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Rogue
Some days we didn't talk at all. We moved fast, following the stream through fields of waving yellow grass that looked as if it had been cut by pinking shears, steadily moving from the occasional trees to slowly thickening clumps. He pushed us, hard, everyday sunup to nearly sundown. That I could handle, that I expected from him, but I hadn't expected how overprotective he was acting. Worse than that, since our first days here he had become a healing factor Nazi.
"Can't afford to have you hurt," he rationalized anytime I rolled my eyes at him. He would just hold out his hand until I took a nip of his powers. He had been right, blast him, but I was real sick of people thinking I couldn't survive on my own merits.
"How long can you hold onto my powers?" he asked one night early on by the fire, camping along the bank of our new friend the stream. I shrugged and tried to ignore the haunted house noises rippling towards us through the grass. With the high octane life we had been leading our last few months on Earth, there hadn't really been time to test my limits. Charles would have been ashamed that one of his students had been so lax in her training.
"Varies, or seems to. Depends on how powerful the powers I borrow are, how much I have to use them, stress I'm under when I'm using them, stuff like that."
He grunted and grabbed for my hand. "Danger Room's in session."
God damn it annoyed me, but we figured out that with normal wear and tear, which for us was hiking in the elements over rocks and pushing through thick grassland and weeds for at least twelve hours a day with little food, water, or sleep, I could stretch my borrowing of his powers to about four hours. If there was a major injury I was healing, we theorized it would lessen the time I held onto his powers. Thankfully, he wasn't looking to test that little hypothesis. Yet. But that son of a bitch made me absorb him five or six times a day like I was taking medication. Even woke me up in the middle of the night to do it. First night he did that, I was fit to be tied.
"You've got to be effing kidding me, Logan," I hissed. I had been sleeping deep, finally. For the first few weeks, the alien smells and sounds brought into high definition by his enhanced senses had kept me on high alert like a scared little rabbit. I couldn't sleep on the uncomfortable ground, I was hot and gritty during the day, cold and tired and hungry in the dark. My dreams when I did sleep were warm cocoons of home and bubble baths and pumpkin spice lattes, of silky Cajun accents with smoldering red on black eyes. I almost didn't want to sleep because I didn't want to dream anymore, to wake to the desperation that was our current situation. Luckily for me, after a week of Logan's boot camp hikes I practically fell into a coma every night from exhaustion, his forced healing factor be damned. Perfect thing, those body draining torture sessions: deep sleep, no dreams.
"What if something attacks us in the night?" He knelt next to me in the waning firelight and his eyes were worried, but there was something else, an almost wistful quality to his stare. He insistently grabbed my hand.
"You gonna spank me if I say no?" I smirked, but he growled. He looked for a second like he was actually considering it and I felt a lecture about my disagreeable attitude coming, so I gave in. Now, we shared his power. I don't know if my skimming his was reducing his ability to heal or if it was blunting his senses, but according to him it wasn't. I guess he would know best and decided to keep my mouth shut to preserve the peace between us. Better safe than sorry on the injury front, and his healing factor meant I could walk longer and push harder with less recovery. Also helped with any sunburns, although this planet seemed wilder than the Earth in so many ways, no industrialized pollution that we had been able to spot that would have stripped away the atmosphere's natural sun protection. We were definitely lucky so far in terms of temperature, some chilly nights, but days sultry like summer, hot enough for an ol' Mississippi gal like me.
It was always so overwhelming to get a big shot of Logan's enhanced senses, but living with them on a daily basis was frightening. Everything around us was so strange already: animals, plants, trees, sky, his senses immersed me in them in ways I never wanted. The…details of everything we encountered were just a little off. It was like someone had described the elements of the Earth to an alien sketch artist, and they had drawn a tree without ever seeing one in person. Hard to describe, I know, but that's the way it all looked to me. Familiar, yet completely different. Leaves attached to trees in different spiraling configurations, bark weird patterns and textures. Things that should have been green were skewed a little blue or yellow. Rocks that looked rough felt smooth as silk, striped through with all the colors of the rainbow. An alien world in Wizard of Oz Technicolor.
Logan was right in that most of the animals were staying away from us. He seemed to put out a pretty solid predatory vibe that, so far, nothing felt the need to challenge. Didn't know how long that would last. Closer we got to the thick of the woods gathering on the horizon mustier, pungent animal smells rolled over us on the breeze like fog. Birds and bugs floated overhead and in the trees, but the smaller rodent-like animals and reptiles scattered whenever we came near. I could hear them gnawing at the edges of our path, watching, their scared little hearts thrumming. We had hunted a few of the little critters, a paranoid Logan still eating everything himself before he would let me practically even smell them.
