And here's chapter two. Any conversation from the movie is done purely from memory, so forgive me if it's horribly, horribly wrong. I can only hope this chapter came out well, because I know there are more than a few places where I ended up getting too wordy.

As stated last time, I'm going to ask for five reviews in exchange for a new chapter, because while I'm getting views, I'm not getting feedback - and feedback is going to be a huge help, in the long run. I need to know where the readers would like to see this go, what you guys think can be improved on, that sort of thing... And I really don't think five reviews is much to ask, do you?


Shiloh had been at this goddamned CIA base for two days now, and only just now was something exciting happening.

She used the word 'exciting' loosely.

Currently, she and the other mutants – sans Charles and Erik – were scouring the base for junk food and bottles of Coke, planning on hauling them into a room they'd designated the 'game room' (thanks to the presence of a single pinball machine – it was a helluva lot more than the other rooms had) for a bit of an impromptu party. It was closer to her idea of fun than clubbing, like Raven had suggested; it may have been a bit bland, but Shiloh didn't even own 'club' clothing (and she wasn't about to borrow some of Raven's clothes – they may have been roughly the same height, but Raven was definitely curvier). Clubbing was more for girls like Raven and Angel anyways – the girls who either had the confidence or had the ability to fake it, the girls who liked getting all dolled up, the ones who could thrive on human interaction.

Human nature aside, Shiloh was not a particularly social creature.

Their pathetic little shindig had actually managed to go on for something like an hour before they all found themselves perched in chairs and on table edges, spread around the room and actually talking (Shiloh is pretty sure she's only surprised by that because back home, her and her friends were more into either spending all their time causing trouble or sitting in the room reading who knows what). It starts out as idle chit-chat, people talking about how weird it is to be here, how different it is from before, things like that, and progressed into talk of powers and code names. She's not sure she wants them to know hers – not both of them, anyways – but she figures it's better if she's completely honest. It makes sense, right? They're all on the same side; it would be a strictly need to know thing. Nobody outside of this room (and, well, Charles and Erik, surely) would ever have to know a thing.

"We're government agents now; we should have secret code names. I want to be called Mystique." Raven said with a grin.

"Damn, I wanted to be called Mystique," Sean said with a roll of his eyes, eyeing Raven as he took a drink.

"Well tough, I called it," Raven stated before she transformed into a perfect copy of Sean in a flurry of blue, leaving the rest of the people in the room to look both confused and amazed. "Besides, I'm way more mysterious than you." Still shifted, Raven continued to stare at the real Sean, who looked quite scared, for a moment longer before she shifted back, the same strange rush of blue crossing her skin. "What about you?"

Sean looked vaguely put out for a moment, as though he was both expecting her to change back into him and truly irritated with her having claimed the name 'Mystique'. "I wanna be… Banshee."

Shiloh's brows rose and she snorted. "You wanna be named called 'Banshee'?" She'd grown up reading stories about things like that – banshees and brownies and boggarts and other strange things – because she'd had a babysitter who was heavily into the myths, something about her family being really involved in the occult or something like that (she didn't remember clearly, she'd been fairly young when she'd had that babysitter, and not much older when that babysitter had left). Personally, the brunette thought they were a load of shit.

"Why do you want to be named after a wailing spirit?" Hank queried.

Sean had the decency to smile sheepishly. "You might wanna cover your ears." He waited until everyone had done so before, Shiloh assumed, attempting to direct his shriek at the glasses on the table, only to miss entirely and hit the large window on the other side of the room. Everyone laughed.

"My stage name is Angel… It kind of fits," Angel stated when she was singled out. She stood and removed her jacket, revealing her wings.

"You can fly?" Raven gasped out at the same time that Shiloh managed to spit out "You have wings?"

"Uh-huh. There's also this…" Angel turned and spit at the statue outside – an acidic hiss was clearly audible, even from this distance. The laughter started up once again – it seemed the statue was the unofficial target of the night.

Eager to avoid the attention for a bit longer once the laughter had died down, Shiloh grinned. "'ey, Darwin, how 'bout you?"

"Well, Darwin's already a nickname… And it fits: 'adapt to survive', and all… Check this." Everyone watched as he approached the fish tank, bending just enough to plunge his head into the water. Gills formed on the side of his neck almost immediately, allowing him to breath underwater.

Shiloh couldn't honestly say that, whatever she had been expecting, that was not it. However, it was pretty neat – and she had to admit that she was a bit jealous, because that was a mutation that had to come in handy more often than not.

As Darwin pulled his head from the tank and shook away the water, he turned his attention to the group. "What's your name?" He directed at Hank, who looked a little bit uncomfortable with the situation.

"How about 'Bigfoot'?" Alex suggested, half-joking, half-serious.

"Well, you know what they say about men with big feet," Raven jumped in, glaring at Alex as Hank looked away. "And yours are kinda small."

