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TITLE: The List
AUTHOR: Roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: Picking up the pieces post-X2. Scott, Rogue and Logan search for the missing.
LENGTH: ~9,000 words. 3 parts.
NOTES: I maybe stretched the timescale of X2 somewhat for this story, providing almost a week between the attack on the mansion and the return. I recall Jubilee largely from the cartoon series. I have never seen X3.
NOTES #2: This fic is the best example ever of how much I suck at actually posting and editing my stories. It was originally written back in 2004, then completely forgotten about. The first part has been on fanfiction(dot)net since 2008. I then managed to lose the rest of the story until the other day. At this point, I'm just posting it quick before I do anything else stupid. Originally I had intended this to be the first of four related stories, but the rest will now never be written.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda yadda yadda.
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THE LIST
1. SCOTT
A tyre cutting into a clogged gutter drenched his legs to the knees in water that he would swear iced up the instant it hit. He turned his head, but he didn't shout after the car or slow his steps. He'd learned the value of keeping a low profile unless necessity called for the exception long ago. Rain soaked his hair, clung to and drained off over the red lenses of his glasses, making vision a more lofty ambition than normal, and he wished he'd worn the visor, for all that it drew more stares.
He ducked into a phone booth, only partially to dry off, the clamour of New York traffic muffled by the closing of the door. Sealed inside, the smell was strongly unpleasant over the scent of rain and petroleum. He unzipped his coat and kept his eyes screwed tight shut while he used the mostly-dry fabric of his shirt to clean off red lenses.
Sight returned, he fed change into the telephone and dialled the number. It rang for a long time, but he was prepared to wait.
The phone was finally picked up and a soft, accented voice said, "Hello. Xavier's School for the Gifted."
"Kurt? I guess you're the secretary today." He didn't know why he'd expected Jean's voice on the line - she'd seldom been the one to answer the mansion phones even when she'd been alive - except that she'd always been the thing he most associated with home.
"Scott." Nightcrawler still sounded uncertain saying his name, courtesy of a too-short acquaintance composed largely of emotional breakdown (Scott's). "Everything is all right?"
"Yeah... everything's fine." The words tasted bitter on their way out and he had to tell himself it wasn't a lie. Everything that would be news to the rest of the school was fine... better than fine, in fact. One target had been acquired for retrieval already, far easier and earlier than expected. "Everything's great. Tell the professor our party will be home and sleeping in our own beds for the night - plus one."
"You found one?"
"We found one." The line blared at him for more coins he wasn't willing to give it. "We should be back before midnight, I hope. I have to go now." He set the receiver down before the 'click' and the dead air, and stared at it in its cradle, his fingers still touching the smooth plastic, wondering why he'd rung at all. Perhaps it was only a need to foster the appearance of achievement, of progress... of hope.
It is an achievement, he told himself irritably. And the professor deserves to know there's at least one missing student now safe and on their way back to him. Especially when so much has been damaged or lost.
He took his hand from the phone and zipped up his coat. Though it was more late afternoon than early evening, the rain had darkened the sky and the city almost to the shades of night. He saw his own reflection, caught between the anaemic lighting in the roof of the phone booth and the dark outside, caught in monochromes and glass and jagged, refracting dashes of rain. Scott Summers - a young man wearing sunglasses built like a prison, a coat that swallowed up the thinness of his form and pants that sagged with the weight of the weather. He felt indeterminably old. He pushed back the door and walked through the space where the reflection had been into the night.
The sidewalk skidded under his feet, puddles sucking at his steps. Hands stuffed in pockets and hunched forward against the rain, he trudged his way across the street and the path of a honking station wagon whose driver leaned from the window to join in the serenade. The front of the diner was a foggy neon glow. Blue neon; purple to him. 'Jemima's', it read.
Two steps up to the door (no obvious wheelchair access). The door, glass, shiny and recently cleaned, grease fingerprints already collecting by the handle nonetheless. There was a bell that tinkled when he pushed the glass inward, adding his fingerprints to the collection, and his chest clenched a moment because it had sounded like something splintering. The comfortable heat and dryness of the interior embraced him and reminded that this wasn't another warzone, here and now.
He saw Logan and Rogue at their table across the diner with raised heads. The plate of fries that had been in front of Rogue when he left was in front of Logan now, and empty; Logan was sucking grease from his fingertips and sprawling indecorously in his plastic chair. Rogue hunched as Rogue was wont to do - although he'd thought she was doing that less of late, so perhaps it was something to do with his own presence.
"Conquered the savage elements, huh?" Logan asked, one eyebrow climbing in low-key humour. "The chief have anything to say?"
"If you mean Professor Xavier... I'm sure the message will get to him."
Scott shrugged out of his wet coat and sat down in the spare chair that wasn't opposite Logan, depositing the coat on the one that was. While any amount of time spent close-quarters with the Wolverine wasn't even approaching his idea of fun, they hadn't come close to actual violence yet, now that the ghost of Jean lay between them. Possibly it had as much to do with the awareness of Marie looking on, but he supposed their newest recruit would have to warm up to the fact sooner or later that not all of the 'X-men' were the big happy family the faculty liked to project. He made an effort to relax, resting his chilled hands flat to the table top in front of him. Their skin was pasty and he rubbed his fingers together, trying to encourage circulation.
"I guess I'm glad I'll be sleeping at home tonight after all," Rogue offered, sounding none too sure. "But I kinda had worked myself up to all this taking longer, you know?"
"It'll take longer, don't worry," Logan said. "We got lucky first time, can't expect it every time. Course, it depends on your definition of lucky. With a bit of 'luck', the place'll even have begun to look like home again by the time we next get back."
Rogue scowled at him a little, apparently for once not appreciating his wisdom. "That ain't why I came," she snapped, and he looked surprised.
"No, it's not," Scott agreed heavily. "You came because I asked you to." And Logan came because Marie came, and Scott had no illusions about why the professor had sent himself.
"Where the hell is that kid?" Logan demanded, his head turning from side to side as though trying to scent her on the air. "What time did you say she got off-shift?"
"Another hour." Rogue's chin sagged into her hand. "I can't believe Jubilee got a job." She ducked her head from their questioning looks. "I mean, Jubilee? Washing plates?"
"Set herself up pretty good without much time or planning. Girl's a survivor."
"We can only hope the same of the others that scattered," Scott murmured.
"Shouldn't have talked to the aunt, though." Logan chewed the inside of his mouth. "First place anyone'd think to ask questions. Look at us."
"I'm not going to grade them on it," Scott told him, frowning. Both of them looked at him with their expressions a riddle he wasn't about to attempt to unravel. He shifted in his seat and wished he'd bought a coffee or a soda, or anything to distract his hands.
Logan's eyebrows had quirked up almost enough to bury into his hairline. He spun the plate on the table using his index finger as a pivot. Cleared his throat. "Might not be a bad thing. Bit of in-the-field experience, you know?"
"If we were teaching them to be soldiers, which we're not. The idea is to teach them to be whatever they want to be, and that doesn't have to be us."
"You think they won't have to fight all their lives anyway?"
And, God damn it, he wasn't qualified to answer that anymore than Logan to believe it. He slapped his hand down on the spinning plate, killing its motion. "We work for a future where none of them will have to fight."
He didn't miss noticing the pinpoints of blood on Logan's knuckles where the claws had almost sprung - from instinct at the sudden motion, he'd guess, more than genuine desire to cause harm - a reminder that, with Logan, he was playing with fire. And who was he to preach pacifist methods, with a foul temper all his own and a body just as deadly a weapon? The pinpricks faded, and Logan growled, "Get the hell off."
Scott covered with, "I'm heading back up to the counter. You want a drink?"
"Sure." Logan sat back and let him take the plate; Rogue shook her head.
The only other current customers, a young couple with an impressive collection of body jewellery between them, paid him a cursory glance as he walked past them on his way to the counter. If his glasses or prior conversation suggested 'mutie' to them, they didn't care... or were too wrapped up in each other to notice. But he hoped for the former. A final victory would be composed of such little things.
The diner's proprietor, whose name was not Jemima but Bob, emerged from the kitchens when he set the offending plate down on the counter. He ordered sodas for himself and Logan and asked to make sure Jubilee was still there in the back.
"Yes she is," the man said gruffly. "I'm telling you, I've been watching her like a hawk. She won't run off again from my place, Mr Summers."
It had seemed an easier prospect to pretend Jubilee was a runaway and themselves stern school officials sent to collect her than to explain the truth. Even if the story of 'How The Government Raided My Mutant School' would've sounded great on Oprah. Thankfully the girl caught on quick, hardly afraid it might sully her reputation, and played the part to perfection. Given that they were already depriving the proprietor of one of his staff, it had seemed only reasonable to wait the few hours until she came off-shift.
Rogue was looking at her watch again when he returned to the table, handing Logan a soda that he looked at as though it was something offensive. Scott didn't sit down, asking instead, "You want to fill in the time with a game or two?" and gesturing over to the pool table in the corner.
A wicked gleam came into Logan's eye. "Yeah."
Scott scraped together enough change for a handful of matches which Logan lost, badly, until he finally tossed the cue aside on the table, bared his teeth, and said, "You set me up, you red-eyed freak."
"Just using the gifts God gave me," he returned sarcastically. "Besides, I'd no idea how you'd play, either." He glanced at Rogue and felt a twinge of guilt. "The two of you go ahead, and I'll sit out."
It turned out that Logan was a gracious and generous player against Rogue, and talked her through choosing and setting up her shots with a rare patience that just made Scott feel more a heel. Patience was something he was short on just now, and the rivalry between he and Logan was on a level of instinct he didn't always notice in time to catch when he wanted to. He resented the Neanderthal in him that uprooted reason and sense when he was thrown together with the guy. It made him feel like a teenager. Jean'd had every right to be pissed.
Purple neon rose and fell like breathing, the night reflecting it back in through the glass. Realisation that he was staring, mind blank, at nothing, forced him to slowly unfreeze. She's not here anymore. She'll never be here again. You have to accept that, or you'll be useless to the rest who still are here and still can be helped.
