*a bad gift*

It's not her birthday; Jubilee buys stuff like this for her all the time, mostly because she never goes to the mall to hang with the rest of Mutant High. The reasons she does not go are varied: schoolwork, training, illness, ennui, the Ol' Miss basketball game on ESPN 45, and the new one (the temporary one), that Logan is back for another indefinite period of time.

She'd been in the garage, watching him tinker with Professor X's old Aston Martin. Before that he had played in the Danger Room with Scott and Jean. Later, she knew, he'd swipe supper for them both, and they'd eat it outside on a bench, doing what they did best: not talking. Then, he would borrow a cycle and jet to the roadhouse across the county line for a boilermaker and a cigar, perhaps a fight, or maybe a roll in the sack with some accommodating female.

But now, this afternoon, Rogue stares at the bag from the mall that lies on her bed, a garish wrinkled bit of plastic, and she wonders what is inside. Jubes is gone again, off to play X-Box games with Bobby and Kitty. Rogue reaches for the bag, cringing when the noise of it crinkling hits her ears.

The bag contains a box. A long thin box. Rogue knows what is in it, and opens the box to the music of her aorta and ventricle.

Gloves.

Everything starts and ends with gloves.

It isn't Jubes' fault really. She couldn't have known the insult she's committed. And if she had, she would never have chosen such high-quality, silken satiny creations such as these—even though they are bright yellow.

Jubes' taste can only go so far.

---

*pretty pretty princess*

Rogue is a connoisseur of five finger adornment. She knows the models, brands, and materials. She knows how to craft them by hand, how to repair them seamlessly. She can get stains out of any color, any texture. She even knows etiquette: what they mean rolled up, pulled on, slapped across the face, folded in the curve of the open hand, sent in a letter, received in a letter. She knows more polite things, too, like that one should put them on in private, though there is a trick to it. She knows she shouldn't eat with them both on, but she does anyway. She knows how to use them to seduce, though she may never need to.

She's still not sure about taking them off in public. She skipped that chapter.

Marie's mother bought her first pair of gloves. All good little Southern girls wore gloves to church. She had two pair of white wristlets with mother of pearl buttons on the outside flank, lace at the edges, the thick cotton of them dulling the fingertips. The sheer stiffness of untried material begged to be stretched when she put them on.

She had loved them. So much so, that she had worn them for two weeks straight before her mother had peeled them from her limp hands as she slept, washing and soaking them in bleach for two days before Marie begged for them back.

Looking back, they were pitiful, second-rate things anyway, stained with dirt and tree bark, Chef-Boyardee spaghetti sauce and Kool-Aid. Their loss had been followed immediately by a pair of black gloves, adorned with wrist embroidery and ribbon rosettes, but since they were for her Aunt Louise's funeral, they didn't have the same appeal.

She had worn them once before she grew out of them, removing them as soon as the funeral was over and tossing them into the bottom of her dress-up trunk, their color leaving stains in the creases of her fingers. Cheap gloves did that under pressure: they bled.

She never did get any gloves afterward. Those funeral weeds had graduated her to the land of rings and fingernail polish, neither of which a girl could or should hide under ratty cotton.

But it was more than that, really. Had it been foreshadowing? Who knew? The gloves had removed her from touching, like a princess who was too good to grace the world with her skin. Church pews had become hard oaken beams, sliding under her hands. Rough and uneven bark had transformed into mysterious ridges and bumps; pieces of silverware were mystic wands she held as if they had been spun glass.

She had been removed from it all, one step away from contact with the real world. Their loss had made Marie blind with sensation: pews became sticky, bark became splinters, and forks and knives bore her oily imprints again. She drowned in a universe of soiled tactile experience. There had been no denying the gloves had been magic, and for two weeks, they had made her a princess.

The next pair of gloves she'd put on were the brown stretchy ones her mother had brought from home to her in the hospital after Cody had lapsed into a coma. She had to admit, as her mother watched her put them on in the waiting room, wordless, just staring, eyes haunted and frightened, that she hadn't felt much like a princess anymore.

---

*self-inflicted symbolism*

The following night is dinner with the buds: Jubes, of course, Kitty, who is surgically attached to Piotr, Remy, Bobby and sometimes St. John. Xavier lets them use the school account to order Chinese, provided that they acquire an extra carton of sesame beef and deliver it to his office.

Jubes argues over the tip in Cantonese with the delivery boy, and Rogue wonders why she never uses her language skills outside if haggling for beef hot pot. Then again, being bilingual doesn't help Jubes' mall rat image, and it does make Rogue the odd man (woman) out, since she only speaks English. Even Kitty is passable in Hebrew ("Yeshiva," she says one night. "Gotta love it."), though it is amazing how motivated she is to pick up Russian. Piotr could motivate any girl.

Well, maybe not ANY girl.

Rogue is wondering when the arguing will stop so that she can get her hands on some Hunan shrimp when hands slide over her shoulders. Those fingers, like hers, are gloved, but they are all cut off but for the two middle ones. She knows that Remy uses these fingers to charge objects, his skin activating the kinetic release at will.

Both his power and his will power are so opposite hers that she is insanely jealous. A look in the mirror in the front hall shows his tall frame looming behind hers, his chin coming to rest on her clothed shoulder, his hands clutching her crossed forearms. He has his eyes closed, and Rogue realizes for a second that his entire body is pressed up against hers.

For a second, she hates him utterly. He can't know what it's like to be Tantalus, because Remy gets everything he wants; even if he was in Tantalus's position, he'd probably find a way to get the fruit off the damn tree. And it's not his fault, Rogue has begin to think, that he's drawn to her. If he charges things with his energy, then she is a vortex, sucking all things in.

