Chapter Text
The year is 1997, and the world is in shambles. Mutant hate is up around the planet, even the other heroes find themselves questioning if mutants like the X-men are really the good guys. The X-men have just won the battle against Bastion, but they lost much along the way, even losing one of their own members on Genosha when Bastion's plan was first set in motion. In this universe, they were not sent across time, but remained in the battle worn state of New York, surrounded by enemies and allies alike. Now the X-men have regrouped, trying to find their place in the world again. Today, we find ourselves in the newly rebuilt X-Mansion, where the X-Men prepare for a very important day.
...
Rogue doesn’t know what drives her into the danger room at the moment, just that she really needs to hit something. Today, heroes from around the world were coming to have a meeting with the X-Men, and she did not want to deal with that right now. This whole situation was driving her up the wall, not to mention that just a few short days ago she may have thrown one of the leaders of the big teams most prized weapon across Canada's tallest mountains. She has come down to the danger room alone a lot since moving back into the newly rebuilt mansion. It calms her raging thoughts to go through the training drills, and believe me, she has lots of raging thoughts. Just by herself her head would be a therapist's nightmare, but that's not even adding all the other peoples thoughts she has swirling around in there. All the people she's ever touched while being a mutant have all left their mark in her brain, and for the past month, it’s been getting harder to manage. Her powers at first were just the power to absorb people's energy and memories, and if they were enhanced, then their powers. But while she was with the brotherhood of mutants her adoptive mother, Mystique, had tricked her into permanently stealing the powers of Captain Marvel, one of the avengers, so now she has the power of flight, invulnerability, and super strength. She hasn’t told anybody about her problems, not even the professor.
“Not like they could help” She reasons with herself. “They’ve tried before, but nothing has worked.”
She goes through the drills alone, using her powers and skill to easily beat all the challenges in the danger room. “If only Logan could see me now” she thinks. “He’d be impressed.” She thinks about going and showing him her skills, but with a pang remembers he's not here. In the battle with Bastion, she had chosen to side with Magneto, against her fellow X-men, but during the fight Wolverine had the adamantium that coated his bones ripped out, putting him in a coma-like state. Magneto had done this, and after watching it happen, Rogue had seriously regretted joining his side. After the battle, when the whole team was beamed away to different places, Wolverine, Morph (who was staying by his side while he used his healing factor to heal), and Storm had gone missing and had yet to return. Thinking about it made Rogue sad, and guilty, and it hurt her a bunch to know that more of the team had been lost, just like-
“No!” she said out loud. She wouldn’t go back there, she wouldn’t start thinking about him again. It hurt too much. This “him” was Remy LeBeau, the cajun X-Man known as Gambit to most of the world. He had the ability to turn whatever he touched into a bomb, and some other powers Rogue didn’t want to stop and remember. He had died in the first part of Bastion's plan on Genosha, saving her and everyone else on that stupid island from being destroyed by the Master Mold. He had died thinking she didn’t love him, that she had chosen Magneto over him. She would never be able to forgive herself. She punched away her feelings of loss for her missing teammates, and kept training.
The danger room was a circular chamber that was able to change its surroundings into whatever the X-Men needed at the time. Currently, Rogue was training in a simulation meant to resemble the alleys of Japan. She punched all the fake sentinels and mutant haters, finishing up the last levels of the drill.
Soon, though, she was joined by another mutant who lived in the house. Erik had gotten dressed earlier in a nice red suit, and had done all his chores around the house, but while doing them had noticed Rogue was not among her fellow X-Men getting ready. He was correct in assuming she was here.
“I knew I’d find you here, Rogue” He told her in a friendly tone. Or, at least, the friendliest tone he could manage. He was not known for being the nicest person in the world, but he had a soft spot for Rogue. For a while, he even thought she would be his queen on Genosha, that they would rule the mutant nation together, but he could not tell if her feelings were the same since then, especially after the Cajuns death.
Rogue ignored him, barely hearing him over the battle she was currently winning.
“You really should be getting ready,” he said, trying again to make her notice him “you don’t want to meet “Earth's Mightiest Heroes” in that, do you?” He pointed at her choice of clothes, which was her normal super hero outfit. Green and yellow jumpsuit with a leather jacket and headband to complete the look, the X sign on her jacket signifying her as an X-Man.
She didn’t respond at first, just looked at him, then she flew down to the ground to meet him. “What do you want Erik?” she asked. Her tone was not quite threatening, but it wasn’t kind either.
“Just making sure everyone is accounted for, I don’t want to ruin the other hero's view on us” He answered in a calm demeanor.
“Why would you care what they think of us?” She asked him, not believing he would make any effort to be nice to these other heroes.
“I don’t think whatever we do will make us look better to them, but Charles did ask us to play nice, and I don’t want to start any wars with them.” he answers in an almost joking way.
