She was no where to be found. He looked for her in her room, the gym, library, rec room, grounds. No dice. She didn’t show up for dinner either. Wolverine ate, ignoring the chatter of the rest of the X-men around him as he grinned inwardly to himself; she was definitely stewing hard, probably sitting somewhere gnashing her teeth in frustration, wondering what she was doing wrong, where she could improve.
Problem was the girl thought too much, not enough action. She was careless because she didn’t trust her instincts and hesitated before she moved into a fight. She spent too much time weighing her options before pouncing. That was her weakness. She needed to trust not only his training and her expertise but have the confidence to believe she’d make the right call, and if she didn’t then she could make another decision and still win the battle. She was erratic because she couldn’t make up her damn mind which course of action to commit to sometimes. When she finally did settle she was unstoppable, but she took too much time dithering.
Her use of firearms was overly cautious. She needed to give up the naïve idea that the war they were fighting wasn’t bloody; everyone got blood on their hands at some point. Her technique and skill were unmatched by everyone on the X-men except Wolverine, but her reluctance to use her skills on anything but Danger Room targets would get her killed, or at least maimed until Wolverine could heal her. She needed to find that killer instinct, quit trying to bury it under her immature hope that one day she wouldn’t have to take a life to save her own or those of her teammates.
Same with her mutation. Wolverine understood she loathed the idea of another mind shouting in her head, but she needed to accept that she would have to turn on her skin during battles to drain enemies and friends alike to fight with the X-men, to take the powers of the fallen to rise up and fight again until victorious. Otherwise she was nothing but a well trained but powerless human. She needed to take ownership of and responsibility for her dangerous gift, learn to use it to her advantage and quit stalling in fear, smothering her power under the crushing weight of her doubts about what would wind up swirling in her mind.
All the X-men were haunted by the memories of things they’d done and fear of things they would inevitably do to protect those mutants who needed them and to stop those out to destroy everything Xavier and the X-men valued. She needed to get over it and accept that any torment that landed in her head from the fight may pale in comparison to what lurked in the memories of her teammates.
She needed to go all out, balls to the wall and tear apart anything in her path to win, to save those who needed protection, and accept that she would have to surrender her own notions of morality and self-preservation to preserve something greater than herself. She was a soldier and she needed to accept that with that came sacrifice. They all lived with it, it was time she learned how to also and quit hiding. She wasn’t a kid anymore. He’d protect her, he’d promised, but not from her own illusions about what life should be. Time to grow up and accept what life was.
Mulling over these thoughts, Wolverine changed in the locker room into his workout gear as he prepared for another late night session in the Danger Room. Just the thing to work out the mental kinks, he thought to himself as he snugged on his black uniform and snapped shut the latches on his heavy boots. He slipped on thin leather gloves over his hands and snapped out the claws, inspecting the metal sheaths that covered the openings and allowed his razor sharp weapons to slide out while still protecting the sensitive torn skin of his knuckles. He had to give it to Xavier, these were a big improvement over the old uniforms. The molecularly-bonded Kevlar weave Beast had cleverly engineered for the skin suit was light, versatile, flexible, and comfortable with none of the bulk of the commercial grade stuff cops and military had to wear. A great improvement over the heavy and constricting leather Xavier had first proposed.
Scott had told him about what sounded like a new and dangerous training program, but he figured it would need a few tweaks to satisfy the Wolverine so he headed to the control room to edit the code. Once in the control room he saw on a monitor a program was running, so he opened one of the blast shields on the observation window and looked down to see a louder-than-life battle sim raging.
Someone had raided the memory stores for a crazy combination of baddies to fight: Deadpool, Avalanche, Lady Deathstryke, and Omega Red. Interesting combination, a little bit of everything. Bullets flew madly in all directions and the earth of the simulated urban wasteland heaved and roiled. Looked be three X-men pinned down behind a crumbling wall as Omega Red bashed the other side with his carbonadium whips. Deathstryke clambered on top of a flaming car in their blind spot and Wolverine almost flipped on the intercom to call a warning down to his teammates. It wasn’t needed as a moment later a dark blossom appeared in the semi-cyborg’s neck.
