Ziva stopped and stared for a couple of reasons. One, because she thought she was imagining things and two because she seriously thought she was imagining things.
"Why is there a cowhide couch in the front entry?" She looked at Craig in question.
"Beats the heck out of me," he said as he walked up and stood next to her. They both stood and stared at the hideously ugly couch that was blocking the front foyer as well as, the front door.
"It isn't a couch, it's a cooooouch!" Mellissa said as she ran up beside them.
"Uh isn't that what I said? It's a couch." Ziva stared at her.
"No, it's a cooooouch! Not the same thing at all," Mellissa insisted.
"What exactly is the difference?" Craig asked her.
"Well, a cooooouch is like a regular couch except it's covered in cowhide and instead of moo it goes cooooouch!" Mellissa explained in a slow patient voice like she was talking to a preschooler.
"And where exactly did you get this couch?" Ziva asked her.
"No, no cooooouch! We ordered it online," Angela said cheerfully as she came dancing up next to them.
"Online? Where did you get the money to order this couch online?" Craig asked Angela.
"Cooooouch! We aren't going to tell you if you can't even get the name correct!" Mellissa replied grumpily.
"Fine, where did you get the cash to buy this cooooouch online?" Ziva snapped.
"From various sources," Mellissa replied evasively.
"Various sources huh," Craig said, sending Ziva a sidelong glance.
"Mmmhmm, various sources," Angela agreed.
"Where in the blazes are my TV and my PlayStation?" Logan asked them as he came stomping down the hallway.
"How should we know?" Ziva asked him.
"I wasn't asking you, kid. I was asking the curtain climbers." He glared pointedly at Mellissa.
Mellissa shrugged. "We aren't allowed near your stuff, Logan."
"Allowed and what you actually do are two completely different things. Where are they?" He jammed the stub of a cigar between his teeth and continued to glare at them.
Mellissa and Angela stared back completely unfazed. Though, Ziva thought she saw Angela's tiny fist clench in the skirt of her tutu. After several minutes of this silent standoff, Logan finally let out a low growl, turned and stomped off.
Storm came rushing down the hallway looking harried and slightly confused. "Has anyone seen my desk chair? I can't seem to locate it anywhere!" She stopped dead when she spotted the cooooouch. "What on earth is that thing?"
"It's a cooooouch!" Mellissa informed her proudly.
"Well whatever it is, get it out of the entry!" Storm hurried off in search of her chair.
"You guys had better find a way to move that thing before Storm gets back," Craig told them.
"No way! We want to find Skylar and have her possess it, so we can ride it! You know like the bull riding in the rodeo!" Mellissa told them excitedly.
Ziva slapped a hand to her forehead. "You have got to be kidding me?"
"Why would we kid about that?" Angela asked her in confusion.
"Stevie is looking for Skylar right now!" Mellissa informed them.
"Great, I'm sure Skylar will be thrilled," Craig said under his breath.
"Let's get out of here before they find Skylar, I don't want to witness this," Ziva grabbed at Craig's sleeve and tried to drag him away.
He chuckled and let her haul him up the stairs.
Mellissa and Angela weren't about to let them get away that easily. "Oh, come on you guys, don't you want to see us ride the wild, bucking cooooouch? It's gonna be so awesome!" They followed Ziva and Craig down the hallway and into Ziva and Skylar's room, begging them the entire way to watch the competition.
***
"Come on Skylar, you know you wanna do it!" Stevie begged her as he trailed her down the hallway.
"Possess a couch? Seriously, Stevie, a couch!" Skylar stopped and turned to face him, her arms folded over her chest.
"No, no it's a cooooouch! Totally different! It'll be fun! I swear! Pleeeeeeaaaase!" he clasped his hands together and batted his eyelashes at her.
She rolled her eyes and dropped her arms. "Okay, fine I'll at least look at the thing. Where is it?"
He clapped his hands and jumped up and down. "Cool! Come on it's in the front foyer!" He grabbed her hand and dragged her to the front of the house.
