bakerstreet | THE POST-APOCALYPTIC MEME

[ This looks great to me! ]

Everyone was exhausted - or dead - and Scott was an absolute ray of sunshine.

Actually, Scott was in the backseat most of the time these days, with Cyclops firmly holding the wheel. There was no time or room for luxuries like grief when the world was trying to wipe out your entire species. Once upon a time he might even have balked a bit at the idea that mutants were an entirely separate species.

Then the sentinels had come, and he'd buried more than a few kids and he was over it. He was exhausted. He was tired. He was trying to find a way to keep as many people alive as he could and-

Somehow, somehow, to Scott every single death, every loss, was his responsibility. He felt it. He was the leader, this was his job and he was failing at it.

He was already in that little horror movie cabin, there was already a fire going, and when Rogue got to the door it swung open before she quite got a chance to touch it.

"Come in. Get warmed up." Food hadn't happened yet. He'd been there for maybe all of 10 minutes.

The door opening on its own was unexpected, but the person on the other side was someone she'd hoped she would see. There were so few of them left, to have someone still around who had been there since the beginning... It was one of the few things that meant anything anymore.

Rogue moved into the cabin and let him close the door behind her before she quickly, carefully wrapped her arms around him in a hug that she wasn't sure he would appreciate or return. She didn't care either way - she needed to touch someone, to know that there was someone else still alive and that she wasn't alone with the echoes in her mind. "Ah'm so glad to see you, sugar," she told him quietly, the words heavy on her tongue. The next were even heavier. "My team's gone."

Her team, the ones he had placed in her care, students of Xavier's who should have had their whole lives ahead of them. The youngest of them had been eighteen years old, and hadn't even had the chance to live yet. She'd failed to protect them and their deaths were on her head. She'd taken all of Scott's lessons to heart over the years, tried to be the best leader she could be, the way he had been, and still she'd lost them all that night. She was glad she couldn't see the disappointment she was sure would be in his eyes.

He stiffened at the contact, but only for a moment. After that he hugged her back. The only used one arm to return the hug, and he didn't hold onto her for long, but it was a solid, strong, tight squeeze while it was there.

"You want me to yell at you?" It wasn't a joke so much as code for saying that he wasn't going to. This situation hurt, and it hurt everyone, but. He pulled back and pushed her back with one arm still on her shoulder. "You did better by them than anyone else could have and you got yourself out."

He blamed himself for it a lot more than her.

Because that was how Cyclops worked.

He hated the losses, but sometimes they were almost inevitable and... maybe he was starting to numb out.

He also didn't say he was sorry. Too trite.

"Logan's still in one piece. I haven't heard from anyone else in a few days."

Scott's words did more than Rogue could express. A weight lifted from her chest ever so slightly, and she could breathe just a little easier. Few other people could have done that for her; she just wished she could offer him the same. She knew how much he blamed himself for these things, and how much he didn't deserve that blame. But even though he eased the pain in her heart a fraction, she would always blame herself in part for these particular deaths.

She'd held Ivy as the girl took her last breath, had watched Sam be physically torn to pieces, and Jonathan... All three of them were in her head, the psyches fresh and bright at the front of her mind, each of them bouncing between assuring her that they didn't blame her for their deaths and complaining that she was referring to them by their given names instead of their chosen ones. It was something she'd started doing a few months back with the younger mutants, as a means to remind them that they were still people and not just the things that the government decided to see them as. Each of her team had come from a loving family, and each of those families had died because of their mutant children. Sam had even been there when it happened, had barely gotten away...

Rogue shook her head a little and stepped away, moving toward the warm fire. The numbness in her limbs wasn't just from grief, after all. "Logan will outlast us all," she commented with a ghost of a smile at the thought of her old friend. His psyche was still as strong as ever in her mind, but nothing compared to the real thing, the man who was fierce and kind and cared so much more than he'd ever admit. And she tried not to think about the others, telling herself that being out of contact was normal these days, that it wasn't anything to worry about.

"When was the last time you ate?" She had to remind herself to do it most days, and it had become habit to ask Scott every time she saw him. None of them took really care of themselves anymore.

[ Jeeze - typos. I'm sorry. ]

Scott waited for her to move toward the fire and then looked back over his shoulder toward the rough cabinets and even rougher, 'camp kitchen'. There was canned stuff in there, but he hadn't had a chance to look to it, yet.

"Logan had better outlast us all."

He didn't like Logan, but Logan irritating him to no end didn't mean he didn't respect the man. It didn't even mean Scott didn't recognize that the man cared - and cared a whole hell of a lot at that. This wasn't any easier on Logan than the rest of them, even if it looked different on him - more outward anger. Right now, though, Scott just mostly needed there to be somebody out there he didn't have to worry about being killed.