Rogue's tentative, "Are you all right?" brought him the rest of the way back to reality.
"Yeah... I was just thinking. Yeah."
"You wanna play again?" She held out a cue, and he reached out to accept it.
Logan cleared his throat uncomfortably. "We're out of money." That did explain how it was they'd come to look to him. The best of friends, these two... or, no, not friends; tight in some way that transcended friendship, but was a long way from sexual. He was the third wheel here, the one they didn't notice unless he advertised himself.
He was on his way to the counter to break open a note when the proprietor, coming out from the kitchen, saw him and said, "I told her to wrap up. She'll be out in a minute."
"Thanks." Scott turned back. Logan and Rogue at the pool table had overheard and were already finishing up drinks - his own as well, he noted - and gathering their things. Rogue handed over his coat, which he wouldn't have known was a particularly dingy shade of dark green but for the fact Jean had told him once. He delved into the sodden pockets for his car keys and tossed them to Logan.
"What the hell am I gonna do with these?"
"Bring the car around?"
"You want me to drive your car?" He narrowed his eyes. "Sure you're feeling all right? Stryker didn't mess with that brain of yours any more than we already know about?"
"Just get the car, Logan. It's a long drive." No hard choice to forgo an explanation of the effects of darkness and rain on his vision.
Logan expelled a small, derisive laugh through his nose, tossed the keys in the air and caught them. In a smooth continuation of the motion, he pointed his finger like a pistol; clicked his tongue. Then he'd spun on his heel and disappeared out into the rain, the music of the door's chime fading in his wake.
Without him, Rogue seemed to shrink in on herself. Her eyes turned down and her shoulders sagged inside the x-jacket, which had been Jean's, that once again encased them. Scott and Logan were in civvies, but Rogue's jacket had somehow found its way along, worn over her jeans and blouse and swinging loose on her shoulders, and since it was new, and did not look particularly out of place, Scott had let it slide and even experienced, when he allowed himself, a small sense of pride.
He wondered about her attitude, though - whether it was second-hand dislike from Logan, who she got along with so well and had had inside her head, or simply the fact that they'd never had a lot of contact, he and she. He refused to believe he was really so intimidating.
"Hey." The voice from behind them was almost a whisper.
Turning, he frowned at the thin girl. A little younger than Marie, black hair, perfect skin, wrapped in a long coat that covered her slim figure near neck to foot. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and a pinched look marred her face. She looked worse than she had two hours ago - the waiting had done her no favours. Too late to regret that he'd allowed the proprietor's claim she ought finish her shift.
"Jubilee..." He touched his hand to her shoulder and she stared palely up at him. Her eyes slid over his face - most people's did; he had no point of contact for them with his own eyes perpetually hidden - and beyond him, to rest longingly on the door.
In spite of the rain and the dark, he gently suggested, "Let's go wait outside for Logan."
They'd climbed down the few steps to the dark recess to the side of the entrance, the rain making its presence felt again on clothes, hair and skin that had barely had time to begin to dry, when he felt something hit him around the midriff, knocking him into Rogue and the both of them backwards against the wall of the diner.
"Oh, God..." Jubilee gulped into his sodden jacket. "Oh, God, I thought you were all dead." Her left arm curled around his back in a grip like steel. Her right was around Rogue's shoulder, and he was very aware that the other girl had gone stiff with terror beside him. A careless contact with her skin could kill. Awkwardly, he disentangled Jubilee from Rogue and let her cling to him.
"It's all right," he told her. "It's all right."
But it wasn't and it hadn't been. "I thought you were all dead," she reasserted, aggrieved, to his chest.
"We're not... everyone's... most of us..." And, oh, he hadn't thought about this. It had never occurred to him - nor, he would imagine, to the professor - that they would have to be told, or that he would have to be the one to tell them. "Everyone except... Jean..." In spite of his best efforts, he heard his voice break.
"Oh, God..." Jubilee's hold clenched tighter.
"Everyone else is okay," he said quickly, stepping over the issue of seven more missing kids. "The school will be fine."
Still, she didn't let go. "I'm sorry," she said, her face pressed to his heart. Her voice squeaked. "I'm so sorry."
With a sigh, he gave in; rested his chin on the top of her head, careful of his glasses, and let the rain wash over them both, too distracted to be glad Logan wasn't there to witness another display, or to wonder what Rogue was thinking, who was.
"Shh," he whispered, rubbing her back as though she were a much younger child. "I know. Shh."
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2. ROGUE
From the moment he'd rejoined them, the drawn lines around his mouth strained so much now that it seemed his skin must snap, and said with a voice like choking, "Eight. There are eight missing," there had been no question it was a task that needed approaching with the utmost urgency. There had been no question in anyone's mind (or, at least, certainly none voiced) that Mr Summers would be the one to go. Maybe the professor's involvement in the decision wasn't entirely that of an innocent bystander, but perhaps this task would have fallen to Mr Summers in any world, even the ones where Jean was still alive. It fit him, in any case, the role of gathering their strays.
Somewhere in the chaos - the rubble, the bullet holes, Ms Munroe bewailing the task of finding any habitable rooms to accommodate the school's remaining complement in any kind of dignity - it had been pointed out that he would need a female presence at his side, and into the ensuing guilty silence Mr Summers had said, "I'll take Rogue."
Her head had jerked up of its own accord at the mention of her name. She was still wearing her uniform from the stopover at the White House, still thinking it merely a loan. Was this then graduation, stepping into a dead woman's clothes that dug into her flesh in uncomfortable places? No congratulation, achievement or fanfare, just a feeling of being too heavy and the ache of responsibility at the back of her skull? If so, she could have lived entirely without ever leaving John's 'kiddy table'.
"I - I--" She hesitated. She couldn't see his eyes, of course, she'd never seen them, but something in his posture, in the hollows of his cheeks, turned her denial into an accepting nod. She stood there under his walled-off gaze and absorbed the implication; the ghost's uniform on her shoulders was there to stay, endorsed by the words, "I'll take Rogue". Even if he wasn't in the best state of mind to make such a decision, he wouldn't go back on it. She didn't know him well, but well enough to know his word was law, once given.
Dr Grey's shoes were daunting, great whopping size nines that would have flopped around on her own feet. She searched for a clue what to think, how to react, but the conversation had moved on and the group weren't looking at her any more. The repair shift - Ms Munroe, Mr Summers, Bobby who'd finally stopped apologising for the water damage, Kurt who hadn't even ever been there when it didn't look like a battle zone, and the professor whose wheeled mobility was limited to the cleared areas of the floor - had too many other demands upon their attention. Their voices were raw with myriad pains and traumas, contrasting personalities a long way on the wrong side of exhaustion for committee decisions. She thought of everything that had happened to all of them that night, and so much still ahead to go before any chance of rest.
Rogue wondered, not for the first time, where Logan had taken himself off to, not that his presence would have been anything more than extra fuel on the fire. But she somehow doubted he was among the children bedded down in the dining hall with sleeping bags salvaged from the camping equipment in the X-jet.
Amid the clamour, the professor put his head down, resting it elegantly on his poised fingers, and sighed. "We need Jean." Strain contorted his face as he realised he'd murmured it aloud. "I'm sorry, Scott."
Mr Summers - Scott, they were teammates now, she had to get used to calling him Scott - answered with the emotion of a machine, "You'll have Hank within the next twelve hours. I'll take Rogue."
Professor Xavier looked back at him with eyes that must see beyond implacable red reflection as nobody else now could. "Get some sleep." He turned that same gaze to Rogue, and she tried not to fall back a step beneath it. "You as well. No--" His raised hand stalled a protest that hadn't yet reached Scott's lips. "The rest of us will be working through the night, yes. But I'll not have you driving, let alone flying, until you've allowed yourself to rest. You have important work to do tomorrow. Go. The benches in the upstairs study should be adequate for a few hours sleep. You shouldn't be disturbed there by the youngsters, or by the rest of us moving things around."
"Yes, sir," Scott said quietly. She was surprised he didn't salute.
He took Rogue's arm and steered her in front of him. It felt like a treachery, to walk away, to even think of sleep - oh, God, how could she sleep? How could he? Dr Grey was dead. The hand on her arm trembled shock, reaction and grief, and withdrew the moment following her realisation as though he sensed the touch betrayed the mask his visor aided so efficiently.
It was already nearing five in the morning, the sky growing lighter outside in glimpses caught through the windows they passed, many broken and letting the air creep through. Adrenaline still thudded in her head, making it ache. Her whole being ached, and she hadn't seen any real combat. Scott had seen his on the wrong side, according to Logan - something she did not dare ask about, but Kurt had told her what had been done to him. How could Professor Xavier think they would find sleep?
The upstairs study had padded, wide benches that would make for more than adequate bunks. It smelled charred, though the scent had carried on the air from where the soldiers blasted their way into a locked store room a few doors down and incinerated half of the school's supply of bedding. The study itself was undamaged, even the windows intact. Scott lay on his back on a bench one side of the room and she headed to the opposite side. An instant after she turned her back, she sensed his consciousness dissipate and knew herself effectively alone in the room.
She turned around again, a little alarmed. He lay very straight, face pointed up, visor hiding closed eyes. One arm sagged off the side of the bench, the other lay on his chest with its fingers curled into a claw. She slowly crossed the room, her footsteps sounding far too loud, until she was close enough to hear his breath, to see its gentle rise and fall, reassuring her he was okay. She supposed the professor had a hand in this sudden comatose state. She supposed it was for the best. Would she, too, sleep so easily once her head touched down?
She stooped to lift his dangling arm, and set it more comfortably upon his chest like its fellow, before returning to the bench she'd picked out for her own.
And she did sleep. Both of them slept until almost eleven o'clock, until the professor sent a psychic wake-up call that was the mental equivalent of a cold shower. It had Rogue bolt-upright on the bench, feeling all the aches of 5AM intensified in her bones. She groaned, sure the leather she'd slept in had left creases in her skin.
Unflappable Scott rolled in more practised fashion from his own bench and stood with a minimum of creaks. She resented him fiercely and decided he at least must be used to such wake-up calls.
