Rogue

Rogue

Having never been the biggest fan of gambling, the central point of Vegas' charm was admittedly lost on Rogue. She liked the glitz all right, she liked the neon, and though she knew full well she didn't have taste discerning enough to know which casinos toed the line between tacky and fun, most of her friends seemed to gravitate toward the classier establishments, so she was happy enough to spend her time there. She had a room at the Cosmopolitan, a large glass casino and hotel that seemed to take its interior cues from James Bond 60s Chic, but filtered through the lense of a teenage girl who was absolutely obsessed with crystal chandeliers. It was incredibly ostentatious, and sparkly, and she was fine with it. It was also next to the Bellagio, and she could watch the fountain shows from her window. It was nice, at night, twenty stories above the noise, watching the spray all lit up.

She'd ventured down the strip a ways, having lost her usual escorts to a poker tournament at Harrah's, and had wound up at the Aria. She liked it. It was slick and modern but everything in it was dark wood and slate, and it was the closest to nature she thought Vegas probably got.

Seemed damn criminal that the cheapest blackjack table at the Aria was twenty five dollars, but nothing was real, money included, so other than the chafing it put on her principles she couldn't care too much. Even when she was losing. Which she was.

"Y'all're gonna chase me back to the slots," she sighed, feeling only slightly mollified when the other three men at the table raised their voices in protest. They weren't real, either, but she could appreciate that the island had provided bodies to humor her vanity. She wasn't even showing any skin- she'd been tempted to take to the town in an emerald green dress with a princess neckline and a slit to the thigh, but had rebelled against it at the last moment and gone instead for high-waisted black skinny jeans, a sequined white top that stopped right where the jeans started, a white tuxedo blazer with a black leather collar and skulls printed on the lining, and black pumps with honest to god spats buttoned onto them. It wasn't white tie, but she figured it was close enough to fit any dress code she might encounter.

"You keep takin' my cards and you keep bustin' my ass," she continued, pointing to a bland but handsome suited young man and then the dealer.

"Least you could do is push me but y'all won't be happy 'til I'm down to my last chip. Penny slots are callin' my name, I can hear 'em from here." She smirked a little against her folded fingertips (perfectly manicured, the spa had been her first destination upon waking up in Tabula Vegas. She'd been there for hours. Her hair hadn't looked so good, or so straight, in ages) and tucked her chin against the heel of her hand. There was another protesting chorus of offers to front her.

"This could be your lucky hand," the dealer said.

"Oh, sugar, if you knew my luck," Rogue drawled, thoughtfully turning her last four chips over between her fingers. With a short breath outward, she stacked them neatly in the circle marked on the felt table top and shook her head a little. The cards she got were good at a glance but the dealer had a nine and her seventeen looked perilous in comparison. Hit and bust, or stay and lose to the dealer by mere inches?

She really hated gambling.

"Typical," she sighed, taking in the cards on the table, knowing no other player would have been allowed so lengthy a pause to consider their options.

"What is a girl to do?"

It was not at all how she had foreseen spending most of her month, mother-henning a mentally child-like Erik Lehnsherr. The language barrier made it difficult but, as seemed to be the pattern with them, he had seemed to trust her readily, and she couldn't bring herself to leave him in other people's hands. Still, after weeks of it, she had to wonder when it might be done, when he would come back to himself.

Not that night, it seemed.

"All right, sugar," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed she had never intended on being so familiar with, "you need me tomorrow, you come lookin', all right?"

It had taken Rogue some time to gather, not the courage, but herself together and go see William de Worde, the editor of the Tabula Rasa Times. After Des had passed, after the funeral had happened, she had curled up and cried for a few days. Only afterward had she been able to make herself crack the cover of his first journal, and once she'd begun to read she couldn't stop. Baseball was the only thing that had drawn her out, and she was grateful for it. Returning to the field after so long, in such a different frame of mind, with the landscape of the teams so changed had been a little bittersweet and saddening, but there were returning faces as well and it was probably Kara's that motivated Rogue the most.

Some people stayed. Regardless of what the Web-Head seemed to think, the place's history and existence had some value.

Journals under her arm, held carefully and close, she knocked on the open door to the Times office and stepped in just past the threshold.

"Pardon me. Mr. de Worde?"

Rogue became aware first of the wall. She was standing before it, but couldn't see how high it was or how far it went in either direction. She frowned at it, puzzled over it, put her hands up against it and pushed- and felt some give- but nothing more. She stood back and looked it over, staring hard, until there was a door, which she went through. Beyond the door was a familiar hallway, one from the school in Westchester, and it was very long and had a lot of doors that she instinctively new led to powers. She shied away from them and tried to hurry to the end, but at some point a voice called her, and she turned to look the way she'd come and there was only black.

She winced, a little, and opened her eyes. Hospital, she thought immediately. She hated those. She tried to sit up, didn't, then tried harder and felt herself sit forward. She opened her eyes more, lashes fluttering, and brought a hand up to her forehead.

Holy heck, what had she gotten herself into?

As a sort of concession to circumstance, Rogue hadn't spent much time alone, lately. She was always with someone, or at practice or in the rec room. She didn't even sleep in her room anymore, though most of her things were still there. It was the smarter way to play it, and she was mostly used to it after life at the mansion, but her greatest option for being alone was gone, and she was missing it more than ever.

