Have I ever told you guys how much I hate explaining my madness? No? I hate explaining my madness. It's all awkward. I like action and drama and stabbing people! Not frikkin Betsy explaining to everyone that Emma's a bitch. ('Cause we all already know that…)
So I had another case of the 'GODDAMIT! HOW MANY TIMES ANM I GOING TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS CHAPTER?'s.
Ah well. *sigh* Since there's no going around it… Hey, how 'bout some chuckles before everything goes to hell?
Remy ran his thumb over Rogue's knuckles again, wishing more than anything that she was awake and that he could touch her to comfort her. He could feel the glares directed at him from Wolverine, who was undoubtedly trying to think of some way that this was Remy's fault.
Why?
Well, Remy putting his arm around Rogue's waist- Cause for death.
Remy going to Rogue's aide after Wolverine had accidentally stabbed her- Cause for death.
Remy being the one to find Rogue when she started losing it the first time while not wearing a shirt- Cause for death.
Thank God he hadn't figured out yet that Remy had spent most of the night in Rogue's room… The resulting bloodshed would be ugly.
Logan took up an aggressive stance beside Rogue's bed that reeked of paternal protection. He noted darkly that Remy was holding a similar position on the other side of her… only Remy's position indicated a positively feral desire to tear out the throat of anyone who crossed him.
Logan glared at the kid.
Never in his life had he been out aggressive-stance'd.
Remy, seeming to sense the heat of Logan's glare, turned and locked eyes with the man with his own intense glare. The staring contest that ensued was epic-worthy.
"If you are both quite done…" Betsy spoke up meekly.
"Anytime you wanna explain what the hell just happened, darlin'." Logan growled, sparing a moment from glaring at Remy so that he could glare at Betsy, who had been trying to recollect herself after her short time in the mind of Rogue.
Betsy winced and nodded.
"Where… where do I start?" She wondered out loud.
"The beginning's always a good place." Warren comforted her with a hand on her bare shoulder. Remy glared at the hand with silent accusation and jealousy, feeling the cloth barrier between himself and Rogue grow more pronounced.
Betsy nodded again with a small smile at Warren and took a deep breath .
"The beginning." She repeated. "The beginning is Emma Frost is a bitch." She snarled. No one disagreed with her.
"What did she do?" Storm asked through grinding teeth.
"She rearranged the mental blocks in Rogue's head." Betsy growled.
"That's… bad?" Jubilee ventured.
"Does it look like it did her any good, luv?" Betsy turned on the smaller girl. Warren planted his other hand on her other shoulder and coaxed her back into a calm state by mumbling something into her ear. Betsy took a deep breath and continued. "She separated Rogue from the psyches that were beneficial to her, like friends almost, and tried to break down the block between her and all of the ones that hate her. They harass her to the point that they govern her every movement just because she wants them to shut up." Her bottom lip started trembling. "They're awful."
"Why would Emma want to do that?" Piotr asked, crossing his arms over his wide chest and scowling. This was the equivalent of breaking chairs over teeth for the collected Russian.
"Why does Emma do anything she does?" Betsy asked.
Everyone internally debated if stabbing a comatose woman was below them.
Logan and Remy decided it wasn't, one unsheathed his claws and the other drew out a deck of cards.
Ororo stood in between the, and Emma's body.
"When she wakes up, she's out." She assured, eyes clouding up slightly. "She has endangered my students and she is no longer welcome in these halls. I don't want bloodshed."
The two men contemplated this for a moment and accepted it as a good answer.
"That's not everything." Betsy muttered.
Remy clenched his jaw and concentrated on not charging his own gloves accidentally while he listened to more bad news.
"I repaired most of the damage done to the block against the…" She struggled with finding a word. "Angry…psyches. But it's not perfect. They're muffled, but not gone." She explained, taking a pause to look at the handprints in the wall before continuing. "I broke down the barrier between her and the psyches that she has come to depend on and… I think they were fighting so hard against the mental block… their mutations manifested externally. Logan, Magneto, Pyro, Pete, and Bobby."
"Like they did when she flipped out earlier this week and all the lights and the windows broke?" Jubilee ventured again, fearing Betsy's reaction.