If she were to voice this to him, he'd smile and tell her that he'd like to give her a *real* charge. And she'd probably play along too, until his hand would reach for her face, and she'd pull back, recede like the waters of Tartarus.

The circular metaphor, paradoxical, stymies her. She tempts herself.

They stand alone in silence. Jubes is paying the delivery boy still, muttering and grumbling, Kitty and Bobby are arguing over a Pink song. Piotr is getting his ass handed to him playing Tekken 3 with St. John. Rogue is thinking of turning suddenly toward Remy, of putting her gloved hands on his face, just to see what he would do. But she doesn't have to wonder because Remy is suddenly gone and next to Jubilee, taking the extra bags and laughing as if the moment had never been there.

Teen dinner night is fast and frantic, every man for himself, like a blue light special on Christmas Eve. No matter what everyone individually orders, it's all common property, and Rogue fights to keep her shrimp while ruthlessly trying to swipe a sizeable portion of Bobby's General Tso's. Jubes is the only one who has her food all to herself, because it's eel.

Kitty talks more than she eats. Piotr and Bobby are rapid-fire food shovelers, probably trying to fill the "hollow legs" Scott says all teenage boys have. Remy, really, is the only male exception: he forgoes a plate entirely in favor of stealing from others with a hummingbird quality, his chopsticks so swift they're invisible except when they appear at his generous lips. As usual, he has all the fortune cookies by the time the rest of them are ready for that part of the meal.

Rogue wistfully thinks on dinners with Logan: informal, like this one, but blessedly quiet, and she'd never have to threaten him with bodily harm to keep her last steamed dumpling. And he would never force her to add "in bed" to the end of her fortune.

Most of the time she doesn't even eat the cookie. It tastes like Styrofoam and sugar, or maybe marchpane. The fortunes, Jubes had told them repeatedly, aren't Chinese, but everyone knows that. Rogue knows that she should only ever really eat the cookie of she wants the fortune to come true. She's not sure if the "in bed" part qualifies enough to eat the cookie.

"Courage is a valuable and profitable investment of character—in bed," Kitty snickers. Remy shakes his head.

"You will find a road to happiness through great toil," Piotr says slowly, with confusion.

"—in bed!" Laughter.

"I'mma kick your ass if you touch that," Bobby mutters around a mouthful of rice as Jubes reaches out to snag his unopened cookie. Then, as an afterthought, "—in bed."

Rogue is wondering when it will be her turn, and if they'll all wait for her to add "in bed" to the last line, because she doesn't really feel like it. But they've all laughed at Remy's and St. John's, so it's her turn. "Your safest asset at this time is yourself," she says softly, the paper curling in her gloved fingers.

No one adds anything at all.

---

*return to sender*

She thought about lots of things, now that she had the time, and didn't have to worry about where she was going to eat next and whether or not she'd have to hitch a ride with a greasy trucker who'd just be waiting for her to fall asleep so he could either fondle her or pick her lint-filled pocket. Now that the Professor took care of all of the necessities, Marie often wondered about her own parents, and what they thought of all of this.

Dear Mom and Dad…

The first few weeks she didn't get beyond that much. But then, in the middle of a crisp October night when Jubes was still flirting enough with Remy that she was out at all hours doing God knows what, she picked the postcard out of her desk drawer and started a mad scribbling. When that postcard ran out, she got another one, and another one, a whole set that Jean had given her saying that perhaps she could write to Logan, even though they both knew that Logan had no address.

By the time she was done, she'd spilt herself all over twenty four postcards and seven 3x5 index cards, because they were the same size and texture and somewhere in the middle of her frantic search for more cards she'd convinced herself that the heavier the paper, the more likely her parents would be to forgive her. She bundled the cards in order and rubberbanded them before asking Scott to send them to her parents, mostly because she knew he'd do it without reading them, and also because she wasn't so sure she wouldn't chicken out at the last minute.

The shocking thing was that really, she didn't remember what she wrote anymore, except to say that she loved them very much, and that she didn't blame them for everything. There were also a few frantic admissions of her own, about the mutancy, about the damage she caused, about deserting them and hitchhiking across the country. She might have mentioned Logan in there, but she wasn't really sure because at some point in time while she wrote her sight seemed to leave her and she could only hear the rhythm of what she wrote and the sweeping lines her pen left more than the meaning of the words. She did remember that she had signed it 'Marie', which had startled her out of the daze at the time, because it had been so long since she had written her real name that it was a reflex to write the other one, and her hand had seemed to know to revert back to form without conscious effort.

Scott had pulled her aside after it was done and told her that they'd been packed in a bubble envelope and mailed off with the school post, and that he'd included a letter from Professor Xavier about the school and all that so that they knew that she hadn't joined a cult ("Per se," he'd joked.). He had then told her that if she had preferred that they didn't know where she was, he'd get it back for her even though tampering with mail was a federal offense. The last part had made her feel better because she knew that Scott was telling the truth, and that he would have really done it, despite his straightedge image. What she really knew was that Scott was not straight-edged at all, but someone who broke tons of vigilante laws whenever he put on his X uniform.

For a while she had been nervous, and whenever the phone had rung or the mail had come she had wondered if her parents would write or if they would come in person. Then she had started to see that there was nothing at all, no mail, no calls, and no people she recognized ambling up the drive whenever she had looked out the windows. To his credit, Scott never said anything about it, though she knew he was too much of a "parent" to have forgotten, and Xavier was a remote creature she saw in the halls, a pleasant older uncle who smiled and said her name, even though she knew he is thinking her real name right at her.

But when Christmas had come, there was a package for her with her home address on it. Marie had waited until Christmas morning to open it, just like her mother and father had made her do when she was little, but she had shaken the box liberally every morning, if not to guess what was inside but to reassure herself that it was there.

