Rogue's Kiss
Leaps of Faith
“I offer myself, flesh to blood. Let Rogue’s spirit know no harm in death, let no demons take her or trick her into darkness. I offer my life to make sure of this.”
A huge animals skull silently shrieked a grin at this, the amusement too much for it to hide its fanged grin. Two candles rose out of its eye sockets giving it a look of baneful life. Smaller bones decorated the surface of the alter in a pattern as ancient as Storm’s tribe. The weather witch brought the blade to her arm and cut deeply into the soft skin. Blood pattered into the wooden bowl between her knees, filling it with her life’s strength. Ororo’s eyes closed in concentration. The spirits must truly believe that this offering was not genuine. She let her blood run into the bowl until it was half full and her head began to swim. She picked up a cloth, bandaged it around her arm, and then placed the bowl of blood in front of the skull.
“Take my life if it would suit you,” she challenged to the capering skull, her arms spread wide, blood soaking through her gash. “All I ask that Rogue come to no harm in her journey’s ahead into that dark realm of death. I beseech you!”
The skull just grinned it eternal grin back at her.
Storm sighed and rocked back on her heels. She was suddenly very aware of her nakedness and covered her arms across her breasts. She had none done a voodoo ritual like this since she had been the weather goddess back in Africa. She had forsaken all this stupid superstition when she had boarded that plane with Charles Xavier all those years ago.
But she still had brought the tool necessary just in case. A sort of security blanket against the unseen forces that sometimes prayed on your mind. Rogue’s death had shaken her to no end. She had no had to deal with a loved ones death since her time in Africa when great fires would be lit and naked women and men danced wildly, driving back the demons that might take the spirit of deceased, even raise the body from death to only do evil. A ritual imbedded in Storm since birth. It seemed infinitely wrong for her not to help Rogue’s spirit along in this way.
Arms still wrapped around her body Storm silently wept, rocking and murmuring in repetition. Her heart beat in time with her words.
“Be restful. Be restful. Be restful. Be restful…”
Ten miles stretched between Rogue and home. She didn’t allow herself hinkhink of the distance, only concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. She shunned the well-lighted streets of Bayville, for some reason preferring the dark back alleys and quiet back yards of sleep houses. She crossed grass and jumped high fences easily. She didn’t allow herself to think at all just repeating, “have to get home, have to get home.”
She fell into one yard only to have a huge pit bull start to bark harshly at her. Red light pulsed around the animal in angry waves. Even clouds of red dust shot out of its mouth with each frenzied bark. She quickly ran across the yard and jumped over the fence.
She stopped dead in her tracks and looked back. The dog had stopped barking at her but that didn’t catch her attention. She looked at the high wooden fence. It was a good ten feet tall but she had just leapt over it, jumping, getting her foot on the top then hopping down. She almost felt like she had… she wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. She fell to her knees as crisp grass scrunched under her weight. Her breath came her harsh gasps of fear. Her whole body trembled with confusion and fear.
“What is going on?” she whispered. She hugged herself in the same way her teacher was at that moment. Her heart however was not beating. Ice ran through her as Rogue put her hand over her chest and felt nothing. She felt her neck.
Nothing.
She struggled hard with panic, fighting it off in the end to get up and continue.
“Don’t think about it. Just get home. Everything will be okay, just get home.”
Her mind flashed to her time in the Brotherhood. That places hadn’t been a home and when she had joined the X-Men she didn’t think that ritzy mansion would ever be either. But now it was all she had between her and dark terror.
The miles passed in a haze of alleys and dim miles. A pale girl in a black lace dress, she passed the school, not giving it a glance. 3 miles to go. She passed people who never knew she was there. When she wasn’t expecting those lights would blaze into life. They had started whispering to her. She shut it out like everything, waiting to deal with it when she wasn’t so alone.
She finally set her hand on the high wrought iron gates. She saw the long, curved driveway clearly with the big fountain. The mansion stood hugely in the night, a few windows still lit with sleepless people. These lights tugged at her heart, pulling he into its comforting light.
She stepped up to the intercom on the gate and pressed the button, holding it down for three seconds. If you held it down it actually took a thumb print scan and let you enter if you were authorized. She held it for three seconds and waited.
Nothing happened. She tried it again. still nothing.
“Musta taken me outta the system…” Rogue said to herself. They really had left her for dead. Claws sank into her heart as sorrow ripped at her. She was really dead. It seemed she hadn’t actually known this until she was turned away from her home. The high-lighted windows now looked so very distant.
She didn’t allow herself to cry. Instead she reasoned, of course they had taken her out of the system. That would have been the first think Logan did. She shoved the pain away and gripped onto the rungs of the gate, looking up its height. It was a good 15 feet high.
Could she jump it?
The ten-foot fence had seemed like nothing. What’s a few more feet?
She hesitantly walked back into the dark away from the gate a good distance. She looked at the gate across the distance. The Professor’s voice wondered into her head, a memory of a training session.
“Remember,” he had said from the controls of the danger room. Kitty had been having trouble phasing long enough to get through a series of traps. “If you truly believe you can do it.”
“Ah can do it.” Rogue whispered into the night. She took a cautious step then broke into a full run, closing the distance to the gate in quick strides. The cement pounded against her boots, her dress billowing back behind her in the wind. When she got close enough she didn’t doubt, she simply jumped, faith taking her.
She shot straight up into the air, wind kissing her face as she rose into the air. The gate passed her eyes quickly until it no longer blocked her vision and all she saw was the mansion. She had cleared it. Her exhilarating happiness was clouded when she reached her peak and started to fall. She instinctively clenched to receive the fall and roll with it and stopped dead in the air.
She floated there 15 above the ground. Her body slightly bobbed p and down in the wind, her boots dangling. Rogue was breathing in harsh gasps again that she quickly controlled.
Okay, so she could fly now. Maybe it just was something to do with dying (cause that is what she did right?). Maybe when a mutant came back they got new powers. After all there were lots of instances of people appearing dead in the past and then waking up in their coffins and mutants have displayed new powers under stress and…
Rogue realized she was babbling a la Kitty and shut her mind up.
She instead concentrated on how she was going to get down from here. She didn’t even feel like she was exerting any effort to stay a float.
Experimentally she tried to just push herself down and found herself descending slowly to the ground. Rogue made no move to speed up the process but just let herself fall slowly.
Her feet finally touched the earth and she stumbled a little when her body seemed to gain all its weight back.
The thought of Kitty going though this and loving losing all her weight at once made her giggle a bit. She continued on. Something tugged at her, almost physically pulling her. She let herself be lead around the wide mansion and into the beginning of the woods. A blue trial of mist seemed to lead across the edge of the forest and around a tree where there was a great cloud of it. It whispered to her louder then any of the random ones she passed. Maybe because it was Kitty’s she thought idly.
She started. How did she know it was Kitty? She looked at the cloud and it seemed to tell her it was in that whisper. And she was in great pain.
Rogue silently walked around the tree and saw the small girl curled in a ball and crying. Great love and longing flooded through Rogue. More then anything she wanted to comfort the poor girl. All thoughts of herself fled Rogue as she thought of all Kitty had been through. The blue mist surrounded Rogue and she knew it was Kitty who organized everything and that, yes, Rogue had died. Kitty had wanted to make sure that Rogue would have liked her funeral. Rogue also felt all the pain over losing her roommate.
Rogue leaned down and embraced her long time friend.
At first she felt Kitty relax into the grip and then the stiffening.
Rogue saw Kitty’s head slowly raise and look into her eyes.