But Logan realized the guy was wearing a suit of armor - no, not a suit;  it was just his skin.  He let out a sigh of disgust and let him go, dropping his hand. “Piotr, what the hell’s the matter with you?  Why did you try and hit me?”

“I didn’t know it was you!” He exclaimed, eyes wide and startled in an otherwise metal face. “I didn’t hear anyone coming up the walk!  The door just opened - what was I supposed to think?”

“I dunno.  Maybe thar someone was comin’ in?” But that’s when it sunk in how wrong the silence was.  Kids made noise;  lots of noise. “Shit, what happened? What did I miss?”

The metal started to disappear, retracting in its odd way, not quite submerging beneath the skin but being swallowed by it.  Weird as hell.  “The Professor was attacked, and whoever did it put the whole school to sleep.  I haven’t had time to wake anyone, I’ve been working on the Professor … or at least trying to.  You don’t have any medical knowledge, do you?”

Logan shrugged, aware that the question was one he should have been able to answer without hesitation. “I can battlefield triage if I need to, I ‘spose.  How was he assaulted? How could he be assaulted?” He took a deep breath, parsing the air for traces of gas, but didn’t pick up any.  Xavier hadn't been knocked out that way.  Telepathy? A spell? Some weird mutant power? “Any sign of forced entry?”

Piotr shook his head and started leading him down the hall. “None.  But I’m glad you’re here.  You picked a good time to come back.”

“I’m known for my timing,” he deadpanned, looking inside the kitchen as they passed.  There was someone passed out at the table, snoring very faintly.  There were more students in the main hallway that they had to step over on their way to the elevator. Piotr hadn't been kidding about everyone being out - it wasn’t even a light sleep, but an obvious hard one, the kind you had after you’d been up for five days in a row, driving through slush and muck, straight through the Yukon.

Not that he would know …

“You never said how he was assaulted,” Logan pointed out, as soon as the elevator doors closed.

Piotr sighed heavily. “That’s because I don’t know.  There’s no obvious physical signs of harm,  he’s not bleeding,  he’s not bruised … he’s just comatose.  I think … I’d better call an ambulance.”

“He can’t go to a normal hospital, you know that.”

The elevator doors slid open, revealing the brightly lit, sterile metal halls of the lower floors, and Piotr stepped out first, but rather than lead the way, he turned to face him, frustration darkening his expression. “But I don’t know what else to do!  I mean, my training has never covered this, and we need someone who might be able to help him.  If anyone can.”

“Okay, fine.  Didn't Xavier have some kinda connections in the medical community?  Someone he could trust to take care of mutants?"

“Yeah, I think so, but I don't know know who.  It's not like he left instructions."

Logan nodded, seeing his point, but not liking it much.  Maybe it was simply a personal prejudice on his part, but just the idea of putting a mutant in a normal hospital sounded like a recipe for disaster. "Let me see 'im first, okay?"

Piotr nodded wearily, and finally led the way down the hall.  Logan again tried to parse the scents, but the air filtration system down here was far too good.  This area was so sealed off from the rest of the school that it had its own air circulation and filtration system, one that couldn't be contaminated from fumes above, and vice versa.  It also scrubbed the scents out of the air in twenty minute intervals, so all he was picking up was himself, Piotr, and Xavier.  If someone else had been down here, he would not pick them up by odor,  not now.

“You never told me how you weren’t affected either,” Logan reminded him.

“Huh?  Oh, I was affected.  I just got woken up.”

“How?”

“By Ricky Martin.”

Wow, things had just gotten more surreal by the moment.  “Say what?”

“On a cell phone ring tone … oh, never mind.  It’s not important.”

Piotr had moved Xavier to Jean's medical lab, attaching him to a few flatscreen monitors that showed all the basics:  heart rate, respiration, blood pressure. Everything was low, but from Logan's scant knowledge of the subject, he didn't think anything was critical.  But then again, how would he know?  Xavier was a mutant, therefore his baseline averages might be different than that of a normal Human.  He hadn't known his own heart rate was different until Jean told him, nor had he known his blood pressure had a tendency to spike when his healing factor was engaged (although in retrospect it made sense).  She'd told him she wanted to study his blood pressure, try and figure out what was normal for him - apparently he had a wacky circulatory system;  she'd called it "hyper-efficient" - but he just couldn't agree to any more medical studying - ever.  He'd been poked, prodded, and cut open enough for six hundred lifetimes.

