Chapter 20
Gambit was stressed, over-tired, too cold, and falling asleep alone. It was a foolproof formula for giving himself nightmares. He knew this. And he knew, in the half-second of semi-consciousness before he fell asleep, that he shouldn't let himself doze off here . . . that he should pull himself together and make it to the dormitory level, take a hot shower to get the chill out of his bones, bury himself under four or five blankets, and pass out in security and privacy. But it wasn't in him. So he fell asleep on an exam table, exhausted and shivering, and dreamt in technicolor.
Rogue lay asleep on the sofa in the library. He knew how she slept, curled up tightly around herself . . . but dream-Rogue lay sprawled gracefully across the cushions, her head thrown back and the long, pale curve of her neck exposed.
He knelt next to her and bent his face to hers, brushing his nose and lips across her forehead. There was no repeat of the horrific shock that had hit them both the last time. There was no shock at all. He could touch her as he'd been able to touch other women, long before he'd even heard of the X-Men—skin to skin, and nothing else. He pulled back, to check that this person was still his Rogue, really his Rogue, then leaned down and kissed her. Years ago, he knew that she would have sold her soul for such an uncomplicated kiss . . . he was startled at how unsatisfying it was, how flat and how dull. A part of him marveled, a little contemptuously, that as a teenager he'd found this so entertaining.
She opened her eyes. Then the wall behind him opened up. Gambit twisted around to see Senator Creed step through it, not a fleck of rubble marring his expensive suit. The senator raised a gun and shot him. He watched the bullet streak through the air, throwing shock waves behind itself, and passed through his chest without leaving a mark. It hit Rogue, behind him, and she collapsed onto the cream carpet and bled and died.
Gambit had only killed one man in his life. It had been a sudden, startling, wrenching, deeply personal thing . . . his kill had been his childhood rival and brother-in-law, and had been inches from his face when his heart stopped beating. But as he raised his own gun and pointed it at Creed's chest, he realized that there was another way to make a kill. Distant. Professional. And that he had no problem whatsoever with pulling this trigger and killing this man.
He fired the gun. The recoil shoved his arm backwards into his shoulder. Creed dropped, and his eyes gleamed yellow as he fell—like Mystique's eyes, like Sabertooth's eyes. Remy stood over him and planted another round in his head. And it felt good. Dark, and bitter, and satisfying.
Something really cold brushed across his forehead . . . cold and tactile on a whole new level. Gambit shuddered and gasped and shot awake. Beast had woken him with an ice cube.
"Earth to Gambit," Hank told him, his voice low but cheerful. "What happened to that legendary light sleeper?" He backed up to give Gambit the room he needed to swing his legs over the edge of the exam bed.
"Nightmares," Gambit told him, deigning to elaborate. He looked across at Kitty. She had a blanket tucked around her and pulled up to her chin. Her color was better, but the florescent lights gleamed harshly off her bare scalp. "She doin' okay?"
"She's fine. Sleeping like a baby. And so should you be. Come on . . . get yourself a shower and some food and go sleep in a real bed. Can you walk, or do you need to be carried?"
Gambit sighed. "Rogue back?"
"No."
"Den I'll walk."
Hank chuckled.
Gambit felt his brain come back into focus. "Kurt's up here, ain't he? Wasn't he supposed t'be watchin' her back?"
"She sent him up to stay with Amanda. She insisted she'd be fine by herself for a few days."
Gambit rolled his eyes upwards, as though imploring higher powers to save him from short-sighted and gullible blue teleporters. "I'll kill him." Then he remembered the dream, and wished he hadn't said it.
"Better get some sleep first. The way your eyes are sinking into your head, right now I wouldn't bet on you versus an overcooked noodle."
"Right." Gambit dragged himself onto his feet, using the side table for support. The darn thing was on wheels; it slipped away from him and bumped Kitty's i.v. stand. He scrambled to steady the stand before it could pull on her arm, then stopped.
There was a square of paper impaled on the hook from which the bag of saline was hanging. In the tapering, graceful lettering produced by a fountain pen was inscribed the number 28. 28 on a silver stand tied to a silver needle.
Gambit swore under his breath and left the medical lab.
Rogue walked along the edge of the road for two hours before a car slowed and stopped for her. It was an uninteresting dark gray sedan, and as the passenger door popped open for her she could see that the only occupant was the driver, a man in his mid-fifties. "Where're you headed, little lady?"
"Nashville," Rogue answered. "Airport."
"Hop in."
She slipped out of her backpack and climbed into the car, holding the bag on her lap. "Thanks," she muttered, bowing her head to let her stripes hang down across her face.
The driver pulled out into the road again and picked up speed. "Long way from anywhere, ain't'cha?"
"Sure seems like it," said Rogue.
"How'd you end up out here?"
"Boyfriend ditched me at a service station a ways back."
