Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

Characters: Rogue, Pyro, Mystique

Warnings: coarse language; non-explicit allusions to brutal violence, non-con, and suicidal thoughts; very dark in mood

A/N: There is some Rogue/Pyro here, but it's mostly Rogue-centric. This is the product of insomnia and reading too much Sylvia Plath, so it's weird and experimental. Many lines from various poems in Ariel are quoted throughout.

D A M A G E

"Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive."

- Josephine Hart

It is not Logan or Bobby or even a kind stranger who finds her.

It is Mystique (because Raven is still a slave name, and she will never accept the chains the cure locked her into) who finds Marie (because Rogue chose to put on shackles far more binding than gloves).

It is Mystique who gathers the lump of blood and bruises and broken bones from the alley floor.

It is Mystique who wraps bandages, sets slings, sews stitches, provides ice packs and pills – antibiotic, analgesic, and morning-after.

Marie isn't sure which part is the worst: that nobody came to her rescue, that the only person who came to pick up the pieces is an old enemy, or that she needs rescuing or picking up at all. Three months ago, those men, those 'Friends of Humanity', would have been comatose at the first grab of Rogue's arm.

But it is not three months ago, and she is not Rogue anymore.

She lies in the bed in Mystique's apartment and stares at the flower pot on the windowsill (I didn't want any flowers, the words drift up from long-buried memories of English class in Mississippi, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty) and lets her mind wander anywhere but the recent past.

She asks her strange caretaker sometimes: why?

Mystique does not answer. Marie thinks it is because she knows that, regardless of the response, her strange patient will always answer: you should have left me to die.

Marie stares longingly at the full bottle of pills Mystique never leaves in her room, at the sharp edges of the mirror above the dresser and the thin, delicate skin of her inner wrists. She is too weak and too well-watched now, and perhaps it reminds her a little too much of taking the cure. The needle piercing her flesh had felt like dying, more than being trapped in Magneto's machine or plummeting out of the jet or squeezing Bobby's hand as her mind flew apart.

Which is appropriate, since it succeeded where the others failed. In trying to resurrect Marie, she killed Rogue.

(At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.)

And even now, Marie does not feel like the same girl she once was. That Marie was shattered to pieces when Rogue came along. Broken, like bits of glass. And just as full of underlying danger.

(But they pulled me out of the sack, and they stuck me together with glue.)

*

Marie thinks several weeks have gone by when she opens her eyes to find that Mystique is not standing in the doorway alone this time. She has brought John. Pyro. Whatever he's calling himself these days.

(There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge)

The irony is that this is Mystique's version of kindness, getting her a familiar face. Perhaps she hopes that Marie will find some comfort in that, will stop wishing for death. Perhaps she thinks that John getting vengeance on Marie's behalf will help. Perhaps she was simply unwilling to go to the Mansion.

In any case, it doesn't work.

Back when she was Rogue, she would imagine running into John again in scenarios that ranged from the sickeningly optimistic to the most brutally pessimistic. The reality is worse. Because hatred and rage from her former friend would have hurt terribly, but it wouldn't have been unexpected. Rogue absorbed John once, and his voice was in her head when the cure was announced, when she took it, and everything in between. Rogue and Marie both know full well what he thinks of her decision.

Seeing pity in John's eyes is much, much worse.

She really must be even more pathetic than his voice used to taunt and shout that she was, for Pyro to pity her.

(And there is a charge, a very large charge, for a word or a touch or a bit of blood)

Back when they were friends, when she was Rogue and he was John, he never pitied her. It was the first thing she came to appreciate about him, the thing that made her look past the sarcasm and sullenness and arrogance and consider him her own friend, rather than just Bobby's. He was the only one in the Mansion who didn't pity her, or tolerate her bouts of self-pity.

Like Logan, he never coddled her.

Unlike Logan, he occasionally took that a step further, arguing that she should see her mutation as a gift, not a curse. One that came with a price, yes, but what in life didn't? John berated Bobby's acquiescence to her demurring from touch, her fear of her own power, and what he deemed her 'tendency to play the martyr'. She had to stop feeling sorry for herself and waiting for other people to save her, he said.

John practically wrote the book on how you had to be cruel to be kind.

(I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern.)

And so Marie cringes away from the sight of his pity. She would prefer that he sneer at her and point out that she brought this upon herself. She would prefer that he laugh at the irony of the former untouchable being in this position. She would prefer that he burn her to a crisp.

Instead, John sighs and comes to sit next to her bed. Perhaps Pyro has learned how to be kind to be cruel.

*

Only once does Marie ask, "Are you going to send me back to the Mansion?"

Mystique glances up from her book with one quirked brow. "Would you like me to?"

Marie considers for a full minute. "No."

Mystique nods in approval and returns her gaze to her book. "I wouldn't keep you here against your will, but they can't give you what you need." She turns a page and does not explain the cryptic remark.

But Marie is glad. She doesn't want to go back there, to that place of bright smiles and optimism and sympathy for humankind. She doesn't want to face more pity. Above all, she doesn't want to hear them tell her that it wasn't her fault (when she still mostly believes it was).

And only once does Marie ask, "What happened to Erik?"

She's not sure if she is asking about whether he's alive or how he's coping with being cured or if Mystique intends to bring him by. She's not sure what she wants the answers to those questions to be, answers Mystique does not give. She only knows that she understands him now.

Rogue thought her mutation was a prison – her skin made up of impenetrable bars, her gloves shackles, her inability to touch like being shut in 'the hole' for years. Marie realizes now that her mutation also freed her – from the fear women around the world carry, from being an easy target of those who hate mutants, from being helpless. Because that's what she was, in that alley. Alone and surrounded by those who didn't care that she had been cured ("a mutie was a mutie, no matter what needles she took"), she was truly helpless. Bleeding and screaming and unable to fight back, she was truly a prisoner of her own flesh.

(Your body hurts me as the world hurts God.)

Marie understands Erik as she would never allow herself to understand him before. Rogue had his memories, but it was against her will, to her near-death, and she refused to sympathize with him. But now she knows all too well how he felt. His mutation manifested in Auschwitz, but he was too starved and too traumatized to make it work much. He could feel metal but he couldn't command it, he couldn't save himself or anyone else, and he will never, ever forgive himself for that.

The only thing worse than being powerless is knowing that you have power but cannot touch it.

(It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults that kill, that kill, that kill.)

And only once does Marie ask, "Why do you make me keep living?"

Because she knows Mystique understands. She is a mutant who spent time in prison. She was 'cured' too.

It's John, standing in the doorway with light behind him casting him in silhouette, who answers. "We're searching for a way to reverse the cure."

*

Marie sleeps all day and wanders around Mystique's apartment all night. Her body is still stitching itself back together, her limbs still sore, her skin still a patchwork of blues and purples, and the fragility obscene.

John enters and Marie turns away, facing the window, not wanting him to see her like this. He's seen her much worse already, but the instinct is still there. Even when she is fully healed, her skin will be delicate, touchable, human. Her downfall, her damnation.

She doesn't know that the moonlight casts an ethereal glow upon her. It bathes her in light, and the starburst of yellow at her eye, the stain of indigo across her cheekbone, the jagged red and purple along her jaw, they all melt away. Like the moon that illuminates it, her beauty shines despite its flaws.

(You leave the same impression, of something beautiful, but annihilating)

John's fingers curl into his palms, and he has never wanted to find the reversal for the cure so badly. It burns fiercely within him and he has to make a concerted effort not to light his wrist flint. The same way he fights himself not to hunt down the baselines who touched her and make them pay.

It is her revenge to take, as Mystique never ceases to remind him.

John hopes she will. Because the thought of her choosing not to take her mutation back, not to take vengeance, not to take what is rightfully hers, makes him even more furious. The X-Men have done enough damage to her already and he'll be damned if he lets them continue to hold her back, push her down, when they've all but abandoned her.

(There's fire between us. Is there still no place turning and turning in the middle air, untouched and untouchable?)

Marie shoots him a look over her shoulder. "Plannin' on reading me the riot act now that I'm not quite as pathetic?"

She uses that word altogether too much around him, John thinks. He feels a bit paranoid, wondering if she somehow knew about that conversation with Bobby in front of the clinic, if Iceman told her before he let her run off, alone and vulnerable. He'd meant what he said that day and he wasn't sorry for it, but with the state of mind Marie is in now, she hasn't yet realized that she doesn't have to be this way.

And so he ignores her question (an invitation for pity or anger or both). "We're close to finding a way to reverse it now," he tells her.

Marie makes a little 'hmm' sound that draws his attention to her still-swollen mouth.

"Are you going to take it?" he asks, trying not to let his tone betray anything.

"Do I have a choice?" she counters immediately, and John almost smiles, because that is definitely more Rogue than Marie.

"We won't make you take it against your will, but if you don't, you'll never get what you need."

"And what is it that you and Mystique think I need? To be a mutant again? To get revenge?"

"You need to accept yourself as you are."

Marie turns back toward the window. A part of her wants to say it's too little too late for that. But another part, the part that remembers what it felt like to be Rogue, wants to tell him: she wishes she had, wishes she could.

She dreams about it sometimes, unsure whether to label those visions 'nightmares' or 'fantasies', in which her skin is resurrected. She dreams about finding her attackers, and ignoring their pleas to stop touching them the way they ignored hers. She dreams about having them cornered and sliding her finger (or her tongue) along John's collarbone, and burning everything around them to ash.

