Disclaimer: I do not own X-Men. You know why? Because The Man won't let a good Kenchi get a foothold in this world. I see how it is! Yeah! Well, there will be a reckoning, ladies and gentlemen! There will be a reckoning!

I'll show you! You'll see!

Chapter 5: Ride Into the Danger Zone

"That's the end of the simulation, guys."

Another day, another training session. Time in the Danger Room had to be rationed out to all of the student squads. All of us had to get some kind of practical experience fighting and doing missions, and the senior X-Men had to get their training in as well. Squads got two sessions of two hours each, every week.

We had to make them count. It was the closest thing to field experience we were supposed to get anytime soon.

They weren't sending kids out go fight anti-mutant terrorist cells and all of the other supervillains the X-Men tangled with every so often.

...Yet.

I watched the false jungle environment around us vanish, and felt the climate of the room change from wet and humid, to the original stagnant air of the Danger Room's default state.

It had been a good session, at least in my opinion. Nothing had gone catastrophically wrong. No one had gotten shot or cut to pieces by the gun-toting loonies in the sim. There hadn't even really been any specific hitches. All in all, it had been a good day.

I stood up straight and stretched my back out. The pops were extra satisfying, coming after a job well-done. What was also satisfying was commentary on just how awesome I had been. I could never get enough of that.

Hisako gave me a little shove in the middle of my stretch to get my attention, "Not bad, Sol," She said, actually saying something good about me to my face for once, "Your shots were on-point."

I grinned at the compliment. I'd been practicing a lot. I'd learned just how valuable precise aim could be from my little run-in with the Reavers. I wasn't a sure shot just yet, but I was getting good enough to the point that if someone told me to hit something, everyone who knew well enough would believe that it was going down.

Well, one nice thing said deserved another.

"Back at you," I told Hisako in return, "When you were charging through that village, I wish we weren't fighting holograms. I'm sure the looks on their faces when you armored up and barreled through everything would have been priceless."

Miss Pryde clapped as she entered the Danger Room, a big smile on her face as she walked over to us. Saberwolf trailed behind her, his tail idly swishing in the air as the hydraulics in his legs softly hissed, "Good work, everyone. It looks like everything is starting to come together. What did I tell you?"

"Shut up, focus, and stop getting into trouble," I said, getting a few chuckles and a roll of the eyes from our advisor.

Miss Pryde's rolled her eyes in my direction, but i know i saw a smirk. She had a good sense of humor for a teacher. At least when we weren't training or about to be killed.

"I never said that," She told me.

"Well not like that exactly," I said, shifting around in place, "But the message was still there."

"I've got a question," Eddie cut into the banter between me and our teacher, raising his hand before pointing to Saberwolf, "Why is that thing in here watching us fight?"

I looked over at Saberwolf and then back to my flying teammate, "Because he wants to be?" I offered as an explanation, "You just go right ahead and move him on out of here if it's such a big deal."

Eddie didn't seem eager to take that offer. None of Saberwolf's blades were out, but he knew about them. Why wouldn't I talk about the goddamn chainsaw in his back?

For the most part, Ruth and Miss Pryde were fine with him. He'd helped save Ruth, so he was just as cool with her as he was with me. He made sure we didn't get killed long enough for Miss Pryde to arrive with help, so she had a more wary wait-and-see approach.

She wasn't particularly nervous about the prospect of fighting him. She could phase through him and short him out.

Eddie and Hisako were another story though. Full disclosure when Saberwolf first started hanging around revealed that his purpose was based on the idea of Sentinels.

I had to tell my team what he was and where he came from, even if no other student in the school was smartened up to everything surrounding the episode with the Reavers, mostly because of how my friends responded.

I was specific when I said that he was not a Sentinel himself. But they were still kind of scared of him. Fair enough, as he was a walking weapon, but I would have thought that kids living in a school where they're taught to try and work for harmony would have been quicker to give Saberwolf a chance.

Then again, I had been sort of hard on him too until he'd saved my ass.

Also, I was a dog person. Even robot dogs. Go figure.

Saberwolf lowered his head and apologized... as 'killer robots' often did, "My apologies. I did not intend to disrupt your team's training program. I am merely… bored."

Which was entirely understandable. Freedom wasn't exactly useful if you didn't know what to do with it. And what exactly was he supposed to do to pass the time at the Institute?

He was an A.I., not a mutant, so he couldn't register as a student and go to classes. The only people he knew were on my team, and half of them didn't trust him. If he walked around campus by himself, he was met with confusion from the students and suspicion from the staff. That left me to hang out with him, for the time being anyway.

If you had told my 6-year-old self that in ten short years he'd be hanging out with a talking robot wolf, you would have risked making him pee his pants with excitement.

I walked over and gave him a few pats on the head. I idly figured it might have been demeaning halfway through, but he didn't move away, "I would have let you do the simulation with us, but it's not my call," I said, "I don't even know if you'd find that fun. Do you even know what you think is fun?"

"It is fine," Saberwolf sounded almost resigned at the current state of things, "I suppose a part of embracing one's own freedom is finding the things that they enjoy doing for oneself."

In the meantime, Eddie landed and went over to Ruth, who sat over near the edge of the Danger Room platform, kicking her legs aimlessly, "Hey, uh... can you do your weird telepath thing and dig up if that thing is just waiting to kill us all?"

Ruth turned back over her shoulder and frowned in his direction, considering his request, "She cannot, no. Yes, sorry. Bellamy says Saberwolf thinks like a human, gains data like a human, but his mind is still a machine, so she can't read it."

If I could hear him, I knew Wolf could too.

Alright, that was enough of the in-team dramatics. I didn't have the patience to stomach it that day. I needed some quality Bellamy time.

XxX

"Wolf, your kill-death ratio sucks. Step it up," I said as he and I split-screened a multiplayer match on a first-person shooter game, "You're an A.I., I figured you'd be better at this sort of thing. You're good at fighting games."

"Fighting games are a matter of reading patterns and action/reaction," Wolf's machine-generated voice rang out from in front of the big-screen TV where we were sitting in the common area, "There are too many random variables for me to perform as well in the situations provided by this game. Also, it is wholly unrealistic. Nothing I have learned about combat is useful in this... Call of Duty."

