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Flecks of white litter the ground as she looks down, always down, at her feet. If she had the courage to glance up when the guards’ attention was directed at the new female prisoner, she would notice the blinding sparkle of the sun rising just beyond the mountains. If she had the courage, she would observe the glint reflected off the lake in the distance. If, if, if. She thinks it’s ironic that there is still majesty in the world. She does not look up.
She has testing today. That’s their euphemism for torture. She used to rip and scratch and struggle when they came to get her, but she doesn’t even try anymore. They make you pay when you fight. She has begun to think about the torture in terms of flavors. Like Baskin Robbins, only they have way more than 31. The beatings she can take. She doesn’t like them or anything, but now she knows the alternatives, and she prays for the beatings. Today they slip drugs into her barely edible food, and she knows it will be worse. When she begins to lose focus, her stomach twists, and she hopes that she will be taken to the testing rooms, stripped, and poked, prodded, stabbed, groped, and simply returned to her cage. She hopes the guards are too tired or too busy to use the arm restraints and the leg restraints, to climb on top of her and tell her that she’s badscumfilthdirtmutant and invade, invade, invade.
Today she’s so gone with the drugs that she giggles and thinks about when she was just a girl and she won at Stratego. She was the invader then. And it’s so pathetic that she laughs and laughs. The soldier on top of her today is with friends (she wonders if they call her the Merry-go-round-a-Rogue since there’s always a line). He’s embarrassed, so he hits her. He likes the snap of her head and her sudden silence, so he hits her again. He gets off on it, and Rogue doesn’t remember his name, but resolves to call him Red, since he likes that color so much. If the days remind her of flavors, the guards remind her of colors. A big fan of metaphors, Rogue.
The soldier sticks his tongue in her mouth, and she thinks he’s trying to eat her. Finally, mercifully, he finishes, slaps her cheeks lightly, zips up his pants and walk away. Yellow steps up for his turn. She calls him yellow because he’s a coward. He does whatever the other guards tell him to do. Not that he doesn’t want to fuck her, because he does. He really has power issues, though, probably because of his submissive position among his own group. She likes to think about them analytically. It subdues the horror.
Yellow turns her over, and she clamps down on a surge of anger. It won’t do her any good since the drugs have long since paralyzed her limbs. She tries to dissociate herself from her body. She doesn’t know how the drugs work, hell, she never even finished high school biology, but she wishes they would paralyze her insides as well. She feels Yellow slobber all over her neck as he pushes into her. He chokes her when he grips her mutant collar. Hate sings in her blood. He slaps her ass in time with his thrusts, and she stores her fury. If she survives this camp, she will make them all pay.
Sometimes she wishes she had listened to Magneto when she had the chance.
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Of the original X-Men, she has only seen Ororo and Scott in any of the other camps before she was transferred to this one. She knows Jean, Bobby, and Professor X are dead. Death by Legacy Virus. And a pleasant firsthand experience that was. She had seen Ororo in the first few weeks after The Purge (or The “Great” Purge, as she had heard some of the guards say), and she had garnered some bumps and bruises, but no…testing. She still looked up in those days. She still believed Logan was coming.
She had been stumbling along after a guard who thought she was working too slowly. That first camp had been in charge of building the wall that separated the outer world from the mutant prisoners. She had spotted Ororo’s white hair and tan body immediately, but stilled her grin when she took in the gaunt body and matted hair. It was still Ororo, though. It was still something familiar. She took a step forward, but another soldier was approaching from the other direction, and when Ororo saw him, she cowered. She cowered. Storm. Eloquence and dignity personified. Some called her a legend. Some called her a goddess. And her knees were in the fucking mud.
Then she knew. There wasn’t a jet coming for her, and there wasn’t a kind, all-knowing mentor waiting in the parlor with tea. And worst of all, Logan, wherever he was, it was probably bad there too. He wasn’t going to save her this time. Rogue’s eyes filled, and she looked away. She never knew if Ororo had seen her.
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Her current prison was maximum security, and reserved for attempted escapees. That was where Scott came in.
She had seen him in the next camp, which was only a few miles from the first and very similar. It would have been safe to say he was having trouble adjusting. Back then, you could get away with talking to a mutant for a few minutes since the prisons were bigger and the guards were more spread out. She figured they must have been ecstatic with their work schedules once the first hundred thousand mutants had died out.
He had been slamming the bricks down, and she had known instantly that it was Scott. She froze with a wave of emotion. The slope of his shoulders reminded her of when he taught her to ride his motorcycle. The cut of his jaw reminded her of how he kissed her on the forehead after her second boyfriend had dumped her. This was family.
