Title: Another Kissing Game
Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel characters or any associated concepts.
Issues: Takes place during X-23 #6; contains flashbacks to X-23 #2 and #3; various X-Force storylines; references events of the Second Coming storyline
Characters: Laura, Logan, Miss Sinister, Julian, Domino, other X-Men
Rating: M for adult concepts, sexual assault, language, sexuality, violence. No explicit sex.

Another Kissing Game

1. Julian

This never happened.

It's not happening, Laura thinks, strapped down in the chair. She looks down at her arm, the arm that Claudine gouged just seconds ago. There's no proof. Her arm is healing, has almost healed, is as good as new, good as always, and she has no evidence of having been hurt except the drying blood, which will flake off when it means to. Laura's watched her own self-inflicted cuts heal dozens of times—and right now, her body doesn't let her down. Her skin closes the way it always does, not even leaving a notch or the promise of a scar. The pain hangs on a little longer, like an unpleasant memory, and then the fear sinks in. Claudine hurt her, and now she plans to do worse.

Claudine is readying her laboratory. Her crude machines are flickering to life.

Does it matter if there's no evidence? No other question—perhaps apart from the question of the soul—occupies Laura so much. She wonders if she's going to die, and—never mind her soul—what will become of her body? She watches as Claudine prepares her equipment, poised in front of the computer. She jabs at the keys like someone who never learned to type properly and Laura once again wonders who made this woman, where she came from. Claudine is like her in some ways, but not in others. She was made, but not made in a facility. This is not the facility, Laura thinks. This acknowledgment comforts her. She has escaped from worse. She has dealt with more powerful people, more advanced technology.

Gambit, please come. Please hurry. Please come help me before it begins. She wants to cry out.

Claudine looks at her as if sensing that she's trying to summon someone. "Relax," she says, and Laura's not comforted anymore. This is not the facility, but that doesn't matter. Right here, right now, Laura is once again the subject of someone's experiment.

Gambit, please. She wishes she was another type of person—she wishes this often, and for many different reasons—but right now she wishes she was a person who could make things happen with her mind.

Claudine smiles and the smile is forced and not at all pleasant. She doesn't want to wait anymore. She doesn't want to pretend to be something she's not: nice. "Sorry—this thing is slow. It'll just be a few more minutes before we're ready. If it's any comfort, I can promise you that you won't feel much pain with this procedure. Unless you want to. And if that's the case, I think I can accommodate you."

Laura stares at the ceiling. She tries not to tense, tries to remember what Logan taught her about suppressing fear. She knows she smells like fear, sweaty and stale, too many quick breaths. Her armpits are damp. She doesn't look down, but she knows dampness, knows the darkening of her shirt. And where is her jacket? She has lost her jacket. Claudine took it and put it somewhere else. "I am not afraid of pain," she says—more to herself than to Claudine. It's a statement she wants to believe.

"I know," Claudine says. "It's why I'm looking forward to this body. Why I already love it so much."

Laura glances down at her arm, at the cut now completely healed. Her knuckles are white, fingers clenching the armrest. She forces herself to look at Claudine's face.

"I love you," Claudine says, and her breath catches a little. Excitement, Laura thinks. Maybe fear? But Laura knows the smell of fear, and this isn't fear. Anticipation. Desire. Something in between. "Well, not because I really love you. I love your ignorance about life. It's to be admired." She takes off her helmet and approaches Laura again, standing over her chair. She crouches down.

Laura stares straight ahead, pretending not to know what's going to happen next—she wishes she was another girl, a girl who didn't know what was coming. When Claudine touches her cheek and then kisses the corner of her mouth, Laura tells herself that it's not really happening—at least not to her. It's just happening to her body, and because it's her body, no one will ever know.

A game. A game where you kissed people you didn't really love. A playing card was passed between people by mouth. A card you couldn't touch with your hands. You pressed the card to your lips and inhaled. And then another person pressed her lips to the card and inhaled as you breathed out. And this continued with many other people. To drop the card—to exhale when you should have inhaled and to let your lips touch another person's—was to lose. To lose was to drink more. Laura did not lose this game—but then again, she did not lose any game. She got the card from Cessily and gave it to David and inhaled their breath as though it was her own.

They sat in Nori's bedroom. They drank cheap beer. Victor got it from his friend in the city. There was a bottle of wine—deep, red, expensive—and no one wanted to tell Laura where they got it.

"Oh God, you're not going to tell on us, are you?" Santo said.

"She won't tell," Nori said quickly, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ears. "Laura's cool. Now, thank God Sooraya's not here."

"Oh, that's not nice," Victor said, but without any spite or passion. He leaned back against the wall, legs crossed.

