In the dark murk of the water he could see the trunk thick pylons of the private pier, and he surfaced beneath it, taking a quiet breath, eyes adjusting from the darkness of the water to the darkness of the gelid night.

He simply floated ( well, as best he could ) and listened, the icy water slapping against the pylons almost unbearably loud and painfully briny as he opened up his senses, but he managed to cope as he tried to listen beyond it.  He could hear - on the boardwalk, not the pier - five guards, four of whom were smoking ( three were smoking Marlboros; someone else was smoking menthols ), and two of whom were talking. One had had French onion soup and a Porterhouse steak for dinner; another was actually wearing Hai Karate cologne, which he thought someone had put out of its misery long ago. Wonders just never ceased, did they? And someone was sneaking drinks too, rotgut whiskey in a flask, and was half way to toasted by now. These guys were just asking to get killed.

The two guards who were talking had been discussing a horse race that one had gone to over the weekend, and lost two thousand dollars at, after making four hundred dollars on a previous bet. He was blaming it on "bad luck", and talked about this casino he heard about in Monte Carlo where you could win two million dollars on a single bet, and how he planned to go there and try as soon as he could save up enough money to do so. The other guard ( Hai Karate man ) just made appropriate listening noises, but was clearly thinking of something else, just letting the guy chatter like a hyperactive myna bird.

As Wolverine reached out and grabbed the nearest pylon, Hai Karate must have reached the end of his tolerance with idiot boy, because he suddenly said, "Hey, have the radios been quiet for a while?"

He knew they wouldn't see him from this angle until he attacked, so he started climbing up the algae slimed wooden pillar, up to the top of the well maintained pier.

There was a crackle of static in the night as they tried their radios. "Come in Echelon," Hai Karate said, even as he was met with another sharp snap of static that was almost painful.

He was now standing on the pier, dripping water, but no one had noticed him yet; they were all too busy trying radios that had no hope of working. His bare feet, which were so cold he had lost all feeling in them, squelched slightly as he stalked from the wood of the pier to the more solid pavement of the "boardwalk", and he suddenly he wondered how close he could get to them before they noticed they had been breached.

As it turned out, fifteen feet.

"Holy fuck!' One of them shouted, dropping his useless radio and swinging his automatic rifle out from beneath his arm.

"Hold it right there! " Another guard - Hai karate man - shouted, also leveling his weapon at him.

Wolverine snickered at them, popping his claws at his side, making them all jump. "Do you really think you got what it takes to stop me?"

They opened fired even before he attacked, but the sting of bullets punching through him only made him happier to cut through them like the chaff they were. In under two minutes, it was all over.

He unzipped the wet suit, now cut with bullet holes and splattered with blood, and stepped out of it, leaving it crumpled up on the boardwalk like a shed skin. The black clothes he wore underneath were dry, save for where the bullets brought up blood and let in drops of water from the outer suit, and blood squelched beneath his feet, which were now feeling the warmth from the healing process. He spotted a big enough guy and pulled off his boots, stepping into them before heading off to the place they had called Echelon.

It looked like just another warehouse in a row of warehouses lining the boardwalk like bomb shelters in a war torn city, but one of them was different than the others; one of them held a high tech station, where they were gathering information on the Organization and the mutants that worked for them. Their purpose was doubtlessly far from benign, but he honestly didn't care - it was nice to just tear something up. He'd been getting bored.

There were several other guards along the way, but the resistance they offered was so pathetic he barely even noticed. The echoes of static from their malfunctioning radios filled the night, overtaking the distant purr of car engines on the highway.

Echelon had a steel door three feet thick, and a retinal scanning door lock, but two claw slashes made that quickly  irrelevant, and it was another slash fest inside as guards put up more futile resistance. Sometimes it was just pathetic. He idly wondered if there was a service out there where you could rent ineffective security officers. It certainly seemed to be a popular service. Maybe they were cheap.

Static dropped in through a skylight as soon as he took out the guards at the main post and permanently switched off their equipment. "I thought the point of you heading the charge was to keep things quiet," she said wryly.

"They didn't shoot for long."

She shook her head, smiling grimly. "You're insane, you know that?"

He grunted noncommittally. "That's why they hired me."

"I thought it was your way with people," she said, giving him a smart ass grin and a wink.

