shoulder and across his back, the other passing beneath Josh's knees.

Josh clenched his teeth around the pained cry he couldn't prevent when Owen picked him up, whimpering through his nose at both the aftermath of that pain and the pain of crying out.

"Shit, fuck, Josh, I'm sorry man," Owen swore with a sympathetic wince as he tried to hold Josh more gently, to hold Josh steadier as he turned back to the path. "Sorry, damn, shoulda had Eve give you a painkiller along with the stabilizer," Owen admonished himself as he started carrying Josh from West Hollywood Park, back toward where Josh had parked his car; Owen had passed it on the way in.

" No, hot. . .you're too hot, " Josh moaned under his breath as they went, feeling the heat radiating off Owen's skin and the sweat soaking through his clothes. " y'got it already..." he despaired. " get me away. . .don' let us 'fect Underground... " he whispered urgently as he lay helpless in Owen's arms.

"Sshhhh, easy Josh, easy man, it's all okay," Owen shushed him as he carefully carried Josh back to his car. "I'm all hot 'cause I just ran five miles or so to get here. We're going straight back to Haven; Eve's got the vaccine all ready, nobody else is gonna catch this thing. It's all okay."

Owen glanced down and saw Josh's worried face still twisted in pain, the bright green of his Feral eyes still peeking out from between his slitted eyelids. Owen suddenly almost grinned, realizing he had more good news to give Josh, something that might help him relax, that would relieve some of his worries, at least.

"Dude, Anne helped Kevin fix his powers. He's, like, stronger now. That's how he found you, knew you were sick. Everything's gonna be fine."

Josh let his eyes close, and smiled, but he cracked them open again, not yet willing to surrender to unconsciousness. Not when he might not wake up again, that's what the Creator had said.

" Creator..." Josh hissed desperately as he struggled to hold onto consciousness. Owen was carrying Josh as smoothly as he could, more than strong enough to hold Josh's body still in his arms, but each step was still jarring agony to Josh, making the tiniest of whimpers come from his nose with each pace. " Creator called my phone. . .could see me. . .broke into our comm frequency. . .knows where we are... " Josh finished with a gasp as his eyes finally slid all the way shut and his muscles went lax.

Owen hurried the rest of the way back to Josh's car, hoping he wasn't hurting Josh further now that he was unconscious.

Shalimar was sitting quietly in one corner of the medical lab, up on the counter and trying to keep out of the way. Anne and Kevin were working together to treat Josh, flooding his system with something that was supposed to kill off the virus. It had sounded like a cross between chemotherapy and heavy-duty antibiotics, so Shalimar wasn't sure if Josh was going to be any less sick when they were done, but at least the virus would be gone.

Eve was carefully monitoring Lexa, who was sedated in the biobed "hot-seat" and lying motionless as its yellow beams scanned back and forth across her constantly. Eve had just completed the genetic modifications to the Creator's New Mutant rabies-influenza virus, substituting the nervous system portions of Lexa's DNA for its own, and applied it to Lexa's system. She was now scanning Lexa to monitor her response and the virus' advancement, making sure Lexa's nerves were regenerated. . .and that the virus didn't do any more than that. The last thing Lexa needed was to go from strained and collapsing nerves to cancer of the nervous system.

So far, things seemed to be proceeding as expected.

Eve hadn't been able to hide her worry when Owen arrived with Josh, who had quite obviously been extremely weak. Owen had been practically vibrating with road rage, frustrated with fighting traffic to get Josh back to Haven as fast as he could. . .if he had been even ten minutes later, they probably would have been stuck in rush hour.

Kevin had immediately stopped treating Lexa; Anne was more than capable of taking Lexa's readings and monitoring her status while Eve was finishing her work with the virus and Lexa's DNA. Eve was an experienced master geneticist and the virus was a brilliant piece of genetic engineering, it hadn't taken her long to perform the work, but she had still paused in the middle to check on Josh when Owen brought him in. Kevin had gone directly to Josh's side, his body trembling against the fatigue of forcing itself to keep moving, but Kevin's hands were steady as he took Josh's readings, his eyes clear and focused as he worked. He had quickly entered Josh's information into the computer, automatically keeping a record in case they needed to refer back to it in the future. Even though Kevin had been tired, frowning, and brittle, he had smoothly set up an IV and done what he could for his lover, acting as a second set of hands for Eve as she treated Josh for the virus' effects.

