The One and Only Disclaimer: I'm not even old enough to own it, you've gotta be kidding me.
One for First Start
The first one is Danny. He's in her mind, always. He was the real reason she ran away. It wasn't what she did that drove her out of the house - it was the aftermath of what she did. It was his thoughts in her mind, giving a running commentary, constantly, like she had asked him for his opinion. Which she hadn't, and she never will now, firstly because the real Danny is in a coma somewhere and secondly because his thoughts aren't nearly as nice as she had imagined. He's accepting and generally nonjudgmental, yes, and that's about as nice as you can get from a teenage boy these days, but he's far more dirty-minded than she had ever realized. Not to mention that, as it turns out, he hadn't cared for her personality nearly as much as he had cared for the shape of her mouth.
Pathetic.
Seeing things from someone else's point of view opens up a whole new world of understanding, and Marie found herself growing, as a person, through what she had of Danny. Danny's understandings were added to her own and it was so much easier to comprehend the world and its challenges with another mind there to make up for what she lacked. Two horses pulling a carriage instead of one, as it were.
For two weeks, she remained in her parents' house (not hers, not anymore), listening to them whisper about that poor boy and what were they going to do with her. She changed so much, huddled in her room with only their whispers and Danny's constant chatter in her mind. It was Danny who urged her to leave. She was timid and afraid, but Danny was not. He was bold and she learned boldness from him.
She actually starts talking back to him after only a week on her own, and it's then that she realizes that he isn't just an echo. She has conversations with him, legitimate ones. He doesn't seem to realize that there's anything unusual about this; that he's a disembodied voice in her head. He's just there, and he talks to her. And, for not being as perfectly perfect as she had believed he was, he's not half bad, after a while. He's useful, certainly. Danny-boy was far worldlier than he let on, apparently, and his echo is shameless.
"He's checking you out," Danny says to her, out of the blue.
An evening in a bar is far more typical than Marie wants it to be, especially after learning that Good Boy Danny had snuck out to quite a few bars and that they really aren't places that she wants to be. But she's in one anyway, just because, through Danny, it is familiar to her, and most people take one look at how covered up she is and know that she's not there for fun or games. This suits her just fine.
What? Marie glances to her left. There's no one there. Who?
" Don't look , you dork. He's to your right. Creepy old dude. Button your jacket up, would you? He's leering. Creeper."
Marie doesn't look this time. She just reaches up and deftly buttons her jacket up to the collar (which, she thinks, she should have done anyway, because as unlikely as it is that someone is going to reach out and touch her exposed collarbone, she just can't risk it). She's not sure why, trusts the Danny in her head. He might not be the nicest person, and definitely not her first choice of people she wants around all the time, but he hasn't steered her wrong yet. It's sort of nice, to have someone who has her back, even if it's not in the physical sense.
It occurs to Marie to wonder how Danny can see something that she can't. He's inside her head, after all. Shouldn't he be looking through her eyes?
Do you know? she asks him.
Danny, of course, has no more of an answer than she does, which is to say that they have no clue.
It goes on like this for quite a while. Danny warns her to go-stop-go at the right moments, and Marie feels oddly grateful to the real Danny, wherever he is. She only hopes that he's getting better, or maybe even woken up from his coma. She doesn't know, though, and doesn't really have a way of finding out, so she keeps on heading north and not thinking too hard about what she left behind. She stays in each town a little longer than the last, fear no longer driving her and Danny's voice no longer urging her. It's surprisingly easy to get work if you don't bother to haggle the price. Marie might have, before, having lived a comfortable life, but nothing about this new life is comfortable and Danny was not as well-off as he had let people assume.
"Beggars can't be choosers," he tells her when she balks at the idea of being paid four dollars an hour for work that will make her tired down to her bones. "If you don't take what you can get, you won't get a thing. Arguing draws attention, and you can't risk that. You're a missing person and still a minor, remember? Keep your hood up and your head down. Don't push."
Four dollars an hour suddenly seems very reasonable when her employers offer her breakfast, lunch, and no questions asked. She can survive on two meals a day - before now, she has been surviving on less. She saves her pittance of a salary and spends only on necessities. A box of pads, firstly, followed by a new toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. All these things suddenly seem like beautiful luxuries, but she still has money left over and she saves that with the intention of getting some thicker socks and a warmer shirt. Hopefully a turtleneck, if she can find one. A turtleneck with so much neck that she can pull it up over her face. Oh yeah.
"Sexy."
Shut up.
The work is hard. It's different every day, if you care for the details of what they're moving and where to, but Marie doesn't. She picks up and carries and drags and heaves and pitches. The cold cracks her skin and the weight makes aches in her bones and the lack of a warm place to sleep makes all of those pains spread to the rest of her body. Her hands grow strong and serve her well, but under her dainty opera gloves, they blister with a vengeance.
"It's time to leave," Danny says one day.
