6

Kitty found herself in her room at the mansion, not one hundred percent sure where she was supposed to be. But it wasn't here, that was for sure.

 
She turned off her stereo, which was mostly just broadcasting static anyways, and tried to think. She was ... damn it, wasn't she off on assignment somewhere? She was pretty sure she was. She'd gone out on a mission with ... Logan. Yes! And they went to ...

 
"Is there a problem, Kitty?" Jean asked.

 
Kitty turned to see Doctor Grey standing in the doorway, and her stomach did a bit of a flop. Wasn't she dead? "Umm, huh?"

 
"You're late for class."

 
"I am?" She glanced at the digital clock on her dresser, and saw it was almost one. Making her late for science lab. "Oh crap! I forgot the time."

 
"I can tell." She gave her a faint, indulgent smile, like she expected this kind of behavior and never found it any less amusing. "Why don't you -" She stopped and looked away as a noise echoed through the mansion. It was a strange noise, kind of metallic, and Kitty had time to ask, "What was that?" before it reached a crescendo.

 
It sounded like something collapsed. A crane or something. "What -" But Jean was no longer in the doorway.

 
Kitty went to the doorway and looked down the hall, only to see the weirdest thing. The polished wood corridors of the mansion seemed to flicker, like a dying lightbulb, and when the shadows swelled, she could see silver metal walls. What was this?

 
What the hell was going on?

 
****

 
Logan heard the noise, the structural failure of metal, and felt it reverberating through the walls. What was Jean doing? He was half curious, and the other half of him just didn't care. She was toying with him probably.

 
Even the resultant thud as whatever gave way hit the ground didn't move him from his corner. He thought he could cut through the metal, maybe, if he was really motivated, but he'd just be playing into her plans, and he was in no mood to play. He was very much of the school of wanting to get things over with. Drawing things out unnecessarily never appealed to him.

 
But the flickering lights and the silence was kind of eerie. He had to give her an A plus for atmosphere.

 
He was simply sitting there, curled up in his corner waiting for her to begin the next phase, when he notice the wall parallel to him was melting. No, not melting; it became water and splashed to the floor. Nariko came through, dressed in her winter gear save for her gloves, which were off and tucked into her coat pocket. "Logan, thank god, we have to find the others," she said. In Japanese, as she seemed to find it easier, when they were alone, to speak her native tongue. And he never cared; half the time he wasn't sure what language he was speaking anyways.

 
Another trick of Jean's. A good one too. "She wouldn't let you go. She'd trap you in a mindscape. Stop it, Jean."

 
Confusion creased her face. "Jean? Look, Logan, it's me. I was in a ... mindscape? I thought I was back at my dad's sushi shack, but my head hurt in a weird way. Then I remembered my head always hurt like that when a telepath read me. I have some sort of built in mental shielding, remember? Xavier couldn't find me after I first used my powers. Remember? You and Scott had to come looking for me."

 
That was true; he'd forgotten about that. But that was just the kind of detail that made a lie plausible. "I remember. But I also know you can't control it."

 
"No, I can't. But if my head hurts enough it sort of triggers a ... lockdown, for lack of a better term. I concentrated long enough, and then it kicked in and I found myself here. Did you hear that noise? I don't know what that was. I swear I didn't do it."

 
He dry washed his face. "Stop it, Jean."

 
"I'm not Jean! Jean's dead. I don't know what's going on here, but I know the others must be around here somewhere. I've gone through about a dozen walls and you're the first person I've found. It's like some weird cubbyhole for humans or something."

 
What was this supposed to accomplish exactly? Was she supposed to get his hopes up and then dash them again? That was the definition of a mind game, so probably. "What do you want from me?"

 
"I want to get out of here!" She replied incredulously. "Don't you?"

 
 “You know I do. That’s why you’re tormenting me with it.”

 
“What? No! Look, I know there’s been some mindfucking going on, but I am real. This is real.” What could she do to convince him? She wracked her brain, trying to figure out what she could do to make him realize this wasn’t this fake stuff, this was real.

 
She was considering hitting him when something hit her.

****

 
Nariko went flying into the far wall, so quickly that she didn’t even have time to put her hands up and protect herself. She smashed into it face first, and didn’t rebound, just sank down to her knees. “You should not have fought me, little girl!” Jean roared, not so much walking in as gliding in.

 
“Leave her alone,” Logan muttered, almost too tired to speak. He wasn’t sure why he was so tired. It felt like he was being drained.

 
Jean ignored him. She had her back to him, so he couldn’t see what she was doing to Nariko, but her crazy villain rant continued. “I will not have you or your kind disobeying me! I will not have you destroy my home!”

 
Nariko made a sort of choking noise. “Stop Jean. Stop it now.” She wasn’t going to listen, was she? Oh god, she wasn’t going to listen. She’d written him off completely.

 
“You think you can fight me, Kyoko, but you can’t. Just because you can block me -”

 
Logan closed his eyes, and it felt like he’d left his own body, just stepped aside. The only way he could do this, the only way he could survive it, was to let the beast out. So he did.

 
Logan thought he heard a scream. No, a guttural roar, something from an angry and sick beast. Time took the funniest of hops. He was in the corner for one second, and then he was standing right behind Jean as her body fell to the floor. He’d already cut off her head and sent it flying; it hit the floor first, over near the hole Nariko had made in the wall. “I told you to leave the kids alone!” he screamed, half enraged, half sickened by what she had just forced him to do. He’d killed her again. How many times was he supposed to kill her and rip his own fucking heart out of his chest?

