Chapter 36: CHAPTER 34

[Draul St. Cross POV]

Jean and Kitty were guiding the kids to the front door with Kitty doing reconnaissance by going through walls and checking for any clear route.

Scott, Ororo and Piotr were going another route – another batch of kids – while Logan went somewhere else. John along with Reiner were making their way to Kitty, and with John tracking them then they should be able to meet up with each other soon which means there’s no need for me to assist Kitty and the kids.

With that judgement, I followed the path Logan took and went in deeper into the facility looking for anything I could find.

I found Logan fighting…or rather killing a poor stick-like man with sap coming out of different part of his body.

“Hey there.” He said as he noticed me.

The floor was littered with thick blood-red sap – obviously from the downed mutant – with the bodies of armed guards scattered about with long precise claw marks cut through their gear.

“You getting queasy.” He asked as he noticed my gaze on the bodies.

“No, I believe I’ve done worse.” I said tearing my eyes away from the corpses decorating the floor.

“Oh.” Was all he said as we stood there in awkward silence.

“Where are the others?” He asked after the silence became unbearable.

I took a moment to look through the wall with my newly acquired X-ray vision. Every time I used it, it was as if I went dizzy before my enhanced senses oriented everything back to balance. 

X-ray vision was hard getting used to. If you weren’t careful you would go on a dizzy trip if you start looking through everything, including the ground you walk on thereby disrupting your sense of balance. No wonder Superman had a hard time getting used to it.

“Kitty, Jean and John are leading the kids to the front door… Scott, Ororo and Piotr are going towards another batch of kids located on the other wing of the base.” I told him.

“Hmm. So that just leaves us alone?” He said it in a way as if he was pointing it out as a fact.

We started walking since no matter what we did the enemies would still rush at us only to be killed a second later by exploding arrows or Logan’s adamantium claws.

“So got a story?” He asked after we made quick work of a group of seven guards.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I replied back with a question.

“They do , and that’s why I’m asking for yours…. So wanna tell.” He said.

“Not much to tell… Did two years working intensively as an experiment,” his face grimaced slightly at that, “a collective six months of brainwashing, a few weeks of mercenary work and that was when I said ‘fuck it' and blew up a base killing over 300 people… Then I came home.”

“That’s rough… How you holding up?” He asked with a flat tone.

“Doing good actually. First thing I did when I got home was to blow up another base of 100 people, and did two more in two weeks killing over 500 people 14 days after I got home.” I said as he stared at me with an unreadable expression plastering his face.

“That's sick. You sure you holding up okay?” This time there was a smidge of concern creeping into his tone.

“I'm doing great truthfully. I mean I took a two months sabbatical to Virginia and now I’m back killing people.”

He looked at the people we killed around us, “Right.”, and said nothing else.

I used my X-ray vision as we walked through the halls while Logan continued asking me some questions, “You know who these people are?”

It was also something I found weird since coming here. I haven’t seen anything that suggests this place as an HYDRA base. No flags, or the foreign languages spoken. Their gears also wasn’t like those of the bases I’ve destroyed in the past.

“I’m not so sure.” I said as I led him to somewhere my vision picked up a chambers storage rooms.

We blasted open the doors and from what we saw, immediately understood what kind of experiments they were doing… or rather I did.

DNA splicing.

They would take the DNA's of mutants and try to culture it in a living body to see if they could replicate the X-gene. 

Ernst once tried that but different from the approach these scientists went, he tried to culture the spliced DNA on me. Trying to turn me into some kind of hive for mutant DNA where they could just pluck it and inject into their soldiers.

It didn’t work though, apparently due to the fact that the X-gene was present in every human DNA it was harder to splice a new foreign DNA into it. 

Ernst did say it wasn’t impossible just that he hadn’t found the way to do it.

What was happening here was that they were probably trying to somehow not splice the DNA but fully extract it and the people in the tubes were the subject mutants. This wasn’t the first time he was seeing something like this.

“What's this?” Logan asked as he looked around the chambers stored inside this room.

“A DNA extraction chamber that extract not only the full data on one’s DNA but also the brain's cerebral function data… or how the brain works in tandem to their mutant abilities.” I gave him a run down explanation of what we were seeing.

“So they are…” He asked hesitantly.

“Dead… All of them. They are nothing more than husks if the living beings they once were.” These were what was in those chambers back at the HYDRA base I served. It was only after I read the files on that drive that I understood what they were doing.

“You've seen this before?” 

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“Yes.” Was the only rely I gave him.

“What do we do about the bodies?” He asked but the way he said it told me that he already knew what I would say.

“…”

“…They are already dead. All we have to do is pull the plug and make it official.” 

“That’s cold for someone who’s likely been where they are. You could at least sympathize with them y'know.” He said with a frown.

“I do. But realistically, showing it is just insulting. All it does is open up wounds and let them fester. And besides it’s useless to them.”

