Knives And Forks Are Better
by Wirrrn

ARCHIVE: All Signs Point To Yes
DISTRIBUTION: You Break It, You Bought It
FANDOM: X-Men. Yes, I'm as surprised as you that I was able to resist the puppy-eyes of my Xandermuse long enough to pen this.
RATING: Very Hard R. Homosexuality, graphic violence, sick humour, gratuitous Australian marsupial name-dropping.
PAIRING: Scott/Logan on lead vocals, several others on slide whistle.
DISCLAIMER: Poison Ivy belongs to DC comics, Honey Barbara to Ray Lawrence's film of Peter Carey's BLISS. All things "X" belong to 20th Century Fox, Marvel and Brian Singer. Oh, except that filing cabinet Chris Carter's got. But Wolverine & Cyclops followed me home, despite my protests that only Xander and Angel can use the spare room.
NOTES: This is set in the Movieverse, but also refers to events in X-Men comics 114-116, "E is for Extinction". It basically featured a newer, deadlier breed of Sentinels, more Australian stereotypes than you could chuck a Wallaby at (mate); and lots of suspiciously close moments between the newly chummy Wolverine and Cyclops. Jean is so just a beard.
Feedback: Welcomed with open arms. Male casts of Buffy and the X-Men movie welcomed with open other things.

"Touch me, if it pleases you;
If it helps you... understand..."
-FROM BEYOND

"How do you like your blue-eyed boy,
Mr Death?"
-E.E Cummings/Thomas Harris

"Have you seen the ghost of Tom?
Long white bones with the flesh all gone
Oooh wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?
Wouldn't it be chilly with no skin on?!
-Children's Traditional

"Watch thou for the mutant"
-John Wyndham

Tiny little mahogany box, lined with plush velvet panels the colour of spoiled plums. Scent of Sandalwood.

A little whorl of the perfumed air is displaced as you port in. Sanctified chill around his ankles alerts your host to stop daydreaming and start talking shop.

"Hello, my son."

The voice is calm, moderated. His vowels drip with that oddly de-masculinized, overly gentled tone common to all men who heed The Call. The hand that slides back the wooden partition is a bright summer day blue, though, as is the throat that bobs up and down with words above the black tunic and starched white collar.

As you entered this frugal fortress of cold stone and painted glass, you had heard the thoughts of one of the elderly humans, shining the pews outside with the bored shifting of their sweaty, pious buttocks.

How nice the wizened old monkey had thought. One of these godless monsters accepting THE TRUE WAY.

That's how it had appeared in her head, too, IN ALL CAPITOLS!

Pitiful monkeys.

Look at the mutant in front of you, clothed in his hard won vestments, and suppress a giggle. Oh yes. The monkeys love it when us muties take their God into our abnormal bosoms, don't they?

Down to business.

"Father", You nod, though you know you're too shadow-swept to be seen.

"My Son. How long has it been since your last confession?"

Since I last missed a meal. I was confessing to everything and anything to get the pain to stop. You think you know Hell, Kurt?

You giggle, quietly. A stray gob of mucous flies into the respirator with a sound like a cat on a griddle.

"...My Son?"

"...A while, Father."

Kurt's eyes shine, iris-less. Saffron lighthouse beacons in the Holy Gloom.

You don't move.

"That's alright." He says. "Quite alright. Just try and make a good confession."

A grin in the dark. Your teeth feel bright.

"I'm not here to confess, Father. I've come for penance."

"I.. I..."

As expected, his Teutonic clip becomes more pronounced when he's confused. By the end of the day, he'll need subtitles.

"...I cannot give you penance without hearing your sins and absolving you first, my son."

"Sure you can, Kurt. Purgatory's pretty flexible. I should know. I live there."

He's thrown, completely. To be fair though, he makes a reasonable job of trying to remain calm.

"You... Know me? Are you... a man of the cloth?"

"Ja, Herr Wagner. We're very close, the Church and I... In fact, I'm a Saint of the Cross"

Work that one out, Padre

More kitten on the oven noises as Kurt stutters. You nearly pass out from a combination of mirth and having to disengage the respirator for a moment to clear it.

A beat, and you repeat your request.

"Now. Give me penance, Priest."

penance.

penance.

Penance

One can almost see the penny drop on our pious little cobalt friend.

"Gott ein Himmel! I... I cannot give her to you. You must know this, Ja? I cannot... nein... I know not where she is..."

Reach an arm Mamba-quick through the partition before he can port out.

"...That's okay, Kurt; you can still help me anyway."

You tighten the hold. He prays beneath his breath, whilst he still has breath to pray with.

The sandalwood odour mixes all too soon with that of old copper. You decide you like the smell.

In a jaunty mood, you exit the booth. On the way out, tap the old monkey bitch on the shoulder.

"Take and eat."

You grin at her, with all your mouths, then show her your stigmata.

The Perentie. Four and a half foot of speckled reptilian muscle, dreaming of rabbits tearing open beneath its long, razored claws.

It is ripped from sleep, voicing angry steam-kettle hisses in a combination of surprise, fear and rage as the bush it sleeps beneath is uprooted.

It hisses again and rears on its hind legs, expecting a dingo to come snuffling, looking for an easy meal. The Perentie's claws snick, its fangs come down from their seat in the gum line, drawing its own blood with them, increasing its rage. The dingo will not find easy meat here.

"AAaaaAAaugh! Shit!"

Wolverine yowled as the furious goanna brought strong jaws together on his upper arm, scrabbling long, curved talons against his clothing as it clutched for purchase on him with its heavy body.

"Dammit! Get off me, you friggin' T-Rex wannabe!"

He cracked his knuckles, flexed his fingers and willed his knives to come ou-

"Logan, no! The thing's just frightened!"

"Yeah, and with good reason, bub..."

" Lo..."

Wolverine shot a long-suffering I-can't-believe-you-played-the-affectionate-nickname- card look over his shoulder, but sheathed the claws anyway.

Trying very hard not to smile, Cyclops walked up to the Canadian and, with both hands and some effort, lifted the big, frenziedly struggling lizard up and off his friend's body. He put it down on the red soil, where it turned and hissed defiantly at the two men before loping off into the scrub.

Logan watched it retreat. "Those things common round here, Slim?"

A broad grin broke over his friend's face and turned him from team leader Cyclops into good friend Scott.

"All over the place. You'll have plenty of time to work on your diplomacy."

"Great."

"Well, at least they're not venomous". Greatly daring, Scott slung an arm around shoulders broader and lower than his own, smiling again when it was not rejected. "According to John, eight of the ten most deadly snakes are found right here Down Under."

"Witness me joy, Bub. It's times like these I wish Chuck hadn't sent that Isley kid on to Gotham."

"Pamela? She wasn't a mutant; more of a psychotic with preternatural skills for self preservation."

"... Sounds like I'd get along great with her then."

Scott's easy smile evaporated and he thwapped the older man's arm hard enough to get his attention. At the Canadian's shocked stare, he flushed red.

"I'm sorry. It's just... You're not a psychotic, Lo."

Logan's hard brown gaze melted like cooking chocolate under the warmth of that comment. Scott's arms came up around him again, soothing the hurt of the slap, and Logan moved in closer, under his friend's arms. He grinned to himself as Scott's smile emerged from its bolt hole behind his lips. For a moment, the two men just held each other, then Scott looked down at his friend.

"...I doubt even Pamela could neutralize the poisons in these snakes, anyway. Apparently, a sheep on John's grandma's farm got bitten, and died in two and a half minutes."

"Venomous snakes, Venomous spiders, poisonous plants, huge sharks... Am I the only one amazed that the little firebug lived long enough to get his powers?"

Scott laughed, hugged Logan tighter momentarily, then released him and stood up straight. "Speaking of which..."

Logan's joints made bored-person-with-bubble wrap noises as he too stood up. Shielding his eyes against the pitiless ball blazing in the white sky above them, he nodded. "Yeah, I know, our pick-up. What did Chuck say the kid's name was again?"

"The only name the Professor could discern was 'Pig Boy'."

"... Please don't tell me we're looking for some hybrid Razorback Boar man."

"No, I think it's just a slur that his peers at High School use. The boy has three faces."

"No shit, Cyke? Three heads?"

"No- One skull. Three faces."

"...Ah."

"Its about four miles, er, that way" Scott pointed. "Up for a hike, Wolverine?"

Logan smirked. "Sure thing bub. We run into any of those snakes a yers, I'll even suck out the poison fer ya."

"...Tease."

Once again, when you port in, you smell fragrant plants. Eucalypts. You idly brush at a pollen heavy branch with one hand, noticing that the slight blue colour - a legacy of dinner with Kurt- has nearly gone.

The beautiful floral scent is everywhere. You must try, next time, to teleport somewhere that smells rank - it will not do to be constantly exposed to beauty and loveliness- you might become inured to nightmare.

The ferocious mutant has been here. The signs are everywhere; marks gouged into the bolus of a tree (source of the strong Eucalypt odour), limestone rock broken and crushed underfoot; a long blade of grass, chewed to pulp and smelling of tannin, spit and rage.

He's here somewhere. He and the other, younger one, whose aura crackles with Ozone. You appear to have missed them by a matter of minutes.

They've left a scent trail. Faint... you would not have picked it up with your beyond-naked-face, but the respirator's sensors are acute. You follow it up a small hill, not expecting much, and are therefore quite surprised when it leads to a hollow log, and inside the log, an enormous lizard, all tooth and claw.

For a moment you are puzzled, then it hisses and you see his blood on its teeth.

The memory of a smile tugs at the place where your lips used to be. Then, beneath the hoarse ululations of the reptile, you hear other things. Whispered threats. Howled profanities. Moans ripped free of throats that sound as though they have been swallowing sharp, dead coral. Faint, distant, background noise- but growing louder.

They're coming.

You look about yourself. The Thug and the Field Leader might be anywhere- rescuing some doe-eyed monkey waif in the desert, or deep in the scrub jerking each other off, for all you know. It will take too long to find them.

