Wrong

Wrong

Wrong

In the beginning, there was darkness.
Rich, velvety, opaque, it swathed his eyes and stifled his breathing. He rather enjoyed it, truth be told. It was almost a return to the womb, this withdrawal from sight and sound. Warm and safe, he lay there breathing.
They had attached electrodes to his temples, his pectorals, the lean curves of muscle in the hollow of each thigh. One long, gentle slide into the base of his brain and twenty little pin pricks on each of his fingers and toes melded into a soothing ionic cacophony of energy and sensation.
But then came the water, marinating him in a slime of sugar, salt and liquid oxygen…not icy, but warm and gentle and slippery. No matter how hard he fought, how still he willed himself, he couldn’t escape the sensation of suffocating as the fluid filled his ears, nose, mouth, stomach and lungs.
Wires along his throat and around his cardiac sphincter kept his gag reflex at bay and cheated him of the ability to vomit. His silent cries for help, for mercy, for his mother, all unanswered. There was no one who cared.
Were they laughing? He sensed pens scratching against paper, fingers adjusting dials, hands curled around the needles.
Pain was next. Hot, piercing, stabbing lava, melting his flesh and charring his organs from the inside out while the cool liquid swallowed his screams. No escape, no comfort, no one to hold him as it invaded. Only the sound of her lullaby, light and soothing in his mind.
He heard her whimpers, too. Not broken or bleeding, but weeping for the dull, rhythmic thudding that could not be stopped. She was not afraid, but she mourned as surely as he raged. There was no way for him to call out to her, but maybe there was some solace to be found in mutual suffering.
If he ever got loose…if he ever found himself alone in a room with one, two, or even ten of them, he could even the score.
He could even the score. Tear a few holes in their plans, make a last stand against the white birth of pain.
He could even the score…

“Logan.”
The Wolverine shot to a sitting position with a growl and the terse resonance of metal on bone.
She was a slender silhouette against the soft light of the hallway lamp. Thank God she knew enough to wake him from the door.
“Time?”
“Five in the morning. There’s something in the lab I think you should see.”
“Gimme a minute.”
She turned her back while he dressed.
He came out a few minutes later wearing jeans and T-shirt. His feet were bare.
She was still wearing her house clothes – pants, shirt, opera-length gloves and long scarf – in her signature color black. He liked the fact that they weren’t nearly as tight as the superhero uniform.
Superhero, my ass. Need to be one just to keep from guttin’ Drake for staring at hers.
Her skin was pale under the incandescent light, but her eyes were lined in liquid black and her lips were stained a intense, opulent red that made him think of bing cherries and blood roses. He guessed that she’d been planning on making out with Little Boy Blue.
Instead, she was staying up way past her bedtime in the lab with something important enough to make her drag him out of bed. God bless her insatiably curious brain.
Still, she looked tired.
“You planning on gettin’ some sleep anytime soon?”
She smiled, her teeth sharp white against her burgundy lips. “Maybe.”
“Anybody else awake?” he asked, listening to the house.
She shook her head. “You and I. But you never know with the Professor and Kurt.”
He followed her down the long corridor to the elevator, her heels clicking softly on the parquet floor. They stepped into the elevator and the door slid shut.
She regarded him from across the narrow expanse of the ridged metal floor – more than six feet of hulking male animal, covered in hair and armed with razor-sharp claws.
“So how does Frosty like the Goth look?”
And a very dry sense of humor.
“Bite me,” she retorted.
He grinned, displaying his canines.
She rolled her eyes.
The doors opened and she stepped out first, leading the way down the long silver white corridor.
The mansion that housed Professor Xavier’s school had three wings and twenty rooms, but the bulk of the X-Men training rooms lay underground. The Danger Room, Cerebro, and the hangar for the Blackbird as well as the gym, simulation rooms, and the immense laboratory sprawled out under more than four acres of topsoil.
