Archive of Our Own ^beta

PROLOGUE

4 a.m.

Scott Summers woke and he was alone in the dark without Jean, and the grief was shard-sharp, a knife to the heart, and the children were silent; he couldn't hear them. He sat up, alone, in the bed and listened; heart hammering, aching for Jean and flinching from the silence that her breathing had once filled. Nothing smelled of her shampoo or her soap or her perfume; the sheets were stale, but she had laid on them once and if he gave them up, she was gone forever.

She was gone forever whatever he did.

Control was an illusion. It always had been. The thing he clung to like the cords of a broken parachute, had no safety to offer him. He could train every day and the children could still be taken while he slept. He could love Jean with every fiber of his being and all it meant was that she would die for him and he would be alone forever.

He crept into the corridor and went from door to darkened door, pressing his ear to the paneling until he heard someone breathe, someone stir, someone offer an incoherent murmur from the depths of dreams. The world was less empty out here. It was warmed by the sighs of sleeping children. There were dropped socks on the carpet, and a toy car that Scott put on a hall table so no one would trip on it but whose gaily plastic red wheels cheered him all the same. He moved through the building, checked the entrances, and the alarms, and the secondary protocols, and everything was working; no one had got in. The children were safe.

If the panic had ebbed, the grief was still gnawing at him; an aching emptiness that he carried with him everywhere. The last time he had been this lonely, he had not yet met a girl called Jean Grey. She had come into his life and the loneliness had stepped out, even though loneliness had been all he had known for years and years, until she came. It had been like living with an enemy who could never be vanquished, however hard one fought back, and then having an ally arrive, out of nowhere, unlooked for, miraculous, who slew the dragon for you with barely a flex of her fiery sword.

No one was going to save him this time and, sorrow-sapped as he was, he hadn't the strength left to be his own hero. So, the loneliness was back again. It lay down with him at night, and got up with him in the morning, and followed him everywhere. He was so weary of his own wretched company. So sickened by all the dreary hours when he was alone with himself. Without the solace of the Danger Room, he thought he would go mad, but training helped, having to strategize helped. Pain helped.

As he passed Logan's room, he stumbled with weariness, and felt a strange thread of longing – as if some hopeful tendril within himself that didn't know he was vanquished was still seeking warmth. He rested his head against the door panel just for a minute, and it was as if, beyond the empty silence of the corridor, there was a cluttered, chaotic warmth that smelled of beer and cigar smoke, that might yet welcome him in.

He sighed and headed back for his room, startled when the door opened behind him and Logan said quietly, "Scott? Is something wrong?"

It hurt inside when Logan called him 'Scott'. There was always an edge to the guy's voice then, like it mattered too much; like he knew how damaged Scott was and wished that he could help him. No one could help him.

Scott looked over his shoulder. Logan was dressed like he was, in sweat pants and nothing else. His eyes were anxious.

Scott said, "I thought I heard something – must have been dreaming. Everything's fine. I checked. Sorry I woke you."

Logan said, "The kids…?"

And there was the same catch in his voice that sounded in Scott's head when he thought about them being taken.

"They're fine. They're asleep. Everyone's asleep."

"Except you."

Scott blinked and Logan was right in front of him, looking into his visor like he'd be able to see Scott's eyes if he just tried hard enough.

Logan said, "You okay? You look beat."

Scott knew he meant 'beat' as in 'tired', not 'beaten', 'defeated', 'utterly undone', but all applied equally well. He said, "I'm just not sleeping that well."

Logan said, "It's hard to sleep alone when you're not used to it."

His voice was too kind and Scott felt the tears come into his stupid red-flaring mutant eyes. Someone said brokenly, "It's so quiet without her…."

Someone else said, "I know, Scott. I know."

There may have been arms around him. There may have been a rough pressure across his back and a gentle stroking of fingers in his hair. He may have laid his head on Logan's massive shoulder, just for a moment, because he was too tired for it to matter, and, anyway, he was probably asleep and this all happening in someone else's head.

Someone said, "You don't have to be alone…."

Scott heard himself say, "I am alone. I've never been so alone. I can't breathe for how alone I am. There used to be her voice in my head and now there's just silence, that's all there is, forever. I used to ask her if the children were safe and she'd tell me that they were, but now I ask her and she doesn't answer, and I don't know. I don't know if they're safe. I'm never going to feel that they're safe."

Logan said, "They're safe, and you need to sleep. You need to sleep and you need not to think. Just switch everything off, Scott. I'll keep the children safe."

Scott was back in his own bed – if he really had left it and not just dreamed everything – and instead of the silence he clung to those words, the way they'd sounded when Logan said them, because they had carried so much conviction then, like it wasn't too late for the world to find a place, still, for mutantkind. Like they wouldn't always be hated.

"I'll keep the children safe."

It wasn't Jean, and the room was dark and silent and there was no warmth here, and no scent of her left, but the words were comforting, and he slept.

***

ONE

Scott had no idea why Kitty was looking at him like that.

Since Jean's death he had been throwing himself into his work. He had gone back through all their old mission reports – well, all his mission reports, as no one else had ever really seen the point in writing them. Even Jean, who had usually shared his keenness to accumulate straight 'A's had always given way to pressure from Warren to go to a party, instead, on the flimsy grounds that they were only young once and needed to de-stress after nearly dying in the Danger Room all day. Hank, of course, had completely understood the need to write reports but he was only interested in the science either utilized or encountered, not strategies, or writing out scenarios of what could have happened if they had tried a different approach and the likelihood of it being more or less successful than the one they had used. These were all interesting things that no one else had ever wanted to talk to him about except the Professor, and even he had occasionally said disquieting things like: 'Scott, perhaps it's possible to think about the missions a little too much…' or, extraordinarily, 'Perhaps you should just take the night off?'

"It's not that we blame you," Kitty said kindly.

So, he had re-read every mission report and his alternative possible scenarios and realized that what he had access to here was a rich treasure trove of possibly life-saving data. So, instead of relying on the Danger Room's programmed scenarios, he had been taking the best and the brightest students through the alternate options in dealing with the first X-Men's real-life missions. He had already discovered that on three separate occasions, the first alternate scenario would, in fact, have achieved the same result more quickly. (Admittedly, four of the alternate scenarios had brought about what would have been catastrophic loss of limbs and life if it were not for the Danger Room protocols, but at least now they knew.)

As a special treat – because he would have loved this opportunity when he was their age – he had been giving his hand-picked team (Rogue, Bobby, Kitty, and Jubilee) the chance to attend extra lessons: not just the regular pre-breakfast individual training, but a group session in the Danger Room as well, and then an extra lesson a day in the subject of their choice. He had even picked fun things for them to choose from: thermodynamics, advanced geometry, quantum mechanics, and the like, for their extra subjects. And then, so they could be even better prepared, there had been the chance for an extra evening session in the Danger Room as well, or, if they preferred, in the simulator so they could learn to pilot the jet through burning debris, hurricanes, tornadoes and similar horrifying natural or deliberately fabricated disasters. And yet, they had seemed to get less and less enthusiastic as the weeks wore on and were now all looking at him like they didn't want to tell him they'd accidentally run over his puppy.

"Blame me for what?" he said, bemused.

"For being you," Kitty said. "I mean – we know you had a bad childhood and that's why you never learned how to be normal."

Rogue elbowed her. "You said you were going to be tactful."

"Yeah!" Jubilee said. "'Let me talk to him', you said. 'I'll be tactful'."

"'Normal'?" Scott echoed.

"I'm being tactful," Kitty insisted. "It's not like I told him straight out how weird he is."

"I'm weird?" Scott said. That seemed unlikely. He was the most normal person he knew.

"Don't tell him he's weird, Kitty," Jubilee protested. "There's no reason why he needs to find out about that."

"Look, stop interrupting!" Kitty protested. She turned back to Scott with an encouraging expression on her face. It made him feel like a baby attempting to take his first steps. "The thing is, you were kind of grown in a vat. I mean, not literally, obviously, although we kind of think Logan was, but, although we asked him to, Doctor McCoy wouldn't run the tests to find out, but you have to admit, it would explain a lot. But, you see, you never got to do stuff like normal kids. You were just too little when that crazy guy put you in his crazy house."

"It was an orphanage not an insane asylum," Scott said, feeling that, if there was a way to regain control of this conversation the scenario was not yet presenting itself to him.

Jubilee took up the baton on Kitty's behalf: "Yes, but it might as well have been a funfair haunted house because, let's face it, the guy running the place was a complete nutbag and he's still all about the experiments where you're concerned, and then there was all the bad stuff that happened to you and then you came here. Which was great! Except, you know, you didn't really do kid stuff here either, and for that first year, you were the only one the Professor had so, obviously, he made all his child-rearing mistakes with you." She said it in such a bright and encouraging manner that Scott found himself nodding, like he knew where she was going with this.

He said, "Okay…."

"So by the time the others got here and you got to meet some normal teenagers, it was kind of too late for you." She gave him a sympathetic little nod. "The damage was already done, and you were…this. So, that's why we don't blame you. At all."

Kitty also nodded earnestly. "Not even a little bit."

"But for what?" he pressed, feeling as if he was hanging on by his fingertips.

Jubilee said, "The thing is, that we get that you aren't punishing us, Mister Summers. We get that the weird kid you were would have really liked doing all this stuff."

Bobby said, "Totally," more as if he felt he should say something than because he had any hope at all of being understood.

Scott said, "I was not weird! I was a perfectly normal teenager!"

"That's the thing – " Kitty put her hand gently on his arm and patted it. "You really weren't, but, you see, we are. So, we don't want to have extra sessions in the Danger Room. We want to watch TV. And we don't want to learn about how Bobby's ice works in relation to the second law of thermodynamics when we could be chilling by the pool."

He was hurt, yes, but mostly confused. "Well, why didn't you say something?"

With a catch in her voice, Rogue said, "You looked so happy."

Jubilee said, "We didn't want to disappoint you."

Bobby said, "It's not like we couldn't see the stuff you were teaching us was useful, it's just that we do all a normal kid's schoolwork, plus trying to learn about our individual powers, plus trying to utilize those powers in a team dynamic. We just need some time to ourselves to –"

"De-stress," Scott sighed. Apparently, then, Warren had not been the odd one, like he and Hank had thought. Great guy, good friend, brave, loyal, bitchy, annoyingly handsome, but kind of eccentric; that was what he and Hank had thought; what with all that…wanting to go to parties when there was homework they could be attending to. Jean – and, later, Storm – had tried to tell them that Warren wasn't really…strange, but Scott had always thought he was kind of…easily distracted. Apparently, though, wanting to take a break from something after doing it for the previous howevermany hours was the normal thing to do. He and Hank were, in fact, contrary to all the Professor's soothing utterances to the contrary, total weirdos, not because they were mutants, but because they were just inherently…odd.

He said: "You need to take some time to do something fun because you're people, not machines, and because you have wants and needs that aren't actually fulfilled by shooting beams out of your eyes at pretend giant robots for six hours straight, Scott, you total freak."

"Did someone say that to you?" Rogue demanded angrily, firing up in his defense in a way that made Scott's heart hurt rather less.

"Yes, he did, about six year ago, and I probably should have listened then. I'm sorry I've been over-scheduling you guys. If it means anything, it's because I think you're good at what you do and I want you to keep safe while you're doing it, that's all. And you don't need to tell me why you didn't tell me this a month ago, because I know, and I appreciate it."

Bobby shook his hand, a little awkwardly, in a manly sort of way, and Scott found himself looking past their potential and their powers to think: Was I ever that young? They were all looking up at him with their unscarred, unlined faces, and he knew that by their age he had already been damaged, probably irreversibly. He didn't want any of the things that had happened to him to ever happen to them.

He said again, sadly, "I just want you to be safe."

Kitty said brightly, "We want that, too."

He and Rogue exchanged a look and he knew what she was seeing because he was seeing it, too. You had to have once been a mutant alone and vulnerable in the world, out of money and options, feeling your stomach shrink through lack of sustenance, flinching from the weather that you had no shelter from, wearing unwashed clothes too thin to shield you. You had to have stood outside the lit windows and looked in at the warm room that was denied to you, to look at Kitty the way he and Rogue were looking at her, and hope, against all reason, that she never found out what the opposite of 'safe' really felt like.

He held up a hand, half-farewell, half-defeat. "Go – do whatever it is that normal teenagers do."

As they headed off, Rogue hung back and Bobby would have waited with her but she sent him off with a wave. When they were alone, he saw her steel herself to ask the question: "You had a Logan, too, right? Someone found you in time?"

He thought of Jack Winters: Who found you when you were running from the cops? Who didn't send you back to the orphanage? Who got you the red specs so you wouldn't be such a public freak? That's right…me. And that's why I own you. He didn't flinch and he didn't shudder. That half-starved kid, sleeping on a leaking mattress in a squalid back room, scared of the next beating – that wasn't him any more, and it was never going to be any of these kids either. He said, "Professor Xavier found me, like he found all of you, and I bet he was way nicer to me than Logan was to you."

Rogue said, unhappily, "But Warren said…"

"You spoke to Warren? What did he say?"

Hopefully not a detailed account of Scott's time in the world before he had been saved by Charles Xavier.

He saw the moment when Rogue decided to protect him. It was strange, seeing it happen. He used so much headspace imagining ways to keep these kids alive, the fear of harm coming to them something that had to be overcome, every day, the choice made again to train them to put themselves in harm's way, because the alternative was: bad mutants ran amok, humans cranked up their fear and hatred, and then it was the horror Magneto had already lived through: registration, imprisonment, experimentation, death. He had never realized until this minute that the kids worried about harm coming to the grown ups, too. Weren't the adults supposed to seem invulnerable? Had Jean's death stolen that security blanket from these kids so very young?

Rogue said, with a breezy shrug, "He said you'd always had the social skills of a cantaloupe and we should make allowances."

"Hey, you have Wolverine for a teacher and I'm Mister No Social Skills?"

"Well, you know, the way Logan looks – people lower their expectations, but you look like you should be normal."

"Rogue, seriously, that's enough…affirmation for the day."

It was a shock when she hugged him, not just because he didn't really…do hugs, but because she didn't either. He patted her gingerly, hoping she would stop touching him quite soon, and she said encouragingly, "You could take us on a nice field trip and talk about…geological strata if you really wanted to. We wouldn't mind and it would probably do you good to get out for a while."

The realization that the kids thought he was in need of a field trip was a little galling. He would have minded a lot less if they'd been trying to scam him into doing something that they wanted, but this seemed to be more a sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of his mental health.

"I'll arrange it," he said. There was still the last faint hope that they might just have somewhere off school grounds they wanted to visit and he was their means of getting there. Contrary to popular opinion he did actually know something about teenagers. "Any suggestions?"

Nothing could have been kinder than Rogue's smile. "Just pick somewhere you want to go and we'll come with you."

She ran off with a farewell wave and he was left with a snort of amusement. Turning slowly, Scott tensed himself for the inevitable. It was every bit as bad as he feared. His shoulders slumped. "How much did you hear, Logan?"

"Enough."

Scott held up his hands. "Take your best shot."

"I ain't saying it wasn't funny, but, hell, I don't get not wanting an extra session in the Danger Room compared with going to some goddamn party either. All that happens at parties is people interfere with your drinking by trying to talk at you. And don't get me started on dancing – if there's a point to it, I ain't ever seen it. Would have thought you liked parties, though, back then – weren't the girls all over you?"

Scott laughed. "With Warren in the room? The wealthy, witty, confident, incredibly handsome guy who could dance like…well, an angel? Trust me, I might as well have been invisible. Besides, I only had eyes for Jean. At parties, there were just that many more guys all over her while I hung around in the corners, wishing we could all go home. Back here, at least there was only Warren between me and Jean. I still don't get why she didn't end up with him."

Logan said, "You know, Slim, like I told you before – she chose you. Maybe – just maybe – she did that for a good reason."

The guy had headed off down the corridor before Scott had processed what he said, re-examined it, re-sifted it, and realized that, no, there wasn't an insult in there. Logan had just said something nice to him. He crossed to a window and looked out but the skies were clear, not a cloud in sight. Logan had been kind to him and it wasn't even Armageddon.

Aloud, Scott said, "This is shaping up to be a very strange day."

***

It was three weeks since Scott had cried in class. That had to be a step forward. The last time it had happened, he'd been teaching English literature, and they'd been covering Cowper. It was where they'd got to in The Harvard Classics, the eighteen hundreds – so long ago that even Logan probably hadn't been alive then – and Hank had left Scott his lecture notes, written in Hank's indecipherable handwriting, that Scott could nevertheless comprehend at a glance simply through long association, although he still complained about its hieroglyphic nature on a regular basis, simply out of habit. ("You try going from humans hands to these, Scott, see how well your penmanship holds up….") Hank usually took poetry because he had more of a feel for it. Scott's understanding of verse was mechanical: iambic pentameter had that rhythm, alliteration served that purpose; these poets were romantic, these were metaphysical, these had died in the mud of Ypres or on some forgotten field in Flanders. Scott could teach enough to get students through exam questions but he couldn't inspire them to love the way the words wound together, the way that Hank could. So, he'd been reading the poem aloud, gazing out of the window at the tranquil grounds, a restless summer heat to the day, while storm flies hovered ominously. They were just words, and the lesson was dull, and the students were bored, and he would rather have been teaching something that might save their lives when Sentinels attacked, in any case, and the poem had completely outflanked him. It had been stiff and old-fashioned, formal repining over pastoral scenes that no longer had the power to soothe the poet's troubled mind, grief too rigidly constrained by rhyme to have meaning for him. Then, out of nowhere, it had risen up off the page and got under his guard and he was midway through it and never saw it coming:

For all that pleased in wood or lawn,
While Peace possessed these silent bowers,
Her animating smile withdrawn,
Has lost its beauties and its powers.

And there was Jean's face in front of him, out of nowhere; they were teenagers, and he was gawky and shy, and she was calm and wise, and they were picnicking on a blanket, Warren luxuriating in his outspread wings, and Hank dangling by his feet from a convenient branch, and Jean practicing pouring tea from a teapot with her telekinesis, and Scott probably spilling things and waving ineffectually at wasps and disapproving of the peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, but, all the time, watching her with longing, and pride, because every day she had more control. And it was like being the schoolmate of Alexander III of Macedon, and knowing that greatness lay ahead of this person, and, if one were very lucky, one might even get to witness it. And she had done it perfectly, not a drop spilled, for the first time, every cup filled, and he had waited for her to turn to Warren or look up at Hank, to share the moment of triumph with her, and she had turned straight to Scott instead, that smile on her face, in her eyes, lit up, even through a ruby quartz visor, alive and alight and looking right at him, because Scott was the one she wanted to share that moment with, and his heart had caught in his chest, and he had been completely happy.

And she was gone. All she was now was memories, and they would fade, and grow faint; and she had never got to achieve the greatness he had waited all these years to witness. And she was never, ever coming back to him.

He had stopped dead in the middle of the poem, unable to get the words out, not understanding why his face was wet and itchy until he saw the children's aghast faces and realized that Kitty and Jubilee were crying because he was, and they couldn't bear to see him like this, and Rogue was angrily wiping her eyes, and he needed to get the hell away from them before he scarred them all mentally with his inescapable grief. Bobby stood up quickly and said, "We've got it from here, Mister Summers. We know the assignment."

He had walked out of the classroom and – behind him – he had heard Bobby reading the next verse out, voice strong enough to cover Scott's ignominious retreat. And no one had yelled at him later for abandoning his post or leaving the children in the lurch, and he had wondered why Logan was being so uncharacteristically not a hardass with him, until he realized that the kids had covered for him. That had made him feel so bad that he had given himself a more brutal lecture than Logan would have done, and gone straight to the Professor to tell him how completely he'd screwed up and to promise that it wouldn't happen again.

He had waited for the Professor to say, "Mind it doesn't…" like he should, which might have made it okay again, but the man had simply looked distressed and said, "It will get better, Scott, I promise you. It won't feel this bad forever." That meant it was real and this was his timeline, not a mistake, not a bad dream, and Jean was dead in it.

Scott had gone back to his room – what had once been their room – and put his head in his hands and rocked because this moment, when it felt like this, was its own eternity, and simply unendurable. His weeping was silent, and, he had presumed, scentless, so it was such a strange, unlikely event, when Logan wordlessly walked in, sat down beside him on the bed, and pulled Scott's head in against his shoulder, that he had felt no embarrassment either then, or later, when he clung to him and wept, because it was all too unreal. Logan had said nothing, he'd just held him, his chin a bristly pressure on Scott's back, his fingers a rough sweep that he could feel through his t-shirt, but which he could just as well have imagined. Logan's fingers moved up and down his back, bumping lightly over his spine, and his ribs, and Scott breathed in Logan's beer and cigar smoke scent, and wept like a stupid, sniveling kid, until he ran out of tears. Logan had run his fingers through Scott's hair awkwardly, like he was a strange dog he wasn't too sure about petting, and then given him a gentle pat on the back before getting up and leaving, still silently. In front of the bathroom mirror, Scott had needed to take off his visor to bathe his tightly closed eyelids, and wash his salt-blotched face, and realized that if it had been real then he'd just mortified himself in front of Logan, but that if it wasn't, imagining that had just happened had made him feel better all the same.

He hadn't cried since.

Now, Scott realized that he had been a little too quick in turning down the offers of help with the field trip from Storm and Hank. He had known it would be painful – he and Jean had always taken the children on trips together in the past. This was one of those landmarks that the grieving could award themselves mental points for passing: First Field Trip Without Jean. If he made it through without weeping could he give himself a gold star?

Lying in the bed without her next to him every night was difficult enough. In the days leading up to her death, she'd been sleeping so badly; the restless power rolling off her in waves whenever she dreamed. Several times he had been hurled out of the depths of sleep and across the room to be slammed into the wall, Scott desperately scrambling back to the bed so that he would be under the covers by the time Jean jolted, panic-stricken into wakefulness. As the windows rattled, she had fumbled for the light, and then turned to him anxiously, her fingers touching his face. "Did I hurt you?"

"No." He had shaken his head like the idea was impossible while his body reverberated painfully from the impact. "Of course not."

"I dreamed you were in danger. I was trying to push you away from it." She kissed him and he could feel how she was trembling from the nightmare. There had been a new quality to her kisses since she had used Cerebro; she had been hungrier than in the past. He had been afraid that was something to do with Logan, but if she had been having yearnings for another man, it certainly hadn't made her distant with Scott. She was as kind and loving to him as she had always been, although he was aware of her struggling with her telepathy, her telekinesis there at the twitch of a finger in a way he had never known before. Her dreams were deeply troubled but she had certainly not been complaining of headaches in the conventional sense. He had barely been able to keep up with her.

He stroked her hair back from her eyes. "Neither of us is in danger. We're home. We're safe. Nothing is going to happen to us."

She kissed him again, deeper, hungrily, and just for a second a trick of the light had made it look as if her eyes were lit by a tawny flame, then she had rolled him under the covers and he had forgotten all about his bruised back and anything else that wasn't vigorously, breathlessly, and all-consumingly Jean.

Those bruises had been overlain by the ones that followed the next nightmare, and the ones after that, and then those had been blotted out entirely by the ones left when he had been slammed into that wall by her telekinesis – luckily strong enough to ward off his force beams or he would have been the man who killed her. Sometimes, in the endless wakeful watches of the night, he still felt like the man who had killed her. It was pathetic how sorry he had been when those last bruises had faded. He had been grateful for the pain of them when the image of that water folding over her became too much to bear.

Their room was still mined with memories. He never knew when a careless step would set off another one. Today it had been all those times of playing rock-paper-scissors in their room before they went downstairs with confident smiles to gather up their charges; dueling for who got to be stuck with the designated bad cop role for the day. Jean had sworn blind she didn't read his mind on those occasions, but somehow if he chose rock, she always knew to go for paper, and he got to be the one who broke up the fights and ordered people down from dangerous cliffs or wouldn't let them go swimming in subterranean caverns or all the really fun life-threatening things they always wanted to do, while Jean got to be sympathetic and to agree that Scott was a killjoy but later they could all have ice cream.

He had complained to Jean once that they had never been like that and she hadn't stopped laughing for five minutes straight.

"Well, okay, maybe we were – but at least we felt bad about it afterwards. Kids today are shameless."

"'Kids today', Methuselah? And what you're also forgetting is that the only person who ever felt bad about it was…you, you know, all those years ago when we were teenagers. Of course, it's a little misty – being so long ago."

"Fine. Mock me. I still say that the Professor had it easy with us compared with you and me having to deal with this crowd."

Memories like that were a fish hook in the heart. It would snag and catch at unexpected times and the wound would reopen, painfully fresh. He had thought he couldn't bear for everything to seem normal except for Jean's absence so he had told Storm he would be fine and Hank that he could manage, and he had not realized, until he was already driving the newer of the two x-vans, that he had apparently been waiting for Logan to offer to come along. Logan wasn't associated with the past. Scott could look at Logan in a forest glade, surrounded by unruly kids, and know he was in the present and Jean was gone. With Hank or Ororo, there was the danger of forgetting that it wasn't six months ago that this scene was happening, when the world had been kinder and Jean had still been in it. Logan, of course, had not offered to help him chaperone a bunch of high-spirited mutant kids unleashed upon the wilderness. Logan had shown far too much sense.

He became aware, as he was counting heads and backpacks as the children settled in the van, that Bobby and Rogue were keeping close by, in case he had need of them, and that Jubilee and Kitty had gone amongst the younger kids and got them to pay attention to the roll call and settle down without pinching, punching, insulting, or trying to make each other more flammable. He realized that he spent a lot of time thinking about what the individual kids' strengths and weaknesses were; what lessons they needed to work harder at, or where they could benefit from more one-on-one study if they showed real aptitude, how they could improve their control, what exercises would help them to develop their confidence; he didn't always think about the people they were. It occurred to him now that they were kind people, even young and occasionally heedless as they were, even permanently out of their depths as they were, in the way of all adolescents, overwhelmed not only by hormones and imperfectly understood impulses, but by their emerging powers as well. Some of them had thought themselves human until very recently, and felt far less like caterpillars who had grown into butterflies than outsiders who had once believed that they belonged. Even with all that to cope with, here they were, still wanting to help him if they could. Just like Storm and Hank, they wanted to protect him from a past that had already happened, a wound that had already scarred. That there wasn't anything they could do to help him was neither here nor there, it was kind of them to want to try.

He said, "Bobby, why don't you drive some of the way there?"

The boy brightened. "Really?"

Rogue said, "Hey! It was my turn next!"

Scott did mental calculations and realized she was right. "Sorry, Bobby. That one's on me." Bobby's face fell and Rogue took pity on him. "Okay, you can go first but only because you have the life burden of being a boy. I'm driving back."

Bobby grinned at her and Rogue grinned back and she ran her gloved hand through his hair and he reached out to touch her face and –

And Rogue grabbed his wrist and held his fingers away from her, like she was dangerous and would hurt him, which she was, and she would, and Bobby was being reckless and Rogue was being sensible, but it still wasn't fair. Scott couldn't help giving Bobby a look of sympathy, because sometimes girls didn't get that it was worth it – even if they were dangerous, even if they could kill you with a touch; when you were young and foolish, sometimes you wanted them to touch you all the same. Jean being able to hurl him through the air just with the force of her mind had never stopped him wanting her to touch him, not for an instant.

Kitty said, "When is it my turn?"

He had thought for a metaphysical second that she meant entering into all the soul-stripping pain of adult romantic life, and then he realized that she wanted to drive. That was so much more terrifying a prospect.

Scott shuddered. "Never again on my watch."

She pouted. "You go up against Magneto every other Wednesday but you're scared to sit in a vehicle that I'm driving?"

"Yes."

Rogue nudged her. "I told you not to phase through that intersection traffic. You know it makes Scott twitchy when you do that."

Jamie said curiously, "What if it was multiple choice? Like – a) be driven into town by Kitty, b) arm-wrestle Sabretooth, c) talk down Wolverine from a berserker rage when your beams aren't working or d) fight a Sentinel with just an egg whisk?"

Scott said, "Anything but option a)."

Kitty flounced. "You could at least have taken a moment to think about it and pretended it was a hard choice!"

"It wasn't," Scott assured her.

He got the kids settled down again and gave Bobby a consoling pat on the shoulder while they all fiercely debated how long Scott would live against Sabretooth, Logan, and the Sentinel under those circumstances. (Averaged out, about two-point-seven seconds seemed to be the general consensus, although Roberto insisted that Sabretooth would need longer because he'd never be able to resist breaking his arm first, just for spite, and Rogue and Kitty were both adamant that Logan would never kill Scott, even when completely Wolverine-crazy. He'd just maim him a little.)

"And he wouldn't do anything to mark Scott's face," Kitty said. "Because of calling him 'pretty boy', so he must like the way he looks."

"You know Logan's just being a dick when he calls him that, right?" Sam said.

"Well, I think it's sweet."

Jubilee said, "How is it not a compliment?"

The girls all innocently chorused their agreement while the boys told them scornfully that they were nuts if they thought a guy calling another guy 'pretty' was ever a compliment, and it occurred to Scott that, without Jean, there was now only Ororo left to explain to teenage girls how male animals worked. At least, he hoped Storm wasn't going to expect him to explain how male animals worked, because, when it came to Logan, he wasn't too sure about that himself, other than that it involved a lot more beer and a lot less washing than Scott found necessary to his daily routine. And what was with those damned cigars? He decided that he had better call Warren in for that job and then just live with the inevitable fallout of every girl in the school being smitten with the guy. Anything to avoid Scott having to discuss menstruation or when not to let a boy get to first base, because, frankly, he would rather self-catheterize with barbed wire.

(Of course, there was every chance that some of the boys might also want to know when not to let a boy get to first base, but he had already got 'never if you're alone with him in a locked room when he's been drinking' as his stock answer to that question, learned the hard way at the kind of frat parties Warren had used to drag him to, where half the supposedly hetero guys on football scholarships got really handsy if there was too much booze in the fruit punch.

Warren might have been a birdbrain in the classroom, who could never resist the lure of an open window, while Scott always handed his homework in on time, but, at parties, Warren was suavely confident and Scott was a trainwreck. Luckily, Hank had been a dab hand at plucking Scott out of tricky situations, sometimes while gripping the light fittings with one strong back foot. Warren, too, had literally flown to the rescue more than once; on one memorable occasion, gliding in through a third floor window and extricating Scott from an unpleasant situation with a solid right that laid out the guy who was failing to take 'Please, would you stop doing that?' as an answer. Warren had then swept Scott into his manly arms and carried him off through the open window like an unnaturally beautiful winged superhero.

Warren landed in the garden – waving nonchalantly to the two guys with the spliff who were too far out of it to be disconcerted by an angel in evening dress and his disheveled friend landing in front of them – set Scott on his feet and walked him sternly amongst the statues while he lectured him on What Not To Do At Parties, while complaining that he had bruised his hand.

"Repeat after me: N-O spells 'No'. 'Get lost' will also sometimes cut it. As we just saw, a fist to the face is also often effective – although painful. Deep breaths, buddy – and, just so we're clear, you are not puking anywhere near my hand-made shoes."

Head spinning, trying not to throw up from the alcohol he had drunk way too fast when he had thought it was orange juice, and fumbling to re-button his pants, Scott had said, "That guy might have been struggling with his sexuality. An outright refusal might have given him a complex." He thought that finding out you were gay might be like finding out you were a mutant – thinking you were one of the ones the world was arranged to suit and then suddenly finding out you were an outsider, after all, with all privileges suspended for the foreseeable future. Admittedly, he had also thought gay guys would be…well…nicer than the ones who usually hit on him at parties, but he still didn't want to add to their burden of post-adolescent angst.

Warren took him by the shoulders so he could walk in more or less a straight line and steered him behind the topiary hedge. "Get real, Scott! That guy's a jerk who's impregnated two sophomores since spring break. Trust me, he's not struggling with anything except an over-production of testosterone. Breathe in, breathe out. You puke, you die. Handmade, remember? In Italy. Seriously, they cost more than your car. What were you thinking, letting that guy get you alone like that? And why was his hand still down your tighty-whities when you clearly didn't want it there and you could have knocked him across the room just by opening your eyes?"

"I was trying to let him down gently." He had also been so alcohol-soused that he could barely function, only vaguely aware that he was being touched by a guy whose name he couldn't remember in a way he really didn't like as he made uncoordinated attempts to struggle free. At least the fresh air was clearing his head a little. "I thought he was gay. I didn't want to be a dick if he was asking me out."

"Scott, get it through your thick head: nice boys don't want to date you – they want to date Hank, and handsome, charming older guys want to date me. The only guys who want to 'date' you are alpha male Neanderthals who want to sexually experiment with you before going back to girls. Some of them also probably want to keep you locked in the trunk of their car for a few days, and the really creepy ones want to kill you, have sex with your corpse, and then keep your fingernails as trophies. This is why you should never just wander off by yourself at parties."

The ground was still tilting strangely. It made the lichen-veined statues look as if they were dancing. Scott said, indistinctly, "I knocked Magneto's helmet off with my optic blasts."

"Yes, you did, but that's only because he didn't know that the best way to incapacitate the leader of the X-Men is to ask him if he wants to dance. Seriously, Scott? You thought that ninety pound girl hitting on you was scarier than a six foot five jock with a boner?"

"She had a tongue stud." He lurched awkwardly and Warren steered him over to a bench and made him sit down and take deep, even breaths. Unfortunately, this in no way lessened either Scott's urge to throw up or Warren's impulse to scold.

"…and what do you think the Professor would say if he knew his star tactician was in the habit of getting himself trapped in locked bedrooms with horny, drunken assholes, twice his size?"

"Please don't tell him – or Jean, or Hank. Especially not Jean and especially not Hank because he said if it happened again he would get mad. Did he mean get mad with me or with the guys…?"

Warren wasn't listening to his drunken meanderings anyway, still on his own rant: "…hadn't let him give you a glass of vodka which he told you was orange juice, then been dumb enough to drink it all, you might have noticed that he was the Guy Most Likely To Be A Future Serial Killer while you were still sober enough to do something about it. No one's saying shoot down the sensitive guy who asks you nicely, but don't let creeps maul you about just because they're drunk and you're a warm body. Didn't anyone tell you this stuff, growing up?"

The injustice of that got through. "The last time I spoke to my mom and dad I was seven and they were about to throw me out of a burning airplane. It wasn't really the moment for dating advice."

"Fine, but next time we go to a party don't just moon over Jean like you have a head injury –"

"I do have a head injury."

"I'm talking now. You're listening. If you've got any sense at all, which I doubt, you'll be writing these pearls of wisdom down. Next time we go to a party, watch the way Jean deals with the creeps, okay? She's polite, she's nice, but she's firm, and they know to back off. You just look terrified and stutter, even when it's a girl hitting on you. You've really got to shut down that prison bitch vibe before some jerk goes too far and Hank has to rip his head off – which we both know he would if any guy got to third base with you."

"Yesterday you screamed like a girl for five minutes straight because that wolf-guy we helped out shed on your camel hair coat and I'm the one with the prison bitch vibe? Are the statues moving? I think they're moving."

"It wasn't camel hair. It was vicuña wool interwoven with gold thread. It costs four thousand dollars a yard. Back to you: don't take candy from strangers, don't get into the vehicle of any man you don't know, even if he offers to show you some puppies –"

"Look, I am trained in self-defense. And if all else fails, I'd use my beans…beams. Beams?"

"Not if the evil frat boy in your most probable future roofies you first. Which reminds me, dumbass – don't let a guy you don't know get you a drink, like you did tonight. That's party-safety one-oh-one. By three a.m. some of these guys will fuck anything, even you." As Scott continued to look woebegone, Warren said, "How can I put this in terms that you can grasp? I know – think of a party like a mission, one you have to prepare for, tactically. So, before you ask a girl to dance – have a plan for acceptance, like not dancing like a dork, and an exit strategy with dignity for when she totally shoots you down in flames. Same goes for drunken frat boys. Just problem solve them. Don't let them manipulate you into a position where your reactions are slowed or your cognitive functions are impaired – like letting them drug you or get you drunk. Don't get into potentially dangerous places with only one exit. If you do, don't let a possible assailant block the exit. Get it now? All that dull strategic stuff you like to do – you can do it here, too, only, wherever possible, less dorkily, because I'm being seen with you in public, without a mask."

"You're the one who made me come here, Warren. I wanted to stay home in the Danger Room, where it's safe. Can't we just go…?"

"No you don't, Summers! I am getting you socialized even if it kills you…."

"I need to be sick now."

"Not the shoes…!"

No. On second thoughts, Scott decided that he would call in Warren to deal with any of the questions the boys might have, too. He would just make him swear not to use any of Scott's past party experiences as part of his pep talk first.)

He turned back to Bobby and gave him the keys to the van; thinking how immensely relieved and grateful he was to no longer be a teenager.

"Just remember that she handles a little heavy, slow down before the bends so you can accelerate into them and keep your traction…." He added a few more sage words of advice and knew Bobby wasn't hearing any of them, too eager to get going. He sat down and turned to remind everyone to buckle up, only to find that everyone had already been fiercely policed into his or her seatbelts by Jubilee and Rogue.

Scott remembered the first time the Professor had let him drive his limousine, and the way he had inched out onto the road with his tongue protruding; the pride he had felt at getting home in one piece. As Bobby started up the van – stalling it, inevitably, like most people did when flummoxed, to a chorus of catcalls from Sam, Roberto, and what had to be half a dozen Multiples – then took a breath and did it again, right this time – Scott turned to Rogue and said, "And, yes, you can drive coming home, I promise."

"And people say you're the no fun teacher."

Scott donned his best hurt look. "They say that?"

"No! No, I was kidding!"

He smiled. "So was I." And for a moment there, breathing in and out around the pain of Jean's loss wasn't excruciating, it was just a bearably dull ache. It was even momentarily possible to imagine a time when it wouldn't hurt every minute of every day.

That had been hours since and he was feeling the humidity after scoping out the perimeter while making contingency plans in case the weather broke and the pool-pocked river flash-flooded. (High ground was a cave network that lay south, on the far side of the river, which could be crossed in three places, two involving log bridges. The caves could be accessed to the north and west; the north entrance at ground level, the west one, a hidden entrance, an awkward scramble, accessible from boulders.) The river was also deep enough to offer shelter from predatory land animals if necessary, but way too cold to make paddling in it something he wanted the kids doing for longer than ten minutes at a time. The forest to the south of the river had ripe bilberries, which was why they were staying on the north bank, in case of bears being attracted to the fruit. This part had nothing that was obviously edible, except for rabbits, and there were no bear, wolf, or coyote tracks, only deer.

(The kids had already groaned at his reconnaissance. Jubilee said, "You're the guy who always looks for where the lifebelts are before you even look at the pool, aren't you?"

Scott, genuinely surprised, had said, "Doesn't everyone?"

Rogue said, "Please tell me there was at least one time in your life when you didn't eat all your vegetables?"

As he cast his mind back, frowning with the effort of trying to recall any such occasion, Sam said, despairingly, "Mister Summers, please! We need relatable role models!"

"What's not relatable about liking vegetables?"

Sam and Roberto had exchanged a look of mutual…something and gone off, shaking their heads, and Jamie had said helpfully, "You know, it's when you say stuff like that that Mister Logan starts banging his head against the walls. He says it helps. Hey, that would probably work for Sam, too." He ran after the other boys, shouting "Sam! Sam! If Mister Summers is giving you a buzzing pain in your head, try cannonballing into a tree!")

Now, of course, Scott was wondering why he hadn't asked Storm to come with him to ward off the thunderclouds that were rolling ominously overhead, or Hank to go collect Jamie – all multiples of him – from the damned bush, river, rock, and tree.

Bobby snatched one Jamie out of a bramble patch while Rogue fished another out of the river, Roberto threatened to set a third alight if he didn't get back here, now, while it was left to Scott to shin up the tree and edge along the branch to collar the one who was way too close to that hornets' nest. Just as he was reaching for him, down on the ground Jamie giggled and summoned all his other selves back again, leaving Scot in a face off with some particularly malevolent-looking examples of Vespa crabro. He backed up along the branch with all the dignity he could muster while the hornets buzzed threateningly at him, then climbed down, trying not to look ruffled, but sincerely grateful that Boom-Boom wasn't there to wolf-whistle at him, as she sometimes, inexplicably, did. (Jean had insisted that the reason his pupils were so slow to grasp concepts of geometry was because way too many of them, when he was writing on the blackboard, instead of attending to his explanations were admiring his rear view. He had never seen any evidence that this was true and could only presume she had been making some kind of…joke.)

(Come to think of it, he'd been pretty disconcerted by that worrying Frost woman who had dropped in to talk something over with Xavier, wearing stilettos, ice-blue lipstick, and what looked like not much more than her underwear, who had gazed at him so appreciatively as he waxed his car. She was…stunning to look at, and it was possible to see so very much of her. He had become embarrassingly aware of being shirtless and sweat-oiled and his jeans being a little snug. Jean had flared up beside him and Emma Frost had held up her hands and said, "Can't a girl admire the scenery? It's not like I'm the only one looking." Which was when Scott had become aware of Logan, who had been standing in the shadows, shifting uncomfortably.

Jean said pointedly, "Logan isn't ogling my husband's ass."

Smoothly, Emma had said, "I wouldn't be so sure about that, darling. He certainly seemed to be admiring it from where I was standing. But it's not just your hubby's ass that's so pleasing, is it? Although it certainly is that – wonderful the way those delightful little buttocks manage to be both supple and taut – but then there are also the shoulders and the back muscles, and the enticing way the knots in his spine just lead the eye downwards…."

Logan had growled ominously, "Get out of my head, Frost."

"Gladly. It's a little…murky in there for me."

Jean had said dangerously, "Do you want to try reading my thoughts, Emma…?"

And it had generally been a huge relief when Xavier had wheeled himself out to lure Emma away with the promise of tea, even if their departure had left Scott with a Logan and Jean who were both glaring at him. Logan had said, "Put on a damned shirt, will you?" and thrown Scott's shirt at his face like a slap. "You're just whoring it out there right now."

Jean had nodded her agreement, eyes with that glint in them she got sometimes that Scott had learned, through years of loving friendship, meant that he should talk in low, soothing tones and try not to make any sudden movements. He had meekly put on the shirt for Jean, even though they were both being irrational and employing complete double standards, but he had glowered at Logan.

"Seriously, Logan? All the times you've gone scampering around the mansion half-naked, and I'm the one whoring it out?"

