X-Men 1. Chapter 1

My continued efforts to write Romy in space. I continue to build a universe that is half my own for this purpose. I hope you are not put off by some of the original cities and characters. Many of them are repeated from other pieces, since deleted. There's a brief nod to Rita from Ludi's House of Cards. If you haven't read Ludi's work...do so immediately.

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…_be careful. All his smiles are lies. _

It was that one sentence at the end of the message that allowed her to identify Etienne Marceaux. When she stood at the doorway of the Hellfire Club, the dusty watering hole inside of Station 12 that tided travelers over till New Madripoor, she saw so…so many, dangerous looking men, clad in the casual utilitarian outfits of smugglers, and mercenaries, and other dubious professions. Some were cleaner than others, some sharper. Some were sullen, squinting, sideways glancing, quiet. All shuffled in together with one another, and with traders, and whores, and old men full of war stories. And when one or the other shot her one of those sullen, squinting, sideways glances, his eyes lingered for only a moment before returning to his pool cue or his drink or his prostitute.

She sidled down the stairs, feeling obvious in this temple of subtlety.

A glass shattered behind the bar. A short chorus of baritone laughter rose and fell over a game of cards in a back corner. There was a low chatter and hum mingled with the scent of working men: sweat and hydraulic fluid and cigarette smoke and cologne and booze.

Her eyes swept the room one more time.

_His name is Etienne, but don't be surprised if he has an alias. He's about six feet, lanky, red/brown hair, kinda shaggy. He wears a coat all the time…a long brown coat. He smokes like a fucking refinery. It's been years since I seen him, so I don't know…best a luck to you I guess. It's a one in a million chance if you find him. But if you do, be careful…_

A man caught her eye, looking over his shoulder as her gaze passed across him. He looked at her for a second. Then another. Then smiled half of a lazy, knowing smile while he raised a cigarette to his lips. It seemed for a moment that everything moved slower. She was about to smile back…when another glass shattered, making her start imperceptibly, shaking her into wakefulness. It was just her own weariness dragging at her heels, she thought. And she was weary. So weary. And she needed to rest.

She walked toward him with enough purpose that he straightened a little and turned to meet her approach. His face spelled out his curiosity as she drew up to him, stopping a few feet away from him, and speaking. No savvy, no style, no artifice, no guile…"You Etienne?"

…_innocent._

He raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his drink.

"I could be."

His reply threw her off balance and there was a pause that stretched into awkwardness. She admonished herself silently for her momentary fluster. Years later she would remember that moment and think to herself. _I should have ordered a drink…no…I should have asked him to buy me a drink. _Or, _I should have just kept on talking, like I already knew who he was. _The silence, evidence of her ineptitude in all the matters which seemed to be important for life and living, made her feel her age: young, perhaps too young.

She took hold of herself at last. "Well." She continued, grabbing a cocktail napkin "If you are Etienne," and she smiled a beguiling sarcastic smile that claimed to know the secrets of any one it lighted upon, she wrote down her ship's dock number, "Then you can get a hold of me here, but only for the next two days." She pushed the napkin a few inches toward him, turned, turned back, "My ship's name is Rogue.", turned again, and walked away without so much as a backward glance.

He looked after her as she sauntered away, all sultry bravado, selling it a little too hard, but not too hard for him to buy. He knocked his head back and finished his bourbon in one swallow, then folded the napkin and slid it into his pocket.

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	2. Chapter 2

Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the catwalk up to the ship, on the metal floor of the bay, all the way to the solitary cockpit, where she sat and began her vigil. Two days on this station, to fuel up and get supplies, to meet with Kurt, and perhaps to gain some expertise to help them "re-acquire" their lost cargo from Bastion. Smuggling had never been her favorite means of making money, but the few times she engaged in it she knew in no uncertain terms that losing cargo, no matter which way you happened to do it, was the surest way to a slit throat, or a busted hull, or some other mode of death. Smuggling for Raven, though rare and a safer bet than most, still had its own unsavory drawbacks. And though she could smuggle, she could not steal, not from this particular dupe - so she needed a thief.

"The best one around." She had said to the fence from her last haul. She hadn't expected an answer. It was a statement of fact and a declaration of understanding. She knew her situation. The woman, Rita, had looked at her with an assessing, compassionate air and pulled a sheet of brown wrapping paper out from under the counter. She scribbled a note on it and passed it to her, then added, "The best one around…if you can find him."

Did she need to go to all this trouble? She could have gone back home empty handed, to be mercilessly admonished, to be parted from her ship, perhaps forever, to be given some repetitive administrative task to perform for the rest of her life, but at least not killed. She didn't want to comprehend the consequences of failure, so she grasped at this last straw and made arrangements to be where this thief was, or at least where he was rumored to be.

A pale flash of light caught her eye, woke her from her reverie - a bit of debris floating through space outside of the windshield. It rotated slowly, peacefully, revealing a colza yellow, and on the other side, a dull silver. Perhaps a piece of billboard that came loose from the station. She watched it turn and turn again three times before it floated out of view. Watching it drift made her feel quiet inside and she wondered at its fate. She hoped sanitation bots wouldn't find it and scavenge it up, though that was its most likely fate. She hoped it would float out into the wilds of space where it could gently loll over and over forever.

Her musings overtook again her for a time, and when she shook herself free it was only by the power of her own exhaustion. She made the lonely, echoing trek to her quarters and nestled into bed to be met by dream filled sleep; dreams in which she wandered through a maze of pale stone hallways and pine doors, all identical, and somehow, some miraculous way, she knew her way around. She felt safe, but sad and lonely. It was the sort of loneliness that drove prisoners and shipwrecked sailors to madness. She began to run through the corridors looking for one door in particular. She found it. She pushed down the handle to open it. And then she woke up.

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	3. Chapter 3

He admitted to himself that he was curious. Curious enough to check out her ship among other things, so he stayed at the bar till closing and in the early hours of the morning made his way down the docking corridor to the ship named ROGUE. He liked the name.

The security interface at the passenger access door was standard and he was able to override it after a few minutes of tinkering. There was a small hydraulic hiss signaling his success and he pulled the door down in one strong fluid motion.

The inside was about what he expected. There was a lower level cargo bay with catwalks above that seemed to lead to rooms, and one obviously led to the cockpit. The bay was empty so he crept quietly up the grated stairs and inspected the living areas. The cockpit was small, seated two comfortably, with four jump seats that could be pulled out of the wall. Everything was tidy and put away but it wasn't too sterile. A bobble head doll of a little geisha girl stood, glued to the dash between the seats, and a few popular books rested in a console cubby along with some pens and gum.

He picked one up. _Sanctuary - _Faulkner_. _He supposed that was impressive. He looked at the next one, _Reforming a Rake, _and laughed silently to himself, then turned to inspect the rest of the ship. Following the ringed catwalk around he came to an open area with comfortable chairs and a side table that faced out at a large viewing window. After that came rooms with closed sliding doors. One, two, with nothing inside but bare shelves, then three…this one was slid ajar a few inches and he peeked inside. The girl was right there, illuminated by the distant lights of the station shining through the cockpit windows, lying on a foam mat on the floor under a thin cotton blanket facing him, so that he sucked a breath in when he saw her, but her eyes were closed and she was sleeping peacefully. He looked at her for a long time, then by the power of some fey impulse he crept a little closer, first crouching, then moving forward on hands and knees.

She was beautiful, and like all beautiful creatures she was even more striking while asleep, when all care and worry was far away and there was nothing on her face but the blissful expression of the innocent at rest. Or so it always seemed to him. He let his eyes wander down the silhouette of her body, the cleavage pressed up by her arms and peeking through her thin tank top. He lingered a little too long and felt like he should be ashamed but wasn't…then that he should be ashamed for not being ashamed…but wasn't…and so on. The tale-spin of absurd reduction that happens when we desire to have different desires.

He pulled back to a crouch, then stood, turned, and walked on to the fourth door finding the same bare accommodations as the first two rooms. He assumed that she lived alone on this ship, which seemed unlikely, but all the evidence pointed to it, and he wanted to believe his pretty would-be employer might need an itch scratched.

After the rooms there was another open space that housed a kitchen and dining area. The counters were bare but the cupboards were full of dehydrated goodies, which he perused at length, stashing a few food bars in his pockets. The refrigerator even had some fresh oranges in it so he decided to help himself to one…call it an advanced payment, but as he reached for it he heard the telltale click and whine of a plasma rifle behind him.

_Fuck. _

He had already started to raise his hands when the man behind him spoke.

"Hands where I can see them." Came the slightly accented voice. Strangely he was less worried about being caught than he was annoyed that there was a man floating around.

"Turn around _slowly_."

He gracefully pivoted on his heels in a slow half circle like a ballet dancer might. The man pointing the rifle at him was lean and swarthy, perhaps his own height with black hair and striking brown eyes so pale they would be called golden.

"Who do you work for." The rifleman said.

He had expected "Who are you." "What are you doing here." "Why shouldn't I kill you?" Or something of the like. Instead "Who do you work for?" It betrayed some hidden secret of identity or affiliation. It was…interesting.

"I work for myself homme." A recent truth that both thrilled him and terrified him to admit.

"So you're robbing us."

"Non," He said in a placating tone, "jus' checkin' you out is all. Your lady friend inquired about my services." And he gave an impertinent stare meant to intimidate any boyfriend. The rifleman seemed unphased however and instead tilted his head slightly and called out a name.

"Anna!"

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	4. Chapter 4

There was some sound coming from the bay downstairs, but not enough to fully wake her, only enough to intrude on her dreams.

"Anna?!...Liebchen?"

Kurt's voice roused her at last and she gazed at her three-faced clock. 12:30PM Jura, 7:00AM Madripoor, 4:30AM Station Time. She sighed heavily. He had obviously returned some time in the night…just now, it sounded like.

"Wuuuuut! Jesus Christ Kurt!" Her voice was thick and groggy. Kurt could come and go as he pleased. He had all the codes for the ship. What reason could he have for waking her while they were locked and docked?

"Come here, bitte!" His voice was calm with a trace of urgency in it. Something was wrong. Her mind pulled into sharp focus and she jumped out of bed in her tank top and pajama pants. She ran painfully in bare feet along the grating to the kitchenette where Kurt was pointing his plasma rifle at someone leaning casually against the counter, a hand on the edge to either side of him.

"Etienne?" She was pleasantly surprised for a split second…then angry with herself. How dangerous it had been to solicit a criminal and give him her address. How foolish. How god-damn stupid. And she felt again what she had felt in the bar: too young.

"You know him?" Kurt's rifle flagged for a moment.

"No. Keep your gun on him." She said and Kurt snapped his eye back to the scope of the rifle, completely unnecessary at this range, but it was a force of habit that the thief took note of.

"How do you know his name?" Kurt asked.

"I…I don't."

"What?"

"I mean…someone recommended him to me. But it looks like I should've been a little more careful getting references." She added sarcastically.

The man watched and smiled at the entire exchange, then finally spoke: "My apologies chere. I didn't come to rob de place if dat's what you're thinkin'." She noticed his accent for the first time.

"Then what are you here for?"…_Was it_ _Cajun?_

"Someone was lookin' for me. I just wanted to know a little more about dem is all. Didn't know your man would come back at four in de morning. Didn't t'ink you had a man. Shoulda known better." He shrugged and smiled at her.

Kurt looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. "What is he talking about?" But she only looked at the thief. She felt exposed and crossed her arms to cover her self.

"An' what do you think after casin' this place"…she said it this time…"Cajun."

His smile dipped a little bit then recovered with a new tint of insolence. He looked her up and down in a way that irritated Kurt and made her clutch her elbows tighter.

"I don' t'ink you work for de Union." He bantered back lazily, as if no weapon were trained on him.

"Is the Union what yah so scared of?" She let her own accent slip and she saw his face light with comprehension.

"Schwester?" Kurt asked quietly, but she said nothing, did not even register that he had spoken.

At the word the man shifted and looked between her and Kurt who was getting annoyed without bothering to hide it. Kurt pulled the rifle back and held it casually at port arms. At last the man looked back to her.

"I don't scare too easy, and I'll take de job. If you can pay me, dat is."

"Oh yeah? What's your price?" She asked.

"Depends on de haul."

Their unhurried back and forth pushed Kurt's confusion to critical mass. They knew each other, and something shady was going on between them, but he wasn't going to get any answers just now. Anna handled all the business on the ship and it was obvious that this was business of some kind. He brusquely handed her the rifle and walked over to the cupboard, fishing out a nutrient bar, then pulled a cup out to make coffee.

"So dat's your brother?"

She nodded.

"And he got a German accent and you got a' Alabama accent."

"Mississippi."

"Ah…Not too many with either o' those these days."

"Well…I generally don't take it out for show and tell."

"Heh…yea' you sound all polished up like a silver spoon…a pity…My guess is you gotta talk pretty for your boss or some t'ing?"

"Something' like that." His prescience annoyed her. "Look I'm not happy you broke into my ship but if we're going to work together then you would have to be here eventually anyways. I don't care how you got on because I assume that breaking into shit is just a thing you do. But I don't trust you farther than I can throw you so if you try anything I'll blow a hole right through you. Me or Kurt. Don't think you can get the drop on us."

Kurt nodded along unconsciously.

"What, you mean twice?" said the Cajun.

"If getting held up in a kitchen is your idea of getting a drop on someone." She had him but she felt self-conscious, like he saw right through her and knew how much posing and posturing she threw out hoping to look like a professional.

"I know what you think…" She said.

"Do you?"

"I know you think I'm stupid."

"Not stupid, chere."

"Naïve."

"Yes."

"Fine then…I'm not as naïve as you think."

"If you say so p'tit."

Her eyes narrowed. She was too tired to keep playing at semantics.

"We leave tomorrow…er…today...at 10ST. I'll explain the job when I see you next, but I'm going to sleep now." She walked away from him as she had done in the bar and she gambled in doing so. Perhaps it was her "naïveté" or perhaps it was her faith in Rita's recommendation but she would let him show himself out and pray that that was all he did.

He peered after her for a few moments and let out a long low whistle. Kurt cleared his throat and eyeballed him for a second before offering him coffee and dehydrated breakfast. He declined and graciously excused himself.

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	5. Chapter 5

At 10ST when she headed to the cockpit with her freshly pressed coffee she found the thief already sitting in the co-pilot's seat with his feet thrown up on the dash. He looked up and over his shoulder at her and smiled.

"Mornin' p'tit. You gonna tell me the tale o' dis get you need got."

She felt off balance yet again but gathered herself quickly. She set her coffee down, took her jacket from off the back of her chair, put it on slowly, stalling. He watched her display of self-control with the same infuriating look of knowing.

"Yes." She said simply after her few moments of pretense. She sat down and took a sip of her coffee, as though it were perfectly natural that he should be sitting there with her. "You know a pirate named Bastion?"

"Mebbe…what he tell you bout' me?"

She snapped her head around to look at him but couldn't tell if he was joking or not…decided he was joking…mostly. He still smiled but no longer looked at her, just toyed with his lighter…click…click…click.

"How well do you know him?"

"Well enough." Click.

She thought about his answer and a sense of foreboding crept over her akin to fear. As though he sensed it, he suddenly looked up at her, and with an oddly neutral expression said "Don't worry p'tit. I'll take good care o' you."

It was the first time he'd spoken to her with a straight face and yet somehow she imagined it was more suggestive than anything else he had said. She could feel a blush rising and she hurried out of her seat and back to the kitchenette. 'I am imagining this' she thought to herself. And in an effort to remain nonchalant she called back to him asking if he wanted any coffee. He assented and she topped off her own as well adding cream and sugar to both as was her habit.

When she returned and sat back down her face was under control. She handed him his coffee and he peered into the pale brown liquid. She was about to continue with her story when he commented, "How'd y' know how I like my coffee chere?"

An impulse of mischief seized her. "You seem like the kind of man who enjoys a little sugah in the mornin'." She parried, accent and all.

He slowly turned his head 90 degrees to look at her with a pleasantly surprised expression and took a sip of his too sweet coffee. She glanced at him briefly and continued.

"We were picking up some…cargo…"

Her pause made him curious and he interrupted. "What was it?" When she did not reply he added, "I gotta know what I'm stealin'."

"Adamantium."

He whistled. "How much?"

"4 tonnes."

At that he exhaled sharply.

"What is it?"

"Jus' wonderin' how I'm gonna move 4 tonnes of adamantium."

"With a palate jack." She replied simply, but immediately got the feeling she had said something foolish once again when she saw his sideways glance. "Anyways…we were picking up this cargo from Izmar…They turned all those old sewers into mines…after the corps 'cleaned them out'. They've been shipping adamantium and rare earths out of it since last fall. We were supposed to divert them to Jura, but Bastion beat us to it. He held us up at our pick up point. The cargo never even touched the ship.

"Its cute how you keep callin' it 'cargo'"

She paused a beat and stuttered out, "But it…it is…that's what it is." Then bit her lip to stop herself from babbling.

