Apocalyptothon Fic: Come on Up, Lay Your Hands in Mine (XMM, Rogue/Iceman/Pyro) Part 1
Title: Come on Up, Lay Your Hands in Mine
Author: misachan
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Rating: R
Pairing: Rogue/Iceman/Pyro
Warnings: Sex and some salty language
Recipient: nekare
Request: Rogue, Bobby and John end up having to deal each other again when they find themselves pretty much alone.
Summary: When everything else is stripped away, all you have to lean on is each other.
(A/N: Special thanks to smartasschef14 for the last minute beta! Fic is set Some Time after X2, but mostly ignores X3. Title is taken from Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising.")
Somewhere around hour five in the vault it occurs to Marie that something must have gone wrong. She leans her head back against the wall and watches Pyro pace, catches him checking his watch when he thinks she and Bobby aren't looking. Bobby has his hand on her wrist like he's worried she's planning something stupid, but it's coming to the point where she wishes someone would do something. "John, how long are you going to keep us here?" Bobby asks, and she can tell he's trying to say as it much like Cyclops as possible.
Pyro smirks at them. "Hey, Magneto said to hold you two down here until I got the signal, and that's what I'm gonna do. Don't act like it's my fault you two were both sloppy enough to get caught." He crosses his arms and leans his shoulder against the wall. "Don't worry though, once I get the word you'll all get to meet the big man up close and personal. Well, meet him again for you, Rogue," he says, and she can feel him eyeing the stripe in her hair.
"Shut up, John."
"My name is Pyro. You two can pretend to be like the rest of the sheep all you want, but I know what I am."
"And what's that?" Bobby says, rolling his eyes.
"On the winning side," Pyro says, and that pretty much puts an end to the conversation.
***
After another three hours even Pyro starts getting antsy. She hears him mumble something about the signal not getting through, then before she can react he's standing over her and wrenching her to her feet by her hair. "Get up," he orders, "and don’t try anything cute. We're going to take a quick look outside. And you," he says, pointing at Bobby, "you even move and she burns. Got it?" Bobby locks eyes with her, and she nods her head just the smallest fraction. His mouth flattens into a thin line but he settles
back against the wall, coiled like a copperhead waiting for its chance. Then she loses sight of him as she's shoved up the stairs and out of the vault.
The transition from dim vault to bright sunlight dazzles her, and anyway she loses her footing when Pyro pushes her across the vault threshold. She's still staring at the ground, trying to work up the nerve to touch him and end this, when she hears his soft, whispered "Fuck."
She looks up and sees exactly what he means.
She sees a car half-buried nose-first in the pavement twenty feet away. The houses that had lined the nice suburban street leading to the bank Magneto had ordered them held in are ripped into kindling; one's roof is lying in the middle of the street, balancing on its point like the bow of a grounded ship. Another house, a cute little colonial that Marie remembers had all of its trim painted pink, is reduced to a free standing door frame, the front door swinging slowly back and forth, its "Welcome!" plaque dangling from one corner. Even the bank is reduced to a single wall.
A hot, constant wind blows in their faces. The horizon looks strange to her until she finally puzzles out why. "What happened to the city?" she says, trying to overlay the missing skyline in her mind. "A whole city can't just disappear." She looks over at John and sees that he's trying to look at everything at once. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out; Marie can see his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows.
Suddenly she hears steps pounding up from the vault, and she has a moment to wonder how long they'd been standing there before Bobby rushes past her and tackles Pyro to the ground. The fight is on then, and as Pyro's lighter comes out she could swear he looks relieved.
It takes long enough for the futility of someone with fire powers and someone with ice powers fighting to sink in that Rogue actually finds herself getting bored. She sits in the dust and watches the battle devolve into the mutant-powered equivalent of exhausted, blind punching, neither able to do any significant damage to the other. Finally, when the two of them are both gasping and barely able to keep their feet, Rogue speaks up: "Are either of you as hungry as I am?"
The two boys study each other, tiny slivers of flame dancing around Pyro's head, icicles hanging down from Bobby's arms, then they simultaneously back off. "We'll finish this later, Iceman," Pyro sneers, then he shuts off his flames. "C'mon, we're heading out."
Rogue gets back to her feet, and she and Iceman share a questioning look, which Pyro catches. "Don't forget, you two," he says, "you're both still my prisoners. The only reason I'm even talking to you is that Magneto wants you both alive." He makes flame wreath around himself to underscore the threat. "If he can't come here for some reason, that just means he expects me to bring you to him. Either of you gonna have problem with that?"
Rogue glances over at Bobby, who just gives her a helpless shrug. Pyro interprets that as surrender and laughs. "Knew you'd see it my way. Follow me." He turns his back on them and starts walking.
They both follow after him. There really isn't much of an alternative.
***
They walk. Midway through the first day they happen upon half of a supermarket still standing and raid it. Without electricity the meat has long since started to go south, so Marie and Bobby grab as much pop tarts and canned goods and bottled water as they can carry, since the market was the first even semi-standing building they'd seen since the vault and neither is willing to gamble on when they'll find another. Pyro rolls his eyes and only takes enough for a night or two; he tells them, loudly and repeatedly, that they're wasting their time, since they’ll have caught up with Magneto and the others in a few days.
The floors are covered with an inch-thick level of fine dust; it billows up with each step, getting in their eyes and making them sneeze. Marie forces herself to think of it as dust because knows she the alternative isn't something she's able to deal with just yet. Having dust caked on her boots is one thing; anything else (ash, bodies, people) and she knows she would just stop.
Rationalizations only go so far, though; as she passes the produce aisle her mouth suddenly starts watering for a fresh pear---right until she sees that it's covered with the same dust as the floor. Suddenly the thought of putting that in her mouth makes her gag, and she runs outside so she won't get sick all over the floors. That would be too big a desecration, even more than what they were already doing, and now she can't stop imagining the supermarket full of old people with pushcarts and mothers checking lists and little kids begging for candy. She wonders how many of those people are on her boots and then she does get sick. By the time Bobby finds her she's crying hysterically, her throat burning and her chest aching, and she can't even tell him why because it'll just start everything all over again.
John is actually nice enough to let her recover before bossing them around ("He looked a little green himself," Bobby tells her later). Getting moving again is actually a relief.
***
By the end of the second day she's cursing whoever decided that the X-Men uniforms should be made out of leather. It's hot at night and it's hotter during the day, and there's no shade. It's not as bad as it could be; every so often Bobby cools her down, but even so she's entertaining vivid fantasies about changes of clothes. Everyone's complaining about the uniforms, even John, and it's nice to hear him admit something about the Brotherhood isn't made of daisies and angel tears.
Bitching about uniform chafing keeps them from having to talk about everything else --- like the arm they find lying in the middle of the road, with no sign of the rest of the owner. Marie doesn't know which is worse: not finding anyone, or just finding bits of them. The worst is when they have to cross the bridge; every inch is packed with cars, just stopped like they're waiting for traffic to move. John climbs up on one of the roofs and hops from car to car; Marie hopes he falls, but she can tell from the way Bobby's watching that he'd just catch him with some kind of ice net. She tortures herself by looking in each of the cars as she passes. Some are empty; those are the easiest.
