This is a translation of the part 2 of one of my longest finished German fanfiction series. I am not a native speaker and apologize for any mistakes. While the "Weathered"-series focus on Scott and his lover and on Jean and Logan as a couple, there are lots of other important characters and plot lines coming into play, one of the biggest being the Dark Phoenix saga Hollywood messed up two times in a row.
"Fire & Ice" is set in the early summer of 2000, shortly after the events of the movie 'X-Men'.
Comments are more than welcome. I'm thirsting for them like so many others.
In these two fanfiction series, you will find many Marvel comic- and cartoon elements and characters that I love, the first two X-Men movies build the canon though (with slight alterations with regard to ships). There's also a lot of photoshop messing around and a couple of videos existing for these fanfiction series. If you want to know more about it and do not shy away from spoilers, you can find the link to my graphic lair in my profile.
WHAT HAPPENED SO FAR:
After surprisingly mutating at the rare age of 20, Katja Ninaus came to the Xavier Institute to learn how to live with her atmokinetic powers. Quickly getting caught up in the chaos that ensued when the Brotherhood came after Logan and Marie and the following battle of Liberty Island, Katja decided to work towards becoming a member of the X-Men. With Scott starting to train her, the two of them fell in love, not least thanks to Jean's and Scott's relationship being long far from happy, and Jean's budding feelings for Logan. After Liberty Island, Jean and Scott ended their relationship and got together with their new respective partners. As Katja was still busy settling in at Mutant High, the Brotherhood made an attempt at kidnapping her for unknown reasons but failed. Soon afterward, a formerly-believed dead Sabretooth reemerged and kidnapped Ororo, torturing and injuring her badly before the X-Men could free her.
Katja had buried the hope for a good night's sleep at the very beginning of her time with the X-Men already.
Even when it wasn't about saving the world: There was always something requiring the presence at least of her partner in his role as leader of their team, thereby disrupting Scott and Katja's well-deserved rest after a busy day. Important calls from friends and partners of the X-Men worldwide who never seemed to have heard of time zones. Problems of or with students at this mutant institute the operating of which was one of the X-Men's most important jobs. Emergency meetings in the office of the Mutant High's founder ... Critical TV reports concerning mutants, which demanded immediate action ... or simply the good old nightmares.
On far too few exciting nights, it sometimes was her partner's hand playfully caressing her leg that convinced Katja that recovering could wait for another little while.
That evening, however, the reason for her startling from her dozing was none of all that. It was a timid knock on their apartment door, so quiet she almost hadn't heard. Scott, being already sound asleep after a particularly hard day with the teenagers in the mansion's Danger Room training area, had apparently not heard it, in any case.
Maybe she'd just imagined it ... Katja needed to take a look anyway. And she was immediately glad she had.
A little boy with messy jet-black hair and dark eyes was standing in the hallway of the teacher's floor, wearing Spiderman pajamas that were already way too small for him and that he couldn't part with anyway. Artie had been crying, Katja saw it immediately. He was crying a lot; he was one of the most sensitive children in the playgroup that Xavier had entrusted to Katja for the occasional hour. She had taken the little guy to her heart from the beginning and had the feeling that he also liked her quite a bit. At this time of the day, however, he had never shown up at her door. He was visibly a bit embarrassed about it, too; he hardly dared to raise his head.
"What is it, Artie? Has something happened?" Katja wrapped the ends of her long dressing gown a little tighter around her body so that she wouldn't look like a complete mess and knelt down next to the little boy.
"Can't sleep," Artie mumbled, barely intelligible due to the lisp his reptilian tongue was causing.
"Can't or won't?" Questioningly, Katja took Artie's much too cold little hand in hers and stroked it soothingly. "Another of those dreams?"
Artie shrugged his shoulders uneasily. He didn't like to talk about what often tormented him in his sleep. Katja knew from Ororo, who had been looking after Artie for a lot longer, that the boy was very afraid of his own mutation. Of what might come from it one day.
"I went to see Miss Munroe, but she didn't open up. Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"
"It would be a bit crowded, don't you think?" Katya struggled to maintain her smile, though alarm bells immediately rang inside her.
It wasn't the first time for Ororo to be holed up in her apartment since her terrible encounter with one of the X-Men's greatest enemies not too long ago. If she wasn't even there for the kids, her condition was starting to get critical.
