Chapter Three: The Mark of the Beast
Westchester, New York. X-Institute, 1974
I: Logan
"Hey? Jimmy?"
"How come you always look both ways before you talk to me?"
"Because I figure you don't wanna be seen talkin' to the likes of me around all your fancy friends, runt."
"You got somethin' important to say, Creed, or just the usual bullshit?"
"Yeah. I do. Listen, I appreciate you lookin' after Rogue for me."
"Well, I wasn't lookin' after her just on your account, Vic. I did it because she needed lookin' after."
"What? Are you sayin' I should be ashamed of myself? What, I'm not a man? I don't get to have a woman? You always do."
"Yours always end up dying."
"So do yours!"
"Because you kill them!"
"Not all of them! And not Stripe. She's like me, now. And like you. Nothing can kill her. Not even us."
"I'll bet you planned that, huh, Vic?"
"You bet your ass I did. That's the secret Jimmy. Like what the Sarge said about Napalm. You pick on a woman who can take care of herself, ya won't be buryin' her anytime soon."
Logan looked at his brother in disbelief as he walked away.
So, you just went ahead and made Rogue that way, Vic?
Then Logan thought again.
Rogue was a lady, but she was every bit as tough as Napalm was, under the skin.
He was pretty sure nobody had made her do anything, and when Victor offered her the opportunity to become a world class badass, she'd jumped at it.
Still, his brother, what a piece of fucking work the man was.
Charlie had explained to him, when he'd first come to the X-Men, what was it, seven, eight, nine years ago, that he could help him get his memories back.
Like that was something that was going to be positive.
Logan had the feeling that he remembered the things he wanted to remember, and when people like his father, and Eddie filled him in, they told him the good things, and left out the bad shit.
Shit that Logan thought he really didn't want to know.
Well, whatever Charlie was up to hadn't really started to do the trick until the end of his tour in 'Nam, which overlapped the beginning of Sabretooth's tour.
Logan had a whole pile of memories of Victor Creed, most of which were conflicting.
His recent history with his archenemy was complicated.
Wolverine's most fractured memories were those of the mid-fifties until the time he joined the X-Men, the period right after he had been tortured and mutilated by the Weapon X program.
His first memory of the aftermath was a room in a S.H.I.E.L.D safehouse, and Eddie Blake telling him it was alright, he was back in the USA, he was safe and out of danger.
He had been pretty close to feral, then, but Eddie wasn't afraid of being hurt by him.
Neither was Victor Creed.
The very next person to show up.
The next thing Logan remembered was being folded back into the S.H.I.E.L.D. covert program, and being placed with Sabretooth.
He had a feeling of trust in the other feral mutant.
After all, the man was his brother.
That's the kind of thing you don't forget.
But Logan always had the sneaking suspicion that he was forgetting some things hat were important.
It was years before he asked why, because Logan didn't want to know the answer.
Any of the answers.
"Vic, is there some reason I feel like I wanna murder you?"
"To tell ya the truth, Jimmy, there's about forty years of bad blood between us."
"Over what?"
"A frail. I don't wanna talk about it. I don't want you to fuckin' remember. When you remember, we won't be able to be brothers, anymore. I hadda live with that for forty years. I don't wanna lose my brother over a dead frail all over again. Leave it."
Logan didn't have much in the world but his brother and Eddie, so he tried to take Vic's advice, and leave it.
Because he started to remember why there was bad blood between him and his brother, and it wasn't too long before he got horrified by Vic's brutality, and his savagery.
Somewhere in the mid sixties, Logan went with the X-Men, Victor went with the Brotherhood, and the war between them started again.
Logan managed to divest himself of much of the feeling he had for Creed, as a comrade or a brother.
Then, they ended up in Vietnam, together, and this was after Charlie started to shake the tree and memories began to rain down on Wolverine's head.
The team had been ambushed, and they were making a retreat through heavy fire when Victor and another soldier got separated.
Col. Blake and Col. Howlett decided that Col. Blake would get PFC MacLeod and Sergeant Marcano back to camp, while Col. Howlett went to recover Major Creed and the First Sergeant.
The first trace of Victor that he found was a mine crater, some bits of uniform and flesh, and a huge pool of blood.
Following their tracks and their scent, and eventually Victor shouting his name, Logan found the First Sergeant retreating rapidly and carrying Victor like a backpack.
Victor's knapsack was on his back, and sticking out of his pack were his legs.
The gruesome sight made Logan dizzy and sick, and he had to stop for a minute to puke his guts out.
