Bobby lies across her bed and builds an ice castle in his palms, turrets and drawbridge and little pennant banners on toothpick thin flagpoles.
"Cinderella," Rogue says, perched carefully on the mattress with space and space between them. Her accent curls around her tongue and she tastes the south in her own voice, fried okra and white church dresses. "I loved that movie."
Bobby smiles at her, straight white teeth. Icicles have formed at the tips of his hair. "Why'd you pick Rogue?" he asks, and Rogue plays with white streaks in her hair, twines them around and around gloved fingers. She thinks about the way Bobby had said she could leave her gloves off if she'd wanted, the thoughts she'd got from him when they'd kissed, warm and soft like thick blankets on rainy days.
"A nickname," she says, teasing, "Momma's little Rogue." Bobby laughs, and his fingers clench a little, involuntarily. Cracks appear in the walls of his castle, and the flagpoles snap and melt to puddles on her duvet. "You broke it," she says, pressing her palm against the wet spots. Bobby kisses her, very quick, very fleeting, and flinches a little as he slides away. Rogue feels the pull before he goes, and tries hard to smile as he brushes her hair out of her face.
"I'll make you another one," he promises.
/
Logan sends her a postcard and a daisy keychain, both obviously bought as a gas station, probably when he stopped for cigars and beef jerky. The postcard has her name on it, written in a thick scrawl, Marie. The picture is of the Eiffel Tower, and Rogue is nearly one hundred percent certain he's not in France. She guesses it was a generic print that he picked at random.
She hangs it on her wall with the blank side out, just her name in Logan's hand, at the height of her bed, so it's hidden by her pillow during the day but she sees it at night by the glow of light coming from the hall and the moon coming in the window, in the morning when her roommate pulls back the heavy curtains and lets the sun in.
/
The Professor gives her private lessons in his office, big plush chairs in leather upholstery that make her jeans crackle with static. She thinks that if she were wearing shorts in the sticky summer heat her skin would kiss the leather, but she's wearing jeans without rips, and that knowledge makes her wander aimlessly around the office, running her fingers over the books on the shelves, the frames on the walls, little knick knacks.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, and Rogue smiles reflexively. She pulls a copy of Voltaire in the original French from the shelves and runs her fingers down the spine. It's a very rare edition, and Rogue cracks it open to smell the paper.
"You're showing your age, Charles," she says in an accent that isn't hers, and stops. She shakes her head, puts the book down on the desk with a muted thump. The Professor smiles at her, very gently, and taps his knuckles on the desk.
"Erik always considered me a bit of a snob, I'm afraid."
Rogue deliberately thickens her accent until she sounds like shooting grandaddy's rifle at chipped glass bottles in the backwoods and sitting on the front porch drinking long glasses of sweet tea. "Dr. Grey says I'm doing fine."
"And how are you feeling?" he asks again, and Rogue's mouth twists up at one corner.
"I'll live," she says.
/
Rogue dreams of the Statue of Liberty, Logan lying still in her lap with wounds opening on his face and his back dripping red, the veins showing clear and raised on his skin. She's cold, and she hurts, and all her thoughts are in German and clouded by men in white coats.
Rogue dreams of Auschwitz.
/
It's not hard to think of Magneto as Magneto, because he's been thinking of himself as Magneto instead of Erik for nearly forty years. But the strongest memories, the ones that linger, are Erik's, so that's how she greets him.
"Erik," she says, and her voice hardly shakes.
Erik sits with perfect posture behind the heavy plastic. He glances indifferently at her as she settles into the visitor's chair. "Hello," he says.
Rogue takes a steady, even breath, deep enough that her ribs creak a little. She closes her eyes briefly and brings the memory to the front of her mind. It's blurred around the edges with age and anger and grief, but this has to be exact, this has to be perfect. When she opens her eyes Erik is looking at her with casual curiosity.
Rogue takes another deep breath. "Ich zähle bis drei, und bewegen Sie die Münze."
Erik's face goes completely and utterly motionless. The hand resting on the tabletop visibly trembles once, and Rogue just looks at him, her heart pounding hard enough in her chest she thinks he must be able to hear it.
"Sie sind sehr jung," he says finally. "You'll learn."
"Never again," Rogue says bitterly, and Erik's mouth twists up in a smirk.
