[Marie, Scott] there were times she was a woman,

[x-rogue.livejournal.com]

Marie finds out that with a mutation like hers, setting out to go as far and fast as you can will get you further than you expect in far less time than you intended and if you aren't paying attention, you'll have no way to get home. She calls Scott to come and find her and he does, and they talk on the way home.


It was dark and the sky had been leaking drizzle for an hour or more. Soaked to the skin and aching all over, Marie stood at a bridge, staring at the sign - Tomac Avenue - and she realized that she had no idea where she was. Her phone was in the pocket of her running shirt. She didn't remember it putting in there and somehow it hurt to know that even in the middle of her pain, she was conditioned to carry the link to home with her, like it wasn't a choice anymore. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped it and it bounced along the shoulder of the road before she could pick it up.

She kept walking, up the slow slope of the bridge that passed over a railway line, and stared at the buttons of the phone in her hands, then turned it on. From the highest point of the bridge, when she looked up, she was almost in the middle of nowhere. Houselights sparkled in the distance but the immediate vicinity was black, wet, and silent. She perched on the railing and picked a button.

Scott was sprawled in his chair in his room, scowling slightly at the grades of his engineering class, when the phone rang.

"Summers here."

"Scott?"

Marie's voice was pale and distant and Scott knew immediately, instinctively, that she wasn't in the school. He tossed his notes onto his desk and sat up. "Blossom? Where are you?" Damn Logan, he thought angrily. What the hell did he do this time?

"I don't know," Marie admitted. "Tomac Avenue, over the traintracks. Wherever that is." She laughed shakily. The cold was starting to get to her now that she'd stopped running.

Tomac Avenue? Scott didn't know where it was either, and he knew the area pretty well. "Hang on, Blossom." He held the phone to his ear with his shoulder, punching keys on his computer with one hand, grabbing his keys with the other. It didn't take a minute for a map to come up and Scott had to zoom out to figure out where she was in relation to the school. "Hell. How did you get there, Marie?"

"I ran." She pulled her feet up to rest her heels on the concrete barrier she was sitting on, noting the ruin of her sneakers.

The printer was spewing out driving directions. Twenty-plus miles. And one state line. Shit. "What did he do?" Scott grabbed his coat and slammed the door behind him, barely resisting the urge to cross the hall and take a moment to deliver the first installment of Logan's re-education plan.

"It's not him." Marie put her head down on her knees and a sob caught in her throat. "It's me. It's me..."

"We'll see." Scott took the stairs too fast, skipping the last handful of stairs on each flight, just as he was always telling the students not to do. "I'll be there soon, Blossom. Don't go anywhere else on me unless you can go somewhere to get warm."

"There's nowhere... I'll just wait. Scott?" Marie hugged herself tightly.

"Yes?" He unlocked his car and slid the computer chips necessary to run the car into place before putting the key in the ignition.

"Thanks. And I'm sorry." She felt overwhelmingly guilty and ashamed of herself for being such a silly child about things.

The garage door opened and Scott was on his way with a squeal of tires. "Don't be sorry. We'll talk when I get there... about twenty minutes, maybe more if I hit traffic." He had every intention of ignoring the speed limit all the way there.

"Okay." She closed the phone and looked at it for a long time, trying to bring herself to call Logan, and she couldn't do it. What was she supposed to say to him? There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't either hurt him or make him want to go un-limb Doug. She put her head down on her knees again, wishing like crazy she hadn't been so stupid, so impulsive, that she'd looked where she was going. She didn't even know how she'd gotten here and just hoped that she hadn't drawn attention to herself in the process.

The headlights of Scott's car cut through the dusk, making halos in the drizzle and outlining a little figure perched on the railing of the bridge he was approaching. He'd seen the distance on the map, but covering it himself was something else. She must have hit a trail that ran into one of the parks and then gone north from there, on streets and trails, until she'd come to this place. In spite of himself, he was making changes to her role in teams based on this demonstration of her speed and stamina.

Marie sat on the railing over the train tracks, swinging her heels against the bridge and waiting for the next train to come. Two had passed since she'd called Scott and she was so cold now that she wasn't cold anymore, strangely warm instead, and feeling a little translucent. When the lights came, she wondered for a moment if she were glowing, and then she heard the tires on the wet pavement as Scott stopped the car.

There was the momentary fear that she might jump and then Scott remembered who he was looking at and shook his head, realizing how high-strung he'd gotten about the kids lately. "Hey Blossom," he said quietly, when he was close enough to be heard.

