Here's what I want you to do real fast.
Put out your hand, palm down. Good, now slap your other hand, palm down as well, on top of that hand. Rotate your thumbs.
That's what this chapter reads like. I tried to fix it, but GODDAMMIT, IT DIDN'T WANT TO BE FIXED! This chapter was probably the worst one for that that I've ever written. (not counting any that included road trip humor… like I said… we don't talk about that)
Logan smiled to himself and shook some broken glass out of his hair as he rolled up to the mansion. The trail he had had on this 'Riptide' character had gone cold after his remains weren't found among the desecrated building. As far as Logan could tell, the man had just disappeared.
So, he'd stopped at a bar to perk himself up.
It wasn't the beer that had put him in a good mood, though that was a playing factor, but the feel of his knuckles pounding into deserving flesh just made him happy.
He whistled a jaunty tune as he parked his bike and shed off his jacket in the garage before walking back out into the sweet night air and up the steps of the mansion.
"Honey, I'm home." He called out jokily. Goodness, he must have been in a better mood than he thought. Jokes. Out loud! That had nothing to do with gutting people!
He chuckled a little bit to himself and tried to remember exactly how many alcoholic beverages he had consumed to achieve this level of cheer.
Not that it mattered. They'd be out of his system in a few moments.
He was still laughing a little bit when he turned the corner into one of the media rooms and found a weary looking Ororo Munroe sitting stonily in one of the over stuffed chairs.
She looked up to him with worn eyes.
His smile faded away from existence.
"What happened?"
The look of the unconscious girl on the bed nearly crippled Logan. Her brown and white hair was tucked behind her ears in a fashion that was so unnaturally placid it made her look dead, her skin was three shades paler than he had ever seen it before, and her normally bright green eyes were closed.
"She had some sort of mental break," Explained the purple haired telepath who was standing next to her. Logan was positive that he knew her name, but was too distracted at the moment to think thoughts beyond 'When I find out who did this to her…'
The girl involuntarily whimpered from her unconsciousness and the hand clutching hers wrapped itself tighter around her fingers.
"What's she feeling?" Ororo asked anxiously from beside Logan.
Logan was about to respond with a gruffly sarcastic 'Well, due to a slight case of unconsciousness, I can't really give you a straight up answer' but was cut off by the Cajun.
"She's scared." He mumbled, running the pad of his thumb over her knuckles. "An' confused. She don't understand what happened. I'm tryin' t' make sure dat goes away..."
Logan looked at the young man skeptically. How'd he know? How did Ororo know that he knew?
"She's not the only one." Warren commented from the back of the room, casting his gaze over to the comatose form of Emma Frost on the other side of the med lab.
"Can you fix her?" Logan asked the purple haired girl bluntly. He didn't care about the Ice Queen, he didn't even really care about anyone who he would have to threaten, beat, or kill to make his kid better. He just wanted it done.
Betsy considered this.
"I can go into her head so long as she stays calm. Maybe I'll be able to repair any damage done, I'm not making any promises." She warned. "At the very least I'll be able to replay her memories and find out what happened."
Logan was about to growl out about how that wasn't good enough, but Storm put a restraining hand on his forearm before he could act rashly.
"See what you can do, Betsy." She said solemnly.
Betsy nodded, snapping on a pair of latex gloves before she placed her fingers on Rogue's temples. The last thing she consciously felt was the seeping feeling of her broadcasting herself into another person's mind.
Rogue sat on the ground in the middle of the empty hallway of the Xavier Institute, confused as to why it was so empty. And cold.
Little ice crystals clung to the walls and carpet.
"Hello?" She called out tentatively, breath fogging the air in front of her. It was so lonely here. She knew that she should be feeling afraid and confused, and she was a little bit, but her emotions felt distant to her. Sort of the way she felt when she stared into Remy's eyes too long. Like, there was no emotion in the world other than what he wanted her to feel.
And so, she was calm.
