Notes: Okay, but now that song is stuck in my head... But yeah, Emma... has always been about getting in Scott's head and trying to twist him into who SHE wants him to be, so this? This is sadly no surprise.

Chapter 3: "Too Many Telepaths"

"Okay, who are we dealing with in there — exactly?" Logan asked Rachel as they made their approach to the new Hellfire headquarters.

There was a touch of fire in her gaze as she had one hand outstretched to focus on the building in front of them. She was not happy about the Hellfire Club coming after her father — especially when she had been enjoying seeing him with her new little brother all warm and contented. "Not too many this time," she muttered. "Emma and her stupid Cuckoos… feels like … Sebastian Shaw, Selene ... somebody new, too."

"Not too many — but all of their nasty hitters," Logan replied with a little frown. "Too damn many telepaths."

Rachel gave him a bit of a look. "That's sort of the point."

"You can't hold 'em all off either, can you?" He had an expression that clearly read he was trying to come up with something — and fast.

"Not just me, no," Rachel said with a frown. "Not without help."

"Yeah, don't … do that," Logan said softly. "I think … we can do this without that kinda help." He got up and left Kurt to fly as he headed to the back of the plane to look through what Hank had on hand for 'toys'. In the middle of the boxes of discarded collars and restraints, he found a fairly impressive dampener field generator that he wasn't entirely sure was functional.

"Hey, Petey, can you see if this thing works?" Logan asked before he tossed the machine his way.

Peter raised his eyebrows at it for a second before he started tinkering with it. "Hold on, please," he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, half mumbling to himself for a few minutes before he nodded triumphantly and tossed it back. "Works now."

Logan flipped it on and turned to Rachel. "What number am I thinking of?"

She frowned at him for a moment, then couldn't help the little smirk as she shook her head. "Not a clue."

"Great; we'll use this then." He flipped it off and tossed it back to Peter. "Web that thing up in the middle of the damn room when we get there so they can't tear it down and flip it on. We can beat them easy if we keep 'em out of our heads."

"Easy 'nuff," Remy agreed with a growing smile as Peter nodded and tucked the machine away.

"Just need you and K to keep from getting shot all to hell and back," Rachel pointed out. "Is that possible?"

"Maybe," K replied with a little shrug. "One way to find out."

The little group of heros began to plot on how best to approach the situation, and it was decided that Rachel would do all she could to block Spiderman from their telepaths to give him a chance to get inside and set up the dampener field while the ferals — Logan, K, and Tyler as well — made a distraction and Kurt and Remy searched for Scott.

As planned, the three ferals took off to circle around and hit what they thought looked like the weak point in the place's security so it at least looked like an actual attempt to hit them. "Come on, Kitten Whiskers," K half sang. "You get to learn how to be distracting."

"I'm not already?" Tyler joked, gesturing at himself.

"No, you're really not," she teased. "Startling sometimes, yes. But not distracting." They got well past the security — more or less taking the same route Scott had used to get in — and almost made it all the way to the door when they were, predictably, busted.

For Tyler, it was a very different sensation to the practice Rachel had put the students through in teaching telepathic self-defense. This was way more unexpected and hurt a heck of a lot more when he hit the ground, along with both Logan and K, as the Cuckoos hit all three of them in a psychic attack.

"You don't belong here," the three of them said in unison. "You're not welcome or wanted here."

"We just came—"

"He doesn't want you here either," they said, cutting Logan off before he could even finish his sentence.

"All the same, I gotta hear it from him first, girls," Logan argued.

But before the Cuckoos could answer, there was a loud shout from inside the house as well as a crash. "O-kay! Telepathy is turned off but they are looking at me and it's creeping me out!"

"On our way," Logan called back before he led the charge through the three blondes, who simply scattered on seeing him rushing them. The three ferals made it past them, but they'd regrouped in time to try and stop Spidey from joining the other heroes. And it was clear Peter did not appreciate the hive-mind approach at all as they continued their creepy speaking-together routine as they surrounded him.

