Marie stopped in the ditch beside the road, letting the man continue on to the car alone. She noted him checking her location over his shoulder and tried to force a reassuring grin before turning her eyes onto her bag. Her left ear was still hearing 'Mission Impossible', not an appropriate soundtrack to this current scene in her life, while her right ear picked up the sound of the gas cap being unscrewed and liquid pouring into the empty tank. First, she dug out her CD's and took care of the music issue, switching to a big band jazz CD. Letting the trumpets boost her energy reserves, dangerously low after all this human interaction, she let her brain sing along while she searched her bag for some short green gloves, hoping that no one would notice the new addition to her slightly odd outfit. She finally reached them, buried under the water bottles, and pulled them onto her shaking hands. The man had no clue how close he had come to death, but she had definitely noticed and not appreciated the proximity in the least. She walked out of the ditch enough to be able to lean over and snag the corner of the duffel, allowing her to drag it towards her so she could dig Norbert out of his prison and clutch him to her chest.
She was just dropping a kiss on his upturned nose when all sound except her music stopped causing her to jerk her attention to the three strangers, all of which were staring at her, the two girls with thinly veiled looks of 'is this bitch crazy?' while the man didn't even attempt to hide his feelings. She refused to subject poor Norbert to more airless travel time when he could now ride in style on her lap. Dragging her chin up and meeting each of their gazes in turn, she picked up her things and trudged towards the car. "And by that destiny to perform an act. Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come, in yous and my discharge." They all looked at her in outraged disbelief, which caused her to roll her eyes. "So are we heading out or not?"
Trouble, Logan reaffirmed as he opened the driver's side door and swung himself into the car, hearing the shocks protest his weight with a groan. Not only was she a runaway but she seemed unable to tell when she was quoting crap from a different time and when she was talkin' sense. And he sure as shit wasn't gonna let himself be curious about had happened to cause that problem for her. He shook his head, dislodging irrational anger at the person responsible for her issues. He must be having problems separating her from the wonder twins cause they were the same age. He'd be pissed if anyone fucked with one of them or one of the other kids at school cause they were his responsibility and they had accepted him as you would a weird ass uncle. And he just wasn't in the market to add to his list of 'people who make him feel'.
Jubes opening the passenger door dragged him from his thoughts. She started to get in when she met his eyes and cocked her head sideways, reading his expression in that crazy accurate way of hers. She nodded her assent and opened the back door instead. "Chica," she addressed the stranger before getting in the car, "You get to ride shotgun. Me and Kitty got some stuff to talk about."
Logan felt slightly lighter, relieved with the riding arrangements. This way, if the girl did turn out to be a threat of any kind, he was the one closest to her so he could handle it. The girl slid into the front seat and buckled herself in, looking pointedly at his lack of seatbelt and opening her mouth as if to comment. His expression was daring her to say anything but she must have used up her courage for the day because she snapped her mouth shut and hunched into her stuffed animal, sitting so close to the door that she was practically making love to it. He snorted slightly and pulled out onto the road, hearing Jellybean in the back start another tirade, this time about useless nonsense, so as not to give away any facts about them.
While driving, he kept his eyes peeled for the gas station and the rest of his senses tuned in to the girl, tracking minute shifts in her scent in hopes of following her thoughts. Right now, he could just get relieved mixed with worried out of her, an odd combination, and her own unique scent that was a mellowing undertone, smooth and slightly sweet but simultaneously airy and almost delicate. It was like smelling sunshine after the clouds had cleared. Come to think of it, he'd never smelt anything quite that close to perfection. Maybe it wouldn't...
His hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist instinctively before his brain even registered that she had moved, completely shattering his crazy thoughts.
"No need to be so jumpy," she said, scolding like a mother to her two-year-old child. "I just wanted to turn up the music and take off these headphones. You can barely hear it now and the ear things on this chafe if I wear them too much." He talked himself into peeling his fingers off her arm one at a time, watching her out of the corner of his eye for any other movement. When she saw his expression she pulled her hand back to her little corner of the car, trying to play meek and shrink into the seat.
"I like this song!" Kitty piped up from the backseat. "You should totally turn it up." Logan met her eyes in the rearview mirror and saw her laughing at him. Whatever. It wouldn't hurt anything.
He twisted the knob to a level acceptable for all those in the car and watched the girl unfold herself to take out the ear buds and turn off the CD player, stroking it like a pet before putting it into her backpack at her feet. Kitty was swaying back and forth to the music in the backseat, though whether that was to try to convince him that she had been telling the truth or because she actually liked this garbage was anybody's guess. Poppy crap was not his music of choice. The girl next to him seemed okay with it though, but she wasn't humming along, as he'd heard her doing with her CD's. She appeared to be riveted to the station like she was trying to hear every slight instrument change and each chord as it was plucked and she was smiling, which just struck him as odd. Before the thought could sink in, he heard his voice in the air as if someone else was operating his mouth even though he was supposed to be driving. "What gives kid? Why so happy with this song?"
She turned to him slightly, but he could see most of her attention was still on the radio. "I've never heard it before," she answered, as if that explained it all. Evidently it did to her because she leaned forward and turned it up another notch, so focused that she didn't even notice his growl at her touching something that wasn't hers. The song ended and she sat back in her seat as an older one came on, still slightly smiling though she seemed dazed for the moment. He pulled his attention back to the road.
They rode for a while with only the music interrupting the silence but the car lacked the feeling of awkwardness that sometimes comes when a stranger is thrown into a group. No one felt the need to babble to cover up the quiet because it wasn't all consuming like some black hole silences are. It almost felt as if the four of them had been together for days instead of barely an hour. Jubilee took that feeling as her cue to be ambassador. No sense being rude to someone you were sharing a ride with when it was obvious that they were a kindred spirit and weren't going to start any funny business.
She leaned towards the front and stuck out her hand to the girl. "I'm Jubilee." She could feel Logan's eyes drilling into her skull. She grabbed the girl's hand anyway, so busy ignoring Wolvie's paranoia that she didn't notice the girl's flinch. "What's your name?"
"No names!" shot into her from two throats, one male one female, flinging her back into her seat. Wolvie had roared and the girl, though not as loud or quite as frightening, had made her point entirely clear. The two sets of eyes in the front crashed together and Jubes thought maybe she had lost control of her powers again because there were defiantly sparks flying from the angry searching gazes battling over the shifter. Evidently deciding not to speak about that further, the girl turned to glare over her shoulder at Jubes and tried to knife her with words. "And don't touch me." Jubilee was in complete shock. Well, so much for non-awkward times.
A few minutes later, Logan was pumping gas at the station when he decided that enough was enough and he needed to know more about their passenger. The longer they spent in her company, the less sense anything made. He wanted to be sure she wasn't a threat to the other two and that little voice in the back of his head saying he was just fascinated by her and wanted to know her for his own sake could go fuck itself. The Wolverine did not just pick up people on the side of the road and keep them, as Scooter tended to do with teenage mutant runaways. Well he wasn't Scooter and she wasn't a teenage or a mutant so the possibility of her being kept was no all around. The saying went curiosity killed the cat not the Wolverine and he would be damned to be the one to change it.
Time for answers, he thought as the gas nozzle bucked in his hand, announcing that the tank was full. The three girls were in the car together, with the music blasting loud enough that he wondered if any of them would have eardrums left. They had turned it up as soon as he got out of the car, evidently to disguise the fact that they weren't speaking. He grabbed the receipt from the machine and got back into the driver seat, snapping the radio off after turning the key. The receipt went into the visor with all the other expense slips from the trip, since it was X-Men business he would be paid back for everything, and the shifter went into drive. He turned to the girl as he picked up speed and merged back onto the highway.
"Why don't you want us to know your name?" he tried to growl, but it sounded slightly weak even to his own ears. Either way, the girl looked intimidated because she was curled up slightly in her seat and clutching that stupid blue rabbit like her life depended on it. He frowned. "Look kid, I ain't gonna hurt you unless you don't tell me what I want to know. Who are you?" She started shaking and all the color washed out of her face, causing him to become slightly alarmed. He knew he could be intimidating sometimes, mostly on purpose, but this girl hadn't been afraid of him earlier in the field when he was trying to really scare her and he wasn't anywhere near that point now leaving him unable to explain the festering fear (and why the fuck was he getting triumph too?) that was oozing from her skin. He looked closer to see her sweating and she jerked her knees into her chest, squishing that rabbit in tight.
"Please," she croaked, going into violent shakes now, making him afraid she might be having a seizure. He slowed the car slightly so he could keep turning his head to track her condition. "So loud, so loud, too loud, Loud, LOUD, LOUD!" each word gained in volume until she shouted the last, making him and the girls in the back start combing through the car, digging for anything that could be making noise.
"What's loud? What do you hear?" he snarled, pissed that someone he was with was under attack, even though she was only a passenger to him. There was no way this girl was hearing a noise he wasn't. He tried to think up something, anything to stop this, but was at a total loss because he lacked even the most basic medical training. He was turning to ask Kitty for ideas when he heard a bang from the girl's direction. His gaze flew to her right before she slammed her head into the window, making the same sound as before, causing him to wince. Then, like a wind rising over the hill, he heard her muttering.
"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul to his own conceit. That from her working all his visage wann'd, tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, a broken voice, and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!"
When she finished she flung her head into the window again, leaving a slight smear of red on the glass and repeated the phrase, this time a little louder and the bang drew even more red, acting as an exclamation mark written on glass. Like a skipping record, she just kept repeating the same thing over and over, so quickly you could barely distinguish one word from another, only knowing when it was going to restart by the punctuating smash into the glass. He took his right hand off the wheel and reached for her, grabbing her around the nape of the neck to drag her away from the danger of the window, thinking she could at least be safe from more physical harm. As he pulled her closer, he felt like he was spinning in circles while falling. This must be what being drunk feels like, he thought before getting struck by lightening and splattering into black.
The sudden silence in the front seat startled Jubilee and made her look up from all the takeout wrappers on the floor that she had been searching through (Scott was gonna be pissed). She saw the girl half dragged into the middle of the front with Logan slumped over the top of her, both of them out cold. She also saw the huge semi-truck that they were about to rear-end if they didn't get control quickly. Logan's leg now driving the gas pedal into the floorboards without his muscles to hold up his metal incased skeleton. It felt like years for her to process everything but in reality it was only a second, before she yelled at Kitty.
"Grab the wheel!"
Kitty didn't even seem to think before phasing herself through the seat and part of Logan's chest to grab the steering wheel with solid hands, jerking it to the left so they could change lanes and safely pass the truck.
"I got the direction part of this runaway train. Now you handle the momentum." She sounded cool as a cucumber, like she was teaching the little ones at school to type or say their ABC's, not worried at all. That was one of the things Jubes loved about her. Great person to have around in a crisis. She patted Kitty's cheek as she climbed it the front seat to sit on Logan's left leg, shuddering when her body passed through phased arms (which felt like someone was walking on your grave). She tried shifting him off the pedal but the weight of most of his body was holding his leg in place and there was no way she could move him alone. She grabbed the wheel from Kitty, taking over that part since she was in a better spot for it, and thought for a minute.
"Kit. Can you phase him through the seats and into the back with you? Then he won't be on the pedal and I can just drive like normal, so no one sees anything suspicious."
"Sure," Kitty said, doing as asked then maneuvering Logan's hands into the most optimal position should he wake up unexpected and release his claws. "Now what?"
"Now, we're gonna pull off at the next rest stop and put her," she pointed at the girl slumped over next to her, "in the trunk so no one sees a passed out 20-year-old in our car. Also, I for one have no idea what she did to Logan but I really don't want the same thing to happen to one of us, though I got a feeling that she didn't do it on purpose. Then you can sit up here with me, making it look like Logan is just napping while we drive home."
Kitty nodded, used to Jubilee's rambling but agreeing with everything nonetheless and settled into the seat with Logan's legs in her lap. "Then I say we find a hotel that doesn't ask questions and wait until he wakes up. We don't want to take a potential danger back to the mansion. Also, he's gonna be not so happy when he wakes up from this. I've never seen him this unconscious before." They locked eyes in the rear-view mirror, neither one voicing their concerns that he may not wake up at all.
Logan felt like he was swimming in quicksand and couldn't remember ever feeling like that before. Must have been some night, he thought, reaching up to rub at his gritty eyes. "Wolvie!" he heard, in what sounded like Jubilee's voice, which wasn't possible if he was in a hotel after a bender because he would never take her with him. Finally, his brain seemed to catch up with the fact that he was somewhat awake and started feeding him images and memories that lead up to him reaching for the girl. The girl. Where was the girl? He opened his mouth to ask but all that came out was a coughing fit, soothed somewhat when Kitty thrust a bottle of water into his hand. He chugged half of it before trying again.
"Where's the girl?" he rasped groggily, still not completely with it.
"Locked in the bathroom. We lined the tub with towels to cushion it a little bit before putting her in there. She's out cold. Kitster here duct tapped the window shut, we stole the tape from the poor thing's backpack, from the outside just in case our girl wakes up and decides she doesn't like our company any more. Not that the window would do her much good cause we're on the third story."