"I never quite bought into that," he says. "It is a nice thought, I suppose."
Rogue adjusts the hat that covers the white in her hair. "Are you sorry?"
Erik does her the courtesy of thinking about her question. "I am sorry that it would have failed."
"There are two kinds of idealists," Rogue says, and Erik quirks an eyebrow at her.
"Now you are starting to sound like Charles."
Rogue ignores him. "There are the cynics, the calculators, the power hungry manipulators." She leans forward in her chair and is suddenly, abruptly, and powerfully furious. "And there are the true believers, the ones with a cause. You could have stepped in that machine, you could have sacrificed for your righteous cause. You aren't a true believer, you aren't working for the good of the future. You're nothing but a power hungry terrorist."
Erik waits for her to finish. "May I see your hair?" he asks politely, and Rogue is knocked off guard. She stops mid-breath, blinking.
"I-what?"
"Your hair," he repeats, "may I see it?"
Rogue stares at him, and then, slowly, tugs the cap off her head. The white streaks fall into her face and she brushes them behind her ears. She feels awkward, and suddenly, just as young as Erik had said she was.
"You should not be ashamed," Erik says.
"I am not ashamed," Rogue says, and gets the impression she's surprised him. She stares at him for a long moment and stands abruptly. "I don't know what I came here to find," she says.
Erik smiles, suddenly, a real smile. "The place between rage and serenity," he says softly, and it niggles at Rogue's mind, like the melody of a song she can't quite remember.
"Goodbye, my friend," she says, and shakes the British out of her head with a quick movement.
"Don't ever be ashamed of what you are," Erik says, and suddenly Rogue thinks of a woman with lines on her face, thin but smiling, the cloth in her hair lit by the candles of the menorah, and under it all are the shadows of blue eyes and floppy hair. "You are special, Miss D'Ancanto, and you should be proud."
"Your mother would be ashamed of you," Rogue says, and leaves with shoulders thrown back.
/
Rogue finds Kurt kneeling in his room, whispering in Latin. She hovers by the doorframe, her fingers twisting in the long sleeves of her shirt.
"Gute Nacht," he says, turning to her face her. His tail flickers up beside him, twisting lazily in the air.
"You," Rogue says, faltering, "you speak German."
"Ich weiß," he says. "Do you?"
Rogue steps into the room. "It's complicated," she says. "But I- it would be comforting, to hear it again."
He smiles at her. "Come," he says, his syllables made harsh by his accent. "come sit here." Rogue walks, slow and careful, and kneels with three feet between them.
"My skin," she mutters. "It's dangerous."
Kurt reaches out and takes her hand, his blue skin against the black of her gloves. Rogue flinches hard, but he tightens his grip. "If you have faith and do not doubt, you will receive whatever you ask of in prayer."
"I'm not very religious," Rogue says quietly, and then, "I think-I think I used to be Presbyterian."
"You think?" he asks, and Rogue flushes.
"I'm forgetting," she confesses in a whisper, and bites her lip.
"Your name is very beautiful," Kurt says in an obvious change of subject, and Rogue smiles.
"It's silly," she says, "but it's-it's what I'd like to be, what I never was. A Rogue."
"It is admirable," he says. Rogue lights a candle with a real match, lights it by pinching the matchbook between two fingers and feeling the flash burn when it ignites. Kurt takes her hand again, and their fingers lace together. "Close your eyes," he says softly, and she does.
"Gegrüßet seist du, Maria, voll der Gnade," he says, "der Herr ist mit dir-"
/
Logan is waiting for her when she gets back from the clinic. "Did you get what you wanted?"
Rogue keeps walking, her hair falling across her face like a curtain. She thinks about getting it cut. "I sure as anything weren't gonna get it from you," she says, and hears him snort from behind her.
"You haven't sounded that Southern in a while," he says as she rounds the corner and jiggles the door to her old room open.
Rogue goes to her closet and pulls out her duffel bag. Her roommate-some brown eyed brown haired slip of girl who looks down at her nose at the general populace and can throw balls of lava if she gets pissed off enough-takes one look at Rogue and Logan and leaves without a word, her magazine dangling from two fingers.
Logan leans against a patch of bare wall, just inside Rogue's half of the room. "I told you I'm not your father."
