To Run In Circles

Chapter One

The tip of Logan's cigar bobbed, danced, to avoid the falling moisture that wished to turn its avid glow dark. The smoke mingled strangely with the rain, like a concentrated fog or the shadow of a phantom, haunting the twined leaves of what was clenched between his teeth. He stood beneath the awning--if it could be called such, an inch or two of stone and even less cloth was decoration, not shelter--of one of the more humble entrances to the mansion. Tobacco-laced air swirled down his throat to lungs made strong from years of pushing against his unique bones, found the space not to their liking, and rushed back out to rejoin the night.

He liked the rain, though the predator in him was considering the cold and the unrelenting Wet--which heightens some scents, and hopelessly blurrs others--with a wrinkled nose and a stiff jaw. He liked having his back against the mansion, against the noise and the collective body heat, liked the dusty stagnation of even this well-groomed Outside being washed away. Liked inhaling the evidence of this cleansing, although these days the water was laden with chemicals stolen from the atmosphere, hidden in each drop like candy in an expert shoplifter's pocket. Later he would have to take a shower, remove the starch-like feeling this pollution leaves on his skin, though now he was enjoying the flow that requires clouds rather than pipes.

Logan watched a caramel membrane of water form over the cobblestone, a glaze to what had been dry and sun-worn. The yard was empty of any movement besides those colossal teardrops and the lazy twists of a glass wind-chime. There was a sundial in the center of the courtyard, a proud project of last year's shop class, and his gaze returned to it again and again though its face was uselessly dark and weeping now. He closed his eyes, felt his chest rub against the inner weave of his shirt--the one Jean called revoltingly tacky but which had been clenched in the fists of a more appreciative woman just a week ago...who had screamed in a completely different way an hour later, spotting the key-chain bearing the Xmen insignia as it tumbled out of his pocket.
He was a few beers past what even the Wolverine would consider a limit--not itching for a fuck or a fight, as he normally would be, but bored. Tired. Despondent, like those men he'd always scorned in bars for not hiding their misery. His thoughts swirled, dry leaves in a wind too languid to carry them more than a drunkards step away. No purpose, no destination, shifting in noncommittal spurts only when the mood hits them. Sensations, fractions of ideas and recollections not unsimiliar to the mosaic of dreams.

Lightning struck to the north, less than a mile away. He heard the sizzle and hum, like a T.V's poor reception. Logan wondered idly if the storm was of Ororo's conjuring, to save her beds of flowers among other effects of the recent drought--but no. No. Of course not. It took him less time than usual to remember that Ororo was gone, that she has been for for a long time now. Strange, how long it was taking him to grow accustomed to that fact. Voices in the building behind him, some hushed but most high and chattering--children find ways to be hyper in any situation. A dog barking incessantly from the house down the road, a screech of some animal whose predator had been unfortunately untroubled by the rain. Vehicles, dozens, scores, each boasting a different radio station or phone call or argument between passengers.

But though Logan tried to let the rain drum this discordant symphony into the background, there was something--something that caused the nerves tied to his ears to perk up, hone their focus in on one instrument of the chorus. An engine broke free of the cluster, made its way past the distant neighbors, past the point that meant its goal was Somewhere Else. On to Xavier's land, down the picturesque lane with its fragile and too-generic beauty. The tires found the entrance, crawled up the gravel with the growl of a exhausted and slightly hoarse beast.

He tracked it without moving from his position, listened with less curiosity than instinct. Few visited the mansion anymore, though in the past benefactors and guests could be counted on to appear every week in well-fed and smiling skin, tailored suits. Now those who arrive were desperate, runaways or parents hoping to divest themselves of a child exhibiting traits that would turn them from pillars to outlaws of a community...Or else, more representatives of a government whose obliviousness and toleration toward the school had long been shed. He doubted this car was of the latter category, smelling too much of rust and not enough of arrogance, but you never knew.

It did not pull into the garage, but followed the same path that delivery vans took--tomorrow Jean would complain about the tire treads in the grass. It drew around the side. His side, in fact, a good choice for those familiar with the layout of the building and relying on a quick escape. And if he were to take a few steps, cross the courtyard to that stone arch, he could see...

Maroon paint, dark like partially dried blood. A Camero with more dents than not, a drained and crumpled tin can. Strips of cardboard and tin foil taped over the holes in the back window, thin tires that sat an inch deep in mud the consistency of saliva, greasy and threadbare. Its driver was an abstract and sullen shadow that remained behind the wheel for a long time, long enough for Logan and the sea and the whole world to take several deep breaths. Then a creak, a protesting scream of metal as the door swung open, and the shadow climbed out.

The figure draped in dark greens and black moved slowly, as the old or injured do. Headless of the downpour, or seeming to be. A jacket of thick wool covered most of her, though it lacked a hood and her locks--streaked white through yet another fashion beyond his comprehension or patience--were soaked within moments. Slim, young, and Logan admired the wholesome curve of her breasts beneath that jacket as well as other pleasing features even as he clocks, measures, and categorizes those that might prove vulnerable or threatening in a fight (thought there appeared to be few of the latter). She walked to the tail of the Camaro, removed from the back seat a duffel bag and from the trunk a second(or even third, fourth)hand suitcase. The easy lift and maneuvering of these suggested that the action had been performed many times before.

The oppressive sky, hanging like a circus tent about to collapse, a child's fort who's supporting chairs are about to tip over; the dim and deceitful light; their inexplicable aloneness and something single-minded in her movements suggested a certain surreality. This wasn't real; they weren't real--their surroundings were nothing but a stage and theater props. Nothing had existed before this moment, and it was possible nothing would after. He felt suddenly and violently nauseous, and swallowed the sensation away.

Still, he watched her drag the suitcase through the slush, listened to her socks squelch within old and certainly not waterproof boots. A creature with the huddled dignity of a refugee or a prisoner, being herded into their respective camps. Making his judgments, assumptions, as those who have been trained to rely on first impressions for convenience and survival do. Yes, definitely another runaway. Another stomach to growl behind the already bursting-at-the-seams walls, splitting all the amenities once so happily and freely provided.

But when she finally glanced up, finally noticed him in the arch as minor heroines or token victims in crime dramas spot, belatedly and fatally, the mugger, the rapist, the murderer, in the alley. She stared, her neck straightening in that perfect, horrible, awareness--a look that was the same no matter what species the Hunted belonged to. It was not until later that Logan would think about this moment, in one of his memory's many renditions, and realize that despite her expression, despite the swift addition of fear to her scent, her stride never so much as faltered. A small, meaningful detail forgivably overshadowed by the sudden visibility of her face.

She was both young and older than he'd expected. In her early twenties, with full lips and an oval, yet starved face...though she couldn't have been completely destitute, for those ivory streaks completely coated the roots of her hair--the dye job must have been recent. A long neck, a complexion that matched the tint of the moon. Breasts that were even more satisfying viewed frontally than in profile. Wide, nice eyes that shifted from alarm to intentional detachment.

He moved--not enough to entirely block her path, but enough to deter any thought of passing him.

"'Scuse me." Her voice was thick with weariness and The South. And there was a fragrance, wavering on the edge of identification, behind those naturally feminine aromas and skin that yearned for soap--but it danced out of his focus.

"You a mutant?"

"What do you think?", she asked, in a tone both flat and over-prepared for confrontation, throwing with all of her force a ball he had merely rolled to her.

"What's your power?"

"Telekinetic castration. What's yours?" He blinked. The lack of amusement or irony in her expression might have sold him, if her scent had been equally free of a lie. Logan grunted.

"Anyone expecting you?"

"Yes." Impatient now, more irritated than fear should allow and her clothes were starting to resemble blankets pulled too soon from a washing machine. But these were standard questions put to every newcomer; this was not a motel and he was not the polite clerk in the lobby--and entertainment was in limited and often repetitive supply these days.

Logan jerked his head in the vague direction of her luggage, or perhaps her breasts. "You got somewhere to put those?"

"Yes."

He raised an eyebrow, looked at her coolly and lengthily, as she began to shiver and acquire a strange hardness at the same time, like some molten core was loosing its heat and solidifying. "Want me to take you to The Professor? Let him know you're here?"

The coldness that had nothing to do with the weather slipped away from her expression as quickly at it had come, wispy strip of fabric that had grazed, briefly and insufficiently, on the barken fingertips of some tree before the wind carried it away. Her gaze fell to some place not visible to any eyes but her's.

She sighed. "He knows I'm here."

A nod to his right, another "Excuse me", and this time Logan stepped aside. Her elbow, her shoulder--a slender thing beneath the sopping coat--brushed his chest as she passed, and the scent he'd been struggling to name offered itself to him with sudden submission. It was certainly not an unfamiliar mixture; he couldn't understand why his nose had found it so foreign--or appealing. A little marijuana, a few tears, and a great deal of hopelessness...And beneath those, so subtle it was overlooked in his triumph of recognizing the others, a fraction of something that in his long and mostly unrecollected years had never touched his airways.





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To Run In Circles:

Chapter Two


Scott waited until the end of the meeting to introduce her. The proposals of new and old congressmen regarding mutants; a group of FOH supporters for sure and members possibly, and a Cajun who might-or-might-not be willing to share intel; an internet-promoted drug that promised to eliminate the X-gene still popular though it had been linked to seventy-six miscarriages.

All the while, the refracted scarlet of Summer's much-beloved laser pointer danced in sweeps across the brunette's quietly, and morosely, attentive face. Their eyes had met once, and not again, though Logan's had found their way to her in visual circuits of the room that seemed to have no other stopping place. Part boredom--Scott's briefings were so depressingly similar (Logan frequently accused him of recycling notes) they could not help but evoke the impatient emotion--part mildly lecherous curiosity, and in part an irritation he could neither understand nor defend. Who was she?

"--and we welcome to the team Rogue, who will be serving in a non-fighting, secondary capacity on missions," Scott concluded shortly, taking this on to, with the same breath and voice, the (shrinking) list of hospitals who continued to accept mutants. "Nice to have you with us again."

She nodded in courteous acknowledgment of this but did not look up. Scott packed away his things, offered some unheard and unrequited words of dismissal, and accompanied Jean out of the conference room--to teach, to eat, or perhaps (since this was Friday) to head upstairs for whatever dry, missionary fumblings they considered sex, while Logan's brain was still busy turning over that word, 'again'.

Although she, Rogue, had risen from her chair no quicker than he, in a matter of seconds she had placed between them more people and space than, Logan told himself, he was willing to cover, though his nose flared and his legs gave starchy resistance against any direction but her's. He watched her disappear up a staircase, listened to her unseen progress while staring at the last place a corner of her leg had been visible--for much longer than he could offer reason.

She's looked and certainly, inexpressibly, smelled better than she had last night after washing both herself and her clothes. Rogue's hair (full, brushed to a clean glossiness) had been pulled into a sharp ponytail, displaying the full pallor of the solemn features beneath and the shadow of twin moons cradling her eyes. She'd worn a maroon blouse with tan cargo pants that, intentionally or incidentally, matched the paint and decor of the mansion. If it had been an attempt to blend in, it had been a gross failure; she stood out as much as the scent--now burnished and intensified with her cleansed body--that still eluded identification.


::::::::::::::


He learned later that Rogue (a title he only grudgingly used and just as unwillingly refrained from mocking. These days all the residents possessed one of the preposterous nicknames--though the protection afforded by these offered little protection from a government that had begun making hating and hunting them a top priority) had been given Ororo's old room. It was tactically not mentioned at the meeting, though space was in short supply and all had been wondering what nook she would be crammed into. Occupancy was another thing the officials were keeping an eye on: one student, one extended guest, one pitied stray kitten over capacity would have the much-coveted excuse to shut the school down. And every runaway accepted meant one more they would soon have to turn away.

Still, the sanctity of the attic room where no one had tread but the weather witch possessed by anyone she, struck a special, dumbfounded pain in each of the resident's souls. A silent emotion, however, because none wished to be the one to give it voice.

And Logan, a close friend of death but not half so familiar with its sibling grief, wondered bemusedly if four months was the traditional point when the dead were replaced and forgotten.

:::::::::::::::::


Approximately three minutes and twenty seconds after leaving the jet hangar (it might have been three flat, if not for the infuriatingly fixed paced of the elevator), Logan was in the kitchen. His right hand was slightly curled, mentally already gripping the chilled glass, a ghost that preceded that wonderfully bitter drink already courting his throat. His course--not so much a beeline but an arrow, the trajectory of a bullet--was impeded. Stupidly, dangerously, unintentionally.

A plate (whose thousands of scratches at the forks and knifes of as many students were beginning to show, even to those without Logan's vision--war wounds of the tableware) sat on the island, crowned with a sandwich that seemed to contain every odorous topping possible. The refrigerator door was tauntingly opened, a tendril of its cold and his beer's scent stroking his cheek like a familiar lover. And standing within its one-armed embrace, directly blocking his goal, was a head of hair whose white streaks spilled from behind the crescent of her ears. A triangle of visible neck, a languid ridge of a curving spine. A line of flesh where her shirt had tugged up and a humble wink of her underwear's elastic band, all culminating in double mounds designed by some generous deity to fill another's hands.

Logan drew closer--though whether the aforementioned or alcohol was his magnet is unclear. Slow, quiet steps, a predator's helplessly instinctual glide.

Over the incline of Rogue' shoulder he glimpsed a hand skimming over the items in the fridge's steel racks and stretching--oh god, just one step closer and he could--toward the sloping necks of a bottle who's label read, 'Molson'.

"Those are mine."

She shrugged her indifference. Her fingers changed their route smoothly, closed around a container of pomegranate juice whose shape abstractly and far too closely resembled female curves for Logan's comfort. Rogue straightened, gave him an inscrutable look she had to her head up to deliver--he'd taken that step closer, but her heart had only offered a few beats that may have been considered out of time. Then she slid past him and, though he expected her to take her edible loot upstairs, as she'd been doing all week, took a seat at the marble island. The scrape of the plate pulled across its surface was much too loud in the otherwise silent room.

Logan picked a beer from the collection within the sterile cold. He glanced at her, thought simultaneously of how long it had been--almost two weeks, and "What the hell", and chose a second bottle. The rubber of his boot closed the metal door, their attached legs crossed the floor in two strides. He set the golden drought in front of her, set himself on the stool opposite. Her plumb lips narrowed, but she accepted the former offering unhesitatingly. The thumb of her right hand removed the cap with practiced ease.

"You didn't go tonight." His own lid came off with a wet plop.

"You're right," Rogue agreed, ignoring the question in his questionless statement. "I didn't." She brought her strongly-scented sandwich to mouth. She took big bites, for such a little person. His eyebrow took an escalated position.

A moment, and a silence he expected her to hold. Scott had looked at him with blank disinterest when Logan had asked where the new kid was, before the X-jet rose and took off for another bloody attempt to help a thankless world. He stared at her chin, round as a budding peach, down her neck to the triangular hollow. The rim of her shirt, the fleshy, pebbled hills draped in two layers of clothing more than necessary. To the edge of the counter, where her body disappointingly became hidden.

"I wasn't needed," she said suddenly, and something in her voice was responding both to his inquiry and one no one else could hear.

"Forty-nine members of that crazy fucking gun cult. I think we could have found something for you to do." At least the kid could have mopped up the aftermath.

