That morning, the
morning the military had attacked, she'd been looking for him, unable to find
him anywhere. She'd been down to the
boathouse, angry that he'd run away from her when every day since he'd first
arrived in their midst he'd been following her around like some single-minded
shadow. She'd been walking back up to
the mansion in the summer heat with Rachel at her side, complaining for the
umpteenth time about the whole sorry state of affairs.
“He doesn’t get it,
Rae,” she'd murmured quietly. “He wants me to touch him. He doesn’t get that if Ah do it, there's no
turnin' back. Ah won't be able to undo
it. Ah'll know everythin' about him,
inside out, every memory, every thought, every secret, every fetish. And he doesn’t give a shit.”
“And is that what you argued about?” Rachel had
asked, eyebrows raised
“A kiss for a
lifetime of secrets,” she had whispered sadly, toying absently with the pendant
about her neck. “Is that the way you'd want to get to know someone you care
about? By rippin' out the mystery of him?”
The mystery of
him. A puzzle to be solved no more. The breath of a touch would have been all it
would have taken and now it was too late.
A smile, a glance,
the whisper of a kiss.
So many promises
gone unfulfilled, so many chances lost.
Her memories were
traitors, every one - they could never bring him back.
* * * * *
She stayed in bed
for a long time. It wasn’t so much
despair as it was rebellion; a rebellion against everything Raven had told her,
against the world that still moved on outside the four walls of her bedroom.
Lying there in that
bed, she could pretend the world didn’t exist, that this room and her bed was a
little pocket universe all on its own that bore no relation to what was going
on outside. Because she still couldn’t
believe what Raven had told her; she couldn’t believe that the world was now
her enemy in every sense of the word, that the shackles she wore were not
merely the shackles of her own mutant ability, but the shackles of slavery
itself. And she couldn’t believe that
the X-Men were dead. That she was the
only survivor, the only survivor within mere inches.
She lay in bed,
awake, for many days. She tried not to
sleep because sleep invited nightmares, nightmares of her friends, her comrades
being massacred, of her mentor, her teacher, the only father she had, being
ripped to shreds, whilst she was paralysed and powerless to stop it.
Xavier was
dead. It hardly seemed credible. Because not only had the man died, so too had
his dream - the dream to awaken the world.
The death of his dream had killed something in her, leaving an empty,
hollow space that burned angrily every waking hour she possessed, burned so
intolerably that some nights she couldn’t even endure being inside her own
body, that she would have torn herself apart if only to free herself from the
anguish inside her.
And then there were
other nights where she would dream of him,
of his hands on her in an exquisitely gentle caress, of his lips on hers, lips
she had never tasted, that she never would because he was dead too. She would wake up bathed in sweat and tears,
sobbing into her pillow for something that had been robbed from her before she
had even had the chance to possess it.
Because that day, the
day they had killed him, she had been going to end it with him, she had been
prepared to walk away from him when he was the only thing she'd ever wanted
more than the chance to touch another person, and now she could never have him,
not ever.
The humans had
taken him away from her. They had taken
away her dreams, every single one of them, leaving her with this gaping hole
inside her, a hole that ached like the loss of a limb, of an organ, of her
heart. There were no more ideologies to
cling to. There were no more legacies to
inherit. There wasn’t even the heart of
a thief left to steal. No one to
embrace, no one to say 'I love you' to, even if she could ever learn to love.
There was nothing.
Nothing but the
wound inside her, bleeding and burning, twisting and turning like a hot knife
in her breast, causing her agony beyond imagining.
There were not
enough tears in the world for her to cry.
And then, quite
inexplicably, there came a day when she found she had cried them all. When she woke up to find the fire gone and
the blood run dry. No more knife, no
more agony, no more anything. One night
she slept to dreams of torture and decay, and the next morning she woke to find
herself dead.
Dead man walking.
It had a whole new
meaning now.
She was hollow
inside, as if the night had invaded her while she slept and stolen all her
insides. She sat up in bed, and there
was no pain. There were no tears. There was only this odd, cold spot inside
her, no more than a pinprick deep inside her breast, one that nevertheless
churned with all the force of a black hole, a vortex sucking her dry.
