Archive of Our Own

Previously on X-Men…

While possessed by the Phoenix Force and consequently under attack by the Avengers, Scott Summers (Cyclops) killed the man who took him in, adopted him, and trained him to be an X-Man: Charles Xavier (Professor X). Thrown in prison by the Avengers for that crime, Scott first sought martyrdom, and tried to provoke his ex-friend and now bitterest adversary, Logan (Wolverine), to kill him. Logan barely restrained himself from doing so only when he realized that Scott was suicidal. After the brutal murder of a fellow mutant in the corrupt prison in which he was held captive, Scott permitted Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) to break him out of jail, believing that he could do more good for his fellow mutants alive than dead. Now, Scott, Magneto, and two of Scott’s fellow ex ‘Phoenix Five’ members, Emma Frost and Illyana Rasputin (Magik) endeavour to rescue other mutants threatened by corrupt or bigoted officialdom and offer them sanctuary in the New Xavier School (their secret base located in the abandoned Weapon X program building in which, in the past, Logan and other mutants suffered horrifying torture), where they hope to bring about a sea change in public thinking that will deliver mutants from continuing oppression. Publicly, Scott is a polarizing figure: mistrusted by government officials, authority figures, and the Avengers, disliked by all but a few of what were once his fellow X-Men, but admired by many, including students and pro-mutant humans, who see him as a bringer of justice and protection to the marginalized and the oppressed. Privately, no longer romantically involved with Emma Frost – whose control over her telepathy has been as damaged by her time as a Phoenix host as Scott’s over his optic blasts – and shunned by most of his former friends, Scott is a man with a mission who is, nevertheless, as alone and unloved as he has ever been.

Then they were gone again: Scott Summers and his Magikal Mystery Tour, taking the Cuckoos and Young Warren with them. Back to their mysterious lair of can’t-even-be-fricking-evil-enough. Scott had to know he was damned for what he’d done, but he kept primly walking the line of nearly salvageable and Logan didn’t even know what side of it he wanted him to fall. He was making a nuisance of himself with his spandex-wrapped civil disobedience, pissing off the police, S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, and that annoying old woman who lived up the end of Greymalkin Avenue, who shook her umbrella at Logan every time Scott turned up on TV.

“He’s not from the school!” he would find himself shouting at her least deaf ear while her furry little rat dog yapped at him frenziedly, like Logan was responsible for all the cat-jeers in the world.

“Mutants!” she’d say. “Nasty, dirty things! Always breaking the law!” Before shaking her umbrella at him again while he’d mentally imagine putting his hands around Scott’s neck and choking him, because all over the world he just knew other people were doing the same thing. And some of them were probably going out at night and breaking a few mutant heads to balance the scales because Scott had time-bubbled the Avengers or optic blasted the cops. Sometimes, after another of those stunts hit the six o’clock news, even putting Quentin Quire back in detention, just because, wasn’t enough to get Logan’s blood pressure back down.

And then when Summers had the effrontery to show his stupid cross-marked face here, of all places…!

Logan hated being this angry all the time. The rage was like a poison and every time he thought the wound had scabbed over, Summers would turn up and make it well up again. It was why he had to hang back. If he got within grabbing distance, he would grab with his claws out. He had almost killed that innocent version of Scott Summers in his fury. Only the fact the boy was sixteen and guiltless had given him the self-control not to hurt him. With Summers he’d used up all the self-control he had. First, in the prison, when the guy had been goading Logan to kill him, then again when he’d read the note Summers had left for him.

There had been other words he could have said instead, on that second prison visit, but he’d tried to think about what Xavier would have wanted him to do, and Xavier had loved Scott; he would have wanted Logan to try to reach Summers’ better self. And so Logan had done his best, and Summers had thrown his kind words and his concern back in his face. It was possible – Summers being the way he was – that he didn’t even know that was exactly what he’d done.

As Scott’s motley crew whisked themselves off back to their lair, leaving a Young Warren-sized hole behind them, Logan spat out what he thought and then, knowing he was ugly with anger, turned away from the kids and slammed back into the school. Rachel went with him, matching him pace for pace, and he wondered if it was the telepathy that helped her know when people needed her to tell them things, or if she was just intuitive.

Rachel said, “He doesn’t hate you.”

“He has no damn reason to hate me! He’s the one who killed Xavier! He’s the one who…!” He’s the one who fucked everything up forever. He tried to breathe evenly like Ro was telling him he should do, concerned, she said, about his spiraling blood pressure, healing factor or not. “He doesn’t have the right to hate me. Not like I do with him.”

“He thinks you and the Avengers left him in a corrupt prison to be murdered, Logan. He doesn’t blame you for doing that because he thinks he deserves to die as well.”

The injustice of it literally took his breath away; he was trying to inhale and nothing was happening. It was impossible that Slim could think that, when he had gone there, Logan had gone there, for no other reason than to stop him overreacting to the murder of that mutant. Stark had called him because he cared. Logan had gone because he cared. Even with everything he had done, even though he had completely forfeited any right to be cared about, after his actions, they had stuck their necks out for him. And, coolly and dispassionately, Summers had proceeded to piss all over both of them by staging a breakout anyway.

As he turned to her in what was probably eye-bulging disbelief, she said, “If you’re going to shoot the messenger, this conversation can end here.” No reproach, just her mother’s steady green gaze as she said, “I read my damaged father’s mind for you, Logan. I don’t expect thanks but I could do with you dialing down the homicidal snarling.”

As he followed her into the teacher’s lounge, the words sputtered out of him, like water from an over-pressured faucet. “I went there…! I knew he’d be feeling…! I flew all the way there just to talk your damn father down…!”

“I know. He doesn’t see it that way.”

Her words were so carefully neutral that he wondered if she didn’t see it that way either. The sunlight was finding the copper gleam in her hair and the hound marks on her face. She had Jean’s jaw-line and Scott’s nose, a funhouse mirror reflection of people lost to him. He cast his mind back to his prison interaction with her father, and all he could recall was him not killing a man who he wanted to kill and who wanted Logan to kill him and then doing his damnedest to try to save his soul. On the wall, the picture of Scott he was using as a dartboard looked back at him from behind its visor, darts arrowing out of it like Saint fucking Sebastian.

“He chose the path he’s on.”

“To him it doesn’t feel as if he was left much choice.” Again, the words were careful, but he could hear what she wasn’t saying: Stark trying to destroy the Phoenix, the Avengers all attacking him, driving him to that hysterical insanity; Scott Summers, the ever-virtuous persecuted by villains. As with Scott Summers, prisoner of conscience, left with no choice but to escape before being shived in the back, Logan wasn’t buying that version.

“I know Stark dropped a phoenix on him, but he had control – at the beginning he had control."

She just said, “You don’t know what it was like for him. With a fifth of the phoenix he had clarity. By the end, he… He has a lot of gaps.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You admit he was himself at the beginning.”

“He felt like he was, certainly, but it wasn’t power he asked for, and you kept hitting him with more of it. You, the Avengers, I mean, not you personally. He tried to only do good with it. He tried not to give in to the dark voices. But he wasn’t meant to carry the Phoenix, Logan, none of them were. By the end…that wasn’t Scott any more.”

“I told him that I knew that,” Logan said shortly. “I tried to give him all the affirmation I could.”

Someone – probably Quire – had stuck up yet another copy of that Rolling Stone cover with Scott on it on one of the windows: head a little bowed, arms crossed across his chest, like he didn’t want to be standing alone in defiance of injustice, but someone had to. God, he hated that image: Scott Summers, red-blinded by his mutation, physically perfect, implacably unyielding in the face of tyranny, and making that defiant gesture of solidarity to mutant sympathizers and warning to their enemies alike. Was there a way the arrogant son-of-a-bitch could have looked more like some misunderstood martyred Christ-figure struggling out there in the wilderness, beloved by true believers and shunned by the servants of oppression? Logan ripped the picture down, screwed it up and threw it in the trash. He felt infiltrated and violated, but mostly misunderstood. He couldn’t bear to think anyone he saw on a regular basis, truly thought that Cyclops Was Right. The guy had ripped their hearts out.

The staff room felt too exposed, and his anger with it. Logan walked out, needing whiskey, still seeing those two pictures – his darts bristling from Scott’s face, and then Scott in all his surface clinging-costumed beauty, none of his honeycomb of character flaws remotely visible to the camera even though anyone who knew him could have told the adoring followers wearing his face for a t-shirt that Scott Summers easily made their Top Ten Most Fucked Up People I Know List, and this from people who were on a first-name basis with the world’s most habitually deranged supervillains.

Patiently following him – even though, as a rule Rachel didn’t really do patient or following – Rachel said, “He appreciates what you said to him in prison, Logan. He knows you think you were doing the right thing.” Logan wished he could stop wondering if she was here right now for him or for Scott; if Rachel was trying to help Logan out or was just being an advocate for her father. He wished he could stop feeling so angry. She was still talking, quietly implacable, and that did remind him way too much of Scott in one of his Will Not Shut Up moods: “You still left him in a corrupt prison in which a mutant had already been murdered and in which nothing had changed. Same torture-collar wielding corrupt governor, same abusive guards, same mutant-hating prisoners.”

“Like Summers couldn’t deal with those assholes with his hands tied behind his…” Logan wheeled around. “Was he expecting me to break him out of there?” It gave him a yawning sinking horror in the pit of his stomach to think of Scott thinking that Logan had come to do that, the way Rogers had rescued him from the Negative Zone, and then slowly being disillusioned of that hope during their conversation. That stole his breath all over again. He looked around for his office and found they were standing outside it.

“No,” Rachel said calmly. “Not for a microsecond.”

“But he expected me to do something I didn’t. What was it?”

“He expected you to do exactly what you did – except for you not going through with killing him.”

As he moved purposefully towards his desk, he thought how that had the painful ring of truth about it. Summers could always do that to him, anticipate Logan’s moves – the ones Logan hadn’t known he was going to make himself – and then incorporate them into his plans. He didn’t know if Scott had learned that from Sinister, during the brainwashing sessions, or if Sinister had acquired the same ability when he remade himself from that supposedly flawless Summers DNA. Scott had even anticipated how Logan would act as a vampire once. (Logan and Vampire Logan were pretty much aligned these days; Non-Vampire Logan also wanted to get Scott alone and then bite his damned neck until he could taste blood.) In Scott’s prison plans, Logan had been the ex-ally whose actions were predictable and unimportant once he chose not to be the agent of Summers’s destruction.

“Sounds like your father. The man with the plan and the rest of us just cogs in his machine.”

He kept calling him ‘your father’ because he wanted to blame someone for what Scott had become and given the way the guy had all his kids assbackwards – why not blame them for how he’d turned out? He knew Rachel knew that. She was sucking that up the way Summers sucked up a punch in the face, but he noticed she didn’t deny him, even though Logan half wanted her to. Didn’t say ‘He’s the father who would have been mine if I’d grown up in this universe, not the father I actually knew’. The Summers-Grey family had learned to be flexible about what family meant. Scott had accepted Nate Grey as his son and Rachel as his daughter despite never holding them as infants. Jean had accepted Cable as her son despite never giving birth to him; despite him being the offspring of the clone who had married the man she loved then done her best to kill them all. Hope was Cable’s daughter in every way that counted. Logan knew exactly how flexible that clan were when it came to the definition of ‘family’ because they had called Logan family once, too. For all he knew, Scott professional martyr Summers still did, at least in the privacy of his own head. If he said it out loud in Logan’s hearing, he was going to lose some of those pearly white teeth. (Except the bastard would probably forgive him for that, too, the way he’d forgiven Santos when he broke his jaw in three places. Logan couldn’t even stomach the idea of Scott’s forgiveness right now. If Scott even thought about forgiving him for anything at all, Logan really would kill him.)

Bitterly, he said, “Your father tried to make me murder him.”

“Perhaps he thought you’d enjoy it.”

Logan remembered that slack body in his hands, not an ounce of resistance, limply acquiescent to whatever came next, even if what came next was death at the hands of someone who had once been his best friend. He could still smell the defeat on him. “How could he do that to me?” he breathed, clenching and unclenching his fists as he felt the metal twitching hungrily under the skin.

“It would have been your choice – your crime. You chose not to commit it. Now it’s not on your conscience.”

He felt wounded and couldn’t keep it from his voice. Unlike Summers, he didn’t have the option of hiding behind a visor, so it was probably there in his eyes, too. He pushed out a chair for her with his foot. “Are you on his side?”

She sat down as if she were unutterably weary. “What side, Logan? You want to make it all ‘you can be for him or you can be for me but you can’t be both’ then that’s on you, but no one else needs to subscribe to this stupid schism between you, and I don’t. I’m here because you’re doing good work in this school and the last time I saw my father he was corrupted by the power of the phoenix and completely off his head – whereas you’re more or less sane quite a lot of the time.”

“There’s a ringing endorsement if I ever I heard one.”

“Let’s try to be realistic about everyone’s limitations, Logan. My point is that we all loved Charles Xavier. We all lost him, including Scott. It’s just that the rest of us don’t have to live with the guilt of having killed him.”

“Because the rest of us didn’t do it!”

“Are you and the Avengers absolutely sure that you didn’t bring it about? Because I’m picking up a lot of repressed guilt.”

“Scott killed Xavier all by himself.”

“He doesn’t remember doing it. He has flashes – before and after – but there’s no clarity there. He keeps chasing it, trying to recall that exact moment, to see if there was a second when he could remember making the decision. All he can remember is the pain of an arrow in his throat, and the realization that Charles is going to help the Avengers kill him, and then Charles is dead and he’s a black grief-cloud of rage and misery and he wants the world to burn, except that isn’t clear either, that’s another after with no before.”

If her tone had been less calmly dispassionate he might have accused her of special pleading, but it was clear she was just trying to make sense of what she’d read.

“If it makes you happy, Logan, even with how much you hate him, he hates himself far more. He’s still alive because he doesn’t think he’s earned the right to die. Not when there are mutants undefended.” She shook back her short red hair. “He admires you, you know. He wants the school to succeed. He worries about harm coming to it, to you, to all of us. Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, it’s one of the things he lies awake fretting about, making strategies to keep us all safe.”

“He needn’t bother on my account. Damn him! Damn him to hell!” He scrabbled in his desk drawer for the whiskey and took a long pull on the bottle. If his liver ever stopped healing along with the rest of him, he was blaming Scott for that, too.

(Unwanted memory of Abigail Brand on her last fly-by stopover for a probably disgustingly depraved session with Henry. It was hard to imagine Brand signing on for any sex that didn’t carry some depravity with it. Acid-tongued in the kitchen the next morning, “I see you’ve run out of jelly. Shall we blame that on Summers, too?”

He suspected Brand of siding with Scott. They both had that crusader crazy about them, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, always, to save the world, save the species, save the day, and she was a mutant who got making the hard choices not to go extinct. She and Summers had never got along but they’d never not understood each other either. Out of kindness to the guy, Logan took care not to be the one to point out to Beast that he was basically fucking a green-haired female Scott Summers, albeit one who knew way more curse words. He suspected Henry was smart enough to have worked that out by himself.)

Rachel didn’t seem surprised by his outburst or the whiskey he was chugging down. “You have to let some of that anger go, Logan. And I’m not saying that because the man it’s directed at is my father. It isn’t good for you. You’re letting yourself get eaten up with bitterness over a man who would step in front of a Sentinel to save you.”

“No one ever has or ever could make me as angry as your damn father, and that stepping in front of a Sentinel thing is just a part of why!”

Summers had been like this for so frickin’ long now. The guy who couldn’t be controlled the way cats couldn’t be herded, who made the plan and saw it through, and too often made Logan a vital component in it without telling him first, or let Logan play out like a fish on a line before reeling him in. Over and over again in X-Force, Summers had called the tune while Logan paid the piper, and although he had hated how it made him feel, hated what they were doing and the blood that would never wash off, he had at least felt he was keeping Summers shielded from the worst of the splatter. He was still protecting the Boy Scout who did the right thing, because he had needed to think that guy was still in there, that Logan had kept him intact. Hank, he suspected, had realized long before Logan did, that that guy was gone. Logan hadn’t saved him. All he’d done was get more blood on both of their hands. Summers had already sold both their souls for the sake of mutantkind while Logan had been thinking they could still be redeemed.

“He always did his own thing! He’d never tell me what the fuck was going on, and he’d make these soul-stripping decisions, like he didn’t care, and then he’d just stand there and take it when I went for him, even though I could have killed him. Every time he just took it, like he knew I could never see it through. Like he knew he was safe.”

“He just felt he deserved it and you had the right to dole out any punishment you saw fit once the mission was over, Logan,” Rachel said wearily, as if it were obvious. “I’m not happy about what either of you did. It was wrong. You were assassins, nothing more or less. But I’m also not too happy that your way of coping with that was to act like a middle manager who comes home from a bad day at the office and beats the wife.”

Logan winced, as a montage played in his head of him manhandling Summers, punching Summers, screaming at him, slamming him to the ground, sliding his claws each side of his throat, wanting him to feel the blades against his skin, the rage a red burning flame in his brain.

“He chose to play general. When generals send ground troops into battle, stands to reason some of the officers might also lose their temper when they lose good men. He chose to be the guy who made the decisions, that means he got to be the guy who answered for them.”

Still, the ‘beat the wife’ thing rankled. There was a kernel of truth in that. But Scott had always taken blows like they were irrelevant, just waiting for them to be over so he could move onto the next order of business, and it was infuriating, being added to the long line of his abusers like your rage was nothing special, and the perfectly justifiable reason for that rage so much white noise that would eventually stop. No one who had not had the dubious pleasure of slamming his fist into Scott’s face while Summers waited for his anger against him to be spent enough that a rational conversation about his next plan could follow – in which, inevitably, Logan would once again be one of his unwitting pawns – could know how infuriating that was.

Scott could make a man feel more powerless, more prick-shrivelingly impotent than anyone Logan had ever met. He had never understood the mentality of the abuser who insisted the victim had made him hurt them until he met Scott fucking Summers. He drove you insane, then he wouldn’t cry out and he wouldn’t give way and he barely acknowledged that it even hurt and you were the guy left there with blood on your knuckles from his bleeding mouth, and another rip in your already shredded soul, and him looking past you to the next point on the agenda if – you know – you were done with the beating him thing and you could both get back to what was important? And it wasn’t like Summers didn’t know he was playing with fire or how annoying he was: his strategy with Norman Osborn could be summarized as ‘be so much myself that he will want to keep punching me too much to notice that he’s losing’.

Wearily, Logan said, “Do you think there’s any chance that you’ll forgive me when I finally snap and murder your fucked up asshole of a father, Rachel?”

She didn’t blink, like nothing about that question surprised her. She just examined it carefully. “I don’t know, Logan, truly I don’t. All I know is that my fucked up asshole of a father would probably want me to try.”

***

Of course the kids had hit the internet the second Scott grabbed his coat and left. He hadn’t even hesitated. A crooked finger from that bearded dimension-hopper in his grunge-chic frontier-wear, and Scott was out of the door without a backward glance. No wonder the children were bubbling with excitement.

Once upon a time, Emma could have listened in on all their thoughts. Now she was reduced to checking their history cache.

‘Hades, once the name of the god of the Underworld, in time came to mean the abode of the dead. He strictly forbade his subjects to leave his domain and would become enraged when anyone tried to leave, or if someone tried to steal the souls from his realm. His wrath was equally terrible for anyone who tried to cheat death or otherwise crossed him. He was not, however, an evil god, for although he was stern, cruel, and unpitying, he was still just.’

‘Yet many heroes traveled there while yet living: Hercules, Aeneas, Odysseus, and Orpheus amongst them….”

‘Extraordinary strength, courage, ingenuity, and sexual prowess with both males and females were among Hercules’ characteristic attributes….’

Oh yes, the rumor mill was going to be working overtime.

But she was looking at Hades and thinking about Limbo. Scott’s powers hadn’t worked right in Limbo. According to that pan-dimensional carpetbagger, Howlett, in Hades, they wouldn’t work at all. Scott would be going up against demigods and hellbeasts and probably bloody Balrogs, with no beams to help him, and nothing to live for. That was the part that frightened her the most. It wasn’t what the Cuckoos were smugly thinking as they looked her over, and assessed her old insecurities, like cracks in a familiar building. She wasn’t afraid of any Logan but the one in this dimension taking Scott away from her. And, anyway, she and Scott were over now, so the old fears, the ones that had spumed up when Scott was in Japan willing to do anything to make Logan like him again, that had driven her to seek out Tony Stark and Namor so she wouldn’t be the one who was left…that was done with now. Logan could have Scott gift-wrapped if he wanted him and yes, she’d mind, God, how she would mind. She’d want to rip out Logan’s adamantium beer openers and stab him in the scrotum with them, but he could have the Scott that she had finished with whenever he got around to not being too stupid to know he wanted him. But no one would be having Scott if he got himself killed in Hades just to avoid having to come home to a life filled with self-hatred.

“We need you, Summers,” she said shortly, wishing she could be beating the words into his brain as in the old days before the son-of-a-bitch she utterly refused to still love had choked her half of the phoenix force from her, broken her powers, and left her with this deafening silence. We, the mutants of the Earth, need you to get your perfectly proportioned butt back here in one piece, because without you, none of us would be here. And whatever Henry and Logan need you to be for their own pathetic nostalgic needs, here, in the real world, mutants need someone who can keep them alive, and that, my no-longer-love, is you. You don’t get to check out and go and take a death-nap while the world’s still full of Sentinels and Purifiers and bloody bastard Avengers who won’t avenge us, whatever get’s done to us… Do you hear me, Scott Summers? You don’t get to die until we’re safe!

She wiped the tears away angrily. He didn’t hear her because nobody heard her now. She was powerless and broken and the silence was terrible. She had lost almost everything but not her wits, and she’d seen that look on his face before. He wanted to run off with Howlett and he wanted not to come back, and he wasn’t her responsibility now. These kids were.

Emma took a deep breath and then sat down in front of the console. There were pages and pages that Eva had bookmarked, all to do with Hades and how terrible a place it was. That was what you did when you had a schoolgirl crush on a man who barely knew you were there, gave yourself an ulcer fretting over him. Emma had other priorities. She looked up and Erik was there, casting an ominous shadow in the time-approved fashion of stylish villains. She wondered if it was coincidence that she and Erik had both been better groomed when they were evil. She didn’t want to be the woman she had been before she fell in love with Scott Summers, but she could have done with her wardrobe.

Erik said, “In light of Scott’s unexpected leave-taking, what now?”

Crisply, Emma said, “You and I and Illyana start making plans for how we’re going to get these children trained with just us as tutors and what our strategy needs to be when the next mutant lights up on that screen.”

Erik sat down on the desk, holding his helmet under his arm like a knight of old before a tournament. He had been fighting this fight longer than any of them. She wondered how he could bear to keep doing it when all it ever won them was more death. Sometimes she could feel a scream building up inside her and then she would realize that it wasn’t one scream but millions: all her dead pupils, the dead of Genosha, the children burned alive because they might be mutants. She would smell the gasoline stink of the coach wreckage again as she ripped out her own fingernails on burning metal, as she clawed her way through debris in search of survivors and found only body parts and the charred, twisted remnants of children who had trusted her to keep them safe.

Erik said, “You don’t think Scott’s coming back?”

“I think he’s been having a nervous breakdown for so long that he’s stopped noticing that’s what he’s doing. I think Howlett might insist that he does.”

“Then…?”

“Then if he doesn’t die in Hades attempting to rescue a club-wielding exhibitionist in a lionskin loincloth for the Logan he wishes that Logan was…then I think Howlett might want to keep him, and Scott just might let him. And I can’t see a son of Zeus turning his nose up at a threesome, can you?”

Erik acknowledged the point with a head tilt, less shocked than she’d hoped, just trying to work out their next move. She supposed they had all lost the ability to be shocked now. When the world threw the next horror at them, there was just a sense of weary recognition: Oh, this is what you look like this time. This is the form you took. We had wondered. She could understand why people in the Middle Ages had been so wedded to the idea of Satan. How much nicer it would be to blame every new atrocity against mutants on one fallen angel instead of having to admit that myriad ordinary men hated them this much merely for existing.

The words broke out before she could call them back: “We were down and out, below our last two hundred, looking extinction in the eye, and they chose to burn human children alive just to rob us of one baby. Why?”

Erik didn’t even blink. “Miss Frost, I lived through the Holocaust, remember? There are no depths to some men’s depravity. It’s a bottomless well. We’d better arrange new shifts to accommodate Scott’s…leave of absence.”

Bitterly, Emma said, “This is all Logan’s fault!”

Erik was politely curious. “Why?”

“No, Erik, you’re not getting the new logic here. Reason isn’t necessary. I learned that from the other school. Just embrace the blind hatred. Scott’s skipped class to go paddle in the Styx and there’s a Jean Grey running around in the world again. Logan has always annoyed me and I find his excessive body hair unattractive and his beer-perfume distasteful, therefore everything in the world is his fault. I hope he rots in hell.”

Erik briefly patted her on the shoulder and said, “I’m sure Scott will be fine. He’s not going in there alone, and Howlett isn’t Logan just because they share the same DNA.”

No, Emma thought, the knife twisting inside her bleakly, Logan still thinks he’s straight. Howlett is way ahead of him…. And, really, what did it matter if Scott let Howlett fuck him? It would probably do Scott good. A lot more good than getting his head pulled off by a Minotaur anyway. Except, she could bear almost anyone else to have him – even Jean Grey – before bloody Logan, who didn’t deserve him, had never deserved him anyway, but deserved him less than ever since he’d sided with the Avengers against his own kind.

“Fuck you, Wolverine,” she said bitterly. “Fuck you very much.” Even all the way over there in the Dead Redhead School For Higher Dysfunction, he had taken Scott away from them, without even trying, and the bastard didn’t even know that he’d done it.

***

When the call came in from Steve Rogers, Logan didn’t even feel surprised. Of course the day was this fucked up already. Of course, some nutjob from the Negative Zone was demanding Scott Summers was handed back to him or threatening to unleash hell. Why wouldn’t he be?

“Do you still think we’re hiding Slim here?” Logan enquired, politely, he thought, under the circumstances.

“No, but I think you’ve seen him since I have and you haven’t turned him in.”

“He has the Queen of Limbo for a taxi service, Rogers. He shows up where and when he wants to. I would have thought you’d have noticed that right around the time he got one of his school-kids to freeze you in a time bubble.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Logan. Can you get in contact with Summers or not?”

“I can try.”

“I don’t want you tipping him off about the situation with Blastaar. I want to talk to him myself, face to face.”

Logan just looked at those chiseled, handsome, all-American features on the monitor until Steve Rogers threw up his hands, exclaiming, “How can you even think that?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“That is not on the agenda, Logan. I give you my word.”

“It’s not on your agenda and it never would be, but I don’t trust S.H.I.E.L.D. the way you do. In fact I don’t trust anyone the way you do. It’s not in my nature.”

The blue eyes were bright with integrity as Steve Rogers leaned in closer to the camera for greater clarity. “I will not hand Scott Summers over to a vengeful maniac like Blastaar and I won’t let anyone else do it either, but I need his input on this. I’ve been trying to find Namor.”

Logan snorted. “Good luck with that. King Fishsticks was hard enough to handle before he went crazy. He’ll be unreachable now.”

“There’s also the matter of the break-in at Tony’s lab. The only things taken were the blood samples Tony took from Summers in prison.”

Logan snorted. “You want me to ask Frost for them back? I’m amazed it took her this long to steal them. No way does she want her boyfriend’s DNA in someone else’s hands.” He didn’t even blame her that much, not with Sinister out there, and all the creepy shit he’d done to Scott using his DNA and Jean’s: test-tube kids, sons infected with viruses and raised in the future, and evil clones of the sons of evil clones. Scott wouldn’t even talk about the probably even creepier shit that Stryfe had done to him and Jean when he had them prisoner. Logan had his own experience of bad touches from a son he hadn’t known he had, so on that point, if no other, Slim had his sympathy. “Stark needs to upgrade his security system.”

“He says it could only have been done by teleportation or shape-shifting. Those are the only two ways to beat his safety measures.”

“In a world that has Magik and Mystique in it? Like I said, Stark needs to upgrade his security system.”

Wearily, Rogers said, “Just ask them about it when you see them, will you? Stark seems as sure as you do that Frost and Rasputin are the ones that stole the samples, but I’d like to be sure where they ended up. And, yes, do ask for them back. Summers signed a release when the blood samples were taken, that makes them the property of Stark Industries.”

“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”

Patiently, Rogers said, “Logan, the threat of an invasion from Blastaar isn’t a joke. Can I leave this with you?”

“I’ll try to get word to Cyke about the Blastaar situation, but I’m not making any promises. In case you somehow failed to notice it, Cyke and I ain’t exactly besties these days.”

Rogers said quietly, “He’d still come if you told him you needed his help. You know he would.”

He wanted to refute it but it was another of those unbearable truths he kept repressing. Trouble was, he was only an accomplished amateur when it came to repressing, not an intergalactic gold medallist like Summers.

Something rose up inside Logan that hurt too much to even contemplate. He shoved it down angrily, voice hoarse: “That’s why I’m not gonna be phrasing it like that.”

And it was there, between him and Captain America, that Logan could recapture Scott for them if he really wanted to, because, on some level, Scott still trusted him. Logan could bait a trap and Scott would walk into it; they could tazer him to his knees and throw him in a S.W.O.R.D. prison too far away for even Magik to break him out, and that would be that, justice served.