"I'm noncombat."

"Nobody's noncombatant."

"And yet, I am. Such a paradox."


Logan looked her up and down, an enjoyable activity. He smirked reflexively, but the words his mouth framed were not the ones his expression suggested. "Need some training?"

Her sandwich was gone, though he couldn't remember seeing her take any more bites--only the pink play of her knuckles, the occasional glimpse of the blue 'Y' within her wrist, a sliver of white teeth. How long had it taken them, to exchange so few words?

"Who said I couldn't fight?" Rogue cocked her head at him, stood calmly. She put the plate in the sink, left him and it--though she took the rest of her beer upstairs with her.

Logan had hardly touched his.

:::::::::::::::::


She was only a mild curiosity, a low-powered blip on his radar. Those half-encounters and thoughts depicted here are meaningful only when the majority of daily interactions are cut away. Whole days would pass where Rogue would not cross his path and barely his mind, though they lived in unimaginably close quarters for a so-called mansion.

A faint interest, a habitual twitch in his groin, a possible vessel in which he might siphon a fraction of his restlessness. The amount of viable distractions shrank by the day--Logan could not risk becoming too much a regular in the local bars, and could not afford to be far from the mansion for fear of who or what might descend in his absence. Only so many fights could be provoked and exacerbated outside gas stations and cigar shops, and only so many women picked up in grocery stores, parking lots or mildly populated strip malls before he was in danger of being recognized--not least by two of the jealous latter category. And the stock of in-house female diversions had run dry, leaving only the irritatingly young and the pedophilic young, neither of which he was yet desperate enough to proposition.

She was not a crush, not an obsession--though he found himself collecting facts about her like slightly-valuable stamps, coins...She knew where all the silverware was kept. She waved to the only gardener who'd not resigned, and his responding grin had not been that of a stranger's. Two others had used the word 'again' in welcoming her. No one that he heard had offered her a tour. She liked to run in the border between afternoon and evening, but wore long sleeves and old jeans during even this sweaty activity--a cutter? a junkie? Rogue favored the public road beyond the mansion gates for her jogs, and ignored his growling reprimands that it was too dangerous until he began to accompany her on the secluded route--after which hers became the domesticated paths of the mansion's grounds.

She liked eating in her room, or outside--seeming to best prefer the shade of dogwood trees. She smiled at the students, willingly assisted with whatever chores the mansion presented, but rarely shared her presence otherwise. His eyes were not the only ones that followed Rogue--one of his gathered facts that both encouraged and inexplicably infuriated him, and he always seemed to catch the tail end of a discussion, story, a compliment or warning referencing her. And furtive or confused--feigned or real--expressions when he investigated these awoke an instinct that this secrecy and his bafflement was not incidental.

And sometimes she wore gloves--elbow length or more, a strange accessory for one whose attire was usually so plain. Those were the days she spent hours in Xavier's office, and left with a paleness to rival her own usual pallor and that of the dead.

A slight, half-interest, and nothing more.

She wasn't.

She wasn't.


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He entered the darkened room just as Rogue was sitting down. A glass of water on the couch-side table, a bag of Oreos in her lap (though purchased with what money, Logan had not a clue. She had not done any work for the team, and Xavier could no longer afford allowances or snacks). An exasperated glance when he stepped in and then a cool one--and her thoughts were as clear as if she'd laid them out on a table to dissect. One look, and he could see her weighing whatever had driven her to the entertainment in the middle of the night against his power to drive her out. Logan grunted, bridled at the unspoken insult. He did not know what Rogue had against him (she normally fled too soon for more than the bare minimum of flirting--he'd barely even touched her breasts those last two times), why the sharp edge of her being was always turned toward him or why it frustrated him less than it should.

"Trouble sleeping?" The sweat, which may as well have been the water from that monstrous tank of the lab and his nightmares, was cooling on his own back.

"Mm-hmmm." She fiddled with the remote, giving it much more attention than it deserved, pressed the red POWER button, and with a burp of static the dark screen was overtaken by a wash of color and movement. Logan sat down on the couch, the farthest end, too much unbroken sinew tying him to the dream to tempt himself or her back to bed, no matter which activity would take place beneath its covers. (He did not, however, choose one of the many and more platonic armchairs, lest his lower half decide to perk up).

He watched the profile of Rogue to his right, her features both soft and sharp--befitting the popular silhouette on an antique broach. Anyone else would have been apologizing by now, in tears or in whimpers, at the very least stuttering as they passed him the remote control (the residents had not been spared from the consequences of his boredom). But Rogue did not so much as glance at him, and Logan found his lips still pressed together, the complaint comfortable in his throat and showing no sign of leaving even as she flicked through channels he would normally only submit to under the heaviest of restraint.

A Lifetime movie; an ancient sitcom whose laugh track never varied; a documentary on Marie Antoinette; a Sex and the City repeat (she changed that one quickly, thankfully, otherwise his patience and his half-hearted disinclination towards hitting women may have vanished); a Law and Order rerun. If she was searching for something in particular, she didn't find it. Soon the selection of channels dwindled to low budget science fiction, a handful of sports programs he urged her toward as if he had the telepathic will of Xavier, paid programing and the nightly news.

A chubby man covered in wrinkles and salt-and-pepper hair, interviewing a woman over an orange table. A running caption across the bottom of the screen summarizing pieces of someone's anguish--an infant beaten to death by a woman's frustrated lover; and outbreak of fires in Tennessee that had swallowed thirteen homes; a popular church taken in the wave of a car bomb--Homeland Security investigating.

"--so you do not feel that Brown vs Board of Educations applies anymore?"

"Of course I do. I'm not a racist. But only to humans, a class to whom these mutants, by definition, do not belong."

Rogue's thumb came down on a button with an up arrow. The pair on the screen were replaced by a woman with a pug face and yellow hair, sprayed into gravity-defying heights. She spoke directly to the camera, as if it were a misbehaving and unforgivable child. "...They run rampant in our society, doing as they please as if their so-called 'gifts' exempt them from the law. If we--"

"....with the deficit at a historical peak, currently the sole opposing argument against the act seems to concern the money registering every mutant in the country would require--"

"...Why should they be hiding? If they mean us no harm, why would they not assent to an national register? The crimes committed by the guilty can be linked to their respective mutants without unjustly persecuting them all--"

"When will something be done? My wife is afraid to send our children to school, in case there's one of them in the classroom as well. Who knows what one of those monster--"

"'Scientists'--and I use that title liberally--claim mutancy is as hereditary as handedness. Why, then, do you suppose that people my become ambidextrous, but these individuals cannot exhibit the same control over their genetic abnormalities?"

"--more on the mutant activists linked to Al Qaida when we return to FOX--"

Rogue sighed, and in the exhale was the sound of the entire world turning to dust. She played with the lid to the remote's batter casing--opening it, closing it, opening it, closing it. She huffed, changed the channel a few more times, chewed on her lower lip. And though Logan was sure Rogue hadn't pressed any of the volume buttons, the noise of the television faded to half a murmur.

Her mouth looked very pink. And very soft.

"Do you like football?", she asked him.









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To Run In Circles:
Chapter Three

If Ororo had been there, they could have relied on her to darken the night, like spilling ink over penciled script. The jet would have been cloaked in fog, wrapped as one bundles an infant. They settled for an ambiguous midnight and a grove of generous pine trees. Risky, still, but they hoped the authorities would arrive long after the thrum of the jet's engine faded in the air.

The metallic bird did not strike, but grazed the yard's downy grass with the expertise of its namesake settling on a telephone wire. Scott was a much better pilot these days. Logan couldn't quite recall when this change had come to be.

Jean pulled her hair into a ponytail; the curls sprang from the band like the flame from a rocket's tail. She rechecked the laces on her boots, twice. Her lips were tight, eyes dark, and when her husband brushed her hand in reassurance she snatched it away. When it came to separating one's emotions from the necessary mind-frame of battle, Jean was cold in a way even Logan envied. The other, moderately newer team members feigned bravery with tight chins and stoic silence, or overly nonchalant jokes. The faint, hairless wobble of the first and the absence of laughter at the second betrayed both

But as Scott went over the strategy a final, exasperatingly needless time, Logan was staring at her. At Rogue. Not that invisible, untraveled distance his eyes usually fixed upon--the place of darkness that the animal in him sought like a spark yearning for its mother flame. She distracted him, distracted the monster from its violent meditation.

She'd never gone with them before.

He heard Summers say that Rogue would not deboard, that she would remain until "after". Logan did not pause, did not stop to wonder at the fact that all of Scott's obsessive, anal attention to detail and the sum of his instructions to her was "after". He heard, but it was still a shock to see the legs of the team descending the metal steps while hers remained firmly planted.

He stood, cracked his neck, glared at her long enough for Jean to screech for his immediate haste. She seemed relaxed, sitting not on the edge of the chair but deep into the stiff cushion of its back. Guns awaited those under even her delicate age just down those steps, and she continued to sit there, calmly. Breathe, calmly. Stare back at him, calmly--and if those level eyes were wet, they were tears enthusiastically overlooked.

"Noncombat," she said, in a voice that tried to be loud and steady but failed at both.

He grunted, or growled, or both, and turned sharply away. What did she have to smell so frightened about?

:::::::::

A bloodbath. A bloodshower, sideways because there were few taller than Logan. Flesh his soap, cartilage his sponge. Scalps, misshapen and fuzzy rugs. He licked the liquid copper from his lips again and again. This was a good one. Fourteen--no, fifteen, there's one hiding behind that table--bodies, or what used to be, meshed together like a particularly thick soup.
Though part of him--the part that screamed in the night while the other popped its claws, that tried to drink itself into oblivion while its brother self never stopped seeking the enemy--was saying enough; it was too much, too much; he was getting carried monstrously away, the animal was rejoicing. Able to release some of the energy kept chained for so long, too long.

He'd been given the main halls, the front of the building. A colossal distraction, his presence absorbing the focus and resistance these...Strange, Logan couldn't quite recall who it was they were attacking. The rest of the team had split upon entry, scurried down obscure side passages to converge at some point he remembered as little as he was interested. He'd been told the objectives of the mission, of course. Repeatedly. All the details of why this carnage was necessary and what catastrophe it would avert had been discussed in briefings, in lectures both official and not, in breathless tones over quick dinners.

But the vapor of death could blur the mind as much as the eyes. These looked like FOH, he thought, or had before their recognizable features had been so thoroughly removed, but what did he know? What did it matter? Does a bullet hesitate once it's aimed and launched from the gun, because of the name of its target? Even catastrophe becomes dull with repetition.

Logan breathed in the fumes of what he had done, watched particles only he could see swirl, a dance just for him. His heart was pounding, a furious, fleshy beast, the determined engine of a ship in turbulent water. He drew his forearm across a weather-beaten, a time-beaten, a pain-beaten face, but as both were equally filthy the action did little good. He told himself it didn't matter what he could and could not remember. The blood would be the same.

::::::::

She was brought in after a tidal wave of voices on the COMs had swept over the static ocean. After most of the team had spilled from the branching corridors to the base of the trunk, clutching boxes and folders with coded tabs like prizes from an exceptionally boring carnival. After Scott had pushed--with more care than he might have were the animal more dampened in the other man's eyes--a stack of the former at Logan. After the so-called leader muttered, 'come on', glanced with a sharp eye toward his wife but a deliberately glassy one to everything under his boot.

Jean's back--partially hidden by the ringlets that had escaped their band--moved out the door, but she was back before they reached it themselves. The files that had been cradled in her arms more attentively than any child had, supposedly, been left on the Blackbird, but she's substituted them with Rogue. Like an unwilling shadow, like a child helplessly following a stranger in the woods, like a calf following its kin into the butchery, she trailed after Jean.

She was a bizarre vision in this atmosphere, and something in him stumbled as if it had misjudged a step on a unforgiving staircase. He'd been angry at the idea of her thinking she could be spared from fighting when no one was, anymore. But now the sight of her scratched at him. She shouldn't be...she shouldn't....

Logan's gaze touched the 'V' between her eyebrows, the hands clasped at her waist like a schoolgirl or an inmate. The contracting in her neck as she swallowed, again and again. The too-pinched fabric at her breasts and the too-loose fabric at her hips--who had the uniform originally belonged to? The glossy leather in the crease behind her knee. And the gaze might as well have been the brush of fingers. Rogue looked at him as they passed, and in her face was the kind of plea men fall over their own blades to answer. A sentimental cliche, but Logan found his foot moving forward obligingly. Unexamined instincts sparking to so direct a look, like the sighting of a rescue boat to the drowned--though for which of the two this analogy applied is unclear.

But then her eyes fell to his wrist, to a surprisingly large clump of someone's hair that had snagged on a button, to an arm limp and owner-less on the floor. Its fingers still clutched the gun it had weilded so earnestly half an hour ago. And that expression turned to one that struck the animal like a stone, required it to clamp down on the restraints of that so distant and buried man--a strange and rare reversal of roles.

Rogue blinked, her lashes bearing too much unhappy moisture to uphold. A tremor ran across her shoulders like the most concentrated of winds; she followed Jean down one of the thin halls without another glance toward Logan or anything else.

"Let's go, Wolverine. Time to reboard."

"What is she doing?"

"Her job," Scott told him, curtly. But as that had never and would never be an acceptable answer to give the Wolverine, he amended, "Helping us gather intel. It's what she's here for."


:::::::::

Her eyes were bloodshot, like the most devoted of students or alcoholics. So pale that when her teeth dug into the bottom lip--nervously, or convulsively--only the faintest pink appeared before the white returned. Logan wondered absently where all the blood went when it was so fearfully drained from a girl's face.

They had been loading the files onto the jet, shoving them into a metal cabinet that had always reminded him of a bread oven. His palm left a smear of browning red on the steel, and this may have been connected to the violent hitchings of some of the less deadened team member's stomachs.

Normally this time would be of utmost importance. Normally the air would be thrust from his lungs with barely enough a pause to let any in. Normally he would hardly be in a state of mind to help the team with such menial tasks, to do anything but sit in a corner and restrain himself from popping his claws at the people an ignorant person would call his friends. Normally every gram, every liter, every inch--whatever it was measured in--of willpower would be called on. To get himself under control or at least under one well faked; to move and speak as if every instinct awoken were not the bloody ones of animals; to convince himself that sharp saliva was not welling among his gums and that his darker urges has been sated. Normally all surroundings and post-mission events would turn foggy and pale in comparison to these tasks. Normally, but this time....

When he caught sight of her, the team was dutifully strapping themselves into their seats and Scott was manipulating the buttons laid before the pilots seat like a special feast, pressing the Bird into life. Jean must have sent him a signal to do so, she was the one person Scott would never even prepare to leave without--but not one of the COMs spoke.

They came stumbling across the grass--or rather, one of them did. Rogue tripped and weaved like a ten year old unused to the more dizzying of amusement rides, a civilian in a war-zone who's just watched an ivory explosion turn his home into dust, brick crumbs. Her hair--though it had been cold inside the building--had become sweaty, plastered to her face like overboiled noodles. Jean hovered behind her, asking worried questions, hands fluttering in the region of her arm, her waist without actually coming to land. As if the strength of her desire to help were equal to actual aid.