"If you can find any clothes," the professor's voice said authoritatively inside her skull, "This outing would be rather better conducted in civilian attire. Please come down to the kitchen when you're both ready."
"Did you--?" She looked to Scott.
"Yeah, I heard it too. Come on. Be quick if you shower." A grimace twisted his lips as he looked towards the clock on the wall.
She did shower, because the grime felt like it had set into her bones, but she hoped she had not been too long and made up for the time by pulling on the first pair of jeans and T-shirt she found in the rubble of her old dorm. When she got down to the kitchen, Professor Xavier was there and Scott wasn't.
The professor indicated a place at the table, wheeled carefully around and, with the aid of a tray balanced across his knees, manoeuvred a cup of coffee and a plate piled with toast in front of her. He didn't look like he'd slept. She wondered where everyone else was, whether they were still trying to make the school secure before they finally allowed themselves to rest.
"Thanks," she saw awkwardly, feeling guilty - she'd slept, and slept well, the waking pains notwithstanding. And it wasn't every day the professor himself served her breakfast. The experience was jarring.
"I, too, wish to feel useful," he said companionably. She met his eyes, and her unsettlement disappeared, swallowed by the kindness and sincerity within. "But since my usefulness in this business of... home repair... is limited, I content myself with co-ordinating the operation from here, keeping a check on the safety of the minds within these walls, and providing nourishment for the workers."
"You have to rest sometime, too," she blurted, concerned for him. She knew he'd had a difficult few days. She remembered what it was like to be a prisoner.
"Thank you, Marie. And I will, soon."
"I'd keep you to that promise."
She turned at the new voice. Scott leaned inside the door frame. She tried to smile at him with a mouthful of toast; a dismal failure. But evidently his attention was elsewhere.
"Ah, Scott." The professor wheeled around and collected items onto another tray which he brought to the place set opposite Rogue. "Do sit down."
Mr Summers slid into the indicated seat like he was moving on autopilot. She noticed that the shirt and pants he was wearing didn't match very well. His hair was sticking up in tufts from the shower, and she was a little surprised to see that he'd taken one. It seemed a curious vanity from Mr Super-efficient considering his earlier hurry, until she connected that he'd had the stain of imprisonment to wash off. She hadn't been able to stay in the shower long enough when they brought her back from Liberty Island.
He ate the toast as though he hadn't eaten in days, teeth tearing pieces off rather than biting. It could have been mistaken for impatience. He absorbed the coffee in one gulp, and was finished long before Rogue.
"I-I'll bring it with me," she said quickly as he stood up.
"Don't. There are a few more preparations to make yet. I'll see you outside the garage. Just don't be too long. Oh, and bring something a little warmer to wear."
Ever-precise, ever-observant. She looked out of the window as he left the room - it had begun to rain.
She asked Professor Xavier, "Will he be all right?"
"I don't know," he replied, his voice little more than breath. "Yes, you might well think that I ought to know, but the mind is an unpredictable domain, and I can't read the future. But I hope - Rogue, you must... please take care of him for me."
"I - me?" The thought made her almost frantic.
He smiled and laughed, barely, and allowed, "You only need do what you would do anyway. I would ask for no more. I already know that you would give... all you could, whatever situation transpired. You are ready, in spite of your doubts. As ready as any of them ever were, when I sent them out to fight this fight." His face darkened; remembering, she supposed, the losses. Remembering Jean. Rogue couldn't help but remember some of Logan's more choice comments about seeing Xavier's people operate in the field, back at the beginning. She hoped he didn't pick them up from her thoughts.
He must have been tired, because he didn't. Or at least he didn't say anything if he did. It was a minute later that he frowned, and his forehead creased into fine lines. "Oh, and you'll find there is an... unexpected addition to your small crusade. Please tell Scott that it's quite all right with me if he feels it won't be a problem."
"What?"
The professor only tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially, and then seemed to phase out, as though events elsewhere in the mansion were occupying his attention, his face like an empty house. Rogue wolfed down the rest of her food, anxious to find out what he was talking about. She only just remembered to dash upstairs for a coat - her uniform jacket lay the closest, abandoned on top of her old bed - and the overnight bag she'd thrown together when she came out of the shower.
The grass in the grounds had been churned to mud in places and made for unsteady footing. The rain falling was too soft yet to smooth its jagged landscape.
In the garage, Scott leaned on the driver's side door of a car more practical and low-key than the ones Logan was making a habit of wrecking, bundled up in an ugly coat. At the passenger side, Logan lolled with his arms folded and a belligerent expression she could discern from his body-language long before she drew close enough to see it in his face.
"Hiya, kid," grunted the professor's surprise addition.
She felt the edges of her mouth climb upwards despite her attempts to tame them into the stolid line befitting of a serious X-woman. "Logan? You're coming with us?"
"That's by no means decided. The professor needs--"
Oh. "The professor said it's up to you, Mr Summers," she said, and relayed the message word for word.
Scott ducked his head, mouth visibly tightening, and dragged a contorted hand through his hair. "All right," he said finally, but turned on Wolverine with an angry addendum that startled her. "But no more repeats of last night, you get that? If you're going to do this, it had damn well better be sober. Or you're nothing but a liability to her or me or the kids we need to protect."
Logan had been...? Oh.
He didn't look hungover, but then she supposed his mutant system would wash out the poisons of alcohol within hours. She watched him absorb a tirade that he certainly would not normally have met with such a shifty, almost embarrassed silence, then he said, "Yeah," voice rough and abused, "y'right, Summers, much as it kills me to say it. I won't be doing that again."
Annoyance flooded through Rogue and she felt her fingernails stab into her palms through her gloves at the idea that while everyone else had been doing much needed repairs, he'd been getting drunk over the death of Scott's fiance. Annoyance with Scott, suddenly, in equal part, because shouldn't it have been him? Didn't Jean deserve to be mourned properly, to have her loss felt, not repressed with a clenched jaw and a composure that hadn't broken since--
But of course it had, and she wished she hadn't reminded herself.
With a sigh, she climbed past Logan into the passenger seat, claiming shotgun position.
Logan piled in last and sprawled across the two seats in the back.
--------------
3. LOGAN
"Fuck!"
The empty basketball court and the quiet grounds surrounding him bounced the shout and the sound of breaking glass implacably back. As the last of the echo faded, he stared down at shaking hands and extended claws.
"Jesus." He retracted the claws and crushed his face into one clammy palm, frustration contorting ugly twists and ridges beneath his fingers and pinching shut his eyes. He'd been right to stay the hell away from people tonight. "This is a school," he muttered, reminding himself. He snapped his head up and dived into the crate discarded on the grass for another beer. "Fuck."
The beer lost the bout, down and out after only four seconds, and the bottle smashed in amongst the shards of its predecessor on the paved ball court. Shit, but this was a school. And Summers was going to kill him. Try to, anyway. But maybe if he got drunk enough quick enough, he'd be unconscious without maiming anyone or destroying anything else before the night was out.
Logan reached for the next beer, the next in a series of reasons not to think about the truckload of people he'd killed in the past week. Not to think about that woman in whose eyes he'd recognised himself the moment life drained out of them. Not to think about another woman whose eyes he wouldn't be searching for signs his charms might be working on her ever again.
Jean... damn it.
"Fuck you!" he yelled - at God, at the fates, at the whole damn universe, and this time the bottle smashed still half-full, so hard that shards and droplets sprayed out to dash him even eight or nine feet distant. The glass made scrapes he felt heal almost on the instant. The droplets hung around on his skin and dribbled off the end of his nose. He swabbed his hand over his face, which probably just made him smell as though he'd bathed in beer, even to ordinary dull senses.
He cursed whatever sensibilities had warned him off buying something stronger to bring back to a school. He cursed Summers and Xavier. It was probably their fault, and it wasn't like he could go wrong cursing Summers. Maybe he should go and find the kid and make him get drunk, too. Hell, he needed it if anyone did tonight.
Sinking his teeth savagely into the inside of his cheek, he reminded himself he was trying to avoid damaging anyone tonight. As such, staying away from Summers was pretty much a goddamn priority.
He sank down on the grass, finally beginning to feel the effects of the drink numbing the edge off the world, off his hyped-up senses which sometimes just seemed to make it all so much more raw. He let the claws out again and sliced the caps off a handful more bottles. The edge had gone from his anger, but he wasn't sure what to do or feel in its absence. He stared down at the rim of the bottle for a long time before raising it to his lips, pausing and retreating without taking a sip.
He tipped the bottle a jaunty fraction. "Here's to you, Jeannie. Put in a good word for me with those angels. You know I'm gonna need it more than that kid of yours." He drank briefly, and lowered the bottle, calm achieved.
He could see her in his mind's eye - like the first time he'd really seen her, in Xavier's office, not running on instinct and animal adrenaline in the lab where he'd woken up and almost taken her head off. Red hair fluffed around her head, the unsure smile always a hint around her lips, the brilliant blaze of spirit behind her eyes. Enough wildness and power, under the gloss and respectability, that he could feel it, the pull between them, like calling to like.
'She wasn't even yours,' said a whisper in his head. 'She never would have been yours.'
And later, when that woman had looked inside his skull and seen him, really seen him, known the reality of him... all he could never articulate and the taste of all he never would tell... and she had flinched, but she hadn't extinguished that spark.
'She didn't choose you.'
"Get outta my head," he muttered to the voice. The first yellow streak of daybreak was showing on the horizon, and calm had deprived him of the adrenaline which had thus far been keeping him warm. He replaced it with another two beers, and slowly drank the rest of the crate as the night turned to morning.
He didn't remember falling asleep, but he woke some time before eight with the customary unpleasant sensation coursing through his body that meant his healing factor was busy chasing the last vestiges of alcohol away. He felt stiff and chilled, but he'd felt worse, and he probably wouldn't be feeling that way very long. The dew that had dampened the grass had collected in his hair and on his face, and its moisture softened the leather of his spare uniform (the bitch with the claws had ripped to shreds the one he'd gotten nicely worn in). The grass was green, and there were bird noises from the trees, the whole place exuding life, and he supposed the world went on, even if Dr Jean Grey was no longer a part of it.