"I haven't been here long enough to eat. Give me a few minutes to find out what's in there, and I'll pull something together for both of us while you thaw." It was all of about four steps away, anyway, just across the room and in the flickering shadows from the firelight.

Once his back was turned, and only then, with him busy with something else did he ask: "Where did you lose them?" He didn't want to know. He needed to know.

Rogue nodded at his offer to deal with the food and scooted even closer to the fire, as close as she could get without being burned. Her hands were clumsy as she tugged off the leather gloves and shrugged out of the jacket of her uniform, leaving her in a worn t-shirt. It left a lot of skin uncovered, but Scott knew to be careful, so she didn't think twice about it.

She shivered a little as the warmth from the flames began to slowly sink into her skin, but still she felt numb and a little detached. Maybe she was shock, either emotionally or physically. It would make sense, she'd been out there for hours.

"About thirty miles west of here," she answered dully. "There was an abandoned town, we were looking for supplies and suddenly they were just... there." Like nightmares come to life. "There were two of them; they're in pieces now." Just like Sam. "I had enough of Ivy's power left to get about halfway here." Ivy had been their flyer. She'd loved being able to touch the sky. Rogue let out a ragged breath and scrubbed frozen fingers over her face. She had to hold it together, she owed it to them.

He didn't doubt that she was in shock, both from cold and from grief and trauma. She shouldn't have to live like this - none of them should have to live like this.

The detail drove the news home, but his response wasn't grief. His grief was for those still living. His first response to yet another set of deaths was, for now at least, anger. Somehow it was the loss of Sam that hit him the hardest. He cared about them all, but Sam? There was something so close to normal in Sam, something most of them had never had, that that loss in particular just doubled down on the anger.

The, he would have had to admit, impotent anger. So he choked it down for the time being, focused on finding a couple of cans of soup he could heat up over the single, propane burner.

He glanced back at Rogue and then left the soup in the pot to heat and moved to strip a blanket off the bed and take it to her. Not to cover skin but to help. Practical was what he knew how to do.

"Are you carrying anyone's powers besides your own right now?"

She took the blanket with a murmured thanks, understanding the intent behind the gesture, no explanations needed. Scott had never been as wary of her powers as the others; cautious, yes, but never afraid. He knew what it was to live without control, and she'd always appreciated his care immensely.

"I still have a bit of Jonathan's," she managed before her expression crumpled and it was all she could do not to completely break down. "He gave up, Scott!" she exclaimed, the memories tearing her from the pool of numbness she'd been drowning in. "He was fine, but after Ivy and Sam, he said he couldn't take it anymore. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn't let me close enough and--" She hadn't been able to stop him from killing himself. The knowledge was sinking in and she felt sick from it.

Suddenly the heat of the fire was too much like Jonathan's heat, the explosive energy he'd been able to generate and direct outward. The energy he'd let bottle up until he had burned. She stood and paced away from the flames, leaning against the far wall that was really only a short distance away.

Scott stepped back for exactly as long as it took to turn the burner flame all the way down - they couldn't afford to waste supplies, even now, and his brain wouldn't let him forget that. There was always some part of his brain thinking about the practicalities of the situation. Emotion didn't really... stop that, not ever.

Didn't mean he didn't feel it, in spite of what other people might have thought about it.

He grabbed the blanket she'd left on the chair, took it with him and used it to wrap around her - both because whatever she thought, she was still half-frozen, and to act as a barrier, and actually hugged her again. Maybe not completely, but in front of her, one arm around her shoulders and other hand gripping her shoulder. Head down so he could look into her eyes even if she couldn't see through the glasses to his.

"Hey." Not soft, or even gentle, but - something more personal anyway. He could not, would not, stand by watch her sink. "Marie." Deliberate use of something besides a codename, and maybe he had taken that page out of her book and maybe it was his own. "Not your fault. Not even Jono's fault."

Because if she had his powers, she had him, at least a part of him, in her head, and - Well.

God, what he wouldn't have given to be able to say it would be all right, instead of just thinking about Jean - and Warren, and Hank, and all those countless other kids who were dying, dead, or trying to fight a losing battle.

Rogue's hands had automatically lifted to grasp the edges of the blanket, to hold it in place as suddenly Scott was there. She hadn't expected that, but it was a welcome surprise. It got through where little else might have. Physical contact had always had a soothing effect on her, helping anchor her in the world outside of her head so she didn't get lost in the swirl of thoughts and emotions and memories that belonged to other people. Because even after years of training with the Professor, it could still be a certifiable circus in her mind.