Katja urgently needed to talk to her tomorrow. Hopefully, her friend would actually want to listen ... So far she had not wanted to talk about this assault to anyone.
It was easier for Katja to be there for the little one, but it was out of the question, of course, that he slept in Scott's and her room. He wouldn't have been allowed to do so with Ororo either, he knew that very well. Artie was still testing the waters about how far he could go with Katja; Ororo had already warned her about that. He was already far too old for such ideas. He had to learn to deal with his dreams because they wouldn't just disappear.
"How about that," Katja hurried to say when Artie's lower lip began to tremble suspiciously. "I'll come with you to your room and stay with you until you fall asleep. Is that okay?"
"Can you tell me a story, too?" The little one was happy again already. A smile lit his pretty, fine features.
"That would wake the others." Katja stroked his hair and straightened up without letting go of his hand. "Tomorrow at playtime, alright?"
With that, they had a deal, and at least the little one actually went back to sleep quite quickly then.
Katja, unfortunately, wouldn't have half as easy a time with that. Back in her apartment, the first thing she did was go on a smoking break on the tiny balcony that belonged to Scott's and her private rooms. The cigarette wasn't even burning yet when, with a questioning mewl, her beloved cat joined her from the direction of the barn, making himself comfortable on the railing for a little petting. Since Morpheus was officially responsible for reducing the mansion's rodent population, he didn't show up in Katja's room quite as often, but a sense of when she wasn't feeling well, he'd already had back in Germany.
Burying her free hand in his thick red fur to fondle him helped her at least not to keep grinding off her nails on the railing. Definitely enough rest for tonight. The growing worry regarding someone at Mutant High, whom Katja had already grown just as fond of as of Artie, made it pointless to lie back down. She had taken a moment to knock on Ororo's door as well, but as expected, no one had answered her either.
Her friend was walling herself in more and more. Not even Scott and Jean or the Professor could get close to her at this point. She'd also stopped showing up for her classes regularly, even though the children were usually so close to her heart. This needed to stop.
Only Katja didn't have e real idea what to do about it; for that, she and Ororo didn't know each other well enough yet ... But helplessness had always driven her crazy.
The balcony door opened, slowly enough not to startle her. She had apparently not been quite as quiet as planned.
"You okay?" Before he joined her, Scott adjusted his usual quartz-coated glasses, which had slipped a tiny bit as happened so often in his sleep, a gesture that had surely become automatism early on with an uncontrollable mutation like his optic blasts.
Coming to stand behind her, propping his chin on her shoulder, he crossed his arms in front of her stomach after patting Morpheus' well-padded flanks for a moment so the little one wouldn't get jealous, with a slightly uncoordinated movement. Scott didn't look entirely awake; he kept yawning into her shoulder furtively. Katja liked it when he looked a little messy, especially because he was always very concerned with a proper appearance at day. It was so much more human when not every hair was in place for a change and his shirt slipped, revealing a seductively toned stomach.
If they didn't have problems right now, the sight would certainly have given her ideas. For such things, so far, they'd, unfortunately, had always far too little time. More often than not, an attack of the Brotherhood or Katja's grim daily 12-hour training had come in the way of that.
"More or less." She told him of the nightly encounter in brief words, her cigarette already half-forgotten on the saucer that she was abusing as an ashtray. At some point, you dropped certain vices all on your own, when you tried to achieve top athletic performances even more regularly than in the past. Katja had never smoked a lot anyway, safe from a few slip-ups involving hashish with her last ex-boyfriend.
"Do me a favor and put that thing out?" Scott seemed to have guessed her thoughts. He murmured it to her affectionately enough not to feel patronized.
"Thanks for taking care of the kids like that, babe. That's not something anyone here is taking for granted." He nibbled on Katja's earlobe softly, wrapping his arms around her waist a little tighter. "Thinking about Ororo again?"
"I just can't let this go." Sighing, Katja leaned her head back against his shoulder. This was another endless discussion just waiting to happen, no doubt, but she didn't want to lie to Scott. He usually knew far too well what was going on in her head anyway, all without any telepathic abilities. The scattered raindrops that her mutation was producing all around them both gave away enough, too. "I know you all see that differently, but ... No one can tell what would have happened if I had gone with her into the forest that day. I can't just forget that."
