They came like a whisper in the night. A cool breeze at the end of summer, the first hint of autumn, of winter. They came with little notice, unseen by the eyes of science, unheralded by the doomsday preachers. They came in great numbers, far too many to count. They came without emotion, without feeling, without remorse, sadness, anger, joy, lust, or love. They came coldly, quietly, methodically.

They came to claim our world. By force, if necessary.

And it was not until their claim had already been made that we noticed.

It was not until then did we stop fighting our own wars, playing at our own politics, squabbling like naughty children to turn and find the bogeyman staring down at us with the flat eyes of a shark. It was not until then did we realize our folly.

Human society is a notoriously selfish, fickle entity. Each person might be an individual, with their own thoughts, feelings, desires, ideals. But when people are put together en masse, the mob mentality is king, and it knows nothing other than self-preservation. The mob fights to retain its status as the mob. The mob runs to maintain its status as the mob. The mob may accept members one day, and cast them out in the next, all to retain its status as the mob. The mob might break apart, might dissipate to the winds, but it is still there, lurking underneath the surface, the skin. We are like ants, waving our antennae about, waiting for the next time that the mob will form. We might apply morally acceptable names to the mob, call it society, government, school, a sports team. But it is still just the mob. It is a living thing. And when we become a part of it, we stop being humans. Our individuality ceases to exist. We are merely a part of the whole, a part of this mob we like to call humanity.

So it was that the mob that had shunned those with differences as being a threat to its very existence one day turned back around and accepted them in the next. So it was that mutant-kind, the one-time enemy, was suddenly elevated to the status of savior.

Not out of understanding. Or goodness. Not out of a change of heart, a realization that brotherly love is best. Not even out of unstable camaraderie, the desire to defeat a common enemy. No.

It came out of the mob's need to survive.

*****

It had been a Thursday night, she remembered. A Thursday night in July, when the humidity had actually been bearable, and the fireflies winked in and out like little fallen stars to the soughing of cicadas. They had had a cookout for dinner with sweet corn on the cob and fresh-squeezed lemonade. It had felt like a normal night. They had all felt, for a few short, wonderful hours, like normal.

When Jean had emerged from the mansion, and called softly to Scott to come inside, to look at something, most did not take notice. The only reason Marie had, in fact, was because she had been at the grill just then to get a burger. The telepath's posture, the way she stood, the way that her smile flickered into place like a shorting light belied a certain, subtle nervousness, a worry she did not usually carry around with her. Scott had turned the grill over to Peter, then, warning him with a smile to not burn the place down, and followed Jean inside.

It had started that way, at Xavier's. Just like that. On a Thursday night in July, when they had had sweet corn and fresh-squeezed lemonade, and the cicadas cried.

*****

Nobody had really known what to call them. Aliens seemed too generic. Our culture's love for science and for sci-fi had grown our imaginations far past Mars, deep into the outer reaches of space, so the term Martian had never been uttered. They did not look or act like anything that we had already dreamed up. They were not like bugs. They were not tripods. They did not bleed acid, and they did not bear cookbooks with them. They were not little gray men. They were not even little green men. They could not be reasoned with by the use of a tuba, flashing lights, a flame-thrower. They could not be wiped out by a simple computer virus, by water, by bacteria, by us simply breathing on them.

Still, we could not come up with a name. In war, it always seemed so important to have a name, something to spit out vehemently, to twist around into an insult based on culture, looks, whatever. Nazi bastards, krauts, dirty Japs, gooks, towel-heads. Humanity has a love for hurting, not just with weapons, but with the power of words.

But they didn't feel; they didn't seem to care about what we screamed at them.

So, five years later, and the ragtag rabble that was left simply called them Them, because we had finally learned that the name was unimportant. In the end, there had been the simple realization of one simple fact: it was Us against Them. It made it easy to differentiate between the two factions. Them worked just fine for us.

And They didn't seem to mind it at all.

*****

It was hard to believe that it had already been five years; time that had gone by so fast and yet so slow. The days had moved as if set to different clocks, some feeling as long as a whole month creeping by, others done as if only lasting an hour. Just after the first year, the school had been obliterated off of the face of the earth as if God himself had been offended by it and had decidedly to lay down some serious Old Testament judgment. The occupants had scattered then, splitting up into smaller groups so that it would be easier to scrounge, easier to hide. It was another long, hard year of scraping by. Most of the younger kids didn't make it. Some of the adults didn't, either.

After that year, on instinct, they had trickled back in to New Salem, reassembling together to reclaim the underground labyrinth that they had forged out in a better time, dub it their stronghold. Logan and Marie, the two remaining souls from their little group, had been among the last to creep back to that safe-haven and find others that had had the same idea.

The Professor was gone. That had been the hardest blow for everyone, really. Hardest for the X-Men themselves, who all handled it in a different way, hardened here, softened there, swore a bitter revenge or promised to build a better world, all in his name. Scott had taken it the worst. Something had died inside of the man, that much was obvious. A quiet faith, maybe. He never forgave himself, though he wouldn't talk about whatever it was that had happened. But it was easy to see in him, that guilt, that feeling of failure. The way he was broken, and how he needed time to mend.

He was still mending, five years after the start of it all. But Jean, true to her red hair, was too stubborn to give up on that, on him. She was a fixer by nature.

They had lost other notables along the way, though. Kurt. Peter. Bobby. Warren. Rumors had spread around that Magneto had finally bit it, though Mystique was still slinking around, like a cockroach that just wouldn't die. And word finally reached them about the total loss of Muir Island, the fall of the team there, and the strongest human ally that they had ever had.

It was a sad five years. They became a refugee camp of sorts, taking in whatever stray person that wandered by. It was hard, sometimes, to keep everything running. But for some reason, they didn't give in. Kept on kicking and screaming. Logan sure as hell didn't let them. Whenever the air turned too blue down in those subterranean depths, he'd start cussing out the lot of them, and somehow it helped. All the little things helped.

And it was at the five year mark that everything changed...

Scott had actually been the one to find them.

The visored leader of the X-Men himself had led a small group that went out foraging from abandoned town to abandoned town for the past five days, rooting through the forgotten debris for anything useful: canned goods, batteries, clothes, paper, things they couldn't make themselves, things that might not have been absolutely necessary, but made life just a little more comfortable underground. The runs were dangerous, a constant sneaking about and making as little noise as possible the whole way, constantly having to stop, constantly having to look over your shoulder. Holding your breath whenever the truck spluttered just a little bit, threatening to maybe strand you out a hundred miles from the remnants of the Institute. That had happened once before, the team forced to hoof it all the way back.

And not all of them had made it back, then.

But this time, the group returned without a single hitch, and they were met warmly, thankfully, when they crept back in to the safety of what had once been merely the lower levels of a grand mansion, a grander campus, but now served as home. Marie had been among the ones there to welcome them back, and to help unload the truck and ferry supplies to different cubby holes and storage spots. Scott peeled himself out of the driver's seat with an air of business, that certain way about him that a lot of people -the ones that didn't know him well- felt was standoffish, aloof, and then approached her with just a flicker of a smile that didn't stick for long.

"Bet you can find somebody who might appreciate these," he said, pulling a small, wooden box out from under the heavy, sheepskin-lined jacket he wore and handing it over.

Marie regarded it with just a little curiosity and a spicing of confusion, accepting it while she tipped her look up to ask him, "What is it?"

He gave an offside shrug, his expression beneath the ruby quartz just a little bit unreadable as he said, "Just something I picked up on the way back."

