For a moment, Marie felt like she was floating and bodiless. Then she opened her eyes and saw herself. She was Yuriko and she was desperate even as the lights were going out, she was clinging to Marie and mentally screaming––DON’T LET THEM TAKE ME BACK AGAIN!. It had been a plea for death as much as for any other kind of escape; the physical pain from the pull of Marie’s skin was almost overcome by the force of feeling Yuriko’s guilt and pain and disgust and horror and fear. Then Marie shut her eyes and had no idea who she was, but somehow her bones felt like they were on fire, searing her. Then there is only bright light and a shower of searing sparks.

”It’s a little known fact that class-5 mutants can defy the laws of physics when they lose control completely.”

This was the rogue mutant’s first thought when she woke up and found herself alone in the middle of nowhere. At first, the thought made no sense, until she tried to figure out where she was, and who she was this time: Marie? Yuriko? Opening her eyes, she found that she could see only white, but when she lifted her head there was a low icy crunch and she could see the woods around her. Chunks of snow slid off of her head. The smell of the air told her that she was far away from Stryker’s base. In fact, she was further away from any other living being than she had ever been, in either life.

She stood up, her clothes crunching with frost as she shook the snow off of herself. There were a vast number of bullet holes in her clothes, and while some of the frost on them was clear or white, and clean, most of it seemed to be tinged with pink and red. She could smell the blood as some of it melted on her skin. She was amazed that she could feel the cold, but that it did not sink into her skin as Marie had been used to. Her body was warm, even soaked in wet slush. She flexed her fingers, and her knuckles popped.

The metallic sound unnerved her and calmed her at the same time.

Only once before had Marie ever touched another mutant, after she had manifested. She had breathed fire for a few hours. It had taught her a lot about her mutation. She could remember now, killing herself on that poison skin––killing Yuriko; she could remember both sides of it in perfect detail, and both of them feeling equally like her own. She remembered the busy streets of Singapore with just as much nostalgia as she recalled the smell of autumn rain in Mississippi.

She tugged off one ragged glove and ran her fingers across her face, feeling the shape of her features and reassuring herself of which body she was in. It triggered a memory: image of Yuriko’s withered corpse, claws of bone still extended from one hand. Bone. Somehow Marie had done the impossible, and stolen the indestructible metal off of Yuriko’s bones. She remembered her first thought upon waking, and remembered that Yuriko had overheard Stryker saying it to one of his fellow doctors, about Marie.

“There’s only been one of ‘em before, that we know about, and he almost destroyed a whole country before a couple class-4’s took him out. This girl’s power...” He looked at some calculations on a computer screen. He had gotten hold of her DNA somehow. “She’s the most adaptable thing I’ve ever seen.”r32;
“And the most dangerous, sir?” the other doctor asked.

“Of course,” Stryker said, almost dismissively. He was a man obsessed with power.

The rogue mutant remembered what his blood had tasted like, from the one time Yuriko had managed to cut him, before he had gotten the dosage of her mind-control perfected, and learned its limitations as they applied to her.

She looked at the pink-and-red mess in the wet snow around her feet, from where she had slept. Most of the blood was hers; although her skin was perfectly healed now. She dug in the snow next to her and found her duffle bag. It had a few bullet holes, too, but she found some undamaged, less filthy clothes in it. They weren’t even all that damp. Secure in how alone she was, she changed clothes there in the middle of the clearing she had awoken in. Marie’s green cloak had a hole near the bottom hem, but she put it on over her fresh clothes anyway.

As she began walking, her boots, jeans, and the bottom two feet of her cloak were soon soaked and icy, but she kept moving. She tried to figure out what it meant, now that she was two people thrown together into one, but got distracted when she ran a hand through her hair and realized that something was different. She examined the white streaks in her hair. Yuriko’s mother had one like it, long ago; it had appeared after Yuriko’s mother had died.

The rogue mutant felt sad, remembering the funeral. Her heart ached. Was it Yuriko’s heart? Did Marie feel her pain, and ache too? Who was she, now?

Both, she decided; she was both. It was not as it had been with the others Marie had touched, with their voices in her head. Conversing with Yuriko seemed as redundant as talking to herself, because that was just what she would be doing. Curiously, she looked at her gloved hands and extended metal claws from her fingertips. She winced slightly when they broke the skin, but was surprised that she did not feel disgust and hatred, as Yuriko usually had. She retracted the claws.

“So I have changed,” she murmured. She was both, and she was neither. It occurred to her that she needed a new name, since neither Yuriko nor Marie quite felt right anymore.

When Yuriko had cut him, William Stryker had shouted into his radio that Deathstrike had gone rogue. Few words had ever sounded so sweet.

She thought about it. Half the people back in Mississippi had long ago taken to calling Marie “the rogue” because of her introversion, and her smart mouth, and the blatantly rebellious stances she had taken against most authority figures.

“My name is Rogue,” she said, testing it out. She found herself smiling. It felt good.

Rogue kept walking, South and East, away from Stryker and towards the unknown. She kept thinking, and kept discovering little things about herself that had changed.

Logan waited for his next challenger to enter the cage. Bumfuck-nowhere, aka Laughlin city, didn’t have much to offer him by way of opponents, especially not compared to what Logan liked to call his “day job” back in New York, but it made him money, and while he was on a lengthy break out from under Chuck’s roof, he had to pay his own bills. Thus, he found himself beating the snot and blood out of redneck assholes in a chain-link cage.

The next guy came in. And down he went, pretty damned quick, too. Logan went back to his corner, deciding to let the next guy get a few hits in first.

A breath of fresh air reached him as somebody came in from outside, and Logan inhaled it deeply, savoring how different it was from the smoke and body odor and alcohol smells surrounding him. Something other than the cleanness of the air caught his attention: the smell of a woman, the smell of metal, the smell of wool soaked in slush, and the faintest trace of blood.

He turned to look at her, blatantly suspicious.

She was looking at him as she pushed back the hood of her cloak. She was young and had short-cropped dark hair, longer in the front so that the white streaks framing her face reached down just past her chin, but the rest was cut up at a sharp angle so that the style formed a bob at the back; the pale skin at the back of her neck peeked over the edge of her heavy scarf. Her brown eyes were so dark they were nearly black. She was pale and a little too thin, but her face was mask-like and reserved. Her gaze dropped to the dog tag around his neck, lingering there before scanning the rest of his body and returning to his face. Something about the look on her face almost made Logan want to reassess his original estimate of her age. There was more than appreciation of his body in that look; there was something wary and something unshakably calm, and something else that was totally and utterly unafraid.

Rogue waited until he was distracted by his next opponent before her hand moved up to touch the adamantium tag dangling just below her collar bone, under her scarf. When the fight announcer called the man she was watching Wolverine, Rogue suppressed a shiver.

Yuriko had known that name.

Rogue sat at the bar and ordered water. When the bartender set it in front of her with a glare and wandered off, Rogue allowed herself to pop her knuckles. The metallic sounds were oddly soothing. She sipped her water and watched the fight.

The Wolverine was lovely to watch, and Rogue found herself tempted to remove her cloak and scarf, because he skin felt suddenly too warm. She resisted, and looked away, pulling her gloves on a little tighter as she recalled her limitations. Still, she felt a little warm. To distract herself, she watched the news, and let herself get irritated at a few politicians.

Later, Rogue could hear the fights ending, and sighed in relief as the crowd began to leave. She scanned the truckers who lingered, hoping to see one she could ask for a ride from without being forced to threaten their lives within an hour, when they would reach for her. In preparation for her performance she hid behind a mask, her features softening as she widened her eyes a little, and made the effort to look like a runaway; years fell from her appearance, and she looked sixteen, for all that she felt one-hundred-sixty. She found herself distracted when the Wolverine, now wearing a shirt and a leather jacket––to her disappointment––strode up to the bar and sat a few seats away. The youthful mask fell away, melting like a snowball in a furnace.

Again she met his gaze. He was looking at her suspiciously. It occurred to Rogue that he might be able to smell the lingering traces of blood from the clothing in her bag. She revealed nothing. Marie had never been able to hide her emotions––unless she was lying: an art at which she had excelled––but Yuriko had been raised in a culture that valued reserve as one of its highest virtues, and Rogue had benefitted from it. She held Wolverine’s gaze for a moment and then glanced away, looking back at the television.

Inwardly, Rogue winced as the news chose that moment to mention the “m” word: some story about the mutant problem and dangerous mutants. A hint of unease flickered across her face, and she clutched the strap of her bag more tightly. Her fingertips itched and her knuckles ached. She lifted her bag to her shoulder in preparation to leave, but then she realized that Wolverine was looking at her again. He looked angry, too, and like he was trying to figure out where her reaction was rooted: against mutants, or against those who vilifed them.

Then he was distracted as one of his opponents from the ring approached him, and said some very stupid things, accusing the Wolverine of cheating. Rogue watched curiously. When the tall bald man ignored the Wolverine’s warnings and pulled out a knife, the shout of alarm rose unbidden from Rogue’s throat and she slid halfway off her seat. Her body was tense and her free hand fell out to her side, instinctively held out in preparation to extend her claws.

And then Logan released his, and Rogue’s breath caught in her throat. She almost growled when the bartender took out his shotgun, but did not move. All eyes in the room were on the Wolverine, and she could not risk them turning to stare at her, too.

She watched him slice the bartender’s gun, and her body tensed when he looked at her again, as though silently asking if she wanted to try something similar. He was rage incarnate for a moment, but faltered when he saw something other than hate or lust in Rogue’s gaze––he could not identify what he saw––and then he sheathed his claws and left.

The sound of the door swinging shut behind him acted like a trigger, sending Rogue shooting after him. She hid in his trailer. If anyone had bothered to ask what she was thinking, she would have cursed at them in two dialects of Chinese and a smattering of French.

He found her sooner than she had thought.

“Hello.”

“Get out.”

“I don’t think you want me to,” she said simply, sitting up and shouldering her duffle bag.

That stunned him somewhat. “Like Hell I don’t.”

Rogue held her breath and lifted one hand so that he could see the tattered fingertips of her gloves. Then she extended her claws.

His eyes opened very wide.

“Hell is where I came from, Sugah. Somethin’ tells me you did, too.” The claws snapped back in. She never once looked away from his face.

“Who the fuck are you?”

She gave an odd, bitter smile, making her look ancient despite her otherwise apparent youth. “My name is Rogue,” she said; her voice was bitter, too, but not as cold as before: tinged with something like southern spitfire.

Logan stared at her for a moment, then jerked his head in the direction of his truck. “Get in.”

Rogue leapt from the trailer with surprising gracefulness. She followed him to his truck and got in on the passenger side, putting her bag on the floor. She sighed heavily and popped her neck. Logan seemed uneasy at the familiar metallic noise.

To distract himself, he started the truck’s engine.

“I know about you,” Rogue said lightly. “I...well, not me, but Yuriko was meant to be like ‘Wolverine two-point-oh’.”

“Who?”

“It’s really, really complicated,” Rogue sighed. Then her brow furrowed. “Do you...he said something about your memory.”

Logan was suddenly glaring at her very sharply. “Styker?”

“Yeah. Do you remember?”

His jaw clenched. “No. I don’t remember anything before the last twenty years, ever since I woke up naked and bloody in the middle of bumfuck nowhere,” he growled.

Rogue’s brow creased with a mixture of concern and sympathetic anger. “Shit. And I thought what he’d done to me––to Yuriko was bad.”

“Who is she?”

Rogue hesitated, adjusting her scarf. “Uhm. I...she’s.” A look of sincere and pained confusion marred her featured. “It’s weird, okay? Havin’ two people in my brain and half the time I can’t tell which one I am because all of her memories just kind of merged with mine and I woke up and I’m Rogue. It’s really, really crazy, and I know I’m not making sense, but just know that this is messed up, okay?”

Logan raised an eyebrow at the random touches of something like a southern drawl in the way she spoke. “Are you a telepath or something?”

“Oh, God, to have it that easy,” Rogue groaned in exasperation, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes. “No. I’ve just got killer skin that sucks the life and souls and mutant powers outta people, and apparently if they hang on long enough that I kill ‘em, then I steal other weird fuckin’ things like metal bones because I’m a class-5 mutant with a mutation determined to steal anything of possible advantage from anyone I touch and the power to do it!” she ranted.

Logan leaned back in his seat a little, obviously a tad stunned.

Rogue held her breath for a moment. “I was yelling that last bit in an angry fashion, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah. Feel better?”

She took a deep breath and let it out, slumping back in her seat and untangling her fingers from her hair, lowering her hands to her side. “Fuck yes. Thanks.”

Logan was trying to wrap his head around all of what she said. “So your skin killed this Yuriko woman.”

“Yeah. But it also took my––it took her mutation and her memories and personality and––well...” She unsheathed her claws again, wincing slightly because two of her fingers hadn’t quite been in the right angle and a few tendons got scraped.

Logan reached for her hand, pausing when she flinched instinctively. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“But I might hurt you,” Rogue countered ruefully. She took a steadying breath and held her hand upright so her claws pointed up and away from both of them, and then held it out for him. “Just be careful of my skin.” Her gloves only went to her wrists, and there was an inch of bare skin between their hem and the long sleeves of her shirt.

Amazed that she smelled of neither lies nor fear, Logan held her arm gently, his fingers just an inch below the bared skin, as he examined her claws closely, the metal all too familiar. “You shouldn’t have been able to take the metal.”

Rogue shook her head. “It has something to do with my being a class-5, according to Stryker.” Her eyebrows lowered in a look of anger. “He was huntin’ me down. He had Yuriko under some kinda mind control, and sent her after me when I managed to get away. She had to stay away longer than he’d anticipated, and the drug started to wear off enough that she made her aim purposely bad, and touched my skin. She held on tight and wouldn’t let go for anything. I––she didn’t want to go back.” Rogue swallowed thickly. “She didn’t have to.” She looked too old for her face, and too pained.

Logan looked away from her claws as she sheathed them, and into her eyes, reading the pain and anger, the coldness and the toughness in her. “You okay?” he asked softly.

She looked away, pulling her hand back slowly, almost reluctantly. He’d given her the only non-violent touch she’d felt in––well, far too long. “I dunno. It’s a strange thing to wake up ragged and covered in blood in the snow when the last thing ya really remember is looking at the body of someone you just killed and knowing it’s yours even though you also know it isn’t.” She looked at him again, and smirked bitterly. “And then here I run into you just over a month later. Small world, huh?”

Logan settled back into his seat with a sigh. “No kiddin’. Jeez. I came out here to get away from these kinda coincidences.”

“Er...Stryker-related ones?”

“No. ‘Isn’t-it-a-small-world’ ones. They’re pretty common back at my day job.”

“Day job?”

“I’m a superhero.”

Rogue blinked twice in quick succession. “Superhero...Okay.” She tried to suppress the amusement in her voice, but found that she couldn’t.

Logan snorted. “Oh like you can talk. What kind of a name is ‘Rogue’ anyway?”

“What kind of a name is Wolverine?”

His head snapped around so he could glare at her, but he couldn’t help the faint smirk that tugged at the corner of his mouth. “My name’s Logan.”

Rogue hesitated. “I used to be Marie.”

His eyebrows raised at that.

Rogue shrugged a little. “With both Marie and Yuriko up here, neither name feels quite right anymore. Rogue, does, though.”

“But you’re still Marie. No offense, but you just don’t look like a ‘Yuriko’, kid.”

Rogue shook her head. “I’m...not really. I look like her. I talk like her now and then when I get mad, since Yuriko’s emotional range tended to be more limited, but...I’m not her anymore. You’d be surprised how hard it is not to say ‘I’ instead of ‘Yuriko’ and to talk about her in the third person; it makes me feel crazier than almost anything else––even with bits of other people I’ve touched still swimming around in my head. I’m something in between the two, and Rogue sounds pretty good to me. It’s better than ‘Lady Deathstryke’ by any measure.”

Logan raised an eyebrow.

Rogue reached under her scarf and tugged at the chain around her neck. She re-latched it and handed the chain and tag to Logan.

It was adamantium, like his, and did indeed bear the name Lady Deathstryke. He ran the pad of his thumb across the letters, and handed it back. “Fine. Rogue.”

Rogue put it back on and looked at him curiously. “So...now what?”

Logan ran a hand through his wild hair. “...Shit. I’ve gotta call Chuck.”

“Who’s Chuck?”

“Bald really-strong telepath with a serious case of the morals, and also the leader of the superhero-team.” He reached across her lap to get to the glove compartment.

Rogue shrank back instinctively, her gaze locked onto his hand and arm, but the passive look on her face showed that this was more courtesy than nervousness or fear. “Ah. I see.” Her nostrils flared as soon as the compartment fell open. “Uhm. There’s food in there.” Her eyes were a little wide and she felt suddenly all too aware of the dull ache of her empty stomach.

Logan seemed a little amused by her reaction, and snagged the bag of beef jerky once he’d got ahold of the communicator. “Hungry, are ya?”

“I haven’t eaten in a couple days.” She did not look away from the bag of jerky.r32;r32; Logan snapped the glove compartment shut and tossed her the half-empty bag.

She caught it deftly. “I like you,” she said quietly, and began inhaling the jerky.

Logan gave an amused snort and opened his communicator as he started turning his truck around to head back east.

Xavier’s voice on the other end: “Logan! I’m surprised to hear from you quite this soon...”

“Neither did I.”

“Oh, dear. What’s happened, and how much property has been damaged?”

Rogue laughed abruptly at that, and sniggered when Logan glared at her for eavesdropping, not that he could blame her.

“Nothing quite like that, this time. I just ran into somebody. Her name is Rogue. She knows a Helluva lot about Stryker.”

Rogue finished her jerky and set the empty bag in the seat between them. She gave a low purr, enjoying the lingering flavor on her tongue.

Logan shot her an odd look, as Xavier asked questions.

She didn’t notice, as she seemed to be slumped in the corner formed by her seat and the door to his truck, curling up there with her eyes shut. As her mask eased a little, her face had a permanent, albeit faint, exasperated and concerned look as she tried to relax.

It was a very bizarre moment for him to realize that she was beautiful.

“Sorry, Chuck, what was that first one? Uh-huh. And all the ones after it?”

Rogue smirked, trying to figure out what the Hell she’d just gotten herself into.

Dr. Hank McCoy stared at the X-rays before him. Very different from Logan, where the seams of each added metal section could be clearly seen, Rogue’s metal skeleton was smooth and eerily natural-looking. “This,” Hank said, tapping the x-ray of her skull, “this should be impossible.”

Rogue sat cross-legged on the edge of the table behind him, which looked like it belonged in a small boardroom. To her left sat Professor Charles Xavier. To her right, Logan lounged in a chair that was tilted back so he could rest his heels on the edge of the table.

“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it?” Rogue mused.

Hank shook his head, and gave a lengthy explanation concerning atomic structure, energy requirements, chain-reactions, and something about nuclear power.

“I’m a walking hydrogen bomb?” Rogue sounded utterly lost, and mildly disconcerted, but also bizarrely amused.

“It’s the only explanation that I can think of for how your mutation created the amount of energy necessary to do this with adamantium.” He tapped a claw to the x-ray of her skull. “How it directed that energy and so perfectly formed the adamantium into natural shapes is something truly astounding, but I think it has to do with the way that you copy or mimic the genetic activity of any-”

“Hank? You lost me five minutes ago, and I don’t think I can take much more,” Logan groaned.

An amused look flickered across her face for a brief moment. “Don’t suppose ya have any suggestions for controlling my skin or anything?” Rogue inquired in droll tones, raising her gloved hands and wriggling her fingers mock-menacingly.

Hank straightened his glasses. “I will be most interested in studying the mechanism of your mutation further, Rogue, and in the process I think I may find some answers for you.”

Rogue nodded slowly, but appeared far more resigned than hopeful.

“That simply leaves the matter of what you want to do next, Rogue,” Xavier said.