"His loss," the man observed, giving her a glance-over that she didn't like at all.
"Not really. Ah was dumpin' his sorry butt anyway."
"I don't blame you. He do that to your face?"
Rogue couldn't stop her hand reaching up to brush the polka-dot bruises on her cheek.
"I'm guessing he didn't take the news too well."
"Seems like it. Said he'd take me as far as the airport so Ah could git home to mah folks, but looks like he got bored with the drive."
"Ah. Where's your folks?"
"Tallahassee."
Rogue was impressed with herself. The lies flowed from her almost gracefully, plausible and consistent and in character with the sullen, bedraggled appearance she presented. She hadn't ever been very good at lying . . . but Remy was the best, and Remy had taught her. It was a survival skill now.
And she'd been naive enough to be shocked when this professional liar had lied to her. How pathetic.
"Sounds like you came a long way from home for this guy," said the driver neutrally.
"Eh," said Rogue. To weasel out of the interrogation, she turned the questions around. "How 'bout you? Where you headed?"
"Home. Wrapping up a business trip."
"What's your business?"
"Hardware."
"You got, like, family and stuff?"
"More or less. I'm on the road a lot, though. Gets lonely."
Aw, crap. She knew that tone, and it meant trouble. "Yeah, that's rough."
"Sounds like you'd know about that yourself."
Rogue shrugged. She curled up tighter around herself and stared deliberately out the window.
"Hey, don't worry about it," the driver told her. "Everybody falls on hard times. Nothin' to be ashamed of. We'll get you to the airport, maybe get you somethin' to eat, it'll be okay. No problem."
His hand settled on her thigh, well above her knee.
Rogue lashed out. She wanted to elbow him in the face, but she couldn't afford to crash the car. So she grabbed the joint of his thumb and squeezed. There was no mistaking the strength of her hand for anything less than superhuman.
"Don't touch me," she ordered softly. The three words were her battle cry, her mantra; she didn't need to raise her voice to make them deadly. "Ah know you don't believe me, but Ah'm really tellin' you for your own good. Don't you lay one finger on me. You just drive this car to the airport. You ain't gonna make any phone calls and you ain't gonna stop for gas. Yeah, you picked up a hitchhiker and she's a freakin' mutie, and that sucks for you. But Ah don't wanna hurt you or steal from you or anything. All Ah want, in this whole world, is to get to the Louisville airport. We clear?"
The guy called her something that erased any guilt she might have felt about almost dislocating his thumb.
"Good." She let go of his hand and brushed it off her leg. "Have a nice drive."
Kitty gradually came to the realization that she'd been dreaming. Something was hovering at the edges of her half-consciousness, something wonderful and exciting and glorious. She struggled to remember if this wonderful thing were a dream, something she should sink back into, or something that she should be hurrying to wake up for.
But the more she tried to figure it out, the more lucid she became, and the dream, if dream it was, slipped farther and farther away. What was that thing? It had made her feel like she was waking up on the first day of summer vacation . . .
No, not summer vacation. It clicked all at once. Not summer, or a birthday, or anything . . . it was Piotr.
The memory burst into her mind like the first rays of sunshine creeping over a window frame. Piotr, cradling her impossibly gently in his arms, his kisses canvassing every inch of her face . . . Peter, Peter, Peter . . .
Her eyes shot open and she jumped out of bed. Or, at least, she tried. What she actually managed to do was to get her head and shoulders about four inches off the mattress. Then she collapsed back onto it and lay gasping.
She was in a medical lab. Was she still captured? She forced her head up and tried to look around. She wasn't strapped down . . . what her panic had interpreted as restraints was just a blanket, tucked in tight around her. But there was no Peter. If she hadn't dreamed the whole thing, then wouldn't he be here?
"Hello?" Drat, she had no volume at all. "Anybody there? Hello? I want my phone call!"
"Kitty?"
Her heart felt like it was giving an awkward twist inside her chest. The voice belonged to Lance.
He appeared in her field of vision, his face pale from insufficient sleep and his too-long brown hair even mussier than usual. "Hey . . . you're finally awake." He cupped her cheek in his hand, and Kitty involuntarily leaned into the warmth and solidity of it. "How're you feeling?"
"I can't get up," Kitty muttered sulkily.
"They said you'd be pretty weak for a while. You . . . you want to sit up? I can help you." He wiggled an arm between her back and the mattress and lifted her, awkwardly but gently, into a sitting position. Kitty squirmed a little, to keep from jostling the i.v. that was neatly taped down on the inside of her arm. When she was propped against the wall at the head of her bed with a pillow behind her back, he pulled the adjacent bed over and sat on it. "You gave us a pretty bad scare."
"What about—" Peter's name caught in her throat. "What . . . what about the, um, the team that came after me? Did everybody get out all right?"
