Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first one is Danny. He's in her mind, always. He was the real reason she ran away. It wasn't what she did that drove her out of the house – it was the aftermath of what she did. It was his thoughts in her mind, giving a running commentary, constantly, like she had asked him for his opinion. Which she hadn't, and she never will now, firstly because the real Danny is in a coma somewhere and secondly because his thoughts aren't nearly as nice as she had imagined. He's accepting and generally nonjudgmental, yes, and that's about as nice as you can get from a teenage boy these days, but he's far more dirty-minded than she had ever realized. Not to mention that, as it turns out, he hadn't cared for her personality nearly as much as he had cared for the shape of her mouth.

Pathetic.

Seeing things from someone else's point of view opens up a whole new world of understanding, and Marie found herself growing, as a person, through what she had of Danny. Danny's understandings were added to her own and it was so much easier to comprehend the world and its challenges with another mind there to make up for what she lacked. Two horses pulling a carriage instead of one, as it were.

For two weeks, she remained in her parents' house (not hers, not anymore), listening to them whisper about that poor boy and what were they going to do with her. She changed so much, huddled in her room with only their whispers and Danny's constant chatter in her mind. It was Danny who urged her to leave. She was timid and afraid, but Danny was not. He was bold and she learned boldness from him.

She actually starts talking back to him after only a week on her own, and it's then that she realizes that he isn't just an echo. She has conversations with him, legitimate ones. He doesn't seem to realize that there's anything unusual about this; that he's a disembodied voice in her head. He's just there, and he talks to her. And, for not being as perfectly perfect as she had believed he was, he's not half bad, after a while. He's useful, certainly. Danny-boy was far worldlier than he let on, apparently, and his echo is shameless.

"He's checking you out," Danny says to her, out of the blue.

An evening in a bar is far more typical than Marie wants it to be, especially after learning that Good Boy Danny had snuck out to quite a few bars and that they really aren't places that she wants to be. But she's in one anyway, just because, through Danny, it is familiar to her, and most people take one look at how covered up she is and know that she's not there for fun or games. This suits her just fine.

What? Marie glances to her left. There's no one there. Who?

" Don't look , you dork. He's to your right. Creepy old dude. Button your jacket up, would you? He's leering. Creeper."

Marie doesn't look this time. She just reaches up and deftly buttons her jacket up to the collar (which, she thinks, she should have done anyway, because as unlikely as it is that someone is going to reach out and touch her exposed collarbone, she just can't risk it). She's not sure why, trusts the Danny in her head. He might not be the nicest person, and definitely not her first choice of people she wants around all the time, but he hasn't driven her wrong yet. It's sort of nice, to have someone who has her back, even if it's not in the physical sense.

It occurs to Marie to wonder how Danny can see something that she can't. He's inside her head, after all. Shouldn't he be looking through her eyes?

Do you know? she asks him.

Danny, of course, has no more of an answer than she does, which is to say that they have no clue.

It goes on like this for quite a while. Danny warns her to go-stop-go at the right moments, and Marie feels oddly grateful to the real Danny, wherever he is. She only hopes that he's getting better, or maybe even woken up from his coma. She doesn't know, though, and doesn't really have a way of finding out, so she keeps on heading north and not thinking too hard about what she left behind. She stays in each town a little longer than the last, fear no longer driving her and Danny's voice no longer urging her. It's surprisingly easy to get work if you don't bother to haggle the price. Marie might have, before, having lived a comfortable life, but nothing about this new life is comfortable and Danny was not as well-off as he had let people assume.

"Beggars can't be choosers," he tells her when she balks at the idea of being paid four dollars an hour for work that will make her tired down to her bones. "If you don't take what you can get, you won't get a thing. Arguing draws attention, and you can't risk that. You're a missing person and still a minor, remember? Keep your hood up and your head down. Don't push."

Four dollars an hour suddenly seems very reasonable when her employers offer her breakfast, lunch, and no questions asked. She can survive on two meals a day – before now, she has been surviving on less. She saves her pittance of a salary and spends only on necessities. A box of pads, firstly, followed by a new toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. All these things suddenly seem like beautiful luxuries, but she still has money left over and she saves that with the intention of getting some thicker socks and a warmer shirt. Hopefully a turtleneck, if she can find one. A turtleneck with so much neck that she can pull it up over her face. Oh yeah.

"Sexy."

Shut up.

The work is hard. It's different every day, if you care for the details of what they're moving and where to, but Marie doesn't. She picks up and carries and drags and heaves and pitches. The cold cracks her skin and the weight makes aches in her bones and the lack of a warm place to sleep makes all of those pains spread to the rest of her body. Her hands grow strong and serve her well, but under her dainty opera gloves, they blister with a vengeance.

"It's time to leave," Danny says one day.

Marie accepts this, but still asks, Why?

" She's looking at you weird."

Who?

" The boss's wife."

So?

" Do you want her to call the CPS?"

… No.

So she leaves with a wad of hard-earned money tucked into her bra and a new turtleneck protecting her from the cold. She slings her pack over her shoulder, puts her hood up, and marches into the dark, cold night like some mysterious heroine from a movie. Which she's totally not, because mysterious heroines shouldn't have to sleep under pine trees, and she totally does sleep under a pine tree.

Honestly, she's not sad to leave it behind. Having two meals a day and an inflow of cash was good, but her hands and back were being ruined. Now she sleeps in the most comfortable places she can find, recovering, feeling the ember-hot ache in her back finally retreat until she feels only the occasional twinge of pain. The blisters heal, too, but she has such strange-looking scars that she thinks might be permanent.

In the next town, she doesn't look for work or a place to spend the night. After learning how comfortable one can make a pine tree, she won't pay for a hotel. Not now, not ever. Not while things are the way they are, and who knows how long this will last?

With that thought, she wonders if the rest of her life will be this way. She didn't finish school. How will she ever get a job that isn't something that will break her body and dull her mind all over again? The thought makes her heart weep in near-despair.

"Hey!" Danny barks. "Stop it. You're gonna fight, got that? You're gonna fight this life. You're gonna last until you're too old for them to drag back to your parents or put in a foster home and then you're gonna get yourself back together and live, you got that?"

Inspiring, Marie thinks dryly, but she takes the words to heart. This doesn't have to last forever if she doesn't let it.

She crosses the Canadian border into the province of Alberta. It's even colder. Her coverings are even less noticeable. She's even less likely to be recognized. She's in another country, after all. Her eighteenth birthday is four months away. She has lasted a whole five months – surely, she can last another four?

"Yes, you can," Danny tells her. It's not encouragement. It's a fact.

My own personal cheerleader, arent'cha, sugah?

Another town. She gets into a fight with a man who gets too handsy. She punches him out of pure instinct and panic and immediately regrets it when pain lances up her whole arm. Danny tells her to elbow him in the face, and she does, and while he's disoriented with a bleeding nose (blood spatter and gts on her face; on her clothes), she knees him in the crotch, downing him long enough for her to get away.

She runs and doesn't look back. When she finally stops to rest, she cries over swollen knuckles, but she's learned another lesson and had another first. First fight, first blood drawn, first desperate scramble to live. Not her first man downed, but that's different, she tells herself, and Danny agrees. It's a memory that stays with her and occasionally makes her shudder in disgust when she thinks of his hand traveling up her thigh, but she knows, now.

Don't let them take an inch, not even an inch. Beat them down if they try. I am strong.

Another town. There's work with less heavy-lifting but no free meals provided. Marie gets a protein-heavy breakfast at the local diner on some mornings and goes without on others, but it gets her through the worst of it without making her gut grumble too much. She can live with that. What she really wants, and needs, is a bath. She notices the smell – she hasn't bathed in a while and her period can make it worse on top of just plain unsanitary and she knows that other people have noticed because sometimes they–

"So what are you gonna do about it?" Danny asks. "This ain't a matter of pride, honey-buns. It's not healthy to live like this. You're gonna get sick, gonna get an infection, and have fun with that."

The answer is obvious and not something she wants to think about, but she has to do it. She has to. Her jaunts into the beautiful privacy of the locked restrooms in gas stations have given her enough time to scrub her face and her scalp, but her bloody underwear? No, sir.

Danny gives her privacy to deal with such things, but he asks questions. How a disembodied voice has the thought-process to ask questions, Marie isn't sure, but she awkwardly answers questions about how her uterus works and how her period feels and female inner anatomy in general. She had gotten in A in Sex Ed. because she didn't want to be ignorant of herself, after all.

The answer to her problems is a river. A really, really cold river, where she needs to wash both herself and her clothes, because no one is going to just let her into their house to use their shower.

Clothes first, she decides, and Danny agrees even though he's sort of in this I'm-not-paying-attention-to-what-you're-doing-don't-mind-me limbo in the back of her brain. If she can get all of her clothes washed, then maybe they'll be at least half-dry by time she's done washing, so she won't have to stand naked in the cold, waiting for her clothes to dry.

She smartly starts a fire and makes a sort of lean-to to hang her clothes on when she's finished washing them.

She cleans her coat first with the hopes that it will be dry enough to put right back on when she is done. The freezing chill of running water numbs her hands, but she scrubs vigorously. It's not even laundry soap that she uses – it's a pale green block of Irish Spring body soap. But it smells like laundry soap and the strength of it makes her skin tingle, or maybe it's just the feeling of being clean again that seems so strange.

"Fast, fast," Danny urges.

I know, I know.

When the coat is hung up as close to the fire as she dares to let it be, she washes her first set of clothes, and then strips naked to wash the second set. Nakedness, or, perhaps, the blunt exposure of it, makes her scarred hands fly to work even faster than before. The vulnerability and danger of her bare skin is a paradox that makes her want to crawl right out of that very skin. When the clothes are fully rinsed clean of soap, she doesn't bother hanging them up on the lean-to. She just flings them aside and forces herself into the river.

The water is so cold that it knocks the breath out of her. Her muscles lock but she makes herself move, shaking so hard that she almost drops the soap several times, but she manages. She washes herself thoroughly, scrubbing hard and digging her nails into her skin to scrape the filth away until she accidently makes herself bleed where the skin is thin, but she can't even feel it, so she keeps scrubbing and soaping and scrubbing and scratching until she has raw, red, stinging patches that bleed. She shaves her underarms with the single disposable razor that she bought to be rid of the uncomfortable growth there and to stop the hair from gathering sweat and odor. Her shaking hands make a mess of it, slicing fragile skin, but she can't care less.

It's so cold.

" I know, I know."

She's crying when she achingly pulls herself out of the water. She shakes herself off, batting at her pained skin with numb hands in an effort to beat the water away before she runs, wobbling all the way, to her barely-dry coat and the fire. She pulls the coat over herself and sidles up next to the fire, sobbing as she does and not thinking any coherent thought, aware of nothing more than the cold and Danny's voice.

Getting dressed when her clothes are finally dry is both painful and relieving, like tearing away a scab. She does it, though, and a fresh pad in clean underwear is almost beautiful enough to make her cry again.

" Makes me wanna cry, too."

Shut up, Danny.

The next day, she searches for anyone to give her a ride into Laughlin City. Without the smell, after all, she is easier to talk to, and her cleanliness makes her more appealing. She is young and clean and very polite and her accent is soothing. No one will disdain of her for any of the reasons they did before.

She catches her reflection in a puddle and is startled by how lean and hungry she looks, how dangerous the lines of her face seem without all the baby fat to soften her, Dark eyes, once wide and far too expression, are now hard and glittering with intelligence (all this from Danny, really?). She neither mourns the passing of her angelic softness nor does she celebrate in how severely adult she has come to appear in such a short time. She only hopes that the hardness of her eyes doesn't cause people to turn her away.

Someone does allow her a ride. A truck-driver. What he's trucking, Marie doesn't care and doesn't ask. She's learned better. No one likes someone else poking around in their business. She is polite and friendly and completely, utterly unobtrusive.

After ten minutes into the drive, though, Marie is tense from the man's side-long glances. She wonders if this will be her second fight. She wonders how she will manage it in a moving truck. They can't fight in this space, she decides, not without driving into a ditch. But if he pulls over anywhere but at a gas station, she's going to bolt (Danny was in track and she didn't know that before he was a voice in her head).

But she doesn't have to.

"You're the Rogue, eh?" he asks when he realizes that she's noticed that he's been watching her.

"The what?" she asks.

"The Rogue," he says again. "The girl. The fightin' girl. North-runner. Rumors 'bout you from Helena t' Red Deer."

"So much for not drawing attention to yourself," Danny grumbles, but he sounds as pleased and as proud as a disembodied voice can.

Marie, though, doesn't think to panic about being noticed. If she's so well-known already and no one has reported her, it probably doesn't matter. She can still lay low for another few months anyway, right? But she still has to know: "Why?"

"Lots of things." The trucker shrugs his hulk of a body and grunts. "Lots of kids run away. Most of 'em don't last like you have. They give up. Most of 'em ain't tough li'l scrappers like you, neither. Man you downed in Cardston, he was a rapist. They caught him because-a you. Caught the whole thing on camera, him tryin'ta hurt you and you fightin' 'im off n'all."

"News must travel faster n'I do. I've never been as far north as Red Deer." She doesn't even know where Red Deer is, actually, only that she's never been there, so it's probably farther north than she's been. Marie doesn't know how to react to what she's been told, either, so she doesn't react at all, really. She just watches the scenery fly past her window, noting how there seems to be more snow with every mile they make north. "Just Laughlin's fine, for now."

"So you are the Rogue."

Marie thinks of her scarred hands and scrubbed-raw body. She thinks of her wild, dark reflection in an icy puddle. She thinks of her chilled bones under taut muscle. She thinks of pale skin bitten by the wind. She thinks of nights spent in the dark wild, under trees, with the sounds of animals echoing in her ears. She thinks of her swollen hand and pounding heart after a man touched her, dared to tough her–

None of this fits into the world of the naïve southern belle named Marie. Marie was soft and sweet and ignorant. Marie could never live like this. Marie would have died on the road in a week.

Therefore, she must not be Marie.

"Yeah." Rogue smirks at her own reflection in the rearview mirror. Her eyes, that had so startled her before, seem so right now. So rightly fierce. "Yeah, sugah, I'm Rogue."

Chapter Text

It's a long ride with plenty of stops along the way. Rogue knows the rule about pit-stops: If you need to go to the restroom, go. If you don't need to go to the restroom, go anyway. Try to grab some food if you can, but if you can't, be prepared to have an empty belly for however long it takes to get to the next stop. And that's how it goes for a full day of frozen terrain. She stares out the window and wonders what she was thinking when she told Danny –Real Life Danny, not Danny In Her Head, whatever the differences between them may be– that this would be an adventure. She's a Mississippi girl, a child from a land of warm and green. What had made this so attractive? What about Anchorage, Alaska had called for her? She isn't even halfway there, and when she gets there, what will happen? Sleeping on the ground here is barely tolerable, but it is tolerable. Sleeping on the ground where the blizzards can drop twenty feet of snow on her is going to kill her.

This was a really dumb idea, Rogue thinks. But, she's doing it. Whatever it is calling her to go north has not yet gone quiet. Besides, by time she gets to Alaska, she might be eighteen, and maybe she'll have earned herself enough money to buy a plane ticket home, if going home is even an option by then. She'll have had her adventure before graduating high school, anyway. Then she'll have a few more 'adventures' before she can find a place that won't make her want to crawl out of her skin. Maybe that place will be Alaska. After all, no one looks at her funny for being covered from head to toe, here. Can't get away with that in Mississippi.

When the truck stops, she gets out without caring where they are, but then she sees the sign and corners of her lips curl downwards.

"This is Laughlin City?" she asks. That's was the frost-covered sign says.

The trucker nods. "Yeah. Not much, is it?"

"No."

