log: erik+rogue WHO: Erik Lehnsherr + Rogue (616) WHEN: Let's say... last night! WHERE: Erik's room WHAT: Rogue comes by for a game of chess, because she wants Erik to be a little more social, and she ends up introducing him to hidden aspects of his powers that he didn't know existed. WARNINGS: N/A
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Chess was far from Rogue’s favorite game, though it was one loaded with memories. Some belonged to others and while they were no longer ingrained in her head like before, she still remembered bits and pieces of others lives. Her own memories were filled learning the game from Irene, remembering how painstakingly patient her other mother had been while teaching her the various rules and guiding her to forming her own strategies. She’d never been one for following along too closely to the traditional moves, always seeking out her own path. It wasn’t too surprising considering she’d chosen the name Rogue when she was young.
Some would say meeting to play chess with this alternate version of a man they all knew was a reckless move, but Rogue figured that some truths held between worlds and didn’t see a reason to be afraid. Though there were definitely bits and pieces she’d forced down, refusing to think about when she met up with Erik for their game. She really should have known better than to let her mother tell her about another world, one where she finally got to be a mother.
Rogue looked down at the pieces before her, going over multiple scenarios in her head as she let her fingers dance above the game. It had been months she’d learned to control her powers, to use them to their full potential, but the lack of material covering her hands was still new. She still caught herself reaching to pull on a pair of gloves every morning and it was a nice reminder of how far she’d come that she didn’t bother leaving a set out to pull on quickly in case of an emergency.
“So,” she started, looking over at him as she finally moved her piece. “You don’t think we’re gonna be seein’ this so far peaceful coexistence we got goin’ here continue for too long, do you? Though I ain’t sure peaceful is even the right word.”
Erik, for the most part, was relatively pleasant.
He was aware that he had a complicated history with most of these people, that he was sometimes an ally and sometimes an enemy. He could accept that. He'd met with the other X-Men for dinner and played baseball, he'd been willing to socialize at an arm's length. He came off as distant, but not unkind
Upon closer inspection, Erik was a man who clearly wanted friends but didn't know what to do with them. His standoffishness was partly intentional, knowing how people felt about him, but it was also awkwardness. He'd spent the last decade in prison with little to no human interaction. Before that, he'd only had brief bursts of having connections with people while spending the rest of his time isolated and alone. He didn't have similar life experience, couldn't relate to the way most people spoke. He was doing his best.
Erik was watching her hands rather than looking at her face, thoughtful and quiet. "No, I don't think so," he said, jumping a knight over his line of pawns to put it into play.
"If the Sky People don't turn on us, the Grounders will." They were all divided along tribal lines, and one day the good of the individual tribe would become more important than the good of the community as a whole. There would be a disaster, a group would be blamed, and that was the beginning of the end. "Even among Pod People, we have no inherent loyalty to one another beyond our immediate group."
She had heard similar statements before, though the other groups were always different ranging from humans to the Avengers. She had seen how quickly groups could turn on one another because of fear as well, some her own experience, far too many from the glimpses she got into people’s minds. But it was those instances where people stood up and banded together that Rogue tried hardest to hold onto and remember. Even if it seemed like those instances were becoming few and far between these days.
“But couldn’t we change that lack of loyalty between everyone?” she asked as she took note of where his knight was and the different plays it could make. “It ain’t exactly going to be an overnight fix because building ties takes time. But not everyone comes in with people they already know roaming about. They gotta make their own connections. It doesn’t have to come down to us versus them.” Though she couldn’t discount that she already had a few ‘leave the mountain’ scenarios in her head for if it did come to that. The tricky part was where to go if they did need to leave.
She looked up after moving one of her pawns into place and noticed him watching her hands. The lack of fear was nice to see and a reminder of the man she knew back home who hadn’t ever feared her skin, even when it could have accidentally killed him. “I won’t accidentally knock you out or anythin’ if you’re wondering that,” she said, before wriggling her fingers. “Well, unless I wanted to.”
Erik knew what it was to be touched by Rogue. He'd asked his universe's Rogue to touch him, he'd wanted to see the extent of her power out of sheer curiosity — but he hadn't counted on his own desire for power taking over in Rogue's mind and causing her to latch on for far longer than she should have.
