When I opened my eyes again, I was lying flat on my back in a bed in the med lab. My entire body was twitching.
The Professor placed his hand on the top of my head to calm me down. “It’s all right, Rogue. Don’t be alarmed. It’s your evening muscle stimulation. There you go. It’s off now.”
I couldn’t help flinching a little as Dr. McCoy reached over and carefully pealed the sticky circular patches off my skin. He stepped back and smiled down at me.
Finding my voice hoarse, I managed to rasp, “What’s going on?”
“Let’s get you some water, hm?” The Professor pushed a button on my bed that lifted me into a sitting position. Dr. McCoy handed me a bottle of water. I drank it gratefully.
I used the time to search my foggy mind for the answer to the question I’d posed. Eventually, I vaguely remembered what had happened with Warbird, though it seemed to me more like what she did, not what I did.
“How’d I get here,” I wanted to know, my voice stronger now.
“John brought you back. And, no, I could not talk him into staying, hard as I tried. It was either imprison him or let him go. Considering all the trouble he went to for you, I chose to let him go.”
Accepting that and not really recalling what had almost happened between us, I asked the Professor, “Warbird, is she gone?”
“She’s no longer a threat,” he assured me.
“We did a sort of scientific exorcism,” Dr. McCoy put in.
The Professor continued, “You see, Rogue, you’ve been away from us for quite awhile. Seven months.”
Ridiculously enough, I grew hopeful. A lot can happen in seven months. “Is Logan…”
“Not yet. But you shouldn’t worry.”
As if saying that would stop me. I dropped the subject, though, and went back to more relevant questions. “I’ve been in a coma for all that time?” I didn’t feel like I had been. In fact, except for a sore throat and a little light sensitivity, I felt fine. Completely lucid.
“‘Coma’ isn’t the right term. There was nothing wrong with you physically. Just as you were trapped inside your mind when Warbird was in control of your body, you’ve been trapped inside the memories of the people you’ve absorbed life force from. Their individual psyches have been vying for control, while yours has been lost. But, in the end, you proved strongest.”
I didn’t know about that. I was sure he had helped me. “Are they gone?”
“As of a few days ago, they’re back under control.”
After a moment, I asked the million dollar question. “Did I hurt anyone?”
“You did nothing wrong, Rogue. You weren’t in control.”
Desperately wanting that to be true, I kept my mouth shut. There was too much to be said about the situation.
The Professor understood why I chose to remain silent. “It’s late and you’ve been through quite a battle. You should get your rest. Is there anything I can get for you,” he asked before he left.
“Do you think that I could talk to Kurt? Just for a little while.”
Professor Xavier nodded. “I think that will help. I’ll get him for you.”
I had ten minutes to stew in my own self-reproach before Kurt sat down shyly in the chair beside my bed. “It’s good to see you awake, Anna Marie.”
“It’s good to be me again.”
“That was a horrible thing you went through,” he said compassionately, taking my gloved hand in his. “I know how it is to be forced to do things against your will.”
“But I think that I deserved it,” I confessed, unable to meet his eyes. “It was like my penance or something. Maybe she was the bad guy, but that doesn’t make me any less of a…murderer. I can say that it was self-defense, but I can’t justify it.”
“You don’t have to. You’re repentant. That shows what a good person you are.”
“The thing that bothers me, though, is that when she started to take over I don’t think I fought it as hard as I maybe could’ve, because I felt like I deserved it. So I – I basically let her use me. It’s all mixed up and hazy, but if she did hurt someone seriously or killed someone, then it’s my fault. So maybe it wasn’t penance at all. Maybe it was just me giving up because I felt like I didn’t deserve to play the hero. Does that make any sense?”
“Ja.”
“How do I deal with that?”
“You learn to make peace with your mistakes. Harder than it sounds, I know. I’m afraid I’m not much of a help to you.”
That wasn’t true at all. “You do so much for me. You listen to me. You take me seriously. You taught me how to try to be a better person.”
Kurt leaned forward to kiss me on the top of my head. “Your complexities make me proud, but you let yourself rest now. Save the worrying for when you feel stronger. Gute Nacht mein Lamm.”
“Gute Nacht. Ich liebe Dich.”
That took him a by surprise. I’d never told him I loved him before. I’d been too embarrassed. Gratitude sparkled in his eyes. “Vielen Dank. Ich liebe Dich.”
I slept easy after Kurt left, until I found myself having Logan’s nightmare again. I hadn’t had it since that first week we’d begun working on my control, which had been almost four years ago. Again, I experienced the nightmare as he experienced it, not as a spectator. But it was more intense than ever before. And, instead of ending in the freezing snow, it ended with fire.
