Alex glared at Logan for a moment, glad that she had decided to block before entering the room. Uncle Charles couldn't know about this, any of it.
It wasn't as if she didn't trust him to respect her privacy...well, yes, it was, actually. He seemed to think he knew what was best for everyone, and, despite the little voice in the back of her mind that told her he hadn't been wrong so far, this was something she had to deal with on her own. Even if she did long to talk to someone, but that was that little voice again, the one who had been telling her since she ran from the med-lab that she should talk to him. It was an insane, treacherous little voice.
Pulling her eyes off him, she forced herself to smile. She had learned from Sarah that Logan had no memory prior to fifteen years ago. Sarah had gotten the information from Charles's mainframe and thus from Charles, so it had to be true. Not that it mattered, there was still a year unaccounted for. A year she hated him for. All his memory loss meant was that she had nothing to fear from him...and that it would be easier to make him pay. And he would pay, for everything.
The grin she threw at Peter was more than a little tinged with sex appeal.
"You like?" she said, turning in a circle fast enough for the flared skirt to ripple around her knees.
He stepped forward and brushed her knuckles with his lips, "As beautiful as ever."
Alex chuckled. At 30, he was too young for her, but he was a natural flirt, and so was she for that matter.
"Why sir," she said, fanning herself with an imaginary fan and talking with a thick southern accent, "I do believe you are going to make me blush."
"There's a first for everything," Maranda said.
Alex stuck the vary tip of her tongue out at her. She must have caught Maranda in a good mood, no doubt thanks to Charles's presence, because she returned the gesture. That got the entire room laughing, everyone but him. He didn't look like he was having a good time at all.
Peter showed her to her seat at the head of the table, than held her chair, earning him a darker scowl from Logan.
"Logan," Charles said, "I'd like to introduce my niece, Alexandra Walker."
Logan looked confused for a moment, before looking between herself and LeAnna and Kat, who were standing near by.
"Another sister?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.
Alex nearly laughed out loud. Although it was nice to be mistaken for her daughters' sister, she never thought he would, he had always been such a good judge of age. Ice dripped from her smile, "Something like that. Please, take a seat."
"Thanks," Logan said, and took the empty seat next to Uncle Charles.
Logan watched as they all bowed their heads, and the prayer they recited came to his own lips as they spoke it as one.
The food was quickly passed around, and before Logan knew it, the plate in front of him was covered by the most balanced meal he'd had in years. The conversation was equally as wholesome, centering around Alex's trip, and what had happened in her absence. Logan was able to piece together that Alex was a long-hall trucker, and how Peter and Gambit found him, probably moments after the guys who had attacked him had rendered him unconscious.
"So, what did they want?" Logan asked, the first time he opened his mouth to do anything but put food in it.
"Well..." the professor started.
"Peter, could you get that?" Trisha said.
Kindle's head snapped up.
The phone rang in the other room.
"Sure," he laughed. He quickly excused himself from the table and left the room.
"That all depends on whether or not they knew who you were," the doc said, getting back to Logan's question.
"How could they?" Logan asked.
"A Telepath or a Precog," Trisha said with a shrug, "or maybe even a Tracker."
"Great," Summers said, "that means that he led them right to the school."
"Not necessarily," the Doc countered, "None of these possibilities depend on keeping tabs on him at all times. And we don't know if any of them are right, he could just have been the first person who came by."
"And even if he did lead them to the school," Alex said, "it isn't the first time the mean and nasties of this world have found out about the school, and it won't be the last."
"I don't buy the coincidental idea," Kat said, shaking her head, "Why would they just attack someone?"
"We know they were mutants," Alex said, "and a lot of mutants are as angry as the normal population. We're not all saints," she gestured down the table to the professor, getting more than one chuckle.
"Would you guys know them if you saw them again?" Trisha asked, including not only Logan, but Gambit in her question.
"Of course," Gambit replied, and Logan nodded.
