X-Men The Gathering Storm

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

((ooc: This is a story about my OC, Kai Creo. It's posted on Fanfiction.net. It has a total different timeline than the one here. It it Kai went to Xavier's a a girl and was friends with Jean, Scott, and Ororo. It is set during X3))
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Prologue

1985

Jean was reading up in her room when she heard them talking.

Nice ride, she thought, seeing it through the mind’s eye of some neighbors, pulling a memory from one of them to more properly identify it as a Mercedes-Benz Maybach salon car, evidently some kind of classic. She didn’t much care for cars. But she caught a resonance from one of the occupants that made her quirk an eyebrow in fascination, a surprisingly adult gesture for a girl of such ostensibly tender years. Given his history and the emotional memories held on a very tight leash, she wondered why he’d possess a German-made car. Spitting in the face of the past, perhaps? She considered probing further but even that cursory stroke of his thoughts had left her with a skull-splitting headache. Neither of the men, she realized, much liked psychic intruders. They were expected. She picked that up from her parents right away, bothered a little that she hadn’t noticed earlier. It was second nature to pry; minds for her had quickly become so transparent that it was like walking through a world made of glass. Almost nothing could be hidden from her, and so much of it was stuff that was so banal, so beyond boring- occasionally so disgusting- that she’d had to remind herself, then force herself, more and more often lately, to mind her own damn business.

She heard a voice, in her thoughts, not her ears, although the man in the car spoke aloud. “I still don’t know why we’re here, Charles. Couldn’t you just make them say yes?”

She didn’t much like that, and stepped to her window to see for herself who’d come to meet her parents.

She saw as man, thirty-something and prematurely bald, eminently respectable in a bespoke suit. Hawk like with the features, piercing eyes, a born hunter. He carried himself with the easy grace of an athlete, comfortable in his strength, confident of his abilities. There was a twist of sorrow to what little of his inner self she could divine, a sense around the edges that he had been places and done things substantially at odds with his upright demeanor. He’d been to war, she realized, when he was very young; he’d needed to prove something to himself, and it had left its mark. First impression, she liked him.

His words cemented the feeling. “Of all people,” he said to his companion, “I would expect you to understand my feelings about misuse of power.”

The second man emerged and the contrast couldn’t have been more pronounced. Dress and manner, as well as accent, suggested a European background. The color of his suit made Jean smile. Not many men would dare to wear royal purple, but he made it work.

“Power corrupts, and all that,” said the taller man, the European, with the air of someone who’d had this discussion too many times. “Yes, Charles, I know. When will you stop lecturing me?”

“when you start listening?” Charles replied easily, using a very slight smile to take the edge off words that he meant seriously.

“We’re not going to meet ever one of them in person are we?”

“No, Erik. This one is special.”

Jean didn’t much like the sound of that. Ghosting her perceptions over the periphery of her parents’, she caught all the appropriate introductions: the bald man was Charles Xavier; the other, his friend and colleague, Erik Lensherr. Mom ushered them into Dad’s study, where she’d already set out a fully laden tea tray.

“Your school looks wonderful,” she said, once everyone was settled, gesturing towards the pile of brochures that had arrived much earlier. “What a beautiful campus. And Salem Center’s only an hour and change down the Taconic; it’s not like Jean’s going very far away.”

“The brochure is great,” her husband agreed. He was standing behind his desk, so that their guests couldn’t help seeing the wall of diplomas and awards that went with being a tenured professor at a major independent college. “But I’m concerned about Jean. What about her… illness?”

“Illness?” Lensherr said, so quietly that both John and Xavier got the message. The one bridled while the other raised an eyebrow in what he hoped was a subtle but unmistakable warning.

Sensing the spike in tension, Elaine Hurriedly intervened: “Now, John!”

“You think your daughter is sick, Mr. Grey?” Lensherr asked in that same silken tone, choosing to ignore Xavier’s caution. On cue, as if to complement his undertone, the tea tray shifted ever so slightly.

“Erik,” Xavier said, speaking both aloud and with his thoughts, “please.”

“Call it what you like,” John Grey continued, refusing to be cowed. “What’s been happening to Jean is not normal. No one can explain it- not medical doctors, nor psychiatrists- and none of them have been able to help. All we know for sure is that she is getting worse.”

“Are you afraid of her?” Lensherr asked, almost as if he assumed they were.

“She’s my daughter,” John flared, “I want to help her.”

“As do we,” Xavier interjected, playing his usual role as peacemaker, biting back the flash of irritation he felt whenever Erik let his growing antipathy towards baseline humans get the better of him. “The whole point of our school is to help people like your daughter. Perhaps, it might be better for us to talk to her. Alone.”

“Of course.” Elaine Grey said, stepping into the hallway, “Jean,” she called, “can you come down a moment, dear?”

Jean was fairly tall for her age, but lean and rangy despite the first curves of womanhood. Her hair was a dark red, like a fire seen in the heart of the deepest forest, where the flames are mostly hidden by trees and shadow. Her beauty was self-evident; by the time she was full-grown, it would be breathtaking, with the foundation of bone structure that guaranteed it would only improve with age.

“We’ll leave you, then,” John Grey told them.

Jean sat on the couch opposite the two men, her demeanor as polite as it was guarded. She’d decided on the way down to let them make the first move.

Xavier obliged her.

“It’s very rude, you know…,” he said-but his lips didn’t move.

Her breath went out of her all in a huff. It never occurred to her that he could do what she did.

“…to read my thoughts, or Mr. Lensherr’s without our permission.”

He was sending her more than words; there was a vast and complex texture to their communication that told her she’d been busted from the first fleeting telepathic contact as they drove down the street. While she’d been spying on them, Xavier was taking her full measure as a psi, without her being the slightest bit aware of it.

Lensherr picked up the conversation from there- only he spoke aloud, suggesting to Jean that his abilities differed markedly from Xavier’s. “Did you think you were the only one of your kind, girl?”

She intended to keep her response to herself, and bridled ever so slightly when Xavier “heard” it anyway. What kind is that? She thought.

“We are mutants, Jean,” Xavier said. “We are like you.”

She felt a flicker of irritation, like the striking of a match within her soul, heralding a flash of temper that was coming more and more often lately, more and more intense, no matter how hard she tried to keep it under control.

She smiled in a way that promised trouble, a warning.

“Really?” The thoughts and emotions that accompanied that single word were raw and rude. “I doubt that.”

Xavier reacted first, to a volley of psychic alarms, Lensherr, following his gaze to look out the study window towards the street.

The next door neighbor, Mr. Pash, was running headlong down the length of his front yard, partly dragged by his lawn mower, partly chasing frantically after it, as the old machine launched itself skyward as if it was wearing blue tights and a cape and was bent on leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

At the same time, the stream of water from Mr. Lee’s hose decided to rebel against the reign of gravity and see what it was like to pour up instead of down. From him, Xavier and Jean heard a muttered expletive, while Pash’s initial frisson of startlement gave way to a bark of incredulous laughter.

Then the laughter faded as he caught sight of what else was floating. All along the street, every car in view had suddenly levitated more than ten feet into the air. Nothing else had changed; it was as though they’d been lifted on invisible platforms.

All told, better than ten tons of metal hung suspended, yet Jean wasn’t even straining.

Lensherr couldn’t help a smile, or a comment. “Oh, Charles, I like this one.”

Xavier wasn’t amused. “You have more power than you can imagine, Jean.”

Her thought, instinctive, defiant. I dunno, I can imagine quite a lot.

She met his gaze.

“The question is, “he continued, refusing to rise to her unspoken challenge, “will you control that power…”

She lost focus, just like that, and the cars crashed at once to the street. She kept her eyes locked on his, realizing that somehow he’d slipped into her mind and blocked the connections between desire and response. She understood immediately how this had happened; with no one but herself possessing psychic powers, how would she have developed any defenses against another with those same abilities? She didn’t like that, hated the thought of being vulnerable; she liked even less the peremptory way he’d acted. He could have asked; sure, she was showing off, but if he’d treated her with respect she’d have listened.

“…or let it control you?” he finished.

She didn’t give him an answer because deep down inside, where the answer really mattered, she didn’t have one to offer, not which had any value. She suspected it was a question- a challenge- she’d hear often in the days to come.

She knew she’d attend his school. She’d learn from him all that he was prepared to teach- if only to be able to stand on her own two feet, free from anyone’s control.

X

1995

Father was at the bathroom door, knocking politely. Warren refused to listen.

“Warren?” called Worthington Jr. Top tier of the Forbes 100, one of the few American billionaires who wasn’t head of a computer giant or a dot-com, one of those rarer still who’d taken the modest inheritance of his own father and built it into something of tangible and lasting value. “Son?” Pause, another knock. “Everything okay?” Another pause, another knock, voice creeping up a notch in the anxiety index. “What’s going on in there?”

“Nothing, Dad,” called Worthington III, railing inside at the tremor in his voice. “Be right out!”

He was twelve and had the features of an angel. Blond hair, face to die for and a body of whipcord muscle, without a spare ounce; he was far stronger than you’d expect of a boy his age. He stood bare to the waist before the big mirror in his bathroom. In his left hand he held a boning knife, swiped from the kitchen just the other day, right after the cook had done the weekly sharpening. The blade was tungsten steel and sharper than a scalpel. There was blood on the blade, blood on the sink, blood on the floor. Warren knew he should have done this in the tub, where he could wash away all the evidence, but there was no view of the mirror from there and he had to be able to see what he was doing.

Sweat coated his face, and he had to force himself to take deep, slow breaths in a vain attempt to calm his racing heart. His metabolism had always been hyper as far back as he could remember; he ate more at meals than most sumo wrestlers and had to struggle not to lose weight. Reactions were the same; that’s why he couldn’t play baseball anymore. Every at bat was an intentional walk, for his skill at making contact with the ball, if it was even marginally near the strike zone, was uncanny. Likewise his fielding. No matter how fast the play, for Warren everything happened in slow motion. And magnificent as his reflexes were, his eyesight eclipsed them. He drove his optometrist to distraction, because there wasn’t a test that could accurately measure his vision. He never told anyone of the test he’d tried on his own, slipping onto the open air observation deck of the World Trade Center and looking out towards Kennedy Airport, a dozen miles away. With the tourist binoculars, you could make out the planes taking off. Warren, with his naked eyes, could read the serial numbers on their fuselage. Looking across the East River towards the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, he could see the details of people’s faces and clothing as they strolled- he could even read the banner headlines on their newspapers.

But, that wasn’t why he kept the visit secret. While there, he had heard a high rising screech a little below and to the side, and looked down to see a red-tailed hawk soaring effortlessly on the thermals generated by the giant HVAC fans atop the Wall Street skyscrapers, cooling the offices within while creating a perpetual heat sink a thousand feet above Manhattan’s streets. It was the most wondrous sight he’d ever seen and, without thinking, his head and upper body began to move in tandem with the hawk, as though Warren could also feel the swirls and eddies of the atmosphere. He imagined what it must be like to feel the rush of air across its wings, to plunge headlong towards oblivion, only to snap the wings wide at precisely the right second to save itself and bag the prey. To Warren Worthington III that seemed like Heaven.

And Heaven was likely where he’d have ended up had a young woman’s strong hands not caught him by the shoulders and pulled him back from the railing.

With a start that left him speechless and trembling, he realized that he’d had one foot and both hands on the rail, and his next move would have been to climb over. Yes, it was only a modest fall to the roof below-thank God the observation platform had been set well back from the edge of the building itself-but for Warren it was the thought that counted most. Or rather, the lack of it, because he couldn’t remember much except wanting more than anything to soar with that hawk.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked, quite calmly, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time. She was taller than he was, more beautiful than any of the myriad faces that stared out from the newsstand walls of fashion magazines, but the most striking thing about her were her eyes, so golden that they were almost glowing, and the way she didn’t quite look at him, almost as if she were looking right through him. She didn’t look too much older than him, but she had the look of an old soul, one who had seen and done far too much. She wore a long strapless white dressed that billowed around her with the winds that accompanied the high altitudes.

“I…I…” was the best he could stammer.

“It’s all right to envy them,” she said, with a smile that washed over him like the sun after a spring rain, just as a cry from the access door heralded the arrival of his parents. She gave him a wink and a gentle squeeze on his arm that let him know this was their secret. “We just have to remember we don’t have wings.” She looked past him and reached out to pluck a feather out of the air that was streaming past. Offering the pristine feather out to him, she smiled slightly, taking care to not let her hand touch his.

Her words made perfect sense- and yet, there was something to the way she said them, the way she looked out across the sky towards that spiraling bird that told him she knew far more than she was saying.

Except-when he and the family had reached the doorway, and he’d turned back to wave good-bye, she was gone. Quickly, he swung his eyes across the entirety of the outdoor deck, but she was nowhere to be found; as if she’d never been.

Warren winced with pain, knew there’d be more blood, the memory banished by the tears that started unbidden from his eyes. He was crying like a baby. But he steeled himself against the tears, against the pain, against the fear. This had to be done.

He scraped the blade across his back, so intent on his purpose that completely missed the latest round of knocks on the door and the call of his father’s voice.

“Come on, Warren,” his father said, close to the end of his patience, “it’s been an hour. Open his door.” He still wasn’t angry, although that would be soon in coming. At the moment he simply seemed concerned by his only son’s increasingly strange behavior.

“One second,” Warren Cried, trying to buy as much time as he could, unaware of how clearly his pain and tears and terror radiated through those two simple words. He moved without thinking, grabbing for his tools to stuff them into the lockbox he’d secreted in the drawer.