“Scott?” She tried to keep the desperation out of her voice.
His vision snapped to her. She could see his eyes. Oh, right. The collar. And, okay, so she could only see one eye. The other was bruised and swollen shut. He had several other bruises and marks that she could see on his body. He had either run his face into each and every guard in the place or he had royally pissed someone off.
“Rogue?” Even his voice was different. Emotional. If she had ever counted on anyone to be practical and rigid, it was Scott. Hell, he defined the terms. She supposed this counted as extenuating circumstances. “Christ, Rogue.” And then he was hugging her, and her arms were limp at her sides. It was just too much. Seeing him was making her think about her other life, when she was safe and loved. She couldn’t afford to think about that life when she had to live this one.
“I thought you were dead. I thought you were all dead.” He's still gripping her arms.
“Nope. Right as rain, sugah.” She is crying now. She has held on for so long.
“Were you…when Jean…were you there?” She supposes he has held on for a long time also.
“Yeah, I was there, Scott. It—” She recognizes the piece of metal hanging from Scott’s neck, just underneath the collar. Dogtags. Her heart stops. Logan wouldn’t have given that to him voluntarily, unless…unless.
He looks at his chest and realization sinks in. “He wanted me to…he wanted you to…”
She clings to him as she sinks to the ground. Everything is numb and surreal. She notes that he is not only a more emotional speaker than before, but he is a lot less eloquent. She tries to hold the thought. She tries to hold any thought. She tries to remember all the names of the members of the Norwegian soccer team, but she is too used to mental multitasking. She can’t hide from the look on Scott’s face. It hurts too much. She isn’t ready. She is just a girl, and she wants to go home.
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After Scott finishes telling her about the final battle for the X-Men and she tells him what she thinks he wants to hear about Jean, the bell rings and they each return to their cells. She can tell he doesn’t want to go. He looks like he wants to rage, and she remembers that look. Logan wore it well. She knows hearing about Jean has reanimated something in him, and he wants to go out with the rest of his era instead of submitting to this life. He wants to kamikaze all over the fucking place just to hurt them back on his way out. But he looks at her, and she knows he is still the same in some ways as she watches the responsibility settle behind his eyes. She is okay with being a burden if it keeps him alive.
That night, she stares blankly at the cell wall. She feels empty. The idea that Logan will never bail her out of a stupid jam again…it hollows her out. She replays scenes from her life with his irreverent humor and charm, and she wants to vomit. She wishes she had never met him, never known what she has lost, and then she feels guilty and takes it back. She remembers him carrying her out of a date he didn't approve of with her slung over his shoulder. She remembers him taking her to lunch on her birthday. Him forced into weeding the garden, and just hacking the thing up. They way he smiled. The way he scratched his head. His claws. She starts crying when she gets to her memories of how he opened beer, and isn’t that just the damndest thing.
She doesn’t sleep all night and falls asleep the next day while she is supposed to be working. She doesn’t see Scott.
A soldier pulls her to her feet, and drags her to what she assumes is the Commander’s Office. She has had a few experiences like this that end in a bruise or cut. Sometimes they only yell at her. She’s almost too tired and sick to care, but she still has a shadow of Logan in her. Survivalist to the core.
There are flags everywhere in the room. Flag pins, flags she used to wave at the fourth of July, and, hey, even a real flag. She takes in the Commander and puts him at about 50, old but not sloppy. His shoulders are broad and he still has a lot of muscle. He has a picture on his desk of what she assumes is his wife and children. Family man. Maybe he’ll be more sympathetic. He asks the soldier to leave. She breathes a sigh of relief. Just a reprimand, then. If he were going to issue a beating, he probably would have just given the order to the soldier right there. She forces herself to smile gratefully as he stands up and locks the door. He walks right up to her and punches her with such speed she doesn’t even have the chance to flinch. She cups the side of her face. A beating, then. She only understands when he slams her against the wall and rips her shift down the middle. Oh, no. She fights with everything she has, but her head is still spinning from the punch, and she hasn’t eaten since finding out Logan is dead. She manages to rake her nails down his face, but he is just so strong. He holds both of her wrists with one hand above her head, and she can’t believe this is really happening. Her grimy shift is hanging open, and she doesn’t have any more protection since the camp doesn’t exactly provide underwear. She tries to knee him, but he’s faster. He grinds his pelvis against her, pinning her to the wall. His free hand palms one of her breasts, and then it all slams into reality for her. She bucks and screams. He doesn’t seem to notice. She screams louder. Someone has to help her. Those are people out there. Someone has to help her. He moves his hand down her stomach gently, and it’s worse, God, it’s so much worse because he’s gentle and this is evil they’re all evil and Logan will kill him and Logan is dead, oh God, please no. His hand reaches the apex of her thighs and his fingers start to probe her, and his fingers are big, and she just wants him to get the fuck out. He reaches resistance and smirks, and she hates him for making her feel humiliated, but she hopes that’s all this is even though she knows he’s not finished. But maybe he is, maybe he just wanted to humiliate her, and, after all, he has a wife. Then he starts unbuckling his pants, and she bucks again, desperately, because this cannot happen. He just grinds back into her, closing his eyes, and his trousers are around his ankles. Then his underwear joins his trousers, and it’s just his skin against hers. She wishes she had eaten enough to throw up on him. He positions himself and she tries to squirm away, but it doesn’t work. He slams into her, and he doesn’t go all the way in, but it hurts. And then he slams again, and he’s through. She passes out for a moment from the pain, but when she opens her eyes, he’s still on top of her, grunting like an animal. He thrusts into her one final time, and she feels like someone is plowing through her body, and half of her face is still numb from where he punched her.