He probably ought go back inside the mansion and see what everyone was doing. He felt a twinge of guilt for the night's abandonment. He got as far as his knees and groaned at the sea of bottles, both broken and whole, that greeted him.
Damn it, this was a school. The kids played ball on that court. What in the hell had he been thinking?
He crawled around gathering the intact bottles together, then made his way back to the mansion to look for a sweeping brush and a refuse sack.
The professor was in the kitchen. The skin around the old guy's eyes tightened as he dumped the armful of bottles in the trash, but Xavier didn't comment. The silence made Logan itch. "It won't happen again," he muttered.
"Please, don't make any promises unless you intend to keep them," the professor said blithely. "I wouldn't ask you to give up entirely the occasional drink, provided no alcohol is stored carelessly on the premises and you behave responsibly. For last night, I suppose, I must make the exception."
"I didn't ask you to." He rummaged through a tall cupboard, cascading a mop and a vacuum cleaner on top of him, but no broom. A roll of waste sacks trundled out from a plastic bucket as it fell on its side and on his toes; he grabbed the roll and shut the rest of the debris back inside the cupboard to collapse on the next unfortunate who opened the doors. "Know where I can find a brush?"
"A brush?"
"Yeah... a sweeping brush. I, uh, broke a bottle."
"Yes, quite," the professor said wryly, light dawning, and he wondered if he was ever going to learn the futility of trying to lie to telepaths. "There should be a storage cupboard out in the corridor, a few doors down on the left."
"...thanks," Logan said distractedly.
With the broken glass cleared from the basketball court and his conscience, he managed to find a shower that wasn't full of bullet holes and a change of clothes that was likewise, and by those means shucked off the lingering scent of alcohol. It was always possible that the rest... Summers... Marie, damn it... weren't aware of why he'd disappeared in the night. It wouldn't do any harm to let them stay ignorant.
It was far too quiet for the X-mansion at nine in the morning. He wandered empty corridors surveying the damage and wondered if everyone barring Professor Xavier had given in to sleep; if they'd knocked themselves out with exhaustion, same way he'd used alcohol to put out his own lights.
He turned a corner and almost tripped over Storm, sitting underneath a boarded-up window with hammer and nails strewn beside her, dressed in an old, torn shirt and jeans with her knees drawn up and her elbows rested atop them. To see her so untidy and graceless gave him pause. "You slept at all?" he asked - it came out more accusing and interrogative than he'd intended.
"A little." It hadn't been his intention, either, that his words should spur her into motion, but a moment later she had dragged her obviously weary form upright. He reached out to steady her as she wavered. "Thank you, Logan." She looked around helplessly. Several feet along the corridor, Logan could see an enormous hole in the wall's old panelling. Further down, two circular holes the size of dinnerplates were punched clear through the outer wall of the house itself. He winced - when commandos attacked a houseful of pre-teen and teenage mutants of uncontrollable powers and raging hormones, the result was gonna be messy.
"I won't rest easy until the place is secure again," Storm said. "More so. Better than before. They took them by surprise, Logan. It should not have happened. It cannot be allowed to happen again. These are the lives of children at stake." She sighed and brushed dust off her clothes in irritable swipes of her palms. "We need to secure the mansion as quickly as possible so we might retrieve the children from the safehouses they ran to. Despite the name, they are not safe. Not protected, only secret. We would have returned them already, but we have nowhere for them... everywhere is destroyed. And, I will confess, we do not have the energy and resources in ourselves."
"Do we know how many got out? I mean..." He stalled. All the death he'd seen - caused - and he couldn't make himself ask if any of the children had been killed.
She looked up into his eyes and understood. Her gaze fell, and her long white lashes drooped to follow it. "Not yet." She hesitated. "There are eight missing. Scott made the tally. They could not be accounted for either among our party or the safehouses he contacted when we returned."
"Hell." Logan wanted to say a lot worse. He settled for digging out a cigar. At least if the professor complained today he could point out he might as well take advantage of the improved ventilation. An icy blast stole through the holes in the wall and out the shattered windows. "We're going to find them, right?"
"We will assuredly look." He had noticed before that Storm was anything but an optimist. "Scott and Rogue are going. Today."
He almost spat his cigar on the abused carpets. "Alone? The professor's all right with that?"
"I believe he may have suggested it, though I couldn't say for sure." Her lips pressed together in a thin line as she regarded him. "I know you dislike Scott, but I assure you she'll be safe with him. Nobody safer."
"I don't trust him to protect her," Logan growled, and Storm, who'd known the object of his disdain a good deal longer, soured.
"I've trusted him with my life more times than I could count. As you can see, with reason - I am still here. Besides, it's a retrieval mission. They won't be fighting Magneto's people nor, hopefully, anyone else."
"Retrieval mission? Mutants are all over the frickin' news and the whole planet's having a coronary. There's no 'only'. The professor wants to send Rogue out in that? Crap."
"She's one of us. She didn't object."
"Yeah." Kid would be so overwhelmed by it all she wouldn't know what to think. And damn it, Logan thought angrily, damn it all to hell, because he knew where his thoughts were going. "They didn't leave yet?"
"No."
"When-?"
"Ask the professor. Before lunchtime, I expect."
"Shit."
Logan didn't feel like asking the professor anything just now. He left Storm at a run and went to spend the next two hours sat on the hood of Summers' remaining car down in the garage.
"Shit." Stunned, flat finality informed the expletive. Logan cracked an eyelid and scowled at the empty white expanse and metal framework of the fancy garage ceiling. He turned his head, bringing his slit view of the world in line with the interloper - Summers, he already knew by scent, standing a wise distance from a waking Wolverine with his hands balled into fists at his sides.
"Didn't know you knew words like that," Logan said, not moving.
"Get the hell off my car. It's the last one you've not wrecked."
Summers looked about pissed off enough to blast a hole through his hide and the car both if he didn't, and given Summers' stress levels these days, Logan figured there was a line to be drawn on just how far he could push it. He rolled off the hood and emphasized his yawn because, well, it didn't mean he couldn't push at all. "Take it we're readying to go at last."
"I am," Summers responded distinctly. He had a travel bag in his hand which he dumped in the trunk. The 'slam' reverberated in Logan's sensitive ears, and Summers walked round to the driver's door and opened it, but instead of getting in merely leaned, facing Logan, arms crossed and rested atop the roof. When he spoke, it was in a voice saturated by weariness and plain old disgust. "This is a collection mission, Logan. Fact-finding, picking up the trail, questioning and appeasing the public. Putting these kids at their ease and doing whatever comfort and scraping back together needs doing when we find them." He knew the eyes behind the glasses would be hard, to match the tone the voice had taken on. "I doubt there'll be any call for... claws. Don't take this the wrong way..." like there was any other way to take it "... but... why would you want to come?"
"You don't know what kind of situations you might find these kids in," Logan said levelly. "I might be able to help."
"You could help here," Summers snapped. "Point of fact, I'm sure they could've used your help last night." His tone made it very clear he knew exactly what Logan had been doing.
"Get your head out of your ass, Summers. I can't be here right now. Shouldn't. Same reason as you - we're the walking wounded, even if there's not a mark on either of us. After what's happened these last few days, I... need something else to focus on."
"Did Xavier tell you to-?"
"No. Xavier doesn't know. Well, likely he does now. What'd you call the world's strongest telepath? The world's biggest snoop." He hoped the professor heard. "Besides, who says you-" Who says you can take care of Rogue when you couldn't take care of Jean? Or the professor and yourself? He was distracted from saying it by the sound of somebody approaching who carried Marie's distinctive scent.
He looked up; saw her brighten when she saw him, and the part of him that wanted to wound Summers just for the hell of it melted before that flicker of a quickly-suppressed smile.
Apparently the professor thought it was a great idea to get the guy with control issues and twelve-inch claws out of the mansion for the duration of the rebuilding, too. His charity towards Summers significantly decreased when the kid unsubtly let slip to Marie how he'd spent last night in a bottle. He didn't need to see that angry betrayal in her eyes.
As Summers eased the car out into the drive, he watched the spots of moisture gather and multiply on the glass. Craning his head to look back toward the mansion, he could see through the watery distortion they were trying to finish boarding up the windows before the rain got in. The car pulled away, and the broken glass and boards and Ororo's face at a second-floor window faded into streaked distance even his keen senses hadn't a hope of cutting through. Logan turned his eyes to the front and felt something in him ease as the distance increased, drawing them away from that place of stifled desperation and overpowering absences. He shut his eyes and let the motion and the largely sleepless night lull him into a light, intermittent doze.
There were people in the world he'd have liked to share a long car journey with less than Scott Summers, and he tried hard to keep that fact in mind. He was half-aware of the guy exchanging sporadic bursts of talk with Rogue in the front, sounding like a teacher even in casual conversation. Logan couldn't remember his own school days, assuming he'd had some, but they couldn't have been a lot of fun given how Summers' tone grated on his nerves and made him itch to punch his claws through the back of the driver's seat.
Midday had found them parked up in the concourse of a gas station, under the shelter of its roof, the rain a vertical sheet slicing down to the tarmac a few feet to their left. Rogue had stripped off her gloves and dipped her pale fingers too into a packet of sweets all colours of the rainbow, which Summers had picked up from the station store. Summers read from a file of papers and asked questions, collecting opinions with a battered stub of a pencil.
Logan wasn't sure why he asked. It felt like Mr Strategy already decided what they were doing, but he made the effort to tease out their involvement nonetheless.
And now - now, after a day that had seemed like a blur, it was Logan behind the wheel, Marie next to him in the front, Jubilee fallen asleep half lying over the seat and over Summers in the back. The rain, winding down into apathy after its exertions throughout the day, tapped at the windows, and the car smelled strongly of damp human... damp mutant. Logan was aware when the rhythm of Summers' breath slowed, too, and his thin frame relaxed and sagged, as oblivious as the girl sleeping across his knees. Marie flicked the channel on the radio again, and Logan gently nudged aside her gloved hand to curl his fingers over the volume dial and lower the sound.
They weren't done yet, but they'd sleep at home tonight. They just had to hope it felt more like home to the kids when they returned than when they'd left.