"Probably not." Scott turned her toward him gently, brushing a few stray strands of hair from her forehead. "We all have our own demons of that kind. I've left enough construction sites in the course of my mutation, too, you know. Most recently the roof of the train station, as you might recall. And I've had to make many decisions regarding my team in the past that I regretted afterward as well. If that had me despair or give up every time, there would long have been no X-Men left. Ororo knows that it wasn't your fault, even if she's not ready to talk about it right now. She's comfortable around you, you make her smile. That's already worth a lot."
"It's not enough." Katja reluctantly untangled herself from him. Walking back to the bed, she threw herself on it belly-down and propped her chin on her forearms. "I want to make it up to her, Scott, somehow. I can't just stand by and watch her collapse ..."
"Help needs to be something she wants, Katja." Settling down next to her, Scott put his arm around her, running his fingertips down the back of her neck, sending instant goosebumps down her spine despite the serious conversation.
"We're all worried. Let's talk to Jean tomorrow. Maybe she'll have some advice. But if you want to be fighting with us someday, you're going to have to learn to live with mistakes, or they'll start to affect your motivation and determination. And you can't afford that in a job like this."
"I know." Katja rubbed her forehead with a sigh and turned to the side to snuggle closer to Scott, to enjoy the warmth of his closeness that always cheered her up, even on nights like this.
"Let's go for a little drive tomorrow, that'll get my mind off things." The driving lessons Scott was giving her on one of his motorcycles were a lot of fun. Unfortunately, they had little time for that – as for so many things. Still, Katja was determined to win Scott's and her little bet that she wouldn't even need ten units before she could get her bike license.
Scott, judging by his amused grin, also had a comment about this friendly competition regarding Katja's driving skills on his lips, but that was when Katja's watch on her nightstand announced a new incoming message. The shrill beep had them both startle equally.
These new watches, the X-Men had only recently received from a friendly, highly secretive mutant and alien research lab in Canada that the Professor was supporting with regular donations. Katja hadn't quite gotten used to the many features that could be used to replace basically any cell phone.
"Proper skin contact first, babe," Scott reminded her, chuckling quietly when Katja struggled in vain to figure out who was trying to contact her because that person's details just wouldn't show up on the device's display.
"DNA scanner, right. One of these days, I'll learn." Rolling her eyes, Katja closed the hard rubber band around her wrist properly so that said scanner could respond to her data programmed into the watch.
"Better that than having someone mess with our network if you ever lose this thing."
In that regard, Scott was thankfully not quite as strict and gruff with her as when that exactly helped her progress as quickly as she wished in training. Some things just took some getting used to.
An outsider should indeed never see achievements in the shape of such alien technology; industry giants would have pounced on it with glee. And each and every criminal syndicate on this planet, too. There were far too many illegal things you could do with such toys if you wanted to.
U.G.E.R. specialized in making such innovative equipment exclusively for people like the X-Men. The Avengers were also among the facility's customers, the second major superhero grouping in the States. Plus Spider-Man, Emma Frost, who just like the Professor ran an asylum for mutants in the New York area, and the Defenders Of The Earth, who had dedicated themselves to protecting Earth from interstellar hostile forces. Making sure that no one else got their hands on this stuff was the job of all these customers themselves.
Making sure that the rest of a humanity, which was far from ready for it, didn't learn about secrets of a nature that had already been hard to digest for Katja in her first days in this mansion back then.
Like the one that the Professor had already had contact with for decades with the empire of an alien species having its residence many millions of light years far away from Earth. Their leader, Lilandra, had apparently already helped Xavier in difficult situations more than once. She, too, was the one repeatedly helping the X-Men and said laboratory with the Shi'ar's technology, like the one that was just grazing Katja's skin in the form of an almost invisibly short, bright beam of light. Among other things, the holo-technology in the Danger Room and the hyper-fast drives of so many of the X-Men's vehicles were her doing.
Given the mood that prevailed among the global powers at the moment, the USA, NATO, China, and Russia would probably have got together at least this once if any of this had gone public, just to launch a few nuclear bombs into space. Purely preventively, as a warning, so that nobody would come anywhere near to Earth.
For security reasons alone, meetings with the X-Men's mysterious partners, therefore, took place only rarely, and only selected people were allowed to be there, to Katja's disappointment. A trip into space without attracting the attention of satellites and sensors of government space agencies was, of course, a challenge. None of the current members of the X-Men team had ever met the Shi'ar. Perhaps that would never happen, either.
But they always said to dream big right?