She looked at him distantly, her face once more a mask of reserve. Marie had never really bothered with plans: only destinations and experiences to be had. Yuriko had once planned almost ever facet of her life, only to have it all smashed like so much glass at the hands of William Stryker. Rogue felt relaxed by the idea of not worrying about the details now and then, especially now that she felt truly invincible; she also felt very, very vengeful. She turned her head and met Logan’s gaze.

He knew she could tell that he was feeling pretty vengeful, too. While they had waited for the blackbird to pick them up in Canada, Logan had practically interrogated Rogue about William Stryker, and everything she knew about him. Her reports had matched the ones given by a blue and German mutant that the X-men had picked up the previous day; his name was Kurt and he had been placed under mind control in order to attempt to assassinate the U.S. President. While Hank had run his initial tests on her genetic sample, Rogue had spoken with Kurt, in a voice that was mostly Yuriko’s. She had apologized for abducting him, and he had offered some spiritual advice.

Marie had become an atheist in reaction against her fundamentalist upbringing and what her family had thought not only of mutants, but of uppity young girls; Yuriko had been a buddhist in a philosophical rather than religious sense. Rogue had thanked Kurt politely, but her heart could not be tapped by more than the poetry and peacefulness and sentiments behind his words, and his more lofty suggestions of ultimate goodness in the world had only made her feel bitter and dark for not believing them.

When Rogue turned to face Xavier again, she said simply, “I want to prevent Stryker from his dream of starting a war. He was planning something big, with Kurt and that little display. I think we should stop him before he implements anything further.” She knew Logan would hear the deliberateness of her words, and sense her true intentions; she did think that Stryker was up to something, but all she really wanted was an opportunity to go back and take him down.

Xavier had observed early on that Rogue’s mind was difficult to get a handle on, with the outer layer of noise caused by the ghosts of excess personalities, and the complexity beneath that of two fully formed minds merged into a seamless whole. He could not passively feel for her emotions as he might do with anyone else in the mansion, and he lacked Logan’s keen senses for the hard-to-detect false tones in her voice.

Soon, an X-men meeting was being held. Logan sat at the edge of the room, smoking near the window. Rogue sat at the far end of the table, sitting nearer to Logan than to any of the others, as Xavier and Scott talked strategy.

Rogue and Logan interrupted frequently: Rogue with statistics and information about the base, including the emergency rear exit; and Logan with biting commentary on the stupidity of some of Scott’s plans. It was only when Rogue gave the details of where Stryker had gotten his mind-control drugs that a snag was thoroughly reached: the illusionist. Xavier assigned various areas of research to Scott, Hank, and himself, and ended the meeting.

By then, it was late into the evening.

Rogue promptly vanished into her room. She had been on her own so long––as both Marie and Yuriko––that being around so many people and keeping up the impression that she was socially competent and keeping her distance and being polite all at once, took a toll on her mind, and even just the near proximity to so many strangers made her skin itch with the urge to flee. She slept fitfully for a few hours, not bothering to undress before getting in bed. When she awoke, she thoroughly enjoyed the indulgence of having a shower and hot water to wash away the cold sweat of nightmares. Then she changed into her last set of clean clothes, and headed downstairs.

It was late into the night, but not totally silent. Rogue moved through the mansion like a shadow, taking in the sounds and scents. She paused in the main T.V. room, and watched a psychic boy channel surf by blinking forcefully. He did not look tired, or show symptoms of insomnia, so when he told her that he didn’t ever sleep, and implied that he didn’t need it, she was not surprised.

She went to the kitchen and rummaged around in the fridge. A soft groan of relief escaped her throat when she found a brand of Japanese beer hidden far in the back: three bottles. Rogue seized one, shut the refrigerator door, and sat cross-legged on the kitchen counter next to it. She was barefoot, and wore only jeans, a tank top, and a pair of comfortable but ragged-looking silk gloves that went halfway up her arms and probably had not originally been fingerless.

Logan found her sitting there in the dark, because she had not needed to turn on the lights. “You see in the dark, too, then?”

“It’s dark?” Rogue mocked.

Logan snorted. “You owe me for that beer. It’s one of mine.” To emphasize the point, he took one of the other bottles from the fridge. “What are you doin’ up, anyway, kid?”

“I’m not a kid, Logan. I’m far older than I look.” She snorted. “And I don’t usually get more than a few hours of sleep at a time.” She shrugged, taking a sip of beer.

Logan twisted the cap off of his. “Nightmares?”

With a dark look on her face, Rogue flexed her fingers, which gave two soft metallic pops. “Yeah. You, too?”

“Yeah.” He leaned against the section of counter opposite hers; an island of countertop in the middle of the large kitchen. He was watching her face closely. Even though colors were never as vivid when seen in the dark, he could still otherwise see her expression clear as day.

She looked oddly war-torn for someone so young. Rogue ran her bare fingertips in random designs through the condensation on her beer bottle. “You know, the first time I heard Stryker talk about you, I immediately started to envy you, if only because you’d escaped,” she said quietly, her expression a perfectly smooth mask except for the slightest narrowing of her eyes: well-trained emotional reserve. “That was before I overheard anything about how they had messed with your memory. When I first heard that...I envied you even more. Not only had you gotten away, and escaped that Hell, but you didn’t have to be haunted by what you’d done.” A shadow crossed her features almost too quickly to be seen: a flicker of pain and guilt.

Logan didn’t answer immediately, but when he did, he asked, “What do you think now that you’ve met me?”

She gave a bitter, twisted smile that left her eyes looking cold and almost dead. “I think it’s about six to one, half-dozen to the other, really. Keep that in mind, wontcha, Sugar?”

He thought about it. This time he couldn’t see nor hear any traces of artifice or manipulation in her, and she smelled like painful honesty. “Alright.”

“Promise?” She looked younger, and warmer, just for a second, and it wasn’t fake either.

Logan tried to figure out why it almost made his breath catch silently, and why the hell he answered, with perfect honesty: “I promise.”

Then she smiled a little, and it all seemed worth it. When she tilted her head back as she took another pull of beer, her hair fell back from her face and left exposed the long lean line from the end of her chin, along her throat, down to her collar bone; below that, her dog tag caught the moonlight with a dull gleam.

This woman is damned dangerous, Logan noted. Somehow, this did not prevent him from staring at the movements of her throat muscles as she swallowed, and the wet shine of those lips of hers wrapped around the mouth of the bottle. To distract himself, he asked, “Where do you get that random bit of southern accent from?”

Rogue set her beer aside for a moment and tugged idly at a fraying part of her glove. “Marie was from Mississippi.”

“How old were you when you ran off?”

Her eyes snapped up, looking into his as her face became a darker mask than a moment before, just out of reflex. He had surprised her, and the momentary tension in her muscles showed it, even as she answered smoothly, “Sixteen. I was on the road and the streets both, respectively, movin’ around for a couple of years or so. I tried to settle in Alaska, but after half a year there was an––incident with another mutant, and I had to run again. It didn’t take me long to realize that this time I was being chased.” Again, she reached for her beer.

Logan nodded. “What was the incident?”

Rogue shook her head. “A local boy manifested at the diner I worked for. Whenever he talked, he breathed out a little puff of flame. After he realized what he was doing, he tried to bolt, and ran headlong into me. Another diner had spilled coffee on my gloves, so I’d just taken them off to put on my spares, so he hit skin.” She shook her head. “Just a stupid bit of every-day chaos, really.”

Logan smirked a bit at that. “Sounds like a normal morning around here, at any rate.”

Rogue showed a hint of curiosity. “How is it here, really?”

He shrugged. “Lots of teenage mutants, complete with angst, hijinks, and repair bills you wouldn’t believe.”

She swirled her beer thoughtfully, listening to the hiss of carbonation. “Why do you stay around?”

It was his turn to tense at how probing the question was, and the implications of what the asker knew just from looking. “Lotsa little annoying things: loyalty to Chuck, for what he’s done to help me; the opportunities to kick bad-guy ass that being a superhero provides; and who else is gonna keep these optimistic do-gooders alive when they start to get too close to real war-type fightin’? Not Scooter––that’s for damned sure.”

Rogue smirked faintly. “He’s a stiff and authoritative type, isn’t he?”

“As anal as the rod he’s got permanently shoved up his ass,” Logan added.

Rogue chuckled a little, and sipped her beer. The look she gave him was half-amused, half-curious. “There’s somethin’ else, though...”

Logan finally glared at her, even as his mind automatically drew up the image of a certain smiling red-head with bright green eyes. “And it’s none of your business.”

“Okay, fine. I’m sure I’ll pick it up from the local rumor mill eventually,” Rogue sighed, but there was a hint of a teasing smile on her lips. Her dark eyes peeked out from under thick dark lashes and a few loose strands of ice-white hair.

Despite his annoyance, Logan had to admit that he’d like to see that look on Rogue’s face more often. There was some kinda spitfire hiding under all the cool and dark she wore. It didn’t have the heat of an open flame; it wasn’t visual and obvious, but instead it was subtle and rather alluring. It was possible to get lost in that kind of heat. “Damned teenagers,” he muttered lightly.

Rogue’s smiled widened a little, and she relaxed enough to lean back and rest the back of her head on a cabinet door. Then she suddenly went tense again, and her eyes opened wider––not out of fear, but instinctively to catch more light. She leaned forward, listening.

And Logan heard it, too.

“Black hawks,” Rogue hissed, a low growl rumbling up from her chest.

Logan stepped up to her, and saw her eyes narrow faintly. “I need to get to that patch of wall behind you to set off the alarm.”

Rogue moved aside quickly, easing around him with fluid grace.

The silent alarm went out as soon as Logan tapped the right button on the hidden panel in the wall, alerting the house’s psychics. Logan heard Rogue strip off her gloves. One fluid flex of her hands caused an almost musical assortment of clicks from her fingers: things snapping into place. She headed for the main hallway and stopped in the center of it. Logan paused, meeting her gaze as she squarely faced the main window.

“I’ll cover this weak spot. You get upstairs,” Rogue whispered, her voice heavy with focus and malice, but something determined and protective as well. She unsheathed her claws.

Logan nodded and left her.

Students were already vanishing into escape tunnels as Logan made his way upstairs and the first black shadows of soldiers appeared at the windows.

Logan situated himself around the first corner, hidden. What’s the situation, Chuck?

They all seem to be wearing helmets with interior designs similar to Magneto’s. I cannot effect their minds. Jean, Storm, and Scott are with the children. Hank is sealing off the lower levels well enough that he may need weeks to reopen them. Kurt has been kind enough to assist me in getting aboard the blackbird; however, we cannot fit everyone in the plane.

Logan unsheathed his claws. How many will still be in the hangar?

Several of the older students, Jean, and Hank have volunteered to stay behind. There are enough supplies here below for a dozen of us for several weeks, if necessary.

We’ll stall them. The first crash of broken glass downstairs. Rogue is with me. Logan himself was startled by how much trust was implicit in that thought, and how easily he gave it, but there had been something about the way she had moved, from the moment she’d heard the helicopters, and the tone of her words.

Xavier sounded relieved, but still gave off a sense of unease at the vicious tones of Logan’s thoughts. Thank you, Logan.

Then Charles’ voice faded, and Logan could hear the not-quiet-enough steps of the soldiers moving down the hall. He could hear the first couple of doors being opened and searched. Logan waited, and heard the eruption of chaos downstairs when other soldiers met Rogue, just as his own first target stepped close enough and spotted him. Before the soldier could cry out, Logan’s claws stole his voice.

There were a lot of soldiers. All black-ops, and probably quite good men, when they weren’t sent to kidnap children in the middle of the night.

Word got out over their radios that there were hostile mutants, resistant to force, and more men flooded in. Logan heard an almost-scream from downstairs and leapt off a balcony and into the fray below. Rogue had half a dozen sets of tranq darts in her; they had slowed her down already and she was getting only slower, for all that she was still on her feet and fighting, but the men attacking her were doing far more damage than before. Logan landed in front of her, taking down the three men closest to her and giving her the critical time to pull the damned things out, but her vision was still blurred. She could smell Logan, and was able to make sure that her claws never landed on him, even as she fought through a hazy drug-fog for a few minutes.

Then her world cleared abruptly and she was able to once more wreak havoc with all her power and skill.

Logan had to admit it; she was good. She was quicker than him, and moved like a cat. While most of the men she took down had more mass, even with her adamantium advantage, as well as height and reach on her, she took them down with ease: tripping them up and hitting them ruthlessly wherever they were vulnerable. He had never seen someone hamstring three men in one move before.

When she moved to stand beside him as the enemy pulled back to regroup, Logan felt a totally unfamiliar instant connection: this sense of having totally reliable support, and faith in the fighter at his side. Distantly, he wondered if this was part of that “teamwork” nonsense Scooter always babbled about. If so, he doubted that the pansy really had any idea what he’d been talking about. This comradeship with Rogue was something solid, and primal, and outright barbaric.

And he and Rogue both squared-off to face the many guns they heard preparing to fire. Rogue was already smeared with blood, some of it her own around the bullet-holes her shirt, and Logan, his shirt already in shreds from previous automatic gunfire, just snarled and roared, “If you’re gonna shoot me, SHOOT ME!” and unsheathed his claws loudly as he marched toward the soldiers.

Then everyone froze as a replying voice shouted, “Don’t shoot ‘im!” And the war zone grew suddenly quiet. Soldiers stepped aside, letting one man move up through their ranks.

“Wolverine. Is that you? You haven’t changed a bit. All these years...” His boots were loud in the silence with every step he took.

Then Rogue caught his scent and instantly gave an deep and utterly hellish growl that sounded like it should have come from a creature three times her size, and Stryker paused, disconcerted.

Half a dozen black-ops flashlights fixed their beams on Rogue, seeming surprised to see a young woman when they had thought that her growl had indicated a hellhound or something similar. Rogue bore her teeth and glared. “They aren’t here, you sonofabitch. You can’t have them any more than you could ever have me. Get the fuck out of this house,” she snarled.

Logan’s gaze finally focused on the aged face of the man whose signature graced the adamantium on his skeleton. He faintly recognized that face, and felt an instinctive anger at the sight of it. Stryker knew about his past, and the other man’s knowledge was so close that Logan could taste it.

Logan took a step forward.

The sound of half a dozen specialized tranq guns being cocked gave him only momentary pause; it was Rogue’s voice, barely a whisper, calling, “Sugar?” that actually made him stop. It pissed him off like nothing else, but she was probably right. And she’d somehow gotten that promise out of him not half an hour ago.

“Get out of my house,” Logan growled, “and leave the kids who live here alone.”

Stryker all but sneered, but some of the men around him were shaken. These hardened men had been trained to fight with honor, and to obey orders, but the former had always been their reassurance. Breaking into a house and taking children was something a bit too close to home, and their orders––to break into a hostile military base to capture hostile mutants terrorists––did not seem to apply in this huge house, where most of the bedrooms that men had searched had shelves of stuffed animals and glitter-framed pictures of young kids and their friends. And they could see the dog tag around Logan’s neck, that marked him as a fellow soldier, while his words marked him as a man protecting his home. Not even the sight of his metal claws could fully shake the feeling of wrongness some of them felt. Stryker sensed the unease in his ranks.

“You always were at home in militant places,” he countered.

“You won’t find anything like that here,” Logan said firmly. Dark clouds were forming outside, and it was beginning to rain and rain hard all of a sudden. The temperature of the air was dropping like a stone, too.

Before Stryker could reply, a foot-thick wall of ice began to form, starting at the floor and ceiling and moving to meet in the middle. Before it closed in and completely sealed them off, Logan added, “You won’t find anything at all.”

Rogue looked over her shoulder, seeing Bobby Drake’s face through a gap in the wall––a hidden door leading to a hidden passage––and his hand pressed to the wall, trails of frost emanating from his fingers all the way out to the ice barrier. Storm was behind him, her eyes glowing white.

“Jean sent us up to bring you guys down before we seal off the hangar,” Bobby whispered, gesturing them over urgently.

Rogue sheathed her claws and flinched as Stryker planted a bomb on the ice barrier. She could hear its timer clicking too quietly for human ears. Logan still hadn’t moved. “Logan?”

Slowly, he turned to look at her.

She started to reach for him, then hesitated, remembering that he was nearly shirtless and that she was gloveless. To compensate, she jerked her head toward the door.

He followed her through it, and shut it behind him. Bobby turned on a small flashlight and lead them down the narrow corridor. Logan couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching his fists, and his knuckles itched.

“When we see him again,” Rogue said, too quietly for Storm or Bobby to hear, “and if ya still really wanna know, I’ll touch him, and I’ll tell ya everything I get from him.”

Logan was stunned momentarily, and looked at her face, reading only determination in her expression. “Thank you.”

She only nodded, and tucked her hands into her pockets, holding her arms close to her body. When she felt Logan’s fingers brush across her spine, over the bloodied fabric of her shirt, she instinctively tensed, but relaxed consciously when he did not pull away.

Logan observed her patiently, until he felt her shoulder blades ease down to a more relaxed position. His touch lingered, moving up and down in a few lazy swipes. He felt her shiver, once, and heard her heartbeat quicken, and reluctantly stopped touching her, letting his hand return to his side.

Rogue’s throat was tight, and her face was slightly flushed. After a few moments wherein she recollected herself, she whispered, “Thank you.”

He only nodded, and by then they had reached the hangar.

Rogue almost winced at the fear-scent that suddenly permeated the air when she and Logan entered the hangar. Even Hank, moving to seal off the door corridor, had done a bit of a double-take at the sight of them.

Logan was the more visibly tattered, his shirt shredded to the point of falling off, from bullet-fire and the occasional knife-gouge; however, Rogue was covered in more bloodstains, her hands and arms most notably coated in red smears, and her grey tank top and jeans peppered with bullet-holes edged in her own blood, as well as one or two evidences of arterial spray that had definitely not been from her––even the white streak in her hair had a reddish smear along a section of it from when a bullet had grazed her scalp.

They looked like they had both just been through Hell, and like they had given out their fair share of it, too. Idly, Logan wondered which idea scared the others more. Then it occurred to him that most of them hadn’t met Rogue.

“My God! Logan, Rogue, are you two alright?” Jean asked, obviously concerned.

“As always, Jeannie,” Logan replied.

Rogue shrugged. “I’ve been worse. I just need a shower.”

Jean took the opportunity to introduce Rogue to the students who had volunteered to stay behind: Remy, Jubilee, Siryn, Kitty, Pete, Bobby, and St. John.

“We just call him Johnny,” Jubilee corrected.

“And we just call her annoying,” Johnny countered.

Jubilee elbowed him.

Johnny poked her side, making her emit an undignified squeak. Bobby pushed them apart and sat between them before a fight broke out. He looked resigned, and Rogue guessed quite rightly that this was a very normal occurrence.

“I see what you mean,” she murmured to Logan, who gave an amused smirk.

“What’s your mutation, petite?” Remy called.

“Killer skin that drains the life, mind, and mutation of people through skin-to-skin contact. I keep it all permanently if I accidentally kill somebody, which is how this happened.” She raised one bloody hand and extended her claws from all five fingertips.

“Holy shit. You’re Wolverine 2.0!”

At that, she visibly winced. “That was the goal of the guy who did it anyway. He just made the mistake of sending her after me without doubling-up the dosage of the mind control drug she was under. If ya don’t mind, I’d really rather not talk about it.” She re-sheathed her claws with a loud metallic snap, her face showing faint traces of irritation.

The room was uncomfortably quiet for a moment, as Rogue put her hands in her pockets again, her expression once more becoming a mask.

“Is that who was here? Did he come for you?” Bobby asked.

Rogue and Logan exchanged glances, and when she looked at Bobby again, Rogue said simply, “He was after everyone in the building, and something hidden down here below it.”

That unnerved them, but they asked no more questions.

Jean moved to lay a comforting hand on Rogue’s back, but Rogue side-stepped it, keeping her distance. Jean looked put-out, but said, “The showers are over here, and we have some clean clothes if you’d like. They aren’t very fashionable, I’m afraid, but...” She shrugged, trying for a playful smile and not succeeding very well.

Rogue only asked, “Do ya have any gloves that don’t smell like latex or something equally medical?”

