I don't own anything to do with anything in the X-Men franchise. That sucks majorly, but that's all right. I'll live. I do own Jaklyn Porter, Silence Allerdyce, Andell Brown, and most of this plot, besides the bits that came from the movie. Mina belongs to my friend. This fic follows along with X-Men III: The Last Stand and is rated for language, violence, drinking, blood, gore, and a little bit of sexual content, but nothing too graphic. Enjoy.

Intoxication
Chapter Ten: In Love.

Ugggghhh…

She was surrounded by darkness and her body was numb. That was, assuming she still had a body and wasn't just a consciousness floating somewhere in the ether. She wasn't even sure her eyes were open. There was nothing to see. She tried to look around, but couldn't. She started to panic, her breaths coming faster and her vision—if you could call it that—was starting to fill with grey spots.

Just let it out.

No. She shook what would have been her head, trying to rid her mind of the voice and the dark, violent thoughts that accompanied it. The voice repeated and it seemed to echo through her core. It hurt, but she was determined to remain in control until she figured out what was going on and where she was.

Just let it out.

No! She shook her head harder and pain lashed through her being.

Jaklyn awoke very suddenly to find herself propped against a car and the metal was warm, almost too hot to touch. She had a massive headache and her body ached all over, but could still move. She groaned and pushed herself away from the disabled vehicle, climbing slowly to a crouching position, leery of the beast inside; it wouldn't do for her to lose control again. She may not have been sure how she ended up unconscious, but she did know where she was and that sticking her head up could be a bad idea, even with the thick fog that was now obscuring the island. Where had the fog come from? It hadn't been foggy when they landed. That could only mean one thing: Storm.

She took a moment to figure out what kind of shape she was in before she moved any more. Jaklyn could breathe with no pain aside from the general aching, and there didn't seem to be any open wounds on her body, although she was covered in blood and she had no idea how much of it was hers. Her hair had come out of its ponytail and one side of her uniform was torn, three evenly spaced slashes visible as the source of the damage, but they weren't from Wolverine; they were too close together. There was no fresh blood, so it had happened, at the very least, several minutes before.

If Andell had had to attack her… What exactly had she done?

Jaklyn shook her head and tried to collect her thoughts. She knew she was in the middle of the battlefield—she could still hear the noises of fighting and screaming and yells as power was expelled and pain as experienced—but in her current spot, she seemed relatively safe.

Deciding she was in no immediate danger, the mutant known as Terror used her heightened senses to locate everyone in the thick fog. As soon as all her senses clicked into place however, something prickled at the back of her throat: something coppery and sweet and nauseating. Jaklyn doubled over and threw up, gobbets of something that looked an awful lot like human—or mutant—flesh coming up with the burning bile. The nausea passed and her other senses flooded to the forefront, specifically her sense of smell. She tried to ignore the stenches of death and vomit and blood and concentrate on those familiar scents; as Andell had committed the pressures of the X-Men to memory, so had Jaklyn done with their smells. It was a trick she'd learned a while ago from Mina. Her nostrils flared as the familiar metallic smell of Colossus filled her nose and she took off in that direction, staying low and not bothering to search out anyone else until she was on the move, and only to make sure they were still alive. When the shining skin of her boyfriend came into view, however, she forgot all about the others and thought only of the comfort Piotr could offer against her powers; she was shaking slightly, from exhaustion more than fear.

Piotr was just finishing tossing Logan into the distance when Jaklyn stumbled up to his side. When she placed a hand on his arm, he turned and for a moment was still, as if he was startled to see her or… was unsure what she was going to do.

Jaklyn sighed heavily as the thought hit her and took a step back, balling her hands into fists. Panic gripped her chest tightly, but she tried to ignore it. There wasn't time. "It's me…" she said quietly. Even as she said it, she realized that she must have done something to put those thoughts in his head. "It's really me…"

He opened his mouth to say something, but there was a yell and then a cacophony of gun shots followed by screams, effectively cutting him off. Colossus looked at her and then took Terror's hand in his own and pulled her away, the girl muttering something about Jean's scent changing, becoming more feral and the power crackling through the air confirming that assessment. The fog very suddenly began to clear, and Jean's red-clad form could be seen gliding through the air, several feet above the ground and heading towards the centre of the clearing, leaving the bridge wide open for escape.

"Are you okay to run?" Piotr asked as they clambered up the rubble in front of the bridge.

