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Flecks of white litter the ground as she looks down, always down, at her feet. If she had the courage to glance up when the guards’ attention was directed at the new female prisoner, she would notice the blinding sparkle of the sun rising just beyond the mountains. If she had the courage, she would observe the glint reflected off the lake in the distance. If, if, if. She thinks it’s ironic that there is still majesty in the world. She does not look up.

She has testing today. That’s their euphemism for torture. She used to rip and scratch and struggle when they came to get her, but she doesn’t even try anymore. They make you pay when you fight. She has begun to think about the torture in terms of flavors. Like Baskin Robbins, only they have way more than 31. The beatings she can take. She doesn’t like them or anything, but now she knows the alternatives, and she prays for the beatings. Today they slip drugs into her barely edible food, and she knows it will be worse. When she begins to lose focus, her stomach twists, and she hopes that she will be taken to the testing rooms, stripped, and poked, prodded, stabbed, groped, and simply returned to her cage. She hopes the guards are too tired or too busy to use the arm restraints and the leg restraints, to climb on top of her and tell her that she’s badscumfilthdirtmutant and invade, invade, invade.

Today she’s so gone with the drugs that she giggles and thinks about when she was just a girl and she won at Stratego. She was the invader then. And it’s so pathetic that she laughs and laughs. The soldier on top of her today is with friends (she wonders if they call her the Merry-go-round-a-Rogue since there’s always a line). He’s embarrassed, so he hits her. He likes the snap of her head and her sudden silence, so he hits her again. He gets off on it, and Rogue doesn’t remember his name, but resolves to call him Red, since he likes that color so much. If the days remind her of flavors, the guards remind her of colors. A big fan of metaphors, Rogue.

The soldier sticks his tongue in her mouth, and she thinks he’s trying to eat her. Finally, mercifully, he finishes, slaps her cheeks lightly, zips up his pants and walk away. Yellow steps up for his turn. She calls him yellow because he’s a coward. He does whatever the other guards tell him to do. Not that he doesn’t want to fuck her, because he does. He really has power issues, though, probably because of his submissive position among his own group. She likes to think about them analytically. It subdues the horror.

Yellow turns her over, and she clamps down on a surge of anger. It won’t do her any good since the drugs have long since paralyzed her limbs. She tries to dissociate herself from her body. She doesn’t know how the drugs work, hell, she never even finished high school biology, but she wishes they would paralyze her insides as well. She feels Yellow slobber all over her neck as he pushes into her. He chokes her when he grips her mutant collar. Hate sings in her blood. He slaps her ass in time with his thrusts, and she stores her fury. If she survives this camp, she will make them all pay.

Sometimes she wishes she had listened to Magneto when she had the chance.

-----------------------

Of the original X-Men, she has only seen Ororo and Scott in any of the other camps before she was transferred to this one. She knows Jean, Bobby, and Professor X are dead. Death by Legacy Virus. And a pleasant firsthand experience that was. She had seen Ororo in the first few weeks after The Purge (or The “Great” Purge, as she had heard some of the guards say), and she had garnered some bumps and bruises, but no…testing. She still looked up in those days. She still believed Logan was coming.

She had been stumbling along after a guard who thought she was working too slowly. That first camp had been in charge of building the wall that separated the outer world from the mutant prisoners. She had spotted Ororo’s white hair and tan body immediately, but stilled her grin when she took in the gaunt body and matted hair. It was still Ororo, though. It was still something familiar. She took a step forward, but another soldier was approaching from the other direction, and when Ororo saw him, she cowered. She cowered. Storm. Eloquence and dignity personified. Some called her a legend. Some called her a goddess. And her knees were in the fucking mud.

Then she knew. There wasn’t a jet coming for her, and there wasn’t a kind, all-knowing mentor waiting in the parlor with tea. And worst of all, Logan, wherever he was, it was probably bad there too. He wasn’t going to save her this time. Rogue’s eyes filled, and she looked away. She never knew if Ororo had seen her.

-----------------------

Her current prison was maximum security, and reserved for attempted escapees. That was where Scott came in.

She had seen him in the next camp, which was only a few miles from the first and very similar. It would have been safe to say he was having trouble adjusting. Back then, you could get away with talking to a mutant for a few minutes since the prisons were bigger and the guards were more spread out. She figured they must have been ecstatic with their work schedules once the first hundred thousand mutants had died out.

He had been slamming the bricks down, and she had known instantly that it was Scott. She froze with a wave of emotion. The slope of his shoulders reminded her of when he taught her to ride his motorcycle. The cut of his jaw reminded her of how he kissed her on the forehead after her second boyfriend had dumped her. This was family.

“Scott?” She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice.

His vision snapped to her. She could see his eyes. Oh, right. The collar. And, okay, so she could only see one eye. The other was bruised and swollen shut. He had several other bruises and marks that she could see on his body. He had either run his face into each and every guard in the place or he had royally pissed someone off.

“Rogue?” Even his voice was different. Emotional. If she had ever counted on anyone to be practical and rigid, it was Scott. Hell, he defined the terms. She supposed this counted as extenuating circumstances. “Christ, Rogue.” And then he was hugging her, and her arms were limp at her sides. It was just too much. Seeing him was making her think about her other life, when she was safe and loved. She couldn’t afford to think about that life when she had to live this one.

“I thought you were dead. I thought you were all dead.” He's still gripping her arms.

“Nope. Right as rain, sugah.” She is crying now. She has held on for so long.

“Were you…when Jean…were you there?” She supposes he has held on for a long time also.

