Disclaimer: Not mine – see 'Marvel'.

Author's Notes: No more Jean-first-person writing. Now we get to the fun. Hope some people are still reading here. Review, if you are, please.

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Scum of the Earth

Chapter One

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Tap, tap…tap.

Jean paused typing for a moment to pop another delicious jellybean into her mouth. It was well past noon, after lunch, and she wasn't hungry, but the jellybeans were right there…what woman could turn down sweet, sweet sugar? Besides diabetics, of course. She smiled slightly at the computer screen, and made a few more adjustments to the file she had open. Mortimer Toynbee, resident of the Canadian testing facility for three months…he now only had two more weeks there, before he'd embark on a number of transfers, being forgotten in the paperwork and picked up by the Professor. Jean's smile widened. It felt good to help.

Beep.

Jean spun around in her gas-lift chair; there were two guards on the other side of the clearance gate. One had swiped an expectedly valid identification through the security checkpoint – she pressed the big red button under her desk, and turned to face them. Two soldiers together often meant that there was a wreck of a mutant being held between them.

Sure enough, there was. "Another one, Ms Gibson," the older of the two soldiers declared as the pair pulled in their hapless prisoner. Jean ignored her alias, tried not to look at the mutant, knowing she was staring, and merely gestured for her to be brought into the next room. She got up and steeled herself for another processing, opening the door into the next room.

The 'processing room'. It was a tiny concrete cube, into which a wooden table had been crammed, with two cheap plastic chairs on opposite ends of it. There was a clipboard, with the crisp, white interview sheet already prepared and waiting.

The older soldier locked the doors and stood guard. The younger one, whom Jean recognized as a uniform who liked to flirt with her, stood behind the mutant.

The mutant herself left no question about her genes – her hair was vibrantly green, almost like a neon light, and her eyes matched. She was pale from cold and fear, covered with the grime of travel and the blood and bruises of a struggle, but Jean could tell she would've been pretty and young otherwise.

The woman stared at her with fierce eyes, blaming her. The suppressor collar around her neck bleeped furiously. Jean tried to school her features – she had to look nonchalant, uncaring, even bored. She had to be just like the doctors, and the soldiers. She had to regard this woman like a waste of valuable time. It should've been easier to do, after two years, but it wasn't.

Pen in hand, Jean got down to business. "Name," she commanded, trying to sound imperious and uninterested at the same time.

The woman seemed to contemplate rebelling. Jean wished she could use her telepathy to let her know what was going on, but she couldn't – not only were there those damned collars, which would stop her ability dead like it did any other mutant gene, but there were sensors that would sound an alarm like the roar at the end of the world. There were some technological advances she could really do without…

"Lorna Dane," the green-haired woman finally said. She said it heavily, her shoulders slumping – she was conceding defeat. She'd fought and lost. Again, Jean was fighting the impulse to consol her. How much easier would this task be if she could just say 'I'm on your side'?

"Mutant alias," she said instead.

"Polaris," the woman replied instantaneously.

"Birthplace."

"Boston."

"Mutant affiliations." Polaris looked confused. Jean shook her head, looking impatient. "Do you know any other mutants? Groups?"

The woman raised an eyebrow, like she was saying 'as if I'd tell you'. "None." It was put out plainly before they were dragged in that they could get some kind of half-baked false immunity by handing over others. Polaris knew, but she had more moral fiber than that.

Jean almost smiled. "Age of mutant manifestation."

"Thirteen."

"Current age."

"Twenty-three."

Five years younger than Jean herself. Poor woman. When she was twenty-three, she'd been in her honor's year at university…

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Jean popped another jellybean into her mouth, then another, and another. She wasn't even chewing them now. It was a nervous displacement-action. Sweet foods were a crutch now but she couldn't be bothered stamping it out. She typed in the rest of Polaris's file – heading it with the serial number the guards were now about to tattoo her with – then saving the file and then securing it. Jean wondered absently, as she sometimes would, if the Professor would see that the mutants he saved got rid of those tattoos. They were a constant reminder – on the forearm of each mutant here was a serial number.

"Just like in the Holocaust," the Professor had said over the phone once. "I have an old friend who was in the German concentration camps; he works with me here, though is always clamoring that we do more. Those tattoos, when he first saw them, sent him into a blind rage. But he won't have his removed, and I think many of the mutants we save won't either." He laughed a little, ironically.

She couldn't understand why that was. Perhaps they were accepting that there was no running from that part of their past; maybe they liked to be reminded of their pain and felt they deserved it, so broken down as they were; maybe they just didn't want to go through the hassle of laser removal surgery. Whatever the reason, Jean realized – as she popped another jellybean into her mouth – she wasn't ever likely to understand it entirely.

