All characters owned by Marvel Comics
Logan
The thunk of the axe rang heavy through the air, each breath a sharp burn in his lungs. Logan split the last log in one satisfying chop, and stooped to retrieve his leather jacket, stiff with cold against his sweaty skin. He loaded the sled with his morning's labors, and pulled it through the snow to the path he had shoveled through the trees. Emerging from the stand of pines, he could just make out the cabin in the grainy morning light, the hint of smoke coming from its chimney calling him home.
The cords of wood he piled on the porch next to the door, the snowy boots he stomped off and stepped out of before tiptoeing sock-footed through the entrance. A blanket of fire warmed air and the smell of bacon wrapped around him as he hung up his jacket.
"Coffee?"
Startled, Logan spun to the voice. A woman with dark brown eyes and shining black hair that reached to her waist stepped forward and held a steaming mug out to him. The skin on the back of his neck prickled.
"Fox?" he whispered hoarsely.
The woman's answering laughter was whiskey rich and deep. "Who else would it be?"
He took the mug and watched her busy herself in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a sizzling cast iron skillet. Silver Fox. They lived together in this cabin. She loved him, and he loved her, but instead of following her into the kitchen and wrapping his arms around her waist like he did most mornings, Logan stood rooted in place. Something didn't feel right. Who else would it be, she had asked, but deep down Logan had expected to see someone else when he opened the cabin door, someone with sharp green eyes.
The room swam before him, and he had to grab the door jamb to keep himself upright.
"Are you all right?" Fox had abandoned the eggs and come back to him, strong yet delicate hands brushing his forehead. So many nights his body had craved the caress of those hands, but today her touch made his skin crawl. Logan squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to clear the cobwebs clouding his brain.
"Logan, are you unwell?"
He caught her hands in his and stared at them. A sudden flash of memory - those same hands covered in blood, those deep brown eyes dead, lifeless. Logan squeezed hard enough to feel her bones grind against each other, and held her fast when she tried to pull away.
"Lady," he snarled, "just who the hell are you?"
The memory solidified and brought with it the truth – Silver Fox was dead, but that had been years ago, another lifetime. Her death had pushed him over a cliff and set him on a path of death and destruction that had taken years to find his way back from, his lifeline coming in the form of a little girl with green eyes and an attitude.
"And where's Rogue?" He said her name before he remembered missing her, and as the sound crossed his lips, he knew it was his daughter he had expected to find in this cabin in the woods. They had been happy here once, before everything had changed.
The woman laughed, the sound different this time, cold and high and shrill. The dark hair and eyes changed color, becoming matching shades of purple, her skin fading to alabaster.
"It appears we will have to do this the hard way," she announced, her accent different, too, British, cultured, not the kind of woman you would find living rough in the woods.
He went for her throat, but the world twisted. Everything swirled to black, the choke of chains around his own neck enough to snap him back to reality. When he opened his eyes it was all gone - the cabin, the trees covered in quiet snow. Instead, Logan was in a cell, chained to a sandstone wall, his hands and claws encased in manacles. When his eyes cleared, the woman was still there, dressed in a silky whisper, her hair cascading down her back in violet waves. At her side, a face Logan had hoped to never see again in any lifetime.
"Nice of ya t'join us, runt."
Victor Creed - Sabretooth. A man Logan had considered a friend in that other life, until the bastard had gutted Silver Fox.
Logan snarled and lunged at the pair, a telepathic ice pick stopping him in his tracks. He clamped his jaws shut to keep from biting his own tongue off while his nervous system twitched the electric chair.
Creed's claws ripped hot across his stomach, tearing flesh like tissue paper. Logan's adamantium laced head butt knocked Creed back, but Sabretooth sprang to his feet, his next swipe connecting with Logan's throat. The chains stopped Creed from flaying open Logan's esophagus, but blood rained onto the floor beneath him just the same.
'Enough!'
Logan and Creed both screamed this time, the psionic bolt a thunderclap inside their skulls.
"Watch it…frail," Creed growled at the woman as he staggered to his feet, but she didn't flinch.
