IT’S A DULL LIFE



Her door closing behind him, Logan thinks that this, more or less, is the order of events:

1. Bobby, Kitty, Piotr go back to the mansion first.

2. He, Hank, Storm and Warren remain in San Francisco to aid in the post-disaster relief; consisting mostly in recovery of survivors (which, since there aren’t any, doesn’t take long) and clean-up (which, in turn, does).

3. When he arrives at the mansion, a month later, she is sleeping with, or has already slept with: Bobby, Piotr, Jubilee, plus four or five new mansion residents he has never met before.

4. And on that same day, Warren mysteriously disappears for several hours, then shows up to dinner looking extremely refreshed. “I think I’m going to like it here,” he tells Logan, who tries to smile.

5. A week later, the news comes: in very rare cases, and almost exclusively for those with immunocentric mutations, the cure’s duration has been shown to be—less than permanent.

6. She disappears. They look for her, the old-fashioned way; Cerebro is gathering dust.

7. Three weeks later, she returns in gloves and a long-sleeve shirt.

8. He finds her before she even makes it to her room, demands to know where the hell she has been. She says only, “Manhattan,” then slips past him and closes the door.

9. The near-constant stream of moaning and dirty talk that once came from her room is now almost entirely replaced by silence.

10. A week later, Storm—with whom he has been casually sleeping with himself, here and there; a few times in San Francisco, and then twice since they have returned to the mansion—calls him into what is now her office.

11. She says, “Did Rogue tell you what happened in Manhattan?”

12. He says no. She brings him to the Danger Room—

13. —where, from the viewing area, he watches as the kid throws a fully metallic Piotr across the room, then flies twenty feet up in the air up to grab Warren by his wing and hook-kick him in the face.

14. Next to him, Storm comments, mildly: “She came back a little… different.”

15. So that night, he goes to her room to talk to her—

16. —and “almost entirely replaced by silence” was right, because in the hallway, he passes the new target-practice instructor: a young Cajun man with fucking spooky eyes and a cheating habit at the men’s weekly poker game (though Logan has yet to succeed in definitively proving it)—

17. —and the young man smells so much like her, he thinks she might be hidden in his trench coat.

18. It takes fifteen minutes of knocking until the door finally opens. Her hair is still wet from the shower. She says, “Jesus, Logan, it’s just you, I thought there was an emergency or something.”

19. He leans against the door frame, arms crossed, and says, “So. You’re a certified bad-ass now.”

20. And she grins at him and says, “More or less.”

21. He asks, “So how’d you get ‘em?”

22. Still grinning, she shakes her head. “Not telling,” she says. “Why not?” he asks. “Because I don’t feel like it,” she replies.

23. He looks at her; at the dripping locks of hair, darkening the shirt around her shoulders. And he says, “Fair enough.”

24. But before he is about to leave, he asks, without looking at her: “So you and the new guy—that’s still going well?”

25. And she bursts out laughing. “Going well? We’re just fucking each other.” She pauses, then says, “So yeah, it’s going really well, actually.”

26. Then she shrugs and says, “As long as the sex is good, I’m not that picky.” She wiggles a gloved hand at him and smirks. “It’s hard for a girl to find a creatively inspired partner.”

27. He says, without knowing what he is saying, “So what, anyone’s okay?”

28. She answers, “As long as it’s good, and it stays strictly casual, anyone’s okay.”

29. He asks, without knowing what he is asking, “Even me?”

30. She raises an eyebrow at him. “If you’re any good.”

31. And an hour later, while he is still shaking, she says, not shakily at all: “Okay, you pass.”

He thinks about Storm’s words, that she came back a little “different.”

Well, who knows how many people he himself has been, in all the years he cannot remember, he thinks to himself. He must be a little different, too.

I CAN GIVE IT ALL ON A FIRST DATE



After the first time, he avoids her carefully for a few days—waiting for her to take it back, to say it was all a mistake, to say something about “protecting their friendship,” to say something like, “I don’t want things to get weird between us,” to say it should never happen again.

She doesn’t say any of those things. Instead, she greets him pleasantly whenever she sees him, as if nothing at all has changed, and her nonchalance is so complete that he asks himself if he has dreamt the entire thing.

Until one morning he is in the garage, assessing the cars, all of which Storm says are now in his care, and she walks in, looking for a scarf she left there the other day.

He grunts a greeting to her, and goes back, mostly, to inspecting the Veyron in front of him.

Mostly—because not five minutes later, she turns around and says, “Either quit staring at my ass, or do something about it. Jesus.”

And the garage floor is cold; then, not so cold.


*


Afterwards, as he is trying to think of a discreet place to dispose the condom, she adjusts her tights and skirt, and remarks, “Even better than the last time.”

She is about to leave, when he calls after her, “So this is okay, then.”

She turns around, gives him a questioning look.

He clarifies, “This kind of—thing—we can—do it. Sometimes.”

She bursts into laughter again, and it sounds exactly like the time she laughed when he asked her about the Cajun.

“What are you, a schoolgirl?” she says.

He scowls, and she continues, “I already told you. As long as it’s good, and as long as it’s casual, we can do it as often as we like.”

Then she turns around again. Just before she is about to walk out, she brightens, then ducks behind a Carrera GT. When she re-appears, she is holding up a green and gold scarf.

“Found it!” she crows.

And after she leaves, he faces the Veyron again, definitely not thinking about how she must have lost the scarf in the first place.


*


“I can’t believe I’m fucking the girl who ate all my jerky,” he mutters, staring up at her in his bed.

She halts in her movements to look down at him, hard.

“You’re not,” she says, and then she moves again and he knows she is right.


*


Before one of his training sessions begins, she enters the Danger Room, followed by Storm, who proceeds to tell him that she would like to enlist Rogue as an assistant combat instructor. To him.

In response to his sputtering protest and absolute, unequivocal refusal, the kid charges forward, lifts him up by his armpits and flings him across the room, where he lands with an alarming thump at the feet of his awaiting students. In unison, they back away.

Flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, he thinks again, A little different.

When he can finally catch his breath, he says, “I guess we can talk about it.”

“We just did,” Rogue replies.


*


Later—in bed—he tells Storm, in the interest of full disclosure, that he and Rogue are casually sleeping together, and that, therefore, it might not be the best arrangement for her to be his assistant instructor.

Storm says, “I know. She told me.”

He blinks at her.

She sighs and says, “Look, Logan. She doesn’t just have these new powers—she has years and years worth of memories about how to control and utilize them. Frankly, it would be ridiculous to ask her to be a student in a combat class.

She adds, “I admit, I was a little unsure at first, myself, since she’s still pretty young—but she really wants to be part of the team. I think this is the best place for her. And you’re the most logical teacher to pair her up with.” She raises an eyebrow and says, “Unless it really makes you uncomfortable.”

“No,” he says slowly. “But it doesn’t make her uncomfortable?”

She shrugs. “She seems perfectly fine with it.”

Unsatisfied, he presses, “But isn’t it—inappropriate, or something?”

She looks at him, amused. “She might be a young one, but she’s an adult. You’re an adult. It’s not unheard of for two instructors in this mansion to have sex. Case in point.” She looks meaningfully down at her own naked body.

He hesitates, then is startled, as if he has just thought of something, and says, “Wait. But are you all right with it?”

“What?” she asks. “Me sleeping with her, too,” he says.

Storm laughs at him, and he thinks he is being laughed at a lot, recently. “Logan—like Rogue, I have no illusions about what we’re doing here,” she says.

Then she is suddenly on top of him, smirking. “So let’s do it again.”


*


As far as he can tell, the kid is only regularly fucking him and Gambit now, though there are rare occasions in which he catches a whiff of metal or ice on her, and he thinks that a couple of residents might also have creative inspirations, every once in a while.

All in all, he has it better than he could have ever imagined. No-strings-attached sex with two gorgeous, experienced partners—and anyone else he cares to pick up on his excursions from the mansion. Work he enjoys, with students who aren’t entirely repellent. A regular seat at a weekly poker game. Good food. A real bed.

Even, strangely, friends: he and Kurt have developed a sort of mutually antagonistic friendship, with his foul-mouthed nihilism against Kurt’s virtuous courtesy—though, like the best oft-lapsing Catholics, the German’s profound sensitivity to sin and guilt sometimes makes for a surprisingly black sense of humor.

Only when he occasionally turns his head to the side, about to make a dirty comment to a redheaded woman who isn’t there, does he remember how painful a happy life can be.


*


While he is fingering her in the Danger Room, he says something that irritates her—he thinks it was something like, “Your hair smells good, what is that”—and she punches him in the stomach so hard he falls straight backwards, like a silent movie star.

“Gross,” she says, standing above him. “No cheesy lines, please.”

“Got it,” he gasps out, clutching his abdomen.

She looks down at him. “I hurt you, big guy?”

“Nah,” he says. “I kinda liked it.”

She grins. “We’ll need a safe word.”

He makes a move to lift himself back up, but she raises a hand to stop him, smiling slyly. “On second thought, stay there,” she says, undoing her scarf and lowering herself onto his face.

And he thinks, Then again, sometimes a happy life is just happy.


*


He and Gambit have a sort of gentleman’s agreement; when they do have to speak to each other—which is rare, with their different teaching specialties—they do so briefly and without any pretense at camaraderie; and at the weekly poker nights, Logan teases Kurt while Gambit and Piotr argue politics, and Warren and Bobby share childhood stories, and he and Cajun almost never talk at all.

Nearly every week, he smells her at the poker table, so much so that one week, when he doesn’t, he searches the Cajun’s face for signs of disappointment, anger, frustration, heartbreak—and quickly averts his gaze when black and red eyes land on him, in a mixture of defiance and amusement, and something else he has looked away too quickly to read.


*


During a particularly athletic session, they fall off his desk. And as he is trying to regain balance, his claws come out, just a tiny bit, and scratch her on the back.

Before the horrified, desperate apology can tumble out of his mouth, she is turning back to look at him, eyes half-closed and mouth upturned with delight, breathing out: “Definitely, definitely need that safe word.”


*


“What about banana?”

“Too obvious.”

“What about fuckhead?”

“That could be confusing, since you actually call me that. Sometimes during sex.”

“Ha,” she says, turning over onto her stomach. “True. Fuckhead. All right. Er, what about—sushi?” At his look, she says, “I just had some today.”

“Eh,” he says. “Could do better.”

“You think of one, then.”

“Can’t,” he says.

“Valiant effort,” she says. “What about karaoke?”

“The hell?”

She laughs. “Kitty and Jubilee asked me if I wanted to go to a karaoke bar last week.”

“Not karaoke.”

“Samurai?”

He glances at her. “What’s up with all the Japanese?”

She blinks, startled. “I don’t know—Jubilee made me watch Zatoichi a couple weeks ago, it must be stuck in my head.”

She is lying, he knows it; though he can’t always tell when she is lying, only when she does it this badly. But he doesn’t know why she would lie about such a thing, so he lets it go.

“All right,” he says. “Samurai works.”

She grins and sits up. “Let’s try it out.” She picks him up in her arms, then flies a few feet up and away from the bed. Then before he can protest, she drops him on the ground, onto his naked ass.

“Samurai?” she taunts, floating.

“Christ,” he groans.

“Wrong answer,” she giggles, and flies towards him.


*


She behaves in class more or less exactly as she behaves during sex; which is to say, fierce, irreverent, brash, prone to punching people in sensitive spots when they annoy her. Still, she is clearly a devoted teacher, and the students warm to her immediately, are visibly happier and more hardworking when she is around.

While they both focus on hand-to-hand combat, she teaches flying (and fight-in-flight) lessons, while he teaches weapons and various martial arts.

How he knows these arts, he doesn’t remember, but a year ago, he had opened a book about martial arts in the library, and the knowledge had flooded back to him, so intensely he had dropped the book.

He is teaching a group of students a tai-chi exercise, in an effort to help them become familiar with the body’s relationship to things like leverage, circulation, stress, and stillness. He tells them he has read about tai chi masters who were able to push people across an entire room with only a gentle push. Or were able to stand so still, so rooted, that no person, no matter how strong, would be able to move them.

“Now if a mutant had tried, that might be a different story,” he admits, and they giggle in response.

On the other side of the training room they are sharing, he hears Rogue say to her group of students:

“While Logan is teaching those guys ballroom dancing, I think today we should learn how to thoroughly fuck people up. One-handed. Does that sound good?”


*


Later that evening, he remembers: No. It wasn’t in the library. It was in Xavier’s office. It was Xavier’s book.

And he nearly puts his claws through the door of his closet, where he had been about to hang his jacket.


*


“So,” he says, another time, as she is putting on her clothes. “You ever gonna tell me the story of how you got these powers?”

“Nope,” she says, and zips up her jeans.

“Not even if I ask nicely?”

She shoots a look at him and winks. “Not even if you ask meanly,” she says, and points to the tiny scratches on her back, nearly healed, before pulling on her shirt.

And his fist tightens around the sheets. “Hey,” he says, his voice a little strangled. “You wanna go another round?”

She laughs. “Sorry, big guy. Previous engagement.” And she zips up her left boot, opens his door, and leaves.


*


“God,” Storm gasps, as he pushes her back onto her desk. “You’re kind of insatiable, recently.”


*


“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” he says suddenly, pulling back from between the kid’s legs and dropping the scarf. “How fuckin’ old are you?”

She stares at him, then shoves her knee up into his chin, hard, so he can hear his own metal jaw clanking, and he bites halfway through his own tongue. “Fuh!” he cries.

“You stop in the middle of eating me out to ask this?” she asks. “Do you have a death wish?”

“A li—le,” he admits, as his tongue heals. “But seriously. How old are you?”

She lets herself fall backwards on the bed. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

Then she looks up and sees he is still waiting for an answer. She exhales. “Old enough for you not to feel too dirty, Logan.”

And then a smile creeps over her face. “But young enough for you to feel a little dirty.”


*


He is in the hallway of her floor, walking towards her room—and from the hallway, a long way away from her door, he can hear her cries.

He turns around and walks away. And at the poker game later that evening, it is definitely not one of the times when Gambit does not smell like her.

And the next day, he more-or-less successfully avoids looking at the various bite marks under her breasts and on her thighs.


*


“You know, I have to tell you,” Storm says, as they lay in her bed. “I’m surprised about you and Rogue.”

He looks over at her. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I always thought you guys were kind of all-or-nothing. Like, either you were going to be together, madly in love, forever; or you’d never be anything but friends.”

She smiles. “I still remember when we first found you guys. Scott and—” And she falters, and swallows, then continues. “We thought you guys had known each other for a while; it was only later that Xavier told us you’d just met.”

He turns over onto his back, looks at the ceiling. “Well, it’s working out great this way.”

Storm looks at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I think that all-or-nothing stuff sounds like bullshit.”

She laughs. “Really.”

He nods. “Yeah. Honestly—this is probably the only way I can imagine things ever working between us.”

She looks at him, and smiles a little. “You must not have a very good imagination, then.”

He lifts an eyebrow at her. “You seemed to find it pretty good just now.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, your imagination on the subject of sex is very vast,” she says, sounding bored. “But I had something else in mind.”

She props herself up on her elbow, pauses, then says, “You never imagined being in love with Rogue?”

He looks at her. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Retract, retract the claws,” she says, laughing again. “It was just a curious question.”

“No,” he says firmly. “I never imagined anything like that. We’ve always been—something else. And what we are now still counts as—something else.”

He frowns at her. “Besides, you know my history in that area.”

Regret floods her face. “Logan, I’m sorry—”

He puts a hand up to quiet her. “It’s fine. It’s fine. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pauses, closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says again. They are quiet for a long time.

Then she smiles, eyes still closed. “It’s just, I still remember how Rogue was like, those first few weeks. She was so sweet. Always looking at you with big cartoons hearts in her eyes.”

Storm opens her eyes again, to look at him. “It made me want to be young again; seeing how she looked at you back then.”

He looks away. “I don’t remember how she looked back then,” he mutters.


*


He remembers: nearly strangling Jean the first time he awoke in the medbay; darting through the lower levels of the mansion, trying to smell where he was, smelling nothing; trying to smell for the girl, smelling nothing. Being in Xavier’s office, feeling like he had been picked up and dropped off in another world; hearing Xavier’s words in his head—Logan, it’s been fifteen years hasn’t it, living from day to day, moving from place to place—and feeling that, instead, it was this other world that had been dropped into his own; it was this new world that had climbed its way inside of his old one.

Like a girl into his trailer, when they were both a little bit—different.

He doesn’t remember how he must have looked back then, either. Those people seem light years away.

SURPRISES ALWAYS HELP



And then, then, then—they receive news that Hank’s home in D.C. has been burned down.

Luckily, Hank hadn’t been home at the time. Storm tells Logan that it was most likely the work of an anti-mutant organization associated with the Republican Party that has in recent months been waging a vigorous campaign for something called SB10700, a bill even more repressive and discriminatory than the Mutant Registration Act, bolstered by the news surrounding the cure and its effectiveness (or lack thereof), and the popular fears that have been revitalized by that news.

He vaguely remembers seeing Hank on the news, talking about the cure; and then he remembers a conversation between Piotr and Gambit at the poker table, during which the Russian had been trying to explain why the cure’s effect had worn off almost exclusively for a certain type of mutation.

“The cure is immunosuppressive. So hyper-immunity mutations would fight it,” Piotr had explained, and Logan remembers having rolled his eyes at how American the accent of this young Russian had become, so quickly.

“So,” Piotr continued, “Defensive mutations. Like Rogue’s.”

And Logan’s ears had twitched at the name. He had glanced over at the two of them.

And Gambit had already been looking at him, over his cards.

“Or Logan’s,” Piotr said, turning to look at him, too.

And Gambit and Logan had stared at directly at each other, for what was perhaps the first time, and he had almost thought the Cajun was going to say something.

“So, what about people like you and me,” Bobby asked Piotr, interrupting the moment, and Logan had shifted his attention back to his cards.

Piotr shrugged. “That’s more difficult. Are organic states a form of hyper-immunity? Hard to tell.”

“This is starting to get boring,” Warren interrupted, and they had resumed the game.

Storm says that Hank is currently in an “undisclosed location,” where he now has more than enough security watching over him, though she has offered to send a few more—uniquely advanced—bodyguards whenever he needs them, for particularly vulnerable situations.

“I wish he’d never taken that damn job,” she says, then covers her mouth. “Sorry. Ah. Shit. I don’t know.”

He looks at her. “No,” he says slowly. “I kinda wished he hadn’t taken it, either.”

“No. I meant the original job, years ago,” she says, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “As Secretary of Mutant Affairs.”

He looks at her, questioningly.

She sighs. “I wish he had stayed here. A scientist.” She frowns. “Where he was safe.”

He lowers his eyes. He hadn’t known either of them back then.

Though he had always suspected that there might have been something between the two of them—there was often something left unsaid in their conversations, during which he sometimes felt like a third wheel, an uninvited guest; like he was interrupting something that hadn’t been resolved, or even touched upon, for years.

But maybe, he thinks, it was a nothing kind of something, like his relationship with the kid.

Or was it a something kind of nothing—the way Storm imagines his relationship with the kid.

“Anyway,” Storm continues, sounding tired. “I hope you’ll also be available for bodyguard duties here and there.”

“Do you even have to ask,” he says, pulling out a cigar.

She looks at him, a little startled; then she smiles, and he has never had someone smile at him like that before. Like she is proud to have been proven right. Then he thinks, he is wrong; Jean smiled at him like that, just before he—but he stops that thought.

“Nope,” she replies, still smiling. “And you better not smoke that thing in here.”


*


The first mission he is sent on with Gambit and Kurt, to guard Hank at a UN Summit on Climate Change. He isn’t comfortable with the idea of going with the Cajun, but Storm says they need offensive-mutation members for this one, so he doesn’t voice a single word of complaint.

And just before he leaves, Rogue comes into his room and they fuck on his bed, wordlessly and almost without a single insult or incidence of bodily harm, and he wonders if she is worried about him.

And waiting in the cockpit, he suddenly realizes that she must have chosen to sleep with him, not Gambit, before the mission. And the thought makes his entire body rigid with fear and shock and—

Then the Cajun finally hurries into the smaller jet, ten minutes late, smelling like poker night.


*


The mission is entirely uneventful, although he understands Storm’s caution, since the event location is somewhat wide-open to a variety of attacks, none of which he would like to imagine, let alone experience.

Thinking, without knowing why, of Storm’s words, about something else entirely: You must not have a very good imagination, then.

Back at the hotel, Kurt sleeps in Hank’s room, to be in the position to teleport him away at the first sign of danger, while—to the delight of precisely no one—Logan and Gambit share a room.

They barely speak to each other. “Are you gonna take a shower,” Logan bites out finally, after an hour of rummaging through suitcases, documents, and silence.

Gambit raises an eyebrow. “Be my guest, mon ami.”

I’m not your ami, Logan wants to retort.

But Gambit is already looking like he regrets that little addition; he has only said it out of habit, not out of provocation, Logan realizes; he may as well have called him chèr, for all he meant to say it. The tense, guarded look on Gambit’s face lets him know immediately that the Cajun knows full well that they are not amis, and has no interest in even joking about the idea.

And when he is in the shower, he thinks to himself: No mind games, at least.

He is a little surprised; he has heard the young man’s lazy and free-associative debates with Piotr during poker games; he has seen the way he murmurs incessantly into Rogue’s ear in the hallway, or outside of her room; and he has a reputation as something of a ladies’ man with some of the other women in the mansion—

(Which Storm confirms later: “Yeah, he’s an amazing lay.” Thankfully, she doesn’t compare the two of them; though he is not sure whose feelings she is sparing.)

—so Logan had been expecting more of a talker, a charmer; but around him, the Cajun is nearly mute. Yet always watching, waiting, assessing. With those bizarre eyes, which discomfit Logan more than he would ever admit aloud.

How can she stand to look into his eyes while they fuck, he thinks before he can stop himself. Then shakes his head quickly.

When he comes back out, the Cajun is lying on his bed, on top of the blanket, in his boxers and a t-shirt.

“Good night,” Gambit says politely, then folds his hands over his chest, and closes his eyes.

Logan looks down at his own bed and he decides, petulantly, hair still wet on his metal skull, that he can fucking well sleep on top of his blanket, too.

During the night, he thinks he hides the shivering well.


*


Back at the mansion, the kid is careful to be somewhere else when the jet arrives, so she will not have to choose whom to greet first. When she comes to his room later that evening, she is freshly showered, so he doesn’t know if he is the first or the second.


*


Then, he is sent on a mission with Rogue and Warren. This time it is to accompany Hank during some kind of gala, which is happening on the rooftop of some sort of fancy hotel in the city. Which is why they need mutants with flying abilities, yeah, yeah, yeah. He is beginning to think Storm is having a little bit of fun with her assignments, despite her seriousness.

At the ball, one young man approaches Rogue and says, “Oh, are you Rogue?”

She stiffens and says, “Who’s asking?”

“I was Dr. McCoy’s first assistant, a long time ago, back when he was still in the Cabinet. He’s told me about you. I heard you had a close encounter with Magneto.”

Her gaze flickers over at Logan. “Pretty close.”

Then Logan is called away, to follow Hank to the other side of the room, but he can see Rogue and the young man still talking. She is laughing, shaking her head, telling him something; but he does not seem to be fazed, and then he lifts his hand to show it to her—and the hand turns metallic and golden.

Logan sees her eyes widen, and then she starts grinning. The young man slips something into her hand, which she puts in the pocket of her leather jumpsuit.


*


Later, back in the room Logan and Hank are sharing, the blue-furred man undoes his necktie and says, “I’m terribly sorry for all this, you know. Ororo is overcautious.”

“She’s just cautious enough. We’re all worried,” Logan replies. Then, deliberately, he adds: “Storm most of all.”

“Yes, well,” Hank says, and looks down.

Logan thinks of the something kind of nothing, or the nothing kind of something.

Hank clears his throat. “Still. I apologize for the—circus—that this whole thing has caused. I certainly don’t wish to be babysat at a diplomatic ball.”

“No apologies necessary,” Logan says. “You’re one of us.”

Hank smiles. “Yes,” he says, and it sounds the way Storm sounded before; when she had sounded proud of being proven right. That Logan would say something like “one of us,” so easily, now.

Then his brow furrows. “Speaking of one of us—Rogue is a bit different, isn’t she?”

Why is everyone saying it like that, Logan wonders.

“Yeah,” he says only.

“And no one knows yet how she obtained those powers?”

“Nope,” Logan replies.

Hank sits down on his bed. “Joshua seemed to like her,” he remarks. Joshua must be the name of the golden guy, Logan thinks.

“Seemed like it,” he says only.

Hank studies him. “Yes,” he says blandly. “Well, Joshua is a very nice young man.”

Logan nods; he would like to get out of this conversation, and quickly. He asks, “You gonna take a shower?”

Hank pauses, then smiles. “Yes, I think I will. Thank you.”


*


And in bed, Logan tries to sleep. Not listening for noise in the hall. Not hearing the opening of a door, the closing of a door. Not listening for a man’s voice. Not hearing one say, “Rogue, over here.” Not hearing the kid’s giggle. Not thinking of a man with a metallic golden hand. Not thinking of creative inspirations.


*


And on the jet, Rogue doesn’t say anything, but she is wearing her scarf tight around her neck and Warren is looking a little sick. From the cockpit, Logan asks, “Everything all right over there, Richie Rich?” Warren only nods his head.


*


But at the cafeteria during dinner that evening, Warren can be heard speaking loudly to a group of students—

“She’ll put out for anyone who comes along, I swear—”

“Warren, that’s enough,” Bobby tries to interject.

“I’m serious, man; she spent the whole night flirting with this guy when we were all supposed to be guarding Dr. McCoy. And then, at night, when we were still supposed to be on watch, she snuck out in the middle of the night and disappeared. And believe me, she came back looking well-fucked; she even had to take a shower afterwards—”

Logan can see Gambit standing from his table, making his way straight for Warren.

“Come on, you guys know it’s true—Jubilee, you know it’s true—she’s the mansion slut, that’s old news—I bet you that’s how she got those crazy powers, too—probably accidentally sucked them out of some guy she was fucking—”

And Logan can see Gambit’s hand coming out of his pocket, and he is suddenly aware of himself moving forward, too, his knuckles shivering.

And he thinks, Have I been moving this whole time, too?

But before either of them can reach Warren, the young man is suddenly flying across the entire cafeteria, straight into the food stations.

And Rogue is standing there—and where the hell did she come from, Logan thinks—with her arms crossed. And from where he is, he can see the two hickeys on her neck, defiantly uncovered.

She calls out, “Still bitter that not even this slut will touch your microscopic dick more than once, Worthington?”

And Logan sees Gambit, on the other side of the room, drop his hand in surprise.

Then the Cajun starts laughing—loudly and raucously and joyously—bending over and grabbing his stomach to catch his breath, then rearing backwards and roaring out laughs again—and it is the first time he has ever seen the man laugh.

But when Gambit finally stops laughing long enough to gaze at the back of the kid’s head, Logan can feel his knuckles start to shiver again. He far prefers the laughing to the look.


*


And Warren doesn’t come to the poker games anymore.

IT’S LETTING PEOPLE IN



The next time they fuck, he says he wants to do it from behind again, and when he looks at her back, he does not even realize what he is looking for until he notices that the scratches have completely and totally healed.


*


Another day, she is sucking him off, and he groans, “Oh, fuck—Marie—”

And she pulls away so fast he hears himself actually whimper, and absolute self-loathing crashes upon him.

“Yikes,” she says. “I did say, ‘No cheesy lines,’ right?”

“It’s your fuckin’ name,” he says, and his voice still sounds too close to a whimper, but her mouth is still incredibly, unbelievably, world-endingly far away.

“You never call me it, so it’s kind of weird to hear it suddenly,” she says, and it’s true, he doesn’t know why he has done it now. An attempt at intimacy? Then he wonders if the Cajun calls her by her name, and he thinks he has an answer to why he just used it.

But, if he is honest with himself, ‘kid’ has always felt even more—right—to him. More intimate, even, than her “real” name.

What are real names, anyway, he thinks to himself. He doesn’t even know if his real name is Logan.

And true enough, she declares, just before mercifully returning to her previous assignment, “I like ‘kid’ from you. It’s cozy,” she says, and he remembers her saying that, the first time. “Sexy, too,” she adds.

“Okay,” he acquiesces—but at this point, with what she is doing, he would have acquiesced to anything she might have asked—and then the thought of what “anything” could be terrifies him into coming.

She looks impressed. “And with a condom on, too. I think that must be a new record for you,” she teases.


*


Storm says, right before going down on him: “There’s something different about you.”


*


Gambit, Kitty, and Kurt leave on a mission to guard Hank during another UN conference on climate change, this one in Madrid. And Logan is relieved to not have to go to yet another boring, uneventful, diplomatic shindig.

But when they come back, Gambit is on a stretcher and even Kurt’s face looks pale.

When she can stop shaking, Storm says that Hank’s convoy was shot at by an anti-mutant terrorist group that has been responsible for recent bombings of mutant refugee shelters in various other European cities.

She says that the shots came so suddenly, Kurt was only able to teleport Hank away after Gambit had already been hit. Kitty had been able to phase him out of the following bullets, but not the first two.

