"The Dividing Line"
Chapter Two: "Zero Distance"
Rogue felt her throat strain and her lungs cry out for air. Taking a much-needed breath, she tried to reel her senses in. She found herself sprawled across Emma Frost's couch, her sweater thrown off, one hand clutching at her own breast. She had somehow managed to unbutton her jeans and slide them down to her knees. She sat up, her breathing labored, and felt her cheeks burn bright red. Flushed was putting it mildly.
Emma Frost, to her credit, was just sitting in her armchair, massaging her temples with the tips of her fingers.
Rogue sprang to action and pulled her jeans up, adjusted herself and pulled on her sweater. She then sat up, put her hands on her knees.
Emma Frost snuck a glance at her and smiled.
"All nice and proper." She commented.
Rogue flinched, but didn't move.
"Rogue, tell me..." Emma Frost said, "Has anything happened last night?"
Rogue bit her lower lip.
"Ah... Ah phased through the floor. Went down two floors. There was this girl when Ah became solid, Ah... sorta fell into her bed."
"And?"
"Before Ah could do anythin, she grabbed me. Ah 'ported on outta there, and ended up outside the dorm."
"The girl, who touched you, what was her name?"
"Stacy. Stacy X."
"Ah." Emma Frost gave her an all-knowing smile, "That explains the distinctively sexual vibe you've been giving off all morning. But that wasn't what I was asking."
"It wasn't?"
"Not quite. Has anything else happened last night?"
Rogue bit her lower lip. She nervously twiddled her thumbs, trying to come up with a plausible lie.
"Rogue, I'm a telepath. Even if I wasn't, I can still tell. Just tell me. I know that it cannot, unfortunately, be sex. That leaves only one other possibility, and you seemed to have gotten quite a kick out of-"
"...she made me."
Emma Frost rose an eyebrow as she took up her notepad and scribbled down something.
"Stacy." Rogue said, "She made me do it."
"It'd be preposterous to think that this was your first such experience."
"Ah'm losin control. Ah don't know what Ah'm doin and what they are makin me do... Ah don't know if it's me doin anything anymore."
"Answer me a simple question. What kind of music do you like?"
"That's... how's that relevant?"
"You carry an iPod on your person at all times, which tells me that it is a type of media that interests you. So what kind of music?"
"Ah like..." emptiness. A void where her thoughts should be. But slowly, some semblance of reference emerged, "Ah... Ah mean, Magneto likes classical an' opera, Wagner especially. Ah like p... no, Ah mean, Kitty likes pop and stuff and Ah... Ah mean Lance... fuck..."
"...you do realize you are just reciting what your echoes' tastes are."
"Ah can't help it, tovarisch Frost, Ah..."
Pause. Rogue clenched her teeth. It hit Emma Frost like a wave, her frustration. Her inability to speak freely, speak as herself.
"I didn't know you spoke Russian."
"Ah don't. Ah do... Ah mean, Piotr Rasputin does. God..."
Another, this time, deeper sigh from Emma Frost.
"I'll be forthcoming with you, and that involves telling you one thing: you will not like it."
"...okay?"
"Rogue, you aren't losing control. You are losing yourself. What you've just experienced here, is sort of a composite echo. You're not even sure which echo you are anymore – you're remembering events from multiple perspectives, because your sense of self has been almost completely eroded."
"What're you sayin? That Ah am an echo? Ah'm becoming someone else?"
"You aren't even one echo anymore. You aren't becoming someone else. You're becoming everyone else."
Emma Frost let it sink in. Rogue's head was buzzing with the affirmations, celebrations, protestations and lamentations of the echoes, and looking into that downward spiral, she sought what she had always sought – herself. The Rogue. What did the Rogue think? What did the Rogue have to say about all this?
No answer. The Rogue wasn't there.
All that was there was a suggestion...
"Ah, yes." Emma Frost said, "Mr. Summers. You routinely touch him. Or, should I say, he routinely touches you?"
"How'd you-"
"He's the clearest thought you have. Curious enough, in that chaotic mess you call a head, he's... distinctive, but not oppressive. Though more pronounced, he's not invading you, he's not trying to overcome you. That, I find very interesting, hence my asking, has anything happened last night?"
Rogue saw her expression and understood that it was a question, again.
"No. How can anythin happen, how can..." Rogue's gaze dropped to the floor, "Nothin happened."
"That so..." Emma Frost smiled, "Well, then, that's it for today. I'd like for you to start coming in on Wednesdays as well from now on, does that suit your schedule?"
"Yes."
"Good. Off you go."
Rogue retrieved her coat and her messenger bag and headed for the door. She tapped on the elevator's singular, down-arrow button and waited. Emma Frost called from her armchair.
"By-the-bye, are you still using melatonin?"
"To sleep, yeah. Not that it works or nothin..."
"Stop. No more medicine, either. Let's have you on your default setting for a while. No painkillers, no drugs of any kind, not even birth control-"
Rogue chuckled bitterly.