“Yeah, I was there, Scott. It—” She recognizes the piece of metal hanging from Scott’s neck, just underneath the collar. Dogtags. Her heart stops. Logan wouldn’t have given that to him voluntarily, unless…unless.

He looks at his chest and realization sinks in. “He wanted me to…he wanted you to…”

She clings to him as she sinks to the ground. Everything is numb and surreal. She notes that he is not only a more emotional speaker than before, but he is a lot less eloquent. She tries to hold the thought. She tries to hold any thought. She tries to remember all the names of the members of the Norwegian soccer team, but she is too used to mental multitasking. She can’t hide from the look on Scott’s face. It hurts too much. She isn’t ready. She is just a girl, and she wants to go home.

-----------------------

After Scott finishes telling her about the final battle for the X-Men and she tells him what she thinks he wants to hear about Jean, the bell rings and they each return to their cells. She can tell he doesn’t want to go. He looks like he wants to rage, and she remembers that look. Logan wore it well. She knows hearing about Jean has reanimated something in him, and he wants to go out with the rest of his era instead of submitting to this life. He wants to kamikaze all over the fucking place just to hurt them back on his way out. But he looks at her, and she knows he is still the same in some ways as she watches the responsibility settle behind his eyes. She is okay with being a burden if it keeps him alive.

That night, she stares blankly at the cell wall. She feels empty. The idea that Logan will never bail her out of a stupid jam again…it hollows her out. She replays scenes from her life with his irreverent humor and charm, and she wants to vomit. She wishes she had never met him, never known what she has lost, and then she feels guilty and takes it back. She remembers him carrying her out of a date he didn't approve of with her slung over his shoulder. She remembers him taking her to lunch on her birthday. Him forced into weeding the garden, and just hacking the thing up. They way he smiled. The way he scratched his head. His claws. She starts crying when she gets to her memories of how he opened beer, and isn’t that just the damndest thing.

She doesn’t sleep all night and falls asleep the next day while she is supposed to be working. She doesn’t see Scott.

A soldier pulls her to her feet, and drags her to what she assumes is the Commander’s Office. She has had a few experiences like this that end in a bruise or cut. Sometimes they only yell at her. She’s almost too tired and sick to care, but she still has a shadow of Logan in her. Survivalist to the core.

There are flags everywhere in the room. Flag pins, flags she used to wave at the fourth of July, and, hey, even a real flag. She takes in the Commander and puts him at about 50, old but not sloppy. His shoulders are broad and he still has a lot of muscle. He has a picture on his desk of what she assumes is his wife and children. Family man. Maybe he’ll be more sympathetic. He asks the soldier to leave. She breathes a sigh of relief. Just a reprimand, then. If he were going to issue a beating, he probably would have just given the order to the soldier right there. She forces herself to smile gratefully as he stands up and locks the door. He walks right up to her and punches her with such speed she doesn’t even have the chance to flinch. She cups the side of her face. A beating, then. She only understands when he slams her against the wall and rips her shift down the middle. Oh, no. She fights with everything she has, but her head is still spinning from the punch, and she hasn’t eaten since finding out Logan is dead. She manages to rake her nails down his face, but he is just so strong. He holds both of her wrists with one hand above her head, and she can’t believe this is really happening. Her grimy shift is hanging open, and she doesn’t have any more protection since the camp doesn’t exactly provide underwear. She tries to knee him, but he’s faster. He grinds his pelvis against her, pinning her to the wall. His free hand palms one of her breasts, and then it all slams into reality for her. She bucks and screams. He doesn’t seem to notice. She screams louder. Someone has to help her. Those are people out there. Someone has to help her. He moves his hand down her stomach gently, and it’s worse, God, it’s so much worse because he’s gentle and this is evil they’re all evil and Logan will kill him and Logan is dead, oh God, please no. His hand reaches the apex of her thighs and his fingers start to probe her, and his fingers are big, and she just wants him to get the fuck out. He reaches resistance and smirks, and she hates him for making her feel humiliated, but she hopes that’s all this is even though she knows he’s not finished. But maybe he is, maybe he just wanted to humiliate her, and, after all, he has a wife. Then he starts unbuckling his pants, and she bucks again, desperately, because this cannot happen. He just grinds back into her, closing his eyes, and his trousers are around his ankles. Then his underwear joins his trousers, and it’s just his skin against hers. She wishes she had eaten enough to throw up on him. He positions himself and she tries to squirm away, but it doesn’t work. He slams into her, and he doesn’t go all the way in, but it hurts. And then he slams again, and he’s through. She passes out for a moment from the pain, but when she opens her eyes, he’s still on top of her, grunting like an animal. He thrusts into her one final time, and she feels like someone is plowing through her body, and half of her face is still numb from where he punched her.

He lets go of her and she falls to the floor in a heap as he rebuckles his pants. She curls her legs into her body and just wants Logan.

“You have the rest of the day off. You’ve earned it.” He says. He tosses her a metal bracelet with a number engraved. She just stares at it. Mutants who are related to human high-ranking officials are allowed to wear identifying bracelets so that they are left alone by guards and only do as much work as they want. But she isn’t this man’s family. She had a family once.

He looks at her as though her continued presence annoys him. She feels like time is falling apart around her. She wonders if she imagined what just happened.

“There’s a new tradition in the Army Mutant Division,” he tells her as he leans against his desk, “Many of us have discovered long lost sisters.” He motions to the bracelet. She manages to keep the revulsion out of her face, then wonders why she bothers. “You’ll be expected to be here at 11:00 every day for our…appointment. Do whatever you want during the rest of the day.” He looks at her like they are conspirators breaking the rules. She wants to rip his face off.

