The smooth, dark steel wall before Anna was slick and otherwise featureless beyond a little red dot around chest level. She got close to the dot, looking at it from one angle and then another. She slipped off the glove on her right hand and pushed a finger into the metal till she heard it creak. Then, digging her nail into the flawless surface, she drew one line and another till an X was formed with the dot featured at its center.
After she slipped her glove back on and took a step back, and rolled her shoulders, followed by her neck. Resting a single curled fist against the steel, she closed her eyes and took a breath. When she opened them again, she pushed with that same curled fist into the metal wall.
Her arm buckled as the wall continued to stand imperiously over her. Without diverting her sight from where she stared at the wall, she kept pushing despite the pain she felt in her elbow and shoulder. She felt the creaking vibrating through the metal before she heard it. It was subdued but present all the same.
Anna braced her fist by wrapping the fingers of her free hand around her wrist. Additionally, she got closer to the wall and leaned her weight and the force of every tense muscle in her body against the singular spot. A pop of denting metal echoed from somewhere on the other side. She twisted her fist into the metal and clenched her teeth. Her lungs began to burn for air, but the concentration she felt in the center of her forehead burned hotter.
With a united shove forward, her cheek slammed into the broadside of the wall and her fist into unknown air beyond. Her forearm burned from the sudden release of pressure, and the nerve endings at the tips of her balled up fingers tingled. She stretched and flexed her hand on the other side of the wall before returning it to her side.
Her hand and forearm looked unharmed, and following a few shakes to reintroduce them to her circulatory system, they felt like it, too. The wall, on the other hand, now had a nice clean hole where her X used to be.
Her left hand suddenly latched onto one open side of the hole, and her right hand the other. Using every muscle she had available for torque, she ripped at the hole. This time, the metal did little to fight her as she peeled and tore the metal like construction paper. With a twist of her right hand, she snapped off a section of wall and used its pointed edge to cut into a new section of wall like a sword. When it failed to produce the results she was hoping for, she tossed the steel to the side and threw her shoulder into it with the equivalent force of a speeding train.
The metal dented, but when it again didn't immediately give, she threw a flurry of kicks and punches into the section of wall. Finally, she threw her gloves off and started ripping at the worn-over metal with her nails. The metal discolored and bent inward, but still refused to fully give way.
Anna stepped back several paces and got on her haunches like an animal sizing up its prey. Getting on all fours, she launched herself into the wall, and finally, with her full strength behind the strike, she found herself breaking through to the other side of the wall.
Following a shallow spray of debris, she lay on the ground and felt her heart race hard enough that it throbbed in a spot at the nape of her neck. She could feel spots that felt hot on her back from where the twisted metal had likely scraped her, but she didn't need to look at this point to know it hadn't resulted in any actual damage.
"That's a new regimented workout I haven't heard of yet?" Anna heard Scott's voice somewhere nearby. She rolled onto her side and saw her team leader standing in the large doorway to the Danger Room.
Anna allowed her body to unravel onto her back, and she stared up at the Danger Room's impossibly tall ceiling. "I had to hit something really… hard."
"Feel better?"
"Not really."
Scott walked over and offered her a hand up. She was about to take it from him when he slipped his hand back at the last second. A spike of indignation flashed through her chest when she realized why he'd done it. She wasn't wearing her gloves.
"Sorry."
"No, I'm sorry. I didn't see -" He cut himself short, watching her struggle to her feet. She looked around briefly for her gloves, and when she found one half of the pair, she slipped it on.
"You alright, Ann?" Scott offered her the other glove.
"Yeah," Anna snapped up her glove with a little more force than she meant to and fastened it back on her hand.
"You sure? I saw your car and it looked pretty dinged up."
"I went for a drive."
"It looks like you went for a crash."
"Look," Anna clapped her hands at her side, "what do you want from me?"
"I want to know if you're okay. Just because the X-Men have been disbanded doesn't mean we're not friends anymore."
Anna knelt at the foot of the wall she was taking her week out on. She took a fragment of jagged metal from the ground and pinched it between her fingers. "What's the point in all this, Scott?"
"What do you mean? In all of what?"
"In all of this!" Anna stood suddenly and tossed the metal fragment to the side. "The Danger Room, in being here!"
"To learn to control our abilities."
"Why?"
"What do you mean -"
"I mean, why us? What about all the other mutant weirdos running around out there our age? What makes us special? Why do we get to live in a fancy mansion with a fancy gym while other people like us have to just figure it out?"
"Well… I don't know -"
"Of course you don't! How could you? The only guy who could answer that is off doing a fucking press tour." Anna kicked the base of the wall, and the whole thing trembled. "Sorry," she said after a short while and leaned on the wall with extended fingers, her face aimed toward the ground. "It's just… what are we without the X-Men? What did we do all this training and the missions for? For you to learn how to shoot your eye lasers better and for me to more efficiently beat the shit out of a wall?"