Others aren't. The smell is indescribable, and if there's a pattern who got atomized and who were left as a pair of arms gripping the steering wheel Marie can't find it. After the crossing they make the mutual decision to stick to back roads.
Shortly before dusk that day they find a farmhouse standing completely untouched, the only sign of the original owners is a man-shaped shadow burned into the front of the building. Pyro magnanimously lets them go in and have a look around.
Upstairs Marie finds a room painted pink with a poster of the singer Jubilee always gushed about hanging on the door. The clothes in the closet look like they're around her size, and she doesn't waste any time stripping off her uniform. She slips into the adjoining bathroom and takes her first shower since the world turned sideways, and when she comes out she gets dressed in a stranger's clothes. She tries not to think about the girl who'd picked out her skirt, whether she'd liked the way it had hanged, whether she'd stared at herself in the mirror trying it on, whether she'd bought it to impress a cute boy at school. She finds a knapsack by the bed, dumps out the books and scribbled papers, and fills it with clothes.
There's a picture on the dresser of a broad-faced, smiling man with his arm around a red-haired girl; Marie stares at the picture for a few minutes, then takes the photo out of the frame and slides it into her pocket.
She leaves her uniform stretched out on the bed. As she passes one of the other rooms, she sees Bobby roll up his own uniform and pack it in his own looted knapsack. She leaves hers where it is.
She knows deep down she'll never wear it again.
***
It's been three days, and none of them have had a full night's sleep. Pyro only lets them sleep in shifts, and only for a few hours. Then it's up again and more walking towards the rendezvous point where Pyro's convinced the Brotherhood is waiting.
Bobby finally explains it. "He doesn't know how he's supposed to keep an eye on us if he falls asleep. I don't think he's slept at all."
Now that Bobby's said it, Marie can see the dilemma written all over Pyro's face. His cheeks are sunken and there are great dark circles drawn under his eyes; she's betting it won't be long until he just falls over if he keeps up this rate. He keeps snapping at them, reminding them they're his prisoners, but his eyes dart around and he looks more unsure by the second. If Bobby couldn't just freeze off the rope, she knew he would try tying them up.
At night he catches himself nodding off and stomps around, trying to keep his eyes open. If she wasn't so tired and didn't despise him so much, it would almost be funny.
Finally, one night he can't keep his eyes open anymore and slumps over by the fire. Marie and Bobby watch him for a few minutes, then she nudges him. "Shouldn't we leave?"
Bobby lays back and looks up at the stars. "Where're we going to go?"
She doesn't have an answer for him. He reaches out an arm and she snuggles carefully against him.
In the morning, Pyro first awakens in panic, but once he sees that Bobby and Marie are still right where he put them the swagger creeps back into his walk. It's worth putting up with his crowing to get some sleep at night.
***
It turns out that having someone with fire powers around when camping out comes in pretty handy. Bobby keeps the water cold, but it's John who starts the fires at night and heats up the food so it's edible. It would almost be nice if they weren't the last people left on Earth and if Pyro would just shut up about Magneto already. Every chance he gets, he brings up Magneto's great master plan, how Magneto was going to unite all the mutants, how Magneto was going to reward him for bring them in. It was getting to the point where it would almost be worth touching him and going through everything that meant just to get some peace and quiet.
Finally, Bobby loses his patience. "You can't still think he's out there," he says, interrupting anther sermon.
Pyro just looks at him like Bobby had just asked if he actually thought water was wet. "Of course he's out there," he says, shaking his head. "Look," he says, and Marie can tell he's using his most magnanimous tone of voice, "I know you guys are worried, but you don't have to be. Everything's different now. Without the X-Men...."
"We don't know they're all dead," Bobby mutters. Pyro gives him a pitying look, and it's all Marie can do not to punch him.
"C'mon, Iceman," he says. "Think about it. There's a ton more X-Men than we have in the Brotherhood. Don't you think we would've seen one of them by now? Felt some voices in our heads? Something?" He clicks his tongue at them. "Face it, guys, whatever this was," he says, waving his hand around to indicate the general devastation, "your team got the worst of it. It's over. We won. But anyway, as I was saying," and he glares at Bobby, "we're all on the same team now. Without the X-Men, there's no one to keep Magneto from doing what he needs to do. He can lead all of us mutants like he's supposed to, and hell, it's not like they're even a lot of humans left to get in the way."
Bobby's mouth drops open, and Marie tries to tell herself he couldn't possibly have meant that the way it sounded. "You're not sayin' Magneto planned this, are you? That this is what he wanted?"
Pyro's mouth opens and closes, and some of the crazy drains from his eyes. "Nah," he admits, finally. "I don't think so. Scorched Earth, this isn't his style. He wants to lead the world, not wreck it. He doesn't even really want to kill all the humans, he just thinks mutants should be running the show."
"That's big of him," Bobby says, rolling his eyes.
"It's true. And I guess they are now, aren't they."
"What's true is that he's a lunatic, and he's got you talking just like him, John. Do you even listen to yourself? You're talking about the apocalypse like it's a good thing."
"I keep telling you, stop calling me that."
"Oh man, you're not going to say that it's your slave name or something, are you? It's like he has you brainwashed."
"Hey, I see the world the way it is. At least Magneto doesn't want us to pretend we live in a candy-coated happy land like Xavier." Bobby stalks off to the edge of their little clearing, leaving Marie sitting alone with Pyro. "He'll come around," he says, and Marie rolls her eyes. "He'd better, he's not gonna have much of a choice. That goes for both of you," he says, and it dawns on Marie that he actually thinks he's being helpful. "You two have to learn to play ball."
"You just can't wait to get back the Brotherhood, can you?"
"Nope." He leans closer. "Look, I know this sounds pretty harsh, but this might be for the best. Think of it as the world's trash being taken out all at once." It was as if once Marie had thought he'd finally said the most evil thing possible, he felt like he had to go out and top himself. "And besides, someone has to be in charge."
"And you think that someone should be Magneto."
"Well, yeah." He plays with the flames from the campfire, shaping them into Brotherhood members. "Even if this all didn't go exactly according to his plan," he says, and she can tell it's paining him a bit to admit even that, "he'll know what to do. He always knows what to do. As long as I've known him, he always, always has a plan."
***
Three weeks later they find Magneto. Stumble onto him, really; all of a sudden the ground dips and they can see into the wide, shallow valley practically before they know it's there. Marie can tell instantly that whatever the battle was, this was where it ended.
Magneto's not the first they find, though; first is Cyclops' visor, which Bobby picks up from the dirt, cracked and half-buried. Marie finds the rosary beads Storm had given Nightcrawler last Christmas, and tries to convince herself that he could have teleported away even though she can't explain why he'd leave the beads behind. Storm herself she finds a few feet away, reduced to little more than white hair, a few bones, and a cape. She forces herself to look for metal claws, black tufted hair. There's no sign of either, and she'd given up hope so long ago that when it starts burning again it actually hurts.
She does find someone else. She screams at the top of her lungs for Bobby, and when he comes over with John all three of them try to believe their eyes.