END
AUTHOR: Roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: Picking up the pieces post-X2. Scott, Rogue and Logan search for the missing.
LENGTH: ~9,000 words. 3 parts.
NOTES: I maybe stretched the timescale of X2 somewhat for this story, providing almost a week between the attack on the mansion and the return. I recall Jubilee largely from the cartoon series. I have never seen X3.
NOTES #2: This fic is the best example ever of how much I suck at actually posting and editing my stories. It was originally written back in 2004, then completely forgotten about. The first part has been on fanfiction(dot)net since 2008. I then managed to lose the rest of the story until the other day. At this point, I'm just posting it quick before I do anything else stupid. Originally I had intended this to be the first of four related stories, but the rest will now never be written.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda yadda yadda.
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THE LIST
1. SCOTT
A tyre cutting into a clogged gutter drenched his legs to the knees in water that he would swear iced up the instant it hit. He turned his head, but he didn't shout after the car or slow his steps. He'd learned the value of keeping a low profile unless necessity called for the exception long ago. Rain soaked his hair, clung to and drained off over the red lenses of his glasses, making vision a more lofty ambition than normal, and he wished he'd worn the visor, for all that it drew more stares.
He ducked into a phone booth, only partially to dry off, the clamour of New York traffic muffled by the closing of the door. Sealed inside, the smell was strongly unpleasant over the scent of rain and petroleum. He unzipped his coat and kept his eyes screwed tight shut while he used the mostly-dry fabric of his shirt to clean off red lenses.
Sight returned, he fed change into the telephone and dialled the number. It rang for a long time, but he was prepared to wait.
The phone was finally picked up and a soft, accented voice said, "Hello. Xavier's School for the Gifted."
"Kurt? I guess you're the secretary today." He didn't know why he'd expected Jean's voice on the line - she'd seldom been the one to answer the mansion phones even when she'd been alive - except that she'd always been the thing he most associated with home.
"Scott." Nightcrawler still sounded uncertain saying his name, courtesy of a too-short acquaintance composed largely of emotional breakdown (Scott's). "Everything is all right?"
"Yeah... everything's fine." The words tasted bitter on their way out and he had to tell himself it wasn't a lie. Everything that would be news to the rest of the school was fine... better than fine, in fact. One target had been acquired for retrieval already, far easier and earlier than expected. "Everything's great. Tell the professor our party will be home and sleeping in our own beds for the night - plus one."
"You found one?"
"We found one." The line blared at him for more coins he wasn't willing to give it. "We should be back before midnight, I hope. I have to go now." He set the receiver down before the 'click' and the dead air, and stared at it in its cradle, his fingers still touching the smooth plastic, wondering why he'd rung at all. Perhaps it was only a need to foster the appearance of achievement, of progress... of hope.
It is an achievement, he told himself irritably. And the professor deserves to know there's at least one missing student now safe and on their way back to him. Especially when so much has been damaged or lost.
He took his hand from the phone and zipped up his coat. Though it was more late afternoon than early evening, the rain had darkened the sky and the city almost to the shades of night. He saw his own reflection, caught between the anaemic lighting in the roof of the phone booth and the dark outside, caught in monochromes and glass and jagged, refracting dashes of rain. Scott Summers - a young man wearing sunglasses built like a prison, a coat that swallowed up the thinness of his form and pants that sagged with the weight of the weather. He felt indeterminably old. He pushed back the door and walked through the space where the reflection had been into the night.
The sidewalk skidded under his feet, puddles sucking at his steps. Hands stuffed in pockets and hunched forward against the rain, he trudged his way across the street and the path of a honking station wagon whose driver leaned from the window to join in the serenade. The front of the diner was a foggy neon glow. Blue neon; purple to him. 'Jemima's', it read.
Two steps up to the door (no obvious wheelchair access). The door, glass, shiny and recently cleaned, grease fingerprints already collecting by the handle nonetheless. There was a bell that tinkled when he pushed the glass inward, adding his fingerprints to the collection, and his chest clenched a moment because it had sounded like something splintering. The comfortable heat and dryness of the interior embraced him and reminded that this wasn't another warzone, here and now.
He saw Logan and Rogue at their table across the diner with raised heads. The plate of fries that had been in front of Rogue when he left was in front of Logan now, and empty; Logan was sucking grease from his fingertips and sprawling indecorously in his plastic chair. Rogue hunched as Rogue was wont to do - although he'd thought she was doing that less of late, so perhaps it was something to do with his own presence.
"Conquered the savage elements, huh?" Logan asked, one eyebrow climbing in low-key humour. "The chief have anything to say?"
"If you mean Professor Xavier... I'm sure the message will get to him."
Scott shrugged out of his wet coat and sat down in the spare chair that wasn't opposite Logan, depositing the coat on the one that was. While any amount of time spent close-quarters with the Wolverine wasn't even approaching his idea of fun, they hadn't come close to actual violence yet, now that the ghost of Jean lay between them. Possibly it had as much to do with the awareness of Marie looking on, but he supposed their newest recruit would have to warm up to the fact sooner or later that not all of the 'X-men' were the big happy family the faculty liked to project. He made an effort to relax, resting his chilled hands flat to the table top in front of him. Their skin was pasty and he rubbed his fingers together, trying to encourage circulation.
"I guess I'm glad I'll be sleeping at home tonight after all," Rogue offered, sounding none too sure. "But I kinda had worked myself up to all this taking longer, you know?"
"It'll take longer, don't worry," Logan said. "We got lucky first time, can't expect it every time. Course, it depends on your definition of lucky. With a bit of 'luck', the place'll even have begun to look like home again by the time we next get back."
Rogue scowled at him a little, apparently for once not appreciating his wisdom. "That ain't why I came," she snapped, and he looked surprised.
"No, it's not," Scott agreed heavily. "You came because I asked you to." And Logan came because Marie came, and Scott had no illusions about why the professor had sent himself.
"Where the hell is that kid?" Logan demanded, his head turning from side to side as though trying to scent her on the air. "What time did you say she got off-shift?"
"Another hour." Rogue's chin sagged into her hand. "I can't believe Jubilee got a job." She ducked her head from their questioning looks. "I mean, Jubilee? Washing plates?"
"Set herself up pretty good without much time or planning. Girl's a survivor."
"We can only hope the same of the others that scattered," Scott murmured.
"Shouldn't have talked to the aunt, though." Logan chewed the inside of his mouth. "First place anyone'd think to ask questions. Look at us."
"I'm not going to grade them on it," Scott told him, frowning. Both of them looked at him with their expressions a riddle he wasn't about to attempt to unravel. He shifted in his seat and wished he'd bought a coffee or a soda, or anything to distract his hands.
Logan's eyebrows had quirked up almost enough to bury into his hairline. He spun the plate on the table using his index finger as a pivot. Cleared his throat. "Might not be a bad thing. Bit of in-the-field experience, you know?"
"If we were teaching them to be soldiers, which we're not. The idea is to teach them to be whatever they want to be, and that doesn't have to be us."
"You think they won't have to fight all their lives anyway?"
And, God damn it, he wasn't qualified to answer that anymore than Logan to believe it. He slapped his hand down on the spinning plate, killing its motion. "We work for a future where none of them will have to fight."
He didn't miss noticing the pinpoints of blood on Logan's knuckles where the claws had almost sprung - from instinct at the sudden motion, he'd guess, more than genuine desire to cause harm - a reminder that, with Logan, he was playing with fire. And who was he to preach pacifist methods, with a foul temper all his own and a body just as deadly a weapon? The pinpricks faded, and Logan growled, "Get the hell off."
Scott covered with, "I'm heading back up to the counter. You want a drink?"
"Sure." Logan sat back and let him take the plate; Rogue shook her head.
The only other current customers, a young couple with an impressive collection of body jewellery between them, paid him a cursory glance as he walked past them on his way to the counter. If his glasses or prior conversation suggested 'mutie' to them, they didn't care... or were too wrapped up in each other to notice. But he hoped for the former. A final victory would be composed of such little things.
The diner's proprietor, whose name was not Jemima but Bob, emerged from the kitchens when he set the offending plate down on the counter. He ordered sodas for himself and Logan and asked to make sure Jubilee was still there in the back.
"Yes she is," the man said gruffly. "I'm telling you, I've been watching her like a hawk. She won't run off again from my place, Mr Summers."
It had seemed an easier prospect to pretend Jubilee was a runaway and themselves stern school officials sent to collect her than to explain the truth. Even if the story of 'How The Government Raided My Mutant School' would've sounded great on Oprah. Thankfully the girl caught on quick, hardly afraid it might sully her reputation, and played the part to perfection. Given that they were already depriving the proprietor of one of his staff, it had seemed only reasonable to wait the few hours until she came off-shift.
Rogue was looking at her watch again when he returned to the table, handing Logan a soda that he looked at as though it was something offensive. Scott didn't sit down, asking instead, "You want to fill in the time with a game or two?" and gesturing over to the pool table in the corner.
A wicked gleam came into Logan's eye. "Yeah."
Scott scraped together enough change for a handful of matches which Logan lost, badly, until he finally tossed the cue aside on the table, bared his teeth, and said, "You set me up, you red-eyed freak."
"Just using the gifts God gave me," he returned sarcastically. "Besides, I'd no idea how you'd play, either." He glanced at Rogue and felt a twinge of guilt. "The two of you go ahead, and I'll sit out."
It turned out that Logan was a gracious and generous player against Rogue, and talked her through choosing and setting up her shots with a rare patience that just made Scott feel more a heel. Patience was something he was short on just now, and the rivalry between he and Logan was on a level of instinct he didn't always notice in time to catch when he wanted to. He resented the Neanderthal in him that uprooted reason and sense when he was thrown together with the guy. It made him feel like a teenager. Jean'd had every right to be pissed.
Purple neon rose and fell like breathing, the night reflecting it back in through the glass. Realisation that he was staring, mind blank, at nothing, forced him to slowly unfreeze. She's not here anymore. She'll never be here again. You have to accept that, or you'll be useless to the rest who still are here and still can be helped.
Rogue's tentative, "Are you all right?" brought him the rest of the way back to reality.