Jaklyn looked over her shoulder at what used to be Jean as her power tore over the island, obliterating buildings, soldiers, mutants and the Blackbird, disintegrating everything. She was tired, freaked out by what she might have done and by the way Piotr had reacted to her, but she could run. She had to run. Jaklyn turned and looked up at Piotr. "I can run, but we can't go too far. What if we're needed? What if…"

He didn't let her finish. Piotr pulled her along after him, and they were joined by the other X-Men, Kitty appearing out of nowhere, a bald boy dressed completely in white following close behind: the source of the cure; Jaklyn remembered Beast telling them his name was Jimmy, a.k.a. Leech. Kitty was breathing heavily and looked shaken, but was otherwise fine. Bobby joined them soon after encased completely in ice, yet still moving around like normal, while Silence and Mina behind him were looking very satisfied, despite the chaos reigning down around them. Both girls had soot smeared across their faces and Silence was holding one arm tightly to her side, and the gleaming edge of bone could be seen sticking out near her elbow through a layer of blood. The younger generation of mutants clambered onto the bridge and ran back a safe distance, hiding behind the parked and abandoned cars. From their vantage point, they could see Alcatraz Island as it began to literally disappear.

And they were all terrified.

"Where are Storm and Logan and the others?" Bobby asked, looking around once they were somewhere they considered safe. His fear was plain on his face, but his words came out calm and steady.

Jaklyn looked at her friend, who was no longer covered in ice, and then turned towards the island, trying to use her superior vision to see what was going on. She could not. Fighting down a scream of frustration, she turned and looked at Jimmy, trying not to glare; it wasn't him she was angry at. But her fear was rapidly turning into anger, because that was something she and her beast knew. Picking up on what the girl was trying to do, Kitty took the boy into the circle of her arms and pulled him back far enough that Jaklyn could once again summon up her heightened senses. As her vision in her natural eye matched the level in her mechanical eye, Jaklyn realized that some of the nausea rolling in her gut had been from the imbalance in her vision.

Just as she was about to turn her newly rebalanced gaze to the island, Storm and Beast came running across the bridge, wide smiles spreading across both their faces as they saw the students were all safe and in relatively one piece each.

"Is everyone okay?" Storm asked, her kind eyes roving over the assembled group, taking a silent headcount and making a mental list of visible injuries. As her gaze reached Jimmy, she dropped to a crouch and extended her hands to the boy and he walked slowly towards her. "Are you okay?" she asked and she sighed with relief when he nodded.

"What about Logan?" Kitty asked.

Storm and Beast both gazed back towards the island, and something in their faces made Jaklyn turn her head sharply back to the island. The vanishing land mass sharpened in her vision and she gasped, the noise turning into a deep growl. She must have made some movement forward, because the next thing she knew, her back was pressed against Piotr's chest and his large arms were wrapped tightly around her middle, pinning her arms to her side.

"SHE'S KILLING LOGAN!" she roared, struggling. She growled again, her skin starting to ripple; a precursor of the change.

Jimmy pulled away from Storm and very cautiously approached Jaklyn. When he was within range, her skin settled and she stopped struggling. She fell slack in Piotr's arms, breathing heavily and a look of fear and worry on her face.

"Logan will be okay, Jaki," Mina said, as she and Silence crouched in front of Jaklyn. "Just worry about… yourself."

After Wolverine and Beast had taken away Magneto's powers using the cure, and after the army had arrived and tried to stop Phoenix, all hell broke loose. And that wasn't really a metaphor. The telepath's powers were ripping through everything on the island, and everyone had gone running, trying to escape certain obliteration even as some of the friends and fellow soldiers were ripped to pieces behind them. If Andell hadn't been able to withstand the power, she would have joined them; as it was, she was kind of thinking about running across the bridge because she was scared, and she didn't scare easily. The Phoenix had relocated herself to the approximate centre of the island and around her, water from the bay rose into the air, as did chunks of rock and fragments of bodies.

But it wasn't the awesome display of power that had Andell's eye.

Andell stood at the bottom of the hill of rubble that had become the Phoenix's stage, claws extended and energy cackling around her with more ferocity than she could recall it ever happening before; the purple bolts had spread from her claws and hands and were dancing up her arms and across her chest. But her thoughts weren't on that, or what the increased electricity could mean for her. Andell's purple eyes were glued ahead, to the scene unfolding in front of her; to the man climbing the slope, even as he screamed, even as he repeatedly disappeared and came as close to dying as he could. Even as the woman he loved tried to kill him, tried to disintegrate him the way she'd done to everything and almost everyone else on the island.

Almost as if to reinforce her thoughts, a wave of Phoenix's powers hit Andell and she felt her skin tear away. She winced, but did not close her eyes, because she could still not believe what she was seeing.

Subject 113 had come searching for the Wolverine, Weapon X, because she wanted revenge—it was because of his successful surgery that she had been given the Adamantium skeleton and claws—but more than that, since Logan was indestructible, she wanted some answers. She had never been told why she'd been offered the chance, and she didn't know why she'd accepted. Her chain of reasoning had been that maybe this man who had been through everything might be able to give her some insight.

