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Her stony black eyes stared blankly at the steel door, squinting as she focused on the wire-reinforced glass pane, waiting for any sign of white lab coats or curious eyes. Their feelings were transparent and written all over their pudgy, overpaid faces: Freak. She scanned the stark, sterile excuse for a room, taking in the steely gleam of the IV poles feeding her the nutrient and enzyme drip, creating a dull throb in the crease of her elbow. Twice they had to change the needle when the nannites that enhanced her neural net and repaired bodily “ and system “ damage rejected the shunt like a foreign body.

William had kindly made the necessary adjustments. Those deceptive eyes of his were benign blue chips as he smiled at her from behind the pane. She heard him loud and clear when he informed the medi-tech, “Lower her painkillers. Her threshold for pain needs to be built back up to its peak. That won’t happen if we dope away every little twinge, will it?”

“I wouldn’t tease a caged lion, Sergeant,” warned the young intern, but beads of perspiration dotted his flesh at the Sergeant's shift from patronizing to…oh, God. The intern swallowed and clenched his knees shut, attempting to maintain some semblance of bladder control.

“I don’t tolerate insubordination well, son.” The last word dripped with scorn.

“N-no, sir.”

“Cut the current dose down to a fifth.” His tone was clipped. “As you were.”

Stryker’s footsteps clop-clopped down the hall as he made his way down to the sub-basement level for a visit to Cornelius and his other pet project.

When he stepped out of the service elevator, strains of Tchaikovsky’s “Peter and the Wolf” greeted him, and he caught Cornelius humming the melody low in his throat as he approached. He shuddered at Cornelius’ head, missing most of his hair and covered with more of the hideous scars and mottled flesh even from behind. He scratched the scar over his eyelid that ran down the side of his cheek sympathetically, silently thanking the Lord that the damage hadn’t been as extensive as his colleague’s.

“Good afternoon, Doctor.”

“Always a pleasure, Sergeant,” he greeted brightly, “always a pleasure.” He tapped his clipboard with his finger. “I feel like a kid in a candy store. Take a good long look at the progress we’ve made.” William gazed at the sheaf of papers clipped neatly to it, speed-reading through inflated language and diagrams scribbled in the doctor’s nearly illegible script. The papers rattled as he flipped impatiently to the next. Cornelius’ expression became slightly smug as he drank in his reaction to the next set of notes.

“Nerve cells…she’s already developed nerve cells?”

“A nervous system, sir,” Cornelius corrected him, beaming as he crossed his arms and waved his head in the direction of the adjacent suite. He placed his palm on the security reader and waited for the green light over the door to flick on. Stryker followed him, his eyes still glued to the papers as he continued to read.

“Isn’t she lovely?” Cornelius quipped, lightly nudging Stryker’s elbow, and he looked up with a gasp at the sight that met his eyes.

“Lord above us,” he whispered.

It was déjà vu all over again. But this…this was so much more glorious.

On the other side of the observation glass stood a tall, wide cylinder bolted onto a base of steel alloy. The nutrient fluid was a slightly murky pink, due in part to the skin cells that continued to multiply in an intricate network, floating like a tattered shroud around the fully formed human skeleton within it. The eye sockets of the skull stared hollowly back at him, the teeth gaping in a grimace that seemed to challenge him with the silent question, What next? He could still hear the faint strains of Tchaikovsky from the anteroom but the roaring and rush of blood in his ears nearly drowned it out. His heart tattooed with the enormity of it all.

The fluid in the tank ebbed and flowed as it drained out through a pipe leading into the floor, and fresh nutrients were pumped in through the jets in the ceiling. The motion of the fluid stirred the new being, making it dance in macabre grace, bony fingers fluttering on the current. The figure turned slightly as if to give Stryker a better view of something…remarkable.

The pinkish-gray tissue pulsed in the cavity of the skull, swelling and falling in a discernible rhythm.

“Her brain’s growing.”

“That’s an understatement, Sergeant. Her brain’s thinking.” He invited him to come closer, leaning over the computer console and typing in the commands to toggle his array to the EEG and CAT scan monitors. As William drew closer, he squinted at the tiny electrodes anchored to the skull that he hadn’t noticed before. The electroencephalogram’s needle scratched as it made jagged trails across the paper strip. The movement was sedate and rhythmic until it spiked briefly, drawing it out into a wide, homely scrawl that made Stryker grin.

“There’s something going on in that pretty head,” he joked.

