She heard it before she felt it. Hints of voices that weren't hers tickled her mind. At first they were indistinct, faraway, easy to dismiss as voices from across the room or behind the next door. She couldn't ever say when they started, because at first she didn't notice that they had. She wondered if the Professor would have been able to see what was coming—but the Professor was gone.

Gradually, they became louder. People started commenting on how jumpy she had become, turning around suddenly with no apparent reason. Bobby would put an arm around her and hold her hand, telling her it was just stress and that she was going to be all right.

She had forgotten what it felt like to touch another being—she hadn't even been able to touch animals with ungloved hands, for fear of absorbing their life-force. After she had taken the cure, she spent hours at the stables near the school, currying horses and resting her face against their warm flanks as she used to do on her uncle's farm back in Mississippi. She spent hours sitting close to Bobby, bare arm against bare arm, ungloved fingers entwined, not needing anything more than that. Holding Bobby's hand like that was better than she ever thought it would be. They held hands almost constantly.

She grew more involved in life at the school, unafraid that accidental contact with someone would land them in the infirmary. She found that Kitty wasn't such a bad kid, after all; that Kitty was just lonely, and that she wasn't the only one. Rogue was amazed how many of the girls at the school were lonely. She wondered how she could have missed it before. She became the friend and confidante of many a young girl afraid of her powers and afraid of showing others that fear. She embraced them as they cried, she kissed their foreheads, she squeezed their hands empathetically. "It's different for you, now," one of them told her, and for an instant she felt a pang of guilt.

The voices in the dormitories grew louder.

One evening she and Bobby were returning from watching the moon rise over the trees in the park. As they climbed the front stairs, he leaned down to kiss her. His lips brushed hers, and he had to grab her to keep her from falling. She pushed away and ran, ran out into the darkness, away from everyone.

She had heard the voices. No. One voice. Bobby's. He was in her head again, and that could only mean one thing.

Bobby found Rogue sitting with her back against a tree, her head down on the knees she had pulled against her chest as she sobbed, small and alone and afraid, because Storm had been right. There was no such thing as a cure.

It was then, really, that she had made the decision to run further. But she stayed for weeks, long enough that people stopped worrying about her, stopped watching her. Long enough for everyone who meant anything to her to tell her what she meant to them, how much she had helped them, how much they cared about her. And every time someone added, "even if I can never touch you again," Rogue took it calmly, took it even as it pierced her heart, lodged there, and made her numb.

The sympathy made it easier, the night she packed and left without so much as a note, as she had left her home in Mississippi years ago. It made it easier because she didn't think she could put up with it for one more day.

She didn't have much money. Money wasn't something you thought about much at Xavier's. She used what she had to head back down South, but she couldn't bring herself to return to the place she had once called home. She stopped in Tennessee, where she found work as a waitress at a seedy, run-down diner where the proprietor didn't ask questions about her obsession with long sleeves and gloves.

The only encouragement she received throughout her day came in the form of a middle-aged woman who stopped by every morning for a cup of coffee. She had shown up early in Rogue's time there and had taken to her right away. Rogue had to admit that she found herself drawn to this woman, too. She reminded Rogue of her mother, in a way. So when it turned out that the woman owned a small farm in the middle of nowhere, and that she wanted Rogue to come work there for her, Rogue trusted her enough to say yes.