"Your presence is hardly required, Victor. If you cannot behave yourself, I will have you forcibly removed. Do I make myself clear?"
When Creed stood, he was almost two feet taller than her and outweighed her by a good three hundred pounds, but when she levelled those purple eyes at Sabretooth, Logan swore he saw the bastard shake.
"Crystal," Creed mumbled.
If Logan's windpipe wasn't slashed to slowly healing ribbons, he would have laughed out loud.
Logan was filthy, starving, and dehydrated. He had no memories of how he had gotten to this place, much less where he was, but it didn't take a genius to figure it out. Creed was the Shadow King's flunky, and the best place to find telepaths these days was Cairo.
Taking as deep of breath as he could manage, Logan tried to find his center, to make his mind untouchable, trying to control the desperation that was choking him worse that the bloody tatters of his throat.
Madripoor was the last thing he remembered, taking the kid to Viper to hide her, but it had all gone to shit real fast. They had been ambushed by the Nazi's brats, and Rogue…panic broke his concentration. Rogue - what had happened to her? Had she gotten away, or was she here? Were they hurting her? If they harmed one hair on her head…
The woman was kneeling before him, the hem of her silk dress a piece of bread sopping up the blood gravy coating the floor. He jumped from her touch again, but she held him fast with her powers.
"So," she whispered, "I wasn't wrong after all. Love is the key. Love is what separates the man from the beast, I merely miscalculated. For you, love of the flesh is fleeting, but love of family is all."
He felt icy fingers dive into the center of his brain and split it like a ripe melon, his throat healing in time to carry the sound of his screams.
Remy
"Where you takin' us?"
An annoyed Polaris moved her eyes from the jet's controls and narrowed them at Remy. "You ask an awful lot of questions, Mister, without answering any yourself. Who are you?"
"De name is Gambit." Letting his accent roll, Remy inclined his head towards the back of the plane where Rogue was playing a hand of poker with Bobby and Kurt. "De lady is Rogue."
Rogue looked up when she heard her name. They had been riding in a jet full of strangers for nearly an hour, and he still hadn't been able to figure out if they were in the company of friends or foes. He had heard of the X-Men, of course, every mutant had. The heroes stood up to Farouk and offered sanctuary for those in need, but Remy had always thought they were just a myth. Were these…kids…really the last hope for mutantkind?
Kurt, whose codename they had learned was Nightcrawler, draped a blanket over Rogue's shoulders. Remy practically kicked himself. He should know better than anyone not to judge a book by its blue-furred cover, but a Catholic upbringing made a forked tail and fangs hard for him to ignore.
Remy was pleased to see he was getting under Polaris's skin - nothing he enjoyed more than getting a pretty woman all hot and bothered. He could tell by her clenched jaw and pinched mouth that she was about two seconds away from screaming at him, but was working really hard to control her temper. If she was the X-Men's boss, she hadn't been for very long. There was more that was green about her than her neon hair.
"Well, Gambit," her upper lip curled into a sneer on his name. "You want to tell me what the hell you and your friend were doing back in Tokyo?"
Remy leaned back in the copilot's chair and rubbed his hand along his jaw. "You mean sides eatin' sushi?" he smirked and watched the red rise in her cheeks.
Polaris angled her chair towards and jabbed an angry finger to emphasize her every word. "Don't get smart with me! We saved your asses from a squad of Marauders, led by Shiro Yashida no less! What did you do to bring the wrath of the Shadow King down on your heads?"
His matched her aggressive posture. "And, what? You and your people jus' happened to find us? Just passin' on through? Give me a break." Their argument had silenced the card game, and the trio of younger mutants, Rogue in the lead, pushed to the front of the jet.
"Problem, sugar?" Her tone was casual, but the hand Rogue laid on his shoulder urged him to relax.
"Oh, no. No problem." Remy waved his hand flippantly. "We on the run, but they just happen to be there to scoop us up, taking us only they know where. Why would I have a problem wit' dat?"
