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Drops of water splash on her face and make it hard to keep her eyes open. She steps through the mud to greet Scott. They’ve given her a new shift. Now it’s dirty again, littered with little brown flecks, but she doesn’t mind. She never did like illusions.
Scott scans the area, and then draws his gaze back to her. “A guard will come get you tonight. He’s on our side.” She feels ridiculous, like she’s in an espionage movie, and she wonders if he will start using codenames.
“Rogue?” But it isn’t a movie, and Scott is the last fixture of a dead era of heroes, so she forces her mind back into coherent thought.
“Yeah. Got it.” She’s never been this compliant before, and even though this is life-and-death-do-or-die stuff, she thinks she sees a flash of disappointment in his eyes. As though her willingness to follow him makes him the last leader still standing, as though there had ever been any hope that she would pick up the mantle and lead the troops along with him. As if he now knew for certain that he was the final hope and his failure would lead directly to an abyss of horror. She thinks maybe he saw Ororo too.
She refocuses and watches as he turns away. His back disappears into the rain.
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The guard comes to get her that night just like Scott said. He is sweating and nervous, and he grips her arm too tight when he pulls her down the dank hallway. He smells like peaches, and she has to bite her lip not to giggle. She thinks she will call this one White.
They reach the outer gates, and Scott is already waiting. He stands up straight and reaches for her hand. She lets him clutch it. She knows she’s his last shot at redemption. “Don’t let go, Rogue. We might have to run, and we can’t get separated. Briggs doesn’t know how long it will take for the alarms to kick in, but since he has to override his security clearance, whenever the computers run through the data to confirm clearance codes, his ID won’t match up. Could be in 15 minutes, could be in a week. We don’t know.” White is swiping some kind of card and punching in a series of numbers on the keypad of the door. She assumes that that is what Scott just described and her head feels slightly fuzzy, so she just nods at him.
Turns out the military have some pretty fucking speedy computers, since the alarm bells go off about three seconds after she and Scott step outside the gate.
Scott takes off running, and she gets dragged along behind him. Her lungs burn and she doesn’t remember Scott’s legs being so long. She looks up as they stumble through the forest. The trees look like they’re reaching for something, but she doesn’t have any pity. She’s shorter than they are.
Scott is looking at her desperately. “I think they drugged your food. Shit.” And she does giggle this time because Scott just cursed. “Rogue, you have to keep moving. We haven’t breached the outer perimeter, and we won’t make it if I carry you.” Breaches and perimeters, that was more like the old Scott, and she pats his cheek.
“Okay, Scott.” And she really does try to keep moving her legs, but they’re just so heavy. And she does try to keep her eyes open and her body upright, but she can’t. She can’t, no matter how much she wants to, and isn’t that just the story of her life.
She passes out with her face against a patch of green ground that reminds her of a dress she used to wear to church when she was a child. She had danced in that dress once.
She wakes up back in her cell, cold and alone, and knows it wasn’t a dream. Her stomach is still churning from the drugs. She looks down at her bare wrist, and she’s relieved for a moment before she remembers the rule. It always gets worse.
They transfer her to the facility for attempted escapees the next day, and it does get worse.
She doesn’t know what happened to Scott, but male flight-risks usually go to the Mutant Research Department, which studies mutant cadavers to create new biological weapons for the military. She assumes he’s dead. It’s dangerous to assume anything else, and she lost the audacity to believe that good always prevails over evil a long time ago.
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Present
On day 203, she thinks she might be pregnant, and the thought makes her claw at her stomach. She knows the guards probably inject her with contraceptives before testing. They’re cruel, but not stupid. It doesn’t stop her from dreaming of monsters, though, of aliens and demons crawling around inside her. Diagonal nail marks stretch from the flesh directly below her breasts to her belly button. She likes the red. It’s the only thing in this place that isn’t gray or subdued.
There are whispers in the camp that a mutant raid is coming to save them. She thinks it’s good that they can maintain a healthy sense of humor.
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She gives up tallying on day 211. It feels too much like counting down, and she doesn’t want to be just another dead body thrown in a ditch somewhere. Logan taught her to keep fighting, so she will. She’ll survive in his honor. So she draws a smiley face in blood on her cell wall big enough that she knows the guards will see, because, really, fuck them. Her fingers bleed for days from the effort, but it’s worth it.