He'd spent over a week in a coma.
The memories were fresh enough that while he didn't fear her, he certainly had concerns about her putting her hands on him.
"You're telling me that you have the ability to control your power?" he asked. He'd noticed that she didn't wear gloves, but he'd never seen her touch anyone else's skin. He'd thought that perhaps she'd simply made a personal choice to be more careful.
Rogue grinned, unable to curtail the excitement that always seemed to blossom inside of her that she’d finally gotten control of them. She doubted the elation she felt would really ever go away. It had been ingrained in her too long to fear and worry over what she could do that being able to use them without the threat of another Carol Danvers’ incident happening was always going to be something to celebrate.
“Yup!” She leaned back against the chair, still unable to stop smiling. “Doesn’t hurt when I take from people anymore unless I want it to. You’d barely feel it depending on how much power I was takin’. Usually I try to only borrow enough to get whatever job done that I’m workin’ on. Plus sharin’ makes it so there’s double the ability in use which has come in real handy. My max number of mutants absorbed at one time is twenty, but that’s more ‘cause we only had twenty of us around at the moment.” She was certain that she would be able to go higher than that considering absorbing twenty had been easy as pie at the time.
Her features darkened for a moment as she remembered her alternate younger self and the struggle the girl was going through. “I wanna work with Marie on it. But right now everyone keeps givin’ her real crappy advice that’s just gonna make it harder in the long run.”
Erik watched Rogue closely, unable to keep himself from smiling. To hear someone embrace their powers, to be so joyous about them, was a surprising change of pace from what he usually heard. It was generally a fight to get mutants to be proud of their abilities, to be proud of themselves, and here was Rogue, chattering on about her abilities and what she could do. Twenty. She could absorb twenty people without hurting them. It was almost an obscene amount of power to hand to one person, and Erik found himself looking at her like a very interesting toy that he desperately wanted to play with.
"What kind of 'crappy advice'?" he asked, temporarily jerked from the thoughts in his head (which were all about ways he could have utilized her within his Brotherhood).
“Everyone thinks she should practice usin’ them,” she told him before sighing. “They don’t mean no harm. It’s what helps most people get better at somethin’, right? Practice makes perfect and all. But if her hang up is the same as mine or even similar to it then practicin’ ain’t ever gonna be anything but a big old detriment.”
Rogue knew that Marie would still be able to absorb people, she might even be able to do a few at a time, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near twenty at one time. Not without driving the girl insane just like she’d been a time or two. And that was something she didn’t want happening to the other girl. Not if she could help her at all and Rogue planned on at least trying to.
“But I’ll talk to her about that and only her about that.” Well, and the few people who might be able to help with what would need to be done if what was going on in Marie’s head was similar to what had gone on in hers. “But you got any questions, sugar, that ain’t gotta do with how I’ll be helpin’ her?”
The crappy advice in question had, in fact, been his own. Erik smiled vaguely as he listened, and while he was endlessly curious about what Rogue would say or do for Marie, it was clear to him that it was apparently no longer his business.
"Mm."
He leaned back in his seat, crossing his legs. "How do you control it, then? Mind over matter? A switch was flipped one day and now you aren't in danger of killing everyone you touch?"
She leaned forward, resting her elbows against the table. “We don’t kill the people we touch. What we end up doing if we hold on too long is leave them in a coma for an indeterminate amount of time. And that’s if they’re lucky. Worst case is we leave them as a shell of who they used to be while takin’ on their powers and every other lil thing about them. It doesn’t fade away. You keep the powers, yeah, and that’s pretty fun, but you keep the person you absorbed to. To the point where some days you are them. You gotta fight to remember what memories are your own and what were someone else’s. Do that with enough people and eventually you just go crazy. Ain’t exactly helpful to anyone when you’re lost inside your own head.”
Something she knew all too well from when she had two billion people roaming around inside her. Rogue didn’t want that to happen to the other girl. “The Professor helped me with it when he figured out what was actually going on that prevented me from being able to control it. So now it's a conscious thing. I can still make it hurt like hell if I wanna but on my friends and the students I prefer it barely registering when I borrow from them. Hell now I can have more than one person touching me when we’re fighting and borrow my friends powers without hurting them while making sure the one we’re fighting ends up knocked out because they touched my skin. Pretty much does what I want it to now.”