"I don't do it where every passing telepath from the Hellfire Club can get an eyeful, pretty boy."

"No, just where my wife can see you."

Jean had glared at him. "Don't start that again. Scott, I don't want you talking to Emma Frost. That woman hasn't had a celibate thought since puberty."

"And how," Logan growled.

Exasperated, Scott had resisted the urge to demand how he was responsible for someone else's wandering gaze, to point out that they were unreasonable hypocrites, and to stick his tongue out at Logan. He thought he deserved particular praise for that last display of self-control.

Later, Emma had waited until Jean had been called away then slinked up beside him and murmured, "Fascinating – the things Wolverine thinks about you when he thinks no one's looking, Cyclops. Tell me, is he right to think that you're a natural sub – because I have a riding crop at home…?"

Scott said, "Good day, Ms Frost. I hope your journey home is pleasant and uneventful right up to the moment when the angry giant fire ants attack you."

"Also – handcuffs. I just know you'd suit bondage beautifully. In fact, the delightful visual aesthetic is probably the real reason why all those super-villains keep chaining you up. And, of course, I wouldn't mind if you indulged in a little switch-hitting from time to time. I like some variety myself. If you're worried about the weight of him – all that adamantium on his bones – apparently he'd be careful not to hurt you. To him, you know, you look quite…fragile. I can't see it myself – to me, you look… perfectly proportioned in every possible way."

"Goodbye."

She drew a beautifully manicured finger down his face and then drew it tantalizingly across his mouth. Not sucking on it took some self-control but he had been studying control for a decade and it didn't fail him. Her voice was a groin-stirringly husky whisper: "You really do need to learn that vanilla isn't the only flavor, you know. And that missionaries weren't the only people who ever came up with a sexual position…."

Seeing Jean blazing in the doorway of the mansion and Logan striding across the lawn, both of them with faces like thunder, Scott had claimed to be short of a wrench and cravenly bolted.)

In the muggy stillness of the forest, Scott forced himself not to think about Jean being angry with him or him looking at other women. It wouldn't help and there was no point in torturing himself about things he couldn't change. She had gone beyond any of his apologies. He had to find a way to remain in the here and now. There were kids dependent on him, and if he drifted off now, as he had done in the Danger Room a few days back, he wouldn't just get a little bruised, he might do something that got someone else hurt. Time to do another mental roll call.

Wolfsbane was chasing rabbits, but barking so happily while doing so that the rabbits had plenty of warning to get away. Amara was sitting quietly, reading, elegant in a sunhat, one hand to the rock to feel connected to the earth, Sam was racing Wolfsbane and tripping over things, while Kitty was morphing through the rock formations that formed the foothills to the caves that Scott had already won everyone's displeasure by not permitting them to explore. She insisted she was studying geology for Doctor McCoy, but to his jaundiced eyes she just seemed to be having fun. He was sorry that John wasn't with them, of course, but there was also the knowledge that if he had been, he would have been bugging Bobby, probably trying to get Roberto to do something cataclysmic with converted solar energy, inciting Jubilee to make things explode, and setting things on fire.

Jubilee said again, "Please, Mr. Summers…?"

"I don't take teenagers caving when I haven't explored the cave system first, because most people consider it bad form for teachers to get the children in their care lost, trapped, drowned, suffocated, or crushed."

"We run the risk of all those things in the Danger Room."

"The Danger Room has safety protocols. The rest of the world doesn't. Sunspot, don't irradiate Multiple. His parents might sue."

Jubilee said, "Haven't you heard of being spontaneous?"

She looked so downcast that he said, "I'm not saying we can't come back another day with caving equipment. I just need to go in there first."

Her eyes widened. "Not by yourself, right?"

He made to answer and had to stop because, of course, Storm's claustrophobia and Hank's size – like, in the past, Warren's wings – made them impossible partners for wriggling into tight places, which was why it had always been him and Jean who explored the underground caverns, the two unconsciously holding hands as they wandered through the dripping dark following a wayward flashlight beam, both of them dazzled by glittering stalactites and awestruck by cave paintings. He realized that he was more than just a soulmate down; pragmatically, he needed another teacher to help him out.

It occurred to him that he would trust a climbing rope that Logan had tested. He would crawl into a dark space, take the plunge into a subterranean cavern where the water felt like ice and one could only snatch a deep breath and hope that one surfaced in a place with a higher ceiling before that air ran out, if Logan was the guy paying out the rope, ready to pull him back if disaster struck. Logan didn't have telepathy or telekinesis, but he had a nose for trouble and incredible physical strength. It was something of a shock to learn that Scott had somehow started trusting Logan the way one wore in a new pair of shoes – after the initial blisters stopped bleeding, one just grew accustomed to the way the leather pinched and rubbed, until they gave a little and one's skin hardened up where necessary, and before one knew it, they were a surprisingly comfortable fit.

He realized Jubilee had stood there and let him have his pensive silence. She said, a little uncertainly, "You do like Mr. Logan, don't you?"

He said. "He'd never let harm come to any of you that he could prevent."

"He wouldn't let it come to you either."

Scott rubbed his shoulder reflexively. It was only three days since Logan had hurled him bodily out of the way of a metal bludgeon in the Danger Room, then yelled at him, like Scott was one of the kids, for not having his head together. He had been right – Scott had been thinking about Jean – but it had still made him angry. He had started yelling back and Logan had just hauled him up and away from another mechanical grabber, given him a brief shake that revealed how strong he was, and said, "Scott! Concentrate!" Sulky but chastened, Scott had concentrated, and at the end of the session, he had apologized stiffly and admitted that Logan had been right; next time he would get into the right frame of mind before he stepped through the door.

Logan had patted his shoulder like he'd seen someone do it in a movie once and thought he ought to try it, and said gruffly, "It's not like you don't have reason to be distracted. It's just – I crack my ribs, it's annoying for five minutes, you crack your ribs, you're going to be feeling it for weeks."

They had both been slightly overwhelmed by the realization that they were conversing like adults and had quickly gone their separate ways. Scott still had the bruise on his shoulder from where Logan had shoved him. What he didn't have was cracked ribs.

Scott was used to his teammates being stronger than he was. Jean had telekinetically tossed him around in the past, when mind-controlled or – on occasion, back when they were teenagers and her self-control had been more imperfect – just really annoyed. Storm had the power of all the elements at her disposal. Hank, of course, could rip him apart if he wanted to, with the same amount of exertion that Scott might use to break a cookie in half. Even Warren, with the strength of those wings behind him could swoop in and pick Scott up as if he were weightless. He hadn't realized how much stronger than him Logan was until he moved him so effortlessly in the Danger Room, and it had bugged him at the time, but now he was realizing that it might be another reason to trust Logan rather than to be wary of him.

Jubilee said with quiet persistence, "You've told him you want him to stick around, right?"

Scott felt inexplicably panicked. "Is he thinking of leaving?"

"The Professor asked him if he would stay for a while but I think he's the kind of guy who needs to be needed."

Scott thought, Aren't we all?

That was when Wolfsbane shot out of the undergrowth, no longer happy and barking, but scared, tail tucked between her legs, to cannon against his shins. Scott sank down to her eye level – she was shivering so violently he wondered if her abusive hypocrite of a father had somehow made his way over from Bonnie Scotland to try to beat religion into all of them. "Rahne, what is it?"

She transformed back into a scared kneeling schoolgirl while Jubilee crouched down to put a protective arm around her. "Men with weapons," Rahne gulped. "They said we were abominations. They said that being sold for parts was all we were fit for." Her teeth were chattering with fear and he had to coax the information out of her: men dressed like soldiers, carrying tazers, guns, nets; dozens of them; they had devices that were pulsing with red dots on little screens, one dot for every mutant. They were angry because there were minerals in the caves that interfered with the readings. They were coming quickly from the west.

The x-van lay directly due west of their current position. "Did they find the van?" he pressed.

"They're still looking for it."

Thank goodness for good old-fashioned paranoia and Hank's excellent cloaking technology.

"How did they know we were coming?"

"They didn't. They were tracking an escaped mutant from their laboratories. They say 'it' leading them to us – that's the proof God hates mutants."

"God doesn't hate you, Rahne," Scott assured her. "But I don't think we'll rely on providence to get us out of this one. Jubilee, take her to the caves now. I'll get the others and follow you. We need to get out of those guys' way before they get here."

For a while he'd been thinking that all their training sessions were going in one ear and straight out of the other, but one look at his face and everyone was there, silent, attentive, even grasping the need to talk in whispers. Bobby grabbed Jamie's hand, Rogue pulled Kitty out of the rocks, and they were all hurrying straight up the shale path he'd forbidden them to take earlier. And, just as if the heavens really did have it in for them, the clouds rolled in black and the lightning forked, brilliant and terrible, and followed by a crack of thunder. Then the rain came in the next breath, an icy, drenching curtain. They were wet to the skin in ten paces.

***

Logan still thought it was a bad idea for Scott to take kids out of the school grounds on a day when Cerebro was having an overhaul. Xavier had been working on new failsafes to prevent it being used as weapon for months and as today was the day when they were being fitted, that meant Hank and Chuck had their hands full, and no one was going to be in telepathic contact with Scott while he was off on his field trip. Admittedly, up to a few months before, it would never have occurred to him that anyone needed to be in telepathic contact, not when they could probably learn how to use a cellphone, but it was now one of the safety protocols he was used to and it not being available today was making him antsy. The truth was that Scott being out of his sight was making him antsy.

Scott had left the bedroom door open and Logan realized that the scent of Jean's perfume was starting to fade. He inhaled it, greedily, stepping into the room before he could stop himself, just to get another noseful of her memory. A few more paces and he realized that Scott must have deliberately not changed the sheets, and Logan could now smell way too much, like the way Scott and Jean had made love the night before the day on which she died. Logan had been on the road then, driving back from Canada on Scott's bike, and those two had been coiling together here in the fragrant shadows, urgent and tender. That scent was overlaid by Scott's solitary routine since, a drab pathway between bed and bathroom with brief detours to retrieve his clothes from the wardrobe. The guy was just camping here, trying to exist, his day running on rusty wheels. The pillow smelled of the salt residue of his tears, of Jean's shampoo where her head had rested there, the faint odor of blood –

Logan sniffed curiously. Jean had always been so gentle with Scott, so loving and protective. Storm had told him herself that no one really saw Jean angry until they saw her when someone was trying to hurt Scott; that was when she stopped being that sweet, reasonable woman they all loved, and became something primal. No one injured Scott in front of Jean and didn't rapidly regret it. Logan had been torn between jealousy and understanding. He didn't want to think of Jean flaring up in Scott's defense, but, yeah, he understood the impulse. Beating up the Boy Scout was a dick move. It kinda made Logan want to punch people who did it, too. He got that better than he got why Jean had been digging her nails in the guy's back hard enough to draw blood. He'd seen Scott naked when they were changing into those stupid leather uniforms and there hadn't been any marks then. He'd even mentally agreed with the Frost woman that their sex-life probably had been pretty tame – but this didn't smell tame, this smelled like Jean biting hard and clawing deep and Scott being excited and responsive but also kind of…bruised.

This was beyond invasive, but he couldn't help it, he sniffed his way over to the wall and saw where the plaster had cracked, noticed a spot where a chair had been moved – its previous position made clear by the indentations in the carpet – pulled out the chair and found more cracked plaster that someone had taken pains to hide – Scott had taken pains to hide. Logan kept looking and sniffing and the evidence kept piling up. If he hadn't known the people involved, he would have said that every night of the week leading up to her death, Jean was throwing the man she loved all around the bedroom, hard enough to crack the plaster. Except Jean was the woman who would put herself between Scott and any danger; the woman who had literally given her life for his. No way would she be telekinetically throwing Scott against the walls just for the hell of it.

He sniffed his way back from the last indentation, the one where the trail was freshest, and Scott had scrambled back to that bed pretty fast.

Logan got it. "She didn't know she was doing it. Scott didn't tell her."

Storm had said something about Jean having a lot of nightmares since she'd used Cerebro, so this had probably been going on for a while. Logan felt a swirl of reactions that he couldn't quite categorize. Mixed up with it was the thought that Scott had long since got used to sleeping with someone dangerous. Every time Jean had spiked a fever, there had probably been some telekinetic fallout. Those two pretty, screwed-up kids had gone through plenty of traumas together, long before Logan arrived on the scene; and Scott wasn't what he looked like. He wasn't pure and unsullied and untouched by life. He was damaged goods. Even the woman who loved him enough to sacrifice herself for him had been someone who could kill him with a careless thought. No wonder he wasn't scared of Logan.

It had been irking him a little – Scott's total lack of fear of him. Most guys acknowledged that Logan was more alpha than they were, that they might not want to get in his face when he was angry if they wanted to stay healthy. Big, hairy cage fighters flinched from him. Scott just looked at his watch pointedly and waited for Logan to get over himself. He had found that infuriating, but now it made more sense. Scott's idea of being safe was being here, in a place where the man who loved him like a father had sent him out to face life-threatening dangers since the age of sixteen, and the woman who loved him enough to marry him, had, on occasion, carelessly tossed him against the walls. Even his oldest friendship was with a guy who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds more than he did and could rip him apart with one flex of his fingers. He didn't think of the world getting any safer than that. Logan, anger management issues and adamantium claws and all, was a long way from being the scariest thing Scott Summers had ever had to live with.

Sometimes, lately, at first just when he was halfway between waking and sleeping, and more often now, when he was in the shower, there had been fantasies Logan was ashamed of. Not just because they were fantasies about a grieving guy who had cried in his arms after his wife sacrificed herself to save the rest of them, or a guy so much younger than Logan that he barely knew which way was up, or even because they were fantasies about a guy whose personality was irksome and whose outer packaging was absurdly perfect. No, what made them embarrassing was the kind of fantasies they were – Logan saving Scott Summers from bad guys, evil robots, and fire-breathing dragons was bad enough, and there had been a buttload of those. Logan as the lord of some underworld hell dimension keeping Scott Summers as his chained and collared slaveboy was so much worse. Especially as Logan's evil overlord shtick was so barely-crayoned-in and all he ever really wanted to think about was Scott sprawled submissively at his feet, wearing the world's skimpiest loincloth, and gazing up at him adoringly while Logan fed him grapes. (Where was he even getting the damned grapes from in his evil underworld hell dimension anyway? And why was Scott so besotted with his lord and master if Logan was evil? And why, as Scott was so besotted, was Logan keeping him chained up? Also, as he never did anything in these damned fantasies but have constant sex with Scott, why was Scott always wearing his impossibly skimpy loincloth instead of already naked?) Being able to see that it was stupid had in no way stopped that image being the one he'd used to get himself off the last three mornings. If Xavier ever dropped in telepathically when Logan was rubbing one out to that little dreamscape, Logan was going to get kicked out of the mansion in a heartbeat.

Logan inhaled again and realized that not only was the scent of Jean fading but the scent of Scott was changing. He was still using her soap but it was overlaid with aftershave. He no longer smelled just like something that belonged to Jean but like a person in his own right. He wondered if the guy felt the way his scent did – that he was slowly emerging as a single entity – or just like something that had been torn in two and was still bleeding from the wound.

A couple of times in the Danger Room, Scott's head had been nothing like in the game. People relying on him made Logan restless. He didn't want to get too bound up in this place, but on the other hand, Charles Xavier's cause made more sense than most of the other ones that had been touted to him. And, right now, Logan didn't feel he could just walk away when they were already a person down and their current leader was a grief-fissured copy of his former self. If they went on a mission like this, he could see Scott getting himself caught if not killed.

Logan had almost offered to go with him today, just so there was someone else around to keep an eye on the kids – and on Scott himself. The guy was still a long way from back to full focus, he kept zoning out, and Logan wasn't even sure if Scott was aware of that death wish he was grappling with; that urge to just let the pain take him away completely. As long as the kids were with him, he was grounded. He wouldn't do anything dumb while they were with him. Logan was pretty sure they knew that themselves, the way they'd been sticking to him like flypaper.

He backed out of the bedroom and closed the door gently, to keep in the last echoes of Jean's scent. It wouldn't last forever, but perhaps it would last long enough for Scott to get to a place where he could live with her absence.

Logan? Would you come to my study if you can spare five minutes?

Xavier's voice in his head. He didn't know what it said about the current state of his nerves, but Logan found himself running, bursting in through the door, breathlessly, and saying, "Is it Scott? Is he okay?"

Xavier didn't look surprised by his overreaction so perhaps he'd been doing a less good job of hiding his concern for Scott than he thought. "I'm sure he's fine. It's just that I tried Cerebro a few hours ago – before Hank and I performed the first overhaul – and the children were all using their powers in a way that suggests they were being quite a handful."

"You want me to ride out there and give him some help with them?" He was already heading for the door.

"It's not that, Logan. It's just that Storm's gone to visit Spyke to try again to persuade Calisto to let us house the Morlocks somewhere more…salubrious, and the weather report says the area where Scott and the children are is being troubled by a violent storm. Also, when Hank and I switched Cerebro back on, after the new failsafe was installed, none of the children were using any of their powers, and when I tried to call the x-van, nobody answered, so I don't think they can be driving home. Most likely they have simply sought shelter from the storm. Hank believes we may have missed a connection and is rechecking Cerebro. It's probably nothing but – "

"I'll head out there now."

"Thank you. I'd appreciate it."

Logan noticed the photograph albums Xavier had been looking through. It was painful to see pictures of a teenage Jean and Scott. She had been beautiful even then. Hair warm as a winter hearth, emerald eyes bright with intelligence. He turned the page curiously and if it had been a brutal blow to see a young Jean smiling, alive and with a bright future ahead of her, it was just shocking to see that painfully thin boy in red sunglasses. In fact, without the red sunglasses he would never have known it was Scott, the boy was so skinny, with those jutting wristbones, so raggedly dressed, so…scared. There wasn't a picture where his head was up, where his shoulders weren't hunched in anticipation of a blow; in every snapshot his head was bowed, right eye hidden under long strands of uncombed hair. He looked like a boy whose spirit had been broken. He turned to Xavier for an explanation. "This is…Scott?"

"That was a bad time in his life." Xavier wheeled himself over to look at the page. "He was so thin and so shy. He barely spoke above a whisper for the first few months he was here. He wouldn't even try to make eye contact. Of course his childhood was…unhappy, but he's hardly the only one. I think Storm's may be even worse. Mutant children are so vulnerable. None of the usual resources open to them that might offer sanctuary to a human child. Ganged up on by other children and sometimes other adults. Locked up like criminals for emerging powers over which they have little control."

Logan said flatly, "This is a beaten kid." He meant it in every sense of the word.

Xavier nodded. "Yes. The mutant who took him in when Scott ran away from the orphanage had an ungovernable temper and no principles. He came very close to crushing Scott's spirit. And, no, Logan, as I can see you're about to ask, he did not prostitute Scott's body for personal gain, only his powers. Scott was spared that, at least."

The relief was extraordinary, but all he said was, "Well, you wouldn't get much for that body, would you? Kid looks like he'd snap in three places if you touched him." He wished he could stop looking at that damned picture but it had gut-punched him more than he'd ever want to admit. The Scott he knew just reeked preppy privilege – so much everything this boy wasn't in his quiet self-confidence, his crisply ironed shirts, his lean strength. Hard to reconcile him with that twig-thin changeling.

"Scott's had to fight hard to get from there to here," Xavier said. "I probably did make a lot of mistakes with him, just like Kitty said. He just so badly wanted someone to believe in – a moral philosophy he could embrace that made his mutation something other than a curse. After all he'd been through, I wanted the poor lad to have a few certainties to hold onto, not to mention one positive role model in his life."

"Now you think Scott probably shouldn't have skipped that teenage rebellion?"

"Well, I think we both know it will probably break out at some point and be far more painful for all parties than if I had encouraged him to argue a little more in the past. It's just such a constant fear that they'll use their powers for personal gain or out of revenge or bad temper that control does seem like the most important lesson. We can do all the good we like, but the fact remains that one bad mutant using his powers for ill on the six o'clock news tends to be what shapes the public mind. Logan, they're too far away for me to reach them telepathically without Cerebro – no doubt Jean's death has left us all a little over-anxious but…?"

Logan said, "Don't sweat it, Chuck. I'm on my way."

***

As the lightning flickered across the sky, Scott gazed down into the rain-darkened forest and realized that he had got far too used to having Storm fix the weather for him. He adjusted the dial on the binoculars and wished his world came in colors other than red. He had grown used to learning the order of traffic lights rather than going by their color ten years earlier, but he wasn't old enough yet to have forgotten how a blue sky looked over a spume-flecked green sea, or the white shock of new snowfall when it came softly in the night, the yellow glint of spring flowers sudden proof of winter's end. Scott wondered for how long he would go on dreaming in color. He dreaded the day when his subconscious world also turned to red. (His nightmares were already mostly duochrome – shades of red shifting obliquely and inevitably into black.) While, for years he'd had to listen to Warren waxing lyrical about the exact shade of green of Jean's eyes without being able to see them himself.

If Warren were here, he could fly off above the concealing cloud line, and drive the x-van up to fetch them, and manage to do it, even in a thunderstorm, without having a hair out of place. Or they could do their old flying gun routine. Warren could soar over the mutant hunters with Scott in his arms and Scott could cause panic and confusion, blasting around them with his force beams while the kids got themselves to the x-van. Or he and Hank…or he and Jean –

The lightning cracked, and Scott had only counted to two before the thunder rolled deafeningly overhead. He counted how many seconds it lasted – long enough to start the van undercover of its roar. The rain was not going to slacken off and it hadn't slowed down the searchers. If they hadn't been trying to hunt down another mutant, he might have got Kitty to morph them into an inner cavern, lit a fire, and got them dried out while they waited for night to come in, then crept back to the van undercover of darkness, but, he couldn't just abandon whichever wounded mutant they were chasing down there to his or her fate. It was just difficult to think with this great torrent of water crashing –

The memory jolt of being that crazed creature Logan had blocked from doing something desperate was still too vivid. It was as if his mind wanted to protect him from the thought of that terrible weight of water smashing down on Jean's unprotected body, so it stopped the mental movie in the Blackbird. He was insane and grieving and Logan was sane and grieving, and he could smell the leather of his uniform and his hair smelt like cigar ash and so did his sideburns, and he was immovable, as Scott railed and thrashed, and tried to push through to the comfort of…something irrevocable, blowing a hole in the jet, throwing himself into the water, Logan was the solid obstacle in his path. Strangely, in the middle of the night sometimes, when he was trying not to wail the 'I just want her back! I just want her back!' in his head, he would comfort himself, like a child with a teddy bear, with the same image. Remember Logan as someone who would protect Scott even from himself. He would lie in a dark still fragrant with Jean's perfume and inhale that imaginary Wolverine scent of old beer and tobacco and unwashed armpits. He would remember the barrier of Logan's body and it felt real and painful and hard and…reliable.

One positive thing about the stormy darkening of the day was that the mutant hunters had needed to switch on their eerie head-lights. He knew that was just to free up their hands for whatever weapons they were carrying, but it made their numbers a lot easier to calculate – just another advantage of occupying high ground that he was going to have to give up to get the children back to the cloaked vehicle. It being hidden was probably a testament to their continuing paranoia, but since soldiers had broken into the mansion and tried to capture all the kids, he had noticed he wasn't the only one who had been left a little bit jumpy. With luck the creepy guys with guns hadn't found it yet. They were searching using a grid system and they were still west of the caves, but their next sweep would bring them directly beneath them. They weren't military, he was sure. Their spacing was less than mathematical; lines a little wobbly. Which didn't alter the fact that he made it close to forty light flashes amidst the trees and exactly one of him.

He realized that he hated being without a team. Hank and Warren stopping coming on missions hadn't hurt as much when Jean was there. It had felt as if the original team was still going forward, just in slightly different form. Now, the truth couldn't be ducked any longer. The X-Men were now Cyclops and Storm. That wasn't a team; that was a remnant. Kitty, Rogue, Bobby, Jubilee – they were all great potential X-Men but they weren't old enough or experienced yet to make up two-thirds of a fighting force; not to mention the fact that Scott couldn't stomach putting kids in the front line so soon after losing Jean. He would get his nerve back, he would, in Logan's parlance, sack up, because there would be no choice, but he wasn't yet able to go out on a mission with Storm as the only other adult X-Man and achieve the kind of mental clarity that he would need to lead the team. There was a headspace he needed to find in that situation: clinical, calm, able to disconnect and see how to deploy the forces he had, see where Storm's weather manipulation would work or where an optic blast would push a Sentinel back for long enough for Kitty to phase through its machinery or Logan to hack off its metal head with his claws. Even in the midst of keeping the others safe there had to be a certain detachment that also made him able to see them as the sum of their powers, forces that he needed to direct and deploy. He couldn't achieve that detachment with schoolkids, not today. Which meant that if Logan didn't stick around, then there would be too few of them with enough experience to take on any serious threat. In fact if Logan didn't stick around, Scott wasn't sure there could be X-Men, at all; at least not ones lead by Scott Summers.

He watched as the lights came closer, tensed as they passed the foot of the trail, and then they swept on, moving east. The hunters were covering the low ground first. Good. They were sticking to too rigid a search pattern and leaving themselves vulnerable. Being predictable always made you vulnerable. In an assault, he would have said his kids, young as they were, already had a better grasp of the use of the unexpected. It was like the way his beams worked, utilizing every angle to hit a target that, unless it was well versed in spatial awareness, didn't know it was the target until it was too late. And the fastball special was the essence of a tactic their enemies never saw coming. Even at their age, the kids of the Xavier Institute already knew all about thinking outside the box, but he still wasn't pitching nine kids against forty mutant-hating soldiers, not when one of those kids was twelve. No, he needed a retreat that carried the minimum risk of discovery.

So, if they went out through the side way in, the awkward one, that would involve lifting the smaller kids up and passing them through the crevice, they could take the steep shingle path down that would arc them round south and bring them through forest already searched to where the van was waiting. There would be one moment of exposure from the west flank, a possible exposure to the north just before the tree-line, two from the south, which so far seemed clear, but none from the east, where the hunters were moving now. In this case he made the circuitous route the most direct and least dangerous. It was good to have a primary exit strategy in place. He mentally ran through two other possible scenarios as those headlights glowed in the rain-darkened day, but decided they carried more risks and would only serve as back-ups. Later, he would try them out in the Danger Room, just to check his findings.

Rogue stood beside him, steaming literally and metaphorically. "We shouldn't have to hide from them. They should have to hide from us."

"Or we could all just learn to get along," he said.

"Humans and mutants not getting along, that ain't on us," she said fiercely. "All we ever do is try to save their lives. How many times have they seen us sticking our neck out for them? Still, nothing ever changes! If we go up against a Sentinel that's attacking everything, they still think we're the ones that built it."

"Magneto trying to wipe them all out every other month probably isn't helping," Bobby put in.

"Well, even he has his reasons to be pissed with them."

On previous trips to see Magneto with Xavier, Scott had waited at the other end of the plastic bridge outside the plastic prison, aware of the guards' hostile eyes upon his visor, the word 'freak' unspoken but so loudly thought that he hadn't needed to be a telepath to pick it up. He had hated the way the guards switched the audio feed on so Xavier and Magneto never had any privacy, but he had heard what was said, as well as them.

"…Follow through logically on your philosophy, Charles, and you make the behavior of the Jews in Germany accountable for the Holocaust."

"I do no such thing. The parallels are not exact, and you know it."

"Nevertheless, we're getting to that time again. Can't you feel it? How many atrocities do you have to witness perpetuated by human against human in the name of infinitesimal differences of race, creed, or color to understand the way this particular animal works? What do you imagine the natural instinct of an aggressor like Homo sapiens is always going to be towards those who are not only different but better? Their whole image of themselves is based on a myth of god-given superiority. We undermine that certainty simply by existing. They're never going to forgive us for that. And yet you think that if we save their children from a few runaway trains and sinking ships that they will learn to love us?"

"I certainly believe that if we terrorize and oppress them that they will never cease to hate and fear us, whereas if they grow used to us, and realize that we're no threat to them –"

"They are the ones who need to change! Let them look to their own good behavior, Charles. Let them be the ones horrified by their own ignorance and prejudice, by their own limitless capacity for cruelty. I know I am, every day."

One of the guards turned to another. "Does this guy like the sound of his own voice, or what?"

Another said scornfully to Scott, "You there – Visor Boy? You agreeing with this metal-bending mutie?"

Scott just turned his head and looked at him and the guy must have seen the pulse of red flicker across because he took a step back and said, "No offence."

Scott said, "Don't call me 'boy'. Don't call Magneto or anyone else a 'mutie'. And, especially, don't piss off the Professor. Unless you want to spend the rest of the day believing you're a ten-year-old girl on the way to ballet class."

The guards had all taken a respectful step back then, muttering a new chorus of 'no offence' and Scott realized that he had just used Magneto's strategy and not the Professor's. He had used their fear of what mutants could do to them to make them leave mutants alone. And it had worked. He was thoroughly annoyed with himself. He also still really disliked the whole lot of them.

He had confessed what he'd done in the jet on the drive home and Xavier had laughed and patted him consolingly on the shoulder. "Scott, we're working within a flexible ethical framework here. Not blasting them with optic beams when they called you 'Visor Boy' still wins you a lollipop."

"Still, I should have risen above it and given them a speech about us all being the same under the skin."

"Except some of us have adamantium bones under the skin and none of them do. We're always going to be different from them. That's the part we need to get them to accept. It may be that eloquence and reason will get us there in time. It may be a disaster that brings us together. That something will, I will not allow myself to doubt. In the meantime, we can only do the best we can."

"You don't think Magneto has a point?"

"There was a time when I thought that he and I could see everything between us that needed to be seen to bring about the end to all this conflict. If he could cease to be so consumed with anger, hatred, and bitterness, he might still be able to do a great deal of good."

Scott wondered, idly, what the human reaction would be if a newscopter flew overhead now: Hate-filled monsters with guns hunt down frightened children, or: Are these brave men all that stands between us and the Mutant Menace? He supposed that would depend on whether or not the copter was flying for Fox News.

He and Rogue debated it in lowered voices as they waited for the people hunting them to do their sweep and head east, Rogue wondering what it would take to make humans see them as anything other than the enemy, Scott explaining wearily that the story was always written first and they were just inserted into it, depending on editorial bias. Their actions were almost immaterial; it was the splashy headline that counted.

"The only way we could ever change that would be if we had control of the story from start to finish," he said. "And that isn't happening."

Roberto said, "Perhaps if we had someone film everything we did for a month…?"

Scott thought of how quickly their footage would be dismissed as a hoax. Mutants couldn't be doing good; mutants were evil. Of course, there was also the fact that some selective editing probably would be necessary, unless they wanted all his and Logan's petty squabbles revealed to the world. He had spent years living in fear that he might accidentally blast an ally with his force beams – Logan made him want to blast an ally with his force beams, on average, about once a day.

Bobby said, "Maybe the Professor needs to buy a news channel."

"The Professor doesn't approve of manipulating the media."

"Why not?" Rogue demanded. "Everyone else does. If Senator Kelly gets to do it, why don't we?"

"I guess we're too busy occupying the moral high ground."

"Well, perhaps we ought to get our asses down from Mount Rise Above It and try putting our tent up in the winners' enclosure," Rogue said bitterly.

Scott said, "I've heard worse ideas."

Sam said, "And even if the humans can't like us or respect us or trust us they still ought to feel bad about just lookin' the other way when people start talking about rounding us up and putting us in camps."

Bobby said, "Sometimes, I think they don't even bother to read their own history."

Rogue said, "I'd rather they were scared of us than thought we were victims."

"But we are victims – look at the Morlocks. Look at the way they have to live, just because of how they look."

Kitty said, "I still think if the humans ever had to look right in the face of the things that get done to us, just because we're different, they wouldn't be able to stomach it."

Scott realized he had never looked at it from that perspective. He had always thought the way forward was to show them as people with strengths who chose to use those strengths for the greater good and in defense of those who had been born without equivalent powers. Mutants as heroes and protectors. That, after all, was what the X-Men were.

"Not the old ladies anyway," Sam added. "They'd start objecting. Old ladies write a lot of letters to congressman. No one wants to mess with someone's grandmother when she starts telling him something ain't right and he ought to be ashamed he ain't doin' more."

"But old ladies like things to be pretty," Kitty said dubiously. "The Morlocks aren't exactly pretty…."

It had never occurred to Scott that they should show the opposite as well – the damage done to mutants by fear and hatred when it was left unchecked. He had an instinctive resistance to the idea of presenting mutants as victims, yet Bobby was right; too often, they were victims, not because they were weak or fearful or helpless, but because human ingenuity when it came to inflicting pain and suffering on those it considered aberrant was, unfortunately, boundless. He just didn't think it was a fair thing to ask of a mutant – to go out there and seek an ignominious defeat so that humans could see them as victims and some of those humans feel bad enough about their part in oppressing them to stand up and be counted the next time anyone talked about registration. Everything in him balked at it.

He had faith in the children, he trusted them to be smart and efficient when it counted; he just didn't have much faith, today, in a world without Jean, in trusting himself to let them take too many risks. Armed soldiers had come into the school and kidnapped the children while Scott had been lying unconscious on the floor of a plastic prison, about as much use – to the Professor and to the kids – as an aneurysm. The thought of what had been happening at the mansion while Scott was hors de combat was something else waking him up with a jolt in the night. He knew they had to be permitted to put themselves in harm's way. It was how they learned. It was how he, Jean, Warren and Hank had all learned how not to be as vulnerable as these kids were now. And these kids were smart, powerful, confident. In some cases smarter, more powerful, and a hell of a lot more confident than Scott had been at their age. The problem wasn't with the kids. The problem was with his twanging nerves. Letting the kids put themselves in danger for mutantkind was the plunging, rearing, bucking horse that Scott was yet to climb back on.

It didn't help that Scott's brain felt like it had been in mothballs. He was used to instant clarity and he realized that he was still grief-misted. Having two contradictory objectives wasn't helping. He had to get the kids home safely, which meant getting them to the van safely. He also needed to find out where these guys were keeping the other mutants they'd captured and help the one trying to escape them to get away. If he hadn't been so leery of letting Hank or Storm come with him – or, better, both – this would be a walk in a very wet park. If he'd asked Logan to come with him –

He felt a pang of loss, then realized that if Logan were here he would just be arguing with Scott right now, probably about Logan's right to vivisect mutant hunters, while Logan sneered and called him 'kid' (or 'Pal' or 'Bub' or 'Pretty Boy') and generally acted like Scott should leave the violence to the grown-ups who weren't so wussily squeamish.

(Sometimes, of late, he had found himself half-horrified, half-amused by a possible future in which Logan stuck around, scruffy in a wife-beater, holding the inevitable beer, and argued about everything, while Scott was put in the position of being the endlessly nagging wife, constantly whining, "Logan – killing people is bad…" while Logan snarled at him and half the time ignored him anyway. It wasn't a comfortable prospect. Oddly, though, it wasn't an entirely unpleasant prospect either. And, at least when a guy was blessed with gut-punching force beams that shot out of his eyes, he had a reasonably good chance of getting the last word in an ideological dispute.)

He looked around the cave at the drenched, shivering kids. They looked like half-drowned kittens and the sight of them snapped his brain back into top gear. Getting them into a vehicle with a heater was something that needed to happen fast.

Scott said, "Listen, guys, this is the situation. The people down there could be Purifiers or possibly U-Men who haven't gone full uniform yet. They're armed. There could be as many as forty of them. I don't think they have any scruples about maiming or killing us and we have scruples about maiming or killing them, so they have us at a disadvantage. That's why I'm going with tactical withdrawal."

He had thought they might be disappointed at not getting to take these guys out but their relief was tangible. It occurred to him that their confidence had probably been shaken by that invasion of the mansion, too. Stryker had stopped them being able to feel safe in their own home.

He went on, "There are two ways I can see that they might be tracking us – something that picks up on the mutant gene or something that picks up use of mutant powers. In case it's the latter, no one use your powers once we leave these caves unless I give you leave. Understood? I'm going to get you guys to the van and then I'm going to see if I can help the mutant they're chasing. I need you to get back to the mansion. As soon as you're within range, one of you – and only one of you – Jubilee, I'm choosing you, let the Professor know where you are and what I'm doing. Do not all shout at him in your heads when he might be in Cerebro or you will give him a migraine."

Rogue said grimly, "You're going to try to find their base."

"Yes."

She gave him a smoldering look. "By yourself?"

"Until Storm and Logan and the others catch up with me, yes." He held her gaze. "I'm not your problem, Rogue. The younger kids are. I'm trusting you older ones to get them and yourselves home, unhurt. That is your mission. I'm not. Understood?"

None of them liked it but most of them nodded. Rogue wasn't one of them and neither was Kitty. Scott decided that in this instance he would accept mute sulking as consent. He had done some fairly intense mute sulking himself, in the past, but he had rarely outright rebelled.

Jean murmuring gently to him in the darkness after Warren had mocked him for being Mister Rulebook: "I like that you follow the rules, Scott. Someone needs to, after all, or else we're Magneto."

"The problem with Magneto is that he always has a point."

"That's why he's dangerous. If he was just wrong, he would be a madman, but he has
all the justification for his anger that he claims. So do we. I just don't see what getting angry is going to achieve that doing the right thing won't achieve faster."

Scott lying in the bed beside her, her hair silky against his skin, thinking how easy it would be to think of all those pinprick night lights out there, in the city, each one, perhaps representative of a human soul, and start doing the math: what percentage of those lights would choose to shine for us when we heard the midnight knock on the door? How many of them would even object when the men with guns came and took the mutant down the hall away? How many of them would cheer them on? That was the trouble, too far away, too many clustered together, they became indistinguishable, but just because the guy across the hall in Joe's Joint shut the door hurriedly when the shouting started, that didn't mean the guy in the room next door – who hadn't looked the other way – should be tarred by the same brush.

(Not even a big guy, even to a fifteen year old Scott, to whom Jack Winters had loomed as large as Sabretooth probably did to Jamie; he worked nights and didn't have much; none of them in that run-down building had been people with much; but he was the one who'd hammered on the door until Jack Winters opened it, and then said, 'You lay off that kid or I'm calling the cops'. Jack, sneering, 'Why do you think he wears those sunglasses? The kid's a mutie.' (Jack had not been big on mutant solidarity.) The guy had been stolidly unmovable. 'I don't give a damn what he is. He's still a kid. Stop hollerin' at him, and if I hear anything that sounds like you're beating on him, I'm coming back in here with a baseball bat. You feel me?' He'd been quietly spoken and completely implacable and Winters, who made two of him, had blinked first. Once the guy was gone, Jack had grabbed Scott and shaken him viciously, a smothering hand over his mouth so he couldn't call out, but he couldn't risk the ring of a slap, the thud of a punch, or the slam of a body being thrown against the furniture when there was someone who could overhear who actually cared, so there had been no beating that evening.)

That guy didn't deserve to get flattened like a bug by whatever anti-human scheme Magneto came up with next, any more than these kids deserved to he hunted down like animals because some sub-sections of humanity always had to have something they could hate.

Back there in the bedroom with Jean, Scott had been so confident as he said, "There have to be moral absolutes. There has to be a line we don't cross and we have to be the guys who know where that line is. Some of the humans are only ever going to care about the humans, and some of the mutants are only ever going to care about the mutants, but we need to care about both."

(Steve Rogers might have added something about them being the best that they could be, but even Scott would have rolled his eyes at that. So would Tony Stark. On the other hand, Scott had often thought that Tony Stark could only be as much of a save-the-world-the-asshole-way as he sometimes was because there was Steve Rogers being the anti-asshole over there with his damned shiny shield. Scott realized that maybe he needed Logan to be the get-the-job-done-the-berserker-thug-way guy as much as Logan needed Scott to be an uptight boy scout. Maybe if Scott ever stopped playing by the rules Logan would have to start playing by them. That would suck for Logan. It might be worth doing it for that reason alone, some day. Maybe, too, if Logan stopped gutting people who threatened mutants, Scott might have to start. He wondered if this numb lack of conviction was true nihilism or just another flavor of grief. He was wary of being alone with himself, at present. Afraid of what he might glimpse in the mirror.)

Now, as he made his way, as silently as he could, through a thunderstorm, with scared, dripping kids, creeping on his heels, the trees storm-lashed, the wind shrieking, having to edge through a lightning-torn window of opportunity to get back to their van before the crazed maniacs with guns hunting them doubled back and cut off their retreat, he could feel a niggling doubt that his past self wouldn't have countenanced. He wasn't going to give it headspace. It had no right to put out a tendril, let alone put down roots, but there were days, and this was one of them, when he needed every ounce of the control he'd acquired so painfully over the years. When he needed all the moral certainties that he had shored up with philosophy and debate and long, involved discussions with Xavier over ethics, to ward off the: Why not just crank the visor up to maximum, or, hell, just take it off, open your eyes as wide as they go, and blast these mutant-hating scumbags into oblivion?

Sometimes Because it isn't right felt like such a frail thing to hang onto. Like he was safety-harnessing himself to a cobweb. A few months after the woman he loved had died because a human maniac had wanted to wipe out every mutant in the world, it felt particularly insubstantial.

There had been blood in the kitchen when they came back to it. Logan had ripped open a human there, claws fully extended. Dazed with grief for Jean who was dead and crushed and drowned and gone, Scott had looked at the corpse and the dried blood and guessed he should feel sorry, should disapprove, but the guy was a soldier, with a loaded weapon, who had chosen to fight a war against unarmed schoolchildren. Looking down at that dead human crumpled on the floor, his mind had been a whirl of sorrow and denial and Socratic debate, but his gut had thought: Serves you right. He wondered what he was going to become without Jean around. She had always been wiser and stronger than he was and now he was without her strength and her wisdom. It was the first time he'd been able to pull away from the ache of grief for long enough to even envisage the future as anything except an abyss. Would he be stronger because the worst had already happened to him? Would he grow brittle and remote? He didn't know who Scott Summers was without Jean Grey in his life. He wondered if he ever would.

He thought he heard a groan and held up a hand for quiet. All stopped except for Jamie who bumped into Bobby and turned into six equally wet, miserable little boys. Scott could imagine that lighting up on those mutant hunters' screens and, sure enough, there were shouts at once from places all around them, and, nothing like distant enough, flares of red light in the dripping red shadows. He tossed Rogue the keys and said, "Jamie, keep yourself together. Everyone get to the van. Wait for the thunder before you start it up. Don't wait for me. That's an order."