He had seen many more gruesome sights in his life, and sights as gruesome as this one while he was looking for his brother and the 1st Sergeant.
But.
But a man who can look at his own brother, blown into three pieces, bled almost white with his severed legs sticking out of his backpack and everything below the middle of his thigh bloody and stringy and gone without losing his lunch, well that's a colder, harder man than even Wolverine.
Logan led them to safety, in a dry, cool grotto in a wall of rock by a river whose name he couldn't recall, at the time.
The First Sergeant patiently fit Victor's bones together and sewed his legs back on, and then left them together, to return to base camp, for help.
Victor was waiting to be alone with his brother.
He had something to say.
He was more than half dead from pain, shock and loss of blood, and close to delirious.
"Jimmy. Listen to me, Jimmy. I'm your goddamn brother. Your Pa is my Pa, and your blood is my blood. I left a big job in a boomtown to spend ten years on that shithole homestead of Pa's, scraping and scrounging to get by so I could raise you after he went on the lam. If I had to, I went hungry so that you could eat. When you were sick, I walked up a fucking mountain and I would have paid that Blackfoot shaman in my blood to get you medicine. I took care of you, Jimmy. Even after you cursed me and left me an' Pa flat over some frail, even after you spent more than thirty years hatin' me and fightin' me and nearly killin' me a few times, when those Weapon X bastards tortured you and mutilated you and tried to break your mind, I came to save you again. Because you're my brother, Jimmy. You're my blood. Hate and love and old grudges don't mean shit. So I want you to do something for me."
Just then, thinking that his brother might be dying, Logan thought about Old Black Tom.
"Name it, Vic." He said.
"If my legs don't heal, I want you to kill me. I can't be half a man for the next two hundred fuckin' years. Can you do that for me, little brother? Considering you been wantin' me dead for about sixty years?"
Tears jumped into his eyes.
"Not like this, Vic. But I'll do it."
"Swear, Jimmy."
"I swear."
Victor recovered, Jimmy's tour ended, and he went home to Westchester.
Where he met Mel, and ended up taking too big of a dose of her powers and went raving in the snow on instinct back to the old homestead, well, that knocked a big chunk of his memories loose.
Something about seeing his father, again, and living on the old place; it made the memories flood back to him.
Some of them were good memories, and some were bad, but one thing was for sure.
Sabretooth was his worst enemy, but Victor Creed was his brother.
His memory of Silver Fox, his first love, that had never left him, and one of the first things he ever recalled, even before he came to the X-Men, was his memory of her death at Sabretooth's hands.
Recalling that Sabretooth was his brother was just as painful as thinking about Silver Fox's death.
What Logan couldn't figure out was why his brother, his own brother, would do such a horrible thing to him.
And then continue doing horrible things to him for the next sixty years or so.
But, also saving his ass on several different occasions.
He had been thinking on it since 1970, and Logan had come to an understanding of his older brother, one that he would rather not have had.
Vic wasn't insane, but he was a complete psychopath.
Not a good trait for a feral mutant to possess.
He hadn't been born that way, but his mother had married some Bible-thumping lunatic who beat the shit out of both of them, and killed her in front of Vic after he pulled his teeth and claws out with pliers to get the Devil out of him.
Cut her head off.
That's enough to make anybody crazy, let alone a feral mutant.
Which may have explained why Vic was in a big goddamn hurry to rush to his half-brother's side after a whole lot of horrible things that Logan didn't remember and Pa wouldn't tell him about happened at the Howlett place.
Things were alright between him and his brother, good, even, as long as it was him and his brother and Pa.
And if there was a woman in the mix, somewhere, well if she came and went, that was alright.
But, if Logan started to get attached, that seemed to bother Victor.
And when he got old enough to decide that maybe his big brother's philosophy of hate and ultraviolence, us against the world, wasn't for him, that really bothered Victor.
Now that they were living together, again, however unwillingly, it all became pretty clear.
He hated his brother, but his brother did not hate him.
Not even a little bit.
Victor just couldn't understand why his little brother let a few dead frails and a couple of fights get in the way of things being the way they used to be, them against the world.
He also didn't understand that it hurt Logan to hate him, and that he wanted to be able to forgive Vic, and bury the hatchet, and be like brothers, again, but Vic was Vic and he would never change, and so Logan could never forgive him.
And then there was the problem with women.
Victor didn't show any desire at all to kill Liv Napier.
She had the Victor Creed Seal of Approval.
