Still somewhat shocked by her own audacity, Rogue tried to straighten out her thoughts. She’d gotten the idea to do what she’d done as soon as she spotted him in the control room, at the end of the Danger Room sim. It had been a fleeting thought, of the sort that she was all too used to pushing aside. God, how long had it been since she’d stopped saying ‘no’ to that particular voice in the back of her head? Rogue thought about it, and realized that she had never said anything else to it. Damn, what a thrill.
Definitely gotta start sayin’ ‘yes’ more often.
She was still flushed, still aroused. There was no way that she could just head back to work downstairs. Gotta cool down. Cool down...heh. A smile overtook her as she thought of a way to do it.
Rogue made her way upstairs to her room, removed everything from her pockets, took off her belt, and stepped out the window and into the sky. The wind and the quiet felt like home as she took flight. Maybe Ah’ve been underground too long.
She rose quickly, until human eyes would struggle to see her against the backdrop of stars and clouds. There was peace, up here. No airplanes overhead in this part of the state, as the hub of New York city always seemed to send its planes out on either side of it. Rogue had little doubt that Xavier had seen that as part of the location’s appeal, and had probably been quietly working to keep it that way.
Rogue floated, glided, swooped, slowly getting closer to the low-hanging clouds that obscured her view of the moon. The air was thin, and cold, and the wind surprisingly strong. The lingering traces of sweat on Rogue’s body threatened to turn to ice, but Rogue focused on what little remained of what she had long ago taken from Remy, and was able to keep herself warm. She only ever kept the smallest traces of others’ mutations, when she didn’t kill them, but those traces had their uses––however rarely. Remy’s ability to channel and transform energy had left her with a heightened awareness and control of her own internal energy flow; as a side effect, she could consciously control how much heat her body gave off. Even in the freezing air, she did not shiver, even as she felt the cold. It felt fantastic to be so warm and so cold at the same time.
Rogue purred, which was a trace of Logan’s mutation that promised to linger. It made her smile even as she plunged into the cold cloud, soaking her uniform in water vapor as ice crystals formed along it in spider-web traces. Larger crystals formed like jewels in her hair. She continued to float up, holding her breath and keeping her eyes shut; past experience had taught her that floating particles of ice and dust landing in wide-open eyes stung like a bitch, and that inhaling cloud vapor lead to coughing fits.
When she felt herself emerge through a break in the cloud, her eyes opened and she hovered carefully in place, moving with the cloud, which still clung about her calves and ankles where she had emerged. It was a full moon, and the cloudscape around her glowed with it. As a child, when she’d first flown in an airplane and seen the fantasy-place of the clouds from the round window, she had wanted to walk through it and climb it and taste it.
Rogue smiled now, her mind as quiet as the night air around her, her eyes drinking in a childhood dream come true. Remy had never understood, the day he asked her whether she regretted being a mutant. Even before she could fly, she had not, and he could not see why.
That should have been her first clue.
Rogue found it very reassuring that Logan had never asked.
She bit her lip, smiling through it with a pure and light kind of happiness. Her facial expressions were much more animated when she flew; she couldn’t help it. She could feel happy up here as she almost never did on the ground.
Rogue let herself drift over the cloudscape, through the arches and amongst the spires of it. Her mind was always clearest up here. She licked her lips, the taste of Logan still on her tongue mingling with the taste of cloud-vapor. It was good. At some point, Rogue thought with a smile, she would have to take him flying.
After an hour or so in the clouds she returned to earth, and slipped out of her uniform. Her dry, day-to-day clothes felt warm and comfortable.
She stepped out of her room and shut the door, lingering thoughtfully in the hallway for a moment as she looked at the door to Logan’s room. He was in there, she knew. It would be so easy to join him. Rogue’s lips parted as she gave a silent sigh, and made her way in the opposite direction down the hall, to the elevators. She returned to her bunker, and continued working late into the night, spreading seeds of change across the most fertile and tactically advantageous lands in cyberspace. Soon they would be picked up by the inhabitants of those virtual lands, and enough of them would explode into life and into bloom, that even if only a tenth of her seeds took root, they would in turn re-seed and spread far and wide, filling up the lands Rogue had marked with them. By noon tomorrow, she expected them to overflow into other lands, as well, and begin growing there, too.