Professor Xavier had given the lab over to Marie until the arrival of the next instructor willing to take up the medical/science mantel at his school. Rogue was really the only one Jean had ever seriously trained on all of the machinery, a pastime she had taken up when Marie took to shadowing her that first year.
Scott, Ororo and the Professor assisted her on occasion with their areas of expertise, but Marie’s absorption of Magneto had given her a vast wealth of scientific knowledge and the intuitive reasoning necessary to be able to operate on her own. Vivid recollections of the smell of burning flesh and the feel of the kapo’s club making harsh and repeated contact with her spine was the price she had paid for her accelerated education.
Chronic insomnia was a welcome side-effect of taking him into her psyche. It was impossible to dream of rats and Angels of Death when you were awake.
Logan often found himself wondering what she’d been like before Magneto, before that boy in Mississippi and God knows how many countless others on the road to Laughlin City until she’d found herself on the business end of his claws. He envied her that she’d been able to keep her memories of childhood, but he suspected that, given the opportunity, she’d willingly trade him for his clean slate.
He followed her as she entered the med lab.
The two refugees lay on the beds, dressed in comfortable pajamas and covered in blankets. Sara slept peacefully, but James was twitching in his sleep.
Marie pressed her black-clad index finger to her lips and went to James. She brought Logan to her side and gestured for him to look at the boy’s forearms.
Logan’s sharp sight recognized that there was movement under the layers of hair, skin and muscle. It was rhythmic and side-to-side along the length of the bone, as if the tendons were shifting from wrist to elbow and back again. Every few seconds, faint red welts appeared on the back of his hands and his knuckles and fingernails turned white.
He looked down at his own hands. He curled them into fists and clenched them as he looked at her.
She took him to the wall of light and pointed to the X-rays that she’d taken of the boy earlier that evening.
There it was, plain as day: three vertical lines running the length of the boy’s forearm that were not part of a Homo sapiens’ endoskeleton. It was hard to breathe as she placed another X-ray next to it. The name scratched into the bottom in Jean’s precise printing: Logan (the Wolverine).
But for allowances made for growth and maturity, they were identical in structure.
He cursed under his breath, turned away, revisiting the first time he’d seen the other. Silvery eyes, sleek muscles and adamantium fingernails poised to attack on Stryker’s command still haunted his dreams, but not in the way anyone would understand.
I thought you were one of a kind. I was wrong.
Marie placed a silent, comforting hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently.

Shower and shave, get the bike out from under your fingernails. Put on your clothes and make sure you tie the laces tight. Just go through the motions and you’ll get through the day.
Opening the door and leaving their room was the hardest. If he took a deep breath and let himself remember, she was still there.
Her perfume sat next to his cologne on their dresser. Her clothes were hung in their closet and folded in their drawers. He still found her hairs on his coat, her shoes under the bed, her books scattered around the room and her mechanical pencils between the sofa cushions.
He’d cried for two hours when he’d found a half-finished crossword puzzle in the pile of newspapers he’d been about to recycle.
About the only thing keeping him going was that it was what Jean would have wanted. She would have told him to keep on teaching the children. She would have wanted him to continue training the next X-Men. She would have wanted him to keep going out on missions and making a difference for his fellow mutants.
She would have wanted him to go on with his life.
He opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
The east wing of the mansion housed the X-Men’s quarters. Storm was right across from him. Wolverine was on their side of the wing, down the hall, with Iceman to his right and Rogue to his left. Xavier had a suite down at the end of the hallway. They had given Nightcrawler his choice of rooms, but at his request, he was lodged in a small room off the oratory in the west wing. That left five rooms unoccupied, with three recruits in training.
Those three were first on his schedule today. Jubilee, Shadowcat and Colossus had all been accepted into the X-Men training program earlier that month and were due for their orientation later this morning. After lunch he would continue teaching his normal classes: chemistry, physics and mathematics.
Then he would spend some time in the hangar, eat dinner, spend some time in the garage and go to sleep and dream about her.
And wake up again tomorrow morning without her.