He lifted his hands defensively. "S'ok…call it whatever you want chere."

There was a brief pause while she gathered herself. "Soooo…we need to find the…cargo." Now saying the word slowly and self-consciously. He chuckled at her. "But Bastion has probably moved it already…so we need to get it from his fence and I think I know who that is."

"I was gonna say…you sound kinda screwed 'less you know his buyer. Who you 't'ink it is?"

"I don't know his real name. They call him Sinister. They say he does all kinds of…"

"I know what he does." He broke in solemnly, almost angrily. Then he added, "We should try Bastion first."

"I doubt he still has it." She repeated dismissively.

"Worth a shot…better than Sinny."

"You have a pet name for him?" She was ashamed of her own astonishment.

"Yup." was all he said. All seriousness. No more sarcasm or levity.

Just then she heard Kurt clomping around in the bay.

"By the way Cajun…you best make nice with my brother. He's a good man to have on your side."

He nodded soberly and stood up and away from the co-pilot's chair moving to a jump seat nestled between two girders. She could feel him behind her and she didn't like not being able to see him. He was too slippery, too mercurial. She needed to have her eyes on him. Needed it for her peace of mind.

"Morgen." Kurt nodded to him as he passed then sat down next to Anna. "Are we going home? Or have you two formulated a plan?" He craned his neck around to look at the thief.

"I t'ink we go to Kitra, eh chere?"

She picked up on his cue and began the egress protocol. Kurt looked over at her and she nodded without moving her gaze.

"How long can you avoid mutter?" he half whispered to her.

"As long as I have to."

Kurt leaned back in his seat and said nothing.

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	6. Chapter 6

It was normally a three-day trip to get from Sation 12 to Kitra but she paid the exorbitant fee to use a jump port, though they all hated it. She always had the impression she had been taken apart and put back together on the other side and it left her unsettled and a little nauseous. All in all, the journey took three hours. An economy of time she found barely conceivable. The technology of jump gates never crossed her mind until the few times she had needed to use one. What a miracle they must have been, allowing mankind to travel the universe.

"You know de far west airfield? Song Xiu?" The thief said.

"Yeah." Anna replied.

"Go to dat one."

Wordlessly she obeyed, pulling up the coordinates from her address library. The ship settled into its new course, giving them an hour or so on autopilot before she would actually need to sit in the pilots seat and respond to the traffic controllers. She got up and wandered back to the bay, stomach churning. It seemed like everything was going too fast. A day ago she truly thought she would crawl home to Raven on her hands and knees to accept her punishment. But she needed to try – she needed to do her due diligence and somehow things were _happening_. Her trajectory had changed. It had changed back in that bar but she hadn't felt it till now. She ran her hands through her hair and walked in wide slow circles around the cargo hold. Then there was the thief…he unbalanced her, made her feel out of control, made her feel just slightly uncomfortable whenever he looked at her. She couldn't decide if she trusted him or not.

"Anna." Kurt's voice, as always, set her on solid ground. "What's wrong?"

"Just a little nervous is all. I think Bastion's gonna have some security and all that adamantium is gonna be hard to move. But if I go back to momma empty handed…"

"She'll forgive you."

"Ha…Not killing someone is a different thing than forgvin' someone."

"She'll forgive you…eventually." Said Kurt.

Raven was a hard woman and though she loved her children she was not prone to displays of affection or the giving of unearned praise. Her esteem was hard to earn and hard to hold and somehow it was addictive to the both of them. They would risk all they had not to incur her ire, but more so, not loose their footing on the little pedestals she had made for them.

"I guess I'm just scared about this whole thing. I've carried goods but I've never gotten the goods. And sneakin' under the Union's radar isn't all that tricky. Maybe I've had it easy for too long."

"Ja…I know what you mean…"

"And it's movin' so fast. We haven't planned anything. What the fuck is gonna happen? I'm just gonna knock on his door an ask for our adamantium back?"

Kurt looked down and kicked at the floor with the toe of his boot. "Not just you Anna. You and me and…" He gestured up to the cockpit…"You hired a professional thief for god's sake."

She visibly shivered and Kurt put his arms around her, held her in a tender and filial embrace while she shook. "Das ist nicht du wie."

"I know, I'm sorry. I don't know what's gotten into me." She pulled away from him and shook her arms out. Turned in a full circle to face him again. "I'll get it together. I just need a minute. Go back to the helm and keep an eye on the Cajun."

He complied and tromped off to let her sort through her thoughts alone for a few more minutes.

In the cockpit Remy toyed with a cigarette, twirling it in his fingers. When Kurt reappeared he asked, "How long till we land homme?"

Kurt looked at the HU display. "About forty five minutes."

Remy thought about that for a moment then asked, "Is there smoking on dis flight?"

"I…I don't know actually." He was surprised at his own ignorance. He stayed on the ship on and off for about a third of his time. The rest he was on assignment. He always considered it Anna's home and never had occasion to ask or to answer such questions.

Anna entered after her few minutes of soul searching and answered it for the both of them.

"Put yah smokes away. I don't have the filters for it." She said as she passed him on the way to her seat, all business once again. Kurt and Remy exchanged a look and a shrug.

Fifteen minutes later Anna pinged Song Xiu's tower and got her flight path. There was another thirty minutes of circling before they were allowed to descend and taxi into an open parking spot and no sooner was the gangway down than Remy was at the end of it gratefully puffing away. He sat, elbows on knees, lost in the pleasure of one of his favorite addictions.

She sat herself down next to him and caught one of his inscrutable glances. "So what's the plan Cajun?" She asked him with some anxiety.

He took another long drag and examined the third of a cigarette remaining. "We go have a look at Bastion's warehouse. He might still have it."

"He's got a warehouse?"

"Well…in a manner of speakin'. He's no joke, chere. He does brisk business for a criminal. And Sinny's only worse."

"Keepin' all that contraband has gotta be dangerous as hell."

"Depends who's got y' back." He winked at her and she looked away.

"So when do we leave?" She asked.

He smiled and gazed at his cigarette again. "You ain't leavin' chere."

"What?" She was tense in an instant, unreasonably so.

"I'll go have a look. It's what you gonna pay me for isn'it. If I need you, I'll call you." He took another drag. "That reminds me…I should get your number."

She felt confused. Of course he would go alone. What could they possibly do for him? Of course he needed her number. Why hadn't they done this before? Why hadn't he asked for payment yet?

She pulled out her phone and passed it to him and he did the same for her. When at last he walked off of the tarmac and onto the train platform to take him into town her thoughts reversed. _I'm good with a gun! _She thought to yell after him, but didn't. No doubt she would only sound more foolish. Instead she turned and walked back into the ship.

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	7. Chapter 7

Remy got off the tram in an old and exhausted part of the city, beaten down by use the way a man's body was beaten down by decades of labor. For a brief time, in the not too distant past, he had worked these streets and he remembered Bastion and his operation well. He remembered Sinister even better. Sometimes he still dreamed about it, and from those dreams he would wake screaming and covered in a sheen of sweat. He pushed the thoughts aside.

Bastion tended to keep his goods in a handful of rented storage facilities. Anything particularly fine he would keep in his home but this was too big for that. The security at these places was reasonable for what they were but no match for him. He hoped against all odds that the adamantium had not been moved yet.

The first storage unit was completely empty but for a few boxes of cloths. It worried him that Bastion might have changed up his MO in the past few months, but the second had drums full of a white powder that smelled of naphthalene. No doubt an ingredient for some synthetic intoxicant yet to be produced. It would be the third. He could feel it in his bones. The way he felt when he was holding pocket aces…all tingly under the skin. And that feeling was _almost _never wrong.

The lock on the third unit clicked open with minimal effort and he slid his picks out. As gently as he could he lifted the corrugated aluminum door a few feet and slipped inside. It stank…like someone had lived in it and never cleaned out the toilet. With his flashlight still in his teeth he scanned the room and saw a canvas covering something big and square. Jackpot. He pulled the heavy fabric off with a sharp _sshhhick_, but saw no bars of rare earth. Only blue eyes shining and terrified staring back at him through dirty grey wisps of hair, locked in a cage meant for circus animals or racing dogs or something. There was a body in there with her, obviously dead, and a bucket filled with excrement.

He should have felt rage, or sadness, or deep pity, but he felt what he felt all those years ago in Izmar…Empty and perhaps cold…but that wasn't the right word. The right word was cool, or disconnected, or drifting…like he was floating in the middle of an ocean, long after the panic of being lost at sea had past, slowly succumbing to madness at the hands of insensible fate. _Of course…of course the world is a shit hole - full of senseless misery. Of course there are little girls starving to death in storage units…you p'tit are one of many. Why would god make the world any other way? _He and his invisible god had had many such one sided arguments until he had given up on understanding.

It was without thought that he picked the lock of the cage. There was no occasion for talk and in any case, the girl, starved as she was, and frightened past words, could not speak, so she mutely followed him out of the unit, out of the loading area, and out into the city. She was weak and shivering and above all conspicuous so he wrapped her in his coat and carried her for a mile, avoiding public transportation, taxis, and any eyes at all if he could, until he reached a midgrade motel near an overpass. He left her outside when he went in to pay for the room and she hid behind a bush as though the very night itself would reach out its arms and grab her. He paid with someone else's credit card, grabbed peanuts, an apple, and a bottle of water in the lobby and returned to her. When they were finally in the room he waited for her to finish greedily drinking before asking her name.

She answered, with a mouth full of apple, something that sounded like Aurora.

"How old are you, Aurora?"

She stopped chewing and stared dumbly at him. Her eyes drifted up and to the right as if the question itself were a riddle. He moved on.

"If I leave you here for a few hours will you stay put?"

She nodded vigorously.

"Alright then…I'm gonna run you a bath p'tit. You can get in it after I leave." She nodded again and, though he lacked confidence in the fidelity of her assurances, he left her a few moments later to search the remaining storage units before the sky began to grow light.

The rest of the night he worked like an automaton, methodical and unfeeling, fueled by something unknown into this furious frenzy of effort and somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it was making him reckless. The fourth locker he thought to try was bare and he began to worry that he would fail this particular assignment. At the fifth facility however he could see a moving truck backed up to unit and three or four men loading something. He moved in closed, ducking behind stacked steel drums and crates. The men were obviously Bastion's. He recognized one of them and knew he would be recognized in turn. Getting in close he could tell it was the adamantium they were moving and once it was all loaded in this truck it would never be seen again.

He waited. The stuff was so heavy they could only move it two bars at a time and he was grateful for the delay. Thank god they didn't have a pallet jack, he thought, and almost allowed himself to be entertained for a moment. At last all three backs were turned and the driver sat preoccupied in the cab. He slunk underneath the truck and nestled himself in the metal frame.

His muscles ached as he perched unnaturally for what seemed like hours, but then he heard the intonation of goodby's and thank you's and the footfalls of a single man walking to the passenger side of the cab. He would have to be fast. It would have to be within a few blocks of this place…or he could follow them all the way to their base. He wasn't sure and it made him antsy. This was not the way he liked to do business. He liked to be sure of things. He liked his jobs well researched and well executed. He liked plans and backup plans and backup backup plans. He had to admit to himself that he accepted this job because of the pretty pilot and his own curiosity. He cursed himself for being an insufferable fool for beautiful women. Still, he would not be the best thief in the known universe, he flattered himself, if he couldn't improvise.

The truck lumbered down a few grey blocks of the city and he decided to wait. After a few minutes it slowed and pulled into a fast food restaurant and the passenger got out and went inside. The hiss of the hydraulic break sounded.

_Now or never_

He dropped and quietly rolled out from under the chassis of the truck. Approaching in the mirror's blind spot he simply opened the door and pulled the driver down by his hair, wrapping an arm around his neck.

"What the fuuuu…" was all the man could get out before he was bent sideways and backwards in a chokehold. His arms flailed and reached for the buckle of the seat belt or for the horn but all he could get to was the edge of the door. He tried to slam it into his unknown assailant but his angle was poor and his strength failing, he changed tactics, trying instead to claw out his attacker's eyes, but again the angle wasn't quite right. He managed to scratch his face and get a fistful of hair but little more before everything started to go dark.

Remy thought about relaxing his grip for an instant just to ask him whom he worked for. Just in case the poor sod uttered some other name besides Nathanial Essex. But he persisted, his fear overwhelming his curiosity. The man passed into unconsciousness and when he woke five minutes later in the filthy ditch next to the road, his partner roughly nudging him with his toe, a bag of burgers and fries dropped carelessly to one side, the truck was nowhere in sight.

Remy drove a few blocks until he found another truck that carried the appropriate registration. He took a moment to switch the plates on his truck, tucking the original plate into the glove compartment, and was on his way again, back to the motel. It was a risky move given the security cameras in the motel parking lot but by the time Bastion or whomever had time to really start looking or him he planned on being deep underground again.

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	8. Chapter 8

The girl, who had lain curled in a ball atop the cheap floral-print comforter, started and looked at him when he entered the room. He noted that her hair wasn't grey any longer; it was pearly white now that it was clean and her blue eyes were particularly noteworthy set in her nut-brown face. She looked to be about 5 years old, maybe 6.

"Up p'tit. We gotta go."

Again she obeyed without a sound and he appreciated it given the state of his nerves.

They were within a hairs breadth of being done with this job but still he couldn't relax. Not until they were back in the ship and underway. It was so hard to sneak up on someone in space. But on the ground, and he knew this to be true, you could kill a man in plain sight and no one might notice at all. Of all the things his estranged wife had taught him, this he remembered vividly, second only to how much pain a heart could feel and keep beating. This was why he sat with his back to the wall when he went out. It was why he looked behind him when he walked. As much as he loved to be on the ground, it was much safer in space.

He drove carefully through the city, the suburbs, past the agricultural zone, and into the airfield. He was on the access list as Anna had promised and the gate guard waved him through after a FOD check, a look inside the truck bed, and some cursory signatures. On the register he wrote "NICKLE, 4 TONNES" and the guard, unable to tell the difference, merely shrugged. He drove up to she ship bold as brass and honked the horn once, then again when there was no immediate response.

At last the loading ramp began to descend and Anna came skipping down with a ridiculous smile that made him double take. If he had been standing there at the end of the ramp he thought she might have jumped into his arms and kissed him. He smiled back at her and gave her an OK sign. As though suddenly remembering something she turned and ran back up the ramp only to return a moment later with the palate jack and a wry look on her face. She walked between the tines pushing it along then deftly spun it around when she got to the bottom.

He laughed aloud and turned the truck around backing the doors up to be unloaded. The loading ramp of the ship could be manually raised to meet the bed of the truck so they could pull the whole palate off at once.

"Well Cajun." She beamed. "Well done."

"We ain't done yet chere…I gotta dump this truck someplace."

"Just drive it into the bay, I'll dump it in Jura."

He pulled his head back. "I…I guess you could."

"Or I'll fly out to the Magnetar and drop it…It'll get sucked in."

"Huh." He thought about it for a second. All the vehicles entering the airfield were logged but no one tracked them to make sure they exited. "Alright…that would actually be…fine." He shook his head to clear it. "Look chere, I gotta tell you something." But she didn't hear him.

She grabed the jack handle and cranked the load up a few inches, then leaned backward slowly dragging the heavy palate up the ramp.

"Let me get dat."

"I can do it." She cut in quickly, almost defensively, between huffing breaths. He raised his hands in surrender but then bent down to add his weight to the palate frame pushing it up the slope. At the top she let go and shook her hands out. Remy walked around to stand next to her.

She looked up at him with her childlike smile, now threatening to become permanent. "Thank you." She breathed, still panting from exertion. She seemed familiar to him in that moment and on an impulse he raised his hands to caress her elbow with his thumb but stopped short, a split second gesture, both awkward and fleeting. "Anytime, chere." He half whispered. She looked down, turned to the side, cleared her throat. He took the cue and backed up a foot or two.

The moment of intimacy left both of them uncomfortable and he sought to dispel it by putting some distance between them.

"Listen…'bout payin' me…"

"Of course…I'm so sorry." She seemed grateful or the distraction and quickly fumbled around in her jacket for her phone to transfer the funds to him. "How much?"

"Non, wait." He ran his fingers through his hair looking nervous for the first time since she'd known him. "Look chere, what I need right now is a place to stay dat's…ahem…out of de way."

She stared at him dumbly, so he made it explicit.

"I wanna board on y' ship fo' a while…as payment."

Her silent stare dragged on.

"And I have a friend I gotta bring wit' me."

"A friend?" She repeated.

"Yeah…she's in de truck."

"Oh…_she_ is?" Her head ducked around him to look into the truck. "I don't see anyone."

He spun around to look but he saw what she did not, a lock of silvery hair peeking above the dash. "She's in there." He said and walked down to the truck to retrieve her. He opened the passenger door and Aurora hopped out like a little bird, all bones and ragged wisps of clothing.