And, of course, now it was a moot point.

“Do you know what his baseline averages are?"  He asked hopefully.

Piotr nodded and went to one of the monitors, calling up a smaller window inside the main one. "Doctor Grey has all - well, almost all - of our basic statistics in her database."

“Almost all?"

He hesitated, and made sure not to look at him as he said, "It only includes students and staff who joined before ... well, you know.  And your record is incomplete."

“It is?  Oh, you mean my blood pressure, right?"

That made him look at him. "How'd you know?"

“She told me she had no real control standard from which to gage it properly. Every time I was in her medical bay, I was out cold or somethin'.  I just never got in for that standard, unhurt and vertical reading."

“Ah.  Yeah, she has several notations on what she thinks it probably is, but the records she has of previous measurements are all over the map.  If you were a normal Human, you'd have had a stroke or an aneurysm by now."

Logan scoffed. "Kid, if I was a normal Human, I'd be dead a million times over."

He looked carefully at the baseline standards for Xavier, and compared them to the current measurements.  Xavier was close to normal Human physiology, as far as he could tell, and while his numbers were shockingly low, it still didn't strike Logan as critical ... yet.

But laying there on the table, under the harsh, unforgiving lights, the older man looked ghostly pale, and surprisingly delicate, like one good jolt could snap his spine. (Again? He never knew how to politely ask how he'd been paralyzed, so he never did, and Xavier never volunteered the information. If the others knew, they hadn't said either.) Piotr had thrown one of those reflective blankets over him, reducing his body to a small, undefined lump.

“Is he stable?"

Piotr didn't answer right away.  He went through more of those computer windows, contrasting readings since the time he'd gotten him hooked up, and as he did, Logan scrutinized Xavier's face and neck, looking for any contusions or marks Piotr might have missed.

And that's when he smelled it.

It was a ghostly whiff of perfume, one he had to lean in close to Xavier's cheek to smell.  It wasn't aftershave, the Professor didn't usually wear that anyway, and it had a hint of jasmine mixed with tones of vanilla.  It was probably a very faint perfume by nature, one Logan could almost stand, but his nose was very sensitive to perfumes of all types, finding them to be generally headache-inducing.

“What the hell are you doing?" Piotr asked.

Where had he smelled the perfume before?  It had been awhile, but he knew he'd smelled it here, in this very school.  Where ..?

And then it hit him.  His gut turned to solid ice, and he didn't want to believe it, but maybe it might explain things . “Rogue."

“What?"

He turned to face Piotr, who continued to give him an odd look, like maybe he'd suddenly snapped and declared himself King of the Potato People.  "Rogue.  Rogue did this.  I can smell her on him."

Piotr's blue eyes widened, bugging out ever so slightly.  "Rogue?!  You can't be serious!  Why would Rogue attack the Professor?"

“She wouldn’t … not if she was in her right mind.”  He rubbed his eyes, and felt like a fool - no, worse.  If the Organization had gotten to Rogue, and it was a simple logical leap to assume they had, it was his fault pure and simple.  Damn it!

“What are you getting at?  A telepath got to her?”

“That’s probably the best case scenario.” He sighed and looked at the still bewildered Piotr. “We need to see if anyone else at the school is missing.  Saddiq, Scott -”

“Scott isn’t here.”

Holy fuck, did they get to him again too?  “What d’ya mean he isn’t here?  He’s missing?”

Piotr shook his head, hesitating ever so slightly. “Not … exactly.  He stormed out of here a couple of days ago, took the jet.  I guess he and the Professor had a fight, the Professor wouldn’t say over what, but it seems he wasn’t happy with the little field trip you guys took Rogue and Sad -” He paused, and his eyes bugged out even more, threatening to fall out of their sockets and roll under the table. “Jesus Christ, is that connected to this?”

“That’d be my guess, yeah.  Do you know where Scott is?”

He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “No idea.  I’m not sure even the Professor knew.”