But Logan taught her well. She is too weak to fight this man now. So she puts the bracelet on her arm, but cannot find it in herself to smile at him. She is not that good of an actress. The edges of her vision are fuzzy and time still feels disjointed. She stands, and folds her shift over her body like a robe. The pain completely blacks out her vision for a moment, but she makes her legs move. She just wants to be away. The Commander watches her leave. She starts calling him Mr. Black in her mind, because she doesn’t know his real name, and The Commander seems too deferential. Then, she decides to just call him Black because he is not a gentleman.

Scott spots her when she is halfway across the courtyard, and he knows as soon as he walks up to her. She can see it in the darkening of his eyes, and the way he glances at her arm. She tries to think of something to say that will comfort him. They stand silently for several minutes.

She sees him struggle to tuck away the lust for revenge, and, finally, he sighs with resignation, and she wishes she had known him when he was young and stupid and free. “Meet me here at dusk tomorrow. I had wanted to wait until I had a safehouse set up, but we can’t afford to wait any longer.”

“What?” She doesn’t let hope in easily any more.

“I’m gonna save you, Rogue.” And he says it with such intensity that she thinks he wants to save another woman from her grave instead. Maybe he wants to save all the X-Men who died. She wishes he could.

But none of them can turn back time.

-----------------------

The next morning, Rogue reports to Black’s office. The guards would just come get her if she didn’t show, and that would probably end up worse for her. If Scott was getting her out tonight anyway, maybe she could just stab him to death with a pen or something.

The door is open, so she walks through it. She tries not to hate herself for coming, even if it isn't voluntary. All her instincts scream at her to resist, to fight, to run.

Black is at his desk writing something. “Shut the door.” She does.

He stands up and walks over to her. He smiles apologetically, and she thinks she might choke on her hatred.

“Get on your knees.” She complies. Even if she isn’t in a position to kill him now and even if she escapes tonight, she promises herself that she will find him one day. She will find him and make him bleed, make him crawl, make him die.

Black unzips his pants, and she tries to remember when Logan would sit with her in the sunshine.

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Drops of water splash on her face and make it hard to keep her eyes open. She steps through the mud to greet Scott. They’ve given her a new shift. Now it’s dirty again, littered with little brown flecks, but she doesn’t mind. She never did like illusions.

Scott scans the area, and then draws his gaze back to her. “A guard will come get you tonight. He’s on our side.” She feels ridiculous, like she’s in an espionage movie, and she wonders if he will start using codenames.

“Rogue?” But it isn’t a movie, and Scott is the last fixture of a dead era of heroes, so she forces her mind back into coherent thought.

“Yeah. Got it.” She’s never been this compliant before, and even though this is life-and-death-do-or-die stuff, she thinks she sees a flash of disappointment in his eyes. As though her willingness to follow him makes him the last leader still standing, as though there had ever been any hope that she would pick up the mantle and lead the troops along with him. As if he now knew for certain that he was the final hope and his failure would lead directly to an abyss of horror. She thinks maybe he saw Ororo too.

She refocuses and watches as he turns away. His back disappears into the rain.

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The guard comes to get her that night just like Scott said. He is sweating and nervous, and he grips her arm too tight when he pulls her down the dank hallway. He smells like peaches, and she has to bite her lip not to giggle. She thinks she will call this one White.

They reach the outer gates, and Scott is already waiting. He stands up straight and reaches for her hand. She lets him clutch it. She knows she’s his last shot at redemption. “Don’t let go, Rogue. We might have to run, and we can’t get separated. Briggs doesn’t know how long it will take for the alarms to kick in, but since he has to override his security clearance, whenever the computers run through the data to confirm clearance codes, his ID won’t match up. Could be in 15 minutes, could be in a week. We don’t know.” White is swiping some kind of card and punching in a series of numbers on the keypad of the door. She assumes that that is what Scott just described and her head feels slightly fuzzy, so she just nods at him.

Turns out the military have some pretty fucking speedy computers, since the alarm bells go off about three seconds after she and Scott step outside the gate.

Scott takes off running, and she gets dragged along behind him. Her lungs burn and she doesn’t remember Scott’s legs being so long. She looks up as they stumble through the forest. The trees look like they’re reaching for something, but she doesn’t have any pity. She’s shorter than they are.

Scott is looking at her desperately. “I think they drugged your food. Shit.” And she does giggle this time because Scott just cursed. “Rogue, you have to keep moving. We haven’t breached the outer perimeter, and we won’t make it if I carry you.” Breaches and perimeters, that was more like the old Scott, and she pats his cheek.

“Okay, Scott.” And she really does try to keep moving her legs, but they’re just so heavy. And she does try to keep her eyes open and her body upright, but she can’t. She can’t, no matter how much she wants to, and isn’t that just the story of her life.

She passes out with her face against a patch of green ground that reminds her of a dress she used to wear to church when she was a child. She had danced in that dress once.

She wakes up back in her cell, cold and alone, and knows it wasn’t a dream. Her stomach is still churning from the drugs. She looks down at her bare wrist, and she’s relieved for a moment before she remembers the rule. It always gets worse.

They transfer her to the facility for attempted escapees the next day, and it does get worse.

She doesn’t know what happened to Scott, but male flight-risks usually go to the Mutant Research Department, which studies mutant cadavers to create new biological weapons for the military. She assumes he’s dead. It’s dangerous to assume anything else, and she lost the audacity to believe that good always prevails over evil a long time ago.

