Log: Mystique and Rogue Who: Mystique and Rogue When: February 21, 2008 Where: the Lehnsherr house What: Rogue goes for a little bit of training with Mystique and they end up talking about Scott’s upcoming vigilante mission… and the Brotherhood mission that’s going to coincide with that. There’s a little bit of a lack of a meeting of the minds and, somehow, Rogue ends up being the one who’s going to have to babysit Scott.
Rogue felt like they had just settled back into the Lair --- which they really had, with John being so eager to get back, even if she would have preferred to stay in the Lehnsherr house a bit [ie: a lot] longer --- when she was already schelping back to Salem Center. Normally, she wouldn’t have minded the trip. Normally, she would have hopped on her bike and enjoyed the fresh air and the freedom of the open road and whatever other clichés she wanted to throw in for good measure. But with her busted up foot, she was reduced to being chaperoned around. So much for the peace and quiet of the open road.
Used to her crutches by now, she was able to navigate around fairly well, but, still, she was a little out of breath and definitely tired of dragging her broken foot around by the time she reached the office… and knocked. No way she was just going to barge in on Mystique. She might have been prone to doing stupid things, but she didn’t have a death wish.
Even away from the White House, Mystique had work to do. She couldn't just take a vacation, the way things were, but she'd been expecting Rogue. Taking time out of her work to spend time with her counted as Brotherhood work, no matter how utterly painful the experience wasn't. Mystique liked Rogue, whether the younger woman believed that or not, enough to train her personally, if she wanted to be trained. It was saying a lot these days.
Hearing the knock, Mystique rearranged a few papers, tucking them into a folder before getting up to open the door. "I expected you a little earlier. Come on in, sit down." Rogue was of no use to anybody hobbling around on crutches, after all.
Rogue opened her mouth to explain why she wasn’t here earlier, then shut it. Even though her own interaction with Mystique tended to border on awkward --- the kind of awkward that came from thinking that you were about to be stabbed in the back at any second alternating with the strange feeling that, maybe, Mystique was being genuinely nice --- she also knew enough not to talk back. Or try to come up with excuses. What was the point anyway? It wouldn’t get her here any earlier. Instead, she just mumbled a sorry and sank gratefully into a chair.
“See? I’m sort of useless right now. Dead weight more than anything.” It was said wryly, but not without an undercurrent of obvious frustration. It was actually sort of poetic… she had a tendency to run when she got upset or frustrated and now she, literally, couldn’t do that.
"Broken bones don't magically keep your skin from sucking the life out of people," Mystique reminded, moving over a chair so she could sit in front of Rogue. Crossing one leg over the other, she seemed infinitely more comfortable than Rogue did -- but she also had full use of both feet. "Given that you've said once or twice that you're exhibiting powers that don't belong to you long after they should have left your system, I believe you can use this time to try to figure that out. When you recover, you'll be more effective than ever."
Rogue pressed her lips together, watching Mystique a little uneasily when she moved her chair. She was still a little… nervous about using her powers again. Using them on John was one thing; she knew what to expect with that. Anyone else was a wild card and she a bit --- a whole lot --- freaked out about her mind going to bizarro world again. “Four times,” she corrected under her breath. “It happened four times. Five if you count that… thing… that happened at St. Vincent’s a year and a half ago. Which I don’t.”
And she didn’t have a clue why it was happening. Although, since it was, it’d be nice if a healing factor would decide to kick in right about now. But, naturally, her powers weren’t being cooperative on that front.
"Four times," Mystique echoed. "Did you hear the person that the powers belonged to particularly strongly in your mind when it happened?" Friendly, really. She wasn't trying to be intimidating -- but making a habit of walking around naked and, oh, helping Magneto take over the entire country meant that 'trying' probably didn't mean much.
Honestly, it was less that Mystique walked around naked [although, that did put Rogue a little more on edge than usual… not so much from a… seeing a blue woman walk around naked standpoint, but from a there being much more exposed flesh and that led to accidents standpoint] or even that she’d helped take over the country [hell, hadn’t that been the goal of the Brotherhood to begin with? At least partially? Rogue had known that getting into the whole thing. And anyone in the Brotherhood balking at the change in government obviously needed to take another look at why they’d joined in the first place]. But more that Mystique had helped try to kill her in the past. Sure, Rogue figured that that wasn’t on Mystique’s agenda now, but the woman was an assassin --- and a damn good one --- and Rogue was always concerned that, one of these days, Magneto was going to decide that she was giving John too much grief, or not good enough for him, or holding him back or whatever and give an order to have her taken care of permanently. So. The awkwardness.