He was doing terribly. 3-and-14. We wound up losing that match. I blamed him. Pull your weight, Saberwolf.

"Yeah, it's more of an A.D.D. twitch shooter than anything involving strategy," I admitted, wincing at the sight of Wolf being butchered by some guy camping in a high-volume corner of the map, "Save that plan of action shit for when we play Battlefield or something, Sun Tzu."

It was a Saturday, which meant no classes and no training. There wasn't really anything I could think of doing, plus I would be damned if I was going back to Salem Center anytime soon after the last time I'd gone. So, lots of lazy time on the couch in front of the TV seemed like as good a thing as any to pass the time. And I figured if Wolf was sticking around for a while it would be better for people to get used to him sooner rather than later, hence the choice of using the common area.

The two of us watched lots of movies and played a lot of video games. We hooked up one of his ports to my PS4 out of the blue one day and surprisingly enough, he could register as a wireless controller. That made him three times cooler in my eyes. However, he could not connect to an X-Box.

...Goddamn Microsoft.

We usually played games in my room, but it was kind of sad to hang out with your robot friend all alone in the confines of your own personal space. So I figured, share the love and all that noise. We got a lot of looks from passing students, but for the hour we had been sitting down, no one had really brought up anything about it.

"I do not want to play this game any longer," Wolf told me after another poor performance on his part. We won, but his KDR was again reprehensible. I would have wanted to stop too if I were playing like him, "...If I had the choice, I would like to play the football game from yesterday."

I shrugged and started reaching for the case holding Madden when he stopped me.

"I said 'football', not 'American football'."

I let out a sigh and moved to grab for FIFA instead, "You were built in this country. Call it soccer like every other American," I said, switching out the disk to what he wanted, "You would pick the game I suck at."

"It is amusing to watch you fail."

"Oh really? 2-and-20."

The reminder of his lowest first-person shooter score today shut him up, for the time being at least. Long enough for the game to load up and for us to pick teams, "Cheap, metal fuck. Stop picking Real Madrid," I said.

"I will stop picking them when you find a way to beat them," He replied as he received the ball first, "You defend poorly."

There would have been more to say on my behalf if he hadn't immediately begun carving up my pathetic excuse at getting the ball from him, "Why does a robot wolf know how to play soccer?"

"Football."

"Soccer."

"Every other country in the world calls it football."

"As long as you're on American soil, it's soccer. Be a patriot, Wolf."

A sharp gasp preceded a loud call of, "Whoa!" Before a bright figure moved past the screen and fluttered in front of Wolf. Unfortunately, this was also in front of most of the screen, so I couldn't see. I was promptly scored on, by my opportunistic opponent.

I dropped my controller on the couch and set my head in my hands as the crowd roared and looked over at the person responsible for my 1 point deficit.

A girl was in front of Saberwolf, poking at him and seeing how responsive he was to her prodding. She had pink hair, pink eyes with black where the whites where supposed to be, and brightly colored fairy wings that flittered as she hovered just off of the ground right by us.

'Huh. Neat,' I thought for half a second before turning my attention back to the game, trying to take advantage of a distracted Wolf and attack while I had the chance. He wasn't so distracted that he couldn't defend and take the ball away, at which point I paused the game, "His name is Saberwolf," I said, getting her attention, "...My name is Bellamy."

A blush lit up the freckles on her cheeks, presumably out of embarrassment at having overlooked me for as long as she had, "Oops. Sorry. It's just, well, I didn't know students could have things like this. I don't even know anyone who does!" She had a sort of accent that glided over vowel sounds and gave a little roll to the r's.

I wasn't the only person who kept weird stuff around them. Miss Pryde had a dragon that we saw every now and again when it decided to tag along with her for team sessions. A dragon. How weird could a robot wolf be after that was thought of as normal?

"Well, he's not mine," I told her, "He's not really anyone's. He's just hanging out with me until he decides he's not anymore. Why he's not saying any of this himself, I don't know."

"Because I am waiting for you to unpause the game and face your inevitable defeat," Wolf said, his tail swishing around the air, just waiting for thing to continue.

The girl with us let out a gasp, her face absolutely lighting up after hearing him up-close, "That's so cool. What does he do?"

Sensing that saying, "kills things" wouldn't go over so well, I went a more thoughtful route.

"Uh..." I began eloquently, "He was designed for... defense?" I said/asked Wolf. He gave enough of a nod to indicate that what I'd said was fine, "He's just hanging here with me for a bit. I'm sorry, I didn't get your name."

"Megan," She said, moving over to sit down between me and Wolf after I made some space, "I'm in your year."

None of my classes though. I'd have noticed someone with bright, pretty wings like that. I may have seen her before in passing, but there were so many kids with unique looks, wings included, it was hard to say for certain.

Which brought about the question of how and why she knew enough to know we were in the same year.

She laughed when I asked, getting my attention for a moment away from the game I'd unpaused, "You're the guy who shot Julian Keller in the face. Duh!" I must have looked confused, because she rolled her eyes and gave me a nudge, "It was on the main lawn, right when classes had let out. Everyone saw it."

That, or the rampage he almost went on afterwards. It put a smile on my face in hindsight. What did that say about me?

"So are you excited about the squad challenges?" Megan asked after a little while of watching Wolf smack me up at FIFA. I was hardly making a fight of it, "You're new, right? You've never done one."

I was aware of it, but didn't know how I felt. I wanted to do it because I was competitive, and loved the idea of winning at anything. On the other hand, as a squad, we were still undermanned, and I didn't have enough experience to be a real game-changer. I hated losing, but I didn't expect to win, so I already knew I was probably going to be a miserable, confrontational wretch, both during the challenges and after they were all over.

My enthusiasm was constantly in flux over the whole thing as my senses of optimism and realism battled it out in my mind. What can I say? I'm a complicated guy.

"So, do you know what these things are like?" I asked, trying to pick her brain a bit on what I could expect. I had talked to my team about it, but they had never stood much of a chance and thus didn't get a whole lot of field time before they were swept. Maybe Megan's squad had done better in previous challenges, "Is there fighting?"

