She let Piotr and Brendan - acting as nervous co-pilot - take the jet home, as she broke down what little plan Logan had for getting Saddiq back. Bobby sat across from her, giving her the wary look he always gave a fuming Logan, like she was a bomb about to go off. She supposed she could understand it, but it still pissed her off.

Once she briefed everyone, Piotr exclaimed, "No way. We're not losing another person. The Professor and Logan's already too much."

"And Scott," Brendan added.

"There's not gonna be any losin', not if we do this right," she insisted, watching Piotr's jaw clench. Piotr may have been the artist of the school, but he was so straight laced sometimes it was hilarious. He wasn't as repressed as Scott, but he could be so stiffly formal. Since he'd never been on a date, or expressed any known interest in females, it was a generally quiet but accepted theory that he was gay, but in the closet. It was certainly more probable than him taking a silent vow of celibacy, or restricting his social life to internet porn, but he kept to himself so much it was really impossible to say for sure.

Then again, thanks to Logan, she knew that for a long time, Russian culture frowned on such a thing, and it was quite possible, since he did spend most of his formative years there, that he learned to repress it to conform. Logan knew a lot about Russian culture, more than she would have ever expected. He read Russian poetry? Weirdness.

"And how do we do this right?" Kitty asked. She was actually sitting right next to her, not freaked out by her "maybe Logan/possibly not" status. Then again, Kitty had a weird fascination with Logan. It wasn't a crush, but it was hard to say what it was. Rogue just knew that Kitty was afraid a lot that she couldn't "pull her weight", whatever that exactly meant, and she saw Logan as the epitome of the guy who could do major things for the team ... when he bothered to show up. And Logan never seemed to dismiss her as a lightweight, which she felt almost everyone else did. For her part, Rogue wasn't sure that was true, but Logan was never around the school long enough to give her that impression.

"Leave that to me."

"Rogue, the Professor would never approve of you going on a mission alone," Piotr pointed out, like she expected him to do. If Scott wasn't here, he could do a damn good impression of him.

"I won't be alone. And he'd approve of Logan going alone, wouldn't he?"

"No, he wouldn't." But he shifted in his seat as he added, almost under his breath, "But he'd go anyways."

"Exactly. Let me work out a few details, and then we can get started."

"You're not Logan," Piotr countered. "You just think you are."

"And we don't have any real plan as to how to rehabilitate Saddiq," Brendan interjected, possibly trying to forestall an argument. "I mean, keeping him on ice until Bob shows up smacks of desperation."

"You bet yer ass it does," she agreed. "But else can we do?  Wait for Logan to come to so he can use his claws to carve Saddiq's skull open so we can remove the nano-chip or whatever the hell it is? Nobody's qualified to do brain surgery here."

"What about one of the telekinetics?" Piotr asked. "We have some at the school."

"Ones who can do chip destruction totally blind?"

That shut him up. It would have been a tall order, even for Jean, who was the strongest TK they had. (Boy, thinking of Jean brought up some weird memories in Logan's mind ... )

"Look, if we have a better plan for getting that chip outta Saddiq once we get him, I'll be all for it.  But right now, let's worry about getting him back. Then we'll worry about the rest."

Maybe we should ask Magneto if he'd be so kind as to do it, Logan commented sarcastically. If it was Logan; no idea. But the thought made her smirk. Yeah, they could send Magneto a postcard, light up the helmet signal, see if he responded. Then, afterwards, maybe they could get a shot at killing the old bastard this time.

(Ooh, Rogue really liked that idea ...)

Piotr turned in the pilot seat to face her, his expression earnest enough that it would have earned a swell of orchestral music in a t.v. movie. "I don't want to send you in alone. Anything could happen.  What if they don't believe you? They have telepaths, right?"

"Right - and I have Logan. The deeper they probe, the more shit Logan can throw at them. He learned how to frustrate and scare telepaths, if not exactly ward them off. He can usually make 'em leave pretty fast." She didn't think she got any of the Bob energy he still had in him, but that was okay - Logan had some mental warfare tools at his disposal.  The only problem was, she'd be subjected to those memories at the same time. Still, she'd probably already seen most of them in her nightmares.

Piotr shook his head the whole time she talked. “He’s been taken by telepaths before. You’re basing this all on supposition.”

“If you gotta better plan, let’s hear it.”

He paused, and she was sure she’d shut him up, but after thinking about for a few seconds, he said, “Not a better plan, but maybe a revision.”