The equipment for the Weapon X project had never been this sensitive or sophisticated, but he waxed nostalgic as he considered It was groundbreaking at the time…

“Will you look at that,” Cornelius murmured fondly, “I think she’s waving hello. Oh, Sergeant, I think I like her already!” It wasn’t a trick of the light; the skeletal hand drifted up, and the fingers fluttered and curled in a motion that ran a chill down Stryker’s spine.

His visits to the sub-basement had become his new favorite hobby ever since watching those cells multiply so rapidly in that tiny Petri dish. Cornelius himself resembled a human parody of the megalomaniacal “mad scientist” in every Frankenstein-derived monster movie ever made, barely restraining himself from rubbing his hands together with glee and crooning “Fetch me the brains, Igor!” And that was just when he handed him the strands of hair. Cornelius had quickly run tests on them for viable cells that could be cultured, and the men had indulged in a snifter of fine brandy to celebrate the discovery before declaring that the project would be well underway the following morning.

It was laughable. What began as a mission of hate was fast becoming a labor of love. He couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

Back upstairs, Yuriko writhed and groaned, gritting her teeth against the clawing pains in her vitals. That old, ungrateful bastard, she seethed. She had been a daughter to him, even his willing slave, and look how repaid her fealty. Her loyalty.

The adamantium clot that ripped through her organs, invading and cramming her abdominal cavity still haunted her. At night, she still heard her own muffled screams, echoing off the watery confines of the tank as it infused her, burning her vessels as it snaked through every vein. She wept silvery tears of the rippling poison as it choked the breath out of her. Her nannite net had been thrown into trauma, and her system had temporarily shut down. Her mind remained defiant, even as she felt the rumblings beneath her as the dam collapsed around her ears.

The voices in her head only left her alone once the rumbling ceased, and the lake was brimful with the release of the dam. Jason’s brief touch came and went. Mostly, he just whispered her name in her thoughts. Not the hated moniker his father had bequeathed her, but her birth name that no one but her biological father seemed to remember anymore since she took up the reins of Lord Darkwind’s empire.

Stryker used his connections to Darkwind and his previous post as the family tutor to his only daughter as his way in. He, not she, had been the natural successor to step up as head of the board.

Jason had been an unknown quantity, she mused. The lobotomy had stripped him of higher level brain functions, but his power was still considerable, and his will as strong as his sire’s. His voice spurred her back to awareness.

She was ruined, broken. Raped by the clot of cooling metal stabbed into her by the roughnecked Canadian and his obsolete weapons.

Her foot twitched, then moved in a broader movement as she struggled for purchase to raise herself from the tank. She was buried under chunks of concrete and debris. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

She wanted to laugh as she remembered the Wolverine’s incredulous look as the gruesome slashes across her cheek closed up as though they had been erased from her tawny skin. She recognized the look for what it was: You’re like me. But there’s no one like me. She had proven him very, very wrong, and enjoyed every minute of it. The voluptuous joy of plunging her claws into his flesh, again and again as he jerked and twisted from where he was pinned. She was flush with power at how it felt to hold his life in her hands…

The burning stab of the spout through her flesh turned the tide. She gazed stupidly at him as it dawned on her what happened. No. NO. This CAN’T be happening. I was built to win. It’s NOT MY TIME to DIE! He heaped that final indignity on her, gazing into her eyes with something akin to pity as she sank down, hitting the floor of the tank with a hollow clang. Tiny bubbles from her nostrils tickled her upper lip.

Jason’s feelings echoed her own as her systems, through still scrambled, came back online with escape parameters and survival mechanisms and failsafes that should have guided her out through the hangar. She wasn’t sure if it was true feelings of empathy with Stryker’s twisted wreck of a son and the way his father had toyed with him or the boy’s own manipulative powers that dragged her feet to the remains of the Cerebro chamber. The door gave way easily as she sliced through it with her claws like it was tin foil.

His pulse was weak, and he was bleeding heavily from his nose and ears, eyes bloodshot with shock. His flesh was still frigid from the wind-witch’s maelstrom. But he blinked at her with recognition. If his palsied lips could have smiled, she convinced herself, they would have at that moment when she tore away the wreckage with trembling hands and freed him from the shackles of his twisted wheelchair. A faint gurgle of pain issued from his lips as she hefted him into her arms. The adamantium still burned as her system struggled to expel it, and blood poured in a steady gout.

There was precious little air, and it took Yuriko a day and a half to tunnel out from the wreckage. She muttered constantly to herself, cursing Stryker, cursing her father for discovering the process of creating and wielding the adamantium, and cursing the Canadian upstart who left her in such deplorable condition. Her claws itched to bury themselves in his flesh again, to savor that plunging, sucking noise it made when they sank into him. She could almost taste it.

