Storm relaxed the pressure around the lower half of her body. She started to sink slowly through the air. Wind was whistling past her, she couldn't hear still. Scott had stopped firing. She couldn't see anyone moving.
She dropped the last few feet, starting to ease the wind. Logan was crouched over the body of the last man he'd killed. Bobby was furthest away, beside a wall of ice eight feet high. As she watched, Kurt dropped out of a tree. Scott and Rogue stood close together. Scott had taken one of his gloves off. It'd worked then. She'd carried his power.
"Keep the wind up." Scott said. He was panting. "Make it unflyable." So short, hard gusts. Storm nodded. The natural wind was from the Northwest, but there was something to the Northeast she could use to create cross-gusts. Storm breathed out slowly, then started to pull on the air. Gusts were harder work than steady winds. If she could build enough static up, lightening would put choppers off too. She had a column built up overhead, she could use it. But she didn't want to risk a fire.
"Logan." She called.
"I'm fine." He said. But he didn't get up.
"Storm, how far is the Blackbird?" Scott said
"Two hundred yards or so." She pointed.
Scott nodded. "Kurt, take Logan, then come back for someone else."
,
Jean stood under The Blackbird, just waiting, and listening. She was close enough to hear shots, Storm's wind was pulling at her, so Storm at least was okay. Scott? Logan? Kurt? Bobby and Rogue? She had no idea.
She shouldn't have come. She should have refused. She couldn't bear to be this close to it, to hear the shots and not know, not be there. But it had been sensible of Scott to leave her here. She wasn't strong enough to fight with the others, not now.
The shots had stopped. So someone had won.
Something to her left. She spun round and leveled her flashlight at the movement. Kurt had appeared, Logan with him.
"Kurt! What's happening?"
"It is over. We have them. Take Logan, I must go back."
"I'm fine." Logan said, as Kurt vanished again.
"Can you get up?" Jean started over to him.
"Yeah, just took a couple of hits at close range." She helped him to his feet. His colour was okay. He was breathing hard. She led him in to the jet. There were bullet holes in the front of his uniform and blood all over his hands. He shook himself and stretched his neck out. "That's better. It's Bobby and Rogue that you're here for. I'm fine." He pulled himself free of her. Jean turned in time to see Kurt reappear, this time with Bobby. He was unshaven and pale, but he looked alert. He was only wearing scrubs! In Canada at night, and he was soaked!
She needed to be triaging properly. She couldn't afford to be this scatty. She stripped off her uniform gloves and went for latex exam gloves instead. Bobby was alarmingly cold to the touch, but seemed to be fully alert, everything else seemed normal, but she should get him out of his wet scrubs ASAP. He was a cryoform. He could handle the cold. She handed him a thermal blanket for the time being, in time to see hear Kurt calling for her from the bottom of the ramp. Rogue was standing there, just as wet as Bobby, and shivering. She was not a cryoform. This was a much bigger problem.
,
Storm landed at the foot of the ramp of the jet. Kurt disappeared to go back for Scott. She needed to get this thing fired up. Every time she breathed out, the wind gusted sharply. She needed to keep that up too, at least until they were ready to fly. She didn't like juggling this much in her head. Jean was busy, Scott was running on adrenaline. He should be off on medical grounds still, but they had what they had. They needed to get in the air. She sat down.
"That is all of us!" Kurt called from behind her. She started the jet. Everything seemed to be coming on line normally. Jean had been guarding it. They would be fine. Nobody could have sabotaged them.
Scott came up behind her. She glanced round. Logan had his eyes shut in resignation, Jean was assessing Rogue.
"Let's get in the air." Scott said, sitting down. He was pale and drawn. "Where's the wind?"
"Five o'clock with gusts from eight."
"Okay, kill the gusts as we get airborne. How close are we to take off?"
"Twenty seconds minimum."
"Twenty seconds then." Scott reached up to the switches over his head, with the wrong hand. "Everyone, strap in."
,
Lightning was flashing around them. Logan could still hear the wind howling. His stomach clenched.
"Sure as hell hope you know what you're doing." He growled.
"We do." Storm said. Logan shut his eyes and pressed his head in to the corner. He heard the Blackbird's engines fire, he felt them jolt upwards and forwards. This crazy wind…
,
Jean needed to get Rogue stripped off and in to dry clothes as fast as she possibly could, the girl was shivering, but she also knew she must not get out of her seat until one of the pilots said so. It wasn't worth risking injuring herself, potentially badly, if Storm misread the air pressures. She swallowed to fix the pressure through her eustachian tubes. It felt like they were leveling out. She could hear Scott and Storm talking to each other, but little more than that. The engines drowned their words out.