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Present

On day 203, she thinks she might be pregnant, and the thought makes her claw at her stomach. She knows the guards probably inject her with contraceptives before testing. They’re cruel, but not stupid. It doesn’t stop her from dreaming of monsters, though, of aliens and demons crawling around inside her. Diagonal nail marks stretch from the flesh directly below her breasts to her belly button. She likes the red. It’s the only thing in this place that isn’t gray or subdued.

There are whispers in the camp that a mutant raid is coming to save them. She thinks it’s good that they can maintain a healthy sense of humor.

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She gives up tallying on day 211. It feels too much like counting down, and she doesn’t want to be just another dead body thrown in a ditch somewhere. Logan taught her to keep fighting, so she will. She’ll survive in his honor. So she draws a smiley face in blood on her cell wall big enough that she knows the guards will see, because, really, fuck them. Her fingers bleed for days from the effort, but it’s worth it.

They think she’s crazy. She doesn’t disagree.

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The mutant raid comes on day 233. She doesn’t think it’s funny this time.

She hears the bombing first. Then a period of gunfire. The other mutants are rattling in their cages. Then nothing happens for a few minutes, and she thinks maybe the mutants have lost. She sits on her cot and puts her hands in her lap the way her uncle had taught her to say grace.

Suddenly, there is an explosion directly above the cells, and she knows that whoever is in the compound has just blasted their way into the control tower. She holds her breath as a voice comes onto the loudspeaker, and she’s so close to being free that she has to grind her hands back into her lap to keep from reaching out. She’s learned not to be certain of Almost. And Almost is the place where she lives now.

So she waits to see what will happen, and the door to her cell swings open. She really can’t believe it’s this easy after so long, after so much. But the other mutant women stampede out of their cells and smash through each other to get to the outside world. There are no more locked doors here.

She trails after them and out into the night air.

They pile into armored trucks, and she passes a few dead guards on the ground. She smiles and it’s brittle, but for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t hurt. The mud doesn’t make her feet stick like it normally does either, and the smells don’t smother her when she breathes in. She wonders what a different world it’s become so quickly. Like last time.

“Rogue! Rogue!” And then Scott is all over her, clutching her shoulders like she’s about to fall down any minute. She guesses she can’t blame him for that one, what with her history of falling down around him. He is scanning her for visible injuries, and he moves his head a bit like a bird, all precision and speed.

“I’m okay, Scott.” And she really isn’t, but he’s here, and she’s free, and she just might get to be a real girl again.

He looks her in the eyes, face full of grief. “I’m so sorry. I had to make it out so I could come back and rescue you. I had to leave you there.” The last part is whispered, and she hugs him back at this point. She would have left him too, but not to come back and save him. She tries not to feel like a bad person.

“Shh, Scott, darlin’, it’s alright. We’re both alive, aren’t we?” She strokes his hair and tries to believe they’ll be able to go back now, to go back to days of tea and football.

“Rogue, there’s more. It’s…” His face is pained, and she knows that look. He’s struggling with a necessary responsibility that is at odds with what he feels is his moral obligation. She’s seen that look plenty of times.

He clenches his jaw and then opens his mouth, but the final truck is filling up.

“We’ll talk later.” He looks relieved.

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The stars shine brightly through the cold, dark sky, winking in and out of life. She thinks they look like the bits of tinfoil and glitter she used to put on the tree at Christmas time.

She remembers how Logan used to glance around to make sure his reputation stayed intact as he lifted her to his shoulders so she could sprinkle it around the top of the tree. He’d scoff and tell her no one would even notice with the other decorations, but she’d always insist that the tree deserved to dress up just as much as they did. Logan would look down pointedly at his own grease-stained shirt and argue that maybe the tree didn’t want to dress up and she was taking away its free will. She’d pout, and he’d feel smug about winning the argument until Ororo shot him an amused glance from the doorway, and then he’d just feel embarrassed for arguing about the dressing habits of a tree in the first place.

“Rogue? We’re addressing the survivors now.” Survivors. Mutants. Victims. She really hated being a statistic.

“Alright, Scott.” She stands up from the bottom of the porch, and trails her hand along the rotting banister as she walks up the steps. When she had seen the armored trucks, she had assumed this was a high-level, well-funded operation and that they’d end up in some sterile but secure bunker underground. She realizes she’s been around Professor X for too long when the trucks pull up to run-down brick house in the middle of nowhere. The windows even have those wooden planks stapled diagonally across the paneling. This doesn’t look like an army. It looks more like Robin Hood’s gang.

She’s still grateful, though, so she follows Scott inside. He wraps a coat around her and it almost falls off her emaciated shoulders. She grips the edges with her fingers.

The mutant women huddle together either for warmth or because there just isn’t enough space to do anything else. They fill the room and line the stairs all the way to the second level of the house. Scott and two other men stand on a couple of concrete blocks in the middle of the room. He looks like a leader. He knows this role. He’s had the script for years.

“No one is a prisoner here. If you have somewhere else to go, feel free to leave. But you’re also welcome to stay. You can remain here and take refuge or you can join up with the Brotherhood and help save other mutants like yourself. We aren’t asking you to do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing. This is your choice.” She sits up straighter when he mentions the Brotherhood, and although it seems like a lifetime ago that that word was part of her vocabulary, there is still something wrong about Scott advocating it. She knows she’ll join, though, because Scott is the last living person she owes allegiance, and because wrong has become a neutral word in her mind and easy to bypass. She thinks someone must have taken a sledgehammer to her moral compass.

Some of the women still look afraid, but some look ravenous. She understands both the fear and the rage and she faults none of them.