"Are you gonna act like my royal taste-tester until we're rescued?" I joked when he grabbed what looked like a purple freckled carrot from me and sniffed it. "Come on, what's the point of making me take your power if you stop me from using it?"
He snapped off a huge bite, reminding me stupidly of Bugs Bunny, chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. "Not bad. Sort of like a carrot, but sweeter, maybe more like a squash or something? Pick a few and stuff them in your purse. Don't eat any 'til tomorrow, that should give us a good judge if they're toxic. Hopefully not, they seem to be growing all along the stream as it's been widening out. And you only take a little of my power at a time, so I eat it all first."
He got more and more tense the closer we stepped towards the forest. We were still a long walk from it, but I could smell the fear on him, the worry that soon something big and nasty wouldn't run from him but run straight for him. Following the stream as it rolled on was becoming a challenge. Near any substantial stands of trees it had started to cut down into deepening craggy bluffs that we had to tiptoe along the top of. Where the trees thinned there were soft sandy shores where we could wade in and wash and fish. The small rodents and birds we had been hunting tasted okay, but they took a lot of energy to catch. If we were stationary, I could have set up snares or traps or something, but mainly we just fished for our supper. It was easy, we were following the stream as closely as we could anyway and the fish had become more available the further we walked. I shuddered to think what we would have done if he hadn't found our water source, our whole lives were coming to revolve around it. We actually didn't even stink too badly, all things considered. A half-naked dunk into icy water wasn't my preference, but it was better than being coated in my own filth.
We weren't able to carry a ton of stuff with us. I kicked myself daily for not grabbing my bigger purse the night of Lila's concert, we could have used one to carry more a whole lot easier than my tiny bag, but at least we had that. I had made a knife and some spear points out of the deer antlers and had those and some food stuffed inside the purse. For now, Logan had been doing most of the fishing with his claws, but we were constantly on the lookout for found items we could MacGyver to another purpose. I had resisted using the bone claws I got from him on a regular basis. Popping them was painful and would use more of his healing factor, which would only make him make me absorb him more.
We were walking out of the thickest grass for the moment, and my hands feathered through the long pale plants growing sparsely out of the edge of the stream bank. I absently tugged on a river reed of some sort that looked like stretched soft grass as we passed by, but I couldn't easily tear it. I paused and knelt down to examine a long blade, found it was supple yet sturdy, folded in on itself like an accordion pleat. I unfolded it and realized it was as wide as my forearm was long. Worth messing with, maybe I could weave some pieces together and make something. I dug out my antler knife and worked to slice down a handful of neighboring plants.
"Let's get movin', there's still daylight," Logan called back to me, a strange look in his eyes. There was a worried edge to his voice, probably because I was out of sight. Or…my heightened hearing picked up a low rumble and I scanned the sky the best I could. The sky above us was clear, but the horizon was too blotted out by the clump of trees we had spent the morning slogging through to spot anything coming over the plains. The thought of thunder sent cold fear to the pit of my stomach. I shivered and picked up the pace to join him.
Logan
Some days she wouldn't shut up. You'd think that would piss me off, but I actually looked forward to those days. Her blabbing about the scenery or old missions meant she was herself, in as good a mood as she was gonna be. It was the days she didn't talk that worried me, when the smell of sadness and panic lay thick on her. I tried my best to keep her animated, to keep her moving.
It had been a long damned while since we had spent any amount of time alone together. I had drug her with me from the X-Men to the Avengers because I was worried about her after Charles' death, and, if I was bein' truthful with myself, because I wanted her there. Me and her made a good team. I had wanted her to have her shot with the big boys, and was damned proud that she had stepped up. It had also been my form of an apology to her. I had been a pretty big asshole to her before we had left Earth, and the reason why followed us like an elephant, daring us not to talk about it. About him. Fuck it, I ain't ever been one to shy away from sensitive subjects, so on one of her silent days I plunged in.
"Why'd you dump Gumbo and jump right into Magneto's bed?" I asked after she hadn't uttered a single word all goddamned day. I knew it was crass and more than a little cruel, but that's me. World's biggest dickhead. I was definitely trying to get a rise out of her, sue me, but I also wanted, needed to know. I had let her failed relationship with Magneto cause a big rift between us, and rather than deal with what it had done to the two of us, I had just ignored it, hoping my feelings of betrayal would go away. I refused to let that self-righteous son of a bitch come between us anymore, especially when he was half a universe away. She stopped and glared at me and I stopped too, crossed my arms over my chest and waited.