He made a sour face at her, and led the way through the complex, claws still extended. "We got a telepath in here," Static told him. "I've got them blocked, but I wouldn't be surprised if they make a run for it."

"Won't get far."

They didn't. The few people left in Echelon were cleared out easily, with Static showing that she had been trained reasonably well, although he thought her martial arts techniques were starting to get rusty. He offered to spar with her next chance they got, which led her to joke: "As soon as you get declawed."

He really hated teaming up with comedians.

She was mainly along not only to block their communications equipment but also to download what data they had before they torched this dump. He had thought this place was too clean somehow, but  only when they were in the main data hub did Static say, " Is there something wrong about this place?"

"Ya noticed," he grumbled, looking around the room. Like all places where they kept major computers, it was a sterile room of white walls and control panels that never seemed to be connected to much of anything, with the computers themselves set up against one wall like a row of high tech lockers.

Once the data dump was underway, she looked around the room, her white eyes searching the ceiling as if for a security camera. "I know you've got a better instinct than me, Wolve - what's the deal?"

He shrugged, wondering if there were any decent bars around the hotel they were supposedly quartered in for the night. He hadn't bothered to have a look at it, as he had to get to the harbor before the patrol boats did their regular rounds. "They probably got tipped off and started attempting to clean house, but they didn't have a lot of lead time to get much done."

She looked at him sharply, eyes narrowing in suspicion. At first it had been kinda weird - she looked blind - but he could feel her eyes upon him if not exactly see them, so he accepted the fact that she was sighted, no matter how she appeared. He knew there were still people back at HQ who did double takes when they saw her, but they  had to be idiots. There were always more to mutants than met the eye. "Are you saying someone leaked the mission?"

"What other reason is there?"

Concerned colored her painfully young ( looking - she couldn't be all that young ) face as she tried too think of a likely suspect. But there were so many it was impossible to chose without a little more to go on. A lot of people hated the Organization - some who still worked for them.

Static glanced at the computer she was working on, and wondered, "Think they left a clue?"

"I wouldn't. But people are generally stupid, so we got a pretty good shot."

She snorted, running a hand through hair so red it looked molten under the florescent lights. "I love the way you're not cynical."

He didn't say anything to that, but looked around in search of a clock. He wondered if the bars were still open around here. The mission was over as far as he was concerned; if someone was trying to screw the Org, he didn't care as long as they didn't try and screw him.

Getting out was a thousand times easier than getting in, which was typical - the guards were all dead, fled, or too unconscious to care one way or another. The hotel they were quartered in was a middling tourist type, his term for a hotel above fleabag but hardly luxurious. Not that he'd know what to do with luxurious, except stand out like a sore thumb; tourist grade was bad enough. Here he was without a Hawaiian shirt.

They had rooms connected by an inner door on the tenth floor, and the rooms were identically bland and small, with a neutral color scheme and more fake wood paneling than was healthy for anyone. He looked out his window at the lights of the city - leaving his lights off so no one on the outside could see him - as Static called in to base in the next room.

The city looked dead. A dreary back end European town with little in the way of nightlife ( unless drunks vomiting in gutters counted as nightlife , it made him wonder why he sometimes had the most curious feeling of déjà vu. When they passed through Paris the other day, Static was unreasonably thrilled, having never been there before, but it seemed ... familiar somehow. Only the French had a word for it - déjà vu. How ironic was that?

But when Static asked him when he'd been to France before he had to admit he didn't think he'd ever been to France before, or at least he didn't remember having ever been. What she didn't know is that he didn't remember much of anything else at all. His mind was more often than not a perfect blank, with nothing but battle tactics and moves bubbling to the surface, like he was just a robot programmed to fight. But he didn't think robots were supposed to feel as pissed off as he usually did. Sometimes all he could feel was hate; basically it was the only thing he felt.

He had memories, of course, but they felt wrong in some way he couldn't put a finger on. It was like he had been given someone else's memories, and he had been inserted into them as an afterthought; as if someone belatedly realized he needed some kind of grounding or he'd go spinning off his axis completely. He thought about his metal claws, and wondered if he was somebody's idea of a robot.

"Reaper thinks we should stay quartered until pick up tomorrow if there's any chance we've been compromised at all," Static announced, coming into his room. Since there had been nothing going on outside, he had moved to an armchair in the corner of the room ( out of view from the window ), and lit up a cigar. He still hadn't bothered to turn on the lights though - why? He didn't need them?