Steve Rogers didn’t trust him when it came to Scott Summers because he suspected a part of Logan of believing that Scott was good for mutantkind. However angry he was with him, however much he wanted him to pay for what he’d done, Logan was a realist and a mutant, and Summers, for all his infinite faults, would do what had to be done, always, to protect mutantkind. He’d become that guy that law-abiding mutants tut-tutted over when the humans were watching, but if he’d been running for office, some of them would have slipped twenty bucks in his campaign fund all the same. Steve Rogers suspected them all of paying lip-service to law and order and privately cheering Scott on when he saved another mutant from another police beating or shooting. And it wasn’t even the truth; as far as Logan was concerned, Slim was a national – no, global – embarrassment and every time he showed up on another news reel telling mutants they weren’t alone, Logan wanted to smack him hard across his chiseled cheekboned model-boy face, and tell him to sit down, shut up, and stop pissing everyone off! Did he want another fucking mutant massacre? Well, did he…?

But the fact remained that maybe there was a part of him that thought Summers might be useful, one day, that tactical brain of his, and those principles that would throw every fucking thing that had ever mattered to him under the bus but not ever his own species. Friends? Relatives? Family? Lovers? Peace of mind? Immortal soul? Fuck that noise; Summers would pay any price and make you pay it right along with him if you let yourself get too close, but mutantkind…? There wasn’t a way Scott Summers wouldn’t die for that or a torture he wouldn’t willingly endure to keep one mutant baby breathing; anything to keep his species alive.

So, much as Logan wanted the murderer of Charles Xavier to go rot in solitary until his ruby gaze cataracted with time, there was a dispassionate part of his brain that thought it might be as well for Scott Summers to be somewhere at liberty in case he turned out to be the cavalry the rest of them had need of. But he would never say that aloud, and he didn’t even like thinking it. It made him feel dirtier than if he’d been working a strip-pole and blowing balding businessmen for coke.

Rogers said quietly, “Logan, it’s better for everyone – including Summers – if he’s brought in and locked up somewhere safe.”

Safe, like the last prison we put him in? He broke out of that the first second he wanted to. It’s what he does. It’s what he’s been doing since he was sixteen years old. He got trained by the guy he murdered in a thousand different ways to get out of jail free. He’s the guy who beat Bastion and Osborn and too many others to count, because it’s all he fucking does, and all he’s ever done – outthink the bad guys and break free from the boxes they try to keep him in. I’m never gonna convince Scott Summers that the bad guy is what he’s become, and I am not playing the villain’s role in his martyred mind-games. I am not going to find myself on the wrong side of the bars he’s behind again. He is not my problem and you are not going to make me shoulder him like he’s my cross to bear. You want to catch him and throw him back in jail, this time you can do it without me.

Aloud, Logan said, “Do you hear me arguing?”

“I can hear your brain bubbling from here. It’s not a complicated issue so don’t try to make it one. Scott Summers committed a crime. He needs to stand trial for it. It’s called due process and the world’s a better place when everyone abides by it. If he’s acquitted because of diminished responsibility, I’ll be the first man to shake his hand.”

“I won’t,” Logan said. “You can have as many twelve good men and true as you like proclaim Scott Summers innocent but, diminished responsibility or not, he murdered a man who mattered right in front of my eyes. Found innocent or guilty, I’m still punching him in the face. What I’m not doing is trading on something that used to matter to both of us just so you can kid yourself there’s some order in the world. There isn’t. Everything to do with the Phoenix is a fucking mess – is, was, and always will be – and putting Summers in prison or finding him innocent doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to what he did. Charles Xavier’s still dead.”

He switched off the link and then reached for the whiskey bottle. Henry McCoy walked in, a big blue-furred bespectacled walking brain who still hadn’t been smart enough not to drag his past into the present and cock the gun against their heads that could wipe them all out with a wrong move. Sometimes, Logan tried to work out how many times the rest of them would be dead, or the world just a burning heap of rubble by now, if Jean or Scott or Warren or Bobby or Hank himself had died at sixteen, after being dragged forward to the future, and, because math wasn’t a strong point he tended to give up at ‘lots’. Unstable geniuses were like unstable nitro-glycerin – things to back away from quietly when they started sweating. Except, ‘unstable genius’ could be applied to half the people Logan hung out with on a regular basis, so the backing away thing was a non-starter unless he wanted a lot of lonely conversations with the shaving mirror.

He thought about the teenagers down the hall under Kitty Pryde’s protective eye. They were still calling it ‘protective’, right? Not admitting just yet that she was well past mildly stabbity and deep into ‘touch my kids and you DIE’? And, yes, even picturing their scrubbed, innocent, not meant to be in this fucking timeline at all ridiculously young little faces would have been enough to make him sprout bleeding ulcers if he hadn’t had healing factor. Yeah. Teen Slim down the hall where he had no business to be, and Renegade Slim still in the wind after his prison break, generally where he had even less business to be, and now needed urgently to avert an invasion by Blastaar the Incredibly Violent. Needed by the Avengers, no less, who had thrown the guy’s ass in jail then been trapped in a time bubble by one of Scott’s new recruits, so not exactly best buds on either side. Illyana Rasputin and Frost breaking into Stark’s laboratory just because they could, and Magneto, the master of Magnetism and occasionally frothing at the mouth freaking crazy guy, probably the sanest of the bunch, and the six o’clock news just calling them all mutants, whether they were shaking ambassadors by the hand or being civilly disobedient all over the place and the media not giving a damn who was affiliated with who.

So, damn right he was drinking JackDaniels at nine fifteen ack-emma. While Logan was still swallowing the bitter burn of the whiskey, McCoy looked pointedly at the clock on the wall. “The sun’s not over the yardarm yet, Logan. I know this school means more to you than most people realize and that can be stressful, but can you at least try to act like a headmaster? Or even a vaguely responsible adult?”

Logan smirked at him because sometimes the only good thing about trouble was sharing it with someone else. “Henry, we have a problem, and – it gets better so be sure to savor this part: It’s about Scott.”

When McCoy groaned and held out a hand for the whiskey bottle, Logan gave it to him without a word.

They met in Central Park. Rachel had arranged it, mind to Cuckoo hive-mind. A quiet area on a quiet day, the jingling of carriage horses could be heard in the distance, offering a strange echo back to the days Logan had forgotten for so many decades and barely remembered now. Back in the day where they’d both been walking the earth, albeit on separate continents, he and Sinister could have been penpals, wouldn’t that have been a blast? The trees waved quietly in the warm breeze and the chimes of the ice cream truck sounded incongruously innocent.

Storm had wanted to come with them but Logan had thought that Ororo and Frost occupying the same space probably wasn’t a good idea right now. Women always tended to feel more betrayed by other women, like men were mostly negligible, their loyalty unimportant in the greater scheme of things. Frost was angry with him on Cyke’s behalf, not her own; but she was furious with Kitty and Ro. He suspected they were probably angrier with her than they were with Scott, too, no doubt on the grounds – which they would never actually voice in Logan’s hearing for obvious reasons – that they half-expected men to be emotionally fragile fuck-ups anyway, always disintegrating into an unstable welter of daddy issues with every other bump in the road, but they had expected far better self-control from the ex-White Queen of the Hellfire Club, the preternaturally poised Emma Frost. In their eyes, perhaps, she was supposed to have been the anchoring power behind the throne, and when she’d let Scott catch that nasty case of cosmic avian fire-flu, she had dropped the ball.

Uneasily, he wondered if half the reason Ro was so keen for everyone to know this thing between her and Logan was just a friends-with-benefits deal – and she’d practically sent out a memo – was so that she didn’t get stuck carrying the can for his screw-ups. That was in no way a comforting thought. At least the women in Scott’s life tended to be all-in; of course, in the past, that hadn’t entailed much of a sacrifice apart from the way he was always getting captured and tortured; being publicly linked to Mr. Goody-Two Shoes not carrying much in the way of moral contamination. It was a while since Scott had been that guy, though, although not – and Logan was the first to admit it – as long as it had been since being associated with Logan and his crimes didn’t carry an automatic taint.

Frost had to be mad as hell at Scott for how far he’d dragged her down. Logan wondered if she was giving Slim a low-level migraine all the time, just because she could. The Emma Frost he’d first met would have been doing that and more. In fact, for all he knew, Scott was wearing that dumbass cross-eyed costume these days just to hide the black eyes from Frost telepathically forcing him to walk into doors. If there were female X-Men looking dubiously at Frost’s situation these days and edging away from committing to the men in their lives just to avoid her fate, Logan was blaming that on Scott, too.

Young Warren looked exactly like an angel, there with the sunlight gilding his blond hair, a gentle breeze fanning it. He was gazing at them with quiet reproach out of those blue, blue eyes, and when Logan thought of what had happened to his adult counterpart, it even felt deserved. He felt a little jolt of guilt at the realization that not only did this Warren not know what had happened to the grown up Warren, Summers didn't know either. Summers didn't even know that X-Force hadn't ended the day he had thanked Logan for what he'd done.

They had asked to meet somewhere isolated, no civilians around to be injured by any fallout, and he had asked Emma and Magneto to leave the kids behind. Naturally, they had insisted on meeting in a public place so the Avengers couldn’t blind-side them without getting caught on camera, and had brought the kids with them, along with the soul-sword-wielding ninety pounds of thigh-boot-wearing insanity that was the younger Rasputin. Logan wasn't a strategist, so he didn't get why they had brought them into what could be a dangerous situation. He felt his familiar anger flare up at Scott's ongoing policy with kids on the frontlines, until McCoy said quietly, "Of course. They probably thought it was a feint – get the grown ups out of the way so we could kidnap their students."

"Why would they think that?" Logan hissed back at him as they advanced slowly across the expanse of parkland, watched by friendly trees.

"Either because they think we're monsters or they think we think they are…?"

"Well, if it isn't Beastadict Arnold and Quislerine."

Frost's whiplash contempt was as icy and brittle as her diamond form. She was wearing sunglasses although the day had a fall feel, like summer was already leaving them, and he wondered if she had just wanted to hide behind those unreadable disks, like Scott and his damned visor. She must have read his mind because she pushed the sunglasses up defiantly, as if to prove she had nothing to hide. Under the carefully applied foundation, the shadows under her blue eyes were awful. She had cried in Logan's arms once. McCoy had worked all night to put her back together when she had been a thousand glittering carats of light, scattered on the floor, and now when she looked at them there was nothing in her eyes but enmity. It hurt.

A few months ago, Logan thought he would probably have flared up, like she wanted him to, been the impulsive animal she evidently thought him. He had learned a lot since then. He was a lot wearier as well. Running a school could do that to you, he had learned. He wondered why she wasn’t wearing white any more; wondered if she even knew the reason for the change to black herself.

"Frost, we just need to talk to Cyke. Tell Magikpants to get him, will ya?"

She looked past them pointedly. "Why, so you can help the Avengers try to kill him again?"

"We weren't trying to kill him."

Logan said it with conviction, and then something just rippled uncomfortably at the back of his memory: Just hurtin’ him’s not good enough. It’s time to put him down. Well, even if they had been trying to kill him. Even if, in that moment, killing him had seemed like the only option to save the planet, it was Scott who had driven them there. No one had woken up on the morning of Charles Xavier’s death thinking that today would be a good day to kill Cyclops until Cyke had decided to go nuts.

"You don't put an arrow in the throat of someone you're not trying to kill. You don't put them in a prison where you know they'll be tortured and shived either. I really can't look at either one of you right now. If it wasn't for Erik, Scott would be dead now, and it would be on the heads of your little friends, and you still wouldn't give a damn."

McCoy sounded as tired as Logan felt. "We didn't come here to fight. We didn't tell anyone else we were coming. We just need to talk to Scott."

"Well, you're out of luck because he isn't here."

Magneto was watching them stonily. It didn't seem that long ago to Logan that Magneto had been the enemy he needed to protect Scott from and now Magneto was standing there, arms folded, glaring at him like Logan was a danger to the innocent.

Logan said brusquely, "Where's Cyke? It's important." He was still waiting for Frost to tell him Scott was off doing his job, saving the oppressed, standing up to the oppressors, when she said:

"Ironically, Logan, he's with you."

"What?"

Frost shook back her blonde hair and, catching her scent, he realized she was angry and hurt. "Another version of you came calling and Scott ran off with him without a backward glance."

"James Howlett, former Governor General of the Dominion of Canada, and Viceroy of Her Majesty’s expedition to Shangri-La," Magneto supplied.

"Howlett?" Logan really was thrown by that. "How does Summers even know him? He wasn't involved with what went down with that different dimension crap."

Frost was lofty as ever but there was an underlying edge to her voice: "No, but he was involved in some other different dimension crap. An alternate version of Storm kidnapped Scott after you and he had your little disagreement about you wanting to roll over for that Sentinel, blow up everything we’d worked for, and run away like a scared puppy, and you stomped off in that epic snit after trying to kill him. Howlett saw those claw marks and joined the dots that you and Scott had argued."

The cuckoos said helpfully, "He probably didn't think Mr. Logan was trying to kill Mr. Summers…"

"… Given where those claw marks were on Mr. Summers' back…"

"… he probably just thought they'd had rough sex."

Logan found that he had a muscle twitching in his jaw but he had determined before he came here that he was going to suck up any insults Summers chose to throw at him and try to do the right thing. Still, the wide-eyed way those new students were drinking in every delicious word was not helping his good temper. "Go on…" he invited grimly. "After I left Utopia, a different version of Ro kidnapped Slim…?"

Frost told him, crisply and with the minimum amount of words. Logan got it. He got the subtext, too. A wounded Scott – hurt by Logan's departure – had bonded with this kinder, nicer Logan in a different dimension and together they had saved the captured superheroes; then, after that kinder, nicer Logan had saved Scott’s life with a well-aimed punch to send him out of harm’s way and back to Scott’s own dimension, he and his motley crew had quietly saved an entire planet before heading off to save the multiverse with Dazzler. So, when this completely awesome and not at all assholeish version of Logan had turned up, needing Scott's assistance with his completely insane quest, Scott had unhesitatingly offered it.

Colossus's crazy little sister said, "They should have let me go with them. I'm good with hell dimensions."

Frost said, "I think Scott was right on that one, dear – Limbo and Hades would probably mix as well as synthetics and silk."

Young Warren said to one of the Cuckoos – Logan still didn't know which was which – in what he clearly imagined to be a lowered tone: "So, is that alternate dimension version of Logan so much nicer because he's gay or is this version of Logan just so much crabbier because he's straight or because he's in the closet and doesn't know it?"

Logan realized that, no, this day wasn't going to get any better. It wasn't even going to make the attempt.

One of the other students said, "Is there a Hercules in this dimension?"

"Yes. Does it have to be Hercules, though?"

One of the creepy cuckoos said, "Miss Frost always thought Mr. Logan and Mr. Summers would have fought a lot less if they just…."

Magneto – mercifully – suggested that the children went and waited under the trees. Some of them were clearly college age but they still trailed off towards the ice cream truck, looking somewhat lost. Logan wanted to whisk them back to his school and its defense systems and the hell away from Scott’s cut-price revolution, but trod down the impulse. They knew where the school was and Scott, being the annoying asshole that he was, had probably shown them a copy of the prospectus and been all just and fair about it. He wished he could accept that there were people who wanted to be with Cyke, without it feeling like what they wanted was not to be with him, but he couldn’t. Every time someone chose to go with Cyke, he felt like they’d personally just spat in his eye.

There was an edge to McCoy's voice that Logan could entirely empathize with as he said, "You're telling us that Scott has gone off with another dimension's Logan to visit that dimension's version of…the Underworld?"

Magneto said, "Yes."

"He's basically gone to hell?"

Frost said coolly, "Why are you objecting, Henry? It's not like you haven't been wishing him there for the past few years, is it?"

"Logan barely got his soul back out of that place intact!”

“Logan has a soul? I am surprised.”

“My point, Emma, is – what on earth was Scott thinking doing something so dangerous by himself?"

Magneto said, "He was thinking that a friend needed his help to save the person that he loves. Scott does know rather a lot about losing people that he loves."

"Why didn't Howlett come to us?" Logan demanded.

"Because he and Scott bonded over saving a world together. Because…never mind because… Those ridiculous children seem to have forgotten they don’t have any money."

Emma walked off to where the kids were lining up to buy fudgesicles. She looked poised and elegant, because Frost didn’t really know how to look any other way, but she smelled like someone who had climbed off the ropes one too many times. It occurred to Logan that the same description could possibly be applied to Scott. The beautiful people were fraying at the edges over here while he and his were flourishing. He tried to tell himself that it made him happy that Emma Frost had dark shadows under her eyes and that Magneto looked as if he had been staring too long into the abyss. That Logan was positively ecstatic that, under the nifty new costume and the perfect physique, and the standing tall and staring down anything the world could throw at him, including the Avengers, unblinkingly behind his visor, Scott was hurting enough to run off to hell with Howlett. But if this was happy then he didn’t much care for it. If this was happy, it felt uncomfortably similar to sad.

Logan remembered that when Blastaar had blindfolded Scott all those months ago he had done it with something that looked uncomfortably like a crown of thorns. He had no idea why that image was suddenly so vivid in his mind.

Magneto was giving nothing away even though Logan could pick up that neither he nor Emma were happy about Scott running off with Howlett. All he said aloud was, “Is your Scott safe, incidentally? If anything happens to that boy or the others –"

"For the moment," Logan said. "Until he steals something else of mine and heads off into danger or decides to take tea with another super villain, yes, he's safe."

"You wouldn't remember Scott looking like that, Logan, but I do and – "

McCoy said tautly, "Do you think I don't? I carried him home enough times after you'd tried to kill him, Erik!"

"It was spiteful, irresponsible, and cruel, what you did. Bringing those children forward – cruel to Scott and cruel to them – "

"I was trying to remind a man of who he used to be! I was trying to save him, our fragile species, and this whole damned world, before you idiots set it on fire with your so-called mutant revolution!"

"Excuse us for not choosing to hide our heads in the sand while children are killed by policemen just for manifesting their powers. Oh, I was forgetting, you're Avengers now – supporting the government, right or wrong, is what you do now, and to hell with civil rights."

As Magneto and McCoy went at it – too many years of frustration breaking out between them, despite the fact both of them had agonized through the aftermath of those three little words that had brought the mutant race to the brink of extinction and cared just as passionately that they appeared to be doomed – Logan walked a little way away to try to clear his head.

"Are you going to help Scott?"

Logan turned to find Young Warren standing under the shade of a tree, looking exactly like an angel, sad and quiet and confused by all the strife and misery in the world. He couldn't help looking at him, so golden and eagle-winged, and remember how that other Warren had looked, naked and beautiful, retrieved wings outspread, that beam of light finding him like the grace of God, and underneath him, that charnel house of bleeding corpses, a mound of dead that Warren's other half had murdered in his frenzied need to take back his wings. The time-displaced kids were so new and untouched. He wanted to wrap them up and keep them that way forever. He wanted to send them back so no harm could come to them here. And he was not going to give into that part of himself that couldn't bear the thought of them being out of his protection, back in a past where he couldn't reach them, with no way of letting his younger self know that he needed to get to Greymalkin Avenue right now and offer his services to Xavier in keeping those dumb kids safe.

"He won't want me there," Logan said. "He's got Howlett." It was surprising how much that hurt.

"I remember you threatening Scotty –"

"I was wrong. It was wrong. He knows I didn't mean it. I wouldn't let any harm come to those kids. You shouldn't be here, you know. You should have stayed with the others."

"That place has changed so much, it just reminds me how far from home I am."

"And what Scott's become doesn't?"

Warren tilted his head to one side, unnervingly bird-like. "I don't really think he's changed that much. The Scott I know always tries to do the right thing, too. It's not like he isn't damaged as well. This one actually has fewer nightmares."

Logan had learned about Young Scott's nightmares, of course – his hearing was too good for him not to. He had been afraid he might feature in them, after threatening the kid with violent death, but Logan hadn't seemed to make even his top ten bad memories. Compared with what Sinister and Winters had done to him, Logan threatening to pop a claw through his scrawny neck was apparently small beer. In fact, being threatened with a quick painless death wasn’t even on his register compared with the inventive ways Winters had threatened to kill him, usually while beating him around their squalid little hideouts.

A quick trip back in a time machine and Logan could turn Jack Winters, unrepentantly brutish abuser of a runaway mutant kid, into a series of wet brown paper parcels scattered across city dumpsters. He could take teenage Scott to Xavier before the beatings even started. He could get Ro and her family out of the house in Egypt before the aircraft attack that had buried them under all that rubble and save her from the Shadow King. He could save Itsu from the Winter Soldier and his son from falling into the hands of Romulus. Raise Daken to be a different man…. That was exactly what was wrong with time travel, that it made you want to tinker with the workings, when you had to let it happen, even the bad things, even the very worst things, or else the wheels came off. To a man with a savior complex, a time machine was the worst of temptations, and Henry should have had more damned sense than to build the thing in the first place. And, besides, perhaps Scott had needed the beatings to become the man he was. Perhaps if they had never happened, Scott had never grown up tough enough to do the things he’d done – the good things as well as the bad. That was why you didn’t fuck with things that had already happened, however much you wanted to.

Warren said thoughtfully, "This Scott only wakes up screaming every other night." He wrapped his arms around himself as if to ward off a sudden chill. "I hate it when he calls out to the Professor, though. That gets everyone down." He met Logan's gaze, those clear eyes of his troubled. "Do you think the Professor's looking for us – back in the past? He must be so worried."

"Beast can send you all back so no time has passed."

"But it's passing now, all the same. He's worrying now."

"The only way to fix that is to go home."

Warren's gaze was very direct. "I'm the one who wanted to, remember?"

"I know Jean's sorry for what she did to you."

Warren spread his wings to catch the warmth of the sun, shaking back his golden hair. He looked impossibly beautiful. "Jean's crazy and desperate here – not like she was back home in our time. Everyone's crazy here. Especially me. What happened to me, Logan?"

He swallowed. "Apocalypse happened to you. Cameron Hodge happened to you."

Warren kept gazing at him steadily. "Scott told me about Cameron. How he pretended to be my friend for all that time, with the hate building. How he got my wings cut off. If I go back and the Professor wipes my mind, that's what's waiting for me – gangrene, betrayal, amputated wings, and the Angel of Death inside me forever – and me battling him for control of my own body, my own mind. And I didn't win that fight, did I?"

Logan put his hands up to his head. "I want to keep you safe. All five of you. You can't imagine how much I want to – but they're your lives and you already lived them. And if you don't. If you change the past – for all I know you die sooner, or the world ends up worse. It may not seem much to you, but we fought for this world, and this present, we paid in blood for it and we lost friends along the way. Good friends. I have to believe it would have been worse if we'd done something else. You've been nothing but good to me, Warren. All I've ever seen you do is try to help mutants, try to help your friends, risk yourself for the cause. You grew up a good man. If there was a way I could spare you going through –"

"I'm dead, Logan. That guy I met, there was no trace of me in him. I don't know who he was but he wasn't me. Five minutes with adult Scott and I knew that, because he's still Scott. Not that you can see it, I know, but, trust me, he is. We're all so damaged. Jean's dead. I might as well be. Half the people Scott's ever loved think he's a monster. Hank clearly went nuts somewhere along the line or we wouldn't be here. Bobby's the only sane one."

Logan decided not to mention the words 'Death Seed'. It wasn't the time.

"I know things look bad – "

"Yes, they do. Millions of us dead on Genosha. Ninety-nine percent of the mutant gene deactivated. Down to less than two hundred mutants left in the world and everything hanging by a thread. If the Phoenix Force hadn't come here, we were facing extinction, and even Hank couldn't find a way to fix that, and Scott's way killed the Professor and damn near killed him. Excuse me for thinking maybe Jean's right and there might be a better future ahead of us than this."

"I thought you – "

"I want to go home, but I don't think I want to live this life. I'm not sure any of us do. All I see are defeats."

"There were victories."

"How many? And how much did they cost us? Does it really have to be this hard?"

Logan looked him right in the eyes and said, "Yeah, kid, I'm sorry but it does. For us it has to be this hard, because we're not like regular people, we're mutants. We get the benefits and we get the cost. You get to soar as high as you like without your wings melting. I get to heal. Jean gets to save lives with the power of her mind. Bobby gets to make the world his personal ice sculpture. And the price we pay is envy and fear and hatred and mistrust – and pain." Lots and lots of physical, emotional, and psychological pain. He decided not to share that last truth with Warren.

***

They had paid the ferryman and were now being rowed across the Styx, while Howlett went over the rules of his dead lover’s universe with him.

“See, this is a world made of crazy, lad, not just down here in the Underworld, everywhere in this dimension. It’s a place where there really are gods on Mount Olympus lolling around in togas. Your optic blasts don’t work here because they’re not in the mythology. My healing factor does because it is. Here, I’m probably invulnerable because someone dipped me in something magical. The claws come out because claws are cool, mythologically-speaking. I was probably sired by a demigod in the guise of a wolf on some unsuspecting handmaiden or something. This world can deal with that, no problem.”

The water was black, blacker than black. Scott kept peering into its depths and thinking he saw the glint of scaled things, but then the blackness washed over it and it was like staring into a sea of ink.

Scott said, “You’re saying my mutation is too lame to get a mythological upgrade?”

Howlett grinned at him. “I’m saying this is a world where nothing makes a whole lot of sense but you’ll get used to it faster than you’d ever believe.”

As they reached the far shore of Hades and stepped out of the boat, the heat was terrible and the air was worse. It wasn’t unlike Limbo. Scott gazed up at black glaciers and walls running with red flame, red lakes in which shadowy things swam, and realized that he had never seen so many shades of red. It was annoying, when he was seeing the world in color, for a change, that it happened to be a world that mostly came in crimson. He wondered if Orpheus was strumming on a lyre down here, Persephone still regretting those pomegranate seeds. He tried not to cough but it was difficult with the sulfur in the air. This wasn’t a place to show weakness.

The atmosphere was…it wasn’t just the brimstone, or the scent of burning soot and searing flesh, there was something restless and hungry about it, tangibly carnivorous. He imagined good thoughts would come only to the pure of heart here, because this was a world that wanted to reshape its inhabitants into predators and prey.

A sultry breeze coiled around his thighs, flickering at his flimsy hemline. When Scott tugged at his costume fretfully Howlett said, again, “Stop it.” He sounded no less amused and no less tolerant than the last three times he’d told him to stop fussing at his party dress, this wasn’t the Prom, but when they got back topside, if he was good, he’d buy him a corsage. Scott had no idea where Howlett’s deeps of patience came from but suspected he had got the share of several other dimensions’ worth of Wolverine calm on his travels, explaining why some of the James Howletts in the multiverse had so little. One in particular seemed to have none left at all, certainly not where Scott was concerned, but he was not going to think of that here, or anywhere else.

The costume bothered him on more than one level – it had no strategic value and offered no protection, in fact it was probably a fire hazard, but it also felt like a part of the way this unfamiliar dimension was trying to mold him into something else that better fitted its mythology. He wasn’t quite sure what that was yet but it clearly wasn’t a leader of mutant warriors in a world that didn’t admit to having mutants, and equally clearly was someone who would wear this in public.

“I feel ridiculous.”

“So you keep saying. You look fine and most importantly you look like you belong in the myth, which means you’re not messing with this world’s fragile hold on reality. I’m never too sure how stable this dimension is and we don’t want a Connecticut Yankee situation.”

“I’m from Alaska.”

“Just so you know, I find the ‘being boringly literal’ thing kinda hot.”

Scott glanced down at himself and grimaced; a skimpy blue wisp of something silky with a red sash, his right shoulder bare, and the rest all legs and sandals. He stared glumly at his own toes, which, by all his own rules, should not have been visible. They were on a mission, and he had a really good lecture that he gave to all new recruits on the importance of the proper footwear for missions: shoes or boots offering protection, grip, and waterproofing were a must. (Emma, naturally enough, had always ignored that lecture and told him that he could dream on, darling, if he thought she was going on a mission wearing anything that wasn’t made by one of the very short list of designers who matched her exacting standards.

“You and the students feel free to encase your toes in all the rubberized polyurethane you like, dear. Some of us, when facing certain death, will be exquisitely wearing Prada.”)

The last time he’d had to wear footwear this insubstantial they’d been those slipper things he’d been forced to put on in prison, along with the jumpsuit and the headgear that made him look like a large, orange insect. He missed his visor, but Howlett had told him his beams wouldn’t work in this dimension, and he’d been right. He felt naked without them; possibly because he practically was naked apart from a meager yard of shimmering blue cloth.

Scott muttered it because he knew it only made Howlett smirk but he needed to say it anyway, just because: “As we’re on a mission, we ought to use codenames.”

“Fine, as long as you don’t mind yours being ‘Monster Bait’.” Howlett sounded fond, and amused by Scott in a way that Logan never had been, even back in those far-off painful days when Logan had been the best friend that he had ever known. They had always been so intense, every word counting, every disagreement a soul-tearing wound; but Howlett was easy in his company, like Scott wasn’t a penance to be around.

It made a nice change not to feel bitter and resentful and under attack; to not have to lock everything down tight and act as if he were unbreachable, because these people, whom he’d once trusted with his life and not yet acquired the knack of forgetting how to love, would pick at his seams if they could, now, and unravel him like twine.

