53 kuzuri part 1

"This is it," Kitty Pryde announced, opening her arms. "Like I said, it's spotless, just like the other one."

Clark looked around, carefully; it turned out that the horrific massacre he investigated earlier — covered up by, probably, Yashida Corporation —, had been the last one, but not the only one. It hadn't even been the second one.

It was the seventh, and according to Kitty Pryde, the body count was well above 40; it was hard to know exactly, since every single crime scene had been cleaned up and official reports simply didn't exist.

Whatever was happening there, they needed to put an end to it, before things got even worse.

Luckily for them, however, even though this crime scene had been cleaned and even though it was older than the one he checked before, his Kryptonian senses still could pick up some clues. And not only his Kryptonian senses, Clark noticed with amazement, but apparently the ones Rogue had copied from him too.

He still hadn't got used to that.

"Holy hell…" Rogue whispered, sheer shock on her expression as she stared at the place. "I can see it!"

"See what?" Kitty asked, looking at Rogue as if she were crazy.

"Everything!" Rogue exclaimed, glancing at Kitty and then at him with wide eyes. "I can see where the blood stains were, fingerprints, footprints, little cracks and marks in the wall from the fighting… My god, is this how you see things all the time?!"

They were both looking at him now; Clark just nodded.

"No wonder you're good at what you do," Rogue breathed, still looking around. "This place has been cleaned days ago and I still can see stuff. This is amazing…"

Clark couldn't help but to smile at the sight. Rogue was probably the only person in the entire universe that could see the world exactly like he could. She thought his gifts were amazing? What her mutant ability could do, replicate mutant and even complex alien physiology with a single touch, that was amazing.

Not for the first time, he wondered exactly how mutants came to be, because some of the stuff they could do was nothing short of incredible, and they were still undeniably humans. Telepaths, people who could shift their atomic composition to phase through solid things, metal manipulation…

Could some advanced alien civilization had something to do with that? Or maybe even gods?

That was an interesting line of questioning, but at the moment they didn't have the time to dwell on that. There were more important things to solve, like finding the mutant girl who was being hunted by Yashida Corporation.

Or was hunting them, given the amount of people she had already killed. It was difficult to tell.

Focusing on the task, Clark started his investigation. The signs left by the fight were still there, less evident when compared to the most recent crime scene, but good enough to give him an idea of what happened. Like before, a small person — the mutant girl, no doubt — stood alone against an overwhelming armed force, using nothing but small blades — adamantium blades. Like before, she had been shot, sliced and hit with blunt force.

And like before she had won, slaughtering her opponents in such a way that the crime scene was left covered in blood and severed body parts.

There was another thing that remained the same as well.

Walking to the center of the place, Clark kneeled by a manhole; a manhole that had traces of small footprints leading to it, just like in the previous crime scene.

"The sewer?!" Kitty asked, unable to keep the horror out of her voice, understanding his line of thought.

"It's not a sewer," Rogue corrected her, glancing at the manhole with a frown; she was looking through it, Clark noticed, still amazed by it.

"It leads to the subway," Clark explained, "just like the one in the previous crime scene." He grinned. "And do you know who happens to manage most of Tokyo's subway lines?"

Both mutant girls looked at him, expectantly, as he carefully lifted the manhole cover.

"Yashida Corporation," Clark answered, glad that he'd decided to make use of the free time he had during his flight to Tokyo and read Natasha's files on them. He looked down at the dark tunnel, then back at them. "Shall we?"

Rogue still didn't know exactly what the connection between the murders and the subway lines was. Was the mutant girl using the subway lines to hide? Was she using them to hunt? Were Yashida Corporation's men using it to move around the city, fast, as they hunted her?

She had no idea, but it was a clue and they were following to see where it led. Better yet, they were following footprints.

Small, bloody, invisible to the human eye footprints, but Clark Kent could see them and, because of his gifts, Rogue could too, even in the dark tunnels; it was overwhelming at first, but Rogue was beginning to like this enhanced vision thing, it was useful as hell.

Not only because it allowed them to follow the mutant girl, but because Rogue could walk around in the dark without tripping every five steps, like Kitty.

"Damn it!" Kitty cursed again, the metallic sound of her feet hitting the rails echoing. "I knew I should've brought a flashlight!"

"Hold my hand," Clark offered, gently grabbing Kitty so she wouldn't fall. "I'll guide you."