Neither of the women carried a box, or a file of documents.







.

To Run In Circles:

Chapter Four


"Sit down, Wolverine," Scott told him irritably, a parent at the end of his rope with a misbehaving child. "Sit down. We're about to--"

He was down the Blackbird steps in a few pumps of his legs and his heart. The grass was almost blue in the tint of night, scratching against and under his boot like the bristles of an antique brush--it would be hours yet before the dew of morning softened them. Over the modest field, relatively quiet in the hush that claims even the voices of insects in the aftermath of battle. The earth stunned into silence, shocked by a brutality you'd think it would be used to by now. To her, soaked in both sweat and distress. To her, the soldier whose brain continues to send the signals to walk but forget to inform its host that it has been shot. To her, and to Jean, following as dedicated and useless as a shadow.

Her face, first white and oddly blurry even after Logan blinked, was a palette on which jars and tubes of paint had broken, and smeared indiscriminately--its artist renouncing his craft in a furious tantrum. There was lethargy, befitting the very drugged or already sleeping more than this miraculously upright creature. There was pain, though he could not spot the source, and Logan told himself that the flurry of bitter sparks in his chest was simple frustration at this. There was a sudden wash of anger and fear--of a tint very different from the sort that usually colored her features. For a moment, for that moment when Rogue raised bleary eyes to his, he thought she....it seemed like she was someone else entirely. Even her scent rippled differently in the air, his airways, but no. No. A trick of his senses, perhaps, though they had never been one for pranks before.
When the next hue to distinguish itself on the palette was that despairing plea, that hybrid between the gasping hope and anguish of the drowning, the previous impression was forgotten.

"Logan, what do you think you're doing?"

"What happened? What happened to her?"

"Noth--it's okay. It's under control."

"What's under control?"

"Go back to the jet, Logan."

He snarled at Jean, his arms already moving, reaching to catch the younger woman though she was still yards out of range. Her ankles bent outward with every step, left slender dents in the parched dirt and threatened to snap from the pressure of their underpaid job. A softening around her eyes, now focused, now not--did they turn blue for a instant? Logan expected her to fall against him, into him, with the ease and the sharp relief of a puzzle piece finally submitting to its designated niche, its soft cardboard offering no resistance.
Nothing sexual about the gesture, and if there was that meaning was assigned later. At once he was responding with the instinct of a well-trained soldier spotting something that must but hasn't been done. He would have asked her, Kid, what's wrong? You're alright, Kid, its going to be okay. Over and over, like the chorus of a particularly repetitious song, carrying her to the jet and whatever medical care she required. Whether this action, these words, would have been implemented with more fervor than they might have been with another injured member of the team can never be known. The moment she could have stood in the breath of his half-cupped hands, the static of his leather uniform, Rogue twisted away. Spun, lurched, out of his grasp with the grace of the drunk, the feverish, the insane.

"Don't touch me," her chapped lips spat. "Don't you fucking touch me." Hate twisting her features, swirling them like poisonous ice-cream. Hate all the more scorching for being undeserved but, as ever with that emotion, cradling a well of fear like an infant--a liability that must be held secure at all costs.

He had no time to speak, no time to overrule her protests. Jean was snapping at him, though later he wouldn't be able to recall any of the fanged words specifically. She--shrouded in apprehension herself--urged him to go, shoved at his back ineffectually and unwisely. She put herself between Logan and the girl, the motion and its accompanying gestures appearing to say, "Here, see? I am helping you. I amprotecting you." Still, none of her kindly ushering hands made contact with her charge's teetering spine.
Rogue made an indistinguishable noise of disgust at Jean and her efforts and turned from them both. Her broken march continued to the Blackbird. She never fell, and Logan's assistance was not offered again--both perhaps aided by Jean's telepathy.


:::::::

They must have been given a command from Scott. A subtle one, a reminder of some previously issued order or one given while its subjects were still outside. In any case, the junior team sat silently and almost expressionlessly as Rogue boarded the jet. There was none of the fuss over an injured member of the group, no voiced concern, no questions of what had happened or how it had happened, no offers to assist Jean in whatever emergency treatment might be called for. No off-color and unamusing joke from Allerdyce, "I though we squashed them all. Was one moving without its head?"

Rogue tripped past them, past the rows of free chairs to one at the back. Her lower self turned, and with this the last of her energy sank down some unseen drain. She fell into the seat's embrace as if she had no bones, as clumsy and heart-sickening as watching the elderly shift from wheelchair to bed. Has she misjudged her position in the slightest Rogue would have found herself on the unforgiving steel floor--though this might have made little difference to her. The redheaded doctor glowered when he folded his body into the seat across the aisle from Rogue's, but pinched her lips in restraint.


Ashen, like the dead and embalmed too late into decomposition. Bloodshot eyes and teeth that snagged upon colorless lips every time she shivered. Jean fluttered over her with almost joyous concern. "What should I do? What do you need?" Logan had never heard her employ these words, that tone, and had never imagined that he might.

"No," Rogue said, a mumble with the edge of impatience. For a second it seemed as if she would say something else, but her lips pressed together and did not part again.
Maybe she's fine, he told himself. Kid probably saw a little more blood than she was used to, got queasy. Too much for her delicate stomach.

The thought passed through his awareness with calm rationality--and a moment later he shoved Jean's presence from his mind.

He did not notice when the Blackbird lifted its wings to meet the sky, nor when Jean left for her place beside her husband, or the sidelong glances of those who had not fully left childhood but had been transformed into weapons through necessity. He was watching Rogue's eyes drift shut, and was aware of nothing else.


::::::


He expected she would go straight to her room, understanding--if not fully--by now that there would be no overnight stay in the MedLab for Rogue. Logan shadowed her faltering steps through the hangar, through the mansions imitation hospital, through the hall that had once been immaculate but was now cluttered with all the matter they could not risk leaving where government eyes could too easily stray.
She was a bit steadier now on those trim legs; perhaps the flight had helped her to recharge--or perhaps that was his imagination. In the elevator--which Logan slid into just as its sideways mouth was closing--Rogue squeezed herself into the corner, the perpendicular walls holding her like wings. She pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezed her eyes shut as if attempting to fuse her upper and lower lids together, kneaded her temples with her fingertips and periodically sent him little glares of irritation.

"Are you okay?"

"Peachy keen."

"Tell me what happened back there, Kid."

"You know, maybe you should take a shower. You've got a little blood...everywhere."

"Unless you're inviting yourself, shut the fuck up and answer the question."

"How can I answer if I'm shutting up? Those are not requests one can fulfill simultaneously." He was surprised she managed to get the words out, slurring and speaking at top speed simultaneously, thrumming with false and sickening cheer. Her's was the amusement of a grimace, of giddy insanity, of the breathy inhale before a sob.

"What's wrong with you?", Logan asked, alarmed and faintly repulsed.

Rogue's sneer--pained and unconvincing in the fist place--slipped off, its adhesive quality as weak as a child's glue-stick. He watched her fiddle with the edges of her gloves--strange, he hadn't notice that she'd been wearing them tonight--pulling them up with almost violent insistence.

"There is nothing wrong with me," she told him, and the elevator doors opened.










.

To Run In Circles: Chapter Five


The carpet had just been vacuumed. By one of the students, presumably, working to earn his or her place in the school before they were old enough to do so in blood. Half of the housekeepers had resigned, fearful (rightfully, and belatedly) of being targeted for consorting with mutants. The rest, save two, had been gently (over-gently, with monetary and telepathic encouragement to hold their tongues regarding the mansion) let go.
Rogue's footsteps left prints in the carpet like snow, freshly fallen. It was these Logan secured his gaze to, a horse tethered to the back of a moving wagon, these he studied, though their owner walked only a few feet ahead. His eyes traced their shapes, their ghostly depth, like the tracks of some wounded prey, admiring the special design of a limp. He did so tiredly, almost absently, as if viewing another's craftsmanship--he could not quite decide if the hunter's role belonged to him in the analogy. These shadows did not lead to Rogue's room, the stairs, or even the kitchen, but down a hall that lost its familiarity in the strangeness of her choosing it.

"Where are you going?"

"Leave me alone."

"You're hurt."

"Fuck off."

"Don't always have to be such a bitch, darlin." His voice was not unkind.

Rogue did not reply, but continued on her weaving path to a door free of any markings, save for the scent of chalk, of furniture oil, of hopelessly aging flesh. "I think you need to lay down."

"Bite me," she said.

"Wasn't talking about that kind of lay-down, Kid, but if that's what you're in the mood for..."

She made a sound of irritation, a verbal roll of her eyes, or perhaps a sob, and wrenched at the door to Xavier's office. It swung open with great force, though not enough to allow his own passage. Her head turned, for just a breath of a moment, but she caught herself in time. Perhaps if she hadn't, perhaps if Logan had seen the look on her face, he would not have allowed that panel of oak to swing shut. But he didn't, and it did. An expanse of over-polished wood took her place, like parchment when a crucial paragraph has been erased.

A heartbeat's worth of voices in the office, and then a quiet that filled his ears like sun warmed wax. There was no such thing as silence for a man, for a mutant, like Logan. And though later this fact stung like a fresh burn, his interest was overpowered by a deluge of frustration, like a river giving sudden way to an ocean and he found himself turning, turning away. The thought that none of this was natural or voluntary did not occur to him, and perhaps this was intentional as well.
And he was Logan again, with too little time allotted between the mission and the expected resumption of mansion life. The animal had retreated to the same place it did when, after a frenzy of fighting and fucking and refilling his dring as quickly as he could swallow the last, Logan would accidentally find himself alone with his thoughts.

And he couldn't remember how many men he'd killed tonight.

And Rogue had closed her eyes on the jet as if grateful at the idea that they may never open.

And her footprints had been visible because of the freshly vacuumed carpet. His were visible because of the blood.

And why did he care?

Why did he care?

Why did he care?


::::::::::::

After the mission, after the visit with Xavier, Rogue stayed in her room for four days. She did not appear for food, for team meetings, for laundry or those morning runs around the mansion. Four days is not much, except when one is waiting without distraction or a prescribed endpoint. And there was only so many excuses that could be made to himself or others as to why he needed to ascend the stairs to Ororo's old, to Rogue's new, attic room.

He passed by--though "passed by" is not a phrase that can really be used with the sole chamber on the top floor--her door several times a day, payed tribute to it like the most devout to an icon of faith. As some cross themselves, burn incense and sacrifices, kneel and dance to the morning and setting sun, so Logan listened outside with all the force his senses afforded. She was there, inside, and she was alive; he could hear her heartbeat, could smell every puff of fragrance her body offered when it shifted. No movement, save for natural and involuntary ones, and the soft noises of those who are sleeping.

Jean said she was fine, perfectly stop worrying--did they throw a fit when he chose to avoid their company for a few days, or weeks, or months? She said no, of course not. Yes, she was sure. Quit obsessing. Since when did he become so nosy? Since when was he so interested in the doings of others? Stop it. Leave it alone, Logan. And leave me alone--I have classes to teach.



On the fifth evening, in one of the thin times between the visits to her door, Logan found Rogue in the kitchen. A coffee filter filled with grapes rested on the marble island; she was cutting thick slices of pot roast from its congealed place in the Tupperware bowl. With zest, though not so intense a hunger as one might expect from someone who hadn't eaten in half a week. Two boiled potatoes, speared and deposited with her fork, topped the meat on her plate like bulging eyes. She pushed this into the microwave, tapped a few buttons with familiar ease, slid the remaining leftovers back into the fridge. Both machines humming, grumbling, as they went about their job, issuing faint and artificial cold, faint and artificial heat.

He stood in the doorway, watching the soft bones play beneath the softer skin of her face, watching brown eyes that took in so much more than their subdued movements suggested, watching hands that should never be hidden move without gloves, and if there had been something he'd wanted to say to her, Logan's lips could not remember it. Rogue looked up at him, a slow and almost lazy sweep of her vision, down, away, and back again. And the expression she donned in the action was much calmer than anything he'd seen her wear. There was something different about her, something younger and peaceful--the absence, perhaps of the tired shadows beneath her eyes which healthier skin had cheerfully taken the place of.

The microwave sounded a series of beeps, a child's cries for attention on a task completed. She turned away, gathered her meal. Walked past him silently, with only one more glance that said something that cannot be recorded, because it does have a voice. Something that had the ring of thank you and the breath of curiosity. And how could he say just how that look, that look, served to deepen his interest, like a spear sinking further into its warm-blooded target.

:::::

Rogue was someone else, for a week after that evening. Someone quiet, someone breaking the surface of the depths that separated the world inside her from the world that surrounded. (And why, why? What was spoken, what was done, in the space that the unforthcoming walls of Xavier's office shielded? What was it that made her moods shift like the golden pendulum of a grandfather clock?) She ate with the team in the busy cafeteria, offered to halve and share whatever dessert or favored provision she'd managed to snag the last of. She'd accept advice, if the weather wasn't too poor for running, a bottle of water if it wasn't. She would abandon her work-out in the Danger Room when Logan and whatever students he'd been coerced into training came in, but sometimes stay, sit against the wall, and watch. Rogue would look at him when Logan asked her a question and sometimes, sometimes, she would answer.

But then, like the sudden thrashing of a candle's flame, her sleeping patterns became erratic, wholly and sharply incalculable. She'd be up, consuming days in a gulp of wakefulness, then retreating to her room for a few minutes or hours worth of a nap at a time, then for thirty minutes every other hour. She would take her lunch at three in the morning, at midnight, at nine. Impossible to predict, impossible to hold her company.

Like you, Jean said.

And her eyes turned cold and shuttered, blockaded like a fort under heavy fire. She looked at him like an unwanted visitor who'd overstayed his forced welcome, like any moment, any word, any action, would spark a fury whose only language was screams. Every sentence that passed her teeth was clipped, irritated, barbed. Why?

Why?

But sometimes, oh, sometimes, Rogue would come and sit beside him, watch a movie, a game, a newsreel. Silent and passive, without the tension or inexplicable anger that so often corded the muscles in her shoulders.

As if there were nothing wrong.


::::::::::::



Like all decent bars, this one was dark, with a tint of maroon that painted the air, rather than any similarly toned furnishings. A jukebox manufactured to look older than it was, for the sake of popular nostalgia against the far wall, crooning a neutral love song that nobody seemed to like or have the energy to change. A bar-top in the shape of an L, creating a long hall that permitted a few extra tables and a set of bathrooms at it's tip. There wasn't a cage, which might explain why this was the least favorite of Logan's few options, but if he wanted a fight the hunt for one was never too prolonged.

There were women, a good selection. Few with a disease he could sell--contagion did not concern Logan, though the odor and sensation of certain infected areas did. One or two--no, three--with necklines so low and skirts so high they have been undressed already. Good if he wanted something fast, wanted to bypass that time-consuming chore of removing clothes.

Logan nearly left when he first spotted her. He could have done so without being seen himself, though it was a small and not overpopulated room. He might even have been able to pick up one of the more attractive patrons on his way out, without speaking enough to draw her attention. He was in a poor mood, a restless mood, and not so inclined to spend time in the company of any but a stranger's.

Why, then, were his feet bringing him not to the door but the oak counter, to her, at once as out of place as a child in her mother's clothing and frighteningly comfortable in this atmosphere where misery pervaded even the most comfortable of scenes.

