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Secret Burdens
Chapter Nineteen: Instinct


“There is no feeling, no urge, no pull, as inherent as their instinct for each other.”


It had happened before any questions could be answered, any thoughts could be realized, any breaths expelled. The onslaught had begun.

Team Alpha had rejoined Team Omega after the southern defense had held fire. There was only a moment to nod at Warren, Kurt, Kitty, and Peter’s entrance onto the field when the ground started to give out below them.

Suddenly, there were screams and shouts as X-Men and soldiers alike felt the earth quaking below them, knocking most of them off their feet and tearing large cracks into the rock and dirt below them. Loose debris from the destroyed rooftop began to fall anew to the barricade below and soldiers flung themselves from the wall to escape the falling concrete.

“Shadowcat!” Storm’s cry was frantic as she caught sight of Kitty in the path of a large chunk of concrete falling from the roof, speeding toward them. Kitty whipped her head toward the sky just as the debris fell on top of her, and for a terrifying second Ororo was motionless in the chaos. But she blinked and realized Kitty had phased in that split second and came running, literally, from within the rock. Her gait was unsteady and wobbling as she tried to make her way to their leader in the earthquake, her arms up above her head for protection. Ororo tried to brace herself in the midst of the rumbling and looked around for each of her team members. So far, they were all relatively unharmed, but barely able to keep their balance as they tried to gather around Storm.

“What the fuckin’ Christ is goin’ on?” she heard Logan yell as he came up beside her.

Ororo glanced around frantically, trying to keep her vision focused through the shaking and running soldiers, her eyes finally landing on a man atop the barricade, crouched, his hands gripping the concrete. The man remained untouched by the growing quake. “There!” she yelled, her hand stretching out to point to him. The others followed where she directed. “It’s Charlie Sutton, the mutant captive with vibration control.”

Bobby stumbled as a crack tore through the rock at his feet. Hank’s large paw reached out and caught his forearm before Bobby could hit the floor. He gripped the beast’s paw in thanks. “Vibrations my ass. He’s a quake-maker!”

“Angel.” Ororo turned to Warren. He nodded quickly, pushing off the trembling ground without needing more orders.

Hank grumbled where he stood, his arms outstretched for balance. “The others may not be far.”

Ororo sighed heavily, her eyes scanning everywhere. “I know.”

The group pulled into a circle, their backs together, eyes wary. Dominguez’s shouts of orders could be heard, and the scrambling of the remaining platoon to pull their injured back into the bunker.

“Help the wounded if you can, but be on the lookout for the other mut-“

Before Ororo could finish her order, Warren’s scream filled their ears and they looked up to see him being slammed into one of the concrete overhangs of the bunker, his side colliding at a sharp angle with the overhang. Logan could hear ribs cracking from where they stood on the field below. Ororo’s gaze was filled with horror but she didn’t have a moment to understand what had hit him because as he tried brokenly to push off from the ledge, his body was pulled by some unseen force harshly down toward the ground dozens of feet below them. Ororo had seconds to act. Her gaze steeled and she reached a hand toward the spot where Warren was headed, wind suddenly cushioning his descent and lowering his aching body to the floor. Two soldiers crouched behind some of the buffered barricade nearby scurried to his side, half crawling, half walking through the growing tremors.

“Devon Chase. Acceleration manipulation.” Hank half-growled, his eyes peeled for the other mutant’s presence. “But where?”

“Looks like evacuations are on the backburner,” Peter answered, motioning toward the damaged entrance atop the stone barricade. Everyone turned in time to see four of the captive mutants exiting the doors, General Shrap at their forefront.

“Bastard!” Wolverine roared as he lunged forward, racing through the debris-littered field, claws extended.

“Wolverine, no!” But Storm’s cry came too late. Logan found himself hooked by some kind of invisible hand, the same he imagined Warren felt, and yanked back forcefully into the jagged edge of fallen concrete. He roared in pain as the sharp stone tore into the skin and muscle at his back, blood soaking his uniform quickly at the spot. He dropped to the floor, his arms trying to hold his weight up while his mutation worked overtime to patch his almost-severed spine. He grit his teeth and tried to pull his legs from under him, finding it difficult to find any kind of purchase when Private Sutton was still creating his contained earthquake.

“Interesting.”

Logan whipped his head up at General Shrap’s comment. Logan knew disgust when he heard it. He’d pinned that one down decades ago.

Shrap’s ominous smile spread across his blunt, square jaw. “My turn.”

* * *

Everyone knew their part. The battle erupted between the X-men and the captive mutants as though it had been orchestrated many times before.

Lieutenant Colonel Dominguez ordered his men to fall back into defensive positions within the bunker and along the inside of the barricade, leaving the field open to the two warring mutant forces. Storm had been grateful for their withdrawal from the field. There was no need for any more death.