So Scott was a wild card.  Most likely he wasn’t in Organization control, just in the midst of a hissy fit, but still he’d want to be in on this.  Where the hell would he go? If even Xavier didn’t know where he went, Scott most likely would have nullified the tracer in the jet.  Damn it, he really didn’t need this shit right now.

Logan mulled it all over, and finally decided on a plan.  It wasn’t much of one, but he figured he’d need room to move, depending on if Saddiq was gone or not. “If Rogue did this, there’s no point in sending Xavier to a hospital - they won’t know how to help him.” He headed for the door, wondering if Scott would have everything he needed in his shop.  Probably - the guy was such a Boy Scout, and weren't they always prepared?

“Where are you going?”

“To wake up the kids and do a headcount.  I need to know how bad things are before we plan a counter-strategy.”

Piotr started to say something else, butLogan was already out the door, and it automatically shut and cut him off.  No matter;  he was in no mood to talk right now.

How could they have gotten to her?  Telepathy was probably out of the question, because it wouldn’t have made sense for her to touch him after he had been neutralized by a stronger telepath.  What did that leave?  The fact that she'd already been compromised when she walked in on Xavier.  So how was it done?

That nanotech stuff?  Hadn’t Bob once burned out a chip in his head supposedly?  Either of those, perhaps - but how did they touch Rogue to even do it in the first place?  They knew her powers;  they must have had some inkling of what she could do, so they avoided touching her skin.  But then, how the hell did they get a chip in his head when he had an adamantium skull?

Because it was small - nano? - and they'd injected it into his brain through his eyeball.  It sounded bad, but they had done much worse to him.  They must have had Rogue just long enough in Mirror Lake to do just that.  And what of Saddiq? His skin couldn’t be cut with anything less than adamantium, but they had adamantium, and that aside, his eye was just as vulnerable as anyone else’s. Gods, he hoped he was still upstairs somewhere, because Rogue being … well, rogue, was bad enough.

At least he knew Xavier would be fine.  No one ever missed out on an opportunity to say “I told you so”, no matter the circumstances.

Although Scott was gone, he still turned out to be ultra-dependable, as Logan found exactly what he was looking for in his garage workshop:  a pair of sound muffling earphones, akin to the ones those guys who guided in planes on runways wore, and an air horn.  He put on the earphones to protect his ears, and started walking through the upstairs levels of the mansion, blasting the air horn.

It woke everyone up, just like he knew it would.  Just to encourage the groggy and confused kids to pull it together faster, as soon as they started stirring, he shouted that he’d be pissed off if they didn’t wake up now.  He knew he scared a lot of the kids, and the idea of getting him pissed off would put an extra vroom in their step.

He looked very hard for Rogue and Saddiq, yet wasn’t too surprised to not find them.  He did notice, with some surprise, that all the Eden kids seemed clustered together, away from the others.  In a school full of mutants they still managed to be outcasts, because they weren’t “real” mutants, but ones designed from a similar template, with the exact same powers.  And yet, even with their very specific group, there was a division: the Rajan kids seemed to keep to themselves, making the very stolid Saddiq the most “outgoing” - and ironically, deadly - of them all.  And he was not among his “brothers”, the youngest of whom was eight.

As soon as he was done doing his tour of the school with the air horn, Logan took off the earphones and left them and the mostly spent horn on an upstairs table. He was headed back down to check Xavier’s office (maybe he did know where Scott was but hadn’t shared the info, or conversely, maybe Scott had called), when he was intercepted by Bobby.

“Hey, you’re back,” he said, pointing out the blindingly obvious.  “When did you get back?”

He scowled at him, both for getting in his way, and for asking such an unimportant question. “While you guys were sleeping.”

“Yeah, what was that about?”  He unconsciously rubbed a tiny little red spot on his forehead, the place where he had probably first impacted the floor; Bobby was one of the unfortunates who gotten hit with sudden narcolepsy in the hall.

“You tell me, I missed it.  Did you hear something?  What was the last thing you remember?”

Bobby continued to follow him down the hall, trailing him like a bad reputation, and even though Logan was relatively certain he hadn’t been gone all that long, Bobby looked a little taller than the last time he'd seen him, and maybe a little lankier. Some teenagers just grew like weeds.

They’d reached the ground floor before Bobby reluctantly admitted, “I don’t remember anything weird.  I was talking to Jason about, uh … math, and then there’s nothing.”

