Peek into the shadow, I come into the light
You tell me I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right
Janet Jackson
Fall 2010
White noise drones above her tilted head. Inside it crackles.
Marie’s skin, already pale from two sunless summers, is bleached under fluorescent exposure. She is translucent where a nurse smears antiseptic over her pulsing vein. The nurse is brisk and efficient, like her slicked, black hair. She is overly cautious. Her skin is separated from Marie’s by latex, metal prongs, and a cotton swab. The other nurse, the one seated with her face in her hands, thinks evolution should have color-coded Marie neon orange or black and yellow striped. Nature’s own warning.
What Nurse Kim doesn’t think is anything nefarious. In two weeks of administering the cure, she hasn’t seen so much as an allergic reaction. Marie’s last logical misgiving seems to check out.
So she is left with white noise, the voiceless static of an eighteen-panel jury. One life for each year of her own. Eleven mutants, five not. Four strangers and an equal number of enemies to friends. More are afraid of her than would admit it. Three love her to the point of ultimatums. Two are dead but not silent.
Never silent. When ignored they are earworm jingles. Show weakness and suddenly they are shattered mirrors of quicksilver memories that vibrate so loud her teeth ache.
Their persistent thrum. A seizure-wracked boy asks the Lord why. A mother prays that her daughter be absolved of someone else’s sins. A sinner’s hands on her face, the first mutation forced on her. She gives her her gods and devils to see. The survivor of horrors sees in a mirror one God, one Devil. He would change her ignorance to sainthood, weakness to martyrdom. Gods and insects, us and them. She has taken the air from a traitor’s lungs, but what he hates her for is why. His is glorious vengeance on the Hallmark family who doesn’t exist even for golden boys. The infuriatingly noble. So sure she won’t hurt him until she does. He pretends he doesn’t suspect that the girl who has everything but him plays an image of them kissing on loop.
Who is alone and who is not. She doesn’t mean to intrude on the fractured mourning of the desolate changed, but in him deathless energy rises before her time. The man who limits omniscience on principle lends her a whisper of his power to set her right. But it doesn’t and he’s gone and the whole world might very well burn with her. Drone, crackle, thrum.
“Are you ready?” A blast of detachment. Exactly what Marie needs out of this.
Her friend comes to her, his presence such a comfort she must be stronger than she wants to be to get by in his absence. Be sure. Her mutation has been his death and his salvation, but he has learned at what cost when he rocked her through his nightmares. It has to be what she wants.
The touch of the needle cools her skin.
“I said, ‘Are you ready?’”
Yes. For so many logical – cowardly, selfish – understandable reasons. She nods her tilted head. If she unclenches her jaw, they won’t quit screaming until it’s over.
It was called “The Freak Out” on the cover of Time. Six million mutants had cried out in front of six billion humans, who’d writhed in turn. Forty-three seconds. A whole planet strangled. Heart attacks, car crashes – the unlucky few who died had equal odds. Mutants lost the numbers game but won an opportunity.
Anna Marie D’Ancanto, composed and contained under the stiff black leather uniform of X-Man Rogue, watched President McKenna fold his hands and address the nation: “An alarm has sounded. We are awake.”
Wideawake. The government’s contingency plan leaked by Mystique, who staged Senator Kelly’s assassination. The public clicked its tongue at internment camps and hundred-foot sentinels. Strangelove conspiracies and Cold War death rays had no place in a world that demanded the preservation of normalcy. The second president to resign from the highest office of these United States did so dodging accusations of paranoia. His successor put together a Department of Mutant Affairs the same day he called up the National Guard.
All across America, they took a breath as one and hold it. Days, weeks, months. They told themselves to forget.
For forty-three seconds, Marie had existed solely on a genetic level. Her side bruised as she pushed her body against the hard floor of the jet. Her clenched fingers nearly snapped under the strain of unfathomable agony. She had been electrocuted from the inside.
The current changed her polarity. Her thoughts sparked synapse to synapse on a negative charge. Static electricity bristled the hairs on her arms. Her gloves fit tighter. Four months later, her mutation had consumed her life.
No, she could not forget. She remained freaked out.
When it came right down to it, the universe had a twisted way of making her choices for her. Circumstantial freewill was all Marie believed she had.
She’d run away from home and then the clinic because she couldn’t take being treated like a leaper or an experiment. Good for her, except she hadn’t actually wanted to live out on the streets. Where did she have to go? Who did she have to trust? Rah, rah, civil rights and all that, but she was as segregated from other mutants as she was from normal people.
Study hall was where she saw the news. Warren Worthington of Worthington Labs lifted a clear vial in just the right way that sunlight glinted off it like a beacon. “We have cure.” Gasps and murmurs. Fifteen mutants in the room, they all turned to stare at the one they knew only as Rogue.
A year and a half before, had the doctors at Meridian Regional offered Marie a magic shot, she wouldn’t have wasted the time to dry her eyes before she said yes. Even ten months later, when she found herself enrolled in the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters almost before she knew it, she’d barely hesitated to ask, “And the Professor, he can cure me?”
“I don’t think it quite works that way,” Storm said then, apologetically. Defeats and victories have made her emphatic. “No,” she told Marie. “They can’t cure us, because there’s nothing to cure. Nothing’s wrong with you.”
To Logan, Marie gave a look like, “Is she serious?” She was either fooling herself or blinded by her own privilege. Logan gave away nothing of his opinion, except that he was unsurprised to hear her asking.
Marie knew there was something wrong with her. At the very least, something would be wrong if she didn’t get some control. Her sessions with Professor Xavier may have been the only barrier between her sense of self and a full blown case of multiple personality disorder. And the only hope she had that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life separate.
The Professor didn’t begrudge her the temptation.
Marie reminded herself of that when she stood up at his funeral to place a single yellow rose on the monument that bore his likeness.
Storm’s eulogy had been moving as only the sad truth can be. Still, the Professor died for a beloved student not for the cause. What separated Charles Xavier from Erik Lehnsherr wasn’t ideology. It was compassion. He treated mutants like the individuals they are.
His death made her decision. Marie didn’t blame him any more than he would’ve her, although there was something missing in her resolve, something he’d instilled in her himself. Conviction.