Current mood:	cheerful
Entry tags:	magneto, mystique, rogue

XMMF Fic: "Tickle", Rated PG. Genfic.
Title: Tickle
Author: Sionnain
Fandom: XMMF
Spoilers: X3.
Characters: Magneto, Rogue, and Mystique. Genfic.
Rating: PG13
Summary: It starts slowly, like a tickle.
Word Count: 1144

AN: Just playing with new!Canon.



Tickle

The first time, at the park, Erik thinks maybe he’s mistaken. That maybe, somehow, the air has been bent and broken around him so that the chess piece moves only from his despair. Or maybe it’s not even that; maybe it’s just the wind.

There is the smallest of sensations, though, like a tickle in his mind that tells him maybe it’s something else. It travels up the back of his mind like a cool sigh, it traces faint patterns like a lover’s familiars fingers on his skin, but it’s too elusive to hold onto for long.

Erik’s getting used to walking down the street without hearing the city sing to him; to opening doors with keys that feel strange and foreign between his fingers. Metal is everywhere and yet it’s nowhere that it should be, and he convinces himself that moment with the chess piece was just a fleeting sensation and nothing more. He’s an amputee, feeling the phantom limb itch, and that is all.

One morning he watches as the doorknob to the bathroom turns, just slightly, before his fingers ever brush the silver metal. He stands still for a moment before going inside the small room, his fingers curled into his palm, nails biting into skin. The pain sharpens his gaze at he looks at himself in the cracked mirror above the dirty Formica basin. He searches deep within his eyes for something more than defeat, searches for something lying quiet and curled beneath the shadows underneath his eyelids.

There’s the slightest hint of steel beneath the icy blue, and he can feel the hum of the faucets in front of him and in the shower behind him. The sound of it reverberates in his head even though it is as quiet as a whisper.

The Formica is solid beneath his splayed hands as the faucet turns; the movement is as slow and painful as the smile he sees in the mirror, curving the hard line of his mouth.

* * *
Bobby’s skin is cold, the pads of his fingers soft and unfamiliar. He is lying beside her, tracing a slow unhurried pattern on the sensitive skin of her upper arm.

While she’d waited in line, she’d imagined what it would be like. Not just this, with him, but everything else. Kissing Logan’s cheek, dancing with Bobby, hugging Kitty on graduation day just like everyone else.

Going to college and being able to share a room with a stranger, but without painful explanations. No more frightened looks, no more long-sleeves and gloves in August. The feel of rain on her skin in the spring, making a snowball and feeling the sharp burn of cold on her hands in the winter.

Behind her, she heard them chanting. We don’t need a cure, we don’t need a cure…

Every now and then she’d remember what using her power felt like; a release, as if her body was doing something inherent and necessary, something it had been designed just to do. It had been painful, for both herself and whomever she touched, but it was a good pain, too.

Then she’d remember Jean Grey swallowed up by cold lake water, a plane full of gifted men and women that could do nothing to stop it. She’d remember Magneto’s machine and the horrible sincerity in his eyes and he’d come for her, hands naked and outstretched.

The cacophony of the chanting behind her would fade away underneath the insistence of her intent. You don’t need a cure, but you’re not me.

She shifted slowly on her feet, too hot in her gloves and her scarf, trying desperately to shut out his voice in her mind, calling her a traitor. Trying to imagine instead Bobby’s bright blue eyes and calming smile, the feel of his mouth against hers.

No one will ever use me again. I will make my own decisions, and have my own life. That’s all she’d ever wanted, from the first. No more bits and pieces of others stuck like flotsam in her head.

She left her gloves and her scarf in a small, colorful pile amongst the discarded signs of Mutants are people, too and Live free, not cured! that were packed in the bin as the protestors grew tired and left. More signs would fill up the canister tomorrow, covering up the brightly knit patterns entirely.

Bobby’s kissing her, pressing her back on the bed, and she thinks it’s all worth it, it’s everything she’s always wanted, and…

There’s a flutter in her stomach and a pricking sensation on her skin; this is not the soft slide of his fingers or the cool caress of his mouth. This is the painful-quick brush of a needle, just the tiniest caress, but she knows full well what will inevitably follow.

One needle was supposed to stop her from feeling the sharp sting of thousands.

One needle wasn’t enough.

“Rogue? Are you crying?” He’s looking at her, concerned, and Rogue doesn’t know what to do. She is crying. She wants to tell him it’s only because she’s happy, but she feels that tiny tickle again and the words fall to dust in her mouth.

* * *

Mystique--Raven, I’m Raven--stands in the shower and tries to adjust to the strange sensation of water on her new skin, the new skin she hates. It’s too slick; the water slides over her body like rainwater on glass, and she has to grit her teeth and force herself to finish showering, without digging her nails deep into the soft pale white stretched over her bones.

Raven always used a loofah in the bath, but one morning she found herself rubbing so hard her skin tore and bled, red washed pink by the water down the metal drain. Now she uses some soft mesh thing, and there’s no more broken skin, and she doesn’t look down at the drain.

She rubs her hands up and down her arms, hating this, hating him. She was granted immunity for her testimony, and that’s something, at least. She’s not surprised that they can’t find him, and she doesn’t think he’s dead. She hopes they cured him. If she has to suffer this hell, then so should he.

At night, revenge takes as many shapes as she once did in her mind, and it’s the only thing that makes the feel of the Egyptian cotton against her skin bearable.

One morning she wakes up and looks down at her hand, curled in front of her face, and she thinks something’s wrong. There is a pregnant moment where the blood is a torrent in her ears and she feels faint, because of what she sees on the pads of her fingers. They are swirled with blue, just a little, as if they’ve been somehow stained with ink. She presses them to her face and starts to cry, for the first time since the sting of the needle was followed by the pain of his betrayal.

She can’t find the energy to hate the way the tears slip down her obscenely smooth cheeks, because she feels the tiniest scratch of scales and that’s all that really matters.