Log/Thread: Pyro and Rogue Who: John and Marie Allerdyce When: December 23, 2007 Where: The Lehnsherr house in Salem Center What: Rogue is having what looks like heroin withdrawals except not, John has a broken hand, everyone’s cranky, and no one baked reindeer cookies. Where the hell are the reindeer cookies? TBC in comments yo.
Rogue was finally at the stage where she’d stopped saying anything, though it had taken awhile to get there. Her first instinct had been to kick and scream, especially when she found herself deposited in a room in the Salem Center house with no way out. And, even when she was pretty sure John had left the house [to go who knew where], she’d kept kicking and screaming at the door, like that would somehow help her get out. Then she’d switched over to crying and begging and using the pity card, blunting telling him that if he loved her he’d let her out. Clearly, he knew exactly what her first move would be if he let her out of here, which would be to go find someone to take the edge off, even if it wasn’t Max, because that didn’t work either.
And then, at some point, Tessa had come in, stabbed her in the arm with a needle before she had a chance to react, and Rogue had been too tired and sluggish to even bother begging to be let out. Even when that had worn off, she hadn’t moved and half-heartedly brushed away any attempt to get her to do anything. Her head hurt, every thought in her head felt like it had been smashed with a hammer, and she was afraid to move because she thought that she might crack apart into a thousand pieces if she tried to.
She’d just wanted a little more, to keep things from falling apart like they had. Obviously, that was too much to ask for. Obviously, torturing her and keeping her from what [she thought was] some semblance of sanity was preferable.
John didn't know what to do with her. Tessa seemed to think this was all for Rogue's own good, but she was suffering and he was the one who was dealing with it. He didn't know what to do. He wanted to make her better, but he also knew a good way to do that was to get her to calm down... to get her to crack and go through hell, and then she'd recover. That was what happened to addicts. It was a painful road but you had to deal with it or suffer the worser fate.
Now, he was back at the house, crouching at Rogue's side and pushing food in her direction with his good hand. The right hand was in a cast, clunky and awkward, and he was definitely the worse for wear when it came to bruises. "Hey," he said quietly. "Hey, hey. This might interest you. Looks like the Friends of Humanity went and attacked Dr. McCoy, right in the middle of town."
Rogue watched him warily as he came toward her. This was exactly how she’d looked at him since he’d basically threw her in the car and backhanded her to get her to calm down: distrustful and wary, a little bit like a caged animal that had been kicked in the past and was waiting for it to happen again. And when he’d come back down one good hand, it hadn’t done much to alleviate the expression.
She stared at him for a few seconds, like she was trying to figure out what about any of that was supposed to interest her, aside from the obvious morbid disgust at the entire thing. “What are you telling me for? Why do you even care enough to tell me.”
John frowned. "Because the Friends of Humanity are out picking on the good guys and the good guys don't have the balls to actually do anything about it," he said, pushing the food a little closer. "Rogue, babe, you have to eat. Come on. Don't make me look like a loser, here. You have to eat."
“So? That’s their own problem if they don’t want to defend themselves, yeah?” She let down her guard around him enough to turn her face away from him, voice muffled in her knees. “I’ll eat if I feel like it. I don’t feel like it.” She figured she should at least have that much control over her surroundings, even if it wasn’t much.
"You're going to feel like it when you start dying," muttered John. "I'm so tired of this, baby. Eat when you feel like it. Fine. But don't cry and whine because you're hungry, all right? You're on withdrawals. You're almost through it. Don't be a bitter bitch, all right? It's almost motherfucking Christmas."
Rogue’s eyes swung back to him and, for the first time since she’d stopped screaming, she looked ready to tear his head off. “You’re sick of this? You’re sick of--” She made a strangled sound in her throat, somewhere between a sob and growl and kicked out blindly with her foot, just wanting him to get away from her, catching him, hard, in the cast over his broken hand.
The kick to his hand caused John to howl, drawing back and holding his hand against his chest with what was almost a pained, horrified sob. "You bitch! What the fuck do you----oh, God..." Squeezing his eyes shut, he held his hand close and pressed his lips together. He did not want to cry like a pussy. "Not funny. Not fucking funny."
Wincing, Rogue immediately scooted back away from him, scurrying back as best she could with her socks slipping against the floor, and hit the wall with a thud. She looked panicked and, worse than that, looked scared, like she thought he was going to haul off and deck her with his good hand once the kick to his hand stopped smarting. She never backed down from him, not even when she was wrong, but right now she was staring at him, wide-eyed, murmuring, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
"Rogue...!" He wasn't going to hit her. He wasn't. "Babe... stop that. Stop that, okay? You kicked me. It fucking hurt. Don't do it again. But I'm not... come on. I'm not going to hit you. I hit you once because you were on the way to crazytown and not making any sense. You needed to be snapped out of it."
Rogue didn’t really look like she believed him. He had a habit of backhanding people when he got pissed and, though he’d never done it to her before that one time, it had shattered any misguided belief that he wouldn’t hit her. Beyond that… she was too broken, both emotionally and mentally, to hit him back and tell him to get the hell away from her like she would have normally. “I just want to go home. I want to go home. I want Logan. I want… I hate it here. Why are you doing this to me.”