Rogue frowned, annoyed; typical, even when she won, she still lost. Sure, holding hands wasn't exactly a safe activity when she was involved, but did Kitty really need to rub it in her face?

"Can't you just make your feet intangible?" Rogue suggested, barely able to keep her displeasure from showing.

"No need, I have a guide now," Kitty answered, smug.

"Whatever, let's move before a train kills us all," Rogue retorted, starting to walk again.

"Not many trains right now, the subway is closed," Clark said, helpfully. "We have about half an hour until it opens again, but for now they're only moving a couple of cars for repairs and such. You can hear them move in the distance if you pay attention."

Paying attention was Rogue's mistake, she realized too late.

Either because of the snippets of memories she got from Clark or because she was finally getting used to the enhanced senses, Rogue had managed to ignore all the loud sounds of the city around her; they were still there, of course, but as background noise that she could just disregard.

When Clark said that, however, her first instinct was to listen.

He was right, the trains were far away, but that made no difference, Rogue could hear them as if they were passing right next to her. Metal against metal, the air being pushed aside when the train advanced, the cars clacking against each other… Without even realizing, Rogue fell to her knees, covering her ears, trying to stop the sudden and overwhelming assault against her senses.

The pain was unbearable. How could someone live like this?! Rogue felt as if someone was drilling her brain and pouring liquid fire in her skull, but worse.

She barely noticed a pair of hands touching her gloved ones, also covering her ears.

"Look at me, Rogue," she heard Clark say, wincing as his voice added to the pain.

Still, she tried to do what he asked.

"Focus on my voice," Clark said, as softly as he could, staring at her eyes. "Ignore everything else. Pretend it's an island…"

"… out in the ocean," Rogue finished, a sudden stream of memories playing inside her mind.

A woman's voice. A woman she loved very much… No, a woman he loved very much.

His mother.

Clark slightly widened his eyes, surprised at her answer, but he didn't allow it to stop him.

"Can you see it?" he asked, after a moment, feeling Rogue slowly relax.

The overwhelming sounds started to fade, pushed back to a place where she could ignore them. There was only her and Clark, nothing else.

"I see it," Rogue whispered, not knowing if she was actually answering the question or quoting a memory.

"Then swim towards it, Rogue."

Rogue opened her eyes, but instead of seeing a dark tunnel, she saw a woman with a gentle face; she felt warm when she hugged her.

"What's wrong with me, mom?"

It was the voice of a young boy. A young Clark, Rogue realized.

As suddenly as it appeared, the memory faded, and she was looking at the concerned expressions of an aged Clark Kent and Kitty.

Shaking her head for a moment, Rogue gathered her strength and got up, supporting herself on Clark.

"Rogue?" Kitty asked, and the concern on her voice was just plain weird.

"I'm good," Rogue answered, doing her best to sound normal. "I got it under control."

Both of them still looked at her like she could fall down at any moment, but Rogue just met their stares defiantly, almost daring them to say anything; they didn't. Instead, they nodded, and started to walk again.

Rogue followed them a second later, unable to pull her eyes from Clark.

For a moment, all she could see was the scared kid of her memories. It seemed she wasn't the only one there that had a hard time with her powers.

Not for the first time, Clark worried about Rogue's current situation and his hand in it, no matter how unintentional. Despite the fact that he was very much enjoying hanging out with a fellow Kryptonian — even if not a real one —, the consequences for her life could be far less pleasant.

There was a reason why Zod tried so hard to terraform Earth, after all, and it was not only because he was a psychopathic conqueror.

Kryptonians needed Krypton's atmosphere to ground their abilities under a yellow sun, otherwise the sheer boost of power they got from it became almost unbearably painful. It took incredible discipline and force of will to learn to control all that, control that very few Kryptonians seemed to possess.

As far as he knew, Clark was the only Kryptonian in history who had actually grown up under a yellow sun, without Krypton's atmosphere; he could only hope Rogue's gifts could also replicate what he learned through years of pain, at least to give her some comfort until her body went back to normal.

"So, how did you find out about all this?" Kitty asked, squeezing his hand to get his attention. "The killings, I mean. We only learned about it because of the Professor." She suddenly gasped. "Did the Avengers send you?! So it's true, you actually hang out with them?"

Clark had no idea what kind of rumors had been going on about him and his relationship with the Avengers, but at least they worked as an alibi as to why "Clark Kent" spent so much time at the Avengers Tower.

