You say why and I say I don't know, oh no
You say goodbye and I say hello
- from "Hello Goodbye" by The Beatles
He didn't know who had said it, or where he had heard it, but the phrase "the waiting is the hardest part" was taking on new meaning for Remy. He had settled into a position at Rogue's side from the moment she was brought into the Institute's infirmary, and he had done his best to stay there ever since.
The biggest distraction had been school, but he'd used someone's cell phone to call BHS and plead sick. However, the secretary was nobody's fool, and Remy's ability to charm didn't work so hot over the phone. In the end he'd managed to secure his days off by arranging for one of the other Institute kids to pick up any missed homework assignments.
He had only been going to one for barely three weeks, but he hated public school with a passion. The Guild had their own teachers, and the subjects they taught, while including the fundamentals, were a lot more entertaining than the three R's and a handful of electives. The lone bright spot, aside from having sixth period with Rogue, was that he had Bayville's teachers
convinced he walked on water - something his Guild teachers would have snorted at.
At the moment, he was still sitting in the infirmary, a stack of textbooks and papers representing two days' worth of homework shoved under Rogue's bed at his feet, and watching her pale, unchanging features with tired eyes.
It was Belle all over again; the second he thought she was finally within reach, something came and snatched her away. He rubbed the place on his finger where the ring would have gone and exhaled sharply. No point remembering the bad stuff now - not when things were already so bad - but he couldn't help it. He wondered if Rogue would ever wake up. He wondered what
Mystique knew that she wasn't telling. He wondered what Essex had done to Rogue, and if Beast and the prof could fix it.
Mostly, though, he just brooded over how much his life sucked in general. And he did such a good job of it that by the time he realized his feet had fallen asleep - again - he was seriously wishing Jean-Pierre LeBeau had never plucked his orphaned self off of the mean streets of New Orleans.
" 'Better to have loved and lost'," he quoted, slouching down in his chair and wincing at the pins-and-needles feeling as circulation returned. "Guess the guy said that didn't know you, huh, chere?"
It was the first thing he'd said in nearly three hours, since before Jubilee had brought him dinner, and much to his pleasant surprise, Rogue's eyes fluttered open with a small moan. Remy's mood instantly improved a thousand percent, and he reached up to take her gloved hand in his. She blinked a few times, and glanced around the room - obviously trying to figure out where she was - then frowned.
"Hey, chere," he said, squeezing her hand. "Had us worried for a bit."
Rogue's attention immediately snapped to him, and her frown changed into a look of alarm.
"It's okay, you're okay," he said, trying to be reassuring. She sat up abruptly, pulled her hand free of his, planted it in the center of his chest, and shoved him across the room.
Remy slammed into the wall, a lot harder than he thought he should because Rogue was just not that strong. She fairly jumped out of the bed and looked around wildly, shoving her hair away from her face.
He hit the intercom button on the wall behind him and yelled, "Infirmary - need some help!"
Rogue, meanwhile, was crossing the room to loom over him. He scrambled to his feet and drew a card out of habit. "Don't wanna hurt you, chere, but if you gonna make me..."
The door flew open and the other X-Men rushed in. Rogue whirled with a panicked light in her eyes, and Gambit dropped the card and grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides.
She tossed him off as though he wasn't there.
He hit the wall again. This time he knocked over a tray of vials and syringes on the way down. They smashed and scattered across the floor; on the floor himself, he watched one glass vial roll unbroken to rest against Rogue's bare foot.
"Just take it easy, Rogue," Scott said, holding out his hands. In the doorway behind him, Kurt and Jean were making equally calming gestures.
Rogue stepped backwards, right onto the vial. It crunched into jagged slivers beneath her heel, but when she took another step, the skin showed smooth and unmarred.
Gambit got a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"Who are you? Where am I?" someone demanded. It took Remy a second to realize that the someone was Rogue, because the voice was not the smoky Southern drawl he was so used to - no, it was a clear soprano with just the trace of a New York accent. "And where is Warren?"
The X-Men just stared.
Evidently that wasn't the reaction Rogue wanted, because she took a step toward them. "Answer me!"
Remy got to his feet again, the sickness in his soul threatening to choke him. What had Essex done?
