25: A sense of self
He wonders if this is what it had been like for the Wolverine. At first, nothing but blackness, and then the memories filtering back, one by one.
Three hours of hard work, and it had begun to feel just like summer camp should. The long bench tables had groaned under the weight of three pots of tuna casserole, a bunch of salads, and a passel of overexcited children. He remembers thinking it would have been helpful if the damn teenagers hadn't insisted on sitting on the tables as they dished up ...
“Jubilee! You're going to tip the whole thing --” Scott bit down on the string of expletives as the table collapsed, spilling food and girl and giggling kids in every direction. They stopped at his glare, though, their eyes riveted on him.
He was hardly going to gut them like the Wolverine, Scott harrumphed as he strode forward. He shook his head ruefully to lighten the moment, but the kids still looked terrified. Huge eyes and open mouths were fixed on the windows behind him, Scott realised slowly, and he swung around just in time to see the room explode into a hail of glass.
“Down! Get down!” he heard himself scream as the throb, throb, throb of helicopters shook the rickety building. He expected to hear the thump of booted feet, or the staccato of gunfire, but instead, half a dozen small canisters came flying through the window, then began to hiss.
Scott was choking even before he could think the word 'gas' but he tried to warn them anyway. His vocal chords refused to cooperate, so no one had any time to cover their mouths, or shut their eyes, or shield themselves from the biting, stinging, burning cloud that stole them all away.
His eyes seemed unaffected, Cyclops thought as he watched a line of soldiers enter carefully through the door, guns at the ready. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't talk, but he could watch as they scooped up the smaller children and dragged the larger. Most had surrendered to unconsciousness; they kicked each child to be sure first, and those who moved were jabbed with some sort of taser that made their eyes roll back and bodies relax immediately.
Then they started on the injections. A tranquiliser, he theorised, until Leo Strong's sharply feline face began to writhe and shift towards more normal proportions. Hanks of yellow hair fell around him, until nothing was left of his pelt except fresh, pink skin.
He couldn't watch, he couldn't, so he looked away, but everywhere he looked, his children were being violated.
Unconsciousness would have been kinder, Scott thought as he lay there paralysed. Blindness would have been kinder.
Death would have been kinder, he thinks as struggles to find some light in the cell, wondering who has captured him. Who has neutered him, and left him to rot.
And who else is lying in the dark, waiting.
*
Quill had fallen by the door, his body prickling with spikes and retracting into blandness as the convulsions overtook him. Callisto had made for the stairs, bound for the panic room, but not quite quick enough. Multiple Man would be forever alone, taken slumbering by the console.
She couldn't have expected it, Mystique told herself as she stared at the roof of her cell. She had needed to see who was available, who could be roused to join forces with the X-men. With Erik gone, they had been open to taking up arms alongside their old enemy, rallied to the idea of a force united against humanity. (Hardly a new concept, my dear, she imagined Erik's German-tinged accent mocking her. His voice was a comfort, now, alone as she was.)
She had been thinking about how to tell them the biggest threat would come from another mutant when the attack came. Gas, then soldiers. Then a terrible stinging dart in her arm, and blackness. Then waking up in this place, this cell, and discovering it was even worse than she thought. The guard was kind, fatherly even, bringing her water to wash clean her furry mouth and some bread to soothe her roiling stomach. Even as he turned his back, she was reaching for his likeness, cataloguing his features and waiting for the change to flow over her skin.
It never came.
*
He has claws, and blood is dripping onto the painfully white floor in this strange, foreign place. James Howlett barely has time to scream before a huge, blue creature flings himself across the room, and he is attacking, slicing and slashing with the obscene metal implements even before he thinks to defend himself. His body knows this dance, he realises. He has done it a thousand times before, a million times.
Something unlocks, and the memories are battering him, one upon another, coming fast and without mercy. He is old. Ancient.“Unnatural!” his father had shrieked, the first time they watched claws erupt from his hands. Bone, not metal like these, and they had burst forth like an orgasm, an eruption of pleasure rather than pain.
He had hated them anyway.
“Ungodly! Get away from me! Abomination!” The pious git had scuttled backwards, and Mad Dog's shotgun splattered him against the wall, shock and revulsion still twisting his features as he stared sightlessly at his sickly, studious, never-good-enough runt of a son. There was no time to mourn his father, however. Something new was preying upon him.
