For a moment, Marie felt like she was floating and bodiless. Then she opened her eyes and saw herself. She was Yuriko and she was desperate even as the lights were going out, she was clinging to Marie and mentally screaming––DON’T LET THEM TAKE ME BACK AGAIN!. It had been a plea for death as much as for any other kind of escape; the physical pain from the pull of Marie’s skin was almost overcome by the force of feeling Yuriko’s guilt and pain and disgust and horror and fear. Then Marie shut her eyes and had no idea who she was, but somehow her bones felt like they were on fire, searing her. Then there is only bright light and a shower of searing sparks.
”It’s a little known fact that class-5 mutants can defy the laws of physics when they lose control completely.”
This was the rogue mutant’s first thought when she woke up and found herself alone in the middle of nowhere. At first, the thought made no sense, until she tried to figure out where she was, and who she was this time: Marie? Yuriko? Opening her eyes, she found that she could see only white, but when she lifted her head there was a low icy crunch and she could see the woods around her. Chunks of snow slid off of her head. The smell of the air told her that she was far away from Stryker’s base. In fact, she was further away from any other living being than she had ever been, in either life.
She stood up, her clothes crunching with frost as she shook the snow off of herself. There were a vast number of bullet holes in her clothes, and while some of the frost on them was clear or white, and clean, most of it seemed to be tinged with pink and red. She could smell the blood as some of it melted on her skin. She was amazed that she could feel the cold, but that it did not sink into her skin as Marie had been used to. Her body was warm, even soaked in wet slush. She flexed her fingers, and her knuckles popped.
The metallic sound unnerved her and calmed her at the same time.
Only once before had Marie ever touched another mutant, after she had manifested. She had breathed fire for a few hours. It had taught her a lot about her mutation. She could remember now, killing herself on that poison skin––killing Yuriko; she could remember both sides of it in perfect detail, and both of them feeling equally like her own. She remembered the busy streets of Singapore with just as much nostalgia as she recalled the smell of autumn rain in Mississippi.
She tugged off one ragged glove and ran her fingers across her face, feeling the shape of her features and reassuring herself of which body she was in. It triggered a memory: image of Yuriko’s withered corpse, claws of bone still extended from one hand. Bone. Somehow Marie had done the impossible, and stolen the indestructible metal off of Yuriko’s bones. She remembered her first thought upon waking, and remembered that Yuriko had overheard Stryker saying it to one of his fellow doctors, about Marie.
“There’s only been one of ‘em before, that we know about, and he almost destroyed a whole country before a couple class-4’s took him out. This girl’s power...” He looked at some calculations on a computer screen. He had gotten hold of her DNA somehow. “She’s the most adaptable thing I’ve ever seen.”r32;
“And the most dangerous, sir?” the other doctor asked.
“Of course,” Stryker said, almost dismissively. He was a man obsessed with power.
The rogue mutant remembered what his blood had tasted like, from the one time Yuriko had managed to cut him, before he had gotten the dosage of her mind-control perfected, and learned its limitations as they applied to her.
She looked at the pink-and-red mess in the wet snow around her feet, from where she had slept. Most of the blood was hers; although her skin was perfectly healed now. She dug in the snow next to her and found her duffle bag. It had a few bullet holes, too, but she found some undamaged, less filthy clothes in it. They weren’t even all that damp. Secure in how alone she was, she changed clothes there in the middle of the clearing she had awoken in. Marie’s green cloak had a hole near the bottom hem, but she put it on over her fresh clothes anyway.
As she began walking, her boots, jeans, and the bottom two feet of her cloak were soon soaked and icy, but she kept moving. She tried to figure out what it meant, now that she was two people thrown together into one, but got distracted when she ran a hand through her hair and realized that something was different. She examined the white streaks in her hair. Yuriko’s mother had one like it, long ago; it had appeared after Yuriko’s mother had died.
The rogue mutant felt sad, remembering the funeral. Her heart ached. Was it Yuriko’s heart? Did Marie feel her pain, and ache too? Who was she, now?
Both, she decided; she was both. It was not as it had been with the others Marie had touched, with their voices in her head. Conversing with Yuriko seemed as redundant as talking to herself, because that was just what she would be doing. Curiously, she looked at her gloved hands and extended metal claws from her fingertips. She winced slightly when they broke the skin, but was surprised that she did not feel disgust and hatred, as Yuriko usually had. She retracted the claws.
“So I have changed,” she murmured. She was both, and she was neither. It occurred to her that she needed a new name, since neither Yuriko nor Marie quite felt right anymore.
When Yuriko had cut him, William Stryker had shouted into his radio that Deathstrike had gone rogue. Few words had ever sounded so sweet.
She thought about it. Half the people back in Mississippi had long ago taken to calling Marie “the rogue” because of her introversion, and her smart mouth, and the blatantly rebellious stances she had taken against most authority figures.
“My name is Rogue,” she said, testing it out. She found herself smiling. It felt good.
Rogue kept walking, South and East, away from Stryker and towards the unknown. She kept thinking, and kept discovering little things about herself that had changed.
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Story Notes:
This was a peculiar, albeit persistent, little plot bunny. Some more exploration of Rogue's possibilities, and, in a way, to work in Yuriko, in whom I've had an interest for a while.