When she had opened it, there was a letter from her parents telling her everything she had wanted to hear, really: that they loved her, that they forgave her, and that Cody was okay. They were glad that she was safe, and rather dismayed that she had hitchhiked so carelessly. They also wanted to meet this Mr. Logan someday, if only to thank him for saving their daughter from the perils of the Alaskan cold.

Marie had never told them about the Statue of Liberty, she knew that much, mostly because she still didn't have any words for that yet.

The package had been wrapped in Santa paper and tied off in ribbon, the ends curled with the flat of a scissors, and even though her mom wasn't there to refold the paper and save it for next year, she peeled the tape bit by bit anyway.

A thin, long slim box. It could have held lots of things: a scarf, a necklace, a pen and pencil set. A suncatcher. A plane ticket home.

It didn't.

---

*a leather onion*

"Well," Logan says in a rare moment of humor. "At least they aren't made of rubber. I suppose you could fill 'em with Vaseline like that guy in that mice novel." He raises an eyebrow and catches the wrench she throws him.

"Curly?" she ventures.

"Yeah." He pauses. "You know, Curly was the best one anyway, I guess. Moe and Larry were much uglier." She watches him slide under the car. When he is out of sight, she makes a face and thinks about stealing one of his smokes. "Don't touch 'em, thank you."

"Are you ever going to finish this car?" she finally asks in frustration.

"That depends on whether or not Scott is goin' to keep fucking up the clutch when he drives it."

She lets the Scott line slide, because she knows he only partly means it. Anyone who's been inside his head knows that Jean is Logan's focus in the school, that is, if one doesn't believe that he's here for the betterment of the kids. She doesn't begrudge him wanting something that he can't have, because she knows all about that. Perhaps that is why she likes to hang with him. For a while she used to think he felt obligated to spend time with her, but it isn't really that simple.

Logan rolls out from under the car and sits up, putting his back against the whitewall tire. He holds a cigarillo --Shermans this time-- in his teeth before lighting it. She knows what that feels like. Funny, but Logan gave her her last taste of touching, and she misses it.

Which is what started this whole conversation in the first place. In reality, she wouldn't have brought this subject up at all, except that tears leave trails on gloves, and a man with super-heightened senses can smell those things.

She didn't tell him about the specifics, though he knows about the gloves and her parents and the whole problem. She didn't tell him about hating Remy, even though she knows that he knows it, too. She didn't tell him about all the times when they're here in this garage and she just wants to reach out and, gloveless, just a little bit, touch his forearm, perhaps the back of his neck, because she doesn't want to know if her knows that.

She certainly won't bring up the fact that she'd like to touch him after he gets home from the bar, sated with beer and violence and sex, because no normal girl, even a mutant one, wants to crack her knuckles before mashing her fist into someone's jaw, or extend three fingers into a woman just to hear her moan before riding her so hard her the crown of her head pushes against the wall. But Rogue wants it anyway, because she remembers that even the fortune cookie industry is against her, and she's fairly sure that once Logan heard it, he wouldn't think that it so strange. After all, he's detached enough himself.

No, in the end, she decides not to say anything because silence is golden, and that is what their afternoons together are all about: silence and camaraderie, interspersed with tranny rebuilds and cigarette breaks.

"Take them off," Logan says gruffly. It's so sudden that she's startled for a second. That fact that he doesn't even register the importance of what he has just said with an emphasizing physical gesture is off-putting.

"Wha-what?"

"Take them off." Logan tosses a wrench into Scott's box none too gently. "No one's forcing you to keep them on."

"Professor—"

"Chuck ain't forcing those on you every morning." Logan grunts and looks elsewhere, though if there is a reason for that she isn't sure. Instead, she picks at the edge of the items in question. "And if he was," Logan continues, "he'd be violatin' his own rules."

"Scott—"

"Woo," is the sharp reply, "we should all listen to him." Logan snorts smoke out his nose. "Yeah."

"But what if—" She stares at her hands. But they aren't her hands, really, just leather painted over things that were once her fingers. Outside the automatic lights come on in the dusk. She can dimly hear the crickets, a sound so familiar that she usually blanks it out.

He taps her hand, and she jerks it back. He raises an eyebrow again. How odd, that action, which should signal confusion, but which Logan rarely uses that way, though his brows rise often. Better to think then, of an animal's ear, cocked forward in anticipation of something good.

"No one here would ever touch you unless you wanted them to, Princess."

Rogue stares into his eyes, a split second of cognizance she doesn't think she understands at all. But Logan doesn't need her understanding; she needs his. It never occurred to her that she might already have it.

One last look, then, at the animated twitch of something alive in the dead leather fingers.

Then she began to peel.

---

*a tidal change*

The lawyer, Ralph Dawson, was a nice man, even though he didn't shake hands with her. He was short and portly, but with one of those countenances that made her think of Colonel Sanders and Santa Claus rolled into one. He was hyper; even as he sat and listened to her recalling of events, his legs were crossed and his left foot was twitching, like he wanted to pace but was trying not to move.

She told him all she knew while her mother prepared iced tea and a tray of cookies, the Archway ones that seem eternally soft. Ordinarily she'd have eaten a whole box of them, but she seemed to have lost her appetite in the past few days. When she was done, Mr. Dawson flipped through the stack of papers in his open briefcase and handed a copy of something to her mother, and slides one over to her gloveless grasp.

"This is the restraining order that the Burkes have filed against Marie, Mrs. DeRue."

She didn't bother to read it, because she knew what it said. Instead, she broke a cookie in two and tried to match the ragged pieces back together with pressure.