Shrap saw differently however. Once the five controlled mutants had initiated battle with the X-Men, Shrap took cover behind one of the fallen chunks of roof concrete to watch and gauge the battle, his Beretta M9 armed and ready.

After Devon Chase’s performance of g-force manipulation and acceleration control when Logan had charged Shrap, Kurt had immediately teleported to the mutant’s location, appearing behind the man and sweeping a leg out to knock Chase’s balance out from under him. It was chaos after that.

The mutants hit the field, charging one another between broken debris from the bunker’s destroyed roof and earth-shattering lightening strikes from the dark sky above.

“Remember, everyone, take them alive!” Ororo yelled into the comm. link over the gale of wind she was creating. “And stay away from Shrap until we have the mutants restrained! We do not yet know if he has more of the controlling substance.” Ororo worried her bottom lip. “Or if he will attempt to use it on us.”

Ororo’s anger and intensity lit up the night sky in blinding flashes of light and whirlwinds of rain as she swept up into the air, past her battling colleagues and toward Warren’s location behind the barricade. As she descended over the barbed wire and into the midst of soldiers, they swung their weapons toward her in apprehension. But she had no mind to pay them, instead rushing to Warren’s side, ignoring their guns trained on her and fell to her knees beside him.

“Angel!” she cried, pulling at his shoulders as gently as she could to roll him over. He grunted in pain, clenching his eyes shut, but let her pull him to her lap, her touch steady and gentle even in the midst of a warzone. Around her soldiers whispered, their attention occasionally grabbed by the clashing of mutants just outside the barrier. No one tried to approach them.

“Storm,” he answered, rough and forced. “I’m sorry, something hit “ I don’t…”

“It is okay, Angel,” she soothed, her hand coming up to trace his forehead. “The others are on it.”

Warren grit his teeth and put his hands to the concrete below him, trying to push himself up. Storm did not hinder his movements, instead releasing her hold on him and pulling into a crouch beside him. “Can you move?” she asked, concerned, as she watched him. Her gaze instinctively shot out over the field to take in the condition of her other X-Men.

Warren nodded, his breathing jagged as he held himself on hands and knees. “I’m fine. I can…I can still fight.”

Ororo eyed him hesitantly.

He could feel the weight of her stare. Warren turned to look at her, and pushed himself up to stand, slowly but confidently. “I can get medical attention when this bastard is put down. I need to help, Storm. You need to let me do this.”

Ororo stood as well, standing eye to eye to the winged mutant. She watched as Warren put a hand to his side, cradling the sharp agony of a couple broken ribs, and knew he was experiencing much more pain than he was letting on. But Ororo knew the need to fight. She knew what it felt like to push the ache aside and do what needed to be done. She’d been doing it for years. Watching Warren’s steady, unwavering gaze as he silently pleaded with her, Ororo knew she had found a fellow warrior within him, a fellow X-Men. The instinct to push aside one’s one suffering and needs was achingly familiar to Ororo, and she found her own will renewed and enflamed.

Not one more mutant would be taken by the malice and hatred of man’s ignorance. Not one more mutant would endure enslavement from their own peers. Not one more mutant would feel less than human as long as the X-Men stood vigilant.

She was in this fight for more than just the innocent. She was in this fight for her students, for her teammates, for perfect strangers who prayed for people like the X-men. For the people she had grown up with, the people she had helped grow up. The people she ate breakfast with, and taught history to, and sparred with in the Danger Room. The people who passed her in the halls in the morning, who moaned about midterms, who waited anxiously for winter break to go home to their families. The ones who grew into seniors and fought for their place among the team. The ones who understood the need to take up arms. The ones who wished there would never be a need to take up arms.

The ones she called family.

She blinked, her eyes moving to watch the field where they instinctively found Logan.

The one she called family.

“Then fight.” Ororo found she could not help her devilish smile as she looked to Warren. “And may God have mercy on our enemies.”

Warren sighed in relief, swallowing down the pain before taking flight. Ororo followed shortly after.

Warren flew upward, following the row of barbed wire that would bring him around the edge of the barricade toward the mutant Charlie Sutton who had created the sudden and violent earthquake on the base at Montauk. Warren found that Hank had already bound his way up to Sutton and dove at him, tackling the man to the floor and causing the jolting return of solid ground beneath everyone’s feet. But Hank was finding it difficult to immobilize the man without greatly harming him as every time he swung a fist to Sutton, the mutant’s contact with Hank resulted in uncontrollable and violent shaking. Hank’s whole body was thrown into uncontainable trembling when Sutton’s touch reached him and then the ground below him would throw the Beast off-balance whenever the captive had a chance to reach his hands to the floor below. Angel took the opportunity to dive straight into Sutton and ram him into the ground, his ribs screaming in agony at the forceful collision. Hank regained some balance and control, pulling a heavy paw back to land in Sutton’s face, knocking him unconscious.

