text: Scott summers was accustomed to darkness. Voluntarily blind, he had long ago learned to curb any and all desire to open his eyes without the protection of his ruby quartz glasses. His was a killing strength—that fire, that sun-fed light in his eyes. People got hurt when he looked at them. People died.
  
  A bad way to live for a man with a conscience. Easier to live life through ruby-quartz glasses and accept the darkness when required. Like now. He was not wearing his visor. Nothing at all covered his eyes. Bad. Very bad.
  
  Scott touched his face, pressing fingertips against his eyelids, afraid to trust himself without that lingering pressure. He listened to the world around him. At first, silence. An unfamiliar quiet, without the kinds of noises one grew accustomed to in certain situations and locales. At home in Westchester, the insects sang like bells all through the dry summer, a constant clipped symphony outside his window through the day and night. Somewhere, too, there was always a familiar voice talking; laughter, maybe, or the distant rumble of a movie. Comfortable sounds, like family. Like Jean, breathing quietly beside him, her body warm.
  
  Not here, though. Not now. He was cold and alone.
  
  Scott mentally reached for his wife. She did not reach back. There was no golden thread flaring bright hot, no soft touch upon his heart. A complete disconnect, as though all those years spent linked together were nothing but fantasy, a fairy tale for a lonely man. It felt like Jean was dead.
  
  Scott sat up. His head hurt. His heart hurt worse. As he moved, he noticed something strange about his body, something very disturbing. Something that he should have noticed right away, because such was the nature of his loss.
  
  He was missing certain... parts. He also had some new ones. He touched them. His hands moved lower, still probing.
  
  "Oh, God," Scott said, and his voice was high and sweet. He took a chance and opened his eyes. Nothing happened. He could see like a normal man, with normal colors, without explosions and beams of cutting light. He looked down and saw small white hands resting in a cotton pajama lap, hands that were attached to slender arms that rose, rose to a body that had...
  
  Scott stood up. He was in a small white room. No lights on, just nighttime shadows. There was a cot behind him, a spindly table on his right. No other furniture. One tall window, chicken wire hugging the glass. Very industrial. It reminded him of the orphanage where he had spent much of his youth.
  
  Again, he forced himself to look down at his body.
  
  No. This is not my body at al.
  
  Not unless he had developed the ability to shape-shift into a woman. Which, considering everything he knew about himself, was highly unlikely.
  
  So. Someone had done this to him, a separation of his physical and mental identities. And if him, then what about the others? The last thing he remembered was standing in front of the Belldonne mental hospital with his team—Jean, Logan, Rogue, and Kurt—all of them looking to him for the final word on their approach, their handling of intelligence that said mutants were being unfairly imprisoned in the building in front of them.
  
  Yes, well.
  
  Scott walked to the door. He had to stand on his toes to peer through the observation window. He could see only a small portion of the hall, which was empty, devoid of any decoration or color. Dimly lit, white and sterile. He tried the doorknob but it would not turn. Scott glanced around the room, looking for something he could turn into a lock pick. He came up empty, until he realized what he was wearing.
  
  Scott took off his bra. He tried not to look at his breasts—or rather, the breasts of the strange woman he seemed to be inhabiting—because that was wrong and impolite and... God. So bizarre.
  
  The bra had wires. He pried them both out, tucking one in the waistband of his underwear—no looking, no looking, you will get your own body back—twisting the other into something resembling an actual tool. Scott was suddenly very grateful for all those long training sessions with Gambit, in which learning to pick a lock, to survive on nothing but a piece of wire and will, was essential to winning.
  
  The lock was easy. Scott cracked open the door and held his breath, listening. Nothing but quiet. He slipped from the room into the empty hall, devoid of anything but doors. White floors, white cracked walls, cold and easy to clean. No security cameras. For a moment, the flickering fluorescent lighting hurt Scott's eyes. He rubbed at them, trying to cope with his new ability to see in color. What little there was, anyway.
  
  Scott did not know where to go, only that he had to move, had to learn why he was here, how, what had happened to the rest of his team—Jean—then get out, run, make things right. Scott was good at making things right. You had to be, when you led the X-Men.
  