Howlett went on, “This isn’t a Rumpelstiltskin deal. We’re in hell, Scott. Vengeful deities knowing our real names isn’t going to make a whit of difference when they’re trying to rip out our souls or feed us to bull-headed beasties.”

As they had dressed in their costumes, before Howlett cast the spell to carry them into the Underworld (a spell he had apparently undergone a dozen hair-raising adventures to obtain before he’d even bothered calling Scott in as reinforcements for the main event), there had been a moment when Howlett had reached across and rearranged Scott’s hair, trying to make it look more like some picture he was using for a reference and Scott had felt a ridiculous surge of comfort, just from being touched by his strong, warm hands. A shiver of sheer misery had followed at how pathetically lonely he’d become. No one in his mind now Emma had lost her powers – and he missed her voice the way he missed her company there – and Erik wasn’t Logan, who would grab him by the front of his clothing to haul him over to look at a trail, as if words were on ration but pulling, prodding, and occasionally punching came free with every six pack of beer. No, Erik didn’t really touch him these days, although Scott suspected it was because Erik knew full well how much Scott wanted to be touched right now, when the nightmares about the dead Charles Xavier at his feet billowed up and he woke in a bed alone. Scott had been needy with Jean, in the past. He had wanted to wind his mind through hers like a hungry cat around the ankles, needing the comfort of her voice in his head. He had been more self-possessed with Emma, perhaps because she didn’t believe in mental privacy. She entered his mind without knocking and rearranged the furniture just to catch the morning light. He had loved her for that.

Erik could offer him absolution and a new father to try to please, to inevitably fail and disappoint and possibly murder…. Erik had been kinder than that, when a part of him – his oldest friend blotted out by Scott’s madness – must have positively yearned to be cruel. He had offered him some hard truths and qualified praise and he had not filled the void that ached in Scott’s life even though Scott was there for the taking right now by anyone who would hurt him just right.

Now, walking beside the Styx with the sulfurous air steaming, Howlett’s voice was a low comforting rumble of familiarity in a world of strangeness: “…so trust me, son, this isn’t a place for spandex. Here, you’ll blend in, and if anyone gets the wrong idea, you’ve got all those martial arts moves.”

“Wrong idea, how?” Scott asked.

Howlett patted him gently on the shoulder. “Never mind. I’m sure it won’t come to that.” Then he grimaced and removed his hand carefully and Scott realized that he must be looking at his scars, the long ugly ones that Logan had raked down his back. He had thought the tunic concealed them but perhaps the ends were visible.

“It was an adrenaline thing,” Scott offered, remembering the furious pace of their fight on the shores of Utopia. God, it hurt to think of it – of Logan and of Utopia, both lost to him now, and of the friendship that had died that day, apparently forever. He had barely felt any of those stab wounds at the time: his hand, his arm, his raked ribs, his scored back. He’d been too angry to feel anything. “I hurt him just as badly. It’s just that what I did didn’t scar.”

Howlett said, “It’s not the same. You don’t have healing factor and he knew that.”

Howlett was a good man. He was tolerant and he was forgiving, but it stood to reason that the one guy he’d be hard on was another version of himself. Logan had been pulling his punches. For all Kavita Rao’s pursed lips and Emma’s narrowed eyes as Scott lay in the infirmary afterwards, both of them shaking their heads at the damage, Logan could have stabbed to kill and he hadn’t, even though, remembering the blazing rage in his eyes, Scott knew he must have wanted to.

“We were both mad as hell and we both thought we were doing the right thing.”

Scott winced even before the words left his lips because they would be putting that on their tombstones. Cyclops and Wolverine: They Knew They Were Right. Only history would know how wrong they might be; that wouldn’t trouble him much, he’d be safely dead somewhere, sleeping in oblivion; but poor old immortal Logan would have to bear it alone. How annoying that would be for him, if he turned out to be justified and there was no Scott left to tell. Scott could easily imagine Logan digging him up just to yell at his corpse. Ordering some future equivalent of Henry to damned well regenerate him somehow, even if he was just a brain in a jar with a hearing aid, because Logan wanted the satisfaction of telling Scott that he had been wrong. Maybe the kindest thing Scott could do with his dying breath was tell Logan he was right about anything and everything, any damned thing Logan wanted, he’d been right about it; just so the guy didn’t have the lack of that acknowledgment niggling at him through all his endless forevers.

Concussed to the point where his head felt like rocks were fighting in it, clamped to a wall, with the world swimming, and Hope still mad at him because he wasn’t her father; her father was dead and Scott was alive in his place, and how dare he be?

“You’re better than me, at everything, ever….”

That was what Hope had needed him to say and had made him say before she freed him. Perhaps Logan needed an equivalent. The next time Scott was dying, if Logan was within earshot, he’d make sure to tell him he was right. Of course, the only way Logan was going to be within earshot to hear Scott’s dying breath, the way things were between them, would be if Logan was the guy killing him, in which case, screw him, he could do without affirmation, and would have to settle for digging up Scott’s corpse to harangue it.

Back in the world above them, in a pillared palace, all graceful statuary and erotic mosaics close to a bed so enormous it could have accommodated every member of the New Xavier School – faculty and students – and still left room for a shire horse, Howlett had changed from his usual garb to his current drapery with a lot less fuss than Scott. Scott had been assessing danger points and exit routes, as usual, as he unwillingly undressed out of the flexible-and-flame-resistant uniform he would have much preferred to be wearing when traveling into hell, and even more unwillingly put his visor in an urn and opened his eyes to a world of white marble. No beams, just as Howlett had warned him back in the school. Here, it seemed, he wasn’t even a mutant.

His irritation was in no way assuaged by the way that Howlett had already made the transition from rugged frontiersman to Clash of the Titans extra without even blinking, just as if these clothes weren’t the silliest things that a grown man could be required to wear in public. In fact he was carrying off his costume with panache, even though Scott had just assumed that his hat didn’t actually come off but came glued on for all occasions, like the cheaper kind of action figure. Khiton-draped, Howlett was lightly furred all over, strong and muscled and fit; like and not like Logan in a way that was both familiar and strange and oddly comforting.

Scott was used to undressing in front of other men. As Henry delighted in pointing out in front of company, there were absolutely no secrets of any kind between the four original male members of the X-Men, including what happened when Warren’s wings outspread for the first time in the mornings and why you didn’t want to be standing too close to him when they did, and the exact dimensions of Beast’s loins pre and post all of his mutations. But for some reason, in that palace with Howlett, that pillared bed spreading for what looked like half an acre – seriously – what did Howlett and Hercules do in that thing? Did they invite all of the immortal hero’s old conquests over for orgy brunches or something? There, opposite the vast mural of a naked Hercules wrestling with a snarling lion, standing uncomfortably close to the equally vast mural of a naked Hercules wrestling – Scott was going to call it wrestling – with some dark-haired Adonis who was apparently double-jointed, and being careful not to stand on the mosaic of a naked Hercules…wrestling a far from snarling Hippolyta, Scott had found himself uncharacteristically self-conscious.

Amused by his modesty, Howlett had mocked him, but kindly. Scott had come to realize that Howlett did almost everything kindly. Scott had pulled off his familiar, sensible clothing and then stood there, nude and embarrassed and trying to pretend he wasn’t both of those things while Howlett went on grinning and offering that ridiculous bit of material that he claimed was an appropriate costume.

“Seriously, Summers, if I had a body like yours I’d be as much of a show-off about it as my Late Lamented. You’re in a world full of narcissistic immortal preeners who all have super strength and body slaves to oil them up so they can look their best in their temple statues, and you’re still the prettiest.”

“It’s not about being…pretty. It’s about being able to rely on your strength and skill and muscle memory, and here I don’t know if I can. My optic blasts don’t work. What else might not work here?”

Howlett just grinned at him, for some bizarre reason finding Scott as diverting as a good book. “Lad, you stand there naked for very much longer in front of this old war horse and I’ll be coming over there to find out. A man only has so much self-control.”

“Very funny.” Reluctantly and with what Emma would probably have categorized as a certain amount of sulking but was really just the old shyness come back to haunt him, Scott pulled on the costume that Howlett insisted he needed to wear and assured Howlett with feeling that he hated it like nothing he had ever worn before. He did some stretches and flips and it didn’t feel right in a stupid little piece of drapery that billowed and floated instead of flexing right along with him, but at least his body seemed to work the same in this dimension even if his beams didn’t.

Howlett said, “Those legs really do go on forever, don’t they?”

Scott tugged at his tunic even more self-consciously. “Does this thing even cover my…?”

“Assets?” Howlett grinned at him. “Scott we’re in Classical Mythology land. Do not confuse it with Ancient Greece. As far as I can tell the place was designed to suit the needs of horny gods, so: biology does whatever they want it to do, beautiful nymphs go around more or less bare-breasted, and attractive young men wear costumes that mean anyone who wants to can get an eyeful. It’s just the way it is. On the upside, the longer you stay here, the more likely you are to look…twenty-two-ish forever. On the downside, you really need to keep a weather eye out for hairy things with horns. Anyway, I gave you a loincloth.”

“I’ve seen bigger thongs,” Scott protested. All it did was bundle up his genitalia and offer limited support. There was still a warmly salacious breeze curling over his ass cheeks.

Howlett said, “Scott, you do know that costume you usually run around in leaves very little to the imagination, right?”

“It covers everything.” Besides, it felt warm and safe and supportive and – above all – familiar.

“It’s spandex body paint.”

“No one looks at my ass when I’m wearing it!” Scott retorted.

Howlett’s expression had been hard to categorize: it looked like a mixture of incredulous disbelief and the kind of amusement people suppressed when they were trying to spare someone’s feelings, but as Scott could see no reason why either of those emotions would be relevant under the circumstances he guessed he was mistaken. Emma was always telling him his people-reading skills were terrible.

Things looked up when Howlett fitted them out with short bronze swords, comfortingly weighty, but it was a while since Scott had worked on his sword practice – he’d been too busy trying to regain some control over his now erratic eye beams – and he hoped he wasn’t going to have to fight…? Actually, what was he going to have to fight…?

Now, on the far shore of the River Styx, looking around at the dripping dark caverns in which ominous shadows stalked and scaly things slithered, Scott realized belatedly that almost everything he knew about Greek mythology had come from watching old Ray Harryhausen movies with the others at Bobby’s insistence. There had been no Movie Night at Sinister’s orphanage, so it had all been so new to Scott. He remembered popcorn and the strangeness of having friends, darting sideways glances to check that this really was his life now – part of a group, part of a team, a team moreover that included the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life. Perhaps that was why his memory of those movies was so hazy, but he remembered skeletons with swords grown from dragon’s teeth, and griffins, and there had been a kraken. Hank had kept explaining all the mythological inaccuracies, and Bobby had kept telling Hank to shut up, while Warren watched Pegasus starry-eyed, and Scott kept sneaking longing looks at Jean.

As they walked along the shore, Scott tried to get his bearings. The black rocks seemed to be bleeding tiny lava streams that glowed like crushed rubies, and gave off a sulfurous smoke. There were burning torches, too, thrust into bronze hands that jutted out as if people had been buried alive. Given that this was hell, they probably had been.

“What are we likely to be up against here?” he asked.

“Anything and everything that ever featured in a sane man’s worst nightmare or a sadomasochist’s best fantasy.” Howlett was looking Scott over as if he were having second thoughts about something. “Incidentally, if you see any centaurs or satyrs, don’t stick around, okay? Just make a run for it. That goes double for minotaurs.”

“Those things are real?”

“Everything’s real, Scott, we’re in Hades: so, gorgons and chimeras and manticores are like buses, and the kind of cyclopes you meet in this place won’t play by your rules. I’m serious about the centaurs. Those things are never sober. In fact anything that has some human parts and some non-human parts, just generally stay away from its…parts.”

It all still seemed a little silly, but Scott drew his bronze sword and advanced with caution between looming black rock, dripping with red stalactites.

The first thing that came at them was many-headed. It was many-tentacled as well, and had absolutely no concept of personal space. Scott had hacked off three heads while slimy tentacles, distractingly, tried to take an uninvited biology class, before he realized that the heads were regenerating, and coming back hungrier and angrier than ever.

Howlett, also enmeshed in groping tentacles, yelled, “It’s a hydra, Scott!”

Hacking at a lunging head, Scott said, “What? Like Viper’s organization?”

“Like the Lernaean Hydra! You have to cauterize the neck stumps after you cut off the heads! Otherwise they just grow back!”

Enmeshed in tentacles but still managing to keep his sword arm free, Scott sliced off a head that lunged at his throat, hacked through a tentacle binding his left arm, grabbed a flaming torch from the wall with his now free hand and threw it to Howlett, who caught it and used it in one deft movement, searing the stump of one of the severed heads. Scott barely stifled a yelp at the hydra’s retaliation and lopped off a tentacle that had absolutely no business being where it was. The hydra slammed him hard against the rock wall and he grabbed another torch, plunging it into the bleeding stump of the last head he’d hacked off. That made the other heads writhe and screech and the tentacles get seriously inappropriate. He replenished the stuttering flame of his torch from the lava stream and threw it to Howlett as Howlett tossed him the smoking one he needed rekindled. They kept hacking and searing, while relighting their torches and keeping the other one equipped with a working flame, and the hydra kept trying to rip off their faces with its lunging heads and to get to third base with its tentacles.

His sword arm was starting to feel as if were coated in lead before they had cut off and cauterized enough heads that the hydra evidently decided to cut its losses. It hurled them both at the wall of the cavern and slithered off, sulkily, leaving the cavern floor littered with still-wriggling tentacles and snapping heads.

Scott picked himself up and adjusted his tunic, metaphorical feathers more than a little ruffled. Howlett clambered back to his feet and patted him on the shoulder. “Good work there, lad. You dealt with it like a pro. Mythological beasts are never easy.”

“I’m used to fighting evil killer tentacle monsters that want to bite my head off, Howlett. This one was just a little…sleazier than I’m used to.” He remembered nothing in the myths about the hydra being as handsy as a drunken customer in a strip bar with a fist full of dollar bills and a single-minded determination about where he would be shoving them.

Howlett grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that, but, like I said, it’s mythology world.”

“So…?”

“So…everything’s about sex: the myths, the rituals, the poetry, the art. The gods are horny, the beasts are horny, and the god-begotten-manbeasts are horny. Just try to keep moving and don’t let them put their hands – or anything else – up your costume.”

“And you knew this and you didn’t let me wear my uniform?”

“You have to work with the mythology, you can’t fight it, and you can’t wear manmade fibers to a classical civilization party. It just doesn’t work.”

Still ruffled, Scott sheathed his sword, smoothed down his totally inadequate clothing and said, “I’d just prefer to be wearing more supportive underwear right now. Also – this place sucks.”

Apologetically, Howlett said, “This place is actually a lot nicer than Tartarus.” Howlett had given him the rundown of his and Hercules’ romantic past and Tartarus had been one of the less pleasant parts of it. Scott presumed that being hurled into demonic pits became a more likely hazard when you were dating a demigod and your in-laws included Zeus.

As they made their way past more red-dripping cliffs, the rock looking as if a million crimson wax candles had melted in rivulets while sulfur smoked up from the lava streams, Scott said, “Your Hercules – is he like the one I know?”

“What’s the one that you know like?”

“Well, he has many positive attributes but what you tend to remember about him most is how naked he usually is.”

Howlett smiled fondly. “Sounds a lot like my Hercules.”

It was when he and Howlett were fighting the bipedal hog-headed man-beasts that Scott realized he was enjoying himself. Eight bad guys with vicious tusks, superhuman strength, and clawed fingers holding serrated swords, against the two of them was the kind of odds that made the adrenaline spike gloriously as his mind ran battle scenarios to see which tactics would defeat them best, and Howlett just flung himself in there in a way comfortingly reminiscent of Logan. Inevitably, the hog-headed man-beasts seemed to be under the impression that Scott had been dropped into the Underworld for their personal usage. Their language was certainly basic, but they made their intentions very clear all the same, and it had taken cutting off the heads of three of them for the others to even begin to get the message that, no, Scott was not going to let them drag him off so they could gang rape him before bashing his head in with a rock and spit-roasting him for their supper – because he was funny like that.

Howlett had got a rush of blood to the head when the biggest and ugliest of the hog-beasts had thrown Scott into a cliff wall in an attempt to subdue him – or possibly tenderize him for later consumption. Even though Scott had deliberately gone limp so the impact barely bruised him, Howlett had come roaring in with his claws out and turned the king of the hog-beasts to flesh confetti. At which point the others had decided that Scott was less appetizing than they thought and run away.

Scott found himself grinning at Howlett as he cleaned his sword on his stupid tunic. “You did say this place was ‘kinda fun’.”

Howlett examined him anxiously for damage. “You okay, Scott?”

“Fine. You?”

“I have healing factor. You don’t.”

Slightly nonplussed, Scott said, “But there were only eight of them.”

There might have been a longer conversation but Howlett, sniffing the air, said urgently, “We need to leave!” He laced his fingers to make a step and then tossed Scott cleanly up onto a ledge ten feet above them, before using his claws to clamber up after him – just snatching his sandaled foot out of the hungry maw of the huge ravening hyena beasts that came charging into the chamber, apparently attracted by the scent of fresh hog-beast blood.

As the air below them turned into a frothing spume of crimson as the giant hyena beasts chowed down, Scott watched their movements with interest, mentally calculating how difficult they would be to fight if they attacked in a pack, and said, “I need to program this place into the Danger Room scenarios.”

Howlett cocked him a glance as amused as it was exasperated. “Groping tentacles and horny hybrid man-beasts included?”

“I think it would work better as a pre-programmed adaptive battle scenario if the chief motivation of the people-creatures and…creature-creatures was trying to eat the trainees.”

Howlett smirked. “You are never gonna tell anyone the whole truth about this place, are you?”

“Not if I can avoid it, no.” Scott saw that the giant hyena beasts were now skirmishing for leftovers and things were getting combative. “Given the competitive nature of the alpha males of this species, if you wounded the biggest one of those, you could seriously undermine the efficiency of the pack, the smell of blood would compel them to kill their wounded leader first and then the realization of a power vacuum existing would almost certainly lead to an immediate fight for supremacy – giving their original prey plenty of time to escape. I wonder if that’s why Earth-based hyena packs are led by alpha females instead?”

“Sometimes I think it would be cool to see all the cogs and levers in your brain going around, lad, and sometimes I think it would just be…creepy. And haven’t the women on your team already told you that external plumbing leads to sloppy thinking?”

“Emma sometimes used to mutter things about men and their diverted bloodflow, but usually only when she was talking about Logan, and most of the things she said about Logan weren’t strictly accurate.”

Howlett seemed to find that disproportionately fascinating. “Your girlfriend and your dimension’s Wolverine didn’t get along?”

“They used to needle each other. I never really understood why. They both like each other really.”

“It didn’t occur to you that they might be jealous?”

Scott blinked in confusion. “Of what…?”

Then bat-winged, bird-beaked, human-breasted harpies came out of the higher tunnels in shrieking, clawing flocks and started trying to tear off their faces, leaving Scott and Howlett fully occupied in doing their best not to die.

Scott and Howlett had got separated somewhere after the hungry Minotaur and before the giant snake, leaving Scott to evade the next batch of screeching claw-winged harpies by clambering through a tunnel too narrow for their leathery wings to fit.

At least, Scott thought the Minotaur had been hungry, it had certainly come roaring out at him like it couldn’t wait to get its hands on his flesh, backhanded Howlett into the wall so hard it snapped his sword blade in two, ripped the sword from Scott’s hand, then pinned him hard to the ground while he fought to free himself from its meat-stinking mouth, iron-heavy bulk, and clutching fingers. The latter had been right in a place where he didn’t want them to be when Howlett had staggered up and hit it with a rock, stunning it, dragged Scott up, and then shoved him at a side-entrance, saying, “Back on Crete it used to get regular rations of boys and girls in skimpy costumes – let’s not help it to backslide, eh? Let’s give it two targets. You go east, I’ll go west.”

Tactically, it made sense, and another shove coupled with the roaring fury of the awakening bull-headed beast had sent Scott into a sprint, but when he looked back to check that Howlett had got off to an equally fast start, he saw the man had treacherously doubled back to ensure he was what was in its awakening eye-line and not Scott.

Scott skidded to a dismayed stop. “Howlett!”

All that won him was a totally unrepentant wink and a: ‘I got this and don’t worry, son, I’m not its type. Now, go and find Hercules and, before you even think about disobeying me, remember, as a General, I outrank you.’ Only then – as the beast came at Howlett roaring – did the man finally charge off in the opposite direction from Scott, jeering at the Minotaur in what were presumably Cretan obscenities to ensure it went after him.

Howlett’s tossed over his shoulder: “Go look for Hercules – that’s an order, Summers!” had propelled an unwilling Scott to do what he was told and head east.

After the harpies – just as grabby and screechy and generally unpleasant as the first batch they’d fought – and worried about Howlett, Scott had crawled through the tunnel and emerged into cavern, heaving with hell-toads. Howlett had warned him about these: black and noisome, with lava streams flowing beneath their skin in place of veins, but otherwise harmless, well, as long as you didn’t let them spit noxious poison in your eyes, blinding you forever, which they would probably attempt to do. Used to traversing unknown places with his eyes firmly closed after being robbed of his visor by bad guys, Scott had made his way through them with minimal squelching and absolutely no venom-seared eyes.

The next chamber had been thankfully free of hell-toads and Scott had risked opening his eyes, which gave him an excellent close-up of the huge horned serpent that promptly enfolded him in its slithering coils. Ophidia-wrestling in an obsidian cave, Scott found he had only half his mind on the battle. He wanted Hercules and Howlett to be reunited. He wanted someone in the world to have a happy ending, even if happy endings, for the murderer of Charles Xavier, were a thing of the past…. He grimaced as the serpent tightened its grip, it was bruising his ribs now and whatever it was doing slithering the tip of its tail up his thigh like that with such rapid purpose was just creepy, particularly given his current lack of proper underwear. Following Howlett’s example, he grabbed a rock and hit the serpent hard on the side of the head, its coils relaxing as it slumped, bleeding to the ground. He untwisted its scales from his body still wondering where Howlett was, and then stripped off the hem of his annoying tunic to bind up the cut on his arm the harpy’s clutching claws had left when he was battling with them, in case there were more beasts down here attracted to the scent of blood.

Having left behind the bleeding serpent, the croaking hell-toads, and the angry harpies, Scott punted his way across a black lake in which unseen things sent up suckered tentacles whose caresses he had to weave and duck to avoid. It was a relief to get back on dry land, even when dry land turned out to involve tiptoeing past a sleeping beast with two beaked heads and flexing golden eagle wings.

He was looking for high ground he could get to in his search for Howlett, when a strange warrior came out of nowhere, gilt hair trailing, all muscled precision. Only Scott’s instincts alerted him, and he ducked and rolled just in time, back flipping onto the balls of his feet, ready for the next feint. When the guy came at him again, Scott threw himself up and over him, stumbling a little as he landed because of the uneven ground. That stumble was enough to undo him – the guy was that fast – gilt and muscular, and bearing Scott to the ground. Scott was the taller but the other the brawnier, still, Scott went to kick him off, the way he had kicked off innumerable enemies in the past.

It was like trying to kick cement.

He rabbit punched and rolled instead, but he was shaken. The guy should have been ten feet away from him by now, gasping for breath.

“What do you want?” Scott demanded. “Why are we fighting?”

“Kneel, slave, and pledge me your obedience now!” the other retorted. “I already do you too much honor in choosing you for my tent.”

Scott ducked a blow that would have broken his jaw, and forearm smashed in retaliation. That didn’t even win him a stagger and his arm was numb now, like he’d punched rock. The man he was fighting ducked low and Scott had a microsecond to identify the body stance: he was going to throw and pin Scott if he could. Scott forward-flipped over him, kicked off from the wall and grabbed an outcrop, sticking one foot in a crevice to get his breath back. He didn’t get the chance; the guy ran up the wall and grabbed him around the waist, tearing him off the wall. Scott hit the rocky ground hard, ducked one blow, caught the glancing edge of another, and landed a punch that made the guy pause but felt as if it had broken his hand.

“How dare you defy me!” his attacker said furiously, backhanding him. “Yield now and I may yet spare you from the punishment you most assuredly deserve! Envied are those who win the favor of Achilles! You should be on your knees doing me obeisance!”

“I am never bitching about Namor again,” Scott muttered darkly, spitting the blood from his mouth.

The guy grabbed Scott by the throat and told him again how inferior and fortunate he was to have been honored by the attentions of Achilles. Scott head-butted him as hard as he could, but the arrogant bastard’s nose didn’t break, although he did relax his chokehold on Scott’s throat. At once Scott fought loose and threw himself clear, looking around for a weapon he could use to hold him off. He didn’t even know what the maniac’s problem was, but the guy had clear anger management issues and he was almost impossible to put down.

As the guy charged him, Scott dropped low and tipped him over his shoulder. The guy went down with a clatter but then sprang up, fury on his face, and Scott was being backed towards a wall with no exit. A punch to the side knocked the breath from his body and he barely ducked the follow up blow, throwing the guy off with a shoulder charge to slam him into the wall that was three parts desperation. He back-flipped away from him and landed ten feet away, the rock wall at his back, but the guy wasn’t even winded and the look in his eyes was murderous, gilt hair trailing across his face while his eyes glared out balefully. Backed into a corner with an overhang above him that prevented an escape, Scott would have given his numb right arm for his optic blasts.

“Achilles!”

Scott looked around and saw Howlett and a muscular giant with the body of…well, a demigod. As his attacker came hurling at him, Scott braced himself for the impact, knowing it was going to hurt like hell. That was when the newcomer sprang agilely between them and held out a hand. “Not this one, Achilles.”

Achilles slammed into the newcomer with a force that would have broken Scott’s ribs but made the naked hero not so much as flinch.

Achilles shook his fist in his face. “I saw him first! Mine is the rightful claim! He is mine, Heracles!”

“Indeed you are mistaken, the boy belongs to my companion and myself. You have staked your claim too late, my friend.” His hand encompassed Howlett who did his best to look like a slightly regretful owner of Scott-booty.

“I will not accept it!”

“Cool your rage, Achilles. The boy has been my war prize for many months and I am not inclined to give him up. Look elsewhere and I wish you well of it.”

Achilles gave Scott a baleful glare. “You should whip him for his insubordinate tongue.”

“Of course I shall,” Hercules said. “Mercilessly.”

Achilles suggested other disciplinary measures that should be taken against Scott forthwith and Hercules cheerfully agreed to implement all of them before Achilles went off, snarling.

Howlett gave him a friendly nod and then turned to roll his eyes at Scott. “Exit brave Achilles – last of the drama queens.”

“Indeed a most tempestuous fellow, always feuding. Naturally, there will be no whipping, branding, or castrating of any kind. That was just for his ears. And you do understand, boy, that it was easier, with such a man as that, to claim you as a war-prize than try to make his unquiet mind accept that ravishing you would be wrong?”

Hercules was looking him over with such a frank and open gaze that it made Scott too self-conscious for the moment to take in his words – and then he did. “Wait – he wanted to what…?”

Hercules said to Howlett, “Indeed, I oft wondered what it was sweet Patrocles saw in such an ill-mannered brute.”

“Got starstruck too young to notice the guy he was shacked up with was an asshole?” Howlett suggested. “I’ve heard it said he wouldn’t be the first….”

Their shared grin suggested a lot of history. Hercules pulled Howlett close by the tunic and said, while looking intently into his eyes, “If you are referring to my much-missed Hylas, I can assure you he was a youth possessed of most clear-sighted wisdom – at least until he was abducted by those treacherous nymphs.”

“I know what he was possessed of – I’ve seen the erotic artwork of the two of you frolicking, remember?”

“I refuse to be compared to the man who defiled Troilus on the steps of Troy.”

Howlett gazed up into Hercules’ eyes and said gruffly, “Achilles, hero of the Iliad and slayer of Hector, isn’t fit to lick your instep and well we both know it.” He beckoned to Scott. “As you’ve probably gathered, Scott – this is the man we came here to rescue. He took out the Minotaur for me, which was completely unnecessary as it was nothing I couldn’t handle, but he does so like to play the hero that I tend to let him do his thing.”

“The beast was about to drop a boulder on your head with great force.”

Howlett tapped his knuckles against his adamantium-lined skull. “Metal of the Gods, remember? Boulders just bounce off.”

Scott might have pointed out waspishly that boulders weren’t the only things that just bounced off his thick skull, including taking sensible precautions when fighting with hell-beasts, but he was finding it difficult to articulate words. Hercules, in this close proximity, was…breathtaking. His towering height, his muscles defined like a marble statue, his…complete and total nakedness, revealing not an ounce of fat nor a muscle that did not bulge impressively with strength and vigor, the whole covered with a dusting of dark hair.

In fact, looking at the amount of body hair on display upon Howlett and Hercules, Scott wondered if they had a problem with static electricity sparking between them when they made out, and then, out of nowhere, he found himself wondering what it would be like to curl up between them, with that furry bulk either side, all that strength and kindness, and the soft comfort of their chest hair. He suspected a man would feel as safe and secure as a wolf cub lying in the middle of the litter, comfort and heartbeats all around him. Scott had to turn away because he wanted that, absurdly, he wanted to step away from this life for just a little while and see if there was anything inside him capable of healing. Absurdly, he truly wanted to lie between these two heroes and absorb the comfort of their strength.