Rogue said fiercely, "We ain't going anywhere without you."

Bobby said, more reasonably, "There's more chance of finding that wounded mutant if we all look for him."

"Just get to the damned van!" Scott said, and if he wasn't shouting, his voice was a lot louder than he had intended. He flinched and said more reasonably, "Give me ten minutes, then, but, please, go to the van."

Rogue gave him a furious look of disapproval but grabbed Jamie's hand in her gloved one and hauled him after her at double time.

Scott was left ducking through the undergrowth, blinking rain from his eyes, red rain from a red sky, steaming red in a red forest, wishing he had Logan or Hank's sense of smell, because there was probably a blood trail, but he couldn't scent it. He crouched low, and there it came again, another groan. You yelled at the kids. He hadn't actually yelled – he'd just come closer to it than he had ever intended. Shouting at children was something bullies did. Jack Winters had yelled at him every day of the miserable few months they'd spent together; the guy had done nothing but lock him inside a series of ever shrinking rooms, beat him, threaten him with inventive kinds of pain, and shout about how worthless Scott was and how much Winters owned him. Scott had resolved right there, in that squalid little room, ribs singing from a thrown chair, anger and misery fighting each other in the crimson throb behind his eyes, that he would never treat anyone the way Winters treated him. He would never be the guy who shouted so loud the windows rattled in their frames or told a mutant kid that he was a useless little freak while he held lit cigarettes to his skin.

Scott rubbed his arm reflexively as he inched forward. He had scars he was proud of; ones well-won, but there was no honor attached to those small, puckered circles. He had been scared and squirming and he had taken it and taken it, to the scent of his own skin burning, until sheer self-preservation had made him snap because it was fight back this time or the guy was going to throttle the life out of him. (Hank had told him, later, that the flexibility of his adolescent hyoid was probably what had saved him. Had Scott been a few years older, with ossification complete, he would not have been so lucky.) And it had taken another vicious beating and being choked half to death with a boot to the throat for him to get there, even so. The only part he was proud of was that he hadn't actually killed Winters when he could have done, despite really, really wanting to. (Logan would probably think that was his biggest mistake.) He could hear the sound of ragged breathing now. He must be very close, but in the dripping shadows, he couldn't see what kind of mutant he was dealing with, and he didn't want to get a bone spike through the visor or a steel claw in the ribs.

He said softly, "My name's Summers. I'm a mutant. Let me help you."

Another groan and then raggedly, "Gladly, mon ami…."

Scott pulled back the undergrowth in disbelief. "Gambit…?"

***

Even though she was the one holding tight to the keys, Rogue said, "You start this van before Scott gets back here, Bobby Drake, and I swear to the almighty I will –"

Bobby said to her very quietly, "Those guys know where Multiple was when his powers showed up on their monitors. Waiting in the caves while they worked this grid reference and then circling back won us a little bit of time, but they're still barely a mile away and you can bet they're all coming west now. Scott's the leader of the X-Men and a trained fighter with the equivalent of a nuclear weapon in his head. Jamie's twelve. How many times has Scott told us in the training sessions that everything on a mission is about prioritizing? Now, between a twelve year-old Jamie and a twenty-six year-old Scott, who do you think has the most chance of evading capture from crazy mutant hunters? – because my money isn't on Jamie."

It hurt more because she knew he was right. She said, just as quietly, "Logan's worried Scott's got a death wish. He told me one night, after too many beers, that when they're in the Danger Room, it's like there's part of Scott all the time that wants to step in front of the weapons. Logan thinks he doesn't even know why he's doing it. What if he's got survivor's guilt because Jean died and he didn't?"

"Then the sooner we get within reach of the Professor's telepathy, the quicker we get Logan out here helping Scott."

"I hate it when you have an answer for everything." She turned to Kitty. "Are you going to weigh in any time soon?"

"I think you're both right. I think Bobby needs to get the other kids home. I think someone needs to help Scott." She and Rogue exchanged a speaking look and Rogue nodded. "Count me in."

That was when Scott struggled up into the van, half carrying a bleeding, half-dead Remy LeBeau. Springing up to help him, Rogue was horrified by the cuts, the bruises, the bleeding, and the head Gambit was barely strong enough to hold up, but was in time to hear him murmur, "Dey runnin' a mutant chop-shop, Cyke. And dey runnin' it on dat cable show I was telling you 'bout."

Rogue looked at Scott in confusion. "'Cable show'?"

Scott said, "He's lost a lot of blood. I need to take a look at him."

Gambit said weakly, "You don't wanna see the things dey been doin'. Like I said, Betsy-girl was showing us –"

"How come Psylocke can do that now?"

"She just back from dat Mojo-place. Powers amped to de max. Says it's temporary, but, right now, she a one-woman radio tower. Course she ain't transmittin' nothin' with that collar on –"

Gambit was usually all charm and confidence, but now he was shivering, soaking, and white as Warren Worthington's wings. Scott helped him to a seat and pulled up his shirt, tight-lipped at the wound. It made Rogue feel sick – it wasn't a jagged cut, but deep and clean and precise, like it had been made with a scalpel. It was too neat an incision to be keeping company with all those bootmarks on his ribs. Amara had already got down the first aid kit and Scott ripped open sterile dressings like he could do it with his eyes closed and had done, many times. It was a little disconcerting how fast Scott was at seeing to a wound. As possible future X-Men, everyone in the van couldn't help seeing that this current X-Man had way too much experience in dealing with bad field injuries. Ten years of missions clearly added up to an awful lot of First Aid practice. That was in no way a comforting thought.

Scott said, "I'm not stitching this without an anesthetic – I already know enough Cajun curse words. Can you take me gluing it?"

"You kiddin'? How long Gambit been trying to get up close and personal with you anyway?"

Rogue was both fascinated and horrified by the way Scott and Gambit just kept talking, even though Scott now had his hand in Gambit's abdomen sticking him back together with superglue and Gambit looked as if he'd been through a shredder. She thought about what Bobby and Kitty had said earlier and wondered if they were right – if humans could see what she was seeing right now, Gambit tortured and cut open with a scalpel, just because, would they feel bad? Would they want it stopped?

"You're sure he's dead – the mutant who got you out?"

"Cyke, dey broke his head like a pumpkin. Without him, Gambit was dead in dat place…."

"You charm him into it?"

Gambit's red gaze flickered up to Scott. "Can Gambit help being charmin'? You know it only don't work on you cause I ain't got the heart to be rough with you. That Danger Room has warped you. You think if someone being gentle with you – just means dey don't have their settings turned up high enough."

Seeing as how Scott was usually all stern and businesslike in a crisis, his grin was unexpected. "Never change, Remy."

"I'm gonna bag you yet, Cyke. See if I don't. Ain't no one can resist Gambit forever."

"You're welcome to keep trying," Scott assured him, clearly amused. "I'll buy you dinner when you're stitched back together again – you can give it your best shot." He put the cap back on the superglue and wiped off his hands before he worked on the dressings.

"Scott, Gambit give it his best shot, you be putty in his hands. Ain't fair to bring out the big guns when all a man's huntin' is small game. Now if we were talkin' about dat Wolverine…."

Scott taped the bandage, tearing off the strips with neat bites of his even, white teeth. "Seriously, Gambit? You really want to go there? The guy has metal claws and no impulse control."

"So how come you ain't datin' him? I thought dat guy would be right up Mister Livin' Dangerously's alley." Gambit tilted his head to look at Scott's ass. "Which is a place a lot of mutants Gambit know would like to visit..."

As Scott was so expertly bandaging the wound, Rogue murmured to Bobby, "What do you suppose they were trying to do to Gambit…?"

"I think they may have been trying to remove his liver."

Perhaps she had already been an X-Man too long, because she didn't even throw up, and, after finding out about there being people like Stryker in the world, there was only the smallest saddest little voice in her head that still didn't want to believe saying: "No…."

Scott said to Gambit, "Okay, the bleeding's under control for now. As long as you lie flat I think you'll be okay until Hank can patch you up. Don't bug the kids too much or they'll probably try to make you explode."

Gambit grabbed Scott's wrist. "Don't go in dere alone. What dey do to de ugly ones is bad enough. What dey do to we pretty ones – is worse."

"I'll be fine. Just try not to bleed out on the way home." Scott elevated Gambit's feet with a handy backpack, covered him with a blanket from the overhead locker, and said to Rogue, "Are you driving?"

"Bobby's driving," she said, throwing him the keys.

Scott tensed and there was a breathless second when she thought he was going to say something but there was no time, and they both knew it. She exhaled as Scott turned to Bobby and gave him instructions about: waiting for the thunder before he started the engine, resisting the urge to ice the road behind him, and ensuring the windows were closed. He stressed the last part.

Confused, Sam said, "Won't the cloaking work if the windows are open?"

Scott said blandly, "No." He hesitated in the doorway and then said, "I have complete faith in all of you, that's why I'm not coming with you. If I didn't, trust me, I wouldn't feel able to do my job. Only use your powers if you absolutely have to and please get Gambit home as fast as you can. Otherwise, we're never going to get the stains out of the upholstery."

Gambit gave him a weak smile. "You all heart, Scott."

Scott nodded, headed back out into the rain and left everyone with a feeling of ragged confidence.

Rogue said in an angry whisper to Kitty, "That's bullshit. If he had complete faith in us, he'd have had us help him take those guys out. What the hell does he think he's gonna accomplish by himself except getting killed? We already lost Jean! He doesn't have the right to do this to us!"

"Which is why we're staying here and helping him whether he likes it or not." Kitty said firmly to Bobby, "Don't forget to wait for the thunder and remember they can't see you as long as no one uses his powers."

"He told you he could manage," Bobby said.

"And you believe him?" Rogue demanded.

"I think he's a lot more capable than we are," Bobby returned. "I also think he's going to do the best he can to stay alive when there are mutants being tortured and experimented on that he might be able to save by not being dead. Don't you?"

She had never wanted to do anything as much as she wanted to kiss him goodbye. She put her gloved hand over his mouth and kissed the back of it instead. "I think men are all idiots," Rogue told him. "Drive safely."

He said, "Try not to get captured or killed, both of you. We'll send reinforcements."

Then they were back out in the rain and the last glimpse they had of any of them was Bobby's pale face and Gambit's pained smile before they stepped outside and the shimmer of the cloaking device hid the van from their sight.

The lightning cracked and they were briefly lit up. Kitty looked twelve, with her hair scraped back in that ponytail, strands escaping, a smudge of dirt on her nose from the cave. She also looked resolute. As the skies roared, they felt rather than heard the vibration of the van's engine as it started up; the sound of it moving away was completely overwhelmed by that earth-shaking thunder. Bobby had clearly not stalled this time.

Rogue thought, We're in this now. She and Kitty had made a command decision; they had disobeyed Scott and were about to put themselves in harm's way. It felt equally wrong and right at the same time, and that seemed so unfair. Shouldn't a girl be able to feel it if she was making the right choice? Then she thought of Scott on the jet as Jean was still dying under all that water and the look on his face as he realized he couldn't get to her. She imagined having to picture that scene in her head all the way home as they drove further and further away from a place where they had left him, alone, to deal with forty crazy mutant hunters with guns, and knew that however bad this felt – being the bad girls who had gone against a direct order – it couldn't feel as bad as that.

Kitty grabbed Rogue's gloved hand, and for a girl who could phase through concrete walls, she had a warm, firm grip. "We're going to find a vantage point and see what our options are," she said.

That was right out of the last extra training session Scott had given them. She could hear the laughter in the Professor's voice as he explained the allocation of teachers: If we want you to learn control, we give you Storm, if we want you to learn to think tactically, we give you Scott, and if we just want to terrify you, we usually give you Logan. Oddly enough, all approaches seem equally effective.

Aloud, she said, "We're going to need all our lessons, Kitty: we're going to have to stay calm, keep control, think tactically, and possibly be absolutely terrifying."

Kitty said, "Cinch." And tugged her up a tree just before the mutant hunters arrived with their headlights flashing and their weapons sending thin cruel red beams ahead of them.

***

TWO

Concealed in the friendly fork of a fir tree, Rogue was angry, not least because the leader of the X-Men wasn't following his own rulebook. This was right out of Scenario 27b; the one where an enemy with superior numbers and superior forces needed to be demoralized into breaking ranks. All Scott's scenarios had clearly outlined ways that a team tackled that problem, and that meant hitting them from different angles in an apparently random attack that was nevertheless carefully coordinated but whose patterns the enemy could not immediately follow and therefore anticipate, if possible with at least one part of the team offering air support. What was the point in her writing all that down in a notebook if he wasn't going to stick to it when he was in the field? Scott's team was currently down a telekinetic, a weather witch, a genius scientist, and a guy with healing factor and adamantium claws, and, last time she'd checked, Scott couldn't fly, so how exactly was he planning on making up the shortfall if Rogue and Kitty didn't help?

Kitty said, "Let's just see what he does. He may have a plan."

"He hasn't had time to have a plan."

"Dr McCoy says has one of those brains where battle scenarios run in the background all the time like a computer game. He also said that's probably why he has no life."

"How does he intend to mount an attack from all sides when he can only be in one place at one time?"

"He'll do something clever with his optic beams," Kitty said confidently. "You know he can make them ricochet all over the place. If he hits enough of those guys with geometric pain, they'll think they've got multiple targets."

"Not if they're smart enough to see it's just one red beam bouncing off a lot of different surfaces and trace the initial impact back to where Scott's standing."

(They'd been given a lesson on doing exactly that by Scott – on the grounds that if he was mind-controlled again, like when Stryker had him, they might have to take him out. It had started in the classroom with a rousing hour of complex geometry, including The Physics of Refraction and Understanding Phase Velocity (no one except Kitty had) before they had all headed to the Danger Room for a two-hour session that might as well have been titled How To Kill Cyclops Just For Fun. Here, their reluctance to get into the spirit of things had confused Scott. He'd kept asking them to start over because Bobby didn't want to Clopsicle him, even though it would have stopped him in his tracks. ('What about putting you into hypothermic shock?' Bobby had demanded. To which Scott, not in any way getting it, had said encouragingly, 'Yes, that would work.') And Rogue, spoilsport that she was, had shown all that wussy reluctance about putting him into a coma. ('But that's the most logical approach, Rogue. Just work out how to stop me using the force beams first so you can get close enough to touch me.') They had been thoroughly unnerved and he had been perplexed as to why they were dragging their heels over the petty little matter of all ganging up on a broken-hearted, grieving guy they really liked, and trying to do him harm. Bobby had spoken for everyone when he murmured to Rogue: 'Seriously – who raised this guy that he thinks we'd be okay with doing that to him? Because I'm thinking wolves would have been a step up at this point.')

They had all hated that lesson and Logan had been waiting for them as they trudged miserably out of the Danger Room, clearly having watched the whole session. He had yelled at Scott about traumatizing them with his goddamned guilt complex. Scott had just let Logan's anger wash over him like a passing cloud and said, stolidly, that they both knew it was a possibility and everyone needed to be prepared for it. Logan had grabbed Scott by the shirt front and slammed him back against the wall and Scott had just let him; he hadn't even been mad, although he usually stood up to Logan; but this time he seemed to get that Logan had something he needed to work through and shoving Scott against a wall was just part of that machinery, or perhaps he just didn't care what harm came to him now that Jean was gone. It had made Rogue feel weird that Scott did nothing to defend himself, just let Logan slam him against the paneling twice, without even flinching, even though Logan was furious, and then waited, patiently, for the third slam, before Logan lowered him back down and smoothed out the creases in his shirt.

"This isn't what these kids need right now, Slim, that's all," Logan had muttered, which Rogue had guessed was Wolverine for 'Sorry I shoved you into a wall'. He even took a step back, so he was no longer in Scott's personal space, his mouth more than an inch from Scott's again.

"Crises don't tend to play by Marquess of Queensbury rules, Logan. And they don't wait for you to be able to bear them. They just show up anyway. I could take the roof off this place just by opening my eyes. The kids need to know how to stop me."

"And how did they think they could stop you?"

"Their favorite option was to let you take care of it."

Logan had grimaced. "Don't think I wouldn't."

"I know you would. It's one of the reasons why I'd like you to stick around."

There had been a sudden fire in Logan's eyes then, and he had moved back into Scott's personal space like it was his by right. His voice had been a strange, dark growl, like it was coming from somewhere very low: "What are the other reasons?"

Rogue had seen that growl of Logan's do something to Scott that threw him off balance in a way that being slammed around hadn't. A frown chased itself across his face and he faltered. "I don't… I mean – there are lots of reasons. You're an asset to the school. The Professor –"

Logan took a step back. "Yeah, get back to me when you buy a clue, Bub."

Scott had hesitated as if there were things he wanted to say, and then, as Logan seemed to have finished mauling him about, smoothed down his creased shirt and headed off, straight-backed and elegant.

Rogue and Logan had both watched him go and Rogue had said tentatively, "Logan, I don't think Scott really understands subtle, not when it comes to, you know…people liking him."

"Who says I like him?" Logan had snapped back.

"He and Jean took us on this day trip to the museum. There was another school there, older kids – all girls, and they were all hitting on him like you wouldn't believe, and he really didn't have a clue. He thought they were asking him all those damn fool questions because they saw him as a teacher, because he just saw them as schoolgirls, he didn't even notice the unbuttoned blouses and the shiny lip gloss or the way they were all twirling their fingers in their hair and looking at his mouth and licking their lips. If there was maybe a guy who liked him, and Scott thought that guy liked girls, he'd never think that guy liked him that way, even if that guy was making it kinda obvious to anyone not actually carrying a white stick…. Which is weird, because you'd think Scott would be clued up by now, on account of Warren saying that, in the old days, Scott at a party could turn straight guys…not-so-straight faster than a keg of beer and an unethical telepath."

Logan had that fiery look in his eyes again. "You don't say."

"He said he was frat boy catnip – back then. Apparently, jocks used to spike his drinks then try to get him alone in a locked room so they could…."

And there it was, that chesty, murderous growl she'd been hoping for. Now she knew she was right. Rogue shrugged. "Warren said that he and Doctor McCoy always got Scott out of there in time, though. Far as they knew."

When Logan had charged off in the direction of Hank's laboratory for clarification, reassurance, and quite possibly a list of names, Rogue had taken that as a step down the right path. She wanted Logan to stick around; whatever he might think, he did better around people. They were good for him, this school was good for him, and Logan had assets he could offer them all. She also thought no one had a better chance of keeping Scott safe than him. She felt she owed it to Jean to try to keep both the guys Jean had cared for alive and well in the mansion and, whether those two knew it or not, they really did like each other. Not being able to touch the boy you wanted and who wanted you, it was all too easy to remember that guys needed to get up close and personal with the things they liked, or the feeling didn't last. She suspected Logan wasn't the kind of guy who could go too long without a sex-life, and, the way Scott looked, if Logan didn't grab him, someone else would, probably that Frost woman with her see-through clothes, and, even with the rages and the claws, Logan would probably be a lot gentler in bed with Scott than her.)

As the rain dripped down on them, Kitty said, "You still think Logan's the best option for Scott?"

"Well, we both know Storm has that thing for T'Challa."

"Do you blame her? Not only is the guy one of the smartest people on the planet, he's gorgeous, and he has all those…special attributes, like the super-strength and being a trained gymnast and linked to the panther god. I mean, I'm fond of Scott and all, but between him and T'Challa and who's the coolest, there's no contest."

"That's why I'm saying Ororo's a non-starter for taking on Scott, and I don't want Emma Frost getting her hooks into him. Do you still think Doctor McCoy would be better?"

"They've known each other longer and he's much better tempered."

"But them knowing each other so long is the problem. If something was going to happen between them it would have done by now."

Kitty said, "Doctor McCoy would never hit Scott. I'm not so sure about Logan."

"Scott wouldn't care, he'd just hit him back harder."

"But then Scott would break his hand on Logan's face."

"Well, he'd use his beams then."

Kitty nodded. "Yes, that's true. He could do that."

"Otherwise, it'll just be that Frost woman. She'll just move in and start sleeping with Scott until he gets used to her being around and to having all that great sex. Hell, she could just get in his head and make him think he likes her. At least Logan would ask him first. And Logan likes him…that way. I want Logan to be happy."

"I want Logan to be happy, too, it's just…you know…this is Scott we're talking about. He can make people kind of crazy, and it's not like Logan isn't half way to crazy on a good day."

She and Kitty exchanged a glance and Rogue did read her own disquiet in Kitty's eyes. It was true that Logan was a lot stronger and hairier and angrier than Jean. It would have been nice if he had been a little better-tempered, and maybe washed more often, but Scott was a Stoic – Doctor McCoy had taught them about those – and stoics were used to putting up with stuff. And, Scott was probably clean enough for two people anyway. And if only Scott had been better with people, there wouldn't have been this need to get him paired off again, quickly; they could have trusted him to manage his own emotional well-being, but Scott was kind of…blinkered when it came to relationships. He could read a place like it was a book, spot all the exits, the weakest and strongest parts of the structure, the places where danger could be concealed, but he didn't really…get people too well, and he was way too good-looking not to have someone moving in on him really fast now he was single. It was kinda like Scott was a baby zebra who had strayed away from the herd and there were so many damned lions closing in that it wasn't a case of keeping him safe from the lions but finding the one lion that wouldn't just devour him straight off, but might take care of him instead, and would at least scare off all the other lions….

Rogue realized she was kind of rambling but Kitty was nodding, like she got it. "I just think they'd really need their own rooms," Kitty said.

She thought about Scott coming back to that room he had shared with Jean, and it having Logan's bike-oily clothes all over the floor and beer cans scattered around the place, and blanched. "They should definitely have their own rooms."

Kitty was warming up to the idea: "They could like – sneak around at night, so they could think we didn't know, and then go back to their own rooms afterwards. Then Scott might not find out about Logan snoring. Oh, or Logan find out about Scott brushing his teeth…after, you know, sex, which apparently he does, and it sometimes made Jean mad."

"It would make Logan mad."

"But if Scott's sensible, he could just wait till Logan sneaked back to his room and then brush his teeth and no one would know."

"I don't know if I'd call Scott 'sensible' around Logan."

Kitty wrinkled her nose. "No. Sometimes he's more like a French aristocrat being carried off to the guillotine, sort of…loftily resigned. But I think it could work if they had rooms near each other but a long way from everyone else, so if they started trying to kill each other, the rest of us could still get our sleep."

Rogue said uncertainly, "But they'd try to kill each other less if they were actually having sex, not just not knowing that they want to have sex, right?"

Kitty considered the point. "I don't know, Rogue. I think it just might mean that they tried to kill each other naked. Maybe if they had their own wing, so the rest of the structure didn't get undermined if Scott started blowing holes in the walls…."

Rogue couldn't see Scott, but she could see all those red lights from the hunters. They were back to doing their careful sweep on a grid system. It made her shiver inside, their methodical, measured actions; it reminded her of the clean, precise lines of that deep incision in Gambit's body when compared with those random, vicious bruises that had mottled his ribs and his face. They were pretending to be efficient and clinical, but underneath they were just an angry mob with a different kind of flaming torches.

She hadn't really seen these hunters at all, not their faces; the storm had made the day too dark; they were just a bunch of walking Christmas lights with weapons, but she was still afraid of them and she could very easily let that fear turn to hate if she wasn't extra careful.

The river was already running faster to her jaundiced eyes, whipped up to a white froth by all that rain that had been pouring into it for the last hour. She and Kitty had already decided that if the mutant hunters moved east – and Gambit had come from the east, they had learned that much while Scott was patching him up – they would follow the river so they had a landmark. Scott and Logan had already taken them on three orienteering trips where they had been furnished with maps and compasses and told where they were heading for and how long it should take. Those estimates had proven sadly unreliable, or perhaps they were the ones who'd been unreliable. There had been a lot about mapping by landmarks; at least there had been after their ability to map by the stars had proven to be disastrous.

Scott drawing the constellations out on the blackboard for them, once again, clearly perplexed by their inability to recognize Orion when it was right there where anyone could see it; anyone, at any rate, who could find one constellation amongst the million other stars all jostling for position in the night sky. Out on that orienteering trip, Rogue had found herself looking over at the tent Scott had put up in thirty seconds flat and the one that was sagging in that woebegone fashion beside her and thinking 'We are never going to get from here to there'. It was impossible to imagine that Scott or Jean or Ororo or Hank had ever been anything but calm and efficient and able to do everything. She hadn't even realized until she tried to fly the jet how impossible it was.

Storm had said gently, "But you did it, Rogue."

"I nearly crashed it. I'm not sure I didn't crash it cause that sure wasn't like any landing I've ever known. It looks so easy when you do it."

"We're older than you are. We've had longer to learn these things. The only difference between us and you is experience – and perhaps a little scar tissue."

Storm was so beautiful it was kind of breath-stealing sometimes. It had been like that with Jean. Rogue would think she was used to it, the way the light turned Jean's hair to flame, the line of Storm's jaw, or Jean's cheekbone, then there would come the white flash of Storm's eyes, the energy coming off her like flame from a candle and Rogue would be transfixed by her. It would seem impossible that she knew this woman who had all this elemental power at her fingertips, white hair streaming, body floating effortlessly aloft, crackling with energy, and so impossibly beautiful. Storm was beyond 'Ororo' then, beyond anything, she was what they all wanted to be: transcendent and controlled, in charge of powers so magnificent that she could tear lightning from the sky, summon snow in summer, carry rain to the desert.

And, knowing all that, seeing all that in her head, as they stood in the corridor of the school, somewhere between history and geography, Rogue had also seen that Storm's eyes were soft with sorrow, because she had lost her friend, and Scott was temporarily beyond any comfort, and the grief had netted Ororo Monroe like a fallen bird. What made it worse was that the shadow in her eyes was one of remembered pain, as well, because all of the teachers at the Charlies Xavier School for Gifted Children were survivors of tragedies in which people they loved had been claimed. This wasn't a new pain for Storm; this was an old one, revived. This was the reality of Rogue's future if she stuck around. She might grow to be magnificent and at one with her powers, invulnerable and efficient and confident, but some of her friends would die along the way, and she would have to go on without them, and a part of her would go on bleeding, forever, from every past loss.

That was just one of the many days when she had thought: I don't know if I can do this. And then the other thought always followed it, like a faithful dog: If not you, then who else? And why should it be her job more than yours?

Today, felt like one of Scott's road not taken scenarios, a chance to find out exactly what happened when a mutant went up against multiple mutant hunters all by himself. Except out here, unlike the Danger Room, they couldn't just press the reset button and everything be magically okay again.

Fiercely, she whispered to Kitty, "I just think what Scott's doing is a really bad idea, and if Logan was here he wouldn't let him do it."

"Scott's the leader of the X-Men, not Logan. No one but the Professor gets to tell him what to do."

"I don't think Logan knows that."

"Well, Scott's still the one who gives Logan orders, not the other way round, and he's been doing this for ten years. Give him some credit."

Suddenly there was a red flare out of the darkness, and it was terrible and beautiful, all that rich, red, power pulsing up out of shadow to light up the sky. There was the crack of a tree breaking and Rogue waited for the red flare to arc from surface to surface, the way Scott did it in the classroom sometimes, a dance of sheer energy shooting past but never touching flesh as it angled off the walls, but nothing else happened.

"He hit a tree," she said, disappointed. "What good does that do? And ain't that kinda destructive? There could have been birds nesting in it."

Kitty grabbed her hand urgently. "We've got to go. We need to get to the river."

"Why?" Rogue demanded.

"Because Scott didn't just hit a tree, he hit the tree – the one Jamie climbed. The one…."

She didn't need to finish the sentence. Rogue could already hear that not-distant-enough angry buzzing. As they scrambled down inelegantly, slithering from branch to branch, glad they were as close as they were to the river, Rogue was thinking that she should have guessed when Scott told them to wind up the windows. And then, as they plunged under the icy surface of the water, she thought, No, I should have known for sure when I identified the battle scenario. He needed a support team that had a centralized intelligence but an unpredictable attack plan. He's the leader of the X-Men; he was gonna find one from somewhere.

That was when, even above the rushing of the river, the sound of the buzzing, and the pounding of their own heartbeats, they heard the first shrieks of pain.

They bobbed up under the far bank, shielded by foliage, and flinched from the screaming and running, and imagined the maddened flailing and tripping. Rogue was trying to remember what she knew about hornet stings; she was pretty sure they could just keep stinging you if they were mad enough; that had to hurt like hell.

Kitty said, "I guess that's how you 'subdue the enemy without fighting'."

"I guess those hunter guys shouldn't have tried to cut out Gambit's liver."

Kitty said, “If Scott's sticking with his Sun Tzu, he's probably thinking: 'Be where your enemy is not'. Going by the trajectory of that beam, I make Scott three miles east of here. Let's get after him.”

"If these guys catch up with Scott after being stung by a load of angry hornets they're going to be really pissed with him."

Kitty waded upstream, still keeping low, both of them holding onto the tree roots to pull themselves forward against the flow of the water. Over her shoulder, she said, "I think he's way ahead of them."

Rogue wished that she could just do what Kitty was doing and remain quietly confident that Scott would prevail. She wanted to believe it, too, but it just didn't feel right, him being out here by himself. There was a reason why X-Men fought as a team. He shouldn't be alone, she thought, the same way she had thought it about Logan when she pictured his life before he came to the mansion. People could believe they were loners and still need not to be alone. People could believe they had nothing left to live for and still be in need of saving. Sometimes, they could even be the most efficient fighter and the most skilled strategist and still need to have someone to help them out. She said it out loud, fiercely, like she could slap him with the words if he was only close enough: "He shouldn't be alone."

"He isn't," Kitty said firmly. "He's got us. He may not know it yet and he may be mad as hell when he finds out, but that's just tough, because whether he likes it or not, we've got his back." She hastily grabbed Rogue and phased them into the trunk of a tree as a mutant hunter ran along the bank, flailing and tearing at his clothes, while, on his heels a huge, shaggy shape roared past, turning its head to snap at pursuing hornets. It was strange how quiet the silence seemed after they were gone. Kitty phased them back out again, eyebrows aloft. "And I always thought 'Exit, pursued by a bear' was one of Shakespeare's more unlikely lines," she said thoughtfully.

The bear roared and there was a horrified screaming and more roaring and then a nasty, crunchy sort of silence. Rogue grimaced and hoped Kitty wasn't traumatized, but Kitty had seen what was done to Gambit, too, she guessed, because she quoted softly: "'Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, Exhilarate the spirit, and restore The tone of languid nature.'" She gave Rogue a defiant look. "Cowper. Remember, Scott covered that one before…?"

Before he had started crying and not even knowing he was doing it, because men who hated mutants had brought about the death of the woman he loved, and would have killed them all, Rogue and Kitty and every mutant on the planet, just for being different. Suddenly, the crunchy silence didn't seem so bad.

Rogue said, "But, seriously, Kitty, if any of these guys survive, when they catch up to Scott they're going to do terrible, awful things to him."

Kitty had her eyes narrowed, that big brain of hers working overtime. "I wish I knew what Gambit told him about that laboratory place."

They waded on through the water for a while and then as the rain eased, and the sound of buzzing and screaming became fainter, risked climbing out on the bank. After having to wade through that rapid weight of water, just walking normally felt like a rest cure.

"He said 'mutant chop shop', and that fits in with what Rahne overheard about us only being fit for spare parts, but what about that 'cable show' thing he said?"

Kitty shuddered. "Do you think there are people who would pay to watch bad things done to mutants? Do you think they hate us that much?"

Rogue took her hand in her gloved one and squeezed it. "People like that – they'd always be hating something. If it wasn't us, it would be someone else." But they were both shivering and not just with the river water dripping from their clothes, trying to envisage a hate so violent, and wondering where it came from, how it could keep feeding itself in the face of rationality and reason. What they had ever done to deserve it being aimed at them.

That was when a beefy hand reached out from the bushes and grabbed Kitty by the shoulder. "Gotcha! You filthy gene-freak!"

Rogue forgot all about being scared – she was too busy being mad as a hornet herself – as she wheeled around, snarling, "She's fifteen! You crazy pedo scumbag!"

A looming black-masked figure with a glowing light on his forehead, shoved a big, impressive gun in her face, and she heard herself snarl again. She whipped off her right glove, grabbed the guy by the wrist and pulled the barrel into her own midriff. "Bring it, tough guy. You sure you've got enough ordnance to take on two little girls?" When he wavered under her touch and then fell back, it was just as well his wrist was tugged free from her fingers because the urge to just go on holding him until he was comatose was almost overwhelming. Even when the thug was unconscious at her feet, she could still see those cuts and bruises on Gambit's handsome face, the blood welling up from where the scalpel had cut so murderously deep. It cost her something to take a step back when she could just reach out and touch someone and, in doing so, make the world a better place.

But it wouldn't make you a better person.

That came in Jean's voice, like a soft sighing between the trees. And the second voice in her head was Storm's:

Sometimes, alone in the dark, you are all you have. And everything you are has to last you a lifetime…. Do not be in too much hurry to become a murderer. Once it is done, you cannot undo it. You cannot ever be guiltless again.

Rogue realized that Storm was right; she didn't want to be a murderer yet. She thought about picking up the gun and then realized that it would weigh a ton and was a dumb weapon anyway, so just kicked it into the river. "Kitty…?"

She anxiously rounded a tree to find that Kitty had phased her assailant into the ground, with just his head sticking out. He was struggling vainly to free himself and threatening ugly things.

Rogue said, "Nap time for you, bozo, and you should wash your mouth out with soap." She reached under his mask, and her fingers on his skin had him slumped like a particularly unsightly broken-stemmed flower. She might have taken some pleasure in her ability to do that if it wasn't too easy to picture Bobby knocked out the same way from one unwise pressure of her lips against his. Kitty phased their victim out of the ground and dumped him, then tossed his rifle into the river after his fellow's. She looked down at him oddly. "Do you want to see their faces?" she whispered.

Rogue took a step back. "No."

"That way we'd know them again."

"What if they just look like everyone? What if they are just like everyone else? How do we go on doing what we do then?"

They left them masked and walked on, hugging the shadows, Rogue with her right glove clutched in her right hand like it was a lifeline, her fingers trembling in readiness. Kitty reached back and circled her arm through hers. "They're not like everyone else. The world has better people in it."

"Well, why don't they do something to stop the people like that?" Rogue demanded hoarsely.

"I guess that's one of those questions that is never going to get answered. All we can do is make sure we're not part of the problem."

"Some days I don't even know if the problem is them or us. It feels like it's Magneto one week, Stryker the next. Is everyone else just plumb crazy?"

Kitty said, "Rogue, some days I'm not even sure that we're sane…."

"Well, at least we're saner than most of the teachers," Rogue pointed out.

"You know, seeing as they started out at the mansion at our age and then grew up the way they did – the same way we're growing up – that's not a comforting thought."

They found the message from Scott a few miles further east. There were two branches arranged in an 'X' on the south bank and concealed under a neat pile of leaves was the plastic bag. It contained a USB stick and a note: Collect Data. Erase HDD. Don't Interfere. It was in Scott's usual neat, unflurried handwriting, just as if he was annotating an essay, rather than fleeing angry hornets and angrier hunters.

Rogue made an incoherent noise of frustration which was not a snarl or a growl. "Damn, that man is annoying!"

"Annoying that he knew we were going to follow him from the second you said Bobby was driving? That he knew we'd come this way? That he took a thumbdrive with him on a field trip? That he obviously didn't have to wade through the river like we did because this notepaper is dry as a bone despite us being in the middle of a thunderstorm? Or…?"

"All of it!" They stumped after him, Rogue still angry. "I swear sometimes I think Logan's too good for him!"

Most of the hunters were behind them. They had been scattered and were trying to regroup, but the hornets had got the whole forest riled up, and the storm wasn't helping. Thinking of their neat lines as they quartered the woods earlier, trying to track them down, Rogue felt a certain grim satisfaction in how completely they had been routed. They would get themselves organized again, though, and when they did, she really wouldn't have wanted to be in Scott's shoes.

"Gambit seemed to like him?" Kitty offered and Rogue realized she was still a semi-holdout on the Logan pairing.

"Gambit likes everyone."

Kitty gave her a sideways look. "Logan said Gambit's a gumbo-sucking whore."

"Had Gambit been flirting with Scott at all before Logan said that?"

"Now you come to mention it, yes, he had. You know, I'd never really seen Scott flirting before. I didn't think he knew how, but he…kinda gets it with Gambit."

"Gambit could get a Purifier to flirt with him, but he wouldn't keep Scott safe. That swamp-rat needs someone to keep him safe."

"Scott thinks Scott can manage fine by himself."

Grimly, Rogue said, "Scott's wrong."

That was when they rounded a bend in the river to find the place where the hunters had left their vehicles. She had been expecting the vans to show signs of being blasted by force beams, but other than that their hoods were up, they seemed in reasonable shape, albeit with no keys; then she noticed that Scott had extracted the distributor cap from every engine but one. He had left a single black van intact.

"Smarter than just taking the keys," Rogue admitted. "That means they can't just hotwire them."

"Do you think he left this one for us?"

"Well, I don't think he meant you to drive it, sugar, that's for sure."

They heard the shouting getting louder and threw themselves into the undamaged van and sped up the muddy trail towards the road. As Rogue was driving, Kitty phased through the wall of the cab to see what lay beyond. Glancing in her side mirror, Rogue could see a scattering of hunters just arriving in the clearing, one took off after them on foot and she floored the gas pedal, watching with satisfaction the way his blotched, angry, mutant-hating face receded out of sight.

Kitty phased back, silently. "What did you find back there?" Rogue asked, and, when there was no answer, she turned her head. Kitty looked ghostly. She sat down in the passenger seat and did up her seatbelt like she wanted some safety in her life.

"Collars, cuffs, chains, things like tazers. Things I don't even want to know what they do."

Rogue gritted her teeth, the anger welling up like blood from an old wound. Things for capturing mutants, suppressing mutant powers, making mutants hurt. Things those scumbags had brought with them to capture a group of mutant kids. "And Scott thinks it's a good idea to go heading straight to Mutant Torture Central!"

Kitty said, "Rogue, I know you had to touch Logan to come back to life those times, but you don't need to keep channeling him."

"You see me popping a claw?"

"Well, you look like you want to."

"Well, I'm pissed with Scott. We should all have been taking on this place. All those mutant powers driving off in the wrong direction when we could have a use for them here."

Kitty said, "I agree with you, but you've got to look at it from his point of view – he couldn't keep Jean safe and she was an omega level mutant. Is it really that surprising he isn't feeling confident about keeping a bunch of school kids alive on a mission?"

"I'd have more sympathy if I thought he gave a damn right now about keeping Scott Summers alive on a mission."

There were business cards in the glove compartment with the name of the place: Risman Enterprises, and an address, and it was so close by that Kitty had still been trying to work out how to use the satnav when they saw the complex up ahead. The place was low, gray, and windowless, like an aircraft hanger. Kitty phased them in through the wall and they discovered that there was nothing much happening on this floor, not least because someone had already laid out and tied up the two guards on the front desk.

"Scott," Rogue said. On the wall behind the unconscious guards' heads, written with a thick black marker pen in Scott's unmistakably neat penmanship was: 14c.

Kitty said in a whisper, "I liked 27b better – everyone came home alive. When we tried out 14c in the Danger Room, the decoy got pounded."

Rogue looked like she was having to fight herself but she said, "We have our orders. Let's find the main computer and start collecting data."

Kitty wished they could wriggle out of it somehow, but the fact remained that Scott was the leader of the X-Men, he had been doing this for ten years longer than they had, he did know what he was doing when it came to coordinating missions, and things tended to go a lot better if people just did what he said. Convincing people of that was the hard part. It was all right for Captain America, of course, he was older than everyone except Logan and God, and he had the innate self-confidence of someone who had been given a chance to grow up before anyone started heaping responsibility on his shoulders. He also had…something, charisma, perhaps, or good old fashioned conviction, that made one want to follow him into battle. Kitty had only seen him from a distance and had been, frankly, dazzled. He was a big, handsome, broad-shouldered hero, who really did seem as if he would have carried a mantle of greatness even without the costume, even without the shield. Scott was younger than most of the people he was giving orders to, was quietly-spoken, tortured by self-doubt, and part of a race that was considered by many humans at best undesirable and, at worst, downright monstrous. He wasn't necessarily inspiring – some days he could be really dull and earnest – and he certainly wasn't scary. Sometimes, next to Doctor McCoy and Logan and their bulging biceps, Scott looked like the chess nerd unaccountably bussed in to give a pep talk to the jocks. People could walk right past him and not even notice he was there. No one walked past Captain America.

Scott didn't demand that people followed him, he just demonstrated quietly and patiently, over and over again, all the reasons why people should, and it still felt like he had to keep re-earning the respect that should have been his by right now. Even loving Logan, as she did, Kitty had to admit that he really hadn't helped with that situation. But she and Rogue couldn't be on the 'Scott really doesn't get enough respect around here' train and then decide to jump off before it reached their station. This was the point where they followed orders and trusted that those orders made sense. This was the point where they agreed that they on no account interfered with whatever he had set in motion because that wasn't their job.

And it wasn't as if they didn't have enough to do. #14 had been a reconnaissance mission to Trask's Sentinel program factory. 14c had been the alternate scenario where they not only collected data for their own use but destroyed the data on the hard-drive once they'd extracted it. Scott still believed that scenario would have been the best one but they'd run out of time and been forced to go with 14b instead. There had been mutants kept in pens to test the Sentinel prototypes upon them and they had, even with scenario 14a, managed to set those free.

Kitty phased them through the floor to the room where the computer and the security monitors were, only to find both the guards here had been laid out and tied up as well. "He's not leaving us anything to do," she complained. And then she saw the note he had left for them on the monitor. "He's kidding, right? I can't do all this!"

Rogue wordlessly pushed the note back under her nose and put her thumb by the last line. There, in Scott's neat handwriting were his last words: You can do this.

As Kitty hacked her way through Risman Enterprises' threadbare security features, she said bitterly, "Sometimes I really hate Scott."

Kitty had done it with exactly three seconds to spare. All the complicated footage-looping and fake readings accomplished as the hornet-stung hunters came charging in through the front door.

Rogue said, "Did you set up the secondary…?"

Kitty said, "Yes!" grabbed her and phased them both through the wall into the locked office beyond. She paled as she realized what she had done. "I left the note behind!"

Rogue grabbed her arm when she would have phased back and held it up. "We're good."