"He would. He hasn't seen this shitty place."

Static sighed loudly. "Do you enjoy sitting in the dark like a pervert?"

"I am a pervert."

She made that noise only women could make - not quite a sigh, but close, and full of disappointment. She then crossed the room and closed the curtain before making her way to the nightstand and turning on the lamp. He knew that was coming and closed his eyes, slowly opening them so they could adjust to the light. She remained standing in front of the nightstand, hands on her hips. "You're just grouchy 'cause you can't go out drinking."

"That and I hate Reaper's smug fucking guts." He wasn't going to tell her it didn't matter - from the number of drunks he saw on the street, it was obvious the bars had already closed and were turning their refuse out.

She fixed him with a mock stern look. He actually liked Static out of all the other losers he was generally teamed with: she was smart, obviously well trained, and wasn't much for dicking around. He liked people who weren't into bullshit, because so many people were. And he had to admit it was nice that she was so easy on the eyes, and generally smelled nice. Also, she treated him like he was Human, as opposed to just a walking Ginsu, and that was just fucking bizarre. He wasn't used to being treated as something other than a bomb about to go off. "This is new, isn't it? What happened between you two that I missed?"

"Nothin' happened. I just can't stand it when people lie to me so blatantly."

She cocked her head curiously, and he could feel her seemingly blind eyes scrutinizing him.  "What's he lying about?"

"What's goin' on with him. If he is indeed him."

After a moment of staring at him with what he guessed was disbelief, she sat down on the edge of his small, stiff looking bed. "Okay, this sounds like a long story. What the fuck do you mean by if indeed it is him?"

He shifted uncomfortably - his shoulders were almost too wide for the confines of this narrow chair - and wondered if he should bother to tell her. Most people would dismiss him out of hand, but he didn't think Static would. "Remember when he went off for his leave of absence?"

She had to think about it for a moment. "Last year?"

"Naw, couple months back, after I returned from Siberia? I know he said he was goin' 'cause he was startin' to have trouble with power surges, but when he came back ... he didn't smell right."

"What do you mean?"

He shrugged, aware he'd never be able to explain it to anyone who couldn't smell things as he did. "Everybody's got a unique smell, darlin' - kinda like a fingerprint. Everybody smells basically the same, but everybody's scent is different. Follow me? And his scent was completely different than before."

"Could it have been due to what they did to control his power surges?"

He shook his head. "No way. But that's another thing - did you ever see any of these so called "power surges" of  his?"

"No, but they guy vaporizes things at will - I'd rather not have been around him if it happened."

"He doesn't seem any more powerful to me. He just seems like an even bigger, stiffer prick than before. In fact, a week ago, I caught him cussing in Russian. Since when the fuck does he know Russian?"

"He was just in Kiev, wasn't he?"

"For seventeen hours! And this wasn't a common curse - it was a pretty complicated one."

"And you know this because ... you speak Russian?"

"I speak almost everything." He said it matter of factly; he could. It wasn't a point of pride with him, it was just another puzzling thing he could do without knowing how he could do it.

But obviously she didn't know that. Sure, she'd been around when he started speaking French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian, but maybe she thought he just memorized key phrases. "Really? Even Urdu?"

He replied in the affirmative. She just stared at him, so he clarified, "That was you bet your ass in Urdu."

"Was it really?" She paused. "You're not kidding, are you?"

"No."

"Shit. Is that some kind of secondary mutation?"

"I have no fucking clue. I just can."

She considered that a moment, picking at a loose thread on the knee of the jeans she had changed into. While her jeans looked old, the white t-shirt was so form fitting and threadbare it looked ancient. "Did you ask him about the Russian?"

"I did, and he bullshitted me, sayin' he picked it up on the trip."

"He could have."

"Not likely, sister. Trust me on that."

Static shifted on the edge of the bed, as if just this train of thought was uncomfortable. "So what do you think's going on? He can't have been replaced by a shapeshifter - the telepaths would've picked up on it."

"Unless one of 'em's in on it."

"In on what?"

He threw up his hands helplessly. "Well fuck me if I know! I just know he ain't right."

