Later, when they ask her what happened, she'll lie. She'll say she doesn't know.
It's not completely false; she doesn't remember any details until the point when she woke up staring at the ceiling-- not wanting to guess what the yellow stain was-- then hearing a man sing Elvis off-key in the bathroom. She never even had an opinion on Elvis before; now every time she hears one of his songs, there's an effect like a Vietnam vet hearing a car backfire. She shivers, or pushes people out of the way to find an exit-- she's developed quite a left hook-- or slides into a corner and takes her gloves off and dares anyone to cross an invisible line.
She doesn't tell the others about these new habits; she walks alone in the halls, buys her meals at the local gas station, locks the door to her bedroom and plays the radio too loudly while she writes next week's articles for the school paper. If she finishes that week, she starts the week after. If there isn't any news to write, she makes up her own. Stories of impossible boredom, of things like sale prices on lilac prom dresses and girls going to fall parties and kissing (fearlessly, without regard for consequences) boys in the garden. Then there are the other stories, those that she deletes as soon as she types the last word: stories about hotel rooms in downtown Philadelpia, of the many ways to break a bone, of the duct tape across her eyes and mouth.
When he comes to her door, with a smudge of some anonymous redhead's lipgloss shimmering on the side of his jaw, she wants to sit him down and tell him the deleted stories. She wants to push him aganst the wall and scream in his face all the names the Elvis man called her trying to break her into telling all the things clogging her brain like hair in a bathtub drain. She wants to see him wince. She can, she knows all his secrets now, all his soft places. A flash of her bare palm and she could have him on his knees, and God knows sometimes that's right where she wants him. But love, with all its inconvenient baggage and dead weight, keeps getting in the way.
So instead she lets him in and offers him a beer. Five months ago, she'd barely been able to pass for nineteen; now she can walk into any liquor store in the county and sell her age as twenty-one and she knows how to get around the I.D. problem. His redheads aren't the only women in town who know how to wield a tube of lipgloss like a machete. He turns down her offer, sticking with all the stubbornness of his latent honor to the deal he made with the One Eyed Wonder not to drink in front of students. But he doesn't try to stop her; maybe he figures he doesn't have the right, maybe he just doesn't know how. He could punch through metal and walk across fire and any other grand melodrama, just to save her, but he can't even look at the scars on her wrists without flinching.
/Heroes/ she thinks in disgust, digging in the back of her close for the half-empty beer bottle she hid during lunch. She knows why he's here. He sits on the edge of her bed and takes her hands in his and begs her to forgive him, for filling her up with his secrets, for not being able to stop her from walking down the wrong alley at the wrong time. For not being able to kill the man who did this to her, trying to finish whatever Stryker started. It's a page straight out of the Art of War. Back a man into a corner and he will fight. She was that corner; now that Jean had ascended to convenient martyrdom. Only someone had got the equation wrong; he hadn't come out, claws flashing, in his bereserker rage. He'd vanished for thirteen frickin' days, well beyond the very legal, very clean arrest of the Elvis man, then had the steel-plated nerve to show up at her hospital bed smelling of a brothel and carrying a bundle of flowers that had already wilted. He'd bought them three days ago and forgotten to water them.
He's seen her scars, all of them. It's like a game of truth or dare; he tells her to show him the worst thing, the worst thing that they did to her. You idiot, she says, the worst thing doesn't even leave a mark. She's looking at the raspberry ice lipgloss on his face when she says it, but of course he doesn't notice the connection, or pretends not to. Sometimes she suspects that he can be cruel.
The conversation is, by now, the same. She could set a recorder between them and just play the same thing over and over again.
"You should have told them," he says.
"Told them what?"
"Whatever they wanted to know about me."
"I might be cheap, but I'm not easy."
"You're not cheap either."
"Of course I am."
"You can't keep doing this--"
"Push yourself one step farther than anyone else can push you. You know that already, but I learned it in that motel room; that's how I survived. That's what takes their power, when you've taken yourself farther than anything they'll be able to pull."
"Xavier can--"
"I don't need him to play housekeeper in my head."
Silence.
"They would have hurt you." She hates the way that comes out, like an excuse for something she did wrong.
"They couldn't hurt me. You know that."
"You don't know them. They'd have found a way."
"How?"
"They're creative."
"Tell me what they did."
"You saw what they did."
"I want to know everything."
"I'm not gonna crucify you, sugah. Go back to the fight club, buy a drink, get some more lipgloss on your face--"
He jabs at his mouth with his sleeve, trying to wipe it away, but only succeeds in smearing it further. She wants to laugh.
"I didn't come here to interrogate you," he tells her.
"What are you here for, then?"
"I wanted you to know something."
"Another secret?"
"You never asked me why I didn't kill him."
"Who?"
"Don't."
"Just trying to avoid the obvious. I know why you didn't."
"I couldn't kill him."
Exactly. The Xavier Code of Honor must be maintained at all costs; they've house-trained you well."
"No. I couldn't kill him because...that was too easy."
"I can imagine the lack of challenge it'd pose to you. Do I skewer him or shred him or just swat him up against a wall?"
"You know that it took the police three days to catch him."
"Yeah. Even with you and Cyke on the trail. But then again, he was smart. No idiot could use a knife that many ways..."
"I found him ten minutes after I left the hotel room."
