Left staring at each other with just their mutual distrust and animosity to witness it they both stretched the already uncomfortable silence waiting for the other to break it or make his move. Neither, stubbornly, gave ground, and neither advanced.
"Do you love her?" The growled question broke the stalemate.
James West wasn't about to start baring his heart to a man who could slice it out of his chest.
"Do you?" He shot back.
Logan shook his head. "This ain't about me Bub...Baby Girl was right when she said that I got the hots for another lady. This is about you and Tyme....and about whether you're gonna hurt someone I like. Which, by they way, I usually react badly to."
At that Logan rushed James and as James twisted his body to throw off the momentum of the brute force attack and drop the brute with a karate blow, he was shocked to find Logan shift his momentum at the last second and avoid not only the chop but he also avoided striking Jim entirely. Instead he now stood calmly behind James without looking even slightly out of breath by the sudden move. James turned quickly but kept his face impassive, not allowing Logan to gage his astonishment at his speed and unlikely looking dexterity.
"Last time. Do You Love Her?" As he asked James watched as the tip of one deadly claw extended itself through Logan's skin and the mutant raised his hand to pick his teeth casually.
West's eyes narrowed and he refused to allow the deliberate motion unnerve him. And West knew that this man knew how to bait. To goad a response. To throw an adversary off balance. It was something any classically trained warrior learned. It tested and prodded and revealed chinks that could exploited when the real assault came.
Jim readied a less then satisfactory reply. He too could bait an opponent. But then he saw Logan's attention shift. Dark, hooded eyes left his sly examination of Jim's reactions. Eyes widened...and his shaggy, maned head swiveled, followed by the rest of his body in a total disregard for the rules of combat and care, no battle ready opponent turned his back on his enemy, that Jim knew, immediately, that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
His head pitched back and Jim could hear him breathe deeply through his nostrils and James stepped up to his side and watched him exhale the breath through bared teeth.
"Too many scents...something's wrong." He looked around.
"Who knows we're here?" he demanded.
West looked up and back down the track toward the outline of the city.
Logan scowled then bolted down the track toward the barn Artie had followed Tyme to.
"They ain't alone West!" He shouted back. "They ain't alone by a long shot!"
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Logan had smelled it when the wind shifted and as much as he wanted to knock the boy scout in blue on his tight panted ass, he knew danger when he smelled it. The smell of men, several men, sweating in the heat. The smell of horses...the smell of oiled guns and gunpowder, and another smell he recognized. The antiseptic smell of a medical people. In a barn? Here? Why?
For Tyme!
He ran for the barn. He cursed himself for being a fool for allowing himself to be snuck up on again, like in the bar parking lot with Tyme. He smelled the hurried taint of men who bore a load they wanted to move quickly...and he was more upset that the wind shift brought only residual scent. He knew when he arrived at the barn door that he wouldn't find anyone there.
With a roar he leapt at the barred door and knocked it deep into the building in a splintering explosion.
Behind him he heard West close in. He looked back and out of the corner of his eye he saw West carried a gun and a small portion of Logan's brain registered curiosity as to where this weapon had been hidden. The man was a walking, running, arsenal.
He didn't bother calling out, no one was there, and as he sniffed the air he knew there'd been no struggle. He was amazed that Tyme hadn't felt her abductor's approach and grew angry with himself and West. It was obvious that she had other things on her mind when she ran out on them earlier.
He heard West stepping over the splintered remains of the door and credited him with not calling out. Then his foot hit something and it made a tinkling sound. He looked down and he could feel his hair rise on his back. He stooped and picked up the glass plunger with its sharp primitive needle and examined it.
Then, spinning, he roared once and fell upon James West for the kill.
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Jim managed to turn at the last second as he felt Wolverine's claws tear into his shirt and caress his ribs with three, thin bloody lines. He spun away from him and raised his gun only to watch the barrel fall off in three pieces in the straw. Jim looked up and felt his eyes widen as the creature, the mad mutant, raised himself up and a hungry look transformed his human seeming eyes into the reflective red glow of circling wolf's.
"Where is she West?" He smiled savagely. "Tell me now and it will be quick...where is she now!"
Jim stopped, crouched slightly, puzzling over the question.
"What are you talking about?!" he demanded.
Then something shot past his head and embedded itself in the wall behind his head. Without taking his eyes off Logan he pulled it out and looked at the object.
It was a hypodermic needle and glass plunger. Jim turned it over in his hand and saw the maker mark and knew its owner. His brow creased, he shook his head slightly. He didn't understand.
Acid etched on the side of the glass, giving it a white opaque satin lettering...."U.S.Army".
"Wha...?"
The plunger fell from Jim's hand as Wolverine's body slammed into him and he took a sudden fall backwards watching in stunned horror as deadly metal claws followed his throat toward the ground, ready to sheath themselves in his neck once they both hit.
Just before his back struck, Jim tucked his knee up to his chest and kicked outward striking Wolverine in the chest and tossing him over his head, closing his eyes briefly and lifting his chin back to avoid, by a hair, the claws flying away from his face.
He rolled away from Wolverine and his hand struck and grabbed an old pitchfork lying on the ground next to him. As he scrambled up to his feet the fork came up in his hand. But Wolverine was faster and before Jim set his feet he saw the wild man running at him with claws extended, a berserker's rage blazing through him. Jim tipped the pitchfork in front of him, almost instinctively, and set the handle against the wall of the stall behind him and jumped backward against the wall as Wolverine ran straight into the tines carried by rage and momentum.
The pitchfork's handle snapped and Wolverine's claws struck the wall and embedded themselves for just a moment a hair's breadth from Jim's left shoulder, he heard a cry, a howl, and then heard a metallic scraping as the claws retracted into the mutant's hands and Jim saw him drop to the ground at his feet. The tines of the fork protruding from his back, one had bent awkwardly, perhaps having glanced off one of the brute's metal encased bones, and it had ripped it's way, jaggedly, from his body.
Jim looked down and was torn, with worry about Tyme, and Artie...and with the blood on his hands now that he looked down at the body of Tyme's overprotective friend. Jim looked down at the blood seeping through his shirt as he lowered himself beside the mutant's body and he grabbed the handle where it was splintered and pulled, wincing to himself as the bent tine tore backwards through Logan's frame as it was extracted. Tossing the fork to the side with an angry grunt, he reached down and rolled the man on his back towards him.
Jim looked at the man's closed eyes and slack face and sighed bitterly.
"You stupid, mean, son-of-a-bitch...." he spat angrily.
He lowered his head and closed his eyes to gather his thoughts.
His eyes flew open again as a steel grip encircled his throat and he felt his body being lifted off the floor.
"Nice, fucking, eulogy Agent West!" roared the resurrected mad man, as Jim felt the air leave his lungs with the sudden and violent slamming of his body against the barn wall. "Sweet...simple...summed me up to a tee....I'll try to do the same for you!"
Logan's grip tightened and Jim felt an immediate, pulsing, whooshing sound that he recognized as his blood pushing through constricted arteries and Logan's face pressed in on him. Jim lifted his arms and with all his strength, struck two fisted judo blows to Logan's chest under his arms on either side. Logan made an annoyed grunt and smiled.
That blow should have knocked the wind out of him...made his grip loosen instead Logan just drew closer.
"No more games West...I know you have communicated with your superior officers. What have you told them about us...about her? Was it just part of the game for you West? Something to keep her busy until you could spring the trap? Did Gordon take her someplace?!"
Logan's fist connected with Jim's stomach painfully but Jim held the reaction back enough to make the big man smile at the implied challenge. Then Jim's eyes flicked down. The tips of Logan's claws pricked Jim's taut stomach muscles where the man's fist pressed tight against him.
"I'll spring them West....I swear I will!" He smiled. "That pitchfork stung. Ya think you'll bounce back as fast as me though Bub?"
Jim had no other recourse then to try to reason with him...and no true belief that reasoning with him would work.
"I don't know where she or Artie are Logan." He rasped. "I am just as worried as you are."
The grip tightened.
"Dammit Logan! I love her...I wouldn't let anyone touch her!" Jim felt light headed.
"Yeah right Government Guy....But you love your nation more...DON'T YOU!?" He roared. "Enough to give it a new weapon to tinker with!"
The horror of what Logan implied struck Jim hard. Did his superiors decide on this? Did he somehow make Tyme a target? No...No..he had done something with Tyme and Logan he had never done before. He'd left important information out of his reports. But maybe someone else...maybe someone else was watching them?
"Logan...listen to me...THINK dammit! Jim hissed. "Use that blasted nose of yours...tell me what else you smell."
Logan looked at Jim with disgust...but a curious look passed through his eyes for a moment and he inhaled deeply. His grip loosened slightly.
Jim saw him scowl...his eyes unfocused for just a moment to brief to count.
"What is it?" Jim asked hoarsely.
"Blood."
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Logan stared hard into the preternaturally calm hazel eyes of James West and tried...tried hard...for Tyme's sake, to find something he could trust in them. The smell bothered him though. It didn't make sense with the scenario Logan had written in his mind.
He didn't seem to hear West until he had repeated himself a couple of times...or maybe it was because Logan still had his throat pinned and clawed fist pushed against his abdomen.
"Blood?" He rasped. "Whose Logan? I know you can tell the difference...whose blood? Tyme's?"
Logan looked at the eyes of the man in front of him...hard...soldier eyes. He watched them soften, beyond all control, with worry...maybe fear. Not for himself. Logan had to admire that about West. The man was no wuss. He imagined that normal humans didn't win many knockdowns with this guy.
Logan retracted the claws and felt West relax minutely as his grip loosened slightly. Logan sneered and gripped his throat again and was gratified to see West's eyes register surprise as he was lifted off his feet by the strangle hold.
"If I find out you're screwing with me....with her...I'll have your god-damned guts for garters!"
With that Logan dropped West. West landed in a crouch...a tense, ready, wary, crouch one hand reaching up to his throat as though he could readjust any damage done. But he dropped his hand and stood...removed his damaged shirt and tossed it aside and looked down at the cuts along his belly and looking back at Wolverine.
"This isn't the blood you smell? Is it?"
The tone was hoarse...but calm and conversational. This guy had a cool you couldn't shake...a bit like Cyke. Or could you?
"No...it's Artie's."
James West's eyes widened at this. Logan could see that West had a history with this Gordon. The friendship was deep...and there was anger in his eyes that Logan knew mirrored his.
"Where?"
Logan took his eyes off of West for the first time since the fight began and that was difficult...usually there'd be a lot more blood at the end of one of his rages. That West was still standing was something of a miracle. He kicked at the straw on the barn floor and pointed to the spot.
"There."
West dropped down to the spot turning his back, bravely, to Logan. He touched the small spots that lay there soaking in the dry boards.
"He isn't dead." Declared West standing and wiping the dirt from his hands and walking out the barn door.
Logan was caught off-guard. "How do you know?"
West turned with a finger raised under Logan's nose. A move that could get a finger removed.
"ONE...not enough blood!" He counted off. "I'm sure you know that there'd be more blood. TWO...no body. And since they left the needle they obviously weren't afraid of being caught so if they killed him they'd have left him...so they took him too."
Logan scowled. "THREE....why?"
Jim shook his head. "I don't know."
Then he turned and ran down the track to the Wanderer. "But I plan to find out...NOW!"
Logan was a tough man...he was a hard...a trained man. He considered himself a free agent...a loner. But more and more he understood that when he was on a mission with other men with the same goal...that he became a follower. And he didn't like it one damned bit. He ran after West.
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James West didn't mention again the fight in the barn, though his side burned under the hasty bandage and his throat was sore and bruised. He understood Logan's motivation and as he got evasive and dismissive telegraph after telegraph from Col. Cole's offices and the other connections in government he thought he could shake he began to suspect that Logan may be right about his suspicions.
He slammed a fist down after the latest telegraph called Artie's kidnapping a temporary reassignment and for security reasons they could tell him nothing else. He swept the papers off the desk and knocked over the chair he'd been sitting in. He turned violently and came face to face with a slightly amused looking Logan.
"Sooo...feeling a little let down by your friends in government?" He blew smoke at West from the cigar in his mouth as he spoke. "Welcome to my world Bub."
Jim frowned, turning away abruptly and pulled a map or the area down and began studying it.
"If this was my time...she could be half way around the world by now....at least ya know they're keeping her local."
James let the curiosity about the statement bury itself and just nodded. Many reasons made him positive she was still local.
"They can't keep her drugged forever. And when she wakes she'll be dangerous." Jim thought out loud.
"Unless they have some reason for her not to use her powers..." Logan's voice lowered.
Jim felt a burning grow in his belly that had nothing to do with the fight earlier.
"A reason...like keeping Artie safe." he finished Logan's thought.
Jim shook himself and looked over the map and his eyes narrowed when he reached a certain location on it.
"Where would you go...if you had a dangerous, unpredictable, top secret human weapon and a less then happy, but resourceful and clever secret service agent?" He mused.
Logan thought. "Someplace remote, inaccessible, escape proof. Someplace only I could get into...no one could stumble onto our..." Logan spat the word he feared most out. "Experiments."
Jim's thoughts got darker. Much darker. He could picture the place now...and Tyme's strange reaction upon seeing it. And he knew that what he would do...what he had to do...would put him at odds with his own government. And James West had never...could never be called a traitor. But this...was...different.
He reached up decisively and placed a colored pushpin in the map, and Logan looked in closer.
"An island fort would work...wouldn't it?" Jim looked at the savage, anticipatory smile that crept over Logan's face. He felt the same grim smile pull on the corners of his mouth.
"Alcatraz."
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Artie came to with the smarting sting of medicine being applied to the cut being closed on the back of his head. His eyes opened wider and he felt the urge to shake his head to reconcile the double vision he was experiencing but hands suddenly gripped his head on both sides and held him secure.
"Please don't move yet Mr. Gordon...I'm almost done here." There was a pulling and Artie winced as he felt the telltale thread snap of a suture being cut. "That's fine...all done. Good as new." The voice was low, amused, and sonorous in a way that made the listener...listen.
And the possessor of the voice was just as commanding. A tall, lean man stepped around the chair, that Artie was just starting to realize he was chained to, and stopped and looked down his long, aristocratic nose at the seated, dazed agent. The man stood at about 6'5 and his peppered gray hair was neatly groomed far back off his high forehead creating an almost V-like widow's peak that made his sculpted short gray burnsides frame his face in a way that made his features formidable...commanding...gaunt...and arresting.
He wore under a long white lab coat that came to his knees a suit of severe black, exquisitely tailored. Artie examined the man's hawk like features and stopped his investigations at the man's eyes and felt a coldness creep into his heart.
The man's eyes were so dark that they appeared to be made of coal. but they were cold. Icy. They didn't see Artie...they examined him. And the smile that creased the edges of his thin hard lined mouth did nothing to add warmth to his bearing. In fact the smile and the eyes actually seemed to work together to lower the temperature of the room.
"Are you sure you're quite awake Mr. Gordon?" The voice was amused, mock concern trying to sound genuine...but the actor in Artie could not be fooled.
"Yeah..." he replied slowly as he looked around him carefully, just realizing that he was chained to the chair he sat on. Then he stiffened. They were not alone.
Against the metal plated door stood a US Army soldier...his rifle held attentively. But that hadn't alarmed Artie. Behind the tall, languid man a table stood. A medical examination table. And Tyme lay on it.
It was obvious by the form visible through the thin sheet covering her and the leering gaze of the other soldier who stood at attention, in more ways then one, at the head of the table, that she had been divested of her garments for some kind of perusal. And apparently in front of these men, with no regard given to her dignity! The gentleman in Artie flared at this abuse and his anger grew when he saw Tyme's poor head.
Her long golden curls were gone. Her head was shaved and her bare, knicked and bald pate was graphed and painted like a grid. Mapped, clinically, like he'd seen done to the heads of mental patients at autopsies for learning medicos to try to decipher why their brains functioned as they did in life.
Artie turned his infuriated mind to the man before him.
"What have you done to her!" he shouted, pulling at his bonds with all his strength despite the known reality that they wouldn't break for him.
"Calm yourself Mr. Gordon. No one has harmed the subject. The subject is very valuable to the US Army, and I have been chosen to study it." The man soothed.
"HER...not "it"!" Artie was struck by the dehumanizing effect of the man's manner.
"As you wish Mr. Gordon." The man conceded with a polite nod. "And you...you have been personally selected by me to help us."
Artie was not digesting the information well. Whether that was from the blow or from his shock at Tyme's state or the man's attitude he couldn't tell. "Who the Hell are you?!"
"I apologize. Let me introduce myself." He bowed just a bit at the waist. "Doctor Edmund Hillmont the Third...at your service."
"Pardon me if I don't rise and shake your hand." Artie bitterly mused. "And this place is?"
"With some quick, and influential tinkering...it is the Alcatraz Weapon's Research Center. For now!" The Doctor swept his arms out expansively.
"The WHAT?!"