He looks for the kid, but she isn’t in her room; that day, or the next, or the next. She only shows up just before class, and leaves directly afterwards. She still taunts them all relentlessly, but when her students’ backs are turned, her face unlocks again, and he thinks he sees real fear in her eyes.

And in class, she now smells like poker night, too—but not quite, he realizes. Not of sex. But only deep, heavy presence; as if she is wearing the Cajun's breath on her skin. And he thinks that might be even worse than poker night’s smell.


*


So he says to Kurt, itching to make fun of the Cajun, “So what, the jerk got shot, just like that? Couldn’t even dodge it?”

He snorts, “Fuckin’ amateur, is what that is.”

Kurt looks at him and says, evenly, “Gambit was shot because he threw himself in front of Hank and Kitty.”

To Logan’s unmoving face, he continues: “Only because he protected them in time was I able to react and teleport Hank out of harm’s way. And at that point, Kitty was able to phase Gambit’s body against the bullets that followed.”

Then he raises one navy blue eyebrow at Logan. “Amateur,” he repeats.


*


That night, alone in his bed, Logan thinks a long time about what Piotr said that one poker night; something about defensive mutations and offensive mutations.

He knows that many, if not most, mutants—like Bobby, Piotr, Storm, Hank, himself—have mutations that are neither predominantly offensive nor defensive, but can be used both ways, even if biologically some of them tend towards what Piotr described as hyper-immunity.

But then he thinks about Gambit. Someone who can make a bomb out of anything—that’s an offensive mutation, no doubt about it.

(Then he remembers, suddenly, that Scott, too, had had a predominantly offensive mutation—and Logan’s fists tighten, and he has to take a minute to re-gather his thoughts.)

And then he remembers a cliché he told Storm once; that the best defense is a good offense.

And he thinks of what he did to Jean, with his own "offensive mutation." What he did—

—to defend everyone else, yes, he knows, he knows, he knows, he knows, he knows. Every time he thinks of it, every time he wants to gut himself at the very thought of it, he has to look around at the mansion, at the kid, at Storm’s face, and know—he did it for them, for these people, for these lives in front of him, and this life they are making together. And he knows had been the only one capable to do it, and survive intact.

But now he thinks of a mutant he doesn’t like at all, with unusual eyes and an offensive mutation and no regenerative factor to speak of. Using his own, un-superhealing body to protect everyone else.

Logan doesn’t want to understand him; and he absolutely doesn’t want to respect him.

But he thinks of the kid’s arms around that mutant, crying the tears he has been smelling all week: outside of the medbay, outside of her room, outside of the Cajun’s room.

And he doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like any of this.


*


Sooner than he had expected, they start to fuck again, and when he sees that her facial expressions have returned to normal, he is relieved to have been proven wrong about what he thought he had seen on her face the past few days. If she can still casually go down on him in the locker room, he thinks, she must not be too affected—even if she had been clearly shaken at the beginning.

But that same evening, Logan sees the Cajun up and walking again, and overhears him promising Piotr that he will be back for poker nights soon, that he is all right now, that he has gotten out of the worst part of the woods, that they can all be relieved; that of course nothing bad would ever happen to him; and Logan thinks he knows why the kid is back to normal.


*


And so it goes—the Cajun makes a relatively speedy and perfect recovery, and returns to once again be a regular presence at the poker table. And the kid resumes her enthusiastic visits to Logan’s genitals, and just as enthusiastically renews the invitation back to her own.

But things are different, he notices: Gambit no longer entertains the same gaggle of rapt female listeners with stories about Paris, and Logan never smells metal or ice or gold on the kid anymore. He smells himself, and the Cajun, and that’s it.

And the look Gambit gives him over the poker table now is no longer simply one of amused rumination and defiance—but something deeper, graver; something more somber and resolved.

And he definitely doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like any of this.


*


Nevertheless, the kid is as detached and casual as ever—but against the backdrop of everything else he has noticed, her behavior is now thrown in sharp relief. It grates, pulls at his skin.

One afternoon, after he goes down on her in the backseat of an Aston Martin V12 Vantage, he asks her again, still between her thighs: “How did you get your powers?”

She looks down at him. “I told you, I’m not telling,” she says, her voice tense and careful.

“I want to know,” he says.

“Well, sucks for you,” she says. Then grins. “Though, speaking of sucking and you—”


*


Another time, he sees a bite mark on her breasts again, and before he knows what he is doing, he lifts his own shirt up by the neckline so the shirt collar covers the bottom half of his face. Then he presses his mouth to the skin there, and bites down—hard, hard, harder, harder, harder—

And she is yelling, “Wha—ow, ow, ow, ow, fuck, samurai, samurai, samurai!”

And when he finally lifts his head, she looks at him, too shocked to even throw him across the room, as he had been expecting. And he is even shocked at himself.

She demands, “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” he says. “Went too far.”

“Thank god for safe words, you sadistic fuck,” she says. “Or I would’ve had to touch you and grow my own tit back.”


*


And he almost says, “Okay.”

To shut himself up, he occupies his mouth elsewhere. Trying to stop himself from thinking: If I touched her, his marks would disappear.


*


And Storm says to him again, “There’s something different about you.”

“What,” he mumbles, his mouth, once again, otherwise occupied.

“I’ll tell you later,” she says, and leans back.

When it is later, he asks, “So what’s different.”

Storm’s eyes glint, as if pleased that he has brought the subject up again. “I don’t know. Just something.”

Then she inspects his face, carefully. “Since he got back from Madrid, Gambit hasn’t been wanting to sleep with anyone else. Much to my own disappointment.”

He freezes, then grunts.

She grins. “I wonder why that could be.”

He grunts again.

Storm’s grin only gets wider. “Oh, Logan, honey, you—”

But he doesn’t let her finish, quickly resuming his mouth’s previous occupation, and he thinks he has found a good—and certainly audience-approved—method to get out of uncomfortable situations.


*


The kid is across from him, reading a newspaper in the cafeteria, and her eyes brighten at an advertisement for an action movie. “Oh, I’m definitely going to go see this.”

“What,” he asks, and she turns the newspaper around to show it to him. A man in a robot suit, standing on a pile of destroyed things.

“Looks smart,” he says dryly.

“It looks fuckin’ amazing, is what it looks like,” she says. She peers at the newspaper more closely.

“In a month only? Why do they advertise it so early if it’s only coming out in a month, that’s annoying.”

“We should go,” he says, without knowing what he is saying.

She looks up at him. “What? I’m still eating.”

“No,” he says, slightly irritated. “To the movie. When it comes out.”

She stares at him. Then she breaks into hysterical laughter, her face on the table and her fist banging the surface. He looks at her, now definitely more than slightly irritated.

Thinking, She laughs like the Cajun.

She lifts her head and says, “Yikes. What was that, you asking me out on a date?” She shakes her head. “Let's keep the romantic comedies in the movies.”

“So that’s a no,” he mutters.

“That’s a no,” she affirms.

Then she smiles sweetly. “But if you give me five minutes to finish my salad, I’ll fuck your brains out in a supply closet.”


*


And he realizes he hasn’t seen Warren around the mansion for a while, so he asks Storm where the asshole went; and Storm looks at him, surprised, then infinitely amused, and says that one lovely afternoon, Warren had gone to his room and his doorknob had exploded in his hand.

She says he was able to save himself from death or permanent dismemberment by flying out of the way, leaving only his pride fatally injured. He moved back to San Francisco shortly after the incident.

“You didn’t know that?” Storm asks, staring at him. “Where the hell have you been?”

And he thinks about offensive and defensive mutations again, and about things he hasn’t seen and doesn’t know.


*


There is another mission, to accompany Hank on a diplomatic visit to Tokyo, in preparation for an upcoming conference that will also take place soon in Japan.

In Storm’s office, while they wait to be given orders, he feels the kid staring at him pensively, and when he looks back at her, she swiftly averts her gaze. Then he sees Gambit, noticing the kid’s discomfort and anxiety. And that grave, determined look is back on the Cajun’s face.

Finally, Storm assigns the Tokyo mission to Kitty, Bobby and Kurt. And the reaction of simultaneous relief and disappointment on the kid’s face has him totally confused.

So afterwards, as they are all filing out of Storm’s office, Logan takes her by the arm and asks, “You okay?”

“Sure,” she says brightly, and once again he knows she is lying, the same way he knew she was lying before; though, once again, he does not know why she should lie over such a thing. But this time he doesn’t let it go.

He asks again, leaning in more closely, “You sure?”

And she backs away from him so hastily, he thinks he might have accidentally touched her skin—but she is still in a long sleeve shirt and gloves, and he is perfectly fine. Still, she is looking at him like she has seen a ghost.

Distressed, he weakens his grip on her arm and murmurs, “Hey—”

From the hallway, Gambit’s voice comes, saying: “Minette.”

And the kid turns a little red, and Logan is doubly confused. It is the first time she has looked this flustered and uncertain since he met her—and now he thinks he was lying when he told Storm he didn’t remember what she looked like back then.

Gambit continues, “You coming to lunch, yeah?”

Then Rogue snaps out of it; she smiles at Logan, and the girl he first met is gone again, and so completely—that just like that, once again, he doesn’t remember her face anymore. She shakes his arm off.

Then she turns and calls back, “Yeah, I’m coming. Jesus, I’m hungry.” And she begins to walk towards the Cajun.

And when she reaches him, Logan can hear her mock-complaining, a little lustily, “Didn’t we say you couldn’t call me that in public? Bad swamp rat.”

“Then you better punish this swamp rat, eh,” he hears Gambit reply.

And Logan doesn’t understand anything, doesn’t like anything.


*


Once again, in Storm’s bed, she asks him: “So. It get any better yet?”

“What,” he says.

She cups her chin in her hand, leaning on her elbows. “Your imagination. It get any better yet?”

He looks at her. Gently, she adds, “Don’t you think it’s time to stop pretending?”

“Cut it out,” he says.

She remarks, “It’s starting to get painful to watch.”

“So stop watching,” he says, then shakes his head and says, starting over, “I mean, there’s nothing to watch.”

“Nothing to watch,” she repeats.

“Yeah, nothing,” he says.

Storm looks at him. She seems to be deciding whether or not she should say what she is thinking. Then she takes a deep breath and asks, “Is it because of what happened with Jean that you won’t admit it?”

He glares at her. “You’re out of line,” he says, and throws the sheet off of his body, looking for his jeans.

“I know how much you loved her, Logan,” Storm says.

“You don’t know anything,” he mutters, cursing their last more adventurous session, for making his belt buckle so hard to find. Finally, he finds it under her desk chair.

“‘I won’t let myself have feelings for someone else just to lose her again,’ that sound about right?” she says from the bed, eyes following him.

He finds one of his shoes under the bed, no socks. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You’re not being honest with yourself,” she says. Then, thoughtfully, as an aside: “Or maybe you really are that dense.”

He finds one of his shirts and slips it over his head. Then he retorts: “Honest, like you are with Hank?”

Storm’s face goes blank. She pulls the bed sheet all the way up to her chin, covering her bare breasts.

“You’re right. We’re finished here. Your other shirt is by the door.” He can hear the tremor in her voice.

He freezes, sits up. “Wait, Storm, sorry, I—”

“Nope. Get out. Good night.”

He exhales and leaves, picking his shirt up off the doorknob, one foot still naked.


*


Almost instinctively, he goes to the kid’s room, but he can hear Gambit’s voice, saying, “Minou… minou… minou.” And her laughter—then no more laughter.


*


During a demonstration in class, the kid throws a particularly strong young boy over her head and onto the ground.

And when the young boy looks up at her in a mix of unabashed adoration and lust, she snickers and says, “Yikes—this is just a judo lesson, big guy. Don’t go falling in love with me.”

And he hears the words as if they are a command especially for him.


*


And then Rogue, Jubilee, Piotr and Kurt are sent on a mission, once again to guard Hank at the U.N. Disarmament Conference, now being held in Kyoto.

They are meant to be gone for nearly a week, as the conference will last for three days. He doesn’t see the kid at all for the week leading up to their departure—she claims the preparation is more complicated for this particular mission; he isn’t sure if he believes her.

Finally he catches her in her room, just before she is about to leave. When she opens the door and sees him, she hesitates, then reluctantly invites him in, saying she doesn’t have much time. He closes the door behind him, and watches her go back to zipping up her bag, putting on her shoes. He doesn’t smell the Cajun on her; she must have seen him earlier and showered.

“So, almost a week, huh,” he says.

“Yup,” she says, then zips the last zipper shut and stands, bag over her shoulder. “So say hi to Storm and your right hand for me.”

She laughs. “And Westchester County, I guess.”

He wants to say, Not Westchester County. Not Storm anymore, so much. My right hand—a lot.

When he tells her, “Bring me back a souvenir,” a look of pain flashes across her face—

And it is driving him crazy, wanting to know what it is, so he says to hell with finding a good moment, and grabs her by the arm and says, “What is that.”

She laughs, tries to tug her arm away playfully. “What? You want to have some fun before I leave? I guess I have two minutes—”

But he doesn’t let go of the arm. He says, “What the hell is with that look on your face every time someone mentions something related to Japan.”

Her face hardens. “Nothing. Let go.”

“No,” he says. “Tell me.”

“Logan, let go,” she says, and pulls—and she is strong, but he isn’t so weak himself, and if he puts the full weight of his skeleton into his hand, she’ll have trouble—

Until she cries, with the voice she used to cry for help that night on the Statue of Liberty, the voice that made him put his claws through his own chest—

“Fucking let go!” and pushes against his chest with the full force of her powers.

And she sends him straight through her heavy front door, into the hallway, and through the door to the room across from hers, which belongs to Kurt—who fortunately isn’t inside the room, because he is already on the jet.

He looks across the hall at her, splintered pieces of door in his lap, in his hair, in his shirt.

She looks at him, breathing hard, both fists clenched. Then she walks out of her room, bag in hand, and mutters, “Get this fuckin’ mess fixed before we’re back from the mission.”


*


That night, he knocks on Storm’s door. She opens it, and mock-cowers at him. “What, you want to destroy my door, too?”

“Can I come in?” he asks, never having had to ask before.

She looks at him, looks inside her room, then looks back at him and smiles remorsefully. “I don’t think so.”

He grimaces. “Are you still pissed about what I said about Hank, because I’m really sorr—”

She holds up a hand, shaking her head. “Ack. Enough. No. I’m not angry about that.”

“Then let me in,” he says, with a little smirk full of his intentions.

Storm keeps shaking her head, the same smile on her face. Then she goes into her room, searches for something, and comes back.

“Sorry, Logan,” she says. “But my general rule is to end things the minute the other person gets serious.”

Her eyes darken, and adds, under her breath, more to herself than to him: “It hasn’t always been a great rule, I admit.”

He shakes his head. “No, I didn’t—”

“Logan,” she cuts him off, impatiently. “You know I don’t mean with me.”

He gapes at her, but can say nothing. And in her hands, she is holding the shoe he had left there during their argument, and his two, now-washed, socks.

She smiles again at him.

“Good night, Logan,” she says, putting the items in his hands. And then he can only watch the door meet his face.


*


And when he masturbates, he cannot stop himself from thinking about the kid, so he doesn't even try; but at some point, he is no longer imagining fucking her, licking her, or being sucked off by her; but, rather, holding her, smelling her. And in his fantasy she smells of nothing but the two of them, and when he comes, it pains him, how not enough it is.


*


The poker night that week is cancelled; at this point, even Bobby knows to avoid being alone in the same room with Gambit and Logan.

He sees the Cajun everywhere: in hallways; in the cafeteria; in the Danger Room right after Gambit’s target-practice class, which is now scheduled just before his own close-combat class as a result of the shift in schedule with Kurt and Piotr away. Gambit, exiting the class shortly after his students, in his light body armor, carrying a bag of their practice projectiles in his arms; exchanging a silent look with Logan, in his loose sweats, ushering his own students in with his customary mocking taunts, only slightly more violent this week.

Logan doesn’t understand why Gambit still hasn’t ever confronted him. He long ago expected a cornering in some dark hallway, a strict order to “stay away from my girl,” a fierce promise of brutal punishments to come, if certain body parts of his ever again came in contact with certain of hers.

Then, he thinks, He must be wondering why I haven’t done the exact same thing.

So he asks himself why he hasn’t. And he thinks he and the Cajun must have the same answer, or attempts at an answer. Excess pride, for one—to issue an outright threat to the other one would be to admit weakness. Also, respect for the general peace of the mansion, especially given the current political climate—as mutants, they all have enough fighting to do.

But more than all of that, Logan thinks they both know that neither of them can say “my girl” and be correct. They both know that she belongs to no one; certainly to neither of them. Knowing that she has worked extremely hard to make it that way; to keep herself utterly separate, utterly un-possessed. To lay any sort of claim on her would be to ensure losing her altogether.

Perhaps they both also know that, somehow, despite their mutual resentment and distrust, they are not really fighting each other—though neither would turn down the opportunity if it presented itself. They both seem to understand that the real adversary is her; that she is far and away the strongest obstacle to either of their hopes or desires or—

But here Logan stops thinking, and begins class.


*


The replacement doors Storm has ordered by rush delivery, are indeed, delivered in a rush. And she leaves all the work to him: to install the doors in place, make new keys, make sure everything works; claiming that she has far more important things to do.

“Believe it or not, I do other things in this mansion besides fuck you and help you get in touch with your feelings,” Storm says with a grin.

“Yeah,” he snickers. “You fuck other people, too.”

And with exchanges like that, it is thus that the tissue of their friendship is protected, even after the end of their sexual relationship—which, he realizes, has unexpectedly lasted quite long. He wonders how long has it been since he started sleeping with Storm.

And he stops, just as he is fixing the kid’s door to its hinges.

Since Alcatraz, he reminds himself, harshly.

He hasn’t thought about it in a while, and the guilt of that realization opens his skin up again. The way it felt when he was struggling towards Jean, feeling each layer of himself ripped off, and then remade, again and again. And he feels it once more; how painful a happy life can be.

He thinks about what Storm said. What happened with Jean.

What did happen with Jean, he asks himself. He had come into the mansion a broken and unfinished creature, with barely fifteen years of memories, all of them consisting of cage fights and motels and women who walked away to live real lives. And when she had walked silently into Xavier’s office—after he had nearly crushed her windpipe in the medbay—she had seemed whole, composed, knowing, at ease in her loveliness.

He had thought, Beautiful, yeah, but probably up herself about it.

But when they spoke later in his room, and she told him about her mutation, he had sensed something else in her, something behind her wholeness and her composure, especially when mentioned working with the professor to develop her telepathy. Something sad and doubtful and fearful and dangerous all at once; as if she, too, thought there might be something broken and unfinished in her; as if she, too, was afraid to know what it was.

And the dangerous part had especially intrigued him; the idea that this woman in clean, expensive-looking clothes could be fierce, even wild; it aroused him to his toes.

Plus, the idea that she might be also able to read his mind, to reveal his past to him—that was too compelling to forget about.

And later, when he had asked her if she could use Cerebro, and she hadn’t wanted to admit that for someone like her, it would be "dangerous"—with Scott supplying the word instead—he had seen that look on her face again, and he had known for certain that there was something else in her, some side of herself she wouldn’t ever be able to show to her loving fiancé and her cherished mentor; some side of herself she thought it would be best to lock away, without perhaps even quite knowing what it was.

He had sensed immediately how unsure and afraid she was of her own power, and he had stopped thinking about how composed she was, but about why she had to be so composed.

He started thinking about the idea that someone that beautiful, that elegant, could be just as broken and unfinished as he was—and once he started thinking about that, he couldn’t stop. He started to think about what it might be like if he were the one she showed that side to.

When he had learned about the blocks Xavier had placed on her mind, he had been furious; furious because it reminded him too much of exactly what had happened to him. Finding out that she, too, had been controlled, contained, remade under someone else’s direction—that like him, her life had been decided for her—and he had known he was right about the look on her face.

He thinks that is the real reason why he had been the only one able to stop her, at the end. Not only because of his specific abilities, but because he knew what she was—knew her in a way the others, who had loved her more, and longer, than he did, wouldn’t ever know her, precisely because they loved her so much. Because they loved her, they wanted her to be safe, protected, normal—even at the cost of her own freedom. They loved her good; but she wasn't all good, and there wasn't anyone who had been able to love that part, until him.

Because he didn’t love her the way they loved her, he had been able to look at all of her without flinching; to recognize her face, contorted in rage and frustration and torment; knowing it as the one he himself had worn, too often, for too long.

And she had begged him to kill her, and he had panicked, had refused, had held her face in his hands; anything but that, anything but that; so he suggested Xavier’s help, and already saying it, he felt like he was betraying her, betraying the unspoken kinship between them; he had known the words were a mistake, even before she tossed him aside.

When he had said "I love you" to Jean, he had also wanted to say, just as much, just as desperately, as both apology and comfort: "I know you."

And after Jean, he had thought: I don’t want to know people anymore. It hurts too much to know someone like that.

Not realizing he might not have a choice in the matter, that his senses might catch things without his wanting to, that his body might let people in without his permission.

Like a girl into his camper. A girl in his room while he was having a nightmare. She was the one he hadn’t ever expected and certainly hadn’t ever asked for.

And now, inside the kid’s room, still making sure her door works, he can smell himself and the Cajun, can smell the sweat on her old clothes, the dirt on the bottom of her old shoes. And he realizes he has already long ago memorized every single smell.

In his head, he tells Storm that, to his dismay, his imagination might be getting a little better.


*


He makes two copies of the kid’s keys, handing Storm only one; knowing it is wrong, not caring.


*


And just like the goddamned Cajun, she fucking comes back injured.

But no one seems to know at first, because everyone is chatting and debriefing in the hangar, and coming up behind the group, still unseen, Logan is the only one who notices—although Gambit is not there to greet her, and he knows the Cajun would have noticed it, too, and then he wonders why Gambit is not here to greet her, but now there are more important things to think about—the way she is casually keeping her right hand in her jumpsuit pocket.

And he doesn’t speak, but walks up behind her and grabs the kid’s gloved hand out of her pocket before she can notice him and fight back.

Then he rips the glove off, and she shouts out in pain, “Motherfuck!”


*


And while he stares at the bloody, cut-covered hand—much, much, much worse than even he had expected—he can distantly hear the others asking:

“My God, Rogue—”

“Why didn’t you—“

“When—”

“How did that—”


*


She is still shouting, “Logan, let go!”

Still holding her by the covered wrist, he says, “So is the fuckin’ souvenir you brought back for me?”

Her eyes closed, wincing, gritting her teeth, she bites out. “Yeah, that’s it, now fucking let me—”

“I’ll take it, then,” he says brusquely, and pushes her sleeve up to grab her bare arm.


*


And he can hear her saying, just before he passes out, “If he doesn’t die, I’m gonna fucking kill him!”


*


And when he awakens, she is nowhere, and when he goes to her room, she isn’t there; and when he checks, she isn’t in the Cajun’s room, either.

For the rest of the week, she avoids him totally and completely, with martial determination. And if she happens to run into him, she starts hissing, “Somebody get him away from me before I fucking destroy him,” and Piotr and Kurt have to quietly, gently escort him out of the room and away from the mansion’s fragile valuables.


*


“We still don’t know what happened to her in Kyoto?” he asks Storm.

Storm shakes her head. “Hank had no idea she was injured, has no idea how that would have even happened. According to all members of the mission, there were absolutely no incidents to speak of. Totally peaceful.”

Logan asks, “You think it’s connected to how she got her powers in Manhattan?”

“I really wonder,” Storm sighs. “She hasn’t told you anything yet?”

“Not a fuckin’ thing,” Logan says.

She looks down, smiles forlornly. “Without any telepaths in this house, it’s harder to get to the bottom of things, isn’t it.”

And he looks at Storm, small inside Xavier’s office. She has changed so little about it; the globe, the intellectual knick-knacks, the antique books—she has kept it all. She has only brought in the documents and devices she needs for her day-to-day activities; as if she is only using the office temporarily.

“She’s completely healed,” Storm says. “But because you were the only one who saw the wound, we have no information about what it was or where it came from.”

“The way it looked, it was recent, like it happened just before they came back,” he says. “Her hand was totally covered in really clean wounds, like it had been cut a bunch of times. Like by a knife or sword.”

When he says sword, something moves in him, but he doesn’t know why.

“Well,” she says. “There is one thing. Beforehand, she asked specifically to be assigned to the Kyoto mission."

He stops. "Why?"

"I asked her, too, she wouldn't tell me," Storm replies. "Just said she wanted to go. Originally I was going to send you."

He cannot think, cannot breathe. "Why would she do that," he bites out, slowly.

Storm sighs. "I think you’re probably the only one who’s going to get anything out of her. Though Gambit might know something.”

“Gambit,” he repeats, and snaps to attention. He can feel his knuckles shivering again. “Why the hell would he know anything?”

Storm looks at him. “They do spend a lot of time together, Logan,” she says flatly. “It’s possible she would tell him things that she wouldn’t tell you.”

The idea—and the fact that he knows it is not just possible, but likely—must do something ugly to his face, because now Storm is raising both her palms in surrender, saying, “But who knows, it’s just a thought, calm down.”


*


The kid doesn’t come to see him. He sees her almost exclusively with the Cajun, who looks at him much the same way she does; ready to destroy him at the slightest suspicious movement.

He thinks, What the hell is she so angry about, she must’ve known I would do it, and if she didn’t know, come on, it’s not like it’s the end of the world.

And then he remembers something Jean said, about Rogue taking on his personality traits for a little while after the Statue of Liberty, and he wonders if it’s really just his own barely suppressed temper, lashing out at him.

Then he wonders—and he can’t believe it is the first time he has ever thought of it—what else she must have taken from him, that time.

He thinks about Japan, and the word sword, and the cuts on her hand, and the look on her face when he asked for a souvenir.

And none of it makes sense, none of it turns into anything that he can remember. But then again, the one thing he does know about himself is that there is so much he doesn’t remember; nearly an entire life in his head, all behind a door he cannot open, in a room he cannot enter, and even Jean and Xavier hadn’t really wanted to go inside his mind—

And then it dawns on him, that Jean and Xavier are not the only ones who have had access to his head.


*


She knows things, he realizes. She knows things.

And the lost past, which he had finally decided to abandon at Alkali Lake, walking away from Stryker forever—now comes roaring back to him, in a place he hadn’t thought to look.


*


He thinks about his body letting people in without his permission. A girl into his camper, a girl into his room. A girl he hadn’t expected and hadn’t asked for.

When he had thought to himself that he didn’t want to know people anymore, he had forgotten about the possibility of someone else knowing him.


*


Then he stops, chokes, and realizes that if all this is true, she must have seen inside his head again, this latest time.

And this time there are even more thoughts that he doesn’t know—but these ones, he can guess.


*


She still will not talk to him, or even be in the same room as him, but the action movie she wanted to see is coming out the upcoming Friday, so he throws a newspaper down directly on top of her pasta—“What the fuck! Gross, Logan, fuck!”—and says, simply:

“Friday. Seven o’clock. I’ll pick you up in your room.”

“If you’re setting the date of your own death,” she says calmly, “that sounds perfect.”

“Movie first,” he says and walks away, trying not to shake as he does.

Seeing Storm on the other side of the cafeteria, wanting to wipe the smirk off her face.

If the kid already knows what hasn’t let himself know yet, then all he has to do is—know it, too.


*


On Friday morning he is already shaking, because he doesn’t think he really knows yet what he’s supposed to know by now; or because it’s too hard to let himself know it, because he doesn’t want to know it, doesn’t want to open the door that knowledge would show him.

And on Friday evening he still doesn’t know. But he makes his way to the kid’s room, anyway.

At seven o’clock on the dot, her new door is locked, and there is no mistaking the sounds he is hearing. Even the Cajun, who is not the most reserved of sexual partners, sounds utterly, achingly undone. And the bed sounds like it is going to break the wall, the floor, itself, all the furniture in close range.

And he would like to think they are faking it, but he can smell the truth of it from outside the door, probably from the end of the hallway.

Logan swallows, looks down at his watch, which he had bought on the road, somewhere in Canada, by a woman who had looked like Jean. Seven-oh-five.

He knocks on the door, loudly, unmistakably. “Hey, kid, time to go.”

But if the sounds stop for a moment, the moment doesn’t last long, and then once again, every single sound of pleasure and exclusion bursts over him, within him, as if they are doing it in his own ear.

And he wants to put his claws in the new door; he wants to use the key in his pocket to barge in and tear the two apart; he wants to prove every hopeless expectation about himself right—

But then, suddenly, he thinks about what he was trying to teach his students during the tai-chi lesson: about stillness, about rootedness. About being unmovable.

He thinks of himself telling Jean, with wistful hope in his heart: “I could be the good guy.”

And Jean replying, knowing him too well, seeing through him yet again, “Logan, the good guy sticks around.”

Logan knows now what that grave, determined look on the Cajun’s face feels like, because he feels it in his own skin, hardening his features.

So he closes his eyes and swallows. He pulls out a cigar, lights it. Then he sits down, on the ground, next to her door. Hearing everything, smelling everything; enduring everything. And he waits. And waits.


*


When Gambit opens the door and sees Logan waiting there on the ground, even he has the decency to look shocked; then, a grudging acknowledgement.