“Morning, Mr. Summers,” Bobby said, waving at him as he closed the door behind him.
Scott put away his pain as he forced himself to smile. “Hey, Bobby, I told you to call me Scott.”
“Whoops, habit.”
Bobby locked the door behind them and they started down the stairs.
“So I heard you got into Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale.”
“Yup. Going to Harvard, though. Hometown pride, an’ all that.” He grinned shyly.
“So when do you start classes?”
“In another four weeks.”
“Correspondence courses?”
Bobby nodded as they started down the stairs.
“Two this summer, four in autumn, two in winter, four in spring. Have my bachelor’s in a little over three years. Rogue gave me the idea with the way she’s doing her double major in three years at Wellesley. She’ll be summa in biology and English.”
Scott whistled low. “Yeah, I heard that she’s minoring in French and chemistry, too.”
“I guess she made the most of her scholarship,” Bobby said. “Just wait ‘til she starts publishing.”
“Isn’t she going for her Master’s this year?”
Bobby shook his head. “She wants her PhD. Says she’s going to do it in two years. Can you imagine, Dr. Rogue?”
“From what I hear, she’s got what it takes. Girl’s brilliant,” Scott acknowledged.
“She’s said before that it helps having ‘The Collective’ backing her up. Seems that David was some kind of science genius and Magneto gave her the laboratory background. But her stranglehold on the English language? That’s hers alone.”
“What about you?”
Bobby shrugged. “I’m just lucky to have a pretty clear head when it comes to numbers, so I’m thinking math is a good major. No thesis, so I don’t have to beat my brains out too much. It’s nice getting the academic scholarships, but I have to admit I’d have liked to play baseball in college.”
“I know. I had a dream of playing football for Notre Dame when I was back in high school. Didn’t happen, but I did get my degree from there.” Scott looked at his watch. “Win some, lose some. Most important thing is that I could even get an education.”
Bobby stopped for a moment to look out the windows that faced the lawn. “It’s kind of like being a Communist in the ‘50’s, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“Being a mutant today.”
Scott looked out the window to where the Kurt lay on the grass, sunning himself while Artie played with his tail, alternately trying to pounce on it or wrestle it to the ground. The boy had taken to Kurt, and had been shadowing him since the teleporter’s arrival.
They entered the dining hall and went to the kitchen. Kitty and Jubilee were managing the younger students and both smiled when they saw the new arrivals.
“Hey, Cyclops,” Jubilee called, “Kitty made your favorite, banana nut pancakes! Does that mean you’ll go easy on us today?”
“Not a chance,” Scott deadpanned as he fought the urge to smile. “Bribery does not work with me, Lee.”
Kitty chuckled and handed him a plate. “Good morning, Mr. Summers.”
“Morning, Kitty.”
She looked stressed. She had shadows under her eyes and her hair, usually neat and smooth, was coming out of its French braid and curling wildly around her neck and cheeks. Jubilee, however, looked the same as always, like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket and gelled the results into some semblance of style.
Scott brought his plate to one of the four long tables in the dining hall and sat down across from Ororo, who was poring over a cup of coffee and her lesson plans. She looked up long enough to meet his eyes and then returned to her work as he dug into breakfast.
Ororo made a sound of “oh dear, trouble is a-brewing” and Scott looked up to see Bobby walking into the room with two plates in his hands, Rogue following with two mugs.
They sat down at one of the small corner tables and immediately launched into a soft, in-depth conversation complete with intense eye contact on his part and wild hand gesturing on hers. Scott had to pause for a moment as he registered the tension building between the two of them.
“John’s room.” Logan sat down next to Ororo and began eating. “They’re discussing what to do with it. Rogue thinks they should empty it and Bobby says that he’ll be back.”
Scott ducked his head and ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus. I almost forgot.”
“I wish I could. John was…he was my failure.” She dropped her dark eyes to the attendance book open before her. Scott could see the stark black line drawn through the first name at the top: Allerdyce, J.