"Anna, dis Aurora. She gon' join de crew fo' a bit if dat's alright wit de captain." He looked at the girl and winked then looked back at Anna for the approval he knew she would have to give.

"How long?" Anna asked matter-of-factly still holding her phone at the ready and looking at the girl with intense concern and trepidation.

He snorted. "Don' worry chere…not too long." And he began to walk past her signaling for the girl to follow. _Never too long._

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	9. Chapter 9

TL;DR – Anna unnecessarily freaks out about Rems and Rora on the ship then Kurt and Remy bro down over some cigarettes and bible verses. Please R&amp;R.

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Kurt heard the tap tap tap of little feet skittering across the bay and leaned over the railing to see Etienne and the girl walking toward the stairs. He passed a long curious look to Anna who stared helplessly back at him. When the pair reached the top Remy made introductions gesturing to Kurt.

"Rora dis Kurt…he's a real bad-ass-muther-fucker so you do what he say." Kurt winced at the language but set his qualms and questions aside and played along, kneeling down and offering his hand to the little girl. "Hello liebchen."

She offered back a sphinx-like smile that he found endearing if not a little strange.

"Maybe you get her some blankets or somet'ing and put her in a room?"

"Ahh…" He looked again to Anna who was now half way up the stairs on her way to the cockpit. She nodded at him with a tight smile. "Alright little one. Follow me." He said.

Anna passed them, dumbfounded, on her way to the cockpit and Remy followed right behind her. She plopped down in her seat and leaned her face into one hand. She heard, rather than saw, him sit in the seat next to her.

"Etienne…I don't know if you can stay." She spit out quickly.

"Oh…dat's fine…I can take my adamantium and be on my way." He said, admiring the whites of his fingernails.

She didn't take the threat seriously and passed him a look that said as much.

"Look…you just…my...boss…can't find you here…ok?"

"Was it really dat hard to spit out all dem words." He asked sarcastically.

"I'm serious."

"Your boss spend a lot o' time on dis ship?"

"No but she might have a look around…know what I mean?"

"I can hide from y' boss." He said, utterly unconcerned.

"And the girl?"

"She's small…we put her in a closet or somet'ing."

She laughed involuntarily. "Alright…" She kneaded her forehead with her left hand, then ran her palm over the crown of her head, pulling her white forelocks back and letting them fall again around her face. "Alright, this is what we'll do." He leaned in with exaggerated interest. "If anyone asks you…you're paying passengers on your way to St. Marge. She'll be ok with that. The little girl is your…niece…or something."

"Your boss really got you under her thumb, huh."

She couldn't deny the truth of his statement and grimaced slightly. "You don't understand."

"Oh, I have an idea."

If there was anything in the world she didn't want to talk about it was her relationship with Raven. She made an obvious attempt at changing the subject.

"We'll be in Jura in 78 hours by the way."

He picked up on her cue and let himself be led into a little careless banter.

"You not gonna use a star gate?" He asked her, not really caring one way or the other.

"A wha…you mean a jump gate?"

"Half a dozen o' one, six o' de other."

"Ah…no…too expensive unless its an emergency. Who calls them star gates?"

"Everyone."

They bantered on for another twenty minutes or so until he started to feel the pull of sleep, the night's adrenaline having finally worn off.

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He slept like the dead and in the morning he was itching for a cigarette so hard it hurt to even think of the next 70 hours. Instinctively he looked for Kurt.

Kurt was reading his bible in the alcove when Remy ambled in and stood by the chair across from him.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Not at all. Sleep well?"

"Yeah…just a hell of a night last night."

"Ja…I can imagine."

"Thanks for takin' on de girl by the way."

Kurt waived his hand in the air, "It was up to Anna…and besides…'Inasmuch as you have done anything for the least of my brethren, even the very least of these, so have you done for me'."

Remy seemed to think about that for a moment with a far away expression, though eventually his mind wandered more than wondered. At length he sat and looked out the window at the pink glow of ionized hydrogen adorning the horsehead nebula. From this angle it looked more like a jellyfish, he mused.

Kurt returned to his scriptures and they sat thusly, in perfect silence for a moment.

Then, out of the blue Remy spoke again. "So there's no where…absolutely no where on dis ship…where I can have a smoke?"

Kurt set his bible thoughtfully in his lap and looked at him.

"Well…and he looked up as he thought. "There is emergency ventilation in the bay for fires."

"Won't that just suffocate us?"

"Not if we override the intake shutoff."

"Won't that suffocate everyone on the ship?"

"Not if it is only a little bit, just for a few minutes. And we can make more air from the septic system."

"I don't think I wanna breathe that air, no offence homme."

Kurt laughed, closed his bible, and stood up.

"Lets give it a try."

"Wait…you're sure." He asked seriously, "I don't wanna get dat sister o' yours after my ass."

Kurt laughed lightheartedly. "Don't worry…I'll protect you."

Remy grinned. "Well alright den."

Ten minutes later, sitting on the catwalk directly below an exhaust intake the two men sat a few feet away from each other. Kurt dangled both feet over the edge and looked down through his knees to the floor below. Remy let one leg hang over the side and bent the other knee to rest his locked elbow on when he wasn't inhaling on his cigarette.

"So you a bible readin' man?"

"Ja."

"Even in dis fucked up world of spaceships and gene therapy and all dat jazz…"

"Ja."

"You t'ink all dem prophecies can be true now dat dere's only a handful of folk on de earth? Now dat people live in de sky?"

"Well…prophecies are…metaphorical. They cannot be relied upon to be perfect."

"Ain't dat a fact." Remy murmured and took a long drag of his cigarette. It was the second time Kurt had said something that hit close to home in less than a quarter hour. Out of some masochistic curiosity he tested his luck. "Read me somet'ing outta your book…just open to a page…I wanna see what we get."

Kurt complied, flopping the heavy leather volume closed and letting the onion skin pages fall open again in his hand. "Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are crimson I shall make them white as wool."

Remy leaned his had back against an I-beam and snorted. Then laughed. Then laughed harder.

"What?" Kurt asked, genuinely curious.

"I just…Nuthin'…Not even God can undo what's been done. Even if he wanted to."

Kurt was quiet for a moment, pondering the truth of the statement.

"But forgiveness isn't about undoing…" He began.

"I'm Catholic too…or I was…just so you know." Remy interrupted.

"Oh…I didn't know."

"I know all the prayers and all the verses." He dreamily arched his hand 180 degrees to his mouth and sucked on his cigarette then flicked a nub of ashes down into the bay.

"So what happened?"

"Hmm?" he looked confused and concerned at the question.

"How did you loose your faith."

"Oh dat?" He took another drag. "I dunno, life got too complicated I guess."

Kurt sensed that a religious conversation would not be to his taste and felt at a loss for words. Etienne didn't seem like much of a man to talk about himself either. The silence proceeded awkwardly for a few beats then Remy picked it up again, changing the subject.

"So what do you do on dis ship? You got dat rifle on you most o' de time, but you go and do all dis mechanical bullshit wit de vents."

"Anna and I have had to learn a lot of tricks to run this ship by ourselves."

"It always just de two of you?"

"Nein, most of the time it's just her."

"Why…where do you get off to."

"I have…assignments."

Remy gave him a crooked smile. "Assignments huh?"

"Ja."

He didn't press the point. "So on this ship you just haul and smuggle a little bit?"

"No smuggling."

"No smuggling? …or maybe just a little smuggling?" He pinched the air with his thumb and forefinger and squinted through the little gap he made.

"No."

"So what was that adamantium about?" He saw the look on Kurt's face and changed direction. "You know what…never mind. I don' wanna talk about business either." He turned to look at Kurt for the first time since their conversation started. "What's the deal wit' your sister. She seems real…weird."

"What do you mean?"

"Sometimes she's so stern and professional: a proper little businesswoman. Sometimes she seems kinda innocent like a little girl. Other times she seems…nervous. I can't figure it out."

"Well…She is very good at what she does…"

"Flying?"

"Yes…and she is a good mechanic and a good at managing all the paperwork with all of the deliveries and such, but she doesn't get out much. She and mother have issues. There are a few reasons I could see. But I'm used to her and she doesn't seem strange to me."

"Oh…how would you describe her?"

"She's…I don't know. She's Anna."

He grunted and thought about that. "What does she do when she ain't workin?"

"She reads a lot. She spends a lot of time on the net. She runs on the treadmill. Other than that…"

"Seems like a lot of fun."

Kurt shrugged. "Better than me and my bible probably."

Remy laughed. "You're alright homme. You know dat." And he pointed at him with the two fingers holding his cigarette. "I like you an' your bible jus' fine." Then took another drag and extinguished the butt on his heel as before.

The two men stood and ambled back into the ship. Despite all the warnings he repeated to himself, Kurt couldn't help liking the thief, and that in itself, he suspected, made him all the more dangerous.

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	10. Chapter 10

The remaining two days and some odd hours Rora spent either in the kitchen, if she was hungry, or the lounge if she was anything else. The stars made her feel peaceful. The immense clouds of the nebulae enthralled her, distracted her, from strange dreams…strange memories. Memories that stretched back a long lifetime and all flowed into a child's nightmare of terrifying shadows and hushed menacing whispers. When she grew tired she would fetch the blanket from her room and curl up with it on the couch looking out at space.

She followed the thief around sometimes, occasionally without him knowing it, and he would sneak about when the grownups weren't looking, peeking his head into storage compartments and little pockets of space hidden away on the ship, behind an air vent or behind an access panel. If he knew she was there he would look at her and put an index finger to his lips and wink. He found a door in the back of the engine room he couldn't open and became a little obsessed with it, but the fascination seemed to pass as they closed on Jura.

She followed the girl-pilot as well, sitting with her in the cockpit for long hours. She liked it in the cockpit for the same reason she liked the lounge - the view. But here there was a sense of self-determination because she was moving forward through space, not simply watching it pass by. That seemed important; a denial of predestination that they both secretly loved.

The pilot, for her part, was friendly with her but unnerved by her otherworldly manner. She could sense it. The confusion. The discomfort. It was because she spoke little and when she did it was with striking formality and breadth of vocabulary. Anna learned quickly to speak to her as an adult, but even then there was something distant about her. Rora felt it herself - a sense of being removed - as though all of life's lessons were already inside her and she wasn't learning about the world so much as remembering it.

Their first real conversation was about cloths…because she wore rags. The pilot gave her some of her own but they were too big. One shirt was so long they put a belt around it to make a dress. Once in Jura Anna took her shopping. She bought her little sandals and black leggings and long flowing blouses.

Their second conversation was about flying. A subject that brought them instantly together like the harmony and melody of a song.

"Do you want to try holding the controls?"…"Here, this throttle will speed us up or slow us down"…"Let me show you how to pull up the HUD." And so on. As with shopping Anna seemed delighted with the act of teaching, of having a protégé, or perhaps simply of having a companion.

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A week or so later, at breakfast, which fell some time between when Kurt made coffee and when Anna got up to drink it. Remy noticed Rora walking barefoot down in the bay.

"Don't y' feet hurt, girl?" he called down to her.

She looked up at him and then down again to ascend the stairs. Remy winced watching her pad along the grated floor.

"The shoes are too small." She said, walking up to him.

He poured himself some coffee and sat down at the table. "Already?…din' Anna jus' buy dem?"

"Yes." The girl looked distressed.

"Eh…kids grow fast…neh? She get you new ones next time we stop."

"I don't want to impose upon Anna's finances again."

"I buy y' some."

"I don't want to impose upon anyone."

"Well…dat's what kids do…don' gotta feel bad about it." He took a sip.

"I'm not a…" Her statement tapered off is a frustrated sigh.

"Not a what?"

"…a kid."

He laughed…"Yeah you're a big girl an all dat."

"Etienne…look at me…" And she drew close. They were of the same height now that he was sitting. He looked at her, serious this time. She quaked imperceptibly, like an aspen grove in the almost still air. "Someone did something to me." She whispered. Desperate confusion shrouding her face and voice. Here was the conversation he knew might come but that he would not begin, that no one could but she. He looked at her with concern and penetrating focus. Swallowed once.

"What did dey do to you p'tit?" he asked in a resigned, sad voice.

Her mouth opened but at first nothing came out. She looked at her hands, tiny delicate hands, clenched them into fists, released them. "I have memories that are older than this body." She continued to look at her hands, entranced. "And I am afraid of something…something that's looking for me…" Remy stared at her, brow furrowed, coffee suspended in midair.

"What are you two conspirin' about?" Anna said as she sauntered into the kitchen. It was enough to make Remy jerk a little bit and spill some coffee on his lap.

"Nuthin' chere…just wonderin what I'm gonna cook y' for dinner when we get to Avalon."

"Oh we're going out to eat when we get to Avalon my friends. Make no mistake about that."

"Yeah, you gonna show us around town?" He was trying to make conversation to distract himself from his own discomfort and it came out trite.

She shrugged. "Sure." And poured herself some coffee.

When he looked back at Aurora she had pulled away a foot or so. Her crisis of confidence had passed and she was once again the creature he knew; serene and distant. She did not look at him, only turned and went to the pantry to rummage for some breakfast. As much as he prided himself on letting things lie - As far as he had gotten in life by not asking questions, he knew he would have to talk to her about this, if only because someone looking for Rora was also looking for him.

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Please R&amp;R...to my lovely anon reviewers...'lovely smile' and 'me voila'...Thank you.


	11. Chapter 11

This chapter is a little extra profane.

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The bazar in Avalon lived up to its name. There were foods there of every variety that an urban consumer of monocultured crops would never be able to identify. Anna and Kurt had been there before but even Remy was a little awed. There were carnival rides and games as well, fortunetellers, street performers, musicians, dancers, fire-eaters, pickpockets…oh the pickpockets. Remy watched them work with a deep pang of nostalgia. He saw Rora and Kurt pass by with a huge stuffed giraffe that Kurt had won for her at a shooting game, and as they did Rora snaked out her hand into a passing mans pocket and pulled out a thin leather wallet. Remy's head tilted unconsciously and he smiled. Was thieving how she ended up in that cage? Somehow he doubted it but the girl just kept getting more and more interesting.

He spied Anna about to have her fortune told in a nearby booth and stole up behind her.

"I can read your palm better than any o' these fake gypsies chere."

She jumped when she heard his voice.

"Holy Jesus Cajun, you snuck up on me."

"One o' my many gifts."

"I'm sure." She began to turn around.

"So how much are you gonna pay dis woman to lie to you."

_More than I pay you to, _she wanted to kick back acidy but she truly didn't believe he had ever lied to her, not overtly. It was just a sense she got from him, whenever he showed off his silver tongue, that lying was one of his _gifts._

"20 credits."

"I bet you she skims yo' card and cleans out y' account."

"You know Etienne…not everyone is a thief."

"No…not _everyone."_

"Fine then…read my palm." And she thrust her hand out toward him. He smiled, the first battle won.

"How about we sit down somewhere. Fortune tellin' is tiring business."

Ten minutes later they were at a cider stall drinking glorified pear juice at 11% with the lights of paper lanterns floating above their heads like fireflies. She held out her hand for him and he cupped it in his own then took his index finger and ran it slowly over the longest line of her palm. Was this the lifeline he wondered? It was the only thing he knew about palm reading, there was a lifeline somewhere.

"Well lets see…I already know y' work for y' mere and y' don' like it one bit. But y' palm tells me y' don't wana quit cuz y' scared o' bein' on y' own." He looked up at her to see her proud and put-off reaction but to his surprise she seemed to think about it, absorb it and consider it in a way that made him think she had mulled this idea over before. He continued brazenly, trying to get under her armor. "Are y' lonely on dat ship when Kurt's not around or do you have…other company?"

She didn't bite.

"You tell me Cajun…you're the one doin' the readin'." She sounded calm, not put off in the slightest. And…she always fell back into her accent around him. Mama would not approve.

A pack of giggling children ran past and someone probably lost their spending money when they did he distantly thought. There was a general noisiness to this place that was pleasant in the same way the chiming of a casino was pleasant.

He leaned in and casually stroked her palm, not even pretending to follow the lines of her skin, not doing anything but looking at her. He dragged three fingernails lightly from the heel of her palm all the way to her fingertips. She saw it, felt it, and shivered instead of tensing or pulling away - which she should have. Her mind ordered her to, but she couldn't. Each long, slow stroke of his fingers made her sink into his eyes the tiniest bit more.

He spoke again; his face was close to her now. "I don't t'ink a femme dat looks like you is lonely for very long." He whispered.

Some shade of sadness crept across her face. _He got it wrong__. _She looked in his eyes, smiled slowly, beautifully, and whispered back to him in her southern drawl, "Cajun, I can't believe how good yah are at bullshittin'."

He flashed the slightest frown then returned to his default half smile.

"At least it was free." He quipped back at her.

Slowly and gently she pulled her hand away from his though her body seemed to resist her.

