"Repentance"
I
Logan wakes in the same darkness that he had passed out in. A small tin room. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor. No windows. No doors. None he can see, anyway. In fact, as he stirs, he barely notices Magneto, sitting across from him, staring into oblivion. They've both been totally stripped of their personal effects, save for their clothes. Magneto's helmet is nowhere to be seen.
'The hell are we?' Logan asks groggily.
'No idea,' Magneto says, looking through the ground.
'You just gonna' sit around, or are we gettin' outta' this birdcage?' Logan stands up to rip a hole through the wall.
'It's no use. Your powers are useless here.' Logan tries to pop his claws in defiance.
Nothing happens.
Magneto looks up at Logan and slyly smiles. He taps his forefinger on his temple three times. 'We'll be stuck here until he lets us leave.'
'The more I hear you talk the more I feel like tearin' you a new one.'
Magneto scoffs. 'You and what mutation?'
Logan crouches down in front of Magneto, looking right into his eyes. 'I don't need my powers to kick your ass.' Magneto sits up straighter and returns to looking through the floor. Logan sits down against a wall and fidgets. He scratches the inside of his thigh and tries to dislodge something in his nose breathing in as quickly and forcefully as he can. Magneto sits perfectly still. Not a single muscle moves. Logan searches for the document stolen from Weapon X and finds it in his shirt pocket. They didn't take it. He mulls over its details again, paying close attention to the date stamp. 'How old am I?' he asks.
'I couldn't say exactly. But older than me, certainly.'
'How old are you?'
'Including my time in stasis I turned ninety-four years old last September.' Logan stares in amazement. Could he be over a hundred years old? Over two hundred even? Would he ever know? Logan racks his brain in search of answers to these questions, but as usual, he comes up blank.
II
A giant military plane rockets through the sky. Built with the general shape of an Osprey, but twice as large in every way. Onboard, the black ops strike team sent by Department H. Most of them are sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but one of the soldiers taps away at a keyboard attached to a monitor and the squad leader stands behind him. 'Weapon X has stopped moving, sir,' the tapper says. A map of the United States appears on the screen, showing a blinking light right over New York state.
'How long ago?' the squad leader asks.
'Roughly eight minutes.'
'What's the location?'
'Westchester County, New York, sir. 1407 Graymalkin Lane.'
The squad leader nods in agreement. 'Listen up, soldiers. We have reason to believe that Weapon X and Magneto are working together at this point in time. We've seen the damage they are capable of and we need to keep property damage to a minimum. Are we clear on that?' Some of the men nod and others shake their heads. 'We have been instructed to retrieve Weapon X alive. We have also been authorised to use lethal force on anyone or thing who interferes with that objective. Understood?' The soldiers seem to like that idea because they all nod their heads this time.
'Let's go get these sons o' bitches.'
III
In the hangar bay beneath the tennis court, Hank hangs from the bottom of the Blackbird, working on the ship through an exposed panel on its surface. Not far from him are Jean and Scott, spinning in office chairs. Around and around and around. Jean drinks some sort of milkshake through a straw. 'Hey, Jeannie,' Hank asks, 'could you pass me that wrench over there?'
'Sure thing, big blue.' She lifts the wrench using her telekinetic powers and it floats gracefully in the air right into Hank's hand.
'Thank you.'
'What was that about?' Scott asks.
'What do you mean?' questions Jean.
'"Big blue" Is that a pet name or something?'
Jean gives Scott a stare of death. 'Is he or is he not blue?'
'He is.'
'Is he or is he not large?'
'He is also.'
'So you see, my love, I was merely making an observation about Hank's physical appearance. No pet names about it.' She sucks so thoroughly on the straw that it looks like her eyes are going to pop out of her head.
'I guess that makes sense, Red.'
Now the death stare means business. Scott knows how much Jean hates being called a redhead. He also knows when and how to best weaponise it.
'Nice glass, one eye,' she throws back at him.
'Oof. Really grating stuff there, Jean. Truly damaging,' he says sarcastically. Maybe they've taken the joke too far now as it errs on offence. But before they can stop Hank continues.
'What would you call Xavier?'
