Author: TheCostumer

E-mail: Tara@costumes.org

Fandom: X-Men the Movie

Disclaimers: 

All characters except Ed and Rolf belong to the Marvel Entertainment 
Group  and Twentieth Century Fox, and are used without permission, for 
entertainment purposes only.  Images on this page are property of 
20th Century Fox. Ed Gruberman and Ti Kwan Leep (Boot to the 
Head) are property of The Frantics.  Quoted song lyrics to "The 
Masochism Tango" and "Magda, Aletys And Belle" are by Tom 
Lehrer and Dannell Lites  respectively. No infringement upon the 
rights of Marvel, Fox, The Frantics, Tom  Lehrer and Dannell 
Lites should be inferred; nor is any intended. 

Links are to pieces of fic by writers that helped inspire this story.

Archiving: OK

Characters: Rogue, Magneto, Bobby, and my own Rolf Lipchitz

Sequel to The Rat Trap, Part of the Whatever Remains Series

Rating: PG. Humor.  Sex fantasies & lawyers.  One swear word, one
vulgarity. No violence, no sex.  Underage drinking.

Summary: Rogue gets arrested and Magneto gets a good lawyer. Mainly plot exposition.  Rogue/Magneto shipper humor.

Last Updated: 12/06/06

Free to Be, You and Me.

Rogue thought that Professor Xavier's behavior was quite odd of late. After his seemingly horrified reaction to her suggestion that she visit Magneto, a week later he was telling her it would be a wonderful idea. What were even less comfortable were all the questions he had been asking her recently. It was obvious that he now knew about her unpleasant adventures on the road north, and seemed extremely curious to hear her version of events. She supposed that the only way he might have found out about those events was if either Logan or Magneto had got her memories transferred to them the same way she had absorbed theirs, and told him.

If that were the case, she reasoned, she was in deep do-do.

Assuming that they both absorbed her memories the way she had absorbed theirs at the point of transfer, there was an oh-so-cheerful prospect that now two men out there knew every embarrassing detail of her past life, her fantasies, and her dreams. Logan for one had featured rather strongly in her dreams and fantasies prior to transfer, and the idea that he might know every bit of those fantasies was enough to make Rogue wish she could transfer to a high school in Siberia. Having Magneto perhaps know all this too was almost as humiliating, although she reflected, with what dirt she now knew of him, the balance sheet was a bit more in her favor.

Although the hideously embarrassing thing about that was that little by little she was getting them now, most probably because since she now realized that if he could touch her, he probably could manage to do other more interesting things as well.

Lately, she had actually managed to dampen down the erotic nightmares and longings she'd had since the onset of her "gift" by concentrating on Logan's absence and the idea of learning to control her power before he got back. However, since Magneto's help figured large in her plans, she was finding herself more and more inclined to catch herself thinking about that tantalizing two inches of male wrist she had briefly captured. Marie felt that having an erotic fascination with a 70+ year old’s left wrist was probably the height of sexual perversion, and she tried to crush these thoughts whenever they occurred.

The other disturbing thing about having both men transfer with her was that she supposed one or both of them might get one of her nightmares and (God forbid!) recognize it as hers. She had experienced several of Logan's nightmares, and her original offer to visit Magneto had occurred late one night after she had experienced one of his. Her daytime fantasies were, she felt, relatively controlled and tame compared to her nightmares, and the idea that either, (or worse, both of them), might be having front row tickets to hers gave her a deep and abiding wish to crawl under a rock.

Another annoyance was the knowledge that one of them had told the Professor what he had learned. If it were Magneto, it was bad news because it meant he had as detailed knowledge of her memory as she had of his, if it were Logan, she would feel betrayed if he had told her secrets. She could not make up her mind which of the two was likely, nor which of the two made her more annoyed. On the one hand, a person who had been a deadly enemy might now have a more thorough knowledge of her secrets and weaknesses than her Mother had when she was 4. On the other, her one true friend and defender might have ratted on her and then skipped town. 

Either option made her feel as warm and fuzzy inside as frozen thumbtacks.

Then to top matters off Professor Xavier had the brilliant notion of contacting her parents to let them know she was now in Westchester. Rogue wondered how a man could have multiple Ph.D.’s and still do anything that mind-numbingly naïve. Her luck being what it was, by this time the authorities in Canada and the US had finally connected her "crimes" with a newspaper story that was run in her local paper about the incident with David Cody. FBI men came to the Xavier school immediately to arrest her, backed by the comic overkill of a S.W.A.T team. Even with some very fast talking by the Professor he could not persuade the Feds to let her out on bail until she had been in custody 24 hours.