Trisha gasped as the door opened and Kindle walked back into the room. He didn't look so good. He was pale and a portable phone was clutched in one hand, but Trisha wasn't looking at him. She was staring into space in front of her, not looking too good herself.
"That was Susan," Kindle said. He addressed the statement to Alex, but the entire room stopped eating. "It's Richard, he's been kidnapped."
"No," LeAnna whispered.
"Take Wolverine and Lynx," Trisha said, and Logan turned to stare at her. He didn't think that anyone had mentioned his code name, and he wasn't wearing his dog tags.
"Where?" Alex's question was a good one.
"The abandoned air strip to the northwest. The six of you should be there in ten minutes by helicopter."
"Six?"
Trisha's eyes focused, "You, Kindle, Gambit, Cyclops, Lynx, and Wolverine."
"Let's suit up," Alex said with a shake of her head as she pushed herself up from the table. "You don't mind, do you?"
Logan almost answered before he realized that she was talking to Summers.
"Not at all."
"Good," she said, then turned her attention to Logan. "Until we step back into this house, you do everything I say without question."
"Look, no offense kid," Logan said, standing up, "But aren't you a little young to be in charge?"
"I'm no kid," she said, her eyes turning to ice.
Logan eyes slid down her body then back up to her face, "You're what, all of twenty-two? And I thought following the Boy Scout was bad," he said, hitching a thumb at Summers.
"Normally I would say 'Guess again', but we don't have that type of time.
"I'm thirty-eight, which means I'm the oldest, if not the most experienced, one going, not to mention that I built this team from the ground up."
"Bull shit."
"'Bull shit' what?" she replied, "That I built this team? I assure you I did, though, I admit, fate had something to do with it. Or that I'm not the most experienced? You might be right there, but I didn't come into the freedom fighting business until a little later in my life, my mid-twenties actually. Or that I'm the oldest? You might be right there too. I've heard some speculation that you could be older than my uncle."
"You're not thirty-eight," Logan growled.
"Yes, she is."
Logan looked down at the professor, then back up at Alex. There was no way...There was no bloody way! She looked, hell, she smelled like a woman of twenty-two, twenty-four max.
"We're wasting time," Alex said, turning to the door, "We leave in ten."
Alex boarded last as usual, and found the only seat left on the small helicopter was next to him.
Slamming the door behind her, she gave the 'all's clear' to Gambit in the co-pilot's seat and Kindle eased the helicopter into the air.
She reached above her head with both hands and gripped the bar above the door. It wouldn't be the first time she had taken a ride standing.
She looked down at him, sitting directly in front of her.
He had borrowed a suit from Scott. She was surprised it fit his wide shoulders.
She watched as he extended his claws, cutting the leather of the gloves.
"Try not to get so much blood on it this time," Scott said from where he sat, as far away from Logan as he could get.
"I was saving your ass."
"You were saving your own."
"I spent a week unconscious saving all our asses. And if I'm not mistaken, you didn't even brake a finger nail."
"And to think," Kindle said over Alex's bulky headset, "We normally fight over who spent the least time unconscious."
Alex smiled. Logan glowered. And for the first time in a long time, Alex felt the urge to giggle.
The helicopter was jostled by turbulence, sending Alex sprawling into Logan's lap. She cursed herself for not having secured herself better as she stared into his eyes. His arms wrapped around her waist, the muscles of his legs on either side of her hips rippled as he braced them from tumbling back into the door. Even when the movement ceased, his legs didn't relax. His hands stayed low around her waist, her own on the front of his chest.
"Kindly remove your hands," Kat's voice was anything but kindly. Scott, having been thrown about by the turbulence too, had braced himself with both hands…on Kat's breasts.
Laughter bubbled up Alex's throat. She gave in to it, resting her head on Logan's shoulder, their earmuffs clinking with her silent laughter.
The laughter turned into a hiccup as the helicopter suddenly lost altitude and her stomach joined her laughter in her throat.
Suddenly, Logan flipped her over, covering her body with his. She felt the air rush out of him along her neck, followed by the sound of metal hitting metal, hard. Peering over his shoulder, she saw four sheared bolts that had been holding a mettle cabinet over their heads.