"What about the other charge?" her mother asked, her voice high and drawly, which meant that she was stressed. Marie stared out the window at the local news van, which had been there since yesterday, and at the growing crowd of people who had brought chairs. Her dad was out there trying to get them off the lawn.

"The assault charge," Mr. Dawson said, handing her mother another set of papers, "is contingent upon intent, which I'm sure I can prove wasn't there." He smiled at Marie, and she couldn't bring herself to mirror it. "However, the complication lies in Cody Burke's health." His eyes lost their sparkle, and for a second, Marie thought he looked like a vulture.

"Should Cody expire as a result of this," here he spread his hands in a manner reminiscent of Mother Mary statuary, "unfortunate accident, the DA is going to press for an involuntary man slaughter conviction regardless of your daughter's intent."

Marie knew it was bound to happen. She'd seen too many episodes of Law and Order, and she understood how the legal system could go after people it saw as responsible for acts.

Her mother was about to say something, but she interrupted her. "Will there be a jury trial?"

If he was surprised, he didn't show it. Instead, he handed her a copy of the assault charges, which she placed on top of the restraining order without reading. His eyes squinted at her, as if he wasn't sure how dangerous she might be, but didn't want to show fear. Marie understood what was going through his head, because she'd seen it in her parents in the past few days: confusion and caution, despite that she was still, for all intents and purposes, a normal girl.

"I want to say no, Marie, but I'm going to be frank with you. When, not if, this thing hits the national media, there's going to be more than one truck out there in your drive. And if he dies, Lord forbid, there are going to be people in Washington who are going to press to have you tried as an adult."

Marie's mother set her lips in a fine line, the rattle of her teacup in her saucer the only other betrayal of emotion.

Mr. Dawson continued. "In fact, this might be a ground setting case for new legislation governing mutant actions. And whatever the outcome, you can bet that Senator Kelly is going to use this to push the Mutant Registration Act."

Marie glanced out at the truck in the yard again, and her dads, waving his hands at the reporter like a crazed windmill. Her mother's eyes followed hers for a second before coming to rest on her again, and Marie wondered what that look meant, because she'd never gotten it before.

"She's a minor" her mother said stiffly, "and she didn't mean it. For god's sake she didn't even know about this, it just happened—"

"Mrs. DeRue—"

"No, you listen to me." Marie's mother put her teacup down on her saucer and flattened her hands on the coffee table. "No one really knows what happened but Marie and Cody, and she's told you everything she knows. There are doctors who say that mutation comes unexpectedly when they're teens, and no, listen to me—" she stopped to glare at Mr. Dawson when he opened his mouth to speak "—and if I have to I'll get that Dr. Grey herself down here to speak in court."

Mr. Dawson didn't say anything, and for a moment there was no sound at all except for the growing shouting from outside filtering in the windows, her father yelling at the channel 2 news truck, which had just pulled up next to the channel 4 one. Someone else, Mr. Van Arten from two doors down, told her dad that everyone had a right to know about "that girl."

There was nothing she could say to her parents, because she'd already apologized, at which her mom had cried even more; her dad had told her that she should never apologize, ever, because one couldn't control their genes, and that if anyone was at fault, it was him, for all the pot he'd smoked in the seventies. Then, surrealistically, he'd told her not to smoke pot, especially Alaskan Thunderfuck, which she'd later found out was pot laced with Angel Dust.

Marie didn't really realize she wasn't paying attention until she heard her name again coming from Dawson's mouth.

"Marie is, to the general population of the United States, no longer human." Marie froze, waiting for her mother's defense of that, but instead there was silence. "Arguing mutant law is tricky, because most lawyers are going to argue that there *isn't any*. To be honest, I can only hope this doesn't come to trial, because our chances of getting a sympathetic jury are probably null, no matter where we go."

The shouting escalated, and her father stormed into the house, mumbled under his breath and slammed the door. Marie tugged her gloves on, but her eyes were glued to her dad, who simply ran up the steps to the second floor. Dawson watched him with limited interest. Marie could still hear a reporter talking to one of her neighbors.

"She was always kind of strange, you know," Mr. Van Arten said in his reedy voice. "She used to take care of my cats, and they all died in the space of three weeks." Marie wondered if he remembered that a car hit one of his cats and the other two got feline leukemia.

"Marie, you need to get more gloves, and wear them all the time," Dawson told her. "When the media sees you, they're going to focus on your mutant ability and how harmful it is." He didn't look at her when he said that. "So you need to wear them all the time, just in case they see you." He paused, thinking of something, his eyes on her Isotoners. "I'd get some of those long evening dress gloves, perhaps wear long sleeved shirts too."

"Long sleeves, in July?"

Marie heard the footsteps of her father coming down the stairs again, and her mother cut off whatever else she might have said with "John, what are you doing?"

Her father carried the shotgun out onto the lawn, Marie saw from the window, cocked it once, and fired at the side of the first news truck. "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

Her mother let out a shriek, and Marie knew that this would be the moment that changed everything for her parents. Not Cody in the ambulance, or her original shriek from her room. This moment, when her parents' peace was shattered forever. She watched her mom run out the door and Dawson stand and button the front of his jacket, trying not to look at her with a face that she translated into "look what you've done to them."

She didn't watch him walk out on the lawn and try to persuade her father to put down the gun. Her eyes catch the family portrait that they had taken not three months ago sitting unhung by the side of the couch, all three of them smiling, unknowing of what was to come. She could hear her mother sobbing, and the cluck clucking of her neighbors like so many scattered chickens, but the only noise she paid any attention to was the sound of leather fingers being curled into fists, a stretching that mirrored something inside her for the first time.

---

*just…fell*

She keeps her hands in her pockets for the first hour, but she is well aware that this is only going to work for so long, because eventually she'll need to hold something, to pick something up, or to run her hand along something for balance. She's only partly worried about what people will do or say, because if Logan thinks it's okay, then maybe she can start to believe that too.

