I'm not really satisfied with this chapter, but I felt like I owed it to you to update, so here it is. WARNING: This chapter gets violent, a little gross, and… maybe even a little scary? I'm not sure how it reads, so you guys will have to tell me.


One More to Get Ready


Rogue has never considered herself the faithful sort. She was kind of sure that she believed in God, but she had never really bothered praying except for on special occasions, like Thanksgiving dinner, or Christmas, or those rare occasions when Aunt Cindy took her to church. Thinking back, she wonders if she never bothered with God because her life was so easy. Everything was cushy and she wanted for nothing. Why pray? What for?

Now she wants to survive, every single day, and she sees some appeal in praying.

God, help me, she thinks, and she is too tired to think anything else. She assumes, since God is God, that he knows what she needs and she doesn't have to fill him in on the details.

And please help Jasmine get her grades up on time for graduation, she adds, just in case, because it's probably good to pray for other people. At least, that seems right to her.

The truck rumbles along, its driver seemingly intent on hitting every bump and pothole in the road. Rogue sighs harshly as wind whistles over the tarp she's hidden under. After three days of almost no sleep whatsoever, she's ready to pass out, but she's not sure if she can. Taking in a new mind so suddenly and violently as she did has given her a tingly, upset feeling in her stomach, one that she's not sure will let her sleep. That, and this trailer is highly uncomfortable. And cold.

Because I've never slept in cold, uncomfortable places with an upset stomach before, Rogue think sarcastically, annoyed with her own fussiness. Her eyes droop heavily and she feels a sense of victory. Yes. Sleep.


She is him. They are together. He is Victor.

War is in his bones and in his blood, shaking him until his teeth chatter. So much war, so little time, but he and Jimmy have all the time in the world. And, therefore, all the war. It's something he can sink his teeth into and tear until it breaks, which is all he really wants, so he pursues it like a lover.

He is vicious, nothing but claws and fangs and hate, ripping through life. He is pain, he is on fire, he is driven by the invisible whip that bites at the backs of his legs. It hurts. Everything hurts. Even Jimmy, good Jimmy, starts to hurt, with those accusing looks asking him why he's let the monster take over. The answer is that it is easier to be a monster than a man, but he can't tell Jimmy that. Jimmy's monster does not rule his mind. Jimmy is still a man. Maybe not the best of man, but a man, all the same, and one who seeks goodness. Victor does not think he was ever like Jimmy, not even as a child. If he was, that is a time forgotten. He lashes out and hits everything as hard as he can, for pain begets pain and he has not the strength to be kind.

Run, boy. Run.

Oh, an execution? How tedious.

A little more war, but on a leash, now. Jimmy goes along with it because Victor doesn't break as many fragile things when he's on a leash. But he still breaks things, and Jimmy has had enough. The good-seeking heart of his is done with Victor's hate. Victor is not brave enough to give up that hate, not with pain still begetting pain in a list on and on like the fathers and sons of the Old Testament, so he stays and Jimmy goes and the invisible collar around his neck tightens with promises of revenge for that parting blow.

Stryker offers revenge on a platter. He also offers war. This is a suitable offering that Victor takes betwixt his fangs like delicacies before ripping them to pieces and consuming them and demanding more, more, more. More to feed the pain. More to feed the fires of hate that are burning him hollow. If he feeds the fire, then it will not die, and if the fire is alive, then he is not quite hollow. He would rather be full of the fire that emptied him than be empty without it.

So the tasks are laid before him like the trials of Hercules. He rips through them with vigor.

Kidnappings, they're just children, even younger than her. He didn't hurt any of them but he wanted to, wanted them to feel what he felt, wanted them to scream like his head was always screaming for what he had done and what had been done to him. And the woman. She is beautiful and a liar and her touch is hypnotism. He hates her because Jimmy loves her. Loves her enough to stay for her. Jimmy didn't love him enough to stay.

It can be argued that he didn't love Jimmy enough to follow, but he prefers not to think about paths not taken.

She screams. He likes it. Some nearly-dead part of him is sickened by the sound.

It's all working out great, from his point of view. Until it's not.

It all falls down around his head. Brother turning on brother, master turning on dog, dog turning on master, humans turning on mutants. He is so confused. He can't remember the last time he cared about right or wrong, but he tries so hard, just for a moment, to see the difference.

He sees.

He fights by his brother's side, and in the confusion, he is lost. He loses Jimmy again. He doesn't think Jimmy is dead, but when the dust settles, he cannot find his brother. He finds the woman with silver eyes, dead and beautiful like a broken bird in the ruins, but he does not find his brother. He does not find anyone.

But the man finds him.

