: HOUSE OF CARDS :
PART ONE : CONSEQUENCES
(3) - Legacy -
Later, it came back to her. A memory.
That morning, the morning the military had attacked, she'd been looking for him, unable to find him anywhere. She'd been down to the boathouse, angry that he'd run away from her when every day since he'd first arrived in their midst he'd been following her around like some single-minded shadow. She'd been walking back up to the mansion in the summer heat with Rachel at her side, complaining for the umpteenth time about the whole sorry state of affairs.
"He doesn't get it, Rae," she'd murmured quietly. "He wants me to touch him. He doesn't get that if Ah do it, there's no turnin' back. Ah won't be able to undo it. Ah'll know everythin' about him, inside out, every memory, every thought, every secret, every fetish. And he doesn't give a shit."
"And is that what you argued about?" Rachel had asked, eyebrows raised.
"A kiss for a lifetime of secrets," she had whispered sadly, toying absently with the pendant about her neck. "Is that the way you'd want to get to know someone you care about? By rippin' out the mystery of him?"
The mystery of him. A puzzle to be solved no more. The breath of a touch would have been all it would have taken and now it was too late.
A smile, a glance, the whisper of a kiss.
So many promises gone unfulfilled, so many chances lost.
Her memories were traitors, every one - they could never bring him back.
-oOo-
She stayed in bed for a long time. It wasn't so much despair as rebellion; a rebellion against everything Raven had told her, against the world that still moved on outside the four walls of her bedroom.
Lying there in that bed, she could pretend the world didn't exist, that this room and her bed was a little pocket universe all on its own that bore no relation to what was going on outside. Because she still couldn't believe what Raven had told her; she couldn't believe that the world was now her enemy in every sense of the word, that the shackles she wore were not merely the shackles of her own mutant ability, but the shackles of slavery itself. And she couldn't believe that the X-Men were dead. That she was the only survivor within mere inches.
She lay in bed, awake, for many days. She tried not to sleep because sleep invited nightmares, nightmares of her friends, her comrades being massacred, of her mentor, her teacher, the only father she had, being ripped to shreds, whilst she was paralysed and powerless to stop it.
Xavier was dead. It hardly seemed credible. Because not only had the man died, so too had his dream - the dream to awaken the world. The death of his dream had killed something in her, leaving an empty, hollow space that burned angrily every waking hour she possessed, burned so intolerably that some nights she couldn't even endure being inside her own body, that she would have torn herself apart if only to free herself from the anguish inside her.
And then there were other nights where she would dream of him, of his hands on her in an exquisitely gentle caress, of his lips on hers, lips she had never tasted, that she never would because he was dead too. She would wake up bathed in sweat and tears, sobbing into her pillow for something that had been robbed from her before she had even had the chance to possess it.
Because that day, the day they had killed him, she had been going to end it with him, she had been prepared to walk away from him when he was the only thing she'd ever wanted more than the chance to touch another person, and now she could never have him, not ever.
The humans had taken him away from her. They had taken away her dreams, every single one of them, leaving her with this gaping hole inside her, a hole that ached like the loss of a limb, of an organ, of her heart. There were no more ideologies to cling to. There were no more legacies to inherit. There wasn't even the heart of a thief left to steal. No one to embrace, no one to say 'I love you' to, even if she could ever learn to love.
There was nothing.
Nothing but the wound inside her, bleeding and burning, twisting and turning like a hot knife in her breast, causing her agony beyond imagining.
There were not enough tears in the world for her to cry.
And then, quite inexplicably, there came a day when she found she had cried them all. When she woke up to find the fire gone and the blood run dry. No more knife, no more agony, no more anything. One night she slept to dreams of torture and decay, and the next morning she woke to find herself dead.
Dead man walking.
It had a whole new meaning now.
She was hollow inside, as if the night had invaded her while she slept and stolen all her insides. She sat up in bed, and there was no pain. There were no tears. There was only this odd, cold spot inside her, no more than a pinprick deep inside her breast, one that nevertheless churned with all the force of a black hole, a vortex sucking her dry.
At first she had no name to call this cold spot inside her, for it wasn't anything so strong or violent as grief, or hate, or rebellion, or revenge. It lay there inside her, quiet and unimposing, resting on her heart like a blot or a stain.
