Note: There's already about a million different realities in the X-Men films and comics, and this is another one. It's a sort of sequel to my earlier "Rogue & Wolverine: Two Against the World" story.

The core team is Wolverine, Cyclops, Rogue, Jean Grey and Beast. Let me know what you think of it by leaving me a review!

In a dark, dead corridor beneath the mowed lawns and quiet streets of an American town, the pungent stench of battle lingered in the air. The surface dwellers, brainwashed by the scaremongering anti-mutant propaganda, were blissfully ignorant of the facility's existence, nor the brutal massacre that had taken place less than an hour ago.

The origin of the underground station was filled with blanks, assumptions and question marks joining the dots that lead back to the mystery of the people in charge. It was similar in appearance to another mysterious facility that the X-Men had visited before—a side-project of a weapons and robotics conglomerate with near-undetectable ties to an obscure department of the Government. Mutants were just another threat to mankind's fragile rule of the world, and places like this had been tasked with researching the solution.

An elevator chirped to life as it began its descent to the third-floor basement, where it's two occupants—Scott Summers and Rogue, members of the X-Men—were unprepared for the nauseating sight that awaited them. The pair had kept their conversations limited to observational comments of the secretive facility, from the unlocked door to the empty, ghostly feel of the reception area. The bottom row of screens in the security office's monitor bank displayed a haze of fractured lines, a hint to where the pair should direct their investigation.

The voice of the younger mutant ended the awkward silence. 'Have you heard from Jean?'

'No.' Scott replied abruptly.

'Do you know if she's coming back?' She folded her arms.

'No.'

'Are you two guys over?'

Cyclops tilted his head round, catching the sight of her white fringe at the corner of his ruby-tinted visor, before looking forward once more.

Rogue rolled her eyes. 'You can talk about it, y'know?'

Scott pressed his back teeth together. 'I don't want to talk about it.'

She sighed. 'You. . . Logan. . . what is it with the guys on this team and not wanting to talk?' She leaned back against the wall of the small elevator. 'We live with someone who can read minds, so it's a waste of time bottling it up. Just saying.'

Scott went to speak as the heavy doors pulled apart, but his reply was lost in a gasp of sudden shock. Behind him, Rogue shuffled in his shadow, her fingers clamping her nostrils shut. 'Ugh—the smell! It's so bad!'

'Yeah. . . but it isn't just the smell that's bad.' He skimmed his fingers through locks of hair stuck together with a faint lather of product and sweat. Ahead of him, a path of carnage and murder stretched the length of the corridor. 'It's like something out of a war film.'

Rogue continued to squeeze her nose tight. 'More like a horror film.'

Scott waded through the landfill of human remains—orphaned limbs scattered across the floor, topped with crimson and a sprinkle of lead. Some of the bodies had been so badly mutilated that it was impossible to identify which arms and legs belonged to which corpse. The narrow passage seemed to go on forever, framed with a series of pipes decorating the wall with intricate detail—the copper cylinders weaving around each other in a complicated pattern that suggested the facility was in a constant state of upgrade and redesign. The recent decoration had left many of the tubes punctured, allowing the musky scent of death to slip inside and spread throughout the rest of the underground station.

'He didn't leave any one alive.' Scott followed the crumpled heap of blood-soaked jumpsuits, his strides long and careful. The soaked grates trembled beneath his boots, the empty casings dancing between the gaps. He crouched down for a closer look. 'At least it looks like most of it was quick.'

'Yeah. . . most of it.' Rogue sighed, keeping her gaze above a certain height.

Cyclops turned to look at her briefly. 'Poor guys.'

She raised an eyebrow. 'Poor guys?'

'Yeah.'

'Don't you mean, poor mutant-hating, jumpsuit-wearing assholes?'

He picked up a finger with a gold band still wrapped round it tightly. 'Or, I mean poor guy with a wife and maybe a kid, just doing his job. . .'

Rogue shrugged her shoulders. 'Well, I ain't saying these guys deserved to get diced in to jigsaw pieces. . . but they are working for the bad guys. Y'know. . . the bad guys that keep trying to kill us?'

'I think you're hanging about with Logan too much.'

As Scott returned to his feet, flicking away something that had attached to his knee, an utterly horrifying sound cut through the rancid air and stabbed at the drums of their ears. The shriek, so heart-wretchingly sickening that he hoped it wasn't human—lasted a few seconds that felt like a lifetime to Scott, and no doubt even longer to the man who made it.

'What was that?' Rogue asked.

Scott leaped from his spot, nearly stumbling over the litter of bodies as he raced towards the source of the sound. Rogue said something to him, but her voice was lost in the clatter of his boots battering against the metal. As he reached the end of the passage, he scrunched his face and slammed his shoulder in to the double doors, stammering in to a brightly-lit room of dials and lights.

'Logan!' Scott shouted.

Wolverine didn't move. The trio of foot-long claws were unsheathed, painted with a thick layer of blood that dripped in to an ever-increasing pool around his feet. Sitting next to him, tied to a chair was something which had once been human, now a wreckage of splintered bones and soft mush.

'What the hell are you doing?' Scott asked.

'What does it look like I'm doing?' He wiped his claws against his legs as he finally turned round to the sound of Rogue's heels coming to a halt.

'I'm on vacation.'