“Later, minou,” he says loudly, still staring down at Logan, then closes the door behind him, discreetly, so that she will not glimpse the other man.

“I’m going in,” Logan says, standing. “Move.”

“She be busy for a while,” Gambit says. “You give her time to get dressed.”

“I don’t care,” he replies.

Gambit looks at him in appraisal and surprise. The words seem to have won Logan some respect in the Cajun’s eyes.

He says, “Rogue don’t want to see you.”

“I don’t care,” Logan says again. “Move. Now.”

Still looking at him, his appraisal concluded, Gambit shakes his head. “The man don’t even know,” he murmurs to himself.

“Out of my way, or I cut my way through you,” Logan says, and he already regrets it, having made the first threat; but then he doesn’t regret it anymore, because he thinks he might actually do it.

And now Gambit looks extremely satisfied, and Logan knows he was right, about the reasons they had never threatened each other up until now, and he feels his pride take a significant hit.

“Be my guest, mon ami,” the Cajun says, and this time the mon ami is purposeful, barbed, full of the kind of hidden rage Logan has only ever recognized in himself, and Jean.

Then Gambit moves out of the doorframe, and begins to walk down the hallway.

“Eh, Wolverine,” he calls, still walking away. “Gambit don’t have to say—one wrong move, Gambit takes your head.”

He turns back around, and the black and red eyes are fixed upon Logan. “You already know, yeah.”

And then he disappears around the corner, and Logan has to retract his claws, not having remembered putting them out in the first place.


*


The door has already locked on its own, so without a single second thought, Logan pulls out the spare key he has made for himself and opens it again.

She is still in bed, still naked, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling—and when she sees him, she screams, covers herself. “What the fuck,” she says. “How the hell did you get in here?”

He says simply: “Made myself a key.”

She says, “Jesus Christ. Get the fuck out of here.” And she wraps the sheet around her, hops out of bed, and tries to reach for her sweater, on the ground. He stops her, starts to move into her arms.

“Wha—wh—hey,” she says. “I haven’t forgiven you yet, asshole.”

“I don’t care,” he says, and doesn’t move.

“Logan—hold on—wait. Just wait.”

“No,” he says, and buries his face in her hair.

“You don’t have any gloves.”

“I don’t care.”

She is tense as wire underneath the sheet. “Just let me get showered, at least.”

“No.”

Her breathing catches, and she says, “Come on, Logan.”

“No.”

“Logan. Just let me take a shower.”

“No.”

“I know you can smell him,” she snaps, finally.

And he can—he smells the Cajun almost more than he can smell her, at this point. The whole room, her entire body, everything is rubbing the evidence in his face: the reality of her pleasure, of her total and absolute non-belonging, of the two of them together. He thinks he might actually have a kind of rage blackout, smelling it for so long, having it fill his nose so completely, having it be lodged so deeply into his body: this reminder of everything she is and does, that isn’t and will never be open to him, part of him.

And he thinks—with just that little thought, he knows a little bit of what he is still not letting himself know.

His arms around her, he sees that he is actually physically shaking with anger and he remembers the first time they had sex, when he had shaken and shaken, and she had been totally still and nonchalant.

Her voice is a little more gentle now when she says, “Come on, Logan. Five minutes.”

She tries to laugh. “Then we can have some fun, too.”

But he still doesn’t move. “No.”

“Logan, I know you can smell him,” she repeats, her voice rising again. “It makes me feel weird. Just let me take a shower. You must not like it either.”

“Yeah,” he says, barely able to speak through the fury. “I fuckin’ hate it.”

“So let go of—”

“No.” And he pulls up the bedsheet and meets her mouth with his, and realizes it is the first time he has ever kissed her.

And he lets the sheet drop for a moment and brushes his uncovered mouth on hers, quickly pulling away before she can start to protest, and then he yanks the bedsheet back up and kisses her through it again.

“Stop, stop,” she says when he breaks free and moves on to other parts of her body. “Shit. Stop.”

“No,” he says.

“Stop,” she says again.

“That’s not the safe word.”

“Logan, st—”

“That’s not the safe word,” he says again, coming back up to look at her face, directly.

She closes her eyes, and he can barely hear her voice now. “Stop.”

“That’s not the safe word,” he says again, and moves back down to kiss her stomach through the sheet. “Say samurai, and I’ll stop.”

“Logan.”

“Say samurai,” he says, moving further down, where she smells even more like the Cajun. “Or banana. Fuckhead. Sushi. Karaoke.”

She starts laughing in spite of herself, but he can smell the salt on her face. “Logan—”

He looks up at her. “If you want me to stop, then say any of those words.”

But she doesn’t speak, only looks down at him, shaking her head, over and over; in defiance, then in desire.


*


Afterwards, he says, before he loses his nerve:

“I want to know how you got your powers. And I want to know what you saw in my head.”

She freezes, says nothing. Finally, she whispers, “Which times?”

He stares at her. “Every time,” he says, and she jolts, and he knows he has said that to her before.

“Jesus, Logan—”

“There’s time,” he interrupts. “I’ll give you time.”

“Time to what,” she asks.

He looks down, at the bed, at his hands. “Time to not be afraid of whatever you’re gonna tell me,” he says.

She frowns at him. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she says, and she sounds distant again, and he can still smell the Cajun in her skin, in her blood.

“It’s not just for you,” he says, and he hadn’t expected to be that honest.

She closes her eyes. “Logan—”

“Don’t say no,” he says, and he knows it sounds like pleading. “Don’t you say you can’t.”

She looks down at her hands, miserably, and once again she looks like the girl he first met, and this time, he recognizes her; recognizes that girl inside this one, thinking he can see, a little bit, the outline of the path she has taken, to become who she is now.

He touches the top of her head with his mouth, then pulls away again, thinking if he touches her now, again, he won’t care about everything else.

“I’ll give you time,” he repeats, feeling every atom of empty space between them. “And then I’ll ask you again.”

OLD FASCINATIONS, NEW SENSATIONS



Lying in bed, Rogue thinks that this, more or less, is the order of events:

1. She fucks Bobby only once, and badly, before they agree to be friends. She doesn’t envy Kitty.

2. Then she fucks Piotr, a little bit as revenge sex; he has an enormous cock but, unfortunately, doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

3. Then Jubilee—and that is the best sex, so far, goddamn!—playful and generous and untiring; and it is with her that she has her first orgasm with another person, and then her next three, too.

4. Jubilee promises toys, next time.

5. Then two new students, at the same time, what are their names; Joseph and Joel, something like that. And it’s fun, but she has the feeling they’d rather be with each other, and are using her to make that possible.

6. Then Jubilee, again, who follows through with her promise about toys.

7. Then another young student with a reptilian-form mutation and a tongue to match.

8. Then Bobby, again, who has just broken up with Kitty, almost immediately after they have gotten together—and it is much better than the first time, perhaps because while it might be pity sex on her side, it’s revenge sex on his side, and that makes for some interesting moments. At some points, he starts freezing strategic parts of her body, and she doesn’t pity Kitty quite so much anymore.

9. Then she fucks Piotr again, with the motivation of that mountain climber who, when asked why one would want to climb Everest, replied simply, “Because it’s there.” Only, “massive cock” instead of “Everest.”

10. She knows a little more what to do this time, and she demands to be on top, and it’s not only good, but great, especially with him moaning in Russian when he comes.

11. Then, for the first time, she meets the new target-practice instructor from New Orleans, just after one of his students has gone down on her in the Danger Room.

12. Was he watching? She still doesn’t know. Meeting her, he says only, “Gambit, at your service, chère.”

13. She says, with the confidence that only sexual power can give, “Rogue. What kinds of service?”

14. He says, smiling like a cat, “All kind of service, chère.”

15. In-fucking-deed. Jesus Christ, Mother Mary, Joseph, saints and angels, God and Lucifer.

16. The Danger Room is going to smell like sex for a year, after that.

17. Then, she fucks Jubilee again, who says she also fucked Gambit last week, and they both agree: holy motherfucking shit.

18. Jubilee says, “I came so hard I really thought I was gonna die. Like, I literally saw my life flashing before my eyes.”

19. She adds, “And I didn’t care.”

20. But then Jubilee gets a boyfriend, one of the other new students, so their little dalliance come to an end, regretfully on both sides, though they hadn’t ever really been that close to begin with. Only sex brought them together, and Rogue thinks this principle goes for most people in her life.

21. She is waiting for Gambit after his target-practice class, and after she finishes an awkward conversation with the student of his who had eaten her out, he exits the Danger Room, smirking at her.

22. “You’re popular, minette,” he says. He must have been listening.

23. “You, too,” she says. “Fuck me.”

24. And holy motherfucking shit: the sequel. The Danger Room really is going to smell like sex for a year.

25. Then Logan, Storm and Warren come back from San Francisco.

26. Warren makes no secret of his interest, eye-fucking her while he is being introduced to the students. He’s not really her type; a little too delicately-boned, a little too smugly “sensitive,” but hell.

27. She fucks him; and it isn’t really his tiny dick that’s the problem, but his—well, general badness. After all this time, she knows what good sex is, and this is not it. He moves limply, makes desperate little noises, and comes far too soon. And he doesn’t even touch her clit, let alone know where it is.

28. She goes to Gambit almost immediately afterwards, and he is already grinning his cat-grin at her. “Rich boy disappoint you?”

29. “Yup,” she grumbles. “Fuck me right.”

30. And holy motherfucking shit, part three—of infinity, she hopes.

31. Well, not infinity, she thinks quickly.

32. Since she took the cure, since she has started this whole adventure—and perhaps since the beginning, since Laughlin City—she has known that, given the possibility, casual sex would be her relationship status of choice.

33. Of course, since for the past few years she has had neither possibility nor choice, she has made some concessions to things called “romance,” things called “relationships.”

34. Though, if she’s honest with herself, she had never quite found her way into them. After all, she’d been the one anxious to fuck Bobby; Lord love him, he’d probably have held her hand and quietly fingered her with a glove for years. She wanted sensation, not intimacy.

35. Although, when he had seen him making an ice-skating rink for Kitty, she had realized what her life might be without either.

36. To be that jealous, when she didn’t want to be jealous at all; finding herself desperate to hold onto the little she had, when she didn’t want to want anything—she couldn’t let that go on. The cure was the answer; somehow, in some way. She hadn’t worked it all out in her head. She just knew—“I’m doing that.”

37. She’d told Logan that she wanted to get close to people, to touch people, but that hadn’t been the entire truth.

38. Then again, she doesn’t remember ever really telling him an entire truth. She hadn’t even told him her entire name.

39. But she’s not thinking about Logan.

40. In any case, now that she does have both possibility and choice, she wants to choose not to choose—to refuse to play the relationship game, the romance game, the intimacy game.

41. She knows, deeply: it’s not for her, never has been. She has enough people in her head; she doesn’t want any more.

42. In fact, she doesn’t want anything from anyone, except an amazing fuck, nimble fingers, and an eager tongue. Everything else can screw itself.

43. Gambit gives her all three, making her come like a fucking lunatic, so much so that one of the students anonymously posts a note on her door asking for a little consideration, when people are trying to sleep.

44. She makes a point of screaming much, much, much louder for much, much, much longer.

45. This amuses Gambit at first, but he tells her to stop after a while: “Gambit don’t like faking, minou.”

46. Then the news comes, after about a month. In very rare cases, and almost exclusively for those with immunocentric mutations, the cure’s duration has been shown to be—less than permanent.

47. And—fuck.

48. All she knows is—she has to leave. Where isn’t important. She has to leave, now.

49. She hasn’t even seen Logan yet, and she knows he will come to her with his face full of sympathy, kindness—and he is the person she wants to see the least. For too many reasons. For only one. She doesn’t know.

50. She is about to leave, backpack in hand, and Gambit intercepts her in the foyer, just as Logan did, before she left for the cure.

51. He asks, smiling, though she knows he already knows, “Where you goin’, minou?”

52. “Out,” she says.

53. He says, “Come with Gambit, it’ll be better than wherever you’re going, I promise.”

54. “Sorry,” she says, and she is. God, she’ll miss fucking him. Can she fuck him right now, right here? The thought tempts her, and she almost suggests it.

55. “Rogue,” he says, and she is startled for a moment at the serious tone of his voice.

56. “Stay,” he says. Then smiles, still like a cat. “Gambit ain’t done with you, yet.”

57. She looks at him, feels lust and regret tighten in her chest. She really is sorry when she says, “Sorry, swamp rat. That’s all you’re gonna get.”

58. She turns around and leaves him there; but unlike Logan, she doesn’t feel him walk away, into the shadows. He stays there, so she can feel him watching her when she closes the door behind her.


*


59. She hitches a ride to the train station, where she buys a ticket to Manhattan, which is where she had been planning to go, the first time she had run away from the mansion.

60. And sitting in the train, she thinks of it again; thinks of Logan, coming into the carriage to stop her. Already, then, she had already known, she had already had him inside—

61. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

62. And the train to Manhattan is uneventful. She puts her hair up in a ponytail, combing the hair over to hide, for the most part, the white streak.

63. She spends the first half of the week fucking human men, typically in club bathrooms. Her skin isn’t coming back, yet.

64. The second half of the week, her skin is buzzing a little bit, but she can tell it isn’t back yet, so she fucks mutant men, typically in club bathrooms.

65. On the subway, she sees an advertisement warning against high-risk sexual practices, and she feels a little guilty; then, after imagining various scenarios, really guilty.

66. The second week in Manhattan—

67. —the second week in Manhattan.

68. The second week in Manhattan, she wanders into a mutant-human hostess bar, lured in by a handsome young Asian man in a suit who calls her beautiful so many times, she’s embarrassed that the line actually works.

69. Apparently the bar is for humans interested in hooking up with mutants. A kind of mutant fetishist bar, she thinks. They really have everything in the city.

70. They ask if she is human or mutant, and she lies and says, “Human.” Holding onto it for as long as she can.

71. And soon she is surrounded by more-or-less good-looking young men, who give low-powered demonstrations of their mutations, like party tricks.

72. Like Bobby with the ice rose; like Gambit, slowly warming a card on her clit—

73. But she is supposed to forget about that now. She is not going back. She drinks another vodka martini.

74. But in the back, she sees a group of Japanese men and American or European women—and at the center, one man in particular whom she recognizes, and time stops around her body.

75. Knowing she does not know him, knowing that she does.

76. He is quite a bit older than in her memories, silver-haired instead of black-haired, now. But he is still youthful in his face, and even though he is sitting down, she can discern his size from here; six feet six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds, still the same. He hasn’t let himself go.

77. He sees her looking at him, and thinks she is interested, so he murmurs something in the ear of one of the younger men in his circle.

78. A blonde woman is next to him, looking jealous.

79. The young man approaches her, and says, in polite but halting English, “My boss would like to meet you.”

80. Dread and curiosity fills her body—but curiosity wins. Shaking, she stands; tries to smile. She approaches the man, to where he is beckoning her to sit, next to him. The blonde woman has to move down.

81. “Pretty girl,” the man says. “What’s your name?”

82. “Marianne,” she says, and mentally kicks herself, because it’s too goddamn close to her real name.

83. “Marianne,” he repeats. “My name is Ryuuji.”

84. No, it’s not, she thinks to herself. It’s Harada Kenichiro.

85. And—fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

86. “You like my bar,” he asks.

87. “Is this your bar?” she asks, and she is genuinely surprised.

88. “Well, my friends and I own part of it,” he replies. She thinks, I’ll bet you do.

89. And what is she doing, what is she doing, what is she doing, what is she doing.

90. She hadn’t meant to sit down here, hadn’t meant to meet this man—

91. She hadn’t thought she would ever have to; she had always thought that he would remain an intimate stranger, a ghost in her head.

92. One of many—and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

93. Now the past comes crashing back to her, but it isn’t her past, it isn’t her past—

94. But here he is, and she cannot help but want to know more, to want answers; to want to finally fill in the blanks to the memories in her head that do not belong to her but occupy her nevertheless.

95. He says, “Are you from New York?”

96. She says, No, she’s from—“Alabama,” she supplies, quickly. She had almost said Mississippi. She needs to get it together.

97. “Ah, that’s where your accent comes from,” he says. “It’s very sexy.”

98. She says, “I like your accent, too.”

99. “Yes, I’m from Japan,” he says. “Have you ever been there?”

100. Yes.

101. “No,” she says. “I’ve never even been outside of America before.”

102. Japan, Canada, Poland, Germany, England—

103. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

104. “It’s much smaller than America,” he says, smiling. His English is actually quite perfect; it’s only his accent that gives him away. “Very crowded. But also very beautiful, especially in the spring time.”

105. The blonde woman is glaring at her. A girlfriend? A wife?

106. “I’ve heard,” she hears herself saying. “The sakura blossoms in the spring time.”

107. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

108. He looks at her, pleased. “Yes, that’s right, sakura,” he says. “Many tourists come for that. Japan is well known for the cherry blossoms.

109. And thank god it’s well known for it; because that’s not how she knew it.

110. She looks at his hands, knowing: Logan has fought those hands.

111. She sees a scar, thinks it might have been Logan’s doing, then she tries to remember; and yes, it was.

112. “You like Japanese men, too?” he asks, leaning towards her. The blonde woman is really glaring now.

113. She thinks: she should suck his skin, and then she would know more.

114. And then she is horrified at her own thoughts, horrified that she would do that to an old man. Who knows who he is now, what his life is. She has to remind herself that it is not her revenge she is carrying out; it is not her fight.

115. How many times has she had to tell herself this: Not her memories. Not her past.

116. But the anger she feels is real, and it is as if she is sixteen again, and hasn’t she learned to cut that shit out already?

117. But she hadn’t ever run into one of Logan’s ghosts in a bar before. And this one is a hell of a first one.

118. Still. She is not going to touch him. She is not going to touch him.

119. She doesn’t even know if her mutation is activated, anyway. She isn’t even wearing gloves, just a very long-sleeved shirt, that hangs well over her fingertips.

120. But looking at him, she thinks she is changing her mind; unable to stop herself from repeating: what he did—what he did—what he did—

121. No.

122. He buys her another drink, and as she is drinking it, she realizes there is something in it, because she is starting to feel thick and syrupy inside her own body.

123. And Harada is leaning over her, about to kiss her, and she tries her best to push him away, trying to convey to him that she isn’t pushing him away as a girl who is fending off an attacker who apparently drugs his future conquests—

124. —though of course, she is doing that, too—

125. —but as a mutant with powers. With powers.

126. But it’s too late, and he kisses her on the mouth.

127. And the powers are definitely back, because he is in her, and with a blinding rush, she has more answers than she wanted, to more questions than she had thought to ask.

128. She has enough presence of mind to jolt and push him away, fast—and they hadn’t kissed for more than a few seconds, but she already can feel his mutation ghosting her skin, can already feel the tachyon field around her, and everything around her buzzing with the possibility of turning into a potential blade.

129. And Harada falls backwards in his seat, unconscious.

130. Everyone is shouting, in Japanese and English—both of which she understands, thanks to Logan—

131. —whom she touched much longer for a few seconds; both times—

132. Not fucking now, she tells herself.

133. And the blonde woman next to him leaps up, tells the other men—whom Rogue understands are about to shoot her—and says in Japanese that she will take care of it.

134. And the woman drags Rogue by the hair and shirt, towards the kitchen, where the woman seems to want the fight to take place. The woman is too strong, she can’t even move, let alone find a patch of skin.

135. Other patrons pretend not to notice. The workers in the kitchen, seeing the blonde woman, hurry out.

136. She thinks: I’m going to die.

137. The blonde woman punches her in the stomach, and Rogue flies onto a steel countertop, knocking over a mixing bowl that clatters to the ground, and the pain is unmaking her.

138. The woman is fucking strong.

139. And now she is shouting, in English, “Who are you? Who do you work for?”

140. And she punches Rogue in the stomach again; she seems to have figured out that she has to avoid her skin. Her blows have now moved them through the kitchen, out the back doors, into an abandoned alleyway that smells profoundly of garbage and mold.

141. Rogue thinks she is some cross between Harada’s consort and bodyguard; the only reason the woman hasn’t killed her yet is because she want answers.

142. She punches Rogue in the stomach one more time, harder—and Rogue thinks dully that soon the woman is probably going to give up on answers—and asks, “Who do you work for?”

143. “Weapon X,” Rogue chokes out, not knowing why, thinking it is probably a bad idea, but at least it will buy her time.

144. And the blonde woman’s eyes widen, then narrow. “Then you’re dead,” she says, and lunges forward to punch Rogue one more time, in the stomach—

145. But Rogue uses the dwindling powers she has just stolen from Harada to tear a hole in her shirt, though in her panic it is a little uncontrolled, so she knows she has showered cuts all over her stomach, as well—

146. —so that when the blonde woman punches her, the skin of her fist connects with the skin of Rogue’s stomach—

147. And the pull begins before the impact of the strike can be absorbed.

148. The woman falls, her hand stuck to Rogue’s stomach. She tries to tear her hand away, to punch again with her free hand, clawing—

149. But Rogue grabs the woman’s hand with her own, now, and screams as the pull roars against her, inside her.

150. When the woman falls to the ground, an eternity later but still too shortly after, Rogue cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot think.

151. But she hears footsteps coming towards the alley from inside the kitchen, and she knows, she has to run, run, run, fast, or she really will die, now—

152. So she runs—

153. But after a while, she realizes she is not quite on the ground anymore.

154. She runs through the Meatpacking District, trying to keep her feet from lifting into the air, feeling her entire body shifting itself, and the only thing that she knows belongs to her now are the tears on her face.


*


155. When she gets back to her hotel, she cannot generate the tachyon field anymore. Harada has already disappeared from her body.

156. But the woman feels different; different from Erik, different from Logan, the only people she had touched like that.

157. Rogue has retained all of their memories—or as much as she lets herself remember, since she had forced herself to start forgetting them more or less immediately after obtaining them.

158. More or less successfully. Less successfully, in some cases.

159. But the woman feels different; her memories are there, with Erik’s and Logan’s, and once again Rogue feels as though she has read twenty books at once, with all the jumbled thoughts and facts and reminiscences floating—

160. But the woman feels different; the power doesn’t feel like a heavy coat she is trying on momentarily; the way it felt with Harada, and even the way it felt with Erik, Logan, John—

161. (Although John had been special; she had already, secretly, been practicing how to control, if not her mutation entirely, then, at least, to some extent, the content of what she took. And on her first trial, she had succeeded; she hadn’t taken any of John’s memories, just his power. But she’d never gotten the chance to do it again; and this evening, she’d been too frantic to control it and try.)

162. But the woman feels different.

163. The woman feels different.

164. The power already feels like a part of her; deep as marrow in her bones. It feels as though she has always had it, and always will.

165. And she knows, without knowing how, that she is right.

166. She has killed a woman. She has taken all of her life.

167. And then she starts to vomit.


*


168. After a few minutes, she is able to make it to the bathroom, where she resumes vomiting in the toilet.

169. As the adrenaline wears off, she is starting to feel the thick effects of that drug again, as well as the bruises on her stomach, so she puts two fingers down her throat, makes herself vomit.

170. Thinking: This, in her blood now, is the woman’s life.

171. And then she doesn’t have to make herself vomit anymore. Tears mix with it.

172. She thinks she’s gotten rid of the drug, at least; but her stomach still pains her, though not as much as she knows it would have, if she hadn’t absorbed the woman.

173. And she vomits again.

174. It is like this, while she is on the floor of a shitty hotel bathroom, bitter saliva hanging from her mouth, tears and snot covering her lips and chin, that the bathroom door opens.

175. And she thinks—this is it, they followed me, after all.

176. Thinking again: I’m going to die.


*


177. But Gambit is standing there, in his light body armor and trench coat, carrying his staff, smiling.

178. As a greeting, he says only, “Told you Gambit ain’t done with you yet.”

179. And she isn’t sure if the sound she is making is laughter or sobbing.


*


180. “What a cheesy fuckin’ line,” she says, when she can finally speak again.

181. “I think you like it,” he says, and she is back to laugh-sobbing, or sob-laughing, for a long while.


*


182. “How,” she asks, when she has wiped her mouth with the towel he is stretching out towards her.

183. She is perched on the edge of the bathtub. Tears are still streaming from her eyes, but she doesn’t feel the emotion of crying anymore, grown numb to it; her body is doing all the work for her.

184. “Thieves and Assassins’ Guild,” he replies. “Gambit have some old friends who come to this bar. Even this swamp rat know what a yakuza is.”

185. She looks down.

186. “You know it’s owned by yakuza, yeah,” he says, and it isn’t really a question.

187. “Yeah,” she mutters, wiping her face with the towel again. The tears aren’t stopping. “So you were an assassin?”

188. “Thief,” he corrects her. “Thieves’ Guild. Until not too long ago, Thieves’ Guild and Assassins’ Guild was enemies. Now they have a union.”

189. “Now that you’re gone?” she quips, trying to smile.

190. “Yeah,” he says, also smiling; but his smile makes more tears come down from her face.

191. He adds, “But there still some people loyal to Gambit. Willing to fight a few little yakuza for him, anyway.”

192. And her eyes widen. Fuck. “What happened?”

193. “Nothin’ happen,” he says, still smiling. He shifts his weight, and she sees that there is blood on his staff.

194. “Much,” he adds, when he sees that she has seen it.

195. “Fuck,” she whispers, aloud this time.

196. “Nothin’ happened that don’t happen every weekend from New Orleans to Tokyo, believe it. Small-time thugs fighting each other, that’s nothing.”

197. Then his eyes narrow. “But what you were doing—with Harada Kenichiro and his girl of the week—now, that don’t happen every weekend.”

198. “Some girl of the week,” she muttered.

199. “She’s dead,” Gambit tells her.

200. “I know,” she snaps. “I killed her.”

201. “I know,” he says. “Good. She woulda killed you if you hadn’t.”

202. She lifts an eyebrow at him. “You sure you’re not part assassin?”

203. He laughs. “Maybe a little bit,” he says.

204. He picks up his staff, puts the bloody end of it in the sink, and starts rinsing it with water. “So, you want to tell this old thief why you were messing around with the old kumicho of Yashida-gumi?”

205. She stares at him. “How do you know all that?”

206. “You insult me, minou,” he says, wiping his now-clean staff with another towel. “I keep informed.”

207. “Yashida-gumi,” he pronounces. “Part of Yamaguchi-gumi; biggest and wealthiest yakuza clan in Japan.”

208. She lowers her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

209. “I saved your life,” Gambit says, pointing his staff at her, so it is only a few inches from her nose.

210. And she has said that before, to someone else—but unlike Logan, she isn’t going to say, No, you didn’t, when it might be true.

211. Instead, she takes hold of the staff, hard. “You wouldn’t like it if I broke this, would you?”

212. He grins and doesn’t move it. “I get others. I’m a thief, remember?”

213. She tightens her grip on the staff, but doesn’t break it. She lets go, and says, reluctantly, “He has something to do with someone I know.”

214. “Someone you’d kill for,” he elaborates.

215. “No,” she says, though it is true, and she has done such a good job of not thinking too much about Logan, she isn’t going to fail now.

216. He studies her. “Yes,” he states, with absolute certainty. “Someone you’d kill for.”

217. She glares at him. “I don’t like you so much when you’re not fucking me.”

218. “Or licking you,” he adds, pleased. “Or—”

219. “All right, all right,” she mutters.

220. He smiles, then pauses. “So this someone you’d kill for, he’s at the mansion,” he says, and it’s not a question, either.

221. She stands from the bathtub rim, tries to step out of the bathroom. He doesn’t let her, blocking the door frame with his body.

222. He stares down at her, and she can see his eyes from up close. She wonders why they don’t scare her, not even a little, the way they seem to scare everyone else.

223. Instead, they turn her on, always and badly, speaking to something small and heated and coiled within her, and she is annoyed at herself for getting wet just by being this close to him, just by seeing those eyes.

224. He seems to have noticed, because he is smiling now, and moving closer, saying, “Maybe you tell Gambit later, eh, minou?”

225. And he tries to kiss her, to touch her bare stomach, with its network of tiny cuts, still exposed by the tear in her shirt—

226. And she jumps back, shouting, “No, don’t!”

227. He looks at her, perplexed. “Why?”

228. “My mutation,” she explains. “It’s back.”

229. “So?” he asks.

230. “So,” she snarls. “So, if you touch me, I’ll fuckin’ kill you, just like that woman.”

231. “So Gambit be careful, yeah,” he says, stepping towards her again.

232. She throws the tear-and-snot-covered towel at his face. “You’re too fuckin’ horny for your own good.”

233. “I’m serious, minou,” he says, catching the towel. Then he laughs to himself. “Gambit’s always serious about sex.”

234. “No,” she says firmly. “Not anymore.”

235. He stares at her. “What, ‘no, not anymore?’”

236. “No,” she repeats, more slowly, as if he is an idiot, which he is. “Not anymore.”

237. He is still staring at her. “What—you done, you close up shop, like that?”

238. “Pretty much,” she says.

239. He starts to laugh. “You sure give up easy, minou.”

240. “Yup,” she says. “Now move, I want to lie down.”

241. He continues staring down at her, then lets her pass. She flops onto the bed, facedown.

242. “Gambit don’t give up that easy,” he calls after her. “But we not gonna have this conversation tonight. Let’s finish the other one first.”