Rogue can’t help but slightly agree with him. How could anything they do today help in the long run? How could one meeting of them playing nice together help save mutant lives around the world, and let them live in peace? But she had trusted Eriks view on things too many times before, and everytime she, or someone she cared about, got hurt. She didn’t really know what she believed anymore. So many of her friends had been hurt by the humans, but could the reality of the world really be as bleak as Erik says it is? Rogue may not know what she believed at the moment, heck, she could barely discern what was actually her in her mind and what was someone else, but she did know she was angry, and sad, and empty from all the loss she had endured.
“I guess we’ll have ta’ find out” she answered in an emotionless tone. Walking away from Erik and the danger room, she flew upstairs to her room to begin getting ready.
Erik couldn't help but feel slightly hurt at the way she dismissed him. There was a time when he and Rogue could have been something more. For a time, they were even a couple, many years ago, and Erik had thought they could be that again. No one could replace his deceased wife, Magda, but this was the closest he had gotten to it in years. It helped very much that Erik was the only person who could touch Rogue without her sucking all their energy. He thought this had made him the prime choice, but she had kept going back to that Cajun, even though they couldn’t touch. After his death, Erik had sensed much distance between himself and Rogue. They couldn’t be over, could they? Things were going so well, weren’t they? What did this Cajun have that he didn’t?
“No sense dwelling on it now.” He thought. “I have some heroes to prepare for.”
…
Her room was decorated in a more southern style, with modern touches here and there. There were clothes lying around on the floor, and a few pictures of her loved ones mixed with makeup and other necessities on her dressers and end tables. By the door there was a grand, full length mirror that used to be the professors, and in the middle was a big, four poster bed decorated with a lovely quilt that her birth-mother had made before she died. Hanging on one of the four-posters pillars was a long, brown trench coat.
Her room used to be much more decorated, full of all kinds of things from the south. She used to have more personal items too, like trophies, old costumes, and much more fashion items. Her walls used to be decorated with some posters of bands she liked, and pictures from her past but they had all been lost when the house was destroyed, leaving her with only a few of her old possessions.
Looking around, she picked out a nice white , sleeveless, blouse and black high waisted pants with fancy gold button accents from her dresser. Then she chose some long gloves from atop her full length mirror, noting that she would have to be careful no one touches her shoulders, and slid them on. Then she found some nice heels to complete the look, and took off her headband, musing her hair to show off her white locks in the front.
“It ain’t the fanciest outfit in the world, but it’ll have ta’ do” she thought to herself.
She hears a knock at her door and turns to see Scott, better known as the leader of the X-Men Cyclops, waiting in her doorway.
“I’m glad we finally found you Rogue, the Professor was starting to think you flew away.” This was not what Rogue was expecting. From the looks of his slightly crumpled expensive button up shirt and very nice pants, he had been ready for a while, and had done some work to the house in the meantime. His look was slightly ruined, however, by the red sunglasses he was wearing, though it wasn’t his fault. His mutation gave him the ability to shoot optic beams out of his eyes, but it was a power he couldn’t turn off, and the only thing immune to his blasts was the rubies inset into his glasses, and his own eye lids.
He talked to her in a friendly, non judgemental way, when he should have been yelling at her for disappearing and not helping in the slightest to get the mansion ready. It's what he had always done. It's what she had braced herself for when she saw him. It was strange not seeing him do it now.
“Not gonna tell me off for being a no-show?” she asked, with a little dry humor in her voice.
Scott was hoping she wouldn’t respond like this. Usually, he liked to make sure his team was doing exactly what they were supposed to, and when they weren’t, he had a history of not being the nicest, but he was trying to be better. He felt guilty for the way he had treated his team in the past, especially for the way he treated Storm, Morph and Gambit, and he really felt guilty for the way he treated Wolverine. Him and Wolverine had always butted heads about something, and he could have definitely been nicer to him. Logan may have always ticked him off, but he was still a good person underneath. He should have listened to Jean and been a little more lenient with him. He might never be able to say sorry to some of them, and he definitely can’t say sorry to Remy now, so he was trying to make amends with his remaining teammates.
Plus, Rogue wasn’t in the best condition right now. Her anger was off the charts, and he knew she was grieving. After her rage induced rampage in the days after Gambit's death, the X-Men had been trying to be cautious with her. She was a ticking time bomb of rage and grief, and they were trying to help her get through it, but no one could tell if anything was actually helping because she mostly kept to herself these days, really only talking to Kurt and Magneto, and even those conversations were sparse. The whole team was in low spirits from their grief over lost teammates, so Scott was trying to make up for it in his attitude.
“Maybe I should, but we don’t really have time for that right now” he answered with a kind smile, trying for the nicest tone possible. “I know everyone has been a lot lately, and sometimes people need a break.”
