To Run In Circles: Chapter Six
"You don't get to make those kind of decisions," Scott said. His voice was warm with the pleasure that came from denying Logan something, anything. The enjoyment of this activity seemed reciprocally related to how important the matter seemed: like now, with the walls meekly absorbing every snarled statement. It might have been one of Summer's few untainted hobbies left to him--aside from Jean's bi-annual blowjob and checkers.
"What the fuck do you want with her?"
"What you want with her is a better question, though it's a bit obvious. Really, Logan, just get a prostitute--at least she'd be moderately interested."
"She's not fucking coming. She can't."
"As a matter of fact, Rogue can. And she is."
"If she--"
"--goes, you won't? What a shame. In that case, I can guarantee her place on the mission--but we'll miss you, Logan."
"You piece of rotting fuckin' shit. What--"
"Let go. Dammit, take your hands off of me or I'll blast your head off. I swear to--"
"She'll be hurt."
"What do you care? Let go. Let go of me, you crazy fucking...."
It took several moments of coughing before Summers could work up enough air and dignity to speak again. "Rouge will be fine."
"Wasn't last time."
"You don't know anything about it," Scott snapped, with a special acidity. But there was a discomfort in his eyes that had nothing to do with the bruises that circled his throat.
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It was a hospital, or had been, though many years had passed since it's visitors would have referred to it as such. A small building in the mountains, it's surroundings a snug garment. More of a clinic, really, a retreat. Plenty of rooms for long-term patients but only a perfunctory E.R.--there were more easily accessed facilities for true emergencies.
A philanthropist had built it, a man with as much money as he had spare time and a streak of that rare and laughable desire to change the world. He had envisioned a center of healing, of generosity, of self-enrichment. A precious and free haven for those with the need but not the means for medical care. Our altruist put all of his energy and spirit--and, most effectively, his bank account, into the creation of such a place.
Naturally, three summers after achieving such a dream the government froze the last of the man's dwindling accounts and the clinic was seized as part of an IRS investigation.
The haven slipped out of the public eye and it's doors, which had stood open to anyone, now only unlocked for a shipment of--
"--mutants," The Professor said to the team. "The lab's not as large as ones we've broken before, but we've had a tip about this one and a chemical compound they're trying to manufacture."
"What will it do?"
"I don't know, Bobby." Xavier said, and his gaze flicked to where Rogue sat, silent and disinterested in the corner. "Let's find out."
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She would not look at him, would not speak. Rogue treated Logan almost as coldly after the night in the bar as she did before it--but with a extra wariness now, ever-vigilant to what he might ask in her presence, or reveal within others. She did not respond to his quiet and not-so-quiet inquiries (the latter of which earned him furious looks from Jean), not to the suggestions that weren't suggestions that she should not be here, nor to the concern that even the blanket of gruffness could not cover.
Yet on the plane she allowed him to sit beside her, or at least did not make a great effort to move. They came to a careful landing in a clearing just large enough to hold the jet--Logan saw a few tree branches kiss the windows, and heard Scott hiss about the cost of paint damage.
And she gave him a very soft look as he deboarded, from the seat she hadn't yet left.
Only a few of them--Jean, and two others--descended the steps into what had been a storeroom for medical supplies. They stepped over the bodies of those pathetically outnumbered guards and vanished down the stairs like figments of a shadow's imagination.
The rest of them dispersed among the halls, the small chambers. Scott attached himself to Logan like a loose but determined strip of Velcro. Keeping an eye on him, of playing the role of restraining superior as only he could. But it was not until later that Logan--who was thinking too much of the girl left in the jet and feeling too little like the animal--thought this supervision might be keeping him from more than excessive violence. Or for him to attach more meaning to the fact that a collection of doctors was the best ready-made distraction for the Wolverine.
A casual, bright place that could have matched most descriptions of the generic office. Few employees than there otherwise might have been, though of course this was nighttime, and even the most devoted practitioners of cruelty do not work twenty-four seven. Water coolers and bowls of peppermints, a rather tired-looking vending machine. A secretary whose skull was quickly and cleanly cracked against the edge of her desk, before she could do more than draw breath to scream. Papers that Scott winced at, muttered "Admittance forms", with a glare.
An entirely ordinary clinic, though entirely ordinary clinics do not usually possess guards who shoot on sight, or locked doors every few feet. Nor an open closed that brimmed with boxes--dirt stained, bloodstained apparel on the right, personal items that might serve a monetary or souvenir purpose on the left.