"Yeah... I was just thinking. Yeah."
"You wanna play again?" She held out a cue, and he reached out to accept it.
Logan cleared his throat uncomfortably. "We're out of money." That did explain how it was they'd come to look to him. The best of friends, these two... or, no, not friends; tight in some way that transcended friendship, but was a long way from sexual. He was the third wheel here, the one they didn't notice unless he advertised himself.
He was on his way to the counter to break open a note when the proprietor, coming out from the kitchen, saw him and said, "I told her to wrap up. She'll be out in a minute."
"Thanks." Scott turned back. Logan and Rogue at the pool table had overheard and were already finishing up drinks - his own as well, he noted - and gathering their things. Rogue handed over his coat, which he wouldn't have known was a particularly dingy shade of dark green but for the fact Jean had told him once. He delved into the sodden pockets for his car keys and tossed them to Logan.
"What the hell am I gonna do with these?"
"Bring the car around?"
"You want me to drive your car?" He narrowed his eyes. "Sure you're feeling all right? Stryker didn't mess with that brain of yours any more than we already know about?"
"Just get the car, Logan. It's a long drive." No hard choice to forgo an explanation of the effects of darkness and rain on his vision.
Logan expelled a small, derisive laugh through his nose, tossed the keys in the air and caught them. In a smooth continuation of the motion, he pointed his finger like a pistol; clicked his tongue. Then he'd spun on his heel and disappeared out into the rain, the music of the door's chime fading in his wake.
Without him, Rogue seemed to shrink in on herself. Her eyes turned down and her shoulders sagged inside the x-jacket, which had been Jean's, that once again encased them. Scott and Logan were in civvies, but Rogue's jacket had somehow found its way along, worn over her jeans and blouse and swinging loose on her shoulders, and since it was new, and did not look particularly out of place, Scott had let it slide and even experienced, when he allowed himself, a small sense of pride.
He wondered about her attitude, though - whether it was second-hand dislike from Logan, who she got along with so well and had had inside her head, or simply the fact that they'd never had a lot of contact, he and she. He refused to believe he was really so intimidating.
"Hey." The voice from behind them was almost a whisper.
Turning, he frowned at the thin girl. A little younger than Marie, black hair, perfect skin, wrapped in a long coat that covered her slim figure near neck to foot. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and a pinched look marred her face. She looked worse than she had two hours ago - the waiting had done her no favours. Too late to regret that he'd allowed the proprietor's claim she ought finish her shift.
"Jubilee..." He touched his hand to her shoulder and she stared palely up at him. Her eyes slid over his face - most people's did; he had no point of contact for them with his own eyes perpetually hidden - and beyond him, to rest longingly on the door.
In spite of the rain and the dark, he gently suggested, "Let's go wait outside for Logan."
They'd climbed down the few steps to the dark recess to the side of the entrance, the rain making its presence felt again on clothes, hair and skin that had barely had time to begin to dry, when he felt something hit him around the midriff, knocking him into Rogue and the both of them backwards against the wall of the diner.
"Oh, God..." Jubilee gulped into his sodden jacket. "Oh, God, I thought you were all dead." Her left arm curled around his back in a grip like steel. Her right was around Rogue's shoulder, and he was very aware that the other girl had gone stiff with terror beside him. A careless contact with her skin could kill. Awkwardly, he disentangled Jubilee from Rogue and let her cling to him.
"It's all right," he told her. "It's all right."
But it wasn't and it hadn't been. "I thought you were all dead," she reasserted, aggrieved, to his chest.
"We're not... everyone's... most of us..." And, oh, he hadn't thought about this. It had never occurred to him - nor, he would imagine, to the professor - that they would have to be told, or that he would have to be the one to tell them. "Everyone except... Jean..." In spite of his best efforts, he heard his voice break.
"Oh, God..." Jubilee's hold clenched tighter.
"Everyone else is okay," he said quickly, stepping over the issue of seven more missing kids. "The school will be fine."
Still, she didn't let go. "I'm sorry," she said, her face pressed to his heart. Her voice squeaked. "I'm so sorry."
With a sigh, he gave in; rested his chin on the top of her head, careful of his glasses, and let the rain wash over them both, too distracted to be glad Logan wasn't there to witness another display, or to wonder what Rogue was thinking, who was.
"Shh," he whispered, rubbing her back as though she were a much younger child. "I know. Shh."
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2. ROGUE
From the moment he'd rejoined them, the drawn lines around his mouth strained so much now that it seemed his skin must snap, and said with a voice like choking, "Eight. There are eight missing," there had been no question it was a task that needed approaching with the utmost urgency. There had been no question in anyone's mind (or, at least, certainly none voiced) that Mr Summers would be the one to go. Maybe the professor's involvement in the decision wasn't entirely that of an innocent bystander, but perhaps this task would have fallen to Mr Summers in any world, even the ones where Jean was still alive. It fit him, in any case, the role of gathering their strays.
Somewhere in the chaos - the rubble, the bullet holes, Ms Munroe bewailing the task of finding any habitable rooms to accommodate the school's remaining complement in any kind of dignity - it had been pointed out that he would need a female presence at his side, and into the ensuing guilty silence Mr Summers had said, "I'll take Rogue."
Her head had jerked up of its own accord at the mention of her name. She was still wearing her uniform from the stopover at the White House, still thinking it merely a loan. Was this then graduation, stepping into a dead woman's clothes that dug into her flesh in uncomfortable places? No congratulation, achievement or fanfare, just a feeling of being too heavy and the ache of responsibility at the back of her skull? If so, she could have lived entirely without ever leaving John's 'kiddy table'.
"I - I--" She hesitated. She couldn't see his eyes, of course, she'd never seen them, but something in his posture, in the hollows of his cheeks, turned her denial into an accepting nod. She stood there under his walled-off gaze and absorbed the implication; the ghost's uniform on her shoulders was there to stay, endorsed by the words, "I'll take Rogue". Even if he wasn't in the best state of mind to make such a decision, he wouldn't go back on it. She didn't know him well, but well enough to know his word was law, once given.
Dr Grey's shoes were daunting, great whopping size nines that would have flopped around on her own feet. She searched for a clue what to think, how to react, but the conversation had moved on and the group weren't looking at her any more. The repair shift - Ms Munroe, Mr Summers, Bobby who'd finally stopped apologising for the water damage, Kurt who hadn't even ever been there when it didn't look like a battle zone, and the professor whose wheeled mobility was limited to the cleared areas of the floor - had too many other demands upon their attention. Their voices were raw with myriad pains and traumas, contrasting personalities a long way on the wrong side of exhaustion for committee decisions. She thought of everything that had happened to all of them that night, and so much still ahead to go before any chance of rest.
Rogue wondered, not for the first time, where Logan had taken himself off to, not that his presence would have been anything more than extra fuel on the fire. But she somehow doubted he was among the children bedded down in the dining hall with sleeping bags salvaged from the camping equipment in the X-jet.
Amid the clamour, the professor put his head down, resting it elegantly on his poised fingers, and sighed. "We need Jean." Strain contorted his face as he realised he'd murmured it aloud. "I'm sorry, Scott."
Mr Summers - Scott, they were teammates now, she had to get used to calling him Scott - answered with the emotion of a machine, "You'll have Hank within the next twelve hours. I'll take Rogue."
Professor Xavier looked back at him with eyes that must see beyond implacable red reflection as nobody else now could. "Get some sleep." He turned that same gaze to Rogue, and she tried not to fall back a step beneath it. "You as well. No--" His raised hand stalled a protest that hadn't yet reached Scott's lips. "The rest of us will be working through the night, yes. But I'll not have you driving, let alone flying, until you've allowed yourself to rest. You have important work to do tomorrow. Go. The benches in the upstairs study should be adequate for a few hours sleep. You shouldn't be disturbed there by the youngsters, or by the rest of us moving things around."
"Yes, sir," Scott said quietly. She was surprised he didn't salute.
He took Rogue's arm and steered her in front of him. It felt like a treachery, to walk away, to even think of sleep - oh, God, how could she sleep? How could he? Dr Grey was dead. The hand on her arm trembled shock, reaction and grief, and withdrew the moment following her realisation as though he sensed the touch betrayed the mask his visor aided so efficiently.
It was already nearing five in the morning, the sky growing lighter outside in glimpses caught through the windows they passed, many broken and letting the air creep through. Adrenaline still thudded in her head, making it ache. Her whole being ached, and she hadn't seen any real combat. Scott had seen his on the wrong side, according to Logan - something she did not dare ask about, but Kurt had told her what had been done to him. How could Professor Xavier think they would find sleep?
The upstairs study had padded, wide benches that would make for more than adequate bunks. It smelled charred, though the scent had carried on the air from where the soldiers blasted their way into a locked store room a few doors down and incinerated half of the school's supply of bedding. The study itself was undamaged, even the windows intact. Scott lay on his back on a bench one side of the room and she headed to the opposite side. An instant after she turned her back, she sensed his consciousness dissipate and knew herself effectively alone in the room.
She turned around again, a little alarmed. He lay very straight, face pointed up, visor hiding closed eyes. One arm sagged off the side of the bench, the other lay on his chest with its fingers curled into a claw. She slowly crossed the room, her footsteps sounding far too loud, until she was close enough to hear his breath, to see its gentle rise and fall, reassuring her he was okay. She supposed the professor had a hand in this sudden comatose state. She supposed it was for the best. Would she, too, sleep so easily once her head touched down?
She stooped to lift his dangling arm, and set it more comfortably upon his chest like its fellow, before returning to the bench she'd picked out for her own.
And she did sleep. Both of them slept until almost eleven o'clock, until the professor sent a psychic wake-up call that was the mental equivalent of a cold shower. It had Rogue bolt-upright on the bench, feeling all the aches of 5AM intensified in her bones. She groaned, sure the leather she'd slept in had left creases in her skin.
Unflappable Scott rolled in more practised fashion from his own bench and stood with a minimum of creaks. She resented him fiercely and decided he at least must be used to such wake-up calls.