Umm, in fact, yes," he answered after a moment. "Well, not all the Avengers, just one, Natasha Romanoff. She pointed me in the right direction to see if I could find out something, to know if they needed to get involved."

"The famous Black Widow!" Kitty exclaimed, shaking her head excitedly. She looked at Rogue, or at least in her direction, since it was unlikely she could actually see her in the dark. "Logan told us about her, they're old friends. Well, I guess Captain America is, in fact, his old friend, but you know what I mean."

Wait, what?

"She tried to kill him," Rogue explained, as if that were the most normal thing to say in the world. "Obviously that didn't take, and no matter how much Logan tries to deny it, he does have a soft spot for children, so he let her go."

He didn't know what was more surprising: the fact that Natasha tried to kill this Logan when she was a kid — something that, knowing her past, shouldn't be a surprise anymore but still was — or the fact that he survived.

Either this guy was very skilled or his mutation was that powerful; maybe both, but before he could reach any conclusion or even think about how Captain America was involved in all this, Kitty went on.

"They met years later again," she said, "by accident, when they were both hunting this Russian mutant Super-Soldier serial killer." Again, Clark didn't know exactly how to react to that information. "She was one of the good guys by then, so they actually worked together."

"Can you imagine, Logan willingly working together with someone?" Kitty remarked, sighing. "What does she have that we don't? Do you think it's because she tried to kill him, is that the secret?"

"Nah, I almost killed him before and he still doesn't take me to important missions," Rogue countered.

"Yeah, but you didn't mean it. Maybe that's how you get Logan to respect you, an honest to god attempt on his life."

Clark would have asked for clarification on the matter, but as he opened his mouth, a familiar smell assaulted his nose: gunpowder.

He stopped for a moment, sniffing the air, while the two girls looked at him a bit confused.

"Gunpowder," Rogue finally got it. She pointed to the end of the tunnel, uncertain. "That way?"

Gently, Clark adjusted the direction of her hand to point at the right direction.

"More like that way, it's coming from the South tunnels," he said, nudging at the left path in the tunnel bifurcation. "It's fresh, I'd say less than an hour ago. I can smell blood too... And I can listen to a heartbeat." He turned to them. "We should hurry."

Before they could go on, however, Kitty stopped them.

"Can we take a shortcut through the walls?" she asked, suddenly, pointing at the nearby wall. "Instead of walking the entire tunnel down here and turning at the end, can't we just skip through a few walls?"

The very first thought that occurred Clark was that any serious damage to the walls, inside a tunnel, could collapse the whole thing; then he remembered. Kitty wasn't asking for him to break the walls, she was asking if they could go through them.

Quickly, he checked with his x-ray vision.

"Yeah," Clark said, grinning. "That would work." He looked at her, interested. "Can you make other people intangible too?"

"People, things… It takes a bit more focusing, but for a short run? Yeah."

Walking to the wall, Kitty turned her back to it and raised both arms, shaking them slightly for them to hold her hands. They did so.

"Okay, don't forget to hold your breath, there's no air inside the walls," she said. "And don't let go of my hand."

Kitty looked back at the wall for a second, then started walking backwards, pulling them slowly. Clark marveled when she disappeared into the wall, sinking into it like Hogwarts students did when they crossed Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, first her legs, then her torso and head, until only her two arms remained, holding Clark and Rogue's hands.

Then she pulled them too.

Except it didn't go as they planned.

CRACK!

Both he and Rogue, guided by Kitty, stepped forward, ready to plunge themselves into the wall as if they were jumping into a pool. But while Kitty's arms retreated back into the concrete, theirs didn't, and both of them hit their foreheads against the wall, cracking it slightly.

"God damn it, Kitty!" Rogue cursed, jumping back while she rubbed her forehead; probably more because of the shock than because of pain. "Since when two people is too much for you?"

Kitty's face appeared back in the tunnel, frowning. Without saying anything, she got out of the wall and walked to them. Then, slowly, she poked their bellies. Clark watched, curious and a little bit anxious, as Kitty tried one, two, three times.

Until her hand disappeared into him and Rogue's stomach.

It was one of the weirdest things he had ever felt. He could feel her hand inside him, moving, going through his organs, his very molecules, but it didn't hurt. Odd, but not painful.