Too late

The door burst open and in came Warren Worthington Jr., tall as his son would someday be, the fulfilled promise in maturity of the boy’s crisp beauty, yes broadly muscular in a way that Warren would never reach. Whatever emotions the father felt going in the door vanished the moment he beheld his son, standing before the mirror where Warren could see reflected what this father saw directly- a pair of ridged protrusions, as though the boy’s shoulder blades had burst upwards through the skin. Only it wasn’t those ridges that had torn the boy’s flesh. That culprit was the length of gleaming steel in his hand.

None of that was what made Worthington Jr. gasp and gape, in shame and horror and disbelief, his mind suddenly flooded with rage at the hand God had dealt him, not directly but through this child he loved more than his life. The objects of those emotions were scattered on the sink and floor, and some still protruded from Warren’s back, where the blade had missed them, or the boy hadn’t quite been able to reach.

Worthington Jr. took a step forward. Without his glasses, the scene wasn’t quite as crisp as he wanted it, the objects on the sink and floor just out of focus enough to require a closer look. Warren misinterpreted the action-small wonder given the expression of horror and disgust on his father’s face- and tumbled himself into the corner, hands held up before him as though he expected to be hit. That alone was enough to break the father’s heart…

….but he couldn’t bring himself to touch his boy, even though his pain and misery were palpable.

Instead, he reached for the objects and had been cut from Warren’s back, refusing to accept what his eyes reported until he had them in his hand.

Feathers.

“No,” the father breathed, in denial.

His son was sprouting feathers.

“Please God, no!”

His son, God help him, was growing wings!

“Not you, Warren. Not…this.”

And there were tears on Worthington’s face now, to match those on his son’s. One in a corner, the other on his knees, both in desperate need of comfort, neither with any to offer.

X

2000

Five years hadn’t changed the father much. He wasn’t quite as rich as he’d been before, but that was because he’d divested a fairly significant portion of his holdings and personal fortune to endow a number of rather esoteric research establishments across the world. He was still handsome, he was still charming-but that day in his son’s bathroom had left its mark in more ways than one. There was a haunted quality to his eyes that told of a commitment to a cause.

“You asked me to come to Bangalore, Dr. Rao. I’m here. What do you have to show me?”

In terms of size, this was a modest lab, a small part of an industrial estate that was accommodating India’s burgeoning software industry. The reason for placing it here was mainly to have access to dependable power and state-of-the-art computing facilities, not to mention the geeks to tweak the systems. Kavita Rao was both an MD and a geneticist, rated on a par with Moira Mactaggart of Edinburgh University and considered just as likely to someday claim a Nobel for medicine. The team she’d gathered in Worthington’s name was nearly on a par with her, and the clinic she’d built with his money was worthy of them all.

One wall consisted of nothing but a giant flat-screen display, which would have cost a decent fortune in and of itself but for the fact that another company in the park specialized in making them. One meeting between Kavita and their managing director, the promise of medical care for their employees, and with that quid pro quo goods and services were speedily and regularly exchanged.

What Worthington Jr. saw on the display was a succession of double helices, which he knew were representations of someone’s DNA, the genetic building blocks of life. He hadn’t a clue what they meant, despite voluminous reading over the past half decade.

Kavita indicated a rail-thin boy, far younger than Worthington expected, lying in an isolation room. The room had been decorated with an eye to the boy’s comfort and peace of mind-it was as much a boy’s space as it could be given the circumstances, with games and stuffed animals sharing the venue with monitors and IV stands. He was reading a stack of comics; sensing Dr. Rao’s attention on him, he offered up a wave.

“His name is Jimmy,” she told Worthington. “It will take some considerable time to explain, and even more to bring matters to fruition, but the initial tests look quite promising. I the fates are kind, all our work may not have been in vain.”

“Time is of no consequence,” Worthington Jr. said, pulling up a chair beside her. “Tell me everything.”

X

The not so distant future

Darkness,

Dark blue water crushing down on her,

A faint light coming from above,

The need to be free, intolerable,

A downward spiral down into the darkening abyss.

-Flash-

"No,” the woman whispered in her sleep as she tossed back and forth under the thin sheet covering her. Darkness shrouded her room, contrasting with the lights and noises of the revelries of Mardi gras outside her window. Her long dark hair sprawled out over the pillows as she thrashed in her bed, whimpering in her sleep.

-Flash-

A man, riding astride a motorcycle, evergreens flying past as he raced down the long and

twisting road, his face grim and determined. He is haunted, haunted by visions of a love long

lost. He somberly rides, anxious to get to his destination.

-Flash-

Still unconscious, the woman arched her back, her hands clutching the sheets on either side.

All around her, the furniture began to shake and lights started flicker on and off, causing even

the drunken revelers outside to give pause.

-Flash-

The same man, now on the banks of a lake. A decrepit dam just past him. He is

Crying. Sobbing. So despairing, so desperate. He hears voices. No, just

One voice... A woman's voice... Jean's voice!

-Flash-

Her body flailed in short quick spasms. Sweat soaked through the black wife beater that she had been wearing, her normally tan skin, pale under the stress of the vision. The room trembling more violently about her, her golden eyes flew open, sightless except for thralls of the vision holding her.

-Flash-

The man yells, a sound so anguished it tears the heart. He rips off his ruby quartz glasses; the

only thing holding his power in check; a burst of red energy shoots out of his eyes and into the

lake. He cries in sorrow as he collapses to his

knees, his face buried in his hands. The lake bubbles and gushes, marking the

path of the laser.

-Flash-

A red-haired woman, wearing power like a cloak, stands in front of the man

She smiles, takes his ruby cortex glasses off... He hesitantly opens his eyes,

Not believing what he sees... He embraces her passionately, shocked and relieved

To have her in his arms again.

-Flash-

The tide turns, she turns... Her eyes, they grow different...black...

Her face, distorting, veins of obsidian shooting through it...

The man feels the relief and love only for an instant before opening his eyes

Wide, in shock and pain, as he feels his life being ripped from

him.

-Flash-

Everything in the scantily clad room- desk, bureau, bed, everything was

violently shaking now. The woman herself was practically levitating off her bed, still thrashing

and Crying...murmuring, “NO...DON'T...SCOTT, NO!".

-Flash-

The man’s veins start to change, as if they were running with black ink instead of blood.

Wherever he and the woman were touching, his veins grew dark, as she was sucking the life

from him . His face... hands... the marks of obsidian leached through him, hungrily.

-Flash-

“NO!” the girl yelled fiercely. Her upper body pushed off the bed by the sheer strain of her vision. The loft she’d rented for the month practically shook along with her, as she convulsed repeatedly.

Then suddenly, everything stopped. The young woman fell to the ground, twisting into a crouched position on the floor. In her hand, she grasped the curved blade that she always kept under her pillow. Her piercing golden eyes, almost obscured by the tears clouding them, scanned the room as she struggled to keep her heart rate down. Music pumped into her high-rise as the Mardi Gras revelers partied on, even though it was 5 o’clock in the morning. Sensing no undo threat in the room she slowly rose from her defensive position and walked over to her cell phone on the desk beside her. She took a deep breath, and tried to clear her mind for the task ahead. Picking the phone up, she dialed one of the few numbers that she had on speed dial.

“Charles”, she said after he picked up his phone, 600 miles away.

“We have a problem”.

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 1

A stimulating simulation

The not so distant future

War zone, pure and simple.

Officially it was night, but the darkness only served as a backdrop for a fireworks display of incredible lethality. The setting had once been a fair-sized town, decent central business district, buildings of some substance, two to five stories tall, built to last, of brick and stone. Spreading outwards in a grid pattern, residential streets, single-family homes, everything from Arts and Crafts bungalows to modern “McMansions.” Couple of parks, one mostly green space, the other intended for kids and recreation-playgrounds, baseball diamonds, bikeways and running tracks. Schools, of course, and churches.

All gone.

The battle lines had surged back and forth over the town, in a manner more reminiscent of the Civil War than modern warfare, but played out with weapons that made the rifles and cannons of that bloody conflict look like toys. Not a building in the town had been left whole and hardly any of the ruins that remained were still standing. The trees had been reduced to shattered stubs, trunks and branches either blown to wicked-deadly splinters or scorched beyond recognition. The earth was so pockmarked with shell holes, the streets so chocked with debris, that vehicular transit was out of the question. Moving on foot was no fun either, since the piles of rubble afforded ideal hidey-holes for snipers and ambush parties, as well as for booby traps of every shape and description.

It was a rat’s nest, a meat grinder that would chew up any force fool enough to take it on.

So of course, the X-Men had been tasked to do just that.

In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of tracers, curving gracefully through the night as the gunner tracked an airborne target, and a few seconds later the sound of firing followed. Both sight and sound were then overwhelmed by an ugly fireball as the falling bombs hit their target.

Logan’s eyes narrowed to slits as he watched from the minimal shelter afforded by the intersection of a house’s two stone walls. His senses were more acute than any hunting predator’s but in a scrap like this the advantage became a liability. He could see clearly in almost total darkness, yet a surprise burst of tracer rounds could strip him of that night vision in a flash. The healing factor that was his main mutant power would deal with the loss of a couple of heartbeats, but in a firefight those seconds usually made the difference between survival and disaster. Logan’s sense of smell allowed him to follow trails that bloodhounds couldn’t trace, but there were so many scents to choose from here that it took conscious effort to process them. Suddenly, he had to use conscious thought to direct processes that were normally backbrain second nature. Didn’t matter that he still did it with a speed and accuracy that left everyone around him in the dust, whether mutant or sapien. It blunted his edge-and that was unacceptable.

He sniffed the air, to catalogue who-or what- was in his immediate vicinity, and smiled at one smell he recognized

Somebody had been kind enough to lose their cigar.

Cuban. Vintage. Hand-rolled. He caught just the smallest residual flavor of the woman who’d made it enough to recognize her if they met, smiled as he considered the possibilities.

He cupped his lighter to shield the flame from view, aware as he did that this habit from previous battlefields wouldn’t help in the least against a heat-sensitive thermal imager; on the other hand, such a device would have nailed him right from the start. No response suggested no such device, which gave him leave to indulge, he didn’t get the opportunity very often these days. Too many falmin’ rules, too many flamin’ busybodies hellbent on enforcing them, too much flamin’ aggravation.

Harsh snaps through the air off to the right caught his attention and he sank a little deeper into the building’s shadows, instinctively hiding the glowing end of the cigar with the hollow of his hand as multiple pulses of laser fire burned their way overhead, clipping a nearby building and creating a shower of heat-fused masonry. Like hail, only harder. Had it hit something more significant with a more powerful pop, he would have had a spray of shrapnel to contend with.

Logan didn’t move; there was no point. Given the lay of the ground, the intensity of the strafing fire, they had nowhere else to go but right past him.

Bingo

Two figures, male and female, in the black leather uniforms of the X-Men. The man was in the lead, big sucker, but moving with surprising grace despite his evident bulk, bare arms standing out from the rest of him in the glow of various explosions. The skin of those arms and of his head reflected the light in a way that told Logan he was metal-even his hair gleamed as though cast from chrome. This was one of the newbies, Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin. Colossus.

Logan spared him only the merest glance; his focus was mainly on Rogue.

She used to flinch at loud noises; now she kept pace with her companion, bobbing and weaving with practiced grace, presenting a random and unpredictable target for the opposition-showing excellent instincts for dealing with any trouble that came her way.

“How long do we have?” the man called to her.

“Two minutes, tops,” she replied, as she dove with him to cover.

Smart girl. The obvious place to hide was the shadowed corner where Logan himself stood, yet she realized that any infantryman worth the name would recognize that as well, and probably drop a brace of rounds on the location just to make sure. She’d chosen a nearby shell hole instead, part of a string of depressions that afforded a messy but relatively secure means of slipping across this open patch of ground.

The moment Rogue hit, she turned her back to the way they’d come, every one of her senses on high alert. Rasputin was a step behind, his attention still on whatever might be chasing them; he hadn’t yet twigged to the possibility of a threat from anywhere else. His wasn’t as artful a landing, either. Downside to all that bulk was, despite his relative ease of movement, Colossus still landed like a falling bank safe. Slid all the way to the bottom and made a deeper hole of his own.

Logan couldn’t help a grin. The girl was pretty damn good. All it had taken was a whiff of his lit cigar.

Better yet, he realized she was looking right at him.

But that was when she made her mistake, standing straight up to greet him, all thoughts of the mission banished behind her smile of welcome and pure delight.

“Logan,” Rogue cried.

“I’m away for a while; the whole world goes to hell.” He should have known better. They had both breached battlefield discipline, had forgotten for a fateful split second what was happening all around them. And nearly paid dearly for the lapse.

He heard footsteps, the kling of a grenade pin flipping free, but never saw the bomb until it blew on the far side of Rogue. No time to pull her clear, no chance to cover her body with his own. She was too far out of reach.

But Colossus wasn’t. His view wasn’t masked by Rogue, as Logan’s was – he saw the grenade- and in the instant it took to fall, the fraction of a heartbeat before it exploded, he grabbed Rogue’s bare hand in one of his.

Back in the day, when Logan first knew her, the assimilation process was gradual. It took a definable length of time, enough for Rogue to have second thoughts, for the subject to pull away, as he felt his life literally pouring out of him. This was virtually instantaneous.

From the point of contact, Rogue’s skin flashed chrome as armor rolled up her arm across her body – while Peter’s reverted the other way, from organic steel back to normal flesh – so that when the spray of anti-personnel shrapnel reached her, it deflected off…

…to clip Logan instead.