  Somewhere distant, a man screamed. Startled, a cry of pain. Scott heard shouting. Careful, his feet small and covered only in thin white socks, he loped down the hall after those sounds—and oh, it was strange moving in that body, that unfamiliar shell with its foreign muscles and rhythms and parts. He could not reconcile his mind to the loss of its physical home, had trouble staying focused on the now, when everything about him was strange and new.
  
  Despite the turmoil ahead of him, the hall remained empty. It was a familiar emptiness, one he associated with his youth. In places where the inhabitants lacked control over their own lives, nighttime meant lockdown, enforced rest. Easier for the graveyard shift, few in number and too underpaid to care about bathroom trips or nightmares.
  
  You are not a child anymore. You are not in the orphanage.
  
  No. He was in a mental hospital. Belldonne, if he was not mistaken. He had studied the blueprints of the place during the short flight to Seattle and it was easy for his mind to translate the two-dimensional lines, the pictures of halls and rooms and stairs, into something concrete, physical. When one had a power like his—creating light that could ricochet, bounce, reflect—one learned very quickly how to visualize the reality of things.
  
  And the reality of this institution was exactly how he had envisioned the physical promise of the blueprint design. Which meant, except for not knowing what floor he was on, that he could easily get in and out of Belldonne. The bigger problem was that he did not know if the rest of his team was in here with him. Until he found out more, he could not afford to take the chance of leaving them behind.
  
  And if you are the only one here? What if there is another person—this woman—looking out through your eyes? Using your powers? Interacting with the others?
  
  That would be bad. He wondered where his body was. He wondered where Jean was, if she was still herself and had noticed the change in his mind. If anyone could fix this, it would be her.
  
  The hospital was not very big. Scott, still following the rumble of concerned voices, those cries of pain, finally drew near enough to hear actual words, like: "careful," and "get ready." A doorknob rattled and Scott peered around a corner in the hall to watch as three men entered a room.
  
  He heard sounds of a struggle—more shouting—and then, after several minutes, a deep quiet broken only by the sobs of a hurting man. Scott remained very still.
  
  The door opened. Two men emerged, carrying another between them. Scott thought his leg might be broken: The injured man could not stop whimpering. Scott got ready to run, but the hospital employees moved down the hall in the opposite direction. The door opened again. Two more men emerged, one of them saying, "He's never been this violent. I thought Maguire was kidding us when he said to straitjacket him."
  
  "He said the same thing to me about Mindy, that I should take precautions, that she might go wacko. Can you believe that?"
  
  "Mindy?" He sounded shocked. "What the hell?"
  
  "Exactly. I didn't do it, either. Maguire doesn't know everything."
  
  "He predicted Jeff. You should have heard him, too. He even talked different."
  
  "Whatever. That shot'll keep him down until tomorrow. Let the day shift handle the rest of his shit"
  
  "Yeah," said the man, though he did not sound happy about it.
  
  They left. Scott listened to the quiet footfalls fade into silence. The old hospital ticked and creaked around him; somewhere distant, another person cried out. A woman, this time. She sounded like she was having a nightmare. Maybe she would wake up on her own, maybe not Scott knew what that was like.
  
  He peered around the corner at the door. The lights were off in this section of the hall; a money saver, to only light every other corridor. Hoping no one else would return, Scott left his hiding place. Exploring the hospital no longer seemed as important as the troublesome patient inside that room, because if he had been body-snatched, then why not the rest of his team?
  
  You're drawing too many conclusions. You need facts.
  
  And he had one: The hospital employees had been surprised by the patient's behavior. Something about this "Jeff' was different, and though it might be nothing more than a chemical imbalance, Scott had to check it out. He could not take the chance that he might be passing up a friend—or his wife. He desperately hoped Jean was okay.
  
  The door was locked, but he still had his little wire. He worked fast.
  
  The room he entered was far bleaker than the one he had awakened in. There was no furniture, no comforts of any kind. In the middle of the cracked dirty floor lay a large man. Dark skin, dreadlocks. Straitjacket pulled tight. There was some blood at the corner of his mouth.
  
  Scott crouched beside the limp figure, studying that face, wondering if this was stupid, how it could be possible that anyone he knew was trapped inside that body.
  
  You re inside a woman, he reminded himself. It's possible.
  
  Cautious, listening for any movement outside in the hall, Scott crouched beside the man. "Hey" he said, shaking that thick shoulder. "Hey... Logan?"
  