"Does it work when other people tell you it's not your fault?" she countered in a tone matching his. They'd been through too much together to pull punches. "Because it's not, sugar. It's not true for either of us. But you know the worst part?" She smiled slightly, brokenly, wishing she could see his eyes even just once, just to know what they looked like as they met hers. "They keep apologizing to me, all three of them in my head, saying they're sorry they let me down. Sorry they left me alone. What am I supposed to do with that?"

As if he would have any of the answers she was missing. They were all lost in this dying world together, and she knew it wouldn't be all right.

Of course it didn't work when people told him that. Mostly because he knew better. What it could do, was make him believe that they didn't blame him. That was about the extent of what he was trying to do for her, though he was admittedly doing an awkward job of it.

He was certainly willing to touch her, if that was what it took to make the message convincing - or to ground her enough to be able to hear it at all.

"No, but that doesn't mean it isn't nice to hear." Which was an unnecessary answer to a question he considered rhetorical, but it was also recognition that he, at least, had heard her in return.

The rest... was harder. Was harder because he was still mad, but mad at the world not Rogue or any of their 'kids' who had left it. "I don't know," he admitted, after a silent moment, moving back but keeping the hand on her shoulder and eyes on hers (he didn't at all wish she could see through his visor. It had become a shield, long before any of this). "I guess you try to make the take away that they didn't blame you, either."

The hell of this hell was really that they all hated themselves. Every last one of them.

She set a hand on his on her shoulder, using the blanket as a shield, and gave his fingers a gentle squeeze. She really was so very glad to see him. How many of the others would understand what this felt like, would know the agony of the self-perceived failure that made her want to cry and scream and rage until the end of the world finally arrived?

Her thoughts turned down a different road and she followed them, the shadows still clinging to the edges but not quite so prominently as before. "Our days at the mansion seem like a lifetime ago instead of just a few years," she commented wistfully, the memories bittersweet. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly as she added, "If I'd known what was coming, I'd have listened to Logan and just stolen your motorcycle instead of spending all those hours begging you to let me borrow it."

The Logan in her head had always been a wild influence on her, and the real Logan had been just as encouraging. She'd always avoided absorbing Scott over the years, his power too uncontrollable to risk borrowing, but she was still completely certain that she'd been a real pain in the ass for him in those early years. It made her even more grateful that he'd even accepted her as part of the team, and that he'd trusted her to lead. Even though it had ended this way.

He let the touch happen for a moment, before he moved away from her and back to the soup that had been put on the... metaphorical back burner, literal low flame. They had to eat, tonight, and it would do as much as the fire blazing in the fire place. It might even do more.

It also gave him a little room to retreat again, after what was a pretty frankly emotional display from him. Maybe not so much more for anyone else but for him-

"It seems like a different life entirely," he agreed. "If I'd known what was coming I would have done everything different." He sounded haunted. He was haunted, if not as literally as Rogue. He was also still, albeit in a controlled way, furious. "I might even have listened to some of what Magneto had to say."

Not all of it. There were things he would have still fought Erik on, mostly his treatment of Rogue, but some other pretty huge things, too. He would have changed over from 'humans and mutants are the same' a hell of a lot sooner, though, understood how dangerous humans could be, and not been so totally unprepared for what he now saw as genocide.

He'd buried too many kids for Charles' idealism to truly stick. What they'd done... it would have been effective in a world that was better than the one they lived in.

Rogue stayed leaning against the wall, clutching the blanket tightly around her shoulders, and gave a real smile at his words, even if it was full of dark amusement. "He's actually a little smug that you said that," she informed Scott, shaking her head slightly in disbelief. "He always thought you had too much of Charles in your head."

Whereas she had too much of Erik. She'd resented the man the first few years after Ellis Island, hated and feared him for what he'd done to her, but as she got older and began working more closely with Xavier, she'd started communicating with the Erik in her mind, his psyche as prominent as Logan's and just as powerful. He'd actually become a sort of friend to her.

"He's never been pleased to know he was right," she continued, watching the fire as the flames crackled with a life of their own. "You'd think he would be, but he'd much rather have been wrong about it all. He only ever wanted what was best for mutants, for us to be able to live in peace and without the pain and persecution he knew as a child." She still had his nightmares of the worst of those days. "We all should have listened a little more."

"Erik had too much fear of humanity and what they were capable of. Charles didn't have enough." The past tense for Charles was because he thought, or wanted to think, Charles was capable of recognizing that mutants being hunted down and slaughtered like animals was not something that didn't deserve at least some fear. "Neither one of them was particularly effective at anything but getting in each other's way."