Only one thing had been beneficial through that whole terrifying experience: a presence she was beginning to call her "Magneto voice". By this time she had managed to smack down the warring echoes of David, Logan and Magneto that rattled through her consciousness, so that they conveniently were recognizably distinct and under control in her head. She could now call any of them in, rather like a consultation, when she needed them. So if she needed assertiveness she would tune into her inner Logan, and within seconds everyone would back off like they had an urgent appointment in Australia. If she needed a little extra charm or flirtatiousness, she called in her old boyfriend, and out popped the most perfect knowledge of what would stroke a teenage boys ego. If she found herself cornered in an unpleasant situation requiring cunning to escape, she just made an appointment with Magneto, and his "voice" told her the shortest way out of the maze.

The whole arrest and 24 hours in jail was just such a situation. She felt horrified by her arrest, and terrified that the jailers or other prisoners might touch her despite her protestations. However, her "Magneto voice" told her to make a point of feebly begging them not to touch her, but not preventing them if there were video cameras or other witnesses in the room. Within the first few hours of her arrest a half dozen police and prisoners had to be put under medical attention, and the police station and jail video logs had enough footage to convince her arraignment judge that she was both pitifully non aggressive, yet helplessly posed a serious danger to the more stupid law enforcement officials. He set her bail at a fairly low rate (considering she was wanted for murder and was a mutant to boot), simply to get rid of the problem temporarily.

Rogue was so delighted; she didn’t even fight her fantasies that night. In fact, she embraced them, along with her pillow, who, at least for that evening, was not Logan.

Magneto felt that although the negative effects of transferring with Rogue were happily waning, the effects of his conversation with Charles about Rogue kept increasing in annoyance. Charles had enlisted the aid of Dr. Jacobs in trying to convince Erik to assist Rogue with controlling her "gift". The two meetings a week with the good doctor, therefore, were turning into as much a concentrated guilt-fest as his weekly visit from Charles. It was wearing him almost as thin as the nightmares had, although in different ways.

"Well at least I'm sleeping more now." He thought.

He was in fact, sleeping too much. The whole debacle at the Statue of Liberty had made him feel tired. It was not so much the draining of his power into Rogue that tired him, nor being shot, nor even his subsequent capture, (with the aid of plastic restraints and drugs administered while he was still unconscious). It was not even the month long series of nightmares he had endured from absorbing Rogue's memories. 

It was the whole depressing notion that Charles had been right on this occasion.

The mutation machine did not work, and if Charles' children had not prevented him, he might easily have not only killed a couple of hundred world leaders, but also possibly even wiped out half of Manhattan. The leaders with their anti-mutant agendas he would willingly fry if the need arose, but what few non-mutant friends he had mainly lived in NYC. 

New York was about the most mutant-friendly city in America, except perhaps for California, where in places it was even fashionable to be a mutant.

Erik wondered at times if he and Charles were both of them entirely wrong in their methods of dealing with discrimination. What if the real answer was just to convince young people that mutants were, as Sylvia would put it "cool." He idly tried to think of arguments for this theory, in the hope that he might use them to distract Charles from what was beginning to be the sole topic of discussion between the two of them.

Well, he had two more days to work on it. Charles came on Saturdays, and his sessions with the doctor were on Monday and Wednesday. Today was Thursday, so he could sleep, or read, or plan his escape undisturbed for two blissful days. Today escape seemed most appealing, since he had a desperate longing just to have an ordinary tuna and toast sandwich for lunch and then sit on the rock that had been home of late, like a lizard in the sun, breathing in sea air.

The government contractors who had slapped together the prison in under a week had done a terrible job, as might be expected. There were all sorts of bits of ferrous metal about that had got into the construction despite the designer's plans, from a set of car keys dropped by a worker into the cement of the lower floor, to bits in the cameras and monitoring equipment in the view room, to the little steel supports inside the arch of nearly everyone's shoes, even Charles'.

And Charles must know, he mused, from past experiences, that even as little iron as was contained in the blood of a human was enough for him to use it to kill the owner of that blood.

So there was really no question that he could escape, it was just a question of how and when. He just had to think of the simplest most straightforward way he could break the prison systems down and walk out. He tried on idea after idea, yet each seemed to him to be too overblown and messy, or too prone to have flaws. He didn’t want to try an escape that had the slightest possibility for failure, nor did he want to do something excessive like destroying the entire prison building just to get that tuna sandwich a day earlier. What he needed was a way out of here that combined maximum effectiveness with minimum fuss. He felt sure he would think of one sooner or later.