In reality, she's being choosy about what to touch first. If it can't be Logan's forearms, or Remy's sharp cheekbone, or even Kitty's curly hair, she'll just have to find something worthy of soiling her hands for the first time in six months. So Rogue passes up the trees and the grass, which she knows will be cool with the evening dew. She passes on the stone steps to the front of the house, and the inviting wood paneling of the walls, and even the hot back of the television, a sensation of warm plastic that she had once found rather enthralling.

She goes into the kitchen, which is empty, and looks around: pots, pans, silverware, the refrigerator handle, which everyone has touched, and so if she were to touch it now, she would in essence be touching all of them. She reaches out and runs one finger down the long metal bar of it.

Nothing happens, and for a second, she is surprised. But she touches all kinds of metal things with her bare hands, even these days. She is well aware that nothing would happen, but it's a strange feeling, like waiting for something to happen, wanting it almost. If she touches something and nothing happens, she starts to think, then it's like she has the gloves on, and that's not a real touch.

Perhaps it's the time of day. Normally at six in the evening she'd have her gloves on, and they're not. That is odd. Is her body this aware of the clock?

Why does she feel like she's sinning?

There is a smattering of noise off to her right, then she can hear Kitty laughing and the tromp of Piotr's heavy footsteps in metal form making their way toward her. Her hand is still on the door, and so she opens it, staring at the contents as if she is hungry.

Kitty rides Piotr into the kitchen, her thin little arms about his neck, her face smiling and pressed against the cool steel of his neck, and Rogue knows in that second that it's finally happened for them, that somewhere in a darkened corner or in the stacks of the library they've shared intimate kisses and nuzzles, perhaps he's muttered affections to her in his rumbly Russian bass with a softness and innate tenderness that belies his massive stature; despite all her giggling and wide eyed innocence, Rogue knows that Kitty can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

It doesn't bother her as much as it might have if she didn't have a head of lettuce in one hand and a bottle of ranch dressing in the other. The condensation is slick and wet, and she almost drops them on her way to the island table, where her friends are now trying to disengage in a manner that might be slightly dignified. It's a failing effort, Rogue sees as Kitty's hand snakes across the front of Piotr's jeans, and she almost opens her mouth to say so, but Kitty has stopped to look at her, knitting her brows as if something is wrong.

If she hides her hands she'll be admitting that she's doing something wrong. She's not doing anything wrong. So she just keeps on, snagging a bowl from an upper cupboard and making eyes at Kitty.

"What?"

"Did you cut your hair?"

She smiles. "No."

"You look different. Contacts? No." Kitty kicks the air under her because from her sitting point on the table she can't reach the floor. She lets Piotr get her a soda and opens the cap off the edge of the table with one hand. "I'll figure it out, you know, and then there will be hell to pay for not being forthcoming, you know."

Rogue rolls her eyes and shreds lettuce into the bowl, then adds some dressing. She leaves the items out on the counter because she doesn't want Kitty to watch her put them away, as if too many hand actions will point out that she's most definitely different. Instead, she picks up her bowl, procures a fork, and leaves the two of them there, where they'll probably stay until Storm or Scott kick them out of the darkened kitchen, possibly after giving them an overdue and unwarranted lecture involving birds and bees.

She knows this because the first time she'd had to ward off Remy, even with the gloves, it had gotten a little physical, and Scott had cornered them both and told them all about birds and bees and when a man and woman really loved each other they--

Needless to say, it was a lecture no one their age needs, but one that Scott feels that he needs to say, just so if something does happen, he can say 'I told you so' later.

Uncharitable thoughts about Scott mean only one thing: she'd been in the garage too long.

There's no one in the rec room in the left wing, ever. Rogue thinks that this is because Professor X's office is two doors down, and so everyone stays away in a vain attempt to keep him from reading their thoughts, which she thinks is ludicrous, because everyone also knows that he doesn't do that kind of thing without explicit --as in written waiver-- permission. They all say it's to give him peace and quiet, but she doesn't have to be a mind reader to know that her real suspicion is correct.

This means that she can watch television on her own. Or, as the case may be this time, set her bowl and fork down and reach out one hand to the velvet draperies, brushing her fingertips against them. The blood red is a rich color in the sunset, which she can barely see through the heavy material.

Rogue is unsure how to categorize touch, because it's not something she gave much thought before it became something she could no longer do, really, because no one really thinks about touch unless they're petting a cat or their lover. Rogue can't do either of those anymore. The velvet is both crisp and furry, stiff and soft in different places., altogether easy to pretend that it's human.

She leans forward and presses it against her cheek.

"Is that cheatin'?" Remy says from behind her, his voice to match the velvet for a second, and she understands how touch is like sound for a split second. She keeps her eyes closed because she doesn't want him to spoil the moment for her, but at the same time her brain starts firing warning signs that her experiment might just get to be too trying, too dangerous. The rest of her head says that she's entitled to touch anything she damn well pleases –within reason, within reason—as long as it doesn't hurt anything.

Except for the one synapse, in the back of her brain, that's saying that of he's going to insist on it, and if his hand happens to slide into hers, if his cheek brushes her, if his lips touch hers, then he must really really want it. Remy knows what she is; she's seen him in the Danger Room enough to know that he's not invincible, that he knows that he's not…

"It's not cheating if I don’t hurt anyone," she whispers, knowing that he will be close enough to hear it by now. She's right. A hand snakes over her shoulders from behind; Remy likes to be behind her always, as if he'd reach up and touch her throat.

Rogue knows that she doesn't like Remy, at least not *that* way, not the way that she likes Logan, who is this creature in the back of her head and will be forever, and not like Bobby, who is perennially sweet to her in a way that would be romantic if she wasn't who she is.