Bronzed and magnificent in the lava light, Hercules was assessing Scott with interest. “Come, boy. Step into the light. I would like to see better who it is that came here to assist me only because my Howlett asked for his help. You need not fear Dread Achilles while Hercules is here.”

Scott would have liked to point out that far from fearing Dread Achilles he had been holding his own with the Lord of the Myrmidons, but as Hercules had possibly just saved him from the fabled Fate Worse Than Death, he decided to suck it up and step into the light. It was a somewhat awkward shuffle – he defied anyone to wear as little as he was wearing with insouciance – but it made Hercules smile with delight. He really did have the kind of smile that lit up even a dark-dripping cavern, red with bloody flame. Scott wondered if the mythology was helping Hercules, in this dimension, to make the hearts of people meeting him for the first time beat just a little faster.

“Howlett! You brought me another Hylas.”

“No, I brought you a Scott Summers from a different dimension. I just dressed him like Hylas. I thought it might help you take to him.”

Scott was uncomfortably reminded of tales of orphaned lambs being wrapped in the skin of dead ones so the bereaved parent would warm to the helpless one in need of mothering and take it under its wing.

Hercules and Howlett exchanged a long, satisfied glance. “You always did have a soft spot for that Summers boy from your regiment,” Hercules said. “Not that I blame you. He is a comely youth.”

“And you always had a hard on for any good-looking young man not wearing very much,” Howlett returned. “And I don’t blame you either. You are your father’s son.”

Hercules clapped Scott on the shoulder. “Well met, friend. You have won the gratitude of Hercules by accompanying my Howlett here.”

Scott wasn’t sure how you addressed a semi-deity, but, after the way he had affronted Achilles, he suspected it might be sensible to act as if Hercules was as difficult as Namor with a head cold and get ready to duck. “Thank you…my lord.”

Hercules walked around him, examining him in a way that did nothing to ease Scott’s embarrassment. “Zounds. You and Howlett’s Summers look just the same. Are you of age yet? Some of my father’s habits I do not care to emulate.”

Scott trod down his indignation; sucking it up was what you learned to do when you were younger than most of the people you were trying to lead and half of them were egomaniacs with terrifying superpowers or Logan. “I’m twenty-seven, Lord Hercules. Wait…why do you want to know that…?”

“I brought Scott here as a warrior not a bed-warmer,” Howlett said firmly. “He used to be the leader of his tribe. He helped me see off the Hydra like he fights twelve-headed serpents every day and you may have noticed he was doing better against Achilles than most people do.”

“I did not notice,” Hercules admitted ruefully. “My apologies, boy, if you feel I did you dishonor in interfering with your combat. Indeed, I confess I thought Achilles on the point of breaking your ribcage in a fit of lustful rage before taking you by force to be his catamite.”

As Scott suspected that was exactly what had been about to happen, he told Hercules not to give it another thought, really, he’d had plenty of honorable combat today anyway. Hercules was still walking around him in a way that made Scott feel acutely self-conscious about the skimpiness of his costume. He tugged at the torn hem of it awkwardly and then darted a reproachful look at Howlett, who, looking maddeningly unperturbed and more than a little amused, only winked at him.

“Handsome youths will always be welcome in my eyes, of course, but I have an even greater weakness for fellow warriors,” Hercules admitted.

He and Howlett exchanged a lascivious smirk, but the light between them hadn’t dimmed. The lust was there, certainly, but mostly what Scott noticed was the love. It felt like an eternity since he had earned the right to be in love like that, simple and unashamed, and full of steady warmth. Still, Hercules must have been trapped in this hellhole for a while, and seemed to have been battling monsters aplenty, so Scott suspected that he had better tread warily around him until Hercules was back home and had recovered his equilibrium. As Hercules reached out a brawny hand, Scott, remembering Logan blood-grimed after an X-Force mission and Namor too long away from water, braced himself for the inevitable blow, and the demigod pulled back at once.

“You have been mistreated.”

Scott wondered if Hercules still thought Scott was some kind of house-slave…thing. “No, my lord, I haven’t.”

Howlett murmured in Hercules’ ear something that sounded like: “…truth is that young man doesn’t know what normal is.” And Scott wondered what on earth Howlett was talking about when Scott was the only person here who did.

“What about Young Kurt?” he asked. “Did he end up here as well?”

Hercules threw up his hands. “My father and his prejudices! At my petitioning he did agree that the boy could serve out his death here and that I might do all in my power to protect him and take him with me when – as was inevitable – my Howlett came for me, if Hades could be persuaded to let us depart. However, he would not take the boy to Olympus and keep him there because he said the boy had a ‘demonic look about him that better suited him for the chthonic realm’. Did you ever hear anything so misguided? To condemn a vulnerable child to hell simply because of the way he looks?”

Grimly, Scott said, “Actually, vulnerable children being condemned to hell because of the way they look is pretty much how some people do it in my dimension, too. Is Kurt okay?”

“He will be very glad to breathe fresh air again but I have kept him safe and, indeed, good Queen Persephone has taken a great liking to him.”

Something hurt Scott under the ribs. “He was a very likeable child as I recall.” He would not think about all the equally likeable children the Purifiers had blown up on that bus or the Kurt he had known, whose last conversation with Scott had been about the stain on Scott and Logan’s souls that was X-Force, and who had died saving Hope; Kurt, another man of conviction, choosing to trust in Scott’s blind faith.

It worked, Kurt. The mutant gene came back. Hope and the Phoenix brought it back, and now new lights wink on every day. Mutants who always should have been mutants but who wouldn’t have been if their x-gene hadn’t been reactivated, wake up every day now and learn what they truly are. We’re not extinct. What else was there to say? We disbanded X-Force, and we’re sorry. You were right. Logan and I both know that you were right.

At least, he hadn’t ever asked Logan directly, but the man had accepted X-Force being disbanded without a word of protest, so that suggested he had agreed with Scott that it was no longer necessary, and perhaps also with the admission neither of them had made aloud that it had been wrong, what they did, and not just because of what it had done to Laura, although that had been indefensible enough. Logan had been closer to Kurt than Scott ever was. Scott was sure that Logan would have wanted to honor Kurt’s memory by taking the high road, not wallowing in more thoughts of vengeance.

Emma had spelled that out for him: “Really, darling, do you think that pre-emptive strike team of yours in all its gore-stained glory was all about preservation of the species that’s left and not at all about payback for the ones that are gone? We buried all those children in the grounds of the school where they should have been safe. All those sad little graves for those sad little charbroiled corpses. Children who had names and faces and futures a brief minute before those godbothering bastards….” She had faltered and Scott was almost certain she wasn’t letting herself think of them dead, but was flinching from the memory of those children when they’d found their powers were gone, asking her if they were being punished, wondering what it was they’d done wrong. She kept going and her voice was steady as a metronome because she and Jean were the strongest people that he had ever met: “We buried them together, Scott, and I could admit how angry it made me, but you…you never were very good at admitting when you were angry, were you? You just push it under the surface and think it’s gone for good. But sometimes when you bury things, they just keep coming back. As the widower of Jean Grey and Madelyne Pryor I would have expected you to know that.”

Women had always had a way of knowing him better than he knew himself, so perhaps Emma had been right and X-Force had been more about vengeance than he had ever wanted to admit. In which case, he hadn’t just asked Logan to once again be the assassin the Weapon X Program had made him; he had asked him to be the worst version of Wolverine he could be, instead of the better man they both knew was in there, fighting that Wolverine every step of the way. That had been a shitty thing to do to a man who - for all his faults and all their quarrels - had always been there for him when it mattered. He didn’t blame Logan for being angry with him about that, although he wondered if Logan even knew that X-Force was one of the reasons why he was angry with Scott.

‘Any last words of encouragement?’
‘Don’t fuck this up.’
‘Thank you, Logan, I mean that.’
‘For what?’
‘For being here.’
‘You made me come.’
‘For always being here.’
‘When there’s somebody around worth following I follow.’
‘That’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’
‘I’m the best there is at stabbing things, not pleasantries. Go make your stupid speech….’

God that memory hurt, that hurt so fucking much. How could it possibly hurt that much after all these endless months? That was then and this was now, and his and Logan’s friendship – what had once been something that worked, against all odds, worked, not seamlessly, not perfectly, but as exhilaratingly as a Ferrari in fifth gear – was now a burned out car wreck rusting by the side of the interstate, fit only for scrap. So it did no good to remember how good it had felt to be behind the wheel of it in the past, to look across and see the other guy there looking back at you, to not even have to look, in the heat of battle, but just know his moves as well as you knew your own, and how well your moves and his would mesh together to keep everyone safe. That was over now, over forever. He was never going to have that with Logan again, because Logan didn’t want it back, not with Scott, not ever. The guy who would have thrown himself between Scott and any danger once, now needed all the self-control he had, when they met up, not to stab Scott in the heart. The Logan who had followed him and believed in him and saved him and been saved by him and possibly even rather liked him, now hated him with the steady flame of an Olympic torch; a quietly unquenchable dislike.

Scott stumbled and Howlett looked at him in concern as Scott had to put a hand to the glassy black wall to regain his balance. “You okay, Summers?”

“I hate these stupid sandals.”

“Would it help at all if I told you that you have really pretty feet?”

“It’s astonishing how much that doesn’t help, Howlett.”

The man grinned at him and slapped him on the arm and Scott felt something twist inside him because it would be so damned easy to hang out with Howlett, and just forget about that other world, where strangers hated and feared him and friends hated him even more. He already wanted this man’s friendship and respect, and it was an achievable target. He liked achievable targets.

He kept in step behind them, Hercules and Howlett, and realized that Hades had become familiar much too soon. It felt right doing this, being here, even here without his eye beams and wearing a stupid costume. It felt right to be on the side of men he admired, trying to do the right thing. It was as familiar and as comforting, even with drunken centaurs galloping past, as a nice hot bath.

Scott had understood, for years now, why some men who had gone through wars came home and wondered what to do with the peace, because it turned out what they were good at was problem solving in the line of fire with no time to think and everything on the line and other lives hanging in the balance – and that, right there, that narrow no-man’s land for lost souls – that was their comfort zone. That was where they shone the brightest, with the mortars going off and the air raid sirens wailing and the anti-aircraft barrage lighting up the sky, that was when everything, for them, clicked into place, and they knew they could do this. They could take the enemy position with minimal loss of life, and they could hold it against all comers, because their brain had been wired up just for this. Steve Rogers had lived through wars that Scott had only read about, but Scott had read about them from every possible angle. Pored over battle tactics, ancient and modern, trying to work out what he would have done and whether or not it would have worked. He and Rogers should have been able to come to a better understanding than they had, but although Scott knew Logan blamed him for the whole debacle, Scott still thought Rogers could have made it a little less obvious that, to him, Scott Summers was always going to be that skinny kid Xavier had taken in. The one Xavier let pretend to be a leader until he grew into the role like a new winter overcoat.

Rogers hadn’t outright said the words, but Scott had heard the message, loud and clear: “We let you play at being an official of your own little country, Summers, because Osborn was an ass to you people and you did good against Nimrod, but human lives could be on the line now so it’s time for you to step down and let the grown ups take over. So, that mutant messiah miracle child last hope for your species, the one your son spent years struggling through future dystopias to keep alive, the one mutants lost arms and legs and lives and arguably souls to save, she’s coming with us, because we say so, and what we say goes. We’ll let you know whether or not we decide to save your species after we’ve ensured the only thing that might reignite the x-gene has been disposed of by our means. Oh, and here’s a receipt for your granddaughter.”

Not really a meeting of true minds. Not even a meeting of equals. There was a voice in Scott’s mind that wanted to tell him it was because he was a mutant, that was why Rogers wouldn’t take him seriously the one time when it really mattered, but he didn’t want to believe that was true so much that he had chosen not to. He didn’t care if he was in denial on that point. He wasn’t going to believe it was because he was a mutant, however much some of the evidence suggested otherwise, not from Captain America, not from someone he had once truly admired. And it was galling and exasperating to have been patronized and marginalized and overruled because he was too young to be listened to by a man who had been the age Scott was now during World War Two, but it was still better than believing it was because he fired optic blasts out of his eyes. Steve Rogers worked with gods and Hulks and Wolverine, and didn’t bat an eye. So Scott was going to believe that just this once Emma had got something wrong.

Now he was here, in the fiery pit, Scott could see that the X-Men had always edged closer to mythology than was strictly comfortable. He’d even been given one of those prophecies that told heroes their fall was imminent, yet still they never listened. He certainly hadn’t. What Sinister had foretold had seemed too improbable. He was the leader of the X-Men, ruler of Utopia. His Extinction Team had faced down space gods and made them blink. Abigail Brand called on him for assistance. Captain America had made the US Government give him a medal. Admittedly, it was a medal that Scott had thrown in the sea, but Rogers hadn’t known that. Scott had thought he was a statesman, someone bringing legitimacy to his species, and all the time he’d been Icarus, flying closer and closer to the sun. His wax had certainly melted with a vengeance and Sinister had been proven right.

Do you want to know how your grand scheme ends? You lose every single thing that’s ever mattered to you. Next time we talk, you’ll be more hated than I’ve ever been.

He had thought that, if it wasn’t just bombast from Sinister, it was the usual hatred he’d been threatening Scott with: the blind kind directed at him by mutant-hating bigots who didn’t know him. He hadn’t even contemplated the idea that it would include every single person that he had ever loved. No, it was true, the heroes never did listen to the fateful prophecy, they just went ahead and killed their father anyway. At least, being an orphan, he couldn’t compound that sin by marrying his mother.

Except, that wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.

He didn’t remember doing it and he couldn’t remember, ever, even for an instant, being a person who would have done it, but he was starting to understand why people confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. As long as he pointed out that it was the phoenix muddling his mind and emotions that had driven him to kill Charles, that the person he truly was could never have done it, people turned away from him, their skin twitching with loathing. As soon as he said he’d done it, even if he hadn’t, there would be the beginning of acceptance, even forgiveness. All he had to do was wear the hair shirt of his remorse and accept the coals of fire of their willingness to overlook that thing he hadn’t done, and they might not hate him any more. As long as he stuck to the truth as he saw it, they would write him off as a man in denial. Either he admitted to a murder he had no clear memory of committing or he went on living a life parallel to that of the people who had once mattered to him most. There could be no redemption without confession.

He was starting to have a whole new admiration for those people who stuck to their claim of innocence over decades in the prison system, knowing that as long as they did so they would never be eligible for parole. The system didn’t allow for mistakes; you accepted its rules, whether they applied to you or not, or you lived without the prospect of mercy, a perennial pariah for whom no redemption was possible. It had been weeks, that was all, and already he was tempted to lie and said he’d done it. He had the guilt and the grief, after all, he was carrying that whatever he did. Shouldn’t he try to make things more bearable by rending his garments and begging for forgiveness because he was a sinner and he wanted to be saved? He thought about Logan’s flinty, watchful eyes showing a flicker of warmth again, the way they had in the prison after Jake’s death. It was pathetic how much that prospect tempted him. No, he didn’t think he had it in him to serve twenty years clinging to his own innocence. Long before then he suspected he would give in and proclaim himself guilty of anything they wanted, just as long as it would win him the prospect of a kind word.

Down here, in the sulfurous caverns it was all too easy to feel part of the mythological scenery, as if it wanted to enmesh him, like the Hydra’s tentacles, and drag him in hard. Patricide was such an appropriately classical crime. And why stop with Oedipus? So easy in this place to picture one tragedy after another: brothers slaying brothers, Alex’s body brought in by Captain Creon to lie in state while Scott, in the role, of Polyneices would be left outside to rot. At least they had no sister to be doomed by their squabbling. Although perhaps Rachel would feel duty bound to honor him with forbidden funeral rites. He should leave her a memo that he’d far rather his corpse was feasted on by carrion than have her risk the fate of Antigone….

Scott gave his head a brisk shake. This was morbid, and unproductive. Hades as a place probably lived to get under the skin of unwary travelers. He needed not to succumb to the myths. He needed to remember the way his own world worked; that place of beauty and bigotry and optic blasts.

What he needed to hang onto was that there still wasn’t a world waiting for him in which a mutant could look like Kurt and be safe, be valued and honored for his many merits instead of being condemned for the blue fur and the forked tail.

Human? You dare call that thing human?

Fuck you, Stryker, yes he is…was. And a better one than you or any of your followers ever were or could have been, you hate-filled jerk.

Scott had been doing this for more than a decade now, and the world still wasn’t safe for mutants. Sometimes he thought it never would be. Sometimes he thought he was Sisyphus, and every day the world reset itself so that the rock still had to be rolled up that endless hill. If he ever let himself wonder if it was worth it, he was afraid of what might happen next. (Did Logan see himself as Tantalus, chained to a rock with the eagle always pecking at his liver? Given what the Weapon X program had done to him, just because it could, it was a definite possibility that he did, although if Logan was taking advice from people he now hated, Scott would also suggest that from a liver-preserving viewpoint cutting back on the booze might help.)

They’d all had doubts. Even Charles had almost given up and chosen Erik’s path instead. Ironic to remember that Scott had been the one with the unwavering conviction then. Scott the one convinced that the high way was the only way to take.

Charles had just had enough. Reached the place where Scott had been for a while now: mad as hell and not going to take it any more, because all that effort to keep turning the other cheek for the greater good, and all the opposition ever took from their refusal to sink to their level was that they were weak, that they’d let the next batch of mutant children be hanged from the playground swings, the same as the last. And, Xavier, as a protector of vulnerable children, had reached the end of his rope.

“I have spent my life smashing my head against a wall that refuses to be broken. Perhaps it’s time I…we…found a better way. I swore long ago that I would see no more X-Men die. If Magneto’s is the only means to that end…then so be it.”

“You brought us together to fulfill a dream, Charles. One born out of hope and the noblest of human aspirations…And we’ve sweated and bled and some of us have died to make it a reality. I’m not prepared to give up. The means are as important as the end. We have to do this right or not at all. Anything less negates every belief we’ve ever had, every sacrifice we’ve ever made.”

That was the Scott Summers, Wolverine and Beast wanted him to be, but that man had been given the luxury of living in a world where mutants were persecuted but plentiful, not down to their last two hundred. M-Day had changed a lot of mutants forever, but for a long time Scott hadn’t realized how much it had also changed those of them who’d been lucky enough to keep their x-gene. Back then, even with all the losses they’d suffered, he had never come close to being this weary of the fight. God, he’d been naïve back then, although….

That was one thing Henry had achieved at least; Scott couldn’t just sneer at the innocent kid he’d used to be, after seeing his face so recently. All of them so young and idealistic, convinced the world could be changed by good and right and the power of conviction. He didn’t want them to become disillusioned. He still wanted those bright-eyed children to be the ones who were right. He just couldn’t find it in his heart any more to believe that they were.

(How quickly he had gone from naming a place of mutant sanctuary, unironically, ‘Utopia’, to seeking a home in the ruins of the place where they’d been tortured and damned. It was like all he could bring himself to trust in now was darkness.)

“Son, I can hear your brain gears going round from here. Throw some grease on those wheels before they start smoking.”

Scott looked up to find Howlett gazing at him in concern and grimaced at the realization of how long he hadn’t had his head in the here and now at all. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s my fault. I promised you adventure and all I’ve given you so far is a groping Hydra, a horny Minotaur, and the hero of the Iliad to fight, so I’m sorry if we’re boring you. Give me a minute and I can probably find us another inappropriately affectionate beast to battle. There’s a magical ram’s horn right there. I could summon a herd of Ixionidae if you want.”

Hercules, who apparently didn’t do gentle sarcasm, said earnestly, “Howlett, I would advise against that. Few of that tribe are civilized creatures like good Chiron and Pholus. This has nothing to do with my issues with Nessos, Dionysus paid a recent visit and the wine has been flowing freely – you know how protective they are of their wine – and now they are both amorous and quarrelsome. I would hate to see the Summers boy carried off against his will to an orgy.”

Scott held up a hand. “I’m against that, too.”

Howlett said, “Then do you want to keep your mind on the game or do you want to wallow in reflective misery? Scott, I know you’re tired, but, down here, all moping over your past mistakes tends to get you is abducted by centaurs.”

Scott very briefly tried to work out how rapine by centaurs actually worked, given biology, and then decided that he never wanted to think about that again. Also, that he would save the pensive reflections for when he wasn’t in the Underworld. Also, Howlett was right, and he was incredibly tired. He just hadn’t realized it until now. He blinked and his eyes felt oddly gritty.

“How long have we been in this place anyway?”

“It’s about twenty hours since we crossed the Styx. Don’t worry, nothing like that amount of time has passed in your dimension. Think of this place like Narnia.”

Scott looked around at the red dripping walls and tried not to flinch as something large and hungry-sounding boomed out a horrifying roar from the dark caverns to the west while the galloping echoes of hoofbeats grew progressively louder. “I’ll try.”

As it turned out, the journey to Hades’ throne room was relatively uneventful. Naturally, they were set upon by a two-headed giant, a very drunken herd of centaurs – Hercules had been right about how rowdy they were – a lion the size of a horse, and a club-wielding ogre but Hercules dealt with them all with relish, much to Scott’s frustration. He was not used to being pushed behind other warriors when danger threatened, or being told to ‘Wait there, boy, while I deal with this nuisance…’ His ‘I can fight…’ earned him a kindly nod from Hercules, not dissimilar to the pat on the head offered to a forward child, before the guy once again shoved Scott behind a pillar then leapt into the fray himself. It made him feel only slightly better that Hercules, exuberant at being reunited with his lover, barely let Howlett help either.

Howlett, however, was a lot more indulgent about it than Scott. Watching tolerantly as Hercules wrestled with the ogre in a battle so spectacular it dislodged half a cliff face, he murmured fondly, “Son of a god, you see. Always going to be a healthy ego there, but his heart’s in the right place….”

“Unlike that ogre’s now,” Scott observed waspishly as Hercules punched through its mighty chest and dragged out the still beating organ before tossing it nonchalantly to the three-headed dragon that had been about to pounce on him from a side cavern. The ogre crashed to the floor with a rock-dislodging crash and the dragon wagged its tail adoringly at Hercules like a Labrador puppy as it gulped down what had evidently been a tasty treat. Hercules obligingly pulled out the ogre’s liver and tossed that to the dragon, too. Scott added: “And that dragon will probably get a Vitamin A overdose now and die in horrible agony.”

“Biology doesn’t really work like that down here,” Howlett reminded him, with a consoling pat on the shoulder.

Swiftly sidestepping a groping satyr – the dirty raincoat brigade of the Underworld as Scott had already learned to his cost – and, thinking about the minotaurs and centaurs, whose existence made even less sense (and whose conception he was absolutely not going to think about), Scott said grimly, “I noticed.”

They made their way over a river of fire on a troll-guarded bridge (not guarded for long, naturally enough, Hercules tossing the troll into the crusty red river with one deft heft) and across a vast cavern of shifting black rocks fissured by belches of sulfurous steam. Hercules was now carrying a brand new lion skin and the ogre’s spiked club, while Scott – unable to keep it to himself – pointed out that sandals were terrible footwear for this environment and that he wasn’t used to being made to sit out battles.

“I do actually fight bad guys for a living,” he muttered resentfully. “And when I’m not doing that I’m training other mutants in how to fight bad guys for a living….”

Howlett grinned at him and murmured, “Be honest now, Summers, you mooch off your Emmeline for a living – you fight bad guys because you enjoy it.”

“Emma and I broke up,” Scott admitted. At Howlett’s tactful questioning, he explained in more detail about the Phoenix Force and the death of Charles Xavier, who was not and never had been – and he could not stress this enough – one of those evil Xaviers threatening the multiverse.

“He was just a good man in a bad place,” Scott said.

Gazing at Scott in a way that Logan, even on his most tenderly beer-marinaded day, had never looked at him, Howlett said gently, “Sounds like he wasn’t the only one.”

That was when the enormous three-headed dog came roaring at them, snarling mouths open to devour them with one gulp.

Braced for bone crunching pain, Scott was shocked when Howlett pulled him in against his body and swung them both round so that the guard dog of the Underworld would have to get through Howlett’s spine to get to Scott. Scott found himself breathing in Howlett’s scent, feeling his warmth against his body, his brawny arms wrapped around him protectively, and it was giving him the worst kind of flashbacks to the Logan he knew doing the same thing. All those times when Logan had thrown himself between Scott and certain death, bouncing blasts off his adamantium skeleton, or simply taking the hit, letting his renewable flesh char so that Scott’s unregenerative skin wouldn’t.

The huge hound crashed into Howlett’s back, knocking them both to the ground. As Scott hit the floor, Howlett’s hand cradled his skull to protect it from the impact. Scott closed his eyes and felt Howlett’s beard against his cheek, his breath against his ear. The man was so certain and so kind; he was all the comfort Scott had lost and would never know again, and he had been managing without it so well. He had been getting up and walking tall and he had been coping with a world where everyone he loved hated him, where their faces contorted with anger and loathing whenever they saw him, and where there was no Jean, no Charles, and no Emma in his head. He had borne it as unflinchingly as he could, determined that no one on Logan’s side was going to see him show weakness, but this…this was unbearable. This was everything he’d lost and something that he had never even come close to having. He pulled away, panicking, because he would rather be eaten alive by a hell-hound than suffer another second of the torture of feeling respected and liked by Logan when it was an illusion too seductive to bear.

He’d forgotten, because, surprisingly, Logan had rarely used it against him, that the man was a lot stronger than he was. So, Howlett pinned him down and continued to cover him, gaze fixed on his with concern. “Stop fighting me, lad,” Howlett breathed.

“I can’t…” Scott said desperately, and he knew that if he gave in, if he succumbed to the protective embrace of Howlett that there would be a time when he would have to decide if he was going to live within that warmth forever or walk back to the cold, knowing he would never feel love or kindness or sympathy like that again. He was almost certain that it would kill him to do that. So, he was fighting for his life here, but Howlett wouldn’t let him go, he kept cushioning Scott’s skull from the rock, and shielding him from the snarling hell-hound with his body. Scott gazed up into the man’s eyes and felt something tear inside him. “Please…” he said desperately.

Don’t make me confess to something I didn’t do just to have him look at me like that again.

“I’m not feeding you to Cerberus, Scott,” Howlett said gently.

“Howlett, please don’t be the…him I miss,” Scott breathed.

Howlett said, “Hush….” Like it was of no importance that a giant hell-hound was grabbing his tunic in its teeth and trying to shake him, that the only thing that mattered was Scott. And Scott let the warm embrace take him, he let Howlett pull up his unresisting, broken-spirited body, and let his head rest on Howlett’s shoulder and his arms encircle him and one hand rub soothing circles in his Achilles-bruised back, and he realized that Logan had just killed him, after all. He’d held back in the prison only to murder him here, because Scott could feel that world of beauty and bigotry and optic blasts slipping away from him. He wasn’t sure he could get back there, and he was almost certain that, even if he did, he wouldn’t be the man who had left it behind in the first place. And was this damned dog going to rip them both limb from limb or not…?

“Cerbi!”

Howlett cautiously raised his head and Scott twisted in his grip to watch as Hercules came bouncing up, arms widespread.

“Cerbi-Werbi-Busikins!”

The slavering hell-hound threw itself at Hercules, body wagging delightedly, as it rubbed all three heads against him at once, while Hercules pulled its six ears and kissed the top of its three skulls.

“Who’s my favorite puppy? Has he been a good little Hadeshound? Has he…?”

“You’re kidding me,” Scott breathed. Howlett rose to his feet and hauled Scott up after him. The three-headed dog was now frolicking around Hercules adoringly, intermittently racing away to grab a random bone and bring it back to him, still squirming in pleasure at seeing him again while his great tail wagged with rock chipping force.

Howlett took a hasty step back and Scott jumped the swinging tail as the huge dog backed up in front of Hercules trying to interest the son of Zeus in throwing a nice chunk of dead griffin for him. As Hercules obliged and the whole cavern shook to the thunder of Cerberus galloping off to retrieve it, he said cheerfully to them, “Cerberus and I are old friends.”

“We noticed.” Scott dusted himself off. Of course, stealing Cerberus had been another of Hercules’ labors; no doubt the dog had been the demigod’s slave ever since. He could still feel the warmth of Howlett around him and shot a longing look at the man before he realized that he wasn’t wearing a visor and everything in his eyes was visible now.

Howlett said, “You need a vacation, Summers.”

Scott indicated the dripping red walls and sulfurous smoking lakes all around them. “I thought we just had one?”

“My mistake. You need a vacation, then you need therapy.”

“I was kidding. I do make jokes.”

“No, you don’t. I’ve traveled the multiverse, remember? And in every dimension you’re a good man with optic blasts, a great ass, and no sense of humor.”

Scott realized that Howlett had a point, and that he had actually been having fun in Hades. It had been nice to just have some old-fashioned bad guys to fight, even if their biology was unlikely and their personal habits unsavory. He realized that even though he was in hell, didn’t have his beams, and was having to wear a stupid costume, he still didn’t want to go home.

Kurt was sitting glumly in Hades’ throne room, holding tapestry silk for Persephone as she wove something somber, while the God of the Underworld played a board game with Eurydice while Orpheus strummed quietly on his lyre. The latter two, apparently reunited at last, exchanged the occasional glance of quiet contentment. What looked suspiciously like their offspring were crawling about at their feet, eating pomegranate seeds. Persephone kept darting doting looks at the children that rather took off the tragic air Scott had been expecting from someone forced to dwell in the darkness for half the year.