With an expression of effort on her face, Kitty wiggled her fingers inside them for a few seconds, and then finally pulled her hands back.

She stared at him, accusingly.

"How dense are you?!" Kitty exclaimed. "It's worse than going through Logan's skeleton!"

"I, umm, don't really know," Clark answered, uncertain, not knowing what the density of his body had to do with Logan's skeleton of all things; he was getting more and more curious about this guy, but that wasn't time for that kind of conversation. "Does it make that much of a difference?"

"Yes! You could have warned me before!" Kitty held their hands again. "Now, come on, we're going as fast as we can, it's like trying to swim with weights dragging me down."

Saying this, she started pulling towards the wall again.

"This better work," Rogue started, "otherw—

Whatever Rogue was about to say was left to their imagination, because suddenly they were inside the walls and light and sound disappeared completely; Clark was, once again, completely in awe with what some of the mutants could do.

His enhanced tact allowed him to feel his molecules moving, their atoms shifting themselves to squeeze between the wall, but never breaking free. A normal human would never be able to feel this, but to his Kryptonian physiology it was as if his entire body was vibrating, pulsing at just the right frequency to allow him to move between solid concrete.

Clark couldn't help but to wonder if he could be able to replicate that using his super-speed, now that he had experienced this bizarre feeling once. Maybe if he learned how to vibrate his body down to his molecules…

Before he could finish his thoughts, however, they emerged at the other side, almost as if jumping out of water. Rogue took a long a breath, shaking herself as if she wanted to scratch an itch; she probably felt exactly what Clark did with her copied Kryptonian sense of touch, but didn't know what she was feeling.

"My god, it was like dragging an anchor while swimming across mud," Kitty said, breathing heavily. "I shouldn't have eaten that much ram—"

Kitty immediately stopped talking when she noticed Clark and Rogue's shocked expressions. She wasn't that distracted, it wasn't really her fault, she simply couldn't see the end of the tunnel like Clark and Rogue could; she couldn't see the very recent crime scene they had spotted.

They had finally found a fresh trail, still untouched by Yashida Corporation, complete would blood, corpses, severed body parts and evidence of one hell of a fight.

But instead of rushing there immediately, Clark went directly to the other thing he had spotted before: the heartbeat sounds. Someone there was still alive; beyond terrified, according to his accelerated pulse, but alive. Moving fast, he quickly found a small maintenance door on the wall, so small and so badly illuminated that someone without his Kryptonian vision could easily miss. Without hesitation, he opened it.

"Kuzuri!" yelled the panicked man, most likely a subway technician going by his uniform.

Rogue and Kitty arrived behind him at that moment, both staring shocked at the man, who had his arms raised as if begging for his life; there was no doubt in his mind that the man had witnessed what happened, and by the tears and the pale white face, it had been a horrible sight.

They needed information, but for that, Clark really needed to calm him down.

Dr. Zander Rice felt no small amount of satisfaction when he saw Yashida Corporation's men dragging his wayward pet back, wrapped up in a steel net, her arms and legs pierced by harpoons and forcibly chained together, a muzzle and a leash keeping her head from moving. To an unsuspecting person, doing that to a young girl might've seen excessive, maybe even cruel; Dr. Rice knew, however, that they were not dealing with a girl.

X-23 was an animal — the trail of corpses she left behind was more than enough proof — and needed to be contained.

Yashida's men entered the lab as if they were coming back from war, covered in blood, some wounded, all of them somber. Without saying a word, they took her to the table and tossed her there, each of them pulling the harpoons piercing her limbs to keep her from moving, while Rice's assistants strapped her down.

The little beast fought every second, completely ignoring the blood spurting from her wounds, as she tried to hit the men with her claws.

Her very deadly adamantium claws, coming out from her hands and feet.

When Dr. Rice was certain she was well tied up, he gestured for the people to leave the room and approached, a smile on his face; somehow, the expression seemed wrong on him. His young and handsome features weren't warmed by the grin, quite the opposite. They grew cold.

Cruel.

Dr. Rice pushed the red hair away from his face as he approached, never taking his eyes from the mutant, his lab coat fluttering behind him. How could someone so small cause so many problems? When Dr. Rice accepted Yashida's challenge to clone that accursed mutant, he never imagined things could escalate this badly.

It was a way to make his career, a way to continue the work his father had started in Weapon X, a way to show the world the brilliant scientist he knew he was.