Aw, this ain't gonna work, she thinks. A giggle bubbles up in her throat and turns into an amused snort. Laughlin City is laughable.

"Ha."

Shut up.

"You made a pun. Kind of."

No.

But it isn't a surprise. She's been in big towns (though never for long), and little hollowed-out scrapes on the side of the road that dared to call themselves towns, but Laughlin City is just sad. It's not an actual city, that's for sure, even if it's not as bad as some of those hovel-collections she's stayed in. It's a close-nit collection of barn-houses and crumbling cement and bent-over light-poles, dusted with seven inches and counting of powdery snow and drawn through with narrow, truck-run streets. That's fine. She's spent weeks in worse conditions.

The problem with Laughlin is not that it's small. The problem is that it's small and crowded.

There might be more to it than she can see. Danny's taught her to look for the things that can't be seen in the dark, and it is Rogue alone who knows, with or without Danny, to never judge a book by its cover. But this cover isn't worth taking a chance on. She can't stay in this sardine can of a town. It might be a good place to sleep for a night, but nothing beyond that.

It's a swing and a miss, Danny concludes for her. This town is a dead end. She'll have to keep moving as quickly as possible.

She won't impose on the trucker's hospitality again. She'll find another ride tonight or she'll stay the night, split at sunrise, and walk to wherever's next. There's no sign of a hotel, but Rogue's discovered that there's one place in every town that isn't as comfortable as a hotel, but free and warm and common as dirt.

She heads for the closest bar, and maybe it's the only bar, but it's loud and crowded and that very likely means that she'll be ignored if she falls asleep in a corner, which is all she needs.

"Actually keep your head down, this time," Danny tells her.

Yes, Mom.

"You have a reputation, Marie."

It's R–

"Rogue, I know. It's Rogue. I think it's cool. Very you."

Thanks, Danny.

She stands in the snow, listening to the sounds of raucous drunkards and blunt, bruising punches traded between brawlers. The shuddering clang of metal hitting metal and the chiming crashes of breaking glass. It sounds absolutely wild, worse than any bar she has yet frequented.

But so is she. Not worse than a bar (she likes to think that she's at least a little bit better than a bar, thank you very much), but wild. Unruly and raw, different from Marie. Raw is the best word she can think of. Raw like the coppery tang of her own blood in the freezing pain of a winter river. Raw like her scarred hands and her thin, severe face. The softness of Marie the southern suburban girl has been peeled away and there is nothing left but her, and she is a strange, bone-and-muscle creature with ice in her eyes and a voice ripped hoarse by the cold.

"It's like Shakespeare in Mrs. Ingerman's English class."

What?

"You're tempestuous."

Oh, Danny.

She steps into the bar with that word printed on her brain. Tempestuous.

It's not as bad as it sounds from the outside, really. The fighting is not, in fact, bar-brawling, but a cage fight. There's a tense, hissing, half-drunken crowd between her and the cage, so she doesn't bother to go see, but something in the back of her mind –that has to be a part of her because it's not Danny– whispers that if she could touch one of those fighters, just for a second or two, they would probably never feel it and she might absorb some much-needed fighting skills... but that's not an option. She won't do that. She doesn't dare risk it and she doesn't especially want another voice in her head, no matter how useful Danny has been.

The man behind the bar eyes her warily and she offers him a smile – not a timid, teenage-girl-who-doesn't-know-what-she's-doing-here smile, but a confident one that promises nothing except that she will be civilized and make no trouble. And she makes no plan to cause trouble, either. She is quiet and blending and not to be noticed. Danny has become some cross of a nagging mother and an overzealous drill sergeant in her head, and she takes him seriously. He has told her time and time again to not get noticed, and, this time, she won't. Like stealing fighting skills, drawing attention is not an option.

At least it's warm in here. There's the temptation to take off her gloves and rub her hands together, but she doesn't do it. Obviously.

"You going to order something, sweetheart?" asks the bartender. He's fit, but time still folds and pulls the skin of his face. It's okay. He has a nice face. Maybe a little cranky, but reminiscent of her grandfather in a way that softens his whole appearance in her eyes into something friendlier than it actually is.

She wonders if he would still be so friendly if he knew what she is.

"No," Rogue says. In her head, something bites nastily at being called sweetheart by a stranger, but Danny calms her, saying that she can't get upset about the little things and the man is just being friendly. And not to buy a drink, but Rogue knows better than that. She can't afford it and she doesn't dare even dip her pinky finger in anything alcoholic anyway. Her being drunk is a bad idea, and she doesn't need Danny to tell her that.

There's a pause, an unreadable look, and then: "Want water?"

He's filling up a glass before she can say yay or nay to the offer, and she's grateful. Drinking melted snow just makes her cold, so she... it's just that dehydration is so easy to not notice, when you live like she does. She wakes in the night, thirsty, and goes back to sleep, and tries to muscle through the chill that snow puts in her gut when she drinks it. And she would put up with that, would muscle through it, but she can't afford to lower her core temperature in this kind of weather.

If Rule Number One is 'Always take a bathroom break,' then Rule Number Two is this: Cold is a killer.

She thanks the bartender and guzzles the water down fast enough to make herself sick, but she stomachs it. He refills. She drinks slower. He refills. She nurses this glass, taking sweet sips and savoring it. She makes a note in her head to buy a water bottle wherever she can get one and refill it at ever pit stop so she can have it with her. This business of going a whole day without having a drink that nearly gives her hypothermia has got to end.

"Got that right."

Shush.

"Hey, hey – look."

At what?

"At that."

***

They're playing that recording on the news again. Some muted, grainy security footage of a girl beating up a guy who turned out to be a wanted serial rapist (and one who occasionally dabbled in pedophilia, to boot). The first time he saw it, he had a good chuckle. Not because rapists are funny (uh, no, and he's beat the living daylights out of a few of those sickos over the past fifteen years), but because the girl or woman or whatever on the tape is a fierce little scrapper and there's nothing better than seeing a kitten get the better of a mean ol' dog. Not that she's a kitten –no, but a mountain lion, maybe– but she does get the better of the man. She bashes his nose in, bruising it with her fist and then smashing it with her elbow. The colors of the tape are washed out, but the red spray of blood arcs obviously. And that kick to the crotch is, well, ouch. If it were any other kind of man feeling the brunt of a kick like that, Logan might feel sympathetic.

But it's been about a month since it happened and Logan has seen the tape plenty of times. The only reason he cares to glance at it anymore is because he's heard what they call her – the Rogue. Allegedly, she travels the same cold, sparsely-populated corridor that he usually does, working her way north (they call her North-Runner, too, but 'Rogue' seems more popular). There are truckers and travelers who claim to have met her, to have seen her on the side of the road in passing, to have given her a ride. They say that she is something almost inhuman, like a legendary half-human being of mythology. A wild element taking the form of a woman.

Most of them don't say it so poetically, but a few of the story-tellers do, and Logan does usually keep to his simple pleasures, but he also likes decent imagery. Yes, he reads.

But what he gains from this is not some entertaining fantasy of a modern-day mythical creature from the epics, but the chance that he might meet her in reality. In fact, it seems unlikely that he won't. And he's not much for people, but from what he's heard, he might not mind her.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

He's going his last round of the night with a muscled, head-shaved thug who is probably doing this just to get out some tension and save some money. Logan can't really blame him for that (okay, it's the guy's fault for gambling, but whatever), so he reminds himself not to hit too hard. If he wins this round (he will), he collects the winner-takes-all prize and makes some of the more clever gamblers in this fine establishment a few coins richer. It's been a good night for him, but he's not in the mood to draw it out. He rarely is. He's tired and this place is wreaking havoc on his finer feral senses.

Fight, win, collect, get a drink to warm me over, then go.

A fist flies towards him and he ducks and then lashes out. He had half a mind to let the guy get in a few punches, but he doesn't have the patience to endure hammy fists bouncing off his gut. He hits hard, one, two, three times and the hulk of a man before him is out for the count. There is cheering from those who were smart enough to bet on him and booing from those who were not, and he doesn't care. What they think of him doesn't matter as long as they pay him, and if they don't pay him, then he'll be on his way to try the next place.

He's collecting his winnings when a rich, iron-heavy scent of blood hits his nose. That's not unusual in and of itself – there's plenty of blood in here. A man knocked out a tooth less than ten minutes ago. But it's not fighting blood. That richness, the way usually tangy copper has been dulled and usually understated iron is so heavy, that's the unique mix that reveals it as the blood of a woman's cycle. There's a watery undertone, to, from the blood of raw, weeping wounds. The whole scent is smothered with a cheap disinfectant that he thinks is actually the same stinging, fifty-cents-a-block soap that he uses himself.

Shaking his head, Logan rubs his palm down the arch of his nose and snorts harshly to dispel the smell. The scent of a woman's cycle does weird things to his feral instincts, and he doesn't like the unwanted urges calling him to protect and defend a female who is possibly made vulnerable by her condition.

Not an animal, Logan snaps at his own feral mind. The Wolverine only growls back. Great. Fine. Be that way.

His sharp eyes pierce the heady smoke to search for the woman, and there she is, sitting at the bar with her hood up and her gloved hands cradling a glass of clear water.

She's completely covered and very layered, but he can see her pale profile. She isn't a feral, but she looks it. She looks hungry. Her cheeks are hollow under sharp cheekbones. Her lips are cracked, drawing red, angry lines over the pale fullness of her mouth. There's redness around her nose and eyes, but she doesn't smell sick, exactly. Just unwell. She's been on the road for a long while without a place to settle. He can tell. And the smell of blood, of wounds, sluggishly stains the inside of her clothes. It's not an open cut, but places where skin has been scratched away just deeply enough for blood to weep weakly. Not life-threatening, but probably very uncomfortable for someone who, as far as he can tell, doesn't have a warm place to sleep the pain off. She's surprisingly clean, but so is he, although he's not sure how she manages it.

Poor kid wisps across his mind, just because she smells young and is built young, but she looks... she looks not young. Not old, not young, just existing with a skin-tingling sharpness that makes all age a void concept. Sort of like him, he supposes. He knows that it's... not normal, to not age a day in fifteen years, and who knows how much longer before that. Maybe, if she had some weight around her face and more softness to her features, she would look young, but that's not the case.

What he's thinking when he sits next to her, he doesn't know, but he does it and the smell of blood and stinging soap and river water makes his nose twitch. He gives her sidelong glances, trying to make out her measure, but he realizes that he doesn't have to be so subtle. She's not looking at him at all. Her eyes are glued, completely attentive, to the fuzzy TV mounted on a high corner. The sound of it can't be heard over the bar's dull roar, but he looks and sees what has her so focused. It's the news, replaying that same grainy tape.

Serial Rapist Caught On Tape, the newsfeed blares in red. Logan smirks, and then his smirk drops.

The girl.... He makes another one of those sidelong glances as sees her split, winter-bitten lips press tightly together, likely irritating the wounds there. She needs an ointment or Vaseline or something. Even he doesn't let his lips get like that. But that's not the point, because those ruined lips curl into a slight grimace and her dark diamond eyes glitter with victorious fury.

Oh, Logan thinks. Huh.

It's her. She's the one from the tape. She's the right size and she covers herself the same way and there's that look in her eyes, the look of vicious pride from someone who got backed into a corner and fought their way out by tooth and claw.

Logan takes a deep breath. Wow.

So, this is the Rogue.

It's not– there's not– he should have noticed as soon as he saw her. He's seen that tape on the news so many times. The hood on a cloak that hangs down to her heels, the gloves, the petite figure. Dead giveaways. But she's not what he expected. He had been expecting someone like himself, someone hard and unbending, not this. Not a shattered creature of sharp edges, dragging herself from one day's survival to the next. Even he isn't like that. He's controlled and enclosed within himself. She's cut open and bleeding furious desperation.

It's intimidating. Or, it would be, but she's so small, so it's not intimidating as much as it's...

There are no words that can truly express this, but she seems unreal. Inhuman, and not in the way of a mutant. She's the Rogue, and that may only be the whispers of northern back-and-forth travelers and gossip-heavy small towns where she made temporary den, but she measures up to her reputation. She is the mythical being of modern-day myth. As is he, in his own way, among lesser fighting circles, but not like her.

Her eyes meet his and he looks away, almost embarrassed to be caught staring.

"I'll have a beer," he grumbles to the aging bartender, who nods curtly.

The Rogue's lip twitches slightly in distain. Not a beer-drinker, then. But she schools her expression quickly enough, so he's pretty sure that she doesn't mean to cast any judgment on him. She just doesn't like beer, apparently, and probably not alcohol at all, seeing as she's in a bar and drinking straight water.

Her loss, he thinks with only the mildest sense of humor, accepting a beer and thumbing over the appropriate amount of bills in payment. One drink, then I'm out of here.

***

"He's staring at you."

Who?

"The fighter. They called him the Wolverine."

What kind of name is Wolverine?

"What kind of name is Rogue?"

... Right.

She's pretty sure that he's a mutant. From a distance, she saw him fight, and it was not quite right. Or, it was too good. Too immovably solid under such strong blows, and he came out barely marked. She's not the only one to notice, either. The thug Wolverine beat is grumbling angrily in a corner, obviously miffed. A buddy of his is doing his best to calm the thug down, but it doesn't seem to be working. There's going to be some conflict here.

"Yeah, that's called trouble," Danny says. "Exactly what we agreed to stay out of, remember?"

Yeah, yeah. Keep your britches on. I'll get out of the way.

The Wolverine –does it sound as silly to be called Rogue as it does to call him Wolverine?– sips at his beer and ignores everything behind him. Rogue doesn't know if he's stupid or if his mutation allows him so much security that he doesn't care about what comes at him. Maybe he's invincible.

Nah.

"Okay, but he might be," Danny says. "He'll be fine. You saw him fight. He can take care of himself. Now can we leave?"

Maybe she already knew it before this moment, but now Rogue truly realizes that, as helpful as Danny has been to her, he has no fight in him. He's a runner. He's made her very good at being a runaway, but there's a difference between being a runaway and actually running away from everything.

"I could have told you that. Disappointed in me, Marie?"

No. I knew. It's alright.

Danny was Marie's crush. Not Rogue's.

The Wolverine is a fighter, and, from what she had seen, a force to be reckoned with. He'll be fine. He doesn't look like the kind of man who would appreciate help anyway.

She downs the rest of her water, gets up, and walks out of the bar.

She doesn't look back.

Chapter Text

She's being followed.

It's either a cougar or a man, and Rogue's not sure which is worse. The last man she fought was drunk off his gourd; it was relatively easy to put him down. If this is a man, he's probably not drunk, especially if he's so subtle that she can't tell the difference between him and a coug. She will have to use her powers. This is bad. Then again, it may be a cougar, but this is also problematic. She's not sure if her powers will work on a cougar, and if they don't, she obviously can't fight one off. She's never even seen one before, not with her own two eyes.

It, he, whatever, has been following her ever since she left Laughlin City, less than three days ago. She has not slept, not nearly enough, and her sleep is light, broken up by jolts of fear at the sound of a snapping twig. Sometimes, she goes hours without sight nor sound of her stalker, and there's a relief that maybe he's quit. But then there will be a sign. A noise, a flash of dull but moving color, and she knows that he's there. He never draws nearer or falls behind. He stalks. That is all.

Nothing stalks so intently without reason, not for three days. This is not innocent curiosity.

She needs to find a road, to get out into the open. Here, he hides, but on the road, he cannot come within eight feet of her without revealing himself. If he is a he, that is. But she doesn't know where the next road is, or how long it will be until she finds civilization again. She'll take a creepy, dilapidated, locals-tell-ghost-stories-about-it cabin in the woods at this point, but ever since leaving Laughlin, there has been nothing. Nothing to protect her from her stalker whom may or may not be a cougar.

I should have stayed on the road.

