Outside the cell.

Robert Drake stood, sadly staring through the one-way glass into the room below. His face was stony, his expression cold. His wife, Kitty, leaned against him. She kept her face buried in his side, unable to face the view her husband endured. From the cool blue eyes she loved so much, amid the laugh lines and the beginning of crows’ feet surrounding those eyes, a few tears fell unnoticed.

He sighed, and ran a hand through his thick sandy hair, still full and wavy but starting to gray. He turned towards his wife, and held her close for a moment. It was always this hard. It probably always would be this hard.

“That’s enough.” His comment was as much for the attendant as for his wife. Robert and Kitty turned and left the room, left the facility without looking back. They would return, next month, as always.

On the other side of the glass, a young woman struggled against her restraints and her fate.

Inside the cell.

Rogue breathed slowly, trying to keep the appearance of calm. She knew that if she and Wolverine were too obvious in their efforts, the guards would come again. Still, every so often she’d grunt with the effort, but it was no use. The web of material restraining them was simply too tight, to fibrous, too sheer to grip, and she finally pursed her lips and considered.

“Darling, we’re going to have to wait. This stuff is just too efficient.” She smiled a tight little smile. “I guess they learned some from last time.”

She recalled the look on the guard’s face, a few years back, when her teeth had sunk into his arm, the copper tang of blood in her mouth, the jolt of life flowing into her even as the drugs tried to suppress her power. A little more contact, or a little more time, and they might have broken free. Instead, they’d just made their captors more careful.

“You hang on there, sugar,” she said. The overhead light shone in her eyes. She still had a girlish figure and a young woman’s face, but her eyes were stark with ancient fear and sadness and desire. She had the eyes of a very old soul.

From behind, just in her blind spot, the perverse place they located her partner, her lover, her friend, she heard a muffled sound. The same drugs that kept her restrained must have been doubled or tripled for Wolverine, and most days she could hear nothing from him but whispers and moans.

“Don’t worry, darling” she whispered fiercely, “Day’ll come. I’m going to get us out of here.”

She wished, as she did every night, that just once they would let her free long enough to see him, to touch him, to hold him again. She wished that her life wasn’t a series of days, in their cell, tied back to back with too many drugs and too many restraints and guards, always the guards. She had begun to dream that the cell would be tolerable, if only she could face him and feel his kiss just one more time.

Rogue breathed slowly, trying to keep the appearance of calm. She knew that if she and Wolverine were too obvious in their efforts, the guards would come again.

Outside the cell.

Alex Summers sat at his desk, pretending to study a report. In the five months since he’d taken over for Ororo Munroe, he’d had plenty of time to regret his decision to take the mantle of Head of the Xavier School. He looked again at the report in his hands, but his mind kept going back to another, more confidential report he’d received the day he took charge.

“Alex, I have something important to share with you,” Storm had told him. To the students she was firmly “Professor Munroe” but to Alex, she would always first be Storm, the woman who had recruited him into the X-Men to take his brother’s place. She’d spoken of Scott in a way that showed her love and respect, without the comparisons or judgment that he’d always felt, competing with his more accomplished brother. She’d managed to miss Scott while welcoming Alex, a careful dance.

Under her leadership, he’d gone from being Havoc, that hotheaded Summers boy, to Alex Summers, respected team leader and trusted mentor to a new generation of mutants.

She’d handed him the file, the dark blue file that had seemed so harmless. She cautioned him to read it in private, and to destroy his copy when he was done. Then, with a show of sadness that rarely made it to her stoic surface, she’d left him to study the folder’s contents.

At first the story was fantastic, familiar and terrifying. The “cure,” and its failure. The resurgence of the x-factor gene that had erupted just six months after the patients were allegedly cured by the Worthington serum. So many had regained their powers with odd kinks or limits. Some never regained them. Some had powers radically changed. Some, like Mystique, had possessed frightening new abilities that made them even more powerful or dangerous.

And then there was Rogue. He’d heard rumors, but had never known what to believe. All he knew for sure was that when her powers began to return, weak and intermittent, she’d turned to the one man she knew could survive an accidental dose, Logan. The man she admired, the man she had loved.