It would take her very many months to recognise it, and when she did, there was only one name fit for it.
Death.
A little death inside her, eating away at her day in, day out.
It didn't matter what she did now, because she had nothing left. Her life was worthless, just like millions of other mutant lives were now worthless - but for her there was one crucial difference. She was alone. She'd never felt more acutely alone in all her life.
It was on that day that she finally got out of bed, only to find that it wasn't so hard at all. She rearranged the comforter, pulled open the curtains, and looked outside. It had once been a dirty, residential street in the ghettos of Mutant Town, now populated only by the skeletons of buildings, tall rows of houses that had been reduced to nothing more than the bare bones of bricks and mortar. Roofs had been ripped off like the lids of tin cans; walls had been knocked down wholesale, filling the roads with rubble, dust and smoke. It looked like a war zone. There was not a soul in sight.
She turned away from the window, finding no emotion in her as she had gazed at the pitiful view.
For the first time in weeks she left the bedroom that had confined her, stepping out onto the landing and descending the stairs with a kind of detached curiosity. The house had been gutted at some point, either by squatters or looters; everything was nondescript, characterised only by dull, cracked walls that had all faded to the same shade of grey, by cobwebs lingering in the corners, by the cockroaches that festered and scuttled against the skirting, giving the house its only sense of inhabitation.
She opened doors, closed them, peered inside rooms that had no meaning, no significance except to those that had once occupied them, mutants who may be eking out a hollow existence elsewhere, or otherwise dead.
There were no ghosts in this house for her.
She finally found Raven sitting in what once must have been the study, perusing an old, worn, leather-bound book with the ravenous look of a vulture scrutinising its prey.
As soon as Rogue saw that book she should have known it would have been easier to walk away. Instead it instilled a sense of purpose within the gap that now engulfed her empty heart.
"Ah'm ready," was all she said.
-oOo-
For a period of some months after this, all her nightmares stopped. The days were an endless void within which she relearned the entirety of herself. It was only later that the nightmares came back to her, when nightmares had ceased being mere figments of imagination and had become reality.
Then again, Irene would have told her dreams are not figments of imagination, but portents of that which is to come.
Mystique had less time for such frivolities, and even less time for riddles. She didn't make philosophy, she was philosophy. For everything Xavier had taught Rogue, she had a counter. With Xavier's death, it seemed that Raven's path had become clearer. There had been many times in the past where Rogue had seen the fervent fanaticism of her foster-mother - in her movements, in her gestures, in her eyes. But now that the times had changed, now that Raven's cause had become more clear-cut than ever, these traits had become more inscribed into her character. It was almost as if Mystique now felt vindicated in walking the path she'd chosen for herself, and it was a collusion she tried to draw Rogue into . To her, Rogue's path could not be more distinct. Her friends, her comrades and her mentor were all dead at the hands of the human aggressors, and instinct dictated a natural desire for vengeance. Rogue, Mystique said, had a duty to those of her kind that had fallen, a duty that demanded revenge of some sort. Thus Mystique had guaranteed Rogue a place in the Brotherhood, this ragtag band of mutant outlaws, part of a larger underground network of terrorists whose ultimate mission was to eliminate the rule of the 'statics', which in revolutionary nomenclature referred to the baseline humans - the villains, the oppressors, the tyrants.
But Rogue felt no true thirst for revenge. It was not that she didn't resent what the statics had done to the X-Men. It was not that she didn't mourn the loss of the only family she had , or that she did not believe that the murders of her friends and comrades should be brought to justice. She harboured all these thoughts and emotions, but felt quite unable to act upon them. It was as though the moment she had woken from her coma, she had woken into a body hewn of stone, one that could not feel and whose heart had been numbed. She bore no hope; but her despair was not of an all-consuming kind. Rather, it was a dull and lingering ache that petered listlessly on throughout all of Mystique's subsequent training. Soon she was to become just another soldier in the war against the Sentinels, the statics, and the Hounds.