She was tough, brash and ultraviolent, she had personally killed Vic twice, and most importantly, she was in his Logan's life only one day a week as a woman.
He was more hostile towards Mel, until she picked his truck up over her head and threatened to hit him with it.
Now, Mel was Logan's steady girl, the way Silver Fox had been, but there was nothing frail about Mel. She may not have been as ultraviolent as Liv, who, among other things, was a mask and a black ops commando with S.H.I.E.L.D., but Yukon Mel was no cream puff.
She was a Hell's Angel who had lived by her wits from the time she was 13 until she was 20, travelling from Vancouver to Tijuana and back again, a graduate of the School of Hard Hippie who could heft pickup trucks over her head.
Vic tolerated her; she was from their home town, and her father was a friend of their father's, because of those things, Mel was alright.
Jean was another story.
Logan could tell that Sabretooth really wanted to kill her.
That was enough to make him hate his brother.
Why?
Because to Victor's twisted mind, Jean, like Silver Fox, was just the kind of woman who could pull Logan away from his brother, and his brother's violent world, and then he, Victor, would lose his brother, forever.
He didn't realise he already had.
And Logan wasn't going to tell him.
He knew he was going to have to kill Victor, someday, but he was never going to tell him that.
But, at least for six months, they had to be civil to each other, and Logan found the truce a little easier to affect than he thought it would be.
Easy to affect, but hard to take, because it made him think of what could have been.
It made him remember when he was a boy 12 years old and his big brother who was only about ten years older than him used to live together on Pa's homestead, high in the Canadian Rockies, and of those days when he was in his early twenties after Pa came back, when he took his boys to the Yukon to his mining claim, and Logan had his first beer, and he was with Silver Fox, his first love, and he was just a dumb country boy from the backwoods, glad that he had her and his Pa and his brother, Vic, and everything was right with the world.
It broke his heart just to think about it.
And then, just when he thought that things couldn't get worse, they did.
He knew from the start that Rogue was his brother's protégé, right before she had joined the X-Men, Victor met with him at the Thruway Tavern, neutral ground, and asked him to look after Rogue.
He had originally suspected that Rogue was closer to Victor than she'd let on, but he had assumed that it was a result of his brother's usual brutal charm towards women.
She hardly mentioned his name to anyone else, and even then, it was "Sabretooth", but Rogue was closer to Logan than she was to anyone at the X-Institute.
He had taken over where Victor left off, and she had no secrets from her mentor.
To Logan, she talked about him all the time.
It was Vic this, and Vic that, and Victor and I did this, and Victor used to tell me that, and it wasn't long before Logan noticed the way she'd say his brother's name, and the look on her face when she said it, and realised that there was something more between his brother and Rogue than him showing her the ropes in more ways than one because she was young and amusing and around.
Eventually, she trusted him enough to show it to him.
The mark on her right shoulder.
Two fang marks with the three claw marks in between them.
Logan knew those marks.
Victor had put those marks on his brother's women that he'd killed, and he had put those marks only once in a hundred years on a living woman, to show that she was his.
Till death did they part.
And death, at Victor's hands, was how they parted.
It hadn't been murder, it had been mercy, but had she never known Victor Creed, Matsuko would probably still be alive.
Not to mention that even with his spotty memories, Logan could recall how her death had broken Victor, shattered him like a glass goblet, and that when he put himself back together, he was less Victor Creed and more Sabretooth than he had been, before.
And now Victor was at the Institute, and it wasn't two weeks before Rogue was walking around wearing a quiet smile where there had been a quiet frown, and he could smell his brother all over her.
Every once in awhile, she would put her hand on her shoulder, and smile.
Logan knew he had to do something, but he didn't know what it was.
II: Charles
Charles Xavier sat in his office, at his desk, looking at several sheets of white notepaper, and the phrases he had written on them.
The first was an observation that, in the past, Rogue had never worn any garment that left her right shoulder fully exposed.
Even in the summertime, if she wore a halter or tank top, and on the occasions that she did, or went swimming, she always wore one and additional scarf wrapped and tied around her shoulder.
Charles had always assumed that she had a particularly ugly scar there, and that was why he was surprised to see her in a halter top on a warm spring day, with a gauzy scarf draped, as usual, around her shoulders, but nothing tied around that right shoulder.
Through the scarf, you could plainly see there was a scar there, but it was only three small scratches with the mark of a puncture wound on either side.
It was a curious mark, and it looked too stylised to have been made accidentally.
