"I'm getting put down,
I've been pushed round.
I'm being beaten every day.
My life's fading,
But things are changing.
I'm not going to sit and weep again."...The Who

As they reached the roof, Katya hit a button on her belt and, as she heard the whine of an engine, grabbed Pete's arm. The next thing he knew they were aboard the ship, and were heading off at a good clip toward God only knew where. He assumed that Katya had phased them aboard in mid flight, which impressed him yet again, but he was too pissed to really compliment her on the maneuver. "Alright, it's later. What in the blood hell was..." Katya held up a hand as she quickly sat down in the pilot's seat and motioned toward the co-pilot seat. "We've got bigger problems than my mutant powers, Wisdom. We've got to get that code to the Human High Council now and I want to input a security weakness I overheard in there into the computers down there so they don't get slaughtered later on." Pete slid into the co-pilot's seat immediately, tabling the old discussion in an instant. "You heard something down there? I could hear mutters through the air vent, but nothing spectacular, and I was a couple of feet away. How did you hear them?" Katya reached into her ear, and pulled out a small device. Plunking it into Pete's hand, she smiled slightly. "Good ol' fashioned hearing aid. I keep one on me and figured I might need it to hear your whispers across the air vent, with the box and all. I'm glad I was wearing it." She let him fly the ship as she quickly moved to the computer terminal off to his right, leaning over his shoulder as she inputed things into the computer. "They have a communication line down there. If we can access it, I'll just simply transmit them a signal with all of that piggybacked onto it. They'll never know where it came from, but I'm betting that they'll use the information one way or the other. They're not dumb enough NOT to check out the security perimeter, and once they realize there is a breech there, they'll take the code seriously too. Here's hoping, anyway. I hate those assholes with a passion, but if they die there's one more line of defense down and that would make life a hell of a lot harder, don't you think?"

Pete flew the plane around in a closer vector to the place and asked, "And if they use the code first, without checking into the security perimeter first?" Katya looked at him calmly in the process of putting a disk into the drive to read it, "Then kiss your sweet ass goodbye -- we're going to meet whatever in the hell is up in that big sky up there." Pete swooped around a building to avoid any type of pursuit that might shoot at the still invisible target and muttered, "I thought that's what you were going to say."

A couple of pitfall turns later that had Katya grabbing onto any available surface to keep her footing later and the message was on its way. When they weren't blown out of the sky thirty seconds later as Pete sped away from the compound, Katya gave a little sigh of relief that that was done. But she knew they had another problem as Pete swooped the plane precariously close to a cliff and swooped up again. "What's up?" Katya plunked into the pilot seat and, as she beheld the screen before her, cursed to beat hell. Seeing all the little red dots on the screen headed straight toward them, she said simply, "Shit. I forgot about Apocolypse's guys. Give me a nano." Pete gritted his teeth as a shot meant to take them down immediately skimmed along the bow of the ship, "No problem. Take your bloody time." Katya lost her footing on the swooping vessel and, as her body made contact with the computer terminal, felt her head impact with the above panel. She managed to blink the black spots from her vision by sheer force of will, thanking her hard head for letting her be able to do it.

She narrowed her eyes to see the keys correctly and wrapped her leg around the base of Pete's chair to hold her balance as much as possible. Another blast rocketed the ship, this one almost a direct hit, Pete returning fire with the few weapons they had. Katya knew that they were dead if she didn't do something fast since they had nothing compared to the heavily armored vessels that were at Havok's command. She watched the red warning popup on the screen in front of her and ignored it, "You piece of SHIT. Do it, god dammit. I KNOW what I'm doing, you freaking rejected toaster oven!" She bypassed the safeties in record time and almost let out a shout of victory when she saw the green affirmative message. "PETE, PULL UP NOW!" Pete did as he was told, not even breaking a sweat as he shot the small vessel straight up into the air at full speed and, as Katya lost her stranglehold on the bulkhead she was clinging to, she prayed she at least landed on something soft. She hit the back wall hard and mentally wondered why it was that everything she'd ever managed to land on was hard, right before the blackness behind her eyes caught up with her and she passed out.