Rogue allowed herself to be transformed because she could see no other prospect for herself. If she were to leave the Brotherhood, what was she to do? Be forced to live underground with the other remaining mutants? Live in abject poverty, be imprisoned, maimed, killed or tortured? She was after all an ex-X-Man. On the outside, she was as good as dead anyway. The Brotherhood was a dysfunctional family that she had left long ago for the very reason that it had no longer held anything for her. But it was the only family she had left; it was the only thing that could give her a purpose in life, because she could never be anything else but someone else's warrior in their own ideological war. She had no other qualification, no other craft.
She was a fighter, and she was going to carry on fighting to the death.
-oOo-
It was strange, how dreams and memories suddenly became interchangeable.
She wasn't sure how it happened, but every day her past life seemed to become less and less real, and whilst her future was certainly dead, her past seemed to have melted, collapsed in on itself, and become a landscape as alien to her as that of a Dali painting.
There were no more certainties in this world of hers, no more truths, no more absolutes. Nevertheless she went back to the mansion, once. Much of what remained of it had been scavenged since its destruction, but there were other artefacts that had been left to rot in the rubble and the dust - Xavier's books and papers, the odd photograph or memento; scraps of clothing too mangled to be of any use, bills and notes and letters that would have no meaning to anyone but their owners.
She spent a long time walking amongst the torn shell of the place she had called home for those few short years, feeling nothing but an extraordinary detachment that was punctuated only by the faint taste of bitterness in her mouth. For the first time since she had awoken to her new life, it finally dawned upon her, with a sharp and unforgiving clarity, that what had happened really had happened; that Xavier's haven really had been destroyed, along with everyone in it - save for her. Although the world had inexorably changed, a part of her had always denied it, until the very moment when she stood amongst the ruins of the old world with the wind in her hair and on her cheeks, with her heart in her mouth. A part of her had always expected to return here and find that nothing had changed, that the old world was still intact and that these past few months of her life had been nothing more than a bad dream.
But the evidence was irrefutable - the mansion was dead, its dreams were dead, and the people within it… they too were dead.
Save for one, and that was her.
She wandered aimlessly through the husk of the building, stopping now and then to pick up and examine some lost fragment or household item that still remained amongst the debris. A spoon, a broken watch, a pair of shattered glasses - Hank's, he'd always worn them in the lab. A crusty notepad with its contents eroded by the elements; an earring in the shape of a red star nestled, forgotten, in a broken corner.
Rogue bent over, picked it up. She remembered. Red hair and fierce green eyes; the plucky, freckled face of a young girl, the stubborn, down-turned mouth. This earring had once belonged to Rachel Summers, had been given to her by her mother on her (ninth?) birthday. Only a few months later, Jean Grey-Summers had been murdered at the hands of the mutant known as Mastermind. He'd detonated a nuclear bomb in Pittsburgh; after that the world had descended into a whirlwind of oddly ordered chaos. Senator Robert Kelly had been mysteriously murdered; consequently anti-mutant legislation had been pushed through post-haste, and Bolivar Trask's Sentinel program had been given the official green light. Within a matter of years, this mansion and the X-Men had followed Jean to the grave.
Rachel, heart-broken, insular and inscrutable in all the time that Rogue had known her, had returned to her mother's arms at last.
Rogue half considered taking the earring with her, but without any conscious reason she decided against it and dropped it back to the ground. It rolled lazily across the once-polished parquet floor before coming to a poignant standstill. Rogue stood. This had once been the ballroom, a wide, open space adorned with diamond chandeliers and grand sash windows. She had a sudden memory of lights and tinsel and foil, in various coruscating colours; of port and champagne and turkey and punch, of laughing faces and chatter, of music and the scent of mingled perfume and tobacco.
She shivered and planted her gloved hands firmly inside the pockets of her jacket.
Remy…
Christmas. It had been Christmas.
She must have known him for about four or five months at the time. He'd always skulked around the sidelines during any group activity, that perpetual, cocky little smirk on his lips, as if he found their togetherness quaint and amusing. It had always irritated her. He was a lonewolf, through and through - it had always made her wonder why he had joined the X-Men at all. Some of the others had resented his unwillingness to open up to the rest of the team, but it had also lent him an aura of mystique she'd always found irresistible.
Even back then she'd always been able to feel when his eyes were on her. He'd been doing it that day from across the length of the ballroom, making her skin prickle and her cheeks flush, until she could stand it no longer. She'd always suspected that he enjoyed doing that to her, drawing her to him with just a glance.
