Chapter Text
Six years ago, Alkali Lake
-----
Her father stepped in, with a cold and a terrible smile of the kind he'd worn since she'd taken down the hulking Sabertooth with a handshake. That mind had been one of the very hardest to absorb and it was in this year of Erik and the Beast that she saw him first. Semi-drugged with tranquilizers, but feral snarls and growls to match anything his non-Adamantium 'enhanced' brother made. And theywerebrothers. The cheekbones, jawline, hirsuteness.....she shook her head at the way Erik was staring in and drinking in the body of the Wolverine to look at the former Reverend, now Brigadier-General.
"Fool."
A single cold word from her father as she stared at the mutant in front of her.
"He joined a terrorist organization based out of a school." She looked at him as he paced around the two of them, and then stared when the tranquilizers were starting to clearly wear off and the Wolverine's thrashing became all the stronger. "My former greatest weapon," he spoke those words as he looked directly at the thrashing mutant, "the great super-soldier. In truth more of an assassin or a special operations specialist, because my horizons were too small."
He looked at her. "X-2, silence the animal."
Her right hand rose and Erik's gaze went through her eyes and the Wolverine froze in recognition and then in horrified awe when his motions froze mid-thrash, jaws open, veins bulging in his neck.
"Good work, X-2. Go to the animal and drink it in, as you did its brother. And then I'll make sure dear Charles gets his soldier back, nice and specially delivered."
The metal went away as she lowered her hand and removed her muleskinners, staring at the Wolverine for a moment, and then he looked at her father.
"You bastard, torturing children now?"
"My son, the great illusionist, killed his mother by boring into her minds until she bored her brains out with a power drill she took to her temple. Children are monsters too, Wolverine. As are all you abominations."
That word again and she closed her hand and stood in a military parade posture from when she'd touched others of the Weapon X program candidates who were drained and then 'freed'.
"No."
"Weapon X2," her father sighed, "you still haven't learned your lessons."
The collar around her neck hummed with a powerful smashing force of electricityenough to illuminate some of her bones in her flesh, a cruel gift thanks to Victor, and then she fell forward, coughing, on her knees.
"I will do this as many times as necessary, X2. Drain the animal."
The agonies scythed through until her vision restored color and only one Father and one Wolverine, and then with a deep look of abiding hate she started to stand up only to be shocked again as she heard the Wolverine roar: "BASTARD!" After a lapse that she would learn from the Wolverine later was a good half-hour she rose that time and left her face carefully neutral and removed her glove, and in that moment her understanding, as partial as it was from the memories of Erik and Victor, had changed forever and she had yet another to the many variants of nightmares that haunted her sleep. The Wolverine fell like a stone, a button in her father's hands releasing the Adamantium-mesh straps that had held him, and the impact had a sickening crunch to it. With that and a shake of his head, newly minted General Stryker huffed.
"Too limited." And then he walked to the Wolverine.
------
Here they were six years later, her father dead at the hands of Carol Danvers, who was not technically dead but close enough to it, for a time. Nobody had ever had quite her gifts, even factoring in the provisionally dead Wanda Maximoff. There had been dark things in her wake, Westview and then whatever had happened at Wungadore. The Vision might have been closer but he was still on ice and blissfully unaware that his supposed great love was dead and there were stirrings of worries that if this happened that the Vision might remember he had been made as a host for Ultron and other, more terrible ghosts revive. These were the major bits of super-news, the vanishing of Wanda Maximoff and Carol Danvers leaving Earth open to another would-be Thanos.....and she was in a bar watching the Wolverine in a cage fight. No claws, only a brutal primordial power that shattered a fist that caught him on the knuckles with that adamantium skeleton and she couldn't resist a slight wince at that. The Wolverine kept sneaking glances at her and she just exhaled. Well, great.
