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Chapter Twenty-One
The rain slapped and soaked them the second they materialized on Genoshan soil. Remy swore under his breath and wiped the sheet of water from his face. It was daytime at least, but you'd hardly know it with the sky black as pitch from Storm's little production. The nearby ruins of the capital city were invisible behind a curtain of rain, but in the distance, he could see the glitter of sunshine through a break in the clouds. The sooner they found Ororo the better. The last thing he wanted was to leave Anna and Bobby, splitting up still seemed like the worst thing they could do, but Remy knew when his wife had dug in her heels. So goddamned stubborn sometimes…It would do no good to argue anymore, not in the thick of it. Best he could do was find Ororo and get back to Rogue as fast as possible. Would Logan's enhanced senses be able to puzzle anything out through the rain? Was the hurricane circling around Stormy's location, could they find her smack in the middle of the eye? Remy grabbed Logan's shoulder, his fingers slipping on the rain slicked leather. The man shrugged off Remy's hand and gestured towards the light.
"This way!" Logan yelled over the din, and took off without him.
Before following, Remy turned back to Anna and grabbed both sides of her face, pulling her into a breathless but soggy kiss. He held his forehead against hers and whispered against her lips. "Come home to me." She nodded sharply before she drew away, and she and Drake trudged in the opposite direction.
He had to scramble to catch up with Logan, jumping the wreckage of obliterated buildings all while being hammered by the deluge. Logan hadn't gotten far ahead, Remy found him crouched against a partial brick alcove, his forearm shielding his face.
Sniffing the air furiously, he turned and shouted at Remy. "Ororo's really fuckin' us over here!"
"You be sure t'tell her that, mon ami!"
From their secluded vantage point, Remy could see their surroundings a little better. There wasn't much left thanks to the sentinels' attack years ago. The only sound structures he could see were the imperial palace and the prison. The citadel, where mutants had been imprisoned and changed during the country's checkered past, lay spotlighted by sunshine beneath the break in the clouds.
"Keep your eyes peeled, if Ororo's in there, it's hard to say which of 'ems pullin' guard duty."
That was their problem. The mission so far was operating on a lot of assumptions. They assumed Vargas had only recruited three mutants as his closest henchmen. They assumed Ororo was still on their side and not the fourth. It made Remy's insides clench because he knew what happened when you assumed, but they didn't have a lot of choices. Stormy needed them.
Using the rain and ruins as cover, the two slunk further towards the watery veil surrounding the citadel. It wasn't like Remy remembered it, a little more war zone than green and pleasant nation, but sections of the magistrate's prison still looked sound, even after the rest of the country and its millions of inhabitants had been burned to the ground by the sentinels. They were out of cover, there were no more fallen building that butted up to the citadel, and they stepped through the curtain of rain into the thick, eerie stillness beyond.
"Damn," Remy muttered and shook the water from his leather trenchcoat, slicking his drenched hair back from his face. The storm raged just a hand's breadth away, soaking the ground and drowning out any other noises, but over the prison existed an oppressive, humid calm that made him light headed and nauseated. At least, he hoped it was the humidity turning his stomach.
Logan sniffed and his eyes darted from side to side. "Got her," he snarled and stalked forward, Remy cursing the man's surprising lack of stealth under his breath. Age certainly hadn't granted Logan subtlety. With his back against the outside wall to catch his breath, Remy followed his hairy partner and cringed when the man popped his claws and slashed through the reinforced steel entrance. The interior corridors were darkened and hot as sin, a jungle without the ventilation system and air conditioning of years' past. The halls were littered with garbage and broken glass. His nose to the ground, Logan charged forward, a man on a mission, through three floors of dead ends and empty corridors.
"Hey," Remy finally hissed behind him. "We goin' in circles here? Thought we were on the same page here...we need to get back to Rogue! You sure you know what you doin'?"
Logan growled and spun, slamming Remy hard against a wall. "Back the fuck off!" An adamantium crowbar in the form of a burly forearm pinned Remy by his throat, and Logan's thick fingers fisted into the lapels of Remy's trenchcoat. "Whole place stinks 'o death…I can't…!"
Remy struggled to get a word and a breath and swallowed his own anger. "…Should be easy then, to…find a live one…!" Seeing stars, he held tight to the fabric of Logan's glove and lit a kinetic charge. The hell if they were going to go through this again…!
