rogue. (absorptions) wrote in age_of_miracles, @ 2007-12-15 21:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | pyro, rogue |
Log: Pyro and Rogue
Who: John Allerdyce and Marie Allerdyce
Where: Some random little town outside of Hartford. I don’t know where. But they’re all called Middletown or Southtown or Northtown or other stupid names.
When: December 15th, 2007
What: Since Rogue ran off, John goes to find her. And finds a very unstable, very freaked out Rogue. And then he backhands her to get her to calm the fuck down already before she starts hyperventilating.
John had been searching for her for days now, and it was like a motherfucking nightmare.
They had a Nor'easter heading their way soon and there'd already been a blizzard and John was freezing, bundled up as much as he possibly could be and driving around. Walking through the woods, stopping in every convenience store and asking if they'd seen the woman with the strange white streaks in her hair. No? He wanted to torch anyone who gave him a negative answer.
Hartford was a big city but John had no luck searching... so he'd gone elsewhere, had gone outside, to the smaller, towns surrounding it where he supposed people would no more. It felt colder here and he was shivering, constantly smoking and trying to get just a little bit of warmth from every cigarette. By Saturday night, he was panicking, thinking that maybe Rogue was dead. Or maybe she didn't want to be found. She was unstable, he knew that much, but that was about all he knew.
Somewhere in a small town just outside Hartford, he slumped against his car and lit up another cigarette. He'd search all through the night if he had to, he'd go trudging through the storm... he hated this. He hated it so much he couldn't enjoy his cigarette. Throwing it down, he gave a scream of frustration and turned, kicking the front tire of his car, over and over again, until his toes ached.
Rogue had literally walked right through the storm, definitely slowly, but she’d been persistent ---- and more than a little in a daze ---- and had eventually made her way out of Hartford. She couldn’t have really said what she was really trying to do, just that she’d gone out to pick up some things from the store, leaving John behind because he’d been tired, and understandably so, considering how often she was draining him these days. And, at some point, before she’d even reached her destination, she’d doubled over with the worst and most sudden migraine she could remember. And everything after that was a haze.
Her head was throbbing, her toes and fingers were partially frozen, her hair was practically frosted over from the snow and sleet and cold, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was typically mostly covered anyway she probably would have frozen to death.
But she wasn’t really thinking about it rationally like that, wasn’t thinking that maybe she should go inside and warm up or, more specially, go back to the hotel in Hartford. Rogue wasn’t running or trying to keep from being found and it was sheer dumb luck [or a lack thereof, depending on who you asked] that no one could remember seeing her. Or maybe it was just that she hadn’t been inside at all and most people were stayed out of the cold. Either way, when she saw John’s car, it made her stop, suddenly, like a deer caught in the headlights, recognizing it, on some level anyway, while still trying to place it.
John gave the car one last kick -- and the front bumper fell right off.
Well, shit. That was the last straw, and he very nearly sobbed, tearing off his hat and throwing it onto the ground, turning when he realized he heard someone behind him.
"Rogue. Oh, my God. Oh, my God." And then he was wrapping his arms around her, tugging her in close so violently that he was sure he heard some joints pop.
“…John?” It felt like she hadn’t had seen him in ages, not just for the few days she’d been missing. And, in a weird way, Rogue really hadn’t, her mind being such a mess that it wasn’t really her. Even now, she wasn’t sure that, if asked, she classify this as ‘her’. Everything was just fractured and pounding and tearing apart in her head and it hurt. It needed to stop.
Rogue grit her teeth, hissing when he pulled her in. He was warm and she was so cold that it was almost unpleasant to be this close to his body heat. She wasn’t even shivering, like her body had given up trying to keep itself warm.
"Where the hell were you?" he snapped, pulling back to look at her, his eyes wide and panicked. "What the fuck were you thinking, just---just walking off like that? What are you, five? Jesus motherfucking Christ, Rogue."
Rogue barely reacted to the admonishment. She would have told him to fuck off if she’d walked off because she was pissed about something, and if she was hurt or scared she probably would have recoiled. Instead, she just blinked at him, slowly. “I didn’t ---- I don’t ----” She dropped to crouch down her head dropping into her gloved hands like it was too much effort to stay standing. “My head hurts. I need to fix it.”
She wasn't okay, and John flinched, bending down to touch her hair. "Okay. Okay." Great. What the fuck was he supposed to do? "You know what? We're going to go back to the Lair. We're going to go home and we're going to help you. Okay? You just have to come with me. You know me."
“I can’t walk that far. I can’t ---- I tried. And then it started to snow. And I need ----” Rogue lifted her head, wincing at the movement, expression confused as her mind struggled to figure out what it was that she needed so badly. As it was, if she’d been fully conscious of what was happening, she might have realized that her mind was shutting down to protect her from thinking about the things she’d done in the past few months now that the last of Max’s absorbed psyche was slowly fading. But all she was really aware of was that she was in pain. “I need more. John. I can’t go back to… I can’t…”
She wasn’t even talking about the Lair, since that was where she’d been heading. She meant going back to being the way she was before she’d absorbed what ever it was that had made her, frankly, batshit crazy.
And John was terrified. Nothing short of terrified. He was shaking, wrapping his arms around her and trying to be comforting even though he was cold ad confused. "I----oh, God, Rogue," he whispered, kissing her ear. "We'll get in the car. I got all our stuff already, we get in the car and we go home, okay? It's not a long drive.. I'll take you home and we'll sort all this out. You don't have to think about anything."
