Rogue's Kiss
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It didn’t make any sense to the old fighter. Half of his senses were telling him that she was dead but the other half insisted that she was alive. Especially the sixth sense that seemed to be an amalgam of all the others that told him when someone was watching him downwind or something was dropping on his head. This one screamed “SHE’S ALIVE!”
Drops of crimson and bloody footprints tracked the floor as he ran with the girl in his arms, Kitty close behind.
Beast was soon right beside him, sprinting for the med lab is huge leaps and bounds, making it there first and franticly setting up his equipment.
“Get her on the table!” Beast shouted, stretching surgery gloves on his huge paws.
Logan’s whole front was smeared in the girl’s blood as she was laid on the hard metal table. Without apology Beast reached down and ripped the girls blood soaked dress right down the middle from neck to pelvis. He asked what the hell was going on when the dress was laid bare.
The shaky timber of Logan’s voice nearly unnerved the reserved doctor.
“I don’t know, Hank! I fucking don’t know! I went outside to see what was going on and I stabbed her! I didn’t know! AND HALF-PINT GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” Logan screamed at the trembling girl by the door watching her previously dead and newly gutted friend about to be operated on. At the scream she jumped and ran out of the room to add her hysterical tears to the bloody boot prints in the hall.
The Professor rolled down the hallway on silent wheels, not changed from his suit as of yet. When Kitty saw him she couldn’t stop the hysteria from finding a voice.
“Professor! Rogue’s back but she’s dead! And hurt and I don’t know why she’s here and not dead and I cant…” here she broke down completely and fell to here knee’s in front of her mentor, her head resting on his lap, crying in wracking sobs.
Xavier was feeling the exact same confusion inside himself and had no answers for her. He simply stroked her hair and promised that he would find out what was happening. The rest of the students had woken up in the commotion, crowding into the medical hallway.
“Everybody go back to bed,” Xavier said, his warm calm washing out in his voice. “We will have an early morning meeting tomorrow in the living room. Now go.”
With the promise of answers in the morning they filed out.
Scott, clad in boxers and a loose shirt hung back with Jean close behind him, clothed in what the Professor knew to be on of Scott’s older shirts. Xavier’s over attentive mind found this a little strange but then scolded himself for thinking on such a thing when a young girl was still crying in his lap.
“Professor, what’s going on?” Scott asked, the ever-present leader coming forward.
“I am not sure, Scott,” he replied. “Jean, could you please take Kitty back to her room.” Jean quietly agreed and came forward to take Kitty back into the main house. Scott hung back still and looked at his teacher in some fear.
“Is it really Rogue in there?” he asked quietly. Xavier looked up stunned at the boy and asked how he had known that.
“Jean felt it when…” a nervous clearing of his throat. “She said that it was her but then kinda went into a trance for a sec and said that she was wrong.”
Xavier regarded the boy silently for a second before he spoke slowly. “It may very well be. I have not gone in yet. Go to bed, Scott. There is nothing you can do here.
Scott wanted to shout that there was plenty he could do but then realized that there really was nothing that he could do. He nodded and headed back down the hallway.
A shrill scream pierced the air, making the Professor cringe. There was something not quite human about that sound.
“TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!!!!”
While Xavier took care of crowd control in the hallway, Beast examined Rogue’s wounds, not letting the fact that the girl was supposed to be dead fetter with his job.
“Clotting has already taken place…” an amazed Beast mused, but he lost all hope when he felt the fragile, thin wrist. There was no pulse. A stethoscope told him her heart was lifeless in her chest. Wolverine turned away when Hank slowly shook his head.
The three bloody puncture wounds were now just clean holes, crusted over with blood, black pits set against sallow skin. Beast laid one finger lightly on the furthest right and it twitched violently under his touch. The blue doctor jerked his paw back and gasped. Wolverine whirled around at the sound and both men watched in amazement as the formerly lifeless body of Rogue start to writhe and moan loudly, body twisting in apparent pain. Her bared breasts rolled with new gasps of air. The wounds were now twitching spastically, making smacking sounds like wet lips when they closed and opened.