Her shoulders were slumped as if the weight of the thin jacket was too much to bear or escape. She sipped at her drink--was the tall glass her request, or did the bartender see something in her face, and deem it and her too delicate for a bottle?--as if trying to make it last the rest of her days. And when he dropped himself onto the stool beside her, she made a sound incredulous and aghast, like one who has been saved from drowning only to find a the rescue boat has sprung a leak, like discovering the character of a book she didn't like in one she did.

"How's it going, Kid?"

"Did you follow me?"

"Why would I follow you?"

"Because it's what your always doing."

Logan was silent. Mock contemplation, and then a grunt. "Not always."

The bartender came without being signaled, with a nod at Logan's preferred beer that was familiar enough to be worrisome. Beside him, Rogue took a deeper swallow of her drink and flinched as if it were something stronger. The shadows of exhaustion on her cheeks looked like bruises, like half-dried paint.

"What are you doing here, Kid?"

"I'm allowed to leave," she said, a high edge to her voice. Upset, defensive. Her chin jerked, stopping short before actually looking at him. For half the span of a breath she seemed close to tears, and her ire continued even after this had passed. There was nothing to say to this, nothing that wouldn't be harsher or weaker than Logan was willing to be with her.

He watched her sit, watched her drink, watched her wish for his absence, hate him for the stress relief that doing so provided. The amber liquid at the bottom of her glass took root in her throat faster than he had imagined it would, and she requested another in the whispery way of the inexperienced. (But had she not seemed perfectly at ease with the beer he'd given her that night in the kitchen?) The bartender--the sort who would have asked for her ID the moment she came in, inspected it under the strongest glasses and light he owned--refilled her glass from a spout in a long row of brothers, whose head wore a glossy Pabst label. She was grimacing even before it was pressed to her lips.

"Might be the shittiest beer you could have ordered, Kid."

"Not my fault." Defensive, again, and he wondered what she could have meant, even as a quick jerk of his throat muscles stole the last of his own brew. Rogue didn't want him here, but that this might be for reasons other than her usual, obscure ones did not immediately occur to him. Logan studied her profile, the smooth incline of her nose that ended in a bump and underscored her youth more that anything else, the dip where her lower lip stopped and her chin began, the eyelashes that curved upward like an impertinent bird in flight. These small characteristics filled his attention, a pitcher left to overrun.

But then he saw her eyes, how they were not studying the middle distance simply to avoid stumbling into his. Rather, they were fixed on a point, a table, a man sitting against the left wall, that hall the L-shaped counter made. A scraggly Italian with an overbite, a special green tint under olive skin. He was unmistakeably her target--when the man's arm would lift to ferry his scotch to its destination, when his head would turn this way or that, her gaze shifted to accommodate the gesture.

Beneath the counter-top, inscribed with years of spilt drinks and the weight of depressed elbows, her leg vibrated with impatient restraint. Logan understood, then, that his presence was the only factor holding Rogue from going over there.

His jaw tightened with the strength of the adamantium it carried--if the room had been even slightly quieter, the other patrons might have heard it. For no particular or understood reason, violent images began to fight for priority in his mind's eye. Logan thought of telling her that she could do better, that he could smell the immune boosters swimming in the streams of the Italian's blood, fighting the current of HIV.

So focused. Almost pathetically intent, was the expression on her face. He could tell her that it was too desperate, that it would turn men off. But why bother? Why should her stare make him uncomfortable? Anger, like greasy heat sank into his muscles. For the first time, in a setting that bore more familiarity than any other in his abbreviated memory, Logan felt out of place. He ordered another Molson, and then something triple its strength, and managed to make both disappear without tasting them. He considered leaving, but a stubbornness and a curiosity made him prefer her unwilling company to any other.

And so, he looked at her, looking at the man across the room, and they both were paying close attention when her subject was approached by another woman. She had unwashed hair that humidity and split ends had loaned a crown of frizz, a t-shirt that revealed her belly button and a ring that had turned the surrounding skin red with infection. Needle-thin arms that never stilled as she sidled up to him, as one who cannot determine if a dog's bark means play or danger.

The two spoke briefly--him, with disinterested derision, the woman with twitchy need--in half-code and muted gestures. The Italian gave her a nod, a flick of his gaze that sent his fidgety inquirer scurrying for--with, perhaps, less than the desired subtlety--the maple His/Her signs that denoted the bathrooms. She chose the Men's. In a score of moments, neither hurried or protracted, the Italian shook himself out of his chair and retraced her path. Utterly casual, utterly unobserved by any save Logan, Rogue, and perhaps the bartender--in whose financial interest it may have been to turn a blind eye.

He returned far too quickly, with far too unsatisfied an expression for the encounter to have been sexual, and Logan understood. "What's your fix, Kid?"

"Don't know what you're talking about," she said, too quickly, which was as good as a confirmation. Her voice was a stack of unweighted pages in a sudden wind, a flag being whipped mercilessly and unpatriotically in a storm. And it was easier, suddenly, to sit beside her in the thick silence, knowing what she would refrain from doing to avoid the shame of him paying witness to it.

Shortly after, Rogue set her glass down on the counter--carefully, as if there was some designated and important niche. Logan asked if she was going to finish it--more than half the weak brew remained, laying as if ashamed at its own taste.

Softer than he expected, she said no, "I'm tired", and looked him in the eye for the first time. Logan had never been stricken by a statement more true.

"Want a ride, Kid?"







.

To Run In Circles: Chapter Six


"You don't get to make those kind of decisions," Scott said. His voice was warm with the pleasure that came from denying Logan something, anything. The enjoyment of this activity seemed reciprocally related to how important the matter seemed: like now, with the walls meekly absorbing every snarled statement. It might have been one of Summer's few untainted hobbies left to him--aside from Jean's bi-annual blowjob and checkers.

"What the fuck do you want with her?"
"What you want with her is a better question, though it's a bit obvious. Really, Logan, just get a prostitute--at least she'd be moderately interested."
"She's not fucking coming. She can't."
"As a matter of fact, Rogue can. And she is."
"If she--"
"--goes, you won't? What a shame. In that case, I can guarantee her place on the mission--but we'll miss you, Logan."
"You piece of rotting fuckin' shit. What--"
"Let go. Dammit, take your hands off of me or I'll blast your head off. I swear to--"
"She'll be hurt."
"What do you care? Let go. Let go of me, you crazy fucking...."
It took several moments of coughing before Summers could work up enough air and dignity to speak again. "Rouge will be fine."
"Wasn't last time."
"You don't know anything about it," Scott snapped, with a special acidity. But there was a discomfort in his eyes that had nothing to do with the bruises that circled his throat.

:::::::::::::


It was a hospital, or had been, though many years had passed since it's visitors would have referred to it as such. A small building in the mountains, it's surroundings a snug garment. More of a clinic, really, a retreat. Plenty of rooms for long-term patients but only a perfunctory E.R.--there were more easily accessed facilities for true emergencies.

A philanthropist had built it, a man with as much money as he had spare time and a streak of that rare and laughable desire to change the world. He had envisioned a center of healing, of generosity, of self-enrichment. A precious and free haven for those with the need but not the means for medical care. Our altruist put all of his energy and spirit--and, most effectively, his bank account, into the creation of such a place.

Naturally, three summers after achieving such a dream the government froze the last of the man's dwindling accounts and the clinic was seized as part of an IRS investigation.

The haven slipped out of the public eye and it's doors, which had stood open to anyone, now only unlocked for a shipment of--
"--mutants," The Professor said to the team. "The lab's not as large as ones we've broken before, but we've had a tip about this one and a chemical compound they're trying to manufacture."
"What will it do?"
"I don't know, Bobby." Xavier said, and his gaze flicked to where Rogue sat, silent and disinterested in the corner. "Let's find out."

:::::::::::::


She would not look at him, would not speak. Rogue treated Logan almost as coldly after the night in the bar as she did before it--but with a extra wariness now, ever-vigilant to what he might ask in her presence, or reveal within others. She did not respond to his quiet and not-so-quiet inquiries (the latter of which earned him furious looks from Jean), not to the suggestions that weren't suggestions that she should not be here, nor to the concern that even the blanket of gruffness could not cover.

Yet on the plane she allowed him to sit beside her, or at least did not make a great effort to move. They came to a careful landing in a clearing just large enough to hold the jet--Logan saw a few tree branches kiss the windows, and heard Scott hiss about the cost of paint damage.

And she gave him a very soft look as he deboarded, from the seat she hadn't yet left.


Only a few of them--Jean, and two others--descended the steps into what had been a storeroom for medical supplies. They stepped over the bodies of those pathetically outnumbered guards and vanished down the stairs like figments of a shadow's imagination.

The rest of them dispersed among the halls, the small chambers. Scott attached himself to Logan like a loose but determined strip of Velcro. Keeping an eye on him, of playing the role of restraining superior as only he could. But it was not until later that Logan--who was thinking too much of the girl left in the jet and feeling too little like the animal--thought this supervision might be keeping him from more than excessive violence. Or for him to attach more meaning to the fact that a collection of doctors was the best ready-made distraction for the Wolverine.

A casual, bright place that could have matched most descriptions of the generic office. Few employees than there otherwise might have been, though of course this was nighttime, and even the most devoted practitioners of cruelty do not work twenty-four seven. Water coolers and bowls of peppermints, a rather tired-looking vending machine. A secretary whose skull was quickly and cleanly cracked against the edge of her desk, before she could do more than draw breath to scream. Papers that Scott winced at, muttered "Admittance forms", with a glare.

An entirely ordinary clinic, though entirely ordinary clinics do not usually possess guards who shoot on sight, or locked doors every few feet. Nor an open closed that brimmed with boxes--dirt stained, bloodstained apparel on the right, personal items that might serve a monetary or souvenir purpose on the left.
Little to be seen until the second floor, from whence came the sound and glimpsing sights of a bustling crowd. The theory that most of the workers had gone home was pushed away. Scott dispensed a pair of their silent group down one of the halls, left another two to guard against attempted escape at the entrance and, with a younger boy, commenced down the busier of paths.

There were cages. A room of them. Thick bars, spots of rust and the scent of terror. Empty, save two, in which the starved husks of what had been people lay.
There were doctors. White coats, and for an absent and rare philosophical moment Logan wondered what could make them believe their jobs were still connected to that symbol of healing. But it was a quick though, one he forgot the moment he'd had it.
There were two employees examining and discussing a stack of X-Rays, and a nurse who walked in. Dealt with quickly because Scott liked to maintain the element of surprise, that grey and tense calm fro as long as possible.
There was a sign, held to the ceiling by two weak chains. The embossed letters "O" and "R" and the last corridor their route offered.
There were metal beds and white sheets, speckled red with the discharge of their previous occupants. Leather straps at their head and foot, and a room in which these restraints were no longer necessary. The person they'd held--naked, blue, with a tail that dangled off the table and to the floor--had long since lost the ability to struggle.

There were needles dipping in and out of a dead arm. Voices speaking a long list of chemical names and comparing how long this one lasted to the others. Figures that might have been shaped from clay for all the humanity Logan saw in them. And that fragile quiet shattered.

There was blood.

There were screams.

There were running footsteps that were cut off, and never sounded again.

There was Scott, saying, "Enough. Enough, Logan," though not half so insistently as usual. The young team member who'd accompanied them, trying to look brave and and not to puke with an equal lack of success. A hand that reached out as if to restrain the bloodier, clawed one, but knew better than to actually do so.

There were orders, a tone that was as shaky as threadbare tires on a gravel road. "Logan....Logan, move...move those bodies against the wall. No, not that one. I think we should...should bring the victims with us, give them a proper burial--oh, for fucks sake, just do it. I don't care how it makes the plane smell. Wrap him in something. Bobby, get those papers. Stay here and give Logan a hand. I'm....I'm...I'm... going to find the others, let John know we need him--we'll be setting fire to this place shortly. Use the COM if you need me."

Scarlet puddles lay on the floor, and made indelicate squelching noises underfoot, hung on the walls, the effects of an overeager artist. Logan was left pushing, rolling, dragging men in varying states of recognizable into a space-saving pile, glowering at Bobby's tremulous motions until the boy gave up at the pretense of help and stood in the corner, fighting tears.

There was no satisfaction found here, only weariness and an incomprehensible nausea, not enough energy to grunt with more than mild irritation at Bobby. Logan stripped a few doctors of their hypocritical attire and wrapped them over and around the dead mutant on the table. Vague pity, but no particular interest in doing so. This was nothing, after all, but the casing of a bullet that had long been discharged.

There was a scent. A tendril of an aroma that tickled his passages, the petals of a demanding flower. Thin and distinct as a line of thread, cutting through all the space and material that separated Logan from it's source.

A thought, no firmer than smoke. Intuition, that was considerably stronger. Realization, recognition of what should have been obvious.
"Wait here," he told the young team member.
His wobbling lips parted in surprise. "Cyclops said--"
"Gonna make a circuit, see if there's anything we've missed. When I get back I'll bring the corpse to the jet...You can wait here, or you can carry it yourself."
The boy nodded reluctantly, and behind Logan heard the sound of retching, as distance between him and the room grew.


::::::::::::

Can a thing which has only happened twice be called a ritual? Or was what Logan saw only two points of a long pattern? Logan stood at the rim of the main lobby, where a filing cabinet made its home and his shelter, with that skill that comes from long being a student of Stealth's art.

He watched him bring her in. Scott this time, instead of Jean--a ridiculous sort of chivalry in he way he ushered her along. A look on her face, a thinness to her lips that spoke of preparing oneself for an unpreparable pain. A fear in her scent that was no tint or shadow but consumed the whole of her being; showed itself in everything from the glossy wetness in her eyes, to the hesitant placement of each food, to the agitated twists of the gloves she wore. The whole of Logan's body was thrumming with that electric instinct that recognizes something wrong, something dangerous--though rarely had this warning sounded for someone other than himself.

And it didn't matter how little he knew her, how even less he understood of what was going on. It didn't matter that his interference was resented by even the subject of it, that such nosiness was a quality he deplored, would loathe in any other case but this. It didn't matter that he wouldn't have been interested, may even have approved of what was going on if it had been anyone, anyone but her.

Logan held himself still, waited with that goal of overdue explanation as Rogue was led down the basement steps. He listened to the rhythm and tempo to judge their distance, the echo of the sound to estimate the size of the chambers beneath and the likelihood of being seen--and then followed.

The lower level had long surpassed it's destiny as a cramped supply close, though the first walls still bore empty shelves from the days of their innocent use. The place had been expanded, a long corridor carved from the soil. The walls were a dark, glossy metal that reflected him, cold and silent. Narrow, slick, like the interior of a languid snake. Immediately easy to see that the rest of the building, no matter what cruel purposes it was put to--may as well have been a painted mask to this, the true lab. A row of broken cameras in one section, vomiting sparks and stray wires--Jubilee's work, he guessed. Sliding doors that had been broken open, and guards that were holding the guns that had planted the bullets so deep in their skulls--Jean's.