As she twitched and searched for comfortable positions, Jason briefly touched her mind again. Just to let her know he was there. And for the briefest moment, he walked through her mind with her to a happier time, and she pictured Jason, whole and hearty the way he was before the procedure, and felt him holding her hand as she stood over her father’s grave in the rain. He smiled as she released his hand long enough to lay a single white chrysanthemum on his headstone.


Alkali Lake shores, the next day:

“How’s it comin’, Blue?”

“Slowly but surely,” he rumbled, giving himself a hearty scratch. His mouth gaped open in a positively leonine yawn, letting his broad pink tongue uncurl, exposing the neat white rows of spiky teeth. Ororo usually got a kick out of watching him do that since his mutation had brought these physical changes in him, but she was currently doing an aerial sweep, taking a better look at the air patterns and current using the manual scanner that Hank had lent her.

Logan strode over to the magnetic field generator and continued to watch the process that had baffled him from the moment that Hank had turned it on.

A funnel of energy swirled in a narrow column above the plate, glowing and winking as it changed shape. Its volume had nearly doubled over the past two days, and Logan’s flesh was crawling in anticipation and unease. The same odd odor, like grinding machinery that he associated with Scott’s optic blasts when he let them loose flooded the lake front. Things had still been eerie and mostly silent except for the conversations from the intrepid friends as they bickered and collaborated in their study.

Well, he and Ororo had bickered. Hank continued to threaten them both with detentions that he couldn’t impose, or having Peter change to his metallic form and sit on them to make them behave once they got back to the Institute. Logan didn’t put it past Peter to oblige, especially after he told him he threw like a girl. One thing he knew for sure, the tall Russian was no doubt making free with his beer stash while he was gone. He promised himself he’d clean the floor with him at a few games of billiards when this was over to make him reimburse those brews.

Problem was, none of them knew when it would be over. Hank’s replies to questions had been noncommittal when they’d asked. Logan was getting restless, and it was taking a toll on Ororo, too.

The look of hope that had flickered in her eyes when this all began was fading fast, and Logan could see the tightness around the corners of her mouth again. She grew sick of the camping rations, pleading with him never to show her another Ballpark frank, can of beans or marshmallow again. She almost kissed him when he’d managed to catch a perfect trout on their fourth night at the site. Almost. She repaid him by cleaning and deboning it and cooking it over another makeshift fire, and in an act of kindness that begged a June Cleaver barb to jump onto his lips, she even washed his shirt and hung it to dry on a large shrub so he wouldn’t feel like it would crawl off of him any minute with the layers of dirt and “camping grunge” that had accumulated on it.

The winds picked up, ruffling Logan’s hair and bringing a whiff of Ororo with it that he savored privately, peering up at her as she made a graceful landing. “Henry, you need so see this.”

He relieved her of the scanner and made a few rumblings in his throat. “Interesting. I wonder…” Hank’s yellow eyes studied her thoughtfully. “Ororo, I need another favor, my dear.”

“Such as?”

“Generate some lightning. Don’t aim it in any particular direction.”

“Like this?” The air around her crackled as her eyes glowed that ethereal shade of blue, and she backed away from Hank, spreading her open palms as electricity danced in playful sparks from her fingers, self-contained but still impressive.”

“Perfect. Keep that up, while I …fiddle with this for a second. Logan, keep an eye on the field cell, would you?”

“Aye, aye, mon capitan,” he growled. He set his beer down and studied it, gaging its activity.

What the flamin’? Hank had stumbled onto something here.

“Hey, ‘Ro, c’mon over here for a sec,” Logan asked, “and bring that lightning of yers with ya.” She shot him a bemused look but complied, wisely avoiding coming too close to him while she was still “live.”

The charged cells of energy loved the currents of electricity, if the way that their volume swelled again and flickered more brightly was any indication.

“Keep it coming, Sunshine.”

“You’re just asking for it, you know,” she reminded him, her face blank as lightning poured down, infusing her with more power and energy. Her hair was aglow and flying about her face in a halo, illuminating her features and making her appear breathtakingly beautiful.

“I love watching you work, Ororo,” Hank rumbled fondly.

“This isn’t work, Henry, this is pleasure.”