The metallic smell of blood filled the helicopter. She ran her hand down his back. It came away wet with blood.
Panic rose in her throat. She slipped from beneath him, reassured by the strength in his arms as he tried to stop her. As soon as she saw the gaping gash in his back all her panic came back ten fold.
"Damn it, Kindle, you better have a bloody good explanation for this!" Alex had little doubt Kindle could have heard her even with out the headset.
She knelt beside the bench, her right hand resting on the back of his neck, her thumb on his pulse point.
"What happened?" Kindle's voice sounded far away as Alex pulled in on herself.
Her eyes closed, she focused on obliterating most of the muscle in her upper arm. She replaced it with a sack of saline, using her own body's water and salt stores. The creation of a tube that ran down the bone to the heel of her hand was more complicated but routine, she had done in a dozen times before.
"One of the cabinets fell, nearly decapitated Alex," Kat said. Alex barely heard her.
Redesigning the mussels to squish the sack, she put her hand just over the gash high on Logan's back. She clenched the muscles and parted the skin at the end of the tube.
Logan pulled in a quick breath as a jet of water washed away the blood. Bile rose in Alex's throat at the extent of the injury. The edges were ragged; it looked like it had been torn instead of cut. In the dim light of the cabin, Alex could see a metallic rib at the bottom of the bloody cut.
She said a silent prayer of thanks for the metals infused onto his skeleton. She hadn't been looking forward to resetting his rib before it knitted itself wrong.
Alex gathered more water and irrigated the cut again. This time it got a mild curse from Logan. "Damn, woman, what're you trying to do, kill me."
"Call me that again, and I will," Alex said, relieved that the cut was already starting to close up.
Closing the skin over the end of the tube, she rested her fingers lightly around the cut. She loaded microscopic spines on the pads with traces of cocaine and injected it into his skin.
"Look, I feel better already," Logan said, trying to stand up.
Laying on his stomach on the narrow bench didn't give him very good leverage and Alex easily pushed him back down.
"That's the cocaine, now don't move."
"Cocaine!?!" This time he tried to get up in earnest.
Alex locked her elbow and shoulder, keeping his head on the bench.
"It works as a short term anesthetic, and it restricts blood flow." And the fact was with his heightened metabolism, she had to maintain a continual drip, depleting her own body's resources. But thankfully, his increased metabolism was also healing him just as fast.
As soon as the cut healed, she moved away from him to sit on the fallen cabinet, restoring her body's natural functions.
Logan felt Alex withdraw. He sat up slowly, twisting his torso. There wasn't so much as a twinge.
"We're landing in one," Kindle said over the headsets.
"Look," Alex said, pulling the hair out of her eyes. "I don't like taking someone into a situation like this half blind. It leaves both you and the rest of my team in danger. So let's clear some things up right now."
Logan watched as she pulled herself into freedom-fighter-leader mode. He'd seen a glimpse of it back at the clinic, but this was impressive. Everything changed, from her posture to her tone of voice.
"First, the team's gifts.
"Kindle deals with fire. He can create and control it. By extension, he also deals with air currents, giving him limited flying capabilities.
"Gambit charges small objects with kinetic energy. When thrown they explode on contact.
"Lynx is telacybernetic. She can interface directly with computers."
Logan looked over at Kat. As he watched, her eyes changed into the almost glowing yellow of cats eyes, complete with elongated pupils. As quickly as the change happened, it reversed itself. Kat just smiled at him.
"And you?" Logan said, turning back to Alex.
"I'm the Chameleon," Alex said, her grin mischievous, "I'm anything I need to be."
She turned to Summers and Lynx. "You two get in and find out what you can from the computer system."
She pointed a finger at Summers, "Anything happens to her it's coming out of your hide.
"Kindle, Gambit, go in with them as far as you can." She turned to Logan, "I guess that leaves you to me."
The helicopter bumped down.