They think she’s crazy. She doesn’t disagree.
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The mutant raid comes on day 233. She doesn’t think it’s funny this time.
She hears the bombing first. Then a period of gunfire. The other mutants are rattling in their cages. Then nothing happens for a few minutes, and she thinks maybe the mutants have lost. She sits on her cot and puts her hands in her lap the way her uncle had taught her to say grace.
Suddenly, there is an explosion directly above the cells, and she knows that whoever is in the compound has just blasted their way into the control tower. She holds her breath as a voice comes onto the loudspeaker, and she’s so close to being free that she has to grind her hands back into her lap to keep from reaching out. She’s learned not to be certain of Almost. And Almost is the place where she lives now.
So she waits to see what will happen, and the door to her cell swings open. She really can’t believe it’s this easy after so long, after so much. But the other mutant women stampede out of their cells and smash through each other to get to the outside world. There are no more locked doors here.
She trails after them and out into the night air.
They pile into armored trucks, and she passes a few dead guards on the ground. She smiles and it’s brittle, but for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t hurt. The mud doesn’t make her feet stick like it normally does either, and the smells don’t smother her when she breathes in. She wonders what a different world it’s become so quickly. Like last time.
“Rogue! Rogue!” And then Scott is all over her, clutching her shoulders like she’s about to fall down any minute. She guesses she can’t blame him for that one, what with her history of falling down around him. He is scanning her for visible injuries, and he moves his head a bit like a bird, all precision and speed.
“I’m okay, Scott.” And she really isn’t, but he’s here, and she’s free, and she just might get to be a real girl again.
He looks her in the eyes, face full of grief. “I’m so sorry. I had to make it out so I could come back and rescue you. I had to leave you there.” The last part is whispered, and she hugs him back at this point. She would have left him too, but not to come back and save him. She tries not to feel like a bad person.
“Shh, Scott, darlin’, it’s alright. We’re both alive, aren’t we?” She strokes his hair and tries to believe they’ll be able to go back now, to go back to days of tea and football.
“Rogue, there’s more. It’s…” His face is pained, and she knows that look. He’s struggling with a necessary responsibility that is at odds with what he feels is his moral obligation. She’s seen that look plenty of times.
He clenches his jaw and then opens his mouth, but the final truck is filling up.
“We’ll talk later.” He looks relieved.
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The stars shine brightly through the cold, dark sky, winking in and out of life. She thinks they look like the bits of tinfoil and glitter she used to put on the tree at Christmas time.
She remembers how Logan used to glance around to make sure his reputation stayed intact as he lifted her to his shoulders so she could sprinkle it around the top of the tree. He’d scoff and tell her no one would even notice with the other decorations, but she’d always insist that the tree deserved to dress up just as much as they did. Logan would look down pointedly at his own grease-stained shirt and argue that maybe the tree didn’t want to dress up and she was taking away its free will. She’d pout, and he’d feel smug about winning the argument until Ororo shot him an amused glance from the doorway, and then he’d just feel embarrassed for arguing about the dressing habits of a tree in the first place.
“Rogue? We’re addressing the survivors now.” Survivors. Mutants. Victims. She really hated being a statistic.
“Alright, Scott.” She stands up from the bottom of the porch, and trails her hand along the rotting banister as she walks up the steps. When she had seen the armored trucks, she had assumed this was a high-level, well-funded operation and that they’d end up in some sterile but secure bunker underground. She realizes she’s been around Professor X for too long when the trucks pull up to run-down brick house in the middle of nowhere. The windows even have those wooden planks stapled diagonally across the paneling. This doesn’t look like an army. It looks more like Robin Hood’s gang.
She’s still grateful, though, so she follows Scott inside. He wraps a coat around her and it almost falls off her emaciated shoulders. She grips the edges with her fingers.
The mutant women huddle together either for warmth or because there just isn’t enough space to do anything else. They fill the room and line the stairs all the way to the second level of the house. Scott and two other men stand on a couple of concrete blocks in the middle of the room. He looks like a leader. He knows this role. He’s had the script for years.
“No one is a prisoner here. If you have somewhere else to go, feel free to leave. But you’re also welcome to stay. You can remain here and take refuge or you can join up with the Brotherhood and help save other mutants like yourself. We aren’t asking you to do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing. This is your choice.” She sits up straighter when he mentions the Brotherhood, and although it seems like a lifetime ago that that word was part of her vocabulary, there is still something wrong about Scott advocating it. She knows she’ll join, though, because Scott is the last living person she owes allegiance, and because wrong has become a neutral word in her mind and easy to bypass. She thinks someone must have taken a sledgehammer to her moral compass.
