Chapter Text
It’s the pain in Scott’s head that wakes him. A pounding agony at his temples, radiating into an ache at the bridge of his nose. He’s laying on his own arm on a hard, cold surface. Trained instinct reminds him not to open his eyes until he’s sure what’s in front of him won’t be harmed by his optic blasts, but he doesn’t immediately recognize his surroundings. His feet are cold.
Cautiously, he lifts his head, drawing his hands up under himself to lift up off the floor. It’s rough under his bare hands, cold cement. He doesn’t feel anything nearby and he pauses, focusing on his other senses. Scott can hear the hum of electrical equipment, a low hiss of something under pressure nearby. The smell of the room is cold, disused, but also tinged with sweat. Maybe mine. There’s a faint chemical bite to the cold air. It’s just below what would be comfortable without a sweater or blanket. It’s dry, too. Scott’s mouth feels parched, all the moisture drawn out while he was unconscious. He still feels…fuzzy.
I was…shot? He reaches a hand carefully up to his neck,feeling a sore there. A scabbed over, puckered injury. Not shot. I’d be dead. Drugged? The dizzy feeling and uncertain roiling in his stomach as well as the headache all suggest, well, a hangover. Okay.
He carefully palms over his own face. There is a device over his eyes, but it’s not his visor. The edges are boxy and rough, and it presses harshly into the skin of his forehead and over the painful bridge of his nose. His hands aren’t tied but something drags at his left ankle—a chain? He can feel a heavyweight key-lock securing an honest to god shackle on his ankle. Well, he hasn’t met a lock that could stand up to his optic blast for very long. Carefully, he cracks his eyes open, looking down at the floor.
There’s not much light in the room—and no blasts make it past the thin, red slot cut into whatever it is on his head. He pushes up a little higher and strains to see his surroundings. He’s confined in a small empty space, cement walls on three sides and prison bars separating him from a larger room. The cell is empty, except for a bucket. Scott can imagine what that’s for. His ankle chain leads to the wall, bolted onto an iron ring. The length of it won’t let him reach the bars.
Beyond them there’s an open space with a lot of heavy equipment—including a large horizontal tube-like unit surrounded by heavy tanks with warning labels. Gas cylinders of some kind? Monitoring equipment with screens showing flat lines or no connection indicators. The rest of the room is dark, large enough that he can’t make out any further details in the dim.
No one else seems to be around. The machine sounds seem to be coming from the tube. So what is this? Where am I? Some kind of holding facility. He tries to think back to where he was before this and remembers he hadn’t been alone. Where’s Logan?
After things went wrong, Scott followed him down the elevator shaft. He remembers that it took longer than he wanted to anchor himself after Wolverine’s warning over the comms, but it would have been stupid to just go down there with no plan to get out again. At the bottom, he’d found a ragged entryway into an intact portion of the building. A hallway with several closed doors leading off of it into the remains of the building. There was blood on the ground, and a few fallen ceiling panels. Had Logan injured himself getting through the gap? He was broader in the chest and shoulders than Scott—despite Scott’s best efforts in the weight room—but he shouldn’t have had to force himself through.
The debris and dust on the floor was disturbed. He hadn’t seen any signs of footprints, but one of the doorways had a clear arc on the carpet in front of it, indicating it had been opened out since the building collapsed. Scott followed the sign of life cautiously. Whatever this was, he no longer thought of it as just a rescue. Inside, he found that the back end of the room collapsed at a sharp angle. The void with the preserved bit of hallway was triangle-shaped and must have been against a load bearing part of the building.
There were footsteps in the dust and a sign of something heavy being dragged in. Then the prints turned and walked back out. Scott had just made out the shape of something—someone?— crumpled in the corner when a sharp sound from behind him precluded the sting of something hitting his neck.
After that, things went fuzzy. It’s clear now that they’d been ambushed and captured—by the group responsible for attacking Genosha, maybe? But why not just kill us? Wolverine being nearly unkillable aside, why kill so many without discrimination but capture two capable and dangerous mutants and try to hold them?
Perhaps as a lure for the rest of the X-Men? Scott checks the rest of himself over—everything but his lowest level of costume is gone. No belt, no boots, no comms, no gear. The armor is gone, too, just a layer of underarmor and his skivvies. Thorough. He must have been out for a while.