The wailing is quite audible now. The Perentie, rolling its lidless eyes in terror, abandons the hollow log and sprints, on two legs, for a nearby gum tree, which it climbs, and flattens itself against, becoming flush with the trunk.

No time, no time. You must feed. Now

You throw your mind out, an astonishing radius you've never before managed- skill boosted by blind panic. No, no, no, human, no...

There.

All around you, the air is charged. It ripples, shimmers, crackles with miniature lightning bolts of static electricity. You feel the atmosphere become somehow solid, like a partly set gelatin mould, as the wormhole attempts to push through. Molecules of air grab at your flesh like taffy, trying to hold you in place.

You port out.

Just as you vanish, the wormhole opens behind you. Hundreds of hands- seeming somehow wrong- clutch at the space you occupied seconds ago.

The cheated howl of rage that rings in the empty air is almost as hungry as your own.

"...Should we go back in? It's dusk already. All over the state, mosquitoes are gearing up for happy hour."

An answering chuckle, as thick, rich and redolent of spice as Creole coffee. "Non, mon ami Chance. De blood in dese veins? He from de Bayou. Time of day don't be meanin a ting- Mosquito, she always hungry for Gambit."

Lips peeled back in a cocky grin, showing teeth that shine mother of pearl in the waxing witch light.

"She has to get in line though, mais oui? Plenty of folk, dey want get dey mouths on dis here Cajun's hot little body. Drink him right down, eh, Mon Chance?"

Realizing that Remy was looking at him with ruby-washed glee in his eyes, that he'd known he'd been the mutant equivalent of a beefcake video for the best part of an hour, Longshot somehow managed to wrench his gaze from the grinning Cajun's navel

-and that hypnotic snail-trail of crisp, rorschart curls that started just above, dipped down into it and continued down, becoming darker and coarser and just beginning to spread wider as it disappeared beneath the waistband of his jea-

Longshot flushed redder than Remy's gaze, swallowed and focused -not necessarily in that order- on the cards in his hand.

He and Remy and a few others were taking their rostered turn as 'Den Mothers' at one of Xavier's bolt-holes for young mutant runaways; a place for them to feel secure and be around others of their kind, minus the more structured and formal environs of the School.

This particular safe-house was housed in a former alligator farm in Florida. The night was sultry and the temperature leeched into the concrete walls, the building soon reeking of old reptile spoor, sharp and meaty. Add to that the humidity, so stifling that it seemed the air might form foamy waves and break over them at any moment, and it was an unpleasant night's sleep for all concerned.

Gambit had produced one of his omnipresent decks and challenged all and sundry to a game on the roof garden. Warren had declined politely, electing to remain with the kids, fanning them with his huge wings to try and make them more comfortable. Guthrie had proclaimed himself "too DELIVERANCE" to comprehend card games and went back to frightening local bats by flying past the building and making sonic booms. Sarah had simply hyper-extended a sharp stalactite of bone from her middle knuckle and told Gambit where he could go.

Longshot, however, had eagerly accepted, and Remy was delighted by this chance

-no pun intended-

to "buck the odds"

oh yeah, Lebeau, you can Buck my odds any day of the wee- down boy

Two hours later and Longshot had thoroughly trounced the Cajun at Go Fish, Blackjack, Poker (Draw and Stud) Twenty One, and was currently thrashing his wryly smiling friend at Snap, despite the fact that the PowerPuff Girls deck Remy was using only had 49 cards.

Even better (from Longshot's viewpoint) Remy had cheerfully refused to succumb to either defeat or mathematical probability, and declared that they would be playing "Strip Snap."

Longshot was still fully clothed.

Remy was now wearing just his cut-off jeans and one sock.

I like those odds

Shaking his head to clear it, Longshot brushed errant wisps of his blond mane from his eyes as, grinning and winking at him redly, Remy put his card down, face up, on the table between them.

"Snap!"

Remy shook his head affably. "Not dis time, my friend. Ce n'est possible pas. Dis time Gambit get to see a bit more of you."

The older mutant's eyes flashed with crimson fire at the thought.

"You see, Chance" he continued "Gambit switch his card when you not lookin'. Not lookin' at Gambit's hands anyway..."

Longshot re-examined the card. It was one of Wolverine's, from the deck he kept in his room back at the mansion. Longshot had seen the Canadian playing Solitaire with them late at night in the canteen, the media room, on those occasions when the clawed man's nightmares kept him exhausted but awake.

The cards

(a gift from Scott Summers, according to the rumour amongst the kids and some of the staff)

featured a backing photo of two handsome and naked young men performing several anatomically dubious feats on each other.

Longshot savoured the mental image of his own and Remy's, of Scott and Logan's, faces in place of those of the young men for a moment more, then smiled and produced his own card.

"I just found this stuck to my shoe about a minute ago... I guess Wolverine dropped it in the hall back home and I stepped on it or something, before we came here."

He put his card over Gambit's.

They matched.

Remy, stock-still, looked at the identical cards for a long time, mouth agape

Well, if you can't beat dem,get dem as bare-assed as you an' beat dem off

and peeled of his remaining sock.

Longshot grinned. His grin (and his eyes) widened considerably a moment later as, tossing the sock over the roof garden balcony, Remy proceeded to unbuckle and zip down his cut-offs.

"Um, Remy? not that I'm complaining but... what are you doing?"

Remy looked up from working his zipper around his anticipatory hard-on, thumbs paused under the waistband of the jeans.

"Cutting out de middle man, mon ami chance. Gambit could pull one of de Dead Sea Scrolls from his boot, and you'd still match him psalm for psalm with dat power o' yours. Besides-"

Here Remy pulled the cut-offs down an inch or two, revealing more of that delicious body hair trail and swamp-tanned skin.

"- I tink you n' Gambit both know where dis friendly little game be goin'".

He leaned forward and brushed Longshot's lips with his own, feeling the other man nodding against him and then return the kiss.

Gambit and Longshot explored in other in their pocket universe of two for a moment longer, hands mapping each other's geography with erotic cartography over abdominal hills, muscular mesa, then Gambit stepped back a pace, let his cut offs fall around his ankles, and stepped out of them.

Longshot was simultaneously aroused and amused by what he saw- a strange sensation in the back of his throat, it felt akin to hiccups.

"You have crawfish patterned boxer shorts?"

Remy looked down his body to his underwear, which sported both an impressive tenting at the front, and red and pink crawfish forming conga lines and jumping- somewhat overzealously- into large pots of boiling water.

Remy looked up at Longshot with a lecherous cant to his lips. "You tink de seafood's good, mon ami, wait 'til you try Gambit's gumbo."

The two mutants leapt for each other at the same moment, meeting at the mouth, belly and crotch with an audible slap of flesh on flesh which gave way to the sibilant, somehow reptilian sound that only male skin rubbing against its own can produce, as taught muscle and coarse body hair slide together.

Longshot divested himself of clothing so fast it could have been mistaken for his mutant power. Remy, for his part, slid the boxers down his calves and stepped out of them; bunching them in his hand, he kinetically charged the silk shorts and sent them sailing out into the night sky, were they exploded in a volley of rose-coloured flames like improbable fireworks.

Now clothed in nothing but his huge grin, bright and curling hugely at the corners like burning crepe paper, Remy reached with both hands and drew Longshot flush against him in a naked embrace. Mouths met quickly, hands resumed their former mapping exercise, though this time they ventured down uncharted regions. Here there definitely be dragons and both men felt their heat.

Longshot moaned gutteraly and bore the older Cajun to the wooden deck of the roof garden. The cheerfully ferocious tourist flypaper of the Florida sun had all but killed every plant up here, and the sweaty, writhing mobius strip of their joined bodies was soon speckled with sawdust, potting mulch and dead, brittle leaves.

The two mutants minded not at all. They rolled over and over, the beast with two backs undergoing radical Callisto evolution. They gasped at the first chopping thrust of cock against cock, revelled at the sandpaper rasp of thickly haired calves locking around smooth buttocks.

Remy grinned and rolled again so that Longshot was beneath him, his oiled, meaty cock prepped and waiting at the younger mutant's entrance. Propping himself up on joyously abraded elbows, he grinned down at his mate.

"Mon Die, mon ami beau" he purred. "Jus' how many times dis night you plannin' to get lucky?"

Longshot's answering laugh, then a drawn out gasp, were the only coherent noises made after that, for a long time.

On the threshold of clammy and restless sleep, Warren was jerked awake, for the third time in an hour, by one of his wings twitching spasmodically and whacking him in the face.

Rolling his eyes and cursing the inventor of the sofa bed to a particularly boxy, poorly-upholstered and awkwardly angled hell, Warren once again leaned forward on the sofa, pulled his trapped right wing out from beneath his sweat slick lower back, pushed the left one out of his face and flexed his shoulders to fold them in their rest position, before rolling onto his stomach- the only position where he need mot worry about damaging wing bones or flight feathers- and attempted to chase down ever-elusive sleep again.

Ten minutes later, after clammy tossings and turnings, of having to adjust his position again, this time to take the weight off his cock, and staring at the chipped wall two feet from his head in the vain hope that his mind would switch off, Warren resigned himself to a sleepless night.

Sitting up, he scratched idly at the hairless expanse of his chest, wondering how to pass the... (quick glance at wristwatch)... five hours to Dawn. A glowing comet tail of white flame and a cluster of terror stricken bats fleeing past the window told him that Sam was still up and about too- a gentlemanly but lecherous inner voice (that sounded bizzarely like Roddy McDowall) suggested that he go to the window, throw open the shade, his wings and his legs, and while away the hours til dawn with his own private Cannonball run.

Instead, he decided to look in on the kids. He stood up and flapped his wings, hovering a few feet in the air whilst he maneuvered his tired legs into boxers and jeans. Landing again, he decided to forgo a shirt, as he was around people who knew him, and the building had wide rooms and high-vaulted ceilings.

Walking down the short hall, he opened the door quietly, in deference to any kids who might actually be asleep.

No such luck.