She listened, and as much as she hated to admit it, he had some good ideas, especially for a guy with little field experience. But she still felt compelled to inform him, “The more people involved in this, the more things can get fucked up.”

“Things are already f … screwed up,” he replied, slightly exasperated. “They can’t get much worse than you walking into that lion’s den alone, and taking them all on.”

“Why don’t we just wait until the Professor’s awake?” Bobby said, finally contributing something to the conversation.

“Because that will take too long,” she pointed out. “He’ll be out for days. The plan was to disable him for a while, and believe me, I did. Now that their plan has fucked up, they’ll probably try and move Saddiq out of the country ASAP. We need to get him now, or we’ll never get ‘im again. Not until he attacks.”

Kitty sighed heavily, leaning her elbows on her knees and staring down at the deck. “This really sucks.”

She didn’t even know the half of it.

****

That was the best laugh he’d had in a long time.

When he was through, he wiped the tears away from his eyes with the back of his hand, only to find Jean staring at him, her hips locked, arms crossed over her chest.  She had a small, smug smile on her face. “Are you done?”

He had to hand it to her; she was cool in her delusions. “Probably not. What the hell are you on to think I would ever help you reacquire something you never should have had in the first place?”

The smug look just grew. “Because I’m all you’ve got. The only other option is to let Xiuh keep the power. And you know what he’s going to do with it, don’t you?”

Bob opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. Oh no.  She couldn’t actually be right, could she? “No, no,” he finally said, shaking his head. “There’s gotta be another way -”

“In what universe? He’s an old god, yes? A crazy, angry old god who thinks people are to blame for not worshipping them any more, right? When he gets bored with looking for us, he’ll send his lackeys to do it, and start killing. How will he do it? You said he was a fire god. So can I assume he’ll burn everything up? Maybe that’s too pedestrian …”

“This can’t be it. The choice can’t be simply you or him.”  But even as he said it, he feared she was right, at least for the moment. Xiuh probably couldn’t be contained, and if he was destroyed, the power would revert back to Jean. The only way it wouldn’t was if Jean died first, and then Xiuh was destroyed; the energy, without an avatar, would disperse.

And Jean must have known that. Her smile had turned evil, as sharp as a razor blade. “Are you going to kill me in cold blood, Bob? Does it mean that much to you?”

Man, what a savage bitch. He had no idea her dark side was quite this bad, but perhaps that’s why she repressed it so intensely. “I’m glad you’re enjoying this. Do you really think you have a hope in hell of carrying this off?”

“The devil you know is better than the devil you know even better, in my estimation.  And I know for a fact that there are people on Earth who need you right now. Angel, for example; someone figured out he wasn’t supposed to be there, someone who may have enough power to do something about it. And of course there’s Scott -”

“Do you have any humanity left at all?” He really wanted to shake her until her brains rattled around her head like buckshot in a cake pan, but he knew it would do no good at all.  She was just like them; Cammy had sunk his claws in so deep that calling her Jean was probably a misnomer.

Her expression was all wrong, gloating and hard, a mask carved from stone. “I can’t, remember?”

Oh yes, she was enjoying this.

“Well, I can’t help you. Don’t know if you noticed, but he’s a hell of a lot stronger than I am. I can’t fight him and win.”

“Of course not. But you know gods who can. Tick tock, Bob. The clock is running.”

He glared at her, aware it was doing nothing but making her gloat all that much more. “You will pay for this.”

Her smile remained a cruel and bright thing, something barely concealing a laugh. “Perhaps. But not today. Now, shall we?”

Did she think it was going to be quite that easy? He took a moment to think of the god most likely to screw them over in a way that wouldn’t equal the apocalypse, and opened a portal.

11

Rags was waiting for them at the mansion when they returned, pissed off about … something (when he was angry, his Cockney really came out, and it was impossible to understand him). It occurred to her he might have the right connections to get them some non-traditional help. He was in no mood to help at first, and seemed really confused by the whole ‘I’m not Logan, but I did absorb him’ thing.

The Professor was no closer to consciousness than he had been when she left him on the catwalk. Logan was just bad; she’d absorbed him too long, and he barely had a readable blood pressure or a heartbeat.  It was there, but clearly his healing factor hadn’t recovered yet.  She felt bad about it all, but the little voice in her head that could have been Logan or her told her, Don’t worry about it.  You didn’t do that to Xavier voluntarily, and I planned to let you drain me dry, to overwhelm the whatever-the-fuck in your brain. I figured it couldn’t adapt as readily to your powers, that that was a complexity that the Organization couldn’t handle. I guess I was right.

