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"---and he just left me there. I mean--"
Rogue blinked twice. She adjusted to the bright lights and colors as a surreal feeling settled over her.
"---at the movies! And I had to call--"
A shopping mall. A frantic girl. Jubilee. They had gone out. Therapy. Another girl. Anger over a boy.
What absurdity for something so small.
But she had been here before. She had lived this moment.
It worked. It worked?
Rogue clutched the edge of the plastic-topped food court table, shaken to the core. At this point, hope was harder to confront than a bleak certainty.
"--Rogue? Are you even listening? You were the one who--"
Rogue nearly crushed the girl with her hug, emotion pouring out in a tidal wave as she clutched desperately at the back of Jubilee's jacket.
"--Girl? What's wrong?"
She didn't want to let go. She didn't want to move.
"--some kind of joke? It isn't funny--"
A million fractured thoughts flew through her mind as she stood there in the shopping center clinging to a girl who had been dead for several years.
But she couldn't stay with this girl. The thought hit her like a Mack truck. Too fast. Everything was going too fast.
But if she stayed any longer, Jubilee would call back to...to the mansion, and she couldn't lose any time. She couldn't even get help from any of the X-Men. They wouldn't kill anyone outright. They might even find a way to stop her, to keep her contained, to deal with the problem logically. She had a flash of cold lab tables and sharp knives. How quickly that word was destined to change.
Once Xavier learned of her plan, he would try to solve it peacefully. That hadn't worked so well last time. The man may have unimaginable strength inside of him, but too much conscience to do what was necessary. She couldn't chance asking for help from the other mutants without entering Xavier's sphere of influence.
But. But maybe she didn't have to avoid it.
The thoughts raced through her head in the space of a few seconds as she looked into Jubilee's concerned blue eyes. God, to be this close to home. They would believe her, and she could let them fix it. She could unload it onto them, and it was their fault if peace didn't work. She wouldn't have to be a warrior anymore. Just a girl.
And, oh, Logan. She could go see Logan. If she told him the truth and gave him the right names, he would do the killing. He would make her curl up in a soft room, and she would never have to leave this body again.
No.
And there it was. That horrible honor she had learned from him. She couldn't steal this body. She was as much a stranger to the girl whose body she was inhabiting as she was to the humans wading through the mall throngs. She was outside of this time. Above it, and responsible for it.
This was her duty, and hers alone, and, even if she never did anything else, even if this mission killed her or threw her into some space-time vacuum, she was going to accomplish this one damn thing. She was sick of being a coward, and she had the fucking right to earn that little girl she used to be a spot in the universe. Maybe Rogue-that-was would never understand, but she would be worthy of all the security she had been given, all the friendship, and...and all the love. She would deserve to stand by Logan, and she would deserve her existence, her freedom. The battle would be won without a thought of it ever entering the head of this young girl. She would never again wonder if her weakness made her imprisonment fair. Those dirty little spear-shaped thoughts of how much of the failure was hers and how much of it was in those who took advantage of that failure. The strong, the smart, the crafty. Those are always the ones who rule. Was it their fault that they had no honor in her time? No generosity or kindness or empathy? Or was it her fault for needing that generosity and kindness?
She shook her head.
None of it would matter if she could just finish this. She couldn't let anyone stop her mission, and she couldn't unload it or throw it away.
So she made her fists unclench and used every ounce of power and strength and steel she had ever possessed to turn around and run away from the chance to touch her old life. To cry to Daddy. To relive these last free moments even if she knew what was coming along with their failure.
She owed them this.
Jubilee stood dumbfounded for a few seconds as Rogue made it into one of the larger crowds. The old Rogue had been terrified of large crowds, terrified she might hurt an innocent person. This Rogue barely noticed the skin above her elbow that skimmed a businessman's hand.
Jubilee kept up with her until she hit the street and began zagging between buildings.
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It was when Rogue hit the first dead-end alleyway that she realized one of two things.
One, she was still going. Right through the wall. That was from Kitty.
Two, her powers were intact.
Everything she had acquired from the future dead during the war, it was all still in her. Kitty. Kurt. A tinge of Xavier. Sabertooth. Caroline. So many more. The whistle kid. God, how could she forget his name? She still remembered crying while his lungs filled with blood and hating herself for stealing his power instead of killing him quickly. But they needed everything. Xavier knew about all the rest, encouraged it, the sacrifice of the dying, but she never told him about that one.
She shouldn't think about this now. What was it Peter Pan had said? Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.
But, hey, how the hell did this work if she was in a younger body? Did that mean that some forms of mutation were simply mental and not fully coded into DNA? Or did it mean some of her DNA time-traveled with her? Future-Hank would be having a field day right now if he weren't ash somewhere over the Atlantic.
Well, whatever. Back to work.
She looked at her surroundings. A parking garage. People really did love their nice, tidy white lines.
And there. A phone booth. A phonebook. She was so close now.
And then Rogue did something she hadn't done in months, if not years. She grinned.
Who's on top now, motherfuckers?
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Logan snatched Jubilee's arm as she tromped her way towards Xavier's office.
"Hey, Sparkles. Where's Marie?"
"It's Jubilee, you overgrown monkey. And I don't know!" Jubilee's voice cracked on the last word.
Logan's face turned to stone. "What happened?" Jubilee tried to yank her arm out of Logan's grasp, but he wasn't budging.