Someone had put that mark on Rogue, and she had been either ashamed to bear it, or unwilling to look at it for as long as she had been with the X-Men, and now, all the sudden, it didn't bother her.
Charles looked at the second piece of paper, frowning.
He had notated upon it that in spite of the fact that Rogue's outward demeanor, one of grateful and reserved stoicism, and contentment, if not true happiness had not changed, the recent internal change in her was so palpable that he could not help but notice it.
Passing Rogue's chair during lunch one afternoon, even though, as it was his custom, Professor X had his internal psi-shields up, the sense of leaping, kinetic, consuming joy that was bursting from Rogue in waves was absolutely incredible.
Her happiness was such that it made him smile, and he was about to ask her on what grounds she should be congratulated when he looked at her and realised that she was keeping up her former demeanour even though it no longer reflected her feelings.
Why would Rogue want too keep such profound joy a secret from him, and from her fellow X-Men?
He looked at the next sheet of paper, and his frown deepened, considerably.
He had seen Victor Creed touch Rogue, put his hand on her skin, and suffer no ill effect.
Of course, this wasn't alarming in and of itself.
Victor, after all, was Logan's brother, and Logan could touch Rogue without suffering any pronounced ill effects.
Also, Rogue had never made a secret of the fact that she was a confused and frightened child when Raven and Erik adopted her, and grew up to be a young woman eager to take her place in her step-parents world.
That was an ambition that was frustrated until she came under the tutelage the man who made her a woman capable of becoming a worthy adversary of the likes of the X-Men and the Avengers.
In a space of two years time.
Victor Creed.
He had been her drill sergeant, her teacher, her mentor.
The set of skills that Sabretooth had taught her, as refined and tempered by Logan, were still the same skills she used as a member of the X-Men.
That Victor would have a certain familiarity with her was to be expected.
It was also to be expected that Rogue would feel ambivalent towards Sabretooth, and that his presence would cause her some emotional turmoil.
That was certainly what Charles had seen.
Rogue was sitting at the table in the kitchen, with a large glass of iced tea, writing in a notebook and watching the television on the counter while she waited for water to boil.
Charles had been loading the dishwasher, at the time, and Scott was also in the kitchen, looking for something in the pantry.
Sometimes, in a mansion full of mutants, it was best to hide in plain sight.
Victor came in, carelessly opened the refrigerator and caused Rogue's glass of iced tea to spill, soaking her beige tee shirt and white voile and lace skirt, and the floor.
"Goddamnit, Victor, you big, clumsy oaf!" she had yelled.
"Settle down, Stripe. That's why they make washing machines."
He had grabbed a tea towel, and started wiping off the front of her clothes, and she slapped his hands away.
"Stop that! Don't touch me!"
"It's not a pass, kid. I was just tryna fuckin' help!"
Charles noticed that Victor grabbed her by the arms and his grasp encompassed the brief area of skin where the gloves stopped and her tee shirt began.
He touched her skin, and showed absolutely no ill effects, and great familiarity.
She shook him off.
"Keep your hands off me! I'm cold and I'm wet and there's ice cold tea running down into mah panties, the last thing ah need is you manhandling me. You've helped enough, thank you!"
"Well, you know me, Stripe. I always manage to get women's panties wet, one way or the other."
Rogue gave him a very dirty look, slammed the notebook shut and left the room.
Victor Creed picked up the glass, tossed it in the sink, and dropped the towel over the pool of spilt tea.
"Women, huh, Chuck? I smell PMS, that's what it is. Shit." He'd said.
He got his beer from the fridge, and left.
Scott muttered something about Victor being a goddamned crude slob, cleaned up the mess, handed Xavier the glass from the sink, and went back to the pantry.
But, as the famous and secretly mutant composer Peter Townshend had observed, it all looks fine to the naked eye, but it doesn't really happen that way at all.
As soon as Victor entered the room with Rogue, Charles had let his shields down.
Into the symphony of Rogue's now quieter happiness another strain crept, a powerful, suffusing feeling that was very primal, very touching, a feeling of being protected and safe, a feeling that someone like Rogue had probably experienced very little in her life, until she met her step-parents.
Victor, like Logan, was fairly inscrutable, but his feelings, for once, were very plain.
He looked from Rogue to Charles and to Scott, and especially when he looked at the younger, able-bodied Cyclops, Professor X could feel the hostility in this angry man spike.
