Magneto considered the board. Smaller pieces, advanced into the fray. Sacrificed. They were unimportant, but they had been useful. Erik Lensherr now knew just how far and how viciously Charles would attack. The ball, to mix metaphors, was in his own court now.

The man who was Magneto glanced around the board again. The faint thud of a door being thrown open came to him through the walls of his plastic cell.

It was an interesting band of mutants Charles had gathered. Under different circumstances... ah well. They would have to go.

His cause was just. He knew it was. That was just the way it was, just as homosapiens had eliminated cro-magnum man and the Neanderthal; mutants, or homomutatis as he had affectionately come to call them, were now eliminating homosapiens. It was just life, 'survival of the fittest'. And by Jove, mutants were the fittest.

He himself had seen a mutant rip an iron girder in half without even thinking about it, warp the wall into a seat just to sit down. One he had seen could extend her normal looking arm eight feet across a room to pick up a glass of milk, and one with the wings of an angel. He had not enjoyed dissecting that one. It had been for the greater good of mutant kind though.

A distant shout of pain echoed around the spherical room in which his polythene prison was contained.

He considered the board again. The rumble of large machinery was heard.

He would enjoy the look on Charles' face when he introduced his newest recruit.

There was a thud as the platform met his cell, a soft beeping, a faint noise as of the rustling of a faint autumn breeze through drifts of sun dried leaves, a low growl followed by a smash and buzz, then the rustling again.

Magneto stretched one bony hand forward, lifted a knight with perfectly manicured fingers and placed it down again.

"Check. What kept you?"

"I have a surprise for you," a feminine voice purred from the shadows behind him.

* * *

The low rumble of the Bentley engine seemed loud as the car swung round the corner on the deserted road.

"So, who is this Gambit then?" Wolverine mumbled.

"Well I've never met him before," he replied, squinting through his rose-tinted sunglasses. "From what the Professor tells me, he's a sympathiser with us. I understand he has the very unique ability to cause an object's atoms to degrade, making it unstable."

"So?" Wolverine replied.

"It causes them to explode."

"So in summary, we're driving in an antique car to the middle of nowhere to meet an extremely dangerous mutant who neither of us have even seen before?"

"That's about it, plus he's from the deep-south."

Wolverine grunted his affirmation.

"Where are we meeting him?"

"Someplace called the 'Southern Blue Motel'."

"Where is it?" asked Logan.

The Bentley swung sharply into a small parking lot, and Scott hauled on the handbrake. The door catches clicked smoothly into place as they stood watching their breath curl away in the freezing air. They started up the path to the motel. Their feet crunching in the fresh snow, Wolverine began to sniff.

"Cold? Or just upset?" Cyclops inquired, rubbing his cold forehead, just above his ruby-filament sunglasses.

"Ssh." Wolverine glared, and then closed his eyes, concentrating. A faint scent came to him across the slight breeze. "I know that smell," he murmured, half to himself, "but it's different somehow."

Cyclops became interested.

"What? What is it?"

"I don't know... it's like... like burnt fur?" A metallic ring filled the air as Wolverine's claws exploded from between his knuckles.

A giant clawed hand swung down and dug into the base of Wolverine's skull and lifted him clean off his feet and into a tree across the way, landing with his head on a rock with a solid thud.

Cyclops whirled around toward where the sudden attack had come from, his hand automatically going to his temple and finding only his sunglasses.

Cyclops stepped back nervously as the beast before him swung round. It was as he had feared; Sabretooth. Scott's eyes glanced down to the animal's chest where he knew he had blasted Sabretooth, hurling him from the Statue of Liberty. It was a mess; huge patches of blackened, curled skin hung in strips exposing red, corded muscle beneath. Black and burned fur was clumped together with dried, sticky blood.

"I remember you," he growled in a low, guttural voice.

"I bet you do," Scott murmured.

Sabretooth flew towards him with a huge bestial roar.

A confusion of flashing metal and claws whirred in front of him as something cannoned into the seven-foot monster. A spurt of bright red blood splattered onto Cyclops' leather jacket.

Wolverine and Sabretooth rolled over and over in the snow.

Scott fumbled in his bag for his visor. He heard a snap, and looking up, saw Sabretooth holding Wolverine by the neck. He saw Sabretooth pick up a fallen tree branch and impale Wolverine to a tree through the stomach.

Sabretooth whirled around again and launched himself at the gaping, ashen-faced Cyclops. His sharp claws gouged through Cyclops' shoulder, making him cry out in pain. He delivered a ringing blow to the back of Scott's head with the back of one meaty hand. The last thing Scott remembered before he blacked out was something tight going around his chest.

Sabretooth heaved the puny mutant over one shoulder and strode back into the nearby woods.

* * *

Jean swung back over the ledge to lay the screwdriver back on the pathway to Cerebro's interface. Picking up the soldering iron, she leant back and turned to the drawer she had opened connected to Cerebro's control junction. Lights and tubes winked at her in preoccupation. Touching the heated tip to a neural coupling link point, she called over to Storm, who was similarly perched on the ledge with her face to a drawer. "How's that?"

"No," she called back, "the power system will just overload it. We need a phase reducer."

"Okay, go and fetch one from the maintenance room." As she watched Storm walk briskly down the silver corridor, she marvelled at just how much Storm had learnt about Cerebro in the last day or so.

"How's it coming along?" inquired the Professor as he wheeled in.

"Just great," Jean replied, wiping her hands on her overalls. It was the analyptic lubricant, it got everywhere. She had, because her hands had been covered in it, dropped a spanner down into the huge room in which Cerebro was housed. She hadn't seen it hit the bottom, but the echoes had filled the room for a few seconds. "I sent Storm to get a phase converter for the power system, it keeps overloading the neural link."

"I'd never thought of that," he replied. "It's so good to have some new blood working on Cerebro for me."

"Here she is now," Jean remarked, holding in her hands a palm-sized cube of metal with various connectors all over it. Connecting up her safety harness, Storm leant back over and was soon busy at work.

The Professor cleared his throat. "I'm hoping these adjustments will enable you to use Cerebro without waking up in a coma."

She smiled at him, turned and leant back over the sheer precipice, the iron in her hand. Just as she was about to try the connector again, an alarm sounded.

* * *

Wolverine opened his eyes, and immediately regretted it. Pain stabbed into his eyes. He tried to get up, but found himself covered in electrodes and a pipe in his nose. Pulling it out, and resisting the urge to gag, he leant over the bed and squinted in the light. He could just make out Jean standing by an X-ray machine, holding his less flattering portrait to the light.

He scratched his bare chest, knocking off a few off the electrodes, and smiled weakly. "So, got my shirt off again, Jean?"

She whirled, her white lab coat flowing behind her like the tail of a gown. She did not return the friendly smile he had given her. His own smile fell.

"You were badly injured," Jean stated, her tone serious and somewhat distraught. "Not even your powers could have saved you completely."

He cocked his animalistic head, confused.

"It's lucky Gambit found you when he did."

For the first time then, he noticed a man sitting in the corner of the room, riffling a deck of cards between his fingers into his spare hand. On his hands he wore black gloves that were absent of the fingers. Sandy- brown coloured curtains of hair hung over a black sweatband, which circled his head just above his light eyes. A metal staff rested by his side. He looked over to Wolverine, still riffling the cards.

"Gambit?" Logan said doubtfully, looking the stranger in the eye.

"Yes," Jean responded. "He found you hanging from a tree, your neck had been broken."

Logan nodded half-heartedly, memories of the fight flowing back to him.

"I thought you were dead," the man said in a rich Southern accent, which was similar to Rogue's, "but then you started to twitch. I saw your tags and knew you were with Xavier." The look in Gambit's soft eyes was of genuine concern. This made Logan's mind ease a little; Gambit was actually on their side.

"What were you doing out there on your own anyway?" Gambit persisted, eyes narrowing a little.

Something similar to panic flashed through Logan. "On my own?" He looked around the lab frantically. The room was empty apart from him, Jean and Gambit. His breath caught in his throat as he realised what must have happened.

"What happened?" Jean asked.

Logan explained all he had seen, down to the slightest detail, careful not to miss a thing, from start to finish. "You didn't find anything?"

Jean looked to Gambit, them back to Logan, her jaw set grimly. "Only you, Scott's sunglasses and..." She stopped.

"And what?" Logan almost shouted, desperate to hear what she had to say.

"Blood," she muttered.

Logan leapt from the cold bed, ripping the remaining electrodes off, and grabbed his ruined jacket from the table nearby, wincing at the difficulty.

Gambit stood as Jean rushed toward Logan, taking hold of his muscular shoulders and forcing him to sit.

Logan was almost tempted to knock her aside, but he just sighed and glanced at her instead.

"You won't find him that way. The Professor can do a better job," Jean told him, taking his jacket and placing it back on the tabletop.

"Cerebro," Logan offered reluctantly.

Jean simply nodded, and continued, "It's what you feared."

"Yeah, but..." Logan said quietly, "what does he want with Scott?"

* * *

Scott came around slowly, keeping his eyes closed through force of habit. By shaking his head slightly, he could tell that he had on neither glasses nor visor. His hands were bound together behind whatever he was sitting on, probably a chair. His legs were tied to it as well. It was weird, he thought as he shifted uncomfortably, and heard a slight metal clinking sound. They went to all this trouble to stop him from lashing out with hands and feet, yet gave him full access to his mutant power. It didn't seem right, but who knew what went on in the minds of the criminally insane?

Bracing himself against the cold, metal chair, he prepared to unleash his laser-sight, which had nearly destroyed his entire high school and the main foyer of a train station.

He opened his eyes.

He saw.

He saw as he had not done since he was seventeen, save for the odd glimpse. He saw a circular room, hewn from rock with a watery pool, split in two halves by the path of rock leading up to the island his chair was sitting on.

He saw all this. Really saw it, crystal clear, and not through a red haze as he had for the last twelve years, since Professor Xavier had found him and given him his first ruby-filament glasses. That was all in the past now, before this wonderful thing had happened. If he wasn't so terrified to the very core of his being at being in the clutches of Magneto, he would be deliriously happy.

