*


She has resigned herself to the absurd twist of fate that has dropped in her in the same San Francisco neighborhood where Erik Lehnsherr now also resides. She thinks, vaguely, that it might not be fate, that there might be some kind of magnetic pull, something that drew her to this area, instead of another. Or, perhaps she has unconsciously followed some tiny, insignificant memory of this area of San Francisco, where he had long ago bought an apartment, accompanied by Mystique in the form of an older British gentleman; a memory that made this area seem more familiar, more appealing to her, more like a place she thought she would be able to live.

In any case, she now finds herself seeing him nearly every other day, in the park, or at Miller’s East Coast Deli, or Bob’s Donuts, talking, not-talking. Sometimes they end up taking the bus back together from Golden Gate Park to their neighborhood, and she thinks her life is an elaborate and painful farce as she watches a young girl who looks like Jubilee insist on giving up her seat to Erik, who sits down with a dramatic elderly-person sigh of gratitude.

One evening she asks him, “Was Xavier your first love?”

Erik looks like he wants to spit out his mouthful of apple fritter. “You have something of an obsession with this subject, it seems,” he finally manages to say.

She explains, “You were in my head; there are things I know and then there are holes. It bothers me. It’s like I forgot things that happened in my own past.”

“But they weren’t in your own past, my dear,” Erik says, a little tiredly.

Rogue glares at him. “I didn’t ask for them to be in my head, either.”

Erik raises his hands. “All right, all right. I admit defeat. I seem to be doing a great deal of this recently.”

He sighs, wipes his fingers on a napkin. “No, Charles was not my ‘first love,’ as you so mawkishly put it.”

When he says it, she blinks, knowing he is telling the truth, and then she blurts out, without realizing what she is saying, “Jean-Luc.”

Erik’s face slightly crumples at the name, and she feels as though she punched him in the stomach. She wants to take it back, she cannot take it back. She says, covering her mouth, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t—I don’t know what—”

He says, “You do know things, don’t you.”

Not a question, a statement. Without a trace of rancor or resentment. Just the starkness of that truth. She squeezes her eyes shut and says, “You don’t have to say anything more, I’m sorry.”

But when she opens her eyes, he is already smiling again, saying, “Oh, my dear girl, don’t you know better than to ask a decrepit old man to start telling stories about the past? You’ll never hear the end of it.”

He pauses, looking at her out of the corner of his eye, giving her this warning, waiting for her to tell him once again to say nothing. But she only looks at him. So he starts to speak.

“Jean-Luc was a young man I met in France, shortly after the war. The British had liberated the Auschwitz prisoners who had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen by the Red Army. I was just trying to get out of Germany; at that point everyone was trying to get to Portugal, to Jerusalem, to marry an American soldier. I don’t even remember how I got from Bergen to Strasbourg, I think I was in a car with a few other former prisoners. All I remember was someone trying to feed me a can of condensed milk, and vomiting in the car. I woke up just outside of the city; in a field by the side of the road. The people in the car must have left me for dead.

“From there, I continued on foot. I couldn’t have gone far, I could barely walk. I suppose I collapsed on the road again, and when I woke up I was in another, smaller car.

“Jean-Luc was driving, his wife Martine was tending to my wounds. When I opened my eyes I was in the backseat, just behind him. I saw him in the rear view mirror. Actually I heard him before I saw him; he was singing some old French song.

“They were driving me to their home, which, it turned out, was just outside of Paris; we must have already been driving for hours. In the car, Martine gave me three boiled eggs, already peeled, and the ugliest, toughest apple I had ever seen in my life, and I ate everything in, perhaps, four seconds: stem, seeds, everything. I would have eaten the eggshell if she hadn’t peeled it. I wasn’t even seventeen.”

She thinks, Don’t tell me that.

“They had been part of the French resistance. They seemed like gods to me. At that point Paris had already been liberated for several months, but you could have told me the planet Jupiter had been liberated; I had no idea what was going on anywhere. I didn’t speak French then, only German and Polish. Jean-Luc taught me my first words. J’ai faim, je m’appelle Max, pomme, poulet, ici, là.”

“Max?” she asks.

“The name I was born with,” he says, after a moment’s hesitation. He looks surprised at himself. He has shared that name without meaning to.

“I stayed at their home, recuperating, and then as a friend, for a little over a year. Jean-Luc never looked at me as anything but perhaps a fragile and beloved younger brother.” Erik looks down, smiles, then shrugs.

