By the time Jean and Betsy had managed to contact Xavier and Emma Frost, and had come up with a plan, Rogue and Wolverine had already prepared themselves for war. Rogue had found an older X-men uniform, probably one from Jean’s younger, training days, and put it on. Logan had been adjusting the fit of his leather gloves when he looked up, seeing her step into the strategy room, where he waited for everyone to catch up. She was encased in slightly-worn black leather, with dark green trim and accents. Logan marveled at all that her baggy, concealing clothes had hidden before.
“Have they realized what they’re gonna have to do, yet?” she asked.
Logan shook his head.
Rogue nodded. Then she paced back and forth, her footsteps scarcely making a whisper even to Logan’s advanced hearing. She moved with predatory impatience, and kept stretching and massaging the muscles in her hands, her bones occasionally making a small metallic pop. Logan leaned against the wall and watched her for a while.
Finally, she paused, turning and looking at him. “See anything interesting?” Her tone was dry, and her face was deadpan: a peculiar sense of humor.
To his surprise, Logan found that he liked it, almost as much as he had liked watching the graceful movements of her limbs as she paced, and how her strides were so efficient and deliberate that the sway of her hips was more subtle than on any other woman he had ever seen with hips quite like hers. “You could say that,” he answered, holding her gaze. His poker face was just as good as hers, but there was something in his voice that hinted.
Rogue blinked twice in rapid succession: the only indication that she was surprised. She tilted her head very slightly to one side, raising an eyebrow in silent question.
Logan wished that he had a cigar on him, but the leather didn’t have good pockets for that sorta thing. He was still looking into her big, dark eyes. “You look good in uniform.”
That seemed to put her slightly at a loss for a second, and she might have blushed, if she were slightly less controlled. “Thank you.” Her eyes flicked up and down his body before meeting his again. “You do, too.” Her expression showed hint of a smirk, and a hint of something like curiosity and almost confusion, as if wondering what on earth he wanted.
Logan was beginning to wonder, himself. He was saved from speaking further when Storm, Jean, Hank, and the kids all came in. The kids moved more slowly, thinking about how they had never been allowed to join an X-men meeting before, and how sobering it actually was, when they had once thought it might just be exciting. Some of the young men stopped a moment to look at Rogue, but the only one she bothered looking back at was Johnny, and she just raised her eyebrows sardonically at him when he looked her up and down with evident fascination.
Johnny raised his hands, palm-forward in a sign of helplessness, but he smirked a little, and feigned a swoon when the others weren’t looking. Remy glanced over in time to see it, and to see a hint of a smile on Rogue’s face, but noticed that she still seemed to lean a little bit towards Logan. He shook his head, and sat down between Storm and Siryn.
Jean explained the problem to them: the soldiers were not leaving, and were still trying to break into the well-hidden sections under the mansion, which they somehow knew about. There were weak areas they might tap into, which Hank needed to fortify, but this would leave them all vulnerable to discovery; if Hank were discovered, or worse––caught, then the soldiers would be able to march straight into the lower levels within hours.
“So you need him protected, and probably a distraction provided,” Logan concluded for them. He had known as much, from the minute Jean had said that the soldiers weren’t leaving. So had Rogue.
“Anyone attempting such an act would be under risk of being captured,” Hank warned quietly. A long silence followed.
Rogue crossed her arms over her chest and clenched her jaw, but after letting out her breath, said quietly, “I’ll do it.”
“And me,” Logan said.
“I’m really good at distractions,” Johnny said softly, his dexterous fingers moving fluidly as his lighter seemed to dance, weaving back and forth between them.
“But can ya get away quiet an’ subtle, homme? Will ya know when ya gon’ have to?” Remy inquired, effortlessly cutting and shuffling his deck of cards in one hand.
John thought about this, a surprisingly solemn look on his face. “With these guys? Probably not. You?”
Remy smiled brightly, his red-on-black eyes narrowing. “I deal wit dis kinda soldiers in times past, an’ made it out jus’ fine. We pair up, maybe we cause some nice chaos, non?”
Logan and Rogue exchanged wary glances.
It was Rogue who finally spoke, “There are media crews out there, and Betsy has them on our side for now––and for the first time, I believe. If anyone goes out there to wreak dramatic, brightly-lit and bloody havoc on the humans out there, it will have been for nothing. This needs to be handled quietly, or at least as quietly as possible.”
Johnny exhaled a disappointed sigh through his teeth. “So one news story about this attack is gonna do what, exactly?”