Relieved, Kitty was already switching on the computer to which she had routed everything via Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Australia, Singapore, and sixteen other satellite connections before bouncing everything like a pinball off a lot of vowel-challenged place-names in the Balkans. It would take a really good hacker several hours before they realized the feed was actually going to the next room, even if they realized it was going anywhere else at all. Before, she had been so busy trying to achieve the impossible in the shortest possible time that she hadn't had time to look; now she did, and promptly wished she hadn't.

Mutants, dozens of them, in a big, draughty, gray hanger, forced into small, bare cages like animals, crouched on wire floors, wrists cuffed, collars around their necks winking green to show the connection was live and working, some of them had sacks over their heads, or blindfolds, some of them had been operated on and showed signs of surgical scars. Some of them looked like children. Some of them had been tortured. Some of them were naked. One of them was Psylocke. Somehow, even caged like an animal, Betsy looked beautiful and, somehow, aloof. In the dreary, light-starved interior, her purple hair still glowed.

Kitty found herself reaching for Rogue's gloved hand mutely. Rogue squeezed her hand back, firm and comforting, but her skin looked too pale against her make-up; it matched the white stripe of her hair. Kitty steeled herself to switch to the next channel and there was the operating theatre from a few hours earlier; Gambit strapped down and screaming, spine arching, tendons straining, while surgeons cut into him with scalpels and the cameras lapped the scene up greedily and streamed it out to their subscribers.

Bitterly, Rogue said, "You think there are people watching this one-handed right now?"

"What did we ever do to them that they would want to watch this done to us?" Kitty breathed.

"Whatever it was, it doesn't justify this."

She switched back to Scott on the caged mutant channel, slipping quietly into the room, a finger to his lips to warn Psylocke not to alert the guards to his presence. He was swift and efficient, the way he brought them down; they fell silently, his blows economical and deft, and there was Scott standing over the unconscious second guard, reaching for the electronic key to unlock the cages, the camera yearning in for a close-up as if it loved his clean-shaven profile. The image shivered for a millisecond and then righted itself, smooth as a bird in flight. Scott was still crossing over to the cages to let Psylocke out when the mutant hunters burst in from both doors and pointed their weapons at the heads of the caged mutants to whom they were closest. Scott grimaced, hesitated, then, as the weapons cocked, put up his hands. They fell on him, rage-fuelled, and savage, dragging his hands down and cuffing them in front of him, fitting the collar around his neck and snapping it into place. Then one of them punched him in the gut, just because. As they dragged him out of the big room into a smaller room, one fitted with a holding cell, they punched him again and again, even though his hands were cuffed and the collar meant he couldn't use his mutant powers in any case. One would hold his arms while one pounded him, then another would hold him so the next one had the pleasure of punching him. When a particularly vicious blow put him on his knees, they dragged him up by the hair and slammed him against the bars of the holding cell.

Kitty watched the four angry, hornet-stung bruisers rolling up their sleeves and moving towards those implements they had laid out on a table ready, and said, "I can't watch this."

Rogue said tersely, "Maybe everyone needs to watch this."

The hunter with the most hornet stings on his face picked up a wand from the table.

"What is that?" Kitty asked anxiously.

"A picana. It's like a cattle prod for use on humans. High voltage, low current. Very painful."

Looking at Rogue's closed-off, angry face, Kitty found no comfort there at all.

Scott looked young and handsome and impassive, still, but there were already bruises darkening on his face and blood running from his nose and mouth. The torturer slid the picana up under his shirt and pressed it against his bruised ribs but didn't yet release the charge.

"You had mutant kids with you," the torturer said clearly, every word bell-clear in the sudden stillness. "We made it nine altogether. Where did they come from? Where have you hidden them?"

Scott said, "I'm sorry about the hornets' nest. I was scared and I panicked. You want to call the cops, I don't blame you, but I'll just tell them what I've told you – you guys looked like mutant hunters. I've been caught by people like that before and –"

Another said, "We are mutant hunters, you filth. We do what everyone should do – get you gene-freaks off the streets."

The guy with the picana said, "We're going to get really good use out of you, mutie. We're going to fuck you up, and then we're going to cut you up. Borrow a kidney, maybe, gouge out some bone marrow. There are plenty of labs working on anti-freak programs these days. You wouldn't believe what those guys will pay for fresh mutant tissue and organs and clean DNA."

"Don't do this," Scott pleaded. "Don't go down this path. Mutants and humans aren't at war. We just want to live in the same world that you do."

The picana jolted its nerve-screaming current into his side, and he cried out. The torturer leaned in close to say, "I really hope you survive the surgery, because if you do we're going to sell you on to the highest bidder. Maybe if you get lucky, your new owner won't just want you for your viable organs. Maybe he'll want to keep you alive in the basement and play with you. You like pain, mutie? From here on in, that's all you're going to know." The picana jolted its current into Scott again and Kitty cringed as the hunter kept it pressed to his side, making him writhe and twist in his bonds.

The biggest of the hornet-stung band grabbed Scott's hair and jerked his head back. "Where are the kids?" As Scott didn't answer, he snarled, "You don't need that mask now." He ripped off his visor and flung it against the wall.

Kitty and Rogue both winced at the exposure of Scott's face. It felt like more of a violation than hitting him, like they'd just stripped him naked in front of everyone when they revealed his eyes. He looked younger and more vulnerable, and his eyes, without that energy flooding through them, weren't a blazing red but a deep, quiet blue, like a pensive sea.

"Where are the kids, freak?"

"What do you want with them?" Scott asked.

The biggest one laughed. "To take them to the zoo and buy them ice-cream. What do you think?"

Scott moistened his cut lips. "They're children. They're twelve year-olds and thirteen year-olds and fourteen year-olds. Don't any of you have children?"

"If one my kids grew up mutant, I'd feed it into a wood chipper."

"We're just humans with a different strand of DNA. Most of us don't even know that we're mutants until we hit puberty."

"You need to be exterminated, like vermin. Tell me where they are?"

Scott gave him an incredulous look. "Seriously? You tell me you think all mutants need to be exterminated and then you ask me to deliver a group of schoolchildren to you?" The picana flared again and Scott jolted agonizingly from the impact, but mutely shook his head.

They kept repeating the process. Asking Scott the question and when he refused to answer, back-handing him or punching him or jolting him with the picana. It was a slow, brutal, horrifying process and Kitty found she was rocking backwards and forwards on her chair. They pulled off his shoes and socks so they could picana his feet, and when they threw buckets of cold water on him and turned up the intensity, there was a different quality to his cries of agony that scraped across her nerves like broken glass. She clung to Rogue, who wrapped an arm around her fiercely and held her close, cussing Scott out under her breath in lilting, musical southern phrases that Kitty had never heard before. She could tell they were all bad words, but in here, in their gray little cubicle, they sounded like prayers.

It was a relief to phase through the floor with Rogue so she could touch the caged mutant whose powers Scott had asked her to borrow so she could fry the hard-drive. A relief right up to the moment when Rogue moaned and staggered after touching the guy because what these humans had done to him was so vivid and agonizing and in her head. As Kitty phased them both back through the ceiling to their room by the monitors, Rogue, gagging from the iron taste of blood in her mouth, said bitterly, "I'm going to kill Scott."

Then they both looked on the monitor and saw that those guys seemed to have already made a start on that and, despite the memories and the pain still swimming around in Rogue's head, the urge to murder Scott sharply receded. The urge to save him, however, became almost impossible to resist. Kitty, for one, felt as if she was clinging to her resolve by a fingernail.

The only brightness was that Jean wasn't having to watch this; that Jean would never, ever have to know, now, that these guys had taken poised, elegant, handsome Scott and shredded him like this. They had ripped off his shirt so they could use his body like a blank canvas, signing it with pain. Kitty kept her head averted but she could still see what was happening out of the corner of her eye, and everything that Scott had been this morning was slowly being eroded. His face had been flawless and now it was cut and bruised and bleeding; his body had been about as perfect as diet and exercise and relentless self-discipline could make it, and now it was lumpy where it shouldn't have been, from when one of them had rabbit-punched him in the ribs. It had been lightly tanned from swimming in the pool but now it was discolored by ugly, flowering bruises that were a dull, angry red, and darkening, minute by minute, to a vicious black. His back had been like an anatomy diagram, Kitty had often thought that if someone wanted to understand the way muscles and tendons worked, they should just sketch Scott, because he was so leanly honed and sculpted that, whenever he moved, one could watch every muscle move, too, just the way it should. And then these humans had dipped a piece of rope in what looked like a bucket of gasoline and started beating him with it and now Scott's back was like a statue someone had scribbled all over with a blood-red marker pen.

The very worst part was that he seemed so bewildered by the depths of their hatred. His beautiful eyes weren't just clouded with pain but with confusion as he kept asking them why they were doing this, why did they hate him and his kind? What harm had mutants ever done them? He looked young and scared and…helpless and Kitty wanted, with every fiber in her being, to rush in there and phase him away from these monsters.

"It ain't really him," Rogue said. "That ain't Scott. He's playing them."

"But it's really Scott really, really being tortured."

"I don't think it's the first time." Rogue was too kind to add that she didn't think it would be the last time either, but Kitty could hear it in her voice.

"You're an abomination! You shouldn't even exist, you fucking little gene-freak! Where are they? Where are those filthy mutie kids?"

Their rage made them sputter and spit, and spew out facts and figures: what they did to Scott's kind, what they had done to Scott's kind, over and over, snatching their victims off the streets, a lot of them runaways, overwhelmed by the first manifestation of their powers, easy pickings for a quasi-military operation that could pick up their surge-spikes on their handheld trackers. They were vicious with rage and they told Scott in graphic detail exactly what they had done to those scared mutant runaways, the organs they'd removed while the kids screamed and begged them to stop, the other things they'd done to them while they screamed and begged them to stop. The things they would do to Scott in the next ten minutes if he didn't talk.

"We go in, right?" Kitty said. "If they start cutting anything off, we go in?"

Rogue said, "Hell, yes."

"Or if they…?"

"Yes." Rogue was a still blaze of anger. "And if they even think about doin' that, I'm going to be cutting things off."

But that was one of the things making Kitty feel sick right now, that hurting Scott, over and over, in all these different ways, was getting these guys horny. When they talked about cutting out one of his kidneys, they licked their lips, like they couldn't wait to get a scalpel under his skin, and one of them was finger-painting with the blood oozing from the welts across Scott's back, writing the word 'Scum' with Scott's welling corpuscles. That guy pressed in close as he smeared Scott with his fingers, pulling his head back by his hair, asking him if he wanted his welts washed out with bleach because he'd be glad to oblige. Another was telling Scott that it would be a shame if they broke his jaw when they started extracting his teeth with pliers but molars were tough, sometimes little mutie bones couldn't handle the process. He caressed Scott's jaw as he spoke, running his thumb across Scott's split, swollen lips, like he wanted to bite them hard enough to draw blood. They were all moving in on him together, like a macabre dance, picking up a scalpel, the picana, a nutcracker that one slipped over Scott's finger like a wedding ring. The biggest, meanest one ran a hand down the muscles of Scott's chest, tracing the blackening bruises, traced the curve of his ribcage, then his fingers slid lower, and lower and Kitty rose to her feet, trembling, and said, "I know he told us not to interfere but –!"

Rogue was on her feet, too, furious and scared, and she said, "The hell with that!"

That was when they heard an unearthly snarl of fury and the sound of metal claws slashing through security doors like they were paper. It was clear that the guys torturing Scott heard it, too, because they looked up in horror, and then Scott's voice rang out, clear and incisive and in Rogue and Kitty's heads:

"Betsy, kill the signal! Kill the signal now!"

As Logan ripped through the bars of the holding cell like a crazed, claw-flexing animal, Kitty scrambled to the computer to see if Betsy had stopped the transmission in time, heaving a sigh of relief as she saw that she had. Wolverine would not be appearing in this picture. She was dimly aware of Scott yelling at Logan not to kill anyone and Logan hurling Scott's torturers around the cell with snarls of murderous fury, and Scott yelling, "Cut me loose, Logan!" and Logan picking the guys up that he had already thrown against the wall once just so that he could throw them again, but at different wall this time, just for the pleasure of watching them bounce.

"Damnit, Logan! We're trying to show the world that mutants aren't crazed, psychotic axe-killers!"

"You're dead, Summers! Do you hear me? Dead!"

"Betsy…?"

"It's fine, Scott. No one is seeing this except us. Incidentally, we're enjoying it a lot more than the last show."

Betsy's British tones were admirably clear, and it was nice to be in the telepathic loop, but Scott sounded maddeningly calm for someone who had just put them through the ordeal of watching him get tortured.

"Is everyone out?"

"We're bringing the last ones now."

"What about the –? Damnit, Logan, stop doing that! What about the other hunters?"

"All out. Security guards, too. All cuffed and waiting for whatever justice humans think they deserve – I just hope it isn't a parade."

"Last chance to change your mind. Proof of mutant torture over risk of mutant genetic material getting into the wrong hands…?"

"Better safe than sorry, Scott."

"Then give us a few minutes and then get your friend to light it up. Are the cops on their way?"

"Cops, ambulances, news crews. I'm picking up a lot of horror and consternation. A lot more than I expected. Of course, you are a very photogenic victim, aren't you?"

"Such cynicism, Betsy, you should be ashamed. Logan, stop dragging me!"

Kitty thought that Scott really was as clueless about people-reading as Warren had suggested if he thought Logan was going to listen to reason right now. Logan was in the kind of blazing, white-heat berserker fury that would have had a sensible man who was partially responsible for putting him in that state being meek and apologetic and saying he was sorry. Scott was choosing to make everything that much more unstable by telling Logan that they needed to get those guys that Logan had just beaten up to a safe distance. He looked surprised and annoyed when, instead of the rational compliance he was apparently expecting, that earned him a raging snarl and a hand grabbing his hair and dragging him bodily towards the exit.

"Betsy! Wolverine's being…Wolverine. Can you get someone to get those guys out of there before the building blows?"

"I think everyone would much prefer them to go up with the building."

A pause and the Scott said in his best wheedling telepathic voice, "Please, Betsy. Pretty please with a cherry on top?"

"You know, if you talked to Wolverine like that he might not want to beat your head in with a crowbar quite as often…."

Kitty phased the hard drive out of the computer to take with them, phased Rogue back through the wall to the mainframe so Rogue could use her temporarily borrowed powers to fry the hell out of it, then with the USB stick clasped tightly in her hand, grabbed Rogue with the other and phased them both out of the building. She said, "How do we stop Logan killing Scott?"

Rogue said grimly, "I was thinking of holding him down for him."

Perhaps she was biased in his favor, but Rogue thought that Logan had actually been holding it together pretty well, all things considered. He had clearly seen some of what had been done to Scott on the journey up – given that Betsy had beamed Scott's torture out on every frequency, blocking all other transmissions so that every channel in the north-east was showing mutant murderers trying to make a guy give up a bunch of schoolchildren for vivisection, Logan had probably seen far too much of it on every storefront TV set he passed. Then he would have smelled Scott's blood, and, close up, probably how aroused those guys were getting by hurting him, and would have already had his temper frayed on the journey, knowing all the time that he was racing to save Scott, that he might not make it before something irrevocable was done to him. If he had met the x-van on the way and seen Gambit, then he would have been even more beside himself.

She said, "Logan, did you meet up with –?"

"Iceman? Yeah." Even to her he could barely bring himself to do more than growl murderously.

"So you saw…?"

"Gumbo. Yeah."

"So, you're pissed?"

"Yeah."

But, she really thought she could have talked him down, if Scott hadn't got it into his head to go back inside a building set to explode just to check that all the torturers and vivisectionists had been got out as Betsy promised. That was when Logan had kind of lost it. He had hurtled after him, grabbed him, and thrown Scott at least ten feet before flinging himself on top of him in a way that had sheltered him from the blast but didn't really explain why his claws were out to their full extent as he stood back up, dragging Scott with him.

"I was trying to avoid any casualties," Scott said irritably.

"Oh, that was what you were trying to do, was it, Bub?" It seemed to cost Logan a huge effort to pull his claws back in and he was shaking with fury, his eyes were wild, and he looked like it was only with the most focused concentration that he wasn't stabbing everything in sight.

Rogue had never seen Logan like this. Usually when he was angry, it was a blazing sort of rage, like a bonfire when someone had just been fool enough to pour on the gasoline. This was a slow burn and it was scaring her. She just wished it was scaring Scott. He was glaring right back – all too obvious now that he wasn't wearing his ruby quartz lenses. He put up his cuffed hands to adjust the visor he wasn't wearing, scowled as he remembered why he was seeing the world in color and then put his fingers to the collar, tugging at it irritably. "Give me the damned collar key, Logan."

Logan grabbed him by the throat. "What, you don't like your collar now? You want to be dangerous again? But I thought mutants were pretty and helpless like little fluffy kittens!"

"Get your hands off me."

Logan yanked him in to close snarling distance. "By the time I'm done with you, Pal, you're going to be wishing you were back in that nice safe torture chamber."

Kitty said, "Please, Logan, don't hurt him."

Rogue said, "At least don't hurt him on camera, Logan!" She gestured to the helicopters that were on their way towards them. Another minute and they would all be in camera range.

Half the mutants were already dispersing into the forest, Logan turned to Psylocke and waved a hand to indicate the burning building, the groaning captives, the milling, injured mutants and said, "You got this?"

She cast a concerned look in Scott's direction. "You do know he spent the last three hours being tortured, right?"

"Yeah, right now I'm calling that a good start. Have you got this or not?"

"Yes." She looked past Logan to Scott. "I'll be going with bewildered and distraught. I believe that goes over well on the evening news."

"Especially when supported by underwiring," Rogue said. She wondered what age Betsy had been when her figure did…that, and if hers was ever going to fill out in the same way, because…wow.

Scott gave Psylocke a brisk nod of approval, like Logan didn't have him by the throat. He said, "Good thinking, Betsy, but if I were you –" At which point Logan hauled him away savagely, snarling under his breath like a wild animal.

Kitty and Rogue exchanged a wide-eyed look and hurried after them. As they passed onto the forest path, Scott was struggling to get loose and Logan was just dragging him, Scott's bare feet sliding in the leaf mold as he tried and failed to dig in. "Damnit, Logan! Let me go!"

"Shut up!" Logan shook him viciously and went back to striding and dragging. Kitty and Rogue exchanged another worried look, neither of them sure if protesting would only make things worse. As they slithered down a rockier path, Scott slipped and went down on one knee, stifling a cry as the impact jolted through his broken ribs. Logan stood there, sides heaving like he'd been running, just with the effort of clinging onto his self-control, and glared down at him ominously. Scott looked up like he had to steel himself to do it, and just for a second he couldn't hide how much he was hurting. It was clear that the adrenaline spike had abandoned him and every bruise and cut and welt and burn was really starting to sing. Rogue saw the pain flicker in his blue eyes and she and Kitty turned to Logan imploringly, but Logan just looked angrier than ever.

"Get up!" he said savagely. "We don't have time for you to take a nap, Summers! We have to get out of here before the news crew discovers their mutant martyr isn't dead meat. Well…not yet he ain't."

"You're not going to kill me," Scott said with what Rogue figured had to be a lot more confidence than he was feeling, given Logan's mood. As he tried to get to his bruised feet, slipping awkwardly in the mud, and Logan just stood there and let him struggle, she and Kitty moved in quickly to help Scott up. Although he was a lot taller than they were, he was supple and responsive, not burdening them with his weight as soon as he could get a foothold, but they held onto him anyway, just to be a human shield between him and Logan as they all scurried along the track Logan had made when he dumped the van and started running to cut off that corner. They could tell his claws had been out because he'd gouged slashes in the trees as he ran. The ones unlucky enough to be in his path, he'd just sliced straight through. Going by how far apart his footprints were, he'd been running incredibly fast.

"Why would I kill you when Beast can do it so much bloodier?" Logan retorted. "He can pull your arms out of their sockets while you're still using them. I'm looking forward to watching that. Don't think we'll televise it, though – might send the wrong message."

"I don't know what you're so pissy about," Scott muttered unwisely.

"And to think I was feeling sorry for you earlier," Logan said, apparently addressing the trees. "That poor kid, I was thinking, all alone in the world, only a vicious criminal between him and starvation – now I'm thinking however many times that Winters guy beat you, it wasn't often enough."

Scott flinched near-imperceptibly and Rogue found herself saying roughly, "That's enough, Logan!"

If Logan had wanted to make Scott understand that Scott had no idea who this version of Wolverine was and that he was in no way safe or predictable, he had at least achieved that, because, as they hurried towards the van, Scott was now casting him wary glances from under his eyelashes. He wasn't scared of Logan – he didn't, Rogue thought, have sense enough for that – but he was definitely seeing him as a problem that might need to be solved; someone who might yet upset the applecart of Scott's latest bid to make the world a better place for mutants. Logan throwing Scott out of a moving vehicle, for instance, when the news helicopter might get the footage, would undermine a lot of good work.

Kitty looked back the way they had come, and, while they had been shielded by the denser trees, the helicopter with the news crew had passed right overhead. She could also see that Logan had cut off a mile, at least, by abandoning the van and cutting cross-country. She wondered, with his acute senses, if he'd been able to smell Scott's blood while he did it.

Before she and Rogue could help Scott up into the vehicle, Logan ripped him out of their hands and threw him into it with a snarl. Scott slammed against the side of the unwieldy metal before landing in the seat. He barely choked down a cry at the impact on his ribs and had to press his bound hands hard to the side of the van to get through the aftermath of the roiling pain waves without uttering another sound. He was successful – the pain turned him sick and white but he managed to keep silent – but his absolute stillness as he was wrestling with it was more disturbing than a scream,

Rogue said furiously, "Logan, you hurt Scott again and I swear to God I'll drain you dry!"

Kitty thought Rogue wouldn't have yelled at Logan if she'd seen the look in his eye as he gazed across at Scott; that was definitely a grimace of regret.

Scott deep-breathed his way through the aftershocks and then carefully raised his head and looked at Logan unflinchingly. "Feel better?"

Logan looked ashamed of himself and Kitty wondered if he'd over-estimated how much Scott weighed when hurling him around and had never intended to jolt him that hard. He snapped back a "No!" then stood there, glowering furiously but somehow not quite as unreachable, and didn't object when Rogue reached into his pocket and snagged the two sets of keys. She flipped down the sunshield, plucked Scott's spare visor from behind it, and handed the collar keys and visor to Kitty, shoved Logan out of the way, and slid behind the wheel. Kitty had never been so grateful for the soothing sound of an engine starting, the familiar reverberation of the X-Van underneath her feet.

As Rogue drove them out of the mudslide of Logan's erratic parking with an engine roar, wheelspin, and spray of red earth, Kitty sat down next to Scott. His breathing sounded like it really hurt and there was a fine tremor still running through him from where they had hit him with those shockwaves, over and over, like he could still feel it in his nerve endings. Every time he moved, even the smallest amount, it hurt him in what seemed to be about ten different places, and when she thought about what they'd done to his back she wanted to burst into tears.

She pretended not to hear as he tried to breathe around the stab of his ribs as she unlocked the cuffs at his wrists, put the visor in his hands and then tried to work out how to undo the collar. There wasn't just a place for the key, there was a numerical pad as well, and she didn't want to get the wrong combination. She explained that to him and Scott agreed unhesitatingly that he would, on the whole, prefer not to have his head blown off by her just typing in random numbers and hoping for the best.

The other collars had been switched off by Scott, of course, using the 'switch off collars' command on the computer. It was the first thing he had done, before checking on the security cameras that there were currently no other mutants in surgery or in any of the labs, then going and cluing Psylocke and the other captive mutants in on his plan to exploit her new transmission skills to get out to the world the proof of what these maniacs had been doing to mutants. He would get himself captured and while he was being tortured, Betsy could beam the session out. Meanwhile, his teammates would grab all the data from the computers and then wipe the hard drives of the remaining data so no mutant hunters could use it. By the way, Rogue would just need to borrow some of the powers from that mutant over there who could destroy electronics with a thought. That was okay, right? Did the mutant captives need any assistance his team could give them in dealing with the returning mutant hunters who were not needed for torturing him? The captive mutants had made it clear that they were not only greatly looking forward to dealing with them but would take any interference from Johnny Come Lately mutants who had not been held prisoner by them very badly. Scott had asked if they could restrain themselves from killing anyone, as it would undermine their message, and they had grudgingly agreed to do their best. Betsy had told him, with an impish smile, that no one less good-looking than him could have got away with so many outrageous demands in so short a time. He had told her that Gambit was on his way to Westchester and should make it, and he was sorry about the guy who had died saving him. Betsy had said that so was she and had probably been on the point of giving Scott her phone number when they had been interrupted by her now uncollared telepathy telling her that the hunters were on their way home from the hill, and Scott therefore having to postpone their conversation on the grounds of urgently needing to be captured. He had asked her to keep in touch telepathically if necessary but had considerately suggested she stayed out of his head while they were torturing him or she would get a headache.

He had left Kitty with the task of making the collars light up green even though their circuits weren't engaged, so that all the mutants in the cages looked as if they were contained in their locked cages wearing their working collars so the returning hunters would have no way of knowing that they were about to be set upon by angry, uncontained mutants with their powers restored. She had also had to cobble together something that made it look as if Scott hadn't yet released the mutants even though he had already undone all the cages and then gone back to his previous spot so Kitty could splice the footage together, taking out the cage unlocking part of it, so it looked as if Scott had just arrived in the room. Scott, of course, had complicated things further by insisting that his collar needed to be working, otherwise, if the guys torturing him pulled his visor off, he might blow their heads off before he could close his eyes. She had never had to work so hard so fast to get so many impossible things done in nothing like enough time, and the fact that she had done it in the time Scott had allotted for her to do it was, in her opinion, neither here nor there.

Kitty wondered about those subscribers, who had been sitting so safely in their homes, enjoying their mutant torture channel, whose names were hopefully somewhere on the USB stick she held in her slightly sweaty hand. She wondered if they were scared right now, when what they had been watching was all over the news. She wondered if wanting to give their names to Magneto so he could deal with them as he most assuredly would, was really truly wrong and, if so, why she wanted to do it so very badly. Scott hadn't even asked her if she'd got all the information he'd set her the task of collecting; just assuming that as the task had been given to her that she had managed to complete it; she didn't know if that was flattering or annoying and decided it was both.

She aimed for bright and brisk as she said, "Doctor McCoy will want to study this collar. It could be useful for slipping in and out of places that can detect an active mutation. Also, he could start visiting the symphony again."

Rubbing the wrists she had uncuffed for him – and which Logan had so pointedly left bound – Scott said, "Thanks, Kitty." She could hear the pain in his voice but he was doing his best to hide it and she appreciated him making the effort – and the weary smile he gave her. He was still trembling faintly, but it wasn't something he seemed to be aware of; she could practically feel him accustoming himself to his current level of pain, not giving way to it, just trying to get his body to deal so he could remain ready for the next crisis.

"Hank ought to be able to visit the symphony looking the way he does now," Logan growled. "I thought that was what we were fighting for. Not people feeling sorry for us." He sat down in a seat and stole a look across at Scott like he didn't want to be caught caring. His grimace as he looked at Scott suggested that he cared way too much.

Rogue was driving too fast but Kitty certainly wouldn't have been brave enough to tell her that, even as they screamed around a corner like Rogue wanted to slam her foot right through the floor.

"Three hours ago that was a place filled with captive mutants being operated on, tortured, and killed, Logan," Rogue snapped. "Now it ain't. You can start thanking Scott for that any time you like."

Even Scott darted her a look like he thought that was overly provocative, given Logan's mood, and Kitty frankly braced herself for the gale force Wolverine rage.

But Logan only growled, "It wasn't a one-man show. And it sure as hell wasn't that one-man show. Why not just beam out all the footage of the stuff they did before?"

"Because none of those mutants had given permission to have what was done to them broadcast," Scott returned. "And whoever was shown on the footage was going to have their anonymity blown. I wasn't doing that to someone else." He looked across at Rogue. "I thought about what all of you said earlier in the cave about little old ladies changing their minds about us if they actually saw some of the things that get done to mutants. It seemed too good an opportunity to pass up."

Logan said, "Opportunity?"

"What would you call it?"

"You don't have the vocabulary to understand what I'd call it, Summers."

"How many times do we get to control the message, Logan?" Rogue demanded, taking a corner on two wheels and slamming them back down in a way that made Scott clutch at his ribs and barely stifle a whimper of pain. "Today we did. Well, Scott did. You really think there's not a human out there, seeing what those guys were doing to mutants, seeing them torturing a guy to try to make him tell them where to find a bunch of schoolkids so they could hurt them for fun, who didn't think doing that was wrong? Because I don't think humans are that different from us."

Logan turned to Scott. "You're letting a teenage girl do your talking for you now?"

"Why not? She's doing a pretty good job, wouldn't you say?" Scott clutched at the seat in front as they screamed around another bend, gritting his teeth. "Still, Rogue – is there any chance of you slowing down a little…?"

She glowered at him furiously over her shoulder although she did ease her foot off the gas pedal. "You want Kitty to drive instead?"

There was a pause before Scott said, "I'm considering it."

Rogue said angrily, "Maybe I don't think you were wrong and maybe I don't think Logan should be hurting you, but that doesn't mean I don't want to smack you myself right now – even if you are a teacher!"

"I know," Scott said gently. "And I appreciate your self-restraint."

"Well – you should!"

"I just hope that one day Logan achieves your level of maturity."

Logan glowered at him. "Don't push your luck, piñata boy. You're stuck with that collar until Hank can take it off and that means no force beams, meaning – if I want to spank you, there's not a damned thing you can do about it."

Kitty, who was having to listen to the pain it was costing Scott to just breathe in and out right now, held out her arms to shield Scott from both Logan and Rogue, and said, "Leave him alone, the pair of you! Stop picking on him!"

"I'm not trying to steal his lunch money, Half-Pint," Logan retorted. "I'm trying to get it through his concrete skull that when he pulls stupid stunts like that, it has consequences. He's supposed to be the leader of a team, not a lone-wolf."

"I saw an opportunity, I took it."

"You should have come home with the kids and fetched the rest of us. All that guff to me about working as part of a team and you come up with that plan?"

"I don't understand what you thought was wrong with the plan," Scott retorted, and he clearly was genuinely mystified. Sitting there, next to Kitty, with his welted back bleeding from twenty different lash marks and his cracked ribs creaking with every exhalation, and every cut glistening and every bruise deepening, he really, truly didn't see the problem. "It showed the world what was being done to mutants. It showed the world where hating us can lead. A lot of people might side-eye us in a railway station for looking different but still not want to see us being cut open without an anesthetic or think it's fine to make snuff movies about torturing or killing us or to subscribe to watching it done. If they can just comprehend that wanting us to register is the first step in a slippery slope that can lead to us being treated like people without any rights–"

"Don't give me a speech, Summers! I'm not a public meeting! We're not talking about abstract concepts of goddamn morality here!"

Scott looked bewildered. "Then what are we talking about?"

"How about – people who love you getting to switch on the TV and see you being tortured on it? How about how that made them feel? Did you think about that, even for a second?"

Scott seemed to become aware that his lip was still bleeding and wiped it impatiently. "Obviously I knew it would be a shock, but I thought that if there were any kids in the room, the Professor would know to change the channel."

Logan sat back in the van seat like all the air had gone out of him. There was a glittering edge to his brief, bitter laughter before he said, "Oh, you thought of that, did you?"

"Well…yes. And I hoped most of the children would still be en route back to the mansion, so…."

"What about Chuck himself? You know, the guy who raised since you were fifteen? The one with the front-row seat to what was being done to you but who was too far away for him to help? What exactly were you planning to do if those pieces of excrement started raping you live on national television?"

Scott blinked. "I was going to try to think about something else until they were done. I thought Betsy might help me with that. She offered to help out with the torture, too, but I thought it would look more authentic if the people watching could see my blood pressure was genuinely elevated and –"

Logan rose up with an inarticulate snarl that made every hair on Kitty's body stand on end. She said, "Logan, I will phase Scott right out of this van if you take another step."

Logan's nostrils flared worryingly, and his hair seemed to be standing out from his head more than usual, like Storm was electrifying the atmosphere. The gleam in his eyes definitely looked all Wolverine, but still, after a tense moment, he did sit back down, albeit with another blood-curling growl.

Kitty said rapidly, "Scott, please don't take this wrong, but I really think you should just sit there quietly for the rest of the journey home."

Scott was still darting a shocked look at Logan. "What the hell brought that on?" he said.

Logan addressed the roof of the van. "I'm going to kill him," he said conversationally. "It may not be today, it may not even be tomorrow, but it will be quite soon, and for those with a sensitive disposition, I am warning you now, it will be messy and painful."

Rogue said sharply, "You're not laying a finger on him, and we both know it. If Storm doesn't fry you, I will." She looked over her shoulder and the van strayed across the road. "Kitty, seriously – tell Scott again until he gets it. I don't want to have to lay Wolverine out."

Scott and Logan both pointed mutely at the road ahead and Rogue cursed, swung back round and wrestled the van back onto the right side of the road.

"No way is my driving worse than that," Kitty murmured.

Scott said, "What am I not getting?"

Kitty sighed. "Everything." She patted his hand gently. "Let's look out of the window. Aren't the stars pretty out here? That sure is a lot of trees. How about a nice game of I Spy?"

He bent his head next to hers and said, "Please, explain it to me?"

She looked into his blue eyes, at his cut and bruised face, glanced down at the welts around his wrists where the cuffs had bitten in when he was jolting in agony as the current was run through his nerves, over and over; at his shredded back where the rope had torn through the skin and left that ugly criss-crossing of lash marks. Quietly, she said, "People who care about you, hate it when you get hurt. It makes them angry with the people who hurt you. Today the person who got you hurt was…you. In a few days, they might be able to see some merit in what you did. They might even think you were right to do it. Today, you forced them to watch you getting tortured and you didn't give them a chance to help you. It's going to take them a while to forgive you for that."

Logan said, "And we have a winner."

Scott looked across at him in shock. "But –"

"No buts, Summers. The kid nailed it. Just sit there, shut up, and think about what you did."

As Scott opened his mouth to rebut, Kitty clamped a hand across it and gave him a steady look. "Seriously – however angry you think they are, you're not even close. You need to multiply by about…twelve point four, then factor in however long they've known you and their level of anger management, also whether or not they have an inner beast that wants to get out, and then add an extra hundred and fifty points for Logan, just because." She withdrew her hand cautiously.

Scott did the math silently and he finally seemed to grasp how much trouble he was in, not just with Logan but also a weather goddess, a terrifyingly powerful telepath, and a three hundred and fifty pound scientist with a feline secondary mutation and the strength of a whole pride of lions at his disposal. He grimaced, not, Kitty noted, with either guilt or apprehension, but just martyred resignation at once again having to deal with the unreasonable reactions of less rational beings. "So, I spy with my little eye…something beginning with…'T'."

She patted him gently on the arm. "I always knew you were a smart guy. 'Trees'?"

"Yes."

"Okay, maybe make it a little harder than that."

"I was flustered."

Kitty said, "I spy with my little eye something beginning with 'S'."

"Stratocumulus."

"Yes. Your turn…."

Logan said, "Someone, kill me now."

Scott said sweetly, "Do you want a volunteer, Logan?"

Rogue stabbed a finger in his direction without looking around. "Don't make me pull this van over!"

Scott said in a hurt tone, "You're still mad at me?"

"It's less than two minutes since I was mad at you before. Did you think I would be over it already?"

"Is anyone not mad at me?" He looked at Kitty hopefully but she shook her head.

"Sorry, I know why you did it, but I'm really pissed with you, too."

He slumped in the corner, gazing out of the window, bruised hands resting in his lap as Rogue sped along the highway. He said sadly, "Jean would have understood."

Logan said, "You really telling me you would have put her through watching that?"

Scott still looked as if they were all speaking a different language he only imperfectly understood, his gaze going from one to the other, a frown creasing his forehead, as he tried to make sense of the way their minds were working. "I'm the leader of the X-Men. It's my job to take the hit."

"Trust me," Logan told him grimly, "soon as you're home – you're going to be taking a lot of hits. I ain't ever heard Hank sound so pissed. You made Storm cry in front of the kids. No one's forgiving you for that any time soon."

Scott wrapped his arms around his bruised ribs and rested his head against the window glass. It was obvious that everything was hurting, and he was going home to a house with no Jean. There was no one waiting there to telepathically ease the pain or to kiss anything better. There were just going to be a lot of angry people, whom he loved but didn't fully understand, yelling at him and making him doubt his own judgment. Kitty could see the cut on his cheekbone reflected right back at her, along with the open cut on his mouth, the bruise on his jaw. She could see the curling ends of the welts webbing his back, like spiky red fingers gripping his sides, she could see the way the bruising was coming out, dull, mauve, and angry where his ribcage had been cracked, and the bruises all up and down his arms where they had grabbed him and punched him and slammed him against things. Around the elbow there were faint circular scars and she couldn't think what had made them, not claws or teeth, by the look of them, or laser blasts; they were too small, too symmetrical. He seemed to notice where her gaze was and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around his left elbow, visibly ashamed. She remembered how he had reacted to what Logan had said earlier.

Lowering her voice, Kitty said, "Did that man Logan talked about do that to you?"

Scott said, "It was a long time ago."

"How long?"

"I was fifteen."

Kitty realized she never thought of them being any age but this – the Professor a bald man in a wheelchair, even though she knew he had once had hair and a working spine; Doctor McCoy had been a football hero once, the legendary starting fullback, back in the days when he hadn't weighed three hundred and fifty pounds or been covered in blue fur. And Storm and Scott had once been children, scared and exploited and…powerless.

"Why did he hurt you?"

"He needed my beams for break-ins, but mostly he just liked having someone to bully – made him feel better about himself."

"Like Rahne's father?"

"Winters was more honest about it. He didn't pretend he was hitting me for the greater glory of God."

"Did he give you a reason?"

Scott shrugged. "I owed him. He owned me. I was a freak. No one else had ever or would ever have given a damn so I should be grateful that he didn't just kill me right there and then. The usual stuff."

It seemed a million miles away from the man she knew; impossible that he had ever been so friendless and alone; even more impossible than that he had ever been her age. She said warmly, "If Logan had been around back then, he would have killed that guy." She realized that Logan could probably hear every word, even though he was pretending not to listen. She touched Scott's fingers where they were still concealing the circular scars. "What happened there?"

"Sometimes the neighbors complained about him throwing furniture at me or punching me. Burning me with cigarettes was quieter."

Logan's claws shot out with a 'snikt' but Scott was looking out of the window and didn't notice.

Kitty kept her voice light. "He sounds like a real sweetheart. Why ever did you leave?"

"He wanted me to kill a security guard. He got angry when I refused – angrier than I'd ever seen him – and, given that he lived to rage, that was saying something. I knew he really was going to kill me this time, not just threaten it. I didn't want to die but I didn't want to kill anyone either. Standing up to him was the only other option I could think of. There wasn't really any heroism involved – I was just panic-stricken and desperate."

Kitty said, "I wonder how many mutant kids there are right now who are panic-stricken and desperate and hoping someone will save them."

"More than we can bear to think about, I imagine," Scott said.

She made a mental note to remind Hank that neglected and abused adolescents often suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex and as that area controlled social behavior it almost certainly wasn't Scott's fault that he was…well, the way he was. Kitty tucked her arm through his and pressed close against him so she could feel that he was still alive. He never seemed to get why people were touching him when they did it, but he was still young enough to be educated. Jean had taught him how to hug and be hugged. Someone else could do that, too. She looked across at Logan and saw that he was grim and tense and his claws were still out. She was pretty sure that if he had to hear any more about that abusive guy, and particularly hear about it from Scott, who seemed to think stuff like that happening to him was just the way things were, not really unjust or unfair, or something to get angry about, just…life, then Logan was going to gut the upholstery in the van again.

She rested her head against Scott's shoulder, even though she was probably putting pressure on a bruise, just needing to feel that he was safe right now, all of them were safe again. Quietly, she said, "Scott?"

"Yes."

"I'm not angry with you any more."

He said, "I still don't really get why you were before."

"I know. I'm not really angry with you about that any more either. I know you can't help it." She looked across at Logan. "He really can't."

Grimly, Logan said, "Hank says his neuronal cell bodies are perfectly capable of transmitting the necessary impulses. He says he just needs the right stimulus. He said something about Skinner boxes."

"They're for rats."

"He said they could be built bigger."

Still resting her head on his shoulder, Kitty said, "Scott, if you could just grasp why it is that people care about you, everything else would probably fall into place."

"But I don't get that," he admitted. "I never have."

Rogue looked over her shoulder. "No one gets that about themselves, really. It's…too hard, but I think it might be really important for everyone to at least try."

Scott said, "Rogue, I know they do most things differently below the Mason-Dixon line, but in the State of New York we drive on the right."

She said, "I'm helping Beast build the Skinner boxes."

Scott slumped back against the window and Kitty gave him a consoling pat on the arm. "I think if everyone could just learn to think of you as a work in progress, they'd be a lot more understanding."

Logan said, "Don't count on it." But he was looking across at Scott with far less of a berserker light in his eyes. His claws slid back in like they didn't need to be forced and his gaze was more curious and contemplative than murderously angry. That had to be a step in the right direction. In fact, as he went on looking at Scott, all young and vulnerable, with his eyes exposed, and those cuts and bruises everywhere, Kitty wondered if part of the reason why Logan had wanted to stay mad at him was so he wouldn't start feeling sorry for him, or even a little bit proud of him, or, perhaps – and she wasn't even going to whisper that out loud – to start thinking that just maybe Scott had been right.

Looking at Logan's face now, as he looked across at Scott, she also thought that Rogue was right about him being a better fit for Scott than Emma Frost. She was hard and cold and brilliant but she was also possibly fractured, and Scott would probably just break her heart in the end, and she would resent him being so impossible to deal with and probably end up hurting him in payment for all the ways he had hurt her. He would never really understand how much he could hurt another human being, because it would never occur to him how deeply someone might come to care for him. He'd just assume they liked him to have sex with, and someone else would probably do as well, or were with him temporarily for some incalculable reason that he needn't think about for too long because there was another mission to plan. He and Jean had grown together when he was still moldable and manageable. Even if he hadn't known why she loved him, he had been impressionable enough when the idea was first presented to him to comprehend that she did. He probably wasn't going to be able to grasp that concept with someone other than Jean.