"You want to do this now?" she asked, her voice as icy as Bobby Drake even in the blazing heat. It was a warm day and she was stripped down to her dress with her jacket and leggings tied around her waist, hair falling from her ponytail in sweaty tendrils down her face. I just stared back at her. "You're an asshole," she growled and stalked off into the grass. I followed behind her angry steps. We were far away from trees today and a lazy dragonfly-lookin' thing the size of a sparrow drifted by on rainbow checkered wings. For the most part the bugs had left us alone; we must not have smelled right to them. They didn't smell right to me, either.
She spun in front of me, all riled up. "For the record, Remy dumped me," she said through gritted teeth. I stopped again and tried not to watch her breasts heaving under that little dress as she worked to control her temper. No doubt about it, she was a beautiful girl, god dammit, a beautiful woman, but never more so than when she was angry. It was one of the oldest cliches, but absolutely true for her, all that fiery passion made her face flush, her eyes ferocious. I didn't want to notice things like that, but she was makin' it hard not to more and more lately. I needed to get ahold of myself. I had been watching her like a starving man watched a steak and it wasn't fair to her.
I started walking again and steered around her blocking my path. "Is that it?" I asked, conjuring up my best bastard sneer. "You needed a pity fuck?" I heard her mouth snap open behind me. "If that was all it was, I'm sure Drake would have been on his knees for the chance. Or, hell, you could have come to me anytime, my room was right down the hall." Her and me together, I wasn't sure what to do with that right now, though the animal in me stirred a little too much at the thought. But I would have put on a French maid's uniform and done cartwheels for her if it would have kept her away from Magneto. I figured that my comments would have had her yelling and throwing punches at me, was kind of hoping it would, anything was better than her moping and dragging her legs through the day. We needed to have this out and leave it behind us, and if she wasn't willing to talk about it I was gonna' drag her through it kicking and screaming.
I stopped and turned towards her, ready with another snarky line, but guilt floated in my stomach at the devastated look on her face. Why had that son of a bitch Magneto gotten under her skin so badly? As far as I knew, their first little encounter in the Savage Land hadn't been much of anything, how did he still have such a hold on her? She was better than that, deserved better than that. Gumbo, I could take. If I had to. Gambit was an idiot most of the time and a huge man-whore, but he really loved her and they were good for each other, most days. Magneto was a controlling egotistical maniac who manipulated everyone he had ever come into contact with. He had to have been using her. She was a hot piece of ass to him and she had let him…had begged him to…
"I thought out of everyone, Logan, you would understand," she said sadly. Angry bile rose in my throat as I thought of them together, of his hands on her. I stalked back towards her.
"Understand? Understand what? That you spread your legs for the bastard that ripped the metal out of my fucking bones? How could you do that to me? He nearly killed me! I thought we were friends, no, more than that, you were my family!" I got in her face, the rage and betrayal I had felt for so long gushing out of me, hot and angry. "How could you degrade yourself with that monster?" She stared unblinking, and her cold, calm demeanor pulled me back to myself.
"Figured you'd understand, Logan. Understand what it was like to want something so bad with your body even when your mind knew it was wrong. To know deep down that what you wanted would make a huge mess of everything and hurt everyone, but to not be able to control the animal impulse inside you." Her comment choked out my rage and I took a step back from her. She walked forward and shoved me harder than I expected in the chest with the flat of her hands. "How fucking dare you! It's none of your goddamned business who I share my bed with! You hypocritical mother fucker! If it had been you, if it had been someone that you wanted, if Jean-fucking-Grey had come to you and told you everything you ever wanted to hear, you would have taken her and not given a good goddamn what anyone else thought or felt! She was married and it didn't even stop you!"
I was trying to get a word in edgewise, but she wouldn't even stop for a fucking breath. "… And don't try to tell me that it was different with the two of you, that you had this great unrequited love affair, it's all bullshit and you know it! I'm a grown woman with no obligations to you or anyone, I shouldn't have to explain my actions to you. Did I love Erik? Hell no, but I was attracted enough to him to be curious, and, goddammit, I was lonely! That whole mess with Moira completely turned all of us inside out and after, when I needed him, Remy dumped me like yesterday's trash! I was angry and scared and confused, and Erik was there and he wanted me! And it felt good to be wanted! Did he take advantage of me? Yes! Did I take advantage of him? Hell, yes! Was it selfish of me to give in to my impulse, my needs like some kind of animal? Maybe it was, but don't you dare make me feel guilty for something that you make a habit of!"