“If you want to take refuge without joining the Brotherhood, you will be transferred to one of several safehouses across the country. If you have mutant family members you have lost, we’ll be happy to check if they’re housed in any of the documented safehouses and transfer you there. If you wish to join the Brotherhood, come see me before tomorrow morning. If you want your collar removed, we’ll do that right now. For those of you with dangerous or volatile mutations, we can simply deactivate the locking mechanism so that you can remove or wear the collar as you see fit.” Scattered claps and even a few sympathetic growls pass through the room as the mutants line up in front of the blocks. She’ll wait until they’re finished. A few more minutes is nothing compared to the last seven months.

The second man steps forward on the block and raises his hand, “Long live the mutants.” This gets a louder response.

----------------------

Rogue pushes through the throng of sweaty bodies rubbing across each other in their desperation to talk to the men in charge. They’ve been at it for over an hour, and she’s sick of seeing herself reflected in their eyes. She didn’t particularly like crowds to being with, but after seven months of this brave new world, body sweat and stagnant air smell like captivity to her. So she slides between the three final mutants near the door, and then she’s out. When fresh air hits her nose, though, she loses the urge to run. White paint flakes off the damp wood beneath her feet, and she sits on a piece of wicker with four legs and half a back that some might loosely describe as a chair. Scott has seen her leave, and she knows he won’t let her out of his sight for long.

Her eyelids are drooping, but she isn’t surprised when she sees Scott march up to her with purpose. You could tell a lot about a person from their stride.

“The Brotherhood has morphed into something useful since the purges. And, Rogue, it’s necessary now. It’s us or them. It’s our people versus theirs. It’s Logan.” He pauses. “It’s Jean.” His whole body radiates intensity.

“I get it, Scott. You don’t have to explain.” She didn’t him to give her a moral reason to fight. She’d kill the bastards just for fun.

“I want you to understand. I want you to—”

“I’m joining the Brotherhood.”

She thought he’d be happy, but he just looks resigned.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.” And she is.

He clenches his jaw and looks off into the distance as he speaks. “Then the Brotherhood has a job for you.” She quirks an eyebrow. Seems like she’s going to get to do something important and dangerous soon. She may just pick up that mantle yet.

“The Brotherhood has acquired a top-secret weapon from an attack on the Mutant Research Division. You are the only living mutant who can activate that weapon.”

She forces herself not to think of Magneto. She volunteered for this. It isn’t just about payback anymore. It’s about the last inch of dignity she can help bring back into the world.

Scott takes a breath. “We think they were trying to control time.”

Wait. What?

“Time travel?” She hasn’t been a normal girl in many years now, but is this is ridiculous. Oh, yes, let’s go take over the world with time travel. That sounds like a good idea. Five points to Tim for suggesting it.

“We found statements in their database suggesting that it would be used for military victory. Hard to lose when you already know all your enemy’s moves. It’s a good thing their creation didn’t work. It’s been my experience that too much power in the hands of one person never yields progress or tolerance. Enforcing such a large amount of power takes away the free will of the people being enforced upon. And they never would have stopped at military might.” As if the one subject he thinks he needs to sell her on is why their enemies shouldn’t have time travel as a weapon. Jesus, Scott.

And she lets it sink in and be digested by a mind now so familiar with inconceivable subjects that it offers little resistance in believing and accepting that this is both possible and vital to the freedom of hundreds of thousands of people. “How can I help?”

“According to their notes, they used the brain of a mutant who could rewind time. They generated an electromagnetic field around the brain, and they thought that if they could draw the energy from the brain and into the field, that a massive reversal of time would occur for whatever or whomever that energy was directed toward.”

She might need another second to absorb that. Or someone to break it down to kiddy terms for her.

“Then they found you. Someone with the specific power to draw the energy out of mutants. It was perfect except for the fact that by your very nature, the energy would be directed at you and not them. It wouldn’t do them any good to send you back in time, so they went back to the metaphorical drawing board. They were still working on a solution when we attacked.”

She hadn’t missed the inflection in his voice. “It wouldn’t do them any good, but you think it could help us.”

“Yes.”

“So you want me to go back to a specific point in time that you think was the catalyst for the purges and change it?” This felt a little unrealistic to her, but she thought she sounded fine. She could handle the mission. She hadn’t been a little girl wearing her mother’s shoes in nearly two decades.

“It doesn’t work like that. Hell, Rogue, we don’t even know if it will work at all.” He shrugged, and after everything, she found she could still be surprised by Scott dropping his pretense. “Theoretically, you get shot back to a random point based on the amount of energy in the electromagnetic field, and, again, theoretically, it would only be your consciousness inside of your previous body.”

“That’s a lot of theoretic.”

“It’s a desperate time for us. I don’t need to tell you that.” She could see it took effort for him to keep his eyes level with hers after that statement.

She ignores that landmine. She really doesn’t want to talk about the specifics of her imprisonment right now.

Which makes her realize something. “So I could end up back in one of the prison camps? Or I could end up being five?”

“Yes, that is a danger.” But it’s your duty. I’ve done mine. She could hear the words in his voice even if he would never even admit to himself that he had thought them.

“I need to think about it.” She wants to do this, she really does, but she doesn’t believe in things the way she used to, and the thought of ending up back in that camp under another guard or lab tech makes her want to give up.

Sometimes she envies the dead. Breaking is the easy part. It’s the bending that hurts, that stretches you out until you don’t know if there’s enough left to mash back together when the time comes.

“Alright. You know where to find me.” He lifts his arm and squeezes her shoulder.

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She sits on the porch for another hour before heading back inside.