That was a lot of wasted effort and energy, and maybe Scott shouldn't be thinking of humanity as a whole as an enemy right now, but he's still alive and anyone who couldn't see how he'd gotten there wasn't paying attention.

He poured the soup into two mugs and cut the burner. He took Rogue's to her, and gave it to her by holding it at the bottom and leaving the handle for her to take hold of. He sat down on the floor near the fire with his own, back against a wall, one knee bent up and other out straight. He wasn't as cold as she was, but he was cold enough.

"Hindsight's 20/20." He took a careful drink from his cup. "Going forward, however far we can go, we've got to change how we do this." There weren't enough of them not to, and they weren't dead yet. Speaking of doing things differently - "You know I'm not letting you go back out there without some kind of range attack onboard."

The heat from the mug slowly seaped into her hands, sinking through skin and muscle and bone and still she felt like she was made of ice. Now that her thoughts were a bit calmer, Erik had always helped with that surprisingly, she carefully made her way back to the fire, mindful of the edges of the blanket as she resumed her former seat near the fireplace. She was lifting the mug to her lips when Scott made the proclamation and everything about her froze in a completely different sense.

"You got someone stashed in the closet I don't know about, sugar?" she asked quietly, tentatively, not at all sure what she thought about where this was going. Not sure she wanted Scott to finally join the rest of the psyches in her mind.

Edited (phone typos) 2015-11-13 14:24 (UTC)

"If there's somebody in the closet, they'd be well advised to announce themselves and come out slowly or stay put until we leave." Otherwise they might find themselves in an unpleasant position and their safe house might lose most of it's structural integrity.

That was a joke. There was no one hiding in closets.

"I don't like it, either. If you'd rather you can just stay with me until we find somebody else, but I can't let you go out there alone with nothing more overtly offensive than whatever's left of Jono's power."

She wanted to laugh at his joke, at least give a smile, but such things were beyond her for the moment. It was easy to see the reasoning behind his suggestion, she knew it was practical and probably the only one to keep herself from getting killed, but still. There were so many people crammed into her mind already, to add a completely new one... But she could already feel Jonathan's power fading, and who knew when they might run into someone who would even be willing to let her tap their abilities.

Sipping at the mug of soup, she watched Scott with dark eyes smudged with deep shades of purple from too many sleepless nights, thinking over her wording before finally responding. "Things are just kinda crowded in here right now. I've taken in a bunch of new people the past few weeks, and I'd have to take a lot from you to get any lasting power." Maybe not a lot in terms of energy, but his mind...

She faced him a little more fully and jumped right into the deep end. "You know it's not just powers I get from people, sugar. Your thoughts, your secrets, your grief, are you sure you're willing to let me know all that?" He wouldn't be able to hide much from her, and she couldn't even consider going forward with this unless he had all the cards in front of him.

Scott really, really, actually hated the idea but he hadn't started talking about this from a place of ignorance. He knew damned well what he was saying to her, and what it involved. He hated the idea with every fiber of his being. He didn't share like that with people - not voluntarily - and especially not after Jean had died.

Even the mention of grief made that well up again, which said nothing good, but.

"I wouldn't have brought it up if I wasn't willing." That was more neutral than outright saying he hated the idea. "You aren't a child anymore. I couldn't tell you what to do when you were. " He took another swallow from his cup and tilted his head to the side. "All I'm saying is I'm not leaving you without a team and little to no decent offense. I don't give a damn how we make that happen at this point."

And that right there was why there had and always would be a place for Scott Summers in her heart, in one way or another. Over the years, he had taken so much upon his own shoulders, carried them all through the madness of a crumbling world, and he'd done it seemingly without any thought to what was best for him. The burdens of leadership were so ingrained in his being that he'd kept going forward even after Jean's death, and they'd all been able to see how deeply wounded he had been in those following months. Scott Summers represented everything good in Rogue's world, and her heart broke for him because of just how far he was willing to go for her now.

"We'd have to test it first," she decided, glancing away from him and gripping her cup a little more tightly. "I don't want to put both of us through that if it turns out I'm not strong enough to handle just a tap."

He was right, she wasn't a child anymore, and she hadn't been for a long time. And if she could use the knowledge she gained from his psyche to somehow find a way to lessen his burdens even the tiniest bit, it would be more than worth it, so long as she managed to stay in one piece through the transfer.

Edited (typos -- need more coffee) 2015-11-13 18:58 (UTC)

Scott was who and what he was. It was all he knew how to be, and he wouldn't have known how to change it if he'd wanted to. It rarely made him any friends, but it usually got the job done.

