X-Men: The Last Stand (10 page)

She’d shared popcorn and wine with him and Hank McCoy and Scott and Jean, watching those classic comedies, and had damn near split her sides with laughter. She completed the couplet: “‘You may be Tolstoy, or Fanny Hurst.’”

Then, more seriously, responding to the undertone beneath the banter, “Charles, you know something you’re not telling.”

He opened the door and she found the answer rising from one of the big, comfy chairs in front of the desk.

“Hank,” she said in greeting, following Xavier into the room.

“Ororo,” McCoy replied.

The hug she gave him matched her strength to his and was filled with very real affection from them both. It was like snuggling with a lion, and she grinned wide, wondering if he knew how many girls at the school wove their fantasies around his silken coat and romantic hero manner. Not for nothing were DVDs of
Beauty and the Beast
among the most popular in the library.

She gave his side whiskers a tug: “I just
love
what you’ve done with your hair.”

He gave hers a flick. “You too—what there is of it.” What once had fallen most of the way down her back now barely touched her shoulders, and she was considering cutting it back farther still. Seasons change, so could she.

Hank and Xavier shook hands, and Ororo’s eyes were drawn to one of the photos on the wall, of the original class of students. She couldn’t help noticing the sight of herself sitting so stiff and formal beside a girl whose hair looked like it had been dipped in blood-hued flame. Jean in her Goth phase, which had lasted barely a semester before she got bored;
she got bored so easily back then,
Ororo remembered. She was so desperately hungry to learn—they all were.
Know the world as the key to knowing thyself.
Had they ever truly been that young? And what could have possessed them to wear those dreadful costumes in public? Thing was, and this she had to admit to herself, back then they considered them the height of cool. New millennium, new attitudes, something else that had changed.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Charles,” McCoy told his mentor.

“You’re always welcome here, Henry. You’re a part of this place, as much as anyone.”

“I have some news.” This wasn’t a social call.

“Erik?” Xavier asked, obviously fearing the worst.

It was the right impulse, just in the wrong direction. And again, Ororo thought:
Everything changes.

“No”—McCoy shook his great, shaggy head—“although we’re making progress on that front. Actually, Mystique was apprehended last week.”

“They caught her?” He sounded so certain, but Ororo had her doubts.

Xavier took him at his word: “The question is, how will they keep her?”

“For the moment, that’s Bolivar Trask’s problem, thank God,” Hank said. “I—”

“Who’s the furball?” challenged a new arrival, from the doorway.

McCoy bristled. Storm knew he hadn’t been fond of the nickname when he was a student here. But he’d also learned manners. “Henry McCoy. Secretary of Mutant Affairs.”

“Right,” Logan acknowledged, “the secretary.” The way he said Hank’s title, it wasn’t a compliment. “Nice suit.”

Hank held out his hand. Logan ignored it. Xavier sighed, mainly to himself. Not a great beginning.

Xavier said: “Hank, Logan is—”

“The Wolverine,” Hank acknowledged. “I read the file.” To Logan directly, “I hear you’re quite the animal.”

Logan sniffed. “Look who’s talking.”

Ororo was done watching this display of testosterone. She addressed Xavier: “Magneto’s not going to be happy about Mystique.”

“Hope your prison has plastic screws,” offered Logan.

“Magneto isn’t the problem,” Hank told them. “At least, not our most pressing one.”

He had their attention.

“A major pharmaceutical company has developed a…mutant antibody. A way to suppress the X-gene.”

“‘Suppress’?” asked Logan after a very awkward silence.

Hank looked at him. “Permanently.” Another, longer, silence while they digested the news. “They’re calling it a ‘cure.’”

Logan snorted in disgust, which took care of his opinion.

Ororo spoke up: “This is crazy. You can’t cure being a mutant.”

“Well, scientifically speaking—” Hank began, but she allowed him to get no further.

“Since when are we a disease? I’ve been called many things in my life, Henry, but a
disease
?” Raw rage and contempt laced her words.

“Ororo,” Xavier said quietly, and then, when she didn’t respond, “Storm!”

She looked at him.

“It’s being announced right now.”

“They’ve been called saints and sinners,” announced Warren Worthington Jr. to the assembled crush of media. “They’ve committed atrocities and been the victims of atrocities themselves.”

He stood hatless against the stiff breeze blowing into San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate, in the shadow of the long-decommissioned prison of Alcatraz, with Kavita Rao, bundled far more snugly, standing a bit behind him on the dais.

