Happy February! I sucked with the updating. I know. But I have an excuse: I wrote a novel in that time! It doesn't seem like much to all you other writers out there, but I have a hard time finishing anything I write. I literally sat down and forced myself to finish it, because otherwise I would be wallowing in my I-can't-complete-anything misery for quite a while. Sigh.
Wade. ROMY. Mystique.
Chapter Three
It was Monday morning and I had a headache the size of Caldecott county when Wade popped his head through the door and dropped a greasy brown bag in front of me.
"What is this?" I asked warily. I'd been just about to leave for work; my keys were in one hand and a half-empty can of Red Bull was clutched in the other.
"Tacos," he said, as if that explained everything.
"Oh, okay," I said, and didn't bother to question him further.
"Remy and I are going to play Uno tonight," Wade chirped. "Wanna join us?"
"Uno?" I finished my energy drink and tossed the can into the recycling bin. Yes, I recycled, I was a good person. "Sure, I guess. But aren't we a bit too old to play that game?"
Wade stared at me blankly, then ripped his mask off, tossed it onto the floor, and stomped on it. "Too old to play Uno? That's like saying I'm too old to watch Dora the Explorer."
I blinked. "What?"
"EXACTLY."
I gently pushed him back, walked out the door, closed it behind me, and locked the door. Wade picked up his mask and dusted it off. "Alright, Wade, I'll play Uno with you guys."
As it turned out, that was proven to be a terrible idea.
"You're so slow, Marie! Even Frenchy came before you, and he lives, like, a mile away. Was there any traffic on the way here?"
"We all live on the same floor, Wade."
"You should've turned on the radio to check the traffic reports beforehand." He rubbed his hands together gleefully.
"Why are you doing that? You look like an evil villain from an old cartoon."
Wade glanced curiously down at his palms, as if he'd just realized he had things attached to his wrists. "I got a new moisturizer."
From the living room, Remy waved to me. "Glad you could make it to our Uno-fest, chere."
I rolled my eyes and walked in, trying not to step on anything. I was unsuccessful in that attempt—the apartment was a wreck, objects strewn on the floor and things pasted and drawn all over the walls. In the center of Wade's mess, like the eye of a hurricane, was a small circle where the junk had been cleared off and a wooden table sat with Uno cards atop it.
"Ooo! Me first!" Wade frolicked through his chaotic jumble of items on the floor and sat down beside Remy, slamming down a green eight on the green four that was the starting card.
Remy placed a red eight atop Wade's card.
"Okay," I said, looking at my hand of cards. I felt slightly ridiculous playing a card game that was only a few steps above Go Fish. "I guess the best will go last."
But only five minutes later—
"Uno!"
Wade gave Remy a squinty-eyed glare. He had three cards left, two more than Remy. On the other hand… I had most of the deck.
I sighed and tossed out a random blue two.
Slowly and dramatically, Wade placed a wildcard on the table, covering my blue two. "Yellow," he chose the color in a low, theatrical voice.
"HA!" Remy threw down his yellow nine with a flourish. "I WIN!" He grinned, then made a terrible mistake in his feverish fit of victory: he leaned back, his fingers touching something that happened to be outside of the clean, sacred Uno circle.
"GET YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF MY POSTER OF MADONNA EATING PIE WITH A SPOON!" Wade screamed instantaneously, and his blades shot out from his hands. He sliced the table in half, cut-up Uno cards flying everywhere.
"What the—" I began, startled. Indeed, there was a blown-up photo of a young Madonna eating pie with a spoon, and Remy's hand was covering part of the star's hair, the smudged tiny pixels that made up her blond locks.
"GET BACK HERE!" Wade shouted, leaping up as Remy laughed and ran out the room. He chased after him, arms flailing frantically.
"Oh, Christ," I muttered, as the two men ran around in circles like small children.
"YOU STEPPED ON MY POWERPUFF GIRLS CANDLE!" I heard Wade holler from the bedroom. "WHY WOULD YOU CRUSH BUTTERCUP LIKE THAT?" The crunch of a wax candle being squashed beneath someone's shoe was audible even through Wade's yelling. "YOU… YOU MONSTER!"
I began to clean up the Uno cards that were still usable, deciding that Wade and Remy were just partially insane and would get over it eventually.
