Pyro's lying in bed naked with the tangled sheet over him, flipping through photo albums, which is a truly fucked way to spend a Saturday morning but kind of fun. Magneto and Mystique have gone down to the beach, but Pyro didn't want to get up and put clothes on and hey, he doesn't have to. One of the great things about being with the bad guys.
Rogue is sitting on the floor of Scott's room where she's kind of supposed to be, because Scott said she could have Jean's black leather gloves now that it's snowing. She found the gloves and then she found the photo albums, and Scott's gone to the mall with the younger kids, so she's sitting on the bedroom floor flipping through pages. No one's going to know; she won't even leave fingerprints.
He thinks Mystique is the one who took most of the pictures because so few of them are of her, although there are enough people he doesn't know in them that some of them could be. A lot of them are of Magneto, visiting places or talking or drinking coffee or whatever. In the recent ones he's wearing stark red and black, the kind of clothes Pyro's seen him wear; in older ones he dresses like a teacher. All ironed.
She's trying to figure out what things mean from how they look, like making sense of the fragments of other people's memories she's left with when she touches their skin. Someone's labeled pictures neatly in ink, so she knows the one she's looking at is Christmas two years ago. There's a tangle of kids around the tree, trying to hang ornaments and getting in each other's way; she recognizes Jubes and Bobby, who has tinsel in his hair.
She takes enough pictures of him that you'd think he was beautiful. Pyro doesn't really get that. The things he likes about Magneto aren't things you can take pictures of. He's got those strong hands and that voice. And all that power. And that way of looking at you like you're maybe in a lot of trouble or maybe going to get just what you want just because you were brave enough to ask for it.
There are people at the edges of the picture, hands or shoulders cut off because Jean's not looking at them. There's John, sitting on the couch just watching like he's too cool for this, one arm stretched back out of the frame reaching for something. There's Kitty, leaning on the windowsill; she's smiling, she's cheerful, she's wearing a sweater with snowflakes on it, but she's not on the floor with the other kids, and the camera takes part of her away.
But, beautiful. Mystique is beautiful. Bobby--but he's over that. He turns a page. The green one with the spiky hair must be Toad. Not a cool way to look. That would make the big blond one Sabretooth. He always looks like he's about to come slap the camera out of her hands, but he must not have done it, because there's picture after picture. Here's one somebody else took--Mystique sitting on the couch watching television, with Toad sitting at her feet, leaning against her knees like he's a little boy. He shakes his head.
There's the professor, reaching down a hand for something--an ornament? She can just see his profile, most of his body cut off by the frame. He's kind of smiling but there's something in his eyes that's wrong, and she doesn't know why. He's looking at John, she thinks, or Kitty, but she can't see enough to understand. The pictures don't really say what's important.
Paging back. Magneto on the beach. Magneto sitting at a wrought-iron table in some outdoor restaurant, smiling at a sexy coffee-brown girl--is that Mystique? Pyro can't be sure. Magneto in Washington, standing on the steps of a museum, frowning off the edge of the frame at something Pyro can't see. Toad and Sabretooth, and then Toad's not there anymore, so that's when he joined the team. Put the black hat on, or whatever.
Her stolen memories might. She spreads out a gloved hand over the picture like that'll help her remember. John was thinking about his parents, and Bobby was embarrassed about the tinsel he let somebody drape him with.
She runs a finger over the picture of the professor, watching him watch Kitty and John.
"They're nothing like me, Charles," a cool dry voice whispers in the back of her head. "You're chasing ghosts."
Paging back. People appear, suddenly; they're not there and then they're smiling up at the camera from page after page. And that means something happened to them, doesn't it? That moment when they appear, that's when something happened. They're here in the pictures but they're not real. You can't touch them or fuck them or play cards with them in the middle of the night.
"And you're not even real," she says, and turns the pages to prove she can. Here's the first picture of John; his hair's too long and he's got bruises on the side of his face like he's been in a fight. He's lying on the couch, propped on his elbows, watching Bobby play video games, looking like he wants to play himself. It's a pretty boring thing to take a picture of.
Here's the first picture of Bobby, in the winter, playing in the snow. Big surprise. Here's the first one of Jubes, grinning up at the camera cockily, suitcase in hand; first day of school and she looks like she owns the place. And then Rogue doesn't know anyone but the teachers, so she pages back, not even sure what she's looking for.
Not that he thinks Magneto plays cards with people in the middle of the night. He and Bobby used to play for money, because otherwise, what's the point? Bobby didn't really care if he won or not, which just made Pyro crazy.
"What's the point in playing with you if you don't even give a shit?" he'd said, and tossed the cards up in the air.
"I don't have to win," Bobby had said, and what the fuck could Pyro say to that?
When she goes back far enough, the teachers are students, which is kind of cool. Here's Jean with a suitcase of her own, only she's leaving the school, not arriving; she's got a Columbia sticker on the side of her suitcase and is grinning and giving a thumbs-up to whoever's taking the picture. Here's Ororo, studying with her feet up on a desk, chair tilted back as if it's going to fall over any minute.
Here's a very young Scott lying on a couch watching Jean play Atari, propped up on his elbows with his hair falling over his glasses, and Rogue realizes why Jean must have taken that picture of John. It's one small mystery solved.
Paging back, and then he's run out of pictures. There's nothing before the very first picture in the album, Magneto with his arm around a brown-haired girl's shoulders in an airport; there's something about the way she holds her head that makes Pyro pretty sure that's Mystique. That's it.
He shuts the album, not really satisfied. Magneto's still old in that picture, older than Scott. There's a whole lot of his life that's not in there, where the only thing Pyro knows is the one that's written on Magneto's skin. And that Professor Xavier's back there somewhere. He tries to imagine them kissing and it's easier than he thought it would be, and also kind of hot in a twisted way.
She turns the page, and stares at the picture, because that's Magneto. He's younger, his hair still mostly dark. He doesn't look like a terrorist; he looks like someone's high school teacher, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He's smiling at someone the camera doesn't show; it's really a great smile.
He's only in a couple of the pictures, and mostly at the edge of the frame. Rogue looks for the first Christmas picture, pretty sure of what she's going to find, but she's disappointed; it's just the tree, and there's no one on the couch, no one standing by the windowsill. Jean's taking a picture of the tree, and whatever's going on with Magneto and Professor Xavier, it's out of the frame, out of sight.
He wishes there were a picture of that, but hey, this is a photo album, not porn. He rolls over on his back, looks at the ceiling. He could go down to the beach. He could get a camera from one of the stands that sells junk for tourists. He could take pictures of the water, and the pretty girls in string bikinis, and Magneto and Mystique, maybe when they're asleep out on the deck and won't know he's doing it.
He'd paste them into a notebook, and write down the date under each picture, in his scribbly handwriting people always say they can't read. It won't matter if people could read it or not, because it's just so he can say it starts here. So there can be a first picture, and you can't see anything before that; you can't turn the pages any further back, because that's where it starts.
It's just a Christmas tree, probably Jean's first Christmas at the school, and the tree she must have helped decorate, dripping with silver icicles. This Christmas it'll be Rogue and Bobby sitting under the tree, and Scott reaching up to put the star on top, and Ororo snapping a picture, a good cheerful picture where you can only see if you look at the edges that someone's looking out of the frame trying to see someone who isn't there.
The van is pulling into the drive. Rogue puts the albums away so Scott won't know she was looking. He probably thinks they're all about him, like his story isn't anybody else's. If he told her about them there'd still be things that got cut off by the frame, all the things he didn't see. But maybe it's worth getting him to anyway; she doesn't really think a picture is worth a thousand words.