I. The Burial of the Dead
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Bobby takes her to see the memorials, cool fingers laced through hers, skin on skin. The air is already shifting toward fall, but she pushes her sleeves up anyway and savors every brush of vagrant breeze.

They stand in front of the marble markers for a long time, not speaking. She wants to ask him if they'd held a formal funeral for Scott and Jean. (The answer is no; Scott had no family remaining to demand one, and Jean's had arranged a quiet cremation. The entire school had turned out when the X-Men scattered the ashes over the lake two days after Alcatraz; everyone tried to pretend that they didn't need to see the remains of the Phoenix body drifting harmlessly away to sleep easier at night.)

She wants to ask what happened in her absence -- she'd seen Magneto shifting the Golden Gate Bridge on a television at the train station. The Erik in her mind had stirred at the sight. I will show you fear in a handful of dust, he'd whispered as her fellow commuters stopped in their tracks and stared, the buzz of human disbelief rising and falling like the tide. She'd clenched her fists at that, to resist reaching for fragments of metal with a power no longer hers, to keep herself from weeping at the knowledge that there were still some things that couldn't be cured.

She wants to ask what he's thinking, but suspects she won't like the answer. (She's right. He's thinking that he wants to ask why she left without talking to him first, why she hadn't trusted him -- to love her, to be careful enough, to give good advice. He wants to ask if taking the cure had hurt.)

It's easier to stand together silently, close, but not quite touching, long habit and recent events forming an invisible barrier between their bodies. It's safer to hide behind the mundane when she finally does speak.

"So this Warren guy, do you think he's going to stick around?"

Bobby shrugs. "Not as a student. He's starting Yale this fall. But he offered to bankroll salaries and scholarships for the semester while we get the Professor's will sorted out."

She wonders who he means by we. The two of them? Hardly. The school at large? His fellow mutants? Storm, Hank, and Bobby? More likely. She can already see how he's stepping into Cyclops's old position. He's earned his black leather with the X stitched into the collar sometime during her absence.

A full-fledged X-Man with a depowered girlfriend. The residue of John in her mind finds it hilarious.

She lets go of his hand, kneels and traces the letters chiseled into Dr. Grey's memorial. The stone is cool beneath her fingertips. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air, she thinks. Jubilee went through a Plath phase last year, plastering quotations all over her side of the room, and now a fragment of the poem about a woman too adept at dying rises unbidden to the surface of her thoughts.

It's too apt. Her hand falls away.

And Scott -- Mr. Summers. Cyclops. It seems so wrong that the only thing marking all his years at the school -- giving killer exams, singing Springsteen hits in the garage, emerging from the sub-basement with engine grease all over his hands, taking them all to the cleaners at pool -- is a name and an X chiseled into cold marble.

"Have you seen anyone else yet?" Bobby asks from behind her. His shadow shields her from the sunlight, and she shivers.

She twists and looks up at him. "Not yet."

"They'll want to see you." They’ll want to touch you and prove to themselves that the poison is gone from your skin. You'll be their talisman or the focus of their anger, but at least you'll no longer be their fear. (There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge for the hearing of my heart -- It really goes.)

She stands. "How many of them are mad?"

"I don't know."

But she knows he does, knows he's heard all the questions and sifted through all the remarks. Maybe he's being tactful or diplomatic, maybe he's trying to protect her. She doesn't ask.

"I'm ready," she says, trying to smile. But it's a lie. As she takes his hand again and squares her shoulders to face down the school, she knows she's only exchanging one confrontation for another.

 
 II. A Game of Chess
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.

Whenever Dr. McCoy visits, he retrieves the chessboard from the Professor's office and challenges her to a game in the rec room, never caring that she plays on borrowed skill. (Xavier's study still smells like polished wood, old leather, and Earl Grey Tea, though these aromas are now overlaid with the thick dry scent of dust. No one actually uses it these days, but there is an unspoken understanding among the X-Men that this room will never be boxed up and packed away. Bobby enters it every now and then to retrieve or replace important files, Storm waters the plants, and Hank takes out the chessboard, but no one stays inside longer than a few minutes. Rogue's not sure if that makes the office a shrine or a tomb.)

She likes Hank. Out of all the people in her life (Logan included), she feels that he most understands her reasons for taking the cure. The others might accept her actions, might even condone them, but she doesn't think any of them truly knows why she did what she did.

It wasn't just about touch, she wants to tell them. It wasn't out of fear of losing her boyfriend (and look, she's lost him anyway, though to duty and not another woman like she'd always half-expected), it wasn't about love or lust. She knows that everyone expected Bobby and her to hop into the sack after her return and not emerge again for a week; she wonders if anyone would believe her if she told them that the furthest the two of them ever got was French-kissing. She'd been surprised at Bobby's reserve and had wondered -- half-pleased and wholly frustrated -- if he really was just that much of a gentleman. But as the weeks passed, she saw that it was his way of acknowledging the fissure in their relationship. He wasn't going to ask for something she'd resent giving him once everything fell apart.

She's grateful for that now, even as she's learning to resent her own gratitude. She's just so damn tired of feeling thankful that someone could be attracted to her, poison skin and all, tired of knowing that everyone thought Bobby Drake was such a self-sacrificing hero for being with a girl like her.

Her teammates aren't sure what to make of their breakup, and she's not about to set anyone straight if they don't have the courage to just come up and ask. (Logan is the only one who's even come close to doing so. He'd shown up at her door with a case of Molsons and an offer to "gut the Popsicle" the night that she and Bobby broke up. She'd refused the death-threat and the beer and accepted his offer of company. They'd sat on the floor of her bedroom playing poker until she'd finally fallen asleep at three in the morning. She hadn't cried or mentioned the breakup. He hadn't expected her to.)

Besides, what would she say? That Bobby counted her taking the cure as a betrayal? That some part of him would always wonder if he'd driven her to it (and oh, the careful way he'd a kept his distance afterward as though he needed to prove himself), and that some part of him would always blame himself?

Don't give yourself so much credit, she wants to tell him. And has, in more cryptic ways. I did it for me; I wanted this. Her skin had been a cage, and if there was any betrayal to speak of it, it was the one her own body had enacted upon itself.

She sees the way the new students look at her. There's envy in some eyes, envy that she had the choice and took it. There's also anger at her supposed betrayal, anger because they think she caved to a hostile society. She wants to tell them that she'd known it was never going to be simple. That she'd known it when she signed her name across the dotted line and slipped into the paper hospital gown. She'd known when she made the choice to take a train back to Xavier's and the mutant world in which she no longer had a place.

But she stays silent, knowing there's no way of making them understand the moment when the cure had seared through her and the doctor (double-gloved and fully covered) had helped her off the exam table, handed her the follow-up literature, and said, "Congratulations." She lets them make of her what they will.

Hank's fingers are surprisingly dexterous with the slick ivory pieces, and she often finds herself staring at his furred hands. Sometimes she wants to ask him if he'd thought of taking the cure, if being the public face of friendly mutants everywhere had stopped him. (The answer is yes, he did and still does think about it nearly every day. Sometimes for his own sake, sometimes because of his position, and sometimes in scientific terms. Hank, too, knows that things are never as simple as they seem.) But she sees how he avoids sitting too close to Jimmy, for all that he brings video games for the boy every time he drops in at the mansion, so she doesn't ask.

On this particular evening, Hank's got her pieces backed into a literal corner and she's concentrating so hard on the board that her eyes keep crossing. Piotr sits unobserved on the couch, sketching the scene they make -- opponents in appearance as well as chess, hunched over the board beneath a window, the lamplight tinting her white streaks golden. Jubilee and Kitty are unsuccessfully trying to watch an MTV special while Jones complains of boredom and keeps blinking the channel away from them.

She can almost pretend that nothing's changed, except that the chess set is out here, and the fingers idly playing over her knight are bare, and Mr. Summers isn't going to walk through the door and break up the fight over the remote.

And then -- every channel is broadcasting the same news.

"Jesus, Jones," Jubilee says, "will you just stop on one?"

She looks up, game forgotten, as station after station breaks the same message. The cure is failing, has failed.

Hank is watching her, waiting for a reaction. She looks down at the board; the pieces blur. Then, very carefully, she reaches out and tips her king over.