"Hey, Sunshine," Marie answered. Her body felt heavy, sodden and paralytic, but she managed to turn around, lifting her leaden legs over the railing. Scott reached out to help her and suddenly Marie was reminded of the last time he'd come to pick her up somewhere. Before she knew it, she was being lifted in strong arms and carried back to the car.

Scott filed "Do you ever eat?" under the list of things he and Marie were going to talk about, and soon, as he put her down on the hood of the car. "Don't move," he ordered. He got sick of the boy scout jokes but he really did try to be prepared. Of course, the only spare clothes he had with him were his, but it wasn't like it would matter if they were too big. He grabbed bottled water and blankets out of the trunk as well and opened the passenger door, tossing everything in to stay dry.

Marie put her head in her hands, feeling hollow. "I'm sorry," she said again.

"Don't be," Scott said, coming around to the front of the car. "Come on." He helped Marie to stand up and walked her around to the passenger side, holding the door open and pointing at the clothes inside. "Get changed, we'll talk when we're driving." He turned his back on her then and waited.

Marie changed quickly, throwing her wet things into the footwell of the car. Scott's clothing was ludicrously big on her but it was dry and warmer than her skin, which wasn't saying much. The car was still running and the heat was on full blast and she couldn't wait to get inside. "Done," she said, when she'd pulled his sweatshirt over her head, over the long-sleeved shirt and jeans he'd also given her to wear. Her gloves were long gone, somewhere, and she didn't remember taking them off.

"In." Scott tucked her into her seat with a blanket around her and opened a bottle of water. "Drink this, slowly," he told her. He got in on his side of the car and looked over at her in the glow of the interior light before he closed his door completely. She looked like a ghost right now and he realized that if he wasn't going to be giving Logan hell over whatever had happened, the other man would probably be ready to do so to whoever was at fault. He closed his door and, making a neat three-point turn, started driving home.

"It wasn't Logan's fault," Marie said after a while. She put the water down carefully, she was shaking so hard she couldn't drink it properly and her voice came out all unsteady when she spoke. "It's me."

"I'll take your word for it." Scott couldn't keep the irritation out of his voice.

"Scott. Please." Marie's expression was drawn and her eyes were wells of hurt. "Don't... just don't."

Scott looked over at her and felt guilty almost instantly. "I'm sorry, Blossom. It's not like he hasn't hurt you before."

"Or that he won't again." Marie pulled the blankets tighter around her. "And I accept that. I love him and he's the person I want to be with, Scott. This is hard enough as it is."

Scott watched the road for a few minutes, thinking about this. She wasn't changing her mind, that was for sure. When he looked over at her again, he realized how miserable she was and knew he was making it worse. "Okay. So what happened?"

"I think I just kind of blew a fuse," Marie admitted. She wasn't shaking as badly now, but tiredness was starting to set in. "I went to talk to Doug about learning some Askani and he said things that should /not/ have upset me but did anyway."

"Anything in particular? And don't answer that until you drink more water. You're dehydrated." Scott got them back on the freeway and decided to take the slow lane home, at least for now.

Marie drank some water obediently before speaking. "I think it had to do with a discussion we were having, he and I and Shinobi and a lot of other people, over email, about the whole Jono-Paige-Angelo complete-non-issue-thing." Marie caught Scott's look of confusion. "That the three of them should stop angsting and just accept that they're kind of together and no one cares as long as they're happy. That was my opinion, that it doesn't matter how many people are in a relationship as long as they're honest and loving."

Scott nodded. It wasn't his cup of tea, that was for sure, and he predicted a hell of a blowup from the threesome at some point, but it happened all the time with average pairings anyway. People struggled at relationships, for the most part. "So he didn't like what you had to say?" That didn't make sense, that Doug would be closed-minded or that Marie would get upset over someone disagreeing with her.

"He did. That was the problem. And he told Angie." Marie drank some more water, tasting the blood from her cracked lips. "And then me." Her voice broke then and she would have cried but there weren't any tears left.

Scott took a moment to digest this, and then a little longer to fight down the urge to bang his head on the steering wheel in frustration.

"I like Angie," Marie continued brokenly. "She's nice and she was saying last week that she wanted me to come do things with them and do you know how rarely anyone ever does that? It's not like I have friends to just throw away, you know? There's people who need me, sure, but friends?" She shook her head.

Scott was silent until he had something to say that didn't involve Doug and the term "dumbass". "I'm sure Angie will get over it," he said at last. "Anyone who lives here knows you'd never do something like that."

"That's not the point, Scott." Marie said quietly. "If I could make him not like me, even hate me, I would. Really."

"I know, Blossom." He reached out and squeezed her arm. "I know. Drink your water now. No more questions for a while."