She thought about that for a minute, continuing to make the frayed hole in her jeans worse. It must have been a nervous habit. "Do you think we've been infiltrated by a hostile?"

"I don't know. Maybe Reaper just volunteered for an experiment. But then why would they be so hush hush about it?" He didn't want to shrug again, but he couldn't help it. There was nothing else he could do. "I mentioned it to Control, but he dismissed me as if it was nothing. In fact, he actually ordered me to drop it. As if that would work."

"So it's probably something Control is in on."

He took a puff on his cigar and just shrugged a shoulder. "Seems that way. But I don't trust him either."

She smiled knowingly. "Do you trust anyone?"

That was hardly a poser. "No."

That made her chuckle. "Not even me?" She gave him a mock wounded look, pushing her ruby lips out in an exaggerated pout.

He raised an eyebrow at her, and when she laughed, he smiled in spite of himself. "Maybe you. But you're it." And to his surprise, he meant that. She was not, nor had she ever been, a bad kid; she didn't seem to have the agendas so many others had. Which, in itself, was instantly suspicious. Everyone had an agenda - the thing was to find someone whose agenda worked with your own.

"Thank you, I feel privileged." She then picked up a small paper flyer off the nightstand and waved it like a flag of surrender. "Since you speak the language so well, why don't you order us up some Chinese food. Room service is closed."

No wonder he liked her - her gall was incredible. She reminded him of himself sometimes. "And I should do this why?"

"Because I'm starving, and if you don't, I'm going to whine and nag."

He glared at her, but she simply glared back, and he relented with a sigh, rolling his eyes. He was hungry anyways.

The man who answered the phone had a Cantonese accent, so he started speaking in Cantonese, aware that sometimes speaking their native language made people more instantly deferential to you. It worked; the man sounded thrilled to be talking to someone who knew the language, and Wolverine imagined it must have been a bit of a novelty in this part of Europe.

Maybe that's why the food seemed to come pretty fast, and seemed particularly authentic and good; or at least better than he initially anticipated. Static had a bar in her room, which seemed unfair since his room didn't have one, but she figured that was because she'd need it more, being his partner ( ha ).

Although he turned on the t.v. set for background noise ( who didn't want to see a twenty year old crappy American comedy badly dubbed? ), Static sat in his room with him and they had dinner, him still sitting in the chair, her still sitting on his bed like it was hers,legs curled beneath her, but since she was supplying the booze he didn't care.

She was telling him about something - a mission she was on that went all bugfuck ( but she was with Shrike - how could it not go wrong? ) - but he wasn't really paying attention; he let her voice wash over her like the hum from the air conditioner in her room. But he caught things now and then, and one thing almost slipped passed him. "Who's Sloane?"

She gave him a funny look, pausing with her chopsticks half way to her lips. "Me. That's my name - Sloane."

"Oh." How many missions had they been on together? Maybe a dozen, more? And he knew her only as Static, her ability and her code name.

She put her chopsticks back in her box of food, and studied him like she'd just realized he wasn't like other men. "You never knew?"

"Has it ever come up?"

She shrugged."I guess not. What's your name?"

He opened his mouth to speak, and then clamped it shut, wondering what he thought he was going to say, because honestly he didn't know. That was a question he couldn't answer in any language. He glanced down at his fried rice, pretending to search for something in it with his chopsticks. "I don't know."

He could feel her eyes on him, but he didn't dare look up. If he saw pity on her face he wouldn't be able to bear it - she thought he was Human; he didn't want her to start seeing him as a ... a ...

( - victim - )

... bigger freak than he was. When he finally did look up, a mask of anger slammed protectively into place, but she was back searching through her own box of food. "We'll have to figure that out someday, huh?" She offered, and he didn't catch a trace of pity in her voice. When she did look up, chewing on a chunk of sweet and sour chicken, he didn't see any pity in her blank eyes, or anywhere else on her preternaturally youthful face. He wasn't sure if he could trust it, but he decided he might as well let it go for now. There was no point in searching for trouble when you knew you weren't going to like what you found.

She went on chattering like nothing had happened, and he was grateful for that, although he rather wished he could feel alcohol for once in his life. He appreciated the irony - a man who didn't remember much wanting to forget everything. He actually wished she'd go away and leave him in peace, but then he wondered for what? So he could brood more? Think about everything he couldn't remember, and ponder why those things that he could were so bloody unsatisfying? He had ample time alone, and it never did him any good.

