Author's note: Posting a chapter two weeks before exams? I oughta have my head examined, what do you think? Ah well. I usually don't do these at the start of a chapter, but this one's different, and I really wanted the end of this chapter to be the end. Give it some thought after you read it. Usual rules apply, these characters aren't mine and don't post this story without my permission. Please, please review this.

"Bonjour." The French expression for hello, and yet it struck in Rogue a great dread. It was not the word, to be fair to the French language, which scared Rogue so much as who she knew was speaking it.

"What do yah want?" She made a deliberate effort to force every word through her teeth and purple-stained lips. Behind her, she heard Remy's boots clop onto the floor, entering her room. She still did not turn to face him and kept her eyes trained on the book splayed open in her lap.

" Oh, 'm jus' celebratin' my good health. Y'heard I got banged up? And on my firs' mission fo' de good guys." Rogue caught that whiff of sarcasm.

"Ah wish Ah'd had a camera."

"Dat's not funny chere," he said in voice that made it clear he got the joke. "I jus' about to head off de grounds fo' a few hours. Maybe y'wanna come, we could grab a coffee."

"Ain't interested."

"Yi don' like coffee?"

"Ah lahke coffee jus' fahne," She didn't see it, but she knew he was grinning at that. Dense as a brick, that was how she had decided to describe him somewhere between New Jersey and West Virginia. She could still recall that wide grin he displayed at every insult she lobbed his way. He'd worn it like a shield. "Why are yah in my room? Uninvited, Ah maght add."

"Now dat's where y' wrong," he interjected, and Rogue looked up, "Yo roommate, Kitty, came outside round de time I was enjoyin' a cigarette with Petey. De girl maght have a t'ing fo' him. Ei'ter wat, I told her I wanted and she told me where t'find you. Perfectly inivited." Note to self: Kill Kitty Pride and eat her bones, thought Rogue.

"Whaht exactly did yah tell her yah wanted?" When she asked that, Remy's grin grew wider.

" M' takin' you out fo' a night on de town! Anywhere y' wanna go is yo' choice," He declared with a great sweeping gesture before squatting on his haunches roughly a foot from where Rogue was sitting. "See, lotta t'ings went t'rough my head past few days. See, I been wonderin' why we don' know more 'bout each other, and finally, it came t'me. We ain't spendin' 'nough time together. So, I t'ink dinner sound perfect."

"Remy, why are yah interested in meh at all?" He grinned.

"Cause y' good lookin'" He said simply, grinning when her face twisted in a mixture of shock and annoyance. She even considered slapping, hell, she wanted to slap him for that comment, but she held the urge. Instead, she stood, pushing herself against the side of her bed and stood up, looking down at him.

"Thaht's the only reason yah got fer chasin' meh? Cause' Ah'm some sorta eye candy for yah," Rogue snorted with derision as she snapped her book shut and tucked it under her arm. "Ah don't know why Ah expected more outta yah." She had barely made it two steps to the door before she felt his hand wrapped around the smooth material of her shirtsleeve. She spun around with a deathglare already cold and set in her hazel eyes.

"Dat's exactly why I wanna take you out tonight. I want a chance to get t'know you, 'M interested in what's going on inside you."

"The only thing yah're interested in is between mah-

"Ears? I want inside yo' head, plain and simple. Not t'say ain't interested in y'body, but there's somethin' goin' on in y'head and 'M lookin' t'be involved. " Rogue let her sneer soften ever so slightly, but she still wrenched her arm out of his grasp. He let her go easily, and she glanced once between him and the sleeve, noticing the slight wrinkles of his grasp were scarcely above the hem.

"Yah could'a hit skin, then where'd yah be? Back in tha infirmary?"

"Nowhere I ain't been before," He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and made like he was exiting the room. When he passed Rogue, however, he leaned in close to her ear and whispered, in a low and seductive tone several octaves below his normal register, "And no place I wouldn't mind bein' again."

She pushed him away, hard, and he landed sitting on Kitty's bed, a stuffed purple dragon falling in his lap from its former perch on the pillow.

