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Chapter Four

"How much farther?"

Remy gripped the steering wheel of the rental car to stop himself from slapping the shit out of the man in the passenger seat. It had been a long drive to D. C. Really long. In the last few hours he had learned more about the Japanese mutant then he ever had wanted to know, not the least of which were Shiro's secret love of Elvis Presley and his penchant for side-seat driving.

"We're close," Remy said through clenched teeth. "This is her street. House should be just up…" The answer died on his lips, drowned out by the wail of police sirens and firetrucks. The glow of red and blue light built on the horizon the closer they came to Lorna's address. He slowed the car and peered in disbelief out the windshield.

"What is it?"

"Police. Emergency crews. Lots of 'em. Something big happened." His guts clenched in outright fear at the growing light of the fire in the distance. "I'll give you three guesses where they're at."

Shiro's voice rose in panic. "We are too late?"

Sighing, Remy eased the car down the street past neighbors who had emptied their houses to stare at the scene. "Only one way to find out." He parked the car just outside the barrier of squad cars surrounding what was left of Lorna Dane's house.

"You cannot just walk up and ask those in authority!"

"Watch me." Unfolding his long legs, Remy stepped from the vehicle and into the pits of hell. The noise was deafening, shouts, sirens, and worried voices all rose in a fevered pitch over the roar and hiss of the firehoses. Where Lorna's house should have been was a raging inferno that sent a shower of sparks raining hot onto the sidewalk, and an army of firefighters rushed to douse the flames that climbed their way into the night sky. The smell and choke of thick black smoke shrouded the gathering crowd of spectators in an eerie orange glow, and dozens of police officers fought to keep the bodies back behind their barricade. Remy spied an ambulance to one side of the melee and made his way towards it with Shiro on his heels.

"Hold it!" A female officer, so short she barely reached Remy's shoulders, held up her hands to stop them. Over her head, Remy saw two paramedics wheel a stretcher towards the open back of the ambulance, and a tumble of their friend's neon green hair was visible beneath a respirator.

"Lorna!" Shiro yelled behind him.

Idiot, Remy thought, she can't hear you, but the officer raised an eyebrow at them.

"You know Miss Dane?"

"Yes. What has happened to her? Is she all right?" Shiro sounded agitated and his behavior was clearly making the petite brunette police officer suspicious.

"Take it easy, mon ami," Remy whispered, and placed a hand on Sunfire's shoulder, but Shiro shrugged it off violently.

"Take it easy, LeBeau? She is clearly injured, yet you tell me to take it easy!?"

The officer pushed her way between them. "Did he just call you LeBeau?"

It was on the tip of his tongue to lie, it was what he always did and he had hundreds of aliases and cover stories memorized and in the system, but for some reason, Remy did something he rarely did. He told the truth.

"Remy LeBeau. This is Shiro Yashida. We're some of Miss Dane's…co-workers."

She frowned. "I.D.s."

Remy pulled out his wallet, Shiro produced his passport. The officer's brown eyes flickered with a flash of pity as she looked from Shiro's passport photo to his now injured face, but only for a moment.

She handed back their documents. "A Remy LeBeau was listed as Miss Dane's emergency contact. I'm assuming she doesn't know more than one." She gestured to the ambulance that was pulling away from the scene with its lights screaming. "We're not exactly sure what happened, but it looks like an explosion caused by a gas leak. Your friend was unconscious when we found her. She got lucky. They're taking her to Memorial Hospital."

"Merci, cherie." Remy bowed and kissed the back of the officer's hand, and he and Shiro pushed back through the crowd.


His fingers closed around her delicate throat and squeezed, but he couldn't stop his own hands. Her green eyes widened in horror and despair but the monster inside him only laughed and gripped tighter.

"Remy!" she gasped. He couldn't fight what he had become, but he screamed from somewhere deep and silent for her to fight for him, to break free of his hold, even as he drowned in a black sea of nothingness in the pit of his mind. "But…I love you!"

The monster that was him just smiled, but to his shock, she smiled back, her expression a mirror image of Death. With the bare skin of her hands, she reached for the creature of Apocalypse and slowly drained him, the rotten decay of his flesh spreading over her beautiful skin…

Remy jumped awake, nearly toppling himself from the cracked vinyl chair, his heart hammering into his throat.

Shiro turned from his place in front of the hospital room's lone window. "Sleep well?" he asked, but Remy just flopped back into the uncomfortable chair and scrubbed his hands down his face.

Sighing, he glanced at the still unconscious Lorna. It was almost dawn, they had been here for hours keeping a near silent vigil over their friend. She hadn't stirred, baffling the doctors on duty. She showed no visible signs of injury despite her proximity to the explosion that had destroyed her home.

