For the rest of the evening, through the night, and late into the next morning, Rogue spent time putting together frames and shelves, and routing large amounts of electricity through heavy protective insulation she had built up from scratch. She worked with an eye for detail, and grim determination. Her little electronic bunker would be protected from all electromagnetic interference short of a nuclear bomb’s EMP, but with all of the out-going wires she arranged, Rogue would have access to every satellite in the sky and every government mainframe on the planet; at least, she would when she had put together her untraceable machines and set up her ghost programs. While her modest laptop and not-so-modest portable servers had her most recent programs and figures and mainframe-structure-maps and dozens of other things, Rogue had always felt that she could have perfected them so much further if she had not been restricted by danger-induced time limits borne from the activities she used her skills for.
Now, she had time, and she planned on creating one Hell of a masterpiece.
But first, she had to put together the machines that would house her creation. She stripped down to her underwear and put on a wristband specially designed to eliminate static electricity. Tools and computer parts collected on the floor before her, she turned on a few lamps and a specialized hanging-magnifying glass that she maneuvered so that it hovered between her face and her more detailed work. She worked with all the precision, delicacy and focus of a surgeon, but the work was all-too-familiar, and she soon fell into a rhythm of movement that allowed her mind to wander freely.
As a younger, less mutant girl, Rogue had often talked to herself, if only in her head as she contemplated complex subjects. Since her mutation had manifested, the practice had been forced to cease for a while, because it was one thing to have an internal dialogue, but quite another thing when the internal dialogue could be interrupted by someone else inside of her head; thus, one of the first things Rogue had been determined to learn about her mutation was a way to clear her mind of other voices so that she could think more clearly. She had found success via her own experimentation with mediation.
Now, alone in her miniature fortress surrounded by the skeletons and organs of machines that were slowly coming into shape under her dexterous fingers, Rogue decided to have a conversation with herself about Logan, because images of him fighting the sentinels had been running through her head far too much of recent.
Outwardly silent, Rogue inwardly mused, “Damn, that man has a fine ass.”
“And chest, and stomach, and-”
“But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
“Of course! Just look at his memories; there’s a lot of naked imagery, plus the sex. Oh, there’s a lot of sex, there.”
“From his perspective. Not that that’s bad, really. Just occasionally disorienting.”
“So is his sex appeal, in general.”
“That’s the problem, though. I don’t get disoriented. Lust can make me feel a lot of things: physical hunger and craving, heat, arousal.”
“But not dizziness.”
“Nope. That’s strictly post-orgasm. Not pre-foreplay. Not even with Remy, and I wanted him pretty bad for a while there. (Blame the uniform because damn!)”
“Then consider quite how amazing it could be to get that from-”
“Stop.”
“Why? You can touch him.”
Rogue tried to pinpoint the source of her unease, and whether it was worth letting it hold her back. She continued the silent conversation, finally answering, “I don’t know what it will do to me to let myself touch him, let myself be touched. I know so much about the experiences of others, and how sex has affected them––emotionally and physically. I’ve had my emotions under control for a while, and through a lot, but that’s because I’ve built up armor and kept myself at a distance. With sex, I won’t be able to do that.”
“Yeah. Armor and distance do get in the way of...release.”
“And with him up here, the distance is already pretty hard. Damn, he’s beautiful.”
“Yes. His mind as much as his body.”
“...I want to go for it.”
Silence greeted her, and Rogue sighed in frustration at the flutter of nervousness still hindering her from a clear decision.
“Am I afraid? Am I a coward?” she asked herself without speaking.
A pause, then: “Are you letting nerves, not logic or reason, prevent you from doing something that you want?”
Rogue’s hands paused in the middle of something complicated involving the placement of a few microchips. She took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly. “Dammit,” she muttered quietly, but kept working.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Just a little update.