Rubbing at the back of her neck, Rogue blinked and shook her head. “No. Not really. They’re usually all in my head, all the time. But there really wasn’t any warning. And I didn’t… I mean, they weren’t screaming any louder in my head or anything. It’s just sort of weird. I figured that if it should be happening with anyone’s powers, it should be John’s. But it wasn’t.”
"Have you ever tried using John's powers without absorbing him first?" Prodding, getting as many answers as possible before they started messing around with powers. Mystique was willing to let Rogue take what she needed and try to play with shapeshifting -- rather than a potentially more dangerous power like John's, or end up phasing through a chair or popping out claws, should she find a way to do it -- but she felt she needed to be informed first. "Or anybody's, for that matter."
Rogue blinked and started to shake her head… then hesitated. “Sort of. When his powers were burned out… I absorbed him to see if I could get them to work. And I did… I just don’t know if that means that I was able to absorbed his burned out powers or if it means I was able to use them from… some other time.” Rogue blew out a frustrated breath, the white in her hair flying up. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not a whole lot of help. I don’t really understand all of it myself. I just sort of keep hoping that nothing too dangerous is going to pop up and hurt someone.”
Mystique was silent at first, tapping two fingers on the arm of her chair while she thought. "I can't stay here as long as I'd like to," she admitted eventually. "The first plan that comes to mind is to let you absorb somebody, wait until their powers should have faded, and then have you try to use them again. I'd be more than willing to allow you to use my abilities for that, but I do have to go back to the White House soon. However, I'll be taking John with me to infiltrate part of the Friends of Humanity soon and if all goes well, we'll return home with Cyclops. If you would be willing to practice on him instead while I'm gone, I'll leave him with you in the Lair rather than take him back to Washington. We'll just have Tessa administer some of her serum on a regular basis so Cerebro doesn't pick him up."
Rogue stiffened, straightening up, looking at Mystique like she was nuts. It was at moments like this when her self-preservation around Mystique tended to fade a bit. “Wait. What? You’re taking John to do what?”
"Cyclops is planning to get himself kidnapped by the Friends of Humanity with a tracker on him to lead the X-Men to one of their bases." Mystique picked a bit of lint off the fabric of her chair, brushing it away. "I wanted to take both of you, but I'm afraid that unless you feel like going back to Xavier's and trying to get a hand on their healer, you won't be well enough to go with us to pick up Mr. Summers before his team can."
She wasn’t even going to ask if Scott was crazy --- of course he was. Considering that he probably didn’t realize that there would be Brotherhood members right behind him, he was just asking to get himself tortured and possibly killed.
Staring at the lint instead of Mystique, because she really didn’t want Mystique to see the ‘fuck no’ expression in her eyes, she said, “I really don’t think they’re going to let me back into the school to snack on their healer. But no, no way. After what happened, you’re not sending him in there without me. No. Find me another healer. How could we not have one anywhere in the Brotherhood?” Well, maybe they did. Finding one in their right mind was another story altogether.
Mystique was convinced that Scott Summers had something up his sleeve he wasn't talking about. She may not have thought much of him, but he wasn't stupid. ...Not entirely, anyway.
"Healers tend to lean more on the moralistic side. We don't seem to attract many, and the Adelaide boy is the only one I could name off the top of my head that isn't stark raving mad---though now that I think of it, I'm sure he'd be happy to help you." There was nothing particularly condescending when she said that, oddly enough. Xavier's healer had healed her once -- offered to do it, actually. "He doesn't seem to hold any loyalties." Honestly, she hesitated to try and find another healer; she didn't know what would be going on in their head, and Rogue had already had one very big brush with insanity recently. She didn't need the extra push.
Rogue grimaced. “So, what? You want me to ask him if it’s okay to suck him dry? Because that’s not usually the way I do it.” Not that… she really wanted to get into the way she usually ended up absorbing powers. And, now that she was settling back into her right frame of mind, she sort of didn’t want to think about it herself either.
"Or just ask him to use his powers himself on you." As if it were the obvious choice. "I'm sure you can work something out with him, so long as you don't infer that you need the function of your foot so you can help kidnap Cyclops."
