Marie felt consciences return in slow drips. First she noticed that her head was on something soft, which was nice and helpful because it allowed her to continue believing that she was floating. The next thing to register was the slight chill of air conditioning feathering over the skin of her hands. Finally, a load unmerciful beat stomped its way into her brain, jolting her out of her fantasyland where horses were purple with pink spots and she was capable flying through the cotton candy clouds, and back to some semblance of reality. She jerked her hands to her ears and, still unable to open her eyes, followed the cord to the CD player, notching it down three spots to level five, odd because normally eight was the perfect volume for her. She shrugged away that thought as unimportant and started a well practiced decent of self into the jazz sounds, letting the overlaying melody help her push back the voices in her head until she could think on her own without other opinions getting in the way. Finally satisfied that all assorted personal was put away in their own chamber, she cracked her eyes to blurry whiteness.
She shook her head slightly, eventually convincing her eyes to focus on the surroundings, though she was having issues believing what they were telling her. Closing her eyes again, she mentally strolled around her brain, checking the individual chamber doors again because some of her passengers liked to play tricks and make her see the wrong things. Her brain almost vibrated with a slight growl when she walked past the last door towards a shadowy spot in the back that had never been there before. She studied it shortly about to start probing when she stopped herself. Whatever it was, it was quiet and not bothering anything and she had other things to worry about at the moment. She walked back out of the hallway and into the real world bathroom again, scanning around to see the only splash of color, Norbert, sitting on the back of the toilet glaring accusingly because she had been unaware when she should have been protecting herself.
The last concrete memory she could drag up was that Jubilee chick asking for her name. Little wisps of musical memory overlaid with images of the man outside the window pumping gas teased her brain as well, but she couldn't place them in the timeline of her day. Not that it mattered anyway. It was quite obvious she had walked into a trap set by one of those government-sanctioned mutant bounty hunter groups her mother was always talking about. Mother said they traveled around in packs and used their specialized cell phones to pick out mutants from the crowd. Mutants that they later snatched and turned in to the local mutant containment facility for loads of money, leaving only a lucky few to wander the streets, always fearfully looking over their shoulder's for fates hand to rip away their freedom. "So count yourself as lucky, you ungrateful wretch", dad would shout. "You could be part of an experiment or dead instead of in this cozy house with food and care". She snorted silently, not wanting to alert anyone to her state of consciousness, at her father's idea of care. Well, these bounty hunters were about to learn that she wasn't a wilting flower to be jerked around by whoever held her stem. Time to move.
Quietly, she pulled herself up in the tub and waited for the slight dizziness to pass before pushing to her feet, finding herself searching the area for gloves to pull over bare hands. She couldn't find any, which would make things interesting when she escaped, but she couldn't let that worry her now. She tried the door first, not surprised in the slightest that it didn't budge, before turning to the window. It was one of those windows that flipped up on the outside, but no matter how hard she pushed, she couldn't get it to move either. Probably had something to do with the dark shadow she could barely make out through the dirty glass. Okay, so they had blocked any sort of exit. She could work with this still. She scoured the room top to bottom but found nothing but a few towels rolled up in the bathtub. Not even shampoo on the counter or a liner in the trashcan. Evidently these people were amazingly thorough or had picked a really low-end place to park her.
She tilted her head towards the mirror as she contemplated smashing it into pieces that could be used as weapons. The downside of that plan was that it would be impossible to do without alerting everyone in the vicinity that she was awake and capable of movement, which was an especially horrible thought when she really had no idea what was on the other side of that door. This bathroom turned holding cell was so unremarkable it could exist anywhere in the world. Breaking the mirror could be enough to draw hundreds of guards to her and have her headed straight to the firing squad or it could end in nothing if no one was around to hear. That plan was placed on the 'use only if desperate' shelf as she tried to come up with something else that could be done silently. Several other plans were discarded as useless before she looked in askance at Norbert, but if he had an idea, he wasn't sharing. He was probably sitting on one and waiting to taunt it with her later. He was an evil little thing like that sometimes.
Wait, sitting on it... She pulled Norbert off the toilet and, after setting him on the counter, picked up the heavy ceramic lid on the back, thinking that she may be able to break the window with it and scramble out before anyone could get to her. That one ranked slightly lower on the 'stupid plan' shelf than her other kept idea and she thought it might just be her only option. Maybe she could somehow use the towels or shower curtain to tie the door closed and slow down any pursuit? Before her mutation reared its ugly head, she used to do that all the time if she wanted to be alone. Though then, she had tied one end of her jump rope around the doorknob and the other to the knob on the closet which stopped the door from opening. About to go ahead with that plan, though the chance of success seemed minimal she couldn't think of something else, she heard someone stomping towards the door and a small scraping sound on the opposite side. She replaced the lid and dove back into the tub, arranging herself in the same position she had woken in only this time she tangled her hand in the end of one of the towels under her body. Sometimes instinctual plans were best.