Some of the women still look afraid, but some look ravenous. She understands both the fear and the rage and she faults none of them.
“If you want to take refuge without joining the Brotherhood, you will be transferred to one of several safehouses across the country. If you have mutant family members you have lost, we’ll be happy to check if they’re housed in any of the documented safehouses and transfer you there. If you wish to join the Brotherhood, come see me before tomorrow morning. If you want your collar removed, we’ll do that right now. For those of you with dangerous or volatile mutations, we can simply deactivate the locking mechanism so that you can remove or wear the collar as you see fit.” Scattered claps and even a few sympathetic growls pass through the room as the mutants line up in front of the blocks. She’ll wait until they’re finished. A few more minutes is nothing compared to the last seven months.
The second man steps forward on the block and raises his hand, “Long live the mutants.” This gets a louder response.
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Rogue pushes through the throng of sweaty bodies rubbing across each other in their desperation to talk to the men in charge. They’ve been at it for over an hour, and she’s sick of seeing herself reflected in their eyes. She didn’t particularly like crowds to being with, but after seven months of this brave new world, body sweat and stagnant air smell like captivity to her. So she slides between the three final mutants near the door, and then she’s out. When fresh air hits her nose, though, she loses the urge to run. White paint flakes off the damp wood beneath her feet, and she sits on a piece of wicker with four legs and half a back that some might loosely describe as a chair. Scott has seen her leave, and she knows he won’t let her out of his sight for long.
Her eyelids are drooping, but she isn’t surprised when she sees Scott march up to her with purpose. You could tell a lot about a person from their stride.
“The Brotherhood has morphed into something useful since the purges. And, Rogue, it’s necessary now. It’s us or them. It’s our people versus theirs. It’s Logan.” He pauses. “It’s Jean.” His whole body radiates intensity.
“I get it, Scott. You don’t have to explain.” She didn’t him to give her a moral reason to fight. She’d kill the bastards just for fun.
“I want you to understand. I want you to—”
“I’m joining the Brotherhood.”
She thought he’d be happy, but he just looks resigned.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.” And she is.
He clenches his jaw and looks off into the distance as he speaks. “Then the Brotherhood has a job for you.” She quirks an eyebrow. Seems like she’s going to get to do something important and dangerous soon. She may just pick up that mantle yet.
“The Brotherhood has acquired a top-secret weapon from an attack on the Mutant Research Division. You are the only living mutant who can activate that weapon.”
She forces herself not to think of Magneto. She volunteered for this. It isn’t just about payback anymore. It’s about the last inch of dignity she can help bring back into the world.
Scott takes a breath. “We think they were trying to control time.”
Wait. What?
“Time travel?” She hasn’t been a normal girl in many years now, but is this is ridiculous. Oh, yes, let’s go take over the world with time travel. That sounds like a good idea. Five points to Tim for suggesting it.
“We found statements in their database suggesting that it would be used for military victory. Hard to lose when you already know all your enemy’s moves. It’s a good thing their creation didn’t work. It’s been my experience that too much power in the hands of one person never yields progress or tolerance. Enforcing such a large amount of power takes away the free will of the people being enforced upon. And they never would have stopped at military might.” As if the one subject he thinks he needs to sell her on is why their enemies shouldn’t have time travel as a weapon. Jesus, Scott.
And she lets it sink in and be digested by a mind now so familiar with inconceivable subjects that it offers little resistance in believing and accepting that this is both possible and vital to the freedom of hundreds of thousands of people. “How can I help?”
“According to their notes, they used the brain of a mutant who could rewind time. They generated an electromagnetic field around the brain, and they thought that if they could draw the energy from the brain and into the field, that a massive reversal of time would occur for whatever or whomever that energy was directed toward.”
She might need another second to absorb that. Or someone to break it down to kiddy terms for her.
“Then they found you. Someone with the specific power to draw the energy out of mutants. It was perfect except for the fact that by your very nature, the energy would be directed at you and not them. It wouldn’t do them any good to send you back in time, so they went back to the metaphorical drawing board. They were still working on a solution when we attacked.”