Little to be seen until the second floor, from whence came the sound and glimpsing sights of a bustling crowd. The theory that most of the workers had gone home was pushed away. Scott dispensed a pair of their silent group down one of the halls, left another two to guard against attempted escape at the entrance and, with a younger boy, commenced down the busier of paths.
There were cages. A room of them. Thick bars, spots of rust and the scent of terror. Empty, save two, in which the starved husks of what had been people lay.
There were doctors. White coats, and for an absent and rare philosophical moment Logan wondered what could make them believe their jobs were still connected to that symbol of healing. But it was a quick though, one he forgot the moment he'd had it.
There were two employees examining and discussing a stack of X-Rays, and a nurse who walked in. Dealt with quickly because Scott liked to maintain the element of surprise, that grey and tense calm fro as long as possible.
There was a sign, held to the ceiling by two weak chains. The embossed letters "O" and "R" and the last corridor their route offered.
There were metal beds and white sheets, speckled red with the discharge of their previous occupants. Leather straps at their head and foot, and a room in which these restraints were no longer necessary. The person they'd held--naked, blue, with a tail that dangled off the table and to the floor--had long since lost the ability to struggle.
There were needles dipping in and out of a dead arm. Voices speaking a long list of chemical names and comparing how long this one lasted to the others. Figures that might have been shaped from clay for all the humanity Logan saw in them. And that fragile quiet shattered.
There was blood.
There were screams.
There were running footsteps that were cut off, and never sounded again.
There was Scott, saying, "Enough. Enough, Logan," though not half so insistently as usual. The young team member who'd accompanied them, trying to look brave and and not to puke with an equal lack of success. A hand that reached out as if to restrain the bloodier, clawed one, but knew better than to actually do so.
There were orders, a tone that was as shaky as threadbare tires on a gravel road. "Logan....Logan, move...move those bodies against the wall. No, not that one. I think we should...should bring the victims with us, give them a proper burial--oh, for fucks sake, just do it. I don't care how it makes the plane smell. Wrap him in something. Bobby, get those papers. Stay here and give Logan a hand. I'm....I'm...I'm... going to find the others, let John know we need him--we'll be setting fire to this place shortly. Use the COM if you need me."
Scarlet puddles lay on the floor, and made indelicate squelching noises underfoot, hung on the walls, the effects of an overeager artist. Logan was left pushing, rolling, dragging men in varying states of recognizable into a space-saving pile, glowering at Bobby's tremulous motions until the boy gave up at the pretense of help and stood in the corner, fighting tears.
There was no satisfaction found here, only weariness and an incomprehensible nausea, not enough energy to grunt with more than mild irritation at Bobby. Logan stripped a few doctors of their hypocritical attire and wrapped them over and around the dead mutant on the table. Vague pity, but no particular interest in doing so. This was nothing, after all, but the casing of a bullet that had long been discharged.
There was a scent. A tendril of an aroma that tickled his passages, the petals of a demanding flower. Thin and distinct as a line of thread, cutting through all the space and material that separated Logan from it's source.
A thought, no firmer than smoke. Intuition, that was considerably stronger. Realization, recognition of what should have been obvious.
"Wait here," he told the young team member.
His wobbling lips parted in surprise. "Cyclops said--"
"Gonna make a circuit, see if there's anything we've missed. When I get back I'll bring the corpse to the jet...You can wait here, or you can carry it yourself."
The boy nodded reluctantly, and behind Logan heard the sound of retching, as distance between him and the room grew.
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Can a thing which has only happened twice be called a ritual? Or was what Logan saw only two points of a long pattern? Logan stood at the rim of the main lobby, where a filing cabinet made its home and his shelter, with that skill that comes from long being a student of Stealth's art.
He watched him bring her in. Scott this time, instead of Jean--a ridiculous sort of chivalry in he way he ushered her along. A look on her face, a thinness to her lips that spoke of preparing oneself for an unpreparable pain. A fear in her scent that was no tint or shadow but consumed the whole of her being; showed itself in everything from the glossy wetness in her eyes, to the hesitant placement of each food, to the agitated twists of the gloves she wore. The whole of Logan's body was thrumming with that electric instinct that recognizes something wrong, something dangerous--though rarely had this warning sounded for someone other than himself.
And it didn't matter how little he knew her, how even less he understood of what was going on. It didn't matter that his interference was resented by even the subject of it, that such nosiness was a quality he deplored, would loathe in any other case but this. It didn't matter that he wouldn't have been interested, may even have approved of what was going on if it had been anyone, anyone but her.