Piotr was in the middle of teaching Betsy, Artie and Leech several colourful Russian profanities (colourful Russian pictographs, in Artie's case). Skin was grossing out Alison Blair by stretching his lips over his knees. Shiro, pale and shaking and being consoled by Sunspot, had clearly just awoken from that recurring nightmare about President Bush dropping the bomb again. Sean was asleep, but the ultra-high frequency snores he emitted had every dog in the neighbourhood howling- which of course had triggered the change to beast-form in Sasquatch, who was crouched in front of the window and howling back. And Kitty...

Actually, Warren had no idea what the excitable Ms Pryde was up to, but she was staring at the ceiling with wide eyes and a deep blush, giggling occasionally. Warren followed her gaze, but saw nothing noteworthy. She could be looking through the ceiling, he supposed, but surely the roof-garden wasn't that enthralling.

Warren considered clapping his hands to gain their attention, but dismissed it as being too school-principalish. He settled on unfolding his great wings, then re-folding them again. The sussurus of noise was much softer, but still woke up Sean with a yelp that cracked two windows, and startled Kitty into falling through her bed.

"Okay ki... people, settle, okay?" He smiled, remembering just in time never to address young teens on the cusp of twenty as 'kids'. "Why aren't you all sleeping?"

"Are you kidding, Deadboy?" this from Betsy, one of the numerous students who were avid Buffy fans and ribbed Warren mercilessly about his chosen team-name. "...It's so hot in here we may as well be back at the mansion rooming with the Pyro- Braniac. That's is Drake'd learn how to share..."

That comment earned her a sharp glance from Warren, and some of the other kids too, he was pleased to notice.

"Miss Braddock, whatever John and Bobby do together in their recreational time and their own rooms in none of your business. And it's not that hot in here. Just open a window."

"We can't, Mr Worthington" replied Kitty, pointedly not looking at the ceiling. "They're so warped into their frames not even Piotr can budge them."

"Couldn't you stay a while, Sir?" Alison. One of the kids with a rather blatant crush on him. One of the female ones, anyway. "...You make such a lovely breeze..." She indicated his huge wings, gaining a good hard perv at his chest in the process.

"I didn't join the team to be a walking air-conditioner, Dazzler" he said, making sure she caught the formal use of her team-name.

At her pout, and the sweaty faces of the other kids, he softened. Well, if it helped them get to sleep... and it did make him feel useful...

Warren sat down in a chair, faced it towards the bunks, arched his wings out and began slowly flapping them, cooling the kids down as they settled themselves back into their bedclothes. After several minutes they were all out, and the gentle , rhythmic "Phwooom.... Phwap" of his wings was beginning to lull him off as well-

[ANGEL]

almost asleep, fair lashes coming together as his eyes slid shu-

[ANGEL!]

He jolted awake. "Whuh?"

[ANGEL WAKE UP THERE'S TROUBLE]

Warren got up quietly and stepped out into the hall so as not to wake the kids.

[VERY CONSIDERATE OF YOU, ANGEL]

Warren's worried voice echoed hollowly in the empty passageway. "What's wrong, Charles?"

[PARISHIONERS AT NIGHTCRAWLER'S CHURCH FOUND HIM DISORIENTATED AND BLEEDING SEVERELY WHEN THEY ARRIVED FOR A CHRISTENING THIS MORNING]

Oh no. "'Humanity Priority' again?"

[NO. THIS WASN'T THE WORK OF ANTI-MUTANT GROUPS. WHEN THE PEOPLE TRIED TO HELP HIM, NIGHTCRAWLER WENT BERSERK. GRABBED THE BABY TO BE CHRISTENED AND TRIED TO DROWN IT IN THE FONT]

"Jesus..."

[QUITE. THE BABY'S FATHER WENT TO THE GIRL'S DEFENSE AND KURT BIT HIM. WITH RUDIMENTARY MOUTHS THAT HAD FORMED IN THE PALMS OF HIS HANDS]

A pause.

[I TAKE IT FROM THE VOLLEY OF PROFANITIES YOU JUST THOUGHT OF YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, ANGEL]

"Yeah, I do. Charles? Is Kurt...?"

[THE CHANGE WASN'T PERMANENT, THANK GOD. JEAN MANAGED TO FLUSH THE TERATOTOXINS FROM HIS SYSTEM. HE'LL BE BACK ON HIS FEET- OR SHOULD I SAY HANDS AND FEET?- WITHIN A MONTH. BUT ANGEL-]

"... You think that Hell's organ donor will be making his way here?"

[IT'S... POSSIBLE. HE'S DRAWN TO THE SUFFERING OF MUTANTS, REMEMBER, AND MANY OF OUR KIDS COME FROM BROKEN HOMES]

"I'll keep alert"

[THANKYOU, ANGEL. I'VE ALREADY WARNED THE OTHER SAFEHOUSES. CHAMBER IS ON HIS WAY TO AL OF YOU, JUST TO BE SAFE]

"Thankyou, Charles."

[NOT AT ALL. OH, AND ANGEL, COULD YOU HAVE WOLVERINE CALL ROGUE? SHE HAD A NIGHTMARE HE WAS HURT, AND WANTS TO KNOW THAT HE AND CYCLOPS ARE ALRIGHT]

"Sure. I'll tell them to call her when they get here."

[...THEY AREN'T THERE YET?]

"No, I thought~"

[THEY SHOULD BE TH... Y NOW.... RIVED THE ....EFORE YESTERD.....AN'T DETECT ANY TR... F THEM....OMETHI.... MA HAV....PENED TO....ELP THE....NGEL...]

"Professor? Professor, I can't hear you! Professor?"

[....HUNGRY....]

".... Professor?"

[HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGR]

Warren jerked his head forward and the...noise, stopped.

"Oh, shit".

>From your position -clinging upside down with your copper stained, copper-cathetered claws sunk deep into the loamy, domey ceiling of the old gator pens/current lobby- you watch as the beautiful man with the wings and face of a seraph walks into the room and stops directly beneath you.

You could take him right now, simply by unclenching your claws and dropping from the sky like a vengeful harpy (you've got the face and the disposition), landing on him to deliver the displeasure of some dark and gibbering god.

No. Not this one.

Closing your eyes (and switching the respirator to Highest Filtration to purge the funk of old reptile flesh from your nose holes) you send out sly psychic filaments through the building; invisible whorls and eddies in a questioning current.

Twenty three of them.

The winged man forty feet below you.

Another flying man, with a different means of propulsion, sitting in a coconut palm outside, watching the stars and sharing a sandwich with some roosting bats.

Two men fucking, deep and messy, a frenzy of kisses, thrusts and howls, in a corner of the roof two floors up.

Seventeen children -some with memories burning bright on the fuel of adolescent terror, making you lick your tongue over what remains of your lips- in the room down the hall where the winged man came from.

Two women in a small medical room, one floor up, six doors down the corridor.

There.

You focus on that last one, drawn to... something. One of the women stands at a mirror and breaks ugly, vermiform growths of ivory from her thighs and ribs, cursing with each crack. The other sits too-upright on a small cot, rubbing her temples, trying to read a book

(Darwin's 'The Origin of Species')

and trying to stay awake, as she's having, as she calls it "One of her nights".

"Gotta ask Sarah to make me more coffee daren't sleep here God No badplacebadvibesbadbloodbaddreams..."

YES! YESYESYESYESYES!

You have her. She's locked. You could port right into the cot beside her if you wished

("Surrrprise!" in your Vader-voice)

without effort, but you like the feel of your Freddy Krueger fingers digging into the soursnakesmell concrete roof, like being upside down, inverted in the face of thine enemies.

Gripping your fingers and toes deeper into the sweaty concrete, you crawl across the ceiling towards the dreamer's room, idly humming to yourself the theme from David Cronenberg's remake of THE FLY.

Help Me.

Angel had his mobile phone held to one shapely ear. He had to use a tiny one, so it would fit in the waistband of his lycra shorts and he wouldn't be tempted to fish it out and use it whilst flying.

("Yes officer... I was talking to my broker and... well, you know how quiet the Concorde's engines are...")

Sam Guthrie is perched in the tree outside, reporting to Warren the results of his latest fly by over the building.

"... Nothin' 'tall Ainge; No hideous mutant monsters in sight... 'Cept maybe Sasquatch of course! HawHawHee!"

Smiling despite himself, soothed by the Appalachian mountains rising geographically majestic in Sam's twang, Warren lifts the phone again.

"Keep looking though, okay Sam? I'm sure I heard him when I spoke with Charles..."

"...Right y'are Ainge; Y'sure you heard him though? Maybe you just caught feedback from old Chu... Fuck me!"

"...Sam?!"

"Thought I saw sumpin. First Aid room."

"That's where Dani's staying. And Sarah's sitting up with her."

"..Dani? Oh right, the Dream Catcher. Well, seems quiet now. Mebbe I was wrong."

"It's clear?"

"I'm at the winder right now. Dani's sleepin, looks like, N' Sarah's picking them thar bones off'n her face. Big purple ones!"

"...Purple?"

"Yessir; big, bright purple... looks almost like meta... Ainge? Ya there?"

But Warren has already dropped the phone, and only the ghosts of alligators hear.

You feed. Feed and feed and feed. You glut yourself on this woman, unspooling the twin chemical threads of her DNA and spinning it through your own; a parasitic seamstress. You take it all- chromosomes, ribosomes, mitochondria, mitosis cells

(you let her keep her meiosis cells though- you've no wish to become pregnant)

You had let Kurt live, just sipping his DNA, climbing only the first rung of his genetic ladder. This woman though, you empty of everything.

Her age

(41)

her race

(part Pawnee, part Sioux)

her shoe size

(8 1/2D)

her unspoken, unrequited love for the other woman

(Sarah)

(Marrow)

whom you'd pummeled unconscious and locked in a cupboard, next to a med kit she can use when she wakes up

(you'd been in a good mood, then)

You feel the woman's identity breaking down, dissolving, as everything that makes her Dani Moonstar becomes you instead.

She weeps tears of Adenine, Thiamine and Cynine as she dies. You lick them from her cheeks.