Logan bet he'd been talking about girls, not math, but that wasn’t important; a powerful telepath had simply told everyone in the school to sleep, and probably no one was consciously aware of the command.  Since Xavier could do that easily, it was a sure bet Rogue had done it as soon as she acquired his powers.  Why?  To make an unencumbered escape?  There was no way to tell, at least so far, how long everybody had been snoozing before Piotr woke up.

“Look, Bobby, you’re gonna have to help me.”

His eyes seemed to brighten, and if he'd had a tail, he would have wagged it.  Had he ever been that eager about anything?  “Sure.  How?”

“I need you to do a head count, see if everyone who was here before the big sleep is still here.” He was an idiot to think he could do it himself - he didn’t even know all the kids that went to this school.  He was never meant to be in charge of the school - that was Xavier’s job, Scott’s, Storm’s, Jean’s … but the first was comatose, the next two were missing, and the last was excused due to sudden godhood.  Bit of a pisser, all in all.

Bobby looked a bit crestfallen, clearly hoping he could do something more than that, but then curiosity creased his brow, making his blue eyes narrow. “Wait - are you saying that people might be missing?  Were we attacked?”

“In a way. Piotr will fill you in, he’s downstairs, but do this first, okay?  This is important.”

The kid nodded reluctantly, wanting to ask him more about the situation, but Logan gave him the look, the one that said ‘Don’t even dare’, and he seemed to get the message, because he turned away and headed back down the hall. How would he react when he realized Rogue was missing?  They were still dating, right? God, he had no fucking idea.  He wasn’t here enough to know anything of value.

He heard the phone in Xavier’s office ringing long before he got there, and he went to answer it, hoping that it was the Boy Scout checking in, sparing him from trying to track him down along with Rogue. (Not that he had to worry too much about that … )

“Yeah?” he barked into the receiver, noticing the light blinking on Xavier’s answering machine.  He had over a dozen calls waiting for him.

There was a pregnant pause, followed by a hesitant, “Er, Logan?  What are … I thought I was calling the Professor.”

It was Brendan, which was a surprise. “You were, but he’s indisposed right now. What d’ya need?”

Again a pause, and Logan suddenly got the feeling he had more bad news to give them.  Why not?  Good things may have come in threes, but bad things came by the gross. “I ... I guess it’ll be easier sayin’ it to you anyway.  There was an explosion, and Scott’s in the hospital here.  I guess he’s stable, but he seems to be critical.  He was lucky, though - this hospital has a whole mutant ward.  It‘s like it‘s no big deal at all.  No demon ward, mind you, but I guess those just belong to the specialty hospitals … ”

Yep, he hated being right.  Well, at least he didn’t have to worry about finding Scott anymore.  He sat on the edge of the desk, and listened to it creak in protest at his weight. “You're still in L.A. right?”

“Yeah.”

“Know what happened?”

“No clue.  He just showed up the other night, looking for Bob, and -”

“Wait a sec.  He was looking for Bob?  Why?”

“I don’t know.  I guess he said something about having strange dreams about Jean - Ms. Grey - and he thought Bob could help him with it.  I don’t know if Bob ever got back to him or not; I haven’t heard that he’s been around lately.”

Jean.  Oh holy shit, no.  She wouldn’t try and kill Scott, would she?  Hell, if she helped Kali come back, would anything be beneath her?  No, that was different, that was Bob; she would take a shot at Bob if it was given to her.  But Scott ..?  No, he couldn’t imagine that.  That would be something he would do, not her.

Unless Scott just got in the way of her latest shot at Bob?

He rubbed his eyes, and tried not to think about it.  He didn’t want to believe such a thing about Jean, but he knew damn well something was deeply wrong with her.  It wasn’t just that she wasn’t the “old Jean”, it was the fact that she seemed to have been corrupted by her own power.  It was, in all probability, driving her crazy, and he didn’t know if they could ever trust her again.  Did they dare?  If only she didn’t look like Jeanie, if she wasn’t almost acting like her the majority of the time, it would be so much easier.

(If it was her … could he do it?  Could he kill her again?  Couldn‘t it be somebody else?)

“Do you know where Scott has the jet stored?”