"Yeah, they're good. Everybody was really worried about you. The goons who had you drained a lot of your blood . . . you needed a transfusion, and you're supposed to rest a lot and drink lots of fluids and the whole thing."
"I guess that explains why I'm so cold." Kitty reached up to scrub at her face with both hands. She stopped with her palms over her eyes. Confused, and with a dawning sense of horror, she slid both hands farther up her forehead, then straight up over her bare scalp. All she felt was skin, textured with fine, spiky stubble.
"Lance?" Her gaze snapped out of the middle distance to fix on his face. "Where's my hair?"
He gave her a regretful, apologetic half-smile. "Missing in action?"
She checked over her head again, just to be sure. Nothing but naked scalp behind her face.
Kitty had handled being drugged and locked up. She hadn't cried, or begged, or otherwise compromised her dignity. The loss of a lot of her blood bothered her not at all, except as a practical annoyance. But they had shaved off her hair. She was bald. And that cracked her. Unable to scoot herself back down on the bed, she pulled the blanket up over her head and took a couple of choked, gasping breaths that rapidly devolved into sobs.
"Hey . . ." She heard Lance's voice approach her, but he didn't touch her, for which she was grateful. "Hey, you don't have to cry. It's gonna be okay. It'll grow back; don't worry."
"Then I'm staying here 'till it does!" Her voice cracked and wavered; the sound was disgusting.
"Kitty . . ."
"Go away!"
She could hear the hurt in his silence. The metal bed frame creaked as he stood up, and his footsteps receded across the room.
She flung the blanket off her head. "Lance, come back. I didn't mean that. I'm sorry."
He stopped and turned around.
"Don't be mad," Kitty requested lamely.
"I'm not mad." He came back and sat down again, this time at the foot of her bed. "I'm really not. Just, y'know, short fuses. I'm still space-sick half the time, and I wasn't any use getting you out, and my powers are useless up here 'cuz I'd probably just crack the asteroid open and kill us all. It's . . . frustrating. But if it helps . . . you really look kind of cute with no hair."
Kitty scoffed. "You're such a liar."
"No, really. It's like . . . your eyes, or . . . something. I dunno. Forget it."
Kitty sighed, smiling a little. He was so much more endearing like this, awkward rather than aggressive. This was the Lance that her mind wandered back to whenever it could . . . the Lance that she dreamed about after the lights went out and before she fell asleep. What would she have given yesterday for a conversation like this? Of course, yesterday Piotr had never kissed her.
The door hissed open. Kitty's heart jumped into her throat, then subsided when she saw that it was only Storm.
"How are you feeling?" Storm asked, setting the pieces of folded fabric she'd brought with her on the side table.
"Like a jell-o jiggler," said Kitty. "With no hair."
"You'll need lots of rest and good food to get your strength back. There's hot soup waiting for you in the kitchen. I'll send someone down with it. I wanted to bring you these." She shook out the cloth she'd brought with her. "To tide you over until your hair grows back. I saw how they were worn when I lived in Cairo."
One of the cloths was a tube—the silver-gray color indicated that it had been cut from an Institute uniform. Storm showed Kitty how to wear it, like an extremely wide headband, covering her ears and all of her bare scalp up to her forehead. The other cloth was a plain square that had formerly been a bed sheet, that draped over the band, folded around her face, and fastened under her chin. The whole arrangement felt weird, but Storm knew how to arrange the trailing ends to sweep gracefully around Kitty's neck and shoulders. And anything was better than having her naked head exposed to public view and pity.
"How is that?" Storm asked, when she'd arranged the last folds.
"I guess I can get used to it," Kitty allowed, tugging a little to give her throat more room. "I can go out in public, at least. Or, you know, I could. If I could walk."
"Food and rest. I'll send Hank down to check on you."
"Okay. Thanks. And, hey, Storm . . .?"
"Yes?"
"Has . . . has anybody else been checking on me? I mean, the rest of the team, are they . . .?"
"Yes. We couldn't keep Gambit out; he refused to rest until he knew you were all right. He took your capture very hard—as your partner on the mission, he feels responsible for what happened."
"Oh." Although it was nice to know that Gambit had been worried about her, that wasn't the name she'd wanted to hear. Where was he? Had he just dropped her off in this med lab like a sack of laundry and gone about his business? Kitty didn't have a lot of experience with . . . well . . . things like this (whatever this was), but somehow she got the feeling that this was not how these things were supposed to go. She was not supposed to pass out in Piotr's arms and wake up looking into Lance's face. And if she did have to deal with this new and complicated situation, did she have to do it with no hair and no blood?
So not fair.
Author's Notes:
So . . . that GRE never knew what hit it, I think. :) Sorry for the brief chapter; I needed the split here for the next chapter, which is also short but quite stand-alone, and may possibly be up in a few hours.