“Possibly, as part of some of the older X-men uniforms. Is leather okay?”

“Leather’s fine.”

Logan watched the two of them vanish into the womens’ locker rooms: Jean standing tall with an open and welcoming grace as she tried to offer comfort, and Rogue with her spine straight but her arms tucked against her sides as she kept herself distant and closed. He didn’t like the unease in Jean’s scent when she was around Rogue, or the almost pitying look in those pretty green eyes––like she could get over her nervousness if she could feel sorry for the untouchable girl. It was the first time Jean had ever managed to annoy him without Scooter somehow being directly involved.

Logan could hear the low voices of the older students as he headed off to the shower; at least none of them were marked by the tones of pity or nervousness––only curiosity, suspicion, and a small-but-healthy dose of fear.

Rogue felt more clear-headed with the smell of gore scrubbed off her skin and cleaned out from under her nails. She even reluctantly rinsed her mouth out to get rid of the lingering traces of blood there. The smell and taste of blood, however thrilling they could be at times, awoke instincts in her that tended to make civility more difficult, and civility, for now, was paramount.

She put on a clean sports bra, borrowed from the laundry because it happened to be her size, although its actual owner was unknown. The underwear and the white t-shirt that she put on were from a cabinet reserved for new arrivals––usually students rescued from less than ideal situations who had been forced to leave items at home. The navy blue pants and light jacket with the stylized X’s on them were from a selection of training uniforms. Jean had also found her a pair of leather gloves that fit tolerably.

Rogue thanked her sincerely, but kept her face masked. The woman meant well, but her nervousness and attempts to compensate were both irritating.

Cots were being set up by the time Rogue emerged from the locker room. The boys on one side of the room, and girls on the other, with teachers sleeping between them. Logan stood next to his own cot, which was apart from the others and near one of the walls where he could listen for any intruders getting into the lower levels. Rogue set herself up similarly against an adjacent wall, but did not lay down to rest as the others did, even when the lights went out.

It was almost pitch black, and even with night senses it was challenging to see in much detail. Rogue sat on her cot, leaning against the wall as she listened in the dark, her keen ears able to make out the faintest sounds of movement from far overhead. She could not hear enough to tell what part of the mansion the sounds came from, or what Stryker and his men might be doing, but she listened anyway, and for over an hour it was the only sound, other than the quiet breathing and uneasy sleep-sounds of the X-men and students.

Then someone stirred, standing up and quietly skulking away from the others, and down a corridor just past the locker rooms. Barefoot and silent as a shadow, Rogue followed.

St. John sat on a crate in the supply room, situating himself directly below the outgoing-air vent in the ceiling. This was, he knew, the only place he could smoke without setting off alarms. He knew, because he’d overheard Scott and Logan arguing about it. His lighter flicked open with a click. The flame felt comforting, and he let it curl into a little ball of light in his hand. Closing his lighter, he lit his cigarette with the little fireball.

“Can I bum a smoke off of ya?” asked a low, feminine voice that was not quite a whisper.

St. John was startled faintly, but the voice sounded sincere rather than accusing. He made the ball of flame in his hand grow brighter, so he could see who it was. The first thing he saw was the shape of her pale face, framed by dark hair with a white streak. He half-gasped, his eyes going very wide even as they stung and began to water as he almost choked on a gulp of smoke. The ball of fire almost went out.

“Take it easy, John. I’m not here to kill you.” She sounded amused, which made her words something less than reassuring, all things considered. “But seriously, can I bum one?”

Johnny could see a gloved hand outstretched, and he held out a cigarette. She took it gently, her gloved fingers not brushing his.

“And a light?”

He held up the small ball of flame at arm’s length, and got a clear look at Rogue’s face as she tucked her hair behind her ears, leaning forward with the cigarette between her lips, and touching the tip of it to the flame, inhaling a little to get it going. She was quite pretty, her cheekbones and dark eyes flatteringly lit up by the firelight. Then she stood up straighter and John took a pull of his own cigarette to keep his hands from shaking as he brought his handful of fire closer to him again.

“Thank you.” She surprised him by sitting just a couple of feet away, on the same crate. She reached next to her and picked up something. “I found this on the way in. Thought you might like it for while you’re sittin’ here.” She reached over and set it on the slightly taller crate in front of him. It was an old-fashioned lantern, the kind that used a real flame.

Johnny turned on the gas, lit it with his handful of flame, and adjusted it without touching any knobs. The fire in his hand went out and in the dim lantern light he looked at Rogue. She was smirking very faintly, looking at the lantern, but when she met his gaze he wondered if it had been a trick of the light, because now he couldn’t read her expression at all.

“I have nightmares about being cut open and having molten metal poured over my skeleton. What’s keeping you awake?” Rogue asked lightly, sounding idle and almost joking, for all that her dark eyes looked inherently serious.

St. John focused on the lantern flame, making it hotter, making strange shapes dance in it. “Not being allowed to fight the bastards,” he muttered bitterly. “Hiding down here like a bunch of trapped rats when we could just as easily wipe ‘em out.” The way he said it implied the idea of ‘teaching those bastards a lesson.’

Rogue knew all about that kind of mentality. She’d faced its milder variations as Marie, but Yuriko had seen it fully-fledged and horrible, and Rogue was the product of its madness. “You’re afraid of all of them, aren’t you?”

“I’m not! I’m just pissed off.”

The look on Rogue’s face gave the distinct impression that she could see right through him. “You’re angry because they’ve made you afraid, and you think the anger makes you strong enough that you won’t ever be a scared little kid again, and they won’t hurt you like before.”

“Fuck you, is this some kind of psychoanalysis bullshit?”

“No. I speak from experience. I just got over it, eventually, and grew up,” Rogue replied.

John glared at her now. “So it wasn’t anger that got you covered in blood before you came down to join the rest of us down here? How many guys did you kill, huh?”

“A lot, Johnny. I counted about twenty that are definitely dead, perhaps several probably survived.” She shrugged. “And yes, there was anger, there, but it wasn’t at them. They were just in the way, so I took them down quickly and efficiently. I didn’t get a kick out of their pain, and I didn’t care to ‘teach them a lesson’ or anything like that. I didn’t have the time to consider teaching them what they needed to learn.”

John was unsettled. Her voice was cold and he felt afraid instinctively. She was looking into his eyes and seeing how much he wanted to hurt people. Not even the house psychics had seemed to see it, but Rogue did. He bit back defensively, “So, what, you were being merciful and just or something?”

“No, Johnny. I’m a monster. I was being a monster. I’ve been one for a while now, and I’ve quite gotten the hang of it. I’m just what you think you want to be: not afraid of them anymore. Of course, I’m not afraid because I’ve been through worse than they could ever do to me, and trust me, you don’t want to have to go through that. And in any case, I want you to know that hurting people, even anti-mutant assholes or soldiers following orders trying to kill you, isn’t nearly as satisfying as it might sound; of the men I killed tonight, some of them have families. A man whose face brushed my skin tonight has a sister with a minor mutant ability that he still wrote letters to, and twin girls at home who are barely five, and he brushed my skin because my claws were buried in his throat and he fell forward until his skin made contact.”

John reflected distantly that he was increasingly sure that liked Xavier’s morality speeches better than Rogue’s; even if they made him bored and irritated, Xavier’s speeches never made him fear for his life or want to crawl away and hide.

Rogue shook her head at some thought of her own and stared into the lantern-flame, but she did not look very remorseful, or even guilty, which was disturbing. John hadn’t been able to hear the tones in her voice that had belied her anger and pain, but Logan had. He’d followed her, after she had followed John. He stood outside the circle of light, out of sight and just listening. He could tell that Rogue knew he was there, even though she did not so much as glance his way.

“What’s satisfying is hurting other monsters, either by thwarting them or torturing them outright if they’ve earned it.” She held John’s gaze again. “Be careful that you don’t turn into a monster, Johnny. You don’t want to fight like we fight, and you don’t want to see the world like we see it. You’re pretty good at makin’ light in the dark, and that’s far more honorable than what I do in it.”

John put out his cigarette and sighed. “What else can I really do? I light fires. Fire burns, and there are few worse ways to die.”

“There are a lot of worse ways to die, actually––most of which I’m capable of inflicting on people, but that’s another matter.” She inhaled a lungful of smoke and let it out slowly. “You strike me as the type who hates extended metaphors, but humor me on this: natural wildfire burns up the excess, the dead and stagnant material, and in burning that away, makes the place fertile and allows life to grow anew. And no, I’m not suggesting that you become a fertility god, no matter how much fun it might sound like to you.”

John gaped at her in a manner that was both amused and unnerved. He couldn’t believe that she’d just made a sex joke, and not only that, but one that he might have made had he been less terrified of her.

Rogue continued, “Now, you wise-crack a lot, don’t you? You point out when people are being stupid, when they’re being overly idealistic. You’re the cynic. You make people see the stupid and the useless things about their own ideas, and about themselves. Sometimes they won’t like it––in fact, you probably annoy the Hell out of a lotta people––but they usually can’t argue, and they’re forced to make something better out of themselves for it, of only to prove you wrong or to otherwise rob you of a particular target. Consider yourself, and I think you’ll like this, a necessary asshole.” Rogue put out her own stub of a cigarette.

John smirked a little despite himself. Maybe this morality speech was better than one of Xavier’s; it wasn’t corny, she didn’t treat him like a kid, and she’d almost made him laugh. He shook his head, but smirked a little more, albeit bitterly. “Alright. Fine, monster-lady. You’ve got a point, and not on the end of a claw this time.” He sighed heavily. “I’m going back to bed. Should I leave the lantern on for you?”

“Sure.”

John left, unaware that he passed within six inches of Logan in the dark. Once his footsteps faded into silence down the corridor, Logan stepped into the dim circle of light as Rogue adjusted the lantern flame, which was far less stable without St. John’s influence. He sat perhaps a foot away from her, noting that she’d taken off her gloves in order to do the adjusting.

Her hands were pale, long-fingered and deceptively delicate-looking. “Did you enjoy the show?” Rogue asked quietly.

“You did a damn sight better than the more do-gooder types.”

Rogue smirked. “Does he look like the type a’ kid who takes do-good feel-good stuff seriously? I could see his scars a mile away.”

Logan nodded, watching her put her gloves back on. “You should sleep.”

“So should you,” she countered, finally meeting his gaze.

“I was asleep until he got up.”

Rogue gave a low hum of understanding.

“You were already awake, though.”

“Yeah. But I got around four solid hours...before the attack.” She shrugged. “I’m still a bit hyped up. Restless.”

“How many did you touch up there?”

She flinched just slightly. “Only three. I didn’t get much. But the energy I got from ‘em...it leaves me kinda wired. It’s like a hit of amphetamine: instant insomnia and extra antisocial tendencies.” She snorted. “Like I need the help.”

Logan chuckled at that. “No argument there.”

“Gee, thanks,” Rogue replied with mock-offense.

Logan shook his head at her. “You’re insane.”

“Truly, you could be the next Sherlock Holmes, good sir! Seriously, how long did that one take you?”

He smirked at her. “I figured it out as soon as I realized my damned trailer had a stow-away. ‘Whoever that is,’ I thought to myself, ‘they are out of their goddamned mind.’”

Rogue snickered. “Ain’t it the truth. Of course, you did let me in your truck, so I’ve gotta wonder if maybe you’re not exactly a paragon of sanity yourself.”

“Fine, ya caught me, but I still say you’re crazier.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

They sat in silence for a while, both amused and oddly at ease.

“You think Hank’s barricades and cloaking programs will work?” Rogue asked.

“Hank can make machines do damned near anything, so far as I can tell.”

An odd look crossed Rogue’s face again, and Logan recognized it all too easily: she had almost let herself feel hope, and had forced herself to stop short.

“If anyone can help ya with your skin, it’s probably him,” he said quietly.

“Mm. Ah’ve lived with it for a little over three years now,” she muttered dismissively. “I barely miss...” Rogue shook her head. “Hell. I was fine until I had to––until Yuriko––because now I actually remember what it’s like. In vivid detail.” Her voice was bitter with ire and she pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger in a gesture of exasperation.

Logan was quiet for a moment. “Same thing happened to me when the X-men first picked me up. It brought back...I wouldn’t say memories, but I suddenly knew what I’d been missing for the fifteen years I’d been on my own with nothing but a name and instinctive knowledge about things like driving, reading, languages, people-reading, and fighting. I suddenly had a sense of honor and duty again, but nothing else.”

Rogue listened, staring at the lantern flame until he finished, and then looking up at his face, reading him. “What was the part you couldn’t have?”

Logan scowled, but finally “Jeannie. And everything she stood for.” He was uncomfortable, realizing that he really was starting to think of that in terms of past tense.

Rogue blinked a few times, and then nodded. “Ah. So she wasn’t...nervous around you like she is with me.”

Logan shook his head. “Never was.”

“Probably because she gets a little turned on when you step close enough,” Rogue mused.

Another scowl. “Yeah that’s never really helped things.” Then he looked more sobered and added, “And admittedly her pity-thing is annoying. Never noticed it before.”

“I have that effect on people, especially if they make the mistaken assumptions that I’m as young as they think I am, that I’m secretly a wounded animal somewhere deep down, and that feeling sorry for me is worth anything,” Rogue murmured.

Logan looked at her, and thought about how Jean had made all of those mistaken assumptions. He wondered, with acute unease, what assumptions Jean might have made about himself. Looking at Rogue he could easily see how she might be mistaken at a glance for young and fragile, but the austerity of her expression and the coolness of her demeanor easily belied that. And she did not look wounded––bitter and slightly sad perhaps, but she seemed obviously, at least to Logan, tough enough to consider pity an insult. “I’ve gotta wonder if that goes beyond assumption and into delusion,” he said finally.

Rogue smirked. “We’ll see. If it persists for too long, we’ll call it delusion, but aside from maybe Hank and X, I’d hazard a guess that they aren’t too quick on the uptake around here, when it comes to seeing something other than the good and the redeemable. Otherwise I wouldn’t’ve had to have that talk with John.”

Logan nodded. “Yeah. It can be annoying.” Then his brow furrowed. “Do you really think you’re a monster?”

“Yeah. But I’m at peace with it, really. I...” She hesitated. “Do you think I might––be able to join the X-men?”

“Yeah. Hell, they let me in the first day I got here. And I’m as much a monster as you are.”

“I didn’t mean it quite like...not like an insult, really-”

“Nietzsche, right?”

Rogue sighed and adjusted her position so that she sat cross-legged, her bare feet tucked under her. “Yeah. Just that we’ve done that ‘staring into an abyss’ too long thing, and the ‘fighting monsters’ thing, both a lot more than is healthy.”

“Yeah. And I try to keep the people in this house from doin’ the same.”

“I think I’d like to do that, too.”

Logan looked at her, and felt that unfamiliar connection again. He wondered if there was a way to put it into words. The result he came up with was: “I already trust you in a fight more than I do any of the pansies here.”

She smiled at that, more brightly than he’d seen before, as she met his gaze. It was a sight to be seen, and Logan found that he wanted to see more of it from her, again and again. “Thanks, Sugar,” she said sincerely, again with just a hint of that southern drawl.

He only nodded, and they sat in the quiet for a while longer, waiting for the others to wake. Outside the hangar and above the ground, dawn was approaching, and bodies were being taken from the mansion. Already, news crews had begun to arrive.

Waiting for them was a woman named Betsy, who was a friend both of Charles Xavier and Emma Frost, who now sheltered the Professor, his X-men, and his students. Emma usually referred to Betsy affectionately as her “dangerous psychic publicity ninja” and she was there to make sure that reporters got their story straight, whether they wanted to or not, and probably without realizing what they were doing.

Logan found Jean working in one of the labs, trying to keep herself from thinking, from worrying. She looked ragged, but still beautiful.

“How are we holdin’ up, Jeannie?”

She jumped slightly, turning on her heel to face him. “Oh. Uhm. Not bad. We have enough supplies, the generators will be fine for up to a month...”

Logan’s eyebrows rose just a fraction. He’d never actually seen her this shaken before, without someone having had a near-death experience. No one had, this time––or, at least, not yet. “How about you, Jeannie?”

She looked up almost reluctantly, and her pretty green eyes were slightly wide, and her brows drawn with worry. “I’m...trying not to think about having soldiers tromping about through my childhood home and the one place I’ve always held to be safe and sacred. And I’m worried about the kids. And Scott.” She sighed raggedly, shaking her head. “But so long as I can keep finding things to do, I’ll be fine.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to figure out if it’s below me to go for an innuendo that easy.”

Jean promptly blushed, shutting her eyes, but her scent indicated a slight increase in her level of interest. “Logan...” Her voice, however, indicated exasperation with her own reaction, as much as with Logan himself.

“What do you think of me, Jeannie?” he asked suddenly. His voice was oddly solemn, darker than it had been a moment before.

Jean could tell that he wasn’t talking about anything sexual this time, but couldn’t for the life of her figure out what he really wanted. “What do you mean?”

“How do you see me, aside from the sex appeal.”

Jean’s brow furrowed. It was cute. Then she thought about it for a few moments, looking more serious, and a little more at ease, slipping into her usual serene demeanor. “I...think you’re more morally grounded than your realize, but in a way that most of us don’t understand; you have a...Spartan sense of honor with a realist, ruthless bent to it. You don’t think of pain like the rest of us do. I’m not sure what exactly...how you think of it, because even when you’re injured on a mission, it never seems to effect you, but I can sense how much pain you’re in.” She looked down. “And you’re...haunted.” She said it as though it meant ‘fragile.’ “I worry that what has happened to you in the past-”

Logan laughed, very quietly, but it somehow savored of disappointment. “She was right.”

“Who was, Logan?”

“Rogue.”

Jean appeared at a complete loss. “What?”

“Why are you scared of her, Jeannie?” His smile was lightly amused, but bitter.

“I-” She hesitated. “I’m not scared of her. I’m just concerned that-”

“She’s no more unstable than I am, just so ya know. And neither of us are likely to loose control of ourselves,” he said quietly. Instead of sounding annoyed or irate, as his words should have merited, his voice was almost sad; but the anger did show in his expression, and in the heat that darkened eyes.

Jean started to speak, and then stopped when she saw that heat; it was so different than his usual expression toward her, that she found herself unnerved. “Logan?”

“You’re right about the things you admit to not understanding, but I know the rest of what you’re sayin’, and none of it’s gonna be quite on the mark, if you’re gonna start out with being concerned about me bein’ ‘haunted’ or any of that crap.” He pulled a cigar out of his pocket and sliced off the end with a claw.

“I...just can’t assume that you are an emotionless machine, and that you, unlike the rest of us, aren’t susceptible to weakness of judgement based on emotions. Especially with the way you act around me, and how often you run off when things don’t go your way,” Jean said quietly, her light glare showing a bit of her stung pride.

But it was also the first time she’d ever sounded almost afraid of him, and that was all it took for Logan to see through her, and see that he’d been wrong about her, too. “I’m sayin’ I misjudged your ability to understand my mentality. I’m not a machine, but I’m also not prone to letting emotions get in the way of my decisions––ever. That’s what war does to you. That’s what happens when you can’t control anything but your own mind, and so ya damn well learn to do it right so you can live through the day. For me, that sometimes means gettin’ away from here to clear my head, so I don’t do something even more stupid.” He held her gaze, his eyes piercing. “I figured you’d understand the bit about control, if not the parts about war.”

Jean opened her mouth, and then shut it, taking in a breath. “I’m sorry, then, Logan.”

“S’ok. It’s apparently not the most common mentality around. I can’t assume you’d know to look for something you’d never seen.” He flexed his fingers as though his knuckles were sore. “I just thought maybe you saw it in the mirror now an’ then, but that was me lookin’ for something that wasn’t there.”

Jean tried not to think about what he implied––that his attraction had been more than just physical all this time. “Are you––are you sure that Rogue has the same control?”

“Would you be able to assimilate all of the memory and personality of a complete stranger and be as collected as she is?” Logan asked.

Jean lowered her head. “I...”

“Or would you panic?”

