Chapter 45

It was embarrassingly brief for the last kiss of a long and happy relationship. There was just too much else going on. Kurt was trying to tell her about what had happened, and Scott's lawyer was trying to talk to him, and at least three reporters were asking loudly (but politely) for statements from them both, and Jean had to be very careful to avoid stepping on Warren, who was helping Betsy to her feet. She let Scott slip out of her arms as he turned to deal with the madding crowd, saving her own sorrow for her to process later.

In the push and jostle of the crowd, she felt hands slip around her waist from behind.

Logan? She'd thought him farther away, still back by the doors. And the hands were too big to be Logan's, anyway. She had every intention of turning around to see who it was, but somehow it seemed to be taking her a long time to react. Were they Piotr's hands? She hadn't seen or felt him in the courtroom.

The grip on her waist tightened before she'd even finished realizing it was there. It seemed like whoever it was was about to lift her into the air. That was an odd way to celebrate . . . who did she know that was both that strong and that exuberant?

There was no lift: just the increasing pressure of the hands around her abdomen. She tried to inhale, and found that she couldn't.

Then the nails of the fingers—pointed, hard nails—pressed through the fabric of her shirt and into her skin. The grip was rapidly shifting from uncomfortable to actually painful. She wanted to tell the person to let her go, or yell for help, but there didn't seem to be any time.

Then the nails were through her skin. The pain was sudden, shocking, and intense. The eight powerful fingers bored into her abdomen while the thumbs stabbed through the muscles in the curve of her lower back. The hands squeezed inexorably, forcing their way into the soft vulnerability of her internal organs. She could feel their progress in exquisite, blazing detail. It was happening so slowly, and yet she had no time to think of what to do.

She managed to breathe in, though doing so pressed out against the crushing grip. The air in her nostrils stank. Testosterone and adrenaline and the sour reek of sweat . . .

There was a rumbling, growling chuckle next to her ear. Sabertooth.

How could he have moved so fast? She'd barely been in the same room with him for ninety seconds, but she'd let her guard down. Logan had been right. She had a sudden, intense, irrational desire to call some kind of time-out, to ask if she could go back and try the last few seconds again, pay attention this time, turn around at the right moment and TK him away before he could touch her. It would have been so easy a few seconds ago.

He'd stabbed all his fingers so deep into her torso that she was worried his fingertips would meet in the middle.

I have to scream, she insisted to herself. And yet there was no time for it. And screaming required a lot of air, which would involve inhaling, and that was too much movement for her to contemplate. All her body wanted to do was hold perfectly still until the hurting stopped, to keep it from getting any worse.

The fingers relaxed their grip and slipped out of her. And then he was gone, as quickly as he'd come up behind her. The whole thing had taken perhaps ten seconds. She hadn't seen anything, and neither had anyone else. Scott was still standing in front of her, his back turned. He had no idea anything was wrong.

Jean looked down. Blood was draining out of the eight holes in her shirt, warm and wet and messy. It looked like someone had poked pinholes in a water balloon filled with tomato soup.

Gingerly, she pressed her hands against her belly, trying to hold her blood inside. How absolutely disgusting. She was making a mess all over her clothes.

She tasted blood in her mouth.

She could feel herself losing her balance. All the muscles of her abdomen, which unconsciously corrected every sway of her body to keep her standing upright, tried to steady her and then recoiled in pain. She tipped backwards, stiff and unprotesting as a board, with barely enough time to think Oh, this is going to hurt before she hit someone behind her. Everything went white as the pain became too much for her brain to handle.

The merciful insensibility only lasted a few seconds. When she came to, she was on the floor and people all around her were shouting. "She's hurt!" "That guy stabbed her!" "Somebody stop him; he tried to kill her!"

"Jean!"

The panic in Scott's voice just made everything, if possible, worse.

She couldn't see him any more than he could see her; she was staring at the ceiling, and moving her head was out of the question. She could feel his hands find her knee, then scramble up the length of her body, sliding through the slick mess of blood now coating her abdomen. He found her face, then (obviously without thinking; he'd been trained to know better than to move an injured person) dragged her into his lap and held her head against his shoulder. His hand grabbed hers and pressed it hard against the gushing holes. "Jean, talk to me. Are you awake? Can you hear me? SOMEONE GET AN AMBULANCE! Jean, you're gonna be okay, I've got you . . ."