243. “Fuck, motherfuck,” she says, raising her head. “Is this conversation the price of your magic cock? ‘Cause it is fuckin’ cher, chèr.”

244. “Pas mal,” he says, impressed. “You speak some French?”

245. “No,” she mutters. Only the little French that Erik knew.

246. And dammit—get back, back, back, back, back, memory.

247. “So, this someone you kill for, he’s at the mansion,” Gambit repeats.

248. “How’d you know it’s a he,” she mumbles into her pillow.

249. There is a silence, and she looks up to see him scrutinizing her.

250. “Because it is,” he says at last.

251. “That’s a good argument,” she says.

252. “Tell me I’m wrong,” Gambit says.

253. She says nothing. “Aha,” he says, and she wants to punch him; knowing that if she does, he’ll probably fly into the wall. The thought is enticing.

254. “So he’s at the mansion,” he repeats, for the hundredth time.

255. “Yes,” she says finally. “Jesus Mary fuck. He’s at the mansion.”

256. She can feel herself being scrutinized once again.

257. “It’s the Wolverine,” he says only.

258. Her head whips around. “How the hell do you know that?”

259. “I didn’t,” he says. “Do now.”

260. And she is going to punch him.

261. He sees the impulse, and is smart enough to back away from the bed, leaning against the small desk situated on the other side of the room.

262. “Because you didn’t fuck him,” he says. “Barely even talked to him. That’s how Gambit know.”

263. She stares at him.

264. “He special to you,” he says, with a look she cannot read.

265. “No,” she says. “He’s just Logan.”

266. He starts to smile. “So you gonna tell him what happened, then, tonight.”

267. Her face goes white. “No—and please, please, please don’t—Gambit—I’m begging you—don’t—”

268. “Ah,” Gambit says, and his smile makes her chest tighten again. “He’s special.”

269. And she closes her eyes, feeling the tears already coming.

270. “Fuckin’ swamp rat,” she says, wiping her face. “The only thing I like about you is your cock.”

271. He is still smiling. “And tongue,” he says.

272. Then, from the desk, he extends his staff towards her and pets her head with it, as she begins to cry again.


*


273. After she has finished crying, he asks, “How you gonna explain the powers?”

274. “I’m not going to,” she says plainly.

275. He snorts. “So you just gonna walk into that mansion with all these new powers, and say, ‘Bonjour, everyone, Papa Nöel came early this year’?”

276. “No,” she says testily. “I’m not gonna tell them anything. I’m not going back to the mansion at all.”

277. And now the staff smacks her on her shoulder, swiftly and sharply.

278. “No,” he says. “You can’t stay in the city, minou. My friends and I didn’t do nothin’ too bad to those guys back there, but if they see you, they’ll kill you, no doubt about it.”

279. “They’re all going back to Japan tomorrow,” she says. “They were only here for the weekend.”

280. He looks at her. “How you know that?”

281. She sighs. “He kissed me, so I absorbed him a little bit. He’s mostly gone now, though. The woman’s taking up almost everything.”

282. “Well,” he says, looking relieved and disappointed at the same time. He has lost some leverage.

283. Then he smiles. “If you don’t come back, Gambit gonna tell your man what happened.”

284. “He’s not my man, and I’ll fuckin’ kill you,” she hisses.

285. That worked, he seems to think to himself, because his smile is huge now.

286. And she really will punch him.

287. “You come back, or Gambit tell everyone,” he says innocently. “That’s the deal.”

288. “What is this, blackmail?” she cries.

289. “Yep,” he says.

290. She explodes. “What the hell is this? Who are you? What are you even doin’ here? I barely fuckin’ know you, and because your skeezy friends spot me in the city, you come to play knight-in-shining-armor?”

291. She laughs, hoping it sounds cruel. “What are you, in love with me?”

292. “Little bit,” he says simply, and she chokes.

293. “Come again?” she asks.

294. “And again and again, as Gambit recall,” he says, grinning.

295. She grabs his staff and is really about to break it now, but he moves quickly enough to pull it back from her, and stand it up at his side. “Uh, uh, uh, easy now, chère,” he says.

296. “You’re ‘a little bit’ in love with me?” she repeats in disbelief. “What the fuck is that?”

297. “That’s that,” he says. “A little bit in love with you. Not a lot. Just a little. For now.”

298. “You’re fucking everything that moves in the mansion,” she says.

299. “So’re you,” he points out.

300. “But I’m not even a little bit in love with you, or anybody else,” she says.

301. “Really,” he says, and it’s that goddamn pained smile again. “Gambit don’t usually kill for people he just find nice.”

302. “Well, that’s why you’re not an assassin,” she says.

303. “No,” he says, staring at her. “Lots of reasons, for that.”

304. She frowns. “Look, I appreciate your—help, and all. But I can’t come back to the mansion.”

305. “Because he’s there,” he finishes.

306. “No,” she cries out, exasperated. “Because my mutation came back.”

307. He scratches his head with the staff. “Last Gambit checked, it was a school for mutants.”

308. “I just don’t have a life there anymore,” she declares. She looks down at her hands, covered by her sleeves.

309. “Last month, I could do anything I wanted, I could live any way I wanted. Now I’m going to have to be stuck in a bubble again, all covered up, with nothing. Either I’ll have to live there, all alone; or worse, I’ll have to get close to someone, be someone’s sweet unfuckable girlfriend again—”

310. And the idea makes her skin crawl.

311. She continues, “I’d rather live alone, anywhere else. Where I can live the way I want, on my terms.”

312. He looks at her. “You can live any way you want,” he says slowly. “You got lots more than nothin’.”

313. “Spare me,” she says.

314. He gestures at her body. “Look at all them new powers you got. You could do some real good on the team with that power, now.”

315. “Oh, yeah,” she bites out. “And what am I supposed to tell them about how I got these powers, ‘Papa Nöel came early this year’?”

316. “Could do,” he says, amused. “Or do what you said; don’t tell ‘em nothin’. It’s your business, they can’t pry. And I won’t tell.”

317. He puts a hand on his heart. “Thief’s honor.”

318. She snorts. “So what, I just join the team, just like this?”

319. However, having said it aloud, the thought appeals to her more than she would expect. Being strong, finally; being in control of something; having a place of worth; doing something helpful for the people who had helped her, who had given her everything. She likes that.

320. And he sees that she is softening, because he stretches the staff out towards her again, and pokes her face with it lightly.

321. “That’s right,” he murmurs. “Just like this. This face should join the team.”

322. “You just wanna fuck me more,” she mutters.

323. “Yep,” he says again.

324. She looks down at her hands, covered by the long sleeves. At the tear in her shirt.

325. “I give you a week,” Gambit says. “If this old thief’s tongue isn’t licking you in a week, then I’m using it to tell everybody what happened. Comprends?”

326. She looks at him. “Gambit—” she says softly.

327. “Remy,” he says.

328. She blinks. His name; his real name. She thinks she might have seen it on a document somewhere, but he has never told it to her before.

329. And she wants to tell him her name—but then she thinks—there’s still only one person she has ever told it to, and—

330. He raises his hand. “No worries, chère,” he says. “Gambit don’t ask nothin’ from you, ‘cept that you think about coming back to the mansion .”

331. He starts to grin. “And about letting me fuck you a little more,” he adds.

332. She can feel herself nodding. “Okay,” she says quietly. “I’ll think about it.”

333. “Bon,” he says. “I’ll be going. You go sleep now, minou.”

334. “All right,” she says, lowering her head to look down at her hands.

335. Then he approaches the bed, stands in front of her.

336. “You didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” he says, clearly and deliberately, fixing her with his eyes. Making sure she hears and registers every word. “She woulda killed you. Comprends?”

337. She closes her eyes and feels the tears and the vomit again, but she swallows them both.

338. “Yeah,” she rasps out.

339. Gambit looks somewhat satisfied. “Good girl,” he says again, and leans forward to kiss her—but she leans back, eyes fearful.

340. He gazes down at her, smiles, then brings his staff up to kiss it—even sticking his tongue out to lick it. Then he touches the staff to her cheek, her mouth.

341. “Ew, it’s wet,” she says.

342. “That ain’t what you said last week,” he remarks. “Bonne nuit, minou.”

343. “Good night,” she says.

344. And when he is gone, she still feels the wet patch on her cheek, her mouth.


*


345. The next day she buys gloves, more long-sleeve shirts. Knowing she has already made her decision.

346. Still, she waits five more days; she doesn’t want the rat to think he’s that convincing.

347. It’s enough time for the cuts and bruising on her body to mostly fade, and she thinks she must have gotten some increased durability, along with the rest of the powers that she is now teaching herself about, parsing through the woman’s memories.

348. She doesn’t have to teach herself much; she has taken the woman’s sense memories, too. She kicks, and her leg goes higher than she had ever thought it capable.

349. Though she doesn’t have the muscle to accommodate it yet, so she is sore as hell afterwards.

350. She spends nearly all five days working out: she goes running in the park; buys protein powders that taste like vanilla chalk, and lifts weights in a nearby gym, trying to ignore the stares from permanent members, at this strange new guest member: at her gloves, long-sleeve shirt, and long sweatpants. She sweats like a pig, but she needs the muscles in her body to match the ones in her mind.

351. But on the sixth day, she takes the train back to the mansion, and for the first time, she nearly calls it home, to herself.

352. But when she walks through the front doors, she nearly turns around and walks back out. She can feel the changed atmosphere among the students, knowing that she is at once “one of them” again; and at the same time, a total exile. Mutants whose genitals she has licked now give her a wide, wide berth.

353. She is sick and nervous and miserable, and for a moment, and she feels sixteen again—

354. Until she thinks, Well, fuck ‘em—and she doesn’t feel sixteen anymore, at all.

355. She thinks Gambit will be the first one to find her, with a smug grin and a sexual invitation she isn’t entirely sure she is capable of turning down.

356. But it’s worse; Logan is the first one to find her, just before she re-enters her old room.

357. And she has spent so much time trying not to think of him, so much time studiously ignoring his presence in her mind, that it has actually worked—she is surprised to see him; so surprised that she is not ready, at all, to see him, and needs to get out of this situation as quickly as possible.

358. Sounding angrier than she has ever heard him speak to her, he says, “Where the hell have you been?”

359. She says, “Manhattan,” and shuts the door behind her. And she throws herself on the bed, facedown, thinking, That went well.

360. Once she is in her old bed, she realizes how tired she is, and falls asleep, still facedown, her growing muscles grateful.

361. A few hours later, a knock comes on her door, and of course it is the Cajun, smiling like the cat who ate the canary. “Funny seeing you here, minou,” he says.

362. “Fuck you,” she says.

363. “All right,” he says happily.

364. “No, no—what I said before still stands,” she insists.

365. “What, how you can’t live your life the way you want?” He rolls his eyes. “Believe me, Gambit ain’t the only one who still wants you. You should hear the boys talk.”

366. She shakes her head. “You’re lying.”

367. “You think you can fuck a metal cock, or a cock made of ice?” he asks her, grinning. “‘Cause Piotr and Bobby are wondering.”

368. And the idea does sound interesting—but that’s not the point, that’s not the point, that’s not the point. “That’s not the point,” she says.

369. “That is the point,” he replies. “You can live how you want. You wanna fuck all the time, you got options. You wanna join the team, let’s go talk to Storm.”

370. Thoughtfully, he adds, “I think you should teach. Flying and combat, somethin’ like that.”

371. “You’re getting too far ahead of yourself, swamp rat,” she says.

372. He shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “This swamp rat just showing you that you got a life here. There’s good things here.”

373. He smiles distantly. “Sure as hell better here, than out there.”

374. She looks away. “I’ll talk to Storm,” she says finally.

375. “Good,” he says. “Now what about the fucking?”

376. She rolls her eyes. “Good night, Gambit,” she says, closing the door.

377. “Remy,” he calls as the door closes.


*


378. The next day, she goes to Storm’s office. Storm looks worried, but not angry or hurt. Rogue thinks with a wince that she probably expects this sort of thing from her. Storm, who hadn’t been happy about her taking the cure—Storm, who had already come to the train station the first time she ran away, looking for her.

379. She realizes, for the first time, with horror, that they must have looked for her this time, too.

380. Rogue says, “I’m so sorry,” and Storm’s face softens.

381. Gently, she says they were all worried about her; Logan especially.

382. Rogue tries not to think about that last part, and apologizes again.

383. “It’s all right, honey,” Storm says. “We’re happy you’re back.” She lowers her voice. “And despite what you might think—I’m very sorry. About the cure.”

384. She looks down at Rogue’s gloved hands. “So your powers are back, now?”

385. Rogue nods. Storm looks relieved.

386. Then Rogue swallows and says, “Actually I have—something to—tell you about that, too.”


*


387. And in the Danger Room, fighting Piotr and Warren, who volunteered for this demonstration of her new powers, she feels great, better than she has ever felt before; almost as good as fucking Gambit, she thinks—

388. —and she knows her resolve on that particular issue isn’t going to last long. She is already thinking of scarves, plastic, latex, the Danger Room, the supply closet, the garage, every car in the garage, the garden, the medbay, every position possible, and these new muscles will come in handy—

389. And just as she is hook-kicking Warren in the middle of one of her fantasies, she glimpses Logan staring at her from the viewing room, and the fantasy shifts without her permission.

390. After the demonstration is over, she goes up to the viewing room to meet Storm, tentatively waiting for the barrage of questions from Logan—but he isn’t there.

391. She isn’t sure if she is relieved, or even more worried. But she has impressed Storm, and that’s all that matters.

392. And when she goes back to her room, Gambit is already waiting outside her door, leaning against it.

393. “You do good?” he asks, standing up straight.

394. “All right, I think,” she says, unable to hide her smile.

395. He gazes at her. “You look good like that, minou.”

396. She looks down at herself; sweaty, disheveled, make-up likely smudged, her armpits rank as hell.

397. “You like that?” she teases. “I guess it’s true what they say about French people and stinky armpits.”

398. “Not French,” he says. “Cajun. Better. Don’t forget it.”

399. She laughs and pulls the key out of her sweatpants. “I’ll try not to.”

400. Behind her, he is already pressing her to the door.

401. “Stinky armpits, huh,” he murmurs. “Gambit like it.”

402. He sniffs, deeply. “Maybe we make an appointment for every time you finish at the Danger Room, eh.”

403. “Pervert,” she mumbles, but she already knows that all her resolve is gone. She wants to fuck him again, desperately—until it makes her more sore than five days of working out.

404. And he knows it, the rat.

405. He must have thought this through, because he has a little square silk kerchief of his own in his pocket, thin enough to be kissed through.

406. Thin enough to be eaten out through.

407. And holy motherfucking shit, it is as good as she remembers, and she doesn’t know how she could have deprived herself of this for nearly a week.

408. Then he asks if she wants to be naked, or if she wants him to be naked; and she is touched that at the generosity of that choice.

409. “You be naked,” she says, reaching for her nightstand drawer, full of condoms and four pairs of strategically altered pairs of tights she had made while dating Bobby, thinking they could use them, though they never did. “As punishment for makin’ me come back to the mansion.”

410. And because her cuts and bruises are just about to fade, but aren’t quite healed, she thinks.

411. “Gambit makes you come in other ways, then,” he says. Then he looks down at her, and she can feel herself warming again, at the sight of his eyes. “And it ain’t no punishment.”

412. And holy motherfucking shit, holy motherfucking shit, holy motherfucking shit.

413. Before he leaves, he says, slipping on his trench coat: “Gambit knew you’d come back.”

414. “I didn’t come back for you, swamp rat,” she says.

415. “I know,” he replies calmly.

416. And she blinks. “No—I didn’t come back for him, either.”

417. He smiles, but doesn’t seem to believe her.

418. “You make this old thief happy, coming back,” he says only. “Gambit missed your face.”

419. “Sweet-talker,” she says.

420. “Yep,” he says. “Later, minou.”

421. And she stretches, letting herself bask in the feeling a little bit.

422. Then she climbs out of bed, towards her bathroom. She is drenched in Danger Room sweat, plus Gambit-sex sweat; but she kind of loves it, is a little sad to feel it dissipate underneath the hot spray.

423. And in the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a towel, she thinks she can hear a frantic knocking at her door, and she thinks, Gambit? An emergency?

424. She hastily puts on a pair of gloves, a new pair of sweatpants and a mismatching long-sleeved shirt, throwing the towel on the bed.

425. When she opens the door, Logan is there, looking half-furious, half-terrified.

426. “Jesus, Logan, it’s just you,” she says, when she can finally breathe again. “I thought there was an emergency or something.”

427. He doesn’t say her, but seems to be smelling her, taking in her clothes, her wet hair.

428. Then, with a gruff voice, he tells her she is a certified bad-ass now; she agrees, delighted at the compliment—especially from him.

429. Then he asks how she got the powers.

430. And she grins with all the joy she can muster in her heart, and shakes her head. “Not telling,” she says. “Why not?” he asks.

431. “Because I don’t feel like it,” she replies, and knows that she is successfully keeping all the pain and unease from her voice.

432. Because it is true, anyway; she doesn’t feel like telling him. And she never will.

433. He is looking at her again, and she thinks she knows this look; but it can’t come from him, it can’t come from him.

434. He moves, as though he is about to leave, so she relaxes; but then he turns back and asks her about Gambit, as if he is pulling teeth. “You and the new guy—that’s still going well?”

435. And she bursts out laughing, more out of shock, rather than an actual comic reaction. “Going well?” she repeats. “We’re just fucking each other.”

436. Although that is going really well; going so well, she already wants to do it again, is thinking of going over to his room.

437. She adds, “So yeah, it’s going really well, actually.”

438. Then she shrugs and says, “As long as the sex is good, I’m not that picky.” She wiggles a gloved hand at him and smirks. “It’s hard for a girl to find a creatively inspired partner.”

439. He says, and she doesn’t know what he is saying, “So what, anyone’s okay?”

440. She looks at him for a moment, then says, honestly: “As long as it’s good, and it stays strictly casual, anyone’s okay.”

441. He asks, and she doesn’t know what he is asking, “Even me?”

442. But then she knows what he is asking.

443. And he is really asking this, she realizes. He is really asking this.

444. But—she can go as far as he can, she thinks. If not farther. She is not a sixteen-year-old girl anymore.

445. She raises an eyebrow at him. “If you’re any good,” she says, also honestly.

446. He looks at her. “You got a scarf?” he barks out, finally.

447. She walks over to her drawer, retrieves a clean scarf. She takes off her sweatpants, puts on a new pair of tights, then walks back to him, like that.

448. “You’re prepared,” he remarks quietly, taking the scarf, looking at the tights.

449. “Yeah, well, I like to—” But he is already kneeling, putting the scarf between her thighs and she has to grab his hair to steady herself.

450. And when they fuck, neither of them are naked, because after he makes her come once, she lunges at him, practically the minute he gets the condom on.

451. That she is fucking Logan; that this could be happening so nonchalantly, so easily, makes her actually feel that it is nonchalant, easy.

452. Like she told herself; she has always wanted a life in which she could choose not to choose; a life in which she could refuse to belong to anyone. Out of the relationship game, the romance game, the intimacy game. She has enough people in her head; she doesn’t want anymore.

453. Nothing but an amazing fuck, eager fingers, a nimble tongue.

454. But if Logan happens to have all those things; and, to top it off, asks nothing else from her—

455. Then she can do it with him, too.

456. Why not. Why not. She is not sixteen years old, anymore. Sixteen years old and in love with a man in her head.

457. She has already long left that girl behind. It’s that girl that she needed to be cured of, she thinks. And she has been; completely.

458. But then she thinks of Harada Kenichiro—and the things she had just learned, that she hasn’t even let herself think about yet, the answers she has, the things she knows without knowing anything—

459. But she won’t, won’t, won’t think of them—they are not her memories—it is not her fight—it is not her past—it is not her past—

460. And now Logan is growling, and she doesn’t think of Harada anymore.


*


461. Afterwards, she tries not to see how much he is trembling; that he looks like he has been hit by a bus. She wonders if she is really that good; but she thinks she is, actually.

462. She says, with all the calm in her body—but she realizes, it isn’t an act; she actually is calm—

463. “Okay, you pass.”

She thinks about Gambit’s words. You can live any way you want.

This wasn’t one of the ways I imagined, she thinks. But it’s still a way, she knows.

She is not a sixteen-year-old girl anymore. In love with a man in her head. Knowing everything without knowing anything. Working so hard, every day, to erase it all, forget it all.

Like she told Gambit: she isn’t even a little bit in love with anyone, anymore. The only real thing is her own want. And she thinks that this way to live, is a way she wants.

I’M SO GLAD THAT I’M AN ISLAND



“There is no explanation of sexuality which reduces it to anything other than itself, for it is already something other than itself, and indeed, if we like, our whole being. Sexuality, it is said, is dramatic because we commit our whole personal life to it. But just why do we do this? Why is our body, for us, the mirror of our being, unless because it is a natural self, a current of given existence, with the result that we never know whether the forces which bear us on are its or ours—or with the result rather that they are never entirely its or ours. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is any sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.”


The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.


*


After the first time, she avoids Logan carefully for a few days—waiting for him to take it back, to say it was all a mistake, to mumble something about not wanting her to “get all weird on me,” to grunt something about her youth, her importance to him, to mumble something like, “you, uh, mean a lot to me, kid.” To say it should never happen again.

She thinks she would prefer that; then thinks about it longer, and knows she would prefer that. While fucking Logan has its obvious—delights—now that she thinks about it again, she isn’t quite sure that adding him to the roster of casual fucks she’s accumulating is an entirely intelligent idea. If she is now remaking her entire life the way she truly wants it—against monogamy, against belonging, against false intimacy—the idea of revisiting a youthful infatuation seems slightly counterintuitive.

And whenever she is around him, the ghosts in her memories only speak louder, and all the work she has done to be able to quiet them seems for naught.

But then she thinks of what the rat had said; how he had known Logan was special because she hadn’t dared to fuck him—and she wants to prove him wrong; prove herself wrong. Knowing that with this, that youthful infatuation can be erased, replaced with the life she is living now—a life that makes her happy in a way that youth never did, or could.

And the day after the first time with Logan, she sees Gambit in the hallway, near the garage. He tells her, smirking, that on his way out of her room he saw the Wolverine, on his way in.

“Trying to prove to Gambit that he ain’t no one special?” the Cajun asks, and she wants to punch him for getting it right.

“No,” she says, crossing her arms, adjusting her green and gold scarf.

He looks at her. Then his eyes glaze over, a little, and he leans closer, looking down at her legs. “Those them special tights, minou?”

She looks at him. Then, looks next to her, at the hood of the nearest car, a Porsche Carrera GT.

And grins.


*


In any case, Logan doesn’t say any of those things, when she finally runs into him again—making sure to greet him as pleasantly as she can. Instead he only looks at her with some mixture of tortured uncertainty and poorly concealed lust; and she doesn’t mind the first, as long as she can have the second, a little less concealed.

And when she sees him in the garage while she is looking for the scarf she left there the last time with Gambit, she thinks, Either it happens, or it doesn’t.

His gaze on her back is so obvious, she thinks he has finally made a decision, but every time she shoots a glance at him, ready to acknowledge his unspoken desire, he is back to looking at the Veyron with an expression of enormous concentration. The idea of a shy Logan—a Logan unsure of how to act around her—is so foreign to her, she doesn’t do anything at first.

She considers going up to him, telling him it’s all right, telling him not to look so worried—but she thinks that would only make him feel more aware of it, more uncomfortable.

So instead, she calls out, bluntly, “Either quit staring at my ass, or do something about it. Jesus.”

He doesn’t look at her at first, still staring down at the car as if waiting for it to give him advice. Then, before she can read the look on his face, he is stalking over to her, yanking her scarf off and lifting up her skirt.

And it’s even better than the last time.


*


And afterwards, as she leaves him to fiddle with the condom, he calls after her, “So this is okay, then,” and her brain is still in an post-orgasmic haze, so she doesn’t understand what the hell he is talking about.

She turns around, and he looks supremely uncomfortable when he says, “This kind of—thing—we can—do it. Sometimes.”

And she can’t help but burst into peals of laughter, because she was right; he is shy, and unsure. So much so that he can’t even say the words—sex, fucking, sitting on my face while I eat you out, letting you suck me off, riding me backwards—and when he has finally said them, looks like he would have rather eaten his own face.

She asks if he’s a schoolgirl. And he looks angry, embarrassed at his own discomfort—but, not saying “forget it,” not brushing her off; still wanting to know the answer to his non-question.

So she repeats her previous words to him. As long as it’s good and as long as it’s casual. And it is the truth.

Then she turns around and continues walking away—then, out of the corner eye, she sees the reason she came into the garage in the first place. She is genuinely overjoyed; it had been one of her favorite scarves.

Well, mostly the reason. She had seen him go in first.


*


But despite Logan’s unarguable talents, he has a tendency to say things in bed that piss her off.

Things like, “I can’t believe I’m fucking the girl who ate all my jerky,” while she rides him.

It shocks her so much she stops all her movements to look down at him—because she is not that girl, and he is not going to think that.

“You’re not,” she says, and rolls her hips, and she is satisfied to see his eyes roll back up into their sockets.


*


She knows that he and Storm are sleeping together; she has seen him leaving her office or her room, looking slightly rumpled and antsy, the way she now knows he looks after sex.

That the knowledge doesn’t bother her, not even a little bit, is a surprising pleasure. Hell, she would like her own chance at Storm; but knowing that the woman is such an important figure in the mansion, and furthermore, a somewhat complicated mother figure in her own life—Storm’s disappointment at her taking the cure had hurt her more than she has ever admitted aloud—cancels that possibility entirely.

Gambit has even slept with Storm, a couple times; when she asks how it was, Gambit tells her, too briefly, until she asks for more detail, and the glint in his eyes gets even brighter.

That was a fun night. Well, night-to-morning. Role-play is fun, she marvels.

But she can imagine Logan and Storm; the things they have been through, the people they have lost together—the two of them had been much more affected by it all; she hadn’t really ever known Scott, and Xavier had always been gentle and courteous, but distant, with the distance of age.

And as for Jean, she had always felt equal parts admiration and discomfort in her presence. There was something about her that reminded Rogue of Logan—and to a lesser extent, herself—something adult and melancholy and guarded. And the woman had died before Rogue could become an adult, too; and be able to see her with the eyes of one.

She knows only that Logan loved her, in a way that was pained and private and theirs alone—and she since she knows so much about Logan already, without wanting to, she wants to keep it that way. When he had touched her at the Statue of Liberty, the seed of that love had already been there; and she has always tried her best to protect that seed from her own eyes.

If she can help it, she doesn’t want to intrude upon his feelings for Jean. That he should have at least one thing she hasn’t accidentally seen, one thing that can remain, as much as possible, in his heart alone, seems like one of the best silent kindnesses she can give him.


*


The day she first demonstrated her new powers to Storm, she had asked the woman if it would be possible to have some sort of position on the teaching staff of the mansion.

Storm looks both hesitant and hopeful, saying, “But you’re still pretty young—”

She points out, “Piotr is teaching European literature and politics, plus transformed-states training. Even Bobby’s learning from him.”

Storm smiles wryly. “Yes, well, Piotr is a year older than you—and, well, he’s Piotr. He could’ve taught European literature and politics ten years ago.”

“I could be like an assistant or something,” Rogue suggests. “I have all these sense memories to go with the new strength, I’m super durable, and Gambit said something about me teaching flying lessons, too, and I think that would be good; you don’t have a flying instructor on the team now that you've taken over as leader, and I think I can teach a lot, about balance, about which muscles to focus on to lessen the impact on the body, and I’ve been really training a lot, every day—and—”

She notices that in her excitement, she is rambling; and she realizes: She really wants this. To be able to do this. This is a life she wants.

Storm thinks for a moment, then says, “All right. Show me. If I think it’s a good idea—maybe I’ll give you a month or so to train a little bit more, on your own, just to prepare yourself. Then we can think about starting you out as someone’s assistant.”

But after the demonstration, Storm says—and the pride and amazement in her voice makes Rogue feel like she is standing on top of the world—“I don’t think you’ll need a month. You’ll start a week from now.”

“Really?” she asks, feeling her cheeks literally glowing. “Who am I gonna work with?”

“I think Logan would be the best choice,” Storm replies, and the glow turns into a freeze.

Storm continues, “You both specialize in hand-to-hand combat, but he has specific martial arts training, while you have your more acrobatic style, and your flying ability. You could make for a very well-rounded class. And students with corresponding abilities would be able to learn from both you.”

“Er, well,” Rogue says. “That all sounds good—really—but the thing is, er. We’re sort of—sleeping together.”

Storm doesn’t look surprised at all, which in turn doesn’t surprise her; but she still wants to explain. “Not seriously or anything, just casually—but would that be a problem?”

“Would it be a problem for you?” Storm asks.

“Not at all,” she replies openly.

“Then it’s not a problem,” Storm says. She grins. “It’s not unheard of for instructors to have sex with each other.”

Rogue laughs at that. Gambit and Storm, Storm and Logan, Jean and Scott; no, it isn’t unheard of.

“Okay,” she says, exhaling. “Thank you.”

She turns to leave, but Storm calls, “Still don’t want to tell us what happened?”

Rogue turns around again, tensing. “No,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Storm smiles, a little sadly. “No apologies necessary,” she says. “I’m just happy you’re back, honey.”

