AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following is just an idle character encounter set back before O:ZT, involving a situation I REALLY think Marvel should have dealt with (boo on them!). Basically, I'm almost asleep at 4:18 am; oooo, groggy AND hideously writer-blocked...not good. I decided to try to force something out anyway, just to see what would happen. I'm not happy with the result. But what the heck, at least it's SOMETHING. :)
DISCLAIMER: Marvel's characters belong to Marvel and are used without permission; the ideas belong to me, and I'd like to be contacted before any archiving-type stuff might take place, though I have no clue who would actually WANT this piece... Feedback if you like at kielle@subreality.com!
Warning: strong language and hints at mature subjects.

by Kielle

"Sugah, ya really should eat something."

The room was gloomy, the curtains drawn; Rogue gripped the wooden tray tightly in both hands, feeling her cheery smile to be rather wasted as she peered into the the dimness. The kitchen had been bright and airy, for the day outside was bright under a hot summer sun. As her eyes adjusted tardily to the darkened bedroom, she could barely make out a lump under the bedcovers. The woman bit back a sigh and stepped over the threshold.

"It's tunafish, just the way ya like it," she said brightly, as if absolutely nothing was wrong. "Jean told me you only eat tuna sandwiches with Best Foods mayonnaise, an' all we had was Miracle Whip, on account'a it bein' Bobby's favorite, so Ah sent Remy to the store for the other kind all special-like. You shoulda heard him bitch up a storm--"

The lump in the bed shifted slightly. "I don't want it. I'm not hungry."

"Girl, y'haven't eaten for two days. You've GOT to eat somethin'."

"Leave it on the dresser then. Whatever makes you happy. I don't give a damn."

Rogue felt her brow furrowing into a frown and hastily smoothed it out into a neutral expression, carefully plastering the smile back into place. Gently, as if setting down a precious bauble, she laid the lunch tray on the dresser. Faintly, she could hear the sounds of a baseball game out on the lawn, and she desperately wanted to join in, but not until--

Until...

What WAS she expecting from this encounter? Every time she brought something nice up to the guest bedroom for the X-Men's almost forgotten guest, this was what she got. Nothing. Worse than nothing. And every time she simply smiled like a HappyHousemaker Barbie and walked away again, respecting their visitor's need to be alone.

Not this time. NOT this time.

Her fists were already set on her hips without her even realizing that they'd flown there. She almost said something tart to the lump in the bed but caught herself just in time. "Look," she said more gently, "Ah understand that you've been through something terrible, an' Ah know how much you must miss him, but you've got to get on with your life. Ya can't just sit in here--"

"Watch me."

Rogue blew out a breath in exasperation. Without hardly even meaning to, she strode over to the bed and yanked the blankets back.

"Ah am NOT stupid, gal. That's just self-pity!"

"You'd know, wouldn't you?"

She chose to ignore that. "C'mon. Up with ya. When's the last time y'took a shower? Don't make me toss you in there mahself--"

She wasn't sure afterwards if she'd actually meant to try to pull the girl out of the bed (and, perhaps by proxy, out of her self-destructive funk) or was just bluffing to see what kind of reaction she could provoke. In the end, it didn't matter either way. Her gloved hand closed on one alarmingly bony shoulder -- and slipped right off again as if greased.

Completely unaffected by a grip that could crush steel, the girl in the bed glared hatefully up at her. Deliberately, she gathered the blankets around herself again until only her eyes were showed, dead blue and ringed with shadows. Rogue realized belatedly that she might have gone a step too far by resorting to physical force, and thus frantically tried to back up onto the solid ground of reason once more.

"Sally--"

"Fuck. Off."

"Fine. Fine! See if Ah care, see if you starve, Ah don't care!"

Rogue stormed out, slamming the door behind herself for good measure.

Sally Blevins simply rolled over to face the wall once more, staring blankly at nothing.

Predictably, Rogue was back an hour later, shifting nervously from one foot to the other as she stood indecisively in the hallway outside the guest bedrrom. She felt simply awful. She'd had no right to act like that, no right at all! Sure, she was frustrated; sure, she felt helpless. But that gave her no right to lose her temper at the girl, no right at all. She was better than that. Wasn't she? Of course she was.