'"Eyebrows",' Jean says first. 'Cause of his big eyebrows, ya know.'
'Are you nuts? "Chromedome" is the only correct answer and I will accept nothing else,' Scott says. Jean chuckles.
'What about "Legs"?' Hank adds.
'Hey, whoa, you can't go around sayin' stuff like that, Hank. You don't have to insult the man.'
'It's really not cool.'
'I was just…' Hank says, defeated. Scott and Jean laugh in the distance. 'Ah, I see. You were being sarcastic.'
'Of course, man. You can't take everything so seriously. But for real though, do not call him that. You don't even have to say it out loud and he'll still know, so maybe it's best to just forget you ever thought it,' says Scott.
'I concur.'
IV
It's five in the morning and the enormous plane flies thirty-thousand feet above Xavier's mansion and the soldiers onboard ready for the jump. They pull their paratrooper gear onto themselves and attach respirators to their faces. The jump ramp opens and gale force winds flood the cabin. 'I want seven to come in through the back, seven on either side and eight from the front with me,' the squad leader yells into a microphone over the wind. The soldiers all nod their heads. 'Let's go!' All thirty men leap from the rear of the plane and drop down to the Earth.
After two minutes of constant falling and being battered by the wind pushing up against them, they pull their parachutes, barely a mile above the ground. They land silently on the school grounds, tumbling along the freshly mowed grass. Seven men enter through the back of the house, picking locked doors and opening windows left slightly ajar. Seven more soldiers enter via the West wing of the building, using a glass cutter to open a hole big enough to fit through. Another seven troops break in through the East wing, breaking a lock on a window and opening it with care. The final nine pick the front door, entering the house in single file.
It's pitch black inside as all thirty men skulk through the mansion; guns raised in front of them and flashlights on at all times. Each separate team has one big, black case carried between them. They take their corners quickly and eventually they all converge on the library at the centre of the house. The four men carrying the cases put them down and open them. Inside each case is a modular floodlight, they'll use them to surprise the mutants for a brief moment, and then they'll take their shots. They place a floodlight in every corner of the room, each standing twelve feet tall. Now they sit and wait.
Hank is still working on the Blackbird when the alarms go off. Jean and Scott still spinning in their chairs. Red lights illuminate the entire room for a second and then stop and they flash again. A klaxon blaring all the while.
'Somebody's breached the school,' Hank informs the others, dropping to the ground from beneath the jet. It only takes them a few moments to put their uniforms on, except Hank, who couldn't conceal his identity even if he tried.
'Are you ready?' Cyclops asks them.
'More than,' Jean says.
'Good to go,' replies Hank.
'Jean, I want you to wake up Kurt, we're going to need his help. Hank, I want you to secure the basement. We can't let them find out about Cerebro or anything down here. When you're both done, meet me at the elevator.'
'What about you?' Jean asks.
'We're going to need all the help we can get.'
Logan and Magneto haven't moved. One of them appears almost lifeless, like he was asleep or meditating. The other has a permanent scowl printed onto their face. I'm sure you can figure out which is which. Suddenly, a crack of light shines through one of the walls. It grows until it becomes a blinding beam and then a giant opening to the outside. In the doorway, silhouetted by the light, is Cyclops. He rolls Magneto's helmet into the cell. 'Are you two up for a fight?'
Logan looks more closely as Cyclops and stands up, snarling. He pops his claws and leaps at Cyclops in less than a second, but he stops mid air. Magneto, hand outstretched, picks his helmet up off the floor. 'Don't be so foolish, Logan.'
'Let go o' me, buckethead.'
'It's not him you want.' Magneto drops his hand to his side and Logan plunges to the ground, landing right on his face. He gets himself up, wiping his bloodied nose. 'Are they here?' Magneto asks, turning to Cyclops.
He nods.
They both look at Logan. 'If you don't help us, we all die,' Cyclops says.
'No, you'll die. I'll be fine.'
'They're here to take you back, Logan,' Magneto says. 'They will catch you and put you back where you belong. Only this time, they'll make sure that you never escape again.'
Logan glances at Magneto, then at Cyclops. He opens his mouth to speak.
