Previously, Rogue was kidnapped. By Sinister. Really, does anything else that happened last time matter?
The mansion's garage was spotless – every tool hung properly on pegboard or laid out neatly in a drawer, spare parts sorted and labeled in clear plastic boxes. Remy figured Scott was to thank for that, and also for the fact that not a single vehicle needed any work, according to the meticulous maintenance log. Left to his own devices, Remy did what any thief would do – methodically worked the locks on every car, then practiced hot-wiring the ignitions. He timed himself, worked on getting a little faster with each vehicle, making sure not to leave tell-tale scratches on the locks or burn marks on the steering column.
It might have been faster, and cleaner, if he were sober. But it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.
Pausing after a pathetically easy economy sedan, he leaned against the hood and studied Scott's little roadster, taking another pull from the bottle of bourbon he had brought along. He didn't turn at the noise behind him.
"Scooter's got all sorts of extras on there. Probably gonna take longer than you think."
He shrugged. "Mebbe. Mebbe not."
Logan held out a beer towards the younger man as he flicked on the lights. "Faster just to jimmy the lock."
Remy pulled a face. "No style, hein? Lock's like a woman, mon pere always said – li'l finesse gets better results. T'anks," he said, accepting the bottle.
They studied the car in silence for a while. The sky outside had darkened to navy, and even in the night, the dull grey clouds piled on, threatening a storm. Remy strode to the open garage door and let the sharp air wash over him. "Xavier ain' found nothin' yet?"
"No." The short reply carried all of Logan's frustration and anger. He grabbed a wrench and moved to his bike. "I want to know about Paris."
"An' bringin' me a beer gonna loosen me up enough to tell you?" Remy laughed humorlessly, took a long swallow. "I ain' one of de kids."
Logan rolled his eyes, tightening a bolt. "If I want you to talk, Gumbo, I don't need a beer to make you do it." He cracked his knuckles meaningfully, then shrugged. "Figured you could use one."
Remy rolled the bottle back and forth between his hands. "Yeah." He fell silent again, studying the green glass. Rogue's eyes were a deeper green, he thought, but just as clear.
"What happened?"
Remy turned from the garage door, rubbed the back of his neck wearily. "Tangled with Creed. He won. I lost." Lost the Star, lost Gennie, lost something he couldn't, or wouldn't, put a name to.
"Need more than that," Logan said, not looking up from the chain he was adjusting.
Remy took another swig of the bourbon, chased it with a long pull of beer. "It ain't 'bout Rogue," he said carefully.
Logan nodded, his tone conversational, as if they were discussing a hockey game. "The way I see it, whoever hired Dane got tired of waiting, so he brought in Creed to get the job done. Once they had Rogue, he took out Dane to cover his bases – no splitting the fee, no loose ends. Plus, the bastard just likes killing. Mostly, though, it was business."
Remy tipped his head back, finished the beer.
"The thing is, cutting her? Leaving the blood? That's personal. That's Creed trying to get under my skin." Logan's jaw tightened at the memory. "Same as he did with the crack about Paris."
"Tol' you he was jus' fuckin' wit me. It got nothin' to do wit' Rogue."
Sitting back on his heels, Logan studied his handiwork. "He hates you that much?"
"It's mutual," Remy said shortly. He dropped the empty bottle in the neatly-labeled recycling bin. Cyclops, he decided, would be a lot happier if he paid as much attention to his girlfriend as he did his garage.
"So how'd you both end up as Acolytes?"
Remy lifted a shoulder. "Signed on with Magneto before I knew he'd be there. Couldn't get out of it once I did." Not only was the contract iron-clad, but it provided him an inarguable defense against Jean-Luc's summons. Since Magneto's disappearance, he had picked up short-term jobs, dabbling here and there, but it didn't carry the same weight with his father. His conversation with Henri had only confirmed what he already suspected – Jean-Luc's patience was wearing thin.
"Just business," Logan said acidly.
"Dat was. Dis ain't."
Logan blew out a short breath, his limited goodwill nearly gone. "Paris, Gumbo. Talk."
Remy sighed and pulled out a deck of cards, breaking the seal and shuffling mindlessly. His voice was low and halting, as if the story he was telling was new even to him. "There was a girl. She had somethin' I needed to...recover. A necklace," he said finally, at Logan's questioning look.
Logan nodded silently, eyes still skeptical. He didn't need all the truth, and he didn't expect it. He just needed enough to understand what Creed's history with the boy was, to give him another piece of the puzzle.