"Yah just don't get it, do yah? It ain't that Ah don't want to touch, Ah want to. Ah want to so bad somedays I think it's gonna give meh a heart attack just thinkin' about it. Ah got a list of all the ways Ah wanna touch people! Ah maght beh a mutant, but that doesn't mean Ah ain't got desires like everyone else. But everyone else ain't got the risks Ah got," Rogue's voice cracked, and her pitch rose slightly, so slight you wouldn't have noticed unless you were paying close attention, but she continued on. "Remy, do yah realize that Kitty's been mah best friend for almost four years and Ah've never been able to hug her without checkin' mah arms first? Ah gotta make sure mah arms are covered every day of mah life, and the one person who's been nicer to me than anyone else in the world calls it a gift. Ah gotta gift. So there, since yah wanted it so badly, is what its lahke bein' in mah head. There yah go Remy, now fuck off." And she stormed out of the room, leaving Remy sitting there slack-jawed and stunned, clutching a stuffed dragon.

Given all this, it was understandable that Rogue was displeased to see Remy a second time, less so given his condition. It put her in a mood that was already foul due to a splitting migraine, something that felt like a chasm opening inside her skull. She hadn't even wished to leave her room, but she was out of aspirin and her Ibuprofen allergy negated anything in Kitty's first-aid kit. So that left her skulking down the smooth metal corridor of the subbasement, each footstep echoing painfully between her ears as she pushed open the door to the infirmary and unsteadily walked through Dr. McCoy's office and into the infirmary itself. The aspirin was not hard to find, although right before she had found it, while her mind was still on Remy and the earlier encounter, one of the machines had begun beeping and Rogue was sure, right then and there, that her head was going to explode. She had torn the cap from the bottle and swallowed to pills, dry, the bitter medication leaving a chalky, putrid taste the whole way down. The room itself was darkened, but there was enough light to see and move around.

Stupid prick…gets drunk and then makes Scott run cleanup duty. Rogue's mind then brought up the unrequited crush that had once existed between her and Scott, mostly on her side of the mat. Who can blame him, she thought bitterly, What sorta chance did Ah have, goin' up against Miss American Pie ova therhe? Her thoughts, unbidden, played against her, bringing up swirling images of the one she had chased and the one now chasing her. She thought back to what he said, about wanting in her head, and even the sentence was enough to leave a foul taste on her tongue. Get in mah head? Ah gotta enough people in mah head as it is. She cast a glance outwards, and caught a glance of Jean. Without quite knowing why, Rogue walked over to her bedside. She remembered Jean as one of the first X-men she met, all the way in Mississippi. Jean had appeared to be the type of girl Rogue would have a natural distaste for, and she would have had Jean not been so earnest in every nice deed she did. She never performed a deed for recognition, rather; she did it for the simple reason that it was the nice, polite thing to do.

Rogue thought about all this, everything that had happened to her since joining the X-men, since realizing she was a mutant, and while she had been given all the patience and understanding she deserved and then more, she couldn't help but feel she didn't belong. It was not the people, or the house, just a small gut feeling that acted like a weight to every mood Rogue was in, weighing down the good times while magnifying the bad. And all she could think, right as she caught a twitch in Jean's fingers, was Maybe this ain't where Ah belong afta all…maybe humanity ain't worth savin'…

Rogue didn't even realize she had been thrown until she collided with the wall at great force, sliding to the ground in a heap of limbs along with anything else that had been tossed in her direction. She brought her hand gingerly to her side, brushing against what she guessed were at least two cracked ribs. Her right leg shouted in pain, but she felt no broken bones, just bruises and a shrill ring in her ears. She darted her head about, and what she saw made her blood run cold. There, where she had been standing, Jean Grey hovered above the floor and her hair surrounded her in fiery halo. Above her, the lights flickered once, twice and then went out completely, followed very shortly by the stark white glow of the emergency lights that mixed with the burning remains of the hospital bed and equipment unfortunate enough to be in blast radius. girl seemed unaware of any outside stimulus, but there was a cold glint in her eye that Rogue had only seen once before. It was the steely gaze of someone unconcerned with life or death. Her mind flashed back to once before, back in high school, and that was when she heard Jean in her head.