At first she had no
name to call this cold spot inside her, for it wasn’t anything so strong or
violent as grief, or hate, or rebellion, or revenge. It lay there inside her, quiet and
unimposing, resting on her heart like a blot or a stain.
It would take her
very many months to recognise it, and when she did, there was only one name fit
for it.
Death.
A little death
inside her, eating away at her day in, day out.
It didn’t matter
what she did now, because she had nothing left.
Her life was worthless, just like millions of other mutant lives were
now worthless - but for her there was one crucial difference. She was alone. She'd never felt more acutely alone in all
her life.
It was on that day
that she finally got out of bed, only to find that it wasn’t so hard at
all. She rearranged the comforter,
pulled open the curtains, and looked outside.
It had once been a dirty, residential street in the ghettos of Mutant Town,
now populated only by the skeletons of buildings, tall rows of houses that had
been reduced to nothing more than the bare bones of bricks and mortar. Roofs had been ripped off like the lids of
tin cans; walls had been knocked down wholesale, filling the roads with rubble,
dust and smoke. It looked like a war
zone. There was not a soul in sight.
She turned away
from the window, finding no emotion in her as she had gazed at the pitiful
view.
For the first time
in weeks she left the bedroom that had confined her, stepping out onto the
landing and descending the stairs with a kind of detached curiosity. The house had been gutted at some point,
either by squatters or looters; everything was nondescript, characterised only
by dull, cracked walls that had all faded to the same shade of grey, by cobwebs
lingering in the corners, by the cockroaches that festered and scuttled against
the skirting, giving the house its only sense of inhabitation.
She opened doors,
closed them, peered inside rooms that had no meaning, no significance except to
those that had once occupied them, mutants who may be eking out a hollow
existence elsewhere, or otherwise dead.
There were no
ghosts in this house for her.
She finally found
Raven sitting in what once must have been the study, perusing an old, worn,
leather-bound book with the ravenous look of a vulture scrutinising its prey.
As soon as Rogue
saw that book she should have known it would have been easier to walk
away. Instead it instilled a sense of
purpose within the gap that now engulfed her empty heart.
“Ah'm ready,” was
all she said.
*
For a period of
some months after this, all her nightmares stopped. The days were an endless void within which
she relearned the entirety of herself.
It was only later that the nightmares came back to her, when nightmares
had ceased being mere figments of imagination and had become reality.
Then again, Irene
would have told her dreams are not figments of imagination, but portents of
that which is to come.
Mystique had less
time for such frivolities, and even less time for riddles. She didn’t make philosophy, she was
philosophy. For everything Xavier had
taught Rogue, she had a counter. With
Xavier's death, it seemed that Raven's path had become clearer. There had been many times in the past where
Rogue had seen the fervent fanaticism of her foster-mother - in her movements,
in her gestures, in her eyes. But now
that the times had changed, now that Raven's cause had become more clear-cut
than ever, these traits had become more inscribed into her character. It was almost as if Mystique now felt
vindicated in walking the path she'd chosen for herself, and it was a collusion
she tried to draw Rogue into. To her,
Rogue's path could not be more distinct.
Her friends, her comrades and her mentor were all dead at the hands of
the human aggressors, and instinct dictated a natural desire for
vengeance. Rogue, Mystique said, had a
duty to those of her kind that had fallen, a duty that demanded revenge of some
sort. Thus Mystique had guaranteed Rogue
a place in the Brotherhood, this ragtag band of mutant outlaws, part of a
larger underground network of terrorists whose ultimate mission was to
eliminate the rule of the 'statics', which in revolutionary nomenclature
referred to the baseline humans – the villains, the oppressors, the tyrants.
But Rogue felt no
true thirst for revenge. It was not that
she didn’t resent what the statics had done to the X-Men. It was not that she didn’t mourn the loss of
the only family she had, or that she did not believe that the murders of her
friends and comrades should be brought to justice. She harboured all these thoughts and
emotions, but felt quite unable to act upon them. It was as though, the moment she had woken
from her coma, she had woken into a body hewn of stone, one that could not feel
and whose heart had been numbed. She
bore no hope; but her despair was not of an all-consuming kind. Rather, it was a dull and lingering ache that
petered listlessly on throughout all of Mystique’s subsequent training. Soon she was to become just another soldier
in the war against the Sentinels, the statics, and the Hounds.