Magneto lies there at their feet a shrunken, blasted husk encased in armor. His skin is bleached white and pulled back like a mummy's, his cape twisted beneath him. She wonders if he was flying when it happened; she pictures him trying to hold a magnetic field together to try to ward off what killed him. He would be arrogant enough to think he could hold off the end of the world. She hopes it hurt like hell.
She's forgotten entirely about Pyro until she hears his voice. "No," he says, and his voice is high and strangled. He can't seem to stop staring at the body. "No. That's...that's not...he can't die. He can't be dead."
"John," Bobby says, putting his hand on Pyro's shoulder, but Pyro shrugs him off and backs up a few steps. "Don't touch me!" He looks back and forth from Bobby to Marie and back to what used to be the Master of Magnetism. "Stay away from me."
"John, it's over, c'mon, he's...."
"No!" His expression shifts from confusion to fury before Marie can blink. "Shut up! you two, you don't know. He's Magneto. He can't die. He can't."
Bobby looks to her for help, but she's not about to touch him now, not with him on the edge of a breakdown like this. "There's just...there's no way. This is his chance. This is our chance. He can't die."
Bobby tries to touch him again, but Pyro jerks away. "Don't fucking touch me. Leave me alone." He turns on his heel and takes off running. Bobby starts to follow him, but Marie grabs his arm. "Let him go," she says, trying to talk him down. "Just let him go. It'll just be a fight if you head out after him now." Bobby finally listens and stares after him, still holding Cyclops' broken visor in his hand.
***
It takes three days for John to come back. Bobby's stubborn about not breaking camp, and he ignores Marie's hints that maybe they should keep moving. She gets the feeling that if he were willing to leave her alone he would head out looking, and she doesn't know whether she loves him for being so good or wants to hit him for being so dumb.
During the days they try to bury everyone as best they can, even Magneto and the other Brotherhood members they find. Bobby says there's no point in holding grudges now. He doesn't understand why she can't let go, and she can't find the right way to explain how being used the way Magneto used her, like a weapon, a thing, is still too big a violation to forgive. She wishes she could talk to Logan. Logan always understood.
He's the only member of the team they find no sign of, and when she finally lets herself believe he might be alive she has to go off by herself and cry.
John slinks back in the dead of the third night; she and Bobby are on the edge of sleep when they hear his footsteps approaching. They watch him hunker down with his back to their inept little fire, not looking in their direction.
After a few minutes he starts sobbing. She and Bobby stay motionless, pretending to be asleep. Nobody gets any rest.
When dawn comes they break camp like John had never left. No one brings up the previous night.
***
A few days later Bobby and John get into a fistfight over Xavier and Magneto. Marie isn't paying attention when the argument begins, and before she realizes it John's called Xavier a coward and Bobby's thrown the first punch.
John stands his ground and wipes the blood from his lip. "Touchy, Drake. Truth hurt?"
Marie can see the muscle in Bobby's jaw clenching. "Take it back."
John sneers. "Make me."
Bobby throws another punch, but this time John sidesteps and trips him. "Man, that Danger Room training must've just gone downhill since I left."
Bobby regains his feet and launches himself at John, this time connecting on the jaw and knocking John on his ass. "I said take it back."
"No."
Bobby grabs John by the shoulders and tries to stand him up, but John pushes him back. "I'm not gonna take it back, because it's true! If he wasn't a coward, why wouldn't he tell the world he's a mutant? Why wouldn't he tell everyone what kind of school he really runs? Either he's a coward or he's just ashamed."
"He's neither and you know it. No one would send their kids to the school if they knew it was for mutants."
"All the more reason to put it out in everyone's face. Or maybe you agree with him," he says. "Maybe you're ashamed too. Took you long enough to come out, didn't it?"
Marie sees Bobby flinch. "Not everyone's like you, John. Some of us actually have a family to think about."
Marie feels herself brought up short by that; she'd never known that about John. In any case, if Bobby had been trying to draw blood it didn't work, because he just smirks at Bobby. "Yeah, fat lot of good they did you, huh?"
Bobby tackles John to the ground. "You shut up about my family," he says, trying to pin John down to the ground, but John twists out of it and wrestles Bobby's arm behind his back.
"Oh, poor widdle Robert Drake, so scared to tell anyone he's a mutant. What would mommy and daddy say?" He slams Bobby hard against the ground, pushing his face in the dirt. "Say it, Drake. Say you're a coward. Say you're a coward just like Xavier, just like him and everyone else in that stupid mansion who'd rather hide than actually fix anything. Say it!"
Bobby sputters in the dust, and John lets him up so he can answer. "I'd rather be a coward than a traitor any day," he finally says.
John lets him go and sits back on his heels. "You're jealous."
Bobby gets back to his feet. "What"?
John laughs like he's finally figured out the answer. "You heard me."
"You're nuts."
"You're jealous because Xavier took in any moron with mutant powers, and Magneto actually picked me."
Marie had never seen a more disgusted look on anyone's face in her life. "He only picked you because he knew he could control you."
"You don't know anything."
"I know that he looked right at you and saw 'minion' written across your forehead."
John's punch comes so fast Marie knows Bobby never sees it coming. He lands flat on his back, and John stands over him. "You don't know anything about the Brotherhood. I mattered. I was important. Magneto picked me because he knew I was different from all the rest of you."
"Yeah," Bobby says, trying to get back up. "He knew he could make you kill for him."
"That's right," he says, and Marie feels sick to her stomach at how much pride there is in his voice. "I'd've done a lot worse if he'd asked. We were changing the world, and I was a part of it. In the Brotherhood, everything I did mattered."
Bobby takes another swing, but John's the one who connects. "He could tell I was special, that I was better than all the rest of you. He could see that. He showed me who I was." He punches Bobby again, and this time Marie realizes that Bobby's letting John hit him. Tears run down John's his face as he rants some about the Brotherhood and about Magneto, and Bobby takes a few more punches before he reaches up and wrestles John down. He squirms to get free, but Bobby has his arms pinned and all the leverage.
"That's it," Bobby says. "That's it. I'm done. It's over." John struggles some more, and Bobby finally lets him up. Marie expects him to take another swing, but he spits at Bobby instead. "Fuck you, Drake," he says, and then he stalks off.
Bobby plops down; his face is already swelling up, and Marie wishes she'd thought to steal a towel so Bobby could make himself an icepack. She takes her least favorite shirt out of her pack and tears the sleeve off. "Why didn't you hit him again?" she asks as she starts wiping off his face.
"Didn't need to," he says, then "Ow," as she hits a tender spot.
"Baby." She goes more carefully anyway. "Think he'll be back?"
"Yeah," he says, wincing as he tries to rotate his arm. "Where's he gonna go?"
Bobby's right, of course. Marie expects the fight to just make everything worse, so she's surprised when later that night she sees the two of them chatting by the fire and comparing wounds. When she asks Bobby about it, he shrugs. "I don't know. Sometimes it's good to just punch things out, you know? Gets all the bad stuff out in the open." He grins. "Back at the mansion, whenever me and John would get on each other's nerves we'd both go work it out in the Danger Room, and then everything would be cool again. I guess this was kind of the same thing. Well, without lasers, anyway."
She just shakes her head at both of them. "Boys."