So far, he had failed to clone Weapon X, failed to come up with a solution to solve that, failed to stop Sarah Kinney from taking the project from him and turning it into the unruly animal in front of him. Instead of a Wolverine, they had only an overly aggressive puppy.

But maybe he still could salvage the situation. The true value of X-23 wasn't in a brainwashed killer — Yashida Corporation actually had an entire ninja clan sworn to them for that —, nor it was in the adamantium coating her bone claws.

It was in her DNA. More specifically, it was in Wolverine's DNA inside her, the DNA his father had acquired years ago, during the Weapon X Program, before the whole thing fell apart and the frenzied mutant slaughtered everyone. The DNA responsible for one of the most impressive healing factors ever seen, capable of curing any disease and healing any wound. Maybe the key to immortality itself.

And it belonged to them.

He grabbed a long needle, staring in X-23's hateful eyes. It was time to take it back.

Kuzuri, Kuzuri, Kuzuri…"

The guy was obviously traumatized by whatever brutality he'd witnessed, Rogue knew that, and that was why she felt a little bit bad for the sudden urge to smack him until he stopped repeating that; that and the fact that Clark needed him conscious to get information.

Maybe if she touched him just tiny bit…

"Don't even think about it," Kitty warned, without even looking at her.

"What?" Rogue asked, as if she hadn't any idea what she meant.

Kitty turned to her, a "Really?!" expression on her face.

"You don't know if you'll get any useful memory out of him, all you know is that you'll knock him out," Kitty pointed out, ignoring Rogue's groan. "Which, I agree, would be nice… But a dick move, nonetheless."

"Fine!" Rogue snapped. "What you're doing, anyway? You've been staring at the wall for the last 10 minutes."

"I'm not staring at the wall, I'm staring at the subway map drawn there," Kitty explained.

It turned out that the room where the traumatized guy hid himself was a small, maintenance room. It had a few terminals, lots of tools, and, apparently, a detailed map of the entire Tokyo subway that Rogue had all but ignored so far, given it was written in Japanese and she had no knowledge of the language whatsoever.

"Why you're so interested?" Rogue asked, glancing to the side as Clark slowly got the man talking.

Kitty grinned and pointed at some part of the map.

"Clark said Yashida Corporation managed the subway, but they do a bit more than that. See?" Rogue couldn't see anything; Kitty rolled her eyes and circled her hand around the entire map. "All these are the subway lines that run beneath Tokyo. But you see those lines over here? They're closed to public trains."

She slapped her hands together.

"Yashida Corporation built a private subway just for them!" Kitty concluded. "Their personnel can go directly where they need to via these subway lines."

Rogue approached the map, eyes fixed on the stations of the private lines, marked by little colorful dots and Japanese letters, each of them a direct access to Yashida Corporation's facilities across Tokyo.

"Can you translate this?" she asked, curious.

"Some," Kitty admitted. "This one seems to be a hospital. This one is their main building, of course, and this one is a factory, maybe? My Japanese is a little bit rusty."

"You wouldn't know what Kuzuri means, then?" Rogue asked, annoyed at the word being uttered again by the traumatized guy talking to Clark. "Because whatever it is, it seems to be important to that guy."

"It's a relatively new addition to Japanese folklore," Clark explained before Kitty could, showing them his phone, as if explaining where the hell he got that information; quite a good phone he had there, to be able to google stuff down there, Rogue noticed. Tapping the man's shoulder one last time, Clark went to them. "From a little bit after WWII. According to the stories, it's an animal, a fierce creature with long claws and sharp teeth, that fears nothing and no one. It cannot be killed." He glanced at the pale man, a little bit calmer now. "He thinks that's what he saw in the tunnels."

Both girls looked at the man as well; it wouldn't be the first time that a mutant inspired legends. Before any of them could say anything, however, Clark went on.

"Of course, a more literal translation of the word Kuzuri is 'Wolverine'," he added, absentmindedly.

Rogue and Kitty snapped their heads towards him, eyes wide.

"Oh, you gotta be kidding me," Rogue muttered, as Kitty quickly grabbed her phone and walked to the subway technician.

"Is this the one you saw?" Kitty asked, showing something at the startled man. "This man over here, is he the Kuzuri?"

She was showing him a picture, Rogue realized, a picture of Kitty, Rogue, Jubilee and Logan that Kitty had convinced him to take one day, back in the mansion. Clark translated Kitty's question to the guy, forehead frowned in confusion.