Rogue allowed
herself to be transformed because she could see no other prospect for
herself. If she were to leave the
Brotherhood, what was she to do? Be
forced to live underground with the other remaining mutants? Live in abject poverty, be imprisoned,
maimed, killed or tortured? She was
after all an ex-X-Man. On the outside she
was as good as dead anyway. The
Brotherhood was a dysfunctional family that she had left long ago for the very
reason that it had no longer held anything for her. But it was the only family she had left; it
was the only thing that could give her a purpose in life, because she could
never be anything else but someone else's warrior in their own ideological
war. She had no other qualification, no
other craft.
She was a fighter,
and she was going to carry on fighting to the death.
*
It was strange, how
dreams and memories suddenly became interchangeable.
She wasn’t sure how
it happened, but every day her past life seemed to become less and less real,
and whilst her future was certainly dead, her past seemed to have melted,
collapsed in on itself, and become a landscape as alien to her as that of a
Dali painting.
There were no more
certainties in this world of hers, no more truths, no more absolutes. Nevertheless she went back to the mansion,
once. Much of what remained of it had
been scavenged since its destruction, but there were other artefacts that had
been left to rot in the rubble and the dust - Xavier's books and papers, the
odd photograph or memento; scraps of clothing too mangled to be of any use,
bills and notes and letters that would have no meaning to anyone but their
owners.
She spent a long
time walking amongst the torn shell of the place she had called home for those
few short years, feeling nothing but an extraordinary detachment that was
punctuated only by the faint taste of bitterness in her mouth. For the first time since she had awoken to
her new life, it finally dawned upon her, with a sharp and unforgiving clarity,
that what had happened really had
happened; that Xavier's haven really had been destroyed, along with
everyone in it - save for her. Although
the world had inexorably changed, a part of her had always denied it, until
that very moment when she stood amongst the ruins of the old world with the
wind in her hair and on her cheeks, with her heart in her mouth. A part of her had always expected to return
here and find that nothing had changed, that the old world was still intact and
that these past few months of her life had been nothing more than a bad dream.
But the evidence
was irrefutable - the mansion was dead, its dreams were dead, and the people
within it… they too were dead.
Save for one, and
that was her.
She wandered
aimlessly through the husk of the building, stopping now and then to pick up
and examine some lost fragment or household item that still remained amongst
the debris. A spoon, a broken watch, a
pair of shattered glasses - Hank's, he'd always worn them in the lab. A crusty notepad with its contents eroded by
the elements; an earring in the shape of a red star nestled, forgotten, in a
broken corner.
Rogue bent over,
picked it up. She remembered. Red hair and fierce green eyes; the plucky,
freckled face of a young girl, the stubborn, down-turned mouth. This earring had once belonged to Rachel
Summers, had been given to her by her mother on her (ninth?) birthday. Only a few
months later, Jean Grey-Summers had been murdered at the hands of the mutant
known as Mastermind. He'd detonated a
nuclear bomb in Pittsburgh; after that the world had descended into a whirlwind
of oddly ordered chaos. Senator Robert Kelly had been mysteriously murdered;
anti-mutant legislation had been pushed through post-haste, and Bolivar
Trask's Sentinel program had been given the official green light. Within a matter of years, this mansion and
the X-Men had followed Jean to the grave.
Rachel, heart-broken, insular and
inscrutable in all the time that Rogue had known her, had returned to her
mother's arms at last.
Rogue half
considered taking the earring with her, but without any conscious reason she
decided against it and dropped it back to the ground. It rolled lazily across the once-polished
parquet floor before coming to a poignant standstill. Rogue stood.
This had once been the ballroom, a wide, open space adorned with diamond
chandeliers and grand sash windows. She
had a sudden memory of lights and tinsel and foil, in various coruscating
colours; of port and champagne and turkey and punch, of laughing faces and
chatter, of music and the scent of mingled perfume and tobacco.
She shivered and
planted her gloved hands firmly inside the pockets of her jacket.
Remy…
Christmas. It had been Christmas.
She must have known
him for about four or five months at the time.