She would see what would happen as it happened. Three minutes of fighting, of snarls and anger from the other man who fighting a man who could become an animal was the one who truly sounded bestial, almost simian......and then he too dropped as a stone as the man raised his right hand, and said "Your champion in the cage, the Wolverine!" Cheers, and the bar floozies would rally to him. She just sat on her own, drinking down the entire bottle of vodka and mourning for how much her gifts had taken from her. Good vodka, this. Russia wasn't worth much but its liquor was worth a great deal. And on her it was no more than a tasteless thing that left her wondering how much there must have been in the lives of those serfs who made Vodka that they craved it as an escape given what she'd seen much less do to people. One particularly obnoxious customer's gaze roved up her body, and while she wore more form-fitting and skin-revealing clothing than she'd had before, as between Carol, her father, and the Juggernaut she'd gained control over her manifold gifts, and power sufficient that the first person put in a coma by her hand still slept somewhere up there in Canada, that huge red outfit and helmet marking him for a very unlikely King Under the-his hand went to her shoulder and she sighed, hating the relish in the way she did as the Wolverine turned and the person moving toward him to start a fight did likewise. A light shove knocked the man sprawling into a cage as he stared, gasping.
"Freak!" His words were tame next to those of Erik, and Carol, and Cain, and Victor, and Scott, and so many other beings who had been unfortunate enough to cross the path of William Stryker and his set of visions and what he'd started calling that "Catch and Release" policy. He was a stout overweight man with a beer gut that was quivering in fear, as she let herself stand up. Both her senses and the Wolverine's detected the bartender going for his gun and co*cking it, as she felt it placed against her neck.
"Get out of my bar, mutie."
She sighed then and then in a single motion and a Photon Blast the gun was cut in half as the man stared in blank open-mouthed shock and she let herself walk out. The man who'd wanted to attack the Wolverine followed with three other people and the Wolverine pinched his nose.
"Scott and Jeannie are gonna love this sh*t."
And then he too padded out like a wolf upon the snow, only to find the men laying down, flattened, and red snow following a path where footprints halted and a human-like figure was flying. His nose twitched and then he reached for the communicator on his watch.
"Wolverine to Professor X. You were right. She's here."
He felt the psychic power and mass of Charles Xavier's being all the way here in the middle of rural Alberta with a shudder that he never quite lost, for there were men and there were supermen, and supermen among the supermen.
+Be careful, Logan. I trust that your history may make this friendlier than anyone else, but I do not wish either of you harmed.+
Logan looked at the sprawled men, one of them wailing as he clutched a leg that was snapped at an angle even he winced to see.
"Chuck, I think that may be a hard sell."
He went into his truck and drove off, a part of him, the part of him that he suppressed where his unlovely brother embraced, chafed and chuffed like a beast before a dying fire, denied its sport with the men. He rolled with the window down, sensing the strange melange of smells he would come to identify as the Rogue, astonished that he could track it in the skies but then he'd tracked and hunted ducks like that when he was really bored and wanted to feel more like a normal man, so why not the person who'd taken down Carol Danvers? He drove further and then when he was out in the long snow-clad wilderness he stopped. There was a figure in the road in tattered leather with a torn sleeveless leather jacket. In the road, but not on it, as she was hovering right in front of his truck. He put on the brakes, turned off the engine, and stepped down. There was something more than faintly ironic in he, the best there was at what he did, and what he did wasn't very nice at all (just ask the Hulk, who he was one of the few beings besides Thanos and the Abomination to make bleed, after all) staring at a pair of boots at his eye level.
"Ah remember you."
He froze.
"Look, kid, I'm sorry."
The boots remained in the air and then she descended and he realized, then, that as short as he was that he was still a head taller than a seventeen year old girl, whose bright green-he flinched at that. Carol Danvers had given her the green eyes, Erik Lehnsherr the white hair. There were glimpses of many within those eyes.
"Sorry 'bout what?"
The surprising innocence in that question made him blink.
"I came to get you out of that place. Stryker baited me into a trap. I fell for it. And we knew enough about what happened and was happening to you to guess, before this Carol Danvers sh*t confirmed what it was."
She blinked then, her head tilted.
"Mah Father was good at that kind of thing."
He blinked, and then shook his head.
"I don't know what lies Stryker told you, but he ain't your daddy, kid."
She raised an eyebrow.
"He raised me from when ah was four, makes him my daddy to me. Guy what did daddy's little squirt didn't have enough time to register."
Wolverine coughed for a moment as she rolled her eyes.
"What do you want, Logan?"