"If you can find any clothes," the professor's voice said authoritatively inside her skull, "This outing would be rather better conducted in civilian attire. Please come down to the kitchen when you're both ready."
"Did you--?" She looked to Scott.
"Yeah, I heard it too. Come on. Be quick if you shower." A grimace twisted his lips as he looked towards the clock on the wall.
She did shower, because the grime felt like it had set into her bones, but she hoped she had not been too long and made up for the time by pulling on the first pair of jeans and T-shirt she found in the rubble of her old dorm. When she got down to the kitchen, Professor Xavier was there and Scott wasn't.
The professor indicated a place at the table, wheeled carefully around and, with the aid of a tray balanced across his knees, manoeuvred a cup of coffee and a plate piled with toast in front of her. He didn't look like he'd slept. She wondered where everyone else was, whether they were still trying to make the school secure before they finally allowed themselves to rest.
"Thanks," she saw awkwardly, feeling guilty - she'd slept, and slept well, the waking pains notwithstanding. And it wasn't every day the professor himself served her breakfast. The experience was jarring.
"I, too, wish to feel useful," he said companionably. She met his eyes, and her unsettlement disappeared, swallowed by the kindness and sincerity within. "But since my usefulness in this business of... home repair... is limited, I content myself with co-ordinating the operation from here, keeping a check on the safety of the minds within these walls, and providing nourishment for the workers."
"You have to rest sometime, too," she blurted, concerned for him. She knew he'd had a difficult few days. She remembered what it was like to be a prisoner.
"Thank you, Marie. And I will, soon."
"I'd keep you to that promise."
She turned at the new voice. Scott leaned inside the door frame. She tried to smile at him with a mouthful of toast; a dismal failure. But evidently his attention was elsewhere.
"Ah, Scott." The professor wheeled around and collected items onto another tray which he brought to the place set opposite Rogue. "Do sit down."
Mr Summers slid into the indicated seat like he was moving on autopilot. She noticed that the shirt and pants he was wearing didn't match very well. His hair was sticking up in tufts from the shower, and she was a little surprised to see that he'd taken one. It seemed a curious vanity from Mr Super-efficient considering his earlier hurry, until she connected that he'd had the stain of imprisonment to wash off. She hadn't been able to stay in the shower long enough when they brought her back from Liberty Island.
He ate the toast as though he hadn't eaten in days, teeth tearing pieces off rather than biting. It could have been mistaken for impatience. He absorbed the coffee in one gulp, and was finished long before Rogue.
"I-I'll bring it with me," she said quickly as he stood up.
"Don't. There are a few more preparations to make yet. I'll see you outside the garage. Just don't be too long. Oh, and bring something a little warmer to wear."
Ever-precise, ever-observant. She looked out of the window as he left the room - it had begun to rain.
She asked Professor Xavier, "Will he be all right?"
"I don't know," he replied, his voice little more than breath. "Yes, you might well think that I ought to know, but the mind is an unpredictable domain, and I can't read the future. But I hope - Rogue, you must... please take care of him for me."
"I - me?" The thought made her almost frantic.
He smiled and laughed, barely, and allowed, "You only need do what you would do anyway. I would ask for no more. I already know that you would give... all you could, whatever situation transpired. You are ready, in spite of your doubts. As ready as any of them ever were, when I sent them out to fight this fight." His face darkened; remembering, she supposed, the losses. Remembering Jean. Rogue couldn't help but remember some of Logan's more choice comments about seeing Xavier's people operate in the field, back at the beginning. She hoped he didn't pick them up from her thoughts.
He must have been tired, because he didn't. Or at least he didn't say anything if he did. It was a minute later that he frowned, and his forehead creased into fine lines. "Oh, and you'll find there is an... unexpected addition to your small crusade. Please tell Scott that it's quite all right with me if he feels it won't be a problem."
"What?"
The professor only tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially, and then seemed to phase out, as though events elsewhere in the mansion were occupying his attention, his face like an empty house. Rogue wolfed down the rest of her food, anxious to find out what he was talking about. She only just remembered to dash upstairs for a coat - her uniform jacket lay the closest, abandoned on top of her old bed - and the overnight bag she'd thrown together when she came out of the shower.
The grass in the grounds had been churned to mud in places and made for unsteady footing. The rain falling was too soft yet to smooth its jagged landscape.
In the garage, Scott leaned on the driver's side door of a car more practical and low-key than the ones Logan was making a habit of wrecking, bundled up in an ugly coat. At the passenger side, Logan lolled with his arms folded and a belligerent expression she could discern from his body-language long before she drew close enough to see it in his face.
"Hiya, kid," grunted the professor's surprise addition.
She felt the edges of her mouth climb upwards despite her attempts to tame them into the stolid line befitting of a serious X-woman. "Logan? You're coming with us?"
"That's by no means decided. The professor needs--"
Oh. "The professor said it's up to you, Mr Summers," she said, and relayed the message word for word.
Scott ducked his head, mouth visibly tightening, and dragged a contorted hand through his hair. "All right," he said finally, but turned on Wolverine with an angry addendum that startled her. "But no more repeats of last night, you get that? If you're going to do this, it had damn well better be sober. Or you're nothing but a liability to her or me or the kids we need to protect."
Logan had been...? Oh.
He didn't look hungover, but then she supposed his mutant system would wash out the poisons of alcohol within hours. She watched him absorb a tirade that he certainly would not normally have met with such a shifty, almost embarrassed silence, then he said, "Yeah," voice rough and abused, "y'right, Summers, much as it kills me to say it. I won't be doing that again."
Annoyance flooded through Rogue and she felt her fingernails stab into her palms through her gloves at the idea that while everyone else had been doing much needed repairs, he'd been getting drunk over the death of Scott's fiance. Annoyance with Scott, suddenly, in equal part, because shouldn't it have been him? Didn't Jean deserve to be mourned properly, to have her loss felt, not repressed with a clenched jaw and a composure that hadn't broken since--
But of course it had, and she wished she hadn't reminded herself.
With a sigh, she climbed past Logan into the passenger seat, claiming shotgun position.
Logan piled in last and sprawled across the two seats in the back.
--------------
3. LOGAN
"Fuck!"
The empty basketball court and the quiet grounds surrounding him bounced the shout and the sound of breaking glass implacably back. As the last of the echo faded, he stared down at shaking hands and extended claws.
"Jesus." He retracted the claws and crushed his face into one clammy palm, frustration contorting ugly twists and ridges beneath his fingers and pinching shut his eyes. He'd been right to stay the hell away from people tonight. "This is a school," he muttered, reminding himself. He snapped his head up and dived into the crate discarded on the grass for another beer. "Fuck."
The beer lost the bout, down and out after only four seconds, and the bottle smashed in amongst the shards of its predecessor on the paved ball court. Shit, but this was a school. And Summers was going to kill him. Try to, anyway. But maybe if he got drunk enough quick enough, he'd be unconscious without maiming anyone or destroying anything else before the night was out.
Logan reached for the next beer, the next in a series of reasons not to think about the truckload of people he'd killed in the past week. Not to think about that woman in whose eyes he'd recognised himself the moment life drained out of them. Not to think about another woman whose eyes he wouldn't be searching for signs his charms might be working on her ever again.
Jean... damn it.
"Fuck you!" he yelled - at God, at the fates, at the whole damn universe, and this time the bottle smashed still half-full, so hard that shards and droplets sprayed out to dash him even eight or nine feet distant. The glass made scrapes he felt heal almost on the instant. The droplets hung around on his skin and dribbled off the end of his nose. He swabbed his hand over his face, which probably just made him smell as though he'd bathed in beer, even to ordinary dull senses.
He cursed whatever sensibilities had warned him off buying something stronger to bring back to a school. He cursed Summers and Xavier. It was probably their fault, and it wasn't like he could go wrong cursing Summers. Maybe he should go and find the kid and make him get drunk, too. Hell, he needed it if anyone did tonight.
Sinking his teeth savagely into the inside of his cheek, he reminded himself he was trying to avoid damaging anyone tonight. As such, staying away from Summers was pretty much a goddamn priority.
He sank down on the grass, finally beginning to feel the effects of the drink numbing the edge off the world, off his hyped-up senses which sometimes just seemed to make it all so much more raw. He let the claws out again and sliced the caps off a handful more bottles. The edge had gone from his anger, but he wasn't sure what to do or feel in its absence. He stared down at the rim of the bottle for a long time before raising it to his lips, pausing and retreating without taking a sip.
He tipped the bottle a jaunty fraction. "Here's to you, Jeannie. Put in a good word for me with those angels. You know I'm gonna need it more than that kid of yours." He drank briefly, and lowered the bottle, calm achieved.
He could see her in his mind's eye - like the first time he'd really seen her, in Xavier's office, not running on instinct and animal adrenaline in the lab where he'd woken up and almost taken her head off. Red hair fluffed around her head, the unsure smile always a hint around her lips, the brilliant blaze of spirit behind her eyes. Enough wildness and power, under the gloss and respectability, that he could feel it, the pull between them, like calling to like.
'She wasn't even yours,' said a whisper in his head. 'She never would have been yours.'
And later, when that woman had looked inside his skull and seen him, really seen him, known the reality of him... all he could never articulate and the taste of all he never would tell... and she had flinched, but she hadn't extinguished that spark.
'She didn't choose you.'
"Get outta my head," he muttered to the voice. The first yellow streak of daybreak was showing on the horizon, and calm had deprived him of the adrenaline which had thus far been keeping him warm. He replaced it with another two beers, and slowly drank the rest of the crate as the night turned to morning.
He didn't remember falling asleep, but he woke some time before eight with the customary unpleasant sensation coursing through his body that meant his healing factor was busy chasing the last vestiges of alcohol away. He felt stiff and chilled, but he'd felt worse, and he probably wouldn't be feeling that way very long. The dew that had dampened the grass had collected in his hair and on his face, and its moisture softened the leather of his spare uniform (the bitch with the claws had ripped to shreds the one he'd gotten nicely worn in). The grass was green, and there were bird noises from the trees, the whole place exuding life, and he supposed the world went on, even if Dr Jean Grey was no longer a part of it.