"Someone had better start talking," Rogue warned. "Who are you, where am I, and where. Is. Warren?"
"Wolverine is one his way," Jean told Scott, one hand to her forehead.
What had Essex done?
Heavy footfalls in the hall signaled Wolverine's arrival. He came running through the infirmary doorway just as Rogue brought her fist down on a stainless steel table, crumpling it like so much cardboard, and shouted, "WHERE - IS - WARREN?!"
Wolverine stopped cold. "Ace?" he asked in total disbelief.
"Logan," she said, wide-eyed, seeing him for the first time. "What are you doing here?!"
The room got a lot quieter in a hurry, but it was a shocked silence rather than any declared truce. It got a lot more still, too, just because everyone was stunned into immobility by the sheer unlikeliness of it all. Remy looked at Rogue, then at Wolverine, and back again, trying to figure it out. That wasn't hard to do.
It all came down to one thing, really: he hadn't saved her soon enough. Her body was safe, sure enough, but he hadn't rescued her from the devil in time to save her soul.
Scott asked, incredulous, "You know her?"
"Yeah, she's a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent," Wolverine said, staring at her. "We ran a couple missions together - what's she doing in Rogue's body?"
Rogue - Ace - looked at her hands, and then her body, and her panicked air returned full force. " 'Rogue's body?' I'm in someone else's body?! Logan -!"
"Calm down, Ace," Wolverine said, as gently as he could, which wasn't very. "I know you've seen weirder stuff than this. Now, I don't know what happened, but someone does, and we'll figure it out."
She stared at the older mutant, shock freezing that face Remy had come to know so well, and in the new, strange voice demanded, "But how? How did someone DO this? And WHY?"
"I c'n answer that, I think," Remy said, voice dull. The X-Men turned to look at him sharply, and he added, "Or maybe I should say, I know someone who be able to."
"Well, by all means, lead us to this person," Ace said. She looked like she was recovering her equanimity a little.
"Whoa, you're not going anywhere," Wolverine said, holding up a hand. "We're gonna get Beast down here to run some tests, and Jean's gonna do a telepathic scan if she feels up to it, but you're stayin' right here, Ace."
She gave him a hard, appraising stare, not quite arguing but looking like she might in a moment. "Who are these people, Logan?"
"The X-Men," he said. "Friends. I trust 'em with my life."
Ace nodded. "You'd better not be lying."
Wolverine gave her a passable imitation of a smile. "Never." To Remy, he motioned and said, "Time's wastin', Gumbo."
It took the words a moment to sink in past the fog of guilt and pain that was now bearing down on Remy. This was his fault; if he'd just trusted his instincts and followed Rogue when she and Risty had snuck off to the city. If he'd told her what he knew about her "best friend," and damn the consequences to his own hide. If he'd had the guts to show up at the lab in the Blackbird with the X-Men behind him. If he'd done so many things differently, with less concern for his own well-being and more for that of someone who was more important anyway.
Wolverine grabbed Kurt and Evan as well and the quartet started for the hangar. They passed Beast in the hallway; he was bounding along towards the infirmary at a pretty good speed, clipboard in hand.
"Keep her calm 'til we get back," Wolverine told him, and Beast nodded.
Remy looked back, watching the doctor race toward the room that held the body but not the soul of his Rogue.
And it was all his fault.
In the hours immediately following the rescue of Rogue, Mystique had abandoned the Risty Wilde persona, moved her base of operations well away from New York, and taken up the still-useful identity of Raven Darkholme (who, as far as anyone knew, had given up a career as a principal for a job with a defense contractor). Her apartment in Washington, D.C., was small,
but well-furnished, she had a dozen bank accounts to choose from, and the X-Men had no idea where she was.
She was safe, unless and until Essex came knocking, and she had very little to complain about in the meantime. But she did anyway.
"IDIOT!"
The ringing shout was accompanied by the equally ringing shatter of glass as she threw a ceramic vase into the bedroom's large mirror. Her reflection splintered into a million shards, all of them showing the same wrathful blue face.
