As Logan knew, as the others were about to learn, in battle a single moment can swing the balance. Thus far, they’d operated mainly in shadow and anonymity. Their foes had occasional glimpses of them, and a general sense of where they were, but no clearly defined fix on their position.
Right then, right there, that changed.
Bobby was the first to see the light, attracted by the commotion. He screamed a warning.
“Peter!”
Too late. Even as Colossus turned, the searchlight found him, and that contact brought all its fellows to bear. Just like that, the team’s position was illuminated in a flood of light that defined the scene as bright as day.
A moment later, the bad guys opened fire. With everything they had.
“Move out,” Storm yelled. “Stay together!”
Instead, they scattered.
Momentarily forgotten amidst the suddenly target-rich environment, Logan kept walking, the personification of calm amidst growing chaos.
With a multitude of small, fast-moving targets to choose from, however, the gunners found themselves facing a completely different challenge than when the teams had been clustered together. The X-Men couldn’t share their abilities to cover one another, but at the same time, they were individually facing a smaller array of weapons. They all began making quick progress towards their final objective.
In the lead, Storm’s glance kept flicking between the battlefield and the countdown clock strapped to her wrist. Time was the inflexible adversary here, not the guys with the guns. The X-Men had a deadline, and they couldn’t be late.
“Storm,” called Bobby, indicating the bunker, like the kid with the winning touchdown in hand, a step from the goal line, “we’re almost there!”
It blew up in his face.
She wasn’t sure whether it was a shell from outside or some hidden sapper charge; what mattered was the spectacular explosion that would have knocked her off her feet had she not used her own innate control of the winds to shunt the pressure wave around her. Bobby wasn’t so fortunate. He not only went flying, he got clipped by debris for his trouble. Bad landing as well, that left him in a twisted, crumpled, unmoving heap.
Something passed over Colossus, moving on the bunker and Bobby. He wrenched the door off a ruined car and hurled it like a discus at the oncoming figure. Metal clanged on metal…
…and the door, suitably crushed, thudded back to Earth at his feet.
Logan, still playing the role of nonchalant observer, was impressed.
“Good arm.”
He looked the other way, saw Bobby fallen, Storm unable to reach him, the remaining two girls isolated and under considerable and growing fire. Things were out of hand.
Kitty summed it up, from her perspective: “We’re screwed.”
Logan had other ideas.
“Throw me,” he told Colossus.
“Shto?” replied the young Russian. He didn’t get it.
“Logan,” Storm called, racing to join them. “Wait—”
“Y’understand baseball?” Logan demanded, popping his claws, darting quick, repeated glances over his shoulder at the source of the mighty footsteps, which could now be heard as well as felt. Colossus nodded. “Y’know, like a fastball?” Again, he nodded. “Then follow where I point and throw me! Now!”
The armored Russian scooped him up, cocked his arm and let fly.
Logan disappeared into the low cloud of smoke that provided a quasi-roof over the town roughly a hundred feet overhead.
The firing slackened, enough for the X-Men to hear the sound of rending metal, followed by an almost unendurably high-pitched squeee! It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that meant—the Wolverine had used his claws, pure adamantium, unimaginably and perpetually sharp, wholly unbreakable, on something that didn’t much like it.
Confirmation landed before them with a thud that shook the ground, momentum rolling it over two complete revolutions before it came to rest in front of the kids. It was a big, giant head, belonging to some kind of equally impressive robot.
They then heard an explosion of such force that the airborne shock wave struck them like a lesser punch, staggering them on their feet. Some seconds later, whatever the head had been attached to crashed and blew itself to bits.
That was when Logan made his entrance, before any of them had a chance to worry about his fate. He looked a bit the worse for wear but, even as he approached, his injuries were healing with every step. He appeared far more concerned about his leather jacket, which was both torn and scorched.
He popped a single claw, forefinger for once, instead of the middle claw he generally tended to favor, and made ready to carve his initials into the crown of the robot’s head…
…when a klaxon sounded…
…and the head dissolved before his eyes.
Same applied to the scenery. Night vanished, replaced by the institutional illumination of a vast and sprawling concourse the size of a commercial jumbo jetliner hangar. The lay of the land was “real,” as the floors realigned themselves to provide for a flat and featureless surface, but the town itself was not. On every side surrounding the X-Men, huge panels of photon imagers—capable of generating constructs that were not only three-dimensional but significantly tangible as well—withdrew into their housings.
Logan shook his head. Not a lot got his full attention, but the Danger Room snagged it every time.
“You find a way to market this to Hollywood and the theme parks, ’Ro,” he said, speaking mainly to himself though he used Ororo’s name, “your collective fortune is made!”
He twisted his back, shoulders, finally his neck, gradually working out the kinks, as he did after every scrap, then looked expectantly at the others.
“I’m starved,” he announced. “Who’s up for pizza?”