The guy shook his head negativelyboth Kitty and Rogue exhaled, relieved. It was a good thing Logan wasn't there, since he had all but forbade them from leaving the apartment, much less work with Clark.

It had to be their missing mutant, then, and the name — Kuzuri — had to be some kind of freaky coincidence. Like the adamantium blades. And the possible healing factor. And the extreme violence.

Rogue had the feeling they were missing a very important part of that puzzle…

"He says they boarded a train after the fight," Clark mentioned, listening as the man talked, "that went in that direction."

He pointed at the map on the wall, at the lines where Kitty claimed were reserved for Yashida Corporation's private trains. But to which station, exactly? That question was answered almost immediately, by Clark himself, who simply peered with his enhanced vision towards the direction the train took.

God, those heightened senses of his could be a pain in the ass, but they were damn useful!

Smiling, he tapped the dot marking the station on the map.

"Here," Clark said. "A Yashida Corporation's Biochemical Genetic Lab."

Oh, shit, that wasn't good.

"We have to go, now!" Rogue said, urgently. Mutants and labs didn't mix very well.

Both Clark and Kitty agreed, and with one last look to confirm that the subway technician was indeed well, they left the room, walking fast.

They needed to find that mutant girl before it was too late.

Wow, I've seen banks' vaults that seemed less secure than that!" Kitty whispered, eyes wide, as she leaned a little bit to look.

Clark was forced to agree. The three of them were hidden behind a train, the same one that supposedly took the mutant girl, now stopped right in front of the station leading to the Yashida Corporation's Biochemical Genetic Lab; instead of a simple stairway or an elevator leading up, however, the path was blocked by what seemed to be a door of a nuclear shelter.

A door guarded by a bunch of armed men.

Whatever they had in that lab was valuable, and he was pretty sure the security measures would be able to fend off a small army; luckily for them, they were a bit more than a small army. Even if Clark — and now Rogue, he supposed — couldn't punch a hole through that door, Kitty was more than able to simply ignore it and get in anyway.

As for the guards… Clark's only concern was not hurting them too badly; now that he thought about it, he remembered as he glanced at Rogue, that was a very real possibility.

"Look, maybe I should go alone from here—" Clark started, but was promptly interrupted.

"No way!" Rogue said, immediately. She gestured towards Kitty. "We're X-Men, it's our job. Maybe you should stay back and call the Avengers, we've actually done this sort of thing before! You're a reporter… A mutant one, but a reporter. You weren't trained for this kind of stuff!"

Well, it was hard to argue with that without giving himself away.

"Yeah, what she said!" Kitty agreed. "The last thing we need is another Logan."

"Okay, fine!" Clark said, before they forgot where they were and raised their voices. "But I have some ground rules, and they're non-negotiable. First: no unnecessary risks. I know you're trained, and that one of you is intangible and the other is bulletproof—"

"I am?!" Rogue exclaimed.

"—…but I don't want any of you hurt for taking stupid chances."

Clark waited a moment, to fully grab their attention.

"Two: no one dies! And no serious injuries if we can avoid it."

"We're not murderers!" Kitty argued, affronted. "No matter how much some of those people might deserve it…"

"I'm glad to hear it," Clark said, sincerely, "but that's not what I meant." He turned to Rogue. "Rogue, the gifts you copied haven't faded yet, have they?" Frowning, she shook her head; Clark leaned closer. "Then listen to me very carefully: your muscles and bones are extraordinarily strong right now. I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying this so you know just how easily you can kill someone just by touching them."

Clark stared into her green eyes, trying to convey just how serious he was.

"Punch a little harder than you intended, squeeze a bit harsher, crash against them a little faster, and their bodies will literally paint the walls red." Both Rogue and Kitty got a little pale by the graphic description. "I'm not exaggerating, I'm stating a fact. Your body is a weapon right now, and like any weapon, you have to wield it responsibly."

By the very wide green eyes staring back at him, it seemed Rogue understood the gravity of the situation.

"You were always a mistake, X-23," Dr. Zander Rice prattled, as he walked around the immobilized girl, barely paying any attention to her. "The DNA sample my father got from Weapon X was too damaged, and after 22 attempts we were unable to salvage the Y chromosome, so Sarah Kinney proposed the idiotic idea of creating a female clone instead. I warned Yashida-sama, but Sarah Kinney disobeyed everyone and went ahead with it anyway… Thus, you were created."

