Nothing Left To Take
Rogue is sick to death of safe.
She's safe with Bobby, with Logan. Bobby only kisses her when his breath is icy cold, when his powers can protect him; the few times Logan has dared to kiss her have been through veils and scarves, the thinnest gauzy materials that nevertheless make her feel smothered, suffocated.
She feels wrapped in their love, in the professor's concern, in Scott's intelligence and Jean's legacy every damn minute in this mansion. Since she arrived at Xavier's four years ago, she can count the number of those special 'accidents' she's had on one hand. Usually that thought fills her with relief; it's not like she wants to hurt anyone, especially not anyone in Xavier's School.
But there's a dark side to every human being; she knows this better than anyone. She has seen their deepest, dark secrets, and, in fact, she suspects that her power absorbs what is hidden deepest first. She knows that Logan only has the most fragile grip on his feral side, and that Bobby calls his family every night at midnight, only to hurriedly hang up the phone the second his mother answers. Since she accidentally touched him in a Danger Room session, she knows that sometimes Scott fantasizes about killing Xavier, blasting his crippled body through every wall in the school for being unable to save Jean, save them all. She knows that Erik still wants Charles with the visceral, burning desire of a man half his age, and that on the night when soldiers invaded the mansion, John wanted to stay behind and torch every one of those military bastards more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life.
Rogue knows that her dark side is this desire, this need for touch, for dangerous, deadly skin-to-skin contact. It's not even the touch she really needs: it's the destruction. The heady feeling of absolute power that comes when she even brushes someone else's skin for a second. Every time it happens, she has to tear herself away, force herself to let go, because the truth is? She loves it as much as her victims hate it.
No drug can compare with the heady feeling of drinking in someone else's soul. She's tried.
Bobby, Logan, all of them think that she hates being touched, hates her power. Which is true: She hates the psyches and ghosts that come with her power, hates the ice cold trickle down her spine she feels whenever one of them tries to wrest control. She hates wondering how much of her has blended with Magneto, with Wolverine--she stopped being able to decipher which thoughts were hers and which thoughts were theirs a long time ago.
The Professor, of course, knows this; a mind as fucked up as hers probably sends a flashing red signal to every telepath on the planet. And so he protects her, gives her gloves and long-sleeved shirts, warns every new student to be careful around her. She knows she should appreciate it, knows that it's for her own damn good.
But she's had pretty much all the protection, all the safety, all the coddling she can take.
She's going to spontaneously combust soon if she doesn't touch someone. She can feel the need buzzing just beneath the surface of her skin, a constant tickle in the back of her mind. But she can't bring herself to touch anyone in the mansion; even if she tried to make it seem like an accident, she can't live knowing that she hurt a teammate just to give herself that cheap thrill.
So she waits. And one night, she stays at the mansion instead of heading off to the movies with the rest of the X-kids. She puts on the most revealing outfit she can find and sneaks out as soon as they're gone, stealing one of the motorcycles but no helmet; she drives aimlessly, heading vaguely in the direction of the city. She's looking for any place with people, anybody and everybody, anywhere where she can press up against a body until they go limp, until she's sated.
But once she finds a suitable club she's frozen, unable to move from her seat at the bar, sweating and sick. What if she can't make herself stop until the person's dead? What if she absorbs someone really fucking psychotic and then has to deal with their mind inside her head? What if she's discovered, what if she's arrested, what if Xavier finds out? But she can smell all the skin out there, all the innocent people she could have just with a touch, and it's making her dizzy with need.
She sees a flame out of the corner of her eye, accompanied by a Zippo lighter and then, a cigarette. St. John Allerdyce. Pyro.
Still handsome; still, apparently, a cocky ass. The cigarette hangs artfully from his lips and he's smirking at some girl moving out from the shadows as he zips up his fly. He puts his arm around her, but it's obvious they won't be leaving together: he already got what he needed.
Rogue feels a wave of acidic rage envelop her, feels her vision turn red, her hands clench into fists. That asshole, that irredeemable arrogant little fuck, how dare he treat intimacy so casually? A blowjob in the back of a crowded bar is as natural to him as waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night. And she hates him for it, wants to rip his throat out for it.
Without realizing what she's doing, Rogue slaps a few bills on the bar, rises, snakes through the crowds and follows him outside, making use of the stealth techniques she's gleaned from Logan's mind. She watches him swagger in the rain, leering at any pretty girl that passes. She stays ten feet behind, ducking into shadows and avoiding the loud splash of rain puddles, tracking him like prey.
He turns into an alleyway and Rogue takes her chance. She moves quickly, faster than him, fast like all those Danger Room sessions have trained her to be, and smashes her lips against his. Skin to skin, teeth against teeth, cigarette falling to the gravel.
He gasps, the movement startling her, and he takes advantage of her distraction to wrench her away from him, holding her by the wrists. "Rogue," he says through clenched teeth. "Is this the way you greet old friends?"
"It's the way I greet old enemies," she says, practically spitting in his face.
He smiles, an unpleasant smirk that doesn't reach his eyes. "You want this, don't you? You need it."
Rogue twists, attempting to escape his grasp but he has her and isn't letting go. She realizes he's not nearly as affected by her kiss as he should be; maybe Magneto, paranoid bastard that he is, trained his Brotherhood to have some kind of immunity against her powers. Maybe she should have thought of that before she cornered him like this.
But he just laughs, and then kisses her back. The shock is so great that Rogue stands frozen for a second before she reciprocates, wrapping her arms around him and attacking his mouth hungrily, desperately. She groans as her powers activate, as the indescribable thing that she sucks out of people flows into her. 'Life force,' for lack of a better word, tastes like copper and unripe fruit, like tears and broken bones, like cobwebs in the furthest corner of an attic.
His thoughts are flowing into her now, and it's obvious that he wants this--needs this--as much as she, if not more. He's in ecstasy now, loving what she's doing to him. Images fly past Rogue's mind eye: a flame skipping idly over his skin, Erik's wrinkled hand on his shoulder, Mystique writhing above him, on top of him.
God, he's fucking hard against her, grinding his erection against her hips as if she's just another sexy fuckbox for his use and abuse. Rogue feels like vomiting in revulsion but she can't stop now, not with all this power flooding into her, not with the sick vampiric feeling of ecstasy pulsing through her veins.
He grows stiff, unyielding and she can tell he's seconds away from a coma or worse. She lets go of him reluctantly, and he drops to the ground, the veins in his face standing out like a spider web across those beautiful features. He's jerking and choking on the ground like all her victims do, his eyes pleading and begging her to call a doctor, or maybe Magneto; and she will, of course she will. She's not a murderer.
But first she leans down and plucks the zippo lighter from his pocket. She stares at the flickering fire, so tiny and tame inside its metal case, and then with a flick of her wrist she's encircled in flames, surrounded by orange heat and the whispering crackle of fire.
She stands, eyes closed, wrapped in John's powers and memories before she smothers the fire and finds John's cell phone. Predictably, the only number in his address book is Magneto's; she calls and, sounding eerily like John himself, tells him where he can find his henchman.
Rogue keeps the lighter and steals one of his cigarettes, too. She pulls her flimsy jacket tighter around her as she walks away, wincing at the rain.
He'll come back to this alley a week from now. He won't know what to expect, only that whatever gnaws at him was temporarily stilled here, and that he wants that to happen again.
Rogue will be waiting for him.