“Huh?” It sounded like Brendan was a little startled.  Had he been quiet that long? “Uh, no, but I’m sure I can find it.”

“You do that, and fly it back here ASAP.  There’s something strange goin’ on, and we may need you.” Demons and the Organization continued to be a bad mix, and he wanted at least one with them on the hunt for Rogue.  Besides, he knew Rogue and Brendan were close, and he’d probably want in on this.

“Umm, what?  Did you just say fly it back?”

“Yeah.  I know you can do it; Scott told me ya could.”

Logan could feel the anxiety oozing over the phone. “Yeah, but … alone?”

“There’s an autopilot function.”

He sighed, but it sounded angry. “I know, but still …”

“Bren, look, if you don’t feel confident enough to do it, fine.  See if Rags can teleport an entire jet and you here, and find out as soon as you can.”

“Things are that bad?  What’s happened?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.  Now move, okay?”

“Okay.  See ya.”

If anybody could be said to hang up with reluctance, it was him.  But as Logan dropped the receiver into its cradle, he found his mind straying back to Jean.

He couldn’t think about her now, there was too much shit going on, but he knew she was on the short list of things they would have to deal with.  They would have to determine, once and for all, if she was friend or foe, and react accordingly.

He just hoped to whatever indifferent Powers That Be sometimes glanced their way that he wouldn’t have to be the one to kill her.

4

Sometimes you didn’t need to be conscious to know you were in the wrong place.

He wasn’t even near full consciousness yet, but Bob knew the energy this place was giving off was all wrong.  He wasn’t on Earth anymore;  he was on a level where he couldn’t quite gauge a steady power signature;  it was constantly in flux, all over the map.  He knew he was probably in a small pocket dimension, something too ill-formed to sustain itself for long.  And it smelled like the sea.

He shoved himself up, hand sinking to the wrist in fine, powdery white sand.  He found himself looking at a calm lavender ocean, beneath a velvet green sky, and thought he spotted a similarity to Camaxtli’s long lost realm.

“I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” Jean said, somewhere behind him.  Far behind him, suggesting she knew he wouldn’t be happy.

And fuck no, he wasn’t.  He sat up, brushing sand off of him, ignoring the pounding in his head, and snarled, “Scott.”

“What?”

“Scott.  Remember him?  I was the only thing protecting him from Xiuh’s power. Did I teleport him out before he drained me, or didn’t I?”

He looked back at her, and found her sitting on the top of a dune, sitting with her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her legs.  She looked small and strangely Human.  The breeze ruffled her hair, and she could have been her old self, save for the flames still flickering low within her irises.  That’s how de-powered she was - they were almost gone.  They were embers.  “I saved your life, and all you can do is complain?”

He shoved himself up to his knees, and wondered if there was anything left of the old Jean at all.  “Did Scott get clear or not?”

She shrugged. Unbelievable. “I’m sure he did.  You acted fast.”

“You’re sure? You didn’t even check?”

“I didn’t have time.  I had to get out of there before that thing realized I was still alive -”

“He was your fiancé, for fuck’s sake!  Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Don’t even presume to stake out the moral high ground here, Bob.  I know what you are.  I know what you did.”

He loved that emphasis on the end word.  Of course he knew what she meant, and he wasn’t at all surprised.  He knew some gods just couldn’t wait to talk all about him.  He climbed to his feet, trying to ignore the terrible throbbing in between his eyes, and the natural weakness that came from Xiuh trying to suck him dry of all his power.  Jean did intercede in time, pulling him out to this unstable bubble universe away from him, but he barely had any energy left at all.  Clearly, she hadn’t faired much better. “And I know you, Jean, so don’t try and take the moral high ground with me either, toots.”

“Toots?” She then shook her head, dismissing it. “Who the hell is he, and how come he’s been able to drain my power?”

It wasn’t difficult to guess who she was talking about. “Xiuhcoatl, the fire snake, the Aztec god of drought and deserts and the very first scorched earth policy. And it’s not really a he; it’s an it.”

That earned him a dirty look.  Her power signature was surprisingly mild, almost Human. “You know what I mean.  Why did he say Camaxtli’s power was his - its - not mine?”