“Panic, I think, would be a normal, healthy response for a sane mind,” Jean said quietly.

Logan chuckled bitterly. “That’s just it, Jeannie. We aren’t normal, even in a house full of mutants. But you can trust us, Jeannie. We’re insane in beneficial ways, for the most part, and we’ve both learned, through the hardest possible ways, how to keep control of ourselves and get through Hell unfazed. Why would a little thing like getting pissed off or depressed send us over the edge? It might inspire me, personally, to run off and attempt to get drunk, but that’s better than the alternative, yeah?”

Jean sighed, sounding a little frazzled, and tired. “I’ve been treating her like a kid, huh?” she said, sounding half-amused and half-ashamed through her sad smile.

“A radioactive one.”

She winced. “Okay. It...it’ll take me a while to get used to thinking about all this.”

“That’s fine. It’s not the world you’re used to. In the world you’re used to, the government doesn’t send kidnappers into yours house at night. That’s why I’m on this team, Jeannie. My world isn’t a pretty one, and I’d like to keep you knuckleheads from falling into it.”

“Yes. And thank you.” She ran a hand through her hair nervously. “...I need to get out of this lab for a while.”

“I think the kids are still playin’ cards out there.”

“That sounds good. I can watch Jubilee and Remy try to out-cheat each other until John gets so jealous that something bursts into flame,” Jean murmured, sounding almost nostalgic, as though this were some delightful memory of good times past.

Logan laughed, and it was less bitter this time. “Alright, come on.”


Everyone had taken to life in the hangar as a challenge, and luckily some of the people were interesting enough to keep the boredom from driving them mad. Unless she saw some labor she could help with, Rogue sat apart, listening and watching, usually somewhere either out of sight or deliberately inconspicuous so that people did not see her. Occasionally, Logan had taken a break to sit with her, and they shared companionable silence, but he had often been called to help Hank with fortifications, or strategy.

She was disturbed when someone else finally got up the nerve to approach her. It was Remy Lebeau, and he sat beside her with a kind of easy confidence that came with being a New Orleans swamp rat, and a master thief. Rogue was mildly suspicious, but not actually perturbed; he was a very pretty man, and he knew it, and that made her wary of his intentions.

“You spend a lotta time alone, petite.” His red-on-black gaze held hers without hesitation. It was refreshing to see that Logan wasn’t the only one who could manage it.

“That, Monsieur Lebeau, would be the story of my life,” she replied dryly, but her words were more idle than hostile.

“By choice, or circumstance?”

Rogue was intrigued by his easy manner, and admitted that he had a very handsome smile. Yuriko’s past experiences with men brought the phrase tomcat to mind. “Choice early on, but it eventually became necessity. It was not so hard an adjustment as it might have been, had I not been who I was.” A story as true for Marie as it had been for Yuriko.

“Ah. You like bein’ alone, den, most times. But always, petite? Dat don’t seem possible. Not while you still live an’ breathe an’ talk like any other human.”

Rogue contemplated this. “I don’t think to miss it as much as I would, perhaps, if my mind were a better example of psychological health. My life circumstances, over the last few years, have instilled in me an instinct to avoid people. I’ve only recently had the opportunity to recall and reflect on what I’ve missed.”

Remy’s mouth formed a thoughtful moue, which Rogue thought was unnecessarily distracting, and cursed Yuriko’s memories for supplying her with the ability to realistically imagine what that mouth might feel like kissing hers. “I t’ink dat’s very sad, petite.”

“I don’t really feel ‘sad’ much. I’ve rarely had the time.”

“Now dat remind me of de Wolverine. He never sit still, but when he’s doin’ somet’ing else, like smoking and listenin’ to everybody within a half-mile ‘round. Is dat what you doin’ here?” the Cajun inquired.

Rogue nodded. “Yeah. I listen, watch, think.”

“But not feel much, non?”

She held Remy’s gaze. “Not really. I’ve had most normal ‘feelings’ burnt outta me.”

Remy nodded, and murmured, “Dat, too, I seen in him.”

“Same Hell burnt it outta him, too,” Rogue murmured.

“Same Hell you fight up in de house last night?”

“The agents of it, at least,” Rogue admitted.

“You protect us all from it, before you even meet us. Why?”

Rogue met his eyes again. “Because there’s parts of who I am that not even Hell could ever burn away, Monsieur Lebeau.”

He did not quite hesitate, but he did allow for a pause, curiosity written across his handsome face. “De fire made you strong, petite. Like tempered metal. Is dere anyt’ing left in you dat is more fragile?”

Thinking about it, Rogue remembered Logan’s touch, his fingers gently stroking her back. She had shivered, and not known why until she realized how warm she had suddenly felt, how wanting and how vulnerable it felt; it had been as though he had reached under her armor and found a place that she had not known was rubbed raw until he’d gently touched it, as if asking her if she knew that it hurt. “I’ve got few sore spots, perhaps, that are not as hardened-over as the rest of me. I’ve been running long enough that I hardly feel any injuries or weak spots, anymore, if I still have many to speak of.”

“Y’ never get tired?”

“Only when the adrenaline and rage wear off, which hasn’t been often thusfar.”

He smirked a little. “C’est la vie; as a mutant, it jus’ be one thrill after another.”

“Thrills. Sure. We’ll call ‘em that. It’s politer than what I was thinking, anyway.”

Remy laughed softly. “You still got a sense a’ humor, den. Dat’s good. You gon’ need it if y’ plan to stay sane in dis house, wit’ all of us in it.” He gestured toward the group of students all seated and laying in a circle in the middle of the hangar. There was a question hidden in his words, but it became clearer when he looked at her again.

“I was planning on staying. I don’t want any of you to go through what I have,” she answered softly.

Remy smiled and held out a hand to her. “I ‘ppreciate dat. An’ if y’ gonna stay wit’ us, den come an’ join us for a while, petite. Get to know your new family, oui?”

Rogue considered it for a long moment, looking at Remy’s hand.

“You still wary about de touchin’, non? Okay.” He lowered his hand. “But will y’ come along, den?” He gave a slight jerk of his head in the direction of the group. He was older than most of the others, no longer quite a teenager, but still closer to a student than a teacher. He was a good intermediary to invite Rogue into their fold.

Rogue unfolded her legs from lotus position, and got to her feet. “Okay.”

Remy gave her a truly dazzling smile, and got to his feet as well. He moved with fluid grace, and Rogue narrowed her eyes just a little in recognition of his skill set: savate, aikido, and she should be wary if he had a weapon such as a cane, staff, or even a sword––it was all there, just in the way he moved as he got to his feet. As he led her toward his posse, she asked lightly, “How long have you practiced savate?”

His footsteps paused momentarily and he looked at her with wide eyes, although his smirk remained firmly in place. “You got a good eye, petite. And I been workin’ at savate as long as I remember.”

Rogue nodded, and they continued on. Only then did she notice Storm seated with the students, who were all talking loudly. Remy noted her glance and moved toward her, knowing Rogue’s familiarity would put her slightly more at ease.

“Remy persuaded you to join us at last, then?” Storm asked gently a faint smile on her face. She was gentle in nature, but had a core of steel, and Rogue respected that. The woman had seen more of the world’s bad side than she let on.

Rogue answered her with a light affirmative as she sat near the weather goddess. She eyed the others more warily, but was subtle enough not to attract attention.

Still, Jubilation Lee had an annoying tendency to notice what she shouldn’t. “Hey! We got company!”

A few heads turned, surprise evident on people’s face. St. John actually smiled.

Rogue offered him a faint smile back, just for a moment. Then she addressed the others casually: “Where did you guys get the cards?”

“Remy has an endless supply of decks in his coat,” John explained, jabbing a thumb in the Cajun’s direction.

“I go nowhere wit’out it. Grabbed it on de way out de door to my room,” Remy explained.

“Fond of card tricks, I assume?” Rogue inquired.

Remy pulled two cards from his sleeve with a lazy grin. “Which you be, Rogue? Queen o’ Clubs, or Queen o’ Spades?” He flipped the cards around for her to see.

Rogue considered with a faint smirk. “Tough choice, but I’ll go with Spades.”

Remy’s red-on-black eyes shone with amusement. “Somehow, I not surprised.” He charged the card very slightly, making it glow violet, and when he let it go, it floated over to her, its edges darkened.

With a deft move, Rogue caught it in mid-air as one extended claw pierced the corner of it. She plucked the card off and retracted her claw, looking at the card, and then back at Remy.

“I charge much more, an’ it coulda blown up, but Stormy get very mad when I make t’ings ‘splode aroun’ her.” He shot Storm a charming smile.

The weather goddess only shook her head at him; although she did smirk a little: amused despite herself. Remy tended to have that effect on a lot of women, but he had not made the mistake of expecting Rogue to fall into it easily; the others were a little more surprised.

“What game?” Rogue asked.

“Texas hold ‘em,” Johnny said. “Of a bastardized sort.”

Rogue watched a couple of rounds, and figured out what he meant. She quirked a brow, but only said, “Deal me in, next round.”

Logan and Jean came in when Rogue was on her second round. She had the best poker face of any of them. Yuriko had been notorious back home as a bit of a card shark; Rogue had not quite inherited her easy conning-demeanor, but she’d kept the card skills. She’d won her first round easily enough.

“You pretty good, petite,” Remy said idly, but there was a challenge in his smirk.

“I have my moments,” Rogue said lightly, and her face revealed nothing. She then turned her head as she heard Logan’s measured footsteps and Jean’s more careless ones. Her eyes scanned them both as she took in their scents; again, her face revealed nothing of her own thoughts or emotions.

Jean gave a wide, reassuring smile that did not quite reach her eyes, and sat on the other side of Storm. Logan settled in next to Rogue, sitting closer than the others dared get.

“Hey,” he greeted, his voice low and a little rough, but he seemed amused to see her playing poker.

“Hey yourself, Sugar,” Rogue countered, raising an eyebrow at him slightly.

He just shook his head a little and chewed on the end of his cigar lightly.

She gave a light nod of understanding and looked at her cards again, her face becoming once more unreadable.

Rogue almost won, but for Jubilee having a slightly higher straight.

“She cheats, ya know,” Logan warned quietly. “So does the Cajun.”

“No wonder ya can cut the sexual tension there with a knife,” Rogue whispered back, deadpan.

Logan gave a low laugh.

Remy won the next round. Then the bets got a bit higher in the next round, and Rogue promptly beat the pants off of them.

Both Remy and Jubilee appeared both put-out and a little confused, but kept playing. The pattern went on, with the usual power-struggle between Jubilee and Remy, interrupted only when the bets increased just enough and Rogue quietly reaped them in. When Logan asked to be dealt in, however, it got a little more interesting, and terrifying. John was about to quit, when Rogue winked at him. Bets were high again, and somehow Johnny won. He then promptly quit while he was ahead and sat back to watch the pros.

There was a question of where the money had originally come from, but no one asked it.

The games only ended late into the afternoon, when Betsy finally contacted Jean. Everyone went quiet, allowing her to focus.

The redhead’s green eyes went wide, and her voice seemed distant. “The soldier’s aren’t leaving. Even with the press increasingly up in arms, even with the growing public outrage Betsy’s helping to foster, they’re still waiting up there and guarding us. They aren’t even sure we’re here, but they won’t leave,” Jean whispered.

By the time Jean and Betsy had managed to contact Xavier and Emma Frost, and had come up with a plan, Rogue and Wolverine had already prepared themselves for war. Rogue had found an older X-men uniform, probably one from Jean’s younger, training days, and put it on. Logan had been adjusting the fit of his leather gloves when he looked up, seeing her step into the strategy room, where he waited for everyone to catch up. She was encased in slightly-worn black leather, with dark green trim and accents. Logan marveled at all that her baggy, concealing clothes had hidden before.

“Have they realized what they’re gonna have to do, yet?” she asked.

Logan shook his head.

Rogue nodded. Then she paced back and forth, her footsteps scarcely making a whisper even to Logan’s advanced hearing. She moved with predatory impatience, and kept stretching and massaging the muscles in her hands, her bones occasionally making a small metallic pop. Logan leaned against the wall and watched her for a while.

Finally, she paused, turning and looking at him. “See anything interesting?” Her tone was dry, and her face was deadpan: a peculiar sense of humor.

To his surprise, Logan found that he liked it, almost as much as he had liked watching the graceful movements of her limbs as she paced, and how her strides were so efficient and deliberate that the sway of her hips was more subtle than on any other woman he had ever seen with hips quite like hers. “You could say that,” he answered, holding her gaze. His poker face was just as good as hers, but there was something in his voice that hinted.

Rogue blinked twice in rapid succession: the only indication that she was surprised. She tilted her head very slightly to one side, raising an eyebrow in silent question.

Logan wished that he had a cigar on him, but the leather didn’t have good pockets for that sorta thing. He was still looking into her big, dark eyes. “You look good in uniform.”

That seemed to put her slightly at a loss for a second, and she might have blushed, if she were slightly less controlled. “Thank you.” Her eyes flicked up and down his body before meeting his again. “You do, too.” Her expression showed hint of a smirk, and a hint of something like curiosity and almost confusion, as if wondering what on earth he wanted.

Logan was beginning to wonder, himself. He was saved from speaking further when Storm, Jean, Hank, and the kids all came in. The kids moved more slowly, thinking about how they had never been allowed to join an X-men meeting before, and how sobering it actually was, when they had once thought it might just be exciting. Some of the young men stopped a moment to look at Rogue, but the only one she bothered looking back at was Johnny, and she just raised her eyebrows sardonically at him when he looked her up and down with evident fascination.

Johnny raised his hands, palm-forward in a sign of helplessness, but he smirked a little, and feigned a swoon when the others weren’t looking. Remy glanced over in time to see it, and to see a hint of a smile on Rogue’s face, but noticed that she still seemed to lean a little bit towards Logan. He shook his head, and sat down between Storm and Siryn.

Jean explained the problem to them: the soldiers were not leaving, and were still trying to break into the well-hidden sections under the mansion, which they somehow knew about. There were weak areas they might tap into, which Hank needed to fortify, but this would leave them all vulnerable to discovery; if Hank were discovered, or worse––caught, then the soldiers would be able to march straight into the lower levels within hours.

“So you need him protected, and probably a distraction provided,” Logan concluded for them. He had known as much, from the minute Jean had said that the soldiers weren’t leaving. So had Rogue.

“Anyone attempting such an act would be under risk of being captured,” Hank warned quietly. A long silence followed.

Rogue crossed her arms over her chest and clenched her jaw, but after letting out her breath, said quietly, “I’ll do it.”

“And me,” Logan said.

“I’m really good at distractions,” Johnny said softly, his dexterous fingers moving fluidly as his lighter seemed to dance, weaving back and forth between them.

“But can ya get away quiet an’ subtle, homme? Will ya know when ya gon’ have to?” Remy inquired, effortlessly cutting and shuffling his deck of cards in one hand.

John thought about this, a surprisingly solemn look on his face. “With these guys? Probably not. You?”

Remy smiled brightly, his red-on-black eyes narrowing. “I deal wit dis kinda soldiers in times past, an’ made it out jus’ fine. We pair up, maybe we cause some nice chaos, non?”

Logan and Rogue exchanged wary glances.

It was Rogue who finally spoke, “There are media crews out there, and Betsy has them on our side for now––and for the first time, I believe. If anyone goes out there to wreak dramatic, brightly-lit and bloody havoc on the humans out there, it will have been for nothing. This needs to be handled quietly, or at least as quietly as possible.”

Johnny exhaled a disappointed sigh through his teeth. “So one news story about this attack is gonna do what, exactly?”

“They keep filming out there, in front of the sign that indicates this is a school. They show pictures of students here, whose parents say they aren’t mutants, and people are seeing what the government might do to humans, in the process of their crusade against us,” Storm said sharply. “For once, it isn’t us they’re afraid of; it’s humans like the ones over our heads, and that’s more progress than we’ve made in years.”

The room fell silent for a few moments.

“Just in case things go wrong, we need everyone down here prepared not only to fight, but to destroy anything and everything down here that might be of any use to these people,” Storm continued, her voice ringing with authority. “They aren’t expecting to find us down here, so they must be after something else, and it must be important if they’re so willing to look so bad in the media. I want all of you spread out, but able to fall back and team up if needed.” She turned on a hologram depicting the layout of the lower levels.

The next few hours were spent plotting and planning, positioning people within the lower levels. Logan and Rogue stood apart, leaning against the wall and preparing themselves mentally for their own tasks. No one needed to tell them what strategies to follow, what to expect, or how to react to anything. They only moved forward only when the others flooded out to suit up; all but Hank, Storm, and Jean remained, already in uniform as well.

Hank explained the places he needed to secure: there were only three. Logan told him whether he would have to approach from below, from within the public parts of the mansion, or––as was the case for only one place––outside. Logan told him what to expect from the soldiers out there, and how to get away, all else failed. Rogue asked Storm to provide thick fog, but not rain, and to be ready to whip up a tornado if all else failed. Jean waited until Hank and Storm went off to check on the kids.

“Thank you both for doing this, but...please don’t kill anyone that you don’t have to.” She looked sincerely worried and sad, the weight of her morals heavy on her shoulders.

Logan and Rogue were far more spartan, carrying only the essentials and their honor. When they stared at Jean, they looked like a pair of disinterested wolves, waiting for Jean to look away so that they could go back to their hunt.

Jean shivered, once, and looked away.

They left her there, saying nothing to alleviate her unease.

The fog rolled in shortly after dark, and Hank finished the first, and most easily accessible, weak spot, within an hour. He had approached it from below, not leaving the subterranean parts of the mansion, and left the path behind him, as he left, totally impassable.

The next target was not so simple, and Logan and Rogue stalked up into the mansion. They did not kill; they only removed the soldiers’ helmets, and let Betsy and Jean take control, keeping the men quiet and oblivious, making sure they raised no alarms. It took two and a half hours.

Of course, the last spot was where it all went wrong. Outside the mansion, Stryker had finally set up a device that greatly limited the workings of telepathic powers. The machine’s output bounced off of stone and metal, but saturated the air outside. Logan and Rogue began neutralizing soldiers the old-fashioned way.

They worked silently in the fog, but the heightened anxiety of the soldiers still moving provided the real problem: within half an hour there was notice of serious radio contact failure, due to the men contacted being unconscious and hog-tied in the dark and the mist. Teams went to investigate the missing men’s patrol area. The first one, small and careful, also ended up knocked-out and tied up, left sitting out in the fog. By then, Hank had been at work for just over an hour.

The second team was bigger, better armed. They were taken down in half an hour, but shots were fired, blood was shed, and a couple of men were killed; levels of nervous anxiety rose amongst those soldiers who remained conscious, straining in the dark to catch some glimpse of unknown enemies. Soldiers were hunting the hunters now, and fear made their trigger-fingers itch like Hell. Logan and Rogue played rock-paper-scissors to determine who would get to be the distraction. Rogue won, and the last of her that Logan saw was her dark eyes lit up and her lips and teeth shaped into a beautiful and ferocious grin, before she vanished. Logan wanted to follow her so badly he could taste it; and it was as much because he wanted to watch her and fight with her as because playing distraction was fun in and of itself.

Cries of men and weapons went off on the other side of the mansion. Radio commands sang out the enemy’s position. Logan took care of the remaining soldiers still searching in his area, taking them down when they got too close to Hank’s project.

Hank finished within an hour, and quickly fled below to his next waiting-point. Logan went back out to find Rogue. Not long after stepping outside, he heard her scream in pain and outrage. He was running before he even processed which direction the sound had come from. He caught her scent, and the scent of her blood, and the scent of William Stryker.

Gunfire erupted, but someone was shouting at the soldiers to stop: Stryker. Logan’s claws all but leapt from between his knuckles, and the pain was sweet and kept his mind clear. His footsteps silent in the gloom, Logan moved through the dark, only to leap behind a hedge when the soldiers abruptly turned on several large sets of floodlights. He could hear helicopters flying low, the beats of their propellers dispelling the fog.

Where the Hell was Rogue?

