Outside the cell.
Robert Drake stood, sadly staring through the one-way glass into the room below. His face was stony, his expression cold. His wife, Kitty, leaned against him. She kept her face buried in his side, unable to face the view her husband endured. From the cool blue eyes she loved so much, amid the laugh lines and the beginning of crows’ feet surrounding those eyes, a few tears fell unnoticed.
He sighed, and ran a hand through his thick sandy hair, still full and wavy but starting to gray. He turned towards his wife, and held her close for a moment. It was always this hard. It probably always would be this hard.
“That’s enough.” His comment was as much for the attendant as for his wife. Robert and Kitty turned and left the room, left the facility without looking back. They would return, next month, as always.
On the other side of the glass, a young woman struggled against her restraints and her fate.
Inside the cell.
Rogue breathed slowly, trying to keep the appearance of calm. She knew that if she and Wolverine were too obvious in their efforts, the guards would come again. Still, every so often she’d grunt with the effort, but it was no use. The web of material restraining them was simply too tight, to fibrous, too sheer to grip, and she finally pursed her lips and considered.
“Darling, we’re going to have to wait. This stuff is just too efficient.” She smiled a tight little smile. “I guess they learned some from last time.”
She recalled the look on the guard’s face, a few years back, when her teeth had sunk into his arm, the copper tang of blood in her mouth, the jolt of life flowing into her even as the drugs tried to suppress her power. A little more contact, or a little more time, and they might have broken free. Instead, they’d just made their captors more careful.
“You hang on there, sugar,” she said. The overhead light shone in her eyes. She still had a girlish figure and a young woman’s face, but her eyes were stark with ancient fear and sadness and desire. She had the eyes of a very old soul.
From behind, just in her blind spot, the perverse place they located her partner, her lover, her friend, she heard a muffled sound. The same drugs that kept her restrained must have been doubled or tripled for Wolverine, and most days she could hear nothing from him but whispers and moans.
“Don’t worry, darling” she whispered fiercely, “Day’ll come. I’m going to get us out of here.”
She wished, as she did every night, that just once they would let her free long enough to see him, to touch him, to hold him again. She wished that her life wasn’t a series of days, in their cell, tied back to back with too many drugs and too many restraints and guards, always the guards. She had begun to dream that the cell would be tolerable, if only she could face him and feel his kiss just one more time.
Rogue breathed slowly, trying to keep the appearance of calm. She knew that if she and Wolverine were too obvious in their efforts, the guards would come again.
Outside the cell.
Alex Summers sat at his desk, pretending to study a report. In the five months since he’d taken over for Ororo Munroe, he’d had plenty of time to regret his decision to take the mantle of Head of the Xavier School. He looked again at the report in his hands, but his mind kept going back to another, more confidential report he’d received the day he took charge.
“Alex, I have something important to share with you,” Storm had told him. To the students she was firmly “Professor Munroe” but to Alex, she would always first be Storm, the woman who had recruited him into the X-Men to take his brother’s place. She’d spoken of Scott in a way that showed her love and respect, without the comparisons or judgment that he’d always felt, competing with his more accomplished brother. She’d managed to miss Scott while welcoming Alex, a careful dance.
Under her leadership, he’d gone from being Havoc, that hotheaded Summers boy, to Alex Summers, respected team leader and trusted mentor to a new generation of mutants.
She’d handed him the file, the dark blue file that had seemed so harmless. She cautioned him to read it in private, and to destroy his copy when he was done. Then, with a show of sadness that rarely made it to her stoic surface, she’d left him to study the folder’s contents.
At first the story was fantastic, familiar and terrifying. The “cure,” and its failure. The resurgence of the x-factor gene that had erupted just six months after the patients were allegedly cured by the Worthington serum. So many had regained their powers with odd kinks or limits. Some never regained them. Some had powers radically changed. Some, like Mystique, had possessed frightening new abilities that made them even more powerful or dangerous.
And then there was Rogue. He’d heard rumors, but had never known what to believe. All he knew for sure was that when her powers began to return, weak and intermittent, she’d turned to the one man she knew could survive an accidental dose, Logan. The man she admired, the man she had loved.
It was the shock of her new power manifesting that was responsible for what had come later. The more he read, the more he wished she had died. When he was done, he tossed the folder into the air and idly tossed a burst of high-energy plasma that reduced the vile contents of the innocent looking folder to superheated ash.
He wished all of his problems could be solved that way some times, but that wasn’t really a solution. That way lies madness. That way lies Magneto, and Phoenix, and anyone who feels the problems of power can be solved by more power.
He thought about Logan, about the time the two of them had worked together. The feral man-beast, the wise old man, and the metal-clad killing machine all wrapped into a stocky frame. He realized he’d not seen anyone smoke a cigar in over a dozen years. He wondered if there were any even sold around Westchester any more.
Time changes everything. Except for the Wolverine, of course.
Inside the cell.
Wolverine awoke in pain. Searing pain, tearing pain. The kind of pain he’d suppressed when they’d bonded the metal to his skeleton, peeling back the flesh piece by piece to expose each bone. He felt like he was being torn apart, piece by piece, all over again.
He realized she was sleeping. As close as they were, and considering all the drugs that were being pumped into both of them, her own power tended to shut him down when she was awake. It meant that despite all their time in shared confinement, he’d never really been able to speak to her.
He breathed, and even his dimmed senses could smell nothing but her, her flesh, her desire, her bitter hatred for their captors. He wished he could sense more, but the effort was just too great.
He closed his eyes and silently howled against the pain and the terrible injustice of it all. He prayed, in a way he hadn’t known he knew how, that she might never understand what his life was like, bound to her, caged, trapped forever. And forever in pain.
** To be continued after exam week **
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