He'd always skulked around the sidelines during any group activity, that
perpetual, cocky little smirk on his lips, as if he found their togetherness
quaint and amusing. It had always
irritated her. He was a lonewolf,
through and through – it had always made her wonder why he should have joined
the X-Men at all. Some of the others had
resented his unwillingness to open up to the rest of the team, but it had also
leant him an aura of mystique she'd always found irresistible.
Even back then
she'd always been able to feel when his eyes were on her. He'd been doing it that day from across the
length of the ballroom, making her skin prickle and her cheeks flush, until she
could stand it no longer. She'd always
suspected that he enjoyed doing that to her, drawing her to him with just a
glance.
He'd been standing
by one of the sash windows, the night looming behind him, as if to reel him
back in. He had been leaning against the
windowframe, smoking, as he always seemed to, with that small, self-absorbed
smile on his face and those dark, hypnotic eyes on her, always on her.
“If yah ain't
enjoyin' yourself, sugah,” she'd admonished him playfully, “then why don’t you
spend the holidays with your folks back home?”
He'd smiled, easy,
suggestive.
“I prefer de view
here.” Always suave, always gallant, always completely the cad. She'd half frowned, half smirked.
“Seriously. Ain't there any loved ones back home yah can visit?”
His smile had
drooped slightly, his eyes had dulled.
“Not anymore,” he’d
said.
She'd liked that
about him. The mystery, the enigma. He was like the dark side of the moon to her,
partially shadowed, partially hidden. She’d
touched his arm with a gloved hand, even though such an action was always taken
as an opening to flirtation between them.
“Then why don’t yah
come and join the rest of us?” she'd asked earnestly. “Storm's been askin' for
yah…”
“No t'anks,” he'd
replied smoothly, reaching out and absently picking a bit of silly string out
of her hair. “I can't stand dese family affairs. Too cute and gooey for de likes of me. I'm fine right here. As long as you're gonna stay here too,
chere.”
She'd raised a
heated eyebrow, never knowing whether to be annoyed or amused at his bravado…
“Remy, it's
Christmas. Yah have to get into the spirit of things…”
A small, slow grin
had crossed his face.
“Well, since you
put it dat way… I guess you're
right. How about we go over dere and
make out under de mistletoe? You could
show me what exactly makes de Rogue's kiss so dynamite.”
Her cheeks had
coloured violently - from embarrassment, from anger and perhaps a little from
desire, because if she'd been any other girl she wouldn’t have said no…
“Remy, yah know Ah
can't --”
“Yes, you can. I seen you kiss men before. Complete and utter strangers at dat. Dey get so excited dey be keelin' over. And dis Cajun can get awful jealous,
chere. He ain't gonna rest till he knows
what all de big fuss is about.”
It had been anger,
not embarrassment. Anger making her
flush, making her reply bitterly: “Don’t joke about it. If Ah kiss yah, Ah steal a little bit of you. Your memories become mine. Ah might even hurt yah.”
He'd looked away,
shrugged.
“Maybe I wouldn’t
mind so much,” he answered baldly. “Maybe I want someone t' understand me. Maybe I want someone to know all my innermost
secrets. And if I can get a kiss from
you thrown into de bargain, maybe it'd all be worth it.” He'd looked back at
her, his gaze intent, lustful, and all in a moment her anger had dissipated,
replaced with the helplessness of want and desire. “Am I bein' selfish yet,
chere?” he'd drawled.
What had struck her
was the fact that, if she'd been braver, if she'd been more foolhardy, she
would have done it. Because she'd wanted
to reach out into him, she'd wanted to know all his secrets, she'd wanted to
understand who and what he really was.
She had been selfish too, back then.
And yet a part of her had balked at the thought. Despite the many times he would tempt her
with romance and kisses afterward, she had never been able to go through with
it.
“You're crazy,”
she'd muttered at last.
“Chere,” he'd
assured her lazily, pressing the cigarette to his lips, “bein' around a femme
as fine as you is enough to drive a man crazy.
Bein' unable to touch her is enough to drive him certifiably insane.”
What he'd never
known was that she'd felt the same way about him. Being around him, with all the cute repartee,
with all the flirtation - hadn't he ever once thought that it had driven her
crazy too?