But, no, she likes traveling off-road. And now she's here, getting stalked by a man-cougar-whatever and probably going to killed in a gruesome fashion.

Danny tells her to stay calm, but his presence in her mind doesn't back up his advice. He buzzes fearfully about in her brain, a constant undercurrent of run-hide-do-something as long as it stops this constant waking fear. Danny was a slick git of a city boy; he knows how to work the poker tables in bars and keep his head low in crowds. He can't tell her what to do here.

What's worse, Danny? A man or a cougar?

"A man." Danny says. "A cougar can't follow you forever. A man can."

Alright. So, a man is worse. She can lose the cougar, but a man will follow her wherever she goes.

"He's already killing you."

Rogue shudders. How?

"Didn't you pay attention in history class? It's called persistence hunting. He'll follow you until you collapse of exhaustion. You've hardly slept, right?"

She hasn't really slept these last two nights, no, not without waking up before reaching REM. How long can she keep moving without any real sleep? Another day? Two? She's already exhausted, her legs shaking with the exertion of walking through ankle-deep snow. She doesn't have long. A cougar will give up if she keeps going just a little while longer, but a man won't stop. So, she needs to get rid of him, no matter what he is.

She just needs to get to the road.

***

He was once something else, but he is Now this. What was Before does not matter, because the Now is not the Before, and the Now is the only thing he perceives. Memories, the echoes of the Before, cannot quite be grasped in his mind, and so he does not care.

The Old Man wants the girl. What the Old Man wants, Sabretooth gets. So, Sabretooth must get the girl, and that– that makes the girl prey. This hunting is the old way, something from Before, something that he has kept from Before even though he is not as he was. This is fine, because the Old Man likes it. The Old Man wants him to use it. So he does, and he enjoys it, as much as he enjoys the noise prey makes. The screams. He doesn't know why he enjoys that, but he does, and the Old Man does, sometimes, let him.

She knows he is there. She is clever and quick, not like a deer. Deer are quick, but they are stupid. Even Men are stupid, but she is not quite Man. He is not Man either, and this makes them alike. He's not sure how he feels about that. It shouldn't matter – he has done worse for the Old Man, and... and, in the Before, he did so much worse. This he knows, even if the images will not come to him while he is awake. Only when he sleeps, and those are bad, so bad. The screams are pleasing but the gut-churning feeling that comes with them is not and he often wakes feeling ill. He does not mind blood, no, he rejoices in it. Blood is life. But the blood in his dreams is not life. It is death, and it follows him like a red shadow. He does not want it.

Her legs are shaking. He can see it from so far away. This is good. She will drop soon. He had thought she might last longer, but he knows she has hardly slept, so he can forgive this. The Old Man will be pleased if he can bring the girl back unharmed. Exhaustion isn't really harm. Food and a good night's sleep will have her all better with plenty of time left over for the Old Man's plan. Whatever the plan is... Sabretooth isn't quite sure about that. The Old Man doesn't really explain things to him as much as he talks in Sabretooth's general direction. Which is fine. It's not like he wants to be chummy with the Old Man anyway.

"I want her unharmed," the Old Man had said, and Sabretooth had agreed. It wasn't as if he could disagree, but he might have tried, if only he had realized how difficult the condition of her being unharmed would make this. He can't chase her down without hurting her. He can't fight her. And, unfortunately, he doesn't think she's the fainting type. Hence, the following. Not his usual way of things, but he's done it before, so he knows it works. If he follows for long enough and doesn't let her sleep through the night, she will fall. He's not hurting her if she fells herself.

The Old Man will be pleased, and that means there will be a sort of peace. Temporarily, at least. That is the best Sabretooth can hope for.

A scent had been bothering him, though, ever since he found her. It smells like blood, but wrong. That worries him. He knows that he hasn't hurt her or allowed her to be hurt, but the Old Man might blame it on him anyway. He never has been good at explaining himself. Words are not beyond Sabretooth, but they are a bit... above him. He is not good with them.

He comes closer and closer, using the trees and brush for cover, sniffing out that scent. He needs to know if it is deep, or infected. He has smelt it for days; how can she have gone so long without cleaning it? He doesn't watch when she stops by the river to do... what she does. He has no desire to see her relieve herself, or to bath. Her emaciated, skin-on-bone body makes him feel no temptation, only a sickness in his gut that is just that much more of a motivation to turn his eyes away from her. So, no, he cannot see if she has a wound or if she has bothered to clean it. He only knows that the scent has persisted.

This is the closest he has ever been to her; can she not hear him breathing? A handful of paces and he would be on top of her. He takes a deep inhale and there is blood, still hot from her body and so rich. It's not precious lifeblood, he can tell. Not fresh from a wound, not being pulsed up and out from the heart, not from so deep in her body that it looks black. It's... ah-ha.

She's not a girl. She's a woman. He ought to have noticed that before.

But that makes no difference. The Old Man said he was to take no pleasures or pains from her, and he feels no need to. Her body is not tempting, not as thin and starved and unhealthy as it is, and... she is not like the others, not... frail, despite being a bit broken. She is like him in some distant way, perhaps even more than he is like the Old Man or the Toad. He doesn't crave her screams. He might have, a few days ago, but after watching her, the urge is gone.

He craves the end of this hunt, though. She is tired, but so is he, and the Old Man wanted them both back as quickly as possible. Time is running out.

And the girl! The girl has broken into a run, without warning. Maybe she did hear him breathing, but, no, she is running with purpose, towards–

Towards the road. He can see it from here. He doesn't want her out in the open like that. Anyone could drive by, and they might get caught, and that's something he has neither the time nor the patience to deal with, not to mention that it might give her the chance to escape.

"No," he growls, and he runs after her.

He is much faster than her. His legs are longer. He is caught up with her, tackling her, on top of her, before she can reach the road.

She shrieks – he was right, her screams bring him no satisfaction – and tries to bolt away, but he tackles her into the snow. She flails out an arm and backhands him across the face with bony, silk-covered knuckles, jolting him, but he doesn't let her wriggle free. The shrieking continues, loud and as piercing as a harpy, making him want to get away from her. Suddenly, although he has her pinned, he doesn't know what to do. He's not used to hunting prey without hurting it. The Old Man wants the girl back unharmed, but how? He can't knock her out without hurting her.

This is why he wanted to let her walk herself to exhaustion.

"No!" she snarls at him, as vicious as any Feral, and her gloves are flung off to lie blood-stained in the snow.

There's barely a second for him to smell the bad blood of the raw wounds on her exposed hands before his whole brain begins to crackle.

Her bare, blistered hands have caught his wrists and are biting him, sucking his life from him as surely as a fanged mouth might suck the blood from his veins. He grunts, jerking back, but his movements are hindered by an iciness that frosts over his skin and creeps down to his bones, so still and cold, like death, this is death, he has not died in a long time (he has died before? Yes, many times), he has forgotten the chill of–

Somewhere in the fog of this all-encompassing chill, she rolls them over. He is flat on his back, gasping even though his lungs feel as still and unforgiving as stone, and she is crouched over him, her fingers digging into his immortal years and tearing them free from him. Those fingers, claws, dig into his brain as well, cracking open parts of his mind long gone dormant, sucking greedily at his memories, even the ones from the Before. The claws grab and grab and grab and pull. He feels the transference even as his heartbeat slows; sees the expression of dawning horror on her face even as his vision goes dark.

Her eyes are wide, as if she is innocent. Her raw lips part and he smells blood on her breath.

"What did they do to you?"

***

She's not sure why those words come out of her mouth. They burst forth without any conscience thought behind them as she jerks her hands back from him, gasping and trembling with adrenaline. His skin has gone pale and his veins are a dark purple, almost black, and she's not sure if she's killed him or not. His chest doesn't rise or fall. He looks very... corpse-y.

Rogue can feel her mind shifting to accommodate a sudden download of information. When she did this with Danny, she hadn't noticed (she had been so afraid, too afraid, to really see or feel anything that was not fear), but now she expects it and she can catch little glimpses of memory and emotions. In her head, Danny scrambles wildly out of the way, startled by the rush of it. There's so much more to this... person, than there was to Danny. It's taking longer for the memories to settle. And the person himself, if there is one.

"He's gonna be in my head," realizes Rogue as she stares down at his prone form. He kept his gold-tinged eyes open until the last second, but they're closed now. He looks about as dead as a person can look while their flesh isn't rotting off their bones. "He's gonna be in my head."

"We don't have time for this," Danny says. "Run."

But he might not be dead, Rogue thinks, desperation creeping in from nowhere she understands. He might just be in a coma, like you. What if he's in a coma? We can't just leave him here if he's in a coma. He'll die.

"I think he's already dead."

We don't know that!

"Rogue, run!"

But...

She's so tired. She doesn't want to run. She wants to sleep. The foggy exhaustion slowing her mind suggests she curl up right next to this still-warm corpse and sleep just so. Danny shrieks at the idea, struggling as if he might break free of her and run away on his own; a consciousness fleeing on the wind. He digs up her own faint desire to run and strengthens it, urging her legs to move. She looks at the way the dark veins are fading from under the cougar man's skin and she thinks that, yes, that might mean that he'll live. That he'll wake up. She knows that she pulled a lot from his brain, but did she pull him? Maybe he's still in his head. Maybe Danny's body is in a coma because Danny himself is in her head. Is that how this works? Is she a consciousness-sucker?

"Run now, think later," Danny hisses, and Rogue does what she's told.

She snatches her gloves of from the ground, retrieves her duffel that she had flung aside while attempting to escape, and bolts to the road. The openness of it makes her feel like an exposed wound, but she takes comfort that, here, if the cougar man follows her again, she will see him coming. He can follow her, but he can't get too close without being seen if she stays on the road.

"That fixes everything," Danny says, and Rogue can't quite tell if he's being facetious or not.

"She did the smart thing, frail," whispers another, barely-there voice, and Rogue could have believed that she only imagined it had the hoarse baritone not made her shiver. Danny shivers too; as much as a disembodied voice can shiver.

That second voice doesn't speak again after five minutes, so Rogue puts all thoughts of it out of her mind and walks. She knows she needs to sleep, but she also needs to put as much distance between herself and the cougar man as possible while he's still asleep. If he's still asleep. If it's sleep at all, and not a coma, or death. If it's a coma, he'll die out there without food or water or warmth, and Rogue's gut churns at the idea. It's a terrible way to go. Its would've been better for her to just suck all the life out of him at once than to leave him to rot in the snow like that.

"Shh," the voice rumbles, quiet, quiet, still not quite settled into existence. It must be him. It must be the cougar man. "Keep walking. Walk until the light fades."

"Are you helping me get away from you?" Rogue asks. The cougar man doesn't answer, but she feels his presence become slightly more solid in her head. The memories seem to lay themselves out in a more accessible order, but she can't quite bring herself to look, not after what she saw when she was taking them.

"There's a car coming," Danny says.

Rogue stops short and cocks her head to the side. She can hear it, but only distantly; the rumble and hum of an oncoming vehicle.

"Crap!" Rogue hisses, scrambling across the ice-slick asphalt to hunker down in the snow-choked ditch. She can hear the rumble of the car coming, but it sounds heavy. Probably a truck carrying a heavy load, but not a logging truck. It doesn't sound that big.

"Get ready to run fast," the cougar-man whispers.

"What?"

A memory flickers up. A short and desperate burst of speed, running and jumping onto the flatbed of a rusty red truck, almost falling, pulling someone else up. Little brother almost fell behind, claws digging into metal and holding –

"Okay," Rogue says, breathless from the energy of the memory, "okay! I can do that!"

"Now!"

***

Logan doesn't catch the quick blur of a person in his side-view mirror. It's there and out of sight too quickly, and he's keeping his eyes on the road. He might feel the slightest bump of that person jumping onto the back of his trailer, but he doesn't notice, not on rough roads like these. He might, if the wind is with him, catch the faintest whiff of blood, but that scent has been haunting him for days. He doesn't notice.

He drives on, unaware of his passenger.

Chapter Text

Rogue has never considered herself the faithful sort. She was kind of sure that she believed in God, but she had never really bothered praying except for on special occasions, like Thanksgiving dinner, or Christmas, or those rare occasions when Aunt Cindy took her to church. Thinking back, she wonders if she never bothered with God because her life was so easy. Everything was cushy and she wanted for nothing. Why pray? What for?

Now she wants to survive, every single day, and she sees some appeal in praying.

God, help me, she thinks, and she is too tired to think anything else. She assumes, since God is God, that he knows what she needs and she doesn't have to fill him in on the details.

And please help Jasmine get her grades up on time for graduation, she adds, just in case, because it's probably good to pray for other people. At least, that seems right to her.

The truck rumbles along, its driver seemingly intent on hitting every bump and pothole in the road. Rogue sighs harshly as wind whistles over the tarp she's hidden under. After three days of almost no sleep whatsoever, she's ready to pass out, but she's not sure if she can. Taking in a new mind so suddenly and violently as she did has given her a tingly, upset feeling in her stomach, one that she's not sure will let her sleep. That, and this trailer is highly uncomfortable. And cold.

Because I've never slept in cold, uncomfortable places with an upset stomach before, Rogue think sarcastically, annoyed with her own fussiness. Her eyes droop heavily and she feels a sense of victory. Yes. Sleep.

***

She is him. They are together. He is Victor.

War is in his bones and in his blood, shaking him until his teeth chatter. So much war, so little time, but he and Jimmy have all the time in the world. And, therefore, all the war. It's something he can sink his teeth into and tear until it breaks, which is all he really wants, so he pursues it like a lover.

He is vicious, nothing but claws and fangs and  hate  , ripping through life. He is pain, he is on fire, he is driven by the invisible whip that bites at the backs of his legs. It hurts. Everything hurts. Even Jimmy, good Jimmy, starts to hurt, with those accusing looks asking him why he's let the monster take over. The answer is that it is easier to be a monster than a man, but he can't tell Jimmy that. Jimmy's monster does not rule his mind. Jimmy is still a man. Maybe not the best of man, but a man, all the same, and one who seeks goodness. Victor does not think he was ever like Jimmy, not even as a child. If he was, that is a time forgotten. He lashes out and hits everything as hard as he can, for pain begets pain and he has not the strength to be kind.

Run, boy. Run.

Oh, an execution? How tedious.

A little more war, but on a leash, now. Jimmy goes along with it because Victor doesn't break as many fragile things when he's on a leash. But he still breaks things, and Jimmy has had enough. The good-seeking heart of his is done with Victor's hate. Victor is not brave enough to give up that hate, not with pain still begetting pain in a list on and on like the fathers and sons of the Old Testament, so he stays and Jimmy goes and the invisible collar around his neck tightens with promises of revenge for that parting blow.

Stryker offers revenge on a platter. He also offers war. This is a suitable offering that Victor takes betwixt his fangs like delicacies before ripping them to pieces and consuming them and demanding more, more, more. More to feed the pain. More to feed the fires of hate that are burning him hollow. If he feeds the fire, then it will not die, and if the fire is alive, then he is not quite hollow. He would rather be full of the fire that emptied him than be empty without it.

So the tasks are laid before him like the trials of Hercules. He rips through them with vigor.

Kidnappings, they're just  children  , even younger than her. He didn't hurt any of them but he wanted to, wanted them to feel what he felt, wanted them to scream like his head was always screaming for what he had done and what had been done to him. And the woman. She is beautiful and a liar and her touch is hypnotism. He hates her because Jimmy loves her. Loves her enough to stay for her. Jimmy didn't love him enough to stay.

It can be argued that  he  didn't love  Jimmy  enough to  follow  , but he prefers not to think about paths not taken. He's not that kind of thinker.

She screams. He likes it. Some nearly-dead part of him is sickened by the sound.

It's all working out great, from his point of view. Until it's not.

