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The next thing I was aware of was a soft humming noise. The tone was light and slightly high pitched like a child's voice. My eyes opened slowly to find myself in what looked like a kid's room. Everywhere I looked around the large room there were bright posters and pictures done in crayon or marker hanging on the walls. The bed was pushed against one of the tall walls and was coated in a plush purple comforter that was weighted down by a large grouping of stuffed animals. For some reason the room seemed almost familiar to me. I couldn't place the exact location, but I had a strange feeling that I had been here before…
"You're awake!" The child's voice suddenly came to my ears again.
I looked over to the one door in the room and saw a little girl standing in front of it. She looked no older than six, or maybe five even. The short child stared at me excitedly with large green eyes behind her long brown waves of hair. From the looks of things, she had been changing into some kind of princess dress-up outfit inside, what I assumed, had to be her closet. I figured she had been in the closet earlier, since I hadn't noticed her presence before now. And she would definitely have been hard to miss in that bright green dress and adult sized heels.
"Where am I?" My voice sounded a bit off to me, but I didn't think too hard on it. There were more pressing questions at hand, and I doubted my brain was up for juggling too many thoughts at once. As I looked down at myself, I found my clothes and body were completely healed. It was as if I had never been in a fight at all! Had I been healed by someone or something?
"That's not important." The child answered my question with a disappointing response.
"Well then, who are you?" I asked her growing more desperate for some explanation.
The child shook her head once more, "That isn't important either."
"Then what is important?"
My body slowly sat up straight in the bean bag chair, I hadn't even noticed I had been sitting on. The child was in no apparent rush to answer my questions. Instead, she began humming her little tune once more before walking ungracefully over to the bed. Upon reaching the monstrous sized bed, she flipped off the oversized shoes and crawled onto the top of her stuffed animal pile. A few of the animals fell off as she began to jump up and down on the bed with reckless abandonment.
"What's," she jumped, "important," jump, "is who," two more jumps, "you are."
"Look kid," I stood up slowly and stretched out my stiff limbs, before giving her the best 'no-more-nonsense' expression I could muster, "Do me a favor 'kay?"
"What?"
"Tell me where I am."
"No." She answered bluntly then started to jump again.
I groaned and rubbed my temples, "Why the hell won't you tell me?"
"I already told you. It's not important." The girl stopped jumping immediately and stared stubbornly into my eyes. We stood still for a while, in the midst of quite an epic staring contest, until she started to mimic my movements. It was small things at first that I barely noticed. She would sigh when I did, furrow her brow when I did, and eventually she placed her fists on her lips like mine.
"Look!" I growled out at her.
"Look!" She mimicked me further.
"I don't have time for this!"
"I don't have time for this!"
"Stop that!"
"Stop that!"
I let out a long groan of frustration and collapsed into a sitting position on the floor with my back against the frame of her large bed. The brat followed my lead and tried, unsuccessfully, to utter a groan as long as mine before she jumped off her bed and sat beside me. After a few minutes of silence, I spotted her staring up at me with that same blissfully ignorant happiness that only people under the age of twelve could muster.
"I like you."
"Great…" I mumbled sarcastically
"And now you can stay with me."
"What?" I declared as both my hands and head shook negatively, just in case she missed my displeasure with that idea. "There is no way I'm staying here."
Desperately, I started to scan the room for some sort of escape path. Had I been feeling more like myself, I would have snapped on the need to plot out the room a while ago. After three continuously bad scans of the large room, I came to the awful conclusion that the only door in the entire space led to a closet. There was no way out of this babysitting nightmare! Panic began to invade my mind as I realized that this very well could be the last place I ever see. What the hell kind of room had just a closet door?!
"What the hell kinda place is this!?" The girl opened her mouth to answer my rant, but I cut her off, "Don't ya dare say it's not important."
"But it isn't!" The girl protested.
"Look," I rubbed my temples as a headache started to form, "I'll answer your questions if you answer mine. Ok?"
"Ok!" The child brightened up instantly as if I had invited her to play the most fascinating game around. After two minutes of what looked like deep concentration, she asked, "Do you know who you are?"
"Of course." I rolled my eyes, "I'm Rogue."
"Wrong!" She declared loudly, "My turn again."
"That ain't wrong!" I growled out to the brat.
"Yes it is!"
"I told you who I am, now you have to answer my question." My words were strict, but the little girl didn't care.
"No!" She yelled and stuck her tongue out at me, before scampering off the floor and trying to run across the room. I reached out in an attempt to grab hold of her arm, but when my hand reached what should have been her shoulder, it went right through her. It was as if I had tried to grab air…
The child grew silent and stared at me while I tried to comprehend what had happened. My courage finally grew enough that I was able to ask her once again, "Where am I?"