And then he was back to the truck, doling out orders, encouraging people to work with that blunted edge of leadership he managed to produce on demand, without any amount of conjuring or difficulty. Rogue watched him for a moment, one brow lifting upwards at the man as he absently scratched at an itch along his jaw -the beard, she knew, the man hated that beard, but good razors were hard to come by- and either didn't notice her or else ignored her.

Inside the box, neatly lined up and packed together, protected from any kind of rot or drying out by the satin liner, was a set of twelve cigars.

She couldn't help the smile that grew into place after the initial surprise, slowly unfolding like a blossom coaxed by a breath of sun. Marie looked back up to Scott, busy playing foreman, down to the treasure she held again, up once more at him, snapped the box shut, and walked off quickly to hunt down that somebody he had mentioned.

And the smile, apparently infectious, spread right on to the Cyclops and tweaked the corner of his mouth just so while he watched her go from the corner of his eye.

******

It's funny, the way you learn to live without certain things when you can't get them. Things that you had once felt were integral to your person, solidified and defined you, made you you, but that suddenly became so trivial and unimportant when life stopped being about living and started being about surviving.

The sixty-two people, mutant and non alike, who called the underground chambers of what had once been Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters home had learned to live without a lot in the five years of surviving that had been going on since They arrived. Things that had once been taken for granted:

Television sitcoms. Morning radio shows. The Internet. Cell phones. Watching movies in a theater. Drive-thru fast-food. Starbucks. Honey-baked ham. Swimming pools. Going to the beach in the summer. The smell of pine sol after cleaning. Shopping at the grocery store every week. Trick-or-Treating on Halloween.

For Logan, he had learned to live without cigars.

The last one he smoked had been on Christmas Day, a full year ago. Marie remembered it well, the way he had lounged there in the space that had been converted into a sort of rec room, his hands tucked behind his head as he puffed in silence on the couch. He had sat that way for the better part of two hours, with his eyes closed, ignoring everything else that went around him; just a man enjoying a fine cigar, all of his worries, his thoughts, his worldly and otherworldly concerns set aside for a small pocket of, not quite heaven, but something that certainly wasn't hell. Something fine, and meant to be savored.

Nobody had griped at him for smoking inside. It had been as if they knew, just as well as he did, that it would probably be his last. It had been as if they knew, just as well as he did, that, at any given moment, it could be the last one for any of them.

After that, Logan hadn't said a word about it. He hadn't complained at all about his lack of tobacco for that whole year, neither good-naturedly or grumpily, something some people found to be a minor miracle. But there had been something sad about that, too, like he had been a jigsaw puzzle missing that last piece that brought the picture to life.

Marie was just about fit to burst to be able to replace that piece and make the man whole again, at least for a little while.

She found him in a leisurely lean against the door frame of the Danger Room, watching as Jubilee instructed some of the younger refugees in the art of self-defense.

Unable to hide a spark of mischief, her features always an open book for everyone to read, she snuck up to him with the box held behind her back.

"Hi, Logan," she announced, though she knew the man probably already knew she was there; he always did.

The Wolverine straightened up and turned to her, a lopsided expression that was meant to be a smile showing up as he said, "Hey, kid."

After all of these years, he still called her kid, a pet name that had stuck and never went away. It might have been insulting to some people, but she was just as fond of it as she was fond of him. It fit. Maybe not her, maybe not him, but it fit them.

"I got a surprise for you," she said, with a creeping sort of smile that sparked in her eyes, showed a glimpse of her teeth, hanging back a few steps from him.

One of his brows went upwards at that, bent at that sharp angle as his head turned just a fraction to eye her a bit in question. "Oh?"

"Yeah, but you're gonna hafta come get it," she teased then, smile transforming into a grin she couldn't help.

The other brow quirked upwards then to join its partner, sustain a higher roof line over his eyes as his head dipped down a little, and his scruffy face produced a bit of a smirk with just a hint of cockiness. The what? look. Marie held in the laugh that wanted to bubble up as he sauntered over to her with that look, the one that, more than any other, defined him. When he got close enough to her, his hands, those strong, those deadly, those firm but surprisingly gentle at times hands settled at her hips, and gave her a tug. With a bit of a yelp, and then a quiet giggle, she was forced to take a step towards him, bringing them close together.

"What?" he finally asked as she drew in, demanding an end to his curiosity, his eyes threatening a hundred little things that would all turn her to silly putty in those hands.

No, "kid" was no longer an apt name, hadn't been for a while, almost two years now, but it was a quiet, smoldering coal of hope that warmed Marie's soul to the idea of life, belonging, joy. A steady glow that burned inside.

She laughed then, light and free at his order, and handed over the small, wooden box with the explanation, "The group that went out at the start of the week just got back in. Scott found it."

Logan considered the box with a little trepidation, mostly an act, she was sure, when she mentioned the finder of the item, letting go of her with first one hand, and then the other to take hold of it while he examined it.

Without lifting his head, instead raising his brows to allow his eyes to look at her, he asked, "It won't blow up or anything, will it?"

Marie delivered a swat to his shoulder with another laugh, and said, "Just open it!"

His head moved a fraction one way, and then the other with a slight pursing of his mouth, as if assessing the potential risk the box posed him. Then he opened it up to find the twelve cigars, settled snugly within the satin liner, their gold foil labels catching dully in the overhead lighting.

Logan stood for a long while there, just looking down at the cigars, his expression showing nothing, though Marie knew the man was touched. He would never admit it, this feral man that she dared to think she loved, this man that solved his problems more often than not with a menacing growl and a flash of claws, but he was touched just the same.

"Cyke, huh?" was the first thing he asked, his voice gruffed up more than usual to hide any true feeling.

"Yeah, sug, Cyke," was her reply, laughter shining in her eyes, though it never sounded out.

And he grunted, grumbled out something unintelligible, closed the box as carefully as if it had contained something fragile, something priceless.

"Well, shit," he said with a false flatness. "Now I'm gonna have to thank him or something."

The laughter finally escaped Marie then, and she had just been about to tease him for that, a light admonishment, when a loud and blaring noise interrupted them. As she tilted her head one way, and Logan tilted his head the other and squinted an eye upwards at the ceiling, they both frowned to the steady, pulsing siren.

Logan was the one to voice it, though they both knew what it was, "Perimeter alarm."

And, even as the kids started to pour out of the Danger Room, Jubilee herding, the pair hurried their way down the hallway, to the nerve center of the underground complex to find out what the hell was going on.

Ice cream. Pizza delivery. Traffic lights. Fed-Ex. Magazines produced weekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. The New York Times Bestseller List. The Top 20 on the Pop Charts. The streaks in the sky jets left as they flew by, high overhead. Valet parking.

Dr. Henry "Hank" Philip McCoy had learned to live without his reading glasses.

The consummate absent-minded professor, in the year of hiding, of constantly moving from place to place in order to avoid detection, Hank had either lost or broken every single pair of his prescription lenses. Since then, occasional hunts through surviving optometrist and glasses shops like Lens Crafters had proved relatively fruitless for his exact needs. Attempts at using a similar prescription had only resulted in furious headaches and blurred vision for days after only using them for a few hours. He could not get his claws on the proper equipment to make his own, although in his collective, pack-rat nature, he had bits and pieces for the project stowed away, should he ever get that far.

Of course, ever the one looking for the silver lining in any cloud, Hank had quipped that it was very lucky, indeed, that he was the one to suffer so, instead of Scott.