(An animal insane for the destination, the bloodspot, the face at the end of the flare.)

"How do I do that?" Marie asks, turning around again. She is startled to find that John closed the gap between them when her back was turned, but she is not afraid. He is standing so close that she can feel the heat of his body, his gaze, his anger, but it doesn't scare her. She looks into those terrible (beautiful) eyes of his.

"You ask yourself two questions," Pyro tells her. "First – would you rather be dangerous to others, or have them be dangerous to you? Because, if you're a mutant, it's one or the other, no in-between."

Marie snorts; the answer is obvious. Of course, she knows that she would have thought the obvious answer an entirely different one only a few months ago.

(I shall bury the wounded like pupas, I shall count and bury the dead.)

"Second…" He reaches up, very slowly, as if concerned that she will recoil. When she doesn't, he tucks a white strand of hair behind her ear. "How far are you willing to go to ensure that what happened to you never happens again? What would you be willing to do to protect yourself and yours?"

Marie (or is it Rogue?) knows that John answered this question for himself on a porch in Boston, what seems like a lifetime ago. The answer came to him without any hesitation or remorse. She had felt it as surely as she felt the pulse of his blood and his fire beneath her fingertips, and it had scared her. Now, she knows her answer is precisely the same as his.

"Anything."

*

Marie is accepted back into the Mansion with open arms and pitying looks. Inside her, amusement battles with annoyance, contempt with guilt.

She reminds herself: no one is going to get hurt, and many mutants are going to benefit. She repeats John and Mystique's words to herself: the X-Men will always be afraid to go to the lengths that are needed because they refuse to admit the depths humanity can sink to. She remembers Erik: freedom is only guaranteed to those who are willing to fight for it, by any means necessary.

(I know the bottom, Marie thinks as she walks the familiar corridors and smiles at the familiar faces. It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.)

She waits three nights. One to be examined by Hank McCoy and note where he keeps the sedatives. One to flinch away from even Logan's touch, and pretend it's entirely for the obvious reason. One to learn in casual (awkward, guilt-ridden, stilted) conversation with Bobby where the boy codenamed "Leech" sleeps.

On the fourth night, she slips out of bed and removes the syringes and the stolen sedatives from her duffel bag. She sneaks into the right room, makes sure all three boys are sound asleep, and then takes what they need from Jimmy. A few vials of blood he'll never miss, though Marie knows full well how the others would react if they found out.

"It was wrong to violate someone like that, Marie."

Even if the X-Men allowed the government to do far worse to the boy for years, and few of them have any idea what true violation feels like.

"The Brotherhood has obviously taken advantage of your pain and fear and brainwashed you."

Despite the fact that for the first time in years, she isn't afraid, and she has something to do with her pain besides suffer it in silence.

"But all you ever wanted was to be able to touch."

They had never understood that it wasn't really about wanting to touch – it was about wanting the freedom to touch. Wanting freedom period. They had refused to help her, and the lack of control over her own body and psyche suffocated her until she took the first escape hatch she could find. Only to realize too late that she had traded one prison for another.

No more, Marie thinks as she slides the vials into her jacket, and heads for the window.

(They thought death was worth it, but I have a self to discover, a queen.)

*

"Don't look at me like that," John snarls.

Marie is defensive. "Like what?"

"Like you expect to be pitied just because you have a little longer to wait."

It's so absurd that Marie almost laughs. "You're the last person I want pity from, John."

(You are the one solid spaces lean on, envious.)

Her words or her expression must reveal what she thinks of him, because he doesn't correct her on the name she uses, and some of the ruthless intensity in him eases. "I've never pitied you," he says bluntly. "You don't need it."

Marie takes a shaky breath and watches him turn away from her to talk to some of the others. She realizes only now that he's right, that it wasn't pity that she saw in his eyes that first day. It was something else – something softer than she had ever seen from him before, something she doesn't quite know how to interpret, something that makes her abruptly, fiercely sick of waiting.

She cuts through the crowd of assorted Brotherhood members and others like her, who had come to see the mistake they made in mutilating themselves. Outside, she finds Mystique holding a syringe to the pale underside of her arm. It takes a moment before it registers that the syringe is empty. Marie holds her breath as Mystique slowly raises her eyes to meet hers. When they flash yellow, both women smile.

Marie reaches for the second needle with fingers that are bare and shaking. It hurts, but it is like coming home.

(you are always there, tremulous breath at the end of my line, curve of water upleaping to my water rod, dazzling and grateful, touching and sucking)

*

Rogue tracks and corners the first one all on her own, as a matter of principle. Mystique had understood; John had been livid. But his fury drains out of him when she returns, shaking, torn between laughter and tears. She wants to run into his arms, but she can't do that anymore.