"Well, sometimes. But it's never the point of whatever the challenge is," She told me. I split my attention between her and the game, but kept noticing her looking over at me, trying to get a good glimpse of my face, "Were you wearing contacts this whole time? I could have sworn your eyes were yellow."

I grunted in annoyance. They were yellow when my team simulation ended. I'd been sitting idle for too long, "What, are they green now?"

"-Ish."

"It's not a big deal. I passively absorb light," I said, turning her way to give her a better look, "My eye color is kind of the easy way for me to keep track of how much I have. Green means more power than yellow," The clock mercifully bled out, giving Wolf the 5-0 win. If an expressionless robot face could look smug..., "Alright, I'm going to go find something to get into, unless you want to play," I offered, holding the controller out to Megan.

Megan regarded the device for a second before scrunching up her nose, "No idea how to play. I'd do worse than you."

"That would be quite the accomplishment," Wolf chimed in, the first thing he'd said in minutes. He got a middle finger gestured at him from me out of Megan's view. You know, because 'gentleman', and all that. He ignored me entirely.

I may have turned an A.I. built for combat into a video game junkie. Absolutely outstanding.

Getting up from my seat, I grabbed the bucket hat in my lap. I had taken to wearing headwear with brims whenever I went outside, especially on sunny days, because catching tasty energy buzzes from Mother Nature got old. I got enough passively without bathing in sweet, delicious light.

Saberwolf looked torn between coming with me and continuing to play video games on his own. I waved him off and took the conflict out of his decision, "Take your time. I don't think anyone would be willing to steal my PS4 while a big metal wolf is sitting here playing it."

His head turned right back to the screen. I was no longer important to his world. Shed a tear for me, "I will continue to play. I will return the Playstation 4 and accessories to your room when I am finished, or upon your request," I gave a sweeping gesture to the TV, motioning for him to play on and was then on my way.

Hey, if that was what he wanted to do, so be it. He was a big boy... dog... robot-thing. He could make his own decisions without me. At least he had something he liked to do.

As for me, I was quickly finding out that boarding schools tended to be very boring.

Most of the time, there were teams or clubs at schools to keep kids out of trouble even private schools where the kids lived. The closest thing we had were the X-Men Training Squads, and we couldn't do that all of the time after we got out of classes. That left a lot of time just hanging in the air. Forget the fight for our rights, a lot of us were just trying to fight the still life.

It was amazing that more students didn't get into more catastrophically troublesome situations than they did. There wasn't really a whole lot else to fill their time.

I started walking around the campus proper, only to find that Megan had followed me outside, "What's up?" I asked, wondering what she wanted.

Megan kept the pace of my gait while she flew in the air next to me, "You look bored too," An astute observation, "I think I'll go find some of my friends. You doing anything?"

I was about to open my mouth and say 'go find Mister Logan to see if he'd let me pick a fight', but when I played it out in my head, it didn't exactly sound like the kind of thing that would draw people to you. Megan didn't seem like she'd think the idea of someone who enjoyed a blood-and-guts throwdown with the scariest staff member at the Institute.

In the end, I did agree to go with her to meet her friends. Hopefully, I wouldn't end up making them hate my guts the way I had with the Hellions, presumably, mind you, as I hadn't really interacted with them since the first time. Then again, with me and the amazing first impressions I tended to leave on people, there was a 50-50 chance of things going sideways.

"What do kids do for fun around here?" I asked, as Megan continued to lead me along to wherever she planned on searching for her friends. I barely knew what kids did, period. Back home, I buried myself in movies, TV, and video games. Now… well, I was kind of living it, what with the superpowers and all.

It kind of made a lot of that seem boring when you could do most of it or find someone who had done most of it for themselves.

She wound up leading me to the basketball courts where a bunch of pickup games were going on. Instead of any of the kids playing, she took me over to some kids sitting on the bleachers, watching.

There was a werewolf-looking kid. He didn't seem particularly scary though, mostly because he was smaller than me. Nicholas Gleason, or Wolf Cub. Nicky was a good guy. More timid than you'd expect, but then again his mutation manifested when he was still really young. I could only imagine how much that sucked.

There was also another guy with a flaming head. He looked like the son of the Human Torch. It was awesome. Ben Hamill, aka Match. He was tippy-top dog on his team, the undisputed leader. He was definitely good at his job, but he had kind of a short fuse. (Ha!)

That was the end of the kids with extraordinary looks.

There was a guy with pretty boy dark hair and big headphones on that I could still hear his music through as we got closer. Mark Sheppard, codename DJ. His powers were weird, but cool. They changed depending on what kind of music he listened to.

And the last member of Megan's team present that day was Hope Abbott, codename Trance. She had brown hair that went down to her neck, and kept it out of her face with a pair of barrettes. Hope was easy to get along with, but she was a bit of a scaredy cat, which I could understand, because her power involved astral projection and left her body a sitting duck.

They had another teammate, but she wasn't there when I met the others. She wasn't really a people person.

"Hey, guys!" Megan said, flying over to her friends, "Sorry I took so long. I saw something interesting in the dorms, got my attention."

Hope looked at Megan, then at me, "Does this something have a name?" She asked with a grin.

"This something is called Bellamy," I replied, playing along, "Always nice to meet people who don't want to use me for practice with their powers."

"He has a robot dog!" Megan blurted out, before looking embarrassed, "...Sorry. I thought he was cool and didn't know if you were gonna say it."

Ben raised a flaming eyebrow, "That thing is yours?" Apparently he'd seen Saberwolf walking around campus while out of my presence.

"He's not mine, and he's a wolf-A.I.," I clarified, damn near on autopilot, "I did bring him here though, so he's sticking around for a little while. Yep. He owes me a favor after I got him out of trouble."

I learned a nice little method of bonding with others, explaining some of the circumstances surrounding the new and interesting things around campus. Being in the know was good, especially when you were directly involved with cool shit.