Remy swallowed a smartass remark when his phone buzzed in his pocket. His still tripping heart skipped a beat at the sight of Fence's number on the screen. "Tell me you got some good news for me, mon ami?"

Shiro scowled at Remy and stepped closer to eavesdrop.

"I found something, took a zoom off of somebody's web cam in a nearby high-rise. I don't know how good it is, it's pretty grainy. Cleaned it up the best I could, but I got a shot of what I think is your girl with two guys I've never seen before. At least I think I did." Remy's mouth went dry. "Sending it to your phone right now."

"Fence, I could kiss you!"

The computer whiz chuckled. "You may not be saying that after you see how crappy the footage is. I'm still working on cleaning it up, but hopefully it helps. I'll keep lookin'. Keep me in the loop, Remy."

Remy scowled at the photo. Grainy was being polite. There were three figures. One was Rogue, but he was only certain of that because he knew her body and stance anywhere. One figure was standing right next to her, but it looked like…not it, he, Remy thought…had green skin, but that could have been a trick of the pixels. The other…also a guy…was seated on the back of a park bench, wearing what looked to be Waldo's hat, but the image quality got really funky as the red and white stripes of the hat echoed oddly onto the man's face in continued black lines.

"What is it?" Shiro stood in front of him with his arms crossed over his chest.

"Fence, an IT guy I know, found a security camera that picked up Anna and the mutants she met with, but it's from so far away I can't really tell who they are." He frowned at the shot again and zoomed on Waldo. "Still, this one, there's somethin'…" The face of the mystery mutant fell in place like a line of dominoes. "Merde!" Remy groaned and leaned forward. "I'm such an idiot!"

Shiro rolled his eyes. "No one is disputing this fact. Do you wish to elaborate?"

"We been saying all along, it's like Anna vanished!" he flashed the screen at Shiro, who glared at the photo.

"Is that…Vanisher? I thought he was dead?"

"No body was ever found, and who hasn't died in this line of work only to miraculously rise from the grave?" He stood and started pacing angrily. "That son of a bitch! What does he want with Anna? What's his game?"

"And who is his partner?" Shiro had zoomed the photo out and pointed to the person standing next to Rogue. "The man with green skin?"

A small voice called from the hospital bed. "Did you say…green skin?"

"Lorna!" The men dashed to Polaris's bedside. Remy crouched and found her hand amongst the IV line and blankets. "Cherie, what happened? Are you all right?"

The neon green eyes that matched the swirling mass of curls on her head were unfocused, but they found Remy's. "Rogue happened."

He had to swallow before he spoke. "What are you talking about?"

She struggled to sit, but Shiro moved to the head of the bed and pushed her back down, then used the controls on the bed to raise her to an upright position. "Lorna, Rogue is missing. As you would suspect, Remy is quite agitated and concerned. If you have seen her…"

Her laugh was thick with phlegm. "Oh, I've seen her all right. She attacked me last night, and she had company!" Remy stood and covered his mouth with one hand while Shiro showed Lorna the image Fence had sent. "That's them. Vanisher…and Mesmero."

"Mesmero?" Shiro asked incredulously, and Remy shared his disbelief. Mesmero, an X-Men baddie from back in the day, had lost his powers along with tens of thousands of other mutants on M-Day.

She glared at them. "I'd know that bastard anywhere. I don't know how he got his powers back, but he has. He tried to get his hooks into me, but I know his little game. There's no way I'm letting anyone take control of me like that again."

Before being de-powered, the mutant known as Mesmero had supposedly been the world's greatest hypnotist. He had once convinced a squad of X-Men that had included Storm, Wolverine, and the Phoenix masquerading as Jean Grey, that they were circus performers, keeping them hostage for days.

A bad feeling gnawed at Remy's stomach, and Lorna confirmed it. "They popped right into my living room, the three of them. Mesmero tried his crap, and when that failed, Rogue attacked me, but it wasn't her, Remy. It was like she wasn't in the driver's seat. I tried to talk to her, but her eyes were just…blank. We fought…"

"And destroyed your home," Shiro stated flatly.

She groaned. "Yeah, that was me. I didn't mean to, but it got out of control. She was so strong! Where did she pick that up again? She nearly broke my arm! After the explosion, I landed in the backyard. The last thing I remember was her standing over me. Then, nothing. I blacked out."

Fuck, fuck, fuck, Remy screamed inside. "They're controlling her!? I gotta find her!" He rushed for the door, but stopped. Why would they need Rogue? If they had Mesmero, they could control anyone they wanted, whoever they were. There must be something specifically that Rogue could do that no one else could…there was only one thing that sprang to mind. "Lorna, do you remember, did Anna…touch you?"