Rogue is about to leave again, but then she looks at Storm and says, “Why?”

The woman says, “Why what?”

“Why, ‘no apologies necessary?’” she asks. Her eyes lower.

She knows she cannot and does not want to tell anyone, especially Logan, but it doesn’t make her feel any less awful about having to lie to Storm, whose respect and admiration she craves.

“Why are you trusting me,” she whispers, looking at her shoes. “I could’ve done something bad, right.”

When she lifts her head, Storm is still gazing at her, her face gentle. “I’m trusting you because I trust you,” she responds.

She adds, softly, “And because from here, it looks like you’re the one something bad happened to.”

Rogue feels her chest constrict. Then the woman says, “If you’re ever ready to talk, you know where to find me,” and gestures down at Xavier’s old desk, hardly changed.

And she hadn’t said, “when you’re ready to talk.” Giving her the possibility of never having to talk about it, forever.

Rogue thinks, talking to Xavier in her head—you made a good place, here. You picked good people.


*


Logan is less supportive of her becoming an assistant instructor—but that bullshit lasts for about four seconds, because she isn’t sixteen, or weak, and so she throws him like the stubborn piece of shit he is.

His own students look shaken at the alarming sound his body makes when he crashes to the ground before them—and she even winks at one of them, a young boy who looks like he has instantly fallen in love.


*


In bed, Gambit asks her, “So what you teaching then, minou?”

“Hand-to-hand combat and flying,” she replies, knowing he will take credit for it.

And he does, grinning. “Ah, that’s a good idea, very good idea—where you get such a good idea, eh?”

She grabs his still sensitive balls with one gloved hand. “Watch it.”

He doesn’t look that fazed, leans his hips forwards into her touch. “Think that would hurt you as much as Gambit, minou.” She rolls her eyes.

“So who you teaching with,” he asks.

She looks at him, trying to gauge whether or not he is teasing her; but he truly does not seem to know, so she says, casually, “Logan.”

He goes still, then raises an eyebrow. “You think that’s a good idea?”

She shrugs. “Sure. And it makes sense for the team. We have similar abilities.”

“Mm-hmm,” he says. Then he sits up on his elbow. “You know he’s sleeping with Stormy, yeah?”

“Yeah, I know,” she replies.

“And that don’t bother you?”

She gives him a look. “No, it really doesn’t,” she says. She makes a show of narrowing her eyes suspiciously. “And shouldn’t you be more worried about whether or not I’m bothered about you sleeping with Storm?”

“No,” he says, his eyes steady on hers. “I know you ain’t.”

She smirks. “That make you sad, swamp rat? Want me to be jealous?” She massages the balls, then brings her other hand up to make a fist around his cock, and he closes his eyes as she starts to stroke him.

“Yeah,” he says, eyes closed. “But only for real.”


*


And the rat was right about Piotr and Bobby still wanting to fuck her; because one day, Piotr asks if he can fuck her in his metal form, and she is at once excited and alarmed. And it’s sort of too much—they both agree that manual and oral sex is better for them. Metal fingers are a fucking revelation.

She makes the same discovery with Bobby; while fucking his ice cock is a little less daunting than Piotr—mostly because he is not as intimidating, size-wise—they come to prefer oral sex. Apparently getting a rimjob while in ice form is a fantasy of his that no one has yet fulfilled. And how can a tongue made of ice still seem so supple?

As she is about to come, she thinks, The world is a flower full of magnificent and wonderful rainbows—and then she can’t think anymore.


*


But Logan is still occasionally saying infuriating things during sex. Fingering her in the Danger Room after class, he has his nose deep in her hair, and he mumbles, close enough to her ear that she is almost about to warn him to back off, “God, you smell good, what is that.”

And this time, she can’t stop herself from punching him in the stomach. He falls backwards like Buster Keaton.

The last thing she wants is a cheesy line, a pretense at romance, at something related to “passion,” and she tells him so. Then without feeling bad about it at all, asks if he is hurt. He is still clutching his stomach.

“Nah,” he says, and when he looks up at her, his face is practically suffused with lust. “I kinda liked it.”

The breath hitches in her throat. “We’ll need a safe word,” she says.

She isn’t really into pain games with anyone else, though Gambit has been known to enjoy a good bit of light hair-pulling and pinching—both giving and taking—but she’s definitely not opposed to new experiences. On the contrary.

He makes a move to lift himself back up, but she likes him too much where she is, so she tells him to stay there. She floats her scarf over his mouth, then lowers herself onto his face. And the sound of arousal he makes rumbles all the way up into her chest.


*


If Gambit sees the tiny scratches accidentally made on her back from just the tip of Logan’s claws during a particularly acrobatic session, he doesn’t say anything.

But a few sessions later, while his gloved hand is stroking her, he bites down sharply on the underside of her breast, and she starts coming, immediately.

He looks down at her, smirking, and says, “Interesting, minou.”


*


And teaching is just as she’d hoped it would be—despite Logan’s sometime annoying tendency to undermine her authority by asking things like, “You sure about that, kid?” or “Be careful, here.”

Luckily, all of their students are pretty young—none of them are high-school age yet, like Gambit’s students. Logan is surprisingly good with them, foul-mouthed and unrelenting, but she sees how a single grunt of praise from him makes their faces light up, makes them run and brag to their friends about how the Wolverine actually thought they were worth something, today.

She remembers how that feels. What is it about him, she wonders. To want his recognition, his admiration. Is it because he gives it out so reluctantly that any gesture of approval seems like a monumental victory?

Or is it because of him, Logan himself: the stern code of honor to which he holds himself accountable; the lonely, guarded silhouette of devotion he makes, picking up equipment in the Danger Room after class has ended; the tentative way he lets himself be surrounded by his students, still unused to having so many people around him, still unused to being anything more than utterly, totally alone.

Teaching alongside him, she can see that she isn’t the only one who has wanted to wrap arms around his hardened shape and feel it yield, a little. Every student looking at him, worshipful as future lovers.


*


She wonders if Logan and Jean were ever able to do anything with each other. She is inclined to think not; for all the woman’s obvious attraction to Logan, she always seemed incredibly faithful, the wistful fidelity of a complicated woman, trying her best to be simple.

The kind of woman who would walk silently out of the jet, while they were all frantically panicking, and lift that jet above water with one hand—while holding back the very instant of her own death, with the other.

And she remembers the professor turning to them all, whispering Jean’s last words to them in his own mouth, his entire face breaking.

Seeing Logan’s panic, Scott’s panic—then his thin, cracked, tightly wound voice as he held a hysterical Scott and said, as if the words were foreign words, as if saying them would teach him what they meant, “She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.”

She hadn’t been able to do anything for him then, and she hadn’t tried. He keeps that loss close, his own private shrine to mourn around; she hopes she never has to really touch him again, because she doesn’t want to know firsthand what it feels like. Even though she is a little older, she doesn’t harbor any illusions about the idea that her newfound maturity might now give her insight into his pain. What age has given her is the realization that every death is a different world; every loss a loss like never before.

We don’t share pain, she thinks. We might share something else—kindness, gentleness. But not the original pain. That is his. She hopes she never takes it from him.


*


When she and Logan are thinking up safe words, she makes the mistake of saying too many Japanese or Japan-related words, without even thinking about it. Our minds are strange and treacherous, she thinks. Thinking then, of the things she has already taken from him.

Only when she suggests samurai, after already having said sushi and karaoke, does she realize that her mind might be acting on its own. And she doesn’t like that, she doesn’t like that at all.

Remembering, cursing herself. Harada Kenichiro, code name Silver Samurai.

And fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Logan is already looking at her suspiciously after she has come up with that clumsy lie about seeing Zatoichi with Jubilee. But unfortunately, now Logan seems to agree on samurai, and if she decides to change it, it will look even more suspicious.

So she decides to divert the attention from her own discomfort, and suggests they try it out. She picks him up, flies away from the bed, and drops him onto his naked ass. The sound he always makes when he drops on the ground is becoming incredibly satisfying.


*


But now, not only does Logan say aggravating things during sex, he sometimes says them afterwards, too. Another time, as she is putting on her clothes, he asks her again about how she got the powers.

She doesn’t look at him, zipping up her jeans. “Nope.” She looks at Logan’s alarm clock; she is supposed to meet Gambit soon, she still needs to shower.

“Not even if I ask nicely?” he asks, and he sounds as if he is trying his best to sound kind, understanding, laid-back—and it sounds fucking creepy, frankly. She’d rather he ask her naturally, which is to say, meanly—though she knows she wouldn’t tell him then, either.

And she tells him just that, pointing to the delicious sex injury he has left on her back.

Behind her, she can hear him, choke out, “You wanna go another round?” And she thinks, someone does like pain games, hm.

But she really does need to take a shower; even she can smell Logan all over her, and throughout all her trysts, she has always been careful to shower in between. She doesn’t really care about the mix of smells herself, but she knows Logan’s nose well enough to know that even after a shower, he might smell the rat, or Piotr, or Bobby. And while she doesn’t pretend to be tender, she is at least decent.

She doesn’t think Gambit would love it, either, the smell of cigar and some other guy’s bitter cum; even if he is only a little in love with her. She rolls her eyes inwardly, at that. Ridiculous.

So she apologizes to Logan, zips up her left boot, and leaves without looking back at him.


*


“You’ve been surprisingly well-behaved,” she tells Gambit, lounging in his bed.

He blinks. “How so, minou?”

She says, “I kinda thought you and Logan would be like cats and dogs. But I haven’t even seen you guys talk, let alone argue. Do you guys even ever see each other?”

“I see him,” he says, playing with her nipple with gloved fingers. “He come to the poker night.”

She freezes. “What poker night?”

He pinches her nipple lightly. “Men’s poker night. Bobby, Piotr, Kurt, Warren, Logan, and Gambit. We play poker every week.”

“When?” she asks.

“It changes,” he says. “Besides, Gambit wouldn’t tell you nothin’, anyway.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“Boys’ rule,” he replies.

Then he looks at her. “And because if you know Gambit’s going to poker night, you won’t fuck me right before,” he says. “And this old thief wouldn’t like that so much.”

“Pervert,” she says, hitting his face lightly. He smiles, but doesn’t say anything else.

“I didn’t know you guys saw each other regularly,” she muses. “So you get along, then. Sort of.”

“Nope,” Gambit says. “I don’t like him, he don’t like me.”

She glances at him. “Any other reason besides the obvious one?”

He pinches her nipple again, harder so that she yelps. “Because of how he plays poker.”

She doesn’t know anything about poker. “How?”

He brings the sheet over the nipple, so that he can bite it, lightly; then a little harder. “Too conservative. Folds if he don’t got nothing. Don’t like to bluff. Scared he’s gonna lose.”

“Isn’t poker all about luck, anyway?” she points out.

“No,” he says. “It’s about what you do with the luck. He don’t do nothing with his bad luck, don’t make nothing of it. Not imaginative enough.”

“He’s plenty imaginative in bed,” she teases.

“Gambit just take your word for it, minou,” he mumbles, then brings his other hand up to her other breast, and they aren’t talking anymore.


*


One evening, Gambit comes back into her room, and while he is undressing, asks, “So you got hyper-immunity, or something?”

She looks at him. “Huh?”

He unzips his pants, pulls them off. “Piotr and I was talking a while ago. He was trying to explain your mutation to me, and why the cure don’t work on powers like yours.”

“Oh,” she says. She hasn’t thought about the failed cure in a little while. “Well—I guess. I don’t know. He could probably explain it to me, too.”

“So you explain it your way,” Gambit says, kicking off his socks, and leaning back in her bed in just his boxer-briefs. “How it work.”

“I was going to do something more fun than a science lesson,” she says in a dirty voice.

“This first,” he says. He covers his crotch. “Interdit,” he says. “Forbidden. For now.”

“I think that’ll hurt you as much as me, chèr,” she says, mockingly. He snorts, but doesn’t budge on the subject.

“How it works,” she says. “I don’t know. It first kicked in when I was kissing a boy—”

“How old,” he interrupts.

“Sixteen,” she replies.

“First kiss at sixteen,” he muses to himself.

She glares at him. “We didn’t all fuck our math teacher in middle school, swamp rat.”

“Didn’t have no math teacher,” he replies. “No middle school, neither. Keep going.”

“Well—I was kissing him, and it just started—sucking.”

“That don’t sound too bad,” he says. “Do you want to hear this or not?” she demands.

He lifts a hand for her to continue; and when he brings his hand away from his crotch, she sees that he is hard.

He sees her looking at it, smiles, says, “Don’t you worry about this, minou. Gambit’s had worse. Keep going.”

She rolls her eyes. “So it just started sucking, and it felt weird, so I pulled away—but he was already passed out, unconscious. I started freaking out, my parents came in, I don’t even remember how it all happened—but suddenly he was in my head, and I could hear all his most recent thoughts, his memories. Like, I knew that he was horny, that he had been drinking milk that morning, it felt like I could taste milk, even though I’m lactose intolerant.”

Gambit is gazing at her thoughtfully. “Hm,” he says.

“And, well, the next person I touched was Logan—”

“The Wolverine?” he asks, sitting up. “You touched him? When?”

She sighs. She doesn’t really want to tell this story; she hasn’t ever told it, and now it feels so far away, she feels as though she is talking about a younger cousin of hers, or a character in a story she read a few years ago.

“We came to the mansion together,” she says. “It was about a month after I ran away from home. I’d been moving around in Canada. I saw him in a cage fight bar; saw that he was a mutant, too. I thought he’d be—understanding, or something.”

The memory of it stings her, so she starts talking faster. “I snuck into his camper. That’s it. Then we were attacked, and when I woke up, I was in the mansion, and so was he. Storm and Scott—” Then she realizes Gambit does not know Scott, but she’s already said it, so she continues, “—came to save us.”

“Lots of holes in that story, minou,” he says. “But okay. Gambit still don’t know how you touched him.”

“He was having a nightmare,” she begins. “We were in adjacent rooms, so I could hear him. I went over and tried to wake him up, but when he woke up, he accidentally put his claws out, and they stabbed me in the chest.”

Now Gambit is sitting straight up in bed, staring at her. His eyes go, instinctively, to her chest.

“No scar,” she says, pulling her shirt down to show him, though he should already know. “I touched him, and took his healing factor.” She swallows, closes her eyes for a minute, then opens them again. “It almost killed him.”

“And so it closed up,” he says. “It closed up,” she confirms.

“Good,” he says. “And afterwards, you got his memories and things like that, too?”

Her face darkens before she can reign herself in, and it’s too late, he’s already noticed. But he is silent, waiting for her to say it. “Yeah,” she says. “But that time it was still okay.”

“There was another time?” he asks, and his voice is just the slightest bit too sharp.

God, why is she telling this fucking story.

“Yeah. Later, Magneto touched me—” And she sees Gambit’s fist close around her sheet. She goes on, “He wanted me to power some device, so I needed to absorb his powers for that; I don’t know, it was complicated. Anyway, he touched me for a really long time. I still have a lot of his memories and thoughts. None of his powers, anymore, though. But a lot of his memories and thoughts. It’s pretty much as if they were all my own.”

“And then,” he says.

“Well, then, he made me power the device, and after that, I think I was pretty much dead,” she says, and Gambit grips the sheet again, then lets go of it quickly, looking down at his own hand in surprise. She thinks she sees a slight singe mark on the sheet.

“But then Logan touched me—you have to understand, other people told me the story, I don’t know how it happened, I was already gone—and, well, I guess at some point, I wasn’t dead anymore. I just woke up all of a sudden, and he was touching me, and he was all bloody and wounded, and I panicked and pushed him away, and he just passed out.”

He watches her. “And then,” he says, quietly.

"That's it," she says.

He shakes his head, not having it. "No. And then. What you absorbed."

She lowers her eyes. “Well,” she begins, then her own fists tighten. “Well. It was different from Erik. I mean, Magneto.”

She exhales heavily. “With Logan—I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. But it was like, because he sort of brought me back from the dead, the first life that was in me was his, you know? Sort of like a blood transfusion—but instead of that, a life transfusion.” She scratches her head. “Does that make sense? Like there was nothing in me, then it was like, he was there first, and then his life in me woke the rest of me up.”

Gambit doesn’t say anything then.

But she is not looking at him, but down at her feet, encased in the thin black nylon of her special tights. Already prepared for sex, feeling so far away from it.

“His memories in my head are different,” she says softly. “They never went away, after that. And I got a lot of them. All mixed up in there. Before I used to go around remembering things that never happened to me. It took me a long time to control it, to make a dividing line between all of his stuff and all of my stuff.

“It’s different even from the woman I—you know,” she says, gesturing with her hand. “The woman I killed. Her memories aren’t even as strong as his.”

He tilts his head at that. “Strange, no?”

She hesitates. “No,” she says. “I think it might be stronger with him because Logan himself doesn’t have his own memory.” He looks at her.

“He lost his memory about eighteen years ago,” she explains. “He doesn’t remember anything before that.”

Gambit stops, and stares at her. Then his face changes. “But you do,” he murmurs.

She nods. “Yeah,” she says, looking down at her gloved hands. “It’s like I stole it or something. Or like, it came out stronger in me because it had been dying to come out in him, and just couldn’t, somehow. Like it finally had a place to unfold, or something.

“Like—you know how some people have phantom limbs, when they lose a limb? And it feels just as strong and real as your old arm? Well, it was like—I had his phantom limb, or something—or I had his real arm, while he had the phantom—or—”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, minou,” he says. He is resting his elbows on his naked knees, now, leaning forward. “Thank you. For this story.”

“I don’t even remember your original question,” she says sheepishly.

“You already answered it,” he says simply. Then he leans back, placing his hands back on the bed. “Now Gambit know how it work.”

She smirks at him. “You scared?”

“A little,” he says, and she is surprised at his candor.

“For you, too,” he says. “For you to have Gambit in your head.” His eyes are just south of meeting her own. “Wouldn’t wish that on you, minou.”

“I can control some parts of it,” she tells him. “I mean, I haven’t practiced that much, but—if I concentrate, I can try to take just powers, instead of memories. Of course, that only goes for mutants; I never tried it on a human before. And if it’s starting, I can usually stay present enough to push the other person away, if it was an accident. Faster than I used to be able to. It doesn’t make me dizzy, anymore. I can stay in control of the situation. Usually.”

Then her face crumbles. “Though—that time—with the woman—I was a little drunk and drugged, too, so—it didn’t—I couldn’t—”

And the nausea is coming back, the ground is sweeping up to cover her head—but he barks, “Chère. You did exactly the right thing. Yeah? You got nothin’ to feel guilty for.”

“I know,” she says, rubbing at her eyes, trying to breathe deeply. “I know.”

“Know it better,” he says, staring at her.

She can’t tear herself from his gaze for a moment. “Okay,” she mumbles.

Gambit looks to the side of her, thinking. “Now Gambit see,” he reflects.

“See what?” she asks.

He seems to think about something for a minute. Then, he opens his mouth. “Why you do what you do,” he says. “Why you are how you are.”

“And how is that,” she retorts sharply, crossing her arms.

“Strong,” he says. “Strong.” And her face softens with pleasure.

Then he covers his eyes with his hands. “Okay,” he says. “Gambit gonna tell you something, minou, since you told me so much.” She looks at him, curiously.

“I can charm people,” he says, his voice solemn.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know you think you’re so gr—”

“No,” he says harshly. “It’s a hypnotic power. I can use it to tell people what to do.”

Her mouth drops. “Wait, what? What the hell? So have you used it on me?” Then she snorts. “Is that how you got me into bed with you? I knew you were a rat.”

“No,” he says. “Gambit never used it on you. And now I can never can.”

She looks at him in question. He explains, “It only works on people who don’t know about it. Nobody else in the mansion know this before. Now you the first.”

She stares at him. He stares back, with the eyes that have always aroused her. Now they do something else, she isn’t sure what.

“So now you know,” he says. “It won’t work on you no more.”

Then he smiles. “So if I want something from you, Gambit gonna have to ask you nicely.” He snickers. “Or steal it from you.”

She approaches him. “Oh, yeah?” she asks roughly, climbing onto the bed, onto his lap. “So tell me something you want.”

Gambit laughs, leans forwards to slide his arms up her back. “Too many to name them all, minou. I’d rather just do them.”

He smirks. “Anyway, everything Gambit want to do right now, you want to do, too.”

“Cocky Cajun,” she mutters, and slides down to pull off his boxers.


*


And then, then, then—they receive news that Hank’s home in D.C. has been burned down.

And they are all shaken, especially Storm—in fact, Rogue notices that Storm is shaken most of all, in a way that she has never seen before, as if with this news, it is the first time she has ever heard of death—even though she has just recently lost three of her closest friends. But this news about Hank is different, for Storm—and Rogue thinks she can put a finger on why, but isn’t entirely sure.

Storm tells them that some of the staff will occasionally be asked to work as bodyguards for Hank, to supplement his current security staff during this precarious time. Everyone agrees immediately, though later, in bed, Gambit tells her, “Why Gambit gotta be a bodyguard for some government jerk? I don’t trust none of these politicians.”

“Because he’s a friend,” Rogue snaps at him. “Because he would do it for you and me.”

He looks at her. “Well, if he would do it for you, minou,” he says, all sparkling charm all of a sudden, crawling over her.

“Pervert,” she says, looking up at him.

“You love it,” he says. “I don’t love anything,” she says, then cries out in pain and lust when he bites down hard on her breast through her scarf.


*


Gambit comes into her room and says, his face dark, “Got assigned on the first mission.”

“Ha!” she crows. “Serves you right, complaining about it! You better protect Hank good, swamp rat.” She smiles. “Really—he’s the face of mutants everywhere. And super nice. And he was always super sweet to me.”

“He sound like a treat,” Gambit says dryly.

“Who are you going with?” she asks. And he looks at her, pointedly. “Guess,” he says.

She stares at him, then starts laughing. “No, really? That’s pretty funny. Storm has a good sense of humor.”

“Hilarious,” he mutters, and starts undoing her top.

As he does, she looks up into his eyes. “What, you bothered?” She takes his gloved hand with her bare one. “The mission is about protecting Hank. Don’t fight with him, okay?”

He slips her top off, undoes her bra with a snap. “Gambit don’t fight for a girl,” he says. “I’ll kill for a girl; but not fighting. That’s kids’ play. He wants to fight me, I kill him, that’s it.”

“No one’s gonna be doing any killing, assassin,” she barks. “Thief,” he barks back.

“Coulda fooled me,” she says. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Don’t you worry, minou,” he says. “This old thief knows better than to fight over you. If he tries, he don’t know nothing about you.”

“He won’t try,” she says, as he pulls her sweatpants and underwear off, but he doesn’t respond and then, again, there is no more talking.


*


Still—she thinks of Hank, of the burning house. Of Storm’s stricken and ashen face; when she must have been thinking about the possibility of a Hank-less world.

And the day of the mission, she goes to Logan’s room and fucks him without speaking, without taking off any of her clothes, just pulling up her skirt and sliding on top of him, as if she is afraid that words will jinx something, break something—eyes closed, hearing the noises of pleasure he makes.

She only opens them once, to smack him, when he tries to tickle her into speaking, and fails. And before she leaves, she only says, “Have a safe trip,” trying not to think the inevitable thought: what if these are the last, what if these are the last, what if these are the last words. Thinking, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan.

Afterwards, she goes to her room, and Gambit is waiting for her there, leaning outside her door, already in his body armor, his trench coat draped over his arm.

She looks at him, surprised. “I was going to shower and come to you,” she says. “I know,” he says, after a short pause.

She lets him into the room. “Just one minute,” she says, her voice a little shaky from having been silent nearly all day. She hurries into the bathroom, quickly strips off her clothes, and hops into the shower.

Behind her, she can hear the shower curtain slide open. He is there, still in his armor but without the shin guards and kneepads; still wearing gloves and socks. “Wait, watch out,” she says, trying to keep the water out of her mouth as she speaks. “I’m naked, and you—”

“All covered,” he says, and begins to touch her. And he does only that, touch her, and the water is in her eyes so she cannot see anymore, cannot see the look on his face or in his eyes. And then he pulls a silk square kerchief out from under his collar—and she recognizes it as the one he used, that first time, after she had come back to the mansion—and kisses her.

Then he pulls back and says, “Let’s go to the room.”

And they fuck on her bed, drenching it with water. This time, he is the wordless one, closing his eyes, which he almost never does.

Afterwards, he looks at the alarm clock on her nightstand, curses, and says he will be late, he will only have time to run back to his room and change into a spare body armor.

“Okay,” she says. “Have a safe trip.”

He brings the kerchief back up, kisses her on the cheek, then bites the flesh there, lightly. “Later, minou.”

And when he is gone, she lies down on the puddle in her bed, and tries not to think about why he would come to her room, already in his armor, ready to leave, when he claimed to have known she was going to come to his room. And was she going to go to his room, she wonders.

She closes her eyes, touches herself, feeling water chill her back. Thinking, thinking, of nothing, of no one.


*


While they are away, she has another rendezvous with Piotr. “What’s great about sucking your cock,” she says, while she is doing it, “is that there’s no messy clean-up afterwards.” Piotr laughs hard at that.

Then she meets Bobby in his room, and he gives her a sharp, cold, stinging orgasm with his ice tongue, making her come with a surprised shout. Afterwards, she tells him what she told Piotr, since the same goes for him, too.

Jokingly, she suggests to Bobby that the three of them do something together—and she sees something in Bobby’s eyes shift and darken with desire, and then something more than desire, and she thinks, Ah, ah.

She doesn’t know if Piotr feels the same way about Bobby, but she wonders if she shouldn’t do something, try to find some way to get them together—but then she stops herself. If she doesn’t want to be match-made; she shouldn’t do it for anyone else, either.

If they figure it out, they figure it out, she decides. It’s up to them.


*


When she hears from Storm that they have all arrived home safely, she feels as though she has lost three pounds in held breath alone.

Then realizes, she has called the mansion “home,” and the three pounds are gained back in her sharp intake of breath.


*


When she is fucking Logan, and she asks how the mission went, he says, “Boring. Better right here.”

When she is fucking Gambit, and she asks how the mission went, “Boring. Gambit missed you, minou.”


*


Then, when she is assigned on a mission with Logan and Warren, she has to stop herself from cursing out loud in Storm’s office. They are the two people she least wants to accompany on a mission; Logan, for being Logan, and Warren for being something of a passive-aggressive douche bag since the first and last time they fucked, after which she began evading all of his subsequent advances.

Hank’s a friend, asshole, she reminds herself, using the same arguments she used with Gambit. He would do it for you.

Only Logan looks more uncomfortable than she does; but when Storm says the mission is a gala taking place on a rooftop, necessitating mutants with flying abilities, just in case, the reluctant looks slide from their faces.

She is a little disappointed that the mission is something as tame as a ball, she had been hoping for something a little more action-filled—she wonders if Storm isn’t overreacting, just a tiny bit. But then, anything can happen anywhere, and she remembers the look on Storm’s face, and doesn’t ever want to feel it on her own, so she doesn’t complain.

Sure enough, the ball is a colossal bore (colossal! Ha! She thinks of Piotr, smiles; then thinks of Bobby and Piotr, and smiles a little more wistfully), not at all helped by Logan’s almost total lack of humor the entire night—either he is taking the mission incredibly seriously, or he’s annoyed about something. He barely speaks to her or Warren, just standing near Hank and scowling at cater-waiters as they come by with silver plates of shrimp rolls and Spanish tapas.

Then one young man, tall and damned cute, if blond—she finds she prefers dark-haired men, personally—comes up to her and says, “Oh, are you Rogue?”

And how the hell he would know her name. She doesn’t know. So she asks, suspiciously, “Who’s asking?”

He says his name is Joshua, explains that he was Hank’s assistant during his time in the Cabinet, which she realizes is the President’s Cabinet. He says Hank has told him about her, and she wonders what Hank could possibly have told him—then he mentions Erik, saying, “I heard you had a close encounter with Magneto.”

Ah. Yes; that must not have gone under the radar of the United States government. The girl who nearly got killed by Magneto while he was trying to kill as many world leaders as possible.

She isn’t her anymore, she thinks to herself, and almost wants to tell him that he’s got the wrong girl.

Then she thinks of someone else who had a close encounter with Magneto; someone else who was there, during that close encounter with Magneto. She can’t help but look over at Logan, who is already looking at her, too. But before she can look away, she is already telling the young man, “Pretty close.”

Logan and Hank move to the other side of the room; she looks over at them. Logan is glaring at yet another cater-waiter who has the audacity to offer him a flute of champagne. Hank sees her looking, and gestures for her to continue talking to Joshua, making a subtle thumbs-up gesture with his hand, then smiling apologetically.

This entire time, he has seemed incredibly embarrassed by the entire situation; having to be protected by the three of them, not the most inconspicuous group—Warren with his special suit, with its strategic slashes, ready to let his wings fly, Logan with the murderous look on his face, her in her gloves and high-necked jumpsuit.

She thinks Hank must also be of the opinion that Storm is overreacting; but whenever someone mentions her, his eyes manage to both soften and harden at the same time. And Rogue thinks of all the things she does not know, and will not understand. Things that are pained and private and theirs.

The young man tells her something funny that she cannot quite remember only twenty seconds later, but he is young, and cute, and obviously interested in her, and a little flirting never hurt anybody.