**********

She woke up with her head pounding a lot worse then the hangover she'd had earlier. She grimaced in pain and then flinched, reaching up to feel along her brow and, as she ran into the raised bumps that she knew foretold the presence of stitches, felt the whole experience come back to her. She looked around her carefully and closed her eyes as the room waved for a couple of moments. She then concentrated her will and, feeling the dizziness pass, opened her eyes again. A couple of blinks later and she found herself looking into the very hostile eyes of Harold Wisdom. "Well, it's about bloody TIME you came to, you devil yank." Katya rolled her legs off the side of the hospital bed carefully, and grabbed the side of her head to make sure it was still there. Assured of that she opened her one eye she wasn't seeing three out of and asked, "Pete?" She knew the concussion was going to hurt a LOT worse later, as was the beaten up back, so she figured she better find out about him now. Logical, cold. Sure, a little voice in her head muttered back, you don't care a lick about him personally... and your hair turned green when you weren't looking, too. The older Wisdom glared at her for a couple of moments, and then motioned toward the other bed. "He's going to be fine. That distress signal piggybacked onto the new cloaking signal you gave us saved you both. He got hit with some debris when the control panel blew, but managed to get the ship steady, park it out there, and get in the back near the safest part of the ship with you before he passed out. Bloody fools. Both of you. How in the hell did Havok find you if you had the bleeding cloaking device that was so good and wonderful?" Katya placed a careful hand on the side of the bed and stepped off, testing her legs as she did so. Noticing that her left knee hurt like hell, but still held her weight, she silently cheered. She then limped toward where Pete was, ignoring Mr. Wisdom completely when he got her in way. She merely stepped around him and continued toward Pete. He stepped in front of her again and, not in the mood to try and phase since she couldn't concentrate that well, and glaring at him, she managed to say, "Either use the gun to kill me, asshole, or get out of my way. I'll explain to you as soon as I know he's all right." Harold must have taken her at her word because he stepped out of the way and even stepped back to give her a little bit of room. She looked at the life sign signals on the computer above Pete's prone head and nodded. "He'll be fine. Good. Looks like he lost a little bit of blood but nothing too serious."

She placed her hand softly on his just to assure herself that he was all right, and then cursed herself for an idiot. She was about to turn and face Harold when Pete's hand raised off the bed and simply grabbed the hand she had been removing from his. She looked down into clear grey eyes that knew instant recognition as he said, "Well. We're still alive. That's bloody good to know." He then looked over at his father and said, "Took you long enough." Pete's dad simply shrugged in return. "Bite me, boy. We got there as quick as we could. The ship didn't fare as well as the two of you, but it's still in one piece. Now what in the hell happened out there? Pete wanted to wait for you to come around before telling us a bloody thing." Katya looked down at Pete for a moment, "You've been up for a while?" Pete nodded as he slowly sat up. "I've been recuperating while you were unconscious and decided to take a code of silence until you could explain the details since I don't know all of them. I just know the bloody asses shot in all directions when we took off straight up and one of the shots managed to catch the ship and take me out. Other than that there wasn't any pursuit. What did you do?"

Katya didn't realize she kept her hand in his as she looked over at Pete's dad and started to explain, "You have to understand. Havok had the codes to the cloaking device because -- I don't know why. I'm going to find out, though. But he didn't realize that I had safeties that I could bypass, that would change the signals on that cloaking device. So, I changed them. It made us disappear from their sensors. One small problem was that I didn't take into account Havok's temper. He must have shot off missiles in all directions in rage when we suddenly disappeared from sensors. It was a boner on my part all the way around that almost got us killed. I was more concerned with keeping the humans alive." Katya blinked a couple of times in pain and the suddenly her eyes popped open wide, her hand tightened on Pete's to the point she'd probably leave bruises, and she looked at Harold with an intensity that anyone else would have found disconcerting. "Wait!?! How long have I been out?" The elder Wisdom looked at her like she'd lost her marbles but she didn't care as he answered, "About 48 hours. You lost some time, but don't worry. Pete managed to fill us in about the wires and how you were right when he woke up a bit ago. We've been checking into a way to stop it ever since." Katya shook her head hard, blinking past the red spots of pain as she said, "It's not that. Shit. The set up... shit shit shit!!!" She looked over at Pete, something akin to desperation in her expression as she said, "Could I use your communication network? I've got to make a call."

