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  • Andraste
    Disclaimer: Not even the idea is mine today, let alone the characters . The former belongs to Khaki, the latter to Marvel and Fox. I m making no money out
    Message 1 of 1 , Apr 22, 2003
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      Disclaimer: Not even the idea is mine today, let alone the characters <g>.
      The former belongs to Khaki, the latter to Marvel and Fox. I'm making no
      money out of this fanfic.

      Author's Notes: Written for the Remix Challenge, the rest of which may be
      found at http://www.unfitforsociety.net/remix/index.htm. This is based on 'A
      Life Found and Lost' by Khaki, which is up at

      PG for a bad word or two, I suppose.


      By Andraste

      Sometimes he thought that getting the walk right was the hardest part of
      all. He was accustomed to a much longer stride, not to mention rather
      different shoes. He could never decide whether the height these particular
      boots gave him was worth the imbalance they created in posture. They made it
      harder to move carefully across the icy lawn, and he paused to adjust his
      body language as he grew closer to the house. It was unlikely that there
      would be anybody about at this hour, only a short time before the midnight
      curfew, or that anyone watching would notice the alteration. Yet the bare
      trees made him feel more exposed than usual, even under cover of darkness.

      Although the season had turned to winter, he still spent as much time as
      possible away from the school. He didn't mind the cold, and today the walk
      home had turned into a quiet stroll around the lake. It was reassuring that
      the grounds, at least, were more or less as he had left them years before.
      Their familiarity was a soothing contrast to the dramatic changes that had
      taken place as the mansion itself was renovated to accommodate several dozen
      teenagers and staff. When he wandered the grounds, he could sometimes
      reflect that it was nice to be back. Still. Given a choice, he would have
      preferred to spend the interminable wait in the other prison.

      He could imagine the disadvantages, even though the news reports and Charles
      had both been irritatingly vague about the conditions. Boredom, frustration,
      the fear that his plan had failed altogether ... no, he could not feel too
      much envy. The irony of envying a condemned criminal at all made him smile,
      if only in private where nobody could see how wrong the expression looked.
      He couldn't help but think, however, that life enshrouded in plastic at the
      tender mercy of the US government must be less nerve-wracking than
      pretending to be a seventeen-year-old girl.

      It had become more difficult of late, new problems replacing the old. At
      first, Marie's memories had been fresh and bright. It had been easy to cover
      his own accent with hers, smile the correct charming smile, and maintain the
      fiction that her psyche had survived the ordeal on Liberty Island intact. He
      had been afraid, in the beginning, that the integrity of his own personality
      would break down under the weight of her fragmented memories.

      It was a far quieter battle than the initial struggle with the Wolverine,
      who had leapt into the girl's mind moments after Erik had found himself
      there. Logan had fought strongly at first, but once he realised that the
      girl was - to all intents and purposes - dead, he had faded away to nothing.
      The war with the tattered remains of Marie was fought by inches. In front of
      the wardrobe and the bathroom mirror, and in his dreams at night.
      Eventually, she had melted away like snow in the spring, leaving only
      whispers behind.

      It had been harder than Erik had anticipated to allow the last of her to
      slide away - he had been reluctantly willing to let her die in his machine,
      but once he knew her intimately he found himself clinging to the last shreds
      of her personality. He still found himself applying the shades of lip gloss
      and eye shadow she had preferred, telling himself that they lent an air of
      verisimilitude to his performance. If he was completely honest, he was sorry
      Marie was gone. But if her martyrdom was rather different from the one he
      had envisioned, it was no less necessary now. Her hopes, dreams and fears
      were small, petty, personal. His own existence must take precedence, for he
      had a duty to perform.

      By the time he had settled into his new surroundings, however, he had lost
      his first chance at freeing his alter ego. His best weapon - a living puppet
      with bones of adamantium - had left the mansion. Eventually, he had decided
      that his best course of action involved waiting for Logan to return. Charles
      had always been the patient one, but Erik knew when to bide his time.

      As the weeks went by, the indignities of living in this body had made a
      fuller impact on his mind. It had rhythms and cadences that felt more alien
      rather than less over time. More often than not he spent the moment between
      sleep and true waking in a state of panic as he struggled to recall what had
      happened. His own hands - not his hands - ambushed him at odd moments. In
      defiance of his new form, he had altered his style of dress and bound the
      girl's long hair back. His manner shifted, too, and he found himself
      snapping at people when she would have laughed, smiling when she would have
      frowned. Erik wondered more than ever how Raven managed to change her inner
      self to match whatever surface she choose to wear.

