To Run In Circles:
Chapter Two
Scott waited until the end of the meeting to introduce her. The proposals of new and old congressmen regarding mutants; a group of FOH supporters for sure and members possibly, and a Cajun who might-or-might-not be willing to share intel; an internet-promoted drug that promised to eliminate the X-gene still popular though it had been linked to seventy-six miscarriages.
All the while, the refracted scarlet of Summer's much-beloved laser pointer danced in sweeps across the brunette's quietly, and morosely, attentive face. Their eyes had met once, and not again, though Logan's had found their way to her in visual circuits of the room that seemed to have no other stopping place. Part boredom--Scott's briefings were so depressingly similar (Logan frequently accused him of recycling notes) they could not help but evoke the impatient emotion--part mildly lecherous curiosity, and in part an irritation he could neither understand nor defend. Who was she?
"--and we welcome to the team Rogue, who will be serving in a non-fighting, secondary capacity on missions," Scott concluded shortly, taking this on to, with the same breath and voice, the (shrinking) list of hospitals who continued to accept mutants. "Nice to have you with us again."
She nodded in courteous acknowledgment of this but did not look up. Scott packed away his things, offered some unheard and unrequited words of dismissal, and accompanied Jean out of the conference room--to teach, to eat, or perhaps (since this was Friday) to head upstairs for whatever dry, missionary fumblings they considered sex, while Logan's brain was still busy turning over that word, 'again'.
Although she, Rogue, had risen from her chair no quicker than he, in a matter of seconds she had placed between them more people and space than, Logan told himself, he was willing to cover, though his nose flared and his legs gave starchy resistance against any direction but her's. He watched her disappear up a staircase, listened to her unseen progress while staring at the last place a corner of her leg had been visible--for much longer than he could offer reason.
She's looked and certainly, inexpressibly, smelled better than she had last night after washing both herself and her clothes. Rogue's hair (full, brushed to a clean glossiness) had been pulled into a sharp ponytail, displaying the full pallor of the solemn features beneath and the shadow of twin moons cradling her eyes. She'd worn a maroon blouse with tan cargo pants that, intentionally or incidentally, matched the paint and decor of the mansion. If it had been an attempt to blend in, it had been a gross failure; she stood out as much as the scent--now burnished and intensified with her cleansed body--that still eluded identification.
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He learned later that Rogue (a title he only grudgingly used and just as unwillingly refrained from mocking. These days all the residents possessed one of the preposterous nicknames--though the protection afforded by these offered little protection from a government that had begun making hating and hunting them a top priority) had been given Ororo's old room. It was tactically not mentioned at the meeting, though space was in short supply and all had been wondering what nook she would be crammed into. Occupancy was another thing the officials were keeping an eye on: one student, one extended guest, one pitied stray kitten over capacity would have the much-coveted excuse to shut the school down. And every runaway accepted meant one more they would soon have to turn away.
Still, the sanctity of the attic room where no one had tread but the weather witch possessed by anyone she, struck a special, dumbfounded pain in each of the resident's souls. A silent emotion, however, because none wished to be the one to give it voice.
And Logan, a close friend of death but not half so familiar with its sibling grief, wondered bemusedly if four months was the traditional point when the dead were replaced and forgotten.
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Approximately three minutes and twenty seconds after leaving the jet hangar (it might have been three flat, if not for the infuriatingly fixed paced of the elevator), Logan was in the kitchen. His right hand was slightly curled, mentally already gripping the chilled glass, a ghost that preceded that wonderfully bitter drink already courting his throat. His course--not so much a beeline but an arrow, the trajectory of a bullet--was impeded. Stupidly, dangerously, unintentionally.
A plate (whose thousands of scratches at the forks and knifes of as many students were beginning to show, even to those without Logan's vision--war wounds of the tableware) sat on the island, crowned with a sandwich that seemed to contain every odorous topping possible. The refrigerator door was tauntingly opened, a tendril of its cold and his beer's scent stroking his cheek like a familiar lover. And standing within its one-armed embrace, directly blocking his goal, was a head of hair whose white streaks spilled from behind the crescent of her ears. A triangle of visible neck, a languid ridge of a curving spine. A line of flesh where her shirt had tugged up and a humble wink of her underwear's elastic band, all culminating in double mounds designed by some generous deity to fill another's hands.