She wasn't going to be okay. She already knew it. She felt too dizzy. There were too many people crowding around the courthouse to get an ambulance in with any kind of speed. She was going to die right here on this filthy bloody slimy courtroom floor. But it wasn't fair . . . she was running away with Logan . . .

Oh, God, Logan . . .

"Get me a towel or a shirt or something! She's bleeding! Where the hell are the paramedics?"

Wow. She'd never head Scott swear in her life.

"Give her to me."

The voice was Logan's: low, rough, and fierce. Then again, loud and furious enough to make her flinch: "GIVE HER TO ME!"

She felt Scott shoved brutally away from her, but before she could hit the ground Logan had one arm around her shoulders and the other under her knees. He picked her up . . . which hurt so much that she somehow managed a little bit of a scream in spite of it all . . . and snapped "YOU! Get us back to Avalon!"

There was a sudden, metallic hum all around her, then several cracks and crashes and a lot of astonished shouting. Something dark cut off her view of the ceiling, leaving her and Logan sealed inside a black, warm, stuffy space. She could feel herself pressed downward as the metal sphere accelerated up. There was another crash, and then silence.

"I don't see what you hope to accomplish," said Magneto's steady, stately voice. "Even a hospital couldn't help her now."

"Your machine," Logan answered. His voice was close; he had his head bowed close to hers, breathing her faint and struggling breath. "You said it could make me a mutant medic."

"It might."

"Might's good enough for me."

Logan. It had taken her a long time to remember that she was a telepath and didn't need breath to speak. That was quite silly, in retrospect.

"You stay with me, darlin'. Stay with me. Come on, Jean. Don't you dare quit on me now."

I'm dying. I'm dying right here.

"Stay awake. You stay awake, Jean! Stay with me!"

I'm staying with you. I chose . . . I promised . . . oh, God, I can't breathe, it hurts too much . . .

"Stay with me. Please."

Logan, stay with me . . .

"Rogue! Rogue!"

Rogue and Remy could both hear the tinny voice emanating from the cell phone on the floor. Rogue refused to care. This once, this one time in her life, duty could call all it wanted; she wasn't going to answer.

"Rogue, pick up! Rogue! Ve need you!"

No. No, no, no, no, no . . . She clung even more tightly around Remy's neck and kissed him harder, trying to stay lost in the dizzying mix of her soul and his.

It was no use. They both knew it. Rogue was a hero at heart . . . if someone needed her, she was going to be there. It was part of why Remy loved her. So even though she could feel exactly how much he wanted her to stay nestled under and wrapped around his body, she moved anyway, squirming awkwardly out from underneath him and tumbling onto the carpet. Remy reached after her, caught her around the back of her neck, pulled her back to him and kissed her once more . . . partly because he wanted to, but mostly because he could feel that a lot of her power was still inside him and a good portion of his was still inside her. If she answered the phone with her head so scrambled she'd probably answer in French, which was always a dead giveaway that they'd been fooling around. And while Remy certainly didn't mind Kurt knowing exactly what they'd been up to, he knew Rogue did.

Their powers mostly sorted out, Rogue grabbed for the phone, which had somehow ended up under the couch, while Remy flipped onto his back and took a second to stare at the ceiling and catch his breath. The interruption was unwelcome, but dang, kissing Rogue was a lot of fun.

"Y-yeah?" Rogue stuttered, grabbing the phone with one hand and trying to reorganize her hair with the other. Remy chuckled; even in English, her voice was a dead giveaway of what she had been doing.

"Rogue, help! Sabertooth attacked Jean and everybody's freaking out and zere's gonna be a riot here in a minute—"

The words were like a bucket of cold water.

"Ah'm comin'," Rogue told him, all traces of fluster or distraction immediately gone. She snapped the phone shut and dropped it on the floor again, scrambling onto her feet and sprinting for the front door.

She was already out the door when she remembered. Dashing back inside, she announced, "Ah love you."

"Je le sais," said Remy. "Go!"

Rogue went.

Remy made it to the front door just in time to be nearly knocked over by the shock wave of Rogue breaking the sound barrier. Glass things shattered up and down the street, every bird in every tree lunged into the air, and car alarms shrieked their startlement and annoyance. Some part of his brain warned that there would be hell to pay over the property damage, but he wasn't inclined to care. Jean . . . his friend . . . she couldn't be hurt. Not just when they'd won. Not when a happy ending for all of them was so close.

