Beside her, Scott frowned and grabbed her slender forearm, immediately noticing the cold sweat on her face and the determined set of her eyes. Desperation tinged his expression and his voice. "Jean? Jean, what is it? Is he waking up? Can he hear you?"

She raised a hand impatiently, and he reluctantly fell silent, but he could not draw his gaze away from the limp body of the professor and the taught form of the girl that stood beside him. The silence of the room was nearly palpable, the clicking of monitors and the professor's carefully measured breaths not interrupted by a single utterance from his nearly constant visitors.

"He…he's in there…I can feel him trying to reach out…trying to get free of whatever is holding him back…"

Scott, with all his legendary calm and his tendency to overlook almost anything that wasn't presented directly to him, understood the profundity of those words with the clarity of an almost incomprehensible apprehension. He felt himself go cold with the shock of barely hoped-for joy, the grief that hovered over his mind beginning to finally lift. His limbs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds and he was unable to move. A quiet sigh of relief escaped him, and Jean gently took his hand in her smaller one and gave it a tender squeeze. On the other side of the room, Rogue shifted underneath her pale gray hospital blanket and whispered something unintelligible. Jean dashed a hand across her eyes, hoping not to frighten Scott with her tears.

"He's definitely still in there. And he's fighting something crazy."

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It only took a few 'ports to reach his intended destination, first to a parking garage of a business he knew to be closed and then to an alley behind a local grocery, where he sent several homeless felines scattering with earsplitting yowls of feral alarm. Knowing it was better not to continue in such a manner onto the open sidewalk outside the Brotherhood's home, and not knowing the specific layout of the building itself, he tore down the side of the street to the house on foot. It would not do anyone any good to be noticed 'porting in the open or to find himself partially lodged through an unfamiliar wall or piece of furniture.

His lungs were blazing and his side cramped up in a sudden stitch as he was arriving on the property, but passion urged him on. There was still a good chance that he, whose method of travel was virtually instantaneous, had arrived before his fleet-footed opponent had done so. With his eyes narrowed into slits, he stepped over the scrubby landscaping at the edge of the property and tried not to think of the strange implications of doing so. He briefly wondered if Nat had felt the same odd sensation when she had first set foot here, and the thought once again made him wonder if she had spent time alone with Pietro, in one of the rooms upstairs. He felt a prickly twinge in his stomach and chest and pushed such thoughts roughly from his mind. He glanced back and forth, looking for some sign of Nat's or Pietro's presence and, finding none, turned to the front steps and began to make his way up them.

He promptly felt himself go cold.

At the top of the broken cobblestone steps, set back on a deep porch and heavily shaded from the noonday sun, the empty whole where the door should have stood gaped blankly, a hole in the head of the house looking oddly black like knocked-out teeth. His breath caught in his throat and his feet were temporarily immobile, rooted on the third stair up from the bottom with his hand hovering weakly over the banister. The sound of his heartbeat knocked about inside his skull.

Recovering after what felt like an eternity, Kurt made his way into the house, moving quickly on wobbling knees and dashing up the carpeted staircase. He scanned the stairs and followed dirty boot tracks that were far too large for Nat to have made and seemed too fresh for the males of the house to have made earlier that morning. The unique and altogether recognizable odor of Nat's smoke lingered in the hallway but was beginning to fade. He tried to ignore the throbbing between his temples and moved toward another empty doorway at the top of the stairs as quickly as his wobbling legs would allow, not trusting his state of mind enough to attempt to 'port.

He took in the scene silently, his vision swimming in what might have been tears. Streaks of smoke stained the walls of the lavishly decorated room and books and manila folders were scattered across the woven carpets, torn and battered by furious hands that he was sure had been hers. He knelt and shuffled through them, lifting one particularly mutilated folder when he noted a familiar name scrawled across the label tab in Mystique's distinctively narrow script. Carefully withdrawing a photograph, he felt his lungs and heart contract when he recognized the dark-haired girl and the frightened cast of her face.

He didn't remember any of it happening. After all, he was the thin blue figure sprawled on the pavement beside her, his head pillowed on her thigh. He could see the shapes of a Ferris wheel and the back of the bumper car stall behind her, and distantly he could make out the regal silhouette of Ororo Monroe and the smaller one of Kitty Pryde. Part of the view was obscured by the fender of a green automobile. The photograph had been snapped by a voyeur, in the parking lot of the amusement park on that fateful afternoon.

He could just imagine whose fingers had taken that picture.

He hands began to shake and he dropped the photo onto the rug, casting his gaze about once more and gagging on rising bile when an unfamiliar chemical invaded his nostrils. A dirty rag, reeking with the scent of the strange stuff, had been thrown aside as soon as its necessity had been worn out. Taking note of a small smear of blood and a knot of dark hair ground into the carpet, he felt his legs beginning to give out, and turned to grab onto the wall for support, his palm resting in the hollow that Natalie's fist had gashed into the plaster not long before. Tears of fear and rage streamed down his cheeks and he jerked to one side to wretch dryly into the base of a potted plant.

"What the hell is goin' on, Nightcrawler?"