Lorna blinked a few times. "Yeah, she did. Right before I blacked out. But…" she lifted a finger and used her magnetic powers to raise the bedside rail. "I still have my powers."

"Hers don't work like that anymore. She can borrow somebody's but still leave them use of their own."

"How long can she hold onto powers?"

Remy shrugged. "Not sure. During that Phoenix Five crap, she had Bobby Drake's powers for days at a time."

"What are you thinking?" Shiro asked quietly.

Shaking his head, Remy reached for the door handle. "I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud. I better let Rogers know what we found, see if they've got anything."


If finals didn't kill her, they might at least send her to the chiropractor.

Jean Grey gave her backpack a secret telekinetic boost to get it off the table, and headed out of the library and into a night crisp with new fallen snow. She trudged slowly back to her dorm room, lost in thought.

ESU's campus was pretty enough for being smack in the heart of New York City, but Jean sorely missed the sprawling woods surrounding Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters almost as much as she missed the man himself. She sighed deeply. Her world had been turned topsy-turvy by Hank McCoy, or at least an older version of the boy who was her friend and teammate. She and her fellow X-Men had come forward into the future to stop a mutant genocide supposedly perpetrated by one of their own, but they had gotten stuck here, and had all been forced to make the best of a lousy situation.

Jean had learned way too much about the woman she was meant to become, and ever since had been trying desperately to avoid that same fate, wanting nothing more than to fade into the background of humanity, to live a normal life, but thanks to the actions of the older version of her ex-boyfriend Scott Summers, Cyclops, that normal life now seemed impossible. Mutants, Inhumans, M-Pox, and Terrigen Mists were on everyone's minds these days, and if anybody knew what was on everyone's minds, it was Jean. Her arrival in the future had caused the emergence of latent telepathic powers that made it extremely difficult to drown out the fears, the wants, the desires of those around her, but she was trying and getting better at it every day. Her parents, the Professor, and now even Scott, were all dead, though not her Scott. Her Scott only hated her.

She sniffed and angrily scrubbed the tears that had formed with the back of her furry mittens. Stupid cow, she scolded herself. Do you think the great Jean Grey of this time, the holier-than-thou host of the cosmic force known as the Phoenix, cried over her ex-boyfriends? There had to have been a mistake. Some joke of the timestream. There was no way, Jean thought, no way that in just a few years' time she could save the universe like the other she had. How could anyone live up to expectations like that?

A funny popping noise interrupted her pity party and by reflex she cast out a net of inquiry with her telepathic power, finding three new minds in her area that hadn't been there before. Barring her way on the sidewalk was a man and a woman, and the woman was familiar to Jean. Rogue, was it? Jean slowed her steps and reached out with her power, shocked at what she felt. In her mind, the Rogue she knew was silently screaming for Jean to run away, the woman's astral form pounding on an invisible barrier that prevented her from controlling her own body.

'Who?' Jean's psychic essence floated in Rogue's mind. 'Who is doing this to you?' In the real world, Jean Grey's body backed away slowly, her telekinetic powers at the ready. Her telepathy was still new to her, and it was so hard to use both powers at once, to split her focus.

Images flooded her mind from Rogue's, the face of a brutishly handsome man Jean didn't recognize. Rogue had battled this man nearly to the death and barely won, but now it seemed he was looking for revenge.

From behind the barrier, Rogue's eyes widened and she mouthed 'Behind you!'

Jean's body thudded into someone who held her fast. "Long time, no see, sweetheart," a voice hissed hot into her ear, and she felt a numbness spreading over her.

Rogue and the other man closed the distance between them, and before Jean could stop Rogue, the woman pressed a cold, bare hand to Jean's forehead. No time for thought, Jean reacted on pure reflex and shoved them all away with her powers, rocketing herself into the night sky. Miles away, she landed with a thud into an alley, panicked gulps of breath sending huge puffs of smoke streaming into the air.

"Get a grip!" she mumbled to herself, wobbling when she tried to stand. She leaned against a rough brick wall.

Mesmero, she realized as she replayed the scene in her mind. And Vanisher! She knocked her head back against the wall. Some big hero, she had run like a scared rabbit, and left a fellow X-Man behind with the bad guys! Somebody had to know, she had to tell someone what had happened so they could help Rogue.

Kicking herself, Jean pictured her backpack still lying in a heap on the ESU sidewalk, miles away, but luckily her phone was in the pocket of her puffer jacket. Her hands were shaking when she found Ororo's number. Cellphones. So strange how attached people had become to these things. Storm didn't answer and Jean was on the verge of tears again. Who could she call?

She bit her lip. There was Storm's friend, the gorgeous guy with the accent and the five o'clock shadow. Ororo had said in case of an emergency, he would still be on Earth…