"How do you make them stop that?" Peter called out.

"Hit 'em real hard," Logan called back before Sebastian Shaw grabbed a hold of him and threw him across the room, half knocking the sense out of him.

"Right. Forgot who I was asking," Peter grumbled to himself, which had Tyler chuckling a bit as he ran over to try and help the creeped-out spider — though it was clear both Tyler and Peter were having a bit of trouble hitting the slight blonde girls.

Sebastian didn't give Logan any time to recover before he started working him over — and for the first time that Tyler had seen, Logan was taken off-guard nearly right off the bat. But that wasn't bound to last for too long as K made her way toward Shaw's blind spot like a freight train and did her level best to kick a field goal with his face.

"Hit them!" K shouted as she squared up with Shaw, who didn't look like he quite knew what to do with himself when he wasn't absorbing every blow landed on him. "I would trade you, but I'm being territorial."

That got a bit of a smirk from Tyler as he took the hint and seized one of the Cuckoos by the back of her shirt and tossed her toward K. "Here — I'll help with the trade."

Logan was getting to his feet as the little blonde squeaked mid-flight and K rushed Shaw to try and knock him back toward Tyler. She was hauling back to give him a right hook when she saw a black-haired woman trying to get up to the dampener. "Oh, that's a little too early in the game," K muttered, missing her shot at hitting Shaw but getting cracked in the mouth herself instead. She hit the ground hard and wasn't getting up nearly as quickly as she was used to — but that seemed to be exactly the fuel Logan and Tyler needed to turn it around on Shaw fast and hard.

Tyler had tossed aside the other two Cuckoos on his way bounding over to Shaw — so Peter found himself free to spot Selene as she was trying to cut through his webbing. "Oh, no you don't!" he called out, webbing her hands to the wall quickly. "No, I had to sneak through the creepy castle to do that. I don't want to know about the looks and the powers, no thank you."

While Logan headed toward Shaw with a snarl that did not match his stance in the least, Tyler went over to help K upright and tried to check her over, shaking his head almost right away, convinced that Shaw had hit her hard enough to concuss her at least a little bit, since she wasn't quite responding like herself.

And with Tyler looking after K, Logan had gone entirely the opposite of his usual attack strategy and was nearly toying with Shaw with a highly-disciplined repertoire that used every little bit of martial arts that he knew — all but dancing around him as he delivered some wicked damage to one pressure point after another.

In the meantime, Kurt was with Remy and Rachel as they tried to locate their missing team leader. With the dampener on, it was no simple matter, as they couldn't just teleport from room to room and Rachel couldn't search out his mind, but Remy, on the other hand, had absolutely zero problems getting them into each room, seeming to honestly enjoy the chance to stretch his lockpicking legs on some of the very old doors.

They were moving room to room as Rachel grew steadily more impatient at how long it was taking. But finally, they knew they'd found the right floor when they heard a bit of a commotion further down the hall.

"Stop playing games, Emma. Where is Annie?" they heard Scott half-shouting.

"There he is," Kurt said as all three of them broke into a run.

When they burst into the lavish room, they found Scott on his feet, though he was blindfolded, and shaking in rage. Emma was picking herself up when the trio of rescuers burst in, and whatever silky explanation she might have offered to Scott died on her tongue when she saw the X-Men.

Emma thrust out a hand, but whatever psychic attack she might have tried to use simply didn't work. In an instant, both Remy and Kurt had burst forward to tear her down, while Rachel went to Scott with a frown — she didn't have to be able to read his mind to know he was livid.

"It's me, it's Rachel," she said before she did anything else so that Scott knew what was going on, though he still looked half-unsure when she took his arm. "What's with the blindfold?"

"I can't control it," Scott said, and Rachel frowned harder at the tone in his voice. "I don't know what happened."

Rachel wasn't sure if it was part of Emma's games or if Scott really was having trouble. "It's okay; we've got a dampening field up."

He paused at that, clearly still half afraid to trust anything that was going on, but when he heard Emma cry out when Remy hit her with his bo staff, he seemed to decide she wasn't screwing with him for the moment and untied the blindfold.

