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...
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Author's Chapter Notes:
My apologies in advance for my profuse and apparent love of wordiness; I promise that this chapter is just an introduction, and subsequent installments will be less epic and more involved with the characters.