Note: For those not speaking French (like me - amazing what you'll find in a dictionary),
"cochon" means "pig."
I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.
- Revelation 3:3
Rogue tapped her fingers against the curved metal of the Blackbird's frame. She was not looking forward to whatever it was they were going to do; she hadn't been exaggerating when she'd told Jean and Logan that she was having a bad day. The morning Danger Room session had gone wrong in every way possible, culminating with her on the receiving end of a Cannonball blast. Her head still ached a little from that.
School just made things worse. Her only normal friend was acting weird, and Rogue had the sinking feeling that she and Risty were never going to get back on track, not now that she'd explained what the Institute was all about. That hurt. She didn't make friends easily, and to lose one over a little thing like a mutant gene... it hurt. And then she'd gotten back her last test in math, which she hadn't studied for. It showed.
So far, she'd been a failure as a scholar, a friend, and a mutant. That pretty much covered everything. And, just to make her life more pathetic, there was still the whole "no touching" thing.
She frowned and sat back in her seat with a frustrated sigh. More to distract herself from her miserable existence than anything else, she asked Wolverine, "We have no idea who this mutant is?"
"I didn't say that." Wolverine made no move to explain for a moment, then sighed in that grudging, "I-hate-kids" way of his. Still looking straight ahead at the cloudscape, he admitted, "It's Mesmero."
"Mesmero?" Cyclops repeated sharply, turning to look at the older mutant. Rogue narrowed her eyes. Yeah, she knew why he was so concerned, and it had a lot to do with Miss Popularity sitting next to her.
She sneaked a glance at Jean, who had gone very still and not a little pale, and felt a bit guilty for her hostile thoughts. Had to be a terrifying experience, having your mind controlled by someone else.
Wolverine held up a hand. "Look, kid, don't start. Xavier thinks we can handle Mesmero, and I ain't inclined to disagree. Last time we were playing nice. This time the claws are out."
"But we could be walking into a trap. How do we know the professor-"
"Hasn't been brainwashed into ordering us out here? Because these are standin' orders." He stopped, apparently waiting for Cyclops to put up further resistance. Scott didn't; Rogue could see that every line of his body was tense and he probably wanted to argue the point until he was just as blue in the face as Nightcrawler, but he said nothing. She admired his self-control, which was something that didn't come so naturally to her. Her mutation had forced to her to learn the skill, and some days she thought she'd learned it too well.
Jean made a small, strangled noise and Rogue looked at her in alarm - noticing out of the corner of her eye that Wolverine and Cyclops turned around to look too. Jean gave them all a weak excuse for a smile. "I'm okay. I just... was clearing my throat."
Wolverine grunted and turned back around.
"Are you sure?" Cyclops asked. Rogue wanted to say, "Aren't you supposed to be flying the plane?" but bit her tongue. It would only come out sounding petty and jealous, which it was, and just because she'd give her right arm to have someone be that concerned over her... well, it was no reason to look like an idiot. If Risty had taught her anything, it was to keep your dignity.
Jean smiled again, a more genuine expression this time, and said. "I'm fine, Scott."
He already thinks you're fine, Rogue thought darkly. She tried not to think it too loud, though, because Jean was a telepath, latent or not.
"We're over Cairo," Cyclops said a minute later, voice neutral. They were still well above the cloud layer, keeping as far away from radar and other air traffic as possible. "Homing in on the professor's signal now."
Rogue sat up straighter and put her hands on her seat's harness, ready to unfasten it as soon as the word was given. Next to her, Jean did the same thing. Wolverine hadn't bothered with his harness in the first place, but he shifted slightly towards the hatch.
Rattled or not, they were a team, and they were ready to fight. She liked that. It was one of the reasons she stayed.
"Over the signal... He's outside the city." Cyclops flipped a few switches on the Blackbird's console, initiating the VTOL system, and began to ease the plane down. "Looks like some kind of fairground or something."
"The circus. Fits his MO," Rogue said. She wrinkled her nose. "Ugh. As though circuses weren't creepy enough already."