She wanted to feel some guilt, but the Logan part wasn’t letting her.  It wanted her to focus on getting Saddiq back first; emotions were a luxury an agent couldn’t afford before a mission.

(Agent?! Mission? What the fuck was that?)

As it turned out, once they calmed him down, Rags had a new spell that he was dying to try out, that could help them immensely. Piotr questioned the actual value of it, but it made Rogue laugh, not only because it was perfect, but because it was perfect irony. Why would he ever need to know that anyways?  In the circles Rags traveled in, it would be as good as spitting in the ocean.  But, if it did work, it would make the whole plan much easier.

Everyone was surprised when she told them where the temporary base of operation was. They apparently thought it was up in Canada, but that was the main reason they wanted the meeting up at Alkali Lake, to further that impression. (Logan was right, though; the minor reason was to send a big “fuck you” to him.) But if you thought about it, it made perfect sense. Did she and Saddiq hitch a ride to evil person central? Did they stop at the border and have to answer the “Do you have any fruit to declare?” question? No, of course not.

The temporary base of operations was in an abandoned power station about thirty miles from the mansion, long redesigned as an emergency station. Because of that, it didn’t have as much security as a long term base, which again served their plan. But time worked against them, as the survivors would be choppered back, but only if the field leader had been killed. Logan thought it was a good bet that almost no normal human could have survived that conflagration, because clearly a Triad hit squad had answered Wing’s call and had orders to scorch the fucking earth. But she didn’t share that little tidbit with the rest of them, who had stopped asking who Logan’s “friends” were, because after having seen the flaming pyre the “island” had become once they lifted off, no one wanted to know anymore.  No, they didn’t like it, and Xavier wouldn’t like it either, but those callous killers had probably saved all their lives.  She knew what the Organization had planned for them.  If the Triad hadn’t shown up prepared for war, the Organization would have captured or killed them all. She had little doubt of this. Those were their orders, after all.

So they worked out the final details of the plan, timing being crucial, and brought Rags in on it. He’d never be in any danger - gods no!  He was too sober to agree to that - but he would need to get close briefly to cast the spell. He was so nervous about that, he seemed to sober up that much more. Also, to keep anyone who was going unaffected by the spell, he had to draw things on them. Rogue didn’t get how a couple of marks on ‘em would spare them, but Logan encouraged her not to question it. No, it made no sense, but a lot of this magic related shit made no sense at all, and yet it still seemed to generally work.

He had to be very careful with her, touching her with no more than a pen (one of the fine tipped markers Piotr seemed to have by the metric ton. At least he picked a really nice blue), and she bared her upper arm for him to scribble on. He was so nervous he sweated on her, but he didn’t touch her bare skin with his skin. (And she never realized how much he smelled like celery until now.) What he drew looked like a snake crossed with something like ivy, a snake with something like leaves springing from its body, and it was not too dissimilar from the tattoos that sleeved both his arms and the back of his hands; those strange black vines that probably had some religious significance to a High Priest of the Stone Temple.

As soon as that was out of the way, they checked the time; Rogue did the math in her head and yet still ended up making a guess (but an educated one, at least). Then she headed down to the garage, and couldn’t help but break into a run, excited beyond the telling of it.

She got to drive the motorcycle!

Okay, technically she could have taken one of the cars, but she didn’t want to. She never got to drive a motorcycle, supposedly because she didn’t know how (Scott somehow managed to always put off teaching her how to as well), but thanks to Logan, she knew how to now.

As she straddled the bike and kicked up the kickstand (wow, it was heavier than she thought), that voice in her head said, You could put on a helmet.

“I have your healing factor!” She exclaimed, turning the key. “Fuck the helmet.”

She revved it a bit, just enjoying the loud growl of the engine, then shot out of the garage like a bat out of hell, finally understanding what that phrase meant.

Damn it was fun. Oh, it was a little scary at first, the bike was much heavier than she expected and responded to gravity and inertia a lot differently than a car, but she let Logan’s instincts take over, and it was as easy as hell. Logan had been driving motorcycles since … well, a long time. There was a freedom to them, an intimate feeling of speed that you just didn’t get with a car. In a way, it was like flying. And she got to see the sky light up with the sherbet colors of dawn, soft pinks and oranges, lilac shades giving way to pale blues.

It also had drawbacks she hadn’t considered. Windburn, for one (not a Logan affliction, of course), and bugs smacking you in the face instead of a windshield. The bugs were the grossest part, although she only really encountered one and a half.  And, oh man, her hair.  What was her hair going to look like after this? Was that what had happened to Logan’s hair?

