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Rogue was used to the ghosts in her head. Maybe that’s why she took the ones haunting the mansion so easily.
When she first came there, running away from her mothers’ home and begging help from people who had every reason to hate her, she thought it was all in her head. Why not? Rogue’s head was a crowded place, and and if she couldn’t remember touching some of these people—well, she was already losing track.
But the others saw them too, these people fading in and out of sight, voices drowned out by some unheard noise. Some of the team flinched guiltily away from an angry, bitter man in bright blue and red and fringe; in the halls, they dodged the shades of the dead just as they would their living friends.
Not always. The Professor didn’t seem to notice the sad-faced woman who sometimes watched him from across the room. Rachel’s eyes widened, as if she saw John Proudstar (Rogue had finally learned his name from an old team photograph) standing in front of her; then she threw herself forward, through him, as if in defiance. (Maybe Rogue was just the only one who didn’t try to talk herself out of seeing them.)
But when a friend was missing, someone would always say, “Well, at least we know she’s not…” and trail off, no one quite willing to say the obvious.
And after the Massacre, the place was full of new ghosts, and no one could deny the truth, anymore.
Then they ran, ran to the other end of the world, and to Rogue the desert base was surprisingly empty. Open.
Surely people had died here too. But if they had, they hadn’t stuck around.
The others liked it. But Rogue found herself lonely, there, the only one still haunted. (Or was Carol haunting them all, when she took over and went shopping, came back with hair and clothes Rogue would never have picked, and a day spent with the friends both of them wanted to claim?)
When they came home, to ashes and ruin, Rogue wondered if the destruction had exorcised the place. But of course it hadn’t, and that was a relief.
Even if it hurt to see Madelyne in one of those yellow dresses she’d loved so much, laughing, looking like a completely different person than the one Rogue had last seen in that twisted, demonic version of New York.
(There was worry in her eyes that Rogue didn’t remember from those early days. But maybe that was just hindsight. All the same, she wished that she could reach out to that dead woman—not that she’d ever dared touch a ghost. The others went through them, but she was convinced, somehow, that she wouldn’t. And she didn’t want to put that to the test. Call it superstition, but it didn’t seem wise.)
The more times they rebuilt the place, the stranger things got. The ghosts walked through halls that almost lined up with what was here now, like the mansion itself was haunted by its destroyed incarnations. Sometimes they walked through walls; sometimes they acted like open air was a dead end.
It reminded Rogue a little of Carol taking her over, those times, a body that didn’t quite line up…
No. That was done.
These ghosts were easy to deal with. Rogue hadn’t put them here, after all. Some of them she’d never even met. Even Madelyne—Rogue missed her, grieved for her, but she hadn’t had much to do with that tragedy.
The ghosts she’d let into her mind and body, trapped there—those were harder.
At least Carol Danvers had survived her time with the team. That, Rogue was grateful for. At least that woman wasn’t haunting her twice over.