Voices far ahead, and the distant figures of Rogue and Scott, who did not look behind them. An opening that had been forcefully blown into the metal door, into which they disappeared and to which Logan crept. Murmurs, broken snatches of phrases, a light which flickered as bodies passed before it, a wide space and--

A large room, longer than it was wide but crowded with shelves and cabinets, technical devices that Scott would have killed for--and indeed managed to find their way onto the jet for the home journey. Tables laden with computers and all manner of test tubs, microscopes and things he could not name. Empty spaces of things that had already been carried to The Blackbird.

All this he saw in a moment's forward shadow, that special breath of silence before the opening note of a song begins. All of Logan's attention, all of his being, was arrested and held to the little drama that was acting itself out before him.

Eight people were kneeling on the floor, tied and sporting bruises. Some wore lab-coats, others plastic aprons, all expressions of a bottomless fear. Pale, gagged, with rapidly shifting gazes that could not believe such a dreaded nightmare had become corporeal.

It was to and among these that Rogue moved; around these that Scott and Jean stood--offering halfhearted words of encouragement. The rest of the team must have been sent on to the jet with what comprised of their loot. Logan started forward, but froze, shifted back just as quickly in a blurring twitch of muscles. Wait, he thought, surprise and a helpless, regrettable curiosity keeping him in place.

Her back was to him, but her scent was more expressive, more honest than anything her face could show. Quavering fingers pulled away the cloth that covered her right hand. She stepped up to one of the prisoners, an grandfatherly man with eyes that sought mercy in one surely too young, too pretty, too normal-looking to be a mutant. Rogue cupped, cradled the man's cheek with the assurance of the closest of friends. The first moment of this touch saw hope on the prisoner's face, the second confusion, a little fear and an attempt to pull away--and horror when he could not. Terror, and, to Logan's own shock, pain, though that hand could not have been more gentle.
Veins like pulsing, writhing blue worms appeared under his skin. his irises rolled up until only white was visible in the almond-shaped sockets. He gagged, shuddered, and finally, finally toppled over, freed from that magnetic touch not by his own will but by the strength of death. His body sagged against the floor, limp and empty.

The other hostages gave cries of fear--muffled, of course, by the cloth in their mouths. Logan's own alarm mingled with appreciation for the violent work of a fellow artist. If it hadn't been her, hadn't been Rogue, perhaps the latter sentiment may have prevailed. If he could have seen the wet trails sparkling over her cheeks, perhaps only the former would have.

In any case, Rogue had moved on before the corpse's head had struck the tiled floor. She grabbed the throat of the nearest lab employee with deceptively rough efficiency. Bound, he struggled and flailed, but though her grasp was not a particularly strong one he could not seem to break it. Pain came faster for him, those bulging veins that offered the impression that his very soul was pumping out. And when death took it's place as well she let him fall, thrust him from her like the collar of a biting dog.

And the dread that had been stewing in him all night, for many nights, rose within Logan with a scathing steam. While two other mansion residents stood to the side, supervisors on an unappealing chore looking on with barely concealed distaste, those hands that Rogue was leading to the next hostage, the next lab employee, the next victim--those hands were shaking.

"Hows it going, Kid?"

She jerked around as if spun on an invisible dial. Faster still, however, was the icy grasp that descended over his mind, as cloyingly restraining as a drug and the cutting voice of Jean. "Wolverine, get the hell out of here. Leave. Get out! Go board The Blackbird."

It was not a command she could have expected him to heed with anything less than the sum of her telepathic ability. And it was this sum that she focused on him now, a ruthless insistence that was almost as potent as the look in Rogue's eyes. That expression of utmost hurt and shame, that knowledge that your worst side had been seen by the one person you wished to hide it from. Fleeting, and tortured, and agonizingly familiar.

Years of succumbing to no will but his own, Jean's greatly overestimated opinion of her own abilities and that look--god, that look--kept Logan from acquiescing. Scott's imprudent yanks on his arm were even more ineffective--those bearing adamantium skeletons are not easily tugged.

Neither, however, could he step forward. He could not move his arm, could not turn his head, could not move in any way. It was as if cords leashed him from all sides, all irresistible, all unyielding, pulling with all the force of that presence in his mind and--what? What was that tie binding him to Rogue?

Jean was livid, enraged...but underneath, underneath ran a current of shame that the harshness of her voice could not hide. She issued a litany of orders, of threats, of censures both viscous and unimportant because Logan was hardly listening. They died out into a frustrated silence, in which the the pressure on his mind (an intrusion that had always been forbidden and would never be forgotten) never relented. Meanwhile, Rogue had ducked his gaze, dodged it like the sharpest of blows. Some words from Scott--"Go on, continue, Rogue. Ignore him. It's okay."--and she turned back to the hostages. Two had been attempting to crawl away in the absence of their attention and the probable influence Jean had been wielding to keep them in place.

He heard her swallow convulsively, watched little shudders break through the calm she was trying and failing to keep, and fought harder to move, to reach for her. Desperately she pressed her hands--those hands, those pale, pretty, terrifying hands--to another lab worker. They were not deaths that Logan would normally blink at, nothing that could even enter the range of some of his work. But it was not them, never them, for whom was concerned.

It was the fifth hostage--a chubby man who smelled of frightened urine, and blinking in a way that spoke of glasses crushed somewhere in the room--that the shudders lost their randomness. A constant, hard tremor--nervous, fierce as if she'd just been pulled from the iciest of lakes. A cough fought it's way up her throat and was followed by a equally unkind series of its brothers. Any air found between these was a prize in a til-death match. Her hand, when not occupied by its strange and gruesome task, rose to the bridge of her nose as if forcing back what was trying to escape the gates of her mind.

Logan tried to speak, to utter some bridling word, but could not make his lips frame her name. The animal in him thrashed, snapped its jaws--from the corner of his eye he saw Jean flinch.

For what was far from the first time, he wondered what purpose this bizarre method of execution served--when, despite their fine presentation of higher morals any of the others could have done a much more efficient job.

One hostage left, a woman with pretty blond hair and a chubby face. She had forgone the struggles which had offered so little aid to her coworkers. She was curled in a ball, huddled against the forever motionless legs of friend--still warm, of course, because what felt like ages passing in this room had only been a span of minutes. She'd been reduced to the state of so many of the subjects who'd filled the cages above, her gag wet with the tears and snot that ran with equal fervor, issuing pleas that emerged only as cartoonish moans.

Rogue's feet stumbled, stuttered like the missed notes of a poor musician. Her breath was unkind waves striking rock, shallow and rapid. She swayed, stretched her fingers toward the woman and drew it back, brought it to her forehead.

She turned to him, to Logan, and that look was there again. It was almost, almost as compelling as the trickle of blood making it's way from her ear.

And that had force that had been drawing him away snapped, the frailest of strings.



.

To Run in Circles


He watched Jean Grey put her hands around the woman’s throat. She wasn’t strangling her, although it would look that way to anyone newly entering the room and wasn’t entirely an act she might be opposed to. Blood fauceted out between Jean’s fingers, blood the shade of her own hair after a shower. It dyed the collar of the woman’s coat, white cloth drinking in the color as if thirsty for it. Gulping. A coat was like the one Jean wore in the X-lab, which must have felt surreal--exactly like; perhaps they favored the same stores. The woman’s shoes were similar as well to those Jean wore when she was being a Doctor and not an X-men. “No no no no,” Jean choked, applying more pressure. “Scott!”

Her husband was at her side in a moment, helping her lay the woman flat upon the floor. Frantic eyes darted there and here; lips opened and closed fish-like. No one bothered to shout at Logan for what he’d done--that’s how he knew how serious it was.

Funny that such a grasp should be grasped to save a life, Logan thought, watching Jean pinch down on the neck like arterial spray was a Jack she could keep In The Box. Funny that the woman should have looked at Logan like that, the moment he’d leaned around Rogue and towards her, nipping his claws across her pulse. A little defiant. A little grateful. As if he was sparing her from something worse. Perhaps he was.
Startled by his sudden presence behind her, the stomp of his boots on the wet tile, by his touch on her spine—Rogue had turned and glared up at him the same way. Fleeting, but there. He was sure of it. Then both women had flinched, curled inward, away from him. Only one of the two were bleeding and only one of them smelled afraid.

Now, they all watched Jean try to slow the process, stop it, although this went against everything he knew about these sorts of missions. Mercy hadn’t been part of the agenda for a long time. It was surreal. It didn’t make sense, and made even less when she looked over her shoulder at Rogue and snapped, “What are you doing just standing there? Do it. We need this. Do it!” Dark patches of anger bloomed on her sharp cheekbones. Logan stared at the doctor and wondered, suddenly, ‘How long have I known you?’

The redhead glanced at him and away, rattled off an order to Scott, who was practically kneeling on the last man Rogue had touched in his haste to be close, to be useful. He’d taken the gag out of the woman’s mouth, he was stroking her hair. Some instincts went too deep, but some orders seemed to go deeper “Come on, can’t you just do it?” he asked Rogue. Rogue, who had her fists balled against her stomach and her teeth embedded in her lower lip, looking back at Scott, at all of them, as if the only thing she wanted to do was run.

And keep running.

‘How long have I known you?’ Logan thought a bit harder at Jean. The answer, surprised and surprising, was years longer than he’d imagined, years longer than he’d ever expected to know a person (although, to be honest, he had never ‘known’ her in the way he’d teased Summers about). He’d known Jean through the Xmen’s Idealistic Years, when she’d been at her flirtiest and her marriage at, ironically, its strongest. When the world began crumbling Jean had hardened, turning colder and dreadfully polite. He’d known her before the transformation and after. He’d seen her lose at card games. He’d seen her put a latte to her lips and moan in a way that made every person in the room distinctly uncomfortable. He’d also seen her chug a black coffee like water. He’d seen her correcting papers at two am and hug Kitty after a third breakup with Bobby. He’d seen her run training sims when everyone else had quit for the day. He’d seen her fall asleep on her husband’s arm during a film and slap his face during a fight Logan wasn’t supposed to walk in on. He’d seen her on television, charming senators—earning respect as a scientist and a person but unafraid to use the wiles of a woman. He’d seen her talk a gunman into turning himself over to the officials and he’d seen her talk an official into putting a gun into his mouth. He’d seen her hold Ororo’s head in her lap and cry openly, unabashedly, breathlessly, like an infant.

Watching her now, Logan was baffled at the depths to which he didn’t understand what she was doing or why she was doing it. ‘Why are we doing any of this?’ a very, very faint voice asked inside him. One he hadn’t noticed in some time. Like a cold breath on the back of his neck, tickling the hairs, there and gone.

Jean refused to meet his gaze again. “Do it,” she told the girl, softer but commanding. Rogue straightened, shrugged as if it didn’t matter. As if nothing mattered.

“Wait a min-“

“Shut up, Logan.”

“Gimme another fuckin’ order, Summers—“

“Shut up.”

“It’s gotta be quick,” Rogue said. The first time she’d spoken. “You can’t be touchin’ her when I’m touchin’ her.” Jean nodded.

Logan started to reach for Rogue when she started to kneel. She shook him off. His understanding of the situation was piecemeal but disturbed; he was more than ready to drag the girl out of here. Scott was watching him pointedly, finger raised to a specific button on his visor. It was clear that would be the only warning the Wolverine would get.

The woman on the floor was struggling. One of her palms were slapping the tile floor in an arrhythmic pattern, the other holding tight but ever looser to Jean’s arm. She was still wearing surgical gloves, green ones. Her skin was paling and so were her eyes. But she was watching them, and Logan saw quivering fear turn into something harder, harsher as she did so. Incapable of arguing with them, but not incapable of protest, the woman began to pry determinedly at Jean’s hands.

“Diane,” Rouge said to her. The woman froze, looking as comically surprised as a person can while dying. She wore no badge, no lanyard, and no nametag. None of the once-people-now-bodies in the room did. How did she know?

“Diane?” The woman’s pupils were huge with alarm. Rogue’s voice was gentle and, though the woman might have cheerfully dissected them all given the chance, full of pity--a little for herself as well. “Diane, I know. But it’s quick. It really is quick. I’m sorry.” She reached out, and Jean let go. Hands up, leaning well away, as if the girl were a crackling stick of dynamite.

They’d over-estimated the woman’s strength of will. Logan might have told them that; he could smell it. As the trickle turned to gush, she began to flail. Her foot struck Rogue in the chest; she was knocked back on her tailbone. “Oof”, she said. (She actually said ‘oof’, he marveled, distantly. He thought that was only done in comics.) Jean and Scott rushed to subdue the woman, but by the time they had such measures were no longer necessary. Logan and Rogue hadn’t offered to help, for reasons of their own—the girl because they wouldn’t have wanted her hands in the tangle, the man because he didn’t give a shit.

For a while they all were still, a huddle, a tableau in the damp room. Incapable of moving (some more than others). And then Scott Summers, man of infinite control, did something that startled The Wolverine. “Damnit,” he snarled. Snarled, in a very un-Summers way. “Damnit, damnit, damnit!” He twisted and punched the bare tile floor, drummed it with his fist. “Damnit! Goddamnit!” Logan heard the first hairline fracture, and the second. He was almost impressed and almost worried.

“Scott.” Jean put her hand on his jumping shoulder, and it stopped. Just like that. The man stared at the floor for a few minutes, swallowing loudly. When her husband turned to look at her, it was Scott again. Back. Passive.
“He’s going to be mad,” he said to Jean. Simply, like, ‘lunch is ready’ or ‘you’ll need an umbrella today.’

“I know that.”

“What the fuck do you mean?”

Logan’s question was ignored and so was he. As if he were a stone in a stream, barely worth diverting the current. The only one who made eye contact was Diane, on the floor, and she couldn’t help it.

“Was he watching?”

“Yes,” Jean said.

“We need to go.”

“Yes.”

Awareness seemed to be returning to the couple, consideration stretching beyond their immediate, bloodied surroundings to include the sound of other team members performing their duties in the rest of the clinic. Young X-men they were responsible for. They noticed Rogue, struggling to get to her feet and made the appropriate concerned noises without touching her. Her arms were wrapped around herself; she didn’t seem willing to use them to get up. Logan listened to the teeth clacking in her skull. A part of him wanted to demand answers, another part wanted to step very, very, quietly to her side and place his nose against her hair. He wasn’t sure which urge belonged to Him and which to The Wolverine.

“Where are my gloves?” she asked helplessly, like a child. Summers found them for her, returned them pinched between two fingers. She pulled them on clumsily, drunkenly, stealing peeks at the bodies. She swallowed again and again; he heard the saliva go down her throat. She didn’t seem too conscious of what was going on around her--but backed away with remarkable dexterity when Logan moved towards her and sniffled a few things that made him think her stronger than she looked. A bundle of potty-mouthed contradictions.

“We need to go. Rogue? We need to go now,” Jean, who saw only the trembling, said. She was back to playing The Comforter, but it took a bit of urging before the girl would come along. When she did it was with Jell-O footsteps and eyes attached like magnets to the ground. His team members filed out of the room, no words to spare for Logan, filled with frustration and confusion and more of the former because of the latter.