"Gambit." The hand on his shoulder squeezed a brutal warning, but Remy shrugged it off.
"Look at that headin', Rogue." He gestured to the control panel. "You see that? That heading takes us to Antarctica. They must think we stupid, like we wouldn't notice. One thing I do know is there ain't nothin' in Antarctica! If you all gon' leave us to die in a frozen wasteland, I'd rather you just pop us now and dump our bodies into de ocean! Anything be better than bein' a frozen popsicle!"
"Hey!" Bobby warned, but Polaris rolled her eyes and turned back to the controls.
"Why would we save you just to kill you?" she snapped, and donned the jet's headset, positioning it around the earpiece that strobed tiny red lights in a strange sequence.
"You tell me, cherie."
Polaris pinched her lips again and spoke into the microphone. "Polaris to base. Requesting permission to land."
"Land!?" Remy stood and leaned into Polaris's personal space. "There ain't nothin' here!"
Ahead in the view screen was an endless expanse of white, impossible to tell where the clouds met the glaciers. He shivered at the sight of all that snow and wondered how the hell they were going to get out of this one.
Behind him, Rogue whispered to her new friends. "Kurt, where are you taking us?"
Remy glared at them. Kurt had put an arm around Rogue's shoulder in a brotherly fashion and pointed to the middle of the jet's windshield.
"Just wait for it, fraulein."
Rogue's confused eyes met Remy's angry ones, but seconds later hers flickered from his to the windshield and widened in surprise.
"Oh mah gawd!" she whispered, and her hands flew to cover her mouth. Remy whipped his head back to the window and his jaw fell to the floor.
"What de hell?"
A circle of vibrant green had appeared smack in the center of the blinding white, getting bigger every second.
Polaris put her hands on the controls and glared at Remy from the corner of her eye. "We're landing, people. You might want to strap in."
Without taking his eyes from that smear of green, Remy found a seat and buckled the belt, Rogue strapped in behind him. When the jet cleared the cloudbank, the green filled the cockpit's windows, and as they began their descent the leaves and fronds of tropical trees became visible.
"No freakin' way," Rogue exclaimed, and Remy felt her hand searching for his. He grasped it and gave her a supportive squeeze, though he was scared out of his mind. A jungle paradise in the middle of the frozen tundra. How was this possible? It was like something out of a movie.
"You sure we ain't already dead, cherie?" Remy asked Polaris.
Her laugh was more of a snort, but it was Bobby who leaned across the aisle and pointed to the window again.
"Or extinct?"
Remy looked to where he pointed, and Rogue squealed. A pair of Pterodactyls were flying loop de loops in front of the jet.
"Bon dieu," Remy hissed, and made the sign of the cross on his chest.
Kurt laughed. "I am not sure our Father has anything to do with a place such as this!"
Buildings became visible through the jungle canopy - gleaming towers of glass and steel arranged along the border of an expanse of cleared space large enough to house a small town. The towers were connected by a series of walls, reminding Remy of a hi-tech medieval castle.
Polaris landed the plane on a raised platform near what looked like a hangar bay. There were two figures standing in the bay's open doors, and as Remy and Rogue were prodded down the Blackbird's descending stairs, the men moved towards them.
"Saint's preserve us!" An older man with reddish blonde hair, in his forties but still muscular and scrappy looking, rushed forward with a sour expression on his freckled face. "What in god's name were ye thinkin', lass? Bringin' 'em here without clearance!?"
"Don't start with me, Sean," Polaris warned. "Farouk's people had them cornered. We didn't have a lot of choice."
"Oh, I would bloody well disagree with that!" Sean huffed, an Irishman from the sound of his accent and temper.
An implosion of air and that brimstone stink signaled Nightcrawler teleporting from the jet. "It's true, Sean." Kurt stretched and scratched his hands through his hair. "When we caught up with the Marauders, Shiro was ready to flambé them."
Behind Sean, a dark haired pile of muscle glowered at Kurt. "Shiro!?" The young man, twenty or so, stood well over six feet tall. He roared, light flashing around him, and his body swelled in size, his skin turning to shiny steel before their eyes. "Izmennik!"