***
It rains for the first time since the catastrophe, hard cold drops like bags of tacks being poured from the sky. They're all caught out in the open, and Bobby makes a little ice shelter to shield them. The monotonous thud of the rain falling against the ice walls gradually makes her eyelids droop until every few seconds she catches herself nodding off. Finally she feels Bobby lay her down on the ground wrapped up in his jacket. "Get some sleep," he says, and she can hear him and John conspiring about something just before she drifts off.
It seems like just s minute later when she feels Bobby nudge her awake. "Rogue," he whispers, "time to get up now. I want you to see this."
She opens her eyes and is so dazzled she almost forgets how to breathe. What had been a simple shelter is now a castle out of a fairy tale; a vault ceiling arches over her head, and through the clear ice walls she can see slanting buttresses and delicate spires reaching up into the sky. "Oh. Oh, Bobby."
"I wanted to see what I could do," he says, shrugging. "It wasn't even as hard as I thought it would be." She stares at him open-mouthed, and he crouches in front of her, grinning. "We're not done yet. John, your go."
John smirks and flicks on his lighter, cupping his hand around the flame. Then he gestures like a stage magician, and the entire castle lights up. Tiny flames flicker in every corner, refracting so soft pinks and oranges and reds color the ice walls. She lays back and watches the thousands of tiny flames dance and has to blink back tears, because it's been so long since she's seen anything beautiful.
***
They find a ham radio in the basement of one house while rummaging around for supplies. "Oh!" Marie says, clearing off the stack of ancient Field and Streams burying it. "David had one of these. He used to fiddle around with it all the time. He had a friend in...I think it was Scotland that he used to talk to."
She sits down and starts turning the knobs. Bobby sidles up behind her, taking in the knobs and dials. "You really know how to work this?"
Marie shrugs. "Well, I never actually used one myself, but I watched David do it often enough. I could give it a shot."
"Man, how cool would it be if we could get a signal?"
"And what would the point of that be?" Marie rolls her eyes as John stomps his way down the stairs to join them. "It's not like there's anyone out there to...."
And then they hear a voice. It's faint, tinny, but undeniably a voice. All three of them stare at the radio for a few seconds, no one wanting to be the first to ask "Did you hear that?" for fear they'd jinx it.
The voice comes through again, breaking the spell. "That's German," Bobby says, grabbing a seat next to Marie. "He's speaking German."
"Since when do you speak German?" John says, now also crowding around the radio.
"I only know a little bit," Bobby says. "Kurt tried to teach us, but I only remember the basics."
"That's more than I do," Marie says, shoving the microphone to Bobby. "See how you make out.
Bobby grips the microphone with both hands; Marie can see the white in his knuckles. "Guten tag," he starts. "Um...mein name ist Bobby Drake. Ich bin in America, es gibt drei von uns." Sweat starts to bead on his forehead. "Jeder ist...dammit, what's dead? Oh, right, um, jeder ist sonst tot. Um...over?"
There's silence for a few seconds, then excited, rapid-fire German explodes from the speaker. "Whoa, whoa, too fast," Bobby says. "Um... verlangsamen! I can't follow you!" The stream of words continues unabated, and Marie thinks she hears another voice adding to the clamor in the background. Then suddenly the signal cuts off, the voice replaced by static.
"What happened?" John asks, leaning over the table. "Why'd it stop?"
"I don't know!" Marie turns the knobs and tries everything she can think of, but there's no change in the static. "It wasn't that strong a signal to begin with, an' these things can be temperamental sometimes." She looks to at Bobby. "Did you catch any of that?"
"Just bits and pieces here and there," he says. "'Gott in Himmel,' that's 'God in Heaven,' Kurt said that all the time. I think the word he kept repeating was "survivor"; it's a big long word and I can't pronounce it, but I recognize it. And the word for 'alive,' he repeated that too. I think he said he was in Frankfurt." He let out a long breath. "I know one sentence was "Thank God someone's out there."
The three of them fall silent. They've found the answer to one question: whatever had happened, apparently it happened on a worldwide scale.
John decides that their new German friend's name is Rolf; they spend their idle moments wondering what Rolf's up too and devising plans to contact him again. They never do get that radio to work again, but Marie writes down the frequency, just in case they stumble upon another one.
They cling to the voice and take turns convincing themselves that they all actually heard it. It's proof they're not the only three people left on Earth
***
One day they come across a vintage Porsche by the side of the road, completely untouched, and John decides to hotwire it. He talks Bobby into freezing open the lock, and before Marie knows it they've all piled into the car. "How do you even know how to do this?" she asks as John removes the panel under the steering wheel and starts messing with wires.
"I've seen Gone in Sixty Seconds forty-three times," he says, as if that's a perfectly reasonable answer. Bobby snickers, and when he sees the look on her face John quickly clarifies, "The original, not the remake. What kind of monster do you think I am?"
"I don't believe you just admitted that out loud," Bobby says. "And you have the nerve to call me a dork."
"Oh yeah, 'cause it's much cooler to have seen Top Gun eighty-five times," John says, keeping his eyes on his work.
Bobby blushes bright red, and Marie turns to stare at him. "Eighty-five?"
"It was up to eighty-five when I left," John continues, "so God only knows what it's up to now. Didn't you ever notice that was what he always nominated for movie night?"
"Shut up, John."
"Wait," Marie says, as something clicks into place, "Is that why you decided to call yourself Iceman?"
"No!" he says, sputtering as John starts to crack up. "I have ice powers, and I'm a guy. It's a perfectly reasonable name to...."
"No, that's it," she says. "That's absolutely it. People were throwing names at you left and right, really good names, an' no one could figure out why you were so stuck on Iceman. An' that's why you got so defensive when Jubilee made fun of it that one time!"
"Busted, Drake. Just sit back and take it like a man."
Bobby glances back and forth between and John and Marie. "Since when are you two on the same side?"
Just then the car springs to life beneath them, and John sits back and plants his hands on the steering wheel. "Yeah! Listen to that," he says, moving the seat back as the engine purrs. "We are sitting in a work of art right now."
Bobby nods towards John and mouths the word "dork" to Marie. "I saw that, Drake," John says, but the smile doesn't drop from his face. "All right, you two, settle back. We're gonna ride in style."
The tires screech as John pulls away from the curb, and Marie clutches onto the seat. "Do you even have a license?"
John laughs, a sound that barely comes through over the revving engines. "Oh shit, you're right! I might get a ticket!" Then they're tearing down the deserted country road, taking the sharp turns as fast as the car can go. John puts the top down and Marie stretches out across the back seat, the wind whipping her hair around her face, and laughs as Bobby alternates between telling John to watch out and urging him on faster. John fires up the CD player and all three sing along at the top of the their lungs to every song, making up lyrics when they don't know the real ones, and Marie hadn't realized how much she'd missed music until then. They almost crash three times, and each near miss makes them all nearly collapse in hysterical laughter.
Hours later they finally run out of gas, and they walk away from the Porsche high on adrenaline and speed, singing their made-up lyrics. The giggles still overtake them every so often, and it feels so good to have something to laugh about.