Sometimes sympathy and pity are overrated, so is kindness and support. Sympathy isn’t always understanding and encouragement, so also as kindness isn’t always warm-heartedness. Trying to help them in this state is just like building your own personalized robot. What made them who they were was already harvested so any other input would be a blot of ink on a clean sheet. All according to the preference of the author.

“Logan are you there?” Came a voice through Logan's comms.

“Talk to me John.” 

“We evacuated all the hostages we could find. We are all already at the jet remaining both of you, Scott says to hurry up.” Came the same voice of the Thunderbird over the comms.

“You heard the man, we don’t have enough time.” I said as I located the power cable that was connected to each chambers and traced the source to a power generator in an adjacent room to the storage which seemed to double down as the storing unit of the downloaded brain data.

I broke it and watched as the power running through the chambers started dwindling until it ran out, signifying the gradual final death of the encase puppets.

I walked say from the storage room with Logan and fished out my burner phone.

“What's that for?” Logan asked as he saw the secret service issued device. I labelled him a deadpan look that said “Really?” which I held for a few seconds before I deigned him an answer with a flat tone, “To make a call.”

I dialed the only number in the phone and waited for a few rings before it was picked up as the voice of the Phil Coulson came through.

“Mr. Cross, nice of you to call at this time. How may I help you?”

“I cleared a base up in Michigan, which should be the only one here, rescued some kids who were undergoing some kind of mutant experiment. Thought you and your boss might wanna see this one.” I didn’t tell him about the X-men since that was wholly unnecessary.

“Copy.” Was all he said before hanging up.

“Who was that?” Asked Logan who had been hovering over me for a while now like a mother hen.

“A collaborator.” Was all I said before we started making our way back to the entrance we came in from.

We walked thought the path we came, stepping over bodies before we got the exit. A little more of walking and we arrived at the X-Jet where over 20 kids all in the range of 10 – 18 years were dressed in laboratory gowns as they all filled into the jet with Ororo and Jean attending to them.

“Did you guys find anything?” Ororo asked as Logan and I entered the jet.

“No, just dead bodies.” I answered before Logan did. I didn’t want to hear any spiel about how they could have been saved when I knew they couldn’t. 

“Right…Then strap in, we are taking off.” She said before she made her way to the co-pilot seat.

“Why didn’t you tell her what we found?” Logan asked as he sat besides me.

“Because frankly there was no need. All it would have done was to bring up a moral debate, you know that don’t you?” I looked at the man-beast at my side. If there was anyone who understood paying the hard price on this ship then it was him. Making the hard choices was something he was sadly familiar with in his century-old existence.

He didn’t say anything at that and just closed his eyes as we lifted off.

Apart from the chattering kids who were ogling Kitty, the jet for the most part was quiet during the bulk of the return journey.

I idly wondered how they were going to fit the new batch of kids inside the mansion. Were they going to build new buildings in the estate, which I think was what they would be doing since housing these many kids in one house , coupled with the older ones already present would be… terrifying. Which also spurred a question in my mind, how was Charles making his money? Did they have sponsors or was Charles a young master during his youth? Even if he was, they had to be a limit to the wealth he had right? From the First-class to the X-men, that was millions of dollars being burnt just to give them state of the art learning and training facility and combat suit and not to mention the fortress that was the Mansion. Xavier had to be stupidly loaded to do all this.

*Sigh* I really needed to make money, even my thoughts were taking on a broke outlook. I couldn’t even access my bank account for fear that HYDRA would use it to me track down. Fury still hadn’t given me the clear on the S.H.I.E.L.D front if I was still labelled a threat on the network.

But since he now knows some of the moles in S.H.I.E.L.D, he would be able to shadow their movements and all I need to do now is get stronger faster which is fine and all but I don’t think I would be able to rush seeing as how it took me two years under intense training to reach the upper tier of the super soldier level but then again I was not about to spend the next two years running from anything… not on earth at least. 

With a quiet ride, I fell asleep and was only woken up when they called landing just in time to see the ground opening up as the Blackbird was put to rest as her engines died down. The nervous kids started clattering again only to be assuaged of their nervousness as Ororo and Kitty placated them.

Hmm…? I wasn’t as excited as I thought I would be when meeting the brain behind the X-Men group. Maybe all the killing and near death experiences reduced the excitement to its lowest. I still wanted to meet them just to check it off my bucket list so to say but as I walked down the jet and saw the blue furball next to a bald man on an automatic wheel chair welcoming the still nervous-but-calmed down experimental subjects, the same expression and thought I had when I met Fury and Logan was the same thing I had when I saw them.

‘Hank McCoy – The Beast and Professor Charles Xavier – Dumbles.'

I stood and watched as they called some students to direct the new intakes and show them around the facility and also prepare lodging and accommodation before the Professor and Hank made their way towards after they were done attending to the kids.

“Hello there, my name is Charles Xavier and this to my side is Dr. Hank McCoy. What do we call you Mr?.”

“Draul St. Cross. Just Draul is fine tho.”

“Well then Mr. St. Cross, would you like to follow us inside? They are some thing we would like to speak with you about.”

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