He probably ought go back inside the mansion and see what everyone was doing. He felt a twinge of guilt for the night's abandonment. He got as far as his knees and groaned at the sea of bottles, both broken and whole, that greeted him.
Damn it, this was a school. The kids played ball on that court. What in the hell had he been thinking?
He crawled around gathering the intact bottles together, then made his way back to the mansion to look for a sweeping brush and a refuse sack.
The professor was in the kitchen. The skin around the old guy's eyes tightened as he dumped the armful of bottles in the trash, but Xavier didn't comment. The silence made Logan itch. "It won't happen again," he muttered.
"Please, don't make any promises unless you intend to keep them," the professor said blithely. "I wouldn't ask you to give up entirely the occasional drink, provided no alcohol is stored carelessly on the premises and you behave responsibly. For last night, I suppose, I must make the exception."
"I didn't ask you to." He rummaged through a tall cupboard, cascading a mop and a vacuum cleaner on top of him, but no broom. A roll of waste sacks trundled out from a plastic bucket as it fell on its side and on his toes; he grabbed the roll and shut the rest of the debris back inside the cupboard to collapse on the next unfortunate who opened the doors. "Know where I can find a brush?"
"A brush?"
"Yeah... a sweeping brush. I, uh, broke a bottle."
"Yes, quite," the professor said wryly, light dawning, and he wondered if he was ever going to learn the futility of trying to lie to telepaths. "There should be a storage cupboard out in the corridor, a few doors down on the left."
"...thanks," Logan said distractedly.
With the broken glass cleared from the basketball court and his conscience, he managed to find a shower that wasn't full of bullet holes and a change of clothes that was likewise, and by those means shucked off the lingering scent of alcohol. It was always possible that the rest... Summers... Marie, damn it... weren't aware of why he'd disappeared in the night. It wouldn't do any harm to let them stay ignorant.
It was far too quiet for the X-mansion at nine in the morning. He wandered empty corridors surveying the damage and wondered if everyone barring Professor Xavier had given in to sleep; if they'd knocked themselves out with exhaustion, same way he'd used alcohol to put out his own lights.
He turned a corner and almost tripped over Storm, sitting underneath a boarded-up window with hammer and nails strewn beside her, dressed in an old, torn shirt and jeans with her knees drawn up and her elbows rested atop them. To see her so untidy and graceless gave him pause. "You slept at all?" he asked - it came out more accusing and interrogative than he'd intended.
"A little." It hadn't been his intention, either, that his words should spur her into motion, but a moment later she had dragged her obviously weary form upright. He reached out to steady her as she wavered. "Thank you, Logan." She looked around helplessly. Several feet along the corridor, Logan could see an enormous hole in the wall's old panelling. Further down, two circular holes the size of dinnerplates were punched clear through the outer wall of the house itself. He winced - when commandos attacked a houseful of pre-teen and teenage mutants of uncontrollable powers and raging hormones, the result was gonna be messy.
"I won't rest easy until the place is secure again," Storm said. "More so. Better than before. They took them by surprise, Logan. It should not have happened. It cannot be allowed to happen again. These are the lives of children at stake." She sighed and brushed dust off her clothes in irritable swipes of her palms. "We need to secure the mansion as quickly as possible so we might retrieve the children from the safehouses they ran to. Despite the name, they are not safe. Not protected, only secret. We would have returned them already, but we have nowhere for them... everywhere is destroyed. And, I will confess, we do not have the energy and resources in ourselves."
"Do we know how many got out? I mean..." He stalled. All the death he'd seen - caused - and he couldn't make himself ask if any of the children had been killed.
She looked up into his eyes and understood. Her gaze fell, and her long white lashes drooped to follow it. "Not yet." She hesitated. "There are eight missing. Scott made the tally. They could not be accounted for either among our party or the safehouses he contacted when we returned."
"Hell." Logan wanted to say a lot worse. He settled for digging out a cigar. At least if the professor complained today he could point out he might as well take advantage of the improved ventilation. An icy blast stole through the holes in the wall and out the shattered windows. "We're going to find them, right?"
"We will assuredly look." He had noticed before that Storm was anything but an optimist. "Scott and Rogue are going. Today."
He almost spat his cigar on the abused carpets. "Alone? The professor's all right with that?"
"I believe he may have suggested it, though I couldn't say for sure." Her lips pressed together in a thin line as she regarded him. "I know you dislike Scott, but I assure you she'll be safe with him. Nobody safer."
"I don't trust him to protect her," Logan growled, and Storm, who'd known the object of his disdain a good deal longer, soured.
"I've trusted him with my life more times than I could count. As you can see, with reason - I am still here. Besides, it's a retrieval mission. They won't be fighting Magneto's people nor, hopefully, anyone else."
"Retrieval mission? Mutants are all over the frickin' news and the whole planet's having a coronary. There's no 'only'. The professor wants to send Rogue out in that? Crap."
"She's one of us. She didn't object."
"Yeah." Kid would be so overwhelmed by it all she wouldn't know what to think. And damn it, Logan thought angrily, damn it all to hell, because he knew where his thoughts were going. "They didn't leave yet?"
"No."
"When-?"
"Ask the professor. Before lunchtime, I expect."
"Shit."
Logan didn't feel like asking the professor anything just now. He left Storm at a run and went to spend the next two hours sat on the hood of Summers' remaining car down in the garage.
"Shit." Stunned, flat finality informed the expletive. Logan cracked an eyelid and scowled at the empty white expanse and metal framework of the fancy garage ceiling. He turned his head, bringing his slit view of the world in line with the interloper - Summers, he already knew by scent, standing a wise distance from a waking Wolverine with his hands balled into fists at his sides.
"Didn't know you knew words like that," Logan said, not moving.
"Get the hell off my car. It's the last one you've not wrecked."
Summers looked about pissed off enough to blast a hole through his hide and the car both if he didn't, and given Summers' stress levels these days, Logan figured there was a line to be drawn on just how far he could push it. He rolled off the hood and emphasized his yawn because, well, it didn't mean he couldn't push at all. "Take it we're readying to go at last."
"I am," Summers responded distinctly. He had a travel bag in his hand which he dumped in the trunk. The 'slam' reverberated in Logan's sensitive ears, and Summers walked round to the driver's door and opened it, but instead of getting in merely leaned, facing Logan, arms crossed and rested atop the roof. When he spoke, it was in a voice saturated by weariness and plain old disgust. "This is a collection mission, Logan. Fact-finding, picking up the trail, questioning and appeasing the public. Putting these kids at their ease and doing whatever comfort and scraping back together needs doing when we find them." He knew the eyes behind the glasses would be hard, to match the tone the voice had taken on. "I doubt there'll be any call for... claws. Don't take this the wrong way..." like there was any other way to take it "... but... why would you want to come?"
"You don't know what kind of situations you might find these kids in," Logan said levelly. "I might be able to help."
"You could help here," Summers snapped. "Point of fact, I'm sure they could've used your help last night." His tone made it very clear he knew exactly what Logan had been doing.
"Get your head out of your ass, Summers. I can't be here right now. Shouldn't. Same reason as you - we're the walking wounded, even if there's not a mark on either of us. After what's happened these last few days, I... need something else to focus on."
"Did Xavier tell you to-?"
"No. Xavier doesn't know. Well, likely he does now. What'd you call the world's strongest telepath? The world's biggest snoop." He hoped the professor heard. "Besides, who says you-" Who says you can take care of Rogue when you couldn't take care of Jean? Or the professor and yourself? He was distracted from saying it by the sound of somebody approaching who carried Marie's distinctive scent.
He looked up; saw her brighten when she saw him, and the part of him that wanted to wound Summers just for the hell of it melted before that flicker of a quickly-suppressed smile.
Apparently the professor thought it was a great idea to get the guy with control issues and twelve-inch claws out of the mansion for the duration of the rebuilding, too. His charity towards Summers significantly decreased when the kid unsubtly let slip to Marie how he'd spent last night in a bottle. He didn't need to see that angry betrayal in her eyes.
As Summers eased the car out into the drive, he watched the spots of moisture gather and multiply on the glass. Craning his head to look back toward the mansion, he could see through the watery distortion they were trying to finish boarding up the windows before the rain got in. The car pulled away, and the broken glass and boards and Ororo's face at a second-floor window faded into streaked distance even his keen senses hadn't a hope of cutting through. Logan turned his eyes to the front and felt something in him ease as the distance increased, drawing them away from that place of stifled desperation and overpowering absences. He shut his eyes and let the motion and the largely sleepless night lull him into a light, intermittent doze.
There were people in the world he'd have liked to share a long car journey with less than Scott Summers, and he tried hard to keep that fact in mind. He was half-aware of the guy exchanging sporadic bursts of talk with Rogue in the front, sounding like a teacher even in casual conversation. Logan couldn't remember his own school days, assuming he'd had some, but they couldn't have been a lot of fun given how Summers' tone grated on his nerves and made him itch to punch his claws through the back of the driver's seat.
Midday had found them parked up in the concourse of a gas station, under the shelter of its roof, the rain a vertical sheet slicing down to the tarmac a few feet to their left. Rogue had stripped off her gloves and dipped her pale fingers too into a packet of sweets all colours of the rainbow, which Summers had picked up from the station store. Summers read from a file of papers and asked questions, collecting opinions with a battered stub of a pencil.
Logan wasn't sure why he asked. It felt like Mr Strategy already decided what they were doing, but he made the effort to tease out their involvement nonetheless.
And now - now, after a day that had seemed like a blur, it was Logan behind the wheel, Marie next to him in the front, Jubilee fallen asleep half lying over the seat and over Summers in the back. The rain, winding down into apathy after its exertions throughout the day, tapped at the windows, and the car smelled strongly of damp human... damp mutant. Logan was aware when the rhythm of Summers' breath slowed, too, and his thin frame relaxed and sagged, as oblivious as the girl sleeping across his knees. Marie flicked the channel on the radio again, and Logan gently nudged aside her gloved hand to curl his fingers over the volume dial and lower the sound.
They weren't done yet, but they'd sleep at home tonight. They just had to hope it felt more like home to the kids when they returned than when they'd left.
END
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