#so she eats spoonfuls of dijon mustard and poptarts

[words-writ-in-starlight]

can you write “something before canon” for Laura Kinney or for anyone you like if you’re not feelin it! Your writing is Peak!!!

HECK that’s a HEADCANONS MEME well okay can you write just. Whatever prompt you feel for the character I mentioned earlier? Sorry!

For the Thousand Meme!  Also, my relevant X-23 AU of Evolution!

1. Something before canon

Subject X-23 was not...the apple of the lab’s eye, so to speak.  X-23 was a gifted fighter in a way that the other subjects weren’t--not because she was better or faster or stronger, but because she was angrier.  The berserker rage was part of their genetic code, true, a direct inheritance from Weapon X, part of their mutation that couldn’t be stripped away, but X-23 was wrathful in a way that the others, by and large, were not.  When they were younger it meant X-23 lost fights when she lost her temper.  By the time they were taken for the adamantium procedure, X-23 had managed to marry precision training to blind rage and come out with something as fatally dangerous as her creators could have hoped.

The issue, of course, lay in the fact that X-23 could not be trusted to point that lethal combination in the right direction.  Or, more often, in any direction at all.    X-23 never quite transgressed to the point where they would have been justified in putting her down, but--only barely.

The discovery that X-23 was the only survivor of the adamantium procedure was...not a welcome one.

The technicians who spent the last decade and change trying to stay out of X-23′s crossfire are not, shall we say, surprised when she wrecks the lab and leaves it burning in her wake.

8. Something domestic

“I don’t understand why this is necessary.”  Laura doesn’t really mean to complain, but she was also supposed to be training today.  Looking forward to training is...strange.  But training with the X-Men is a wildly different experience from her training in the lab.  Less precise and efficient.  Scott ended a training match once, because Laura had a broken piece of shrapnel lodged in her ribs, even though he knows she heals.  She had demanded, angry, why he had stopped the hologram, and Scott had looked her square in the eye and said flatly, “We don’t expect you to fight while you’re bleeding into a lung.  I don’t care how fast you heal.”

She’d gone to Logan, afterward, because she always goes to Logan these days, and he’d shrugged and said, “They’re your team.  They’re teaching you to have their backs, and how to let them have yours.  You’ll adjust.”

So she’s adjusting.

Except not today, apparently, because today she’s standing with her arms clasped around her chest while Ororo puts a pan on the stove.

“It’s necessary that you be able to feed yourself,” Ororo says sternly, arching a white eyebrow at Laura.  

“I can feed myself,” Laura says.

“I refuse to allow Bobby Drake and Jubilee to be your sole concept of edible food,” Ororo continues as if Laura didn’t say anything.  “Hot Pockets are not--good, or cooking, and eating Poptarts for every meal will give you some kind of deficiency.  If you want to eat condiments with a spoon because you like the taste, that’s fine, but you’re learning to make real food if it kills us both.”  She gives Laura a look that says she knows why they run through mustard so fast.  

Laura scowls at the floor.  By and large, no one has really prevented her from bouncing around the food pyramid like a Super Ball--she has a high calorie demand under normal circumstances, higher when she’s healing herself, and she did see Jean stick a spoon full of marmalade in her mouth, so no one’s got that much of a moral high ground.  But clearly someone ratted her out for eating three boxes of cherry Poptarts and nothing else on Tuesday, and apparently even Ororo’s infinite patience has its limits.

“It sounds like a lot of work,” Laura says.

“We’ll learn things that are easy,” Ororo says, as inexorable as a storm front rolling over the horizon.  “If you decide you like it enough, someone here can teach you more complicated recipes.  Today we’re going to cook cheesy eggs with tomatoes.”

Laura glances up at that.  “Do I get to eat them, after?”

“Obviously.”