It's years later when it happens, but Stryker finds him. Angry, angry Stryker is full of hate. Victor knows that. Stryker reeks of hate and always has. But now Stryker takes that hate out on Victor, and Victor lets him.

There's so much pain. Dark places. Needles, bright lights, surgical masks, cold tables, hecan'tbreathethereisnoairinthishellhecan'tbreatheplease, bare skin, scalpels splitting open flesh again and again and again andagainandagainandagainandagain, they shove a tube down his throat and sink him down into the water, intothedarkwaterwaterwater


Logan stares at the tiny figure curled up on the back of his trailer and isn't sure what to do with himself, or with her, or with the tarp still clenched in his fist.

He had parked his truck on the side of the road, nine miles outside of Red Deer, planning to get some sleep, when the smell hit him. The smell of another feral.

And that smell led him to this.

The Rogue.

The funny thing is that Logan is very, very sure that the Rogue wasn't a feral just a few days ago. He didn't even know if she was a mutant, although it had seemed like a good possibility at the time. Now, he knows she's a mutant, because that's what ferals are, and she definitely is one. She reeks of it, in fact. So either she's just become a mutant between now and when he saw her at the bar, or she's been a mutant the whole time and her mutant ability is to hide her feral nature.

Wouldn't that be nice, Logan thinks to himself, because there is nothing else to think, other than, what the hell?

And so he says as much.

"What the hell?" he asks her.

He's not sure what that means or what sort of answer he expects from her. She obviously isn't sure either, just staring at him with those dark diamond eyes.

That's a little creepy, he thinks, because it is. Her eyes are strange and he doesn't want to meet them. The Wolverine demands that he does anyway. He cannot be stared down by her.

He smells fear on her like a heavy blanket. He's not so good at telling emotion by scent, but fear is a rancid note that can't be mistaken for anything else. It turns his stomach, but he doesn't think it's him she's afraid of. The fear is a lingering thing, like the blood of the sores hidden under her clothes, not the gushing stink of an open wound. She was afraid, and it was strong. If she is afraid now, it is nothing compared to what she felt before, and her eyes meet his without hesitation.

I see you, those eyes say. This is the language of animals, and her eyes speak it well. I see you, and I will see if you move to hurt me. I will hurt you back. I will fight.

But there is not only warning in her eyes. There is recognition, as strong as a shock. He thinks, if she was standing, she might reel from him. She remembers him, more than she should. They had been two ships in the night, not even speaking to each other, but she remembers him in her bones. He can see all of this from that strange, inhuman face of hers, and it makes him want to bolt.

He doesn't bolt. Obviously.

He is a grown man.

"Have you been back here since Laughlin?" he asks when what the hell doesn't seem to be working for either of them.

"No," she says, in the same tone of voice that one might say, are you serious?

He doesn't really appreciate that tone of voice.

"Then how the hell did you get on?" he asks, less patiently this time, less for her benefit and more for his own. She doesn't flinch at the slight bite in his voice, her crystal glare as even and as cool as a house cat's.

"I jumped," she says plainly.

"You jumped?" Logan does look away now, looks into the dirt as he scuffs the toe of his boot into it, because he doesn't know what expression his face is making and he doesn't want it to show. "She jumped."

Okay, yeah, sure. She jumped. Of course she jumped. How stupid am I to think she just snuck onto my trailer while it was still parked, like a normal person? Obviously, she jumped.

Before he can respond, she says, "Bye," and hops out of the trailer.

She tugs a filthy black duffel bag after her and shoulders the strap with a wince that makes him hurt. She stares at him for a moment, probably no longer than five seconds, before she turns and starts walking. Not in the direction he was going or the direction he came from, but towards the woods. And that makes sense to him, because she looks like she belongs there, but she also looks like she needs somewhere warm to sleep and a hot meal and a bath. Maybe two baths.

"Hey!" he calls out even as she's climbing over a snow drift towards the woods. "You want a ride?"

She stops and looks back at him. Waits.

"I mean, shotgun," he says. That surprises her; he can tell by the way she lifts one delicate eyebrow in his direction. "Unless you like it in the trailer. That's fine too."

It's really not, but if she doesn't trust him enough to sit inside a small space with him, he doesn't blame her. He doesn't really trust her, either. He has a sort of faith, instead, something like intuition, that tells him that she won't hurt him unless he does something to hurt her. He won't, so she won't. Why would she? She won't even steal. If she was willing to steal, she wouldn't be so skinny.

Or maybe she's just a rotten thief, but he's willing to bet all his money and another hundred he hasn't earned yet on the chance that she's just a good person. Which is insane.

"Alright," she says, hoarse like a wind choked by the violent storm, and she walks with him to the front of the truck.

Well, if with him is five feet away from him, that is. She keeps her distance. He'll consider it with him and call it good.

She's small and skinnier than he's ever seen something that wasn't dead, but she doesn't struggle to lift herself into the cab. That's good, if only because he doesn't think she would let him help her if she needed it. She swings herself up with practiced leverage, though, and he remembers that she's probably gotten a ride from a hundred other truckers before him. To her, this is as familiar as opening a door.

He waits until she's settled to drive off. He keeps his eyes on the road, but he catches the cutting glances she keeps brushing over him like a scalpel. He doesn't think she means to be so harsh with her eyes. It's just what the wilderness had made her. A byproduct of that hungry look and the strange crystalline quality of her eyes. He appreciates her silence, but he doesn't like the feeling of eyes like blades on him. It would be better if she would ask questions, or maybe even fall asleep, but he doesn't think she'll fall asleep with him. If she's really a feral (which she is, he can smell it like that fear that still clings to her), then she can probably smell that he's a feral too, which is… not good. Or, less generally, not safe. So, if she's smart, she won't fall asleep in a confined space with him.

She won't fall asleep.

"There's jerky in the glovebox," he finally says. "If you're hungry."

He hears her swallow.

"Thanks," she says, so softly that it's only his enhanced hearing that allows him to be sure she really said it.

"No problem," he says.

She opens the glovebox gingerly, like it might bite her, but Logan realizes it has nothing to do with the glovebox itself. She pulls out the bag of jerky just as carefully, only to shut the glovebox with her knee.

Her hands are hurting, he realizes. Bad.

The dainty opera gloves are tenderly removed with all the care of someone with severe arthritis, and the smell of dried blood and old infection hits Logan like a punch to the nose. The insides of the gloves are mottled with bloodstains, almost as badly as her pale hands are decorated with shiny pink scars and healing blisters. Her fingers are so bony, so thin, and he can see the twitch of every tendon. Her nails are clipped – no, bitten – down to pink nubs.

Aw, Logan thinks, batting his sense of pity away. Between the hands and the lips and the everything, the legendary Rogue is looking more and more like a storm rattling around in a human body. She shouldn't be that scuffed up, not even on winter roads as rough as these.

She rips tough jerky with her white teeth and rips it again, breaking it down to bite-sized pieces that she chews slowly, so slowly, like this nearly-past-its-expiration-date offering is the nectar of the gods. She savors each piece, teeth grinding until there is nothing left to grind and the reflex to swallow food cannot be ignored any longer. Logan almost envies her self-control; he remembers gorging himself like a starved animal after being forced to go without food for longer than two days. He can bet she's gone for longer.

"You can have all of that," he allows her, because he's got the sneaking suspicion that she would leave at least half the bag uneaten out of politeness even if she was starving, which she sort of is.

"Hm," she says, which he assumes is what passes for a thank you when one's mouth is full.

And then she stops. Her hands tremble once, twice, like they're experiencing their own localized seizure, and the look on the Rogue's face is one he's seen before.

He stops the truck on the side of the road and she flings herself into a ditch to vomit.


Her muscles lock and she seizes as her gut pushes up all the jerky she just ate. It burns her throat and her mouth and her eyes water. She spits when it stops and presses her face into the snow, only for it to start again. This isn't fair. She should get to eat. She's hungry. And, worse than that, worse than the panic-inducing pain of her body trying to gag up its insides – her hands hurt.

Her hands hurt so bad.

"You'll be fine," Victor assures her, although he doesn't sound assuring as much as he sounds like it's just fact that she'll be fine so she might as well calm down. She appreciates the forthright nature of that, if nothing else.

I'm sick, she tells him, and she doesn't just mean right now I am sick because, look, vomit. She means sick. Her body aches with it, which may be typical of the spasms caused by vomiting, but she feels the wrongness of this. She is sick.

Her stomach is empty and she dry-heaves painfully once, twice, until her body gives out and she slumps into the dirty snow. Snow feels good.

"Yeah, you're sick," Victor finally agrees.

"No kidding," says Danny, who sounds a little sick himself. At least he can't throw up in her brain.

"My hands hurt," she rasps into the filthy snow even as she rubs her face in it.

"My hands hurt too," says Victor.

It's something above the speech level of communication – maybe his tone, maybe the fact that he's in her brain and therefore easier to comprehend – that tells Rogue that he doesn't mean, at this moment, his hands hurt. Other than the fact that he doesn't have any actual hands, she knows that he means this in the past tense. His hands used to hurt.