It was as if the four had spent years in the room; the rest of the clinic appeared foreign to him, new. Even those carcasses he was responsible for; they provoked an odd stutter in his thoughts when he saw them. He looked at a handprint on the wall and wondered where the animal went—The Wolverine should still be writhing and raging in his chest, not sniffing the air for Rogue’s vital signs. All the way down the clinic hall, Scott discussed the evacuation with Jean. Calmly. He radioed John to begin burning the evidence in the far wing and Kitty to start up the jet. Calmly. Sent Jubilee to requisition certain items. Calmly. Logan was accustomed to a little bitching from Summers; the lack of it made him itch. The courtesy crawled under his skin. It happened without warning, as they reached the lobby, Jean shepherding the girl through the doors. Scott spun to face Logan and put his finger back on the visor button. Not angry—even a little apologetic. He breathed evenly, his jaw relaxed. Logan stopped in his tracks.

“Do we leave him?” he asked his wife without looking at her. Scott, a man he’d worked beside and taught beside and lived beside—who he had fought and taunted and respected for just as long as he had Jean. Logan popped his claws, but they were a mere reflex. The men were too far apart and he knew how fast Summer’s lasers were. How effective.

Jean paused in the entrance, put a hand over her mouth. For one heartbeat she seemed horrified, in the next a far-away expression came over her face. Logan knew who she was consulting. He could feel pressure on his mind, like faint tapping fingers, and it wasn’t difficult picturing The Professor far away in Cerebro.

“He says it’s,” she began.

“Don’t!” Rogue stumbled back through the doors, tottered towards them. Her face was bloodless, except for those threads in her eyes. She reached Scott and touched his elbow, and the man flinched before he recognized the two layers of leather separating their skin. “No. I got enough from the others. We didn’t really need her. I collected enough. I swear I did.” It was with some surprise that he realized she was pleading, and for him.

She looked at Jean, who looked at Scott, who looked at Logan, who looked at Rogue.

Doctor Grey swallowed. “Not worth the risk.” Her voice was small.

“Okay, then,” Scott said. He exhaled.

Logan shifted his weight, heard the cheap carpet crackle. He could also hear the footsteps of the junior team, the crackle of COMMS and boxes and the radiator and the copy machine and Rogue’s lungs. Conversations loud and soft. A gurgling stomach. The breath of everybody in the building and the splash of urine a particularly bold coyote left against the Blackbird’s wheel. The heart palpitating under Rogue’s ribcage. Scott’s grunt when she kicked the back of his leg and her scream when Jean—determined expression, little paranoia of skin contact now--wrapped a restraining arm about her waist. The scream didn’t last long. The girl was overtaken by a coughing fit, and when she next raised her head he saw a drop of blood slide out of her nose and down her upper lip. A painful sensation in Logan’s chest, like he might fall through the floor and keep falling, although this clinic only had one level. A sick, oily something in his gut.

“I’m not going to forget this,” he told Scott and the girl simultaneously. He didn’t growl it.

“You shouldn’t,” Scott said, shortly.

And then a violent quantity of red filled Logan’s vision, a greater amount of heat accompanying it.
For some time those were the only things he was aware of.

To Run in Circles, Part Two

The first time she had sex was also the first time she ever heard a man urinate. He was an obese truck driver from Oklahoma and it was immediately After. He waddled into the little motel bathroom—she saw the hair on his legs and his lower back, in a V-shape at the base of his spine—closing the bathroom door behind him but only halfheartedly, so it bounced off the latch.

Men pee differently than women do, she mused, reeling her knees against her chest and rubbing her palms against the hair on her own legs. It had been a while since she’d had the chance to shave. Maybe she’d splurge on one of those little pink gas station razors. She shivered, listening to the splashes. Loud, thick. Like he was in there pouring something out of a pitcher. Her thighs were sticky like they’d had glue painted on them with a brush. It squished. She pushed a wad of blanket down there and tried, very determinedly, Not. To. Think. Instead, she blinked up at the ceiling. Blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. They should pay the maid more—perhaps then she’d dust the blades of the ceiling fan. They were thick with grime, spinning slowly, too slow to stir the air but enough to provide a distracting wobble. She heard the flush of the toilet and no sequel-ing rush of the faucet. Mr. Splash came back out, scratching his belly sheepishly. She didn’t Look.

“Are you okay, then?” he asked while pulling on his pants. He’d laid them across the chair, protecting the crease. Pretty fastidious for someone with a tongue dyed tictac orange.
“Yup.”
“I didn’t—you’re not, y’know, you’re not hurt too—“
“Nope.”
“Good. Good. I’m glad. I, uh, appreciated this.”
“Yup.”
He took a minute to button his shirt. Glancing up at her, then back down. “You sure you’re okay? You look a bit—“
“Fine. Thanks. I'm fine.”
“Okay.”
He wasn’t so bad, she thought. He’d bought her breakfast in Gainesville and lunch in Lawton, and at this point, she wasn’t undervaluing the luxury of eating twice in one day. For free. This, all of this, had actually been her idea. It really had. But it had come to fruition so quickly. An hour ago she’d been fumbling with the brochures rack while he paid for the room and when the clerk started giving her the stink eye he’d put a protective hand on her back.

“So you, uh, you—I’m going on to Kansas City. I’ve gotta check in here pretty soon. I could take you as far as that. If you really need me to, I mean. They don't really like me taking passengers but I could—um—“ He was trying so hard to avoid saying, ‘want a ride?’ She almost laughed aloud. And he was right; it would have sounded a bit too HBO. She couldn’t stop a smile from playing around her lips, although the way he seemed worried she’d want to keep traveling with him helped cut the mirth.
“No, thank you,” she told him.
Perhaps the smile put Mr. Splash at ease. He put his wedding ring back on.“I really like your hair, by the way. I don’t know if I told you that alr—“
“You did.”
“Oh. Well. It looks real pretty. Different, y’know. With the—“ he flicked a finger towards his own nonexistent locks as if she wouldn’t know what he was referring to— “white?”
“Yeah.”
“Suits you.”
“Thank you." He seemed to be having a lot more trouble looking at her naked than he had minutes ago. She resisted the urge to wrap a sheet around herself, enjoying his discomfort more than her own.
“Well,” Splash said, flushing all the way to the collar of his shirt. He started to take a seat on the corner of the mattress but shot back up. “Well, I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated this, Mary.”
“Marie,” she corrected. “Thank you, Ed.”
“Marie,” he repeated. “Really appreciated it. And I’d like to, y’know, help you out—“

He shifted his weight, dug his hand into a back pocket in the way they’d both been waiting for him to do. He retrieved it, the hefty afternoon promise—a roll of twenties bound up in an orange scrunchie. Worth punchin’ a nun, her father would have said, though for a man who thought lightly of punching his own wife this was not an immeasurable fortune. It was, however, worth doing a lot of things besides assaulting the clergy. Mr. Splash started to set the roll on the bedside table but, perhaps deeming this too cliché, was forced to approach the bed again. She plucked it out of his pink, puffy fingers.

For a few beats, they just stared at one another, long enough for him to raise an eyebrow. For some reason, she found it difficult to say thank you again. Impossible. She couldn’t squeeze the words out. They came up her throat and stayed there, jammed, a rancid bile on the back of her tongue. So instead, she nodded sociably, holding her knees a bit tighter, and eventually Mr. Splash bumbled his way out the door.

She dropped the money roll like something burning and thrust her legs over the side of the bed, almost launching herself off. She went to the bathroom, determinedly not making eye contact with the object in the trashcan, that strip of like wet snakeskin. The mirror was out of the question. There was something else she wasn’t making eye contact with, a whimpering creature in the back of her mind, someone she couldn’t afford to be anymore. Her stomach hurt, like menstrual cramps but sharper. She took a washcloth off the rack, stiffened to rigor mortis from too much bleaching, and stepped gingerly into the tub. She felt brittle, meaty. Was it always like this? Spinning the water dial—the cold, because the hot wouldn’t turn, she scrubbed and scrubbed—the same way she’d cleaned her hands after David. The shower head peered down at her, an alien creature with some twenty rheumatic eyes.

She was about to unwrap the soap, the little square left on the counter with the bottles of shampoo the size of her pinkie. Maybe she’d splurge on some body wash, some conditioner. Yeah. And then--then the thought struck her, like a cold chunk of hail. No. No way. She tripped her way back out of the tub, leaving footprints and concussion-sized puddles on the floor. Naked she back to the bed. Where was the money? Where was it? She ripped back the sheets, a jungle pattern, green with flecks of red. There—she caught the roll up, tore off the horrid scrunchie (yet another 90’s germ left floating through the world when it got sneezed off the production line). She unfurled the bills with shaking, damp fingers. Spread them out, pinching her lips to halt the quaking. Her eyes stung, and no amount of blinking would get them to stop.

The top bill, just as she’d seen, was a twenty. But the rest—warped from their long-curled pose—were wrinkles ones. George Washington gave her thirty philandering smirks as he slid from her fingers. Her knees spasmed. They wanted to sit and never, ever stand. She put her hands on her thighs and pinched the skin, felt pain slither up her spine.Not one for talking to herself (people who heard voices in their head couldn’t afford that eccentricity), she nonetheless found herself addressing the empty air. “No. Please. Fuck. I mean, fuck. You liar. You liar. You liar!” Her voice broke like a plate thrown at a wall.

Where was her bag? In the corner. Where were her pants? By the foot of the bed, underwear tucked inside. Her shoes, with socks, tucked inside. Where was her sweater? By the pillows. Where was her bra? No, forget it, forget it, she didn’t have time. She didn’t tie her sneakers, she didn’t zip the jeans, or buckle the belt. No time no time no time. She pried apart the slats in the vertical blinds and squinted through, but there was nothing to see from there. She flung herself at the door, out the door, against the metal railing with rust the same color as the cinnamon carrots her mother would bake. She leaned over, gripping the metal so hard she'd later find metal flakes under her nails.

The tops of cars and the maid’s cleaning cart. Two kids trying to steal from the vending machine. The laundry room. A stray cat licking something off the wall. Rows and rows and rows of doors. Pizza delivery girl. And the highway and there—there!—was Mr. Splash, lumbering back across the street to the IHOP. He walked straight to his truck, looking neither left nor right and certainly not back to the motel.
“Ed!”
Nothing. He kept going.
“Hey!” She meant to scream it, she really did, but something sat on the word and squished all of the strength out of it. “Hey!” She tried again, but now she was thinking.
And unable to stop.
What did she think she was going to do? Chase him down and quibble about the money he’d promised her—or, at least, implied? How did one go about screaming at a man who’d underpaid you for sex? Was there a way to win that argument? She wasn’t exactly in a position to threaten—

Well.

Actually.

She glanced at her bare hands, her fingers clenched to whiteness around the railing. Considering. Maybe...

No, she thought. Never. She’d never do that again.

--or call the police. And here was a greasy thought, adhering to the lining of her skull like spaghetti noodles to the pot: had he actually underpaid her? Had he truly? After all, he’d gotten the motel room. How much had that cost? And she could stay in it all night. She could stay at least til check out time. There were free cookies and coffee in the main building, free vending snacks if she followed those kids’ lead.

Virginity—oh, god—aside, was she any worse off than she’d been before? Really? Fifty dollars. She could add that to the three dollars she had tucked in the lining of her shoe. Fifty dollars and a place to sleep with an actual lock. Fifty dollars and a shower just to listen to some grunting in her ear, to stare at a freckled, fat shoulder and dirty ceiling blades. Just a bit of soreness and the knowledge that she’d set down a piece of herself she couldn’t pick back up. Was it worth it? Was she?

Mr. Splash was backing his truck carefully out of the parking spot now. He guided it out of the lot and headed towards the highway. He used his blinker; he came to complete stops at stop signs and an extra one to wave a jogger across the road.
“Hey,” she said. But she didn’t even say it this time. She mumbled it. Her mother would be ashamed. Hay is for horses, young lady.

“Hey yourself,” offered a voice to her right. A few doors down. Young, lanky man in artfully ripped jeans cupped his hands around a slim lighter and a slimmer smoke. He put the former back into his jacket pocket and looked her up and down and up again. Slowly, cheerfully. Taking inventory. When he smiled she saw both incisors. “How're you, then?”

She stormed back into the hotel room, hooking the chain and twisting the lock until she was certain it wouldn’t go any further.

But, because she was learning to be a practical person, she’d taken a moment to smile at the man first. To push her hair back and respond—“I’m just fine.”

It was like driving on the interstate, she thought. Like driving on the interstate and the car in front of her had abruptly stopped. Even over the squeal of her own breaks she knew what was going to happen, knew it. It was coming on too fast to be changed.
And because she had just answered her question, she walked calmly, measuredly back to the bathroom. She knelt before the toilet, lifted the lid—touching the germy porcelain as little as she could get away with. And then she leaned forward and let her stomach heave until she was completely, completely empty inside.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

This was after, of course. It would never have been an option before. After New York, after The Statue, after The Professsor and those glorious days at the school.
It was after Control.

To Run in Circles
Chapter Nine


Jean uncapped the syringe. She hadn’t bothered with makeup in a few days, and without it her eyes looked like small, scarlet-laced marbles. They were purpled beneath—by sleep loss, not fists. Too many nights staring at a ceiling or a wall or at Scott or a medical chart. She was wearing a turtle neck—her red one, her favorite, although less form fitting than it had once been since she lived almost exclusively on coffee and ibuprofen. Jean wore her white coat and surgical gloves, blue ones pulled from a box kept on the table just outside the door as a reminder for anyone who intended to go near Her. The overall effect of this wardrobe—the red, the white, the blue--was one of scary patriotism.

Rogue developed a reaction to the snap of latex like that of certain caged animals. Understandable, as it rarely meant good things. Her breath would speed up; her bladder tighten. She too wore gloves—cloth ones that climbed all the way up her shoulders, like some grand Shakespearian lady. She doubted, however, that the Elizabethans secured their gloves with such tight straps or had the wrists bound together. This forced her into a near-constant prayer position, an appeal never answered except with joint pain.

All things considered, hers wasn’t the worst cage a mutant could be placed in. Xavier had made that emphatically clear. The chamber was spacious, with walls made of glass (the kind that didn’t break, regardless of what or who you threw against it) but ample privacy screens, positioned tactfully around the bed and toilet. She also had shelves overflowing with books and magazines, puzzles. A radio that played the top forty in the morning and classical in the afternoon. A mounted television which would show any film she wanted, even those fresh out of theater. A dorm-size refrigerator with her favorite snacks and a soft bed--to which she was no longer tied, having promised to stop biting people.

Rogue paid very little attention to these amenities. Or to the pain. Or to the fear. There seemed to loom a Great Wall between that part of her which felt things and saw things, and the part that simply…floated. She lived in fog, drifting in a place somewhere between fantasy and recollection. Her lucid periods started and ended with Jean’s visits, with the tap of a fingernail on the side of a syringe, with the sparkling tip of the needle, and with the critcch that Velcro made when a flap in the glove was opened just enough to expose a vein. Sometimes, like today, Jean was accompanied—although not lately by The Professor, who was giving her Time to Think Things Over. Rather, she was followed into the cell by her husband, trailing at her heels like a dog who no longer needs a leash. They found the girl curled cat-like in the corner, absently tugging threads out of the rug and piling them in a little mound, a pyramid of string. They didn’t pause their conversation, but continued it sotto voce, as one might expect around the ill or sleeping—

“Any sign of him?”

“No. No news.”

