------------Rated M for adult themes, violence and execution themes. I own no rights to anything herein. Marvel owns most everything, probably including your soul--------

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Prologue:

One hundred sixty four first degree murders. Seventy eight second degree murders. Nine charges of manslaughter.

That's what I was convicted of.

That's why I'm lying here, chained down with heavy manacles to a hospital bed, awaiting my lethal injection.

It's being televised.

I thought that I'd made my peace with it. That I wouldn't be afraid to die. Maybe I wouldn't be if things were different. If I wasn't just chained down to a bed with prison workers around me, preparing the adequate dosage to finish me off. The CNN camera does a close up of my face. I look more frightened than I thought I did.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

I was supposed to get a second chance. Charles Xavier once offered me one, if I ever wanted to take it, while he was whispering in my head all those years ago. Rogue on my shoulder outside the train station. He must have known what Magneto put me through. He must have seen it when he was scrounging around in my brain, because the offer lay there on the table for years before I took it.

He was long dead by the time I went to the Institute to escape my mad man once-savior. The man who'd found me on the streets of London as a boy and rescued me from a lifetime of persecution. Rescued me. Ha. Sometimes I wished he'd let the streets swallow me up and finish me off as a child. Somehow, I thought being human for a while might have put things in perspective for him. Especially after all the carnage he was responsible for. The deaths of so many of our people that could be attributed more to his mistakes than anyone else's. If anything, being human made him angrier.

I was always the brunt of that anger. I was always the whipping boy. Since I came to live on the Island, I'd been the lap dog. Any mistake I made, any mistake he'd made, and it came out of my hide. Sometimes he had Sabretooth or Mystique beat me, more often he'd do it himself. And I lived that way, thought I was happy to live that way, for the last fifteen years of my life.

It wasn't as though the last beating was any more severe than the others. But, it was the first I'd received since Magneto regained his powers, and I suppose in that year he was missing them, I'd become accustomed to the comforts of life without pain.

I left that night. Stole a boat and snuck away to the mainland. Made my way across the city to upstate New York, where, in the pouring rain, I rang the bell, and Storm answered it, and ushered me inside. I told her I wanted a fresh start. That's the way Xavier had offered it to me, a fresh start, a second chance.

She didn't look happy, but I suppose for the old man's memory, she let me stay. Gave me a warm room and a comfortable bed, soft clothes. I worked for them. Mechanical stuff. Whatever needed fixing, I fixed, and I worked hard at it too. I didn't want any handouts; I earned my keep. I didn't make any friends, but I hadn't expected to. It was enough to heal from the beatings and not receive more. It was enough to not have to worry about food and showers and being warm enough. I wasn't happy, but I was closer than I ever recalled being.

That was before she came. But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand how royally she fucked me over, I'll have to tell it as it was. As it came to me.

Keep in mind, I am about to die.