"She was a nice fille. Her family….dey shouldn't have gotten her involved." He was quiet for a moment, lost in thought. Genevieve Darcenaux had been a preternaturally gifted thief – she had to be, in order to steal the Star from Herzog to begin with. But she had been so young – younger than Remy had ever been, even as a child, and that kind of innocence carried an awfully high price. "Took a while, but I got it back."
He slid the straps of Gennie's dress off her shoulders, grinned as the rose-colored silk pooled at her feet. Her breath caught in her throat as he tugged her lacy underwear off, and he laughed when she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him towards the bed. By the time he had insisted she take the Star off, she was in no mood to protest, her hands fumbling at the clasp in her urgency. The next morning, before dawn had crept over the sky, he had slid the Star off the nightstand, muffling the platinum chain in a length of velvet. He never even stopped to turn around and look at Gennie one last time.
"She was a nice girl," Remy said again, taking another swallow of bourbon. "The day I got the necklace, I walked back to my hotel, an' Henri was gone."
"Henri?" Logan could hear the hint of a slur in Remy's voice. Noting the level of bourbon left in the bottle, he had to give the kid a little credit – most men would have been laid out flat.
"My brother. Came with to keep an' eye on things. Creed took him, left me a note." A scrawl of black on a sheet of hotel stationery, the first card in the house to come tumbling down. "Went back t' Gennie's, found another note."
"He took 'em both?"
Remy nodded, voice bleak. "Met him on top o' Notre Dame. Pretty building," he said distantly. "Never seen stone look so light. You'd think it didn't weigh anything at all. Creed said he'd trade." The city had been still and quiet, the sky just peeking above the horizon, the air blue and hinting at a lovely spring day.
"Your brother and the girl for the necklace."
Remy's smile twisted. "Non. Henri or Gennie. Not both."
Logan hands on the bike stilled, his eyes fixing on Remy.
"He was my brother," Remy whispered fiercely. "He had a new wife. Dey hadn't even been married six months."
"And the girl?" Logan didn't know exactly what he was asking, only that there was more to the story.
"I didn't know," he said, unable to mask the brokenness in his voice. "I thought everything dat happened wit us was jus' fun, nothin' serious."
"But she didn't."
"She thought it was for real. Thought I was." Thought that Remy would somehow save her, would at least meet her eyes as he sentenced her to plummet past gargoyles and angels on a cold spring morning. Instead, he failed her in every way imaginable. At the end, he couldn't even call her parents and tell them where to find their only daughter's body.
"She loved you." There was no condemnation in his voice, only a grim understanding.
"Thought she did, anyway." Remy took another drink of bourbon, wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. Nothing seemed to take away the greasy, sour taste that coated his throat when he thought about Gennie, the way her white-blond hair had looked against the blood pooling on the cobblestones. He turned bleary eyes to Logan, tuning back in. "Tol' you. Ain' bout Rogue."
"So why'd Creed say this time was worse?" Logan asked, watching Remy's face closely.
"Cause it's real," Remy replied without thinking, words slurring more now. "Cause it's Rogue. Cause I don't know what he's doin', an' he knows it's killin' me to sit around. He's enjoyin' it."
He walked unsteadily to the garage door, leaned against the frame and stared into the darkness. Whatever Remy was looking at, Logan was certain it wasn't the neatly-edged drive of the mansion. Logan considered the story he had heard. The girl's death was a burden that Remy was learning to live with, he knew, and wondered how much it had changed the younger man. Wondered how much it played into the boy's self-appointed position as Rogue's rescuer. Wondered why he didn't mind more.
"It's my fault," Remy muttered. "I said Dane wouldn't hit her at school."
Logan shook his head. "You didn't know Creed was gonna be there. None of us did."
"But I'm the one said she'd be okay." Remy's face was haggard and grey, his hands shaking just a little as he tilted the bottle and took a sip.
"You really think you Chuck would've sent her back to school just on your say-so? You think I would?" Logan looked at him, and his eyes belied his gruff tone. "I'll kick your ass when we get her back."
"When?" Remy raised his gaze to Logan's. He couldn't quite stop himself from sounding hopeful.
Logan nodded. "When."
Rogue sat on the bed in her cell, knees pulled to her chest, fighting to keep her breathing slow and even. Moments after Essex left with an oily, "We'll talk soon," the personalities had flooded her again, beating against the walls of her mind like a flock of birds startled into flight.
She staggered to her feet, reeling at the internal cacophony. "You wanna eat," she gritted, "then shut the hell up."