"Let's fly." Alex, still smiling, pulled open the door and jumped to the ground before the blades stopped spinning.
It wasn't as if she didn't trust him to respect her privacy...well, yes, it was, actually. He seemed to think he knew what was best for everyone, and, despite the little voice in the back of her mind that told her he hadn't been wrong so far, this was something she had to deal with on her own. Even if she did long to talk to someone, but that was that little voice again, the one who had been telling her since she ran from the med-lab that she should talk to him. It was an insane, treacherous little voice.
Pulling her eyes off him, she forced herself to smile. She had learned from Sarah that Logan had no memory prior to fifteen years ago. Sarah had gotten the information from Charles's mainframe and thus from Charles, so it had to be true. Not that it mattered, there was still a year unaccounted for. A year she hated him for. All his memory loss meant was that she had nothing to fear from him...and that it would be easier to make him pay. And he would pay, for everything.
The grin she threw at Peter was more than a little tinged with sex appeal.
"You like?" she said, turning in a circle fast enough for the flared skirt to ripple around her knees.
He stepped forward and brushed her knuckles with his lips, "As beautiful as ever."
Alex chuckled. At 30, he was too young for her, but he was a natural flirt, and so was she for that matter.
"Why sir," she said, fanning herself with an imaginary fan and talking with a thick southern accent, "I do believe you are going to make me blush."
"There's a first for everything," Maranda said.
Alex stuck the vary tip of her tongue out at her. She must have caught Maranda in a good mood, no doubt thanks to Charles's presence, because she returned the gesture. That got the entire room laughing, everyone but him. He didn't look like he was having a good time at all.
Peter showed her to her seat at the head of the table, than held her chair, earning him a darker scowl from Logan.
"Logan," Charles said, "I'd like to introduce my niece, Alexandra Walker."
Logan looked confused for a moment, before looking between herself and LeAnna and Kat, who were standing near by.
"Another sister?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.
Alex nearly laughed out loud. Although it was nice to be mistaken for her daughters' sister, she never thought he would, he had always been such a good judge of age. Ice dripped from her smile, "Something like that. Please, take a seat."
"Thanks," Logan said, and took the empty seat next to Uncle Charles.
Logan watched as they all bowed their heads, and the prayer they recited came to his own lips as they spoke it as one.
The food was quickly passed around, and before Logan knew it, the plate in front of him was covered by the most balanced meal he'd had in years. The conversation was equally as wholesome, centering around Alex's trip, and what had happened in her absence. Logan was able to piece together that Alex was a long-hall trucker, and how Peter and Gambit found him, probably moments after the guys who had attacked him had rendered him unconscious.
"So, what did they want?" Logan asked, the first time he opened his mouth to do anything but put food in it.
"Well..." the professor started.
"Peter, could you get that?" Trisha said.
Kindle's head snapped up.
The phone rang in the other room.
"Sure," he laughed. He quickly excused himself from the table and left the room.
"That all depends on whether or not they knew who you were," the doc said, getting back to Logan's question.
"How could they?" Logan asked.
"A Telepath or a Precog," Trisha said with a shrug, "or maybe even a Tracker."
"Great," Summers said, "that means that he led them right to the school."
"Not necessarily," the Doc countered, "None of these possibilities depend on keeping tabs on him at all times. And we don't know if any of them are right, he could just have been the first person who came by."
"And even if he did lead them to the school," Alex said, "it isn't the first time the mean and nasties of this world have found out about the school, and it won't be the last."
"I don't buy the coincidental idea," Kat said, shaking her head, "Why would they just attack someone?"
"We know they were mutants," Alex said, "and a lot of mutants are as angry as the normal population. We're not all saints," she gestured down the table to the professor, getting more than one chuckle.
"Would you guys know them if you saw them again?" Trisha asked, including not only Logan, but Gambit in her question.
"Of course," Gambit replied, and Logan nodded.
Trisha gasped as the door opened and Kindle walked back into the room. He didn't look so good. He was pale and a portable phone was clutched in one hand, but Trisha wasn't looking at him. She was staring into space in front of her, not looking too good herself.