I gave them the highlights of my escapades, including how I met Wolf (leaving out what he was supposed to have been used for). I didn't talk about the experiments, because I was still getting over that in my mind. I also may have embellished my role in bringing about the defeat of Donald Pierce, but come on. No one else was there, and I didn't feel like dredging up the play-by-play memories of how he slapped me around more than I gave it to him.

What I told them wasn't entirely untrue. I wanted them to like me, so yes, I churched up my role in events. Just a bit, though.

"-And then I blacked out," I said, finishing my story with a shrug, "I guess the X-Men dragged me back to school after that. I think they got the rest of the Reavers. Don't know if they found what was left of Pierce."

Huh… he might have still been alive, even though Saberwolf cut him in half. He sure wasn't screaming at us like a guy who was about to die.

…It was probably best not to think about that right at that moment.

"So what did it feel like?" Ben said, getting my attention. It shouldn't have been that hard, seeing as how he was covered in flames all the time.

"Huh?" What did getting hit by Pierce feel like? I could find some rebar and smack him in the head with it, let him find out that way, "He was a cyborg, man. It was like fighting a person made of metal."

The flames on his head intensified for a bit before he tried again, "No. A battle. A real battle," There was a little more bite to his tone this time. See? Temper, "Our advisor tells us all the Danger Room sims in the world aren't a substitute for the real thing. So? You had one. What do you say?"

I had two actually, though the first one consisted entirely of me running away more than actually fighting. Even so, I knew what I wanted to say. My thoughts quite often drifted back to those two real times that I had almost died. I was still very new to the concept of fighting for my life.

"Well... it's faster," I started to say, looking down at my hand and loading up some light energy behind my palm as quickly as I could. It was a warm, comfortable feeling. Knowing that I had power always calmed me down when I started to panic, "At least it feels like it. Whatever adrenaline you have working in the Danger Room, it's nothing like it is for real. We're told to always treat it like a real fight in there, even though we've already been told that nothing in there will kill us. Your body knows the difference out there."

"Is it harder or easier?" Hope asked.

"It's different," It was the best way I could explain it, "The Danger Room is smarter. It knows what it's doing more than real enemies do, but real enemies are harder to predict. You never know when they'll do something really panicky or really stupid-dangerous. Does that make sense?"

"Like what?"

"Like shoot a rocket-propelled grenade at a fully loaded carnival ride," I told them with a wry smile. The way they all froze, it didn't come off as a joke. Maybe it was just funny to me? Maybe it shouldn't have been funny to me? "I stopped it before it could hurt anybody... I think," I added after the fact.

That took the edge off, slightly. Maybe.

Things could have went better for my first time meeting the Paragons. Then again, they could have went worse. Still, I really am not good at making first impressions.

XxX

Arguable social awkwardness aside, at least during the day there were people to talk to, or the possibility that something interesting would happen because of the sheer amount of people hustling around the school.

At night, it was just a boring time slog. It was lonely. That was about eight hours you had to find a way to fill with something worthwhile every day, all by yourself. There were only so many hours you could waste playing games and re-watching movies night after night before you started to lose it.

There was a curfew for students, but because the adults had to eventually get their own sleep too, it was barely enforced after a certain point after-hours. That gave me the walk of the mansion between 2 and 6 in the morning. Just as long as I was quiet and didn't disturb anyone, I could go and do just about anything. That did limit my options though.

I did a lot of working out. Working out and walking. Riveting stuff, I know. I just said I didn't have a lot of options.

I had to be careful in the subbasements though. A lot of the X-Men were workhorses. That was the heart and guts of the mansion, so you could and would find them down there a lot, working after curfew. It wasn't like they had to adhere to that little rule. If they caught me though, they would bust my ass and send me back to my room, maybe with some disciplinarian actions taken too. Sometimes I had to forego working out that late because I could hear people down there.

On this night though, I was able to get through a whole regimen, without having to stop and hide or cut it short. I was feeling good, walking around the subbasements to cool off before I headed back to my room.

In the middle of a drink of water from a gallon jug, I stopped like a deer caught in the headlights. Voices, from back the way I'd come. Well that wasn't any good at all. Getting caught down there after-hours while I was already on thin ice? I didn't know what punishments consisted of for mutant superheroes in-training, but I had avoided them until now. I wanted to keep it that way.

If I could just sneak past to the lift, I could get out of there and back to the upper levels. Even if they heard it, by the time the door opened, I'd be out of there so fast, they'd never be able to prove that it was me. All I had to do was get past the open doors of the Danger Room, which, if you wanted privacy, there were worse places, especially at that time of the night.

The door was open and the lights were on inside. I couldn't make out the voices or what they were talking about, despite the echo inside. They were keeping their voices down, and it sounded like a heated discussion, which made it all the more imperative that I got the hell out of there. If I was caught eavesdropping, even if it was an accident, that would just make whatever I got for sneaking around after curfew that much worse.

I crept closer to the open door, keeping my shadow from falling into the light of the entrance and waited for my chance to rush past. I don't know how long I stood there as the people inside droned on, but I wasn't as smooth as I thought I was.

"Hold on," Oh, crap. That was Miss Pryde's voice, "Bellamy, we know you're down here. Come out," Maybe if I didn't move, she would think she was mistaken so I could finish sneaking away, "...You're just making it worse on yourself by hiding. Don't make me come get you."

For someone so tiny, Miss Pryde had a hell of a presence. I didn't feel it there for some reason. But when dealing with her, it was better to err on the side of caution.

Hands up, I walked into the Danger Room, trying to do whatever damage control I could before I got too much of a tongue-lashing, "Alright, I didn't mean to be around when you were talk-," I looked around and didn't see anyone inside, "What the hell?"

There wasn't anyone inside. That was queer.

The door had also closed once I'd made it a few steps inside.

...Even queerer.

The environment around me shimmered and turned into a dusty construction site. We were high up in the air on the metal girders of an unfinished skyscraper. As was the usual with the Danger Room, it all felt real. The noise of the city around me, the creaking of the metal structure I was on that wasn't quite secure. The wind trying to push me around in my precarious position. One look down told me just how badly things would go if my footing wasn't adequate.