I sat up swiftly, wondering why I wasn’t greeted by the rising run, thatched walls, and the chirp of many hundreds of crickets. Falling back on the pillow, I tried to bring the image back, but it was gone. I rubbed the phantom ache in my knuckles while pondering the possibilities. Was the hut something Logan remembered or was it the place he was now? Unable to answer that, I resolved to ask the Professor about it in the morning and tried to go back to sleep. Despite my exhaustion, it was a difficult endeavor. Logan’s nightmare, especially the fiery ending, had unnerved me.
The Professor came to visit me again early that next morning, and I wasted no time in telling him about the nightmare and what I’d felt after.
He thought about it awhile, finally saying, “For obvious reasons, the two strongest psyches inside of your mind are Warbird’s and Logan’s. When Warbird finally subsided, it was Logan who came to the forefront. Some of the things that I saw in your mind whilst he was in control seemed peculiar to me. I also got the impression that I was viewing things that were happening at the present. I believe that, because Logan survived your complete absorption of his life force, the copy made of his psyche became a sort of window.”
Before I could fully grasp the implications of that, the doors to the med lab opened and Dr. McCoy came through. “Sorry to interrupt, but Rogue has some very insistent well-wishers who would like to see her.”
The Professor looked to me for consent. Straightening the sheets around me, I nodded. Dr. McCoy turned around and beckoned Bobby, Keller, Kitty, Jubilee, and Peter inside. Each of them carried either balloons, flowers, candy, or, in Bobby’s case, a polar bear stuffed animal. They took turns giving me hugs – Peter’s was a little awkward and Kitty’s a little emotional – and Jubilee promised me that I didn’t need to worry. “All those things you said? Forgiven and forgotten. Totally wasn’t you.”
“I think she’s way ahead of us on the forgetting part,” Keller pointed out, noting my confused and discomfited expression.
Jubilee brushed it off. “Even better.”
They stayed with me for most of the rest of the day, feeding me mini-Snickers bars and catching me up on the latest news, important and otherwise. It was so strange. To me, it felt like I’d only been gone for the two and half weeks Warbird had taken me to New York. For them, it had been thirty weeks. That’s over two hundred days. Life had gone on, the world had kept on turning, but I’d missed it completely.
It didn’t take long for my incredulousness to evolve into a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that made sure I realized how far out of the loop I really was. I did not even want to consider how much makeup work I had for my classes or how out of shape I probably was.
But, as it happened, Dr. McCoy’s electro-stimulation had kept my muscles from atrophying, so when I attempted to get up and walk around the med lab I only had to combat dizziness and stiffness from being horizontal for so long.
My muscles, he informed me after he’d kicked my friends out of the med lab in a very professional manner, were actually stronger than they’d ever been because I’d retained Warbird’s powers like I had Logan’s.
Or, at least, that was the theory. Accessing the power was another matter. My attempt to levitate myself off the table was to no avail. Not even repeating, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” in my head helped.
Clipboard in hand, Dr. McCoy peered down at me from over the top of his glasses. “What’s the problem?”
“It’s not working.”
“That’s probably because the mutation is trigged by adrenaline. Never mind. We’ll work on that some other time. I was going to wait to tell you with the Professor, but…Would you like to hear about the breakthrough I’ve made in my work on your skin cells?”
“Breakthrough?”
“Yes, breakthrough.” There was pride in his voice when he stated, “Actually, I’ve completed work on a serum that has the potential to make you one of the most powerful mutants in the world. If not the most.”
“What?”
“I know, it’s remarkable, isn’t it? It’s some of my best work. I believe that I can now alter the genetic makeup of your entire mutation so that it acts more like that of Everett Thomas’s. You know Everett, the boy they call Synch? He has a wonderful power, but it doesn’t last. In your case, however, if, over a period of time, we inject enough Power Boost into you, then you could retain any mutant’s power forever. And not by touch, either. By seeing them in action, like Everett does. In fact, I believe that altering your mutation will, by extension, alter your incapacity to touch completely.” He finished with a head-bob of excitement.
“What’s the catch?”
His giddiness was put on pause. He’d obviously expected me to jump at this opportunity, no questions asked. “I don’t…”
“The catch. The catch that every mutant’s power has. There’s always a downside. There has to be. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be natural.”
“Well, this isn’t natural. This is improving on nature. Though, I suppose you are partially correct. In any scientific experiment, there’s always a chance that something might go wrong.”
“Altering my genetic makeup sounds extreme.”
“Rogue, I promise you that I would take the utmost of care,” he replied sincerely.
“I know you would. I just don’t think I could handle all that power. I have more than my fair share now.”
Dr. McCoy respected my wishes but was undeniably upset by my lack of interest. He told me to think about it some more. I knew I wouldn’t. I hated to disappoint him since he had to have worked on this for a long, long time. Yet, in spite of the trust I had in his ability, it just seemed too risky to tempt fate. I didn’t want to be all-powerful. I didn’t even want to be team leader. I just wanted to be needed. That’s where my ambition ended.