It's not his fault, really, that he wants to touch her, she thinks, closing her eyes again and seeing only red when a beam of dying sun hits them in the window. Isn't this what he needs to do? To charge her, to fill her negative space?

"Don't," she says, knowing that the last of her will power will be gone if she thinks of Logan and Bobby in the same thought, or the silken fall of Storm's hair, or even the smooth slide of the backs of Jubilee's calves when she lies asleep in her bed at night, legs skewed and tangled up in the bedsheets.

"Don't what? I'm not touching you anywhere," he taunts. "'Less you want me to." She can see, when she opens her eyes, his own eyes in the reflection, a red to match the drapes, and one comma of hair that comes over his forehead and down to rest against her cheek.

But he's all over her, and if he doesn't call that *touching*, then there has to be a happy medium somewhere, despite of what she knows she might do to him. Because right now, more than anything, she wants to touch him. It's not romantic, or sexual, though maybe he thinks it is, this feeling, more guttural, animal, perhaps a bit of Logan, but mostly herself, wanting to rub against him like a cat, to feel his skin, knowing that he'd be yielding enough to indulge her.

"Really," she says, but it's not any kind of reply, just a sound she makes that is noncommittal while she ponders what she's doing, and how close to the Professor's office she is, and how perhaps she could convince herself of anything in this state, and what had Logan been thinking when he had told her to take the gloves off?

They're still in her pocket, so she could very well put them on. And when Remy reaches for her jaw, she does look for them, blindly, eyes closing again, her hands patting her pockets.

"Looking for these?" he says, voice still that low smooth confection. Her gloves dangle from either of his hands, long black twisted leather things swinging back and forth with his movements. She turns in his arms and gives him a solid push, because this time he's done it, he can't play with them as if they're normal pieces of clothing, taking them from her even if she's not wearing them.

"Give them to me," she says softly, imparting as much weight into that sentence without giving herself away.

Remy's eyes, that disturbing red that makes his face ever more unreadable, narrow, and for the first time she wonders if that smile is covering malice, or simply foolish flirting. "Non."

And while she stands there in front of him, he starts to put one on.

She doesn't know why she screams, why she lunges for him, more frightened of this action more than any of his more questionable ones in the past. She doesn't really think that this might make her fall right into his arms, that he might take this opportunity to grab her hands, holding both of them in one of his while cradling the back of her neck in his other, to bring her close and whisper in her ear.

"I can touch you, y'know. I can touch y—"

She knows what's happening before he even loses his voice and she breaks the hold he has on her neck, even though for a second all she wants to do is move forward, knowing that the contact has already begun, and that it was his fault, and that if she were to take advantage of it no one would be the wiser.

His hold on her hands is paralyzing, because there's only a split second where she *can* let go of him, and that time has passed. Now, all she can do is ride it out and hope that they both regain control of their bodies before something very terrible happens. Remy's skin loses that darkened color for a more pallid hue, but that's all she sees before her hands start to push energy out, into the backs of his hands, hands that grip hers vice-like, and her vision starts to tint in fantastic ways that she can't even stop to analyze.

That tell-tale red glow that is Remy's is now hers, and her hands start to make it even as she holds on to him. Somewhere in her she is thinking that this is what it's like to suck the vortex dry, but the rest of her is fully aware that something has to happen, or she'll charge Remy's body and let it go in ways that will be disastrous.

She doesn't have to, because Remy lets go suddenly, slumping to the floor, taking the gloves with him. Everything looks as if she's seeing it through some sort of night goggles, and in the room, somewhere, Scott is telling her to close her eyes and clench her fists. The energy builds inside her then, when she doesn't give it an outlet, coiling upon itself, as if it comes from nowhere and is piling up.

There is nothing to do but scream and scream, because she can't touch anything, though she is still dying to. She feels a cool hand on her neck, a sharp prick, and then nothing.

---

*alaskan thunderfuck*

In the dream, the one she had from the road, she dreamt of kittens and Cody. Somewhere in her subconscious, she had later mused that the two were harmless and that they are so easy to feel bad for when they are hurt. Later she wondered where that had come from, because Cody wasn't a baby, but on his way to becoming a full-fledged man, which had been why he had gotten into the coma in the first place.

Marie had also thought to herself that she would have helped make him more of a man, in a crass sort of teenager way, and then understood that in another different way she *had,* a thought that is, not surprisingly, not very comforting at all.

In the dream that came on the road to Laughlan City, there was no Logan yet, nor was there anything positive associated with her being, except what she had lost, and so it wasn't by any means a good dream. But in the dream things that never happened played through her head as wishful thinking: Cody waking up, her mom's terrible piano playing, her Dad practicing his putt in the backyard and screaming "MULLIGAN" every three minutes, so loud she could hear it over her Alan Jackson CD. Some of the things were real, they happened, and some of them were not, and that was what got to be really confusing.

Had her dad really told her that on her seventeenth birthday he'd buy her a car? Had her mom really worn Obsession? Had her best friend Katie McDonald really dared her to streak down the street at their slumber party in the seventh grade? And had she done it?

Do her hands really kill people? Or do they simply suck out something else? Is it life force? Toxins? Does she suck people's souls out of them?

It felt like it, she knew at the time, because for three weeks she had felt something alien inside her, something that made her want to do things she had never wanted to do before, like ride quads, play baseball, and jerk off in the shower, an urge that she didn’t have the equipment to satisfy. That had really cemented it for her, the first night by herself, in a little motel in Topeka, far from home and by herself watching the free porn channels, when she had felt like making herself explode and realized that she was experiencing what every man feels probably ten times a day. There had really been no time to be ashamed, because most of her had noted that there *was* nothing to be ashamed of, then she had simply hiked down her jeans and gotten herself off like all girls did.