Wolverine started in surprise. Not only was that a damn nice shot with almost instantaneous reaction time, but Rogue hadn’t hesitated to strike, nor did she waste time looking at Deathstryke once the woman collapsed behind the smoking wreckage. She merely shouted her partners to get down as more bullets flew past them from a hidden assailant, most likely Deadpool, the gun crazy mercenary.
One of her partners was too slow, so Rogue grabbed the mutant by the collar and dragged him down, shielding him with her own body when masonry tumbled overhead as Omega Red slammed into the wall once more.
Impressed, Wolverine leaned over the control panel to watch the wild scenario. Rogue, Shadowcat and Nightcrawler backed up from the brutal onslaught of Avalanche’s quakes and the threatening snaps of Omega Red’s whips as they crackled with electricity and snaked after them. They weren’t retreating, instead seeking higher ground from which to launch a counter-assault. Why didn’t they just disappear from the sight of their adversaries and take Rogue with them to a safer distance to launch their own attack? Wolverine studied the team carefully, it appeared there was some dissension among the ranks as Rogue shook her head and gestured towards the fight while Crawler and Cat clearly wanted to go in the opposite direction. At that moment, Deadpool slid around a corner and pumped a veritable bombardment of ammo at the three. Kurt bamfed out of sight, Kitty shrieked and phased through the ground and vanished. Wolverine snarled as her teammates disappeared around her and Rogue took a bullet to the shoulder. Rather than fall in shock, she spun behind a cement girder barely holding up a decimated parking garage thenpeeked her head out briefly to unload her Glock at the assassin before again ducked behind the crumbling barricade.
Wolverine watched as she slipped a knife from her boot and sliced a strip of her uniform off to tie roughly around her injured shoulder, his eyes widening at the sight of blood snaking down her arm and chest, then flicked down to the control panel. The safeties were off. He tried to activate them but was denied access. Growling he punched in his override code, but the system firmly stated he did not have proper authorization to alter the running program. One of the squirts’ doing, he was sure. Knowing without the right shut-down code the sim would only end when one side or the other was utterly defeated he sped down the stairs to the door of the DR and sliced through the release mechanism when it initially denied him entrance. He stormed in just in time to see Deathstryke impale Shadowcat through the back with her adamantium talons. The X-man’s eyes widened as blood frothed at her lips and ran down her uniform while the Japanese madwoman shrieked in triumph.
“NO!” Wolver roared and unsheathed his claws only to pause in mid-step towards the fallen girl as she dissolved in a spate of pixels. A hologram, they both were. He let Deathstryke run into the smoke as he sped towards the last place he’d seen Rogue, unsure who was real or not but he had a feeling she at least was, this was where she’d been hiding. He skidded to a stop at the precariously leaning parking garage, no one in sight and he sniffed the air to find a trace of living breath to latch onto and track.
A groan and twist of metal warned him almost too late as a huge slab of rebar reinforced concrete broke off the unstable structure and plummeted toward him and the ground heaved under his feet. He launched himself to the side just in time to avoid being crushed as several tons of mortar slammed to the ground, only to be greeted with a knee to the face as the Russian earth-shaker attacked him. He had only enough time to head butt the man viciously before he lost his balance once again on the unstable ground. But he took his foe down with him and drilled crushing fists into the other man’s face until he fell still under him, blood running from his ears and nose.
As Wolverine stood over the holographic corpse, watching is vanish, he heard gunfire again, very close this time. He crept around the side of a burned out building to see down the block to Nightcrawler winking in and out of sight as he dodged a hail of bullets and the occasional grenade from Deadpool, who was cackling, “Weren’t you in that Lilo and Stitch movie? Does Mickey know you left the Magic Kingdom?”