It would take him a lot longer to get back to Manhattan, but standing here wasn't going to get him there any quicker. He went to get his latest stolen car, immeasurably grateful that he'd thought to leave it safely sheltered behind the house.

It took Rogue the better part of fifteen minutes to reach the courthouse, even at her top speed. She found it in a state of absolute chaos. One of the long, tall windows was smashed to pieces and a good chunk of the wall had been torn away. The crowd outside extended for blocks and was roaring, though Rogue couldn't tell if the noise was joyful, angry, or just confused.

Inside was hardly any better. Though guards were at the doors, preventing anyone else from coming in, the crowd inside was jostling uncertainly around the room, some wanting to leave, others wanting to see what would happen next, several arguing with the guards, and everybody getting in everybody else's way. Six or seven people were lying, unconscious, on the floor. Some others were trying to help them, but what resulted was a lot of everyone getting under everyone else's feet.

Scott was leaning on the defense table, head bowed, eyes still bandaged shut. There was no sign of Jean.

Rogue dropped onto the floor in front of him, grabbed his face with both hands, and kissed him hard. It was a brusque, businesslike, no-time-to-fuss-with-taking-gloves-off kiss. Ignoring everything she'd ever learned about controlling her powers, she let herself suck in every bit of energy she could feel in him as fast as it would come.

"Rogue?" Scott demanded, as soon as he got his mouth free. The question was astonishment more than inquiry; it would be hard not to figure out that it was her.

"You gotta get this place under control or somebody's gonna get hurt," Rogue instructed. She could feel something behind the backs of her eyes getting uncomfortably hot, and everything seemed to be turning red.

She grabbed at the blindfold and yanked it down over his nose. He blinked, and she got one good look at his eyes—green; she'd always wondered—before tightly closing her own.

She felt Scott's hand grip her shoulder. "Thank you." He took her hand and made sure she had a steadying grip on the table before letting her go.

Scott Summers stuck stuck two fingers in his mouth and produced the kind of whistle that would wake the dead.

Silence followed immediately. Everyone turned to stare at him, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, he could stare back at them. Wow, colors were incredible without a red filter.

"Now LISTEN UP!" Scott ordered, his voice clear and confident. "If you are not injured and you have no medical training, I need you to leave this room. We've got hurt people here, and the paramedics can't get in unless you all clear out. So move out, nice and easy!"

And everyone did as they were told.

"Kurt!"

He didn't know where Kurt had been holed up, but he was back in a puff of smelly smoke. "Vhat about Jean?" he demanded, wide-eyed with barely concealed panic.

"Logan's taking care of her," Scott insisted to them both. "She's gonna be okay. I need you to focus right now. There have got to be ambulances trying to get to us, but the crowd's making it hard. Go find 'em and start moving some EMTs in here."

Kurt nodded and disappeared.

Scott turned his attention to the floor. He'd heard something go klang . . . where was it?

In a few seconds, he found what he as looking for: Magneto's helmet.

He picked it up and got onto the floor next to the blonde woman that Jean had called Emma Frost. The helmet was much too big for her head, but it was the only size they had. He undid his tie to fasten the helmet in place, noting as he did so that it actually was a nice tie; he'd have to thank Royal when he figured out what he looked like.

The jostling of her head brought Frost out of unconsciousness. She shifted, moaned, and grabbed for the strap of silk under her chin. Scott caught her wrists; he was a lot stronger than she was.

"No, you don't," he told her. "You're going to prison, and if you ask me, it's too good for you."

She moaned, tentatively opening ice-blue eyes. When she spoke, it was in a crisp, upper-class British accent even more marked than Betsy's. "I suppose this is where you expect me to tell you that I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids."

"Not kids anymore," Scott told her, scowling.

She cocked a half-smile. "I know. Your daydreams have made that very clear."

Scott found himself squeezing her wrists harder than he'd meant to. "You've been in my head?" he demanded.

"Regularly. I could hardly control a man with a telepath lover . . . too much awareness of how telepathy works and what it feels like. But I could keep an eye on you, under a more familiar nom de plume. And I don't recall you voicing any complaints."

Scott shoved her over so she was lying on her stomach and pinned her arms behind her, holding them with one hand while he undid his blindfold with the other. As he tied it around her wrists, he snapped, "Consider this my complaint."

Je le sais: I know. (Is it an Empire Strikes Back homage? Oh yes.)