"It's late. I'm gonna head back to the ship." She paused briefly to text Kurt then looked back up at him. "You boys don't have too much fun tonight…and don't keep the girl out too late." She stood up and began to walk off still working on her drink.

He was about to complain, to remind her that it was only the 20th hour on a 30 hour planet, but he heard something; a noise a little off key…a little louder than the rest of the crowd. Four syllables that didn't belong.

"I t'ink I turn in too, neh?"

She shot him a wary glance but he ignored it and fell in along side her. They walked silently for a few yards then he heard it again.

His name.

"Remy! Remy LeBeau!"

It was Victor's voice.

The name meant nothing to Anna, though he was sure she heard it. They continued casually strolling toward the ship. His mind scrambled. _Disappear into the crowd? Hide? Turn and fight? Draw her into it?_

Victor pulled along side Anna so that she was between the two of them. A maneuver Remy knew was intended to piss him off.

_So that's how it's gonna be._

"Hey pretty lady, who's your boyfriend?"

Anna gave him the most cursory of glances, enough to see his height and burl, his cruel smile adorned by sharply filed incisors, his military grey t-shirt, the lattice work of tattoos on his forearms, the eight pointed star. She made absolutely no reply.

"I _said..._who's your boyfriend."

By harassing the woman he was baiting the man. He would either fight or look foolish in front of what Victor assumed was an imminent conquest. But Remy didn't move and Anna looked at him quizzically, trying to put pieces together.

Remy could feel the heat rising in his blood but he fought to look calm and unconcerned. He suddenly grabbed Anna's wrist and jerked her behind him with such force she fell to the ground clutching her cider.

Victor laughed.

"You're comin' with me LeBeau. Say goodnight to your lady friend."

"Fuck you Sabre." He bit out out praying to god he didn't have backup."

"You really wanna fight me in front of all these people? You think you'd win?"

They circled each other a few feet apart in the patch of dirt that had opened for them. A handful of people stopped to watch but a fistfight wasn't enough of a novelty here to draw a real audience.

Remy reached in his coat and Victor charged. _Sshhink. _The staff extended just as he ducked out of the way. Victor grabbed the edge of his coat as he passed and Remy was forced to shed it. Victor whipped it aside and spit.

"You know guns kill people faster than shiny fuckin' sticks. But you never were that smart ya coon-ass little shit."

Anna stood up from her dusty seat and watched the circling men. Sabre's back was to her. He was talking. What an idiot.

She lifted her arm and swung her bottle into the back of his head but it didn't shatter, just bounced off. She was a little disappointed and a little bit scared. He turned to her snarling up at her from a half crouch that put them eye to eye and in that moment of confusion, the split second before he was going to backhand her back onto her ass, she stepped forward and drove her forehead into his nose. He howled and closed his eyes so that everything was already dark when the staff made contact with his skull.

His body crumbled in a heavy pile but it was a small and fleeting victory. Victor's compatriots were filtering through the crowd. They were easy to spot once you knew what to look for. The grey and dark blue paraphernalia. The dog tags. The dark patch with the white star on it. The emblems of Chirman Nur's favorite security firm – Dark Star. The Dogs of War, Raven called them or sometimes The Horsemen. They were the ones that had cleared out Izmar. They were the ones that enforced Nur's brutal regime, that had pushed her so far underground she didn't even know what she was doing with her life. But really Raven had done that…hadn't she? Or had she done it to herself…a crime of omission.

She looked up and made eye contact with one of the contractors…he pointed at her and said something over his shoulder then began trotting in her direction.

"C'mon!" She hissed at the thief. She grabbed his coat for him and grasped his hand like they were children running away from a monster. He didn't hesitate and released her hand almost immediately so they could sprint.

She looked back only once to see a couple of random grey-shirts turning the corner a hundred yards behind them, but they were already on the dirt landing strip and she could see Kurt and Rora walking onto the ship.

"Get in! Get in!" She yelled to them. A few moments later she and Remy came barreling up the ramp. Rora in true Rora fashion already had the engine spun up and the ramp closed right behind them. Anna tore up to the cockpit and fired up the stabilizing burners, clouding up the air, covering the ship's name and ID number. A few hopeless bullets and plasma bursts bounced of the hull or were absorbed. Even the tempered glass of the windows wouldn't have noticed, but the expanding cloud of dust made shooting utterly pointless.

She tilted the ship up and burned the engine as hard as it was willing, taking off at near vertical. The gravity of the planet and the artificial gravity vied for dominance and Remy and Kurt found themselves clutching at the cargo netting behind their seats to keep from sliding out the door of the cockpit. Alarms started sounding. Over-G alarms and pressure alarms and heat alarms but still she persisted, because if there were a bunch of contractors hanging around Avalon it meant they were on shore leave (hopefully nothing more) and if they were on shore leave it meant there was a ship nearby.

Rogue would need some attention after this she thought, but she didn't want to risk heading back to Jura right away, on the off chance she might be followed.

At last they hit orbit and she punched in a flight path for Madripoor. Weird, out-of-the-way Madripoor, far from civilization but with enough shipping traffic that nothing would seem amiss if an empty cargo ship happened to stumble along looking for a haul.

She looked over her shoulder at the thief still gripping the netting.

"How does Madripoor sound to you…_Remy?"_

* * *

Dark Star is my play on Black Water...the favorite security firm that the US uses. They have since "disbanded" but really just operate under different names.


	12. Chapter 12

He needed to think. And he needed a smoke.

While Anna was still busy at the controls, before she had time to turn her attention to him again, he got up and went to his smoking roost in the bay. He adjusted the ventilation as he had been shown and went to the metal perch below which a pile of ash was starting to accumulate. He tore through one cigarette in a bare minute and lit another one right behind it.

It wasn't long before he heard the hollow clanking of Anna's footfalls approaching…he could tell just from the rhythm of her gait, quick and light and oh-so uptight. She strode up and sat next to him without ceremony, holding out her hand for his cigarette. He took one more long drag and handed it to her imagining the coughing fit that would follow but she surprised him, inhaling on it lightly but not inexpertly, then handing it back.

"Why is Dark Star after you?" She asked, straight to the point.

He inhaled deeply and paused, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds, then let it all out in a gust.

"Chere, just let me off in Madripoor and you won't ever have t' worry about it."

She was quiet for a beat or two, held out her hand for the cigarette again, sucked on it, handed it back.

"I might…if they ID us."

"Not even then. Just tell them I was a paying passenger like you were planin' on telling y' mere."

Anna laughed a soft breathless laugh, rubbed her hands up and down her thighs.

"No…I can't do that. Aside from the fact that I assaulted one of them…I can't have them search this ship."

He didn't respond, caught up in his own worry.

"Is there a bounty on you?" She asked, toying with a long string on the cuff of her blouse.

"Probably." _Yes._

She crossed her ankles and swung her feet back and forth a little bit, a habit of thought. _He could disappear in Madripoor. God knows it was the place for someone like him to disappear._

She sensed an impasse and it needled at her. Her own instincts told her to let it go but she jumped to the best conclusion she could come up with and let the words escape her lips before she had time to hold them back.

"You're a deserter." She whispered. "You had a contract with Dark Star and you took off." She said it like it was a fact and he was silent when she looked up at him to see his half lidded eyes looking down at her, assessing.

"Somethin' like that." He said at last then took another drag.

"And that guy…Sabre…was looking to get a pat on the back by brining you in?"

He shrugged.

She swallowed. "What did they call you…when you were in uniform."

"What do you mean?"

"Your call sign."

He chuckled and she was relieved by it. "Not everyone gets a call sign chere."

"But you did…didn't you." Because people that could do the kind of work that Etie…that Remy did…were not ordinary.

He nodded, but didn't answer.

She exhaled, a little ashamed that she had pried, then she slapped her hands on her knees signaling the end of their conversation and began to stand up. "Well don't disappear as soon as we land Cajun." She said. "I might need your help with one last thing before you ride off into the sunset."

"Oh yeah, what's that?"

"Stealin' something…of course." And she winked at him with all the brassy charm of a ten piece band…and he smiled.

* * *

New Madripoor had an old-world feel to it. Much like the original city it was named after, it was built on an island and took up nearly all of it. It was a city of sprawling slums and soaring palaces. The smell and sound of the ocean pervaded everything especially during the hot summer when the stagnant air filled up with the scents of the many fishing boats; from tiny sail boats to industrial trawlers. Seagulls and rats were everywhere.

The planet that housed it, called N'Gari by the inhabitants but known by a combination of numbers and letters on most star charts, was almost entirely water but for several groups of islands scattered over its surface, each one crowned with a dead or dying volcanic peak. But for all this its defining feature was its division from the Union. It, and the other planets it shared a system with, had never been pulled into the fold of worlds and colonies that Nur and the Cabinet presided over. The reasons were unclear and perhaps political, but most assumed it was because of the immense wealth that resided here as well as an array of advanced technologies unique to Madripoor's military. The culture here was different, wilder and freer at the same time.

Kurt stepped off the ship with his rifle still on his back, something he dared not do in a Union city. He and Rora walked out onto a long quay that seemed to stretch on for miles. It bobbed and twisted under their feet. Fishermen offered to sell to them as they passed but Kurt demurred with a smile and a raised palm. From a distance he looked like a saint blessing the net fulls of fish.

When they reached the end they sat down and looked out over the ocean. It was cloudy and Kurt let out a disappointed sigh.

"You know…there's an island right…there." And he pointed his finger precisely, with one eye shut…like he was aiming. "You can't quite see it through the clouds."

"What makes you think of it just now." Asked Rora.

"I don't know…it looks pretty when you can see it in shadow with the sunset behind it. Once Anna claimed she could swim to it."

Rora imagined it, the black silhouette of a volcano with all the colors of evening to backlight it and as she did a light breeze sprang up and lifted her hair out of her face. The heavy clouds began to move and the boats clattered gently against one another. It blew away the smell of fish and seaweed, replacing it with the pure smell of saltwater, and it blew away the thick clots of cloud until thin slanted rays of light broke through to spotlight patches of blue on the surface of the choppy water.

"Huh." Said Kurt. "This feels nice. I wonder if there's gonna be a storm?"

Dreamily Rora leant her head against a wooden pile.

"No, there will be no Storm." She murmured.

* * *

"This is it." Anna said slapping her hand on a dark grey metal square barely delineated from the rest of the engine room wall covered in lights and cannon plugs and various i/o ports. She grabbed two small metal handles on either side of the box and pulled with enough force that she had to brace herself against the wall with her leg and he could see the slender muscles in her neck straining. When it disengaged she released it and stumbled back a few feet, then rubbed her hands together and looked at him self-consciously. "It's a lot easier goin' in." She said. Then she hoisted it out, bracing it on her knee, and set it on its face so that it rested on the flats of the two handles. "Here's the IFF port." She said pointing to an uncovered cannon plug on the back. "If it doesn't say IFF on the back somewhere don't take it."

"What if it ain't in Union?"

"Wha…everything's in Union speak. I doubt there's a ship here that wasn't manufactured in a Union space port."

"Dis Madripoor…y' never know."

She thought about it for a minute, decided it was unlikely if not impossible.

"Well just…don't take it if you don't see the IFF port. Besides, the ship I pointed out to you should be similar to Rogue."

He nodded and she bent to pick up the metal box but it was heavy and awkward. He offered to help and she let him lift the end of it back into its slot, then she slid it back onto its connectors with a strong and sudden push. It clicked, a soft, gentle, and strangely satisfying sound inconsistent with her rough handling.

They were about to head out but Remy stopped at the door he had once tried unsuccessfully to break into. He had no doubt that he could defeat it but not without leaving some trace of his questing, and he liked it on the ship, he liked the people on the ship, so he had left off.

"Hey p'tit?" He nodded to the white, carbon fiber door.

"Yeah."

"What's in there?"

She answered without pause or anxiety, a fact that amazed him in retrospect.

"It's the engine."

* * *

Thanks as always to 'lovely smile' and 'me voila'

So...I left my outline in the dust a couple of chapters ago. I have to say I feel like the writing is better, but I'm a little nervous I may introduce inconsistencies or repeat myself. I can already tell the pacing has changed and I'm not sure how faithfully I'm representing Kurt. I've also noticed I'm better at writing fight scenes than flirty Romy stuff, which really surprised me. I'll, uh...work on that.

Please feel free to provide actual literary criticism. These are called Etudes because they're practice. I give myself a lot of leeway because of the limited amount of time I have to write but I'd still love to get better.

Thanks for reading and reviewing.

XOXO

-J


	13. Chapter 13

Within a few hours of landing Anna had found a contract, predictably hauling frozen fish to Station 12, and she went into business mode preparing for it. Flushing and replacing the water in the septic systems, clearing out space for the big styrofoam boxes, and filling out the customs forms in advance.

In the evening they all went to the Sovereign Hotel for dinner and drinks and a little gambling. Rora squirmed in her shoes which had once again grown tight and Remy, as promised, bought her a new expensive pair of leather sandals with black straps that wrapped around the ankle, not unaware that these were the third pair of shoes she'd gone through in the past few months. She grew fast, and though it was in the nature of children to grow quickly, her growth was particularly striking. He marveled that they had all denied the fact for so long, but seeing her everyday had blunted the force of her change. Only when he recalled the memory of her in rags tucked in his arms could he truly see how much she'd grown. She might have been five or six when he found her…now she looked to be eight or nine…or so he guessed. But then he doubted himself again. Adolescent girls came in a shocking variety and he didn't really know anything about them, and besides, she'd been starved back then. He let his concerns drift off and watched her excitedly scamper in and out of dressing rooms while he palmed some crystal jewelry just to pass the time.

Her cloths seemed small as well, so with characteristic generosity he bought her a few new outfits, a sleeveless red and gold tunic with jeans, a long-sleeved blouse of embroidered white linen with black leather pants, a long dress of pale pink silk like the inside of a seashell, all beautiful and pricey, but he liked watching her sway this way and that in the tall mirrors. He liked her childlike smile, the one he almost never saw. She looked like a wealthy man's daughter in her finery. No one would suspect she was a wandering orphan in the company of a thief, a smuggler, and whatever the fuck Kurt was. He felt a certain kinship with her and he longed to protect her, as he himself had not been.

After dinner Rora went home with Kurt, who had little taste for games of chance, and Remy took the opportunity to continue his lazy and thus far fruitless pursuit of the pilot. The two of them played black jack and a few dice games peculiar to Madripoor. They won a little, lost a little, and eventually ended up at one of the bars ringing the floor, listening to the upbeat chatter of the gamblers and the pentatonic hum of a string ensemble.

He asked her about the card he was supposed to steal and she told him it would let her to masquerade as another ship for a while…if she needed to, a precaution against Dark Star in the wake of their near miss. He asked her about her travels, her favorite cities, her most memorable jobs, but when she asked about him he always found a way to deflect her questions and before she knew it she was talking about herself again.

"Why is your life such a secret Remy?" She finally asked out of frustration.

"Because I'm a criminal." He answered matter-of-factly.

She rolled her eyes. "That doesn't matter."

"Oh yeah…I forgot. You a criminal too."

"I'm not a smuggler."

"Dat's right…keep sayin' it."

"Pffft…you don't know." And she waved her hand in the air a little sloppily. She noticed her increasing ataxia for the first time and furrowed her brow. "I think I drank too much. I should go back to the ship."

She got down from the stool and looked at him. "You comin'?"

"Non."

"But you're coming back tonight…right? Or should Ah just lock the ship up…actually…nevermind."

He chuckled at her. "You can lock up….I'm gonna stay in de hotel."

She nodded and turned to go but he stopped her.

"You could stay in the hotel too..."

"Yeah but Ah got a free bed on the ship, so…" She shrugged.

He stared at her with an almost smile and held her gaze even when he tilted his head back to take a sip of his drink.

She didn't get it.

So he said it.

"You got a free bed here, p'tit."

She blinked. Her mouth opened in a silent "Oh' and a blush flared on her cheeks. Charming, beautiful…innocent, as he remembered her in the Hellfire Club…but frozen like an animal caught in the beam of a floodlight.

He hopped off the barstool and lined up next to her with his arm bent, an invitation for her to take it. She accepted, slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow without a word, and walking with him all the way to the elevators. Her other hand came up to his arm as well so that she clung to him as if to let go would be to fall.

When they arrived in the room she lingered by the door like she didn't belong there. He walked to the French doors, opened them, stepped out, lit a cigarette. When he looked back at her she was still standing in the same place. He frowned.

"Wassa matter chere? C'mere."

Obediently she floated to him like a ghost, slowly walking the length of the ornate room, and the bewilderment on her face was disconcerting. He reached out a hand when she came close and tucked a white lock of hair behind her ear.

"I don't get it p'tit. You ain't afraid o' nuthin' on your ship. You're little miss in charge, and _I got this_, and _don't worry about it_. I take you outta der and you look like you gonna fall apart.

"I like it on my ship."

He snorted. "Guess so."