"That stupid, backstabbing, miserable little THIEF!" she shouted, ready to tear out her hair at the sheer injustice of it all. LeBeau was going to die. That was all she could think. He deserved to die, just for humiliating her in this way.
She turned on her heel, pacing for lack of something better to do, and fumed. Somehow, someway, LeBeau had managed to talk her into letting him - LETTING him! - take Rogue to Xavier. Into ALLOWING him to lock the most powerful mutant anyone had ever found back in that pathetic ivory tower, AFTER Essex had done only god-knew-what to enhance her power!
It was enough to drive even the strongest woman insane.
The phone, still lying in half-destroyed ruin in front of the smashed television, emitted a strangled beep. She broke off her pacing and picked it up, forcing her voice into some semblance of normality. Still, her tone was less than pleasant, even to her. "Hello?"
Her supervisor's voice buzzed, "Darkholme? You sound like you're ready to kill someone."
"It's nothing - just a stressful commute," she said, feigning world-weary humor. He was a rube in the truest sense of the word; she didn't even have to offer halfway-convincing lies for him to swallow them whole.
Her supervisor gave a short chuckle. "Oh, do I know that. Listen, I called to tell you that we will need the report on that pattern analysis for tomorrow after all."
She grimaced and rubbed her forehead, suddenly reminded of why she hated pretending to be human. "I don't know if I can pull it together that soon."
"Raven, if you don't, the brass is going to suspend funding for Wideawake, and we're all going to be out of jobs. You've been on vacation for over a month - what have you been doing?"
Oh, the magic word. Wideawake. Mystique sighed and said, "I'll have it. Don't worry."
"That's all I wanted to hear," her supervisor said, then hung up.
She lowered the mangled phone from her ear and scowled at it. The things I do for my species, she thought, and pointedly ignored the fact that she had actually been ordered - under some duress - to infiltrate Project: Wideawake by Magneto.
Distracted by the call, her anger at LeBeau had dimmed slightly, but now it returned full force, and she stalked towards the living room with murder on her mind. If she ever saw him again, she was going to wring his catfish-chewing neck.
That resolution was sorely tested, though, when she emerged into the living room to find not only LeBeau, but Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Spyke standing in wait. Full uniforms. Ready to fight.
She was fazed for approximately half a second, and then she snarled, "Get out of my apartment."
"Hello to you too, mother," Kurt said, and the barbed tone hurt her despite herself. Was she always destined to lose her children to other peoples' causes? She'd been afraid to ask Irene - was still, but perhaps it was time. Time to know if the enemy would share her genes.
Before she could respond to her son's bit of baiting, Wolverine crossed the floor and shoved a finger into her chest. "Cut the garbage, Mystique. What happened to Rogue?"
Mystique returned his angry glare with a faint smirk, then glanced over his shoulder at LeBeau. "Is that what he told you - that I was behind this?"
"He didn't tell us much of anything," Wolverine said, prodding her again, "except where to start lookin'."
"Well, I'm afraid he's got you looking in the wrong place," she said, smoothly and casually sidestepping away from Wolverine and into the rough circle formed by the other X-Men. "The better to conceal his own crimes. Isn't that right, Remy?"
LeBeau finally met her eyes, and she was more surprised by what she saw there than she had been by the discovery of four armed men in her living room: Defeat. Pain.
...Loss?
"She's gone, Mystique," he said, flat, and each word fell like a stone.
Speechless, she turned to Wolverine, hoping to hear some denial. She was warning herself not to believe them, because they were her enemy, and the enemy would lie to gain an advantage. But the X-Men had always been disgustingly honest with her.
Wolverine nodded, a grudging, pained gesture. "Gone."
And with that, Mystique felt her heart seal itself off completely. She closed her eyes for a brief moment, then opened them and demanded, "Explain."
Wolverine was not impressed, but he said, "Near as we can tell, she swapped bodies with a woman named Carol Danvers. We wanna know why and how that happened."
She debated the risks and benefits of telling them, then said, "Fine. They were both kidnapped by a man calling himself Mr. Sinister. He ran some sort of experiment on them."
"And?" Wolverine prompted.
"And that's all I know," she snapped. "I was also captured, but I escaped and called the X-Men for assistance. Gambit was the only one to respond. Why was that?"