The mansion is just beginning to react to the news when she gets up and walks out.


III. The Fire Sermon
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and a chuckle spread from ear to ear.

He's leaning against the front door, arms crossed and scowling, by the time she reaches the foyer.

She stops in front of him and raises her chin in defiance, waiting for him to ask her if she's running, waiting for him to call her kid. She wonders if they will ever get past this conversation.

"Marie," he says instead.

"You can't stop me," she tells him.

One eyebrow goes up at that, and then the corner of his mouth follows. "Wouldn't dream of trying, darlin'." He pulls the door open before reaching out and taking her hand. "Come on, let's blow this joint."

-----

It's not until later (flying down the back roads of Salem Center at a hundred miles an hour on Scott's bike, her arms around Logan's waist and his broad back shielding her against the wind) that it occurs to her to wonder if Logan hadn't stopped her after all. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, she thinks darkly. But she's not about to protest that she was just going to go for a solitary walk around school grounds, especially not when he pulls up in front of a bar and turns off the ignition.

She follows him inside and looks around. "You sure know how to show a girl a good time," she tells Logan.

The place is a step up from the bar in Laughlin City where they'd met, but just barely. There's a stage and a third-rate band rather than a cage, and the clientele's a lot younger. Bored suburban teenagers out for cheap fun, she suspects. But it means they won't card, and the way she's feeling tonight, she's willing to put up with some drunken football players to get to the beer.

"Pool or drinks?" Logan asks. (It occurs to her that he might have really meant what he said when he called himself her friend.)

"Drinks, please."

He steers her to the bar, one hand low on the small of her back. As he orders, she climbs onto a stool and stares out at the dance floor, her elbows propped back on the counter. The wood is sticky and cool beneath her bare skin.

He passes her a bottle and she lifts it to her lips, not really caring what she's drinking. The glass sweats drops of ice water over her fingers, and she wonders if Bobby's heard the news yet, if he's looking for her. (Why? To comfort her, to offer to take her back?)

Logan's looking at her like he wants her to start talking, but she doesn't have the faintest idea where or how to begin. "Can we dance?" she asks, because she has a feeling that he'll do anything she wants tonight, and dancing will be easier than navigating the nuances of speech. She wants to live in her body for just a little longer, for as long as it will allow her.

He glances at the drunk teenagers bumping and grinding in front of the stage, and even in this dim light she can see his frown. She's about to tell him never mind, it was just a stupid whim when he downs the last of his whiskey and says, "Let's go."

But when they reach the edge of the mass of sweaty bodies, she stops dead, unsure of what to do next. Her face burns and she hopes Logan realizes that when she asked him to dance, she hadn't been asking for this… this sex with clothes on that everyone else is doing.

He takes her hand, palm warm against hers, and pulls her toward him. It takes her about five seconds and his hissed, "Jesus, woman, just follow," to realize that he's waltzing her. Here, in the middle of this classless place with its substandard band and juvenile patrons. She bursts into tears, not sure if she's grieving for him or herself or all the mutants whose dreams were shattered by this day's events.

"Hey," he says, tugging her closer. He smells like leather and cigars, and his thumb against her wet cheeks is gentle. He keeps moving her through the figures of the dance, and she's not sure if she follows so well because he leads skillfully or because there's a part of him in her brain. She doesn't ask how he learned to waltz -- the answer likely lies buried in another life, and if she's not quite ready to face the future tonight, she'd rather not linger on the past either.

No, just to have this moment, with this man. She looks up at him and there's an instant when she wonders if her head feels this light because of the alcohol, if she's only imagining how closely he's holding her, how charged the air between them has become.

Then he bends his head and his mouth finds hers.

(Bobby hadn't kissed like this. He was all eager, inexperienced, teenage male body mixed with a strategist's mind. His kisses were hungry, passionate, but also strangely detached at times, like she was a puzzle to solve or a battle to win, as if her mouth was a maze and he could find the map if he just tried hard enough.)

Logan kisses her as if he has all the time in the world, as if he's inviting her to tell him all her secrets, as if he's driving away her secret fears. He leads her in this, as he led her in dancing, and he tastes like whiskey and possibility. Her lips part beneath his, but he doesn't deepen the kiss like she'd expected. He's taking his time. His hands skim down her back; the touch is leisurely, almost impersonal.

