Chapter Two: Tainted Love
Upper East Side, New York City, Central Park West. Fall 1995
I: Victor
“Of course he’s not dead, Raven…he just looks that way. His eyes are open, now. Victor? Can you hear me?”
Sabretooth focused on the several Eriks that were expanding and contracting from one to many in his blurry vision.
“I lied to you, Erik. I never let go of her. I lied to you for years. Make good on your threat. Kill me. I lost my brother. I lost my little girl. I don’t wanna live anymore. I’m too damn old. I’ve seen too much.”
Magneto looked sympathetic.
“I’ve lost her too, Victor. But we’ll get her back. You’ll see.”
“No, you won’t. You’d better kill me. Because I sent her away. You’ll never get her now. You’ll never see her again, and neither will I, but you won’t get to fuckin’ kill her. You own daughter. You heartless son of a bitch.”
“Is that what you thought? My God, Creed, you are in love with her!”
“I told you he was, Erik. I would know.”
“Please, Raven, not now.”
Magneto sighed.
“Maybe it’s for the best. Whether you love Marie or not, you’re no good for her. And if she’s at Charles’ school, at least she’ll be with her own kind. And she’ll get to see, firsthand, that he’s living in a dream world. Come on, Victor. Get up.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
Sabretooth was in a daze.
He had gotten extremely drunk after talking to Wolverine on the phone, trashed his apartment, and made several attempts at suicide, including shooting himself multiple times, slitting his own throat, and clawing his guts out.
His vision was poor, because he had clawed out one of his own eyes, in anguish.
It was an extremely grisly scene.
“No. I am going to try to help you. Raven, could you change into someone very large, and help me pick Victor up? Because you’ve done it, Victor. Made my plan possible, and not at the extent of Marie’s life. If he hasn’t already, your brother, will bond with Marie, and she will absorb his powers. Permanently. Then, she will be able to survive just about anything.”
Victor was about to announce that he wouldn’t let Erik do it, only over his dead body, but then he shut his mouth.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” he said, instead.
Thinking that, when the time came, he would do whatever he had to do.
That was, after all, what he did best.
***
Victor Creed was every dark and evil thing that Magneto had told Rogue that he was, and more.
He was a murderer and a mercenary, a man with no ties to his fellow men or to any God.
He was fond of his adopted country, because it often provided him with steady work, in the intelligence and tactical military communities, but even so, after thirty years of government work dried up during the Clinton administration, he drifted back to working with the Brotherhood, biding his time until his country needed him again.
To women, whom he called frails, he was somewhere between a fantasy and a nightmare.
There were women who were attracted to him who survived their encounters with him, in fact more did than didn’t.
Creed wasn’t a pervert in the sexual sense of the word; he just lost his temper easily, and human life, male or female, meant little to him.
As for lasting entanglements, he had few, and if you asked him, he would tell you that love was something he wasn’t capable of.
There were, however a few women living, all of them mutants, who could tell you otherwise.
Because Sabretooth was a vicious killer, a beast of a man, twisted and evil and psychopathic, but his dark and deeply mutated soul was not devoid of love.
That was his greatest curse.
He still loved his baby brother, and hoped that someday the little runt would cut the bullshit over a couple of frails and some stupid fight they had over nothing back in the 70’s, and they could be goddamn brothers, again.
And Pa?
What reason did he have not to love his real father, although he had plenty of reasons to hate Zebediah Creed, the stepfather who had tortured him his whole life, murdered his mother in front of him, and mutilated him , horribly.
But that was another story.
Once, about a million years ago, he had loved Raven Darkholme, but she was never as interested in him as he was in her, and neither of them were too interested in their ungrateful misbegotten homo sapien son, Greydon.
Maybe, then it was a simple twist of fate, that thing which befell him, one fall afternoon.
Victor had hardly given Rogue a second look when she was just some little Southern Fried brat that Raven and Erik had decided to take in, but she was a scrappy little thing, devoid of fear, probably because she knew she had the capacity to kill anything she touched.
But not him.
That fascinated the kid even more, so whenever he was around Erik’s brownstone, the kid was never far away.
New York was a dangerous place, and since the kid had taken to him, anyway, Erik made Victor his adopted daughter’s unofficial bodyguard.
The kid was quite a piece of work.
She was 14 going on 45; there was never anything childish about her.
As came to know her, Victor changed his mind about her being just a little Southern Fried brat.
