Disclaimer: See other chapters.

First Impressions

It had, Magneto decided, turned out slightly better than he'd hoped. He'd only planned on ending up with one new recruit (if Sabretooth could be counted as just one) and had instead ended up with three. The boy, Toad, he wasn't sure about, but Mystique had seemed to think highly of him. The other one, Gambit, he would need paying, but Magneto was not planning on going short of cash.

They weren't ready yet, oh they were nowhere near ready, but he could wait. He couldn't take on Charles, not with the whole school, but there were plenty of other targets. His aim was not to supplant Charles, hardly even to challenge him, but to do the things that Charles refused to do.

With power came responsibility. They had never agreed, him and Charles, what that responsibility was. For Magneto the responsibility was to look after other mutants, to protect mutant kind.

Humanity? He felt no responsibility for them. Just a sort of slow weary anger, that would flare up at times into something that even he could see was dangerous. But that danger could be put to use...

"Erik?" It was Mystique. Only one person called him Erik.

Sighing, he turned around, "What is it?"

"Sabretooth has woken up. We should probably speak to him before he starts jumping to false conclusions: Gambit did say he was under the impression we were working for Stryker."

Magneto nodded, and together they left the room.


Cautiously Toad edged into the room, wrapping his coat around him as he did so. He'd been putting this off for a while, hovering nervously near the door and hoping like hell that the man with the red eyes would leave.

He hadn't left. He'd stayed obstinately where he was, reading some book and drinking out of a long thin glass containing something that looked a suspicious yellow colour. It wasn't that Toad found the man scary as such, it was just that this was clearly his space, he didn't want to intrude, yeah, that was it, he was being polite.

Then the man had turned around and Toad had bitten back a snigger, because it's quite hard to maintain the swave trench-coated coolness when your face makes it so clear that you've recently been on the wrong end of a fight. The man had scowled at him and then turned back to the book, which Toad took as an invitation to come in.

He sidled over to the least metallic-looking chair and collapsed into it, pulling his knees up to his chin and trying to squint at the title of whatever the man was reading. "You, uh, you been here long?"

"Non." The man muttered.

"You French or something?"

The question got him a dagger-like glare that shut him up for a while. Bored, he stared around the room. Whoever lived here, and he assumed it was the old man, had a serious problem with interior design. The place seemed to suck the heat out of everything, and the continuing scheme of metal and rock was beginning to give him the creeps.

Actually the rock wasn't so bad. And he'd had a look around after Mystique had given him the pizza and there were some caves that definitely looked interesting. Caves that spoke to him in the generic language of all things green and amphibious; they made the place seem more like somewhere he could call home.

There was a roar and a loud clang from somewhere inside the building and they both jumped, looking guiltily at each other immediately afterwards. The tension in the room dissipated somewhat, and Toad felt it was worth risking another question. "W-what do you think that was?"

"Dat was Sabretooth." Came the reply.

"Sabretooth?"

"The guy dey sent me out to get. Huh, never mentioned he was so dangerous. Dat guy's got a swing like a brick wall, not'ing natural in that."

"He's a mutant?"

"More dan jus' a mutant. Dere's … rumours dat Gambit heard. About what some people do wit' mutants. Bad stuff, wit' experiments and stuff. I'm t'inking dat Sabretooth went through some of dat."

"Ah." Toad managed to keep most of the fear off his face. "Is…is your name Gambit?"

"Dat's me."

"I'm Toad."

The man glanced at him, "Yeah, dat figures."

Toad scowled, trying to work out whether it was an insult or not.


Thinking was not something that Victor Creed did often. It had been pretty much drilled out of him in the army; soldiers weren't meant to think, just to act, and at the turning point of a fight, where everything's just mud and blood and craziness there's no time for thinking. No place for it. Obey orders and survive, that was how things worked.

Thinking could get you killed.

He scowled at the metal in front of him, and tried another swing at it, which achieved nothing except hurting his hands. Maybe there was a time for everything. And maybe this was a time for thinking.

The old man was a mutant, that was clear enough. They'd only managed a ten minute conversation before Sabretooth had tried attacking him, but he'd managed to get that through. Of course, swinging a large ton of metal right into Sabretooth's face had helped as well.

He was trapped now. Trapped in a metal box. Nothing to do but wait, and think.

He was no longer certain that Stryker was involved in the proceedings. But what did that leave? Some old man with a talent for metal? Sabretooth tried to remember what the man had been wittering on about. Mutant freedom. That sounded fair enough. And fighting, fighting had been mentioned. There had been a woman as well, all blue, just like the Cajun guy had said.

Sabretooth gave a growl of frustration, wishing he'd just knocked the Cajun down and slung him over a cliff somewhere. He could've been back in the bar right now, two meals a day and a bottle of whisky, there were a lot worse positions to be in.

Scowling he tried another fruitless attack at the walls of his metallic prison. If he got out he was going to give that guy hell.

Hell as only a Sabretooth could make it.


A/N: Ghasp! What is this! Can it be a whole chapter with no gratuitous violence? Looks like it!

Meh. Not too happy with this chapter. But hey, it takes the story where I want it to go, and the next chapter is all planned out in my head. (Does the last sentence work on a separate line? Or is it just too melodramatic. Maybe I should add a Dun Dun Duuuunnn at the end. Heh)

I have so much work…