DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
thatcraftykid
track two // “ANY COLOR YOU LIKE”
GREEN-EYED MONSTER
“You saw what I did,” she reminds him.
“I killed her. It took seconds. It could happen to you.”
– Rogue –
The measuring cup drops to the kitchen floor when Rogue hears the rattling hiss. Her bare hand stills over the fifty pound bag of flour. A second passes as a minute, and the snake flicks its banded tail against the open flap.
Rogue breathes, “Ew,” even as a several voices tell her to shriek and run. She keeps still, irrationally more afraid of the snake slithering into sight than she is of it striking from where she can’t see. Cooler minds prevail. Slowly, very slowly, she pulls her hand away, palm up.
A flat head glances her, and Rogue skitters back from the pantry with the frantic impression that the snake is flying toward her face.
A wheezy whoop punctuations her realization that she’s got the snake around the neck. Keep a hold, mutie!
Hardly able to make a sound, she curses at the snake, herself, and other people’s stupid, moronic, Darwin award-winning impulses.
The snake is enormous. Four feet long. The markings on its back are dark enough that it takes a minute for her to realize that something took a bite out of it.
It pulls back to strike!
Rogue throws up one elbow to protect herself. The other she straightens, pushing the jerking, disgusting thing as far away as her arm will stretch. Hand twitching wildly, her fingertips betray her and dig into the snake’s spongy back.
’At’s a way! Poison the sucker, like it wants t’ poison you. The hard-forgotten hacking twang of Redneck Macomb, he of the key-jangling sadism. Two snakes too many.
“Logan!” she croaks. She tries again to little more success.
But he’s in the shower, and the snake is pissed and trying to wrap itself – herself, it’s a her, just slithered out of brumation and looking for a male – inch by dry, reptilian inch around Rogue’s arms – David’s brother had a boa constrictor he threatened in him with, slow death by strangulation – and she’s too preoccupied with poison to do anything normal, like shake her off or snap her spine.
As Rogue draws her lips back in disgust, the snake bares her fangs to the gums. Their eyes are impossibly round and so afraid. Skin. Sharp. Suck. Sink.
We agree on that, she thinks, washed by a sudden calm. Rogue pulls the snake’s face closer to her own. She snaps and hisses, but that’s her right. In the end, there can be only one predator.
To the snake, she thinks, Stronger mind, stronger poison.
Wood creaks. Logan edges into the kitchen. His hand is stretched out toward her, palm up. “Gonna have to be quick about this,” he says steadily.
Her eyes snap shut. Her fingers curve around to hide the veins protruding from her throat just as the snake goes limp. She holds the carcass out to him.
“Are you hurt?” Logan’s tone is insistent and he’s getting closer. He must’ve already asked a few times.
“I didn’t mean to touch her,” Rogue says, dropping the snake in a pile at her feet. She clasps her empty hands together and wrings. “She was in the flour.”
Water from his wet hair drips into Logan’s eyes. He doesn’t blink. “Show me your arms.”
Blood still pounds hard, darkening her veins. She shows him smooth, undamaged skin.
“Christ,” he bites off, shaking more water out of his hair. “I thought – I come out here, ready to give you hell, and you’re in a starin’ contest with a damn snake...”
“Give me hell?” she prompts. Even that sounds like a safer subject.
He pounces on it. “You used up all the hot water again.”
“I did?” she remarks to his chin, the highest part of his body she can manage to direct her eyes.
A drop of water falls from his scruff to his chest and rolls down. The towel he’s barely wrapped in rides rakishly across the cut of his hips, like the wide belts of the swashbucklers on the paperbacks her momma read in delicious rotation.
He says something about twelve year-old water heaters. She nods.
Little Marie was about twelve when she took to sneaking into her momma’s bedroom to pour through those paperbacks, one after another, in a shocking haze of bodice-ripping and maidenhead-stealing. The flushed anticipation of getting caught only doubled the thrill, because she knew when her momma gasped, “Holy hell!” and knocked The Golden Barbarian out of her hands that she’d found something worth the trouble.
