Uncanny X-Men 1943

Chapter 1

A/N: This is an AU story, so some aspects of characters have been changed to fit the story and the time in which it's set. I am also uploading this onto ff.net and Ao3.

Disclaimer: I do not own the names of characters, etc. These belong to Marvel.

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......

November 1943.

Special Operations Executive

Baker Street

London

AKA: The Baker Street Irregulars

If anyone asks, this place doesn't exist. Ask anyone who works here. They'll swear black and blue that they're a secretary at the Foreign Office. Anyone who receives that as an answer knows better than to keep asking.

Division X. Now, this place really doesn't exist. If one should have the correct security clearance, and the person you're asking has the information, they will be able to inform you that Mrs Emma Summers managed to get her own division by her powers of persuasion. It is to be noted that persuasion here means telepathy and very tight shirts. Emma is her own boss, but there will be no medals, awards and celebratory dinners should her team succeed, and no one to clean the mess up should the situation go south. Emma is on her own. But in a way, she always has been. Especially here. A married woman with children running a military crack team? Of course she's alone. Who would want to deal with the fall out of that?

~

Emma looked at the papers on her desk. Through a variety of channels, word reached her of three mutants stranded in an increasingly hostile Lyon, and in rather urgent need of extraction, not least because were known operatives within the Resistance. The Gestapo were doubling their efforts in the area, and Emma had heard enough tales of what happens when mutants get caught.

At the top of her list was Remy LeBeau, born in southern France, a petty thief, able write a Michelin guide to the prisons of his birth region if he had the inclination, suddenly went "clean" in '38. Most of the prisons he was incarcerated in during the 30's Remy also escaped from, authorities believing him to be some sort of munitions expert, but Emma's resources told her there was a lot more to the man than that.

Second on the list was a woman know as Anne-Marie, an American who calls herself "Rogue". She disappeared from an orphanage at age of 13, then popped in France 10 years later, but what she did during the years in-between is a mystery. Once arriving in Marseilles, and has become quite the partner to M. LeBeau. Her power set, as far as Emma understood, was to borrow the powers of anyone she touched, which sounded wonderfully useful for an operative.

The third and final unfortunate mutant was a former society girl from a prominent family, Monet St Croix. Most of the large St Croix family had already been detained and interred by the Gestapo, and her awful, literally life-sucking brother Marius had switched sides, and was now dressing in grey, hunting his own sister and the other remaining mutants in Lyon. Notes on Monet included as much on the brother, if not more. Emma hoped he'd rot in hell.

Emma closed the folder, took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. It should be easy enough. On paper it was straight forward. Two nobodies and a stroppy girl. She went to find her secretary Miss Lee to get a her cup of tea and have the required telegrams sent. As usual, time would not be their friend. Why couldn't she find anyone with time-manipulating powers?

The following morning a meeting was planned with Emma's team, only there was an anomaly with the paperwork.

"Miss Lee?" Emma called to her secretary.