Logan caught her scent again and stalked through the mansion’s veritable maze of garden hedges and other assorted shrubberies. He had to hand it to Storm: she had made her elegant and beautiful gardens tactically functional for stealthy defense of the mansion.

He found Rogue, mostly-concealed behind and beneath a few large rose bushes, leaning her weight back against a tree trunk. She was breathing hard, and the skin across her stomach was exposed: the leather torn open by a burst of automatic fire. A few warped and bloodied bullets littered the ground beside her, where they had fallen on their own, and as Logan approached, she used a few inches of extended thumb-claw to remove another one from where it had gotten jammed between two of her adamantium ribs. By the time he crouched next to her, the wound was healed.

“You alright?” he asked, his voice too low for human ears.

Rogue opened her other hand, which had been tightly closed around something: a two-inch long bright blue dart. It was half-empty; she must have pulled it out before it was done. “This is made special for us, Sugar. I need a minute ‘fore I can walk.”

Logan took the dart from her and examined it closely.

“If I get hit with a green one of those, you won’t be able to trust me.” When he looked at her curiously, she explained: “They have the damned mind-control shit in ‘em, and while a bullet may have been enough of a shock to Kurt’s system to shut it off, my abilities made it much harder to disable. The only sure-fire way I know how to turn it off, in my case, would be electrocution: found that out from a lab accident.” She grinned viciously at the thought. “That’s incidentally also how I know what Stryker’s blood smells like.”

Logan nodded and tossed the dart aside. “Hank’s finished. All’s well, there. The entrance isn’t far.” Because, as luck and good planning would have it, the entrance was well-hidden there in the garden.

Rogue nodded. “Good.”

Soldiers were slowly spreading out, now, and some had entered the garden’s maze.

“Can you get up, now?”

“Yeah. Just...can you lend me a little leverage?” She held her hand an inch above his forearm, waiting for permission. She had taken her gloves off when she had put her uniform on.

Logan nodded, and raised his arm until her fingers touched it. Then he stood up and pulled her to her feet. She clung to his arm and leaned on it a little, lifting her other hand to her head as a wave of wooziness hit her, along with a sharp pang similar to a brain freeze. Logan put a gloved hand over her wrist, holding her hand pressed to his arm, and began leading her toward the entrance. Her movements were automatic, and still very nearly silent, but she was not so graceful as before, and stumbled now and then.

They had reached the door and it had begun to open, when three darts flew through the air. Rogue instinctively lashed out, and the man who had aimed and fired the darts fell to the ground without his throat missing. Then Rogue spun around just in time to see Logan collapse.

Hank had the door half-open when he heard the commotion, and had lifted himself up through the narrow trapdoor. That was when he heard Rogue cursing in a bizarre mixture of French and Chinese, and saw her pull three darts from a single spot on Logan’s chest: two green, one blue. Then she spotted Hank.

She tossed the darts to him. “Catch.” He did. “You’ll want to study that shit.” She then sliced a hole in Logan’s uniform, tossing away a sizable scrap of leather. She pushed Logan within reach of Hank, but stopped him when he reached for Logan to bring him in.

“Rogue, what-”

“Take him into the lower levels, and strap him down, but don’t let me in. You’ll want to completely disable, destroy, and blockade this entrance.” She pressed a bare hand over Logan’s skin where the darts had hit him. She grit her teeth against the flood and felt her senses immediately hindered by the contents of the sedative dart. Her dark eyes were turning milky green-blue. Before she totally lost control, she kicked Logan through the trapdoor, where a shocked Hank caught him. “They won’t take him again,” she growled, and forced the door shut.

She got to her feet and bolted, waiting for what she had absorbed from Logan to kick in and wanting to get as far as possible from that entrance and the other targets while she could. As soon as she emerged from the garden, two sets of floodlights flared on, exposing her. Rogue cursed her timing and extended her claws, but two blue darts hit her: one in the throat, and another in her left pectoral.

Rogue went down, but as her world darkened, she marveled a little. The green darts had not kicked in, as she had thought they would. After Marie had absorbed Yuriko, Rogue had assumed that sheer shock of killing, and of experiencing death, had been what had prevented the mind-control drug from effecting her before. Maybe absorbing someone, even a little, was enough of a shock to her whole system to loosen or even prevent the grip of Stryker’s mind-control.

It was a comforting thought, because when Colonel William Stryker leaned over her and said something smug-sounding, Rogue knew she would need every weapon against that control that she could get. She smirked, and called Stryker a doomed sonofabitch before the darkness of unconsciousness dragged her all the way under.

There was a pretty Asian reporter on the television as Betsy watched, silently transmitting the report to Jean. “There was commotion here last night, under cover of some surprisingly thick and heavy fog. The military is claiming that the soldiers here were under attack by a small squad of highly dangerous mutants, and claim that five men lost their lives, with a fourth very badly wounded, and many others with assorted smaller injuries; however, they have not released any information about the dead, or given any information about the mutants in question––not even whether or not they were killed, captured, or got away...” Jean thanked Betsy, and said that she had heard enough.

The med lab was tense and silent.

It had been several hours, and Logan had only just woken up a few minutes ago, from the throes of a nightmare. He had turned on Hank and Jean with wide eyes and extended claws, poised to spring into an attack. Then Hank had spoken, and his voice made Logan’s pupils shrink, going back to their normal size.

Logan had retracted his claws, seized the sheet he lay under and wrapped it about his bare hips to keep them from staring, and headed for the showers down the hall.

Now he had come back, with the smells of fear and metabolized sedatives scrubbed from his skin, and at least a pair of sweatpants on. He was rather unhappy with the prolonged hesitant silence that had greeted his simple question: “Where’s Rogue?”

After the long pause stretched to what Logan considered a ridiculous length, he gave a low growl. “Oh come on!”

Hank reached into his pocket and retrieved the three darts: two green, one blue. “You got hit with these, right outside the entrance. Rogue cut open your uniform, drained you and apparently pulled the toxins out of your system, and tossed you to me before she lost control of her mind.”

Logan stared at the darts as if reading something deeply irritating and slightly confounding written on them. “Where is she now?”

“We don’t know, Logan,” Jean said quietly. “With Stryker’s device in effect, we couldn’t get a lock on her position, let alone follow her.”

Logan growled again, running a hand through his hair. His knuckles itched.

“But the soldiers are gone, now, Logan,” Hank murmured. “They left behind surveillance equipment, but I can easily hack into it. There remains only the lingering trace of the press corps, and even those hardy souls are in the process of leaving.”

Logan clenched and unclenched his fists. “Good. Then I can head out tonight.”

Jean was immediately worried. “Logan-”

Hank rested a hand on her shoulder, and she fell quiet. “Do you want any of us to join you, Logan? I would not advise your going in alone––especially not when they are in all likelihood expecting you.”

Logan appeared thoughtful, in a dark sort of way, but also grateful. “We should get these kids to Chuck, anyway. I can head out from there, and if any of the rest of the X-men wanna follow me, I won’t stop ‘em, but no matter what ideas Scooter gets into his head, this is gonna be my mission. This isn’t his territory; it’s a real war-man we’re up against here, not another ideology that happens to want a war, and that means he’ll fight like the war’s already started and the Geneva conventions never applied to us.”

Hank nodded, and squeezed Jean’s shoulder, saying to her, “Tell Betsy to help you contact the Professor. I will prepare the emergency subterranean escape plans, and make sure everyone knows what to do.”

Jean nodded, and stepped out of the lab.

When the door shut behind her, Logan turned his gaze to meet Hank’s, and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I’ve processed that formula: it resembles something on record for a former student here, who was apparently Stryker’s son...and a vastly powerful illusionist.”

Logan nodded slowly. “You stole some of those ugly-ass helmets from the soldiers, right, Hank?”

“You know me too well, my friend.”

Again, he nodded. “Yeah. Maybe I do.” Logan raised his eyebrows slightly. “What’d she say that rattled you?”

Hank hesitated. “It was...more to do with the way in which she said it, but yes, she did rattle me. It was simply the way she said that ‘they wouldn’t be taking you again.’”

Logan’s poker face cracked for half an instant, but he recovered too quickly for Hank to read the emotion there. Logan took in a slow, deep breath, recollecting himself. “Thanks, Hank.”

Hank wondered how much Logan remembered, from before he had fully passed out. The sedative had a slight delay before it took full effect. Hank bid Logan a light farewell and stepped out of the lab, leaving Logan to his thoughts.

Logan rested a hand over the place on his chest Rogue had touched. It had been that touch, not the drugs, that had sent him flying into an abyss. He had seen her eyes change color and the momentary panic that almost overtook her as she absorbed what was in his system––as she had absorbed him. It had hurt like nothing else he could remember: like electricity had been trying to slide between his skin and the rest of his body and rip it away. And she’d done it to keep them from taking him––or maybe, just maybe, she had done it deliberately in order to go back to the lab. Logan doubted it, but he had seen the thought cross Jean’s mind, even without telepathy. He had never smelled a lie on Rogue, and the all-too-clear scents of pain and fear and anger when she had touched him...

Her skin had been soft. Logan had been surprised momentarily at how fragile, and how soft her skin had felt. He’d seen her wrap her hands around a man’s neck and snap it, but her touch had been soft, and firm, for that brief moment before her mutation activated. She had looked almost apologetic just before his vision went black.

Logan made his way to the locker rooms just outside the hangar, and put on his t-shirt and jeans. He sliced off the end of a cigar and set off for the one place he could smoke. He sat in the dark with his thoughts, uninterrupted for ten glorious minutes, before the sound of quiet footsteps and the smell of a lit butane lighter interrupted him.

Johnny approached, seeming unperturbed when Logan appeared in the dark once the firebug’s dim circle of light got close enough. He sat a few feet away and transferred the flame of his lighter to form a sphere of dancing flame hovering over his palm. John then put his lighter away, and used his fireball to light the tip of a cigarette.

To Logan’s relief, the kid stayed quiet for a while, letting the disgruntled Wolverine adjust to his presence.

Then Johnny said, “We heard about Rogue.”

Logan just looked at him, his gaze hard.

Johnny held it, if only for a few moments before looking away. “I want to help you bring her back. I’m just not sure any of the other X-men will be too keen on lettin’ me.” Smoke curled around his words and flames danced in his warm brown eyes, making them look yellow and almost wolfish.

Rogue, Logan reflected, had been right about the kid’s scars. She’d also been right about not giving him the do-good feel-good treatment. John wasn’t a monster yet, but he’d sure as Hell left innocence behind a long time ago. Logan said, quietly, “You’ll be with me. If Scooter doesn’t like it, he can deal with me.”

John exhaled, sounding relieved, but his mood was solemn enough not to allow a smile, and he had something else to clear up, too. “You heard us, didn’t you?”

“I was here the whole time.”

“Yeah...you tend to be, whenever something’s goin’ down. Whenever you’re here, at least.” Johnny let his ball of fire roll back and forth between his hands, like a cross between a slinky and molten lava. “You think she’ll stick around?”

Logan eyed the movements of the flames, looking deeply contemplative. “She wanted to, but once she’s outta that lab, if she’s anything like me, she may not want to be around any people for a while.” He tapped ash off of the end of his cigar. “Maybe a long while.”

John considered this. “I’ll just have to charm her with my sparkling wit,” he said, perfectly deadpan.

After a slight pause, Logan gave one single low chuckle. “You do that, firebug.”

John winced. “Oh, God, don’t tell me that’s gotta be my X-man title.”

Logan gave an amused snort, and shook his head. “Nah. Pyro should do for that.”

John was only mildly surprised that he’d overheard Jubilee’s nickname for him, and the way it had begun to stick amongst their circle of friends. “Yeah. I’ve always been at least a little bit of a Pyro. Might as well make it official.”

Distantly, they both heard a knock on the supply room door. Then Storm’s voice floated to them through it.“Logan? Are you in there?”

Logan stubbed out the small stub of his cigar and pocketed it. “Yeah, ‘Ro.”

She opened the door, instinctively reaching out and flipping on the light switch, even as a look of surprise crossed her face as she realized Johnny was there. “Oh. Hello, John.” She turned to Logan again. “We’re having a strategy meeting.”

Logan nodded, getting to his feet. He looked at John and jerked his head toward the door. “C’mon, kid.”

John leapt to his feet and followed him.

Storm’s brow furrowed and she looked momentarily hesitant. “Logan?”

“He’ll be joinin’ us on this one.”

Storm seemed about to question, but after a lingering look at the determination on both men’s faces, she merely nodded, understanding. Logan rather liked that about her.



Rogue was first aware of the metal around her hands: keeping her fingers fully extended and bent slightly back, so that attempting to extend her claws would be both unspeakably painful and essentially futile. Shortly after noticing this, she snapped fully awake, opening her eyes wide and then snapping them shut again against the bright surgical lights. She gave a low grunt of discomfort, tugging at her bonds instinctively, though she knew it wouldn’t help her. She was held fast, on an inclined board which Rogue thought might be reminiscent of “the rack” from the Spanish Inquisition, which of course no one would suspect from an evil doctor with a sadistic streak; although her arms were not held out above her head, but instead spread-eagled out on either side of her.

A growl escaped her throat when she caught Stryker’s scent.

“That’s quite a voice you’ve got. Sounds just like a panther,” Stryker said, his voice coming from a position behind the board. Rogue felt a faint buzz on the skin of her arms and winced, glaring at the intricate traces of micro-wires, like silvery threads along her skin, acting as sensors and held in place by conductive gel that felt cold. When Rogue shifted her head, she felt highly disconcerted to realized that there was a gap in the board just behind her head, allowing something of Stryker’s to attach itself to the back of her neck. She could feel the weight of it, and the slight tug when the cord plugged into it shifted.

“What’s on my neck?”

“Think of it as a specialized applicator. It allows me to be precise with what I give you.”

“Why am I awake?” Rogue asked suspiciously. “I know that’s not how you work.”

“I’ve got some questions for you.” The device positioned directly between two vertebrae in the back of her neck, with two tiny needles sticking into her spinal column, gave a single low beep and a faint hiss.

Rogue’s head lolled back onto her small headrest as the unfamiliar drug hit her system. Yuriko had never been hit with this; although it was similar to the mind-control, it left her somehow still close to present. Her dark eyes were tinged with pale green at the edges.

Stryker had a small headset on. “Testing. Testing.” Satisfied with his recording stats on the screen in front of him, Stryker gave his name, military ID, and a long series of numbers and other codes related to super-secret things. “New subject: mutant with adaptive ability with absorbs and replicates the mutations of others, and drains life. Fatal potential, as proven in the destruction of project Deathstryke, whose abilities and metal skeleton seem to have been absorbed and retained for a much longer period than previous observations would indicate she was capable of. Mutation is activated only through skin-to-skin contact with another living creature. Subject is under the influence of 50mL of compound nine-six-two-seven also known as Veritas.”

Stryker made his way around the table, pressing a button on a small remote control in his pocket that caused the table to rotate until Rogue was positioned vertically.

“Test question: what is your name?”

Rogue’s eyes fluttered as she struggled through the fog, but her lips moved of their own accord. Her voice sounded flat, distant, and as though she were half-way dreaming. “My name is Rogue,” she said.

Stryker snorted. “No. Your name is Marie D’Ancato, born in Meridian, Mississippi. Why do you say that your name is Rogue?”

Rogue’s brow furrowed, just slightly. “Marie is in here, but so is Yuriko. I’m not either of them: I’m both.”

Stryker made a thoughtful noise. “How do you know the name Yuriko?”

“Yuriko Oyama was my name, before you sent me to capture the girl named Marie. The chase ran on too long, and my mind had begun to return. My head went clear when she touched me, and I decided I would rather die than come back here.”

“So you do not think you are Marie?”

“I was. But I’m not anymore.”

“I see. And this occurred after the absorption?”

“Yes.”

“Where was Yuriko Oyama born?” Stryker demanded, upping the dosage of the truth drug slightly.

Rogue shivered as it sent a chill down her spine. “Singapore, in the English embassy in the capital. It was raining.” Her voice sounded dreamy, as though she might actually be hallucinating.

Stryker made another thoughtful sound. “Subject appears to have developed an identity disorder, resulting from the absorption of more than we had anticipated. Her abilities must extend into something slightly psychic, as well. This has potential for making her an information-gatherer,” he said into the headset.

Rogue’s eyes were wide and blank and emotionless, but inside she was screaming.

“Why were you at the school?”

Internally, she began to struggle, and she wondered if it was just wishful thinking or hallucination that made her feel like it might work. “I was––” Her brow creased. “I found the Wolverine. He brought me there.”

Stryker covered the mouthpiece of his headset as he muttered something under his breath about ‘taking in wild animals.’ Then he turned back to Rogue and stared hard at her face. “What do you know about the device called ‘Cerebro’?”

“It was mentioned, but never described,” Rogue replied, her voice sounding empty.

“How many mutants were in that school?”

Rogue was still fighting, and managed to halt her answer for a few seconds, but could not permanently stop it. She gave him an exact number. She had instinctively counted them all, when she had been given a tour of the mansion, when she had wandered, listening to its nighttime sounds, and she had learned all of their scents before she had even seen most of them.

“My, my, my: that’s more than we thought,” Stryker mused. “How many are members of the so-called ‘X-men?’ Do not count Xavier among them.”

“Five.”

“Hmm.” He scratched a few notes on a notepad. “What, exactly, does your mutation do?”

Her voice sounded ever so slightly less dreamy. “It drains energy from people, which gives me a bit of a buzz, but I also get their thoughts, impressions of their personalities and memories like ghosts in my head, and mutations if they have them. If I hold on too long, they die, and everything I got from them is assimilated, until they are as much a part of me as I am.” In a sharper, more forced voice, she added, “I guess you really could call it a disordered identity.” She sounded pained, but triumphant.

Stryker immediately upped her dosage again, narrowing his eyes even as Rogue shuddered and went limp in her bonds. “Why do you require such a high dosage? It isn’t the healing factor from Deathstryke.”

Rogue’s eyes opened a little, as the last dose, double what he had initially given her, had caused her eyelids to weigh roughly a ton. “I don’t know. Perhaps the same reason that telepaths cannot get a good read off of me: my mutation makes my mind a very complicated and dangerous place.”

He pushed another button on the remote, and Rogue slipped into temporary oblivion.

Rogue’s world became a blur wherein time meant nothing. Her drug resistance meant that she was always on the edge of outright hallucinations due to high dosages. Most disconcerting was how, and how often, she kept snapping awake.

Stryker had initially just been testing out her weapon-capabilities, but he seem to have quickly run into a very clear problem: using her mutation and absorbing someone caused all of his control drugs to abruptly stop working, and nothing he tried seemed to hinder the process in the least. He was becoming increasingly frustrated.

Rogue was just getting tired of waking up with extra ghosts whilst her mutation collected yet another to add to her collection. How Stryker had gotten nearly a dozen of his men to volunteer for this, she did not really want to think about.

Then the experiments seemed to change. She rarely woke up, but she knew they went on even whilst she was under. He was trying to turn off her skin.

Rogue finally woke up, and stayed awake, with no visible machines or strange new devices around her, for a full minute. It was sweet, blissful sanity like a breath of air after drowning. Then she looked straight ahead, opening her eyes fully, and felt a coil of fear in her stomach as the strange scent of the man seated before her finally reached her nostrils.

“Hello, Rogue,” Stryker said quietly. He stood beside his son, a hand on the withered creature’s shoulder. “This is Jason. He’s gonna help you find a way to consciously control that pesky power of yours.”

So that you can control it. Of course. Fuck! Rogue forced herself to calm down, glaring at Stryker. “How long have I been here?”

He smiled. It was not reassuring. “Lost track of time did you? It’s been two weeks. I don’t think that those pesky little X-men are comin’ to get you. I don’t think they can find you without access to their Cerebro, and if they try to get to that, I’ll know, and I’ll have them destroyed within an hour.”

Rogue felt sick, but did not blanch. “Ya sure about that?”

Stryker laughed, but there was something in his eyes that looked like fear. “Help her out, won’t you, Jason?” he said, loud enough for her to hear. When Jason’s eyes flicked in his direction, Stryker leaned down and whispered to him.