 
He was panting like he’d run a marathon, and he felt like he might vomit. His claws were still out and Nariko, who had a hand cupped over her bloody nose, was staring at him in wide eyed terror. He could smell her fear, and the beast in him felt it was encouragement. But he was aware enough of himself to be appalled by the thought. He sank to his knees, gutted by the thought of what he’d just done. He didn’t know if he wanted to cry or scream. Or both.

 
“I-It wasn’t her,” Nariko said quietly, stuttering slightly. Her voice was still shot through with tremors of fear. “It wasn’t Jean, Logan, it wasn’t her.”

 
He closed his eyes tight against the tears, refusing to cry in front of her.

 
“Logan, listen to me. She called me Kyoko. Nobody ever called me that except my dad at the sushi shack. She slipped up, she called me what was in my hallucination. Jean never called me Kyoko. Are you listening to me, Logan?  Please be Logan. You are Logan, right? And not … well, I don’t know. Now I’m rambling because I’m scared. Please say something to shut me up.”
 

Holy shit - she was right. Jean said Kyoko. He was out of himself, but yeah, in retrospect she called her Kyoko. Jean wouldn’t do that. She might call her Alchemy, reverting to her code name, but why would she call her by her middle name? That didn’t make sense. He felt the psychotic break just waiting to happen drain out of him like sand down a drain. It was a trick, a trap. Son of a bitch - he fell for it. Bastard. Bastard! Someone was going to pay for this. Sudden rage gave him his strength back.

 
“Are you all right?” he asked.

 
“What?”

 
Logan opened his eyes, which felt damp, but he’d managed to hold back most of the tears. He stood up, and Nariko continued to eye him warily. “Let me see that.”

 
He retracted his claws, which made her jump, and he grimaced in embarrassment. It felt shockingly fast to him; he couldn’t imagine how it would have looked to her. One second she was telekinetically pinned to a wall by an angry, ranting Jean, and the next Jean’s head was flying across the room and she was staring at a neck stump spewing blood. He was probably lucky she’d seen him bust out the ultra violence before, or she would have fainted or puked all over the place.  He gently grabbed her chin, and she reluctantly let him remove her hand from her nose. It was bleeding profusely, but from what he could tell, the cartilage hadn’t fractured.  “Lucky you have a small nose.  Keep your head tilted back. It’s not broken, but it’s gonna fuckin’ hurt.”

 
“It already kinda does.”  She only kept her head tilted slightly back, and put the back of her hand against her nose again.  “That sound was real.”

 
It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. “That metal noise?”

 
“Yeah. I didn’t do it either. I kinda … snapped out of it, I guess, and a couple seconds later, before I’d even made a hole in the wall, I heard it. It was like a big thud. Maybe a wall collapsing, I’m not sure. For a minute I was sure something big and ugly was after me, but the sound didn’t continue.”

 
Logan considered that a moment. “Someone else broke out.”

 
“Someone who could take down a wall?” She thought about that a moment. Her fear was gone. “Colossus?”

 
“Or Zehra.”

 
“Did you think Jean - the Jean thing, whoever she was - got them? Is that why we don’t hear it anymore?”

 
Logan could only shake his head. “No idea. I guess we’ll have to find out. We split up. You go -”

 
“Split up?” she interrupted. “I really don’t want to split up right now.”

 
He sighed heavily, and rubbed his eyes. They’d search the base faster if they were separated, but he could understand why she might be a little freaked out. They still had no fucking clue what was going on, or who was running the place, or what was the point. And what about those missing people? They had less than nothing. “Fine, we go together. C’mon.”  He stepped back, and was going to help her over the Jean/Not Jean’s corpse, but it wasn’t there.

 
The body was gone, and so was the head. There was no blood either, just Nariko’s. Nariko looked around, so frantically that some blood flecks flew from her nose. “What? How could …” She grabbed her nose again, bit her lip. “Fuck. This isn’t a mindscape, I know it isn’t! My head would hurt if some telepath was trying to root around again.”

 
Did he still smell a trace of blood in the air? A trace of blood that wasn’t Nariko’s? He was pretty sure he did. But just a trace, a pinprick. Wow, how many ways was this all wrong? “Either this is a mindscape or it isn’t. But right now I’m tired of sitting on my ass, so let’s find the others and worry about what the fuck’s going on later, okay?” He held her gaze until she found her courage again and nodded.

 
Logan walked over to an intact wall, popped his claws, and drove them into the wall. It hurt; the tremor of impact ran up his arm, a shiver of pain. His claws went through, but there was resistance. “This is coated with adamantium, or something close to it,” he said, dragging his claws down. He cut a sort of X in the wall and kicked out the slices. “Maybe you oughta do the walls from now on.”

 
“Adamantium? Do you think this is … y’know. Organization?”

 
“No, no way. They’re more organized than this - no pun intended - and there’d be a bunch of guys with a fuckload of guns in our face. This is something else.”

 
“What?”

 
He hated to, but he was forced to shrug. It wasn’t likely the Russian version of the Organization, as they too had a love of guys in suits with many big guns. But who else could have done  this? And more importantly, why?

 
He had no answers for her, at  least not yet. But the next room was much like his, a little featureless metal box, and he wondered if this was what she meant by a Human cubbyhole. It did seem odd, room after room, all small and bare. Where were the hallways? The connecting corridors? And for fuck’s sake, the doors? Didn’t most buildings have actual doors?

 
How did they get put in here? There were no doors to carry them through. A teleporter? That would also explain how the Jean thing disappeared … but it wouldn’t explain the disappearance of the blood. So they were facing a telepath, a teleporter, and a … what? He knew there was a gap, he sensed there was a missing piece, but right now he didn’t know what it was.

 
He hoped he didn’t have to figure it out the hard way, when they were right in his face. But, on the plus side, being right in his face put them in stabbing range.

 
Come to think of it, he could live with that.