Chapter 7

Rogue didn't retreat into the X-Jet to change into her training uniform until Jean and the Professor were absolutely certain that Magneto was long gone. She did not want to be naked when that man was within fifty miles of her.

When she emerged from the plane, Piotr was carrying Logan out of Velocity. Kitty still walked beside them, one hand on Logan's head and the other on Piotr's arm, keeping all three of them safely phased out.

Gambit re-entered the hangar from the doorway that led deeper into the complex. "I found someplace," he announced. "Ain't much, but dey's room enough for us all to patch ourselves up an' get some sleep. Not too defensible, but . . ." He shrugged.

"Great," Scott told him. "Let's go."

The room that Gambit had found was indeed not much. It looked like it was supposed to be a conference room, but there was no furniture in it; just a carpeted floor and a wide, sweeping window that looked out onto the blue-green curve of the planet below them. There was only one door, which suited Rogue fine.

Hank opened up the medical kit he'd brought with him and started unpacking it. "Okay, who wants pain pills?"

"Me," chorused several exhausted voices.

Rogue grabbed an emergency blanket and a handful of alcohol wipes and flew over to Piotr and Kitty. "Here," she told them, spreading the blanket over the carpet in a far corner of the room.

Piotr eased down to his knees and laid Logan's battered, bloodied, unconscious body onto the blanket. "He saved our lives tonight," he murmured, carefully crossing Logan's clawed hands across his chest.

"Ah'll stay with him," Rogue promised, dropping wearily down onto the thick, soft pile of the gray carpet.

As soon as Piotr and Kitty had walked away, Rogue pulled one of Logan's unnaturally heavy hands onto her lap, careful to avoid his deadly claws, and tore open the first of the alcohol wipes. She could see the wounds on his skin slowly easing closed, but those weren't what worried her. She didn't want her friend to have to wake up with his hands soaked in enemy blood.

Jean moved so quietly that Rogue had no indication of her coming until she was kneeling down on Logan's other side. She, too, had changed into her training uniform. She sat silent and still for a moment, looking at Logan, then letting her eyes stray up to Rogue's. Without telepathy, she silently asked permission to help.

Rogue passed her some of the alcohol wipes.

She'd spent years resenting Jean, then months pitying her. It was so easy to dislike Jean: to be angry at her for being perfect, to hate her for hurting Logan, to fear her for the power that she wielded over the men of the Institute without even realizing how. The two girls would never be friends, despite all that they shared. But tonight, Rogue was seeing something new in Jean. There was sadness in her bowed head, reverence in the steady movements of her hands as she sponged the blood off Logan's skin. Jean was mourning tonight.

On a sunny mountainside in Japan, Rogue had once joked bitterly that in a perfect world, she would have won Scott's heart and thus left Jean free to be with Logan. It had been an inappropriate comment then, and it was worse now. But Rogue was forced to wonder . . . how much truth had there been in that idle daydream? Had Jean, too, imagined all their lives working out differently? How much of her gentleness was motivated by simple gratitude, and how much by secret things that could never be spoken?

It was none of Rogue's business. Not by a long shot. She dropped her eyes to her work, gently swabbing dried blood out of the creased skin of Logan's knuckles, the lines of his palm, around the exit wounds of his claws. She wiped the stains off of each gleaming blade, transforming them from the weapons of a killer back into the swords of a white knight.

He's starting to come around," Jean murmured. "I can hear him."

Rogue lay his hand down on his chest, carefully keeping the claws from cutting either Jean or herself. "You'd better get back. You know how he wakes up real sudden . . . and jumpy."

Jean crossed Logan's right hand over his left and climbed to her feet, moving well out of his range. Rogue, too, stood and retreated. She was still unwilling to find out if his claws could pierce her skin.

"Jean? Rogue?" Hank drew their attention back to the middle of the room. "Can one of you see about Gambit's shoulder?"

It would have to be one of them. Gambit couldn't be touched by anyone but Rogue, so either Rogue would have to treat him by hand or Jean would have to do it telekinetically. Rogue stepped up. "Ah got him. Come on and sit down, you stupid Cajun, before you bleed to death."

Gambit half-smiled at her and did as he was told. Rogue snagged up some of the medical supplies and knelt down next to him. The bullet had soundly clipped the edge of his shoulder, just below the curve of his neck, and had torn the collar of the t-shirt he slept in. A torn strip of the shirt's hem was wrapped over his shoulder and under his opposite arm, to slow the bleeding. Rogue unfastened the knot and eased the bandage off, flinching as she saw fresh blood welling up as the pressure was released. Not life-threatening, but gross.