He unsheathed his claws and strode down the street, only to see Rogue slither from a shadow behind Deadpool and leap onto his back while the lunatic was distracted taking potshot at the elf. Wolverine paused, waiting to see what she would do, but still tense with the safeties off. Even though he was a hologram, Deadpool’s bullets still wounded and his swords were deadly sharp. Wolverine crouched behind an over-turned car, tensed for the spring he never had to make as, with a piercing scream, Rogue snaked her arms around the killers neck and squeezed even as she bit him brutally through his mask. The mouthy merc shouted in pain and dropped his gun to bring his hands to his face in agony. Rogue continued to choke him until the man dropped to the ground beneath them. She gritted her teeth and strained, even as her shoulder bleed profusely, to keep her death grip on her foe. Crawler ported to her side as she lay heavily on the still mutant pinned under her, her arms crushing tighter until Deadpool’s wheezes and desperate scrabbling ceased. Even then she did not release him.
“Scheiße, Rogue! He eez not brezing, let go,” the German man tugged at her arms until she unwound them from Deadpool’s neck. Wolverine started forward, ready to lead them out of the DR to safety but froze when Rogue leaned down over the fallen mutant and gripped him by the chin and side of the head. A second later a sickening crack resounded; she'd broken the mutant’s neck.
Wolverine couldn’t believe it. Yes, it was a sim, a training program, but she’d done it so coldly and such with brutal efficiency to make sure the enemy was down for the count. He would have felt pride in her skill if the beast inside hadn’t suddenly shouldered his conscience aside to gaze hungrily upon the deadly woman as she dropped the limp form. Wolverine felt his lip curl as a low rumble rose from deep in his chest.
Rogue bent down and unstrapped the two katanas on Deadpool’s back to put them on herself, then stripped his holster housing a pair of mean looking Sig Sauer P220s and wrapped it around her own hips, checking the clips before slamming them home. “Let’s go,” she said bluntly to the blue mutant, who was regarding her with a stunned look on his face.
“Rogue…you just-“ His words were cut off as the corpse shockingly sat up and latched one red gloved hand on his tail as the other whipped out a wicked butterfly knife from a calf sheath.
“If you’re thinking about choking me again sweetcheeks, I gotta tell you that’s really annoying,” the merc quipped as he hauled Crawler towards him and prodded the elf none-too-gently with the knife. “Of course,” he said, looking Rogue over, “if that sort of thing gets you hot I could-“
Silence fell as a katana flashed and Deadpool’s head neatly parted company with his body. Kurt shied away from the now one foot shorter corpse as it fell away from him, then disappeared, and again as Rogue flicked the blood from the blade with a practiced flick of her wrist. Wolverine slunk back into the shadows to watch her, his pulse racing at her chilling expertise, every movement as sharp and precise as the blades she now carried.
“Now he’s dead. C’mon,” she barked at Nightcrawler and they made their way down the block, darting from barricade to doorway before stepping to the shadows on the far side of the street. Wolverine tracked from a distance, wouldn’t do to alert them to his presence now, he wanted to see what Rogue else would do unaware of his scrutiny. He wanted to watch her closely, admire the way she moved, powerful and supple; it fired his blood something fierce. The authority she exuded as she took the lead in recon, signaling Kurt with subtle hand gestures to teleport and scout the high ground.
He’d never seen her like this. She was pure power, perfect in every line and motion. It was commanding, intoxicating.
When Omega Red crashed through the wall Kurt was crawling over, seized the blue mutant with one of his whips around the neck and fried him, Rogue didn’t hesitate to draw one of Deadpool’s guns with smooth dexterity and blast two .45 caliber slugs into the metal enhanced mutant’s left eye. The one part of his body not protected by carbonadium. She was too late to save Kurt, who’d been electrocuted, and when the young man disappeared in a spark of pixels Wolverine breathed a sigh of relief. He’d thought her teammate was another hologram, and was glad to see he was right.