It all falls down around his head. Brother turning on brother, master turning on dog, dog turning on master, humans turning on mutants. He is so confused. He can't remember the last time he cared about right or wrong, but he tries so hard, just for a moment, to see the difference.

He sees.

He fights by his brother's side, and in the confusion, he is lost. He loses Jimmy again. He doesn't think Jimmy is dead, but when the dust settles, he cannot find his brother. He finds the woman with silver eyes, dead and beautiful like a broken bird in the ruins, but he does not find his brother. He does not find anyone.

But the man finds him.

It's years later when it happens, but Stryker finds him. Angry, angry Stryker is full of hate. Victor knows that. Stryker reeks of hate and always has. But now Stryker takes that hate out on Victor, and Victor lets him.

There's so much pain. Dark places. Needles, bright lights, surgical masks, cold tables, hecan'tbreathethereisnoairinthishellhecan'tbreatheplease, bare skin, scalpels splitting open flesh again and again and again andagainandagainandagainandagain, they shove a tube down his throat and sink him down into the water, intothedarkwaterwater water  –

***

Logan stares at the tiny figure curled up on the back of his trailer and isn't sure what to do with himself, or with her, or with the tarp still clenched in his fist.

He had parked his truck on the side of the road, nine miles outside of Red Deer, planning to get some sleep, when the smell hit him. The smell of another feral.

And that smell led him to this.

The Rogue.

The funny thing is that Logan is very, very sure that the Rogue wasn't a feral just a few days ago. He didn't even know if she was a mutant, although it had seemed like a good possibility at the time. Now, he knows she's a mutant, because that's what ferals are, and she definitely is one. She reeks of it, in fact. So either she's just become a mutant between now and when he saw her at the bar, or she's been a mutant the whole time and her mutant ability is to hide her feral nature.

Wouldn't that be nice, Logan thinks to himself, because there is nothing else to think, other than, what the hell?

And so he says as much.

"What the hell?" he asks her.

He's not sure what that means or what sort of answer he expects from her. She obviously isn't sure either, just staring back at him with those dark diamond eyes.

That's a little creepy, he thinks, because it is. Her eyes are strange and he doesn't want to meet them. The Wolverine demands that he does anyway. He cannot be stared down by her.

He smells fear on her like a heavy blanket. He's not so good at telling emotion by scent, but fear is a rancid note that can't be mistaken for anything else. It turns his stomach, but he doesn't think it's him she's afraid of. The fear is a lingering thing, like the blood of the sores hidden under her clothes, not the gushing stink of an open wound. She was afraid, and it was strong. If she is afraid now, it is nothing compared to what she felt before, and her eyes meet his without hesitation.

I see you, those eyes say. This is the language of animals, and her eyes speak it well. I see you, and I will see if you move to hurt me. I will hurt you back. I will fight.

But there is not only warning in her eyes. There is recognition, as strong as a shock. He thinks, if she was standing, she might reel from him. She remembers him, more than she should. They had been two ships in the night, not even speaking to each other, but she remembers him in her bones. He can see all of this from that strange, inhuman face of hers, and it makes him want to bolt.

He doesn't bolt. Obviously.

He is a grown man.

"Have you been back here since Laughlin?" he asks when what the hell doesn't seem to be working for either of them.

"No," she says, in the same tone of voice that one might say, are you serious?

He doesn't really appreciate that tone of voice.

"Then how the hell did you get on?" he asks, less patiently this time, less for her benefit and more for his own. She doesn't flinch at the slight bite in his voice, her crystal glare as even and as cool as a house cat's.

"I jumped," she says plainly.

"You jumped?" Logan does look away now, looks into the dirt as he scuffs the toe of his boot into it, because he doesn't know what expression his face is making and he doesn't want it to show. "She jumped."

Okay, yeah, sure. She jumped. Of course she jumped. How stupid am I to think she just snuck onto my trailer while it was still parked, like a normal hitchhiking person? Obviously, she jumped.

Before he can respond, she says, "Bye," and hops out of the trailer.

She tugs a filthy black duffel bag after her and shoulders the strap with a wince that makes him hurt. She stares at him for a moment, probably no longer than five seconds, before she turns and starts walking. Not in the direction he was going or the direction he came from, but towards the woods. And that makes sense to him, because she looks like she belongs there, but she also looks like she needs somewhere warm to sleep and a hot meal and a bath. Maybe two baths.

"Hey!" he calls out even as she's climbing over a snow drift towards the woods. "You want a ride?"

She stops and looks back at him. Waits.

"I mean, shotgun," he says. That surprises her; he can tell by the way she lifts one delicate eyebrow in his direction. "Unless you like it in the trailer. That's fine too."

It's really not, but if she doesn't trust him enough to sit inside a small space with him, he doesn't blame her. He doesn't really trust her, either. He has a sort of faith, instead, something like intuition, that tells him that she won't hurt him unless he does something to hurt her. He won't, so she won't. Why would she? She won't even steal. If she was willing to steal, she wouldn't be so skinny.

Or maybe she's just a rotten thief, but he's willing to bet all his money and another hundred he hasn't earned yet on the chance that she's just a good person. Which is insane.

"Alright," she says, hoarse like a wind choked by the violent storm, and she walks with him to the front of the truck.

Well, if with him is five feet away from him, that is. She keeps her distance. He'll consider it with him and call it good.

She's small and skinnier than he's ever seen something that wasn't dead, but she doesn't struggle to lift herself into the cab. That's good, if only because he doesn't think she would let him help her if she needed it. She swings herself up with practiced leverage, though, and he remembers that she's probably gotten a ride from a hundred other truckers before him (well, maybe not a hundred). To her, this is as familiar as opening a door.

He waits until she's settled to drive off. He keeps his eyes on the road, but he catches the cutting glances she keeps tracing over him like a scalpel. He doesn't think she means to be so harsh with her eyes. It's just what the wilderness had made her. A byproduct of that hungry look and the strange crystalline quality of her eyes. He appreciates her silence, but he doesn't like the feeling of eyes like blades on him. It would be better if she would ask questions, or maybe even fall asleep, but he doesn't think she'll fall asleep with him. If she's really a feral (which she is, he can smell it like that fear that still clings to her), then she can probably smell that he's a feral too, which is... not good. Or, less generally, not safe. So, if she's smart, she won't fall asleep in a confined space with him.

She won't fall asleep.

"There's jerky in the glovebox," he finally says. "If you're hungry."

He hears her swallow.

"Thanks," she says, so softly that it's only his enhanced hearing that allows him to be sure she really said it.

"No problem," he says.

She opens the glovebox gingerly, like it might bite her, but Logan realizes it has nothing to do with the glovebox itself. She pulls out the bag of jerky just as carefully, only to shut the glovebox with her knee.

Her hands are hurting, he realizes. Bad.

The dainty opera gloves are tenderly removed with all the care of someone with severe arthritis, and the smell of dried blood and old infection hits Logan like a punch to the nose. The insides of the gloves are mottled with bloodstains, almost as badly as her pale hands are decorated with shiny pink scars and healing blisters. Her fingers are so bony, so thin, and he can see the twitch of every tendon. Her nails are clipped – no, bitten – down to pink nubs.

Aw, Logan thinks, batting his sense of pity away. Between the hands and the lips and the everything, the legendary Rogue is looking more and more like a storm rattling around in a human body. She shouldn't be that scuffed up, not even on winter roads as rough as these.

She rips tough jerky with her white teeth and rips it again, breaking it down to bite-sized pieces that she chews slowly, so slowly, like this nearly-past-its-expiration-date offering is the nectar of the gods. She savors each piece, teeth grinding until there is nothing left to grind and the reflex to swallow food cannot be ignored any longer. Logan almost envies her self-control; he remembers gorging himself like a starved animal after being forced to go without food for longer than two days. He can bet she's gone for longer.

"You can have all of that," he allows her, because he's got the sneaking suspicion that she would leave at least half the bag uneaten out of politeness even if she was starving, which she sort of is.

"Hm," she says, which he assumes is what passes for a thank you when one's mouth is full.

And then she stops. Her hands tremble once, twice, like they're experiencing their own localized seizure, and the look on the Rogue's face is one he's seen before.

He stops the truck on the side of the road and she flings herself into a ditch to vomit.

***

Her muscles lock and she seizes as her gut pushes up all the jerky she just ate. It burns her throat and her mouth and her eyes water. She spits when it stops and presses her face into the snow, only for it to start again. This isn't fair. She should get to eat. She's hungry. And, worse than that, worse than the panic-inducing pain of her body trying to gag up its insides – her hands hurt.

Her hands hurt so bad.

"You'll be fine," Victor assures her, although he doesn't sound assuring as much as he sounds like it's just fact that she'll be fine so she might as well calm down. She appreciates the forthright nature of that, if nothing else.

I'm sick, she tells him, and she doesn't just mean right now I am sick because, look, vomit. She means sick. Her body aches with it, which may be typical of the spasms caused by vomiting, but she feels the wrongness of this. She is sick.

Her stomach is empty and she dry-heaves painfully once, twice, until her body gives out and she slumps into the dirty snow. Snow feels good.

"Yeah, you're sick," Victor finally agrees.

"No kidding," says Danny, who sounds a little sick himself. At least he can't throw up in her brain.

"My hands hurt," she rasps into the filthy snow even as she rubs her face in it.

"My hands hurt too," says Victor.

It's something above the speech level of communication – maybe his tone, maybe the fact that he's in her brain and therefore easier to comprehend – that tells Rogue that he doesn't mean, at this moment, his hands hurt, right now. Other than the fact that he doesn't have any actual hands, she knows that he means this in the past tense. His hands used to hurt.

She clenches her fingers and the throbbing ache radiates all the way up to her shoulders. She barely muffles a moan – or maybe it's a scream, she doesn't even know now – and that effort alone forces her to writhe. She presses her hands into the snow, hoping that the sting of bitter cold might numb her at least a little. It does. Sort of. It's slightly more bearable.

God, help me, she prays, because that is all she can think to do.

The pain increases with a vengeance and a new pain blooms between her ears.

She hears, in some far-off world where there is less pain, the crunching of boots in snow.

"Hey. Hey, hey, easy. Easy, now."

Rogue wants to scream but her body cannot manage the effort of screaming. Her head is being hit again and again, she knows it must be. Her feet join her hands in the painful, throbbing beat that now thrums down her pine and radiates through her muscles.

"It's almost over, it's almost over! I've got you. It's almost over."

It's almost over?

Her eyes open even though she doesn't remember closing them, and the pain doesn't stop, but she looks into the deep, dark woods and sees a face. A green face. It gives her a gummy, dull-toothed grin, and a long, dark tongue lolls out teasingly.

"Run!" cries Victor, and Danny, and VictorSabretoothVictor, and Marie, and every cell in her body.

"Run," she croaks out, because she can't run but the WolverineJimmy can.

The green grin widens and retreats into the underbrush.

"I'm not leavin' ya, kid," the Wolverine says, his hands on her as her whole body shudders. "I'll get you through this."

"Run, Jimmy," says Victor through Rogue's mouth. "Run. The Toad."

"The Toad?"

The face in the woods has disappeared but Victor knows that slimy, algae-foul scent. He knows and they know that Toad is still close, too close.

"Magneto knows I failed," Victor says, jagged and urgent through the pounding of her headache. "He sent the Toad to catch you."

Rogue does not care, though. They pain has taken her down, down, down, and she does not care.

WolverineJimmy is gone with a sudden, violent rush of air, and she hears the horrible sound of a body knocking dully against something stronger and harder, and a jittery cackle rushes after it. She knows it is all happening over her head, but it sounds so far away. Nothing is louder than this pain.

"Good fun," says the Toad, an English accent bending his words. It's not the educated, suave accent of the gentlemen in her mother's old movies, but something that sounds more real. Common, maybe. And there's something not in the accent but in him that seeps through his voice. It's a little rude, like he doesn't care if his voice offends and actually puts a little effort into trying to sound like he thinks you're less interesting than cigarettes. "Ooh, you're not the big mean nasty I thought you'd be. How'd you get away from the kitty-cat, eh?"

She could vomit from the hurt it causes to look up at him. It feels like her eyeballs are about to vibrate out of her skull, but she looks, and she sees a man who can barely pass for human if he tries, and she sees him with Victor's knowing (Victor knows that he's scared, all the time, he can smell it, Sabretooth could always smell the fear and the pain and Toad was and is a hurt little creature). She feels pity and disgust and hurt and sympathy and all those heart-twisting feelings, and they are beaten into her by the thud thud thud of pain in her body. But she doesn't stop looking.

He is on top of Wolverine, purposefully pressing a dislocated shoulder even further out of joint. The WolverineJimmy is out cold, eyelids fluttering but not opening as blood drips down across his face. He'd hit his head against the truck, Rogue realizes, although she doesn't realize it with words. She is beyond words, now, the pain wringing eloquence out of her. She simply sees and comprehends. There is blood on the truck; there is blood on him. And as the blood seeps, Toad seems to enjoy causing pain, even if there isn't a proper reaction. Not from Wolverine, anyway. Toad looks to her, awaiting her reaction as he pulls and presses and ruins. When she does not react, he frowns.

"Not a fun one, then," he comments casually. He lifts off of Wolverine to crouch in the snow. "Y'know, Sabretooth wasn't much of a conversationalist, but he always knew how to make'em scream. I don't really care for the screamin', m'self." He pauses, sighing heavily. "T'be honest, I don't like any of it. Don't know how I got inta this. But I'm not much good for anythin' else, see? And who else would have me, with this face? Mags is the only one. He'll never get what he wants, I don't think, but if he does, then it might be better for the likes a'me. You understand."

Rogue wheezes.

"Yeah, you do."

The Toad's crouch deepens, his knees bending and his weight middling down for momentum, and Rogue knows that look. She's had three cats, all of them hunters. They liked to play with their food. Hunt it a little bit more even though it was already caught. Rogue recognizes this. The Toad is a toad, not a cat, but humans and cats both hunt for sport. All he needs to do now is drag her off, but he won't. He's going to toy with her, because he doesn't know how to do anything else.

"My hands hurt too," Victor says. "Right before."

The Toad leaps for her and she sinks her claws into his throat.

Chapter Text

Jean shakes the whole mansion with the feedback of her nightmare. The children are frightened by it, but this is not the first time this has happened and they know how to usher themselves back into their beds, elder students comforting the greener children. The shaking ceases. Nothing is broken. And so, this shouldn't be so terribly worrying – she's done it before and will, no doubt, do it again. Jean has nightmares regularly.

But this isn't just a nightmare.

When Charles Xavier wakes to Jean's vision still pounding behind his eyes, the shock of it drags the air from his lungs. He can feel the echo sensations of hands on his body, hands that pull and suck the life from him, and eyes of glistening ruby and gold still bore into his skull.

"What did I do?" the phantom asks him, the plaintive hurt of a confused child clear in her voice even as she pulls him out of the shell of his body. He knows it's not happening, he knows that it's only a ghost experience, but he feels more afraid than he has since he was out of the wheelchair. "What did I do wrong?"

"Death," Jean cries into Scott's shirt, twisting with her hands and letting the most inhuman sounds warp her sobs. Her eyes are red with Phoenix fire, and anyone who knows anything about it knows that this is not just a nightmare. Charles does not need to look. "Death."

A thousand possibilities occur to Charles. In Jean's nightmare, he had seen the eyes – eyes like the darkest jewels, crystalline and hungry and intense, with feral gold at their centers. Those eyes were deathly, in a way. He's heard of ferals that could defy death. For a long time, at least, if not permanently. Ferals, like all mutants, lack rules to limit their capabilities. Their powers are as varied and as unpredictable as any other, their feral nature being the only constant. If some ferals could defy death, maybe one could… manipulate it in a different fashion. Bring it forwards instead of put it off. Give or take as well as keep.