It hurt like hell, both from slashing open a stretch of his side – which bled freely – and because the metal was red-hot, burning him as well. That’s why he favored T-shirts and clothes older than most of the junior X-Men; the way he generally got himself torn up, they were the most easily replaceable. Made him smile inside and shake his head, to wonder at the replacement cost of the custom-constructed X-Men uniforms.

Logan pressed his hand against the wound, but no more blood was flowing; there’d been just enough for that first, glorious, indelible stain before the skin regrew. It was still tender, but in a matter of minutes there’d be only a scar, and by tomorrow nothing at all. No sign whatsoever that he’d been wounded.

If only he could dump the sense memories of those hurts as easily. One thing to be a man who’s almost impossible to kill; totally another to remember pretty near every one of those quasi-death experiences.

He took another puff of his cigar. They’d been here long enough. “The whole world’s going to hell, and you’re just gonna sit there?”

“I didn’t see you at briefing, bub,” Rogue sassed him back, giving as good as she got, which cheered him. “D’you have the slightest idea where we’re goin’?”

She had the knowledge from the briefing, but he had the experience. As a brace of searchlights speared down from some hovering platform to illuminate the scene for the enemy gunners, he gestured towards a squat and ugly structure some distance away, across what had been the town’s central square.

“I’m thinkin’ that bunker.”

The look she gave him told Logan he’d scored, and also that if she had just absorbed Cyclops’s optic blasts instead of Colossus’s steel, the frustration in her eyes might have propelled him all the way over there in a single shot!

He felt a tremor through the ground, saw ripples in a pool of water pulse inward to the center.

Another pulse, establishing a steady cadence whose spacing suggested the march of something massive.

“Time to go, children, “he told the others, noting that both were reverting to their original states; Rogue human, Colossus in armor. She’d way improved since he saw her last.

“We get to that door,” Rogue announced, stress making her Mississippi accent a bit more pronounced, breathless from the double-sided transformation, “we’re clear.”

The two younger X-Men began moving from cover to cover, just as they’d been trained.

Logan started walking, right out in the open, as though he were out for an evening stroll- making himself a stalking horse for anyone dumb enough to take a shot. Watching him, Rogue didn’t know whether to admire his courage or shake him silly for being such a damn fool!

Rogue wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. On the far side of a nearby hill, Storm also watched him take his walk and confined her spoken comments to a single word: “Logan!”

Thinking to herself, she used terms that would have given even him pause and made any telepath with access to those thoughts sever the connection instantly. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and while his presence was always welcome in a firefight, she really didn’t like surprises when lives were on the line.

Storm looked again through her binoculars, this time checking the integral display. Logan was fifty meters ahead, the bunker some two hundred plus beyond.

Twisting around, she used hand signals to alert the rest of her team, under cover of their own a few dozen meters back and to the side. Kitty Pryde was already on the move, body low to the ground as she sprinted in a zigzag towards Bobby Drake. The maneuvering wasn’t really necessary; of all the team, she was the closest to Wolverine in her practical invulnerability to harm. Not so much like Colossus, whose organic steel armor could actually be breached with the right weapons, but because neither bullets nor energy beams can have much effect on a girl who was essentially a ghost.

Storm could feel the tremors in the earth as well, could sense the displacement in the air that told her something massive was moving through the night, closing on them with every giant step. Time had just joined the opposition.

“You okay?” Kitty called to Bobby as she slid down to join him, misjudging her angle just enough that she arrived half sink into the ground. He didn’t say anything, but his look was eloquent: she new the casual way she walked through walls really creeped him out.

“Yeah,” he replied. “You?”

“A little dusty.”

He reached out and brushed her shoulder clean. She’d invited the contact, and he’d responded, both operating on instinct. That was as far as either was prepared to take things. Now.

Still, he couldn’t help giving her a smile. It was clear he liked her. Problem was, while Kitty was a free spirit, Bobby already had a girl – Rogue.

“Storm’s signaling; she wants us to catch up. Your lead?”

She grinned and took off, and Bobby had to scramble to keep up. She was as dangerously arrogant as Wolverine when it came to getting hurt. She didn’t believe it was possible. Kitty didn’t even have to worry much about being taken by surprise, because for the most part her power was always “on.” Her natural state, according to Professor Xavier, was to be phased; she stayed coherent by an act of will.

Laser pulses sought them out, and Bobby blocked them with a wall of ice that was porous enough to allow them through but filled with enough impurities – namely dirt – to diffuse the beam to the point of harmlessness.

But those beams weren’t the only threat. A brace of rockets shot in from another direction. Bobby was only aware of them after Kitty suddenly grabbed him, crushing her body against his in a hard embrace that allowed her to phase them both so the missiles passed through them as if they were air. His insides tingled as they did, reminding him of a joy buzzer-pen his brother had once blown his allowance for on Halloween.

Across the field, Rogue had also seen the approaching missiles – they’d passed her on the way – and in the moment before impact, when she saw Bobby so vulnerable and unaware, her heart stopped and leapt up to her throat. He was happy to see him survive unscathed, but a lot less so when she noted that it took way too many extra moments for him and kitty to break apart.

“Keep movin’ kid,” Logan told her. He’d seen what she’d seen, damn him; he didn’t miss anything. “And keep you eyes dead ahead.”

Storm missed it all. She was focused on their objective, and the handheld display which presented her with a map of the battlefield, complete with the disposition of her team and a counter that was just passing ninety seconds.

“Time, people,” she told Kitty and Bobby as they arrived, using the comset clipped to her ear to alert the others. “No more margin for error. Iceman, Shadowcat – get in position.” This was to Bobby and Kitty directly, using their code names. “On my mark.”

The moved forward at a jog trot, quick but careful, in a V-formation led by Storm, with her younger teammates trailing by a couple of steps, covering her flanks while she concentrated on the way ahead.

The last bit of cover was a pile of junked cars; beyond was nothing but open ground, an ideal killing field. Somebody with a mortar got their range and began bracketing them with rounds as they approached the checkpoint, inching closer with every shot, the last forcing them to pitch forward in an undignified scramble that brought them with a crash down beside the other assault team, who’d gotten there first.

Logan was leaning against one of the cars, apparently without a care in the world.

“What are you doing here?” Storm flared at him, letting a bit more of her feelings show than she’d actually intended. High above, a complement to those emotions, came a blinding flash, gone almost before it had time to register, accompanied by a basso drum roll that was instantly recognized. A bolt of lightning, a trill of thunder; the elements were echoing Storm’s emotions

That wasn’t good. The fact that she had to take a moment to master herself didn’t help her mood. Chances wee, when this op was over, someone, somewhere might have to deal with some very nasty weather.

“Enjoying the scenery,” he suggested, choosing the completely wrong moment for levity and then making it significantly worse by using a piece of flaming debris to relight his cigar.

For a moment, Storm seriously considered going “Zeus” on his insubordinate ass and using her next bolt of lightning to knock him flat. Perhaps a very near miss would knock some sense into his thick Canadian skull. Or at least inspire a modicum of respect.

She dismissed the inspiration even before it was fully formed, because she knew it would do no good. “We’re gettin' killed out here!”

He looked down at her with his ever-present quirked brow and replied in an Omni-potent manner, “Yeah, I know! They're not ready storm". He looked back up as the earth started to quake, the sound of gargantuan footsteps could be heard coming up from behind them.

Storm looked in the direction of the sound and saw two round eyes far above where they were hiding, "Logan?!"

He rolled his eyes, "Don't get your panties in a bun-"

And suddenly, there was no time for conscious thought at all as she sensed movement in the air – that same massive shape she’d noticed before, only much, much closer. How had it crept up on them so quickly? Realization and action came as one as she grabbed for her friend and teammate and yanked him bodily clear of the car, just as a massive armored foot the size of a semi-trailer squashed it flat.

Logan looked over to the now thoroughly destroyed car that had been their hideout, back at Storm and finally, looking half-heartedly at his hand, he sighed and said,

"That was my last cigar!"

“I got this,” said Storm, as the foot moved on. Through the smoke and the shadows, the literal fog of battle, none of them was in a position to see what it was attached to. The younger X-men weren’t sure they wanted to.

“Watch my back, okay?” she told him.

“Not a problem,” he replied.

Storm, all business, instructed, “Stay in formation. Wait to make your move.”

They knew whatever cues she was talking about, but Storm knew Logan didn’t. She grabbed him as he stood to make a move of his own.

“Logan,” she snapped, “we work as a team!”

He smiled tolerantly and she thought more seriously this time about that lightning bolt. “You let me know how that works out for you, darlin’,” he replied, and resumed his evening stroll.

So obvious a target couldn’t be ignored. Their adversaries opened up with everything they had. So foolhardy a friend couldn’t be abandoned. Bobby and Peter exchanged quick glances. Then Peter rose to follow.

“Peter!” Storm snapped, genuinely furious now. “Get back here!”

The raw edge of command in her voice actually got through to him, and to Bobby as well, who’d been caught halfway to his feet. Peter stopped, torn between wanting to follow the Wolverine and his responsibility to Storm as mission commander.

As Logan knew, as the others were about to learn, in battle a single moment can swing the balance. Thus far, they’d operated mainly in shadow and anonymity. Their foes had occasional glimpses of them, and a general sense of where they were, but no clearly defined fixed on their position.

Right then, right there, that changed.

Bobby was the first to see the light, attracted by the commotion. He screamed a warning.

“Peter!”

Too late. Even as Colossus turned, the searchlight found him, and that contact brought all its fellows to bear. Just like that, the team’s position was illuminated in a flood of light that defined the scene as bright as the day. A moment later, the bad guys opened fire. With everything they had.

“Move out,” Storm yelled. “Stay together!”

Instead, they scattered.

Momentarily forgotten amidst the suddenly target-rich environment, Logan kept walking, the personification of calm amidst growing chaos.

With a multitude of small, fast-moving targets to choose from, however, the gunners found themselves facing a completely different challenge than when the teams had been clustered together. The X-Men couldn’t share their abilities to cover one another, but at the same time, they were individually facing a smaller array of weapons. They all began making quick progress towards their final objective.

In the lead, Storm’s glance kept flicking between the battlefield and the countdown clock strapped to her wrist. Time was the inflexible adversary here, not the guys with the guns. The X-Men had a deadline, and they couldn’t be late.

“Storm,” called Bobby, indicating the bunker, like the kid with the winning touchdown in hand, a step from the goal line, “we’re almost there!”

It blew up in his face.

She wasn’t sure whether it was a shell from outside or some hidden sapper charge; what mattered was the spectacular explosion that would have knocked her off her feet had she not used her won innate control of the winds to shunt the pressure wave around her. Bobby wasn’t so fortunate. He not only went flying, he got clipped by debris for his trouble. Bad landing as well, that left him in a twisted, crumpled, unmoving heap.

Something passed over Colossus, moving on the bunker and Bobby. He wrenched the door off a ruined car and hurled it like a discus at the oncoming figure.

Metal clanged on metal…

…and the door, suitably crushed, thudded back to the Earth at his feet.

Logan, still playing the role of nonchalant observer, was impressed.

“Good arm.”

He looked the other way, saw Bobby fallen, Storm unable to reach him, the remaining two girls isolated and under considerable and growing fire. Things were out of hand.

Kitty summed it up, from her perspective: “We’re screwed.”

Logan had other ideas.

“Throw me,” he told Colossus.

“Shto?” replied the young Russian. He didn’t get it.

“Logan,” Storm called, racing to join them. “Wait-“

“Y’understand baseball?” Logan demanded, popping his claws, darting quick, repeated glances over his shoulder at the source of the mighty footsteps, which could now be heard as well as felt. Colossus nodded. “Y’know, like a fastball?” Again, he nodded. “Then follow where I point and throw me! Now!”

The armored Russian scooped him up, cocked his arm and let fly.

Logan disappeared into the low cloud of smoke that provided a quasi-roof over the town roughly a hundred feet overhead.

The firing slackened, enough for the X-Men to hear the sound of rending metal, followed by an almost unendurably high-pitched squeee! It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that meant – the Wolverine had used his claws, pure adamantium, unimaginably and perpetually sharp, wholly unbreakable, on something that didn’t much like it.

Confirmation landed before them with a thud that shook the ground, momentum rolling it over two complete revolutions before it came to rest in front of the kids. It was a big, giant head, belonging to some kind of equally impressive robot.

They then heard an explosion of such force that the airborne shock wave struck them like a lesser punch, staggering them on their feet. Some seconds later, whatever the head had been attached to crashed and blew itself to bits.

That was when Logan made his entrance, before any of them had a chance to worry about his fate. He looked a bit the worse for wear but, even as he approached, his injuries were healing with every step. He appeared far more concerned about his leather Jacket, which was both torn and scorched.

“Class Dismissed”.

He popped a single claw, forefinger for once, instead of the middle claw he generally tended to favor, and made ready to carve his initials into the crown of the robot’s head…

…when a klaxon sounded…

…and the head dissolved before his eyes.

Same applied to the scenery. Night vanished, replaced by the institutional illumination of a vast and sprawling concourse the size of a commercial jumbo jetliner hanger. The lay of the land was “real,” as the floors realigned themselves to provide for a flat and featureless surface, but the town itself was not. On every side surrounding the X-Men, huge panels of photon imagers – capable of generating constructs that were not only three-dimensional but significantly tangible as well – withdrew into their housings.

Logan shook his head. Not a lot got his full attention but the Danger room snagged it every time.