  Hey, nothing. Scott sighed. This was a dead end, at least until the man—Jeff—woke up. Until then, he had to keep moving, try to figure out why and how he was here. Maybe even fulfill the intent of his mission and discover if there were mutants being kept against their will.
  
  Ha, ha. Funny.
  
  Scott left the room with its sleeping man. He did not look back.
  
  The thing about institutions of any kind—orphanage, nursing home, mental hospital—was that the staff always gossiped about the individuals in their care. It was inevitable, the best catharsis available, and even though such discussions were discouraged so as to prevent any potential mean-spiritedness, Scott knew all too well that it was impossible to curb a tongue in need of wagging. As a child, he himself had been the focus of adult gossip, sometimes pleasant—sometimes not. He knew how the game was played.
  
  Which meant that just before dawn he returned to his room and waited for the staff to come check on him. It was difficult, but Scott was good at being patient, at waiting on moments. He had excellent control.
  
  There was sunlight streaming through his window when the door finally rattled and a woman entered. She was short and plump, with a round dark face and squinting eyes. She gave the impression of being difficult, rough, but she smiled when she saw Scott and her voice was loud and cheerful as she said, "Good morning, Mindy. How did you sleep?"
  
  Mindy. Scott remembered that name. He said, "I slept fine, thank you."
  
  The woman's smile disappeared and she stared at him, unblinking. Scott thought, Oh no, and tried to look dumb.
  
  "You talked," she said.
  
  Scott said nothing. He looked down at his hands, folded primly in his lap. He wished he knew how Mindy usually sat, her expressions and behavior. He did not want any special attention, no trouble. He did not want to be the focus of the gossip he so desperately wanted to hear.
  
  The woman drew near. "Mindy," she said, and placed her hands under Scott's chin to force his head up. He refused to look into her eyes. Shy, he thought. Maybe this Mindy is shy.
  
  "Mindy," she said again. "Say something else." Scott stayed silent, and after a long moment the woman sighed, releasing him with a shove. "Yeah, you be stupid for another day. Suits you fine, I guess."
  
  It did suit him, just fine. Scott glanced at the tag on her uniform. PALMER, it said, in big letters. Nurse Palmer.
  
  "Come on." She stepped back from the bed. "Dr. Maguire wants you supervised while he's on vacation, but I don't have time for that. You just follow your routine, Mindy, and we won't have a problem. Right? Go on, now. Get washed up and then head down to the recreation room. They've got music there today."
  
  Scott did not need to be told twice, though he was circumspect in his movements, trying to take on an air of quiet timidity that he hoped was like the real Mindy. He had a feeling he was doing a lousy job. Though he did not look at Nurse Palmer, he felt her studying him, and her scrutiny made him uncomfortable.
  
  She did not say anything, though, and when Scott shuffled down the hall toward the women's bathroom—a door he had passed, and almost entered, during his nighttime excursion—Nurse Palmer turned and strode away in the other direction. She unlocked the door next to Scott's room, and entered with much the same greeting.
  
  At least you know more than you did before. Even if it was not much, although if Nurse Palmer's reaction was any indication, Mindy had a completely nonthreatening reputation that meant he could run circles around the hospital and its staff and not get into very much trouble.
  
  The bathroom felt more like a locker room, complete with open showers and toilet stalls. The air smelled warm, moist. Scott looked at himself in the long mirror above the sinks.
  
  His first reaction was to shout, to close his eyes—and indeed, some strangled sound did pass his lips, though his gaze never wavered from the fine feminine features staring back at him from the mirror. Pale skin, high cheekbones framed by short black hair. Brown eyes. Mindy's face looked Asian; Chinese, perhaps. She was... pretty.
  
  He shuddered, finally looking away. He could not stand to see himself, to gaze through those strange eyes and know who he was, trapped inside a stranger's body. It was too surreal, too disturbing. He felt lost. Mortal, even, in a way he never had before. It was the ultimate violation, a stripping away of the illusion that he had any control over his life, his body.
  
  He turned and walked to the toilets. His bladder hurt. It was not easy, relieving himself, but he managed.
  
