Fic: Drunk With Power
E-mail: violet147@yahoo.com
Rating: PG-13, R in some parts for language.
Warnings: No smut. Yeah. I know.
Feedback: Always appreciated.
Pairings: John/Marie, Bobby/Marie
Summary: Marie reflects on having to share her own head.


She vaguely remembers a time when she felt strong, but it feels like a ghost of a memory now. That’s what her old life feels like, a ghost, her old name a shadow, her old personality a dream. It’s so hard for her to remember the way things used to be, before all this, before she became a god. She’s not sure why she used the term god, she knows it’s not one that Marie D’Ancanto would have used. It is one that Erik Lensherr has used. No wonder she can’t remember her old life, she thinks to herself. She has everyone else’s in her head to remember.

It is moments like this that only reaffirm for her how powerless she truly is. She hears constantly on the news about what mutants can do, how they’re genetically superior, how much POWER they have. Power? What power? She’s so powerful she can’t even use her own voice to speak, she ends up using everyone else’s. She can’t count the number of times she’s said something that she KNOWS she’d never say, something that Logan would say, or Magneto would say, and now Bobby. That is not power; that is entrapment.

Ever since her powers kicked this is how it’s been. She has felt nothing but trapped. She heard the Professor talking with Jean and Scott about how she’s one of the most powerful mutants he’s ever had as a student, but they’ve got it wrong. Her POWER is strength, but the ferocity of it traps her, traps her in a box, and every time she puts her bare hand on someone else’s skin, it only reminds her that she’s stuck in this box, and her fingers are too weak to scratch through it. Her power is strength, but she herself is not powerful. She is its slave; she is weak.

When they first kicked in, she walked around, wishing for that strength to return, hoping that one day she’d wake up and she’d be able to be Marie again. Eventually the hope died, and she just let the frustration and the pain sink in. They have no fucking idea what it’s like, especially Bobby, sweet little Bobby, who thinks she won’t kiss him because she’s afraid to hurt him. He doesn’t know that when she says, “I don’t want to hurt you” she’s actually saying, “I don’t want you in my head.” But of course, she can’t say that. She has to tell everyone that it’s all about them, she doesn’t want to hurt them, that way they’ll leave her alone and stop trying to get her to TALK about it.

Talking about it is only more infuriating. What can talking do about it? Oh, she should accept herself, she should love herself. What the fuck does Storm know about it? She doesn’t have to wear gloves just to take a shower. She wishes they would leave her alone about it. She wishes that it wasn’t all talk and no show. When she got here, she was told they could help her learn to possibly control it one day. What happened to that? All she does is take tests about the French Revolution. She’s not any step closer to controlling it than the day it kicked in. It only fuels her rage more.

What was the worst was when the school was invaded. She knows there was nothing she could do, but that doesn’t change the fact that she had wanted to. But no, all she could do was run and scream like a little girl, and watch as Logan sank his claws into anything that moved. She remembers looking at him and feeling nothing but envy, envious of the power he had in his hands, envious that HE decided when the claws should emerge, not the claws themselves.

She remembers seeing Bobby put his hand on the wall and creating an ice wall and feeling nothing but jealousy. He can touch anything and it won’t turn to ice, it only turns when HE decides to turn it. They have helped him learn to control his powers. It reminds her how they have done nothing for her. It only makes her want to scream and lash out even more.

But she tried to control this urge. After all, she was nothing short of a supportive girlfriend when Bobby came out to his parents. She looked at them all with sympathetic eyes, did not snort when his dumbass mom asked him if he could try to not be a mutant. Nor did she fight back when the police came to the house, and when they shot Logan she lay on the ground like she was supposed to. Because there was nothing she could do, she couldn’t walk over to them and touch them and stop them. She remembers laying there feeling so weak and pathetic, trapped by a power that lends itself only to the most inopportune times, unable to be accessed for the times she could really use it.

And then John took a stand and defended them all. She knows what everyone thinks, that John was showing off, that he lost control, but she knew he was defending them, his family. She looked up at him and there was no loss of control there. He knew exactly what he was doing, knew exactly just how far to extend his hand, knew just how hard he should throw his arm out. She remembers the familiar envy rising up inside her, because once again, it was HE who was controlling the flames, not the other way around. The three of them, the boys, all controlling themselves and their power, were so strong and powerful, while she merely lay on the porch, meek and quiet and trapped.