It was the shock of her new power manifesting that was responsible for what had come later. The more he read, the more he wished she had died. When he was done, he tossed the folder into the air and idly tossed a burst of high-energy plasma that reduced the vile contents of the innocent looking folder to superheated ash.

He wished all of his problems could be solved that way some times, but that wasn’t really a solution. That way lies madness. That way lies Magneto, and Phoenix, and anyone who feels the problems of power can be solved by more power.

He thought about Logan, about the time the two of them had worked together. The feral man-beast, the wise old man, and the metal-clad killing machine all wrapped into a stocky frame. He realized he’d not seen anyone smoke a cigar in over a dozen years. He wondered if there were any even sold around Westchester any more.

Time changes everything. Except for the Wolverine, of course.

Inside the cell.

Wolverine awoke in pain. Searing pain, tearing pain. The kind of pain he’d suppressed when they’d bonded the metal to his skeleton, peeling back the flesh piece by piece to expose each bone. He felt like he was being torn apart, piece by piece, all over again.

He realized she was sleeping. As close as they were, and considering all the drugs that were being pumped into both of them, her own power tended to shut him down when she was awake. It meant that despite all their time in shared confinement, he’d never really been able to speak to her.

He breathed, and even his dimmed senses could smell nothing but her, her flesh, her desire, her bitter hatred for their captors. He wished he could sense more, but the effort was just too great.

He closed his eyes and silently howled against the pain and the terrible injustice of it all. He prayed, in a way he hadn’t known he knew how, that she might never understand what his life was like, bound to her, caged, trapped forever. And forever in pain.

** To be continued after exam week **

outside the cell


Alex looked for a moment at his uninvited guest, and then he shook his head slightly to Colossus and Jubilee. Any violation of the school defenses was by its nature serious, but not every one was an emergency. This appeared not to be.

“It’s all right,” he said clearly, and then slightly relaxed behind his desk, not wishing to escalate an already tense situation. “Morningstar is an old… acquaintance.”

The two X-Men considered the situation, and shook their heads silently in reply. Peter transformed from organic steel back to flesh and bone, and opened the door for Jubilee. With a curious glance back over his shoulder as he exited, he closed the door, leaving the other two mutants alone.

Warren Worthington III regarded their exit with a bemused grin, just visible below the edge of the scarred iron helmet which covered most of his face.

“You couldn’t just say I was a friend, Alex? Not even after all this time?” Worthington folded his wings close to his body, and hopped up lightly to perch on the edge of the credenza. He pushed the scabbard and sword at his side into his lap, almost casually, as he sat.

“You could at least call me ‘Angel,’ considering where we are,” he continued.

“No.” Alex wasn’t angry, but he also wasn’t accommodating. “The day you picked up that damned sword, you gave up the right to that name as far as I’m concerned.”

“Your opinion,” Worthington allowed dismissively. “Enough of the pleasantries. I need to know, once and for all, what happened to Wolverine.”

“No, you don’t. Wanting isn’t needing, Warren.”

“Don’t get holier than thou with me, Havoc,” Worthington said impatiently. “We’re getting it from both sides these days. You got your Second Brotherhood saying he’s dead, murdered by the government. Then there are the Blue Wavers, claiming he’s being held hostage in some secret prison, a-waitin’ for the Judgment Day. I’m the only one both sides might believe, and you know it.”

“I understand, but again, that’s not my problem.” Alex sighed and drummed his fingers on the desktop. It wasn’t as if he’d never imagined this day would come, but now it was here he was stalling. Still, it would almost be a relief to share the truth with someone else at last. Almost a relief. Almost the truth.

“Don’t make me say it, Havoc.” Worthington was getting agitated. Alex could see the knuckles of Morningstar’s hand tightening, gripping the famous Sword of Vengeance. The living blade was sleeping restlessly in its scabbard, singing songs of righteous fury. Worthington stood, and the sword slid to its position on his hip with the ease of weary years.

“Don’t make me say San Antonio.” Worthington’s body language wasn’t hostile, it was defensive, as if he knew the danger and pain and insult of the buttons he was pushing.