For the moment, Katja pushed these thoughts aside with a jerky shake of her head. After her very personal first alien technology possession had verified that she was indeed herself, the display of her watch lit up white – the Professor's color. She wondered instinctively why Xavier hadn't called Scott's watch but had a feeling she wouldn't like the answer. If she, as someone who was not even officially part of the team, was included in such a conversation, that could actually only mean that the trouble, whatever it was, was about her ...
The audible tremble in Charles' usually calm, thoughtful voice had her jump up immediately and grab the nearest pair of jeans. Something had happened that shouldn't have, she knew even before the Professor had uttered more than one syllable of her name.
"Flashwind – to my office. Bring Scott while you're on it. Magneto has escaped prison."
"Ten guards dead, seventeen wounded. Mystique, Toad, and Sabretooth picked Erik up by helicopter and took down anyone who got in their way with their powers, or with firearms." The Professor's expression darkened further as he listed this shocking résumé to his team. Anger and disappointment dug deep furrows into his high forehead.
The fact that once again the Brotherhood, and especially their leader, with whom Xavier had once been close friends and for some years lovers even, were responsible for so many senseless deaths weighed heavily on him. With Liberty Island, the X-Men's struggle against this group that used nothing but aggression and terror to fight mankind's persecution and exclusion of mutants had taken on much more serious proportions than in the past. The Professor was increasingly thrust into an opposing position he had never wanted to hold. But he had no choice if he wanted to continue trying to maintain world peace.
"The three of them must have been in contact with Magneto for quite some time." Disapprovingly, Charles nodded down at his massive desk, where the file on his archrival lay open. An informant at the maximum security prison had already forwarded photos of the crime scene to him via e-mail. "They found a communicator in his cell."
"Where did he get that? I thought he was hermetically guarded nonstop."
Jean's words came slightly sluggishly; she'd probably once again been putting in tiring extra shifts at the lab. She sat snuggled close to Logan's half-naked torso, one hand casually resting on his thigh. Again and again, she nuzzled against the muscular arm around her shoulders. The two of them were visibly comfortable on the wide sofa they had chosen as their favorite spot in Xavier's spacious office. Not even the smelly cigar hanging half-forgotten from the corner of Logan's mouth seemed to bother Jean.
Something that would definitely have been grounds for divorce for Katja. No guy could be that attractive ...
Definitely a perfect match. Katja couldn't remember ever having seen such a natural search for closeness back when Jean had still been with Scott.
It was observations like these that always gave Katja the reassurance that the four of them had made the right decision back then, no matter how difficult it had been. She instinctively reached for Scott's hand and smiled when her partner immediately took her in his arms without taking his eyes off his mentor. The affectionate touch at least helped chase away the uneasiness over the current news.
Katja wished Ororo would have someone to look to for comfort on such difficult nights as well. Her friend looked all but lost, sitting there in her chair, arms folded on her knees, shoulders low, staring silently ahead. Her long white hair seemed dull, carelessly combed. She'd lost weight, too, her cheeks had hollowed. The barely closed cruel wounds of fangs on her left arm and the side of her neck stood out as a thick web of scars against her dark skin. Even though she acted as unfazed as possible on the outside, not even bothering to hide these traces of the attack with long sleeves and scarves inside the house ... After this traumatic encounter with a predator in mutant form, which could have ended even much worse, it would probably take some time before Ororo would be able to open up to any man or woman in her life.
The thought immediately rekindled Katja's rage, at that bastard Sabretooth as much as at herself. It frightened her how well Scott knew her by now. His hand came to rest on hers in determination before it had even properly clenched into a fist. She understood the gesture immediately, forcing herself to take a deep breath and refocus on the meeting.
It didn't make a difference. Katya was in no position to seek revenge for this mess. She could only try to stand by Ororo and otherwise do everything she could to prevent something like this from happening again. And that included, as the most important task, being aware of as many of the Brotherhood's activities as possible.
"Magneto's source is not yet known. But we know what a strong opponent Mystique is. She's able to pull off a lot. The extraction was perfectly planned and executed. The authorities never had a chance."
Xavier stared at his protégés and comrades-in-arms one by one, folding the file shut with a too-loud noise. "Things are back to serious. I've gone to visit Erik a few times lately, as you know. By now he knows, fortunately, that his invention is indeed useless. He wouldn't have believed you, but the two guards liquefying right before his eyes during the fight at the Statue of Liberty convinced him. What he plans to do next, we can only speculate. His stay in prison hasn't improved his opinion of mankind, though. He's more dangerous than ever."