Rogue tried to listen, but found herself overwhelmed as the world drained away, replaced with a new one. Jason’s mind lulled her, made her forget all about Stryker, all about where she was, and began to weave a little dream for her...



Logan followed Emma Frost down into the lower levels beneath the mansion, once Forge and Hank had successfully hacked all of Stryker’s surveillance systems into thinking that everything was normal.

Jean had refused to use Cerebro, and it would not have been safe to take Xavier. Emma had volunteered, but only after looking for a long few moments at Logan’s face. That had been a few days ago. It had taken Logan a long time, too damned long in his opinion, to make his case to Xavier and to make Scott stop bitching so loud.

“You don’t really do charity. You’re not the type. What’s your angle?” Logan asked finally, as they made their way down the steps.

“Xavier’s contacts in the financial and international realm, for one. But you mean why I’ve agreed to help you in your own little cause, while the others hide and try to come up with a morally satisfactory tactic to take?” Her ice-blue eyes were impossible to read, and her smile was enigmatically knowing.

Logan wondered if she practiced that look in the mirror. “That, too. In fact, mostly that, but thanks for the rest; I’ll add it as a footnote.”

She smirked a little. “If you must know, I like seeing Jean Grey get her prudish little neuroses tied up in knots. It used to be my favorite hobby back in our school days.”

Logan pictured Emma and Jean as teenagers both living at Xavier’s, and shuddered; ‘cat fight’ would not cover it, but ‘cat apocalypse’ might not be too far off. “That’s more petty than I expected from you.”

“Yes...well, it also stands that this Styker person stole a person of great interest to me, and for truly abominable purposes. I was just about to invite him to my school, and now he’s in Xavier’s clutches. I’m also rather put out about that, and want to make sure that he never gets any ideas about other mutants I keep my eye on.” She sounded more vicious, but covered it up well with a light-hearted air.

“The blue teleporter?”

“Yes. Kurt Wagner.”

Logan gave an affirmative grunt and followed her into Cerebro, where he leaned against the door. “You sure you need me for this?”

“I have a theory that the connections in your mind linked not only to Rogue, but to your history with Stryker, will provide me a clearer trail to them both on the astral plane.” She was already putting on Xavier’s helmet.

Logan was still caught on the way she had implied that his mind was linked to Rogue’s. It had occurred to him that Rogue had probably absorbed more than the toxins in his blood, but...

“Not only that, Logan; although I’m interested to see quite how that might work. Now hold still, please,” Emma said firmly, and Cerebro activated with a low hum and a flood of vivid images, voices, and the feeling of impossible movement.

Logan grit his teeth instinctively against dizziness and squared his shoulders against the sensation of falling. He could see a trace of a silvery-white line from his own forehead to the top of Emma’s. Every now and then he could almost see something moving in it, like seeing the world through a narrow slit.

Something twisted and Logan felt a pang in his chest so strongly that it made him curse.

“Ooh. That’s some impressive interference, indeed. No wonder Jean and dear Betsy had such trouble,” Emma murmured, and parted the fog like a cloud with minimal effort. She had very nearly as much power as Xavier, and was far more casual about using it. “Now...let’s see here.”

Logan got a glimpse of a military compound, as seen through dozens of eyes within it.

Then Emma finally seemed to hit a barrier, a low gasp catching in her throat. “No...oh, no, dear Jason, what has he done to you?” she whispered.

Logan knew the name, from previous X-men discussions over the past few days. “The batshit illusionist?”

Emma shot him a glare. “He was only batshit because of that horrendous father of his. And the monster has gone and made it worse than you dare imagine. Feel lucky, Logan, that your existence is not half so bad as his.” She turned back to the console and took a deep breath, regaining her focus.

She half-closed her eyes and tried to see through the cloud of far more powerful interference caused by Jason’s illusions. Rogue was in its center, and Emma wanted to see the mind that had so unsettled poor Jean; but Emma got too close, and the illusion and Rogue’s mind both sent twin jolts of pain and horror through her mind, until she nearly yelled.

Emma jerked back in her seat and reeled out, moving on to a simpler mind in the compound to ease her aching head. She settled on William Stryker herself, and soon regretted it.

“I should kill him,” she hissed.

“Not your right,” Logan said firmly.

Emma looked at him without turning her head.

He felt it, and flinched, but did not look away. “I’ve got a little more claim than you on that sonofabitch.”

Emma gave a reluctant affirmative, and returned to her body, removing the helmet from her shiny platinum head. “Alright, but I’ll be there to make sure you actually do it.”

Logan snorted, but reluctantly accepted.

“We should be able to head out this evening,” Emma mused.

“It’s about damned time.”



Rogue was momentarily lost, the illusion shattered yet again. She was slippery to him––to Jason, or whatever it was that was left of Jason after all this time and all that his father had done to him. His illusions could not correctly replicate how her mutation felt when it activated. He also could not quite fabricate the way that Rogue experienced her sense of smell: his olfactory illusions were dim compared to how brilliantly vibrant and real his sights and sounds were, and they would be interrupted now and then by the smells of the laboratory, bringing Rogue’s dream to an abrupt and screaming halt that left her breathless.

This time had been different, though. She had almost felt something, almost seen the attacker in her dream become a curious-looking blonde woman, and suddenly her world had gotten bright and loud and painful, and now she was floating.

And then the floating absorbed her, and became the sensation of laying in a hammock in the sun. She was warm and comfortable, and she could hear the sounds of children playing, chasing chickens. She was in Singapore and the smells of a nearby open market enchanted her senses. Pulled directly from Yuriko’s memories, they were vivid as only childhood memories can be, and Rogue found herself smiling.

“You comfortable, there, Darlin’?”

“Yeah.” She opened her eyes slowly and saw Logan standing there with two open beers. They smelled good, but not as strong as she preferred, it seemed. Logan was smirking at her, and something about the look made Rogue feel a spreading warmth in her chest. “You got some piss-poor beer, there, Sugar. I can’t trust you with anything.” She reached for one. She wore very thin silk gloves, and when he handed her a beer the condensation on the glass soaked her fingertips.

“I look too white for them to give me much else, even when I tell ‘em I’m Canadian.”

She laughed, and tilted her head back, draining her beer in a few large gulps because she it was hot out and her throat had somehow gone dry. She could feel Logan watching her, and once her beer was gone, she met his gaze as she tossed away the empty bottle. “See something interesting?”

“Yeah.” He sat on the edge of the wide mesh hammock she occupied, and smiled when she gave a playful growl of protest at the way this caused her to cling to the mesh in order to avoid rolling onto the ground.

She was still muttering curses at him when he finally lifted the rest of his body onto the hammock. The curses stopped abruptly. The whole length of Logan’s body was lined up against hers, and she could feel every lean line of him. His pupils were slightly dilated as he pushed her bicolor hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. Rogue’s eyes fell shut for a moment, but her lips parted slightly, sucking in a breath.

Logan leaned in and fixed his mouth over her throat, letting her feel his lips and tongue through her sheer silk scarf.

Rogue shuddered, clinging to his shirt with one gloved hand. Then he shifted a little more, his body on top of hers as his hand slid down from her hip to her knee and tugged, gently urging her to wrap a leg around him. He felt so good, so close, so warm and strong and she felt that they were tangled together impossibly close until his sheer presence threatened to overwhelm her, and what he was doing to her neck––as his hand on her knee moved up her inner thigh––threatened to make her cum right there. She had a cool Singapore breeze on her back through the mesh of the hammock, and the warmth of Logan’s body everywhere else.

Then she felt him growing hard in his jeans, felt him rub against her core, and saw sparks as a tremor went through her, not quite sending her over the edge but leaving her panting, and wanting.

“Rogue,” Logan whispered, his lips close to her ear. “Turn it off.”

Rogue gave a low moan, her hips rolling against him. “C’mon Logan, please...” She was panting, and her body felt weak with how close she was to satisfaction.

He ran his tongue up the side of her throat through the scarf. “I want t’ touch you,” he growled, and bit at her throat again, a little harder than before.

Rogue squirmed, and tried to do it, tried...tried...

But there was no magic switch to reach for, no sudden insights.

She inhaled deeply through her nose, to clear her head, but the information she got from it sent her spiraling downward. She felt disappointment so acute that her whole body went limp, desire extinguished, and she felt choked with rage and embarrassment and something like shame. It wasn’t Logan. Rogue opened her eyes and glared at Jason, especially when she felt a strange and unfamiliar chill on her face, from the dampened skin under her eyes: wet trails made by tears.

This was not fair. She had been given horrors, villains, and guidance from mediation teachers, but nothing like this: nothing so sweet that she wanted to shatter as soon as it ended. She felt anger well up, but could take no strength from it.

“When I get out of here, I won’t even kill you, ya sonofabitch. It’d give you too much satisfaction to die.” She let her head droop forward, and squeezed her eyes tight shut. “You don’t deserve the relief it’d give ya.” Despite the rage in it, her voice was uncharacteristically shaken.

Her world drained away again, and she was caught in another dream.

She was at the desk in the room that she had been given at Xavier’s mansion, and she looking over a few papers: a few class schedules for teaching self-defense to the younger students. Rogue was thinking about whether she might have to change around a few of the dates for one or the other.

She was aware of Logan walking in, shutting the door behind him. She did not look up, but gave a faint, distracted sound that could be interpreted as greeting. Then she sensed him step up close and lean his weight on the back of her chair, one of his hands splaying across the edge of her desk as he peered over her shoulder. His proximity was quite distracting, but Rogue could feel herself smiling a little, almost involuntarily.

“Busy?” Logan rumbled.

He was trying to pull her away from her work. She rather wanted to let him. “Yeah,” she said, but peered up at his face through her eyelashes playfully, just long enough to catch his eye before she looked once more down at her schedules.

Logan gave a thoughtful, mock-absent-minded hum, and watched her scratch at a few dates and times with a red pen. After nearly a full minute, he leaned in closer and nuzzled her neck through her sheer scarf.

Rogue’s body went a little tense, feeling and hearing his breath so close to her ear. The sound and the feel of his mouth, when he suckled a tender spot on the side of her neck, took her breath away and made her flush.

“Mmn, Logan.”

He bit, just lightly, and tugged at her scarf with his teeth. “Let me touch your skin, Darlin’.” His tongue flicked across the skin under the corner of her jaw––just too fast for her mutation to kick in.

Rogue’s breathing was a little uneven. “I can’t, Logan.”

His tongue flicked across the tender skin just under the edge of her scarf.

God, that felt good. Rogue took a sharp breath, and cursed when the olfactory illusion fell short of fooling her; she could smell the lab, and she could smell Jason.

“It’s him again. Fuck!” she hissed.

“Does it matter?” Logan asked.

Rogue slid out of her chair with an elegant movement that simultaneously pushed Logan back, tripped him up, and got her to her feet so she could turn and glare at her hallucination.

“Damned right, it does. I don’t do fantasy, dammit, I’m a creature of the real fuckin’ world!” She narrowed her eyes as Logan’s shape became that of a little girl with bicolor eyes. The sight made her feel distinctly queasy, for a lot of reasons.

“How do you know whether it’s real or it’s not? Why isn’t my world ever enough for anyone?” the girl asked, sounding hollow and emotionless.

Rogue snorted. “When you’ve got as much shit in your head as I do––as many ghosts and as many strangers, as many dreams that ain’t yours––you learn the hard way how to distinguish reality from hallucination. In your case, you can’t fabricate enough to cover up the smell, and I have a bit of a problem with someone controlling my mind!”

That snapped her awake again, and she stared at Jason, listening to the hiss of his breathing apparatus.

“I’m sure that’s that part that most other people hate, too,” she added, and then let her head loll forward as she caught her breath, feeling suddenly as though she had run several miles. She’d had no idea how much it could hurt to have something good ripped away like that. It ached deep within her very bones.

When she heard the room’s only door swing open, she winced, but lifted her head again, glaring at the intruder. At the sight of Stryker’s face, she felt some of her strength and resolve return. She’d kept him from getting what he wanted: Xavier’s kids, Logan, and whatever it was he wanted from under the mansion––probably Cerebro.

“Hello, Colonel. How’s your German-style chicken restaurant chain doing? Still got all that pesky resistance from expansion into Poland?” When she called someone a nazi, she at least wanted to be clever about it.

Stryker ignored her, ordering two doctors next to him to take Jason away. Then he approached Rogue. He had something in his latex-gloved hands: a dull, metallic circle.

Rogue’s gaze fixed on it, and the way he all but cradled it like something precious. Then she looked into Stryker’s eyes, and felt her muscles instinctively grow tense. She growled low, showing her teeth.

“Now, now. None of that.” He pulled the little remote from his pocket, and pressed the control button a few times.

Rogue’s eyes flared blue-green and her facial expression smoothed into a blank mask.

Stryker placed the little metal circle around her neck, snapping it like a handcuff, and latching it with a complicated little gesture. A small green light near Rogue’s pulse-point flickered to life. Stryker pulled off a glove and touched a fingertip to Rogue’s forearm. Nothing happened, and after a few long moments, he gave a truly vile grin.

“Gentleman, we have ourselves a weapon.”

The attack on the compound was well-planned. Storm created what appeared to be a normal mountain thunderstorm, providing visual cover as well as electrical interference, and causing the guards outside the compound to take off their metal helmets for their own safety. Jean and Emma promptly took care of them, and found the highest ranking officer; it was Emma who infiltrated the base with him. He found the back door, and quietly opened it for the X-men waiting outside.

Logan couldn’t help but notice claw marks on the edge of the door: his.

Scott and Hank moved to take over the control room. Johnny waited just outside the door, smirking knowingly to himself as he hefted a heavy steel pipe in his hands and leaned against a wall: the picture of patient anger, smoking cigarettes.

Logan sought out Stryker. His search brought him to a surgical room, a concrete cage with no windows, again with a few familiar claw marks in the stone, and an all-too-familiar tank of blue-green liquid, near a heated, bubbling containment unit of adamantium. There were x-rays on two lit-up walls: Yuriko’s, side by side with Rogue’s.

Rogue was here, clad in a new leather uniform that was smoother and less embroidered than those of the X-men. Her back was to him. Stryker stood next to her, adjusting something on Rogue’s neck: a metal collar. Rogue stiffened, and turned to look over her shoulder, her gaze fixing on Logan. Her eyes were pale blue edged in green, and they did not register recognition or curiosity; it was unclear as to whether she could actually see him at all.

Stryker followed her gaze and leapt back, a look of shock and horror crossing his face.

Logan growled low. Deep down, he knew that he’d always wanted to see that look on the puppetmaster’s face.

“You! What are you doing here?”

“What the Hell do you think?” Logan snarled, and unleashed the claws.

Stryker sneered and pointed at him, commanding Rogue, “Kill him!”

Rogue moved automatically, stepping between Stryker and Logan, squaring off with the latter. Her face was totally blank, doll-like. There was a flickering green light at her throat and she wore no gloves. She extended her claws and came at him.

Logan swore heavily, trying to dodge around her when Styker bolted out the door, but Rogue moved fluidly, quickly, dodged his attempts to catch her and sliced right through his achilles tendons, sending him sprawling to the ground with a shout of pain.

He flung her away when she came at him again, and managed to get to his feet as his damaged tissue healed. “Rogue, fight the damned drug!” he shouted.

Rogue only tilted her head a little, and charged again.

Logan withdrew his claws and cursed heavily as he fended off her blows. She really was damned quick, and sent him stumbling back, trying desperately to think of a plan. His eyes were drawn to the lit x-ray display, and he began leading the wrathful, brainwashed Rogue toward it.

“Do ya remember what you told me about the drug, Darlin’?” he asked, his breath short from this little workout. “Because I’m totally claiming that this was your idea.” His back was almost against the wall when he seized her wrist and pulled, sinking her claws into the electrical wires behind the lit-up panels and quickly letting go.

Electricity flooded Rogue’s system, conducted by her bones quite impressively. After more than ten seconds, the breaker seemed to overload and burst, flinging Rogue back until she crashed into a computer terminal, and hit the ground, scattering pieces of computer around her as forks of lightning leapt from her body, the electricity rapidly dissipating.

Logan followed her immediately, tentatively laying a hand on her leather-clad forearm, and gripping her when he was not electrocuted. “Rogue?”

She gasped and jumped up, trying to scoot away, but her eyes were wide open, all traces of blue and green absent. After a moment, she recognized him, but this only seemed to momentarily increase her panic. “Oh, God! Tell me this isn’t a fucking hallucination!”

Logan’s brown furrowed as a new wave of anger washed over him. “They used that psycho on you?”

Rogue lifted a hand to the side of her head, breathing hard. “Yeah. I...” She took a deep breath through her nose, and her eyes fell shut for a moment, her body shaking with weakness and bone-deep relief. She met Logan’s gaze and rested a hand on his shoulder, squeezing both to reassure herself that he was solid and to emphasize her words as she said, “Thank you.”

Logan nodded and wrapped his hand around her wrist, pulling her to her feet as he stood up. Her hair was spectacular after the electrocution, and he smirked when she instinctively smoothed it down, even while her legs were still unsteady from the electricity. She did not tremble, but she jerked now and then, and her muscles were weakened. Logan noticed a red light on the collar at her throat. “What’s the thing around your neck? It’s blinkin’ red.”

Rogue touched it, confusion creasing her brow for a moment. Then it cleared. “It...shut off my skin, but I think that it just got kinda fried. It probably isn’t workin’ right.”

Logan nodded thoughtfully.

Rogue suddenly regained focus. “Where’s Stryker? Don’t tell me he got away!”

Logan only smirked. “You know me better than that.” He slid her arm across his shoulder and helped her walk out.



Johnny was leaning on the pipe now. There was a bit of blood on the end of it. At Johnny’s feet was William Stryker, hog-tied and chained, knocked unconscious. A small bloodstain interrupted the uniform salt-and-pepper coloration of the hair on the back of his head. The firebug had already frisked him, and pocketed a few interesting keepsakes: the adamantium knife would have to be his favorite.

He smiled brilliantly and ferociously when Logan and Rogue appeared. “Good to see you, Rogue. I’ve got a present for ya.” He kicked Stryker in the ribs, earning a groan from the unconscious man.

Rogue smirked a little. “Oh, Johnny; you know just what to get a girl.”

“Admittedly, I got some helpful advice on this one,” Johnny added, jerking his head in Logan’s direction.

Logan, still supporting Rogue, was eyeing Stryker with obvious hatred. “Emma contact you yet?” he growled.

“Yeap. Everything’s on schedule.”

Logan smirked. “Good.”



Stryker awoke to find himself bound, face-down on the floor. When he dared tilt his head up, what he saw left him horrified.

Rogue leaned against a post, her arms crossed over her chest, and she glared at him with pitiless eyes so dark that they were almost black. “Hello, Stryker. Yer lucky ya woke up, ya know. You mighta just been blown away whilst in a coma, but Logan wouldn’t let me touch ya. He said he’d learn enough about his past from all the files and things we’ve pulled from ya computers and storage rooms.” She clicked her tongue, tilting her head a little.

Stryker’s eyes moved around the room widely. He tried to speak, but his mouth had been duct-taped shut.

“Wonderin’ about that burning smell?” Rogue asked, a truly ferocious grin on her face, showing every tooth in her head. “That’s the work of our friend, Johnny Pyro. He’s the one who was kind enough to give ya that little love tap on the back of your head. Did I ever tell you just how satisfyin’ the smell of your blood is? Mmm.” She shook her head, still grinning.

Stryker shouted something almost intelligible through the tape.

“I’m as much a monster as ya made me, Stryker. It’s just that you’re damned unlucky that I survived and lived long enough to adapt to it, and know what to do with it and how to do it.” Her smile was gone, and Stryker could not tell if that was more or less terrifying than the smile alone had been.

Logan approached, unsheathing his claws. “He’s awake, then?”

“Yeah.” Rogue tilted her head a little. “Are ya sure, Sugar-”

Logan’s hand on her shoulder. “Not even his ghost should get outta here. Especially not if you’d have to live with it, Darlin’.”