"Mr. Gordon. You, more then anyone, should be aware of this subject's potential." the man confided eagerly. "You were subject to it's...ummm her...talents first hand. If she were researched properly, trained properly...THINK what a benefit she would be to the security of the nation!"
Artie bristled at what he was hearing but held his tongue.
"This subject could destroy an enemy army with a single thought before any shots were exchanged on the battlefield saving American lives...as a government assassin she could eliminate the head's of state of enemy nations with a blink and read the thoughts of those whom we want to understand better." The man's eyes glittered like light shining off a cockroach's black carapace. The look of lust...not unlike the soldier who still ogled Tyme's frighteningly still form, but this lust was pure power.
"And my role in this?" Artie was curious as to how this man thought he could sell him on any of this.
"Has been left, entirely, up to me." The man drew himself to his full height. "The subject is dangerous. Potentially lethal. You, Mr. Gordon, will be here to calm her, to keep her from using her powers unwisely which would force us to employ more...ummm..persuasive..means of obtaining her cooperation. I'm afraid that if your presence is not enough to restrain her that we may need to use methods of "negative reinforcement" to convince her otherwise."
The man was talking torture and they both knew it. Artemus Gordon remembered what Wolverine had said about living in a world where mutants were feared and hated and he recalled what Tyme had said happened to Logan in that world. And he was coming to the bitter realization that that "world" was his too. He couldn't let Tyme become an experiment, dehumanized to make it easier for the government to ignore her freedom. He couldn't let her become a slave, and for the safety of all he couldn't let her become a weapon.
"I'm not going to help you hurt her." He said. His voice was low...barely contained fury in every syllable.
"You don't know anything about her...you are making a serious mistake. You don't know what you are doing. And you won't get away with this...I promise you that."
The man's smiling face fell into a sneer. He was a someone who didn't accept criticism well it appeared. He puffed his chest out self-importantly and smiled sourly, one hand reaching back and laying itself on Tyme's stomach possessively. The man saw Artie tense angrily and cocked his head in an amused fashion and he chuckled.
"Mr. Gordon...really...think of the Subject. You are her friend aren't you? Surely you want what is healthiest for her...and you. I know..." he said with a lingering smile as his hand ran a caressing path down Tyme's leg as the doctor opened the door. "I know you want what is going to bring the least amount of discomfort to the situation. You won't be helping to hurt her...you'll be sparing her...and you... a lot of negative experiences."
Artemus Gordon was shaking with fury as the doctor prepared to leave. "She isn't "the subject", she has a name you know."
The doctor paused and looked at Tyme with an frighteningly white and hungry smile. "She has nothing...not even a name...until I give it to her."
And with that the guards followed him out the door and Artie was alone staring helplessly at Tyme and apologizing to her silently for the betrayal he felt over the situation.
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Jim suddenly found his connections drying up. The maps and detailed building plans he could easily get any other time were not available to him now and he repeatedly slammed his fist against walls and desks until it was sore. Logan looked at him and knew that he no longer wore an amused smile but that his face was thoughtful, angry, and a little sad.
"Look Bub..." he said as he stepped up to Jim's side, gazing down at the rough old draft plan of the prison fort they had managed to get a hold of. "I don't know a soul that has ever tried to break into Alcatraz...folks in my time would laugh at the idea for sure. And I've heard of about three men who ever busted out of that hellhole. One drowned. Don't beat yourself up over it."
"You'll do that for me?" Jim snorted bitterly.
There was a rough bark that could have been a laugh. "Yeah...I get the pleasure. But we gotta get her...uhhh...them..outta there first. And we will. And make history at the same time maybe?" He blew a ring of smoke and stepped back. "The only fools to break in...and out...of Alcatraz!"
Jim's imagination was running wild. He wasn't as worried about Artie as much as Tyme. He knew Artie was Tyme's edge in there...if he could stall, or protect or escape he would. But he wasn't prepared for the image of what his own government may do to Tyme to make her cooperate with their demands. He wasn't a fanciful man, but as he looked at Logan from the desk he needed to know. He needed to know.
"Tyme said you were experimented on...by the government."
"Canadian." The big man sniffed. "But if what you want to know is how bad was it...then I'll tell ya that I won't leave that girl in there. Once someone has decided you aren't human enough to be considered...that you're a thing that can be abducted and drugged. Then they are capable of all kinds of things to get you to do what they want." He turned away and looked out the window of the train car. "They made me into an assassin...breaking away from their control almost killed me...but not before they made me a better killer then I already was.""
Jim knew that they wanted to make her a weapon...it would be the only reason to take her like this. He wasn't going to let that happen. Even if it killed him.
"We'll have to swim for it." Jim said. Then he smiled a bit. "Can you swim...I mean...you know? With a metal skeleton and all if I toss you into the bay and you sink like an anchor Tyme will never forgive me."
He had the guilty pleasure of seeing the brute bristle and Jim was pretty sure it was at the suggestion that he could be "tossed"...still. it was reaction. Then he heard the barking laugh again.
"I can swim boy scout."
Jim smiled. "Boy scout?"
"You remind me of a fella back home...by the book...annoying...mission first...straight laced kid. He leads the group I run with sometimes. Pain in the ass."
"Are you his friend?" Jim asked without taking his eyes off the mad man.
Logan's face remained impassive as he chewed the cigar. He turned away...walking towards the door of the train. "Yeah...he's a...friend."
Jim picked up his hat and followed him. Allowing the uncomfortable admission to dissolve as they made their way to the edge of the bay.
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Artie didn't make any objections about the way the guard looked over Tyme's body. He'd tried too and sported what would be an impressive bruise on his jaw. And he couldn't help Tyme if he were dead.
The chains held him tight and he couldn't reach any of his secreted devices like this. It was a waiting game now. But then a strangely familiar tickle entered his mind. It amazed him for a moment how he could find such a new, otherworldly, sensation comforting but he did. And it took all his abilities as an actor not to reveal his delight...or his trepidation.
He was still watching the guard, carefully, when the man's face grew flush and his eyes took on that fixed and lustful look of the criminal deviant. Jim and Artie had run into their kind enough times and seen the evil glowing in their eyes. Artie sat bolt upright. He almost shouted, almost called out to Tyme. To warn her. Then the man's hand raised. Artie growled like Logan, a frustrated helpless warning and the guard laid his rifle across Tyme's belly and pointed it at him and smiled a warning. His other hand tickled the edge of the sheet covering the young woman's breast.
"If you touch them...you'll come away with a stump." Came a stern, whispered warning. The guard's eyes opened wide and Tyme grabbed the rifle laying across her and slammed it up into the startled guard's chin. The man sank to the ground with little sound.
Whipping her legs around Tyme sat up unsteadily, having moved too swiftly. She looked down and let loose with a string of obscenities that shocked Artie as much as it amused him while he delicately pretended not to notice her covering her truly superb breasts with the fallen sheet.
She looked down at the fallen guard. "Pervert!" she muttered testily.
"Someone wake on the wrong side of the examination table today?" Artie smiled, relief giving him a chipper edge.
Tyme looked at him...around him. Through him...blearily and shook her head to bring some kind of clarity. "I'm not Mary Sunshine when I wake up...I need a cup of coffee bad." She looked down at herself and pulled the sheet up higher. "That and clothes." Then reaching up she brushed her head with her hand and began to let go with another string of muttered expletives.
"You kiss people with that mouth young lady?"
She looked at him and stuck out her tongue.
She got off the table gingerly and almost fell as she tried to shake the residual effects of the tranquilizer. She pushed herself up and looked around. Then back at Artie. "Clothes?"
"I saw them over there on that shelf." Artie inclined his head.
He averted his eyes, with some difficulty, while Tyme dressed hastily. Besides her initial outburst she hadn't obsessed much over her new coiffure except as she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror in passing.
"New look for me.... edgy...daring...God, I look like Professor X!" And she laughed. It wasn't gallows or sad...it was good humored and truly amused laughter.
And Artie thought it was a wonderful thing to hear. Few women, it seemed, weren't vain or fixated on their looks. The fact that she could take such a mean defacing of her womanly charms in stride spoke well of her stamina, priorities and, ultimately, in Jim's choice of her as a lover. How all of that would end was anyone's guess...but Artie had a lot of confidence in her ability to get through it.
"Tyme...If you can reach into the collar of my coat you'll find a pick that can be used to unlock these chains."
Tyme quickly located the pick and set to work on the troublesome locks. "Dammit...I wish Cyclops was here...this would sure go a lot faster if he could just blast the lock open."
Artie recalled the mention of this "X-Man" leader from an earlier discussion and nodded...eye beams that intense would be useful, but Artie would prefer to keep his fingers.
"You're doing fine. There...see. It's open." He smiled at her proudly. He reached up and rubbed her bald pate and smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry I couldn't stop that."
"Hair grows." she shrugged. "It's just funny...feeling the breeze up there." She looked around. "What do we do now?"
Artie saw the guard on the floor move slightly. "First...we tie up your "pervert"...then we try to get out of here."
The gleam in Tyme's eye was unmistakable, the smile...delighted, as she looked at the guard. She might be able to adjust to her new situation and appearance just fine, but the idea of some small revenge was very appealing to her as well. Maybe she and Jim had too much in common. He wasn't sure she had any fighting experience...but he knew she was fit...and she was certainly more then game.
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They stared at the opposite shore. It was daunting...and Logan knew from history...or in this case...the future...that people swimming the San Fran Bay to escape The Rock just didn't make it.
He saw the boyscou...Jim...remove his shirt and do some compact, well-trained stretches. The man was fit. As fit as Logan had ever seen in a homosapien. Or was he? Logan couldn't help noticing that the three lines...the cuts he'd made that bisected the agent's chiseled six-pack appeared to be in a slightly more accelerated stage of healing then a normal human. Not much more...but there was also an odd lack of scars on the man...as though he were immune to them. They may not be dominant in his make up...but Logan would love to see how this guy's genes looked under Hank's microscope.
"So...you never answered the question. Are you in love with her?"
West stopped what he was doing and looked at Logan with a exacerbated glare. "We don't have time for this."
"That's not an answer either."
West came up out of a deep bending stretch, reaching high above him and dropped his arms to his side with a long sigh. His eyes never left his feet.
"Yes." He looked up and stared out across the water. "I love her."
"Then she's gonna be hurt." Logan sighed too. He suddenly didn't want to add to West's plate...he no longer had the urge to be angered by him, or challenged by him. He just wanted to make sure West understood. He was fairly certain that Tyme wouldn't find solace in the kind of comfort they once shared. And Logan wasn't the best in the comfort category. He just wanted West to know.
"I don't want to hurt her." West bundled his clothes into a bag and stood.
"West...she can't stay...and you can't go with her." Logan looked at him steadily. "You would never go with her. You ain't no dummy, you know you couldn't live in our time...you couldn't leave your friend...you couldn't leave what you know. And she knows it. All she'll know, when we get back to our time, is that you'll be bones and dust in some forgotten hole in the ground...and that girl don't need ghosts. You can't give her what she needs."
Logan could tell that West wanted to argue that love was all they needed...or that it would work out, but the words wouldn't form because he knew they weren't true. Instead West waded out into the bay and turned back as Logan entered the water.
"What does she need?" he asked curtly.
"Someone who won't leave. Face it West...even if she could stay, you would end up hurting her there too. You ain't any better at commitment then I am at opera singing. You like the ladies too much Bub...you're a player. And you wouldn't set out trying to hurt her...but you would. She needs a love that will last."
West looked at him for a moment, his handsome face immobile. Then he took a breath and disappeared under the frigid bay waters. Logan shook his head sadly and followed.
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"Let me try something." said Tyme as she stepped up behind Artie, who was prepared to jimmey the lock of the door.
Artie looked at her curiously, but stepped aside. Tyme really didn't mind losing her hair. She was feeling a rush of power running through her, she was feeling potential she'd never known before and she had a situation where she could test it. It reminded her of the danger room exercises she always refused to participate in either due to feeling inadequate or because of the professor's presence. She knew...she really did realize that they were in danger, but part of her was soaring. She wanted to stretch her limits and if it meant losing her hair...so be it.
She smiled nervously and laid her hands on the door. Her eyes grew bright and everything around her took on the green glow, like she was looking at the world through a lit green light bulb. She felt the guards stir. One was feeling bored the other disgruntled. Both were violent men, they didn't fit in with the regular soldiers. She knew they were picked for this "assignment" for that reason. But both could feel the rise of adrenaline, the panic of the feeling that something was wrong and that they would be blamed. When they burst into the room it was almost a comical tripping, Three Stooges like. Artie and she were waiting. Artie grabbed one gun barrel and dragged the bearer forward into his closed fist, and the rifle Tyme wielded like a club brained the second neatly. They joined the tied and gagged first guard, and Artie, armed with a liberated gun and Tyme...armed with powers she wasn't sure of, eased into the halls of their prison fortress.
Artie was fascinated with Tyme's journey of discovery as she found new and interesting ways to incapacitate guards they found along the way, or ways she found to lead them into their reach that allowed Artie to render them insensible. But he also had to admit that he worried about her.
He worried that she may be using their predicament as a way to hide in the moment. It wasn't uncommon. When pain had struck too close to home for him on occasion, Artie had used the action, the adventure, and the rush of sensation to mask the pain. But when it was all over the pain still had to be faced.
He hoped, deep down, that she realized that. And he hoped if she did...that it didn't make her reckless.
Then he heard her gasp and he covered her mouth with a hand and drew her back. Her eyes were glowing but that started to die and she shook his hand from her mouth and looked at him with a frightened, awed, expression.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Pain." she whispered. "That guard, I was trying to plant a fake emotional response when I felt a pain in my stomach like it was burning deep. And then I knew what it was."
"What?" asked Artie alarmed.
"It, he has a medical problem," she whispered. "Ulcers I think...but I could feel it like I had them too." She looked at him with wide eyes. "I never thought I could feel anything but emotional states...perhaps a bit of telepathy. But actually feeling what someone feels physically too?" She trembled. "I wasn't ready for that."
"Frightening?" he asked holding her closer.
She nodded.
"I've been expecting to feel the pull back to my time...that starts as an ache..it takes a while for the pain to get real bad...but I haven't felt it pull on me yet. This pain was sharp...and not connected to me." She looked up at Artie and reached out a shaking hand for his arm for support. "We need to get out of here...now."
"Hold on." Artie smiled. "He's the last guard...that looks like some sort of outer door. Let me take care of him and we'll get out of here and see where we are and how to get back."
He was happy to take the last guard out of commission. He worked well with Jim...as a partner Jim was the physical side of their equation. Artemus Gordon was happy to operate in a more cerebral way. But since their progress to freedom he had allowed Tyme to take that position and he had relegated himself to providing the muscle...and he was plain tired.
Tyme watched him curiously as he produced a small silver ball from the heel of his boot. With a light flick, almost like a child shooting marbles, he struck the toe of the guard who looked down with mild curiosity and bent to retrieve it. The ball exploded in a tiny puff of yellow smoke and Artie covered his mouth with a hankie and saw Tyme cover her mouth in response to his lead. Artie checked the man's pulse quickly and handed his cuffs to Tyme who shackled the man to a pipe while Artie gagged him.
Artie was unsure at this point. He looked at Tyme.
"We need to know what's out there Tyme. Can you feel around, maybe tell me how many we have waiting for us outside."
Her eyes were already glowing greener in response. She placed the palm of both hands against the door and he could almost feel the air shift as she pressed her powers beyond the door. She didn't blink, but her eyes narrowed until the green glow resembled a half opened lantern against the heavy wood door. Then her eyes grew wide and her mouth opened wide. Distress was plain on her face. Terror. She pushed herself away from the door falling backwards with an unmuffled cry.
Looking around wildly she didn't seem to see him for a moment then she found his face and grabbed his collar urgently. "No!" she cried.
"They want me...let me go...I'll go. Please..please stay here. Wait for Jim & Logan. I felt them out there...faintly. They're coming. But the man out there...he LET us get this far. He knew we would! I need to go out to face him...you stay here!"
She was frantic as he shook his head calmly and tried to settle her. She refused to be comforted.
"You don't understand." Her voice lowered, her insistence was as urgent as the need to breathe. "There are too many of them...maybe fifty or more. They are armed, I could feel their readiness, I could feel their grips on the triggers. I can't incapacitate them all...and we would both be killed. All they want is me. If I go you won't get hurt."
Artie pulled her close to him. "Jim would kill me if I let you go out there alone, and Logan would use the rest of me for hair ribbons. And I can't let you go out there..." Artie tried to find the right way to explain the Doctor Hillmont's threats against her. "Tyme...if you don't act the way he wants you to he hinted that he may use torture to get you to cooperate."
She shook her head violently. "I've seen the heart of the man that wants to use me....he isn't threatening me...." She looked at a loss to explain to him what she was trying to say. Instead she grabbed the sides of his temples and slammed into his mind painfully quick...and his eyes opened wide but he didn't see her in front of him.