"How's my coat?" Gambit asked, craning around to see his reflection in the window.

"It's all covered in blood, but Ah don't think it got torn." Rogue gingerly touched the slimy fabric. "Nah, it's okay."

"Bon. Help me off wid dis?" He shrugged his good shoulder, and Rogue helped him ease the coat off, one arm at a time. He was still bleeding, but she knew that the coat had its own triage priority. Remy loved that stupid coat.

The t-shirt was going to be trickier. Rogue hesitated, unsure of how to get the shirt off so she could dress the wound. Finally, she decided that the direct approach was best, since the thing was wrecked anyway. She tore the shirt open, starting at the collar and ripping down the sleeve.

Gambit grinned at her. "You got any idea how hot dat was?"

"If you try to distract me now, this is just gonna hurt worse," she told him, determinedly keeping her eyes on her work. She gingerly pulled away the blood-stiffened fabric, hesitating when she felt Gambit wince. "Sorry." She cracked open a bottle of water and dampened a handful of gauze, then dabbed it on the fabric to soften it until it would peel away without ripping open the wound any further.

She pressed clean gauze onto it, then caught Gambit's good hand and pressed it onto the bandage. "Hold onto that."

The shift in his position brought his face to within inches of hers. Rogue paused for a long, breathless second, then leaned in and kissed him.

The position was awkward and uncomfortable, with his arm wedged between them. They were both desperately sore. They were in plain view of the whole team. And the last thing Gambit needed was to raise his heart rate and speed his bleeding. But neither one cared. Rogue just needed to be close to him, to be assured by his touch and his taste and his scent and his energy that he was still there when so much of what she'd depended on had been torn away from her. She felt her body start shuddering, a sympathetic vibration reacting to the adrenalin rush that had hit him when she hadn't answered their telepathic hails. They were both cold with shock and horror and military detachment, but the heat of the kiss ran through them, reawakening deadened nerves, bringing them back to life.

They drew apart when they both felt the twinge in Remy's shoulder. Rogue carefully untangled her hands from his hair and broke their contact, though the separation left her feeling empty and alone. "Not the time or the place, Ah guess," she murmured.

"Well, I ain't goin' anywhere," Remy joked. "You just say when."

"First I'm getting you cleaned up, and then I'm sleepin' for a year. Then we kin think about 'when'." She moved around to his back and started working on peeling the stiffened cotton fabric from the exit wound.

While the team patched itself up, Kitty went exploring. She just wanted to have a basic grasp of what was around them, and maybe find out where they would find things like food and bathrooms and showers when these things became important. And though she didn't think she wanted to know, it was probably a good idea to find out if there was anyone else in this crazy spaceship with them.

The complex was a crazy maze of hallways and rooms. While this was intimidating, it did make sense: it was probably hard to build in straight lines when you were building on a lumpy, irregular asteroid instead of a nice patch of flat, securely-on-Earth ground. Kitty did her best to keep track of where she was, noting landmarks and backtracking to them when she became disoriented. Logan had taught her this; it worked as well on asteroid space stations as it did in the woods north of the Institute.

She heard footsteps. Lots of footsteps. And they were coming from the wrong direction to be made by her teammates coming after her.

Kitty ducked into a nearby wall and lay down, leaving just her forehead and eyes sticking into the hallway like a crocodile. She had to hold her breath, but that was okay; she didn't think she could have breathed anyway.

"Man, we been goin' in circles for an hour. We get any lost-er and we're gonna be back in Bayville. Don't they got maps or somethin' in this place?"

Toad. The inevitable, insufferable, wonderfully familiar Toad Talanski. Kitty almost cheered. She scrambled to her feet, gratefully gasping in the recycled air, and called out. "Hey! Over here!"

There was a sound, like a very large zipper being closed right next to her ear, and her hair flew in every direction, and Pietro Maximoff was standing next to her. "It's Kitty!" he announced.

"Kitty?"

"Shadowcat?"

"Kitty!"

Around the corner came the whole Brotherhood team: Toad rebounding off the walls with an eerie, slightly disgustingly-unhuman grace; Wanda, sweeping along in her long red coat as though promising doom and destruction to everything that tried to stand in her way; Blob, graceless but inexorable, doing his best to maneuver up a hallway that was just small enough to keep him from being comfortable; and Lance.