Betsy nodded again, which she seemed to be doing a lot lately. "When they fight with the other psyches intensely, I believe they could manifest again… maybe even more violently then these two times. The psyches I've muffled only really seem to harass her when she gets emotionally strained. Thus, the only way to keep Rogue from not theoretically blowing us all to hell is to keep her calm and happy until we can find a better telepath than I to make the wall stronger. Agreed?"
"I like that plan." Jubilee interjected.
Everyone else nodded readily. Death by angry Rogue was not high on their list of 'Things to do today'.
And 'The truth' was finally and completely erased from Remy's list of 'Things to tell Rogue in my lifetime', because, undoubtedly if there was ever something that was going to make her upset, the goddamn truth was it.
"What about Emma?" Piotr spoke again, his other activities during the conversation had been clenching his jaw and clenching his fists.
"What about her?" Remy and Logan growled in unison, noticed this, and then entered another glaring battle.
"I do not think that Rogue could do so much damage as to send her into coma." Pete explained. "Perhaps there is third party involved?"
"Ooooor," Jubilee jumped in. "Maybe Rogue was pissed that Emma was screwing around with her head and strangled her purely out of self-defense. What do you think, Warren?"
"I vote divine-intervention." Warren said, a boyish grin slipped across his face as he pictured God's hand reaching down from the heavens and just straight up bitch-slapping Emma Frost.
Betsy, catching this mental image projected, punched him in the arm. "Stop being stupid." She snipped.
"Owww-ah!" Warren groaned as he rubbed furiously at the bruised flesh.
"I don't know what you did or thought, but stop it." Storm snorted.
In Warren made up more creative things that could have happened to Emma inside of his mind, including a dinosaur, a walkie-talkie, a giant washing machine, and some sort of large flightless bird. The only thing that saved him from more bruises from Betsy's fist was the distracting sound of faint groaning directly underneath the glowering war of Logan and Remy.
Rogue opened her eyes hazily to find the two most prominent figures attempting to light each other on fire with nothing but their glares.
"Uhm…" She breathed in confusion as she tried to sit up. As soon as she crunched up the muscles in her abdomen Logan's hand clamped down on her left shoulder and Remy's down on her right in almost perfect unison.
The glaring became more intense.
Apparently she wasn't allowed up until one of them won.
"Ah'm so confused." She rubbed her head and looked around the rest of the room. Her confusion was not helped as when her gaze landed on the others in the room their faces suddenly split into 'Holy-shit-don't-make-her-upset' grins.
Except for Warren, who was momentarily out of the loop as he wondered if the walkie talkie and the giant washing machine could some how work together to beat Emma senseless.
"Smile, dammit." Betsy elbowed him in the ribs.
"What?" He looked around and saw Rogue looking at him. "Right!" His own smile was nearly blindingly bright.
"What's goin' on?" Rogue asked anxiously.
Everyone silently agreed that 'If we accidentally make you upset, everyone will die' would only make her upset.
"Nothing, chica." Jubilee's grin looked like it was about to break. "How are you feeling?" She asked before Rogue could ask more questions.
"Pretty nice." Rogue smiled and shifted a little under the hands still pinning her down. "It's quite inside my head and-."
"GODDAMMIT!" Logan blinked, losing the glaring war.
"'M just good, homme." Remy grinned a completely legitimate grin before plopping himself down on the table next to Rogue. "Mornin' sleepin' beauty." He smiled down at her.
"Morinin'." She smiled back. Her smile faded away after a moment. "How's your throat?" She asked nervously.
"Fine." He brushed off her concern.
"I'm sorry…" She continued before he cut her off.
"Chere, I guarantee y' that worse has happened t' me and worse is yet t' come." He soothed her and she smiled softly at him.
Logan found this an opportune time to interrupt.
"Are you hungry, kid?" He grabbed her attention. "I heard you hadn't eaten dinner and it's just about time for breakfast."
"Uh… Sure, I guess." She took another look at all of the people acting oddly in the room. "Can I … get up now?" She looked down pointedly at Logan's hand still on her shoulder.
He seemed to seriously consider his answer before removing his hand.
"Y'all are so weird." She mutter as she hoisted herself into a standing position.
Riptide, having listened to this entire exchange from his perch on the outside wall, took out a pen he had snatch and quickly scrawled out 'Neutralize before detaining' next to 'Hot brunette w/ white streak' on the list on his arm.