"Ms. Frost, what the hell am Ah gonna do with birth control pills?"
The elevator announced its arrival with a soft ding. Emma Frost hadn't said anything.
"G'day, Ms. Frost."
"Say hi to Mr. Summers for me."
The elevator doors closed and Rogue went down.
Rogue hurried to class. She had two periods of introduction to sociology now, and a third period free. She and Scott had coordinated their schedules around each other's at the beginning of the term. They had lunch four days a week, and today was one of their a-free-period-and-lunch days.
She felt ravenous, even then.
Maybe I shouldn'tve skipped breakfast... maybe Juggernaut should have needed breakfast.
The class passed by in a blur. Her head was filled with Erik Lensherr spewing anecdotes about the Weberian concept of the household, constantly running interference and phasing out Professor Shaw's voice. She jotted down a broken mess of jumbled jargon and well-thought out theories, most of which her hand was quoting verbatim from all the books she had never read, but some of her echoes had practically memorized (and Colossus had the inside track on what a working class family meant. He missed Illyana. Rogue missed Illyana.)
When the class ended, Rogue stuffed her notebook into her bag and headed for the lecture hall's door. It led her out to the hallway and to the thick, pulsating sea of people. For a few moments, as it happened every time, Rogue stood there with her back to the wall, clutching her bag, trying to shrink as much as possible. It took her quite a few suggestions to be able to start slinking through the anonymous bodies in the crowd. The thick of it choked her from the first two steps on, and she only made it about fifteen feet before breathing became the only important thing to her.
She curved and slithered and slid and brushed past the students surrounding the hallways, lost in her sense of claustrophobia. She hunched, pushing her shoulders in and pressing her breasts together in attempt to become smaller. Breath knotted in her chest, the hallway seemed to stretch out into eternity. The red-brick ceiling, curving upwards, seemed to be bearing down on her, and everyone around her... shoulder-to-shoulder, flesh to flesh, too crowded, it was too crowded, too many people...
Breathless. Absolutely breathless.
For a moment, she lost herself in that small space between abject fury and mindless need for release. She hated crowds, absolutely despised them with a burning passion. Too many patches of uncovered skin, too many limbs flailing around carelessly.
The crowd made her want to shrink, but she couldn't. She wanted all of them away. She wanted to touch and kiss and caress and lick and fuck all of them. Every single one.
But for now, she just focused on going further down the hall and then maybe to that inner courtyard opening in the center of the building. In desperate need to get there, she hastened her steps and slithered through the dense river of people. Blind rush, onwards, she needed out.
She didn't see it coming.
Rogue brushed against a blonde, unable to stop herself, wanting out, out of here, out of this place (out of this dump, house, river, situation, mansion, head...) The blonde stumbled, kept her balance, and managed to steady herself.
"Watch where you're..." the blonde started, one hand reaching.
Fear screamed inside Rogue as the aversion to another's touch cried against the inevitable.
Palm on her face, fingertips touching her eyelids. Contact.
Flash of memories, overbearing, on extreme fast-forward. Spreading across her mind, pushing everything belonging to her identity, already kept afloat by the barest of senses of it, aside completely. Got rid of everything but itself. Made room for itself. And then, for the briefest of moments, she wasn't in the hallway anymore, she was in a barely-registered ride throughout another life.
Rogue stumbled, almost losing her footing, and reached out to something, anything, to hold onto. Nothing there. She took a few clumsy steps to the side, the crowd around her moving away. She finally snapped one leg into position and strained against it, keeping her balance.
For the seventeen years crammed into a single instant, her name was Paige Elisabeth Guthrie; and with the name now sinking into her mind, Rogue forgot herself a little more.
She sensed Paige's thoughts and lived her life with more than just a passing glimpse: whenever she touched someone, she'd experienced things from their perspective, which meant the barest concepts of the simplest things crammed into her head at great detail. Paige liked to collect knives, because they reminded her, in some unconscious part of herself, of her father.
Her father's hands, mine worker's hands, thick, hair on the back of them. Grasping a wooden block and a carving knife.
That thick sliding sound of excess pieces being chipped away. The knife, gleaming, scattering stray pieces of wood, held in those hairy hands.
Somewhere in the base reality, Rogue fell to her knees, the cold, hard ground sending sharp pain with the impact.
Her father. The coal mines, where he worked. It wasn't a sight so much as it was an impression, the impression little Paige had from hearing about it. Tunnels spiraling around each other, like vines, knotted up, reaching into the heart of the earth. Walls encrusted with coal (to Paige, black rocks that are usual rocks, just are too dirty to be called rocks stretching in every direction.)
Rogue groaned. The sense was delayed, like belonging to another body entirely. She couldn't focus. The ground was slowly rising...
Soot on his hands every night when he came home and gave her a hug; the mixed smell of dust, sweat, coal, wood and the road. Road salt. A weary scent, that she remembers belonging to a happier time.
