It didn't seem like much, the bar, but it spoke to something in her. The anonymity, the feeling of being just another transient face in an endless stream of tired, weary travellers.
She flips the kickstand on the bike down, pulls the front wheel to the left and sinuously slips from the saddle, right leg coming over the back of the bike in a motion reminiscent of the slow, easy grace of a cat. As both her boots touch down on the ground of a different state from one they left that morning, she unconsciously slips into a predator's stance, alert and watchful. She's got a Special Forces' appreciation for the surrounding territory, an animal instinct for danger and a wad of cash that's slowly diminishing as she continues her search.
He's not making it easy, even though part of him is helping her.
She pulls the helmet off, blinking in the sun and takes a second look around. She pulls her hair back from her face before the slight breeze can catch it, the two white streaks being tucked neatly behind her ears. It's down to the small of her back now, and she takes great pleasure in twisting it into elaborate plaits and designs, then smoothing it all out to become its natural raven fall down her back.
The heat rising off the blacktop makes the air shimmer, and she starts sweating through the leathers. She had them custom made in a shop in Westchester that Xavier sourced the uniforms from, and they've been designed to take into account her mutation, as well as to look damned good. So far they've held up extremely well, and she says a silent thank-you to the seamstress that put them together. She shrugs out of the knapsack on her back and unzips the top, allowing a slightly cool breeze to brush her chest.
She immobilises the bike with the key fob, and then starts across the lot with the knapsack in one hand, helmet in the other. She's parked in such a way that she can pick any booth in the bar along the window and have an uninterrupted view of the lot, the bar and the road. She sometimes thinks she's being paranoid.
Then she remembers the nightmare of seven years ago, Stryker's attack on the school. And the man in her head saying, There's no such thing as too much paranoia.
There are several other cars here in the lot, and she doesn't see any two plates from the same state. They've got a large black truck, its bed covered with what looks like a fiberglass shell. A couple of SUVs, and one that grabs her attention for a long second – a Chevrolet, midnight-black, Kansas plates and forty years old, if she's any judge. She looks beautiful. She can imagine the owner of that car being fiercely possessive, and a damn good mechanic if it's still in roadworthy condition. Scratch that, she thinks. Showroom condition.
The door is thick, solid oak and it's reinforced with what smells like iron. Her hunter's senses pick up on the smell of weaponry; hot metal, gun oil, cordite, and underneath it all like an ominous premonition: blood. She can hear the sounds of magazines being loaded, the tinkle of bullets and the repetitive click as they each slot neatly into their new homes; knives being hand-sharpened with whetstones.
She's not even over the threshold.
She puts one booted foot forward, shifts her weight, and is smoothly in motion, looking at the selection of spirits behind the bar as she becomes aware of the interior. Three pool tables at one end of the bar, none being used. The cues are neatly racked, and there's a black plastic triangle, a small towel and a cube of chalk at the head of each table. The cue balls are all sitting on their dots, waiting.
Tables are scattered in a seeming haphazard fashion across the floor, which is strewn with sawdust. Part of her is happy about that, knowing that this bar is no stranger to fights and settling things with power, not talk. Another part is philosophical, wondering what the hell a small-town Southern belle is doing in a place like this.
Three steps over the threshold, and she slows, aware that she's being watched. Not just watched, she realises, studied, people carrying out their own threat evaluations of her, just as she is doing the same to them. Her eyes flick from right to left, and she carries on, barely breaking stride. I'm here, she's saying, I'm not looking for a fight, but I know how to take care of myself. And in the event that the self-defence classes she participated in at the Institute fail, well.
She doesn't want to think about what might happen in that outcome.
She puts the knapsack and helmet on the floor, hooks a foot round a stool that's surprisingly heavy, and pulls it towards her, pushing herself onto it with the other foot and a bracing hand on the bar. Most of the other patrons have correctly evaluated her as no immediate threat, and gone back to what they were doing. Two are filling handgun magazines, bullets loose on a plate in front of them. They are strangely dull under the lights, and they look hand-forged. Not like the sleek rows of bullets she's seen in briefing photos before the team deployed to take down a target, or the belts of heavy-caliber ammunition from a half-remembered past that doesn't belong to her. Another is writing in a book, a sheaf of newspapers scattered around him. He's not looked up, and there's a wicked-looking knife lying brazenly on the table next to his right arm. He's writing left handed, she realises, and some part of her knows instinctively that he was born right handed, but he's trained himself to be ambidextrous.
Three other men are sitting in a booth to themselves, heads close together and deep in a discussion about something. Her heightened senses pick up on the words cattle, possession and demon, and then she tunes out.
A woman emerges from what she takes to be the cellar, wiping her hands on a rag. She apprises the newcomer in one glance, and says, "Get you anything?"