"I don't like the weather," Jean said, surprising them all. Rogue hadn't even noticed - she was too busy psyching herself up - but now she saw that the cloud layer they'd been flying over was the deceptively calm top of a very active storm cell. Maybe Jean wasn't as rattled as she'd thought, or maybe she was just trying to keep distracted. "It looks like Storm is... busy."
As if on cue, a bolt of lightning split the sky in front of the descending jet, and the almost-instantaneous thunderclap made the Blackbird vibrate slightly. They touched down a moment later, and Wolverine, already up and standing at the hatch, popped his claws. "So let's go give her a breather, huh?"
Rogue was the last one out, right behind Jean. There was no immediate sign of the professor, Storm, or Mesmero, and since the rain interfered with Logan's tracking ability, the calvary split up to conduct a quick search of the grounds.
She found herself checking the empty booths and tents on the midway. The circus was deserted, evidently on the verge of leaving town. It made the whole place more surreal, and she half-expected some plot from The X-Files to unfold right in front of her. Not for the first time, she wondered if the whole circus was under Mesmero's control or if he merely used it as a convenient cover.
Let that tattooed sicko try to get into her head; she wasn't a telepath, but she nonetheless had a heck of a lot of experience in shoving other people's thoughts out.
The unmistakable sound of an optic blast from the other side of the fairgrounds made her break off her search and run flat-out towards the noise. Passing a booth, she slid in the dirty grey mud, but caught her balance just in time - and saw a pair of red eyes glowing in the shadows of a tent.
She blinked, and the eyes were gone.
Imagining things or not? Another optic blast streaked across the sky and made the question moot. She took off again, jumping and skidding her way through the rows of tents and trailers until she came to the fight.
And it was a fight.
The battlefield was framed by Mesmero's tent on one side and the charred, smoking ruins of the X-Men's black helicopter on the other.
The professor was next to the destroyed helicopter, still in his wheelchair - that was always a good sign - with his hands to his temples and a look of fierce concentration on his face. Storm was lying on the ground a few yards away, rain shrouding her body in mist. She was unconscious.
Wolverine was nowhere in sight, but Scott and Jean were circling around Mesmero, trying to catch him off-guard.
"Rogue! Keep him busy!" Cyclops called to her without taking his hand off his visor. "The professor can't take him down on his own!"
"Got it!" she called back. Easier said than done; unlike her teammates, she didn't have lightning bolts, energy blasts, or telekinesis at her disposal. There was only one way she could help to weaken Mesmero, aside from throwing circus trash at him.
She really didn't want to. But she didn't have much choice.
Jean lashed out with a telekinetic blow that sent Mesmero staggering. Rogue took the opportunity to dart around behind the villain unseen, and stripped off one of her gloves.
"You miserable insects," he raged, regaining his balance. "You cannot stop this!"
Cyclops feinted to the right, Mesmero went left, and Rogue was there to intercept him. "I'm gettin' tired of your mouth," she said, pressing her bare hand against his equally bare neck. "Let's see if this shuts you up."
It was the way it always was, like turning on a faucet - no, a waterfall, a torrential deluge of memories and images and sounds and emotions that flashed through her mind too fast for her to comprehend - and then it suddenly came to a complete, painful, screeching stop. She felt like she'd hit a solid brick wall face-first, a wall that pulsed with some living, hateful... thing, and she pulled away from the mutant's skin with the last vestiges of self-preservation.
Dimly, she heard her teammates calling her name, but she couldn't focus on the sounds long enough to make any sense of them. It was all she could do to stay on her feet. The hateful thing pulsed in her mind now, and she staggered off of the field of battle, looking for shelter, looking for something, anything...
Her knees buckled and she fell to the muddy ground, hands clenched around her head. She saw - she saw herself walking on a mountain - there was a door - and the thing was behind the door - behind it for a long time, and it wanted out. Oh, it wanted out. It was so powerful. It hated being locked up, and its hate made it stronger. Strong enough to reach out to her as she walked on the mountain, whisper sweet words of power in her mind. She was supposed to get the keys to set it free...
No. Not her. Someone else. Mesmero, that was it. She was looking at his memories. This wasn't her mission. None of it had any power over her. It was just absorbed data.
The hateful thing pulsed once more, faintly, and then it was gone.