(You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames.)

She can't do that yet, Rogue corrects herself. There is a difference.

The X-Men had told her, back in the beginning, that there was no difference – that her mutation was one that was probably beyond control.

And even Magneto (and this is the true difference between him and Erik) would rather use her as a pawn than truly empower her.

Like John, she has no use for either anymore.

(It means: no more idols but me, me and you.)

A new recruit to Mystique's Brotherhood, a telepath, accompanies her to deal with the second one. Rogue didn't use her mutation to kill the first because, frankly, she didn't want someone like that swimming around in her mind permanently. But she wants to kill at least one of them in what is, to her, the natural way.

The telepath places shields around her mind for her, so that Rogue can enjoy the terror, pain, and death her touch causes without being touched by it herself.

It occurs to Rogue, as she watches the last flickers of life fade from the man's eyes, that this is precisely what the humans fear, and that the X-Men share the same fear. They want their gods and their devils far away, figures with power over life and death that are distant and detached. Not here on earth, here among them, to make every day Judgment Day.

(Herr God, Herr Lucifer. Beware. Beware.)

When the time comes to finish off the third and final one, the ringleader, Rogue agrees to let John come with her. She takes her time. She uses fists and feet to break his body as hers was broken. Then, and only then, does she step back and slip off her gloves.

John steps closer from behind her, so that her back is against his chest and the warmth of his breath tickles her ear. Rogue leans into him and hears the wrist flint ignite. John drags a single finger down the graceful line of her neck, across her bare shoulders, and heat floods her at the contact. Rogue raises a hand to draw the fire up, and smiles at her victim.

(Let their souls writhe in a dew, incense in my track.)

With the fire swirling around them, they must look like demons, Rogue thinks. But it isn't either of them going to hell tonight.

*

Erik looks up from his chessboard, and finds the spitting image of Jean Grey standing before him. He nods respectfully, a wry smile twisting his mouth slightly. "Bravo, my dear. A cure for the cure."

Mystique sits down across from him. "You shouldn't be so surprised."

It is a reproach of a dozen layers.

Erik accepts it with a brief closing of his eyes. In retrospect, it had been a mistake to abandon her. Mystique was always his most dedicated follower, fanatically loyal to both him and the cause. Along with her resourcefulness and ruthlessness, she had been the perfect second-in-command.

He should have known that being reduced to a human was only a temporary setback where she was concerned.

(Out of the ash I rise with my red hair)

"However did you manage to get a sample of the boy's DNA, when he is so carefully guarded by the saints in leather?" Erik asks, opening his eyes, because Mystique's methods were always a fascinating study in cold-blooded cunning.

"Rogue," Mystique answers with a self-satisfied smirk that looks very out of place on the countenance of Jean Grey. "And I have every confidence that she will continue to be as valuable to the Brotherhood in the future."

Erik is genuinely shocked this time. "How?"

Mystique gives an elegant shrug. "I paid three baselines to do something rather…distasteful. I ensured a rescue and a reunion. And then I let nature take its course."

The word 'distasteful' from Mystique's mouth is never a good sign. It translates into the kind of dirty work that only she ever did, because even the other Brotherhood members would balk at it. Erik doesn't ask, and Mystique doesn't give him any more details.

Instead, she removes a syringe from the inner pocket of her jacket, and sets it in the middle of the chessboard. Erik doesn't bother asking if it is truly the reversal serum or if it is Mystique's revenge for his abandonment; they both know she is a virtuoso of deceit and that he is going to take his chances regardless.

There is nothing more to say, and Mystique rises to her feet and walks away. She doesn't have to stick around to watch Erik gain his power back, only to suffer a stroke minutes later. This is vengeance, but it is also pragmatism – she is the Brotherhood's leader now, and she will suffer no contest for leadership.

That brings to mind her two young protégés and Mystique smiles fondly. It is regrettable, the lengths she had to go to, but in the end, she considers the price paid well worth it. The mutant race no longer has the cure to worry about, Rogue and Pyro will keep each other content, and the Brotherhood has more committed mutants among its ranks.

When the tide of the world turns to war once more, Mystique has every confidence that she will succeed where Erik failed.

(And I eat men like air.)

A/N: The various lines of poetry are all from Sylvia Plath's Ariel, and are from the following poems, in order: Tulips and Daddy (first part), Lady Lazarus (second part), Fever 103º and Elm (third part), The Rival and Getting There (fourth part), Elm again, as well as Stings (fifth part), Nick and the Candlestick and Medusa (sixth part), and Poppies in July, The Munich Mannequins, and Lady Lazarus and Getting There again (seventh part).