If only getting the job done meant that he lost less, he would have had an easier time living with himself.

"Finish your soup and warming up, then we'll test it."

He didn't want her falling apart, either. That would have been the opposite of useful for either of them and he, at least, knew enough to not think of Rogue as reckless in any regard.

"But you're strong enough to handle whatever you have to handle."

That one earned him a smile, small but heartfelt. He'd always been on her side in the past, pushing her when needed and trusting her own measure of things where some of the others had assumed her capable of too much or too little. She knew that despite his confidence in her, if she said it was too much to handle, he'd take her word for it - he'd seen what happened in the early years when she'd reached too far, when other personalities threatened to overtake her own and it had taken days for her to recover. They didn't have that kind of time now.

"Thanks, sugar," she murmured, her attention turning inward as she continued to sip on the warm soup and prepare her mind for another new tenant. Years of training with Xavier had provided her a system of compartmentalizing the stolen psyches; some wandered free, like Logan and Erik, but most were locked behind doors that became brittle if not regularly reinforced. That was what she focused on until the soup was gone and there was nothing left to delay the inevitable.

Setting her mug on the floor, and stood and walked the few feet to where he sat, sinking to the floor by his outstretched leg. "Last chance to back out," she offered, trying for a joke but ending up far more serious than planned. She wouldn't blame him if he did.

Scott let her have her silence.

No, he wouldn't push her to do what she couldn't - he would just have faith that she could until she told him otherwise. He pushed, yeah, he'd pushed them all. He'd also gotten some of them killed, but there was always a bigger cause. Breaking Marie in the name of saving her wasn't who he was, or what he did.

He needed her to live, though. Tonight, more than ever, he really needed to be able to do something to see one of those kids - who weren't kids at all anymore - make it.

So, he stayed quiet and gave her the space she needed to do what she had to do. He drank his own soup, soaked in the heat of the fire and let the heat from the flames sink deeper into him. He didn't really seem to be thinking about anything at all, but he was. He was looking for a way to end this, thinking about Charles and Erik and kids they had lost.

Thinking about the kid Marie had been, when she'd been begging to borrow her bike or showing just a little too much Logan. Just - thinking, but steering well clear of thoughts of Jean.

When she spoke he put his own (empty) cup down and pushed it aside.

"When was the last time you saw me back out?" there was the same 'trying to joke' there for him, but he wasn't pulling it off either. He'd made a commitment, he was keeping it. "Let's see what we've got to work with."

[I have to say, I absolutely adore your Scott.]

She'd known he wouldn't back out, it wasn't what Scott did, but she'd had to give him the chance. He was the last person she wanted to hurt, and this wouldn't be pleasant for either of them. Her power drained people of their energy, exposed everything they held dear, and could hurt like hell if she held on long enough. That was why she wasn't jumping headfirst into this, why she'd called for a trial run, so to speak.

Rogue unearthed one of her bare hands from the depths of the blanket still wrapped around her and settled a little closer to him, within easy reach but still giving him space. "I'm just gonna take a little off the top," she explained, hold her hand out near his but not yet touching him. "Enough to get some of your energy and thoughts, but not much of your power - whatever I do get won't last more than a few minutes."

She started to lower her hand to his, but stopped suddenly, frowning. "If there are things you don't want me to get, concentrate on anything else. Hard. It doesn't always work, but it's worth a try." It was the only solution she could offer to try and let him keep even some semblance of privacy as she stole everything in him. Hopes, dreams, fears, regret, she couldn't pick and choose what she took, but he might at least be able to point her in a particular direction.

Rogue took a deep breath, held it, and let her fingertips brush the skin of his hand. The pull of her power was instantaneous.

[And I *adore* your Rogue! ]

He held his hand palm up for her, gave her access to exposed skin, but otherwise let her control it. That his impulse was to reach up and make contact himself so he was in control of a process he was worried about and unsure of didn't factor in - not in this.

He'd had a lot of people in his head over his life - for all his life, really. From Sinister to Jack to Charles and Jean. He knew damned well that his ability to really psychically shield under any circumstance was basically non-existent and he didn't try now. She had seen enough of him through other people that there was little there that he could hide, anyway.

For her sake he kept not thinking about Jean, and pushed his steadfast determination and faith in her to the forefront, but that was really it. There wasn't much else he could do to help her, here.

Besides not try to flinch away from her and the discomfort that came with that touch. 'Discomfort' - because what it was was fairly indescribable, anyway.

He kept his eyes on her face to monitor how she was doing with it, though.

THE POST-APOCALYPTIC MEME

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