Remy rushed into the room, laughing hysterically as Wade followed him. A card from the pile in my hands flew out, and Remy snatched it out of the air expertly. I watched, stunned, as the flimsy card began to glow magenta. He tossed it backward to Wade, and it smacked him in the chest, exploding on impact. A hole was blasted right above Wade's heart, bloody and gory, but it healed just as fast as it appeared, the skin literally stitching itself back together.
"FRENCHY!"
Remy's eyes glowed red and he grinned, knocking over a broken wind-up clock with is foot. The clock exploded, showering the room with sparks.
I chose a something from the disorderly assemble of junk around me. There was a bottle of crusty nail polish, a putrid shade of brown. Next to it was a package of erasers that smelled like fruit.
"See, Wade? Marie's touching your trash, too." Remy flashed a smile at me. I rolled my eyes.
Wade stopped and blinked. "Oh, cool."
"What? That's not fair!" Remy protested, ducking as Wade sliced off a few strands of his hair, narrowly missing his nose. He laughed and tangoed away from the blades.
"Stop it!" I stood up, sloshing through the mess. I planted my hands on my hips and glared at them, feeling like a frustrated parent. "Somebody's going to get hurt."
"He started it!" Wade protested.
I poked his cheek, hard. With a gasp, he shriveled up, passing out.
"Hmm." I glanced at my hand as Wade twitched on the floor in his semi-comatose state. "Why can't I absorb him?"
Remy straightened up, regarding me with a mix of caution and curiosity. I couldn't blame him—he was probably afraid that he would end up like his Uno partner on the floor. "Absorb Wade, chere?"
"Yes. Shouldn't blades be popping out of my hands right now?"
He paused and thought. "Well, those were added to him later on in his life."
I had a flashback of Logan, and the bone claws that tore through my skin whenever I absorbed him. They were never made of his metallic adamantium, which I guessed he hadn't been born with.
"Right, but I don't even feel his personality."
"It was a just a poke."
I bent down and pressed my palm to Wade's cheek. He shuddered in his sleep, as if in pain, and I stepped back quickly.
"Well, I don't think…" I froze as something wedged beneath Remy's foot made a loud cracking noise, snapping in half. Subconsciously, as if removed from my own body, I heard the sound of a sharp intake of breath from my lips.
"Marie?" He glanced at me expectantly, carefully.
I tackled him to the floor as Wade's personality jumpstarted my mental circuits. I felt weightless, as if my mind was disconnected from my body.
It felt amazing.
"GET YOUR COW-SHIT FEET OFF MY CHEAP PLASTIC LION SCULPTURE FROM WATERLOO!"
Remy choked as the wind was knocked out of him, his voice raspy and muffled. "Merde!"
"ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, EVENTS, OR LOCALES IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL," I shouted, throwing a punch at his face. A tooth fell out.
He shook his head, and spit out a mouthful of blood in an 'oh, nice punch' manner. "Folie à deux." He stated, groaning and putting a hand over the side of his face. "Insanity shared by two. Wade is strange man, and you are much stranger, chere." He grinned, then winced at the pain it caused him.
Underneath the layer of said personality that was covering me, I silently agreed.
A little while later, Wade was still asleep on his living room floor, although his personality had faded from my mind, and I was back in my own apartment. I found myself in bed with Remy, who had snuck in just before I turned off my bedside lamp.
"I'm sorry about your tooth," I apologized as Remy curled up next to me, an icepack strapped to his cheek. His four and a half inches had been minimized to three, which I allowed due to my guilt over punching him in the face.
"It was my last wisdom tooth, chere," he said, eyelids fluttering shut. "It was supposedto come out some time or another. I just held off getting it removed."
"So… I did you a favor." I snorted.
"Oui." His eyes opened slowly, lashes rising like the curtains of the show. "Don't make me talk right now. It hurts."
"Sorry." I said again. I tilted my head back and stared up at the ceiling, my hand reaching for the off switch on my lamp. "Well… I'm turning this off."
"Be my guest," Remy mumbled.
Flick.
In the dark, I swallowed, my eyes adjusting. It was so weird to have someone in my bed whom I wasn't romantically involved with. The girls back at the mansion would die of heart failure if they saw me now, in bed with the Cajun ladies' man I'd just punched an hour before.
"Marie." He stated.
"Remy." I said his name the way he said mine, turning my head to look at him.
