DISCLAIMER: Hank and Trish don't belong to me, they belong to Marvel. Everything else does belong to me, so please ask before using. And, a warning, I can't write Beast very well, he came out sounding like my father, so please be kind.
New York City is full of cheap motels that can be rented for no more then therty dollars a night. These old, rundown, rat and roach infested places cause a lot of dirty people to come to them. Drug dealer, prostitutes, the homeless, criminals, people come to lay over for a few days to heal bullet wounds, or hide from the cops. But sometimes, sometimes but not often, you might find a perfectly nice, decent family who just had a run of bad luck.
The flashing neon sign with most of the lights broken or gone out, read "Sleep Good Inn. Therty bucks a night, or ten an hour. Vacancy." Just under this sign, a woman walked up to room 10A, and pushed open the door with the busted lock. Her arms were filled with a clothes hamper that held all the clothing they owned these days.
Her dress was old, worn, and faded. It had once been a fine periwinkle blue summer dress she had loved so well, but now it was so faded the color couldn't be determined. It was stained, and had so much patchwork on it, she could barely remember where the patches stopped and the original cloth began.
Her hair, which had once been a long flowing cream color, was gray now, despite the fact that she was only 28. It was cut unevenly short. She could still remember the times she used to spend in a beauty parlor having her hair cut and styled just so. But now, she or her husband usually cut it. Most of the time with his pocket knife their son had given him two Father's Days ago.
Her face didn't seem as young anymore, at least not to her. The only thing about her that didn't say she was as old as she felt were her blue-green eyes that still danced with laughter even after all they had been through. They were the only aspect of her features that didn't look dead.
She watched a roach crawl out from under the dresser and under the bed as she set the hamper there. As shiver ran down her spine. No matter how many of the things she had seen, she still didn't like the thought of them in her room, moving about while she slept. She had always had a fear that something like that would crawl up in her ears as she slept, so she now kept ear muffs on at night.
Slimy things. She thought as she felt with her right hand for the ring that used to be on her left. She had had to sell it when her husband had gone bankrupt and the construction company was taken away. Her huge three caret diamond had only put food from McDonald's on the table for a week before they'd had to sell his ring.
She sighed, then she set about folding the clothes, checking them over to see if she was going to have to apply her needle anywhere. Once upon a time, she didn't have to worry about those sorts of things. She had people do them for her. All she had to worry about was what to wear to a party, and what to have the chef cook that night. She sighed, old memories would only make her all the more sad.
The TV, the only thing in this place that worked, was on, and she watched it as she did her work. The news was on. More stuff about mutants and the last fading news about Operation: Zero Tolerance. There was bigger news now, something about people being eaten alive by some sort of creature that literally ripped its victims to shreds. She shivered once again. And she thought roaches were bad.
She sighed, and was about to turn the TV off, when a picture of a smiling boy came up behind the anchor man. Her hand froze in mid air just before the on/off button.
"This just in about Kevin LeBeau, formally Kevin Anderson, the little boy who was cured of Mrots Syndrome. It has been confirmed that the virus that was attacking the little boy has almost completely left his system. Here's Trish Tilby with the man who made it all possible."
The picture changed from the man with a very bad toupee, to a pretty women with black hair. "Thanks, Jim. This is Trish Tilby reporting live from the laboratory of the esteemed Doctor Henry McCoy, who created the anti-virus that saved Kevin LeBeau's life. Doctor? Can you tell us how you came about creating the vaccine?"
She pressed her microphone into the face of a blue-furred man. He was quite fearsome looking, this man--all that blue fur and animal-like ears. When he opened his mouth, he revealed sharp, animalistic teeth.
"Well, as all know by now, Kevin had a very precarious case of Mrots Syndrome, and Mrots Syndrome is lethal. It simply devours away deoxyribonucleic acid, an essential constituent of chromosomes, in the blood stream and lives off the white blood cells. It was my deduction to reduplicate the missing deoxyribonucleic acid and replace them within Kevin's body. Mrots Syndrome travels its course to the brain where it finally kills its victim, but it mustn't leave certain patterns in deoxyribonucleic acid so it literally turned around to start eating away what was replaced, but by replacing more of the deoxyribonucleic acid, the virus deteriorated." He smiled and took off his glasses, wiping them on his lab coat.
The camera turned back to Trish Tilby, who was obviously biting her lip to keep from laughing. "Um, Dr. McCoy, for the viewers out there who are not scientists, could you please say that in laymen's terms?" She asked stiffly.
The camera returned to Hank McCoy, who, if he hadn't had his blue fur covering, appeared to be blushing. "Basically, I recreated Kevin's DNA strands and replaced them within his body. The virus then turned around to eat at what was replaced, and then turned again until it was doing no more then chasing it's tail, so to speak. Then it died."
"Thank you, Dr. McCoy. This is Trish Tilby signing off. Jim? Back to you."
The anchor man was back. "Thank you, Trish. You know," he said turning to a man beside him with an equally bad toupee, "It's quite amazing what that boy's been though."
"You're right, Jim. And he was adopted less then a week after he was cured. He's one lucky child."
Her hand trembling, she moved it the few more inches, and pushed the button to turn the TV off. Then she replaced both hands in her lap. She sat this way, with her clothes only half folded, staring at the blank television screen silently weeping to herself.
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