I: Dream

It was only when she woke that she knew they were dreams. It was what she hated most of all, that her subconscious would play on her deepest desires.

But she never realized it immediately - the phantom caress lingered on her skin; her flesh tingled from its pressure. She’d smile and stretch as the sounds hit her ears – Jubilee’s delicate snores; Kitty’s mumbles – and realize where she was.

Who she was.

God, she’d never believed in curses but if she thought it’d work, she’d go to Doctor Trulough. She’d beg the houngan for mercy. Beg him for a cure.

Because the dreams were worse than the nightmares.

In her dreams, she still had hope.

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II: Nightmare

It was different waking from a nightmare and still the same, because for a few seconds, she wasn’t sure where she was, wasn’t sure that she still wasn’t locked into the images in her head. Her heart clenched and shuddered in her chest, her lungs didn’t draw in enough air and she still heard the echoes of whispers in her ears. Her eyes didn’t quite work, still overwhelmed by the visions in the nightmare, by the things she’d seen.

Sometimes they were clear; clinking champagne glasses to celebrate metal grafted to bone; the meat-like scent of roasting bodies in the concentration camps; the screams of the burning boy who dared torture her – his – dog with fire. Sometimes they roiled together until she wasn’t sure where one memory left off and the next began.

And when she realized they weren’t her dreams, her memories but someone else’s, she wondered if Magneto wasn’t right.

Some people didn’t deserve to live.

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III: Fantasy

She had read somewhere that on an average of every six minutes, a man thinks about sex.

It wasn’t something she really thought about until she thought of Bobby. Or St. John. Or Mr. Summers. No, she didn’t really want to think about Mr. Summers thinking about sex every six minutes.

But thinking about Logan thinking about sex....

She knew he wouldn’t think of her that way. She was his little sister, the kid. Not anything remotely female enough to think about in a sexual way, no matter that she had a boyfriend and had learned how to dress to show off what no one could ever touch.

It didn’t mean she couldn’t think of him that way, though. She knew, knew the way he looked, sweating and shirtless, jeans slung low on his hips and a glass of whiskey in his hand. In her fantasies, she took the glass from his hand and tipped back the booze down her throat. She tasted the salt left from his mouth and it tingled on her lips. She skimmed her naked palms over his chest, feeling his skin shift and pull beneath her touch. She leaned forward and tasted the sweat that collected above his collar bone. And then, he said her name, her real name, his voice a soft thrum like a touch along her skin.

But she didn’t pull that fantasy out often.

Like the dreams, it gave her hope.