This time, he looked at her, his eyes cold; she barely reacted.

"A mistake," he repeated. "A failed attempt to salvage the experiment from disaster, and one that cost us 13 years. And for what? A feral animal, unable to obey? A watered-down version of Weapon X? The healing factor within you cannot even be transferred to someone else!"

Something that greatly upset Yashida-sama; after all, why else would he spend so much money on this?

Yashida-sama was old and he was dying, and at this point there was only one thing that could change that: Weapon X's healing factor. But all their attempts to lure or recapture him had failed, and the experiment to clone him had resulted in the useless animal strapped down in front of him.

And her healing factor, probably because of the failed cloning process, was lethal to anyone else but her.

The subjects injected with it found that out the hard way, when an unstoppable cancerous growth took their bodies completely; they were more tumor than humans when they put them down.

No, it was time to start over.

"I will take what I can back from you," he informed the girl, "and I will do it properly this time. As for you, the Silver Samurais have been informed. They will take you back to Yashida-sama… Or at least your corpse."

Dr. Rice grinned cruelly at the girl; and she still didn't react.

He felt a hot fury grow inside him. She would learn to fear him before the end.

Rogue had a big problem, and she had no idea how to solve it.

She nodded almost automatically, as Clark calmly explained to her how to best control her new temporary gifts. He went on and on, giving her a crash course on how to avoid hurting people too much during fights, how to put them down quick and easy — but causing the least amount possible of harm —, how not to accidentally kill someone by just touching them.

That, by itself, wasn't the problem; the problem was how close he was standing to her as he did that.

Clark leaned over her as they hid behind the train, whispering in her ear, his breath tickling face, his heat emanating from his skin to hers almost as if he was a human-shaped sun. Rogue was barely breathing, eyes straight forward, as she did the best she could to ignore the growing feeling slowly taking over her.

Arousal.

It wasn't her fault! A lifetime without intimacy, without proximity, without touch, was taking its toll, and being close to someone that hot as he whispered in her ear was seriously testing her limits.

She knew it was wrong, that the timing couldn't be worse — Clark was trying to teach her how not to kill people, as they prepared to save a mutant girl from being experimented upon or killed — but no matter how much she tried to ignore her feelings, no matter how much she tried to stop the very steamy thoughts playing in her disobedient brain, Rogue couldn't. It got to the point where her entire body became warm, almost unbearably hot, almost as if waves of pure heat were traveling through her.

It was only when the heat got to her eyes, so powerfully that they actually burned, that Rogue knew something was wrong.

Clark noticed what was happening just as she did. With wide eyes, before Rogue could even think, he grabbed her by the back of her head — using her hair not to touch her skin directly — and turned her face away from him and Kitty.

Rogue understood why he did that a second later, when a pair of red beams of energy was unleashed from her eyes.

It was as if Hell itself was spilling out of her eyes, unstoppable, unforgiving, devastating. The train they were using to hide themselves simply melt like an ice cube facing a flamethrower, the liquified metal spattering away as the pair of energy beams reduced one of the cars to nothing and went on.

Right in the direction of the lab's fortified entrance.

The armed guards in front of the door had no time to even react, and if Clark hadn't grabbed her head and aimed the beams away, they would've been vaporized; as it was, the heat beams passed between them, clashing against the fortified door directly.

There was no resistance, not even a moment when the reinforced steel doors stopped or slowed down the heat beams. The red energy melted a hole through it, completely annihilating the doors, leaving a pile of liquified metal behind.

Rogue could see it all, even as the beams of pure heat poured out of her eyes; as it all happened, a stray thought inside her mind compared it to the few times she had absorbed Scott's power. Like Cyclops, her eyes were also reduced to nothing more than a weapon of mass destruction, a cannon that dispensed death of which she had no control over whatsoever.

Differently from Scott's ability, however, this time Rogue could feelit. And it hurt.

Scott's eyes fired some kind of concussive force, a concussive force Scott was immune to; Clark's gift, however, burned her as much as it burned everything else. Rogue was screaming in pain as fire was unleashed out of her eyes, melting steel and whatever else it touched instantly, and she knew that if Clark wasn't holding her, keeping the energy beams away from people, she would've probably killed everyone around her already.