She hadn’t missed the inflection in his voice. “It wouldn’t do them any good, but you think it could help us.”
“Yes.”
“So you want me to go back to a specific point in time that you think was the catalyst for the purges and change it?” This felt a little unrealistic to her, but she thought she sounded fine. She could handle the mission. She hadn’t been a little girl wearing her mother’s shoes in nearly two decades.
“It doesn’t work like that. Hell, Rogue, we don’t even know if it will work at all.” He shrugged, and after everything, she found she could still be surprised by Scott dropping his pretense. “Theoretically, you get shot back to a random point based on the amount of energy in the electromagnetic field, and, again, theoretically, it would only be your consciousness inside of your previous body.”
“That’s a lot of theoretic.”
“It’s a desperate time for us. I don’t need to tell you that.” She could see it took effort for him to keep his eyes level with hers after that statement.
She ignores that landmine. She really doesn’t want to talk about the specifics of her imprisonment right now.
Which makes her realize something. “So I could end up back in one of the prison camps? Or I could end up being five?”
“Yes, that is a danger.” But it’s your duty. I’ve done mine. She could hear the words in his voice even if he would never even admit to himself that he had thought them.
“I need to think about it.” She wants to do this, she really does, but she doesn’t believe in things the way she used to, and the thought of ending up back in that camp under another guard or lab tech makes her want to give up.
Sometimes she envies the dead. Breaking is the easy part. It’s the bending that hurts, that stretches you out until you don’t know if there’s enough left to mash back together when the time comes.
“Alright. You know where to find me.” He lifts his arm and squeezes her shoulder.
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She sits on the porch for another hour before heading back inside.
They’ve set up blankets over the floor, and she has to brace herself against the wall not to step on anyone.
She can no longer go to sleep with other people in the room, and certainly not with the proximity that these people are currently enjoying, so she perches on the stairs and leans her forehead on the banister.
She wraps her hands around the rectangular wooden bars lining the stairs, and peers lazily through at all the dirty women on the floor.
She wonders what these people would have been if they hadn’t been stripped down, unraveled, reduced. She wonders what they had been building in their lives before the big bad wolf came and blew their house down. She wonders which ones were lawyers. Bank tellers. Teachers. Gas attendants. Students. Mothers. People.
Her knuckles are white.
But she remembers the story. She’s got a new house now. Maybe it’s just a few bricks inside her mind, but when it’s finished, it’ll be a fortress. And this time, no matter how big and bad the wolf gets, no matter how sharp its claws and how strong its muscles, when he comes calling, she’ll got get a gun and shoot him in the fucking balls. She’ll take her time with the rest.
She gazes back at the mutants littering the ground. Life was stolen from these people.
The sudden anger burns in her.
She’s going to steal it back for them. And for Scott. For Jean. Professor X. Bobby. Ororo. Logan. And for herself. Because her wolf has rabies. And she has a bit of big and bad inside of her that’s been leashed for far too long.
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She opens her eyes just as the dawn breaks and, before making her way to the second floor, she enjoys the scattered rays of sunlight as they fracture themselves in the smudged window.
She puts the tips of her fingers against Scott’s door, closes her eyes, and knocks. He opens the door almost immediately and there is no mussed hair or boxers. There is only a soldier.
“Rogue?” And his face softens.
“I’ll do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
And a shadow of the grin she used to know flashes in his face, but his eyes look beyond her. Magneto’s eyes. But he blinks and the look is gone.
He pulls her into the room and tells her to wait for the other men. She isn’t comfortable with strange men anymore, but she really can’t complain. These men have risked everything to be here.
When Scott walks back through the door flanked by his men, she sees the desperation and a hint of madness in their faces and knows what she saw in Scott a moment ago. Determination. This move was everything they had. No more secret gadgets stored in hidden vaults. No more miracles. She was it. The last best chance.
Every single one of them knew what it was to live in Almost. And that’s where the madness seeps in. To reach and run and scream and never close your fist over triumph. To see victory in the distance but never stroke it with your fingers.
“Are you going to leave these people here while we go wherever we’re going? Seems like one of you should stay here.”
The man to Scott’s left crinkles his brow. “We brought it with us when we came to bust you out of the compound. Those people were incidental. You were the mission. I thought Scott told you.” He moves to open a locked box on the table next to her.