“They keep filming out there, in front of the sign that indicates this is a school. They show pictures of students here, whose parents say they aren’t mutants, and people are seeing what the government might do to humans, in the process of their crusade against us,” Storm said sharply. “For once, it isn’t us they’re afraid of; it’s humans like the ones over our heads, and that’s more progress than we’ve made in years.”
The room fell silent for a few moments.
“Just in case things go wrong, we need everyone down here prepared not only to fight, but to destroy anything and everything down here that might be of any use to these people,” Storm continued, her voice ringing with authority. “They aren’t expecting to find us down here, so they must be after something else, and it must be important if they’re so willing to look so bad in the media. I want all of you spread out, but able to fall back and team up if needed.” She turned on a hologram depicting the layout of the lower levels.
The next few hours were spent plotting and planning, positioning people within the lower levels. Logan and Rogue stood apart, leaning against the wall and preparing themselves mentally for their own tasks. No one needed to tell them what strategies to follow, what to expect, or how to react to anything. They only moved forward only when the others flooded out to suit up; all but Hank, Storm, and Jean remained, already in uniform as well.
Hank explained the places he needed to secure: there were only three. Logan told him whether he would have to approach from below, from within the public parts of the mansion, or––as was the case for only one place––outside. Logan told him what to expect from the soldiers out there, and how to get away, all else failed. Rogue asked Storm to provide thick fog, but not rain, and to be ready to whip up a tornado if all else failed. Jean waited until Hank and Storm went off to check on the kids.
“Thank you both for doing this, but...please don’t kill anyone that you don’t have to.” She looked sincerely worried and sad, the weight of her morals heavy on her shoulders.
Logan and Rogue were far more spartan, carrying only the essentials and their honor. When they stared at Jean, they looked like a pair of disinterested wolves, waiting for Jean to look away so that they could go back to their hunt.
Jean shivered, once, and looked away.
They left her there, saying nothing to alleviate her unease.
The fog rolled in shortly after dark, and Hank finished the first, and most easily accessible, weak spot, within an hour. He had approached it from below, not leaving the subterranean parts of the mansion, and left the path behind him, as he left, totally impassable.
The next target was not so simple, and Logan and Rogue stalked up into the mansion. They did not kill; they only removed the soldiers’ helmets, and let Betsy and Jean take control, keeping the men quiet and oblivious, making sure they raised no alarms. It took two and a half hours.
Of course, the last spot was where it all went wrong. Outside the mansion, Stryker had finally set up a device that greatly limited the workings of telepathic powers. The machine’s output bounced off of stone and metal, but saturated the air outside. Logan and Rogue began neutralizing soldiers the old-fashioned way.
They worked silently in the fog, but the heightened anxiety of the soldiers still moving provided the real problem: within half an hour there was notice of serious radio contact failure, due to the men contacted being unconscious and hog-tied in the dark and the mist. Teams went to investigate the missing men’s patrol area. The first one, small and careful, also ended up knocked-out and tied up, left sitting out in the fog. By then, Hank had been at work for just over an hour.
The second team was bigger, better armed. They were taken down in half an hour, but shots were fired, blood was shed, and a couple of men were killed; levels of nervous anxiety rose amongst those soldiers who remained conscious, straining in the dark to catch some glimpse of unknown enemies. Soldiers were hunting the hunters now, and fear made their trigger-fingers itch like Hell. Logan and Rogue played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would get to be the distraction. Rogue won, and the last of her that Logan saw was her dark eyes lit up and her lips and teeth shaped into a beautiful and ferocious grin, before she vanished. Logan wanted to follow her so badly he could taste it; and it was as much because he wanted to watch her and fight with her as because playing distraction was fun in and of itself.
Cries of men and weapons went off on the other side of the mansion. Radio commands sang out the enemy’s position. Logan took care of the remaining soldiers still searching in his area, taking them down when they got too close to Hank’s project.
Hank finished within an hour, and quickly fled below to his next waiting-point. Logan went back out to find Rogue. Not long after stepping outside, he heard her scream in pain and outrage. He was running before he even processed which direction the sound had come from. He caught her scent, and the scent of her blood, and the scent of William Stryker.
Gunfire erupted, but someone was shouting at the soldiers to stop: Stryker. Logan’s claws all but leapt from between his knuckles, and the pain was sweet and kept his mind clear. His footsteps silent in the gloom, Logan moved through the dark, only to leap behind a hedge when the soldiers abruptly turned on several large sets of floodlights. He could hear helicopters flying low, the beats of their propellers dispelling the fog.
Where the Hell was Rogue?