Shiloh cracked a grin, shaking her head at the irritated look on Alex's face. He'd had that one coming. "Okay, okay, breakin' up the tension here –" She'd hoped to be able to throw someone up to bat, so to speak, but never got a chance, because next Raven was asking her about her power. She almost winced as she stood. "Well, I don't' know 'bout a name that doesn't make me sound like dog, but I can, uh, create and control electricity," she explained, holding up a hand and snapping a couple of times, willing the electricity to her fingertips to arc and crackle. I'm also, a, uh… Low-level empath."

Sean looked confused by the word 'empath' – she wasn't surprised. However, she didn't have the chance to explain, because Hank had already jumped in to do so.

"She can sense, possibly feel our emotions." Hank explains, and she's fairly certain about as much as he knows how to dumb things down, and he'd even seemed to have some difficulty with that (which isn't even close to shocking, as Hank is nothing short of incredibly brilliant, if equally as socially awkward).

When Sean looks to her a moment later like he's asking for confirmation, she nods. "I only really get, uh, bits and pieces, y'know? I don't really feel it – or, I haven't, anyways – but I can kind of… See it. Like each feeling is a colour, sorta, and varyin' degrees of emotions and similar emotions are just different shades of the same colour, if that makes any sense at all." She notices that Sean doesn't look like the subject is any clearer to him, but he nods regardless, so she doesn't continue explaining and sits back down. She isn't sure how much more clearly she could explain that without a drawing – and she's awful at drawing. "I guess I could go with, with... Synergy. I mean, sorta covers everything, I guess."

Raven nodded at her, and then it's quiet for a little bit before Darwin asks, "What is your gift, Alex?"

"I can't. I can't do it," Alex said, frowning, "Not here."

"Could you do it outside?" Darwin asked, motioning towards the destroyed window. "Come on!"

"Yeah, c'mon!" Shiloh and Sean chip in simultaneously.

After a bit more heckling, Alex reluctantly agrees to show off his abilities, standing, stepping over the glass and disappearing to the right of the window. "Get down when I tell you." He waits until everyone agrees and he sees them peering around the corner. Clearly, he resists the urge to roll his eyes. "Get back," he orders.

They obey, but only briefly. They're all practically falling over each other, trying to peer around the corner and see his power.

"Whatever."

As they watched, Alex began to shift his body, discs of energy appearing around his body, all turning at different angles. When he stopped and thrust his chest forward, the rings left his body, flying forward to destroy several parts of the area outside, the most noteworthy slicing the statue in half.

Shiloh grinned and let out a sharp whistle, impressed. "That was hardcore, man."


From there, the 'party' had escalated fairly quickly. Where it had dragged on from the start, the lot of them trying to make small talk, now they had all split off into little groups: Angel and Raven were off to one side dancing, Darwin and Alex were playing pinball (or, rather, Alex was kicking Darwin's ass at pinball), and Sean openly eyeing Angel and Raven between snippets of laughter-riddled conversation with Hank and Shiloh.

"Sean, you could at least try to be discreet 'bout your starin'," Shiloh said, snorting when Sean turned back to her with a frown. "If you stare at 'em like a creep, you don't have a chance, man." Sean just makes a noncommittal noise before returning to dividing his attention evenly between paying attention to the conversation and staring like, well, a creep. In fact, Shiloh's pretty sure he's now going out of his way to make his leering more obvious, just to spite her. While she knows some girls from back home wouldn't mind in the least (they'd be glad for the attention and glad they didn't have to decipher any vague signals), most of them would probably start a fight with Sean over this.

Most of her female friends are from what her parents call 'the wrong side of the tracks'. They're less catty, but twice as likely get physical if you start something; she figures it's a fair enough trade. It's not like she has a lot of female friends - about six, tops, and four of them are from the bad end of town.

"Boys," she eventually says with a roll of her eyes, turning her attention to Hank and giving him a wide grin to assure him that she was, in fact, listening to him, and she was not under the impression that she fell into the same category as Sean. As she opened her mouth to speak again, she paused, frowned, and cast a quick glance around. She was fairly certain that she'd heard something, she just wasn't sure what. "You guys hear that?" When she was met with silence, her frown deepened. She was half-convinced that she'd just been hearing things until she heard it again: a faint sound like she'd always envisioned accompanying a puff of smoke in a magician's act. "There, that! Y'hear it now?"

Darwin nodded. "Yeah, yeah, I hear it."

For a long, almost uncomfortable moment, it was completely silent, before they could hear the same sound just outside the window. She wasn't sure what it was, but she was damn sure she didn't like it, because it was making her nervous. From there, everything went to hell in a damned hand basket. It turned out that they had been tracked down by a mutant named Sebastian Shaw and his rag-tag band of batshit crazy mutants. He preached about humans being inferior, about wanting to claim the mutants' rightful place at the top of the world, so to speak. It should have been easy to guess, from the way he'd had his teleporter bouncing around, dropping humans from insane heights to explode on the ground below (and oh, had they ever exploded - it was awful).