Scott had been acting like this ever since the Bastion attack. Everyone had been treating her like she was made of glass, like she could break at the slightest misstep or mistake, and she didn’t know how she felt about it. Part of her wanted to scream about it, how she didn’t want to be treated like a baby. Another part of her felt happy to be left alone all the time, to not have to try and be normal in front of anyone. Remy would know exactly what she needed, he would know how to help her with her head, maybe she would-
Scott watches Rogues face drop from a casual, tired expression to a deeply sad face, then to a slight look of anger. “Sorry for dropping in on you like this,” he said, trying to save her from whatever bad thought she may have just had “but the professor said you were supposed to be cleaning the dining room with Jubilee, and asked me to come and find you.” He didn’t know what to say to help her feel better, so he hoped he could take her mind off of whatever was troubling her with work, after all, that's what he always did when something was on his mind.
Rogue could see what Cyclops was trying to do. He was one of the only ones who didn’t constantly ask if she wanted to talk about her feelings, and she appreciated it. It was something Remy would have done, cause he somehow always knew when she needed to talk about things, or when she needed to punch something instead. Scott reminded her of him in many ways, and it made her heart hurt.
“Yeah, I oughta do somethin’ ‘round here. Can’t let myself start slackin’ on the job, not if those other heroes let the Professor go through with his plans.”
Thos “plans” she was talking about were plans to turn the Professor's house into an actual school, but not just any regular school, a school for Mutants. For a long time the X-Men had been hiding in Xavier's mansion under the guise of it being a school for the gifted, but ever since the house had been outed as their base people had known it wasn’t a real school. The professor wanted the approval of these other heroes and the governments they worked for to make it an actual school, where Mutant children could be safe from humans who wished to harm them. Meeting with the heroes instead of the actual government seemed like the best way to go about getting their idea approved, and they wanted the other heroes to know they could trust them, and that not all Mutants were bad.
After Magneto had almost wiped out the human race as a whole, Scott wasn’t sure what would happen, but they had to try. Thinking of this place as a school for mutants made him incredibly happy. It would help mutants have a safe place to grow and use their powers, especially under the protection of the other X-Men. The professor hoped to make them all teachers of some kind, like a history or math teacher, while also teaching the students other important things, like how to live in a society that didn’t like them much, or how to control their powers and learn to protect themselves, or to just give them a nice, stable home and teach them how to be around other people again. Becoming a stable influence in their lives. Many mutants have been largely abused in one way or another, and giving young mutants a place to belong and learn how to be a part of the world again would be the best thing a school for mutants could do.
“Let's hope so.” Scott said kindly “C’mon, I’ll walk you down to the others.”
They walked in silence with each other through the long, Victorian-esque halls for a minute, looking at all the clean rooms redone to look more like class rooms. Almost every room had been redone to be a dormitory, classroom, or lounge for the students. Eventually, Rogue broke the silence.
“Do you really think they’ll let us go through with this?” She asked, not able to contain the harsh question. “I mean, I know these heroes aren’t all Mutant haters, but they ain’t been kind to us either.”
“I think you’ve been talking to Magneto too much. Not every human is a terrible, Mutant hating monster like he wants you to believe.” He answered, his tone hinting at a joke she didn’t quite grasp.
“I know there are good humans out there, but you gotta admit, Erik has some good points.” she told him in a wary tone. “Besides, we haven’t given em’ much reason to trust us. We lied to em’, and fought with em’, heck, Erik almost killed all of em.”
Scott knew some of that statement was focused mainly on her and her accident with the Avengers when she was younger. “We’ve all made mistakes, them especially. Don’t you remember Ultron?” Scott answered her simply.
“How could I forget?” she said with a small, sad chuckle.” We were fight’n off all them robots for days before the Avengers finally took ‘im down.” She reminisced about those early days fondly, even if they were fighting for the fate of the planet at the time.
“What about the Hydra bots? Or all of the Hulk's rampages through New York?”
She smiled at all these memories, even though she knew fighting for the safety of the world shouldn't be something to remember fondly. “I think Hulk destroyed 20 blocks of Manhattan before the Fantastic Four finally stopped him.”
“I’m sure if we were there, you could’ve taken him out with one punch.” Scott said sarcastically before getting a little punch from Rogue in the side, which hurt more than it would’ve, if it came from someone without super strength.
There was a beat of silence while Rogue pondered what he was saying, then, with a sadder face - “I know they’ve made mistakes, Cyk, but they ain’t like us. We’ve always had the odds stacked against us.” she said in a sad voice, not quite meeting his eyes.
“Yeah well, you can’t be called “Earth's Mightiest Heroes’ and be complete monsters, and only complete monsters would stop us from trying to build a safe place for child Mutants to go. And besides,” he said with a smile as they made it to the dining room “I feel like the cards are in the X-Men's favor tonight.”
Rogue gave Scott a sad smile at the catchphrase. Man, when Scott said stuff like that, she really could think things were okay. He did have a way of saying it that reminded her of Remy. Instead of feeling angry at the reminder of her lost “Boyfriend”?, “Friend”?.
None of that felt right, but she grew energized, more uplifted than she had felt in a long while at hearing those words as Scott brought her to the big, wooden doors that led into the dining room.