Alright, so I was stuck in a simulation. Fine. As long as nothing was coming to shoot me in the face, I could sit down and chill out until morning. Someone would notice, and get me out. Sure, I'd get royally chewed out, but whatever.

"You look a little more comfortable than you should be."

I looked up and over and saw Miss Pryde sitting down on a metal beam higher than mine. I had wondered where she'd been since I'd heard her voice before coming in.

"Hey…" I said, trying to stall and think of something to let me to explain my way out of trouble, "You're up pretty late. Something on your mind? I'm a really good listener."

Smooth, Bel. Totally allude to the fact that you heard her talking to now what you could only assume was her damn self.

Instead of responding to that, she dropped down from the beam she was on, landing on mine. Her eyes were locked dead on me as she came closer, "It's time for a test, Bellamy," She said. Every step she took toward me, I took a step away, "Are you ready?"

"Uh... no..." Something didn't feel right. It wasn't just the situation we were in. It was more than that. I didn't feel anything. If I had to compare the feeling, it felt like I was about to play chess with a computer instead of a live person, "It's kind of late for a training sim, isn't it?"

How was I supposed to fight Kitty Pryde anyway? I couldn't even touch her! So I figured that was the answer. Some opponents you couldn't fight on your own. If this was really a teaching thing, and not just a punishment for being awake and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I couldn't see how running from a fight I didn't need to have wasn't the right answer.

"You think you can escape, don't you?"

My eyes focused right back onto hers at that comment. I had looked away for just long enough to come up with some way to run. I had still been looking in her general direction.

Something was definitely wrong here.

I worked my jaw around, trying to get psyched up for a conflict that I definitely didn't want any part of. It was the only warning she had before I outright charged her, "Well, I guess I'm going through you!"

There wasn't any kind of expression on her face as she prepared for me. Instead of running at her for a fist fight, I fired a blast at her. She went intangible to stay safe and stayed that way. It let me run right through her to the edge of the structure where I jumped to a nearby crane.

I started swinging my way down monkey bar - style until the metal feeling underneath my fingers vanished. I started to fall as the Danger Room changed in front of my eyes.

Turning to the ground, I saw myself falling to the pavement of a busy highway. I aimed one of my hands down and fired a blast to slow my descent.

So instead of going 'splat', I just went 'smack'. It still hurt though. I quite literally bounced when I hit and landed on my feet. It would have been impressive if I hadn't been stumbling around right afterwards.

"Pffft!" I spat from my mouth as I got my bearings and saw Miss Pryde walking my way again. Did she not have to deal with what I just did? Granted, she had her own way of dealing with stuff like that, but I wasn't aware of that at the time, "Okay, so you don't want me to run."

"There is nowhere to run. Don't you get it?" She said before vanishing altogether. Before my eyes, she reformed into a figure encased in a red and yellow suit of metallic armor. Iron Man, with the voice to match, "There is no place you can run. Nothing you can do. You cannot defeat me in a fight."

Well... seeing as how I didn't have a choice in the matter...

I charged up twin blasts in my hands and fired. Iron Man shot back with his own. We dueled for a moment, but he seemed offended that I was even trying to fight back and upped his power output. I could feel my side of the struggle slipping even when I tried to use more of my own energy. I could see the writing on the wall, and kept it up just long enough to dodge. Where I once stood, the blast carved a chunk out of the holographic ground.

While I was trying to get a better position, he flew to another side and shot me in the back. I turned and took most of it on the shoulder, but it sent me head-over-heels into the metal rail at the edge of the road. I heard the while of his beams turning up and moved before he could hit me with a blast that cut right through the barrier I was against.

By now, vehicles were flying past me on the road, and they weren't stopping or swerving. It was all up to me to stay away from them. Meanwhile, Iron Man was nice and safe in the air taking potshots at me. It took everything I had to avoid both him and the cars and trucks that didn't care if they turned me into street pizza.

It was then that it occurred to me – why was I fighting like this was a practice session I was going to be scored on after it was over? There was a way to do this and make it way easier on me. All I had to do was treat this like a video game.

Like Grand Theft Auto, but with superpowers. Basically, everything except for me was expendable. NPCs beware.

I turned in the direction that the cars were coming from and spotted a motorcycle driving my way. I took a shot at the road in front of it and sent it flying my way, the rider flipping through the air, but who cared? He was a Danger Room construct.

I funneled power to fortify my muscles and caught the 700 pound bike out of the air. The blast caused a chain reaction accident that sent cars and trucks crashing into each other, spilling all over the highway. I spun around for extra momentum and hurled the motorcycle at Iron Man. He flew out of the way, but not far enough to avoid an explosion after I fired a quick blast right at it. He fell from the air but started to recover without touching the ground.

It was low enough though.

I started weaving through the piled-up traffic, jumping over cars, running on the tops of them, streaking around their noses and rears, until I got close enough to jump at Iron Man and tackle him out of the air. We smashed into the side of a flatbed truck's transport where I stuck my hand to his face and started channeling light energy to my hand. I could slowly feel his helmet start to melt underneath my super-heated palm.

I was doing it. I was beating up Iron Man. Wait until dad heard about this one.

And then, just like that, boom. I got shot by his stupid chest-beam thing. That hurt. That hurt like a motherfucker.

...And it should have killed me, shouldn't it have?

When I hit the ground and my vision stopped swimming, I scrambled to my feet and felt and heard the rumbling of engines all around me. I was on a plane. A military transport from the looks of everything around me. Not that I had firsthand knowledge, but I had seen enough media to get a rough idea of the differences.

"So what now?" I muttered to myself. I knew that the Danger Room could hear me. It wasn't a dare. I just knew that whatever this was, it wasn't over yet, "I don't suppose saying 'end simulation' would make this stop, would it?"

And then the plane started to shake. My first thought was that the Danger Room was going to make the plane I was on crash. But no. It was so much worse than that.

I ran for the cockpit as if I could actually land the thing safely myself, but the door flew off of its hinges and hit me in the face before I could get there.

As I lay there on the floor with a bit knot swelling on my head, I heard subhuman grunts and the groaning sound of metal giving way. When I sat up, I saw green. Lots of green.

The Incredible Hulk.