She reminded him a little of himself when he was that age, a little shell-shocked from living too much in too little time.
The other thing was, Rogue was a lady.
In the old-fashioned sense of the word, the way his mother, Victoria, had been a lady.
It took him until she was 15, however, to see that she was also a woman.
She came home from school one day, and Victor just happened to be in conference with Erik and Raven.
They hardly noticed the girl running up the stairs, but Victor smelled blood, and lots of it, and, almost as a reflex, considering his job as her informal bodyguard, curious, he excused himself from the table and followed her.
Drops of blood on the stairs, leading to the bathroom door that slammed in his face.
“Open this door, Stripe. You gotta show somebody how bad you’re hurt. Better me than your father.”
She opened the door.
“Don’t be melodramatic, Victor. It looks far worse than it is. Why, if I was still living in the swamp, I’d call this Tuesday. The thing that bothers me is I had to be wearing white, today. Mama just bought me this skirt, and now look at it! All over mud. It’s a good thing mah shirt is navy-blue; the bloodstains don’t show up so much. Ah have to take care of mah things, you know. Never know when all this might be taken away from us.”
Rogue was standing regally erect and straight-backed in front of the bathroom mirror, with not a tear on her eye, holding a rapidly reddening towel with one hand to a cut on her forehead while trying to clean the blood off her shirt and skirt with the other.
Her lip was split and puffy and one of her eyes was blackened, but her poise was uninterrupted.
It reminded him of his mother.
Zebediah used to beat the unholy fuck out of her all the time, but she never let him get to her, and it wasn’t just her healing factor.
He remembered his mother standing in front of a mirror after a beating, with the same gravity, straightening her clothes.
“I just wish your stepfather would keep his hands off me when I’m wearing the clothes I teach in. It’s so hard to get blood out of a good blouse. Victor, go and get the baking soda for Mother.”
He cleared his throat.
“You know, kid, baking soda will take that right out, with a little water.”
“Would you go downstairs at get some for me, Victor?”
“Just gimme the clothes an’ I’ll soak ‘em in the sink in the laundry room. I know the drill, I usedta do this for my Ma when my stepfather beat the shit out of her. Your father’s going to want me to take care of those guys, you know?”
She held up one hand, and it was ungloved.
“They are taken care of. Ah had no choice. It was me, or them. And ah would appreciate it if Papa and Mama didn’t know. The doctors can’t touch me, anyway.”
“Yeah, but I can. Let me fix you up, Stripe.”
“Fix mah clothes up, first, Victor.”
He came and knocked on the door again, and she had a tank top and a pair of women’s boxer shorts on, so you could see she was beat up bad.
Her legs were bruised, her knees were skinned, and she had road rash all over one leg and one arm.
But, as Rogue pointed out, doctors couldn’t touch her, even with rubber gloves on their hands, if their skin brushed up against hers in any way, they might end up as dead as the punks who had attacked Rogue.
Eventually, Erik got to wondering what was taking Victor so long.
One of the only times you knew that Magneto had a heart was when he was with Raven and Rogue, and he just about cried when he saw her, all beat to hell.
“Marie! What in God’s name happened to you?”
“Ah was mugged, Papa. It’s alright. I’ll be alright. Victor’s patching me up. Did you know he knows how to suture?”
“Five stitches over her eye, Erik.”
“Who did this to you? Where are they?”
Rogue looked at the bathroom floor.
“Ah tried to tell them they had better leave me alone. But they wanted what they wanted, and it wasn’t just mah purse. Ah took mah gloves off, and ah did what ah had to do. After all, ah am a lady. They could have had mah money, Papa, but they weren’t going to steal my virtue.”
“Victor, from now on, I want you to walk with Marie to school, and back.”
“I was gonna suggest that.”
That stuck in his head.
What Stripe said about her being a lady, and preserving her virtue.
Broads didn’t think like that, anymore.
Little girls wanted to lose their virginity to the first junkie punk or big black gangbanger they could get their legs around, then e-mail all their little whore friends about it.
You’d see them, even in this neighbourhood, at the end of that train, 19 or 20 years old, either fat as a pig or all scrawny and scraggly, with a cigarette in their mouths and a dead look on their faces, all used up and fucked out and doped up, some of them with a kid or two from different guys straggling behind them.
But Rogue wasn’t like them.
She was a good girl.
She spent most of her time at libraries and bookstores, reading or studying.