A shadow flicked towards them, and all it took was a twitch of Remy's eyebrows to signal Wolverine. In an instant, the man went from choking Remy to throwing him to the ground, bending his own body backwards to catch the business end of a katana with his extended claws. The hypnotized Elisabeth Braddock kicked at the back of Wolverine's knees, dropping him to the ground with a resounding thud. She raised her sword to strike, but Remy rolled forward and landed a kick to her midsection, her blade clattering to the floor. When she lunged back towards Remy, he blocked her sharp fist and caught her wrist, wrenching it behind her. She pitched forward, catching Remy off balance, and flipped the pair of them, Remy landing on his back. Ready to strike, her psychic knife flashed to life, but Logan barreled into her and pinned her to the ground where the two thrashed.
"Hold her steady!" Remy reached into a pocket of his trenchcoat and retrieved one of the psychic dampeners Forge had sent with them, saying a silent prayer as he slapped it onto the woman's wrist. The red lights circling the band flashed a frightening disco beat and Betsy screamed, her face and body shaking in the sudden throes of a seizure.
"Oh, fuck," Logan leaned his weight on her heavily, and wedged the collar of his leather jacket into her mouth to stop her from biting off her own tongue.
'Oh, fuck' was just about right, Remy thought grimly, panic swirling his insides. Rogue had their teleportation ring, the one she had gotten from Raven had been lost in Tibet when she and Logan had been attacked. They were screwed if Betsy needed anything besides basic first aid. The woman shuddered and gasped, her body stilling beneath Logan. Remy felt frantically for her pulse.
"She's still breathin', Cajun," Logan whispered and crouched over Betsy's body.
They had hoped freeing their comrades from Vargas's influence would give them a few extra hands against the villain, but if Elisabeth was any indication, they were going to be saddled with a few unconscious burdens before it was all over.
Logan lifted Psylocke's limp form over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes as he stood. "Let's find Ororo."
"Incoming!"
Snatching Rogue by the shoulders, Iceman shoved her into a snowbank and shot an icy projectile into the now whiteout sky. Rogue rolled, got her feet under her, and rocketed into the air after Bobby's blast. Archangel dodged the snowball, but not her fist, and Warren crashed to the ground in a heap. A frozen blanket of ice frothed over him.
"I got this!" Bobby yelled over the roaring wind. Beneath the ice, Warren twitched and struggled, but Iceman held him fast.
Rogue's plan had been to draw all the attention so the sneaky boys could do what they did best. When Remy and Logan had Ororo, they'd come join the fight and, together, they'd end all this mess, one way or another. Forge's gun still weighed heavily in her pocket. Erasing Vargas's powers was a Hail Mary at best, he wasn't exactly a mutant and the weapon's range was fairly limited, but he had to be stopped, and she would use everything they had to make sure that happened.
When Remy and Logan had disappeared into the storm, Bobby and Rogue, hers a mirror image of Iceman's powers, had tapped into the meteorological energy drowning them. Together they had dropped the temperature sixty degrees in just as many seconds. 80 to 20, and lower still they had pushed, the raging thunderstorm wildly shifting gears. Their distraction had given the African nation its first recorded snowfall in modern history. Rogue shivered, reminded of her near frozen escape attempt from Apocalypse's temple, but their little trick had been like waving a red cape in front of a bull.
She nodded to Bobby and rose higher, hoping to get a bird's eye view through the blizzard, but she hadn't gone more than a hundred vertical feet when a magnetic blast knocked her from the sky. She landed with a hard thud in a pile of snowy concrete blocks. Lucky them, they had hit the motherlode of brainwashed X-Men. She swore and wrenched herself free from the rubble in time to see Bobby taking a crack at Magneto, using his mutant powers to twist the ice and snow around Anna's former lover. Magneto broke the icy chains as soon as they formed, but Rogue felt the temperature dropping like a rock around them, her breath forming great frozen clouds over her head. Focused on Magneto, Bobby lost his grip on the cage holding Archangel, and Warren roared and spread his wings, sending frozen shards to rain on Rogue. Warren launched himself for Bobby, but Rogue gave chase, slamming into him and making him change trajectory and head higher.