Her momma starts up again, gasping and knocking around her head. The compulsion to get caught looking only gets more irresistible. Rogue’s eyes lock on the intersection of what the towel exposes and what it doesn’t. A vein winds from the space between Logan’s lower abs to edge of the gray cloth, which is thin and damp enough for her momma to cry indecency.
But the old forbidden fascination has been replaced. It’s possible to reach out to touch what had to be covered, not what could acceptably be left bare. The vein, nothing but blood pounding under raised skin, is more obscene than the bulge. His torso, his ankles, his face – skin and hair, hair and skin. Nowhere to look but the towel, dead center.
Logan shifts his hips in a move so self-conscious it startles Rogue into recognizing the sudden silence. He can probably hear her knees knocking together.
She holds onto her arms at the elbows, skin prickling. “I won’t do it again,” she says, and steps over her kill. “Do you want pancakes? I was about to make pancakes. Start offering the praise now, because you are going to heaven.” Pulling open the refrigerator, she pushes a carton of milk aside and frowns. “No blueberries?”
“Didn’t look good at the store.”
“No?” She shuts the fridge and leans against it. “Another morning.” Rogue points a toe. “I guess we could eat her. Circle of life and all that. Or not. I just feel like I haven’t eaten in weeks.”
Why is she so breathless?
One chip of pink passion nail polish on her big toe is all that’s left of her last pedicure. Fascinating. She doesn’t often go barefoot. Wiggling her toes, she thinks of cold, damp soil.
Her eyes dart up to Logan, then flick over to the jerky he left out last night. She snatches up a handful and beats a hasty retreat. “Gotta get dressed. I’ve got that roof to finish.”
“Hey, hey,” Logan chides as she picks her way around him. “You take it easy. You ain’t right.”
Rogue’s breath catches on a hiss. Concern, not accusation. Even still. She lifts her chin. “I have a job to do, and my boss won’t pay me until it’s done.” They argued, two days before, about whether she should get paid hourly or by the job. She lost. “So.”
Logan gives her a wide berth.
Hours later, she’s up on the roof and he’s still in the house. She can hear him, though. His words, “You ain’t right,” are in her head like a new personality. The opposite of the understanding she has with the snake.
Ugh. Animals, with their half-thoughts and quarter-memories, never sit right. But they aren’t usually so overpowering. Rogue sniffs back her runny nose and shakes her body to dislodge the brain fog.
Levity and lightness – that’s what Carol the Marvel would proscribe.
Arms pointed straight out for balance against the wind, she hesitates as she tries to convince her spine to fall into a graceful backbend. Though she personally hasn’t done tricks on a balance beam since she was about eight, Carol performed all the way through college.
Rogue tests the traction of her sneakers against the shingles she’s just re-nailed. She decides that wool socks are a better idea, so she drops her shoes into the wet snow a story and a half below. The work gloves she keeps for their warmth and thickness.
Perching again on the crease, she takes a deep breath and waits until her mind signals her body to remember something it’s never felt – that rush of exhilaration that comes with posing in front of a crowd, muscles quivering in anticipation.
A crowd is not something she can easily conjure up, not with the expansive, desolate panoramic view she’s come to revel in this past week. The view over the cliff alone excites a sense of discovery in her, as if at the bottom there could be some new world.
She knows for a fact there’s a dirt road down there, but it’s a nice daydream.
Deep breath, bent knees – Rogue nearly misses catching her weight, but manages to maintain a handstand through force of adrenaline. Her knees still almost buckle against the wind.
“Marie!”
The metal ladder shakes with the force of Logan clambering up. Very carefully, she walks her body around so she can see a little bit of him thorough her hair. It’s an impressive display, if she does say so herself, even if she is cheating with some anti-gravity action.