The scanner’s aerial rays continued to catch and reflect the energy and attract it from the sky and surrounding flora. Logan didn’t have to strain his vision anymore to detect it. It had been flowing with greater frequency as time passed, and Ororo had sat beside him at the campfire, occasionally whispering “Just look at that. It’s…just so amazing.” They both stretched out, legs sprawled lazily and feet occasionally touching as they observed the dance of energy currents, and during the course of their trip, they had fallen into something companionable that felt a lot like friendship. Furtive looks at each other flew back and forth, each one looking away when the other caught their eye.

Ororo wished she had Peter’s drawing abilities and a sketch pad to capture Logan’s essence, the way he was here. Rough-hewn, natural, and in his element in the Canadian wilderness. His skin was ruddy with exposure to the wind and sun, and his crisp, dark hair shone with faint auburn highlights that made her long to run her hands through it, burying her nose in the scent. The low evening light brought his profile into stark relief as she continued to study him. She would miss these little opportunities, she mused. Then she shook herself.

Bright Lady above, this was Logan, for heaven’s sake. And she was…she was…

She wasn’t Jean.

Well. That settled that.


Sub-basement level, Oyama Heavy Industries:

“Cornelius, status please.” Stryker noticed the absence of the symphonies and opera that he’d come to associate with the doctor’s labors in his anteroom as he placed his palm on the security plate. His breath caught in his throat as he stared through the observation cubicle.

Cornelius leaned against the tank, caressing it lovingly with his palms as he gazed inside, awestruck as a new father counting his infant’s fingers for the first time.

The lithe, naked body floated, still suspended in the tank, various wires still monitoring her vital signs and decorating her flesh, which was now completely intact, a perfect sheath of skin that glowed slightly translucent from her long sojourn in the nutrient bath.

Slender fingertips floated, searching for purchase as her eyes slowly fluttered open. The fingers grazed the interior of the tank curiously, and her expression was dumbfounded as she pawed at the air mask over her lips. Bubbles stirred beneath her feet as she began to acclimate herself, turning this way that to take in her close quarters.

The EEG and CAT scan monitors were off the chart, clicking and beeping madly as the tapes rolled out with broad scratches and readings that Cornelius had lost interest in the moment he was her body begin to twitch with intentional movements.

“Sergeant…say hello to Eve.”

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good,” Stryker grated out instead, gripping the console for balance as he fought to breathe at his normal pace. His hand curled into a fist as he raised it high and banged it against the console in triumph. “Yes,” he cried, “yes, yes!” His shout rang out and echoed off the steel walls, and his face nearly cracked with the broad smile that was completely out of character for the stoic soldier.

Rippling waves of coppery red hair fluttered and swayed as she turned to watch his approach. Her brow furrowed as she tried to place him and guess his intentions.

“Enough lollygagging, Doctor. Let her stretch her legs. Take her out of there, she’s turning into a prune.” Cornelius ambled into the step ladder and unlatched the safety clamps atop the tank, and almost automatically the fluid began to bubble and drain from away. Her face was initially calm, until she lost the support of the fluid that buoyed her and held her aloft, and she slumped against the walls, clutching frantically for balance. Her hands trembled as the fluid continued to sluice off her skin, leaving her hair plastering her skin in long, mossy runnels. Stryker heard her frantic gasps through the air mask and felt the hairs on his own nape rise with the awareness that her latent gifts were coming back sooner than they had anticipated.

He did the only thing that he could at that moment.

“It’s all right, my child,” he murmured, bracing himself against the tank wall, making small shushing sounds to sooth her. “Look at me. It’s all right.” Her strangled moan was slightly muffled as she began to claw off the air mask. With a lurching clunk, the tank began to lower itself into the floor, and her hands nearly slipped as the wall that she supported her receded away.

She pitched and tumbled forward into his waiting arms as Cornelius fetched a blanket out of the warmer. She didn’t fight him as he held her in a snug grip, his thick wool sweater and the nubby acrylic blanket scraping her senses raw. Tenderly he peeled away the mask, letting her suck in her first unassisted breath of cold, sterile air. Her cheeks flooded with color as she choked and spasmed, coughing as she struggled to adjust. Her bottle green eyes dilated as she looked up into his face again, trying to place him.

“Welcome to the world, Miss Grey.”

“Wh-who, who am I?” Her voice was raspy and sounded foreign to her own ears.

“Whoever I tell you to be,” he promised, smiling warmly at his new charge.


Back at Alkali’s shores:

The ground rumbled beneath Logan, launching him off the rocks where he’d reclined to watch the magnetic field do its work.

A clap of thunder that Ororo hadn’t summoned pounded their ear drums and vibrated through her body, tearing a scream from her lungs.