He ate mechanically, no longer tasting anything, and gulped it down with alcohol that could only give him a brief warmth that never lasted long enough. Static did go to her own room eventually ( he just couldn't think of her as Sloane right now ), leaving him in peace, but again it felt hollow. He turned off the t.v. - he was tired of idiot noise - and the light, preferring the solitude of darkness.

His mind fell back to Reaper, and what the hell was going on with him. His base scent was the same, so that was probably his body, but what could have happened to him? Mind control usually didn't change scent ... usually. Maybe this was a new breed of animal.

Even though she had closed the shared door between their rooms, he knew by sound exactly where she was and what she was doing. She turned off the air conditioner; she ran a bath; she helped herself to another drink from the bar; she went and had her bath. The man in the room beneath his was currently vomiting, and Wolverine guessed he'd just came back from the bar, and had pushed his limit way too far. He decided to try and block out all the noises, as he could do without the barfing.

Was Control using a new breed of telepath to manipulate Reaper? Why? Reaper was an annoying toady - he obeyed him without question. Control didn't need a proxy to pull his strings. So what exactly was going on?
And what a weird coincidence he cursed in Russian - could that mean something? This did occur after he returned from Siberia ... but all he brought back was data.

What about the soldiers who extracted him? Did they have a counter mission he knew nothing about? There seemed to be a rather large team sent to get him, and the base itself seemed remarkably meaningless compared to the size of the army guarding it. That was always suspicious.

The inner door opened once more, and Static stood there, silhouetted from the light in her room. Her partially dried hair was piled on her head in a loose knot, and she wore a long, sheer crimson bathrobe that clung to her curvaceous figure like it was painted on. She put a hand on her hip and sighed. "Back in the dark again?"

"I belong here." In fact, in some way, he was always here - he never left the darkness.

"Has anyone ever told you you're very existential?"

"Is that a compliment?"

"Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. You going to bed?"

He scowled at her, even though she probably couldn't see it. "What's it to you?"

"I just thought you might be interested," she replied casually, untying the sash of her robe and letting it fall to the floor. He caught a flash of her naked back as she walked away, leaving it behind like an old skin.

He levered himself out of the chair, leaving his cigar butt smoldering in the ashtray, and walked slowly across the room to the doorway, carefully stepping over the puddle of red silk she had left on the floor. She was stretched out naked on her bed, her skin still rosy from the warm bath water, and she was in a sort of calculated pose, one arm behind her head, the other arm stretched out beside her, her hair now loose and spilling over her pillow like a fan of red velvet. She had longer legs than he ever realized, and while her breasts were small, they were firm and nearly the same milky pale color as her eyes. He saw the red, green, and black mark on her left hip, which was canted up slightly to show her legs to better effect. "I didn't know you had a tattoo," he remarked. Wow, what a stupid thing to say. But he was pretty sure he had little blood getting to his brain at the moment.

"Oh yeah. I went back to Dublin during my senior year in college, and got completely wasted. I guess I decided I needed a tattoo to show my Irish solidarity - or whatever the fuck, I don't know, I just know I can't drink three stouts in the space of an hour - and I decided on this, for some reason. I bet I just thought the snake looked cool."

"Is an ouroboros Irish?"

She shrugged casually, as if they weren't having this conversation while she was laid out naked on her bed, waiting for him. "I got no fucking clue. I'm just glad I didn't get the clover - how tacky is that?"

He shrugged. He had always thought she had an occasional upward lilt to her vowels, like she'd done a lot of time in Ireland, but he had no idea she was from there, as she had lost all but the dregs of her accent. There was a lot he didn't know about her, and a lot he didn't know about himself. Maybe that made it even.

He peeled off his shirt as he crossed the room towards her. He always knew she was good looking, but he had never realized she was beautiful. "Why me?" He asked, and he didn't know why. What did he mean by that? Was he even asking her and not just thinking aloud? Frankly, he was surprised he was still capable of speech.

She smiled seductively at him, and said, "I like you."

It could have been a joke - it was pretty obvious she liked him - but he knew it wasn't; she was serious. He tossed the shirt on the floor - like he cared where it landed - and kicked off the dead man's boots, which had been an imperfect fit anyways. She deserved better than him - a mindless assassin, an idiot who was never quite sure what was going on around him; an animal who was only good for killing.