To her surprise, the voices quieted slightly – just enough for her to inch across the room to the tray on the floor. A black-clad guard had dropped it off, one hand on the gun at his hip as he slid it across the threshold of the open door.
Her watch read nine o'clock, and since the meal on the tray was dinner-like, she assumed it was nighttime. Without a window, there was no way for her to tell for sure. She looked at the plate suspiciously. Broiled chicken, a roll, cooked carrots, an apple neatly cut into eighths. A plastic tumbler of milk. A perfectly balanced meal, the sort Scott made when he pulled dinner duty at the Institute. The thought of the mansion made her stomach clench in a way that had nothing to do with food.
She had been eyeing the tray for the better part of three hours, convinced that it was drugged, that eating anything provided by Essex was tantamount to surrender. But her last meal had been a hasty breakfast after the morning's session with Logan. She was hungry, and scared, and utterly, utterly alone. And principles, she realized, weren't going to quell the gnawing in her stomach.
Just as she crouched next to the tray, the door slid open.
"Still no dinner, Rogue?" Essex tsk'd. "You really should keep up your strength." He placed a metal chair inside the door, then sat down.
"For what?" she asked, eyes narrowing.
He considered her for a moment. "You have many questions, I'm sure. However, my answers are likely to prove unsatisfactory, at least this early in our relationship."
"We don't have a relationship," she ground out. "And the only answer Ah want is what the hell do you want?"
He reached down for the roll, studying it. "It's perfectly safe," he said. "You can't possibly think I would go to the trouble of bringing you here and then immediately do you harm."
"You kidnapped me!" she snapped. "What else would Ah think?"
He broke off a corner of the roll, then popped it in his mouth, giving her an indulgent smile. He held out the rest to her, but she crossed her arms and looked away.
"Your resolve is charming," he dryly.
"What do you want?"
He ignored her question again. "How is the suppression collar?" he asked. "It almost resembles some of that urban jewelry you seem to favor."
She bit down on her lower lip, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of a response.
"Come, Rogue. I would have thought you'd be thrilled to have the burden of your mutation lifted."
"Doesn't do me much good locked up here," she said.
"No, I suppose it doesn't. I find it quite useful. It's really an exceptional piece of engineering. I designed it myself, you know, especially for you."
"I'm flattered," she snarled. He wanted to brag, she realized dimly. Wanted to show off his inventions and his superiority and ultimately, his plan for her. He wanted to cow her with it, and that very arrogance, she decided in an instant, was exactly what she'd use to get out, or at least stay alive until the team came for her. "Lotta trouble for just one girl."
"You're not just any girl," he returned. He stood and moved closer, even as she backed away. "You are a singularity, Rogue. A sport, if you will. Charles Xavier may be unwilling to recognize that, to cultivate that which makes you so unique, but I have no such qualms."
"What do you want?" she asked in a low, angry voice.
"You are a key, my dear. You carry within your cells everything I need to unlock the secrets of mutantkind. With you as my guide, I can lay bare the very essence of mutants."
She stared, trying to quell the acid rising in her throat as she realized his meaning. "My DNA," she said flatly.
Essex only smiled.
"You want my DNA? Hell," she said, shoving up the sleeve of her shirt, "Ah'll give you a blood sample right now. Ah want to go home."
Essex merely gave her an indulgent smile. "While I appreciate the offer, it's unnecessary. I have your DNA. Your time in Area 51 was not without some use."
She stiffened. "You work for Trask?"
He scoffed. "Hardly. Colonel Trask's work at Area 51 was merely a reiteration of things I learned long ago. He piqued my interest solely because he had managed to acquire you. His tests were fairly limited, were they not?"
She gritted her teeth. "Seemed pretty thorough t'me."
"Eye of the beholder," he said dismissively. "Nevertheless, Trask's preliminary findings confirmed certain hypotheses I had formed regarding the nature of your mutation. Your recent experiences in Tibet helped to refine those ideas."
She thought back to her time at Area 51 – the countless samples of skin, blood, bone marrow, even spinal fluid – that Trask's men had taken from her. Unconsciously, she rubbed at the inside crook of her elbow, remembering the feel of rubber tubing knotted there. "If you've got all of that, what do you need me for?"
"Trask's experiments were limited in both depth and breadth – I'm seeking a more comprehensive understanding of how your gifts manifest themselves. And for that, I need you. You are the original, Rogue. Working directly with you affords me the greatest chance of success."