"Wait, why would they kidnap you?" Spyke asked, before LeBeau could do anything but give her a dull glare.
Mystique sighed and shifted into Risty's form, which was no longer a useful disguise anyway. "Because I was with her, why else?"
The two kids gaped. Wolverine did not look surprised; LeBeau had known all along.
Spyke finally exclaimed, "You're Risty? That's... that's sick!"
"No, it's standard spycraft," Mystique said, calmly assuming her usual body again. "Risty Wilde died of natural causes when she was four months old. She was a citizen of the United Kingdom, with all the right documents - and since she doesn't need her identity... I simply borrowed it."
"More than once," LeBeau added in a sullen tone. Fortunately, none of the X-Men heard him.
"So you're the reason Rogue snuck out that night?" Wolverine asked, locking her into a stare that challenged her to lie. "Survellience camera thinks it saw your car waitin' for her outside the gates."
She met his gaze, unconcerned. "We were going to a party."
He narrowed his eyes. "Right."
The staring contest was interrupted by Kurt, who approached and asked Mystique, audibly indignant for his teammate, "You were pretending to be her friend - why?"
"Because I care - cared - about her," she answered, crossing her arms over her chest. "I spent two years raising her, and had her under the care of a trusted friend until the X-Men showed up to steal her away. Rogue was the only one of my children I could take pride in." His yellow eyes clouded over in hurt, and perhaps because of that, she found herself adding, "It's a pity she wasn't actually mine."
"Then why -?"
"I'm not playing Twenty Questions anymore," she said abruptly, cutting off all hints of further conversation with a single fierce glare. "Do you boys want to stay for milk and cookies or are you going to leave?"
"We'll leave, thanks," Wolverine said, with no small amount of irony. "But we'll be back the second we think you're hidin' something."
"I'm sure you will." She watched them leave her apartment and take off in their precious helicopter, then methodically swept the place for listening devices or other bugs until she was satisfied it was clean. Then and only then did make herself a nice stiff drink, sit down, and reevaluate her future.
It was, she decided, a very good time to disappear altogether. But first she had a report to write.
Back in the Velocity, Wolverine set the controls to autopilot and turned to interrogate Gambit, slouched in one of the last seats. "Much as I hate to give her any credibility, Gumbo, I'm gonna have to ask - is there somethin' you know that you aren't tellin'?"
Kurt and Evan looked at their teammate as well. Gambit just shook his head and asked the floor, "What does it matter?"
"It matters because what you know could help Rogue," Logan said, playing the only card (and there was some irony) that he had.
Gambit shook his head again and stared, unseeing, at the metal floor of the 'copter.
Wolverine made a face and turned back around. He didn't like this; hadn't liked it from the moment the Cajun had shown up at the Institute in Scott's car at four in the morning with a comatose Rogue in the backseat and no explanation in the offing. Mystique's typically untrustworthy "help" wasn't making him feel any better. Far from it, in fact. He was absolutely sure that she was hiding something, and whatever it was, it was important.
He also felt not a little sorry for Remy, which was why he decided not to press the issue, and why he'd been unusually merciful about the whole thing. The kid was obviously torn up about what was happening, and that was punishment enough. Once Xavier got back from Scotland, he'd handle whatever needed to be handled. Until then, Logan was going to run damage control. No more, no less. And right now, that meant trying to make sure Ace didn't trash the Institute out of frustration and fear.
Truth to tell, he was more worried about Ace than anything else. They'd never been good friends, but he remembered her, and she'd never done anything worthy of his dislike. Just the opposite - he had the strong recollection that she'd saved his life at least once, and he could say that about maybe three people in the world.
Yeah, he remembered Ace. He remembered what she could do.
He hoped Beast had things under control, but he doubted it, and he pushed the Velocity a little faster.
"You have to scramble a mission," Ace said urgently, for perhaps the twelfth time in the last ten minutes. "You have to go to New York and find Warren Worthington and rescue him!"
Beast, who was trying to take a blood sample but kept breaking needles on her skin, put a restraining hand on her arm. "I'm sorry, but we can't."