He'd been standing by one of the sash windows, the night looming behind him, as if to reel him back in. He had been leaning against the windowframe, smoking, as he always seemed to, with that small, self-absorbed smile on his face and those dark, hypnotic eyes on her, always on her.
"If yah ain't enjoyin' yourself, sugah," she'd admonished him playfully, "then why don't you spend the holidays with your folks back home?"
He'd smiled, easy, suggestive.
"I prefer de view here." Always suave, always gallant, always completely the cad. She'd half frowned, half smirked.
"Seriously. Ain't there any loved ones back home yah can visit?"
His smile had drooped slightly, his eyes had dulled.
"Not anymore," he said.
She'd liked that about him. The mystery, the enigma. He was like the dark side of the moon to her, partially shadowed, partially hidden. She'd touched his arm with a gloved hand, even though such an action was always taken as an open to flirtation between them.
"Then why don't yah come and join the rest of us?" she'd asked earnestly. "Storm's been askin' for yah…"
"No t'anks," he'd replied smoothly, reaching out and absently picking a bit of silly string out of her hair. "I can't stand dese family affairs. Too cute and gooey for de likes of me. I'm fine right here. As long as you're gonna stay here too, chere."
She'd raised a heated eyebrow, never knowing whether to be annoyed or amused at his bravado…
"Remy, it's Christmas. Yah have to get into the spirit of things…"
A small, slow grin had crossed his face.
"Well, since you put it dat way… I guess you're right. How about we go over dere and make out under de mistletoe? You could show me what exactly makes de Rogue's kiss so dynamite."
Her cheeks had coloured violently - from embarrassment, from anger and perhaps a little from desire, because if she'd been any other girl she wouldn't have said no…
"Remy, yah know Ah can't --"
"Yes, you can. I seen you kiss men before. Complete strangers at dat. Dey get so excited dey be keelin' over. And dis Cajun can get awful jealous, chere. He ain't gonna rest till he knows what all de big fuss is about."
It had been anger, not embarrassment. Anger making her flush, making her reply bitterly: "Don't joke about it. If Ah kiss yah, Ah steal a little bit of you. Your memories become mine. Ah might even hurt yah."
He'd looked away, shrugged.
"Maybe I wouldn't mind so much," he answered baldly. "Maybe I want someone t' understand me. Maybe I want someone to know all my innermost secrets. And if I can get a kiss from you thrown into de bargain, maybe it'd all be worth it." He'd looked back at her, his gaze intent, lustful, and all in a moment her anger had dissipated, replaced with the helplessness of want and desire. "Am I bein' selfish yet, chere?" he'd drawled.
What had struck her was the fact that, if she'd been braver, if she'd been more foolhardy, she would have done it. Because she'd wanted to reach out into him, she'd wanted to know all his secrets, she'd wanted to understand who and what he really was. She had been selfish too, back then. And yet a part of her had balked at the thought. Despite the many times he would tempt her with romance and kisses afterward, she had never been able to go through with it.
"You're crazy," she'd muttered at last.
"Chere," he'd assured her lazily, pressing the cigarette to his lips, "bein' around a femme as fine as you is enough to drive a man crazy. Bein' unable to touch her is enough to drive him certifiably insane."
What he'd never known was that she'd felt the same way about him. Being around him, with all the cute repartee, with all the flirtation - hadn't he ever once thought that it had driven her crazy too?
To want someone so badly that you dreamt about them at night, and to live knowing that if you ever reached out to touch them you could kill them?
Still, there were days now that she wished that she'd reached out and kissed him that night.
At least then she would have got to know him, before she'd lost him forever.
Rogue sighed, looking up to concrete grey skies, letting the breeze touch her pale cheeks. There was not even a building left to contain these memories; all she had was locked inside her own being, and more often than not they were memories she no longer wished to touch. It was better that the ruins of this place be left to the elements - there could be no memorial, except within her. She was an unworthy successor to the past and all that it stood for.
And that made her as alone and frightened as she had been the first moment she had stepped inside this mansion some four of five years before.
"It's time we went."