Kitty knew how Lance walked. She'd had a crazy crush on him for most of high school, and had stared at him more than she probably should have. She knew he was the central figure of the Brotherhood, the anchor around which the rest of the team orbited; that he moved hesitantly but defiantly, his shoulders slumped but his feet planting as though he were staking out his territory with every step. That was how Lance was supposed to walk. He was not supposed to be leaning on Blob. His feet were not supposed to be struggling uncertainly for purchase against the floor. And his face was most certainly not supposed to be that color. No one's face was supposed to be that color.

It was the color, more than anything else, that made Kitty forget instantly and absolutely that she had sworn never to speak to him again. She darted forward, phasing to avoid bumping into Toad, and caught his fevered face between her hands. "Lance! What happened?"

"Kitty," Lance murmured, and a pale shadow of a smile crossed his face. "You're okay."

Kitty brushed back his unkempt brown bangs and pressed the back of her fingers against his forehead. His skin was cool and sweaty. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

He shook his head. "Just airsick," he muttered, shrugging off his embarrassment.

"Magneto got us out before the feds moved on your house," Pietro told her. "We could see 'em closing in."

"But Rocky here doesn't like flyin' much," Toad added, sounding less than sympathetic.

"It's my powers," Lance insisted, trying to justify himself. "There's no ground . . ."

In an instant, Kitty understood. "Oh, I get it. Amara gets the same thing on boats. Look, come back with me to the X-Men. We've got all our medical gear, and blankets and stuff."

"Camp out with the X-Men?" Blob demanded incredulously.

"Hey," Kitty told him. "We've been kicked out of our houses by guys with guns. I think this officially counts as 'extreme circumstances'. All we've got now is each other."

From instinct, or old habit, or respect, or all three, the whole team looked to Lance for a decision. He nodded, pushing away from Blob a little to stand on his own shaky feet. "Let's go."

Logan hovered in drugged half-consciousness for an unnaturally long time. His healing powers only had so much energy; fighting off his tremendous injuries and blood loss hadn't left much to neutralize the morphine. And morphine gave him strange, horrible dreams, of guns and fire, screams and blood, needles and knives. He felt a snarl building up in his chest, but it caught in his throat, strangling him.

He woke up disoriented and half-choked, his claws sweeping blindly at the air, coughing and retching as though all his body wanted to do was expel all of his internal organs through his mouth. Strong, slender hands gripped his shoulders from behind, keeping him from curling up on himself, forcing his airway to stay open.

Something solid shoved its way up through his throat. He clapped his clawed hand to his mouth in time to catch four bullets of varying calibers. He stared at them, coughed once more to expel the bitter, metallic taste, and dropped them onto the carpet with a miserable, exhausted groan. A set of unique muscles in his forearms contracted, pulling his claws back through his wrists and into their housings.

"How are you?" asked Storm's voice from behind him.

"Not dead," he murmured back despondently. "Again."

His hands were clean. How could his hands be clean? He stretched one out and scrutinized it in the faint light. The skin of his arm from the wrist up was stiff with dried blood, but his hand was unmarked and smelled of rubbing alcohol. There were faint, red-brown lines under his fingernails.

That had to be Rogue. Only she would have known about how the slimy warm stickiness of bloody hands haunted his numerous nightmares. He'd fought tonight like he hadn't fought for years: as a berserker, a killer, an animal. It was a part of him he'd never wanted the Institute students to see. But Rogue had seen. Rogue knew, and understood, and forgave, and swabbed the blood off of his hands.

His right hand smelled of Jean. He tried not to think about it.

He raised his head, struggling to come to grips with his surroundings. He was in a large, dark, unfurnished room, lit only by the stars outside the enormous window. The floor was littered with people. His people. The air was full of the soft whispers of all of them breathing the slow, steady breaths of exhausted sleep.

Rogue and Gambit lay spooned together, his arm draped over her waist. It looked like she'd fallen asleep holding onto that arm, but her hands had fallen away and lay limply on the carpet. The inescapable duster was draped over them both. Scott and Jean, always more sensitive to the demands of propriety, slept side-by-side with only their interlocked hands touching. Piotr slept propped up against the wall, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulder, the much-smaller Kitty tucked under his arm and curled up against his chest. Kurt, almost invisible in the darkness, was curled into a small blue lump in one corner of the room. The tip of his tail twitched restlessly in his sleep. All of the younger boys slept in one cluster, Jamie safely in the middle, with Hank stretched out within arm's reach of Sam and Roberto. Amara was on his other side, sprawled on her back, twitching fitfully in her sleep and producing faint, unhappy moans with every other breath. At the far end of the room, Logan could just make out the dim forms of the Brotherhood: Wanda and Pietro sleeping back to back, with Toad curled up at Wanda's feet like a puppy, Lance sprawled on his back with a folded cloth across his forehead, Blob a huge mass of silent sleeping teenage boy. Next to the door was a figure that he didn't recognize at first, but when he squinted he could make out long purple hair: Betsy the telepath, from Muir.