The new X-Men reach the elevator shaft. Cyclops, Firebird, Nightcrawler, Beast, Magneto and Logan. They cram inside the lift and huddle together. 'When we get out there, we stay in a group. It will be harder for them to pick us off like that. I don't want anybody going off on their own,' Cyclops orders. They all nod except for Logan. 'They probably outnumber us substantially, but that doesn't mean they can overpower us. But to do that I need everybody to work together, as a team.' Cyclops looks at Logan, who puts his previously crossed arms in the air as if to surrender. 'Let's do this thing.' Cyclops presses the button that takes them to the ground floor of the mansion. Seconds go by as they travel up and up and up. The elevator stops and the door opens.
They file out of the elevator, which has opened up where a grandfather clock once stood against a wall in one of the mansion's many corridors. The last mutant exits, Logan, and the door closes, concealing the entrance. 'Everyone keep down low,' says Cyclops. The six X-Men hug the corridor wall, diffused shafts of light peak in from behind the drawn curtains as the sun starts to rise in the early morning. Still not enough to be able to see anything meaningfully. Half of them, Beast, Nightcrawler and Logan, split off onto the adjacent wall.
As they slink through the mansion, they reach the library and see a soldier standing in the doorway.
30.
Cyclops motions to Firebird and she sneaks behind the goon, places her hand on the back of his head and he drops to the floor. Magneto stops his body from making a loud thud as it hits the ground by keeping afloat at the belt buckle. Firebird turns to Magneto and gives him two thumbs up. He shakes his head.
29 to go.
The other X-Men catch up to Firebird and follow her into the library. The floodlights come on, catching them off guard. All the remaining soldiers all point their guns at the mutant filled corridor and fire. Firebird flicks her hand and the bullets spray into a bookcase beside them as Magneto lifts his hand in the air and clenches his fist. The lightbulb filaments in all of the floodlights explode, sending tiny shards of white hot glass everywhere, plunging the room into darkness again. There's an almost inaudible buzzing or screeching noise as the soldiers pull goggles down over their eyes.
'They've got night vision,' Logan informs them. 'I can hear it.'
Magneto brings both of his hands into the air and a ball of light appears between them. 'You should avert your eyes,' he tells the X-Men. The ball grows bigger and it grows brighter. It quickly becomes as big as a beach ball, bigger and brighter still. It becomes blinding and Magneto throws it into the centre of the room as it floats to the ceiling. It's as bright as the sun and some of the soldiers couldn't get their goggles off fast enough while the others either looked away or tore the goggles from their faces. The ball of light explodes and fourteen of the soldiers are blinded; their retinas melt and sever their optic nerves, disconnecting their eyeballs from their brain. They fall to the ground, writhing and screaming in pain.
15 left.
The X-Men run to the centre of the room while the other soldiers struggle to reset their vision to the darkness of the room. More light starts to slip through the windows but barely enough to see the outlines of each other. They fire their guns wherever they see motion; and with six X-Men you might think they would be easy targets, but their senses are far keener than the average man's. A stray bullet slips underneath a fellow soldier's chin, severing his carotid artery, in a gruesome act of accidental friendly fire.
Only 14 now.
Logan takes slugs to the chest like water off a duck's back; they enter his skin and pop straight back out, hitting the ground with a little tink. A bullet flies towards Magneto and seeing it in a passing beam of light, he tries to swat it away with his powers. But the bullet keeps going in a straight line, hitting him in the shoulder. He looks at the shells on the ground and realises they are all plastic, as are the guns. He rips a piece of metal piping from beneath the floor and reshapes it, flattening it into a paper thin disc. A barrage of bullets take aim at Magneto and he elongates the disc to cover the entire length of his body as a shield. The bullets ricochet across the room and Magneto charges his assailant, utilising the disc as a makeshift shuriken, penetrating right through the soldier's gut before he drops to the floor.
13.
Cyclops fires his concussive beams to incapacitate a soldier, bathing the room in bright red light for a moment. One of the soldiers that he chases hides behind a bookcase, but Cyclops simply shoots a blast through it, knocking the goon behind it through a wall in the mansion. Books fly everywhere as natural sunlight streams into the room, everything now visible again.
12 to go.