When she heard no answer, she felt her fingers curl inward toward the wall's where they dug little channels in their wake. "Why do we get the protection and the training? Why can't we at the very least help people like us? We have the resources, we have the ability. Why are we just sitting by and doing nothing? For what, to be safe? The world is going to hell anyway, we might as well go down fighting."
Scott surprised her when he suddenly appeared in her vision to her right. His sudden appearance made her jump, and when she wanted to ask what he was doing, he drew a finger across his lips to shush her.
"Scott -"
He only shook his head and kept his finger to his lips. He walked his way towards the doors and gestured for her to follow him. Intrigued, she did just that.
"What are we doing?" Anna heard her voice bounce off the walls beyond the Danger Room, but instead of answering, Scott kept up his pace without looking back at her. She finally caught his arm, "Scott," she said, and this time he stopped. Just when she thought she might get sort of answer out of him, she found he only stopped to address a door at the end of the hall.
Scott held up his watch and clicked its surface. It blinked red along with a corresponding keypad to his right. He got close to the steel door and knocked once, twice, once, then three times. Following a long pause, the keypad suddenly flashed green, and the doors before them split. Scott was quick to dart inside and pull Anna along with him before the doors snapped shut so quickly they nearly caught her between them.
They stood on a long pathway with either side falling into a deep pit below them. Above stood a tall, sloped roof that collected together at the very top in the shape of a sphere. It had been so long since Anna had traveled down that particular stretch of hallway that had didn't even realize they were headed to the Cerebro room.
At the end of the pathway was a mess of twisted wires draped around a computer the size of a car. Just below the mass of technology was a bank of monitors and… a person who wasn't Xavier sat in the captain's chair.
"Scott!" Jean stood at the helm of the computers, her head in a helmet of thick, bundled wires. "What are you doing?"
Scott held up his hands, "It's alright, Jean. Anna is on our side."
"And how can you be so sure of that? This was meant to stay between the two of us!"
"Call it intuition."
Anna followed in Scott's wake toward Cerbro and Jean. Hand-drawn notes were scattered on a nearby table across several notebooks and a few sticky notes. "What's going on here?"
Jean gave Scott a scornful glare before turning her attention to Anna. "The X-Men is what's happening." Without looking at the screens, one of them flipped on behind Jean and cycled through several stations of news footage. She turned in her chair and looked at a blank screen. Seemingly on command, it flipped onto a cycling set of GPS coordinates over a green on black grid.
"I've been monitoring both local and national stations the past few days," Jean continued. On a pad filled with chicken scratch notes, she filled a small blank corner with what looked like some numbers. "Things aren't looking good out there, and the adults have decided to turn a blind eye to it all. Scott and I didn't feel the same way."
Anna walked over to the edge of the platform and peered down into the abyss below. "You did all this using Cerebro? I thought only the Professor could use it."
"Anyone with psychoconetic abilities can work Cerebro's interface. Or at least that's what I found out when I started messing around with it about a week or so ago. Everything else I worked through trial and error or cursory research."
"And locking the door to Cerebro? That's some Evan level of tech."
"Yes, well," Jean glanced at the screen, blinking coordinates. "Evan's not the only one who can figure out how a computer works."
Scott took a seat on the edge of a worn couch, sat next to Cerebro's bank of computers. "We're not letting the X-Men die when they're needed most." He pressed the tips of his fingers together in a way reminiscent of the Professor. "And from what you told me in the Danger Room, it sounded like you felt the same way."
Anna's attention flicked from Jean to Scott. "What about Kurt and Evan? Do they know what you two have been up to?"
"Not yet… I've been trying to figure out how to bring it up without letting the adults know."
"How about Cerebro? Surely Ororo and Logan have been keeping tabs on it."
"The whole thing was shut down and had a sheet over it when I found it." Jean looked away from the monitors, and they all turned off as she reviewed her notes. "I doubt anyone has been in here since the Professor left. I've also been monitoring the security system and silenced the alarm you tripped last night when you went out."
"Oh… I didn't think about that."
"That's alright. Having the gate loose on its hinges may not be a bad thing. We're not going to have access to the Blackbird since there's no way for me to keep that out of the adults' loop, so we'll be using the vehicles in the garage to get around. Being able to swing the gate open without worrying about an alarm now will be useful. As for any resources the cars may need, I can easily fudge the mansion's monthly budget. God knows the Danger Room is such a money dump that I'm sure no one would notice a few numbers getting moved around in there."
"So," Scott rubbed his knees with his palms. "What do you say, Anna? Want to revive the team?"
"She doesn't really have a choice at this point." Jean took off the Cerebro helmet and rested it on the table. She turned in her chair, and for the first time, Anna saw her without being tangled up in wires. "It's either she agrees, or she walks out of here not remembering what happened."
The chill that ran down Anna's spine was hard to ignore. Jean's face was humorless, and her cool eyes drilled into Anna's. The time lapsed was apparently a good enough answer because Jean reached back for one of her notepads. "You two better suit up, we have a mission."