Hello there! :) Here's chapter 3, I hope you like it and you Keep on reading! Annika x

Chapter 3: Nightcrawler's return

Here in the mansion they always spoke of me in the third person, or even better, of „her", not caring if I was present or not, that's what I noticed the next days.

If someone had seen her (Sorry, but that's like the worst joke I've ever heard!).

If they could trust her.

If someone had spoken to her.

Or, best one: How much news Magneto found out about the X-Men now.

This egocentric bunch of complete idiots. Possibly none of them had ever made any mistakes. Well I admit, joining Magneto had been pretty bad if I thought about it now, but how should Charles Xavier and his mutants ever find out about me and answer all their questions if none of them spoke to me? Or even thought about it?

Well, I actually had had a few conversations, but they had either been cold and unfriendly (with that horrible bitch Jean Grey) or with my reflection in the mirror about what I did with all of my spare time here.

Reading child book classics.

The whole fucking day long.

When I was done with Oliver Twist I started Anne of Green Gables, then Moby Dick, worked my way through Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit. But after one and a half weeks of constant reading, when the last thing I held in my hands was Winnie-the-Pooh, I was close to having another one of my good old rage eruptions, during my time with Magneto probably the only state in which I could have gotten quite dangerous for Sabretooth.

Fine, I was safe in this school, but I was too old to attend the actual classes or at least it seemed embarrasing to ask the professor about it.

I needed an adventure, or at least a bit of difference!

I got it on my nineteenth day in the mansion in the form of a mental call to all the mutants in the institute that had already come off age, also reaching me.

Nightcrawler is back. Come to my office.

I had no idiea who or what that Nightcrawler was, but I predicted him to be a mutant that had been on a mission somewhere and had to be welcomed now. I just didn't understand what role I was to play in there.

Of course, I had two theories, but one was unlikely, the other one virtually inhumane.

Either the X-Men trusted me now or they wanted to exhibit me in front of others of their kind like a piece of meat.

I walked into the professors office squeezed in between Wolverine, the only one who looked at me from time to time, and Storm, that I had only talked once to to date, and that conversation laid back three years now and we had been chained to a wall after a clash with a mutant hunter, so we had been in more or less the same predicament. That's why I believed that her opinion of me wasn't too negative. Probably not positive either, but neutral like that, she was way better than the rest.

It was the first time I saw all the mutants of the X-Men in one room.

Jean Grey and Scott Summers a.k.a. Cyclops stood next to the board, hand in hand. They both gave me unfriendly looks when I glanced at them for a second, which I would have loved to answer with a sticked out tongue, but with 23 years of age I found that a but too childish (even though they weren't acting more grown up either!).

To Scott's left there was a man in his early thirties, leaning to the desk in a kind of casual way, who was having a coolness competition with Logan, or at least that was what it looked like. His dark hair was mostly falling into his face, even though he had tried to repress it into a ponytail with a ribbon in the back of his head. He was wearing a brown cloak with long arms, that reached him to his ancles. He was spinning around a deck of cards in his hands. He was French (I guess …) and his name was Remy LeBeau, as a mutant Gambit. He lived close to Xavier's school and showed up here once in a while, apart from that he apparently spent loads of time in close-by casinos and fooled people out of their money by using his powers. I didn't know what his actual mutation was, but I did know that he liked poker cards to play a role in using them. To be honest, I dound him really interesting and attractive, but he had this look he liked to give everyone, that made me nervous and that felt like thousands of little electric shocks everywhere on my body.

Storm was standing next to him. Her white hair was perfectly straight like always and she herself was standing straight like a stick, struggling with represent her role model function, which she had for the students as a teacher, also when she was with the other mutants.

With a hand gesture she told me to sit down on the chair next to her. I followed her silent request and sat down, in a perfect angle to watch Logan who was standing next to the door smoking his cigar, giving Gambit cold looks, but at the same time watching the professor who was sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the half circle of grown up mutants.

Something inside me was really curious about the new guy – or should I say, the guy coming back? – but on the other hand I was sure that he wasn't different from all the others in this room, so I wasn't missing anythings in the time he wasn't here.

The creepiest thing about him was, that he made us wait for a long time and we were all just silent.

But then …

I jerked.

Right next to me a tall man suddenly appeared out of nothing, leaving a cloud of dark blue fog.

My heart was still beating faster than usual, when he walked towards the professor with an elegant walk and friendly shook his hand. I only realized now that something was wrong with him. He was a mutant obviously, and furthermore a teleporter, but he seemed to be not even human.

He indeed had the figure of a normal slim young man, but on the height of his tailbone, he had a tail, a long and dark blue one that ended in seomething that looked like an arrow. His skin seemed to be blue, that's what I gathered from the color of his tail and the hand, that was shaking the professor's. And as if that wasn't enough, that hand only had three fingers, two normal ines and a thumb, all of them fat and round.

I shuddered again when he turned around to greet the other X-Men standing around me. His face wasn't disfigured, the small scars that were writing signs into his face gave him something mystic and made him just as attractive as I found Logan and Remy LeBeau privily, but his eyes were yellow and his teeth sharp. And there was something about him that made me have a lot of respect for him. Maybe it was the fact that he looked like I imagined a demon to look like?

The suit and the pretty shoes he was wearing really didn't go with that warrior-look.

He said a few words to Storm and he others and I was suprised how clear and friendly his voice sounded, even though he had a slight accent, German perhaps.. But what surprised me even more – and the others as well – was that he nodded to me before he left the room.