Logan charges a soldier, claws extended. He tackles them to the ground, lifts his arms into the air and thrusts his claws into the soldier's chest. Lifting the corpse above his head, he throws it over his back into another soldier at such a speed that when they both hit the bookcase behind he breaks his neck.
10.
Firebird is targeted more than anyone else. She forms force shields of pink and purple light out of telekinetic energy. Bullets hit the shield and fall straight to the ground. She enters into a soldier's mind where she builds a psionic illusion. He looks around the room and all he sees is Firebird, hundreds of her attacking him, swarming and overpowering him. He drops to his knees, shielding his face with his hands, while the one and only Firebird sidles up behind him, puts her hand on the nape of neck and renders him unconscious, tipping over with a thud.
9.
Beast climbs up onto a wall using his simian agility. He grabs the top of a bookshelf and jumps, bringing the shelf crashing down onto a soldier below.
7.
Nightcrawler teleports around a soldier and then again and again, trying to trick him into firing. He's in front, now behind. On his left. He teleports above the soldier and drops from the ceiling. He falls with enough speed and force to knock him out cold. Nightcrawler laughs at his own ingenuity.
7.
Logan runs up to Nightcrawler. 'I got an idea, elf. I'm gunna' run at ya' and you're gonna' grab me by the arm, teleport to the other side o' the room holding me and then let me go.' Nightcrawler's face lights up.
'Wunderbar,' he exclaims.
'Hurry it up!' Nightcrawler nods and teleports to one end of the library. Logan gives him a thumbs up to indicate the incoming attack. Logan starts running, quickly reaching full speed. Nightcrawler reaches out to grab his arm and misses, sending Logan to tear a hole in the wall that leads to the grounds outside.
'Weapon X is in the street and vulnerable!' the squad leader says to his troops. The soldiers scramble to the exit that Logan's body created and they shuffle through the hole. Six of them manage to escape but Cyclops shoots the slowest, tossing him into a nearby tree. The X-Men follow suit and run outside. They see Logan, embedded in the side of a parked car, being surrounded by the soldiers. Nightcrawler teleports in front of the trooper closest to Logan.
'Hello,' he says. The soldier raises his gun to fire and Nightcrawler teleports behind him, grabs him by the waist of his pants and teleports forty feet into the air as the soldier fires. Bang! Nightcrawler lets go of him and materialises next to the other X-Men as the soldier falls from the sky with a bone shattering crack. Nearly every bone in his body is broken, but he somehow survives. The remaining five soldiers all turn to face the mutants.
Cyclops fires an energy beam at one. Hank charges another down, smashing their head into the asphalt road. Firebird pulls a third into the air and rends him back down to the earth, breaking his legs. Magneto uses his metal disc to form a skin tight layer of steel around another soldier's hands, leaving them useless. A hand tap on the final soldier's shoulder. Logan, having freed himself from the chassis of the car, grabs the trooper by his vest and lifts him above his head.
'Yer' really startin' to piss me off,' Logan says as he headbutts the soldier. His adamantium skull breaks the soldier's, sending splinters of bone into his brain. Logan throws the man to the ground. Exhausted, he and the other mutants crouch down in the street to take a breather. As usual, Nightcrawler is the first to break the ice.
'You know…,' he starts, winded, 'for a second zhere, I wasn't sure we were winning.' Everybody sits there in silence for a good long while, until Cyclops starts laughing.
'I never doubted us for a second,' he says, lying through a smile. He looks over at Firebird, who instantly loses all of the colour from her skin. 'Jean, what's wrong?' She points to the sidewalk across the street, where a woman, between sixteen and twenty, holds her cell phone towards the X-Men. It's obvious to Cyclops what's been going on. 'Okay,' he whispers, 'I can deal with this.'
He walks over to the woman in a calm and measured manner. He gets within three or four feet of her when she starts backing away from. 'I'm not going to hurt you,' Cyclops assures her. He stops and asks, 'Were you filming what just happened?'
She nods.
'Have you been streaming it?'
She nods again.
'Are you still live now?'
She nods one last time.
'Fantastic,' he says sarcastically, 'how much did you get?'
