Wow! Thank you guys so much for your reviews. Mocla, Meep, Lost Angel, thank you for your support. Miracle Chick, you especially seem to like it, which is the highest form of flattery I could imagine. Thanks.

I still one nothing. Marvel owns it all.

On with the show!

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The ten by twelve foot metal cell, somewhere in the middle of a small building, which was somewhere in the middle of nowhere had become so silent that it was just about the loudest silence in the history of the world.

In his corner of the cell, Pietro sat curled up into a little ball, his eyes bloodshot and ringed in darkness. None of them had slept since the guards had taken Fred away. Sometimes he sat still; sometimes he rocked himself back and forth with his eyes shut. Without really knowing why, he sometimes sang softly to himself; no one acknowledged it, and in a few minutes it stopped. Pietro could only think one thing- Fred was gone, maybe dead, and it was only a matter of time before he was next.

To Pietro's right, Todd was hunched up in the nearest corner, shaking. His skin, which had always been pale, had turned some kind of a deathly white, except in the places where it was a badly bruised purple, which was almost everywhere. Some of the time he sat quiet and numb, staring at the chrome (always fucking chrome!); sometimes for reasons he couldn't quite grasp, he burst into tears, loud sobs escaping his throat and echoing through the room, eating up the silence. No one acknowledged it, and in a few minutes it stopped. There was only one thing that Todd could grasp for certain and it was this- Fred was gone, probably dead, and it was only a matter of time before he was next.

On the far side of the room, Lance was sprawled out flat on his back, his eyes shut as he feigned sleep. His mind was working through pattern after pattern, as if he had decided that the second he managed to figure out the guard's routine, they would all be set free. 'Let's see,' he thought. 'Eleven meals when Fred was taken, two since. The gaurds have come back once, beat me, then left.' His mind was racing, his stomach churning, and he was getting nowhere. Slowly, he cracked open his purple and swollen eye at half-mast and acknowledged the fact that he was going insane. 'Todd is crying, Pietro is singing "Monkey Wrench", and I'm going round the bend.' he thought. 'If there is a pattern, I don't know what it is.' Lance did know one thing for sure. Fred was gone, almost certainly dead, and it was entirely his fault.

At that moment, the gaurds came in, grabbed Pietro, beat him, and left. No one acknowledged it, and in a few minutes, it went away.

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"Thwack!"

The sound of Todd slamming against the steel door of the cell resounded though the air for the five-hundredth time in the last hour or so. Sometime after his little crying fit, Todd had himself a second wind and began to hop around frantically, in search of a way out. 'Doesn't that hurt him?' Lance thought. He knew that Todd could really get up some serious momentum when he put his all into his jumps. 'Maybe he just doesn't feel pain anymore.'

"Hey you guys, we gotta get outa here, yo!" Todd cried out. He was becoming hysterical. "Man, we have to find a way out! They're gonna kill us!" His yellow eyes darted around the little room, finally resting on Lance. "Lance, yo! Avalanche, we gotta come up with a plan. Get up, yo!" When Lance didn't budge, Todd tried again. "Come on, man, you're the leader, so lead! Get up!" Todd lifted Lance's head and looked him in the eye. That's when he realized- Lance wasn't getting up because Lance *couldn't* get up. His face was pale- almost as pale as Todd's once was- and his eyeballs seemed sunken in. His brown hair seemed a little thinner, and his once muscular frame looked frail and diminished. 'He looks kinda like me,' Todd thought. 'Or at least how I looked before I came here.'

Lance managed to pull himself into a sitting position, but when he tried to get up, his legs wouldn't obey. "Sorry, man," he croaked to Todd, managing a slight grin of apology. Todd shuddered at the effect, which was rather like the menacing grin of a skeleton. Lance was so thin, he looked like a victim of the advanced stages of cancer, and Todd guessed he might live another week or two. 'Our leader is as good as dead,' he thought. He wasn't a bright guy, but now he finally understood. They had no hope.

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An unknown amount of time passed- it didn't matter how much. Time had no meaning here. Its fingers couldn't reach this place.

Todd had finally given up throwing himself at the door, and he retreated to the corner where he now sat, crying his eyes out. From his mat on the floor, Lance watched him. 'Poor guy,' he thought. It was sometimes hard for them to remember that Todd was so much younger than them, only fourteen. 'Just a kid, really.'

Lance knew that, despite his immaturity, Todd was a great accepter of things. Todd had once told Lance that he knew that he was ugly, and that he knew he would never get laid. "It's not *such* a big deal, yo. I got over it a long time ago," Todd had said. He just *accepted* things like that. But the idea that they would be stuck in here until they were dead, murdered at the hands of psychopaths, that was too much for him. He was becoming unglued.

The creaking noise that Lance had come to associate with pain and suffering sounded through the air. This time, though, he didn't even flinch; he was just too tired. "Go ahead and have your fun, guys," he muttered. "It must make you feel like really big men, beating up on sick and wounded kids."

The guards ignored him and moved toward Todd and Pietro. "You two. Come with us," the gunman ordered.

The reaction of the two mutant boys was nothing short of hysterical.

Todd, who had been in tears before the guard's arrival, flattened himself against the back wall, sobbing and pleading for his life. "P-p- please, yo, don't m-m-make me! Please!" Pietro was quick to join in, breaking down into fresh tears and started repeating himself over and over. "Oh man, oh man, oh man---"

The gunman turned to the other guard and shrugged. It was almost never this easy. Two guards approached Todd and Pietro, slapped handcuffs on them, and simply lead them away. They followed, as if in a dream state. It just wasn't real to them; it had to be some kind of nightmare.

Lance played the roll of the ever-present observer, so sick that they didn't even bother to have someone stand guard over him. 'The door is open,' he thought. 'It's right there, open and waiting for me to run out of it, and I can't even stand up.' The guards and his friends exited, slamming and locking the door behind them.

It felt like the room was spinning. 'I'm alone now,' Lance told himself. 'This is it. Pietro and Todd are as good as dead.' The room was utterly silent for about ten seconds before Lance crawled to the bucket and threw up.

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This chapter is a little shorter than the others, but so far it's also one of my favorites. Please review 'cause I *LOVE* reviews.