She still wasn't ashamed later when she had fondled the produce in the Winn-Dixie with a fair amount of rising anger, or when she had almost hit on a woman in a train station who was looking at her rather suggestively. It had only been shaming later, when she realized why she felt this way, and what that might mean for the boy in the bed back in Mississippi.

In those early days, she had dreamed of things like the man with no hair, whom she had later learned was Professor Xavier, searching for her, and the things he was saying. But for some reason, as with all dreams, he came in and out like a radio with bad reception. He had told her that it was not her fault, and that she wasn't evil. He couldn't answer her burning question, of what her mutation did, because in retrospect, he hadn't known then either.

So the question had haunted her all the way up into Alaska: soul sucker or not? It was a ruthlessly vile question, the very word "sucker" echoing in her like a rotten core that would cave in and ooze if she pushed too hard.

When she had hit Alaska, she had almost told her self that it didn't matter. It didn’t matter where she was going, or what she did, as long as she could keep herself away and in control. In reality, she had had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do if and when she got there, and these needed things would be the key to her control, but she hadn't known that then. The most she could say was that she was far from Meridian.

She was never really sure just when the turning point was for her afterward, when the dreams stopped, because Logan's dreams had taken over once she had gotten to the mansion, something that has never really bothered her because after she has them, even when she is shaking and screaming and clawing at thin wires in her skin that were never there, she knows, that they were never hers. Alaska dreams belonged to her, with their kittens and Cody and innocence, and a whole girlhood that he almost overwrote, that Logan almost overwrote, that anyone she touches could infiltrate like a virus and rewrite with a small injection of skin.

It was this steely cold metaphor that she used when the urge got to be too great, when she wanted to touch skin, despite that Kitty hugs her with arms wide open, and Jubes and Bobby grab her hands to drag her into the car when they go out to Harry's Hideaway in the afternoons. Logan doesn't touch her at all, a thing that she didn't understand until she realized that he knows what he almost did to her. But all viral ideas aside, she started to believe that there was a mystical thing to being able to touch one's skin, to be able to allow that contact of any kind, even though when she still had that ability she never realized how holy it was.

Professor Xavier tried to teach her, when she got here, ways to deal with the urge to reach out to others without her gloves. He had tried to tell her that it was the gloves that should be seen as tools then, to keep her from temptation. He has told her that once she's seen inside others, she'll want to do it more and more. Marie believed, still believes, him, because after all, he knew what he was talking about.

Those little tastes of Logan, of Cody and of Magneto, which wasn't so much of a small taste as a big swallow, had shown her that she could live through other people's touches, living bits and pieces of thing they'd experienced, felt, been. She could very well live out the rest of her life stealing touches left and right. But she would know, and Xavier would know, and that wasn't the answer.

What was touch, anyway, that she was so obsessed with it?

When he had been in Alaska, dream-Cody had told her that he wanted her, his hands on her body and over her breasts, other places that she tried to copy in the shower. But dream-Cody had told her other things too, and she wasn't so sure about what they meant. In the end, she decided that dreams, unlike most other things, were parts of herself that she didn’t have to think about very hard.

Because the present reality had been so much more difficult to understand, really, and Cody, for all that he had said that he'd go with her across the country, wasn't really there, or all there, anyway. Instead, she made the trip without him, carrying the memory of him in her hands, tucked away under woolen mittens to keep herself and him, and everybody else, safe.

---

*fastball special*

"That wasn't quite what I had in mind then I told you to take off those gloves, Marie," Logan says into the darkness that is in front of her closed eyes. That she is awake is something she cannot hide from him, now that she had heard the words and reacted to them in ways that she cannot control, but that he can probably smell.

When she opens her eyes he's there, sitting in a chair next to her bed, his feet propped up on a tray that is loaded with medical tools.

He helps her sit up a little, so that she can drink from a plastic cup. She can see that he has a medical glove on one hand, but his other one is bare. She sits back when she's done and stares off into space.

"I'm not talking about it," she says, gripping the sheet, feeling an instant tingle as she does, almost like being able to feel the noise a camera flash makes when it's turned on and warming up. Logan stills her hand with his gloved one, shaking his head.

"That's not a good idea. This is the third bed you've been in."

"Oh."

She stares at the wall clock, a digital readout that simply says 12:32. There is no day or night marker, so she has to rely on Logan for the actual time. She decides that it's better off if she doesn't know. After a quick inspection of her arms, which have no IVs in them, and her body, which is covered in a hospital gown that ties in the back, there's nothing much left to do, but stare into space, or wait for Logan to say something, or say something herself. She chooses that last.

"He's okay, right?"

"He's actually more fine than you were. Seems that chargin' power of his fills him up pretty fast, and he was back on his feet three days ago." Logan bites down on his unlit cigarillo while he works a knife against a piece of wood in his hand.

Most of her is relieved, and a great deal of her is angry, for what, she's not sure. There's no one to blame, really. Logan can't be responsible for making the suggestion, because she's thought of it a dozen times herself. She didn't start "it", though, and Remy couldn't help it, even if that is a lame excuse.

"The frog knows what the scorpion is when he lets it onto his back," she says softly. Logan gives her the raised brow, but doesn't correct her. She's not sure how to interpret that. "I should have known better. But I just wanted. I wanted…too much."

She might cry, but there's nothing in her eyes but some hazy spectrum that she doesn't normally have, and she doesn't want to dwell on where it came from.

"Princess," he says softly, taking the cigarillo out of his mouth, "you're goin' to have to learn new ways of touchin'. Because this can't happen all the time."