"We need to protect Flashwind." For once, that didn't come from Scott; Jean beat him to it. "The attempt to kidnap her at the end of May must already have been Magneto's idea. That much is clear now."
"Indeed," Xavier nodded. "It's safe to assume that he at least wants to try and recruit her. And special gene constellations like her late mutation could provide the research basis for further versions of Erik's mutation machine; Hank is pretty sure of that by now. It would have been better if he hadn't found out about her for a while, but a certain someone was a little too hasty in their first time here."
Xavier gave Katja a look that spoke volumes. "I suppose you know what that means."
"Big Brother?" Katja grimaced. It wasn't the first time she was being threatened with that kind of constant surveillance in this house. And even though she understood, of course, how necessary such a measure was as long as she lacked practice in hand-to-hand combat and was not yet in full control of her powers ... She was extremely allergic to having to give up even a part of her independence on principle.
"Let's call it security detail." This unpleasant sharpness crept into Xavier's voice that had Katja at least lower her eyes every time. The authority that spoke from those intense gray eyes was just hard to escape. "I don't want to lock you up, but make sure you don't leave the mansion alone for the time being."
"I'm not sure how this is going to work when I'm supposed to be in college tomorrow." Katja folded her arms defensively, in a last halfhearted effort to fight the inevitable. "At some point, I'm going to have to start taking care of myself, Professor."
"Don't start overestimating yourself again," Jean warned her. "Just because you're doing well with your combat training doesn't mean you caught up in a few weeks with everything the rest of us have spent years training for."
"Well, I didn't enter your bootcamp completely out of shape, did I? I've been training my body all my life." Katja could not deny that her pride was hurt. The use of her mutation was not designed for close combat anyway. Ideally, it wouldn't even come to that.
Now even Logan spoke up. He usually stayed out of such debates, but he and Katja always liked to tease each other. It was a game they both enjoyed far too much to let it go. "Just because you put Scooter on his back in the gym a few times doesn't make you Jackie Chan. That's not much of a challenge."
"Shut up, Claws," Scott growled, without much conviction in his voice. Even he, as a stern team leader, had long given up trying to teach Logan manners. At least, as long as they were not on a mission. On those, even a Wolverine had to behave.
"What exactly are we even discussing here, Flashwind?" Scott let go of Katja, demonstratively keeping his distance and adjusting his glasses in an agitated gesture. There weren't many people who could disturb his emotional serenity, but with Katja, that had been the case on a regular basis from the beginning. And if her partner was starting to call her by her code name, trouble was in the air. "To be honest, I don't care what you think about it. You'll get security detail, period. Feel free to file a written protest to your commander."
"That settles that," the Professor nodded with satisfaction when Katja shut her mouth with a pout. "I want Ororo to accompany you when you go for a ride on the neighbor's property and in the woods. Jean, you take her to college. And you, Scott, keep your eyes open the rest of the time. Not a punishment for either of you, is it?" He winked at Katja and Scott good-naturedly, the seriousness of the situation momentarily forgotten.
"As for you, Logan ..."
"Me?" Logan raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "Why would Lehnsherr come after me? To take revenge for Liberty Island? Aren't you the one always insisting the guy doesn't kill mutants?"
"He does not," Xavier confirmed, ignoring the ill-concealed criticism. Once more, he didn't allow any more of that towards Magneto than the files contained on principle. "But to achieve his goals, he's not afraid to use them, for example. Or to steal from them if they have something rare in their possession that he can use."
"The adamantium?" Jean was much more startled than Logan. Her hand instinctively closed tighter around his.
"Can the skeleton even be removed?" Katja frowned, her thoughts with the X-rays of Logan she'd seen. Perhaps it was because she had never faced Magneto in person, never experienced the force of his powers, but the question popped up immediately of how one would separate such an indestructible alloy from its base.
"With Logan's healing factor?" Jean gave a short, mirthless laugh.
"Anytime. Logan, you're going to have to watch your back for a while. As long as you've got that stuff in you, Erik may be your most dangerous enemy."
Her partner had only a wry grin and a drag on his cigar to spare for such musings. Logan was rarely worried about a possible future. He was far too busy chasing his past in the shape of his memory loss. "Who's going to protect me from him? Where Erik goes, he takes his lapdog. I don't want any of you ladies to be alone with that primitive Creed again. Once Magneto is around, I won't be able to help you then." Sometimes Logan had the sense of tact of the iceberg the Titanic had rammed back then.