Why wasn’t the sim over? All the enemies were gone, beaten, beheaded, shot, otherwise incapacitated beyond redeeming for the purposes of the training program. Rogue also seemed surprised the program ran on, and she slowly pulled one of the swords from the scabbards on her back as she slammed another clip into the gun.
Her apprehension at the unknown danger still lurking spiked and Wolverine caught a whiff. Potent stuff, provocative adrenalin and salty sweat mixed in with that smoky sandlewood scent that was all Rogue. The beast gnawed at the back of his brain, bristling to be released to hunt down the source of the delectable smell. Wolverine didn’t even bother to stifle the rumble seeping through his teeth. For a better view of her as she moved through the blasted landscape Wolverine tracked her from the high ground, scuttling over rooftops, enjoying the chase even as his prey had no idea the beast persued.
Rogue crept stealthily along seemingly deserted city streets until she came to a junkyard and paused, eyes analyzing the scene for a moment before she moved quietly but confidently into the maze of wrecked autos. Wolverine followed her at a distance, tracking her from a parallel path through the wreckage, his pulse rising steadily the longer the sim ran, the longer the expectancy of the final fight, his nerves stretched close to snapping. Judging from the fizzle of tension radiating on Rogue’s scent hers were too, strung tight as a bow and ready to fly, deadly and true.
“Gaijin dog!” shouted a voice. Deathstryke, bitch always turned up when you least wanted to see her ugly mug.
Rogue sneered, “You sure you want those to be your last words?”
Wolverine heard the distinct sound of metal clashing and ran down the rows, anxious to find his way to the two combatants. He skidded around a corner in time to see Deathstryke lash out with her adamantium talons and take a vicious swipe at Rogue’s midsection that the younger mutant parried with the flat of the swords she gripped in both hands.
Still the Japanese psychopath’s nails stripped away a long swath of the X-man’s uniform and exposed soft skin laced now with a row of bloody scratches. Rogue’s scent shot skyward with adrenalin and intensity as she briefly assessed her wounds. Then she smiled at the psychotic Asian woman, the way a shark shows its teeth before it bites you in half.
Wolverine snarled triumphantly to see it. There it was. The killer instinct. Not just determination to slay, but to make sure it ached, screamed, tortured. Maybe draw it out to send a message.
His hands fisted as he fought to restrain himself, to let her make the kill. Christ, seeing her like this, she was perfect.
Deathstryke’s hands were the only part of her body infused with adamantiumm but the rest of her was enhanced with cyborg components that, in some places, entirely replaced limb and muscle. Rogue knew this as she flung her opponent away with a powerful kick to the chest and followed it up with a lethal slash of her katana that ripped through one of Deathstryke’s less protected thighs, exposing damaged bio-circuitry and severed wires.
The woman screamed as her leg wobbled under her and struck with lethal ferocity once more, this time scoring Rogue’s face with a line of bloody gashes before battered back once more by the X-man’s flurry of parries and savages thrusts.
“Rogue!” shouted Wolverine, his claws flashing out at the sight of her ruined face. He charged forward.
“Stay back!” Rogue screamed as she dove away from Deathstryke’s deadly hands and the maniac’s talons ripped through the side of a car.
“Come Logan-san!” the psycho hissed, “Come see as I rip your woman’s intestines out. I will feed them to the dogs!”
Wolverine roared as he charged forward, only to be brought down by a wicked slash to the back of his thighs by Rogue’s blades.
“Stay the fuck out of this!” she screamed as he collapsed under the agony of severed hamstrings. As he fell forward he caught himself in time to keep from landing flat on his face and pressed up to watch the two women lock once again in mortal combat. He struggled to rise but Rogue had carved him deeply; he was useless until his healing factor caught up. All he could do now was watch in fervent horror as the two circled each other, each landing and receiving punishing hits and blood spattering slices.
