I'm so sorry if you are getting multiple alerts. I forget to add a trigger warning about a discussion of an attempted rape. It's not graphic, but it is mentioned and I did not want anyone to be surprised. Also some other somewhat graphic descriptions of other bad things, so please keep that in mind over the next two chapters.
Chapter 9: The Hard Truth (Part 1)
Her white-gloved fist knocked on Remy's door just after ten o'clock. It sounded timid. As if she hadn't fully committed to the action. Pulling in a breath and preparing to knock again, with some authority this time, she fisted her hand just as the door came open. Remy was on the other side, looking annoyed, half-dressed, and on the verge of telling her to fuck off, but he never did. His free hand, the one not braced on the door, pushed through his dark hair as a frown tugged over his red on black eyes. "Rogue?"
It was difficult to sort out where to look. Rogue had been avoiding his gaze for days, but he wasn't wearing a shirt, only a pair of cotton shorts slung low on his hips. So low, in fact, that she could see the wings of a V disappearing into the top of them. She nearly went cross-eyed staring at his nose. "Can I come in?"
Remy darted looks down the hallway in either direction out of sheer habit before stepping aside and gesturing her in. If she'd had on shoes he would've thought this was a goodbye before she bolted as the girl was zipped into a grey hoodie and wearing dark yoga pants while toting a heavy-looking canvas satchel. But on her feet there were only socks, he thought maybe they had tiny alligators on them. "Let me close de windows, petite, and get the air condition' goin'." He'd covered the vents, preferring the balmy air and the rich smell of the night, fresh cut grass and the promise of rain.
"No, leave it." She fidgeted with the army green strap over her shoulder, only taking enough steps inside the room for him to shut the door behind them.
"You plannin' on getting' heatstroke? 'Cause you stay bundled up like that without the air…" his fingers splayed. They, at least, were covered as she had expected with his signature half-ass gloves. He must've been smoking too, the smell lingered in the room and an ashtray sat by the open window. So did a deck of cards. She knew just how fast his hands were from watching him shuffle, deal, and charge decks like that at poker games she didn't join or in the Danger Room. "Unless you ain't stayin'?"
"I'm stayin'. If you'll let me. I keep my windows open too. Never really liked air conditioning."
"Then take off your jacket." When she slanted him a look identical to the one she'd given him that first night when he'd tried to shake her hand, Remy's smile curled slowly over his mouth. "I put on a shirt, long-sleeves, okay?" She stared for another beat, eventually nodding and placing her satchel on the edge of the bed so she cold un-zip the cotton hoodie. Remy found himself watching the metal claws unclasp, practically riveted, and had to tear himself away to snag a worn, long-sleeved tee shirt from a drawer. Once it was on, he sat on his bed, leaning back against the headboard. "What can I do for you tonight?" With the timid knock he'd been expecting another one of the students hoping he'd initiate them, so to speak. Never occurred to him Rogue was on the other side, acting mysterious.
"I'm sorry."
Remy went still, his restless fingers caught in the act of scraping back his too long hair. "What're you sorry for, chere? Showin' up?"
"No. For avoidin' you." She pulled at the bottom of the black tank, looking like a curvy cat burglar now. Except for the socks. She wiggled her toes and the alligators danced.
"Come on, petite, sit down. It's alright."
"It ain't and I want to tell you, answer your question. You been taking care of me for weeks and besides it'll matter to you personally sooner or later," with that cryptic answer she climbed onto the bed, sitting cross legged and edging the satchel in front of her.
"Remember when I explained, 'bout my mutation?" Remy nodded, taking up the opposite side of the bed and stretching out. An arm was tucked behind his head and his back leaned into the heavy wooden headboard. "I said I take everythin' and I left it at that. Well, I do, I meant it, I wasn't exaggerating. When I touch a human, I take their life force, with a mutant—"
"Their power, I know, chere."
"And with either one I take their memories, their personality, essence, soul—whatever you wanna call it. The powers, they fade, the psyches? Well, now, they stick around." He didn't understand, not yet. "When I go have my sessions with the professor, he spends a lot of time talkin' to my other personalities." He could see she was serious, but he wasn't touching that with a nine-foot pole. The laugh, her laugh, sounded startled and strangled. "I know I sound bat shit crazy, but, then, I am."
He didn't like the edge of hysteria in that laugh of hers. "We gonna start tellin' each other how we crazy—and, petite, you ain't the only one with a story—then I think it 'bout time you call me Remy. S'what best friends do."
He winked. She touched a fingertip to the cheap gold medallion resting on her chest. No doubt it had ben twenty-five cents and had come in a plastic bubble from a machine at a gas station. Didn't matter. "Anna Marie. D'Ancanto. My name, most people call me-called me, Marie."
Once again, he found himself stretching a hand toward the girl with the white-streaked hair and the deep shadow of the swamp eyes. "We ain't most people, Anna Marie. I'm Remy Etienne LeBeau, at your service, day or night." That sinner's smile flashed. "Especially at night."
This time, she took his hand, their gloves keeping them both safe. Even through the material she could feel his heat, but the hold was brief before he sat back again. She tucked her hand into her lap. "Most of the others, they don't know, exactly, how it works. After Ellis Island—do you know 'bout that?"