He took a drag of his cigarette and offered it to her. She inhaled on it gratefully, hoping it would calm her nerves…and he just kept _looking_ at her, but now instead of the hungry, wolfish stare she was used to there was only concern.

"You know chere…we don't haveta do anything." He said as he took the cigarette back from her.

"No…its ok…I wanna." She stammered out.

"Don' seem like it." His voice had a slight edge to it. She heard it and apologized.

"I'm sorry…I'm just…not very experienced."

He breathed a last puff of smoke and crushed the cigarette on the metal railing of the balcony.

"That's fine…how many men you been wit'?" He asked this most personal of questions so casually, like it was no big deal. She felt off balance again in that very particular way he tended to dislocate her.

"Been with?...I…I kissed a boy…once."

Remy froze, felt his stomach do a little flip. "You never been wit' anyone? Cuz I don't know if I believe dat."

"Well…what do you mean by 'been with'?"

He laughed, astonished, and ran his hand through his hair looking over her head at nothing in particular, suddenly unsure of what to do with her. He was used to an Anna that was self possessed, feisty, confident, wound tight but occasionally fun and generally sure of herself. This drunk and trembling virgin seemed a whole other person…and it confused him. He felt the wind kick up and slide along the side of the building, ruffling his hair right out of place again.

"Mebbe we go back to de ship after all…eh?"

"You don't wanna…" She read the look on his face, the distress, and she snapped out of it in an instant, like the recoil of a gun. All the softness left her and she straitened into the tough-as-nails captain of Rogue.

"Yeah I'll go back to the ship." She bit out and turned on her heels.

"Chere…wait. Don't be like dat." He grabbed her elbow but she shook him off angrily and stomped across the room with a slight weave in her step.

"Oh, don't worry about it Remy...I just didn't realize you invited me here to make me feel like an idiot!" She shouted over her shoulder before she jerked open the door and slammed it behind her.

* * *

Please Review.


	14. Chapter 14

Remy thought about following her but didn't know what he would say. It was probably best if she cooled off for a second. In any case, he'd gone months without getting laid and that was ending tonight. He threw his coat back on and went down to the bar where he'd already eyed a pretty waitress. _Every plan should have a backup_, and he smiled to himself.

* * *

Back on the ship, Rora was in her room asleep and Kurt sat in the viewing alcove reading. He was waiting up for Anna in true older brother fashion but it was late and he was tired and perhaps a little tipsy. His eyes flagged and his head bobbed until he passed into dreams right there in the soft leather chair.

He met a stewardess once, on a shuttle out of New York, with golden hair and a ready smile, beautiful pink lips shaped just so. Her name was Amanda and there was something about her face that he was never able to forget, something in its shape and in the set of her hazel eyes. They struck up a conversation and at the end of the flight, as they were all piling off, she slipped her phone number into his hand. Why had he never called her?

In his dream they talked as before but instead of slipping out of her life forever as he had done, he slipped her into the shuttle bathroom, picked her whole body up, set her down right on the sink edge. She gasped delightedly, whispered "What are you doing?" though her eyes sparkled, and he smiled and kissed her with all the violence a man may kiss a woman and keep her willing. Someone banged on the bathroom door a few times but he ignored it until it finally stopped. His arms went around her waist and hers went to his chest and she moaned into his mouth. It was all perfect. I was all too perfect.

Somewhere on the shuttle a child began to cry. Again he ignored it, but the formless sounds grew louder, shaped into the words and the words became his name over and over and over…

"Kuuuuuurt!"

He woke up just as Rora's screaming abruptly stopped and he heard the muted clanging of soft-soled boots on the catwalks and mumbled orders. He jerked forward to grab his rifle and flipped off the safety, resisting the urge to press his hands around the transducer to quiet the sound of its whine. He leveled the barrel on the back of the chair and the first fool came into view around the corner, wearing an all black uniform with a red insignia on it, a six tentacled skull. He squeezed the trigger and a bright bolt of plasma hit the hapless gendarme in the chest and toppled him over the railing to the floor below. Indistinct voices shouted and he could hear feet moving.

He moved to the wall and edged up to the corner, then shot blindly around it assuming there was another and was rewarded with the dull thud of a body hitting the catwalk. A few more stray shots met only air. He looked left and right then down into the bay where he could see one of them carrying the girl over his shoulders toward the open maw of the ramp. He ran and vaulted over the railing launching himself ten feet through the air to the dangling cargo chain which began to slide down quickly with his weight, clang-clang-clang-clang-clang. The man turned and fired at him with his free hand and nicked his body armor. Kurt spun on his chain and fired back, hitting him in the leg and forcing him to kneel. Then he jumped to the floor, charging him as he unceremoniously dropped Rora to the ground.

The whine of his rifle was audible again which meant it was recovering and that was fine. He ducked out of the way of the man's ceramic bullet and spun the rifle by the trigger hold and then the barrel in a carnival display of virtuosity, so that the butt of the weapon came up under the man's chin with enough force to pop some teeth out and break his jaw. The man howled in pain but his blood shot eyes stayed focused and he aimed again at Kurt who had simply beaten him to the punch at this point. Kurt fired a low blast into his abdomen knocking him into the wall and rushed over to close the bay door. Pulled out his phone, typed in PANIC2 and pressed send. He rushed to Rora's side and checked her pulse then left her lying there to sweep the rest of the ship.

He heard a comm link crackle on the man on the floor.

"Gauntlet 6 this is Gauntlet 1. What is the status of the ship? Over."

He pressed the small receiver on the man's arm and suppressed his accent.

"Gauntlet 1 this is Gauntlet 6. The ship is empty. What are your instructions? Over."

"Standby Gauntlet 6."

He sighed and his head dropped. He ripped the receiver off of the body and carried it with him to look for the fourth man. Because three was just too strange a number…there had to be a fourth…somewhere.

* * *

Anna stomped angrily down the hall and took the stairs down seven flights so that no one in the elevators would see her flushed face and her wet eyes. Somewhere between the second and third floor she stopped to sit on the stairs and reflect, to gather her thoughts and her feelings. She felt like she'd ruined something, by losing her temper, by being drunk, by being stupid in general or when it came to this man in particular.

Maybe it was a dumb idea anyways. He'd as much as said that he would stay in Madripoor to disappear from his ex-comrades. But even if she never saw him again she couldn't help what she wanted, and again it seemed stupid, to get hung up on a vagabond with a price on his head. And yet she was.

She let loose a torrent of tears and shuddering sobs that were as much a product of her years of self pity as they were of a single rejection. And when she was done she felt better, strong again, as she should be, as she was. She stood, straightened her shirt and jacket, wiped her eyes…everything was fine…fine.

Her phone alarm went off, not the delicate chime of her alerts, but a constant buzzing screech. She didn't even have to look at it. She flew down the remaining stairs in a second and out of the stairwell door. Tipsy revelers stopped and looked at her as she sprinted down the wide marble hallway, past tall windows that looked into bars, restaurants, shops, and on out into the city.

* * *

In the bar the waitress was already sidled up close to Remy, putting her hand on his knee, sliding it up. Their conversation had bottomed out and entirely turned to innuendo after ten minutes. He was whispering some obscene promise in her ear when he saw Anna through the windows, running for her life, clipping a shopper who fell and spilled clothes all over the cream-colored stone floor. She didn't even seem to notice, and when he saw her he fell silent mid sentence.

"What is it?" said the waitress.

"Huh."

"When we get up to the room you're gonna…what?"

He smiled at her playfully, put his hands on her hips. "Why don't you head up there and wait for me…den I'll show you." He opened his wallet and handed her a room key. "814."

"Hmm." It was half hum half closed mouth laugh. She lowered her head and put the corner of the card in her teeth. "Why don't you come up with me?"

He brushed her hair out of her face, tucked it behind her ear as he had done for Anna less than half an hour ago. It was striking how all these gestures of tenderness could mean anything.

"I got somet'ing I gotta do first p'tit."

She made that pleasant humming sound again.

"I like it when you call me p'tit."

He smiled wickedly.

"I'm gonna call you dat and some more in a little bit, now go on."

She swung her hips this way and that biting her lip, then spun around and walked away sashaying as she went. She turned left out of the bar and headed to the elevators, winking back at him as the doors closed on her.

Remy sighed quietly as he watched her go. When he left the bar he turned right.

* * *

Please Review.


	15. Chapter 15

Anna's lungs burned from running but she was so frantic that she observed the pain more than felt it. Dark alleys passed in a blur, the late night remnants of the stalls gave color to the stone walls of New Madripoor's market district. Remy had to give up the pretense of stealth and flat out chase her as her feet beat out a merciless rhythm on the cobblestones. At last the buildings receded behind her and she came to the open fields of sea grass surrounding the airfield. The grass smacked wetly against her shins as she ran and eventually the sound gave way to the soft clapping of asphalt.

She shuddered to a halt at the passenger access door of the ship, sweating and panting. For the first time she turned to look behind her and saw Remy as he caught up to her, but she had no breath to speak nor time to explain nor even a moment to register surprise. She tapped in the code and the door descended, then she took the six steps three at a time up to the small airlock and entered another code at the console there. When that too opened she stepped into the brightness of the bay and squinted. She could see a crumpled body of a man in uniform on the far side of the bay and knew immediately that it wasn't Kurt. Remy stepped behind her and breathlessly panted, "Chere?"

"Shhh." She held her hand up and half turned her head back to him. "It's so quiet."

He listened to the eerie silence with her.

"Let's go…back to de hotel…Chere?"

She gave no answer.

"Chere?"

She craned her head around to look at him with wide eyes. "I have to take the ship up."

"Non…leave wit' me…now." He put his hand on her elbow. She didn't shrug it off this time.

"Please!…" She practically wept, so plaintive was her voice. "Once we're in the air no one can hurt us."

He scowled at her disbelieving, feeling in his bones that they were making a terrible mistake and pitying her innocence, wondering where Rora was with a pang in his heart, wondering if Anna cared through her haze of panic. He dropped his hand.

She took his silence for assent and turned, reached to the side of him to press the toggle switch on the inside console and close the access door. They stepped out from under the overhanging catwalk swiftly and quietly like church mice. Anna's eyes darted every which way. Remy looked right in front of him, tight mouthed, but all his attention was in his periphery. He didn't like how exposed they were and he decided that if he ever designed cargo ships the stairs to the cockpit would not extend from the open bay.

They reached the cockpit without any further sign of worry but she hadn't thought this through. If she knew where Kurt and Rora were she would seal the cockpit and open the bay doors when they got out of the atmosphere just to make sure no one was lurking around. But that wouldn't work if Kurt or Rora were lying concussed in the far reaches of the ship somewhere. They were still going to need to search everything. She sat in her seat and started flipping switches. The dash came alive with LEDs and the hum of electricity but when she pushed the throttle to spin up the engine…nothing happened.

A shiver ran through her body. She swallowed.

"What is it?" Asked Remy.

A radio down in the bay crackled and they both jumped and turned to look behind them.

"Only two of them." They heard a man's voice speaking. Anna turned back to the controls and hit a button only to be shocked again when the cockpit door didn't slide shut.

"Oh god…the interface bus." She dove to the foot of her seat and slid a silver panel out of the way chucking it behind her with a loud metallic clatter.

Scores of heavy footfalls rang everywhere, closer and closer. Remy's eyes were half lidded. He smiled sardonically and put his hands in his lap. He knew it was too late. He was annoyed and bored by the prospect of breaking out of another jail cell. Annoyed with himself for being here when he should be sweating in the arms of a casino waitress.

"Stand up and put your hands where I can see them." The guard yelled. Anna choked on her tears and crawled back slowly, releasing the connector of a brightly colored ribbon of wires, then she rose to stand but was grabbed by rough hands before ever raising her arms.

* * *

They were frog-marched outside, separated, told to lie face down on the ground, fingers spread wide over their heads. From her vantage point she could make out the hovering chassis of several armored vans. There was a constant chatter of serious conversation and an unnatural white light everywhere. She lay there for about fifteen minutes and at last a man stood over her, pulled her hands behind her back, zip tied her wrists together. He stood her up and walked her to one of the vans, which had lowered to the ground for loading. She stepped into it with her captors aid and could see Kurt's legs sticking out of the darkness where he lay on his side, bloodied and unmoving.

She fell to her knees and yelled his name, nudging him with her knee, falling and half laying on him. Trying to feel his pulse with her face at his throat, but it was pointless.

"Kurt?" Her cries softened to pleading whimpers. "I'm so sorry!" She cried and nuzzled her face into his arm, noting that at least he was warm and repeating her unheard apology as the door slammed shut behind her.

* * *

Raven's phone had gone off during the meeting, vibrating three times in succession and then falling silent. Five minutes later it repeated the same pattern. She was forced to excuse herself and that irritated her to no end. She clomped angrily through the anteroom, down the alabaster hallway to her cavernous office and finally looked at her phone with a curse.

Imperious. That was the word for Raven Darkholm. Competent. Intelligent. Frightening. Those words as well, but Imperious covered all the bases. It was what one felt immediately in her presence. Even the Cabinet members she worked with, though technically her superiors, felt the weight of her power. And she had a most impressive suite of powers when it came to politics: Influence, charisma, and money.

Nur was up for election this year and no one would dare run against him whom he hadn't himself placed as a puppet for the sake of illusion. It would be years before anyone could run against him in earnest, and so all of her efforts were bent towards thwarting him in subtle ways, embarrassing him, weakening him, strengthening his most promising rivals, to make room for some idiot to be the first to challenge him. That man or woman would die, and probably the next after that, but eventually his political base would erode…either that or civil war…and war was to be avoided at all cost. Even if it required more targeted sacrifices. Even if it required her own children.

Already the nets were cast far afield and drawn in by imperceptible degrees. Her avatars slept. A brotherhood of dissidents. They served tea in the ministry chambers, they did paperwork in fancy offices lined with burlwood, in laboratories funded by Nur's government, a few wore the KAS uniform, a few Dark Star, and two of them in particular hauled freight all over the galaxy, just waiting…waiting for the moment she needed them.

When _she_ needed _them._

Not the other way around.

* * *

Thanks to my reviewers. Lovely Smile and Me Voila in particular.

I do have to say, I feel like I've veered away from Rogue quite a bit as well...I needed a barrier to touch that wasn't her mutation and I gave her a bunch of psychological features to that end, but she seems to have developed a different personality to the one I had envisioned. More dualistic for sure...I like this version of her in any case though she isn't really the quintessential Rogue.


	16. Chapter 16

She cried all her tears out in a whitewashed room, an interrogation room she assumed, though there was no mirror or video camera that she could see. There was a stainless steel table and two stainless steel chairs but she chose to sit in the corner on the floor where she could curl into the wall and feel the slightest hint of comfort.

When the door finally did open with a deep _chnk_, she didn't seem startled. She didn't even look up.

A man seated himself in the chair closest to her and scooted it around 90 degrees to face her. He didn't bother introducing himself.

"Well Ms. Wagner. There isn't much to you is there?" A soft voice. A gentle voice. The practiced voice of an interrogator.

She knit her brows and looked at him for the first time, a handsome, youngish officer dressed in a well cut green uniform, so dark it appeared black at first glance. High on the side of his arm she could see the red skull with its six tentacles, the emblem of Hydra. He was leaning over with his elbows on his knees and peered at her over a thin manila folder.

"No there isn't." She said at last, leaning her head back against the wall.

"Hmm." He half laughed. "There's virtually nothing on your phone. Barely any contacts. Unusual for a young twenty-something."

Bitterness crept into her voice. "Ah don't like a lot of old messages cluttering up my phone. And Ah don't have a lot of contacts in my phone because Ah don't have a lot of contacts in my life. " A half lie, but true enough. Her phone deleted messages after 30 minutes for security and her contacts she knew to keep in her head if they were worth keeping at all. The only exception was Remy, but she supposed she could remember his number now too if she liked. All the other numbers in there were business contacts for work, and none of them would raise the least suspicion.

"It has subspace capabilities. I've never seen that on a civilian phone." He commented almost to himself, but she knew she was meant to respond.

"Ah have a shipping business. Ah need to coordinate across planetary time zones sometimes." Her voice smoothed over with calm. There was no point in bitterness. There was no point in any emotion anymore.

He seemed to think about that, nodding silently to himself. "Well then, I'm just going to cut to it Ms. Wagner. Did you know you were traveling with a deserter and infamous larcenist?"

"No."

He made a note.

"Where did you pick him up?"

"Kitra." She should have said station 12. Kurt wouldn't say Kitra. Kurt would say station 12…if Kurt were alive. But it didn't matter anyways. The Hydra gendarme would search the ship. They would come to the white door and it would refuse to open for them, so they would blow it up. They would walk down the round white corridor and their guns and rank insignia would lift off of them, pull away, fly into the banks upon banks of adamantium magnets, destroying the invisible prison, and then the dark secret in the heart of Rogue would expand outward in a flash, absorbing and annihilating anything and everything it touched. It would happen soon. Any second now.