“If you find a way to market this to Hollywood and the theme Parks, ‘Ro,” he said, speaking mainly to himself though he used Ororo’s name, “your collective fortune is made!”

He twisted his back, shoulders, finally his neck, gradually working out the kinks, as he did after every scrap, then looked expectantly at the others.

“I’m starved,” he announced. “Who’s up for pizza?”

Bobby pushed himself up, Kitty hanging back as Rogue slipped an arm through his, visibly and intentionally reminding all of their relationship. He wasn’t hurt. The Room’s core programming wouldn’t allow it. Death held no sway here, and the worst the room would do to anyone was stun them and then use its projectors to paint the most horrendous wounds imaginable on the body.

As they all started for the exit, Logan threw an arm companionably across Peter’s shoulder.

“Hey, Tinman,” he said, making Peter roll his eyes. The Russian didn’t much care for the nickname and pretty much knew what was coming after. “gotta tell ya – you throw like a girl.”

Storm stopped Logan dead in his tracks, her eyes flashing a dangerous cerulean blue – a precursor to them going white and her turning loose the extreme weather.

“I am a girl,” she said simply, throwing down the gauntlet as hard as she knew how before turning on her heel and beating them through the doorway, as a metallic voice filtered throughout the intercom system, echoing,

“Simulation complete”.

X

Two floors above the exhausted trainees, a world-wearied professor raised his automatic bed to a sitting position. He sighed deeply as he reached for the light at his bedside table, so that he could find the phone which was ringing very insistently. It was if the person on the other end very urgently needed to talk to him, and just wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Of course, that was usually the case for Charles Xavier. As an important man in matters of state/mutant affairs, he got many calls. But, not usually this early in the morning.

“Hello”, he said groggily into the receiver, trying to suppress a very insistent yawn. He may be the most powerful telepath living, but, he was still human and still prone to lack of sleep.

“Charles?” he immediately woke up and took notice when he heard the voice on the other end. A voice he had not heard in a very long time.

“We have a problem”

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 2

"Kai?" Charles spoke into the receiver. He hadn't heard from his old student and friend for almost a year and a half, and that last call was only to console Scott in his loss of Jean. He didn't blame her, of course, the mansion, and he himself, held too many painful memories for her.

"Yeah, Charlie, it's me". He could hear the pain in her voice, even without reaching out telepathically. It seemed that in the few years that she had been gone, her pain hadn't lessened, just dulled. It must have been very urgent, for her to be calling him.

The older man mentally ‘paged’ Ororo, to come and meet him while asking the woman on the line,

"My dear, what has happened?"

He listened quietly as she quickly detailed all that she had seen, precognitive. His face quickly drained of all color. He quickly went through the very short list of possibilities of how this could have happened.

"Charles...there's only one way that this could have happened...” Kai said slowly, seemingly mimicking the professors own thoughts.

Charles nodded slowly, also knowing that this was the only way that Jean could have survived Alkalai Lake. He put his free hand up to his eyes, seemingly to cover them from the horrors, he could predict were to come.

"Yes, Kai, the Phoenix has broken free.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Storm always knew that Logan was one to bend and/or break the rules, but this was really over the line. To come into her class and just disregard the entire point of the exercise...and to make it worse, he wasn't even the appointed teacher for Danger Room sessions...he wasn't a teacher at all! She shook her head as she stormed out of the Danger room.

As she took her uniform gloves off, she looked at Logan out of the corner of her eye and asked,

"What the hell was that"?

As he caught up with her, he feigned innocence, saying, “Danger room session".

"You know what I mean", she scoffed back.

"Oh, lighten up Storm-"

"Look, you can't just change the rules when you feel like it", she butted in. "I'm trying to teach them something!"

Logan shrugged his arms, defensively, "Well, I taught them something".

She wasn’t amused.

“They’re mainly adolescents, Logan. Teenagers? Ring a bell maybe, what that was like? At this age, especially when they have powers, they’re hardwired to act like fool. I don’t need you encouraging them.”

Backed into a rhetorical corner, he said nothing

“If you’d read the syllabus, you’d know this was a defensive exercise. Evasive maneuvers.”

"Yeah, best defense is a good offense...” he counter, but then countered it, “Or is it the other way around?"

Storm abruptly turned around and faced him, “This isn't a game, Logan".

Logan rolled his eyes as the rest of the students passed their teachers by, "Well, you sure fooled me"...He sighed, "Hey, I'm just the sub, you got a problem", he shrugged, “talk to Scott".

He walked off, irritated, 'Only seven in the morning, and I already need a beer.'

Storm watched him walk off with a little sigh herself, as she thought of her deeply depressed teammate and friend. Shaking her head, she moved down the hi-tech hallways towards the ladies locker room to get ready for her first class of the day.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

At that very same time, the teammate that they were talking about huddled in his room, desolate and bereft of all light. He sat on his bed, dejected, almost mad with grief.

'I can't even cry for her,' He thought mournfully. Because of his ability, the energy that originated from his eyes instantly burned up any tears he made. He couldn't even show his grief in ways that others so easily could.

SCOTT! Jean's voice yelled to him. His head jerked up, as if pulled by a wire.

"Jean". He whispered painfully. It had been as clear as day, like she was standing right beside him, yelling into his ear. How could that be? She died over half a year ago.

She had died in a torrent of icy water that was meant for all of the team and the children kidnapped by Striker. She had died to save them, and now was back to torment him about it. He should've been able to save her, he could have done something. But, in the end he couldn't. He just watched, as the love of his life sacrificed herself for her family.

'I must be finally losing it', He thought, dejectedly, to himself.

But, then he heard it again... and again...and again, until her voice, calling out his name, was echoing off every point of the room.

Quickly breathing in and out, with his head buried in his hands, he waited for this latest round of torment to pass. When it did, he didn’t stop to think, unzipping his carryall, he stuffed in whatever clothes came immediately to hand. The only thing he knew for certain was that he had to go.

And with that thought, he was gone.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The debilitating news dealt a crushing blow to Charles Xavier.

"We have to stop Scott", an alto voice said, breaking into his thoughts. Unfortunately, the professor, rummaging in his thoughts, didn't hear her.

"Oh, I'm sorry, what did you say?" He asked, realizing that he had missed a part of the conversation.

On the other end of the line, Kai Creo couldn't believe that she was actually taking this conversation past the usual warning and the hanging up of the phone. She hadn't had what you could call a real conversation with this man in over three years. Why was this time any different?

Oh yes, it involved the rising of an old friend from the dead and the killing of another friend by that same said friend.

Confusing as that may be, it strangely made sense in her mind. She had always been able to ascertain patterns and auras, ever since she was little. Xavier had always said that it was her latent powers, the ones that her Native American heritage brought out. By the time she was ten, she could solve any puzzle put in front of her. But, after she turned eleven, she stopped doing puzzles. That was when the traumatic event that the professor always alluded to, had actually happened.

After so much death had happened in her life, Kai just couldn't stand by and watch another good friend die.

"We have to stop Scott from going back up to that lake...Is he still there?" Her golden eyes, systematically scanned the darkened room that she was in, force of habit more that an actual cause.

Charles mentally checked the mansion for Scott, but came up with something very strange.

"Kai?" He asked into the mouthpiece of the phone, “It is very strange...I can sense Scott, but...it is like there is a fog around his mind, creating a barrier so that I can't get in."

Oh, no Kai thought. That was a trick Jean used to do to sneak us out at night

“Charles”, she replied, urgently, “Contact ‘Ro, contact anyone. You have to stop him! She’s gotten into his mind!

Charles didn’t have to ask to know who ‘she’ was. Only one telepath would want to get into Scott’s mind. Quickly, he contacted Ororo to be on the lookout for him.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Logan walked down the hallway to his room in the left wing. He was really pissed at Scott right now. Because of him slacking off of his teaching duties, Logan had to get out of bed, way too early for it to be called morning. He knew that Scott was in mourning, and all. But, so was the rest of the school, the least Scott could do would be to put on a brave face and try to get on with life,

'If I can do it, he certainly can.'

It was at that opportune moment that Scott chose to brush by and walk down the hall. Logan turned to face his direction.

"Hey, Scott, we were looking for you downstairs", he commented, very irritated, "you didn't show".

Scott barely turned around, saying off-handedly, “What do you care?" and kept walking.

Logan started to lose his temper, but reined it in cause he knew what ol' scooter was going through,

"Well, for starters, I had to cover your ass!"

Scott now stopped and turned around as he replied, " I didn't ask you to"

"No, you didn't. The Professor did," Logan said, walking up closer to him, letting a few seconds pass to let the fact that he used Xavier’s title sink in. "I was just passing through".

Scott didn’t bat an eye. "So? Pass through, Logan. It’s what you do best.”

Another beat, only a moment in real time, but it seemed to stretch to an almost unendurable length.

“Look, Scott, I know how you feel -

This time Scott cut him off:

"Don't". He interrupted, looking down. He couldn't look into the face of his rival.

But, Logan would not be swayed, "When Jean died-"

"I said don't!” Scott whispered fiercely and pulled his arm away from Logan’s grasp.

Logan looked at his one-time rival with the sad and honest truth in his eyes,

"Maybe it's time for us to move on".

Scott finally looked him in the eye and with a sad smirk on his face, he replied,

"Not everybody heals as fast as you, Logan", and walked swiftly away, towards the stairs.

Logan watched as the great front doors of the Mansion closed behind Scott, listened to the sound of a bike engine being pushed to its limits and going quickly down the long driveway, taking as much time as he needed to compose himself.

Logan looked after him, clenching his teeth into a small grimace, as he thought of all the different things that had happened over the past two years. He stayed there for who knows how long, until a familiar, but pesky psycic butted into his mind saying,

'Logan, have you seen Scott anywhere?'

He was always surprised when Chuck would just, nonchalantly, waltz through his mind like that. But, this time he didn't argue with the Professor over it, on account of Chuck's anxiety.

'Yeah, he just blazed outta here on his bike...why?’ he replied, hurriedly. He didn't really want to find out what would happen if whatever was bothering chuck would start bothering him.

'There's no time, I need you to go after him immediately! You have to stop him!'

Without a second thought, the feral took off, running down the front steps and down the driveway. He knew that whatever had Xavier worried was really bad for everyone else, and he personally didn't want to find out what that problem was.

But, Scott was already gone. He was too late.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Now, all of the sudden, very weary of the world, Charles Xavier cradled his head in his hand as he spoke somberly into the phone,

"We are too late".

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 3

As Kai listened to those words, she felt a stab of pain shoot through her heart as she saw an 'echo' of her vision. Usually the echoes, flashbacks of previous visions, resurfaced while she slept. But, considering the emotional ties to this precognition, she wasn't surprised when she felt the after-effects of it now. She took a deep breathe. Running her free hand through her long hair she said,

"Charles...we have to do something. We can't just give up on them."

"We won't give up on him, Kai, I've already contacted Ororo and Logan. They’ll go after him; they’ll bring him back home."

Kai didn't miss the use of only Scott's name. He should have known better than to try and get that past her.

"What about Jean, Charles. We are going to try and save her too?" She asked incredulously. "We can bring her back, I know we can!" Her jaw tightened and she shook her head as she began to realize, he wouldn't save her.

"You're just going to abandon her?!"

Charles took in a deep sigh," Kai-"

"God! Just like old times, huh Chuck!" She sarcastically exclaimed through the telephone, "You’re just gonna let her rot down there and die…Just like Daniel! God! She's practically your own daughter!" She exclaimed. She knew that it was a bad idea to contact him again. She knew it! She should have just acted on her instincts and just taken care of it herself.

He tried to break in," Kai, you know what has taken over her, you know first hand what she can do! Trust me, I will try-"

"You'll what, Charles, you'll try to save her?" She bitterly scoffed at that. "Where have I heard that before!"

Charles remembered that day she was alluding to all too well. It was the day when his best friend betrayed him, when several students left him, and when he had made a fatal mistake in trying to save one child, which cost him the life of another.

Charles knew that she was past reasoning with, but still, he had to try.

"Kai-"

"You know what Charles? You go ahead and do what you have to do", she cut in, dangerously quiet.

"And I'll do what I have to". And with that, she pressed the END button on her phone. She stared at the phone for a long while. To the naked eye, it would seem as if she were a statue. But, in all reality, her fingers were clenched so tightly around the phone that they turned white and her lips were trembling with rage. Suddenly acting upon that rage, she threw the phone across the room with an enraged yell. She threw it so hard that it smashed into a hundred different pieces and scattered across the floor. Then, quicker than humanly possible, she erased all traces of herself from the loft, grabbed her things, and ran out the door.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

Charles Xavier slowly put down his phone, sighing deeply.

Ororo? He called out mentally, Have you caught up with Scott?

No, Charles. She communicated back. He took the only bike with the specialized engine. He's long gone. Ororo walked up the steps to go back inside. As she opened the door she sent a message back to the Professor,

Professor, What exactly is happening with Scott?. She walked through the main entrance way, waiting for an answer.

Professor?

Come to my office Ororo. Bring Logan in with you.

Ororo didn't like resignation in Charles' voice. She turned around and walked back through the main doors. Hurrying past the steps and jogging down the drive, she looked around for her wayward colleague.

"Logan?" She yelled out across the lawn.

"Yeah, 'Ro?" Ororo heard from behind her. She turned around,

"Logan, the Professor wants to-". Storm stopped short, taking a closer look at her friends face. His once vibrant, hazel eyes were now dull and weary, the skin around them a bit red, as if he were just crying. She looked past him, to the direction in which he was coming from, and knew what the problem was. He had come from the memorial.