But if she didn't know that, he wasn't about to tell her now.

***

Not plain old, wimpy hypodermics, but injectors with silver needles at least five inches long, and cylinders as thick as soup cans and only slightly longer. The people wielding them were faceless behind sterile suits and full face hoods with protective plastic inserts that weren't quite see through. He knew those he could see were men only because of the width of their shoulders and chests, and the size of their hands inside their protective gloves.

( "The visors are in case blood splatters," some part of him - some cold, unforgivably insane part of him - noted. "They don't want to get it in their eyes. Your filthy mutant blood ... ")

He watched one of those needles - elongating as if this was a nightmare; a needle turning into a slender spear - descend towards his face with a slowness that was maddening. It gave him enough time to wonder why he couldn't move, why the glass coffin he was in seemed to be filling with a water he could see but not precisely feel, even as his back burned like someone had kindled a fire in the middle of his spine. There was another, slightly less fiery sensation at the base of his throat.

That cold voice again, that insane part of him that had just let go of the outside world and now only observed things as a passive, uninvolved observer, spoke up again. ("They severed your spinal column, so you'd be paralyzed and unable to move. You can breath, but they cut your vocal chords so you can't scream. Drugs are wasted on you; they never last long enough. And you always come back, no matter what they do to you, or how often.")

The burning was the healing process; yes, he could feel the splashes of the tepid water as it started to fill in the spaces around him. His nerves were well on the way to recovery, but the damage to the vertebrae itself would take longer. Long enough to keep him from feeling all of this?

He was finding it hard to breathe as he felt the needle penetrate the skin beneath and just to the right of his eye; he felt a similar needle jab through his skin in the matching spot on the other side of his face. He felt the metal scrape the bone of his cheek, and then the needles began too pump something underneath his skin. It felt like molten lava, like live wasps stinging the inside of his flesh in a desperate bid to escape, and suddenly he could smell burning flesh; his flesh. He was being burned alive from the inside out, his skin being parboiled as a prelude to being flayed off his bones.

The fire was spreading; it was spreading from his face to his scalp, and down into his throat, and he couldn't breath. He couldn't breathe, and the water was now in his eyes, and the burn in his back and his throat had given way to this true fire; this liquid fire he could feel moving beneath his skin like snakes, insects ...

Wolverine woke up with a noise that was somewhere between a swallowed scream and desperate gasp, sitting up, hands reaching out blindly to grab the penetrating needles and stab them in the eyes of the men trying to burn him alive.

But the men weren't there - he was not in a place that smelled of death and metal, but a dark, cool room that smelled of sex and sweat. It still took him a moment to remember where he was.

He felt a cool hand on his bicep. "Hey," a sleepy but startled female voice asked. "What - "

It was instinct to yank his arm away violently; he didn't want to be touched. It didn't matter if it was a caress or a punch - in the end, they were all the same. "Don't touch me," he snapped, sounding angry, but really it was a helpful warning. He just couldn't deal with it right now, and he couldn't be held responsible for what he did if she kept it up. Especially instinct kept screaming at him to kill them all before they could hurt him again.

He continued to suck in air desperately, like a swimmer who had finally punched a hole through the ice forming over his head at the last possible second, and that quiet, distant voice in the back of his own mind told him he'd hyperventilate if he didn't stop. He was almost curious to see if he could hyperventilate.

"Fine, be that way," Static said, her voice limned with frost, as she turned over and laid down, her back to him. Her hip made a smooth curve in the sheets, and he knew, if he could bear it, he would touch it, run his hand down to her lean, muscular thigh. But right now, the idea was hideous.

He rested his face on his upraised knees, and covered his head like he was tensed for a blow. He tried to control his own breathing even as the nightmare ( memory ) fled, leaving nothing behind but a feeling of violation and dread. In two minutes, he couldn't even remember what had bothered him so much to wake him up, but the metallic taste of fear lingered in the back of his throat.

He laid down, turning his back to her, staring at the hotel room door in the darkness, wondering what he had ever done to end up like this. She shifted, and then he felt her hand on his back, in between his shoulder blades, but although he jolted slightly, he did not shrug her off. "I'm sorry," she said softly.

He never wanted to know why she said that.