"Where were you taking him?"

She blinked. "St. Marge. Right after this job."

He bent to write something again.

"What did he tell you about the girl."

And Rora…she would die too.

"He said she was his niece."

The questions were simple, perfunctory. He nodded and mmhm-ed at each one. Sometimes he took notes. Another five minutes of questions passed until someone knocked at the door and opened it quickly, surprising her questioner. He stood up, sputtered, snapped to attention.

"As you were sergeant. I'll be directing this interrogation from here on out. May I have your notes?"

"Of course Major."

The younger man was obviously confused but obeyed and edged out of the room in a hurry. The major sat down in his place and stared at her for a few moments.

So this was his ticket out. This broken looking girl and her equally innocent looking brother. How many years had he toiled for Hydra only to be denied promotion at the last moment. His retirement would be forfeit if he was passed over again, and that was the most likely scenario. But…if he helped this…child…he could forget all about his pension and still live in splendor. He could retire to the southern Isles and farm pearls and fish for Marlin until he died like the old man in the book. His wife would be pleased with him, his grandchildren could go to fancy private schools. And truly, what did any of this have to do with Hydra, with Madripoor, with N'Gari? It was all some affair to do with Nur and his Union so it wasn't even a betrayal.

He shifted in his seat, closed the folder and set it on the table.

"Well you certainly sang like a canary." He baited her a little, just for fun, but she didn't rise to it. She appeared serene in a sad and oddly unsettling way, folded in on herself, vacant.

He cleared his throat.

"Madame Viper likes to keep a…" he gestured with his hand, showing her an open palm, "friendly relationship with merchants. It is the basis of a strong economy after all." He rolled his eyes unconsciously. "So we will finish up this paperwork and have you on your way as soon as we can. Do you need any water? Perhaps a female officer can escort you to the restroom?" He offered with forced politeness, noticing the slightest blush of life returning to her face.

She was still for a few seconds, so still that he wondered if she had even heard him, but then she spun her head around to face him, surprising him.

"Has my ship been searched?"

That was her first question? He half smiled…_smuggler._

"Just a walk through, nothing…invasive." He smiled, falsely sure of himself. "Though we cloned your hard drive as per protocol. I'm sure you have no objections."

She sniffed and nodded. Looked away again.

Is my brother alright?

"He's fine…just some bruises." An understatement, but he wasn't here to have a conversation and he was bored by the prospect of answering her many questions. He stood up and slid the chair back into its place.

"What about the thief and the girl."

"One of your Union contractors paid good money for them. I suggest you forget you ever knew them." He was at the door now.

"What do they want with the girl?" She spit out as his hand pressed on the door handle.

His repressed a sneer. It wasn't often he met people who dared not to address him with the respect due his rank.

"I haven't the faintest idea." And he closed the door on her.

* * *

An hour later, an hour of dizzying relief, and she and Kurt were dropped off on a street in lowtown. Kurt leaned on her hard then slid to the ground and sat running his palms along the length of his calves.

"You ok?" She asked, concerned.

He nodded. "They kicked me in the legs." He said evenly. Doubtless they had kicked him all over, but there was some unspoken rule of cruelty among Hydra's foot soldiers, that if you wanted to brutalize someone without killing them, you could take your steel toed boots to their legs with impunity. Of course, broken bones and ruptured arteries still occurred but that was acceptable.

She looked away from him, directing her angry eyes to the fading stars. Kurt of all the people she knew didn't deserve to be hurt. He was gentle and kind, but he was always the first one to throw himself in harms way if he thought he needed to. He was noble in that self-sacrificing way that hero's and martyrs are extolled for. But it made her fear for him, and still more, it made her feel guilty, because she couldn't ever deserve such a protector.

A rickshaw trundled down the street and she raised her hand to hail it. The ride back to the ship was peaceful. She knew she should hurry the driver, but her nihilistic hangover lingered, and oddly, it made her feel stronger, more able to face the wrath of Raven yet to come.

The sun was just cresting the horizon when they arrived at the airfield and her load of frozen fish was idling alongside her ship in a refrigerated truck. She had to laugh to herself. _Back to business – just like that. _

She paid the rickshaw driver and helped Kurt into the ship and up to the viewing lounge where he stretched out on the couch with an involuntary whimper that made her cringe. She brought him some water and some low-grade painkillers then returned to the driver of the truck and made her apologies for being late.

It wasn't until half of the cases were loaded that she noticed the mid sized shuttle parked 500 meters down the tarmac. She could barely make out the name from the distance, but she was absolutely certain that the emblem painted fore of the swept wings was an eight-pointed star.

* * *

Thank you to Me Voila and Lovely Smile. What do you guys think of the pacing? Does it feel like the story is rushed?


	17. Chapter 17

TL;DR - Exposition. Sorry for the short chapter. Thanks as always to Me Voila, Lovely Smile, and now Ludi.

* * *

Motion sensing lights flickered on as Raven and Emma entered a bunker office outside of Jura. It was cold, having reverted to the temperature of the earth after months of disuse.

"He said that he can't afford to continue supporting us if this election cycle doesn't pan out." Said Emma as she walked across the room to seat herself in a leather armchair.

Raven paused at her desk. "What were his exact words."

Emma flipped through some pages and quoted directly from the meeting minutes. "Oyama Heavy Industries cannot continue to make contributions of this size to so many recipients. It is an unsustainable burden on the corporation that the board of directors can no longer support."

Raven seemed unconcerned. She slid a wall panel aside to reveal a wet bar and reached into a freezer for a perfectly round ice cube which she placed into a cut crystal rocks glass.

"Do you want anything to drink Emma?"

It was generally wise to refuse such offers from Raven. She would put you at ease to learn your secrets, your motivations, your deepest desires only to use them later to her advantage. But Emma was able to resist and parry these attempts at psychological warfare. It had made their relationship one of mutual respect over the years, though Raven would never decline an opportunity to manipulate someone if they presented it.

"I'll have some water if you don't mind."

Raven nodded with her back turned as she crushed a crystalized orange slice into the bottom of her glass and poured a finger of whiskey over it. "An Old Fashioned without fresh oranges is just ridiculous. I should rename this cocktail." She turned and handed Emma a similarly ornate glass filled with water then sat down behind her desk

"I thought an Old Fashioned only used the rind?" Emma commented lightly.

The older woman smirked. "I didn't realize you were an aficionado."

"I know a few things." She retorted with a fleeting smile, waiting for her employer to get back to business.

"Well..." Raven began, leaning back in her chair and looking up at the ceiling for a moment of thoughtfulness then returning her gaze to Emma. "This changes nothing."

"How so? If we lose this backer two election cycles from now Christian will no longer be in position to run for a regional seat."

"Not so…for several reasons. First, the name Oyama."

"What of it?"

Raven let her face show a bare instant of annoyance. "He's given us a pragmatic reason for withdrawing support, Tatamae...the appearance of truth. What he really means is that he is losing faith in our abilities and if we want to maintain his loyalty we need to hurry up, Honne...truth. But no matter where he places his faith, no one is offering him a better chance at revenge than we are. And lets be honest…its revenge he wants. He could attain a cabinet position without all of this back door dealing and for less cost, but he's playing the long game. He wants Essex dead for personal reasons and Nur dead for political reasons and he wants a new government into the bargain so that he can have a hand in remaking the rules. No one is offering him all that but us. Second, if he withdraws support now and we are successful, he will not reap any of the benefits when the power change occurs. And third, he has plenty of money…an obscene amount….his board of directors are all puppets.

"So we do nothing?"

Raven laughed…"No…in the end Oyama only urges us to follow our own desires. It has taken too long already. No one could have anticipated that Buckman's tenure in the Cabinet would be so…lengthy. He should be dead by now of natural causes, but doubtless Essex has something to do with his freakish longevity. Sadly we may have to help him along to the next phase of his life's journey."

Emma nodded, understanding. "Do you want me to have Logan get in contact with Kurt?"

"Not yet. Rogue ran into some trouble in New Madripoor. She should be heading back now. Prepare a dossier on Edward Buckman and make it damning." She sneered a little. "Kurt always needs to be _convinced_."

* * *

Hope I got Honne and Tatamae right.

Please Review


	18. Chapter 18

She sat on the ramp and looked for a long time. They had just landed, she could tell. A figure came down the ramp and laid chocks on either side of the landing gear. They would be here a while and it should have been a small comfort to her, knowing that she had time if she wanted to do something, if she wanted to make a move, but fear had compressed every other feeling in her so that she earnestly considered taking off, turning her back on everything, on the thief and the little girl, and going back to her normal life. But there was a barrier between her and that decision the shape and nature of which she could not discern. Perhaps because her life, even on the other side of that choice, was its own kind of misery. Day after day of practiced isolation with the occasional job for Raven and the sure knowledge that someday she would be found out, tracked down like a dog, and killed, or, more likely, sent to a reeducation camp.

And then there was the fact that she didn't know anything else beyond this life. Raven and Kurt were all she really had and for a little while she had a charming con man and a little sister of sorts. Still, she only needed to be convinced to act the hero at times like these, when she was hollowed out; so empty her emotions seemed to echo inside of her.

Well, if she was going to die, she wasn't going to do it in a camp, that was for damn sure. And she felt comfortable speaking for Kurt on the issue as well.

So death was certain…not the sort of death that all men must face etc…but the glorious or ignominious death of a freedom fighter. Fast in a thunderous explosion of radiation and lights and subatomic particles, or slow, starving over long months of work and torture in what was essentially a prison…

Something distracted her then from her silent soliloquy…she felt a hand on her knee and she looked down to see…nothing there…yet the sensation persisted and dragged all the way up to her hip with an eerie sensuousness that made her shiver. How many days had it been now? Only one. No. Two. She had forgotten yesterday. But still that seemed too fast. _It must be the stress._ She went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, raised her hand to it to open the medicine cabinet but stopped when she saw her own eyes staring back at her.

_You can tell can't you? You can tell what's real and what's not._

Her hand slid along the edge of the mirror and slipped off, down to the sink.

Almost reflexively she washed her hands.

* * *

Remy was still sitting in his white cell hours later. No coat. No Shoes. His pat down had been thorough enough to divest him of his lock picks so he sat brooding, casting his mind into the future, imagining the scenario that would provide the most opportunity for escape.

A guard, or an officer, or a sergeant…he couldn't tell…escorted him to the restroom and back once and on his way he passed a general confinement area like a cage that the guards could see into, full of drunks and petty criminals. He looked in it for the pilot and Kurt and the girl but to no avail. It unsettled him that he wasn't in there. It meant they thought there was something noteworthy about him and that idea twisted in the back of his mind.

He spent the rest of his little foray casing the interior of what seemed to be a militarized police station, noting the pale fingers of dawn creeping into the sky on the other side of a row of small porthole windows. When he returned to the cell he lay down on the floor, laid his head on his arm and prepared to sleep if only for a few minutes, to gather his strength.

It seemed only moments later that he heard someone at the door and he shot up and stood in the middle of the empty room, but whoever it was was struggling with the handle and it gave him a moment to think, to arrange himself casually against the wall, knees bent…no…just one knee bent. There. Only then when he sat quietly for a moment did he recognize the tell tale clicking and scraping was not the sound of a hand struggling with a key…it was the questing of a long pointed needle of metal looking for the pins of the lock. His breath stilled in his throat and his heart raced and he stared wide eyed and closed mouthed at the door handle until he heard it…_click_…soft and musical. The most delicate percussion. And the door fell open on its hinge just an inch as quietly as a leaf turning on its stem.

* * *

She was still staring at herself in the mirror when she heard Kurt call out to her in a voice of rising distress, so she hurried out and along the catwalk to where he lay. His face was pinched with pain and he had turned awkwardly on his side grasping his thigh with both hands.

"What is it?" She asked with breathless concern.

"It hurts." He bit out, now gritting his teeth. "Something is wrong." And he gasped a little.

"Is it broken?"

"I don't know!" He hissed, not looking at her and it made her take a step back and grow calm. Kurt didn't yell. He never yelled. And not at her, but if ever she had seen him _want_ to…it was now.

"Do you wanna go to the hospital?" She asked, hoping he would say no.

"I want to get home and I want to see Hank…just….just…go!" But he cried out again at the end of his choppy sentence and she knew she had to do something for him, because they weren't going home yet. She needed to figure some things out first.

"Don't worry. This is New Madripoor." She said almost to herself. "I'll get you some _good_ drugs." And without another word between them she turned and left.

Out at the flight line perimeter there was a smattering of rickshaw and cart-bike drivers waiting for the odd fare into town. She hopped onto the back of a cart bike and urgently barked out "Any pharmacy in Low Town." as she unceremoniously wrapped her arms around the thin man's waist. The driver wasted no time, pulled his motorcycle up and revved off with all the hurry she could hope for.

She paid the driver extra to wait for her outside the dimly lit store. It's shelves lined so closely together that she had to side step through them. She let her fingers read for her along the row of drugs starting with F trying to remember the names of the good drugs. Felbatol…Fentanyl…Fermodan…Her finger traced back a few. Fentanyl. The package it came in was worn and bent as though it had traveled far and inside it were a dozen square foil packages each containing a transdermal patch. She knew from experience that this would work and from that same experience her fingers itched to try one herself. To pry open the plastic and foil and slap one on her wrist for the road, to take the edge off a long and frankly miserable day.

She grabbed the package and headed to the tiny counter where a wizened old man slouched over a fablet watching a streaming game of soccer. Her eye caught the "Sol" of a bottle out of the corner of her eye and stopped in her tracks.

'Solian 200' it read. 200 was too small a dose by a third, but there was no time to ponder. She grabbed it, opened it where she stood, and dry swallowed one of the tablets. The old man stood suddenly and glowered, but the next moment she slammed the bottle and the package down on the counter and flashed her credit card.

* * *

Author's Note - Well, this story has gone off the rails, as I mentioned before, to the point where I may write some of the alternate versions and release them as Etude 5.1…5.2…etc. Would any one be interested in that? (Not that it wont take me forever to finish this one.) And as always please review.

Oh...and sorry for making you wait Lovely Smile. I always know to get on the ball when you start asking where I am.


	19. Chapter 19

Note: Sorry for the delay. I was really sick for a while and it was making me hate everything clockwork orange style...so I took a break from fanfic for a while. I have to say its hard to get back in the groove after a long absence. Please forgive any stylistic incongruities, but as always feedback is welcome. Merry Christmas.

**TL;DR** \- Remy finds a place to sleep. Anna gets yelled at by Raven.

* * *

He disabled a fire alarm and they walked out the back door like nothing ever happened. He looked down at her, impressed by her and her hairpins. She was a better thief than he might have imagined and it didn't hurt that she looked so young. It meant they didn't pat her down too hard.

They walked briskly, side by side down the alleyways taking senseless turns and doubling back. Going nowhere. She stopped him at length and told him she was going back to the ship.

"Bad idea p'tit"

But she insisted. His protectiveness vied with his instincts. He wanted to go with her, just to the edge of the airfield, to make sure she was safe but he couldn't bring himself to do it. It was too risky. Instead he invited her to come with him but she declined and he felt a sad relief when she did. He realized that on his own he didn't want to be responsible for her. He rescued her, sure, and he would again…but he was no one's guardian angel. He had always intended to leave her with someone. With Anna.

Anna…and Kurt.

A place in his heart sank but there was no time for any of that. He gave Rora his phone number…

"I won't be usin' dis phone much longer…if you can get to a phone…text me if everyt'ing's ok….or if it ain't"

She nodded and for a split second neither one knew what to do. Most people would hug, but it didn't feel right, so she smiled at him and nodded again.

"Goodbye Remy." And she turned away, took three steps around a corner and was gone.

When she disappeared a weight lifted off of him he hadn't known he bore. An attachment severed. Now he was free…no one to worry about but himself and it felt good, it felt natural, but there was a hollowness to it as well, like a hangover.

He spent the morning looking for rental apartments and condos. Fancy ones, expensive ones that wouldn't sell too fast, that would sit on the market for a while. Few buyers would come and no one would notice a nighttime squatter. And besides, high class suited him.

He found one he liked around midday and started walking. When he came to a bank he paused, thought about cracking into one of his accounts, but kept moving.

After hours of walking he reached the high rise with its exposed spine of balconies on each side. He walked to a sheltered side in an alleyway and took the staff out of his coat. He gauged the height of the first balcony and released the catch on his staff.

_Sshhink_, It shot out three feet on each end and he backed up, backed up, backed up, then leaned forward and ran digging the end of the staff into a divot in the asphalt. It bent just slightly as it propelled him upward, storing the energy, then straightening, releasing it at the top of the arch, pushing him higher, and he stretched his arm out with everything in him and gained a tenuous handhold on the ledge of the first balcony with his left hand. Dangling there he found the catch of his staff and retracted it, put it away, and pulled himself up by both hands. Story by story, balcony by balcony he climbed until he was a hundred feet in the air, one hundred fifty, one seventy, and there he stopped, on the seventeenth floor and pulled himself over the railing. The breath burned in his lungs from exertion and he idly thought how easy his months on the ship had been and how he would need to find a gym soon.