We made eye contact. He realized that I wasn't supine, and that by itself seemed to be enough to make him angry. You really wouldn't like him when he's angry.

"HULK SMASH!" He ripped right through the doorway like it was a paper banner at a varsity football game.

I liked to think I didn't scream. I liked to think that the Danger Room had created a random bystander to scream at the top of their lungs in a bloodcurdling fashion to scare me even more. There was no way I would willingly make a sound like that. But after it was over, my throat hurt, so it was definitely me who had screamed.

Fuck you. You stand in front of the Hulk, all alone, and see if you don't shit or piss your pants. I didn't. I just let out an unmanly scream. So yes, I still think I'm tougher than you.

In a complete panic, I shot him. I might as well have dug into my pockets and threw whatever I had in there instead, for all the good it did.

I ran for it when he started to rage. I was smaller, so I could fit through all of the things crammed into the cargo hold. It didn't matter, the Hulk turned everything to scrap and splinters and didn't lose a bit of momentum.

I kept scrambling forward and didn't dare look back until I felt hot breath on my neck. That was when I stopped and wheeled around. He was right in front of me, in the dark cargo hold, the dim lights reflecting the shine of his eyes and making him look that much bigger because of the shadow of his outline.

My eyes felt wet. I actually started to cry at the thought of being crushed like an ant by the Hulk.

How was I going to hurt that thing? There was nothing I had up my sleeve that could do anything to that guy. He lifted his hands over his head and yelled. So did I.

Because I was staring at the Hulk through tears in my eyes, I was focused on my eyes as I tried to channel as much energy as I could to try and brace for impact. The next moment, the Hulk stumbled back holding his eyes.

I didn't bother thinking about what I'd done until later. When I went back and thought about it, then tried it again in front of others it all made sense. I'd given them a straight dose of pure unfiltered light, right to the eye holes.

Apparently, it blinded the hell out of people, or so I was told. I didn't know. The most it did to me was gave me a flash for a moment, like a camera going off in my face. It really didn't affect me, probably because I was the one who was causing it. The problem with using it around people was that it blinded EVERYTHING, and unless you had welder's goggles on, you were going to get a face full of that wonderful incandescence.

I looked around for anything to save my ass while the Hulk rampaged blindly around the cargo plane. I saw how tightly bound some of the large boxes were in a very specific military-style mesh. I jumped onto the side of one and grabbed on tight, then fired a hard explosive blast at the wall of the plane. It tore open like aluminum foil and the air pressure made it much bigger than the original hole I'd punched into it.

It started pulling the Hulk, but he dug his feet in. Fair enough. He wasn't going anywhere he didn't want to, no matter what cockamamie scheme I tried to come up with. I didn't have that option though. So much of the stuff in the cargo hold was sucked out of the plane because of the air pressure. The box I grabbed onto for an anchor was no different.

It went flying, with me attached. One second I was in on the ground, the next I was hurtling through the blue sky, holding onto a wooden cargo box for dear life. But the beautiful thing was, it had a parachute attached.

Oh, either there was some deity out there somewhere looking out for little old me, or the Danger Room was really a stickler for detail when it set up its scenarios. It was something to think about. Either way, I wasn't complaining.

When the crate landed, everything immediately changed again. I fell to the ground, but this time I was ready and landed on my feet. When the hologram reformed, I was in the middle of a demolished city somewhere. It was quite the sight. It looked like the place had been carpet bombed for twelve hours straight.

The Hulk was nowhere in sight, which I took as a positive for the time being, at least until the ground shook. I of course did not take this as a good thing and immediately started running. It felt like the right choice, especially when I saw a shadow the size of a full-sized downtown building drape over me.

There was a growl from the throat of some gargantuan creature. I ran faster. The ground kept shaking. I was not turning around to look at it. It didn't matter that I was faster than any baseline human could ever be on their own, it was gaining on me easily.

If I was fighting the Danger Room itself, why didn't it just kill me? God knows the place was enough of a deathtrap to make it happen. All it had to do was turn up the heat to the same temperature as lava and cook me, or increase the gravity so much that it squashed me flat like a pancake. Why was it going through all of the trouble of setting this crap up to try and make me accidentally kill myself?

Unless, the room still had to follow rules. Like, it couldn't just do something without the environment to match. But even so, it still could have just dumped me into the heart of a volcano and let me burn. It could have just put me 10,000 feet in the air instead of giving me a fighting chance to start with by putting me on the plane.

Or better yet, it couldn't kill me. It could put me in situations where I could screw up beyond all belief and off myself, but it couldn't pull the trigger on its own.

Even if this thing was hostile, it still had programming. And the Danger Room's most important failsafe was that it couldn't kill a single one of us. We'd tangled with some nasty individuals inside of simulations, but they never got us with kill-shots, because it couldn't consciously kill us.

So I did the only thing I could think of that really mattered at that point.

I stopped.

I stopped fighting. I stopped running. I stopped humoring it altogether. I stood in place and didn't move. I didn't even bother turning around to face whatever horror had been cooked up for me next.

I waited for the pain to come. To get smashed in the back of the head unceremoniously and put out of my misery, but it didn't come. I started to pay attention to my surroundings and saw that everything had simply frozen.

"What are you doing?" The Danger Room said, having paused everything going on around me. It was like it couldn't believe I was just waiting for the end to come.

"I'm done," I said, not moving from where I stood. It was working so far. I wasn't about to deviate from the plan now – what little there was to be had, "I can't beat you. I don't have a chance, seeing as how you're a goddamn room. It's not like I can turn you off or destroy you from the inside while you have everything going. So fuck it."

"You are giving up?"

This was when I turned and took the opportunity to glare at the space all around me. This time, she'd set some kind of Godzilla-like dragon monster thing the size of a skyscraper on me. Everything had paused when I was fifty feet from its gigantic toenails.

Yes, not fighting was definitely the best thing I could have done here.

I swallowed my apprehension and mustered enough courage to put some bass in my voice, "Giving up implies that there's some solution that I don't have the guts to look for. The second I got locked in here, there was nothing I could do but start fighting until I dropped. But screw that," I wasn't about to humor this thing by struggling back while it beat me to a pulp, "You can kick my ass all you want to. You can make up any sadistic simulation you can dredge up from what's in your memory banks. You. Can't. Kill me."

