Common Place
They all speak of Magneto's influence with hushed voices, because his very existence drives them to distraction, and they cannot imagine having him live inside their minds. They watch Logan storm around the mansion, fire burning inside of him, grafted in with adamantium and they can't seem to figure out how she's able to keep him underneath the layers of herself.
It is sadly typical, she thinks, that they only remember the mutants she has touched, because David, of course, is the loudest voice in her head.
Perhaps it wouldn't make sense to anyone else. Magneto and Wolverine are both bizarrely larger than life, compelling and metal and terrifying. Erik and Logan are no less so, though they are more human and less like the personalities they have constructed for the world's viewing pleasure. They are still indomitable, single minded, and almost impossible to overcome.
And who is David? A teenager, a boy with a sweet smile and no thoughts bigger than his hope of making varsity his sophomore year. A boy who still screams inside her trembling mind, filled with terror and making her hands shake inside their gloves.
The two men, after all, were familiar with the sensation of imprisonment. The mind of one lost girl could never compare to the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, and so Erik adapted himself quite easily. He had seen and felt stranger things than her mind could even conceive, so he settled in and amused himself by occasionally making the paperclips on her desk drift without direction. She despised his collected resignation, his assurance that he had lived through much and would live through this, and she tried to avoid metal.
Logan, on the other hand, though he hated being trapped, didn't seem to regard her mind as anything like incarceration. After nightmares of cruel experimentation lasting as long as he could remember, the frail psyche of a girl he cared about was hardly an unpleasant place to be. He wanted to know her, wanted to help her, and if he could do that better from the inside, then he wasn't going to complain. He had touched her without hesitation, after all. If her soft mouth occasionally growled under his influence, he thought there was even less to regret.
David had no bad memories. He had been raised by loving parents in a small southern town, and he did not understand the bizarre. The word 'mutant' had never meant much to him, because he hated watching the news, and normal was almost an art form in his limited sphere. Marie had been a pretty girl with a pretty smile, because even 'lovely' might have been too literary for his vocabulary to willingly embrace. So when a coy kiss sucked his mind into her own, the confused horror was ten times worse than the pain.
**
David, in fact, influences her personality more than anyone can guess. The most prevalent example of his continuing dominance is, perhaps, his invasive accent. His parents were not from Mississippi, and although Marie has been speaking with a southern drawl her entire life, David's memories of his mother's speech patterns are enough to flatten out Marie's honeyed voice. She stumbles over words as his memories of speech twist her mouth in a way his kiss never had a chance to do. When she suddenly speaks German, she knows that Magneto has cropped up, and she can label him. She is certain. It is far more disturbing to her that David is so subtle when he alters her.
After all, she and David had a lot in common. They were both fairly shy, dreamy and sweet. But his ambitions were not exactly the same, and she knows there must have been a time when she didn't dream of growing to be six feet tall. She broke her 'favorite' cd one day, because she realized that the music she had loved for the past two months was his. It was his rhythm and the lyrics matched his life, and she hadn't even noticed.
She has come to appreciate certainty. When Logan jumps in her mind, she can recognize him. When Erik's cold smile contorts her face into something horrible, she is in the background, grappling for control, and never ever imagining that she would do such a thing.
David, though, David sneaks inside of her. He's lost and frightened still and she never feared him enough to lock him somewhere down deep, and now he has tendrils running through her entire mind. She eats his favorite brand of potato chips without thinking about it, but when Kitty imagines they share some kinship because they have the same taste in fatty foods, Rogue knows. She knows that he's just a boy and not really a threat, and yet the very helplessness of his nature is what makes him most capable of eating away at the fabric of her own personality.
She hates sports, but the tragedy of being too weak to play in the baseball season because his girlfriend was a mutant still puts a bitter taste in her mouth. She, no, he would have made varsity. He would have been the best shortstop the school had ever seen.
Their memories bleed into one another, and she wishes she could remember what pure solitude felt like.