“Bullshit, ‘Ro. Kid was a fuckin’ whack job. Almost turned me, Bobby and Rogue into crispy critters back in Boston when he lost his shit. Ain’t nothin’ you, me, or One-Eye could’ve done at that point.”
Scott got up from the table and left.
Ororo looked at Logan, frowning. Then she allowed herself a slight smile as she covered his hand with hers. “I appreciate the sentiment.”
“It’s not your fault, ‘Ro,” he whispered. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
She met his eyes and her vision blurred.
“I have to go,” she said, pulling away.

“Good morning, Sara.”
Sara slowly opened her eyes and found herself staring at a ceiling she did not remember.
Where–?
“You are in Westchester, New York.”
Really? For how long?
“It has been twelve hours since you arrived,” the disembodied voice answered her.
She turned her head to the side and found herself looking at the owner of the voice.
No hair… twelve hours…dark eyes, strong nose, cleft chin, and a very nice suit-tie combination… lab destroyed in a discreet implosion so there would be no more needles, no more pain… sitting in a wheelchair… James triggered the auto-destruct then she fainted in the airplane…
James. Oh my God, James—!
“He’s still asleep.”
Telepath. Prime-level. Erudite. Compassionate. Humanitarian. Trustworthy.
Mutant.
“And a cripple. Please don’t forget that,” he said, not unkindly.
She opened her mouth to talk and found that her vocal cords hurt when she tried to make a sound. All she managed was a small squeak.
:May we talk mind-to-mind?: he asked, his face impassive but for the twinkle in his deep-set eyes.
:Yes. Please forgive if sending is not perfect. Not used long time.: she answered.
:Understood. I am Charles Xavier. I was once a Professor of English literature at Oxford. Now I am headmaster of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. That is where you are right now.:
:Sara Bannister. Captive in a lab. James?:
:Here. Asleep. But his brain is emitting a very complex pattern that the EEG has been monitoring. Quite fascinating, I must say.:
:Processing. He downloaded lab’s files into brain and he needs good twenty-four hours to arrange before regains consciousness and can access.:
:For our safety, is he an absorber?:
:What?:
:The young woman on the team with the silver streaks in her hair – Rogue – is a mutant with the powers of absorption. She takes in energy when she touches the skin of other life forms. She said that it looked as if something of that nature passed between the boy and you.:
:No, no, other way around. He received energy from me. James does absorb, but mostly programming, electronics and code. No impact on living things, as far as I know.:
:So you’re an energy emitter?:
:Of sorts. A bit of telepathy. Called me a Prime for different mutation. It’s what they called “diagnostic” sense.:
:So as I can sense thoughts…?:
:I can sense hormones, cells and tissues in the body unbalanced. If I have all my strength, can balance them. Takes a lot out of me.:
:So when you touched James in the lab—?:
:I gave him energy.:
:I see.:
:Think that’s why they took me. Able to hide telepathy and picked up a lot unspoken. Thought they could use me as some sort of bodyguard.:
:And they decided to breed you instead.:
:How do you know that?:
:Rogue performed a diagnostic on you and mentioned the stretch marks on your abdomen.:
She was silent.
:Yes, we did run other tests so we know that James is related to you on your mother’s side. You have the same—:
:Mitochondrial DNA.:
:Did they take him when they took you?:
:No, he came…he came after.:
:I was told that there were four tubes in the storage facility. Were the other two in use?:
:No. Wait! Yes. Yes, one of other in use, but when woke she was gone.:
:Who?:
:Girl. Mutant. Prime. Marina.:
:And the other?:
:I don’t know. It was empty when we arrived last autumn.:
:Was Marina related to you as well?:
:Yes.:
:Part of your mother’s family?:
:Yes.:
:Your sister?:
Sara shook her head, took a deep breath.
:No. Not sister to me.:
She let her cheek rest against the mattress.
:Sister of James.:
She closed her eyes.
:Daughter and son...:
A tear slid out of the corner of her eye, down her cheek, making the sheet transparent where it fell.
:Daughter and son to me.: