Author's Note: 'Bout time Beast got a look in...

Scene Eleven

Beast was having difficulty staying alert. At that moment, Hank McCoy was hanging by his wrists, his blue fur lank with grease and matted with both sweat and blood. His glasses, one lens smashed and the arm bent, were on the floor at his feet. Forced to work for days on the chemical that he had originally designed as a cure, allowed to rest for only an hour or two at a time, eating food not fit for rats, Beast was cold, exhausted and disheartened. He had witnessed things no man or mutant should ever have to witness, Mystique's idea to ensure he did what they wanted, humans suffering and dying because he could not perfect the chemical formula that forced the human genome to become mutant. Robert Kelly had not been the first to die.

After seven failures, the eighth experiment had looked as though the mutation accelerator would work; injected into a sedated patient, she had taken on a mutation that suggested she would become a telekinetic. When she changed, but did not die, Mystique and her boss Magneto had come up with the plan to mutate Senator Kelly. But by the time Mystique had injected Kelly, the sedated patient had died. The rational part of Beast's mind put it down to the difference in heart rate. The sedated girl, with her slower heart rate, had pumped the venom around her body slower that Robert Kelly's had. And so she had died slower. Beast hoped that it had been less painful for her than for the others he had seen. But however much he hoped, some part of him knew it was not true.

"Have you made progress today?" Vixen asked Beast quietly. She moved so quietly, not even Beast's sharp hearing had caught her entrance. He looked up with an undeniable flare of hope, which irrationally ignored the question and heard only what he wanted to hear – the voice of a friend. His head snapped up, and he was looking upon his friend, colleague and goddaughter. He smiled widely, testing the strength of the shackles that held with sudden and renewed vigour... the hope died as suddenly as it built as he saw Mystique's yellow eyes burning in Vixen's skull. He turned his head away without answering.

Mystique melted into her blue form, scales and red hair shining, yellow eyes burning. She studied Beast with narrowed eyes, watching the hope die within his eyes as he recognised her. He was so miserable... she smiled a little at that. Mystique wanted more from this experiment than her master. Magneto wanted to rule over humans, to make them suffer for their arrogance in the belief that anything different to them was substandard and wrong. Mystique wanted more, she wanted Beast to suffer for daring to believe that he could take away the gift that all mutants were given; that the gifts they had been given were wrong in some way. Mystique, like Magneto in this much, wanted there to be a day when she could walk down the street in her true form and not be attacked or stared at.

"Have you?" She asked again, stepping around so that she was in Beast's line of view. "Made progress?"

"Some." The word was hoarse.

"We will do another test tomorrow. Toad and Sabretooth are bringing us another subject."

"No." Beast croaked the word in protest. "No more."

"You would rather test it on yourself?"

Beast looked up and murmured the words "By medicine life may be prolong'd, yet Death will seize the Doctor too" quoting Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Mystique frowned at his stubbornness. She smiled cruelly at his fear and laughed that without him the mission was useless and so the tests must continue. She encouraged him forcefully that the only way to save lives was to perfect the formula.

"Mystique!" Magneto's voice, deep and commanding, blazed from an intercom. "Get up here!"

Beast and Mystique looked up towards the speaker. Both frowned at the same time, things had been quiet in the evenings, Magneto's command could only mean trouble. Slowly, hearing the faint grumble of engines he knew too well, Beast smiled. And it was that look that made Mystique turn on her heel and march from the room that was Beast's cell.