If she wanted to get crazy she went to the movies, and if she went to let her hair down and have a drink, it was at Starbucks.
With him.
As far as Sabretooth could see, she wasn’t real close to any of the kids she went to school with.
For one thing, she was about a year and a half older than the kids in her class, for another, she was light-years away from them.
Stripe, that’s what he called her, because of her one lock of pure white hair, was a serious student; she was first in her class and had plans to go to NYU and study several foreign languages and History or something, in expectation of becoming a professor, or some kind of UN diplomat.
Rogue was a lady raised with 19th century values, and Sabretooth was a man raised during the 19th century to know the difference between a lady and a whore.
He courted her, accordingly.
First, the formalities.
Victor insisted on carrying her backpack to and from school, and carrying her books to and from the library.
He opened the car door for her, and any other doors they came upon, and when they went anywhere, he insisted on paying for everything.
It was Erik’s money, but hers was Erik’s money, too; it was the principle of the thing.
He helped her on and off with her coat and held her umbrella, the whole nine yards.
Stripe would often comment to him on it.
“Victor, you’re not like the boys I go to school with; you’re a gentleman.”
Unlike his brother, who was raised by their crazy Pa, and then Victor took over, on some God-forsaken homestead in the mountains, Victoria Creed had always raised her son to be a gentleman.
He tried, when people deserved it, and most of the time, they didn’t.
More importantly, though, as Rogue pointed out, a lady guards her virtue with her life, and Victor made no attempts on it.
After he had been her bodyguard for eight months, Rogue hesitantly reached for his hand when they were walking home from a movie, and it made him feel like he was a boy again, dressed in a high-collared shirt, accidentally brushing against a girl’s ram leaving church.
It was the same kind of thrill, and this time there was no Zebediah Creed looking down on him for it.
That said, Sabretooth was no monk; after Rogue went to bed, or when he was away, doing her father’s dirty work, he had more than his share of broads.
And it wasn’t to say that his relationship with Rogue was formal; he was just about her only friend in the world. And that, oddly enough was how the man who was over a century and the girl who wasn’t yet twenty interacted, as friends.
Two storm-tossed mutants, against the world.
She was sixteen when the improbable predated the unthinkable.
Rogue came into her local Starbucks, well, one of her local Starbucks, when school let out early after there was a water main break.
Sabretooth was there with one of his broads, a fairly pretty punkette who was a graduate of the X-Institute, a poor little rich girl pursuing some kind of artistic pursuit as far as Victor could fathom.
She was a metamorph, like Raven, which got interesting.
Speaking of interesting, Rogue took one look at them and marched over to the table like the devil had just blown a handful of red pepper up her ass.
She slammed her books down on the table, and took off her glove.
“Ah don’t know who the hell you are, Little Miss Piercing, but ah do know that if ah put this hand of mine on one of your jailhouse tattoos and hold it there, you’ll be as dead as your oh so 1991 look is within about five minutes. Peddle that elsewhere, sugah.”
“What the fuck is…”
Rogue grabbed the other mutant’s arm.
“Jesus, Stripe!”
“Shut your God-damn mouth, Victor Creed!”
She let the other girl go, and as soon as the terrified metamorph could move, she did.
Before Sabretooth could wipe the slack-jawed expression off his face, Rogue slapped him in it.
“Damn you, Victor, cain’t you keep your whores out of mah face! It’s bad enough you have them, without parading them around in front of me!”
Then she stalked out the door.
Victor went after her, and caught her by the arm in the street.
It was all very typical, especially for that part of town, at that time of day.
“What the hell, Stripe? Is there something going on I don’t know about?’
“Yes! Ah understand that you’re afraid that if you…get any closer to me you might…get seriously hurt, but you might be decent enough to to rub it in that every cheap ho in town has from you what ah will never get. It’s bad enough, without you dragging them all out in front of me.”
Victor was a gentleman, and Rogue was a lady, and a gentleman always waits until a lady is ready.
Seemed like she was, alright.
“You got me all wrong, Stripe. What did you want me to do, crawl all over you?”
“What I want you to do, Victor, is to tell me the truth. Do you love me?”
They were standing in the middle of a busy street in Manhattan, but Sabretooth didn’t even bat an eye.
“Of course I do, Stripe. You’re my girl. Other frails, they don’t mean a thing to me. It’s just, I’m a man, yunno?”
“Yes, Victor, ah am very much aware of that. And ah am, after all, am a woman.”