**********

The blank viewscreen blinked a couple of times as it jammed the signal going out, another couple of times as it waited for an answer. Katya sat with relief in one of the communcation chairs, Agent R who had helped her stagger there letting her have her privacy to a point since Agent X came in and plunked Pete right out of eyeshot of the viewscreen. She knew she was going to have a lot of explaining to do to the Englishman and the others, but first she had to make this call. She hadn't prayed in years, but she found herself doing it now as the screen erupted into color and into a view of Victor Creed's face, "This is Creed." He then looked up, the sandwich he'd been eating temporarily forgotten. "Well, I'll be damned. Cat! How are you, kiddo? I haven't seen you in a long time."

He then looked at her face for a few seconds, the face on the screen suddenly going from joyful to concerned. "Okay. This ain't a social call. You heard, didn't you?" Katya knew then that it wasn't good... not at all, and she let the beat-up side of her face show up on the screen for the first time. "What happened, Vic?" She heard the curse as he beheld her face. "Kid, you look like shit." His face changed at that moment to one of confusion. "You mean you haven't heard about Pietro and the others? If it ain't that, what are you calling for." At Katya's motion to explain, the big man sighed and she saw some of his true age enter his eyes. "Pietro and the others went to a plant that was supposedly holding all kinds of parts for Nimrod and other nasties in a big way. Our informant's information got leaked to the enemy and they were waiting for his team. Ororo and the others got beat up pretty damn bad, but due to a security flaw in the system managed to escape. But that one eyed freak really beat the shit out of them before Havok came in and fucked up the operation." Katya swallowed a couple of times, not only to fight off the nausea she was feeling, and asked, "You said something about Pietro?" Vic nodded, his eyes reflecting the look of a man who knew he was about to bust someone's world up pretty damn bad, "They got him, Cat. He's being held prisoner somewhere now. We're looking for him, but we don't know if we'll be able to find him in time." Katya slammed her fist down on the control panel hard and shouted the one word that seemed to echo through her head, "FUCK!" She then looked up at Vic and, motioning to the side of her face, said, "If it wasn't for Havok and a fuck up on my part, he wouldn't have been captured at all. God damn it all!"

Vic looked at her calmly from the screen and she watched as Wildchild settled onto his shoulder. He just sat back in the chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, "Explain." She went quickly through her story as much as she felt safe portraying over any line, secure or not, and watched as the knowledge suffused Victor's face into a slow killing rage. "Well, son of a bitch." The tone was soft and deadly, which actually made Katya feel a little bit better. She ran her hand along her thigh in agitation, and spoke in a calm and deadly tone as it fisted tightly, "They could have been in our midst all along, which means that Wanda's location to Nemesis..." The thought was left unspoken, but they both knew what she meant. Vic nodded. "I'll tell Mags about it. He's not taking this at all well so far, and this might give him someone to at least hunt down. I don't think he can take losing another kid after Wanda. Especially the way they'd die in there." Katya nodded. "I'll hunt from here and see what I can find out."

Vic looked at her in mutual respect and friendship, a comradeship most people wouldn't understand if they watched it in action. "You do that. Get some rest before, though. You look like complete shit and probably need some tylenol for that concussion and some rest. And Cat... if you find them, invite me along. I want a piece of them too." He then looked into her eyes and she saw the human emotions he didn't let out too often to others enter them as he said, "Don't worry, Cat. We'll figure out some way to get him the hell out of there." Katya just nodded, her throat tight as she hit the button in front of her that made the screen go blank.

She bowed her head for a couple of minutes, eyes squeezed tightly shut as if fighting inner demons or her own emotions... perhaps both, both fists tightly clenched in her lap. A male hand was on her shoulder in another moment, Pete's soft voice speaking to her through her torment, "You want to talk about it? Pietro is just the co-leader of the X-men, right? If he dies what impact will that have on the team?" Katya's head snapped up, her throbbing head forgotten for a moment, and Pete was amazed to see moisture that she was fighting not to release in her eyes. "Pietro isn't just a fucking co-leader, Pete. He's my FRIEND. One of the few I have left in this world that hasn't stabbed me in the back or otherwise nailed the crap out of me when I trusted them. He's like a brother to me. And dammit... he doesn't deserve to be in there at the mercy of that psychotic piece of refuse." Pete blinked at her in confusion for a moment and then sat down in the seat next to her, putting a hand on her thigh in comfort. Him giving comfort... who knew, he reflected. He met her eyes and, knowing he'd probably regret it later, asked, "You mean who? Dark Beast?" Katya nodded tightly, swallowing hard as she said, "Yes. Dark Beast."