"That was Susan," Kindle said. He addressed the statement to Alex, but the entire room stopped eating. "It's Richard, he's been kidnapped."
"No," LeAnna whispered.
"Take Wolverine and Lynx," Trisha said, and Logan turned to stare at her. He didn't think that anyone had mentioned his code name, and he wasn't wearing his dog tags.
"Where?" Alex's question was a good one.
"The abandoned air strip to the northwest. The six of you should be there in ten minutes by helicopter."
"Six?"
Trisha's eyes focused, "You, Kindle, Gambit, Cyclops, Lynx, and Wolverine."
"Let's suit up," Alex said with a shake of her head as she pushed herself up from the table. "You don't mind, do you?"
Logan almost answered before he realized that she was talking to Summers.
"Not at all."
"Good," she said, then turned her attention to Logan. "Until we step back into this house, you do everything I say without question."
"Look, no offense kid," Logan said, standing up, "But aren't you a little young to be in charge?"
"I'm no kid," she said, her eyes turning to ice.
Logan eyes slid down her body then back up to her face, "You're what, all of twenty-two? And I thought following the Boy Scout was bad," he said, hitching a thumb at Summers.
"Normally I would say 'Guess again', but we don't have that type of time.
"I'm thirty-eight, which means I'm the oldest, if not the most experienced, one going, not to mention that I built this team from the ground up."
"Bull shit."
"'Bull shit' what?" she replied, "That I built this team? I assure you I did, though, I admit, fate had something to do with it. Or that I'm not the most experienced? You might be right there, but I didn't come into the freedom fighting business until a little later in my life, my mid-twenties actually. Or that I'm the oldest? You might be right there too. I've heard some speculation that you could be older than my uncle."
"You're not thirty-eight," Logan growled.
"Yes, she is."
Logan looked down at the professor, then back up at Alex. There was no way...There was no bloody way! She looked, hell, she smelled like a woman of twenty-two, twenty-four max.
"We're wasting time," Alex said, turning to the door, "We leave in ten."
Alex boarded last as usual, and found the only seat left on the small helicopter was next to him.
Slamming the door behind her, she gave the 'all's clear' to Gambit in the co-pilot's seat and Kindle eased the helicopter into the air.
She reached above her head with both hands and gripped the bar above the door. It wouldn't be the first time she had taken a ride standing.
She looked down at him, sitting directly in front of her.
He had borrowed a suit from Scott. She was surprised it fit his wide shoulders.
She watched as he extended his claws, cutting the leather of the gloves.
"Try not to get so much blood on it this time," Scott said from where he sat, as far away from Logan as he could get.
"I was saving your ass."
"You were saving your own."
"I spent a week unconscious saving all our asses. And if I'm not mistaken, you didn't even brake a finger nail."
"And to think," Kindle said over Alex's bulky headset, "We normally fight over who spent the least time unconscious."
Alex smiled. Logan glowered. And for the first time in a long time, Alex felt the urge to giggle.
The helicopter was jostled by turbulence, sending Alex sprawling into Logan's lap. She cursed herself for not having secured herself better as she stared into his eyes. His arms wrapped around her waist, the muscles of his legs on either side of her hips rippled as he braced them from tumbling back into the door. Even when the movement ceased, his legs didn't relax. His hands stayed low around her waist, her own on the front of his chest.
"Kindly remove your hands," Kat's voice was anything but kindly. Scott, having been thrown about by the turbulence too, had braced himself with both hands…on Kat's breasts.
Laughter bubbled up Alex's throat. She gave in to it, resting her head on Logan's shoulder, their earmuffs clinking with her silent laughter.
The laughter turned into a hiccup as the helicopter suddenly lost altitude and her stomach joined her laughter in her throat.
Suddenly, Logan flipped her over, covering her body with his. She felt the air rush out of him along her neck, followed by the sound of metal hitting metal, hard. Peering over his shoulder, she saw four sheared bolts that had been holding a mettle cabinet over their heads.