"Why NOT?" she demanded. Beast took a small step backward. The attitude was almost perfectly Rogue's, but the voice was so different; it was all very surreal.
"Well, for one thing, we have school in the morning," Scott said from the doorway. Jean and Kitty, behind him, gave small nods of agreement. Kitty was there to help Beast cobble together a diagnostic program to help the absent professor more easily determine the nature of Ace's existence, as it were, but thus far they'd gotten no work done at all.
Ace stared at the students, incredulity slowly giving way to anger. "School? School? I tell you that a mutant is being held somewhere against his will and you, despite the fact that you're all mutants yourselves and obviously living in a training facility - you tell me you can't rescue them because you have to go to school?"
"They are students," Beast said, as mildly as possible. She turned on him with fury writ large across her features, and he added, "I know you're concerned about your friend. We have no doubt of that. And we share that concern - if we're talking about the same mutant, he saved Rogue's life once, and probably Cyclops' as well. But the information you've given us is simply not enough to justify dragging the children out on a search on a school night."
That did not calm Ace down. She opened her mouth to start another harangue, and Beast rushed to cut her off.
"What do we know? That he's in a secret lab, which may or may not be underground, and being held there by someone or someones with unknown resources for an unkown purpose." Beast spread his large, furry hands wide to show helplessness. "Logan said you were a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Surely you can see the futility of a search based on that information."
Ace's fury abruptly gave way to surrender; she seemed to deflate against the infirmary bed. "You're right," she said, burying her face in one hand in a very un-Rogue-like gesture. "I just wish I could remember more -!"
"And I wish I could help you," Jean said, stepping forward sympathetically, "but I'm not very good at telepathy yet, and there's something weird about your mind anyway. It's - It's a double signature, almost, like two minds in one."
"Is it?" Ace asked, tentatively touching her pale forehead with a gloved hand. "I do feel something... like an echo..."
Beast frowned, hypothesizing. He wasn't an expert in this area - far from it - but he was starting to wonder if perhaps, instead of body-swapping, the unknown scientist had merely pushed Rogue's power to its utmost limits. He had seen the girl retain characteristics of her "victims" for a good while; and Professor Xavier had once said something about the danger of Rogue's
absorbtion power that, coupled with Jean's identification of a double signature, now led him to believe that she was still in there.
"Dr. McCoy?" Kitty asked, very near his ear, and he started. The three students and Ace were looking at him with concern.
"Yes, Kitty?"
"You were, like, seriously zoning out there," Kitty said. He smiled at her; one of the younger children, she was also the smartest - and as a former child prodigy himself, he felt a great deal of connection with her.
"Just thinking," he said, dismissing the issue with an avuncular pat on her shoulder, and returned his attention to Ace and the job at hand. "Unfortunately, our resident master telepath is out of the country on other matters," he said. "I believe I told you that earlier, but I'm not sure if you heard me over your ranting."
Ace smiled - not really repentant, but recognizing her irrational behavior for what it was. "I'm sorry for that. I just... hate inaction."
"Perfectly understandable," Beast said, nodding encouragingly. "And it will all be resolved in due time. Now, I'd like to get back to the tests... Is there a reason why I've broken a half-dozen stainless steel needles on your arm?"
From her sitting position on the bed, she looked down at the small, glinting metal fragments littering the floor. "Oh - I thought I felt something. Yes, there's a very good reason."
He waited a beat for her to elaborate, and when she did not, he discreetly motioned for the students to leave, thinking it might make things easier. The students filed out, but Scott gave him a small nod that Beast undertood meant, "We'll be right outside."
He smiled to himself, eternally amused by the seriousness of these students. Some of them, at any rate, he amended, thinking of the youngest batch and their tendency towards horseplay.
"If you'd just lean back," he told Ace, retrieving his clipboard and pen and settling himself in front of a computer terminal, "I have some basic questions to ask you, and then I'd like to hook you up to some monitoring equipment - EEGs and such - and see what you can do, as far as powers are concerned."
She consented, arranging herself on the infirmary bed as though she was a client of a Freudian psychologist. Beast, who had once upon a time taken some psychology courses in order to get his teaching license, had very little respect for Freud, but he did think the world would be a poorer place without the ubiquitous and easily stereotyped Couch. "Shoot."