What I was then is paltry compared to what I am now, and when Rogue attempted to choke out a reply, taking in a sharp, pained breath, she heard I am uninterested in your opinions, Rogue. Stay out of my way and your body will mend in time. Rogue watched, slack jawed, as Jean let her bare feet touch the ground, lightly stepping towards the door. If you asked her later, she would not have been able to put it into words, but Rogue dreaded the idea of Jean reaching that door. Shaking away her injuries, using her fear as adrenaline, Rogue jumped and chased after Jean, making it within a hair's width before she felt every muscle in her body tense as stiff as steel.

"I can cause your brain to pour out your ears. I can disconnect your brain stem from your spinal column in the time it takes you to blink. You are not the focus of my ire, so I would advise you not to blindly step into my path. Now," and Rogue felt every pressure point of her body simultaneously trigger, and the sensation made her vision go white with pain. "Do not interrupt again," she hissed and Rogue clattered to the ground, broken and beaten. She wheezed out a pained gasp and her head fell to the floor. The slick, cold tile felt good against her flushed cheeks, and on her lips she could taste the blood that poured from her nose. Her eyelids felt heavy against her emerald eyes, and she was about to allow exhaustion to overtake her, when she caught sight of Jean's ankle. Rogue pulled, out of nowhere, one last shred of strength from her bowels and lunged, landing her palm on Jean's ankle, right before everything went black.

Things were developing on a similarly poor path in the elevator that currently contained Scott and Remy. Remy was still splayed out on the floor, although now his eyes darted wildly about inside their heavy lidded sockets, the cloud of intoxication temporarily lifted by simple animal fear. Scott stood with his knees bent slightly and both his arms extended outwards, walking an invisible balance beam. The only light came from Scott's cell phone, and even that felt harsh on the dull headache forming above his eyes.

"We gonna die?" Remy managed to whisper.

"No. No, we're going to be alright, but we need to get out of this elevator. There's a maintenance hatch in the ceiling," Scott tilted the cell phone towards the ceiling, and discovered his intention within the space of seconds. Standing on the balls of his feet, he was just able to jostle the hatch out of its cradle. "Remy, I'm going to pull myself up onto the top of the elevator, then I'm going to pull you up. Are you alright to move?" Scott focused the light on Remy momentarily and the small pool of light glowed garishly of Remy's skin, exaggerating his tired state.

"I'll be alrahgt. Ain't de firs' time I been drunk." Scott nodded and handed his cell phone to Remy before grasping all he could of the hatch's jamb. It was laborious and his arms ached as though his veins pumped concrete, but he managed up on top of the elevator all the same.

"Did'n' know dey still put dese t'ings in elevators. Had ta replan half a bank robbery 'cause o dat." Remy muttered once they were both out of the cabin.

"Xavier doesn't like to take chances." Said Scott as he grabbed onto a thin metal ladder running the length of the elevator shaft and began climbing up. Remy followed soon after.

The explosion awoke the entire mansion; true, but one resident, Raymond Crisp, had been up long before. Suffering from a bout of insomnia possibly due to a crucial upcoming French exam, he had been working on his fourth cup of milk when the mansion floor shook, jostling the glass from his hand. It shattered on the floor, but he hardly noticed it. An explosion meant trouble and trouble at the mansion was never good. He walked out of the kitchen with determination in each footstep, stalking down the halls in search of the noise. As the hallway spilled out into the foyer, he saw from behind Jean Grey, floating maybe a foot off the ground. He took his steps slowly and clenched his hands into tight fists. He'd never liked the girl, and although his feelings towards her could not be classified as hate, this was the first time he felt fear at seeing her. And from the back, no less. He let a small electric charge travel through his hands, small, silent crackles of white and blue. His feet softly tapped the floor on the toes and balls of his feet, so it was a great surprise to him when he saw Jean spin towards him, and suddenly he too was floating in air, complete loss of control over his extremities. Her voice echoed loud and cruel through his head, but he heard none of the words. He saw her eyes, and that was enough. Her eyes showed no physical change, but behind them he could see no soul, nothing to indicate that the person before him, in complete control of his mental faculties, was anything more than a shell. A tiny little smirk crossed her lips, and out of the corner of his eyes, he saw his teammate, the rest of the X-men, converging at the top of the stairs. That was when Jean telekinetically crushed his skull, and he crumpled to the carpet before letting out one last death-rattle of a breath. Raymond Crisp was dead.

