The Ultimate X-Men (21 page)

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A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight angled through the window and fell on the family tree, painting everything in the room the color of fool’s gold.

She returned home with the baby. Her crusades were little ones, waged against grass and chocolate stains, dingy floors, and balancing the checkbook. Day after meaningless day blew past with the bland uniformity of sand.

She was dusting the gilt-framed portrait of Remy, Charlie, and herself when the doorbell rang. She returned the photograph to its place on the piano and answered the door. She was expecting it to be Jean, dropping by with the new Crichton book she’d promised to lend her, but her heart gave a wild, surging leap, banging against her ribs like a wild bird in a cage when she saw her caller was— “Logan?”

He was wearing a black tank top, exposing his hirsute arms and shoulders, his back and chest. He was leaning easily against the door frame, never taking his eyes from Rogue.

“Remy—” she started, and had to back up and try again. “Remy, he ain’t here.”

“I didn’t come t’see Gumbo boy,” he answered. “I came t’see you. T’give you whatcha need.”

She told herself that she should slam the door in his face, but she didn’t move a muscle.

“I can smell it on you, darlin’. Smell the disappointment an’ frustration an’—”

Whispering, she finished, “Yearnin’.”

“Got it in one,” he answered with a feral grin. “You’re yearnin’ for the wild side. For a
man.”

TIE UlTIMATE MIEN

“I—I already got a man.”

“You,” he said, lighting a cigar, “got a watered down copy of a man.”

He stepped closer and she could smell the beer on his breath, the stale cigars the stink of sweat: the smell of life. She could feel these scents enfolding her and at the same time, felt her senses expanding outward like ripples in a pond. She became aware of the sound of her own excited breathing, the sound of the blood drums pounding out a Charlie Watts solo in her ears; she could feel the weight of the air on her skin, the bead of sweat behind her left ear; she could see the slow dance of the dust motes in the late afternoon sun and the lazy flight of the honeybee in her front yard, and the individual leaves of grass, all part of some great, cosmic puzzle.

Logan moved closer to kiss her.

“Don’t worry, darlin’. I’m the best there is that at what I do.”

Again she told herself she should do something. Again she didn’t move a muscle, but allowed him to move close enough to kiss her.

“Dat’s not what Remy hear!” the Cajun said, striking Logan a staggering blow from behind with his softball bat. Logan spun around in one fluid motion, swinging with his claws at the same time Remy brought his bat up. The blades buried themselves deep in the soft ash and Remy wrenched the staff away, declawing Logan in the same movement.

Unluckily, Logan didn’t need the claws to be an animal, and his blocky right fist looped in and landed solidly on Remy’s nose, mashing it flat against his face. Remy used the move to trap Logan’s arm under his left arm, and simulta-

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neously brought up his leg to strike Logan repeatedly in the side of the head and neck.

By this point, both men were snarling, growiing, wordless creatures, rolling on the floor, punching, kicking, biting. Remy slammed Logan’s head into the piano leg, over and over, making the keyboard issue a crazy, jangling chord than hung in the air forever. The family portrait slipped down the side of the Steinway and smashed on the floor.

Rogue had, in some secret room of her heart, wanted to have two men fight over her, but not like this. It was impossible to tell where one man began and the other left off with the cutting and growiing and biting, and so Rogue did the only sane and sensible thing she could—she laughed.

She laughed so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks and prismed her vision, and she had to force herself to stop laughing long enough to say, “End program.”

And at her command, the walls and furniture of the home dissolved around her, replaced by the bulwarks of the mansion’s Danger Room, cold and gray and uniform. Nothing comforting there, other than its familiarity.