The seeds that Rogue spread were memes: contagious pieces of thought that stuck in people’s minds, growing on their closest held beliefs about what it meant to be good people.
It had all started with the first, most powerful seeds: the videos of Stryker’s victims, and the raw emotional power of the images. Then she worked more subtly, influencing the language used to discuss Stryker and his deeds, and quietly making more information available in the most untraceable places, the dark depths where people collected horrors, and where other people made admirable efforts learn from the past horrors in order to stop some in the process of happening and prevent others from ever being repeated. Agents of law swam through looking for crimes. Agents of truth were less common, but they had a much more interesting effect: they brought horrors into the light.
Rogue only needed one or two of these journalists. They did not even need to be respectable or famous; they had only needed to find what she had left for them.
It had taken less than a day. Then Rogue had only to spread the word in her quiet way: posting links, luring others into the depths looking for more.
The wildfire had spread from there, and Rogue had merely guided it now and then, to places it would find the best fuel and light up the places that she most needed lit.
She had photos and footage, which the television media had been thusfar too scared to touch, that depicted the damage and horrors committed by Sentinels in the countries that had not been able to stop them. Many, especially in Britain, had been taken by security cameras. The images depicted children being hunted down by metal monsters, and the homes and lives of innocent non-mutants torn apart purely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rogue enhanced them, and set them loose. Like an invisible divine hand, she guided their progress late into the morning. She was faintly aware of someone approaching the door to her bunker, but did not look up, even when the figure on the screen in her peripheral vision, video fed from her security camera, did not leave when his code failed.
When her door swung open with only the softest whisper, Rogue still did not look up.
“Hello, Remy,” she greeted.
Remy leaned against the doorframe to watch her for a few moments, then stepped in and shut the door behind him. “Up to mischief, chere?”
“Always,” she countered. It was easy banter, and had been repeated between them at least once on every mission they had gone on for Fenris. “What’s on ya mind?”
He strode up to her chair and leaned against a nearby cabinet. He waited until she turned to meet his gaze, before he spoke. “You, chere. An’ how much a’ thief I am, to de bone.”
“With a thief’s pride,” Rogue warned quietly, her voice edged with something dark that lingered in her eyes.
Remy sighed, running a hand through his red-brown hair. “I learnt long ago ya can’t be stole, Rogue. Don’t stop me wishin’.”
“Then you should stop yourself, Remy. Waste your time on wishes, and you won’t see what’s right in front of you, and that’s dangerous for a thief, if only for the possibility of having missed an opportunity.”
Remy’s eyebrows raised. “Quoi? Co faire?”
Rogue smiled just a little, and shook her head. “Ah have eyes an’ ears, Sugah. Don’t tell me yours are malfunctionin’.” She paused to look at him and, seeing that he was clueless, suggested, “Who was it you were really buttin’ heads with, when you first got here? One of the girls just seemed to really hate you, right?”
Remy’s brow furrowed now. “Well, I did kinda almos’ blow up de junior team. None o’ dem like me much at firs’, ‘xcept Jube-Jube. She a street rat, she understood.”
Rogue smirked at that. “The street rat speaks fluent swamp rat. Ah’m not surprised. But she ain’t the one half in love with you.”
That made him hesitate, leaning more of his weight on the cabinet, and on one hand that he rested on the edge of Rogue’s desk to lean a little closer. “Have I been dat out of it?”
“Only since Ah got here, but somethin’ tells me this is new t’ her. It’s a recent change, and she’s still uneasy with it.”
Remy looked away, rubbing his chin thoughtfully for several moments, only half aware of Rogue once more tapping at her keyboard, her eyes glued to her main computer screen. After nearly a minute, he finally seemed to get it, his eyes growing suddenly wide. He said something in French under his breath that sounded heavy with shock and disbelief.
“When did she stop hating you?” Rogue asked quietly.
“I got hurt.”
“Being protective and noble while doing it, I’m guessing?” Rogue’s own unique experiences with the human psyche had given her a good sense for people’s characters, and the patterns of romantic entanglements to which they were prone.
“Oui.” Remy swallowed. “We still argue, but it started bein’ more like a game, den. Me, her an’ Jube-Jube make a good team. We all seen t’ings an’ lived in dark places.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Merde. When did she change?”
