17: Black as sorrow
The mid-afternoon sun streamed into the room, gilding the two warriors sprawled akimbo on the floor. Rogue groaned with pleasure, and the surfeit of it. She should have known better than to spar with Logan, alone, in his new quarters. She didn't know whether it was the fighting or the fucking that left her muscles liquid, but the combination was a killer.
She smirked, and stretched out one quivering leg to poke him with her foot.
“You think now you're finished beating me into submission you could carry me to your bed?”
He barely opened one eye, but the eyebrow still managed to shoot skyward.
“You actually expectin' me to walk, after that? Hmmmph.”
He pulled a blanket down from the couch behind them – she'd been cold, those first few nights - and spread it over them, pulling her onto his chest.
“Pillow,” was all he said before he fell asleep, his face relaxing into an almost-smile.
*
So much potential, wasted. So many years with nothing to show for it. The world was slumbering, the telepath thought. Time to wake it up.
*
Normally, she would say something, or do something dramatic, Molly told herself. Normally she wouldn't just ignore them, or let them ignore her. But sometimes, when you spent most of your waking hours in a roomful of fourteen year olds, you made allowances. Vacation started in a week, and the end of the day grew near. She was as exhausted as they were.
Oh, to be a small town English teacher, she found herself thinking sourly. Trying to share the joy of Shakespeare and Whitman and Salinger with year upon year of knuckleheaded footballers, or vacuous cheerleaders. Just one or two kids on her wavelength – on any wavelength, really – and not even a decent bookstore in town anymore. Sometimes, she wondered if the world was still spinning out there, out where real life was taking place.
Hurry up, she found herself telling the clock. Otherwise I'm going to strangle one of the little shits. But the seconds crawled as slowly as they ever did, and the minutes sloped disconsolately behind. The sound of her chalk on the blackboard was hurting her ears, and she worked hard to ignore the rustle of notes passing from hand to hand. And not to envy whoever it was that was snoring quietly in the back row.
“Uh, Miss Anderson? Miss Anderson!”
She contemplated ignoring him, and returning to the thematic outline on the board. Kelly Spencer, of course. Hotshot know-it all. Sometimes her favourite student, but today … she took a deep breath, schooled her features and turned around, professional smile in place.
He was staring at the claws that had erupted from hands, and she couldn't help herself. She screamed.
They were covered in his classmates' blood, after all.
*
Jean felt the rush of his enthusiasm as he crossed to the whiteboard, scribbling frantically in a bid to explain the theorem to his class. Scott and higher mathematics – she wanted to roll her eyes, but his love of teaching, the joy he took from it – she would always love him, for that alone.
She studied the lines of his face, and tried not to think of another man. It wasn't that he wasn't beautiful to watch – he was, all sharp angles and incredible symmetry, a study in clean, polished perfection. Once, his very calmness had drawn her in. His control had seemed the most thrilling, exciting, desirable thing in her world.
Now, though. Sometimes, all she wanted to do was to marr that perfection. Scratch it up, tease out something wild. Something like him, her conscience taunted her.
Something like her, his thoughts whispered, even as he focused on explaining himself to the baffled seniors.
Jean sorrowed for them both, and prayed the end would come soon. One way or another.
*
He was standing in line at the bank when it happened. The big guy in front of him seemed to double over, convulse. Then he just seemed to … grow. Transform. Jack was so surprised when the change came, he forgot to be scared. Until the guy's skin turned green, that is.
Then he tried to run.
The last thing he remembered was a huge hand trapping his ankle, and as looked around, terrified, the sight of strangely human-looking brown eyes, staring from that massive green face, pleading with him.
He didn't know for what. He would never know, as that huge fist came swinging towards him, opening up his skull and smashing his frontal lobe into a gooey, seething mass.
*
Hank was no secret agent, but he had his skills. The skills of Dr Henry McCoy, over-educated empiricist, he reminded himself, because pitting his feral self against someone the calibre of the Wolverine … that would be stupid, he realised.
Logic. Reasoning. Some basic data from the man's bank accounts and medical records. Good places to start, he reassured himself as the search string began to deliver hits on the Wolverine's known aliases. He wanted to cross-reference them for any association with Rogue, but he couldn't, not yet. He mocked himself for feeling disloyal, even as the couple attempted to deceive the entire mansion as to their association. But she was his teammate.
His lethal, incredibly accomplished teammate, Hank conceded with a sigh. With unparalleled combat skills. And a strategic genius. Perhaps they were truly her own – or she might have gained them via absorption. It was possible. Even as he protested his own logic, the dreadful feeling in the pit of his stomach testified to his real suspicions, and he found himself perusing the FBI database for reports of a team of assassins, rather than just a lone shooter. A highly successful team, he read with dawning horror.
Two murders in the Seattle Bay area, and another two in greater Los Angeles. Five in New York. One in Arkansas, another in Alabama, and a third in Mississippi. A multiplicity of weapons, and a dearth of evidence. No arrests on record, simply a few grainy surveillance photos that proved nothing more than the fact that they had existed.
Maybe it wasn't them, his heart insisted. The images weren't good, and the woman was too small, too thin to be her. And the dates didn't match up, anyway – those crimes were committed more than five years ago, and then the couple had vanished, the file said. Rogue had been with the X-men just over three years, he remembered. Yesterday, she had admitted to spending two years with the Brotherhood.
She was too young, he insisted. Rogue couldn't be more than 21 or 22 now … he sprung up so suddenly the desk chair slid wildly across the room. A long bound, and he was hunched over the sink, retching.
Apparently, a feral couldn't lie to himself. He tried not to think about them as his shaking hands poured a glass of water to rinse the foul taste away. But a chorus in his head was jeering at him: that man you so admire. That feral. He made a child his lover, and then turned her into a killer. She couldn't have been more than 16.
And there was no part of him that didn't believe it, Hank thought sadly.
*
She was a healer. She'd been born one, not that the hospital knew it. To them, she was just Doctor Seesanang, paediatric surgeon. Sure, she'd studied for eight years, even done some post doc work, but it wasn't the wall full of qualifications that made her a healer, Sriya thought.
It was this. It was being able to massage a child's heart back into life, being able to beg a soul to come back, to rejoin the living. She had been born to this, her X-gene equipping her for pediatrics long before she'd ever set foot in the University.
She was so happy here, so fulfilled. Sixteen lives she had saved this week. Sixteen families, who would be whole now. Sixteen smiles from innocent, beautiful children.
Sriya laughed as she moved from bed to bed, touching her young patients softly and gently. A stroke on the brow here. A pat on the hand there. Leaving their corpses behind her as their tiny hearts stuttered and stilled in her wake.
*
Charles had just wheeled himself into the dining room for a late lunch when the explosion of grief and terror reached him. Humans and mutants alike, crying out in horror. Crying out for revenge. Waves of revulsion, and fear. So much fear. It crashed down into his consciousness until he was drowning in it, unable to function, unable to even breathe with the weight of it. Yet still more came, and more. Thousands of souls, screaming for assistance.
He heard his own voice, screaming too. Screaming at the impossibility of it – mutants, good people, targeting others so cruelly, and randomly. Everywhere, at the same time. Thousands and thousands of people, dead.
It was the start of a war. And mutants, it seemed, had started it.
*
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
Anyone in search of answers might want to turn back now :D Short, but not at all sweet.
Chapter End Notes:
Berate me. Curse me! Chastise me. You know you want to :D