Rogue took a deep breath, and let it out. “Alright. Got everything set up?”

“Yeah, and Johnny’s on his way out. He looks like he’s havin’ the time of his life.”

That lifted a bit of the dark from Rogue’s expression. “I’ll bet he is. He’s never had a fire that big to play with, before.” She leaned against him as he once more slung her arm across his shoulders to help her walk.

Stryker tried to shout as they slowly walked away. He could hear the creaking of pipes, the hissing of pressure within them, and the screaming of alarms as the heat from the levels below became more and more intense.

They did not even glance back at him.

Hank was the first to greet the pair when they reached the blackbird. He immediately began questioning their health and how on earth the fire had started, and informed them how little time they had left to get out.

Rogue extended a bit of claw and cut the clasp holding the collar around her neck. Retracting the claw, she handed the collar to Hank. “Here. Please see if you can improve this for me, eh, Hank?” She smiled tiredly.

“What on earth is it?”

“It shut off my skin.”

“Oh my...yes, I shall have to look into it, indeed. May I help you with your apparent inability to walk unassisted?”

“It’s just havin’ been electrocuted with all those drugs in my system. I’ll be alright by mornin’ or so. I just need time to detox, as it were.”

“Oh, dear. I’m sure you do! I’ll fetch you an IV with some of this serum I worked up...”

Rogue shook her head a little, then leaned it on Logan’s shoulder and again inhaled his scent, wishing she could drown in it. It was the only thing anchoring her to reality and making her absolutely sure that it was real.

Logan sat on one of the benches near the back of the plane, pulling Rogue down with him. She was not difficult to persuade, seeming highly unwilling to break contact with him. She still leaned on his shoulder even when she no longer had an arm around him for support. Logan could feel Emma’s curious eyes on them, where she watched from the cockpit, but he ignored her. “I was in the illusions, wasn’t I?”

“Mm,” Rogue said, in a tone that did not reveal much, but then she sighed. “Yeah. He could never get ya scent right. It shattered the whole illusion, every time he tried t’ use ya.” Her eyes fell shut when she felt him wrap an arm around her, his fingers stroking her hair.

“Think he’s roasted yet?” He sounded pleased.

“He deserves worse,” Rogue muttered under her breath. She cracked her knuckles.

“Yeah. But it’s still pretty satisfying.”

She smirked involuntarily, almost reluctantly. “Yeah.” One hand clutched a little at the leather of Logan’s uniform, at his sleeve. “I need sleep, but I still smell like that place,” she murmured, her voice just slightly weak, as he hadn’t heard from her before.

Logan nodded. “Yeah.”

“Can I...just stay here?” She tilted her face down a little. Her cheek rested just over his collarbone.

Logan fumbled around and finally found seat belts, buckling them both in. “Yeah. Now ya can.”

“Thank you,” she murmured. “And thank you for bringing all these geeks to come get me.” She curled up comfortably against his side, already relaxing. She did not see Hank starting to approach with an IV, stopping as he reconsidered, and then turning away to leave them be.

Logan smirked a little, resting his chin on the top of her head. He could not find words for how relieved he was that she was okay, and that she wanted to be close to him. Something had just caught his eye, though. There was a second dog tag on the chain around her neck. He picked it up, holding it out just far enough from its resting place that he could read it.

Rogue’s eyelids lifted just slightly, to see what he was doing. “Yeah. I was surprised he bothered to listen, too.”

The tag said: ROGUE.

Logan gave a sound of agreement and put the tags back.

By the time the blackbird took off two minutes later, Rogue was asleep. Within fifteen more minutes, Stryker’s base had been blown to smithereens, and swallowed by Alkalai Lake.

Logan listened to Rogue’s breathing, and occasionally opened his eyes to watch the rest of the X-men at the front of the blackbird. They were all quiet: Storm and Jean at the helm, Scott and Hank sorting some of the non-digital files they had taken from Stryker, Kurt and Emma talking quietly on the other side of the row; and Johnny sitting apart from them, curled up in his seat and sleeping peacefully, only the occasional smirk disturbing the serenity of his expression.

Rogue slept more fitfully, the occasional flinch, shiver, or growl going through her, but Logan knew it could be worse. He could see her hands tense, her fingers flexing as if about to slice something open, but she never unsheathed her claws. He breathing would speed up, and her heartbeat quicken and get louder, but in the end, a few deep breaths––even in dreams she instinctively controlled her breathing after a certain point––seemed to calm her, and she would relax again.

Once returned to the mansion––now free from threat, surveillance, and soldiers (and with repairs in progress)––Logan had managed to carry her halfway to her room before she awoke.

She looked around in confusion, sniffing the air deeply. “Mansion?” she asked sleepily.

“Yeah.”

“You’re carrying me,” she observed, sounding a tad confused.

“You wanna walk?”

Rogue considered this. “Honestly? No.”

Logan smirked a little. “I figured.”

“I’m just...it’s weird. I’m not used to being touched, let alone this. Kinda nice, though.” She was coming down from her initial adrenaline high. Hank had warned that she might be a little––off, due to the lingering toxins in her system.

Logan thought ‘tipsy’ might be about the word for it. “Good thing, too. Not many other modes of transport are available.”

“Professor Wheels gets along well enough,” Rogue muttered.

Logan sniggered.

“Am I...drunk?” Rogue asked.

“Hank said the electricity would have had a funny effect on the drugs still in your system, and might make you a little odd.”

“I’m always a bit odd, but this...everything has a bit of a vapor trail now and then. And I get the feeling that I sound like a crazy person.”

“You do, but I won’t hold it against you.”

“Mm.” Rogue leaned her head on his shoulder again. “Ya’ve done a lot for me, today, Sugar,” she observed.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Damn. It was a very good question, but also a difficult one. Logan sighed. “I could ask you the same about why you drained me and took my place in that Hell, Rogue.”

She made a thoughtful noise, but did not look up at him.

Logan shook his head a little. “Because he took you, and I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of having caught any of us. And because I want you here, to help me keep these geeks safe; I can’t think of anyone I’d prefer to have my back in a fight, especially not now.”

One of her bare hands gripped his clothed shoulder. “Logan...”

“It was the same for you, I think.”

She nodded slightly. “Yeah. But I’m still surprised that I’m gettin’ carried up to my room. It’s like gettin’ the royal treatment.”

Logan considered this. “I knew you wouldn’t wake well if you woke up in the med lab.”

Rogue shuddered involuntarily.

“My thoughts exactly,” Logan murmured.

“Thank you.”

He gave a low answering rumble, which Rogue found quite comforting.

Logan set her down at the door to her room, and looked her over once more, making absolutely sure that she was really there. He was slightly surprised when she reached out and grabbed his arm when he turned to leave; even more so when she stepped close, and stood on her toes to brush her lips across his––just a fleeting, soft, and all-too-brief touch so that she wouldn’t drain him.

“Goodnight, Logan,” she said quietly, releasing him, and stepping back, putting a hand on her door.

“Goodnight, Rogue.”

Logan stared at her door for a few long moments, after she had gone into her room and shut it softly behind her. His eyes fell shut when he heard the faint sound of the zipper on the front of her uniform being pulled down. After a moment more, he made his way down the hall to his own room, thinking strange thoughts.

Rogue was unsure exactly when it had started: her little breakdown. She had kissed Logan, which had reminded her of distant dreams and rude awakenings. Then she had stripped out of the uniform Stryker had given her, and tossed it into her room’s trash can and tied the bag shut so that she could no longer smell the traces of the lab embedded in the leather. Then she had stepped under the gloriously hot shower, and washed away all traces of the lab except the metal around her neck and the scars in her own mind. At some point those scars had begun to ache, and throb, and Rogue’s muscles had felt even weaker.

She found herself curled up on the floor of her shower, shaking, and smelling of tears and futile anger, and pain. Her breathing was rough, choked and harsh, and her stomach ached from heaving up some of the more volatile toxins in her system: her healing factor having sent it to her stomach for disposal. She could smell traces of it still being washed down the drain as she got to her feet and began scrubbing her skin until it was red and raw, and smelled only of unscented soap and her own natural scent. Then she washed her hair, stepped out of the shower, and found that the whole episode was suddenly over.

Most people don’t recover this fast, Rogue thought to herself, but found that it didn’t bother her. I’ve never been ‘most people’ no matter who I was.

She dried off and curled up on the bed that still smelled faintly of her first night in the mansion. She covered her pillow with a towel, slid under the covers, and passed out cold: dreamless for now, but, she knew, once her bone-deep exhaustion had worn off, it would not remain so, and for years to come most of her nights would remind her that her healing factor did not extend to cover psychological damage.

Hank woke her the next morning, asking that she come down to the med lab for a check-up. “I know that you probably are uncomfortable with the environment, but I merely want to be sure that all of Stryker’s drugs are out of your system.”

Rogue had agreed, and promised to be with him in ten minutes. After hunting down her clothes––not in her duffle bag, as she had expected, but folded in her room’s set of drawers and smelling faintly of unscented detergent and Logan (he had not rummaged through anything else in her bag, which she appreciated)––she dressed, and made her way down to the med lab.

The smells of the place made her nervous, but the fact that it was well-lit and not made mostly of dark concrete was very reassuring. Hank told her a few things that she already knew: that she was underweight, that her system had taken care of almost all of the lingering toxins, and that she could expect a full recovery. He also gave her a small injection of serum which eliminated what little remained, and that he said would prevent further after-effects.

“Have ya had time to look at the collar?” Rogue asked.

“Yes. I’ve already begun work on a prototype. It could be so much smaller, with the drug-applying sections removed. It’s a surprisingly simple concept involving the electromagnetic-”

“Thank you, Hank,” Rogue said, interrupting him with a hint of dry amusement, but also very sincere gratitude.

He smiled at her and gave a gracious bow. “‘Tis my pleasure, m’lady.”

Rogue gave a snort of further amusement at that.

“And I shall see if I cannot get you a bracelet or ring by the end of the week.”

Rogue’s eyes widened and she felt utterly stunned. “I...really?” Her voice sounded small, uncertain, and oddly human for once.

“Yes, indeed. Now I would suggest you go have breakfast so that you can return all the more quickly to full health.” He gave her a warm, toothy smile. Under all that blue fur, he really was an adorable little genius.

Rogue took one of his hands in her gloved one and gave it a grateful squeeze, smiling at him. He was the only person she had offered non-violent touch, other than Logan, and she could tell he was surprised. She thanked him again, softly, and went back upstairs.

Logan found her when she was on her third helping of bacon and her fourth biscuit. She was also, once more, drinking his beer. He quirked a brow at her, eyeing her breakfast choices with evident amusement. “Bacon, biscuits, and beer. Breakfast of champions?” he mocked.

Rogue raised an eyebrow at him. “Just because you prefer toast and sausage along with it,” she countered. “And no biscuit. I suppose that’s less alliterative, but is that really the point?”

Logan raised both eyebrows this time, giving her a questioning look, wondering how she knew what he preferred for breakfast.

Understanding clearly, Rogue tapped two fingers to the side of her head. “I’ve got a bit of you rattlin’ around up here, now.”

“Mm.” Logan nodded vaguely. “I’d forgotten about that. I’m not givin’ you any trouble, up there, am I?”

Shaking her head a little, Rogue smirked. “Nah. We get along fine. It’s kinda nice havin’ someone up here crazy the same way I am.” A thoughtful look crossed her face, as though she was sure there was something she was meant to have remembered. Then she added, “And thank you for doing my laundry.”

Logan smiled crookedly, turned to grab a beer of his own from the fridge, and sat down across from her, pilfering a slice of bacon. “Didn’t figure most of the others would be quite as inclined to trust you enough not to do a full search.”

She glared at him, but not altogether seriously.

“Everything check out with the Doc? He said he wanted to see you this morning.”

Rogue nodded. “Yeah. Told me a lotta what I coulda told him.” She shrugged.

Logan smirked a little. “That’s usually the case with me, too.”

Rogue took a swig of beer. “He also said...that he’d have a prototype ring or bracelet for me within a week or so.” She smiled a little, but seemed almost hesitant about it, glancing at where she had set aside her gloves so as not to get bacon grease on them.

Trying not to think quite the way he had been thinking last night––after he had felt the velvet brush of her lips, when it had occurred to him that he could do quite a lot with just a scrap of thin silk––Logan raised his eyebrows in surprised and tapped his beer bottle against hers in a softly celebratory gesture. “Good news for you, then.”

Rogue nodded slightly, meeting his gaze for a moment before looking down again. “Yeah...I’m just not sure if I can handle it again.” She shrugged, looking slightly nervous. “I don’t like letting people close. Marie used to be terrified of her skin, and Yuriko was just paranoid about being found out.” Rogue tapped her fingertips across the table. “The idea of anyone, other than you, not keeping their distance––it’s unnerving.” She took another swig of beer.

Logan looked at her thoughtfully. “I think you can handle ‘em. I’ve found that growling can do wonders,” he mused.

Rogue laughed, just a little, trying unsuccessfully to hide it behind one hand. It was utterly adorable. “I’ll keep that in mind, Sugar.” She stopped hiding her smile, then, and held his gaze.

Logan was amused, but sounded more serious when he asked her, “Why me?”

Rogue looked down at her plate again, breaking off a piece of biscuit and popping it into her mouth. “I––just trust you. It’s in the way ya move, and the way ya look at me, the expressions on your face.” She met his stare, giving him an almost curious look, as if reading something written in his eyes, and she smiled almost tentatively when she appeared to find what she had been seeking out there. Then she shrugged, becoming again more confident, more sage, and explained, “You’re crazy in the same ways I am, for the most part. And you’re not afraid of me.” She looked down again, smirking a little, this time with a distinctly wicked edge as she picked up another bite of food. “And you’re sexy as Hell, too, which helps.”

Logan’s eyes widened, but then he smiled a just a little bit darkly. He scolded himself for thinking that Rogue would be innocent. If he’d met her when she was Marie, she might have been, but when the woman across from him now looked back up at him, there was a mature and knowing heat in her stare that Logan could feel as though it caressed him. And, oh, the places it caressed, and with such mixed curiosity and knowing hunger.

“What about you, Logan? I thought redheads were more your type.” She smiled playfully, and Logan knew that she had sensed the change in the air between himself and Jean.

“Yeah, well––she can’t see what we see––and what she can see of it, she distorts,” he murmured. There was something intense in his look: curiosity when he was watching her. “And you interest me.” He looked down at her bare hands. “And when he took you, after you’d kept me from gettin’ drugged––I guess it’s like you said, and I’ve never met somebody as crazy as I am before.” He met her gaze again as he took a swig of beer.

Rogue nodded, smiling a little. “Yeah. I like this kinda crazy, though.” She ate her last bite of bacon.

“I’m thinkin’ that I do, too,” Logan rumbled.

Rogue finished the last few bites of her biscuit, drained her beer, and stood up, walking over to the counter to put her plate in the sink and her bottle in the recycling bin. The jeans she wore were just snug enough to tantalize, and Logan considered the possibilities for touching her through the denim. He watched her put her gloves back on and lean against the table, standing close to him. She cupped the side of his face in one hand, only a thin layer of silk between her flesh and his.

“I’m new at this, at the same time that I’m really not; and either way––I like the idea of bein’ around you, Logan.” Her fingers traced the line of his cheekbone and jaw, and trailed a little through his facial hair.

“I can’t promise anything,” Logan said firmly, still holding her gaze. He was marveling at how good she smelled, and how much her simple touch made him so much more eager to feel her pressed against him. She could match him, he knew; more than anyone he might have taken to bed before, she had the most potential to make an addict out of him. He could promise that she’d probably never get sex better than with him, but there was little else he could give. He didn’t do anniversaries, flowers, love poems, or romance.

Rogue leaned towards him, bending at the waist so that her face was very close to his and so that when her lovely, deadly lips parted as she spoke, he could feel the warmth of her breath. “I’m a runner, too, Logan. You can trust me in a fight, and I can swear on my honor that I’ll be worth that trust, but I can’t promise ya anything off the battlefield.” She smiled. “Aside from the obvious opportunity.” Her thumb brushed his lower lip, smiling at the way his pupils dilated. “And that my behavior in any fight won’t be effected negatively by anything between us outside it. I’m more professional than that, Logan.”

Logan smirked, suddenly curious. “Who the Hell was Yuriko, anyway?” Because it sure as Hell wasn’t any untouched runaway named Marie who talked like that––like a woman and a warrior and like she had tasted blood.

Rogue shrugged, reluctantly lifting her fingers from Logan’s skin as she leaned back against the counter. “Mercenary. Specialty was assassinations. And she was a looker, too, believe me. She had a tendency to attach too much moral significance to who she chose to go after. Her meeting with Marie’s mind changed that––made reality a little more stark, and made her all the more self-destructive.” Rogue appeared thoughtful. “I don’t think things would have worked out the way they have for me, if she hadn’t so badly wanted to die. I might still be Marie, with crazy Yuriko in her head, stronger than all of the other ghosts combined.” She shrugged, seeming to prefer the way things had worked out; with Rogue.

Logan tried to imagine what it must be like, waking up with all the memories of two different lives, all of the emotions, and what personality might have emerged from the tangled chaos of sobering realizations about the world, and about what really mattered––what was right and what made life worth living. “Did you have a choice with what you kept from both of them?”

Rogue smiled, seeing that he understood, at least a large part of it. “Yes. And I had the distance to be very practical about all of it––especially with more than a week wandering the frozen middle-of-fuckin’ nowhere before I started to see any signs of other people, aside from empty stretches of highway with the occasional truck I might conceal myself from.”

Logan nodded. Isolation, and time to think––she had been damned lucky, and he told her as much.

She nodded solemnly. “Trust me. I know.” The look in her dark eyes said it all.

“You got any questions for me?” he asked.

Rogue tilted her head a little. “How much did you find in the files?”

Logan took a deep breath. “A lot. I’ve already read the history as far as World War I.” He took a pull of beer.

Rogue raised her eyebrows in surprise at first, but then nodded solemnly, understanding written across her features.

“How old are your memories?” Logan asked.

Rogue looked away out the kitchen window, her eyes moving back and forth as if scanning a distant horizon. “Old, but not quite that old,” she said softly. “I was born shortly after World War I––at least, half of me was.” She shrugged. “Counting Marie’s lifetime, I’m just over a hundred. If you count the few years I’ve kept from the each of the several or so ghosts I’ve picked up over time, it’s more like a century and a quarter.” A thoughtful look crossed her face, creasing her brow. “I’ve––never told anyone else about that.”

Logan nodded. “I’m over one-fifty. Almost two hundred.” He drained his beer.

Rogue could read in his expression something like grief. “You’ve gotten some memories back, I take it.”

He exhaled through his teeth. “They don’t even feel like they’re mine, though,” he growled, running a hand through his hair as if clawing at it.

Rogue reached out and put her hand across the back of his, stopping it before he pulled it out of his hair. Her fingers slid between his, stroking the hollows between his knuckles where the claws came out. She did not press or squeeze, but almost caressed, and rested there solidly. “I know exactly how that feels,” she said firmly, quietly.

Logan turned his head to look at her again, and saw something dark behind her eyes, like war and pain and loss. He could recognize in the solemnity of her expression the habit of someone who is used to holding their emotion behind an iron curtain of reserve, and someone who had had that curtain ripped away before––shredded, in fact––and had painstakingly reconstructed it. After regaining memories of life in Japan, it felt familiar. When she tugged lightly on his hand, his arm relaxed and obeyed her.

Rogue held his hand out, exploring it with her gloved ones, paying special attention to the hollows between his knuckles, and to his fingertips. With her eyes downcast, and her mask of reserve still in place, Logan could almost believe her name was really Yuriko. “Do you believe me?” she asked softly.

He considered for a moment, still watching her face, although his gaze sometimes darted to their hands. “Yeah.”

A faint smile touched her features, visible more around her eyes than in the line of her mouth. “I’m glad I hid in your trailer.”