Down below on the field, Peter and Bobby had begun trading blows with Malcolm Fields, the captive mutant with heat control. Fields had exceptional martial arts training and seemed to be besting Bobby in hand to hand when Peter moved in with his metal casing shimmering up the length of his body. Fields threw a punch toward Peter after hitting Bobby with a roundhouse kick, only to find the metal of Peter’s form painful and skin-splitting to his knuckles. Fields howled in pain and Peter grabbed for the man’s arms, trying to contain him with the least amount of harm possible. But Fields grasped Peter’s forearms and flushed him with intense heat, his metal skin spiking in temperature and growing painfully bright red. Peter tried to hold on to Fields until he found his smoking metal skin too hot to keep under the mutant’s touch and released him. Next to the two, Bobby pushed off from the ground, wiping the blood from his mouth and threw his hands toward Peter, blowing cold and ice from his palms to chill Peter’s burning metal frame. Bobby turned his palms to Fields just as the mutant came rushing toward him and shot a beam of ice that collided with Fields’ chin, knocking his head back as he fell to the ground. Peter ran to the fallen mutant and threw a punch to knock him out, rolling him over to pin his arms behind his back in case he returned to consciousness and decided to use his powers once more.

Kurt found he needed to rely heavily on his mutation if he wanted to take down the mutant Devon Chase. Every time Kurt swung a fist toward Chase, the mutant would send out waves that either halted or accelerated Kurt’s movement, and the only way he knew to escape Chase’s hold was to teleport to another location. Kurt disappeared from in front of Chase with the usual blue and smoke-like cloud only to suddenly reappear behind him and swing low with a kick, knocking Chase off his feet. Without giving Chase time to pin down his movement, Kurt teleported again just as Chase tried to push off the ground. The former soldier barely saw the uppercut Kurt threw as he appeared inches in front of him, and then once again teleporting to behind him as Kurt shoved a sharp elbow to his back. Chase grunted in pain, his hand flying to his back and he whirled to catch Kurt, his features furious. But Kurt was gone once more and Chase could barely keep up with the blue mutant’s constant teleporting and random strikes until he turned once to the sound of Kurt’s teleporting just in time to see a fist flying his way. And then it was just black.

Meanwhile, Kitty was standing at the ready a short ways from Peter and Bobby’s battle with Malcolm Fields. Her eyes scanned the field, her ears straining for any sign of the enemy.

“I know you’re here, Pishna Rajik.” Kitty swung around, hoping to catch the elusive mutant with chameleon abilities. She barely had time to register the foot coming to her face as she bent low and rolled out, springing back up with her fists ready. She caught sight of what looked like a ripple in the air, almost like seeing heat waves over a horizon. She smiled. So that ripple signified his morphing into his surroundings. She just had to get him to move once more.

“Shadowcat!” Ororo called as she descended to Kitty’s position. “Need some light?” Ororo smirked as she raised her hands to the sky, her white eyes reflecting the sudden flashes of lightning that sped to the ground, littering the small amount of field where the two X-Men stood. A couple of the streaks cast a momentary shadow over what looked to be the crouched figure of a person just to Kitty’s left. She shrieked in surprise, unprepared, as Rajik lunged for her. Ororo’s kick caught his jaw before he could tackle Kitty but they lost him again once the ripples subsided and he had blended once again.

“Storm, again!” Kitty cried and Ororo answered with her palms turned skyward once more, blinding streaks of lightning flashing to the ground. Kitty was ready this time. When she caught sight of Rajik’s shadow, she brought her arms up defensively, watching as the shadow lunged toward her again. She smirked, and felt Rajik as he plunged right through her, clearly unprepared for her phasing. He tumbled to the ground, and Kitty turned sharply following the ripples his mutation gave out trying to quickly match his surroundings. But Ororo and Kitty were on him before he could camouflage fully, one having pinned him with his stomach to the floor and the other grabbing his arms to restrain him.

Shink! Logan’s adamantium claws retreated back into his knuckles as he eyed the fifth mutant, Shayna Braxton. “Sorry to cut your play time short, darlin’, but the boss wants you without a scratch.”

She hissed in response, her snake eyes bright and focused. Braxton had a grace and fluidity to her movements, advantages to her snake-like mutation, and she evaded Logan’s first charge. He was quick to adapt though, and swung his arm back toward her. She caught it, turning to flip him over her back when Logan dug his foot into the ground just in front of her, bending and twisting to pull her off balance instead. She fell to the ground, bracing her fall with her palms on the dirt and pushing into a roll away from Logan.

