thatcraftykid
“Change is the law of life.
And those who look only to the past or present
are certain to miss the future.”
– John F. Kennedy –
Part One
“Honest Development”
“Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth.
To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere
and honest development of one’s potential.”
– Bruce Lee –
~ “Strength to Endure” ~
It’s human nature to take certain things for granted. It’s a fact of life that, most of the time, we don’t notice how lucky we are to have the things that we do until we don’t have them anymore. Part of growing up is learning to take the time to look around and just be grateful, even when it seems like there’s more in life to be angry about than anything else. “It’s not fair.” I’ve whined that phrase hundreds of times, only to get the same answer: “Life’s not fair.” Well, fairness is subjective. Anytime something seems unfair to one person, there’s someone else in the world who sees it as perfectly fair.
As long as I can remember, the leading party in America has been the conservatives. Coming from a Southern background, I never questioned that. Now that I find myself on the opposite team, well, you can imagine that my bumper sticker doesn’t read, “Proud Member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.” From my point of view, popular conservative opinion is unjust and discriminatory toward mutants. The conservatives, of course, don’t see it that way. Therein lays the conflict. They are our enemy. Not in the same way that the Brotherhood is our enemy, but our enemy nonetheless. We fight them with words and through peaceful example. We protect them from ourselves.
There is a political beast in some ways worse than the conservatives, however, and they are the fence-sitters from both parties. President McKenna, as much as I admire him for fending off his own bloodthirsty constituents for so many years, was a fence-sitter. He adopted that position after that first meeting with Professor Xavier and stuck with it for the rest of his first term and throughout most of his second. Under President McKenna, we were forced to play a tense waiting game on a field of shaky equilibrium. Many mutant lives were lost in those six years, a lot of them ardent yet weary supporters of a man who wouldn’t, for fear of political backlash, publicly admit that they were human beings – good ones at that. All of those losses were hard, but none more so than the first. Dr. Grey’s death affected us all, and I was no exception. Her death forced me to take the first steps away from self-indulgent teenager and toward eventual adulthood.
I didn’t know Dr. Grey apart from what she was to me: teacher, X-Man, and the woman Logan loved. When she was alive, I didn’t realize that what she was was only a limited reflection of who she was. It didn’t occur to me to care until after she died. That might sound awful, but it wasn’t like I expected her to have any kind of a vested interest in me, either. I was her student, the girl she helped save from Magneto, and Logan’s stray. I didn’t think it would have surprised her to know that there was more to me than that, but it didn’t matter. It’s a lesson everyone has to learn. No one person is center of the universe.
The thing is, even knowing that, when I saw Logan kissing her the night before she died, I took it as a personal insult. I hated her. But it was a superficial hate that didn’t hold under the weight of my self-pity. I knew that kiss had nothing to do with me. That was probably why it hurt so much. If it had been about me, it would have fed my ego more than my jealousy. As it was, all I could muster were hurt feelings. Logan was the absolute number one in my life; I could only guess where I ranked in his. And I did guess, often. Every second he wasn’t paying attention to me I unconsciously pushed myself lower and lower in his estimation. It was a masochistic game I played with my emotions, but I was young then. And, to my credit, I grew up quickly after that.
Even back then, I was an incredibly introspective person – a byproduct of never needing too many friends as a child and of surviving on my own for four and half months with only a faraway sense of exploration and curiosity to keep me going.
I tended to think a lot about things, Dr. Grey’s death especially. Perhaps it was morbid, but her death fascinated and humbled me all at the same time. For one thing, she saved my life. Well, she saved everyone’s life, including mine. I couldn’t begrudge her after that. For another, her sacrifice was an entirely selfless act and, having been so self-involved for so long, that remarkable fact stuck with me. I began to admire selflessness, and later I aspired to it. It was a brave thing to do, too. It must have hurt like hell – both the force of the water crashing down on her and the leaving behind of the world and everyone she loved in it. Even so, she sounded astonishingly calm when she communicated through Professor Xavier. She made a choice that she honestly believed was right, and she stuck with it. Can’t ask a person to do more than that.