Alex pushed up from his desk, not attacking but moving with abrupt purpose. A faint nimbus of energy surrounded him, lifting his hair and crackling with parastatic power as he took the remote from his desk and aimed it, not at Morningstar, but at the back wall of his office, the wall that contained the vault.

“Fine,” Alex said after a long moment, “You want to know what happened to the Wolverine? See for yourself, Morningstar, Light-bearer, Lucifer. See for yourself, and then have the will to judge me.”

The panels concealing the vault had swung open in response to his thumbprint on the remote’s pad. Now three reinforced panels of vibranium steel withdrew, moved by mighty engines both mystic and mechanical, to reveal the inner vault of the Xavier School, something only slightly less unknowable than the conscience of God.

A platform slid into view, and small lights flickered and buzzed to life, showing the contents in stark relief. Worthington took a half step forward, drawn to the terrible sight.

“It can’t be destroyed,” Alex said, grief and loss erasing all traces of spite or teasing between them. “It can never be destroyed, just as it can never be allowed to fall into the hands of those who would use it for evil. So it sits, and waits, buried here in darkness.”

“Like the Grail,” Worthington breathed softly. “Like Excalibur, waiting for the return of the King.” The eyes behind his iron mask were rimmed with tears.

“For a champion,” Alex agreed, moving to stand next to his former friend. “A king who will never come again.”

Alex triggered the switch again, and the platform began to retract. As the lights failed, darkness took the form on the platform, the glistening bones, the mythic claws, as the unbreakable skeleton of the Wolverine, gleaming dully in the vault, retreated from the view of mortal man.

“How?” was the only word Morningstar could manage.

“A woman. An accident. A sacrifice.” Alex shrugged. It was close enough to the truth that Worthington never guessed he was being lied to. “It didn’t have to happen. If he hadn’t been who he was, doing what he did, he could have lived forever.”

Worthington shrugged, stepping forlornly onto the balcony. He looked back at Alex.

“If he wasn’t who he was, what would forever have meant?” He leapt into the air, wings not spreading until he was already hurtling the railing. With a few mighty beats of his startlingly bright white wings, he was gone, into the night.

Alex went back to his desk, to his students, and to his ghosts.

**more coming after exam week**

Inside the cell

Mr. Crick, the new guy, watched his trainer carefully, taking notes on a small pad of paper with a pencil. Very low tech, very retro. His mentor, Mr. Watson, was very cautiously fitting a bowl of nutrient-rich “soup” into the rubberized grip of a plastic robot manipulator arm.

“We have to use a lot of non-metals, wherever we can. In her career, she absorbed a lot of power from Magneto, and later of course there’s what she did to poor Lodestone. It’s just safer to assume she can call up a bit of mischief any time.”

Watson, having secured the bowl, moved back to the edge of the shield, and carefully began to steer the robot arm towards the center of the cell. He didn’t take his eyes off his task as he spoke.

“I guess she’d been here about a year and a half when I started. She was in bad shape, of course, and I figured this was hospice work. I prayed for her soul, if you can believe it, back then. His too, of course.”

“Does she…” Crick, tried to frame his question. “Does she understand what’s happened to herself?”

“God, I hope not,” Watson said. There was a small whine from a motor as one of the robot arm’s servos overheated. It jerked, and the bowl clattered to the floor.

“Well, Christ,” muttered Watson. “Well, I might as well show you close-approach protocols after all. Grab a bungee.”

As the younger man watched, Watson secured an elastic cable to a fitting on his coverall. Crick took the ‘dead man’ switch from Watson, and pushed the trigger down, freeing the line. If anything happened to either of them, all Crick had to do was release the switch and the line would retract, hopefully retrieving Watson from the center of the cell. It would activate other, more aggressive precautions as well.

“Watch close, Francis,” Watson said as he edged around the corner of the shield. He got the robot arm swung out of the way and was reaching for the fallen bowl when it all happened.

**

Inside the cell

“Here he comes,” she thought, trying so hard not to appear interested. For the last two years, she’d been focusing all of her pyrokinetic energy, all of her plasma blasts, her probability manipulation, her photonic blasts, even her cold breath on one joint of the robot feeder arm. She had almost no powers left, but she had passion, and hatred, and a desire to free herself and her lover.