His reason had been stolen by a towering, ungovernable rage. He tried to stand in the face of it, to resist, but Mad Dog Logan's howl of triumph rang in his ears, and he started to advance, his newly massive body shaking with the need to slash, to tear, to kill. The man inside him looked on in horror as blood rained on the walls and the roof of the fine house he was raised in. Blood on his hands, and his lips, and in his heart.
Twenty four years, it took.
Twenty four years, to realise that wild creature was as much a part of him as young Mr Howlett, the product of nineteen years of social conditioning. Twenty four years to bring the two sides of himself together, to be able to think and see and reason through a feral rage. To find enough control to allow James Howlett to rejoin the world, just another gruff mountain man working the northern woods, and letting off steam in the local fight bars.
The Wolverine, they called him. He laughed about it, that name. It was fitting. Almost poetic.
And then the war came, and he became a soldier, and everything human, everything genteel and kind and honourable was burnt out of him. The Wolverine was all he had left.
*
Thoughts buzzed. Stop. Don't. Think! Beast slapped them away, and lost himself in the glory of bite-kick-tear-smash-howl. So easy. Simple. Satisfying.
The crunch of the other feral's ribcage under his paws startled him (the third rib seperating from the sternum, the fourth rib pulverised, the fifth fractured) but it felt good, so good. Power. Rage. Blood, blinding him.
He licked it from his face (erythrocytes and leukocytes, plasma and electrolytes, marvellous stuff, blood) and the coppery tang charged to his every tastebud, his every nerve with a dose of pure adrenalin. Pure oblivion, where nothing existed but drive to show them, show them all who was strongest, wildest, alpha.
The other one, he was strong too, but he was bigger, even if the other one healed. Remarkable mutation, really, magnificent to see it close up, to hear the bones knitting and watch the skin reform. The claws gave him an advantage, longer than his own, sharper, and they were slicing into him, slowing him down, making him bleed, but he! He could leap over the other man's head, cling to the roof a little, recover, then drown him in several hundred kilos of blue fur, falling at high velocity.
The Wolverine was groaning beneath him, and the bellows and grunts were less enraged now, and he was actually speaking, ceding control to the man. Weak! Beast protested, but this fight wasn't going the way it should, he wasn't dying or slinking away to lick his wounds, and it allowed too much time to think.
Why are we fighting? We could learn from this man, Henry McCoy whispered from somewhere deep inside. He could teach us how to learn from each other ...
Beast roared, enraged by the thought of humanity having anything to offer him, but the thought refused to be lost to the waves of aggression flowing through him. Wolverine. His animal had a name, almost as if he was proud of it. Honoured it.
Logan let it take control, rather than have it ripped from him. The Wolverine was never locked away, blind to the world, chained in one tiny corner of the man's brain.
Beast sprung up, and backed away, panting. Why were they fighting? Who had started this? What the heck was going on?
He kept a wary eye on the Wolverine as he levered himself to his feet, groaning as bones and tendons snapped themselves back into place. He shrugged a few times, and rolled his shoulders to loosen them, but made no move to retaliate.
“Thanks, bub,” the other man said finally. “Bitch out of your head, yet?”
Hank stuttered a little, the words thick in his mouth, but managed to nod.
“She took me … away,” he said slowly. “I ...”
Wolverine cut him off with a non-committal grunt.
“Yeah, bub. Been there. Killed that. It's over now.” As dismissive as the words were, the older man held his gaze for a moment, and there was understanding there. Acceptance.
Hank felt the smile twisting his face, and hoped it was less doubtful than he felt. He wasn't sure that this would ever be over. His feral self had been fully unleashed for the first time, and forced his human side to realise something.
Lock something away, and you feed the rage. Let it out, and you've got a chance to learn how control it.
Start learning, Beast snarled, and slunk backwards to let Henry McCoy get on with cleaning up this mess.
*
“Let me go you idiot numbskull norm bastard motherfucker!”
The yellow girl, Mystique thought sourly. That shrill voice and overly creative vocabulary. Best brace herself – luck most definitely wasn't hers today, and if there was a cellmate she would have preferred not to have … the guard stopped outside of her cell, carefully opened the door, and pushed the young Asian girl inside.
Mystique couldn't hold back the smile.
“So how go things with the X-men?” she enquired as Jubilee pounded on the rapidly closing door, earning herself a vicious kick from the guard in the process.
