"And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them
…. I am on fire…"

Henry IV Act IV Scene I

"That's Lapouge, isn't it?" Rogue asked Jean in an aside. She didn't look at either Jean or Scott, because she didn't want to take her attention off of the man blocking their path to safety.

She remembered this room from her entry; she could easily smell her own scent still lingering in the air, along with those of the fake Sabretooths. Stepping through that archway had transformed it from ordinary cellar to secret lair, so it stood to reason that the reverse would bring them closer to home.

Right now she was perfectly content to define "victory" as "getting out of here alive".

"Milbury," Jean whispered back. She must've caught Rogue's huh? frown, because she added, "He said his name was Milbury."

"It's him," Scott put in, scowling fiercely behind his sunglasses. "It's Milbury. He used to run the Boys' Home when I lived here. I remember that much."

Lapouge, or Milbury, or whoever he was, stopped clapping and folded his hands behind his back.

"And so the mice have run the maze," he said, tone dry, words crisp.

Rogue stiffened; it was the man who'd spoken to her in the attic, right before he'd sicced that pack of Sabretooths on her. She snarled – it was somewhat involuntary – and said, "Yeah, and now you're standin' between us and the cheese."

He ignored her with consummate grace. "The sun and the moon, orbiting Mars once again," he said, spreading his hands in a gesture aimed at Jean and Rogue. "Do you feel better, young ladies, to have your center of gravity restored?"

"We only want to go home," Jean said in a conciliatory tone, at the same time Rogue barked, "Quit talking and fight already!"

Milbury smiled. It was a patronizing expression, and it was probably not the best one to use on somebody currently hosting a healthy dose of Sabretooth's personality.

Rogue saw red. She roared and charged him.

Milbury made a move as if to sidestep, but not fast enough; she raked her claws across his abdomen in a move designed to eviscerate him, her blood singing in fierce, predatory triumph.

"Rogue, no!" Scott yelled – too late.

The dark gray suit shredded. Black gashes appeared beneath the torn cloth – and Milbury put out a hand, lightning fast, and caught Rogue by her forearm.

"Well done," he said to her, sounding pleasantly surprised. A doctor heartened by his patient's unlikely recovery; a father proud of a reformed ne'er-do-well child. "Well done indeed. I was wrong: you do merit further scrutiny."

Rogue struggled against his grasp, but even with Sabretooth's strength, Milbury wasn't giving her a millimeter. And as she watched, her triumph turning to wild frustration, the gashes that should have been a fatal wound closed over with barely a ripple, cloth and all.

"What are you?" Rogue asked, recoiling as far as he would let her. "A shapeshifter?"

Milbury precisely and effortlessly twisted her arm in his grip until she cried out and went down on her knees. "I," he said, "am a man with a vision. An engineer. An architect of tomorrow."

"No," Scott said, anger crackling. "You're done!"

He pulled off his ruby quartz glasses and opened his eyes. The blast turned the room red, as if there were alarms going off here, too. As always, his aim was perfect; the blast hit Milbury squarely in the chest.

Scott's optic blasts were force beams. There was no heat behind them, despite their color. He could theoretically punch through a mountain, but he couldn't start a fire. Rogue had watched him hit dozens and dozens of enemies, real and simulated, with blasts of the exact same intensity as the one he was using now. She knew what was supposed to happen: Milbury would be knocked backwards, away from her, possibly into the wall. Then the three X-Men would regroup and either continue the attack or leave.

Instead, Milbury let out an agonized, uncontrolled scream and staggered back. His chest, where Scott's blast had struck, was reduced to a bubbling, frothy black goo.

It smelled terrible – like meat and rubber and chemicals all lit on fire at once, then doused with more of the same. Rogue hauled violently on her arm and at last succeeded in breaking free.

"What –" Milbury gasped in a voice gone suddenly raspy and metallic. He put one hand to the mess that used to be his upper abdomen, but didn't quite dare to touch it. "No - what – what have you – ahh -"

"Oh man," Rogue said, trying to hold her breath. This was not the time to have an enhanced sense of smell.

Jean was on her knees, hand clamped over her mouth and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Scott looked horrified. Then his mouth compressed into a determined line. He stepped forward and, deliberately, lifted his glasses again.

This blast impacted Milbury in the shoulder. The man – if that's what he was; there was enough mad science and weirdness here to comprise an entire archipelago of Dr. Moreau islands – made a sound that Rogue never wanted to hear any living thing make ever again. His shoulder disappeared into a seething, boiling mass, and he fell.

Milbury was a terrible person. He had kidnapped Scott, strapped that neural scrambler to Jean's head, used Rogue herself as Sabretooth bait, and saw all of them as specimens in some perverted sort of lab experiment.

But in that moment, watching him writhe in agony, Rogue felt sorry for him.

Just a little.

And only for a moment.

Scott stood over Milbury, one hand on his sunglasses. As tempting as it was to let Scott put a few more perforations in the bad guy, Rogue realized this was probably their last best chance to escape.