Marie accepts this, but still asks, Why?
" She's looking at you weird."
Who?
" The boss's wife."
So?
" Do you want her to call CPS?"
... No.
So she leaves with a wad of hard-earned money tucked into her bra and a new turtleneck protecting her from the cold. She slings her pack over her shoulder, puts her hood up, and marches into the dark, cold night like some mysterious heroine from a movie. Which she's totally not, because mysterious heroines shouldn't have to sleep under pine trees, and she totally does sleep under a pine tree.
Honestly, she's not sad to leave it behind. Having two meals a day and an inflow of cash was good, but her hands and back were being ruined. Now she sleeps in the most comfortable places she can find, recovering, feeling the ember-hot ache in her back finally retreat until she feels only the occasional twinge of pain. The blisters heal, too, but she has such strange-looking scars that she thinks might be permanent.
In the next town, she doesn't look for work or a place to spend the night. After learning how comfortable one can make a pine tree, she won't pay for a hotel. Not now, not ever. Not while things are the way they are, and who knows how long this will last?
With that thought, she wonders if the rest of her life will be this way. She didn't finish school. How will she ever get a job that isn't something that will break her body and dull her mind all over again? The thought makes her heart weep in near-despair.
"Hey!" Danny barks. "Stop it. You're gonna fight, got that? You're gonna fight this life. You're gonna last until you're too old for them to drag back to your parents or put in a foster home and then you're gonna get yourself back together and live, you got that?"
Inspiring, Marie thinks dryly, but she takes the words to heart. This doesn't have to last forever if she doesn't let it.
She crosses the Canadian border into the province of Alberta. It's even colder. Her coverings are even less noticeable. She's even less likely to be recognized. She's in another country, after all. Her eighteenth birthday is four months away. She has lasted a whole five months since she got her... powers. Surely, she can last another four months?
"Yes, you can," Danny tells her. It's not encouragement. It's a fact.
My own personal cheerleader, arent'cha, sugah?
Another town. She gets into a fight with a man who gets too handsy. She punches him out of pure instinct and panic and immediately regrets it when pain lances up her whole arm. Danny tells her to elbow him in the face, and she does, and while he's disoriented with a bleeding nose (blood spatters and gets on her face; on her clothes), she knees him in the crotch, downing him long enough for her to get away.
She runs and doesn't look back. When she finally stops to rest, she cries over swollen knuckles, but she's learned another lesson and had another first. First fight, first blood drawn, first desperate scramble to live. Not her first man downed, but that's different, she tells herself, and Danny agrees. It's a memory that stays with her and occasionally makes her shudder in disgust when she thinks of his hand traveling up her thigh, but she knows, now.
Don't let them take an inch, not even an inch. Beat them down if they try. I am strong.
Another town. There's work with less heavy-lifting but no free meals provided. Marie gets a protein-heavy breakfast at the local diner on some mornings and goes without on others, but it gets her through the worst of it without making her gut grumble too much. She can live with that. What she really wants, and needs, is a bath. She notices the smell - she hasn't bathed in a while and her period can make it worse on top of just plain unsanitary and she knows that other people have noticed because sometimes they-
"So what are you gonna do about it?" Danny asks. "This ain't a matter of pride, honey-buns. It's not healthy to live like this. You're gonna get sick, gonna get an infection, and have fun with that."
The answer is obvious and not something she wants to think about, but she has to do it. She has to. Her jaunts into the beautiful privacy of the locked restrooms in gas stations have given her enough time to scrub her face and her scalp, but her bloody underwear? No, sir.
Danny gives her privacy to deal with such things, but he asks questions. How a disembodied voice has the thought-process to ask questions, Marie isn't sure, but she awkwardly answers questions about how her uterus works and how her period feels and female inner anatomy in general. She had gotten in A in Sex Ed. because she didn't want to be ignorant of herself, after all.
The answer to her problems is a river. A really, really cold river, where she needs to wash both herself and her clothes, because no one is going to just let her into their house to use their shower.
Clothes first, she decides, and Danny agrees even though he's sort of in this I'm-not-paying-attention-to-what-you're-doing-don't-mind-me limbo in the back of her brain. If she can get all of her clothes washed, then maybe they'll be at least half-dry by time she's done washing herself, so she won't have to stand naked in the cold, waiting for her clothes to dry.
She smartly starts a fire and makes a sort of lean-to to hang her clothes on when she's finished washing them.
She cleans her coat first with the hopes that it will be dry enough to put right back on when she is done. The freezing chill of running water numbs her hands, but she scrubs vigorously. It's not even laundry soap that she uses - it's a pale green block of Irish Spring body soap. But it smells like laundry soap and the strength of it makes her skin tingle, or maybe it's just the feeling of being clean again that seems so strange.
"Fast, fast," Danny urges.
I know, I know.