Having passed over a truly spiteful number of books on aviation and a few issues of Superman, she'd slipped A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court off the shelf and curled up in the corner of the sofa with it. She'd read it when she was first at Xavier's, something the Professor had suggested she'd like. She'd been skeptical. And wrong.

She only made it a few chapters. The jukebox was quiet, no one was watching a film reel. In fact, she was totally unaware of anyone else in the room. It probably should have been indicative of how out of it she was, but she'd missed that, too. She fell asleep, book on the cushion beside her, arms curled across her stomach and forehead tilted against the back of the couch. It was the deepest she'd slept in days.

There was a whole big list of things Rogue absolutely could not handle. She hadn't anticipated Being Home would have been one of them, but, it was. All the other little things that went under that umbrella heading were, to be sure, daunting on their own, so added up it felt like she was going out of her skin with restlessness.

The only good thing was, she could get away from the immediate crush of it all by flying. The school was already getting pieced back together from the Sentinel attack, by those who hadn't been wounded in the fights that followed. She'd been one of the first ones awake, and though she knew she had her part to do- probably had to fix that damn dome right back up where it was supposed to go- she hadn't had it in her. She'd had to fly.

Touching down, the grounds seemed quiet. Walking into the mansion didn't change the feeling and she didn't like the sensation.

Place this big shouldn't be so still. Specially when there's a whole host o'folks I'd like to avoid. Wish I could put a bell on' em.

She headed downstairs. Maybe a shower and a nap would make things better. Or maybe pummeling something in the danger room. Or a swim. The options suddenly didn't seem so much different than they had on the island. But then again, she could go shopping, or get some coffee or, Lord above, watch some tv.

Didn't sound so bad.

"Careless."

She'd barely started to turn toward the voice, low and feral, before the claws came down. They shredded her jacket sleeve and some of the bodysuit underneath and across her ribs, but the impact, the power in his arm, that was what actually hurt. She barely got a sound out as she made a dent in the metal floor.

"Cruh- Creed?!" She gasped, pushing herself up. bad news. Bad. Her skin was as tough as his, but it didn't fix as quick once it did get busted, and if there were only a couple around with stamina enough to make a dent, he was one of them.

How the hell had the manacles come off?

"Any more questions?" he asked, lifting her by the back of the head and slamming her face first into the wall.

After enough time on the island, it wasn't unusual to wake up and notice things were different. Weather changed and the atmosphere smelled different, the bed you were sleeping in wasn't quite right, the skin you were sleeping in wasn't yours.

Which was just creepy.

This time, though, as Rogue stretched into the sheets and turned her face against the pillow, instead of the nag of unfamiliarity and the typical roll of dread in the pit of her stomach, she felt a deep flood of comfort. She breathed in deep and opened her eyes, slowly, letting the creme colored paint and familiar furniture come into focus. The light from the window meant it was morning. Distantly she could hear sounds of movement, but it was far off, in some distant room of the mansion. The mansion.

She sat bolt upright, suddenly hyper aware of her surroundings. Her room looked exactly as she had left it. This was zero help. The island never pulled the same trick twice in a month. Hell, the island never pulled the same trick twice in a year. She started for the door, turned back and found some shorts so she wasn't running around in a thong and a t-shirt, and then headed out, bewildered and skeptical. She stomped barefooted down the hall for the stairs, her thoughts turning rapidly. If she was home, what did that mean? Shouldn't she have been on that barren plateau holding an unconscious Remy Lebeau in her arms? Or did the world reset itself after the M'kraan hit, and then unhit? It was possible, maybe, that the rift in the timeline Legion had created had done something similar to all the X-Men, sent them someplace else and brought them back. Siege Perilous had done similar. And if that were true, and she was about to be surrounded by a bunch of grumpy, agitated, confused mutants (she'd prefer Sentinels, good Lord) then after the dust settled and they'd been debriefed, maybe she could just give Gateway or Lila Cheney a li'l visit 'n see...

See if the island was even a real place? Home two minutes and you're lookin' for a way back? How is that right...?

The thought had stopped her and she looked up, seeing where she was for the first time since her room. Muscle memory, years of habit, knowing the place so intimately- she'd made straight for the kitchen. Beast stared at her from the beam he hung upside down on, coffee in one hand and newspaper in the other, and Iceman sat with a spoon poking out of his mouth and a bowl of rapidly disintegrating cereal in front of him.

"...What?" she said, startled.

"Good morning," Bobby said around the spoon before pulling it out.

"And I inquired as to how you were feeling on this particularly lovely day," Beast added. "But perhaps it's earlier for some of us than others. Coffee, Rogue?"

The young mutant known only as Rogue blinked, twice, and tried to get a grip on reality as she said, "Oh. No thanks, Hank."

Rogue had spent a while running through jungle, only half-seeing where she was going through the blurring leaves and the tears. By the time she came bursting out into the orchard they had dried, and the only sting she felt was in her lungs from the exertion and a little deeper, from the conversation she'd been running from. She collapsed against a tree for a while, curling over to rest her forehead against her knees, but the sitting made her feel jumpy, anxious.

She hadn't run far enough, yet.

She pushed herself unsteadily up to standing and started, away from the compound, back into the comparative shade of the jungle, though in a different, markedly more familiar direction. By the time she was wandering up to her boyfriend's place, she figured at least the red in her eyes and cheeks had to have gone down some.