After almost seven hundred days, the tiniest bit of power that still was in her, through the fields and the drugs and the passage of time, that tiniest bit of power had made the guards’ machine fail, and now it was time for them both to act.

As the guard bent carefully, thinking she was asleep, thinking he was safely outside her reach, thinking he was going to live one more day, she made her move.

With a sudden springing twist, she brought one manacled wrist to her mouth and stood as straight as her bonds allowed. Then, with a harsh cry, she bit hard into her skin, just below her elbow.

She felt the blood in her mouth, smelled the copper and tasted the metal tang. She felt the flesh tearing in her teeth, and more than the pain, she recognized the feral joy of it. It was his, something of Logan that she had felt in his touch once, the feeling of the teeth stripping flesh from the bone. It was that memory that had sung to her secret heart and formed her plan.

With two brutally sharp tugs, her teeth peeled a six-inch strip of flesh off the bone of her arm, revealing red flesh and dark blood underneath. The strip was still attached at her wrist, so when she jumped, stopped by her chains after only a few inches to fall flat out, she was able to jackknife her arm forward.

The strip of skin, still vitally attached and flowing with what power she still possessed, whipped forward, extending a critical few inches past her outstretched fingertips. With a wet smack and a tingle of pain that was rapidly fighting through the shock, her flesh connected with a bare patch on the guard’s arm, where his sleeve gaped as he bent to pick up the bowl.

When her flesh touched his, she felt it. Felt the strength, the fear, the life. She felt his memory and most of all his terror as she began to drink his life away, the veins pulsing darkly under his skin as all he was flowed into her through the bridge of bloody flesh that connected them. It was dark, and savage, and good.

Where her skin touched him, his own skin was beginning to ripple and writhe. With panic and pain gaping his eyes, the guard gurgled and tried to scream. No sound came.

**

Inside the cell

Crick watched in horror, panic battling fear and revulsion, the hot bile in his throat as he watched the skin boiling away from Watson. It flowed in sluggish pulses into the slender woman in the shackles through the conduit of her connecting skin, being absorbed by the monstrously perverted force of Rogue’s mutant power. Finally, as Watson collapsed to hi knees, Watson released the dead man switch.

With a thunderous TWANG, the elastic bungee jerked Watson clear, flinging him al the way to the padded wall of the antechamber behind Crick. He hit with a muffled thump and hung motionless from the harness on his belt.

Crick looked back, at the bloody smile spread wide across the face of the woman, her eyes fey and unblinking as she shuddered with renewed life and power. She shrugged, and looked over her shoulder.

“This is it, darlin’,” she shouted, “Give it all you got!”

With that, she bent and turned, trying to give the cell’s other occupant room to make some sort of move. Blood spattered from her mouth as she shouted, and there were writhing, moving shapes of flesh under her paper coverall.

As she turned, the paper tore, revealing her pale back, traced with black veins and shockingly wrong, moving masses beneath the skin. Protruding, about half way between her shoulder blades, was the oblique plane of a face, bristling with a few stout, wiry hairs.

A few inches farther down, seven fingertips of varying completion pressed, clawing at the air with febrile wiggling. Even as her power absorbed and consumed his flesh, his renewed their life; they were caught, forever in a stasis of unending torment and death and rebirth and draining, sapping, torturous pain, never aging, never healing, never dying.

As Crick backed away, unconsciously crossing himself against the sight, the more complete of the two eyes in the gruesomely submerged face opened and stared wildly at him. The mouth opened, partially sealed by tendrils of flesh that spread between the lips. In the shocked silence, Crick could hear the whispered cry above the dripping of blood onto the sealed styrene floor.

“Kill me… for the love of God, Bub, please, kill me…”

As the alarm klaxon sounded, a roiling rainbow cloud of sedatives, power blockers, tranquilizers and anti-mutagenics flooded the cell, leaving the gasping Wolverine staring into Crick’s shattering soul for a moment before he and his companion were lost in the mists.

Crick rushed to the mutilated and distorted figure of Watson. He found with some relief that Watson was dead.

-fin-