Emma Frost was going to have to either keep her heart guarded or at least try to pretend that she had done so, if she got involved with Scott, and that was no good for him. He needed someone who was going to make it clear that they were all in; that Scott was going to cause them irreparable damage if he let harm come to himself. Logan hadn't been restful company on the journey home but he had certainly made it clear that he felt strongly about what Scott did and didn't do. Scott might not easily grasp that Logan had feelings for him but he seemed to have already grasped that if he did something Logan didn't like that Logan would yell and threaten in a way that Scott found annoying. Whether he found it annoying enough for it to actually impact on his behavior was a completely different matter. But it was at least remotely possible that if – every time Scott needlessly put himself in danger, Logan angrily punched him in the face, Scott might eventually stop putting himself needlessly in danger. Scott had an endlessly subtle mind when it came to strategy but he couldn't grasp subtle human interaction with a map and a flashlight. Sadly, Kitty was coming to suspect that only the most direct approach with Scott and interpersonal relations was ever going to be effective. She also realized that he had now done the impossible and made her feel sorry for Emma Frost.

She briefly imagined Emma Frost as a pagan goddess-worshipper, silvery and elegant, mixing potions and drawing pentagrams as she waited for the planets to align so she could ensnare the lonely knight in his lonely tower with a star-crossed enchantment. But it was almost impossible to imagine Scott ever turning up at the right time or doing the right thing to make a subtle spell work, even if it would enslave a hundred other men. He would just say he didn't drink magic potions because he had heard they contained transfats and could affect tournament performance, or would want to know if she used an astrolabe for her calculations, and, if so, what kind, and what were her thoughts on the Antikythera mechanism, also he'd be interested in the provenance of her pentagrams…and would never grasp the fundamental fact of her wanting to sleep with him. Much easier to imagine that, while Emma was gathering toadstools from the fringes of fairy rings, Logan had wandered in, troll-direct, and bashed Scott over the head with a club before dragging him back to his cave. Being captured by a hairy hermit wrapped in animal skins and then being given food, alcohol, and rough, demanding kisses would be straightforward enough for Scott not to get mixed signals. Under those circumstances, even Scott could probably grasp that this guy kind of liked him, and not just as a friend.

Kitty leaned across the aisle and said quietly, "Logan, you probably don't get told this too often, but when it comes to Scott you might not want to be too subtle."

He looked at her in confusion and she realized that they were going to need help. She gave Logan a 'never mind' wave and cuddled back into Scott. He put his arm around her shoulders, less because he wanted to, she was sure, than because she was still damp, and shivering as the night turned colder, and he wanted to keep her warm. She was careful not to put any weight on his ribs but could feel the moment when her body heat against the bruises eased the ache of them and he gave a little sigh of relief. She realized that was probably always the way to go with Scott. It was pointless offering him comfort because, unless it came from Jean, he would never realize that he needed or wanted it or even what to do with it, but if you could coax him into offering it to you, he ended up getting the benefit of it as well. She wondered if she ought to start writing these things down for Logan.

***

THREE

Logan could smell blood and pain and sweat and arousal. The blood and pain was mostly Scott's, although, when he looked down, he realized that he had bodily fluids from the scumbags he'd beaten up earlier liberally spattered on his clothing. The sweat was a combination of the cold break-out of perspiration that had bathed Scott's skin as he was tortured, and the musky, rank sweat from the guys who had been torturing him. The arousal was all those guys. The guys who had got off on having Scott Summers' buff young body writhing in agony under their hands when they jolted him with current or lashed him with that heavy wet rope, or –

Their hands had been all over him, on every television set in the store window, coiled in his soft dark hair, pulling his head back, making his spine arch as they drove the cattle prod into his side and threatened, gloatingly, to shove it up into his ass if he didn't tell them where the freak kids were. Right there, for the world to see. Scott had signed up to be humiliated and degraded for the shock value, even though he was too proud and too stubborn to let anyone help him on an ordinary day, but he'd let those bastards turn him into a victim on national television because he thought it might do some good and it was too hard a thing to ask of someone else. It was still making Logan want to smack him but – as his anger had begun to ebb – the ache of fear and near-loss was also getting a chance to have its message heard. He definitely preferred the consuming rage to having to admit how thoroughly Scott had scared him. He had thought the guy was going to be vivisected before he could reach him, or, at the very least, raped. He hadn't known, then, that Rogue and Kitty were on hand to ensure that didn't happen, and that Psylocke had been ready to intervene whether Scott wanted her to or not.

Seeing the state of Gambit had done nothing to reassure him. Those guys had not been playing around and Scott had deliberately put himself in harm's way. Logan didn't even know if that had been his subconscious death-wish or his very conscious inner strategist who had come up with that plan, but it had been a terrible plan, all the same. He couldn't stress often enough how bad a plan it had been, and how very much he needed everyone to tell Scott that.

They were met at the door of the mansion by a grim-faced Henry. Logan had to metaphorically sit on his hands not to help Scott down from the van, letting Kitty do it instead, which she did a lot more gently than he would have done.

As he limped barefoot across the gravel, still holding his ribs, Scott said, "Did Bobby and the kids get home okay?"

Hank said, "Yes."

"Gambit?"

"Is out of surgery and recovering."

Nothing could have been less encouraging than either tone or expression. Scott looked up at Hank's blue-furred, bespectacled face, opened his mouth to say something else, and then, amazingly, showed sense enough to keep quiet. Hank took Scott by the arm, said, "Infirmary," and frog-marched him into the mansion and down the paneled corridor towards the infirmary.

Rogue and Kitty exchanged a speaking glance. "Poor Scott," Kitty said.

"He kinda has it coming," Rogue said.

"No 'kinda' about it," Logan said, but he found himself heading towards the infirmary anyway, just in case Hank suddenly forgot he was a pacifist.

He could hear Scott saying, in a resigned tone, as he was marched down the corridor, "So, apparently, everyone's mad at me and I suck."

"The 'apparently' suggests that you don't actually understand what you did wrong."

"Kitty explained it to me, and then Rogue explained it to me louder."

"I trust she used very small words."

"Mostly, although as I recall 'reckless', 'selfish' and 'dickwad' are all disyllables."

"Still, it does sound as if she covered the essential thrust of the central argument as to why everyone is currently very angry with you indeed and more or less united as to the reasons why you do, in fact, suck."

Scott looked hopeful. "'More or less'? So some people are less mad with me?"

"The children are still sentimental enough to mostly feel sorry for you. And those of us who are not dominatrices don't, on the whole, feel that you deserve to be soundly whipped at the earliest possible juncture. I think Emma Frost is a party of one on that issue."

"Party of two," Logan growled.

Hank raised his free hand to acknowledge the correction. "Ah yes, party of two."

Scott darted a wary glance over his shoulder at Logan, which, coupled with bruising, pulled muscles, and exhaustion, caused him to stumble, which caused Hank's grip on his arm to tighten and thereby shatter the illusion that he was simply helping him along as opposed to dragging him forcefully like a stern teacher with a naughty child.

As they reached the infirmary, Scott said, coaxingly, "Hank, I was just…."

Hank picked him up by the waist and dumped him a little less than gently on an examination table. "Except you always do this, Scott! You always do exactly what you think is right even if everyone else has told you, repeatedly, why they don't agree with you, and then the rest of us are left living with the consequences."

"The whole point of the plan was that I didn't want to involve anyone else."

"You are a teacher in a school filled with pupils, many of whom have no family but the one they find here. You cannot risk your own health, safety, or life without potentially impacting on scores of other people, some of them vulnerable mutant children, and some of whom have known you for rather longer than they want to think about!"

Scott craned his neck to see the occupant of the other bed, but Gambit was still peacefully post-operative and did not look up. Logan had to admit that, despite the drip he was hooked up to, the Cajun looked healthier than the last time he'd set eyes on him. Hank began lifting small, neatly-inscribed bottles down from glass-fronted cabinets, murmuring about painkillers, anti-inflammatories, muscle-relaxants, and nerve-soothing special formulas in the experimental stage, then adding antibiotics and yet more varieties of painkiller that might counteract the effect of this, that, or the other, before adding carefully measured quantities to the medicine he was mixing. Logan thought he looked worryingly like a mad scientist, particularly with the talking to himself, but also noted that even when relieving his feelings by action, Hank's blue-furred face remained a series of tense, angry lines.

Scott said, "Hank, is the Professor…?"

"Completely traumatized? Yes, I rather think he is. Storm certainly is. You made us watch that, Scott! It's only a few months since we lost Jean and you made us witness those…animals –"

"I'm sorry. I didn't think of it from that perspective. I was thinking about humans who mistrust mutants watching the broadcast, not the rest of you."

"You never do think about it from that perspective!" Hank took some calming breaths as he pulled the medical tray towards himself and began to fill a very large syringe from the cocktail of liquids he had assembled. Surprisingly, the resultant mixture had coalesced to an unexpectedly pretty pink. "I have to ask – would you have done it if Jean had still been alive?"

Scott said, "Yes."

His total lack of hesitation did nothing to improve Logan's ugly mood. "You're unbelievable!"

"Jean was an X-Man before she was my wife. She would have agreed with me."

Logan said carefully, "And what do you imagine Jean would have done to those guys if she had been the one to rescue you instead of me? Because I'm thinking it would have got bloody."

"Jean would never hurt humans if it could be avoided. Jean had principles."

"But you push everyone to their limit, Pal. You push them right over the goddamned edge. And the worst thing is, you don't even know you're doing it."

"Which is why you can't be mad at him about it, Logan."

He turned to find Kitty and Rogue standing in the doorway. Kitty said, "You said it yourself – he doesn't know he's doing it. He just does what seems to him to be the right thing. He's not trying to upset anyone. He's not even trying to piss you off."

Hank said, not unkindly, "You two can't be in here right now. Not least because Logan and I are about to remove Scott's clothing so we can tend to his wounds, and we prefer faculty members to keep at least some of our mystery."

Scott said, "Kitty, when do you think you'll be able to start uploading that data so that Hank can –?" At Logan's warning snarl, Scott jumped, clutched his ribs, and then said irritably, "What now? For all we know there are other facilities out there. There could be other mutants in danger. That data's important."

"So is eating, sleeping, and changing out of wet clothes," Hank reminded him. "All actions in which we traditionally encourage our students to indulge after they've had a hellish day attempting to assist their temporarily deranged teacher in his efforts to get himself captured and tortured."

Scott seemed to notice how grubby Kitty and Rogue were for the first time and gave a brief head nod in their direction. "I guess tomorrow will be fine for working on that data. Although, if you do get a chance tonight to –"

Logan clamped a hand over Scott's mouth. "This is a public safety announcement, Bub: Shut up." As the girls turned to go, Logan prodded Scott in the shoulder and removed his hand. "You going to thank them?" As Scott looked blank, Logan said, "They did everything you asked them to do, right? They took the initiative. They provided you with backup. They got all the data you asked them for and wiped the hard drive they left behind. They did a good job, right?"

"Yes." Scott looked surprised that anyone would doubt it.

"Did you tell them that?"

Scott looked over at them. "You two know you did a good job and I'm proud of you, don't you?"

Exasperated, Rogue said, "Not being psychic, Scott – no, we didn't."

"Oh." He looked mildly surprised. "Well, you did, and I am. In fact, I couldn't have done it without you."

The two girls exchanged looks of pained resignation. Carefully, Kitty said, "So, if we hadn't taken our own initiative to follow you, you wouldn't have come up with a plan that involved you getting tortured?"

"Well, without your assistance, I would have had to secure the data myself and I don't have the know-how to rig the computer to show a false reading so I would have had to settle for laying out the guards and setting the other mutants free without the false camera feed. And the live on television idea really came from Bobby and the conversation we had in the cave, and, of course, Gambit telling me about Pyslock's temporary powers – but…."

"So the idea for getting captured on purpose – that was because you knew Rogue and I were going to be around to do the data retrieval, leaving you freed up to…get tortured on television…?" Kitty said a little faintly.

"Naturally, having back-up gave me the opportunity to accomplish far more, and I knew that you and Rogue had been studying scenario 14b so…."

Rogue held up a hand. "Please, Scott. I think now I've had enough affirmation for the day, if it's all the same to you."

Kitty was looking between Gambit and Logan with the expression of someone who couldn't decide which kitten she wanted to take home. Rogue was just looking anxiously at the Cajun. "Is he going to be okay?"

"He's not going to be harvested for organs anyway," Hank reassured her. "Well, not unless Logan loses his temper."

"He looks real sick."

"He had a bad time, but he's safe now. Everyone is – however temporarily – safe now."

Logan realized that Hank had hit upon the magic word as the two girls nodded in relief and then reluctantly left the infirmary. Scott gave them a wave and added, once again, that he really couldn't have successfully completed the mission without their help. Everyone in the room could hear the effort it cost him not to add that he'd really like them to start uploading that data tonight.

Rogue wearily looped her arm through Kitty's and said, "Come on, Sugar. Let's go find chocolate…."

"Yes, do tell them the last thing on earth they want to hear," Hank murmured to Scott as soon as the girls were out of earshot.

Logan said, "This is wonder boy being a leader?"

"When you've been on as many missions with him as I have, Logan, you will realize that he's very good at strategy, outstanding even, and sometimes he's perfectly effective when it comes to man management. And sometimes…he isn't. He can evaluate the most effective way to mobilize your mutation in a battle scenario in the blink of an eye, he just can't necessarily communicate with you effectively on any subject that isn't to do with battle strategies. He's also a wallflower at parties. Oh, that reminds me." Hank turned back to Scott. "Warren's pissed at you, by the way."

"Is he coming over?"

"I think we managed to talk him out of coming over tonight. Ms Frost, however, was – as one might expect from her secondary mutation – adamant."

Scott darted a wary look at the large syringe. "Villains get a say in what I do now?"

Hank disinfected Scott's arm and stuck the needle into it, depressing the plunger carefully. "Even morally challenged mutants could be said to have a dog in this particular fight. In fact, Magneto called up Charles to offer to extricate you from your predicament forthwith. He, you see, understood that Charles would find it traumatic to watch you being tortured. Can you imagine the consequences if Magneto's idea of appropriate justice for men who murder mutants had been televised?"

"Well, Betsy would almost certainly have switched off the signal before he –"

A quelling look from Hank caused Scott to turn that sentence into an unconvincing cough. Grimly, Hank said, "Once again, Scott, you reveal your famed ability to miss the point by something approximating to an ell."

Scott darted him a sideways look. "If you're going to punch me, can you please do it quickly and then give me some painkillers?"

Hank eased the needle carefully out of his arm. "I just gave you a very large injection of painkillers, coupled with an equally large dose of antibiotics, some muscle relaxants, and something of my own devising to try to counteract the nerve damage. You should start to feel considerably more comfortable within the next half an hour. I still intend, however, to keep you in the infirmary overnight for observation and to put you on a drip."

"Is that because I need to be kept in overnight, because you want to punish me, or because you want to make it harder for Logan to eviscerate me or Emma Frost to dominatrix me?"

"All of the above."

Scott looked towards the doorway somewhat wistfully. "I thought Ororo and the Professor might drop in."

"They're debriefing the children." Hank shot Scott a grim look. "They thought they might be a little upset."

Scott said softly, "Are you going to hit me, Hank?" And that at least did sound to Logan as if he minded less about being punched than he did about having made Hank that degree of angry with him.

Hank began to cleanse Scott's scored back, large fingers gentle and dexterous. "I've been trying to calculate the formula for the amount of force I would need to exert when boxing your ears to satisfy my own irritation without in any way exacerbating any of your previous head injuries, and, unfortunately, it doesn't compute. Even a fraction of the annoyance I feel, if physically expressed, would undoubtedly concuss you for a week."

Scott winced as his back was bathed, but bore it silently while Logan seethed inwardly at the sight of those welts and cuts marking his previously flawless skin. His anger bubbled up higher. "Hank, you're the only one he might actually listen to if you spelled it out for him exactly why –"

Hank glanced at Logan over the top of his spectacles. "I presume this 'explanation' would involve a certain amount of physical violence?"

"You can dangle him out of a fourth story window by one ankle and shake him until his teeth rattle, and you have self-control enough not to just drop him on his head, whereas if I start smacking him I'm not going to be able to stop."

"Nevertheless, I think it's possible that he has endured enough physical discomfort today."

"Don't tell me you don't want to thwap him right now?"

Grimly, Hank said, "You will notice how careful I am being not to say that."

Scott could be seen visibly unraveling double negatives before grimacing. "As the leader of the X-Men, I think I should get a say –"

"You don't," Logan assured him.

"And I suppose that if I suggested that you're all overreacting…?"

Hank's expression was foreboding as he looked over his spectacles at his patient and there was a steely edge to his voice: "I would strongly advise that you make no such suggestion, Scott. If you know what's good for you."

Scott folded his hands neatly in his lap, assumed an expression of meek docility, and showed sense enough to keep quiet. Logan just knew that Scott was never going to be that obedient with him. His natural instinct was to give orders, not follow them. Logan suspected he wasn't really being obedient with Hank, just putting up a show of being Good so that he could get right back to the important work of ignoring everything being said to him and planning his next stupid martyred gesture for the sake of mutantkind as he fearlessly led the x-men into battle.

Logan growled low in his chest and Hank, still tending with unfailing efficiency and gentleness to Scott, despite the audible grinding of his teeth, said, "No healing factor. No super-strength. No unusual abilities of any kind, in fact, except for the force beams. Anyone larger or stronger than he is could very easily kill him without even trying very hard."

Scott said, "That's a warning, right? Not a suggestion?"

As Logan made to clout him round the back of the head, Hank grabbed his wrist. "Seriously, Logan. I've actually lost count of his concussions, and I'm his primary physician. I don't think it's in anyone's best interests for Scott to lose even more IQ points."

Logan growled, "Goddamn glass cannon…."

Scott's blue eyes flashed dangerously and he turned his head. "Hank, give me a mirror. I'm going to take this collar off myself."

"You're going to do no such thing. Given the likelihood of you already having a head injury, not to mention the near certainty of your sustaining another one if you don't stop riling up Wolverine, it will be a great relief to be able to check the reactivity of your pupils for once. Now, please look into the light…."

It had taken half an hour for Hank to get Scott treated and bandaged. At the end of it, Scott was looking spaced out and woozy but in considerably less pain, although oddly inclined to wave his fingers backwards and forwards and murmur about trails. He looked across at the sweet jar on the table out of which well-behaved children were rewarded if they stoically endured their examinations without manifesting. "Do I get a lollipop now?"

"No," Hank assured him.

"Oh, give dat boy a lollipop – he's had a hard day."

Scott brightened at the sound of Gambit's voice, jumped down from the examining table – clutching at his ribs as the impact reverberated through them – then weaved his way somewhat circuitously across to where the Cajun lay, pale and bandaged, in an infirmary bed. When Gambit reached out a hand, Scott clasped it on the second attempt. "Remy, you made it."

"Course Gambit made it. He has t'ings to do – still got you to nail, for one, non?"

"Because we're both up to that right now."

"Hey, lookin' at dose pretty eyes Gambit can be up for anytin'. Dat's a crime against nature, keepin' dose hidden…."

They grinned at each other and Logan felt something stir in his guts, because Gambit knew how to get Scott to lighten up and smile, and when Scott smiled like that, he looked young and…sweet. There was something a little bashful in his smile, like a girl being paid her first compliment. Logan had an uncomfortable realization that Gambit probably had been swinging by the mansion for years, the youngest and the most handsome, careless, and dashing of the older mutants who dropped in from time to time. He thought of that skinny, gawky Scott in Xavier's old photographs, shuffling around with his hands in his pockets, not making eye contact in case a stare was taken as a challenge, shy, lonely, and self-doubting, and Gambit breezing in, all easy Cajun charm; flirting with Scott so outrageously that it made him laugh and feel flattered and warm and noticed for something other than the fact he was the freak who could shoot force beams out of his eyes. He could image that there had been a little heart-fluttering even; for all Logan knew there still was.

Scott was certainly looking very concerned and relieved as he went on holding Gambit's hand while Hank felt around Gambit's bandaging and Gambit made soft orgasmic sounds and told Hank he was making him crazy.

Hank said, "No sex for a week, Gambit. No violent exertion of any kind for six weeks would be even better, but I'm not going to demand the impossible."

"No sex for a week? You already did demand de impossible! Scott, you gonna take pity on Gambit, right?"

"Remy, you came this close to losing your liver. Can't you think about higher things?"

"Righ' now, I'm t'inkin' about your mouth on a lower t'ing…."

"You're impossible," but Scott was saying it far too indulgently for Logan's temper.

"If Scott's as fixed up as you can get him, we need to take him to see the Professor before you tie him up with a drip," he said to Hank.

"I don't need 'taking' anywhere, I'm not a Yorkshire Terrier." Scott flashed Logan a warning look. "I just need this damned collar off."

"Gambit do dat for you, mon brave," Gambit said easily, beckoning Scott lower.

"Just tell me the code?" Hank suggested, but Gambit was having way too much fun moving Scott so he was 'under the light' enough for Gambit to supposedly see what he was doing; not at all incidentally, Logan was sure, putting Scott's mouth very close to Gambit's, as the Cajun gazed into Scott's eyes while he stroked gentle fingers up and down Scott's throat. Logan realized how long it was since anyone had touched Scott like that – not since Jean's death going by the way Scott gave that little shiver of pleasure, closing his eyes so he could enjoy it more, and then Gambit's hand was cradling the back of Scott's head, and he was pulling him in for the gentlest of kisses, a soft and tender mouthing of lips against lips before he slipped his tongue into Scott's mouth like it belonged there.

Logan didn't even know what he was doing until Beast grabbed him and held him back, saying sharply, "Logan, don't!"

Which was when he realized his claws were out and he still wanted to jam them through Remy LeBeau's bandaged body with unnecessary force.

Scott pulled back from Gambit's kiss, giggling – there was no other word for it – like they were schoolboys who had just done something naughty.

"Exactly what drugs did you give him?" Logan demanded.

"Mostly painkillers." Hank was also looking perturbed. "I didn't want his torn muscles to seize up or his nerves to suffer any after-effects from the electroshock treatment so I may possibly have overdone it a little. In Gambit's defense, he has even more drugs in his system than Scott."

Gambit was stroking Scott's hair gently, like it was his right to do that, and brushing his thumb lightly down his mouth. "One day, Scott – you gonna let Gambit go all de way, non?"

"Not when you just had surgery, Gambit. Your liver falling out midway would be a major turn-off." Still, Scott was entirely failing to move away from Gambit's caressing fingers and his own fingers were lightly tracing the line of Gambit's bandage, forehead creased with concentration, as if there was some math he was trying to work out.

Logan grabbed Scott by the elbow and yanked him away from Gambit. "What the hell are you two idiots playing at?"

Scott scowled at him, and even his scowl was unnecessarily pretty. "Gambit's going to take my collar off."

"You're keeping your damned collar on until I say otherwise," Logan snapped at him, realizing as he said it that he was being unreasonable on so many levels that it was probably bleeding into different dimensions at this point.

"You're not the boss of me, Logan!"

Hank looked at him in concern. "And you're not twelve, which makes me think you're not entirely yourself right now. Scott, look into this light again. Now, walk from the bed to the table."

When Scott weaved from side to side as he attempted to obey and then turned around with the care more appropriate to a man on a slippery deck in a high wind, before walking back with his arms outstretched like wannabe wings and his tongue protruding with the effort, Hank grimaced. "I definitely may have overdone it with the painkillers."

"Ya think?" Logan drawled.

Scott said in surprise, "I'm cold."

"That would be the blood loss, plus the shock, plus the lack of clothing, plus the fever you're spiking. Get into bed, Scott."

Scott said hopefully, "With Gambit?"

Logan grabbed him by the arm and dragged him forcefully to the first unoccupied bed. "Get in! Now!"

"You don't need to shout. Hank doesn't shout."

"In! Now! Get in the damned bed now!"

Logan was not really proud of the amount of yelling and threatening that he indulged in during the next five minutes, but Scott had wound his nerves to breaking point more than once today. However, when the Scott he had bodily dumped in the bed before loading down with blankets as if the sheer weight of them would keep him in one place, said sulkily, "I don't even want to sleep with you now, Logan. And, before, I did – but now I don't, so there," Logan found he was shocked into silence. Scott needed a few attempts to get Hank into focus, but then he gave him a delightfully sweet smile and said, "Beast! We should cuddle like we did in that cave. I like your fur. It's so warm and soft…." He fell asleep mid-sentence and Logan turned a gimlet eye on Hank.

"Wanna explain that last part to me, Bub?"

"It was a long time ago, after I'd…changed. Scott, and I got separated from Jean and Warren when a blizzard came in. Warren flew himself and Jean to safety but Scott and I had to take shelter in a cave. Scott was soaked through from getting knocked into an icy river and – why am I even explaining myself to you?"

"You had to cuddle with a wet, naked Scott for his own good? That's the story you're going with?"

"It happens to be the truth."

Logan narrowed his eyes. "Did you enjoy it?"

Henry's golden eyes were perfectly unreadable but his mouth was definitely fighting a smile. "Apparently we both did. Perhaps we should do it again some time…."

Logan popped a claw. "Listen, you big furball –"

"Seems to me dat Logan actin' awful jealous for a man who ain't Scott's boyfriend…."

Logan made the huge effort required to pull his claws back in. "Seems to me that if you want to keep that liver, you might wanna try shutting up, Gumbo."

"You even ask Scotty if he wants to date you yet? Cause I'd be happy to ask him real nice…."

Logan found he had a blood-pressure cuff being pumped up on his arm while Hank pursed his lips and shook his head. "You really need to take some deep, calming breaths. Remembering that Remy habitually sleeps with women and is just pushing your buttons for fun might also be a good idea."

"What are you talking about? That swamp-rat's been flirting with Scott for hours!"

"Because Gambit flirts with everyone. If he actually had sex with everyone he flirts with, he would have no time to do anything else and would long since have expired of exhaustion. Try to apply some logic instead of just being instinctively reactive – that process is, after all, what is supposed to differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom."

"I really need today not to have happened, Hank!"

"I think we all need today not to have happened, Logan," Xavier said dryly, wheeling himself into the infirmary. His gaze went to Scott at once. "How is he?"

"Running a temperature but in better shape than Gambit."

"You all keep naggin' at him," Gambit said, "but de truth is Gambit dead right now without Scott. Dat boy save a lot of mutants today."

"No one is disputing that the end result was a positive outcome, Gambit," Xavier said. "It's Scott's chosen method that left something to be desired." He rested a hand on Scott's forehead and grimaced. "If his temperature doesn't come down soon, we may need Bobby."

"I don't want to put him in an ice-bath when he got wet through earlier and then underwent all those shocks…."

"Nevertheless, Hank…."

Logan left them to their medical discussion while he found his fists were clenched and his blood pressure showed no sign of dropping. He pulled off the cuff before it could broadcast his stress to the world. Scott looked worn out and beaten up and nothing like old enough to have been through even the day's ordeal never mind all the other ordeals in his past. Xavier kept him under the surface of consciousness while Logan and Hank got him into a hospital gown, having to handle him gingerly because of all the many injuries discoloring his body, not to mention the fever-heat of his skin. He wasn't properly asleep, Logan could smell his spiking fever, and he had a restless, disordered look, at least until Xavier touched his temple and gently slipped into his mind to quiet it, then, at least he drifted closer to something that was normal sleep.

"…in contact with Psylocke…mutants in need of medical attention…preferred to rely on healers but I told her that we had beds here if she felt the need…."

Logan let it wash over him, although he did tense up when Gambit's stats took a turn for the worse, before Xavier and Hank between them got him back to normal. There had been enough time for the horror of the 'what if's to kick in and Logan realized he was now scared about all those possible outcomes – several of them running in his mind at once, like snuff movies he couldn't unsee – and would probably never stop being angry with Scott. He would have been angry with Gambit for being dumb enough to get caught and nearly turned into a walking organ farm, too, if he wasn't too busy being angry with him for coming onto Scott when they were both half-dead and pumped full of painkillers. That was beyond whoreish.

Xavier wheeled his way over to Logan after they had both patients stabilized and said, "How are you?"

"Pissed."

"Yes, I don't need to be a telepath to gather that. Your thunderous expression is clue enough. Please don't take your annoyance out on Scott."

"Your foster-son drives me insane, Chuck."

"Scott is my adopted son, Logan – I can show you the paperwork if you need to see it – and, in his defense, he would probably drive you somewhat less insane if you did not have feelings for him."

Logan thought about denying it and then realized that it would be singularly pointless while talking to a telepath. "Jean never threw him through a window? Not even once?"

"Jean had remarkable self-control. I'd appreciate it if you tried to emulate some of her restraint, particularly when it comes to defenestration."

Logan lowered his voice to say: "I know she was throwing him at the walls in her sleep. I know she was wanting sex with him all the time, some of it pretty rough. What was that about?"

"Nothing with which you need to concern yourself, given that Jean is dead. It certainly was not the usual pattern of their relationship. Jean was unfailingly loving and protective when it came to Scott. If you can't be the same then –"

"Look, I'm stronger than Scott, I'm heavier than Scott, and I have a bad temper. Chances are I'm going to lose it with him at some point. That doesn't mean I don't care about him."

"I will never consent to Scott being in an abusive relationship."

"Nor would I," Logan returned flatly. "I'm not planning to punch the guy, Xavier. I'm just saying, realistically, it might happen. If it does, I don't want you wiping our minds and sending me off to Canada. I want him to stand up for himself, kick my ass, and decide for himself if we're over. He can blow my head off my shoulders if he wants to. He doesn't need Daddy to run interference."

Xavier narrowed his blue eyes. "What are you suggesting?"

"Chuck, don't get me wrong, I like you. I admire what you've achieved and what you're doing here. I think you might be the goddamned mutant messiah, for all I know, who's going to lead us into the Holy Land of a better future. But, I've got a lot of gaps in my memories. It makes a guy develop different ways of thinking when the past ain't always where he expects it to be. Scott knows way too many of those tricks."

"I told you – Sinister put mental blocks in his mind."

"There are missions Scott doesn't remember the same way that Hank does. There are things he doesn't remember at all that happened way after he had left the orphanage. I ain't judging you, I'm just saying you can't protect him forever. You can't just erase all the bad shit so it isn't there in his head – because it'll break through sometime and then all it will have done is stop him trusting you. I ain't asking you what you've wiped out or changed or sealed up in his head. I'm just saying, I think it's time to stop. If I fuck this up and end up hurting him, he needs to remember it so he doesn't just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I might be his next bad mistake. I don't know. But I want what happens between me and Scott to be real, however it turns out. We have a right to that."

Xavier wheeled himself a few feet away while Logan held his gaze. There was a long pause and then Xavier gave a terse nod. "He was very fragile when he came here – not just physically, mentally and emotionally. He was asked to put himself into situations which had great potential for failure and sometimes he failed. I didn't want him to be so haunted by his mistakes that he couldn't go on to succeed."

"Chuck, when I told you I wasn't judging, I wasn't judging, okay? I don't know how you raise a kid who's spent years under the control of a guy who's obsessed with his DNA and keeps trying to brainwash him. For all I know, without you, Scott would be in a padded cell wearing a wraparound jacket or sucking dick in a doorway for his next fix. I'm just saying, I think there's a point where you have to stop trying to control every single aspect of his life, including blocking his access to the stuff that hurts."

"And who he sleeps with?"

"Well, obviously, I'd prefer it if you backed off from that as well."

The frown lines vanished from Xavier's forehead. "I will not interfere in your romance with Scott, Logan. If you mess it up, you can take comfort from the thought that it will be all your own work."

"I don't get a cigar and you telling me you're gaining another son?"

Xavier surprised him by smiling. "Not quite yet, Logan. I think you might at least want to get through your first date before demanding my blessing." As Xavier wheeled himself away, Logan felt the near-imperceptible sensation of something leaving his mind, a receding warmth. His anger flared up as he realized that Xavier had been rummaging around and then he realized that the guy had been smiling. The guy had, in fact, been looking perfectly okay about Logan dating his adopted son. Logan grimaced at the realization that Xavier must have come across some mushy stuff in there. He had been hoping to keep that to himself.

He was aware of Storm coming in to check on the patients, beautiful eyes full of concern, and Kitty and Rogue passing back through, and the other kids sticking their heads around the door at regular intervals, but he was mostly just aware of the rise and fall of Scott Summers' hairless chest. Hank had compromised and pulled off the covers, leaving Scott covered with a sheet, and placed him near an open window, but was still insisting that they didn't need Bobby to get his fever down. Most of Hank's attention was for Gambit, who had been subjected to days of ill-use even before he had been operated on without an anesthetic, and was in bad shape on several levels, blood pressure and temperature both see-sawing so violently that his chart looked like a cross section of the Rockies, although being half-dead in no way seemed to lessen his ability to flirt with Hank, which he did expertly, much to Hank's obvious amusement. Which at least left Scott to Logan. He sat by his bed, brooding morosely, and resisting the urge to mop his brow or hold his hand or do any of the other sappy things that some lame part of his brain wanted him to do.

He didn't even notice that it was late until Hank put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Logan, you should get some sleep."

One look at Hank revealed which of the two of them looked the most exhausted. Logan nodded to the free bed. "Get some shut-eye, Henry. I'll come and get you if any lights start flashing on their monitors. I'd be sitting here anyway."

Hank darted a look at Scott and said, "If Jean asked you to take care of him before she died, she set you an impossible task."

"She didn't."

"I may have been the smart one, but she was always the wise one. The only foolish thing Jean ever did in her life was fall in love with Scott."

"Is that a warning?"

"I'm just saying that I've known him since he was sixteen and it seems to me very unlikely that he is going to change. He's going to keep heading into danger because he wants to make Charles proud of him and because it's the right thing to do and mutants need a champion and mankind needs to be protected and because he doesn't really believe he deserved to be saved, not after the number Sinister did on him, so he has to earn it again, every day. If you're happy to always come second to the mission then feel free to sign up for all the inevitable frustration and heartbreak, but don't expect him to ever effectively communicate to you what is going through his head at any given time. There's a reason why the man dated a telepath."

"Hey, I'm not exactly Mister Heart On His Sleeve myself."

"Compared with Scott, you are. The only way Scott could be any more emotionally constipated is if he were British – and even then he might at least have been born with a sense of humor."

"He can't help the way he is."

"He really can't, but trust me, even knowing that his formative years were spent with Scott being experimented on by a madman, it doesn't help when he does something enraging, which, I can promise you, he will be doing on a fairly regular basis – in between not understanding your jokes. On the plus side, he is apparently both unselfish and responsive in bed. Just don't expect him to ever initiate sex."

As Logan glowered at him for knowing that, Hank added, "Oh yes, and you also will have to live with the fact that other people have known him for a lot longer than you have, and will have seen him naked many, many times more than you have done. And will have been in positions of extreme…closeness with him on several occasions."

"Have you slept with him?"

"Often. Prison cells make for close quarters on occasion, so do impromptu hideouts –"

"Have you put your dick inside him, Hank?"

"No. Nor, I believe, has Warren. But you're not just jealous of intercourse, are you, Logan? You're also jealous of intimacy, and both Warren and I have been intimate with Scott on many occasions. That's part of the baggage that comes with Scott that you're going to have to carry."

Logan realized simultaneously that he had a huge problem with Scott having achieved comfortable intimacy with other males – especially given that comfortable intimacy was something Scott could barely achieve with anything that didn't come equipped with a jet engine, and which Logan strongly suspected he had barely achieved with the woman he loved – and that he was going to have to suck it up.

"I'm really not kidding about the 'Scott never initiates sex' thing either. Jean did mention it from time to time, sometimes quite loudly. She was a very tolerant woman but everyone has their limits."

"Doesn't he like sex?"

"Apparently he likes it very much when he's reminded that it's an option, and is extremely obliging when prompted. It just tends to come a long way down his mental To Do list."

"Doesn't his sex drive remind him to…move it up the list?" Logan demanded, nonplussed. His own sex drive tended to send him memos throughout the day with increasing urgency. By the time darkness fell, it was usually shouting at him in neon red capitals. Beer was the only thing that tended to douse it.

"Scott habitually suppresses all bodily messages that don't come from his brain. Otherwise he might have to stop halfway through a mission because of his broken bones or weeping veins. Just so you know, he eats and sleeps on a schedule, not when he's hungry or weary like normal people. Just like he drinks filtered water in exactly the right quantities to keep someone of his height and build properly hydrated. In fact, to save time, trouble, and the inevitable impact on your blood pressure, I advise you to find a study that proves that achieving regular orgasm improves mental acuity. I'll write one for you if you need it. One useful thing about Scott is, that if you can convince him that it's beneficial to the greater good, he'll let you do pretty much anything to him – well, look at the Danger Room."

Logan said, "You're making this up, right?"

Hank gently patted his shoulder. "Logan, when the rest of us arranged things so that Jean and Scott could be alone in an isolated cabin in the woods for a dirty weekend, you know the first thing he thought they should do…?"

"Please tell me it was the obvious?"

"Housework. God's truth. He thought they should clean. That's how much Jean loved him, that she didn't dump him right then and there as a lesser woman surely would have done. You're following in some pretty impressive footprints, Logan."

"Well, I doubt I can pull off the high heels the way Jean did. You think me and Scott getting together is a bad idea, don't you?"

"I think it's a terrible idea on so many levels and can see very few ways that it won't result in you both wanting to kill each other. I also think it's rather a magnificent idea, like those follies erected in the grounds of otherwise unremarkable parks – a lightning-blasted ruin erected already broken, as if it had always been there, withstanding the centuries."

"I'm not that old!"

"Ironically, your memories go back about as far as Scott's do. You both stumbled out into the light pre-damaged by life. The difference between you is that you know you're a walking bomb crater and Scott believes himself to be relatively normal. Oh, and – in case you have failed to work this out by yourself – he is going to make you angry in ways that you didn't think it was possible to achieve without your head exploding. It's his secondary mutation."

Logan looked at Hank's uncompromising face. "You love him."

"Of course I love him! He's one of my oldest and dearest friends. It would test my abhorrence of violence to the limit not to rend limb from limb anyone who did him harm, but I'm in no way blinded to his many, many – did I mention many? – faults. I also know how angry he has made me on occasion and I am far more equable than you are, Logan."

"Did you give Jean this speech?"

"Jean knew what she was signing up for. She also had considerably better self-control than you do, and she was still moved to telekinetically shake him by the scruff of the neck on occasion. Oh, and resign yourself now to the fact that every third villain you encounter is going to do something…creepy to Scott. They don't actually have sex with him – as far as I'm aware – they just channel the sexual interest he awakens in them into strange and disturbing activities. It's one of the problems you'll have to get used to if you date him."

"Look, if you want me to back off, just be honest about it."

Hank looked mildly surprised. "But I don't want you to back off, Logan. That was actually my 'welcome to the family' speech. Did I not make that clear?"

He went off to lie down on an unoccupied bed while Logan muttered, "No, you didn't make that clear!"

He wondered how everyone knew that he wanted to sleep with Scott. Storm had said something to him about Logan needing to take better care of him that suggested she was on board, albeit in an irrational, female way that was going to hold Logan responsible when Scott did dumb things from here on out, even though he just bet she hadn't blamed Jean when he did dumb things in the past. Perhaps with Hank he had just smelled the want on him, but all the kids seem to know it, too, from the little hints and nudges they had been sending his way. Rogue seemed to be for the idea, albeit a little dubious as to how it was going to work out. Even Kitty had seemed to be for it although he had noticed her looking between him and Gambit in a way that suggested she was still weighing up their respective merits.

That, if anything was the decider. Gambit might be carelessly charming and devilishly handsome but he was still a damned flake. By comparison, Logan, berserker rages and all, was still the reliable option.

He also got what Kitty had meant about not being too subtle. Apparently Jean had liked Scott from pretty early on and Scott had been too clueless to notice. This was not a guy to woo gradually. This was a guy to grab firmly and drag towards the nearest bed. Unfortunately, the state Scott was in, that was out of the question for the foreseeable future. The only consolation was that, innuendo or not, Gambit was in no fit state to be having sex with anyone either.

It was possible that he'd dozed because, abruptly, he was wide awake with Scott tossing and turning, fever-bright and muttering Jean's name. It was a surprise to learn that Logan saying his name and slapping a damp flannel on his head before brusquely ordering him to settle down and go back to sleep actually had an impact. Scott did settle down and drift back under. He did it twice more, the other times he woke up, still saying Jean's name in a broken whisper that did painful things to Logan's heart. And then there was the shock of hearing his own name murmured with longing.

He stroked that trailing bang away from Scott's eye and bent his head close. "Scott…?"

"Logan…."

That was definitely longing. Wistful and sad and…hopeless. The long eyelashes fluttered a little but he didn't open his eyes.

"You dumb kid," Logan whispered fiercely. "Don'tcha even know I like you? Every other busybody in the place does."

Gambit said, "You tell him dat you like him, Wolverine? Cause if you didn' tell him already, no way does Scotty-boy know dat. He ain' too quick when it comes to matters of de heart."

"No one asked for your input, swamp-boy," Logan growled.

"Just saying, Scott dere got exactly one example of someone likin' him like dat and Gambit don't remember Jeannie ever yellin' at him like you do. Mostly people who yell at Scott like you do – dey de bad guys."

"I come over there, trust me, you're going to wish you were back with the bad guys."

Gambit blew him a kiss. "Kinda makes Gambit hot when you growl like dat, Logan. How 'bout, when everyone is feeling better, you and me take Scott to someplace with a hot tub and show him a real nice time...?"

Gambit's life was possibly saved by the door of the infirmary opening and Emma Frost sweeping inside, resplendent in some very expensive, very brief garment that left almost nothing to the imagination. Ambling behind her was what looked like a rock monster, who had to bend almost double to fit under the doorframe.

"This is Desmond," she said imperiously. "Desmond these are the x-men – a group of well-meaning mutants who blunder about the world attempting to do good and invariably getting captured by super-villains. I won't bother making individual introductions. With their track record of efficiency, most of them will probably be dead by next week so there's little point in getting attached."

Hank woke up and said with more aplomb than Logan could have managed, "It's very considerate of you to call, Emma, however, it is four in the morning and –"

She snapped her fingers at the rock monster and pointed to Scott, who woke up, bleary and with his hair sticking up in tufts, then closed his eyes in panic.

"You're still wearing the collar," Logan reminded him quietly. "No force beams, remember? Enjoy the world in color while you can."

Scott cautiously opened his eyes again and looked up at Logan a little shyly. "You're still here?"

"Yes."

"Without beer?"