Logan held himself still, waited with that goal of overdue explanation as Rogue was led down the basement steps. He listened to the rhythm and tempo to judge their distance, the echo of the sound to estimate the size of the chambers beneath and the likelihood of being seen--and then followed.
The lower level had long surpassed it's destiny as a cramped supply close, though the first walls still bore empty shelves from the days of their innocent use. The place had been expanded, a long corridor carved from the soil. The walls were a dark, glossy metal that reflected him, cold and silent. Narrow, slick, like the interior of a languid snake. Immediately easy to see that the rest of the building, no matter what cruel purposes it was put to--may as well have been a painted mask to this, the true lab. A row of broken cameras in one section, vomiting sparks and stray wires--Jubilee's work, he guessed. Sliding doors that had been broken open, and guards that were holding the guns that had planted the bullets so deep in their skulls--Jean's.
Voices far ahead, and the distant figures of Rogue and Scott, who did not look behind them. An opening that had been forcefully blown into the metal door, into which they disappeared and to which Logan crept. Murmurs, broken snatches of phrases, a light which flickered as bodies passed before it, a wide space and--
A large room, longer than it was wide but crowded with shelves and cabinets, technical devices that Scott would have killed for--and indeed managed to find their way onto the jet for the home journey. Tables laden with computers and all manner of test tubs, microscopes and things he could not name. Empty spaces of things that had already been carried to The Blackbird.
All this he saw in a moment's forward shadow, that special breath of silence before the opening note of a song begins. All of Logan's attention, all of his being, was arrested and held to the little drama that was acting itself out before him.
Eight people were kneeling on the floor, tied and sporting bruises. Some wore lab-coats, others plastic aprons, all expressions of a bottomless fear. Pale, gagged, with rapidly shifting gazes that could not believe such a dreaded nightmare had become corporeal.
It was to and among these that Rogue moved; around these that Scott and Jean stood--offering halfhearted words of encouragement. The rest of the team must have been sent on to the jet with what comprised of their loot. Logan started forward, but froze, shifted back just as quickly in a blurring twitch of muscles. Wait, he thought, surprise and a helpless, regrettable curiosity keeping him in place.
Her back was to him, but her scent was more expressive, more honest than anything her face could show. Quavering fingers pulled away the cloth that covered her right hand. She stepped up to one of the prisoners, an grandfatherly man with eyes that sought mercy in one surely too young, too pretty, too normal-looking to be a mutant. Rogue cupped, cradled the man's cheek with the assurance of the closest of friends. The first moment of this touch saw hope on the prisoner's face, the second confusion, a little fear and an attempt to pull away--and horror when he could not. Terror, and, to Logan's own shock, pain, though that hand could not have been more gentle.
Veins like pulsing, writhing blue worms appeared under his skin. his irises rolled up until only white was visible in the almond-shaped sockets. He gagged, shuddered, and finally, finally toppled over, freed from that magnetic touch not by his own will but by the strength of death. His body sagged against the floor, limp and empty.
The other hostages gave cries of fear--muffled, of course, by the cloth in their mouths. Logan's own alarm mingled with appreciation for the violent work of a fellow artist. If it hadn't been her, hadn't been Rogue, perhaps the latter sentiment may have prevailed. If he could have seen the wet trails sparkling over her cheeks, perhaps only the former would have.
In any case, Rogue had moved on before the corpse's head had struck the tiled floor. She grabbed the throat of the nearest lab employee with deceptively rough efficiency. Bound, he struggled and flailed, but though her grasp was not a particularly strong one he could not seem to break it. Pain came faster for him, those bulging veins that offered the impression that his very soul was pumping out. And when death took it's place as well she let him fall, thrust him from her like the collar of a biting dog.
And the dread that had been stewing in him all night, for many nights, rose within Logan with a scathing steam. While two other mansion residents stood to the side, supervisors on an unappealing chore looking on with barely concealed distaste, those hands that Rogue was leading to the next hostage, the next lab employee, the next victim--those hands were shaking.
"Hows it going, Kid?"
She jerked around as if spun on an invisible dial. Faster still, however, was the icy grasp that descended over his mind, as cloyingly restraining as a drug and the cutting voice of Jean. "Wolverine, get the hell out of here. Leave. Get out! Go board The Blackbird."