His fingers tap-danced across the three inches between us and graced my arm with a soft caress. I shivered. "Here's your daily touch," he joked, sounding slightly incoherent from the painkillers I'd stuffed him with after knocking out his tooth. "Since I can somehow touch you."
I flexed my wrist and pressed my fingertips into his palm. "Mmm hmm."
Just his calloused skin made me forget who I was. One person was more than enough for the untouchable Rogue.
"What's it like to have your mutation back?" I asked her uncomfortably, shifting in my plastic café chair. "It's more convenient, isn't it?"
Across from me, my mother—ahem, Mystique—smiled wittingly in a way that made her forehead crinkle like it always did. But I knew she wasn't my mother, at least not my biological one. She still had the same appearance she'd had when I was five, the brown hair tied in an elastic and free of gray, and the smooth face that lacked wrinkles. My real mother, if she were alive now, definitely would not look like a sister or cousin of mine—which Mystique appeared to be—instead of a parent. "It is."
I glanced down at my Dr. Pepper with ice. "I would've really appreciated it if you came to speak to me in your natural form instead of this one."
"I can't, not without getting kicked out of here." She gestured toward the neat café and the calm, quiet people milling around. "Would you rather I take on this form?" Her body rippled, and in seconds she was Remy LeBeau.
I dropped my fork, looking around hurriedly. When I figured nobody had noticed, I turned back to her. Mystique was already back in the form I had always known her as—my mother, not her scaly and blue original form—when I narrowed my eyes and hissed, "How did you know?"
"Know what?" She asked innocently.
"That… that Remy is the only person I can touch. How did you know?"
Like mine, Mystique's fork clattered onto her plate. "You can… you can touch him?"
I stared at her in confusion and disbelief. "Isn't that how you found out?"
"No…" she frowned. "I thought he was simply your latest boyfriend. I saw you two walking together yesterday."
I thought back to this morning, when Wade had forced Remy and I to go out and buy him a new pack of Uno cards, though he had been the one who'd shredded everything to pieces. I'd gone willingly with Remy to the nearest Duane Reade, where we somehow managed to find a box of Uno cards. I'd paid attention to the way Remy talked and gestured the entire time as we walked down the street, not my surroundings. How could I have known that Mystique had tracked me down and decided to drop in for an impromptu visit?
"He's not my boyfriend," I said finally, and watched Mystique sip her tea. "But I'm really happy that there's somebody I can touch."
"Hmm." She didn't say more.
I gripped my glass tightly in my hand. The cold condensation running down the sides made my palm wet and slick. "Um, are you still with Magneto?"
Mystique stared at me, long and hard. "Maybe."
"Maybe?" I repeated. "It's a yes or no question, Ma—um, Mystique."
Her lips curled into a smug smile as I rushed to cover my mistake. "Then, no. I am not with him at the moment."
"You left me for him," I accused her, resenting the smirk on her face. "You left me parentless and alone with people who never liked me. You made me run away."
Mystique crossed her arms over her chest. She wore a vest over a sweater, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, the default for her Ma appearance. "I may have left you, but I did not make you run away. Your own weak control over your emotions and powers made you leave home to…" she made a face. "…to join the X-Men."
I didn't speak, fuming silently at her words.
"—But I am happy that you have left that trivial team of mutants to start a better life." She leaned across the table. "Would you consider pursuing a new life with me? You may even bring your… friend along. He's a mutant as well, isn't he?"
I met her eyes, a familiar green I saw every time I looked into a mirror. But Mystique's green wasn't real, it wasn't authentic. "How do you know," I began in a low voice, "that I quit the X-Men? How can you be so sure that I'm not on a mission and Logan isn't secretly hiding behind the far-right decorative pillar over there?" My gaze flickered to the Greek-style Ionic column in the back of the café.
Mystique stare turned beady and suspicious. My hand was only inches from her bent elbow. I could absorb her if I wanted to, and we both knew it. "You're bluffing."
"You don't know what I would do." Even to my own ears, I sounded dangerously hostile.
She sniffed disbelievingly and leaned back, an action that angered me further. "I do, actually. You are my daughter."
I gritted my teeth. "I am not."
"Not by birth, but I raised you and made you who you are. You can't deny that."
Her sleeves were rolled up, her mistake. I touched her elbow with my fingertips and met her gaze steadily. "That's right, I can't."
