Chapter 48
The house was . . .
"Know what I t'ink?" Gambit asked, as he and Rogue stood at the end of the driveway and surveyed what was left of their home.
"Do Ah care what you think?" Rogue responded automatically, though she knew this probably wasn't the time or place for teasing him. She tugged her jacket more tightly around her chest, warding off the morning chill.
"I think dis looks like de aftermath of a much better party den what we just put up wid."
Rogue snorted.
The front doors were cut open. The hole in the library still gaped inward. Windows were broken everywhere. The lawn had been reduced to a sludge of mud and last season's grass, stirred by the truck tires and tank treads. The angel statue lay in pieces in the basin of the fountain. The few remaining patches of snow, mostly in the flowerbeds, were grainy from the new spring warmth and black from vehicle exhaust.
"Ah ain't sure Ah wanna see what they done tuh mah bedroom," Rogue observed, after another moment of depressed silence.
Remy's mind jumped back to his memory of the darkened, ransacked room. Suddenly he turned away from the house and focused on Rogue. "Since y'mention it . . . you care t'explain de outfit y'been hidin' in de back'a your closet?"
"Huh?"
"De tube top. And de pants."
"Oh," said Rogue. "That."
"Ouais. Dat."
He could see a smile threatening to force its way onto her face. "That's nothin'."
"Nothin'."
"Yeah. Nothin'."
"An' I s'pose de matchin' one Kitty has ain't nothin', neither?"
"Nope." The devilish smile suddenly won out. "And neither are the ones that Jean and Amara and Tabby have."
Jean, Amara, and Tabby. Gambit's brain skipped a gear and shuddered to a halt.
"Hey, it's Scott!" Rogue suddenly cried, jumping a couple feet in the air to get a better look at the car approaching up Greymalkin. "Scott!" She waved her whole arm and zipped away to meet him.
Remy followed almost passively, still struggling to cope with the idea of the five hottest girls of the Institute in black faux leather and tube tops.
The car pulled up to the gate, and Scott jumped from the back seat. "Hi, Rogue!"
Rogue dropped into his arms and hugged him hard. "We made it! We're home!"
"No place like it," said the driver of the car, stepping out and slamming his door. "At least, I hope not. What a mess."
"C'est vrai, ça," Gambit muttered.
"Guys, this is Jeremy Royal, my lawyer, and his boyfriend Tony. Royal, Tony, this is Rogue her boyfriend Gambit."
Handshakes ensued.
"We brought work gloves and shovels," said Tony, popping the trunk of the car. "And lots of bottled water."
"The rest of the team is supposed to be here by noon," Scott informed them.
"Well," said Rogue, tying her hair up into a messy knot at the top of her head, "we better get to work, or ain't nobody gonna have anyplace tuh sleep tonight."
"What a mess," said Bobby.
"Holy cow," said Jamie.
Roberto just whistled.
"Quit starin' and start cleanin'," Rogue ordered, dropping from the sky above them and shoving a broom into Roberto's hands. "The good news is that the bunker ain't got any holes in it, but the bad news is that the Marines been living there for a month and they are SO losin' their security deposit."
"The bunker is still habitable?" Professor Xavier asked. He was the last one out of the spheres, as he had to wait for Magneto to lift his chair out onto the driveway.
"Sorta," Rogue told him. "Ask Scott. Ah got work tuh do."
She indicated Scott's location with a jerk of her head. He was approaching from the front door of the ransacked house.
"Professor Xavier!"
"Hello, Scott." His star pupil looked a little thinner than he'd been when last Charles saw him, but he walked with energy and was grinning. "How are you feeling?"
"Never better. Well, except for . . ." He gestured vaguely to the house.
"Tell me the worst of it," Charles requested.
"It's not that bad. Well . . . relatively. The bunker's still intact. The power's out, but we've got one of the backup generators working. Water okay, sewer okay. Gas is out. And I think the city stopped picking up our trash and recycling."
"Will everyone have a place to sleep tonight?"
"It'll be a little crowded, but we should be okay."
"Well, that's a relief."
"Yes, sir." Scott waited a moment, watching Rogue hustle the younger X-Men towards the work to be done. When he was assured of some measure of privacy, he asked, "How's Jean?"
"Neither better nor worse. Logan is staying with her."
Scott smiled. "Good. I wouldn't trust her to anyone else."
Professor Xavier looked the younger man up and down. Oh, Scott. And Eric says I trust people too easily. You have so much faith.
He said nothing about it. He never would.
"How is the rest of the house?" he asked instead.