But… Remy wasn't anywhere in sight…
"Marie? Is that you, little one?" Someone called back. "Come here."
Rogue was feeling very small and alone in this place, so she willingly followed the voice. For some strange reason, she couldn't remember her way around. The hallways were mazes. The rooms were traps.
"Over here, Marie." It cooed.
"I-I can't find you…" Rogue wandered around the dark passages blindly.
"Hurry up, Marie."
"We're over here, Marie."
"Come and find us, Marie."
Rogue stumbled down another hallway, then another, and another, following the eerie musical sounds of the voices calling out for her until she stumbled into another hallway. A black and broken door sat at the end of the hallway. The wood was rotting away and the hinges were rusty. The knob itself looked tarnished and abused, but for some strange reason, it seemed to call out to her, beg her to come and release the secrets kept behind the door.
"In here, Marie!" They called to her from behind the door. "Come and find us!"
She saw the reflection of her hand in the dirty metal of the knob as she reached towards i.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you, luv." A hand wrapped around her wrist, stopping her motion.
A bare hand.
"No!" Rogue screamed, snapping back to reality as she jumped away from the person and the door. "Don't touch me!" She shouted in a panic. "Neverever touch meh!"
"It's alright," The young woman with purple hair tried to soothe her.
"What did the girl ever do to you, Marie?" The voices brought up their cat-calls. Rogue sank to the floor and put her hands over her ears.
"Were you going to kill her, Marie? Is that it? Were you going to kill her with your poison?" One asked.
"I don't mean tah…" She mumbled.
"Water doesn't mean to drown it's victims. Cold doesn't mean to freeze them. Fire doesn't mean to burn them. It's just in their nature to kill." One of the cooed. "Just. Like. Poison."
"You're jus a leech, Marie." One of them sang. "A poor, pathetic, leech."
"Please make them stop." Rogue mumbled.
Betsy inspected the door as Rogue whimpered on the ground.
"This is troublesome." She muttered and ran her hand over the cracking wood. "This shouldn't be like this…"
"Marie…" The voices started again.
"SHUT UP!" Betsy screamed at them, losing her concentration.
For the moment, they listened.
"I think I can fix this…" Betsy muttered as she turned back to the door. Rogue watched the strange woman put her hand on the door, and with what seemed like an enormous amount of effort, the wood of the door faded away from black and back to a brown, the hinges and knob regained their shine. The voices were muffled behind it.
As Betsy lifted her hand away from the door, something entirely unexpected happened.
A butterfly flew out of her palm and fluttered around the door.
"What?" Rogue asked in a daze as the butterfly flitted around in front of her face. "What's goin' on?"
"Sorry about the butterfly." Betsy smiled. "I'm not strong enough to alter the mind without leaving my mark. Xavier could do it, I'm sure, but I can't. Usually telepaths leave their mark, in my case a butterfly, but it could be an animal, or a small object, or maybe even-."
"Frost?" Rogue asked as she ran her fingers across the ice crystals in the carpet.
Betsy looked down at the ice, noticing it for the first time. Her eyes narrowed. Frost.
"So… I'm in mah mind?" Rogue asked before Betsy could start again.
Betsy nodded.
"Why doesn't the Institute work the same way it did?" Rogue asked, and then at Betsy's quizzical look, elaborated. "All the halls are different… An' if it was my mind… wouldn't I know the way?" She sounded skeptical. Rogue didn't have much experience with this 'trapped inside of the mind' thing. As soon as her skepticism arose, however, it faded and left her naked fear. "Are… Are they gone?" She looked at the door.
"No…" Betsy shook her head sadly. "Muffled, but not gone entirely."
Rogue nodded.
"An'… what about Logan an' Erik an' Johnny an' all tha rest… what happened tah them?"
Betsy raised her eyebrows. "They're gone?"