She clenches her fingers and the throbbing ache radiates all the way up to her shoulders. She barely muffles a moan – or maybe it's a scream, she doesn't even know now – and that effort alone forces her to writhe. She presses her hands into the snow, hoping that the sting of bitter cold might numb her at least a little. It does. Sort of. It's slightly more bearable.

God, help me, she prays, because that is all she can think to do.

The pain increases with a vengeance and a new pain blooms between her ears.

She hears, in some far-off world where there is less pain, the crunching of boots in snow.

"Hey. Hey, hey, easy. Easy, now."

Rogue wants to scream but her body cannot manage the effort of screaming. Her head is being hit again and again, she knows it must be. Her feet join her hands in the painful, throbbing beat that now thrums down her pine and radiates through her muscles.

"It's almost over, it's almost over! I've got you. It's almost over."

It's almost over?

Her eyes open even though she doesn't remember closing them, and the pain doesn't stop, but she looks into the deep, dark woods and sees a face. A green face. It gives her a gummy, dull-toothed grin, and a long, dark tongue lolls out teasingly.

"Run!" cries Victor, and Danny, and VictorSabretoothVictor, and Marie, and every cell in her body.

"Run," she croaks out, because she can't run but the WolverineJimmy can.

The green grin widens and retreats into the underbrush.

"I'm not leavin' ya, kid," the Wolverine says, his hands on her as her whole body shudders. "I'll get you through this."

"Run, Jimmy," says Victor through Rogue's mouth. "Run. The Toad."

"The Toad?"

The face in the woods has disappeared but Victor knows that slimy, algae-foul scent. He knows and they know that Toad is still close, too close.

"Magneto knows I failed," Victor says, jagged and urgent through the pounding of her headache. "He sent the Toad to catch you."

Rogue does not care, though. They pain has taken her down, down, down, and she does not care.

WolverineJimmy is gone with a sudden, violent rush of air, and she hears the horrible sound of a body knocking dully against something stronger and harder, and a jittery cackle rushes after it. She knows it is all happening over her head, but it sounds so far away. Nothing is louder than this pain.

"Good fun," says the Toad, an English accent bending his words. It's not the educated, suave accent of the gentlemen in her mother's old movies, but something that sounds more real. Common, maybe. And there's something not in the accent but in him that seeps through his voice. It's a little rude, like he doesn't care if his voice offends and actually puts a little effort into trying to sound like he thinks you're less interesting than cigarettes. "Ooh, you're not the big mean nasty I thought you'd be. How'd you get away from the kitty-cat, eh?"

She could vomit from the hurt it causes to look up at him. It feels like her eyeballs are about to vibrate out of her skull, but she looks, and she sees a man who can barely pass for human if he tries, and she sees him with Victor's knowing (Victor knows that he's scared, all the time, he can smell it, Sabretooth could always smell the fear and the pain and Toad was and is a hurt little creature). She feels pity and disgust and hurt and sympathy and all those heart-twisting feelings, and they are beaten into her by the thud thud thud of pain in her body. But she doesn't stop looking.

He is on top of Wolverine, purposefully pressing a dislocated shoulder even further out of joint. The WolverineJimmy is out, eyelids fluttering but not opening as blood drips down across his face. He'd hit his head against the truck, Rogue realizes, although she doesn't realize it with words. She is beyond words, now, the pain wringing eloquence out of her. She simply sees and comprehends. There is blood on the truck, there is blood on him. And as the blood seeps, Toad seems to enjoy causing pain, even if there isn't a proper reaction. Not from Wolverine, anyway. Toad looks to her, awaiting her reaction as he pulls and presses and ruins. When she does not react, he frowns.

"Not a fun one, then," he comments casually. He lifts off of Wolverine to crouch in the snow. "Y'know, Sabretooth wasn't much of a conversationalist, but he always knew how to make'em scream. I don't really care for the screamin', m'self." He pauses, sighing heavily. "T'be honest, I don't like any of it. Don't know how I got inta this. But I'm not much good for anythin' else, see? And who else would have me, with this face? Mags is the only one. He'll never get what he wants, I don't think, but if he does, then it might be better for the likes a'me. You understand."

Rogue wheezes.

"Yeah, you do."

The Toad's crouch deepens, his knees bending and his weight middling down for momentum, and Rogue knows that look. She's had three cats, all of them hunters. They liked to play with their food. Hunt it a little bit more even though it was already caught. Rogue recognizes this. The Toad is a toad, not a cat, but humans and cats both hunt for sport. All he needs to do now is drag her off, but he won't. He's going to toy with her, because he doesn't know how to do anything else.

"My hands hurt too," Victor says. "Right before."

The Toad leaps for her and she sinks her claws into his throat.


Hoo-boy. That turned out longer than I planned. As always, reviews are much appreciated.