Scott got to his feet, feeling almost defensive. “What are you … haven’t you heard of knocking?”

Bob shrugged. “Sure, but where’s the fun in that?” Bob was inexplicably wearing knee length surfer shorts, bright blue with little green and brown palm trees on them, showing off what seemed to be a reasonably good tan, and a loose butter yellow tank top with what looked like some kind of dried fruit decal in the center, surrounded by the legend ‘Eat Me Dates’. (Oh man, he so didn’t want to know.) His hair was mussed, a bit more blond than usual (sun bleached?), and slightly longer than it had been last time he’d seen him. “Working in another dimension” his ass - he’d clearly been lounging at the beach, the disingenuous bastard. All he was missing was the zinc smear on his nose.

Suddenly he winced and grabbed his head, letting out a small groan of pain. “Bloody hell, mate, you got a relic of Oberlyn in here?”

How the hell did he know that? Although he had planned this all out in his head, now that Bob was here, now that he had surprised him, he wasn’t sure what to do. He stood up, and did his best to focus. “I want to -”

“- know about Jean, right, yeah, got that,” Bob interrupted. He was squinting in pain, a palm pressed up to his temple, like he was having a savage migraine attack. “What about her? And what the hell are you doing with an Oberlyn fetish?”

Something about his annoyed tone made Scott angry, and he remembered exactly how he wanted to do this. “What about her? How dare you say that! What the hell have you done to her?”

“Huh? What are y -” he didn’t just pause, he froze, cobalt eyes hardening like ice. He was staring intently at something over Scott’s shoulder.

He turned, and saw Jean standing against the far wall, giving them both a smile that quickly grew into something leering and evil. “Hello Bob,” she said, but there was something wrong about her voice. It sounded correct, but since when had Jean ever had a tone of voice quite that cold? “I ssee you’ve hardly changed.”

And since when had she had a lisp?

Bob grabbed his arm hard and yanked him behind him, putting himself between Scott and Jean. “Get out of here,” Bob muttered grimly. “He wants me, not you.”

“He?”

Jean laughed, a sharp, harsh bark that seemed contemptuous. “He doessn’t know; he’ss jusst a stupid Human. He believess what hiss eyess tell him - or better yet, hiss mind. Why even try and protect him, Bob? He’ss your Judass; he jusst led you to your death.”

In the blink of an eye, Scott saw that it wasn’t Jean, but something hideous. Humanoid, yes, but something like snakeskin stretched taut over a skeletal frame, brown and silver diamond shapes scales clinging to his (?) emaciated body like spandex. His torso seemed unusually long and thin, as did what passed for his arms, and his head was slightly bulbous, with huge horizontal slits for eyes, pupils glowing yellow from within irises of bloody crimson. Its mouth was a like a black gash in its flat face.

How could he have been so stupid? How could he have ever believed that that thing was Jean?

“Fine, whatever Xiuh,” Bob agreed, still shoving him back towards the door. He was still trying to protect him? Why? “Let’s just take this somewhere else, huh?”

The thing Bob had called Xiuh (what kind of name was that?) made a rasping noise that Scott assumed was its version of a laugh. “And spare the Human? Remove you from the realm of Oberlyn’s power? How dumb do you think I am? I was dead, not mentally crippled.”

He understood now, and couldn’t believe what a fool he had been. He thought he was setting a trap for Bob, and he had been - but he was the bait. He was simply a tool to get to Bob, and nothing more. Revenge for Jean wasn’t to be had, because Bob had done nothing to her - or at least not what he had been led to believe. This … thing had been pushing all the right emotional buttons to get him to do exactly what he wanted, and serve him up Bob on a silver platter.

The thing raised its hand, like it was lifting an invisible book, and for some reason Bob tensed and lunged for him, yelling, “No!”

But the whole room exploded into flame, and the last thing Scott thought was that he had probably deserved this.

11

The most helpless thing in the world was to know something was wrong, and yet be perfectly unable to do anything about it.

Xavier simply didn’t know where to start. Scott was deliberately remaining out of contact, which could only be a bad sign, and considering the mood he left in, Xavier was expecting the worst. Logan wasn’t out of contact, just off on his own in London, but listening to the BBC radio news upstairs, he heard there was a “mysterious” incident in London that left several buildings damaged and at least one person dead in what was being described as an “act of extreme violence”, and instantly he knew Logan was involved.

Okay, he didn’t know, he just assumed the worst. Where Logan went, trouble followed, or at least so it seemed. He was sure if he was involved there was probably a good reason for it - he didn’t kill as indiscriminately as Scott liked to think; usually it was in defense of someone, if not himself (although even he had to admit that with Logan’s mutation, it was hard to seriously argue self-defense, simply because it was so damn hard to actually kill him) - but he couldn’t keep living his life like this. He would never heal from his traumas if he kept running into fights. Yes, it probably made him feel better in the short term to take out his anger and pain in aggression, but in the long run he was simply reinforcing the message that the Organization pounded into his head with all the subtlety of a jackhammer: fighting and killing was all he was good for. No matter what he thought - no matter what Scott or the kids thought - it wasn’t true.