So, when the members of the X-Men began to siphon into the Central Nerve Center of the underground facility, they found the hulking blue man hunched over at a station in order to squint at the small font that sped by in a code that only he could really understand; it took days for anyone else to decipher what he could blaze through in a mere minute. Strains of Chopin perfumed the air, as he had been working in there before the alarm had sounded.

The Central Nerve Center had been Hank's idea, of course. The certified genius trapped in the apish physique had immediately begun converting everything that he could think of to make life easier, and survivable, for everyone in the underground chambers of what had been the mansion as soon as he had returned. He had reasoned that, although a potential security risk should they ever come across a traitorous individual that might act as saboteur (which, he had gone on to explain, at length, as highly unlikely, due to the current situation of humanity as a whole, with his calculated figures scribbled up on a white board), a single room containing all of the processing computers that acted as a brain for the underground levels, ensuring that all systems, such as ventilation, lighting, heating and cooling, security, functioned nominally at all times, would be their wisest choice. Due to the power of the computers, they could be left alone, if necessary, and only one operator would be required to handle any situation that might come up, if manpower was scarce. Also, by placing all of these systems in one room, said room could be reinforced to withstand even the most volatile of attacks.

Of course, Hank had also suggested that there be a back-up center in another room, on another level, where they could override the main brain, just in case, and take over control of the most important of systems, should the need arise.

They had all agreed with him. So, the Central Nerve Center had been born.

But, beyond the CNC, as some of them liked to shorten it, Hank had done so much more for the livelihood of all of them. The first to realize that their dependence on fossil fuels would serve to strangle their efforts in a few short years, as the gas stations around them would all eventually be bled dry by their needs, he had at once begun the conversion of everything possible to another means of power. He had led the effort to dig out an extra level to their location, largely to allow for more living space, but also so that he could construct a small-scale variant on a Kaplan turbine to power their generators with. As a back-up (Kaplan turbines, of course, required a water flow), he had also devised batteries that could be charged by Jubilee's powers. All of the vehicles they used he had also converted to electricity-driven, rather than requiring gasoline, and he had improved upon the battery design for them to improve their maximum storage capacity.

Hank had not stopped there, however. The blue Beast had done a multitude of other things, such as tracking down a warehouse that had been full of energy-efficient, long-lasting light bulbs that had been hitting the market when They had arrived. A portion of the warehouse had survived, and so they had carted off better than 500 bulbs, each with a lifetime expectancy of five years. He had reworked the ventilation systems and the water heating and cooling methods to be less reliant on expended energy; one of his ideas, for instance, had been to run water through ceramic pipes located in the giant, walk-in refrigeration storage room -also of his devising- to cool it off, should anyone have a need for cold water. They had also tapped into a ground well as a source of a fresh water supply, which first ran through the turbine, and then passed through a series of filters that he had constructed.

He had been terribly determined to improve upon their conditions, and make it as homey as possible. And it had worked, as most of them referred to those underground levels simply as Home.

There had been a downside to his unending creativity, however. As time had gone on, and Hank had proved, time and again, how invaluable his intelligence was, he was taken on scavenging trips less and less, until such opportunities had all but ceased to exist for him; no one wanted to risk losing such a precious commodity. Understanding, he had acquiesced in a type of voluntary confinement without complaint. There was an unspoken rule that he could not even go topside by himself.

Besides his reading glasses, Hank had learned to live without his freedom.

His friends made it bearable. Indeed, the entire refugee population did, as well. They saw in him something that had failed to surface in the years before the arrival of Them. His status as a fount of knowledge, as a doctor, his quiet, guiding nature, like a steady light in a dark hallway, had solidified him into the image of an elder for the small, underground community. For the first time in his life, an entire group of people, not just individuals, overlooked his physical differences, his beastly visage, to respect him, even revere him, seeking him out for needed advice, for teachings and little bits of imparted wisdom without so much as a glance at his fur, at his protruding canines, his claws. Even the other X-Men saw him in this way. No harm could come to Hank because, ironically, it would be the greatest insult to their humanity. He, more than anyone else, had come to embody the society they clung so desperately to in order to hang onto themselves as people.

In a way, Hank had assumed the mantle that had become a cold, fathomless void when the Professor had died.

Therefore, when he shushed those entering the Central Nerve Center as Chopin played softly, and yet still managed to win out over the blaring alarm, they all fell silent and did not dare to ask him what had triggered the system. To do so would have been close to sacrilege, like trying to interrupt the meditations of the Dalai Lama or the Christmas Mass of the Pope.

Marie instead took the time to note who had arrived. Ororo was already there when she and Logan had arrived, and she guessed that the weather witch had been there prior to the alarm setting off. Storm and the Beast had grown close to each other over the past couple of years, in a quiet courtship that almost belonged in another era: sweet and gentle and proper, and so unlike her relationship with Logan that she could not help but smile about the seeming innocence of it every time she saw them. It was almost like watching some PG-rated family film that was heavy on the geeky guy meets attractive girl from out of town and makes clumsy attempts to woo her that results in making him endearing theme.

Shortly after they arrived, Scott and Jean filtered in, the former still wearing the sheepskin-lined jacket, having still been unloading the truck when the klaxons sounded. The telepath had taken on that faraway look of hers when she was listening for things not found in the room, her hand absently settled on the large swell of her belly that gave away her pregnancy.

That, almost everyone in their little community was quite sure of, had not exactly been planned for. Life, however, seemed undeterred by invading alien species hell-bent on its destruction, and doggedly trudged on, defiantly flipping Them the bird along the way.

Having ferried the kids she had been training down to the lowest level, leaving them to the adults among the refugees, Jubilee appeared perhaps half a minute after Jean and Scott, followed quickly by the Shadowcat. Responsibility had suited the two young women well, growing into roles that had proved vital to the whole group's survival more than once. Jubilee had been given charge of the maintenance of the meager fleet of vehicles they had, ensuring that each and every one was able to run at all times, fixing any problems that came up after returning from venturing out into the open. Kitty, with her ability to even sink into the ground at any signs of danger, had taken on the role of scout and spy for them. She was one of the very few people that knew exactly what They looked like, what They smelled like, sounded like, from the distance of a mere few feet. She did not, however, like to talk about it, as much as the younger residents (and even some of the older ones) asked. After that had happened, after she had been toe to toe with one of Them... she had aged in ways the other X-Men didn't even know were possible.

As was the usual trend, Remy was the last one to show up, his air of nonchalance relatively unaffected by the past five years, that Bo staff of his resting on one shoulder as he produced something of a cocky grin as, not so much a greeting, but an announcement that he had arrived.

It was a long, tense moment while they waited for Hank to say something, to the point that Logan was just about to open his mouth and growl something out to remind him that they were all there, knowing just how forgetful the big blue guy could get. But finally, he sat back from the screen and spoke.

"Well, I can certainly say with satisfaction that it is not Them," he said with a borderline happiness. "I also do not believe it to be any type of native fauna to the area, as the movements do not resemble the usual patterns of a herd of deer, and they are much too large to be a pack of wild dogs or coyotes."

"So, people," Logan voiced before anyone else could.

"That would be my assessment, yes," said Hank.

"How many?" was what Scott asked, moving over to one of the other computer stations to rapidly click through a bunch of different programs, trying to bring something up.

"Ten would be my best estimate, due to the movement and heat signatures," the Beast replied, looking over to the visored man.

A kind of tentative uneasiness slid through the group like engine oil getting into a city's water supply. They were not, all of the sixty-two residents in the underground levels had learned, the only enemy that could rear its ugly head; other humans, the dismal dregs of society, occasionally banded together and sought to prey on the weaker members of their species in order to survive.