Deathstryke laughed as Rogue appeared to weaken from blood loss and she lurched to one side. One leg collapsed under her and Rogue fell to her knees, one sword clattering from her hand.
“That’s right, gaijin whore, kneel to Deathstryke,” the deranged woman cooed as she traced one more bloody slice across Rogue’s cheek as the woman shivered before her, barely remaining upright as blood trickled from dozens of cuts. “I am the last thing you will see before I gouge your eyes out.” Talons curved inward, ready to pluck the sight from the X-man’s face.
“Rogue!” Wolverine shouted, struggling to get up but his legs would not obey.
BANG
“You talk too much,” Rogue sneered as Deathstryke stumbled back and stared uncomprehendingly down at the bullet hole that went through her heart and exited her back in a huge clot of mechanics and muscle. Rogue stood up swiftly, the smoking Sig Sauer now in her free hand and spun in what seemed to be slow-motion to Wolverine.
Arms, legs, slivered torso, mangled shoulder, all moved in fluidity as she turned her back to Deathstryke in a seemingly gentle sway. Then her remaining katana shot behind her in a blaze of steel tempered to near molecule thinness, spearing the demented villain through the gut. As Rogue completed her strike and turned to face her opponent once more, she brought the sword up smoothly and it sliced up through her crazed foe, parting her ribs easily, up through her throat to slip lethally under her chin until the point emerged from the top of Deathstryke’s head.
“Stay dead,” Rogue spat in the face of her fallen nemesis before she withdrew the sword and the body fell to the ground with an air of finality and disappeared. The sim ended and the bare walls and floor of the Danger Room emerged from the darkness. Rogue stalked over to Wolverine where his tendons and skin finally raveled back together as he got to his knees.
“I told you to stay the fuck out of it, Wolverine!” she shouted down at him.
He didn’t care if she was pissed, he was just relieved she had apparently been feinting how serious her injuries were in order to lure Deathstryke close enough for a final blow. Her cunning and surety with the killing stroke had stoked a fire in him that threatened to rage of our control, consume him where he knelt in front of her. The sight of her, uniform in shreds, the intoxicating scent of her adrenalin, sweat, and fury, covered in blood and victorious, all her enemies dead at her feet threatened his sanity.
She stood there, a specter of icy and efficient death, an avenging angel or dark goddess come to earth to lay waste to all in her path.
“Rogue-“ he started, reaching a hand to her ruined face.
“Save it!” she shouted as her hand swung high in an arc and the butt of the gun crashed into his temple. All went black and he fell at her feet, like all the others. She wasn’t done, not by a long shot.
“At least you’re good for something,” she muttered as stripped off her bloody gloves and laid her hands on Wolverine’s face, draining him to soothe her wounds and wash away her aches as she prepared for another sim.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Sorry, chapter 3 with the smutty probably won't be up tonight, I'm just really tired and chapter two was a lot longer than I planned. Last chapter up tomorrow night
Chapter End Notes:
For those of you who may not be familiar with some of the baddies in the sim:
Deadpool is a healter like Logan, in addition to being a complete nut and crazy about weaponry. You can slice off his arm and he can just stick is back on. Freaky.
Omega Red is the former Sovier Union's attempt at Weapon X but they couldn't harness adamantium so they used carbonadium.
Lady Deathstryke is resistant to many injuries b/c her cybernetic compenents can knit back together to an extent.
Or just wikipedia them. :)
Deadpool is a healter like Logan, in addition to being a complete nut and crazy about weaponry. You can slice off his arm and he can just stick is back on. Freaky.
Omega Red is the former Sovier Union's attempt at Weapon X but they couldn't harness adamantium so they used carbonadium.
Lady Deathstryke is resistant to many injuries b/c her cybernetic compenents can knit back together to an extent.
Or just wikipedia them. :)