Between a Bear and a Hard Place(15)

On the horizon, as the big bear began to descend the side of the overpass, back to where he’d stashed his bike, thunder boomed in the distance. He stood for a moment, watching an arc of lightning crack the sky, and then another peal of thunder blasted the desert landscape.

It was like a dream, Rogue thought; an endless, meaningless, haunting dream. One of those nightmares where you go to sleep and live an entire life in your mind in the eight hours of sleep you get, in eight-second bursts. And by the end of the dream, you actually feel old, tired, ready to die from extreme antiquity.

Rain pattered the cracked ground a hundred feet to the north of where Rogue stood, but somehow his position stayed dry. These pop-up storms that did nothing but smell nice and cool the air momentarily happen all the time, but for some reason, this one stuck in the bear’s mind. He watched the clouds boil up on the horizon, watched the lightning arc again – blue and yellow and green to his over-sensitive eyes.

“What happens when this is all over?” he asked the night. “What does it mean that someone escaped? Does it mean anything, or am I just seeing things where they don’t exist?”

He pulled the soft leather of his jacket closer around his neck, shielding himself from the wind that began to bluster across the hard-cracked desert. He laughed at himself, then laughed at himself laughing at himself.

The phone in his back pocket rang again.

Rogue slipped it from his jeans and opened it, pressing the handset against his face without speaking.

“You there?” it was Jill, and she wasn’t happy. “Rogue? Answer me. I need you back here.”

“Sorry,” he finally croaked, still reflecting on everything that had come up in the last eight minutes of his life. Elsa, the clan, the escape. But something stopped him from saying anything. Something made him just act like he’d had yet another pointless, boring meeting with the old man that saved all their skins. “Draven was just... just checking in. What’s wrong?”

“King,” she said plainly. “Slate and Arrow went out drinking with their friends. King is convinced they’re going to end up on someone’s mantle. Just hurry up, okay?”

He nodded, even though he knew no one could see him. “I’m on the way. I’ll try to cut some time on the way back. It’s raining a little. It’ll be easy to blast across big chunks of desert.”

She usually told him to be careful when he suggested something like that. Although recently, she’d started relaxing more, figuring that he wasn’t actually going to hurt himself, since even if he did, he’d heal shortly afterward.

“Well okay,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to bed. If you show up before I wake up tomorrow, I’m sure he’ll still be pacing. Just... do me a favor, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Anything for you.”

“I’m not feeling so great. Something’s giving me indigestion. Anyway, calm him down, get him to get some sleep. And Rogue?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t slam the door.”

With a laugh, he clicked the phone shut, swinging his leg back over the saddle of his motorcycle and kicking the engine to life.





-5-


“Where’s the milk?”


-Jill


“Where the hell have you been?”

Jill pushed the slightly-sweaty tendrils of hair out of her head, and swallowed hard. Rogue looked at her for a moment, thinking that she really didn’t look all that great. Not in a non-attractive way, rather in a super-tired and not-sleeping-well kind of way. On top of all that, King had been up all night worrying about his cubs, which didn’t help a damn thing in the world.

She threw the words at Rogue like a brick to the forehead, thrown from a car which was going fairly slowly, but fast enough to get away before he could chase it. He put his hands up defensively, instinctually, and shook his head. “Hold on just a second, Jill, you know where I went, I went—”

She blew out a puff of air that sent one of her curls of hair flying backward before it flopped back down in front of her face. “Yes,” she said. “I know where you were. How is he, by the way?”

“Draven? Fine. Mysterious, I guess.”

“So he’s still Draven. Good, glad we got that out of the way. Now, will you do something about him?”

Jill flicked her hand backward, thumb outstretched in the direction of an excessively large, and apparently excessively mopey, werebear.

“What’s wrong with King?” Rogue asked, looking perplexed. “Is he really this upset over Arrow and Slate? But they’re—”

“Yeah,” Jill said, firmly entrenching her hands into the tops of her hipbones. “Yeah, they’re both twenty-one, and went out with their friends. God knows what he’s so worked up about, but he’s been pacing back and forth since they left. If he had any pearls, he’d be clutching them.”