When the coat is hung up as close to the fire as she dares to let it be, she washes her first set of clothes, and then strips naked to wash the second set. Nakedness, or, perhaps, the blunt exposure of it, makes her scarred hands fly to work even faster than before. The vulnerability and danger of her bare skin is a paradox that makes her want to crawl right out of that very skin. When the clothes are fully rinsed clean of soap, she doesn't bother hanging them up on the lean-to. She just flings them aside and forces herself into the river.
The water is so cold that it knocks the breath out of her. Her muscles lock but she makes herself move, shaking so hard that she almost drops the soap several times, but she manages. She washes herself thoroughly, scrubbing hard and digging her nails into her skin to scrape the filth away until she accidentally makes herself bleed where the skin is thin, but she can't even feel it, so she keeps scrubbing and soaping and scrubbing and scratching until she has raw, red, stinging patches that bleed. She shaves her underarms with the single disposable razor that she bought to be rid of the uncomfortable growth there and to stop the hair from gathering sweat and odor. Her shaking hands make a mess of it, slicing fragile skin, but she can't care less.
It's so cold.
"I know, I know."
She's crying when she achingly pulls herself out of the water. She shakes herself off, batting at her pained skin with numb hands in an effort to beat the water away before she runs, wobbling all the way, to her barely-dry coat and the fire. She pulls the coat over herself and sidles up next to the fire, sobbing as she does and not thinking any coherent thought, aware of nothing more than the cold and Danny's voice.
Getting dressed when her clothes are finally dry is both painful and relieving, like tearing away a scab. She does it, though, and a fresh pad in clean underwear is almost beautiful enough to make her cry again.
" Makes me wanna cry, too."
Shut up, Danny.
The next day, she searches for anyone to give her a ride into Laughlin City. Without the smell, after all, she is easier to talk to, and her cleanliness makes her more appealing. She is young and clean and very polite and her accent is soothing. No one will disdain of her for any of the reasons they did before.
She catches her reflection in a puddle and is startled by how lean and hungry she looks, how dangerous the lines of her face seem without all the baby fat to soften her. Dark eyes, once wide and far too expressive to lie, are now hard and glittering with intelligence (all this from Danny, really?). She neither mourns the passing of her angelic softness nor does she celebrate how severely adult she has come to appear in such a short time. She only hopes that the hardness of her eyes doesn't cause people to turn her away.
Someone does allow her a ride. A truck-driver. What he's trucking, Marie doesn't care and doesn't ask. She's learned better. No one likes someone else poking around in their business. She is polite and friendly and completely, utterly unobtrusive.
After ten minutes into the drive, though, Marie is tense from the man's side-long glances. She wonders if this will be her second fight. She wonders how she will manage it in a moving truck. They can't fight in this space, she decides, not without driving into a ditch. But if he pulls over anywhere but at a gas station, she's going to bolt (Danny was in track and she didn't know that before he was a voice in her head).
But she doesn't have to.
"You're the Rogue, eh?" he asks when he realizes that she's noticed that he's been watching her.
"The what?" she asks.
"The Rogue," he says again. "The girl. The fightin' girl. North-runner. Rumors 'bout you from Helena t' Red Deer."
"So much for not drawing attention to yourself," Danny grumbles, but he sounds as pleased and as proud as a disembodied voice can.
Marie, though, doesn't think to panic about being noticed. If she's so well-known already and no one has reported her, it probably doesn't matter. She can still lay low for another few months anyway, right? But she still has to know: "Why?"
"Lots of things." The trucker shrugs his hulk of a body and grunts. "Lots of kids run away. Most of 'em don't last like you have. They give up. Most of 'em ain't tough li'l scrappers like you, neither. Man you downed in Cardston, he was a rapist. They caught him because-a you. Caught the whole thing on camera, him tryin'ta hurt you and you fightin' 'im off n'all."
"News must travel faster n'I do. I've never been as far north as Red Deer." She doesn't even know where Red Deer is, actually, only that she's never been there, so it's probably farther north than she's been. Marie doesn't know how to react to what she's been told, either, so she doesn't react at all, really. She just watches the scenery fly past her window, noting how there seems to be more snow with every mile they make north. "Just Laughlin's fine, for now."
"So you are the Rogue."
Marie thinks of her scarred hands and scrubbed-raw body. She thinks of her wild, dark reflection in an icy puddle. She thinks of her chilled bones under taut muscle. She thinks of pale skin bitten by the wind. She thinks of nights spent in the dark wild, under trees, with the sounds of animals echoing in her ears. She thinks of her swollen hand and pounding heart after a man touched her, dared to touch her-
None of this fits into the world of the naïve southern belle named Marie. Marie was soft and sweet and ignorant. Marie could never live like this. Marie would have died on the road in a week.
Therefore, she must not be Marie.
"Yeah." Rogue smirks at her own reflection in the rearview mirror. Her eyes, that had so startled her before, seem so right now. So rightly fierce. "Yeah, sugah, I'm Rogue."