Rogue nodded again, wiping some burning tears from her eyes. "Usually they fight with the voices… Tell 'em tah shut up. They don't let them talk tah me ugly. But… but they went somewhere… they left meh…" She sniffed. "Just like the voices said they would…"
Betsy turned to the walls and traced her fingers down the layers of frost.
"I assure you, luv," She turned back to Rogue and pulled her to her feet. "If they went anywhere, it wasn't because they wanted to. Would you like to find them?"
Rogue nodded eagerly. "I honestly don't know what'd Ah'd do without them. When Ah was alone on tha streets, or here, even, Logan and Erik would tell me stories and John would tell me jokes, Bobby would fight with 'im, but even their banter was pretty funny, and then Pete would step in and tell 'em all tah stop fightin' and let meh get some sleep…" Rogue smiled to herself.
"You have an interesting relationship with these psyches." Betsy commented as they made their way down the halls. Betsy followed the trail of frost.
"They're my friends when nobody else will be." Rogue said sadly.
Betsy felt a stab of guilty sadness for the girl. While she had never herself taunted Rogue or mocked her, she hadn't ever stopped anyone else who had.
The trail of frost tapered off next to a sturdy looking steel door.
"The hell?" Rogue put her hand on the door. "Ah've never seen this befor'." There were a few stifled growls, screams of fury, and threats projected from behind it.
"That's because it's not supposed to be here." Betsy clenched her fists and made up a remarkably colorful list of things she was going to do to a certain blond telepath when she got out of Rogue's mind. "Hold on, luv," Betsy braced her hands against the door. "This is going to hurt."
Remy clutched his fingers around Rogue's hand tighter as she started to writhe in pain under the telepath's fingers.
"What's going on?" Wolverine demanded.
"Merde, she's hurtin'!" Remy groaned as the waves of pain radiated off of her and struck him.
"Will she get through it?" Storm asked apprehensively.
Just before he could say anything, Betsy screamed slightly and stumbled away from Rogue."Holy-Dear-Lord-Jesus-Mary-Mother-Of-God," She muttered a spastic blur of curses as she scrambled away from Rogue, wrenching Remy out of contact with her. Just as he was about to protest, everyone in the room's attention was captured by Rogue.
Her skin started to slick over with a metallic material.
Piotr Rasputin, standing in the back, paled.
The scrapes on her hands and knees closed up.
Logan stood, mouth agape.
The table underneath her body iced over, the fire that Hank was working with in the back of the lab flared, the metal walls of the room contorted . Slowly, as Rogue's body stopped convulsing in pain her skin returned to normal, the table thawed, and the fire was coaxed back into submission.
Batsy Braddock, panting on the ground, looked up to see the six faces of the unamused friends of Rogue.
"You mind explaining what the hell just happened?" Jubilee demanded, looking from Betsy, to the still unconscious Rogue, to what looked like hand prints in the manipulated walls.
AUTHOR BABBLES-
Somebody asked me about where exactly I'm pulling my facts from- because I set it up like it was going to be pretty in sync with the movies and the totally disregarded the fact that not only did Betsy and Jamie show up in the third movie, but Jamie was thirty and Betsy died. That's bacuse I don't really consider X3 a movie… just kind of like that brother you never tell people you have like-
X1- Wow, I was fantastic! You know who plays Xavier? GODDAMN JEAN LUC PICCARD! THAT'S WHO! And Wolverine's a Broadway singer!
X2- Stryker! Nightcrawler! Deathstrike! Jean dies!
Origins- I lack logic, but MOFO! I HAD GAMBIT!
Fan-… What about him?
*everyone turns to look at X3, busy turning Rogue into a whiney biotch, making Magneto and Mystique not cool and killing off Scott and the Professor*
X1-…We don't talk about him…
Jamie- I shall only take two facts from the atrocity known as X-men 3: The Last Stand- Uno! Scott and Xavier are dead. Dos! There was a cure (this will come into play later, and even then I will slander the crap out of it)
I hope that clears things up C: