inside me
victoria p.

He calls me Marie, and I have to laugh.

After all this time, Marie is gone. There's none of her left in here. There's barely any Rogue, either. It's all him, now. All him.

He touches me to heal me, he says. He touches me because he loves me. But it's not me, not Marie, not Rogue that he loves. No, it's himself inside me. I'm as much him as I am me, now. And that's what he loves, what he wants. He thinks he's making love to me, but he's fucking himself.

"Yeah, baby, yeah, that's it," he says in my ear when we're in bed, and in my head he says the same thing to himself. His hands run over my body, and he wants me, and my hands run over his, and he wants himself, too. He wants me to want him. He needs to touch, and yet he never let anyone but an untouchable girl get close to him. Eventually, the only one he'll be touching is himself.

At first he pretended it was accidental. Only enough to make him weak, not knock him out altogether. Enough so I could feel how he feels about me. How much he wants to make me his own. Make me in his own image. As time went on, his mutant immune system started protecting him from me, so he had to hold on longer and longer before he'd get hurt. What he doesn't realize is how much of him is in me.

I don't even think he consciously knows what he wants from me. That he wants to be in me, always, and, in some ways, be me. He wants us to never be apart, and he's literal about it.

There's only one way I can save myself now. One way I can protect what little is left of the me inside Marie's body.

I smile as I knock him out of the way and let Sabretooth's claws rip my belly out. I laugh as he yells, "No!" when I take the blows meant for him, and I feel Sabretooth's claws slice through my neck and I feel the sticky warmth of my blood gush out as I fall to the ground, and I pray that the damage is extensive enough that he can't heal me.

Either way, this time, Rogue is dead.

 

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