He hoped it was sooner, however, since he felt each day that his resolve to refuse to meet Rogue was wavering. It was not so much the constant pressure from Charles and Dr. Jacobs that was making him bend, as his own memory of her hand on his own.

That and the revealing look inside her head.

Erik had known quite a number of women in his day, and been on rather intimate terms with variety of them. For all that, he admitted, he rarely understood how they thought. Almost invariably his strong personality and amorous abilities inspired hero-worshipping lust in the beginning of a relationship. His total lack of understanding of the female mind, however, invariably got him dumped before he was even aware that the relationship was in trouble.

Little Marie’s thoughts and urges, on the other hand, were an open, and rather fascinating, book.

For a child (for that is how he thought of her) of sixteen, she had an almost Byzantine complexity. She had gone to private Christian schools her whole life, attended church weekly, and prayed nightly, made hand-embroidered WWJD bracelets for her friends, yet even before she left home, admitted to herself she really did not believe in God. All her external manifestations of faith were not done cynically either. She reasoned that if there was no God to manage things for her, she had to be even more strong and circumspect.

Another thing was her language. She never swore at anyone, nor let any words pass her lips that were not edited for form and content. Far from a gossipy teen girl, she usually bottled up everything behind a shy appearance of modesty. Internally, however, she had some rather acerbic remarks to say about everything she saw. She would also mentally swear a blue streak when she was frustrated, frightened or annoyed.

And then there was her relationship with Logan.  On the one hand she had a rather sweet childish adoration of Wolverine, she felt sorry for his sorrows, and sincerely appreciated his help and understanding.  She was as much in love with Logan as an adolescent girl could be.

But when push came to shove, and she was bleeding to death from his accidental wounds to her chest, she didn't hesitate risking his death to save her own life.

Erik admitted that he wanted to be there when she began to show her real self to the world. Rogue self-contained was a fascinating bundle of contradictions, but Rogue unleashed would likely be as strong and dangerous a personality as himself.

His musings were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of the retractable bridge being extended towards his cell. He looked up to see who was coming, unscheduled, to visit him.

The incidents where Rogue had allowed stupid police and prisoners to touch her, and so get minor injuries in the county jail, not only helped her in gaining a temporary release, but also within a few weeks, helped her case. Xavier hired a lawyer for the girl, and the lawyer subpoenaed the police station videotapes as evidence to show a jury. She also got records on the men who claimed to have been attacked by Rogue, as well as the man she killed. Finding that five of the six had previous convictions ranging from credit card fraud to child molestation severely weakened the prosecution case. She successfully argued with the Feds that child molesters and shoplifters would not make credible witnesses against a young girl who looked like a fashion model, had been secretary of the Bible Club at Meridian Christian Academy while maintaining a 3.7 GPA,  and who had no prior arrests. The clincher, however, had been when a legal researcher in her office managed to find that the dead man’s fingerprints matched those of an interestingly creative sex killer wanted in Oklahoma and Arkansas for multiple mutilation-homicides. 

After that, the prosecution just decided that maybe a jury would award her with a scholarship, tiara and bunch of roses instead of jail time. So the charges were dropped.

Rogue, not knowing all the complex machinations that had been put in motion on her behalf, tended to assume that her deliverance was largely, if not entirely, due to her having listened to her "Magneto voice." She became more inclined to want to listen to it, and explore its memories than she had been before. She began a fairly concentrated effort to find out from it everything she could about Magneto’s past, before bits of it faded from her consciousness, as all the "voices" were wont to do over time.

Not surprisingly, she decided to begin with a more through review of his love life.

"Rolf?" Erik said in amazement, as his tailor was ushered into his cell.

"Hiya, Erik." Lipchitz said cheerily. "Weird setup!  It looks like a Habitrail.  Why'd they got you in a plastic box?"

"They imagine that it should prevent me from escaping." Magneto explained, wondering why Rolf, who had never visited him at home, should visit him here.

"Oh! Yeah." Rolf continued. "But, did they have this thing built already?"

"No, they kept me drugged for a week, and managed to build it in that time."

"Wow!" Rolf was impressed. "My contractor has been doing our miniscule roof for two months, and he's not finished.  I should fire him and hire those folks."

"Probably." Erik conceded, not wishing to draw attention to the errors in his prison's design.

"So I know this guy who I think can get you out of here." Lipchitz said.

"What's his superpower?" Magneto asked, intrigued.

"He's a lawyer."