“Who writes y’dialogue?” Rogue asked the men, as fragile and translucent as figures carved from soap bubbles. “Some love-starved little girl?” They didn’t answer as they vanished with a cold, hard snap, but then, there was no need. She wrote their dialogue, their life-scripts, with the help of the incredible alien computer of the Xavier Institute, a gift from the empress of a society whose technology far outstripped Earth’s. She had been trying to pretend to have a normal life through the holographic images of the Danger Room, had been hoping to lose herself, if only for

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a moment, in the fantasy, to achieve some manner of epiphany. She had the computer program images of her teammates, but without powers, extrapolate how they might have been if they weren’t all mutants—if they were normal.

But neither she nor the alien computer had a true idea of what normal
was.
As a result, whenever the program got too tricky to navigate—too real or humdrum—she simply fast-forwarded over that particular glitch into a new scene or situation.

She had hoped for a chance to realize her dream of being able to touch and hold and love Remy, something she could not do with anyone thanks to her mutant power that forced her to absorb the powers and memories of anyone she made flesh-to-flesh contact with. But she felt only the more empty and cheated for her efforts. What good were dreams if you could only hold them in your sleep?

Although the Danger Room could replicate perfecdy feel and texture, even though it could create images that looked and sounded and behaved like the originals, it couldn’t capture the little things, the burning passions and buried hurts that made the people real and unique and alive. The memories were real; it was just that the events never happened, and the fire and humor she loved about. Remy simply couldn’t be captured by a holographic construct.

Even if she couldn’t touch the man she loved in this reality, in this imperfect world, at least it was Remy.

It was impossible to guess whether she would ever get her powers under control to the point of having a normal life, but it was worth hoping she would.

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After all, half of “life” is made up of “if,” and sometimes, in the end, hope is all we really have.

“And all we need,” she said with a firm voice to that quiet room. “If life was perfect, if life was easy, we’d never dream, an’ it was a dream that built this mansion.”

She set a smile on her face, squared her shoulders, and left the room without a backward glance.

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Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg

Tawfiq Badr’s expression as he tumbled through the hot Egyptian air told the whole story. Yes, he’d been a pickpocket for a very long time. Yes, he’d honed the surreptitious art to an exacting science, here in the controlled mayhem of Cairo’s bustling open-air market. Yes, he’d had his fair share of close scrapes and run-ins with the local authorities.

And, no, he’d never had a victim literally blow him off his feet.

But that’s exactly what was happening. To Tawfiq, the two American women had looked like easy prey—or at least the younger one had: a pale, spoiled, overdressed, and complaining teenager lugging far too many suitcases through the tightly packed bazaar. Her companion—a tall, serene and confident-looking white-haired black woman wearing a sensible khaki outfit—seemed much more at home in this pungent sea of human motion. But even if the African Amazon saw him snatch the girl’s wallet, what could she do against a wily, seasoned professional like Tawfiq?

The answer, apparently, was that she could cause motion in the very air, summoning a hot desert wind of such force that it lifted and tumbled Tawfiq as if he were a feather caught in a sirocco. The wallet he had just purloined from the girl’s garish yellow overcoat dropped from his own pocket and onto the dusty ground—as did four other wallets he had lifted earlier that afternoon.

“Freakin’ animals!” the pale girl snapped, dropping her suitcases and rushing over to retrieve her wallet, as Tawfiq landed in a dusty heap about ten feet away. “I hate this place already, Storm!” she complained to her companion,

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who was already striding purposefully toward the shaken pickpocket.

With scores of slack-jawed Egyptian dealers and international tourists looking on in disbelief, “Storm” grabbed the man by the coat and easily lifted him to his feet. Tawfiq looked into her eyes, and saw that her blue irises had completely disappeared, forcing him to stare at an eerie, allwhite gaze that chilled his soul. “Who do you work for?” she asked him in perfect Egyptian Arabic. ‘‘El-Gibar?”