Scientifically speaking, of course, it was one type of good strategy employed in the process of evolution. Survival of the fittest, with an elimination of the weaker genes.

Humanly speaking, however, it was loathsome, dangerous, and made one question his or her own state of being, and why humanity should even be allowed to survive in the first place, were they so inclined to such dark thoughts.

Had it been a group limited to just a few souls, the tenor in the room would not have changed so drastically; thugs tended to roam in packs, for superior numbers, where stragglers and those in need of help did not. Experience teaches the wise to expect the worst.

Still, they could not simply leave them out there.

Scott absently scratched at his beard while he studied the screen before him, which had gone a shade of gray. In actuality, it was a wide multitude of grays, all mixing together, pixel by pixel, to create a sort of singular shade that was constantly changing, though changing so slowly that it could not be easily detected by the human eye. He tapped the Enter key on the keyboard, there was a momentary fizzle, and then the screen went gray again. He repeated this process multiple times, with each person in the room watching the screen. Numerals that displayed in the lower right-hand corner, and slight deviances in the shading, appeared to be the only changes.

The X-Men had learned some time ago that the weather was both a strange ally and stranger foe. They seemed to favor the daytime more than They did the night. They seemed to favor sunny days, although They were out occasionally in the rain. They did not seem to mind snow, however, either on the ground or in the air, and They came out the most whenever the sky turned those weird shades of green that threatened to produce tornadoes, which seemed to violate Their general rule about sunny days.

The most important fact that the X-Men had learned, however, was that They never showed up in fog.

Indeed, other communities of survivors around the globe had discovered this little nugget of information, as well. Via CB Radio transmissions, Hank had chatted amiably with small pockets of people living along the coast of Maine, up on the Grand Banks in Newfoundland, Canada (which was, he mused, the foggiest place on earth, so they must be quite restful there), and even as far away as Cape Disappointment in Washington State. It was heartwarming to learn of other people out there, people surviving, making due with what was left to them, and refusing to back down. It made the world feel a little less empty now and then, even while hammering that realization home all the harder.

Of course, they could not keep the terrain above the lower levels enshrouded in fog all of the time. Storm would have been drained within three days of attempting to do so, and fog juice was a rare commodity. So instead, the X-Men decided on a compromise: each vehicle in their possession was fitted with a tracking device, and whenever one of those vehicles was on the move, within a ten mile radius of the entrance to the underground, fog machines would automatically trigger aboveground, to conceal the area. The last thing they needed was to have Them descend upon a returning foraging team just as the hidden entrance opened wide to allow their return. That would have been disastrous.

The fog that had been triggered upon Scott's team's return was still lingering on, clinging to the ground like a sleepy child hanging onto a bed with the hope that it was still the weekend, not a school day. None of the security cameras could provide a view that was unobscured by it.

"Well," Scott said, after a while of switching from camera to camera with growing frustration. "I don't think we can really wait for it to burn off. Those people might need help."

"Or they could just be waiting to ambush us," Logan offered, a bit flatly.

"I'm willing to take that chance," was Scott's answer, undaunted. "They could have simply been draw in by the fog, knowing They won't show up in it. I'll go up. I'm already dressed for it, anyway."

Marie glanced between the others, thinking. Scott couldn't go alone, as that would be too dangerous. But Hank couldn't go, Jean wouldn't be allowed, knowing Scott, despite how useful she could be when encountering people, Jubilee rarely ventured out unless it was with a vehicle convoy, and Remy rarely volunteered for anything, though he usually wound up going, anyway. Ororo, of course, would never let Scott go alone, and anything to do outside was a given for the Shadowcat's involvement.

And meanwhile, Logan had settled into what Marie liked to think of as his defiant stance: back rigid, unmoving, with his arms folded across his chest and his head cocked slightly at one angle while his jaw set in the other direction as if just daring anyone to try to move him even one measly inch. It was the pose he assumed when he expected to butt heads with someone. Especially Scott.

It always made her smile internally, largely because he still tried it on her every so often, and it never worked. He'd take it on when he didn't agree with her on something, usually her safety, and she'd just brush it off with laughter, a quick kiss, and after his initial bristling like a porcupine afterwards, he would cave in. She knew that now would be no different.

Logan tilted his slightly narrowed gaze in her direction. That mischievous look must have appeared on her features again.

"I'll go with you," she then volunteered to Scott, a little cheerily, though she was looking straight at Logan.

And Logan tensed in posture, shoulders hunching a little more and seizing up as if he might explode with an adamant ordering of her to stay the hell inside.

There was a long moment of silence, in which everyone watched him expectantly.

"Fine," he finally said, and then, "I'll get our shit," was growled out while he stalked from the room.

And Marie had to fight the threat of laughter at her grumbly Wolverine.

The fog was like a living thing.

When Logan shouldered open the heavily reinforced, and cleverly concealed trap door that barred entrance to the steps leading down into the lower levels, the fog at first skittered backwards, swirling away from the rush of air, startled. But slowly, with curiosity, it crept back into to place, investigating the new hole in the ground, sending small tendrils in and over and around the edges like probing fingers. It breathed over Logan as he stood there, tense, waiting, claws extended, and seemed to inhale him back in again, taking in the smell of him even as he was smelling it. And then, apparently comfortable with this new development, the fog resettled, a placid and unperturbed blanket of gray.

He couldn't see a goddamned thing. It was the type of fog that liked to play tricks on you, that whorled just enough to lend a sense of depth that was all wrong, that coaxed the eyes into a false sense of security, shrank the world down and lured the mind into a dangerous sense of peace. It dampened sound and smell, so that things were only mournful echoes, muddled scents. It prickled on the skin, turned it clammy, and then crawled deep down into the bones to chill them, make them ache the ache of a sea giant at the end of his days, tangled in seaweed and starfish and the uncaring waters of the deep. It was a swamp fog, a barrow fog, a graveyard fog.

Logan knew this, and was wary. For long moments, he stood motionless, ready to spring at the slightest threat, one foot on the top step while the other rested on terra firma. When he finally turned his body enough to be able to look back at Scott, who stood a few steps below him, hand poised at his visor, a haze had already succeeded in drifting between the two of them, so that it looked, weirdly, like they were peering at each other from different worlds that were separated for a short time only by a thin, penumbral veil.

With a jerking inclination of his head, Logan signaled the all clear and stalked deeper into the fog without bothering to make sure that the others were following. He was certain that they were, after years of this. It had only taken the lot of them -him, Scott, Ororo, Remy, Kitty, and, of course, Marie- a mere five minutes to ready themselves for this little cautionary venture. Once upon a time, it had been practically a weekly exercise, when there were still people wandering around often enough to make it all feel like this life was just a temporary thing. But They had been methodical in ensuring that such an occurrence happened with less and less frequency. The last time they had done this had been months ago. Still, the X-Men had not lost their edge, and they filed out with their senses sharpened, bodies ready for combat.

As a rule, they made no sound until all of them were twenty steps away from the entrance to Home; they did not want to inadvertently give away the secret entrance to the unfriendly by announcing themselves too near it. Usually, without the cover of fog, they could have spied on whoever it was lurking around first, to make an assessment of their threat level, and then proceeded from there. The fog, however, made that all but impossible, so they had moved without question or comment, silent ghosts in a ghost world.

When Remy, bringing up the rear, had reached the rest of them at that new location, Scott called out, "Hello?!"

Strangely, his voice was both dampened by and echoed in the fog. They all waited for a long and silent moment, ears straining to listen for a reply. None came.

"Is there anybody there?!" Scott tried again.