Artie saw felt the open prison yard yawn out in front of him without opening the door. He could feel, anger, resentment, boredom, curiosity, cruelty and excitement pouring into him from all sides...crushing his mind with genuinely itchy fingers and bloodlust. And he felt the heart of this evil throng...surrounded by men ranging from curious to apathetic to more then a few with difficulties with the ethics of what they were doing, the soul of Hillmont's stood out. It was a proud, cruel, power hungry piece of slime. It was a self-righteous heap of filth, a masquerade that let him believe he worked for a greater good when all he really lusted after was power, whether that power was over life and death on a soldier under his knife or whether it was the callous severing of a leg that could have been saved because he had had a bad sandwich brought to him and he needed to take it out on someone...it didn't matter. Hillmont's goal, for now, was to make Tyme a weapon...if he couldn't control her no one would. And his means of control wasn't torturing her.
Artie saw that it was him that was meant for that sacrificial altar.
When she released his head he sank to his knees and she sank down to face him.
He looked at her, dazed. Part of him wanted to be angry at what she'd done...part of him wanted to hug her. If that was what it was like to be her...to feel that tidal wave...that pressure, day in and out...he had underestimated her strength.
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The rush, the excitement, the feeling of exploration died with what Tyme had felt awaiting them on the other side of the door.
"You need to find another way out. I'll stall them. Jim...I feel him and Logan. They know where we are and they're coming." She steadied her breathing. "He won't hurt his investment...but if you go with me, he will hurt you."
"And you can't disable them?" Artie seemed to overestimate her powers now.
"No. Not all of them...not without seeing them." She paused. "And since they're armed, chances are a gun will blow you into hell before I can get everyone."
"I'm not leaving you."
"Artie..." she smiled. "If you don't leave me I'm going to put you to sleep and shove you in a locked closet. They'll hurt you!"
"I'm not going to leave you." he said earnestly. "You gave me a damned headache, but I know exactly what that bastard wants with you...I can't leave you to face that alone."
She tried to shrug nonchalantly. "He won't be able to use me for long Artie. I'll hop back when the pull gets strong enough."
It didn't fool Artemus Gordon. "You said you can't control what time you hop to, you wouldn't be able to come back for Logan. Tyme...you won't strand him here and you know it. You'll die...you'll wait here too."
"And if I do, I still won't be any good to him dead so problem solved." She grinned.
Artie sighed.
"We can always do a Butch and Sundance." she quipped. Then at his quizzical expression she added. "Outlaw duo, who when outnumbered by many guns, decided to burst through that last door and go out in a blaze of gunfire and glory...sad ending. Made a great movie. Redford was soooo hot."
"Let's not and say we did." Artie smiled back.
Then the decision was taken from them.
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The swim was treacherous, but Jim wasn't about to let his fatigue slow him. He inwardly berated himself for the need to prove himself that he felt around the untiring mutant who plowed, determinedly, through the rough bay wake. Logan's words still stung Jim as he took another stroke toward the island fort. It was an impossible situation and Jim knew he'd made it worse. He would have to say goodbye. This wasn't his choice anymore. He was used to saying goodbye, used to being the person who made that decision first. But this was different. And he knew everything that was inside her...if this was going to be hard on him, he knew it would be worse for her.
Logan was right and Jim hated him for pointing it out. There was no way to fix what had happened...no way to fall out of love...the only thing he could do was hope they all lived through this to find out just how bad "goodbye" would be. Hardly something to look forward to. But with each stroke Jim felt an urgency drawing him nearer. He felt as though a rope in his mind was drawing him to shore...moments of humor and curiosity, power and fear passed through him. Tremors along a spider's web. He swam harder.
His mind seized suddenly, he felt his heart race and he felt the rush of heat that filled him only when he was battling for his life. His strokes stopped and he floundered, the waves, both of pain and anger and fear washed over him from the direction of the island. He lost sight of the dark rock, and of Logan as his head went under the surface. He felt Tyme rein in the emotional outburst as quickly as she could. But he had swallowed water and he couldn't remember for a moment which direction to swim to reach the air.
The grip on his thrashing arm was painful, but it was his pain alone, and for a moment the water flowed faster past him as he felt himself dragged. When his face broke the surface Logan was looking at him with an appraising, almost concerned, gaze.
"I'm taking it they're in trouble?" He asked loudly over the sound of wave and coughing.
Jim tried to nod as he coughed and expelled the water he'd swallowed and he noticed that Logan held his arm and didn't let go.
"You gonna be all right Bub?" The wild man asked.
Jim nodded and pulled his arm away from Logan and extended it outward in a determined stroke. He swam about ten more strokes when he turned his head slightly...not enough to see Logan, but enough to know where he was.
"Thanks."
He didn't need to be an empath to hear the splashing stop for a contemplative moment behind him...then resume again.
They both swam purposefully toward the looming rock that jutted out of the center of the turbulent bay.
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She gasped as her head was pulled back. Her hair was no longer a handle so one of the guards who held her secure had his sweaty hand on her forehead and her head pulled back, hard, against his chest so that she looked up at a neck wrenching angle toward her captors. Her arms were held by two other men but the man who held her head back earned a sharp headache as she amplified and stabbed her discomfort straight into his mind.
The satisfying comfort revenge gave her was interrupted by a cry and a slap to the side of her face.
The green haze she saw the world in abated and she craned her head as best she could to see Artie. He had fought strongly. Several of the guards who stood around him sported bloodied lips and noses. But Artie had been out numbered. They both had. This annoyed Tyme greatly and she couldn't help but think she'd make a piss poor X-Men. The Brotherhood of Mutants...Sentinels...and she couldn't handle a courtyard of humans with stone age weapons. She vowed that if she ever got back she'd work out in the danger room... taking martial arts training and actually being able to use it in a fight were two different things.... she wasn't ready and Artie was in trouble because she couldn't help.
Arties hands were bound now, stretched high over his head and through a metal loop on a pole in the center of the prison courtyard.
The cry had been the deep scratch that oozed blood right between his shoulder blades where the guard had used his knife to cut his shirt. Then the ripping sound as the man tore downward with both hands to reveal Artie's back all the way to his waist.
Her eyes came back center when a hand grabbed her chin and forced her head forward. Her vision flared green but a shocked cry called her eyes back to Artie.
"If you attempt to use your magic on me or the guards your friend will suffer for it."
The voice was deep, sonorous, and calm. She attempted to reach inside the mind behind it to see what she could see and before another cry tore the air to her right and she stopped she knew it was the source of evil she had sensed on the other side of the door. The sick, twisted, sadistic horror. The power hunger...the hunger for more then mortal power. This man held lives in his hands and extinguishing them made him feel omnipotent. He knew medicine but he wasn't a healer...he knew medicine so he could know how to cause pain...not stop it. She drew in a breath and fixed her eyes on a genteel looking monster and felt an almost feral growl rise in her throat. She thought for a millisecond that she might be channeling Wolverine.
"Leave him alone!" she screamed at Dr. Hillmont who held her chin. Lifting her legs she relied on the guards to hold her weight for the second it took to kick outward and launch the bastard backwards about seven feet. She was glad to see he looked startled by this move...she was only sad that she hadn't kicked lower.
Without her empathic abilities she knew she must be projecting the feelings pretty well because as he stood and dusted himself off in silence he made sure not to come within kicking distance again. He raised his long fingered hand and signaled the gorilla of a man who stood with a bullwhip in his hand near Artie. She saw Artie tense as the man drew back his arm and she heard a muffled cry as he bit his lip and then a long shaky exhale.
"When you are ready to listen, and work with us, your friend will be spared further discomfort." Hillmont's brows knitted together with false concern. "I don't wish to harm you or Mr. Gordon..."
She interrupted his with a warning hiss. "You want to know what I can do?"
He nodded gravely.
"Then let's not pretend..." She looked at him her green eyes fixed without breaking away from his. Piercing him. "Here's the first secret.... my power is empathic."
The man's eyes narrowed with interest.
"I can feel every sick, perverted, sad, delusional, sadistic emotion that crawls through what passes for a soul in you." She turned her head and raised her voice. "In all of you!"
She saw a few men back away with self-conscious dread in their eyes. Her smile became predatory. She looked back at the doctor.
"So don't tell me you don't want to hurt anyone!" She grinned. "You and I know you live for it...it makes you feel important! You used to cut off legs and arms that could have been saved, just because you were in a bad mood and making someone else scream relieved your tension!"
Some of the soldiers shifted uncomfortably and a few mumbled under their breaths. The doctor's face grew hard...his lip twisted up in a sneer and she saw the tension fill his body until he shook with rage.
Tyme's pointed stare was shaken by Artie who lifted his head with a rasping laugh.
"Get 'em Tiger!"
The dark, ego bruised doctor signaled the whip man again.
Tyme winced sympathetically.
"What do you want?!"
The tall sanguine looking man stepped forward confidently, daring her with a flick of his eyes toward Artemus Gordon, to defy him...to attack him. He smiled when she didn't.
"I want you...to do whatever I tell you to."
He raised a hand and Tyme feared that he was signaling for the whip again. Instead two guards dragged an emaciated, filthy man dressed in gray rags forward and held him up next to the doctor who indicated the man with a small gesture from his long fingers.
"This man is an army deserter. He ran when Indians overran his fort. He left his friends alone to die and made deals with the savages to save his own hide." His lip curled with distain. "He has been sentenced to hang. He is dead no matter what. So what I want you to do is to use your special powers...and kill him."
The man smiled at her and Tyme didn't have to be empathic to know how much pleasure he was taking from her total revulsion. It was almost sexual...the smile a cruel seduction. Her eyes flared briefly. But enough to make the smile disappear and the doctor step back.
And Artie cried out again.
Tyme looked at the doomed man. He looked up with rheumy eyes, barely comprehending...totally confused. She felt inside her mind. her eyes flared green but no punishment came because her gaze was focused on the condemned man. The man was past caring, past being really afraid of what would happen to him. Tyme felt his hunger rumble in her...felt his apathy. She felt anger for him and disengaged herself and threw a poisoned gaze up at the doctor.
"No."
There was no change in that evil smile. Artie bit off a scream.
She found the cry made her start and she tried to look over toward him but her head was caught between two long fingered hands.
"I don't know how, or why you possess the abilities you do. But I know you can kill with them if you chose to." He hissed down in his face. "And you will kill...for me...on my orders...whenever I order you! You have only two choices. Obey...or watch others suffer for your disobedience!" With that he nodded toward the wielder of the whip who began to beat Artie mercilessly.
She closed her eyes against his agony and pulled her head out of Hillmont's cold hands. The crack of the whip, and the sound of Artemus Gordon trying to spare her the sound of his pain. But it was no good. She lifted her head and her eyes opened with a green beaming shine.
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Artie looked at her as she stepped away from the hands of the guards and up to the dazed prisoner. Her face was grim...unreadable. She gently lifted the man's head and brushed dirty strands from his forehead. Her eyes grew wider...the glow bathed her in emerald light.
"Tyme!" he cried out to her. "Tyme...Don't do it!"
He saw her falter for a second and then he made a choking sound as a filthy rag was shoved and tied into his mouth and another blow sliced across his shoulders. His eyes blurred with pain then refocused on Tyme as she held the man's head and leaned forward and placed her forehead against the prisoner's.
He couldn't believe what was happening. Could she really do it? He thought she could. To save someone she cared for. But he prayed he was wrong. The last thing she needed was this poor man's blood on her hands. He strained and screamed into his gag to get her attention and raged at the look of domineering avarice that was displayed on Hillmont's smug face.
The man in Tyme's hands stiffened suddenly and Artie's pain turned into despair as the man collapsed in his guard's hands. Tyme straightened and her eyes faded to their natural greener then green shade and she sighed and stepped back.
Artie's beating ceased as all stared at the limp body. Hillmont strode forward with a proud gait and knelt slightly and reached for the man's throat for a pulse when a rumbling drone escaped the body. Then another...then another...then another. The dead man was snoring!
Artie grinned in his gag proudly.
Hillmont stood swiftly and rigidly. Whirling on Tyme as the guards tittered. Red to the roots of his dark hair he shook with rage. Tyme smiled at him and hers was the smug visage. Hillmont snapped. Unholstering his service revolver he turned and shot the sleeping man through the top of his bowed head and turned toward Tyme who stood stock-still. Her eyes wide at the spray of gore she had seen.
Another man was dragged across the courtyard. The tittering of the guards had fallen silent under the rage of their commanding officer. This man fought hard against his guards. He had seen what Tyme could do and certainly what would happen in any case if she didn't kill him first. His eyes darted desperately around. Pleading eyes to his fellow soldiers. to Artie who wanted to help him but couldn't and to Tyme who still stared at the corpse of the grizzled old prisoner.
Artie was fairly certain this was the first time she had seen death so cruel. She was in shock and only her slow blink seemed to indicate she was even conscious and not some half standing corpse herself. Artie was almost grateful for the guards who kept her from falling and injuring herself.
"We shall try again." threatened Hillmont, a slight rise in his deep voice betraying his still palpable rage. "This man is also condemned. Kill him...and Mr. Gordon goes free. Play games with me and Mr. Gordon suffers and the prisoner dies anyway!"
Artie saw the signal given to the flagellist and he shut his eyes in preparation of the sting of the lash biting into his back and did not see Tyme's reaction. But mingled with his own cry he heard a low moan of despair come from her that was echoed by the struggling prisoner.
The seconds dragged by in waves of agony. He leaned heavily on the pole he as tied to and feeling moisture that was more then sweat on his back and wrists he looked up and saw that his own struggles had caused his wrists to bleed where the ropes burned into them. The time between lashes was short...too short for him to focus his eyes past the pain and see what was happening to Tyme.
All Artie knew was that every lash meant that she was resisting Hillmont's will. Artie was happy for that. But he knew that unless Jim and Wolverine found them...soon...he would have to die to give Tyme her chance to escape. That as long as Hillmont had him to hold over her, that she would not attack him or the guards. And blinded by pain and that reasoning Artie was beginning to hope that it would all be over soon.
Strangely Artie had assumed that after a while the pain would become a numbed wall...that it would level off and he would adjust. But that was wrong. Dust settling in his torn flesh was an agony that nearly drove him insane and he cried around his gag until the spittle drooled down his chin and he prayed for unconsciousness. Then the blows stopped briefly and he looked up and saw Tyme and he shook his head to clear it.
The prisoner struggled and Hillmont leaned in with his revolver in hand to watch. This time the light pouring out of Tyme's eyes filled the twilight dimming courtyard. The look on Tyme's face was conflicted...not the serene, unreadable expression of before. Artie, even through a haze of incredible pain, could see that she was coming to a decision, which frightened her, and Artie leaned his head into the pole and waited in agonized sadness.
Artie felt nothing. He blinked. He, literally, felt nothing. He body was too weak to support his weight, he could feel the warm wetness of blood on his back and arms. He could feel the sweat as it course down his face. But he felt no....pain.
His eyes opened wide at the wonder of it when they focused on Tyme. Her eyes blazing, her mouth opened wide and her body rigid to the point that her back bowed backwards. And she screamed. She screamed and yanked her contorting body from the guards reach and stumbled forward and fell at Artie's feet. Artie saw her body arch and draw itself into a fetal position again and again and her teeth were clenched tight and a high wheezing screech came from her like a demon escaping hell.
Artie wanted to scream her name...he wanted to reach down to her and shake her.
Hillmont gave her two choices. Kill at his command, or watch Artie suffer. But, Dammit, Tyme came up with a third choice that shocked Artie with its audacity...and bravery. And he wished to God he could stop her.
She wasn't going to be forced to kill....and she couldn't save Artie from dying...but she was determined to save him from the pain of dying like this. She was somehow using her powers not just to share his pain...but also to remove it entirely. But apparently the only way to remove it was for her to live it.
The guards milled around in confusion. Hillmont stood back a look of disbelief clouding his lean face. Then he moved forward...he kicked her. Again. Again.
"Stop this!" he demanded. "I command you to stop what you're doing! NOW!" His voice pitched higher and spittle flew from his lips.
He kicked her again and Tyme endured it as she adjusted herself to the waves of pain she stole from Artie. Her eyes were half open and wet, glazed, shining bright. Artie wondered if she even knew what was going on or if she could hear or feel Hillmont through the pain she had taken upon herself. Artie was too weak to lift himself or he would have kicked the bastard for what he was doing.
But God...part of him wanted Tyme to listen to him. To give him back his pain and to wait for Jim...to live for Jim. By now Hillmont was a man possessed...gone was the doctor he pretended he was...gone was the patriot who had convinced people in government that he should have the resources to conduct his mad project. Gone was the project. Replacing all of it was a mad man...a power hungry sadist who had been cheated...outwitted. by this tiny woman/child.
He grabbed up the bullwhip and pushed the man who wielded it out of the way.
"You'll stop....if I have to kill you...you'll do as I say!"