She shrugs her shoulders, 'Most of it, I guess.'
Cyclops thinks on this for a moment, silently bobbing his head back and forth an inch or two at a time. 'How many people?'
She glances at the phone making sure that she only moves her eyes away. 'Hundred thousand,' she replies.
Cyclops puts his hands on his hips and looks down to the ground. What the hell am I gonna do, he thinks. It hits him. He looks back at her. 'I've got some things I need to say and I need you to help me say it. Can you do that for me?' She thinks and then nods. 'Okay, just keep filming me.' He motions her to come closer so that only his head and bust are in frame. He looks right into the lens before speaking.
'People of the world. My name is Cyclops… and I am a mutant,' he starts. 'We have been hiding ourselves from you for hundreds of years. Most of us have lived in peace under your blissful ignorance of our existence. But some of us, the ones who are more obviously mutants, have been taken hostage by the criminal governments. Imprisoned. Tortured. Murdered.
'Enough is enough and we cannot go on like this. Pretending to be like everyone else. Pretending to be people we aren't. Because, as I said,' he moves aside and gestures towards Beast and Nightcrawler, who are sharing a laugh, 'it's much more difficult to hide for some of us. Over the last few days I have seen support for mutantkind establishing itself and for this we are grateful. But the fight is only just beginning. There is a vocal subsection of the population who will actively try to infringe upon our human rights. The unfortunate truth is that I don't believe it will ever stop. And to those people, I say this.
'We are the X-Men and we are the protectors of mutantkind.'
Cyclops takes a few seconds to let the moment sink in. He looks at the woman and points to the phone, 'Did you get all that?'
She nods her head, swipes the app away and puts her phone in her pocket. She points to the soldiers on the ground, 'Did you kill all of those men?'
'Uhh, no, of course not. You see my visor,' he says pointing to it, 'it lets me control the intensity of my concussive blasts. I only ever use enough power to incapacitate.'
'Hey, Cyke!' Firebird yells behind her, 'We're all going back inside, are you coming with?' If she didn't interrupt him now, she knew that he would talk the poor woman to death. As she speaks, she and the other X-Men traverse the grounds back up to the hole in the wall they originally came through. Magneto silently floats into the sky, standing on his metal disc, and disappears into the morning air.
'I'll be right there!' Cyclops calls back. 'Uh, what was your name?' he asks the woman.
'Alison.'
'Thank you, Alison,' he says, jogging back to the mansion. 'And if you're ever in trouble, ya know where to find us!'
Cyclops is the last man through the hole and is greeted by Piotr, now standing on his own, and Xavier, not standing on his own. 'Hey, big guy. What are you doin' out of bed?'
'I hear loud noises, so I came to see what happening and I missed the big fight.'
Nightcrawler sidles beside Piotr and puts a hand on his shoulder blade. 'Yes, mein freund. You missed a great battle, indeed,' he says mockingly.
Simultaneously, Xavier wheels over to Logan. 'Hello, Logan,' he says.
'Have we met?'
Xavier speaks to him telepathically. 'No, but I have acquainted myself with you. In as much as you know about yourself, which brings me to my point. I have an offer to make you, if you will listen.' He waits for Logan to reply, but he just stands there. Listening. 'I'm sure you are aware by now that I am a telepath.'
'I caught on,' Logan replies in his own mind.
'Well, there is a possibility that, with your permission of course, that I could help you access your blocked memories.'
Logan's interest piques and his ears prick up like a dog's. 'I think they were pretty thorough. I don't think I'm gettin' those back.'
'Wouldn't you like to know for sure? It's possible that they left your memories intact and simply buried them under decades of mind suppression. Clearly they didn't erase everything because you can speak, you understand us. Your basic knowledge of the world has already come back to you. But I couldn't tell you how much they left without trying to help you.'
Logan looks Xavier right in the eyes with an almost sad look in his own. 'And if don't work, do I gotta' stay?'
'You would be free to leave at any time regardless of the outcome.'
Logan ponders the offer and offers his hand to be shaken. 'You've got yerself a deal, legs.' Beast looks at Firebird and Cyclops, whose mouths are agape, and gives them an "I told you so" sort of look. Xavier reciprocates as he and Logan shake hands.