Mystique inhaled sharply as cracks fixed themselves across her skin. "Stop it."
I could feel my face straining against the resistance to change I was forcing onto myself. My body was already changing, filling out to match Mystique's currently more voluptuous figure.
"Shit," I muttered, as my simple green sneakers morphed into suede boots. I removed my fingers from Mystique, who was turning an ashen gray color. She gasped for air as I released my grip, and cast her eyes downward, avoiding my gaze. I was impressed that she hadn't fainted.
I tore my eyes away from her and focused on the couple at the table beside us, feeling the muscles of my face move, trying to change myself into the tiny, thin woman with the half-eaten pasta on her plate. I felt my waist shrink considerably and my height drop, but I forced my face to stay the same.
"I'm sorry," Mystique said, smoothing out the napkin on her lap and untying her hair. The swishy brown locks fell forward, more auburn than mine, and young and healthy. Hell, I had more white hair than my so-called 'mother'. Of course, the white in my hair wasn't from old age, but nonetheless, Mystique should have at least one white strand on her head to pass as my ma. "You seem to think that you're more powerful than me. You seem to disregard the fact that you are one of the weakest mutants on this planet."
Her second voice, filling my head with spite, repeated the words to me in a whisper.
"Really?" I let a bit of the voice take over my senses. "Weren't you weak yourself when you lost your powers, shivering and naked and vulnerable on the floor of a truck?"
Mystique stiffened.
"I can't believe you didn't turn into dust once your mutation was lifted. Aren't you one hundred, two hundred years old?"
She flinched. "A metamorphic mutant's physical age stays the same."
"You…" I started to fire off another insult, but Mystique's personality faded in a millisecond, leaving me speechless and empty-brained. How could I talk back to my mother, the woman who raised me? A rush of shame spread through my body.
I looked away, and she noticed.
Mystique smiled, and it was a smile as cold as Bobby's ice. "You're weak, Marie, but your powers are useful. One day, Magneto will rise again, and we will recruit you. I'll make sure of it."
I became flustered, my face hot and red. "I-I—"
Somebody cleared their throat. "There you are, chere. I've been looking everywhere for you. This borough—much less the city—isn't small, you know."
I turned to face my lifesaver, a certain man from 4-J, who had placed his hands on my shoulders from behind. "Oh," I said simply.
Remy chuckled. "Who's your friend?"
As I watched, Mystique's face seemed to slyly, discreetly increase in beauty, the cheekbones becoming more prominent and the eyes wider, the irises a shade of emerald that my plain ones couldn't even compare to.
"Bonjour," she said with a flourish, having automatically caught and identified his accent. She flashed him a captivating smile. "Call me Raven."
I shot a glare at her. "Remy, this is my mother. Ma, meet Remy LeBeau, my… neighbor."
Mystique ignored my blatant nastiness and said flirtatiously to him, "Nice to meet you, Remy."
He nodded and grinned crookedly. "Likewise, madame."
"Oh, I'm not married." She shook her head with exaggerated sadness. "Marie was a mistake, unfortunately. Illegitimate."
There was silence in the entire café.
… At what point had I stopped loving her and realized what a bitch she could be? Today? Yesterday? Ten years ago?
Remy blinked. "Uh… well, okay." He glanced between the two of us awkwardly. "I need to borrow her for a while. Is that alright with you, um, mademoiselle?"
"It's fine with me." Mystique grabbed my arm before I could leave and pulled me close to her face. I felt her breath in my ear and resisted the urge to run screaming away. "Don't forget, Marie, that I love you. I always will."
Remy quickly took my hand, our fingers interlacing. He tugged, hard, and pulled me out the café.
"What do you need to borrow me for?" I asked as we stumbled down the street, hand in hand.
He laughed. "Nothing. I just saw you when I went to pick up something to eat. I figured…"
"Figured what?"
"Just thought you needed saving, that's all. It was time to rescue you."
Thanks to angel897, Fire Makes Me Smile, Redtailedfox, tfobmv18, Chellerbelle, ncisfan, Resirius, Rogueslove22, annemariedarkhome, LibraMoon, PuddingCup30, courtneykutie, Chica De Los Ojos Cafe, Demon Flame, and My Beautiful Ending for reviewing. I know I grossed most of you out with the Boston Sperm doughnuts. HURRAH!
=D
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