Chapter 7: Seven Little Girls Sitting in the Back Seat


New York City

The night was young, and the club goers equally so. College kids mostly, but several older people mingled in the crowd, more interested in taking an overly-inebriated college co-ed than in dancing to the music that pounded out of the speakers liberally placed in the room.

In some ways, this could have been any club on any corner in Manhattan. There was one integral difference between this place and those other places. It wasn't the music that came from the speakers, for it was the usual regurgitated with a better beat popular music of the moment, with a few golden oldies thrown in for nostalgia. It wasn't the location, because it was just another warehouse club in the Meat District, a building no different than the other rehabbed ones around it. It wasn't the booze, for it was the same watered-down slop served all over the country and world.

What set this party apart from the ones that happened within blocks of it had to be the patrons. It was the green bartender, who used his many limbs (eight by Rogue's count) to serve customers. It was the winged bartender who served drinks on the first floor of the club, then took more to the second floor by flight (though how he balanced that tray she didn't know). It was even the DJ, a baseline looking girl whose hair changed colors as the music changed, red when the beat was hot, blue for a slower song, and when the remix got going a rainbow of colors moving so quickly that she almost glowed.

The club was called Lila's and it was the only one of its kind currently in existence. A mutant club, protected by the same. The owner, Ms. Cheney, was fond of saying that she'd started it to protect mutants and to protect the nightlife from them. Rogue wondered idly as she headed to the door if Lila still said that.

The doorman was big and dumb, bald but with one shiny blond curl at his forehead. She'd have recognized him anywhere. "Hey, Guido."

The large mammoth of a mutant turned to Rogue, a large oddly child-like grin covering the lower half of his face as he picked her up for a rib-crunching hug (literally, she had to turn on Logan's healing powers). "Rogue! It has been too long!"

Rogue laughed as he put her back on the ground, patting his shoulder affectionately. "For you maybe, not me. I just saw you a month ago."

Guido looked confused for a few seconds. "Lila and I were sent here about three years ago. Time travel confuses me."

Rogue laughed again, relaxing for the first time since she'd been sent back to this time. Guido Carrosella had always had that affect on her. Rogue had first met Lila and Guido when they'd been partners in the future, working for the X.S.E. As time travel crime had begun to heat up, with people jumping back and forth and causing damage all along the lines, she and he had been sent here as permanent handlers. They provided temporary lodgings, food, money, and other such needs as operatives sent back needed.

Several outposts such as Lila's had been set up at various points in history. It was tricky business, but the X.S.E. was handling it as best they could. Rogue and her companions had not been the first to be forced into the past to repair damage, and they wouldn't be the last.

"Guido, you seen Bishop?"

"Yeah, he got here a few hours ago."

Rogue nodded, gesturing for him to let her in. "What about Pulse?"

"Blondie here too? I didn't know they let thieves travel," Guido said snidely, well aware of Rogue's former paramour's 'side jobs' and her own disapproval of it'. Some might say it was just proof that Rogue always had a thing for thieves.

Rogue levitated herself a few feet, so she could lean in close and whisper in the behemoth's ears. "I never said he was here officially."

"Always breaking rules."

"Always for the best reasons," she responded with a smile, slinking past him and into the dim hallway that followed.

There was no cover-charge at Lila's, but there was a promissory note that must be signed. Any mutant who entered here had to agree that any fights started were finished here, never carried out into the innocent populace that loitered in the streets around. Any damage inflicted on the premises would be paid for by the inflictor, and a lot of other things were listed that most people didn't read or pay attention to.

At least until Guido showed up, and then they all paid attention, big bad mutant or not.

The dance floor was packed with a variety of people, of every nationality, color, and power. Several with wings or levitation abilities danced above the rest and set themselves apart. Others transmutated into different things, trying to catch the eye of someone they found attractive, or to just get attention. Rogue saw several wolf men, and one rather attractive half-butterfly half-woman that moved in an oddly graceful weaving dance.

Not that Rogue played for that team, but she always had an eye for beauty.

She hesitated at the doorway, using her physical eyes and her psychic ones to find her quarry, finally picking up his 'scent' all the way across the dance floor and at the bar. With a smile and small shove to the porcupine-looking mutant that dared to jostle past her, Rogue set off across the floor, not even bothering to walk around the gyrating people in the middle.

She moved smoothly, almost slithering through the crowd. Even as she was cocooned from all sides, she remained aloof from them, seemingly untouched by their sweaty hot bodies, or the rhythm that had them gasping for air and unable to stop dancing until they were well and truly dead to the world. It wasn't a mutant thing, this frantic yearning for oblivion that only exhaustion could give you. It was a teenage thing, a young thing, and mostly a girl thing.

While boys did dance, they never did it with the spirit and passion of a female. Whereas boys dance to be near the girls, girls dance to dance. To feel the burn and heat of movement, the freedom of absolute lack of control.

