Notes:  Maddie and Sabretooth are on their own.  Or are they?

Warnings:  None

Min's notes:  Sasha's entry, and boy did she leave us on a cliff-hanger.

They arrived with the daylight.

They had been traveling non-stop for days, and she was tired and hungry. Lucy had been quiet most of the time, and appeared very fascinated with Sabretooth, but now she was starting to whimper a little. Sabretooth himself hadn't seemed to notice that he was carrying around a small girlchild who seemed even smaller in his large hands; he simply went along, doing business as usual.

Or not so usual, when she thought about it. It couldn't be everyday that he broke out of a research facility with a pregnant woman and a little girl.

Or perhaps it was, what did she know?

"Get inside," he said (that is, he growled, but it was a nice growl, not an 'I'm going to kill you now' growl) and pushed open the cabin door.

Huh, she thought and went inside. "Are we staying here?"

"Yes. They don't know about this place. We should be safe here." He closed the door behind him. "For a while," he added. "A couple of years if we're lucky; a month if we're not." He looked at her for a moment, then turned and went outside again, leaving the door ajar.

She looked around the cabin, holding Lucy's hand tightly. The room she stood in was quite sparsely furnished. There was a small kitchen area straight back and to the left, with a fireplace beside it. A table with four chairs was next, and to her right, a sofa with a coffee table and a bookshelf placed against the wall. There were multicolored woven carpets on the floor ­- something she'd never seen before -­ and a radio sitting on the dinner table.

Madelyne liked this better than the cold steel, glass and plastic of the Program. This . . . . This felt more like a home. She could have raised Lucy, Clara and Remy here, given the chance. Maybe this place didn't have the hyper-modernity of the research facility, but it would've had warmth.

Would have warmth.

Her left hand rested on her stomach and the right held on to Lucy.

Sabretooth came stomping in with an armful of firewood. He went past her and dumped it all in a wooden box by the fireplace. "Bedroom's through that door and the bathroom's outside. Don't touch any papers and don't break anything."

"Wouldn't dream of it," she snapped.

"Good."

He lit the fire.

"Have you seen this woman? No? Are you sure? She's pregnant, if that . . . ? No? All right, guys, move on." The door clanged shut after the three men, and the gas-station attendant wondered what the woman could have done to warrant the Feds on the search for her.
 

"Can't you do anything?" Sabretooth scowled at her, absently patting Lucy on the head. The girl sat by his feet, banging together blocks of wood and giggling madly at the loud noise.

"I can breed," Madelyne replied, scowling, too. "You might not have noticed, but that's about the only thing I've been allowed to do." That, and read. Shakespeare, Darwin, Dante, Homer . . . .  She could quote any of those, but she had to admit that such a skill was hardly a very useful at the moment.

"Hmm." Sabretooth narrowed his eyes at her. "Well. Then you learn."

So she did.

She learned that milk tended to boil over at the exact moment when you weren't looking because Lucy had dropped a block on her foot and was squealing like anything.

She learned that he would eat pretty much anything, even when it was almost raw, while she wouldn't.

She learned that various sorts of meat and fish tasted better if she added spices or vegetables to the food.

And she learned that baking with Lucy's help tended to end up in food fights and washing from top tp toe while Sabretooth shook his head and read though his papers.

Cooking was fun, she decided.

" . . . She might be accompanied by this man here, and this girl . . . . Haven't seen them? I had a feeling. All right, thanks for your help."
 
 

He was back.

He'd been gone for two weeks, and now he was back.

Lucy pounced him before he even made into the cabin, while Madelyne watched. She wasn't sure if she liked the fact that he was back or not. She felt safer with him there, sure, because he was tall and strong and feral and seemed to want to protect them. Well, to protect Lucy, at any rate. Why he'd bothered to bring Maddie along, she didn't know.

Sabretooth placed Lucy on his shoulder (she grabbed his hair and continued babbling happily about all the things she'd done while he'd been gone) and held out a sack towards her. "Here."

She blinked and took the sack.

The sack was a treasure box. It had all sorts of things. She didn't really have much concept of money, but this must have cost a lot. . . . if he'd bought it.

There was candy, a hairbrush, two toothbrushes, a brown teddy-bear and a small wooden doll. Four dresses (three for her, one for Lucy), and three pairs of pants (one for her, two for Lucy). Four sweaters, two for each of them, and underwear (He'd gone underwear shopping? . . . Mustn't die of laughter, mustn't die of laughter . . . ). Soap, a thick blanket and . . . books!

She lit up.

At the bottom of the sack was a shiny new Cookbook for Dummies, a used copy of The Godfather by Mario Puzo, a new copy of' Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling, a used version of the CIA World Fact Book with comments scribbled in here and there, and a used pocketbook version of Le petit prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

She opened the last book and smiled. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

"Thank you," she said, smiling.

"Roll on out, boys! We've got ourselves an address!"
 

Lucy really liked to run around in the forest. Maddie wasn't so keen on that. It wasn't so much that she didn't like it, it was just that she'd never really seen a forest before. She'd only seen nature -­ free, wild nature -­ on the TV-shows and movies that Sabretooth had shown her, to teach her about the outside world and about being a mother. And there, it had been . . . different.

She did try to familiarize herself with her surroundings, though. Both because Sabretooth told her to, and to keep an eye on Lucy.

She had never been a mother before, not for real, not to a two year old, and she frequently felt like she wasn't doing a very good job.

To which Sabretooth had said, well, grunted; "She's still alive, isn't she?" And to him, that seemed to make her a pretty good mother. Maddie wasn't all too sure of that, but if Sabretooth said so . . . .  He'd been her only contact with the outside and 'normal life' for as long as she could remember. Of course she'd read books and watched TV, but she understood that these things weren't real in the same way. To her mind, whatever Sabretooth said, it was probably right. He wasn't the type to waste words on telling her lies. Why should he lie to her? There was no point in that.

The trees were tall here -­ taller than she'd thought they would be, with thin green needles and a tendency to loom over her, sort of the same way Sabretooth did. The ground was covered in dirt, which turned into mud when it rained. Lucy liked the mud too.

If she walked a little bit down from the cabin, she came to a small river. When the weather was nice, she liked to sit by it and read one of her books. Lucy liked to swim in the river, and didn't seem to care whether it was hot or cold outside. "She got that from me," Sabretooth explained, and looked 'paternally proud,' just like they did on the TV shows. He didn't look at all dangerous then.

"Well, THAT was a dead end."
 

"This is Leni," Sabretooth said and scowled. "She's staying here for a while."

Maddie looked up from her helicopter manual and blinked at the tall blonde woman. " . . . Okay."

The blonde woman beamed. "Aw, so you're his little woman? How adorable! Where's the brat?"

Sabretooth scowled harder.

"Oh, shush. It's not like I'm going to eat her or anything." Leni elbowed Sabretooth playfully.

Maddie blinked. She'd never seen anyone do ANYTHING playful to Sabretooth. At least not and still keep all their limbs. This visit could be interesting.

"We won't fail this time."

notes:
"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux." -- And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Leni Zauber is one of Mystique's cover personalities.

Go on to Diana's "The Huntress"

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