“If he has to touch me to heal me---” Which, in her experience, most healers had to do “---then it’s the same effect,” Rogue mumbled. Her lips twitched, though, at Mystique’s next comment. “Come on, you don’t think I’m that stupid, do you? To ask if he could fix my foot so I can go help kidnap one of the X-Men?”
"You're not going to get anywhere putting words in my mouth." Mystique shifted comfortably in her chair. "If you want to come along, you need to find yourself a healer or talk to the one you're aware of. Until then, I'm working with the assumption that John and I are going alone, unless I decide to bring someone else with us." She wasn't adverse to taking Rogue -- of course not -- but Mystique wasn't entertaining the idea of taking someone else to replace her if she couldn't. It was more of a revenge and ego boost mission than anything else.
Pressing her lips together, Rogue did not look amused… not that she expected that to make a damn bit of difference to Mystique. “Don’t.” As in, don’t work with that assumption. “I’ll figure it out.” She wasn’t entirely sure how she was going to figure it out yet, though she was starting to get the sinking feeling that she was going to have to swallow her pride and just ask for help. If she’d done that in the first place, either from the healer at the school or Logan, she wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.
A pause, and then Rogue added, tentatively, “Why are we kidnapping Cyclops?”
"Why?" Mystique raised an eyebrow. "He leads the X-Men." It should have been obvious, what with the X-Men being the Brotherhood's enemies and all that.
“Yeah. Which means it’s going to really piss them off. As in… really piss them off.” Rogue frowned and normally she would have stopped, considering that she tried her damnedest to seem completely and totally loyal to the Brotherhood… whether or not she was successful was another story altogether. But this time she kept going. “And I’ve been reading about Eric. That he’s not doing so great. Does he really need a bunch of pissed off X-Men at the front door of the White House?”
"Does it matter? If they could hurt us, they would have by now." She wasn't going to tell Rogue that Charles had messed with Eric's head. That they needed to hit the X-Men below the belt and destroy them so Eric wouldn't have to deal with that anymore. Magneto couldn't attack Xavier the way he needed to, but Mystique could.
Rogue blinked. She’d worked with the X-Men. She’d been an X-Men. She knew enough to know that, unless the situation called for it, they didn’t jump into things half-cocked. “Or maybe they’re working on being able to hurt us. Or… Hey,” she held up her hands in surrender. “I’m not arguing with you. I’m sure you know what you’re doing a hell of a lot better than I do.” And that Mystique had more information about things than she did. “I was just saying that not-pissed-off X-Men are usually better than the pissed off ones.” Another paused before: “We’re not planning on hurting him, are we?”
"If I leave him with you to train with? That's up to you. If I take him with me, I can't promise his stay will be the most comfortable." Mystique frowned. "You sound like you'd rather we didn't."
“You’d rather we did?” Rogue said with a blink. “What’s the point in that? They’re already all up in arms over at the school. Doing unnecessary damage --- and it is unnecessary because there’s no reason to hurt him --- is going to have them all out with them pitchforks and flaming torches. And maybe they can’t hurt us. But I’m pretty sure that they can manage to take a few of us out before we stop them.”
"Kidnapping him in the first place will have them breaking out the torches and pitchforks. You're focusing on the technical when there's no reason to." Mystique didn't seem too bothered by her questions, despite what she said. There were bigger things to get up in arms about, and a small argument on a plan already decided on wasn't it.
“There’s a really big difference between kidnapping him to break the X-Men up and leave them without a strong leader and kidnapping him and … torturing him or hurting him or… whatever you’re thinking of doing.” A huge difference. And, after what she, John and Bobby had gone through, regardless of who was the enemy and who wasn’t, she really, really didn’t want to see anyone getting tortured. Especially not someone like Scott who, other side or not, was a decent guy. A pain in the ass, especially when it came to training, but a decent guy.
Mystique leaned back, regarding Rogue for a moment before she replied, "Then you take care of him, since you seem to be the advocate of his welfare." It took a burden off her hands, anyway.
“Fine,” she muttered, frowning and looking away. “Not to… practice on or… whatever. Just to keep an eye on.” Because Rogue wasn’t entirely convinced that using Scott for ‘practice’ was any better than torture.
"I'm sure he'll appreciate having someone familiar around." Mystique's mouth twitched into the hint of a smile. "As for training, we should get started."