Beep.

Jean pressed the red button under her desk and turned to look at the approaching soldiers – the soldiers' guarding the cells currently were about to be relieved. One of them, a big dumb blond, stopped at the checkpoint window and smiled at her. "Hey, Jeannie."

She smiled at him, trying to radiate happiness and all the other good feelings that she wasn't getting right now. "Hello, Duncan." She turned back to the screen, and resisted the urge to chug the rest of her jellybeans. She'd kept her first name when using the alias 'Gibson'. That was enough, surely?

"Processed any more today?" he asked, trying to peer around at the screen. Jean closed Polaris's file, and turned back to him.

"Just two." Polaris had been the second; twenty minutes into the morning, Jean had to process another – a deathly pale, stuttering and half-insane mutant who called himself 'Sinister'. They'd found him standing over the corpse of a soldier who'd been keeping guard on the gate. She frowned to herself and popped a jellybean – she still couldn't understand what had gotten into that one. Most mutants knew enough to keep away from this area…

"I heard about that one in the morning…" Duncan had, at least, the sensitivity to be worried for her 'delicate senses', which – though the sentiment was misplaced concerning this particular – was more than any of the other soldiers could claim to. "He wasn't too bad, was he?"

Jean forced a smile. "Oh, he was a little more than I'm used to dealing with before I've had my two coffees in the morning."

Duncan grinned, looking even more like an attractive, vacant jock. He was an all-American type of guy – he'd grown up with perfect parents, masses of friends, a place on the football team and more popularity than the geeks and nerds of his school could dream up. He had blue eyes, blond hair and a physique that was striven for in gyms all over the world. It was a pity that this outstanding specimen of Yankee upbringing didn't have two brain cells to introduce to each other…but this place probably wouldn't have him any other way.

"Isn't your shift about to start?" Jean asked, looking down the corridor as the group he'd come in with laughed and stomped themselves out of sight.

"Oh, yeah…" He looked down the corridor, and started to edge away. "I'll, uh, probably see you on the way up again…talk to you then."

"See you," Jean said, waving him away with a smile, before grabbing a whole handful of jellybeans and shoving them in her mouth. It wasn't just the injustices done here – it was that she had to make nice with the people who instigated and joked about them. She turned back to the computer and brought up another transferal form, her hands shaking with anger.

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Elizabeth Braddock was only one click on the 'save' button away from freedom in a month when the alarms began to ring. Red lights flashed, the scuffle of boots could be faintly heard over the noise of the sirens, and beyond that were the shouts of orders and screams…screams?

Whoop, whoop, whoop.

Jean shoved herself away from the computer, eyes wide, shaking like a leaf. Something was…what? Had she been caught?

But, no, of course not…

Beep.

Over the whoop, whoop of the sirens came the signal to let up the gates. Jean pressed the red button under her desk, trying to control her shaking hands, and composed herself, sitting back down and shoveling another handful of jellybeans into her mouth. Calming, sweet sugar…

She turned to the window over the desk and looked for the approaching soldiers. There were many of them, but they were subduing something…something snarling.

Eyes wide, Jean pushed her chair away from the window and backed right into the wall opposite it. The senior officer who'd brought in Polaris was there, with a heavy gash across his cheek. He untangled himself from the melee, sought Jean, nodded acknowledgement and began barking orders to his men to drag their snarling captive into the processing room.

Jean watched the mass of struggling uniforms herd the mutant into the room, but didn't dare go in herself. "My God," she whispered. "What was…what's going on?"

The senior soldier was still there. He turned to face her, bleeding freely and obviously angry. "Healing mutant," he explained shortly. He made a face, spat, and a tooth clattered to the concrete ground. "Shit," he muttered, looking at the tooth with something akin to awe. "That little fuck…" He stopped himself, looked up at Jean, and wiped the blood off of his face with his sleeve. "Sorry, Miss Gibson. But, needless to say, tranquilizers don't work too good on a healing mutant. He's a fighter. Got his hands on Reed's gun, too…coulda been a massacre…"

Jean wasn't looking at him, though – the tooth tap, tap, tapping to the ground had drew her attention down, where a trail of blood advertised just how much the healing mutant didn't want to be there. "I…oh, God…is anyone…?"

"No one's too bad, but the mutant's pretty shot up." The soldier spat again, adding more blood to the smear on the floor. He shrugged. "He'll heal. We've had orders not to collar this one yet."

"But why?"

