Author: dilly r
Archive: Archive: Madpash dot com. Others must ask by sending an email to dilificus at gmail dot com.
Summary:They were too late. The camp is abandoned; the mutants within it are dead. All that's left is burial duty. (Written for the We Invented the Remix... Redux III: Reloaded challenge. Remix of Unspoken by K Marie.)
Notes: If you're confused, keep in mind that the timeline is backwards, hence the subtitle Living in Rewind.
They were too late. The camp is abandoned; the mutants within it are dead. All that's left is burial duty.
Burial duty is a hard, horrible job, but no one ever complains. Since the Registration Act took effect, the adults never had time for anything, so it's the younger ones who do clean up. They were told from the start that if they don't want to do it, all they have to do is say so. Every time burial duty comes around, everyone is there. This time, Bobby is supervising. He doesn't really have time either anymore, but this camp was in his hometown. His family had left Port Jefferson for Boston when he was very young, but he knows the place. It had been a huge apartment complex and a parking lot before it was torn down and a mutant camp built over it.
It is dangerous work. Before the troops had moved out, they'd locked all of the mutants in their rooms and gassed them. And, even though the mutants have gained control of Long Island, there is no telling when the military might stage an attack.
Bobby leaves the children outside in protective formation, the youngest ones circled by the older ones, and goes in. One of the children with telekinesis has unlocked all of the doors from outside. Unfortunately, dragging the bodies out is something the kid couldn't manage from long range. It is a matter of airing the rooms out so they can all come in and drag the bodies out one by one.
Ten buildings filled to the brim with mutants lined the walkway. Bobby opens a door, then walks through, stepping over bodies, to the opposite wall. Once there, he uses a pillar of ice to break through the wall on the other side. He tries not to look at faces, hands, feet, ribs jutting out thin, gray skin... The black rim of the goggles on his gas mask work like blinders.
He opens the door to the last building and pauses. It seems empty. He turns his head, left, then right. There, one body. All he can see are the feet peeking out around the great wooden side of a bunk made for far more people. He knows he should go about his business as he had in the other rooms, but he edges around the corner of the bunk to see the tiny body there.
The details come slowly to him. Delicate. Naked. Female. Marks on her body, but no nullifying collar that kept the other mutants in line. Face sunken with starvation and decay; she's been dead longer than the others. Hair almost gone; what hadn't been cut off has fallen out. Strands of it on her pillow. Auburn, auburn, silver, auburn. A darker spot on her shoulder that used to be a mole.
Bobby's hands shake.
Marie is the perfect candidate for experimentation. Even though there are only bits and pieces of his memory left, the Erik in her remembers. He tells her how to get through it. Find comfort in their schedule. Find comfort in knowing they come at this time, they, take you from this room to another, remove the color and force you to absorb another mutant's powerSmemOriesUrgesLongings, experiment however way they want to experiment with whatever she absorbed, put her back into the other room (sometimes with the collar on, sometimes with the collar off).
When they rape her (collar on), Marie gets Erik through it. They discuss things somewhere deep inside her mind while they wait for it to be over. He asks her again, "Why did you let them take you?" and she asks him back, "Was there an alternative?" She can feel him want to say yes, but he doesn't. He says, "You stayed with Charles too long." She says, "So did you."
Absorbing Erik disillusioned Marie in that way. Bobby was so idealistic. Bobby was so in love with Xavier's dream. Bobby was so dedicated to Xavier's goals. They would have fierce arguments. Even as she heard Xavier's voice in Bobby and was disgusted that he had no dream that was truly his own, she could hear Erik's voice layered over her words. Erik and Xavier had not been satisfied with tearing each other apart; their passion tore Marie and Bobby apart too.
Logan believed in Xavier like Bobby did, but he believed in himself more.
"If you had stayed with Bobby, you wouldn't be here," Erik says.
She doesn't argue, because he's right.
They are having one of these conversations when the man on her back forgets to let her head up so that she can breathe, and she suffocates against the mattress.
Logan lives his life from rewind to fast forward. No play or pause. He's riding his motorcycle (does it belong to him or did he "borrow" it? he doesn't remember.) on something that used to be a road before the weather ate it away and no one cared enough to fix it up again. He thinks of it as the ass crack of Canada. He remembers his personal nickname for it, but he doesn't remember when he was on it before.
"What if your mind treats memories like wounds?" Marie had said once. It was after he'd cut himself on a broken mug in the kitchen. Blood was everywhere, but his foot was good as new seconds later. "What if it just heals over and there's no sign of it later?"
"What if you weren't so clumsy and didn't drop mugs where I'm planning to walk?"
Marie had smiled.
It's just now on that ass crack of a road with the cold wind stinging his face that he's pretty sure she was right.
For now, he remembers Marie. He knows there was something before their little apartment. Something before their little arrangement of not-quite-a-real-relationship. He knows there was someone who mattered before Marie, but he can't think of a name or a face. Just a flash of red (a red dress? red lipstick? red hair?) and a vague sense of nostalgia, but the rest is gone.