***
That night it occurs to Marie that it's been days since she's thought of John as "Pyro". Later on she realizes she can't remember the last time she thought of herself as Rogue.
(Part 2)
Author: misachan
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Rating: R
Pairing: Rogue/Iceman/Pyro
Warnings: Sex and some salty language
Recipient: nekare
Request: Rogue, Bobby and John end up having to deal each other again when they find themselves pretty much alone.
Summary: When everything else is stripped away, all you have to lean on is each other.
(A/N: Special thanks to smartasschef14 for the last minute beta! Fic is set Some Time after X2, but mostly ignores X3. Title is taken from Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising.")
Somewhere around hour five in the vault it occurs to Marie that something must have gone wrong. She leans her head back against the wall and watches Pyro pace, catches him checking his watch when he thinks she and Bobby aren't looking. Bobby has his hand on her wrist like he's worried she's planning something stupid, but it's coming to the point where she wishes someone would do something. "John, how long are you going to keep us here?" Bobby asks, and she can tell he's trying to say as it much like Cyclops as possible.
Pyro smirks at them. "Hey, Magneto said to hold you two down here until I got the signal, and that's what I'm gonna do. Don't act like it's my fault you two were both sloppy enough to get caught." He crosses his arms and leans his shoulder against the wall. "Don't worry though, once I get the word you'll all get to meet the big man up close and personal. Well, meet him again for you, Rogue," he says, and she can feel him eyeing the stripe in her hair.
"Shut up, John."
"My name is Pyro. You two can pretend to be like the rest of the sheep all you want, but I know what I am."
"And what's that?" Bobby says, rolling his eyes.
"On the winning side," Pyro says, and that pretty much puts an end to the conversation.
***
After another three hours even Pyro starts getting antsy. She hears him mumble something about the signal not getting through, then before she can react he's standing over her and wrenching her to her feet by her hair. "Get up," he orders, "and don’t try anything cute. We're going to take a quick look outside. And you," he says, pointing at Bobby, "you even move and she burns. Got it?" Bobby locks eyes with her, and she nods her head just the smallest fraction. His mouth flattens into a thin line but he settles
back against the wall, coiled like a copperhead waiting for its chance. Then she loses sight of him as she's shoved up the stairs and out of the vault.
The transition from dim vault to bright sunlight dazzles her, and anyway she loses her footing when Pyro pushes her across the vault threshold. She's still staring at the ground, trying to work up the nerve to touch him and end this, when she hears his soft, whispered "Fuck."
She looks up and sees exactly what he means.
She sees a car half-buried nose-first in the pavement twenty feet away. The houses that had lined the nice suburban street leading to the bank Magneto had ordered them held in are ripped into kindling; one's roof is lying in the middle of the street, balancing on its point like the bow of a grounded ship. Another house, a cute little colonial that Marie remembers had all of its trim painted pink, is reduced to a free standing door frame, the front door swinging slowly back and forth, its "Welcome!" plaque dangling from one corner. Even the bank is reduced to a single wall.
A hot, constant wind blows in their faces. The horizon looks strange to her until she finally puzzles out why. "What happened to the city?" she says, trying to overlay the missing skyline in her mind. "A whole city can't just disappear." She looks over at John and sees that he's trying to look at everything at once. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out; Marie can see his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows.
Suddenly she hears steps pounding up from the vault, and she has a moment to wonder how long they'd been standing there before Bobby rushes past her and tackles Pyro to the ground. The fight is on then, and as Pyro's lighter comes out she could swear he looks relieved.
It takes long enough for the futility of someone with fire powers and someone with ice powers fighting to sink in that Rogue actually finds herself getting bored. She sits in the dust and watches the battle devolve into the mutant-powered equivalent of exhausted, blind punching, neither able to do any significant damage to the other. Finally, when the two of them are both gasping and barely able to keep their feet, Rogue speaks up: "Are either of you as hungry as I am?"
The two boys study each other, tiny slivers of flame dancing around Pyro's head, icicles hanging down from Bobby's arms, then they simultaneously back off. "We'll finish this later, Iceman," Pyro sneers, then he shuts off his flames. "C'mon, we're heading out."
Rogue gets back to her feet, and she and Iceman share a questioning look, which Pyro catches. "Don't forget, you two," he says, "you're both still my prisoners. The only reason I'm even talking to you is that Magneto wants you both alive." He makes flame wreath around himself to underscore the threat. "If he can't come here for some reason, that just means he expects me to bring you to him. Either of you gonna have problem with that?"
Rogue glances over at Bobby, who just gives her a helpless shrug. Pyro interprets that as surrender and laughs. "Knew you'd see it my way. Follow me." He turns his back on them and starts walking.
They both follow after him. There really isn't much of an alternative.
***
They walk. Midway through the first day they happen upon half of a supermarket still standing and raid it. Without electricity the meat has long since started to go south, so Marie and Bobby grab as much pop tarts and canned goods and bottled water as they can carry, since the market was the first even semi-standing building they'd seen since the vault and neither is willing to gamble on when they'll find another. Pyro rolls his eyes and only takes enough for a night or two; he tells them, loudly and repeatedly, that they're wasting their time, since they’ll have caught up with Magneto and the others in a few days.
The floors are covered with an inch-thick level of fine dust; it billows up with each step, getting in their eyes and making them sneeze. Marie forces herself to think of it as dust because knows she the alternative isn't something she's able to deal with just yet. Having dust caked on her boots is one thing; anything else (ash, bodies, people) and she knows she would just stop.
Rationalizations only go so far, though; as she passes the produce aisle her mouth suddenly starts watering for a fresh pear---right until she sees that it's covered with the same dust as the floor. Suddenly the thought of putting that in her mouth makes her gag, and she runs outside so she won't get sick all over the floors. That would be too big a desecration, even more than what they were already doing, and now she can't stop imagining the supermarket full of old people with pushcarts and mothers checking lists and little kids begging for candy. She wonders how many of those people are on her boots and then she does get sick. By the time Bobby finds her she's crying hysterically, her throat burning and her chest aching, and she can't even tell him why because it'll just start everything all over again.
John is actually nice enough to let her recover before bossing them around ("He looked a little green himself," Bobby tells her later). Getting moving again is actually a relief.
***
By the end of the second day she's cursing whoever decided that the X-Men uniforms should be made out of leather. It's hot at night and it's hotter during the day, and there's no shade. It's not as bad as it could be; every so often Bobby cools her down, but even so she's entertaining vivid fantasies about changes of clothes. Everyone's complaining about the uniforms, even John, and it's nice to hear him admit something about the Brotherhood isn't made of daisies and angel tears.
Bitching about uniform chafing keeps them from having to talk about everything else --- like the arm they find lying in the middle of the road, with no sign of the rest of the owner. Marie doesn't know which is worse: not finding anyone, or just finding bits of them. The worst is when they have to cross the bridge; every inch is packed with cars, just stopped like they're waiting for traffic to move. John climbs up on one of the roofs and hops from car to car; Marie hopes he falls, but she can tell from the way Bobby's watching that he'd just catch him with some kind of ice net. She tortures herself by looking in each of the cars as she passes. Some are empty; those are the easiest.