His hand gestured, a curling motion indicating the white streak in her hair. "I heard."
"Wolverine was in a coma for days and me? I was cravin' cigars, beer, and a hockey game." Remy laughed, as she'd intended. "It faded and he woke up and everyone figured that was the end of it. Everyone 'cept those who really knew what my mutation does. Logan's still up there and so is everyone else."
"Everyone you ever touch is up there?" He tapped his own head with his fingers.
"Everyone I've touched since the mutation manifested. Logan, Magneto, Colossus—he's good about sharin', in the Danger Room." There was a pause, then "Others" and another pause, brief as a blink. "Piotr, Colossus, you know?" She seemed to veer sharply away from that last category: Others. Remy noticed and he noticed the quick flutter of her caged bird heart. "With him I know how much he misses his sister and the scent of the Russian countryside and a couple of swear words that he gets real upset if I use." There was a laugh in her voice and Remy responded to it instantly, his mouth moving to mirror hers though the darkness creeping at her edges was like a siren wail to him.
Rogue focused on the satchel then, dumping its contents between them. A curious jumble of books spilled out, no two the same. There were some with glitter, one with the Ole Miss Rebel on it—at least two dozen scattered on his bed. "These are theirs. Everyone gets a journal. Almost everyone. "
She snagged a book, the football one that seemed like it was about used up and even had papers spilling out. "The first boy I kissed. I wasn't the first girl he kissed, that was Julie Benton two weeks before he asked me out. His mama likes to watch telenovelas even though she don't understand a lick of Spanish." She picked books up, naming the personality they belonged to then moved on to the next. "My momma's. Daddy's. Logan's." She paused with his, almost cradling it. "He'd've never told me half the things I know if I hadn't stolen 'em." She sat his aside carefully, then the largest of the books was hefted. "Magneto. He had me take an awful lot from him. An awful lot."
Green eyes skittered from the book, over the darker green of his walls. "All week I've been cravin' green tea ice cream. You ever had it?"
"Sure, not my favorite." She seemed hectic, recklessly bouncing between fragments of her story, but he went along, voice as sluggish as the swamp and cool as a breeze through the Cyprus tress.
"I couldn't think of anythin' better all week long. So when Bobby and I went out we stopped and got some." The look on her face wasn't right, her lips twisted in an almost reminiscent smile. "I almost threw it up, that's how much I hated the taste of it. Turns out, I hate green tea ice cream. Don't even like regular ol' green tea. Could be the thought from someone I brushed in a crowd or it could be one of the other students, from the training room. The list of possibilities is pretty long. Bobby had t'remind me that my favorite is pralines and cream. After he'd bought me another cone and I about refused to even try it."
"Oh, petite." He didn't say more; the shake of her head and the hummingbird rapidity with which she was telling her story, the erratic stops and starts, warned him off of interruptions.
"Sometimes I get the smell of burning flesh stuck in my nose and in my throat and I gag. Can't eat for days." Tears welled in her luminous eyes as she looked at him. "I want to hate Magneto for what he did to me, but we starved together in an internment camp when we couldn't do what they asked us to do, have to touch my ribs to feel that I'm not still starving," she did so now and cracked his heart, "lost everyone we ever loved because, what, we were born Jewish? And here I am, different again, mutant, hated for nothin' I chose or can change or should have to. So why not just let them burn? Why not let them suffocate and starve and live in filth and cry themselves to sleep, huh?" She slammed the book shut suddenly, but didn't throw it, set it away as carefully as she had done Logan's. Her eyes weren't quite her own when she looked up at Gambit again. "I hate them, the humans. And I want to watch them as they watch someone they love burn."
He hadn't realized this was where that depth of pain came from. He knew better than to let her see what it did to him, though. "You don't hate anyone, Rogue."
But she did. It was there, just like her ability to change the oil in any car in the garage of the mansion without ever having read a book, taken a class, been taught. "It ain't just that or him. I am a monster because I have monsters inside me.
"When I was hitchhikin' there was a man, there were a few, but this one, he liked his girls a little younger, but I was there. I kept telling him to stop but I was pinned in the truck—I'd gotten in, was my own fault. By the time he got his hands under my shirt I'd stopped telling him not to touch me. He didn't make it any further than that with my body or his own road trip."
"Anna Marie." She couldn't hear the raw sound in his voice, too many other voices clambering for attention. She couldn't stop until he could really see what a monster she was, what terrible secrets she kept locked up inside her mind.
"I hope he never woke up. He deserved it, sadistic bastard. Magneto and Logan usually keep him in check; they don't have no use for him." Different personalities paired up, kept others down. It could easily go the other way. They could pair up, take her down.
"And, it hurts—anyone bother to tell you that? Hurts when I take. For me, it's like I'm drownin', but for them," she shook her head, those damp curls spilling forward and obscuring her face as she tucked her chin, fingers skimming from book to book in front of her, "for them it's like havin' every single droplet of blood ripped from your veins and through your skin. Worst pain most of 'em have ever felt. " The words so hushed now that Remy almost missed them. "So, that's my secret."
Author's Note: This chapter came out suuuuper long. So I broke it up a little for the sake of eyes and brains and stuff. Onward! (I'm posting simultaneously.)