Marie decided that no matter what her "Logan" and "Magneto" voices said, beer, whether Moosehead or Pilsner, tasted like piss.

Still, when one of the boys found a hidden stash of the stuff in Logan's old room, she went with all the others to the secret "kegger" party in the pool house, and got as drunk as the rest.  She had never tasted alcohol before, and was rippingly drunk within two beers.  

Everyone else was drunk as well, or pretended to be, since at their age, they thought that was the sophisticated thing to do.  

Kitty and Jubilee told everyone the old story about the time they thought they caught Mr. Summers and Dr. Grey buying bondage gear with the Professor's credit card. Rogue thought that was quite titillating, but she faked sophisticated boredom at this news quite admirably.

Bobby then launched into a song by his favorite composer, Tom Lehrer, called The Masochism Tango, while Kitty and Jubilee acted it out with frivolous verve.

How I ache for the touch of your lips, dear, 
But much more for the feel of your whips, dear, 
You can raise welts, 
Like nobody else, 
As we dance to the Masochism Tango! 

After equally "sophisticated" bouts of giggling through Truth or Dare they played Spin the Bottle. Bobby tried to French kiss Rogue with the aid of Saran wrap he'd brought to the pool house expressly for that purpose, and nearly managed to asphyxiate both of them trying. 

More beer was consumed, and Rogue, turned on by Bobby's daring on her behalf, relaxed rather more than was advisable.  

So, when Remy, in another bout of Truth or Dare asked her what kinds of memories she had managed to absorb from Magneto, she told them.

In detail. 

Bobby turned green, whether from jealousy or alcohol poisoning it was unclear.  And promptly was sick all over poor Kitty's shoes.

"I heard you were arrested, and thought I'd find out how you were.  I heard your lawyer on the TV and decided you needed help. That yo-yo you got sounds like he's going to plead insanity or some such crap." Rolf opined. "Where did you find such a schmuk?" 

"He's the one the government assigned to me." Erik replied, his lawyer really had not interested him.  He did not believe for a moment that the authorities would let him go with or without a trial.

"YOU'VE GOT A PUBLIC DEFENDER!?" Rolf roared. "WHY?" He continued in more normal tone: "I mean it's not like you're hard up for cash, are you?"

"No." 

"Well then," Rolf continued, "we should get you a decent lawyer."

"Why?" Erik demanded. "Do you think that they built me this special prison so that they could let me go?" The cynicism in his voice was palpable. "Do you really think because we're in America, I will magically get a fair trial?"

"Oh, right!" Lipchitz countered. "Like I'm that naive?  Get a life..." Rolf matched him sarcasm for sarcasm. "I think that because we're in America you can get off from what ever it was you did do if you buy a good enough lawyer." 

That gave Erik pause.  It happened often enough.  He had amazingly got off of all charges when he blew up that Russian atomic submarine, years ago.  It was worth a shot.

And it would be such fun to watch.

"So," he said with a smile, "who is this Superlawyer?"

Rogue didn't remember exactly what she had said at the pool house the night before last, but from the way everyone whispered behind her back, she was quite sure she had said too much.  She had spent the intervening day, like most of the others, nursing an awful hangover, and enduring the obvious disapproval of the faculty, who clearly suspected that the students had done exactly what they had  done.

Today, however, was infinitely worse.  From whispers, the furtive comments of the students had progressed to giggles, and she burned in shame wondering what she had said to prompt such an embarrassing situation.  

Did she admit she had hit on Dr. Gray after Logan had healed her the second time?  Did she admit she had called Mr. Summer a "Dick" around the same time?  Did she tell them about the man she killed?

No, she decided, that wouldn't induce giggles.  What would induce giggles?

That her High School boyfriend had turned out to be gay?  No.  Too ordinary.  It probably happened all the time.  

Perhaps she admitted she had a crush on Logan.

No, definitely not that.  Everyone seemed to know that already.

She prayed that she had not described one of her erotic nightmares that had so plagued her nights from the time she'd killed that man till fairly recently.  

As she approached the student lounge, however, the real answer wafted down the hall with guitar accompaniment, freezing her in her tracks:

His lovers were many and varied
From the day he began his beguine
There were three favored ones where he tarried
And God knows how many between!

Oh, Magnus, tell us!
Professor Xavier is jealous
Which of you're magnetic spells
Got you Magda, Aletys and Belle?

Bobby's voice went on for several verses, detailing Magneto's past love life, while Marie felt herself slowly turn red with abject shame.  When one of the verses implied that she too had a crush on him she fled.