Others aren't. The smell is indescribable, and if there's a pattern who got atomized and who were left as a pair of arms gripping the steering wheel Marie can't find it. After the crossing they make the mutual decision to stick to back roads.
Shortly before dusk that day they find a farmhouse standing completely untouched, the only sign of the original owners is a man-shaped shadow burned into the front of the building. Pyro magnanimously lets them go in and have a look around.
Upstairs Marie finds a room painted pink with a poster of the singer Jubilee always gushed about hanging on the door. The clothes in the closet look like they're around her size, and she doesn't waste any time stripping off her uniform. She slips into the adjoining bathroom and takes her first shower since the world turned sideways, and when she comes out she gets dressed in a stranger's clothes. She tries not to think about the girl who'd picked out her skirt, whether she'd liked the way it had hanged, whether she'd stared at herself in the mirror trying it on, whether she'd bought it to impress a cute boy at school. She finds a knapsack by the bed, dumps out the books and scribbled papers, and fills it with clothes.
There's a picture on the dresser of a broad-faced, smiling man with his arm around a red-haired girl; Marie stares at the picture for a few minutes, then takes the photo out of the frame and slides it into her pocket.
She leaves her uniform stretched out on the bed. As she passes one of the other rooms, she sees Bobby roll up his own uniform and pack it in his own looted knapsack. She leaves hers where it is.
She knows deep down she'll never wear it again.
***
It's been three days, and none of them have had a full night's sleep. Pyro only lets them sleep in shifts, and only for a few hours. Then it's up again and more walking towards the rendezvous point where Pyro's convinced the Brotherhood is waiting.
Bobby finally explains it. "He doesn't know how he's supposed to keep an eye on us if he falls asleep. I don't think he's slept at all."
Now that Bobby's said it, Marie can see the dilemma written all over Pyro's face. His cheeks are sunken and there are great dark circles drawn under his eyes; she's betting it won't be long until he just falls over if he keeps up this rate. He keeps snapping at them, reminding them they're his prisoners, but his eyes dart around and he looks more unsure by the second. If Bobby couldn't just freeze off the rope, she knew he would try tying them up.
At night he catches himself nodding off and stomps around, trying to keep his eyes open. If she wasn't so tired and didn't despise him so much, it would almost be funny.
Finally, one night he can't keep his eyes open anymore and slumps over by the fire. Marie and Bobby watch him for a few minutes, then she nudges him. "Shouldn't we leave?"
Bobby lays back and looks up at the stars. "Where're we going to go?"
She doesn't have an answer for him. He reaches out an arm and she snuggles carefully against him.
In the morning, Pyro first awakens in panic, but once he sees that Bobby and Marie are still right where he put them the swagger creeps back into his walk. It's worth putting up with his crowing to get some sleep at night.
***
It turns out that having someone with fire powers around when camping out comes in pretty handy. Bobby keeps the water cold, but it's John who starts the fires at night and heats up the food so it's edible. It would almost be nice if they weren't the last people left on Earth and if Pyro would just shut up about Magneto already. Every chance he gets, he brings up Magneto's great master plan, how Magneto was going to unite all the mutants, how Magneto was going to reward him for bring them in. It was getting to the point where it would almost be worth touching him and going through everything that meant just to get some peace and quiet.
Finally, Bobby loses his patience. "You can't still think he's out there," he says, interrupting anther sermon.
Pyro just looks at him like Bobby had just asked if he actually thought water was wet. "Of course he's out there," he says, shaking his head. "Look," he says, and Marie can tell he's using his most magnanimous tone of voice, "I know you guys are worried, but you don't have to be. Everything's different now. Without the X-Men...."
"We don't know they're all dead," Bobby mutters. Pyro gives him a pitying look, and it's all Marie can do not to punch him.
"C'mon, Iceman," he says. "Think about it. There's a ton more X-Men than we have in the Brotherhood. Don't you think we would've seen one of them by now? Felt some voices in our heads? Something?" He clicks his tongue at them. "Face it, guys, whatever this was," he says, waving his hand around to indicate the general devastation, "your team got the worst of it. It's over. We won. But anyway, as I was saying," and he glares at Bobby, "we're all on the same team now. Without the X-Men, there's no one to keep Magneto from doing what he needs to do. He can lead all of us mutants like he's supposed to, and hell, it's not like they're even a lot of humans left to get in the way."
Bobby's mouth drops open, and Marie tries to tell herself he couldn't possibly have meant that the way it sounded. "You're not sayin' Magneto planned this, are you? That this is what he wanted?"
Pyro's mouth opens and closes, and some of the crazy drains from his eyes. "Nah," he admits, finally. "I don't think so. Scorched Earth, this isn't his style. He wants to lead the world, not wreck it. He doesn't even really want to kill all the humans, he just thinks mutants should be running the show."
"That's big of him," Bobby says, rolling his eyes.
"It's true. And I guess they are now, aren't they."
"What's true is that he's a lunatic, and he's got you talking just like him, John. Do you even listen to yourself? You're talking about the apocalypse like it's a good thing."
"I keep telling you, stop calling me that."
"Oh man, you're not going to say that it's your slave name or something, are you? It's like he has you brainwashed."
"Hey, I see the world the way it is. At least Magneto doesn't want us to pretend we live in a candy-coated happy land like Xavier." Bobby stalks off to the edge of their little clearing, leaving Marie sitting alone with Pyro. "He'll come around," he says, and Marie rolls her eyes. "He'd better, he's not gonna have much of a choice. That goes for both of you," he says, and it dawns on Marie that he actually thinks he's being helpful. "You two have to learn to play ball."
"You just can't wait to get back the Brotherhood, can you?"
"Nope." He leans closer. "Look, I know this sounds pretty harsh, but this might be for the best. Think of it as the world's trash being taken out all at once." It was as if once Marie had thought he'd finally said the most evil thing possible, he felt like he had to go out and top himself. "And besides, someone has to be in charge."
"And you think that someone should be Magneto."
"Well, yeah." He plays with the flames from the campfire, shaping them into Brotherhood members. "Even if this all didn't go exactly according to his plan," he says, and she can tell it's paining him a bit to admit even that, "he'll know what to do. He always knows what to do. As long as I've known him, he always, always has a plan."
***
Three weeks later they find Magneto. Stumble onto him, really; all of a sudden the ground dips and they can see into the wide, shallow valley practically before they know it's there. Marie can tell instantly that whatever the battle was, this was where it ended.
Magneto's not the first they find, though; first is Cyclops' visor, which Bobby picks up from the dirt, cracked and half-buried. Marie finds the rosary beads Storm had given Nightcrawler last Christmas, and tries to convince herself that he could have teleported away even though she can't explain why he'd leave the beads behind. Storm herself she finds a few feet away, reduced to little more than white hair, a few bones, and a cape. She forces herself to look for metal claws, black tufted hair. There's no sign of either, and she'd given up hope so long ago that when it starts burning again it actually hurts.
She does find someone else. She screams at the top of her lungs for Bobby, and when he comes over with John all three of them try to believe their eyes.