"Success at what?"
"I want to understand at the most essential level how mutations work. How to control them without resorting to collars, or other devices, like your friend Cyclops requires."
Rogue flinched just a little.
Essex continued. "I suspect that most mutations have far greater potential than we realize. Understanding how they appear on the genetic level is the first step towards achieving that potential."
"Golly," she drawled. "That's mighty big of you."
He inclined his head, a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth.
"If you're so damned noble, why kidnap me? You could ask the Professor and Beast for help, be upfront about it."
He stood, tugging at the sleeve of his white lab coat. "I sincerely doubt that your Professor would approve of my methods or how I choose to apply my findings. And I am not terribly inclined to share."
He reached out as if to touch her and she slapped his hand away without thinking. He just chuckled. "Pleasant dreams, Rogue."
Without giving her a chance to reply, he left. Rogue stood trembling with rage until the door slid shut. Slowly, she lowered herself to the bed and curled into a ball, tears sliding across her face and pooling on the mattress beneath her.
"We need a plan," Scott said firmly. "We need to think this through."
At the head of the briefing room's conference table, Xavier nodded his agreement. Rogue's kidnapping seemed to have aged him – his face had taken on the waxy translucence of a much older man, and his penetrating gaze had faded slightly, though it was no less intelligent. "The chances of finding Rogue without an organized approach are slim," he said.
"And Cerebro still isn't showing where they are?" Kurt asked, unable to disguise his frustration.
Jean turned to him, voice placating. "Cerebro picks up the neural signature of mutants. Rogue's signature hasn't appeared, but that's probably because of the collar."
"What about Sabretooth?" Kitty laid a comforting hand on Kurt's, gave a squeeze meant to reassure. He gripped back as if she were a lifeline.
Jean shifted, brow furrowed. "He's not showing up either. We think he's blocking it somehow, like Magneto did with his helmet."
"I'm afraid finding Rogue is going to rely upon more traditional methods of detective work," Xavier said. "We'll need to contact anyone who might have dealt with Sabretooth recently, find out all we can about Dane and his background."
"Follow the money," Remy said from his seat at the end of the table. When heads swiveled to him, he shrugged. "Dane wasn't workin' f'free. Whoever hired him paid somethin' up front. Follow that back, find de source."
Logan chewed his cigar, considering Remy's words. "He wouldn't have financed the Friends on his own, either. He brought in people to boost their numbers, supplied 'em with weapons. And Creed doesn't come cheap. Someone's got a lot of money and doesn't mind spending it."
"I can look into that," Kitty offered.
Xavier nodded tiredly. "At this point, it seems unlikely that Rogue was taken as leverage against me, which leads me to believe that her kidnapper is interested in her mutation."
"Apocalypse?" Scott asked.
"I don't think so. Rogue has already served her purpose for him – he has no further use for her, nor does she pose a threat."
"What about the collar?" Logan asked. "There's gotta be a trail there."
"I concur," said Hank. "That sort of engineering is staggeringly complicated; certainly, a mind that could develop such a device would not have gone unnoticed in scientific circles."
Logan flinched. Scientists meant labs. Labs meant experiments. "Follow up on it," he said. "I've got some circles of my own."
Xavier glanced at him sharply. Fury? he asked, and Logan nodded once, mouth tight.
Xavier's eyes swept the assembled group. "Very well. Scott, Ororo, Kurt – investigate both Sabretooth and Dane's recent activities. Kitty, please begin your research. Don't limit it to those two – find out what you can about the Friends and their financing. Hank, please unearth what you can about the maker of that collar. Jean and I will continue working with Cerebro. Logan…" he trailed off, momentarily at a loss for words. "I trust you can pursue your own investigation."
Deceptively laid-back, Logan jerked his chin toward Remy. "What are you gonna do, Gumbo?"
Remy looked at him evenly. "Make some calls. See some people. Find de Rogue."
Logan nearly smiled, and instead stood, pulling on his jacket and clapping his black cowboy hat on his head. "Let's go, then. We've wasted enough time."
"We'll start with something simple, I think," Essex said. "Ready, Rogue?"
"Let me go," she said, her voice hoarse with fury. They had come for her while she was still asleep, and while she had managed to break one guard's nose and dislocate another's shoulder, there was no fighting the tranquilizer dart they had fired. She had woken to find herself strapped to an operating table, her powers once again active and burning inside her.
Somehow, Rogue didn't find that a relief.