Remy's Russian was worse than his Japanese, but he was well acquainted with that word – traitor – and it took him a second to realize the Ruskie wasn't talking about him.
"You made the right decision, Lorna."
A third figure stepped from the shadows, and all the mutants save him and Rogue snapped to attention. The man was tall and elegant, and the same earpiece worn by the others glinted in his snowy white hair. His costume was red and black, and cut like a Nehru jacket with a cape thrown across the shoulders. He was older than Sean, but there was a predatory fierceness behind his bright blue eyes that belied his hospitable demeanor.
"Th…thank you, father," Polaris said breathlessly, her face pink with pride.
Father? Remy caught Rogue's eyes. Kurt and Bobby may have called Lorna boss, but it was clear they were meeting the X-Men's real head honcho - Magneto.
"The Savageland is a sanctuary for all mutants seeking a better way of life." The words were welcoming, but Remy felt those eyes moving over the both of them.
Sean exhaled loudly. "Aye, any enemy of Farouk's is a friend 'o the X-Men." The Irishman took a turn looking them over and Remy couldn't remember when he had felt more like a piece of meat. "Ye both look like hell," Sean declared instead. "We'll get ye fed and find ye some quarters so ye can shower and rest."
"Now, hold on," Remy interjected. "Who said we stayin'?"
The group of mutants started in surprise at his question.
"Why wouldn't you stay?" Lorna's temper was winding up again, but Remy could tell she didn't want to start screaming at him in front of her father. He pushed a little harder.
"Not that we didn't appreciate the "rescue", cherie," Remy put the air quotes in for good measure, "but you people basically kidnapped us."
Lorna's mouth fell open. "Kidnapped!?" she sputtered. "You lousy son of a…!"
"Gambit!" Rogue stepped between him and the green-haired mutant. "Forgive my friend," Rogue smiled sweetly at the X-Men, but dug her fingers into Remy's arm. "He's not usually such an ass. We've had a rough few days, and the lack of sleep is makin' him forget his manners."
Her emerald eyes shot a warning to his and he bit his tongue. At the moment, they were stuck with these people whether Remy liked it or not. Canada was awfully far away, especially with the frozen wasteland of Antarctica barring their path.
"I'm Rogue, and his name is Gambit, and we'd appreciate any hospitality y'all can offer." Rogue laid the Mississippi on thick, and her charm had the desired effect as the tension visibly ratcheted down.
Sean held out a hand "Welcome, Rogue. They call me the Banshee, but to you, darlin', it's just Sean." Rogue hesitated, Remy noticing her gloves weren't in the best of shape, but she gingerly took the hand offered her.
"And you, lad," Sean pumped Remy's outstretched hand. "Call me Mr. Cassidy."
The Russian's name was Peter Rasputin – Colossus - and Lorna's pops was Magneto, just like Remy had figured. Magneto's battles against Farouk were the stuff of legend, and Remy was oscillating between acting like a star-struck fanboy and acting, as Rogue put it, like an ass because he was scared that the man wouldn't quite live up to the myth. There was an arrogance emanating from Magneto, which Remy would expect, but also a thinly veiled fanaticism that made him uneasy. These were the people he was trusting with their lives?
An irritated Remy abandoned the guest quarters almost as soon as they left him alone.
He had taken a quick shower and changed into a set of red and black workout clothes he found in the closet, only to discover the saviors of mutantkind had locked him in his room like a common criminal. Even though the lock took him all of five seconds to pick, being caged like an animal did nothing for his paranoia. There was part of him that understood why they would have wanted to keep a stranger quarantined, but he was pissed and set off to find Rogue.
Free to roam, the thief in him took stock of his surroundings. The X-Men's base was light years beyond the technology of even the world's most powerful governments before they had fallen to Farouk. Walls fashioned out of some unknown metal, not steel or titanium or anything Remy had ever felt. Seamless glowing panels lit his way, computer touch screens set near each knob-less door. There was a low hum barely perceptible at the edges of Remy's hearing, and with his fingertips pressed to the smooth metal surrounding him he could feel the sound resonating beneath the surface. What was this place?