And the whip fell across Artie's back. An while he felt the weight of the stroke, and felt the pole absorb the shock through him, it was Tyme who screamed until her mouth stood open but no sound would emerge. Over and over he beat Artie. The blood dripped in the dirt around his feet and Artie was horrified to see his blood falling on Tyme. She was wearing the blood she was feeling the pain for.
Artie was growing weaker. Light headed. It was a strange sensation. Stranger still because as he grew weaker so did Tyme's cries. Maybe if he died...maybe the pain would stop for Tyme.
Then she stirred at his feet, almost at the moment the thought passed through him and she rolled onto her back her fists clenched so tight that her nails dug into bloodied palms. Her eyes opened wide and even though Artemus Gordon couldn't see either pupil or iris in the green glow he knew she was looking up at him. She smiled.
"Butch....and Sundance...." she breathed raggedly. Her chest rose and fell. Labored...in time with his.
She knew....she knew it was a no win situation and she'd made her choice. Going out as a pair...no survivors if the other one wouldn't be coming out. Artie wanted to shake her, tell her to let go. But he didn't even make a sound. The fact is if he were in her place...he wouldn't have left her either.
Artie closed his eyes. His dying wouldn't save Tyme. He knew now that they were linked in a way that once his body succumbed to the abuse it was taking...that she would be pulled into death by the chain of pain she'd forged.
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It was there...the brief blinding flash of pain as he and Wolverine pulled themselves ashore and then everything was severed. The tug. the pull that he knew was Tyme's connection to him cut like a knife through a spider's web. Jim's eyes flew up the craggy rocks of the jutting fortress of California stone set deep in the impossible moat of San Francisco Bay and he pull it apart with his bare hands. He wanted to rage at the possibility that they fought so hard to have it end here.
But he didn't. He met the idea with a cold rage...a rage he had only ever felt but one time. When he had "seen" Artie murdered by pistolaros and he had stalked his rage to a small Mexican town and watched the man who had done the deed die in his arms. If this severing was all he would have left of Tyme, if he had to face losing Artie again.... when he reached the prison then he would have revenge. And he didn't care if there would be anything left of him afterward...because it just wouldn't matter.
While Wolverine was far less exhausted by the swim then he was...not to mention his incredible healing powers, James was doing a fair job of outdistancing the mutant wild man. Maybe it was his leaner frame, but he seemed more sure on the rocks then the man who seemed more built for crashing through them. He looked back briefly at a stony explosion behind him and smiled grimly.
Wolverine was in full claw and was using them like a climber's pitons, using sheer muscle and determination to bury them into the rocky surface and drawing himself up until he was even with Jim's acrobatic display over the craggy landscape.
"You got circus freak blood in ya cowboy?" he huffed. "Cuz you remind me of a blue elf I know."
Jim didn't answer. He was glad that Logan wasn't fighting against him now...but he had no time to exchange quips. He had a feeling that the clawed man understood this because his climbing now matched Jim's and they both labored up the wall of stone, pulling each other along portions where needed, in determined silence.
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Wolverine didn't want to ask West if he'd felt the sudden breaking that disconnected him from Tyme. He didn't have to. He watched the human's efforts to reach her...to reach his friend. and he knew that there was a rawness to his actions that was almost as messy as if he were bleeding all over the rocks they climbed.
And that scared him. He had a feeling that West had a deeper connection to Tyme then his was...and that he might know something so terrible that Logan felt he wasn't ready for that berserker's rage to come over him again. Not now...not yet.
Wolverine knew the rage would strike. Wolverine had lost friends before. And lovers. He wondered if West had ever lost both...or if he had ever lost them both on the same day. He really didn't want to see the boy scout hurt like that.
Yeah...well he wasn't ever gonna be the guy's best bud, but West had his respect. And Wolverine would watch his back.
Looking back across the bay as he climbed he wondered what would happen if he was stranded here. If Tyme didn't walk out of this...THIS...would be his new home. This time, if not the place.
What then? How does a mutant with a bad temper and metal claws stay out of time's way? If the Prof. was right then chances were he'd see the X-Men again...someday. But he'd be much older. Maybe too old for....awww forget it you canucklehead, she'd still be Scott's girl and you'd be an old dog.
He wished he had a smoke.
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West drew a finger up to his lips and pointed above them and Wolverine looked up and nodded. Lacing his fingers Wolverine gave Jim a launching platform. Jim was jarred by just how far the mutant could toss him, but not as jarred as the guard on the battlement above who was downed by the flying left fist of the secret agent who caught the man's rifle before it hit the walkway. Signaling below he waited and looked around while Wolverine used his claws to scale the wall.
Then across and down into the courtyard Jim saw it. The gathered guards. some of whom on the edges dropped their weapons and ran for the exits of the yard. Horrified by what they saw, but none tried to stop the crime being committed and for that James West vowed they'd all see jail cells. Or nooses.
He heard the crack of the whip like a firecracker going off inside his brain and ran along the wall toward the stairs that led down to the yard below. At the top of the stairs he startled a burly guard who lunged at him with his bayonet. Jim caught the barrel of his rifle with his forearms and twisted, flipping the gun butt end up into the man's chin and then caught the gun in his hands and used it as a club to knock the unsteady man off the steps and out of his way. As he ran down the steps he heard a groan and jumped aside as the broken body of another guard rolled down the steps past him.
"Wait for me Bub!" shouted Wolverine who leapt the steps three at a time.
They ran toward the pole in the center of the courtyard like it was a beacon and started beating their way through the crowd of guards watching the Roman circus before them. Jim flung aside mostly unresisting men...some who took swings at him, if they woke up, would regret it.
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Tyme felt everything and nothing. Her head buzzed and through the green haze she kept her narrowing vision fixed on Artemus Gordon's face. Her body seemed to be beyond responding to the pain she siphoned away from Gordon's abused body. She imagined that he, they, were probably close to shutting down. But she was amazed by how much punishment he could take despite being human. Funny she could think such a thing at a time like this. It wasn't hard though, for her mind to wander even while she did what she did. She imagined that Charl....the Professor...would be proud of what she had developed into as a mutant. She regretted not being able to tell him. She regretted also leaving Logan here. With her and Artemus dead she imagined...she hoped...they would turn to each other for comfort, maybe even friendship.
But she mostly regretted not seeing Jim again, not being held in his arms, not being able to tell him how much she loved him. She could almost imagine, if she tried hard enough, that she could hear his voice.
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Wolverine saw Jim reach the pole and cut the rope holding Gordon standing. He watched West lower him to the ground as his friend's bloodstained his skin. Then he saw West lift Tyme into his lap and saw him shout at her, shake her. Oh God.
Then as most of the guards fell back, or ran now that the jig was up, Wolverine saw a tall, bent, stalking figure emerge from the confusion. He didn't need to be an empath to know what this man was going to do.
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Artemus Gordon felt his bunched muscles relax as he was lowered to the ground. He opened his eyes and felt his gag pulled away from his mouth. But before he could find his voice he saw Jim's back as he focused on Tyme. Her body lay across his lap. Still. Artie turned his eyes outward at the blurring circle of blue that were the guards' backs and his eyes widened. Hillmont held a gun and was pointing it at the back of Jim's head.
Artie opened his mouth to sound the alarm when Hillmont stopped and the side of his mouth went slack as a thin line of blood ran from his thin lips. The doctor looked down and the gun tumbled from his hand as he tried to grasp one of the three blades that protruded from his chest. A finger was severed as the knives retreated from him and his eyes rolled up and he fell forward almost landing on Artie but he was caught and tossed aside as Wolverine stepped into the now unoccupied space, the wounds in between his knuckles sealing magically as he sheathed his weapons.
The big mutant grabbed one of the guards and ripped the guy's coat off his back and he knelt beside Artie and covered his raw and bleeding back and helped prop him up so he wouldn't be laying on it.
Artie found his voice and it was as raw as his back. "Make her give back my pain...please...it's killing her."
Wolverine's eyes narrowed. "What? What...she's somehow feeling your pain...with you."
Artie shook his head. "Instead of me!"
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Jim touched the top of Tyme's bald head and brushed the sweaty dust from her head and looked for the injury that had her close to death, but saw nothing.
Then he heard Artie talking to Wolverine and he understood. She had done something to keep Artie from feeling the pain when he was being beaten. That the severing of their connection had probably been to protect him as well. But he looked at how weak Artie was and he looked at Tyme and he shook his head.
"Tyme knows what she's doing...I think. If she let's the pain go, the shock will kill you."
Wolverine reached out and grabbed a flash of dusty white and Jim recognized a young army doctor...a captain. No doubt one of the men assisting the monster who was in charge.
While Wolverine allowed a claw to menacingly escape his closed fist in front of the man's face Jim explained exactly where they needed to go and what the doctor would do if he knew what was healthy for him. The red haired man's head bobbed and Wolverine gathered up Artie and Jim lifted Tyme and they ran for the prison infirmary.
Artie's wounds had to be cleaned and dressed quickly and fluids were given to him as quickly as could be managed. Then the young captain gave Artie a syringe full of morphine, upping the dosage until Tyme's breathing steadied.
Lifting Tyme's eyelid the doctor noted that the glowing had subsided and that both patients would probably survive.
Jim watched Logan "explain" to the doctor that all of this was a dream and that if he talked he'd carve him like a student cadaver. The young man nodded his understanding and promptly wet himself.
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Logan was impressed with the chewing out West gave to his superior officer Col. Richmond.
The seething, scathing, pugnacious report made Logan lean against the wall with his arms crossed over his broad chest and smile around the smoking stub of a cigar in his mouth.
Richmond's indignant, chagrined response was as much of an apology as one could hope for no matter what the era from a government official. They disavowed any knowledge of Dr. Hillmont's intended actions (ala: a bad episode of Mission Impossible). And any and all of Hillmont's handpicked soldiers who actively participated in the kidnapping and torture of Artemus Gordon, ("And were still alive." thought Wolverine with a bigger smile), would be court-martialed and imprisoned and the cowards who ran busted down in rank and given some less then choice postings. As to Tyme and Logan's situation...the Colonel eyed the big cunuck suspiciously. He'd heard more then a dozen reports of the final battle and he'd seen the injuries...and the mortal wounds and his eyes wandered to a close scrutiny of Logan's hands.
Let him look. Logan plucked the stub from his mouth and smiled to show his teeth. Which almost always had more of an effect of seeing a wolf bare it's teeth then as a show of humor.
"Ya want something....Bub?"
The Colonel shook his head quickly and Logan saw James West grin behind the man's back and lower his head to regain the rage he'd been nursing since Artie and Tyme were seen by a respectable doctor and surgeon three weeks earlier.
Instead Col. Richmond handed James West a packet of papers and excused himself, skirting Wolverine as he walked out the Wanderer's door.
He picked up the whiskey bottle off the bar and poured a drink for himself and one for West who retrieved it without a sound.
West tossed aside the papers and sat down heavily.
"It's almost time for us to go." Logan said.
"And Artie and I have a new assignment. We leave in two days." West drank his drink and Logan passed him the bottle for a refill.
"Tyme told me she could feel the pull back...strong. I think she's been fighting it." Logan took a drag on what was left of the stub and put the rest out in his palm with a satisfying wince.
West threw his glass into the wall and it exploded with the impact in an equally satisfying way.
"We both have." Then he got up and walked out, purposefully picking up the thinly padded gloves on the desk and headed toward the barn. Stress relief, thought Logan....good idea.
He followed.
When he got there he saw West taking some vicious stabs at the hanging bag.
"Need a sparring partner?" He asked.
The agent looked at him curiously. Then shook his head.
"I think I need to get back to work." He smiled sadly.
Logan turned to go.
"Logan....tell me something." Logan stopped, jarred to hear his name...curious.
"What?"
"How does she live? What kind of people will be there for her...besides you?" He looked at Logan with his piercingly direct gaze. "Is this...is love...any easier with her own kind?"
Logan kicked at the straw and fell back heavily against the wall and looked up at the ceiling then back down at West with a sad shaking of his head.
"Bub...she'll make it. She's gotten so damn strong. Stronger then I ever thought she'd become. But if she never falls in love...or blows it over and over and over, then she'll be no different then any other mutant at that school...or anywhere else. But at least, I think, she finished running away from her feelings. She's ready to join the rest of the mutant race. The rest of the human race."
"If you treat her bad....I'll haunt you."
Logan laughed. "Anything but that Bub!"
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Jim laughed too.
Comforted slightly. Hurting terribly. The mission Col. Richmond had given him was the signal. And Jim felt guilty that he was actually relieved. When things got tough...the war...his parents death....the day his sister died...he threw himself into his work, study, even...play, just that much harder. And the hurt would lessen. But would it work on love? He knew it was time to find out.
Almost as if summoned, Artie and Tyme came through the door holding hands and laughing. Tyme's hair was a pale peachy fuzz covered by a bonnet, but to Jim she looked more beautiful then he could imagine.
Tyme smiled at Jim and Logan, but her eyes flashed brightly and her smile became melancholy.
"Butch bought me a nice hat to keep the sun off my noggin." She tried to sound upbeat. "Logan. do you think the Professor will think I'm making fun of him?"
"Naw baby....just let him wear the hat every once in a while." Smiled Logan. Then looking back at Jim. "I need to get some things done...before..."
Jim nodded.
Artie didn't need to be drawn a diagram. He leaned in and kissed Tyme's cheek. "See you in a bit Sundance." Jim didn't miss him squeezing her hand...and throwing him an almost warning look. But Jim noted a sympathetic glint to it and grinned at his old friend reassuringly.
"Butch? Sundance?" he said as he approached her.
"Artie will tell you later..." she said stepping into the circle of his embrace. "When we're gone."
"We have an assignment." He tried to sound casual.
"And I can't hold out here much longer."
"Yes." He pulled her in closer.
She fumbled with the folds of the dress she'd worn into town and brought out a small frame with a closed front. She handed it to him.
"Artie found me a very nice wig...almost my hair...anyway. It looked good for the photo."
He opened it and Tyme's face beamed back at him with calm, quiet, peaceful love from the picture. Her eyes were catching the flash of the powder and seemed particularly bright. shiny. She looked beautiful.
"Don't worry...I stole a pic of you and Artie already...so this is to replace it."
"Its beautiful...except..." Jim smiled.
Tyme lifted her small hand and brushed her knuckles against his temple softly. Her eyes flared.
Then she giggled. "I'm too covered up?"
He reached around behind her and began to unbutton her gown.
She smiled. "You have a filthy mind Agent West."
"Now, now, now...I've seen yours too...." He smiled.
She unbuckled the top of his pants.
"So you have...so you have."
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Laying in each other's arms Tyme knew that good bye should be coming. She had planned on saying something more to Jim...but she didn't want to break the spell. As far as partings go...they were doing a good job at not falling apart around each other. She remembered her parting from a younger Charlie. Sick, young, weak, crying. Begging for a way to stay...wrenching sadness.
She loved Jim more then she could ever have imagined with Charles Xavier...but...this was almost serene.
How did she come to this point?
From the blind grief of losing someone...to feeling okay with it?
Then she knew...it wasn't goodbye.
"Jim...promise me something." Jim turned on his side and touched her shoulder, her neck.
"What?"
"Keep a diary." Jim looked slightly unnerved by that...she smiled. "Not of feelings silly. Places you've been..dates..times. Keep that kind of a diary. Keep it stored safely...and someday...put it in a bank vault and bequeath it to the Xavier School."
Jim's eyes dawned with a confused understanding.
"But you said you can't control WHERE in time you go." Jim looked at her expectantly.
"Not yet I can't." She grinned. "But since my powers have grown I've done a helluva lot of things I couldn't before."
Jim shook his head with awe. "You think? You think you can....?"
"James West...I love you. And this is not goodbye."
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Rogue bounced around nervously outside the school's hospital doors. "Are they all right Jean?"
She tried to crane her head around the tall red head but was gently pushed back.
"They are tired...it was a hard time but they'll be fine." She reassured the anxious teen. Then looking over at Professor Charles Xavier. "Tyme wants to see you."
Charles Xavier rolled into the pink colored room and smiled at Tyme where she lay propped up in her bed. Logan sat next to her and cheerfully ignored the no smoking sign as he puffed on a fairly large, obnoxious cigar.
Dr Henry McCoy stepped up next to the bed and pulled back the blankets slightly to look at his patients one more time.
Tyme smiled. "Charles Xavier...please meet James Logan and Artemis Charlene West."
Logan's chest puffed out just a bit more and he handed Xavier an equally large cigar.
Xavier reached a finger into the folds of the blankets and felt gently into the simple, complicated, wonderfully innocent minds of creatures so new. "Welcome to the Xavier Institute little ones."
Tyme smiled at him. He was happy to see her...happy that she could bring him back into her life without the pain there was before. Their ordeal had been terrible. But the fruit it bore....
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James West looked at Artie with shock. "YOU KNEW!?"
"She made me promise Jim...after you left."
James West sat down as his friend poured him a drink. Tyme and Logan had "hopped" out of their lives just 3 hours earlier. Taking the drink Jim turned Tyme's portrait over.
"I'm going to have a baby." It read in a clear strong hand.
Jim held his drink up and Artie did as well. "No goodbyes!" he toasted.
"Do you love her?" The growled question broke the stalemate.
James West wasn't about to start baring his heart to a man who could slice it out of his chest.
"Do you?" He shot back.
Logan shook his head. "This ain't about me Bub...Baby Girl was right when she said that I got the hots for another lady. This is about you and Tyme....and about whether you're gonna hurt someone I like. Which, by they way, I usually react badly to."
At that Logan rushed James and as James twisted his body to throw off the momentum of the brute force attack and drop the brute with a karate blow, he was shocked to find Logan shift his momentum at the last second and avoid not only the chop but he also avoided striking Jim entirely. Instead he now stood calmly behind James without looking even slightly out of breath by the sudden move. James turned quickly but kept his face impassive, not allowing Logan to gage his astonishment at his speed and unlikely looking dexterity.
"Last time. Do You Love Her?" As he asked James watched as the tip of one deadly claw extended itself through Logan's skin and the mutant raised his hand to pick his teeth casually.
West's eyes narrowed and he refused to allow the deliberate motion unnerve him. And West knew that this man knew how to bait. To goad a response. To throw an adversary off balance. It was something any classically trained warrior learned. It tested and prodded and revealed chinks that could exploited when the real assault came.
Jim readied a less then satisfactory reply. He too could bait an opponent. But then he saw Logan's attention shift. Dark, hooded eyes left his sly examination of Jim's reactions. Eyes widened...and his shaggy, maned head swiveled, followed by the rest of his body in a total disregard for the rules of combat and care, no battle ready opponent turned his back on his enemy, that Jim knew, immediately, that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
His head pitched back and Jim could hear him breathe deeply through his nostrils and James stepped up to his side and watched him exhale the breath through bared teeth.
"Too many scents...something's wrong." He looked around.
"Who knows we're here?" he demanded.
West looked up and back down the track toward the outline of the city.
Logan scowled then bolted down the track toward the barn Artie had followed Tyme to.
"They ain't alone West!" He shouted back. "They ain't alone by a long shot!"
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Logan had smelled it when the wind shifted and as much as he wanted to knock the boy scout in blue on his tight panted ass, he knew danger when he smelled it. The smell of men, several men, sweating in the heat. The smell of horses...the smell of oiled guns and gunpowder, and another smell he recognized. The antiseptic smell of a medical people. In a barn? Here? Why?
For Tyme!
He ran for the barn. He cursed himself for being a fool for allowing himself to be snuck up on again, like in the bar parking lot with Tyme. He smelled the hurried taint of men who bore a load they wanted to move quickly...and he was more upset that the wind shift brought only residual scent. He knew when he arrived at the barn door that he wouldn't find anyone there.
With a roar he leapt at the barred door and knocked it deep into the building in a splintering explosion.
Behind him he heard West close in. He looked back and out of the corner of his eye he saw West carried a gun and a small portion of Logan's brain registered curiosity as to where this weapon had been hidden. The man was a walking, running, arsenal.
He didn't bother calling out, no one was there, and as he sniffed the air he knew there'd been no struggle. He was amazed that Tyme hadn't felt her abductor's approach and grew angry with himself and West. It was obvious that she had other things on her mind when she ran out on them earlier.
He heard West stepping over the splintered remains of the door and credited him with not calling out. Then his foot hit something and it made a tinkling sound. He looked down and he could feel his hair rise on his back. He stooped and picked up the glass plunger with its sharp primitive needle and examined it.
Then, spinning, he roared once and fell upon James West for the kill.
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Jim managed to turn at the last second as he felt Wolverine's claws tear into his shirt and caress his ribs with three, thin bloody lines. He spun away from him and raised his gun only to watch the barrel fall off in three pieces in the straw. Jim looked up and felt his eyes widen as the creature, the mad mutant, raised himself up and a hungry look transformed his human seeming eyes into the reflective red glow of circling wolf's.
"Where is she West?" He smiled savagely. "Tell me now and it will be quick...where is she now!"
Jim stopped, crouched slightly, puzzling over the question.
"What are you talking about?!" he demanded.
Then something shot past his head and embedded itself in the wall behind his head. Without taking his eyes off Logan he pulled it out and looked at the object.
It was a hypodermic needle and glass plunger. Jim turned it over in his hand and saw the maker mark and knew its owner. His brow creased, he shook his head slightly. He didn't understand.
Acid etched on the side of the glass, giving it a white opaque satin lettering...."U.S.Army".
"Wha...?"
The plunger fell from Jim's hand as Wolverine's body slammed into him and he took a sudden fall backwards watching in stunned horror as deadly metal claws followed his throat toward the ground, ready to sheath themselves in his neck once they both hit.
Just before his back struck, Jim tucked his knee up to his chest and kicked outward striking Wolverine in the chest and tossing him over his head, closing his eyes briefly and lifting his chin back to avoid, by a hair, the claws flying away from his face.
He rolled away from Wolverine and his hand struck and grabbed an old pitchfork lying on the ground next to him. As he scrambled up to his feet the fork came up in his hand. But Wolverine was faster and before Jim set his feet he saw the wild man running at him with claws extended, a berserker's rage blazing through him. Jim tipped the pitchfork in front of him, almost instinctively, and set the handle against the wall of the stall behind him and jumped backward against the wall as Wolverine ran straight into the tines carried by rage and momentum.
The pitchfork's handle snapped and Wolverine's claws struck the wall and embedded themselves for just a moment a hair's breadth from Jim's left shoulder, he heard a cry, a howl, and then heard a metallic scraping as the claws retracted into the mutant's hands and Jim saw him drop to the ground at his feet. The tines of the fork protruding from his back, one had bent awkwardly, perhaps having glanced off one of the brute's metal encased bones, and it had ripped it's way, jaggedly, from his body.
Jim looked down and was torn, with worry about Tyme, and Artie...and with the blood on his hands now that he looked down at the body of Tyme's overprotective friend. Jim looked down at the blood seeping through his shirt as he lowered himself beside the mutant's body and he grabbed the handle where it was splintered and pulled, wincing to himself as the bent tine tore backwards through Logan's frame as it was extracted. Tossing the fork to the side with an angry grunt, he reached down and rolled the man on his back towards him.
Jim looked at the man's closed eyes and slack face and sighed bitterly.
"You stupid, mean, son-of-a-bitch...." he spat angrily.
He lowered his head and closed his eyes to gather his thoughts.
His eyes flew open again as a steel grip encircled his throat and he felt his body being lifted off the floor.
"Nice, fucking, eulogy Agent West!" roared the resurrected mad man, as Jim felt the air leave his lungs with the sudden and violent slamming of his body against the barn wall. "Sweet...simple...summed me up to a tee....I'll try to do the same for you!"
Logan's grip tightened and Jim felt an immediate, pulsing, whooshing sound that he recognized as his blood pushing through constricted arteries and Logan's face pressed in on him. Jim lifted his arms and with all his strength, struck two fisted judo blows to Logan's chest under his arms on either side. Logan made an annoyed grunt and smiled.
That blow should have knocked the wind out of him...made his grip loosen instead Logan just drew closer.
"No more games West...I know you have communicated with your superior officers. What have you told them about us...about her? Was it just part of the game for you West? Something to keep her busy until you could spring the trap? Did Gordon take her someplace?!"
Logan's fist connected with Jim's stomach painfully but Jim held the reaction back enough to make the big man smile at the implied challenge. Then Jim's eyes flicked down. The tips of Logan's claws pricked Jim's taut stomach muscles where the man's fist pressed tight against him.
"I'll spring them West....I swear I will!" He smiled. "That pitchfork stung. Ya think you'll bounce back as fast as me though Bub?"
Jim had no other recourse then to try to reason with him...and no true belief that reasoning with him would work.
"I don't know where she or Artie are Logan." He rasped. "I am just as worried as you are."
The grip tightened.
"Dammit Logan! I love her...I wouldn't let anyone touch her!" Jim felt light headed.
"Yeah right Government Guy....But you love your nation more...DON'T YOU!?" He roared. "Enough to give it a new weapon to tinker with!"
The horror of what Logan implied struck Jim hard. Did his superiors decide on this? Did he somehow make Tyme a target? No...No..he had done something with Tyme and Logan he had never done before. He'd left important information out of his reports. But maybe someone else...maybe someone else was watching them?
"Logan...listen to me...THINK dammit! Jim hissed. "Use that blasted nose of yours...tell me what else you smell."
Logan looked at Jim with disgust...but a curious look passed through his eyes for a moment and he inhaled deeply. His grip loosened slightly.
Jim saw him scowl...his eyes unfocused for just a moment to brief to count.
"What is it?" Jim asked hoarsely.
"Blood."
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Logan stared hard into the preternaturally calm hazel eyes of James West and tried...tried hard...for Tyme's sake, to find something he could trust in them. The smell bothered him though. It didn't make sense with the scenario Logan had written in his mind.
He didn't seem to hear West until he had repeated himself a couple of times...or maybe it was because Logan still had his throat pinned and clawed fist pushed against his abdomen.
"Blood?" He rasped. "Whose Logan? I know you can tell the difference...whose blood? Tyme's?"
Logan looked at the eyes of the man in front of him...hard...soldier eyes. He watched them soften, beyond all control, with worry...maybe fear. Not for himself. Logan had to admire that about West. The man was no wuss. He imagined that normal humans didn't win many knockdowns with this guy.
Logan retracted the claws and felt West relax minutely as his grip loosened slightly. Logan sneered and gripped his throat again and was gratified to see West's eyes register surprise as he was lifted off his feet by the strangle hold.
"If I find out you're screwing with me....with her...I'll have your god-damned guts for garters!"
With that Logan dropped West. West landed in a crouch...a tense, ready, wary, crouch one hand reaching up to his throat as though he could readjust any damage done. But he dropped his hand and stood...removed his damaged shirt and tossed it aside and looked down at the cuts along his belly and looking back at Wolverine.
"This isn't the blood you smell? Is it?"
The tone was hoarse...but calm and conversational. This guy had a cool you couldn't shake...a bit like Cyke. Or could you?
"No...it's Artie's."
James West's eyes widened at this. Logan could see that West had a history with this Gordon. The friendship was deep...and there was anger in his eyes that Logan knew mirrored his.
"Where?"
Logan took his eyes off of West for the first time since the fight began and that was difficult...usually there'd be a lot more blood at the end of one of his rages. That West was still standing was something of a miracle. He kicked at the straw on the barn floor and pointed to the spot.
"There."
West dropped down to the spot turning his back, bravely, to Logan. He touched the small spots that lay there soaking in the dry boards.
"He isn't dead." Declared West standing and wiping the dirt from his hands and walking out the barn door.
Logan was caught off-guard. "How do you know?"
West turned with a finger raised under Logan's nose. A move that could get a finger removed.
"ONE...not enough blood!" He counted off. "I'm sure you know that there'd be more blood. TWO...no body. And since they left the needle they obviously weren't afraid of being caught so if they killed him they'd have left him...so they took him too."
Logan scowled. "THREE....why?"
Jim shook his head. "I don't know."
Then he turned and ran down the track to the Wanderer. "But I plan to find out...NOW!"
Logan was a tough man...he was a hard...a trained man. He considered himself a free agent...a loner. But more and more he understood that when he was on a mission with other men with the same goal...that he became a follower. And he didn't like it one damned bit. He ran after West.
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James West didn't mention again the fight in the barn, though his side burned under the hasty bandage and his throat was sore and bruised. He understood Logan's motivation and as he got evasive and dismissive telegraph after telegraph from Col. Cole's offices and the other connections in government he thought he could shake he began to suspect that Logan may be right about his suspicions.
He slammed a fist down after the latest telegraph called Artie's kidnapping a temporary reassignment and for security reasons they could tell him nothing else. He swept the papers off the desk and knocked over the chair he'd been sitting in. He turned violently and came face to face with a slightly amused looking Logan.
"Sooo...feeling a little let down by your friends in government?" He blew smoke at West from the cigar in his mouth as he spoke. "Welcome to my world Bub."
Jim frowned, turning away abruptly and pulled a map or the area down and began studying it.
"If this was my time...she could be half way around the world by now....at least ya know they're keeping her local."
James let the curiosity about the statement bury itself and just nodded. Many reasons made him positive she was still local.
"They can't keep her drugged forever. And when she wakes she'll be dangerous." Jim thought out loud.
"Unless they have some reason for her not to use her powers..." Logan's voice lowered.
Jim felt a burning grow in his belly that had nothing to do with the fight earlier.
"A reason...like keeping Artie safe." he finished Logan's thought.
Jim shook himself and looked over the map and his eyes narrowed when he reached a certain location on it.
"Where would you go...if you had a dangerous, unpredictable, top secret human weapon and a less then happy, but resourceful and clever secret service agent?" He mused.
Logan thought. "Someplace remote, inaccessible, escape proof. Someplace only I could get into...no one could stumble onto our..." Logan spat the word he feared most out. "Experiments."
Jim's thoughts got darker. Much darker. He could picture the place now...and Tyme's strange reaction upon seeing it. And he knew that what he would do...what he had to do...would put him at odds with his own government. And James West had never...could never be called a traitor. But this...was...different.
He reached up decisively and placed a colored pushpin in the map, and Logan looked in closer.
"An island fort would work...wouldn't it?" Jim looked at the savage, anticipatory smile that crept over Logan's face. He felt the same grim smile pull on the corners of his mouth.
"Alcatraz."
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Artie came to with the smarting sting of medicine being applied to the cut being closed on the back of his head. His eyes opened wider and he felt the urge to shake his head to reconcile the double vision he was experiencing but hands suddenly gripped his head on both sides and held him secure.
"Please don't move yet Mr. Gordon...I'm almost done here." There was a pulling and Artie winced as he felt the telltale thread snap of a suture being cut. "That's fine...all done. Good as new." The voice was low, amused, and sonorous in a way that made the listener...listen.
And the possessor of the voice was just as commanding. A tall, lean man stepped around the chair, that Artie was just starting to realize he was chained to, and stopped and looked down his long, aristocratic nose at the seated, dazed agent. The man stood at about 6'5 and his peppered gray hair was neatly groomed far back off his high forehead creating an almost V-like widow's peak that made his sculpted short gray burnsides frame his face in a way that made his features formidable...commanding...gaunt...and arresting.
He wore under a long white lab coat that came to his knees a suit of severe black, exquisitely tailored. Artie examined the man's hawk like features and stopped his investigations at the man's eyes and felt a coldness creep into his heart.
The man's eyes were so dark that they appeared to be made of coal. but they were cold. Icy. They didn't see Artie...they examined him. And the smile that creased the edges of his thin hard lined mouth did nothing to add warmth to his bearing. In fact the smile and the eyes actually seemed to work together to lower the temperature of the room.
"Are you sure you're quite awake Mr. Gordon?" The voice was amused, mock concern trying to sound genuine...but the actor in Artie could not be fooled.
"Yeah..." he replied slowly as he looked around him carefully, just realizing that he was chained to the chair he sat on. Then he stiffened. They were not alone.
Against the metal plated door stood a US Army soldier...his rifle held attentively. But that hadn't alarmed Artie. Behind the tall, languid man a table stood. A medical examination table. And Tyme lay on it.
It was obvious by the form visible through the thin sheet covering her and the leering gaze of the other soldier who stood at attention, in more ways then one, at the head of the table, that she had been divested of her garments for some kind of perusal. And apparently in front of these men, with no regard given to her dignity! The gentleman in Artie flared at this abuse and his anger grew when he saw Tyme's poor head.
Her long golden curls were gone. Her head was shaved and her bare, knicked and bald pate was graphed and painted like a grid. Mapped, clinically, like he'd seen done to the heads of mental patients at autopsies for learning medicos to try to decipher why their brains functioned as they did in life.
Artie turned his infuriated mind to the man before him.
"What have you done to her!" he shouted, pulling at his bonds with all his strength despite the known reality that they wouldn't break for him.
"Calm yourself Mr. Gordon. No one has harmed the subject. The subject is very valuable to the US Army, and I have been chosen to study it." The man soothed.
"HER...not "it"!" Artie was struck by the dehumanizing effect of the man's manner.
"As you wish Mr. Gordon." The man conceded with a polite nod. "And you...you have been personally selected by me to help us."
Artie was not digesting the information well. Whether that was from the blow or from his shock at Tyme's state or the man's attitude he couldn't tell. "Who the Hell are you?!"
"I apologize. Let me introduce myself." He bowed just a bit at the waist. "Doctor Edmund Hillmont the Third...at your service."
"Pardon me if I don't rise and shake your hand." Artie bitterly mused. "And this place is?"
"With some quick, and influential tinkering...it is the Alcatraz Weapon's Research Center. For now!" The Doctor swept his arms out expansively.
"The WHAT?!"
"Mr. Gordon. You, more then anyone, should be aware of this subject's potential." the man confided eagerly. "You were subject to it's...ummm her...talents first hand. If she were researched properly, trained properly...THINK what a benefit she would be to the security of the nation!"
Artie bristled at what he was hearing but held his tongue.
"This subject could destroy an enemy army with a single thought before any shots were exchanged on the battlefield saving American lives...as a government assassin she could eliminate the head's of state of enemy nations with a blink and read the thoughts of those whom we want to understand better." The man's eyes glittered like light shining off a cockroach's black carapace. The look of lust...not unlike the soldier who still ogled Tyme's frighteningly still form, but this lust was pure power.
"And my role in this?" Artie was curious as to how this man thought he could sell him on any of this.
"Has been left, entirely, up to me." The man drew himself to his full height. "The subject is dangerous. Potentially lethal. You, Mr. Gordon, will be here to calm her, to keep her from using her powers unwisely which would force us to employ more...ummm..persuasive..means of obtaining her cooperation. I'm afraid that if your presence is not enough to restrain her that we may need to use methods of "negative reinforcement" to convince her otherwise."
The man was talking torture and they both knew it. Artemus Gordon remembered what Wolverine had said about living in a world where mutants were feared and hated and he recalled what Tyme had said happened to Logan in that world. And he was coming to the bitter realization that that "world" was his too. He couldn't let Tyme become an experiment, dehumanized to make it easier for the government to ignore her freedom. He couldn't let her become a slave, and for the safety of all he couldn't let her become a weapon.
"I'm not going to help you hurt her." He said. His voice was low...barely contained fury in every syllable.
"You don't know anything about her...you are making a serious mistake. You don't know what you are doing. And you won't get away with this...I promise you that."
The man's smiling face fell into a sneer. He was a someone who didn't accept criticism well it appeared. He puffed his chest out self-importantly and smiled sourly, one hand reaching back and laying itself on Tyme's stomach possessively. The man saw Artie tense angrily and cocked his head in an amused fashion and he chuckled.
"Mr. Gordon...really...think of the Subject. You are her friend aren't you? Surely you want what is healthiest for her...and you. I know..." he said with a lingering smile as his hand ran a caressing path down Tyme's leg as the doctor opened the door. "I know you want what is going to bring the least amount of discomfort to the situation. You won't be helping to hurt her...you'll be sparing her...and you... a lot of negative experiences."
Artemus Gordon was shaking with fury as the doctor prepared to leave. "She isn't "the subject", she has a name you know."
The doctor paused and looked at Tyme with an frighteningly white and hungry smile. "She has nothing...not even a name...until I give it to her."
And with that the guards followed him out the door and Artie was alone staring helplessly at Tyme and apologizing to her silently for the betrayal he felt over the situation.
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Jim suddenly found his connections drying up. The maps and detailed building plans he could easily get any other time were not available to him now and he repeatedly slammed his fist against walls and desks until it was sore. Logan looked at him and knew that he no longer wore an amused smile but that his face was thoughtful, angry, and a little sad.
"Look Bub..." he said as he stepped up to Jim's side, gazing down at the rough old draft plan of the prison fort they had managed to get a hold of. "I don't know a soul that has ever tried to break into Alcatraz...folks in my time would laugh at the idea for sure. And I've heard of about three men who ever busted out of that hellhole. One drowned. Don't beat yourself up over it."
"You'll do that for me?" Jim snorted bitterly.
There was a rough bark that could have been a laugh. "Yeah...I get the pleasure. But we gotta get her...uhhh...them..outta there first. And we will. And make history at the same time maybe?" He blew a ring of smoke and stepped back. "The only fools to break in...and out...of Alcatraz!"
Jim's imagination was running wild. He wasn't as worried about Artie as much as Tyme. He knew Artie was Tyme's edge in there...if he could stall, or protect or escape he would. But he wasn't prepared for the image of what his own government may do to Tyme to make her cooperate with their demands. He wasn't a fanciful man, but as he looked at Logan from the desk he needed to know. He needed to know.
"Tyme said you were experimented on...by the government."
"Canadian." The big man sniffed. "But if what you want to know is how bad was it...then I'll tell ya that I won't leave that girl in there. Once someone has decided you aren't human enough to be considered...that you're a thing that can be abducted and drugged. Then they are capable of all kinds of things to get you to do what they want." He turned away and looked out the window of the train car. "They made me into an assassin...breaking away from their control almost killed me...but not before they made me a better killer then I already was.""
Jim knew that they wanted to make her a weapon...it would be the only reason to take her like this. He wasn't going to let that happen. Even if it killed him.
"We'll have to swim for it." Jim said. Then he smiled a bit. "Can you swim...I mean...you know? With a metal skeleton and all if I toss you into the bay and you sink like an anchor Tyme will never forgive me."
He had the guilty pleasure of seeing the brute bristle and Jim was pretty sure it was at the suggestion that he could be "tossed"...still. it was reaction. Then he heard the barking laugh again.
"I can swim boy scout."
Jim smiled. "Boy scout?"
"You remind me of a fella back home...by the book...annoying...mission first...straight laced kid. He leads the group I run with sometimes. Pain in the ass."
"Are you his friend?" Jim asked without taking his eyes off the mad man.
Logan's face remained impassive as he chewed the cigar. He turned away...walking towards the door of the train. "Yeah...he's a...friend."
Jim picked up his hat and followed him. Allowing the uncomfortable admission to dissolve as they made their way to the edge of the bay.
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Artie didn't make any objections about the way the guard looked over Tyme's body. He'd tried too and sported what would be an impressive bruise on his jaw. And he couldn't help Tyme if he were dead.
The chains held him tight and he couldn't reach any of his secreted devices like this. It was a waiting game now. But then a strangely familiar tickle entered his mind. It amazed him for a moment how he could find such a new, otherworldly, sensation comforting but he did. And it took all his abilities as an actor not to reveal his delight...or his trepidation.
He was still watching the guard, carefully, when the man's face grew flush and his eyes took on that fixed and lustful look of the criminal deviant. Jim and Artie had run into their kind enough times and seen the evil glowing in their eyes. Artie sat bolt upright. He almost shouted, almost called out to Tyme. To warn her. Then the man's hand raised. Artie growled like Logan, a frustrated helpless warning and the guard laid his rifle across Tyme's belly and pointed it at him and smiled a warning. His other hand tickled the edge of the sheet covering the young woman's breast.
"If you touch them...you'll come away with a stump." Came a stern, whispered warning. The guard's eyes opened wide and Tyme grabbed the rifle laying across her and slammed it up into the startled guard's chin. The man sank to the ground with little sound.
Whipping her legs around Tyme sat up unsteadily, having moved too swiftly. She looked down and let loose with a string of obscenities that shocked Artie as much as it amused him while he delicately pretended not to notice her covering her truly superb breasts with the fallen sheet.
She looked down at the fallen guard. "Pervert!" she muttered testily.
"Someone wake on the wrong side of the examination table today?" Artie smiled, relief giving him a chipper edge.
Tyme looked at him...around him. Through him...blearily and shook her head to bring some kind of clarity. "I'm not Mary Sunshine when I wake up...I need a cup of coffee bad." She looked down at herself and pulled the sheet up higher. "That and clothes." Then reaching up she brushed her head with her hand and began to let go with another string of muttered expletives.
"You kiss people with that mouth young lady?"
She looked at him and stuck out her tongue.
She got off the table gingerly and almost fell as she tried to shake the residual effects of the tranquilizer. She pushed herself up and looked around. Then back at Artie. "Clothes?"
"I saw them over there on that shelf." Artie inclined his head.
He averted his eyes, with some difficulty, while Tyme dressed hastily. Besides her initial outburst she hadn't obsessed much over her new coiffure except as she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror in passing.
"New look for me.... edgy...daring...God, I look like Professor X!" And she laughed. It wasn't gallows or sad...it was good humored and truly amused laughter.
And Artie thought it was a wonderful thing to hear. Few women, it seemed, weren't vain or fixated on their looks. The fact that she could take such a mean defacing of her womanly charms in stride spoke well of her stamina, priorities and, ultimately, in Jim's choice of her as a lover. How all of that would end was anyone's guess...but Artie had a lot of confidence in her ability to get through it.
"Tyme...If you can reach into the collar of my coat you'll find a pick that can be used to unlock these chains."
Tyme quickly located the pick and set to work on the troublesome locks. "Dammit...I wish Cyclops was here...this would sure go a lot faster if he could just blast the lock open."
Artie recalled the mention of this "X-Man" leader from an earlier discussion and nodded...eye beams that intense would be useful, but Artie would prefer to keep his fingers.
"You're doing fine. There...see. It's open." He smiled at her proudly. He reached up and rubbed her bald pate and smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry I couldn't stop that."
"Hair grows." she shrugged. "It's just funny...feeling the breeze up there." She looked around. "What do we do now?"
Artie saw the guard on the floor move slightly. "First...we tie up your "pervert"...then we try to get out of here."
The gleam in Tyme's eye was unmistakable, the smile...delighted, as she looked at the guard. She might be able to adjust to her new situation and appearance just fine, but the idea of some small revenge was very appealing to her as well. Maybe she and Jim had too much in common. He wasn't sure she had any fighting experience...but he knew she was fit...and she was certainly more then game.
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They stared at the opposite shore. It was daunting...and Logan knew from history...or in this case...the future...that people swimming the San Fran Bay to escape The Rock just didn't make it.
He saw the boyscou...Jim...remove his shirt and do some compact, well-trained stretches. The man was fit. As fit as Logan had ever seen in a homosapien. Or was he? Logan couldn't help noticing that the three lines...the cuts he'd made that bisected the agent's chiseled six-pack appeared to be in a slightly more accelerated stage of healing then a normal human. Not much more...but there was also an odd lack of scars on the man...as though he were immune to them. They may not be dominant in his make up...but Logan would love to see how this guy's genes looked under Hank's microscope.
"So...you never answered the question. Are you in love with her?"
West stopped what he was doing and looked at Logan with a exacerbated glare. "We don't have time for this."
"That's not an answer either."
West came up out of a deep bending stretch, reaching high above him and dropped his arms to his side with a long sigh. His eyes never left his feet.
"Yes." He looked up and stared out across the water. "I love her."
"Then she's gonna be hurt." Logan sighed too. He suddenly didn't want to add to West's plate...he no longer had the urge to be angered by him, or challenged by him. He just wanted to make sure West understood. He was fairly certain that Tyme wouldn't find solace in the kind of comfort they once shared. And Logan wasn't the best in the comfort category. He just wanted West to know.
"I don't want to hurt her." West bundled his clothes into a bag and stood.
"West...she can't stay...and you can't go with her." Logan looked at him steadily. "You would never go with her. You ain't no dummy, you know you couldn't live in our time...you couldn't leave your friend...you couldn't leave what you know. And she knows it. All she'll know, when we get back to our time, is that you'll be bones and dust in some forgotten hole in the ground...and that girl don't need ghosts. You can't give her what she needs."
Logan could tell that West wanted to argue that love was all they needed...or that it would work out, but the words wouldn't form because he knew they weren't true. Instead West waded out into the bay and turned back as Logan entered the water.
"What does she need?" he asked curtly.
"Someone who won't leave. Face it West...even if she could stay, you would end up hurting her there too. You ain't any better at commitment then I am at opera singing. You like the ladies too much Bub...you're a player. And you wouldn't set out trying to hurt her...but you would. She needs a love that will last."
West looked at him for a moment, his handsome face immobile. Then he took a breath and disappeared under the frigid bay waters. Logan shook his head sadly and followed.
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"Let me try something." said Tyme as she stepped up behind Artie, who was prepared to jimmey the lock of the door.
Artie looked at her curiously, but stepped aside. Tyme really didn't mind losing her hair. She was feeling a rush of power running through her, she was feeling potential she'd never known before and she had a situation where she could test it. It reminded her of the danger room exercises she always refused to participate in either due to feeling inadequate or because of the professor's presence. She knew...she really did realize that they were in danger, but part of her was soaring. She wanted to stretch her limits and if it meant losing her hair...so be it.
She smiled nervously and laid her hands on the door. Her eyes grew bright and everything around her took on the green glow, like she was looking at the world through a lit green light bulb. She felt the guards stir. One was feeling bored the other disgruntled. Both were violent men, they didn't fit in with the regular soldiers. She knew they were picked for this "assignment" for that reason. But both could feel the rise of adrenaline, the panic of the feeling that something was wrong and that they would be blamed. When they burst into the room it was almost a comical tripping, Three Stooges like. Artie and she were waiting. Artie grabbed one gun barrel and dragged the bearer forward into his closed fist, and the rifle Tyme wielded like a club brained the second neatly. They joined the tied and gagged first guard, and Artie, armed with a liberated gun and Tyme...armed with powers she wasn't sure of, eased into the halls of their prison fortress.
Artie was fascinated with Tyme's journey of discovery as she found new and interesting ways to incapacitate guards they found along the way, or ways she found to lead them into their reach that allowed Artie to render them insensible. But he also had to admit that he worried about her.
He worried that she may be using their predicament as a way to hide in the moment. It wasn't uncommon. When pain had struck too close to home for him on occasion, Artie had used the action, the adventure, and the rush of sensation to mask the pain. But when it was all over the pain still had to be faced.
He hoped, deep down, that she realized that. And he hoped if she did...that it didn't make her reckless.
Then he heard her gasp and he covered her mouth with a hand and drew her back. Her eyes were glowing but that started to die and she shook his hand from her mouth and looked at him with a frightened, awed, expression.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Pain." she whispered. "That guard, I was trying to plant a fake emotional response when I felt a pain in my stomach like it was burning deep. And then I knew what it was."
"What?" asked Artie alarmed.
"It, he has a medical problem," she whispered. "Ulcers I think...but I could feel it like I had them too." She looked at him with wide eyes. "I never thought I could feel anything but emotional states...perhaps a bit of telepathy. But actually feeling what someone feels physically too?" She trembled. "I wasn't ready for that."
"Frightening?" he asked holding her closer.
She nodded.
"I've been expecting to feel the pull back to my time...that starts as an ache..it takes a while for the pain to get real bad...but I haven't felt it pull on me yet. This pain was sharp...and not connected to me." She looked up at Artie and reached out a shaking hand for his arm for support. "We need to get out of here...now."
"Hold on." Artie smiled. "He's the last guard...that looks like some sort of outer door. Let me take care of him and we'll get out of here and see where we are and how to get back."
He was happy to take the last guard out of commission. He worked well with Jim...as a partner Jim was the physical side of their equation. Artemus Gordon was happy to operate in a more cerebral way. But since their progress to freedom he had allowed Tyme to take that position and he had relegated himself to providing the muscle...and he was plain tired.
Tyme watched him curiously as he produced a small silver ball from the heel of his boot. With a light flick, almost like a child shooting marbles, he struck the toe of the guard who looked down with mild curiosity and bent to retrieve it. The ball exploded in a tiny puff of yellow smoke and Artie covered his mouth with a hankie and saw Tyme cover her mouth in response to his lead. Artie checked the man's pulse quickly and handed his cuffs to Tyme who shackled the man to a pipe while Artie gagged him.
Artie was unsure at this point. He looked at Tyme.
"We need to know what's out there Tyme. Can you feel around, maybe tell me how many we have waiting for us outside."
Her eyes were already glowing greener in response. She placed the palm of both hands against the door and he could almost feel the air shift as she pressed her powers beyond the door. She didn't blink, but her eyes narrowed until the green glow resembled a half opened lantern against the heavy wood door. Then her eyes grew wide and her mouth opened wide. Distress was plain on her face. Terror. She pushed herself away from the door falling backwards with an unmuffled cry.
Looking around wildly she didn't seem to see him for a moment then she found his face and grabbed his collar urgently. "No!" she cried.
"They want me...let me go...I'll go. Please..please stay here. Wait for Jim & Logan. I felt them out there...faintly. They're coming. But the man out there...he LET us get this far. He knew we would! I need to go out to face him...you stay here!"
She was frantic as he shook his head calmly and tried to settle her. She refused to be comforted.
"You don't understand." Her voice lowered, her insistence was as urgent as the need to breathe. "There are too many of them...maybe fifty or more. They are armed, I could feel their readiness, I could feel their grips on the triggers. I can't incapacitate them all...and we would both be killed. All they want is me. If I go you won't get hurt."
Artie pulled her close to him. "Jim would kill me if I let you go out there alone, and Logan would use the rest of me for hair ribbons. And I can't let you go out there..." Artie tried to find the right way to explain the Doctor Hillmont's threats against her. "Tyme...if you don't act the way he wants you to he hinted that he may use torture to get you to cooperate."
She shook her head violently. "I've seen the heart of the man that wants to use me....he isn't threatening me...." She looked at a loss to explain to him what she was trying to say. Instead she grabbed the sides of his temples and slammed into his mind painfully quick...and his eyes opened wide but he didn't see her in front of him.
Artie saw felt the open prison yard yawn out in front of him without opening the door. He could feel, anger, resentment, boredom, curiosity, cruelty and excitement pouring into him from all sides...crushing his mind with genuinely itchy fingers and bloodlust. And he felt the heart of this evil throng...surrounded by men ranging from curious to apathetic to more then a few with difficulties with the ethics of what they were doing, the soul of Hillmont's stood out. It was a proud, cruel, power hungry piece of slime. It was a self-righteous heap of filth, a masquerade that let him believe he worked for a greater good when all he really lusted after was power, whether that power was over life and death on a soldier under his knife or whether it was the callous severing of a leg that could have been saved because he had had a bad sandwich brought to him and he needed to take it out on someone...it didn't matter. Hillmont's goal, for now, was to make Tyme a weapon...if he couldn't control her no one would. And his means of control wasn't torturing her.
Artie saw that it was him that was meant for that sacrificial altar.
When she released his head he sank to his knees and she sank down to face him.
He looked at her, dazed. Part of him wanted to be angry at what she'd done...part of him wanted to hug her. If that was what it was like to be her...to feel that tidal wave...that pressure, day in and out...he had underestimated her strength.
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The rush, the excitement, the feeling of exploration died with what Tyme had felt awaiting them on the other side of the door.
"You need to find another way out. I'll stall them. Jim...I feel him and Logan. They know where we are and they're coming." She steadied her breathing. "He won't hurt his investment...but if you go with me, he will hurt you."
"And you can't disable them?" Artie seemed to overestimate her powers now.
"No. Not all of them...not without seeing them." She paused. "And since they're armed, chances are a gun will blow you into hell before I can get everyone."
"I'm not leaving you."
"Artie..." she smiled. "If you don't leave me I'm going to put you to sleep and shove you in a locked closet. They'll hurt you!"
"I'm not going to leave you." he said earnestly. "You gave me a damned headache, but I know exactly what that bastard wants with you...I can't leave you to face that alone."
She tried to shrug nonchalantly. "He won't be able to use me for long Artie. I'll hop back when the pull gets strong enough."
It didn't fool Artemus Gordon. "You said you can't control what time you hop to, you wouldn't be able to come back for Logan. Tyme...you won't strand him here and you know it. You'll die...you'll wait here too."
"And if I do, I still won't be any good to him dead so problem solved." She grinned.
Artie sighed.
"We can always do a Butch and Sundance." she quipped. Then at his quizzical expression she added. "Outlaw duo, who when outnumbered by many guns, decided to burst through that last door and go out in a blaze of gunfire and glory...sad ending. Made a great movie. Redford was soooo hot."
"Let's not and say we did." Artie smiled back.
Then the decision was taken from them.
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The swim was treacherous, but Jim wasn't about to let his fatigue slow him. He inwardly berated himself for the need to prove himself that he felt around the untiring mutant who plowed, determinedly, through the rough bay wake. Logan's words still stung Jim as he took another stroke toward the island fort. It was an impossible situation and Jim knew he'd made it worse. He would have to say goodbye. This wasn't his choice anymore. He was used to saying goodbye, used to being the person who made that decision first. But this was different. And he knew everything that was inside her...if this was going to be hard on him, he knew it would be worse for her.
Logan was right and Jim hated him for pointing it out. There was no way to fix what had happened...no way to fall out of love...the only thing he could do was hope they all lived through this to find out just how bad "goodbye" would be. Hardly something to look forward to. But with each stroke Jim felt an urgency drawing him nearer. He felt as though a rope in his mind was drawing him to shore...moments of humor and curiosity, power and fear passed through him. Tremors along a spider's web. He swam harder.
His mind seized suddenly, he felt his heart race and he felt the rush of heat that filled him only when he was battling for his life. His strokes stopped and he floundered, the waves, both of pain and anger and fear washed over him from the direction of the island. He lost sight of the dark rock, and of Logan as his head went under the surface. He felt Tyme rein in the emotional outburst as quickly as she could. But he had swallowed water and he couldn't remember for a moment which direction to swim to reach the air.
The grip on his thrashing arm was painful, but it was his pain alone, and for a moment the water flowed faster past him as he felt himself dragged. When his face broke the surface Logan was looking at him with an appraising, almost concerned, gaze.
"I'm taking it they're in trouble?" He asked loudly over the sound of wave and coughing.
Jim tried to nod as he coughed and expelled the water he'd swallowed and he noticed that Logan held his arm and didn't let go.
"You gonna be all right Bub?" The wild man asked.
Jim nodded and pulled his arm away from Logan and extended it outward in a determined stroke. He swam about ten more strokes when he turned his head slightly...not enough to see Logan, but enough to know where he was.
"Thanks."
He didn't need to be an empath to hear the splashing stop for a contemplative moment behind him...then resume again.
They both swam purposefully toward the looming rock that jutted out of the center of the turbulent bay.
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She gasped as her head was pulled back. Her hair was no longer a handle so one of the guards who held her secure had his sweaty hand on her forehead and her head pulled back, hard, against his chest so that she looked up at a neck wrenching angle toward her captors. Her arms were held by two other men but the man who held her head back earned a sharp headache as she amplified and stabbed her discomfort straight into his mind.
The satisfying comfort revenge gave her was interrupted by a cry and a slap to the side of her face.
The green haze she saw the world in abated and she craned her head as best she could to see Artie. He had fought strongly. Several of the guards who stood around him sported bloodied lips and noses. But Artie had been out numbered. They both had. This annoyed Tyme greatly and she couldn't help but think she'd make a piss poor X-Men. The Brotherhood of Mutants...Sentinels...and she couldn't handle a courtyard of humans with stone age weapons. She vowed that if she ever got back she'd work out in the danger room... taking martial arts training and actually being able to use it in a fight were two different things.... she wasn't ready and Artie was in trouble because she couldn't help.
Arties hands were bound now, stretched high over his head and through a metal loop on a pole in the center of the prison courtyard.
The cry had been the deep scratch that oozed blood right between his shoulder blades where the guard had used his knife to cut his shirt. Then the ripping sound as the man tore downward with both hands to reveal Artie's back all the way to his waist.
Her eyes came back center when a hand grabbed her chin and forced her head forward. Her vision flared green but a shocked cry called her eyes back to Artie.
"If you attempt to use your magic on me or the guards your friend will suffer for it."
The voice was deep, sonorous, and calm. She attempted to reach inside the mind behind it to see what she could see and before another cry tore the air to her right and she stopped she knew it was the source of evil she had sensed on the other side of the door. The sick, twisted, sadistic horror. The power hunger...the hunger for more then mortal power. This man held lives in his hands and extinguishing them made him feel omnipotent. He knew medicine but he wasn't a healer...he knew medicine so he could know how to cause pain...not stop it. She drew in a breath and fixed her eyes on a genteel looking monster and felt an almost feral growl rise in her throat. She thought for a millisecond that she might be channeling Wolverine.
"Leave him alone!" she screamed at Dr. Hillmont who held her chin. Lifting her legs she relied on the guards to hold her weight for the second it took to kick outward and launch the bastard backwards about seven feet. She was glad to see he looked startled by this move...she was only sad that she hadn't kicked lower.
Without her empathic abilities she knew she must be projecting the feelings pretty well because as he stood and dusted himself off in silence he made sure not to come within kicking distance again. He raised his long fingered hand and signaled the gorilla of a man who stood with a bullwhip in his hand near Artie. She saw Artie tense as the man drew back his arm and she heard a muffled cry as he bit his lip and then a long shaky exhale.
"When you are ready to listen, and work with us, your friend will be spared further discomfort." Hillmont's brows knitted together with false concern. "I don't wish to harm you or Mr. Gordon..."
She interrupted his with a warning hiss. "You want to know what I can do?"
He nodded gravely.
"Then let's not pretend..." She looked at him her green eyes fixed without breaking away from his. Piercing him. "Here's the first secret.... my power is empathic."
The man's eyes narrowed with interest.
"I can feel every sick, perverted, sad, delusional, sadistic emotion that crawls through what passes for a soul in you." She turned her head and raised her voice. "In all of you!"
She saw a few men back away with self-conscious dread in their eyes. Her smile became predatory. She looked back at the doctor.
"So don't tell me you don't want to hurt anyone!" She grinned. "You and I know you live for it...it makes you feel important! You used to cut off legs and arms that could have been saved, just because you were in a bad mood and making someone else scream relieved your tension!"
Some of the soldiers shifted uncomfortably and a few mumbled under their breaths. The doctor's face grew hard...his lip twisted up in a sneer and she saw the tension fill his body until he shook with rage.
Tyme's pointed stare was shaken by Artie who lifted his head with a rasping laugh.
"Get 'em Tiger!"
The dark, ego bruised doctor signaled the whip man again.
Tyme winced sympathetically.
"What do you want?!"
The tall sanguine looking man stepped forward confidently, daring her with a flick of his eyes toward Artemus Gordon, to defy him...to attack him. He smiled when she didn't.
"I want you...to do whatever I tell you to."
He raised a hand and Tyme feared that he was signaling for the whip again. Instead two guards dragged an emaciated, filthy man dressed in gray rags forward and held him up next to the doctor who indicated the man with a small gesture from his long fingers.
"This man is an army deserter. He ran when Indians overran his fort. He left his friends alone to die and made deals with the savages to save his own hide." His lip curled with distain. "He has been sentenced to hang. He is dead no matter what. So what I want you to do is to use your special powers...and kill him."
The man smiled at her and Tyme didn't have to be empathic to know how much pleasure he was taking from her total revulsion. It was almost sexual...the smile a cruel seduction. Her eyes flared briefly. But enough to make the smile disappear and the doctor step back.
And Artie cried out again.
Tyme looked at the doomed man. He looked up with rheumy eyes, barely comprehending...totally confused. She felt inside her mind. her eyes flared green but no punishment came because her gaze was focused on the condemned man. The man was past caring, past being really afraid of what would happen to him. Tyme felt his hunger rumble in her...felt his apathy. She felt anger for him and disengaged herself and threw a poisoned gaze up at the doctor.
"No."
There was no change in that evil smile. Artie bit off a scream.
She found the cry made her start and she tried to look over toward him but her head was caught between two long fingered hands.
"I don't know how, or why you possess the abilities you do. But I know you can kill with them if you chose to." He hissed down in his face. "And you will kill...for me...on my orders...whenever I order you! You have only two choices. Obey...or watch others suffer for your disobedience!" With that he nodded toward the wielder of the whip who began to beat Artie mercilessly.
She closed her eyes against his agony and pulled her head out of Hillmont's cold hands. The crack of the whip, and the sound of Artemus Gordon trying to spare her the sound of his pain. But it was no good. She lifted her head and her eyes opened with a green beaming shine.
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Artie looked at her as she stepped away from the hands of the guards and up to the dazed prisoner. Her face was grim...unreadable. She gently lifted the man's head and brushed dirty strands from his forehead. Her eyes grew wider...the glow bathed her in emerald light.
"Tyme!" he cried out to her. "Tyme...Don't do it!"
He saw her falter for a second and then he made a choking sound as a filthy rag was shoved and tied into his mouth and another blow sliced across his shoulders. His eyes blurred with pain then refocused on Tyme as she held the man's head and leaned forward and placed her forehead against the prisoner's.
He couldn't believe what was happening. Could she really do it? He thought she could. To save someone she cared for. But he prayed he was wrong. The last thing she needed was this poor man's blood on her hands. He strained and screamed into his gag to get her attention and raged at the look of domineering avarice that was displayed on Hillmont's smug face.
The man in Tyme's hands stiffened suddenly and Artie's pain turned into despair as the man collapsed in his guard's hands. Tyme straightened and her eyes faded to their natural greener then green shade and she sighed and stepped back.
Artie's beating ceased as all stared at the limp body. Hillmont strode forward with a proud gait and knelt slightly and reached for the man's throat for a pulse when a rumbling drone escaped the body. Then another...then another...then another. The dead man was snoring!
Artie grinned in his gag proudly.
Hillmont stood swiftly and rigidly. Whirling on Tyme as the guards tittered. Red to the roots of his dark hair he shook with rage. Tyme smiled at him and hers was the smug visage. Hillmont snapped. Unholstering his service revolver he turned and shot the sleeping man through the top of his bowed head and turned toward Tyme who stood stock-still. Her eyes wide at the spray of gore she had seen.
Another man was dragged across the courtyard. The tittering of the guards had fallen silent under the rage of their commanding officer. This man fought hard against his guards. He had seen what Tyme could do and certainly what would happen in any case if she didn't kill him first. His eyes darted desperately around. Pleading eyes to his fellow soldiers. to Artie who wanted to help him but couldn't and to Tyme who still stared at the corpse of the grizzled old prisoner.
Artie was fairly certain this was the first time she had seen death so cruel. She was in shock and only her slow blink seemed to indicate she was even conscious and not some half standing corpse herself. Artie was almost grateful for the guards who kept her from falling and injuring herself.
"We shall try again." threatened Hillmont, a slight rise in his deep voice betraying his still palpable rage. "This man is also condemned. Kill him...and Mr. Gordon goes free. Play games with me and Mr. Gordon suffers and the prisoner dies anyway!"
Artie saw the signal given to the flagellist and he shut his eyes in preparation of the sting of the lash biting into his back and did not see Tyme's reaction. But mingled with his own cry he heard a low moan of despair come from her that was echoed by the struggling prisoner.
The seconds dragged by in waves of agony. He leaned heavily on the pole he as tied to and feeling moisture that was more then sweat on his back and wrists he looked up and saw that his own struggles had caused his wrists to bleed where the ropes burned into them. The time between lashes was short...too short for him to focus his eyes past the pain and see what was happening to Tyme.
All Artie knew was that every lash meant that she was resisting Hillmont's will. Artie was happy for that. But he knew that unless Jim and Wolverine found them...soon...he would have to die to give Tyme her chance to escape. That as long as Hillmont had him to hold over her, that she would not attack him or the guards. And blinded by pain and that reasoning Artie was beginning to hope that it would all be over soon.
Strangely Artie had assumed that after a while the pain would become a numbed wall...that it would level off and he would adjust. But that was wrong. Dust settling in his torn flesh was an agony that nearly drove him insane and he cried around his gag until the spittle drooled down his chin and he prayed for unconsciousness. Then the blows stopped briefly and he looked up and saw Tyme and he shook his head to clear it.
The prisoner struggled and Hillmont leaned in with his revolver in hand to watch. This time the light pouring out of Tyme's eyes filled the twilight dimming courtyard. The look on Tyme's face was conflicted...not the serene, unreadable expression of before. Artie, even through a haze of incredible pain, could see that she was coming to a decision, which frightened her, and Artie leaned his head into the pole and waited in agonized sadness.
Artie felt nothing. He blinked. He, literally, felt nothing. He body was too weak to support his weight, he could feel the warm wetness of blood on his back and arms. He could feel the sweat as it course down his face. But he felt no....pain.
His eyes opened wide at the wonder of it when they focused on Tyme. Her eyes blazing, her mouth opened wide and her body rigid to the point that her back bowed backwards. And she screamed. She screamed and yanked her contorting body from the guards reach and stumbled forward and fell at Artie's feet. Artie saw her body arch and draw itself into a fetal position again and again and her teeth were clenched tight and a high wheezing screech came from her like a demon escaping hell.
Artie wanted to scream her name...he wanted to reach down to her and shake her.
Hillmont gave her two choices. Kill at his command, or watch Artie suffer. But, Dammit, Tyme came up with a third choice that shocked Artie with its audacity...and bravery. And he wished to God he could stop her.
She wasn't going to be forced to kill....and she couldn't save Artie from dying...but she was determined to save him from the pain of dying like this. She was somehow using her powers not just to share his pain...but also to remove it entirely. But apparently the only way to remove it was for her to live it.
The guards milled around in confusion. Hillmont stood back a look of disbelief clouding his lean face. Then he moved forward...he kicked her. Again. Again.
"Stop this!" he demanded. "I command you to stop what you're doing! NOW!" His voice pitched higher and spittle flew from his lips.
He kicked her again and Tyme endured it as she adjusted herself to the waves of pain she stole from Artie. Her eyes were half open and wet, glazed, shining bright. Artie wondered if she even knew what was going on or if she could hear or feel Hillmont through the pain she had taken upon herself. Artie was too weak to lift himself or he would have kicked the bastard for what he was doing.
But God...part of him wanted Tyme to listen to him. To give him back his pain and to wait for Jim...to live for Jim. By now Hillmont was a man possessed...gone was the doctor he pretended he was...gone was the patriot who had convinced people in government that he should have the resources to conduct his mad project. Gone was the project. Replacing all of it was a mad man...a power hungry sadist who had been cheated...outwitted. by this tiny woman/child.
He grabbed up the bullwhip and pushed the man who wielded it out of the way.
"You'll stop....if I have to kill you...you'll do as I say!"
And the whip fell across Artie's back. An while he felt the weight of the stroke, and felt the pole absorb the shock through him, it was Tyme who screamed until her mouth stood open but no sound would emerge. Over and over he beat Artie. The blood dripped in the dirt around his feet and Artie was horrified to see his blood falling on Tyme. She was wearing the blood she was feeling the pain for.