“I noticed.”
“I do love you, Victor. And it’s not just by default, because you’re the only man I’ve ever met that I can touch without killing him. Or beacuse you're tall and blond and good-lookin'. Ah love you, Victor, all that's good in you. Ah love you…the way a woman loves a man. But ah wouldn’t want to put your life in danger. Ah would understand, if you wanted us to leave things…the way they are.”
With belated stupidity, Victor realized that she thought he was holding her off because he was afraid that she could kill him with her pussy.
He laughed.
“Baby, I’ve lived a long fucking time. Longer than any man should. If I have to die to have you, then I’m ready to go, right now, today. I promise you’ll never regret it. Not the first time, or the last. Besides, I don’t think there’s any more powers in any other parts of your body than there are in your hands.”
“But what if there are, Victor?”
“Then I’ll get better real fast. Stripe, a gentleman waits until a lady is ready. And, you seem pretty goddam ready, to me.”
“Oh ah am, Victor! Ah am!”
That was enough for Old Black Tom Logan’s sonny boy Vic Creed, yes it was.
He bundled Rogue into his car and drove her to the Village where he had an apartment that was less flash than Erik’s, but it was no dive.
They went straight from the car to his bedroom, where Victor peeled every stitch of clothing off of Stripe’s eager, starving, hot little body and he discovered not only that her sweet teenage pussy wasn’t going to kill him, but that she was that kind of woman that men of his generation valued most of all.
A lady in the parlor, a whore in the bedroom.
She was 16, she was beautiful, and she was his, all his, and it certainly didn’t help that Stripe couldn’t seem to get enough of him.
Life being what it is, despite their best efforts, they got a little what you might call, indiscreet.
It wasn’t her fault.
Victor should have exercised some self control when she started climbing all over him in Erik’s fucking living room, but she was such a sweet, dirty little thing.
It could make a grown man cry, the way she looked into his eyes with an expression of misty-eyed pleasure on her face while she was sucking his cock, and that look of lust and gratitude and love shining in her big green eyes.
Now, when any man comes home and finds his teenage daughter smoking a guy’s pole on his couch, in his living room, he’s going to be an unhappy son of a bitch. And if the guy in question happens to be his employee, he’s going to be unhappier, yet.
Now, make that guy Magneto, and Victor knew right away that he was in a world of shit.
It was a big scene, with Erik aiming metal objects at Victor’s head, and Rogue clinging to his clothes, screaming, “No, Papa! No, I love him! I love him!”
Which only made things worse.
Now Victor imagined that when Bill Stryker, the son of a bitch, put all that metal on Jimmy, that Jimmy was in a world of hurt, and he could understand why a thing like that might make your mind a little fuzzy.
But, what he went through at the hands of the master of magnetism made all that look like nothing.
When Magneto found out, he went crazy, and Sabretooth couldn’t blame him.
Under horrible torture that it took him three months to completely heal from, Sabretooth promised Magneto that he would never touch Rogue again, but he broke his promise as soon as he was physically able to.
He had the feeling Erik knew, or suspected, but he didn’t do anything about it, because under the same horrible torture Victor kept declaring over and over again that he was not lying about loving Marie.
Erik did go and tell Rogue every lousy, dirty, crumby, evil, no-good rotten thing he had ever done in his life, and then some that he hadn’t but that he was rumored to have done, but Stripe was pretty philosophical about it.
If he wasn’t doing it to her, them what he did to other people she never knew and never would didn’t matter.
And Erik should have expected that Machiavellian attitude from any child of his.
The only thing that really seemed to bother her was the alleged rape and murder of Kayla Sliverfox, his brother’s woman.
Which Victor straightened out right the fuck away.
“Alright, first of all, Stripe, I did not kill her. As far as I know, as of right now, today, she still ain’t dead. My CO, Bill Stryker set Jimmy up with that broad, she was an operative of his. To keep tabs on the runt. Well, Jimmy’s a sucker for a broad, especially if she’s the wrong broad for him, so he fell for her like a ton of bricks. And Kayla fell for him, too. Anyway, I was supposed to make it look like I killed her so that Bill could get Jimmy mad enough at me to get the adamantium on him. Naturally, Bill told me that it was so he could bring Jimmy back into the fold, and it would get his mind right, and we could go back to working together again. And I was getting promoted to Colonel , which Jimmy got in fucking 1945. The son of a bitch was lying. Turns out he and his brother are the founding members of the C of H, and he fucked up Jimmy’s mind, and his whole life, and fucked up my life, too, because I never could convince my brother after that I wasn’t his enemy. There was bad blood between us in the past, but after all that shit? Forget it.”