They’ve set up blankets over the floor, and she has to brace herself against the wall not to step on anyone.

She can no longer go to sleep with other people in the room, and certainly not with the proximity that these people are currently enjoying, so she perches on the stairs and leans her forehead on the banister.

She wraps her hands around the rectangular wooden bars lining the stairs, and peers lazily through at all the dirty women on the floor.

She wonders what these people would have been if they hadn’t been stripped down, unraveled, reduced. She wonders what they had been building in their lives before the big bad wolf came and blew their house down. She wonders which ones were lawyers. Bank tellers. Teachers. Gas attendants. Students. Mothers. People.

Her knuckles are white.

But she remembers the story. She’s got a new house now. Maybe it’s just a few bricks inside her mind, but when it’s finished, it’ll be a fortress. And this time, no matter how big and bad the wolf gets, no matter how sharp its claws and how strong its muscles, when he comes calling, she’ll got get a gun and shoot him in the fucking balls. She’ll take her time with the rest.

She gazes back at the mutants littering the ground. Life was stolen from these people.

The sudden anger burns in her.

She’s going to steal it back for them. And for Scott. For Jean. Professor X. Bobby. Ororo. Logan. And for herself. Because her wolf has rabies. And she has a bit of big and bad inside of her that’s been leashed for far too long.

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She opens her eyes just as the dawn breaks and, before making her way to the second floor, she enjoys the scattered rays of sunlight as they fracture themselves in the smudged window.

She puts the tips of her fingers against Scott’s door, closes her eyes, and knocks. He opens the door almost immediately and there is no mussed hair or boxers. There is only a soldier.

“Rogue?” And his face softens.

“I’ll do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

And a shadow of the grin she used to know flashes in his face, but his eyes look beyond her. Magneto’s eyes. But he blinks and the look is gone.

He pulls her into the room and tells her to wait for the other men. She isn’t comfortable with strange men anymore, but she really can’t complain. These men have risked everything to be here.

When Scott walks back through the door flanked by his men, she sees the desperation and a hint of madness in their faces and knows what she saw in Scott a moment ago. Determination. This move was everything they had. No more secret gadgets stored in hidden vaults. No more miracles. She was it. The last best chance.

Every single one of them knew what it was to live in Almost. And that’s where the madness seeps in. To reach and run and scream and never close your fist over triumph. To see victory in the distance but never stroke it with your fingers.

“Are you going to leave these people here while we go wherever we’re going? Seems like one of you should stay here.”

The man to Scott’s left crinkles his brow. “We brought it with us when we came to bust you out of the compound. Those people were incidental. You were the mission. I thought Scott told you.” He moves to open a locked box on the table next to her.

Scott focuses on the top of her head without meeting her eyes, and she finally understands. She’d never had a choice at all. They just wanted to create the illusion of freedom to make sure she would do her job. She tries not to ask herself if Scott would have come back for her if that black box had been empty. She tries not to let it feel like betrayal. She knows Scott loves her, but she isn’t Jean. He would never directly barter her life for Jean’s because he was a hero, and no matter how far he falls into this world without integrity, no matter how many compromises he makes, he would never lose his essential goodness. But this was a way he could bend. He might kill her with this thing or make her eighty years old, but it probably wouldn’t kill her directly, and it might save Jean. And it might save the rest of the mutants. And although Scott could write a book on the value of the greater good, she suspects that deep down in his soul, it was for the former reason that he would force her to do this. Not that she isn’t going to do it voluntarily, but she understands now that if she refused, he’d use every mindfuck in the book to get her to reconsider. Because the fear of having the person you love most in the world just not be anymore is beyond principles. Scott is a moral person, but morality is expensive during times like these, and she suspects it’s harder for him than most because of that strength he had. He would do what was necessary, but the very nature of this time made what was necessary a morally bankrupt business. He didn’t leave her in the woods that day because he was a coward. He’d left her in the woods because he wasn’t. He knew he was a greater asset outside of the prison, even if it was against his ideology and his very nature to leave her behind.

His hands don't shake when he holds out a sheet of paper, and his eyes meet hers when he speaks. His voice doesn't tremor. Feel the emotion, deal with it or erase it, and finish the mission. Scott to the bone.

“We want you to kill the people on this sheet. The engineers of the first purge. These are the key players. You had weapons training with the X-Men, so we feel you’re ready physically. You’ll need to memorize that list right now. Take as much time as you need.” He had forced the words out, and she knows it cost him. He was a good person, so he was a guilty person. She found that fundamentally unfair.

“It’s okay, Scott.” His head snaps up and she grips his hand for a moment when she takes the sheet of paper. “It’s okay.” She wonders when she became a person who didn’t even blink when confronted with assassination orders.

“Thank you.” His words feel like a confession. She hopes it made him feel better. The two men are shooting each other knowing glances. As if they knew anything about her.

Looking down at the list of people, she already knows most of the names. She’d been watching the news religiously before the first purge, just like every other mutant with cable tv. There were only two she didn’t recognize. Larry Dansberg and Peter Ryan. It was almost insulting that her worst nightmares could have come from two men named Larry and Peter.

“I think I got it.” She knows it’s almost time.

“Rogue,” and being addressed as a person by anyone but Scott actually startled her for a moment, “meet Echo.” She steps over, looks into the black box, and recoils.

It was a sphere of what she assumed was energy, but she could see into the center to the coiling, sloppy pink mass. And she had felt like Frankenstein.

And then it hits her that this gross blob was once a person with Christmas trees and tinfoil of their very own. She thinks it’s ironic that the government claims that mutants have no souls, no humanity. She looks at the brain on the table and wonders how they define humanity.