Logan chuckled a little at that, smirking faintly when she met his gaze. He ran two fingertips along the length of her palm. “It’s a good thing I didn’t leave your ass behind, huh?”

Rogue shrugged. “It’d be your loss as much as mine, Sugar.”

Arching a brow, Logan admitted, “I suppose.”

Rogue gave a somewhat less than ladylike snort in response, her mask of serenity disturbed as her inner southern spitfire rose near the surface. “Asshole. Admit it: you’re glad ya let me in your truck.”

Logan briefly considered telling her that he’d considered that to be a good decision from the moment she’d let him touch her the first time, allowed him to hold her wrist and examine her claws––and that he’d known it was one of the best damned decisions he’d ever made when she’d stood calmly in the hallway, ready to face Stryker’s men, and he’d seen that look on her face...

Briefly, Logan might have wished he were more verbose by nature; but outwardly he only gave Rogue a brilliantly predatory grin and teased, “Maybe.”

She growled at him playfully. “I will bite you, if I have to.”

He arched an eyebrow suggestively. “I’ll bite back and make you like it.”

Returning the gesture in kind, she countered, “What makes you think I’ll need to be persuaded?”

Logan gave a low rumble that bordered on a purr instead of an actual growl. “And you said you were new at this.”

Rogue smirked brazenly. “Sugar, what do ya think Yuriko did for almost a hundred years, especially once it was clear aging had stopped?” She leaned in and spoke low in his ear. “I inherited a lot of knowledge, and a lot of memories, Logan. I know as much about the game as you do––maybe more.”

“Maybe,” he murmured, pulling his hand away from hers and running it up her spine from just above her ass to where her bra-line should have been, feeling the way her muscles tensed under the lazy stroke. “But you haven’t had the chance to experience it yourself.”

The hitch in her breathing told him he had gotten the low, rumbling pitch of his voice just right. Rogue marveled a little at her own hypersensitivity––it was something about Marie’s body that she had not previously had the chance to discover. Thinking about how much potential this gave her made heat pool in her stomach. A low purr reverberated up from her chest, and she heard Logan’s pulse quicken as he felt it under his hand. She pulled back enough to meet his gaze; her pupils dilated and her lips a little redder than before. “Think you can handle me, old man?” she challenged quietly.

Logan felt his blood rush south. He’d known, early on, that something seriously dark and heavy and hot had lurked behind that mask of hers, but looking at her now he still had to marvel at it: the curiosity of an innocent, without the innocence, and instead possessing wicked knowledge and a tantalizing amount of power. While he’d once hoped to see a side like this from Jean, as he’d thought he’d seen the potential for it, Logan had to admit that he quite preferred the woman in front of him. And God, her scent was intoxicating as her arousal began to spike.

She had a silk scarf around her neck––light-as-air soft fabric that seemed, at that moment, truly full of possibilities, and Logan was about to reach for it...

Until they both heard a couple of younger students heading for the kitchen.

Rogue glared at the doorway and cursed creatively under her breath.

Logan, who knew a little more than a smattering of French, was a little impressed, but he gave an empathetic noise as he reluctantly removed his arm from around her waist.

Rogue leaned back against the counter, putting her mask in place, although there was something moody and borderline threatening about the way she sharply tugged on and adjusted the edges of her gloves when the two young girls––Kitty and Siryn––finally sauntered into the room. Kitty appeared nervous and hid behind the refrigerator door as she searched for a snack, while Siryn only raised her eyebrows a little and appeared almost amused, but mostly curious.

“Hey, Wolvie. Hey, Rogue.”

Logan winced at the nickname.

Rogue smirked a little and looked at him, clearly entertained. “So it’s ‘Wolvie’ is it?”

With a groan, Logan explained that Jubilee––or as he called her, the ‘yellow-jacketed sparkler’––was responsible.

Both Siryn and Kitty looked a bit disturbed when Rogue laughed.

“Oh, God, she’s adopted you, hasn’t she?” Rogue sniggered.

Logan growled.

Once she had finally gotten her snacks and closed the fridge, Kitty finally got up the courage to ask something that had been weighing on her mind. “Uhm...Rogue? Are you going to become a teacher, here, or a student?”

Rogue blinked a couple of times. It had not even remotely occurred to her to become a student, but neither had she thought about herself in a teacher role. “Uhm. Not a student.”

“But you can’t be more than––I dunno. Nineteen, tops,” Siryn interjected.

Rogue bristled a little. “Yes. I can,” she said firmly, but not loudly, her voice perfectly even.

Kitty elbowed her friend and hissed, “Healing factor,” not quite quietly enough.

Siryn’s eyebrows raised. “Oh. So you’re really old?”

Rogue smirked a little. “Ancient.”

Kitty was by now trying to push Siryn out the door, but before she managed to succeed fully, Siryn added, “Lucky for you, Wolvie!”

Then Kitty sank them both through the floor, with an audible: “GONNAgetusallkilled!”

Rogue sniggered at the way Logan glared after them. “Oh God, I keep forgetting that people keep thinking I’m jailbait!” Her laughing abruptly stopped when Logan stood up and tugged away her scarf, leaving her throat suddenly bare. She had just enough time to look up at him in surprised before he pinned her against the table and kissed her hard, only the scarf between them.

Logan smiled a bit against her lips when she gave a low moan and pressed up against him, her mouth opening to him. He could taste her through the wet silk, and it was as good as the way she smelled. And she met him eagerly, her tongue sliding past his, exploring him and teasing him. He pressed against her hips, leaning her back over the table when her gloved hands untangled from his hair and slid down the back of his neck. Logan only broke the kiss when she curled a leg around his, and he reluctantly recalled all too clearly that they were in the middle of the goddamned kitchen; it followed shortly that he realized how bad an idea it would be when they got caught mid-coitus by goddamned teenagers, but that that would be exactly what would happen if she ran her leg up his like that again.

Rogue got a grip on herself quickly, and restrained her urge to writhe her hips against his and growl in order to get him to continue––because Holy Hell was she aroused. In none of her memories had it been so easy to get so worked up so fast. And it wasn’t just Logan’s skill––although she would easily admit that the man was really, superlatively good––but something about her body, and the way Logan’s scent was going to her head more than anyone else’s in her memory, was making it far too easy to get lost in the sensations and let them overwhelm her. And God, was that good. “Holy Hell, Logan, you smell fantastic,” she said breathlessly, before she could stop herself.

Logan chuckled darkly, leaning forward and shifting her scarf to cover her neck again, albeit only partially, and fixed his mouth there.

Rogue gasped sharply, her hands clutching at his shirt as his mouth and the feel of his body against her––his hardness pressing against her hip and the heat and closeness of him––making her head spin and her clit throb. She tilted her head to allow him further access and this time couldn’t restrain the urgent grind of her hips.

Logan stiffened, in more ways than one, at the feel of that grind, and how it brought his attention to the increasingly powerful scent of her. God, she was already dripping, and there was nothing but denim between him and that wet heat. He groaned audibly and bit her neck a little harder, along the tender, sensitive skin of her throat.

Real life totally trumps hallucination, Rogue thought distantly, and pulled him closer. The thought that they might get caught crossed her mind briefly, but it only added a hint of desperation––because if he stopped now, she might lose her mind. She rolled her hips again and whispered, “Logan, please...”

He shuddered at that, and his fingers automatically found themselves tugging open the front of her jeans and sliding in to rub her through the thin fabric of her panties. He could smell nothing else save her heat, and the way her muscles squeezed at him and fluttered under her skin, made him painfully hard, his erection straining against his own jeans. And he was shocked at how little it took for her to come, shuddering as she clutched at him and his fingers rubbed firm little circles over her clit, and she gave a low, rumbling purr-sound as well as a low moan as she peaked, trembling against him and breathing hard. Logan imagined what reactions he could get, just from tasting her, and almost came himself.

He didn’t stop until she grabbed his wrist and pulled him away, her occasional moans as she rode out the aftershocks turning abruptly into discomfort as her pleasure mixed with the pain of being over-stimulated and hyper-sensitive. Then she leaned her forehead against his shoulder and caught her breath; although she did rest her hand over his erection, squeezing firmly and earning a low groan.

“Damn, Darlin’!” he hissed warningly, but couldn’t help the way his hips arched into her touch, and his groan of relief, when she released his erection from its denim confines was hardly discouraging. And then––Oh, the feel of those silk gloves as she stroked him, exploring the shape and the length of him.

Rogue wanted to taste him, craving the heady rush it would give her, from having so much power over his body, but did not dare tempt fate, with her skin still such a risk––and the way he was responding to just her hand was certainly encouraging. She smirked. “You’re real excited for me, Sugar. I’m flattered.” She slid her thumb across the weeping head of his cock.

Logan gave a low rumble, sliding a hand up her side to cup a breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra, thank God. “I could say the same for your little display,” he countered.

She gave an amused, low hum, and began stroking him faster. Her fingers were knowledgeable, and she was doing all the right things, making him breathe as hard as she had. “Yeah. I didn’t actually know I was quite that easily stimulated; thanks for the lesson.” She lowered her head to fix her mouth over his nipple through his shirt.

Logan’s hips jerked and knew he was close. “Goddammit, Rogue,” he groaned.

He felt her smirk this time, as her tongue swirled over his nipple as her teeth pressed into his flesh a little, and her hands did something truly amazing. Logan leaned in and bit her shoulder as he came with a loud, low growl, jerking his hips. He shivered when she lifted her head just enough to run her tongue along the side of his adams’ apple, just quick enough that she didn’t drain him. After he’d caught his breath, he muttered, “You are evil.”

“Are you complaining?” she purred.

“Fuck. No,” he hissed. “But we’re about to be interrupted.”

Rogue cursed in two different dialects of Chinese as Logan zipped up first her jeans, and then his own. She picked up a few napkins from nearby and wiped up as Logan pulled away. Rogue sniggered and pointed out the wet spot on his shirt. Logan snorted, and removed his shirt. He then smirked at Rogue when she ogled him openly.

By the time Scott came in, half a minute later, Rogue was cleaning her breakfast dishes and Logan was sitting at the table drinking beer without a shirt on: nothing unusual, really. Rogue’s healing factor had even prevented her getting hickeys. Scott raised an eyebrow so that it was visible over the edge of his shades, but simply fetched what he needed from the pantry, shot them a suspicious look, and left again.

“Okay, so kitchen isn’t the best idea,” Rogue admitted.

Logan chuckled. She shivered in surprise at how quickly he got close to her again; she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “Where next, then, Darlin’?”

After glancing at the clock and almost pouting visibly at what it told her, Rogue turned around to face him, picking up her soiled gloves from where she’d tossed them down next to the sink. She admired his chest openly, and smirked a little when she looked into his eyes. “Next, today, I’ve gotta meet with Xavier. He wanted to talk to me about the house rules and my stickin’ around. I should probably clean up a bit first, though.” She brushed past him as she headed for the door, her breasts sliding across his chest for a moment so that he could feel her still-hard nipples through her shirt. “Later, Sugar.”

Logan watched the subtle sway of her hips as she left, and found himself grinning.

“Hello, Professor.”

Rogue was possessed of a habit of darting her gaze around any room she entered, before she had fully stepped across the threshold. Both Marie and Yuriko both had picked up the habit separately before they had met, and it had saved each of their respective lives a number of times.

Xavier recognized it when she entered his office, because Wolverine did the same thing, every time, no matter how well he knew a place. “Welcome, Rogue. If you would sit down, please.” He gestured to the chair in front of his desk.

Rogue approached, and Xavier casually observed the preciseness of her long strides, giving the illusion of an almost wolfish lope to her gait. She did not sway in a feminine manner; her whole demeanor was one of containment; it matched her mind.

She settled into the chair opposite him, her dark eyes reading his expression intently, and Xavier had no doubt that she was just as perceptive as Logan, due to her senses and past experiences; in fact, she would probably read him better, since she tended more toward eerie calm than sudden outbursts.

Rogue smirked to see him trying to read her without his mutation. “Are you worried about me?” she asked. It was a question with multiple layers: was he worried about Rogue’s mind, worried about Rogue’s presence in his school, worried about her predatory tendencies and questionable morals...

“I am simply wondering what your plans are, and how I may help you with them,” Xavier answered. “We found your records amongst Styker’s data...”

“I’m not Marie,” she interrupted. “Not anymore, at least. Look over the files on Yuriko Oyama, or Project Deathstryke. You’ll understand me much better, then.”

Xavier nodded, and gestured toward the large stack of papers on the edge of his desk. “Yes, I looked into those as well, once I read that you had killed her in self-defense. I also listened to Stryker’s recorded notes.” Seeing the way her body stiffened, Xavier gave her a look that was part-apology and part-sympathy. “I believe he was under the misapprehension that it was some kind of delusion on your part based on what you had absorbed from Yuriko, but I doubt that this is the case.”

“Rightly so.”

“I take it, then, that you do not have any plans to become a student here. Yuriko’s records were harder for Stryker to put together than Logan’s, and have more gaps in them due to how good she was at hiding, but I can guess that your mental age is, in all likelihood, nearer to mine than to those who would have been Marie’s peers.”

Rogue nodded. Then a hint of curiosity, almost amused, crossed her features for a moment. “Do you think I’ve been corrupted?”

Xavier hesitated. “I would not quite say that. It was not intentionally done to-”

“Yes it was, X,” Rogue interrupted, her voice low, but firm. “Yuriko was trying to kill herself, despite having a good idea of what it would do to Marie. It was only in the chaos of double-identity that she began to regret, and that was only because her ideas of right and wrong were already blurring as they mixed with Marie’s. Yuriko’s only concern was not going back to Stryker’s lab as his puppet, and not giving him the satisfaction of getting what he wanted: me.”

Xavier considered this. “I am sorry that I misunderstood.”

“But,” Rogue urged, “would you call it corruption?”

Xavier looked at her, and at the edges of his senses could feel and almost see the peculiar form of her psyche. “I would say that you have taken what you have been given, and done well with it, and grown stronger from it, in ways that few people could possibly understand, and fewer could ever hope to achieve had they been placed in your situation.”

She smiled very faintly, from amusement more than anything. “You give good answers, considering that you claim you can’t see into my mind.”

“It is not impossible for me, but I cannot do it easily, and in order to not damage anything within your psyche I would need you to be in a meditative state or something similar, which would calm some of the chaos of impression that forms a barrier around your mind.”

Rogue tilted her head. “‘Chaos of impressions’ is it? You mean to say that my ghosts are keeping you out?”

“In a way, yes. They form a barrier of––white noise, but with thoughts, memories, and portions of psyche. It’s rather disconcerting to look at, let alone try to navigate through.”

Rogue nodded, looking thoughtful. “Oh. That’s just the background noise.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, letting the breath out and taking another, smoothly. Then she opened her eyes, still breathing slow, half her focus on keeping her mind calm. “How is that?”

Xavier could feel the way her mental energy output smoothed out, and hesitantly lowered his mental shields in her direction. The chaos had calmed, the various impressions of people Rogue had touched were individual shapes, calm, still, and almost transparent––and he could see their faces, now; they did indeed look like ghosts or tricks of the light. They still surrounded Rogue’s mind, but he could actually see her through the faint fog now, and what he saw was...interesting.

Like two portraits superimposed over each other to make a completely new image or two colors mixed so that they swirled into a spiral and mixed into a new color at the edges where they touched; Marie and Yuriko were both still there, but not alive as Rogue was. Xavier must have stared at her for a slightly too-long while, because he could feel her relax her hold on whatever it was that had calmed her ghosts. Soon she was eclipsed again behind them, like the moon behind a veil of clouds.

“Thank you for showing me, Rogue. I believe that I understand a bit better,” Xavier said.

Rogue’s dark gaze was piercing. “Ya sound a little unnerved, there, X.”

He calmed himself deliberately, but was hard to look at her face now, framed by white streaks, and not see the faint after-image of Yuriko. Marie’s eyes had been dark, too, but they hadn’t been so nearly black; yet when Rogue smiled it was with a fiery edge that had once belonged to Marie.

“I was simply surprised,” Xavier said, “I had not expected that Yuriko was quite as old as she was, and I’m still not sure how so much age and so many memories didn’t overwhelm you, but there is an unnervingly perfect balance between her and Marie.”

Rogue smiled enigmatically. “Marie was tougher than anyone expected.” Including herself, she added silently, secure in knowing that Xavier could not hear it.

“Indeed.” Xavier took a breath. “That taken into account: with your...more mercenary past, I am not entirely sure why you have expressed an interest in joining the X-men.” He looked at her cooly, a calm negotiator once more: impossible to offend and serene to the core. “St. John mentioned it to me, if you were wondering. He seems to like you.”

Rogue’s smile faded from her lips, but lingered a little around her eyes. “I’ve been a mercenary, yes, but I’ve also been a helpless runaway and a victim of some of the most outlandishly abusive and inhuman treatment of mutants in the last few decades: non sum qualis eram, Professsor.” She shrugged. As Xavier nodded in sagely understanding, Rogue’s grin returned a little more openly, if only for a moment. “And I’ve spoken with Johnny. He’s a good kid, really.” She leaned back in her seat a bit more, appearing at ease, but clearly still hyper-aware of the room around her. Outside, she could occasionally hear the whispers of conversation from passerby.

“You’ve reached him, where I and the rest of my staff have previously been unable,” Xavier said, with mixed gratitude and sadness.

“He’s been roughed up enough to think that anything that sounds good or idealistic is either a scam or stupidity. He needed to hear the blunt, realist take on it, from someone else who sees things in a slightly more predatory fashion. I just let him get the idea of what kind of sharks he’d be swimming with if he went too much further down the same paths I’ve tread, and I told him in a way that would resonate in his mind, which is a few shades darker than you and your staff are really comfortable with getting into. That’s part of why I want to join your team: I’ve been in all those dark places, and I’ve survived them, and I can keep other people from going in there and either dying or turning into the kind of twisted monster that I used to be.” For a moment all the years of her lives and the lives of her ghosts showed in her eyes and her expression. “And I can do what needs to be done to keep you all alive.”

Xavier’s eyes lowered, and he appeared very deep in thought. “Yes. I am well aware that your contributions so far have prevented a large number of the children at this school from being taken into the lab of William Stryker.” He looked into her eyes, open and sincere. “I thank you for that, Rogue.” He almost hesitated, just for half a second. “And also for what you did for Logan.”

Rogue’s impeccable poker face returned en force. “You don’t have to thank me for that. It wasn’t for you or your team,” she said quietly. At his questioning look, she added, “We’re the same kind of creature, he and I.”

Xavier nodded. “Logan currently teaches self-defense and survival courses here. He also helps Hank design and implement lessons, drills, and scenarios through our simulation programs for the younger prospective members of the X-men team. He has been rather overburdened, I admit. Would you be interested in taking up the same kind of work?”

Rogue’s eyebrows raised a little. “Simulation programs? Sounds ominous, X.”

Xavier smiled, almost conspiratorially. “I rather think you will like it when you see it.”

Rogue was sincerely curious now. “I’m interested, certainly. I can also offer my services as an all-purpose shredder.” She waved about one hand in the air lazily, her fingers curled to resemble claws.

“Something else you share with Logan,” he murmured, eyeing her fingertips. “You work well with him.” The way he said it suggested a great deal.

Rogue’s smile quirked a little, and for a moment Xavier could almost read a hint of softness in her expression. “Like I said before...”

“You are of like kind, yes,” Xavier finished for her, still smiling. He nodded, once, respectfully. “You are very welcome to stay here, Rogue.”

She nodded back, her smile a little more solemn. “Thank you...Charles.”

Xavier tilted his head slightly to one side, curious as to what she meant by the use of his first name, knowing the importance that she usually attributed to her own three names. In this case, he was quite sure that it was gratitude. “And thank you, again, for what you’ve already done for us.”

Rogue got to her feet and straightened her gloves. “I just do what I have to do, to be who I am and to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day. If I can make a profession of it here, all the better.” She saluted him briefly. “Thanks for the opportunity.”

Xavier watched her leave, feeling a mixture of moral anxiety and amusement, which he could only hope boded well; it had been so with Logan.