But such a mutant should not have sent Jean into hysterics, no matter what she saw them doing, which is why Charles delves into her mind to catch the quickly-fading remnants of the nightmare before it disintegrates. He sees the eyes in a white, drawn-in face, but she is too blurred to identify, as it always is according to the nature of dreams and visions. The phantom that had asked, so desperately, what she did wrong; it's her face. He sees Magneto or someone who looks like him, and a tower, and lights too bright even in his mind, and hundreds of people falling dead under the shadow of the… of the Statue of Liberty.

Ellis Island. The summit.

It was only a few days away. So many world leaders gathered in one place, and Jean had seen their deaths.

"We knew he might try to sabotage it," Scott tells him as they rush down into the underbelly of the mansion to Cerebro. The boy is trying to sound reassuring, but Charles knows the only person Scott is trying to reassure is himself. That's not the most brave thing to do, but Charles sees the fear in Scott's mind and can't blame him. "We were expecting this. We're prepared. And Magneto doesn't know that we know."

"But the girl," Jean says. She has dark shadows under her eyes and her hair is tangled, but she has already agreed to suit up and go after whoever Cerebro helps Charles find. "The girl's part of the plan, I felt it. She's…"

But Jean doesn't know what she was going to say, because the vision has already faded.

Charles Xavier knows all of this and takes comfort in none of it. He knows that they have expected Erik to do something, and they have made themselves ready, but he does not feel prepared. He knows that Jean's vision has given them a step up that Erik doesn't know about, but Charles only feels as if they have fallen behind. And he knows, as well as one can know from a dream, that the girl with death in her eyes is involved, but he doesn't know if she is an enemy or an ally in all of this.

He doesn't tell them any of this. He doesn't want to put any more strain on Jean, and he cannot risk that his own fears might cause Scott to falter. So, instead, he says:

"Magneto cannot be found even with Cerebro, but I can find the girl. Perhaps, if we can find her, some questions will be answered."

And that has to be good enough until they have something more tangible to work with.

Rogue is curled up in a ditch, blood on her hands and splattered all over the front of her coat. Toad lies next to her, shivering in the cold as blood drips steadily from the deep punctures om his throat.

The weird-and-maybe-fortunate-but-maybe-unfortunate part is that Toad isn't dead. He isn't in a coma. His veins didn't turn black under his green skin. She cut into him with her claws and he shrieked and fell. But he's not dead. Rogue knows that he's not dead because she can hear him breathing. Plus, y'know, he's shivering.

She had hardly touched him for a second, maybe two, and it was mostly the desperate dig of claws to keep him from pinning her. She's not even sure if her skin actually touched his skin, because before she could even register what she was doing to him and whatthehellthoseareclaws, he retreated and fell into the snow and stayed there.

"Smart," she spits at him weakly. His eyelids twitch and he curls further into himself, pulling his arms up to shield the exposed back of his neck. Smart, smart, smart.

He doesn't want to die, obviously. His loyalty to Magneto is not, apparently, strong enough to risk getting his throat ripped out by a feral. She gets that. She doesn't quite get why he would join up with a radical human-hater in the first place (okay, she sort of understands the motivation, but not why he would actually do it), but she gets that he's not loyal to the cause. He's just really, really good at it.

But that's not her concern.

Rogue shakily tries and fails to pick herself up off the ground. She can't quite do it. Her two-second attack on Toad (well, defense, technically) has exhausted her, as has her pain. The intensity of emerging claws and feral senses has wrung the energy and strength from her the same way she used to wring water from a washcloth. And, oh, these feral senses. No wonder she had a headache.

There's blood on her hands and on her face and she can practically taste it, the smell is so strong. Everything is stronger now. The sound of the wind in the trees is a dull roar, like the crashing of the ocean, and she can hear the pine needles clacking together in a soft cacophony. Snow feathers by and hisses as it falls to the ground, those tiny crystals of frozen water crashing together. The heat of blood is crackling against the cold of the ground, popping and breaking, and the Toad's easy, shallow breaths might as well be the sighs of a whale. She can hear it all, feel it all, taste the intensity of it on her own breath, and it is almost too much.

Almost.

But Victor is here, and he has felt all of this and more for much longer than she has. Much, much longer. So he stretches through her mind and fine-tunes her senses, nudging and pulling, so that she is not overtaken by her own awareness. She is adjusted in seconds, and even the claws do not feel so terribly alien. The sharper teeth in her mouth do not feel like monstrous replacements, her eyes do not burn with how much clearer and sharper everything appears, and the scent of spilt blood does not twist and toy with her self-control.

"It's okay," she realizes. She breathes deeply and she can taste the world, but it's okay. But, she doesn't have the strength to move, and that's not okay.

She shudders with nausea when she tries to lift her head, so she doesn't try that again. She aches, but only just so. It's the exhaustion keeping her down, not the pain. She can't really move, but she knows that if she could, she would be able to do it without screaming, and she doesn't think she'll be taking that for granted again any time soon. Or at all. Ever. Because ow.

"Try again," Victor urges her. "Don't you dare quit. Get up. You wanna die on your back?"

"Give her a minute to breathe!" Danny snaps, and Rogue can bet that Danny is going to do that a lot. Snap at Victor, that is, because it's becoming rather obvious that those two aren't going to start getting along anytime soon.

"I'm gettin' up," she mutters, silencing the both of them, but she can feel their unease as she rolls onto her belly –oh, good word, she's going to puke in a ditch on the side of the road like a drunk idiot, again– and slowly lifts herself up into an awkward, heels-tucked-and-knees-splayed position.

"C'mon," Victor says. "That's it. Get up."

Rogue rolls her eyes. "I am up."

She looks down at her hands. Her gloves are still in the truck, so her white hands are bare to the world. The wounds there aren't bleeding anymore, which is good. Some of them are even scabbed over. And about time, too. She was starting to think they wouldn't heal. But the sores and cuts and blisters are not what catch her eye, nor is it the fresh blood coating her fingers. It's the claws.

"Stars," she says, echoing her grandmother. "Mercy be! Why, my stars!" the old woman always said, ring-laden hand pressed over her pacemaker-assisted heart. Rogue kinda feels like she imagines her grandmother felt whenever she said her silly not-curses. Because she doesn't have a pacemaker or a husband who died all the way back in WWII or an old house that smells like old people and soap, but she has claws and she's pretty sure that deserves a mercy be or my stars.

She washes her hands in the grit-speckled snow and finds white, polished talons, gently curving from her fingers with dangerous grace. They are not curved enough to be called hooked, nor are they so narrow or sharp that they could be given the description of needle-like. They are treacherously beautiful, looking so delicate and cutting so sharply. They look like porcelain.

Victor and Danny make their own observations through her eyes. Danny seems both curious and appalled at once, like he is surveying something morbidly fascinating. Through him, Rogue remembers horror movies that she never went to see and finds them lacking in the gut-wrenching reality that is true fear. But, finally, he leaves with the sensation of being reluctantly impressed, and Rogue knows that he will voice no complaints at the change (except that these have only made her more conspicuous, and Danny hates that). Victor is more critical, measuring and weighing the usefulness and durability of the new claws before he is satisfied with them. And satisfied, he is.

"Mine are nicer than yours," Rogue brags teasingly, smiling at nothing because she knows that Victor knows that she's smiling. And they are nicer; Sabretooth's talons had been yellowed, jagged things, unkempt and uncared for. They almost looked infected. She can imagine that they hurt.

"You still got 'em from me," Victor reminds her. He is proud; she can feel it. "You're welcome."

Rogue huffs out a soft laugh, but then she remembers something.

Jimmy.

"Damn it," she mutters, struggling to pull her legs out from under herself so that she can at least crawl, if not walk. She immediately discovers that walking is not yet an option unless she wants to keel over and hit her head, so she pulls herself across the cold ground towards Wolverine's prone form. Toad twitches. "Damn it, damn it."

She pulls herself up next to him, gravel scraping under her. There is so much blood in the snow, but it looks like he's stopped bleeding. Which is weird; aren't head wounds supposed to bleed more?

"Not for us," says Victor. ("Not for us," Danny mocks in a snide voice, and Rogue would smack him if he were physically present.)

She follows the blood with her fingers and searches through blood-soaked tresses to find the wound. It should be a cracked-open skull, but it isn't. It's nothing. It's perfectly smooth skin covered in thick, dark hair. The blood is just splashed there, no wound in sight, like a cheat of special effects used in films. She searches again, but there is nothing. When she looked before, blood had been dripping freely, but now it is going cold in stillness. Rogue eases back on her haunches, too cautious to be relieved.

"Wolverine?" she says, shaking his shoulder. "Jimmy?"

"He'll be alright," says Victor.

Well, yes, it looks like he will be, but Rogue still asks, "How do you know?"

" Because he's Jimmy. And now you're like us."

"And what are you like?" she says. She regrets when Victor pushes memories towards the forefront of her mind.

Live die live again live die live again back to back live die live again live die live again, executed at dawn and how did that go? Ha. It tickled.

She looks down at his behest and the landscape of wounds on her hands seal before her eyes.

"Holy–!" Rogue shrieks, jumping back only to land on her rump in the snow.

In her mind, Victor laughs.

All her scars fade to silver-white but don't quite disappear. She reaches up to her face to find her split and stinging lips are smooth and whole. The scrapes and cuts on her body no longer twinge, for they are no longer present. The constant ache in her back and legs lessens and lessens until it sputters out into a stretched feeling, like her whole body has yawned. Rogue moans in relief, slumping back into the snow. She feels better in this moment than she has ever since she left home, and she's on her period.

Not to mention she was writhing in agony a couple minutes ago.

"Neat trick," says Danny, both put off and fascinated in the same way he might be about an overly gory movie. It is a little grotesque, in a weird way, to see open wound heal at super-speed.

"Better than anything you have to offer, frail," Victor gloats, and even Sabretooth purrs with pride.

Rogue basks in the pain relief for a minute – and then two, and three, and five, until she is dozing in the snow. She doesn't feel cold at all. She doesn't know if that's good or bad. Has she bundled herself up so well that she doesn't feel the elements or is there something wrong with her? Going numb is a sign of something bad, she knows, but she's not numb. She just feels very, very comfortable, staring up at a grey sky from the gentle cradle of… a ditch.

Okay. Maybe this isn't the best spot for a nap. But she's tired and she doesn't feel like she's going to throw up anymore, which means that it's naptime now.

A snowflake lands on her lips. She allows it to melt into the crease of her mouth before she swallows it, licking her healed lips. She's so thirsty.

"Hey, kid, don't fall asleep here," Victor tells her.

"Yeah, bad idea," Danny agrees.

Why? Rogue asks.

" Because Toad is only playing dead and Jimmy is still passed out."

Rogue looks over at Toad. He still hasn't moved and – wow, that's a lot of blood. She hadn't thought her claws reached that deep, but he's nothing but red from his collarbone to his jawline and the crystals of snow beneath him are turning to rubies. Playing dead? Right. How much blood can someone lose before they pass out?

"Hey." Rogue drags herself over to Toad, scraping over the pink-streaked snow and gravel. He opens one murky eye to look at her. "How bad?"

"Kitten's got claws," he hisses at her, but it's with a smile, like he's pleased with this development. Which would be in character, she thinks, from what she's seen of him so far. "How bad's it look?"

That's a good question, but all it looks like is blood. His front is drenched with it, so much that she wouldn't be able to find the punctures in his throat if she didn't already know where they were.

"Messy," she informs him.

He sits up slowly, struggling with his own weight, and blood spills down his chest. He makes a sound that is neither a whimper nor a moan but still pathetic and hurt. His eyes squeeze shut against what Rogue imagines is a bad rush of vertigo, so she grabs his shoulder to keep him steady.

"Thanks," he mutters. He looks at her and holds that look, squinting like that might bring her motivations into focus. "Daft chit. Y'should've killed me while I was down."

"I don't need to," she says, wiggling the fingers of her free hand at him. "Poison skin. You touch me for longer than a second, you could die."

He raises one brow. "Izzat what you do? Maggy didn't say."

"Magneto's that mutant terrorist on the news, right?" she says, just for confirmation. She knows because Victor holds nothing back in this, but she needs to know as Toad knows. "I think he was in my history book."

"Yeah, Mag's been around long enough for that," Toad confirms. He looks down at his ruined clothes and hisses out a sigh. "I doubt big man over there has a first aid kit."

"So, the toad guy isn't gonna kill us?" Danny asks. Rogue remembers him using that same tone of voice years ago in their pre-algebra class. Which is fair, because letters in math tend to inspire confusion in seventh-graders.

"Nah," Victor says. "Toad doesn't have the guts. If he thinks you can really hurt him, he'll run."

Rogue thinks this makes her feel better. And he thinks I can hurt him?

" You can , and he knows it."

"Well, isn't that nice," Danny snarks. "Can we calm down, Neanderthal?"

" Excuse me, frail?"

Rogue wonders if the ghosts in her head can kill each other.

"I've got some stuff in my bag," she tells Toad, and before he can comment, she wobbles up to her feet and walks back to the truck in search of her duffel. And, thank-you-new-healing-factor, she doesn't feel even a hint of queasiness.

Rogue had been in a hurry when she packed, but she hadn't been stupid; she knew she might have an accident. The pirated contents of a first aid kit are tucked under her spare bra. She's used up half the gauze already for one thing or another, but there's enough for what she needs to do.

She's not sure if this is safe, or if it's a good idea, or if Toad will stab her in the back the second he gets the chance. Actually, no matter what Victor says, there's a pretty good chance that Toad will turn on her. Not because he's evil or 'the bad guy' or he hates her, but because he's scared and she poses a legitimate danger to him. So, no, helping him isn't safe.

But leaving Sabretooth –Victor, she left Victor– in the woods to possibly-most-likely-die was safe. Leaving Wolverine to fend for himself back in that dingy bar was safe. Never calling home to find out what happened after she left was safe. Never calling Jasmine was safe. Running without thinking had at the time, seemed safe.

She's realizing that she doesn't like how playing it safe makes her feel.

"You helpin' me?" Toad asks incredulously when he sees her coming back with a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in one hand and a roll of gauze in the other.

"Yup."

Rogue sank to her knees beside Toad and began wiping the blood off of his chest with leftover napkins she had found in the truck's glovebox.

He narrows his too-big eyes at her. "Why?"

"Because I can," Rogue says. She pulls out a length of gauze and presses it over the wounds on his neck. "Just let me do this and then you can go to sleep."

He flicks two fingers at her in some distorted, irreverent version of a salute. "Ta, luv."

Rogue snorts, but turns her eyes to the sky when she hears the faint hum of approaching engines. The kind not in a car. It sounds oddly muffled, like someone has stuffed a jet turbine under a massive wad of cotton, but she's pretty sure even a military stealth jet or whatever would be louder to her new and improved ears. Admittedly, she knows next to nothing about planes or engines, but she's pretty sure.

But then Toad asks, "Izzat a jet?" and then a jet basically lands on top of them.

 Scott Summers has seen a lot of too-crazy-to-be-true in his lifetime. He's also been present for a lot of it but not seen it because he's spent an unusual amount of time in a state of temporary blindness. He's seen weird, unbelievable, uncanny things, too many to count, and he's not even that old. He's in his prime. He's got a long way to go and a lot of weird to see.

But this deserves its own section of wall in the Weirdness Hall of Fame.

Three mutants are settled in the dirty, blood-streaked snow alongside a tarp-covered trailer. One, a big guy with blood all over his face, is passed out against the trailer. Another, whom Scott definitely recognizes as one of Magneto's even-less-tasteful-than-the-usual-trash lackeys, has blood all down his front and well-applied bandages on his neck. And the last is a girl, crouched down next to Unnamed Lackey #5, staring him down with the gold-flecked eyes of a feral.

