Rescue Rogue

The empty chair at dinner is a quiet kind of alarm.

It was a Tuesday evening at the Xavier School — late October, the trees along the drive bare and dark against a grey sky — and the kitchen was warm with the smell of something Hank had made. Everyone was there except one. Rogue's chair sat empty, her plate untouched, her glass unfilled.

Remy LeBeau — Gambit — had noticed at six o'clock. He had set his fork down at six-fifteen and sat very still. He had said nothing, because sometimes silence is how a person asks for help without admitting they need it.

Jean noticed the silence. Jean noticed most things.

She closed her eyes at the table, held very still, and reached outward with her telepathy the way you might reach into a dark hallway looking for a light switch. She followed a thread she had been half-aware of all day — faint and cold and somewhere far north.

Cold. High floor. An unfamiliar building. And Rogue, alive but unable to move.

Jean opened her eyes. "She's in Montreal."

The Blackbird was in the air seventeen minutes later.

Beast briefed them on the way up. The facility was on the St. Lawrence River, operated by a group called the Purifiers — a faction that opposed mutants and had built this particular facility specifically to contain them. The upper floors were lined with power-dampening technology, designed to suppress mutant abilities. Inside those walls, Storm couldn't fully control weather systems. Jean's telepathy was muffled. Cyclops's optic blasts were less focused. Gambit's charges were slower.

But not everything.

Nightcrawler's power didn't require a large expression — it just required an instant of concentration. Kurt Wagner had been born in Bavaria, raised in a circus, and he moved through the world with a light, acrobatic grace. His skin was blue-grey, his tail pointed, his eyes warm yellow. He could teleport — a soft POP and a curl of sulfur smoke — from one spot to any other he could see or had memorized. And the way he did it, the distance of each jump was small enough that the dampening field couldn't fully catch it.

He was the key.

Kurt teleported to the loading dock below the dampening floor — BAMF, curl of smoke, he was there. He moved to the first locked door, teleported through the lock itself — BAMF — and was on the other side before the door registered a breach. Second door. Third. BAMF. BAMF. The service entrance clicked open from inside.

The moment it opened, Storm and Logan went in.

Storm stayed near the entrance, below the dampening field's main coverage, and called up a dense grey fog bank around the entire perimeter of the building. The fog came in off the St. Lawrence in sheets, wrapping the exterior in white. Anyone watching from outside couldn't see ten feet.

Logan moved through the ground floor the way Logan always moved — fast and quiet and already three rooms ahead before anyone had time to react.

On the roof, Gambit crouched beside the security room's ventilation panel. Three cards. Already charged. He dropped them precisely into three separate slots. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Every interior camera screen went dark at once.

Jean, still aboard the Blackbird, held her psychic line to Rogue and spoke through it — not aloud, but the way close friends can sometimes communicate, as though thinking directly to someone. Stay still. Two minutes. We're here.

She felt Rogue receive it. She felt a wave of relief.

Beast found the room from the floor plans he had memorized on the flight up. Fourth floor, east wing, room 412. He had the door open in thirty seconds. Rogue was on a cot under a thin blanket, cold and disoriented but physically unharmed. Her powers were suppressed by the dampening field — she couldn't feel the edges of her own abilities — but she was alert.

"Hank," she said, and her voice was steadier than she probably felt.

"Right here," he said, and he scooped her up and moved.

Three flights of stairs. Down through the building, below the dampening threshold, and out the service door where Logan held it open. Nightcrawler was already at the tree line with a clear line of sight to Beast and Rogue.

BAMF.

They were in the trees.

BAMF again.

They were at the Blackbird ramp.

Four minutes and twenty seconds from service door to safety.

Rogue sat in the Blackbird wrapped in a blanket. Jean handed her something warm to drink. Gambit sat beside her without being asked, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

She looked around at all seven of them.

"You didn't have to come all together," she said. It didn't quite sound like a protest.

"Everyone's here," Cyclops said from the front.

That was all.

The Blackbird banked south over the St. Lawrence River, its lights warm against the dark Canadian sky, and brought everyone home.

Goodnight. That's what family does.