He took out his lock picks, but the door was unlocked. Not entirely surprising given how high up he was.

He stepped inside the still furnished interior and tapped a smooth track pad that controlled the lighting. A soft yellow illuminated a generously decorated apartment. Leather couches and fine carpets, a fur rug in front of the fire place. Crystal wine glasses, eggshell thin, sat in a little cluster in the center of the dinning room table.

He looked into the rooms. Everything was made up and spotless. He ran his hands over the towels in the linen closet, soft as down. There were a few little soaps shaped like seashells in a ceramic dish in the bathroom but all other toiletries had been removed. This place was ready to be shown.

He stripped down and showered with a latherless shell soap, let the warm water wash over him and relax his muscles. He had been awake for a day and a night and a day, but so what, he'd been through worse, so why did he feel so worn?

He dried off and put his cloths to wash sans detergent in the stacked washer-dryer and he slept naked between the perfect sheets of the spare bedroom. In the morning everything was clearer.

He sat on the balcony smoking his first cigarette of the day and thought about the past couple of nights. He wished it hadn't gone down the way it did. He wished he'd said goodbye to Kurt. He wished he'd slept with Anna. He knew he was going to stay here, that he was leaving them, but it had all felt so normal for a little while. And then he'd fucked it up by showing his face a little too much, by being seen. He should have come straight here, opened his accounts, gotten an apartment and some bullshit job and just settled the fuck down. But he saw her in that bar, the first time he'd ever seen her and he knew he was going to get himself into trouble.

Over the course of their time together he'd flirted with her here and there and sometimes she'd reciprocated but mostly she hadn't seemed to notice, or if she did it just confused her. Then his last chance, all in, he asked her to sleep with him and she said _yes_! And then, _then_ he had second thoughts?! Why? Because he liked her enough…(after she broke Sabre's nose he knew he was gonna _like_ her enough) Because she just wanted to loose something, didn't really want him. Because virgins are no fun. Because it would be a hassle and he was just looking for a lay. Because if she really knew about him, about all he had done with himself in his 20-some-odd years, she wouldn't want to look at him let alone touch him. Because, because, because, blagh, blagh, blagh…

Forget it. He wasn't in love with her. He just respected her enough not to let her first time be with him. In a few days he'd have the past few months out of his system.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms then let his head hang between his knees while the cigarette burned itself out against the filter.

* * *

Kurt was peaceful when they wheeled him into the infirmary. He was awake but not entirely aware, speaking as if in a dream about cousins coming to visit, about his lawyer, about someone named Amanda, but he was able to indicate to Dr. McCoy that it was his leg causing the problem and so body scan was ordered revealing a spiral fracture in his femur on its way to becoming compound and a series of embolisms causing the blood flow to his leg to be almost entirely cut off. He went into surgery moments later.

Anna sat in the day room waiting…knowing she should go to Raven, wondering why she hadn't already been called. And as much as she wanted to wait for word of Kurt she knew what Raven's answer would be.

_There's nothing you can do for him. Waiting is pointless. _

So she headed down the long sandstone hallway to the double doors of Raven's office and pressed a button on the console next to the door and a few moments later they parted with a gentle swish. Raven sat at her console drink in hand, lips slightly pursed. Anna approached but stopped within 10 feet of the desk. Her hands unconsciously went behind her back in a casual parade rest. Raven looked up at her silently for a few seconds and the two women exchanged emotionless stares. Raven returned her gaze to her console and spoke.

"How much money do you think I spent on you last night?"

Anna looked at the floor and cleared her throat. "Millions."

"Oh sorry…what was that."

"Millions" She repeated a little louder, strained.

Raven nodded slowly. "Yes…millions. 42 million credits to be precise. The families of the guards Kurt killed, the police that saw you, the records that had to be erased…and then you bring Kurt back to me broken and a you adopt a teenage girl on the way…oh, I almost forgot the 40 tons of broad-bill I had to pay for because you managed to get a shipping contract during all of this nonsense...shall I go on!"

"No ma'am." She said quietly, unable to tear her eyes away from the carpet.

"By the way, if anyone asks, you haven't been to New Madripoor in over a year..." There was another silence during which Raven seethed. Her next words came out in a whispery hiss."You've never fucked up like this before…Look at me!"

Anna snapped her eyes upward.

There was a long pause. "Do you need to talk to Dr. McCoy about your prescription?" she asked with real concern edging into her voice.

She reflexively rolled her eyes. "Nooo Mama."

"Then tell me what the fuck you were thinking."

There was no option but the truth. There was no telling how much her mother knew and she didn't want to be caught in a lie.

"It goes way back to that adamantium a few months ago."

Raven looked intrigued and leaned back in her chair.

"We never actually picked it up, we got robbed so I hired someone to help me get it back…only he didn't want any money in return. He just wanted a place to stay. Him and a little girl. Turns out he deserted from a security contractor and they put a price on his head. Some one from his old unit recognized him and chased us to New Madripoor…and that's how we got arrested. They informed the local police who then staked out the ship and jumped us once he came back."

Raven's mouth parted slightly as she exhaled and with muted wonder exclaimed "huh." Another moment passed. "So everything was fine until you returned to the ship."

"No…I came back because Kurt used a panic code."

"So they weren't looking for the deserter because you and he were off together somewhere." She meant to offend with insinuation and was surprised when Anna blushed deeply.

"I…I assume they must have been. They chased us out of Avalon and…and after I was released I saw one of their patrol vessels…"

"Dark Star's patrol vessels are everywhere."

"Are you telling me it wasn't him they were after?"

"Correct."

"Then who?"

"Young…." Raven flipped open a folder on her desk and read from it. "Ororo Munroe."

"Who?"

Slowly this time "Ororo….Munroe."


	20. Chapter 20

Author's note: My annual update. I swear I will finish this story if its the last thing I do.

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She found herself in what appeared to be a hotel suite of sorts. There was a small kitchen and sitting area. Slightly apart there was a large bathroom. The mirrored closets separated living space from bathing space and there she stood, gazing at herself. Long white hair with a certain kink to it, giving it body. Brown skin, completely flawless, and blue eyes bright and jarring. A genetic aberration. An accident of evolution…or no accident at all.

Ororo they had called her, and she knew that was right. She had gotten used to Aurora; a slight mispronunciation she once attributed to accent, now it merely seemed her name; lovely and different, far away from her strange half-memories/half-dreams.

Looking in the mirror she saw a young teenager but her face wasn't strange to her. She remembered herself at this age. Over and over she remembered. It seemed she could recall, as though the future had snuck up behind her and become the past, the features of the woman she would grow to be.

A knock sounded at the door and she turned her head just in time to see an attractive blond woman enter with a tray of food and drink.

"Hello Ms. Munro." Chimed the woman, stern yet melodic. "My name is Emma Frost." She brushed past and put the tray down on a counter of the kitchenette. She followed as it seemed proper and was hungry.

"Thank you Ms. Frost." She said with careful delicacy and Emma returned a smile. She remembered that smile because it seemed so genuine with just a touch of tightness to it, a beautifully executed facsimile of pleasantness. It betrayed a great deal.

"I have to ask you a few questions while you eat…do you mind?"

Rora nodded as she unwrapped a sandwich placed perfectly on a china bread plate.

"Do you mind if I record our conversation?"

Rora's chewing slowed but she shook her head.

"Wonderful." And Emma retrieved what appeared to be a pen from her shirt and set it on the table between them. "How old are you?"

Rora swallowed and said "I don't know." Casually before taking another bite.

Emma's brows furrowed ever so slightly. "Do you remember your parents?"

"No." another bite.

"What is the first thing you remember?"

This question set off a storm of memory as her mind raced back in time…or forward. Her hands held her sandwich inches from her face and she stared at the juice box on the tray. She looked shocked for a moment, as this was a question she had not even asked herself. "I don't know." She said, somewhat astonished.

"Hmm..." Emma pressed her lips together. "How about your time on the ship, do you remember that?"

"Yes."

"How did you end up on the ship?"

Rora gauged how much she wanted to tell. She had been treated well and Anna seemed comfortable here, but this had the distinct flavor of an interrogation. "Anna's friend, the thief brought me."

"And how did you meet the thief?"

"He rescued me...from…a cage." She cricked her neck and took another bite.

"Uh huh… … …and who put you in the cage."

"Bad men."

Emma's face became perfectly calm for a split second before animating again to continue the surprisingly difficult conversation.

"What do you know about the bad men?" She was getting annoyed. She could tell that the girl was capable of more fluent discourse.

Rora set down the sandwich and looked Emma square in the face.

"What if I choose not to answer your questions?"

"Are you scared of me?" Emma parried without a pause.

"A little." Replied Rora.

Such honesty Emma did not expect, though she should have and a moment of silence passed.

"Would you rather talk to…"

"Why are you recording this?"

Emma weighed her response. "My…superior would like to hear your story."

"What sort of business are you in Ms. Frost."

"Politics."

"Obviously."

Emma folded her hands on the table and leaned forward. "Look…I have been sent to gather your story because some of my affiliates believe you are connected in some way to a powerful government scientist." She picked the pen up off of the table and pressed a button on the side of it. "Everyone involved is rather keen on treating you with kid gloves and gaining your cooperation. If I were you I would not jeopardize that."

Rora watched her stand up and leave with a restrained but furious grace.

Then she finished her sandwich.

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Anna skulked around the bay waiting for the first maintainer to arrive. The whole ship needed a thorough going over after her recent treatment of it, and first thing first was of course the engine. A ship like Rogue required a team of mechanics and technicians to properly maintain and now that she was grounded she would be in charge of the maintenance schedule. She had made an appointment for early afternoon but the guy was running late. She didn't have much choice in contractors. Raven had vetted them all and passed a list on to Emma who had passed it on to Logan who had passed it onto her. It was merely a matter of setting up the appointments.

She sat at the mouth of the gangway and played on her phone.

"Hey…are you Anna?"

She snapped her head up to see an attractive youngish, sandy haired man in orange and black coveralls carrying a heavy bag of what she assumed were tools in one hand and a computer case in the other.

"Yeah that's me" She stood and extended her hand. He set his bag down and shook it, then bent to pick it back up again. "My name's Joe…I'm the magnet guy."

"Great. It's nice to meet you. Let me show you to the bowl"

She walked him back to the white door, entered a code that seemed to take five minutes to type in.

"A lot of security huh?"

"Yeah…don't distract me."

"Sorry."

At length the door swished open and she took her shoes and jacket off to enter.

"You don't have shoes without metal?" He asked as they walked down the white hallway.

"I do, I just don't mind taking them off. It's usually so clean back here anyways."

"Heh, I ran out and found these boots just for this job. It's been a long time since I've worked on an antimatter power source."

Anna laughed nervously. "Like how long."

"Oh don't worry, I know what I'm doing…its just that outside of an academic setting or a municipal setting…these things are…umm…"

"Illegal?"

"Yeah."

He seemed rather new to the whole business so she asked him…"How do you know Logan. You were the only person he had on the list."

"Oh…He first contacted me when I was studying physics at the University of Sao Paulo. I actually just finished my post doctoral research."

His mention of the University impressed her and awoke a little fracture of insecurity. She looked sidelong at him for an instant but he had lost all interest in her. His eyes were fixed in the scintillating purple orb of antimatter, 5 meters in diameter, trapped within the powerful magnetic field.

The room itself was a white sphere studded with soft edged white rectangles. Behind each rectangle rested a single, specially smelted magnet of neodymium and adamantium. But even these as, powerful as they were, needed to be changed out at regular intervals as they weakened, lest the antimatter escape. One could

occasionally gauge the weakening of the field by the distortion of the antimatter. An ovoid shape indicated the location of specifically weakened magnets, but if all of the magnets weakened at the same rate the sphere would simply expand until it came into contact with the sides of the "bowl", destroy the remaining containment, and annihilate everything it touched as it expanded outward. Hank once estimated that this much antimatter could void a chunk of a planet large enough to affect its orbit, perhaps even destroy it.

"Dear God." Said Joe as his eyes took in the enormity of it.

She grinned at him. "What's the matter?" she said stepping closer to the whirling ball of nothingness. She could see him grit his teeth as she edged near, but she was showing off to the fancy science man and sidled even closer.

"You do know what happens if you touch it. Don't you?"

Her face was inches away and she raised her hand to it still closer. "Yeah…It'll kill me."

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"She doesn't want to talk to me." Said Emma, leaning comfortably on the couch in Raven's office but with a strained face that betrayed her unhappiness.

Raven stood facing a floor length mirror and arranged her hair into a complicated bun. She wore a regal Sari of midnight blue and gold in preparation for some diplomatic junket. "Why not? Weren't you charming enough?"

"I shouldn't have recorded her conversation…it made her suspicious." _And then I threatened her._

Raven seemed unconcerned. "Well…I have to go back to Kitra for the next cabinet meeting and honestly I need to show my face more in the offices. You'll just have to figure it out."

"What do you want me to do about Anna?"

Raven half turned to look at her. "What about Anna?"

Emma shifted a little uncomfortably. "Don't you think her behavior with the whole adamantium affair was…odd."

Raven turned back and continued with her hair. "I think she met a young man and made some bad choices…but I suppose you are right. Just keep her on the planet until I get back. She should be busy with maintenance anyways."

Emma was silent, obviously unsatisfied by this answer. But then Raven had an inexplicable blind spot where her children were concerned. A few more moments passed and Raven's plaited up-do was complete. She turned and picked up her computer case and was about to walk right out, but Emma remained seated on the couch.

"What is it?" Raven asked diplomatically and stopped feet from the door.

Emma cleared her throat and contemplated revisiting the Anna issue but decided it wasn't the time. "What about Buckman. Kurt is recovering but we should choose another to deal with him."

"Let Kurt recover."

"But these things take time, and Oyama…"

"Finding people you can trust takes time. " Raven snapped back. "If you can find me someone you can trust as much as Kurt, who is as good a shot, and who you feel can kill Buckman without implicating himself or us then by all means forward his name to me. " And with that she was gone, walking briskly through the doorway, her sari trailing behind.

* * *

He paced.

All his life he felt at the mercy of others. To pay for his own passage through life he had to obey the orders of more powerful men and he wanted to be free of it…and now he was. But all of that time spent in obedience had not left him with a sure knowledge of what to do with himself in the absence of a handler.

It had been months and he was bored. Even when he thought to distract himself with women and alcohol neither one seemed quite as appealing. He had purchased the apartment under the name Phi Nguyen and he had brought back girls from the bar who were happy to drink his fancy spirits and enjoy his lavish home. They sat in his lap. They embraced and caressed him. They whispered sweet obscenities to him and it was all fruitless.

He slept with one girl the first week; a waitress from a nearby café with whom he had struck up a brief conversation. But when he called her a few days later she did not answer, nor the day after. To sooth his ego he brought home a bartender but in her classless pursuit sex she utterly banished any desire in him. He let her drink herself into a stupor and fall asleep on the couch.

He still thought about Rora and Kurt but it unsettled him that most of all he still thought about Anna. Not just her features or her figure, but her mannerisms, her laugh, her nervousness with people and with him, her competence when in came to her ship. He imagined that she liked him, looked up to him even. He imagined that she trusted him. How much was his imagining and how much was true? He lay awake at night and imagined she put her hands on his chest, around his waist, that she perched on her toes to reach his lips, and gazed into his eyes, blushing furiously, while sliding her hand down his stomach.

He sighed and rubbed his forehead, then picked up his phone. The next shuttle to Jura left in the morning.

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please review


	21. Chapter 21

Authors Note: This chapter might veer into mature content. Also...Big thanks to Ludi for Beta-ing for me.

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Rora's last text had reassured him at the time.

"Bailed out. Going home."

After that he had destroyed his phone as promised. But in the intervening weeks he wished he had asked more. He wondered about Anna…how she had fallen apart that last day. Had she been put back together?

He didn't know what he would find but he was going to Jura, or Phi Nguyen was going at any rate. He printed the visa and ticket off at the kiosk before walking, walking, walking to the distant terminal where all the little puddle jumpers and personal shuttles were docked. The ship was kind that gets loud and hot during exit and reentry and then fucking cold for the duration. He steeled himself for an uncomfortable trip.

Vibration from the ventilation system rattled the inside of the shuttle. People lined the interior of the hull on seats made of cargo netting, so tight their knees touched across the width of the fuselage. Passengers held duffle bags and babies on their laps. The heat of bodies grew uncomfortable and the sound of quiet conversations punctuated by children's cries filled his ears. He knew Jura was small, a backwater where wheat, oats, corn, rice, and cotton were collected into great silos before being shipped out to more populated planets, but having travelled there only on Anna's ship he had not realized the sorts of accommodation he should expect. When all of the passengers were aboard a pallet of live chickens was loaded behind them. He rolled his eyes and leaned his head back on the netting.