Rogue starts throwing clothing into her bag. "I heard you the first time."
"I never said-"
Rogue spins on him. "I asked you for help and you told me to do whatever the hell I felt like!"
Logan straightens up off the wall. "That's not exactly what I said-you're an adult, and maybe you oughtta start acting like-"
"You said you'd take care of me," Rogue says, and Logan goes quiet. "You promised."
"You shouldn't expect things from me, kid," he says, almost gentle. Rogue yanks the blanket back from her bed and exposes the postcard, taped crooked to the wall, the one he'd sent her. She reaches under the mattress and pulls out that ratty green jacket she'd been wearing the day they'd met, shrugs it on. She hesitates a second, feeling his eyes on her back, and rips the postcard off the wall in a hard motion.
She knows Logan the way she only knows a few people. Bobby, John, David. Erik. She doesn't know what food he likes, what makes him smile, but she knows him at his core, and she knows that he might break his promise to her a thousand times over but he'll never stop feeling guilty about it, and she knows that's how she can hurt him.
She gives him the postcard, her bare fingers inches from his. "I'll never stop expecting things from you," she says, and waits until he takes the card from her fingers.
She goes to zip up her bag and Logan frowns. "Why are you packing gloves?" he asks, and she freezes.
"Old habit," she says, and zips up her bag with a firm motion.
"Liar," Logan says.
"I'm going North," she says, "Alaska, maybe."
She turns to leave and Logan steps into her path, deliberate. He reaches for her ungloved hand and she flinches so hard her knuckles bang against the wall. "You didn't get the Cure," he says, and his mouth is open to say more but her keys jingle in her palms and his eyes go wide at the keychain, a dingy sort of daisy stained with oil and dirt. "You kept it," he says, surprised, and Rogue pushes past him to get to the backdoor through the garage.
"Goodbye, Logan," she says.
/
Ororo is waiting for her by the gate. Rogue undoes the Mansion keyfob from her keychain and offers it to her. Ororo hesitates.
"Keep it," she says. "You will always be welcome here, no matter what you've chosen."
Rogue snorts. "You don't have to be nice to me anymore, Miss Munroe."
"There will always be a place for you here," she repeats, and Rogue thinks she looks tired, drawn. Rogue remembers that she's lost her closest friends, her boss, her mentor, and some of her students, all in a few short years. "It's what Charles would have wanted."
What Charles wanted was never an option, Erik whispers in her mind, I tried to warn you, Charles. Rogue forces a smile. "I'll keep in touch," she says, and Ororo catches her by the shoulder.
"Wait," she says, "Marie-Rogue. Take one of the cars."
"I'll hitch," Rogue says, "I've done it before."
"Take the car," Ororo says, a little tight, and cuts her off before she can argue again. "Please. It's all I can do."
"Okay," Rogue says, and watches Ororo stand at the gate in the rearview mirror until the car turns a corner and she's out of sight. Later she finds almost two hundred dollars rolled into a tight bundle in the glove compartment, held with thin rubber bands around a card with a phone number written in a clean neat hand. The money smells like cement after it's rained, like glass warm from sunshine.
/
Rogue sleeps in the backseat of the car at a rest stop, wrapped in her coat and starting to feel that gnawing ache in her belly, the one she lived with from the second she climbed out her parent's window to the moment Logan reached across her and pressed food into her hands.
She dreams Bobby's dreams first, his powers manifesting, lying in bed and wracked with shivers and he burns ice-hot with shivers, ice forming and melting on his skin, certain he's dying and too scared to call out for his parents.
John's dream is the mirror image, except he's standing in an orphanage with fire curling around him like a particularly affectionate cat, laughing as the other children scream and cry and run.
/
Rogue goes home.
She parks by the library and walks through the minipark, her boots crunching on brown dried up grass. She kicks a discarded can with the tip of her shoe and sighs. The white pointed spire of a church rises in front of her and she tries to remember if it's the one she used to go to like clockwork every Sunday, tries to remember if it's the one with the parking lot that David asked her out in, wiping the sweat on his palms off on his pressed khaki pants.