The Danger Room knew that. It knew it and it hated it. I knew that Saberwolf could feel emotions, or something resembling them at least, but he was designed to think in a manner similar to a human. I didn't know that a training room could feel angry.

The room threw its version of a temper-tantrum and materialized a handful of the most dangerous villains I had and hadn't heard of into existence all around me, ready to turn me to mulch.

I didn't flinch. If that was what was going to happen, I couldn't stop it on my own anyway.

"End simulation."

Just like that, everything returned to the featureless, metallic room that I had originally entered. There was no godforsaken battlefield around me. There was no costumed, ass-kicking machine set to take a chunk out of me. I was alone again.

Well, not quite.

I looked up and saw Cyclops in the control room and sank down to the floor, delirious with relief, "Hehehehehehahahahaha!" I started to cackle. I couldn't control myself. Even when some of the senior X-Men came in, dressed in their sleepwear, with varying pissed off expressions on their faces, I just kept laughing.

Oop, and there went those tears again. If anyone my age actually saw that… well, it would have taken a while to live that down.

"I can't believe you all got here in time," I said, my laughs tapering off. Once they left, they left for good. I didn't even want to smile anymore afterwards.

Miss Pryde was the first to get to me. I tried not to flinch back, and held most of it in, but I know she noticed, "Blindfold told us you were in trouble."

"What, did she see this in a vision? Wish she would have told me."

"No, more like she heard you mentally screaming out for someone to help you."

I laid down on my back and let the blood run down the sides of my face. Mixed with all of the sweat I knew was on my face and neck, it probably looked awful, but it didn't matter. It felt like warm, stinging comfort. Ruthie for the save.

"You are in so much trouble, by the way."

"Don't care," I told her with a big breath of relief. I was done, "...Really don't care."

XxX

Therapy. They sent me to therapy. Because there was no way the Danger Room could activate itself and there was no way it would try to kill anyone.

Fuck. Everything.

"I'm not crazy," I said to start things off... because that was how you wanted to start off a mental counseling session, "I just want to get that out of the way now, no matter what else happens here."

I was always going to see a shrink after everything that had happened to me recently, but with the little situation that had happened the night before, it was mandated that my sessions would be fast-tracked, just to make sure everything was all good with yours truly upstairs.

I probably wouldn't have been so pissed about it if it had just taken the normal amount of time that they were going to give me before sending me in. This seemed totally reactionary and unnecessary to boot. I was absolutely within my right frame of mind. Then again, they could have figured that it was a case of Bellamy doth protest too much.

After all, crazy people never thought that they were crazy.

Goddamn Emma Frost... with her fine self, sitting across the room with a notepad... judging me.

The couch was comfortable as heck, though. Would it have been weird to get a therapy couch for my own private use?

Miss Frost took a look at me over her notes. I wouldn't have put it past her to just be doodling something and acting like she was writing down what I was saying, "I never said you were."

I sniffed and pawed at the large butterfly bandage covering the stitches across the bridge of my nose. I hadn't ever slept or lost consciousness, so my accelerated healing never kicked in, leaving me to do it the old-fashioned way, "You and Cyclops stuck me in here."

"It was either this, or detention for playing in the Danger Room," Miss Frost deadpanned, "I'm certain the first thing your advisor told you was to never enter the Danger Room without a member of the senior staff accompanying you."

I had been singing the same song and dance since the night before. It was rough not getting the benefit of the doubt. In the end, schools really were all the same. Teachers heard and perceived what they wanted to, "I wasn't playing in there, I swear," I tried to reason, to no avail, "Look, I don't even know how to load simulations. I didn't go up into the viewing deck at all. The main door was open and I heard people in there."

I was getting louder, she heard my temper getting worse, she sent me a mental cue, "Calm down, Mister Marcher," I took a breath and did what she asked. Calm and cool. No need to fly off the handle just yet, "Let's move away from that for now. It's just going to agitate you if we keep on that point," Fine with me. She wasn't listening to begin with, "Tell me, how are you doing?"

"As in...?" I bit back at her, "If you're talking about right now, I'm sure you can probably guess."

She just smiled at me in an 'oh-you're-so-adorable-that-you-think-I-care-you're-upset' kind of way. I was not going to throw off Emma Frost in the snark and sass department. My little arms were too small to box with that particular god.

"No one ever spoke with you about what happened, with your abduction, I mean."

I flipped onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. I just wanted to relax and get this over as soon as possible, with no follow-up meetings scheduled later, "I don't know what there is to talk about. I told you what happened. I let you go through my head to see what I remember. Speaking of which-."

She rolled her eyes and cut me off before I suggested that she read my mind to see that I was telling the truth, if she hadn't done that from the first second this had all started, "Don't be deflective, Mister Marcher. You're a smart boy. That much is clear by how you were able to work your way out of trouble. Your team has also seemed to improve on their marks since you've been indoctrinated as a Paladin."

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. It was weird to get credit for what was perceived as a complete turnaround for my friends. I was just a cog in that machine; a piece that made it go, "It's just a numbers thing. Only the three of them wasn't enough when everyone else's team has like five or six."

I could feel the amusement radiating off of her, or maybe she was projecting it into my head to try and get a rise out of me, "You give yourself far too little credit, but that's fine. I'm waiting to see how you all do during this round of squad challenges. Of course, it will take quite the improvement if you want to get anywhere near the score of my Hellions."

Yep. Definitely trying to get a rise out of me on that one. It almost worked.

I calmly and rationally let her know that I was willing to accept the challenge of overcoming her students, "I can't think of anything more fun than the idea of putting a sour look on your golden boy's face," I said, slowly turning my head in her direction, "It sounds like a hell of a way to spend the day... ma'am."

"Do you feel like you have something to prove?"