Her power, though, was the fascinating part. The absolute strength of it. She was everything for one moment. It felt like she controlled the world. Then she was gone. It was so shockingly abrupt that I couldn’t believe it. I was torn between Logan’s stunned acceptance and Cyclops’s desperate denial. Kurt’s simple prayer moved me. I’d forgotten how comforting it was to know, without a doubt, that death was not the end. I prayed with him, silently, trying to will back tears of my own so as not to infringe on anyone else’s pain. Before, I might have been resentful that it was her death that had moved the unshakable Wolverine to tears. I wasn’t.
Like I said, I grew up fast.
Maybe Professor Xavier sensed that from me and that’s why my on-order uniform arrived much earlier than expected. Then again, Bobby’s did too.
So maybe it was just a matter of us being there and looking like part of the team – a united front to present to President McKenna. Or it could have been a reward for keeping the cause when we might have been swayed by Magneto’s cruel logic the way John had been. If that was the case, he needn’t have worried about me. After the Statue of Liberty, a little of Magneto had lingered around the edges of my mind for a while, all grand intentions and misguided morals. To a certain extent, I was sympathetic, but I didn’t confuse sympathy with agreement. A forced martyr is not a martyr at all. If I was going to die for a cause, it wasn’t going to be Magneto’s. My loyalty was to Professor Xavier’s principle of peaceful coexistence, however impractical and idealistic.
For me, it wasn’t only an honor to be a part of the team; it was also a point of pride to hold the title of youngest X-Man ever recruited. I beat Bobby by two weeks and two days. He didn’t mind, but I still liked to tease him about it on occasion. Yes, I did still tease people despite all my talk of premature adulthood and emotional maturity. Humor is one of the best defenses anyone can have in this world. It’s necessary for balance and escape. The only other defense that can top humor is love.
It’s funny, I named myself Rogue in a burst of cockiness at being a badass pickpocket and runaway, yet I know I craved love more then than I ever did as plain old Mississippi-born-and-bred Anna Marie D’Ancanto. I had it easy there. My mom and dad were good to me and the kids at school were nice enough, though I never really felt the need to socialize all that much. I liked a few close friends who didn’t mind that I was a dreamer. David hadn’t minded. He listened to me talk endlessly about the adventures I was going to have, always with an air of indulgence. That afternoon in my room, I’d toyed with the idea of inviting him to come with me to Alaska. I ultimately settled for kissing him first.
For the longest time, I fixated and agonized over that decision. The three weeks I spent lying in my bed, staring up at my ceiling and thinking about David comatose in the hospital, I prayed that God would make it so the kiss had never happened. I guess I thought that if I could take back that one moment that I could take back everything, especially my mutation. It didn’t work. I held a grudge for as long as my life was shit, then I came to the school and things weren’t so bad anymore, so I forgot to be angry. There were times, nevertheless, when I blamed God because I couldn’t kiss Bobby. That was because nothing had ever been my fault. I was always a victim of circumstance. I eventually came to understand that when things I can’t control happen, it’s my responsibility to make them turn out the way I want. No one’s going to do it for me because no one controls my actions. The catch-22 of freewill, I suppose.
Kurt and I have had a lot of discussions about freewill. Just after graduation I became a sort of teacher’s aide to him despite the fact that I hadn’t taken yet taken any of his theology or German classes – the two subjects added to the curriculum after Professor Xavier invited him to stay. Kurt’s take on God-given freewill is something I’ve been pondering for years. He holds that all the twists and turns life takes are God’s way of helping us become better people. If everything were easy all the time then all of those heroic ideals we hold in such high esteem would be meaningless. Resilience and forgiveness. Sacrifice. It’s the idea that without hate there can’t be love and without pain there can’t be pleasure.