Logan drew closer--though whether the aforementioned or alcohol was his magnet is unclear. Slow, quiet steps, a predator's helplessly instinctual glide.
Over the incline of Rogue' shoulder he glimpsed a hand skimming over the items in the fridge's steel racks and stretching--oh god, just one step closer and he could--toward the sloping necks of a bottle who's label read, 'Molson'.
"Those are mine."
She shrugged her indifference. Her fingers changed their route smoothly, closed around a container of pomegranate juice whose shape abstractly and far too closely resembled female curves for Logan's comfort. Rogue straightened, gave him an inscrutable look she had to her head up to deliver--he'd taken that step closer, but her heart had only offered a few beats that may have been considered out of time. Then she slid past him and, though he expected her to take her edible loot upstairs, as she'd been doing all week, took a seat at the marble island. The scrape of the plate pulled across its surface was much too loud in the otherwise silent room.
Logan picked a beer from the collection within the sterile cold. He glanced at her, thought simultaneously of how long it had been--almost two weeks, and "What the hell", and chose a second bottle. The rubber of his boot closed the metal door, their attached legs crossed the floor in two strides. He set the golden drought in front of her, set himself on the stool opposite. Her plumb lips narrowed, but she accepted the former offering unhesitatingly. The thumb of her right hand removed the cap with practiced ease.
"You didn't go tonight." His own lid came off with a wet plop.
"You're right," Rogue agreed, ignoring the question in his questionless statement. "I didn't." She brought her strongly-scented sandwich to mouth. She took big bites, for such a little person. His eyebrow took an escalated position.
A moment, and a silence he expected her to hold. Scott had looked at him with blank disinterest when Logan had asked where the new kid was, before the X-jet rose and took off for another bloody attempt to help a thankless world. He stared at her chin, round as a budding peach, down her neck to the triangular hollow. The rim of her shirt, the fleshy, pebbled hills draped in two layers of clothing more than necessary. To the edge of the counter, where her body disappointingly became hidden.
"I wasn't needed," she said suddenly, and something in her voice was responding both to his inquiry and one no one else could hear.
"Forty-nine members of that crazy fucking gun cult. I think we could have found something for you to do." At least the kid could have mopped up the aftermath.
"I'm noncombat."
"Nobody's noncombatant."
"And yet, I am. Such a paradox."
Logan looked her up and down, an enjoyable activity. He smirked reflexively, but the words his mouth framed were not the ones his expression suggested. "Need some training?"
Her sandwich was gone, though he couldn't remember seeing her take any more bites--only the pink play of her knuckles, the occasional glimpse of the blue 'Y' within her wrist, a sliver of white teeth. How long had it taken them, to exchange so few words?
"Who said I couldn't fight?" Rogue cocked her head at him, stood calmly. She put the plate in the sink, left him and it--though she took the rest of her beer upstairs with her.
Logan had hardly touched his.
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She was only a mild curiosity, a low-powered blip on his radar. Those half-encounters and thoughts depicted here are meaningful only when the majority of daily interactions are cut away. Whole days would pass where Rogue would not cross his path and barely his mind, though they lived in unimaginably close quarters for a so-called mansion.
A faint interest, a habitual twitch in his groin, a possible vessel in which he might siphon a fraction of his restlessness. The amount of viable distractions shrank by the day--Logan could not risk becoming too much a regular in the local bars, and could not afford to be far from the mansion for fear of who or what might descend in his absence. Only so many fights could be provoked and exacerbated outside gas stations and cigar shops, and only so many women picked up in grocery stores, parking lots or mildly populated strip malls before he was in danger of being recognized--not least by two of the jealous latter category. And the stock of in-house female diversions had run dry, leaving only the irritatingly young and the pedophilic young, neither of which he was yet desperate enough to proposition.