Where’s Logan? He’d be secured somewhere, too. Probably with more than just a leg chain, if their captors had any sense. Scott’s not sure how anyone ever manages to take and hold Logan against his will, but there seem to be methods. Maybe I should ask about them. Scott’s nose is still sore from where Logan hit him.
With nothing else pressing to take in, Scott’s old worries return. This is wasting time they could be using to help in Genosha. People are dying out there, trapped and helpless, and he could be making a difference. Madelyne is still out there. Somewhere. He doesn’t feel her in his thoughts anymore, but she could be injured or unconscious, trapped somewhere. Maybe even somewhere like this.
Scott picks himself up. His visor is gone, but something is affixed on his head like a restraint that seems to serve the purpose of nullifying his powers. He can’t lift it, and touching it flares up a pounding, screaming pain in his temples. It calls up an echoing agony from the back of his head and nausea comes on so strong he has to take a moment to collect himself as his mouth floods with warning spit. His stomach lurching, Scott goes totally still until the wave passes.
So, that’s out for the moment. The lock on his ankle shackle feels sturdy, and the chain is too short to reach the bars. The other three walls are uninterrupted cement. There’s a two inch drain hole in the center of the floor, with a metal grate cover sunk down flush. The ceiling matches the floor, with the exception of the drain hole. In all, a stark concrete box.
Scott examines the only other object in the cell—a white plastic bucket with a pair of holes that a handle had been removed from. The remains of a paper label have been partially scrubbed away but bright green scraps remain, indicating that it had once contained bulk margarine, likely for food service. It’s empty now, but given the absence of any plumbing…
His options are limited. His tools are minimal. Doing nothing seems impossible, and he thinks waiting is something that Genosha can’t afford.
“Hey!” It hurts to yell. His throat feels dry, and his head feels like the sound bangs around in it and leaves every part ringing. He never quite knows what to say when he wakes up in someplace with no clue why he’s there. At least Mr. Sinister is usually there to gloat about it when he kidnaps an X-Man.
“Hey—you out there! What is this? I want out!”
Nothing moves. He has no answer. He’s seized by the sudden illogical concern that he’s down here completely alone, forgotten and left to die. Why would anyone bother with this elaborate setup for that? He’d been unconscious and helpless—obviously at their mercy while under the effects of whatever they drugged him with. They could have already killed him, or just left him behind in the rubble.
“Hello?”
No response. Scott calls until it echoes in the larger space, clanks his chain against the ground until the sound makes his head ache. He stops short of hurling the bucket against the unreachable bars. That seems like a stupid line to draw, but he might need the damn thing.
Time passes. Eventually, he gives up—his throat dry enough that his voice is hoarse and his headache has grown nearly unbearable. Scott backs into a corner of cold concrete and sits. The silence grows around him. He realizes he can’t feel Jean in his mind, either—she has been distant in the aftermath of discovering his connection to Madelyne but not—gone. It feels empty as the space around him. Is she in danger? Gone too? She’d been on the way to the U.N. Perhaps distance had stretched their thin bond even thinner, or maybe it’s a function of this place—or the restraint on his head keeping his optic rays at bay.
Stop it. There’s no point in speculating without any information. He can’t tell how much time is passing.
Finally—finally— he hears a different noise. He moves closer to the bars until he reaches the end of his chain, looking out toward a new source of light. To the left of his viewpoint, a large bulkhead door swings open, admitting a group of humanoid figures hauling a sagging bundle between them The light coming from behind them renders the shapes difficult to sort out at first, but eventually he makes out five upright figures and one slumped figure suspended between four of them.
“Hey!” Scott shouts—his voice emerges as a rasp. None of the figures—four of them armored in the garb of guards or police, with bullet proof armor and heavy belts of gear—respond. They don’t even look in his direction. Just quick-shuffle the slumped, unmoving figure between them toward the large tube like device in the middle of the room his cell attaches to.
The fifth upright figure is a woman, severely dressed and with her hair pulled back into a tight bun with not a single strand out of place. She’s wearing white coveralls, and there’s a smear of drying blood on the front. On her nose, she wears pale-rimmed catseye glasses like a single concession to femininity. She has the air of supervisory authority, carrying a PDA and stylus in one hand.
The guards drop the unconscious figure on the floor next to the tube, without any regard to comfort or gentleness. There’s clearly a plan because they don’t require any discussion to move into various places around the device.