Laura wouldn't tell. To tell something was to tell everything, to get caught once was to get caught always. She imagined herself alone in Ms. Frost's office, and Ms. Frost would say, "And what else, Laura? What else do you have to say?" And what if Laura couldn't contain herself; what if she said something about the team? Everything would be over, and Logan would be in trouble, and Mr. Summers, and the rest of the team. Everyone would know everything they had ever done—Josh, Warren, Jimmy, Rahne. She wasn't keeping the secret for her but for them. You can't tell anybody anything, Logan said. Silence is best. Tell one person one little detail about where we were last night, and suddenly nothing fits your story, and everything's out of the bag. Laura understood and obeyed.

Another thing Logan told her: If you never lie, you never have to remember anything. But this made no sense. All they did was lie. There was so much to remember.

Her friends didn't know about her—she knew they didn't know because she could read their faces. They didn't look at her for longer or shorter periods of time than they did before, and when they asked her where she was and she told them the lie that Logan had instructed her to tell—that she was studying late at the library downtown, or that she was helping Logan with something special—they didn't ask. Not even Cessily. People liked simple answers, Laura thought. People accepted her explanations and smiled and went back to thinking about themselves.

It should have been more difficult to keep the secret. Laura suspected it was more difficult for Josh and Jimmy. But Laura was quiet—and she found that staying quiet was easy. Unlike Josh or Jimmy, she didn't have to confide in anyone. She wasn't expected to disclose things to close friends or a significant other. She wasn't accountable to anyone.

Now Laura looked at Nori and didn't hesitate or blink. "I won't tell anyone."

But Cessily was the one who replied. "We got the wine from Ms. Frost's office," she said. "She left it unattended. It was in a fruit basket of some kind."

"A fruit basket she got from Tony Stark," Nori said, grinning and looking uncharacteristically impish.

"Christ, Nori," Julian said. He stood over them and his hair fell in his face. "Like she's not going to miss that. Shit. We might as well all schedule ourselves for year-long detention now. I hope you enjoyed your last trip to the city."

"We'll get rid of the bottle," Nori said. "She won't find it. And if she can't find it with us, she can't prove that we did anything."

"Absence of proof isn't proof of absence," Victor rattled off. Then he laughed, drunk and happy. "Especially not for Emma Frost. She doesn't need proof. She already knows. Might as well live it up tonight. Circle up."

And then Victor began to fiddle with the bottle. He placed his hand on its neck. Crouching on his knees, he positioned it away from himself and gave it a good spin and then sat back. Laura recognized this as another game, another kissing game. This game was more straightforward than the card game but more bizarre, and she never quite understood its logic. Why kiss someone you might not really want to kiss under normal circumstances? Why kiss someone at all? Laura was both mystified and intrigued by kissing, by how it was something people liked to do for its own sake. Laura secretly thought that kissing was unsettling—if it didn't lead to sex, it was pointless, and if it did, then it was part of the act itself. And sex was another thing she didn't talk about. She knew more than other kids her age, and though she wasn't quite sure how much they knew about her—or about how much they knew about sex in general—she now understood that they needed to buy into the fiction that they all had almost-equal levels of knowledge. Those who were virgins exaggerated their experience, and those who had slept with more than one person pretended that they hadn't. One day she had been at the pool with Nori and Alani, and they had been in bikinis, and Santo had been there, and he cracked a joke about someone getting a facial. "Oh, go to hell," Nori said, but she wasn't angry, just annoyed, and Santo laughed. Laura just stared straight ahead at the trees. She didn't even dare to look down at herself, at her squarish, compact body for fear that it might betray her—and she understood, just tenuously—that she could never be the sort of girl who got to be annoyed, not angry, about a joke. God, did any other girl ever feel so invisible? She wanted nothing more than for other people's gazes to skim over her without stopping.

The bottle spun.

"No powers, Julian," Nori warned. "Let the bottle stop where it stops."

"Don't flatter yourself," Julian said, sitting back in Nori's beanbag chair with his hands behind his head. "There's nobody here I'm, like, jonesing to kiss. Least of all you, Nori."

Nori blew her bangs out of her eyes.

"I think you protest too much, Julian," Victor said. The bottle stopped spinning. It pointed to the place where no one sat. It pointed to the door.

"Well, that's a sign," Santo said. "The universe does not want you to kiss anyone, Victor. Why are we even doing this? How twelve are we?"

Victor spun the bottle again. "I'm doing it for you, Santo. Because this is the only action you get all year."

"Ouch," Nori said.

"No, this is the only action you get. This gives you an excuse to grope everyone you stare at."

"I don't need an excuse."

Julian laughed. Then bottle stopped spinning, its opening pointing in the direction of the bean bag chair. Almost right at him. Not quite.

He rose to his feet and stepped into the circle, arms outstretched. "C'mon, Victor. Let's show these people how it's done."

Victor jumped up, his socks sliding along the carpet. He skidded into Julian's arms. Julian grabbed hold of him and tilted him back, kissing him on the mouth, no hesitation.