She suddenly jumped to her feet and limped back and forth, lost in the past as she remembered, "I've been in that son of a bitch's clutches and it's torture to its truest extent. I was only in his damn lab for a couple of days and I have this..." She pulled her blonde hair from its bun and let it fall around her shoulders, "...sterility and a whole load of bad memories, nightmares, bitterness and betrayal to show for it." Pete felt rage rise in his soul that the woman before him had somehow been lost into a madman's clutches for even a few minutes, let alone a few days, and managed to work past the rage enough to ask, "How?" Katya spun and looked at the wall behind her. "It was a suicide mission, honestly. Jean Grey was taken from us during a mission. I was one of the best fighters Logan had, not to mention his student and friend. I acted as rearguard for him since everyone else didn't stand a chance in hell of getting out alive. I was taken out about halfway through the battle just by sheer numbers, exhaustion, and oh... they gassed me, more fool I." She clenched her fists hard enough that Pete wondered if she'd leave bloody marks as she continued, "He left me there." She turned to look at Pete, her eyes pits of hell if he'd ever seen them as she said, "The man I loved like a surrogate father, mentor, and one of my best friends in the world, I thought, got Jean Grey out of the pens and was more concerned with getting her to safety when she had been well fed and taken care of and to keep his damn arm OPEN so that he could remember what ol' one eye did to him that he just plain overlooked me and went back to base."

She unclenched her fists slowly and crossed her arms around her waist as she stared off into space, breaking eye contact with him almost, it seemed, out of self preservation. "I was taken to another base before I came to and found myself in the company of Dr. Henry McCoy for the next two days. They're days I'll never forget. No matter how much I may want to. The gas he tested on me in my phased form trying to discorporate me forever to see the scientfic reaction gave me blonde hair after I solidified again in comparison to my natural brown. My eye color changed. I was sterilized -- much to his disappointment. And I was able to use my powers in new ways because they boosted themselves or something, I'm not sure. All I know is that I could turn myself into a living shadow temporarily, like you saw today, after that, and a couple of other tricks. I barely survived, but managed to somehow get through all of it."

Pete wanted to kill something in that moment. He wasn't sure exactly what, but he wanted to hurt something bad on her behalf and kill it... painfully. But he wanted to know it all, so he asked the one last question left to ask. "How did you get out?" Katya blinked at him a couple of times, recognition returning to her eyes slowly, like she'd forgotten he was there. "Vic. Vic and Kurt went looking, found out where I was and made a mess getting me out. But all three of us got out alive. My own fucking husband wasn't even in the general vicinity to help them get me out, although he swore later that if he had known, he would have helped break me out. Vic and Kurt at least didn't leave me there to die at McCoy's hands. They would have finished me off if they'd had to, but they would have done me that much respect. The look of disgust and revulsion on Piotr's face still hurt when he saw me again... he wondered what I was after McCoy got done with me. The X-men looked at me much the same way... with the exception of Kurt and Vic... they knew I was still me." Katya flung out her claws that she had picked up on the way to the comm unit and, studying them carefully, said, "I wear these as a reminder of what Logan did and who he considered of more import in his life. I swore to myself one day I'd get back at him for leaving me there. He apologized, and then said that he had expected me to be able to get out of there alive because I was one of his students and all. He almost blew off the whole situation because I was back and I was whole. At least to him I was okay. I left the X-men after that, remembered who my friends were, and realized just how cheap life is. There are three people in this world I would never leave behind. Kurt and Vic are two. The third is Pietro because he's never betrayed my trust and has been a good friend to me. Now you know. Happy now?"

Pete looked at the woman before him and, getting up slowly, walked up to her and, taking her arms where they were wrapped around her body, pried them loose carefully. He then enfolded her stiff form in his arms as he said, "No, I'm not happy, but thank you for telling me anyway." She relaxed into his arms in exhaustion, emotional distress or both, he wasn't sure, but he knew she needed arms around her at that moment and had never gotten them before when she needed them, or far too little in her life. He simply held her as a couple of silent tears ran down her face and seeped into his shirt, knowing in that moment that he had lost his heart to the strong, noble survivor before him, and knowing he could not find the will to care or worry about it. She was as damaged inside as he was, and he realized he finally had found someone who might just understand him. Maybe they could rebuild some of the damage that had been done to them both together in the short time they had, he reflected, and held her a little tighter to him.

************