“Uh, sorry lady, but kinda busy here!” Jubilee snarked in between hurling threats out the peephole.
“Who're you anyway? How do you know the X-men?”
How to answer that, she sighed. These children had no concept of the deep past, of how interwoven their lives had been. No clue about Charles, or Erik, or Raven. All they knew was Mystique, with her beautiful blue skin, copperbright hair and gleaming golden eyes. Her endless campaign of hate.
This bland new face, that no one had ever seen before, could be the perfect disguise.
She shook away the temptation and spoke softly, so as not to startle the girl. “My name is Raven Darkholme. You knew me as Mystique.”
She saw the moment the name registered; saw the stillness creep over her, and the careful, measured turn that brought her face to face with the enemy.
“Mystique?”
“Very little left, I'm afraid.” She needed to work on that note of insouciance. That had veered dangerously close to pathetic.
“Where are the rest of your merry little band? Bold and free, or snivelling and powerless?”
Jubilee's head snapped back at that. The mutinous sneer was so predictable that Mystique had to fight back the smile that threatened while she waited for girl's outrage to break.
“Well, obviously the bitch gene isn't linked to your mutation! I might not be able to fry your ass right now, but you can be sure it's going on the fucking to-do list,” she blustered.
“Your people might'a forgotten about you, but sure as tomorrow's Tuesday, the Professor's got a fix on us right now, and there's gonna be a team jetting in any minute. And this little thing with my pfaffs, and Kit's phasing, and Cyclops ...”
Mystique looked away for a moment as the burst of anger gave way to silent tears. The poor child didn't even know Xavier was dead, she realised, and that the Mansion was somehow the primary target for whoever it was that had created this whole mess. Gently, she told herself. Carefully.
“They took us at headquarters. Magneto is dead. The rest of us,” she shrugged, holding out her all- too-human arms, disgust rising at the thought of what had been taken from her. “They call it the Cure. They strapped me down, and injected it into my veins. And then they expected me to walk away, like a meek little lamb.”
She pinned the girl with an unwavering gaze.
“The doctor who stuck that poison in my veins? She's dead. I don't need to be Mystique to be deadly, girl. I might not be able to shift, or see in the dark, or dance the way I used to, but I still know how to break a neck.”
She shrugged again, and smiled.
“I just have to try a little harder now.”
The yellow girl's mouth was open in shock, and Raven waited for a deluge of recriminations. Instead, her mouth twitched with indecision for a moment, then firmed as she gave a little nod.
“I was a gymnast, before. A really good one. It's not like I used my mutation a whole lot in combat anyway.”
Not exactly true, Raven remembered ruefully, but she'd take that.
“I'm sorry. I've forgotten your name.”
“Jubilation Lee. Jubilee.”
“Well, Jubilee. I don't know about you, but I really need to get out of here. Any thoughts on how?”
The smile was full of teeth and pride.
“I might not be able to melt locks anymore, but I still know how to pick pockets,” she grinned, producing a electronic keycard from inside her bra.
*
He was running through a tunnel, ignoring them all, the hands and arms reaching for him, the angry faces, the crying faces, the screaming, wailing, teeth-gnashing faces. He couldn't block the sound - “beware, beware,” and “remember the beginning, Scott, don't forget,” and everywhere, the redheaded woman, the apparition that looked like Jean, “help me, Scott, help me, help me.” He couldn't look at her, wouldn't stop, simply kept running and running, knowing it had to end soon.
They were shaking him now, reaching out and pulling at his clothes and yanking him about, and he didn't want to hurt anybody, really he didn't, but he just wanted to be left alone, left to grieve, and it's not like he could help anyway … he pushed back, and his tormentor went reeling backwards, tumbling onto the floor of the cell.
“Summers! Wake up! We're trying to rescue you here!”
The sharp tones cut through his nightmare and he opened his eyes to a beautiful woman he had never seen before. She was breathtaking, really, with a thick fall of dark hair and huge brown eyes that dominated the sharp planes of a perfectly balanced face.
“What's happened?” he croaked when he could finally speaked. “How can I see?”
“Long story, Cyclops. I'll tell you on the way,” the woman snapped. The tone was naggingly familiar, Scott realised. Someone he had heard before but never seen?
But apparently the time for explanations was over, because she was already moving out of his cell and onto the next one.
Kitty, he panicked, finally coming back to himself. Jubilee! The kids!
He flings himself after her.
*
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