She saw him freeze again for a moment.
"There's....bad people looking for you, kid."
Her lips peeled into a snarl that other people would have seen for a smile and he smelled the anticipation mixed with the ozone-scent of her rising into the air.
"Let 'em. Only thing mah daddy did for me is give me a charmed life. That Wanda Maximoff, that Invisible Girl, them I might respect in a fight. Or that robot if they ever defrost him."
She shrugged, her shoulders rolling.
"Anyone else? I say let 'em sic me and find out the hard way just what the Rogue can do."
He bit his lip for a moment.
"One of the people looking for you is Magneto."
She stiffened.
"Well uh..." her nose twitched.
"That do change things, yeah."
His shoulders slumped slightly in relief and then he heard a mirthless laugh from her.
"Oh I ain't scared Ah can beat 'im, sugah. Way Ah am now Ah can beat damn near anyone in a fight, especially when daddy gave me that little paradox as a 'Christmas Present.' Ah hope that lil' boy's OK."
He scratched his head, not understanding until years later that if he'd mentioned that one line so many other things might have been vastly different. In the snows, facing a woman hovering with every one of his enhanced senses registering an unusual, and to his further shamearousingsensation (and he reminded himself that as old as those eyes were, as some of the.....ways her mutation worked, that this was achildand he was able to deny it after a few seconds, while her own senses registered it and her fists began to glow for a moment) of being the prey instead of the predator.
"In a fight, Ah can beat 'im. That mind of his, that inability to take no for an answer? Nah. That Ah ain't gonna take on all on my lil' ol' lonesome. He got some reasons to dislike me, Erik does. Ah reminded him he was a man among men in front of mere humans, ain't no greater sin in Erik-Land."
The Erik within gave her a set of cold and bitter voices and then her nose sniffed, as did the Wolverine's. She stared in blank surprise when a tree was hurled straight at the Wolverine with sufficient force to hurl him into the windscreen of his truck, staring for a moment and then sighing when theotherferal stepped out.
"Glad you remember lil' Jimmy there, Frail. I remember you too, and I owe you a thing or two for what you did in our last little....social interaction."
She shook her head.
"Oh, Victor." Her voice was syrupy as the flames around her fists grew and he put his hand in front of his face.
"Y'all might owe me in that little club of yours but y'all gon' have a problem collectin' that there bill."
He roared then and leaped at her only for her to grasp him by the neck and hold him up as if he weighed nothing at all, his claws scraping off of her invulnerable flesh and rending the tattered leather further but the only results of that were to leave her arms utterly bared in the cold of a winter that had no effect at all.
"Yeah," she said with contempt and then a sudden thundering impact into his face was followed by three more at lightning pace and he spat out one of his fangs as he fell to the ground, more blood on the snows. She looked at the blood and bits of enamel on her hand and then shook it off with a shiver.
"Nasty," and then she turned and kicked Sabertooth like a football to a point that if she'd been on a professional football team she might have made Kicker, hurling him high enough that it would take some genuine effort for his Brotherhood colleagues to find him. That was when the Wolverine finally stirred from the impact, shaking off the wooziness as she did and staring at another bloody spot.
"Charmed life."
He stared for a moment, shaking his head.
"You ain't kiddin' darlin'."
She raised a single eyebrow and then went over to him.
"What?"
"I hope you weren't too attached to that truck."
He shrugged.
"I borrowed it from Weapon X when I left. f*ck it."
She turned to it then and then hearing those words her hand blazed with fire and three photon blasts left a sequence of explosions and shrapnel.
"Not fond of most things from Weapon X."
Logan stood very still for a moment.
"You want me to go with you," he could hear a faint trace of Erik in her words, autocratic and regal and a kind of dangerous eagerness leavened by the secret things between Erik and Charles that everyone knew but only they knew the fullness thereof, "to that school. To become one of your own little club."
He nodded.
"Yeah."
He held up his watch.
"I can call Scott and Jeannie like this, and let 'em find me."
She smiled then, that same feral smile.
"Nah, sugah. I don't like planes. Who would when you can fly yourself."