"Or you can join me and live like kings... And queens."

That last line seemed to be all the incentive Angel needed to join the man who'd just had several dozen innocent people killed (they may have been assholes, but that didn't warrant their deaths, did it?).

"Angel!" Raven gasped, frowning.

"Are you kiddin' me?" Sean seemed the most shocked by it - but that may have just been that he hadn't been struck dumb by what had just happened.

For a moment, Angel looked torn, frowning at the group that she'd been friends with only moments go. "Come on, we don't belong here." She sighed. "And that's nothing to be ashamed of."

Silence settled over the group, a silence that Raven quickly broke. "We have to do something."

"Far as I'm concerned," Shiloh said, eyeing Angel with disgust evident in her tone, "she wants to go with the asshole in the suit, it's her call."

In front of her, there was a brief scuffle between Alex and Darwin, before Darwin moved to follow Shaw and his gang through the broken window. "Stop. I'm comin' with you."

Shaw looked thrilled when he turned around. "Good choice. So, tell me about your mutation."

"I adapt to survive," Darwin said, cracking a smile. "So, I guess I'm comin' with you."

"I like that."

The moment Darwin was near enough to Angel, he pulled her close to him. "Alex!"

Alex rushed forward. "Get out!"

"Do it!"

Though every bit of her brain told her not to listen, to offer aid, Shiloh did as told, rushing out of the way of Alex's power. So, that's what that fight was about. She just hoped the plan they clearly had worked, because otherwise... Somebody's ass was grass, and she really hoped it wasn't any of theirs... But clearly, everything wasn't going to go according to plan. When she moved again, looked up, she saw that Shaw seemed to have absorb the energy from Alex's attack. Fuck.

"Protecting your fellow mutants? That's a noble gesture. Feels good." Shaw commented with a sick smile. As he finished speaking, he turned to Darwin, taking his chin in his hand and holding up the other. In it, Shiloh could see a ball of glowing red energy, which was pushed past Darwin's lips not a moment later. "Adapt to this." The group could only watch in horror as Darwin shifted through several forms, attempting to adapt to the large amount of energy. Before he finally disintegrated, he looked towards Alex, as if trying to convey how much he didn't want him to blame himself for this.

Shiloh slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. Honestly, she'd seen a lot in her life, but she'd never watched somebody die, let alone someone she had absolutely no chance of saving. She wasn't sure if she wanted to cry or deteriorate straight into hysterical laughter - maybe she'd end up skipping both of those things altogether and go straight to vomiting. This was just too much for her to handle. If she'd known what was in store when she'd agreed to go with Charles and Erik... Well, honestly, she probably still would have gone; she just would have had more time to prepare, find a way to save Darwin.

"Oh, god." The worst part of this was her empathic abilities - she could see the fear, the sorrow, the anger, she could read the sickness on all of them. Alex was the worst: there was clearly a part of him that completely blamed himself for Darwin's death, something he couldn't have stopped, not if they'd wanted a chance at getting Angel back. Darwin had known that, he had to have. For a moment, Shiloh had to shut her eyes, take a few deep breaths - it was almost overwhelming sensing what they felt, even more so when it mixed with her own emotions.

God, were they ever in for a long night.


The rest of their night was spent waiting, huddled together and mourning Darwin. She knew the others had drifted off at some point, but she'd ended up with her knees pulled to her chest, staring up at the sky; despite all her trying, she hadn't been able to sleep, so when the morning came, she was glad for the large sunglasses she had to perch on her face, hiding the dark circles that were bound to be present under her eyes.

"We've made arrangements for you to be taken home immediately."

Shiloh's head jerked up. Home. It'd barely been a week that she'd been away, and so much had happened. She couldn't go back under these circumstances, couldn't let her parents know about the danger.

"We're not goin' home," Sean stated simply. "He's not going back to prison."

"He killed Darwin!" Alex said in an attempt to back Sean's statement up.

"All the more reason for you to leave. This is over."

Raven shook her head. "Darwin's dead, Charles. And we can't even bury him."

Shiloh frowned, attempting to settle more into her seat between Alex and Sean. She was too tired for this argument, too tired to hear about death again; she needed a good night's rest before this was something she wanted to deal with.

"We can avenge him."

"Erik, a word, please."

The teens watched as the older mutants conversed in hushed tones. "If he seriously thought we were goin' home, your brother ain't half as smart as I gave him credit for, Raven," Shiloh said lightly, a weak attempt at lightening the mood.

"We'll have to train," Charles stated as he and Erik returned to the group, "all of us. Yes?"

"Yeah!" Shiloh and Alex said at the same time, prompting the girl to nudge the blond in the ribs with a half smile.

"Well, we can't stay here," Hank interjected with a frown. "Even if they re-open the department, it's not safe. We've got nowhere to go."

Charles almost smiled. "Yes, we do."