She left her eyes open the barest slit, indictable to an observer, but still helpful in seeing the person entering the room, though she found she could pinpoint the girl by the god-awful smell of her deodorant. Damn, someone had to convince this mousy chick to switch brands because that was just overpoweringly rank. She suppressed both a shudder and a smirk as the girl closed the door and started walking towards the tub, eyes so fixated on her that she failed to notice Norbert's new location, a lack of observation Marie would have never made and that could get her killed in some situations. She tracked the girl's sure steps to the side of the tub, where she kneeled down and reached towards Marie's wrist with gloved fingers, almost startling Marie into jerking away because she couldn't figure out how they had discovered how dangerous her skin was. Marie mentally shrugged off the worry as insignificant to the current situation. Now that this woman was concentrating on her pulse, which she carefully regulated using some long practiced breathing techniques, it was countdown time.
She let go of her wrist, stood and turned to walk back to the door, evidently satisfied that Marie was still passed out. She leapt out of the tub and plastered herself to the woman's back, pulling the towel taut across her neck with enough pressure to stop the vocal cords from vibrating and halting almost all air. She leaned forward and whispered into the short brown hair. "Now, I don't want to hurt you. I'm going to release some of this pressure so you can breath, but if I hear you inhale loudly or do anything else that suggests you'll call for help, I will do everything in my considerable power to make sure you don't survive this night. Clear?" She punctuated the question with a jerk on the towel, drawing the slightest squeak out of the girl glued to her front. Waiting to feel the movement of the woman's nod against the side of her own head before she eased up on her throat seemed to take forever and she had to suppress a wince of pity at the red mark she could already see forming on pale skin.
"I know you don't think of me as a person. To you, I'm a dollar sign in front of a hell of a lot of zeros. But I am someone and I just escaped from one prison. I'm not letting you assholes take me back to another. I will be free. And you're going to get me out of here. Then, I'll let you go and you can return to your disgusting job as slave trader if you still have the stomach for it." She started walking towards the door, using her hips to push the girl in front of her. "When I tell you, open the door and tell your 'friends' out there to flatten themselves up against the wall farthest from us so I can see 'em."
She stopped them in front of the door, but the woman didn't reach for the knob. Instead, the lady opened her mouth to speak. The only words Marie heard were "It's not..." before she pulled the towel down unmercifully hard, fearing that she would have to take yet another life. The woman in front of her jerked and she could swear she saw her eyes roll in the mirror before she just suddenly wasn't a solid presence. Marie could see her, but felt nothing in front of her, almost like she was touching a projection. The woman calmly walked through the towel and then through the door in front of her, evidently turning substantial enough to be able to throw the lock on the other side. Marie stood there stunned for a moment then inspected the towel, looking for any cuts or breaks that could explain the other woman's escape. She wasn't even able to contemplate the door business; maybe she was still passed out and dreaming?
She pinched herself, no she was awake, cause that really hurt. Starting to pace around the bathroom, she heard that the woman's voice through the wood.
"As I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted, it's not what you think. We aren't here to turn you in for anything, let alone a simple accident with your mutation. You approached us, remember, not the other way around. Now, if you can calm yourself down a little bit, we can unlock this door and sort some stuff out."
Marie shook her head. Why would these people want to talk anything out with her? She ran to the door and began kicking it as she had when her parents had first locked her away. "All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on prosper fall, and make you by inch-meal a disease!" she yelled through the door, mad as hell at the world for her current situation. She was confused, imprisoned (again), they had taken almost all of her things and her CD player was starting to beep its low battery signal. All in all, this was not in her original plans for her first day out of the attic.
She started using her fists to pound the door, no longer listening to the placating voice still trying to reach her, and attacking what she hoped was head level for the girl. After one especially hard hit, she felt a blinding pain eat its way through her fist and up her arm. She caught a glimpse of what seemed to be bones protruding from her closed hand, making her scramble back and fall onto her butt, keeping the rest of her body as far from her hand as possible and treating it as if it was no longer part of her. The fingers of her other hand fearfully ghosted over the bones, cutting the tips on the underside and causing blood to well and flow. She jerked that hand away and looked at her fingers in awe as the slices closed up and the pain disappeared into a strange tingling, like when your foot fell asleep, before that sensation faded as well.