Rogue was smiling now. “Sometime ‘fore Ah got here. Somethin’ started it.”
Remy suddenly looked disturbed. “Oh no.”
That earned him an amused and curious look. “Oh, I know that voice, Sugah. Ah’ve heard that once before, shortly after ya’d gotten drunk enough not to remember half a what ya’d done. Whatever happened to those Egyptian artifacts you had in your coat?”
“Oh, mon Dieu. She tol’ me I didn’ do anything but pass out sometime after tryin’ to do card tricks drunk-”
“Ah though the puttied-over spots there had a familiar shrapnel-pattern,” Rogue mused.
“Merde, what did I do?” He sounded sincerely unnerved.
“Afraid you led her on?” Rogue asked innocently.
Remy opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand, cursing under his breath. “No, no dat not my worry, damn you.”
Rogue smirked, seeing that he had abruptly gotten over his fixation on her, in favor of a more compliant target.
After cursing for a bit longer, Remy seemed to regain his composure. He gave one last ragged sigh and asked, “You comin’ up for breakfast?”
Rogue’s fingers tapped out a final, decisive clatter across her keyboard, and half of her screens went black. She pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “Ah suppose that might be a good idea.” Her smirk faded when he raised a hand to cup her cheek.
Remy smiled faintly. “If de hairy man give you any trouble, call me an’ I’ll make ‘is skeleton combust.
“Remy,” Rogue sighed, sounding disappointed, and only just restraining herself from rolling her eyes.
“Ah, chere, jus’ lemme say it. I know ya can tear de world an’ him apart, but I gotta tell ya I got your back somehow.” He dropped his hand away and crossed his arms over his chest, shaking his head.
Rogue blinked twice, then smiled in a half-puzzled fashion and shook her head. “Thanks Remy. Ah appreciate it. And Ah’m sorry about the injury to your tail. Ah’ll try t’ be more careful with the rockin’ chair.”
Remy gave a surprised laugh, and followed her to the door. When she opened it for him, he leaned in and said softly in her ear, “I knew about your neck de whole time.” Then he sauntered past.
Rogue stilled for a moment, shocked, then smirked faintly, and followed him, shaking her head. “She’ll be damned lucky to steal your heart, ya know that right?”
“Was it luck you had, chere?” Remy mocked, raising his eyebrows at her as they approached the elevator.
Rogue thought about it. “Alright. Fine. She gets major points for tyin’ you in knots without even sayin’ anything. Ah at least flirted openly. She’s pretty subtle in this respect.”
“Oui.” The elevator dinged, and the doors swished open. He let her step in first. “Now, Logan, that homme has de luck.”
“No more than you, Remy. Ah didn’ even see him in uniform at first, there, so he didn’ have that advantage like you did.”
Remy shook his head. “Y’ cruel to me, chere.”
“You wound my pride, Ah wound yers.”
“I t’ink it was you who started it. Certainly looked like it in de kitchen dat night.”
“Yeah.” She smirked a little. “Maybe so. But if ya hadn’t been so easily distracted by me, you coulda made your move first. Not my fault, there.”
Remy sighed heavily. “All I gotta do t’ check my ego be to talk to you, Rogue.”
“It’s secretly my purpose in life. Along with bein’ generally mysterious an’ snarky.”
“An’ seducin’ de Wolverine.”
“You seduce, Remy. This is a different kinda game. It ain’t really about pursuit.”
“Non? What it be about, den?”
Rogue just smiled wickedly, and said nothing. The elevator doors opened, revealing a surprised-looking Wolverine, who had apparently been about to press the ‘down’ button. “Hey, Logan,” Rogue greeted, her smile still present.
Logan looked from Rogue, to Remy, back and forth.
Remy waved slightly, and slid past Logan to head down the hall. “Be seein’ you, non? I got somebody I need to talk to.”
“Best of luck with her,” Rogue called.
Logan’s eyebrows raised as he watched the Cajun leave. “What was that about?”
“What’d Jean wanna talk ta ya about?” Rogue countered, and shrugged idly. “Although he’s more bruised than worried. Ah just pointed out somethin’ he hadn’t noticed.”
“Siryn?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s about time,” Logan huffed, but he smirked when Rogue grabbed his wrist, tugging him away.
“It’s also about time Ah got fed, Sugah, come on.”
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