She stalked off into the grass and I followed. Maybe silence wasn't so bad sometimes.
Sam
"I've got a lock on them, Sam!"
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. I leaned back from the console and put my hands over my face. Exhaling slowly, I wiped the sweat away from my eyes and stared at the cold dim lights of the War Room's monitors. Hank's paw felt heavy on my shoulder. Gambit and Storm's mission had started smooth as silk, in and out of the facility with no Purifier the wiser, but I should have known it was too good to be true. When it came to the X-Men, a lucky break was sometimes too much to hope for.
"Find what we were after?" I had asked through my headset. The radar was up in the War Room, and I was manning my station like I had been on every one of their strikes, watching for anything suspicious and tracking the Blackbird's progress home. Our jet was sophisticated enough to hide from conventional radar and sensors, but the school's appropriated Shi'ar technology made for a decidedly different world view, enabling me to keep an eye on them. The two X-Men had maintained radio silence since they had initially landed, but had kept their com channels open to allow me to eavesdrop on what was happening. Once they were done and airborne, they didn't get much chattier.
"It's…promising, mon ami." I could practically hear Gambit smirking over the airwaves. I had been coordinating most of our strikes against the Purifiers, getting the intel, scouting satellite photos, planning our routes, but this facilities' discovery and subsequent hit had happened courtesy of Gambit's connections with the New Orleans' Thieves Guild. I near climbed out of my skin in frustrated glee.
"Seriously? Don't play with me here! Did you get a sample?" I tried to keep from sounding like an overexcited idiot, but for months these little missions had gotten us squat. Everyone's nerves were wearing thin with worry for our friends. My powers were still touchy, but the main concern was Lila's non-existent teleportation powers. Like me, she was unable to access her abilities without exquisite amounts of pain. Beast was trying his best, but without a sample of whatever they had injected us with, he was pretty much stuck.
"We will discuss it upon landing, Samuel." Ororo's normally calm voice also seemed to have a huge grin tugging at the edges. "Let us not get ahead of ourselves."
"O'course, cherie. Wouldn't dream of it." Gambit said smugly. "Y'just remember where this tip came from, make sure you tell that Wolverine who it was that saved his ass." My heart jumped into my throat, and I fought the urge to jump on top of my chair and pump my fists in the air. My good mood was shattered into a thousand pieces of anger and panic when the alarm on my monitors started going like gangbusters.
"Storm, you guys have company. Two hostiles, coming up fast out of nowhere!" Not there one second, right on their tail the next, two blips smaller than the jet but closin' at speeds our craft couldn't dream of.
"We see them," Storm's voice was all business. "Can you tell us what…?" An explosion shredded my eardrum through the headset. I screamed and smacked it off my face, frantically pounding the keys on the radar feed, swallowing panic, trying to get a sense of what had just happened. I scooped up the headset and screamed for Rachel at the top of my mental lungs while I screamed for Storm and Gambit through the garbled static.
"Answer me, dammit!" The Blackbird was gone, obliterated from the screen, but in the next sweep the feed went absolutely crazy, and I couldn't pick out a blasted thing. Panicked, I switched to SHIELD's view, then to some of the standard Earth radars and satellites, did a double-take when I hit the Weather-Channel's. Right over the Midwest, where the jet had last been, sat a swirling vortex of angry thunderheads laced with strokes of lightning. Sweet Jesus, let that be Ororo's doing I prayed, gritting my teeth to keep myself from throwing up.
"I'm scanning with cerebro now, Sam. Hank is on his way." For once, Rachel's intrusion into my mind was a welcome one. I knew she wouldn't stop until she found them. Hank barreled through the War Room's thick bunker doors, his face all wide eyes and pointed teeth.
"Sam?" I got up and gestured for him to take my seat.
"Mission was done, they were clear and in the air." I cued up a replay of the radar and satellite sequences complete with the audio feed. "Two bogeys came out of nowhere and then, boom, nothing!" I clicked to the weather satellite. "Well, almost nothing." The vortex had grown. My grim eyes met their mirror in his.
Hank turned to the screens, and his big furry fingers stabbed the keys. "The computers were unable to identify where the contacts originated?" I nodded and gestured to another window on the screen.