"Because you're batshit insane," John spat irritably. "I went to jail and you went nuts and now you're on withdrawals from draining that crazy fuck. But I have a broken hand because you were draining me constantly with your incessant need to fuck and I lost a fight against a sapien because of it. So don't you whine at me, all right? You have an addiction. I'm helping you break it. And it sucks, but you have to deal with it. I'm not going to give you anything you want."
He looked down at his hand, wincing, the throbbing still present and very, very irritating.
“I don’t have an addiction!” Rogue snapped, punctuating each word with an angry punch to the wall. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? If I don’t keep doing it it wears off. It wears off and I start… remembering all of… all of that without any kind of…” Without some kind of barrier to keep her from realizing how horrific all the crap she’d done was. Which, actually, sounded a lot like taking a drug to make reality a little easier to deal with.
She stared at him through narrowed, distrustful eyes. “You didn’t mind it when you were fucking me. You didn’t mind when I was getting you off. You knew that wasn’t me, that I wasn’t in control, and you did it anyway. You want to know what most people call that, John?” If she’d been talkative over the last week, the way her mood kept spiking back and forth between different personalities she’d absorbed in the past would have been more readily apparent. It was impossible to tell, from one moment to the next, whether she’d be reacting with a terrified, hurt psyche or a pissed off, indignant one.
"No, Rogue, what would you call it?" John said with a frown. "Enabling? Maybe. All I know is that you've done this and it's not healthy. So you're going to have to own the fuck up. And you're going to have to think about the stuff you've done, without a buffer." He crawled over to her on his knees. "Because you know what, babe? We don't have that. Nobody else has that. We have to deal with the shit we do. We do it on drugs, we come off the drugs and we remember it and we're embarrassed by it and for a while we can't deal and all we want to do is be on the goddamn drugs again, but guess what. That makes things worse. You're going to have to think about it. And you're going to have to own up to it, and most of all, you're going to have to get the fuck over it because I'm so sick of you acting like a scared rabbit one second and then a tiger the next, clawing my head off. I'm either going to have to kill you or leave you, one of the two."
“Rape, you sick fuck. Most people would call it rape.” Her teeth were tightly clenched together and when he crawled toward her she stared at him, the expression in her eyes confused and muddled, like she wasn’t sure how to react, to either run or scream. Fight or flight.
“Like you have any right to talk at me about this. You’re a crack addict. You inhaled enough Kick to make your powers burn out. And you act like you’re over that, and then you go and smoke up every once in awhile like that’s fine. Who the hell are you? Who the hell are you to tell me that I can’t --- it’s great for you when you’re getting what you want. And the second you don’t like it, suddenly I need to own up to things and get the fuck over it? Fuck you, John. You bitched because I wasn’t excited enough about the Brotherhood before this and now you’re taking away the only thing that makes me happy to be a part of it. Leave me. Kill me. I don’t care.”
John flinched visibly, staring at her for a moment with his mouth open but no words coming out. She had to hit on every single sensitive aspect that was bothering him at the moment and make him feel like an asshole on top of it.
He pushed himself up to stand, and went the door, swinging it open. "Do whatever you want," he said, leaving the room and letting the door stay open.
If nothing else --- if absolutely nothing else --- she knew him. Knew his weak points, especially, and knew how to poke every single one of them. She didn’t usually sink this low, not even when they fault, at least not all at once like this. But everything hurt so bad and she just wanted him to let her out… she was willing to say just about anything.
But when he left the door open, Rogue blinked at it, staring, like it was some kind of trick, or test. And for a second she was relieved. She could go. Maybe, somehow, Max was still alive. She could fix things. Everything would be okay if she could just piece her thoughts back together.
And then she panicked. He wasn’t supposed to leave. He wasn’t supposed to leave. And she was scared that maybe he had. That maybe he was seriously getting in his car, driving away, and leaving her here permanently. “John?” The first time she said it, it was tentative, quiet. And then louder. “John? John.” Then she was literally scrambling out of the room nearly sending herself flying down the stairs from the lack of traction on her socks.
John wasn't heading to the car. John had, in fact, ended up in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his head bowed like he was either going to break down in sobs or kill something----one of the two, and he was teetering on a very dangerous edge. He hated seeing his wife like this. He hated feeling like there was nothing he could do, he hated being treated this way and feeling like he had to be cruel to be kind. He was sick of it, sure, but most of all he was scared. Scared of what would happen to her, scared about their marriage----like she'd wake up one day and realize she was just kidding when she said she loved him.
Rogue managed to get down the steps without breaking her neck, luckily, since that wouldn’t have helped matters. And was so convinced that he’d left that she literally skidded right past the kitchen without looking inside… which would have been comical out of context.
In context, she was freaking out, nearly slamming into the back of the door as she slid to a stop, tugging the door open and becoming frantic when she didn’t immediately see his car, completely oblivious to the fact that he was a room away. “John.” She was practically on the verge of sobs.
John frowned, looking up and pushing his hand through his hair. Exhausted, he left the kitchen, and soon he was standing right behind her, absently kissing the back of her head. "What, babe. What is it." Gentler, now.
At the touch and the sound of his voice, Rogue started violently, whirling back to him so quickly that she had to grab his sleeve to keep from losing her balance. “You left. You’re not supposed to leave. You’re not supposed to leave.” He was scared that she’d realize she didn’t really love him; she was terrified that he’d leave again or that he’d choose the Brotherhood over her if she couldn’t take it. She wouldn’t have gone to the extreme measures she’d gone to if she hadn’t been absolutely, out-of-her-mind terrified.