"So, Charles assisted you." He wanted to know how. The fact that he was endlessly curious about Rogue wasn't simply self-serving, even if in the future he was aware that he'd use Marie to stand in his place in a machine that would have killed him. Erik took just as much interest in the mutants he had under his wing, he had just as much of a desire to mentor them and help them — but he turned them into soldiers.
The more he was learning about Charles in Rogue's world, the more obvious it was that he and Charles were not so very different after all. Charles simply insisted he was taking the high road, the hypocritical bastard.
"You think that you can do this for Ro — Marie?"
“I dunno for sure. It’s goin’ to depend if she’s got the same hang ups that I did.” But Rogue knew that the telepaths that were there could do the job. She’d just need to see if Marie had the same chaos going on in her head as she had before the Professor had been able to help her. “But I ain’t wanting to give her any kind of hope only to pull it out from under her.” It was always worst having no control when there had been a tiny bit of hope to get control and then it was dashed in front of her.
“I already know her and I got differences. Our names ain’t the same. She wasn’t raised by Mystique. Our powers didn’t onset at the same age. I was a lot younger. But a lot of that seems to alternate depending on the multiverse. I’d think our powers would be the same. But maybe not.” She frowned, trying to figure out how best to voice what she meant. “Like yours is electromagnetism, right? But I dunno if you can do the same things that my Erik does with the shields, and the flyin’, or being an ass and shuttin’ off gravity around him to make things more difficult. Or the sight thing he does seeing the world in like electrical and magnetic patterns.”
Erik did see the world in magnetic patterns, in auras of energy he could manipulate and control. He could also fly, or at least float — he'd never thought to go any sort of long distance with it, as that seemed absurd. He hadn't considered shields, and now the wheels were turning in the back of his mind.
However, one item on that list intrigued him the most, and he sat forward.
"Shutting off gravity, you said?"
“Yeah, but I ain’t sure I can explain that one.” She knew that it had something to do with polarity but had zoned out a bit during the explanation part. “I could show you…”
She held out her hands. It was up to him or not if he wanted to give it a go. Magneto’s power was one she had absorbed enough times in her world that she knew it pretty much inside and out; not as perfectly as Logan’s or Carol’s, but enough that she was used to being able to use it without trouble.
Erik's gaze flickered down to her hands. He'd offered his hand to Marie and ended up in a coma. Touching Rogue now meant trusting her, trusting that her powers were truly in control. He was effectively putting his life in her hands.
Perhaps it was wisest to politely refuse, but Erik's curiosity was always going to get the better of him. She'd absorbed this other version of him countless times, a version that had years more experience. She was intimately acquainted with his abilities, and touching her meant gaining insight.
He stretched his hands out over the chessboard, his fingertips hovering above hers. "Be gentle with me."
“You’ll barely even feel anythin’,” she told him as she grasped his hands before letting her power begin. Rogue made sure to keep it pleasant, he should only feel something akin to a gentle tug if what the students told her was right. She took a little of his power, just enough to last for the next hour or so, before letting go of him, pushing any stray thoughts she might have picked up away, not in the mood to deal with those then and there.
The world shifted for her, auras of energy she didn’t usually see on display as the familiar power washed through her. “You might wanna keep yourself and the chair rooted to the floor,” she warned him before she reversed the polarity in the room around them, effectively shutting off gravity and causing anything not bolted down to move upwards and float inside the room. “So yeah, it’s reversin’ the polarity. Only works for a certain radius though but it comes in handy. My favorite’s the flyin’ even if the annoyin’ bubble has to be used with your power to breathe in space.”
Erik's hands snapped out and grabbed the table, but that did nothing when the table was floating upward — as was his chair. For a few comically useless moments, Erik flailed in midair before grabbing onto the metal chair and using it as an anchor to keep himself on the floor.
His pride was ruffled for a mere moment, immediately replaced with feelings of awe as he took in his surroundings. Turning off gravity. Breathing in space.
He liked to think that he knew his powers. He liked to think that he had exquisite control over them, particularly after months in the forge where he'd been making painstakingly detailed art and jewelry just for the sake of practice. Precision over power. He knew he had work to do in terms of honing his skills, particularly after a decade of solitary confinement.