"Remember, you are free to not answer anything you don't want to, but the more information you can give us, the better."
She closed her her eyes and waved him on impatiently.
He clicked his pen. "Name?"
"Carol Susan Jane Danvers," she said, eyes still closed, and rattled off an address and a Social Security number. Beast punched the information into the computer and immediately came up with a grainy driver's license photo - not a bad one, either - showing a smiling, attractive blonde woman.
"Occupation?" he asked.
"Occupations," she corrected. "My memory is a little shaky, but I'll tell you the ones I do know. Let's see... former Air Force major, former NASA security agent, former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative, former freelance writer, and currently, bodyguard."
"That's quite a resume," Beast said, jotting it all down. "Age?"
She opened one eye and grinned up at him. "Older than you, younger than Logan."
Beast puzzled over that for a moment; the driver's-license picture had shown a woman in her mid-twenties, if that. The answer came to him in a sudden burst of comprehension, and although he resisted the desire to exclaim "Eureka," he did actually snap his fingers. The broken needles, cracked off against her skin, were the key. "Your cells are extremely resistant to damage of any kind, including that accrued by the natural aging process."
"So the S.H.I.E.L.D. exobio boys told me," she said, sitting up and swinging her legs off the table in a gesture so like Rogue that for a moment Beast found it difficult to believe that the troubled fifteen-year-old's psyche was not in charge. "By the way, my codename was never Ace. If you should ever happen to get access to S.H.I.E.L.D. records, you'll find me listed as Warbird. Logan, however, tends to give people nicknames of his own - whether they like it or not."
"Really," Beast said, grinning. "I hadn't noticed."
Carol smiled in return, then steered the conversation back on track with an unsubtle, "Is that it?" "Just a few more, and then we'll get adjourn to the Danger Room. This next question is a little delicate, but how did you come to be with Warren Worthington the night you were, ah, kidnapped?"
She sighed. "About three months ago I was approached by Warren's parents. They were concerned about their son's safety - there was a hazing incident at his prep school or something - and I had been recommended to them by another member of the intelligence community. I've had worse assignments than hanging around with a rich teenage billionaire, so I said yes. And then," she said, a bleak look coming into her eyes, "we walked into a bad situation and I couldn't get us out. Simple."
"I'm sorry," Beast said, rather awkwardly.
"It wasn't your fault," Carol said, hopping down from the table. "So, I understand you wanted to see a demonstration of my powers -?"
Beast gave her a forced smile, remembering Wolverine's admonition to keep her calm. "Of course. Just as soon as Logan returns. In the meantime, the last question: what codename would you like to use in the field?"
"Signing me up for the long haul, huh," she said, winking. Beast smiled again, this time more naturally, and she sank into a thoughtful silence. "Just Carol," she finally said. "I'm a little too old for secret codenames, I think."
"Not according to your driver's license," Beast said, tapping the computer's screen with his pen.
Carol leaned over and squinted at the numbers. "Ha! Well, everyone lies about their age."
"Everything okay?" Wolverine's voice asked from the doorway.
Beast checked the time, surprised to see the other mutant back so quickly. To his further surprise, he saw that close to an hour had passed since Logan and the others had departed. He did some quick mental calculations and realized he'd spent most of the time trying to calm Carol down.
"As okay as they can be," Carol said. "Do I get to smash things now?"
Wolverine gave her a rare, genuine grin. "Oh, yeah."
"This is, ah, Rogue's uniform?" Carol asked, adjusting the sleeve of the outfit as they walked down the hallway to the Danger Room. She looked nervous, an impression not helped by the wireless electrodes attached to her skull.
"It is," Jean told her, before Beast could. "But don't worry, it's clean."
"She's so small," Carol said softly, staring at her - Rogue's - hands. She didn't seem to have heard Jean; in fact, she seemed to be locked in a kind of trace. "Just a child. I remember... she was afraid."
Beast exchanged a glance with Logan, and noted absently that Jean and Cyclops were doing the same thing between each other. "Afraid of what?"
Carol snapped out of her trace. "I don't know. Are we ready to go?"