"It's a mess, but salvageable. Most of the basement's shot, obviously. The main floor is sort of okay, or it will be if we can find something to block the hole in the library. And the second floor . . . well, the stairs are gone."
Professor Xavier nodded. "That is a bit inconvenient."
"It was them or us, sir."
Magneto walked up behind Charles's chair, surveying the wrecked house with his impassive gray eyes. "Most of the metal in your wall is still there," he observed, tapping into his own ability to sense magnetic fields. "It's only a temporary fix, but . . ."
He narrowed his eyes at the wall. It hummed, moaned, and wrenched back into place. Most of the repair was bare, shining steel, devoid of plaster or insulation, but at least it was flat and vertical and would keep the wind out.
"I can probably build you a temporary staircase, too, though I can't vouch for its aesthetics."
"That would be a big help, actually," Scott conceded. "I hope you don't mind me saying, um, Mister Lenscherr, but you're being unusually helpful. For a . . . villain."
"You won the wager," Magneto informed him. "Fair is fair. You'll find some food and basic supplies in the larger sphere; it should be enough to tide your team over until you can unfreeze your financial accounts."
"I'll get someone to unload it," Scott told him, glancing around the wrecked lawn for someone in need of a task. "Hey, Piotr!"
As the two young men headed for the sphere, Charles commented, "I don't recall supplies being part of our arrangement."
"Avalon will be abandoned by the end of the week. It's not as though I was planning to eat all the leftover perishables myself."
"Very true. After all, It couldn't be that you wanted to help us get back on our feet. That would be embarrassing."
Magneto didn't respond. Charles, with some effort, resisted the urge to reach inside his head and spy around a bit.
"Almost as embarrassing," he continued, "as that moment in the courtroom when you tried to put your helmet onto that telepath instead of donning it yourself."
Eric scowled. "It was idiotic. If I'd protected myself first, I could have taken her down in seconds."
"But you didn't protect yourself first. You tried to protect everyone."
"It happened too quickly. I had no time to think. I acted on impulse."
"The impulse to protect others before yourself."
"Don't psychoanalyze me, Charles."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
Silence hung between them for a moment, strangely loud against the background of the young X-Men shouting orders and questions at one another as they worked.
"All this chaos has produced a lot of publicity for the school," Charles commented at length. "Our enrollment will probably increase by a fair amount next year. We may need another teacher."
Eric chuckled and shook his head. "I tell you that you trust people far too easily, and this is your response?"
"I thought it sensible. If I trust too easily, then there should be someone on staff who doesn't trust anyone."
"You can't be serious."
"Perfectly so. What were you planning to do, anyway? Return to Avalon and orbit the earth in isolation, coming up with another evil scheme to kill us all?"
"You make it sound so awfully melodramatic."
"Well . . . of the two of us, I'm the only one that's never appeared in public in a cape."
To Charles's surprise and delight, Eric actually laughed.
The next few days were busy for everyone.
Scott led the charge in getting the house cleaned and repaired. If he was worried about Jean, he never let it show; he was calm, focused, organized, and positive, insisting in his manners and behavior that everything was going to be all right now.
Magneto helped with repairs occasionally, but spent more time away, shuttling Avalon's inhabitants home and bringing supplies and equipment down from the station. Pietro was ostensibly helping with this, but Wanda and the other Brotherhood boys turned down any offers of help from the X-Men and stayed focused on putting their own house back together.
Amanda went home, with Kurt in tow, to have a confrontation with her parents. Kurt didn't tell anyone, even Rogue, how the conversation unfolded, but two days later Amanda arrived at at the house in work clothes, bringing a plate of cookies baked by her father.
Tabitha showed up at the gates three days after Scott's ruling, with a backpack full of clothes and a teasing wink for Scott. She proceeded to kick Jamie, Roberto, and Ray out of the four-bed dormitory they'd been sharing, insisting that she and Amara would need the space. True to her prediction, the next day Amara called from JFK, where her flight from Brazil had just landed. Tabitha was dispatched in Scott's car to go pick her up and bring her home. She brought the car back with cookie crumbs in the seats and a dent in the fender. Scott decided not to say anything.
Another interesting arrival showed up in a convertible even nicer than Scott's. Warren Worthington III, his magnificent wings poking through holes cut in the back of his Princeton t-shirt, pulled up in their driveway with all his worldly possessions in a matching monogrammed luggage set. After his very public exposure, and days of interviews and press statements about mutant rights, his father had fired and disowned him. Warren had retaliated by selling all his WI stock, moving the proceeds to an offshore account, and driving to Bayville. Professor Xavier welcomed him warmly, and set him to work repairing the fountain in the front garden with Betsy, who'd been released from the hospital that morning and was staying with the X-Men until Professor MacTaggart decided it was safe to return to Muir.