While Ororo remained stubborn in her silence, she visibly trembled at the mere thought of her enemy.
Jean gave Logan an annoyed look. "Later," she growled.
"Well, in that case, I guess you're going to have to spend a lot of time with Scott now."
Both men gasped. "Now wait a minute ..." Scott began, already half sitting up, taking a deep breath to launch into a monologue of protest.
"Are you high, red?" Logan managed to sum up his assessment of that proposal in fewer words.
"Good idea, Jean," the Professor nodded.
"All of you, make sure to have someone with you whenever you leave the area, if possible. And don't take off your tracking devices. After Liberty Island, Magneto will not be very friendly to either of us. In the meantime, Jean and I will keep looking for the Brotherhood's base, so at least we'll know where to go if things escalate and the transmitters fail. Any more questions?"
"Well ..." Scott and Logan began simultaneously.
"You, I didn't ask. Ororo, do you feel ready to resume your work on the team? You're welcome to take a break for a while. You're no more committed to this job than the others," Charles reminded one of his favorite pupils in a gentle tone that barely seemed to get through to her though.
"I'm not leaving. There's no reason to." Though Ororo barely raised her toneless voice, the sharp tug around her dark eyes made it very clear that her decision was a final one. Her hands had clenched into painfully hard fists. "And I hope I've just had to repeat that for the last time."
The Professor eyed the young woman with sadness but nodded.
"Thank you, then. Flashwind? There's no question that Logan knows how to fight off most other mutants, but how much do you realistically trust yourself to do at this point? Do you see yourself out there with the others in case of an emergency?"
"It wouldn't be the first time, would it?" Katja grumbled. Actually, she was tired of this discussion, just like of the murderous glances that promptly started going back and forth between Scott and Xavier.
Let the two of them figure that out alone. No one had taken Katja's assessment of her own abilities seriously a minute ago either. They would tell her when they thought she was good enough to help save the world.
"Last time you didn't exactly wait for permission before you recklessly risked your life," the Professor replied unusually annoyed, making it very clear that he, at least, wouldn't allow such another unauthorized trip like that. "Now you are under my responsibility again. Before I let you go to war, I need to be certain that you will not regret it afterward."
"If I'm needed on this team, I'll be there, no matter when or for what," Katja replied firmly, never once avoiding Xavier's gaze. That had been easy. She had decided to do that days after arriving in Westchester.
"We'll get back to that. When to do so, though, is still entirely Scott's decision."
Xavier turned his wheelchair and wheeled toward the large gable window behind his desk, staring absently out into the cloudy night for seconds. They weren't done yet, apparently. That thing with Ororo still hung like a dark shadow over every one of these meetings, over every single action of his people. Before the next encounter with the Brotherhood – and that would now undoubtedly not be too far – something had to be straightened out. "This conflict has become a lot more dangerous than it used to be. More personal, too. I'm not turning a blind eye to that, no matter what you think. I'm not going to exclude anyone from the team just because you're less squeamish about fighting than you used to be. But anyone who kills one of Magneto's people without need has fought for the X-Men for the last time. I will not let hatred make you the same monsters as those who follow Erik. I hope I've made myself clear. Dismissed."
Without objection, the others left the office, casting furtive sidelong glances at Ororo. The same question was probably going through all of their minds right now ...
What she had to say to this order of the Professor. How Ororo would react if she would face Sabretooth again someday.
And whether the others would even be able to stop their friend from getting rid of this beast forever then. It was more likely that at least a few inconspicuous claw tips and a stealthy laser beam from the side would help her ...
When the tension became too much, Ororo stopped abruptly. "That's enough. This guy is my problem. None of you needs to get involved in this. So will you stop treating me like I'm made of glass?" She turned on her heel and disappeared toward her apartment.
"She needs time," Jean said, which didn't sound like a lot of comfort.
"What she needs is a good kick in the butt to finally wake up," Katja objected.
"Well, she'll probably get that soon," Jean commented.
"But until then, let's all be a little more tactful." She gave Logan a look that spoke volumes.
"Heard you the first time, red," Logan growled.
"For now, it's wait and watch. Doubtful that Lehnsherr will get started immediately."
An assumption as optimistic as it was erroneous, as would become apparent the very next day.