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Kwannon never used to be an insomniac–the Hand trained her too well for her to ever miss out on any opportunities to rest–but in the time since her resurrection, she’s found herself lying awake for long hours on far more nights than she’s found sleep easily. Part of it is that there is so much to catch up on, so many things that have happened in the time that she was dead and Betsy Braddock wore her body that her head is constantly overflowing with information and her mind always racing as she tries to process it all. The other part is that whenever she allows herself to lie down and close her eyes and truly relax , whenever she allows sleep to start creeping over her like a fog, it feels so much like what she remembers it was like to die that she almost always jerks back to being wide awake.
So, she’s become an insomniac. It could be worse. But it does mean that even after long days of wrangling the rest of the Hellions around and doing her best to create a true team out of a group of misfits who can’t quite seem to decide if they’re still villains, sleep eludes her. Normally when she has a particularly bad bout of insomnia these days, Kwannon spends an hour or two training alone until she’s so tired that her restless mind finally quiets. But Orphanmaker accidentally threw her into a wall earlier during a sparring bout and there’s an impressive bruise forming on her shoulder, so that plan is out. Instead, Kwannon finds herself wandering the halls of Bar Sinister instead.
Nathaniel Essex’s abode is not to her taste, to be frank. The rooms belonging to the Hellions are normal enough, but the rest of it is decorated like a cross between a Victorian dandy’s townhouse and a mad scientist’s lab–which perfectly sums up Essex himself, really, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to look at. Uncomfortably stuffed sofas and old scientific equipment sit by side, and the walls are all carved from opaque red stone. Still, with the lights dimmed and the halls silent, it’s a good enough place for Kwannon to wander until her restless mind quiets itself.
She walks through empty hallways, up and down staircases, trying to find the still and peaceful place within herself where all her thoughts can finally quiet. But it doesn’t come.
Kwannon isn’t sure how long she’s been walking when she hears the music. It’s faint at first, soft enough that she isn’t sure if it’s a product of her tired mind, but the further she walks through Bar Sinister, the louder it gets. She turns a corner and now she hears it clearly: a classic rock station, one song sliding into another as it echoes through the halls. She doesn’t recognize the exact song, but it’s the sort of thing that Wolverine would listen to at the X-Mansion while he smoked a cigar and drank a beer in the evenings.
Kwannon walks faster, following the noise, and finds herself emerging from the dark silence of the rest of Bar Sinister into a brightly lit industrial kitchen. John Greycrow stands behind the stainless steel counter, a radio playing the music she heard at his elbow and assorted baking supplies scattered before him.
Her footsteps are silent as always, just as the Hand taught her, and any other sounds of her approach would have been muffled by the music, but Greycrow looks up as she approaches anyway. He always seems to know when she’s around–not in a way that Kwannon finds unsettling, more that he’s always carefully paying careful attention to her. She supposes that keeping track of his surroundings in that way has probably become second nature after so long working as a hired killer. Not that he looks much like a killer right now. His hair is tied back, his hands covered in flour, and he seems more at ease than she’s ever seen him.
“Kwannon,” he says as he reaches over and turns down the music. “What are you doing up so late? Trouble with the others?”
She shakes her head. “No, everyone else is asleep. I just couldn’t sleep. What are you doing?”
“Baking bread,” replies Greycrow. He picks up the metal mixing bowl in front of him and tilts it towards her so she can see the dough he’s mixing together in it. She inhales and smells flour, yeast, and salt–very different scents from his usual ones of metal and oil and gunpowder.
“I didn’t know you were learning how to bake,” says Kwannon. Then again, it’s a decent skill to learn if you’re trying to become something other than a killer.
Greycrow shakes his head. “Not learning, already knew. Before I was a Marauder, I was a line cook at a diner, did a little baking on the side too. Been finding myself coming back to it lately.”
“I didn’t know that,” Kwannon says again. She’s not sure why she’s surprised about this; it’s not like she knows Greycrow that well. She knows who he used to be and that he doesn’t want to be that person anymore, and she knows that he’ll always have her back in a fight. She doesn’t really need to know anything else about him in order to be his team leader. But she realizes that she does.