And, okay, none of the talent actually belongs to her, but he doesn’t know that. He’s not going to find out, either. Because as useful as it is, it’s still galling that whenever she’s unsure of him she automatically turns on the Carol filter.
Carol has a history of being good at impressing men. Rogue’s imitation is passable. The first time she a quipped a Carolism – “Oh, I know why women love you, cowboy. You talk low, you talk slow, and you don’t say much…with your mouth” – it earned her a sidelong, half-lidded stare hot enough to sent her stomach into spasms.
Not that it takes much. Even his glower agitates the butterflies.
“You actively tryin’ to get yourself killed today?” Logan grouches, still standing on the ladder.
Snorting, she brings her arms out to her sides and hovers upside down.
“Uh-huh. Stay there awhile, you need as much blood to the brain as you can get.”
“Tough crowd,” Rogue acknowledges, wondering what the easiest way to right herself would be. Upside down, she spins thoughtfully.
“This ain’t a circus, kid. Finish over by the loft or leave it for me. It’s gonna rain again tonight, and there’s no reason you should have to sleep on the couch.”
“Couch was comfy,” she replies, actually meaning that he was comfy.
A good amount of maneuvering had gone into getting herself into the perfect position so that when her head started to droop she could rest it on his shoulder, and then slide it ever so slowly into his lap.
He didn’t seem bothered one way or another, but even after seven days and sixteen hours of shamelessly flirting with what amounts to a brick wall with eyebrows, Rogue is still carefully holding out hope that he thinks she’s sexy. Or at least pretty. Heck, she’ll take cute at this point – anything he likes.
The huge fleece shirt she has tucked into the waistband of her jeans slips suddenly over her eyes. Perhaps he’ll like getting flashed by a bra that’s seen better days?
“Quit messin’ around,” he snaps.
Rogue fumbles with the shirt while attempting to get to a standing position. A gust of wind twists her so that she falls shoulder-first onto the roof and then slides halfway down it on her stomach.
Ow.
Almost as exasperated as she is embarrassed and hurt, Rogue doesn’t even make an effort to get up.
Logan crouches beside her. The leather of his work gloves brush against her exposed spine, making her jerk her already raw stomach against the rough shingles.
He stands swiftly, barking, “Well, kid, you’re bleedin’. Roll yourself over.”
Rogue gets onto her hands and knees instead, and holds her arm out to him as a peace offering. He helps her up, his begrudging expression fading. She lifts the flannel shirt up and sticks her pelvic bone out so they can both assess the damage. Wide, uneven stripes of red run vertically from her belly button to her ribcage, oozing tiny splotches of blood.
“It looks worse than it feels,” she tells him, even though it stings like hell.
He picks out a piece of asphalt and holds it so close to her nose she has to look at it cross-eyed. “It’s gonna feel a lot worse soaked in peroxide.”
Ignoring her pitiful whine, he impels her toward the ladder. His belt buckle hits against her butt on the way down as he keeps that babying proximity reserved for the injured or the infirm.
He stops her on the last rung, telling her to stay put.
“No sense,” he mutters, shaking the wet snow off her tennis shoes and lifting her ankle so he can shove one on and then the other.
Rogue snorts, hopping to the ground. “Tie them for me, too. I don’t know how.”
He just tugs her along into the house.
“Why’re you acting so weird?” she asks him before he asks her. “Yesterday, you were – ” She stops herself at “wonderful,” though the patient, intelligent way he taught her how to keep an engine in good repair deserves the term. And, while he did tease her into blushing laughter more times than she can remember, “dead sexy” she skips right over entirely.
“I was what?” he asks, letting go of her once they’re through the backdoor and striding ahead.
“Right!” she finishes, bent over a little as she shuffles to the bathroom.
Thigh against the sink, Logan’s unwrapping the first-aid kit he clearly bought just for her. Makes her feel a little ungrateful.
“You don’t know me well enough to know right,” he says evenly.