He rubbed his aching forehead and chuckled, turning away to face the lilac surf. He wondered if he had enough power left to make it a little choppy;  some surfing would be nice right about now.  Might calm the throbbing in his head.

“Don’t you dare ignore me,” she snapped.

He couldn’t help but chuckle again at that, and he didn’t bother to turn and acknowledge her, as they were the only two people in this dimension.  And she would never have saved him if she didn‘t want something from him, something much bigger than mere information.  She wanted something she could only get with his power or his help, and he couldn‘t help but wonder how on earth - any of them - she was going to make him play along, as he really wasn‘t inclined to.  Not here, not now. “Who’d you piss off enough to make them bring Xiuh into this?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“You know.  And I’m not answering your question until you answer mine.” Actually, he thought he knew, but he wanted her to admit it.  It wasn’t like they didn’t have all the time in the world.  Until Xiuh tracked them down and killed them both, that is.

How did he end up in so many situations like this?  He just didn’t live right.

****

He was just finishing up playing Xavier’s messages, seeing if anyone had left anything interesting (no - a parent making an enquiry into the school, several telephone solicitors, a banker who identified himself as Hernandez, and a hang up call with what sounded like doctors being paged in the background - an earlier call by Brendan, who must have decided he couldn’t leave such grim news on an answering machine), when Piotr came storming in, demanding answers.

Logan was too tired to even get pissed off at him.  He told him it was probably the Organization counting coup, and even though he explained there was no way he or Scott could have known that Rogue had been compromised in any way - even she hadn’t known - Piotr still got angry about it anyway.  He kicked over a coffee table, sending it slamming into wall at great force, making it shatter into little bits of kindling, and ranted and raved about responsibility and other shit he'd pretty much expected from Xavier.  He was angry enough that he actually slipped into Russian for part of it, probably without realizing it, and Logan knew he couldn’t feign ignorance, because he already knew he spoke Russian.  Still, he let it go in one ear and out the other, just letting him vent, because there was simply no way Piotr could be more angry at him than Logan was at himself.

Finally ranted out, he exclaimed, “Why the hell aren’t we out there looking for her now?”

Logan sighed, and wondered when he got as old as he currently felt. “’Cause there ain’t no need.  They’ll let us know where she is.”

That seemed to confuse him. “What?”

“They know I’m not gonna stand for this; they know I’ll come after her.  In fact, I’m sure they’re counting on it.  They will leave, or have already left, a major clue to her destination, or they’ll have Rogue leave it in an obvious trail of bodies.  They’ll want to lead me - us - into a trap, a place where they’ll control the battlefield. They know we won’t just give her up like that, so they’ll have a plan in place for us.” It was a game; a very old and tired game.

Now Piotr just looked flabbergasted, and made several helpless gestures with his hands. “But … so … what the hell are we gonna do about it?  We’re just not gonna stand for that, are we?”

Before he could tell him that yeah, they were pretty much going to have to, Bobby came rushing in, panting and breathless.   As he struggled to get enough air to speak, Logan said, “Let me guess - Rogue is missing.”

His eyes widened in surprise, and he nodded, slightly dumbstruck. “I think Saddiq’s gone too; I can’t find him anywhere.”

Both of them.  Holy shit.  Together, they were a two person army, very close to unstoppable.  He sincerely hoped the Organization hadn’t picked the “you will know us by the trail of the dead” option, because it could be a sizable one.

It was then that he noticed Bobby had something in his hand.  It was a square of paper, or maybe thin cardboard, held behind his back. “I found something weird,” the boy said, explaining the paper. “It was tacked to the door of Rogue’s room, but it wasn’t there this morning.  I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean, but -”

Logan held out his hand and gestured for him to give it to him.  He did, obediently, but Logan noticed he was very careful handing it to him, like he was afraid his claws might accidentally “go off”.

The square of paper was actually a book cover, probably torn off a library book.  It was “The Drowned World” by J.G. Ballard.

He felt the shadow of Piotr fall over him as he leaned in to look at it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”  He wondered.

Logan shook his head and tossed it on the desk, hating the Organization more than anything in this universe.  He didn’t even hate himself as much as he hated them. “That’s their message; that’s where she’s going.”

“The Drowned World?” Bobby asked in disbelief.