But then he suggests, rather brazenly, that they meet up at his room later. She looks at him, laughs, and shakes her head regretfully. “I can’t,” she says, pointing at her skin. “My mutation is my skin; I absorb people through their skin. No touching.”

He looks at her. “Can you touch people in other states?”

She blinks. “I—what, like metal and ice? Yeah, usually.”

He lifts up his hand, and it turns to metallic gold in front of her eyes, which must have widened like saucers, because he starts to smile. And then she, too, starts to grin, feeling like a giddy idiot.

With the metallic hand, he pulls out his room key and says, “Room 407. I’ll be there after the party; come by after you’re off the job.”

“I’m in 435,” she says. “Same floor.”

“How convenient,” Joshua says, and she has never, ever, ever thought of sex as “convenient” before—casual, amazing, awful; yes, but never convenient—and the joyful thrill she feels warms her entire body.


*


And when she tiptoes out into the hall, when Warren is asleep, she walks down the corridor to see his head poking out of one room. “Rogue, over here,” he says in a stage-whisper. She giggles and hurries over, and by the time she reaches his door, he is fully golden, and his kisses are cool, then warm.

When she gets back, she thinks it would be better to take a shower now, rather than in the morning, so she does so. Warren is turned over on his side, she cannot see his face. And in the bathroom, she sees two hickeys on her neck, and she thinks, Like a high-schooler, huh, but the thought gives her so much youthful, girlish pleasure that in the shower she cannot stop laughing, until she realizes she is crying, too.


*


On the jet, Warren is once again being pissy as a baby, and even Logan notices, asking him if he is all right. She keeps the scarf wound tightly around her neck; although she knows she doesn’t care who knows what she does, it doesn’t mean she has to telegraph it around.


*

She is just outside one of the side entrances to the cafeteria, and she can already hear Warren talking—he is just in front of her, she can hear every word.

“She’ll put out for anyone who comes along, I swear—”

She hears Bobby weakly trying to shut him up, failing. Thank you, Bobby, she thinks wryly.

“I’m serious, man; she spent the whole night flirting with this guy when we were all supposed to be guarding Dr. McCoy. And then, at night, when we were still supposed to be on watch, she snuck out in the middle of the night and disappeared. And believe me, she came back looking well-fucked; she even had to take a shower afterwards—”

From where she is standing, though, she has a good vantage point of the entire cafeteria; and to her left, she can see a familiar trench-coated figure stand from his seat, several tables behind and to the left of Warren.

Gambit starts to move, and she thinks, That’s not good.

“Come on, you guys know it’s true—Jubilee, you know it’s true—she’s the mansion slut, that’s old news—I bet you that’s how she got those crazy powers, too—probably accidentally sucked them out of some guy she was fucking—”

Then, several tables in front of Warren, and to the right, by the food stations, she sees Logan, standing, holding a sandwich. Then he drops the sandwich and starts walking towards the young man, too, and she can see his fist dropping to his side, in the customary position he makes before drawing the claws.

And she can see Gambit’s entire back now, and one of his hands is in the pocket that holds his cards.

And she thinks, That’s definitely not good, and she flies forward, fast, and throws Warren across the room, more toward Logan’s direction—the further the rat’s projectiles have to aim, the better—and into the food stations. The man isn’t that light, but he isn’t that heavy, either, but the reason she is throwing him isn’t just to defend herself—but to protect him from whatever these two morons she’s inexplicably fucking were about to do.

While he is flying, she pulls off her scarf so that the hickeys can be seen, and lets it dangle from her hands. She thinks, To hell with it, then, I’ll telegraph everything around. And the air on her skin feels freeing.

She calls out, “Still bitter that not even this slut will touch your microscopic dick more than once, Worthington?”

Behind her, she can hear Gambit’s deep, gravelly laugh, which she knows well—but then it starts to turn into something more like a roar, whooping and uncontrolled and celebratory. She hasn’t ever heard him laugh like that.

And in front of her, she can see Logan, his hand relaxing, staring at her—then staring at the rat while he laughs.

Then Gambit stops laughing, and Logan is still looking at him, but his hand isn’t relaxed anymore.

“As you were, children,” Rogue announces to the rest of the cafeteria, and walks out.

Trying to ignore, in her mind, the sound of Gambit’s laughter; and the look of Logan’s hand tensing, then relaxing, then tensing again.

DIS-MOI CE QUE TU PENSES / DE MA VIE, DE MON ADOLESCENCE



“Why can the memories recalled to the one-armed man cause the phantom arm to appear? The phantom arm is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now, folded over his chest, with no hint of its belonging to the past. Nor can we suppose that the image of an arm, wandering through consciousness, has jointed itself to the stump: for then it would not be a ‘phantom,’ but a renascent perception. The phantom arm must be the same arm, lacerated by shell splinters, its visible substance burned or rotted somwhere, which appears to haunt the present without being absorbed into it. The imaginary arm is, then, like repressed experience, a former present which cannot decide to recede into the past…

“But it would not be memory if the object which it constructs were not still held by a few intentional threads to the horizon of the lived-through past, and to that past itself as we should rediscover it if we were to delve beyond these horizons and reopen time. In the same way, if we put back emotion into being-in-the-world, we can understand how it can be the origin of the phantom limb. To feel emotion is to be involved in a situation which one is not managing to face and from which, nevertheless, one does not want to escape…

Memory, emotion and phantom limb are equivalents in the context of being in the world.”

The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.


*


“Is it true you exploded Warren’s doorknob?” she demands when the rat opens his door.

He looks at her, innocently. “I don’t know what you talking about, minou. I never went near that man’s doorknob.”

“Oh, so it just spontaneously combusted,” she exclaims.

“Must have,” he says, the picture of angelhood.

“He could’ve died!” she shouts, and punches him in the stomach, so he flies backwards onto his ass.

“Gambit could’ve died just now,” he mutters, struggling to get up. “Is this how you show your love and affection to me, minou?”

“I’m not showing you either,” she says, standing in front of him and pulling her fist back to knock him another time around the head. But he grabs her legs, recovered already, and slides his hands up her tights, underneath her skirt.

“Want to show me something else?” he asks, smiling, already feeling the answer.

“Cocky Cajun,” she mutters, but pulls her skirt up.


*


“What do ‘minou’ and ‘minette’ mean,” she asks Gambit after he has just come in her mouth.

Still trying to catch his breath, he opens one eye. “Ah,” he says. “Thought you’d never ask, minou.”

“Well?” she asks. “It’s a pet name, right? Like chère?”

He grins, looking a little sheepish. “It’s a pet name,” he says slowly. “People use it. But it’s different from chère, more personal. Minou means little kitten.”

Then he looks as mischievous as a little boy, when he reaches between her legs, runs a gloved finger up her sex, and says, “But it also can mean—this here.”

She stares at him, and can feel herself blushing. “Are you kidding me?”

He laughs. “Minette is even dirtier, Gambit don’t use that one too often.”

“Wait, didn’t you call me that first?” she asks, mildly scandalized. He’s been going around, literally calling her pussy, this whole time. The thought offends her as much as it turns her on, turns her on as much as it offends her. What if she went around calling him cock?

Then she thinks, she does go around calling him—and plenty of other people—“dick,” but that’s an insult, not a pet name.

“Yes,” he says. He laughs. “It’s because the first time Gambit saw you, that student of mine had his head between your legs.”

And she remembers that, vaguely. “That was the first time you saw me?”

“Well, no,” he admits. “Gambit saw you around, a little bit; sneaking off with other boys or girls. Sometimes looking a little sad, on your own.”

“I never did that,” she says. “You did,” he insists. “Like this,” and he sticks his lower lip out, exaggeratedly. She elbows him in the stomach, hard, and he doubles over, coughing.

She jumps; she forgot that he doesn’t have a healing factor, she cannot just beat on him the way she does to Logan.

“Sorry!” she cries. “You okay?”

He looks up at her; she thinks he knows what he is thinking, why she apologized, whom she had just thought of, at that moment.

“Gambit’s more durable than your average homme, minou,” he says, his voice already back to normal. “I’m good.”

Then he raises an eyebrow. “‘Sorry,’ eh,” he repeats. “First time Gambit get an apology from you.”

He leans forward so his bare mouth is near hers. “You fell in love with this old thief, already?”

“Not a chance,” she says, bringing her gloved up hand between them and pushing him off.

“Quelle femme,” he moans. Then he smiles. “Anyway—so Gambit saw you around, but I think the real time I saw you was that time, in the Danger Room.”

“Getting eaten out,” she repeats, incredulously. “No wonder you’re such a pervert about me. First impressions, and all that.”

He laughs. “Maybe,” he says. “Gambit saw your face then. Looking happy, and powerful, and turned on, and vulnerable, and still sad—and—don’t know. Did something to me.”

“Gave you a hard-on, is what it did to you,” she mutters.

“Yep,” he says, and she cracks up, smacking him in the face. He continues, “But something else, too.”

“What?” she asks, skeptical—but then, at the look in his eyes, curious, too.

He looks at her and smiles. “You want to know?”

“No,” she says immediately, not curious at all, anymore.

His smile doesn’t falter, but it doesn’t stay the same, either. “Didn’t think so,” he says, and pulls a scarf over her sex again and settles himself between her legs.

“Eh, minette,” he murmurs, huskily, and the way he says the word makes her wet—

But she snaps to attention and says, “You can’t call me that in public anymore, then.”

“What? Minette?” he asks, staring up at her.

“Either one,” she says. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Why? Nobody know what it means,” he says. “That’s not like you, minou. To be embarrassed. Not about this.”

And he is right, she knows—it’s Mississippi Baptist morality, rolling up to bite her in the ass at the most unexpected time. Shame of your womanly body parts. Shame of your sex. Jesus, still? Well, fuck them.

“Okay, fine,” she says. Then a concession. “But not minette, if that’s the really dirty one.”

“Fine,” he says. “Gambit don’t call you that too often, anyway. It’s a little too rough, even for this old thief.”

Then he smirks and lowers his mouth again. “But sometimes you like rough, no? Minette,” and she shivers at the feel of his mouth.


*


That night, she thinks: Names. Names, names, names.

Names like James Howlett, Remy LeBeau, Harada Kenichiro, Yashida Mariko, Oyama Yuriko, Oyama Kenji. Names like Marie D’Ancanto.

Kid, minou. Anata, kisama.

Names and their heaviness. She wants to put them all down.


*


But names follow her, because one day, she is going down on Logan, and with his fist in her hair, he groans, “Oh, fuck—Marie—”

And she pulls away so fast, she nearly bursts out laughing at the panicked, begging sound that comes from his throat. But she is not in the mood for laughing.

She doesn’t want to hear that name; not that name, not its implied confidence. Not the name she gave to him when she was sixteen years old, then never gave anyone else again. She is not that girl.

“Yikes,” she says only. “I did say, ‘No cheesy lines,’ right?”

“It’s your fuckin’ name,” he practically whines, and it must be torture, but still, she keeps her head a good distance from where he would like it to be.

“You never call me it, so it’s kind of weird to hear it suddenly,” she tries to explain.

And it’s true—he has never naturally called her by her name. Only that one time, when she practically forced him to, right before getting the cure. When she had thought that the cure would make her more Marie, give Marie back to her. Not yet having realized that it wasn’t a distinction between human Marie and mutant Rogue that she had already made, but a previous life and the current one. She is old enough to know that Marie is and always was a fantasy; a young girl’s dream. Marie seems as much a ghost to her now as do any of the characters in Logan’s memories.

Although she might protest against some of them, she far prefers the pet names: the minou, the kid, Storm’s “honey.” They don’t seem less personal to her at all; but supple, fluid, tailored to just for her life in that moment, for her life in their lives. A single name is a box; and she knows no box is big enough for all the things that she alone has been, not to mention all the additional occupants now in her head. She wants names that live with her, that are faithful to her lack of fidelity, that change as she changes.

To Logan, she says only, “I like ‘kid’ from you. It’s cozy,” she says, suddenly remembers that she has said that before. Thinking about his camper. And she hasn’t thought about that in a long time.

But the word is right; the name ‘kid’ feels like that place: a total mess, a place she isn’t sure she wants to sleep, a place she isn’t sure she can really relax—but still, somehow, warm, sweet, lonely, a little forlorn.

“Sexy, too,” she adds, thinking about what it would be like to fuck him in that camper, now, blushing as she does. She hasn’t had that fantasy in a while.

“Okay,” he says, but it’s the voice she has heard from every man about to get a blowjob, and she knows he’s only half-listening, now. So she starts to suck him again, but he comes practically the minute she applies the slightest pressure with her tongue and mouth. She feels a little bad; he must really have been up for it.

Not bad enough to keep from teasing him about it, though. “And with a condom on, too. I think that must be a new record for you.”


*


She goes to Storm’s office to ask her a question about—she doesn’t even remember, now. Outside her door, she hears Storm arguing to someone, and she thinks it is Logan, until she notices the other person is too silent to even be Logan, and realizes she is on the phone.

“You’re being ridiculous,” Storm is saying. “Because you—no, no—you know just as well as I do what it’s like over there right now—Hank—we’re not arguing about this again—not this one—Hank—don’t—”

Then a pause, and Rogue can hear a receiver being slammed down. She thinks it isn’t the best time, and tries to walk away, but Storm opens the door just then, about to storm—storm, ha!—out.

“Rogue,” she says suddenly. “I didn’t see you out here.”

Her face is red, blotchy from tears she has not let herself cry. “What can I do for you?”

Rogue swallows, says, “It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll come back later.”

Storm nods, clears her throat, looks away. “Okay, then,” she says. “Hey—you’re doing a great job, honey. All the kids are talking about you.”

“Thanks,” Rogue says, her voice still careful, kind. “I’m really enjoying it.”

“Good, good,” Storm says. She wrings her hands together. “So, we’ll talk later. Oh, that’s right, I did want to talk to you about something, too.”

“All right,” Rogue says. “Later.”


*


But later doesn’t come, because Storm is distracted and busy; and then a few days later, Gambit, Kitty and Kurt are assigned to a mission to guard Hank during a UN conference on climate change, in Madrid. Apparently the mission has come so suddenly because Hank had attempted, evidently unsuccessfully, to keep Storm from knowing about it.

She sits on Gambit’s bed, watching him dress. Putting on his light ballistic vest, his black pants, his thin black socks, his silver kneepads and shin guards. Watching every movement, as if she has been permitted to view a holy ritual. He even makes a little sign of the cross to himself, before putting on his trench coat.

“What was that?” she teases. “You’re suddenly a believer in God?”

“Always a believer, minou,” he says, winking. “Not always in God.”

He hovers over her, leaning against the bed. “You got anything you want to say to this old thief before he leave?”

“Like what,” she asks, looking up at him.

“Like, ‘I’ll miss you, Remy,’” he supplies, “‘I be thinking about you and touching myself all the time, thinking ‘bout your beautiful face.’”

She kicks him in the shin guard; but they are actually quite hard, and she hurts herself, a little bit.

“I think you’re talking about yourself,” she says, rubbing her own shin.

He lowers his hand to rub her shin for her, and brings his face closer to hers.

“Okay, then, minou,” he murmurs. “What about, ‘I fell in love with you already, Remy,’ then?”

“You know, I’m not sure they can have someone on the mission who’s this sick in the head,” she replies calmly, meeting his gaze full on. “Maybe we should switch.”

His eyes change, she doesn’t quite know why. But he just pulls away from her face and stands up straight.

“Ah,” he sighs to himself. “You break this old thief’s heart, you.”

“I’m sure you’ll find lots of Spanish minettes in Madrid to make you feel better,” she says. “Come back and tell me all about it, and we can do role-play again.”

He smiles at her, and it’s the smile she cannot read, again. “Okay,” he says. “You be good, minou.”

He leans in to kiss her mouth, but he doesn’t have a scarf, and neither does she, so she leans back—without fear in her eyes, just a rueful reminder. She turns to pull up his bedsheet so he can kiss her, but he is already pulling back, and she thinks the feeling in her stomach is disappointment.

She looks up at him, and he turns to the side to pick up his staff—he kisses it hard, flicking his tongue over it. Then he touches the staff to her mouth, staring down at her. And the metal is warm as flesh.

She stares up at him, not moving, not speaking.

He pulls the staff away, picks up his bag, and walks to the door. “Later, minou,” he says, smiling again, easy as always.


*


And he comes back on a stretcher.

And if he weren’t already half-dead, she’d kill him; if only she could stop her hands from shaking.


*


Two bullets in his body; one in his upper chest, where his vest doesn’t protect him, and one in his stomach, straight through the vest.

After Storm tells her the news—her own voice shaken and full of uncried tears—she runs to the medbay. She sees his unconscious face, the blood still on his chest, his mouth slightly open because the muscles are too slack to keep them closed—and it’s not him, it’s not him, this is not him, and even as they are beginning surgery she cannot be made to move, so Kurt has to teleport her out.


*


“How, how, what happened, what happened, what happened,” she says over and over when she can finally speak again; hearing her voice, wondering who it is, unable to recognize herself in it.

“He was shot, kleine,” Kurt says, kindly, his arms still wrapped around her, and she doesn’t even have the presence of mind to push him away, to protect him from her skin.

“The shots were directed at Hank, and Kitty, who was next to him. None of us would have noticed in time. Only Gambit jumped in front of them. He saved our lives.”

And she shakes her head. “But he wears a vest,” she babbles, trying to pull her voice together, failing. “He wears a vest, he has guards, he, he.”

Kurt doesn’t say anything more, but holds her until the end of surgery, praying the whole time. She doesn’t ask him to be quiet.


*


After the surgery is finished, she walks into the medbay. He is not awake yet, but she looks down at him.

Thinking of saving people. Thinking of a hand on her lifeless and life-stealing face. Thinking of a woman and a jet and a wave of water and death above her and beneath her. Thinking of a man and body armor that fails him.

She remembers that in Manhattan, when he had come into the bathroom, she had felt tears coming down her face without the actual physical sensation of crying. Her body doing all the work for her.

It does it for her again, now—until she joins in the effort, and finds herself sobbing freely.

The surgeon had said, “He was lucky. They missed everything. Just a little bit to the left or right for either bullet, and we would’ve had a real problem.”

Thinking about what Gambit had said about Logan, and poker, and what you do with your bad luck.

Lucky, she thinks, crazily. You hear that, rat? You got good luck this time. This is good luck.


*


While he is unconscious, she doesn’t sleep in her room, but in the medbay. She goes to her room only to change into her clothes, go down to the Danger Room, teach ass-kicking with Logan, then go straight back to the medbay.

Logan is watching her, she knows; worried about her, she’s certain—but she can’t deal with Logan, or whatever’s in his eyes that she can’t read, whatever’s in his face that she can’t recognize. He doesn’t tell her that he’s sorry about what happened to the rat, and she doesn’t wait for him to; she doesn’t think it would be all that true, in any case. Thinking of Gambit saying, I don’t like him, he don’t like me.

She is there when Gambit awakens, and her entire body explodes in relief. She yells for the nurse, the surgeon, someone—that’s what they do in television shows when the unconscious patient wakes up, right?

He cracks a tiny smile that looks like it hurts. “So loud, minou,” he croaks.

“Sorry,” she says immediately, and takes his bare hand with her own gloved ones.

“Apology two,” he says. Looking up at her through half-open eyes, a mouth crusted over with dried saliva and cracked skin, his beard unkempt and grown even longer than he usually lets it go.

Then widens the tiny, painful smile and says, “So you in love with Gambit yet?”

She starts to squeeze the hand, harder. “When you get outta here, I’m gonna kill you,” she whispers.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow,” he says.


*


She is on her way to the medbay from class when she hears Storm, already there, talking; and once again she thinks she is arguing with Hank or Logan, until she remembers that Hank is not here, and Logan never, ever comes to the medbay.

“I shouldn’t have let you,” Storm is saying. “A good leader wouldn’t have let you switch.”

“No, Stormy. Gambit chose to go ‘cause of something like this.”

“But—there must have been—”

“No, no, petite,” he is saying. “Stop that now. You did a good thing. Everything all right now. Everything happened the way it’s supposed to happen.”

And Rogue doesn’t understand anything; but she doesn’t like the sound of it.

When Storm comes out of the medbay, she is waiting for her; and the older woman freezes in horror.

“What was that,” Rogue asks.

“Rogue,” the woman begins, hesitating.

Rogue repeats, “What was that?”

Storm covers her face—she is not quite crying, but her body is shaking, has been shaking more or less constantly since Gambit and the team returned.

Reluctantly, she tells Rogue that Gambit had asked specifically to be on this mission—that he had been aware of a recent spate of anti-mutant terrorist attacks in Western Europe, targeting mutant refugee hostels and poorer mutant communities, and that Hank’s presence in Madrid as the only mutant U.N. ambassador would be the perfect opportunity for an assassination attempt.

She says Gambit had said, very clearly, that because of his knowledge of the situation and his particular skills, he would be better equipped to handle unexpected occurrences.

Rogue thinks of Gambit, talking about Harada Kenichiro, about an old kumicho, about yakuza clans, about Yashida-gumi, Yamaguchi-gumi.

I keep informed, he had said to her nonchalantly.

“He was right,” Storm mutters, then says, “Shit,” and rubs her eyes again. She looks like hell, and her hands are still shaking.

Rogue stares at her. Then she remembers something else Gambit had said. “What did he mean by switch? Switch with who?”

Storm lowers her shaking hand, and Rogue thinks the tears that she has been holding in might actually come out now. They don’t, but still she can barely speak—yet Rogue hears her as if there is no other sound in the room.

“I was going to send you,” Storm says.


*


When she enters the medbay, to where Gambit’s bed is, she sits down in the adjacent chair without saying anything. He glances over at her, his face still paler than usual, making the dark beard he is growing look even darker. “Hey, minou,” he says. “You eat already?”

She nods, although she hasn’t. “Really?” he asks again. She nods again. He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t push the issue. He turns his head towards her, settling into the pillow comfortably, letting his sleepy eyes rest on her. She doesn’t say anything, but looks at him. Looks at him.

“Minou,” he says only, as he falls back asleep. “Minou.”


*


When he is better, at least better enough to be wheeled back to his room, though not better enough to begin teaching his own classes yet—“I recover pretty fast, minou,” he tells her—she stays in his room, watching as an orderly helps him into bed.

“Gambit prefer she be the one to do all this,” he mutters, gesturing towards Rogue.

“Behave,” she says.

When the orderly leaves, he looks over at her, then down at his stomach and crotch, grins, and says, “Think you’ll have to be on top this time, minou.”

“Your horniness is a fucking illness, swamp rat,” she says, suppressing the urge to punch him right in his chest wound.

But she stays, even when he falls asleep, in the padded chair next to his bed; and doesn’t move until the orderly comes back in the morning, awakening both of them with his brisk knock.

“Morning, minou,” Gambit says when he sees her. “Didn’t think the first time you stayed in Gambit’s room we wouldn’t even be in bed together.”


*


After his sponge bath—for which she will have to apologize to the orderly later, she should have known he would make all those filthy comments if she remained in the room—she asks, finally, what she has been wanting to ask: “Did you charm Storm to get her to put you on the mission instead of me?”

He looks at her. “Ah,” he says. “You did know.”

“I heard you talking,” she says.

“Thought so,” he says. “No, Gambit didn’t charm her, minou. I asked nicely, the right way and everything.”

She looks at him suspiciously. He is sitting up in bed, his top half naked except for the bandages around his chest. He looks back at her; a little weak, but calm. He is telling the truth, she thinks.

“Why did you even want to switch with me,” she says, not sure if she wants to know.

Gambit shrugs, scratches at the skin around one of his bandages. “I switched with you because I knew what was going on over there. Gambit told you he keep informed.”

“So you thought you would handle it better,” she says bitterly. “When your armor doesn’t even fucking protect you good enough.”

“It just didn’t protect me from those kind of bullets,” he says. “They got some new stuff, high-grade military stuff. That don’t come from people making bombs in the basement. They got resources, connections.” He frowns, but doesn't say anything else.

She sighs. “Fine. But it still means you thought you would be better than me. Stronger than me.”

“Yep,” he says, and once again she wants to punch him.

“I can take a bullet, no problem, at this point,” she points out. “I can fly, move fast. Storm would’ve been right to send me.”

“Nope,” he says. “You can’t shoot back.”

She blinks. Storm hadn’t mentioned that there had been a full-on fight. “Did you?”

He only nods.

“How many?”

“Just one shooter,” he says. “Less than Gambit expected.”

“What, with a card?”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “With my mind.”

She stares at him. “What the hell do you mean, your mind?”

He looks down at his hands. “At full power, I can charge things without touching them if they’re in my line of sight,” he says, and her eyes widen. “If I see it, and think about it, that’s enough. That’s why it was important to get hit; to know the line of the shot, where exactly it come from.”

She freezes—then her eyes widen, remembering how he had only said he hadn’t gone near Warren’s doorknob.

He seems to know what she is thinking, because he starts to laugh hoarsely. Then he adjusts himself on the bed, smiling. “But it still take a lot out of this old thief, though. Look at me. Healing so slow.”

She thinks he’s healing pretty fast, but what the hell does she know.

“Did you let yourself get shot on purpose?” she asks, not sure if she wants to know the answer.

He laughs. “Nobody like to get shot,” he says, but it’s not really an answer, and he doesn’t say anything else.

“Do the others know you have that power?” she asks.

He says, “Stormy knows. I told her that’s why I thought I’d be better for the job.”

She stares at him. “Did you plan all this from the beginning?”

He laughs again. “It was one of the plans.”

At the look on her face, he shrugs and says, “See, that’s why Gambit’s a better choice than you. You don’t go nowhere thinking, I’m gonna kill somebody today, so how am I gonna do it.

“You know that saying, one thief knows another thief—that’s true. You don’t look at everybody’s face, looking for the one you’re gonna steal from, the one who’s gonna steal from you. The one you’re gonna kill, the one who’s gonna kill you. None of you do,” he declares, folding his hands in his lap.

“Except maybe the Wolverine," he adds, and she cannot read the look on his face. "And this old thief.”

She is still staring at him. “I think you are a fucking assassin, thief,” she says.

He sighs. “A little bit of both, after all, eh,” he says, and now she cannot read his voice, either. Still looking down at his now-folded hands. “Thief and assassin.”

Every time he says these two words, they seem to open up a wound in him. She shakes her head at her own thoughts; she isn’t sure she wants to know this, either. But then—

“Go on,” she says softly, anyway. “Tell me about it.”

He looks up at her, puzzled. “What?”

“When you were a thief,” she says. “Back then.”

He looks surprised then, and he starts talking immediately, almost before he himself has even realized what he is saying, afraid she will still take it back.

“I was a thief in New Orleans,” he says, cautiously, waiting for her to stop him. “Jean-Luc LeBeau found me on the streets when I was ten years old. Trying to pick his pocket, not knowing this big man was the king of thieves, the head of the Thieves’ Guild. He took me in as his son.”

He sees that she is really listening, now, so he relaxes into his own voice.

“Thieves’ Guild and Assassins’ Guild was enemies, back then. But the first time I met the daughter of the Assassins’ Guild head, I was done, finished, like a fool. We were thirteen, sneaking around, feeling like Romeo and Juliet, making out everywhere.” He laughs. “Little horny Remy.”

“Not so different from big horny Remy,” she observes, and the look of surprise and pleasure on his face at the sound of his name in her mouth startles her into saying, hastily, “Go on.”

“When we were eighteen, we told everybody what was going on. They wasn’t too happy, but then they saw the good in it; we was supposed to get married, seal the alliance, that kinda thing. Told me about some prophecy they heard when Remy was little; that I was gonna unite the Thieves’ Guild and the Assassins’ Guild. They thought it meant the prophecy was coming true.

“I didn’t care about none of it; I was in love, I woulda married her when I was thirteen.”

Thinking of Gambit as a married man seems so strange to her she thinks he is talking about someone else.

“The morning of the wedding, her brother Julien comes and challenges Gambit to a duel. ‘To the death,’ he say, like a real man. I say, ‘Fine,’ because when I was eighteen, you couldn’t stop me from fighting nobody, I’d fight a trashcan if it looked at me funny. Plus, I was crazy in love. Had some idea that I was protecting my woman’s honor, or something.”

He is silent for a minute, thinking.

“And then,” she murmurs, wanting to know, not wanting to know.

“And then,” he says. “We was supposed to fight just hand-to-hand. But as he was losing, he took out a gun.”

She stares at him as he says, still looking at his hands, “I don’t even know what I did, really. Think it was the first time I did it with my mind. I made the gun explode in his hand just before he was gonna shoot me. Set off all the bullets inside, killed him immediately. Not just the gun; think I might have exploded the whole front of his body, too. It wasn’t so controlled, back then. It was hard to tell. Wasn’t much left of the body.”

He gives her a smile, and she clenches her own fists at the pain in it. “You see why Gambit said he don’t fight over girls no more.”

“After that, nobody know what to do. They knew it was Julien’s fault for wanting to duel in the first place, and then for bringing out that gun—but I had used my powers on him, and that wasn’t too forgivable, neither.

“Some of them wanted me dead; other people knew the alliance was too important to mess up. In the end, she was the one, made the decision. She said the alliance would continue, as long as she didn’t marry me. And I had to be exiled from New Orleans, forever.