She turned slightly. Mystique was standing a little way behind her, her raven locks rippling silkily in the wind. She'd afforded her foster-daughter enough time to mourn - for Mystique, there was little left to mourn in this world but a dead son and the inescapable passages of time. But Rogue wasn't quite ready to leave just yet. She turned back and looked down the slope, to the lake glistening clear and untouched as it always had been, to the familiar old cedar tree that she'd sought refuge under so many times before.
She absently clutched the pendant about her neck with a gloved hand.
"Just a moment longer," she murmured.
"A moment longer and you won't be able to leave," Raven noted quietly.
True…
She sighed and turned again. Raven was still standing in the same place, an expectant look on her grim and forbidding face. Neither of them found any pleasure in returning to this place, although for entirely different reasons.
"You were right, momma," Rogue murmured softly, the words whipped from her mouth on a sudden breeze. "It is gone."
"And you doubted me?" Raven asked, a black eyebrow raised. Rogue glanced away. Amongst the dust and the rubble, the red star earring glittered in the faltering sunlight.
"Maybe. A little." She paused, looked back at the implacable face before her. "It's strange. Ah feel… nothin'."
"Or maybe you don't have a name for what it is you're feeling," Mystique pointed out shrewdly, her eyes eagle-like. Rogue lowered her eyelids, tucked an unruly lock of white hair back behind her ear. "Maybe…"
Raven watched her.
"Those you loved are gone," she spoke at last. "There's little use in pining." She too slipped her hands into her pockets, closed her eyes momentarily, and when she opened them again they were staring off into the distance. "What you experienced here, Rogue, was merely a short period of respite in your life. One, I might venture to add, that did very little for you. You came with the expectation that Xavier would be able to cure you of your 'abnormality'. Five years later and you're still no closer."
"Still no closer to being able to touch…" Rogue agreed under her breath. She looked up again to find Raven's eyes back on her.
"What held you back, Rogue?" Raven asked, and this time there was a real earnestness in her voice. "I always thought that if I could not help you to control your abilities, then at least the good professor would be able to. And yet he too failed. Why?"
Sometimes Ah think that if Ah ever let you get close t' me… Ah'd kill you.
"Ah guess Ah just got scared that Ah might hurt the people Ah cared about," Rogue half-whispered. "Like what happened with Cody…" She trailed off.
Maybe I want someone to know all my innermost secrets…
"That damned boy," Raven muttered heartlessly. "He ruined you, Rogue, ruined everything your power could have helped you to be. Still, at least he served his purpose. He brought you to us - even if you didn't stay very long."
"Five years is a long time," Rogue observed. Raven's smile was sardonic.
"Evidently not long enough."
Rogue did not smile. She looked away again, to the lake, to the cedar tree, to the things that would not decay however many petty wars were fought and lost.
"What is it?" Mystique asked softly.
"Ah'm just thinkin' that there's no one left to care for now. That maybe Ah don't need to be scared anymore." She looked back over her shoulder; Raven's eyes were once more silent, watchful. "Ah'm thinkin' that maybe Ah'm ready now - really ready."
Those timeless grey eyes glittered, with pride, with triumph; but Rogue looked away, back to the tree, feeling nothing.
"Maybe you could teach me now, momma. Maybe you could teach me to touch."
-oOo-
A/N: Yeah, I know. The DoFP timeline. Sorry I dropped all you guys into that there. I didn't know much about it either, so I had to do a bit of researching. But even then, a lot of this story has been tweaked and so it's only really loosely based on the DoFP timeline. Basically, in this timeline, martial law was declared against all mutants, and the mansion was destroyed by the military and the Sentinels. Prof X was killed, as were most of the X-Men and a lot of other heroes... But I won't say anymore since it'll probably ruin the story. Best place to go if you're looking for more info is uncannyxmen. net. uncannyxmen(dot)?faq9&fldAuto36 . BTW, I know this is going slowly at the moment, but please bear with me. The real drama will begin in the next couple of chapters. princess fairys... The answer to your question is easy. I've already written the whole story already. :) And Sweety, I think Mags is on the run right now. Later on he loses the use of both his legs (ironically), and gets incarcerated by the military. But he doesn't really come into this story. :)
Thanks to everyone else who reviewed... your support is muchly appreciated! Ciao!