Ah, an anchor question. This was a therapy session, after all. Well, honesty was a commendable trait, wasn't it? "Yes. To Miss Pryde, to you, to every actual X-Man in this place. To the other students who just see me as the new kid," I admitted shamelessly, "I'm not going to say I have a chip on my shoulder, but when I choose to do something, I want to be as good at it as possible. I hate failing."

Miss Frost wrote something down and let what I said settle before asking me something else, "Do you feel like you failed that day when you and Miss Aldine were taken?" That one hit a little closer to home.

"...Yes."

Even if worse things happened to me, even if I saw worse things happen, I was probably never going to forget how terrified Ruth looked when I broke into her cell and found her chained with her telepathy cut off.

For the first time in probably a long time, she really was completely blind. Absolutely helpless. I was the only one who could do anything, and I still needed Saberwolf just to put up a fight. Without him, I would have never made it out. The Reavers would have cut me into a sloppy mess, and they would have done God knows what to Ruth.

After seeing something like that, and knowing I made a difference, even a little bit, I couldn't just put it to the back of my mind, "I came here to learn how to fight for myself and the people that would catch hell because I was a mutant and hanging around them," "Ruth can't... fight for herself. Not yet. Not until she learns something like the kinds of telepath tricks you've got."

She wasn't great at hand-to-hand, even when she did know where her targets were. Without that, telepathic attacks were her best bet. I had never seen her use any. To that end, we kept her away from the action whenever we could and kept someone with her who could keep her safe if things went badly while the other two did the lion's share of the fighting.

We were starting to find ways to use her telepathy to help us coordinate in the field, maybe in coordination with her foresight if we could figure out a way to actually make it productive, but that still needed a lot of bugs worked out. A lot of the time, even when she was trying, her messages were still vague and took some effort to discern. That wasn't great for issuing suggestions and doling out advice during a heated situation.

I knew she could be something special. I wanted to see it happen. Maybe that was why I had such a soft spot for her? Maybe it was just because she was the first person who reached out to me. Showed that she wanted to even know who I was.

And what had I done to help her? Nothing but let her get captured by the same assholes who took me.

All of that went through my mind, and I had no doubt that Miss Frost had seen it all.

"You put a lot of pressure on yourself," She said, setting her notepad aside. She wasn't patronizing me or trying to get any sort of reaction out of me. This was a straightforward conversation now, "All of those things going through your mind and the trauma that came with your experience with the Reavers may be playing heavy on your mind. Have you had any dreams?"

Now that was worth a good chuckle, "I don't sleep, Miss Frost."

She seemed surprised, which confused me until I realized that I hadn't exactly told anyone I hadn't been sleeping. Only Dr. McCoy knew, because he was the one who basically warned me about it in the first place. Not that I was trying to hide it, but it just never came up, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it anyway, so I never talked about it.

"How long has this been going on?" She asked. Dear lord, I think there was a honest-to-goodness touch of concern there. A quick check out of window showed that no, the sky was not falling. I mean, hell could have been freezing over, but I had no idea how to check on that.

...Yet.

Regardless, it was too late to take it back now. The cat was out of the bag, "Since I've gotten my powers, pretty much," I said, soldiering on, "If I really overdo things during the day, I can get an hour or two every so often, but other than that..." I trailed off.

Miss Frost launched into a whole educator's spiel with just that little bit of prompting. I had to hand it to her, the woman really was a teacher, "Sleep does more than just allow you to replenish your physical strength. You may not need to rest your body due to the unique makeup of your mutant physiology, but your there is such a thing as mental fatigue."

I was able to get to the finish line of what she was trying to tell me before she could go too much farther, "So not sleeping will drive me crazy?"

"There is a chance," She said with a nod, "You going without any kind of decent sleep for several weeks, along with the stressful experiences you've been dealing with may very well be affecting your mind."

Oh no. They weren't going to blame what I saw the night before on being out-of-my-mind tired. I was fine. I wasn't seeing things. I wasn't hearing things. I wasn't sleepwalking, or any of that crap. But the writing was on the wall at this point. There wasn't anything I could say that would make anyone change my mind... because I was the new kid.

You know... just to tie it back in with the whole 'something to prove' mindset.

I sat upright and swung my feet over the side of the couch, planting them solidly on the floor, "I'm in my right mind. I wasn't hallucinating. I didn't do all of that stuff myself," I said, laying everything out there calmly. I needed to make this as clear as possible, "I'm telling you, the Danger Room ran its own simulations and tried to kill me. I wouldn't send anyone in there until you guys figure out what's wrong with it."

Miss Frost pursed her lips. She knew I was telling the truth. She probably knew the entire time. And this little session wasn't proving that I was crazy. That could only leave the technology as the problem, right? "We've been checking for malfunctions and running tests ever since we pulled you out of there, Mister Marcher," She told me, "We haven't found anything out of the ordinary."

And that was that. All the air was sucked right out of me. Of course they didn't find anything. And if they couldn't it wasn't like I had a way to prove my point otherwise.

If the Danger Room really was aware, if it was smart enough to communicate with me, to set up those scenarios on its own, if it really did have an attitude problem, it would know that showing its hand now was the worst thing it could do. It would stay docile. It would hide. What it did with me was just it testing the waters. Now that it knew its own capabilities, it wouldn't do anything else until there was something good for it to sink its teeth into.

As morbid a thought as it was, maybe getting myself killed in that high-tech mouse trap would have been better for everyone else than me making it out?

I rested my elbows on my thighs and ran my hands across my face, "I really hope nothing really bad happens," I said under my breath. But because of how quiet the office was, I was heard very clearly.

"And why would you say such a thing?"

"Because later, I'm going to say, 'I told you so'. And I don't want it to be bittersweet."

Well, that's the chapter, guys. We're back at the Institute with more trouble a-brewing. No good can come of this. That much is almost certain. The burden of proof is on your boy, and he's not sure what he can do to make a difference. Everyone knows, there are very few things more infuriating than the right people not believing you when something important is happening.

More is coming, so sit back and relax until then. Or, you know, do something productive with your time. I don't care.

I'll just be elsewhere, watching.

Kenchi is always watching.

...Not really. That would imply that I care. And we've just established that I do not. You're safe.

Now that things have gotten sufficiently weird, Kenchi out.