"Logan. You can't deep blame blaming yourself for Jean's death", she said gently, her hands grasping his upper arms. He looked away from her eyes. He couldn't bear it, it was as if she saw right through him.

"No, don't look away from me Log-".

"What did the Professor want", he quickly cut in. He wasn't into all that mushy shit, he'd always just pushed past the pain, brushing aside any consolement or pity. He hated when people looked at him with pity. So, he'd do what he'd always done, ignore the pain.

Ororo sighed, knowing that she'd never get through to him. The only thing that would help him would be time. She let go of his arms," He's going to explain what's going on with Scott, and why it was so important to stop him".

Logan slowly nodded, taking the information in. "Well, lead the way".

XxXxXxXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxXXxXxX

A lone rider could be seen on a dark motorcycle, riding down the deserted streets of the French Quarter. Kai slowly rode her black Honda EVO6 down an empty alleyway, careful not to run over the passed out tourists and street bums left over from the revels of Mardi Gras. She kicked the stand out and sat her baby down as she quickly scanned the darkened alleyway, making sure there were no surprises laying in wait. With a determined look on her face, her golden eyes honing in on the balcony of the third floor, she quickly scaled the wall next to her. Leaping over the railing on the third floor, she landed in a crouch. She slowly stood up and very nonchalantly walked straight through the french glass doors.
She had the quick chance to glimpse the sparsely decorated room, before she was roughly kicked to the floor and held down by a pair of sinewy arms. But, by unlucky chance for her captor, he had inopportunely positioned himself. Without blinking, the thief swung her legs around his body, jerking his arms from their grasp, and hooked them around his head, flipping him to the ground. With a dancer's grace, Kai then flipped her body upward, catching the rogue as he fell and straddled him, virtually trapping him beneath her.

"Little trigger happy, now aren't we Remy?"

The trapped cajun squinted up at her, trying to see in the dark. Of course that was always hard when one is wearing sunglasses at night. Kai leaned down and took the offending accessory off of his face.

"Kai". The thief stated with his thick creole accent. "You gots to be a bi' mo' careful. Ah, could 'ave killed you mon chere".

She barked out a laugh at that, quircking her eyebrow at him. As if she were saying 'yeah right'. She got up off him, offering a hand as he slowly got to his feet. He took it, saying," Well, Ah at leas' could 'ave damaged you a bi'".

She laughed again at that, dusting him off, "that's the spirit, Gambit". Turning away from him, she sighed deeply, "Remy...I've got a problem. I have to go away for a while." She looked out the window, not wanting to look at his face as he took the information in.

Remy looked at his friend and partner, in shock. "Kai...wha' about de Guild. Wha' about de job dat we still 'ave to do."

He walked up to her and turned her forcefully around to look at him, his hands grabbing her shoulders, hard. “We are ‘bout to do one of de biggest heists of all N’awlins, Kai! What do you have to do that is more important than that!” They had just been assigned the crown jewel of all heists- The Assassins Guild’s trove. Every year each guild of the darker persuasion would through a ball- a way to show off, so to say. Remy and Kai had been assigned to infiltrate the Assassins Guild ball and locate their latest prize: a rare piece of artwork lifted off one of their Marks.

She shoved the Cajun back, "Don't you think that I would know better than to leave unless it was just as, or even more important?!" She wrenched her arms away from him. "This is more important that the Thieves’ Guild or the Assassins Guild, or any other Guild you throw at me." Turning around, she went and sat abruptly on the edge of the bed.

Remy's face softened as he looked upon his friend. He went and sat softly next to her, putting his arm around her, "Did you 'ave a'nother vision, mon sucrée?" She nodded slowly, leaning into him.

"Wha' was it abou'?"

"Death".

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 4


“So... Where are you going to go, Mon Amie?” Remy asked, taking what Kai had said to be truth. “I am assuming dat you tellin’ me dis, means dat you are wantin’ me to tell de Guilds your troubles. So, it would be very convenient if I knew some of de circumstances. Oui?” During this little speech, he got up and started to organize his already meticulous room. Occupational hazard of a good thief, making sure no one knew you were there.

Kai watched him with her wolf eyes as Remy cleaned. This was going to be the hard part, the part she was dreading. “No, Remy…I actually…don’t want you to tell them”. Remy put the book he was holding down onto his desk. Without turning he asked, dangerously quiet, “quoi?”

She put her head in her hands, deeply sighing, “I can’t tell the guilds what my circumstances are, unless I tell them what I am, and you know them!” She stood up. “It’ll turn into an all out war.” She threw her arms up, “You know that they’ll want to use me…and I won’t be used.” She sighed, running her hands through her waist long hair. “Remy… I don’t want them to find out who I really am.”

At those words, Remy’s shoulders slumped. He turned around to face his friend. A friend he had known and loved since he was seventeen years old. They had laughed together, cried together, shared bitter memories of broken pasts, and lived through it all.

He sighed… “Kai, why can you not just stay till de end of de job? You could avoid all bloodshed then, the guild wouldn’t care if you were a mutant or not.” He took her head between his rough but gentle hands, “Why can you not wait”, he repeated softly, looking into her sightless eyes.

Putting her hand on top of his, she replied, “Some people I know … family…they’re in danger. And-“

“Wait, wait, wait”, Remy dropped his hands to his friends shoulders, “You talkin’ ‘bout dat same family dat let your Daniel die? Da ones dat abandoned you?” he asked, incredulous. “You abadonin’ de guild for dem?!” He let go of her and walked to the bay windows, staring out them with his devil-like eyes. He sighed, leaning forward against the window frame

“They’re my family, Remy…what else would you have me do?” She replied softly, blindly staring out at the Orleans nightlife, next to him.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“He’s gone to Alkali Lake”.

Ororo stared at the professor in shock. They had just let themselves into Charles office. Charles was staring wistfully out of his bay windows as if he wanted to redo the past. “Charles…Why would he ever want to go to that place again?”

Logan looked at the old man, waiting for a good answer. He crossed his arms and cocked his eyebrow, taking his customary stance for when he new a bullshit story was going to be thrown around.

Well? Go on Chuck, do your best. He thought, with a mentally quirked eyebrow, knowing that the professor could hear him.

‘Chuck’ winced briefly at Logan’s comment, so openly projected to him, as he turned around to answer Ororo’s question.

“I don’t know, Ororo. Perhaps he wants closure. All I do know is that he might hurt himself, inadvertently or not. So, you both must follow him up there and bring him back here.”

Logan snorted, “That’s a load of bull, and we all know it. You know why he left, you’re a mind reader for God’s sake, it’s your job! You just don’t want to tell us.”

He leaned forward on the edge of the professors’ desk, putting all his weight on his hands. “I just have to wonder why.”

The professor looking straight at the feral, replied, “Logan, right now, that does not matter. What matters is getting him back here, safe.” He wheeled around the mahogany desk, looking at both Logan and Storm. “You are right. I have had some inkling as to why Scott went back to Alkali Lake. And I received a call this morning that confirmed it. For some time now, I have been sensing a…presence at Alkali. I had feared to even begin to hope that it might be Jean; that she somehow survived. But, I hadn’t wanted to get anyone’s hopes up, most of all, Scott’s.” He looked Logan straight in the eyes, “Do you blame me for wanting to save Scott, and everyone else, the pain of realizing a second time, that she wasn’t coming back?”

Logan broke eye contact with the Professor, somewhat ashamed of his outburst. He’d overlooked, briefly, that Xavier had had to deal with as much pain as anyone else. He sighed, looking back at Charles he told Ororo,

“Let’s go.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Kai drove her motorcycle down a dark strip of highway, leaving the revelries of Mardi Gras far behind her. She’d asked Remy to come with her, but she knew he wouldn’t. He loved the life he had, his family, all too much; she could understand his decision to stay. After all, she had a family once too.

Flashback

“Come on Kai!” Mal cried out as he ran down the steep hill, to the coast. A little dark-haired girl ran closely behind him, trying to keep up.

“Malek! Wait for me!” She called as she ran down the rocky slope. All around her were masses of green and grey. Growing up in the outer reaches of Washington state,, you see a lot of those colors. The 9-year old laughed as she tumbled after her twin brother, and best friend. She and Mal had lived there on a Native American reservation for as long as they could remember. Their mother was a Salish Indian, one of the Flathead tribes, who had gone to university on the other side of the country, citing the rage of the tribal elders, and had then come back six years later with two three year-olds in tow.

The two children had been inseparable from birth, never leaving a day without seeing one another. Their mother had died when they were 4, leaving them in the care of their grandmother, Ninna. Often during the summer months they would create imaginary worlds and go off and have adventures. It wasn’t very hard to do, with no one but themselves as entertainment.

Malek’s dark auburn head suddenly disappeared around an outcropping. Kai stopped short, “Mal...Malek?” She yelled out for him. “Mal-“She cried out as a hand quickly grabbed her arm and pulled her under the outcropping.

Mal laughed gleefully at his befuddled sister, “Ha, ha! Gotcha!” Kai half-heartedly punched him in the arm, “Jerk!” she exclaimed. Then, suddenly realizing that they weren’t out in the open anymore, she looked around. They were standing in the entrance of a long tunnel! “Mal, oh look!”

Mal nodded, “See”, he said, smugly, “Aren’t you glad I pulled you in here?” He put his arm around his twin as she nodded, mutely. They walked around, excitedly, examining this and that, making up stories for what the cave was used for, for hours it seemed; until suddenly a soft rumbling startled them out of their revelry.

“Mal?!” Kai called out, reaching for her brother in the darkness. She could hardly see him, for he was farther into the cave than she was. The rumbling grew more pronounced and the ground started to shake. Rocks and debris fell all around them as they tried to get back to each other.

“Kai!” Mal screamed out for his sister, trying to reach her, to protect her, as the world came crashing down around them.

Going around 190 miles an hour, Kai took the twist and turns sharp, the wind gliding off her black suit. She grimaced behind her shielded helmet. She didn’t like remembering the past, it was always too painful for her. But, nonetheless, the memories had a mind of their own…

An eleven year-old Kai walked down the hallways of this unfamiliar place, which she now had to call home. Kai sighed deeply, readjusting the strap of her messenger bag. Professor Xavier had come personally all the way from New York to take her to this school of his. You could say, she still hadn’t really warmed up to the idea of living on the other side of the country; especially if she had to do it without her brother.

She and her brother had been trapped in those caves for the better part of a week before anyone had found them. By the time they got them out, they were both in comas. Kai woke up, Malek didn’t. He was moved to a special facility that the Professor recommended called the Muir Island facility. That had been five months ago. She had never been away from her brother for that long. Her feet eventually walked her outside to a secluded part of the gardens. Making sure no one else was around she dropped her bag and quickly took her clothes off and folded them into it. She breathed slowly in and out before taking off into the woods, running as fast as she could.

She had always liked to run, but after she got out of the hospital, she found she could run much faster than she used to. In fact, she could do a whole lot more things than she used to. As she ran through the forest, she closed her eyes and concentrated. Leaping off a log and stretching her arms out forward, as if she were doing an aerial flip, a light glow seemed to surround her as she transformed…

Landing on the ground, the wolf took off running. Running Free.

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 5

Scott traveled as far as he could by bike, and went the rest of the way on foot. He had gotten to Alkali lake far faster than he should have.. With his motorcycle, even with the custom engine, it should have taken him at least three days to get to Alkali Lake from Xavier’s. But he didn’t care, all he could think about was her. He could hear her calling him, constantly now, her voice ringing in his ears.

Alkali Lake hadn’t changed. Scott had assumed that the lake would be well on its way back to its original state of being, a wild and untamed river. But, Fate wasn’t done joking. Turned out there was a sharp bend about a mile downstream from the dam that formed a natural choke point, preventing the water from draining completely. The level had dropped by more than half since the breach, but had finally reached a kind of equilibrium that still left the industrial complex beneath the dam’s face significantly underwater. Worse, the clearing where the Blackbird took off, where Jean had died, remained likewise buried.

He looked haggard, his lean features gaunt, as he stood at the water’s edge, staring at nothing. Maybe now he could find some peace. Maybe now he could say goodbye…

Once more, he heard her call.

“Stop,” he pleaded. “Stop it.”

But she wouldn’t.

“Scott,” he heard, “Please. Help me!”

That was the last straw.

With a cry torn from the deepest part of him – “Jean!” – Scott tore off his visor and opened his eyes wide.

Scarlet glory erupted through the air, as though someone had opened a window to the surface of the sun, and raw concussive energy gouged a momentary trench directly to the bottom of the lake, parting the waters like the hands of God through the Red Sea. Unchecked for once, wholly unrestrained, the bolt hammered at the rock along the opposite shore, following Scott’s line of sight so that when his gaze flicked towards one of the remaining towers of the dam, the entire structure shuddered with the initial impact, as though struck by a battering ram. Then, with breathtaking suddenness, it shattered, not into rocks and boulders but powder, allowing the implacable beam to strike the mountainsides beyond.

And then, just like that, the beam was gone, and the only sign marking its passage through the lake was the crash of water filling space, coupled with the rise of vapor.

Scott collapsed to his knees, although even then – spent and exhausted as he was, in spirit and mind and body – he still reflexively groped for his glasses and snugged them back into place.

Then the water started bubbling in front of him, almost boiling as he rose to his feet for a better look.

As the display built to a crescendo, water shot skyward in a magnificent fountain easily a hundred meters across, rising three or four times that into the air, generating a shock wave that bent the evergreens around Scott almost double and knocked him off his feet.