They waited in vain.

This, however, proved nothing, although it served to tighten their already tightly wound nerves. The people might not have replied because they were too frightened, because they were incapable of doing for some reason, perhaps medical, or simply because they were out there, waiting to spring a trap.

Logan's claws itched. He knew, on a conscious level, that he had no feeling in them; they were just cold, ruthless, sharpened slabs of adamantium, mere tools to be employed in attack and defense, like any knife or gun.

They itched, all the same.

"Don't like it," he said quietly, sniffing again at the air.

"Agreed," said Scott, and the silence found them again for another moment as they all still waited. Then he said, "Okay, move in pairs. Storm and Gambit, Shadowcat and Wolverine, me and Rogue. Fan out and go slow. They're here somewhere."

Logan didn't really like the pairs. He understood them, which was why he didn't protest them. Storm was cautious, and Gambit liked to take risks, which meant they balanced each other out. He and the Shadowcat could move the quietest, which meant they could slink around together like nobody's business. Cyclops could keep his eye on Rogue, and drag anybody off of her without gutting them as a first instinct if it was necessary. No, he understood the teams just fine. He sure as hell didn't have to like it, though.

"Let's go," he said gruffly to the Shadowcat, and then melted into the fog, without waiting for her.

As she hurried off after him, Scott just sighed and waited for Marie before moving in another direction.

*****

Postcards. County Fairs. Psychics peddling their wares out of strip malls. Strip clubs. Dance clubs. Country clubs. Sears. Macy*s. Nordstrom. The Gap. Best Buy. Bed, Bath and Beyond. The little flower-shaped pats of butter at fancy restaurants. The city lights on a clear night. The growl of a powerful engine on the open road.

Scott Summers -a.k.a. Slim, Scooter, Boy Scout, Cyclops- had learned to live without shaving.

Some people might have thought of it as something of a trivial, inconsequential thing, shaving. It was not a necessity for living. One could continue on just as happily with a covered chin as without. After all, many men changed their facial hair on a weekly or monthly basis, this Thursday appearing with sideburns, and then the next Thursday without, and then the next one after that with a fledgling goatee. Change had been encouraged in the American market where styles, fads, and fashions had gone in and out faster than you could utter hulahoop or macarena. Change was fresh, sparkling, desired. Change was good.

Except to Scott. Everybody on the planet had their own set of signatures and quirks that defined them, and the sixty-two people dwelling in the underground levels of Xavier's were no different. Remy had his trenchcoat and his deck of cards. Marie had her gloves and that streak of white hair. A man named Harris always carried a pocket knife and a smile made lopsided by a mild stroke. And, even more so than his ruby quartz glasses, Scott had had his clean-cut image, with near-perfect hair and a chin that made the butts of babies everywhere jealous.

He loathed the itchiness that a beard brought on. He hated how he looked in the mirror, the conjuration of some hobo, some mountain man that he tried so hard not to be. Though he had never been in the military himself, the genes of his barely remembered father had managed to infiltrate him to the very core, so that he winced whenever he remembered that he could never hope to pass an inspection with such a hairy chin. Whenever he thought about it, he made himself miserable.

Razors, however, were hard to come by, and Scott had never gotten into the whole shaving-with-a-knife bit that Logan sometimes employed. He had tried a straight razor for a little while, and then gave up when they ran out of shaving cream. He would rather suffer with a beard than with the enflamed, reddened skin that threatened to drive him mad caused by dry shaving. When they did come across razors, they were delegated out to the women, and, well, that made everybody happy. So Scott suffered quietly, making his little sacrifice without complaint, but with the occasional scratching.

And Marie could hear him scratching idly in the fog then while they made their way from wherever to wherever, progressing slowly for the occasional debris in the grass that still lingered on from the total annihilation of the mansion. She tried to picture where they were in her head, both realistically and in the past: here the few bits of foundation remaining for a wall, and another close by, placing them in a hallway, there the rotting remains of a cabinet from what had been the kitchen, apparently deemed unsalvageable and left to molder back into the earth. At one point, they moved out of whispery grass and onto a barren space of blacktop: the remains of the basketball court. Those hidden doors for the hangar had long since been sealed shut forever, the Blackbird destroyed even before the mansion. They had converted that large space into living quarters instead of trying to resurrect the jet, which was a thing Marie knew Scott missed just as much as his clean-shaven chin.

She had just been thinking about that, in fact, about how sad it was that he had given up so much of himself in the past couple of years, and how she would have to take special note to find him some razors the next time she was out scavenging -a sort of thank you gift for Logan's cigars- when Marie looked up to find him gone.

Well, hell.

"Cyke?" she asked quietly of the fog, but it supplied no ready answer.

Her scalp prickled just a little bit, and a spider danced on the back of her neck, tangling itself up on its own thread. She shook the feeling off, however, sure that he was close by, and that it was only the damnable fog. He was probably wondering where the hell she had wandered off to right about then, himself.

"C'mon now, sug, no playin' games-" she had started to sass, when something clapped over her mouth, and she felt another something cold and hard prod into her back.

*****

The fog seemed to quietly enjoy torturing Logan as it was, dulling his senses to such a degree that, though they were not neutralized in any way, they only served to confuse him in subtle ways. What he perceived as far away turned out to be much closer, and what he thought was nearby wound up being quite a distance away. It was almost like he had stepped into one of those M.C. Escher drawings Hank was always trying to get him interested in, the one with all of the stairs going every which way, and if it weren't for the ground beneath his feet, he wouldn't have been able to tell which way was up, which was down, and which led to an unfavorable end.

And it did not help that the Shadowcat kept sneezing.

Oh, he knew she tried her best to quell it, said 'watermelon' under her breath in the attempts to stop it, clamped a hand over her mouth and nose and sneezed without letting the sneezes out, which had to hurt, had to irritate her sinuses something fierce. But she was still sneezing. He knew why, too; the fog was man-made, and had a tendency to smell a little like dust and tickle the nose. But... she was still sneezing.

It made things potentially just a little more dangerous. Not that he minded the whole dangerous part. Logan hadn't sat down with his old pal dangerous to shoot the shit for a good long while, and he missed their talks. Still, though, he wasn't playing at the lone wolf bit today, so he had other people to think about.

You know, like Marie.

His mind had just been straying off into thoughts that didn't involve fog, didn't involve tromping around, trying to look for people, and certainly didn't involve a sneezing Shadowcat, when there was a shout, muffled in the sea of gray. He whirled around, trying to pinpoint the sound, having difficulty, letting out a slight grumble of frustration because of that, and then the fog lit up in red like they were standing inside of a giant neon sign.

"Guess they ain't friendly," was his gruff comment to Kitty, even as he charged off in the direction he thought Cyclops' blast might have come from.

*****

The something that had clapped over her mouth had been a hand. Marie's startled sound of surprise had largely been subdued by it, and then she had felt the insistent prod of what she was sure was a gun barrel at her back, which caused her to go still, instead of trying to struggle with whoever the hell it was that thought it was a bright idea to try to jump her.

Yessir, real bright, this one.

She didn't have to struggle, of course. The hand was bare, lacking any sort of protection against her skin, and so she stood there, attempting to quiver and be all meek and placid-like so the guy wouldn't get all wound up and do something dumb like actually shoot her. Her mutation did all of the work for her. That always curious sensation of the draining started to creep into her, like shifting liquid from one container to another, spreading like a peculiar warmth outwards from his hand. Just as strange memories, utterly foreign, unwelcome, began to batter her mind and his grip started to loosen with a choking sound, Marie drove an elbow backwards into his gut and then twisted to the side, in case he still had enough sense to pull the trigger.