Everyone laughed. Someone made a whooping noise. "Yeah," Santo said. "Make your mothers proud."

The kiss lasted for five seconds. When Julian pulled Victor upright again and let him go, Victor was grinning but not blushing. (Laura was certain she was blushing. She reminded herself to breathe normally and hoped no one was looking at her to chart her reaction. This would pass. This whole thing was just a game.)

Victor went back to his place in the circle and sat down, and Laura could not tell whether he was smug or triumphant or just drunk. He raised his beer can to Julian.

"That's the highlight of your month, huh Victor?" Santo said.

"Or yours," Victor replied.

Nori tucked her legs beneath her. "Julian, it's your spin."

Laura watched as Julian crouched between David and Cessily and grabbed the middle of the bottle. She tried to make herself sit very still, hoping that she might draw the opening of the bottle to her by willing it. She took a sip of beer and thought about Logan—wondered why he drank so much when it was so hard to get drunk on beer and it tasted so bad. Everyone around her was boozy and a little wasted, but she was not. She thought about Julian, about how easy it was for him to kiss Victor. Other boys would have protested, or they would have pretended to protest. David, for instance. Or Josh, who wasn't there. But Julian could kiss Victor, and he could kiss him meaningfully, and it didn't mean anything. Or it was funny. Because he was Julian, he could do whatever he wanted.

The bottle stopped at Cessily.

Laura could feel Cessily tense. She tried not to tense herself, tried to remember what Logan taught her about suppressing undesirable emotions, about pushing past pain. She tried to ignore the tiny twinge of her heart.

Cessily turned to face Julian and crouched on her knees. They traded a quick kiss and then it was over, and then she turned back and sat down.

Cessily spun the bottle and it stopped Laura. Laura leaned into the circle, expecting another quick kiss, but Cessily held on a little longer this time and when she pulled back she looked down and then sat back, her hair in her eyes.

Laura spun. She got Victor and his kiss was confident and impersonal, and he even slipped her a little tongue. He was good at kissing.

The evening continued, and Laura kissed most of the others at some point—most everyone except Julian. She wondered if that happened by design or chance. It didn't seem to matter; what happened happened. She couldn't get what she wanted by willing it; she knew this. In the end, Nori passed out on her bed and Julian in the bean bag chair, and some of the others curled up on the floor. Laura slipped out of the room, sober and alert. She went back to her own room and to bed.

Right now Laura wants to be woozy and drunk. Instead she is awake and too alert and too alive.

"Do you have a boyfriend?" Claudine whispers. Her whisper is closer than her kiss.

Laura tries not to twist her hands.

Claudine's lips are on her neck, her hand on her abdomen, stroking her waist. She repeats her question, and Laura knows what she's really asking: Are you a virgin? Do you come easily?

Claudine rises over her. Laura turns her head and waits for Claudine to touch her again. She'll try not to flinch this time, she promises. She even hears herself say something to this effect aloud. Claudine's hands are cold, but she won't flinch—not when Claudine touches her, slipping one hand under her shirt and the other down her pants. She wants to know Laura's body before it becomes her own. In a few minutes, she will be inside her.

Julian— Laura thinks. She closes her eyes, not wanting to think of him, but already he is there. She remembers the time she sneaked down to the gym to watch him doing physical therapy with Madison. He didn't know she was there, and she felt bad about that now—felt that perhaps she had invaded his privacy. They threw a ball back and forth, and Julian kept trying to catch it with his stumps. (That's how he referred to them. Let's face facts, she overheard him say to Alani once. I'm a cripple. He was trying to be upbeat but his voice had an edge.) He kept dropping the ball. Sometimes he used his powers. "No powers," Madison said, "you'll never learn if you keep using them," and Julian said, "Fuck you." Finally he picked up the ball with both stumps and let it drop. He walked away. "Oh, come on, Julian," Madison said, and Julian headed for the door.

In English class they were scheduled to read a story about a black man who was burned in a fire and lost his face. Miss Frost changed the schedule so that they read Maggie, A Girl of the Streets instead.

And now she thinks of it—of the last time she saw Julian. Not the very last time—not the time she looked in on him while he was sleeping—but right before she went to hell, right before Logan hurt him. When he was trying to keep her from hurting Logan. I'm doing this for you, Julian had said. And how reasonable he'd seemed—and how irrational and chaotic she must have looked to him. What she couldn't bring herself to tell him: Logan—or what looked like Logan—had touched her. How could she make Julian understand this? What words could she say? She didn't even understand it herself—the proximity of Logan's touch, the way someone's hands could be something you loved, and then something you hated. Wolverine would never. He would never do to me what other people—

She couldn't bring herself to articulate what had just happened. He hadn't really touched her. But now he had. Yes, he had, just like everyone else, but it wasn't him. Or it was his body that had touched her, but not his soul. Like everything, his touch was the memory of what had already happened to her in a previous life, and the fear of what might come next.