Ominously, Logan repeated, "No force beams, remember?"

Gambit said, "See – Jean never threatened dat boy like dat. She be nice to him."

"This is me being nice."

Scott noticed Emma and looked aghast, which, given the way the Frost woman looked, made Logan mentally question Scott's eyesight, his sanity, and his libido. Scott, however, darted a 'save me' look at Hank who did hasten to put himself between the two of them as a large, blue-furred mutant shield. "Emma, I know that you eloquently expressed both your anger and your intentions earlier, but I really don't think Scott is up to your idea of suitable punishment –"

"Desmond is a healer," Emma explained impatiently, although Logan really didn't get how they were supposed to get from 'enormous rock monster' to 'healer' without a few signposts.

"That's very kind of you, but as I understand it, the mutants who were with Psylocke were more in need of –"

"Healers were dispatched to them, too, Henry, but Desmond is the best."

She gestured imperiously at Scott again and as the rock monster lumbered towards him, Scott said hastily, "Gambit's worse hurt than I am."

"And even more handsome, chèrie," Gambit observed.

"That too," Scott said.

Emma cast an assessing look at Gambit and then reluctantly waved Desmond in his direction. "But only because you're not unattractive," she told him. "And they did try to cut out your liver without an anesthetic, which I imagine, put something of a crimp in your day."

"If you fix him, he's just gonna go all out to nail Scott," Logan said.

"Better him than you – at least he washes."

"But I'll stick around. He won't."

"Yes, but I imagine that he would have no problem with sharing, whereas I can see that you're the grabby type."

Scott said faintly, "I'm lying right here." No one paid any attention to him.

Gambit said chivalrously, "Gambit be happy to share with such a beautiful lady."

Scott gave him a reproachful look. "Gambit!"

"You don' wan' Gambit to share you? Or you don' wan' Gambit to share you wit' sexy ladies who have whips? Cause Gambit happy to share wit' Logan too."

"Logan won't be sharing with anyone," Logan said shortly. "Logan will be keeping Scott entirely to himself and the rest of you clowns can go whistle." Scott darted him a look of such shock that Logan realized everyone who had told him how clueless Scott was about noticing when people liked him had not in any way overstated the case. Logan threw a challenging look Emma's way. "You still want to heal him if you don't get to have him afterwards?"

She breezed past, saying, "It's a matter of aesthetics, Logan, although I don't expect you to engage with concepts that you can't spell. I simply want a work of art restored to its former glory."

Logan became aware of Scott still gazing up at him in confusion. When Logan turned to look at him, he actually lowered his eyelashes and blushed, which was quite possibly the cutest thing that Logan had seen that didn't involve baby bunny rabbits, and put him more in charity with Scott than he had been for days.

Hank murmured, "Logan, Scott's not really himself right now…."

Which Logan ignored, because there was doing the right thing and then there was just being an idiot. A hand under Scott's jaw, an upward tilt and he was getting to look into those very blue eyes before he bent down and kissed him, gently but firmly, in a way that not even Scott Summers on his slowest day could construe as platonic. Scott closed his eyes but he was opening his mouth and shyly kissing him back.

Gambit said, "Finally!"

Logan ignored him to pull Scott up by his hospital gown until Logan had an arm around his back to steady him, and the other hand free to brush his trailing hair off his forehead and trace the line of his high cheekbone down to his mouth before he kissed it again, very tenderly.

Hank said, "Logan! Don't touch his back. And, given his temperature, I'd rather you didn't cause him to die of exposure…."

Logan became belatedly aware that in pulling up Scott's hospital gown he was baring his ass to Emma Frost's appreciative gaze. "Okay – back to bed!" He lowered him carefully back onto the mattress while Scott kept attempting to kiss him and the effort involved in not keeping his mouth pressed to Scott's hot, dry little lips was considerable.

"He's still spiking a fever," Hank reminded him. "Also – drugged out of his mind. Remember?"

Logan lowered Scott's head carefully back onto the pillow and Scott clutched at his shirt and tugged him down after him, mouth opening obligingly. Enunciating carefully to make allowances for Scott's fever-scrambled brain, Logan said, "Scott, did you like me before today?"

Scott had to think about that but then he nodded. "Yes."

"Since when?"

"I don't know. It just happened."

"What happened?"

"You holding me was what I thought about to make myself feel better."

Logan turned to Hank. "Good enough?"

"Good enough." Hank covered Scott up with a blanket. "I will still take it very much amiss if you attempt to make out with him in his current condition, however."

"I wasn't planning to."

Desmond lay his large, rock-like hands on Gambit's bare, bandaged torso, and they began to glow. Gambit gasped, arched his back, and then said something in French that sounded kinda…orgasmic to Logan. He twisted from side to side, clutched at Desmond's arm then grabbed his shoulder and pulled himself up against him, emitting a soft, pleasurable wail that Logan had to admit went straight to his groin. The light from Desmond's fingers blazed through yellow to white, then Gambit fell back onto his bed, limp and sweaty and satiated and Desmond gave him a few gentle pets and strokes.

Panting, Gambit said, "Mon Dieu! Desmond – marry me now."

Hank hurried over, peeled off the bandage and blinked in surprise. Logan strode over to take a look for himself and found that Gambit's surgical wound hadn't just healed but had vanished completely without even leaving a scar. As Hank stroked gentle blue fingers across Gambit's abdomen to check that there was no heat or swelling, Gambit offered a soft, satiated moan and said, "Henri, dat feels real good but Gambit gonna need a few minutes…."

"That's extraordinarily effective," Hank observed to Desmond. "That's a remarkable ability you have there."

Desmond made a graceful bow and pointed to Scott. "If it won't exhaust you, I'd be delighted if you could repair our other patient as well," Hank assured him.

"Maybe without the orgasm?" Logan suggested.

Desmond's look of confusion suggested that his powers just worked that way and always had and it was strange that Logan didn't know that.

When it was Scott's turn to get the rock-monster cure, Logan had to sit a little way away and not even attempt to get up for some considerable time after, the image of Scott's arching spine and gasping, open mouth, not to mention his ecstatic moans and whimpers, repeating itself all too vividly in his brain.

Emma looked at him loftily. "Your buttons are so easy to press."

"And if your nipples were any harder they'd be boring through your…bikini," Logan retorted. "Hank, is he okay?"

Hank was carefully unwinding bandages while giving Scott a soothing pat on the shoulder. Scott said faintly, "What just happened…?"

"Mister…Desmond was kind enough to use his mutation to heal some of your injuries."

Logan moved carefully across to where Hank was checking Scott's vitals. "Is he okay?" he pressed.

"Blood pressure – normal; temperature – normal. Bruises gone. Back healed. No heat coming off ribcage, suggesting to me that it is no longer broken. Burns vanished. As good as new, in fact."

Scott looked down at his body in shock, touching the places where the wounds had been, then looked across at Desmond. His "Thank you" was heartfelt. He received a gentle nod of acknowledgement from the big guy. Scott turned to Hank. "You realize what this means…?"

It took Logan a moment to realize that Scott was suggesting to Hank that as his bodily ills were now all completely cured – thanks to Desmond – he could return to his own room.

"Good idea. Why not? Maybe from there you can get yourself a nice workout in the Danger Room…?" Logan suggested silkily.

Scott turned to him in what was clearly about to be relieved agreement when he seemed to suspect that there might be a trap behind Logan's chilly smile.

"Not…necessarily," he said cautiously.

Logan turned to Hank. "You sedate him or I will and you won't like the way I do it."

Hank already had a syringe loaded up. "I think a few more hours sleep is in order, Scott." He injected it without preamble and Scott gave Logan a reproachful look.

"If you think you're going to get to boss me around just because you kissed me – "

"This isn't me bossing you around, Slim. This is me being the voice of sanity. You need to learn to know the difference."

"Well, they sound exactly the same to me…." He struggled against the sedative valiantly for a moment but then closed his eyes and was asleep in a minute. Hank covered him up with the blankets. He turned to Gambit. "Do you have sense enough to go to sleep without being drugged?"

"Of course I do, Henri," Gambit returned easily. "Gambit has way less bangs on de head than poor Scott."

Hank was thanking Emma Frost, with sincerity, Logan noticed, which was more than Scott had done. She and Hank seemed to genuinely like each other; he was also unprepared for the raw concern her eyes so briefly betrayed as she looked across at a sleeping Scott. Under the surface snark, he realized, the poor woman had it badly. He wondered what she had gone through having to watch him being tortured on her no doubt big screen television. He moved across and could smell the very expensive perfume she had put on with a ladle, no doubt to hide how she really felt. He caught her wrist and saw the crescent shaped cuts in her palm where she had dug her fingernails into her skin.

"You too, eh?"

"Try not to damage him, Logan," she told him aloofly, firmly removing her hand from his grasp. "As far as I'm concerned, he is your property on a purely temporary basis. Common sense – not to mention sheer self-preservation – is bound to prevail at some point."

"This is Scott Summers we're talking about, darlin'," Logan reminded her. "He doesn't have any common-sense or self-preservation. Also, he's a lot more scared of you than he is of me."

"Yes, I noticed – why is that?"

Logan shrugged. "You got me. I guess he hasn't grown out of his 'girls are scary' phase."

"I blame Jean," Emma retorted. "She was much too powerful. It's probably given him a complex."

"If she did, it would have been one among many," Hank reminded them both.

Emma looked Logan up and down. "I get the collar and the chain, and I certainly get the slaveboy thing, but why the loincloth? It's not as if – "

"Get out of my head and stay out of it, Frost!"

Hank steered their visitor towards the door with aplomb. "Always a pleasure, Emma. And thank you both again. Yours was a most timely intervention." He kissed her hand in farewell and she left, straight-backed and dignified, with Desmond shambling amiably in the rear. "Poor Emma," Hank said. "She has a good heart under all the evil plans, manipulation, and spite." He glanced at Logan. "And she would almost certainly hunt you down and kill you if you hurt Scott. Not as terrifyingly as Jean would have done, perhaps, but I still think she'd get the job done."

"What is it with Scott Summers and women, anyway?" Logan demanded. "I've never met a guy with less idea how to talk to girls or with more of them panting over him."

Hank looked amused. "Well, as you may have noticed, he is very attractive."

"Women are so shallow," Logan said, and sat down by Scott's bed to drink in the way he could see every plane of his face without the visor shadowing it.

***

"Scott…?"

Scott woke up cautiously, the way experience had taught him, to the inevitable grief of remembering that Jean was now dead, ready-braced for the pain of whatever bruises chose to awake with him. None did. He opened his eyes and hastily closed them when he saw the world in color.

"It's all right, Scott, your powers are temporarily contained by a collar that we have all been very remiss about removing. I needed to check with you first that you wanted it done."

The Professor's voice was as soothing to him outside his mind as inside it. Scott opened his eyes and blinked as the world was indeed in color. The Professor was by his bed, and Logan was sleeping in an uncomfortable-looking hospital chair, slumped across Scott's bed with his head on Scott's knees. Hank was drowsing on one bed, and Gambit was asleep in another. Scott let the memories well in gradually, not wanting to be overwhelmed by whatever terrible thing had been happening to them last. The torture jagged its way through his brain, and he flinched from the remembered pain of nerve-shock and punches, a wet rope end laid across his back, and then reached for his ribcage. Yet still nothing hurt.

"Desmond…?" The Professor prompted. "Emma Frost…?"

Scott remembered and breathed a sigh of relief although there was a touch of embarrassment as well. "That woman scares me."

"I think your enemies have a great deal more reason to be afraid of her than you do."

Sniffing himself, Scott grimaced. He had clearly sweated a lot while being tortured, Logan had clearly sweated a lot, too, before falling asleep on him, and Scott now consequently smelt like something that was desperately in need of a shower. He focused on the Professor's face and noticed that he had shadows under his eyes. "Did what I did yesterday upset you?"

"At the time, a little, yes. I would have preferred it if the same result could have been achieved at less cost to you." He must have seen that Scott looked downcast because he added quickly, "That's not a criticism, Scott. I put you in charge of the X-Men for a reason. For someone who appears to live in straight lines you have surprisingly elliptical thought processes. I wanted you to see something. Do you feel well enough to walk?"

"I feel perfectly normal," Scott whispered back. "Except – did I kiss Logan…?"

"Yes. And Gambit, I understand."

"I didn't kiss you, did I?"

"No, Scott. Nor Hank. Do you still want to kiss Logan?"

Scott looked at the disheveled, unshaven creature, currently snoring on his knees. "Yes," he whispered furtively. "Does that mean I have another head injury?"

"I think it's just another example of your elliptical thought processes at work. Logan is nothing if not…outside the box." The Professor must have noticed Scott's anxious sideways glance because he said, "Scott, my dear boy, I raise mutant children in the hope of them being able to live in a world that will finally learn to accept their differences. Did you really think that I would object to you wanting to sleep with a man? How much of a hypocrite do you think I am?"

"I don't! It's just…I mean…Logan…?"

"I admit he may not have been my first choice of son-in-law, but I don't think anyone can doubt that he would literally carve his way through a wall to get to you if he thought you were in danger. I'm sure Jean would have understood, if that's what's troubling you. And she would always have wanted you to be safe."

"Why does no one ever think I can keep myself safe?" Scott said a little petulantly.

The Professor looked as if he were having to fight rather hard not to smile. "I can't imagine," he said kindly. "Will you come with me…?"

Climbing gingerly out from under Logan's dead weight on his legs, Scott couldn't help wondering if this was what he was going to be doing the next morning, waking up to Logan's snores and beer breath and finding them oddly…hot. Surely, he must have had a head injury? He craned his neck to look at Logan's face and it looked ridiculously attractive to him, even though his mouth was open and he was drooling. "Damn, I must have it badly," he sighed.

"If it's any consolation, I'm quite sure that he has it even worse," Xavier reassured him.

Xavier let him brush his teeth – Scott could not really function until he had brushed his teeth – and handed him a mug of coffee, and Scott thought that there were advantages, after all, to being surrounded by people who had known you for years, and to whom you were no kind of mystery. He downed the coffee in three grateful gulps.

"You do know you've just stained the teeth you cleaned, doing that?" Xavier said, more as if he couldn't help himself. He grimaced. "Sorry. I know you're an adult now. Old habits and so on."

Even as a telepath, after the chilly indifference of the orphanage, Scott wondered if Xavier had any idea how grateful he had been to be given a strict routine, and have someone tell him dull parental things, like not going outside with damp hair or bare feet, and not brushing his teeth more than three times a day or he'd start impacting on the enamel. He wheeled Xavier down the corridor. It was still early, Scott could tell that from the unusual quiet. No pupils shouting at one another or running or zapping each other with their powers. It gave the mansion a holy atmosphere that the children usually effortlessly dispersed; as if they were visiting a cathedral.

He whispered, "Are all the kids sedated, too?"

"Just asleep. It's barely six. Hank's plan was for you to sleep through until ten. I rather suspected that the lingering effects of Desmond's healing…mojo would swiftly counteract the effects of any sedative in fairly short order, but I thought it was kinder to let Hank rest without worrying about that."

"Have you spoken to Betsy?"

"Yes. Telepathically. She has made quite a splash on the local news channels." He switched on the TV and Scott saw footage of Betsy looking bruised but beautiful, purple hair whipped by the downdraft from the helicopter blades, two mutant children, one black, one white, both grubby and confused, clasped in her arms. "That image was on most of the front pages as well," Xavier said. "It has all the human interest elements that humans enjoy. The little boy has already been reunited with his parents, who are telling every outlet that will listen that the police do nothing when your child goes missing, if that child happens to be a mutant, even if they're snatched from their own garden. A newspaper reporter is trying to find the girl's parents even now. They're hoping for a heartwarming exclusive."

"I notice Betsy didn't grab one of the green-skinned kids or the ones with beaks instead of mouths," Scott said.

"Not her choice. She assured me she would have welcomed the opportunity to get a less conventionally photogenic mutant in front of the cameras, but they were unwilling to be subjected to the spotlight. Their experience of being seen in public is of being yelled at, having things thrown at them, and hunted down by vicious mobs. She is still trying to persuade one of the Morlock children to appear on Breakfast TV with her before the current wave of good will dissipates."

"Do you know what happened to the ones that were in the facility?"

"The injured ones are being treated by Desmond's friends. Some have returned to their families. Some are probably on their way to join up with Magneto. He has extended the hand of friendship to them, and they certainly have every reason to be angry. They were, of course, offered a place here, but so far everyone has declined."

The Professor changed the channel and Scott flinched from the sight of his own face. There were talking heads in a studio, earnestly debating, and his face behind them, very cut and bruised. It was disconcerting. He looked strange without sunglasses. He also looked embarrassingly young.

"I don't really look like that, do I?"

"Not since Desmond healed you, no."

"No, I mean…" Scott grimaced. "You know what I mean and you're being tactful."

"Something you might want to try yourself if you're serious about this relationship with Logan. The man is easier to wound than his healing factor might lead you to suppose."

"Do you think me dating him is a bad idea?"

"I think you can rest assured, at least, that it is an entirely original one that no telepath of your acquaintance is likely to have put into your head." But Xavier was smiling and he seemed quite unperturbed.

"…the question, Senator, is should crimes against mutants be reclassified as a hate crime…?

"Mutants living among us is a complex problem that necessitates a complex solution."

"Would that be a final solution, Senator…?"

It took Scott a moment to realize that the interviewer's silky aggression was being deployed against the man who thought mutants needed to be registered. He cast a shocked look at Xavier.

"What are the other channels saying?"

Xavier obligingly changed the channel. Scott's face was there again, behind another set of leather chairs and this time a younger interviewer with someone wearing a lot of combat medals and an air of rapidly rising blood pressure.

"The fact of the matter is that this was going on under the noses of the government. Is it so unreasonable that people are now asking if it was with government compliance…?"

"It most assuredly was not!"

"Then, General, when the data recovered from the bombed out facility is examined, there is no possibility of any mutant organs, blood samples or DNA having been purchased from that place of experimentation and murder by any laboratory currently in receipt of a government contract. Is that what you're telling me…?"

Xavier changed the channel again and it took Scott a moment to recognize that this was some kind of breakfast television…thing. He only tended to look at the news channels so he was unfamiliar with people who conversed from the comfort of couches while weather people gesticulated in the background. These people were very well dressed with shiny, sleek coiffures, perma-tans, and bright, white smiles.

"…are we seeing a sea-change in public opinion…?"

"I think it's too early to say. I think what we're seeing is a climate where people want to have the debate that they might not have wanted to have last week. I think we're seeing people taking a look at their own prejudices…."

"But the fact remains that some mutants are dangerous. Don't you agree?"

"Well, so are some humans but we don't say every white heterosexual male needs to be registered every time the FBI arrests another Ted Bundy…"

Xavier switched it off. "You wanted to have an impact – you did."

"It won't last," Scott shrugged. "Magneto will bend another bridge or Juggernaut will trash another reservoir and we'll be back to vigilantes hanging mutant kids from swings."

"They're still carrying mutant corpses out of the rubble of that facility. Some of them very small corpses. Apparently their freezer facility was almost full. Those images are not going to fade away overnight. Perhaps all you've won us is a breathing space but it's still an achievement. As absolutely no one else in the school is going to admit that you may have been right to do what you did, I thought perhaps I should."

Scott smiled in relief. "Thank you, Professor. I appreciate it."

Xavier patted his arm. "From a strictly non-strategic viewpoint, however, Scott, I would prefer it if, on the next occasion that such an opportunity arises, that you…find another way."

"Understood."

"That's not a criticism. It's just a…personal request." Xavier wheeled himself towards the doorway. "Should I ask what you're planning to do next or would it be better for everyone if I remained in ignorance?"

"I was going to shower. Work out in the Danger Room. And then shower again. I smell like…."

"Pain…?" Xavier said gently.

"I was going with sweat and Logan."

Xavier inclined his head. "Odors to which you had probably better accustom yourself if you wish this…romance to progress."

"I don't know what I want," Scott admitted. "Every aim I've ever had has been mission-orientated, or to do with making the world a better place for humans and mutants to co-exist. Without Jean, I don't know how to just plan what I want to do tomorrow or the day after."

"Scott, you have always been excellent at both focused concentration and multi-tasking. Trust me, you are perfectly capable of working towards making the world a better place, planning individual missions, and driving Logan to distraction…."

Scott stepped out of the shower and was handed a towel. He said, "Logan…?" in surprise and then turned to find that it was Warren. The man was wearing a coat that Scott suspected was very expensive, and looked, as always, inhumanly beautiful and the epitome of elegance from his perfectly styled blond hair to the tips of his beautifully shiny shoes. Scott tied the towel around his waist and waited, irresolutely, to see if Warren wanted to punch him or yell at him. He was absolutely certain that he would not want Scott dripping on his thousand dollar coat –

Warren's arms engulfed him and he was pulled in to a breath-stealing embrace. "Scott, you half-witted Boy Scout, what were you thinking?"

It was a long time since anyone who wasn't Jean had hugged him. Scott found that he was unexpectedly moved by it – especially as he was making Warren damp and untidy, two things Warren hated to be. Warren stroked his wet hair back from his right eye and then pulled him in for another embrace. He sounded choked: "I thought you were a goner for sure this time."

Scott said, "I'm sorry," and meant it, because Warren was a beautifully sculpted surface hiding his never-ending ache for the skies, and was never snuffly and tearful and moved.

"I don't know why I should be surprised about you getting tortured. You always were the damsel in distress on the team." Warren seemed to belatedly realize that Scott was making his coat wet and let Scott go while he removed it, and, being Warren, found a hook to hang it from. He was shirtless underneath the coat, and his wings were strapped down. Scott grimaced at the sight. "You didn't fly here?"

"I came by chauffeur-driven limousine. It's a millionaire playboy thing."

Warren's wings quickly began to ache when they were strapped down. His father still preferred them that way. He had a son who had outdone Icarus and all he wanted was for him to be earthbound. Scott was all too aware that children had no defense against their parents' expectations. In his experience, it was impossible to not keep trying to please them even when they were dead; hopeless to resist that impulse when they were still alive.

"You should fly home. You should fly everywhere."

Warren said, "Help me then."

Scott was only too happy to reach for the buckles, tugging them loose so Warren's wings could flex, blindingly white and beautiful, while the straps fell to the ground. Warren's wings outspread and then Scott was back in Warren's arms, being softly scolded, while his wings folded around Scott tenderly. It was like being in warm, soft cocoon. It made Scott feel sixteen again, and he wanted to be, in that moment, desperately, because then at least some of the terrible things wouldn't have happened and could still be averted, and Jean would still be alive. He sighed and leaned in close, his wet chest touching Warren's bare one, just breathing Warren in, like he was a winged time machine who could carry them both back to the past.

Warren said, "I'm so sorry about Jean," as if he hadn't said it a dozen times before. As if he hadn't come to the funeral and cried at her empty grave as well.

"I wasn't trying to kill myself."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm the only one that is. Maybe the Professor…. But I think Hank thinks –"

"He does."

"I wouldn't do that to the rest of you. I know too well how it feels to be left behind."

Warren hugged him tighter. "You idiot. You idiot. You idiot."

"Worse things happened to us – were done to us – much worse."

"It's different when you're in the middle of a mission, there's the adrenaline and the terror to distract you. Besides, missions were always ugly things. The ugliness isn't meant to follow you home to your comfortable apartment. It's not supposed to be your friends who make the evening news." Warren raised his wings again and Scott missed the white warmth of their embrace, still loved the avian grace with which they folded back. Those wings never looked out of place on Warren; they perfected him. People didn't flinch from Warren's wings because they were abnormal, but because Warren reminded everyone else that they were flightless.

Warren touched his face. "No visor?"

"It's temporary."

Warren's expression was searching. "Whenever your powers got turned off, you used to be ecstatic. You would practically throw a party – and, given that you have no idea how parties are thrown, that was saying something."

"With the force beams, I'm a freak of nature, doomed to see the world in red, who might kill someone that he loves just by opening his eyes. But without them – I'm not an X-Man. All I'd be on a mission is a liability."

"Funny, because I seem to remember you taking out a Sentinel, single-handed, without any beams."

"It was a fluke, Warren."

"It was smart thinking and good training."

"Smart thinking and good training isn't enough these days. We have too many enemies."

Warren combed Scott's wet hair back into order with his fingers. "I'm not coming back to this madhouse."

"I know."

"Do you miss me?"

Scott shook his head. "Nah."

"Truth or dare, Scotty."

"Fine. I miss you every damned day. So does Hank. You added tone."

"Talking of tone, you know not to try to dress yourself, right? I remember those suits you wore before Jean started buying your clothes, and there are times when being color blind isn't enough of an excuse. So, only wear things she picked out, and when you need new ones, don't go shopping without me. Promise?"

"Warren…."

"I'm serious. You have no taste in…anything. You wouldn't know a Château Pétrus from Asti Spumante, you'll eat anything, whatever it tastes like, if it's good for you, and you certainly don't know what clothing to buy that doesn't make you look like a…guy who reads comic books. Now – promise!"

"Fine. I promise."

Warren teased Scott's wet hair back into its usual style. "Tell me again that you miss me?"

"I admit it was nice having someone able to fly us away from the bad guys."

"You liked being nagged to diet, did you?"

"Jean fibbed, you know. She was the one who snacked."

It hurt to smile. Everything hurt when the people one loved were so fragile and the world in which they lived so dangerous, and some of them were already lost forever. Warren said, "Okay, if we're truth-telling, you were always pretty light and I never minded carrying you. I was just afraid of dropping you."

"I used to have nightmares about falling. Burning planes. Burning parachutes. I never worried about you dropping me. I never had a nightmare where you did. I always felt safe in your arms."

Scott stroked his fingers tentatively through the overlapping feathers of Warren's wings; they were dense and light at the same time; hooked and barbed and soft as swansdown, remiges like airy outspread fingers. He remembered sheltering in the arc of them while lightning tore the skies, just as he remembered the strength and solidity of Hank with one huge, hairy arm wrapped around Scott to keep him warm, his blue chest the most comforting of pillows. He touched the soft, sharp-edged flight feathers again and they were miraculous, still, like touching light. He said, "Have you found anywhere safe to fly?"

"Perfect safety is an illusion."

"Hope might be, too. Try living without it."

Warren cradled Scott's head in his hands and gazed intently into his eyes. Scott realized how strange that was for both of them, eye contact the rarest of luxuries which had been denied him for so many years. Warren said, "Are you – living without it?"

Scott had to think about that but then he shook his head. "No."

"But you must be so lonely without Jean. You two were besties long before you started dating."

"I miss her all the time. But I sort of fell for someone…." His voice trailed off as he remembered all those lectures Warren had given him at parties. "Never mind."

Warren's perfect nose was wrinkled and his beautifully blue eyes narrowed with suspicion. "It's a guy, isn't it?"

"It's really none of your – "

"It's some grunting caveman. Damnit, Scott! Didn't you listen to anything I told you back then?"

"I don't think he's just experimenting with me before he goes back to girls. And he's never tried to tie me up and put me in the trunk of his car." Scott wondered briefly if leaving Scott bound and collared, and bodily hurling him into the back-up x-van counted in that scenario but swiftly decided that it didn't.

"Does he look like a serial killer?"

Scott thought about Logan with that berserker light in his eyes and his claws out. "Well…not all the time."

"What the hell is Hank thinking?" Warren demanded. He grabbed Scott by the shoulders and pulled him in close. "I forbid it, do you hear me? I utterly forbid it. You're coming home with me, today, and I'm going to fix you up with some nice mutant boy from a good family, who I know for a fact doesn't keep anyone's dismembered pets in his basement."

"Logan likes animals," Scott protested feebly.

"To eat or have sex with?"

"That's rich coming from you, Tweety Bird. I hear you can do it airborne."

Scott turned his head slowly, knowing that what he saw was going to be an angry, unreasonable Logan. What he saw was a shirtless Logan, wearing yesterday's pants, and no shoes, with crazy bed hair, suggesting that he had come straight from waking up in the infirmary to running in search of Scott. And he guessed what Logan saw was Scott, wet, and almost naked, in the arms of another bare-chested man. Logan surprised him by coming forward with no claws out and no murder light in his eyes. He looked and sounded reasonable. He also looked incredibly handsome. Scott realized he should probably stop staring at Logan in that wistful, pining way. It was going to make playing hard to get very difficult to pull off should the need arise to try to hang onto some dignity.

He murmured, "Warren, this is Logan. Logan, this is Warren." They both ignored him.

Logan said, "I'm not a serial killer. I don't want to experiment with Scott or on him. I don't want to keep him in the trunk of my car – seriously, that's a thing with him…?"

Warren was giving Logan a wary, searching look, but his tone was level: "Name something creepy, some guy will have either done it to Scott or fantasized about doing it to Scott. He has that effect on people."

Scott said, "That isn't true. That's just something you and Hank got stuck in your heads that has no basis in reality."

"Really, what about the time –?"

Scott said hastily, "There's no need to start rehashing old missions. I'm cold. I want to get dressed."

That was a tactical error. He immediately had two guys fussing at him and over him, Warren grabbing a towel and rubbing Scott's hair with it like Scott was six and Warren was a particularly annoying aunt, while Logan grabbed Hank's robe from the hook clearly marked 'Hank' and tried to stuff Scott into it.

He found himself muttering, "You're insane. Everyone's insane except me," but they both ignored him, Warren explaining his concerns and citing examples from parties in which other people had made Scott drunk and Scott had endangered his own virtue by not following the guidelines for party behavior as laid down by Warren, while Logan sympathized with Warren and agreed with his conclusions.

"Here's an idea – why don't you two date…?" Scott suggested, but still his arms were now in Hank's robe and it was being belted around him even though it should have been obvious to anyone paying even a modicum of attention that it was never going to fit him.

Warren and Logan seemed to have reached some kind of accommodation. Still, Warren said, "If a swan's wing can break a man's arm, what do you imagine mine can do?"

Logan said, "I'm not promising to never lose my temper with him. He's very annoying."

"Why do people keep saying I'm annoying when I'm not?" Scott enquired of the tiles.

"All I'm saying is if you hurt him…."

"Get real, Birdboy. If I hurt him, Hank's ten yards up the corridor. You really think he's going to leave you anything to peck? Look – this thing between me and Fearless Leader Boy is like five minutes old. I can't tell you if it's going to work out or not. All I can tell you is that I'm not getting involved with the guy because I want to make his life harder than it already is, okay?"

Warren said, "Fair enough."

"And, anyway, if it isn't me it'll be Emma Frost – who, last time I checked, was evil."

"Really? Emma Frost? I see her at functions all the time."

"You didn't know she was evil?"

"Oh, I knew that. I just didn't know she was interested in Scott. She's a beautiful, powerful, sophisticated, witty woman – what on earth does she see in him?"

"As far as I can tell, it's just old-fashioned lust."

"I guess that explains it. Still – she does know she'd have to make all the running all the time? Not to mention probably having to draw Scott a picture before every non-vanilla sex act? And there's the fact he has no discernible sense of humor. And that stick up his ass, which, given her predilections would probably get in the way when she wanted to –"

"Just as a matter of interest, why does everyone feel it's okay to talk about me as if I'm not here?" Scott enquired.

"Hank is probably going to wake up a lot happier if you're back in the infirmary when he surfaces." Logan held up his hands and his tone was almost…reasonable. "Not being the boss of you, just making a suggestion. You got your work out in the Danger Room in. You've had your shower. You've scared the crap out of me, and you've made out with bird-boy here, so, would it kill you to just do this one thing for the guy you put through hell yesterday?"

"We weren't 'making out'," Scott retorted. "Warren and I have never made out. We've just…."

"Known each other a long time. I get it. Hank explained it to me. Everyone's seen you naked. I get it."

If Logan had been an asshole about it, Scott would have argued, but he sounded weary and resigned and…sad. Scott wanted to know how Gambit was anyway. He didn't want to make Hank unhappy. There were several good reasons for going back to the infirmary, even though there was now nothing wrong with him except for being swaddled in a toweling robe far too large for him. He said, "Okay." He hesitated, looking at Warren. "Don't be a stranger."

Then the man enveloped him another brief, rough embrace, feathers soft against Scott's face as his wings extended. Warren said, "You can be an X-Man without force beams."

Scott said, sadly, "No, I can't."

"I just want you to be able to see the world in color."

"I want you not to have to hide your wings – but we're not there yet."

Warren said, "That's not your fault."

Scott thought about his less than perfect performance in the Danger Room that morning. He had made two tactical errors, one potentially serious, and had been slow to respond to a possible threat, at least twice. As soon as no one was watching, he intended to go back and have another shot at the same scenario, this time learning from his mistakes. He said, "I could be better."

Warren laughed hollowly. "You never change, do you? Not your hairstyle, not your outlook, not your complete absence of anything approximating to a life."

Scott said, "But I like my life."

Warren patted him gently on the shoulder. "Scott, my boy, that is the true tragedy here. It's my sincere wish, fond as I am of him, that one day Xavier is going to take a long hard look at you and wonder why the hell he didn't just take you to the funfair or give you ten bucks and tell you to go the movies – instead of building you a room where you could learn how to risk your neck every day."

"The danger isn't an illusion. There are people out there who hate us. If we can't change their minds then the future for mutants is probably extinction –"

Warren held up a manicured hand. "Don't give me the spiel. I know it by heart. You still deserved more than fighting the good fight. We all deserved more than that. Tell Hank I love him."

"He knows."

Warren said, "Tell him anyway. And you know I love you, right?"

"I can't think of any particular reason why you should."

"It's a mystery to me, too, but, still – there it is."

Scott said, "Don't let them strap your wings down, Warren."

"Try to avoid getting tortured on national television..."

Logan watched their goodbye with his heart clenched. It wasn't even jealousy this time, although when he had found Scott wrapped in the warm, white wings of a guy who looked like a Greek statue come to life, the green-eyed monster had definitely awoken. This Warren guy was…stunning. Even Scott, with his chiseled cheekbones and perfect physique couldn't compete with him. Logan had come haring from the Danger Room to the showers, wondering if Scott had cracked his ribs again, got injured through grief and lack of focus, or the drugs still swimming in his system, and he had seen –

Warren being unreally beautiful and shirtless and Scott wearing the world's smallest towel, and dripping wet, and the two of them…hugging, and, yes, the jealousy had flared, painfully, at the way Scott, who was crap at touching, was okay with being touched by these guys. It was the way he'd been with Jean, completely comfortable, and, standing in the mansion shower block, Logan had realized that Scott's uncharacteristic lack of hang-ups when it came to Jean also extended to his interactions with Hank and this Warren guy but might not yet extend to him. On the other hand, it also probably explained why Scott wasn't bothered by the claws, not when his best friends were a lion-guy and a bird-guy; having a wolf-guy in his life as well was probably par for the course.

There had also been the relief, as he gazed anxiously at Scott's lean, wet, barely-towel-covered body, to see that it really was miraculously unmarked. No lash marks, no lumpy discoloration over his ribcage, no bruises, anywhere. There were a few old scars but absolutely no new injuries.

He was hurting for them now because he could see the children they had been, because they could see the children they had been. He could see Warren looking searchingly at a gawky teenager who wanted to make Xavier proud, and he could see that Warren thought Scott had been abused by all his father figures, including Xavier. Did he think the guy should have hidden the truth from them? Told them the world was a safe place or that it wasn't their job to change it? Or just given Scott some time to be a kid? It was all too late now, in any case. Scott was this forever. Or until life got so much tougher that it changed him again, probably for the worse. Warren was looking at Scott the way a rescue dog who got to go home with a nice family from the suburbs might look back at the sad puppies who'd been left behind.

Logan said, "Other people care what happens to him, Worthington. It isn't just you."

Warren said, "Do you really think I would have left him here if they didn't?"

The arrogance was irksome but Logan realized the guy had a point. He could swoop in here, pick up Scott in his arms, and fly off with him any time he liked. As Warren took his coat off the hook, Scott said, "You're going home in the limousine?"

Warren shrugged his way into the coat elegantly. "Too many people around not to. That collar suits you – in a 'my other half has a sex torture dungeon' way. You should think about keeping it."

"It's coming off today."

"At least have sex without the force beams, Scott! I'm sure you'll find it more relaxing if you're not having to worry about blowing your other half's head off."

"But I won't be looking that way – " Scott began and then blushed. Once again, Logan was surprised by how cute Scott looked with that red flush staining those high cheekbones of his. And he couldn't believe he had used the word 'cute' about another guy, even in the privacy of his own head. Not that the concept of 'privacy of his own head' really applied in a world with nosy telepaths anyway.

Warren looked past Scott to Logan. "Well, what do you know, I did him a disservice, he actually knows two sexual positions. Scott you can have sex with a guy while facing him, you dimwit, you just have to hook your leg up – "

"This is a show don't tell," Logan told Warren firmly. "And I'll be the one showing him."

"Of course, it's even easier if you have sex with two guys at once, then one of them can support your shoulders for you while you orally satisfy him. Gambit's still here, isn't he?"

Logan said ominously, "Wanna take a hike, Worthington?"

Warren mimed drawing on paper. "Seriously, Scott will need diagrams. Detailed diagrams. You should probably buy him some kind of manual. Pretend you're a Harley-Davidson."

"Bub, if we weren't in the basement I would throw you out of a window."

Warren waved casually to Logan and then grabbed Scott by the lapels of Hank's robe, spun him around as a human shield between himself and Logan, pulled him in close and pressed his forehead against his. "Being an X-Man for all those years has already shot my nerves to hell so try not to do anything dumb for at least another six months, will you?"

"I'll do my best."

"Enjoy the guy-sex. Try to remember, there isn't a test later and no one will be marking you on it. There is actually no such thing as a failing grade. If one or both of you get off, it's an automatic gold star." He kissed Scott on the brow, shoved him into Logan's arms before Logan could retaliate with violence, and gave Logan a cheery wave as he backed up with far too much poise for Logan's temper. Warren said, "You may want to kill me now, hairy guy whose name I didn't catch, but you'll be thanking me for telling Scott that later. Especially given that, going by your age, your refractory period is probably longer than his, and he'll just make you do a reset if he doesn't think he did it perfectly."

"I have healing factor, Bub. My refractory period is about five minutes."

He had at least succeeded in impressing the smartass with the wings. Warren's eyebrows shot up and he gave Scott a double thumb's up. "Then I guess you can go on being an uptight perfectionist who always wants a do-over, Scott. Go you!"

Scott was laughing but he still looked sad as he waved him goodbye. Warren was still backing up, but he mimed putting a phone to his ear and mouthed: Call me. Tell me everything. I won't judge. Aloud he said, "You know about lube, right?"

Logan said conversationally, "If you're still in sight in thirty seconds, I'm going to seriously clip your wings, Pal."

Scott still went on gazing until Warren was out of sight and then said with a sigh, "I hate to see him walking. Warren in flight is one of the most beautiful –" He seemed to become aware of Logan's expression. "You didn't…like him…?"

Logan thought about yelling all the things uppermost in his mind but instead said mildly, "He seems like a nice guy."

He suspected that Scott's look of relief had less to do with Logan not being angry – which Scott would just resent – and a lot more to do with Logan not indulging in confusing and contradictory behavior that he might expect Scott to successfully interpret. "The kids kinda had a point about you and that vat, didn't they, Cyke?"

"Have you even asked me out yet, Logan?"

"Summers, if you were hoping to play hard to get, you've left it a little late."

"You could still ask me."

Logan rested his hands on Scott's shoulders, gazed into his eyes and said, "Scott Summers, I kinda like you. Wanna go out sometime?"

Scott considered the matter and then shrugged. "That wasn't the most romantic proposal I've ever received from another guy but…okay."

As they began to stroll back to the infirmary, Logan said, "Tell me one guy who has ever made you a more romantic offer than that?"

Scott thought it over. "There was a guy at a party once who made me what I think was a…proposal for how he and I could spend the next ten minutes but I didn't understand it at the time. For all I know it was quite romantic."

"Was he a big, dumb, muscle-bound jock?"

"He was on a football scholarship, but need I remind you that Hank, and his genius-level IQ, also used to play –"

"Did this suggestion of his involve numbers of any kind?"

"Yes."

"Then it wasn't romantic."

"Sabretooth once suggested that I should perform various tasks for him that may possibly have related to –"

"Sex, Scott, it would have been about sex, trust me on this." Logan realized that he didn't actually want to win this argument. He stopped. "Seriously, Scott, you look like…this and you've never had a sober, non-jerk guy ask you out before?"

"Not ask me out, no. They mostly just asked me to blow them after too many beers. Warren said that was on account of my being a platinum-plated creep-magnet. Hank agreed with him. Actually, so did Jean…."

Logan took him by the shoulders again and gazed into his eyes. "Well, I'm not a creep, Cyke, and I don't want to date you just because you're pretty. You drive me nuts, but I like you. I even kinda like the things about you that drive me nuts."

Scott said, "I kind of like you, too, Logan. Yesterday, in the woods with the kids, I realized I would have liked it if you were there. Not least because then you could have yelled at them and I could have said you were a grouch and promised them ice cream, and I would get to be the cool teacher for once."

"Scott, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but no power on heaven or earth could ever make you the cool teacher. And just so you know, going in, I'm never gonna take it well if you get hurt, and I'm never not gonna act out about you getting up close and personal with another guy."

"So, I guess that threesome's out then?"

"Like you even know what a threesome is, you Boy Scout!"

Logan cradled his face in his hands and kissed him very gently on the mouth, then more firmly, then – as he stroked his damp hair back from his face, and moved his body in closer, so they were warm and tight together, the scent of Scott's shower gel and shampoo overwhelming his senses – with a teasing, mouthing pressure that tantalized his lips. Scott had his eyes closed and his mouth open, and his body was yielding and a little unsteady, like he was dazed and drowning. Logan put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in harder, letting their groins touch, their scents intermingle, slipping his muscular thigh between Scott's slim legs, as he cupped his head in his hand and kissed him, slow and deep and lingering.

Scott came up breathless, and wide-eyed, half-hard and panting. Hank had been right. Perhaps he didn't know how to initiate sex, but he sure as hell knew how to respond to the right overtures. His fingers were trailing down Logan's chest, and Logan realized Scott had never touched another man's body with intent before. Chest hair and beard-rash were a brave new world to him.

Logan said, "Later."

Still stroking Logan's chest hair, curiously, Scott said, "Okay…except, why not now?"

"I have sex with you now, when Hank thinks you're safely asleep in his infirmary, he'll take it amiss. We'll pick this up later, when he's given you the all-clear."

