Disclaimer: I own nothing X.
Set The Fire To The Third Bar
The Straight Line
It isn't the kind of research she is supposed be doing for the pre-Ivy League work her parents' shining eyes have always anticipated.
It isn't a group project for school – always frustrating, because even though she is too shy to speak up, she always perceives things from an angle crucially sidestepped by her classmates.
And it isn't as simple as biking to the local library on her own to use the Internet.
It isn't even as simple as hiking to a crossroads in the dead of night to bury a photo of herself, spit spitefully onto the ground, and make a deal with the devil.
Looking expressionlessly into the bitter eyes of this rogue FBI agent, she sees nothing but a malicious, deadened spirit.
She steps forward, fidgeting slightly with her hands, though not taking her eyes from his.
He glances down and snorts. "What's with the gloves?"
She does not respond. Too shy to speak up.
Or, too smart.
As she pulls the cold, middle-aged man toward her with long, thin, lace-gloved fingers, she notices that she is half an inch taller than he.
Their lips are only half an inch apart. She pauses. Conscience.
Or possibly fear.
"Uh, hello. I'm paying for some skirt here."
But what's to fear. The jerk has no sticks and stones in his pockets.
Hands gripped around his neck, she presses her thin and resolute lips against his thick, chapped ones.
She doesn't see his pink skin yawning to grey and purple. She doesn't feel his body buzzing half an inch from hers. She doesn't sense the desperate flickering of cold, grey-blue eyes, as though he is trying to withdraw his consent the only way his seized muscles know how.
Her research is a search not yet complete. She zips through his memory, closed eyes wide, and stitches her own existence into the humming yet barren network of nerves only where the signposts point this way to Weapon X.
Ice and snow and terrible winds, as bitter as her subject's eyes.
She uploads the images to her own memory and zips them into a byte the size of a pinpoint on a large transparency sheet in her mind. She shifts the transparency onto the grid of a map which she memorized before she left home.
Her search is to make home "home" again.
But a shiver inside her tells her she will never be able to go home again.
Anna-Marie d'Ancanto is deader than this frozen, shaking man. Anna-Marie is deader than his malicious spirit.
Rogue is roguer than this rough, lustful FBI agent. Rogue is roguer than his last self-proclaimed assignment: to track her down.
The pinpoint blinks red and gold and beeping against the textured map of the wild continent.
North is only a straight line away.