"Coors, please" she says, because she was not raised by wolves.
The woman retrieves a bottle from a chiller under the bar and puts it down on a faded beer mat advertising Molson. She picks up the five that's put down on the bar, and moves to the register. On the way back, she picks up a damp cloth, and begins to wipe the bar down with a slow purposefulness.
"Name's Ellen," she offers.
"Rogue," replies the younger woman.
"Interesting name," says Ellen.
"It's got... history."
"I bet."
"Nice place you have here."
Ellen laughs. It's a pleasant sound, and she has the impression that Ellen's had precious little to laugh about recently.
"It's okay. It keeps me busy. Where are you from, Rogue?"
"Westchester, New York," she says, then adds, "but I was born in Meridian."
"Mississippi," supplies Ellen.
Rogue nods the affirmitive.
"So what are you doing here? You're a long, long way from anything familiar."
"I'm..." she hesitates. She doesn't know this woman, this kind-faced owner of a bar where weaponry is not just allowed, but openly flaunted. It occurs to her just how odd this is. She decides to go with a half-truth. "I'm looking for something."
"Something, or someone?" prompts Ellen.
"Someone. A man. I know he came this way. And... I know he's familiar with this bar. He's told me about this place. But he's not been here for years."
A guarded look passes over Ellen's features. "What was his name?"
"Logan," says Rogue.
She shakes her head. "I don't know anyone by that name."
"He's a bit taller than me, very compact. He's got black hair that kinds of sweeps up at the sides-" she demonstrates with her hands "-and he's got really thick muttonchop sideburns. Wearing a white vest and jeans, and a huge belt buckle."
Ellen's got a funny look on her face, and she calls over to one of the tables. "Hey, Winchester!!"
The three men that had been sitting engrossed in conversation turn as one to look at Ellen. "Yeah?"
"That drifter we had in here a week ago – did he say where he was going, or where he was from?"
"No," said the oldest of the three. He looked to be double the age of the younger two, at least, and life had not been kind to him. His hair was unkempt, he needed a shave and his clothes looked like they hadn't been washed in a week.
"He told us he was from New York," offered the taller of the two younger men. Rogue saw dimples, long bangs, and dark, intense eyes, and wondered if he was still single. If she wasn't chasing Logan down with the avowed intention of convincing him to come back to the Institute, she's have liked to take him out to a bar and get to know him. But time was short, and her cash even shorter, and she regretted that circumstances were working against her.
You'd think, after learning to control a deadly vampiric power that absorbs people's life force through skin-to-skin contact, that picking up guys in bars would be easy. Rogue had never been more frustrated in her life.
She pushed that thought out of her mind, took a deep breath, and spoke. "Did he say where he was going?"
"West. He was heading for Oregon."
Oregon. The name reverberates through her mind, but no clues as to why it holds such significance emerged. If Wolverine knew why he was going there, or what in his past had occurred to make it important, the part of him in her head wasn't sharing it with her. Maybe they see her confusion.
"He said something about a friend he had to see in the state, and then he'd move on again."
"Thanks, sugar," says Rogue. That means nothing on its own. It could be a lie he spun for the benefit of these three, and anyone else he got talking to in the bar. It could be a diversionary tactic, and he's not heading to Oregon at all.
Or, it could be the truth.
She's been given the most solid lead on his whereabouts for the last four months, and she owes these guys. "Can I buy you a drink?"
---
She leaves the bar later that afternoon, after spreading out her map of the continental United States on one of the pool tables and making faint pencil markings, showing how far she's come and how far she has to go to catch him. He has a nine-day head start on her, and he knows where he's going. She traces possible routes, the fastest, the longest, the one with the most interesting sights, the ones where he won't see another person for nine hours or more at a time. The task is almost impossible.
Almost.
She's restocked her supplies, filled her knapsack with food and water, and her money stash is down another fifteen bucks. For all that, though, she's close. Closer than she was when she left Nebraska and stopped in Wyoming. She's got to get through Idaho, and then into Oregon, and she'll see what she finds there.
She gets on the bike, twists the key and listens appreciatively as it starts with a throaty purr. She learned most of her motorcycle mechanics course in the pair of times that she touched him, and passed Summers' engineering course with full marks and no instruction.
She eases the clutch, toes the bike into first gear and peels out of the lot, not looking back. Her hair streams out from under the helmet, an obsidian sheet that ripples in the wind as she accelerates to seventy. She starts humming an old song as she clicks up through the gears. She's heading west, following the routes of the early pioneers and the more recent trail of a single man.
She's looking forward, into a never-ending road, pursuing a man who doesn't want to be found, and loving every minute of it.