Sanctum 2.1

There wasn't an airport anywhere near the dusty old road that had been pelting the decrepit undercarriage of Logan's burnt sienna gremlin with small stones and clumps of dirt for the past twenty minutes. Still, when he passed a thicket of trees, just beyond Anna spotted a massive black aircraft parked in the middle of an abandoned field. As the car followed an old driveway, she got a good look at the long, seemingly windowless, impossibly smooth, alien craft. It was all curves and its only edge was its pointed nose that looked as if it could split the earth if it hit it hard enough. They stop just short of one of its massive landing gear and Logan got out of the car without killing the engine. He whistled and waved one of his hands and a second later Anna heard the obnoxiously loud buzzing of a phone from somewhere in the car. The whole vehicle shifted towards the driver's side as Logan eased himself back inside and rooted his hand around the back seat.

He produced a phone from his duffel bag and hit the answer button. "What?" He shouted as he shielded his eyes against the setting sun with one of his thick hands. "By which way does the crow fly?" Asked a man's voice over the little speaker.

"Eh -" Logan scratched his stubble. "In the winter's moonlight, the crow stays gathered by the farmer's lamp light."

There was a pause, then the rear of the aircraft began to hiss air as a ramp appeared from the seamless body and lowered towards the parched earth of the field. "Stupid poetry crap," Logan muttered to himself while he killed the engine. "Bet the damn weather witch came up with that particular hippie fluff." He stood out of the car, folded the front seat, and started dredging up his remaining gear out of the minuscule back seats. Anna popped open her door, it shuttered on its hinges as it tried to bare its own weight, and she stood. A gust of humid air caught the edges of her hair and the loose dust from the earth kicked up and caught her in the eye. She was forced to rub them with the heels of her hands, and when she opened her eyes again, there was a remarkably tall woman standing at the foot of the ramp. Her long hair was as white as freshly fallen snow and her skin an ebony that almost seemed to glisten under the biting rays of the sun. A moment later she was joined by a guy that looked as if a pencil started walking around on its own. All legs and arms, the dude was rail thin and wore some sort of black jumpsuit with a yellow band around his waist and two around his chest that looked like he had been rubber-stamped with a gigantic yellow 'X'. Most notably he wore a funky-looking plastic visor around his eyes that made him look like some sort of Star Trek reject.

"Logan, I'm glad you made it back -" The woman paused when he got close. "Goddess, Logan - what happened to your face? You look as if someone took a brick to it."

Logan made to touch his nose but pulled his fingers immediately back when they grazed the tip. "Eh - had a run-in with… a local. Wasn't anything I couldn't handle." He and the woman exchanged a look.

"A civilian did that to you?" The guy asked. He angled his too long of a neck to get a better look at Logan's face. "Wow. What did you do to piss them off?"

"There isn't enough time in the day, kid." Logan looked back. "You coming?"

Anna didn't look back at Logan, instead, she stared at the massive ship before her. "Who… are you people exactly?"

"What? He didn't tell you?" The guy rounded Logan and approached Anna. "We're the X-Men. My code-name is Cyclops." He held out a hand for her to shake. "And you must be Anna. It's a pleasure!" The way the guy spoke sounded like he was a doll with a string being pulled out of his back, all canned and pre-recorded.

She looked down at his hand, which was wrapped in a thick yellow glove to match his bright yellow bands, up into his visored face, then past him towards Logan who just gave her a single shoulder shrug. "Uh, right." She took his hand, shook once, then let go. "The 'X-Men' huh? Are you guys supposed to be, like, superheroes or something?"

The guy wrinkled his brow. "The old man really didn't tell you a thing, did he?"

"There will be plenty of time to catch her up on the flight, Cyclops." The woman spoke with a certain haughtiness that wasn't outright disdainful but carried the full weight of a rolling thunderhead behind it. "We must be going. We've spent enough time on the ground."

Cyclops nodded at the woman and looked back at Anna. "I can help you with your bags if you want."

Anna looked back up at him and found her reflection in the strip of red in his visor. She felt her brows stitch together in such a way that communicated a contempt she didn't outright say, but knew she felt somewhere deep down inside.