The soldier shrugged again. "You don't have to come in yet, Miss," he added, as he started walking away to the processing room. "Stryker wants to sit in on this interview, and we need to get some more tranquilizers on this bastard anyway…it's not safe to let you in there just yet." He snorted. "He's a goddamn animal."

"Absolutely right," came a new, but chillingly familiar voice. Stryker. Jean looked down the corridor to find the Colonel himself approaching with a mass of doctors in tow. "In there," he told them, gesturing to the processing room. They filed in, and the Colonel turned to Jean. "Once he's subdued, he'll probably only answer to a gentler voice than my lieutenants have, so we still need you to do it," he told her. "He won't talk now, but God knows what he'd do to you like he is anyway." He sneered and looked at the door over his shoulder, where the snarling mutant was now raging louder than ever. "Goddamn animal."

The door separating her office and the processing room rattled and crunched – something was being thrown on it. Jean yelped and backed away. In all her time there, she had never, ever been afraid of a mutant, not even Sinister, whose eyes were red as fire, just like his hands were red with the blood of his kill.

Finally, the yelling and the scuffling died down. After a moment of silence, a young bloodied soldier appeared in the corridor, saluting Stryker. The white-coated men filed out behind him and slipped away from sight down the corridor. "The mutant's subdued, sir," the soldier reported. "The doctors can only guess how much time until it wears off."

"How long?" Stryker demanded with narrowed eyes.

"Twenty minutes."

The Colonel looked at Jean. "That long enough?"

Jean nodded, pale and shaking. "I'll…right. Is he…?"

"He's restrained, Miss Gibson," the bloodied young soldier told her, sympathetic. "He's tied, and we've got a collar ready for him if he gets too…enraged. It'll stop him from going through the drugs so quickly, they reckon…"

"Of course it will," Stryker barked. "Back inside, soldier!"

The young man saluted smartly, and hurried back. The senior officer followed, and Stryker approached the glassless window of Jean's office. "We already know a fair bit," he told her confidentially, quietly. "Whatever he doesn't tell you, I've got in an old army recruitment folder…"

"He was in the army?" Jean asked, gathering her wits and trying to compose herself. That little bit of information did strike her as odd…how had he avoided escape for so long, then, if they had a file on him?

Stryker grinned. "In Vietnam, Korea and the Second World War, it seems," he told her quietly. "Try to get his age out of him – I can't find the truth on that one – and anything about him before he enlisted. He won't be able to tell much from shit right now, but you might be able to get that out of him." He started towards the door in the corridor. "Just follow procedure. You'll be completely safe, Miss Gibson."

Jean didn't believe that, but knew it would probably be her job if she said 'no'. So she took a deep breath, practically drank the rest of her jellybeans, and grabbed a pen. The clipboard would already be waiting for her, if it hadn't been decimated. Prepared, but not ready, she opened the door.

Sure enough, they had something tied up. As he looked, with his head hanging down, he certainly didn't look like he could have seen the Second World War – his skin was a little weather-beaten and torn in the struggle, but he wasn't old. His hair was blacker than a night's sky; not a touch of grey could be seen. He was taking very good care of himself, to be as old as Stryker was suggesting.

Jean pulled back the plastic chair opposite him and sat down carefully. The clipboard was in front of her – she picked it up. That got the man's attention. He looked up slowly, then raised his head a little more when he got a better look at her. Maybe he was surprised that she wasn't a soldier; maybe he was just wondering what was going on. Jean avoided his eyes.

She opened her mouth, and prepared to get into it, but there was a hand on her shoulder. Stryker leaned down to her ear. "I know it's a bit much to ask, Miss Gibson," he said, "but I'd like you to put on your counseling skills for this one. Coax the information out of him. It might throw him off enough to get an answer."

Jean nodded slowly, and looked down at her clipboard. During her psychology course, she'd never expected to wind up cajoling information out of a crazed, bloodied mutant across an interrogation table in the presence of freshly-wounded soldiers.

She looked up at him, to find him staring at her. His eyes were empty and brown, but she had the feeling his mind was going a mile a minute. He was coming to grips with what was around him, just like every other mutant who'd ever sat in that chair. He was calculating his odds. He was fighting off the drug-induced haze he was under.

Jean blinked and looked down at the clipboard again. Coax information out of him, huh? She could try.

"Hello," she began, looking up once again and feeling oddly embarrassed. "Don't be alarmed, I'm not here to make you uncomfortable. I just want to talk."

He said nothing.

"I'd like to know a little about you."

Nothing.

"Is there anything you'd like to start me off with…your name, maybe? What you do for a living?"

Nothing.

Jean paused. "Would you like anything? A drink? Something to eat?"

That got a response, but not anything audible. His eyes ceased being empty and began to show something like surprise. Jean took advantage.