"Even fed the data into the Avengers' computer, SHIELD's database, too. Nobody can tell me where the hell they came from." Taking his glasses off and cleaning them on his lab coat, Hank frowned in the dim greenish glow of the computers.
"And yet, at least Ororo must have survived. The storm raging in place of the Blackbird is clearly not a natural phenomenon, and seems to be strengthening rather than weakening. One could extrapolate her powers as the likely source of said phenomenon." He settled his glasses low on his nose like Dumbledore, and focused on the data rolling down the screen. We settled in and scoured every available scrap of satellite information and security camera footage in the northern hemisphere while Rachel gave herself a headache trying to make a connection. Gambit was damn near impossible to pin down telepathically, or so every mind reader ever on the team had told me, and Storm's mind could be just as closed off. It was two hours before Rachel found them, another three before the pair of them floated onto the grounds of the school, scorched and exhausted. It was damn near sunrise and we hurried them into the lower depths of the school and straight into sickbay before the students could see, an injured Gambit supported between Storm and Beast. Rachel had gone to help the other teachers with the school's morning traffic.
"Ahhhh." Gambit hissed in pain as Storm slipped out from under his arm and helped him onto the examination table. His black bodysuit had been burned away over half of his chest, the flesh underneath ashy and scorched. They were both bruised, battered, and scraped.
"Lie back carefully, Remy. I'm going to have to cut away your uniform in order to get a better look at your wounds." Remy groaned and let Ororo support him as he leaned back. I scrambled to put together a tray and handed Hank his surgical scissors.
Gambit grunted while Hank started cutting. "For the record, I'm not the one taking my shirt off." Storm smiled weakly and held one of her wrists awkwardly to her chest as she backed away. I pulled a chair up for her, close enough to Remy to hold his hand if she wanted but far enough away to give Hank room to work. It was easy to forget how close Storm and Gambit had always been. He had followed her to the X-Men all those years ago, but until the recent crisis they didn't spend much time together as far as I knew. The panicked look on her normally calm face spoke volumes for the emotions beneath the surface of the usually serene goddess.
"Here, Ororo, let me see." My field training thanks to the man Cable kicked in, and I gestured towards her wrist. She grimaced and held it out for me. Her uniform had charred patches as well, her snow white hair singed black in some places, but it looked like Gambit had taken the brunt of whatever had happened to them. "Looks like a sprain. I'll wrap it up for you."
"Thank you, Samuel." Her blue cat-like eyes flicked towards Hank. "You are being unnervingly quiet, Henry." Hank moved to the supply cabinet and came back with an armload of gauze and gels.
"Merely admiring the view of our defrocked friend, Ororo." Gambit snorted and then winced in pain when Beast resumed treatment. "These burns appear to be extensive, second degree and fairly deep. I should be able to numb the pain, but you will want to stay as immobilized as possible for the foreseeable future. I'll do what I can to prevent scarring, but the possibility exists." He grimaced at Gambit. "Sorry, my friend, but this is going to hurt like the proverbial Dickens." Gambit nodded and reached out for Ororo's hand. Beast and I set about the slow and torturous business of cleaning the large patch of blistering burns that crisscrossed his chest and torso. Remy bit his lip so hard I saw blood, but the man didn't make a peep.
When Beast was done, he looked approvingly at the wrap job I had done on Ororo's wrist. "Well done, Samuel. Perhaps you should teach a first aid course to the students." I wasn't in the mood for his well-meaning banter. I was thanking God my friends were safe, but inside I was crushed. All that damned work to move against the Purifiers down the drain, we were back at square one. My anger must have shown, never really had what you called a great poker face. Gambit smiled up at me lopsidedly.
"What?" I asked, exhaustion tearing my temper apart. He winked at Ororo.
"Had this dramatic reveal all planned out, but can't stand seeing you with such a sad face, mon ami." He painfully reached into a pocket on the outer thigh of his uniform and produced a small liquid filled vial. "Did someone say, 'Best X-Man Ever'?" He grinned and my jaw dropped.
"Son of a bitch," I whispered and had to steady myself on the edge of his bed. Gambit laughed so loud he barked and held his side in pain, handing the sample to a flabbergasted Hank.
"What? How?" Beast sputtered and just stared at the tiny glass cylinder now in his big furry paw.
"The best indeed, Remy. You have even managed to render Henry speechless." Ororo patted his hand.
"Told you we'd get it," Gambit said smugly, still grinning ear to ear.