When Rogue cried out in her anger, and Victor tried to clean her off with the towel, Charles was surprised to detect a feeling in him that identical to one his brother often had.
A fierce protectiveness.
But this was not a general feeling of fierce protectiveness, it was very specific to Rogue, and combined with an equally fierce possessiveness.
Finally, in the last exchange between them, especially as Victor insisted he wasn't making a pass and Rogue was shouting in outrage about cold tea running into her underwear, a very strong and definite sexual tension crackled electrifyingly between them.
Charles rearranged his papers, again, and sat back a little, shaking his head as he put together what they told him.
Victor Creed was not just Rogue's teacher and mentor, he had been her lover, quite possibly, because of her lack of control over her powers, the only lover she'd ever had.
This was not surprising in and of itself.
What was surprising was that it was plain that Rogue had aroused that in Victor Creed which was still human, decent and sane, and that he considered her to be his.
As such, he marked her, with his claws and his teeth, to show the world that this woman belonged to him.
No wonder Rogue was so conflicted.
Victor Creed had been her friend, her mentor, and her lover, and watched over her with a fierce protectiveness and possessiveness that made her feel warm, and safe, and loved.
Then, when she became old enough and wise enough to choose the right path from the wrong path, and left the Brotherhood for the X-Men, she was torn, not only from her step-parents, but from this man who was father, teacher, lover and protector all in one person.
It also explained why she had cleaved so strongly to Logan, and if he even suspected after seeing the scar on her shoulder, why Logan had let her, why concern for her intruded so often into his thoughts that it was palpable to Professor X.
And now, Victor was in the X-Mansion, he was professing to have turned over a new leaf, and all of the sudden it must have seemed to Rogue that there was no reason that she and Creed should be parted any longer.
Or, possibly, she had come to the sobering realisation that no matter whether they were on opposite sides, no matter that there was much in Victor Creed that was brutal, and evil, that the bond between them was unbreakable, and that to continue to deny its existence was folly.
"Till death to us part. And what God has joined, let no man put asunder." Professor X mused.
He put his head on his desk for a moment.
Charles knew he had to do something, but he wasn't sure what it was.
He was still sitting behind his desk, pondering, when there was a knock on his door.
It was Logan.
"Enter, Logan. I have a feeling that we have something to talk about."
Logan came in and sat down in front of Charles Xavier's desk.
Professor X put an ashtray in front of him.
"I see you've been thinkin' about what I've been thinkin' about, Charlie?"
"Logan, it would be wonderful if you could tell me that I am wrong. But, I think that Rogue is, well, inextricably bound to Victor Creed, and he to her, insofar as he has physically marked her."
Logan lit a cigar.
"Sorry, Charlie. You got it in one."
"What does the mark mean?"
"It means that she's his. An' when I say that, it ain't some kinda hearts and flowers kinda thing. Vic put that mark on my women he's killed to spite me. And he only put it on one living woman I know of. If he puts his mark onna woman, that's Vic's mate. Yunno, in every animalistic sense of the term. He'd kill for her, and she's his woman so she's his responsibility. When she came here, Creed asked me to look after her. Because I'm his brother. And with Rogue, he made sure to imprint his powers on her so she'll be a feral until the day she dies. He learned from the last one. And since she's got his powers, the only way she'll ever die is if he kills her. That mark means Rogue belongs to Sabretooth till death do they part. They may argue, an' fight, an' there may be years, decades, even, when they ain't speakin', but you can't turn back the clock on this, Charlie."
"And you knew about this when Rogue came here?"
"I was afraid you wouldn't take her in. I hate to ever let these words come outa my mouth, but, for once, I agreed with my sunnuvabitch brother. Rogue didn't belong in the Brotherhood."
"Logan, do you think she even understands what she's done?"
"Yeah, I do. I mean, young as she is, she can't think in terms of decades, but she knows. The only reason she covered up that mark was because she thought that abandoning the Brotherhood meant abandoning Creed. An' prob'ly Magneto an' Mystique, too. That's the part she don't understand. The complicated part. Right now, she's just so damn happy that she's not alone, an' she's got her man a staircase an' a hallway away, she's over the fuckin' moon. She has no idea the world of shit that's waitin' for her, but, when it comes, I don't think she'll care. Love's funny that way."
Professor Xavier frowned.