Suddenly, a huge slime-covered tongue like a horrible putrid snake flew up and hit him on his injured shoulder, which he noticed was bandaged. He gave a cry of pain at the sting of the contact, and it tingled in agony for a few seconds after.

An ugly, warted head of green skin, green hair, green teeth with yellow bloated eyes rose above the surface of the water some fifteen feet from him, about halfway to the door at the end of the path.

"An X-Man, eh? Odd." With that, the head sprung out of the water and onto the path, crouching with its overly long legs folded up either side of the body.

"Toad?" Scott croaked. "I thought you were dead."

"Well, you thought wrong, one-eye!" The tongue shot out again, but slower than Scott had known before. "Your friend with the white hair burnt me up pretty bad, though. Me and Sabretooth have been arguing over who gets to rip that pretty white hair out of her head, chunk by chunk." Toad gave a disgusting gurgling sound that Scott took for a cackle. "That beast keeps saying she owes him a scream."

"You evil son-of-a-bitch!" Scott struggled vainly to release his hands from the metal cuffs around the wrists to grip the creature's neck and squeeze. He didn't have his power, but he knew how to fight.

Toad gave that horrible laugh again.

The man known as Cyclops gave up and slumped forward in his chair, the cuffs biting into his wrists.

Toad stood, revealing huge burn marks all over his skin and clothes, and dived into the water.

Scott didn't know how long he sat there, exhausted, pain throbbing from his injured shoulder and he realised, the back of his head, where Sabretooth had struck him earlier that day. Or at least he thought it was earlier that day. It could have been days ago, he thought miserably. He continued to sit, the pain hurting so much he thought he might lapse back into unconsciousness. The thought of Toad and Sabretooth kept him awake, the white-hot fury of anger and revenge burning inside him. Could have been hours or just a few minutes he sat, he didn't know. It seemed like an eternity. Eventually, he heard a door slide open on hydraulics.

Dimly, he looked up and saw a figure standing in the light. It strode towards him, getting bigger and clearer with every step. The illumination in the room brightened from unseen sources. As the man stepped nearer, he saw who it was; Magneto.

He tried to remember about Magneto. There was something he had done or was trying to do, but as he looked at the man he knew as Magneto, something was wrong. Something was fogging up the higher part of his mind. His eyes looked up from the floor, where they had drifted.

That didn't seem to matter though, as he looked into the face of an old man, quite a nice old man's face as old man faces go.

"Hello, Scott." His voice was soft and gentle seeming. There couldn't be anything bad about this kind old man. A little part of his mind told him that this was wrong. It was screaming at him, but he couldn't hear it.

"There... there was something, something I had to remember... remember about you." Scott winced in pain as he moved his shoulder.

"Oh yes, I'm sorry about my underlings. They can be rather... enthusiastic sometimes. I'm sorry; they shouldn't have hurt you so."

There, see. He had just apologised. There couldn't be anything wrong with this kind old man.

No. No, that was wrong!

He couldn't hear.

"If I get you out of those nasty cuffs, you'll help me do a few things, won't you?" Magneto asked.

Scott nodded dreamily.

"The sooner you help me kill Wolverine and a couple of others with your visor, the sooner you can leave all this behind, and never be burdened with your power again, with the help of this belt."

Scott glanced down at his chest. Over his clothes, a metal belt ran down the left hand side of his chest, with a strap going over the opposite shoulder.

"But I don't want to put my visor on," he whined.

"It's just for a little while, then you can wear the belt forever and see Jean Grey for the first time, properly."

Jean.

With the mention of his most beloved's name, his mind cleared. It felt like a cold rinse washing away the soapsuds and dirt of fogginess from his mind. He perceived true clarity.

Looking up at Magneto, he saw him for what he really was; a bitter and twisted old man. He saw all the people Magneto had killed staring back at him from those cold, grey eyes.

He gathered up all his reserves of strength, spat at Magneto, hitting him square in the eye and screamed, "Never!"

"I see," Magneto replied calmly, wiping his eye, "that the drug has not worked."

"I'm not that weak-minded, Magneto," Scott retorted.

"Believe me, you will soon wish the drug had worked."

Magneto straightened and checked the belt around Scott's chest, shoulder and waist. It sat over the civilian clothes Scott had been wearing at the time of his capture.

Magneto turned on his heels and clicked his fingers.

Immediately, the lecturous head appeared above the water and the door at the end of the path opened, and Mystique, wearing her usual clothes, that is naked as the day she was born, covered from head to toe in blue fish-like scales, crowned with close cropped fiery red hair, started walking down the path towards him. She passed Magneto on his way out and came to a stop in front of Scott's chair. The amphibian-like Toad leapt out of the water with surprising grace and landed, dripping, next to her.

Twin primeval smiles leered at him from a foot away.

Scott knew he was in trouble.

He thought of Jean.

* * *

Note: Well, there you have Chapter 2. I hope it satisfied. As you may have noticed, the character of Gambit (a fave of mine) was changed subtlely. His eyes are blue, not red, and the French is gone. Not sure why, just seemed to fit better with my plans. I hope you are not too disappointed. Thanks for reading again! :)