Your hands throb.

Warren didn't even try to run upstairs. He flew up the stairwell and down the corridor to the Med Room.

As he landed by the door, Warren saw Cannonball flying in through a window nearby, without bothering to open it. His upper body shattered the glass, his lower body's heat evaporating the shards before they could cut anyone.

"Ainge" he gasped. "You 'kay?"

Warren was regarding the closed Med Room door with the superstitious awe of a child watching a closet that may contain the Boogeyman.

"...Angel?"

"-He's in there, Sam, feeding. He... takes things from you when he feeds. Skills... strengths."

"Okay, so we bust in there and give him a few more reasons to use that life support."

"..Wait!" At any other time, Warren would have relished the feel of Sam's mine-hewn shoulder muscles twitching beneath his hand. "Dani... She can pluck dreams from people's heads, from their bedding, give the dreams corporeal form..."

Warren indicated the door. "The kids, you see? We've been taking turns minding the kids here"

Warren's hand tightened on Sam's shoulder.

"Sam... last week... Logan slept in this room..."

Sam gasped.

"Oh, shi-"

-The door exploded open.

The room was full of Ethanol.

Not just soaked into the floor, or dripping from the ends of the many sharp implements hanging from the walls- full of it. The acrid, fume-fogging medical preservative flooded the room, filling it completely with no air pockets at all, like a bizarre scientific swimming pool.

Or an enormous specimen jar.

Despite this, Warren had no trouble breathing, despite the fact he was chained upside down and sewn into a straitjacket.. Nor did the burning, hospital-stink of the ethanol hurt his eyes- he could quite clearly see the room about him, Sam Guthrie some seven feet away, similarly straitjacketed- and Dani Moonstar's corpse, nondescript, blank of all features, racial and gender characteristics, save her long black hair floating in an inky nimbus about her as she drifted in the fluid.

And, of course, he could see the five green-smocked surgeons walking leisurely towards him through the ethanol, bone saws and reticulators whirring as they made their way leisurely over to him, adamantium bones and joints being wheeled along on a tray beside them, ready for implantation.

Warren thrashed about in the straitjacket, trying to will his claws to come out. They didn't, of course. This may have been Wolverine's nightmare, but he was not Wolverine. Even if he had been, he couldn't have used the claws anyway- the Surgeons hadn't implanted them yet.

They're closer now, their green scrubs floating gently in the current as they raise their scalpels, their skull-keys, their ribcage separators.

Even if the straitjacket he was wearing didn't have two diamond-shaped holes cut out at the shoulder blades- SILENCE OF THE LAMBS skin suit in reverse- Warren would still have known what these nightmare doctors wanted to amputate from him. He's been terrified of losing them again for years, ever since the tyrannical Apocalypse had grafted new ones to him, given him back the sky again.

He flexed them, flapped them, but they would not move. Every feather was numb, be it by the ethanol or the dream-ether, he doesn't know.

The doctors close in now- half of them continue towards him, half move over to stand before Sam. They're going to do both men in front of each other, so they can watch each other's pain.

Vox Populi vivisection. If this was Reality TV, it'd rate its ass off.

One of the surgeons though, the sixth, seems content to hang back, to float in the fluid and just watch.

Warren is not at all surprised to see gray, scarified flesh beneath the green scrubs, purple tubing where the face mask should be, a fanged mouth grinning at him from the hand raised in a mocking wave.

As the surgeons reach for him, eyes sharper than their instruments, he sees that Sam is struggling not to use his powers. The white-hot plasma, in all this ethanol...

Sam would survive of course. But Warren would go up like the Phoenix on its pyre, ressurection not included.

Catching the other man's eye, Warren tries to signal for him to use the power anyway, to escape. Sam shakes his head in defiant no.

One of the doctors takes a wing

(all his muscles freeze in terror as the blade strokes the flight feathers)

and holds it steady for his colleague with the vertebrae shears. Across the way, another is marking Sam's forehead in several areas with a black indelible marker, whilst the other picks up a bone drill from his tray.

A strange insectile whrrr burrs through the room, and not from the drill. Almost as soon as Warren -and the surgeons- have craned their necks to look, the sound sputters and dies.

-And two playing cards, jokers grinning like the fools they are- have lodged in the corners of two doctors' face masks.

Both dream doctors turn hungry, void-eyes downward in a shark-roll towards the jesters lodged beneath their noses.

The cards begin to glow pink, like radioactive bubblegum.

The surgeons lift long, slender fingers- the hands of a piano or torture prodigy, to their deep sea faces to remove the cards.

And, with nothing more than a quiet

(WHUUUF!)

both jokers explode, taking the two surgeons' heads off above their tongues, redistributing the vivisected vivisectors into the ethanol about them, staining it a cloudy pink-black; ink from a haemmorhaging squid.

The two remaining nightmares

(and the third, the Doctor Who Isn't)

look about them for something to rend and kill.

More playing cards frisbee out of the amber dark.

One slides into the Gordian knot of chains binding Warren's feet and hands, the other into the thick of those restraining Sam.

They explode

(with notably less force than before)

and the men are freed.

Cannonball tears the remains of the Houdinied straitjacket from his Kentucky unfried body and vaults over to Warren, helping him unravel the heavy metal chains from delicate flight muscles.

Neither of the two are very surprised when leaping into their midst comes Gambit, grinning anew and cartwheeling around the huge room, flinging a whole deck of Gambler's Friends at the remaining nightmares like some deranged card shark.

Only this card shark bites.

One of the remaining surgeons is hit by a whole suit

(Aces and Eights- The Deadman's Hand, that Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he cashed in his chips)

and the creature howls through its mint green scrubs as the volley of two dimensional missiles reduces it to flotsam.

The second Doctor-thing has managed to wrap its boogey-brain around the concept of fleeing; unfortunately, it hasn't had time to master the concept before Gambit's hurled bolas -suitably kinetically charged of course- wrap around its stick legs and blow it to the Land of Honest Politicians, Sane Religious Leaders and other Forgotten Dreams.

Warren is opening his mouth to ask Remy LeBeau

a] how he's preventing the explosions from igniting the ethanol

and

b] why he's bare-assed naked

when he sees to answer to all of the above in the form of

c] Longshot

standing slightly behind Remy with both of his equally naked body's hands warped around the Cajun's ropey throwing arm and working their statistic-buggering mojo

(oops, bad choice of words- good thing he didn't say Mojo out loud)

So that explains the cards, and Warren's old enough to work out the logistics of Remy and Longshot emerging from upstairs (the Roof Garden) naked, flushed and together.

He makes a mental note to give Shadowcat detention.

With a shriek of rage, attention momentarily diverted by male flesh returns to their host, who has scaled a wall halfway and abandoned the surgical scrubs in favour of his usual apparel of rags, wounds and prosthetic lifeforce enhancers.

Gambit flings several cards in the deformed mutant's direction, but a mouth-palmed hand simply extends and flickers, and the cards morph into dozens of tiny faeries, with long-hooded robes and long brown hair shot through with white

Rogue?

that dance around his rotten-apple face and caramel-apple eyes, smile at the four men, then vanish.

Remy looks puzzled. Warren speaks, the ethanol tickling his throat like centipedes with their feet dipped in pepper.

"Dani's power... fuelling Logan's dreams..."

but the Cajun shakes his head, either not understanding or not believing the blonde youth, and either way showing a remarkable degree of affrontery for a naked guy.

A chuckling howl comes from the initimable Mr Saint-Croix as he discovers to his artificially augmented heart's delight that Logan wasn't the only dreamer dreaming dreams in this room. He waves elaborate patterns in the air with his hypnotically hideous hands.

Twelve gigantic alligators slide out of the old-reptile stinking walls, the Ghosts of Crocodilians past. They swim in lazy dream circles around the four men, scales shiny in the liquid gleam, eyes a burnt out zombie white from the ethanol.

And then, from behind them, comes a larger shadow.

Evidently, one of the gators that used to sleep here had a phenomenal imagination- it has dreamed of itself not as a gator but as an old relative.

One hundred and twenty two feet of Liopleurodon -an ancient marine reptile from the prepubescent Earth's primal Pacific- slips through the chemical waves, blue-striped and awesome. Twelve tonnes of reptilian rictus grin through the mouthful of foot long ivory sabres that serve it as teeth.

Longshot pulls Gambit into an embrace. It appears even he isn't confident of the odds

("You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em...")

and Cannonball and Angel surprise each other by taking each other's hands at the same moment.

High up on his wall, grinning, purple-masked Death gibbers and crows and leans forward for a better look.

And a hand - tiny and green and sticky with the candied clumsiness of childhood- reaches up and grabs one of Saint-Croix's, pulling Emplate into an Embrace.

And everything stops.

The limitless expanse is suddenly a small medroom again. The ethanol is gone, replaced by only air. Moonstar's blank, bowling-pin body crashes to a dry floor. The Liopleurodon devours all twelve of its smaller siblings in one bite before fading with a screech.

Longshot and Gambit. Angel and Cannonball. All turn as one to look.

Leech- the little Morlock boy, holds Emplate's strange fingers in his. Leech; green-skinned, sweet-natured, pals around with Artie, he of the pictograph persuasion.

Leech- who negates the powers of any mutant he touches.

You feel Moonstar's energies twitch and die in you, the Sandman's dust fusing into brittle, logic seared glass. Deprived of their power source, the Dreamscape and its Nightmares collapse into mere memories and fade, as all memory must.

The little green child holding your hand smiles at you, raising his free hand to wave.

You twitch your scarred mouth up to return the greeting, opening your other two lower mouths to make it a goodbye.

Nothing. Your hand-mouths are tightly closed, have taken a vow of silence and gone of a hunger strike.

No powers. No Skills. No strength. You can't even summon enough effort to hurl this smiling, emerald-hued... doldrums... away from you.

Wait. No energy?

Then the Feeding was undone.

Your voice sounds tinny and mechanical, even to you.