Bobby pushed himself up, Kitty hanging back as Rogue slipped an arm through his, visibly and intentionally reminding all of their relationship. He wasn’t hurt. The Room’s core programming wouldn’t allow it. Death held no sway here, and the worst the room would do to anyone was stun them and then use its projectors to paint the most horrendous wounds imaginable on the body.
As they all started for the exit, Logan threw an arm companionably across Peter Rasputin’s shoulder.
“Hey, Tinman,” he said, making Peter roll his eyes. The Russian didn’t much care for the nickname and pretty much knew what was coming after. “Gotta tell ya—you throw like a girl.”
Storm stopped Logan dead in his tracks, her eyes flashing a dangerous cerulean blue—a precursor to them going white and her turning loose the extreme weather.
“I am a girl,” she said simply, throwing down the gauntlet as hard as she knew how before turning on her heel and beating them through the doorway.
She was waiting in the hallway beyond, with such electricity in the air surrounding her that her team beat a hasty retreat into the locker room, figuring to take their time getting changed in hopes that the “storm” would quickly pass.
Logan took a moment to look fondly at the stub that remained of his cigar, then tossed it into the disposal.
“What the hell was that?” Ororo demanded.
“Danger Room session.”
Kitty had her ear partially phased through the wall, relaying the gist of the conversation to the others. She visibly blanched when she heard what was being exchanged, wondering aloud if that Canucklehead wanted to get turned into a crispy critter.
Surprisingly, Ororo kept a leash on her emotions.
“You know what I mean.”
Logan spread his arms wide, close to a shrug. This was somewhere he didn’t want to go.
“ ’Ro,” he began, and then after a pause and an awkward silence between them, “Storm—”
“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t just come and go as you please. We’re trying to run a school here.”
“Well, I taught ’em something.”
She wasn’t amused.
“They’re mainly adolescents, Logan. Teenagers? Ring a bell maybe, what that was like? At this age, especially when they have powers, they’re hardwired to act like fools. I don’t need you encouraging them.”
Backed into a rhetorical corner, he said nothing.
“If you’d read the syllabus, you’d know this was a defensive exercise. Evasive maneuvers.”
“Best defense is a good offense,” he countered, but then thought better of it. “Or is it the other way ’round?”
“I’ll try to remember that for my next class.” Her tone was acid. This hadn’t gone well.
Logan understood only too well. He just didn’t have a clue how to make it right. So he took a page from his own dictum and closed the conversation by charging her barricades.
“Hey, ’Ro, I’m just the sub,” he said, letting his own irritation show. “You got a beef, talk to Scott.”
Scott Summers was cold.
It wasn’t simply a physical sensation—it went far beyond that, encompassing every aspect of his body and mind and spirit. He was cold in a way that told him he’d never know warmth again, in the way he always imagined deepest space must feel, the way the Cosmos must have been in the whatever space of nontime there was before the Big Bang brought it into being.
He bundled in sweaters, he warmed himself in down quilts, cracked the heat, stood before roaring fires—none of it helped. The cold was in the core of him. He might alter things on the surface, but that was for only a painfully small measure of time.
It sapped his strength, it sapped his will, it made him a shadow of the man he’d been.
He’d sought refuge in the school library, reading enough on depression to treat the disease himself. Scott talked to the professor, but Xavier’s telepathy didn’t help, nor did any of the current regimes of drugs.
He knew he looked like hell, and he simply didn’t care.
Somewhere—and this thought brought the hint of a smile to the corner of his mouth—he must have been infected with an active case of Wolverine. Too bad the disease hadn’t also come with its own healing factor.
He took a deep and reflexive breath at the consideration of the other man, his rival for so many things, and his brow furrowed as he recognized the scent of pine sap and fresh-fallen snow, and suddenly the cold had a focus and an identity he’d never noticed before. The shore of Alkali Lake, in the mountains of western Canada, where—
And just like that, the cold changed again, pressing in on him from every side, filling him inside and out. He flailed on his bed, mouth agape in a frantic quest for air while his mind shrieked the utter wrongness of that action, because there was no air to breathe. He was underwater, he was at the bottom, he was tangled in weeds, caught in the muck amidst a mad forest of boulders big as houses and slabs of rebar-threaded masonry that were bigger still, deposited here by the monumental outflow of water that had occurred when the dam had burst.
He was screaming, which only generated a flood of bubbles, marking the final passage of his life as they cascaded up to the surface.
Then something caught his eye that drove all fear and thought from him and touched his heart with the first semblance of warmth he’d felt since—
The X-Men were fleeing for their lives. The dam had failed, a flood was coming, they had perhaps a minute before oblivion. Their Blackbird stratojet was literally stuck in the mud after a less than perfect landing; the vertical thrusters couldn’t lift it clear.
Jean had been injured in battle earlier, her leg broken. Scott had left her in the passenger compartment, while he scrambled forward to help on the flight deck. There was so much confusion nobody noticed she’d left the plane until Professor Xavier announced it.