Singing the jazz music, though the twilight zone theme would have been way more appropriate, she pulled herself slightly together and felt around her wrist, finding something that felt like a catch that had never been there before. Pushing the slight bump snapped the bones back into her arms and she watched, slightly amazed, as the holes in her hands fixed themselves. Norbert was easily in reach so she pulled him off the cold counter and into her lap, talking herself back from the freak out edge and using his familiar presence to surround her like a comforting cloak. Okay. Maybe this was another part of her mutation that had just never had a chance to make itself known. She sucked in a breath and concentrated on her arm, willing those bone extensions to shoot back out, half of her afraid that they would while the other half thought that maybe she had finally tipped the rest of the way over into crazy land. They shot back out, causing as much pain as the first time, though no one would have been able to tell by looking at her face. She glanced for reassurance at Norbert and stood, tucking her CD player in the back of her jeans before walking to the door. She shifted her gaze between the sharpened bones and the knob, finally shrugging and plunging them into it, shredding the locking mechanism. She jerked her hand back out, retracted the bones, and pushed the door open to see the man there, looking newly awoken and not thrilled about it, looming over her head, hand raised as if to knock. She pushed the catch to snap the bones back in, raised her eyes to his and calmly stated, "I'll pay for that".
Logan ran his hands through his hair; looking down at the girl who should still be locked in the bathroom and wondering for the fiftieth time just what fuck he had gotten himself into. Kitty's yelling had roused him from another almost coma-like sleep, something that kinda freaked him out cuz it had never happened before today, and he had dragged himself to the door right as metallic sound had split his eardrums. Seems this girl had other tricks up her sleeve. He advanced, forcing her to copy his steps in reverse unless she wanted him to run into her. He kept one of his eyes on her, not sure if she had listened to Kitty's explanations or not, while the other checked out the door. He eyebrow started an uphill trek towards his hairline when he saw marks on the doorknob that looked remarkably like ones he could have made with his own claws. Refocusing on her face, he saw though her mask of bravery to the true fearfulness she was trying to squash to death.
"Look, you're obviously the one in charge. Please just let me go," she said, voice almost, but not quite pleading. "Ya'll can keep whatever's in my bag, I just can't go back to being a prisoner again."
Evidently his eyebrow had decided the hairline wasn't far enough and was out to conquer Everest because it just kept climbing. "I don't know who locked you up before, but that ain't what we do. We want nothing you got anyway. We're gonna talk. The four of us" he shot a look over his shoulder at the two girls sitting on one of the double beds. "And we're gonna explain that we're not whatever you seem to think. Then, Rogue, you're comin' to New York."
He saw her head jerk up at the name and in denial before she cracked her mouth in protest. Enough of this shit. He popped the claws, hoping to cow her into silence and cooperation, but fear wasn't what he was scenting from her now. It was amazement, wariness and the barest hint of excitement, none of which was conveyed in her voice.
"Those are like mine," she deadpanned, brow crinkled with frown. "How can you imitate my mutation? Do you have my skin, too?" She took a step back with that, finally showing a little healthy respect towards him, though it most certainly wasn't needed now. Actually, he was slightly insulted by her fear. He hadn't hurt her yet, why would she think he would start now? He had to keep this girl. He shook his head, rattling his brain into behaving. No. They. They just had to keep this girl. She was way too messed up to be let loose at this stage.
"Rogue," he said, trying for reassuring and getting gruff instead, "just talk with the girls. I didn't take your mutation. From the looks of that" he pointed at the door, "you stole mine when you knocked me out back there. Do whatever you did to get through." Her green eyes widened when he mentioned his mutation then locked with his and she seemed to decide to trust him because a look of concentration crossed her face before he heard the familiar sound of skin tearing. He studied her hands, saw her doing the same, and yeah, the claws were just like his only shorter and made of bone. Must be what his were like before the lab... He stepped to her and ran his finger down the dull side, fascinated by the joint that split each one in the middle because it was something he no longer had. She snapped her head up again and he heard a faint whisper, "They're not as long than they were before. They're going away." She sounded glad, though he couldn't blame her. She had enough of her own issues as it was to add any more. He saw her eyes drop to the floor again and before scrambling back up "ya'll are mutants?"
He nodded, which seemed to satisfy her, because she pulled the claws back in and started for the door, looking at him over her shoulder and quipping "So, what kind of name is Rogue anyway?" He felt a smirk stretch the bottom of his face. "It seemed appropriate," he replied, following her into the main room.