"Oh My Go-"

-With a roar, the wormhole appears directly beneath your feet, gibbering in triumph with a thousand voices as it gulps you down its astral gullet. You have no strength to fight it, can do nothing but watch the portal take you, can do nothing but look at the dark shapes waiting at the end of the void, the bright, glittering metal things they hold in their patient hands.

No, you're wrong. There is something you can do.

And, as the four mutants you would have fed off

(if it weren't for this lousy kid)

watch you vanish, you do it.

You scream.

>From three places.

"...Logan... Oh...God...Logan!...Jesus, Lo..."

Scott tightens his embrace around the older man's shoulders, pulling the shirt up and off the muscular, hairy body in his arms in a frenzy of emotion.

"...Jesus, Logan!..." Scott cries out again as the extent of the Canadian's injuries become apparent. "Lo... don't you fucking dare die on me..."

The sound of pitch bubbles bursting on the boiled skin of the LaBrea Tarpits is Logan's answering chuckle. His teeth seem very white in contrast to the raw eggplant colour of the flesh still hanging from his face.

"Won't...die...Slim..." gurgles the fried scarecrow that is Scott's best friend. "...You still... owe me... a shag..."

Logan coughs again as the effort of speech scours his seared lungs. Bloody froth bubbles at the corner of his mouth; aborted frogspawn.

Though Scott is wearing his emergency contacts

(He was still amazed that the fucking thing had eaten his visor, like some freakish trash compactor breaking a diet)

tears nethertheless form in his eyes, vapourizing with a soft salt sting as they touch the hot quartz. He knew that Logan could recover from the fourth degree burns, if only he was given some time to regenera...

Logan's fingers are trailing gentle tributaries in the tear tracks down Scott's rarely seen, sharply-hewn cheekbones. "Skkk... Sccckkk..."

He coughs, tries again. "Scott.... back... they're coming back..."

A scuttling-scarping sound, like a crab crawling over a reef, but too artificial, too large to be mistaken for one, crashing through the bushes about them. Scott puts his cheek against Logan's face, feeling the warmth of a fire-blackened adamantium jawbone against his chin.

"...Back..."

And they were.

It had all gone so wrong so fast.

Scott and Logan had easily found their way to the tiny outback town of Fenn (Population: 356) by the simple virtue that it was the only artificially constructed building around the surrounding miles of bush and harsh, scrub-addled desert.

The town's sparse headcount could be laid at the feet of three things:

The Heat (45 degrees Celsius was considered "mild")

Lack of Water (Aboriginal people in the town had access to plenty of drinking water, in the form of dozens of Cyclorana- small burrowing frogs that stored many litres of water in their bladders- which the Aboriginal people dug up and drank from before returning them to their holes; Fenn's European community treats Aboriginals with the same cold disdain as most of White Australia, and remains ignorant. And thirsty)

and, of course Proximity to Witenoom, once a thriving asbestos mining town, now contaminated, evacuated and wiped from most maps- West Australia's very own Roswell.

Once they'd found the town, it hadn't taken the two mutants doings to find 'Pigboy', the 3-faced boy they'd come to help.

They found his home first, a modest shack that had all its windows smashed by bricks and bottles and sporting graffiti all over the walls.

(MUTIES FRY IN HELL)

(PIGBOY SUX THREE DICKS AT WUNCE FUKEN FAGIT FREEK)

(HEART THE MUTANT H8 THE MUTATION)

-But a white haired old woman, temples and teeth yellow with nicotine

(who spat on the soil when told whom they searched for, and started to mouth the words "Mutie Lovers" until she caught the misanthropic glitter in the eyes of The Wolverine)

told them Pigboy was staying in an Apiary on the town's outskirts.

Logan and Scott had trudged over, being followed partway by three dingoes that the community had apparently adopted, and finally met up with Dave 'PigBoy' Bunton, sitting on the porch of a beautiful house and eating cereal, hot dogs, and sticky date pudding

(one dish per face)

whilst watching a youngish Aboriginal woman tending the dozens of beehives in her huge and fragrant garden.

The air hummed.

Though her face was at first hard as the Ironbarks growing at the rear of the yard as the two strangers asked after PigBoy, once they explained about Professor Xavier and his School, the woman, Barbara Honeybees, broke open the waxy comb of her face to reveal the warm and golden smile within, whilst all around her the sky sang with the labours of her thousand children.

They'd set off all three for the X-Plane around Noon, after Barbara Honeybees had insisted they stay for a jug or three of mead, some Yellowbox flower honey biscuits and had given Logan a jam jar full of special honey that would "drive him wilder than a Drone on a nuptual flight". As she'd said this, she'd winked broadly at a deeply blushing Scott.

They'd walked through the scrub towards the landing site. Logan had asked PigBoy if he had any special powers, but the answer had been none, save not needing a mask on Halloween.

His self-depreciation aside, it had been the youth's six ears that had heard them first.

Scott had been too busy trying not to visualise Logan wearing nothing but a sticky coat of honey.

Logan was on the look out for any snap-happy lizards waiting to rumble.

So PigBoy heard them first.

When the first of the things had breached the scrub, Logan thought he was having some kind of Magneto Mnemonic flashback.

He'd seen Sentinels, those muticidal automatons so bent on wiping out his species, before of course; had even taken some apart under his claws.

These ones though, they were... different.

Horribly different.

The old-school Sentinels had appeared mostly human. Huge, mechanical, even bio-mechanical sometimes, but humna.

The only part of the NeoSentinels that in any way recalled the anthropoid was the torso, deep chested and rippled with abdominal muscles -albeit armoured chests and ribs that presented too long, too many and far too sharp.

A whirligig mardi gras of surreal, oddly-jointed figures paraded in the bright air as they flashed from bush to bush, gaining new cover with unnaturally rapid skittering jumps.

Bulbous pelvic girdles, dozens of multi-segmented legs terminating in whirring knives, saws, pincers. Crushing gears, propellors, mallets. Razor-studded flails in lieu of head, body and in one case, pubic hair. Jointed mechanical stings bearing huge bulbs full of napalm and venom. Fingers, arms or cocks ending in huge syringes, swimming with poisons and embolism-triggering air. Machine guns. Flamethrowers. Flensing spears. Razore wire nets. Laser rifles.

The mad rush of sharp angled, articulated pain hopping from tree to tree shone in the ferocious daylight, reflecting the glare back at the three mutants in painful squares of gleaming, eye-stabbing bright.

Brief glimpses of shining, blue-black metal, gone before Logan can find something to rend, before Scott, hands to temples, can draw a bead.

The shining afterimage of sunlit metal mocked Logan's vision.

Not just metal, you see- Adamantium. The NeoSentinels chided Logan with a dark and eerie kinship.

Scott had swung his head back and forth, seeking a target.

"...Lo?... Do you-"

The Canadian cut him off with a rasied hand, and a terse, "Not now, Scott."

He immediately gentled the hurt with a quick smile at the younger man, but the use of the first name, rather than the affectionate "Bub", playful "Cyke", or flirtatious "Slim" was telling of his anxious state.

Nostrils had twitched violently in the rugged face as he scented the air. He could smell them, their... wrongness... but could pinpoint nothing.

PigBoy's ears again prove to not be silk purses. "There. Behind the banksias."

"Bub?"

A sigh from the frightened boy, delivered in triplicate. "The boxy trees with the flowers like lanterns. There." He pointed.

Scott had risked a quick glance over to the boy. "David? Can you tell how many?"

"...Twelve..."

Logan cursed low and deep, making up in imagery what he lacked in volume. His claws unsheathed of their own accord, sliding in and out of his knuckles like the bobbing sting of a wasp on the alert.

Scott crossed over to his friend, put a gentling hand on twitching shoulder. "Lo... it's okay". His free hand went to the trigger on his ear cup. "I can just fry that whole section of scru-"

The bushes flew apart, and the NeoSentinels poured forth.

-Logan had thrown his head back on corded neck and howled at the heat-haze sky like a mad thing as the Wolverine flowed into his strange bones, took control of his burgeoning muscles. He threw his arms wide in unmistakable invitation.

An invitation three of the NeoSentinels wasted no time accepting.

Wolverine simultaneously ducked and backtracked as a huge blue-black nightmare with the head and raptorial forelegs of a gigantic preying mantis slashed at him. Two quick slashes of his own in answer, and the mantis head toppled from the neck to the dusty red earth, neatly sheared from the body.

(and unlike the real mantis, Wolverine hadn't even had to mate with it first)

No sooner had the first creature fallen to the ochre earth, pumping arcane fuel from its fountaining neck, when the other two that had caught Logan's scent (and him their fancy) vaulted towards him.

One, a cloaked Grim Reaper-esque figure with huge, anvil-shaped mallets for hands, leapt at him with an oddly beautiful, balletic shuffle-hop, like an exotic but crippled bird.

The second, rolling towards him across the scree, was a huge starfish shape studded all over the body and each of the five "arms" with metre-long bayonet blades. In the centre of the hub gnashed a maw -of sorts- a churning thresher of scythes.

Hammer-hands swung a blow with both fists. Wolverine dodged the first hand and sliced down, severing it from the screeching thing's arm. Scalding steam poured from the wound, blinding Wolverine to the creature's second swipe with its other arm. It backhanded Logan right across the clearing, breaking his lower jaw, nose, cheek and the orbit of his right eye

(the injuries healed in seconds)

and propelling him through the air-

-straight into the arms of the Razored Starfish Sentinel.

Wolverine screamed in agony as dozens of metre long spines punched through his body. At the hub of the legs, the creature's face

(inches away from Wolverine's own)

gibbered and howled in triumph and wiggled the spines, twisting them deeper into the mutant's body.

Wolverine roared again as his body tried to heal around the knives, then again as they dug in anew. He thrashed on the creature's pincushion body like a gaffed fish, trying to pull himself up and off the cruel metal.

-Wolverine felt a flash of intense heat near his head that gave his faceflesh that tightening, crawly, ageing feeling of standing too close to a large campfire. He felt the hairs of his sideburns twitch in the convection currents.