Scott focuses on the top of her head without meeting her eyes, and she finally understands. She’d never had a choice at all. They just wanted to create the illusion of freedom to make sure she would do her job. She tries not to ask herself if Scott would have come back for her if that black box had been empty. She tries not to let it feel like betrayal. She knows Scott loves her, but she isn’t Jean. He would never directly barter her life for Jean’s because he was a hero, and no matter how far he falls into this world without integrity, no matter how many compromises he makes, he would never lose his essential goodness. But this was a way he could bend. He might kill her with this thing or make her eighty years old, but it probably wouldn’t kill her directly, and it might save Jean. And it might save the rest of the mutants. And although Scott could write a book on the value of the greater good, she suspects that deep down in his soul, it was for the former reason that he would force her to do this. Not that she isn’t going to do it voluntarily, but she understands now that if she refused, he’d use every mindfuck in the book to get her to reconsider. Because the fear of having the person you love most in the world just not be anymore is beyond principles. Scott is a moral person, but morality is expensive during times like these, and she suspects it’s harder for him than most because of that strength he had. He would do what was necessary, but the very nature of this time made what was necessary a morally bankrupt business. He didn’t leave her in the woods that day because he was a coward. He’d left her in the woods because he wasn’t. He knew he was a greater asset outside of the prison, even if it was against his ideology and his very nature to leave her behind.
His hands don't shake when he holds out a sheet of paper, and his eyes meet hers when he speaks. His voice doesn't tremor. Feel the emotion, deal with it or erase it, and finish the mission. Scott to the bone.
“We want you to kill the people on this sheet. The engineers of the first purge. These are the key players. You had weapons training with the X-Men, so we feel you’re ready physically. You’ll need to memorize that list right now. Take as much time as you need.” He had forced the words out, and she knows it cost him. He was a good person, so he was a guilty person. She found that fundamentally unfair.
“It’s okay, Scott.” His head snaps up and she grips his hand for a moment when she takes the sheet of paper. “It’s okay.” She wonders when she became a person who didn’t even blink when confronted with assassination orders.
“Thank you.” His words feel like a confession. She hopes it made him feel better. The two men are shooting each other knowing glances. As if they knew anything about her.
Looking down at the list of people, she already knows most of the names. She’d been watching the news religiously before the first purge, just like every other mutant with cable tv. There were only two she didn’t recognize. Larry Dansberg and Peter Ryan. It was almost insulting that her worst nightmares could have come from two men named Larry and Peter.
“I think I got it.” She knows it’s almost time.
“Rogue,” and being addressed as a person by anyone but Scott actually startled her for a moment, “meet Echo.” She steps over, looks into the black box, and recoils.
It was a sphere of what she assumed was energy, but she could see into the center to the coiling, sloppy pink mass. And she had felt like Frankenstein.
And then it hits her that this gross blob was once a person with Christmas trees and tinfoil of their very own. She thinks it’s ironic that the government claims that mutants have no souls, no humanity. She looks at the brain on the table and wonders how they define humanity.
“Whenever you’re ready.” And the man steps away from the box.
“We appreciate what you’re doing.” Man number two looks at her the way her mother used to look at the painting of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. She doesn’t tell him that she’s far from being a virgin. She doesn’t tell him that she’s not like Scott. She isn’t a hero.
But Scott must have seen something in her face, because he steps up and wraps his arms around her and whispers in her ear, “You’re the best among us. Don’t forget that.”
And she has to squint her eyes not to cry because she had no idea how much she needed that. She makes herself believe that he means it.
She lets go of Scott, and clicks the lock off on her collar. There is a rush behind her eyes as she feels it flood back. Power. Death. Things she had once hated. Now she savors them.
She is aware of every part of her body as she steps up to the black box, and then she slips her hands beyond the slimy film and sucks.
A wall of black slams into her face and she feels like a rag-doll as the blowback sends her body spinning through space.
Fear and the certainty that everything had gone wrong rip through her.
And then she opens her eyes.
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The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This chapter is plot-driven, so not quite as much broken-doll/contemplative Rogue once it gets going. Love me anyway?
Chapter End Notes:
Logan is in the next chapter, I swear on my little dog Muffin! (I'm actually planning on writing it from his POV, but we'll see).
Lemme know what you think. Reviews are love. :D
Lemme know what you think. Reviews are love. :D