Author Notes

1) I tend to go a little crazy looking for titles. The working title for this one was "Doubtful Gift" which changed to "Doubtful, Gifted"; neither satisfied me completely. Roses came into play when I went back to my favourite source of themes-- fairy tales. Rae suggested that Rogue was Beast from "Beauty and the Beast". I flipped over this of course because my favourite film of all time Is Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."

The fairy tale is often interpreted as a coming of age story. When arranged marriages were the norm, the tale advised the young girl to accept an arranged marriage to a beastly older man. In modern readings, it's about accepting her sexuality as a part of growing up. Another popular theme is a woman's love taming the bestial or wildness in men.

Since this particular story is gen (yay!), both the Beauty and the Beast characters are in Rogue. Seeing her powers as a beast, she isolates herself and even goes as far as to try to kill the beast within. It's only when she accepts her powers and loves herself that the "beast" transforms.

Roses, long time symbols of love and beauty, feature heavily in the Beauty and the Beast folktales. Once again, because Rogue sees herself as a beast, she gives this symbol to herself after learning to appreciate her powers and, by association, herself. The significant difference here is that she doesn't love the rose despite of the thorns but that she loves the thorns which have a lovely rose as a side-benefit. ;)
/dissertation

2) SR-71 Blackbirds takes approximately 24 hours to prep even with a highly trained crew. The X-Jet is obviously modified to the nth degree but I still doubt that you could turn it on and off like a car.

3) The amygdala is the part of the cerebrum that processes and stores emotional reactions. It's also heavily involved in sensing smells, putting things in long-term memory and responding to emotions. That's part of the reason why people get so much comfort from home-cooking; the smell of food from your childhood brings back more carefree times (hopefully). /biology dork

4) Yes, I know the movie supposedly had a "Psylocke" but I'm pretending that was Kwannon!Psylocke. The one featured here is Lady Betsy Braddock-- blonde, blue-eyed, and a female Captain Britain. Despite great temptation, I didn't switch her mind with a Japanese assassin's because we've already got way too many body switches in this story. This doesn't really matter since there will be no sequels (please God) but at some point in the future, she'll have camera-eyes.

5) Hah! I wrote Gambit and Rogue in the same story WITHOUT shipping them. :P to you, Rae!