Madripoor had been, and still was, a good idea he decided; a refuge, a retreat…a place to be at ease and get his bearings…and it felt good to have an established identity and an apartment just in case, but It also felt good to be on the move again, even with such accommodations. The impulse to wander had perhaps been satisfied when he traveled with Anna and Kurt, or suppressed by the pleasantness of companionship and the fear of Victor, which still lingered at the back of his mind.

She had it right when she called him a deserter. He didn't like the word but it was undeniable, and he had to admit to himself that he felt some shame. He tried to reason himself out of it. The work had been too brutal, too mindless, too violent. They had done things that were…wrong. And still he felt deficient for leaving. Not good enough. Not strong enough to do what needed to be done, and hadn't he been told it was all "necessary", and he had believed it until he was there, wiring the explosives, pushing the buttons, collapsing the underground tunnels filed with 'Morlocks', people too poor to live anywhere else. All his talk of right and wrong seemed like cowardice, a cover for him to flee under. Is it cowardice to refuse to kill children? Is it cowardice to refuse to kill any more children?

Traveling to another planet to chase a girl suddenly seemed stupid, petty.

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The cabinet member filtered in one by one. Men of old or middling age and their attendants, the various experts Nur deemed valuable for running his government. There were 14 of them in all and each had their own entourage of analysts, advisors, and secretaries filling the room to its stifling brim. She was among the handful who advised Buckman on issues pertaining to commerce and certain sectors of Industrial logistics and she was slated for a promotion, on the wings of an old rivalry and on the generous patronage of Oyama Heavy Industries and Wagner's KAS. It would not surprise her in fact if Nur was folding in the fledgling, but growing, security firm as a coup-proofing measure.

At the 12th hour everyone stood and Nur entered. He towered above normal men and Raven sometimes wondered at how such a body made for war also housed a mind made for manipulation, subjugation, and tireless, methodical bureaucracy. She was admittedly jealous.

He menaced over his audience for a moment.

"Be seated." He orated at last, a high priest presiding over the rituals of formality. The room filled with the momentary shuffle of sitting bodies and was silent again. At length he too sat and began the meeting.

"As you may have noticed Minister Song is not present today. He passed away this week and will be greatly missed." A moment of silence was observed. "In his place many of you have recommended Ms. Darkholm." His words rolled out like thunder and she couldn't help but feel humbled. He graced her with his glance and indicated that she should stand. She obeyed with her hands clasped crisply before her. "Ms Darkholm has provided invaluable analysis to inform the decisions made by this office and those below it and she is herself expert in administration, finance, agricultural policy, and logistics. She has, since the untimely death of the governor, overseen the entire city and prefecture of Jura, responsible for producing 39% of the Union's food crops. Today Ms. Darkholm…" His eyes rested on her again and prepared to utter the official words "I elevate you to the position of Minister of Agriculture with all of the accompanying duties and privileges. As a servant of the Union we trust that you shall execute the duties of your office with diligence and loyalty." Raven cocked her head and half bowed in an improvised but ultimately graceful show of respect. Nur stretched out his arm and indicated the vacant seat at the long Maplewood table. Applause went up all around as she swept past in her midnight silks, past Buckman, past Shaw, past Essex, to the empty spot vacated by the recently deceased pharmaceutical mogul. Much like his granddaughter, she suspected he had been killed by Minister of Medicine…but she would never know. She glanced at Essex as she sat. He tilted his head to return her gaze and he still clapped, but his half smile and lazily lidded eyes spoke the truth of his estimation of her. She stared back at him dully. He would be a handsome man were he not a psychopath.

"Congratulations Raven. A long deserved promotion." He whispered to her in the dying clatter of applause. It rankled her that he spoke to her, her first name even, with his unnaturally sweet voice, that he condescended to praise her at all. She was mostly successful in suppressing her sneer as she nodded to him. He laughed a derisive, all knowing laugh, and leaned back in his seat.

The applause subsided and Nur continued, gazing into his leather portfolio.

"What is the consensus on the worlds in the 6th Quadrant. These have been much on my mind of late."

Raven looked down and enjoyed the play of gold boteh on the deep blue of her Sari. She would not speak on matters so soon after her appointment. She listened to the arguments of the cabinet without looking up, as she knew each voice by heart.

"I would not destroy such a resource for no reason whatsoever, but it cannot become common knowledge after having been so long kept secret."

"It is ridiculous to even consider sparing these worlds for their "resources". Maintaining the demographics of the Union does not require any more resources. Asteroids can be mined. Food is well managed as it is. Earth is under remediation"

"Laughable. The 'remediation' you speak of will take centuries even if it is fully funded…which it isn't may I remind you"

"What of science? What of medicine? What undiscovered compounds are locked up in the flora and fauna of these worlds."

"Only one is currently habitable. The costs of terraforming them are too great."

"The cost is only an excuse. People are overcrowded and Earth is a cesspool. They are poor. They would do anything for a place to expand to."

"Frankly I don't understand the rush to determine the fate of these planets. The space is restricted…no one knows anything of them."

"That is naïve."

"What sort of managed expansion could we allow?"

"None! We have economic equilibrium and we _must_ strive to protect it."

She lowered her head further to hide her smile. _One mans "economic equilibrium" is another man's status quo. _

Nur spoke again, demanding the thing that Raven was determined to avoid. "What is your opinion on this Darkholm."

She swallowed and straightened her shoulders. Of course expansion would destabilize the Union…it was the only chance she could see on the horizon to truly shake up the oligarchy…but she couldn't say that. That was not a part of the script meant for them.

"It will undoubtedly be difficult to maintain…"equilibrium"…as Advisor Buckman alluded to earlier. However, it is easier to destroy a planet than to re-create it should we decide it is valuable. If there is any reservation whatsoever we should delay liquidation."

Essex nodded as did a few others, but she could see Buckman staring her down across the table. Under normal circumstances she would have been nervous, but in a few more months she would have nothing to worry about from him either.

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When he was living on the Rogue he would sometimes climb the stairs to the cockpit and sit next to Anna if Rora was not already there. She would take off her red headphones and give him a little nod of acknowledgment.

"Isn't this thing on auto pilot? Why you gotta sit in the cockpit all day long? Come back and play some poker wit' us." Inviting her to activities had about a 50% success rate. Enough to keep him asking in any case.

She smiled. "It's a good habit to stay up here and watch in case there's anything weird in the flight path…like an asteroid or something."

"You're goin' like…a thousand miles a second. How you gonna avoid an asteroid. Tell me you've ever had to do that."

"I have."

"Bullshit."

"No joke…it was on some elliptical orbit and it was coming right at me. The sensors went off and the ship slowed down…but it just kept coming. It was easy enough to maneuver out of its path but it was so weird it took me a second to realize what was goin' on."

"You're a very responsible pilot den because I'd be dead." It was a peace keeping comment. He suspected that she just wanted an excuse to decline for whatever reason.

Even so…she laughed. She looked at him. She smiled. A genuine and beguiling smile utterly devoid of pretense.

_Don't smile at me like dat p'tit. You wouldn't smile if you knew 'bout me. _

Still, he couldn't help but smile back. It was in such moments that he wondered what she truly wanted from him, because she seemed more than friendly but less than flirtatious. She declined his invitation and yet gave all the indications of one who wanted his company. There was a cautious affection in all of her conversations with him, as though she wanted them to be more than just strangers, more than professionals, but how much more wasn't clear. Only at the hotel, after he forced the issue, did he know for certain that she wanted him, and that knowledge had taken root in his mind until months later he was still thinking about it.

He was still thinking about it when the shuttle began its descent, old school, swept wing, a bumpy jostle and bounce down the runway. It finally taxied to its parking spot the cargo ramp descended and the livestock slid off the runners onto a forklift. There were a few men dressed like administrators and he worried that his identity might have been compromised, but they were merely spouses.

He cursed himself for his excessive rumination as he carried his duffle bag across the tiny airfield, as he sat at the airport bar, as he ordered a drink. He cursed himself for having acted impetuously and for now being here, in a strange place with no place to stay for the night…again. This sort of obsession was rare for him. Only one other had inspired such foolishness… But no, this Anna was not like Belle…this Anna was in his mind. He wanted her merely because she was out of sight, mysterious to him, a creature part memory and part imagination. He merely needed to touch her to banish it. To see her again. To hear her again.

A few drinks at the bar and the bartender had given him the address of a hostel for migrant farm workers. Hotels were not really a thing in this part of Jura, but hostels were not really his style either.

He left, warmed by the liquor, and made his way to the hangars, the part of the airfield where small freighters and local craft were parked. The Pegasus, The Emerald Dawn, The London Blonde, The "Something in Korean", the Legacy…on and on they went for a mile he estimated. He sauntered lazily past the Queen Rania, then stopped, lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the slanting sunlight and peered down the long row of ships. He didn't want to walk all the way to the end of the flight line, but he had made it this far. Maybe this was a sign that he shouldn't have come. He sat down under the hull of the Queen Rania and took out a little pocket flask that he'd lifted recently.

_Maybe she's on a delivery. _He thought a little disappointed…but if she was maybe it was a kind of reprieve because what was he really going to say to her anyway?

He pressed his palms into his eyes and took out a cigarette, leaned back onto his duffle bag until he was comfortably reclined, and looked at the sky.

_Dis' nice._ He allowed himself to relax, to become distracted. The weather was pleasant and the sunset colors were beautiful projected onto the white mares' tails. He took another drag of his cigarette and didn't to think. The sky deepened and sunset passed into twilight as his cigarette burned down. He could hear rumbling from a long way off, too gentle to be a ship and he turned his head to look for the source. It was a fuel truck pulling up to one of the ships he had passed. A worker with a bright yellow vest hopped down and started uncoiling a heavy hose with a lamprey like nozzle. Remy hopped up and waved. "Hey." He shouted as he jogged over. The man raised his head and looked at him a little annoyed. "Hey, you know a ship called Rogue?" He called out from about fifty paces.

The man nodded. "Maintenance Hanger." He yelled and pointed across the tarmac. "Right there."

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* * *

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He found himself ascending the ramp quietly, carefully, he wasn't sure why. When he was almost at the joint of the ramp he peered into the bay and saw no one, heard no one. Then there was the faintest humming coming from the viewing lounge overhead.

"Ello?" He shouted into the echoing bay. The quick clatter of footsteps followed at Anna ran around the railings and peered down. Shock crossed her face and a little smile.

"Well I'll be damned Cajun. Rora said you wandered off into the night. Ah didn't think I'd see you again.

Her face was bright and confident. It put him at ease, half expecting to find the agitated mess he left behind.

"Heh…Dis Cajun full o' surprises."

"Come up here. What are you doing in town?"

It felt like a warm welcome. It made him happy.

They settled onto the couch in the viewing lounge and he pulled the flask out of his bag. He offered her a little and was surprised when she took it from him. She tilted her head back and swallowed twice, then smiled wryly as she handed it back to him. "I always expect it to be sweet and it never is."

"Chere if you want sweet liquor I can get you some." He took a long swig himself and put the cap back on. Already he felt the beginnings of a buzz. A pleasant heaviness in his muscles. They had fallen back into a friendly banter almost immediately, like he'd never left and it was almost a little weird given the circumstances they parted under. He didn't want to bring it up. It might be too heavy for what he was here for.

_And what are you here for homme?_

He didn't even know. He'd already refused her once…nothing had changed. He knew that. She knew that.

"So why're you in Jura?" She asked, catching him off balance by pulling the thoughts from his mind.

"I got an interview at de seed factory." He lied.

She laughed "The Ag complex? Are you a geneticist or somethin'?" She asked with gentle sarcasm. "What kinda work are you gonna do for them?"

"Security stuff." He said vaguely, and took another sip by way of distraction.

She proffered her hand and he passed her the flask again. She drank and handed it back but she was leaning towards him now. Her body language was warm, inviting. He took note.

_Was it always this way? She just keeps a lid on it until she gets a little tipsy?_

He didn't remember her drinking much in all the time they traveled together.

"Like walkin' around with a gun and shooting the bad guys that go there to steal seeds?" She laughed.

"Hey, dey got secret stuff there. Research stuff."

She rolled her eyes. "I'll never understand what's so secret about genetically engineered corn or whatever." She waved her hand…letting it go. He happily took the cue and took another drink.

"You know…I'm lucky I ran into you. Thought you'd be running all over the galaxy like you usually do." He found his body language shifting to match hers, pulling his knee onto the couch, leg flush to the fabric. Now they were a scant six inches from each other, leaning in like conspirators.

"Nope, I'm grounded…Ship needs maintenance."

"So you just hang around?"

"I _do _some of it, but yeah, mostly I've just been readin'"

"What do you read?"

She smiled at him. "Silly books."

"You should read some to me." The line was so corny he took his flask out again. Perhaps he could blame it on the alcohol.

"Somehow I think my literature could be a bit too silly for a man like you."

"Oh yeah…what kinda man am I petit?" He smirked, tried to make it sound sexy, but he sounded a little sad instead.

She shuffled nearer holding his gaze, almost touching him, reached over and took the flask out of his hand again, drank from it. A gesture he found profoundly encouraging. He had not given explicit thought to what he intended to do by coming here. He only knew that he wanted to come. And he realized that some ancient part of his brain was driving him, some base urge, some primal chemistry that he was tangentially aware of only by his desire to touch her, to coax smiles and blushes from her.

"I think you're a complicated man Mr. Le Beau." She said plainly. There were a thousand different ways she could have spun that line and the one she picked was unreadable…she was never obvious about what she wanted, even inches away from her as he was, she didn't radiate the sort of desire that most women radiated. Perhaps it was her inexperience…her inability to flirt, to signal. He didn't know. At moments he thought he caught glimpses of her lust intermingled with shyness, or professionalism, or something else that held her in check.

"Heh…I bet you say dat to all de boys you lure onto your ship." He quipped back.

She laughed. "I think that's technically true."

"Oh?" He said as he took the flask back from her, brushing her knuckles with his fingertips. Nothing. God dammit he wanted her to be obvious. He wanted her to ask for it. She sat so close to him he could feel the warmth of her breath, all the angles of her body were welcoming him, but if he reached out and kissed her it might be too much.

"Yeah." Was all she said.

He just looked at her for a beat and she looked back…the moment grew, became awkward, but when he thought she would look away, she said haltingly "Why didn't you want me…when we were in New Madripoor?"

The question gave him goose bumps. It was a question he had asked himself but he knew the reason and he figured it was a good reason. He licked his lips before he answered.

"You were drunk Chere." A response he thought would be instantly accepted and would absolve him of his rejection.

"Was that really it?" She asked pointedly, slowly. "Because it seems like you were interested until I told you…" She opened her palm and gave the slightest shrug.

He nodded slowly "Yeah...dat's true." And he lowered his gaze for a moment to think. _Why me? Wouldn't you want dat to be special or sometin_? He couldn't say that though and risk making her feel somehow immoral for being willing to sleep with a vagabond and a thief like himself on her first go round, not to mention the other words that could apply to him. He revised ever so slightly. "You'd wanna be sober y' first time, wouldn't you?" He looked back up at her. A thread of bitterness at himself for dissuading her and a thread of frisson at the direction this evening was going.

Her eyes were fixed on him, searching his face, and he was unable to break her gaze this time. His pulse buzzed in his ears. At length she offered him a slow nod.

"I can see that…" She paused. "but, sober I would never have…" she pressed her lips together thoughtfully and gathered herself. He was not surprised to hear her say it. That she never would have come upstairs with him in the first place…

"…I would never have had the courage…" She left off there, trusting that enough had been spoken. His pulse picked up another beat.

_Fuck it, just kiss her_

"Looks like you got de courage now p'tit." He teased as he slipped his arms around her waist, pulled her into an embrace, felt her delicate shudder.

"Dis what you want?" He whispered against her cheek and pulled back again briefly, enjoying the wide eyed wonderment and inexperienced fearfulness commingled. Her hands grasped his biceps and her breath came fast and shallow. But she didn't answer him and he wanted to hear it…

"How 'bout dis." As he pressed his lips to hers. She kissed him back timidly, stiffly and he answered with calculated aggression, gently forcing her mouth open. And then it was…perfect. Perfect suppleness, perfect tender submission. He could practically feel her melting, relaxing against him. Her grasp became an embrace and as he withdrew her teeth tugged gently at his lower lip making him moan involuntarily.

It was a yes.

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Please Review


	22. Note

I'll be posting the rest of this story as Romy Etude 51 (fanfiction doesn't allow decimals) because there are getting to be too many chapters and the rest of the story will probably be a solid M rating. I reposted this last chapter of Romy Etude 5 as the first chapter of Romy Etude 51, just for the slightest bit of context.

Thank you all for your reviews. I'll see you on the flip side.


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