Which, damn, because he's never liked ferals. They're too pushy and generally all-around difficult to deal with. He's okay with Dr. McCoy, but Dr. McCoy isn't even a naturally mutated feral. There's a difference.

Ororo approaches the girl with caution. Not enough caution, though, because the girl bares her teeth –ooh, goody, she's got fangs– and Ororo is smart enough to stop where she is.

"Are you alright?" Ororo asks.

The girl pointedly ignores her, keeping her eyes on Scott. And Scott's no coward, but he kinda wishes Storm could take the heat for five seconds, because this girl, woman, whatever, has the evil eye mastered even better than Jean.

She smiles tiredly at him, but nothing about it seems particularly friendly.

"You're a bit late to the party, sugah."

He wakes up on his back, facing the sky, and this is wrong because he never sleeps on his back; he hasn't since– Before? What? Since–

Jimmy, where are you? Jimmy? Little Brother?

Victor…

There is death in his veins; he can feel it. Death touched him. Death drank from him. Death wormed her way into his head and pulled him out from his own grey matter like string from a roll of yarn, unraveling him, but when he fell back into himself, he did so… naturally. Death did not cruelly stuff him back in the wrong way, not like They did. He is no longer a tangle of Before and Now. He can remember it all. And it hurts, but it's as it should be.

Death did not kill him. Death has purified him.

Chapter Text

Storm's childhood years of prosecution and pick-pocketing pounded in their ugly habits, soldering them with white-hot hatred. She doesn't feel that anymore, not so keenly, but sometimes she looks into the mirror and she sees it. Her powers correlate more often than not with cold, biting things: ice and wind and snow and rain. But when she catches sight of her own reflection and the fire in her eyes is unbearably present, she knows that she is none of those things. She is the fire, an element her powers deny her but her heart holds and allows to burn.

She can't stand it.

"I don't want to feel this way," Storm once confided to the professor. She was still very young then, still with stars in her eyes for the glorious goodness that was Professor Charles Xavier and his safe haven for mutants. She had thought that, with time, he could fix everything. Even her. "I don't like myself when I feel this."

"It's alright," he soothed. It was a lie. Maybe he didn't mean to lie, maybe he believed it with all his too-good heart, but it was a lie. "It won't be this way forever. You'll learn to let go."

That was a lie too. She lets nothing go.

She still thinks that Charles is the best of men. She just doesn't hold much hope for him fixing her or her fire pit of a heart. Someone might. One day. Someone with a different understanding of the universe, someone with different powers or a stronger love or a purer heart. Someone might be able to teach her how to let the hate fall away.

But Mortimer Toynbee, the slimy little miscreant that he is, is not that person.

Storm tries not to let her temper get the better of her when she sees the Toad smile at her. The hate flares, bright and full, at the sight of his cheeky, gummy-mouthed grin, and she so wants to blast him with a piercing wind full of ice or even a lightning bolt. Oh, yes, a lightning bolt. Lightning is good. But he doesn't make an aggressive move towards her, so she keeps that urge in check and refuses to let herself act on her anger.

But then Toad blows a raspberry at her as she lets the creep onto her jet and so she pretends it's nothing more than a completely natural gusty breeze that makes him lose his footing. But Toad knows exactly where that breeze comes from and he's not afraid to shoot her an unimpressed look when he manages to stay upright anyway.

"S'bit petty, wasn't it?" he remarks snidely, grinning. His dull teeth gleam at her. "Thought you lot were supposed t'be all virtuous 'n goodly."

She's tempted to outright knock him over, but he jauntily skips into the jet and doesn't look back at her. She has to count to ten when she sees that he's left a spotty trail of blood behind him.

"Don't let him get to ya," Scott tells her. Easy for him to say. He's never beaten Toad, but he's never been knocked out by the slimeball, either.

Storm expects Toad to try to get back at her for her small burst of petty behavior, but to her infinite surprise, he doesn't. He just sits calmly at the back of the jet with the girl.

Oh, the girl.

The word 'girl' comes to mind only because she is small. Short and slight. And no one can see her body under all those layers, so there's a reasonable chance that she's also girl-shaped, not woman-shaped. Maybe, if she were just a bit taller, or dressed a bit less like a mountain-climbing hobo, she would be more womanly, but as it is, she looks like a shard of glass more than anything else. A shard of glass that might shred them to pieces.

Storm tries to offer her a seat near the front of the plane, but is rebuffed. The girl is silent and still; her presence attracts no more attention than what cannot be helped. Storm stares anyway, even though she has scolded her students time and time again for the same rudeness. It's only that Storm has never seen a female feral before. Admittedly, she hasn't seen many ferals at all. They're not a common phenomenon, which makes them a minority within a minority. But the girl's eyes have a hint of feral gold in them, matched nicely by ivory fangs and claws, and there is no doubt that she is a member of that minority.

Poor girl, Storm thinks, because being a feral is not a fortunate thing.

But the poor girl does not act poor or unfortunate. She lets the Toad lean his head against her shoulder while she keeps a watchful eye on their other passenger – the unconscious man with blood all over his face but no wound to be found. Something about her posture seems protective, even of the Toad. She's guarding the two men. Storm can see that in her eyes and the way her clawed hand curls easily around Toad's shoulder. And Storm knows, because she knows that Toad's loyalty extends solely to the person who gives him the most back for it (certainly not Magneto, not now), that if a fight were to break out, the Toad would fight for the girl.

Considering why they came here, Storm isn't sure if that is better or worse than fighting for Magneto.

"What the hell," he says, because those are, in fact, the calmest words he can muster at this moment. Crasser, coarser language comes to mind, more intense expletives bubble hotly on his tongue, but he's too busy staring at himself to string them together coherently or otherwise.

The filthy restroom in the back of a rickety gas station is uncomfortable. Everything about it, from the dark-stained grout to the buzzing fluorescent lights full of dead flies and whatever the heck that thing is, makes his senses prickle. He doesn't want to be here anymore than he wants to lick the edge of the toilet bowl, but this is the first sign of civilization he's seen since waking up, and he doesn't want to risk walking another five miles in search of civilization just because he turns his nose up at this dump. His pride settles with being disgusted by everything around him and vowing not to touch anything that isn't absolutely necessary.

After waking up in the woods, covered in fresh snow and reeking of someone else's fear, Sabr– Victor had stayed there for a long time, wondering what had happened and why and how and how long it had been since his head was his own. He still isn't sure about any of those things, but he remembers flickers of memories too brief and wild to be understood without context. There was another person who is somehow responsible for his brain being his own again, but that's more confusing than anything. If they helped him, why did they leave him in the middle of nowhere? Where did they go? Did he know them? Did they leave him because they were forced to, and if so, are they looking for him now? Should he be looking for them?

But, of all these questions, the one that stands most important in his mind is the one he finally manages to voice.

"Am I blond?" he asks his very blond reflection.

Hair the color of hay gleams under sickly fluorescents. It looks very… unkempt. He looks very unkempt. When he walked in, the gangly, pimple-faced cashier at the front of the store had looked at him like a rabid lion had walked in instead of a man. Looking at himself now, Victor can see why. He has the very authentic appearance of having just crawled out of the Stone Age. Which isn't too terribly off the mark, considering that he's pretty sure that he's died recently. He knows the feeling of dying, too. He's died before. He doesn't precisely remember the hows and the whys of that, but he knows it happened.

He discovers a very sharp knife in his boot and immediately begins cutting away the offending mane of gold. And it's definitely a mane. Sabretooth, his ass. He looks like a reject lion with this hair. It's matted and tangled and greasy and Victor finds vegetation from the woods caught up in it, twigs and pine needles and bits of moss, as well as what Victor is pretty sure is blood. And, alright, maybe cleanliness has never been his top priority, especially as a soldier – oh… yes, he was a soldier, he remembers that now – but this is disgusting. Just plain wrong.

The hair falls to the floor in jagged chunks, and Victor breathes a sigh of relief when he finds dark roots underneath. Maybe it'll grow out dark. And it's not that he's vain. He's just sheared his hair to patchy, uneven wisps and it looks awful, so it's certainly not a matter of vanity. But he almost doesn't recognize himself and the sight of that dark hair is familiar to him. His eyes are too dark, his skin too weathered; everything is too, too, too, too. Nothing is right. Almost, in some places, but not quite. And he can't really remember why.

Cold hands.

Victor grunts and braces himself against the sink as the memory hits him.

He is much faster than her. His legs are longer. He is caught up with her, tackling her, on top of her, before she can reach the road.

Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no. This is not – no. He doesn't want to remember this. This is bad. He knows what he – what he used to be like, what he's going to do to this girl because he remembers that he used to do it and it makes him sick–

" No!" she snarls at him, as vicious as any feral, and her gloves are flung off to lie blood-stained in the snow.

He can see her eyes in his head. They are incredibly dark, but reflective. Like dark crystal. She was scared of him in that moment, anybody with sense would be, but she was just as dangerous as him and she knew it. It was not fear that made her eyes turn to blood-brown diamonds. It was danger. She was threatening him. Back off or I ruin you. He knows that look like he knows fear.

There's barely a second for him to smell the bad blood of the raw wounds on her exposed hands before his whole brain begins to crackle.

It hurt. Oh, it hurt.

Her bare, blistered hands have caught his wrists and are biting him, sucking his life from him as surely as a fanged mouth might suck the blood from his veins. He grunts, jerking back, but his movements are hindered by an iciness that frosts over his skin and creeps down to his bones, so still and cold, like death, this is death, he has not died in a long time (he has died before? Yes, many times), he has forgotten the chill of–

Victor turns to the toilet and retches.

Somewhere in the fog of this all-encompassing chill, she rolls them over. He is flat on his back, gasping even though his lungs feel as still and unforgiving as stone, and she is crouched over him, her fingers digging into his immortal years and tearing them free from him. Those fingers, claws, dig into his brain as well, cracking open parts of his mind long gone dormant, sucking greedily at his memories, even the ones from the Before. The claws grab and grab and grab and pull. He feels the transference even as his heartbeat slows; sees the expression of dawning horror on her face even as his vision goes dark.

He has remembered his own death before. Plenty of times. The hows and the whys are sweeping back into accessible brain matter, and bang-bang-bang go all the bullets that have ever pierced him, because he remembers now. It almost always hurts and he almost always remembers, and it's made him sick before. Dying can get ugly. He knows. But this is different. He's never been pulled out of himself before.

Her eyes are wide, as if she is innocent. Her raw lips part and he smells blood on her breath.

Victor shakes so hard that he almost slips. He still has one hand clinging to the side of the sink, his claws cracking the white surface and leaving deep gouges there, but he leans helplessly over the toilet as his gut rolls and he vomits again (well, better to say that he dry-heaves, because he hasn't eaten anything in... a while). He feels like he's been pulled inside out. She pulled him inside out, she did, but then she put him back.

The thought jolts him, but he suddenly knows. Death. He met some incarnation of Death, and she… did this. She killed him so that he could live. When she put him back, she put him back right. She purified him. She cut away the rotting bits, untied all the knots; broke the chains that Stryker put on his brain. Even his body feels… more like his own. She could've just killed him, he's sure. If anyone can kill him, it's probably her. All she would have to do is hold on a little longer than she did. But she didn't. She let him live, and she gave him back his sanity as well.

Victor looks down at his wrists where she grabbed him. There are twin sets of pockmarks there, scars from where her nails dug into his skin. He shouldn't have any scars. Those should have healed by now. Heck, they should have healed before he even woke up.

He examines his face again, looking for the place where he faintly remembers her hitting him. She had backhanded him. Hard. Hard enough to make it hurt. If her bitten nubs of nails had broken his skin, that slap should have left a pretty obvious bruise. It had practically been a punch, really. But there's no bruise on his face, not a single broken blood vessel, and the little white scars on his wrist remain a mystery.

The marks of Death, he muses to himself. He's died so many times, but it's never left a mark before. It's funny, but he doesn't believe in Death being a person. No Grim Reaper or anything like that. But that girl was a sort of Death, he thinks, if there ever was one.

And he's going to find her.

The second they're off the jet, it's a fight.

Not a fistfight or a power fight or anything that comes to blows. There aren't even raised voices. But they land, and the scary feral girl stands up and plants herself firmly between her male companions and the rest of the world, looking more than ready to tell that world to go screw itself if it makes one wrong move.

Well, damn it all to hell in a handbasket, Scott thinks, because he's not taking that on.

"He needs medical care," Ororo soothes, ever the calming influence. Or, she tries to be, just because no one else is up for it. Scott's certainly not the one for that job, not this time, and even if they ask Jean to come out here, mind-readers tend to make people all sorts of nervous, which is the exact opposite of what they need.

"No, he really doesn't," the girl says. That southern accent of hers curls softly through her words, in and out, like it's fading.

Scott has to wonder where she comes from, and how long she's been on the road. And she's obviously been on the road. She reeks of… he's not sure what that smell is, actually. Blood. Pine. Something sour. She smells like the grit of the road and icy river water and the sap dripping in the woods and those fights he got into behind his old high school before his mutation came. He hadn't realized those had smells, but he smells it on her. She brings back those memories of getting his face shoved into the concrete and trying to get blood washed out of his shirt before he goes home. It's not a good smell.

She's a runaway. The question is how long she's been running.

"What's your name?" Storm asks. See, that's good socializing. Scott wasn't even thinking about this ticking time bomb's name.

"Rogue," says the time bomb, who is turning out to be a woman of few words. Well, that's just great. The one person who probably has any answers for them has a lead tongue.

"No," Ororo says, and Scott thinks, no-no-no, Storm, no, you've met enough of these kids to know better than that, "your name."

The girl, the woman, the Rogue, whatever, narrows those dark eyes at Storm and says, in a tone that brooks no room for argument, "Rogue." And then, "He doesn't need medicine. He heals."

There's an inference there, in the tone of her voice, that Scott's about ninety-eight percent sure means that this guy isn't just good at bouncing back from injuries as much as it means he heals, quickly and efficiently, at inhuman speeds. Which, as far as Scott's happily limited knowledge of ferals suggests, is very common for ferals. Healing, that is. It's like their compensation for getting such a difficult mutation. Yippee.

"Okay," Scott says, because he's not an idiot.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Storm look at him with surprise. Oh, after all the time she's spent with Dr. McCoy, she doesn't know how ferals can be? How nice for her. Scott knows all too well.

"Okay," he repeats. "We won't do anything without your say-so. You know him and we don't. It's okay."

Rogue gives him a look that he's pretty sure means, damn right. Well, that works out just fine then, doesn't it?

"Can we at least go inside?" Storm asks, as if Storm cares. Her awesome powers are not only awesome, but they have a perk: she doesn't get cold. Or hot. The damp can't give her pneumonia and the heavy summer days can't give her heat-stroke and the snow can't give her frostbite. Which makes sense, considering what her powers are, but Scott sort of wishes that Storm could understand what it's like to have a power that makes life difficult. Like, say, having uncontrollable laser beams coming out of her eyes so that she has to wear clunky headgear every second of every day for the rest of her life, for example.

The Toad whispers something in Rogue's ear and she nods.

"Alright," she says, more to Scott than to Storm, and Scott has the sinking feeling that Ororo isn't in this girl's good books. Which isn't exactly Storm's fault. Storm didn't know any better and Scott has more experience with this particular brand of difficult. But if Rogue is tetchy at Storm, Scott can make an educated guess that she's not going to like Jean. At all.

Which is just… fantastic. Right.

"Can we at least go inside?" the dark lady asks. She has a bit of an accent that Rogue doesn't recognize, and maybe it's not okay to assume that she's from Africa, but? Rogue's pretty sure?