Scott took some persuading but he agreed, in the end, after Logan had promised him all the romance he desired at some unspecified future date but which he sincerely hoped would be later the same day. He still looked a little dazed and Logan wondered if that cocktail of drugs was really out of his system. He felt a pang of conscience.

"Scott, have you ever – you know – with anyone except Jean…?" At Scott's headshake, Logan grimaced and then pasted on what he sincerely hoped was a smile. "We'll just take it really slow."

He walked Scott back to the infirmary, answered Hank's anxious enquiries automatically, helped bully Scott back into bed – which he did only with a lot of martyred sighing – then pulled Hank over to one side and said fiercely, "You need to run every test there is to make sure he's really healed up and in his right mind."

"Logan, I can tell he's both of those things from across the room."

"I need scientific proof!"

"As his friend and his doctor I can assure you that Scott is fine. I'm only keeping him here so he doesn't obsess over the news programs and start second-guessing himself. I really don't need him wallowing in self-doubt – and, trust me, he will. If anything bad happens to any mutant in the next forty-eight hours, he'll think it's his fault."

"How come you guys didn't give him enough affirmation to fix him?"

"Because, by the time we met him, thanks to Sinister, he was already unfixable. Not to mention the not inconsiderable matter of us all having our own demons to deal with, some of them somewhat more socially disadvantageous than his." Hank held up one blue-furred hand as an example. "None of us have exactly had it easy, Logan. You're just less interested in our problems because you don't want to sleep with us."

Logan looked Hank up and down. "I wouldn't say no."

"Sorry, Logan. I think, if I did decide to become gay, Scott would probably be more my type."

"I don't think it's something you get to decide. I think you are or you're…not so much. Unless you're British – then it just depends on how much beer you've drunk."

"And yet here you are, about to sleep with Scott."

"Well, I have unusually high testosterone levels."

"Oh I see. You're just too manly to be merely heterosexual like we lesser beings?"

Logan said, "Something like that."

"Who knew the Greek ideal would prove so enduring even in the face of Judao-Christian conditioning?" Hank picked up a syringe. "I will reluctantly agree to annoy Scott with unnecessary tests because I both comprehend and applaud your concerns, I can, however, assure you now, that if Scott has consented to sleep with you it is because…he wants to sleep with you. Of course, any good psychiatrist could probably find you a dozen reasons to show you that you are simply the beneficiary of one or more of his childhood traumas, but the same could have been said about him sleeping with Jean as relating to his maternal abandonment issues. She still made him very happy. Can you?"

"I can try."

Hank shrugged. "That's good enough for me, Logan. I think you need to make it good enough for you." He waved Logan out of the infirmary and advanced on Scott's bed. "Scott, I'm afraid I need to run a few more tests, so, please, bear with me…."

***

FOUR

At Rogue's urging, Logan had tidied his room in Scott's honor. It was the closest he could come to making a romantic gesture and still feel comfortable about it. He wasn't buying the guy flowers, after all, and it wasn't like Scott even ate chocolate. He probably thought a peanut butter and jello sandwich equaled the depths of depravity. Admittedly, Logan had needed to stop in between picking up the bike magazines (and, okay, in the past there would have been some other kind of magazines, too, but he was living in a school now, he had some standards), and locating all the empty beer cans that had rolled under the bed, to ask himself What the hell are you doing, Logan? Are you out of your frickin' mind? Because…Scott Summers? The guy eight out of ten supervillains who expressed a preference almost certainly considered the Most Annoying Guy They Ever Mistakenly Ordered Manacled? And it wasn't even a sexy, devil-may-care Tony Stark-style throwing out quips and snarky one-liners as he downed another liver-racking glassful kind of annoying. It was being lectured about the fire exits being blocked in contravention of health and safety guidelines in one's Den of Evil, or told that one's dastardly minions were at risk of contracting asbestosis because of poorly selected ceiling tiles, or that the philosophical bedrock upon which a maniac had built his driving psychosis had been disproved by modern psychiatry. It was Scott still being surprised that Sinister was, well…sinister, or that Magneto's evil plan was Evil, or that Sabretooth had just done something violent and destructive instead of trying to make the world a better place.

He really, truly wanted to date the guy who liked workouts in the Danger Room more than sex, almost certainly ironed his underpants, and who had the soul of an accountant inexplicably stuffed into the body of a Greek athlete? The guy who was always going to second-guess himself and who had Mister Deep-Seated Insecurity on speed dial? The guy who, according to Hank, at the ripe old age of twenty-six had no frickin' clue how a man would go about getting drunk, should the need arise, having experienced a lifetime's haul of four whole hangovers – all of them brought on by jerks spiking his soft drinks.

"I admit that one of those jerks was me – but it was for science and the results were fascinating…."

Standing in the infirmary, Logan had actually thought, for one brief, shining moment, that Hank was pulling his leg. "You're kidding, right?"

"I'm in deadly earnest. Scott doesn't know how to drink. On the occasions when he was forced into an alcohol-rich environment he would generally ask Jean what she was drinking and then tentatively imbibe the same."

"You're telling me, Cyclops, leader of the X-Men and scourge of evildoers, drinks spritzers?"

"And, if feeling adventurous, a glass of undiluted sparkling wine – only on very special occasions, obviously."

"He never wanted to get a fake ID and buy a six pack?"

"Of course not. He never wanted to steal hubcaps either. He only ever wanted to be Good."

"How does that fit in with him having sex with me?"

"Well, if it's any consolation, he'll probably want to have sex with you…very efficiently. He is a perfectionist. He's just wound a little tight."

Logan paced up and down the infirmary. "This is insane. This is never going to work. Scott and I don't have a damn thing in common."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. You're both brave, loyal, stoic, heroic, socially awkward, unsmiling, moody, introverts, with a woeful inability to express your feelings in any meaningful fashion. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me."

Logan glowered at Hank. "As a brother-in-law, you fall a little short of perfection, Pal."

"I'm not denying there are differences – you throw all your anger outward, or try drowning it in alcohol, he internalizes it into a suffocating tsunami of self-doubt. You are not exactly unmemorable, while it usually takes people three meetings with Scott before they even remember his name. I would characterize your personality as 'abrasive' whereas, I admit, I was still attempting to devise a scientific test to check if Scott even possessed a personality a year after I met him. He likes lecturing people. You like punching them in the face. He lives in fear of losing control. You live in fear of running out of beer. No one would classify you as Siamese twins."

Logan held up his forefinger. "One nice thing, Hank, that's all I'm asking for you to say."

"All right – if there were Sentinels attacking the school right this minute, the first two names I would want on any list of people present to defend the children from giant killer robots would be Scott's and yours. And I would bet against the Sentinels."

Logan was mollified. "Okay. That's better."

"Also, you needn't worry about boring him. He finds vacuum cleaner salesmen interesting. With very little encouragement those guys will take the whole thing apart and explain how it works. He loves that. Geothermal heating companies actually won't send people here any more because Scott always wants to read all the literature. It also probably didn't help that one of their guys got a…bad touch from a sentient plant, which, in my defense…."

"This isn't helping."

"What else can I tell you about Scott? He loves math, particularly geometry. He can tell you how every single moving part in the Blackbird interacts with every other moving part even if you'd much rather that he didn't. He's also very fond of trigonometry…."

"I'm having sex with him, not setting him a test paper, and – I'm out of here." Logan had been exiting the infirmary at that point, so could pretend not to have heard Hank calling after him, "Warren told you that you might need to use diagrams, right?"

Rogue had met him in the corridor and said, without preamble. "Logan, you need to tidy your room."

"It's bad enough I'm getting dating tips from Mister Wingy and the Smurf Lion, I don't need advice from you kids as well."

"Scott's tidy, you're kind of a slob. You need to keep that from him. You know you can't have sex with him in his room, right?"

"Yes," Logan retorted. "I know."

"Because that would be a disaster. He'd be thinking about Jean. You'd probably be smelling Jean –"

"Way ahead of you on this, kid. Beast has cleared him for take-off and he is coming to my room in two hours."

"Well, you need to tidy that room so it doesn't look like a pigsty or he's just gonna want to clean up when you want to get busy, and then you need to shower." Seeing his glower, she rolled her eyes. "I ain't making personal remarks, Logan. Tell me you can't still smell those creeps on you from when you were knocking their teeth out? How is that not going to make you mad at the worst possible moment? Do you want to have sex with Scott or do you want to get distracted and start yelling at him again?"

Which is how he had spent an hour tidying his room before taking three showers. It said something about how badly he seemed to have been clipped by Cupid's damned annoying arrow, that right now, in this moment, in his clean, tidy room, with everything smelling of shower gel, it was all kinda seeming worth it.

Because Scott Summers, naked, was a sight worth looking at, and, sitting on the bed, Logan took a moment just to take in the view. Clothed, Scott could look like any other athlete, broad shoulders, slender waist, narrow hips, those legs that went on forever, but naked, there was a boyish delicacy to him that caught at Logan's heart. He looked not just unclothed but undisguised. With Scott looking up at him a little warily from under those long, black lashes, out of those blue, blue eyes, trying to project confidence but foundering on his natural reefs of doubt, Logan wished he could just go back to wanting him without wanting to get to know him. (And, okay, Scott had disrobed a little bashfully and made sure his socks were balled in a pair, his shirt hung on the back of a chair to avoid creases, his pants carefully folded, and there had been that definite hesitation before he slid down his underwear even though he'd been happy to hug bird-boy wearing that facecloth-sized towel, but he'd gotten there in the end.)

There were old scars on that youthful body and his fingers traced them regretfully. Logan found himself wanting to kiss the jutting edge of his pelvic bone and lick the ridges of his ribcage. With his visor on, Scott Summers looked all X-Man, clean-cut good looks as unassailable as his hidden eyes, Disney Prince handsome. With the visor off, his eyes betrayed how young he still was. Logan flinched inwardly, because when Scott looked at him like that, like he thought Logan was going to see right through all of his disguises and despise what he truly was, he wanted to banish his fears and keep him safe from any more harm with a ferocity that frightened him.

That wasn't their life, after all. They didn't get to dwell in safety like people rescued from a shipwreck, drama spent and the quiet days back again. Every day was another storm warning; every day the lifeboat had to be launched again. He couldn't help looking at Scott, spread out on his bed – wary and theoretically willing but so damned unsure what it was that anyone but Jean could really see in him – and wondering how this guy would have grown up differently if he'd been simply human. Logan also wondered, looking at the delicate structure beneath the confident surface, the easily damaged skeleton, the already-scarred soul, if he could bear to get any fonder of Scott Summers than he already was, given that life so far had done nothing but kick the living crap out of the pair of them and seemed unlikely to be changing its plans for them any time soon.

Logan stripped off himself, a lot less tidily, tossing his clothes in the general direction of the floor while Scott watched him curiously. His eyes widened as Logan tossed his boxers, but he didn't look put off, just intrigued, and although he took a good long look when Logan sat beside him on the bed, he examined the rest of his body with equally close attention. "You can touch, you know," Logan told him. "I don't charge."

It was a strange feeling when Scott tentatively ran his hand across his abdomen; way too close to Jeannie doing the same thing not to be weird. Scott ran his fingers through the soft fuzz of Logan's chest hair, seeming to like the feel of it, and Logan – remembering the guy high on those painkillers the night before recalling his happy snuggles with Beast – hoped this wasn't evidence of some kind of fur fetish that would inevitably see Scott wanting to cuddle up with Hank in more caves. His examination was thorough, and Logan thought of all the times he had seen Scott taking apart machinery and fitting it back together, fingers skilled and precise. Taking Scott's right wrist in his hand he guided his hand downwards, wondering if Scott was going to jib at touching another guy's package when it came to it, but Scott stroked his balls with the same delicate attention that he might have adjusted some wiring, fingers sensitive to Logan's responses, before drawing curious fingers along Logan's thick shaft. If his touch was a little light and decidedly unpracticed, Logan decided that was a good fault. He would have loved it if Scott had wanted to try a taste, even the most tentative of licks, but wasn't surprised when it didn't occur to him. Logan was an oral kind of guy; Scott decidedly not someone who sucked on cigars, or even pen nibs. There was plenty of time to introduce him to the thought that sometimes it was a good idea to put strange things in your mouth.

Looking down the length of Scott's body, Logan was struck again by how model-boy perfect it was. The guy was flawless. Every damned thing about him was flawless. That body and that face to advertise it to all and sundry, and Xavier had used to send the guy out in skin-tight spandex and now thought black leather was a good idea…? Did no one in this place get what kind of thoughts Scott Summers' ass in black leather was most likely going to summon up in the mind of the average bad guy…?

Logan ran a pensive hand down Scott's warm, lean thigh. "I wish you didn't look like this," he growled.

Scott looked hurt. "What's wrong with the way I look?"

"What's wrong with it is that everyone without a white stick can see that you're pretty, which means that there's no reason for everyone else not to want you, and I want to keep you for myself. I don't want to share you with every horny telepath who wants to lick your brain, and I sure as hell don't ever want to have to share you with someone who didn't ask you first. You're lucky I'm not crazier than I am, because if I was a rich miser there would be a part of me wanting to keep you locked up in a castle someplace, like dragon gold, where no else could steal you away from me."

Logan realized they were back to the Disney Prince theme again. On the other hand, he didn't want to be the villain of this tale, and he sure as hell didn't want to get killed at the end by some swashbuckling babe in thigh-high leather boots who'd climbed the tower and slain the dragon to set her handsome prince free. Well, not unless Logan got to come back to life and there was some kind of threesome arrangement. He wondered, briefly, how Psylocke would look in thigh-high leather boots.

"Logan, every time I think I'm getting to know you, even a little, I realize that you're actually a lot weirder than I thought."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"It really wasn't meant as one."

That was better. The guy looked a lot less wary and self-doubting and a lot more like himself – preppy, annoying, insanely hot. Logan straddled his impossibly long legs, leaned down and kissed him quickly, before Scott reverted to looking like someone too fragile for him to want to bruise, and there was that hesitation before Scott responded that told him Logan was the first guy to kiss him – at least when he wasn't pumped full of drugs. (He had already decided that the Gambit kiss Did Not Count.) That made the protective urge spike to painful levels and he found himself cradling his face in his hands and kissing him very gently, like he could be broken with too much pressure. Scott was kissing him back, just as tentatively, maybe thinking male mouths met in a different way, and then he seemed to get that kissing was kissing, and his tongue met Logan's and his mouth opened wider to invite him in and Logan pressed in, still carefully. Logan opened his eyes to see that Scott's were closed, that long sweep of black eyelashes shadowing his face, expression tensed as if he were bracing himself for pain. Logan wondered if that was what Scott expected when it came to Logan – that the guy would hurt him somehow, even when he was trying to be kind. It struck him – unpleasantly – that he might be benefiting from Scott's screwed-up childhood, after all. Perhaps the guy's sexuality was fluid, not because of where he landed on the Kinsey scale but because he'd been pre-abused for Logan's convenience.

Pulling back, Logan said gruffly, "Wait. Do we need to have a conversation about Sinister?"

Scott's gaze could not have been more unflinching. "Why not? I know talking about deranged narcissists always gets me in the mood." As Logan returned his stare, Scott rolled his eyes. "Seriously? You want to talk about my childhood traumas? Now? If it makes you feel better, the closest I've come to being molested was when Hank let those sentient plants get away from him. They had seriously straying tendrils and one of them got very close to third base, but I still don't want to talk about it."

Logan kissed him again. "I'm just relieved you know what third base is."

Scott said, "That reminds me. I have some printouts."

Logan pulled back again. "You have what…?"

Scott reached for the bedside table and proffered the pieces of paper he had placed there so neatly before removing and folding his clothing. "Printouts with the optimum positions to achieve maximum –"

Logan plucked them from his hand, screwed them up, and tossed them over his shoulder. "Scott, trust me on this. No one with a blood flow needs a schematic to have sex."

By the affronted way Scott gazed after those crumpled printouts, Logan realized that he had been right to step up and shoulder the mutant burden of being Scott Summers' boyfriend, because Emma Frost would eat this guy alive and then pick her pearly white teeth with his bones.

Scott said, "I know – and my blood flow is fine, which a more observant person might have noticed by now."

His smile carried quite a punch. Logan found himself a little breathless. "Trust me, I noticed the blood flow. And you're really good with winging it without an instruction manual? You rebel, you…."

"Well, I may have asked Gambit to explain a few things…."

Logan looked at him in disbelief. "Are you…joking…?"

"Yes…except I really did ask him to explain some…stuff."

Grimly, he said, "What did he say?"

"That if I didn't trust you enough to know what you were doing, I should be getting naked with him instead." He rolled his eyes at Logan's immediate bristling reaction. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Logan realized that Scott had a point there. He was both present and naked. "I know Desmond fixed the physical stuff but if you're still…you know…."

"Traumatized?"

"Yes."

"No. My game. My play. I'm angry about what those maniacs did to the others, and the mutants they killed before we found out what they were doing, and what they nearly did to Gambit. But what they did to me wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I'm over it."

"You know, from what I know about Stryker, there's a good chance I was tortured. I was vivisected. I was turned into a weapon. There's no way that adamantium went into my body that wasn't a horror story. I probably killed innocent mutants – maybe humans, too. I think you can imagine any scenario, however screwed up, and I was probably a part of it, possibly for decades. And you are still more fucked up than I am. You just batten all the dark stuff down, deeper and deeper, and don't admit it's there." The uncomfortable thought occurred to Logan that somewhere, in an alternate universe, Scott Summers was probably a really smart serial killer; taking out mutant-haters one deftly wielded cheese-wire at a time, then carefully cataloguing the trophies he took from each kill with a card-indexing system.

Oblivious of Logan's thoughts, Scott shrugged. "The Professor taught me control."

"He might have done better to teach you how to be a…guy." Scott looked confused by that concept. Presumably he thought being a guy meant having a y chromosome and descended testicles – things he was already in possession of and therefore good to go. And it wasn't like Logan got to judge anyone for being socially inept and emotionally repressed; it just bothered him a little that no one had ever taught Cyke how to be a real boy. At least Scott having sex would be something normal, and messy, and a little out of control, three things Scott definitely needed in his life on a far more regular basis.

Logan looked over his shoulder at the crumpled pages. "If there's a way you think you'd be more comfortable doin' it, we can use your…diagrams."

"Have you killed anyone having sex with him or her yet?"

"Not that I remember."

Scott shrugged. "Then do it the way you…usually do it, that doesn't result in fatalities."

"This is your end game for the evening? Surviving?"

"I was trying to make it clear that my wanting to have sex with you has nothing to do with the death wish you think I have. Which I don't – by the way. I have things I need to do that I can't do dead. I want to leave the world a better place for mutants than the one I grew up in."

"It's cute that you think you're grown up."

Logan realized that he liked riling Scott up way too much. He loved that flare of annoyance in his eyes – he was gonna miss that when the visor went back on – that tensing muscle in his jaw, that prissy little pursed mouth thing. It made Scott a lot more human than when he was just an unbreachable surface calm over a perfect physique. As he bent back over him, Logan murmured, "I am never going to get tired of pulling your pigtails, Slim."

"You're such an asshole, Logan. I have no idea what I see in you – "

Logan cradled Scott's face in his hands and silenced him with a gentle kiss. It really did work like magic; one second Scott was all spiky resistance, and the next he was all melting compliance. Logan really hoped that none of the bad guys out there ever tried this approach to shutting up the annoying leader of the X-Men, because if any of them were good kissers it just might work. (So far, Logan gathered, they had just tried punching him, which didn't work at all. He had a dark suspicion that Magneto was probably a very good kisser – just one more reason to keep the Master of Magnetism the hell away from Scott.) He mouthed tenderly at Scott's lips, wondering if Scott had been Jean's one and only, too, in which case, there would have been two innocent kids in that bedroom over the years, both probably much too wide-eyed and lovestruck to ever try anything kinky. Scott opened his mouth to him and closed his eyes, and it was sweet and shy and it made Logan's heart hurt, because Scott was so old for his years in some experiences and so woefully young in others. He was tense between Logan's knees, and Logan stroked his hair back from his face, glad of that one straggling bang that didn't want to conform; glad something in Scott Summers could contemplate rebellion. When he slid a hand down his face to touch his chest, Scott flinched, and Logan realized, without needing to be told, that, whatever jokes Scott might make about sentient plants, the only guys who had ever touched him like this before now had been bad guys, when Scott was tied up and they were trying to mindfuck him. He wondered if some of them had taken it further than wandering fingers, after all, and Xavier had just walled those memories up or erased them completely…and then decided that if he started to think about all the things that had not only been done to Scott Summers but that might have been done to him, he was going to kill the mood forever.

It took a lot of deep, heavy kisses before Scott finally began to relax underneath Logan instead of being as taut as a bowstring. His muscles loosened up, his heartbeat steadied then increased for the right reason, he started to smell aroused instead of just wary. He felt warm and supple and when Logan slid a knee between his legs, they parted without any of that earlier hesitation. He was also, as he had pointed out earlier, young enough and fit enough to get hard just from kissing, so his popularity with women was possibly not just based on his looks.

"I think today we should just make out a little…" Logan said easily, like the flinch had never happened.

Scott said, "No."

"You do know that Warren guy had a point about there not being a test later, right? Sex is for fun or procreation, and, as procreation is off the table for you and me, that just leaves fun. So, any part that ain't fun for one or both parties – I think we should skip it."

Scott tensed up again. "No. We have to do it…properly."

"Seriously, Slim? 'Properly'? It's not the right way to fold a map – it's sex. A blowjob is sex. A hand job is sex. You and me rubbing against each other is sex. There is no essay question. There is no final exam."

He might as well have saved his breath. Scott just looked stubborn and said, "Just do the…whole thing but don't do it too fast, so I can –"

"Take notes for a future dissertation?"

"Catch up, you dick."

Logan realized that this was, after all, what he'd signed up for – Scott Summers, naked, handsome, and completely fucked up. He stroked his fingers down Scott's chest again, and this time the flinch was less. He made circling motions with his fingers, gentle and steady, then wider, firmer circles, and Scott breathed out cautiously and then gradually relaxed into the rhythm of Logan's caresses. It took a while, and there were still areas of tension. Logan could feel the stiffening of muscles as certain patterns were played out on his skin, from which he guessed that bad guys had probably felt Scott up and then punched him, maybe hard enough to crack his ribs; he could imagine Sabretooth doing that for the hell of it. Muscle memory was usually a guy's friend in the bedroom, but in Scott's case Logan suspected he was going to be hitting nothing but old torture scenarios. For the first time he wished that Hank or Warren had got drunk and frisky with Scott in the past. At least then Scott would have some memories of being touched by guys in ways that were intimate and enjoyable and, above all, not creepy. Logan supposed he should be grateful that he'd forgotten most of the godawful things that had been done to him. Otherwise they'd never get to the good part.

He kept on kissing him, taking it carefully, and Scott was kissing him back less tentatively, putting his arms around Logan's neck without being prompted, mouth opening responsively, tongue curling to greet Logan's, while Logan gently brushed a thumb across one nipple. He wasn't expecting much of a response – Logan's nipples weren't that sensitive, but it was always worth a try – but Scott gave a little gasp of reaction. Logan thought, in amusement, God, Summers, you're such a girl; grateful that Scott was not a telepath and so would not be punching him in response to that thought – girly nipples or not, the guy had a great right hook. Logan kissed Scott again, harder, and then slipped his tongue out of his mouth, bending his head to mouth at that responsive little nipple. Scott arched and gasped again, but almost silently, and Logan wondered what hang-ups a guy grew up with when his sex-life happened almost exclusively in a school at which he was first a pupil and then a teacher. Whatever else Scott was in the sack, Logan was laying mental bets now that he wasn't a screamer.

In between licking his chest and mouthing at his nipples, Logan said conversationally, "Just so we're clear, I'll do anything you want and I'll not do anything you don't like and I'll stop any time you like. Any time, Scott. Understood?"

Scott gave another arch and gasp as Logan's tongue tantalized his left nipple. "What? Okay."

Logan resisted the urge to roll his eyes and concentrated on mouthing Scott's nipples to hardness – he was very responsive, just as Hank had suggested, but utterly reactive; apparently his famed powers of initiative didn't apply in the bedroom. Without someone else making the running, he'd presumably just lie there quietly and think about fractals. When Logan reached down and gently touched his cock, Scott flinched before he settled down and Logan caressed his legs for a moment instead as he kept mouthing at him, caressing his inner thigh with careful, rhythmic strokes to which Scott gradually responded with a lessening of tension. Making out with Scott Summers was a little like crossing a minefield – a guy never knew what his next careless step might spark. Logan figured he just had to keep going. A few more thigh-strokes and he risked touching his cock again, this time Scott only tensed lightly, and then cautiously relaxed into Logan's careful fondling of his shaft. Logan hoped the wariness was just a shock-of-the-new male-hand-touching-him thing, callused palm as opposed to female hand, smell of male sweat, but he did wonder if someone had unzipped Scott when they had him tied up, or had just palmed him, mockingly, through his spandex. No, it was just the shock of the strangeness of it. Logan decided he would go with that thought. Given how young Scott had been when he first went on missions, it was considerably less disturbing than the others.

He licked his chest soothingly and then said, still lightly, "There is no point of no return, okay?"

Scott had his eyes closed now, breaths focused, body betraying even firmer rising excitement as Logan's funneling of his shaft continued at the same steady pace. He gave soft little gasps of arousal, and it was sexy as hell and kinda maddening at the same time because Logan would have laid odds he wasn't listening to a damn thing he said. "Scott…?"

Scott opened his eyes and the sight of them, not to mention the absurd blueness of them, still carried a punch. "What?"

Logan inched back up the bed and kissed him on the mouth, holding his gaze. "'No' means 'no' at any point. Okay?" As Scott looked handsomely blank, Logan sighed. "It's not a transaction. It's not like 'the guy paid for dinner so I have to put out'."

"You didn't pay for dinner."

"God give me strength."

"Well, I don't know what you mean."

"Fine. If, at any point when I have my tongue, my finger, or my dick in your ass, you want it the hell out of your ass, tell me and I will remove it as swiftly and painlessly as possible. Clear enough?" It occurred to him that he had possibly still not clarified sufficiently for someone of Summer's meager comprehension of the subject under discussion. "It will probably feel uncomfortable, especially at first. If you don't like how it feels, you don't have to put up with it. This isn't the Danger Room. You don't have to let the scenario play out. Just say 'Stop' and I'll stop. We can date for a decade and never try that again if you don't like it. Clearer?"

"You could have just said it wasn't a crossing the Rubicon deal."

"Now I don't know what you're talking about."

"In 49 BC, Julius Caesar, summoned back to Rome because of senatorial disquiet about his war in Gaul –"

"You really want to give me a history lesson now…?" Logan funneled his cock again teasingly and Scott swallowed hard, tongue straying over his lips unconsciously as his mouth opened and closed in response. Shifting restlessly, he said, "I could probably tell you about Caesar's Civil War another time."

"Yeah, Slim, you do that." Logan supported Scott's head with his left hand as he kissed him, deeper and harder, as he increased the friction as he palmed his shaft. He had already decided that, given Scott's numerous actual and potential past bad experiences, the first thing he needed to do was get the guy off, then, whatever else happened, it would still be a relatively happy experience for both of them. Scott was now gasping into his mouth, eyelashes fluttering, and Logan realized that when Jean had done this she'd been a lot gentler, and Scott really liked it rougher, and had never realized he had those impulses until this moment. Logan hastily pushed away the thought that Emma Frost and her riding crop would probably know exactly how to give Scott the best sex of his life – and how – and decided that Scott could damn well make do with the second best sex that Logan was going to be giving him instead.

He rubbed his thumb roughly over the leaking tip of Scott's cock, ground his knuckle up from his balls to his pelvis, and then palmed him in brutally rapid strokes. Leaning down he whispered hotly in Scott's ear the filthiest, most loving things he could think of then sucked hard under his jaw. Scott murmured a few inarticulate protests, arched, stifled a cry with his fist, and came like it was torn from him, the milky come pulsing over Logan's hand. Scott curled up into the aftershocks, as if to conceal that he had just lost control, and Logan kept stroking him, milking the aftermath, and nuzzling into his face. "It's okay," he whispered. "You were great. You looked beautiful."

Scott had his eyes closed, flushing as he panted, clearly embarrassed. "I was too quick."

"Slim, you were…a damned fine ego-stroke."

"I'm not a kid."

"Hey, over-achiever boy, it was your first time with a guy, and I was pushing your buttons on purpose. Got it?" Logan licked at his mouth and Scott reluctantly opened up to him. Logan kissed him as he reached for the lube, wanting it opened and close by if Scott was okay with him taking things further. He put one sticky finger up to Scott's mouth and said, "Taste it, I dare you."

Scott licked at his finger tentatively and then with more curiosity. "It tastes salty."

As Scott sucked on his finger, Logan wondered if Scott knew what that was doing to Logan's own blood flow. Logan slipped his thumb into Scott's mouth and Scott obligingly sucked it with inevitable light-headed consequences. As the world briefly grayed in and out, it didn't help that Scott's expression was so intent and fascinated or that his mouth was so beautiful.

Logan slipped his thumb out before they were both coming like schoolboys, then kissed him, hard. Scott resisted for a millisecond before opening up to him. Logan's tongue pressed in, deep and demanding, sharing his taste. Two minutes of hot and heavy kissing and Scott's throat relaxed obligingly in a way that made Logan's balls ache and his cock stiffen like a poker. The guy was a complete natural and had been wandering around, unprotected, looking like this. It was slightly terrifying. Logan pulled back, breathing hard. "No missions without me from now on."

"What brought that on?"

"Never mind."

He had his middle finger lubed up now and moved in for some more deep kissing, to which Scott skillfully responded, then Logan rubbed his finger in gentle circling movements around Scott's opening. Everything tensed, and Scott stopped breathing for a second. Logan could practically feel the bad memory that touch evoked trying to get through from whatever barrier it was stashed behind – erased or simply repressed. He kept moving his finger, like neither of them knew anything wrong had ever happened here, and Scott breathed again, and made himself relax, the way someone only could who embraced self-discipline like a religion. Logan's finger slipped in easily and he kept everything slow and careful, breathing in Scott's scent to be certain there was no pain, and Scott kept himself relaxed and open, mouth flexing cautiously – Logan kissed him again so he had two places to think about and Scott kissed him back, fingers clutching at Logan's hair while making his body take that slow, silken slide of Logan's thick middle finger as it slipped in to the knuckle, breaths measured and even, body pushed into a receptive state by sheer willpower.

"Summers, you're a natural," Logan told him with another kiss. He guessed the guy would probably resent being asked if he was okay, as if this was something Logan was doing to him as opposed to a mission they were going on together, so bit that question down. Instead, he said, "Well, fearless leader boy, what next?"

Scott said, "You're pretty big – so more preparatory stretching is probably in order." And Logan had no idea why it made him so damned hot that Scott said that so matter-of-factly, like he was reminding everyone to pack sunblock and insect repellent before they went into the woods.

"Will do, Boss."

Scott gave him a crooked grin. "I wondered if there was a way to make you follow orders."

"Just give me orders I wanna follow, Cyke. It'll work every time." Logan leaned back down to kiss him again as he massaged him gently, trying to get things loosened up as he worked a second finger in. Their tongues met comfortably now, rapidly becoming old friends, and Scott looked at his mouth as he kissed it, and stroked his sideburns, and then looked, a little shyly, at his eyes, and Logan realized with a heart-twinge that Scott was trying to memorize the way everything looked in color so he could replay it in his head when they were doing this in ruby quartz red. As he kissed him, with deep, hungry kisses, he rubbed his finger gently around Scott's opening before pushing back in, one slicked slide this time, right to the knuckle, and Scott gave a tiny flinch and then opened to it. Logan kept doing it, careful as a massage, one finger then two – another little hitched breath, slight flicker of discomfort before Scott smoothed that from his face the way he smoothed resistance from his body, just breathed down and slid under it, forced relaxation.

Logan nuzzled at his mouth, murmuring, "I have serious questions about what exactly you guys used to practice in the Danger Room…."

But he must have touched Scott just right because the guy was too busy giving a surprised little gasp into Logan's mouth to listen to him. Logan made sure he moved his fingers the same way, rubbing his bristly jaw against Scott's as he did so, wanting him to associate this flicker of pleasure with Logan's scent and touch. Scott grabbed at his right arm as Logan twisted his fingers deeper and pressed his mouth against the muscle of Logan's left shoulder, body tensing and flexing back to meet his fingers. When Logan slid two fingers out and pushed three in, Scott closed his eyes, still gripping him tight enough to bruise and made a stifled little sound of pleasure. That was gratifying, although the surprise underlying those rough, rapid breaths as Logan finger-fucked him was at once maddening and typical.

Nuzzling Scott's forehead with his mouth as he kept working those three fingers into him, deep and slow, Logan murmured, "Any particular reason why you were letting a guy you didn't really think was any good at this fuck you, Cyke…?"

"I thought I'd like it because it was you. I didn't know you knew how to…." Scott managed in between ragged breaths. "God, that feels so…."

"What?"

"Good. Really…good… God, Logan, why does it feel so good…?"

He was clearly not expecting an answer to that, grabbing hold of Logan tighter as those three fingers stretched him and slicked him and massaged him open, while Scott opened his mouth and closed his eyes and went with the sensations like they were his first acid trip. Logan had been planning a careful explanation of what he was going to do next and how, and to reiterate again that Scott could stop the bus any time he wanted to get off, but Scott was abruptly pulling himself forward with that grip on his shoulder, and his incredible stomach muscles, long legs splayed as he wriggled onto Logan's lap. The movement pushed Logan's fingers in as deep as they could go and Scott's breath hitched again, eyes closing again as he savored the sensation. He clutched at Logan and said, "Please…I want it deeper, thicker, harder…."

Logan said, "Easy, Scott. Let's just…."

Scott said, "Now…!"

And Logan realized that yes, damnit, he did kinda like it when Scott Summers gave him orders, because that was a lick of heat from his balls all the way up his spine. "Okay, just…." He had to slide his fingers out quickly because Scott was trying to straddle his cock with them still in there and they were talking about a finite amount of space here. "Take a breath, Slim!"

Scott clutched at his shoulders and pressed his forehead against Logan's, and said, "Please…please…?" And if Logan hadn't already been painfully, leakingly hard, that breathy little moan would have done the job for sure.

Logan said, "Just take it easy, I'll do anything you want – " Including begging, barking, and dying for the goddamn Queen if you'll just keep making those sounds….

He steadied Scott with hands on his hips, while Scott kept hold of Logan's shoulders and angled down, and, of course, the geometry nerd, not to mention the jet pilot, came in for landing at the perfect trajectory to make them both offer broken moans. And Logan was saying blasphemous things as his cock was squeezed so damned well, and Scott was light for a guy but heavier than any girl who'd ever sat on Logan's dick, so the press down was faster and unbelievably tighter, and Scott was uttering needy, pained whimpers, and Logan said, panting, "Scott, take it slow – " And then realized that he might as well have saved his breath because this was Scott Summers, who could adapt and learn in any new situation like Darwinian theory run rampant. So Scott got right away that it had to be shallow at first, just riding the head of Logan's cock with careful clenches of his perfect ass, before he adjusted to the new, slicked thickness of Logan's swollen head. He was gasping rhythmically, gaze on some distant point in his mind as his fingers flexed on Logan's shoulders and his hips moved in that steady, rocking rhythm, and then he was pushing down. Logan closed his eyes because it felt so damned good as they slid an inch closer to ecstasy, and Logan was murmuring incoherent, obscene things as he kept steadying his hips, and Scott was all focus and maximum efficiency, probably from reading those damned diagrams, and maybe there was something in the study of geometry because –

"Oh God…" Logan breathed, everything licking flame and pleasure bursts and his spine just thrumming with it, balls pulsing, everything pulsing as Scott pressed down harder, and faster now, longer, deeper pushes, uttering little hitched gasps as he did it that made Logan want to bite him like an animal. Scott's fingers were kneading his shoulders and he was riding his cock like he did this for a living, speeding up, harder and deeper, head going back as the pleasure climbed, mouth open, eyes wide, unseeingly focused on how everything felt, and Logan thought that if this was how Scott ran his missions then he could sign Logan up for all of them. And then Scott pressed down and eased back and hit a steady pace, just a fraction too slow, that pushed them into a holding pattern, so the pleasure kept flaring but not quite climaxing, like Jean must have taught him, to prolong the moment. Logan let Scot ride him up and down those flickering pleasure peaks as their hips moved together and he could look right into Scott's eyes as they focused with fixed concentration on that distant horizon line, enjoying the slow build, over and over, and then, abruptly, his alpha male inner animal didn't want every bedroom maneuver being run with maximum efficiency by a super hot schoolboy, and he let out a low growl that made Scott start and look right at him in shock.

The precision thrusts stuttered and Logan flipped them with one deft motion so Scott was flat on his back, Logan holding his thighs. He gazed into Scott's eyes – and the guy was looking at him now, shocked and inclined to protest and then, as he saw the dark fire in Logan's eyes, flushed and excited. Logan said in a low rumble, "My turn…" and Scott shivered with reaction, incredibly turned on and endearingly embarrassed about it, turning his head quickly so Logan wouldn't see how that masterful growl had gone straight to his loins. Logan thrust, slow but deep, hitting Scott's spot, before he began to speed up, each rougher thrust hard enough to lift Scott's shapely buttocks off the bed. Scott was grunting and pleasure-flaring at each impact, the bright flash of it coming off him like aftershave, and Logan pulled him up, and kissed him hard, mouth biting his, as his hips slammed home and Scott jolted and made strangled sounds, body reverberating from impacts he wasn't controlling. Logan pushed him back down again, and thrust faster and deeper, and Scott's back arched, and his hands clawed blindly, and they were off the map now, and Logan was pounding his prostate and Scott was squirming pleasurably, purely reactive, sensation an ocean crashing over his head, control slipping, falling, gone, and him clutching blindly after it while Logan wouldn't let him snatch it back, pushing the pace and making him feel it in every thunderbolt of sensation.

There was a moment where Logan had them both riding the contact wave, harder and harder, bodies slamming ecstatically, and Scott just firing neurons, all body no brain, no room for anything else in his head and that breathless litany pouring from his sculpted mouth of "God…Logan…fuck…no…please…yes…." He cried out, "Logan…!" like it meant something, and came with a wild arching of his spine, and tightening of his thighs, gasping like it hurt better than any pain he'd ever known, and it was incredible. Logan came just from seeing that shocked, ecstatic look in his eyes, and then collapsed on top of him, sweaty and grateful and tender and…smug. He pulsed for a moment, enjoying the aftershocks, and then eased out carefully, everything slicked and hot with ejaculate, one last spurt ribboning across Scott's inner thigh.

Scott needed a few minutes to stop just gasping and then said, in breathless accusation, "What the hell was that?"

Logan propped himself up on one elbow, breathing hard. "That, Cyke, was sex the way we do it in Canada."

Still panting, and wiping a hand across his sweating brow, Scott said shakily, "No – that's – that's sex the way they do it in the big bad forests you only find in fairytales. That's…werewolf sex."

"No, because I didn't bite you, also, werewolves do it doggy fashion. We can do it that way next if you like, but maybe not the whole shove-my-balls-in-your-ass-and-swing-my-leg-over-your-back-thing, though…that's a little primal even for me."

And that was…flare of cobalt blue curiosity in the place where prissy choirboy shock should have been living. Apparently, Scott found primal…possibly relevant to his interests. Logan blinked in surprise. Of course he'd lied – nothing was too primal for him, including chest-beating, swinging from lianas like Tarzan, and tattooing his initials on Scott's ass, but he didn't think that was a confession for a first date. Feeling his way carefully, he said, "Or we can do it your way from now on, if you'd rather…?"

"No," Scott said hastily. "I mean – your way was fine. Better than fine. Kind of…good."

"Your way was good, too," Logan said. "Very…efficient."

"It's supposed to prolong…."

"I got that. I'm just…you know…I'm me, Scott. I'm the kind of guy who likes to take charge in the bedroom. Doesn't mean I can't take orders, too."

Scott swallowed, and it said a lot for his personal fitness that his heart-rate was already returning to normal and he was breathing at a steady pace. "Maybe if you let me be in charge on missions, I'll let you take us into the deep, dark woods from time to time."

Logan leaned down to kiss him, and he tasted different somehow, richer, sweeter, like good wine, and Logan realized that was because he now tasted like something that belonged to him, and thought again that he was infinitely grateful that Scott didn't have the gift of telepathy. He kissed him again, teasingly. "No compass? No breadcrumbs?"

Scott said, "No biting."

Logan nuzzled at him. "What if it's somewhere that doesn't show…?" He licked at his throat and then sucked at his pulse point and Scott gave a shivering little sigh and closed his eyes.

"Maybe…if it doesn't show…."

Logan nuzzled at his throat, appreciating the fact that all Scott probably wanted to do was get up and fetch a washcloth, because he was that kind of boy, and that he was instead lying here, sticky, so that Logan could kiss him. "Remind me again, how long is your recovery time?"

"About fifteen minutes."

Logan blinked. That was fast. Not as fast as Logan, admittedly, but a hell of a lot faster than every other guy he'd ever encountered. He wondered if Jeannie had been helping with that or if being at the peak of physical fitness had other advantages when it came to blood flow.

Scott said defensively, "I'm twenty-six now. I was quicker when I was eighteen."

"Fifteen minutes is fine," Logan assured him. "It's actually kinda impressive. All those workouts in the Danger Room suddenly make sense." He made a mental note that Emma Frost and her fabulous breasts would never learn of Scott's typical refractory period from him. "You wanna…go again…?"

Scott flashed him a shamed, hopeful look. "Do…you…?"

"I was thinking in about…say, fifteen minutes, I might want to give you a blow job. Think you'd be up for that…?"

Scott said, "I could probably clear a spot on my schedule."

"I just thought if I showed you the way I did it then if you ever wanted to try it yourself – "

"I'm always up for learning new things." Scott gazed down at the stickiness covering both of them and darted a longing look in the direction of the shower. "Maybe we could…?"

"Shower…?"

That grateful look almost made up for the fact he was dating a clean freak who was probably going to want to brush his teeth after every blow job, even though half the fun was kissing afterwards. He wondered if Scott would let Logan lick him in his naughty places if Logan promised to use a mouthwash afterwards. It occurred to him that Scott might let him do lots of things in the shower that he wouldn't want to do on the sheets. He got up off him. "Do you want that collar off? Someone must have figured out the code by now."