She was the team telekinetic, and she intended to use the power of her thoughts to hold the flood at bay until she lifted the Blackbird free. It was an impossible ambition. She’d never exhibited even a fraction of that kind of power, or control. One or the other would pose a supreme test of her abilities, but both—never happen, not a prayer.
Without her they were all doomed anyway. That too was part of the equation.
Scott raced after her but she closed and sealed the hatch in his face. He might have been able to blast it open with his optic blasts. Wolverine for sure could have cut through with his claws, but instead Logan held him back. He wouldn’t try himself, and he wouldn’t give Scott the chance. So what if Jean was doing this for him, because she loved him; didn’t she, didn’t any of them comprehend how hollow his life would be without her? He’d been alone his whole life, for as far back as he could remember, in the Nebraska State Home for Foundlings; he couldn’t bear the thought of the woman he loved facing her final moments without someone to at least hold her hand.
He remembered her voice coming from Xavier’s lips as she spoke through him, but what mattered more was the warmth that flared within Scott, a glorious celestial chorus that—even though he knew he was experiencing but the smallest portion of the transcendence Jean herself embraced—filled him with a sense of wonder unlike anything he’d ever known.
He wept then, not for grief—that would come later, a knife through the heart—but in awe at such impossible, eternal beauty.
Then the plane rose above the flood and before they could bring her home…
…she was gone.
The fire went with her, that loss made infinitely worse by the memory of what had been.
Yet here, and now, with each beat of his broken heart came the faintest resonance of what he’d felt during those last moments of her life.
And even though a part of him knew he sat in his room at the Xavier Institute, he also fully accepted that he stood as well at the bottom of Alkali Lake.
Staring at a body.
A woman. Clothes and features all obscured, wreathed in a crown of dark red hair, the fiery auburn of leaves turning in fall.
Quick as it had come, the image was gone, as suddenly as if one of the Fates had flicked a switch.
Scott trembled, rubbing his hands, keeping his eyes shut tight as he pulled off his visor and rubbed his face, realizing as he did that he didn’t feel quite so hollow anymore. Things had changed. The best part of his soul had come back to him.
He didn’t stop to think, replacing the visor, unzipping his carryall and stuffing in whatever clothes came immediately to hand. This wasn’t a moment for rationality or explanations—and once more the image of a character infection passed on by Wolverine slipped through his awareness—but for action. Make the move, worry about consequences later.
The only things he knew for certain were that this had to be done, and that it was right.
And with that thought, he was gone.
The estate had been in Xavier’s family since this part of New York—roughly an hour north of the City—had still been considered Indian Country. Considering the locale, its size was remarkable: three miles along the shore of Breakstone Lake and a mile inland, in upper Westchester County hard by the border of neighboring Putnam County and the state of Connecticut just to the east. Most of the property had never been developed, beyond the immediate vicinity of the great house itself, and still essentially remained virgin Hudson Valley forest.
The Mansion itself had been built during the so-called Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, by an ancestor who wanted to prove himself on a par with the Vanderbilts and the Goulds and the Astors. It was an attempt to construct outside Salem Center a home that would rival, and preferably surpass, what was filling the Newport shoreline in Rhode Island.
What resulted was a monument to wealth that beggared modern conceptions of the term but also exemplified rather extraordinary good taste. No expense had been spared in the Mansion’s construction, while at the same time neither owner nor builders ever lost sight of the fact that they were creating a home that was actually to be lived in. Something that the residents might actually enjoy, more than a proclamation of excess.
The main building rose a total of four stories above the knoll on
which it was built (including the topmost turret, which Kitty had immediately claimed for her own), allowing for a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. There were also three full levels below, for staff facilities—which proved a godsend to Charles Xavier when the time came to adapt the building to the needs of both his planned school and the X-Men who would grow from it. A multitude of secret passages were left over from Prohibition by a more recent ancestor who financed the upkeep with some rather high-end bootlegging. Considering the mansion’s recent history, which included a full-scale armed assault by a cadre of Black Ops paramilitarists, in addition to the everyday wear and tear from scores of energetic youngsters with superpowers, the house had held up incredibly well.
After Kitty’s gossipy report on the exchange between Ororo and Logan, Rogue and Bobby came up the elevator on their own. Kitty was the resident geek, and she often seemed far more comfortable with the server array that ran the Danger Room than with the students who used it. She could invariably be found either down in the catacombs or up in her room, but rarely in between, outside of mandated classes. She hung a lot with her partner in crime, Doug Ramsey, whose mutant skill with languages made his facility for writing software code the perfect complement to her intuitive brilliance with hardware, and there were also rumors of a long-distance friendship with Peter’s kid sister Illyana, back in Russia. But beyond that, Kitty pretty much kept to herself.
Bobby actually didn’t mind her absence. Rogue was in a foul mood and he was determined to ferret out the cause, and then hopefully stomp it to death. He cared too much for her and hated seeing her so torn up inside. So he pushed and pushed as they rode the elevator and finally she caved, spitting the words out like bullets.
X-Men(tm) The Last Stand Page 4