“Then I met another young Polish woman in Paris, who had also been in the camps. She was living alone with her daughter; her husband had died at Dachau. We lived together for a few years, the three of us, in Paris then in London, until my mutation manifested itself uncontrollably and I nearly killed them both. She took her daughter and ran. I was living alone in London when I met Charles. He was only seventeen. And that, as they say, was that.”

He tears a piece of apple fritter off, but does not eat it. “I sometimes think I must have seemed to Charles then the way Jean-Luc seemed to me: powerful, charismatic, passionate. Someone who had every answer to every question in the world.” He sighs. “Some of my answers disappointed him, obviously.”

She looks down at her own untouched apple fritter. “Did you keep in touch with Jean-Luc? What happened to him?” She thinks she already knows.

Erik smiles, that smile instead of a knife across his neck.

“We kept in touch. I never told him I was a mutant. He became a journalist, and was especially involved in covering the Algerian war of independence. A few weeks after the Paris massacre in October 1961, he filled his pockets with paving stones and threw himself into the Seine.”

She has never heard of the event he is talking about, but she sees it, recognizes it. Enough bodies in the Seine to dye the river red.

“So that,” Erik says, “is the story of my first love.” He bites into his apple fritter. “Though I fear it has failed to satisfy your inexplicable—though, I suppose, also endearing—thirst for romance.”

He says “romance” with an exaggerated Dracula-like accent and a flourish with his right hand.

“Thank you,” she says only.

He shrugs, and once again he looks like any old man, in a plaid wool jacket that is pilling, telling stories to his granddaughter. “What is a first love there for, anyway? To be the first, that’s all.”


*


That night she dreams of being sixteen years old and opening her eyes in a strange car and falling in love with the driver, a young man in his late-twenties or early-thirties, who is singing, along with a voice on the radio that she does not yet recognizes as Charles Trenet: “Ménilmontant, mais oui madame, c’est là que j’ai laissé mon coeur. C’est là que je viens retrouver mon âme, toute ma flamme, tout mon bonheur!”


*


She has been in San Francisco for three months now. Her white roots are showing; she dyes them again.

It is coming back faster than she expected. She was wrong when she thought she would have half a year. After sex, more and more of her partners are falling asleep, yawning, saying things like, “That really took something out of me,” while she spends a few seconds thinking in Korean before she snaps out of it and is herself again.

Over pastrami sandwiches, she tells Erik this. “It’s wearing off more and more.” In response, Erik moves his fork an inch closer to him without touching it. Then he picks the fork up, spears his pickle with it and takes a bite, eyebrow raised.


*


After fucking a young man whom she orders to remain clothed, and who yells for his mother when he comes, she goes back to a bank near her apartment and obtains ten dollars worth of quarters for her laundry. But instead of going home to do her laundry, she stops at the payphone and calls Logan’s cell phone again.

He picks up only after several rings, saying, “Yeah.” A pause, and then another, “Yeah.”

She doesn’t hear anyone behind him. It is nine o’clock in San Francisco, midnight o’clock in New York. He is probably in his room. She curses herself; she might have woken him up.

“Ah, kid,” he says. He sounds tired. He must have had a particularly trying day. He breathes out heavily into the phone, and once again she can feel it against her ear. She wonders if that is why he does it.

“Kids are still little terrors. They keep coming in here with new powers, different mutations. I couldn’t just have another who can just phase in and out of walls, or turn into metal? At least then I’d have some reference. What do you do when a kid’s body goes totally viscous, like a blob, whenever she’s upset, which is all the fuckin’ time since she got here? We all know the fuckin’ story, parents kicked me out, blah, blah, it’s the same fuckin’ story for everyone. And to top it off, the blob is fuckin’ poisonous, and sticky as hell. And the thing is, sometimes she can’t reverse it, she gets so deep into it. Then you just gotta wait it out, or worse, try to coax her out of it. If you told me a year ago I’d be trying to talk a deadly blob down from the ledge, I would’ve—I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He is rambling. Even the new, more talkative Logan, doesn’t talk like this. He sounds half-drunk, and she doesn’t want to know the quantities of alcohol that he would have had to consume to bring him to that state. She puts another quarter in the payphone.

There is a sound; she thinks it is him rubbing his beard with his hand. “Shit,” he says. “I haven’t really slept for something like a week now. Just workin’ nonstop. Seems there’s always something else to do.”

She says nothing, and he seems to be listening for her breath as much as she is listening for his. Waiting for her to speak. When he realizes she is not going to, he exhales heavily again.

“Ah, kid,” he says, and all the life has gone out of his voice. She can barely hear him; he speaks so quietly, as if every word is wounding him. “I am so fuckin’ angry at you.”

And she can expect that, already expects that, only he doesn’t sound angry at all.

“But not as angry with you as,” and here he stops talking entirely, but she can hear his trembling breath, can feel it as if it has a body, as if it is his body, against her ear. And with each breath, the sound thickens a little more, so she can hear the breaths sticking in his throat, so it sounds like he is gagging on them.

Then he says, “I killed her,” so weakly that she only knows he has said it because it is exactly what she has been hearing him say, whenever he been saying everything else. And then those thick, ragged breaths crash over her ear again.

She does not know how much time she spends listening to Logan’s breathing, which is sometimes so dense and jagged and loud that it hurts her ears, and then sometimes so faint she is not sure if he is still on the line.

Gradually, she nearly empties the entire roll of quarters in the payphone, shifting her weight from one leg to the other every now and then. Shops close around her, more and more lights in more and more windows are turned off. The world darkens and falls asleep around her.

Finally, she can hear the breaths becoming more even. She puts in two more quarters just to listen to him sleep.


*


She gets an email from Logan the next day. Sorry, kid. I was a little out of it. Rough day. I’m working too hard over here. I’m not angry with you. Well, I’m fucking pissed at you, but I’m not angry with you. You get what I mean. Anyway, Danger Room simulation in ten minutes. Take care of yourself.

Diligently, she sends another blank email as reply.

She thinks about how horrified she would have been if Logan had been shot with a cure needle during the battle at Alcatraz. Robbed of his healing mutation. He would not have, like her, simply become human, or close to it, again. He would have been maimed from the inside out; he would have died around his skeleton.

She meets a young man in a chain bookstore and he fingers her in the restroom because she tells him she is wearing a tampon. Afterwards, he says he wants to see her again, and she says she doesn’t have a California number yet, but gives him her New York number, changing just the last 7 into a 5.

Only afterwards does she realize he looked a little bit like Scott. She tells herself, There are too many ghosts, she can’t possibly avoid them all.


*


And more and more she can feel it start to hum, for longer and longer intervals, and she pulls an old pair of opera gloves out of her duffel bag and looks at them. Not yet, she says, but doesn’t quite believe herself.


*


“And you,” Erik says to her over a chessboard in Golden Gate Park. “Who was your first love?”

She gives him a pointed glare and he makes a show of looking extremely wounded. “What, my dear, are you the only one permitted to ask inappropriate personal questions?”

She looks down at the chessboard. They are not playing, just sitting here, because she does not know how to play very well, and she refuses to, as Erik requests, “access the me in your mind who is an excellent chess player.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had one yet,” she replies. “And I’m not sure I want one.”

Erik looks extremely disappointed. “And here I thought I was answering questions to soothe your broken heart, not providing data for an objective case study on first loves.” He hovers his right hand over the chess pieces, and they sway to and fro beneath his fingers, like blades of grass. “I was under the impression you were in love with the Wolverine.”

“Stop that, people will notice.”

He laughs, “My dear, for me, it’s like being able to breathe again after being underwater. Don’t you agree?”

She looks down at her still ungloved hands. “Mine is different. I’ve never been able to control it.”

He tilts his head. “What do you mean? You just—control it.” He gestures vaguely with his unoccupied hand.

“Helpful,” she remarks. “Thank you.”

He laughs then, and it is a real laugh. “Yes, my apologies. I imagine it’s like not being able to whistle: people who can whistle are always giving you incredibly imprecise directions, like—‘You just blow.’”

“Well, I can whistle,” she says, and does so.

Erik purses his lips, but no sound comes out. “I’ve never been able to.”

She says, cheerfully, “You just blow.”

He smirks at her, then turns suddenly serious. “You ought to observe yourself carefully right now. If you are able to tell what your body feels like when your mutation is inactive, and then what it feels like when your mutation is just beginning to awaken, you might be able to better understand that distinction—and, thereby, how to consciously control what has otherwise been an involuntary reflex.”

She does not want to tell him she thinks it is a good idea, but the deep crinkles around his eyes tell her that he already knows.

Then he stops playing with the chess pieces, leans on his left elbow, and she knows he is going to do that thing; and then he does it, and now he is smiling like Casanova, behind his liver-spotted hand. “So there is no story, then, between you and the Wolverine.”

She does not say anything, but moves a pawn forward, beginning a game. Erik chuckles. “Very clever,” he says, and she is not sure if she is referring to her chess move, or her avoidance of the topic.

Then, after a few minutes of wordless play, she tells him: “When you were in my head, you only spoke English, never German or Polish. I always wondered why.”

“Ah,” he says, leaning back in his chair. Then, “Have you ever heard of the poet Paul Celan?” She shakes her head, no. “He was a German poet, born to a Jewish family in Romania. While he survived, he lost his parents during the war, when they were deported to internment camps; his mother died particularly violently, I believe.

“Well, in his poetry there was always a strong ambivalence about what it meant, for him as a Shoah survivor, to use German, to speak in German, which was, at once, his mother tongue, the language of his poetry—but also the official language of his parents’ destruction, the language of those that sought to erase him, and people like him. ‘Death is a master from Germany,’ went one of his poems. Still, he never stopped writing in German, though the German of his poetry was something of an invention, a way of subverting German from within, of staring deep into its horror, its abyss.”

Erik moves another piece. “Now, unlike him, and perhaps to Charles’ great disappointment, I am not and never was a poet—I did not have the imaginative resources to remake German for myself. It was absolutely intolerable for me to speak it, so as soon as I could speak something else, I spoke something else. I can barely speak German now, and Polish even less. My current accent is almost entirely stolen from Charles, a fact which he never ceased to tease me about.”

She notices that he is right; that it is Xavier’s voice in his mouth, Xavier’s vowels, Xavier’s breathing rhythm. Realizing she is not the only one who knows how to absorb others.

He adds with an ironic grin, “Come to think of it, Celan also threw ended up throwing himself into the Seine.”

“Jesus Christ,” she says.

“Not exactly,” he cracks, with the same grin.

Erik plays with a chess piece. Then he looks up at her, and she is not sure he sees her anymore when he recites, from memory, “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“The world is gone,” he murmurs. “I must carry you.”

Then he shakes his head. “That’s the first time I’ve spoken German in a long time.”

Still gazing at her, he says, “It’s not easy, is it. To be the one that survives.”

She lets out a breath she did not know she was holding. “No,” she says, looking down at her hands again. “It isn’t.”

Then Erik remarks, out of nowhere: “You weren’t there, that night. At Alcatraz.”

Her head snaps up so abruptly her neck hurts. “No,” she says. “I wasn’t.” She moves another piece.

He is considering something; his next move, she assumes. Instead, he asks, “And do you regret that?”

She stares down at the pieces before her. “Not really,” she says. “It wasn’t my place.”

“And yet here you are,” he says pointedly.

He takes one of her pieces. When she does not say anything else, he continues, “You must know, then, that it was your Wolverine who was the one to finally—stop—Jean.”

Another move, and she wants to say again, not mine, not mine. She takes one of his pieces. “Yes.”

Erik covers his mouth with his hand again, but he is not smiling. “He came after us in the forest. He was so desperate. I remember thinking, What an incredibly stupid man.”

And now he starts smiling again. “He told me I let Charles die.” He moves a piece, holding onto the miniature horse head a little longer, a little more tightly. “I wanted to pull his skeleton out through his eye sockets. I still wonder why I didn’t.” And when he releases the piece, the head is dented.

She moves a piece, takes a piece. “That sounds like something he would say. He was trying to hit at your weak spot. He came for Jean.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Erik says, sounding bored again. “He was so terribly resolute. He knew I could play him like a puppeteer and still he came after her alone. I genuinely could not believe the extent of his stupidity.” He snorts. “But in the end, I was stupider, I suppose.”

She thinks of Logan, paralyzed as a doll inside Erik’s grasp.

“He loved her very much,” she says, and though it is something she knows, has always known, the way she knows her own flesh, she has never said it aloud to anyone before.

Erik looks at her a long time. Then he seems to decide against patronizing her. “Yes,” he says. “That much a tree could tell.”

Then he looks down at the chessboard and chuckles. “Ah. You see what I mean about needing to learn conscious control, my dear?”

“What?” she asks.

He gestures down at the pieces. “You say you can’t control your mutation—you say you can’t access all the things you’ve taken into your head. And yet, and yet.” He smiles, and she looks down at the chessboard. She has checkmated him.

She looks down at her still bare hand as though it is a stranger.

“Rather than learning how to control your mutation,” Erik says dryly, “it seems to me that most of the time, you control it a bit too well.”

She pushes her chair back. “We’re done here,” she barks, sweeping the pieces away with her hand. They sway, but none of them fall.

While his fingers guide the pieces back upright, Erik continues, his voice rising sharply:

“Ashamed of your own strength, idling away in some elaborate parody of ‘humanity,’ you took the cure hoping it would relieve you of the burden of having to truly confront your own power—”

“That’s enough,” she says.

His voice is firm and unrelenting: “But you are not and never will be like them—not like the humans, and not like other mutants, either, and it’s time you start embracing that fact, if you don’t want to end up like Jean—”

“That’s enough,” she cries, and shoves all the chess pieces to the ground before realizing that she hasn’t touched a single one.

Now Erik’s smile is wistful when he tells her, “My dear, haven’t you noticed already that not all of the mutants who took the cure are getting their powers back at the same rate?”

He leans down, and begins to retrieve the chess pieces, one by one, with his hands. “For now, it’s only the strongest ones.”

She stares at him, mouth agape, then turns around and leaves him there, picking pawns off the ground. He doesn’t call after her as she walks away.


*


And when she gets home, her entire body is buzzing, and she knows it is back, and once again she looks down at her hand like it is a stranger.


*


He is wrong. What would Erik Lehnsherr, official spokesperson for the ‘destruction-is-best’ approach to mutant powers, know about her mutation and how she has had to live with it? Someone who sees every mutation as a potential weapon, a vital advantage in the guerrilla war he had only recently stopped fighting—what can he know about having to protect the people you care for from yourself, about a body that forgets nothing, about keeping everything you touch.

When she had first heard about the blocks Xavier had constructed in Jean’s mind to manage the more volatile aspects of her power, she had thought the blocks sounded an awful lot like what she herself had already come to do, on her own, without help, instinctively; not only with her mind, but with her body, her flesh.

Even to herself she finds it difficult to explain exactly what she has learned to do. Something a little like selective amnesia. After the Statue of Liberty incident, she had felt the staggering sensation of suddenly containing another person’s near-entire life and strength within her body, the soul-tearing rush of having every single cell of her body open, bare, exposed; of losing in less than an instant the limit between everything that was her, and everything that wasn’t.

And during the counseling sessions with Xavier, she had glimpsed the infinite possibility of what she could become, of everything she could obtain, everything she could know, and for a split second she had even entertained the idea of reaching forward and touching the professor’s hand with her lips.

And Xavier had seen it, had sensed her idea; but he must have chalked the desire up to Erik, not her, because then he had rolled forward, taken her gloved hand between both of his bare ones and said, with a voice full of a love she could not understand and certainly did not deserve, “Rogue, you are stronger than your power.”

She proved she was stronger than her power by throwing a blanket over it. She established her skin as a forbidden zone, a thing to avoid and ignore, and made a point of training without using it, as if she were simply an eager martial arts enthusiast who had joined the team in a burst of pro-mutant sentiment. She labored to forget the things she learned, the instincts she had gained, and, obediently, they all faded, or at least lay dormant, and she told herself that she had successfully erased the things she had taken.

Then, on the porch of Bobby’s childhood home, she had touched John’s ankle, with an intuitive awareness of what she was going to do; but something had been different, she was touching him and he wasn’t collapsing, and she wasn’t getting nearly as much of his memory; she was taking almost exclusively his power, his instinctive knowledge.

And it reminded her a little of the first time she touched Logan, unthinkingly, with blood spilling from her wound; when she had somehow known exactly how long she could hold on before she would kill him, when she had felt herself coming dangerously close to that limit before she saw his eyes full of confusion and supplication and she finally forced herself to tear her hand away. And when she had said it was an accident, she hadn’t been sure if it was the truth.

She had always thought Xavier had meant: strong enough to overcome your power, strong enough to suppress your power. Strong enough to erase your power altogether.

Now she thinks he might have meant, as Erik does now: strong enough to accept your power, strong enough to use your power without fear. Strong enough to stand inside your own body, and trust it to be good.