Scott murmured to Howlett, “I thought those two were tragically separated forever because he looked back before she was out of the Underworld?”

“Guy obviously then worked out that if you can’t get your lover out of Hades to join you in the world of the living you can still join her in the land of the dead and have your happy ever after that way.”

“That’s cheating,” Scott said, wondering if it was that easy to find your way to the White Hot Room, and if Jean would even want him underfoot these days if he did. And if you had kids in the afterlife would they let you keep them?

Howlett shrugged. “It’s mythology, Scott. Just go with it.” But his eyes were on Kurt, checking him for damage, clenching his fists to hold in his emotions because he was once again seeing the boy he loved like a son.

That was when Kurt looked up and saw Howlett. The tapestry silk was dropped as he sprang to his feet and then disappeared and reappeared in Howlett’s arms in a burst of sulfur, the two of them hugging each other in overflowing relief and disbelief, Howlett breathing the boy in like happiness as he spun him round. Scott saw the tears glint in Howlett’s eyes and had to walk away for a minute, thinking of being whisked away from Nathan, when Nathan had been barely this Kurt’s age, of his reunion with his own father after Scott had come back from the dead and the man had settled for a handshake because a hug was too much to ask. Scott had taken what Corsair was willing to give him, even the backhand that put him on the ground, as it was followed by a facsimile of the father he remembered, because he had been needy and love-starved enough to settle for anything. This, though, the father and son relationship between Howlett and Kurt, this was undiluted by anything but love.

“I missed you so much…” the boy breathed.

“Not half as much as I missed you, boy,” Howlett returned, choked, as he set him back on his feet.

Hercules was unashamedly wiping away a tear even as he patted Cerberus absently as the dog banged a centaur’s thighbone insistently against the demigod’s shin.

Scott realized he had forgotten in all the excitement of their adventures that the real task still lay ahead of them. It was possible for Hercules to flourish here, perhaps, but Kurt had already been trapped in the Underworld for too long. He needed to be back amongst the living and the young. They had to get him out of here somehow. Scott’s mind was already in overdrive, assessing the situation, pulling up all the old data he had, checking for exits. Six strategies had immediately come to mind. Unlike the others, who had a teenage son to raise, Scott was expendable. If he staged a distraction, Howlett and Hercules could get the boy across the Styx and –

Howlett put a hand on his arm. “Doesn’t work like that down here, lad, so put the tactical brain back in neutral. Kurt – you remember Scott?”

They shook hands solemnly. Scott told him he was sorry about Kitty. Kurt said, “Sprite.”

“I’m sorry about Sprite.”

“She helped save a whole world. That wouldn’t have happened without you making them find another way.”

“I didn’t find it, though. I just made it necessary that someone else should.”

“You saved us,” Kurt said with feeling, and Scott realized that the poor boy was still traumatized from his time trapped in a see-through tube, being forced to watch superheroes die all around him, and that worse things had happened to him since. Scott turned to Howlett and his eyes were probably just begging at this point, used as he was to having them hidden he hadn’t really had to work at keeping his ocular emotions disguised.

Howlett gave his arm a comforting squeeze, gaze fixed on Hades before whom Hercules was now kneeling to make a respectful speech. “Trust Hercules,” he said.

Scott opened his mouth to point out that, in his experience, leaving things to the muscle brigade didn’t tend to work out too well and that he usually found strategy was a more effective tool than rippling biceps, or even really big hammers, and then realized that if he was too insignificant a person for his opinion to count in the eyes of Captain America, after a decade of positive interaction, topworld in a different dimension, down here he was a dust mote. Even great heroes and the sons of gods had to follow the rules that Hades set. In this world, Scott Summers, fallen ruler of Utopia, ex-leader of the X-Men, carrier, according to a deranged Victorian geneticist, of near-perfect DNA, and proud possessor of an active x-gene, was a potential centaur party favor and nothing more.

“This world sucks,” he hissed at Howlett, who, with his arms wrapped around Kurt protectively, said equably, “Hush.”

“I need to get a back-up plan in place in case….”

Howlett said, “Just stand there and look pretty, Scott. You’d be amazed how effective that can be with the gods of this world. Are you any good at batting your eyelashes? Oh, and do you know the ‘just bending over to adjust my sandal’ maneuver? because that one works a treat with Hercules. Or you could always just rip a few more inches off your hemline.”

Scott realized he now felt just as useless and twice as uncomfortable. He said, “I think I’m starting to hate you as much as my Wolverine, Howlett.”

Howlett’s voice rumbled on, quiet and amused: “Of course, I’m still hoping Hercules can swing this without us having to pimp you out to Zeus for godly assistance but…you did say you wanted to be useful….”

“Okay. I definitely hate you now.”

They had caught Hades in an unusually mellow mood – apparently Persephone was expecting, which was going to seriously piss off the God of the Underworld’s mother-in-law but was making him happy – so he only asked the impossible. Scott tried not to let his jaw drop as Hades gave Hercules a catalogue of tasks to perform and mystical treasures, conferring magical powers, that he wanted retrieved from impossibly perilous places. Hercules nodded intently while Howlett whipped out a notebook from his sleeve and made a list. Kurt corrected his spelling and began working on the physics, apparently as unfazed as Howlett, while Scott muttered out of the side of his mouth that they should at least try to negotiate the labors down from ‘leading to certain death’ to ‘slim chance of survival’.

“Don’t be silly, lad. Gods don’t set tasks that aren’t inevitably fatal. They have the mythology to think of.”

“But….”

Howlett gave him another reassuring pat on the arm. “It’ll be fine. Hercules likes impossible tasks.”

“I don’t suppose he wants to come and make my world a better place for mutants, does he?”

“Only if it could be done by a lot of smiting.”

Scott grimaced. In his experience it was more a case of three-steps-forward-two-steps-back, constant compromises, negotiating with people who one knew would happily see your species melted down for soap, sucking up pseudo-science from Fox News talking heads about why mutants could not be classified as humans nor should ever be the recipients of usual human rights, and not just blasting the hell out of every ignorant asshole bigot that one encountered on a regular basis, however great the temptation. In Hercules’ position, Scott had to admit, he would also rather go steal golden apples from fire-breathing dragons instead.

“You should stick around,” Howlett said. “Some of these labors sound like fun.”

Scott firmly trod down the thought that they did. Impossible and invariably fatal as they clearly were, they did also sound like excellent adventures.

Hercules was bowing to Hades and making a speech about how beneficent and merciful were the eternal sons of Cronus and Rhea.

“Save the ego-stroking for your father.” Hades waved him off. “Although if you would like to point out to him that primogeniture should be designated by the order in which children were given birth to by their mother, not regurgitated by their father, I’d appreciate it.”

Howlett murmured to Scott, “Well, Hercules won’t be touching that one with a very long staff…Zeus and Hades have been arguing that point for millennia.”

Scott might have made a coherent response but he had made the mistake of letting his gaze stray below Hercules’ muscular waist as Howlett was talking, and found that with the glistening, naked demigod returning to them, the words ‘very long staff’ were, for some odd reason, bouncing around in his mind like a pinball. It wasn’t just length either, there was…heft to take into account. He was tired, and it was too long since he’d eaten, which was no doubt why his mind was straying so oddly, and why he now found himself wondering if Howlett was exactly like Logan…physically, because Logan…physically, had been pretty impressive himself.

Hades added casually that, of course, any forfeiture would involve immediate and eternal suffering in Tartarus, but, barring that, he expected to see them all back here in twelve months time, labors completed, relics delivered. Hercules bowed as casually as if the God of the Underworld had asked him to pop out for a carton of milk. Then he was pulling Howlett into his arms for a lengthy and apparently extremely satisfying kiss, before swinging Kurt up onto his shoulders, and clapping Scott on the arm in a way that made him stagger.

“I thank you, my friends. The boy and I have been freed to perform twelve new labors for Hades. We have a year to complete them and may call on the assistance of any friends we wish. If we complete the labors to his satisfaction, Hades has promised to release us from the realm of the dead forever – or until we next die, whichever comes soonest.”

Scott fell into step beside the demigod, rubbing his bruised upper arm. “So, you’re effectively out on special license? You’re paroled from the Underworld?” Turning to hear Hercules’ answer, he found the man looking him up and down with frank appraisal. Scott became embarrassingly self-conscious, just as he had with Howlett earlier, and found himself fidgeting and tugging at his drapery.

“Boy, like my beloved Howlett, you’re a vision for these hell-wearied eyes,” Hercules told him cheerfully. “I can’t wait to bathe you and get you out of those blood-stained rags.”

“Warrior, remember?” Howlett prompted. “Not bedwarmer.”

“The best of men are both lovers and fighters,” Hercules assured him. “Am I not right, Scott Summers?”

Scott Summers, finding himself walking between two muscular men who seemed to represent his last chance of knowing any kindness, even in a different world, found himself oddly unable to formulate a sentence.

Kurt, from his perch on Hercules’ shoulders, looked down at Scott critically and said, “I think he’s too tired and hungry to flirt with you, Hercules. Don’t forget Scott’s mortal and he doesn’t have Howlett’s healing factor, and he’s been fighting Underworld beasts for a night and a day. He probably wants a hot meal and a soft bed more than he wants you hitting on him right now. Either that or you need some better pick-up lines.”

Scott realized that he was in fact stumbling with weariness, and his stomach was growling at him. “Hard bed,” he managed, not very coherently. “Soft beds have poor lumbar support.”

Hercules put a brawny arm around his shoulders, and it felt strong and supportive. “Mine is the best of beds.”

“Big bed…” Scott murmured, remembering the acreage of it spread out in front of him in the mosaic-floored palace. He thought about lying on it, in between the warmth of Howlett and Hercules, and felt a flutter of something that felt a little like fear and a lot like excitement.

Hercules said, “Indeed. Most capacious. There would be room and more for you in it beside Howlett and myself. Indeed, snugly naked between Howlett and myself, is exactly where I think that you should be….”

“Good,” Scott said vaguely. “That sounds…good.” He was aware that Howlett and Hercules were winking at each other around him and that he didn’t mind. In fact, whatever they had planned for him, up to and including selling him to Zeus as surety for Kurt’s safety, was fine with him. Anything, he realized, as he stumbled again in his stupid sandals, and Howlett gently looped Scott’s left arm around his neck to support him and let Scott’s weary head come to rest, quite naturally, on his brawny shoulder, was fine with him if he could just stay here a little longer and not have to go home quite yet.

***

Captain America tapped his fingers restlessly on the table in the conference room. On the monitor they could see Frost sitting stiffly in the comfortable waiting room, sipping coffee elegantly out of a cup and saucer while Magneto gazed out at the city whose girders he could bend to his will.

“That guy makes me nervous,” Stark said.

“That’s because you choose to hang out in a metal suit and you’re a wuss,” Logan pointed out. “I’m not scared of him and I have a metal-coated skeleton.”

“It’s not a virtue being too dumb to be scared, Logan,” Stark said, still fidgeting. “I, however, have an IQ higher than my shoe-size and I’ve seen what that guy can do. And what exactly is stopping Frost from sticking her telepathic stiletto blade in our brains and whisking, right now? Other than…you know…her inherent good nature. Something – do I need to remind you all – she doesn’t actually have?”

“You this jittery around all your exes, Stark?” Logan enquired. “Because you might wanna rethink your bedroom technique.”

“I don’t get why they agreed to come in,” Hawkeye said, also fretting, and pacing, his arrows bristling from his quiver. “They’ve made it clear they’re not giving themselves up and that if we try to arrest them they’ll do something sticky and painful to us. They sent their kids home to their evil lair via their evil mystical taxi service. The same evil mystical taxi service Frost can summon back here with a thought.”

“Illyana Rasputin isn’t evil,” Hank said. “She’s just lived a…complicated life. None of those people are ‘evil’. They just…lost their way.”

“Except they think that’s you and me, Hank,” Logan pointed out bitterly. “They think we’re the ones who can’t find our own asses without a compass because we’re such a pair of sellouts.”

Rogers said, “Are they lying about Summers or not?”

“They’re not lying,” Logan said. “One, it’s beneath them. If they didn’t want us to have him, they’d tell us that to our faces. Two, Frost’s genuinely upset about Cyke running off with Howlett.”

Stark cocked a head Logan’s way and caught Hawkeye’s eye. “She’s not the only one, is she?”

“Yeah, I don’t know why you’re so convinced Summers is putting out for Gayverine, Logan, unless he’s already in the habit of putting out for…?”

“Barton, you wanna find out exactly what that arrow feels like when it’s shoved up your…?”

Rogers said, “Much as I would like to think the childish squabbling in this room is the result of Emma Frost’s mind control, I can’t help thinking there are just a lot of people here who can’t focus on what’s important.”

“What is important, o stalwart leader?” Stark tossed back another ginger ale while flickering another wary look at the monitor.

“Hill had word sent to her that Blastaar isn’t going to wait very much longer if he doesn’t get what he wants. We’re looking at an invasion from the Negative Zone if we can’t find Summers soon.”

McCoy said quietly, “I want to talk about those missing phials of Scott’s blood.”

Stark rolled his eyes. “His crew took them.”

“They say they didn’t. Not only did they say they didn’t, when we taxed them with it, they insisted on accompanying us here to insist you rechecked that you hadn’t just filed them away in the wrong place and that they really are missing. If they took the blood samples, they wouldn’t be worried about them.”

“And they are worried,” Logan put in. “I can smell it all over Frost. She thinks we’re fucking them over. Again.”

Stark groaned. “It was a break-in. It was sophisticated. It must have involved some kind of teleportation ability or else shape-shifting. And cui bono, here? Frost didn’t want me having samples of her boyfriend’s blood, so she had Rasputin beam her in to steal them. End of story.”

“Or Mystique. Who’s off everyone’s radar right now,” Logan countered. “She could get through your security with her shape-shifting.”

“To what purpose?”

“Making us all mistrust one another even more than we already do? Selling Scott down the river.”

“How can Summers get any further down the river than he already is, running around being a terrorist?” Hawkeye countered. “The guy’s already on an ocean liner halfway across the Atlantic heading straight for an iceberg. That’s how far down the river he is.”

Stark winced. “Please don’t clumsily over-extend slave-trading metaphors in my hearing. I have a headache.”

McCoy said, “As I may have mentioned before, Tony, the best cure for hangovers is not drinking excessively the night before.”

“Yeah, the scientific evidence for that is sketchy if you ask me.”

Steepling his fingers as the sunlight cascaded through the window to turn his fur a particularly fetching shade of blue, McCoy looked around at them all over his spectacles. “Time to stop ducking the issue. Emma is here because she didn’t take those blood samples, that means somebody else did. That means it is our responsibility that a person or persons unknown now may have gained access to the DNA of Scott Summers.”

“Stark’s responsibility,” Hawkeye murmured. “Not ours.”

“What about ‘all for one and one for all’?” Stark demanded.

Hawkeye pointed to his bare head. “Do you see a big feather in my hat? Am I wearing high-heeled boots and a girly cloak?”

“Do you know the last time bows and arrows had an impact on a significant conflict, Hawkeye? The Battle of Agincourt. That means you and your skillset have both been irrelevant since 1415. Congratulations on your continuing redundancy.”

Hawkeye’s smirk was a thing of beauty. “I think General Custer might disagree with you there. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was in 1876.”

“The Lakota had better rifles than Custer did!”

Captain America, his blond hair glinting in the sunbeams, said, “Yes, a debate about the comparative effectiveness of Springfield carbines versus Winchester repeating rifles is exactly what is needed when Blastaar is threatening to invade the Earth, Cyclops’s DNA is in the wind, and Magneto and Emma Frost are waiting in the next room for an explanation we don’t have.”

Outside the window it was a clear, bright New York day. In the anteroom, Emma Frost was examining the perfectly polished tips of her fingernails. Logan had an uncomfortable memory of cutting out paper dolls and being chased up a tree by a ravening Henry and had to remind himself that had been Cassandra Nova, not Frost. Aloud, however, he said roughly, “Stop stalling, Stark. Go tell Frost you let her boyfriend’s blood samples get stolen. Telepathically turning you into a drooling vegetable will occupy her for long enough for Romanoff to take her out, meanwhile, Beast can hit Magneto with an EMP gun. Then Rogers can tell Hill that we can’t pony up Summers to save the planet because he ran off with Other Me to go play with some hell-beasts. It’ll be fun.”

Stark regarded him narrowly. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, Wolverine, but no one actually likes you. If we ever got to pick teams, you’d be the fat kid left sitting on the bench.”

Sighing, Rogers said, “Tony – go and tell Frost and Magneto that we don’t know who took Summers’ blood but we’re looking into it.” At Stark’s deer-in-headlights expression, Rogers sighed again. “Do you want me to come too?”

“I don’t need you to hold my hand, Steve.” Stark tugged at the collar of his shirt and then unbuttoned it as if air was being rationed. “But if you want to come with…that’s okay, I guess.”

Logan watched the two of them walk into the next room, and heard the low reasonable sound of Steve Rogers making an explanation, punctuated by the jerkier interjections of Tony Stark. He and McCoy exchanged a glance, while Romanoff, in faintly creaking black leather, sat on the table, negligently filing her nails like she was someone’s secretary and not a super-spy who could have cheesewired all their heads off before Logan unfurled his claws. His and McCoy’s look acknowledged that this could go either way. Sometimes Emma was as coldly composed as her surname. Sometimes she lost her temper. Sometimes when she lost her temper, strong men started bleeding out of the eyeballs.

“YOU LOST THEM?”

Logan grimaced. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Frost isn’t gonna take this as well as we hoped.” He cast his mind back over telepathic punishments administered by angry women. It was Jean who had made the Purifiers soil themselves. When those Benetech guys had kissed Scott with a bullet, Emma had elected for punishing them with projectile vomiting. He tried to remember what he’d had for breakfast – mostly whiskey, as he recalled.

“YOU SELF-RIGHTEOUS HYPOCRITICAL JACKBOOTED THUGS LOST SCOTT’S BLOOD SAMPLES! WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED THAT THE MAN WHO DROPPED A FUCKING PHOENIX ON THE REST OF US CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER TO LOCK HIS OWN LABORATORY DOOR?”

Romanoff glanced through the glass door. “Probably a good move on Stark’s part not to be wearing the metal suit right now. Magneto looks pissed.”

“Is Stark’s brain dripping out of his nose yet?” Logan asked.

“Logan, our teammates getting verbally beaten up is not a cause for celebration.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun though, Hank.”

“Logan!”

Unwillingly, Logan followed his blue-furred compatriot into the glass-windowed room in which Emma Frost was telling them, in meticulous and grisly anatomical detail, exactly how they should all go straight to hell.

***

There had, of course, been adventures on their way back to the River Styx. Apparently Scott had acquitted himself admirably in the various combats. By that point he had been reacting on instinct, training, and muscle-memory because his brain was mostly asleep. Hercules, however, had been impressed, and Kurt had asked him if he could teach him the next level of taekwondo. Scott had possibly agreed to anything asked of him, before slumping against Howlett in the boat, lulled by Kurt and Howlett’s catch-up conversation – the still high-pitched chatter from Kurt, the low, familiar rumble of Howlett – and aware, like the beam of a lighthouse as it moved, even against his closed eyelids, of Howlett and Hercules exchanging those quietly contented looks, lovers reunited and determined never to be separated again.

Safely returned to the marble pillared palace of Hercules, the son of Zeus, and the ex-governor general of the Dominion of Canada had laid an utterly exhausted Scott gently on a silken couch, rather than the huge bed, in case he should want something to eat, or indeed to join in the feast of celebration at Hercules’ homecoming from Hades. Hercules had made the mistake of giving him a glass of something to try to revive him from his semi-sentient stupor – it had been sweet and delicious and Scott had drunk it eagerly before he realized just how potent it was – Howlett’s exclamation about Cyclopes the multiverse over all being lightweights when it came to alcohol coming a moment too late. After that, there had really been no likelihood at all of Scott making any contribution to the homecoming celebrations.

Scott had been aware that he was indeed hungry and that there were delicious things laid out temptingly close by, but the act of actually eating was beyond him; he could neither open his eyes for long enough or coordinate the necessary Hydra-wrenched and Achilles-bruised body parts. Healthily dog-tired and now somewhat drunk, Scott drifted in and out of consciousness in the midst of the feast, fitfully aware of other revelers eating and drinking, and the comings and goings of myriad people who might almost have been fellow mutants, some with hooves, some with horns, and some with pert breasts perfectly visible through the merest hint of drapery.

There were curious naiads dripping lakewater – Hercules had shooed those firmly away from Scott – and nereids leaving salty puddles, dryads shedding soft falls of oak leaves, and hairy-legged satyrs, who had all admired Scott and petted him curiously while he drowsed. There had been no end of brawny warriors arriving, usually with dead animals slung over their shoulders as their contribution to the festivities, all with loud, carrying, sleep-jarring voices, and all dropping in to share the feast and welcome Hercules home. A few of them had shifted Scott’s drowsing body, casually but more kindly than not, to take their place on the couch, putting his head or his feet in their laps to make room for others, or absently stroking his skin as the wine did its work. He suspected that they would have as absently had sex with him, probably without much lull in the conversation – and he would have been equally too tired to care – had not Hercules been very firm about Scott not being a slave, a catamite, or, as far as anyone knew, that kind of boy, and insisting that Scott’s body therefore, however tempting anyone found it, must be held inviolate.

Even when Scott briefly woke to find himself now pillowed full length along the laps of a satyr, a one-eyed ogre, a one-breasted Amazon, and a two-headed bowman, all throwing back the wine and arguing fiercely over a battle fought apparently several centuries since, Scott had been far too exhausted to object. He decided that the only thing that mattered about satyr thighs was their softness beneath the head, and that an ogre casually thumbing one’s nipples made an excellent sleep-aid. Only when the bowman began sketching the contribution the Lapithian archers had made in seeing off the Centaurs with a piece of charcoal upon Scott’s bare thigh – which tickled – did Scott make an incoherent protest. Encouraged by Howlett to use the serving vessels to depict the battle instead, the quarrelsome warriors had posted Scott back onto the couch and clustered around the table to continue their disagreement, now loudly punctuated with salt cellars and pitchers.

Later, he had half-woken again, dimly aware of Kurt complaining about being sent off to bed while the feast was still in progress, the boy coaxed away by his excitement about the room Howlett had decorated for him – apparently as well as a teenage boy’s bedroom could be decorated when he hailed from a different dimension and they were now in a world without a Spider-Man – not to mention Kurt tut-tutting over the amateurish patch-up job Howlett had done on the ghost box he’d used to fetch Scott. There had also been that faint far-off sound of Kurt demanding that they made Scott stay here, with them, the four of them a team who could take on all comers.

“Make this Scott stay, Howlett….”

“I’m not ‘making’ the lad do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“But this is what he wants to do….”

“Well, I don’t think he wants to do what that old goat Silenus has in mind. Hercules! Ware, Scott…!”

Scott had found what the satyr was doing quite soothing and was almost sorry when Hercules tossed Silenus out and told him to come back when he was sober, if he ever was, and no damned prophecies, no one was in the mood for his fairground tricks.

“Felt nice…” Scott murmured, still more drunk than not but quite pleasantly so.

“Howlett and I can do much nicer things to you than that, boy,” Hercules told him, amused. “And not in full view of those beady-eyed nymphs.”

“Nice girls but a bit damp…” Scott said drowsily. “Asked me if I wanted to come and play in their pool… Where is their pool anyway…?”

“Are those watery strumpets insatiable?” Hercules said furiously. “How many of my companions do they intend to steal…?” The naiads had been ejected from the feast hall in short order, but the party had shown no sign of abating.

Scott had tried, several times, to wake up and contribute in some meaningful fashion, but it was as if not just hours but months of exhaustion had taken hold and sleep had kept closing over his head until he felt like a drowner losing to the sea. Letting go at last, his head pillowed on a dryad’s lap, her twiggy fingers tenderly stroking his hair, he had sunk under the dream-waves and slept and slept.

Scott woke, greatly refreshed, to the sound of someone with a deep, booming voice, trying to buy something from Hercules. It took Scott a moment to realize that the goods the stranger was trying to buy were…him.

“…and this magical amulet that can summon help for a hero across time and space itself. All I ask in exchange is that sleeping shepherd boy. Or is he a slave? If so, I will only give you the fleece for him.”

“I do not want a golden fleece, friend, and even if I did I would not sell the Summers boy to you for all the great treasures that you possess. I will, however, buy that trinket from you for a far higher price than it merits. So great is my goodwill today.”

Scott cracked open an eye and saw that a huge bull-headed man had festooned the feast hall with all manner of beautiful and extraordinary objects, some of which seemed to be…well, all too familiar.

(That time when he’d had to cancel their romantic dinner at that fancy restaurant for which Emma had waited…days for a reservation, all because of Logan breaking out in a bad case of every virus, bacteria, and disease known to man, had caused Scott to get rather more intimately acquainted than he really liked with what were euphemistically referred to as ‘marital aids’. Although he had indeed promised to make it up to Emma and he had – he hoped quite stoically – taken it like a man, as she desired –– he had told Logan firmly that the next time he decided to go down with botulism, leprosy, smallpox, bubonic plague, ebola, and canine distemper, Scott was going to leave him to convalesce alone, quarantine be damned. He had kept his self-respect by first turning down a threesome with her and Henry and then jibbing at saying, despite Emma’s coaxing, ‘Oh, Warren, your wings are so big’ at the critical juncture, because despite the faculty water cooler gossip to the contrary, he had actually sometimes said ‘No’ to Emma’s more unreasonable sexual demands.)

He watched Hercules buying some jewelry, some weaponry, some fertility symbols, and various esoteric objects which Scott could not identify, even with squinting, but waited until the bull-headed salesman – casting a last regretful look Scott’s way – had been ushered off the premises, before cautiously sitting up.

“Sorry about last night,” he said. “I didn’t make much of a contribution to your homecoming party.”

“You were picturesque, boy. Many commented as much. Indeed, had you not been there I would have needed to bring in some comely shepherd boys to drape around the place – people expect such things at my feasts.”

Hercules handed him a flagon which Scott was about to accept when Howlett swooped in and removed it. “He’s not you, Hercules. He doesn’t run on mead and adrenaline. Get Scott some water or he’s going to be drunk again before he’s awake.”

Scott realized as he stretched that he felt remarkably like himself. No hangover, no lingering exhaustion. There was the occasional muscle ache but no more than he might have expected after an ordinary mission. There had been no nightmares, and he felt very much refreshed. A shower, a cup of coffee, and a workout in the Danger Room and he would feel quite normal. All, of course, unfortunately out of the question.

“The air’s like wine here,” Howlett said, “especially after breathing in all that sulfur in Hades. It really would do you good to stay for a while. Breakfast?”

Scott had woken up ravenous, so, after a quick fifty press ups and sit ups, he accepted a flagon of clear spring water and demolished a plate of olives, cheese, grapes, unleavened bread, honey cakes, and roast venison with a good appetite.

“Where’s Kurt?”

“Out exploring the countryside. I’m sure Hercules mentioning that there’s a pretty girl whose mother is a goddess and whose father was a woodsprite – and who can subsequently phase through solid objects – living in the house on the hill had nothing to do with it. That reminds me – Hercules we need to introduce Scott to the Cithaeronides.”

“No nymphs! I forbid it!”

“Just…trust me. That nice Oread, Echo, has got a silly crush on Liriope’s son.”

Hercules said grudgingly, “He is a handsome boy.”

“Without a thought between his ears! The girl can do better, but she needs to get out more. See there are other fish in the sea. So, I’m borrowing Scott. Cephisus will be grateful. He says watching the girl pining over his dimwitted son is getting on his scales. It’s always handy having a river god owing you a favor.”

“Scott needs to bathe and change,” Hercules said firmly.

Howlett smirked. “I know what bathing and changing will lead to if you get in the pool with him. No one can resist you on your home turf. No, he’s coming with me like this. I want to show Echo how attractively he bruises.”

Scott hadn’t fully understood what their mission actually was even when it was apparently accomplished. He had accompanied Howlett up a lightly wooded hillside, a rapid river running down it, and far below, the checkered fields and olive groves, and the forest close by, alive, apparently, with boar, deer, and all manner of gods in animal form attempting to inveigle their way into the affections of unwitting nymphs and shepherd boys.

“Best to keep out of the woods unless you’re hunting,” Howlett explained. “The gods are as bad as the hell-beasts when it comes to taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

“I don’t think I’m in any danger. I’ve never been abducted for…romantic purposes at home,” Scott pointed out. “Of course, back home I never got felt up by tentacle monsters either….”

“Sorry, son. It’s the way you look and the way the myths run. A few more years here – if the mythology doesn’t de-age you just because it can – and you can be a tragic hero, having your wife want to murder your kids because you cheated on her, or your discarded mistress trying to immolate the next woman you fancy….”

“I’ve already been that guy.”

“Unfortunately for you, you still look like you’re in the abductable youth category, so, watch out for apparently harmless animals, because they might be about to whisk you off to Mount Olympus. It’s not so bad when they transform back into human form before the…seduction, but half the time they don’t seem to bother and then you get stuck with the…odd kids.”

“My biology hasn’t altered. I don’t have a womb.”

“Son, your biology must have altered – your optic blasts don’t work. We have no idea if you have a womb or not, so just to be on the safe side…stay out of the woods.”

