X Men Saga

Once upon a time, the X-Men had to fly into the desert.

It was not a vacation. It was never a vacation when Cyclops assembled the full team at six in the morning with his jaw set and his red visor slightly brighter than usual — which was how everyone could tell he was worried.

The Reavers had come back.

The Reavers were a difficult problem. Not mutants — human beings who had enhanced their bodies with cybernetic technology: metal limbs, targeting computers wired into their nervous systems, armor beneath their skin. They bore a specific grudge against the X-Men that had been building for years. Intelligence placed them at an abandoned HYDRA base dug into a mesa in the Mojave Desert, armed heavily enough to worry a small army.

Cyclops assembled the team: Gambit, Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Cyclops, Jean Grey. Six X-Men. Remy pulled on his coat in the early morning dark of his room and picked up his bo staff. He could hear Wolverine's boots in the corridor, Storm's quiet voice below. Rogue was in the kitchen, drinking coffee in her gloves, reading the mission brief. They all boarded the Blackbird — the X-Men's long black supersonic jet — and flew west through a morning sky that turned from gray to gold to the wide blazing blue of the California desert.

The base was mostly underground — a maze of concrete corridors and hangar bays extending beneath the mesa's flat top, with entrances at three points and booby traps at all of them. Cyclops had the schematics, but schematics were never perfectly current. He needed eyes inside.

"Gambit," Cyclops said.

Remy took the comm earpiece from Scott's hand, settled it in his ear, and went over the mesa in darkness. He moved through the desert with the attentive silence Marcel had built into him in New Orleans, his eyes narrowed to thin slits. Three corridors mapped. Four booby traps found and reported through the earpiece — positions, distances, timing — without triggering a single one.

"Bring the team," he said. "Use my route."

He held softly charged cards as the team spread through the corridors behind him — glowing just enough to see by, a warm pink-purple lantern in the dark. He cleared two tripwires with micro-charges, precisely aimed. SNIP. SNIP.

Behind him, Cyclops directed: Wolverine to the left door, Storm to the ventilation shaft above the main bay, Jean monitoring all their positions telepathically. Everyone in their role. Everyone trusting everyone else to be there.

Remy had not always been comfortable being trusted. In New Orleans, in the Guild, trust was carefully rationed. You trusted your partner on a job, your trainer. That was the shape of it. Teams were more complicated — the more people knew about you, the more they could see of the places where you were still figuring things out.

He was still figuring things out. But here, in this concrete corridor in the Mojave Desert, following the route he had mapped himself, with Logan's measured footfalls and Ororo's steady breathing behind him, he felt something he did not always let himself feel at the mansion.

He felt like he belonged.

At the main hangar he stopped, fist raised. Thirty voices inside. Automated ceiling guns warming up.

One word through the earpiece: "Now."

Three doors opened simultaneously.

BZZZT — Cyclops's optic blast swept the ceiling, and the guns clattered down before they finished warming. CRACK-BOOM — Storm called lightning through the metal infrastructure and the power grid died. Rogue came through the high vent and landed in the center of the Reavers' formation. Gambit came from the left door — CRACK CRACK KRAKOOM — Wolverine from the right. Jean kept everyone's position synced without controlling anyone.

Four minutes. Complete.

Walking out, Logan fell into step beside Remy.

"You're better in a team than you let on," he said.

Remy thought about the route, the tripwires, the chain of small trusts that had held because every link was real.

"I'm a thief," he said. "We don't like people knowing how good we are."

Logan made the sound that in his vocabulary constituted a laugh.

On the Blackbird flying home, the sunset spread in long brilliant bands across the sky. Remy sat by the window. Beside him, Rogue looked at the light. Their shoulders were close. Both of them in gloves.

"Good work," she said quietly.

"Good team," he said.

Below them, the Mojave glowed.

The X-Men were going home.