"You okay?" she asked when he looked her way.

He nodded, the expression of pure fury obvious as he looked Emma's way even as Kurt hit her with the back of his hilt and she went sprawling to the floor. "Where's Annie?" he asked before he did anything else.

"Don' worry. Miss Annie back at de house with Miss Kate and de kids," Remy said with a sideways grin. "She's more worried 'bout you den anythin' else."

"Let's get you back to her," Kurt said with a nod, and the four of them burst out into the hallway at a run, ready to leave the house behind and get out.

While Logan seemed to be faring well, Spidey had again found himself surrounded by Cuckoos, and the girls had apparently remembered everything from Logan's self defense classes and were turning it on Spidey with a rather large amount of malice for having been called creepy. And Tyler made sure that K was sitting down away from the trouble while she still looked dazed and rushed to Spider Man's help to fight the girls.

But while they were distracted, Selene had been working hard at getting her hands free. She didn't pay K the least bit of attention as she got loose and then rushed to a desk in the sitting room nearby to rifle through it — retrieving the handgun that was hidden there.

She clearly wasn't entirely familiar with it, though, as she tried to take aim at the dampener webbed to the ceiling. Her first shot was wide, and it startled everyone in the room and seemed to wake K up a bit from her daze. Logan rushed forward and threw an elbow into Shaw's face to knock him out, and as he hit the ground, Selene turned her sights on him and tried to level the weapon his way.

She was just starting to pull the trigger when K launched herself at the vampire and disarmed her with an echoing crack that promised something was broken. Selene screamed and held her arm as K growled low in the middle of the room, glaring at her hard, though she was certainly still a bit punch drunk from the shot Shaw had landed on her earlier. Selene looked horrified at the fact that her injury had not yet healed, and she certainly didn't look like she wanted to take on the little feral without her powers, but K had already decided she wasn't going to put up with anyone else trying to take aim at her family and friends.

When Tyler saw K trying to circle Selene into a corner, he had to warn her. "You shouldn't be taking any more hits," he called out.

K barely looked his way before Selene struck her — the problem of course being that even though the Black Queen was a mutant, she was also a magic user. And seeing as she was unable to tap into her abilities, she used what she did have access to. Selene used her magic to fight K, and though K found her way around many of the little spells to get her shots in, it wasn't long before Selene simply got the upper hand.

The little feral found herself frozen to the spot as Tyler, Peter, and Logan all pushed hard to put the Cuckoos on the ground where they couldn't do any more damage than they already had. Logan had just knocked one out when a man's voice to his left called out, ordering him to stop fighting.

He frowned and turned toward the newcomer with a look of confusion as the man kept talking and approaching him slowly. Logan simply… watched, unsure what the heck this guy was on to be talking to him like that, When the guy got a little too close and told him to turn on Peter and Tyler, Logan began to growl an instant before he punched the guy square in the face. The adamantium-laced punch had some serious trouble behind it; the man's front teeth broke off, and he stumbled backward in total shock, his hand covering his mouth as he staggered and Logan approached him.

"Stop," he said to Logan, who simply growled lower and began to pull himself into a snarl. And at that, the man finally wised up, turned tail, and ran the other way, zipping out what Logan thought was an exit before very suddenly, he felt the familiar buzz of his healing factor working overtime, erasing his injuries.

Just like that, it struck him what kind of trouble his wife was likely in, and he flat out ran back toward where K had been fighting Selene.

In the hallway, Scott and the others quickly realized that the powers had been turned back on when they felt, for just a second, the prick of a psychic attack that was quickly quenched as Rachel turned with a cry of fury to face Emma, who looked absolutely furious that her plans had been interrupted.

Rachel didn't bother with defense; she jumped straight into offense and tore through Emma's psychic barriers, raw anger and a whole lot of pent-up "wish I'd done this ages ago" plowing right into Emma's head as she went, the edges of her attack searing and burning where she broke through.