He picked himself up, stunned, senses kicking into proper gear, reacting now from his training and experience. And he found himself facing a radiance as welcome and comforting as the morning sun.

“Jean?” He didn’t believe it as he spoke, certain that somewhere along the way he’d stumbled headlong into madness, and he was beholding what he yearned for rather than what was.

Her laughter convinced him otherwise.

“Scott,” Jean called, laughing with delight at the sight of him, yet still unsure as to how she had somehow found herself alive once more. Those last moments were still vivid in her thoughts. The wall of water had struck like it was made of steel, shattering her on contact; she didn’t even have the chance to drown. Everything was over in an instant.

Or so she’d thought

“How?” he asked, reaching out in surprise to her hair, which now fell in glossy waves to the small of her back.

“I don’t know,” she told him truthfully, staring at his eyes through the visor covering them, her hand caressing his haggard face.

And for a while there were no more works, nothing at all save for two lovers holding each other close, savoring the joy that comes with finding your heart’s desire. Neither had ever been more happy, or at peace.

“Jean?!” A new voice entered the fray. The two looked up to see Logan half running down the beach towards them with Ororo not two feet behind. They both had identical looks of bafflement and wonderment on their faces. The blackbird parked somewhat off in the distance. They had just landed in the confusion of the water burst, just in time to see Jean appear.

Logan jarringly halted in front of them, looking at Jean with wonder,

“How?” he asked, slowly touching a lock of her hair.

Scott answered, “We don’t know”, without taking his eyes off of Jean.

Ororo took her friend in her arms, crying and laughing at the same time, “I can’t believe it!” Jean’s face broke into a grin as she hugged her back, not wanting to ever let go.

Logan could hardly believe his eyes. He looked over at Scott who looked just as amazed as he did. Looking back at the girls he said,

“‘Ro, go prep the jet.” He looked into Jean’s eyes, “Let’s get you home.”

Storm nodded, smiling again at her best friends face as she ran to get the jet prepped. Logan looked back at Scott and Jean, he smirked a little at their arms wrapped around each other, “I guess I’ll give you two some privacy”, he murmured, smiling and shaking his head. He never got an answer.

As Logan turned to follow Ororo to the jet, he spotted a woman clad in motorcycle gear sprinted out of the tree line towards the couple next to the lake, shouting-

“Jean…. NO!”

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 6

Kai had been pushing her motorcycle at least 200 miles per hour for the last four hours, getting her from Louisiana to the Canadian border in about half a day instead of the two days it would’ve taken. She even got so desperate that she pumped the NOS tank in the back. But, even going that fast, her sense of dread just kept growing.

Reaching her destination, she stopped her bike at the end of the ‘usable’ road. Everything from then on was washed out by the dam break. So, she quickly got off her bike, throwing her black helmet to the ground and started running. Evergreens flashed by her as she pumped her arms up and down, using her animalistic momentum to propel herself through the last stretch of forest. She would never be able to forgive herself if she let Scott die; if she let Jean become the monster she had foreseen her to become. Ever since she had come to the mansion, Kai had been a loner, Jean was one of her few friends. She would never forgive herself if anything happened to her.

Flashback

Kai felt more exhilarated than she had felt in months. Panting lightly, she stood up in her human form, just recently transformed. Months cooped up in the hospital had driven her mad, no where to run, no fresh air, and no freedom. She quickly looked around to check if there was anyone around. Seeing no one, she quickly put her clothes on and grabbed her messenger bag. Clothes didn't change when she did. They either ripped if she shifted large or got left when she shifted small. She always had to be careful where she put her clothes. It was very embarrassing if she had to go up to some random house stark naked and ask for clothes if hers got stolen. As she started to leave the clearing she heard a crack of a twig behind her. She whirled around, going into defensive mode, crouching down. A girl, not so much older than her had been climbing down from the tree beside her. She reached the ground and walked cautiously towards the feral. Very quickly, as if deciding to just get it over with, she put out her hand to shake Kai’s and said very hurriedly -

“Hi, I’m Jean Grey. The professor sent me to look for you, but you took off running before I could get to you and I didn’t want to just leave you out here, so I waited here in that tree, by the way, it was very cool what you did back there, you know, the whole turning into a wolf thing.

Kai, so dumbfounded that this girl had just come up and spouted off a whole paragraph to her without seeming to take a breath, asked incredulously, and without thinking –

“Did you even take a breath during that monologue?” She slowly rose from her defensive stance, her eyebrow quirked, as she took in the girl before her.

The girl, Jean Grey, looked questioningly at her for a moment before cracking up into laughter, “No…” she replied between gulps of air, “I don’t think I did!” Both still laughing outrageously, the two teens walked back to the mansion.

xXx

Please don’t let me be late

Breaking through the tree line Kai quickly took in all that was before her. The Blackbird was to her right, some ways away with, she assumed, Ororo at the helm. A man whom she didn’t know was making his way towards it. But, her main attention was on the two people before her. She knew it had to be Jean and Scott because of the way they were embracing each other. As they kissed Jeans eyes flashed open and the light in her eyes turned to fire as the veins in her skin turned black.

“Jean…NO!” Kai screamed as she sprinted towards them. Logan, turned around at the woman’s scream and looked to where she was running. He saw Jeans face grow darker, her eyes black, as Scott’s face grew paler by the second, his veins turning black as well.

“NO” he yelled as he took off towards them.

Logan reached them first, being the closest and pulled Scott away from Jean. But, that only drew her attention to him. As Scott crumpled to the ground, the thing he had thought to be Jean turned her rage on him. Suddenly, Logan couldn’t move his body. It was like there was an invisible force holding him there, until that force started to pull his body apart. Logan yelled in agony as Jean focused all her attention on him. Kai finally reached them about half a second later. She used Jeans focus of attention to surprise her. She quickly one of her psionic blasts, a trick she had learned from the professor, at Jean’s head hoping that it would knock her out. One blast could usually knock a person out for a day. Any more than that and a regular person would go into a coma.

Well, Jean wasn’t regular.

She looked fleetingly at Logan, and used her telekinesis to throw him across the beach, smashing him against one of the trees lining the shore.

Seeing that Jean was still conscious, Kai quickly burst out two more blasts at her. At that, the black in Jean’s face and eyes slowly faded as she blinked once or twice before crumpling to the ground beside Scott. Kai ran over towards her and checked her pulse. Oh thank God, she thought in a rush, as she felt a weak but stable heartbeat. Then she turned to check on Scott, who thankfully was also still alive…barely. He needed to get back to the med lab; they both did.

Breathing heavily from the exertion of three psionic blasts, Kai slowly stood and looked up, in surprise, to the man should have been dead, but was surprisingly standing in front of her, a little out of breath as well.

Kai looked at him with surprise.

“Hi”.

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 7


“Power corrupts,” Charles Xavier told his ethics class, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is a lesson every one of us must learn and live. Why? Because we are mutants.

“Will it be for the greater good,” he continued, “or personal, destructive, and tyrannical? This is a question we all must ask ourselves. Why? Because we are mutants.”

Kitty answered him with a sigh and briefly considered relaxing her hold on her power, just for a heartbeat, her phased form remaining at rest while the Earth continued merrily spinning on its axis. Just that little burst would put her outside the building. If she held her breath for a couple of minutes, she could be miles away.

It was tempting, but it would be wrong. Like it or not, responsibility had become her second nature. She had Xavier to thank for that.

“Riiight,” she agreed. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Xavier shook his head. He didn’t like it when she was intellectually lazy.

Kitty, that’s not an argument, it’s a cliché and a generalization. And like all generalizations, it’s only partly true. Unfortunately, students” – he explained the colloquy to embrace the entire class – “There are no absolutes when it comes to questions of ethics. For psychics, such as myself. . .” As he said this, Kitty felt his thoughts jump into her mid: and as well for those who can walk through walls. She got the message, sitting straight up while her cheeks flushed tomato scarlet, pursing her lips in embarrassment at being busted. Xavier continued, “. . . this presents a particular problem. When is it acceptable to use our powers and when do we cross that invisible line that turns us into tyrants over our fellow men?”

“Professor,” Kitty countered, seizing the opening with a question that was actually pertinent, yet also just that faintest bit of naughty, “if the line is invisible, how do we know when we’ve crossed it?”

Some of the others grinned, and even Xavier permitted himself an itsy-bitsy quirk of the lips that might be interpreted as a smile. His game of choice had always been chess, but Kitty’s was tennis, and she served to win.

Behind the professor, a flat-screen display revealed a hospital room, together with a legend that identified the source as the Muir Isle Research Facility, Scotland. It was an isolation cubicle, marked with the international biohazard trefoil and an M stamped in the middle to indicate mutant biohazard. A man lay on the single bed, clearly not in the best of health. Beside him stood a woman, Dr. Moira MacTaggart, old friend of Xavier’s, a former lover, and partner in many of his current researches.

“This case was forwarded to me by a colleague, Dr. MacTaggart.”

Everyone took notes. Kitty couldn’t help sneaking an envious peek over at Jules, who was merely running a pair of fingertips along each line of her notebook page. In their wake, every word Xavier spoke what transcribed automatically from her ear to the page, although it seemed to be going to be going smoothly now, it wasn’t always as easy as that; when she got distracted, Jules’ transcription power tapped into her thoughts and her notes became a stream-of-consciousness exercise that put Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to sham. Then, of course, it was all hands to the rescue among her best friends at school, Kitty included, to try to separate out what was supposed to be there. This morning, though, she looked totally on track.

Dr. MacTaggart was speaking, the screen obligingly providing subtitles for those who found her Highland accent a bit hard to fathom.

“The man you see here,” she said, indicating her patient, “was born with no higher-level brain functions. His organs and nervous system function normally, but he has no consciousness to speak of. That has been confirmed both by the most comprehensive medical scans available to us, and telepathic examination as well.”

Xavier paused the transmission.

“What if,” he asked the class, “we could transfer the consciousness of one person, say a father of four with terminal cancer, into the body of this man?”

Kitty couldn’t help muttering, “Sounds like someone wants to play God.”

Jules giggled.

Xavier ignored them both.

“How are we going to . . .?”

He paused, looking off to the side for just a moment, then tried to move on.

“How are we to decide what is within the range of ethical behavior and what is . . .” His voice trailed off again as he put his hand to his brow, closing his eyes.

“Professor . . .?” Kitty started.

“We’ll continue Tomorrow,” Xavier announced suddenly, to the surprise of very few. You didn’t have to be a student at Xavier’s very long to figure out what moments like this were all about. “Class dismissed”.

As the students filed out of his room one by one, Xavier wheeled himself over to his Bay windows, looking out over the grounds, his eyes finding their way unbidden to a willow tree on the bank of a pond.

“Kai . . . be careful”

~X~

After finally managing to get Jean and Scott into the Blackbird, Logan and Kai strapped in as Ororo prepped the bird for flight. Ororo had seen what had happened with Jean from her seat in the jet and after kai knocked Jean unconscious, Ro ran out, demanding to know what had happened, to which Kai had politely, but firmly replied, “Not now, Ro, on the plane!”.

Ororo sputtered, dumbfounded, “Kai…how…what?”

Kai looked up from her task of dragging Scott to the bird since Logan and automatically taken Jean, “Ro. . . I don’t know how long my blasts will keep her unconscious, so unless you want a schizophrenic omega mutant on your hands, save it for later and help!”

They go the two unconscious X-men into the jet much faster after that, for Ro uses her winds to bolster them up and take some of the burden from each.

After settling all those unconscious into the mini medi-lab in the back, Logan let himself fall into one of the seats nearer to the front, across from the mystery woman.

‘Where did she come from? How had she known about Jean, and how to stop her? How did she know Ororo?’

“You gonna keep staring at me? Or are you going to actually ask a question?” Her light Creole accent startled him out of his reverie. She was staring over at him for he didn’t know how long. He continued to look at her before asking his questions aloud for her to answer.

The girl in question looked over at him then, her golden eyes, smiling. They weren’t like Mystiques eyes, brassy and cold, they were subtler, more of a hazel gold, almost copper, but he could tell that they couldn’t be natural that they were a part of her mutation.

“Well, my name is Kai, but mostly I’m known as Marrok. I didn’t know for sure that I could knock Jean out, I only hoped, and I know ‘Ro because I went to school wither her . . . at the Institute.” Her voice grew a little bitter at that last statement.

Logan wondered what the bad blood might be with her and the institute. Logan looked forward for a while, processing the information before letting his sarcasm get the best of him and smirked saying, “What kinda name is Marrok?”

Kai took a slow breath, willing herself not to kick this guy’s ass . . . or at least to wait till they got on solid ground. She looked over to him, careful to show no emotion on her face as she simply stated,

“Mine”, and quirked her eyebrow, daring him to say anything else about it. Then, unstrapping her belts, she walked up to sit next to Storm.

Logan watched her get up and leave, puzzling the mystery that was that woman. What was the deal with her and the school? What exactly was her power? How’d she stop Jean?

At the thought of Jean, he looked over his shoulder to the back where she and Scott lay prone. Sighing, he unstrapped himself and walked back to Jean, he reached down to caress her face and-

“Don’t touch her!”

Kai had heard him get up and followed him, knowing that he’d have question that she had to answer sooner rather than later. As she looked back she saw him reaching for the telepath and had yelled out. She ran to the back pulling his hand away from the unconscious mutant, “I don’t know what will happen if you touch her, but I do know that if some part of her brain is active, the sudden influx of your thoughts would wake her. And I for one do not want her waking up at 50,000ft, do you?”