She might as well have kicked him in the testicles with a spike-toed boot, however; looking blanched, doubled over from the elbow blow and still making strangled, windless sounds, he eventually keeled over in the throes of mild seizure. Gingerly, Marie stepped over to him to nudge the gun out of his spasming hand with a foot. She then tried to make sense of her slightly jumbled up head.

...his name was Brian, but everyone called him Bulldog...

He was a singularly ugly man, with a visage comparable to the gargoyles found on ancient gothic cathedrals, carved with the intent to frighten off evil spirits. His expression looked tortured then, facial muscles experiencing a series of rapid tics and twitches that only made him all the more unaesthetic, bordering on grotesque. The fog did not help him, either, but rather painted him in an eerie lighting that conjured up images of half-orcs and hobgoblins from fantasy role play games.

What memories Marie had gleaned from him felt rather mundane, like most people, little snippets remembered for who knew what reasons.

...fishing with dad on the lake, when it rained, and we had to bail out the boat before it sank, and the old man is just cussing up a storm greater than the one overhead, having chugged one too many beers before lunch already...

He stopped seizing. Groaned.

...Lauren Brewbaker in the fifth grade, doing a cartwheel in gym class, accidentally showing off to everybody that she was wearing a training bra...

Rolled over to get to his hands and knees.

...detention in 10th grade for flushing cherry bombs down the toilet in the teacher's lounge. They had blown up just as Mr. Schmidtz, a stuffy math teacher with a stick up his ass, had sat down to take a shit. You could hear the whump all the way up on the second floor...

Marie placed a foot squarely on his back and brought it downwards, to keep him put and let him know that he wasn't going anywhere any time soon. She was pretty sure that Scott would want to ask the guy some questions, like why he had pulled a gun on her, wherever the visored X-Man had wandered off to.

...Luke saying, "Bulldog, you get the woman, we'll take on the guy"...

Even as she got a hold of that disturbing memory and understood it, she heard the shout come from not too far away, and then saw everything around her light up in red, the fog amplifying the color, taking it on like a hue-changing octopus, blinking bright and then dull again. Cyclops.

Marie had started to head in the direction that she thought the shout had come from, when she was tripped up, stumbled, and fell, barely catching herself before she landed face-first in the dirt. Bulldog had Igrabbed her ankle before she was able to slip away. She kicked at him, kicked harder, trying to shake him loose. True to his name, he didn't let go, but instead tried to hang on while getting back to his knees so he could pin her.

"Let go, ya idiot! Bad dog!" she hollered at him.

He didn't seem so inclined to comply with her request. In fact, he suddenly surged forwards, letting go of her ankle in an attempt to grapple with her, hold her arms down and keep her trapped by his own weight. Nonplussed, she hauled off and hit him in the face with one fist first, and then tried to go for a kidney shot with the other just after that. He was sort of snarling then, obviously frustrated by her, a meaty hand delivering a slap to her in retaliation for those blows that was hard enough to cause her teeth to clack together and her eyes to water.

It was strange, fighting with the same person that you had just peeked on, had just caught a glimpse of their mind, their heart, their soul. Strange, to be fighting with a person that you couldn't quite yet sort yourself completely out from, differentiate between what belonged to you, and what belonged to them. Marie knew that he liked pastrami, hated salmon, liked off-roading and working on cars and fishing and hunting deer, illegally, never could remember birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and while she struggled with him, she struggled equally with trying to remember if she liked and hated all of those things, had trouble remembering dates herself or not. The mind can only handle so much at a time, sort so many items into neat little piles, or else it gets jammed up and breaks the system down.

But the one thing that she easily split off, that was useful to her, that she knew right away was not one of her memories, was that Bulldog had an ulcer. A bad one. And that whatever Tums he could scrounge up from time to time only did so much for him. A churning, gnawing, fiery blight of pain in his gut, deep-rooted like kudzu and just as tenacious and insistent about its existence.

When he wrenched himself upwards again, trying to get a grip on her arms, Rogue kneed him as hard as she could in the stomach, willing the entire weight of her frame into the blow.

Bulldog did not make a sound. Instead, his face immediately reddened, like a boiled lobster, and his mouth pulled open to birth a cry that never was, framed by a horrific expression only imaginable by monsters of another time.

Before he could recover, Marie shoved him off of her, just a sack of cement, and scrambled to her feet again, her body tensed just on the off-chance that the man still had bite.

She had, however, effectively pulled his teeth with that blow. He lay there, curled around and clutching at his gut, wretching. He was pathetic that way, reduced to such a sorry state of being. For reasons she could not quite define, Marie pitied him right then. Perhaps it was because he served as a reminder of just how fragile they all were, how easily they all could be taken down by the most simplistic of blows. Perhaps not. She couldn't tell. Nor could she bring herself to do anything more to him, as deserving as he might have been. Quietly, she kept an eye on him, straining her ears to listen to her surroundings. It was quiet and still for long moments, save for Bulldog's sounds of dry-heaving.

When she heard running footsteps, she tensed, readied herself for an attack. She couldn't quite tell where they were coming from, dampened as they were by the fog, so she turned slowly around, 360 degrees, damning the gray, damning her eyes, damning everything and anything and then damning herself for feeling so vulnerable.

She nearly clocked Logan a good one, when he suddenly materialized behind her and she whirled around to face him, surprised. She wound up hugging him instead.

"What the hell is that?" he asked with a nod to the man on the ground, after a fierce if fleeting embrace.

"He goes by Bulldog, Ah guess," Marie answered, just as the Shadowcat appeared beside them. "Scott's missing."

And the Wolverine smirked a bit at that and said, "Figures."

*****

The fog hindered their search. At some point, there was gunfire somewhere in the distance, and Logan grew more and more agitated by the fact that the sea of gray stubbornly refused to lift. After half an hour, they met back up with Storm and Gambit, who professed to have stumbled across no one. At Logan's adamant demand, the weather witch put her powers to use, and drew in the winds to blow out the once beneficial, but now wholly malignant man-made fog. It departed in trailing wisps of promise to return another day.

Somewhere along the way, Bulldog had regained enough of himself to attempt an escape. Logan split him from groin to sternum when the man foolishly tried to battle his way to freedom. At least it freed him of the ulcer.

It took them nearly an hour of searching before they found him. It was the sound that drew them in, a slow and subtle creaking, like a shutter in an old, abandoned house catching on a breeze and forcing a rusty hinge into use, or an ancient ship brushing against an ageless dock.

Or a rope, rubbing against the branch of a tree as the weight of what it held slowly swung back and forth like a hobbled pendulum.

They had strung Scott up by his feet, and stripped him bare of everything but his boxers. Clothes were valuable, after all. A wound in his shoulder had once been bleeding freely, drizzling weird, haruspex patterns on the ground beneath him. Now the wound merely wept, either having lost most of its supply, or else clotted enough to halt the flow, and every so often a spat sounded as a fat droplet fell from his fingers.

At some point, from what they could discern, one of the bandits had attempted to take Scott's visor. It lay on the ground, bathed in the blood, red coating the red. A dead man was some feet away, halfway embedded in the earth that was dented itself by the sheer power of one of Cyclops' optic blasts in the raw.

Carrion eaters had already descended on the scene. Two fat American ravens had been squabbling with a trio of turkey buzzards to pick at the man lodged into the ground when the X-Men appeared. The buzzards had hopped some distance away. The ravens watched with keen interest from a nearby tree.