Rogue had once hated not having control. She hadn't danced, hadn't sang, hadn't kissed, hadn't touched. All because she couldn't control the most integral part of her, and for years she'd shut herself down emotionally so that she wouldn't have to feel the pain that she also couldn't control.

She was back in that place and time, and those old emotions were haunting her from her memories, so because she could...she danced.

She let the music take her and she began to sway. Back and forth, faster until she had the rhythm, and then she well and truly began to move. Hips swinging, knees bending, arms flailing above her head thrown back as she tried to breathe through the sudden all encompassing heat of the people around her.

She spun into the arms of someone she didn't know, letting him dip her and slam her up into the air, before she leapt from him and to another. Back and forth, across the dance floor she moved, to man, to woman, feeling the single exquisite touch that each of them could give her. Every touch different, in aim, in motive, in texture. She remembered them all, storing them in a small private place of her mind. In her dreams, they all touched her at once and she felt almost child-like in her joy.

Suddenly, in mid-dip with a Chinese mutant who she could tell by fleeting imprint had an affinity for fire, she felt the brush petal-soft and almost non-existent of telepath. Rogue.

It immediately sobered her, and she almost stumbled as she suddenly stood. The music didn't affect her anymore, and neither did the touch of her companion. She turned and walked from him without a word, no longer even noticing the people that surrounded her.

She didn't know why she'd let her guards down, even for an instant. She'd been trained better than this, but this time was getting to her. Making her forget all the vows and promises she'd made to her superiors and her partner.

Speaking of, her partner still sat at the bar, just where she'd first seen him. He looked a bit out of sorts in the crowd, one of the oldest people there and the meanest. His hair was pulled back into a tight pony-tail, his face stern-looking as he stared into the mirror over the bar. He brushed his fingers down the M-brand on his face, marveling at the sight of all these people. Untouched by cruelty as of yet, untouched by years of dissatisfaction with humanity and with themselves.

Rogue slid into the seat next to him, brushing her fingers down his M-brand with him, before brushing her fingers down her matching one. It was smaller than his; roughly the same ratio on her face as his was on his. When she'd first woken in the future, she'd thought the bandage over her right eye had been because of an injury she'd sustained on the journey. It was only when Bishop had taken it off and explained to her what it was that she realized she'd well and truly traveled to a different place.

If she'd been able, Rogue sometimes thought that in that instant she'd have come home. Back to the bosom of her friends and family, and perhaps that would have even been best for her. Maybe she'd be blissfully ignorant of what was to come in the future. Maybe she'd have been happier.

She wouldn't have control, though. She wouldn't have had Bishop. She wouldn't have had her own independence from Xavier's ideals, and she wouldn't have the choice.

Bishop gave her a small smile, and gestured for one of the private booths along the wall. Neither of them was comfortable with the amount of people in here, and with the chance of being overheard, so wordlessly they stood and walked over. The bartender would tell Pulse where to find them when he arrived.

Rogue snorted and thought to herself, if he arrives.

Her ex-boyfriend had never really been that reliable, though she'd be damned if he wasn't one of the finest mutants she'd ever seen.

"How was your plane trip?" Rogue asked as the door closed behind them and she began to close the airflow in the room, preventing any eavesdropping through vents, while she also checked for listening devices. Lila was a friend, but Rogue didn't trust the people Lila considered friends.

"Long and uncomfortable. Your's?"

Rogue grinned. "I didn't fly."

Bishop sat and studied her face. "I know you didn't teleport."

"I, uh, stole a car. Several actually."

"That's lovely."

"Gus must be rubbing off on me."

"He'll be happy to hear it."

Rogue grinned again, and pressed a small button on the lone table in the small room to summon a server. They waited until the gilled-and-scaly lad had gotten their orders and left to speak again. "Have you heard from Pulse?"

Bishop shook his head. "Radio silence until rendezvous here, correct?"

"Supposed to be, but Pulse rarely listens."

"He listened this time," Bishop noted, going silent again as his tonic water was delivered. Rogue just drank water. "You heard anything about Fitzroy?"

Rogue shook her head. "Nothing going on the psychic plane, but if he's with the Hellfire gang then I doubt I'll hear from him. They've got a couple very talented spooks. One of which, I've already encountered."

Bishop immediately stopped studying the crowd outside the window near their table and looked at her. "What happened?"

"The White Queen has taken an interest in my mind."

"She got in?"

Rogue glared at him mockingly. "This is me we're talking about."

Bishop grinned and shrugged. "You've been known to slip."

"Yeah, in the first few weeks of training. I haven't slipped in months."

He threw his hands up in surrender and looked back out at the crowd. "We have to be careful." He glared at her. "The fate of the world is on our shoulders."

Rogue lost her grin and nodded solemnly. "Isn't it always?"

"It does seem that way," Bishop agreed, before pointing out the fact approaching figure. "There's Pulse."

Rogue sighed. "Good, let's get this briefing over with."