"Let me go!" she rasped again. Tugging at the restraints, she was chagrined to find there was no play at all in the thick metal cuffs – she was immobilized.
"For now, we'll stick with baseline humans. It should be easier to map the changes to the haplotypes of your DNA if we know precisely what we're adding to the mix."
Rogue turned her head. A boy – too skinny, with the raw pallor of one recently scrubbed clean, his head shorn close – was strapped to an adjacent table. His eyes were clenched shut, his breathing rapid and uneven. He had the clammy look of someone going into shock.
"What's your name?" she asked, unsurprised when he didn't answer. She glared at Essex. "He's a kid," she hissed.
"Oh, I assure you – he lacks the X-gene. We tested him thoroughly before your arrival."
"It's different on humans," she said urgently. "It doesn't work the same way. It could kill him."
He tilted his head, clearly curious. "How long does that take?"
She tried to steady her nerves, think back. How long had it taken to knock Cody unconscious? A few moments of his skin brushing against hers; certainly less than a minute. "Ah don't know. Not that long. A few minutes, maybe."
"Well then," he said briskly, "we'll start slowly. Build up to fatal exposure."
"No! That wasn't what Ah meant!"
"I'm sure it wasn't." He checked the cuffs on her wrists and ankles, then began to untie the hospital-style gown she wore.
"Stop! Don't touch me!" She tried to shrink away from Essex, but her bonds held fast as he affixed sensors to her chest and temples. She flushed, humiliated at the invasion.
"Rogue, I can hardly be expected to learn anything if I don't monitor your condition during the experiment."
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself away as Essex's fingers, cool and dusty in latex gloves, smoothed the wires over her chest. She could feel the personalities surging in her head, as if they could sense the imminent absorption. Defeat, and the knowledge of what was to come, tasted cold and ferric.
"There," Essex said, "I believe we're ready." With a whir, the armrest she was cuffed to swung towards the trembling boy.
She bit her lip, tasted blood as Remy's voice came unbidden to her, an echo of the day they had fought Dane on the rooftop. Jus' hang on. Jus' hang on. She did this all the time, she reminded herself. She might not enjoy the absorption – the more personalities she gathered inside herself, the more overwhelming each episode became – but it wasn't unmanageable. More horrific was the fact that her powers were, once again, being used against her will.
It was ironic, she often thought, that a girl who had named herself Rogue valued control over everything else. And that was the last thought she had before the tips of her fingers brushed against the boy's arm Paul, my name is Paul and the borrowed memories of six months alone on the streets of New York left her feeling violated all over again.
It wasn't like absorbing a mutant – there were no powers to manage, just the flow of memories and psyche and life itself – and she concentrated on boxing Paul up as neatly as she could, walling him off from her mind with an efficiency that would have made the professor proud, had he witnessed it.
Over the din in her head, she could hear Essex muttering to himself, analyzing the monitor feeds, and she realized with a start that she was still touching the boy. The flow continued, more and more of his life pouring into her, and she writhed, trying to break the connection between them.
"Essex!" she gasped, and with an annoyed glance at her, he flipped a switch – the armrest swung away, and the connection was broken.
He strode over to her and immediately drew another vial of blood, handing it off to a waiting technician. "Describe what happened."
She shivered, still reeling from the transfer – she didn't know how much time had passed, but if her reaction was any gauge, she had absorbed more of Paul than anyone else. She couldn't bear to turn and look at the boy lying next to her, but she had to know. "Is he dead?"
"It hardly signifies. Describe what happened."
She tried for a sneer, but couldn't keep from shaking and sweating. "Ain't that why you have all those machines?"
"They can't tell me how you feel, only how your body reacts to the absorption."
"Screw you."
"You might want to reconsider your defiance, Rogue. Your victim," she winced visibly as the barb struck home, and he continued, "is alive. Whether he remains that way is up to you. It would be a simple matter to lengthen the exposure time – to determine exactly how long you need to drain someone's life force completely and irrevocably."
She forced down the nausea, forced the turbulent beating of Paul's mind further back into her own as Essex smiled down pleasantly at her. "Describe what happened," he said again with the good nature of someone who knows they have won before the game even begins, "and do try to be detailed."
She closed her eyes. "Everything flashes," she began softly. "Like lightning."
A/N: Yes, haplotypes are a real part of your DNA. No, I don't know significantly more than that. Any further science that appears here will be mostly made-up.
Next chapter: More experiments. The team searches for Rogue. Remy makes a deal. Kitty makes a discovery.
Many thanks to all the nice reviewers!