Title: Sense

Chapter Title: Thoughts

Rating K+

Notes: He is part of her, but different.


She sat at the desk in her room – she'd been given a private room after Liberty Island – and struggled with her homework. He sat on her bed, watching her, his fingers laced together.

"I could help," he said, not for the first time.

"'As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all,'" she murmured, and threw a pencil at him.

"Please do not quote Oscar Wilde at me," he said with dignity. "You wouldn't know it, if not for me."

"Charles lent me some of his plays," she told him.

"Only because you had quotations in your mind," he sniffed. "And since when do you call him Charles?"

"Since you," she said wryly. She looked up at him. "Please. I have to get this done. I've got an exam next week."

"Exams are pointless," he said scornfully.

"And if I let you help, the Professor will know," she pointed out. He gazed evenly at her; she shook her head in exasperation and tried to return her concentration to the problem at hand. He kept watching her. She fidgeted under the intense stare.

"Stop it," she said at last. "I can't think when you do that." He said nothing, but rose and came to read over her shoulder. She let him, and then her pen flew across the paper, solving the equation effortlessly and in a handwriting not her own.

"There, you see? Wasn't that easier."

"Maybe easier, but it wasn't necessarily right," she muttered. She dated the paper, and signed her name to the bottom with a flourish, the 'r' and the 'g' twirling.

"'Friendship is essentially a partnership,'" he pointed out.

"We're not friends," she said wryly. "And Aristotle didn't know us."

"Very well. How about, 'in politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships,'" he offered.

"Tocqueville. Hardly relevant," she snorted, and reached for her history textbook. "Now hush up. I do want to get my high school diploma, you know."

"You wish to conform," he said, dangerously mild. "I comprehend perfectly."

"I don't want to be like other people," she protested. "Not really. But without qualifications, there's nothing I can do."

"There's nothing you can do anyway," he pointed out. She stiffened and didn't look at him. "Oh, come now, Rogue. You didn't really think you had a future among the humans, did you? You cannot touch them. How would you attain a degree? What job would you have? What career options?" He shook his head pityingly. "Don't be so naïve."

"There are correspondence courses," she began hotly.

"Don't fool yourself, child," he thundered. "Even if you completed a degree, what would you do with it?"

"Not everyone hates mutants," she snapped.

"Enough do!"

They stared at each other; she was breathing heavily.

"If you were real," she whispered at last, "I would slap you."

"If I were real, you wouldn't need to," he murmured. "We'd be doing other things."

She turned away and focused on her history text. For long moments there was silence. Then:

"'Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but with greatness of mind.'"

She smiled despite herself. "Yes, but Aristotle lived in a world without mutants."

"Very well," he conceded. "Something more modern, then. 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.'"

She glanced at him incredulously. "You've seen Star Wars?"

He looked disdainful. "No. That I plucked from your mind, my dear."

"It's true though. Isn't it." It wasn't a question. She was staring at the pictures in the pages of her history book. He moved to look, then had to turn away swiftly.

"They were scared. They were terrified and they had no way out." She closed her eyes, determined not to cry.

He closed the book. "Marie, you must stop this," he said gently and firmly. "These are not your memories. You did not live through the Holocaust. You have never seen a concentration camp, and I hope you never will."

"But I still remember," she whispered forlornly. "It's all there in my head, and not just that. Everything, Erik, I remember everything." She looked up at him. "Charles said it would fade, but it hasn't."

"No," he nodded. "It hasn't." He waited a beat. "Do you wish it had?"

"I – I don't know," she said slowly. "I could do without the nightmares."

"But you enjoy my company," he guessed astutely. "Ah, my dear Marie. I'm all in your head, you know."

"I know that," she muttered, almost sullenly. "I'm insane, right?"

"Not quite," he said. His hand rested gently for a moment on her head, and she almost thought she could feel the weight of it pressing against her hair. "I think your mind is a dangerous and unique thing."

"Unique." She tossed the word aside as useless. "What's the good in being unique if you can't do anything? You're right, Erik, I'm never gonna be anything."

"I didn't mean to make you so despondent," he offered. "There are things you could do, I suppose."

"I could teach here," she nodded after a moment. "Jean suggested that." Her lip curled. "Be stuck here in Mutant High for the rest of my life. I don't think I could stand it. They'll always see me as poor, helpless little Marie."

"I see Rogue."


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