The engines' pitch dropped. They were leveling.
"Okay, you can get up." Storm called. Jean undid her seat belt and got up. She had to get Rogue out of her wet scrubs.
"Everyone, eyes front." She called to the front of the Blackbird. She had no real way of giving Rogue privacy, but this had to be done. Everyone seemed to have heard her, she undid Rogue's seatbelt and pulled her to her feet. The poor girl was clearly too cold and too tired to do much for herself. She stank of the water she was soaked with. Jean got spare clothes out of one of the overhead lockers.
"I'm sorry, Rogue, but I'm just going to do this." She didn't protest. She let Jean strip her and re-dress her in dry clothes. Her hair was still soaked, every hair on her body was standing upright; she was still shivering. She was making half hearted attempts to cover herself, though no one in the front was looking. Jean couldn't see any obvious injuries, just a bit of bruising over both cephalic veins, as though she'd had catheters placed and drawn several times.
"I'm going to keep on saying this," Jean started, "but you need to keep in touch with me for the next while. Some people will experiment on Mutants like we're less than animals. If either of you think anything is wrong, anything, come and tell me right away. Do you understand me?" Rogue nodded once. Jean did up the sweater she'd given her.
"Hey." Logan reached an ungloved hand backwards, without turning round, offering himself to Rogue.
Jean shook her head. "We're okay. She's cold, not injured." And, judging by New York, if Logan gave too much to Rogue he could un-heal himself, and that could cause far bigger problems.
"I don't think they did anything to me." Bobby said. "They just left me shut in a room, they asked me to tell them where to find other mutants." Jean looked up. "They said they'd let me go if I led them to three others." Jean could almost hear Scott and Storm draw breath, wondering who they needed to warn. "I didn't." Bobby said.
Scott glanced backwards. "You kept your mouth shut?" Bobby nodded. "Good kid." Jean saw Bobby straighten a little, even though he looked exhausted.
Right. Next priority. The cold didn't bother Bobby as such, they knew that, but to use his power like that was probably energy expensive, and Rogue would cope better with the cold if she was fed. So calories.
,
Logan got out of his seat when they'd been in the air about an hour. Kurt and Bobby were both asleep. How, Logan had no idea. He couldn't imagine ever being able to sleep in the air. Storm and Cyclops were focusing on flying, Jean was still sitting in the back of the jet, with Rogue. Rogue was wrapped in two blankets and dry clothes, but she was still pale. Jean was holding her, but Logan could still see Rogue shivering. He sat down. Both of them looked at him for a second. They looked exhausted, both of them. He put his arms around Rogue, careful to keep something between his skin and hers. Two bodies had to do better at this than one. Without a word, the two of them shifted to let him in.
,
Jean made her way back up the stairs. Bobby and Rogue were both in the infirmary, more for privacy and so they could choose when they faced the rest of the school than for any medical reason. Rogue was a roughly normal temperature now and they were both more tired than anything else. The best she could do for them now was let them sleep. Which applied to another patient too.
She had 3.5ml of buprenorphine in her hand. She hadn't read him, she hadn't dared, but something in the way he'd been holding himself had told her that Scott was in pain, that he'd done too much tonight.
He was there ahead of her, he'd got out of his field gear, but hadn't got any further. He was lying flat on his back on the bed, arms out. He looked at her, then at her right hand. She shook her head at him.
"You could have sent Storm." She said, pulling the cap off the needle.
"You know why I didn't." He grimaced as he moved his arm across his body to raise his vein. Jean sighed as she gave him the drug. Yes, she knew, but she didn't have to like it. Scott relaxed with a soft grunt. "To start off, you wouldn't have been able to do anything for Bobby and Rogue in the air, you'd have had to fly the jet." That was not the reason. He looked at her for a long moment. "It happened on my watch."
Jean looked down. "I know." He'd lost them, or he felt he had, so he had to go and get them back, whatever the cost, whatever physical state he was in. They might be Xavier's X-men, but they were under Scott's charge in the field. She knew how it had hurt him to lose Bobby and Rogue, and how it had tormented him that he hadn't realized.
There would be fallout from this. Scott wouldn't want to leave the kidnapping of two X-men and an attack on the school unanswered, but not tonight. Jean for one was exhausted, Scott had done far too much on broken ribs, and she wanted to do a more thorough set of tests on Bobby and Rogue before anyone even though about letting them fight. For tonight, all they could do was sleep.