It doesn't matter, really. Maybe this lady is from Africa. Maybe the man is from Middle Earth, who cares? Rogue's just thinking that she's got one passed out guy on a jet, an injured guy on a jet (which is kinda her fault but he's the one who tried to pounce on her like a demented house cat), and two other guys in her head who both want to give their opinions on the situation, and two other people who she doesn't know but she just took a ride from them anyway like the dumbest kid getting into the white van for candy and puppies, and for some reason all these people are looking at her like she's supposed to know what to do.

Which, really, what the hell?

Is there a manual for this? she wonders.

"I doubt it," Danny says. "Ask the frog guy."

The 'frog guy' doesn't need to be asked, as it turns out, because he, too, is ready to give his two cents on the matter. Toad leans over her shoulder and whispers, "Might be nice for 'im t'wake up in a real bed. You too, I'd bet."

Rogue can't remember exactly what a bed feels like. But, yeah, Toad's right. It would be nice. For her and for Jimmy and for him, too. And, good word, a shower, with hot water and soap that doesn't sting her skin and real shampoo and maybe she can get some food. Food not bought at a gas station. That would be… amazing.

"Alright," she says to the man, because it doesn't feel like the woman's really listening to her. Rogue's not going to waste her time talking to a brick wall.

"What do you need?" asks the man with the weirdest sunglasses ever that she's betting aren't sunglasses at all. Did he ever say his name? Did he say, "Hi, I'm Larry," or something? Because Rogue is drawing a blank on him.

Toad shifts at her back.

"Bed, shower, food," Rogue says, hoping she sounds authoritative without coming off as bossy because, hey, he asked.

"Take what you can while you can," mutters Victor.

"That's a given," says the man, offering a nervous but handsome smile. "We'll find, uh… It's a big house. We'll find someplace private for the three of you."

The three. Geez. Like her head wasn't crowded enough, now she's got actual people in the flesh to tote around. Like, like little purse dogs, but bigger and much more dangerous and not nearly so easy. This was not the plan.

Getting Jimmy out of the jet is easier than getting him into it was. Getting him into this… mansion? Is it a mansion or is it just a freaky-big house? How big does a house have to be to be a mansion?

It's a mansion. Whatever. Getting Jimmy into the mansion is a chore because he's really heavy. Why? Rogue doesn't know, Rogue doesn't care, and when they look at her like she's going explain it, Rogue ignores them. (And then Victor informs her that Jimmy is heavy because he has super-strong metal melded to his skeleton, and Rogue decides to just keep her mouth shut.)

They get him into a bed. It's the first bed Rogue has seen in months, and they drop Jimmy onto it like the biggest sack of potatoes ever. It feels almost sacrilegious because the sheets are clean and Jimmy has blood all over him, but so does she and so does Toad, for that matter, and it's not like they have spare clothes on them. She does, but they don't. And, oh, dammit, they just left Logan's truck and trailer on the side of the road back in Canada, didn't they? She's pretty sure they're not in Canada anymore. She'll have to talk to someone about that.

"He can, uh, stay here," the what's-his-name-with-the-weird-glasses man says. "Over there, that door leads to a bathroom that's connected to another bedroom. You can, um, sleep in there. Call out if you need anything; there's always someone around."

And then the door shuts and they're left alone. Sort of. If three people and two voices in her head can ever really be alone, that is. At least one of them is passed out.

"That went well," says Toad, and Rogue can't tell whether or not he's being sarcastic.

"Could've been a lot worse," Rogue agrees, not really caring whether or not he's being sarcastic.

The room is really big. Bigger than a bedroom ought to be, really. What would anybody need this much space for? There's a couch in here, for Pete's sake. But she's glad that there's a couch, because she's not leaving Jimmy to wake up alone in here. That's just asking for someone to die. Toad can sleep in the other room. She'll sleep here and make sure Jimmy doesn't wake up and commit murder.

Rogue walks over to the couch and flops onto it dramatically, groaning.

"This isn't quite the worst day I've ever had," she moans, "But it's in the top five."

Toad giggles (really), and joins her on the couch. He folds his legs up under his body and sort of eases into a very relaxed crouch. Rogue thinks it looks almost frog-like, and she wonders if Toad's done it that way on purpose or if this is just part of his mutation and he can't help it.

"So what's your story, eh?" he asks her, and that is the worst question ever.

Crud, she thinks. Of all the questions. But why not? Maybe if she talks, he will too. Not that she's particularly curious about his villainous backstory, but she feels like she should… know. Because he just hopped on a jet with her even though he was sent to drag her back to Magneto or whoever, and he stuck by her side in that jet which also happened to have two people in it that were enemies of his or Magneto's or whoever, and then he walked straight into the proverbial lion's den and allowed himself to be shoved into a room with her and a guy who he attacked only a few short hours ago.

So, maybe this is all just a matter of everything happening too fast for him to make a decision, but she has the feeling that she's going to be stuck with him for a while, and she wants to know why.

"Well, I got powers, um… a few months ago." It's been too long to believe. It doesn't feel like it's been months. Or maybe it feels like it's been longer. She can't really figure out that personal paradox of sensation. "Put the first boy I ever kissed in a coma, that was fun. Ran away two weeks after that happened because my parents wouldn't even look me in the eye. Um… and now I hear voices."

"Voices?" Toad tilts his head towards her. "You crazy, luv? Y'got schizo-whatsit?"

"No, it's because of my powers." At Toad's questioning look, Rogue taps the side of her head and explains, "The boy I put in a coma? I can hear him in my head."

That definitely throws Toad for a loop, because he sits there blinking at her for almost a solid minute before saying, "Wow."

"Yeah," she agrees, because it is 'wow.' "What about you?"

"Ah, been workin' as Magneto's go-getter for nine… nine? Yeah, nine years now," he tells her. His nose scrunches up as he thinks. "Not a cushy job, lemme tell you. Was wanderin' afore that. Didn't like it. An' afore that, I was a soldier o' sorts."

"A soldier?" That's a surprise. He doesn't strike Rogue as a soldier. He doesn't strike her as somebody who does rules or orders or anything like that, actually.

"I served in the Vietnam War," he says, and that's a much bigger surprise. "That's about when they realized they could use mutants. They kept us separate from the normals. Kept us in these big, uh…" –Toad tries to indicate the measure with his hands and makes a box shape– "crates, sor'of? Yeah. Jus' small enough they could lift it with a chopper. Served in the American forces, though. That was the only place they'd let mutants serve. Couldn't sign up for the military back in England. We couldn't even go in stores in England. Weren't allowed. That's why I came here. They don't like us here much either, but a'least there in't no sign on the door sayin' I can't come in 'cause 'm green."

She squints at him. He doesn't look old enough to have been in Vietnam. Her father served in Vietnam. And Toad is apparently old enough to be her father, but she looks at his face and can't accept it. He looks… twenty-something, maybe thirty-some? Which would have made him a baby during Vietnam, if even that. But if he were old enough to join then, then he's at least… well, he's probably fifty, if not older. Maybe a couple years younger, but no less.

"That's awful," she says, her accent stressing out that w. "But ya don't look like you're..."

"M' fifty-seven," Toad says, knowing what she means. "I know I don't look it. Don't feel it, neither. Feel young. Never felt old in my life, not even when I was so tired I thought I'd give it up. Went t'war an' saw people shred up by bullets, bits and pieces o'us all over, never felt old then. N'y'know what?"

Rogue only looks at him, because she's got the feeling that whatever he's about to tell her, she doesn't know and she doesn't want to. There's been a whole lot of that since she got her powers.

"Out there, with all the bullets flyin' an' the rain comin' down on us, I never could tell the difference between the humans an' the mutants," he confides to her, ever so softly. His eyes go a bit out of focus, like he's looking at something off in the distance, but there is no distance. There's just a wall. "When you're all torn up, y'look the same as everyone else. Saw lotsa corpses, luv. Couldn't tell the difference. Bones was all white and blood was all red. Didn't matter. All died the same."

"Holy cow," says Danny. Victor is silent in a heavy, loud way.

Rogue turns her gaze to the floor, not sure how to respond. Toad's voice had gone all throaty and thick while he was talking, and she's sure that he's – well, maybe not crying, but worked up, anyway. She's never seen a grown man cry.

"I cried," Victor whispers to her. "When I couldn't find Jimmy, I cried. I searched for days, but I couldn't find him."

Rogue can see Victor in her mind as the memory flares to life. He's the Victor from before, not the flaxen beast of a man who attacked her. It's strange to be looking at him like this without his knowing it but it's just a memory and she's not really there as he paces angrily in some unknown alleyway, growling and snarling to himself. She can taste the heat of his rage when he lashes out and actually tears a trashcan in two with his claws, rips it right down the middle and lets stinking trash scatter everywhere, and he kicks that and– and– and–

He sits down on the wet, filthy ground and covers his face with his hands. He digs his claws into his scalp, latches onto the dark curls there and pulls until it hurts, and he cries. Deep, chest-heaving sobs that sound like the strangled moans of a dying animal. It's heavy and ugly and he hates it, hates the weakness, but he can't stop and he doesn't want to because he needs this ugly thing out of him. It's been making a knot in his gut for days and now all he can do is retch it out with these fire-hot tears because it hurts and he hates it and he hates himself because all of this is  his fault  .

If he had just kept himself in line like Jimmy asked him to, Stryker never would have found them.

If he hadn't let the beast take over, he never would have done those things, those awful things, hell, he can still hear the screaming.

If he hadn't let the bloodlust get the best of him, Jimmy wouldn't have looked at him like he was a monster.

If he had just turned his back on Stryker and gone with Jimmy when his brother said no more, he never would have become Stryker's damned pet.

If he had never trusted Stryker, if he had never killed his teammates, if he had never taken the children, if he had, if he had, if he had.

If he had just  tried harder  .

But Jimmy's gone and now he's alone and it's all his fault and he  can't  –

Rogue feels dizzy as she pulls back from the memory, but she knows what to do, now.

She puts her arms around Toad's shoulder and Toad, instead of pulling away from her, turns towards her. She's conscious of how close he is, wary of skin-on-skin contact, but he keeps his hands away from hers and presses his face against the slightly padded shoulder of her coat.

"Magneto liked that I didn't care," he says, voice cracking and muffled against her. "Humans, mutants, I knew the blood an' bones were all the same so I– I– I did whatever he told me t'do t'whoever he said no matta what they were or why and I–"

The words spiral into unintelligible muttering as Rogue clings to him. This – this is not what she had expected. This is not what she had thought she was getting when she helped him. She had thought she was getting a slightly volatile tag-along, not a – this. Not a broken, violent person who is violent because he's never done anything else.

And this is insane, but she's okay with it, which is also insane.

"Holy cow," Danny says again.

She's not sure how long they stay like that, with Toad pretending that he's not crying on her and her pretending that she's not holding him like a mother holding a hurt child. It feels like a long time. It's probably not all that long.

"You daft chit," he finally says, voice hoarse. He swallows so hard the she feels it. "Y'should've killed me while I was down."

"I'm glad I didn't," Rogue tells him. He leans against her so that she can let go and they can both relax, but she keeps one arm around his shoulders. He doesn't shrug her off.

And then they are both very quiet and very still and Rogue realizes this is the first time she's let someone touch her in months.

The voices in her head know better than to interrupt.

Charles heard the jet's return, and he felt the minds of his former students slip back into his telepathic range. Their extra guests come as a surprise to him, however, and he feels a tension in his spine (as far down as he can feel his spine, that is). They were only supposed to bring the girl, but there are three other people on the jet. He doesn't recognize their mental signatures at all.

He doesn't look into their minds. In his younger days, he would have felt no qualms about doing so. In fact, he would have done it out of pure curiosity, forget what he was willing to do for the safety of his students. But Scott and Ororo seemed well. Tense, perhaps, but if there was something truly wrong, they would call for him. So he keeps to his own mind at lets it be, for now. He is no longer the rash young man who invaded people's minds for the simple fun of it. He actually teaches an ethics class, for heaven's sake. To tread where he is unwelcome in such an intimate way without provocation would be hypocritical of him.

But that doesn't mean he's lost that fierce curiosity of his.

Scott, if you could –

Already on my way, Professor.

Less than a minute later, Scott ducks into the office, and Charles feels a distant relief when he finds no sign of a fight on Scott's person.

"Thank you for being quick, Scott," Charles says, referring to both the mission and Scott's timely reporting in. "I noticed you brought a few unexpected passengers."

Scott nods curtly. "It's alright. Just a… slight complication. Nothing we couldn't handle. And you were right about the girl. She's a feral."

Charles raises one eyebrow. "And?"

"She's… I don't know." Scott shrugs in a way that Charles hasn't seen him do since the boy was… well, a boy. "Her name is Rogue. Just Rogue. We barely got that out of her, because she's not a big talker. And, uh… She's got Toad with her."

And that catches Charles's attention, because Toad has been a thorn in the side of his X-Men for almost a decade now, and hearing that he's anywhere near the mansion makes Charles worry. Well, maybe not worry, but certainly on alert. "Mortimer?"

"Yeah, him," Scott sighs, sounding less than pleased. Charles can't precisely blame him, considering the trouble Toad has caused for the team. "He hasn't left her side once since we found them."

Well. That's not really a surprise, not to Charles. He's seen Toad's mind before, even if it was only briefly and in an emergency. He knows Toad's never had any real loyalty to the cause or even to Erik. Toad likes to fight, and he does, because he's good at it, and he does whatever Erik tells him to do, because he's good at that, too. But Erik has become less gentle in his later years, less soft. He never really was soft, but there was a gentleness in him reserved for mutants, especially victimized ones. Toad has certainly been victimized, Charles knows, but he also knows that Erik hasn't offered Toad any of that old gentleness. None of that kind heart. Erik was hardened, but Magneto is… worse.

So, no, this is not really a surprise in that regard. Toad was bound to leave Erik if he thought someone else would do better. The surprise is that he has found someone.

"I thought he might attach himself to someone else if he found a master kinder than Magneto," Charles finally admits. The truth is that, of all the Brotherhood, he's never given much thought to Toad beyond his initial analysis. He's regretting that now. "Toad does not do well on his own; he prefers a guiding hand. If this Rogue suits him better than the Brotherhood has, no doubt he will fight to stay with her."

"I always thought he was loyal to the Brotherhood," says Scott.

"He is loyal to whomever he thinks has the most to offer him, and that is no longer Erik Lensherr."

Which is wholly Erik's fault. Charles can't say he didn't expect that Erik's followers might start turning on him, but it's almost a sad thing to see. No matter how grand Erik's plans might be, it is obvious that Erik's movement is slowly losing traction. Which is good, of course. It's very good. But Charles remembers Erik before he was Magneto, and to see him slipping so feels like some sort of tragedy.

"… That's a good thing, isn't it?" asks Scott. He sounds unsure. Charles finds that he is equally so. Yes, Erik is slipping. But that does not account for Toad's immediate attachment to this Rogue, and the variables are too many to even guess an explanation for it.

"I'm afraid that I don't know," Charles murmurs. "I simply don't know."

Chapter Text

Much like in baseball, but with more terrorism, there is no crying in the Brotherhood of Mutants.

This might be exactly why Toad cries all over the girl.

He doesn't mean to, and he's actually pretty shocked and beyond embarrassed that he did it, but he is used to… harshness. He can't remember, or doesn't want to remember, the last time he had a soft place to land when he went crashing down. Magneto certainly doesn't offer such comforts. He's heard whispers that Magneto used to be an alright sort, when he was younger. Still a human-hating throat-slitter, but alright to his fellow mutants. The Brotherhood was truly a brotherhood, once. It was safe and the people were just trying to do what they thought was best for their own kind in a world that didn't offer any sympathy to the uncanny.