“We can’t stay in this lockdown forever.” Together, the two carried the girl back to the bed. She didn’t fight. Her feet were numb, heavy. And her lips. And her eyes.

“I’m aware of that, Jean. I don’t suppose you have any idea what he’s planning?”

A long pause. “No.” Scott held Rogue’s arms down as his wife checked and rechecked the dosage. His jaw was clenched, and from her position she could count how many places his razor had missed.

Rogue didn’t know who they were talking about and she didn’t particularly care, although she had a vague feeling that she had, once. She caught the redhead’s eye as the needle went entered her arm, and held if for as long as she could. “Some doctor you are,” she mumbled, just for the vague pleasure of seeing the spasm that crossed Jean’s face.



::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::;
It had begun to snow again. From beneath her eyelashes she watched the flakes dropping outside the window—fat bulbs resembling packing peanuts—and her breath inside it. Billowing in and out, dragonesque. Earlier, she had drawn an M in the frostiest corner of the glass, as she had so many times in so many vehicles since Meridian. When this vehicle was moving it rattled, like it had swallowed a percussionist, and when it stopped—as it did now—it was with a groan like death.

“Hey.” The driver gave her shoulder a rough shake. She flinched, though his contact was brief and separated from her skin by two shirts, a sweater, coat, and scarf. She’d been awake before he touched her, although experience had taught the girl to assess surroundings before admitting consciousness. The surroundings she was assessing now were not promising: decrepit automobiles in a decrepit lot around a decrepit pile of wood you’d call a building if you were feeling kind.

Or concussed.

Her heart contracted painfully, and she sent a suspicious glance toward the driver, whose name was something grunted 400 miles back. “What is this? You said you’d take me as far as Laughlin City.”

“This is Laughlin City,” he said, with no sense of irony. Or perhaps too much.

It was Laughlin City. The frost bitten sign between the ugly Chevy and the uglier camping trailer confirmed it. The letters as faded as the initial she’d drawn on the window. The man waited only long enough to see her out of his vehicle and lock it before stomping off to do whatever it is one did in Laughlin City.

She stood in the falling white, which was much colder than packing peanuts should be. She clutched her duffel against her, wishing it was fuller.

And then she followed, because her options were 400 mile back.

It turned out that what one did in Laughlin City was spill large mouthfuls of bad beer while shouting through a haze of smoke and crushed peanut shells. There were animal skins on the walls, tiered benches made of wooden pallets. It took a while to identify the noise, and a while longer to find its source—a metal cage in the center of the room. There was no other word for it--cage, but she didn’t get to see what or who it housed. The crowd was too thick. A sea of flannel and denim, middle school dropouts and domestic violence arrests. The tide rushed to the bar and back again. She could scarcely step without her way being barred by a sweaty back or drinking arm. And when she did—it was towards the bar, the ache in her throat sharper than curiosity. Whatever these rednecks were booing over, it wasn’t going to help her.

She hovered at the counter, attempting to look the right kind of pitiful. Nobody took the bait—which was to say, nobody took much notice of her. There was a fight—that was it, that what was going on in the cage. She gathered this over the next hour. When her ears adjusted to the din she could hear it, the slap of meat on meat. Some kind of competition—the kind that necessitated a mop bucket in the corner with pink water. Men and women were taking bets around her, their moods cresting and falling. None of it did her any good. She didn’t have any money for food, let alone to lay down.

She couldn’t see the man who’d brought her here.

In time she found an open seat, slightly sticky—for reasons she didn’t care to deduce. And there she sat, trying to look as alluring as a person can when they are wearing so many layers of clothing and thinking about dying in the Canadian wilderness. Because that was what she faced, if she couldn’t get a ride before this bar closed. Most of the patrons seemed to know each other but not the kind to travel; half the tires in the parking lot were on their last roll. She needed to reach an actual city, someplace she could find work. She needed someone—someone safe. A Good Samaritan, but not the Ted Bundy variety. She needed a plan. She needed money. Money to—

“Can I get you something?” The bartender leaned over the calloused bar top, whiskers studded his cheeks like splinters. If he was the owner then she supposed it was right, what they said about people growing to resemble their pets.

“I’ll have some water, please.”

“With what?”

“With…just the water. Thanks.”

He grunted either disgust or assent, and several resentful minutes later slammed a glass in front of her. It might have slopped over, had he filled it high enough to slop. Around them the crowd roared as something brutal happened in the cage. A voice began to speak over them and the screeching protests of a cheap microphone.

”Gentlemen, in all my years—“

“He spat in your drink.”

The voice was so smooth that it seemed almost part and parcel with her own thoughts. So cleanly did it cut through the din she wondered if it might be a voice in her head, although rarely did any of them sound so confident. Instead of psychosis, she found the true speaker perched on a stool right at her side. Its former occupant, a meth head with a James Dean t-shirt, had vanished without as much as a rustle.

The person who sat there now was nothing like the other women in the bar—leopard tops and terrible perms, shaking hands lighting bummed cigarettes. This one was wearing a jacket that could feed a family of four for a month—although that leather didn’t look very warm. What it did look was extremely fitted—confirmed by the glances of men nearby and the prompt attendance of the bartender. A hand with a pert engagement ring waved him off. Nails long and exact, painted to match the color of her lips, which was painted to match the color of her hair, which was the shade of some mythic bird. She was beautiful.

“He spat in your drink,” this creature repeated. “The bartender. I wouldn’t drink it.” Double parenthesis framed the corners of her mouth, giving her the impression of smiling even when she wasn’t—but she was now. At the—gently, amicably. “Actually, I wouldn’t touch a peanut in this place without antibacterial wipes.”

The girl smiled into her lap. She set the glass back down, although she still quite thirsty.

“This isn’t the nicest place for someone your age. Are you alone? Did you come here with somebody?” The woman glanced around the bar, eyes lingering on the cage. Her nose wrinkled, as if she couldn’t imagine someone might enjoy such barbaric entertainment.

“Yes,” she answered. “I mean, no I—“

“I hope you don’t mind my asking. Only, I work at a school, and it’s troubling for me to see somebody like yourself in this environment.”

“No, not at all. I just--” She felt nervous, having a conversation with this creature, the way she’d felt around cheerleaders at school (before frostbite took the place of popularity on her list of concerns). At the same time, there was something gracious about the woman. Imperturbable. She imagined she could say anything and the woman would sympathize, anything at all—

She blinked. What was she thinking?

The redhead was staring at her, eyebrow lifted delicately.

A tremendous noise rattled the bottles of beer on the wall behind the counter, a crash so great she thought the building might be about to collapse around them. That possibility remained, but it wasn’t the source of the commotion—it seemed that someone heavyset and (now) unconscious had been thrown against the wall of the cage. The metal and wire mesh shrieked in protest, and so did the spectators who’d lost their bets. Her companion frowned. Cerise nails clicked irritably on the counter, hard enough to threaten the paint.

The redhead turned back with only a slight crease in her forehead, and leaned towards her just like they were the dearest confidantes. Her breath touched her ear. “May I be completely honest with you?”

In response the girl leaned away, nearly falling into the leather fetishist on the stool to her left. He didn’t notice; he was studying the backwash in his tumbler. She blushed. “Um. Yes?”

“I don’t mean to alarm you.” To prove this, the woman put her hands in her lap and crossed her ankles, as if to make herself look the least possible reason for alarm. “My name is Jean. Or Doctor Grey. And the thing is—the thing is, I believe I know who you are. Are you Ma—Oh, please don’t. It’s okay. Please sit back down. I’m not going to hurt you. I swear I won’t.”

“You said you were a teacher.”

“I am. Well, I work at a school. I’m a doctor. Look—just sit down, okay? We’re in a public place. I didn’t come here to frighten you or--or, for that matter, for this boozy ambiance. I want to help you. I’m here to help you.” The woman—Jean—plucked a card out of a pocket in the wrist of her jacket (that would be great for poker, the girl thought, a little frantically) and held it out until she took it. Their fingertips didn’t quite touch, a restraint that, in hindsight, couldn’t have been anything but deliberate.

“I’m part of a group. A team that’s built something of a safe haven for—“

“’Gifted Youngsters?’”

“That’s right.”

She turned the card over. It was black, with a yellow ‘X’ in the center. The edges were sharp. “You think I might be a gifted youngster?”

“I know you are.”

She shook her head, but she couldn’t meet Jean’s eyes. Her mind was screaming Doctor She hated doctors. Doctors were dangerous. But so was causing a scene. “Why would you want to help me?” she stalled.

“Because—my team? That’s what we do. And we have reason to believe you might be in some peril.”

“Peril?”

“Danger.”

“I know what it means,” an ember of teenage indignation flared up, and with it her southern accent at its thickest. “I can take care of myself. I have been.”

Jean said condescendingly, “I’m sure you have. But this is—you know, I don’t think this is something we should discuss here. Will you let us—“

“’Us?’”

“My friend is waiting in the car. She’d stand out a bit in here, and we didn’t want that. Her name is Ororo—you’ll like her. Everyone does. Will you come to the school? Or allow you give you a ride, at least, and hear us out? You can’t intend to stay here all night.”

A voice in her head was screaming, Don’t take candy from strangers! It sounded suspiciously like her mother’s. She crossed her arms over her chest, tried to sound firm. “You expect me to just get in a car with you? Why would I do that?”

The woman sighed, smiling in a way that said, Do you have a better offer? But, to her lasting credit, she didn’t say that. She whispered instead, “Because we’re rather gifted ourselves.”

She nodded pointedly at the glass of water, focusing her gaze on it until the girl did the same, and they both watched the cup lift slightly—but definitely in the air. Nothing holding it up. It hovered only a moment, then came clattering down. Liquid streamed slowly across the counter, possibly the nicest thing that had been spilled there in some time.

“Well. I’m still working on some things. I’m not Matilda.” Ignoring the cursing approach of the bartender, Jean stood. She pushed her stool in with one hand and ran the fingers of the other through her hair, cracked her neck, looked sidelong at the girl—whose eyes were still round in shock—and said, by way of conclusion and farewell. “It’s your call. Nobody is going to make you do something you don’t want to do.”

And then she was gone, just like that, gliding confidently between the patrons and out the door, as if carried on invisible wings.

It had happened so fast. She could hear her heart, wet drumming in her ears. Dry lips. Clenching stomach. There was no time for deliberation, just a hitching in her chest, an excitement quite indivisible from fear. As the bartender swiped halfheartedly at the spilled drink, she jumped down from her stool. She nearly tipped it and herself over. “I’m sorry,” she said to the old man, who grunted something vulgar in reply.

She barely heard him. The strap of her duffel was pulled onto her shoulder in a quick, practiced motion. The crowd didn’t part for her the way they had for Jean, but she made it through with hasty excuse-me’s and a liberal use of her elbow. She might have caused quite an argument, but everyone’s attention was on the cage. The man with the microphone seemed to be wrapping things up for the evening.

A cheek-stinging flurry of snow met the girl when she left the bar. That, and a sleek black vehicle. All the others in the lot were drowning in white, but this one was untouched—it didn’t even have the wipers going. She didn’t pause to question this, driven into the backseat by cold and her own momentum. Honestly, she was afraid of what would happen if she took too long to consider, to really consider these things. She was so tired of watching her every move. Leather seats and heat that was like a bath, Debussy bubbling softly out of the radio. Bottles of soda and water in a box by the floor. Jean grinning at her from the passenger seat and another woman, with a shock of white hair, from behind the wheel.

What choice did she have?

To Run in Circles:
Chapter Ten



Then

It happened on a Thursday night, just minutes shy of a Friday morning. Friday the thirteenth, obviously, because what her life needed was irony.

It happened during a nightmare. It happened with a crowd of onlookers.
It happened to Jean.

They’d placed her in a dorm with two other mutants, although she protested as much as one could a thing freely given. The road might have taught her that, but as a Southerner those travel-sized morals packed into her already from a very young age. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Marie. Kids are starving in China. Hey is for horses. Keep crying and I’ll give you something to cry about. All the standard correctors of behavior and hope.

Xavier’s gift horse had three futons and a communal dresser, one roommate who spent an hour in the bathroom every morning and another who entered without knocking—and not always through the door. Single suites were for the X-Men and Special Cases. Apparently, she didn’t qualify for the latter; was too young for the former. “I hope soon you will be past the need or desire for isolation,” The Professor had told her warmly, over a cup of get-to-know-you tea. He was referring to her control. Not that she had control. Not that she was gaining control…Not that she had any reason to believe Control was more than the Santa Claus of Mutant High.

Her roommates were polite if distant—which was only to be expected, considering that her presence shrank valuable closet space—and they had too much experience with nightmares to condemn hers. Still, they’d been told about The Skin Issue, so when the new girl started kicking off the sheets and thrashing around on her bed, Kitty melted right through the walls to fetch a teacher. In a ratty t-shirt, without hair gel or foundation and looking far more like the child she denied herself to be, Jubilee pressed herself against the panels, wishing she could follow. But instead, she was stuck. Stuck in this room with someone arching their back as if they’d been electrocuted, like that creature from that horror movie they’d watched last week. Any animal making the noises that new girl was making would be put down. Should be put down. Gargles and groans and screams.

She’d find a way to turn it into a joke tomorrow. She couldn’t, just then. Jubilee was relieved beyond humor when Dr. Grey swept in, silk dressing gown trailing like the feathers of a bird in flight. Composed, compassionate, competent. As always. Good ol’ Jean.

The new girl didn’t see good ol’ Jean’s composed, compassionate, competent face no more than she saw the lamp go crashing to the floor or her new roommates rushing to get backup. She was aware only of the cage of her own mind-- a pink, fleshy room--every stolen voice in her head screaming to be let out.

She heard one even after she opened her eyes, even when she saw her fingers closed over Jean’s—not the woman’s hands, which were covered, nor her shoulders, which were covered--but her neck, which was bare and leaning so alarmingly above her. Veins jumped beneath the doctor’s surprised expression. The paleness of her, the cold, skin-colored ice. Ice her fingers were stuck to. Frozen. Only Jean’s eyes moved, and they darted over the girl’s face like the hopping steps of a finch. Asking a question that joined the chorus. It wasn’t unexpected. It was the first question. The one they always, always asked:

What’s happening to me?
And then the second, as terribly familiar:
Why is this happening to me?

The room had begun to shake. Bottles of nail polish, books, cups sliding off the dresser. The other beds lifting and dropping like bucking horses. She couldn’t tell who was doing it—herself or Jean or both, but it was clear they couldn’t stop it. The voice in her head was loud, louder than the crash of their furniture, louder than the shouts of the students gathering at the door. Teenagers frightened and sleep-tousled back into the shape of children. Their shouts were earnest but collectively ineffectual at separating Jean from the girl, and they were unwilling to do more. What if the new girl’s powers were like some electric current that could continue through a chain of bodies? For mutants, this was not so unreasonable a theory. It took Scott, wearing his glasses and pajama bottoms and nothing else, to wrap his arm around his wife’s waist and finally drag her out of Rogue’s grip. Together the couple crashed against the other bed, which lay still now, immobile as an inanimate object should be.

Everyone was staring at her. The kids, Scott. She didn’t need borrowed telepathy to know what they were thinking, but she had it anyway and they were exactly the kind of thoughts you’d expect.