Clenching her hands in his jacket ---- and it hurt to do that, bending her fingers when they were so stiff and cold ---- Rogue shook her head. “John. I need more. I need more and I’ll be okay. Just… just a little.” She started to shake a little then, his body warmth starting to warm her up just enough that her body’s own self-preservation started to kick in. If it hadn’t been for the pounding in her head, it would have hurt like a bitch. “It wears off. It wears off if I don’t keep ----”
"You need a little more what. Tell me what you need and if I can get it for you I will, okay? At least----come on, get up, get in the car. I'm freezing and I bet you are, too. I'll turn the heat on. That, amazingly, is probably the only damn thing that works in this car."
Rogue nodded a little, tightening her grip on his coat to help herself get back to her feet. It was painful and she could feel everything creaking and groaning at the effort. “More in my head,” she whispered. “It’s wearing off and it hurts.”
"Come here." John pressed his cheek up against Rogue's----he didn't know if she wanted him or anyone else but he could feed her addiction for now, as best he could.
“Not you. Not you.” Rogue literally flinched, jerking her cheek back. “I’ve already taken ---- God, I’ve practically been killing you…” Her eyes went a little wide before her immediately shut off that train of thought because it could delve to deeply into anything else she’d done.
"Whatever," John muttered, even though it was true. "You're sick, you need help. I think you need your own thoughts back, not anyone else's... and... if that means not touching anyone for a while, it means not touching anyone." He brushed Rogue's hair out of her eyes gently. "I don't care if you need a fix. You're not going to get one." This sounded... very familiar. If anyone knew how to break an addictive habit, it was John.
“John.” It was said as a plaintive, pleading whine. “John. I need it. I need it. You can’t let me go back to that.” Because, if anything had Rogue terrified more than anything it else, it was the thought of being fully conscious and back in control of her own mind with the knowledge of everything that had gone on in the past couple of months. “I did this for you. You can’t ---- you can’t keep me from ---- I did all of this for you.”
John was barely feeling the cold now, his concern for Rogue overriding just about everything else. "You did all what for me? You made yourself nuts? You---you drove yourself crazy so you're shaking like a junkie on withdrawal? Don't tell me you did this for me. God, please don't fucking tell me that."
“I made myself the perfect Brotherhood member.” Granted, she was, amazingly, considering how insane some of the Brotherhood was, a little crazier than the average member, but still. It had made her like it, hadn’t it? Had her out doing things for the Brotherhood that she normally wouldn’t have agreed to and had her enjoying every second of it.
John gulped. "Rogue, that's not funny. That's not fucking funny."
“I’m not being funny,” Rogue said softly, fingers twitching in the material of his jacket. “Isn’t ---- the way I was ---- I’m always going to be an X-Man. People are always going to think you’re… you’re weak or stupid for being with me. I don’t know how else to fix that. I don’t want to hold you back. And Eric ---- Eric won’t ---- I’m trying to help you.”
"Okay, babe," John whispered, kissing her hair. "Okay. We're going to take you home. We're going to take you back to the Lehnsherr house in Salem Center and warm you up in front of a nice fire and calm you down. Give you some time to think and rest and break this habit. You're a hell of a lot stronger than you think you are. All right? So don't fucking tell me you can't handle this. Making yourself batshit crazy isn't the answer. I love my wife, I don't love what my wife thinks I want."
“No,” Rogue said vehemently, shaking her head and gripping his coat like she thought that would help get her point across. “He’s not there. He’s not there and you can’t… you can’t… I need this. You’re not listening to me. Why won’t you listen to me.”
"I am listening to you. I am listening to you and what I know is that whoever you're keeping in the spider cells needs to go. You can't keep draining him. You can't. It's making you sick. It's making you crazy. You can't keep doing this, Rogue. It's not good for you, it's breaking your mind." John held her firmly, refusing to give in to her. "It's not going to be pretty and it's not going to be easy, but the best thing to do is either to kill him or let him go. You can't absorb him anymore."
“I have to. I have to. You don’t understand.” She was practically babbling, wild-eyed and terrified, wrenching herself back and stumbling away from him. If she stayed like this for too long, if she started thinking rationally, she was going to be sick. “Just let me do this. Let me do this and we’ll be okay again. Okay? I’ll get there on my own. I can walk. I can---” That was debatable, really, and it was more likely that she keel over, frozen to death, before she even got to New York. But Rogue seemed to think she could get there on foot.
"No. You can't." And then, John was grabbing Rogue by the coat, walking around the car (stepping over the fallen bumper), opening the passengers' side door, and practically throwing her in. "Buckle up. I'm exercising my right as man of the house. Get in the car, shut up, I know what's best for you, and if you don't sit down and buckle up, I'm going to have to knock you out, and you know I hate being an asshole like that."
“You can’t do this,” Rogue practically shrieked. And, if anyone was within earshot, they probably would have thought he was trying to murder her. “Let me out. John. Let me out of the car.”
And John smacked her, backhanding her across the face. "Shut up!" he snapped, and then he was buckling her seat belt for her and slamming the door shut. He slumped against the door, closing his eyes. "Jesus fucking Christ, this just doesn't get any easier."