Logan caught her scent again and stalked through the mansion’s veritable maze of garden hedges and other assorted shrubberies. He had to hand it to Storm: she had made her elegant and beautiful gardens tactically functional for stealthy defense of the mansion.
He found Rogue, mostly-concealed behind and beneath a few large rose bushes, leaning her weight back against a tree trunk. She was breathing hard, and the skin across her stomach was exposed: the leather torn open by a burst of automatic fire. A few warped and bloodied bullets littered the ground beside her, where they had fallen on their own, and as Logan approached, she used a few inches of extended thumb-claw to remove another one from where it had gotten jammed between two of her adamantium ribs. By the time he crouched next to her, the wound was healed.
“You alright?” he asked, his voice too low for human ears.
Rogue opened her other hand, which had been tightly closed around something: a two-inch long bright blue dart. It was half-empty; she must have pulled it out before it was done. “This is made special for us, Sugar. I need a minute ‘fore I can walk.”
Logan took the dart from her and examined it closely.
“If I get hit with a green one of those, you won’t be able to trust me.” When he looked at her curiously, she explained: “They have the damned mind-control shit in ‘em, and while a bullet may have been enough of a shock to Kurt’s system to shut it off, my abilities made it much harder to disable. The only sure-fire way I know how to turn it off, in my case, would be electrocution: found that out from a lab accident.” She grinned viciously at the thought. “That’s incidentally also how I know what Stryker’s blood smells like.”
Logan nodded and tossed the dart aside. “Hank’s finished. All’s well, there. The entrance isn’t far.” Because, as luck and good planning would have it, the entrance was well-hidden there in the garden.
Rogue nodded. “Good.”
Soldiers were slowly spreading out, now, and some had entered the garden’s maze.
“Can you get up, now?”
“Yeah. Just...can you lend me a little leverage?” She held her hand an inch above his forearm, waiting for permission. She had taken her gloves off when she had put her uniform on.
Logan nodded, and raised his arm until her fingers touched it. Then he stood up and pulled her to her feet. She clung to his arm and leaned on it a little, lifting her other hand to her head as a wave of wooziness hit her, along with a sharp pang similar to a brain freeze. Logan put a gloved hand over her wrist, holding her hand pressed to his arm, and began leading her toward the entrance. Her movements were automatic, and still very nearly silent, but she was not so graceful as before, and stumbled now and then.
They had reached the door and it had begun to open, when three darts flew through the air. Rogue instinctively lashed out, and the man who had aimed and fired the darts fell to the ground without his throat missing. Then Rogue spun around just in time to see Logan collapse.
Hank had the door half-open when he heard the commotion, and had lifted himself up through the narrow trapdoor. That was when he heard Rogue cursing in a bizarre mixture of French and Chinese, and saw her pull three darts from a single spot on Logan’s chest: two green, one blue. Then she spotted Hank.
She tossed the darts to him. “Catch.” He did. “You’ll want to study that shit.” She then sliced a hole in Logan’s uniform, tossing away a sizable scrap of leather. She pushed Logan within reach of Hank, but stopped him when he reached for Logan to bring him in.
“Rogue, what-”
“Take him into the lower levels, and strap him down, but don’t let me in. You’ll want to completely disable, destroy, and blockade this entrance.” She pressed a bare hand over Logan’s skin where the darts had hit him. She grit her teeth against the flood and felt her senses immediately hindered by the contents of the sedative dart. Her dark eyes were turning milky green-blue. Before she totally lost control, she kicked Logan through the trapdoor, where a shocked Hank caught him. “They won’t take him again,” she growled, and forced the door shut.
She got to her feet and bolted, waiting for what she had absorbed from Logan to kick in and wanting to get as far as possible from that entrance and the other targets while she could. As soon as she emerged from the garden, two sets of floodlights flared on, exposing her. Rogue cursed her timing and extended her claws, but two blue darts hit her: one in the throat, and another in her left pectoral.
Rogue went down, but as her world darkened, she marveled a little. The green darts had not kicked in, as she had thought they would. After Marie had absorbed Yuriko, Rogue had assumed that sheer shock of killing, and of experiencing death, had been what had prevented the mind-control drug from effecting her before. Maybe absorbing someone, even a little, was enough of a shock to her whole system to loosen or even prevent the grip of Stryker’s mind-control.
It was a comforting thought, because when Colonel William Stryker leaned over her and said something smug-sounding, Rogue knew she would need every weapon against that control that she could get. She smirked, and called Stryker a doomed sonofabitch before the darkness of unconsciousness dragged her all the way under.
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