“Jean-Luc tried to fight for me,” he says. “But he knew he had to do what was best for the guild. I knew it, too. So I left. She didn’t say goodbye to me—didn’t, or couldn’t, Gambit still don’t know. Been wandering around ever since, picking pockets.

“Probably picked your mama’s pocket sometime way back,” he finishes, trying to lighten the tone of the story again.

She stares at him. How old is he. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty? Over ten years of wandering around. She cannot help but think of someone else she knows, wandering around, having lost everything, living solely on the particular crime he was talented at.

“So she’s still there, in New Orleans,” she says. “Your fiancée.”

“Nope,” he says. “Almost all of them dead, now. ‘Cept for the few that left earlier, like me, scattered all over the world: now, no more Thieves’ Guild, no more Assassins’ Guild.”

She looks at him, perplexed. “Lot of them joined Magneto and the Brotherhood, right before Alcatraz, when the cure was coming out,” he explains. “The guilds been coming under police pressure for a while; government thought they was some kinda mutant criminal organization. Which was a little true, but not all true.

“But mercenaries was coming in the middle of the night, shooting mutant thieves in their sleep with the cure; hiring assassins for fake assassinations then throwing them in jail, and torturing them for information, confessions no one’d be able to believe.”

Gambit sighs. “So the ones left joined up with Magneto, to fight.” He looks at her, and adds, “At Alcatraz, they were part of the first wave to die.”

She knows so little about Alcatraz; about what happened there, about how they all fought. She has never asked anybody to tell her anything.

Then he rubs his palms, says, “That’s what Gambit heard, at least. I was in Québec City. When I came back, was too late. There was only dust left. The battle must’ve lasted an hour, at most.”

He smiles, and once again she clenches her fists for him. He says, “Now you know why this old thief try to keep better informed, from now on.”

“In San Francisco, Gambit saw Dr. McCoy, Storm and the Wolverine, with the soldiers, helping the clean-up. Found out how they fought Magneto, what they did, who they were. That the same thing happened to them, their house, their people.”

He shrugs. “So Gambit think, Now I don’t like the soldiers too much, but these guys seem okay. I’d heard of Xavier, and Jean Grey, the fight against the Mutant Registration Act, all his history and things with mutant rights. They legends. But then I heard they’d both been killed. And Gambit thought—maybe I go over there, maybe this old thief can do something to help.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You, helpful?” she teases. “That doesn’t sound very cool-loner-type, to me.”

“Gambit ain’t no kind of cool loner, minou,” he remarks. “That’s the Wolverine.”

She looks down, but he continues, “Gambit didn’t like being exiled. Didn’t like not having a home. Didn’t like leaving everybody behind. Wandering around the continent, everything seeming like it was made of shit. But then Gambit heard about Xavier’s death, and saw the three of them cleaning up that mess, and Gambit thought, maybe there’s a place that ain’t made of shit. So I talked to Stormy in San Francisco.”

“You met her there?” she asks. She’s never heard this before.

“Yep,” he says. “Asked how I could help. Told her my powers. She talked to me for a while, then said some guy from Germany was flying in to help, and she would have him evaluate me, and if it worked out, I could go back to the mansion to help, since he was gonna start teaching there, too.”

She wants to ask; she doesn’t want to ask.

He already knows the question in her mouth. “No, Gambit didn’t meet him, minou,” he says, and his voice sounds a little tired. He leans back against his bed’s headboard.

“Only met Stormy and Hank. He wasn’t nowhere. He didn’t even really talk to Storm and Hank. He helped with the tasks, then he disappeared. I saw him, once, wandering around Alcatraz after the clean-up. Looking like the world broke on his head.”

“He was the one who stopped Jean, at Alcatraz; but he was in love with her,” she tells him, and then regrets telling him.

“Ah,” he says, looking at her curiously. “That explains it. That was his look.”

She shifts her weight from foot to foot, realizing she has grown sore, standing for so long, while he tells this story. He beckons for her to climb into bed next to him, patting the space beside him. She obeys, sliding on top of the blanket, fully clothed and gloved.

“Then this old thief came here,” he says, pulling on one a lock of her white hair with his hand. “Met you.”

Then he seems to remember something. “Oh, yeah—Gambit bought you a souvenir from Madrid.”

He snickers. “Well, stole.” Then he nods to his trench coat, draped over a chair. “In the right pocket.”

She raises her eyebrows, stands from the bed and approaches the coat, reaches into a pocket. As she is searching with her hand, she sees a few splatters of blood on the collar, just as her fist is closing around the small object.

Gambit’s blood on his collar; and she thinks of Logan’s blood pouring from his jumpsuit after he had touched her on the Statue of Liberty—and when she turns around to face Gambit again, holding his gift in her hand, she is already crying.

“Minou,” he says, alarmed. “What?”

But she can’t speak, just keeps crying; she keeps moving through her crying, as if is a hiccup, or a fit of coughing. Walking towards him, climbing back onto the bed, still crying. She opens her fist to reveal a small, painted porcelain sculpture of a black bull with large horns.

On his flank, the words: I, then a red heart, then MADRID. And the crying doesn’t stop.

“It’s a bull, ‘cause they have lots of them there,” he says, a little frantically, trying to distract her from her crying. “See? It’s virile. Like me. Gambit think we should call it Remy. Eh? What you think, minou? Eh?”

She can’t stop the tears, so she nods, wipes her face, says, “Okay, okay. Thank you.”

“So what you think of him,” he says.

“I like it,” she says, running her thumb over the horns. “It’s cute.”

He picks up the bull and starts poking her face with it. “You like it? You like Remy? You sure you don’t love Remy, then?”

She glares at him through her tears. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” he says, grinning, and she smacks him, right on the bandage. “Ruthless woman,” he says, wincing.

Then he positions the bull on her back, making it walk up and down. “You know what souvenir mean in French, minou?”

“No,” she says, sniffling. “What?”

“Both memory,” he says. “and to remember.” He looks at her. “Mes souvenirs; my memories. Je me souviens de toi; I remember you.”

Then he nods at the bull. “Though Gambit don’t know how much he wants to remember what happened in Madrid, eh.”

She closes her eyes. He doesn’t say anything else while she continues crying, just walking the bull up and down her back, over and over, back and forth.


*


Souvenirs, she thinks. Memory and to remember. Things to remember; things to bring back; things to give to others.

How many souvenirs has she been given, in her lifetime. Souvenirs from Mississippi, Canada, Japan, Germany, Poland, England. She can’t carry them all, has tried to leave them behind, but they hang on to her. His most of all.

And now, new ones: New Orleans, Madrid.

She thinks, What happened to against intimacy? And here she is, in this man’s room, listening to his life story, gaining another set of ghosts to make company with the ones already in her head.

She thinks, with a panic, that she may have forgotten the intention of this entire adventure in the first place.

Opening her eyes, she realizes she had fallen asleep for quite some time. Seeing Gambit sleeping, deeply, on his back next to her: looking at the bandages on his chest, his stomach, his hair mussed and a little sweaty from lack of proper showering.

Thinking, knowing: If he had come back dead, it would have ended me.

She has to get the hell out of here.

She crawls, slowly and quietly, backwards out of bed. Gambit doesn’t move, his breathing remains the same, with that bearded mouth slightly open, front teeth showing.

She finally manages to slip off the bed with only a slight creaking sound, then pads towards the door on her tiptoes, trying not to look at the tiny dark red stains on the trench coat as she passes.

She picks her shoes up in her hand, opens the door as little as possible, and slides out through it, locking and closing the door behind her. It is nearly morning anyway—the orderly will be there soon.


*


Still, she waits outside his door for another hour, listening for a sound of discomfort or pain from within the room, until she can hear the orderly’s soft footsteps in the hall, and sees him turning the corner. Then, finally, she lets herself leave.


*


And on her way back to her room, she sees Bobby, also slipping out of someone’s room, closing the door she now recognizes is Piotr’s, looking dazed and blissful.

He sees her coming, looks startled and panicked for a moment, then he smiles; gently and knowingly, like allies.


*


Lying in bed, thinking: Not that smile—I’m not like you two. I’m not like you two.


*


That night, she dreams of a teenage Harada, his older half-sister Yashida Mariko, an American soldier in love; a fight, a mistake.

Then she dreams of Harada as a young man, next to a young woman named Oyama Yuriko and her father, Oyama Kenji; a flight on an American army plane, from Japan to the Canadian Rockies; a man in a tank, his body being filled with metal; more fighting, more mistakes.

Then she dreams of a young man in love, blowing up the body of his future brother-in-law on the day of his wedding. Coming to Alcatraz too late, finding only ashes were people and places once were. Learning to be more informed, the next time.

And none of it makes sense, none of it hangs together. People she doesn’t understand, lives she doesn’t understand; but those people are her now, those lives are hers now.

At sixteen she had thought of all these things with a mixture of panic and obsession; with a desire to redeem, to save, to help—not knowing yet that she couldn’t do any of those things, that it wasn’t her place to do any of those things; that she had gained all these memories by accident, unjustly.

She had taken things from Logan he didn’t even know he owned anymore, things he didn’t even have the power to give to her, let alone to anyone else. And to be in love with someone for that reason alone—because some twist of evolution had monstrously given her a peek inside his head—seems terrible to her, the lowest low.

She wouldn’t forgive that if it happened to her. If someone knew things about her that she didn’t even know, that she wasn't even capable of knowing anymore. She doesn’t have a single right to the things she knows. The only thing she can do for him is to try, every day, not knowing them.

But she lately she feels as though she is failing miserably in this task—seeing Harada again, and now Gambit—she can’t help it, the things she knows are only growing and growing, and she cannot keep them apart from each other, or apart from her. They bleed out, spilling over everything; and she thinks again and again, I don’t want to know people anymore, it’s unbearable to know people at all.


*


The next day, she runs into Gambit in the hallway, and surprised, says, “What are you doing up?”

He says, gesturing down at himself. “Almost good as new, minou,” he says. “You must’ve done something to me when this old thief was sleeping, yeah?”

“You wish,” she shoots at him.

“Yep,” he agrees. “But not yet, eh?”

He pats his stomach, underneath his black shirt, and she can hear the bandages rustle against his hand. “Just a little bit longer.”

“Well, hurry up,” she says cheerfully, and winks.

“Minou—” he calls after her, and she turns around. He is holding the little bull between his fingers. “You forget Remy in my room.”

Her jaw tightens. “Thanks, rat,” she says, plucking it from his hand. Then she spin around and walks away, quickly.


*


She needs to get it together, she tells herself. She puts the bull in one of her nightstand’s empty drawers, one she doesn’t use for anything, and never ever has to open, at all.


*


When she finds Logan the next day, the sight of his face is so refreshing to her, she realizes for the first time that she hasn’t seen him in quite a while—spending all her time with the rat, in the medbay and in his room.

She sees his face, and before she can think about anything else—anything else, anything else, anyone else—she more or less jumps him, yanking the zipper of his jeans down with her gloved hand. But he doesn’t complain when she wraps him in a condom and starts to suck on him. This feels right; this feels feels familiar and safe and just the right distance between them. Sucking his cock or fucking him feels far less intimate than even thinking about Harada—so she fucks him twice.



*


She would like to keep fucking Bobby and Piotr as well, but now that they are nervously and piously and ecstatically fucking each other, she can’t go to them anymore. And the realization that it’s down to just Logan and Gambit now makes it hard for her to breathe.


*


And Logan still hasn’t totally shaken his habit of asking intrusive questions during sex.

She doesn’t understand it—he barely barks a word to her about anything else during the day, but the time around coitus seems to be his preferred interrogation period. Is it because he knows she can’t run away, or won’t want to run away? Or is it because this is the only time that he, too, lets down the massive guard he always carries around with him?

She doesn’t know, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to know—just let him stop asking these questions.

She has just come in the backseat of one of the cars in the garage, Logan’s face is still slick with his own saliva, and the scarf is still stuck to her sex, when he asks, a little short of breath, “How did you get your powers?”

And not now, not now, not while she is still trying to get everything back into order.

“I told you, I’m not telling,” she says, hoping she sounds calm. But the fact that she hasn’t punched him in the face is probably already an indication of how serious she actually feels.

“I want to know,” he says, and he looks determined and earnest, and no, no, no, he cannot ask her this, he cannot really ask her to be honest with him, when they have already so long ago arranged to ask nothing from each other.

“Well, sucks for you,” she says, making the deliberate double entendre. Grinning as widely and as slyly as she can, adding “Though, speaking of sucking and you—”

It takes him a little longer to come this time, though he seems aroused as ever—and when she looks up at him to check what the progress is on his orgasm, he is staring down at her with a look she cannot read and desperately does not want to.


*


Another time, Logan bites down on her breasts so hard she has to scream out the safe word, and hearing herself say the word “samurai” makes her voice tremble. Luckily, she can pass it off as pain.

So she exaggerates her reaction to hide her genuine panic, and asks him, “What the hell?”

“Sorry,” he says. “Went too far.”

“Thank god for safe words, you sadistic fuck,” she says, still being dramatic. “Or I would’ve had to touch you and grow my own tit back.”

Then she thinks, with a jolt: No. She will never do that. She will never do that. Never never never never never. She will never let herself be healed by him again.

Only later, in the bathroom after taking a shower, does she sees that there are three bite marks on her breasts: two little ones, and one big one, angry one above them; and she knows Logan only bit her once.

And she doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like this at all.


*


Passing by Storm’s office on the way back to her room after her class with Logan, she hears the woman arguing, and this time she knows exactly whom she is speaking to. Then Storm is silent, and Rogue thinks it must be Hank talking, now.

“Rogue,” Storm’s voice calls from inside the office. “I can see you there, honey.”

Shit. She pushes open the door slightly, her face apologetic. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to eavesdrop—”

“Sure you did,” Storm says, smiling, though Rogue can tell that she wants to do just the opposite. “Come in, have a seat.”

She obeys, not exactly sure what she is doing there. Behind her desk—still Xavier’s desk—Storm smiles. “So how you doing, honey,” she asks, exhaling. “Teaching going okay?”

“Great,” Rogue replies. “I’m still really loving it; it’s so weird to actually find something I’m good at.”

“Why weird?” Storm asks.

Rogue shrugs. “I never thought I’d be good at anything, I guess. Never thought I’d be able to do anything enough to get good at it. Sounds stupid now that I say it out loud, but I really thought that.”

“Hm,” Storm says. “No, I thought that, too, when I was younger.” Then she winces. “Actually I still think that way. Recently, a lot. Especially after this last mission.”

“What?” Rogue exclaims. “No way—Storm, you’re doing a great job. Everyone thinks so.”

Storm smiles. “Not quite everyone. But—thank you.”

Rogue looks down. “Hank’s not that happy about all the bodyguard stuff, huh,” she says.

Storm looks a little taken aback. “No,” she says. “He’s really not. How did you know?”

“He looked pretty uncomfortable at that gala we went to,” Rogue says. “I guess it was kind of embarrassing to be so protected at a party like that, with all those important people around.”

Storm sighs, rubs her right temple. “Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“But I think it was the right thing to do,” Rogue says quickly, and Storm looks at her, with a hesitant encouraged smile, and the woman looks much, much younger, suddenly.

And Rogue thinks about how beautiful Storm is; how much she’s always wanted at least her approval, having always been too young to really ever be her friend—how much she’s always wanted to be like her, strong and calm and centered and fierce. Watching how she moves, how she carries herself—regally, with none of the suppressed sorrow of Jean; only her own confidence and frankness: angry when she angry, calm when she is calm.

In her own timid way, Rogue thinks she can admit that she loves Storm, at least; the only one she’ll admit that about.

Rogue goes on, “I would want to do anything to protect the people—” And then she stops. “The people important to me,” she finishes.

Something flashes in Storm’s eye, and in her smile Rogue thinks she can see something like recognition, knowing. “The people important to us,” she repeats, sighing. “Yeah.”

This seems like a serious conversation, so Rogue dares to ask, “Hank’s important to you, isn’t he?”

Storm sighs again, and then simply nods. “Yes, he is.”

“In that—way?” Rogue ventures. Storm smiles, and now she doesn’t look so young anymore.

She says, “Honey, I think you understand better than anyone that there are lots of ways for someone to be important.”

Rogue looks at her. “But why—” She looks down at her gloved hands, and thinks she wants to do for Storm what she couldn’t do for Bobby and Piotr; just because she doesn’t believe in or want certain things doesn’t mean others don’t, or shouldn’t.

“I think Hank feels the same way,” Rogue says quietly. “About you.”

Then she takes a breath and says, “It’s all over his face whenever anyone says your name.”

And Storm’s face fills with sadness, and Rogue thinks she must have said something wrong, something she didn’t want to hear, and she curses herself for not being old enough, after all, to be Storm’s friend.

“I,” Storm begins. “I—ah. It’s just—complicated. We were close when he lived at the mansion, and when he left, years ago, to take the position in the Cabinet, I—well. I couldn’t support it.”

Rogue thinks about Storm, furious at the idea that she would take the cure, that any of them would even think about it—that any of them would ever leave this mansion, abandon what it stood for, what it could do, what it had given to all of them. Fighting to protect this haven and everyone who lived there. Feeling like every parting was an abandonment, a betrayal.

And behind Xavier’s desk, the older woman looks small, anxious, fragile.

Storm looks down at her desk. “We never talked about it and eventually we went back to being close again, but, well.” Her jaw tenses slightly. “You can be close and still tell when things are just—different.

“And I—haven’t really been able to—” She sighs, grimaces. “I guess some part of me is still mad at him for leaving. For living some new life, somewhere else.” Storm sighs. “I guess I just drew a line,” she says.

Rogue thinks about Hank’s face, about his blue-furred figure at the gala, looking solitary and distant and stiff whenever he wasn’t being badgered by some senator or lobbyist. And all around him, for months now, his bodyguards; everyone sent by Storm, but never Storm. Her absence wrapped around him like an armor he hasn't chosen and doesn't want to wear.

“You don’t think you can get over it?” she asks softly.

Storm grimaces again. “I—it’s not that easy to let yourself—really be with people.”

Then she looks up and smiles wistfully. “But you know that, too.”

“Yeah,” Rogue says, nodding. Then she laughs. “But you don’t have skin that kills him, and neither does he. So—it should be a little easier, right?”

Storm laughs, too, but her laugh has no happiness in it. “Ah, well,” she says, running a hand through her hair. “Killer mutations aren’t the only reason someone might be afraid to get close to others.”

She smiles, and the smile has no happiness in it, either. “Even happens to normal-looking mutants. And actual normal people, too.”

Rogue doesn’t say anything, stunned at the idea that she and Storm might have something in common besides the two men they have both been fucking. That she and Storm might behave the same way when it comes to certain things; a single certain thing; one certain, important thing.

“It’s the hardest, isn’t it,” Storm says, looking at her. “Letting people in.”

She shakes her head, and the white hair shivers on her shoulders. “I don’t know how anyone does it.”

Rogue thinks she might cry, right here, right now—while Storm confides in her for the first time in her life. And she knows, with a keening joy that feels just like sorrow, that she is not sixteen anymore, at all.

“Me neither,” she says, instead.


*


She is sitting in the cafeteria alone, after nearly all the students have finished eating, as she prefers it, when Logan suddenly seats himself in front of her. She is so surprised at his presence that she pretends to be reaching for the newspaper that the table’s previous occupants had left there.

“Hey, Logan,” she says. He only grunts, but starts eating.

Is he aware of the fact that he has a very disconcerting, near-constant staring problem? She doesn’t like it.

To distract him, she pretends to laugh at the first movie advertisement she sees and says, “Oh, I’m definitely going to see this.”

“What,” he asks, and she turns the newspaper around to show it to him. She realizes it doesn’t exactly look like the most sophisticated film, and she feels the flicker of her age, coming back to her.

Sure enough, he has a skeptical, mocking look on his face. “Looks smart.” And she wants to kick him under the table.

“It looks fuckin’ amazing, is what it looks like,” she says, then looks at the newspaper. It does actually look like it would be fun. But the film is only showing a month from now, and she is genuinely disappointed.

Then Logan says, “We should go.”

And she thinks, Go, I just got here. “What?” she asks. “I’m still eating.”

He looks like he might want to kick her under the table himself. “No,” he says, his voice little more than a snarl. “To the movie. When it comes out.”

She stares at him. Is she being asked out on a date by Logan? The idea is so absurd she cannot help but burst into laughter; and the more she thinks about it, the more absurd it becomes, so her laughter only becomes more hysterical, until she thinks about its implications, and then her laughter has a note of panic in it, and she has to put her face down on the table, banging her fist, to hide the expression of dread that must be in her eyes now.

What is he doing—with the staring, and the questions, and the moaning of her old name, and the bite marks and now this, this date, this—whatever this was? If she didn’t have part of him in her head, she wouldn’t understand him at all—and the thought makes her bite down on her lip, still pretending to laugh.

She thinks of Gambit—and a bull named Remy—and two bullets—and Harada Kenichiro—no, no, no, no, no.

When she is composed again, she lifts her head and says, easily, “Yikes. What was that, you asking me out on a date?” She shakes her head. “Let’s keep the romantic comedies in the movies.”

“So that’s a no,” he mutters, and she thinks his face might be a little red, with his annoyance.

“That’s a no,” she affirms.

Then she smiles with all the mischief she can muster. “But if you give me five minutes to finish my salad, I’ll fuck your brains out in a supply closet.”


*


And when she fucks him, while he is sitting on a bucket and she sits astride him, he doesn’t look at her, but only breathes her hair in, deeply.

And she likes that, she likes that—and then she isn’t sure she likes that, she isn’t sure she likes that.

IT’S ONLY WHEN I HIT THE GROUND IT CAUSES ALL THE GRIEF



In Storm’s office, they learn that the next mission will be to guard Hank on a diplomatic visit to Tokyo, in preparation for an upcoming conference in Japan.

And she freezes at the word Tokyo, at the word Japan. Without realizing it, she finds herself staring at Logan. Seeing Harada through his eyes, feeling her knuckles hum—but there is nothing there to hum. Feeling rage and confusion and despair surge up through her body, up from her toes to her fingers—but it is not her rage and confusion and despair.

And then Logan feels her staring, and glances over at her, and she thinks she is quick enough to look away.

But then she can feel Gambit staring at her, now, and she knows that he knows just what she is thinking about.

Storm assigns the mission to Kitty, Bobby and Kurt—and she is at once extremely relieved and sharply disappointed. Which one relieves her and which one disappoints her, she doesn’t know: that Logan isn’t going; that she isn’t going.

She wants to leave as soon as possible; she is almost certain that Logan will try and talk to her, it is written in his entire tensed body.

And as expected, he grabs her arm just before she can walk out the door. So close, she thinks. But she is already prepared to lie and smile.

“You okay,” he asks. He is looking at her closely, carefully.

“Sure,” she replies, then regrets the word—it’s just a touch too perky, and she sees on his face that he isn’t buying it; that he had been waiting for her to lie, to give him the excuse to press her on the matter.

And he does, not letting go of her arm and leaning in even more closely, asking, “You sure?”

She can feel the breath on her face; her nose and eyelashes, and it is so warm she thinks he might have touched her, so she steps back, so fast she nearly trips over herself. And when she looks at him again, he is staring across the new distance between them, still holding onto her arm.

She looks at him and sees Kenichiro, Mariko—a man named Oyama Kenji, a woman named Oyama Yuriko—things he had to do—

No, it’s not her seeing them. And she’s not seeing them, at all. She’s just looking at Logan; it’s just Logan.

But the look on her face must be alarming, because his fingers loosen around her arm and he says, “Hey,” softly and worriedly, about to step closer—

From the hallway, she can hear Gambit call, “Minette.”

And both the word and the voice send a current of memory down her neck, through her chest, into her belly, and she feels her cheeks flush. To hear that word, knowing what it means now—and to hear Gambit’s voice speaking it, low and rasping and not-a-little fierce, makes her shiver, as if the current of memory is physical, is inside her body. Along with a tiny flash of embarrassment that deepens the flush in her cheeks.

But before her, Logan looks entirely confused, and not-a-little pissed off at being interrupted by a word he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t even look in Gambit’s direction, but keeps staring at her.

Gambit is still talking: “You coming to lunch, yeah?”

And the sentence jolts her out of her daze; she remembers to smile at Logan, brightly again, and shakes her arm from his now-weakened grasp and strides over to meet Gambit, confirming his invitation.

To gather her thoughts again, to calm herself back down, she makes a show of admonishing him for the pet name: “Didn’t we say you couldn’t call me that in public? Bad swamp rat.”

He looks back at her, but it is not only lust in his face when he says, “Then you better punish this swamp rat, eh.”


*


After lunch, Gambit follows her to her room, knowing neither of them have class in the afternoon. And normally they would fuck, but she has a feeling that is not what they are going to do, this time.

And she knows him well—the realization surprises her—because the minute he closes the door behind them, he asks, “You gonna go to Japan, then.”

She stares at him. “No, Storm didn’t assign me to the mission.”

“Not this one,” he says. “The one that’s coming up. In Kyoto.”

She flinches. He does keep informed, doesn’t he. He has a way of knowing things before she has said them, even to herself; before she has thought them, even to herself.

He says, “Gambit know Yashida headquarters is in Kyoto. Harada Kenichiro lives there.”

She sits down on the bed, says nothing.

“What are you doing, minou,” he murmurs. “What are you doing.”

Still she says nothing—she has no answer.

He leans against the table in front of her bed, and it is just like in Manhattan, in the hotel, only he doesn’t have his staff with him now.

“Then I go with you,” he says, suddenly.

“No,” she snaps, so quickly she can see the anger and hurt around his eyes, before he hides it again. “No. Definitely not. Not after what happened in Madrid. You’re not doing anything like that.”

“What you planning to do, go off on your own and find him?” he demands. “Then what, kill him? You’ll never find him—or worse, he finds out Dr. McCoy’s bodyguard’s the same girl who almost killed him in Manhattan, and he kills you. Or gets one of his guys to kill you. Fin. If he’s even there at all.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “He’ll be there.” She looks up at him, and exhales at the question in his eyes.

“He’s a security advisor for the Japanese ambassador to the U.N.,” she explains softly. “He’ll be there, at the conference. Probably. Especially since it’s taking place in Japan. He often goes, just to supervise and evaluate the bodyguards.”

He stares at her, jaw agape. “How you know that?” Then he mutters, more to admonish himself, “Wait, why didn’t I see him in Ma—” Then he frowns, remembers. “Japan wasn’t at that conference.”

He looks at her again. “So how you know that?”

She sighs, points to her mouth. “When I absorbed him in Manhattan, I learned new things.”

Things she hasn’t even let herself think about yet, she thinks. Let alone say. Like this.

Gambit bends over, holding his knees, groaning. “Merde,” he mutters to himself.

Then he stands back up. “Minou, you can’t do this. Listen to me,” he says, coming forward to kneel between her knees. “You gonna get yourself hurt.”

“I’m strong,” she snaps.

“It’s not your fight,” he says, and now his voice is just below shouting. “You don’t have to avenge nobody. Why you gonna do this?”

“I just have to,” she says.

“No, you think you have to, ‘cause he’s in your head, and he would have to, he would want to—”

She throws her hands up. “Yes, maybe—”

“And,” Gambit says, still kneeling. “And you love him.”

She pushes him backwards, but he doesn’t budge. “That’s not it,” she states, firmly.

“Yes,” Gambit says, just as firmly. “Been in love with him since he first touched you. Maybe before.”

“No,” she says, shaking his head. “Okay—maybe I was in love with him back then—a little bit—but that’s not what this is. It’s just something I have to do—I have to confront Harada—I have to know.”

“Have to know what?” Gambit asks. “Why?”

“Everything!” she cries. “Because it’s all in my head, and none of it makes sense, and I tried to forget about it all, but I can’t—I’m going crazy. It’s in me. It’s in me.”

He says, “You mean, he’s in you.”

“Stop it,” she says. “That’s not what this is.”

“Gambit told you, you don’t kill for just anyone,” he says. “And now you wanna go to Kyoto to kill Harada Kenichiro.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to kill him.” Though she is not sure that is the truth.

She says, “I know he has something to do with Logan’s skeleton—with what happened to him, with the Weapon X program.”

He is silent for a moment, at that. “Weapon X,” he repeats.

“It’s—”

“Gambit know what it is,” he cuts in.

She looks down at her knees. “I just want answers.”

He is still silent. Then he says, “Why. Why you need answers? It’s not your past. Are those answers for you? No.”

She doesn’t say anything, and Gambit’s face shifts, then pales below his stubble.

“Ah,” he says. “You wanna tell him.”

“No,” she says abruptly.

“Yes,” he says, rubbing at his eyes tiredly. “You wanna give him back all the memories he lost. You wanna do that for him.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

But he might be right; in the heart she has closed, even to herself, it might be what she wants most. But she knows she could never do it—she knows she isn’t brave enough to stand in front of Logan and lay out everything she has inadvertently taken from him. Giving it all back, with interest.

But then, why is Gambit right. Indeed, she had been planning to go to Kyoto, somehow. And if Logan had been assigned to the mission, also, or instead of her, well—she would have asked Storm to take him off of it. Would have shielded him from whatever might have been waiting for him there, in Japan—

Gambit is still kneeling in front of her. “Minou, don’t do this,” he says. “If you love him, then just tell him everything; everything you know, already, messy, just like that. Don’t go this far. If you love him—”

“I don’t,” she cries, pushing against his chest again.