To want someone so
badly that you dreamt about them at night, and to live knowing that if you ever
reached out to touch them you could kill them?
Still, there were
days now that she wished that she'd reached out and kissed him that night.
At least then she
would have got to know him, before she'd lost him forever.
Rogue sighed,
looking up to concrete grey skies, letting the breeze touch her pale
cheeks. There was not even a building
left to contain these memories; all she had was locked inside her own being,
and more often than not they were memories she no longer wished to touch. It was better that the ruins of this place be
left to the elements - there could be no memorial, except within her. She was an unworthy successor to the past and
all that it stood for.
And that made her
as alone and frightened as she had been the first moment she had stepped inside
this mansion some four or five years before.
“It's time we
went.”
She turned
slightly. Mystique was standing a little
way behind her, her raven locks rippling silkily in the wind. She'd afforded her foster-daughter enough
time to mourn - for Mystique, there was little left to mourn in this world but
a dead son and the inescapable passages of time. But Rogue wasn’t quite ready to leave just
yet. She turned back and looked down the
slope, to the lake glistening clear and untouched as it always had been, to the
familiar old cedar tree that she'd sought refuge under so many times before.
She absently
clutched the pendant about her neck with a gloved hand.
“Just a moment
longer,” she murmured.
“A moment longer
and you won't be able to leave,” Raven noted quietly.
True…
She sighed and
turned again. Raven was still standing
in the same place, an expectant look on her grim and somewhat forbidding
face. Neither of them found any pleasure
in returning to this place, although for entirely different reasons.
“You were right,
momma,” Rogue murmured softly, the words whipped from her mouth on a sudden
breeze. “It is gone.”
“And you doubted
me?” Raven asked, a black eyebrow raised.
Rogue glanced away. Amongst the
dust and the rubble, the red star earring glittered in the faltering sunlight.
“Maybe. A little.” She paused, looked back at the
implacable face before her. “It's strange.
Ah feel… nothin'.”
“Or maybe you don’t
have a name for what it is you're feeling,” Mystique pointed out shrewdly, her
eyes eagle-like. Rogue lowered her
eyelids, tucked an unruly lock of white hair back behind her ear. “Maybe…”
Raven watched her. “Those
you loved are gone,” she spoke at last. “There's little use in pining.” She too
slipped her hands into her pockets,
closed her eyes momentarily, and when she opened them again they were staring
off into the distance. “What you experienced here, Rogue, was merely a short
period of respite in your life. One, I
might venture to add, that did very little for you. You came with the expectation that Xavier
would be able to cure you of your 'abnormality'. Five years later and you're still no closer.”
“Still no closer to
being able to touch…” Rogue agreed under her breath. She looked up again to find Raven's eyes back
on her.
“What held you
back, Rogue?” Raven asked, and this time there was a real earnestness in her
voice. “I always thought that if I
could not help you to control your abilities, then at least the good professor
would be able to. And yet he too
failed. Why?”
Sometimes Ah think that if Ah ever let you
get close t' me… Ah'd kill you.
“Ah guess Ah just
got scared that Ah might hurt the people Ah cared about,” Rogue half-whispered.
“Like what happened with Cody…” She trailed off.
Maybe I want someone to know all my
innermost secrets…
“That damned boy,”
Raven muttered heartlessly. “He ruined you, Rogue, ruined everything your power
could have helped you to be. Still, at least he served his purpose. He brought you to us - even if you didn’t
stay very long.”
“Five years is a
long time,” Rogue observed. Raven's
smile was sardonic.
“Evidently not long
enough.”
Rogue did not
smile. She looked away again, to the
lake, to the cedar tree, to the things that would not decay however many petty
wars were fought and lost.
“What is it?”
Mystique asked softly.
“Ah'm just thinkin'
that there's no one left to care for now.
That maybe Ah don’t need to be scared anymore.” She looked back over her
shoulder; Raven's eyes were once more silent, watchful. “Ah'm thinkin' that
maybe Ah'm ready now - really ready.”
Those timeless grey
eyes glittered, with pride, with triumph; but Rogue looked away, back to the
tree, feeling nothing.
“Maybe you could
teach me now, momma. Maybe you could
teach me to touch.”
*
Go to Chapter 2
: Go to Chapter 4