“Oh my stars and garters,” Beast quietly exclaimed as the holes began to shrink in their exercises. Soon they are just puckered little dots across her stomach, like miniature belly buttons.
The twin green eyes flew open in very much apparent life, staring right into the harsh fluorescent lights of the overheads. The scream she let out was of pure pain and agony. The speed with which she flew off the bed and crouched in the furthest corner took even Logan by surprise. Just a streak of black cuts the air before she is screaming in barely understandable words.
“TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!!!!”
Both men looked completely lost at sea before the Professor rolled through the swinging doors, quickly noting what was going on, taking images from both men’s minds. Times like these don’t call for politeness.
“Hank, turn down the lights if you would,” Xavier said loudly in the hysterical noise. The blue physician bounded over to the wall and turned off all but one set of lights, the furthest away from the girl.
She immediately quieted down and just crouched in a tight black ball in the corner, shivering violently.
Xavier rolled a little closer to the trembling creature, calling her softly. “Rogue?”
The head swept up and looked at him through threads of hair, perfectly still. She could have been confused for some horrible statue made to resemble terror.
Logan recognized the look. ‘Gone tharn.” He silently sent to Xavier. Those times when animals just stopped in front of your car. They go tharn.
Wolverine makes a subtle shift of weight. Nobody else would have noticed it but Rogue shrank back harder against the wall and shuddered.
“Logan, would you please wait outside,” Xavier asked.
It broke his heart to do it but he did as requested and walked through the swing doors. Rogue visibly relaxed and turned her gaze back to Xavier.
He knew it was a stupid question but he had to start somewhere, “are you okay?”
In a strained, croaking voice, the Rogue-thing answered, “no, ah’m not alright.”
“So I see. Would you come back over to the table and let Hank look at you? See how you are?” the gentleness was a caress. Soothing telepathic waves sent through the air to calm the girl. Whether they worked or not she slowly got to her feet and came back, holding the front of her dress together in a clenched fist.
When she had perched herself on the table, Beast walked slowly over to her and gently took her wrist checking her pulse, heartbeat and blood pressure. He looked at her newly formed scars, squinting in the dim, which should have taken a year to look as they did now. Her pupils were shined (accompanied by a short scream) and temperature taken. All the while he talked quietly asking her to open her mouth or hold out an arm. The last exercise was an odd one. He got a mirror from a drawer and held it in front of her face, more down so she couldn’t see just how ragged she looked.
“Just breath normally,” she did but the Professor failed to see the point of this test. After a minute Beast said all right and pulled it away. “Lie down, dear,” Beast said, gently urging her down. “You need rest. Would you like to sleep?”
Rogue simply nodded but just laid on her side, staring at the wall, her mind a pleasant blank.
Beast looks over at Xavier in a silent question. The professor nods and tentatively reaches into the girls mind. It was blank but only the exhausted and overloaded blank that was to be expected. But underneath it all was something bigger. Darker. And very deadly. Xavier tore himself away before he wanted to examine it and lulled the girl to sleep. Her green eyes shutting down.
The two men watched the girl who seemed to have aged ten years look for all the world like just a 16-year-old girl without a care in the world.
“Good lord, Hank, what is going on? The Professor breathed. The question was rhetorical but Beast answered anyway.
“If God had anything to do with this he did a rather incompetent job,” he had been gazing at Rogue but not looked at the man in the wheelchair. “Rogue has no pulse. No heart beat. No blood pressure. Her eyes are hypersensitive and her core temperature is about 80 degrees. When I placed the mirror in front of her face I was just going on a whim but it gave me results anyway. No fog condensed on the mirror, meaning no breath and something so frightening I almost shed all my fur.
“What?”
“Professor, she has no reflection.”