She hadn't expected to find herself hopeful upon finding him.

But she was.

Standing there at the bottom of the hill, watching the tragic scene, feeling the unrestrained love from Logan towards Jean, Andell was hopeful, because maybe there was a chance she could still have a life that didn't revolve around killing.

A life like the one Logan had with the X-Men.

Another wave of Jean's power hit Andell knocking her to her knees and tearing away most of her flesh and clothing and knocking any revelations she was about to have from the forefront of her mind. She cried out, but still didn't take her eyes from the two mutants in front of her, she couldn't. She clung to the only glimmer of hope she'd seen in years. In the wake of Jean's power came Logan's sorrow and it drove the wind from Andell's lungs. She dropped to her hands, so she was crouching on all fours, and she gasped, trying to gather enough air to keep herself from passing out, but still her purple eyes didn't leave Logan.

He had reached the top of the hill, and was standing in front of the terrifying figure of Phoenix.

He grabbed her around the waist.

He extended his claws and drove them into her gut, angling upwards and hitting her heart.

And then he screamed and Andell screamed with him because she felt his heart break and she felt Jean, the Jean Logan had loved—she felt Jean's happiness that she had finally been freed from the Phoenix, that she had been saved. Andell screamed with Logan as the water and debris that been held in the air by telekinesis came crashing down around them. Andell screamed and for the first time she could recall since she'd been given her metal bones, she felt tears slide down her face. The weight of Logan's pain was almost too much.

A final burst of energy from Jean, not Phoenix, was what finally did Andell in.

She screamed once more and collapsed against the rocky ground, her sensitively to energy keeping her pinned and her claws painfully extended. Purplish bolts of energy started jumping around her whole body, drawn out by Jean's power, like lightning to metal. Andell managed to turn her head so she could see Logan kneeling, hands held up as Jean's body vanished in the same manner the island had under her will. His head was thrown back. He was crying.

And she cried harder.

When Andell could move again, she pushed herself to all fours and took a deep, gasping breath in, her claws retracting and the energy around her dissipating, even as the parts of her body removed began to heal, flesh once more covering her metal bones. Most of her jacket, shirt and bra were gone, as well as about half her jeans and one of her boots, leaving her half-naked. She didn't really care. At some point during the chaos, she hadn't been sure she'd heal completely—she'd never faced so much energy before—so she was glad she was returned to her normal state. Back on her feet, she rotated her neck, metal joints cracking, and turned back towards the hill. Logan was no longer on top of it, but striding down towards her, looking no less confident than he had when Andell had met him, even though she knew he was devastated.

He stopped in front of her, his gaze heavy. "You okay?" he asked after a long minute of silence.

She nodded once, jaw clenched and tear stains visible on her cheeks. She didn't ask if he was okay, but she knew the answer and asking might have been cruel.

Right then, she didn't want to cause any pain.

She kicked her remaining boot off and followed Logan across the battlefield in her bare feet, keeping her mouth closed.

Author's Note.

HOLY SHIT ANOTHER UPDATE.

You may all be floored now, because, baby, I am on a roll.

Also, Matt, FEAR MY COMMAS. THEY WILL ATTACK YOU IN YOUR SLEEP FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT.

, , , , , , , , ,

Sorry, I'm sick and need about a million hours of sleep. And Matt doesn't like commas. *sticks out tongue*

(This period of insanity has been brought to you by Leigh and Shauna, the co-chairs of the Insane Canadian Women Society.)

Okay, so for the record, Andell seems a little wishy-washy because she doesn't have any loyalties. She's able to change sides so quickly because she only cares about herself. And while she cares for the X-Men after just meeting them, it's the type of caring you feel towards a little kid you don't know or something akin to that. It can be powerful, but it's not permanent unless something forces you to make in permanent. In Andell's case, her curiosity is what keeps her going, and specifically in this story, it's the curiosity revolving herself and Logan and their Adamantium bones.

I hope that makes sense.

Hey, has anyone noticed that I say "for the record" a lot? Because I JUST noticed that. You'd think with me knowing me as well as I do, that I would have realized that before, but I didn't.

Huh.

There are six chapters left, and some of you are wondering how the hell I'm going to stretch the rest of the movie out into six chapters, and the answer is, I'm not! This fic extends beyond the movie because, well, for one, I wanted it to, and two, when I finished the planning for the movie, there were still a bunch of questions left unanswered about the OCs and some of the canon that I wanted to, well, answer. Also, at the time of planning this fic, there was another X-Men fic in the works. I still have the planning and stuff for that one, so depends on how the response is when this one ends, I might put it on the docket.

Anyways, enjoy the chapter please. And review!

Next Chapter: Break For Peace.