She turns her head away, because she can't stand for him to tell her what she already knows, she just can't, because if he starts to look at her like that, then she'll just die.

"I know what you're thinkin', Marie." He reaches out then, and with one finger pushes her hair from her forehead. The plastic of his glove crinkles a bit, and for a second she imagines that it isn't there.

It would be too hard for her to imagine a world where no one can feel her gloves, and where she can feel everything through them. That world doesn't exist, and it never will. That's the only way to touch things, she knows, that will satisfy her now; she's going to let herself become a junky.

She reaches out to touch him, and he lets her, on his shirt, resting her hand on the thin cotton material, feeling the heat radiating from him, knowing that right underneath is something her mind is telling her she needs to feel.

"People go through this world touchin' each other's skin, Marie, and they never find what they're looking for." Then he lets her grasp his bicep a little before taking her hand in his gloved one. "What you're looking for isn't there. You think it is, because it's what you can't have."

Rogue closes her eyes, knowing that something is out of her grasp. Everything is so hot and she just wants to take something in her hands and push and squeeze it.

Logan pulls the covers off her and grasps her shoulders, urging her to sit up. "Come on, time to go do the routine discharge."

She blushes because she thinks that he means that they're going to the toilet, and she wonders who's been helping her with *that*, but then Logan hooks up her catheter bag to one of those poles with wheels and she understands that he means something else entirely. He doesn't seem to be embarrassed at all by the catheter, or the fact that her gown is open in the back. In fact, he hands her a robe and helps her put it on before taking her hand in his gloved one and guiding her down the hall, out of the infirmary and down towards the training rooms.

The halls are deserted, but that doesn't mean much because this place is off limits unless one is accompanied by an adult. And the Danger Room, while she's seen it, is definitely verboten. The doors open, and she expects to see a wonderland of technology and is rewarded with a cold metal room

Logan leads her in, though just what they're doing there is a mystery to her, so she lets him sit her down on a stool and hand her a Ping-Pong ball, which she holds. He watches it in her hand, heating, and then when she looks down at it it's glowing, red and angry and frightening.

"You better lob it," Logan tells her, finally lighting his cigarillo. "Or it'll start to burn, I'm told."

Her hands know what to do more than her head, and as with all times that she's absorbed someone else, she goes with that instinct. Rogue reaches back and winds up, then throws the mass of energy and plastic at the wall. It hits with a spectacular bang, making sparks and pieces of wall fall down. She knows that the wall is just a projection of the room, and that she's not really hurting anything, and that the wall won't hit them when it flies off because it's not much of anything anyway, but it's still damn impressive.

"Cool."

Logan hands her another ball. "Ya got a fastball in there?"

She does.

---

*amnion*

For a while Marie thought she'd slide into some sort of self-afflicted silence when she got out of the infirmary to find Logan gone, the garage vacant and the bike conspicuously missing. But the days passed and she fell into step with her classmates, her roommates, her teachers, the younger kids, and the thin material on her hands. Every day, one at a time, consists of arising, greeting her hands with a sort of fleeting ruefulness, and then plowing her way through the miasma of interaction that never seems to be real for the want of something she can't pin down.

It doesn't matter *when* she understands faintly, intrinsically, something that Remy and Logan have taught her, something she couldn't process entirely, not yet.

She keeps a scrap of paper in the long arm of her glove. Every so often she takes it out and reads it. It's kind of grubby, because she has learned that gloves of any texture cause sweat. Every so often she replaces it when it gets too mucked up to read. But she recopies it, even though she had it memorized. She needs it to be there, in the glove, against her skin.

Logan had left it for her before he had left, probably while she was still in the infirmary. Previously it had never crossed her mind to wonder why Logan had been in the library so much, mostly because for some reason, the idea that he could and did enjoy reading had never occurred to her.

It was something, all right.

Long after he had left, the book had stayed open on her desk for weeks. Sometimes she stopped to read the open page, sometimes she just let Jubes toss her comic books all over the desk's surface.

She had read it, especially the part that he had faintly underlined in pencil, despite that it was a library book, but then again, violating rules was one of Logan's strong points, and so she had known it had been his hand that had done it. It had come to her one day out of the back of her head and she had written it down on the corner of her history notes and had found herself staring at her own scrawl, as if Logan had possessed her to scribble it.

He might have.

She had torn the corner loose, folded it, and tucked it in, over her bicep, above her elbow, lost in the leather and skin, where it waits, until she can say for certain that she understands.

Our age is weak—and vague—
in what it does with hands, there is a history
both of terror and loathing. My first forty years
were an agony. I lived by touching and holding.
It was my ruin.


END

---

Addendum notes: The poem in question is "A Pair of Hands" by Gerald Stern, one which I have always tried to work into a fic, but never really found appropriate until Marie, not Rogue, came along. It is as follows.

A Pair of Hands
(Gerald Stern)

That is a pair of white hands I see
floating in the mirror, the fingers on the left
are blunt and rounded, the ones on the right hand are raised
as if in thought. They are almost like gloves,
the lines are gone, they are abstracted, the suffering
is in the creases, somewhere in the folds
underneath the knuckles, or somewhere in the spaces
over the fingertips. I choose them this time
over the mouth, the mouth with two great trenches
and two great cheeks beyond the trenches, the mouth
with a curled smile, and I choose them over the eyes,
surrounded by wrinkles, wounded and bloodshot. The hands
are permanent and heavy, they are the means
both to pain and pleasure, thus the ancient
Peruvians buried them inside their clothes,
thus the Arabs cut them off and fed
them to their dogs. Our age is weak—and vague—
in what it does with hands, there is a history
both of terror and loathing. My first forty years
were an agony. I lived by touching and holding.
It was my ruin.

FINIS