“GODDESS!”

“Holeeeeee…STORM!” He didn’t dare touch her, but a look of agony twisted her features into a violent grimace as lightning flooded her, then rushed back up at the sky in a seething blanket of electricity. Random bolts and sparked flitted from one scanner to the next, disrupting their array and nearly frying the circuitry as each one was now recalibrated to work at triple their previous speed.

Logan had crawled over to Hank and covered him with his body, digging into the ground with his claws as a means to anchor them both against the onslaught of Ororo’s winds.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by they name,” Logan heard Hank rumbling out a hasty prayer.

“This ain’t the time ta pray, Blue! LOOK AT HER! We’ve gotta do something, damn it!”

“I’m open to suggestions, Wolverine, but right now I’m hard pressed to do anything more than hope we’re not her next target. I’ve known this woman for years. She has pinpoint-accurate control of her powers. This isn’t control.”

“Gee, ya think?” The winds whipped themselves into the beginnings of a cyclone, wrapping around the lake and making the water rise, pelting them all with icy mist.

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Ororo’s screams churned Logan’s gut and made his legs rubbery. He couldn’t stand her suffering, and didn’t have the first damn clue what to do about it. His claws itched as he remembered back to Alcatraz…no.

Not for one damned second. This wasn’t a woman caught up in the grip of passions spun out of control. This was a woman who was actually fighting for control. Ororo would sooner die than harm those she loved and longed to protect.

“Stay,” Logan barked to Hank.

“Easier said than done!” Without Logan’s adamantium-enhanced weight to hold him in place, Hank flew back from his perch, until he slammed into a tree and found a feasible grip, clawing into it for dear life. Leaves and stinging water pelted him, making his flesh feel raw even beneath his protective layer of fur.

“Darlin’, ya gotta knock this shit off, now!” Logan insisted, tugging himself forward with more determination than he could remember, meeting Ororo’s gaze and gale head-on. “What’s happenin’ to ya? What the fuck are ya doin’?”

“Not me,” she cried. “It’s not me…AAAGGGH! HURTS! It’s…it’s JEAN!” His heart had been slamming in his chest, but it stuttered and sank into his shoes at her words. Time seemed to stand still for one horrible moment at her revelation. “She’s…she’s doing this through me, I can’t stop her, I can’t…” Her scream was hoarse and deafening as the lightning crackled and threw him back, burning into his chest. He rolled futilely on the ground, clutching his chest against the searing pain, and as he met her gaze, she beseeched him, her face wreathed in apologies.

“I didn’t…she didn’t mean…oh, Logan!”

“S’alright, baby, just do what ya gotta do,” he assured her, not wanting to burden her with guilt on top of having her body shanghaied and wielded like a puppet. Or an instrument, he realized.

She followed his instructions to the letter. The scanners and magnetic field pulsed with a stream of crimson light, infused with fire that seemed to engulf the growing volume of red energy and Ororo both. Ororo’s eyes spouted sparks of lightning and flame as she cried out one last prayer.

“SCOTT! COME BACK TO MEEEE!”

…and he did.

Every scattered atom of Scott’s being made its way home in a frantic rush. Out of the flames licking up around the magnetic field, Scott Summers stood, trembling, vibrating with energy, looking thoroughly confused and staring at Logan, completely dumbfounded.

Not to mention as naked as the day he was born.

“What the…hell…hapeeennnnneeeddddd,” he slurred. Logan lurched forward and caught him as he fell, nerveless and limp, shivering with cold.

“HANK!” he bellowed.

“I’m okay,” he cried out, more to reassure himself than anyone else. Logan heard his large feet stumbling through the brush.

“That’s a relief,” whimpered a tiny voice by Logan’s elbow. His head whipped around to gaze at Ororo as she staggered to regain her balance, passing a hand over her exhausted brown eyes. “You can put him down now,” she suggested.

“What? Oh.” He laid Scott on the grass for a moment. “Why?”

“Cuz I need y’to catch me,” and her voice tapered off as her knees buckled beneath her. He was just barely getting his own equilibrium back but he ignored it, reaching out halt her tumble to the ground. She felt too light in his arms, and her skin was chilled. Ororo’s hair fell in a silvery curtain over his shoulder as he cradled her carefully, looking thoroughly flummoxed when Hank finally reached him.

He lowered himself to the ground beside Scott and held onto her tightly, looking fearful and unsettled as Hank scrambled onto the jet to find the medical kit and radio Peter.





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