"I was just talking about my date, and Rogue went apeshit and ran away. She's being so horrible! She didn't even tell me where she was going, and I don't know if this is a prank or if something offended her or if she's running away for real, and now I'm worried and she doesn't have her phone with her--Logan!"
But he was already on his way out. "Get Xavier on it," he tossed over his shoulder.
Jubilee rubbed her arm. "That's where I was going, asswipe."
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Logan had tracked Jubilee's scent to the shopping mall, and had picked up Marie's scent wafting near the street. Why were there so many damn people out, today? Was it Merry bloody Christmas? A woman cringed as he growled at her for walking directly through his scent trail.
What did that girl think she was doing, anyway? If this was over a boy again...well, he had planned on putting Bobby through extra hand-to-hand rotations this week, anyway. Now they'd just be hand-to-claw.
And now the crowd was thinning out as the trail led between buildings. And finally...what? Her trail stopped cold in an alleyway with no more smell-threads...He was beginning to get an unsettling feeling.
One of these days he was going to act on that desire to lock her in a room and never let her out.
Well, if she didn't go up, and she didn't double back, then she must have either blipped out of existence or gone through the wall.
Shrugging and ignoring an imaginary disapproving Xavier voice in his head, he began slicing through the wall.
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Seven of Eight.
That was how many addresses she had in her pocket. How many assassination orders she had gotten one step closer to completing.
Two.
That was how many guns she had acquired, one strapped to her calf underneath her baggy pants, one in the belt at the small of her back. As if she did this every day.
Sixty-five.
That was the number of minutes it had taken to write down the addresses and rob a weapons store.
Thirteen.
That was how many feet away victim number one was standing. Peter Ryan. Golden hair, bright smile. Pre-med major. Bet he enjoyed smiling for his fucking homecoming photo. Pretty girlfriend...or wife. Maybe sister? She even had manicured nails. She'd heard he had always appreciated details. He was destined to become a pretty renowned military surgeon, after all. He'd create many forms of biological "mutant inhibitors," as well as the ever-so-handy mutant collars. Thanks a bunch, Peter.
He finished speaking to the girl on the sidewalk of his apartment, gave her kiss, and waved as she drove off. Not a sister, then.
Rogue walked out from behind the large tree as she heard the screen-door bounce and settle. She walked closer to the door, purposefully walking through the pretty garden. He didn't deserve to nurture anything. Her hand shook as it clasped the doorknob. She didn't know why she didn't just walk through the door. Habit, she guessed. The door swung open. He was so carefree he hadn't even bothered to lock it. Her stomach hurt.
Then she heard him in the next room on the phone.
"Don't cry, Mama. He'll be fine. Yes, I've wired the money. Of course not--"
Rogue sat down on the couch. She'd let him say goodbye to his mother. No point in being rude.
"I'll be in for the funeral--"
Well, that was ironic. She looked around the room as her target dealt with a death that was not his own. Her hand shook a little as she looked at his refrigerator. Childish drawings of houses and suns and smiley faces. A note to "pick up Lilly after Orgo" and "make study group sandwiches." A picture of a little girl in pigtails holding a teddy bear.
Her bravado was slipping. There was a child who relied on this man.
"I love you too, Mama. We'll be home soon. I miss you."
What right did monsters have to love? To miss? To have family?
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Logan gave his bloody hands a cursory glance as they healed. A parking garage?
He sniffed. Gotcha.
She had obviously walked around for a bit, but he got a whiff of a scent-thread leaving the parking garage through a door about three feet from where he was standing in front of a gaping hole littered with rubble and blood.
Well. That was embarrassing.
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Rogue sat back on the couch. He had hung up the phone. He could walk back in at any minute. She pulled the gun out of her buckle and fingered the design coating it.
It couldn't matter that he was nice to his mother or that he had a child. It couldn't matter that he was barely a child himself.
He had taken her houses and suns and smiley faces. And he had taken them from plenty of other people.
She had thought that he would be like the other men she had fought in her time. All rotten teeth and red eyes. It was easy to see the devil in them. But they weren't the devil, were they? They were the devil's hotel staff.
This was the devil. The beautiful aristocrat in the ivory tower pushing the buttons. One of eight, anyway.
He was the ideology. The white grime.
She heard him shuffling papers in the room next door, and her heart sped up. Could he not hear it beating?
She clutched the gun and remembered her future enemies.
She remembered the inch of madness in their minds, that inch of madness that gave way to a mountain.
There was something in this boy that would make hundreds of thousands of people crawl, beg, and bleed. There was a seed in him, even if it was only a possibility.
There were plenty of dead people out there who would give a fuck about her guilt.
She summoned every painful memory she had suffered at the hands of this man-who-would-be, walked into the room, and unloaded a round of bullets into his head.
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The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Hey guys. :)
I was going to stop writing this because my computer had to be wiped, and I pretty much lost everything else I had written (and several chapters of this story). It was slightly demoralizing. I got a lot of great feedback, though, so I thought I'd give it another go. Lemme know what you think!
I was going to stop writing this because my computer had to be wiped, and I pretty much lost everything else I had written (and several chapters of this story). It was slightly demoralizing. I got a lot of great feedback, though, so I thought I'd give it another go. Lemme know what you think!
Chapter End Notes:
You guys are wicked sweet reviewers, and I seriously love you.