All the spines puncturing him withdrew into the NeoSentinels body cavity. It dropped it and fell to the ground, curling its legs in on its centre like a dying spider.

Cyclops, standing over him. No, not standing- bending down and helping him to his feet, running those strong, elegant-fingered hands over his body, checking the damage.

The wounds healed beneath Cyclops fingers as he explored Wolverine's body, so swiftly that an outside observer of the Christian persuasion would think that the younger man was healing the older with his touch.

"Sorry I took so long" said Cyclops. "Couldn't just shoot at its arms- they would've torn you apart in reflex if I'd blasted them. Had to wait until the thing turned around, could get a clear shot at its mouppphffff...."

The rest of Cyclops' words had been lost to all but Wolverine's tonsils as the Candian had taken Cyclops in his arms and pulled him into a deep and luxurious kiss.

Though completely into the moment- he'd wanted this since first clapping eyes on the kid's ridiculous beauty in Wheels' office, and the feeling had only increased when he'd gotten to know the man behind the cheekbones-

Logan's peripheral vision- as peripheral as super-enhanced optic nerves on a scientifically -tinkered with mutant can become, anyway- registered eight twisted hulks of broken, reflexively twitching blackened slag dotting the clearing about them, recipients of heat so intense it had melted metal like candlewax.

Despite himself, Logan broke the kiss, nibbled Scott's delectably swollen lips once or twice and rested his forehead against Scott's. Logan tightened his embrace, breathing great gulps of passion air into the other man's mouth, as if sharing their lips wasn't enough and they'd decided to share inert gases as well.

"I assume you did this, not PigBoy..."

Logan was taken by surprise as Scott jerked his head back from Logan's

(their sweaty flesh making a sucky "sccccchhhhhkkk" as it parted)

and looked at him with as much incredulity as a man with a partly obscured face can muster.

Logan remained surprised a moment longer, then put his words together with the place his hand had been resting

(cupping the hard yet deliciously pliable bulge in his field leader's pants)

and blushed a shade redder than Scott's visor.

"No, Scott, I..." he pulled Scott back into his arms, kissing mouth, nose, the cold-but-warm metal of the visor. "I didn't mean this..." he caressed Scott's crotch again and the other man sagged in his arms despite himself. "..I meant this..." gently tilting Scott's jaw towards the freshly baked NeoSentinels all in a row.

"Oh..." Scott looked properly contrite over the wrong conclusion he had jumped to for a token second the broke into a broad grin which Logan, greatly relieved, soon mirrored. Scott leaned in close to the Canadian and did something unprintable to the seat of his uniform. The older man groaned and almost came in his suit.

"Yeah..." Scott smiled, his mouth pressing to Logan's every other word. "I managed to get 'em all... David just stayed... out of the way... Kinda like now..."

Logan moved his lips from the salty cleft of Scott's throat and shuffled slightly so he could see around him.

(and if his mouth consequently slid up to the juncture of Scott's ear, tongue sandpapering an "Uoooooh" from the visored man, well these things happen)

-and saw PigBoy sitting on a mossy fallen log, idly pitching grass seeds into the wind and pointedly not looking at the two men making out nearby.

Logan scoffed against Scott's flesh

(cue another gasp)

"Don't tell me hat-trick head has a problem with fags."

Scott shushed him. "He's from an isolated rural community, Lo; he doesn't know any better."

"-Well, bein' hounded day n' night fer bein' the mutie equivalent of Cereberus shoulda smartened him up real quick!"

Eyes hard, Logan watched until he was sure that at least one of the six eyes was on him, then kissed Scott full on the mouth as deeply, wetly and noisily as he could, grabbing a double handful of Cyclops bubblebutt whilst he was at it.

When Pigboy's faces crunched in a look of disgust, outrage and offense, Logan flipped him the Finger from behind Scott's uniformed back.

Looking as he was in the kid's direction, Logan caught the movement from the bushes first.

Whuh?

Maybe an animal...

I killed two, Scott fried eight and the one that stuck me

...Maybe not.

David? How many?

And Logan

...Twelve

didn't hear PigBoy's cry of alarm as the boy stood in a rush, tangled his feet and went down again,

fuckthere'ssonemoreoneleftwemissed

didn't hear the ululating screech of agony and rage from the blistered, bubbling ruin of the NeoSentinel that had crawled off to die of its wounds but hadn't, as it rose from the leaf litter. Adamantium carapace burning in places, dripping molten in others, it came on still; the blazing, idiot juggernaut of a darkly raving god

Holy fucking crap is that a jet engine in its mouth?

didn't hear Scott's question as his friend noticed Wolverine's tension, saw his eyes focused beyond him and half-turned to look...

Wolverine heard none of this. Indeed, he heard nothing. All his senses had tunnelvisioned down to the sight of the moribund cyborg -huge and arachnoform- bring the honest-to-goodness jet fighter rocket engine in its maw up and forward, locking on Scott's unprotected back...

A magnetic pulse from a dish on the thing's head set Wolverine's teeth on edge against an oily tang, ripped the visor completely free of Scott's face and over to the NeoSentinel, which immolated the optics in the white-hot mouth at exactly the same moment that Logan hurled Scott to the ground, hurled himself on top of him...

-Though Scott was wearing the emergency contacts, he'd still had them a short enough time to still close his eyes reflexively tight as the visor was snatched away.

Blind, he fell to the rough, dry grass and let out a grunting woof of air as Logan's metal-laced body landed on top of him, keeping him flush with the earth.

Blind, he felt an immense, crackling tsunami of flame cook the air as it roiled over his head, a hot wind crashing about them like sea foam.

Logan's hands, wrapped around Scott's shoulders, suddenly twitched spastically and went limp.

Oh fuck, no...

Scott groped in the soil around him, unmindful of the cyborg crashing moribund in front of him, twitching razor-legs rending the soil beneath it as it died, as though it hoped to bury itself in death,

Scott's hands found Logan's torso, his hands moving over rich, burnished leather. He reached up, stroked Logan's face.

And Logan's face came off in his hand.

Scott fainted.

Which led to now. Scott, wet-faced and cradling Logan in his lap.Logan, flesh seared all but off the bone from the mid-chest up. PigBoy, looking down at the two men who are obviously together, with a mixture of discomfort and fascination.

And all around them, sly snicking sounds from the umber undergrowth as more Neosentinels unhurriedly hunt them down.

Somewhere in the not-nearly-enough-distance, a dry crack rips at the air, the kind of sound a library book might make as it died. A tree- broken and tossed aside and underfoot by a huge and hunting weight. PigBoy flinches, flinches and gasps.

Logan lifts his head from Scott's lap, turns fried egg eyes to where he remembered the youth was standing. "Bub? D'ya know how many are out there this time?"

PigBoy's multiple glance slides away, making him look like a guilty spider. "You won't like it, Mister."

"...Kid..."

(Sigh sigh sigh) "...Sixteen, maybe more."

Another crack, closer. The death yip of some hapless marsupial.

Logan turns eyes now sighted again and their normal honeyed leather-colour onto Scott. "Okay, Slim.... You know what I'm gonna say..."

Scott has started shaking his head before the sentence is even complete. "I'm not leaving you."

Logan squeezes a smile through ribboned lips, points to his chest, which has healed from a ragged fourth degree burn to new, slightly pink skin and has begun sprouting thick hair again, albeit in a different follicular pattern.

"C'mon, Slim~ I'm healin'! This little sunburn'll be gone in no time. Yer should go; I'll catch up when I'm mobile."

"...Those Sentinels or whatever the fuck they think they are will be here in less than five minutes, and you now it" Scott counters, defiant "I'm staying put."

-Scott's face softens, gentling despite the blazing red irises, and he takes one of Logan's hands between both of his. "Please Lo; don't make me leave. I can't lose you... don't ask me..."

Logan strokes a gentle finger over the other man's lips. "Stubborn prick" he murmurs, without heat. "It's okay, Scott...Shhhh" Stroking soft chestnut hair now "....Ssssh, Scott; yer stay, then."

Scott lets himself be pulled into Logan's gravity, burying his face in the deep chest, nose tickled by the hamburgery smell of burnt leather, eyelashes by crisp Logan body hair.

"...God, Slim..."

PigBoy has stopped scanning the trees and is deigning to look at them again.

"-You two been an item long?"

Scott looks up, slightly puzzled by the bluntness and timing of the question, but answers anyway. "We've known each other for a few years; been close... a bit less. We're not a couple, though."

Logan grunts amusement "Not official, anyhow."

Both Scott and PigBoy respond together. "Huh?"

Another rasped chuckle, though the rasp is less pronounced. The skin at the throat has healed, the larynx cracked back into position. The jaw glistens as skin cells reach out to each other with neotenal fingers over a bridge of molecular metal.

C'mon Lo, that's it... Heal for me...

"-Jeez, Slim, yer should listen ter the kids outside the class, sometime. They've practically got the two of us pickin' out furniture and china patterns."

"-What?!"

"Yup. Marie reckons that in the gossip stakes we're jus' behind Drake, n'only because they can hear what's goin in in Frosty's room. An' Warren, of course. You walk round blond n' built n'wearing nothin but a pair a lycra shorts, yer askin fer a label."

PigBoy's triple face boasts an unreadable expression. "So. This...Mutant High; the others are okay with you two being fa- gay?"

The Wolverine paces warily behind warm Logan eyes. "I ain't exactly GLAAD's man of the year, but I hold me own, bub." He pauses for a moment, thinking, the growls. "Though I'd like to see 'em stop me from marchin on St Patrick's Day... Nah, it's Slim 'ere who has the tougher time of it, eh Scott?" A brief snort. "What with the fiance n'all..."

-Only those who knew the Canadian intimately would have picked up the quick double lightning flash of worry and guilt across those dark eyes.

Scott catches it. Sitting up, he moves slightly away from the older man, but doesn't let go of his hand, indeed, the gentle pressure is increased. "Piss me off all you want, Lo. I'm not going to storm off and leave you."

Damn... noble bub; still, it was worth a shot...