Emma's defenses were good — of course they were — but they were melting in the face of Rachel's raw power. So instead, Emma went on the offensive, trying to provoke Rachel into either drawing back or losing her concentration. She poured memories into Rachel's mind of the years she'd spent with Scott — half of it real and half of it fantasies of what else she would like to do just to get Rachel upset enough to lose her control. When Rachel did seem to shift her attention for a moment, Emma poured it on hotter — memories more than fantasies of what she was able to get away with, even what Jean had allowed without argument. And then memories of how she was already working to sow doubts in Scott's mind with his newest "plaything," as Emma described Annie — a way to win him back over as she always did when he felt he had no one.

I always get what I want. That was the clear message — and she had the evidence to back it up.

But Rachel wasn't going to put up with that. She rallied — hard. And when she did, she threw back all the misery that she knew Emma had caused — all the discord, all the trouble. She made sure to show her how much the White Queen was distrusted by her father, how much happier he was with anyone but Emma, and followed it up by turning Emma's own deeply-buried secrets and fears against her until she simply couldn't handle it and, with a gasp, shifted into her diamond form.

You have been getting what you want, Rachel projected to her as her eyes flashed with fire and she forced Emma out of her diamond phase. But it's high time you got what you deserved.

Emma's eyes widened as she moved to block Rachel's continuing attack — and found that she simply couldn't. It wasn't even that she had no defenses; she couldn't find that control, that sense that was her telepathy. Where she should have been able to reach it, her mind felt slippery, hard to hold on to, and she let out a shout. "You can't do this to me," she said in near disbelief.

"I already did," Rachel replied simply as a very widely smirking Remy decided to help her along by slamming the end of his bo staff into Emma's temple.

"It's high time we left dis place," he said Rachel's way. "I'm tinkin' we kin say we done what we came for an' more, non?"

"Oui," Rachel replied with a little smirk as she took Scott's arm — he was once again reluctant to risk opening his eyes the second he realized the powers were back on, and Rachel wasn't entirely sure herself what Emma had done when Emma's focus had been more on her broader plans than the specifics.

When Rachel, Kurt, Scott, and Remy made their way downstairs, they were in time to see Selene's exit as she simply dropped K in a heap, having taken what she wanted of her life force and stalking off. Tyler and Spidey both recoiled on her passing as Logan tried to rush toward Selene in a rage.

"I didn't kill her for you," Selene called out to Logan as her heels clicked against the marble floors. "I simply taught her a lesson for crossing me."

Logan turned to head back toward K, but before he could do much of anything, the group of heroes found themselves again under attack. Two of the Cuckoos had staggered back to their feet while the rest of the heroes were distracted by Selene — and what's more, it looked like more goons and reinforcements were coming to cover the Hellfire Club's exit.

With K down and Scott still unsure of his powers, Kurt decided to take the two of them out of the fight, teleporting first K and then Scott to the waiting blackbird.

"K had a run-in with Selene," he explained quickly as he led Scott to sit next to her. "Until we get her home, she'll need someone with her." He didn't give either of them a chance to protest as he disappeared again in a poof of smoke.

Scott let out a breath before he reached out until he found K's shoulder and gave her a reassuring squeeze. "You okay?"

"Sorry you're stuck here," she said quietly.

But he shook his head hard. "I'm sorry you had to come after me."

"I was hoping to even the score … but here we are."

"Yeah." He rested his hand on her arm and leaned back a bit.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Or should I go limp off and stab someone for you?"

"Pretty sure the rest of the team has that covered," he said dryly.

"Are you saying they don't need us or you don't want me to go stab someone?"

"I'm saying they don't need a limping and half-drained teammate and a blind leader."

"Something happen to you back there?" K asked, shifting in her seat a bit to try and look him over better.

Of course, when she started to move, he tried to keep her from doing that, particularly when he could feel that she was shaking from the effort of trying to shift herself. "Hey — you should be resting. Selene's got a nasty bite," he said with a frown.

"Well, unless you're going to stop me …"

"You'll what — limp into battle and give her another snack?"