And Jean stared, too, before her eyes rolled back in her head and she began to seize. She was looking at Rogue, and the gaze that had darted before was fixed, focused, as was the question running through her head. The most honest thoughts Jean Grey would ever share with the girl, amplified a thousand times between them:

What does Charles want with you?

____________________________________________________


“Jean doesn’t blame you, Rogue. Nobody blames you.” She sat sideways on the train seat, knees angled toward the girl.

“It was an accident.”

“Of course it was.” Ororo didn’t say it reassuringly, she said it with surprise as if there wasn’t any doubt. The girl appreciated this, especially because the telepathy she’d borrowed from Dr. Grey had worn off and she couldn’t hear the knives behind the soft words. She didn’t want to. Nice to pretend they weren’t there. She turned away from the teacher, the forgiveness burning like a match held to her throat. Outside the window, the station attendants were arguing with a blue-haired passenger who seemed to have lost her purse on the last train. She was gesturing quite emphatically and the employees kept rolling their eyes at each other—she was going to slow everything up.

“You’re not in trouble, Rogue.”

“That’s not it.” Or, at least, not all of it—or too much of it. Ugh. She barely knew her own thoughts.

“What is it, then? Look—look at me. I know you’re worried about hurting someone. We all worry about that, with our mutations—I’m sorry, our gifts. See, even I have trouble sometimes remembering that the abilities I have are a blessing. We’ve all been where you are. Just come back to the mansion. I’m sure, in time, you’ll come to see—well, The Professor says you show a lot of promise.” Ororo paused. She looked closer at the young girl. “What is it, Rogue? What aren’t you saying?”

She played with the edge of her gloves, trying to find words that wouldn’t sound petulant. Or paranoid. “It’s been weeks. He doesn’t--the sessions don’t seem to be helping much,” she confided. It was true. So far the meetings with The Professor consisted of them sitting knee to knee, his hands hovering around her head. She’d kept her eyes shut to avoid awkward eye contact, but it still felt weird—not least because of the sensation of knuckles knocking on the wall of her mind. Nothing else had come of it, although—

--although. She thought hard. Although—the last person she had touched had stayed in a coma for three weeks. Jean had already woken. That was an improvement. Was it Control? And if so, was that Xavier’s doing, or hers? Maybe--

But this hope was punctuated when she thought of touching Jean, what she’d heard as she fled through the mansion, doors opening and closing, objects flying from shelves, flukes of a borrowed mutation. What does Charles want with you?

“Does The Professor need me to do something?”

“Why would you say that?” For the first time, Ororo’s brow creased and her smile dropped. “Rogue, why would you say that?”

She looked at the teacher, everything about her the epitome of trust, and found herself wishing that Jean’s power had lingered just a bit longer. “Would you still help me if I didn’t want to go back to the mansion?”

“Of co—,” the teacher started to say.

And then the train tore in half.

__________________________________________________________

In fact, she was told more about what had happened to her than she actually remembered happening to her.

What She Was Told:

Jean, despite being in a state of recovery, rallied immediately when she heard her student was in trouble.

How did they know? When had Scott had time to call them? How did they get there so quickly? Had they been waiting outside the station the entire time, while Ororo went in to speak with her?

Xavier had done everything he could to talk Magneto down, but when it came down to a choice between letting her go with them or the death of a dozen police officers, what could he do? What could he do? He’d erased the memories of the witnesses, of course. To protect her.

To protect her?

The Professor was gravely injured by the serum Mystique had placed in Cerebro. She wasn’t to blame for this, of course. Truly. The whole team came to save her and the city from Magneto.

And an entire summit of people in powerful positions.

They thought she was dead. If Scott had blasted the torch a minute later, she would have been. She was lucky. She was so lucky.
She should be grateful.

What She Remembered:

The blades swirling around her. A silver tornado with fingers of light reaching, stretching out—from the machine, from her--as if they wanted to caress the city below. The city she glimpsed in slats and gasps, beautiful as the light washed towards it. Magneto’s thoughts in her head and his power—blistering, joyous power—lifted from her veins. And then a flash, a flush, a sword of red. Disrupting the blades, sending them tumbling and shrieking like acrobats from the trapeze. And her, too, because Scott’s laser had cut right through her side. A shark bite. Toothy flames.

All the beautiful lights went out.


___________________________________________________________

What She Was Told:

She was safe now. She was safe, thanks to the team. Erik Lensherr had been arrested by the authorities and pending trial. And best of all—Was she paying attention? The Professor sat at eye level next to her bed in the med lab. The lines in his face smoothing out in some places and doubling in others because this was good news, and he relished delivering good news. Best of all—he’d taken the liberty of walking through her mind while she lay in the coma. And he believed he’d found the key to Control. For her, that is. Over her powers. Now, now. No need to speak, she was perfectly welcome.

Lifting her head up to see the length of herself under the thin lab blanket. The warm, long-lost sensation of a hand holding hers. The Professor’s hand. Skin soft and hairless and remarkably strong for its age. She found herself crying, couldn’t wipe her face until he let go. He didn’t.

What She Remembered:

Cracks in the wall of her mind, widening. Bricks pulled loose and a voice whispering through the stone.

Listen to me.

_______________________________________________________

They were gathered in the entertainment room, sardine-close so that they could see the television. All the students, the ones old enough to understand, all the teachers, except those minding the ones too young to understand. The room was hot with their collective breath. There’d been various bids to get another set installed in other rooms, but Xavier was old-fashioned. He said it would rot their brains. Rogue didn’t mind the closeness, even though some of the boys had just come in from a basketball game and brought the sweat to prove it.

For once, no one seemed to mind sharing the room with the girl. Although they’d celebrated her control (with a cake, red velvet) weeks ago, overtures of friendship had come slowly from those who had witnessed her ‘attack’ on Jean Grey. Fear runs deep, and even among outcasts, there exists a hierarchy of Odd. Even now, it was one of the teachers who made room for her on the sofa, and an embarrassing show of calling her over. That’s how she ended up with a prime seat for the show, between Ororo and Bobby (who was holding tight to Kitty’s waist). The screen featured only a curtain at the moment, and a ribbon of words already read and reread.

…despite the surprising renunciation on the part of Senator Kelly, now facing heated criticism from his longtime supporters…Mutant Registration Bill passed almost unanimously……many such measures enacted around…the terrorist attack on Liberty Island…Attorney General stated yesterday in his…

She was aware of Ororo’s perfume—spicy, exotic—and of Bobby’s shoulder against hers, chilly beneath his sweater. She was aware that Jubilee’s hair was puffing with static and John, at a loss for what to do with his hands since the confiscation of his lighter, was chewing his cuticles. Scott was gazing somberly at the screen as if to set an example for all of them;and Jean kept glancing around to make sure they followed it. The only real missing link to their nervous little tangle was The Professor. He mingled less and less with the residents of the mansion these days. Some said he’d never quite recovered from the Cerebro poisoning. Rogue guessed it had more to do with the verdict in the Erik Lensherr trial. He was the only one who’d seemed surprised, just as Senator Kelly was the only one to condemn it.


On their TV screen, and on screens all around the country, the little clock in the corner changed silently to 5:55. The curtain drew back. The picture quality was rough, because of both the distance of the camera to the subject and the many layers of plastic in between. It was as if they’d scored theater tickets only to discover theirs were the worst seats in the house. The actors wore shapeless clothes and masks, gloves. It was a degree of coverage exceeding even Rogue’s, but Ororo explained, almost to herself, that this was to prevent identification, not contact. The government was concerned about mutant retribution against the employees. They were thorough—all four figures were the same height, whether naturally, or because their shoes had been adjusted to make it so. Their genders couldn’t be told apart. The walls in the little room were bare, the same color that the curtain had been. Grey, like steel, though it was anything but.

The only person they knew was the old man on the table, and only because it wasn’t likely to be anyone else. He wasn’t struggling, just lying there, perhaps already drugged. He was not asked to speak and didn’t. A voice, digitally altered, read Magneto’s crimes and the sentence, in case there were any uninformed viewers left. She doubted it. The seconds ticked down. At 6:00 exactly, one of the four disguised figures inserted a special needle—glass—into his arm, and at 6:06 Magneto was pronounced dead.

Public executions had, of course, been banned several years ago. But after Liberty Island, they’d written an amendment for nonhumans.
There was murmuring in the room around her, but for the most part, the students were still, quiet as if buried under invisible snow. They hardly seemed to breathe. Rogue asked herself if she felt relieved. Magneto had, after all, kidnapped her. Threatened her life and those of so many people. Innocent people, a term which stretched to include humans but no further. She should be relieved. It wouldn’t be wrong.

Instead, she shivered, recognizing the world around and inside her as a much colder place than it used to be.

To Run in Circles
Chapter Eleven




The inconvenience of healing factor meant that he was awake, wanting to scream long before his lungs repaired themselves to the degree that would allow him to do so. Even then, there wasn’t much air and what little there was came filtered through flame and smoke and brick. Logan’s bottom half was trapped. Craning his neck up, he thought he recognized a section of the second-floor bathroom—a door, a wall, a sink. Pipes wove in and out of his skin like some half-assed sewing project.

Cutting himself free took a long time, pulling himself out took longer. He hacked at the rubble until he could sit up, and then continued working his way down, slashes of his claws that might just as easily sever the legs he was trying to free. He glimpsed an adamantium femur, threads of grey among the pink and the red.
In his chest, which still smoldered a bit from Scott’s laser, his heart spluttered indignantly, threatened to quit, but always grudgingly returned to its work. It didn’t seem to understand why it should pump blood he was just going to spill everywhere. The only advantage was the thin layer of moisture, a protectant from the heat that didn’t protect for very long.

He passed out, woke, passed out again. The smell of his own burning muscles filled his nostrils, made him think of steaks forgotten on a grill, charred and inedible.

The crushed bodyparts screamed when the pressing weights on top of them were shifted, screamed more as he tried to move. He lay back, choking too hard to rest but keeping still until veins and tissue fell back in line. Someone else would have had ample chances to wish for death and be glad when it was given to him; he only got the first. Logan crawled, scrambled over pieces of the ceiling that was now the floor, or some jigsaw equivalent. His skin picked up glass and splinters like a lint brush.

The flames were roaring, an entire zoo’s worth of predators released for the hunt. Fire zig-zagged over the grass. Behind him, the lab stood like a smashed birthday cake. He tried to guess how much time might have passed since they’d blown up the building.

He couldn’t remember hearing the Blackbird take off, but he wasn’t sure he’d had working eardrums at that point.
What they heard now were helicopters, blades thumping the air like a boxer’s gloves on a punching bag. It was possible they weren’t military, he thought. Possible, if unlikely. They might be forest services, come to salvage what they could of the hills. Rescue teams. Maybe a News crew.

Regardless, none of those would make it okay for him to be spotted standing around Ground Zero, so he made for the least ignited tree line. Blood-drenched, soot-soaked, organs cooked enough to be served on a plate. Dazed and tired, the remains of his leather X-suit more nuisance than an answer to the demands of cold air and decency. That Logan was able to leave the area before the authorities arrived spoke to the marvel of his healing factor, but it had more to do with how very fucking angry he was.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eleven days. He got himself clean, clothed. He got a vehicle, and enough cash to smooth the way. In the process, Logan committed several crimes—some of which were necessary, a few that just made him feel better. Logan wondered what they’d told the junior team about why he’d been left behind if they’d told them anything at all. He wondered if the subject of him had had its very own debriefing. He wondered if they’d send someone after him.
When the time was right, he spent a week leaving indicators of a route he never intended to take—a clawed ATM in Detroit, a terrified desk clerk in Battle Creek, a bar fight in Fort Dodge. Let them think he was healing. Let them think he was hiding, but not well. Let them think he was moving away from New York. And he did, for a while—the fake route took him west, towards Oregon.

Then he turned south.

________________________________________________________________________________________________


“Don’t move.”

One arm’s worth of claws pointed at the reverend’s sternum, and the other closer, draped across the man’s neck, the edges drawing up tiny red dots if he took so much as a deep breath. He was wearing a white dress shirt with pearl buttons, not so immaculate as it had been some twenty minutes ago. There were rips now, wet patches. The man shifted his weight; Logan settled the blades a centimeter deeper, through shirt and flesh. The wet patches grew.

“I said don’t move.”

“How did you get past my security team?” he wheezed, scarcely parting his lips.

“That was a security team?”

Sweat was loosening the adhesive that kept the man’s toupee on. His cheeks spasmed; water shivered in his eyes. For someone who made thousands preaching to a stadium’s worth of churchgoers, twice as many watching from home, he was having trouble forming coherent sentence now. “Puh-please. You d-d-don’t need—Oh, Jesus—don’t kill me.”

“Is that taking the Lord’s name in vain? I can never tell.”

“P-lease. I have money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I have—I have influence.”

“Don’t want your influence.”

“Then how about a beer?”

Then the reverend, head of six megachurches in the continental U.S. and the owner of twice as many bank accounts overseas rippled. He lost three inches and thirty pounds, as well as his clothing. The toupee became real hair, redder than anything a salon could sell and slicked close to the scalp--her scalp.
“Or would you prefer something stronger?”

“I wouldn’t say no.” Logan took a step back from Mystique, but slowly. One could never really tell which version of her you’d get, even when she looked like herself. She didn’t break eye contact with him, rubbed a pinkie finger over the scratches he’d made and then sucked on it. He watched her sashay across the apartment, righting chairs as she went. “I really liked that lamp,” she mentioned, stepping over the pieces. “Would you have killed me, if I was the reverend?”

“Be a waste of gas money if I didn’t.”

“Mm,” she agreed. “And you knew that I wasn’t because-?”

“We’ve been tracking you.”

“Charles lost Cerebro.”

“Not like that. Every year or so, some far-right son of a bitch in power has a change of heart, starts preaching tolerance towards mutants. That runs its course, then starts somewhere else. This time you were literally preaching. Not gonna lie, we all got a kick out of it.”

“Ratings plummeted.”

“I bet they did.”

She opened the mini-bar, pulled out two bottles—bending slowly, glancing back over her shoulders with a smile.
Logan kept his claws out.

“It’s nearly time for a change, anyway.”

“You gonna put up “Make America Human Again” signs?”

“Don’t be silly; I’ll have people to do that for me.” Placing one of the bottles on a nearby coffee table, too cautious to quite bring herself back within arm’s reach, Mystique sat down on the couch and crossed one blue leg over the other. Patting the space next to her—“What brings you to Texas? I’d heard you were up north, doing all sorts of bloody things so that Charles can say he’s done good.”

“Not now. I need some help.” He took a seat on the edge of one of the newly upright chairs, picturing how many times, over the years, he’d tried to kill the woman across from him. Her expression seemed to suggest a similar train of thought. But her smirk seemed a little forced. Nobody else would have noticed, but Logan thought she might be worried for him.

“Whatever you did, be careful. He knows how to hold a grudge.”

“So do I.”

Mystique shrugged. She wasn’t going to waste valuable time contradicting him; she’d lost too many people she cared about to cling to the leftovers. “What is it you think I’m going to do for you?”

Logan blinked, looking down at his knuckles, his arms, where the blades had retreated. “I left something, up there in New York. I need you to help me get it back.”




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