She was not a crush, not an obsession--though he found himself collecting facts about her like slightly-valuable stamps, coins...She knew where all the silverware was kept. She waved to the only gardener who'd not resigned, and his responding grin had not been that of a stranger's. Two others had used the word 'again' in welcoming her. No one that he heard had offered her a tour. She liked to run in the border between afternoon and evening, but wore long sleeves and old jeans during even this sweaty activity--a cutter? a junkie? Rogue favored the public road beyond the mansion gates for her jogs, and ignored his growling reprimands that it was too dangerous until he began to accompany her on the secluded route--after which hers became the domesticated paths of the mansion's grounds.
She liked eating in her room, or outside--seeming to best prefer the shade of dogwood trees. She smiled at the students, willingly assisted with whatever chores the mansion presented, but rarely shared her presence otherwise. His eyes were not the only ones that followed Rogue--one of his gathered facts that both encouraged and inexplicably infuriated him, and he always seemed to catch the tail end of a discussion, story, a compliment or warning referencing her. And furtive or confused--feigned or real--expressions when he investigated these awoke an instinct that this secrecy and his bafflement was not incidental.
And sometimes she wore gloves--elbow length or more, a strange accessory for one whose attire was usually so plain. Those were the days she spent hours in Xavier's office, and left with a paleness to rival her own usual pallor and that of the dead.
A slight, half-interest, and nothing more.
She wasn't.
She wasn't.
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He entered the darkened room just as Rogue was sitting down. A glass of water on the couch-side table, a bag of Oreos in her lap (though purchased with what money, Logan had not a clue. She had not done any work for the team, and Xavier could no longer afford allowances or snacks). An exasperated glance when he stepped in and then a cool one--and her thoughts were as clear as if she'd laid them out on a table to dissect. One look, and he could see her weighing whatever had driven her to the entertainment in the middle of the night against his power to drive her out. Logan grunted, bridled at the unspoken insult. He did not know what Rogue had against him (she normally fled too soon for more than the bare minimum of flirting--he'd barely even touched her breasts those last two times), why the sharp edge of her being was always turned toward him or why it frustrated him less than it should.
"Trouble sleeping?" The sweat, which may as well have been the water from that monstrous tank of the lab and his nightmares, was cooling on his own back.
"Mm-hmmm." She fiddled with the remote, giving it much more attention than it deserved, pressed the red POWER button, and with a burp of static the dark screen was overtaken by a wash of color and movement. Logan sat down on the couch, the farthest end, too much unbroken sinew tying him to the dream to tempt himself or her back to bed, no matter which activity would take place beneath its covers. (He did not, however, choose one of the many and more platonic armchairs, lest his lower half decide to perk up).
He watched the profile of Rogue to his right, her features both soft and sharp--befitting the popular silhouette on an antique broach. Anyone else would have been apologizing by now, in tears or in whimpers, at the very least stuttering as they passed him the remote control (the residents had not been spared from the consequences of his boredom). But Rogue did not so much as glance at him, and Logan found his lips still pressed together, the complaint comfortable in his throat and showing no sign of leaving even as she flicked through channels he would normally only submit to under the heaviest of restraint.
A Lifetime movie; an ancient sitcom whose laugh track never varied; a documentary on Marie Antoinette; a Sex and the City repeat (she changed that one quickly, thankfully, otherwise his patience and his half-hearted disinclination towards hitting women may have vanished); a Law and Order rerun. If she was searching for something in particular, she didn't find it. Soon the selection of channels dwindled to low budget science fiction, a handful of sports programs he urged her toward as if he had the telepathic will of Xavier, paid programing and the nightly news.
A chubby man covered in wrinkles and salt-and-pepper hair, interviewing a woman over an orange table. A running caption across the bottom of the screen summarizing pieces of someone's anguish--an infant beaten to death by a woman's frustrated lover; and outbreak of fires in Tennessee that had swallowed thirteen homes; a popular church taken in the wave of a car bomb--Homeland Security investigating.
"--so you do not feel that Brown vs Board of Educations applies anymore?"
