Disclaimer: The X-Men belong to Marvel and Fox. No money is being made from this story.
Summary: It's about time for Marie to move on.
Warnings: Contains sex, vague spoilers, and an Xavier inspired by X3 characterization.
We're rotten fruit
We're damaged goods
What the hell we've got nothing more to lose
One burst and we will probably crumble
We're backdrifters.
-- Radiohead, Backdrifts
Marie stands in her old room, looking at the walls. Her posters are still up, her bedspread is on the bed, and everything is so crazy around here right now that there's no way anyone is going to come tell her she doesn't belong. She could probably stay here for a couple of days before anyone but Logan would remember, and he's not going to kick her out. All of her shoes are still in the closet where she left them and her scarves and pairs of gloves are in the top drawer of the dresser; there's no reason why they wouldn't be. She was only gone a few days. But it's not her room anymore.
Despite the institutional furniture, it looks lived-in now -- CDs lined up in not-quite alphabetical order on the shelves that came with the room, magazines and paperbacks scattered on the floor. The notebooks on her desk are neat, but there are three tubes of lipstick, a Spanish-English dictionary and a plaster statue of a fairy cluttering the windowsill. Marie has been at the school for more than a year, and somehow in that time, she's acquired more stuff than will fit into a duffel bag.
So she's sorting out what to take. She'll organize the things that aren't important, the things she'll leave behind for Bobby, for Jubilee -- for Kitty, if she wants them. Why not?
Or for the next mutant kid who shows up on the doorstep with nothing because of some so-called ability that makes them breath out poison gas or gives them flippers that won't fit into the gloves. Some kid who won't get to choose like she did. Marie knows inheriting her stuff's not going to make it better, but maybe it'll help them feel at home, here.
The school will still be the best place, under the circumstances, and Marie is trying not to be angry. Ms. Monroe isn't Xavier, and maybe that ‘s what the school needs -- someone who can think in absolutes, who can always be certain about the side she has chosen. Maybe it will make things easier for the rest of them. Because Marie knows that when you try to consider what's best for every single person, no one ends up happy.
"That's the problem with telepaths," Professor Xavier had said to her once. After the first few months of failure, his private lessons in how to control her powers had become lessons in how to live with them, which mostly took the form of her losing to him at chess in the library on Tuesday afternoons. "If Jean's powers were limited to telekinesis, she wouldn't have been capable of stepping outside the jet."
"And then we'd all be dead," Rogue pointed out, "not just her."
"We would," he said, looking away from the pieces on the board, his eyes scanning the titles of books on the wall.
"I thought you were an idealist," she said, sliding her castle forward. "Don't you believe in real heroism? Don't you have to?"
"Oh yes," he said. "I believe in a whole spectrum of human possibilities."
"I'm not a telepath."
He looked at her gloves. "No. You have a simpler way to block out unwanted thoughts."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"That you should continue to be very cautious." He took her knight. "Check."
"Yeah," she said. "I know."
Marie understands that hitchhiking is not as safe for her as it used to be. Before, when she was trying to run away from her power, that power was always there to defend her, at least. She had the grim satisfaction of knowing that anyone who tried to rape her would be very sorry.
No one ever tried. Maybe, she tells herself now, it was because they could tell she wasn't scared.
She's got to be careful these days, got to watch which cars she gets into, but she's got no alternative, so she stands by the side of the highway, somewhere in Connecticut now. She's got her duffel-bag of clothes and her Xavier diploma, but no friends, no money, no plan, really. Nowhere to go.
All the people she knows are in Mississippi, so she's heading north like old times. It's early fall, it's not cold yet, but she's wearing gloves. They still make her feel safer.
A pick-up starts to slow, but it's a man driving alone, so Marie puts her hands in her pockets and ducks her head until she hears the truck rumble past.
The world is a dangerous place. She's not a mutant anymore, but it's not something she's about to forget.
"Forgetting what you know," she said once, running a finger across the delft-blue tiles in the kitchen. "Is that an option for you? Most powerful telepath in the world and all that. Can you do it on purpose?"
Professor Xavier took the two mugs out of the microwave and pushed them across the counter to her. "Do you want to know about my own memories or about yours?"
"I don't understand why you always make me own up to stuff," she said. "It sort of defeats the purpose of you being able to read minds."
He took a sip of his hot chocolate. "I've better things to do with my telepathy than help you avoid saying the hard things aloud."
"Fine." Rogue looked straight at him. "I'm talking about Magneto. I'm talking about Magneto's memories." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "Could you make them go away?"
"Hypothetically, yes. Practically, I'm not as certain. Erik never asked me to try."
It sounded almost like an accusation.
"I'm not him," Rogue said. "They're not mine."
"No," Professor Xavier said mildly.
"I'm tired of the nightmares, OK? I'm tired of not trusting anyone. I don't trust you anymore, do you know that?"
The professor shrugged. "That doesn't bother me. If Erik's fears were justified, you wouldn't ever be able to doubt me." He stared into the depths of his mug. "Believe me, I wish I could have spared you his memories. I wish I could have spared all of the people affected by his experiences, starting with him, of course. Unfortunately, the damage is done. You have to decide to learn a different lesson from the Holocaust than he did."
"How can I learn from something that didn't even really happen to me?"
Professor Xavier frowned. "Life isn't fair," he said, and she could have sworn she felt a touch like a fingertip on her neck. "You and I, Erik -- we all know that. But never let me hear you complain about learning."