"What was that?"

"I do not know, Logan."

"Did-did Jean just…" Kitty attempted to force the rest out, but sentence refused to be structured. Her mind, in the grips of dumb, reptilian fear, had simply seized up, refusing to acknowledge what it had witnessed.

"Jean, stop!" The professor shouted, and was rewarded with his chair tipping from under him. Ororo righted his chair and carefully helped him into it.

"Is this how you heroes have fun," Wanda suddenly screamed from behind the crowd. "Father was right; you people are sick!" She barreled through the thin crowd that parted for her, all secretly, subconsciously relived.

Wanda came from behind, hitting Jean in the back with a sharp hex bolt. While the bolt managed to bring Jean to the ground, she recovered quickly enough, and within seconds was inside Wanda's head.

What a fascinating little mind this is. Two memories, but two complete sets. Seamless, you see the second set as real. But a duplicate is an inferior, and with that, Wanda felt a crushing flood of memories. She saw a snow-capped mountain with a single small dome on top. She saw a thin orange man sliding down a slope, and quickly she realized that she was also on skis, in a rapid pursuit. She saw her father and a man she did not recognize standing over her, and their discussion was all about her. Father? False…memories…but Father was good…wait…mental institution? Father? Images rushed through her head, memories of her swinging with her father alongside memories of her tied up and drugged on cold metal bed, but she found she couldn't concentrate because of the noise. It took her several minutes to realize that the sound was her own screams.

His claws seemed to spring out faster than usual, but Logan would not allow them to enter back. He was halfway down the stairs before he felt a delicate hand on his shoulder, and even through his t-shirt he could feel the calluses from years of tilling soil and trimming branches.

"I ain't usin' 'em on her. I just wanta bring her down enough so we can figure what's goin' on," Logan cast a glance towards Wanda, who was curled in the fetal position, still screaming. "Jean just killed one person and god knows what she did to Maximoff." He turned over his shoulder, making eye contact with Ororo for the first time.

"She's a friend and a student, Logan. How do your propose we fight someone that was close friends with almost everyone here?"

"We ain't fightin' her. Just let me distract her long enough for you to get somethin' good built up. Take her down and let the professor take it from there. How's that sit with you?"

"Just be careful, Logan." Outside, Jean was levitating a black van, allowing it to spin in midair faster and faster and faster-

CRASH!

The van smashed against the front of the mansion, against a high wall that was no more than glass and steel, a decorative touch to the mansion that now transformed into hundreds of tiny, twinkling weapons, raining down on the crowd. The van scraped down the wall, and took out both front doors before crashing to the front porch, rolling down the sairs and finally coming to rest on its side.

"Hank, get the students down to the danger room!" Charles yelled, although most of the students had already run towards the back of the institute; Hank gathered up the few still left and ran in the direction of the others as Ororo and Logan bounded out onto the grass, where Jean was busy throwing another car into the air. Logan silently nodded to Ororo, who began rising into the air until the entire institute resembled a model.

"Jean," Logan screamed, but he was cut off by being thrown fifty feet into a brick wall. He lay still for several moments until his spine repaired. "It's gonna take a lot more than that to take me out."

Then come closer and let me find out what will. Logan glanced up at the sky and saw the briefest flash of lightening, then charged forward with all the strength his legs could muster. His claws glinted with flame from one of the cars Jean had tossed in the air.

He came with five feet of her. She was no longer levitating, just standing on the ground, and there was no evil in her eyes.

Logan paused.

"Logan, help me." And then the skin on his forearms split in two, equally, running quickly up his biceps and to his chest. The adamantium glinted softly as Logan saw the metal peel from his bones. His skin continued to split and peel, gushing blood muscle as the metal bonded to his bones years prior was torn from his form. His legs were ripped from their sockets and he collapsed like a sock puppet to the ground. The last was his skull; it opened and hair and bloody flesh fell into his eyes as he allowed all his senses to dull, and he drifted into a dark chasm.