Rogue opened her eyes, blinked a few times to clear her vision, and climbed to her feet again. The
brick-wall feeling lingered, along with a general lightheadedness; she shrugged it off and took stock
of the fight.
She'd come to rest not far from the professor and Storm. The professor was out now too. Psychic backlash, she realized belatedly. Whatever she'd dragged to the surface of Mesmero's mind was nasty, all right. Since Xavier was the only true telepath in the mental tangle, he'd taken the brunt of it.
She was going to catch all kinds of trouble for that mistake - if they made it out of here.
Scott and Jean were still fighting, more intensely now that the psychic battle was over. Mesmero looked winded, but not beaten, not by a long shot.
Wolverine was not there.
"Okay, girl, time for a new strategy," she told herself under her breath, looking around. Maybe she could run back to the Blackbird, bring the weapons to bear on... No. What she needed to do was find Wolverine. Hypnotism was no match for adamantium claws.
"I'm gonna find Wolverine!" she shouted.
"That would be helpful!" Jean called, and for once, Rogue wasn't annoyed at her superior air. It would be helpful.
She backed up between two tents, trying to decide which way to go.
There was a humming noise above her, almost like electricity, and a glowing object shot out of nowhere and lanced into the ground at Mesmero's feet.
"What is this-" he started to snarl.
The object exploded.
It was more flash than bang, Rogue saw, but it made everyone jump back. Judging from the way the smoke curled over them, Jean had thrown up a telekinetic shield around her and Scott. Mesmero, unprotected, coughed and sputtered.
A figure jumped down from somewhere, landing a few yards in front of her - about halfway between her and the trio of fighters. Rogue couldn't see the person's face, but she could see a long brown duster, a shock of brown hair, and a metal staff pointed squarely at Mesmero. "This is for my brother, murderer!"
"The... thief," Mesmero said between coughs. He looked amused, in a sour way. "You are... in over your head, little boy."
"Non," the newcomer said, shaking his head. "Little boy" was inaccurate; Rogue thought he was about the same age she was. "You are."
"Such confidence." Mesmero drew himself up straight again and gestured dismissively. "You are a fool just like your brother."
"Takes one to know one, cochon," the thief retorted, turning the staff in his hands and slowly advancing towards the trio. Mesmero did not appear to be worried in the least.
Cyclops and Jean were holding their ground, obviously waiting to see how this went down. Rogue briefly considered going after Wolverine again, and decided it was a bad idea. She wasn't going to leave her teammates in a situation like this. And speaking of teammates... A slight movement from Storm caught her attention.
" 'Bout time," she muttered, ducking under a tent line to reach the white-haired mutant. "Storm, wake up! Things are gettin' bad."
Storm's eyes fluttered open, and she managed to push herself into a half-sitting position. "Mesmero - has he -?"
"Not for lack of tryin'." She put an arm around her teacher's shoulders, helping her stand. "Can't you do anything?"
Storm put a hand to her forehead in pain, clearly disoriented. "I don't believe so, no."
"Great." She was missing school for this...?
"You killed Henri!" the thief shouted suddenly, reminding her that there were more players in this fight than X-Men and villain. She shifted a bit in order to see him better; he was indeed her age, maybe a year or so older, and, as Kitty might say, totally fine. His eyes glowed with an eerie orange-pink fire. What was it with mutants' eyes? Everyone's glowed or shone or went blank, like those of the woman she was holding up. Right now, though, Storm's eyes were tightly closed.
Mesmero actually chuckled. "Hard to prove that, little boy. An Assassin pulled the trigger, if you'll remember."
"You put him in the bullet's path," the thief snarled, producing a playing card from thin air, like a magician. Even from where she stood, Rogue could see the big, black spade on the card's face. She knew enough about fortune-telling to know the ace of spades was the death card, and sure enough, it started glowing with the same energy that spilled from his eyes - the same energy that had filled the first object. "Now - you gonna join him!"
From scarcely a yard away, he threw the card at Mesmero. An optic blast intercepted it and the card exploded in midair with a blinding flash. Rogue looked away quickly, shutting her eyes.
When she looked back, Cyclops had tackled the thief, Jean was running to the professor, and Mesmero... was gone.