Yet, at the same time, I balked at the idea of being tested, of having my strings pulled to and fro so that I could be manipulated to live up to grandiose concepts that half the time I couldn’t even understand. I admitted that sentiment to Kurt one evening, quite hesitantly. I didn’t want him to think less of me because I had doubts. He, of course, didn’t and never would.
I remember, vividly, him smiling down at me, pointed teeth gleaming, unsettling yellow eyes fond. His sharp nail had been gentle where it touched my cheek. When he’d spoken, his voice had been soft and his words sincere. “With Him it is never a test, pass or fail, Anna Marie.”
He always calls me Anna Marie, even though I prefer Rogue. It’s because it’s like Mary. He thinks Mary is the most beautiful name in the world.
“There’s always another chance. We will fail most of the time and it will hurt,” he’d continued, his accent thickening as he spoke. “Then there will be times when we succeed magnificently. That is why we live.”
“I thought you said we live for love and faith?”
“Love is part of our success. Faith is what sustains us until we reach it, and the only thing we have left after we lose it. Faith is strength.”
“And bitterness makes us weak,” I’d finished the familiar sentiment.
“You’re a smart little lamb. I don’t understand why you do so poorly in my German class,” he’d teased, his triangular tail brushing the back of my chair as he walked past me to his desk. “Could it be my teaching, I wonder?”
We’d smiled at each other and settled into back into the flowing, angelic music that always accompanied our evening sessions. Once again my faith had been sustained through a demonic-looking blue man with more forgiveness and understanding in one of his hoof-like fingers than most people have in their whole bodies. Like Dr. Grey, Kurt played a huge part in shaping the person I am today. More so, because I was given the opportunity to really know Kurt as a person. Which is a pretty rare thing, even between friends.
Our friendship spawned from a mutual feeling of alienation, what with both of us being a couple of the biggest freaks in the freak show. Not that I’d ever tell him that. He doesn’t share my sardonic sense of humor. Sarcasm is the clever, more popular cousin of bitterness, but it’s bitterness nonetheless. Kurt is a much stronger human being than I will ever be. I lean on sarcasm like a crutch. It’s too late to learn to walk without it. I find it too comfortable. But who would we be without our little flaws? Better people maybe, but certainly not ourselves.
At any rate, I started hanging around Kurt the summer after Dr. Grey’s funeral. I was still clinging to my adolescent ways at that point. I was an X-Man, sure, but I was also still taking classes for my GED and dating Bobby and trying to make friends with Jubilee and Kitty even though we didn’t have much in common. It was a relaxed period that I took for granted. Bobby and I were never sent on any missions or anything dangerous, so we enjoyed the perks of being X-Men without any of the responsibility. The perks, for me, were all a matter of walking down the hall with an air of superiority, and getting to train with Logan one-on-one every day except Sunday and the days he, Cyclops, and Storm were gone on missions.
They weren’t gone a whole lot, actually. It was strange to have Logan around so often. It made me realize just how little time we’d really actually spent together before. Sharing life-alternating experiences with a person tends to forge a strong bond quickly. That, and the fact that pieces of him still lurked around my consciousness. I got it into my head and heart that he was mine so thoroughly that it didn’t seem at all unusual for me to seek him out to shoot a game of pool or just sit around and watch TV. I cringe when I think about how often I was around. Poor guy. It’s a wonder he put up with me. He got used to it eventually, and he must have come to enjoy it since he ditched me in favor of bars less and less as time wore on.
Meanwhile, I endeavored to become his confessor. I’d ask him about Stryker and Dr. Grey. He’d get really still when I did that. If he felt like it, he’d tell me bits here and there, leaving me to paste the full story together myself. Sometimes he’d just leave. I didn’t pursue as hard as I maybe could have. I figured if he wasn’t talking to me about it then he wasn’t confiding in anyone else, either.
Sadly, that was what mattered most. But it’s good that I didn’t push him at the time. It would have been for the wrong reasons.