“I believe you, Victor. That covers the murder. What about the rape?”
“Awww, shit! Excuse my language, Stripe, but of all the women for Jimmy to fall for, that fuckin’ cunt? I mean, you might say, well she’s an empath, it’s her nature, but as far as I know, there’s no mutation that turns you into a complete fuckin’ whore. I mean, Jimmy, he used to go up on the mountain, every day, to that logging camp where our Pa still works, sometimes, and work like a fuckin’ dog for that woman. Hell, he built the place they lived in from the ground up, with his own two hands. And she didn’t do shit. She taught kids in kindergarten in the fuckin’ morning. Big deal. And when Bill sent me in to get briefed, I ended up nearly getting de-briefed. I mean, my foot wasn’t through the door before Kayla was all over my belt buckle. And I thought of my brother, up there bustin’ his butt so her Injun ass could live in style, and what’s the squaw doing behind his back? Hopping on every dick that came through the door? I was the only guy that walked into that house that didn’t fuck her. Now I won’t lie to you, Stripe, me an’ Jimmy, we shared everything, we had the same woman before, but in those days, there weren’t a whole pile of broads around, two guys havin’ the same woman wasn’t such an unusual thing. But this wasn’t like that. I never touched her. Naturally, she went and told Jimmy I did, while she was allegedly dying, the vindictive bitch. Now I’ve killed frails. I’ve killed just about everything that walks, crawls, or flies on this Earth, and I been in more wars than I can remember. But I ain’t no rapo. That’s not how I was brought up.”
Stripe believed him on that, too, and she should have, because it was true.
Victor didn’t know where it was all going to end up, and he didn’t really think about it.
Things were good. He took care of Stripe, and she took care of him. Every night, she cooked his dinner for him, and she took over cleaning his place, and doing his laundry.
Victor never cleaned, and when his clothes got too dirty, he usually just threw them out.
He knew he was a spendthrift, and he was also a degenerate gambler; it was just that nobody in New York was dumb enough to try to get him to pay up when he didn’t feel like it, or refuse his bets.
So, if he blew all his money on some spree, she’d get some dough from Erik to pay his bills, and buy his groceries, and everything.
He never apologized for being the man he was, and she never got on his ass about it.
Victor even tried to clean up his act, a little, to make it easier on Stripe.
As for the future, he imagined that Stripe would finish high school, and go to college, and get her job, and if she wasn’t tired of old Vic Creed by then, she’s be way past the age of 21 and Erik could take a flying fuck at a rolling donut if he didn’t like it.
Besides, by then there would be another war, another terrorist act, another big thing for Uncle Sam to get his boxers in a bunch over, and have to call on Major Victor Creed, USMC Special Forces to go do the voodoo that he did so well, and he could get out of this two-bit idealistic civilian bullshit.
Because Sabretooth though that Magneto was every bit as much of a bullshit idealist as Charlie X, except he was too dumb to soft-pedal it so he could get the okee dokee from Uncle Sam, like his old pal had.
Who knew, Pa was about his age when he was born.
Maybe it was about time to get a head start on the next generation; Jimmy’s taste in broads was so lousy, he wasn’t going to do much about it.
Maybe he could succeed in getting Stripe to permanently absorb his powers.
After that, shit, the sky was the limit.
Maybe, just maybe, the sun was going to shine on Old Black Tom Logan’s sonny boy Victor Creed.
Then came the initial briefing for Erik’s Liberty Island Scheme.
It was one of his more way-out plans, one he sad that might take up to a year to realize.
Some crazy shit about a death ray or something like it that would turn all humans into mutants, and he needed to use the Statue of Liberty for it, or some shit, Victor wasn’t listening.
Until he heard Stripe’s name mentioned.
“…of course, there’s a chance, and a good one that it might be harmful or fatal to Marie to absorb my powers and act as the catalyst, but, if I have to sacrifice her life for the well being of our entire race, well, they have driven me to it, the humans…”
He said something else after that, about tests and healing factors and so on, but Victor didn’t hear another word.
He sat through the whole briefing like he was over the broad and didn’t give a shit, but right after, he went out and packed Rogue a survival kit, and got some cash together, and a plane ticket to Vancouver.