“This is ready to knead, if you want to help,” offered Greycrow, and she finds herself nodding. He scoops the dough out of the bowl with one hand, sprinkling the surface of the counter with a liberal dose of flour with the other, and she notices that he’s wearing a latex glove over his metal hand. Seeing her notice, he says, “Learned the hard way that when dough and flour get in the gears, it’s hell to clean. So, I’ve mixed the ingredients together and now it’s time to knead the dough. Have you done that before?”
She shakes her head. “The Hand had a rigorous education program, but it didn’t extend to baking.”
“Well, it’s not too hard,” he reassures her. “Wash your hands, get some flour on them, and I’ll show you how to do it.” She obliges and joins him behind the counter.
“I’ve got two things of dough here,” says Greycrow, lifting another unformed blob of dough out of a second metal mixing bowl. He holds with the same care she’s seen him take when cleaning his guns or fixing a gadget. “I was planning to make two loaves anyway. I’ll show you want to do and you can copy. Sounds good?”
Kwannon nods. It’s been a long time, she thinks, since she was learning something new like this. Maybe not since she was a girl and training with her teachers from the Hand, desperate for their approval.
“You use the heel of your hand to flatten the dough,” says Greycrow, doing just that. “Really put your weight into it, but not so much that you tear a hole in the dough. Then fold the whole thing over in half, turn it a quarter, and flatten it again.”
As he speaks, he demonstrates the actions. The easy, casual way that he works with the dough speaks to the number of times that he’s done this before. Kwannon does her best to mimic his actions even if they feel awkward at first, the dough clinging to the creases of her palms and the surface of the table, but eventually she finds a kind of rhythm in it. Flatten, fold, turn, flatten, fold, turn. There’s something peaceful about the repetition, the same kind of peace that she finds all too rarely during meditation these days. And it’s satisfying to watch the dough take shape under her hands and know that she’s actually making something.
“How long do we knead the dough for?” asks Kwannon, pausing to blow an errant strand of hair out of her face.
Greycrow shrugs. “Depends on the kind of bread you’re making, but this one, I’d say maybe ten minutes, so we’re halfway there. Don’t knead the dough enough, the bread doesn’t expand when you bake it and you end up with a dense, flat loaf.”
“And that would certainly be a horror,” says Kwannon, a little amused by his seriousness. And by how talkative he is–John Greycrow is a man of few words, something that she can relate to, but tonight he’s positively chatty.
“No flat loaves, not in my kitchen,” says Greycrow, squashing his dough extra flat to make his point. Kwannon finds her lips quirking into a faint smile.
Now that they’re talking, she finds it easier to ask, “Why are you baking bread tonight?”
Greycrow shrugs. “Just good to remind myself there are other things I can do with my hands besides killing. Spent so long being a gun for hire–and then Sinister’s gun whether I wanted to be or not–that I started to forget I could be anything else.”
“You’re not Sinister’s hired gun,” says Kwannon as she folds and turns the dough yet again. “You’re a Hellion.”
“I am now ,” agrees Greycrow. “Wasn’t always. I was a Marauder a hell of a lot longer than I’ve been one of the Hellions. Most folks on Krakoa can’t forget that, and I don’t blame them.”
“And I was an assassin for the Hand,” replies Kwannon. “I’m not in any place to judge you on who you used to be. Plenty of people on Krakoa have done bad things–that doesn’t mean they can’t do better in the future. You’re not even the only person who’s worked for Essex before; Gambit used to be his man once too, and now he’s a member of Excalibur.”
“He hasn’t done what I have,” says Greycrow grimly, and she can’t argue with that. “Remy LeBeau was always a better man than I was.”
There’s a level of familiarity to that sentiment that she wasn’t expecting, and she finds herself asking, “You know each other?”
“Used to,” says Greycrow with a chuckle, methodically turning and flattening his dough again. “That line cook job I mentioned? Gambit worked there too. Somewhere out in Arizona there’s a diner where some of the regulars probably still remember John Greycrow’s hash browns and Remy LeBeau’s gumbo.” He sighs and adds, “Probably should have stuck with that job instead of becoming Sinister’s man, but it’s too late for that now.”
“It’s not too late to become something other than Sinister’s man,” points out Kwannon. “Someday you can get a drink with Gambit at the Green Lagoon and know you’re a better man than you were the last time you saw him. That’s the point of the Hellions.”