Of course, one of the big stumbling blocks was the fact that Logan, in the back of his mind, honestly thought he wanted him here because of his use as a “weapon”, to work for them instead of against them as “Weapon X”. He’d have been lying if he didn’t admit that on some level, he did want Logan where he could keep his eye on him; he was still in a very precarious mental state - strange how years of torture and telepathic raping could do that to a person - and his mutation, combined with his fighting skills and a reservoir of rage that could drown the world, did make him a dangerous man.

But, thank god, Logan was far too independent and distrustful of authority to contract out to the Magnetos of the world, or to fully embrace their ideology. Of course he didn’t embrace his either, but Logan didn’t trust enough to believe anything wholeheartedly. He’d been burned so many times, it was amazing he believed anything at all. In Logan’s world, trust seemed to be a poisonous word, the one thing sure to kill you in the morning.

He honestly believed Logan could be invaluable to them, if he could just find some measure of inner peace, of safety. He knew many things, much more than he probably consciously knew, and he had a rougher, more streetwise point of view that could only be invaluable in many situations. Also, you never had to ask Logan to take one for the team; “lone wolf” tendencies or not, he’d be the first one to draw the attention, draw the fire, simply because he knew most people didn’t have what it took to kill him, or even keep him down for long. He and Scott would make an excellent team, each making up for the other’s natural weaknesses … if, of course, they could stand each other. That seemed to vary on a day to day basis: sometimes they got along well enough that they forgot to have a pissing contest, other times they seemed to be a second away from taking after each other with chainsaws.

He wasn’t too concerned about Logan, at least not for the moment. Right now, his concern was with Scott, mainly because he hadn’t been acting like himself. It was bad enough when Jean died, but when it turned out she wasn’t dead and yet somehow that was worse - an avatar; a god; a capricious being that seemed nothing like the Jean they knew - something in him seemed to fall apart. The fact that he left the school for a while was, in fact, the least of the signs; the worst sign of his dissolution was this bizarre revenge mission against the Organization. The fact that he would do it at all was an obvious sign that Scott was spiraling out of control, becoming consumed by the very emotions he liked to pretend he didn’t have (in itself a psychologically unhealthy thing) - but the fact that he agreed to let some of the older children go along was inexcusable. The Scott he knew would never have put them at risk if he could help it.

And now he had gone off, to who knew where (he’d deactivated the tracer in the jet), to do god knew what. He’d made it clear he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed, he hadn’t wanted to talk to him, but Xavier was sure he’d come to his sense and contact him, if only to vent some more rage. But it hadn’t happened.

Xavier sat in front of the Cerebro console, headpiece in his hands, wondering if he should violate his privacy like this. He’d kept his distance, tried to give him time to find whatever he was looking for, but that news report, as brief and vague as it was, sparked a bad feeling in his gut. Logan probably wasn’t in trouble; if there was terrible violence, they had brought something to his turf, and Logan was the master of that domain. If they wanted to fight, they had probably already lost the moment they made the decision to attack. But his mind had settled on Scott, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the one in trouble.

He wasn’t psychic; he didn’t, as a rule, have premonitions. But every now and then he had strong hunches that usually paid off. He sensed this was one of them.

He was still holding the control device in his hands, trying to decide if he should risk losing Scott’s trust forever by using Cerebro to track him down, when he sensed that someone was standing at the open door of the chamber.

“Somethin’ wrong?” Rogue asked curiously.

He shook his head, still eying the helmet like it was an angry snake. Why did this feel so irrevocable? “No, Marie, everything’s fine. I was just considering finding … someone.”

“Scott?”

He smirked, dipping his head so she couldn’t see it in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes she learned so fast it was shocking. “Perhaps. What are you doing down here? Don’t you have class?”

“Not now, no. I suppose I should be doing my homework, but why?”

He set the helmet down on the console, and started maneuvering his chair backwards so he could turn around. “Now Marie, we’ve discussed this. Studies are important if you want to make something of yourself in this world.”

He hadn’t realized it, but she was right behind him, and when he thought he had struck her with his chair, she had simply grabbed it. He looked back at her, and realized there was something wrong with the rhythm of her thoughts. Not only that, but there was a strange vacancy in her eyes, like they were staring out at nothing. “I’m gonna make somethin’ of myself, starting with you.” Before he had time to react, she touched his face - with her bare hand.

****

Rogue watched the old man drop to the catwalk, now unconscious as well as useless, and felt his power swirling through her head, opening up psychic doors she had never known existed. It was like everyone’s thoughts thrummed, intangible music carried on invisible wires. The things she could do with it …

“Are you done here?” Saddiq asked, coming to the entryway. His thoughts were different, just like hers, regular and almost mechanical. He was the only one she could trust; he was the only one who knew the truth.

“One moment,” she said, shoving the old man’s wheelchair off the edge of the abyss.

How had she ever been so deluded? How had she never seen it?

Mutants weren’t an evolutionary “next step”; they were aberrations, the nuclear age version of freaks in a sideshow. It was so clear it was almost painful, and she could think of nothing else.

Mutants were a scourge on the face of humanity. And she and Saddiq had to stop them, by any means necessary.

To be continued ….