“Whenever you’re ready.” And the man steps away from the box.

“We appreciate what you’re doing.” Man number two looks at her the way her mother used to look at the painting of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. She doesn’t tell him that she’s far from being a virgin. She doesn’t tell him that she’s not like Scott. She isn’t a hero.

But Scott must have seen something in her face, because he steps up and wraps his arms around her and whispers in her ear, “You’re the best among us. Don’t forget that.”

And she has to squint her eyes not to cry because she had no idea how much she needed that. She makes herself believe that he means it.

She lets go of Scott, and clicks the lock off on her collar. There is a rush behind her eyes as she feels it flood back. Power. Death. Things she had once hated. Now she savors them.

She is aware of every part of her body as she steps up to the black box, and then she slips her hands beyond the slimy film and sucks.

A wall of black slams into her face and she feels like a rag-doll as the blowback sends her body spinning through space.

Fear and the certainty that everything had gone wrong rip through her.

And then she opens her eyes.
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"---and he just left me there. I mean--"

Rogue blinked twice. She adjusted to the bright lights and colors as a surreal feeling settled over her.

"---at the movies! And I had to call--"

A shopping mall. A frantic girl. Jubilee. They had gone out. Therapy. Another girl. Anger over a boy.

What absurdity for something so small.

But she had been here before. She had lived this moment.

It worked. It worked?

Rogue clutched the edge of the plastic-topped food court table, shaken to the core. At this point, hope was harder to confront than a bleak certainty.

"--Rogue? Are you even listening? You were the one who--"

Rogue nearly crushed the girl with her hug, emotion pouring out in a tidal wave as she clutched desperately at the back of Jubilee's jacket.

"--Girl? What's wrong?"

She didn't want to let go. She didn't want to move.

"--some kind of joke? It isn't funny--"

A million fractured thoughts flew through her mind as she stood there in the shopping center clinging to a girl who had been dead for several years.

But she couldn't stay with this girl. The thought hit her like a Mack truck. Too fast. Everything was going too fast.

But if she stayed any longer, Jubilee would call back to...to the mansion, and she couldn't lose any time. She couldn't even get help from any of the X-Men. They wouldn't kill anyone outright. They might even find a way to stop her, to keep her contained, to deal with the problem logically. She had a flash of cold lab tables and sharp knives. How quickly that word was destined to change.

Once Xavier learned of her plan, he would try to solve it peacefully. That hadn't worked so well last time. The man may have unimaginable strength inside of him, but too much conscience to do what was necessary. She couldn't chance asking for help from the other mutants without entering Xavier's sphere of influence.

But. But maybe she didn't have to avoid it.

The thoughts raced through her head in the space of a few seconds as she looked into Jubilee's concerned blue eyes. God, to be this close to home. They would believe her, and she could let them fix it. She could unload it onto them, and it was their fault if peace didn't work. She wouldn't have to be a warrior anymore. Just a girl.

And, oh, Logan. She could go see Logan. If she told him the truth and gave him the right names, he would do the killing. He would make her curl up in a soft room, and she would never have to leave this body again.

No.

And there it was. That horrible honor she had learned from him. She couldn't steal this body. She was as much a stranger to the girl whose body she was inhabiting as she was to the humans wading through the mall throngs. She was outside of this time. Above it, and responsible for it.

This was her duty, and hers alone, and, even if she never did anything else, even if this mission killed her or threw her into some space-time vacuum, she was going to accomplish this one damn thing. She was sick of being a coward, and she had the fucking right to earn that little girl she used to be a spot in the universe. Maybe Rogue-that-was would never understand, but she would be worthy of all the security she had been given, all the friendship, and...and all the love. She would deserve to stand by Logan, and she would deserve her existence, her freedom. The battle would be won without a thought of it ever entering the head of this young girl. She would never again wonder if her weakness made her imprisonment fair. Those dirty little spear-shaped thoughts of how much of the failure was hers and how much of it was in those who took advantage of that failure. The strong, the smart, the crafty. Those are always the ones who rule. Was it their fault that they had no honor in her time? No generosity or kindness or empathy? Or was it her fault for needing that generosity and kindness?

She shook her head.

None of it would matter if she could just finish this. She couldn't let anyone stop her mission, and she couldn't unload it or throw it away.

So she made her fists unclench and used every ounce of power and strength and steel she had ever possessed to turn around and run away from the chance to touch her old life. To cry to Daddy. To relive these last free moments even if she knew what was coming along with their failure.

She owed them this.

Jubilee stood dumbfounded for a few seconds as Rogue made it into one of the larger crowds. The old Rogue had been terrified of large crowds, terrified she might hurt an innocent person. This Rogue barely noticed the skin above her elbow that skimmed a businessman's hand.

Jubilee kept up with her until she hit the street and began zagging between buildings.

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It was when Rogue hit the first dead-end alleyway that she realized one of two things.

One, she was still going. Right through the wall. That was from Kitty.

Two, her powers were intact.

Everything she had acquired from the future dead during the war, it was all still in her. Kitty. Kurt. A tinge of Xavier. Sabertooth. Caroline. So many more. The whistle kid. God, how could she forget his name? She still remembered crying while his lungs filled with blood and hating herself for stealing his power instead of killing him quickly. But they needed everything. Xavier knew about all the rest, encouraged it, the sacrifice of the dying, but she never told him about that one.

She shouldn't think about this now. What was it Peter Pan had said? Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.

