"The Dividing Line"
Author's Note: "The Dividing Line" is the fourth installment of the "Untouchable" series, which is comprised of: Touch, The Rest of the World is Noise, and Mouvement. This one takes place a few weeks (about two months) after the events of the previous one. Oh, and, I don't own anything, not even the story and song titles – they are all taken from Dark Tranquillity songs.
Prologue
(Static.)
In the backyard of that old home, small, with dead grass and dead leaves under her bare feet. Dark skies overhead, with a tint of sickly green and dark brown. The woods, shrouded in the shadows that stretch between the crooked, twisted trees surrounding the house, all of its dark secrets and terrible inhabitants kept back by the rotted fence.
Toys at her feet. Wooden cars. Meant for a boy. They never had a boy, or had they lost him? She didn't remember. But maybe, they didn't even belong to her. Belonged to them.
They were out there, she knew. In the woods, barely kept back by the rotted fence, lurking. Whispering hell and damnation from afar.
"Why do you keep coming back here?" he asked her. She turned. He was standing on the porch, with a brown trench coat on top of his regular clothes, hands in pockets. The ruby quartz glasses gleaming in the darkness with a slight, reddish hue.
"Ah have to." She said.
"And why's that? What did you forget in here?"
"Don't ya see? It's a piece of mahself. It's here. Means Ah'm still in here, somewhere."
"There is no assurance of that. You might be lost forever."
"Ah'm lost either way. Don't matter none. Ah have ta try."
"Not like this. It's dangerous here."
"You're with me. Ah'm safe. Isn't that what you always say?"
"I can't be with you forever. I can't keep you safe from everything."
That was the truth of it – no matter how much she wanted to deny it. She felt that he meant no malice by stating it outright, by reminding her just where she was and exactly what she had to lose.
She knew what she'd say. She knew what the Rogue would say, and the shadow-forms whispering in the woods agreed.
"Then go. Ah can't stop you. Everybody goes away in the end. Everybody leaves."
"You can stop me, if you want. I can stay with you."
"Not for long."
"But for a while. Longer than any of them," he casually waved towards the shadow-forms of others, circling the house, "I can linger."
"Not really stayin. 'sokay. Ah'm used to it. Ah just need to find out... find out..."
What was it that she needed to find out? She knew that it was here, somewhere, the crooked, decaying place of her own identity, one that had been ravaged by the shadows surrounding it. This purity, slowly being stained, wasn't what she was looking for, though – it was something within it, something deeper. Something lost.
A reverberation through the woods. The shadows, moving closer.
"Let's go inside." He said.
Rogue turned and looked at him. He was standing right in front of the door. The shadows lurking on the porch, around him, whispered promises of madness inside the old home. He, untouched by it all, held out a hand, inviting her to take it.
Rogue shirked from it. Shirked from his touch.
"Come on." He urged, "Come with me."
"Ah can't."
"Why not?"
"...Ah'm scared to go in there."
"That's where you are." he said, "That's where you always were."
Rogue looked at the door. It was more than just a door, it was a threshold – a pure idea, waiting. The old home, where she knew her memories were, had only one entrance.
"Ah can't go in there. Not now."
His neck cricked and she saw him looking at something behind her. She didn't need to look. She knew. Echoes. Echoes, wrapped in shadow, hissing whispers of their private languages, speaking phrases of mundane significant – malevolent, creeping, coming closer.
"Come inside." He said, his voice growing urgent, "Please. I can't protect you here."
She could hear their movements in the grass, they were a little ways away, their collective voices rising in a murmur. And there he was, with that panicked expression on his face, concerned, afraid – all for her. For her still.
"You've done enough."
"I can't protect you here."
"Ya don't have to." Rogue said. She turned her eyes to his, and pretended, as she often did, that she could see them. "Ah'm sorry." She said.
Hands. On her shoulder, down her arms, gripping her hands, her legs, her ankles. Arms snaked around her torso, embraced her, and as Scott watched in sorrow, the echoes pulled her away from the porch and threw her to the ground. Rogue looked around and saw familiar faces, ones she was used to seeing coated in expressions of concealed disdain, pity, suspicion, and in other occasions, love, concern, care. Kitty, Kurt, Lance, Fred, Toad, Jean, Logan, Sam, Bobby, Jamie, Risty, Tabitha, Amara, Ray, Jubilee, Henry McCoy, Erik Lensher, even Mystique... they were drawing closer, and she, lying in the middle of their circle, was too afraid to move, because their expressions were unequivocally and unanimously hungry.
Rogue shut her eyes tight and waited for the inevitable.
In a second, hands were all over her: touching, groping, caressing, poking and prodding, and growing harsher, more painful with each passing contact. Before long, screaming with joy, the crowd was clawing away at her – Rogue tried to stop them, lifted her arms up and tried to wrench her legs away, but somebody was holding down her ankles, and there was nothing she could do... she could feel her clothes being ripped to shreds simultaneously as nails were digging into her skin, drawing blood, bringing pain, and she screamed out, and her own screams followed her down...