  He washed his hands, his face—trying so hard not to look at himself again—and then left the bathroom. He followed his memories of the blueprints, walking down the long corridor until he found a wide set of stairs. Scott heard voices; the hospital was waking up. Indeed, by the time he reached the first floor, the halls were already filled with shuffling, talking, weeping, staring, bodies. Nurses and security guards mingled among the patients, but many of the staff gathered at various stations located throughout the corridor. Most looked tired; they clutched mugs of coffee and watched the patients with dull eyes.
  
  The most alert employees seemed to be located at the nurses' station across from the recreation room, which also doubled as the dining hall. A small line of patients stood before a utilitarian service line, holding trays and taking food from several women who stood behind a low stainless-steel wall. Scott's stomach growled. He got in line.
  
  'To, yo, yo," muttered the short man in front of him. He had wild hair and bulging eyes, hollow cheeks covered in a light beard peppered with silver. "Yo, Mindy. You got a pencil on you?"
  
  Scott said nothing and the man whispered, "Yo, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Mindy, you got some shit on you?" He began laughing, loud, with a hint of hysteria.
  
  "Shut the hell up," someone said. A woman. Scott turned, and had to look up to see the tanned face, the hard green eyes and unforgiving mouth. He felt very short.
  
  The woman smiled, tight-lipped, and looked over Scott's head at the—now silent—heckler. He clutched his tray to his chest and swallowed hard.
  
  "Yeah," she said softly. "Yeah, you be quiet now. Got that?"
  
  He nodded. Scott would have nodded, too, if he was that man. This woman looked like she could break him in half and smoke on his bones for breakfast Which made him wonder.
  
  "Logan?" he asked. The woman gave him a strange look.
  
  "When did you start talking? And no, I'm no Logan." She shoved her finger into Scott's shoulder. "Do I look like a man?"
  
  Scott shook his head and turned quickly away. He picked up a tray and took the plastic-wrapped egg and biscuit sandwich handed to him by one of the cooks. She also gave him an apple and a box of orange juice. Finger foods only, apparently. No silverware, no sharp pointy objects.
  
  "Hey!" The woman held up her sandwich and stared at the cook. "Thought I told you girls I'm a vegetarian."
  
  She received no response. Scott got the feeling this was something they heard on a regular basis. The woman muttered and nudged Scott with her elbow. "Come on. Freaks are animal murderers. One of these days I'll make them into chop suey and see how they like eating it."
  
  Which might be difficult, seeing as how they would presumably be dead when she was through with them. Scott did not point that out. He dutifully followed the taller woman as she led him to an empty plastic table by the window. The chairs were also plastic, covered in vibrant colors that distracted Scott. His eyes hurt, looking at those chairs, but he felt hunger, too, for the rich variety of blue and green and yellow. Jean sometimes let him see the world through her eyes, but this was better. He had forgotten how clear and sharp the color yellow could be, that snap of green shine in the apple.
  
  The woman snagged the only red chair—a red that was better, richer, with more variance and warmth than he remembered—and went to another table to grab a second of the same color for Scott. She pushed away all the other chairs until they clogged the walking space around their table. Some of the patients gave her dirty looks; the rest did not seem to care or notice.
  
  "Red's best," she said, turning her chair around so that she straddled it. "Red is hot. It's like fire."
  
  Scott nodded, unwrapping his breakfast. Red was good, except when it was the only color you could count on seeing for the rest of your life.
  
  He glanced around the dining room. He would have preferred to sit closer to the nurses' station; all the good gossip would be there, every little complaint and nuanced praise. If any of the patients were acting .unusual, that was the best place to find out. Still, he did not want to upset the woman, and she seemed to like... Mindy. A couple minutes, then. Surely she would get bored with him before long.
  
  But she did not get bored, and over the next half hour proceeded to tell Scott everything about herself, smoothly, and with enough practice that she sounded rehearsed, like the words spilling out of her were tradition, some game she played, like—last night they made me go around in the circle and say my name is Rachel, like I'm a Gemini, which means I'm nuts, and yeah, I showed them my scars, said "see these scars, these scars on my arm," and no that's not from drugs, stupid, not from anything like that, because it was done to me here, you know, like they give you all this medicine in your ass, just go JABBING it in when they want you to calm down, but I ask nice so they give it to me in the arm or with pills, you know, to help me think better, which is such shit because I think just fine, really just fine, and they're a bunch of meat-eating Nazis in this place and why the hell are you eating that egg, Holy Crap, they turned you into one of them, Mindy, give me that trash, don't put that in your body—which meant that all Scott got was a scrap of biscuit and an apple, and that was enough to make him irritated.
  
  He was just getting ready to give up and switch tables, when Rachel looked behind him, frowned, and said, "That's weird."
  
  Scott, at this point uncaring about how the real Mindy would and would not act, turned in his chair to look. He did not see anything out of the ordinary, and said, "Who?"
  
  Rachel stared at him. "You are talking."
  
  Scott ignored that. "Who is acting weird?"
  
  Rachel, still looking like the Antichrist was speaking out of Mindy's mouth, said, "Renny. He's like you. Doesn't talk worth shit. But he's over there now, chatting up a love storm with little blond Betty."
  
  Scott looked, and sure enough he saw a slender dark-skinned man leaning over the shoulder of an older blond woman. She was smiling, he was smiling, and Scott thought they both looked like they were having far too much fun to be one of his X-Men. Surely, if one of his team had been kidnapped, they would not be using this as an excuse to flirt.
  
  Yeah, right He stood up. Rachel said, "What the hell?"
  
  Scott said, "I'll be back," and he walked over to the man called Renny. He was peripherally aware of the nurses watching from their station, and remembered the conversation he had overheard the previous night. The doctor had asked that Mindy be carefully observed, something the graveyard shift had scoffed at. Maybe the day shift scoffed, too, but Scott still felt their hard gazes. He was most likely giving them something to talk about now. Mindy was acting out of character.
  
  Scott got close enough to hear Betty giggle and say, "I love your new accent," and then he was right up against Renny's side, and the man looked down into Scott's eyes and there was a gleam there, this hint of a smile that was so familiar it made him wonder about souls and personalities and too many other existential matters-that he had no time for, and Scott said, "Kurt?"
  
  Teeth flashed. A slender hand reached up to touch the tip of a brown round ear. "Ja, it's a miracle....Scott?"
  
  "How did you know?" He grinned, unable to stop himself from looking so happy. He was happy, thrilled to finally know he was not alone in this place.
  
  'The face is different, but something else remains."
  
  Kurt smiled, clapping his hand on Scott's shoulder. He drew him away from Betty, who watched them leave with a pout. "It is good to see you."
  
  "We need to find the others," Scott said, quieter. "Assuming, of course, that we're all here."
  
  "It would make no sense to take only two of us, especially us two. We are strong, Scott, but not quite as threatening as Jean, Rogue, or Logan. No, no. The others must be somewhere near."
  
  "Any idea how this happened?"
  
  Kurt shook his head. It was disconcerting to see this stranger speak and act with Kurt's mannerisms, but Scott pretended it was the work of an image inducer, that their new bodies were a hologram, some odd camouflage hiding their true selves. It was easier that way, though not terribly honest.
  
  Kurt's gaze flickered, which gave Scott enough warning to turn. Rachel was approaching fast. She looked intense.
  
  "A friend?" Kurt asked mildly. Scott did not have time to answer. Rachel stopped in front of him with her fists planted on her hips and an ugly tilt to her hard mouth.
  
  "You've been holding out on me," she said. "Bitch."
  
  "I don't understand," Scott said.
  
  "All this time you could talk and you never said anything to me? And now, with this lowlife, you're all coochy-coo? After all I've done to help your ass? Screw that. I'm sorry, but that's firickin' rude."
  
  "Wait," Scott said. "Rachel-"
  
  She took a swing at him. Scott blocked the blow, instinct pouring through foreign muscles, making them work in ways they were not accustomed. Mindy was not a physically strong woman; Scott had to readjust, but he was too slow—Rachel got in one good blow, straight to his gut. He heard shouting, Kurt's accent in an unfamiliar voice, and then white—white uniforms gathering, pushing, and Rachel screaming obscenities as she was carried to the ground, slammed on her stomach with her face pressed into linoleum and the back of her jammies yanked down so that some woman could stick a needle into her pasty backside.
  
  And then Kurt was there, helping Scott to his feet. Behind them, a woman laughed. Low, soft, and sweedy sensual. Familiar.
  
  "Sugah, sugah," said a raspy voice, which was not as recognizable. "I knew if I looked for a fight, I'd find you boys."
  
  Scott and Kurt turned. Rogue smiled.