"Well that's great for you but what about-"
He had to consciously restrain the Wolverine from trying to shank the invulnerable girl right in the chest when she hefted him over her shoulders with all his weight as if he were nothing at all, and then spent the next fifteen minutes cursing his mutation and all its senses and the concussive effects of G-forces on a body that however tough it was and however much the metal skeleton made it tougher, was still human against flesh that no longer was.
Westchester, New York, Xavier School for the Gifted, Cerebro
-----
Charles Xavier removed the helm and looked to Jean and Scott.
"No need to take the plane, Jean."
He saw the way she pouted slightly and he bit back a smile that Scott didn't quite bother.
"She's on her way."
"So do we have-"
And then there was a bit of noise from the students sitting on the front lawn and a buzzer message from Hank McCoy.
"I uh......." they paused. When the erudite Doctor McCoy was reduced to mere ordinary verbiage, that was a sign, and they did not quite run but they were certainly power-walking and Xavier's hoverchair was a low consistent hum as he followed them.
"Oh my stars and garters," they heard Hank say, as his claws brushed his face. The crowd, too, was staring as they saw the Wolverine dusting himself off and giving a dirty look to the figure who'd flown in with one of the most feared of the X-Men over her shoulder as if he weighed nothing at all, and then hovered on the grounds in front of them, hands crossed in front of her chest for all the world like a skunk-striped brunette Supergirl in torn leather. It was an open secret in the school that there had been the one solo mission Wolverine had returned from unconscious, wounds that had opened still sealing, removed nearly suffocated to death from a body bag choking on his own blood. The story of an eleven year old girl, a mutant experimented upon and indoctrinated to hate her own kind, a figure of phobia and fear among the mutant community for the nature of her gift. The Voice from the Lake, who had taken down one of the mightiest of Earth's mightiest heroes.
Mutants could fly, or levitate. Jean's powers when she could more fully control them granted her something like flight, there was Warren Worthington, and there were others who had that gift. Not quite any of them looking like the figure who'd stepped out of stories and speculation. She was no longer eleven, and the looks in those eyes were what led the stories to become not chatter but whispers. The stories had led them to speculate a great many things about her appearance, a girl with the kind of figure she had, with the skunk stripe, with the hair in that ponytail, and for all that a being who was fairly ordinary in height and weight and not the twenty-foot tall giant with iron skin and laser eyes so many of them had built up was a bit disappointing. She was waiting for something, and what that wait was, and the confirmation of the stories and speculation to a point in certain ways, was when Professor X himself appeared and the woman nodded, and then in a voice that was a man's and not her own at all for a moment spoke.
"Hello, Charles."
Charles Xavier exhaled slowly.
"Welcome, Rogue."
The figure landed, then.
--------
A telepathic signal led to choruses of grumblings and disappointment and to Wolverine standing somewhat awkwardly with the dignity of an affronted cat, while Scott Summers was flashing him an evil grin that led Jean to exhale slowly, and then there was Rogue herself, standing on the grounds before the big furry blue man, on the furthest left, the redhead in leather, Professor X, Visor Boy as she referred to him with her inner Logan laughing himself sick for a moment, and Wolverine as far to the right as the big blue man was to the left. The gaze and the words of Erik shifted then, and the manner did too and that drew an exhale from Hank.
"Stars and garters indeed."
She raised an eyebrow at the phrase and shrugged.
"The Wolverine," as she jerked her thumb at him, "said that Erik Lehnsherr's looking for me. Wants revenge, I imagine, for the unpleasant events beneath Alkali Lake."
And with that the spell vanished, as Charles shook his head.
"Partially, Rogue," his voice was carefully level. "But there is, I'm afraid, more to it than that."
Rogue bit her lip as he gestured with his head.
"If you will follow me into the Mansion and into my office we will be able to speak more about what Erik's goals are, and about certain other factors that are no less important."
As they followed, the Wolverine and the guy with the visor lingering last, Rogue's enhanced senses heard a bit of the talk between Logan and Visor Boy who were lingering last.
"Did she really have you over her shoulder?"
"f*ck you, Cyke."
She heard his laughter as he said "I should have been spending time with Jean out front, I'm sorry I missed it."
"Don't push it, bub."
Visor Boy just laughed again, and they were the last ones in the mansion.