She didn't want to leave Bobby. It looked like he and Erik were at a stalemate, but the sneaky Bobby was slowly lowering the temperature and she couldn't get any closer to the pair without freezing solid herself. Stretching for the upper atmosphere, she snagged Warren's ankle and swung him in circles, huddling closer to his body to steer clear of his razor sharp wings. He struggled to free himself from her grip, and the two locked themselves into a tailspin and crashed through the side of a half collapsed building.
"Warren!"
Rogue had tried to take the brunt of the impact with her invulnerable body, but Archangel lay motionless beside her. She quickly felt for a pulse and swallowed in relief at the faint, sluggish beat. Pulling free one of the psionic dampeners from her pocket, she lifted Warren's arm and snapped the bracelet into place.
"Oh, Warren…" Pushing the cowl of his costume back, she smoothed the matted blonde locks from his forehead. "Are you even in there, sugar?"
Warren had never really been her friend, truthfully she didn't think he had ever forgiven her for her childish vendetta against him and Dazzler all those crazy years ago, and Rogue was pretty sure his snooty ass just saw her as poor white trash, but they had a grudging respect for each other. She hated to see that Apocalypse's machinations still had such a hold on him. What did that mean for Remy and the others? Her husband had beaten back the monster inside of him, but so had Warren.
A shadow fell across the opening to the outside, and she turned towards the slithering voice that greeted her.
"Hello, Rogue."
The resemblance to Apocalypse was even stronger than she had remembered.
"Vargas?" As she turned, she slid a hand into her pocket to feel the cold steel of Forge's gun. "Is that what you're still callin' yourself?" Keep him, talkin', she told himself. She knew he wanted to finish this as much as she did, but she needed to keep him here. If he teleported away again, they may never find him.
He sneered and laughed softly into the skeletal building. "And why wouldn't I?"
Had she struck a nerve? "I dunno. Have ya' looked in a mirror lately?"
She pulled the weapon free and fired a clean shot into his shoulder. Vargas roared in pain and a blinding flash of light and heat flared from his body. Another shot to the opposite shoulder dropped him to his knees.
"Meddling woman!"
She advanced and fired again, but he rolled and she missed. He responded with a blast of solar energy from outstretched hands that whizzed by her head and singed her curls.
"Let this wretched place be your tomb!"
She rolled from another blast, dragging Warren with her, wedging Archangel's body under a torn piece of drywall. Using the drywall as cover she fired again, the shot wide this time.
Solar blasts. Son of a fucking bitch…Forge's gun wasn't working fast enough. She was ready to rip this monster to shreds with her bare hands for all he had taken from her friends, which wasn't improving her aim. She pocketed the gun again, and with the sting of tears in her eyes, sprang from her hiding place and launched herself at Vargas. Solar blasts…Roberto DaCosta, the arrogant punk kid she had watched grow into an even more arrogant, but heroic man, those were his powers.
"Stolen powers? Bite off more than you can chew, big boy?" She punched into Vargas's torso and sent him flying straight backwards from the remains of the building. "How many have you taken? Bet it's getting' a little crowded in that head of yours."
He screwed up his face, concentrating. Was he trying to teleport? Rogue kept her hands on him, but nothing happened, and Vargas blinked in surprise. He tried it again, but he remained in her grasp, and Rogue laughed in his face. "Sugar, tell me you ain't trying to break wind in front of me!"
The creature snarled and lashed out at her with another solar blast, frying the fabric covering her arm. Catching him with a right hook and knocking him against the framework of the building, she grabbed him by the front of his bodysuit and stared into those haunting yellow eyes.
"'Berto!" she pleaded, "Can ya hear me, sugar? I know you're in there. Tabby? James? Fight him!" She held Vargas with one arm against his throat while the villain clawed at her arms and face. Grabbing Forge's toy again, she pressed the weapon between them and fired, but Vargas twisted the barrel as she pulled the trigger, snapping the chamber and exploding the weapon's payload. The blast blew them apart in a flash of white light and they both screamed. Rogue doubled over in pain, blinded, but somehow able to stay aloft. She was still flying but so was Vargas. What had Forge's weapon done? Did they each have too many abilities for the weapon to wipe the slate clean?
"Enough!"
Instead of attacking, Vargas grabbed her and yanked on her arms, flipping her up and over his head and back into another gaping hole in the building. Her eyes still blurry, she saw him rocket into the sky on powers not his own. Woozy, she gave chase, hoping deep inside that what she took from Simon would be enough to save them all.