Greycrow doesn’t say anything in reply to that, but he doesn’t have to. It’s enough for them to continue to knead the dough together in silence, the radio quietly playing another classic rock song. Eventually Greycrow regards the two balls of dough with a careful eye, presses each one with a finger, and declares, “Looks like they’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” asks Kwannon, who’s starting to realize that she really does not know very much at all about the art of baking bread. It’s never been something that seemed important to know.
“Now we let them rise,” Greycrow says as he maneuvers a ball of dough into a rectangular metal tin, smoothing it down so it fills the whole container. She does the same to hers, then watches curiously as he covers each container with a cloth.
“How long is this part?”
He shrugs as he carries the two baking tins over to a corner of the kitchen and sets them down on yet another counter. “Forty minutes, maybe; it’s warm enough in here it shouldn’t take long. Plenty of time to clean up the rest of this.”
So they do, working to tie up the bags of flour and wash the sticky mixing bowls in companionable silence. Kwannon still isn’t tired enough to sleep, not yet, so she doesn’t mind keeping Greycrow company as he meticulously scrubs the dirty bowls and she dries them off.
During a lull in the cleaning up, as he hands her one bowl and before he picks up another, she says, “Thank you for this. For letting me help you.”
“I don’t mind,” says Greycrow. “It’s good to see you.”
Kwannon feels herself blush slightly and tells herself that it’s just the heat of the steam from the sink. “I think you’re right. It was nice to do something with my hands. It was…grounding. A reminder.”
“A reminder that Betsy Braddock doesn’t control your body anymore?” asks Greycrow after a pause. Startled, she glances at him. She’s never been under any impression that he didn’t know the whole story of what happened with her and Braddock, but hardly anyone ever brings it up these days, and especially not in such blunt terms. Betsy Braddock might be Captain Britain these days, but she was one of the X-Men before she ever took up that title, and the X-Men don’t like thinking about all the years their friend spent walking around in the body of a dead woman.
“Yes,” says Kwannon at last. “That. I know this is my body, mine and not hers, but…it can be hard to remember that sometimes. I wasn’t there when she was in this body; I was dead and gone. I don’t know what she did while she was me. These hands have killed people whose blood I don’t remember spilling; people have touched this skin that I don’t even remember talking to. This body has–” She almost says This body has borne a child and then remembers that Greycrow doesn’t know about her daughter. No one can know about her, not as long as Essex keeps the digital version of the girl hanging over Kwannon’s head like the sword of Damocles. Instead, she finishes, “This body has been mine longer than it ever has been hers, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.”
She pauses, realizing how much she said. How easily the words tumbled out of her, knowing that the person she’s speaking to wouldn’t judge her over them in the slightest. Greycrow was never Braddock’s friend; he doesn’t have the weight of that history dragging them down as is the case with so many other people on Krakoa. He doesn’t have to reconcile that someone he fought alongside was also the worst kind of thief, even unintentionally, and she’s grateful for that.
To her immense relief, Greycrow doesn’t try to offer any empty platitudes or flat excuses for the woman that she’s forever tied to because of their shared history. Instead, he just says, “I know a thing or two about the body you live in not being yours anymore.”
“Essex’s cloning?” guesses Kwannon, and he nods.
“Us Marauders, we started off working for him willingly, I won’t deny that. The pay was good enough that we were willing to do just about anything for him, dirty our hands in any way he asked. But eventually he started cloning us. One of us died, he’d bring us back like nothing happened, with genetic failsafes to make sure we couldn’t ever go against him. He cloned me so many times I can’t even remember them all.” Greycrow laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Gambit once broke into Sinister’s lab and accidentally killed me with one of his exploding cards. Sinister had another one of me up and running within the hour.”
Kwannon realizes that she’s still holding one of the metal mixing bowls, and puts it down as quietly as she can. “I’m sorry.”
Greycrow just shakes his head. “What he did to me doesn’t excuse what I did to others while I was a Marauder. I’m just saying, I know what it’s like to feel like you aren’t in control of the body you live in. But right here, right now, I know that I’m me and you’re you. Doesn’t matter what we used to be.”
It’s blunt and to the point, but somehow it helps more than any number of hours of talking to anyone else could. “Thank you," she says. “Do you think the bread’s done rising yet?”
“Might be,” agrees Greycrow, and goes to check. He reports that it’s almost there, but another few minutes won’t hurt, and they pass the time cleaning up spilled flour while the radio plays on. Greycrow checks the bread again, then announces it’s ready to bake.
