"Breaking news. We're coming to you live from Washington. The Oval Office at the White House has been attacked, and the full situation is still developing. At this time, officials confirm that both the president and vice president are safe. Sources suggest the attackers may be one or more mutants."
The moment the broadcast hit the screen, silence fell over Xavier's Institute.
Charles Xavier and the X-Men stared at the television, each of them processing the report in a different way. Rex Viper had warned them before. He had said that the president might be targeted, and while that warning had already been enough to leave an impression, none of them had imagined the situation would unfold exactly like this—or that the assassin would turn out to be a mutant.
The atmosphere in the room changed immediately.
No one had to say the next part out loud. Once the White House was attacked and mutants were named as suspects, public opinion would turn vicious overnight. Politicians who had already been looking for an excuse would have one, and the president, no matter how calm he acted in front of cameras, would almost certainly start thinking about harsher measures.
It didn't take long for their suspicions to settle on a familiar name.
Magneto.
Even if he was imprisoned, even if the situation felt too clean and too sudden, he was still the person most likely to be connected to an attack like this. He had the motive, the ideology, and the reputation. In a crisis involving mutant extremism, he was always the first shadow people saw.
Charles wasted no time.
Using Cerebro, he began searching for the assassin's trace while assigning tasks to the rest of the team. His expression was grave, but beneath that calm surface, tension was running through him hard and fast.
He and Cyclops would head to the super-prison where Magneto was being held. Jean and Storm would track down the assassin directly. Logan, for the time being, would stay behind at the Institute.
That was the plan.
And then Wolverine objected.
"Why aren't we bringing in the big hero?"
The words hit the room like a stone thrown into still water. Several people, all of whom had been thinking along similar lines without voicing them, paused at the same time.
Logan looked at each of them in turn, his eyes sharp and unblinking. There was impatience in his voice, but more than that, there was something close to anger.
"You still don't trust him?" he said. "Even after what he did? He saved millions of people, and you're still hesitating. Why? Because he's not a mutant? Or because he came from outside your little circle?"
Scott's expression cooled instantly.
"We mutants do not discriminate against ordinary humans," he said, his tone clipped and controlled. "And we do not look down on outsiders just because we don't know where they came from. Logan, you know that."
Storm stepped in before the tension could sharpen further.
"Logan," she said, frowning slightly, "do you think Rex didn't know the assassin was a mutant? Or that he knew and chose not to tell us?"
Logan crossed his arms over his chest, jaw set hard. For a moment he looked like he wanted to snap back immediately, but when he spoke, his voice was rougher and more deliberate.
"I used to think like that," he admitted. "Used to think everybody who got close had an angle. That if someone knew too much, it meant trouble. But I'm done with that."
Then he looked straight at Charles.
"Professor, you couldn't read through him before, so you didn't trust him. Fine. But what about now? He's done more than any of us could've done last night. He stood in the sky and saved half of New York with his own body."
His voice rose with every sentence, not wild, but full of conviction.
"Not everyone worth trusting has to be someone you can see through. This isn't some classroom exercise. This is a real crisis, and pretending otherwise isn't going to help anybody."
Charles said nothing for a long moment.
His lips pressed into a thin line, and his eyes drifted away as if he were weighing not just Logan's words but his own earlier judgment. The room held still around him. Then, after a deep breath, he nodded once.
"Alright," he said quietly. "I'll try to trust him."
Logan's whole expression changed at once.
"Good," he said, almost immediately. "Then go. You deal with Magneto, go after the assassin, do whatever you need to do. I'll call him and have him come help guard the school."
He planted a hand on the table and leaned forward with a grin that was almost too eager.
"Relax. With the two of us here, nobody's touching a brick at Xavier's."
Scott rolled his eyes so hard it was almost theatrical.
Logan, as always, had exposed his own real purpose without even trying.
He wanted Rex here.
After receiving Wolverine's call, Rex agreed almost at once.
His tone had been warm, even enthusiastic, but the truth was simpler than that. He had already seen the White House news long before the call came in, and he had been waiting for this exact invitation.
He knew Charles probably wouldn't believe him so quickly. That much had been obvious from the professor's nature alone. But belief didn't matter. The next part of Rex's plan didn't require trust.
By the time he arrived at Xavier's Institute, the core team had already left.
Logan welcomed him in like an old drinking buddy returning from war, with far more enthusiasm than reserve. The mansion itself was quieter than usual, but not calm. There was a strange tension hanging in the air, the kind that settled over a place when the people inside knew something bad was coming and had no way to predict from where.
Rex already knew the professor, Jean, and the others had departed. He didn't need anyone to tell him.
The moment the White House attack had flashed across television screens, he had already sent David's drone to wait near the Institute's entrance. He wasn't here to admire mutant education or build goodwill through tea and conversation.
He had one real objective.
Find Magneto.
This, in Rex's eyes, was the best opportunity he was likely to get. Erik Lehnsherr was famous for turning every appearance into a spectacle, for taking control of a scene and making the whole world react to him. At this point in time, his power was not just dangerous—it was overwhelming. Among humanity's strongest, he stood near the top.
Rex had prepared for that as best he could.