He lets go of her and she falls to the floor in a heap as he rebuckles his pants. She curls her legs into her body and just wants Logan.
“You have the rest of the day off. You’ve earned it.” He says. He tosses her a metal bracelet with a number engraved. She just stares at it. Mutants who are related to human high-ranking officials are allowed to wear identifying bracelets so that they are left alone by guards and only do as much work as they want. But she isn’t this man’s family. She had a family once.
He looks at her as though her continued presence annoys him. She feels like time is falling apart around her. She wonders if she imagined what just happened.
“There’s a new tradition in the Army Mutant Division,” he tells her as he leans against his desk, “Many of us have discovered long lost sisters.” He motions to the bracelet. She manages to keep the revulsion out of her face, then wonders why she bothers. “You’ll be expected to be here at 11:00 every day for our…appointment. Do whatever you want during the rest of the day.” He looks at her like they are conspirators breaking the rules. She wants to rip his face off.
But Logan taught her well. She is too weak to fight this man now. So she puts the bracelet on her arm, but cannot find it in herself to smile at him. She is not that good of an actress. The edges of her vision are fuzzy and time still feels disjointed. She stands, and folds her shift over her body like a robe. The pain completely blacks out her vision for a moment, but she makes her legs move. She just wants to be away. The Commander watches her leave. She starts calling him Mr. Black in her mind, because she doesn’t know his real name, and The Commander seems too deferential. Then, she decides to just call him Black because he is not a gentleman.
Scott spots her when she is halfway across the courtyard, and he knows as soon as he walks up to her. She can see it in the darkening of his eyes, and the way he glances at her arm. She tries to think of something to say that will comfort him. They stand silently for several minutes.
She sees him struggle to tuck away the lust for revenge, and, finally, he sighs with resignation, and she wishes she had known him when he was young and stupid and free. “Meet me here at dusk tomorrow. I had wanted to wait until I had a safehouse set up, but we can’t afford to wait any longer.”
“What?” She doesn’t let hope in easily any more.
“I’m gonna save you, Rogue.” And he says it with such intensity that she thinks he wants to save another woman from her grave instead. Maybe he wants to save all the X-Men who died. She wishes he could.
But none of them can turn back time.
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The next morning, Rogue reports to Black’s office. The guards would just come get her if she didn’t show, and that would probably end up worse for her. If Scott was getting her out tonight anyway, maybe she could just stab him to death with a pen or something.
The door is open, so she walks through it. She tries not to hate herself for coming, even if it isn't voluntary. All her instincts scream at her to resist, to fight, to run.
Black is at his desk writing something. “Shut the door.” She does.
He stands up and walks over to her. He smiles apologetically, and she thinks she might choke on her hatred.
“Get on your knees.” She complies. Even if she isn’t in a position to kill him now and even if she escapes tonight, she promises herself that she will find him one day. She will find him and make him bleed, make him crawl, make him die.
Black unzips his pants, and she tries to remember when Logan would sit with her in the sunshine.
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The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Story Notes:
This one starts out dark, yo.
Author's Chapter Notes:
So I’m new at this. Constructive criticism always welcome, along with kindness and pity. :D
Chapter End Notes:
Okay, so not much in the way of Logan interaction, or, y’know, happiness, in this chapter, but I’m getting there, I swear. Also, I’m not really sure how one goes about getting a beta, but if anyone wants to volunteer, lemme know.