Rogue woke up to a semi-familiar ceiling and discovered that she was unable to move. Her entire body was like a clenched fist – muscles locked and refusing to answer to her most basic commands. Paralyzed, she listened to the thumping in her ears, trying to relax, trying to get the edge off but how was that even possible when her heart was beating too slow, 80 bpm was for suckers and why... no. What? Who? Fast, quick... oh. Quicksilver's thoughts.
Slowly, her body started to unlock, gradually giving her her control, such as it was, back. She sat up in bed, and glanced around, trying to get her bearings. The dorm room, the only coed room on the Academy of Tomorrow campus was somewhat familiar. The beds were on either sides of the room, hers being closer to the large closet space built into the wall. On her left were the windows, cracked open, inviting the night-time chill and the moisture in. On the other side of the room, were study desks, both next to each other. Each bed had a small bedside, and Rogue's showed a digital clock displaying 3:32 in green.
Rogue could hear Scott's steady breathing, blending into the ambient hum of the room.
God, her head was throbbing. She felt her eyeballs as what they were – fleshy spheres turning inside sockets. She clenched her fist in attempt to channel the pain somewhere else, but all that brought her was more pain in the form of bone claws tearing through the skin between her knuckles.
What..?
Rogue looked at her hand. There they were, three claws, in proportionate length to her size. Blood was dripping from their roots, where her flesh had been torn.
Oh no. No... please no...
Rogue felt herself get lighter and lighter and lighter, and it didn't make sense until she saw the room rising around her. She felt light-headed, and she knew the symptom. Desperately, she flailed her arms, one hand still sporting the claws, trying to catch something, anything, but all she could do was grasp at thin air as she phased right through the bed and the floor, and down to the next one. She barely had time to try to concentrate before, again, she went down another floor.
I need to be solid, I need to be solid, I need to be solid...
Rogue felt her body regain its solid shape in mid-air, and had time only to let out a yelp before she fell into somebody's bed. She panicked – what if she touched whoever was there? What if that person was a mutant? She had enough echoes to contend with as it is.
Rogue threw her legs off of the bed, and was about to move when two hands (bare, unprotected palms)grabbed her by the arms. Contact.
Scaleskinburroughscornerpays exmarlborotrojanphermoneorga sm
Rogue felt pleasure, pure and sudden, shoot trough her, overtaking her. She gasped. As her chaotic head made way for the next echo, she saw snake eyes gleam in the dark, and a girl (Stacy, her name was, Stacy X – she was from Brooklyn and after a certain point, her life was a string of anonymous encounters with many different men with different budget constraints asking for different things to be done to them) completely naked, snarling at her.
Her mouth was open, and she was screaming: "What the fuck are you-"
With a resounding BAMF, Rogue found herself outside of the dormitory building. Her bare feet dug into the mud, but it wasn't enough to keep her balance. Rogue flailed her arms around, trying to keep her footing, but failed and fell face-down.
Her head was buzzing with voices, but one of them slipped through.
It takes a while to get a hang of re-appearing. The trick is to not appear too high above the ground.
Shut up, Kurt.
Rogue crawled on all fours and got back onto the cold concrete. She shivered. Late-October Chicago (but she was in Brooklyn, and it was winter, and she had hours to go before she could go home... no. Not her.) wasn't suited for the t-shirt and underwear combo. Of course, even that was too much, who needed clothes when you were the ice-man himself?
Wait. No. Bobby's thoughts.
Rogue felt a crawling sensation and looked at her hands. Her fingers had frozen solid.
Rogue sat there, covered in mud and cold, waiting for something else to kick in, somebody else to have a go at driving her body. She looked at her hand. The claws were still there. Clenching her teeth, she tried to prepare herself for the pain, and then retracted them.
Pain. Sharp. Sudden. Lingering.
It took Rogue a while to settle the voices in her head down enough to generate a conscious enough thought. When she managed to separate the ones she didn't find agreeable, she just clung to the ones she thought she could agree with, and that was as close as she was going to get to her own thoughts, she knew.
Those in agreement said that she should go inside. She was going to catch a cold. The dorm buildings, however, had swipe-locks - you'd swipe your ID and they would open for a short amount of time. Of course, having forgotten to wear her ID badge necklace, again, she had no way of getting in.
Why don't you bang on windows, scream your lungs off, or try shouting 'fire'?
Tabitha...
Oh come on, it's either that or looking for shit to throw at the doors' glass sections, and deal property damage you know you can't pay off. Much as I love the mayhem, this shit? Not worth it. So why don't you get some blue fur on that pale butt of yours and zap on home?
It doesn't work that way. I'm not in control.
And who's fault is that?
Shut up, Jean, nobody asked you.
It took Rogue nearly an hour of shivering and going from window to window to find somebody who would help her get inside. She didn't know why this girl was not as indifferent as the rest until she stepped into the light and Rogue saw her skin. It resembled mercury – it was, seemingly, just a dense, silvery liquid keeping the perfect human shape. Rogue sheepishly thanked her for letting her in, and hurried up to the fourth floor, leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind.
