Rogue started to come to, but couldn't quite finish it. There was a dull roar in her ears, like an engine, although it could have been the aftereffects of the drug she'd been popped with. The noise rose and faded at odd intervals, probably as she wandered in and out of consciousness.
At one point when the noise was particularly loud, she heard a woman's voice speaking – a low, snappish woman's voice that she knew even in her current condition. "Get her into her own clothes."
"Do we have to?" asked a boy that sounded remarkably like Lance, with something like a tremor of terror.
The noise faded again. When it reemerged, she felt herself being moved and manipulated, though vaguely, as though she'd received a shot of novocaine to the spine. Her eyes were jostled open in the process, and she saw Lance, blushing furiously, deliberately avoiding her drugged gaze.
You just wait 'till I tell Kitty what you're doing, Rogue thought, but she couldn't say it any more than she could beat him off as he, Pietro, and Pyro returned her to her own clothes.
"Where're her shoes, then?"
"Dunno."
"You were supposed to bring them!"
"Whatever! You were the one being all snappy about 'hurrying up'!"
"Forget it. She can just wear those."
"They don't really match."
"What do you care?"
More silence. More buzzing in her brain.
Then things were quieter. Rogue could identify a headache and a stomachache, both of which probably belonged to her, and from these points she could guess at where the rest of her body was. The roar was gone. Someone with gloves on was touching her face.
"Open your eyes, Rogue," ordered Mystique.
Rogue's eyes opened, though she wasn't one hundred percent positive the action had been her doing. Mystique's face was very fuzzy around the edges.
"Stand up."
The headache and the stomachache changed relative positions.
"Come with me."
Everything was so out of focus that Rogue had no way of knowing if she was going anywhere, or even if she was still standing upright. But an occasional tugging sensation around what was probably her shoulder assured her that Mystique had a good grip on her arm.
"Good morning. I need a visitor's pass for my daughter, please. Marie. Yes, same last name. Thank you very much. There you go, Marie."
More tugging. A ding that might have been an elevator. A hissed command: "Take off your gloves."
Ah need mah gloves, thought Rogue, but she must have taken them off anyway because Mystique did not say anything else to her.
Tugging. Noise. Faces approaching and vanishing in the haze.
"Miss Danvers? Excuse me, Miss Danvers!"
"Yes? I'm sorry, I don't think we've met."
"I'm Ellie Dale, from R&D. I'm sorry to trouble you—I know you must be in a hurry—but my daughter, Marie, is such a fan of yours and she wanted so badly to meet you . . ."
"Oh, of course. No, it's quite all right; I have a few minutes. Hello, Marie."
"Don't be so shy, Sweetheart. Take her hand. It's all right."
No, it ain't! Run away from me, whoever you are! Don't touch me! Don't!
Too late.
Rogue's awareness came shooting back into her body in a firey blaze of pain. In front of her was the woman Mystique had called "Miss Danvers." She only saw the face clearly for a second—a beautiful face, blonde hair framing it and sticking in tendrils to the sweat that glazed her cheeks, bright blue eyes wide with terror, mouth open in a silent cry of pain. Rogue had a death grip on her hand. She could feel power shooting up her arm like white-hot knives, through her chest and into her brain—
Rogue screamed. It was a sound she'd never heard herself make before: a harsh, grating shriek of agony. The muscles of her hand and arm convulsed, loosening her grip.
"Hold on, Rogue!" Mystique ordered, and Rogue felt her hand tense up again. Screaming and screaming, she tried to make herself let go. Her fingers shuddered and twitched with the pain and the conflict. Miss Danvers's fingers began to slip away, made slick by the sweat now pouring off them both.
"Don't let go!" cried Mystique. She seized Rogue's wrist in one gloved hand and Danvers's in the other and pressed the palms together.
The pain began to ease. Rogue could not stop screaming. Even through the drugs and the pain and the fear, she knew instinctively what the approaching relief meant: Miss Danvers, whoever she was, was dying.
The burning power retreated from her legs and left arm, drained from her head, condensed into a fierce line from her palm to her heart, and then faded entirely. The blue-eyed face sank into the haze and was lost. Rogue could not stop screaming. Even after she felt a needle prick her arm and was swallowed up in black unconsciousness, she could hear the echoes of two anguished voices reverberating throughout her mind.
The engine hum was back when consciousness began to re-assert itself. Her aches and pains were gone. Her mind was clear, if a little fuzzy from being asleep for so long.
I'm probably in an airplane.
She peeked open one eye to confirm her assumption. She was lying on a metal floor under a curved metal ceiling, next to a massive computer tower.
Yep. Airplane. Her eyes strayed to a logo near the top of the computer. 56-320 spyplane. I wonder how she got one of those. Why didn't anyone tell us a spyplane had gone missing?
She felt peculiarly unworried. An airplane in flight was no trouble at all. It would be an easy drop to the ground. They couldn't be more than ten thousand feet up; there was plenty of atmosphere left. She could almost see the metal walls around her writhe and buckle from the force of the winds outside. They were as flimsy as paper. She could tear them open with one hand . . .
And she did.
The wind caught her almost instantly and sucked her from the plane, throwing her clear of the engine's backdraft. She got one good look at the craft before dropping below it, tossing in the wake as though riding in a wave pool. It was fun. She had a sudden urge to yell "Whee!" as her utterly relaxed body did a couple of end-over-end flips and then settled down to the business of falling. It was going to be a long time before she hit the ground.
She decided to go back to sleep.