"Why not? I could stab a blonde on my way through," she replied.

"Don't," he said, sounding almost weary. "Just don't."

"Then tell me what's bothering you, or I'll go … to the back of the plane and be very quiet so you don't know if I'm here or not if you won't look at me."

He raised an eyebrow the slightest bit, his eyes still tightly closed as he gestured at his own face. "It's not obvious?"

"You don't smell like you were pepper sprayed, and if you were, it wears off faster if you open your eyes."

"You really don't want me to do that," he said.

"Of course I do. You've got pretty eyes for a grump ass."

He took a deep breath and shook his head. "Not gonna risk it, K. Not until we get back and we can get somewhere I know I won't blast a hole in the blackbird — or in you."

"Well, how about I just wander over and get you a collar? Then you can babysit me properly. Tell me how awful I look. That kind of thing." She paused for a moment and got an idea. "Might even need to have you fly the rest of them home."

"That… might not be a bad idea," he admitted after a moment.

"Okay then; I'll be right back," she promised, already pushing away from him to work her way to the rear of the plane where all that junk was sitting for whoever needed it. She took her time, looking at all of them, sure to call out that she didn't realize so many of them were broken before she found one that actually was broken but not easily discernible as being slashed or half cranked open.

When she got back, she simply handed it to him. "There you go. I won't put it on you, though. You have to do it yourself."

He almost smirked at her as he did it. "What — you actually get squeamish about something?"

"I don't want to endure the bondage jokes later," she clarified, half curling into her chair and feeling totally wiped out.

He leaned back and gave her a very dry look as he opened his eyes, though when he saw the way she was looking, he very quickly shifted from the dry look to one of more obvious concern. "You… yeah, you don't look so good," he said as he headed to one of the cabinets to get some of the emergency stash of food and water.

"I'll wait until we're back, thanks," she argued.

He handed her a water bottle anyway as he dropped back into the seat next to her. "Helps to rehydrate," he said simply.

"Just want to go to sleep," she said. "And Scott… take that stupid collar off. You don't need it, and you look ridiculous."

"I told you; I'm going to wait until we—"

"Scott … look me in the eyes," K said slowly, leaning toward him. When he raised both eyebrows but did just that, she smirked at him. "That collar is broken. You don't need it."

He stared at her for a moment, slightly wide-eyed, before looked almost angry. "You shouldn't have taken the risk."

"Rachel gave me the long and short before Kurt got me out — you're fine, outside of having one of the worst exes ever in the history of history."

He glared at her as he wrenched off the collar and shook his head. "Never did figure out how to get her to keep out of my powers," he muttered, mostly to himself.

"I'm sorry that I pulled a fast one on you," K told him. "Really. But after the job that witch pulled on you ... you don't need to go home with a complex."

"I'm fine. I just want to make sure we take the right precautions is all," he grumbled her way.

"I know," she said. "Shoot me if I made you that mad. You know... make sure it still works."

He rolled his eyes at her and then, just to do it, fired off a narrow beam that more or less melted the collar she'd used to trick him. "Seems to be working fine now."

"Good," she said with a tiny smirk. "So you can go help them if you want. I'm not going anywhere."

"They don't need me," Scott said, shaking his head.

"They might," she argued. "I'm just going to be sitting here; you don't need to stay here with me. Nothing really earth-shattering."

"If they need me, they'll call," Scott pointed out. "Told Kurt I'd look out for you. And besides, I could use a break myself." He tipped his head her way for just a second before he made himself more comfortable. "You going to sleep? I can get you a blanket."

"Yeah," she said quietly, her eyes already drifting shut. "Can't help it."

He smirked at her for a second before he got up to get a blanket and draped it around her shoulders for her. "You gonna fight me some more, or will you actually drink some of that water and go to sleep?"

"Do you want me to fight you some more?" she asked. "Because I was planning on just going to sleep."

He rolled his eyes. "Good night, K."

"Sweet dreams, big guy," she replied. "Or … whatever."