They skidded to a stop at the front door. Skylar frowned at Stevie. "Well? Where is it?"
"I don't understand. This is where we left it! It was right here! Maybe Mellissa and Angela moved it! Mellissa! Angela!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Several minutes—and a lot of screaming—later, Mellissa and Angela came down from upstairs. Followed by Ziva and Craig, as well as Storm.
"What's up, Stevie?" Mellissa asked him.
"Where's the cooooouch?" he asked her.
"It's right ..." she stopped speaking and stared at the empty spot that had contained the cooooouch moments before when they had gone upstairs. "It was right there! Oh, my God, It walked off!"
"Relax, it didn't walk off. I had Logan put it in your room; it was blocking the front door. Rogue and Bobby almost tripped over it when they came in," Storm told them.
"Well if they would unlock their lips occasionally maybe they could see where they're going," Angela said with an eye roll.
"I can't believe you moved our cooooouch!" Mellissa told her.
"Yeah that was an expensive cooooouch, you could have damaged it!" Angela said with a scowl.
"Expensive?" Ziva arched a brow at her.
"Yeah, it was used in an episode of Dallas. I got it in an auction. It was only used in one episode and the scene it was used in ended up getting cut from the episode. I was lucky to get it," Angela told her in a serious voice. "They were gonna destroy it if no one bought it. Poor little cooooouch." She rummaged in the pocket of her tutu and pulled out an envelope. "I've got paperwork autenticalculating it!"
Skylar giggled. "Authenticating it."
"Yeah, that!"
Ziva stared in silence, she was unsure what kind of response could be given to her explanation of where they'd gotten the couch from. Instead, she looked at Skylar and spoke to her. "Are you seriously going to possess this thing so they can play rodeo?"
Skylar shrugged. "Why not? I've got nothing better to do today and we have no idea where Lenny is. Until we do we can't go find him and his shiny paper crown."
Storm glowered at them. "And even if you do, you aren't going to go find him. You are all grounded. Remember? Lenny isn't your concern. The X-Men team will handle Lenny." She turned away and walked off down the hallway.
Mellissa rubbed her hands together. "So, are we gonna do this or what?"
Skylar sighed. "Yeah, let's do it." She disappeared, Mellissa ran for the stairs and disappeared down the hallway into the room she shared with Angela, she leaped aboard the back of the cooooouch, riding it like a horse.
"Start the timer, Stevie!" Mellissa screamed and the cooooouch started bucking wildly beneath her and came racing out of the bedroom. It bucked its way down the hall and moved awkwardly down the stairs, with Mellissa still hanging on to its back. Halfway down the stairs Mellissa lost her grip and went flying from the cooooouch, she panicked and went invisible mid-air, landing with a huff somewhere on the stairs.
"Darn, I thought I'd stay on longer!"
Angela half-laughed, half-screamed, and went running to the stairs to try and find her. "Mellissa? Mellissa? Where are you?"
"Here!" Mellissa said although she was still invisible, so Angela couldn't locate her.
In the meantime, Skylar—as the cooooouch—went wildly bucking off down the first-floor hallway, with Stevie chasing after her. He managed to get in front of the cooooouch and climbed a bookcase before he jumped, landing awkwardly on the back of the cooooouch and screaming out, "I'm gonna beat Mellissa's time."
He was thrown roughly four seconds later and the Skylar cooooouch disappeared around a corner.
"Guys your cooooouch is gone or rather Skylar is gone with your cooooouch," Ziva told them jerking her thumb over her shoulder in the direction Skylar had disappeared.
"Mellissa is still having trouble reappearing," Angela told them.
Craig sighed. "Give her a minute. As soon as she calms down she'll come back, you know that." As if on cue, Mellissa reappeared mid-stair.
"We have to find the cooooouch! It'll be all scared!" Mellissa wailed.