Jean was still on her knees. She had been white as a ghost ever since Rogue had caught up with her, and her looks were not improving with time. Now she was white as a ghost and sweating bullets, and her eyes were taking on a glassy sheen that did not bode well at all.

Rogue scooped up Jean into something like a fireman's carry and grabbed Scott's collar with her free hand, dragging him with her. "Come on!"

"But –"

Another involuntary snarl. "Just move it!"

Behind them, Milbury gasped and guttered; then there was a brief flash of light. Rogue glanced over her shoulder, tensing for an attack, and was shocked to see…

Nothing.

Milbury was gone.

"Wait, where'd he go?" she demanded, putting on the brakes. She set Jean down, just in case, and made sure the other girl was steady before she let go. "What was that light?"

Scott looked back, too, one hand on his glasses. "He can't – teleport, can he?"

"He's a geneticist," Jean said. She leaned on Scott. "If he can clone Sabretooth -"

"Point taken," Rogue said.

"Let's get out of here before we run into any more surprises," Scott said.

They were at the archway. A step beyond it, the cellar stairs rose up, promising freedom – if they could survive it. Freezing wind howled down through the open doors, carrying snow that somehow never made it past the archway. It was pitch-black night outside, and obviously miserable; it would be doubly so for Scott, who was still head-to-toe wet.

The snow on the ground was even thicker now than it had been when she and Jean arrived. Rogue looked at her teammates and came to a sinking realization: Scott and Jean couldn't make it on their own two feet, and – "I can't carry both of you."

"Leave me here," Scott said immediately. "Take Jean first."

"No!" Jean exclaimed. "Scott, you have to get out of here!"

"We all have to get out of here," he pointed out, level-headed and sensible. "But I can, um, hurt Milbury. It makes more sense for me to stay behind."

Rogue looked at Jean, who nodded grimly. Something else they agreed on.

Rogue grabbed Scott and threw him over her shoulder, then leaped up the stairs and into the snowstorm before he had a chance to do more than exclaim, "Hey!"

"Sorry," she said, a little breathless; bounding through the snow with a body on her back was hard.

"Go back!" he ordered.

"Not on your life." She reached the Blackbird and set him down, then had to haul him up into the cabin. "Stay here, start the engines, and I'll go get Jean."

For a moment, she stepped outside of herself and marveled at what was going on: barking orders at Cyclops, expecting him to obey – this had to be some sort of alternate reality.

But there was Scott, his clothes and hair with a sheen of fast-melting ice and snow, taking a seat in the pilot's chair and going through the startup.

Then his entire body stiffened, and he was out of the chair and trying to get past Rogue to the cabin door. "Whoa! Wait!" she said, blocking him.

"Something's wrong," Scott said, fear and worry playing across his face and coloring his voice. "Something's happening to Jean."

Rogue squinted out at the house. There was a light flickering by the side of the building, near the cellar doors. It was white, and it seemed to be getting both brighter and more erratic as she watched. "Don't worry, I'm going back right–"

The Milbury Boys' Home exploded.

It was there one moment – almost invisible in the dark and the swirling snow, but there – and then it erupted into a towering fireball.

Rogue put her arms up to shield her face and turned away slightly as the hot, dry blast wave reached her. An instant later, debris peppered the Blackbird, some pieces on fire, some large enough to leave dents. None of it hit her.

"Oh no," Rogue said, stunned, watching the building blaze.

Scott tried to push past her, more desperately this time. "Jean!"

She put one hand on his chest and shoved him back as hard as she could; with Sabretooth's strength, that meant he went flying across the cabin and slammed into the bulkhead on the other side. "Sorry," Rogue said, wincing. Then she told him, "Stay here!" and jumped out into the snow.

The house was still burning furiously. Hot cinders swirled and blew along with smoke, ash, and snowflakes. The snow would do nothing to dampen the fire; it was going to burn until there was nothing left but scorched earth.

Rogue couldn't bring herself to feel too bad about that.

Anxious, she retraced her path to the cellar doors and found Jean standing knee-deep in snow a safe distance away from the house. The older girl didn't seem to be burned, but there was blood trailing from her ears and nose. She was staring at the fire with blank-eyed terror, motionless while hot updrafts swirled her red hair around.

"Jean!" Rogue grabbed her arm and gave her a little shake. "Jean, what happened? You okay?"

Jean blinked and put a hand to her head. The neural scrambler was gone, Rogue suddenly noticed. "I… I'm okay."

"What happened? Did Lapouge – I mean Milbury – did he do this?"

Jean blinked some more. "I don't know," she said slowly, starting to sound more like herself. The glazed-over look left her face, and she focused properly on Rogue for the first time. "Milbury was here. He was talking to me… and then… I don't know where he went."

Rogue looked around, but her enhanced senses told her nothing. A cold shiver prickled along her back. "Come on, let's get out of here."

They ran through the snow to the jet, where Scott was waiting with the engines spun up.

Neither girl looked back.