Magneto lies there at their feet a shrunken, blasted husk encased in armor. His skin is bleached white and pulled back like a mummy's, his cape twisted beneath him. She wonders if he was flying when it happened; she pictures him trying to hold a magnetic field together to try to ward off what killed him. He would be arrogant enough to think he could hold off the end of the world. She hopes it hurt like hell.
She's forgotten entirely about Pyro until she hears his voice. "No," he says, and his voice is high and strangled. He can't seem to stop staring at the body. "No. That's...that's not...he can't die. He can't be dead."
"John," Bobby says, putting his hand on Pyro's shoulder, but Pyro shrugs him off and backs up a few steps. "Don't touch me!" He looks back and forth from Bobby to Marie and back to what used to be the Master of Magnetism. "Stay away from me."
"John, it's over, c'mon, he's...."
"No!" His expression shifts from confusion to fury before Marie can blink. "Shut up! you two, you don't know. He's Magneto. He can't die. He can't."
Bobby looks to her for help, but she's not about to touch him now, not with him on the edge of a breakdown like this. "There's just...there's no way. This is his chance. This is our chance. He can't die."
Bobby tries to touch him again, but Pyro jerks away. "Don't fucking touch me. Leave me alone." He turns on his heel and takes off running. Bobby starts to follow him, but Marie grabs his arm. "Let him go," she says, trying to talk him down. "Just let him go. It'll just be a fight if you head out after him now." Bobby finally listens and stares after him, still holding Cyclops' broken visor in his hand.
***
It takes three days for John to come back. Bobby's stubborn about not breaking camp, and he ignores Marie's hints that maybe they should keep moving. She gets the feeling that if he were willing to leave her alone he would head out looking, and she doesn't know whether she loves him for being so good or wants to hit him for being so dumb.
During the days they try to bury everyone as best they can, even Magneto and the other Brotherhood members they find. Bobby says there's no point in holding grudges now. He doesn't understand why she can't let go, and she can't find the right way to explain how being used the way Magneto used her, like a weapon, a thing, is still too big a violation to forgive. She wishes she could talk to Logan. Logan always understood.
He's the only member of the team they find no sign of, and when she finally lets herself believe he might be alive she has to go off by herself and cry.
John slinks back in the dead of the third night; she and Bobby are on the edge of sleep when they hear his footsteps approaching. They watch him hunker down with his back to their inept little fire, not looking in their direction.
After a few minutes he starts sobbing. She and Bobby stay motionless, pretending to be asleep. Nobody gets any rest.
When dawn comes they break camp like John had never left. No one brings up the previous night.
***
A few days later Bobby and John get into a fistfight over Xavier and Magneto. Marie isn't paying attention when the argument begins, and before she realizes it John's called Xavier a coward and Bobby's thrown the first punch.
John stands his ground and wipes the blood from his lip. "Touchy, Drake. Truth hurt?"
Marie can see the muscle in Bobby's jaw clenching. "Take it back."
John sneers. "Make me."
Bobby throws another punch, but this time John sidesteps and trips him. "Man, that Danger Room training must've just gone downhill since I left."
Bobby regains his feet and launches himself at John, this time connecting on the jaw and knocking John on his ass. "I said take it back."
"No."
Bobby grabs John by the shoulders and tries to stand him up, but John pushes him back. "I'm not gonna take it back, because it's true! If he wasn't a coward, why wouldn't he tell the world he's a mutant? Why wouldn't he tell everyone what kind of school he really runs? Either he's a coward or he's just ashamed."
"He's neither and you know it. No one would send their kids to the school if they knew it was for mutants."
"All the more reason to put it out in everyone's face. Or maybe you agree with him," he says. "Maybe you're ashamed too. Took you long enough to come out, didn't it?"
Marie sees Bobby flinch. "Not everyone's like you, John. Some of us actually have a family to think about."
Marie feels herself brought up short by that; she'd never known that about John. In any case, if Bobby had been trying to draw blood it didn't work, because he just smirks at Bobby. "Yeah, fat lot of good they did you, huh?"
Bobby tackles John to the ground. "You shut up about my family," he says, trying to pin John down to the ground, but John twists out of it and wrestles Bobby's arm behind his back.
"Oh, poor widdle Robert Drake, so scared to tell anyone he's a mutant. What would mommy and daddy say?" He slams Bobby hard against the ground, pushing his face in the dirt. "Say it, Drake. Say you're a coward. Say you're a coward just like Xavier, just like him and everyone else in that stupid mansion who'd rather hide than actually fix anything. Say it!"
Bobby sputters in the dust, and John lets him up so he can answer. "I'd rather be a coward than a traitor any day," he finally says.
John lets him go and sits back on his heels. "You're jealous."
Bobby gets back to his feet. "What"?
John laughs like he's finally figured out the answer. "You heard me."
"You're nuts."
"You're jealous because Xavier took in any moron with mutant powers, and Magneto actually picked me."
Marie had never seen a more disgusted look on anyone's face in her life. "He only picked you because he knew he could control you."
"You don't know anything."
"I know that he looked right at you and saw 'minion' written across your forehead."
John's punch comes so fast Marie knows Bobby never sees it coming. He lands flat on his back, and John stands over him. "You don't know anything about the Brotherhood. I mattered. I was important. Magneto picked me because he knew I was different from all the rest of you."
"Yeah," Bobby says, trying to get back up. "He knew he could make you kill for him."
"That's right," he says, and Marie feels sick to her stomach at how much pride there is in his voice. "I'd've done a lot worse if he'd asked. We were changing the world, and I was a part of it. In the Brotherhood, everything I did mattered."
Bobby takes another swing, but John's the one who connects. "He could tell I was special, that I was better than all the rest of you. He could see that. He showed me who I was." He punches Bobby again, and this time Marie realizes that Bobby's letting John hit him. Tears run down John's his face as he rants some about the Brotherhood and about Magneto, and Bobby takes a few more punches before he reaches up and wrestles John down. He squirms to get free, but Bobby has his arms pinned and all the leverage.
"That's it," Bobby says. "That's it. I'm done. It's over." John struggles some more, and Bobby finally lets him up. Marie expects him to take another swing, but he spits at Bobby instead. "Fuck you, Drake," he says, and then he stalks off.
Bobby plops down; his face is already swelling up, and Marie wishes she'd thought to steal a towel so Bobby could make himself an icepack. She takes her least favorite shirt out of her pack and tears the sleeve off. "Why didn't you hit him again?" she asks as she starts wiping off his face.
"Didn't need to," he says, then "Ow," as she hits a tender spot.
"Baby." She goes more carefully anyway. "Think he'll be back?"
"Yeah," he says, wincing as he tries to rotate his arm. "Where's he gonna go?"
Bobby's right, of course. Marie expects the fight to just make everything worse, so she's surprised when later that night she sees the two of them chatting by the fire and comparing wounds. When she asks Bobby about it, he shrugs. "I don't know. Sometimes it's good to just punch things out, you know? Gets all the bad stuff out in the open." He grins. "Back at the mansion, whenever me and John would get on each other's nerves we'd both go work it out in the Danger Room, and then everything would be cool again. I guess this was kind of the same thing. Well, without lasers, anyway."
She just shakes her head at both of them. "Boys."