Anyway, if she'd been in Sally's shoes, wouldn't she have done the exact same thing? Withdrawn, lashed out perhaps? Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, she could understand it. It was the sort of thing people did when someone they loved was murdered right in front of their eyes...

The X-woman took a deep breath and gingerly opened the guest bedroom door once more. She didn't bother to knock -- rude though it might seem, she'd learned days again that there would never be an answer. "Sally girl? It's me." She padded across the room, finding the bed by touch in the nigh darkness, following its comforting contours with her fingers until she encountered a foot underneath the covers and thus located a spot next to it where she could perch without squashing the bed's inhabitant. "Ah came to say that Ah'm sorry."

No answer.

"Ah don't blame you. Ah really don't. Ah was rude and inconsiderate, and Ah'd like to make it up to ya somehow."

The bed shifted slightly under her. "I don't want any more pity from you," a voice replied softly but clearly from under the blankets. "If I want to eat, I'll come downstairs to eat. If I want to shower, I'll shower. Just leave me alone. All right? THAT'S how you can apologize."

"Ah just want t'help."

A sound that might have been a low bark of cynical laughter.

"Oh RIGHT. You just want to help me because it makes YOU feel like a saint."

Rogue bridled slightly until she reminded herself that she was there to apologize, not to be goaded into another rash childish action she'd regret later. "Ah'm sorry that's what ya think. Jeannie told me a little about where ya come from, an' Ah'd understand if ya cain't quite believe that someone would want t'offer help with nothin' expected in return..."

A touselled blonde head popped out from the woolen cocoon, an indignant light glittering in her eyes. "Oh god, don't tell me that Saint Jean gave you the whole 'poor abused little Morlock girl' sob story!"

Rogue blinked. "It wasn't true?"

"Oh, it's true enough, but shit, she didn't have to go telling to get you all sympathetic for me."

"That's NOT why Ah'm here. Ah want to..." Rogue paused, not sure how to phrase it delicately. Sally's expression hardened, her eyes like diamonds.

"To help me 'get over' Rusty's death, is that it? To merrily skip out of this room, to 'rejoin life' and all you happy happy X-Men, tral-la-la? I said it before and I'll say it again: Fuck. You. Get out."

Her piece said, Sally promptly vanished into her nest again. Rogue raked a frustrated hand through her white forelock, holding her temper on a short rein. "If Ah didn't know better, Ah'd say that you LIKE bein' all penned up in here like a weepin' widow," she said tightly instead. "Ah know he was your friend, an' it's horrible what happened to him, but--"

"We were going to get married."

"--What?"

"I SAID, we were going to get married. Dunno how we were going to manage it up there in space, but we were going to try. Maybe even sneak away to Earth for a honeymoon. Maybe never come back to this whole stupid 'hero' thing. Neither one of us ever wanted to be a hero, did you know that? No way no how. But we got stuck into it, thanks to Freedom Force and X-Factor and those damn New Mutants and yeah, you X-Men too. Thanks for nothing." There was a sniffle from the depths of the blankets. "Oh, I don't know, maybe he DID want to be a hero, what with the whole 'nice Navy boy' schtick he was on when it all started. But I never wanted to be a hero..."

"You've got to let it go, gal," Rogue said softly. "Not just Rusty's...death, but everything else. Yeah, Jean told me about yoah poppa too, an' Ah'm sorry for that too. You've gotta move on..."

She was abruptly almost thrown to the floor as Sally shot upright in bed, face taut with fury. "How dare you?! How dare YOU come in here, telling ME to let the past go?!? Let me tell YOU something, 'gal.' I'll bet Jean told you why I can't control my powers all that good? Yeah, daddy was a real asshole. Manifesting my forcefield was the only thing that kept him from beating the living daylights out of me...and yeah, after that I COULDN'T turn it off for a long time. But I learned. I learned! Rusty and I, we learned to control our powers together. That was the magic of it, he and I. I HAVE laid my past to rest. But I don't think YOU have. So you have no right to judge ME. No -- goddamn -- RIGHT!"