      Fortunately, nobody present was familiar enough with girl to spot the Trojan
      horse. Only Charles knew *him* well enough to present any kind of risk. He
      had thought long and hard about that, wondering if he needed to sabotage
      Cerebro again, or find some other way of removing his old friend from the
      game ... but Charles wasn't the only one with background knowledge. Erik
      knew the right words, the right sideways glances, to crush any temptation
      the telepath might have felt to probe his mind. If Charles looked at him
      sadly from time to time, well, Charles was sad far more often than most
      people realised. Trauma and restless memories gave him all the explanation
      for Rogue's behaviour that he would ever look for. At first the sheer static
      of Rogue's mind had protected him, and now he was careful to keep his mental
      shields up at all times.

      So he watched and waited, avoided the rest of the student body, and
      practiced the use of his powers when he could. They were weaker than before,
      but his new body was fit and healthy. Smaller and softer than his own had
      been when he was in his prime, but with a strong heart and good lungs. There
      were times when he almost literally turned cartwheels with the sheer joy of
      being young again, even in this shell. It occurred to him that he would long
      outlive the other Magneto, and occasionally he wondered if he needed him at
      all. Perhaps it would be better to leave the other Erik in prison, to lull
      the X-Men and the government into a false sense of security ... but his own
      freedom was one sacrifice he would not make, and he could not take the risk
      that someone would find a way to use him as a weapon. Besides which, his
      copied powers lacked both range and depth. He had almost reached the front
      door when he sensed Wolverine sitting on the recreation room couch.

      For a moment, he froze. He had thought that he would be waiting - and
      preparing - far longer than this. Nobody but Logan had been with Marie for
      more than a day before she died, but although the wild mutant had hardly
      known her longer, the pair had forged a strong connection. Before the man
      left, the girl's personality had still been almost intact, but now ... He
      would note the absence of her body language and mannerisms far more readily
      than Xavier's staff and students. Part of Erik ached to remove the threat at
      onc, instead of following his carefully constructed plan.

      He steadied himself. He had the advantage here, having seen Logan's thoughts
      when the man used his healing powers to save Marie. Erik was better at
      manipulating metal than human emotion (another area where Charles had it
      over him) but he had learned something from raising two daughters and a son.
      If the worst did come to the worst, his powers would protect him.

      He opened the front door, slipped inside quietly as he did every night at
      about this time, and headed for the stairs. He left it for his opponent to
      make the first move.

      "Marie?" said the familiar voice from the recreation room doorway behind

      "Welcome back," Erik said dryly, half turning before moving toward the
      stairs once more, at a faster pace. Logan, predictable to a fault, followed.

      "Rogue? Wait, where are you ..."

      "Your dog tags are up in my room. You said you would return for them, did
      you not?" Damn. The voice was off - his nerves were getting to him - but the
      expression on the Canadian's face suggested that he was too startled to

      "They can wait," he said, crossing the corridor and placing a hand or
      Erik's - Marie's - shoulder. He tried not to flinch away, although the size
      and proximity of the man was ... disconcerting ... under the current
      circumstances. "What's the matter?"

      "What makes you think that something is wrong?"

      "Where have you been all day? I've been waiting here for you since I got
      back this afternoon, and nobody knew where you'd gone. And what the hell are
      you wearing?" he added, taking in Erik's austere monochromatic attire.

      "I was at the library." That was true - his worst enemy of late had been
      sheer boredom. He couldn't write anything important down or sketch diagrams
      for any new machines, and being subjected to an American high school
      education at his stage in life was stultifying dull. All that was left was
      catching up on his reading. As he'd already devoured everything in the
      mansion's library years before, he was forced to go further afield.
      "Improving my mind." He crushed the urge to smile. "I don't see how my
      fashion sense is any of your business."

      Logan frowned, and let the last remark pass. "You were at the library this

      "No. I went for a walk after they closed for the evening." He reached for
      Wanda's favourite 'I'm-too-old-for-you-to-give-me-a-curfew' tone, and it
      seemed effective enough. The man didn't lack intelligence, but he really
      could be unforgivably dense. Perhaps it went with the healing factor.

