un_gloved | (no subject)

The night air was warm, but the wind coming off the ocean was cool. Distant storm systems sent the smell of ozone and gusts of salty wind up into the trees. They might never make landfall, if the island was truly one of the two only actual landmasses in what seemed to be an endless, looping world of ocean. She sort of hoped one would, but the feel of the storms, the smell of them was good enough for the time being.

It wasn't her usual activity, granted- she'd been good about not sleeping alone, something made easier by giving up the ghost and going back to Spike the way she'd wanted to, anyway- but it had been a trying week, and her head and her heart were roiling like the far-off clouds. She couldn't center herself, couldn't console herself, so she'd slipped out into the dark, a woven cotton blanket wrapped around her body, and gone to the top of the waterfall.

The view was different in the dark. The sky wasn't crystal clear, the moonlight filtered, muted ever now and then by a passing veneer of cloud, but the water and the canopy moving in the breeze still glittered in the light. It looked like a world carved out of obsidian. Beautiful, and not still, but quiet.

Breathing deeply, feeling the wind pick up, carrying mist from the waterfall's spray upward with it, Rogue slipped the blanket from her shoulders and tilted her face toward the sky. The elements might not have been hers to control, but they were still hers to feel, and their enormity and immediacy filled her senses and cleared her head.

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"It's swell and all, but I think I'd prefer it if you were actually you," I say, frowning some. "No offence."

Letting someone else take over... well, I can understand the idea behind it. With me, it's less a person, though, more the animal.

Which means I know how bad news it is. I don't think this is entirely better, even if Storm here's preferable to a berserk rage.

"As would I, I am certain," she commented with a barely raised eyebrow.

"Though from my perspective, I am as much myself as I could hope to be. I think it is because I gave my powers to Rogue in trust that I am so aware of the situation. Other minds in here are not. It is better, though, than it was. She is finding ways of compartmentalizing the throng. I am glad for her." She turned her face toward the moon, closing her eyes in silent revelry as the wind picked up again and moved her hair around her neck and face.

"Perhaps with you here she will wish to take control again, but she was floundering, and could not focus. It is good, then, however strange the sentiment may seem, that I am here for her. Better me than another."

"She locking them all down tight?" I say. "Well, good for her."

And us, for that matter. Means we don't have to keep tangling with her. Watching her slip out of our reach as other personalities sweep her under.

"She is trying to," she said gently.

"And how are you, old friend?"

"Me?" I say, with a slightly barbed smile. "You're in her head, sure you've heard. Healthy as a bull. The kind sitting in a pen waiting for them to stab it and send it out to the matador."

"I wish I could dismiss this paranoia for your usual pessimism," she sighed, "but I cannot. I may only say that I am glad, not only for Rogue's sake, that you are well."

To be honest, I don't know that I can say that makes two of us.

"Is it still paranoia if I really am stuck in a joint where some chump is playing games with us?"

"Can you prove it to be so?" she asked, stepping aside so there was more room at the ledge in case he wanted to take in the view.

"We are mistrustful of good fortune, quick to call it machinations, because of our histories. If this is something as simple as a twist of fate, would that be any more difficult to believe than half of what we have come up against, in our time?"

"Can you prove it isn't?" I say back. It really is like talking to Storm. It'd be comforting, except for the fact that it's just the version of her built as a construct in Rogue's head. "Why should I think the person supplying me with the life-saving drugs is any different to the one swapping people's bodies around? The one dumping us all here to begin with?"

"If it is a 'person' at all. I confess to have believed in capricious spirits- and after joining the X-Men I even met a few," she said with a slim, wry smile and slightest graceful tilt of her head.

"But energy, unschooled and wild, perhaps guided by the expectations or desires of the people who have found themselves here, can it be blamed in the way a person might?" She reached over to put a hand on his shoulder.

"I do not wish to play devil's advocate, merely to try and see this place in a more forgiving light."

"Could be," I concede.

It's possible. We've seen weirder things.

"But maybe I feel better imagining there's someone behind this I'm gonna get to hit one day."