"Of course I do. I'm not a racist. But only to humans, a class to whom these mutants, by definition, do not belong."
Rogue's thumb came down on a button with an up arrow. The pair on the screen were replaced by a woman with a pug face and yellow hair, sprayed into gravity-defying heights. She spoke directly to the camera, as if it were a misbehaving and unforgivable child. "...They run rampant in our society, doing as they please as if their so-called 'gifts' exempt them from the law. If we--"
"....with the deficit at a historical peak, currently the sole opposing argument against the act seems to concern the money registering every mutant in the country would require--"
"...Why should they be hiding? If they mean us no harm, why would they not assent to an national register? The crimes committed by the guilty can be linked to their respective mutants without unjustly persecuting them all--"
"When will something be done? My wife is afraid to send our children to school, in case there's one of them in the classroom as well. Who knows what one of those monster--"
"'Scientists'--and I use that title liberally--claim mutancy is as hereditary as handedness. Why, then, do you suppose that people my become ambidextrous, but these individuals cannot exhibit the same control over their genetic abnormalities?"
"--more on the mutant activists linked to Al Qaida when we return to FOX--"
Rogue sighed, and in the exhale was the sound of the entire world turning to dust. She played with the lid to the remote's batter casing--opening it, closing it, opening it, closing it. She huffed, changed the channel a few more times, chewed on her lower lip. And though Logan was sure Rogue hadn't pressed any of the volume buttons, the noise of the television faded to half a murmur.
Her mouth looked very pink. And very soft.
"Do you like football?", she asked him.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Woot! On-time update! It's so rare--I feel like I've found a unicorn.
Thanks goes to all who reviewed the last chapter. It is guys like you, the kindness and generosity you show toward my stories and I, that gets me from week to week. I dearly hope your patience will not run out, and that you will continue to make time for the mess that comes out of my pen.
You'll be glad to hear that I've finished the latest of the rambling Mr. Nabokov, though my doctor tells me his long-winded effects may last a few chapters more. I apologize for any mistakes left over from the editing process--no excuse to offer, though I did my best; if you find one feel free to point it out--and for what a horndog our Logan is shaping out to be, kinda surprised even me there.
This update is dedicated to reviewers (of course), sleep and its absence, Disney songs (admit it--we all love them), dogwood trees and people who are kind even when they don't have to be.
Thanks goes to all who reviewed the last chapter. It is guys like you, the kindness and generosity you show toward my stories and I, that gets me from week to week. I dearly hope your patience will not run out, and that you will continue to make time for the mess that comes out of my pen.
You'll be glad to hear that I've finished the latest of the rambling Mr. Nabokov, though my doctor tells me his long-winded effects may last a few chapters more. I apologize for any mistakes left over from the editing process--no excuse to offer, though I did my best; if you find one feel free to point it out--and for what a horndog our Logan is shaping out to be, kinda surprised even me there.
This update is dedicated to reviewers (of course), sleep and its absence, Disney songs (admit it--we all love them), dogwood trees and people who are kind even when they don't have to be.
Chapter End Notes:
That little comment box is so, so close. Just think of what joy you give another human being just by directing your mouse within it, and typing whatever letters add up to what you thought of this chapter. Please? Pwetty please? Pwetty pwetty please with icecream and double whip cream and caramel sauce and eight cherries that the employee is not supposed to give you but winks and does it anyway? Got a naked picture of Hugh Jackman, willing to barter with that....
Anyway, I hope this met your expectations (or failed them, if you were expecting something over which flies would circle) and that you are sufficiently interested enough to read the chapters that follow. Have a nice day (or night, whatever time zone you may be in), and happy reading!
P.S. Sorry about Ororo. I didn't plan it. It just...happened.
Anyway, I hope this met your expectations (or failed them, if you were expecting something over which flies would circle) and that you are sufficiently interested enough to read the chapters that follow. Have a nice day (or night, whatever time zone you may be in), and happy reading!
P.S. Sorry about Ororo. I didn't plan it. It just...happened.