He opened his mouth to ask what had happened when Jubes started talking before he even got the question out.
"Rogue did something to you to knock you out. We don't know what that was yet because she hasn't woke up either. You've been down for five hours. Yes five. I wouldn't lie to you about that. Kit got you in the backseat and we put her in the trunk then we drove here. I checked us in, they just think it's the two of us staying. Kitty had to phase you through the car door and onto my skateboard. See, you're glad I brought it now, aren't you? We didn't want to have to pick your heavy ass up twice and we knew we were gonna have to at least once to get you on the bed. Then we wheeled you in here and we've been twiddling our thumbs and playing pick-up-sticks while you napped. I tried to bandage Rogue's head before we locked her in but I couldn't find the cut from where she hit the window. You're gonna have to smell out the fresh blood in all that hair cause we gotta take care of it. Regardless, Roguey is not looking too hot right now."
"Rogue?" he frowned at the name, knowing that the girl had never given hers while he was conscience and, by the sound of it, she's passed out at the same time he did.
"Well, she kept repeating that same thing over and over and the only thing we could get out of it was the beginning. I think it's Hamlet or something, not sure though, call Dr. Grey if you really care. We decided it was as good as a name as any since she went so crazy when we asked her before. So, are we gonna keep her? Let's take her to the Prof. He will totally be down. And she can share a room with me and the Kitster here cause we like her and she's had a really bad time and we think she could be a big help when we're trying to annoy you cause she isn't afraid of anything and-"
"Jubes," Kitty shrieked, making Logan groan and pull the pillow over his head. "Breath girl. Shit." She saw Logan hiding his sensitive ears and chuckled a little "Sorry for screeching, Wolvie. But I do agree with Jellybean. Rogue needs our help. She's obviously a mutant, I don't know of anything else that could tax your mutation enough that you were in a coma for five hours, and she's in need of some help. I think we should help her."
"Let me call the boss man," he said, grunting and groaning himself to his feet. He looked at the other bed, pleased to see all of the girl's things out and organized on the comforter. First thing you do in an emergency situation is figure out exactly what you have. He nodded acknowledgement at the girls for taking his lesson to heart and glanced over everything while dialing Xavier's office number. He studied the contents more amazed that the girl had been intelligent enough to grab some of it. At first glance, he found food, cash, ID papers, a leatherman, duct tape and WD-40, all of which could be very helpful for someone on the run. Maybe this Rogue wasn't as lost case.
"Where's her CD player?" He asked Jubes, hoping that it hadn't lost in all the craziness. That and the rabbit seemed to be the only things that the girl loved. He was startled by Xavier picking up the phone, but he still noticed Jubilee pointing towards the bathroom. Good. The girl had it with her. Maybe it would help her feel less scared..
In his ear he could hear Wheels sounding slightly concerned. "Yes, Logan? Is something the matter?"
"Well, actually Professor, I was just calling to say we're on the planned schedule. We're stayin' here and we'll be back tomorrow."
"That is excellent to hear, but you did not need to call to tell me everything is alright. You seem troubled, Logan. What is it?"
Logan was conflicted. He really didn't think that Xavier would turn away anyone asking for sanctuary, but he also didn't want to take the chance that she would be deemed too dangerous before Xavier got to meet her. And there was no way he was going to put a blacked out powerful-as-hell mutant girl that was strong but fragile back out on the streets.
"I just wanted to let you know we're bringing someone with us. I'll introduce you tomorrow." And then Logan officially became the first person ever to hang up on Charles Xavier.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Longer chapter here and I had to work for it let me tell you. Thanks to all my reviewers. This 5:40am update literally wouldn't have been possible without you. And with that, you go onto the fic, I go onto bed. Happy reading. Kiss Kiss.
Chapter End Notes:
Let me know what you think. Also, I might be MIA for a little bit until I get back from Florida on the 17th. I'll try to get another chapter around while I"m there, but no promises cause I'm gonna be crazy busy.
“And by that destiny to perform an act. Whereof what’s past is prologue..."- The Tempest
"Oh what a rogue and pleasant slave am I..."- Hamlet (Jubes is smart? Get out!)
“And by that destiny to perform an act. Whereof what’s past is prologue..."- The Tempest
"Oh what a rogue and pleasant slave am I..."- Hamlet (Jubes is smart? Get out!)