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It sounded like such a average everyday thing to say, bumping into him, like he wasn't teamed up with their major adversary.
But that was what happened. Admittedly the circumstances weren't usual, not for most people.
Gyrich had tried to set
up another mutant registration centre in Philadelphia so the Professor had decided to make a little intervention. Unfortunately
Magneto had decided to do the same thing, or rather fortunately given that the Government put more guards and security alarms
in this one. Still not enough to stop them but enough to make it difficult for them to get in and out.
Luckily then
Magneto and crew turned up, distracted the guards. The next day it was less lucky 'cause then the papers decided that they
were in league with Magneto and managed, as per usual, to spin it into 'all mutants are evil'.
But John was there.
Looking as sulky as usual, but alive. Not that they thought he wasn't but they worried when they didn't know where he was.
Bobby worried anyway. Marie knew that John was like a cat, landed feet first all the time. She might have been amazed that
he was still in one piece, she knew how much he used to wind Xavier up. She couldn't see Magneto standing for that, so she
was amazed he did have John permanently within smacking distance, except she knew Erik wasn't like that and didn't like knowing
that. Stupid John. She'd mostly shaken off the shade of Erik, as someone, undoubtedly Hank, had called it, unless she thought
about him directly.
And John was, as had always been the case, distracting Bobby, only this was slightly more serious
than advanced calculus. She nudged him out of his trance, "Come on, they've done us a favour. We're getting out of here."
Sure enough they were, with Cyclops on point and Logan guarding the rear. And he would have murdered them if he had had to
practically shove them through the door.
~~~~
There was the one thing Pyro couldn't get over, the one change
that really freaked him out. It was the way he only saw his old friends when they were either fighting each other or when
Magneto decided to help their asses out of whatever mess they'd got themselves into. Messes that Xavier had been too short-sighted
to predict would happen and therefore hadn't sent an extraction team.
Pyro didn't know why Magneto did Xavier's job
for him on these occasions, but he'd be lying if he said he wasn't kind of glad. At least it meant he could check that they
were still alive, which wasn't always a given, if they were stupid enough to blindly follow Xavier and his belief in some
fool's paradise that was never going to come to pass then they were more than stupid enough to get themselves all kinds of
killed.
This had to be the third or fourth time they'd done this and everyone was still here, a few of the other kids
were joining up, like those leather outfits could disguise who they were.
A Sentinel tried to squash him, he spun out
of the way, unfortunately straight into another one, only to be pulled out of the way by his t-shirt collar, no stupid costumes
for him, no way.
"Thanks Mystique." Except it wasn't Mystique, wasn't blue. She always fought blue, said it was more
comfortable.
"General retreat. Too many Sentinels." Rogue was out of breath, she'd been fighting hand to hand with the
robots, which was new. "Come on John, even Logan's moving out." He started moving, but obviously not fast enough for Rogue,
who picked him up and slung him over her shoulder. That was definitely a change, there was a time, not more than three years
ago, when he'd do that to her and she'd mock-complain because she couldn't do it back to him, and the change wasn't all muscle.
After
about five minutes of this upside down racing about Pyro was lost and feeling sick. She finally put him down, on some hard
bumpy ground, that looked like the rubble left after the demolition of a building.
"I'd say thanks, except I think
I'm going to throw up."
"Oh shut up. I just saved your ass." That was the situation back to normal with them.
"Yeah
right."
"You would have been smashed."
"And you wouldn't have been."
"No, I wouldn't." She wasn't bragging, she sounded
kind of down about it. And it might explain why she was in the front line instead of in the reserves with the rest of the
kids. It was nice that Xavier thought he had those options, the reality was, it would take every last one of them to get rid
of the threat posed to them by humanity. She must have had something though, 'cause she was up there with Cyclops, Wolverine
and Storm. Sure Piotr was up there too, but hello, he was Mr. Metal and generally invulnerable. What the hell was Rogue then?
"Okay,
so you wouldn't." There was another pause. This was awkward. "You suppose that they've figured out that we got out."
"I
hope so. You don't look so worried."
Pyro looked at his watch, "I've got another five hours and forty-five minutes before
I've got to check in." They weren't going to be worrying yet. Well, Magneto might, but he doubted it, he was the one that
instituted the six hour call in protocol. Short enough that you couldn't get into too much trouble, long enough to allow you
to escape whoever was after you and then get to a phone.
"No such luck. There's a tracking device on me, and no, I'm
not going to tell you where or show you, so they'll be coming to pick me up. I suppose I can trust you not to get into trouble
if I go to the pizza place round the corner."
"Not handing me over? I'm a wanted man don't you know."
"I figure that
you let the little fish go, that and," she leant over to kiss him. Pyro freaked, and would have pulled away except he couldn't,
he was frozen, colder than he'd ever been, even in his second foster home, and it felt like he was falling screaming into
the abyss. "No, I still don't get it." She put him down and Pyro tried to get the breath back in his lungs. "I was gone, totally
gone for six months. Bobby was happy enough when I got back but he didn't seem to be quite as overjoyed as when he saw you
on the other side when Erik first let you loose on the world."
With that she went, leaving him to try and shout, "But
I've never kissed Bobby" at her, failing because his throat was still croaky and his lungs were still wheezing.
~~~~
She
was expecting the call, she hadn't changed her cell number in three years, mainly because she could still barely remember
this one.
"What the hell got into you?"
"Nothing. Everything."
"I really don't have time for teenage existentialism."
"John,
I'm six months older than you, I'm already twenty."
"Whatever!" John got onto the real reason he called. "I'm in town,
want to meet up?"
"Where?"