It was actually a relief when they arrived at the place where a river god and various nymphs of the mountain stream seemed to have their home, all silver flowing water, graceful willows and comfortable rocks. Scott had been introduced to several pretty Oreads, and been prodded by Howlett to talk about their journey into Hades, which he had done as accurately as he could, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on the woody horizon, given the amount of nipples on display, and then answered their breathless questions about his own dimension and his other adventures. Having lots of barely clad nymphs fluttering around him had made him somewhat nervous, especially when they kept touching him with their soft, damp little fingers – when he went home and Emma read what he had been doing in his mind, she would be furious… Sadly, he remembered that Emma could no longer read his mind, since he and the Phoenix had broken her telepathy, and nor would she care how many naked nymphs caressed him.

He noticed that Howlett was talking to a particularly melancholy nymph all the while in a fatherly fashion, the two of them sitting on a flat rock with their feet dangling in the rapid, rushing waters, trout darting up to nibble at their toes. From the snatches Scott overheard, Howlett seemed to be pointing out that handsome was as handsome did, but that there were young men out there who were a bit more use to a girl than one so hung up on his own appearance that he could barely be tempted away from a reflective surface.

“Scott’s not even unique, you know. Scott, are you the best-looking of the X-Men?”

Scott blinked at Howlett in confusion. “No. Warren and Remy are the good-looking ones. And Logan has his animal magnetism…and…and I think he’s handsome.” With Howlett right here in front of him, eyes so steadily blue, it was impossible not to picture Logan in all his maddening contradictions, and to feel his heart curl up like a snail touched by salt.

“See, girl? Modest, useful, loyal, and hard-working. That’s the kind of feller a nice nymph like yourself should be thinking of, not that airhead Narcissus.”

The oread Howlett had been talking to had walked around Scott, gazed at him very closely, blushed, stroked his thigh, apparently to test for muscle strength, murmured appreciative things, then run off with the other nymphs, giggling.

“What was all that about?” Scott asked, feeling underdressed once again.

Howlett was looking peculiarly pleased with himself. “I don’t have Hercules’s prejudice against nymphs. Yes, they’ve got libidos, obviously, but haven’t we all? I don’t want that girl pining herself to a shadow over that Narcissus boy. Now she’s seen there are other young men around, just as good-looking and far more useful, hopefully she’ll snap out of it.”

Young Kurt appeared next to them in a puff of sulfur. “Howlett! I think she is this dimension’s Sprite. She’s very smart, she loves physics as much as I do, she can phase right through things, and she doesn’t mind the way I look.”

“Why should she? You’re a handsome young feller. Girl got a name, has she?”

“Aikaterine. Her mother’s Hecate, but her dad was a woodsprite. Unfortunately, he got abducted by some god so her mom’s a single parent now, but she’s working on a spell to get him back. She’s quite a powerful witch. Cool dogs, too. Can I stay for lunch…and maybe supper? Her mom said it would be okay if I stayed over for the day. Kat’s kind of…fun.”

Howlett turned to Scott conspiratorially. “What do you think?”

“I think that it’s probably not a good idea to insult an all-powerful goddess by turning down a play-date with her daughter.”

Kurt said innocently, “And, Howlett, if you know I’m going to be out of the house for hours and hours, it might give you guys time to…wash Scott. And if he liked being…washed by you guys, he might want to stick around. You know, if you did it well enough.”

Howlett pulled a cigar out of Scott knew not where, and lit it, saying quite calmly, “I can see you’ve spent far too long in the Underworld, young Waggoner.”

“It’s the centaurs,” Kurt admitted. “Once they’ve had a few drinks they’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything. Sometimes even things you really didn’t want to know. So, can I spend the day with Kat?”

They looked across to the graceful villa on the hill, shaded by olive groves, large hunting dogs bounding around, while a girl with her hair tied back and a small winged beast on her shoulder waved across to them. Scott felt a terrible pang; the familiar desolation washing over him of being separated forever from most of the people that he cared about. “She looks just like Kitty did at that age.”

Howlett waved back and told Kurt to be good and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and have fun, but not the wrong kind of fun, absolutely no quantum mechanics that might involve removing himself to a different dimension, and not to go into the woods because of deities on the prowl for people to…wash.

“Kat says we can just phase through them or teleport away – apparently it drives them nuts when that happens. Serves them right, if you ask me. Bye!”

He teleported back to the wall of the villa where the girl was waiting for him, and then went off arm and arm with his new friend, the two of them chattering away as if they had known each other forever. Looking after them, Scott thought about the Kurt he knew, who was dead, and the Kitty he knew, who was no longer his friend, and felt like someone had scooped out his insides and replaced them with burning stones.

“Come on, lad,” Howlett said quietly. “The boy was right about one thing…after fighting all those hydras, harpies, and hog-beasts, you really do need a bath.”

Scott had carried his melancholy with him back to the palace. It had been a mistake to come here, he realized that now. As long as his shoulder was to the wheel, he could focus on just that task: keep mutants safe, rescue the ones in danger, let the bigots and bullies know there would be consequences if they hurt them, that even if the law would never do its part to keep them safe, there were other people who would intervene and the bullies might not enjoy their idea of retribution. He had never shirked from doing his duty; it had sustained him through a lot of bad times, but in recent weeks it had only been possible for him to keep up the façade of being the man he had used to be if he didn’t think about anything else. Just: the lessons for the kids for the day, the resources they needed and how to obtain them, the next light that was a new mutant’s powers manifesting for the first time…. Not, the man he’d killed, the people he’d lost, the respect and affection and trust withdrawn from him by people who’d once loved him as much as he still loved them, the whole damned life he’d lost forever. When he thought about the abyss he was in and how impossible it would ever be to climb back out…then he realized how much everything hurt. But as long as he’d just stuck to his day to day routine, it was bearable. Focus on the kids, focus on the school, focus on the next thing that needed to be done, necessary myopia, sanity-saving tunnel vision. And it had been working, damnit. It had been working really well. And then Howlett had had to show up and screw everything up.

He slumped on the couch and put his head in his hands because somehow he had let the desolation in and he couldn’t seem to shut it out again. All that was waiting for him back on his own world was guilt and grief and horror and hatred, and the hatred was even worse than the guilt, because it was so very different a thing to be hated by friends than simply by strangers. Duty should have been enough. It always had been enough. He didn’t know what to do or what he was if it stopped being enough.

Howlett said, “Scott, this isn’t a problem you can think your way through. You really do need to put your brain in neutral for a while and just let life happen.”

“I can’t…!” The panic in his own voice scared him, because he had to cope, he had to cling on and keep it together or else everything fell apart.

“Look, the only thing that Emmeline we met couldn’t deal with was losing you. She became a god so she wouldn’t have to feel the pain of it any more. And the Magneto I met – he’d been helping to sustain a revolution against impossible odds. They were strong people. Are you telling me your versions aren’t?”

Dully, he said, “No, they’re stronger than…they’ve had to be. Erik lived through the Holocaust. He’s suffered every imaginable hell including madness.”

Howlett sat next to him. “So has my Hercules. He’s seen and done terrible things and he’s still here. Scott, you just need a break. Just let it go for a few days. Let them run the show while you have a break. Things will look better then.”

He knew it wasn’t true. He knew very well that if he let go, he was lost forever. If he went back now, this minute, and never thought about this world or the people in it again, he might be able to cling onto the Scott Summers he needed to be, but if he let their affection and respect and warmth seep into him and then had to go back to the cold, he was a dead man walking. Scott raised his head to explain that to Howlett and made the mistake of looking into his eyes. They were very blue and full of kindness. He could see every color and contour, every line, every follicle on the man’s face, and none of it through a red haze. He could see Howlett in a way he never got to see Logan, and never would get to see Logan, because Logan would never look at him like this.

And he might have been saved, even then, except Howlett’s compassion for Scott got the better of him, and he said, far too kindly, “Let it go, lad, just for a few days.” And then he kissed Scott, first gently and then firmly, deepening the kiss in a way that was delicious and intoxicating and made something in Scott’s brain that had been running and running, like a gear in neutral, just shut down.

Howlett cushioned his skull, like he had in the Underworld, and eased him down onto the couch, and slid a warm hand up under his drapery, and Scott’s arms were around his neck and his long legs wrapping themselves around Howlett’s bulky thighs, and he was kissing him back, like a drowning man in search of oxygen.

A shadow fell over them, and Scott tilted his head and opened his eyes to see a naked Hercules looking down on them, a broad smile on his face. “Time to bathe, wouldn’t you say, Howlett?”

Scott found himself plucked from the couch by Hercules’ brawny arms and carried, like a crown on a cushion, his fingers clutching fretfully at Howlett, tugging him after him and the man, grinning, obligingly leaned forward to kiss him again, only breaking off to pull his tunic over his head, revealing his muscular, broad-chested body.

“Trust me,” he said, “the bathing facilities here are a lot better than a power shower, Scott.”

Scott was still saying, “But I like power showers…” as Hercules carried him down the marble steps into the sunken marble pool in which the scented water steamed around them, rose petals floating on the surface, and ewers of wine and bottles of oil shone at strategic intervals on the tiled lip of the turquoise waters. Hercules ripped off Scot’s stained rag of a costume and hurled it far away, then lowered Scott tenderly into the blissfully warm water and kissed away any last protests he might have been about to make.

Scott found himself making soft, defeated whimpers, as the demigod’s tongue did wonderful things to his mouth, and Howlett first soaped and then kissed the back of his neck in a way that made him squirm deliciously. The blood and dirt were lathered off him and then perfumed oil smoothed across his body before the strigil scraped seductively across the surface of his skin. And Hercules knew things about his nerve clusters that Scott had never even guessed, so he kept jolting and whimpering needily, and wondering who it was making that desperate mewling sound, and every time he tried to access his brain and ground himself by checking his current columns of misery, like an IRS man inventorying the accounts, a new sensation would shiver through him and reset his mind to all-feeling and no-knowing.

It was the best and most terrible foreplay he’d ever know, because they kept dancing around the places he wanted them to touch, and licking his knees, and his anklebones, and his shoulders and nipples, and nuzzling into his ears and his temples and being so gentle that it was like being kissed by sunbeams, and it was all the touching he hadn’t known in all these barren days since the Phoenix had sharded its way into him like the blade of a knife, and it was unbearable. The only thing more unbearable would be if it stopped.

When he was so clean that no one could possibly have been cleaner, Hercules carried him out of the water and sat him, more or less on his lap, on another silken couch. Scott was embarrassed by all the whimpering and mewling and general base submission to their tongues and fingers he’d been doing, so he kept his eyes closed, but couldn’t help rubbing his face needily against Howlett’s chest hair.

When Hercules traced those raked scars down Scott’s back that Logan’s claws had left with a gentle finger, Scott felt a shiver go through him that felt just like longing.

Still gently, Hercules said, “The Howlett in your world is less equable than mine, I take it?”

“He was angry.”

He was provoked or thought he was. That was the story of their relationship now, him and Logan: Logan thinking Scott had provoked him and erupting with fury; Scott wondering why the guy didn’t just get in a killing blow and end it, finally. They had come so close to their last dance in the prison. He’d been a flexed claw away from oblivion. There had been time to wonder, eagerly, if he’d see Jean again, his mom, his dad; if he could finally get a chance to apologize to Charles. And then he’d realized that he wouldn’t be seeing them again. They were good people and he’d be going to a place with monsters. Madelyne would probably be waiting for him there. He wondered if hell counted as hell if you got to torture the ex-husband you hated for all eternity and enjoy every minute of it. He wondered if hell counted as hell when you wanted her to hurt you just as much as she wanted to make you bleed. He imagined a forgotten room in Gehenna, their paperwork misplaced by careless demons, and the two of them left alone to spiral through their sadomasochistic rituals while she gouged and he screamed….

But Logan had chosen not to murder him. Logan had reeled away from him in horror, wounded in a way that Scott hadn’t anticipated by Scott’s craving for death.

There was nothing between them now but Logan’s rage and bitterness, and that was too vast a sea for Scott to ever swim. Emma had told him he needed to cut off: from Henry and from Logan. All they were ever going to do now was hurt him in payment for the myriad ways that Scott had hurt them. Before the death of Charles Xavier, there had been a childish bewilderment to add to his anger.

What did I do, Emma? Even now, after all the yelling, I’m not sure what it is I did to make them hate me this much?

You changed, Scott. You grew up and you toughened up and you stopped playing by the rules and started thinking the unthinkable. You stopped being the Boy Scout they needed you to be.

Because the mutant race needed me to be this.

But they needed you to be what you were and you’re not that Scott Summers any more. You robbed them of him. You took away their friend and you took away their belief that they could save the innocent. Why do you suppose Logan is so crazy for preserving the childhood of mutant kids, Scott? He’s seen what happens to boy soldiers sent out to fight the bad guys too young, and, in his opinion, they don’t turn out well….

Of course, she’d kissed him, and pulled him down and dug her fingernails in the way that hurt just right, telling him that she, of course, thought they were idiots, and in her opinion some boy soldiers grew up very well indeed, but the words had lodged. Logan thought he was a write-off; the car crash he wanted the younger kids to avoid; unsalvageable.

Perhaps he should be grateful to Henry, even though it had hurt like Hawkeye’s arrow in the throat to see his younger self and see Jean, Jean, Jean, looking at him with that horror in their eyes, because he was Magneto now. At least Henry had thought there was a way he might be shocked back to being the man Henry had once needed him to be… No, he needed to face facts. Henry hadn’t been trying to save him; he’d just been trying to punish him for killing Charles Xavier, and he’d succeeded admirably.

At least, after he had been possessed, gone insane, and murdered a man they loved in front of them, their hatred felt reasonable; deserved, even, measured out on the proper scales. It was easier to live with their hate now it was so much less complicated. He’d killed Xavier and they would never forgive him. No one would ever forgive him. Not Erik, not Emma, not the Avengers, who would always see a murderer when they looked at him, and certainly not Logan. He could understand that perfectly. He couldn’t forgive himself either. Emma had told him that Xavier hadn’t been a saint, that he needed to remember all the bad decisions the man had made, but now he was dead, all Scott could remember was that Charles Xavier had shown him the first kindness he’d known in eight years of sheer misery. That he had offered stability and sanity and purpose, instead of chaos and madness and cruelty. Scott was the ungrateful child who had turned out to be sharper than a serpent’s tooth indeed. And now a good man was dead because of him and the mutant race was forever impoverished.

A warm tongue lapped along the scar-line and Scott gasped. It had been so long. Want shivered through him again, surprising him with its intensity. He hadn’t had a sex-drive in a long time. He was too wretched with self-hatred to even want to touch himself let alone have someone else touch him, but Hercules was so far above him. If a demigod wanted something from him, the demigod might as well take it. Scott’s only use was as a means of keeping other mutants safe from harm. That was the only good he could do now, but he couldn’t do that here, and Hercules was a hero – if a hero needed something from him then Scott should let him do whatever he wanted. He looked a question at Howlett, who combined all the things he’d lost – a father-figure who didn’t judge him and find him so worthless that he joined with his enemies against him, and a Logan who didn’t hate him.

Howlett stroked Scott’s wet hair back from his face as Hercules still licked along those scars as if he could banish them. He said, in that gruff, familiar voice, “It’s what you want, Scott…? First time. Big step. So far, all you did was let us wash off the bloodstains. No one here wants you to do anything you don’t want to do or will regret later.”

Regret later? Accepting this would kill him. Being touched with kindness, being loved with intimacy, being held and kissed and made to feel needed and wanted by two men who mattered, by people whose opinion he respected and whose affection he craved? That was everything he wanted and more. Losing it would be the end of everything. Losing it would crack him like a dropped egg.

But Scott wasn’t entitled to wants any more, not for himself. He could want justice and freedom from persecution for his species but he didn’t even think he was entitled to it for himself, but he could not object to something that might give two men he admired and who had been kinder to him than anyone else had in years some fleeting pleasure.

He just said, “Yes,” which was so much easier than explaining that he’d never done this and didn’t even really know what you did, especially with two of them, but anything at all they wanted from him they were welcome to take. They could hurt him if they wanted to, although there was a danger he might fall agonizingly in love with them if they didn’t. So, perhaps, yes, they had better hurt him. “Yes” covered everything pretty well, he thought.

Howlett said, “I wish I knew what you were thinking, Scott. Then I find myself wondering if it’s just as well I don’t.”

Hercules licked between Scott’s shoulder blades, a brawny arm wrapped around his body as he pulled him back then nuzzled his ear. Scott knew their eyes would be meeting – Howlett and Hercules – as they worked out what to do with him that would make them both happy.

Hercules said, “If you ask me, the lad thinks too much. We need to shut down his brain, Howlett. Are you up for the challenge?”

“Reckon so.”

Howlett pressed close and Scott closed his eyes to revel in it, the bulky warmth of them, hair bristling softly against his back and his own bare chest. He felt for the first time in a very long time, completely safe. He realized Howlett was up for the task indeed – that was pressing wetly against his belly, and Hercules, looming massively over both of them from behind him, was clearly equal to all challenges. He thought about those arm muscles that were bigger than his thighs, and the incredible strength they possessed, and the weight of them, and he didn’t care that they could kill him with a snap of their fingers. Anything they wanted to do to him he wanted them to do. When Howlett kissed him, very gently, Scott clung to him, eyes closed, lashes wet, trying not to feel stabbed to the heart because someone was touching him and it wasn’t even a blow, and when Hercules picked him up and carried him to the bed, Scott just let go and curled into his touch as if he had shivered through the darkest of winters and Hercules was a warm beam of light.

They were both so strong and they were so incredibly gentle with him. He had never been kissed so lightly or stroked so carefully; not even Jean had treated him like this, and she had been both kind and careful as she eased him through his first time, soothing him with her mind and her fingers as he panicked at the prospect of losing control. But Hercules and Howlett treated him like porcelain, as if he could be bruised with a sigh. They had explored every inch of him as carefully as if he were spun glass, advancing by tiny increments. There had been so many kisses and licks and the softest touches as they tried to encourage him to have preferences, to make choices: that touch or this touch? A lick there? A finger there?

What do you want, Scott…?

Howlett kept asking him that and he kept telling him that whatever they wanted to do was fine with him. He’d do what they liked. Shouldn’t he be sucking something or licking something by now? But, no, it seemed he wasn’t required to do anything at all except relax on an enormous bed and learn what it was he liked to have done to him when the people doing it were men.

They treated him as if he might shatter into a million atoms if they spoke above a whisper, as if he were some damaged, precious thing that they wanted to mend, piece by piece. He wondered if he somehow gave off a wrong note, like cracked china, or if they could just feel the ridges where he hadn’t been glued back together right. He didn’t even sound like himself, those breathless keening whimpers. They didn’t hush him, they just gentled him if the unexpected pleasure spiked too high and he panicked about his beams coming back, even here.

“Anything you want us to do, we’ll do, Scott…” Howlett told him with a nuzzling kiss, his beard soft against Scott’s skin. “Anything you don’t want us to do, we won’t.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

Hercules said with a smile in his voice, “Well, perhaps we can help you work that out.”

They were stroking him in unison, Howlett his inner thighs, Hercules the base of his spine. He squirmed with pleasure, wanting so much more, embarrassed to say it out loud. Howlett pressed his face close to his and breathed in his ear kindly, “More of this?”

Scott managed, “Deeper…” afraid he was probably blushing as if he were still that untried teenager who now lived in the present, and not the man who had been so thoroughly broken in by Jean, Madelyne, and Emma. They didn’t make him say more, he suspected Howlett was steering by Scott’s scent, knowing how aroused he was, ready at the first whiff of pain to stop what was happening. His fingers were skillful but it was the other hand that was making Scott want to break down, not the one doing such firm, coaxing things between his legs, but the one that was rubbing a gentling thumb up and down his cheekbone, letting him know it was his face Howlett was looking at, the person he was, here and now, that Howlett was touching. Scott opened his eyes, shocked at the luxury of it, a room and faces colored by soft candlelight, the only red the rich draperies and the wine in their goblets. Howlett kissed him and Scott clung to his broad shoulders, inhaling his scent, keeping his eyes open because Howlett wasn’t picturing a different Scott Summers so Scott wasn’t going to imagine himself with a different Logan. He kissed him back, over and over, dizzy with gratitude because Howlett wasn’t just thrusting a tongue into his mouth and then pinning him down hard, even thought he’d thought that was what he wanted.

He realized that he’d had these images skirting around the corners of his mind for a while: his head cracking on the floor, Logan’s fingers bruising his wrists, clothes ripping, a belt yanked open, a vicious tug of the zipper, imagined it erupting out of the inevitable rage, sex instead of death, a way that Logan stopped himself becoming a murderer at the last minute. Given the way things were between them, he’d thought that was probably the best that they could do. He’d thought it might even mend things between them a little, make Logan feel he’d won some victory that would offset his rage. He’d thought it would be worth it, however rough it was at the time: Logan would feel better when it was done and Scott would heal in time, and perhaps they could be friends again….

Now, with Howlett kissing him like this, he realized that the Logan who was this man even in one dimension, would never be pacified by rape. It would just add to the things Logan drank to forget – another item on the catalogue of self-hatred. Scott’s own list was too long for him to want to add to another person’s encyclopedia of sins. He realized that Logan must hate him for trying to make him a murderer and must never find out that Scott had let himself believe that Logan could become a rapist. How had they even got to this place? Hadn’t they seen good in each other once? Logan had hated him for so long and so earnestly, like he worked at it, the way devout men worked at their prayers, that Scott had let himself get poisoned by it. He had started simultaneously mistrusting Logan’s judgment and believing he was right. Thinking Logan was blind and Scott was worthy of his hatred. They’d both been sucked into the vortex of their own quarrel and neither one of them knew who the other one was any more. Perhaps that meant they couldn’t know who they were either. Perhaps they were that toxically linked. Or perhaps they just needed to live on different worlds where they couldn’t fuck each other over any further.

“I don’t think I know who he is any more,” he murmured to Howlett.

“Do you need to?”

“It’s my job to know who everyone is and how they’ll react in any situation so I can plan ahead accordingly.”

“That seems like kind of a tall order, Scott,” Howlett said, still kindly. “Maybe you should just let that kind of thinking go for a while. Just until the next crisis. Maybe take each day as it comes.”

“There’s always a crisis and it never stops.”

Hercules’ voice was a deep, calming rumble. “Nothing is your responsibility here. You are a guest in our dimension and you have no tasks before you except to get well.”

Scott frowned. “Aren’t I well?”

Another kiss from Howlett, beard bristle tickling his skin and those strong lips so soft against his. “Not yet, but Herc and I – you might be surprised at what good doctors we make.”

Hercules slipped a finger inside him, very carefully, very gently, and Scott realized that as long as he just relaxed and let it happen it felt wonderful, deep and fulfilling and incredible, but if he tried to tense up and control it, it was just a thing that hurt. He relaxed, from the top of his head all the way to the tip of his stupidly bare toes. He pushed back against Hercules and his incredible demigod strength and his gentle, skillful finger, and he pulled Howlett after him, holding onto his shoulders and pulling him in for another hungry kiss.

Hercules rumbled, “At last! Good boy…” as if Scott was a particularly slow-witted puppy who had finally worked out how to sit when all the other puppies had learned how to do that an hour ago. They had been waiting for him to not just be reactive, then; to actually initiate something himself. He probably should have realized that before now.

It should have been embarrassing but Scott found that he didn’t care that Hercules thought he was damaged and a little dim-witted in bed and Howlett thought he needed time to mend. They were kind and they were fond and they were utterly focused on making him have a nice time. They were doing everything they could not to hurt him and they didn’t hate him at all for killing Charles Xavier, not even a little bit.

Later, after surely more preparation than the most blushing bride on her wedding night, with Scott’s back braced against Hercules’ furred chest and Howlett’s huge arms dwarfing Scott’s long bare legs, Howlett pressed into him, still gently, his careful push causing a blissful ache that hurt Scott just right, then set up a sweet, rocking rhythm that made Scott’s pleasure centers dance. It was like the high from piloting a ship or flying a jet; it seated something deep in him that he hadn’t even known was there and anchored it in place. It made him feel connected to another human being in a way he hadn’t felt in far too long.

Howlett took it so slowly and carefully that Scott had to beg him for more, and then had to beg Hercules to follow him, please, because it felt so good, someone being inside him like that, warm and pulsing and linking him to them, and he didn’t want it to end. They changed positions so that Scott was now nestled as safely in Howlett’s arms as he’d been nestled in Hercules’. And Hercules was even bigger and there was a sharp stretch that made him gasp with the shock of it, but nothing to complain of compared with other pain he’d known, nothing that wasn’t worth it a million times over when he took Scott firm and deep while Howlett steadied his shoulders and Scott’s legs danced over the bulging muscles of Hercules’ arms. He had to twist himself round to mouth at Howlett’s chest as the pleasure built and built and Hercules somehow kept him right at the brink without letting him tip over until Scott was wailing and clutching at Howlett, who laughed but sympathetically and stroked the sweat-draggled hair from his eyes.

Scott made sounds he hadn’t known he was capable of, body contorting as the pleasure thrummed everywhere, sparks shooting down his legs and up his spine, and Hercules still kept him teetering with god-like pulsing thrusts, and then finally, everything exploded into light and he was fired with sensation, like an arrow from a bow, and then falling back into himself from all the places he’d been flung to, and he was possibly whole again, but dripping and panting and still moaning with the agonizingly ecstatic afterthrums and in the arms and the lap of a very sympathetic Governor General Howlett.

Who said, as he gentled him with soothing strokes, “Being immortal, he’s had a lot of practice. That’s how he knows how to do that.”

“It’s fiendish,” Scott panted.

Hercules laughed. “Did you enjoy that, lad?”

“I think I might be made of different molecules now.”

“Well, you, Scott Summers, are as appetizing as ambrosia.” But they were looking over Scott’s still heaving body – the one they were both tenderly stroking but absently, like a favorite pet – into each other’s eyes with perfect understanding, and Scott realized they had given up their first day back together to initiate him.

He said, “I should go…” and began to look around for his clothes.

Which was when Hercules hand closed in his hair with just a hint of the power he had been reining in, and tilted Scott’s head back, the Olympian gazed into Scott’s eyes sternly, and was briefly all a demigod should be: remote and unreachable and cast in bronze, and then he kissed Scott in the way Namor probably kissed – imperiously tender. “I do not approve of slavery but I do not doubt there are manacles somewhere at hand should they prove necessary.”

Scott said, “I was just…”

And Hercules kept him pinned with his majestic gaze and said, “Boy, are you disobeying one who should be as a god to you?”

“No…?” Scott essayed.

“One before whose magnificence you should be awestruck?”

“No…definitely not. No. Howlett…?”

Howlett didn’t even pretend he wasn’t enjoying himself. “He is the son of Zeus, you know. Not to mention the…”

“Slayer of the Nemean Lion, the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra, and the Stymphalian Birds. Is that who you are defying, boy?”

Scott realized that not just Howlett but all of them were enjoying this far too much. “I wouldn’t dream of it, my lord.”

“That is gratifying to hear, because as the capturer of the Golden Hind of Artemis, the Erymanthian Boar, the Cretan Bull, the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, and three-headed Cerberus himself, I might take it amiss if you were.”

“I’m very obedient where immortals are concerned,” Scott assured him. “Ask any of them.” He thought that over for a moment and then, remembering his last interactions with them, said, “Well, maybe don’t ask Thor or Ares….”

“I think, boy, as you have been pleasured at your convenience, you will in due time need to be punished at ours. Howlett – you agree?”

Howlett, the traitor, just winked at Scott again. “I’m like Summers, here. I never disagree with demigods.”

Hercules poured them all more wine, told Scott imperiously, that he must learn to have a better head for it now that he was in a civilized dimension, and said that he was now going to tell them the story of how he had obtained the girdle of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.”

Scott raised his hand. “Will there be questions afterwards?”

Firmly suppressing a smirk, Hercules said, “Boy, there will be sound whippings for any who do not hang on my every word.”

(Not even under torture would Scott have admitted to that tiny spark first of excitement at the threat and then disappointment as he realized Hercules was only teasing.)

“That is a pretty raunchy tale for the boy’s first day in,” Howlett said, putting his goblet into Scott’s hand to hold, then settling himself back against the cushions of the bed comfortably, and arranging Scott in his arms before taking back his goblet and giving Scott a hair ruffle that was oddly avuncular given that he had been making love to him half an hour before. Scott didn’t even care if what he had really been in receipt of in Howlett’s case was a pity-fuck; it had been a damned good pity-fuck and he had enjoyed every moment of it.

“The tale of Iole and Iphitus?” Hercules suggested, settling himself in on the bed with an arm around Howlett so that Scott was warmly pressed between them.

“You and your brother-and-sister threesomes,” Howlett said fondly.

“What about the time I slew the giants, Albion and Bergyon, the sons of Posiedon? That is a rousing tale.”

Scott took a sip of the strong red wine, post-orgasmic brain not as clear as it could have been, splinters of Henry’s mythology lectures emerging from the mist of the past. “In my dimension, your father was supposed to have helped you out with that – oh mighty Hercules, Lion of Olympus, Prince of Power.” The last part was said somewhat more rapidly than the first, and he did brace himself for retribution. When he dared open his eyes, Hercules was looking down on him quite fondly.

“The Hercules of your world must be a tyrant indeed.”