Logan counted up the X-Men again. "Where's Charles?"

"In conference with Magneto."

He sat up. "You should probably back up to when I passed out and catch me up from there."

Storm did.

"Magneto," Logan repeated when she'd finished.

"Yes."

"Space."

"Yes. Amara and Lance are decidedly space-sick, and Bobby had a very close call, but other than that we are all right."

Logan glanced down to her leg, where the shape of a bandage was visible under the fabric of her uniform. "How all right, exactly?"

"Now that you're awake, completely all right."

"Just a little shot up."

"Yes. You took more bullets than the rest of the team put together, Logan. You were the one we were concerned about."

"And we're not concerned about Charles? With Magneto?"

"No." Storm reached out and laid her hand on a cylindrical object that rested next to her on the carpet: Magneto's telepathic-shield helmet. "I am not worried."

Charles and Eric sat side by side, drinking tea. It was, perhaps, rather a pretentious gesture, but Charles appreciated it. The warm liquid, and the comforting sense of ritual, helped to ease away the last echoes of panic that still trembled in the muscles of his arms and neck and back. He'd come so close to losing one of his children tonight . . . only a matter of a few inches had saved Scott, Gambit, and Storm, and if Bobby hadn't been able to ice up he would have suffered the long, agonizing, disgusting death that inevitably followed bullet wounds to the stomach. In his younger days, Charles had taken his share of bullets and suffered more than one brush with death. But it was easier to bear these things oneself than to watch one's children bear them. They were so brave.

"I believe it's time for my line," Eric announced. He cleared his throat, then announced, "I told you so."

"It's not time yet," Charles insisted. "This was an aberration. A misunderstanding. We can still resolve this peacefully."

"They have driven you out of your home. Out of your country. Off of the planet, Charles. What more must they do to you for you to believe me? Humans are the enemy. They have proven it tonight."

"Some are. We have to find out who ordered this attack, and expose them. This attack is enough to topple Mutant Registration, if we're lucky."

"You will not be lucky."

Charles set his cup down on the table, annoyed. "Did you bring me all the way up here simply to argue the same old argument with me? You could have just called."

Eric shook his head. "I brought you up here to keep you and your students safe. Whatever differences you and I have had, those children are still mutants. Still our own kind. I have no wish to see them hurt, either by the humans or by friendly fire."

Charles paused, holding perfectly still, studying the dark, enigmatic eyes of his former friend. "Then you have kidnapped us . . . locked us away up here to keep us from standing between you and your precious all-out war. It won't work."

"I know it won't. That's not what I have done. I want to negotiate with you, not imprison you. Neither of us will ever get what we want while we expend all our resources fighting one another. I propose a truce."

"I won't agree to anything that involves the loss of innocent lives."

"Hear me out first. You and I will agree on a set period of time—a limited time, not forever—for you to try to defeat mutant registration your way. Peaceful protest, good public relations, the courts, the Senate . . . whatever you want. I'll offer you all the assistance in my power."

"And at the end of that limited time?"

"At the end of that time," Eric echoed, "You let me try things my way, without hindrance from you."

"You know I can't stand by and just let you hurt innocent people. And neither will my students. I couldn't stop them from hindering you if I tried."

Eric smiled. "Yes, I know. Your intrepid, indomitable X-Men. I'm not asking you to lock them up. Each of us must fight for what he believes in. All I ask is that you, yourself, stand down, and that you not order them into combat on your own authority. If your young field commander wants to organize them, I'll deal with him. But right now, I'm dealing with you."

Charles leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers as he tended to do when thinking hard about something. "And if I refuse this truce?"

"Then we will remain enemies. I will try to fight for our people, you will try to stop me, and when the dust settles lives will have been lost. Mutants' lives. Children's lives. Is that really what you want? How much will you risk to prevent it?"

He would risk a lot. They both knew it. Already he had risked his students' lives over and over again in the name of peaceful coexistence. Charles considered the alternatives, weighed his options, thought of the team asleep in the conference room, thought of the planet sleeping below them.

"You said 'a limited time'," he said at last. "How limited a time did you have in mind?"

Author's Notes:

No language switching this week, really . . . everybody's a bit too on edge.