"Try to control yourself, Rogue!" Clark yelled in her ear, as she screamed. "The energy is yours, you can channel it anyway you want. Keep it inside you!"

Easier said than done! Still screaming, her arms waving desperately and aimlessly by her sides, Rogue tried to focus, to dig up some buried memory that might help her to control this. Faded images played inside her mind: a teenager Clark blasting scarecrows with his heat vision in a farm, as an older man — his father, Rogue knew — watched, an amused smile on his face; he was as amused as Clark was embarrassed, and Rogue quickly understood why.

Holy hell, was this what happened when he got aroused?! Talk about inconvenient gifts!

Suppressing that line of thought, Rogue dove back into the memories, trying to feel as teenager Clark felt, allowing her body to unconsciously copy his as he stopped the red beams of death. The pain started to fade.

And just as suddenly as they appeared, the red beams disappeared.

Immediately, Rogue took her hands to her eyes, covering them, still feeling the burning itch, but the heat was vanishing; she knew then that it was over. Panting, Rogue looked around, carefully, seeing a terrified Kitty, a worried Clark, and a trail of molten metal and destruction in front of her.

Now she could definitely understand why Scott was so damn afraid when he lost his glasses; Rogue had a feeling, however, that a pair of ruby-quartz lenses wouldn't have made a damn difference in her case.

She glanced at Clark, still panting; his "laser eyes" didn't come with a handy off-switch, unless self-control and his very own eyelids counted.

Rogue really needed to learn how to keep her emotions under control.

It's ironic, really," Dr. Zander Rice said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the drill piercing X-23's bones. "Sarah Kinney was the only person who could see any future in you. She was the one who fought for you, the one who disobeyed all orders and went ahead with the project."

He pulled the drill from her arm, absentmindedly looking at the samples he had already collected from her: blood, bone marrow, skin, hair… Everything that could be of some use after he disposed of this failure.

"She went as far as using her own genetic material to complete the process… And finished it by giving birth to you. For all intents and purposes, she was your mother."

And X-23 very features showed that corruption in their experiment, almost proudly. The mutant girl resembled Sarah Kinney so much that he almost felt he was looking at a tiny version of the doctor, the Japanese features completely taking over what was supposed to be a Weapon X clone. She was small, deceptively frail — a last mistake that many had committed —, with very dark long hair, and a face so pretty it made her look like a porcelain doll sculpted by an artist; if she had the time to grow up, X-23 would become even more beautiful than her surrogate mother.

Dr. Zander Rice was enraged just by looking at X-23 and seeing the despised dead woman.

Cruelly, he grinned, staring deeply inside her eyes.

"And yet, rabid animal that you are, you still tore her apart with your own claws."

For the first time, there was a slight reaction in X-23's eyes, something that not even the drill piercing her bones managed to provoke. Regret, rage, sadness? It was hard to tell, so Dr. Rice decided to go for the finishing blow.

"What you don't know," he started, his voice dripping with sadistic pleasure, "is that you weren't yourself when that happened." X-23's slowly eyes turned to him; he smiled. "Pheromones, X-23, a chemical compound I called 'Trigger 42'. It induces pure, blind fury in animals like you… And I made sure that Sarah Kinney was immersed in it when she visited your cell that day."

X-23 didn't say anything, she didn't try to escape, she didn't even alter her breathing pattern. She just kept staring at Dr. Zander Rice; he felt a pang of rage at being summarily dismissed.

He grabbed her by her hair, aggressively.

"I killed your mother, you stupid animal!" he snarled. "Have you nothing to say about that?!"

There was just silence for a few seconds and Dr. Rice had to stop himself from slapping her in anger, but then X-23 finally answered.

"Go…," X-23 whispered, almost inaudibly.

Dr. Zander Rice frowned, utterly confused, and stood a little closer to try to listen.

"…Yon…"

"What?" he asked.

"…San…"

And as if answering his question, she glanced down, to her own abdomen.

"…Ni…"

Still completely confused, Zander Rice followed her gaze, released her hair and pulled her tattered shirt up, uncovering her stomach; his eyes widened when he saw the weirdly shaped swollen protuberance on the otherwise flat abdomen.

There was something inside it!

"Ichi," X-23 concluded.

Dr. Zander Rice looked to her face again. His brain had finally caught up with what X-23 said and translated the Japanese words she had whispered.

Five, four, three, two, one.

"Oh, shi—"

BOOOOOOM!

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