“He’s more Logan’s friend than mine. I believe he’s quite amiable. I just know Namor.”

“He is a challenging companion?”

“Exacting on occasion,” Scott admitted.

Hercules stroked Scott’s chest absently. “I think we had better keep this one from my father’s sight. I would not see him serve as another Ganymede.” His fingers moved further down, still absently, and Scott found that he was being fondled by the son of Zeus in a way that was much too effective. At his gasp, Howlett took the goblet from him and Scott realized what he might have worked out before if he hadn’t been so brain-jangled with orgasm – that Howlett had the kind of recovery period that went with healing factor and Hercules was a demigod. They could thoroughly wear him out and still enjoy their first day home together with him passed out from exhaustion between them. At the thought of the ways in which they might choose to wear him out, a spasm of anticipation flickered up his spine and…elsewhere.

“Not such a Boy Scout as I thought,” Howlett said, giving Scott a friendly grin.

“I admit the novelty hasn’t exactly worn off yet,” Scott admitted. “But, you know, if it’s too much trouble. Some immortals possibly not being as young as they once were….”

Hercules proceeded to punish him quite splendidly, and then Howlett took over in a firmly tender manner, tilting Scott up so he was almost standing on his head on the bed, then gathering him in so he was bent like a bow, calves hooked over Howlett’s shoulders, yet still cradled by Howlett’s right arm, before driving into him with an intensity so deeply effective that it made Scott squirm and climax his way to a limp, ecstatic oblivion. As he drifted off to sleep in the silken acreage of their bed, they placed him out of harm’s way, hedged around with pillows, and welcomed each other home passionately through the warm curtain of his dreams.

He woke between two warm, soft-furred bodies, dense with muscle, and both dwarfing his own lean strength. He felt satiated and relaxed and…happy. It took him a moment to identify that emotion because it was so long since he’d felt it. He was still a murderer and a fugitive and half the people he had ever loved were either dead or hated him, but he had spent hours wrapped in a comforting blanket of affection and the afterglow hadn’t faded yet.

When Hercules said critically, “Boy, I fear Howlett and I have made you a little sticky. We’d best give you another bath,” Scott found he had no desire whatsoever to object.

The rest of the day passed in a hazy glow: the washing, the what-the-washing-inevitably-led-to; the drinking of wine, some of it licked from Scott’s skin; the eating of delicious food, much of it from Scott’s body. (It tickled, deliciously, to have mead lapped from his abdomen, almost as deliciously as it did to have honey licked off his nipples.) Then Kurt teleporting home to tell them all about his day with Kat, lit up and happy after hours in the light with clean air to breathe, no demons to avoid, and a girl his own age to play with. Their next day together was mapped out in detail, with Kat already drafted as a co-conspirator for the first labor and mentioning other friends she thought would be useful, whom Kurt would be meeting on the morrow, it seemed. There was the white-haired, blue-eyed grand-daughter of Eos, bringer of the dawn. She was, Kurt told them, a daughter of one of the Anemoi, who had inherited her father’s power over the elements. Kat said she was sure she’d be happy to help out….

Scott kept looking from Kurt’s chattering face, the boy eating with a good appetite even as he sketched out for Howlett the invention he was working on to detect and block thaumaturgic currents, enabling them to penetrate Circe’s island so they could steal her magic potion, to Howlett’s fond, calm one, to Hercules, glowing with good health and vigor and the sheer joy of being freed from the Underworld and back in his rightful place as head of this truly happy family.

Looking at their future, Scott saw all manner of dangers and difficulties, but none of that wearisome grind of doing over and over what had not worked before in the hope that it might somehow help this time. He could feel their own good spirits infecting him, like a benevolent contagion. If only….

“Summers – are you thinking again?” Howlett demanded. “Because we can cure you of that.”

“No, I….”

“Too late,” Hercules said forbiddingly. “We had better teach you this morning’s lesson again.”

Scott said, “Again…?” and although he really did try to sound regretful, his jolt of anticipation would probably have tipped someone off with far less acute senses than Howlett that he was not exactly averse. It was embarrassing but he was already starting to get an extra thrill from Hercules being…masterful with him. When the demigod feigned being sternly implacable, something fiery shivered up Scott’s thighs. Hercules was incredibly amused by it and was playing it up to the hilt. Howlett thought it was pretty funny as well. Scott was both mortified and enjoying himself and then extra mortified by how much he was enjoying himself.

“Most certainly ‘again’,” Hercules said imperiously. “We cannot have lessons left unlearned.”

Kurt grinned, and picked up his parchment sketches. “That’s my cue to go to my room and focus on a plan for getting us into Poseidon’s kingdom – which would have been so much easier if you hadn’t pissed him off by slaying that big fish thing, Hercules. Kat says there’s no way Keto’s going to help you after that either.” He cast an appraising glance at Scott. “Of course, the nereids are quite susceptible, Kat says, and they did like the look of Scott last night. Kat says that Howlett’s right, and sometimes batting your eyelashes is the best way to go. Scott…?”

Scott had been gazing at Howlett who had just winked at him before throwing him a grape – Scott had never been the sort of person who just opened his mouth so people could throw fruit into it, despite Emma’s best efforts to retrain him, but somehow with Howlett it came all too easily. He realized Kurt was saying his name and tried not to choke on the grape he was sucking. “What…?”

“How do you feel about chatting up some sea nymphs? I was thinking we could fake a shipwreck and have you wash up where they could find you, and then they’d be bound to fall in love with you and you could give them a sob story about needing to get into Poseidon’s throne room and….”

“I’d be terrible at that,” Scott said, appalled by the prospect. “I’m not Natasha Romanoff. I don’t do honey traps.”

“But it has to be you. Hercules would be good at the seducing the nymphs part, but everyone knows who he is, so there’d be no chance of subterfuge, and Howlett doesn’t know how to flirt with girls. He acts like he’s their dad, so he’d just start advising them to be more discerning in their choice of mermen and tell them that drowning sailors just to bang them was a morally gray area. Come on, Scott, it’s easy – you could get washed up on a beach and look handsome and sad, right? I mean looking handsome and sad is kind of your default setting anyway. Just don’t wear very much – nothing at all would probably be best – and say that you really need to lay your hands on Poseidon’s trident and can they help you? Crying would probably be a good idea, too. Kat says nymphs are suckers for handsome men who cry – not the snotty kind of crying though, she says you have to cry prettily….”

“I don’t know how to cry prettily or how to flirt with nymphs. I don’t know how to flirt with anyone,” Scott said desperately. “I never really…learned.”

“Well, how come you keep getting married and having girlfriends, then?”

“Honestly, I’m…not too sure.”

Howlett said, “I think any plan involving Scott having to bat his eyelashes at anyone is probably a non-starter, Kurt. He does kinda suck at it.”

Kurt shook his head. “I said that to Kat and she said then that made Scott an unrealized asset, particularly with the Circe mission coming up, and that we ought to try and retrain him so he’d be more cost effective – she spent some time in a different dimension studying economics. She has a ghost box, too.”

“But I’m really good at other things,” Scott protested. “I could strategize to win a war with an army half the size of the opposition. I’m great at that.”

Patiently, Kurt said, “But, in this dimension, Scott, it would be much more useful for everyone if you learned how to stand around looking handsome and sad and naked, and crying prettily. There’s no end of uses Kat and I could put that to. Work on it, will you?”

Kurt had been piled up with unhealthy snacks – Scott had raised a token objection but been firmly overruled – and sent off to his room to work on his thaumaturgic current detector and told not to come to their room even if he heard screaming, in fact especially if he heard screaming. “I know,” he said, amused. “The centaurs told me about all that stuff.”

As Kurt moved out of earshot, Howlett shook his head. “He should not be getting sex-ed from centaurs.”

“Well, as he seems to be pretty much hanging on Aikaterine’s every word right now, I expect he’ll be spouting her version of the birds and the bees in no time,” Scott said consolingly.

“Great. So, he’ll just grow up doing whatever the woman he’s smitten with at the time tells him to do?”

Scott paused in his chewing of a honeycake, confused by Howlett’s disapproving tone. “What’s wrong with that?”

Howlett had his mouth open to tell him when Hercules made some quelling gesture and then patted Scott on the shoulder. “Nothing at all, my friend. Obeying the whims of beautiful women is a time-honored philosophy.”

Howlett snorted. “Yeah, that worked out really well for all Medea’s cast-offs.”

“She did not cast me off,” Hercules protested. “The Thebans drove her out, that was all. I admit, she did promise to write and then failed to do so, but she is a very busy woman.”

“She was banging Aegeus before your bed was cold.”

“She is a woman of strong passions. I like women of strong passions.” Hercules’s gaze flickered over Howlett as he tossed an olive into his mouth and sucked it provocatively. “I like men of strong passions as well.”

Howlett shrugged while his blue eyes flashed an irresistible fire. “I suppose I have something of a weakness for them myself….”

The next minute, Hercules had grabbed Scott and tossed him over his shoulder, and the three of them had first retired to the steaming, scented pool, with its – Scott now noticed – erotic mosaic floor, for some very thorough washing before retiring, damp and somewhat slippery in Scott’s case, to the ridiculously large bed, where there was more wine, and much oil, and the kind of kisses and touches and then deft, tender thrusts that did indeed drive from Scott’s mind any ability to think at all.

Scott had always been an early riser but he did not, even when caressed by the rosy fingers of dawn, usually wake, naked, and pleasantly sticky, between two slumbering heroes. He did wince a little as he flexed his legs, because, though Howlett and Hercules had shown him nothing but consideration and tenderness, he had never had that much sex in his life, and especially not that kind of sex. It was embarrassing to realize how much he could get to like the gentle ache they had left him with. Still, he needed to be realistic, here: those two would both count as ‘over-endowed’, had the sex drive of stallions and the refractory period of rams, and whenever either one of them gave him a come-hither look Scott apparently lost the ability to do anything but open his heart, his mouth, and his legs. If he didn’t get out of bed before they woke up he was going to be walking funny for the rest of the day.

He made the mistake of lying there for a moment, in this world that wasn’t just ruby-tinted, but was currently pink, white, and gold with the rising tide of the sun reflected upon the graceful pillars, and watching their broad chests going up and down as they breathed in unison. It felt much too right to lie here, cushioned between them, warmed by their hair-dusted bodies, the ropes of their tendons and the pads of their muscles hinting at all the strength that lay beneath their warm skin. Their faces had become beautiful to him far too quickly.

He was already hero-worshipping Hercules in a way that was frankly embarrassing, and was fighting hard not to fall in love with Howlett for his own sake. The man was so…decent and Scott was so lonely. But there would always be the question of whether or not Howlett was just a substitute for Logan. It seemed inefficient in someone who had always aced repressing to start sighing over a demigod’s lover, not to mention one, who, left to his own devices, would probably rather adopt Scott than fuck him. Especially when what Scott wanted from this good man’s doppelganger was for him just not to hate him; making diving into bed with Howlett probably a little foolish, and falling in love with him, definite overkill. Howlett and Hercules had made space for Scott in their bed and their lovemaking, the way they were perfectly willing to make a space for him in their lives, but they didn’t need him. They were perfectly contented with each other. No one, unfortunately, really needed him at all.

Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t be useful here. That was undeniable. He might not be necessary to them, but he could help them with their labors, argue them out of their more suicidal strategies, coax them back from being too impulsive, and try to find ways that didn’t end in smiting to get the job done. He could even, if he really had to, try to persuade nymphs to let him get his hands on Poseidon’s mighty trident (which he was assuming wasn’t a metaphor, although with Howlett and his odd sense of humor, you could never tell).

But the longer he stayed here, the harder it would be to go home. His teenage self was already starting to jib at turning his back on the future and returning, tamely, to the past. That version of Scott wanted to earnestly fix everything, even the unfixable, especially the unfixable. Scott could relate.

So, he needed to get out of bed now, before he got much too comfortable here.

He was used to improvising, so, as there wasn’t a shower, and the huge sunken bath had too many…happy connotations for him to feel he would be able to just bathe in it, he washed in the smaller sunken bath with the mosaic-tiled floor, heated by a hypocaust, then brushed his teeth with an apple twig and some tooth powder in a silver bowl that the noiseless servant assured him with gestures was perfect for cleaning the teeth. Embarrassed about being naked in front of a stranger, Scott had not argued the point but gone ahead and brushed his teeth with what seemed to be a mixture of rock salt, mint, and some unidentifiable crushed things, which whitened his teeth obligingly but also made his gums bleed. He had then pulled on a clean piece of ridiculous drapery and made his way to the kitchen to concoct breakfast from some figs, apricots, goat’s milk, and more honey cakes in case Kurt got up as early as the younger children had always done back at the school.

Kurt did indeed arrive, as if summoned by an invisible bell, lighting up when he saw breakfast laid out.

“Should we wait for the other two?” Scott asked diffidently,

Kurt snorted. “They’ll be having sex for ages yet. Why aren’t you with them?”

Embarrassed, Scott said, “I thought they might like some time alone. Did you sleep okay?”

“Fine, except for Howlett coming into my room three times to check that I hadn’t died again. He knows fifteen year-olds don’t usually expire of cot death, right? It’s creepy waking up to find someone holding a mirror over your mouth to check you’re still breathing.”

Scott poured them both some warm goat’s milk. “After my baby son was taken – Jean and I were so afraid of more harm coming to him that we took him on a mission instead of leaving him at home with the babysitters. He could have been eaten by trolls so it wasn’t one of our better ideas, but I understand the paranoia that kicks in.”

Kurt regarded him sympathetically, golden eyes kind against his handsome blue-furred face, his tail moving gently like a cat in the sun. “Were you the kind of parent who prods sleeping babies to check that they’re still alive?”

Scott had to admit that he did fall into that category. It was oddly easy to talk to Kurt. Having crossed dimensional portals and spent some time in the realm of the dead had given him a maturity beyond his years, but he was still very much a kid, and as non-judgmental as the nicer kind of children were. Scott found himself telling him about Cable in all his time-snatched contradictions while Kurt listened sympathetically.

“A son twenty years older than you, eh? That’s got to be weird.”

“I think we’re both used to it now. Other people still find it strange.”

The light pouring into the palace was extraordinarily beautiful; there was a liquid quality to it, as if they were really being bathed in olive oil, and there was no view that wasn’t breath-taking, the blueness of the sky, the graceful shivering of the trees and the coiled, caressing olive groves, promising magical transformations. When a herd of winged horses flew past, it felt only fitting. Scott watched them, all the same, until they were out of sight, thinking how much Kitty and Hisako and Jubilee and Young Jean would have loved to see them and Young Warren would have liked to fly with them – hell, Young Scott would have loved to see them, although he might have been embarrassed about admitting it. It hurt him a little that both Rachel and Hope were too hardened by their lives to probably feel true wonder any more.

It’s not that I don’t understand where you’re coming from, Logan. It’s not that I want them to lose their sense of innocence and joy, I just think the best way to keep children safe is to teach them how to defend themselves, and for us adults to go out there and make it clear that anyone who tries to hurt them just for being mutants is going to regret it.

Kurt was looking at him curiously. “What?” Scott asked.

“What happened to you?”

“To me? I’m not the one who sacrificed himself for the greater good, died, then went to live in the Underworld for months in Hades’ throne room. All before my sixteenth birthday.”

“When we were all trapped in that place, where we first met, you were confident, you were kickass, and sorta ruthless. You were kind of awesome.”

“Thanks.”

“Then the next time we saw you, you were kind of useless and got beaten up by Broods. Dazzler had to save you and Howlett had to mop your brow while you lay there being unconscious and bleeding a lot. So, what happened?”

“I killed Charles Xavier.”

“Wasn’t that your job?”

“No. The one I killed wasn’t evil. The one I killed was… He took me in when I was your age, and we…we had issues later about some of the choices he made for me, but he was still the closest thing to a father that I had. Kurt, it’s like if you killed Howlett. That’s what I did.”

The boy looked so horrified that Scott wished he’d phrased it differently, but there was also that quick understanding. “You must feel terrible.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I’m not even sure if I did.” He tried to explain, and it helped a ridiculous amount to talk to someone with no preconceived ideas about either his guilt or innocence. There was that clarity that a young mind had, one that hadn’t had time to get clouded yet.

“It sounds like half of you wants to say you didn’t do it and half of you wants to say you did.”

“I don’t remember doing it. I’ve tried to remember it but…. The people who used to be my friends won’t ever forgive me for what I did unless I say I did it, and I’m not sure that some of them can even get closure for themselves on losing Charles unless I say I did it. I think every time I say it wasn’t me, it just opens the wound up for them all over again.”

Kurt said, “Hercules did some bad things, you know. Some really bad things. When he wasn’t himself. He told me about them. He’s still a hero and Howlett still loves him. I don’t think there’s anything he could do that Howlett couldn’t forgive.”

“Well, they’re a couple. It’s different when you’re part of a couple. If one of you has a problem then you both have it and you tackle it together.”

“Is that what you and Emmeline did?”

“Emma and I needed to break up. We both did terrible things to each other. The kind of things where if you got back together after that you wouldn’t really like yourselves very much.”

“Is that how it is with you and the Howlett from your world, too?”

“It is for him. He can’t be friends with me after what I did and have any respect for himself. Luckily, he doesn’t want to be friends with me any more anyway, so it’s not costing him anything to shut me out.”

“It sounds to me like you’re angry with him but you don’t want to admit it.”

Scott ate another honeycake as he thought that over. “That could be true. I’m not really as sure about who I am anymore as I used to be, so I don’t always know how I feel.”

“Hercules doesn’t really have doubts. He says he has Howlett to have them for him. It sounds like you need someone to have your certainties for you.”

“I’m wary of certainties right now. I remember having them. They were seductive things, but I’m not sure how good for me they were. I don’t think they made me a very likeable person.”

“They probably made you a better leader though,” Kurt pointed out. “I mean, no offence, but the guy we found on that weird little island was kind of a waste of space. You were fine in the park against the Brood-controlled space whale Xavier but those first Broods kicked your ass.”

“Yeah, thanks for the reminder.”

“Do you miss your Howlett?”

“He isn’t my Howlett, but…yes.”

“I miss my Spider-Man lunchbox.” Kurt didn’t mention his parents. Scott knew all about losses that were too terrible to even speak aloud. He also understood that losing something the people he had lost had given him had hurt Kurt far more deeply than anyone who wasn’t an orphan could fully understand.

“I’ll try to get you another one.”

Kurt said, “Do you want Kat and me to try to pick you up another Howlett so you don’t have to share? We’ve got the ghost box working really well now, absolutely no radioactive emissions. I could look out for a nice one for you?”

Scott’s mind briefly balked at what a ‘nice’ Logan would look like. Howlett was good and kind and decent but he also tended to shove his claws through things that annoyed him or got in his way. ‘Nice’ was not what he was. ‘Nice’ was probably never what a Wolverine should be. The prospect sounded terrifying.

“No, I think that would be an incredibly bad idea. World-shatteringly bad, probably literally, and I don’t want a different Logan, I just want the one I know not to hate me so much. Which isn’t going to…. It’s not a fixable problem, Kurt. The past can’t be altered and my version of Howlett can’t be replaced any more than yours could, but, look, I know you can do things with quantum mechanics that would make my brain bleed, but if you’re going to stay on this world I think you might have to get to grips with more basic concepts. Do you know how a hypocaust works?”

“I don’t even know what a hypocaust is.”

“It’s a system of underfloor heating, used since Roman times to heat houses using hot air. It’s heating this palace right now – despite this being a pre-Hellenic society – and I seriously doubt Hercules or Howlett would be able to fix it if it broke down, so….”

“You really want to tell me how it works, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Scott admitted.

“Well, as you helped break me out of hell….”

Scott told Kurt about hypocausts, he even sketched a caldarium for him, and then, out of habit, he set him some homework. Kurt was a genius who understood physics in a way that Scott never could, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t write a book report. It felt very familiar and very comforting to be back in the teaching role, and although Kurt grumbled, he seemed to enjoy it as well.

“Two structure guys is going to take some getting used to,” he said, writing his report all the same.

“Two what…?”

“You and Howlett. Hercules is freeform, he’s the one who lets me stop doing lessons and go and do sword practice. Howlett is structure, he’s all ‘put your dirty clothes in the basket and brush your teeth’.”

With a pang, Scott realized again that he wasn’t needed here. Howlett would find Kurt tutors and make sure he kept to some kind of routine. They didn’t need him to make sure anyone ate his vegetables. Kurt must have noticed the silence because he looked up, alert. “You’re gonna stick around this time, right?” As Scott shook his head, his face fell. “Why can’t you stay here with us?”

“Because it would feel too much like running away.”

“We want you and those other people don’t.”

“This isn’t my home.”

“Home is wherever the people are that you want to be with.”

“I… Kurt, it isn’t that simple. I have to make amends. Charles wanted mutants to be safe in the world and they’re not, not yet. They’re being born into an unsafe world and I need to make things better for them. I need to make sure mutants aren’t being terrorized. I need to do my part to make the world a better place. And I can’t do it here. I’m not even a mutant here.”

“I wonder why not. Howlett and I both have our powers.”

“Perhaps because the universe doesn’t want to let me off the hook yet.”

“You think the universe is sentient?”

Scott said, “Howlett needs to get you a philosophy teacher.”

Kurt said, “Scott, really, why don’t you just stay here with this Howlett? We both know you want to. I can see how much you like him.”

“Because he doesn’t need me and I don’t deserve to be happy.” As the boy looked stricken, Scott found a smile for him. “And it’s okay, Kurt, really. You, however, do deserve to be happy, but you need to remember that there’s more to life than ghost box technology and fusion reactors and going on life-threatening missions to save the multiverse.”

“Oh really? And what were you doing at my age?”

“Getting beaten up by a bank robber on a regular basis.” Scott pushed the boy another mug of goat’s milk. “Okay, and then going on life-threatening missions – it’s just I really think it would finish Howlett if you got yourself killed again. I had to give up my son too many times. It scars you inside and it makes you put up walls to try and protect yourself from that level of pain. I don’t want Howlett to ever turn into me.”

“I didn’t like dying,” Kurt reassured him. “It hurt. I don’t want to do it again. I’ll try not to.”

“Glad to hear it.”

There was a long silence in which Scott could feel the day warming up outside, the dogs barking in the forest, and the far off singing of the river nymphs, the birdsong that he never heard now, because they lived deep underground in the place where Logan had been turned into a living weapon by the Weapon X program.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Kurt said softly.

“I know and I’m sorry, but I have to.”

Sitting there, Scott felt the sadness wash over him, because he really hadn’t earned the right to be happy. He had to go back and face whatever the world wanted to throw at him next, and to try to pretend that he didn’t hope the next thing that it threw at him was a nice, quiet death.

***

Kurt had reset the ghost box biometrically. That was why, it turned out, that they portaled into the argument that Erik and Emma were having with the Avengers in Central Park over something to do with Scott’s blood samples; an argument that seemed to have begun in the mansion and then spilled back into the park because Emma was too angry to breathe Stark-filtered air. Blood samples were the theme of the day, as Kurt had used Howlett’s blood as the lodestone for their destination point, expecting to portal them back to the school that bore Scott’s dead wife’s name. Scott suspected the boy had been trying to create a reconciliation between Logan and himself. A kind thought, but obviously futile.

Rogers said, “Summers! Finally!” as if Scott had missed an appointment.

Scott had never been so glad that he had changed back into his concealing uniform instead of that flimsy piece of blue silk, but, still, the culture shock was surprisingly acute. He realized that Howlett had been right about the mythology being an entity in its own right. It had been gathering him in and molding him to fits its patterns, and he was still altered by it; some part of him yearning back to a place where he wasn’t quite himself and resisting re-assimilation into a realm where he was. These people, waiting for him without liking, were as vivid as if he were seeing them for the first time.

He was struck at once by Rogers’ quiet restraint; the man reminding him in that moment of his grandfather in old photographs and that generation of ex-officers who had carried their war wounds silently back to civilian life and never mentioned them after. Barton’s febrile energy was barely reined in, along with his hostility, while Stark’s restless brilliance felt strangely out of place, as if he should have been wearing white tails at a function, an inevitable glass in his hand. In another dimension, Scott suspected, there was a Tony Stark who had never quite found his niche, not realizing in time that the playboy life was what was leaving him unfulfilled because in his heart he was actually a hero.

Henry still managed to give off the air of stolid strength and reliability that had been such a feature of his younger self before the tendency-to-mad-scientist-ing had gotten out of hand. Beneath the fur, Scott could still see the young man with the big hands and feet and the even bigger heart, who had got on with problem-solving the palpably impossible while Warren, white wings outspread, yearned for action, and Bobby polished his next quip. In the past, that Henry could bring Scott’s blood pressure down just with one eminently sane sentence.

A terrible surge of regret rolled over Scott like a wave, for the Jean who had been his best friend as much as his first love, and for those three who had been his first experience of male friendship. With it came an equally acute stab of relief that Warren, Hank, and Bobby, at least, were still alive. He would take them alive in the world, even hating him, over them being dead any day. They could hate him forever and stick pins in his effigy every night, just as long as they didn’t die on him as had so many other people that he loved.

He mistrusted Erik’s perspicacity; men who had lived as long as he and Charles always knew too much, so Scott avoided his potentially all-seeing eye; while it just felt so wrong to be standing this close to Emma, smelling her perfume and there being no answering scent on his own skin, and she not whispering secret updates directly into his brain.

Her languorous, “Have fun, darling?” was as coolly well-bred as always, but he noticed that her fists were clenched. So were Logan’s.

Scott said, as politely as a child returned from a birthday party, “I had a wonderful time, thank you.” The silly thing was that he had, hell-beasts and tentacle monsters and all. It had been glorious.

Hawkeye burst out furiously: “Well, I’m glad you were enjoying yourself, Summers! The planet is this close to being invaded and we can’t find any sign of that fucker Namor, but as long as you were having a good time…!”

Rogers said, “Hawkeye…” wearily, and probably not for the first time that morning. “Dial it down. Summers had no way of knowing we were waiting for him.”

Scott said calmly, “You want me for something, Captain? Other than the usual arresting me for murder thing?”

He heard ‘Blastaar’ and ‘Negative Zone’ and ‘urgent’ and ‘imminent invasion’ but he was looking at Logan who was staring stonily at him, his face closed off and hostile and twisted with dislike. He thought he’d been prepared for it but it hurt so damned much more now he’d had those days with Howlett.

He mentally assessed everything Rogers was saying and got that it didn’t make much sense, not given the way Blastaar was, but that Rogers believed it, although there were some fretting doubts in the back of his mind he wasn’t listening to. The blood samples going missing was probably relevant, too, although they didn’t seem to have joined the dots yet, but Scott could see a pattern and if it wasn’t a pretty one it was at least familiar. Scott could feel Logan’s gaze glaring at him and it felt as if the guy’s claws were methodically peeling off his skin with quiet, focused hatred. He made himself look at Henry and got distant dislike straight back.

Making the introductions gave him the chance to avert his eyes without giving anything away – Hercules and Howlett watchful and quiet, Kurt downcast because there was so much more anger in the air than he’d hoped for. Scott forgot that Logan and the others couldn’t see his eyes now, that he was securely masked and they couldn’t penetrate his thoughts or his feelings, not unless he let them. He bolted every emotion down and didn’t flinch, but he could feel his soul tearing and it didn’t feel worth it, struggling on like this, forever, when nothing he tried ever did any good. Howlett was right. Emma and Erik had this. They were smarter than he was. They could do it without him. Everyone in the whole damned multiverse could manage perfectly well without him, so why did he have to keep putting himself through it? Hadn’t he done enough? Enough good and enough harm to justify his time on the planet and justify his need to check out from it?

Logan said roughly, “What’s up with you, Slim?”

“Nothing.” He turned to Captain America. “I need to buy something in that store over there before I go with you. Can you give me ten minutes?”

Hawkeye said angrily, “Do you think we’re morons? No, you don’t get to…!”

But Rogers had been looking at him closely and he said, “Okay, Summers. Ten minutes.”

Hawkeye said, “You trust him?” like Rogers had completely lost his mind, and it was Stark, surprisingly, who said, “Shut up, Clint. If Summers says he’ll be back, he will.”

He turned to walk into the store and then remembered that he didn’t have any money. He was turning to Emma when Logan unexpectedly pulled a wad of bills out of his back pocket and shoved them at him with a grunt. Scott took the money carefully, because if he thought for a minute there was any chance of a thaw, but, no…Logan was smart enough to know what he wanted the money for; this had nothing to do with him. Still, he appreciated it. Being careful not to look at him, Scott said, “Thank you. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

They were all being iPod-framed by tourists by the time he came back out, a striking but uneasy tableau. The sun was shining on them and they looked quite wonderful in their way, Rogers’ hair and tricolor (red) shield gleaming – hard to look at it and not remember what the concussions it dealt out felt like, but this wasn’t a day for remembering that, even if Scott’s temples did throb a little just by association – Stark very handsome there, standing next to Emma, who looked beautiful in black (red), almost as beautiful as she had always done in white (red). Stark was saying something to her quietly, and she was rejecting it, rejecting him, utterly. He felt sorry for Stark, who felt things more deeply than he ever wanted the world to know, and had carried a torch for Emma for years now, even if he wouldn’t have admitted it, except possibly under torture. Scott wasn’t going to flinch from that quiver of arrows slung over Hawkeye’s shoulder, even though he was never going to forget how it felt to feel the artery puncture and the blood well up in his throat, choking him, before the Phoenix healed him, but the blazing dislike in Barton’s eyes did sting. Erik had really never lost the knack of being quietly magnificent. Hero or villain, sane or crazy, the man had gravitas. Scott was going to miss him.