Friendly.

She pulls back, and the movement is so sudden that he can't react before she's out of his arms. He opens his mouth, but she beats him to it (too afraid, perhaps, that he'll apologize, that he'll explain).

"I don't want a pity fuck, Logan," she hisses, before turning on her heel and pushing her way through the crowd, away from him.

He grabs her arm before she can take three steps, spins her around. "Where do you think you're going now?" No apology, no explanation.

"Let me go."

"I've got the keys to Slim's bike, kid. And I'll be damned if I just let you walk out of this backwoods watering hole into the middle of nowhere."

He's got a point. She raises her voice, "Jesus, I'm just going to the bathroom! Why do you have to be like this all the time?"

He glares at her as some of the couples around them look up at this apparent lovers' quarrel. She's willing to bet that if she turns around she'll see the bartender eyeing them suspiciously. He's sizing Logan up, looking her down, and doing the math in his head. Logan's the one who taught her how to fight dirty. He knows what'll happen if he doesn't let her go.

His fingers go slack on her arm. She pulls away.

She pushes through the door marked "Dames" and steadies herself on the least grimy sink. The image that the mirror reflects back looks like something even the cat wouldn't drag in; the flickering fluorescent lights leech the color from her skin, and her eyes look feverish. She turns on the tap and splashes some cold water on her face, trying to ignore the lingering heat between her legs.

When she looks into the mirror again, she realizes that she's not alone.

"Hello, Rogue."

She stares. The woman shakes her black hair away from her face.

"Who are you?"

Her dark lips curve upward in a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "We love what you've done with your hair," she says, in Erik's voice. Mystique might have been "cured," but she hasn't lost some of her uncanny knack for impersonations.

Rogue's fingers twitch, and she finds herself yearning for her powers in a way she'd never thought she would.

Mystique seems to read her thoughts. "I'm not going to hurt you, little girl. My fight's no longer with Charles Xavier's children."

"How--" she stops, unable to imagine why Magneto's right hand woman would ever have accepted the cure. She suddenly understands the news reports about the missing Senator Kelly. "When did this happen?"

"Turned out that I was only a pawn who fancied herself a queen in Erik's game of chess." Mystique's voice turns hard. "Did your little boyfriend ditch you, too, once you weren't 'special' anymore? I noticed you're not here with him tonight."

"You know nothing about Bobby and me."

Mystique lifts one shoulder in a shrug, catlike. "Nor do I particularly care."

"Give me one good reason why I should even be talking to you."

"The cure."

Her breath hitches in her throat. This is a bluff. It has to be. "Why don't you just call the school then? I'm sure Storm would be thrilled to hear from you."

"As if she'd believe anything I have to say without seeing me like this." Mystique waves disdainfully at her human form.

"Believe you about what?"

She laughs deep in her throat. "Are all of you so stupid that you don't realize the government will practically have a mutant registry once our powers return?"

Rogue takes a breath, remembers the chill of the hospital room, remembers the nurse asking her for a history -- when had her mutation manifested? What did it entail? Did she have any siblings? The pieces fall into place.

"Worthington Labs," she says. "They have my… our information. Everyone who went."

"Clever girl." Mystique walks to the door and pulls it open. "Give my regards to Logan."

"Wait!"

She stops and raises an eyebrow.

"What are you going to do?" Rogue asks. "I mean, when your… your power comes back."

Again, that mirthless smile. "Erik Lensherr will have to sleep with one eye open once that day comes." And then she's gone.

Rogue turns back to the mirror and looks herself in the eye. She wonders what it would feel like to be so sure of herself, to know exactly what to do when the cure fails. But she doesn't wish for the same certainty. She's done with unshakeable ideologies.

She leaves the bathroom and finds Logan at the bar. He turns when she taps him on the shoulder, expression closed and eyes wary. They look at each other for a long time before he opens his mouth as if to speak.

She doesn't let him. "Let's go home," she says.


IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.