In the end she can't remember, and she gets back in the car. She burns her wrist on the metal of her seatbuckle and remembers Logan turning to her with a cigar in one hand, listen kid I don't need auto safety advice. The steering wheel is too hot to touch and she sits there with the windows rolled down in the stifling, shearing hot air, staring at the streets that used to be her home and trying to remember the last time David held her hand, the last time her mother pressed a kiss to her temple.
She can't remember, so she pulls her gloves on one by one, the long white opera gloves Bobby had given her two weeks before he kissed Kitty Pryde, and drives away from Jackson Mississippi with the heat of the steering wheel searing her palms through thin gorgeous fabric.
On a whim she drives down the street she was born on, the street she grew up on. There are a few fathers mowing the lawns, patches of green, and little boys in overalls run around the porch, weaving between the legs of moms coming back from church in their fine linen gloves and pearls and the daughters in white chiffon dresses and pink ribbons wound around their hats. She tries to think if one of the men wiping sweat from their receding hairlines is her father, if one of the women brushing the dirt smudge off their son's cheek is her mother and a baby brother she'll never meet, if one of the girls crouched in the grass making daisy chain crowns is the replacement daughter who's not a freak.
No one looks familiar, no house looks like hers.
/
Rogue pulls over into a field and lies on the hood of her car under the stars. She smokes a cigarette, a menthol one that she found half crushed under the driver's seat when she was looking for spare change, and it twists funny on her tongue. John had preferred Marlboro Red, Erik had exclusively purchased Camel. Logan loves cigars but holds a fondness for Lucky Strike and can't quite remember why. It's very quiet out in the country, and Rogue can hear the hiss of the paper as it burns. She watches the red glow eat away, shrinking it smaller and smaller, and the ash drifts away on the breeze like snow.
She dreams Logan's dreams, drowning and drowning in thick green liquid while someone cuts into her in long thin slices, and she wakes when the car heats up hot enough to leave a red welt on her inner forearm. It curves exactly through where Erik's letters would have been etched in fuzzy ink.
/
Rogue goes home.
The gate creaks open and her keyfob still works, and she drives slow, so slow, up to the garage, the tires crunching on loose gravel. She hangs the duffel bag over her shoulder and looks at the dust on the hem of her pants.
A boy answers the door, older than her by maybe five years, and his eyes are black slitted with red. Rogue doesn't even blink as he winks at her. He half-bows, flamboyant and overdoing it on purpose, and she smiles despite herself.
"What kind of a name is Rogue?" he asks, voice like the Bayou, like catfish fresh fried and the whiskey stained pavement of Bourbon Street. Rogue feels her own accent thicken to match.
"It's mine," she says, and goes to find Ororo.
/
Rogue goes to dinner and comes back to find Logan sitting on her bed. "Your own room," he says. "Nice."
"You're still here," Rogue says, tugging her bag out from under the bed.
"Maybe I was waiting for a letter," he says, and pulls the postcard from his back pocket, folded in half and crinkled in long jagged crags.
"I haven't got any tape," Rogue says, and Logan shrugs. He presses the postcard against the wall and punctures it to the wall with one slip of a claw.
"Belongs with you," he says, and Rogue smiles. She slips a hand into her jacket pocket and comes out with a keychain.
"For you," she says, and Logan takes it.
"It's pink," he says, and she tries not to smile.
"And glittery," she says helpfully.
"And a 'W,'" he says, staring at it.
"For Wolverine," she says, and gives in to her smile, ducking her head.
"Come here," Logan says, and she hugs him. He holds her tight for a second and relaxes, and when she leans back he smiles at her, soft and warm. "Hey kid," he says, and touches the white in her hair. "Still going by Rogue?"
Rogue shrugs. "Better than Stripes, I guess."
Logan stretches until his back pops and stops in her doorway. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"I guess," Rogue says, hesitantly, "you could call me Marie. If you wanted."
"Why?" Logan asks, shrugging. "Your name's Rogue. I'll see you for breakfast?"
"Yeah," Rogue says, and strips her gloves off in long smooth motions as he closes the door behind him. She leans back on the bed and looks at her ceiling in the dim light. She thinks about the boy who'd answered the door, the way he smiled when he heard her accent, she thinks about how Bobby had flinched when she'd said goodbye, the warm hug Ororo had given her, the way Logan had released a long pent up breath when she'd hugged him.
"I'll see you at breakfast," she repeats, and closes her eyes.