"Then teach me something useful," Rogue said. "I'm tired of chess."
Marie's learning how you get by when you don't have anywhere to go. Sometimes it involves sleeping in bus stations and on park benches. Other times it means drifting off in a stranger's car on the way to somewhere else, hoping for the best. It's only a matter of time before something bad happens. She knows she can't keep this up forever.
If she settled down in one place, she could get a job, maybe, but she'd need somewhere to stay, and she doesn't have the money for an apartment deposit or even a cheap hotel, and she's scared to go to a shelter. It seems impossible. She wonders sometimes what Logan and Ms. Monroe thought she was going to do.
A man in a park in Lewiston, Maine -- a kid really, pretty close to her age -- offers her a bag of pot in exchange for a blow job, right in the middle of the afternoon. She almost can't believe it. She squints at him in the bright afternoon sunlight and tells him no thanks.
She doesn't want drugs, and she's never had someone's dick in her mouth before. But she knows what to do. She could have said yes.
Well, this was supposed to give her more options.
Professor Xavier never touched her.
"Do you really think this is what I need?" she asked one time -- out loud so that he didn't have the option of pretending that he was too busy playing with her nerve endings to read her thoughts.
"No, not necessarily," he said. "Do you want me to stop?"
"No," she said. They were in his bedroom and she was sitting on the edge of the bed facing him with her shirt off, his mouth inches away from her skin, phantom hands moving all over her back. She wondered what anyone who walked in on them would think.
Not that anyone was ever going to walk in on them.
"Almost everything's your fault," she said. "Dr. Grey being dead, John leaving with Magneto -- you should have stopped it."
"You know Erik's mind almost as well as I do," he said. "Why didn't you do anything?"
She must have looked shocked. "I flew the jet," she said. "When I didn't know how."
"That's what it's like to be a telepath," he said. "You do your best."
"What if you're wrong? Wrong about everything?"
It's possible, he said into her mind, blowing gently on her bare nipples. But although it must be hard for someone in your position to believe, I do know more about human nature than Erik Lehnsherr.
She clenched her buttocks at the almost-touch of his breath, arching forward. "Would I believe it if I touched you?" she asked, half-offering, half-threatening, gripping his shoulder through his shirt.
"I don't think you touching me would be particularly good for either of us." He smiled crookedly. "Although it would depend on how long you held on."
She drew back; he was baring his throat, but she didn't trust the gesture any more than Logan would have. "No. You'd stop me."
"I tried to kill every human being on the planet, Rogue." She could feel hands on her face that weren't there. "But I wouldn't stop you." He sighed. "If you have power, you have to decide yourself whether or not to use it."
She still didn't believe him. But she was too scared to try and find out.
Her best dreams are about power. The ones that used to disturb her are thrilling now, the ones where she's turning perfect circles in the middle of a crowd, claws raking, sinking through without resistance. Duck and weave, slash and stab, no need to worry about who is the enemy.
She has dreams about burning and freezing, dreams about turning into metal, too, and about gliding weightless through walls -- leftovers from brief touches in the Danger Room. They're different, these dreams, but really, they're all the same. It's instinct. It's better than choice.
Her very favorite, though, is the train-yard dream. It's before the war and she's very small. The bricked factories close her in from behind, her feet in too-big boots are anchored firmly in the loose gravel, her hands are braced against the splintered wood slats, but when she looks at the miles of iron rail through the gap in the fence, at the freight cars lined up and waiting to be loaded that are still too heavy for her to lift, she feels free. She is surrounded by potential. She doesn't know what to do with all this metal, yet, but in the dream, she knows the power will always be at her call.
The dreams about her real family -- about the transom windows above the doors in her grandfather's house and the way the floorboards creaked, about grapenut pie and dogwood blossoms and cool washcloths on the back of her neck in the summer -- those are the worst. They don't make her shake like the augmentation room or cry like the gates and wire, but they're more dangerous. They make her want to go back.
There's no reason her family wouldn't take her in now. They'd have to, they'd probably love to, and she tries not to think about that when she's hungry and tired and lonely, which is almost all the time. Just because she's cured doesn't mean she can forget what her mother said to her, or how her daddy looked when they realized what she'd done, what she was.
They're bigots, they were wrong about her -- and they're the easiest option, the safest. It's so tempting to turn around, so she keeps her back to them, always moving north. Even though part of her is very sure that there is no point indulging in idealism, she still has her pride. She's already more of a traitor than she can stand.
Sooner or later, she'll get to Alaska, like she planned in what seems like another lifetime. When she runs out of north, she'll just have to figure out some other way to remember not to backslide.
Rogue could feel a ghost-mouth on her private parts, tongue squiggling, invisible fingers gripping each of her bare knees, thumbs pressed against the inside of her thighs.
"This is all I'll ever have," she said. "It's not the same thing. It never will be." Her voice was steady and her eyes were dry, but the professor must have been able to tell that this was as close to crying as she could get. He withdrew his presence from her mind.
"No, " he said, "It's not. I'm sorry." She knew that he really was, and she could barely stand it.
"I can't be rehabilitated." she said flatly. "It's not safe to release me into the wild. I can never leave, can I. I'm going to end up teaching here like Mr. Summers." She was trying to provoke him out of the pity she'd always hated. "I'm stuck forever."
"Shh," he said, stroking her arm through the fabric of her shirt. "You'll always have a home. We appreciate you for what you are, Rogue. There are far worse things than that."
The End