“You know, Storm,” Logan spoke into his comm. link, “ this’d be a helluva lot easier if I didn’t have to worry ‘bout bangin’ her up.”

Braxton sprang back up quicker than he expected, slashing a sharp-nailed hand across his chest. Logan barely pulled back in time, dancing out of her reach momentarily. “Fuck! Cause they got no qualms ‘bout killin’ us!”

“Careful, Logan,” he heard Storm’s voice in his ear. “We still do not know if she carries a poison.”

Logan looked down to his chest where she almost slashed through his uniform leather with her nails, grumbling. Braxton look the moment to throw an uppercut, then a left hook, her knee following shortly and Logan had to break her strikes with his arms, fending off her blows as she kept coming. One of her fists clipped Logan’s jaw, and he was surprised for a moment, missing her knee as it came slamming into his ribcage. Logan gasped for breath, gritting his teeth and when she tried to ram him with her elbow he dodged it in time. Quickly, Logan grabbed her arm as she flew past him, yanking it harshly behind her back to hold her. She threw her head back and smashed Logan’s nose. He howled in pain, throwing her away from him. Braxton stumbled for balance, then flipped toward him, her hands catching her weight on the ground as her feet flew toward Logan’s face. He looked up in time to catch her kick, grunted with the force of her weight and wrapped a hand around her ankles to swiftly yank her to the ground. Her back hit the dirt hard and she cried out in pain.

“Alright, that’s it, you slippery bitch!” Logan was grinning wildly as he twisted his hold on her ankle and pulled back so that he turned and landed on her back, one arm linking around her neck and shoulder, holding her in place with one arm and one leg locked behind her. She shrieked in frustration.

“How you like them apples!” He couldn’t stop laughing as he watched her struggle uselessly in his hold until she eventually lost consciousness from the pressure on her windpipe.

Ororo called into her comm. for everyone’s status as Kitty tried to subdue the chameleon mutant Pishna Rajik and she took to the skies once more. Everyone seemed to be holding their own for now but no one knew how long the controlling substance would last, or if it stayed in effect until the power-negating portion of the strand was injected. Did the researchers even develop an antidote that didn’t strip the host of their powers? And did Shrap have the negating substance on him? Ororo landed on the ground beside Logan, her eyes scanning the field for Shrap and beside her Logan strained his ears for sounds of the General.

Just then Ororo heard someone yelling from the bunker. She didn’t recognize the man as he came running out but he was holding up a vile in his hand, and he was carrying some kind of injection gun, one that resembled those containing the “cure” used on Alcatraz. Logan saw him too and ran to intercept him.

“Marks! You traitor!” Shrap’s bellow of rage caught Ororo’s attention and she whipped her head to him in time to see him training his gun on Colonel Marks and Logan, from behind the cover of fallen concrete to her right.

“Logan!” Ororo screamed.

A gunshot rang.

* * *

Ororo wonders how it all happened like this.

She’s sure it was only moments, only seconds, barely the span of a breath and yet, every detail is crisp and stark, seared into her memory. In that instant in time, hundreds of thoughts and terrors and possibilities flooded Ororo’s mind.

If that gun in Shrap’s hand carried the controlling substance and he hit Logan with it, it would be near impossible to stop him. Logan’s healing factor coupled with his adamantium skeleton and his fierce training made him as close to indestructible as any mutant could come. Ororo wasn’t certain they could take him if that happened. And even if they could, she knew they’d lose some of their own trying.

But if that gun in Shrap’s hand carried the power-negating substance instead, he was signing Logan’s death sentence. If Logan lost his healing mutation and his powers of regeneration, that very adamantium skeleton that was his advantage in battle would be the death of him.

Ororo had moved without realizing it.

She would later realize that the gun in Shrap’s hand was actually a standard issue Berretta M9, the kind of gun that, while lethal should it hit Colonel Marks as he ran toward them with the antidote, was not in fact lethal to Logan.

She would later realize that none of those rational fears rushing through her head of Logan being hit with Shrap’s strand were what spurred her into action.

She would later realize it was the simple fear of losing him that moved her. The image of Logan in the path of danger, the panic at the sudden threat, the refusal to let it happen.

She would later realize how powerful her instinct to keep him close had become.

She would later realize it was the bullet ripping through her ribcage that had sent the searing pain up the length of her body, sent the chilling scream ripping from her throat.

And as she stared at Logan before her, his eyes wide and unblinking, his mouth trembling as it hung open in disbelief, she would later realize it was her blood she saw splattered across his face.

Her body fell to the floor, limp.





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