The figure on the floor is a man, naked except for a huge device encasing his head, covering his face with a variety of metal appliances—a big, boxy protrusion over the eyes and muzzled over the mouth and nose. It looks like a deep sea diver’s respirator, with a connection port where a valve allows a hose line to be screwed in and on the opposite side a filter chamber hanging off over the cheek, where CO2 would exit. For a moment, Scott stares, trying to understand the device’s purpose before he realizes he knows the figure it’s attached to.
It’s Logan whose head is entirely encased in that cobbled-together looking apparatus, and Scott is only sure because who else has that kind of compact, hairy body? Who else needs to be restrained so excessively by physical and chemical means? Maybe the Hulk, but that's not Bruce Banner.
“Hey!” Scott finally snaps out of his fascination. “What are you doing to him?”
How are they doing it?
“Watch and see, Mr. Summers.” The woman asserts her authority without even looking Scott’s way, keeping strict attention on the process going on in front of her. The four guards have moved into place around the tube—capsule? They’ve opened a heavy looking armored door on the top, swinging it open away from them on a sturdy hinge. The soldiers pull a series of wires out from the inside. These, they hook up to Logan’s slumped body—sensors on pulse points and then a series of very long, very sharp looking needles that go into ports on the helmet, sinking in by inches in a way that makes Scott cringe involuntarily. Finally, the woman directs them to lift him into the chamber.
She herself connects a hose to the screw-port on his mask, then holds her hand near the filter side for some signal she seems to get, and then, as vital signs begin to appear on the monitors hooked up to the chamber, she locates a vein in his arm and sets an I.V. The other end of the line leads down into the capsule out of sight, apparently all regulated by the machine.
Then they close him into the tube, and the window showing dim white light inside goes dark as the gas cylinders attached to the machine hiss—pressurizing it?
The guards step back, but still look ready. Nothing about the operation had seemed relaxed. Then again, with such a dangerous captive, one wrong move was the last one. It seems deeply risky, but Logan hadn’t even moved throughout the process.
The machines don’t beep like they would in a hospital setting, but seem to be showing the same sort of information—heart rate, osats, brain function, and a monitor that says ‘flow rate’ and seems to be constantly regulating several things. The woman makes some notes on her palm pilot, then steps away from the machine, apparently satisfied.
She finally turns to face Scott, looking at him with an absent expression, as if she’s still thinking about something else and he’s only an afterthought. “Mr. Summers. Welcome to Weapon Next. Make yourself comfortable.”
“Are you—did you attack Genosha?” Scott demands. Weapon Next? It seems nonsensical. A spectre from the past.
“My goodness, wouldn’t that have been lofty. Just to get our hands on two little mutants?” She doesn’t smile, and in the low light her face seems as severe as her hair. She might be wearing makeup, Scott can’t tell through the thick red lense over his eyes, but she has a sort of lineless, flat quality to her face. “No, we merely had our antennas up for a situation we could take advantage of. One of those does tend to present every few weeks.”
She lifts the PDA and presses several buttons, withdrawing the stylus from a slot in the bottom. “I couldn’t have guessed something guaranteed to bring you all scurrying would fall right into our laps, but… preparedness pays off.”
“What is this?”
“For you? A little stay in captivity. For Subject X? Well, it’s a collection on an investment.”
Subject X? Scott can’t put that together, and his confusion must show on his face because she jerks the stylus up to point the back-end of it over her shoulder, at the the chamber she’s loaded Logan into.
“Now, be a good boy—my notes tell me you’re good at that—and sit tight. It’s going to be a lengthy process but we all know you can’t rush perfection.” At that she does smile, and then turns, abruptly finished with the conversation. The guards fall into step behind her.
“Wait—” Scott stumbles as he reaches the end of his chain, drawn up short. “That’s it? People are dying, suffering. They need our help. Whatever you’re doing, no one can afford for us to be captive right now.”
“No, I don’t think that’s the case.” She isn’t moved. She doesn’t even slow her pace. “The age of mutants is over, but that makes you scarce resources. Others will be working to finish the job of elimination, and that’s just fine by me. I have what I need, and you’re safe while you can be useful.”
When the last guard has followed her out through the heavy door, it clangs closed behind her and locks with a heavy, mechanical thud, leaving the room plunged into darkness again except for the monitors showing that Wolverine is still alive.