It shouldn't be long until Marie is nothing but a flash of color, a sense of déjà vu when he sees a girl who looks like her, or just a disembodied smile. He could write something down, keep a picture, find a way to make himself remember her long after she's dead.
But why would he want to?
He cut his foot on something somewhere a while back, and he remembers that someone said something that made him think for a moment... but he can't quite remember what it was that she said, so he just keeps riding down that ass crack of a road trying to recall when he was here before.
Marie waits on bottom step for the buses to reach her apartment. The Sentinels they have with them are the eight foot ones, pretty much only equipped to recognize registered mutants and restrain the ones without enhanced strength or particularly destructive powers. Marie squints against the sun at one of them as it leads the eighteen year old bag boy she used to chat with at the local grocery store and tries to decide if these Sentinels are more or less scary than the big ones for looking more human.
For someone who lost her righteous indignation sometime after turning twenty-five, her mind is buzzing with fury. It doesn't belong to her, of course, but she never qutie lost the pieces of Erik, Logan, John, Bobby... and anyone else she'd absorbed over the years. Those four have remained the loudest. They are yelling at her as she watches the busses flanked with eight Sentinels roll down the street toward her. All of them but Bobby. Bobby doesn't want her to go, but he knows her well enough that he knows when arguing doesn't do any good anymore.
They don't have to come and get her. She stands when they arrive and she walks calmly toward the bus. The Sentinel is going through it's typical "YOU ARE MUTANT NUMBER BLAH BLAH BLAH, DO NOT RESIST BLAH BLAH BLAH" speech while she's walking up the three little stairs into the bus. She looks down the aisle-- not at the faces, but at the seats themselves. It's the same type of bus that they'd ride on choir trips back when she went to junior high. She can tell by the upholstery.
"He wouldn't leave you behind," Loganinherhead says.
"But he did," she answers aloud as she sits in her comfortable, well cushioned seat, waiting for the bus to continue its rounds.
Logan has had two suitcases under their bed for years now. Sometimes he'll add a thing or two, but nothing unnecessary. He keeps them just in case he needs to pick up and leave. With the atmosphere (emphasis on FEAR) in American these days, he figures it's the only thing two people on their own can do. It'd be different if they'd stayed with the X-Men, but they hadn't. They still have a reliable contact, though. Bobby Drake. Logan knows Bobby still loves Marie, never stopped in fact, and he respects the kid for being grown up enough to still look out for her even after she left him far behind.
Of course, he's only a kid in Logan years now. Bobby's the one who calls them.
It's early enough in the morning that Marie sleeps right through the blaring ringtone of their cell phone. Marie changed it to a Britney Spears song as a joke one time. One day, Logan is going to figure out how to change it.
"They're rounding people up in your area," Bobby says. He doesn't waste time, another reason Logan's grown to like him.
"Bucketheads?"
"Humanoids. About eight, ten to a bus along with a few armed troops. No big guys have shown up yet. Looks like your best bet would be getting out of the state. You've got a couple hours at best." He pauses. Briefly. "If you need help..."
"Figure you X-Men have bigger things to handle. Me and Marie, we can handle ourselves."
"You'd better be right about that."
The phone clicks off.
Logan looks at Marie. She's still asleep. He has a few things to take care of before they can take off. He gets dressed and heads out. The suitcases are ready. Once he gets back, it'll only take a few minutes.
It isn't long before he's at a side door of an old, gray building. He knocks, his knuckles clanging harshly against the metal door. The speakeasy slides open and a pair of eyes inspects him, then the door opens exposing a beefy man dressed all in black.
"I guess you'll be wanting to get out of here soon," the man says.
If he hadn't appreciated Bobby's terseness before... "Are they ready?"
"You have my money?"
Logan pulls a wad of hundred dollar bills out of his pocket. The man counts them quickly, then smiles and hands Logan a box in return. "You'll have everything you'll need for a new identity in there."
"You're sure the injection will throw off the Sentinels."
"Honest Abe, mister. I know what will happen to me if it didn't."
Logan sniffs and heads down the stairs and down the ally toward the street. He doesn't quite make it to daylight when he's blindsided. He holds the box tight against him and snarls, holding himself up against the wall.
"We have a score to settle," Sabretooth growls.
"Not right now, bub." Logan leaps and grabs the ladder of a fire escape, but Sabretooth is on him again before he can get away.
"When did you take up running away from a fight?"
"When I got more important things than you to--"
Sabretooth barrels into his stomach, knocking him back against the fire escape's steps. His heart is pumping hard and his fists ball up, his claws almost pushing themselves out in self defense.
"If it's a fight, you want." Logan cuts into Sabretooth's side. Sabretooth's nostrils flare, and the real fight begins.
When Logan finally gets back to their apartment, they've already taken Marie.
The parts of Erik still alive in Marie's head are pretty quiet for the most part, something everyone who spends time with her is very happy about. It's just that sometimes something will wake him up and she'll be halfway into a sentence before she realizes that she's not talking about her own views at all.