The biggest surprise arrived, not by car, but on foot. The sun was starting to set on their fifth day of cleanup work when a lone figure walked up the driveway.
Remy, kneeling in the flower bed with Rogue and Kitty, sat up and shielded his eyes against the slanting orange light. "C'est qui, ca?"
Rogue frowned. "Ain't another reporter, is it?" They'd been having some trouble with reporters hunting stories while the team was trying to get work done.
"Reporters wouldn't come on foot," Kitty observed. "Should I go get Scott?"
"Mebbe you better," said Rogue. Thoughts of Sabertooth skittered through her head, slowing her breathing and sending her into her well-trained, overly calm panic mode.
Kitty was just climbing to her feet when the plastic sheeting that was serving them for a front door rustled. Storm stepped out onto the pavement, then froze. She stood paralyzed for a moment, staring down the driveway at the oncoming figure.
Then she shrieked: a trembling, octave-jumping cry so unlike her usual calm that all three of the students jumped. "EVAN!"
She jumped down the front steps and ran as fast as her long legs could carry her. Rogue jumped up and shot after her, with Remy and Kitty close behind.
Storm reached her erstwhile nephew first and threw her arms around him, ignoring the rough, stiff carapace that encased his torso and arms. "Oh, Evan . . ."
"Hey, Auntie O," said Evan, gruffly. His voice had dropped since Rogue and Kitty had seen him last. His mouth crumpled a little with the tension of refusing to cry.
"Where have you been?" Storm demanded. "Your poor mother . . ."
"I saw the news about Scott," Evan told her. "I found it on a paper in the trash. And I thought that . . . well . . . I thought maybe it was time to come home."
Logan knew Jean was waking up before she even twitched.
Avalon station had been growing quieter and quieter as sphereloads of people went home. The engines, now only maintaining life support on a few levels, had faded from a roar to a hum. Logan was now surrounded by mostly empty, dark, abandoned passages. Not that he cared. The medical bay was bright, the refrigerators and freezers were still working in the kitchen, and the corridors between the two were still acceptably warm.
The only other person he'd seen in days was the nurse, Liz. Logan didn't know her very well, but was as impressed with her as his exhausted, distracted state would allow. She just stayed, patient and competent, making sure that Jean's monitors were functioning. She sat up with Jean when Logan fell asleep, and kept to herself when he was awake. Logan found himself barely noticing her presence, except as a vague, comforting awareness of medical training close to hand.
Though neither of them were telepaths, she, too, knew that something was different.
Logan had been asleep, seated in a chair next to Jean's bed with his torso and head leaned forward to rest on the blankets. He awoke with jarring abruptness, eyes snapping open while the rest of his body remained perfectly still.
Jean was waking up. He knew it. Something, in his dreams or in his extra senses, told him.
Liz got up from her chair at the far side of the room, where she'd been reading a paperback novel that someone had forgotten to take home with them. She picked up Jean's wrist and checked the pulse, counting off the beats against her own watch. "Yep," she said, in response to Logan's intense, inquiring eyes. "Her pulse is up."
Logan took Jean's other hand in both of his, chafing her cold, slender fingers. Come on, Jeannie. Come on. You can do it. Come on, Red. Come back to me.
Her breathing changed pace, first hitching, then resuming at a faster, deeper pace. Healthy breaths. Then tiny muscles in her face began to twitch, one at a time, as though her body were doing a systems check. Logan felt her thumb tap involuntarily against his hand.
Her eyelids twitched open. Her pupils dilated almost closed at the sudden inrush of fluorescent light. Then her gaze flicked up, down, sideways-under her conscious control.
Logan tried to say something, and found to his surprise that he couldn't make a sound.
Liz stepped up instead. "Jean," she announced gently, "My name is Liz. I'm your nurse. Do you know where you are?"
The dancing blue eyes focused on Liz's face, then on Logan's. Logan suddenly found he couldn't breathe, either. This was killing him. He had never in all his life wanted something as he now wanted Jean to see him, and know him, and smile.
She didn't smile.
"I don't know where I am," she said in response to Liz's question, turning her gaze back to the nurse.
"That's okay," Liz assured her. "That's just fine. You're on Avalon station, and you're safe, and you're being taken care of. Okay?"
"Okay," Jean echoed.
"You've woken up, and that's a really good sign. You're doing great. Can you tell me what the last thing is that you remember? Anything at all."
Jean glanced back at Logan again, her eyes examining his face.
"No," she murmured. "I don't remember anything."
C'est qui, ca? Who is that?