"You're not going to like it." She bit her lip and watched me closely.
"Where?"
"In your mind…"
A dead silence encompassed the once cheery bedroom. How could I be inside my own mind? Was I dead or something? Was this the afterlife? Was the afterlife really being stuck with an annoying six year old for the rest of eternity? Slowly, my brain started to function again and I was able to form sentences, "Why am I here?"
"I don't know." The little girl shrugged, "You never came to see me before."
"You can't really blame me for that." I groaned and leaned my head back to stare at the ceiling, "It's not like I knew you were here."
The girl sat beside me and nodded her head slowly, "I don't think I've been here that long anyways. At least, not as long as the others."
"Others?"
"Yeah." She shivered and scooted a fraction of an inch closer to me, "I hear them a lot. They are really loud and always yelling and fighting. They're scary."
"You're telling me." I looked down at the young girl and felt a new emotion begin to stir in my chest. Despite her annoying tendencies, this child had lived with something that tormented me on even the best days. She was probably the only person I had ever met that could begin to understand how hard it is to function in my brain. Whoever she was, she had gained a little of my respect, "Do you have a name or something? I don't remember ever, um… absorbing ya."
"Well," the girl smiled as her mood bounced right back to childish glee, "I guess you can call me… um… Molly."
"Molly?"
"I like the name Molly."
"Ok." I shrugged and looked around Molly's room, "So, Molly..."
She pulled an obviously extremely loved stuffed tiger that was barely hanging on the edge of her bed into her arms, "Yeah?"
"Why did you think I was wrong about my name?"
"'Cause you are." She hugged her tiger and listened to the toy's sound box emit a garbled growl.
"That is my name."
"I didn't ask you that though."
"Yes, you did Molly." I was starting to grow frustrated again, "You said, 'Who are you?' And I said, 'I'm Rogue.' That is who I am."
"No, that's just your name."
"It's also who I am."
"No," The little girl stood up and walked over to the child sized table across the room. She picked up a few pieces of multi-colored paper before skipping back over to me. "My mommy used to say that you can call yourself whatever you want, but you'll always be who you are."
"Ok.." I looked at her with confusion.
"And you don't know who you are. You just got a name, but not a who."
Molly held out her pictures to me with a surprisingly nervous hand. I took the pieces of construction paper and looked through them with a mix of apprehension and curiosity. The first few images were of a happy looking family with, I guessed from the clothing and hairstyles, three daughters and a son. They weren't drawn very lifelike, but I could till spot some interesting features in the people. They all had green eyes and brown hair, except for the mother whose eyes were a pale blue color.
"These are nice…" I complemented Molly on her first two images, but fell silent as the third picture came up to the top of the pile.
The third picture took on a more gruesome look. The family was crying and some blue stick figure was chasing them. I pulled out the next drawing and found myself staring at what looked like a poorly drawn version of my nightmare. The page was coated in red crayon strokes to symbolize the pools of blood. The only thing different about this picture compared to my dream, was a small person drawn hiding in the corner with tears in her eyes. I stared at the crying girl hidden in the picture and noticed that she had on a gold necklace. It was the same heart shaped necklace I had just bought. The one I felt so comfortable with… Could it be…
Before I could even fathom a way to ask Molly about the gruesome image, the room began to shake violently. The jerky and powerful motions sent me flying across the room with little effort. I tried desperately to see if Molly was somewhere nearby, but my vision was blocked by the toys and art supplies flying across the room. After fending off a few stuffed animals and a plastic doll, I was able to get a clear picture of the room. Although I couldn't see any sign of Molly in the mess, I could hear a loud whimpering coming from the other side of the room. The earthquake began again and the whimper was suddenly over powered by a loud scream.
"Molly?!" I tried to look for her as I was thrown in the shaking room. But as hard as I looked, Molly had apparently vanished.
"Molly?! Where are you?!"I screamed once more as my body felt like it was suddenly being ripped from the room and into a deep darkness.
As I came back into, what I figured, had to be the real world I looked around the room expecting to see Molly unconscious or worse. The only thing that greeted my terrified imagination was the faces of some rather worried X-men. My chest heaved quickly as I tried to process the scene before me and the strange little girl I had left in the darkness. Silently, I prayed that this was real life and not some other bizarre mind trap. I don't know if I could handle it if this place started to dissolve into some dark hole.
"Rogue," Professor X's voice came to me slowly as he wheeled his chair near me, "You are all right now. You are in the medical wing of the mansion."