Her power comes back to her one morning when she's jogging around the lake. She'd been afraid that it'd be sudden, that she wouldn't know, that she'd find out by touching someone.

But instead, she's alone, and it sweeps over her like a wave and she knows it's back because suddenly it feels like her skin's grabbing at everything in its vicinity -- dirt, lake water, air.

She sinks to her knees on the shore. It hurts, and her fingers scrabble against smooth pebbles. She clutches two fistfuls and waits for the flood to subside.

The wind ruffles the dark surface of the lake, and she finds herself wondering if this is what Jean had felt when Alkali Lake broke over her, when her latent telepathy burst its bonds and erased her former self.

When the pain finally passes, she unclenches her fingers one by one and reaches into her pocket for the gloves that she's kept with her since the night she'd heard the news. She pulls them on, her hands feeling clumsy in the fabric.

She thinks she can hear bars closing around her.


V. What the Thunder Said
These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

It's raining when they leave the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology headquarters in Washington. It's real rain and not weather conjured up for cover. It's cold and sharp against their faces, but Storm's too exhausted at the moment to do anything about it and the rest of them are too tired to care.

-----

The mission was an exercise in futility from the start.

"We cannot hope to kill the Hydra," Hank had told them during the briefing, "only to wound it and buy ourselves some time."

"We're going in primarily to find out how much information they have," Storm had said. "We'll collect samples, copy their data, and run analyses here at the mansion. Doug's virus will delete whatever files the DS&T have now, but there are any number of backups in places we can't even guess at.

"Doug will hack into the security systems from the Blackbird and loop the camera feeds. Kitty will be responsible for phasing the team in and running the virus; Logan, you'll cover her if we get split up. We're going in at night, and Doug will warn us about approaching security, but if we run into anything, Bobby, Piotr, and I will be our primary defense. Rogue, you'll help me fly the jet and confirm any samples of the cure that we might find, since Hank isn't coming."

"But I was present when Warren unleashed the virus upon the computers in Worthington Labs."

"Yes, and that time we walked through the front door as VIPs," she'd retorted. "It's too dangerous this time. You have to fight for us out in the daylight, in front of senators and presidents, Henry."

"And leave all the fun of this caper to you?"

"And leave all the if-we-get-caught-we're-majorly-screwed work to us, yes."

They'd laughed, but it had felt like whistling in the dark.

So she found herself co-piloting the X-Jet (so strange, without Cyclops sitting next to her) and breaking into a CIA headquarters two weeks after her powers returned.

Kitty phased them into an empty hallway, and the crackle of Doug's voice in their earpieces (punctuated every now and again by a flurry of clicks as he worked on the computer) led them down two levels without mishap into a corridor lined with office doors, until--

"Shit. Storm, you've got five incoming. Shadowcat, clear to go one level down."

Kitty grabbed Logan and dropped through the floor. The rest of them readied their tranquilizers, and Piotr had just begun to shift into his metal form when the guards rounded the corner.

They drew their guns immediately. "Get on the floor and put your hands where I can see them!" one man yelled.

Bobby kneeled first, hands spread as if to surrender. In the last possible second, he slapped both palms onto the floor and slicked the entire hallway with ice. Piotr took out two of the guards with tranquilizers as they fell; the other three opened fire.

"Take cover!" Storm ordered. Piotr broke down an office door and pushed Rogue and Bobby inside. Storm held her ground in the hallway, her eyes misting over as she conjured up a gust of wind that ripped down the hall and pinned the guards against the far wall. "Iceman!"

Bobby ducked his head out of the doorway, one hand clenching it for support and the other raising his tranquilizer gun to stun two of the guards. Storm's wind ripped the gun out of the remaining man's hand before dying down to nothing. She beckoned to the team as she approached the man, dart gun held at ready.

Bobby tapped his earpiece. "Wolverine, Shadowcat, do you copy?"

"Copy."

"Copy."

"Wolverine, have you located the lab?" Storm asked. They reached the guard lying in a heap on the floor. A trickle of blood runs from his hairline down over his forehead.

Logan's voice crackled in their ears. "Not yet, Storm. Place is a fucking maze."

"Cypher?"

More clicks and then-- "I've got nothing for you, Storm. The lab you're looking for isn't on the official blueprints."