Scott said, "Tomorrow, but thanks…."

"Hey – I'm just looking out for my own interests here. Too many more hours of you looking like a sex-slave and I'm not going to want to give that up."

Scott nodded. "Good to know you're still a jerk, Logan."

"Thought you could do with the reassurance." Logan gave him a searching look as Scott sat up – which he did as gracefully and smoothly as a guy who did stomach crunches for fun, and, most importantly, without any hint of a wince. "You okay so far?"

"No, I'm suffering horribly, can't you tell?"

"I always suspected you'd be a snippy little bitch in bed. It's one of the things that made me want to date you."

"I get yelled at until my ears are bleeding because everyone is supposedly so traumatized by seeing me in pain and you still can't tell how I look when things are hurting…?"

Logan gave him a look of disbelief. "Scott, you incredibly hot dickweed, your life has been one long catalogue of pain, which all you do is repress, and you're seriously telling me that I should be able to tell by looking at you if something is wrong?"

"I must have forgotten how open you are to sharing your every thought and feeling with the rest of us, Mister Steals My Bike To Go Hunting For His Tortured Past Alone."

Logan looked at his watch. "Shit!"

"What?"

"You just cost me fifty bucks, Scott!"

Scott hitched up one long, semen-spattered leg in a way that was not at all unattractive, rested his elbow on his knee, and propped his chin in his hand. "I wasn't planning to charge you. I guess we should have established that up front."

"Gumbo said he gave us ten minutes or less from afterglow to first fight. I bet him fifty dollars he was wrong."

"Well, that was dumb."

Logan rolled his eyes. "Yeah – I get that now." He cast a wary look at the object of his affections. "It's usually only women who get…fractious after sex. I thought praying mantis syndrome was exclusive to them."

Scott gave him a glimpse of his heart-stealing crooked smile. "Maybe you're just annoying enough to transcend gender. It could be your secondary mutation."

"I think we already established that being annoying was yours."

Scott looked at his own watch and grimaced. "You know, we didn't even get close to ten minutes. It was like…two and a half."

Logan slumped on the edge of the bed and absently ran a hand down Scott's shapely shin. He had great legs for a guy, with fine fair hairs, barely visible, and those long, elegant thighs. He made Logan feel bulky but strong next to him, hairy and masculine next to Scott's smooth, lean strength; they complemented each other naked even better than they did clothed. Logan said, "It's not the money, it's the principle. Everyone's gonna know we squabbled after sex, just like they thought we would."

"What do you mean 'everyone'? Who else knows we're having sex?"

"Who doesn't?"

"Well, the children don't. Do they…?"

"Are you kidding? Rogue's the one who told me to clean my room."

Scott looked around in surprise. "This is how your room looks after you've cleaned it…? Wait – Rogue knows…?"

"I think Kitty's still on the fence about it. She's still hankering after you dating Gambit. Or maybe Hank. I think she's undecided. The only thing everyone agrees on is that they don't want you dating Frost. Kinda think Frost got a bum deal there, she seems to really like you in her own evil way."

"I don't suppose anyone thought my input was of any interest…?"

"Everyone thinks you're there for the taking. Which I think is now kind of established."

Scott glowered at him. "I was drugged when I kissed Gambit!"

"Storm's being Switzerland. Says she just wants you to be happy and if you think I'll make you happy, that's fine with her, as long as it's understood by all parties that she will fry my testicles with a lightning bolt if I mess you around. Turns out Jubilee thinks you and Worthington would make a cute couple. She likes the idea of you living in a penthouse and going to fancy parties."

"But I don't want to live in a penthouse or go to fancy parties. It's my idea of hell. And Warren and I aren't attracted to each other."

"The guy is really good looking and he has cool wings. Jubilee feels this should be enough for you."

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint her, but I like the hairy, beer-drinking guy with claws."

Logan gave him a sideways looks. "Bird-boy did say you had terrible taste in everything."

"Hey, I remember that held-together-with-baling-wire truck of yours. It's not like you're Louis Quatorze."

"The racehorse?"

Scott rolled his eyes. "The French monarch with exquisite taste."

"That makes more sense." Logan reached across and stroked that straying bang back from Scott's eye again. "Kid, one look in the mirror ought to tell you that we're not exactly on a level playing field here."

"Logan, twelve hours ago was the first time you got to look me in the eye. It'll probably be the last time for another decade. I'm a freak who fires force beams out of his eyes. It's what I'll always be. People look at me and most of the time, they know something's wrong. Maybe it's not as obvious as it is with Hank that I'm a mutant, but a second glance is usually enough. If anyone's getting a bad deal here, it's you."

"Cuz who doesn't want to date a foul-tempered ex-who-knows-what with amnesia and impulse control issues?"

"You're not bringing up the being a Canadian thing? Cause, I wasn't going to say anything, but that is a hard pill to swallow. Is it true you guys have to have a moose present at every marriage ceremony for it to be valid? Seriously, you're not going to make me learn the rules of ice hockey, are you?"

"Learn the rules? I expect you to have mastered playing the game by next Wednesday. Of course, knowing you, you probably will."

"Sorry to break it to you but I'm terrible on ice. I fall over and embarrass my friends. Apparently many of them are still scarred by the experience of me attempting to skate in public."

Logan put a hand behind Scott's handsome head to hold him steady as he kissed him. "Hey, if it makes you feel better, you just cost me fifty bucks – that's a lot of beer I'm not going to get to drink, and I still think you're worth it."

Trying not to laugh, Scott bit his lip. "Did you have a bet with Gambit about how long it would take us to get from first fight to make-up sex?"

"No."

Scott gave him a meaningful look. "Pity."

Logan licked his lips and looked at his watch again. "Only ten minutes to go."

"Maybe less if you have a detachable showerhead and do that thing with your fingers again…."

Logan was already on his feet, grabbing Scott by the hand and tugging him towards the shower. "I feel a sudden urge to get clean."

"If it helps, I can get you your fifty dollars back. Gambit doesn't know what I can do on a pool table."

Logan mind went to an X-rated place. "What can you do on a pool table?"

"Let's just say, you'd probably really enjoy watching it – especially if you bet on me."

He really was going to miss those eyes when the visor went back on. There was so much life in them; it didn't seem fair that most of the time they were just weapons waiting to be used. That was downright mischief dancing in them now, and Scott looked young and close to carefree. Even if it was just for this hour before grief or memory came crashing back in again, it was good to see that light in his eyes, and better still to know he had put it there. Logan realized how much he needed this; to be of use to someone else who was wounded; to be making someone's pain less, instead of feeling as if his only point in the world was to make it bloodier so someone else didn't have to.

He kissed Scott again, gentle and tender. "I would always bet on you, Scott. You may drive me nuts, but you…make me want to believe in something better. You make me want to be…better."

Scott gazed into his eyes for a long, breathless moment as they kissed, and there was so much yearning there, as he gathered memories of eye color, hair color and skin tone greedily, imprinting them in his mind for later, when the red days were back again. He ran a hand tentatively through Logan's hair, like he wasn't sure he was really given permission to touch yet, or thought his license to do so might be revoked. Logan rubbed his head against his palm, making it clear that this was more than permitted, this was welcome, even encouraged, and Scott traced the line of his sideburns down to his jaw, then kissed him back with unexpected urgency, eyes squeezing close. They kissed until Scott sighed, relieved that nothing had happened to break them apart, and Logan swept a rough hand over Scott's lean belly, then slid his fingers down to fondle him, very gently. Another kiss, another stroke and he felt bobbing interest and raised an eyebrow.

"I'm never mocking your devotion to physical fitness again."

Scott was breathing carefully as Logan's lazy fingers swept up and down. His breath gave a jagged little hitch. "You're…good at that. Do you practice?"

"Yeah, Cyke, that's kinda what the morning shower's for – to deal with the morning wood."

Scott looked nonplussed. "It's where I plan my day's training. Doesn't everyone?"

"No, Slim, that's just you." I just fantasize about you sprawled adoringly at my feet in a loincloth – because that's what normal people do.

"You think I'm weird."

He did, of course – the guy was – but he saw no way that saying that would improve his sex life, so opted for tact. "I think you're the mutant equivalent of Madagascar – strange and fascinating and really hot."

Scott thought about that for a moment and then smiled shyly. "Thank you."

Logan caught his head in his hands and kissed him thoroughly, mouth, cheekbone, eyelids, long lashes tickling his lips, then jaw, neck, back to mouth again. Scott came up for air, breathless, lips swollen, and other parts of him swaying and bobbing urgently against Logan's belly. "What…what brought that on?"

"Never mind." Logan took him by the hand again and tugged him purposefully towards the shower.

"I want to know."

"Look, I think it's important for the sake of both our sense of ourselves as men that I don't in any way mention you being cuter than a basketful of kittens, don't you?"

Scott looked understandably appalled. "God, yes."

"Okay then – manly sex in the shower, it is."

He tugged Scott towards the cubicle and guided him in first, hands on his narrow hips as Scott was stepping in backwards and Logan didn't want him to trip; only realizing that was a mistake as he stepped in after him and Scott gave another of those imperceptible flinches. So, being backed into a confined space by a guy blocking the exit was another of those little landmines, and Logan had just stepped on it. Scott said, "Sorry…" embarrassed the way he had been when he flubbed landing the Blackbird and Logan took a second before he answered, needing to find a casual tone: "It's fine. Anything you're not comfortable with – we don't do."

Scott said hastily, "No, I want to –" like Logan was going to cancel his treat when he'd done his chores, truly. "It's nothing. I don't remember anything to – "

Logan rested his hands lightly on Scott's shoulders and pivoted them both so Scott had his back to the exit and Logan had his back to the tiles and Scott could get out any time he wanted to. "Okay…?"

Scott darted him another embarrassed look and Logan pulled him in for a hug, not least because he didn't want Scott seeing his expression. He kissed his temple and took a moment to let the rage flare and then die down again. He didn't know if it was better or worse that all Scott was getting were microflashes of forgotten trauma that came and went in an eye-blink, but he wondered what it had been like for Jean, the two of them linked on the telepathic plain, but Scott's mind a landscape of hastily-erected walls, the plaster still wet in places. She would have worked out the reason for the psychic dry-lining and it would have hurt her. He wondered if it had set off a slow burn of rage against the world that had let this be done to the guy she loved that she'd needed to repress like lava, because if so – he could relate. In fact, with the steam rising in the shower and her boyfriend naked in front of him, he felt closer to her than he had before her death, because he got now why she cared about cardigan-wearing, stick-up-his-ass, teacher's pet, Summers. The guy was both stronger and more vulnerable than he had ever realized when she was alive and he wished he'd had the chance to tell her that he got it, all of it, why she wanted to keep him safe, and why she wanted to bang his brains out, because…yeah, Logan was now on the same page.

With the door pulled across, Logan switched on the water, let it run warm and then lathered up with shower gel, soaping Scott's belly, groin, and upper thighs where they had both spattered on him. Scott was still reactive, enjoying Logan's fingers soaping him but not taking the initiative to respond yet. Logan didn't mind. It wasn't like the novelty of exploring Scott's hot, young body was in any way wearing off, and the way Scott responded to being touched was beautiful to behold. He lifted down the shower head and began to rinse Scott off, letting the spray tantalize his sensitive places – nipples, inner thighs, balls, cock, before he let the water gush up to that enticing little opening of his, slipping in two soaped fingers as he did so. Scott put his head back and went with the sensations, and Logan slipped the shower head into his right hand so he could concentrate on kneeling in front of him and taking the eagerly bobbing cock into his mouth. It tasted of shower gel, of course. Logan suspected that one could have a tongue like Toad and insert it into any of Scott's crevices and still never get to taste anything that wasn't squeaky clean and soap-flavored because Scott just was that much of a boy scout, but he enjoyed swirling his tongue around the head and feeling it harden in response to the heat of his mouth.

As he licked and sucked and worked his fingers in, Scott played the warm water across his chest, and then began to move to Logan's rhythm, hips moving in response to the flexing fingers burrowing soapily inside him, the hot suction on his dick. He made soft little sounds, that got louder and more ragged as Logan's fingers thrust harder and his mouth took him in deeper, and clearly this was his first blow job with ass play, and it was doing amazing things to him to be doubly stimulated like that, thighs shaking and body squirming, shuddering with pleasure that only built as Logan's fingers jabbed fast and firm. Scott threw his head back, and Logan took him deeper as Scott's hips thrust blindly, the guy squirming deliciously as Logan relaxed his throat around his eager cock and then slowed things down by slipping his fingers out and just circling his entrance with firm, steady strokes. He didn't want to make him sore – so far he was just nicely slick and open – and he really wanted to leave him wanting more.

Scott said, "Please…Logan…."

Logan pulled out, licking the head tenderly and said, "You don't need it."

"Please…!"

Logan was amused to discover that Scott Summers discovering the joys of anal stimulation was like a fourteen-year-old boy discovering how to masturbate. He said, "Trust me." He played with his balls gently, licked them, took them carefully into his mouth, one at a time, and then stroked his middle finger along his perineum as he bent his head back over that eagerly bobbing, nicely weighty cock. Scott was still trying to impale himself on Logan's caressing fingers, but Logan grinned and thwarted him, running his tongue along the vein before slipping the rosy tip back into his mouth and giving Scott a thoroughly comprehensive masterclass in how to give head.

Five minutes of Scott fighting not to give in, and the guy came with a squirming, arching, whimpering submission that was thoroughly satisfying to both parties. Logan caught him as Scott's legs gave out, and lowered him carefully onto the floor of the shower, before rinsing and soaping him clean, while Scott sat dazedly with his head back, still panting for breath. Logan gave him a minute to come back from his orgasm high and then kissed him, smugly. "Toldya you didn't need it."

Scott focused on him with difficulty, still a little dazed. "It feels so good…" He sounded understandably surprised, Logan guessed, given that he had gotten to this age and never realized until the past hour that he really liked male mouths on his cock and male fingers in his ass. Logan gave him a kindly pat on the shoulder. "You come back down in your own time, Slim, while I get myself cleaned up."

He soaped himself thoroughly while Scott continued to look like Scott-after-an-orgasm, which was worryingly similar to the look of Scott-when-recently-concussed, although hopefully more fun for him. With his long legs splayed across the shower floor, he looked relaxed and sleepy and generally ready for bed, which was disappointing but also kinda cute. Logan gently plucked the shower head from his fingers and using it to clean himself off, soaping his cock with particular thoroughness on the off chance that Scott decided to add an oral fixation to his newly minted anal one, while keeping an eye on Scott to make sure he didn't nod off.

Logan had lathered and rinsed three times before Scott started to blink his way back to some kind of focus and Logan sank back down to meet his eye. "You back with me, Cyke?"

"That was even better than Hank's drugs."

"Yeah. No more drugs for you, Pal. Also, no sleeping in caves with Hank."

Scott gave a guilty little twitch, which, coupled with the way his toes instinctively curled made Logan suspect that Scott-and-Hank-sleeping-in-a-cave had probably been a long-buried happy fever dream that Scott had taken care not to examine too closely in the intervening years. He wondered if the flip side of being forced into a position of leadership at such a young age was the need to hand over responsibility to someone older and stronger from time to time. Like cuddling up with one's three and hundred and fifty pound genius teammate and surreptitiously stroking his nice, soft fur.

Logan kissed him and Scott responded with a sweet, downward sweep of the eyelashes, and a steadying hand on Logan's jaw, mouth warmly receptive to Logan's tongue. Logan took Scott's hand in his and drew his fingers down his chest hair as they came up for air. "You can sleep with me in as many caves as you like. I also encourage snuggling."

Scott looked unconvinced. "You're a…snuggler…?"

"Damn straight." Logan pointed to his chest. "Kissing Logan…good. Kissing Gambit…bad. Snuggling with Logan…good. Snuggling with Hank…?"

Scott dutifully picked up his cue. "Bad."

"Very, very bad."

Scott looked up at him from under those long wet eyelashes. "Of course, I may need some positive reinforcement."

Logan decided that he was way past playing hard to get here. "You want it on the bed?" He barely waited for Scott's nod before grabbing his hand, hauling him to his feet, switching off the water, and tugging him rapidly towards the bed. He grabbed a towel on the way and gave Scott a gentle shove onto the bed before blotting his leanly muscled body in between deep, hungry kisses.

There were no flinches now, Logan noticed with relief, as he dried him off and then licked where he'd dried, wanting to get back to the taste of his warm, smooth skin. He explored him carefully; still aware of how new all this was to Scott, licking up his thighs, gently stroking his balls. He was limp, of course, and still beautifully relaxed, eyelids heavy over those pretty eyes of his. Logan suspected that one more nice, gentle fuck would send him off to the best night's sleep he'd had in months and decided that was now the mission. Their bodies were moving together more easily now, like they knew how to fit without clashing, and Scott was no longer wary about being touched, but Logan was still careful to use slow, sweeping movements, and the lightest caresses, knowing there was psychic scar tissue so close to the surface.

Scott said sleepily, "I'm good so do something just for you, Logan."

He almost objected, and then realized how much he'd enjoyed being unselfish today – it made sense that Scott wanted the chance to be unselfish too. He figured if Scott started trying to suck him off he'd fall asleep with Logan's cock in his mouth, and although that was a nice idea, Logan really did want another climax before Scott went to bye-bye land.

A little clumsy with tiredness, Scott turned over onto his hands and knees, taut buttocks prettily presented, and rested his head on the pillows with a sigh. "Okay…?"

Logan needed no second invitation. Scott was slick, he was open, and he could hardly have been more relaxed without anesthesia. Logan couldn't resist a gentle thumb circling movement and then a dabbing lick and Scott gave a surprised little 'Oh!" that was certainly shocked but by no means repulsed. He said, "Is that…hygienic…?"

"Scott, you have the cleanest ass in Christendom."

Logan licked him again, deeper this time, and Scott's breath hitched in what definitely did not sound like displeasure. Another dabbing lick and then a deeper one and Scott said, like someone just getting the punch line to a two-year old joke, "Oh, is that what Toad meant…?" He broke off hastily, presumably having remembered that his boyfriend was a short-tempered guy with jealousy issues. Apologetically, he added, "I didn't really get what he was suggesting until just now."

"I got that you didn't get it," Logan told him, and, no, he wasn't thrilled about the prospect of Toad and his incredibly agile tongue wanting to rim his boyfriend.

"I get it now," Scott added, as if that needed clarifying.

Grimly, Logan said, "Did he tell you that you'd like it?"

Evidently embarrassed, Scott muttered, "He said he could get even a tightass like me to come screaming just with his tongue."

Given the way Scott was flexing back to meet Logan's warm licks, Toad probably had a point. Logan added him to his mental list of people he didn't want anywhere near Scott. He wondered what Sabretooth's most recent proposal had been. Fisting? Dogging? Almost certainly not dinner and a show. You do not want Hank in a cave. You do not need Toad's tongue to lave. You do not need a Gambit kiss. You do not need some Angel bliss. No, he'd be here all day if he had to go through everyone who had ever cosied up to Scott or contemplated seeing him naked. The guy was definitely much too pretty for his own good and, for an uptight, by-the-book rule-follower, far too open to new experiences. Logan had no doubt whatsoever that if first given something to reduce his inhibitions, Scott had it in him to enjoy being pegged by Emma Frost, tongued by Toad, cuddled by Beast, and taught any number of athletic sex acts by Gambit. That tower and a quick descent into crazy was looking damned good to him right now. He decided he had better make do with keeping Scott sexually satisfied, and, whenever possible, too exhausted to be open to anyone else's advances.

Another deep lick elicited a soft moan of pleasure and Logan slipped his finger in to check that everything really was as receptive as it felt. Scott moved his hips back to meet Logan's cock, drowsily eager, and Logan pushed forward carefully. Scott gave a sigh of contentment as Logan slid in by slow degrees, spine arching to meet his advance like they'd been doing this for years. The guy was nothing if not a fast learner.

It felt great; it felt familiar and right, his cock being welcomed into Scott Summer's beautifully tight ass, and Logan pushed in slowly, savoring every inch. Balls deep in, he gave him a moment to adjust to the inevitable stretch, rubbing a thumb gently across the base of his spine as he did so.

Scott said sleepily, "Feels…nice."

"Yeah, to me too," Logan assured him.

Naturally, Scott began to wriggle almost at once and Logan wondered why it had taken him this long to realize that of course Scott Summers would be a bossy bottom. Not only was he the leader of the X-Men, he was intensely passive aggressive and he had serious authority issues – the textbook demanding sub. He pulled back gradually and pushed forward, very deep, very slow, enjoying the sweet torture of it; that steady back and forth. Scott moaned his impatience and Logan slapped his ass lightly, which made him jump, curse Logan under his breath, and – inevitably – give a twitch of definite interest.

Arousal shivered up from Logan's aching balls to his aching cock, and a twitch of fire lit up his spine. If they had designed a guy in a lab who was best suited to bring out all of Logan's sleeping perversions, it was Scott Summers, the guy who apparently couldn't get enough of slicked things in his ass, had not actually run away screaming from the thought of doing it doggy fashion in the forest, and who it now seemed liked to be spanked. He was like the world's kinkiest virgin.

"Absolutely no missions without me."

Scott said sleepily, "You'd better stick around then, Mister Lone Wolf."

"Trust me, pretty boy, I ain't going anywhere."

He kissed down his spine hungrily, aware of his own bulky arms and thighs dwarfing Scott's smooth, boyish planes. Scott was all lean strength and balls-aching flexibility and Logan couldn't get enough of touching him, running his fingers over his hollow stomach, his warm thighs, thumbing his nipples just to hear his breath catch, his head go up instinctively as his spine arched with pleasure. Logan drove in deep from the hips, in long, steady strokes, and Scott made small, back-of-his-throat sounds that fell somewhere between words and gasps and were the sweetest music to Logan's ears.

He kept him on the edge, teasing him, teasing them both, when they were aching for it rougher, just enjoying being joined to Scott Summers, feeling his body heat surrounding him as Logan fucked him gently. Scott lowered his head and straddled his legs wider, pushing back, and Logan finally gave him what he wanted in harder, deeper, thrusts, Scott offering soft, surprised cries, still shocked by how good it felt. Logan came with a stifled groan, face contorting as he pumped into him, reveling in it way too much, that it was his seed filling him, hot and creamy, into his deepest places. He thought, You're an animal, Logan, and then in some surprise, You're his animal now. And realized that after all his master-slave sex fantasies about Scott Summers, where Logan got to sit on a throne of skulls and Scott knelt at his feet, wearing a collar and chain and a rapt expression, what seemed to have happened here was that the stories had bled into each other, and either the fairy tale prince had won himself a tinderbox dog or little red riding visor had conquered the big bad wolf. Either way, he didn't think Scott was the one enslaved.

He eased out of him and leaned down to kiss him lovingly. Scott was barely awake but he put up a hand to ward him off. "You're going to brush your teeth, right? Actually, given where your dick's just been, you really need to shower again, too."

Logan thought about arguing and then realized that it was futile and, anyway, this was what he had signed up for, but resolved, as he tottered, weak-legged back to the bathroom to brush his damned teeth and wash his damned dick, that he was no longer going to feel guilty about those Scott-in-chains-in-the-throne-room head fantasies.

***

EPILOGUE

2 a.m.

Rogue dreamed that she and Bobby were kissing, and it was beautiful. She was touching him and he was touching her, and her tongue was in his mouth, which was sweet and oddly warm yet tasted of ice cream, and she was holding him as tight as she wanted to, and her fingers were cupping his face and stroking his hair and –

She awoke with her heart hammering in terror because what if it was true; what if she'd touched him…? She tugged at her sheets and blankets, looking for his blue-lipped comatose body, wondering if she'd killed this boy the way she'd almost killed the last one. Even with the light on, it wasn't enough. Even looking under the bed wasn't enough. She had to creep down the corridor in her pajamas and turn the handle of his door then look inside to be certain. He was peacefully asleep, chest rising and falling, but, as she watched, he gave a sad little sigh, rolled onto his side and murmured, "Rogue…?" while his hand reached for someone who wasn't there. Even sleeping, his body seemed to sag with disappointment and then he was drifting under the surface, alone, just like she was alone, and always would be.

Rogue stumbled back to bed through a blur of tears.

***

4 a.m.

Scott Summers woke and he was alone in the dark without Jean, and the grief was shard-sharp, a knife to the heart, and –

He wasn't alone. There was a warm body pressed against his and someone else was breathing – someone who certainly wasn't Jean. He turned his head and, as he turned, he remembered that this was Logan's bed, and, in the same crowded instant, Scott became aware of a warmth against his back, a weight across his midriff, and the pleasurable flexing of the newly explored places in his body; places of which he had not been aware until this moment. It wasn't pain; it was just…awakening – as if one of his fingers had developed sight. There were places inside him that were responsive and eager that had been merely sleeping before. He felt a twinge of embarrassment at how adolescent that was, at his age, to find he liked it when Logan touched him…there. Shouldn't his body have been thoroughly self-mapped by now? All those years of building its strengths and trying to mitigate its weaknesses, working on flexibility and power and speed and agility and…it turned out that Logan's tongue, finger, or cock in his ass made him squirm and flail like a tickled kid. He was a little annoyed that he hadn't known that until last night. Shouldn't there have been a memo?

Logan wasn't exactly snoring, but his breathing was definitely verging on the…stertorous. No one, for instance, waking in the night and feeling his dense, furry bulk pressed against his body, one heavy arm thrown casually across his waist, or even hearing that rhythmic inhalation and exhalation, could imagine for a moment that he was waking up next to his dead wife. This was a whole new world.

As Scott moved, the arm around his waist tightened instinctively, and he stroked the hair on it, touched the skin between the knuckles behind which those metal claws lived, then felt the hardness of the muscle as his fingers traced sinews up to the shoulder. The adamantium was buried under tissue and skin; he wouldn't have known it was there except for the weight of that arm around him. He remembered what Emma Frost had said about Logan being careful not to crush him and realized that he must have been very careful indeed, because there hadn't been a moment last night when Scott had felt overpowered or oppressed. He could feel Logan's strength now, and he was glad of it.

He knew if he whispered his name, Logan would wake up ready for any enemy that might threaten them. Scott wasn't alone in the dark with all those nameless dangers out there, wanting to break in, and no one left who understood exactly how that felt; to wake up scared, and feeling that that world was a sea of fear and hate and the mansion a tiny island that might be boarded in the night, the children taken from their beds. The children strung up by their wrists and bombarded with flashing, hectoring commands that couldn't be followed, however hard one tried; told over and over that they weren't trying hard enough to do as they were told; weren't worth all the time lavished on them, wretched boy, a waste of effort; were alone, and forgotten and unwanted and unadopted for a reason, because they were worthless and weak and would never be good enough.

Scott cringed inwardly and it felt as if there were angry bats beating at his mind with scratching claws and leather wings, trying to tear fissures in his damaged brain.

"You okay?"

And somehow Logan had gone from almost-snoring to completely awake and sitting upright, one hand cradling Scott's jaw so he could look intently into his eyes. "Bad dream?"

"I wake up every night and I think Stryker's come for the children while I wasn't here. I think they'll be taken to places where nobody loves them and people experiment on them, where they're always scared and alone and there's no hope of it ever ending because this is the way life is."

Logan said, "That isn't going to happen, Scott. That's why this place exists – so that won't happen, and, you and me, we're not going to let it happen. Okay? If bad guys come, we'll stop them. If people take the children, we'll go and get them back. And if Sinister wants more of your DNA, he has to come through me to get it."

Scott waved the last one aside. "I don't care about what happens to me."

"That's the difference between us – I do."

He was being kissed, and it was still so strange, that bristling harshness of Logan's stubble against his skin, the size of the hand cupping his face, the stretch of the fingers, the broad roughness of the pads, the scent of beer and sweat, and the taste of different toothpaste – beer-flavored, apparently, unless Logan had sneaked another can since brushing. Logan's tongue was bigger and more demanding than Jean's, not to mention the beer-flavored thing, and even when he was gentle, as now, there was a roughness to the way he pushed Scott flat on the bed, that was strangely exhilarating.

Logan stroked Scott's bangs back from his face, looking into his eyes with yearning and regret because in a few hours they were going back behind the visor. He was blue-lit in the pre-dawn light that leached through the drapes, like his hair-warmed skin was made of starlight; his arms were as hard as steel rope and his belly was soft with hair, furring more densely as it licked down to his half-hard cock and his heavy balls. He was strange and fascinating but also completely safe and familiar. Scott wasn't alone in the dark.

He said, "Logan, tell me what I want to hear…?"

No hesitation. "The children are safe. No one's coming for them tonight."

It carried the unmistakable ring of conviction and Scott felt the fist that closed around his heart in the night slacken its grip. "Thank you."

Logan kissed him again, slow, sexy, very skilled, while one thumb toyed with Scott's nipple, lighting little pleasure beacons with playful flicks. "Now tell me what I want to hear?"

"I want to suck your cock until you scream like a little girl."

Scott glanced down to check and felt smug as he saw that 'half-hard' flex thrillingly into blood-flushed and aching. A drop of moisture oozed up from the depths as he watched and glistened attentively. "Damn, I'm good," he said.

Logan's voice sounded oddly constricted, strangely high: "How the hell did you go in one night from practically-a-virgin to world's worst prick tease?"

"It's only a tease if I don't follow through…." Scott shoved Logan onto his back and climbed astride him. There was a lot of Logan to explore. He was like an oddly-furred new continent that Scott had barely mapped yet. He said, "This may take a while. I'm very thorough when it comes to orienteering."

Logan swallowed hard. "Orient away," he managed thickly.

And then Scott was licking his way down this fascinating new country and Logan's fingers were carding roughly through his hair, and the children was safe, and Jean was dead, and his heart hurt for her absence, ever and always, but Logan was warm and alive and offering strangled pleasure sounds because apparently Scott was really good at this, and he wasn't alone in the dark.

***

6 a.m.

Kitty was falling. High above her was an angel with outstretched wings, but he was too far away to help her, and the ground was rushing up to meet her, cars buzzing like hornets, headlights glowing mutant-hating red, everything hating her, even the smeared neon street signs, all winking on and off: No Mutants Alley. Gene Freak Street. Mutant Scum Plaza. She fell through the angry cars, past the angry sidewalk, and there was the white and chrome room waiting, the gurney cuffs flipped back like claws, and laid out on a long metal tray all the scalpels and knives and scissors and the serrated teeth of bone-cutting things, and the masked surgeons standing there, white gloves clinging to their fingers, as she landed breathless before them, and they said, "We've been waiting for you, Miss Pryde…"

Kitty screamed and fell through the floor, turning solid with fear as she did so, then landed, neatly in Scott Summers' arms, which he had instinctively outstretched to catch her. He gathered her safely into his bare chest and she clung to his bare shoulder, which was…bare. Kitty gaped at him and he gave her an enquiring look. "Bad dream?"

She looked around in shock and realized that, no, she wasn't still dreaming. She was in her pajamas, in the dawn-lit kitchen of the mansion, in the arms of her bare-chested teacher, who smelt of toothpaste and shower gel, and whose dark hair was damp and disheveled, and whose eyes were the bluest she had ever seen – and who was shirtless, had she mentioned how shirtless he was? She felt a hot flush of embarrassed attraction; traitorous teenage hormones rebounding like pinballs. Faintly, she said, "Yes. Bad dream." She wanted to say, "You have the longest eyelashes in the world," but heroically bit it down.

They stayed like that for a moment, Scott holding her, easily enough, while clearly trying to think of something to say, while she looked at his sculpted mouth and his smooth, hairless chest, and wailed mentally But I don't even think of him like this! I think of him like an older brother! But even knowing it really was just hormones and would pass, in the exquisite agony of that brief, intense attraction, it was just torture.

Scott said, "Do you want some breakfast?"

Kitty said, "Yes, please."

And – thank every goddess in the universe – Scott was placing her carefully on a chair and heading off to the fridge to fetch milk and orange juice, just as if he didn't look like Hylas before he got abducted by the nymphs, and was just Scott Summers, mutant, teacher, and guy wearing just a pair of sweatpants that barely hung on the bones of his narrow hips. He was bending over to get the orange juice. Why was he bending over? She must have made some incoherent protest because he looked over his shoulder at her.

"Are you okay? You look a little flushed." He put the milk and orange juice on the table, laid a hand on her forehead, and then frowned. "Your head's hot. You probably caught a chill yesterday, out in the rain all that time. This is all my fault."

"No!" she said hastily. "I'm fine, Scott. Truly."

"You don't look fine."

Yesterday that collar around his neck had been a distasteful reminder of how mutants were hated. She'd looked at it a dozen times and just wondered how to take the horrible thing off. But today, out of nowhere, it made him look like Ganymede after being grabbed by Zeus. It made him look like…property; like men would fight wars to possess him or lay waste to white towers to steal him; like he'd been abducted by belle dames devoid of merci and taken to fairyland like Tam Lin, or sent into the heart of the labyrinth to pacify the Minotaur, and…and why couldn't she think of anyone doing anything to Scott Summers right now that didn't involve depraved, sweaty, slave-sex?

He took her wrist in his hand, and his fingers were strong and gentle at the same time and much too well shaped, and the bone of his wrist was beautiful and why was her body doing this to her?

"You've definitely got an increased pulse."

He put his head to her chest and listened and she had no idea how she managed to choke down that wail of protest as he put his ear to her heart, and his mouth far too close to the breasts he probably didn't even think she had yet. She clutched the arm of the chair as his warm breath tortured her and thought I'm going to die of shame, right here in the kitchen!

Which was when salvation walked through the door. She raised her horrified eyes and there was Doctor McCoy, who took one look at her flushed face and clammy skin, and no doubt could hear the pounding of her heart and the shameful scent of her brief, bodily attraction that had nothing to do with anything and gave her a sympathetic smile.

"Did I miss you getting a medical degree, Scott?" he enquired mildly.

Scott straightened up and turned to him in relief, although he kept his strong, masculine fingers on the pulse of Kitty's wrist. "I think Kitty may have pneumonia. She's flushed and clammy and her pulse is rapid. This is all my fault."

"Yes, it most certainly is. Why don't you go and put on a robe, Scott, or at least a t-shirt? I'll take a look at Kitty."

"I don't have a fever. Why do I need to put on a robe?"

"Trust me – you just do."

Scott said reassuringly to Kitty, "I'll be right back."

The second he was out of the kitchen, she put her face in her hands and wailed. "I just want to die!"

"He has no idea, and it is in no way your fault." Hank told her kindly. "He's always been a walking minefield for adolescent attraction – one never knows who's going to step on him next. It will pass."

"I don't even feel like that about him!"

"I know, believe me, I know. It's just…proximity and hormones. People go about their business, completely oblivious of any magnetic pull in his direction, and then suddenly he wanders around shirtless at a time when their bodies are telling them that they are newly adult and should find someone to mate with, and suddenly it's unbearable to be near to him. Everyone goes through it."

She looked up at him with interest. "Even you?"

Doctor McCoy poured her a glass of orange juice and began to shake cereal into a bowl. He added milk, handed her a spoon and sat down next to her, still clearly mulling the matter over. "Well, I'd say I was immune except – there was this one time in a cave where I did experience a definite…twinge. I think I would say that my heterosexuality was definitely tested for a good hour or so there. He really didn't help matters by telling me repeatedly how I was even more handsome since I'd changed, stroking my fur, and wanting to snuggle. Of course, he was slightly deranged with hypothermia at the time."

"Did you…snuggle…?"

There was a definite gleam of mischief in Doctor McCoy's golden eyes. "Only for as long as it took to warm him up again. At least…it would have been, only he seemed so comfortable by that point that I didn't have the heart to move him. I did however, heroically, forbear from taking base advantage of his somewhat adolescent curiosity even after being more or less encouraged to do so."

Spooning Cheerios into her mouth – Kitty realized she was actually ravenous – she said solemnly, "You deserve a medal."

"I've often thought so. You have to understand, however, that he was a somewhat scrawny little creature in those days so he offered a rather less tempting aspect than he does now that he's…bloomed."

"I really don't have a crush on Scott," Kitty said.

"I know you don't. You merely suffered a spontaneous physical attraction entirely divorced from your emotional relationship with him. It happens."

"I do look sometimes when he's writing on the blackboard, but I try not to. I always look when he bends over, though. I feel bad about that."

"Everyone looks when he bends over, Kitty. I do myself. I look at nice sunsets, too. There's not so much beauty in the world that we should reject it when it presents itself to us."

She could feel her heart-rate returning to normal and her breasts becoming less clenched and painful and the awful clammy fever-heat receding. Doctor McCoy fanned her kindly with the newspaper and suggested she drank her orange juice, as it would probably help.

"I'm so embarrassed."

"He really has no idea. Not the remotest glimmering. I'll prescribe an aspirin and tell you to avoid the damp for a few days and he can go on happily feeling guilty about letting you sit around in wet clothing – which, frankly, he should." His gaze over his spectacles was level and kind. "I take it you had a bad dream?"

She shuddered. "It was that laboratory."

"I'm not at all surprised. Scott had no business exposing you and Rogue to those images. He suffers from chronic tunnel vision on occasion."

"I think he just wants us not to have the things happen to us that happened to him."

Doctor McCoy patted her hand gently. "If it's any consolation, Kitty, I don't think he remembers most of the things that happened to him. Sinister used to block off his access to their brainwashing sessions once they were over. He is also, of course, a past master of emotional repression."

Kitty said, "Jean didn't do things to his mind, did she?"

"No. She just linked them together."

"What about the Professor?"

There was a laden silence before Doctor McCoy shrugged eloquently. "Perhaps, on occasion, there may have been a few tweaks. I know we're your teachers, so you probably don't want to hear this, but it's not as if any of us has the answer to all questions or can always see the definitively moral action to take. We blunder around in the dark with the best of intentions and hope that, in the end, it will all turn out all right."

Scott came back in, pulling a t-shirt over his head. "Is that what you're teaching in philosophy class these days, Hank? Because I've heard better pep talks."

"I, at least, did not give any of our students nightmares yesterday, Scott, unlike you." Doctor McCoy made Kitty describe her bad dream and Scott asked curious questions – as if he hoped she might have secret information locked up in her brain that would be useful and could be revealed through her night terrors – at least until reminded that he should be feeling penitent for being a terrible teacher who traumatized his students, whereupon he looked utterly downcast and truly sorry and Kitty found herself petting him, consolingly, as if he were a puppy scolded for peeing on the carpet, with not a single twinge of attraction.

Even while telling Scott off, Doctor McCoy, managed to make everyone French toast and cereal, and explain that he had found the code to remove the collar and did they think it might be an idea to do that before Logan got too wedded to that slave boy fantasy of his?

Scott coughed on his toast crumbs. "What slave boy fantasy?"

"I suspect exposure to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs at an impressionable age. I remember his heroes invariably being attired in loincloths."

Rogue walked in, looking ghost white and as if she'd barely slept, and said, "What kind of sex-slave fantasy worth a damn involves people wearing clothing?"

Kitty hurried to ply her with eggs and orange juice and then sat close to her, stroking her ineffectually, because she just seemed so wounded.

Scott looked at Rogue uncertainly and said, "Is this about seeing the laboratory? Because I'm sorry."

Doctor McCoy said, "You're not sorry. You'd do the same thing again."

"Just because I'd do the same thing again doesn't mean I'm not sorry."

"At this moment in time, Scott, just so you know, the impulse to ask Warren to give the children a lecture on safe behavior in a social setting, using you as an example of all the 'Don't's, is almost overwhelming."

Scott paused with his toast in front of his open mouth. "You wouldn't?"

"You might be surprised at what evil I am capable of if my patience were tried too far."

Scott turned back to Rogue. "I'm very sorry that you and Kitty got wet yesterday, and that you saw that laboratory, and that I upset you by getting tortured. I will never do anything like that again – unless I really…have to."

"Well, I know I feel better already," Doctor McCoy said, rolling his eyes.

"I don't know what you want from me, Hank!"

Doctor McCoy shoved his ruby quartz sunglasses in his hand, said, "Scott, there are days when you try my patience to breaking point," and then pressed the buttons on the collar with swift efficiency before removing it. Scott had already hastily closed his eyes and now slipped on the sunglasses.

Kitty couldn't help a sigh of regret, but at least he looked more…Cyclops with them on; more like the leader of the X-Men and less like someone who would be swooped upon by amorous centaurs and carried off to Mount Olympus. Scott examined the collar curiously. "It might be useful if you could reverse engineer it when you have the time," he observed.

"I was actually going to start on that now –" Doctor McCoy began.

"No, not just yet." Scott leaned across the table and put the collar in Rogue's gloved hand. "Bobby was a pretty good boyfriend yesterday, wasn't he? He didn't cut up rough about you going off on a mission without him. He never once mentioned that he was scared to death that you were going to get killed. He just sucked it up and took the kids home like you asked. Maybe you might want to tell him that you appreciate it?"

Rogue threw her arms around Scott's neck and kissed him on the cheek then hurriedly pulled back. "Sorry! Are you okay?"

Scott wavered and Hank caught him under the arms. "He's fine, Rogue. That was too brief a duration to harm him. I trust you understand that Scott is not in any way suggesting that you are obligated to grant Robert any sexual favors that you might not feel comfortable…?"

"Are you out of your mind?" Rogue snapped on the collar and asked Kitty to check it was done up right. "I don't want anyone disturbing us for the next six hours unless the damn mansion's on fire!" She headed off at a run.

Scott said, hurt, as he was lowered into a chair, "You know, girls do have sexual desires too, Hank. Jean told me that."

Doctor McCoy said, "I wonder if I should be more disturbed than I am by the realization that you associate 'being a good boyfriend' with doing whatever a woman tells you to do with the least amount of argument. Please tell me you're not teaching social sciences this year? I don't really want us turning out endless toyboy fodder for Emma Frost."

Scott looked so blank and confused that Kitty realized he really hadn't considered for a moment the possibility that there was any other way to be a good boyfriend than the one he had just outlined. She said breathlessly, "Scott, from now on, you should probably only ever date men."

Doctor McCoy nodded to her as he put another helping of French toast onto her plate. "Thank you, Kitty, an excellent suggestion. I have no idea why he is so much better able to stand up to the male of the species than the female – although, no doubt, any good psychiatrist would have a field day trying to work it out – but I think we all have cause to be grateful that Logan happened by when he did. At least in his case we know that Scott is perfectly able to argue with him at the least provocation. Oh, that reminds me…" He turned to Scott. "Gambit told me to tell you to tell Logan that he owes him fifty dollars."

The End