He stands up, not looking at her, but all the wall, at the Smashing Pumpkins poster she bought at a vintage music store for the feral look in Billy Corgan's eyes. She doesn't say anything now; she knows when to keep her mouth shut.
"There was this storage shed downtown," he says. His fingers rub the back of his knuckles. "One of those places that looked like cardboard boxes stacked together. The kind of place that doesn't ask questions."
(Her stomach, at this point, is a small hurricane. She hasn't even touched the beer.)
"I kept him in shed 204. I just made things up as I went along, and when I couldn't think of anything else, I called Summers. He came by for a while, with a blowtorch. He arranged things with the police; I didn't want to bring the guy in, but Cyke had an idea. We told him we'd give him up if he committed suicide in his cell; we even gave him a choice-- he could hang himself with his belt or slit his wrists with a razor blade we put in his shoe. It was that or we'd kill him on our terms. We made sure he knew we could get to him no matter where they put him in prison, no matter what he told the guards. He chose the belt, if you'll remember the rumors. I'm not surprised. Summers has a flair for that sort of thing."
She wonders if she's supposed to feel grateful. Or honored, or perhaps even smug because no matter how much he mourns for Jean and lets other women smear lip gloss on his face, he's never crossed these kind of lines for his lady-loves. Instead, she just feels a vague emptiness in the center of her chest. Her biggest and most convenient reason for hating him has just been deflated. She woke up in a hospital bed with bandages everywhere and a morphine drip in her arm and Bobby was sitting by her bed crying into the vase of overly-sweet pink roses he'd brought as some kind of reason-to-live bribe. The man who'd given her the secrets that gotten her into this whole thing was nowhere to be seen. It was so frickin' predictable that she laughed and then started sobbing. Everyone blamed the trauma. But now she can't hate him anymore, not after looking at his face and seeing that weight.
"Scott?"
"He lost Jeannie. He ain't about to lose another one of us. This an object lesson."
"That wasn't necessary."
"Yes. It was."
"Why? I'm not her."
(She flings it at him like a bullet, wanting him to flinch, out of reflex. Then she regrets it, but it's too late.)
"I couldn't have told her the things I told you."
"Afraid it might crack her perfectly flossed smile?"
"She wouldn't have understood."
"So you dumped it on me for safe-keeping then got all guilty when someone decided to pry it out of me? That's what this was? Some kind of penance?"
He traces the lower line of her jaw with his finger, and she hates him most because no matter how much she wants to pull away, she can't.
"I used you." (There it is, that naked honest voice.) "There are some things no one can keep to themselves, and after we got back from Stryker's, I had to tell someone. So I came to you. When you went missing, I knew why. And then we found you in that hotel room."
"Not a hallmark moment, to be sure."
"I didn't hunt him down for penance."
"Enlighten me, then."
"No one hurts you."
"No one but you, right?"
"That's not fair."
"If you want me to, darlin', I can lie to you."
"We...I...had to let them know what would happen the next time they tried to use you to get to me. They won't."
"Why does it matter?"
"Everyone needs someone else to keep them sane."
That's the closest thing to a declaration of love that she'll ever get from him. She drops her beer, still untouched, into the trashcan and notices his eyes flash with relief that he won't have to steer her through another hangover. /Here's to being Saint Marie of the Silence. Bendable, breakable, useable, irreplacable./ On impulse, she crosses the room to him, stands on tiptoe, and kisses his jaw over the sticky smear of lipgloss. She tastes raspberries and wax and sweat. He stiffens, like he can already feel her pulling out his electricity. But she pulls away before that.
"Rogue--"
"Need goes both ways. You best remember that."
He's gone before she can blink. Another of his convenient luxuries.
Later, when they all ask her what happened, she'll lie. She'll say she never loved him, that it was all a ruse, a two-week crush that never got past scribbling his name on the back of her physics book. But she always mixes a little truth into it. She exists outside of love, in all of the space that those four tiny letters can't fill, where the people you can't live without are the ones who'll save you or kill you or both. He'll come back again, when the things he can't say start filling up his throat and he needs her to pull them out. After he's finished telling her about the latest memory, she'll kiss him, just once, not even skin-to-skin. An even trade. She'll never tell him what happened to her in the hotel room, just like he won't tell her what he did after he found the Elvis man. They'll hold the possibilities as weapons over each other's heads, or else as razor wire, strung up in case either of them try to escape the other. Maybe it is love, some of the time.
But that's irrelevant. That's after the fact.
post-adrenaline notes (or, Why Espresso Is Dangerous To Writing)
soundtrack: Sinead O'Connor-- Troy, White Trance Mix
So this came partly from the idea that after Xavier's little Cerebro stunt, people aren't just goingto kiss-and-make-up with mutants because the President listened to a tolerance pep talk. And that got me thinking how far the X-men would go to make it clear that they weren't going to allow hunting season....and of course, Logan had to get a little bit feral and Rogue had to get some angst-time because she was entirely too perky in the movie. ::grin::
As I said, I had adrenaline issues. I'm much calmer now, really.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
Umm.....hi. I really haven't been in hiding, just college. I thought I'd sworn off my X-men writing adddiction, but X2 has left me with a plot bunny breeding farm. This is a rather feeble attempt to appease the bunny gods. I suspect I'm a bit rusty at this whole fic thing, so we'll cross our fingers and see how this goes... this isn't one of those neatly plotted stories; it just kind of happened after I went to see the movie again and needed to write off some serious adrenaline.