An hour later, Marie was just starting to get used to being called Rogue, the new additions to her mutation had faded completely (thank God) and the two girls, Jubilee and Kitty, had helped the man, Logan, straighten her out. Well, it was more like Jubilee talked with Kitty throwing out tidbits of information during the occasional pause when Jubilee was gulping air into starved lungs and Logan looked on chewing the end of a cigar. She was also pretty exhausted from spending the whole day pingponging all over the emotion scale. She rubbed her eyes, trying to get rid of the grit before smirking at the girls, thinking that she might just grow to like the jabber mouth. She had evidently never bought into the 'silence is golden' thing, which Marie had a hard time agreeing to as well.
The trio had made it completely clear that there weren't any government paid bounty hunters out there and that, at the moment anyway, no one was rounding up mutants for extermination camps. It was a hard pill to swallow, her mother had been shoving those lies down her throat for years, always trying to frighten her into not trying an escape, but eventually she chose to believe it until something proved her different. Kitty did stress however, looking pointedly at Logan, that there were some labs operating in secret that would be more than happy with more people to experiment on. Marie found she didn't doubt it, her mother had never been one with an imagination so she had to have gotten the idea somewhere, and was slightly in awe of Logan for having survived one mostly intact.
It seemed Jubilee, the only one whose mutation she hadn't seen in action, could create small exploding bomb like things that went off wherever she directed them. Norbet, who had been listening to everything in that silent way of his, seemed to be as impressed as she was. Now why was she stuck with a mutation like hers with all these other cool ones around? She switched her CD player's batteries quickly, something the other's politely ignored, before turning to Logan, the one person in the group that she had spent the last hour convincing herself wouldn't feed her a line of bull.
"And ya'll are saying this Xavier person will help me with my mutation? Help me finish school? Feed and clothe me out of the goodness of his heart? I'm sorry, but I just can't bring myself to believe that. My parents didn't even do that for me."
"He will Rogue, he does it all the time for many of the students at the school," Jubilee threw in, even though the statement hadn't be directed her way. "And I don't want you wandering around on your own until you know exactly what your mutation can do, Rogue," Logan grumbled, obviously not comfortable being her momentary focus but taking the lead anyway. "I was in a lab and it ain't a place I'd throw my worst enemy, let alone a twenty year old girl." She studied his features, checking the smoothness of his forehead and the edges of his eyes for telltale lines that would indicate a lie and finding none.
"Okay," she finally agreed, shedding her last bit of worry and caution to the wind, "I'll come with you. But only on a trial basis. I get to leave whenever I want." She looked at Logan, ignoring Jubilee's piped in "You mean if you want" in favor of watching his facial expression. "Right?!"
He looked slightly pained before his expression cleared "Yeah, kid. You can leave whenever you want. And I'll personally make sure you get wherever you want to go."
"Why then the world's mine oyster," she murmured to herself before snapping to refocus on Logan. "You promise?" she said, trying to drill her eyes into his head. He seemed momentarily startled before replying. "Yeah, I promise." She nodded her head to affirm and turned to the two girls.
"Now help me get all my stuff back in the bag so we can get the hell out of here. I don't know about ya'll but I for one don't wanna be anywhere near this place when the cleaning lady sees that bathroom door." She stood up and started putting things back in her backpack; fitting them in certain locations because she knew there was no way it would all fit otherwise.
Jubilee started handing her bottles of water and threw out teasingly, "Chica, I thought you could just sing a song, ya know, all Merlin or Mary Poppins style, and get all that crap to dance its way back into your bag. I'm convinced it's the only way you got it all in there to begin with."
Marie rolled her eyes, "I'm the master packer. Stand back, watch me work." And she got down to business singing along with her CD player like the song was actually moving the items into the bag, listening to someone else laugh for the first time in years. She savored the human interaction of the past few hours and loaded the last few things into her bag. Mary Poppins had nothing on the newly christened Rogue.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Hey guys, sorry real life ate me for a little while there. Had to crawl my way back out to get this finished. Thanks to witchbaby, capt mackenzie, dark dragonfly, notmyself and velvetemr73 for reviewing the last chapter. I reread all the reviews and used them to dredge up the motivation to finish this chapter. Thanks for reading!
Chapter End Notes:
What do you think? Let me know! Kiss Kiss.
"All the infections that the sun sucks up..."-The Tempest
"Why then, the world's mine oyster"-The Merry Wives of Windsor
"All the infections that the sun sucks up..."-The Tempest
"Why then, the world's mine oyster"-The Merry Wives of Windsor