"Is he...?" Kitty had started to ask, unable to finish even the thought.

"No," Logan replied simply. As he stalked to the tree, the claws emerged with that distinctive snikt. "Gambit, hold him up so he doesn't drop while I cut him down."

Going to the beach. Sushi. Jasmine tea. Chocolate chip cookie dough Hagen-Daaz ice cream. The Rocky Horror Picture Show shown every weekend at midnight at a few choice theaters. The subway. Hot-dog and pretzel carts. New Year's Eve at Times Square. Carriage rides in Central Park. The Big Apple.

Dr. Jean Grey had learned, at times, to live without her sanity.

She had already known that something had gone wrong even before they dragged Scott in, still unconscious, terribly pale from the loss of blood, the Grim Reaper trailing after with an air of sullen expectancy. She had known because she had been unable to ping him telepathically somewhere along the way of them kicking around aboveground. It had been a long, horribly drawn-out hour while she had waited for their return, a million thoughts to think of, a million ways a person could be killed. She knew that many ways because she saw it in other people's minds. So many dark ideas, so many methods to shirk the concept, the badge of humanity.

Being a telepath was a right bitch, sometimes.

But Jean had steeled herself, banished her emotions to some dark and secret cave, as hard as it was, when she saw him that way. She refused to succumb to even the unpredictable, unstable hormones of her pregnancy, becoming nothing but Doctor Grey. It had been so hard. So damned hard. All she had wanted to do was curl up and cry with him near her then. But even if there was Hank, her skills in medicine had been needed.

Logan had helped. He had said a line that made her actually want to laugh, though that would have broken the flood gates holding back the tears for damn sure. He'd said, all bristly:

"His ass better be fine, cuz I still gotta thank him for these damn cigars, and I just know he'll be all smug about it until I do."

Fortunately, they found that the bullet had passed through his shoulder. Too high for the heart, too low to shatter the collarbone. Somehow it didn't destroy his scapula. Surgery was neat and tidy. Blood transfusions went without a hitch.

And after all of that, after Scott was snug in a bed in the medlab, after he was pronounced stable, after Hank chided her for needing rest, and after everyone else that had wanted to check on him left, Jean stayed on at his side.

And it was only after all of that did she finally give in and cry out the pent-up tears to get rid of them, outing them from that dark and secret cave as if purging a toxin while resting her head on the unharmed side of his chest. And it was only after that did Scott wake up enough to realize where he was, and who was with him, marveling and disturbed at how weak he felt when he brought his hand up to stroke her red hair.

And it was only after that that everything was, more or less, back to normal.

As normal as it could be, anyway.

*****

Logan, for whatever reason, had insisted on going back outside after they dropped off Scott to drag the corpse of the guy who had called himself Bulldog underground with them. When Marie had pressed him on the issue, he had simply, obliquely stated that he "smelled funny."

Well, besides smelling like a dead guy that had just been disemboweled, which she would never describe as funny, but more along the lines of sickening, putrid, or otherwise disgusting, she couldn't really tell what he was talking about. But knowing Logan, and knowing his nose, she had agreed to go and help him, even though he didn't want any, because she didn't like the thought of him tramping around out there to fetch a dead body and bring it back alone.

...not that he couldn't take care of himself, really. No, she had pondered the question of just why she wanted to go with him the entire time they had been outside, the fog finally seeping away into oblivion, revealing the clearing of where the mansion had once stood. She had supposed that it was because of Scott, and seeing that look in Jean's eyes, as hard as the telepath had tried to hide it, that quiet terror of loss, that spurred her on. Bullets wouldn't have stopped Logan, she knew on a conscious level, but ... well, the heart rarely listened to reason and logic. And she hadn't wanted to be away from him right then. They had all been reminded of just how tenuous their residency on the planet was. It was a reminder that managed to harden the shell of a person, as often as they got it, as often as it was thrust into their face and made apparent, but it never quite got rid of that soft and fragile core, the soul. No matter how hard they tried, they still felt it in some way.

In any case, life was short, consider it precious, live it to the fullest, yaddayadda. She got it. Really, she did. So she had gone out with him, he grumbling about how she should be back inside the whole way, she grumbling back about having to go collect a dead guy that had tried to kill her, and somehow it felt homey. It felt almost like they were a regular couple performing a regular chore on a regular day in a regular world. Never mind the obscene macabre quality to it as he had tried to figure out the best way to carry Bulldog back without getting gore all over him.

Love was funny that way, sometimes.

After returning, they stashed him in one of the cold storage slots in the tiny morgue they possessed, and then wandered off without much purpose. Adrenaline had sucked the life out of them, leaving them tired, weary. They stank of dirt and grime and the dead. So, they decided on showers, and then they decided on bed.

After reaffirming that they were, in fact, very much alive, after reassuring each other with the act of love in its most physical, its rawest and sweetest form, Marie fell asleep to the mingling scents of soap and cigar and that subtle feral manliness she knew so well.

Nothing had ever smelled better.

*****

Logan's nose and paranoia had, as they had in times past, proven themselves fruitful, to a degree. It had taken Hank a few days to get around to performing an autopsy on Bulldog, but whatever it was that he discovered had excited him like a kid on Christmas morning.

Well, that was Hank for you; he could cheer on a fungal spore in the process of mitotic division with as much enthusiasm as a diehard football fan cheering on his team in the Superbowl.

Well, that is, if the Superbowl had still existed.

In any case, the furry blue doctor with a penchant for absent-mindedness called them all together to go over his findings, which he had deemed as being High Priority. That meant they couldn't get out of it. Marie had groaned at that news, relatively uninterested in an autopsy report that was, no doubt, going to go over just how intriguing such and such vessel or this and that organ had reacted to being shredded by cold, unforgiving adamantium. And, after all, the guy had tried to kill her: even if she was putting up the whole I'm-just-fine act, she was repulsed about being in the room with him, dead or no. Being outside with his corpse had been bearable, but being in an enclosed space with it was nearly intolerable. She wasn't exactly sure that every little trace of Bulldog had finally been drop-kicked out of her head, either, and the prospect of that little remaining shred of him in her mind encountering--and freaking out about--his dead self was not entirely appealing.

She sucked it up and went, anyway.

Fortunately, the morgue had seen very little use in the past couple of years, and so there were still some plastic sheets covering up equipment that Hank had not needed to use while dissecting Rogue's one-time assailant. It did not appear to be a ghostly place like in horror flicks or crime lab TV shows from a bygone error, however, but was lit up brightly to better allow examination. It also smelled strongly of disinfectant and some kind of floral scent that Hank had attempted to spray around to mask the stench of decomposition. It wasn't doing its job very well, and Jean, of all people, with her medical degree and years of practice, was looking the greenest out of them, a hand held up over her nose and mouth.

Well, they said pregnant women could get all kinds of crazy sensitive to smell, Marie remembered. She felt bad for the telepath, who'd gone through enough in the past week and probably didn't need this, as curious as Jean might be about Hank's findings. Those two could nerd out about all things medical for hours, and she was probably the only one in the room actually looking forward to this briefing...

"I'm sorry to have called you together so late-" the Doctor McCoy had begun, breaking Marie's train of thought.

"It's actually mid-afternoon, Hank," Jubilee had interrupted, attempting to keep a straight face.

"Oh, I see, oh yes, of course," Hank continued, mildly flustered by the correction. He cleared his throat, and continued, "Scott I've ordered not to come, as he is still to maintain his bed rest, in case any of you were wondering. He seems highly displeased with me for my stern recommendation that he not leave the lower levels for another few weeks, but as I explained to him, he will be quite weak for at least another week, considering his current condition-"

An impatient Logan was the next to interrupt, with, "Hank, less small talk, more explanation for the meeting. It stinks down here."