Startled by this explosion of vehemance after so many days of limp nothingness, Rogue was staring slack-jawed at the incensed demoness who had risen from the bed to verbally tear into her. "What the hell are ya talkin' about?"

Sally merely stared pointedly at Rogue's gloves and long sleeves -- protective measures which contained her power to absorb psyches and powers on contact. Rogue flushed. "That has nothin' ta do with it. We're talkin' about movin' ahead with life, not about powers an' so-such."

"I'll bet we ARE talking about clinging to the past, actually."

There was an almost unholy light in Sally's eyes as she lashed out at her infuriatingly smug, self-rightous self-appointed nursemaid. "I don't need to get Jean to squeal to me to figure out what's going on with YOU. Little Miss 'Oh Poor Me, I Can't Touch Anyone, Oh Boo Hoo.' Lady...deep down in a place you don't like to go, you don't WANT to be touched."

Rogue jerked at that. "What did you say?" It came out as a disbelieving whisper, like the first breeze of an approaching hurricane.

"Did I hit a nerve? Oh, you probably don't even realize it yourself...but ain't it a great excuse? No one can touch you, so you can't get hurt." Her tone dropped hard, from mocking to bitter. "Trust me -- I understand these things. Think hard...think real carefully..."

Sally smiled mirthlessly as she drove relentlessly on, looking for a weak spot, searching for a line she could cross in order to completely infuriate her unwanted visitor. She was not usually like this -- it was as if she was possessed by a blind hatred that rode on the rising swells of a sudden overwhelming urge to hurt someone as badly as she'd been hurt. Rusty was gone, and these, these hypocritical PEOPLE with their stupid "dream" sent her cute little sandwiches and a stuffed animal or two and a standing invitation to blithely rejoin the life which had abandoned the man she loved to a horrible, unmourned death.

"I'll bet," she guessed blindly, probing, aiming only to hurt, "you didn't get along all that well with YOUR 'poppa' either, huh? Did he hit you? Or did he do worse...?"

Rogue...froze.

And turned sheet white.

Without a word, she rose and fled from the room.

Baseless rage broken like a sudden fever, Sally -- "Skids" to her old friends, friends who in the end had abandoned her -- could do nothing except stare after her with her mouth agape. She'd expected the older woman to color angrily, to argue back, to deny it -- hell, even perhaps to take a swing at her. Not to look like that...not to look as if her most terrible fear had been callously ripped loose and laid out for all to see...

A flash memory struck Skids then: the almost distant feel of pearls slipping over and over again through her frictionless fingers, tears of shock and frustration coursing over her cheeks as she tried in vain to damp down her newfound protective ability long enough to collect the scattered remains of her mother's precious necklace...

If a few bruises and black eyes could result in months of lack of control over an uncontrollable forcefield, what could cause a girl to completely, permanently lose her grip on a power that would brutally stripmine anyone who touched her (~again~) in any way shape or form?

She didn't want to go after Rogue. She didn't want to leave the room she'd been given, to leave the monotonous but somehow safe comfort of her solitary angry grief. Hell, she didn't even LIKE Rogue -- probably wouldn't have liked her even if they'd met on better terms. She was too artificial for Sally's liking, a plastic woman with a plastic smile...

And now you know WHY she's so fake, her awakening conscience whispered in the back of her mind, and you really are a bitch if you don't at least try to make amends. It won't kill you to go down a few doors, you know where her room is, you can see it from the bathroom...

I suppose, she thought slowly as she stood up and dreamily wrapped the bedsheet around herself, I suppose it wouldn't be all that hard to walk down there and at least apologize...

No, it wouldn't. So get moving!

So Skids went, leaving her grieving bower behind. For the moment only, of course. But moments add up...and time goes on, dragging life along with it whether it likes it or not.

.-= Finis? =-.

Afterword: <grimace> Well joy, what a lousy pointless ending. I ran out of steam, I wholeheartedly admit it ... but at least it's SOMETHING. I'm willing to try ANYTHING to try to hammer through my writer's block right now...gyaaaah help me... :) I've actually had this theory about Rogue's (ahem) problem bouncing around for some time now ... if anyone is intrigued enough by it to continue this or to use it in an entirely new venue, I'd be delighted to hand it over -- just say the word...

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