      "Why not come inside?" His frown deepened. "Marie ... Xavier's worried about
      you. He said that you hardly talk to anyone, haven't made any real friends
      ... I thought you were *happy* to be with people who understood. Don't you
      like it here?"

      "This coming from the man who left me here on my own. Don't *you* like it
      here, Logan?"

      The desired shock and hurt were easy to read in the man's eyes. "Xavier gave
      me a lead on my past - you know why I had to go. Shit, Marie, you've seen
      the inside of my head."

      "I asked you to stay."

      "I told you I'd be back."

      The pout came surprisingly easily. "You didn't say when - I thought you'd be
      gone a week, not two whole months." Now came the difficult part. He dropped
      his eyes to the floor and lowered his voice. "I needed you."

      "Needed me?" Logan moved the hand on his shoulder, draping an arm around
      Erik and moving him toward the recreation room. "You know I'll always look
      out for you, but there are people here who can do the same, if you let

      He shook his head. "No, I ... I needed *you*. Because of the voices." He
      hoped that the tremulous tone didn't approach over-acting.

      "Wha - you mean Magneto? David Cody? Or ... me?"

      He nodded, biting his lower lip. One of Anya's favourite tricks when she was
      trying to seem more pathetic and needy than she truly was.

      "Why didn't you tell me before?"

      "I thought they'd go away, like David did. But you and Erik ... you're
      stronger than that." Stronger than Logan could possibly guess. "Then you
      left, and I didn't know where you'd gone ..."

      It took all his restraint to avoid throwing the Wolverine across the room as
      the arm across his shoulders squeezed tighter.

      "Why haven't you told Xavier? Or Dr. Grey? They're the experts. I want to
      help you, Marie, and I'll do anything, but I don't know if I *can* help." He
      put a hand under Erik's chin.

      "I'm scared they'll throw me out if they find out I still hear the voices.
      Or lock me up in the basement. Sometimes they do that, you know, to protect
      the other students." That had the desired effect - Logan looked deeply
      suspicious and shifted uneasily. "I don't trust them like I trust you.
      Besides you *do* help." He paused. This was the delicate part of the
      operation. If this didn't work, his task would become far more difficult.
      "When you're close, he's quiet. The you in my head."

      The other mutant's forehead wrinkled as he tried to wrap his mind around the
      concept. "Why would that work?"

      "I've been thinking about that a lot. I suppose that you're controlling him
      somehow - who knows how my powers work?" Erik was relying on the element of
      mystery inherent in many mutant abilities. Nobody knew how Rogue's
      absorption functioned, and therefore nobody knew what to expect from her.

      "So right now, I'm helping?"

      "Oh, yes." He nodded decisively. "The Logan inside my head is quiet now." It
      wasn't even a lie.

      "What about Magneto?" Logan used his chosen name as if it was a curse word.

      "He's much worse than you - you don't *want* to hurt me. He tells me to do
      terrible things sometimes, and ... I don't know how long I can fight him."
      Another pause, and now he met the Canadian's eyes willingly. "I want to go
      visit him in prison."

      "What?!" Logan's arm dropped from around Erik's shoulders, and he took a
      step back. "No way, Marie, that's too damn dangerous. I'm not letting you
      near that psychopath again"

      "He's safely locked up - the professor goes to visit him all the time. If I
      see him, maybe I could do something to make him leave me alone forever."

      "You don't know that will help ... please, won't you let Xavier or Jean try?
      I know they're good people, you can trust them."

      He shook his head, and put on his best expression of resolve. "Will you just
      let me try this first? If it doesn't do anything I promise I'll tell someone
      else, now that you're here to protect me. And ... could you come with me and
      wait outside? I asked the professor to take me, but he said no. I'm afraid
      to go alone." Erik hadn't expected his first request to work - Charles was
      far too cautious. Wolverine, on the other hand, would do anything his
      precious ingénue asked of him ...

      "OK, Marie." He reached out for a hug, and Erik, heart leaping triumphantly,
      decided to allow it. "I'll take you. We'll go Monday."

      Erik let himself smile.

      "Thank you, Logan. You're always so much help to me."

      The End

      A/N: If you're puzzled and/or curiuos, try running the title through Google.