Her father. Death.
Bordering on lung collapse due to inhaling too much of the dust. Breathless.
Her father. Always, her father.
She remembered wishing, hard as she could, that they weren't made of all this soft tissue and skin and fragile organs. Wishing that they were made of diamonds, like coal, but like her father's wooden figures, chipped away at until they were the right shape, size and hardness.
Wishing they could withstand.
Voices in the distance, bleeding into Paige's life, her life. Voices shouting a name Paige doesn't recognize, a name Paige doesn't know. A name neither of them, neither Paige nor Paige-by-Rogue know.
"Rogue!"
Touch. Familiar. Warm.
The kids at the playground always taunted her. Fatherless girl, they called her, fatherless. Where's your daddy, fatherless girl? Where did he go?
The older girls pulled her hair and pinched and scratched her. Where's your daddy, why can't he help you?
Little Jay would always come to her aid, but having nothing more than a few soft punches and a few demands to be let go of, couldn't do much. Sam, well, Sam was always beating up boys that dared call him a bastard.
Her father. Dead. That was all she would remember in the years after the fact, that his defining characteristic had switched to being dead, and had stayed that way.
Her father. She missed her father.
She hadn't wanted to tell Jay that father wasn't coming back no more.
The voice. Calling. Wanting to be heard.
The older girls calling her names, beating her up. She defended herself with flailing kicks and punches, but none of them were enough. She wasn't hard enough, not made of sterner stuff.
Her father's hands, rough, but caring, gentle.
No, she thought while on the ground, being kicked by the older girls, no, I don't want to be like this, I don't want to be this weak, I don't want to be made of things this weak, I don't...
This weakness was making her the victim, this weakness of materials. She wanted to be made of diamonds, not soft flesh to be victimized, diamonds to be contended with, diamonds to be respected...
Rogue screamed, her body thrashing, as the skin on her hands was split open from the inside, revealing a shining, hard substance. The glistening layer of diamonds were tearing their way out from the inside.
"Oh, God, what the-" his voice. Beloved voice. It hurts... it hurts... make it stop...
"That's my mutation!" go away... go away... I'm not you... I'm not...
Rocks, trees, soil, gold, silver, steel, iron, harder, stronger, better...
"Is it supposed to be painful?" voice of the beloved. Save me. Save me.
"It's... no. It's not..." Go away. You infect me.
Her skin cracked... underneath it, there was a second skin now.
"Rogue!"
The colors of grey washed out everything else, drowning Paige Elisabeth Guthrie and pushing her aside. Paige-by-Rogue now suppressed slightly, Rogue experienced the rest of her life in the fraction of a fraction of a second.
She opened her eyes and saw Scott standing over her... Scott-by-Rogue collided with Paige-by-Rogue, merged and drowned her own thoughts out.
"Everyone, give her some space!"
The sea of bodies receded, forming an empty pond in the middle, containing only Scott, Paige and Rogue. Scott bent over Rogue and tried to see if there was any damage. There seemed to be none.
"What happened?" Scott asked.
"She just sort of... crashed against me." Paige said, "I didn't think nothin of it, maybe she was just not payin no attention, so I pushed her away."
"Was there skin contact?"
"Well, yeah... wait, is that why-"
"Shit... Rogue, can you hear me?"
Rogue's eyes told him that she was conscious and did recognize him. Why was she unresponsive?
"Rogue? Tell me you're here, I need to know you're here."
You found me...
Paige-by-Rogue, screaming, joined in by Sam-by-Rogue, Everyone-by-Rogue, wailing, a choir of chaos singing in her head...
"Scott..."
Jean, echoing.
Why don't you take advantage of this little predicament too!? Don't hold back on my account!
Kitty, jubilant.
Live a little, girl!
Mystique, stern.
You need help. You always did, you weak, pathetic waste.
Shut up... shut up...
Taryn, vindictive.
C'mon, Scott wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole and you know it!
Stacy, somehow turned on.
Mmm, look at those lips, I can just go for a vacation right there.
Toad, disgusted with the idea.
Ewww! Seriously! What the fuck, man? It's like kissing cousins!
Let me breathe...
Pietro, lightning-fast.
Knowwhatyoushoulddo? Grabhimbythehair andkissthelivingshitoutofhim , scrapeouttheremaindersofthat Greychick withyourlizardtogue , leaveanicerichaftertaste, tokeephimcomingbackforsecond s. Makeitatonguetwister!
Paige, crying.
How am I gonna tell little Jay..? What are we gonna do?
Rogue grabbed Scott by the hair and pulled him in. Their lips met, and sighing, Rogue shifted. Held him cheek-to-cheek. She needed him. In that moment, more than anything else, she needed him.
As she drew him in, more and more, something inside her was screaming. Thief. Thief. Thief.
I need... I need to...
I need you.
The colors of grey crashed over the mess of echoes and drowned them out. The last thing Rogue consciously experienced was Paige screaming at her that she was killing him.