"The girl doesn't have any bags, Scott," Logan added helpfully in the silence. "Ororo is right, though. We want to get going, you two, so -" He waved his hand toward the ramp.

"Doesn't have any -" The guy scratched at the ample mound of brunette curls perched atop the only visible part of his scalp that wasn't protected by the odd black cowl tucking away his ears and neck. "Wolverine, didn't her parents cosign her release?"

"Didn't you hear what the woman said, kid? There will be plenty of time to talk about it once we are in the air!" Logan pointed a hairy finger at the open hatch of the aircraft. "Now if you'd both so kindly…" Anna watched as the guy, Cyclops, hesitated, shifted, then started walking towards the ramp without looking back at her. Then Logan's pointed gaze was focused on her. "You too, bub."

Anna felt her grip tighten on the open car door she had been hiding behind. "What about your car?"

"What about it?"

"Aren't you going to load it up too?"

"No, it's a heap. Xavier bought it so I could keep a low profile." He gave a backhanded wave at the old gremlin. "I was just going to leave the keys in it and let some hillbilly find it."

Anna tucked her chin to her chest and eyed the car over twice her age from the corner of her vision. Its burnt sienna paint visibly pealed from some unknown acid stain on the roof, the metal rims had all but fallen off, and the interior shag carpeting looked as if it was a careless cigarette away from combusting.

"Would it be possible…" Anna started, her voice squeaky and a little off kilter. "To take it with us?"

Cyclops paused mid-step and turned to look at her. "Wait," He let out a small laugh as if anticipating the punchline of a joke. "You actually want that thing?"

Anna immediately felt her neck go hot. "Well - if you guys are just going to throw it away! I don't want to just waste a perfectly functioning -"

"Of course we will bring it." All eyes turned towards the woman who somehow seemed to be standing a head taller than everyone else at that moment. "The Blackbird has a vehicle bay that is plenty large enough to hold a car that small. I see no reason why we can't bring it along."

Logan scratched his widow's peak. "Yeah, but then you got to strap the thing down so it won't roll. Plus the added weight -"

"Well it's not like she has bags to weigh us down, does she, Logan?" The woman straightened her back. "Besides, you are so good with all those straps and chains. I'm sure you'll be done by the time young Cyclops is back in the pilot seat."

Logan rolled his shoulders and held his duffel bag loosely in his right hand. "Right… of course." He then sauntered down the ramp towards the car.

Anna's lips drew to a line watching him. She then felt a strong breeze and a breath later, the woman stood at her flank. "Are you feeling alright, my dear? Not hurt in the scuffle I hope."

Anna near jumped at the woman's sudden appearance. "N-Nah, I'm fine!"

The woman held out her hand, but not for a shake, like the Cyclops, did earlier. It was as if she were holding out some invisible and incredibly delicate petal in the crease of her palm. "My name is Ororo." Her tone had changed from the way she spoke to either of the boys. It carried the same weight and certain spark of electricity, but now her words were soft like a gentle breeze brushing against her skin.

"Anna." She took the woman's hand in her own and felt a strange sort of calm wash over her. Like she was suddenly laid back on a leaf suspended in a cool pond of water instead of covered in sweat and grime standing in a field.

"It's lovely to finally meet you, Anna. If you'll follow me, I'll take you to the passenger bay." Ororo lead her, up the ramp, through a few slim corridors, then they were stood in - what looked like - a gigantic cockpit. In the frontmost portion were two seats, side by side, with an array of blinking lights and knobs with a fancy-looking steering wheel in front of either seat. Behind them were two rows of seats with three chairs, each whose only feature, in contrast, was a couple of heavy-duty-looking seat belts mounted above the shoulders. Ororo lowered Anna into one of the seats by the hand and crouched next to her. "Are you sure you are alright?"

"Yeah - I mean I'll be fine." Anna felt her teeth chatter ever so slightly behind her lips and her toes curl in her boots. She wanted to meet the woman's eyes, but they were almost too much to behold. Not for the same reason that Erik guy was back at the diner. Under his gaze, it felt like two bright lights were blasting you with rays that threatened to melt off your skin. Instead, Ororo's eyes were like two rich galaxies coated in stars and nebulas. It felt as if you brought yourself to look upon them, you might never be able to pull yourself away again.

Without looking into the other woman's eyes, Anna could feel them smiling down on her. "I appreciate your strength and courage, but I can tell when someone is in a great deal of pain. It's your abdomen, isn't it?"

Anna swallowed. "I might have gotten a couple of bruises."

"With your permission, might I try something?"

Anna blinked then eventually nodded. The woman then extended two fingers and pressed them against Anna's stomach. A blanket of comfortable warmth coated the skin under her shirt followed by a pleasant cool that soothed her aching muscles. A moment later, the pain was gone.

"Wow!" Anna looked up at her. "That's amazing!"

Ororo smiled. "I'm not a surgeon, but I know a few tricks."

"Parlor tricks." Logan appeared in the doorway to the cockpit, his forehead dabbed with sweat, he clapped his hands together as if trying to get the dust off of them.

Ororo stood and met his gaze. "If you'd like, Logan, I could probably help you with that nose."

"No thanks. I was the test dummy for a few of those 'tricks' of yours back in the day. Besides, it'll figure itself out in another fifteen or twenty minutes anyway." He slipped his way past her towards the two driver seats. "What do you think? Can the boy take off without his hand being held?"

"What? Of course, I can!" Anna heard Cyclops' voice from the leftmost driver's seat. She hadn't even realized he had joined them up there. "It was like, what, the second thing I learned?"

"Was I talking to you, Summers?" Logan looked over his shoulder back at Ororo. "What do you think?"

"I think he's learning to fly quite quickly. He flew here completely by himself." Ororo slipped by Logan with more grace than he had by her and sat down in the right-most driver's seat. "Still, I'll sit as his co-pilot."

"You can take a nap if you'd like, Storm," Cyclops said. "You've been up longer than me. Besides, I got this."

"Thank you, Cyclops, but I'm feeling just fine. Now, why don't you get us in the air if you don't mind. I'm getting a little tired of all this humidity."

Cyclops started flicking a few switches and clicking buttons. The vehicle around them started to whine and shutter accordingly. "If you can control the weather, why don't you just make it less humid?"

"One does not disrupt an entire ecosystem, simply because their hair is getting frizzy." Ororo suddenly grabbed Cyclops' hand before he went for the wheel.

"What?" He lurched

"Hold on, what have you forgotten to do?"

He sat there, head fixed forward. "The fuel check?"

She nodded her head.

"Well, what does that matter? We have enough to circle the world and it's not like I could stop at a gas station anyway."

"I know I'm not listening to you question our best pilot," Logan growled as dropped into the seat across from Anna.

"I'm not questioning I'm just-"

"You always check everything before takeoff," Ororo said with a deathly jab. "It's the difference between flying and falling out of the sky."

Cyclops's lips looked poised to argue further, but if he was going to say anything, he swallowed it back down. He clicked a button and a hazy holographic display appeared before him.

"92%," He said, voice flat.

"Good," Ororo replied. "Continue."

Anna watched as Cyclops took the funky-looking wheel in both of his yellow gloved hands and pulled it back towards his chest. It pulled back in his grasp and the whole aircraft shuttered, made a loud whirring noise, and started to rise. Anna looked out the wide window to her right and watched as the ground below them slowly start to shrink.

"Ever flown before, kid?" She heard Logan ask.

"No - never." She felt a hand grip her shoulder and throw her down in the seat.

"Well, the first thing you do is fasten your seat belt." He tugged one of the crisscrossing belts free from over her shoulder and wiggled it in her face. She snapped it out of his hand and jammed them in their respective sockets. "Jeez, you didn't have to be a dick about it, you know."

Logan sneered at her, his yellow teeth poking out from under his thin lip, as he fastened his seat belts. "Love to hear you calling me names when Captain Confidence up there wraps us around a tree going a thousand miles an hour and the only thing that saves you is those two bits of woven nylon."

"Logan." Ororo snapped from the front seat.

"What? I'm sure he'll do just fine." Logan crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat.

The aircraft continued to rise higher and higher straight up till they were almost amongst the clouds. A moment later there was another shutter, then a vibration that rocked the whole ship back and forth till they started speeding up faster and faster forward. Anna was pushed flat back into her seat, her ears stinging from the pressure. Teeth clenched, she watched as streaks of water raced each other on the glass canopy. After what felt like an eternity, the acceleration stopped and she felt like she could breathe again. She blinked, then looked down out the window. Past fluffy orange and pink clouds were winding roads and rows of cars with headlights ablaze. She could see for miles, further than she could ever have imagined. "God-" Anna whispered, her breath fogging the glass. "It's there. It's all down there and I'm finally leaving it…"

"Please tell me someone activated the cloak." She just managed to hear Logan say over the popping in her ears.

"Yeah - I got it." Cyclops snapped.

"Good. Because if you didn't, any yocal would have seen that ascent and sworn the aliens had arrived after all.

Anna leaned back from the window. "A cloak? You mean - we're invisible right now?"

"Well, practically." Logan crossed his legs and shook his foot. "A thing this big can't really be invisible per-say, but it can refract light. It's some more sophisticated stealth tech that started being developed back in the '80s."

"That's intense." Anna looked at the backs of Ororo and Cyclops and then back at Logan. "So, who are you guys exactly? This all looks like some pretty serious hardware… are you, like, paramilitary types?"

"No, kid, you just escaped the paramilitary types," Logan answered with even more gristle in his voice than usual. "We're - well - I guess you could call us 'peace-keepers'. I'd call us hippies with a particularly fat wallet -" Anna could hear Ororo snicker from her seat up front and Logan grinned.

"We're the good guys." Cyclops chimed in and the smile washed off Logan's face.

"Yeah." He said then shifted the feet he had crossed and ran one hand along the length of his leg. "What we do is similar to The Brotherhood, it's just we don't use people as weapons. We find kids, like you, and we help them come to terms with their abilities. Help them control them and use em.' And we give them a safe place to learn them.

"Normally, when we find that new mutant has sprung up, we will contact the parents, explain who we are, what is going on with their kid, explain what we do - stuff like that. We didn't get the opportunity with you -" Logan made an odd sort of flutter gesture with his right hand. "Well, circumstances didn't allow for it."

Anna looked down at her feet. Her brow flattened to a line and her tongue ran along the front of her top teeth behind her lip. "Because my Mom is Mystique, right?"

A silence fell over the cockpit like a sudden wash of cold water from a bucket. Anna could feel individual hairs standing on end from necks, pulses picking up and lips were being peeled back and prepared for combat.

The aircraft jerked to one side and Cyclops craned his neck around his seat to look back at her. "What did you just say?" The craft jerked again as Ororo took command from her co-pilot controls.

Before Anna could reply, Logan cut her off at the pass. "Cool your jets, Summers."

"Er - Excuse me," Cyclops stood out of his chair and faced Anna." But I'm pretty sure she just said she's Mystique's kid. Did I just hear that right? Do we actually have our actual arch-rival's kid on board?"

"We were going to tell you and the others at the right time." Logan sat on the edge of his seat. "Now sit back down!"

"When the hell was that going to be, Logan? After she sold us out to her fucking mother? After she sent photos and recordings of our training sessions to The Brotherhood along with our blood types and favorite types of cereal?"

Logan undid his seatbelt and stood to meet Cyclops. "This is why I was waiting to tell you -"

"Yeah, I don't blame you! Because had I known earlier, I would have left her down in that field where she belonged!"

"That was never a call you could make, bub. This is my mission - not yours. Your job is to learn to fly the damn plane." Logan pressed a finger into Cyclops' chest. "Xavier may have made you into a squad leader, but you aren't the leader of this operation, kid. If me or Ororo tell you to jump, you do it, if we tell you to crash the fucking jet into the ground, you do it." He pointed back at Anna. "Right now, this girl is coming back with us, and I'm telling you to shut the hell up and sit back down!"

Cyclops looked back down into Logan's face through his visor. His lips quivered a moment before drawing to a line. He then straightened his back, shoulder-checked Logan, and walked out of the cockpit through the sliding doors. Anna watched him walk off till the doors slid back closed behind him.

"Damn, pup," Logan growled.