The Old Toy - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by LA
Last updated: 01/02/2007 02:01:11 AM

Chapter 1

You finished the puzzle for me in the end didn't you. You ragged old thing. Strange. Always thought Rogue was the one who talks to teddies.

You were the one who revealed the long hidden truth to me eventually, you with your button eye hangin off. I didn't want to believe it, didn't want to acknowledge that this cruel, seemingly heartless man was my father.

I remember now Ted. Thanks to you.

The whole nightmare began a week ago. Got a call from my friends the Mafia that some mass murderer was on the loose - the kind that'd take candy from a baby if it made them feel powerful.

Anyway, I caught wind of what this guy was up to and didn't like what I heard at all. He had money, he had power and he had plans with devastating outcomes for everyone - most of all mutants. It's not that he didn't like us freaks, he just saw us as a minority waiting to be exploited in any hideous manner. What was shocking was the amount of power he had over society's underbelly, my world - the raw fabric this world is built upon. Not many can earn the respect of people so close to the truth of humanity - I know for I am one who has. It seems he earnt their fear, marauderers and snouts alike. Well it isn't the 'why' that's mportant now… It's what happenend after I found him.

I was staring down the barrel of a gun at this animal - nothing could stop me ffrom ridding my people of him - when he looked deep into my eyes.

"Just?" The question was murmured fainter than a whisper but with ten times the impact. Damn. How did he know my name. He must have had more of an influence in the underworld than I thought … no, no one knew my name for I barely remembered it myself. How did he recognize me?

"How…?" I trailed off, the question left hanging in mid-air.

"Just LeBlanc?" he repeated and expanded upon my name.

"Wha…?" this was a new one on me.

"It is you," he was a little cocky for a man with a gun to his head. Probably planning on talking his way out. I remember thinking that's what I'd do if I had a gun to my head. I hate that comparison.

Then it clicked. No one knew my birth name. Not even the Theives Guild. I grabbed him roughly by the wrists.

"Come on."

I drove wildly along the dark, narrow streets of Oslo until we reached the stereotypical warehouse that gangsters are so fond of using. I tied him up - just for good practise - and asked, just to be sure, "How do you know my name?"

"You don't recognize your own father, my dear son?" I snorted in denial. Yet all the facts available could not be ignored. True, I did not remember my real parents, but they would remember me - how many people have red on black eyes? "Look in my pocket," he said. There was a photograph: him, me and my mother. You were in his pocket too weren't you, Ted? Because you belonged to my mama before me. It was you that brought it all back: the father beating ' the devil' out of his three-year-old son; the husband beating his beautiful young wife 'coz he wanted to'.

I remember mama taking my hand and running with me out of our house, away from our home, away from my father. He caught up with her and grabbed her, but she screamed for me to keep going. Never saw her again.

"Where's my mother?" I asked him through gritted teeth.

"She was a nuisance and had to be dealt with," hot tears ran down my cheeks, his answer so cold.

Nothing.

The new silencer on my gun did a good job didn't it Ted?

The job was done, the threat eliminated. But now, I remember…