Artie was growing weaker. Light headed. It was a strange sensation. Stranger still because as he grew weaker so did Tyme's cries. Maybe if he died...maybe the pain would stop for Tyme.
Then she stirred at his feet, almost at the moment the thought passed through him and she rolled onto her back her fists clenched so tight that her nails dug into bloodied palms. Her eyes opened wide and even though Artemus Gordon couldn't see either pupil or iris in the green glow he knew she was looking up at him. She smiled.
"Butch....and Sundance...." she breathed raggedly. Her chest rose and fell. Labored...in time with his.
She knew....she knew it was a no win situation and she'd made her choice. Going out as a pair...no survivors if the other one wouldn't be coming out. Artie wanted to shake her, tell her to let go. But he didn't even make a sound. The fact is if he were in her place...he wouldn't have left her either.
Artie closed his eyes. His dying wouldn't save Tyme. He knew now that they were linked in a way that once his body succumbed to the abuse it was taking...that she would be pulled into death by the chain of pain she'd forged.
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It was there...the brief blinding flash of pain as he and Wolverine pulled themselves ashore and then everything was severed. The tug. the pull that he knew was Tyme's connection to him cut like a knife through a spider's web. Jim's eyes flew up the craggy rocks of the jutting fortress of California stone set deep in the impossible moat of San Francisco Bay and he pull it apart with his bare hands. He wanted to rage at the possibility that they fought so hard to have it end here.
But he didn't. He met the idea with a cold rage...a rage he had only ever felt but one time. When he had "seen" Artie murdered by pistolaros and he had stalked his rage to a small Mexican town and watched the man who had done the deed die in his arms. If this severing was all he would have left of Tyme, if he had to face losing Artie again.... when he reached the prison then he would have revenge. And he didn't care if there would be anything left of him afterward...because it just wouldn't matter.
While Wolverine was far less exhausted by the swim then he was...not to mention his incredible healing powers, James was doing a fair job of outdistancing the mutant wild man. Maybe it was his leaner frame, but he seemed more sure on the rocks then the man who seemed more built for crashing through them. He looked back briefly at a stony explosion behind him and smiled grimly.
Wolverine was in full claw and was using them like a climber's pitons, using sheer muscle and determination to bury them into the rocky surface and drawing himself up until he was even with Jim's acrobatic display over the craggy landscape.
"You got circus freak blood in ya cowboy?" he huffed. "Cuz you remind me of a blue elf I know."
Jim didn't answer. He was glad that Logan wasn't fighting against him now...but he had no time to exchange quips. He had a feeling that the clawed man understood this because his climbing now matched Jim's and they both labored up the wall of stone, pulling each other along portions where needed, in determined silence.
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Wolverine didn't want to ask West if he'd felt the sudden breaking that disconnected him from Tyme. He didn't have to. He watched the human's efforts to reach her...to reach his friend. and he knew that there was a rawness to his actions that was almost as messy as if he were bleeding all over the rocks they climbed.
And that scared him. He had a feeling that West had a deeper connection to Tyme then his was...and that he might know something so terrible that Logan felt he wasn't ready for that berserker's rage to come over him again. Not now...not yet.
Wolverine knew the rage would strike. Wolverine had lost friends before. And lovers. He wondered if West had ever lost both...or if he had ever lost them both on the same day. He really didn't want to see the boy scout hurt like that.
Yeah...well he wasn't ever gonna be the guy's best bud, but West had his respect. And Wolverine would watch his back.
Looking back across the bay as he climbed he wondered what would happen if he was stranded here. If Tyme didn't walk out of this...THIS...would be his new home. This time, if not the place.
What then? How does a mutant with a bad temper and metal claws stay out of time's way? If the Prof. was right then chances were he'd see the X-Men again...someday. But he'd be much older. Maybe too old for....awww forget it you canucklehead, she'd still be Scott's girl and you'd be an old dog.
He wished he had a smoke.
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West drew a finger up to his lips and pointed above them and Wolverine looked up and nodded. Lacing his fingers Wolverine gave Jim a launching platform. Jim was jarred by just how far the mutant could toss him, but not as jarred as the guard on the battlement above who was downed by the flying left fist of the secret agent who caught the man's rifle before it hit the walkway. Signaling below he waited and looked around while Wolverine used his claws to scale the wall.
Then across and down into the courtyard Jim saw it. The gathered guards. some of whom on the edges dropped their weapons and ran for the exits of the yard. Horrified by what they saw, but none tried to stop the crime being committed and for that James West vowed they'd all see jail cells. Or nooses.
He heard the crack of the whip like a firecracker going off inside his brain and ran along the wall toward the stairs that led down to the yard below. At the top of the stairs he startled a burly guard who lunged at him with his bayonet. Jim caught the barrel of his rifle with his forearms and twisted, flipping the gun butt end up into the man's chin and then caught the gun in his hands and used it as a club to knock the unsteady man off the steps and out of his way. As he ran down the steps he heard a groan and jumped aside as the broken body of another guard rolled down the steps past him.
"Wait for me Bub!" shouted Wolverine who leapt the steps three at a time.
They ran toward the pole in the center of the courtyard like it was a beacon and started beating their way through the crowd of guards watching the Roman circus before them. Jim flung aside mostly unresisting men...some who took swings at him, if they woke up, would regret it.
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Tyme felt everything and nothing. Her head buzzed and through the green haze she kept her narrowing vision fixed on Artemus Gordon's face. Her body seemed to be beyond responding to the pain she siphoned away from Gordon's abused body. She imagined that he, they, were probably close to shutting down. But she was amazed by how much punishment he could take despite being human. Funny she could think such a thing at a time like this. It wasn't hard though, for her mind to wander even while she did what she did. She imagined that Charl....the Professor...would be proud of what she had developed into as a mutant. She regretted not being able to tell him. She regretted also leaving Logan here. With her and Artemus dead she imagined...she hoped...they would turn to each other for comfort, maybe even friendship.
But she mostly regretted not seeing Jim again, not being held in his arms, not being able to tell him how much she loved him. She could almost imagine, if she tried hard enough, that she could hear his voice.
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Wolverine saw Jim reach the pole and cut the rope holding Gordon standing. He watched West lower him to the ground as his friend's bloodstained his skin. Then he saw West lift Tyme into his lap and saw him shout at her, shake her. Oh God.
Then as most of the guards fell back, or ran now that the jig was up, Wolverine saw a tall, bent, stalking figure emerge from the confusion. He didn't need to be an empath to know what this man was going to do.
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Artemus Gordon felt his bunched muscles relax as he was lowered to the ground. He opened his eyes and felt his gag pulled away from his mouth. But before he could find his voice he saw Jim's back as he focused on Tyme. Her body lay across his lap. Still. Artie turned his eyes outward at the blurring circle of blue that were the guards' backs and his eyes widened. Hillmont held a gun and was pointing it at the back of Jim's head.
Artie opened his mouth to sound the alarm when Hillmont stopped and the side of his mouth went slack as a thin line of blood ran from his thin lips. The doctor looked down and the gun tumbled from his hand as he tried to grasp one of the three blades that protruded from his chest. A finger was severed as the knives retreated from him and his eyes rolled up and he fell forward almost landing on Artie but he was caught and tossed aside as Wolverine stepped into the now unoccupied space, the wounds in between his knuckles sealing magically as he sheathed his weapons.
The big mutant grabbed one of the guards and ripped the guy's coat off his back and he knelt beside Artie and covered his raw and bleeding back and helped prop him up so he wouldn't be laying on it.
Artie found his voice and it was as raw as his back. "Make her give back my pain...please...it's killing her."
Wolverine's eyes narrowed. "What? What...she's somehow feeling your pain...with you."
Artie shook his head. "Instead of me!"
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Jim touched the top of Tyme's bald head and brushed the sweaty dust from her head and looked for the injury that had her close to death, but saw nothing.
Then he heard Artie talking to Wolverine and he understood. She had done something to keep Artie from feeling the pain when he was being beaten. That the severing of their connection had probably been to protect him as well. But he looked at how weak Artie was and he looked at Tyme and he shook his head.
"Tyme knows what she's doing...I think. If she let's the pain go, the shock will kill you."
Wolverine reached out and grabbed a flash of dusty white and Jim recognized a young army doctor...a captain. No doubt one of the men assisting the monster who was in charge.
While Wolverine allowed a claw to menacingly escape his closed fist in front of the man's face Jim explained exactly where they needed to go and what the doctor would do if he knew what was healthy for him. The red haired man's head bobbed and Wolverine gathered up Artie and Jim lifted Tyme and they ran for the prison infirmary.
Artie's wounds had to be cleaned and dressed quickly and fluids were given to him as quickly as could be managed. Then the young captain gave Artie a syringe full of morphine, upping the dosage until Tyme's breathing steadied.
Lifting Tyme's eyelid the doctor noted that the glowing had subsided and that both patients would probably survive.
Jim watched Logan "explain" to the doctor that all of this was a dream and that if he talked he'd carve him like a student cadaver. The young man nodded his understanding and promptly wet himself.
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Logan was impressed with the chewing out West gave to his superior officer Col. Richmond.
The seething, scathing, pugnacious report made Logan lean against the wall with his arms crossed over his broad chest and smile around the smoking stub of a cigar in his mouth.
Richmond's indignant, chagrined response was as much of an apology as one could hope for no matter what the era from a government official. They disavowed any knowledge of Dr. Hillmont's intended actions (ala: a bad episode of Mission Impossible). And any and all of Hillmont's handpicked soldiers who actively participated in the kidnapping and torture of Artemus Gordon, ("And were still alive." thought Wolverine with a bigger smile), would be court-martialed and imprisoned and the cowards who ran busted down in rank and given some less then choice postings. As to Tyme and Logan's situation...the Colonel eyed the big cunuck suspiciously. He'd heard more then a dozen reports of the final battle and he'd seen the injuries...and the mortal wounds and his eyes wandered to a close scrutiny of Logan's hands.
Let him look. Logan plucked the stub from his mouth and smiled to show his teeth. Which almost always had more of an effect of seeing a wolf bare it's teeth then as a show of humor.
"Ya want something....Bub?"
The Colonel shook his head quickly and Logan saw James West grin behind the man's back and lower his head to regain the rage he'd been nursing since Artie and Tyme were seen by a respectable doctor and surgeon three weeks earlier.
Instead Col. Richmond handed James West a packet of papers and excused himself, skirting Wolverine as he walked out the Wanderer's door.
He picked up the whiskey bottle off the bar and poured a drink for himself and one for West who retrieved it without a sound.
West tossed aside the papers and sat down heavily.
"It's almost time for us to go." Logan said.
"And Artie and I have a new assignment. We leave in two days." West drank his drink and Logan passed him the bottle for a refill.
"Tyme told me she could feel the pull back...strong. I think she's been fighting it." Logan took a drag on what was left of the stub and put the rest out in his palm with a satisfying wince.
West threw his glass into the wall and it exploded with the impact in an equally satisfying way.
"We both have." Then he got up and walked out, purposefully picking up the thinly padded gloves on the desk and headed toward the barn. Stress relief, thought Logan....good idea.
He followed.
When he got there he saw West taking some vicious stabs at the hanging bag.
"Need a sparring partner?" He asked.
The agent looked at him curiously. Then shook his head.
"I think I need to get back to work." He smiled sadly.
Logan turned to go.
"Logan....tell me something." Logan stopped, jarred to hear his name...curious.
"What?"
"How does she live? What kind of people will be there for her...besides you?" He looked at Logan with his piercingly direct gaze. "Is this...is love...any easier with her own kind?"
Logan kicked at the straw and fell back heavily against the wall and looked up at the ceiling then back down at West with a sad shaking of his head.
"Bub...she'll make it. She's gotten so damn strong. Stronger then I ever thought she'd become. But if she never falls in love...or blows it over and over and over, then she'll be no different then any other mutant at that school...or anywhere else. But at least, I think, she finished running away from her feelings. She's ready to join the rest of the mutant race. The rest of the human race."
"If you treat her bad....I'll haunt you."
Logan laughed. "Anything but that Bub!"
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Jim laughed too.
Comforted slightly. Hurting terribly. The mission Col. Richmond had given him was the signal. And Jim felt guilty that he was actually relieved. When things got tough...the war...his parents death....the day his sister died...he threw himself into his work, study, even...play, just that much harder. And the hurt would lessen. But would it work on love? He knew it was time to find out.
Almost as if summoned, Artie and Tyme came through the door holding hands and laughing. Tyme's hair was a pale peachy fuzz covered by a bonnet, but to Jim she looked more beautiful then he could imagine.
Tyme smiled at Jim and Logan, but her eyes flashed brightly and her smile became melancholy.
"Butch bought me a nice hat to keep the sun off my noggin." She tried to sound upbeat. "Logan. do you think the Professor will think I'm making fun of him?"
"Naw baby....just let him wear the hat every once in a while." Smiled Logan. Then looking back at Jim. "I need to get some things done...before..."
Jim nodded.
Artie didn't need to be drawn a diagram. He leaned in and kissed Tyme's cheek. "See you in a bit Sundance." Jim didn't miss him squeezing her hand...and throwing him an almost warning look. But Jim noted a sympathetic glint to it and grinned at his old friend reassuringly.
"Butch? Sundance?" he said as he approached her.
"Artie will tell you later..." she said stepping into the circle of his embrace. "When we're gone."
"We have an assignment." He tried to sound casual.
"And I can't hold out here much longer."
"Yes." He pulled her in closer.
She fumbled with the folds of the dress she'd worn into town and brought out a small frame with a closed front. She handed it to him.
"Artie found me a very nice wig...almost my hair...anyway. It looked good for the photo."
He opened it and Tyme's face beamed back at him with calm, quiet, peaceful love from the picture. Her eyes were catching the flash of the powder and seemed particularly bright. shiny. She looked beautiful.
"Don't worry...I stole a pic of you and Artie already...so this is to replace it."
"Its beautiful...except..." Jim smiled.
Tyme lifted her small hand and brushed her knuckles against his temple softly. Her eyes flared.
Then she giggled. "I'm too covered up?"
He reached around behind her and began to unbutton her gown.
She smiled. "You have a filthy mind Agent West."
"Now, now, now...I've seen yours too...." He smiled.
She unbuckled the top of his pants.
"So you have...so you have."
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Laying in each other's arms Tyme knew that good bye should be coming. She had planned on saying something more to Jim...but she didn't want to break the spell. As far as partings go...they were doing a good job at not falling apart around each other. She remembered her parting from a younger Charlie. Sick, young, weak, crying. Begging for a way to stay...wrenching sadness.
She loved Jim more then she could ever have imagined with Charles Xavier...but...this was almost serene.
How did she come to this point?
From the blind grief of losing someone...to feeling okay with it?
Then she knew...it wasn't goodbye.
"Jim...promise me something." Jim turned on his side and touched her shoulder, her neck.
"What?"
"Keep a diary." Jim looked slightly unnerved by that...she smiled. "Not of feelings silly. Places you've been..dates..times. Keep that kind of a diary. Keep it stored safely...and someday...put it in a bank vault and bequeath it to the Xavier School."
Jim's eyes dawned with a confused understanding.
"But you said you can't control WHERE in time you go." Jim looked at her expectantly.
"Not yet I can't." She grinned. "But since my powers have grown I've done a helluva lot of things I couldn't before."
Jim shook his head with awe. "You think? You think you can....?"
"James West...I love you. And this is not goodbye."
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Rogue bounced around nervously outside the school's hospital doors. "Are they all right Jean?"
She tried to crane her head around the tall red head but was gently pushed back.
"They are tired...it was a hard time but they'll be fine." She reassured the anxious teen. Then looking over at Professor Charles Xavier. "Tyme wants to see you."
Charles Xavier rolled into the pink colored room and smiled at Tyme where she lay propped up in her bed. Logan sat next to her and cheerfully ignored the no smoking sign as he puffed on a fairly large, obnoxious cigar.
Dr Henry McCoy stepped up next to the bed and pulled back the blankets slightly to look at his patients one more time.
Tyme smiled. "Charles Xavier...please meet James Logan and Artemis Charlene West."
Logan's chest puffed out just a bit more and he handed Xavier an equally large cigar.
Xavier reached a finger into the folds of the blankets and felt gently into the simple, complicated, wonderfully innocent minds of creatures so new. "Welcome to the Xavier Institute little ones."
Tyme smiled at him. He was happy to see her...happy that she could bring him back into her life without the pain there was before. Their ordeal had been terrible. But the fruit it bore....
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James West looked at Artie with shock. "YOU KNEW!?"
"She made me promise Jim...after you left."
James West sat down as his friend poured him a drink. Tyme and Logan had "hopped" out of their lives just 3 hours earlier. Taking the drink Jim turned Tyme's portrait over.
"I'm going to have a baby." It read in a clear strong hand.
Jim held his drink up and Artie did as well. "No goodbyes!" he toasted.