But, hey, how the hell did this work if she was in a younger body? Did that mean that some forms of mutation were simply mental and not fully coded into DNA? Or did it mean some of her DNA time-traveled with her? Future-Hank would be having a field day right now if he weren't ash somewhere over the Atlantic.

Well, whatever. Back to work.

She looked at her surroundings. A parking garage. People really did love their nice, tidy white lines.

And there. A phone booth. A phonebook. She was so close now.

And then Rogue did something she hadn't done in months, if not years. She grinned.

Who's on top now, motherfuckers?

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Logan snatched Jubilee's arm as she tromped her way towards Xavier's office.

"Hey, Sparkles. Where's Marie?"

"It's Jubilee, you overgrown monkey. And I don't know!" Jubilee's voice cracked on the last word.

Logan's face turned to stone. "What happened?" Jubilee tried to yank her arm out of Logan's grasp, but he wasn't budging.

"I was just talking about my date, and Rogue went apeshit and ran away. She's being so horrible! She didn't even tell me where she was going, and I don't know if this is a prank or if something offended her or if she's running away for real, and now I'm worried and she doesn't have her phone with her--Logan!"

But he was already on his way out. "Get Xavier on it," he tossed over his shoulder.

Jubilee rubbed her arm. "That's where I was going, asswipe."

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Logan had tracked Jubilee's scent to the shopping mall, and had picked up Marie's scent wafting near the street. Why were there so many damn people out, today? Was it Merry bloody Christmas? A woman cringed as he growled at her for walking directly through his scent trail.

What did that girl think she was doing, anyway? If this was over a boy again...well, he had planned on putting Bobby through extra hand-to-hand rotations this week, anyway. Now they'd just be hand-to-claw.

And now the crowd was thinning out as the trail led between buildings. And finally...what? Her trail stopped cold in an alleyway with no more smell-threads...He was beginning to get an unsettling feeling.

One of these days he was going to act on that desire to lock her in a room and never let her out.

Well, if she didn't go up, and she didn't double back, then she must have either blipped out of existence or gone through the wall.

Shrugging and ignoring an imaginary disapproving Xavier voice in his head, he began slicing through the wall.

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Seven of Eight.

That was how many addresses she had in her pocket. How many assassination orders she had gotten one step closer to completing.

Two.

That was how many guns she had acquired, one strapped to her calf underneath her baggy pants, one in the belt at the small of her back. As if she did this every day.

Sixty-five.

That was the number of minutes it had taken to write down the addresses and rob a weapons store.

Thirteen.

That was how many feet away victim number one was standing. Peter Ryan. Golden hair, bright smile. Pre-med major. Bet he enjoyed smiling for his fucking homecoming photo. Pretty girlfriend...or wife. Maybe sister? She even had manicured nails. She'd heard he had always appreciated details. He was destined to become a pretty renowned military surgeon, after all. He'd create many forms of biological "mutant inhibitors," as well as the ever-so-handy mutant collars. Thanks a bunch, Peter.

He finished speaking to the girl on the sidewalk of his apartment, gave her kiss, and waved as she drove off. Not a sister, then.

Rogue walked out from behind the large tree as she heard the screen-door bounce and settle. She walked closer to the door, purposefully walking through the pretty garden. He didn't deserve to nurture anything. Her hand shook as it clasped the doorknob. She didn't know why she didn't just walk through the door. Habit, she guessed. The door swung open. He was so carefree he hadn't even bothered to lock it. Her stomach hurt.

Then she heard him in the next room on the phone.

"Don't cry, Mama. He'll be fine. Yes, I've wired the money. Of course not--"

Rogue sat down on the couch. She'd let him say goodbye to his mother. No point in being rude.

"I'll be in for the funeral--"

Well, that was ironic. She looked around the room as her target dealt with a death that was not his own. Her hand shook a little as she looked at his refrigerator. Childish drawings of houses and suns and smiley faces. A note to "pick up Lilly after Orgo" and "make study group sandwiches." A picture of a little girl in pigtails holding a teddy bear.

Her bravado was slipping. There was a child who relied on this man.

"I love you too, Mama. We'll be home soon. I miss you."

What right did monsters have to love? To miss? To have family?
----------------------------------------------------

Logan gave his bloody hands a cursory glance as they healed. A parking garage?

He sniffed. Gotcha.

She had obviously walked around for a bit, but he got a whiff of a scent-thread leaving the parking garage through a door about three feet from where he was standing in front of a gaping hole littered with rubble and blood.

Well. That was embarrassing.
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Rogue sat back on the couch. He had hung up the phone. He could walk back in at any minute. She pulled the gun out of her buckle and fingered the design coating it.

It couldn't matter that he was nice to his mother or that he had a child. It couldn't matter that he was barely a child himself.

He had taken her houses and suns and smiley faces. And he had taken them from plenty of other people.

She had thought that he would be like the other men she had fought in her time. All rotten teeth and red eyes. It was easy to see the devil in them. But they weren't the devil, were they? They were the devil's hotel staff.

This was the devil. The beautiful aristocrat in the ivory tower pushing the buttons. One of eight, anyway.

He was the ideology. The white grime.

She heard him shuffling papers in the room next door, and her heart sped up. Could he not hear it beating?

She clutched the gun and remembered her future enemies.

She remembered the inch of madness in their minds, that inch of madness that gave way to a mountain.

There was something in this boy that would make hundreds of thousands of people crawl, beg, and bleed. There was a seed in him, even if it was only a possibility.

There were plenty of dead people out there who would give a fuck about her guilt.

She summoned every painful memory she had suffered at the hands of this man-who-would-be, walked into the room, and unloaded a round of bullets into his head.
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