Like she's sitting with Logan watching the news. This mutant business owner had her shop burned down by this new anti-mutant group. A mutant activist is talking about how the government was behind the attack. The activist will be shot in Boston the next time she gives a speech, but they don't know that yet.
"Crackpots giving us a bad name," Logan mutters into the lip of his beer bottle. Marie tilts his head to look up at him.
"If she's right, it won't be long until they're rounding us up. Does that not look familiar to you?" She points at the footage of flames burping out of the broken store windows.
Logan arches an eyebrow. "You're a little young for it to be looking familiar to you aren't you?"
Marie blinks, then goes quiet. They show the store's owner standing outside on the street watching her livelihood burn down with the words "BRENDA MURFEY: REGISTERED MUTANT" lining the bottom of the screen and, yeah, it looks familiar.
Bobby's hands shake.
By nature, Bobby's pretty cool under pressure. No pun intended. But Marie's been able to shoot the version of himself he likes to imagine ever since the first time they met. Today is no different as he's sitting on her couch in her new apartment. Logan is sitting on the armchair nearby and, if he notices Bobby's nervousness, he's being nice enough not to mention it. Or, maybe he's just more interested in nursing his beer than checking out Bobby. This seems more realistic.
Marie comes back out with a couple of sodas in frosted mugs. She's wearing this little baby blue tank top with "princess" written across the top of it in script, with the little mole on her shoulder that Bobby used to be particularly fond of showing just under the sleeve strap. Her gloves are made out of this soft white material which brushes agaisnt Bobby's palm when she hands him his mug.
"Thanks," Bobby says, with only the vaguest smile. As much as he's over her, sort of, and they're now just friends, sort of, he still thinks she's probably the most beautiful girl he's ever met. So, when she smiles back, he looks away. Logan's looking at Bobby over his beer with an eyebrow raised high enough that Bobby wonders if the guy's developed telepathy since he and Marie moved out of the mansion.
"Um, where's your bathroom?" He just needs a minute to breathe. And he kind of needs to take a piss too.
Marie points. "It's right through the bedroom on the right. Don't go in the door straight across or you'll end up in the closet."
"Wouldn't want that." Bobby manages a laugh at his own joke, and gives himself a mental lecture on his own lameness as he heads for the bathroom. He tries to keep his head down and not look around, but he opens the door and there it is. Their bed. One king-sized bed with steel-blue sheets and a few little pillows embroidered with flowers all pushed to one side. Marie's side, Bobby assumes. Why the hell couldn't they have the common decency to sleep in twin beds like Lucy and Ricky? Peeking out from under the sheet is a small suitcase. Bobby squints. What would they have a suitcase there for?
Bobby jumps about half a foot in the air when he hears the door open again behind him. It's Logan, again with a raised eyebrow. He calmly closes the door. Bobby wonders for a moment if Logan is about to kill him.
"You all right?" Which is not exactly the sentence Bobby was expecting to come out of Logan's mouth, but it was preferable to being clawed to death.
"I'm... all right," Bobby answers slowly.
Logan pushes past him and sits on the bed. The side without the flowery pillows. "She was worried. Kept going on about being like that Pyro kid."
"Yeah, well..." Bobby shifts his weight from one leg to the other. "She was the one mad at John, not me."
Logan sniffs. "I'm just telling you so you don't act like a prick and get her crying again."
"I didn't like her leaving the mansion, but that was up to her. I just--"
"Look, I don't care about whatever problems you have with this. Thought I already made that clear before," Logan says.
"That's not what I was saying."
"You make her cry again, I'll make sure you don't come back."
Bobby is quiet for a moment. He runs his tongue along the edge of his teeth. "What's the suitcase for?"
Logan looks at Bobby so closely that Bobby almost flinches away. Almost.
"It's in case things turn bad."
"So, let me get this straight," Bobby says. "I'm not allowed to make her cry, but you can pick up and leave her whenever you two have an argument."
Logan shakes his head shortly. "If things get back with mutants. With the government. I'm taking her with me. Make sure she's safe."
"Oh." Bobby's righteous indignation is immediately drained, and he's back to feeling awkward. "You've... told her that, right?"
"She knows," Logan says with a shrug.
Bobby takes a deep breath. It's abundantly clear to him suddenly, like a thought that's always been there but he only just now knows how to understand it, that Marie's not his anymore. He his hands are starting to shake again, so he crosses his arms to hide them. "If I hear anything, I'll let you guys know, so you can get a head start."
"You're all right, Bobby Drake," Logan says as he stands.
"Aren't we back to the beginning of this conversation?"
Logan just snorts as he brushes by Bobby on the way back to the living room.
Bobby is thinking about the first time he visited their apartment while he carries Marie's body out of the building. He goes out the back, so that the children don't see. Some of them knew her. This is the kind of thing that might make them lose hope. Bobby doesn't have any to lose anymore. Not really.
He breaks a section of what used to be pavement a few feet away from the building with his ice. Ice seems fitting. Then, he buries her under a good few feet of earth, draws a suitcase into the dirt with his fingertip, then covers it all over with the broken blacktop.