“Why do you do that?” Rogue asks, eyes on the thick, hollow tips of the work gloves as she pulls out the flannel shirt to unstick it from her stomach. Her best friend in junior high used to get injured like this when she slid into home plate. Raspberries, she called them.
Logan’s focus is on applying Neosporin to the back of the length of gauze.
“I mean, the way you make knowing someone all about time.” Keeping the flannel away from her body, she tries to slip the bottom button open. “I know you just as well as you know me, which might not be as well as somebody who’s known me my whole life or whatever, but I’m not even close to who I was even a year ago.”
The bottom button finally comes undone, but the next keeps rolling into the fold of the extra fabric over her thumb.
“So you just getting to know me now still gives you the advantage over anybody else.”
She might as well being wearing mittens for all the dexterity these gloves give her.
Tossing them in the sink with Logan’s, she returns to the task with renewed vigor and a final point to her rambling – “And, seeing as how you’re all Lone Ranger, I’m pretty sure I’ve got the advantage, too.”
The shirt slides down her arms and drops to the tile, making Logan look down at her.
“It was sticking.” Rogue tries to shrug, not knowing what to do with so much skin but not wanting to look anymore like an idiot. She hooks her fingers into the back waistband of her jeans and juts her hip out casually.
While he unscrews the peroxide, she slyly checks herself out. Her bra shrunk in the wash, which does great things for her cleavage. Logan turns back around, and Rogue looks at the ceiling of all places. Smooth.
He sets the peroxide on the sink, followed by the tweezers, which he squeezes a couple times just to make her grimace.
“There has to be a better way,” she gripes, her eyes already on his forehead and her skin starting to wake up before her brain hits upon the obvious. Rogue clamps her eyes shut.
“Name it,” he prompts.
She shakes her head vigorously. Not even an option. Even if it means he’d never get to say she doesn’t know him well enough again.
Well. Except for the part where he’d probably never talk to her again.
Impatiently, Logan says her name.
“I want the peroxide,” she replies, more to herself.
“Then take this.” He pushes a towel against her.
Eyes still closed, she holds it so nothing will drip into her jeans. As he tips the bottle against her skin, Rogue wonders if he can see the quiver. The reaching out.
The acid-like bubbling is painful, especially when Logan blots at it with a ripped towel square, but it’s easy to ignore compared to the itch. That gash had to have been four inches long and at least an inch wide. And his skin had just sealed itself, smooth as wax dripping down a candle.
Everyone’s skin has a will of its own. Goosebumps, ticklishness, wrinkles, sweat glands, bruises, scars. Healing. Poisoning. Pulling. It just happens. Less consciously than breathing.
Logan catches skin with the tweezers. Rogue hisses out a breath, her eyes flying open and her hand catching his.
Bare fingers clamped over his knuckles, she’s filled with a dizzying relief. Latex. He’s wearing hospital gloves. The thin kind, not the high-risk, double-layered latex they used at Southaven.
Her lips form a tremulous smile. “Gloves. Thoughtful,” she says, and she means it even if it’s a precaution for the infectious. She takes a shaky breath, blinking rapidly.
“You’re tougher than this,” Logan tells her, sounding confused.
Rogue clasps her hands behind her back. “I wasn’t – I wasn’t paying attention. And I didn’t know you were wearing gloves.” Tears spill over, drip babishly from her chin.
“Hey.” Latex brushes her shoulders. “Hey, c’mon. You couldn’t hurt me that much.”
The arrogance. Frustration and snot clog her voice. “You saw what I did,” she reminds him. “I killed her. It took seconds. It could happen to you.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
His skepticism isn’t helping and neither is the fact that she does know what would’ve happened, at least in the long run.
Even if Logan forgave it as an accident, neither of them would be able to look at each other the same way. Especially not her. She’d know what is to be Wolverine – to be really and truly invincible – and the next time she took from him it would be on purpose.
And then she’d be right back on her way to becoming the monster they always said she was.