Scott's red gaze has settled on the middle distance. "Besides, Jean and I... I don't think you need worry about whose side of the church to sit on, Logan."

One of Wolverine's eyebrows quirks skyward. "...Bub?"

Scott still stares intently at nothing.

"...Scott?" Gentler.

"-Jean and I aren't just having trouble. We're not together any more."

The Wolverine is chased off into Logan's backbrain with a gasp. "What?!" Logan's free hand floats near Scott's shoulder, unsure whether or not to touch "...Why?"

Scott's eyes return from nowhere, meet Logan's. Shocked brown meets calm, red-covered blue. Put together their gazes would be the muddy rust of old blood, long-ago pain.

"We broke up. We broke up because I told her I didn't love her."

The red gaze holds, but the hand on Logan's trembles, slightly. "...Because I told her I was in love with you, Lo."

"Scott?! Je- Jesus, Scott! I... I..."

-If something bent on carnage and chaos can be said to be a welcome distraction, then the enormous blue-black collossus that is the NeoSentinel smashing its way into the clearing now, might be called such a thing.

The machine looks down at the prey. Prey Item #1 is a juvenile, sporting a serious word to its internal components that it seems to be keeping from the others. Prey Item #2 was reported as badly burned by Hunter Unit Gamma, since deleted, but the NeoSentinel's scanners show no trace of damage, save a slight blistering around the forehead and scalp that is healing at a metabolic rate not possible for the species. The NeoSentinel takes that particular scanner offline until a diagnostic for possible faults can be made later.

Prey Item #3 is whole and unmarred.

Killing circuitry is fired up and brought online. Weapons systems are activated. The NeoSentinel rears back and roars as it engages the execution protocols that some wag at the Cybernetics Panel that had greenlighted NeoSentinel R & D had labelled its "Darwin Mode".

The huge machine shrieks at the three targets, a high-pitched sound calling to mind the haunting cry of the Skrike, or butcherbird.

("SssssKKKKKkkreeeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeeeee!")

and charges.

The three mutants look up in shock at the rampaging automaton. So wrapped up have they been in their declarations, passions and declarations of passions that they have all but forgotten their pursuers.

PigBoy ducks to one side, behind the bizarre, Dr Seuss-esque forms of a group of Xanthia grass trees. Wolverine, scalp still raw and metal cranium shining through in spots like a Techno Jack o' Lantern, flips onto his feet and brandishes all six claws, fully extended. Cyclops rushes forward to stand by his friend's side, blinking his eyelids five times in a predetermined, intricate rhythm that Hank built into the quartz. Blinking in said pattern activates a chip in each lense that turns them opaque so Scott can shoot his blasts through them.

(There'd been a few glitches when, early in the contacts' development, Scott had worn them to bed, twitched his eyes in REM sleep and blown out the wall that led to Storm's room)

The huge creature- this one appeared to have been modeled on a cephalopod of some kind- completely ignores the Xanthia copse that conceals PigBoy, flicks Logan across the clearing with the casual wariness of a picnicker shooing an angry wasp from a softdrink can, and locomotes forward, straight for Cyclops.

Though his brain is still trying to come to terms with him being knocked flying like some sort of origami figure of a man, Wolverine's body instinctively recognizes danger to his friend

(partner)

(betrothed)

(mate)

and fills his lungs with air so he can shout...

"Scott! Move!"

And Cyclops is moving- he's judged that the window to get a blast off is too small and he turns, pivots, bolts for the bushes, but the size of the NeoSentinel means that it catches up to him with just

One

Two

Three leviathan strides

and Cyclops whirls and fires off a beam and it hits the huge machine's left leg and blows it to pieces but the thing has seven more and just cants to one side a bit and reaches another girder sized appendage out and wraps around Cyclops and hauls him up in the air before it and suddenly the part of Scott Summers will be played by Fay Wraye

(or Jessica Lange if you have no shame)

and the thing puts Cyclops an inch or two from one of its own gargantuan eyes to study him, which isn't so clever really as Scott now fires a beam straight into its clanking brain,

-whilst at ground level Logan's claws slice cleanly through the cables that link the thorax to the legs and the NeoSentinel has time to realise it has fucked up bigtime before

1100110: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED 111001: CPU SUSTAINING HIGH DAMAGE TO- 111110: WARNING UNACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF WASTE GAS VENTING TO- -ERROR ERROR SYSTEM SHUTDOWN IMMIN

and Scott drops from fingers that are suddenly nothing more than a ludicriusly expensive metalwork sculpture

(or a scrapyard worker's wet dream)

into Logan's arms and Logan kisses him deeply and leaps off the dead NeoSentinel's waist to the ground, tightening his hold on Scott and absorbing the juddering impact of the ground for him.

And

Sixteen more NeoSentinels boil into the clearing.

Scott gains his feet and puts his arms around Logan, not bothering to look at the things, knowing they've no chance. A line from an old film he can't quite place

("Close your eyes, baby...")

echoes in his head as he takes Logan's face in his hands and looks in his eyes.

"I love you, Logan."

"Scott, I Lo-"

-And they hear a scream, not of fear or pain but of triumph, and PigBoy is leaping up and down on the other side of the clearing, drawing the NeoSentinel's attention even as he yells at Logan and Scott to get down out of sight, and he bolts out of the clearing into the thick undergrowth with all sixteen mechanoids following him, as enraged as a machine can get by the boy's colourful insults and suddenly Logan and Scott hear PigBoy's voice insulting the NeoSentinels again

from here

and then from here

and

from here too

all at the same

time

And the NeoSentinels are thrown into confusion by the cacaphony of young male voices ringing through the bushes, instructing them to perform anatomically impossible acts of sexual gratification on each other from different places all around them.

Logan looks up at Scott. "The clever little bastard's throwin his voice! All three of 'em!"

The two mutants listen as the mocking voices of PigBoy become more distant, as do the accompanying roars annd crashes from the NeoSentinels that follow him, a lunatic version of Where The Wild Things Are illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Scott gets to his feet then turns and helps Logan to his. "C'Mon, Lo- we can still find him."

Logan stops the younger man with a gentle hand to one shoulder. "Scott? No."

Scott looks at the Canadian for a long, molasses moment.

"-He's not coming back, is he Lo?"

The small, tight smile on the older mutant's face speaks volumes. "The way he was carrying himself, Slim? He was hurt, inside. Bad."

"-Oh".

Both mutants look skyward as a new sound tears at the heavens above their clearing.

"What the...?"

The X Plane.

It hovers, as if making up its aerodynamic mind, then lands with pin point accuracy right beside the pair.

Scott and Logan share a worried look. They'd left the plane, deliberatly, in a thick depression packed with scrub, covered it with branches just to be sure.

So who had flown it here?

The two mutants look toward the gangplank leading to the plane's dark underbelly, regarding the hatchway with suspicion.

Then, as one, they both grab their foreheads, wincing.

[...SCOTT? LOGAN? THANK GOD. FORGIVE ME MY SHOUTING- I'VE BEEN VERY WORRIED ABOUT THE PAIR OF YOU]

Logan smirks and takes Scott's hand in his as they walk up the hatchway into the aircraft.

"...No harm, no foul Chuck; your timing's great."

[I'M GLAD TO HEAR IT, WOLVERINE. INDEED, I'M JUST GLAD TO HEAR YOU; SOMETHING HAS BEEN BLOCKING MY NEURAL SWEEPS FOR SEVERAL HOURS NOW. THE INTERFERENCE JUST CLEARED A FEW MOMENTS AGO]

Scott maintains his handhold with Logan even as he sends the X-Plane skyward. He looks down at the bushland receeding now into a quilt of different shaded green squares far below.

"Thankyou again, David."

[SCOTT? ARE YOU ALRIGHT? YOU FEEL... SAD]

"No, Charles I'm... we're...fine, thanks to you. I don't think either of us would have had an easy time finding the plane again in our condition..."

[...PLANE?]

Logan butts in, mentally speaking.

"Yeah Chuck; the X Plane yer just flew to us" He turns, grinning, to Scott. "Guess the mind really is the first thing to go, hey Bub?"

[AS MUCH AS I LOATHE TO ADD TO YOUR DOUBTS OVER MY FACULTIES, WOLVERINE, I MUST ADMIT TO HAVING NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT]

"Yer mean yer didn't command the plane ter pick us u-"

[NO]

"Well then who-"

[YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE, WOLVERINE]

"But-"

Scott, smiling, leans over and shuts Logan up with a kiss, long and lingering. Everything shrinks to just the two of them.

I should have thought of this years ago... Everybody wins...

[INDEED SCOTT, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE EXPEDIENT...]

Oh God... I'm sorry Charles, I forgot I was broadcasting...

A mental chuckle tickles his pineal lobe.

[THINK NOTHING OF IT, SCOTT; JUST COME HOME, THE BOTH OF YOU. I'LL HAVE A LARGER ROOM MADE UP FOR YOU AND LOGAN TO SHARE IF YOU WISH]

"Okay' yes... yes, Charles, that'd be great!"

Scott feels the Professor take his leave. He turns back to the X Plane controls.

But who did bring the plane around? Eh, I'm wiped... It can wait

"Hey, Bub?"

-Scott half turns. "Lo?"

"...I love you too, Scott".

-and grins like a lunatic for the rest of the flight home.

"...Can I just say how much I hate these stupid new uniforms?"

"-Well, since you've done nothing but complain about the things from the moment we got them, I'd venture that you definitely can say that, yes."

"... Wiseass..."

"-You can tell that about my ass just by having your hand on it like that? Is this a new mutant power? And if you hate the uniform so much, how come I'm the only naked guy in the room?"

"So many questions, so little time..."

"-Not to mention little patience; strip for me, love."

Pyro rolled his eyes ceiling-ward, but complied. Most of the time, St John Allerdyce wasn't one for following orders, but when the person issuing the orders was lying back in bed totally naked, throbbingly erect and hands pillowed behind his head, displaying himself shamelessly, John was willing to make an exception.