"You do realize that it is an inanimate object and Skylar is just possessing it?" Ziva told her. Angela gave her a wide-eyed trembling lipped look and she shook her head. "Fine, fine let's go find the thing before it gets frightened."
As they passed the study, Logan looked up at them, glared, and then stared at the empty spot where his TV and PlayStation went.
Mellissa stopped and gave him a teary-eyed look. "Logan? Can you build our cooooouch a house outside?"
"What are you talking about?" he asked her.
"Well, there isn't room in our bedroom for it and Storm won't let us keep it anyplace else, so can you build it like a dog house, but a cooooouch house out in the yard?" Mellissa asked him.
He stared at her for a full minute before he finally stood and followed them outside.
When they got out into the backyard, they found Skylar the cooooouch frolicking around the yard happily.
Logan grumbled about the idiotic things they talked him into before he went and found some wood in the garage and started building a house for the cooooouch. Several hours later, and with a little help from Craig and the others, he had built a nice little house for the cooooouch, Skylar trotted inside, popped out of the cooooouch and Mellissa tucked the thing in for the night before closing the door.
"Thanks, Logan!" She hugged his legs before the three curtain climbers ran inside the school building.
Ziva grinned at Logan and he sent her a glare. "What are you grinning at, kid?"
"You are nothing but a big softy," she told him.
"Right, sure. Do not make the mistake of thinking that, it's likely to get you killed." He turned and stomped off.
Craig shook his head at her. "He's probably right, Ziva. He'd most likely shred you before he'd hug you."
She shrugged. "I don't think so."
Skylar yawned. "I'm exhausted from all that running about while being the cooooouch. I'm gonna go take a nap."
Ziva gave a small laugh. "I can't believe you did that, Skylar."
"It was kinda fun, actually."
Craig chuckled. "You looked ridiculous."
Skylar punched him in the shoulder before they all turned and headed for the back door. "Yeah, but the kids were happy, so it doesn't matter."
"That's true," Ziva told her.
"Guys, if we find out anything more about Lenny we have to go after him. We can't leave it to the X-Men. You know that, right?" Craig said quietly.
"Yeah, we know," Ziva and Skylar answered simultaneously.
"We agree not to leave it to them?" he asked.
"Yes," they agreed.
They stopped walking and the three of them stared silently at one another for a moment. Before Ziva spoke.
"We're a team, Craig."
He nodded. Frowned. "I don't want to be known as the Sandman, the name is so lame." He grimaced.
Ziva smiled at him. "Yeah, I know. What do we call each other?" She looked at them.
Skylar shifted a bit and then shrugged. "I'm fine with no name; I mean I can just stay Skylar. I don't need to have a special name or anything."
"I'll think about it, I don't know if I want to stick with Craig or nickname myself," he said.
"Well, I'm definitely not staying Ziva."
Craig frowned at her. "What are you going to call yourself?"
She began pacing around, her brow furrowed. "Gateway," she finally said.
"What?" Skylar frowned at her.
"Gateway. I heard it once, a while back. I was holed up in this building that was under construction and I overheard these electricians talking. It's an electrical term, something about pathways for electricity. I really wasn't paying attention to everything they were talking about, but that one word caught, it has to do with opening paths or something for electricity to flow. I think. That is basically, what my power does; I pull electricity through my body and let it flow. It's the perfect name."
Craig smirked at her. "Gateway. It works."
Skylar nodded. "It does work. Well, I suppose we had better get inside. And we need to keep quiet about going after Lenny. If Storm knows that we're still looking for him she'll put us on lockdown."
"Yeah, she will. Come on let's get inside." Craig led the way.
Ziva spared one last glance over her shoulder at the little house that held the cooooouch. She shook her head and turned away. She never thought this is where she'd end up. Dead in a ditch, maybe. Perhaps locked away somewhere for using her powers and blowing something up. But in a school full of other mutants, fighting to stop a crazy dude wearing a paper Burger King Crown. Nope. Not in a million years.
And strangely enough, she was happier than she'd been in a very long time.