Marie had to hold back a laugh at the owlish blink the Beast produced, despite herself. The poor man hated to be rushed, she knew, and was trying his hardest to make the morgue a place where they could feel a little comfortable, and not so, well...disgusted or weirded out. She snagged Logan's hand in her gloved one then, and gave it a light squeeze, just a quiet way of asking him to behave. He didn't appear to be terribly happy about that, judging by his expression, but he seemed to acquiesce.

"Well, as requested, on to business, then," Hank started, once again. "As you all well know, I was finally able to perform a thorough autopsy on our rather undesirable and quite living-impaired guest, and have come up with some possibly disturbing results. You see, as Marie pointed out the man's belief that he had an ulcer, and Logan's method of, er, termination, I first directed my attention to his abdominal cavity. As some of you may or may not know, the number of stomach complaints have gone up in the past year for our little community."

While he explained, Hank had made his way over to the wall that possessed two light panels. He switched one on, and then slipped a sheet of film into place. It was a close-up shot of the Bulldog's gut, in all of its gory splendor, and Jubilee and Kitty both groaned and looked ill at the same time for the sight of it.

Marie was a little proud of herself for not reacting that way.

"Hank, what is that discoloration in the stomach lining?" Jean asked, taking a couple of steps closer to the shot, and putting the entire lot of them to shame on the squeamish scale, considering how miserable she was.

"Ah, yes, that is exactly what I wanted to show you," the furry man continued, and circled the area with a claw. "As you can see, there is a dark greenish discoloration that has more or less accumulated in his stomach lining. This discoloration continues on into the duodendrum, the first portion of the small intestine. Obviously, this belies the fact that it is not as simple as an ulcer."

He swapped films on the light board then, producing a new shot of what looked like thousands of tiny, straight threads all jumbled together like pick-up-sticks.

"As this shot displays, the discoloration appears to be made up of millions of microscopic fibers, but crystal-like in composition. I ran some tests, and when subjected to certain types of light, particularly UV rays, these fibers reacted as iron filaments would to a magnet, pulled towards the light source while also anchored to each other."

"So what the hell is it?" groused Logan then, impatient over the fact that he didn't really understand what Hank was talking about.

With a mild frown, Hank then turned back to them and admitted, "I don't know. I've never seen anything quite like it. Jean?"

The redheaded doctor had moved closer to the film, and studied the strange substance for some time before replying, "The only thing that I can think of even being close to this would be Morgellons. Which...well, that was being disputed as fact or fiction back before They arrived."

"I ran the fibers through the computer, and it was unable to identify the chemical make-up or exact atomic composition with a cursory check. I have it running a more thorough examination currently, but..." and here Hank took a deep breath, before continuing on. "I believe it to be an organism introduced to our ecology by Them."

"So...it's some kinda shit from outerspace, is what you're saying," Logan said, glancing between the picture and Hank. "What, some kinda biological warfare?"

The Beast shrugged then. "That is certainly a possible scenario. It could be a calculated introduction, or it could quite possibly be accidental. Most diseases and viruses that were introduced to other locations via human expansion--the conquering of the Americas would be the best example--were done so purely by accident."

"Yeah, but that shit don't look like chicken pox to me, bub."

"Well, no, but history suggests the possibility..."

"You think this is what's causing all of the stomach aches people have been getting lately, Hank?" Jean had turned her attention back to the others then, frowning mildly, her expression no doubt concealing a greater dread.

Hank took another deep breath, and then said, "Yes, I feel it to be a strong possibility, based on the facts that I have at hand. At first I thought that such ailments were on the increase due to our dependency on prepackaged foodstuffs, and their penchant for expiration, but this introduces an entirely new situation. I would have to run tests on several subjects here in order to confirm or disprove the hypothesis, but..."

"But?" Logan was the first to ask--looking extremely talkative compared to everybody else, for once--his brows both shooting upwards into small, hairy, wary peaks.

"We lack the necessary equipment needed here. Especially for something this completely foreign in nature. I believe that either the Columbia University Medical Center or else Mount Sinai should have what I need, as they were more or less left in tact after the scouring of the City..."

That caused Logan to throw his hands up and take a few, disgruntled steps away, more or less towards the door, before he turned back and said, "So you want us to go out and fetch you stuff, is really what it is."

"Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure that all of the equipment I would require could be 'fetched,' due to either the size or delicacy of the equipment."

Marie suddenly realized what Hank was getting at, and she went a little wide-eyed at the concept. "You need to go yourself, don't you, Hank?"

Everyone, but Hank, had started talking at once as soon as Marie had suggested it. Even then, she was thinking how strange it was, that the idea of one man actually going outside could be such a taboo. But Hank had established himself as such a fixture, such a precious, needed commodity for their little community, that it was actually something to be debated about. Strange, but that was how things were. She also knew that perhaps Hank hadn't wanted Scott to come to the meeting for more than just medical reasons: the man in the red shades would have adamantly denied such a request, hands down, and probably no one would have spoken against him, had he been there.

Not only that, however, but Hank was suggesting a journey into the ruins of New York City. A former shadow of itself, a decimated husk devoid of warmth and life, it was an extremely hazardous place to go, had been declared off-limits for the scavenging teams for some time now, and was a place that They seemed to like to frequent, for reasons unknown. Hank wouldn't be putting just himself on the line for such a foray.

After a few moments of multiple conversations that shifted around from person to person, weaving together and then fracturing apart as now Kitty brought up a point, then Remy a counter, then Logan a gruff denial of both points, Hank finally held up a clawed hand so that he could interject without completely raising his voice.

"I understand the trepidation that some of you might have, as I have already weighed the benefits and the consequences in my head, but I find it to be our only option at this point in time. If this strange infection is indeed highly malignant in nature, then we must find a way to quell it, which I cannot do here. Jean obviously cannot make such a dangerous trek in my stead, considering her current condition, and there is no one else who would be able to perform the tests that I need to run, so I must go. I will not ask any of you to go with me, however, because of the potential hazards-"

Logan cut him off there with, "Like Hell you're going alone, furball."

"-but I would certainly appreciate the company, would some of you be so inclined to accompany me," Hank completed, and then smiled faintly at the Wolverine, because the man had more or less volunteered with that statement, they all knew.

"Well," Marie said lightly, after a moment of quiet. "We better stop at Saks while we're there, then. Make the trip worthwhile, at least."

*****

Scott did not take the news particularly well. He had argued with Jean at first, and then demanded that he go along with the little expedition force that was preparing to leave the next day. She had weathered his anger and countered it with a firm calmness, denying him the chance to head up the team.

He was still furious when she kissed him gently, told him to get some sleep, and that she would be back soon. She needed to check on some things.

A day didn't go by that Jean didn't use Cerebro in the hopes of locating other people close to their vicinity. On that day, she stepped into the large room with the same intent, plus another task.

The rest of Bulldog's crew was still out there, somewhere, of course. She could have been vengeful, if she had wanted. The thought had crossed her mind, the things that she could have done to them with the amplifying power of Cerebro. Hell hath no fury, after all...

She didn't, though. Jean couldn't have brought herself to do that, even if they had actually killed Scott, instead of leaving him for dead. Instead, she went looking for them, so that she could let Logan know where they were, so he could pick a route that would avoid them.

Or go after them, if he wanted. That was something she wouldn't interfere with.

For once.