There had been a heartstopping moment when Josh's heart had literally stopped.

It had happened so quickly, Josh's heart failing even as his readings fluctuated and Eve checked them to find out what was happening. One second an alarm was going off because Josh's blood pressure was steadily dropping, the next his heart had stopped beating. Eve had screamed for Brennan, desperately thinking to use his powers as a defibrillator, an external New Mutant pacemaker, but it hadn't been necessary.

Calmly, literally missing only one beat, Kevin had raised a hand toward Josh's chest and closed his eyes. He didn't even have to astral project, his body was still conscious, he was still in it, standing over Josh with his arm raised. . .but Kevin shifted his perceptions to the astral. "Staring" at Josh from behind his eyelids, Kevin could see his lover's aura, the lines of his body beneath the sheet they had half-covered him with, the muscles beneath that, the bones under them, the heart lying still within his chest.

Kevin had flexed his hand slightly, thump-thump, and Josh's heart pumped in response, beating telekinetically.

There had been a brief moment's pause while everyone stared in shock, then Eve and Anne scrambled to inject the appropriate stimulants and adjust the IV to restore pressure to Josh's system. A moment later Kevin had felt his lover's heart start to beat of its own accord again, and he'd opened his eyes and stepped in to assist once more.

Once Josh was stabilized and receiving the treatments and medications for his symptoms that he needed, Eve had gone back to completing the genetic work for Lexa's treatment. Anne and Kevin had continued Josh's treatment while Jesse had prepared Lexa for the EDD biobed. Owen, Chris, and Brennan had simply stayed out of the way, Brennan leaning against the counter next to Shalimar just in case his powers were needed after all and Chris and Owen hovering in the doorway, not willing to leave until they knew Josh and Lexa would be all right.

Eventually Josh's system was being flooded and Lexa's was being monitored, and all they could do was wait.

"You should sit," Chris said as he stepped back into the medical lab, grabbing the abandoned office chair and rolling it up to Kevin again. "Sit down before you fall down, man," Chris urged as he looked at Kevin's swaying form with worried eyes. "You can hold his hand while you're in the chair, you know?"

Kevin blinked his gaze away from Josh's slack face to their joined hands, almost unaware he had taken Josh's hand in his own, then turned to look at the chair Chris had wheeled up behind him.

"Uh," Kevin said clearly, with another blink. "Yeah," he said, then managed to twist enough to hold the chair steady with one hand, sitting without ever releasing Josh's.

Chris shook his head fondly as he turned back to the door and smirked at Owen; Owen pursed his lips just the tiniest bit in amusement and maybe a hint of jealousy as he turned to go tell Jamie they were out of the woods. Not that he was jealous of Kevin or Josh specifically, just of the fact that they had each other. Owen wouldn't mind a mate of his own, even if he wasn't conscious of envying what Josh and Kevin had.

"Hey, Jamie," Owen called out as he approached the main workstation. "Looks like Josh and Lexa are pulling through. It was touch and go for a second, but they're good, for now," he said as he came up behind Jamie. "You shoulda seen it, Kevin was pumping Josh's heart telekinetically, easy as you please. While more or less out on his feet; it was pretty bad-ass," Owen finished as he put a hand on Jamie's shoulder and saw the computer screen flickering through readout after readout of data.

"Dude, you still working on that database thing?" Owen asked with a frown. "That Jesse said would drive him nuts? What, you trying to prove you're even better than he is?" Owen asked with a smirk. "Nerd Wonder Junior no more?"

"Actually, I think you can call me Nerd Genius," Jamie said, his eyes still wide as he stared at the screen. "I did it, man. I decrypted the Dominion's database using their frequencies off Kev's phone. I'm in."