Just to add to the fun, it started to sprinkle as she came within view of the power station in question, a dreary pillbox of a place in a weedy field just south of a still functioning gravel pit, where heavy machinery tore big chunks out of the earth, and the wind blew a gray layer of dirt over everything in the vicinity. It made it look like there had been a recent volcanic eruption, the ash still silting to the ground.

Was the timing right? She honestly wasn’t sure; she was just having too much fun sailing down the road way too fast and way too exposed to keep track of time. (And the bug collision also threw her off a bit.) She let the bike idle a moment before heading up the road leading to the front of the abandoned power station, which still had a seven foot high concrete wall topped with three separate strands of sharp razor wire, all of which looked strangely new in comparison with the rest of the site.

She drove slowly, and wasn’t at all surprised when a spotlight stabbed down from one of the high posts near the locked gate, and a voice barked, “Identify yourself.”

She stopped the bike, killed the engine, and put down the kickstand, if only to spare it from coming inside. “Duh, it’s me, Rogue. I’m back. Do you actually think they could hold me hostage for a single second?”

She knew it would take a second for the information to filter inside through the system. They were probably scanning the area now, checking all the passive cameras and sensors hidden in the field, checking for her back up. Of course they’d find none. They’d have the tech-ops on high alert for at least an hour now, not trusting that this wasn’t a trap, but they had no cameras trained on their own roof.

She walked up to the gate, hands held up to show she had no weapons - and she had her gloves on, further proof of no ill intent. After half a minute elapsed, she started to get really impatient. There was no way it should have taken them this long to clear her.

They’re seeing how you react, that voice said, with great certainty. Just act bored.

Done and done. Oh, inside she was just dying from the anxiety, from the fear things could go horribly wrong in a billion ways (maybe First wasn’t killed), but Logan had an instinctual default that she borrowed to get through this. It wasn’t so much a personality as the lack of one, a refusal to let any emotions surface, a way to deny them the merest clues to what they sought. She knew, only as a grim afterthought, this was how he'd survived torture; give them nothing on the outside, study and wait, no matter how excruciating it was. There would come a time when there would be an opening, a chance … and then they would all pay. It was a deadly mindset, and she was startled at what a dark and ugly mental vein she had tapped into here. But she might need it; she couldn’t deny that this base survival instinct - or whatever it was - was something that just might give her the edge if it all suddenly went tits up.

(What the hell kind of expression was that?!)

Finally, a voice barked, “Don’t move until we tell you to move.” The gate unlocked with a “clank”, and as it was pulled aside, several armed soldiers in the best body armor money could buy (that didn’t give you adamantium poisoning) aimed nasty looking automatic rifles at her - Logan’s mind informed her they were actually AS50 semi-automatics, whatever those were (modified so their base tripods were gone; it was also possible they were upgrade to full auto; rather heavy to lug around, but known for their ability to take a lot of damage and still work, as well as have sniper rifle levels of accuracy … how the fuck did he know all this?!) - and suddenly Titan was there, a large white bandage on her right cheek, almost covering the scowl on her face as she brought out a pair of metal restraints, and snapped, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back, or I’ll bash your fucking skull in.”

“Yer gonna cuff me?  Jeeze, this is the fucking thanks I get for taking those idiots out?”  She obeyed, though. Part of her wanted to - she really didn’t want to have to go in there handcuffed - but that survival instinct made her, Logan looking out for her even though he wasn’t here. “So what happened to your face? Freezer burn?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Titan snarled, slapping the cuffs on a lot more roughly than she needed to, but Rogue was unable to suppress a snicker.  Yeah, it was probably something like that.  Strength didn’t help her much then, did it?

Still, as cool as she was keeping things on the outside, Rogue's stomach was burning, starting to tie itself in knots as she felt the cold steel even through the leather base of her gloves, heard the metallic click of the cuffs being locked and tightened.  Oh, yeah - this was so bad.

No, she couldn’t think like that. She would prove she wasn’t bait, and they would let her go, simple as that. (What if it wasn’t, though? What if they didn’t buy it, what if her timing was way off, what if she was trapped here for an hour waiting for Rags to show up and do his thing?)

Nothing is gonna happen to you, the voice reassured her. I won’t let it.

She wasn’t sure if that was comforting or frightening. And since he was her - or she was him; however it worked - what could he possibly do?

Then she remembered the gaping chasm of the deadly space inside his mind, and realized she didn’t want to know.