But this was something else entirely. This tapped into potential he never knew he had, that Schmidt had never thought to exploit. Erik's interpretation of his own abilities had been so limited.
"This is my power?" he asked, his voice soft.
Rogue reversed the polarity back to normal, setting back what she could where it had been before. She leaned forward, resting her arms against the table as she looked at him, trying to figure out what was going on his head. He sounded a bit surprised with what she’d done, in awe of his own power even. It was a nice reminder of how much younger this man was than the one she knew.
“Yeah,” she told him with a smile. “Most get caught up in the whole manipulatin’ metal thing. I reckon that’s what most think it's all about. I know I did aside from the flight part that I’d seen with my own eyes.” That had been the part of Magneto’s power that she was used to using and had played with the most often when she’d absorbed him previously.
“But back home, Erik made sure I knew some of the other things he could do. He wanted me to be able to use it all like he would in case I had it and he was incapacitated.” Considering that had happened on more than one occasion Rogue was grateful he’d made sure she knew. Even if it wasn’t the most thrilling pillow talk before sleeping. “It’s a pretty damn good power.”
Erik was silent. His gaze drifted around the room, at objects that hadn't quite made it back to their place. Several of the chess pieces were now on the floor.
He tried to feel the pull of the gravity around him, tried to sense the energy the way he sensed the metal in the chair underneath him. It was one of those distant feelings that theoretically seemed possible, but like wiggling one's ears it proved out of his grasp.
"Why would he give this to you?" he asked. He sounded shaken, overwhelmed, but his feelings were always just bubbling violently underneath the surface, barely contained.
Rogue was silent for a long moment, not quite sure how to answer that or which truths she wanted to reveal. “We went from a world full of mutants to a fraction of that. In the blink of an eye we were decimated and everythin’ kinda spun on its head. I don’t think he wanted to chance anymore of us gettin’ killed and me knowin’ his powers helped ensure that. Especially since I was usually tasked with keepin’ the kids safe.”
She floated up one of the rooks and set it back onto the table, mulling over if she should say anything else. It was already a lot to take in but Rogue knew all too well how annoying it could be to almost have the whole picture but not quite see all the pieces clearly.
Sighing she leaned back, flexing her fingers as the borrowed power still rippled inside of her. “Probably didn’t hurt that we were together.”
Mutants, decimated. He didn't know how, he didn't know why. He'd heard things about this other world, but no one had told him about this. Protecting mutants had become his cause, his reason for being, in the absence of destroying the men who'd harmed him. He'd found his kinsmen, his brothers and sisters, and in the absence of feeling like he could lead a normal life he'd dedicated himself to keeping them safe. Had he failed so horribly in Rogue's world that mutants were even more endangered?
He had questions, immediate ones, but all of them were put aside when Rogue went on. His attention snapped back to her.
"I …" He closed his mouth, shifting a little in his seat. "Oh."
He looked genuinely dumbfounded for a moment, then delicately began resetting the pieces on the board. "Well, this is news."
Rogue shook her head unable to hold back a soft chuckle. “Ain’t exactly a relationship the others were all that happy with and it hardly matters here anyway. You ain’t him and he and I were goin’ through some changes.” Like the fact she’d chosen to follow Logan to his new school while Magneto had chosen to stay with Scott on Utopia. She doubted the relationship would have lasted with the distance. Plus there was the fact she was in love with someone else.
“Anyway, if you want help figurin’ out all you can do, I reckon that I can offer some insight here and there if you’d like,” Rogue told him, even though she was certain there would be some people in their community who wouldn’t like that at all. “Up to you though.”
"Yes," Erik said, without hesitation.
He wasn't so proud as to refuse help. He didn't pretend to know everything. Charles had been able to help him access the full terrible strength of his power, and his work in the forge had helped him hone his skills with fine detail. It would have been foolish to have these new facets of his abilities dangled in front of him and not reach out to grasp them.
For a moment, he watched her, and it was no wonder why his alternate self was drawn to her. An attractive face, an attractive body, that was all inconsequential compared to the beauty of power, and Rogue's were nothing short of extraordinary. She could absorb anyone. Become anything.