The bathroom is suddenly too small. She hits her elbow against the sink when she draws her hands up to brush the asphalt off her stomach, never mind the blood and the puss.
“There. Like ripping off a band-aid. More peroxide. Please.”
Rogue tilts her chin up and Logan positively towers over her. Has he always been this tall? Or is it just that she’s never felt this small? And this big. All at once.
Logan’s palm – she can almost feel the ridges under the latex – presses against her forehead. He pulls it back wet. “Fever. I told you to take it easy today.”
Wonderingly, she says, “I’m allergic. She poisoned me after all.”
“No, kid, you’re sick. After moths of breakin’ into shitty motels to take showers, you’re surprised you caught somethin’?”
“I never get really sick, it just…goes away.” Her tone hits a flat note. It never just went away. She took, and then she got well again. Is that awful? Her moral compass isn’t fine-tuned enough to know for sure.
“Hey,” he says, which she’s just now realizing is Logan for, “I’m about to say something meaningful.”
She raises her eyes, and he slides her damp hair off her forehead.
“You can afford to be sick with me.”
It takes another dose of self-control not to fall apart again. She presses her cheek against his shirt and hugs her arms around his waist. She’s almost doubled-over so he can’t really return the embrace. A moment’s hesitation, then he tucks his elbow around her head and lets the sleeve of his other arm graze down her exposed back.
This time, Rogue doesn’t flinch. She shivers.
Another beat, then he says, “Gotta take care of that fever.”
She reluctantly lets him go. He’s right. Her resolve probably won’t hold if she gets any sicker.
Logan finishes cleaning her stomach and wraps it in gauze. He tells her to go lie down – in his room, so he can finish up on the roof. “And take a shirt,” he adds, passing the door on his way to the kitchen. She’s more than happy to comply, his t-shirts smelling like him as they do.
Several minutes later, he catches her drowsily burying her nose in his pillow. She lifts her head up swiftly, embarrassed but glad to accept the warm bowl of soup.
“Smells great,” she jokes.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s out of a can. This is more important.” He sets a beautifully designed sake cup and saucer down on the nightstand. “Herbal tea. Diaphoretic. Trick I picked up in Japan, among others.”
Rogue smiles. “Like you’ve ever been sick a day in your life.”
“Still won’t take my word for it.”
“I wasn’t doubting you. Anyway, how’d you know I should take it easy? I felt…off. But even I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Last night you were sweatin’ in your sleep, but you kept cuddlin’ up like you had a chill.”
Stirring her soup thoughtfully, she decides Carol would send him a wink. “I guess you’re used to women drooling on your lap for different reasons.”
That earns her very first eyebrow cock of the day. Rogue cocks one right back, slipping the spoon into her mouth.
“I’m gonna see about the roof. Drink that tea, kid. Fever’s something you gotta sweat out.”
And sweat she does. A cold sweat that gathers at her armpits and between her breasts and behind her knees. She can’t get comfortable in any position, except she knows she could on her stomach pretty much because it hurts too much to be an option.
Rogue hoped to be wet and writhing on Logan’s bed. But this just sucks.
Throwing off his covers, she drags herself into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub. The first spurts of water are as freezing as Logan complained about this morning. She’s patient, though, and soon hot steam clouds the air.
Tub halfway full, she slides in with a sigh. Oh yes. Much better.
She wonders if Logan’s going to get on her about the hot water again. Smirking, she spreads her limbs out. Plenty of room for two, if he’d only just join her.
A completely ludicrous, completely compelling fantasy. She rubs her pale calf against the smooth, bright white tub, trying to imagine a muscular leg covered in dark hair. How it would feel to lounge against his chest.
Rogue sinks further into the water, letting her mind drift. She starts humming Joan Jett’s version of “Crimson and Clover,” trying to remember what that song has to do with a bathtub and a rodeo…Oklahoma, summer before basic. He lost the trophy to a good ol’ boy from Tennessee, but he pursued her like a winner so she took him back to her hotel.
There are a lot of fascinating things Carol’s wild days illustrate a fearless woman can do to an enthusiastic man.
Bitterness takes Rogue out of the moment. Three strikes against her – she’s too dangerous to be fearless, and Logan’s obliviousness makes her seriously doubt that even a fake age and stolen experience can turn her into a woman.
Still, Carol’s appreciation for a well-worn pair of jeans and everything underneath soon preoccupies her again. So much so that she doesn’t notice the bathwater cooling. She has her foot propped on the edge of the tub and a hand between her thighs.
“Want something, cowboy?” she coos, before she even knows Logan’s there.
Water splashes to the floor with the force of her jerking upright. A split second later, she’s back down, covering herself with her arms. She peeks over the edge but doesn’t see him.
“Logan?” Please say she imagined him.
No such luck. “Door came open when I knocked,” he replies, evidently from around the corner.
So he didn’t see? Thank God, thank God, thank God. “That’s all right. Did you want something?” Rogue winces at the echo of Carol’s question.
He grunts something about drowning.
“Nope, not drown.” Not yet, anyway. It’s tempting, now that she’s nearly gotten caught three times today acting like a snake high on pheromones.
“I got more tea ready.”
“Out in a sec.”
He leaves, and Rogue lets her head sink underwater.
The predator instinct strikes again. She didn’t lock the door. She might even have left it open to bait him in. Only she obviously doesn’t have the right lure. Rogue is no bombshell, not in either sense. She wouldn’t tear a man part, rip him to pieces and send him flying like Carol’s exes always accused.
Baby doll, all you need…
She holds her breath hard. When she sits up, oxygen is the only thing on her mind.
Wrapping herself in a towel, Rogue takes a seat on the tub to let the pounding in her brain stop. She’s not surprised that she feels better. Maybe her fever already broke. Or maybe it was all in her head.
Rogue watches water funnel down into the pipes.
Carol has been too much on her mind. She’s pawned one too many of her memories and her traits off as her own to impress Logan. To be a bombshell.
But she’s much more dangerous than that. She’s a snakebite. A slow poison that would bring Logan to his knees until the spark of hate in his eyes would be his only vitality. And she’d drain even that, carry it with her always.
Macabre. Self-pitying. Whatever.
Rogue pitches the wet gauze but doesn’t bother to rewrap her stomach. She gets dressed and puts on real gloves, which she hasn’t worn all day.
“I have issues,” Rogue announces to Logan when she takes her seat across from him at the table. “Jealousy is a big one. I was apparently a thief before I was even out of the cradle, if you can believe my daddy’s ‘Entitled Brat’ speeches.”
Logan pushes the kettle toward her, and she picks it up.
“You don’t get sick. You don’t get hurt. I wish I could be like that, so I want to hurt you. That’s my mutation. It wasn’t like that at first, and maybe I can get to a point where I’m more, I don’t know, Zen about the whole thing.” Rogue gulps the tea down, not caring very much when it burns her tongue.
One way to keep the monster at bay – zero self-regard.
“Ever try meditation?”
“You have?” The herbal tea was enough of a surprise.
He shrugs. “It works.”
“I don’t know.” But then she remembers what he said about not taking his word. “I’d be willing to try.”
Logan studies her. “You know your eyes’ve been green all day.”
“It’s a warning,” Rogue says absently. Like when a snake rattles her tail. She sets down her sake cup, hard. For the love of God, shut up about it, she orders herself.
He pours them both more tea.
Rogue sips, watching Logan over the rim. “What color are they now?”
“They’re brown.” He’s looking into his sake cup.
Plopping her head on her hand, she shrugs. That fact doesn’t make her skin any less lethal. “They were blue when I was born. But that’s common.”
“Brown suits you.”
Her frown pulls into a rueful smile. It’s not that significant of a compliment, but she goes ahead and adds it to the mental tally she’s keeping. Brown eyes at least she can claim for herself. It’s a start.
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