“They’ve been labeled monsters, and not without reason,” Worthington Jr. went on. “But these so-called monsters are people just like us. They are our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters—they are,” and here, just for the briefest instant that only Kavita noticed, his voice caught, “our children. Their affliction is nothing more than a disease. A corruption of healthy cellular activity. Finally, there is hope. A way to eradicate their suffering and the suffering of those who love them.”

He held up a slide of a DNA helix in one hand. And in the other, a photo of Kavita’s long-time patient, young Jimmy.

“A few years ago, we found a mutant with the most extraordinary ability—to repress, and even
reverse,
the powers of those other mutants who came close to him. Now, after much research and experimentation, we’ve found the means for
all
mutants to get ‘close’ to him.”

He set down the photos and held up a vial. He paused while the crowd before him erupted in flashbulbs. He didn’t need his media advisor screaming through his earbug to know that with those words, every news channel on the spectrum had just gone live to this press conference. He wasn’t just a sound bite on the evening news any longer, he was speaking to the whole world.

Among them, President Cockrum, watching with Bolivar Trask and others of his key staff in the Oval Office.

“This site,” Worthington was saying, “which was once the world’s most famous prison, will now be the source of
freedom
for mutants everywhere.”

Among them, the students of the Xavier Institute, gathered in common rooms throughout the great mansion.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Worthington concluded, “I proudly present the answer to mutation. Finally, we have a
cure
!”

Rogue let out her breath, unaware that she’d been holding it all this while, trolling her gaze over the assemblage of students, noting how folks were sitting, what they were wearing. She was covered head to toe, a fact of life for a girl who could steal memories and lives with the slightest
accidental
touch. She licked her lips, remembering a moment like it had just happened, the taste of Bobby Drake when she’d kissed him, the delight she’d found when her breath puffed cold just like his. That taste hadn’t been enough, and they’d tried again—he promising it would be all right, assuring her he wasn’t scared, she wanting to believe, certain it would end badly. She was the one proven right.

Her eyes went to the TV, which had cut to a talking head recapping the announcement while they rustled up learned commentators, promising an in-depth interiew and analysis with author Laurie Garrett. Then, Rogue looked down at her hands, gloved as always. She made a face, glanced towards Soraya, sitting demurely by the window in her burqa. At least the Afghani girl covered herself up by choice, as an article of her faith. Rogue was stuck like this, she’d thought for forever.

But now—and her eyes rose once more to the screen—but
now
…

Storm looked ready to hit something, radiating a violent fury that seemed to impress even Logan, and Hank thought it was probably because it reminded the Wolverine of himself.

“Who would
want
this cure? I mean, what kind of coward would take it, just to fit in?”

Hank bristled ever so slightly.

“I understand your concerns, Ororo. For God’s sake, that’s why I’m here! But not all of us have such an easy time as others ‘fitting in.’”

She looked at him, and the pain that showed in his eyes wholly belied the joking words that followed.

“
You
don’t shed on the furniture.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it that way—”

“Don’t apologize,” Logan told her, sounding one small step removed from a snarl. “For all we know, the government helped cook this up. I mean, let’s be rational for a second and consider the
civil liberties
side of things. Do parents have the right to impose this cure on their kids? Employers on their employees? Suppose someone decides mutants are a public safety issue and society’s better off without ’em? Or better yet, let’s turn the tables—if you can make a drug to erase the gene, how ’bout one to
create
it? You thought nukes were scary, folks, howzabout
us
? Why bomb an army when Storm can drown it? And what then, the feds decide—for our own ‘protection’—maybe we belong on a reservation, where we’re available if needed but can be kept isolated from the general population? Pandora’s box has
nothing
on this.”

“I can assure you,” Hank said stiffly, defensively, because Logan’s impassioned argument walked the same path as too many recent, increasingly heated, conversations between himself and Alicia Vargas, himself and his own soul, “the government has nothing to do with this.”

Logan looked at him pityingly: “I’ve heard that before, bub.”

“My boy,” Hank snapped, provoked past caring about propriety, “I’ve been fighting for mutant rights since before you had claws!”

Logan looked to Ororo. “Did he just call me ‘boy’?”

“Enough.”
Hank apparently wasn’t the only one short of patience. Xavier’s voice was harder and flatter than he’d ever heard before. “All of you.”