He wasn’t looking at Logan because Logan was going to insist on a scene, because that was the mood he was in, bristling with it, argumentatively, so they would have that behind closed doors and out of earshot of anyone else who might be wounded by their word artilleries; and Scott and Henry were just done, these days, there was nothing left between them except the past that still bound them together and kept forcing them to endure more painful meetings like this.

And there were Howlett and Hercules in their tunics, and Kurt’s once-blue fur now the same deep shade of red as the sky, and they were the most beautiful of all. Which was why he could cross the street smiling, and truly enjoying the sunlight and the red cloud-scudded red skies.

“This is for you.”

He had never had the chance to be there for his son’s birthdays. So he’d never got to do the birthday presents and Christmas gifts under the tree that he could just remember from before his parents’ plane, and his and Alex’s world, had exploded. So, this was a rare treat for him.

He handed over the Spider-Man lunchbox and the Spider-Man thermos, and the bag with the pens and sketchpads in it – because working with papyrus and parchment was hard when you were trying to sketch out physics-bending schematics – and the toothbrushes, and the Colgate toothpaste.

“Because that stuff Hercules has is really too astringent for us non-immortals,” he said.

Kurt was holding the lunchbox like he thought it might evaporate. When he opened it, he did it cautiously, ready to flinch, but this one was perfectly empty and clean, nothing moldering in it greenly, rusting the hinges. He gazed up at Scott and his eyes were shining. “Thank you.” He held it close. “I wish I could get you something you want as much as I wanted this.”

Scott said, “Don’t die. Don’t let them die either. I want that more than you could ever imagine.”

Kurt nodded his head at the Avengers. “What is it they want you to do?”

“Nothing I’m not happy to do.”

“They don’t look very friendly.”

“No, we’re not friends any more, but they’re good men.”

Still holding the lunchbox close, Kurt said, “I don’t like leaving you here with people who don’t care about you.”

“I’ll be fine.” He looked over Kurt’s head to meet Howlett’s steady blue (red) gaze. “You should go. Kurt has to be at Kat’s for lunch. He’s meeting that friend of hers. She sounds a bit like Storm – and you could do with the cloud cover if you’re going to pull off the Circe mission.”

Hercules embraced him so hard that Scott felt his ribs creak, and it still hurt far more when the man reluctantly let him go.

“I hate leaving you here, lad,” the demigod breathed and it took all the self-control Scott had not to rub himself against him. Scott had a suspicion that staying in their world would have turned him into whatever Hercules needed him to be, possibly quite fast, and he didn’t really want to become a hero-worshipping warrior boy who never aged and never matured but remained eternally smooth-skinned and supple-bodied and abjectly adoring forever. Scott would be a walk-on at best in a story chiefly concerned with tales of the immortals and probably end up abducted by sea nymphs or needing to be rescued from the Underworld himself. Here, at least, he had something to contribute that wasn’t just standing around not wearing very much, however much fun that had weirdly turned out to be. Hercules said, “Come back with us.”

“This is where I belong,” Scott said. “Good luck with the labors.”

“I’ll keep them safe,” Hercules promised.

“Keep yourself safe, too,” Scott said. “You can’t expect Howlett to keep gatecrashing Hades to rescue you.”

“Remember what I told you. If you have need of us – call us. We’ll come for you at once. Indeed we may come for you anyway. I chafe at leaving you here.”

“I’ll be fine….” Scott offered assurances that he hoped sounded more convincing to Hercules than they did to him and the demigod walked away, face stern and sorrowful.

Bidding farewell to Howlett was terrible so Scott kept it brief. An embrace, a quick inhalation of that cigar scent he had missed so much, and a brief, broken smile. He was proud of the way he did not cling to him, even though there were still coils of the mythology snaking around his feet that wanted to turn him into a guy who did.

Howlett said, “Scott, come back with us. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Scott stepped back firmly out of reach, before one of them just grabbed him or the mythology got its hooks in any deeper. “Yes, it does – have to be this way. You and Kurt can make a life for yourself in that world. I can’t and still be me. But, goodbye, Howlett. Thank you for everything.”

Then he turned and walked away so he wouldn’t have to watch them step into the portal and wink away so far beyond his reach.

Emma said, “Scott – you’re not seriously handing yourself over to these jokers?”

“Blastaar. Invasion. My presence isn’t really negotiable.”

“Demand safeguards! Ensure they don’t screw you over….”

He kissed her on the forehead and touched her hair, closing his eyes briefly to breathe in her scent, and truly hoping she didn’t still love him as much as he still loved her because he had hurt her too much already.

“Emma, it doesn’t matter. Trust me. Steve Rogers isn’t going to feed me to Blastaar even to save the Earth. It isn’t in him. If anything happens to me it certainly won’t be his fault.” He wanted to tell her he was sorry, again, and that he hoped her telepathy came back better than ever, but that would throw up a bright red distress beacon that someone far less smart than she was could see from space.

It was actually a relief when Logan snarled, “Enough chit chat!”, and unceremoniously grabbed Scott by the arm and dragged him into the mansion.

Logan shoved him into an elevator, hit random buttons, let the machinery whisk them upwards, then hauled Scott out on some unspecified floor and pushed him into the first room they came to. And on any other day, Scott would never have let Logan manhandle him like that, but today he honestly didn’t care. Compared with the pain of waving Hercules, Howlett, and Young Kurt off, Logan stabbing him would have been a welcome distraction. There was a moment when Logan didn’t let him go, he just went on gripping Scott’s arm, and then he leaned in close and sniffed him, glowering and suspicious. He sniffed him again, less to confirm what he must have known as Scott stepped through the portal and more as if he wanted to wallow in how much he hated the message he was inhaling.

The growl that came from Logan’s throat seemed to have escaped against his will; it was angry and possessive; and Scott would not have admitted, even under torture, that at the sound of it he felt a secret thrill licking down his spine. Logan let him go with something very like a snarl.

He was newly and acutely aware of Logan’s animal energy. It had used to worry him – being expected to go on a mission with someone who was about as reliable as a ferociously disobedient dog, who might bite one at any moment or else tear out the throat of one’s enemies, however strongly he was ordered to let them live, but it had taken a surprisingly short time for Scott to grow used to that primal force and to rely on it. Logan probably had no idea how many times Scott had felt his own energy levels ebb to zero after they’d had their asses kicked, once again, and then been restored just by Logan slamming into a room, undimmed, and undaunted, and wanting to know how soon they were getting back out there to fight the next fight. He didn’t think it had anything to do with Logan’s healing factor – take that away and the man would still blaze with angry strength.

He looked around at their surroundings – it was a nice room, even red-washed with ruby quartz in a way Hercules’ palace hadn’t been; books on high shelves, a table with comfortable chairs. A placid sort of setting for what was clearly not going to be a very even-tempered exchange. There had been rooms like this on Utopia. He wondered if Emma had been able to get anything back on the insurance. Would a war with the Avengers count as an Act of God because they had Thor on the team?

Scott held out the remains of the wad of bills. “Thanks. Here’s your change. I owe you eighty-eight dollars.”

Logan practically ripped the money out of his hand with another snarl and then shoved it negligently into the pocket of his jeans. Scott suspected he would have been seeing Logan through a red haze even without his glasses – the guy was in that kind of a mood.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Logan demanded.

“About…?” Scott prompted, because for all he knew Logan had a laundry list.

Oddly enough that seemed to inhibit him. Logan prowled around the room, glowering at Scott horribly from a safe distance, presumably so he wouldn’t just stab him the way he evidently wanted to.

Logan said, “Where have you been anyway?”

“I was in Hercules’ dimension. Howlett asked me to….”

“I know that. I mean…where else…? Once you helped break the demigod out of the Underworld?” There was an executive toy on the far end of the desk, with shiny silver balls that Logan promptly set swinging in a jerky rhythm and then angrily stopped.

“Hercules’s palace. It’s very nice.” That clearly fell on stony ground. Scott offered: “It has a hypocaust.”

“Long trip just to take a wash.”

“Well, Hades was somewhat sooty.”

The conference chairs looked comfortable, and he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any soft furnishings where he was going next, so he picked something upholstered in beige corduroy and sat on it. There was water in a carafe and glasses, so he poured himself a glass and drank it down dutifully. He doubted he was going to get any more water for a while and kidney failure wasn’t a nice way to go. He placed the glass back on the table, but on a coaster, because there might be drips and this was a polished mahogany surface, and because he was, as Emma never tired of telling him, an anal chess-nerd inexplicably trapped inside the body of a superhero.

Of course, he had argued that point. In vain had he tried to persuade her that all athletes trained, diligently, and with focused attention, for their next event; it was just that his next event tended to be the fight to ensure the survival of his species so he had to be even more purposeful and concentrated. That did not mean that the graffiti Logan had left in the men’s bathroom that time was accurate.

Yes, Scott, you keep telling yourself that. In the meantime, I’ll just go on living with the shameful realization that this particular Prom Queen got suckered into thinking she was dating the captain of the football team only to learn she was actually going steady with that skinny nerdy kid in glasses whom the real jocks used to shove into his locker at recess….

You do realize, Emma, that Henry was the star athlete of the football team at my school and he never once shoved me into my locker….

It had probably been a little unfortunate that Henry had been particularly sleep-deprived by an impossible scientific demand Scott had made upon him and unusually irritated by the phalangeal limitations of his newest mutation when he had walked in on that conversation, as it had led to Henry promptly suggesting that they found out if Scott could indeed still be inserted into a locker and then left in it for some considerable period of time.

Logan said, “Are you here or are you there, Summers? Because you keep drifting off and it’s fucking irritating when I’m trying to tell you what a dick you are.”

The accurate answer was probably ‘neither here nor there’ but he didn’t necessarily want to get stabbed in the stomach right now so he said, “What’s this really about, Logan? Why did you bring me here? Do you finally want to have an adult conversation or do you just want to stick to the usual snarling and insults?”

When Logan came at him fast, Scott waited, resignedly, for the inevitable blow and Logan pulled up at the last minute and said, “What? Did you think I was going to hit you?” As if Logan hitting him would be the most incredible and unlikely thing to happen that didn’t involve hot and cold running unicorns.

“Go ahead if it makes you feel better,” Scott said.

“I’m not that guy,” Logan snapped.

Scott held up his hands in submission. “Whatever you say, Logan.”

“Fuck, you’re annoying.”

Scott pulled back the hood of his uniform so Logan could see his face, and slipped on his visor; so he could see this wasn’t just the usual bitter foxtrot the two of them kept dancing. “I don’t want to be, and, hard as it may be for you to believe, I’m not trying to be. I meant what I said. If there are things you want to say, I’m ready to hear them. There are things I want to say, too, but I’m happy for you to go first.”

“You always did like the last word,” Logan said bitterly. But he did finally launch into an expletive-punctuated explanation of what damage he thought Scott was doing running around breaking the law, how he thought he should turn himself in and face the fucking music already, and how Scott’s kids would be better off in Logan’s school, a safe environment where kids could be kids, not putting a goddamn X on their foreheads running around with Cyke Guevara and his mad, bad, and decidedly dangerous to know sidekicks. Also, that Scott was an asshole. Oh, and the old woman with the yappy dog who lived along the street thought he sucked, too. And had he mentioned that Scott was an asshole?

Logan sat down on the conference table and glowered at him. “Now, give me all the reasons why I’m wrong and you’re right. You know if the air’s not too thin up there, you supercilious dick.”

“Being taller than you isn’t the same as looking down on you, Logan. I can’t help the first thing. I’ve never done the second. If I ever gave you the impression that I did then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

It was the first time Logan had really looked at him; before it had been darting angry glances, more like a bird pecking viciously at a worm than any attempt to make eye contact; and, yes, he knew it sucked for people not to be able to look him in the eye, but people had at least made the effort in the past, Logan included. Now he was doing it again. Quietly, Logan said, “Your turn.”

“What?”

“You said you had things you wanted to say – so say ‘em. I’m listening.”

One good thing about hitting rock bottom and being ready to just let the next thing take him – the next thing being what Scott was pretty sure was going to happen next, and which poor Rogers hadn’t worked out yet, on account of being such a trusting soul – was the realization that he wasn’t angry with Logan any more. He could let that go. He could remember so many times when the man currently glowering at him from that conference table had been there when he needed him, and even if Logan wasn’t that guy any more, he might be him again one day, and he would like that guy to think of him more kindly than this one did, and, anyway, Scott owed him. So, he wanted Logan to have closure and he didn’t want to score points any more. They had fought and he had lost, so he might as well be gracious in defeat. It was surprising how easy it was just to make that decision. He’d been scourged and sheared by separating himself from Howlett, Hercules, and Kurt. He had no defenses left and he didn’t even care, finally, that Logan knew that. It was like he’d stopped fidgeting at his drapery hem and just accepted being naked,

“I just wanted to say that it’s okay that you hate me.”

“You’re giving me permission? Big of you, Cyke.”

In the past, Logan looking at him like that – eyes boiling with dislike – it would have hurt, and he would have resented the pain and wanted to freeze him out. This time he opened himself up to it. It felt oddly good to let all that pain in. He wanted it to fill up all available space until there was nothing there but pain, and then he wanted to experience the relief when it stopped. He rose to his feet and crossed to the picture window that looked down on the city, the way he thought of the Avengers looking down on lesser mortals and the way Logan evidently thought Scott looked down on him.

“No, I just mean it’s…okay. I did a terrible thing and you hate me for it. It’s reasonable. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I think we both of us need to give ourselves permission not to be Kurt. He would have wanted you to forgive me. He would have wanted me to forgive myself. Well, I can’t, so why should you? Why can’t where we’ve got to…be…here? Why can’t it be okay to be here?”

There had been alarm bells ringing in Logan’s head since Scott had stepped through the damned portal. Something wasn’t right – and not just the fact that untouchably self-possessed Scott Summers had been letting two guys he barely knew plow him like a cornfield for the past few days. Even leaving aside the general weirdness of Slim letting strange men lick honey from his nipples and it not even being something Frost was making him do so she could watch, that creeping sense of unease was getting creepier. Scott looked oddly calm and unusually relaxed, and he smelled far too clearly of good sex on silk sheets. He had the body language of a man with his toes in the pool and his fingers just playing with the surface waves. There was something about it that was familiar but Logan didn’t know what it was. He might have been able to concentrate better if there hadn’t been a brimstone voice in his head, ugly with senseless jealousy, wanting to spit out: ‘whore!’.

Logan forced himself to concentrate on the here and now and not those odors coming off Scott that hadn’t been washed off well enough by those murky bath-time frolics. “Where do you think ‘here’ is?”

You let Howlett fuck you?

Scott gazed out of the window at all the bustling city below and his smile was so unexpected that Logan took a step forward.

Governor General James Howlett? You just opened your legs and let him…?

Scott said, “There are new mutants down there, Logan. Their sleeping genes are activating. And some of them will hate us for revealing what they are, and some of them will finally feel complete, but we’re not extinct. Everything you and Jean and Emma and Storm and Kitty and Rogue and Hank and Bobby and Warren and I did, everything that Charles did and Erik did, and Nathan did and Kurt died for. Everything that everyone did to bring us here. All the blood we shed and the bleeding we did, and the cost, the terrible, overwhelming cost, and it wasn’t for nothing. None of it was for nothing. We’re not extinct.” He turned to look at Logan and his smile was a tragedy because the poor bastard thought he was happy. He thought this was what happiness was.

Scott was still talking and Logan wished he’d just shut up:

“…And one of the costs was our friendship. It got irrevocably broken, and that’s sad. More sad for me than for you, I think, because I miss you sometimes. Sometimes I miss you so much I think it’s worse than when I lost Jean, and three days ago I would have cut out my own tongue before I admitted that to you, but, really, what does it matter that you know? But if we’d been asked, before X-Force, before Kurt, before that day on the beach, when you were the guy I could always rely on and I was the guy you had faith in, if we would give up our friendship forever to save our species – I don’t think either one of us would have hesitated. So maybe it wasn’t a choice we got offered, but maybe it was just the price we had to pay to get what we wanted most.”

“And Charles?” Logan demanded. “What about the price he paid?”

Scott didn’t flinch, and it wasn’t as if he’d armored himself, this time, it was like he’d already absorbed that pain so completely there was none of it left to take in. He said, “I think he would have paid it gladly to save us all.”

“It would have been nice if you gave him the choice!”

Behind the ruby quartz glasses, Scott just kept looking at him steadily, not into his eyes, just at his face, like he wanted to remember it. Like he liked looking at it. “You don’t trust me. I get that. You think I’m a manipulative shit who always has an angle.”

“You are a manipulative shit who always has an angle, Slim.”

A manipulative shit who always has an angle who let Howlett fuck him!

“I didn’t used to be like that…this.” Scott looked as if he were gazing back into the past from a vast distance, but it was barely more than a decade. It had taken less than twelve years to turn that sweet, earnest kid back at the school into this burned-out, perfectly-poised wreck. “I forget I’m not who I was. Sometimes this version of me feels like someone I just had to pretend to be for a while to get everything done. I don’t think I realized that life doesn’t work like that. You really can’t go home again, and for years I thought you could, but you can’t be the you that you used to be, like Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers. So, perhaps my mind can’t even work in straight lines any more, but I don’t think this is a chess game. I think it’s just the truth. And I doubt we’ll see much more of each other so there were things I wanted to say.”

“I get it,” Logan growled. “I have your permission to hate you, and Charles Xavier would have been glad to die for the cause. Got the memo. Anything else?” Apart from you letting Howlett fuck you?

“That I was wrong about X-Force. Everyone kept saying it and I thought they just couldn’t see the reality. That they had the luxury of ethics and that was good for them but someone had to make the hard decisions and that was my duty, that there was no choice. But there’s always a choice and I made the wrong one. And I dragged you down with me, and I’m sorry. I didn’t see what it was doing to you because I was too focused on getting it done. You kept telling me – with Laura, with the others, but I couldn’t see the truth, which is that it was a terrible thing to ask you to do, given what those bastards made you do, and I should never have done it. I stood in the Weapon Plus building, you know, Logan, that time with Fantomex, and I gave him a lecture on how you weren’t a weapon to be wielded, how you were better than that, and then I forgot every damned word I’d said, and I’m sorry, and I hope, one day, even though you can’t forgive me for killing Charles, that you might be able to forgive me for X-Force.”

Scott gave him another of those weirdly calm smiles. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

Logan felt as if he’d been gut-punched and it would be just like Scott to have gut-punched him with his fucking mind games before he climbed back up on his cross, but Scott wasn’t even looking at him any more, he was gazing back out of the window at all those seething people, wondering how many of them were mutants, how many there would be in ten years time, twenty years time. The way a man did when he knew he wouldn’t be there to see it. The sense of creeping unease wasn’t going away.

Logan said hoarsely, “X-Force was necessary. I didn’t like a lot of the decisions you made but the reasoning behind it….”

“The reasoning behind it was that we had to kill them before they killed us, but if we turn into them, they killed us anyway. It was never just about being mutants. It was about being X-Men, too, so I was wrong and I’m sorry. I thought there wasn’t a choice and there was, because there always is. And there must have been choices before…before…Charles, and I’ve tried to remember making them, Logan, I truly have, but I just don’t remember… But I believe that I made them, because everyone else is so sure that I did. I kept telling myself that I thought you all knew me but you couldn’t have done to turn on me the way you did, but then I thought how much more sense it made if you turned on me the way you did because you knew me better than I knew myself.”

He looked back at Logan and his tone was quiet and a little sad but mostly curious, like suddenly Logan was a truth-teller and fount of fucking wisdom: “Was I really that angry with Charles? Erik thinks I was. I thought I was over what he did. I thought I loved him.”

“You can love someone and still want to kill him,” Logan said thickly. He’d realized it just now and he wasn’t sure he could ever forgive Scott for making him see that either.

Scott wasn’t looking at him now. He was looking at the skyline, off into the clouds and the birds, to Warren’s realm; the realm of the Warren he didn’t know was dead, his body inhabited by a new mind, a new person, who had never shared all those past times with Scott Summers, and who didn’t share any of those memories. Scott said, “That must have been what it was then.”

Logan didn’t lay hands on him because they had already established he wasn’t that guy; that Scott had been doing him an injustice when he thought he was that guy; but he felt as if Scott was standing right in front of him and slipping through his fingers at the same time. Scott had always been feline to Logan’s canine; they’d always clashed at that fundamental a level, like they really were two different species having to work together against the laws of nature; but today Scott was Macavity, and any minute now he wasn’t going to be there.

“What is this?” Logan demanded roughly, wanting to shake him but not doing it because – not that guy. He noticed the chain around Scott’s neck and the pendant hanging from it. Scott didn’t wear jewelry and this didn’t look anything like close to local, so Hercules or Howlett must have given it to them. He looked at Scott’s fingers just to check he wasn’t wearing their damned ring as well and was ridiculously relieved when he saw that his fingers were bare.

“It’s goodbye.”

Of course it was goodbye. He’d gotten that, loud and clear. But why the fuck was it goodbye?

“I came to see you in the last prison. What makes you think I won’t come and see you in this one?”

There, he’d demonstrated that he, too, could be three steps ahead. They could have a quantum conversation, or whatever the hell the term was, one that happened on different planes at once. So, after Scott did what S.H.I.E.L.D. needed him to do in the Negative Zone with Rogers, they would throw him in jail, and Scott had come here, knowing that, and Logan was letting him know that he knew it, too; everyone knew, except Cap, who would give his reluctant consent later because due process was the altar at which he worshipped. There was a double-cross written in and everyone was clear about it and he, at least, was fine with it. So, apparently was Scott, but that still didn’t explain why this was goodbye. Unless…?

“Howlett.” Logan didn’t snarl the name but it came out ugly. “Howlett’s coming back for you and when you leave with him you’re not coming back here.”

He knew Scott’s face so well that he could read it, with the visor on, as well as he could read someone else whose eyes he could see, so that was disappointment. Logan had disappointed him. “I thought you knew me…” Scott sighed. “No, Logan. Howlett isn’t coming back, but they’re happy, you know? They’re going to have exciting and dangerous adventures, and slay terrible monsters, and have statues built to them. And Kurt’s going to have two parents who love him and who will never let harm come to him, and he’s going to grow up a hero, too, just like Spider-Man. And they’re all three of them going to have a happy ending because someone, somewhere, should.”

He felt choked up and he had no idea why. “But not us, eh, Cyke?”

That smile wasn’t weird or far away, it was the way they’d smiled at each other when no one else could see them and Emma needed coffee or she’d stab someone because Scott had made her wake up before noon or Abigail Brand was making Henry uncomfortable and it was nothing but entertaining to watch. “No, Logan,” Scott said, amused and weirdly, oddly, upsettingly fond. “Not us.”

“Too much blood on our hands?”

“That would suggest some kind of creative design within a moral and just universe. I know Kurt believed in that but I’m not sure I can sign up for it, so, maybe it’s just that in this world we’re not the version that got to be happy. There could be lots of other worlds where we did.”

“And that’s enough for you – that Howlett gets to be happy. You don’t care that I don’t?”

“I care that you don’t get to be happy, Logan, but I think it isn’t in your stars any more than it’s in mine. That doesn’t mean there won’t be good days, though. And you are immortal. Enough good days and maybe that does equal a happy life.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you don’t think I’ll be visiting you in prison?”

Scott adjusted his visor minutely, the way he did when he just didn’t want to be looking your way. “Just call it a hunch, Logan.”

Logan said brutally, “Was it good? The sex?”

Scott ducked his head; not quite blushing but trying not to smile at a memory that was clearly something special; embarrassed and happy and a little shy. He pushed through that and raised his head, like he didn’t want there to be any more concealment between them even if Logan couldn’t see his eyes. “Yes, it was…good. He’s a good man, Howlett. It was kind, what he did. He was nothing other than kind to me.”

Heroically overlooking the bone-headed way Scott was saying that as if he thought Logan would be pleased to hear it: Hey, Logan, look, you must be a good man at heart because that other version of you was considerate about sticking his dick in me – to concentrate on what mattered, Logan noticed that Scott wasn’t talking like a lover. He didn’t seem to be in love with Howlett or with Hercules. Not completely anyway, not yet. Maybe teetering on the brink of it a little but he sounded mostly…grateful, like they’d done him a good turn.

“I doubt it was that much of a heroic sacrifice,” Logan spat out. “Or do you think fucking you counts as a thirteenth labor? Cause plenty of other people seem to have managed to get through that particular ordeal without too much hardship.” He knew the whole litany of them and felt the anger bubble up. “Is that where the bruises come from?”

“You can smell those, too?” Scott looked impressed. “No, that was from the hydra, and the hog-beasts, and the minotaur, and the harpies, and the snake, oh, and Achilles – who’s a dick, by the way.”

Logan was distracted. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. You should ask this dimension’s Hercules about him. I bet he has some stories.”

“The last thing that guy needs is to be encouraged to tell stories.”

Scott’s expression was far too fond. “It’s good that you and him are friends.”

“Friends is all we are, Summers.”

“I know. I’m just glad you know someone else who…you know…?”

“Knows how it feels to bury everyone who matters to him?”

Scott nodded. “Yes. No one should have to go through that alone.”

Logan felt another flash of anger because just for a moment it felt like old times, and that had felt much too good, to be able to have this man as a friend again, this guy who had been the only witness to some parts of his life that mattered to him, far too much. And Scott had made it impossible for Logan to ever have that again because what he had done was too bad a thing to ever forgive.

Scott just gave a little nod, as if he’d been following every thought. “And that’s okay, remember?”

“It’s not okay! It’s not fucking okay!” And Logan had him slammed up against the wall just like old times. Just like he was that guy, after all, and could never be a better one. And Scott looked so damned sorry for him; like he knew just how it felt to try to climb the greasy pole out of the hellfire pit and just keep sliding back down. “It’s not okay, what you did! It’s not okay how it makes me feel…!”

He closed his hand around the pendant and it took all the self-control he had not to just rip it brutally from Scott’s neck. How dare he wear their gifts? How dare he smell of them still? How dare he smell as if Logan was the one he had spread his legs for when he’d never come near to letting him get that close? No, with Logan, he’d been all eye-concealing visor, face a mask no one could read, damn him and his perfect repression. He’d never really let Logan in – but Howlett had gotten an open door and a goddamn red carpet.

“It wouldn’t suit you to be comfortably numb, Logan. Better feel something, even hate, than nothing at all. You have to be you, whoever that is, the good and the bad. You need to learn to like that guy even when he screws up. I always did.”

Logan hit him and it didn’t help, when in the past it had. In the past he had hit him when he wanted to kill him but had managed to wrestle it down to a blow, and it had felt like he had been the better man, but now Scott smelled of Howlett, who had been gentle and kind and made love to him carefully on silk-soft sheets, when Logan had just cut his mouth open, a dark well of blood from what would soon be a thick, ugly scab. He hit him again, for having sex with Howlett, a squalid blow and spiteful. A bruise began to flower on Scott’s high cheekbone and Scott didn’t just wait him out this time; like Logan’s blows didn’t matter, or the self-hatred afterwards was of no account; he said with real sympathy, “Logan, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I wanted us to be better than this, too.”

“I am better than this! I’m better than this with everyone but you!” Logan pulled away from him before he hit him again; back down at the base of the pole again, with blood on his knuckles and the bruise darkening on Scott’s face. “No one does this to me but you!”

“Then we’re better apart,” Scott said, quite gently. “But I’m still proud of the good things we did. Even though it ended up like this, I wouldn’t undo it. Even the mistakes. But I will never not be sorry about X-Force and what it did to you.” He moved swiftly to the door and tapped on it, knowing as well as Logan did that someone would be there waiting because Summers was basically a captive from here on in. “We’re done in here.”

Hawkeye opened the door with a sneer. “Conjugal visit was it, Summers?”

Logan wondered if he should be grateful that Scott could bring out the worst in someone other than him – poor Hawkeye already wincing because he wasn’t that guy either. He really wasn’t. Scott truly did have a gift.

Hawkeye saw the cut mouth and bruised cheekbone, then, and grimaced, because now the Avengers had been a party to one of their own beating up a prisoner. “You two kids have fun?” He looked past Scott to Logan, expression full of condemnation. Logan shrugged like he didn’t care.

“It was my fault,” Scott said. “It probably always was.” He gave Logan something that was half a wave and half a salute and murmured: “Nos morituri te salutamus, Logan. Truly.” He went with Hawkeye, already a prisoner, and he didn’t look back, and Logan felt the wrongness settle in him, bitter and angry, but mostly afraid, because Scott knew something he didn’t, just like old times, and by the time Logan found out what it was, going by past experience, it would be too late.

Scott Summers, you martyred Machiavellian asshole, what are you planning this time?

In the past, it would have involved him. Logan would have been a cog in Slim’s wheel, and that had been as infuriating as it was invariably effective, but this time, he felt a well of emptiness, because whatever happened next had nothing to do with him. Scott had said his goodbyes and closed the door between them. Logan was free of him forever. Free to hate and blame him with a crystal clear conscience, and live a life where their lines never intersected again. The future was bright and filled with every color except for ruby quartz.

The future was oddly empty.

End of Part One

The story continues in Cyclops Goes to L.I.M.B.O.