"I must admit, Logan, I don't know what to do. Of course, it could only be positive for Rogue to reconnect with the man she loves, who has sworn to protect her life with his, and with her stepmother and her stepfather, who were more her parents than her natural parents ever were. I would never advise a student to give up family or love, just for the sake of being an X-Man. But, Magneto and Mystique are Rogue's family, and Sabretooth is her beau. How can we be sure she will maintain her relationships to Erik, Raven and Viktor, without returning to Magneto, Mystique, and the Brotherhood?"
Professor X did not get the answer he expected.
"It's simple, Charlie. Victor's a bad man. Worse than you know. He was always a born killer and a violent son of a bitch. But he was more man than animal, when he was younger. Until the death of his wife. Matsuko, back in the early fifties. Since then, he's had no reason to be anything but a mad animal, and he's buried the man in him under an ocean of blood and a mountain of corpses. But there's somethin' about Rogue that's made him want to dig into that pile and see if he can't find that little scrap of humanity he had to begin with. That's why he came in fro the cold, no matter what he says to the contrary. So, he'd rather die than see Rogue on the other side of the cape. See, he didn't entrust her to you. He entrusted her to me. And I know why. That life nearly killed her, and anybody who tries to drag her back into it, Vic will make sure they're chokin' on their own blood an' toastin' in hell before he'll let 'em do it. An' that goes double for Mystique and Magneto. It was a committee decision, havin' Rogue come over to our side. "
"What happened, Logan? What brought Rogue to us that I don't know about?"
Logan stood up.
"Would you try and understand when I tell you that I can't tell you that? At least, not yet."
"If that's the case, Logan, I'll wait."
Westchester, New York, X-Institute, 1970
III: Rogue
I didn't have to pretend to be irate that Victor had spilled iced tea all over me, and I wasn't too happy to see him when he barged into my room while I was in my bathroom, in my bra and panties, trying to wash the tea stains out of my skirt and shirt in the sink.
"You need any help with that, Stripe?" he leered.
Sometimes, I swear Victor thinks that life really is like a dirty movie.
I poured a little more Woolite into the warm, soapy water.
"Goddamnit, Victor, why don't you just take out an ad in the paper and announce that you and I are together! You did that deliberately, and then, that bit with the towel, that wouldn't have fooled an idiot, let alone a telepath?"
Then, he laughed at me in that way that makes me want to claw one of his eyes out.
"Baby, what you are is paranoid. Scooter's occupyin' the TV watchin' some shitty show. You still got that beer I put in your fridge…no, fuck that, I think I'll have a glass of wine."
Then, while I was standing there, washing my clothes, I remembered the occasion of buying them.
Mama and I had gone shopping, in the Village, and I saw the multi-tiered skirt on the mannequin in the window.
With the beige babydoll jersey that tied around the waist, and a matching beige floppy hat, with a wide hatband the same color and design as the skirt.
It was one of the last times we were together, and it was what I was wearing the last time I saw Papa.
Running out of the brownstone to meet Liv Napier, who was honking her horn for me.
Papa stopped me at the door, and he had my purse in his hand.
"Don't forget your purse, Rogue. Trivelino probably only has five dollars and a condom in her pockets. Call if something terrible happens. I won't be angry."
I thought back in my mind, as I wrung out the skirt and shirt, and hung them over the shower curtain bar to dry, how long it had been.
Two years.
I sat down, on the bathmat, in my bra and my panties, and put my face in my hands, and started to cry.
I was embarrassed to cry at all, let alone cry in front of Victor, but I couldn't seem to stop.
I heard him calling my name from the doorway, but I didn't want to lift my head.
He was good enough not to say anything to me; Victor just held me close against his body while I cried.
And cried.
And cried.
Finally, I had cried myself out, and I looked at him through my bleary eyes.
I must have been a terrible sight, my eyes all puffy and my face all red and blotchy from weeping.
"I was just thinking about Mama and Papa. Are they doing alright? Have you seen them?"
"Yeah, I have. I was workin' for your Old Man, for awhile. Nothin's changed. They talk about you, all the has a scrapbook he pastes your press clippings in. He's pretty sure someday he'll have a box of them, just like the Joker does about Red. But what they can't figure out, Erik and Raven, is how Red sees her father all the time, without goin' over to the other side, and you've never even called."
"Are they mad at me?"
"Mad's not a good word for it. More like impatient. Impatient for you to grow up and realise that your family is your family, no matter who signs your paycheck and what color costume you wear."
I thought about it.
Victor's return to my life hadn't made me long to jump back over to the other side of the cape, and he hadn't tried to entice me there.
Out of our costumes, we are just people, after all, aren't we?
Well?
Aren't we?