“N-no,” Tawfiq stammered in his native language, feeling the hackles on his neck involuntarily rise—almost as if electricity were being pumped into him by the very touch of the woman. “Don’t work for anyone, not for a long time—”

“Well, if you see Achmed,” she interrupted Tawfiq, inexplicably smiling now, “tell him I said hello. He’ll know who you mean,’ ’ she added, releasing her grip on the pickpocket’s collar. Dazed, Tawfiq instinctively backed away from her, his eyeballs darting around the immediate area for signs of police—then he fled, expertly disappearing into the crowd of flesh within seconds.

Storm sighed as she walked back toward her companion, who was now standing there, with five w
^r
allets in her hands. “I’d forgotten how much I miss this place, Jubilee,” Storm told her in English, with an ironic smirk,

“Yeah, cool home turf, Storm,” Jubilation Lee answered with a snort, pocketing her own wallet and eyeing the other four. “Makes Sarajevo look like Disney World, y’know? Maybe if we’re lucky, the local Mickey Mouse’ll stop by and beat the crap out of us.”

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Smiling, Storm retrieved their luggage. “I know this isn’t the easiest or safest route to our hotel from the airport,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t pass up the chance to take a walk through my old stomping grounds.”

“You mean ‘old
stealing
grounds,’ ” Jubilee grumbled, buttoning her wallet pocket shut. “I know you grew up around here, used to be a pickpocket yourself—heck, /used to be a packrat hangin’ out in Hollywood Mall, I know what it’s like—but this place is just nasty!”

“You get used to it, Jubilee—people are remarkably adaptable creatures,” Storm answered, taking the four extra wallets from her dark-haired companion and swapping them for a couple of suitcases. “We’ll return these wallets to the authorities when we get to the hotel.”

“What about the smell?” Jubilee asked, wrinkling her nose as she and Storm moved farther into the bazaar. “Do you get used to that? And how about the flies? And the sweat? And the camels spitting? Yeccch! And every guy lookin’ at you like you’re on sale? And what about. . .” Jubilee’s ceaseless complaining faded into the recesses of Storm’s consciousness, as feelings of nostalgia once again overwhelmed her. It didn’t seem like very long ago that five-year-old Ororo Munroe, the Manhattan-born daughter of an American photojournalist and a Kenyan princess, had found herself orphaned on these rough streets of Cairo.

She remembered being taken in by Egyptian master thief Achmed el-Gibar, who had a whole troop of children who stole for him. Ororo quickly became his prize pupil, and within a year, she was considered by el-Gibar (and, more importantly, by the police) to be the most accomplished juvenile thief and pickpocket in all of Cairo.

THE MTIIUTE X-HEU

Seven years of Ororo’s life—nearly her entire childhood—were spent this way, in this place. Lifting wallets, darting into and out of crowds, picking locks, duping tourists—it wasn’t a bad life for a child who had known little else. But when she was twelve years old, Ororo suddenly felt a strong desire to go south, to seek out her African ancestors.

Leaving Cairo and her life of petty crime behind, young Ororo trekked across the Sahara on foot. It took her nearly a year to reach the Serengeti Plain, home of her mother’s tribe. And during that long journey, Ororo’s womanhood blossomed—as did her uncanny ability
⁷
to control the weather.

Upon rejoining the tribes of her mother’s youth near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, Ororo learned that she and her mother, N’Dare, were descended from a line of African witch-priestesses that could be traced back to the dawn of humanity. All the women in this line of descent had white hair, blue eyes, and the potential for magical abilities.

Ororo’s newfound power to control the weather, however, was neither magical nor mystical. Rather, it was the byproduct of a random mutation of her DNA. Like so many others, Ororo was a mutant, a member, not of
homo sapiens,
but of the newly emerging subgenus
homo superior.

Ororo used her weather-altering abilities to help several local Kenyan tribes in times of need. In return, they worshipped her as a goddess. Money, theft, conflict, fear—all these things became little more than fading memories to her. More contented than she had ever been, Ororo spent much of her young adulthood fully enjoying the life of a deity
⁷
. Indeed, who wouldn’t?