'Welcome to the X-Men, Logan.'
V
Later in the day Hank brings Logan down to his lab. Logan sits in a medical chair while Hank studies an image of Logan's brain and skull on the monitor screen. 'This is the tracking implant,' he says, pointing to a blinking red light. 'Unfortunately for you, it's embedded within the bone of your skull.'
'Why unfortunately?' Logan asks.
'Well your entire skeleton is coated with adamantium, including your cranium. So to get your skull I would have to cut through the adamantium first. Now the only way I would even have a chance of doing that is with super-heated adamantium tools. But even then, it's a one in a million shot.'
'I'm guessin' you don't got any of that.'
'Not so much as a thumbtack.'
Logan looks down at his hands and pops the middle claw from his right fist. 'Super heat this.'
'And then do what with it, Logan?'
'Tell me where to stick it and I'll ram the fucker through it.'
'You'd slice your brain to pieces.'
'It'll heal,' Logan says growls.
'I won't do it. It needs to be precise and you are anything but.'
Logan retracts the claw. 'Fine,' he says, 'any better ideas?'
'As a matter of fact, yes.' Hank pulls two electrodes out a drawer and puts them on Logan's head, either side of the tracking implant. He hooks the other end of the nodes up to a mini generator. 'I'm going to shock it out. The implant has an electrical flow to function, right? So I'll pass a stronger current through it via the electrodes and voila! We'll have a short circuited tracker on our hands. Well, in your skull, but that's semantics.'
'And that won't do any damage?'
'Nothing that will last.'
'Whatever, as long as it actually fries the damn thing.'
Hank claps his hands in anticipation. 'Excellent!' he exclaims. 'Let's get started then, shall we?' Hank starts turning a dial on the generator and its voltage output keeps going up and up and up.
'How much are you putting through me?'
'Not a lot.'
'How much, fuzzball?' Logan snarls.
Hank keeps turning the dial before he answers. 'About a hundred thousand volts.'
'Now wait a second–' Logan starts to stand up but Hank turns the generator on just as he does. He's shocked back down into the seat, his entire body convulsing. All of the claws in both his hands start extruding from his knuckles, albeit, extremely slowly. Hank turns the machine off and Logan struggles for air.
'How do you feel, fuzzball?' Hank asks sardonically.
'I'm… going to… kill you…'
Hank looks back at the monitor, the light still blinking. 'Whoops, looks like that wasn't enough to destroy it. You ready for round two?' And before Logan can even answer, Hank switches the generator back on. Logan lifts an open hand into the air in a failed attempt to stop Hank, who is at this point laughing. The machine stops outputting electricity. 'Okay, we got it that time.'
Logan, slowly getting to his feet, holds his hands in front of his face in preparation for a fight.
He pops his claws.
'What are you doing, Logan?'
'I told ya, Hank. I'm going to kill you.' Hank bounds away on all fours as Logan struggles to chase after him.
VI
'Everything mutates. Thoughts, beliefs, ideologies. Of course, people mutate too, both throughout their lives and in the more literal mutant sense. Being a telepath, I never met a mind that I could not change, until I met him.
'I tried to change the mind of a man I once knew, named Erik Lehsnherr. I thought I knew him well enough that I felt he was capable of change. Even having lived inside his mind for some time, I could not convince him to see the other side of things. My side of things. Call it arrogance or call it sheer force of will. I call it my greatest failure.
'I regret not showing myself to the world, my true self, some twenty years ago. Perhaps then we mutants might have been more tolerated. I regret not listening to my students, who if not for them, we would still be living in hiding. Scott specifically I owe an apology. He understands that the minds of the youth are impressionable and easily influenced. I only hope that my X-Men and I give them the right impression. He is able to understand the minds of children better even than I. And despite my best efforts, we were still exposed to humanity before we were ready.
'My failure to protect my students led me back to my initial failure. I stumbled over my thoughts and wondered, "If I couldn't change the mind of one man, how could I expect to change the mind of the entire world?" I stewed in the question for hours before coming to a realisation. The only times the world has ever changed, is when all at once, while your eyes are blinking, everything mutates.'