***
It rains for the first time since the catastrophe, hard cold drops like bags of tacks being poured from the sky. They're all caught out in the open, and Bobby makes a little ice shelter to shield them. The monotonous thud of the rain falling against the ice walls gradually makes her eyelids droop until every few seconds she catches herself nodding off. Finally she feels Bobby lay her down on the ground wrapped up in his jacket. "Get some sleep," he says, and she can hear him and John conspiring about something just before she drifts off.
It seems like just s minute later when she feels Bobby nudge her awake. "Rogue," he whispers, "time to get up now. I want you to see this."
She opens her eyes and is so dazzled she almost forgets how to breathe. What had been a simple shelter is now a castle out of a fairy tale; a vault ceiling arches over her head, and through the clear ice walls she can see slanting buttresses and delicate spires reaching up into the sky. "Oh. Oh, Bobby."
"I wanted to see what I could do," he says, shrugging. "It wasn't even as hard as I thought it would be." She stares at him open-mouthed, and he crouches in front of her, grinning. "We're not done yet. John, your go."
John smirks and flicks on his lighter, cupping his hand around the flame. Then he gestures like a stage magician, and the entire castle lights up. Tiny flames flicker in every corner, refracting so soft pinks and oranges and reds color the ice walls. She lays back and watches the thousands of tiny flames dance and has to blink back tears, because it's been so long since she's seen anything beautiful.
***
They find a ham radio in the basement of one house while rummaging around for supplies. "Oh!" Marie says, clearing off the stack of ancient Field and Streams burying it. "David had one of these. He used to fiddle around with it all the time. He had a friend in...I think it was Scotland that he used to talk to."
She sits down and starts turning the knobs. Bobby sidles up behind her, taking in the knobs and dials. "You really know how to work this?"
Marie shrugs. "Well, I never actually used one myself, but I watched David do it often enough. I could give it a shot."
"Man, how cool would it be if we could get a signal?"
"And what would the point of that be?" Marie rolls her eyes as John stomps his way down the stairs to join them. "It's not like there's anyone out there to...."
And then they hear a voice. It's faint, tinny, but undeniably a voice. All three of them stare at the radio for a few seconds, no one wanting to be the first to ask "Did you hear that?" for fear they'd jinx it.
The voice comes through again, breaking the spell. "That's German," Bobby says, grabbing a seat next to Marie. "He's speaking German."
"Since when do you speak German?" John says, now also crowding around the radio.
"I only know a little bit," Bobby says. "Kurt tried to teach us, but I only remember the basics."
"That's more than I do," Marie says, shoving the microphone to Bobby. "See how you make out.
Bobby grips the microphone with both hands; Marie can see the white in his knuckles. "Guten tag," he starts. "Um...mein name ist Bobby Drake. Ich bin in America, es gibt drei von uns." Sweat starts to bead on his forehead. "Jeder ist...dammit, what's dead? Oh, right, um, jeder ist sonst tot. Um...over?"
There's silence for a few seconds, then excited, rapid-fire German explodes from the speaker. "Whoa, whoa, too fast," Bobby says. "Um... verlangsamen! I can't follow you!" The stream of words continues unabated, and Marie thinks she hears another voice adding to the clamor in the background. Then suddenly the signal cuts off, the voice replaced by static.
"What happened?" John asks, leaning over the table. "Why'd it stop?"
"I don't know!" Marie turns the knobs and tries everything she can think of, but there's no change in the static. "It wasn't that strong a signal to begin with, an' these things can be temperamental sometimes." She looks to at Bobby. "Did you catch any of that?"
"Just bits and pieces here and there," he says. "'Gott in Himmel,' that's 'God in Heaven,' Kurt said that all the time. I think the word he kept repeating was "survivor"; it's a big long word and I can't pronounce it, but I recognize it. And the word for 'alive,' he repeated that too. I think he said he was in Frankfurt." He let out a long breath. "I know one sentence was "Thank God someone's out there."
The three of them fall silent. They've found the answer to one question: whatever had happened, apparently it happened on a worldwide scale.
John decides that their new German friend's name is Rolf; they spend their idle moments wondering what Rolf's up too and devising plans to contact him again. They never do get that radio to work again, but Marie writes down the frequency, just in case they stumble upon another one.
They cling to the voice and take turns convincing themselves that they all actually heard it. It's proof they're not the only three people left on Earth
***
One day they come across a vintage Porsche by the side of the road, completely untouched, and John decides to hotwire it. He talks Bobby into freezing open the lock, and before Marie knows it they've all piled into the car. "How do you even know how to do this?" she asks as John removes the panel under the steering wheel and starts messing with wires.
"I've seen Gone in Sixty Seconds forty-three times," he says, as if that's a perfectly reasonable answer. Bobby snickers, and when he sees the look on her face John quickly clarifies, "The original, not the remake. What kind of monster do you think I am?"
"I don't believe you just admitted that out loud," Bobby says. "And you have the nerve to call me a dork."
"Oh yeah, 'cause it's much cooler to have seen Top Gun eighty-five times," John says, keeping his eyes on his work.
Bobby blushes bright red, and Marie turns to stare at him. "Eighty-five?"
"It was up to eighty-five when I left," John continues, "so God only knows what it's up to now. Didn't you ever notice that was what he always nominated for movie night?"
"Shut up, John."
"Wait," Marie says, as something clicks into place, "Is that why you decided to call yourself Iceman?"
"No!" he says, sputtering as John starts to crack up. "I have ice powers, and I'm a guy. It's a perfectly reasonable name to...."
"No, that's it," she says. "That's absolutely it. People were throwing names at you left and right, really good names, an' no one could figure out why you were so stuck on Iceman. An' that's why you got so defensive when Jubilee made fun of it that one time!"
"Busted, Drake. Just sit back and take it like a man."
Bobby glances back and forth between and John and Marie. "Since when are you two on the same side?"
Just then the car springs to life beneath them, and John sits back and plants his hands on the steering wheel. "Yeah! Listen to that," he says, moving the seat back as the engine purrs. "We are sitting in a work of art right now."
Bobby nods towards John and mouths the word "dork" to Marie. "I saw that, Drake," John says, but the smile doesn't drop from his face. "All right, you two, settle back. We're gonna ride in style."
The tires screech as John pulls away from the curb, and Marie clutches onto the seat. "Do you even have a license?"
John laughs, a sound that barely comes through over the revving engines. "Oh shit, you're right! I might get a ticket!" Then they're tearing down the deserted country road, taking the sharp turns as fast as the car can go. John puts the top down and Marie stretches out across the back seat, the wind whipping her hair around her face, and laughs as Bobby alternates between telling John to watch out and urging him on faster. John fires up the CD player and all three sing along at the top of the their lungs to every song, making up lyrics when they don't know the real ones, and Marie hadn't realized how much she'd missed music until then. They almost crash three times, and each near miss makes them all nearly collapse in hysterical laughter.
Hours later they finally run out of gas, and they walk away from the Porsche high on adrenaline and speed, singing their made-up lyrics. The giggles still overtake them every so often, and it feels so good to have something to laugh about.
***
That night it occurs to Marie that it's been days since she's thought of John as "Pyro". Later on she realizes she can't remember the last time she thought of herself as Rogue.
(Part 2)