"I think so. If you'll come with me, I'll get you oriented," Jean said, gesturing towards the Danger Room's door and stifling a yawn at the same time. It really was past the students' bedtimes, and they did have school the next morning; and while letting the two seniormost students sleep late while the rest were dragged to dawn training would hardly seem fair to the younger kids, Beast decided that was exactly what was going to happen.
"What about you?" Carol asked. She was looking at the small group of Cyclops, Logan, and himself, but Beast had the distinct feeling she was talking to Logan only.
Nonetheless, Beast answered, "We'll be monitoring you from the control room."
Carol nodded and followed Jean into the room while Beast turned to make his way up to the control room.
By the time he reached it and turned on the intercom, Jean had finished explaining the Danger Room to Carol and was bidding her goodnight. She paused at the door long enough to add "goodnights" for Beast, Logan, and Cyclops, then left. The door sealed behind her, leaving Carol standing in the middle of the circular room.
" 'Danger Room,' " Carol said, surveying the place with hands on hips. "Catchy. Did you think of that one, Logan?"
"Kids named it," he said, smirking.
She flexed her fingers. "So what do I have to do in this dangerous room?"
"Defend yourself," Beast said, quite succinctly, and pressed the button that would start the program.
Six laser guns lifted from the floor and aimed themselves at Carol. Simultaneously, three guns rotated into position on the curved walls, and all nine began firing at the same moment.
Carol dove away from the blasts and ran towards a gun. She drew back her fist and punched the metal cowling; the entire gun crumpled around the impact point and toppled over as though she had rammed it with a small tank.
Beast raised his eyebrows at the display of raw power. Cyclops let out a low whistle. Logan, however, just nodded.
"She was just a rookie when I was there," he said to Beast and Cyclops. "But she was already good. On loan from NASA, I think, who'd borrowed her from Air Force Intelligence. Drove the top brass crazy. They had no idea what to do with her, 'cept shove her into 'metahuman special ops' with the rest of us. The things she can do..." He paused for a moment, evidently remembering, then chuckled. "I've seen one person come close, and that's the Juggernaut. And Ace was born with it."
Carol neatly dodged a burst of laserfire and ripped out the wiring of another gun, sending a shower of white-hot sparks directly into her face. She shook her head, brushed the back of one arm across her ash-covered face, and was running toward the next gun without so much as a pause.
"On one mission I saw her take a point-blank shotgun blast to the chest," Logan said, gesturing to his own chest, and then at the uninjured figure twisting a laser gun's barrel shut with her bare - well, gloved - hands. "Shredded her Kevlar vest. Didn't even leave a bruise. Another time she lifted a train engine over her head without breakin' a sweat, then tossed it away like it was nothin'. And she had this weird kind of ESP - called it her 'seventh sense,' whatever that's supposed to mean."
Below, Carol slung a piece of debris at the last remaining ground laser and turned her attention upwards, at the three wall-mounted units still firing. Beast expected her to throw more debris, but she took a few running steps, jumped - and flew.
"That's a new one," Logan muttered.
"How is she doing that?" Cyclops asked. He sounded less concerned than curious, and rightly so. Storm could fly because she manipulated winds to lift herself; the now-missing Angel could fly because he had wings. Flight by any other means, Beast thought, paraphrasing the Bard, is still flight, but it makes it slightly more fantastic to see it unpowered - in a manner of speaking.
He studied the raw data coming in from the electrodes and said, "It looks like she's generating some kind of energy field around herself. As to how that allows her to break the laws of gravity... I have no idea."
Carol smashed the last of the three lasers and swooped to a stop in front of the control room, where she hovered, observing them through the glass with a knowing smile on her face. "Well?"
Keying their side of the intercom open, Beast said, "If you can do windows, you're hired."
She laughed, a brilliant, musical sound, and dropped down to the floor.
Beast shut off the intercom and turned to face the other X-Men. "What do you think?"
"I think she would have made that fight with Apocalypse a lot easier," Cyclops said immediately.
"I agree. We've been needin' someone who can take on a small army, and Ace can do that," Logan said. "But we also need to be careful."
Beast peered down at the smashed Danger Room equipment. "I'll say."