He'd already instructed Anton and his son to modify his armor with Faraday cage properties, specifically to reduce the risk of electromagnetic attacks. But preparation only got you so far. In stories like this, anti-whatever armor usually ended up getting torn apart by the exact thing it was built to resist.
So there was a cleaner answer.
Kill Magneto.
Take him off the board before the problem got bigger, and at the same time inherit his place as the man who could hijack any scene he entered. Last night's lightning-filled destruction over New York had already made Rex impossible to ignore. As far as spectacle went, that performance would be hard for anyone to top for years.
Once he sat down in the conference room, Logan disappeared briefly and returned carrying a large box of beer.
He dropped it onto the table, pulled one out for himself, and sat across from Rex with the kind of direct, heated gaze that made it clear his mind had been stuck on only one thing since the phone call ended.
Rex looked at him for a moment, then gave a helpless shrug.
"You really need to know right now?"
Logan blinked as if the question itself was ridiculous.
"Why not?"
Rex leaned back slightly and let out a quiet breath. His face relaxed, but his thoughts sharpened. If he wanted Logan stable enough to be useful later, then there was no point easing in halfway.
"Alright," he said.
He gathered his thoughts for only a second before beginning.
"You traveled the world with your brother. Fought in war after war. You lived through battlefields most men couldn't survive for ten minutes, and somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling unusual."
Logan's hand tightened unconsciously around the bottle.
"Later, you joined a team put together by a man named Stryker. You worked for him. Bled for him. Killed for him. You did a lot of ugly things because you thought there was a purpose behind it."
Rex's voice remained calm, even, almost detached. That steadiness made every word hit harder.
"Eventually, you got sick of that life. You walked away, tried to become someone else. A lumberjack. A man in the woods. A man who didn't need war anymore."
Logan's breathing slowed.
Then it changed.
"And then," Rex said, "your brother killed your lover. Kayla."
The beer was forgotten.
Logan's eyes reddened almost instantly, bloodshot veins spreading as memories he had kept buried for too long began forcing their way up. Without realizing it, he extended all six adamantium claws. They slid out with a metallic hiss, cold and bright in the conference room light.
Something inside him had started shaking loose.
He saw fragments.
Kayla standing in sunset light. Kayla touching his face. Kayla smiling in that quiet, steady way that made everything feel still. Then the image twisted, and all he could see was blood.
A body on the ground.
A woman he couldn't save.
His voice came out hoarse.
"So I volunteered," he said slowly, "to have this steel skeleton put in me… because I wanted revenge on my brother?"
Rex watched him closely, then shook his head.
"No. The part about volunteering was a lie. Stryker tricked you. He wanted you in the experiment from the start."
Then came the next cut.
"Kayla wasn't dead. She and your brother played along. You were manipulated."
The fury in Logan's face didn't disappear, but it fractured. Confusion pushed into it, raw and ugly.
"Everyone…" he muttered. "Everyone was playing me?"
His gaze dropped toward the claws extending from his hands.
"All this… because of this?"
A bitter laugh escaped him, but there was nothing amused in it.
Rex said nothing for a moment.
He was watching carefully now, because the most dangerous part hadn't even arrived yet. Logan was already starting to fray around the edges, the pressure of incomplete memory and sudden truth mixing into something unstable.
Logan's breathing grew heavier.
"Heh…" He stared somewhere past Rex, smile twisting into something painful. "So it was all a setup. Fine. Fine. If she didn't really die, then I don't need to grieve, right?"
He swallowed hard, and for a split second he almost sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
"I just got my bones replaced. That's all. If she's alive, then none of it matters. Right?"
Then he looked up.
His eyes were red, wet, and terrifying.
He stared at Rex like a starving wolf trying to decide whether the truth in front of him was salvation or something he needed to tear apart.
Rex's face didn't change.
That, more than anything, set Logan off.
He surged to his feet in a single violent motion and slashed downward. The wooden table between them exploded into splinters under the strike, broken apart so completely it looked like it had been hit by machinery rather than claws.
"Am I right?" Logan roared. "Answer me!"
The shout carried through the corridor outside.
Footsteps pounded toward the room, quick and alarmed. Rogue, Bobby, John, and several others appeared at the doorway, but the two men inside barely noticed them.
Rex stayed seated.
"No, Logan," he said. "That's not right."
The room seemed to tighten around those words.
Then Rex continued, his voice still calm, still controlled, every sentence placed with brutal precision.
"Stryker took Kayla's sister and used her against her. He forced Kayla to get close to you."
Logan didn't move.
"But she did fall in love with you," Rex said. "That part was real. And later, the two of you helped save the mutants trapped at Stryker's base."
Hope and dread warred visibly across Logan's face.
"In the end," Rex said, "she stayed behind. She chose to face the enemy with you."
Logan leaned forward like a man about to step off a cliff.
"And what happened to her?" he asked, voice suddenly frantic. "Why can't I remember her? Where is she?"
Rex looked at him.
"Dead. Stryker killed her."
No one in the doorway breathed.
"And then he shot you in the head with a special bullet. That's why you lost your memory."
Logan's claws trembled.
"The last time you saw her," Rex said, "she was lying in a pool of blood right in front of you."
Rex's gaze did not waver.
"What a pity. You forgot her."
After Rex finished speaking, the room went silent.
But beneath that silence, violent emotions were beginning to boil.
....
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