"O'Reilly's."
"But that's such a dive."
"It's such a dive that it doesn't check ID.
And I'm going to need alcohol if you're going to whine."
"You don't have to come you know."
"See you at nine then."
And he just hung up. He must have run out of money for the payphone.
She hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said O'Reilly's
was a dive. As she walked down the dark, dank steps that led to the basement where it was she could feel her feet sticking
to the floor.
"I'm over here."
"Hi John."
"It's Pyro now."
"Sure."
"I prefer it that way."
"Fine. Hi
Pyro." Rogue was practically rolling her eyes.
"So?" John asked. Rogue started to tell him the small things. How everyone
at the School was, how Piotr had got a scholarship to Columbia, how Bobby was doing well with the accountancy thing, which
had led to John ranting about accountancy being a fate worse than death. Eventually, and after far too many drinks, they got
onto the subject of Rogue's new powers.
"This girl, she'd somehow found out about, you know, the thing, and decided
she wanted to commit death by Rogue. So she crept into the School one night, God knows how she got past the security system,
and just grabbed hold of me while I slept. Of course, I didn't notice until too late, but she just wouldn't let go. It was
too late by the time that I managed to push her off. She's in a permanent coma in New York now. Or I wish she was, she's stuck
in my head. It wouldn't be so bad if she made any sense in my head. There was a slight upside, the way there always is, she
had latent mutant powers that kicked in in me."
"So what've you got."
"Flight, super-strength and I'm kind of difficult
to hurt."
"Not much really." He had to laugh, he would have killed for those kind of powers, and Rogue apparently had done.
Well close enough.
"If only that was all she gave me," she said it in a strange way, but it had to be her own not Magneto's,
even psychic backwash, or whatever, couldn't last this long, "she was a very alive person. It's like one of Jubilee's coffee's,
it's all zing, zing, zing and it doesn't stop. Doesn't ever stop." She stroked the side of John's face. John wanted to move
away from the hand, even with a glove on her hand, he felt cold where Rogue touched him.
"Of course she chose completely
the wrong girl to get sucked into. She was a nympho, a woe-is-me nympho, but unfortunately the minute I got her powers Bobby
broke it off." Rogue gave a bitter laugh. "Your best friend feels threatened by strong women."
"Nah, my ex-best friend
just doesn't know how to handle them." Bobby had always been backward about coming forward and if Rogue wanted to put out,
why not let her, if they'd figured out how to without the life-sucking and fatal aspects.
Marie was so glad that she'd
remembered that John was always as hot to trot as she was now, which had to be hell if he was working with Mystique. Marie
doubted if Mystique would put out for John, so he had to be desperate.
"And you do."
"And I do. Even if I say so
myself."
"Good. 'Cause I was worried this motel room," Rogue swung the room keys round on her finger, "would go to waste."
"You
got a car?"
"Hell no, you think I could have escaped school with a car? I would have had Mr. Summers and Logan chasing
after me."
"Why aren't they?"
"I'm seeing a maiden aunt." He had to laugh.
"So, are we getting going?"
"Sure,
just let me finish this drink." Rogue slugged down her bourbon like a pro, or like Logan, which was more likely.
The
motel was just the right kind of seedy, better than the ones he was used to when he was on a mission, but not clean enough
that he felt dirty, about to bang his best friend's ex-girlfriend, 'cause even if they weren't still together she was still
Bobby's girl.
"So how we doing this, 'cause hot as you are, I don't much feel like doing the veiny thing again." He
had nightmares the night after the kiss, nightmares where he was buried alive, drowning, fifteen separate ways of dying because
he couldn't breathe.
Rogue flipped open her small black case and pulled out two pairs of tight blue latex gloves.
She
took off her usual dark green gloves and replaced them with these new ones. Once she'd done that she threw the other pair
at John. 'When in Rome,' he thought. They didn't feel too bad, weird maybe, but not actually bad.
"You know this is
how rubber fetishes start."
Rogue just laughed. And started to undo his trousers. He could play it this way, he'd done
it before. With guys mostly, 'cause well, it's easier to get hands to dicks than it is to get your hands in a girl's pussy.
But
they managed it somehow, because Rogue was willing to lie back and take it for all that she was suddenly Supergirl strong,
and why did Bobby ever give this up because Rogue was so soft and yielding, plus she knew how to give a good hand job. Yeah,
in the list of girls he'd slept with she definitely came top, if only because he hadn't quite convinced Mystique to let him
between her legs.
Sex made her less uptight, more reasonable, more Rogue rather than multiple-personality-keeping-it-together
girl.
"So why me, why not say Piotr?"
"'Cause he's finally got together with Kitty."
"Finally. Still, there's got
to be some single guys at the School, people who aren't, you know, fighting for the enemy."
"'Cause I trust you enough
to have your fingers in me, but I don't have to talk to you in the morning." John really hadn't meant his face to move into
whatever expression Rogue now took exception to. "Oh come on John, let's not play pretend, whichever one of us wakes up first
is going to get dressed and be out of the door fast as they can."
That was true. Because her reasons were the same
as his, and he was wondering why he'd ever thought he'd had more in common with Bobby because this girl she knew and understood.
Of course that could have been because she'd mind-sucked him a day ago, and had lingering impressions of his usual behaviour.
"Sorry,
that was probably kind of harsh."
"Hey, don't worry about it. I'm just glad my vanishing act isn't going to upset you."
Rogue smiled and kissed his chest through his t-shirt. "Thanks for coming."
"It's no problem."
They were both
there when Rogue fell asleep, but she hoped and expected to be on her own the next morning.
~~~~
The End
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