"I…" My green eyes stared at all the faces around me and then back down to my body, which was once again healed, "I'm healed..."
"Logan volunteered to share some of his healing ability." Professor X smiled at me softly as if I had proven to him I was not completely brain dead, then looked to Logan who was perched on the edge of the bed next to mine.
"Th… thanks." I mumbled to him and he gave me a curt nod.
"You were pretty banged up, Stripes."
"It was like so scary, Rogue!" Kitty piped up from her position at the edge of my bed, "We were so worried when you never came back. And then Logan and Remy found you in the woods."
The woods! I tried to get up from the bed, but was gently pushed back down by a very concerned looking Cajun. My brain started to click into motion and I turned to face Logan, "Did you see them Logan?"
"See who, Stripes?" Logan grumbled out with his ever common suspicious frown.
"Me… well the other me's. There were two of 'em. And one was badly injured and couldn't have gotten away from you. She bled on the ground even. You had to have smelled it wasn't mine right?"
Logan's expression softened slightly which caused my heart to sink, "Rogue you were the only thing out there. The Cajun and I searched the entire area, and there was nothing but your scent everywhere."
I looked at Remy, desperate for some kind of defense, but the boy just gave me his own worried look, "He's right, Cherie. It was only you."
"But you did leave quite a scene man!" Evan piped up that time, "It was like you burned trees and froze stuff and clawed stuff. It looked like you even laser beamed some stuff."
The rest of the emergency room crowd spared Evan a disapproving look, before turning their stares to me. What could I tell them? I knew exactly what they all wanted to know, and I also knew I didn't want to tell them. After working this hard to keep my secret, it felt like an utterly devastating defeat to admit everything now. By this point, I wasn't sure what they would believe from me now. My mind tried to come up with one last excuse, but it was fruitless.
"I had a power burst."
For the next three hours, I received lectures, disappointment speeches, and of course a long questionnaire about what exactly had been happening and for how long. The Professor had been a bit ticked off that I hid something that could have been dangerous from him, but after I let him check through my mind to see if the personalities inside were acting up, even he relented and announced that I seemed fine. It had been hard not to smile and snap out a sarcastic remark when he said I was fine. Calling my brain 'Fine', was the same as calling a tornado a little gust of wind. It took an extra hour to convince the other adults that I would be fine to go to school tomorrow. They only agreed to the idea after I pointed out that it was not only the last day of finals, but that I was also already cured thanks to Logan. There really was no point in staying cooped up tomorrow when I wasn't sick or injured.
It was around one in the morning when the adults, and a particularly stubborn Remy, finally left me alone in the medical ward to get some sleep. Storm had volunteered to stay at the front desk of the medical wing, just in case I needed anything during the night, but all I could think about was Molly. What had her drawings meant? Were they something that she had lived through? Maybe, I was seeing her memories in my dreams? It wouldn't have been the first time my dreams turned out to be other people's past emotional scars. Apparently, my subconscious had no skill when it came to making its own dreams, so it probably enjoyed stealing memories from other people.
I let out a soft sigh and looked down to the necklace that was still around my neck. How could one little trinket cause so much trouble?
"It's just a heart pendant on a chain…" I mumbled and slowly touched the necklace with my ungloved hand.
As soon as I touched the jewel the necklace began to glow and heat up. I stared in wonder at the necklace that now appeared to be some kind of locket. With a nervous hand I opened the locket and found the treasures it held inside. There was a picture of a little girl and her parents on the right side of the necklace. The child and father both had bright green eyes, while the mother's were a very pale blue color. It was just like Molly's happier drawings. I stared in disbelief at the little girl and bit my lip to try and curb any possible outburst of emotion, "That's Molly and her parents…"
The shock washed over me in slow continuous waves, that grew by leaps and bounds when I examined the other side of the locket. There was an inscription engraved in a fancy font that I could easily make out; 'Wherever you may go, whatever you may call yourself, you will always be our baby.' The inscription was followed by what I thought at first was a date, but upon closer inspection I could tell it was some kind of location. I knew enough to determine it was a longitude and latitude coordinate, but understanding where the coordinate was telling me to go was way past my skill level.
I'm not sure when my mind officially decided to take the drastic course of action that had been bubbling in the back of brain. But either way, as I stared at the necklace in my hands I knew that there was something I had to do. For some reason, Molly's problems were mixing with my own and I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I let this matter go unresolved. Somehow, I would have to find a way to reach whatever location was printed on the locket. And though I had no idea how, I would have to figure out once and for all what was going on.