Logan stared back at her, slightly surprised, before nodding in agreement. They stared at each other for another moment before Logan looked down at their hands which were still clasped. Seeing this as well, Kai quickly dropped his hand and headed toward the front of the jet without another word. Logan looked her way then back down to his hand, where it tingled a bit, and headed that way as well.

Logan analyzed the rugged mutant across from him. After they had gotten Jean and Scott into the plane, she had gone into the woods a bit and rolled out a black motorcycle, so he at least knew she had good taste. It looked as if it had been modified and improved so many times that it could hardly be called a motorcycle. If he didn’t know it, he would have called it a mini jet! At first glance her clothes looked like regular biker armor, but upon closer inspection he saw that it had the same tell-tale designs as their X-suits, just modified. She wore a black leather sleeveless jacket and worn leather pants with black combat boots. The clothes were obviously made for protection, but they had been modified for easier maneuvering. Her long dark auburn hair was wild and windblown, and with no sign of a helmet, he could assume that she hadn’t worn one on the ride to Alkali, so either she was reckless or she can’t be hurt, like him. There were only two knives that he could see, but they were well worn, so she knew how to use them, and when there were two, there were bound to be more. She twisted a little bit, looking out of her window, down to the cityscape below. He saw a glint of silver metal on her back, so there was at least one other weapon on her back, maybe two. She was definitely prepared . . . for a war at least. Logan shook his head and turned to look out his own window.

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 8

“Jean Grey was the only Class Five mutant I’ve ever encountered,” Xavier told the trio a day later, back in the mansion’s infirmary. “Her potential was practically limitless.”

She lay on the examining table. Her body was dotted all over with direct sensors, surrounded by the information panels of their remote scanning counterparts. They projected on a phalanx of nearby flat-panel displays. Her vitals were totally nominal, and had been since they found her, wholly consistent with her last physical, not long before her death.

Scott could be seen through a two-way mirror on the opposite side of the room. The decision had been made to separate them in the hopes that the distance would perhaps loosen Jeans hold on Scott’s mind. After half a day in isolation, he was still in a coma.

“Her mutation was seated in her limbic system,” Xavier continued, taking refuge from his own deep feelings by adopting his most professorial tone, “the unconscious part of her mind. And therein lay the danger.”

Logan snorted, gaining him a sharp look from both Xavier, seated in his wheelchair at Jean’s head, and Ororo, flanking him opposite Logan. Kai didn’t respond, she just stared at Jean from her seat on the desk next to Logan.

Logan didn’t bother explaining aloud; it wasn’t his way. He was still trying to figure things out himself. Out loud, he said: “I thought you were treating her,” and got another warning glare from Ororo about his tone. He didn’t much care.

“I tried…”

An unbidden image came to Logan’s mind mixing moments from the mission that led to Jean’s death – Magneto’s quiet, constant jibes about Xavier’s failure to treat the mutant son of William Stryker, Xavier’s own very real regret, and worst of all, the very real consequences that arose from that failure. Jason had been made by his father into a weapon; their attempt to stop the use of that weapon had lead to Jean’s death.

If Xavier sensed Logan’s thoughts this time, he gave no sign as he laid his hands gently on Jean’s head and closed his eyes. The monitors flickered; charting his progress ad he resumed treating her.

Logan paid him no attention. His concentration was locked on Jean’s face, as if his own senses could tell him what Xavier’s telepathy and devices could not.

“I created a series of psychic barriers, many years ago,” Xavier said, “to separate her powers from her conscious mind, until such time as she could integrate the two properly and safely. However, in doing so, she developed a split personality . . .”

This was news to Logan and, by the look on her face, to Ororo, too. Logan glanced over at the unknown woman beside him to try and glimpse her reaction, but all he could see was her long hair winging her face as she fiddled with one of her throwing knives. He had a hunch that she had known about Jean for a while. After all, how else could she have known what Jean was capable of doing to her own fiancée? For Ororo and Logan, though, neither of them took in this new information well.

Logan spoke for them both. “What?” he demanded.

“The conscious Jean, whose powers were always under control, and that dormant side, a personality that, in our sessions, came to call itself The Phoenix. A purely instinctual creature, all desire, and joy and . . . rage.”

He checked the monitors, made some notes.

Logan had grown ominously still and quiet, in a way that would clear even the most roughhouse saloons the world over.

Then, “Jean knew about this?”

xXx

Kai watched Xavier shake his head, so engrossed in his work that he missed the cues and warnings this feral was radiating. Even she, who had just met the man, could pick up on his cues. She shifted her stance just a little. But knew her options were limited. This part of the infirmary was already much too crowded with the four mutants and the unconscious Jean, and she didn’t want to be the reason The Phoenix awoke if someone jarred her. She quickly calculated that the only way to get him down and to stay down would be to either punch a few quick jabs to some of his pressure points or to psychic blast him like she did Jean, but she didn’t know if she could do the last one because of the power she expended into the blasts she hit Jean with.

Shit

Ororo could sense the tension coming off of Logan from a mile away. It was like the surge of electricity that charged the air right before a massive thunder storm. She knew that Logan was a creature of primal passions who fought to keep them in check with his own rigorous code of honor. Now, with Jean, both elements were in play – his feelings for Jean combined with the growing outrage at Xavier’s revelations. It was a deadly mix, more volatile that matches and gasoline.

“It’s unclear precisely how much she remembered,” Charles told them. “The more pressing issue is that I’m not sure whether the woman we see in front of us is the Jean Grey we know, or the phoenix, violently struggling to be free.”

Logan took a step closer, and Kai tensed.

“She looks pretty peaceful to me Chuck.”

“That is because, I, with the help of Kai, am keeping her that way,” Xavier replied with a nod to the woman across from him, not rising to the bait. Kai just kept her face to the ground, her body tense to strike if the circumstances allowed. Though, for all the attention he paid them, despite their ongoing conversation, it was as if Logan, Ororo and Kai weren’t even there. “I’m trying to restore those psychic blacks and reenergize them, and cage the beast again.”

Logan’s nostrils flared, and this time Xavier seemed to react to the sub vocalized grown that issued from deep in the other man’s throat.

“What did you just say?” Logan demanded.

“Logan, try to understand – “

“We’re talking about a person’s mind here, Charles, about Jean! We could be talking about her goddamn soul! How could you do this to her?”

She has to be controlled. She isn’t safe.”

“‘Controlled,’ Professor, controlled?! You know, sometimes, when you ‘cage the beast’ the beast gets angry.”

“You have no idea what she’s capable of.”

“No, Professor, “Logan spat with finality, and he made Xavier’s title sound like the most profane of epithets. “I had no idea what you were capable of.”

After this last comment, Logan knew that, had Xavier still possessed the use of his legs, the professor would be right up in his face, probably challenging him to do his worst. Logan never denied the man had balls, but this was the first he’d ever considered that Charles Xavier might be lacking something essential in the way of a heart.

Damn it, Logan,” Xavier flared, “I want her back as much as you do!?

Logan shook his head: “Not even close.”

xXx

Xavier couldn’t stand Logan’s glare for more than a few seconds. It wasn’t that he lacked the strength, but – being a more intensely private man than even Logan – Charles couldn’t bear to reveal to them the depths of his own pain. Or the concern that walked with it hand in hand, growing with each and every step into a very real and present fear. The only person he could even remotely open up to was the woman sitting cross-legged on the desk across from him. And as he looked at her, she raised her head and molten copper eyes flickered to his cobalt blues with a modicum of understanding. For, she too knew what the Phoenix was capable of. After all she had seen the creature in front of her kill them all.

xXx

Xavier turned his back on the trio and motored his chair towards the door, pausing at last to tell them, “I had a terrible choice to make, Logan. I chose the lesser of two evils.”

And as Charles and Ororo left the infirmary, Charles knew Logan wouldn’t – couldn’t– let him go without saying something. “Sounds to me like Jean had no choice at all.”

Logan looked away from the departing form of Xavier, briefly to Ororo, and then once more rested his eyes on Jean. He had a hunter’s patience. He’d wait as long as he had to.

And after that . . .

. . . after that . . .

More gently than Xavier’s touch, he stroked his rough palm from the crown of Jean’s head back across her hair, and breathed in the scent of her. Not a lot of great things happened in his life, but he knew with certainty, this woman was one of them. Likely the best of them.

He repeated to himself what he’s sworn the moment they met, what he’d failed to do at Alkali Lake.

I’ll save you, Jean, he promised silently. Whatever the cost.

He looked up to meet Kai’s gaze, still sitting on the desk, and a look of wrenching sadness and understanding crossed over her face. She understood what it was like to lose someone you loved. Then suddenly her look changed to one of steely eyed determination right before Logan’s eyes. She briefly nodded to Logan as if agreeing with his sentiments to save Jean whatever the cost, before jumping off the desk and following the Professor down the hall.

I’ll save you!

xXx

Kai couldn’t stand to be in the room anymore. Out of all the places in the entire institute, that room was the place with the best and the worst memories. Sighing she took her leave of Logan and an unconscious Jean and walked the opposite way of the professor and Storm. Walking past the cold steel walls aimlessly, Kai couldn’t help but relieve some of the memories of this place that she hadn’t stepped foot in, in over seven years. Tears springing to her eyes, she remembered the first time she’d even been to the infirmary; the first time she’d met him.

Flashback 16 years ago…

In an angry huff, an eleven year old Kai burst out of the Headmaster’s office. Roughly, she brushed past student left and right, sparking many exclamations and retorts.

Who does he think he is telling me what I can and can’t do?! I have freakin’ free will damn it! I can shift whenever and wherever I want! She thought angrily to herself.

Hell! That’s why I was sent here in the first place!

The shifter had been here for about a month when one of her teachers had noticed that every new day she came to class she would have a new scratch or two marring her tan skin. Worried that she might be harming herself the teacher had told the Professor. Of course with just one look into her mind the telepath had seen that she was just getting the scratches from running in the forests surrounding the school. However he also saw that she had been skipping classes to do the shift, spending more and more time to roam the grounds in one of her animal forms, be it wolf or falcon or any number that she could think of. She had even tried fish form for a day, just to see if she could. She’d never tried being an amphibian before, and she found it very liberating. But, even so, the professor demanded that she layoff the shifting for the time being, to get ‘adjusted’ to this new life.

“Bullshit” she muttered angrily to herself.

The angry shifter got about three steps past the elevator to the lower levels before she got her brilliant idea. A small smirk crossed her face: the infirmary was always overstocked, she had seen that when she was down there for her physical. So, she could easily sneak down there and filch some supplies. That way she could treat her scrapes and no one would be the wiser.

Still smirking at her brilliant plan she pressed the ‘down’ button for the elevator and quickly swerved away to look somewhere else so as not to attract attention. Students weren’t supposed to go down to the basement without a note from Xavier or one of the teachers and the young doctor Moira MacTaggart had a habit of catching students who were wandering, probably with a little help from a psychic ‘birdie’.

The dark oak doors pinged open as the elevator arrived. Calmly looking left and right down the semi-deserted hallway, most of the students she saw were already in their next class waiting for their teachers to start of their lessons. Satisfied that no one was paying attention to her silent rebellion, she slipped into the elevator before it pinged closed.

xXx

The basement of the Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters was a far cry from any basement Kai could ever say she’d seen. Once the elevator doors opened, she stepped out of the world of mahogany and oak and into a world of technology and chrome. Pleased with herself for getting this far in the house of a psychic, Kai walked briskly down the hallway to the one unlocked room of this maze. With a quick turn of the knob, she opened the door at the end of the hall. Using her enhanced hearing, she’d surmised when she got off the elevator that Dr. MacTaggart was somewhere else on the grounds at the moment, thankfully. Emboldened by her daring she thrust the glass double doors wide open and walked into the infirmary as if she’d owned the place. Humming slightly she leisurely perused the glass cabinets lining the walls.

So absorbed in her search, she didn’t even hear the footsteps behind her. She did, however, feel the hand that grasped her right shoulder. Purely out of animal instinct she grabbed the hand with her own and with her other she grabbed the mysterious upper arm and using her assailant’s weight against him, she flipped him over causing him to crash into the three trash bins that lined the wall. And it was indeed a ‘him’, she had seen that when she flipped him.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry” she said in a rush. Kneeling down next to the boy she helped him to sit up. He looked to be about her age with dark brown hair and slightly foreign looking features. When he opened his eyes to meet hers she saw that they were a very light color blue. Rubbing his head he looked he looked incredulously at her,

“Jeez, what’d I ever do to you?” he asked in a slight Scottish accent.

Kai shook her head, not knowing what to say, “I’m so sorry. When you grabbed me. . . I just moved.” His incredulous look slowly turned to one of amazement as he fully realized that he had just been flying through the air.

Well, whatever you did. . . It was bloody brilliant! Can you teach me?!”

Kai stared hard at him for a second, as if contemplating his sanity before cracking a grin and nodding her assent. Both laughing, they got up and brushed themselves off. The boy stuck out his hand to shake,

“Daniel.”

And Kai took it,

“Kai.”

xXx

Back in the present, Kai smiled to herself, remembering these things. They had gone on to talk about themselves, their pasts, their abilities’ . . . everything, for hours holed up in one of the many rooms of the basement. Over the next few weeks Daniel and Kai quickly became best friends and years later, lovers.