Not anymore. If it was ever true that Mags were kind, which Toad strongly doubts, Toad can't imagine being on the receiving end of that kindness. Mystique, perhaps, but other than her… nah. Still, the rumors fly and Toad resents them, because he joined the Brotherhood hoping that they would help him. He thought he would get back as much as he gave. He thought they would have his back, that they would be helping other mutants; that all of this combined would drown out the sound of gunfire in his ears.

Sometimes he would smell blood and filth and gunpowder and hot iron when there was nothing. And sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, he could see the sticky gleam of shattered bones, only to look and find nothing more than whole, unbroken people. And at night, he would be far, far away, in the rain and the heat and the dust, bullets razing the foliage over his head.

He didn't expect it to stop. It would never stop. He just thought that, among all those mutants who had been used and abused in so many different ways, someone would finally help him.

I was so wrong.

Toad feels angry, so angry, that the person that Mags sent him to drag back like a bounty turns out to be the one person who's been kind to him all this time. And he hurt her. Hurt her friend. And she hurt him back, in self-defense, but then she protected him, and now she's letting him do this. She's letting him cry in her arms and babble incoherently about the nightmares hiding behind his eyes, and he… he sinks into this girl's presence, because she is the first person to bother embracing him in such a very long time that he forgot what it felt like. It feels strange, but like riding a bike, he remembers. He remembers how to relax, how to let himself be held, and it suddenly makes all the tears he's been holding in burn less as he breaks himself open.

He's not sure how long this lasts (probably a solid, humiliating fifteen minutes, knowing how he can cry), but he eventually sits up on his own. It takes an inhuman amount of effort to leave the comfort she offers him, and just as much effort to resist the temptation to sink back into that comfort.

(Maybe later?)

Toad turns his face away from Rogue, not wanting her to see what a mess he is despite her being present for the entirety of his breakdown. His jaw aches from crying and his eyes feel like they've been dragged over by sandpaper, but he's pretty sure his dignity has taken more pain than his impending migraine is about to inflict.

"Sorry," he mutters hoarsely, not looking at Rogue. He roughly wipes his sleeve over his face, and then, finding that unsatisfactory, rubs the heels of his palms against his swollen eyes. Agh, he doesn't think that he's cried like this since he was a child. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Rogue says, soft and understanding and everything he hasn't had in years. It makes him want to cringe as much as it makes him want more. "I really don't mind."

Stop being so damn nice, Toad thinks. Who gave you the right to be this way?

It's going to be her downfall, he deliberates. This girl, with all her unasked-for kindness, is going to get herself killed by being merciful. Not everybody is like him. Not everybody is right on the edge of becoming a loyal dog if she gives them a treat. Someone isn't going to care about kindness. Someone is going to kill this girl, or do their best to, and then what will be left of her.

She's too soft.

It's been a while since anything about her was soft.

She's not going soft, though. She can't afford that. She doesn't know how much progress she's lost, getting on a jet to who-knows-where, but she has the funniest feeling that she's even farther away from Alaska than she was before. Which means that she'll have to start over again, which means – damn it.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

She doesn't want to start over. She doesn't want to walk all those miles all over again. She doesn't want to go the pilgrimage a second time without even finishing it the first time. She just wants to be back where she was without any of this other anything. No Toad, no Sabretooth, no Magneto creeping up behind her. She could do without dealing with Jimmy, too, as nice as he's been. She doesn't want anything to do with whatever their problem is. She just wants to be back on the road and heading northwest. Her feet need to be pointed towards Anchorage.

And, no, this gang of merry misfits isn't invited. Which isn't going to happen, no, it is not happening, because they are not sticking together, because as soon as they get out of this place, Rogue is dumping Toad wherever is most convenient at the soonest possible opportunity and letting Jimmy go on his merry-as-hell way while she's at it because she didn't want either of them around in the first place.

("We're not dumping Jimmy," Victor whispers somewhere, but he knows and she knows that Jimmy probably won't have any interest in sticking with her anyways.)

But she can't dump either of them right this second. They're here because of her, so she's going to get them out. Jimmy will probably be fine on his own as soon as he doesn't have a concussion, but she sensed bad blood between Toad and the leather fetishists, so she at least wants to get him out of firing range, if that's possible. But, for now, she'll just have to deal with them.

Speaking of which, she remembers that Jimmy is still covered in blood. On clean pillows, which are on a clean bed, which is not his or hers but belong to some really weird people who can kick them out anytime they want. And he's getting blood on them.

"Crap," Rogue says.

"What?" asks Toad, giving her a look. It's a little weak because his eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, but she pretends not to notice.

"Blood on everything," Rogue explains, gesturing to Jimmy, and Toad makes an "ah-ha" face.

"Right," he says. He fidgets for a moment, unsure, before saying, "I'll get a towel. I'll get– three towels."

"Thanks."

Toad escapes into the bathroom to find towels while Rogue wrestles Jimmy's boots off of his feet. She notices her hands while she does this – a few days ago, this would have been a painful activity that probably would have busted a few blisters or reopened a healing cut, but there's nothing now. Just smooth skin and sharp claws. There is a little scarring, especially on her palms, but it's silver and dim like stretchmarks. Understated. She would never have noticed if she wasn't looking.

Weird, she thinks, and allows one boot to fall to the floor with a dull thunk.

Jimmy doesn't even twitch at the noise. Rogue would be surprised, but he slept through a trip on a jet and Toad's sobbing, so maybe not. She's not sure if he just isn't easily roused of if serious damage was done to his brain, in which case–

"In which case," Victor speaks up for the first time in a while, "he'll be fine. I've seen him get shot in the head. His brain just spits the bullet back out. He's fine."

It sounds like Victor was trying to assure himself of that more than her, but Rogue isn't about to point that out while his brother was passed out and bloody.

And she's not sure if it's the super-healing tricking her into feeling better than she actually is, but Rogue thinks that her period might be finished (this one has lasted a record seven days. That's a solid week. She feels like she should get an award), which means that she really needs to trash this gross pad that she hasn't changed since… oh, ew, she can't exactly remember. Before Sabretooth attacked her? Ugh. That's actually disgusting and not sanitary in the least and she's probably ruined this pair of undies, which is the last thing she needs. Can the toxic shock thing happen with pads, or is that just tampons?

Is it sad that she doesn't know?

Toad bring the three promised towels and begins to strip away the bloodied pillowcases and shove white towels under Jimmy's head to keep it all from soaking through to the bedsheets.

Rogue's honestly not sure if ruining towels is any better than ruining pillows, but at least they've tried.

When Rogue's wrestled off Jimmy's other boot and even gotten him out of his leather jacket (with Toad's help), she makes her escape.

"Toad, sugah, I really… really need to spend some quality time with my that shower, so…" she trails off, too self-aware to truly be comfortable but too bereft of dignity to be embarrassed.

"Aw, you never talk to me that way," Victor snarks.

Like you would let me.

"Say no more," Toad says, putting his hands up. "I'll just make myself scarce. Ah… there's another room through the bathroom, in't there?"

Ah. Yes. He's right. And a good thing, too, because Jimmy is going to wake up soon, hopefully. If they were alone, this might not be such an issue, but if Jimmy wakes up in a room with Toad, they might kill each other. Which would be bad and totally waste all the effort she's put into making sure nobody killed anybody today. But she needs to pee. And have a shower.

Still. Rogue wishes she could leave a note, or something, for if Jimmy wakes up while she's gone. Nothing complicated, just something along the lines of, Don't kill anybody yet — R.

"Oh, yeah, that would work," says Victor, and Rogue wishes she could smack him.

"I wish I could smack him too," Danny agrees. Sabretooth snarls.

Rogue waits until she hears Toad slamming a door (too loudly and maybe for her benefit even though she's pretty sure her new senses could let her hear a fly crawling on the wall if she focused) before she bolts into the first clean, private bathroom she's seen in months.

"Heaven," she sighs, marveling at the cleanliness of it all and the scent of disinfectant and soap.

"I wish I was physically present to appreciate this," Danny says, sounding like he's just as in awe as she is, which isn't likely, but he's probably just glad she isn't going to be bathing in the icy river again.

"There are so many things I could respond to that with," Victor hisses gleefully at Danny's expense, chuckling with mirth at the well of inappropriate and thankfully untold jokes that he seems to have a collection of.

"Y'all are gonna shut up and go away, now," Rogue says, staring at the white tiled floor. "Because this ain't a show and I won't have an audience."

Danny does not need to be told twice – he knows what's coming and he retreats back into her mind as far as he can go without being lost in her grey matter. Victor lingers for a moment, somehow coming off as both curious and sullenly uninterested before he slinks away.

"Good."

Rogue pushes her jeans and underwear down all at once and gags at what she finds.

The pad is black with old blood. It's bled through her underwear and spotted on the crotch of her jeans. Blood is matted in her hair and smeared at the crooks of her thighs. She itches where she felt nothing before. The smell is foul.

"Oh," Rogue whispers in a sort of horror as she peels the pad from her underwear. A sound is shoved out of her that might be caused by her rolling stomach or possibly by the way her lungs want to rebel against breathing. "Oh, no, no, no-no-no..."

She wraps the pad in toilet paper and throws it into a waste bin.

"Yuck."

Figuring out how to use the shower in someone else's house (or giant mansion, whatever) is always a traumatic event, not all that much unlike getting tossed into the deep end when you don't know how to swim, except worse, because instinct doesn't kick in when it comes to weird knobs and foreign showerheads. In this case, however, the system seems rather straightforward, and Rogue has the water running from the showerhead (no, not running, blasting, because she discovers that the water pressure is adjustable if you turn that little tab up there).

She peels her clothes off while the water warms up. She's suddenly mindful of her claws, having to be careful not to scratch herself. Not that it would matter for more than a few seconds, she discovers, because she does scratch herself, just slightly, and after a single line of blood streaks down over her ribcage, the wound seals, and there is no more blood except for that which is already on her skin.

It's weird. It's so weird. But, hey, she thinks, no more paper cuts.

She realizes somewhere halfway she cannot get her jeans or her disgusting underwear off without also taking her boots off. And then she discovers that trying to take her boots off hurts.

"What the heck," she mutters, struggling with a boot but wincing with every tug. It hurts her toes to pull like this.

"Claws," says Victor in a distant whisper, like he wants to help but doesn't want to intrude on her nakedness or disgust.

"Damn," says Rogue, because she should have thought of this.

Claws on her fingers means claws on her toes. Claws on her toes means her boots aren't going to fit anymore. But her feet were already in her boots when she got those claws, so those claws madethe boots fit.

It takes some maneuvering (partly because this is just awkward and partly because her jeans are halfway down her legs and she doesn't bother pulling them back up), but she manages to pull her foot up at an angle so that she can see where her claws have pierced the toe of the boot from the inside. They haven't poked through, but there is a sharp push on the toe where the shoe has been cut and misshapen.

Rogue digs her pocketknife out of her back pocket and, with a sense of desperation, begins to completely demolish her boots.

The water is running so hot that steam comes from the shower in great wafts. Rogue takes some comfort in that. Hot water is her reward for this mess. She is ruining her boots and doesn't have another pair, but there is hot water. She has bled through a pair of underwear so that they are now not fit for even her to wear, but there is hot water. She reeks and itches with old blood that is stuck in the awkward cracks and crevices of her body, but there is hot water.

She wants to cry, or throw up, or both, but she's thrown up enough for one day (for her whole life), and she doesn't think she has the energy to cry. She really, really doesn't.

She dumps her ruined boots and underwear in the trash. Her jeans are shucked to the floor along with the rest of her not-ruined clothes in a big heap. She stumbles into the shower and almost finds that energy to cry when she feels hot water on her skin.

"Oh," she says. She tilts her head back so that the water massages her scalp. "Ah. Oh my– holy– ugh."

"It's a shower, not sex," Victor says with a drawn-out chuckle.

Rogue's lip curls back in disgust.

"Shut up and go away, you pervert," she says. It's said without much venom, probably because she still sort of fighting off the urge to gag and can't muster up much irritation for Victor. "I haven't showered in months. This is the best thing that has ever happened in my entire life."

There's blood running down the drain in a steady stream of pink and brown and she's scrubbing places that she never paid attention to before and her own body looks like it shouldn't be alive and she's trying not to look at the claws on her feet, but it is still the best thing that has ever happened in her entire life.

Entire.

Life.

"This is freaky," she finally says. She's feeling oddly calm, now, and she's wondering if that's shock and she's going to feel it later or if she's already freaked out enough over all of this and she's finally getting to relax.

"It ain't normal, that's for sure," Vistor agrees with her. "But you were never gonna be normal, kid."

Her first reaction is to tell him to not call her a kid, but she's not offended enough to bother. She feels both very young and very old all at once and she can't bring herself to care. He can call her kid, and he's not wrong. He could call her an old hag, and that wouldn't feel wrong either. She feels old. And kind of haggish too, really.

"I'm naked," she settles with. "You're supposed to go away."

Victor grumbles. He retreats, but not too far – Rogue can feel him hovering at the edge of her consciousness, from where he can't see a thing but he has a general feel of what's going on out in the real world. Outside of her own head. She wonders if he feels trapped, or if he feels anything at all.

Rogue bows her head and watches the blood and filth run down the drain. It's beautiful.

Toad hears knocking down the hallway and completely plans to ignore it until he realizes it's the geek squad knocking at the room that the Wolverine is in.

Crap, he thinks, forcing himself up from the bed he had been happily resting on. Why didn't the Brotherhood have fluffy pillows? Was Mags against comfort? Were soft things too human for his royal magnety?

Toad shoves the door open and looks down the hall to find that, yes, indeed, it is the geek squad knocking on the other door. Cyclops and the redhead chick. The weird one. What's her name again?

"Whadda you want?" he snaps at them.

Cyclops turns to face him quickly, with battle-sharp movements that speak of far too much caution for someone who really believes that Toad isn't here to start trouble. Which is smart, Toad supposes. Even if it's the truth and he isn't here to start trouble (unless the little lady tells him too, in which case he will do so with absolute glee), it would be completely naïve to actually believe it so soon. Or at all.

"I would like to speak to… Rogue, please," the weird chick says (Grey, that's her name, it's Dr. Grey!), drawing closer even though it's rather obvious that Stupid Shades would happily stay on the other end of the hall and simply speak in slightly-raised voices from a safe distance. Toad sympathizes, to a degree, because he would like to keep space between them too, but his throat hurts from crying and he doesn't want to lose his voice before the day ends.

"She's washin' the blood off," Toad replies mulishly, with an equally mulish expression. "Takin' a soak. Been a real bad day."

Cyclops makes a face. Or, Toad thinks he does. It's sort of hard to tell with all the headgear, but I'm-really-annoyed-and-I-have-a-stick-up-my-arse is sort of transcendent in that it can be expressed with only half a face.

"And whose fault is that?" Cyclops asks, and yeah, Toad was right. That's definitely an I'm-really-annoyed-and-I-have-a-stick-up-my-arse tone of voice. Dr. Grey also has the look, tempered slightly by a pretty face, which actually seems to make it worse.

"Eh, now, no need for that. I'm bein' hospitable," Toad says, not feeling nearly as offended as he knows he sounds. It's not like he was expecting any different from someone he's beat the living daylights out of before. But, for his own sake more than theirs, he says, "Won't lay a hand on your precious students."

It comes out a little more derisive than he wanted, but he said it, and that's what matters.

Grey doesn't seem to agree with that sentiment, though, because she raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow and says, "Really."

"Yeah." Toad wants to tell the both of them to piss off. He actually wants to tell the whole world to piss off, because it's been a bad day for literally everybody and he doesn't want to deal with any of this, ever, much less today. But instead of telling them to piss off, he says, "Leave her be a bit longer. I'll tell her you asked for her."

And then he shuts the door in their faces, which is almost just as good.