"Well, if you won't say anything, I might as well start things off," she said, putting down the pen and crossing her legs. According to one of her lecturers at university, the best thing to do with patients who wouldn't talk was to keep talking yourself, to make yourself known to them so that they'd be comfortable with you. She schooled her expression to look calm and casual, and put down the clipboard as she leaned back in her chair. Cool, calm and composed. "My name's Jean Gibson."

His eyes began to empty again. Jean's mouth twisted a little. Here was a challenge. She had to keep him mildly interested in her conversation. The best method of doing that was to go off on something random – that got most people's attention.

"My best friend in high school broke her two front teeth when she hit her head getting into her prom limousine, but just kept her mouth shut for the night so she could still go," she said conversationally, looking away from him and into space, as though she were reminiscing. "My staunchly religious great-aunt used to call me a whore because I tied my hair in pigtails. Oh, and my father's company were amongst the first to start that annoying spam email thing – his friends still hit him over the head for that."

She was getting a response – he looked confused, wondering where this was going; she'd thrown him off-guard. Well, it was a start. She smiled a little, and sat a little straighter.

"Don't you have anything – anything at all – that you could tell me?" she wheedled. "Even a name – it doesn't even have to be yours. Something you've heard once. I don't care – I just want to talk."

Still nothing. His eyes were getting a little clearer now, and the confusion in them was gone, replaced with a guarded look. Jean bit her bottom lip, and sighed.

"I don't want to be the bad guy," she told him quietly, "and I know that's useless to say, because I'm only ever going to be that according to you, but one thing that will always help you here is cooperation. If you at least talk to me, give me the information I've been told to get, then you won't have to deal with the soldiers so much." And that wasn't an empty threat. Often, uncooperative mutants who wouldn't give their information to her on command were beaten to unconsciousness, revived, then brought back. "Trust me; giving me the information up front is the lesser of two evils, as far as this stage of things is concerned."

His expression had hardened, but his eyes – almost clear of the drugs now – seemed to say he conceded to her point. "What do you wanna know?" he demanded.

Jean's stomach tightened uncomfortably. He was slurring over a bruised mouth, but that didn't make him any harder to hear. His voice was harsh, probably through lack of use, and she had the feeling that it was the last thing many people had ever heard.

But she collected herself – she composed her features, and picked up the clipboard and pen again. "How about your name, for a start?"

"I don't know."

Jean paused. "You never had one, or…?"

"Amnesia." Jean quirked an eyebrow, and the man mimicked the gesture. "Hand to God."

"Have you ever heard a name that sounded…right?" she asked, shrugging at the lack of a better word.

He paused. "Logan," he said finally.

"Right." Jean didn't even write it down – she was going to remember all of this conversation, she didn't need notes. "Any aliases you go by?"

"None. Never wanted one."

"Fair enough," Jean said, nodding. "Really, with some of the other aliases I've heard…"

"What else?"

Jean pursed her lips. "Age?"

"No idea."

She sighed. "Birthplace?"

"Don't know."

"Huh." Jean tapped the pen against the unused clipboard. "Any other mutants you know?"

Logan's head snapped up, surprised. Jean was a bit confused – surely he'd expected that question? But an idea seemed to be churning around in his head.

"Creed," he said, spitting out the word. "Victor Creed." He almost grinned at her, like they were sharing an in-joke, purposely excluding the soldiers. "Always said I'd drag him to hell with me."

With friends like these… Jean looked away from him. "… Permanent residency?"

"Canadian woods."

Jean looked back up. "You've been living in the forests? In the middle of winter?"

"Nice to see you all concerned about me…Jeannie," he sneered, baring his feral canine teeth.

At this point Stryker, who'd been getting angrier and angrier behind Jean, grabbed the back of her chair and dragged her away from the table. "He's off the tranquilizers again!" he roared at the doctors. "Drug him up, clap on a goddamn collar and get him the hell out of my sight!" And with that, he was out of the room.

Jean leapt off of her chair and fled to the door to her office as three soldiers advanced, holding Logan down as one of the doctors prepared a syringe. She slammed the door behind her, belatedly realizing she forgot the clipboard, as the snarling broke out again, and the soldiers yelled at each other in confusion and panic.

It hadn't gone well. Stryker had nothing that he wanted, Jean had no hope of transferring the mutant without a lot of notice, and Logan himself was about to embark on the worst experience imaginable. She closed her eyes and sat back down at her desk, reaching for the jellybean bowl before she realized there was nothing left in it.

"The story of my life," she whispered to herself, as the furious roars and sounds of the struggle died down.

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