The next day, he picked her up from school, as usual, and they went to his place, as usual, and that’s where he laid the bad news on her.
He hadn’t counted on how much it would hurt, when she was gone, at the hole that opened up in his life, the yawning crater where Stripe had been.
He had been able to stand it, until he heard from Jimmy, and that was when he realized that she was really gone, that in all possibility she was gone from his life, forever.
And, lying in a pool of his own blood in the ruins of his apartment, Victor came face to face with the irony of ironies.
He could kill everything that walked and crawled and flew on this Earth, except himself.
And now that he wanted to die, who the hell was going to kill him?
“God damn you, Jimmy, you’re never here when I need you.” He gurgled.
And knew nothing more, until Erik and Raven discovered him.
Later on, he would realize that he had lain there for days.
II:Rogue
Rogue had not yet decided if she believed in her father’s cause; and he never pressured her, at 18, not even finished with high school, to make such a choice.
Nor did Rogue wish to.
She had the feeling that choosing might entail losing her home and her family, and she didn’t want that.
She had endured awful hardships as an orphan growing up in fear of her neighbors and genteel poverty in the Deep South, a ward of her dead parent’s wary relatives, and then living in a swamp in fear of her life from the same people she always thought had killed her parents.
A life that Papa and Mama, Erik and Raven, Magneto and Mystique, had rescued her from.
The last thing she wanted to do was betray them.
And she had a good life, with her parents, living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, on Central Park West. She went to a very good school, and was planning on attending NYU after she graduated high school.
She would be 19, then, a little older than her classmates, but better late than never.
Rogue had problems, to be sure.
At school, she blamed her long sleeves and gloves on a skin condition; the truth was that more than a passing touch from Rogue could kill, and even brief contact was dangerous.
Even more dangerous to mutants and masks; she was capable of absorbing their powers.
But, as Papa always said, most teenagers have embarrassing skin conditions.
He and Mama were trying to find a telepath to help her gain control of her powers; as a last-ditch effort Charles Xavier was not out of the question.
And, Rogue thought, as she brushed her hair in preparation to go to bed, a lot of teenage girls’ fathers did not approve of their choice of male companions.
Not that Rogue had a lot of choices open to her.
Even if she had, she thought, she would choose Victor.
He was a hard man to love, but she didn't mind.
He ain't heavy, he's my Victor.
Then, on one ordinary afternoon, her life changed.
It was after school, and she was fixing Victor's dinner, as usual, when he stopped her.
“ Stripe, I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just tell you straight . He means to fucking kill you. Your own father. He’s got some crazy fuckin’ scheme to change everybody into mutants, and he needs you as his catalyst. He wins his war, but you die in the process. I just heard him lay this plan out, with my own ears. Get dressed, baby. Take this bag, and this money. There’s a plane ticket in the bag to take you to Vancouver. And some clothes, and things you’re gonna need. Go find Jimmy. Have him take you to the X-Men. Jimmy will protect you, and so will Professor X, and all of ‘em. Forget all about me, and Erik. Jimmy’s a better man than I am. I trust you with him. You’re a good woman, you deserve better than me. An’ he can give you everything I can’t. Not to mention after all the lousy luck he’s had with broads, he deserves a good woman. Good as gold. Now, don’t say anything, Stripe. Take this stuff and go.”
“But Victor…he’s your brother…I…I…”
He kissed her, furiously.
“I know he is. And you can trust him like you trust me. I know he’ll fall for you as hard as I did, and when he does, he’ll never let anything hurt you."
"I don't care, Victor. Ah would rather die than lose you. Why don't you take me away? I'll go with you."
"Because I can't protect you from your crazy father. Or from myself, if I lose my shit. Jimmy can. And so can Chuck X, and the X-Men. Marie, listen to me. Please.
Baby, if you love me, do what I say. Go. And never look back. If there's a way I can come back to you, someday, I will, Even if it takes me a thousand fucking years."
And so, Rogue went once more into the world with next to nothing, running heedlessly from the past, to blindly embrace the future.
But she would not forget Victor Creed.
Any more than Logan would forget Jean Grey.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
In which Victor learns that to love and lose can kill you.
Chapter End Notes:
Wow! That was tragic! And do you believe me that Rogue loves Logan every bit as much as she loves Victor? That's more than a tragedy. It's a bloodbath in the making. And don't forget, Rogue has some claws of her own.