Her hands slightly skimming the walls as she moved by, they hadn’t been this high tech sixteen years ago. A technopath she and Daniel had gone to school with, by the name of Forge, redid the entire underground years ago, right before she left. There hadn’t been a cerebro or Danger Room or any of the high tech things down there then. Passing by said Danger Room, Kai stopped. A small mischievous grin alighted to her face. Calmly she looked to left and right of the doorway, then walked through as they opened with a whoosh.

[Kai ~ Gabriel]

Chapter 9

It was a modest office black by federal standards, left over from a more decorative age, like the Old Executive Office Building and the Smithsonian. But, what it lacked in modern aesthetics it more than made up for in proximity to the one building in town that really mattered. The one with the address 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The offices housed the youngest of the President’s cabinet departments. But, the reason both for its importance and for its being treated as a bastard stepchild could be found on the official identification plaque out front:

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF MUTANT AFFAIRS

As usual, despite the constant surveillance of CCTV cameras and patrols by the DC metro police and federal security, someone had still managed to tag the sign during the night, using spray paint to cover Affairs with the word Abominations.

The third floor front suite, with a view of the White House, belonged to the Secretary of Mutant Affairs. Alicia Vargas – former secret service bodyguard to the previous president, now employed by DOMA as unofficial bodyguard and thoroughly official executive assistant to the Secretary – strode down the elegant wood hallway and with pro forma knock, opened the door to her boss’s office.

The room was exquisitely furnished; whatever else you could say about Henry McCoy, DSC, PhD, he had excellent taste. At the moment, he was also hanging upside down from the suitably reinforced chandelier, thoroughly enjoying the latest issue of the Economist.

Alicia was a lovely woman, the kind you would expect to be chairing a PTA meeting. She was as professionally turned out as her boss, them both wearing quality designed suits. The major difference was that hers was cut to hide a SIG, while his was built around his six foot, nearly 300 pound, immensely athletic body completely covered in rich blue fur.

He had fangs, too – a mouthful. And claws that became quite evident when he neglected to keep his nails properly trimmed. He had a leonine mane of hair which was a discernibly darker hue than his body, swept elegantly back from a dramatic widow’s peak, as well as sweeping side whiskers that bore an uncanny resemblance to one of the major villains of a world-famous comic book. He could bench press twice his body weight without trying, and had reflexes that were almost a match for Alicia’s – only because she too was a mutant, just not quite so obvious a manifestation, thank God – and agility that could send the most madcap of monkeys back to school. He was, in fact, everything implied by the nick name he’d been given back in school – The Beast.

McCoy could also speak a score of languages fluently, was one of the more respected genetic anthropologists on the planet, a demon dancer, and apparently an even better lover. He enjoyed fine wines with his brother, the Jungion psychiatrist, preferred cooking to eating out because he was a better chef than most professionals, and had an unfortunate weakness for karaoke bars. His speaking voice was wonderful, but his singing tended to recall cats congregating on a backyard fence.

What endeared him most to Alicia, however, was the fact that he needed reading glasses. He wore a classic pair, perched on his rather dramatic nose.

McCoy raised an eyebrow over the spine of the magazine as she snared his jacket off the back of his chair.

"The White House called," she told him. "They've moved up the meeting. Something to do with Bolivar Trask."

"Hmnh" was Hank's only comment as he flipped through a crisp, confined somersault to land on the floor with feline grace. He frowned as he slipped on his shoes - Alicia was the only one who ever saw those reactions, the only one he truly trusted here - he muched preferred to go barefoot. His feet were designed for it, not for being strapped in. But, people were spooked enough by his appearance as it was; dressing respectably was the first, big - necessary - step towards winning their tolerance, if not their acceptance.

"Your car's waiting downstars," She told him as he donned his jacket, taking a moment for their usual exit ritual as she smoothed the shirt across his shoulders and straightened his tie.

Then, twitching her own suit jacket to make sure her gun was in ready reach, she followed him out the door.

xXx

Another surprise awaited Hank and Alicia when they checked in at the White House: The meeting originally scheduled for the Oval Office had been moved downstairs to the Situation Room. It was a small and select meeting: The President, his national security advisor, the director of the FBI, a pair of uniforms, one representing the Joint Chiefs, the other the national Security Council, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Bolivar Trask.

Big as Hank was, Trask matched him in every dimension, tall and broad and radiating the impression that he remained as powerful and dangerous now as he was in his youth. They'd come out of Detroit, served a career in Army Special Ops before confounding everyone when he turned in his papers and built a new life for himself in disaster management. Trask had barely made it out of high shcool, yet over the course of his two careers he had amassed more practical knowledge than a roomful of certified academics, possessing an eclectic mix of street smarts and on-the-job training. He was a brilliant manager, as gifted in the military and defense aspects of his department as the civil, and seemed soundly determined to protect the country from natural disasters and terrorist threats.

"Sorry I'm late, Mr. President," Hank apologized, as he strode into the darkened room. Display screens were already active, filling the wall at the far end of the room, where everyone at the table could easily see them.

President David Cockrum indicated the open chair to his left. "Have a seat, Henry. Sorry for catching you short, but things have been happening."

Trask sat opposite McCoy, at the president's right hand. From everyone's body language, McCoy knew this was Bolivar's briefing.

"Homeland Security was tracking Magneto. . ."

With that cue, surveillance images appeared on the display wall, showing a tall and handsome man of natually aristocratic bearing. Some time in the recent past, he must a grown a beard, neatly trimmed of course, which gave him the air of a shakespearean warrior king in exile. A lion in winter, McCoy thought, with a pang of regret at the memory of brighter, younger days, and all that might have been.

Trask was speaking, using a laser pointer to highlight his bullet points with the appropriate image. "Homeland Security has been cooridinating with all the relevant alphabet agencies - CIA, NSA, DIA - Plus their counter parts overseas. As you can see, we got hits on him in Lisbon, Geneva, Montreal. NavSat lost him crossing the border. But we did get a consolation prize. . ."

Different screen now, the biggest in the aray, with a crawl at the bottom to inform everyone that they were watching in real-time streaming video. The setting was obviously an interrogation room of some sort, with a double-door security airlock and double-paned observation glass, suggesting something more appropriate to a biohazard containment facility than a standard lock up. There were two figures in view, interrogator and prisoner. No guards - that could be seen.

The object of all this attention lounged in a chair as though she owned the place, and hadn't a care in the world. She was naked and flaunted a perfect body as proudly as any other woman would a new designer gown. Her skin was as blue as McCoy's fur, her hair the color of blood, swept straight back from her forehead and face to end in an impossibly precise blunt cut at the base of her neck. Her body was decorated with ridges, down the arms, breasts, stomach, and groin, with a scattering along her legs. Hank had always been curious whether they were decorative or had some functional value, and the scientist in his soul wondered, How hard would it be to get a cell sample?

Her eyes were a gleaming chrome yellow, reminding him of another, friendlier, shapeshifter he knew, only Kai's were a much warmer coppery type of gold. The woman on the screen's eyes glowed in the dark, Hank knew, where the rest of her could become effectively invisible. The way they flicked from camera to camera, the way she allwoed herself the smallest of smiles, told Hank that the she knew she was being broadcast, and probably who was watching.

She called herself Mystique. She'd been by Magneto's side for almost as long as he had been in active opposition to Charles Xavier. No one had ever been able to fathom the precise nature of their relationship, beyond the obvious fact that she was utterly devoted to him and to his cause, and that Magneto cared for her as he did for few others in his life, past or present.

She was a metamorph, a shape-changer able to transform herself with a thought into any other human form she pleased. What they were viewing now was supposedly her default form; it was certainly the skin she was most comfortable wearing, the one she always returned to.

The main screen was complimented by an array of lesser display windows, showing different perspecties on the scene. Looking at he one aimed at her eyes, McCoy couldn't hake the sense that she was looking right back at him through the lens. that she could actually see him.

With an inner wrench, he turned his attention back to Trask, who was still speaking. "We picked her up breaking into the FDA, of all places."

"Do you know who she was imitating?" the President asked in an aside to Hank, "Secretary Trask."

That must have been a sight to behold, Hank thought, and almost as if he'd heard the comment aloud, Trask cued an archival shot of the scene in question, showing Mystique before, and then right after, the takedown. Hank looked from the man himself to the screen and back again - as did everyone else present. The match was flawless.

"Yes, sir," Hank told the president. "She can do that."

"Not anymore, she can't," Trask said with pardonable satisfaction. Smart as she may have been he had found a way to nail her: "We got her."

"You think your walls can hold her, Trask?"

"We have some new walls, Henry." came the reply, with the hint of an edge. Trask's tone indicatied that he thought that Hank's question was utterly foolish. What was the point of taking the woman if you didn't have the means to keep her? "We'll be a step ahead this time."

Hank was about to press him on that point when Trask gestured with his remote and added sound to the streaming video from the interrogation room.

"Raven," the agent with her said softly, and was ignored.

"Raven," he repeated, 'I'm talking to you"

She flicked her eyes dismissively. "I don't answer to my slave name."

"It's on your birth certificate. Raven Darkholme, or has he convinced you that you don't have a family anymore?"

No one needed to be told which 'he' was being referred to, but the question did provoke a response. Mystique swung round in her chair to face the agent. Her look promised mayhem. the interrogator took it in stride.

"My family tried to kill me, you pathetic meat-sack."

"So, now he's your family?"

She sniffed, haughtily as a queen, and half turned away striking a glamour pose that flaunted her body to him and to the cameras.

The interrogator's tone hardened.

"Are you playing games with me?"

She gave the agent a smile as overtly sexy as her pose, and then morped into a mirror image of him.

"What makes you say that?"

The interrogator leaned forward, "Is it worth it, all this, to protect him?"

"You really want to know where he is?" He didn't need to reply. He didn't have to, the answer went without saying. "All right then, I'll tell you . . ."

She leaned forward. Inviting the interrogator to meet her halfway.

Hank's eyes flickered a warning to Trask. Both men were on the same wave length. This was too soon, too easy. Way to good to be true. Trask already had a phone in hand, a direct line to the holding cell, but never got a chance to warn him.

Even as Hank heard the ringing phone through the main display, Mystique struck, grabbing the interrogator by the ears and delivering a vicious head-butt that would have him in the hospital for the better part of a week with a wicked concussion.

Now the previously unseen guards made their entrance, hard and fast and in no mood to paly. Their adversary was faster than they were, stronger as well, likely more skilled in the martial arts. She'd stopped herself free of every restraint, making her hands momentarily boneless so that they'd slid loose from her cuffs, but the room was too small and suddenly filled wall-to-wall with muscle. She had no room to maneuver, and when she tried morphing into one of them Hank saw that they'd been biotagged. External surveillance systems told the team outside who was who so that they always knew who to hit.

It was a gallant, desperate struggle that reminded Hank too much of a wild animal being caged. It was doomed from the start and quickly over.

Trask shut off the feed.

"One down," he said quietly, "one to go".

Hank stared at him. "You know her capture will only provoke Magneto."

"So? Do we forgo the capture of terrorsit lieutenants because we're scared of their boss? If that's our policy, why don't we just hand over the country to him and be done with it?"

Trask gestured to the screen. "Henry, be real here. You see what we're dealing with here."

"All the more reason to be diplomatic."

"You expect me to negotiate with these people?" asked the president pointedly.

Hank's first reaction was thankfully an unspoked thought:

And what people precisely would you be referring to, sir? The 'terroristst' mutants or mutants in general?

Aloud, he chose to follow his own advice and speak diplomatically: "All due respect, sir, I thought that's why you appointed me."

Hank shook his head, realizing from the look on the president's face and the way the other man's eyes shifted ever so slightly, that the venue for this meeting hadn't been any last minute change, nor had it's earlier start.

"This isn't why you called me here, is it, sir?"

The president shook his head. "No," he said, his tone conveying what was surely meant to sound like a sincere and heartfelt apology. He slid a file towards McCoy.

"This is what she was after."

Hank used a ritual with his glasses to regain his inner composure: he removed the bifocals, puffed on the lenses, wiping them clear on the thick luxurious fur protruding from his cuffs.

When he was done reading, when the axis of the Earth had finished shifting beneath him, he didn't know whether he felt rage or terror, but assumed that it was a decent measure of both. He pressed his hands together, resting his face against them, like a man assuming an attitude of prayer, determined not to allow them to tremble and hoping his voice wouldn't betray him when he spoke.

"Is it viable?" He asked.

"We believe it is, yes."

"Do you have any idea of the level of impact this will have on the mutant community?"

The president nodded, choosing his words very carefully.

"Yes, I do. That's precisely why we need some of your 'diplomacy' now."

Hank closed his eyes, his inner child hoping against hope that this was merely some wild flight of fancy, and that when he opened them again he'd be back in his old room at Xavier's, young and carefree, with no thoughts for the days ahead other than charming the daylights out of Jean and teaching Kai how to slow-dance.

And then came a darker image, of a movie he'd watched far to often, one to compliment the books and files he'd commited to memory while researching his first doctoral thesis, which hadn't been on medicine of any kind, but history. In 1942, there'd been a conference in Wonnsee Villa, a resort outside Berlin, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, who'd go down in history as "Hangman Heydrich" (his fellow Nazis called him 'The Blood Butcher'). He was then Deputy Reichsfuherer, a handsome, powerfully commanding presence whom everyone assumed would claim the leadership of the Third Reich if and when Hitler passed from the scene. He'd gathered the top bureaucrats in the Reich, from all the key departments of state, and in a meeting that lasted ninety minutes, they'd resolved the 'Jewish question' in Europe. In terms both barbaric in their racial virulence and damnably chilling in their institutional banality, these men signed the death warrant of millions.