The metallic smell of blood filled the helicopter. She ran her hand down his back. It came away wet with blood.
Panic rose in her throat. She slipped from beneath him, reassured by the strength in his arms as he tried to stop her. As soon as she saw the gaping gash in his back all her panic came back ten fold.
"Damn it, Kindle, you better have a bloody good explanation for this!" Alex had little doubt Kindle could have heard her even with out the headset.
She knelt beside the bench, her right hand resting on the back of his neck, her thumb on his pulse point.
"What happened?" Kindle's voice sounded far away as Alex pulled in on herself.
Her eyes closed, she focused on obliterating most of the muscle in her upper arm. She replaced it with a sack of saline, using her own body's water and salt stores. The creation of a tube that ran down the bone to the heel of her hand was more complicated but routine, she had done in a dozen times before.
"One of the cabinets fell, nearly decapitated Alex," Kat said. Alex barely heard her.
Redesigning the mussels to squish the sack, she put her hand just over the gash high on Logan's back. She clenched the muscles and parted the skin at the end of the tube.
Logan pulled in a quick breath as a jet of water washed away the blood. Bile rose in Alex's throat at the extent of the injury. The edges were ragged; it looked like it had been torn instead of cut. In the dim light of the cabin, Alex could see a metallic rib at the bottom of the bloody cut.
She said a silent prayer of thanks for the metals infused onto his skeleton. She hadn't been looking forward to resetting his rib before it knitted itself wrong.
Alex gathered more water and irrigated the cut again. This time it got a mild curse from Logan. "Damn, woman, what're you trying to do, kill me."
"Call me that again, and I will," Alex said, relieved that the cut was already starting to close up.
Closing the skin over the end of the tube, she rested her fingers lightly around the cut. She loaded microscopic spines on the pads with traces of cocaine and injected it into his skin.
"Look, I feel better already," Logan said, trying to stand up.
Laying on his stomach on the narrow bench didn't give him very good leverage and Alex easily pushed him back down.
"That's the cocaine, now don't move."
"Cocaine!?!" This time he tried to get up in earnest.
Alex locked her elbow and shoulder, keeping his head on the bench.
"It works as a short term anesthetic, and it restricts blood flow." And the fact was with his heightened metabolism, she had to maintain a continual drip, depleting her own body's resources. But thankfully, his increased metabolism was also healing him just as fast.
As soon as the cut healed, she moved away from him to sit on the fallen cabinet, restoring her body's natural functions.
Logan felt Alex withdraw. He sat up slowly, twisting his torso. There wasn't so much as a twinge.
"We're landing in one," Kindle said over the headsets.
"Look," Alex said, pulling the hair out of her eyes. "I don't like taking someone into a situation like this half blind. It leaves both you and the rest of my team in danger. So let's clear some things up right now."
Logan watched as she pulled herself into freedom-fighter-leader mode. He'd seen a glimpse of it back at the clinic, but this was impressive. Everything changed, from her posture to her tone of voice.
"First, the team's gifts.
"Kindle deals with fire. He can create and control it. By extension, he also deals with air currents, giving him limited flying capabilities.
"Gambit charges small objects with kinetic energy. When thrown they explode on contact.
"Lynx is telacybernetic. She can interface directly with computers."
Logan looked over at Kat. As he watched, her eyes changed into the almost glowing yellow of cats eyes, complete with elongated pupils. As quickly as the change happened, it reversed itself. Kat just smiled at him.
"And you?" Logan said, turning back to Alex.
"I'm the Chameleon," Alex said, her grin mischievous, "I'm anything I need to be."
She turned to Summers and Lynx. "You two get in and find out what you can from the computer system."
She pointed a finger at Summers, "Anything happens to her it's coming out of your hide.
"Kindle, Gambit, go in with them as far as you can." She turned to Logan, "I guess that leaves you to me."
The helicopter bumped down.
"Let's fly." Alex, still smiling, pulled open the door and jumped to the ground before the blades stopped spinning.