Ororo could see none of this from her spot in the sky; all she could see were the clouds surrounding her. Her eyes were shut and her mind was concentrated in silent prayer. Around her, the clouds darkened at her mind's command and lightening crackled around her. Her teeth rattled inside her jaw and she knew that she was not only pushing herself to the limit, but the atmosphere as well. The lightening crackled, spitting towards the earth below in rapid machine-gun succession. She allowed herself to float back to earth, concentrating the lightening closer and closer to Jean. She could now see small craters where the lightening had hit, a few small fires at the edges. Suddenly, her flying was disrupted, and her momentum increased exponentially and she hurtled toward the ground, crashing into the side of a fountain and snapping her arm.

I do not like the little firefly bugs, no I do not, Ororo heard before she passed out.

The door struggled against them, attempting to remain shut, but after several seconds it yielded to Scott's hands, sliding into the wall with little resistance. Scott crawled out, followed by Remy, and within seconds they noticed both Raymond's lifeless corpse with flames glinting in the drying pool of blood.

"Who's dat?" Scott approached the body cautiously; putting his back to him as Remy genuflected, making a quick sign of the cross over his chest before standing back up.

"It's Ray Crisp, he's one of the students. But who would…" He looked out the front doorway, all it was since the doors themselves lay in crumpled heaps. "Magneto?"

"Don' t'ink so, mon ami. Take a look." They both looked outside, where things had grown unusually silent. The very earth was torn up by unseen hands, and in the middle of it all, Jean floated there with a faint smile above what looked like a massacre. The ground was torn to shreds with huge mounds of dirt standing like mountains. Ororo lay motionless at the base of one mound with her arm bent at a violently odd angle. A body lay in a clearing, and Scott guessed it was Logan only because the pulpy mass of muscle and tissue and blood was still breathing by some hideous mean.

"Jean?" He whispered his question, and it seemed that it could have stopped the sun itself from rising. She stopped moving and inside his head, Scott heard

Scott? And she fell, plummeting to the earth. Scott blocked out everything else, running across the lawn at a breakneck pace, until he reached the large mound of dirt that made up the outside ring of the crater Jean had plummeted into.

Scott cautiously stepped forward, past the flaming wreckage and scorched earth, and peered into the eye of this maelstrom. He had prepared himself to see anything, even Jean's lifeless body, but what he saw still took his breath away. There, in a crater maybe ten feet deep, Jean lay huddled in the fetal position loudly sobbing. Momentarily forgetting the events of the past hour, he slid most of the way down the wall of the crater, making it to Jean's side in record time.

"I-I think I killed Rogue," She said hoarsely, keeping her back to Scott. "Oh god, Scott, I killed Rogue. And Ray. Oh, god, and what about Logan, and Ororo, and Wanda?" She asked before choking out another sob and throwing her arms around Scott. She shook against him as she continued to cry, and her sobs mixed with the crackling fire above them.

"Jean, you-he- no one's dead."

"You're lying," she said into his chest. "I can hear your thoughts. What am I? What happened?"

"I don't know, Jean. I don't know." And Scott hugged her tighter as tears began streaming down his own cheeks.

"I can't do this, Scott. I'm responsible for all of this, and I have no idea why I did it. All I remember is anger. I felt every emotion, every tiny little change. Then I got to anger, and all I could remember was every time someone called me mutie. Everything Principal Kelly did. Scott, he tried to-oh god!" Jean yelled, and her body shook with another fresh bout of sobs. The two sat in relative silence for a very long time, no sounds but tears and breathing and fire.

"We-we should get back to the others."

"I'm not going back, Scott," Jean said simply, unwrapping her arms from him. "I can't. I disfigured Logan-"

"Logan will heal, Jean." She took several steps back, pacing the length of the crater before speaking.

"But not Ray. Or Wanda. Or Rogue. What about them?" Jean waited several minutes for an answer. "I can't go back to that, Scott. I-I'm sorry; I don't know what this thing is, inside of me, but it scares me enough that I'm willing to anything I can to make sure that this never happens again." Neither had noticed, but they had both started crying again.

"Jean, no. Please, the professor can help, whatever it is, whatever is happening. There's other options." She stepped up to him, lightly, and kissed him, keeping one hand behind her back. There was another long pause, neither wanting to break the silence.

"Jean, please don't do this. I love you."

"I love you too, Scott. Promise me something."

"Anything."

"Live."