Rogue realized then the advantages of having a telepath on hand as Storm started to question the guard on the whereabouts of the lab. He glared up at them, but remained incredibly closemouthed. One glance would've told him that their guns were only tranqs, and he wasn't about to give into their mutie bad cop routine when he could see that they were there to stun and not kill.

Rogue finally stepped forward. She stripped off one glove and reached out her hand, placing it on the man's cheek.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, before the knowledge flooded into her. She pulled away almost immediately, but there were already more images than the one she'd been seeking. Two little boys snuggling up to their father for a bedtime story; a Little League game on a hot and dry afternoon; a cup of coffee set beside the paper each morning; a brunette in a white wedding dress…

Piotr lowered the unconscious man to the floor. She closed her eyes.

"We have to go down two more floors. I can direct us from there. There shouldn't be more guards," she told them. She didn't say, His name is Tom and his wife is Laura. There's a spot on her neck that drives her crazy when he runs his tongue over it. They have two sons; he tells them they can be anything they want, but he secretly hopes that they'll grow up to play in the major leagues. He'd do anything for his family.

Doug had the lab's security measures disabled by the time they arrived in the right hallway. Kitty phased them through the door into an enormous room. A network of computers was set up in the center of the room, while work stations and freezers lined the walls.

Doug talked Kitty through the computer security codes and she set to work uploading the relevant files to him. The rest of them scoured the lab for specimens of the cure.

"Storm," Bobby called. They all clustered around and peered into the glass case that he indicated.

"Rogue? Do these look like--"

"Yeah." She didn't need a closer look. "This is it, Storm."

Logan sliced a hole into the front panel, and Bobby made quick work of packing ten vials into a cooler.

"Shadowcat?"

"All done, Storm. Just let me run the virus."

"Okay. We're out of here."

Rogue hesitated a moment, looking at the vials stacked in the case. The liquid was a mesmerizing, vibrant blue in the lab's low lights. She glanced at the rest of her team phasing out one by one with Kitty, then reached into the case and took out a vial. She tucked it into the padded front of her uniform before following the others up and out into the rain.

-----


Now she slides into the copilot's seat next to Storm and goes through the takeoff protocol with her leader. The others busy themselves with strapping in. Puddles collect on the floor.

They start the engines, and the Blackbird purrs softly beneath their feet. She runs a hand down the side of her seat, idly, leather on leather.

Once they're in the air, Storm turns to her. "You took one," she says, her voice low so that the others won't hear. "You know the effects won't last, no matter what you do." She doesn't say, think of the example you'll be setting; you don't need to be cured; there's nothing wrong with you.

Rogue doesn't try to prevaricate. "I'm not going to get rid of it." She pauses, then says, "But I don't know if I'll take it."

"Then why?"

She knows her ambivalence frustrates Storm. It's not black and white, right and wrong, humans and mutants. It's not tangible the way weather is, or quiescent like Ororo's flowers. But she respects this woman who's pulled them back together in the wake of Alcatraz, and she answers her, even though she doesn't owe Storm any explanation.

"Because I want the choice. Even if I don't choose to take it, I need to know that I can."

She can see Storm turning this over in her mind, can see that it doesn't sit well with her by the set of her shoulders and the tension in her mouth. But she nods and turns back to the controls.

Some minutes later, they break through the clouds into a clear night sky, and Storm sets the course for home.

"I think we can safely say 'mission, accomplished,'" she says, mustering up a tired smile.

Rogue fingers the vial through her suit.

"Yeah," she says. "I think we can."

-----------------

A/N: This fic was written for ladybug218 in the 2006 XMM Ficathon.  She requested "Rogue, post X3" and "First X-Men mission after the events of X3." I took the liberty of combining the two.  The title, subheadings, and Erik's quote come from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," and the Plath quotes are from "Lady Lazarus." Obviously, I own neither.  Nor do I own the CIA, and while there is a DS&T, the one portrayed in this particular story is competely fictional.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Cadenza for beta-ing this piece and holding my hand through the action sequences.

eta: K. Marie (just_like_rogue) requested a DVD-style commentary for this piece.  You can find it at my Livejournal here.

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