It was not a command she could have expected him to heed with anything less than the sum of her telepathic ability. And it was this sum that she focused on him now, a ruthless insistence that was almost as potent as the look in Rogue's eyes. That expression of utmost hurt and shame, that knowledge that your worst side had been seen by the one person you wished to hide it from. Fleeting, and tortured, and agonizingly familiar.
Years of succumbing to no will but his own, Jean's greatly overestimated opinion of her own abilities and that look--god, that look--kept Logan from acquiescing. Scott's imprudent yanks on his arm were even more ineffective--those bearing adamantium skeletons are not easily tugged.
Neither, however, could he step forward. He could not move his arm, could not turn his head, could not move in any way. It was as if cords leashed him from all sides, all irresistible, all unyielding, pulling with all the force of that presence in his mind and--what? What was that tie binding him to Rogue?
Jean was livid, enraged...but underneath, underneath ran a current of shame that the harshness of her voice could not hide. She issued a litany of orders, of threats, of censures both viscous and unimportant because Logan was hardly listening. They died out into a frustrated silence, in which the the pressure on his mind (an intrusion that had always been forbidden and would never be forgotten) never relented. Meanwhile, Rogue had ducked his gaze, dodged it like the sharpest of blows. Some words from Scott--"Go on, continue, Rogue. Ignore him. It's okay."--and she turned back to the hostages. Two had been attempting to crawl away in the absence of their attention and the probable influence Jean had been wielding to keep them in place.
He heard her swallow convulsively, watched little shudders break through the calm she was trying and failing to keep, and fought harder to move, to reach for her. Desperately she pressed her hands--those hands, those pale, pretty, terrifying hands--to another lab worker. They were not deaths that Logan would normally blink at, nothing that could even enter the range of some of his work. But it was not them, never them, for whom was concerned.
It was the fifth hostage--a chubby man who smelled of frightened urine, and blinking in a way that spoke of glasses crushed somewhere in the room--that the shudders lost their randomness. A constant, hard tremor--nervous, fierce as if she'd just been pulled from the iciest of lakes. A cough fought it's way up her throat and was followed by a equally unkind series of its brothers. Any air found between these was a prize in a til-death match. Her hand, when not occupied by its strange and gruesome task, rose to the bridge of her nose as if forcing back what was trying to escape the gates of her mind.
Logan tried to speak, to utter some bridling word, but could not make his lips frame her name. The animal in him thrashed, snapped its jaws--from the corner of his eye he saw Jean flinch.
For what was far from the first time, he wondered what purpose this bizarre method of execution served--when, despite their fine presentation of higher morals any of the others could have done a much more efficient job.
One hostage left, a woman with pretty blond hair and a chubby face. She had forgone the struggles which had offered so little aid to her coworkers. She was curled in a ball, huddled against the forever motionless legs of friend--still warm, of course, because what felt like ages passing in this room had only been a span of minutes. She'd been reduced to the state of so many of the subjects who'd filled the cages above, her gag wet with the tears and snot that ran with equal fervor, issuing pleas that emerged only as cartoonish moans.
Rogue's feet stumbled, stuttered like the missed notes of a poor musician. Her breath was unkind waves striking rock, shallow and rapid. She swayed, stretched her fingers toward the woman and drew it back, brought it to her forehead.
She turned to him, to Logan, and that look was there again. It was almost, almost as compelling as the trickle of blood making it's way from her ear.
And that had force that had been drawing him away snapped, the frailest of strings.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
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I've been struggling to think of a suitable explanation, a suitable apology, for a silence that has stretched for longer than I could ever have imagined...Was very tempted to meekly slip this in, without commenting at all, but that's a bit too cowardly. I have many excuses, a list of what dried up the stream of inspiration when I was able to write, and what prevented me from writing when it was flowing. But I don't deserve to list them, and I can only hope that you have not forgotten this story in the months since it was last updated.
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I've been struggling to think of a suitable explanation, a suitable apology, for a silence that has stretched for longer than I could ever have imagined...Was very tempted to meekly slip this in, without commenting at all, but that's a bit too cowardly. I have many excuses, a list of what dried up the stream of inspiration when I was able to write, and what prevented me from writing when it was flowing. But I don't deserve to list them, and I can only hope that you have not forgotten this story in the months since it was last updated.
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Chapter End Notes:
If you enjoyed the last chapter, I hope you will be kind enough to type a review in that box below. If you didn't, I am sorry--I'm better at writing the kind of Rogue-Logan action that takes place in the bedroom. In either case, thank you for taking the time to read it.