He fought the urge to bang his head against a wall. Separate rooms with locked doors? The X-Men's hospitality was getting worse by the second. Instead of being led to their quarters or fed as originally promised, he and Rogue had been given the once over in the X-Men's infirmary. After the Banshee had finished turning him inside out – doing everything shy of making him turn his head and cough - Remy had been shuffled out of the infirmary and into the upper levels of the one of the towers they had seen on their landing. Feeling more guinea pig than guest, Remy had the sneaking suspicion these people were intentionally keeping him from Rogue. Maybe checking to see that the strangers kept their stories straight?
Snapping him from his thoughts, a door slid open automatically at his approach, and Remy had to dodge a pack of kids rushing through, led by a gangly blonde boy. Not a one of them was past puberty.
Was this what a mutant paradise looked like? Kids laughing and horsing around without a care for the Shadow King or his slave pens? A proud Mr. Cassidy had blathered on about the X-Men's base really being a school, their mission to gather and teach kids to use their powers for the benefit of mutantkind, but a cynical Remy could only shake his head in disbelief. The world had become such a shitty place. Beyond the walls and the snow protecting them, these kids would face nothing but misery, forced into Farouk's service or forced underground, the price for either their innocence. No matter how good their defenses, the Shadow King would find them, and he would make them pay.
"3…2…1..!"
Ahead, a girl with choppy blonde hair stopped at the doorway and lobbed a glowing sphere towards the pack's leader. Most of the kids screeched and kept running down the hall, but the blonde boy stood his ground, along with another who stepped up – this kid with darker skin and darker hair, but just as young. The dark haired boy started glowing with his own energy and caught the sphere, holding it between his palms where the sphere burst with a muffled explosion.
"Tabby!"
The blonde girl laughed and raced away, the two boys giving chase, nearly mowing down a beautiful red haired woman walking down the hall. This one was closer to Remy's age.
"Take it outside!" the woman scolded, and froze to let the kids whiz by on either side of her. Her wide smile reached giant green eyes - not quite the same shade as Rogue's, but still very pretty. Upon seeing Remy, her smile disappeared as surely as if he had wiped it from her face. She took a few halting steps forward, but stopped several feet from him.
"I can't hear you," she stated, blinked, and tilted her head.
Remy blinked back. "That's 'cause I didn't say anything, petite," he teased, but the woman continued to stare at him, then starting walking forward again, circling him like a wary dog sniffing another.
"I can't hear you," she said again and moved closer.
"Well, I best speak up then, cherie. I said…" His tongue froze. Though he tried, he was unable to form another syllable, his mouth held in an invisible vice grip.
"Shush," the woman ordered. "How can I hear you if you won't stop talking?" She was on the short side - five-four, five-five at the most - but reached up and grabbed his head, roughly tilting it side to side to inspect Remy's ears, ignoring his gurgled protests. She let go of him and the vice grip on his mouth relaxed. "Who are you?" she asked cautiously.
Charm always suited him best, so he bent to kiss her hand. "De name is Gambit, but a belle femme such as yourself can call me Remy." He released her hand, and she stared at where his lips had been.
"What are you doing here?" she continued questioning him.
He chuckled. "Been trying to figure that out myself, petite. My lady friend and I got rescued by your X-Men, and then we…"
The vice grip slapped his mouth again. "No. Here. What are you doing here, wandering the halls by yourself? Are you lost?" She was holding his tongue with some power she had, and Remy gestured for her to let him go.
"I'm not lost. Least I don't think I am. Just trying to find my friend, Rogue. They took us to the infirmary, but I don't know…"
The woman grabbed his hands and a determined scowl darkened her features. "Come with me." She tugged at his arms with whatever power had been holding his mouth shut.
"Now, petite," he protested, "just wait!"
His tongue stilled mid complaint, and he found himself levitated down the hall.