"This is Derek O’Malley, What can I do for you?"

"This is Charity." I really can’t believe I’m doing this.

"Oh." There was a rather long pause, as if he was trying to breath after getting the wind knocked out of him. At least this was only over the phone. I would not be able to face him in person. "How are you doing, is your leg OK?"

"I’ll live. The bone broke and I’ll be a gimp for a good while yet, but, I’ll be okay."

"That’s good to hear." Another drawn-out silence filled the phone lines.

"How are you doing?" It was inane but I had to say something. The silence was getting to me.

"Not too bad, all things considered."

"I hope the FBI aren’t too hard on you?"

"No, they’re their usual arrogant selves. I have a couple of Mulder and Scully wannabes who think this is some conspiracy or something. Not that they’re all that far off."

"I wanted to thank you for covering things for us. It could have been much worse."

"Yea well, I just told them what I knew. I’d been following a lead in another case that led me to the house. By the time Daren and I got there, there was a body, two wounded and a hyperventilating tenant. Congratulate Maria on her acting by the way. She put on a fine show of hysterics for the Feds. Any way, I had no idea where you had gone or if you were even there in the first place and other than that, it was their problem. They weren’t to impressed with the breach of their security and are probably going to be revamping all their security procedures after this."

"Yea, it wasn’t all that good. Where did Maria say my mom was?"

"Out of town to research a few details for the Paranormal Institute in the east. She didn’t tell me more than that. How are thing’s working out over there? Your mom settling in good?"

"Oh she’s having a ball. When she found out the Esteemed Dr. Henry McCoy was here, she just about went into hysterics. It was interesting, because he was trying to bandage up her leg at the time."

"Dr. McCoy lives with you guys? I’ve read some of his papers on the Legacy virus, I don’t suppose he is one I’ve met."

"Um, remember the, ah, incident in the bar."

"It’s been haunting me regularly."

"The big blue guy,"

"Yea."

"That’s Hank."

"Oh." There was a bit of a pause here. I think Derek was saying good bye to all hopes of ever meeting Hank under normal circumstances. "I guess, I should say something about that evening."

"Jean mentioned you were an empath. I guess, there wasn’t much you could do about it."

"Really? I still have trouble remembering all of that evening. What exactly did happened?"

"I discovered first hand that I have a rather bizarre reaction to alcohol. It basically turns my hormones on full blast. I couldn’t help myself and since you’re and empath, there wasn’t much you could do about it either. Any way, I threw myself at you, you responded and while nothing actually happened, it did become a. . . well, an interesting evening."

"Nothing happened?"

"Nothing happened. And I might be able to talk about it soon with out turning beet red."

"Thank heaven’s vid phones aren’t invented yet."

"I agree. I’m starting to glow my face is so red."

"At least you don’t have people staring at you right now."

"Yea, but I have two telepaths living with me."

"You win. That’s worse. Any idea if the FBI are still looking for you?"

"Yea, Bishop’s having fun leading them astray. By the time he’s done, they’ll be looking for me in Alaska. And he’s managed to clear up a few over sights and distance Charity Thomas from the X-Men. Has Maria said anything about the FBI looking for Mom?"

"Nope, so far they haven’t said anything to her about that, but no doubt they’re tracking her down as we speak. I wonder what they’ll do if they ever find out she’s actually staying with you?"

"Truthfully, she’s visiting with Charles Xaviar and I’m just a member of the school he runs. With any luck, they’ll just visit her here, never see me and then leave her alone." I started to twist the phone cord harder than I was earlier. "I don’t like the way they treated her in the past. They acted like she was the criminal."

"Well, they had been trying to put your father away for a long time and she was their only le. . . "

"Don’t call that insane, power hungry, mutant hating, megalomaniac my father. He gave up the right to that when he tried to kill me." I think the cord could now officially be called a casualty of war.

"Was it that bad?"

"Let’s just say, I had to be carried away from the main compound on a stretcher."

"I’m sorry. I didn’t know."

"That’s okay, I’m living with it. How’s Karst doing?"

"Daren is having a field day messing with the two agents’ minds. He has them convinced that he’s an agent for a rival government faction that was sent there to blur their attempts to find out the truth. All he has to do is tell parts of the truth and they go looking in the other direction. You should have seen the look on their faces when he said he suspected the X-Men were somehow involved. They just about burst out laughing."

"I almost wish I could have been there. What did they say about the attack at the Laundromat though. I’m surprised they haven’t been banging down the door here yet." I left the phone cord alone and started to doodle on the message pad.

"The strangest thing happened, it seems that when someone tried an illegal hack, a lot of files ended up destroyed, including the report on that incident and a lot of the associated research. I had to write up the whole report up again, from scratch. I included how you were nice enough to come in and give a full report including a description of the guy,-"

"Liar."

"- and after that, you forgot to leave a permanent address, so we weren’t able to contact you afterwards. We were tracking down the man, which led us to Spokane."

"I don’t even want to think about what would happen if they ever took a deeper look into this case. You’d be up to it to your eyeballs."

"Then I’ll quit and start that fishing shop I’ve always wanted."

"And probably go nuts after a week."

"Yup, but at least no one would get hurt."

"Yea." I pushed down the memory of Mike from my mind. "Listen I should get going, this is going to break the long distance budget for this place."

"Yea, me too. I’ve got to finish the pile of paper work that multiplied while I was away." I listened to this unsure of what I was going to say next. Just saying Bye and then hanging up didn’t seem right.

"Hey, listen, if you’re even in town again, stop by and see us. I could use the company."

"Driving everyone nuts yet?"

"If it wasn’t for the video store that I beg whoever’s close enough to go to regularly, they’d have had to lock me up many times over. The cast they improvised isn’t too bad, but they’re not letting me out for a while yet. Till then, I’m stuck playing invalid."

"Well, take it easy and don’t push yourself too hard."

"Nobody’ll let me."

"Still. . . "

"Okay, okay, I will."

"I should really get going, Daren is starting to look at me funny."

"Sure. I guess I’ll see you around then."

"Yea. Till later then?

"Till later."

"Bye."