“You put a pot of water on the rack underneath the loaves to keep it moist and help it expand. Gives it a nice thick crust, too,” he explains as she sets the two baking tins inside the oven. She’s pleased at how perfectly symmetrical the loaves are considering it’s the first time she’s baked anything.
“I didn’t realize baking was such a careful art,” says Kwannon drily.
“It is if you want to do it right. I’ve made my living destroying things, and I’ve made my living baking things, and only one of them ever produced anything worthwhile.”
Greycrow closes the oven and says, “Those’ll bake for twenty, twenty-five minutes. We’ll know they’re ready to come out when they’re golden-brown on top.”
“Is there anything to eat with the bread?” asks Kwannon, realizing that she’s hungry. Her insomnia has driven her so far into the night that dinner is a distant memory.
The ensuing search turns up several kinds of jam in the depths of one of the industrial freezes, some of them imported from the mainland and others more experimental ones made from uniquely Krakoan fruits. Kwannon can’t imagine Nathaniel Essex eating jam on his toast for breakfast–frankly, she can’t imagine him eating anything for breakfast, but if she had to guess, he seems more like a kippers and beans on toast kind of man–but some careful taste tests prove the jam seems to be just that and nothing more.
After discovering the jam, Kwannon pulls up a stool and leans against the counter, not asleep but not quite awake either. Her Hand training makes it difficult for her to relax enough to sleep with other people in the room, but she trusts Greycrow enough to at least be able to close her eyes around him. That’s more than she’s trusted anyone in a long time, maybe not since her old lover Matsu'o.
Matsu’o Tsurayaba and John Greycrow…that’s not a comparison she’s in the mood to analyze right now. Maybe not ever. By the time the X-Men told her of Matsu’o’s death, it was old news to them, but it still feels like a fresh wound to her. Betsy Braddock’s killing of Kwannon’s old lover was a mercy, they told her, a way to save a suffering man from Wolverine’s wrath over a long-ago crime. Perhaps it really was, but to Kwannon, it’s just one more death at her hands that she can’t even remember.
Eventually Greycrow taps her lightly on the shoulder and says, “Kwannon. Bread should be done about now.”
She’s alert and awake instantly–that old Hand training that she can never shake–and when Greycrow opens the oven to a great blast of heat, she sees two puffy golden-brown loaves of bread waiting for them. Greycrow sets them to rest on the counter and they watch in pleased silence as the two loaves steam and cool.
She helped make those. Kwannon is hardly a woman lacking in talents, but there’s something especially pleasing about knowing that she helped make something. Krakoa is a place for new beginnings, but until now, she’s been the same person she always has been–a killer honing her skills and her psychic blades. Now she is…well, she doesn’t think she has a future as a baker, but she is someone who at least knows how to knead dough.
Greycrow slices off a thick slab of still-hot bread, spreads some of the jam on it, and hands it over to Kwannon. She takes a large bite and is amazed that it somehow tastes even better than it looks–the inside light and moist and rich, the crust crunching satisfyingly under her teeth, the strawberry jam sweet but not unpleasantly so.
“It’s good,” she says once she’s swallowed it. “Very good.”
“It should be,” says Greycrow with quiet satisfaction. “I know what I’m doing.”
Between the two of them, they eat half a loaf, only stopping when Kwannon begins to yawn. It must be closer to dawn than dusk by now, and her exhaustion is finally catching up to her.
“Get some sleep,” suggests Greycrow as he boxes up the rest of the bread for the other Hellions. “I’ll tell the rest of the team not to bother you unless we get a mission from the Quiet Council.”
“Thank you,” says Kwannon, smothering a yawn. Then, more seriously: “Really. Thank you, John. I appreciate it–all of it. The bread and the talk.”
“Don’t mention it,” he says. “Company’s never unwelcome when it’s you, Kwannon.”
There’s a warmth in her chest at that–not the tight, blazing knot of anger and guilt that she feels every time she does Essex’s bidding, but something softer and lighter.
“Good night, John,” she says quietly, and leaves him there tidying up the last remnants of his baking. The rest of Bar Sinister is still dim and quiet, but now she finds the darkness peaceful, not oppressive, and knows that tonight, at least, sleep will find her easily enough.