He untucked the black leather top from the matching uniform pants. Pulling it off over his head, he drew in a strained breath through tight teeth as the thicker, coarser stitching of the large yellow X across the front dragged over the sensitized nubs of his nipples, hardened in the suddenly chill air of the room.

Hang on... Chill?

Shirtless, John turned around, waving a hand at his goose-fleshed pecs. "Is this your doing, Drake?"

"-I'm taking the fifth."

John bit his lip to keep from smiling. "So you're not worried about shrinkage, then?"

"-Right now I'm more worried about dying of sexual frustration. Get 'em off!"

John was tempted to argue the point, enjoying their banter as he was, but then Bobby reached down and pumped himself vigorously several times and John's head was suddenly as open and dry as his mouth.

John very nearly broke several World Land Speed Records in his haste to remove the rest of his uniform. Kicking boots off into a corner of the room, pulling the kevlar and leather pants down long, dancer's legs, stepping out of boxers

(Black silk shorts decorated with a large red X at the crotch and seat, a gag gift from Bobby for his birthday last month)

Blessedly naked at last, John grins hugely and leaps bodily onto the bed beside Bobby Drake, delighting in the ripple of the waterbed mattress against his bare skin.

Bobby's beautiful face slid into a leer that would un-nerve Wolverine "...You really do have the most incredible ass, babe."

John's cock pulsed fatly and he almost came there and then, barely controlling himself with a combination of mutant reflexes and the inherent staying power of an eighteen year old.

Wrapping his arms round his boyfriend, Bobby rolled over onto his side, pulling John with him and thrusting forward with his hips, bringing their bodies into delicious contact all along their lengths.

As always happened whenever they made love, the prolonged touch of their nude bodies -Bobby's pale, markedly cold skin sliding against John's tan, perpetual feverheat- caused a small but thick fog to wisp from their entwined forms and enshroud their bodies and the bed, intensifying into a low lying pea-souper as the young men began thrusting against each other in earnest.

Knowing from experience this byproduct of their passion

(Ororo often catches the boys smiling slyly at each other when she creates a camoflaging mist during missions)

would promote mildew in the sheets, John kicks the bedclothes down below their sweat-slick calves.

He moaned into Bobby's mouth, counter thrusting up with each short, chopping stroke of the other man's cock. Each time their roiling balls swung forward into contact, he lost his mind.

Both men loved to talk during sex, and, the moment the only tongue in his mouth was his own, John spoke.

"God, Bobby... Don't you think it's... oh, yeah!... weird that...unhh...you've got the hairiest legs of any guy on the planet..." he rasped his own legs against Bobby's thickly haired calves for emphasis, both of them delighting in the resultant whispery tickle "-Including Victor Creed, but...fuck!... your ass is just totally muscle...no hair at all?'

Bobby chuckled throatily against John's chest. "I have two words...hunh... for you, Johnny... 'Karate' and 'kid'..."

"Huh?"

"Mmmmuh... Wax on, Wax off!" Bobby playfully slid a thickly haired leg up against John's balls, earning himself both a moan and a playful slap.

Bobby grinned and Called the ice to his hand, running frost-coated fingers over John's nipples, hardening them again before taking one into his mouth and tormenting it further with a chilly tongue. He continued sliding the fingers down, skating chill patterns along the flesh of his boyfriend's body.

John arced up into the touch, then smirked and stretched out a hand to the vanilla-scented candle burning down on the bedside table beside them. The flame seemed to leap into his hand, an a moment later there was a gentle "whuff" as the skin of his stomach caught fire, following the pattern of his body hair from mid-stomach to groin. The ice around Bobby's fingers turned to water which trickled into the hole of John's navel, extinguishing the flames with a gentle hiss. Smoke rising from his belly and pubic hair, Johnny looked like a sensual ifrit released from some darkly exotic lamp.

Bobby indicated the last dwindling flames with a smile. "Thanks for the landing lights, babe."

John grinned, then gasped as Bobby Called the ice to his cock- and three thrusts later both young men howled and locked together taughtly as they emptied themselves onto each other, cold and hot semen mingling into a lukewarm stickiness on their pressed together, shuddering bellies.

Bobby gathered his lover in his arms and they curled around each other. Bobby's hoar-frost eyes are a glacial spring in thaw as he kisses John softly. "Love you, Allerdyce."

"...Love you right back, Drake."

Lying back together now, laughing, joking, just talking together. They knew the girls next door (Rogue and Jubes; fortunately Kitty was still in Florida) were probably laying the usual bets on the old 'are they or aren't they' arguement that was still circulating. Both boys smile.

John gently huffed a warm breath onto Bobby's shoulders, melting the frozen sex sweat there into a little trickle that ran a short distance down Bobby's chest then refroze.

"So is this what they mean by water off a duck's back?"

"-Hey! Drakes are male ducks, I'll have you know!"

"What's good for the goose..."

A beat, then a chortling Bobby pounced.

Five minutes later, on her way to the kitchen, Jubilation Lee is surprised to see, of all things, a fog seeping out beneath Pyro's door.

Moments after Jubilee leaves the kitchen, egg-salad sandwich in tow, there is a bright flash of light, a groan and a wheeze.

Purple light. A metallic groan. The wheeze of a respirator.

-You crawl to your feet, every movement sending your nerves into another marionette jig of agony. You catalogue your surroundings, still not quite believing you're free again. Each time you turn a corner in the night-silent mansion, you expect Them to be there, eyes greedy for your suffering, hands gripping the Instrument of Torment Du Jour.

This time- thanks to the little green snot- They'd used hammers.

And piano wire.

You skulk across a darkened passageway, limping noticeably, as one of the legs you're skulking on is artificial- yet another prosthetic for your collection. It's not yet functioning at peak performance, and you can't scale walls or ceilings on it for now. You feel really, bizzarely odd, walking on the floor, like a fly with its wings cut off.

Of course, They'd cut off much more than that. The leg, a kidney. They'd put one of your eyes out too, and you haven't had time to build a suitable replacement yet, so you've covered the raw socket over with a metal plate. Purple metal, of course. If you're going to be a hideous, masked nightmare, Marius, by God you'll be a co-ordinated one.

You actually quite like the eye-patch, the razor slash of rusty purple metals, shaped vaguely like some techno boomerang.

Thinking of boomerangs and you flash onto thoughts of Australia.

You smile your Jack O'Lantern smile , remembering the baffled faces of the Wild Thing and the Field Leader as they'd wondered who'd flown the aircraft to them, whilst you'd been back in the cabin not ten feet away, suitably dephased and trying not to snicker.

You could easily have waited until they'd relaxed and drained them into dustbunny husks, but for some reason -perhaps some last strange vestige of kinship- you'd quietly slipped off the jet and allowed the lovers to fly away home.

Yes, it may have been akindness on your part- or it may have been that allowing the two men to leave in the X-Plane had marooned the remaining NeoSentinels in the forest.

With you.

(The poor creatures hadn't so much as a prayer; all their high-tech killing apparatus and grafted on armature aside, they were nothing more than oversized clockwork toys before you, Patron Saint of Prosthetic Perdition.

But eventually you'd eaten your fill of them and had to leave, and here you are in good old Westchester. You'd watched the Asian girl gathering her sandwich, could have reached out a hand and devoured her before she screamed. You could have climbed the stairs and taken the girl brushing white streaked hair with gloved hands, then nipped next door and absorbed the two boys lost in the gravitational pull of their frenzied rutting.

No. The NeoSentinels have provided you wish nourishment enough, for perhaps the next month. You're a mutant camel, or a dromedary, depending on how many humps you have after a visit to the pocket dimension.

No. You haven't come here for food. Not this time.

Coveniently, Xavier's troops have put a large map of the mansion (and associated grounds) up in the common room. The single deep sea eye roiling in your strange skull locates the area on the map labeled

BIOL-BOTANIC-MEDICAL

and beneath that, the area you want

LABORATORY

[surgery] [equip] [storage]

It takes you longer to port out than usual, as you still have to remember to subtract an eye and add the new prostheses to your mental body image, but after some seconds of staring frustratingly into space you shimmer and find yourself in

[storage]

And there it is, on a shelf right in front of you, with all the other items the X Men's pet Igors Jean Grey and Hank

(or perhaps Hank was more a Pretorius than an Igor?)

had set aside for analysis.

You pick up the test tube, examine the charred pieces of flesh preserved inside. Most of them were just small flakes of skin that had been collected of the uniform after the burns had healed, but some pieces were large enough to possibly contain-

Ah.

A tooth. A single tooth, roots and all.

With a single, tiny particle of Adamantium jaw stuck right at the base.

You take the tooth and, knowing that eating it won't cut it, so to speak, this time, you slip it into your respirator and inhale sharply.

Brief sensation of panic as it blocks your airway and then its in your "luns" if the shredded and maimed flesh can still so be called. You feel a tingle, the a burning, then a white hot fire...

Then...

You disengage the respirator from your face, switching off the oxygen. You choke for a few seconds as the mask catches on your face, then again as you remove it but it's been so long you can't remember how to breathe on your own and your ckoking you can't...

Breathe. You're breathing, unaided, for the first time in fifteen years.

You take the respirator in your hands and, joyfully, dash it to pieces on the floor.

"-Scott?"

Shit. Someone...

"Is that you in the store-room? Scott?'

The voice, female, becomes huskier and quieter.

"...Logan?"

Evidently Dr Grey -for who else could it be?- takes your silence as assent, as she steps into the store-room, silhouetted in the doorway by the bright, sterile lab behind her. You draw back deeper into welcoming shadows.

"...Logan. I knew it wouldn't last. I knew you'd get tired of Scott before long; God knows I did; So... crawling back to me, eh?"

She steps into the room further, closing the door a little but leaving the light of.

Come into my Parlor

"C'mon Logan, I know you're the strong silent type but seduction's a two way street, y'know?"

Said the Spider

she holds out an arm to the dark

to the fly

"How about giving me a hand, lover?"

Smiling, finally able to show the smile, you loom out of the darkness, a kiss in each palm as you reach to obey her.

The End