So she did something she probably shouldn’t have done. She took her glove off and grabbed Johnny’s ankle. And immediately he was there, in her head, screaming for her to stop, but then there was Bobby, yelling some shit about how John was out of control and that he needed to stop. Marie was nowhere to be found as John argued he was just trying to protect them, look, he wasn’t killing the police, and Bobby screaming about how John’s got to stop, he’s GOING to kill them. It was Bobby who made her hold her hand out and retract the flames. She was on vacation as usual as the two of them took over her head, without her permission.

And then everything else happened so fast, with Alkali Lake, John leaving them, Jean sacrificing herself, the meeting with the President, becoming an X-Man, that she didn’t have the time to stop and think about why she did not hesitate to grab John and bring him inside her head. Now that she’s thought about it, she doesn’t know why there was no hesitation, like there is with everyone else still. Perhaps because she has never seen an ounce of hesitation in him, even when a gun is staring him straight down.

Perhaps it is for a reason she’ll never be able to figure out. That’s not what’s important anyway, the why. What’s important is that he’s in her head now, and while she normally hates it when she finds herself exhibiting Logan’s or Erik’s or Bobby’s behaviors, it does not bother her to have Johnny in her head, poking around, smirking and being snarky and constantly flicking his lighter on and off. In fact, it’s far from that, and it’s almost like a dirty little secret.

She LOVES having him in her head.

She loves it when she’s walking down the hallway, and she’s walking in his rhythm, instead of her own. She laughs every time she hears him mumbling under his breath about how unsanitary the forks are, and is she really going to put that in her mouth, because. It would just be nasty if she did.

She loves how different he is from all the others in her head. While Logan and Bobby and Erik use her voice to speak out of, saying things she’d never say, Johnny actually works with her a bit. When she opens her mouth, she speaks in her voice, but she says it the way he would say it. Like after they got back from Alkali Lake, after the service for Jean, she went to the Professor and told him that she wanted to start training for the control of her powers. “There’s plenty of time-“

“Plenty of time that’s been wasted,” she had told him, and the tone in which she spoke most definitely belonged to John. She ended up laughing, and she knew it sounded just like John; the look on the Professor’s face confirmed that. “When I got here,” she said. “You told me you could help me. And I think it’s about time that you DO.”

The Professor had merely looked at her with those startling eyes, and she could feel him poking around her head. She wondered if he could even find her there, if all he could find were John and Logan and Erik and Bobby. He said, “I know this isn’t you, Marie.” and looked at her with such pity on his face, it not only made John furious, but Marie as well.

She’s not sure if it was John who made her pick up the paperweight on the Professor’s desk and throw it, or if it was herself. She realizes now it didn’t matter if it was John or not. If the weight hitting the wall had surprised the Professor, he didn’t show it. She walked over to him and looking him straight in the eye, and in a voice that was distinctly Marie, she asked, “How can you even tell who’s me and who’s not?”

He had been quiet for a long time, until finally he nodded under the weight of her/John’s gaze. “Alright. Tomorrow we’ll run some tests and see how deep your mutation is.”

She nodded at him, but she knew he did not understand the depth of the request. She merely walked out of the room and walked to the gym, her boot heels clicking to the rhythm of John’s heart in her head, hands clenched in fists. When she got there she ripped off her jacket and pretty corset ensemble, wearing one of John’s left behind wifebeaters, and started to punch the punching bags with strength she knows is not hers. She’s not sure if it was John or Marie punching the bags, but it does not matter, because John is not trying to take over, like the rest of them. He’s working with her. Co-existing with her.

And she loves the burning sensation she gets every time she sits in front of the fireplace with Bobby, how she can close her eyes and feel it coursing through her veins. Bobby always asks what she’s thinking about, and she smiles and says nothing, and when he leans over and tries to kiss her, she pulls away and smiles demurely. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she repeats, and he doesn’t know what she’s actually saying is, “I don’t want you replacing him.” But of course she can’t say that, because they have to think it’s about them and her desire not to hurt them.

She hasn’t felt this strong in…she can’t remember the last time she’s felt this strong. And even though none of them can possibly understand what it’s like to be weak one moment then as strong as bull from one single touch, for once, it doesn’t bother her. The strength coursing throughout her is overriding the frustration and the pain. She hasn’t felt this free since she was a child, and she’s going to ride with it, let herself get drunk on the power, his power, and it will become another dirty little secret.

That she is addicted, and she will do anything she can to keep John’s strength inside her head and her heart, even if it means having to wear gloves as she showers.


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