“Enough,” he barks. “Enough. Gambit don’t like this thing you do. Where you think it’s honest enough to say only part of the truth and keep silent on the rest. Like telling me you maybe used to be in love with him, long time ago. Thinking if you reveal something big enough, people leave the rest alone. But you still holding all the important cards in your sleeve.”

She shakes her head, again and again. “No—you don’t understand. It’s just because he was inside my head—so I think I have a connection to him—but it’s not right—it’s not real—”

“Ça, c’est de la merde,” he says, nearly spitting; his accent thickening, fast, in his anger. “He’s part of you. He’s in you like your blood. He gave you his life so you would come back from the dead. That’s not nothing. You think that’s all there is, so it mean it’s not the real thing. But you’re wrong.”

He puts his hands on her knees. “You love him in the real way; love him like anybody can love anybody. Simple and stupid.” His hands grip her knees, tighter. “You don’t want it, but you love him.”

“No,” she says, lowering her head, letting her hair fall into her face.

He nods. “Yes,” he says, pulling the hair away. “Yes.”

Her eyes closed, she says, “Why are you pushing me on this so hard.” Then mutters, “Aren’t you supposed to be ‘a little bit’ in love with me, too.”

“No,” he says, and she opens her eyes to look at him. The black and red eyes are just inches away from hers.

Gambit says, without moving, without breaking his gaze: “Not a little bit. All the way, now.”

She looks at him in horror; opens her mouth to speak, cannot speak.

He smiles faintly. “You know this already, minou.”

She shakes her head, frantically. “No, I—”

“Yes,” he says. “You know this already. But you never want to know the things you know.”

Her face crumples. “Then why, why are you—”

“Gambit don’t think making someone yours is love,” he says. “Though this old thief kinda want it. All that old-time stuff. Making you be mine, all of that.” He frowns. “But mine’s the kind of love that mean loving everything. And the you Gambit loves, loves him.”

“What, all because you saw me coming on someone’s face in the Danger Room?” she sneers, hoping to shake the calm from his face, but failing.

“Yeah,” he admits. “It start like that. Gambit saw the look on your face when you’re alone and real and living life how you want. I liked that look. I don’t want to take that look from you. But this old thief would take it, if I tried to ‘win’ you, or make you ‘choose,’ or some fool thing like that.”

He declares, with conviction: “This is real, minou. Ain’t been a Romeo since I was thirteen. Gambit loves you. The you that loves the Wolverine. The you you.”

“Shut up already,” she cries out, pressing her gloved hand over his mouth; but he shakes himself free.

“What you think love is for,” he demands. “Tie you down, make you someone you not, want only one part of you?”

He stares at her. “You think you can love him—not wanting to take nothing from him, not wanting to break nothing in him—but you don’t think you can be loved like that, too?”

“Shut up,” she whispers, burying her head in her hands. She can feel his own gloved hand finding its way into her hair, against her neck. Can feel his bare face against the backs of her own gloves.

“Minou,” he says, again and again, into her hands. “Minou, minou.”

And every word is full of a tenderness she has felt from him since Manhattan, nameless until now.

But she pushes him away. “Go away,” she says. “Just leave.”

He looks at her. “You really want that,” he says, slowly.

“Yes,” she says, still covering her face. “Out.”

Gambit exhales, pulls his hands from her neck and face. Then he rocks back onto his heels, standing back up. Looking down at her, he says, “Gambit leave you alone for a little bit. But we ain’t done here.”

She shakes her head, covers her eyes. She can feel his hand on the top of her head. “Minou,” she hears him say again.

She can see only blackness behind her hands, behind her eyelids, and then she feels his hand lift from her head, can feel his body retreating from hers, until the electricity of his body in the room fades, fades, and she hears the door open, and close.

Only then does she remove the hands from her face, and see herself alone in the room. She falls backwards onto the bed, exhausted as if she has been running for hours and hours, for days and days. She doesn’t notice herself falling asleep.


*


She half-dreams, half-thinks of the moment before Logan left the mansion for Alkali Lake, alone. His skittish, evasive, “Not really,” when she asked him if he was running again.

How in love with him she had been, then. The passion of a somewhat-precocious-for-her-age teenage girl. Knowing he was leaving to look for clues about his past—trying to keep him there, with her, anyway. A teenager, selfishly in love, saying, “I don’t want you to go.” Sensing immediately how he was both anxious and pleased by her words; nervously happy to feel someone exact a hold on him; to hear someone ask him to stay somewhere, anywhere.

She had been delighted to know that she could make him nervous; that he didn’t quite know how to behave around her. She saw that he thought of her as different, singular, without yet knowing why.

All of this now feels like memories from distant childhood. The only thing that remains present, still accurate, is the uneasiness that always accompanies pleasure, with Logan: in his voice when they joke with each other, in his body after sex. It has always disarmed her, that quality of his; any other person could have fallen in love with him for that quality, alone.

She can still hear it in his voice, as if he is speaking to her now. As if he is lulling her to sleep, while in the meantime, sleep eludes him.


*


Simple and stupid. There’s nothing simple and stupid about any of it.


*


When she awakens and glances at her alarm clock, it is already the middle of the night; she has slept straight through dinner.

She hears the noise of water running in her bathroom. She closes her eyes, already knowing who it is. She wants to fall back asleep, to pretend she is still dreaming. But the water stops running, and she can hear the soft splashing sound, as the water is parted by a body.

She groans, rolls out of bed, looks down at herself. Still fully dressed. She kicks her shoes off, closes her eyes again. Now the water is still, there is no more noise. If she closes her eyes, it is as if no one is there.

But there are already enough people behind the place where her eyes close, for her to know that she isn’t alone there, either. She opens her eyes again.

She stands, walks towards the bathroom, and opens it, already looking for Gambit, who is sitting in the full tub, his ankles crossed over the rim, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Only his eyes move to look at her, and they crinkle as his lips smile around the cigarette.

“Voilà la belle au bois dormant,” he says, cheerfully, as if their last conversation had never happened. “Here she is, the beauty of the sleeping forest.”

“How’d you get back in here,” she demands. Why does it feel like they are always having significant encounters in bathrooms.

He grins. “Like a good thief,” he says.

“You mean a burglar,” she mutters. Then looking at the cigarette, says, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Don’t,” he says. “Gambit quit a while ago.” He smiles wryly. “Lately I been thinking ‘bout starting again, though.”

“Not in my bathroom,” she says.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, taking the cigarette out his mouth and placing it on the rim, next to her shampoos, then turning back to her. “You sleep good?”

She shrugs. He beckons her over, holding his bare hand out to hers. “Come here, minou.”

She hesitates, but comes, taking his hand. He pulls her hand, forcefully, and she has to brace herself against the tile wall above the tub to keep from falling in. “Watch out,” she says. “I’m gonna fall in.”

“That’s the idea,” he says, bringing her gloved hand to his mouth. She realizes for the first time that they haven’t fucked since he came back from Madrid; not even once.

She breathes out, and lets him tug her again, so that she climbs into the bathtub, still in her clothes and gloves, sloshing water over the rim and everywhere onto the floor. She seats herself somewhat awkwardly between his legs. She looks at him: the naked body, surrounding her; the hair on his legs, the pubic hair framing his crotch, his half-erect cock.

The two scars that were not there before. On his chest, on his stomach.

He says, “Don’t look like that, minou.”

“Like what,” she says, lifting her head again.

He replies, “Like you gonna cry again.” He points to the scars. “Everything heal up just fine. Good as new.”

“Not good as new,” she says, touching the one on his chest, then the one on his stomach; that one makes him shiver. “Tickles,” he mutters.

He looks down at her hand as it moves over the scars, touching them, feeling their shape—as if the hand wants to know how they happened, how the bullet had entered him, how it had moved aside the flesh of his body, forever.

He takes her gloved finger, presses it down hard on one scar, and says, severely, “Gambit don’t want this to happen to you.”

She looks at him. Saying nothing, she reaches down, takes his cock in her hands, begins to stroke him, cupping his balls. He jumps a little, surprised, says, “Minou—”

“I want to,” she says, before he can say anything.

He laughs, his eyes half-closed now, says, “Wasn’t really gonna stop you.”

She makes him come, a little too quickly, with a raspy cry that comes from somewhere deep in his stomach. Near his wound, she thinks. He must have been under pressure; he comes as if he has been needing to, for a long time.

He opens his eyes and smiles, a little weakly, at her, and she sees his unconscious face in the medbay again; too bearded, too pale—

And she feels something near the terror she felt then, when she realizes he might have been pent up because he hasn’t fucking anyone else.

“Let’s go to the room,” he says, opening his eyes.

And she remembers his voice, just before he left for his first mission, with Logan. Wearing his mission-ready clothes in the shower, touching her with his gloved hands, then murmuring, Let’s go to the room. Where they fucked, soaking, on the bed, and he closed his eyes and never said a word.

She thinks, Already then.

“Okay,” she says, and stands up. He stands up after her, more water crashing over the rim and only adding to the minor ocean on the floor. She steps out of the tub, taking his hand, and he follows her, out the door, to the bed, where he sits down first and starts to remove her skirt.

“Wait,” she says. “I’ll do it. You don’t have gloves.” She is already reaching for the drawer with her tights, so she can change into an altered pair; she is still wearing a normal one.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Gambit be careful.”

And before she can protest, his bare hands are on the waistband of her skirt, unzipping it and tugging its waterlogged shape off. Then his hands stretch the elastic of the tights, inches from her skin, so he can tug the tights down.

She does not breathe, does not move—a single move, and he will touch her skin; she has to control it, control it so she only gets powers, just in case—but is that what she wants; powers or thoughts. And she thinks: Powers, definitely powers.

But he reaches her ankles without incident, and she has to lift her leg, just slightly, so he can slip the stocking off one foot, then the other. Then he tosses the tights to the side, lifts himself back up, and smiles. “See? Easy.”

With shaking hands, she opens the drawer, fumbles for a new pair of tights, a condom, a scarf. And he says, “Gambit put this one on, too.”

And he does, again, the same way—and again she is frozen, clutching the scarf in her hand, watching his hands that are careful, but not that careful. Bringing the dry tights over her still damp legs, letting the waistband bounce into place with a little snap against the flesh on her hips.

“This thief got some talent at this,” he says, happily.

She doesn’t say anything, but lifts the scarf up to kiss him. She doesn’t close her eyes, and neither does he; and she remembers a time when these eyes only badly aroused her. That time seems far, far away.

He leans back, then lowers that scarf to her sex, stroking her through it with his still bare hand. She has to put a gloved hand on his shoulder for balance, closes her eyes.

“Gambit won’t say it too much for now,” she hears him say—and she knew it was too good to be true, him not having mentioned the subject all this time.

“You still too scared for it,” he murmurs.

“I’m not scared,” she snaps, bringing her head up—but he is too close, still staring, and she leans back, but his other hand comes up to hold her thigh in place, while his stroking hand doesn’t stop, and she buckles forward again, her hand on his shoulder.

“Every time Gambit say minou, you’ll hear it,” he says, leaning forward underneath her arm, to kiss the hip covered by black nylon. “Eh, minou. Minou. Minou.”

And she shakes her head, but she is already coming, and she digs into his shoulder with her nails, even through the gloves.

Later, when they are fucking, she grumbles, looking down at him, “We keep soaking my damn bed.”

“It’s worth it, no?” he says, punctuating the words with a little thrust. “Eh, minou? Minou—minou—”

“Aren’t you just saying you love my pussy,” she taunts.

He shrugs. “So what, that’s true, too,” he says, and she smacks him, laughing, as he says it again, again, again. And then she is not laughing anymore. For too many reasons, now.


*


During a demonstration in class, she is teaching a judo throw to a tall young boy who has been looking at her with hearts in his eyes since they have started sparring.

To the side, she sees Logan staring at her, silent as ever. She thinks about Kyoto; about souvenirs.

Then she thinks about Gambit’s words—Not wanting to take nothing, not wanting to break nothing.

And the thought bothers her so much, so sharply, that she throws the boy to the ground, a little more roughly than she had been planning to. But the boy looks up at her, and now the hearts in his eyes are ringed with pink sparkles; and she can already see his growing hard-on beneath her.

And she thinks of Gambit putting her tights on for her; of Logan asking her to go see a movie.

And when she says, “Yikes—this is just a judo lesson, big guy. Don’t go falling in love with me,” she is not talking only to the boy.


*


She goes to Storm’s office. She somewhat expects her to be arguing on the phone with Hank, or crying to herself. But she is doing neither, simply going through papers, wearing a pair of reading glasses.

When she sees Rogue outside her door, her face warms into a smile and says, “Come on in, honey. What can I do for you.”

Rogue says, without preamble, “I’d like to be on the Kyoto mission.”

Storm looks startled. “I haven’t assigned it yet.”

“I know,” she says. “But I’d like to volunteer.”

“Why?” Storm asks.

Rogue looks down. “I just want to go on this one,” she replies. “I think I’m well-equipped for it.”

“Does it have something to do with Gambit?” Storm asks. “Or Logan?”

Rogue’s head pops up, eyes wide. “I, I—”

Storm smiles, holds up a hand to calm her. “The last thing you’re getting from me is judgment, honey,” she says, gently. “Just asking.”

Rogue looks back down at Storm’s desk. Xavier’s old round paperweight still on it.

“I’d like you not to ask Logan on the mission,” she whispers, answering without answering.

Storm looks at her over the stack of papers, still smiling. “Well-equipped, huh,” she murmurs, and Rogue cringes at the knowing in her eyes.

Then she says, “Well, you and Logan have similar things to bring to the table, combat-wise, so if I wanted a close-combat person, I’d probably be choosing between the two of you, anyway.”

Rogue takes a deep breath. “If you’re choosing between us,” she says, “please choose me.”

Storm folds her hands on top of her desk. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she replies.

Rogue nods, clenches and unclenches her fist. “Okay,” she says, standing to get up. “Thanks.”


*


Two days later, Storm calls Rogue, Jubilee, Piotr and Kurt into her office and announces that they have been chosen to guard Hank at the U.N. Disarmament Conference taking place in Kyoto, which will take about five days total; three days for the conference itself, and one day on either side, for arrival and departure.

And while she is telling them the news, Storm manages not to give her a single special look; but afterwards, as the four of them are leaving, she gives Rogue a small smile of trust and affection that makes the younger woman’s heart soar like an adolescent’s in love.


*


Gambit is waiting for her, leaning against her door, when she comes back from Storm’s meeting.

“So you really gonna do this,” he says, and there is no question about what “this” is referring to.

“How’d you know that?” she asks, genuinely shocked. “I just got told, myself.”

“Eavesdropped, then came over here to wait for you,” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “Assassin, thief and spy,” she mutters.

“Gambit don’t like it,” he pronounces. “Don’t like it, don’t agree with it.”

“That’s not your call,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “You have class later?”

She shakes her head. “No, not today.”

He pushes himself off of the door with his shoulder. “Okay. Let’s go then.”

“Where?” she asks.

“Come on,” he says, and starts walking. She follows him into the elevator.

Inside, he does not talk to her, does not rub up against her, does not whisper a filthy invitation too close to her ear, like he normally would. She realizes, suddenly, that he is angry—that this is what he is like when he is angry at her.

The elevator stops at the medbay level. “Medbay?” she asks, but he shakes his head.

They continue walking through the silver corridors, past the medbay, then into a corridor where she has never been before. Then through a side door, into a small room that is almost entirely unfurnished. Only two mats, and a small lamp on the floor in the center of the room, between the mats.

“What’s this,” she says.

“Meditation room,” Gambit replies. “Think Jean Grey and the professor used to use it.”

Her eyes widen, and she says, “Should we be in here?”

He shrugs. “Nobody come in here no more.” And that stings, the truth of it. Looking down at the two clean, long-uncreased mats.

She glances over at him. “So how’d you find it?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Gambit’s a thief, minou. No place in the mansion Gambit don’t know about.” He moves into the room, ahead of her. “Okay, sit down,” he says.

She asks, “What are we doing?” She snorts. “New place to fuck?”

“Gambit gonna teach you how to do hypnosis,” he replies.

She stares at him. That, she hadn’t expected. “What?”

He is already taking off his trench coat, folding it into a pile in a corner of the room. “If you want answers from Harada Kenichiro and you don’t want to kill him, it’ll help.”

She still has not moved from her place in the doorframe. He looks at her; he is already sitting cross legged on one of the mats. “Sit down, here.”

“Why are you trying to help,” she says, staring at him. “You don’t agree with it. And you’re mad at me.”

“It’s because Gambit don’t agree with it,” he says.

As in the bath, he points to the place on his chest where one of the scars is located.

Gambit says, “You come back on a stretcher, this thief takes somebody’s head. You know that, yeah.”

She smiles a little. “Yeah,” she says.

“Good,” he says, lowering his hand from his chest, and then looking at her again.

“But stretcher or no—you come back,” he says. And it is not a question, not a request. His voice is low, shaking only slightly.

“Yeah,” she says softly.

He nods. “Good,” he says. “Sit down.”

She sits down. He takes off his glove to reveal his naked hand. “First, you touch me.”

She jumps back to her feet. “What the hell?”

He looks at her, still calm. “Gambit gonna give you some of my power, so you can get the charming.”

Her mouth drops. “Are you insane?” she asks.

“You said you can control it so you just take powers,” he says, as if he is asking her to breakfast. “So touch me and take some.”

“No,” she hisses, and makes her way to the door—but when she opens it and looks down the silver hallway and realizes she has no idea how to get back to the elevator. She turns back to glare at him.

Still sitting there with his hand outstretched, he says, “Gambit’s gonna control it, too. With my mind. I’ll close it down as much as I can, so you won’t get no thoughts or memories.”

“How are you going to do that? You’re not telepathic,” she demands. “Are you?”

He shrugs. “No, but I ain’t totally without shields up there. Otherwise Gambit’d be blowing everything he see, up all the time.”

He looks at her, still holding out the bare hand. “Trust me.”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter, it won’t last long enough to make it to Kyoto anyway. And if I touch you long enough to take it permanently, I’ll kill you.”

“You don’t need to keep it permanently,” he says. “It’s ain’t totally part of my mutation; it’s more like a spirit energy type thing.”

Her brow furrows. “What, like voodoo?” she asks, every stereotype about Louisiana jumping into her head.

He shrugs. “Kinda,” he replies. “My power’s about energy: moving it, making it, doing things to it. Usually that means charging things, making them explode. But there’s other things you can do with it.

“Some people, they talk about things called chakras, energy centers, pathways, things like that. Gambit’s more sensitive to all that stuff, that’s why I heal a little bit faster and can jump around so much. But normal people see it too, even humans. Gurus and healers and stuff.

“Same thing for the charming. With me it works just like my charging, but gentler. You see the other person’s energy, use yours to mold it, draw it, make it do what you want, make it bend to you, so the other person feels like he’s in your spell.”

He shrugs. “You won’t be able to charge nothing, but I’ll teach you regular hypnosis so you can do something with the energy you see.”

She stares at him. “I don’t get it.”

He sighs. “It’s hard to explain, eh. That’s why if you touch me, you feel it first hand, you’ll see how it works, then you can remember it from there. If you get it in your head once, probably you know how to get to it later. It ain’t a genetic thing, it’s just a power; you gotta learn to see it, the energy in things.”

“So what, I’ll be able to charm people forever, if I can figure out how?” she asks.

“Maybe,” he says. “Not me.”

Then he frowns. “But you’d be able to charm Harada Kenichiro. And then you wouldn’t have to touch him to get answers.”

She realizes, with a start—he is trying to give her a way to not have yet another person’s ghosts in her head.

She looks at him, then looks down at her hand. “You can really shield your mind?” she asks quietly.

He puts the bare hand back on his chest. “Thief’s honor, Gambit try his best. Can’t promise nothing, but I think it can done.”

She comes back into the room, sits down across from him. Staring at his hand. The truth is, she wants to try it; she wants to do the thing she did to John, back at Bobby’s house in Boston—to see if she can just take powers, not thoughts and memories, without significantly hurting the other person.

“Anything happen, we got the medbay right next door, we say it was a sex accident,” he says, and she manages to laugh. He holds his hand out. “Come on,” he says. “Trust me.”

“Shouldn’t I be asking you to trust me?” she jokes.

“Gambit already do,” he says. “Come on.”

And she takes a deep breath. She removes her glove, looks down at the hand again, then back up at Gambit. He is looking at her, calmly and steadily. His hand—callused where he grips the staff, she sees for the first time, though she has felt the calluses against her body—held out to her. Then, with the tips of her fingers, she touches his palm.

She doesn’t feel much of anything at first; then the pull begins, and she concentrates her mind, the way she did with John, looking for the thread in the connection that is only about power; about that specific energy that makes mutation—and she realizes for the first time that her power might be a bit similar to the rat’s. He makes and manipulates energy, she absorbs and assimilates it.

She can feel it, coming into her body, like a glowing red filament: the charging power, the vision of everything trembling with its own latent forces. And it’s already enough; she can see the channels of energy running through his body, through her body, vibrating off the floor, the mats, the lamp in between them, the door—and so she pulls her hand away.

Gambit falls forward a little bit, he has to grab onto the mat with his one gloved hand.

“Sorry!” she cries. “Was it too much?”

His head is lowered so she cannot see his face. Breathing hard, he rasps out, “Apology three—you going soft.”

She scowls, about to hit him; then he shakes his head, quickly, like a dog shaking off water, and looks back up at her.

“It work?” he asks.

She nods. She can see pathways everywhere, can feel her hand humming; she thinks if she touched her glove right now and thought about it, it would burn.

“What about.” He gestures to his head. “No thoughts?”

Her eyes widen, and she nods, realizing. “No thoughts,” she says.

Nothing, not even an inkling. Just the signature of his energy within her.

The realization hits her body like a blow: the time with John wasn’t a fluke. She can do this. She can really do this. She can control some part of it; even in this small way. She starts to smile, like an idiot, looking down at her own hand like it is something she has never seen before, something she is only now beginning to get to know.

Gambit exhales, and then smiles. “Good,” he says, but doesn’t say anything else. Then he puts his glove back on. “Now let’s begin.”


*


Much to her dismay, he hypnotizes her multiple times over the first and second days, before she protests, “I thought that wouldn’t work on me anymore, since you told me about it!”

He says, “The charm power don’t have no effect on you. So it mean it ain’t certain to work on you. Doesn’t mean Gambit can’t still hypnotize you if I’m good at it.” He snorts. “And I’m good at it.”

“Cocky Cajun,” she mutters.

“Actually,” he says, “Gambit think my charm power could still work on people who already know it, if they actually wanna be charmed. The reason it don’t work after someone knows is ‘cause people change their energy when they know about it, put up defenses, aren’t relaxed anymore; then I can’t mold their energy the same way without forcing it. And then it might become an explosion. If you let me use it on you, Gambit think he could still do it.”

“Wanna try?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“Too risky,” he says.

“And what we just did wasn’t?” she counters.

He gazes at her, says, “You have a reason for what you doing. Gambit don’t have no reason to take that kinda risk on you, minou.”

He says “minou” for the first time since they have seen each other today, out of habit, and she realizes he must have been trying to avoid using it.

His face softens. And now, just as he had predicted, she hears something else in the word—but then he is back to business, his voice hardening again. “Now concentrate.”


*


During the sessions, Gambit says hypnosis isn’t about lulling someone to sleep, or to dream; it’s about making the body relaxed, while the mind becomes even more attentive and receptive. He talks about other things, too, that she doesn’t totally understand; about feeling energy moving through her, and being able to sense another person’s energy, and know whether or not the hypnosis is working; or even just know when another person is starting to get nervous and erratic.

He tells her that what he’s teaching her is some mixture of hypnosis and something called reiki, which he says is a kind of energy healing. He tells her things about stillness; about being attuned; about energy being intelligent, about how, when she sees another person, she will just know how to ask the question, what to say, to draw the person in.

And it’s true; even when his power dissipates from her body, she finds it surprisingly easy to find the threads of energy in things again, if she concentrates the right way; as if a light has been turned on inside her eyes.

She thinks about things she didn’t know and didn’t expect—Logan teaching his students tai chi, Gambit and chakras.

And on the third day, she hypnotizes him for the first time. When he breaks out of it, he looks a little startled, but still proud.

“I hypnotized you!” she exclaims.

“Gambit just got distracted by your pretty face,” he mumbles.

But she does it several more times during that day, and he looks less and less disgruntled, more and more amazed. “You’re good at it,” he observes. “A natural.” A natural at feeling someone else’s energy, pulling it towards her, bending it. She had never known there were other ways to do that.

The next day, he tells her, “Your eye fixation is good. You’re good with verbal suggestion. But the talking is best when it’s not that gentle, but more firm. Some people are better hypnotists when they speak gentle; you’re better if it’s like an order.”

He grumbles to himself, “Why ain’t Gambit surprised,” and she kicks him.

Then he adds, “It’s good if you add some physical contact, too. It don’t have to be skin-on-skin. You can wear gloves. It’s just about the nearness. If you’re in contact with his body, you feel the energy better. Hold him like you hold a bird; not too tight, not too gentle. So it’s like you’re part of him.”

“Okay,” she says. And it’s true; when she puts her gloved hand on his shoulder and speaks, she can feel his energy bowing to her, as his eyes become vague and distant.

Gambit trains her like that for a week. The time they usually spend for fucking is cut nearly in half. And when they do fuck, he is still different; quieter, tenser. Thinking.

Still angry, she thinks to herself. Though he has a weird way of showing it.


*


She barely sees Logan at all that week, spending nearly all her time teaching class, training with Gambit, or going over mission details and logistics with the other team members. She tells him, when he asks where she’s been, that the preparation for this mission is more complicated—he still looks suspicious.

The night before the mission, she goes to Gambit’s room. When he opens the door, he is surprised, saying, “Gambit was just coming to your room. Come in.”

Though she has been here countless times, she feels as though she is seeing this room for the first time. How things are neat, but messy, a kind of devoted disorder; how it now smells of cigarettes, and she knows he must have been smoking, though she has never smelled it on his breath. How things look worn, cared for, long-loved. An old trench coat, tons of yellowed playing cards, a metal staff laid across a chair.

Looking at the tenderness of this room, she thinks about a thirteen-year-old boy in love; then an eighteen-year-old boy in love, on the day of his wedding, exploding a gun with his mind.

“You’ll do good,” he says, behind her. “Don’t you worry.”

She turns around, comes close to him, presses her bare face to his chest. She asks, “So you want me to be naked, or you?”

He smiles, brings a gloved hand up to her mouth. “Let’s not do nothing today, minou,” he says—and she hears minou, hears something else—but he continues, “You need your rest. And your concentration.”

“You’re still mad at me,” she says, frowning.

“Yep,” he says, easily, honestly, the way he always says it, the way he said it after she accused him of just wanting to fuck her, in Manhattan.

“Then maybe I should leave,” she threatens, crossing her arms.

He doesn’t reach for her, to try to stop her, but pulls away and climbs into his own bed.

“You can sleep here,” he says. “You can still be naked if you want. Gambit be clothed.” He lifts a gloved hand, to show her.

She looks down at her clothes. She takes off her skirt only, then steps forward to climb into his bed. It is the only the second time she has ever slept next to him. And strangely, both times, they haven’t had sex. It feels strange to be here, again, like that; not about to fuck, not even close.

“You’re still mad at me,” she says.

“Yep,” he says again. Then smiles. “Nothing for you to worry about. Go sleep now.”

“You really don’t want to do anything?” she asks, resting her head on her elbow. Now that she is horizontal, she can feel how good sleep already sounds, feels.

Gambit laughs. “Gambit wanna do lots,” he says. “But we’re not gonna do nothing tonight.”

“Why not,” she mumbles, already half-asleep.

He gazes down at her. “‘Cause it would feel like it’s the last time,” he says, and she opens her eyes to meet his eyes. “And Gambit don’t like that.”

She stares at him. Hearing: Not a little bit. All the way, now.

Still looking at her, he adds, quietly, “You come back, yeah.” She can only nod.

“Good,” he says. “You go sleep now, minou.” Once again, the same words he had said, before leaving her room in Manhattan.

And as she is falling asleep, she can feel him watching her. He doesn’t touch her; but he doesn’t have to.


*


Early the next morning, he is next to her, not touching her, still asleep—or pretending to be asleep, she doesn’t know. She thinks he doesn’t want to say a good-bye, either. So she just pinches his nose with her gloved fingers. “Later, rat,” she whispers. He doesn’t stir.

She slips out of the room, goes back to her room, and showers. Not so much time until she has to go to the jet; the mission begins early.

She is glad she won’t have time to see Logan before she goes. Seeing him, now, knowing what she is planning to do in Kyoto—though, does she really know what she is planning to do in Kyoto?—would throw her off, mess with her concentration, and she doesn’t need that. Having Gambit teach her hypnosis all week has helped to keep herself out of Logan’s way, besides giving her a skill that she not only might actually need, but seems to be naturally good at. The knowledge pleases her.

But she isn’t glad for long, because not ten minutes before she is about to leave her room for the jet, the knock comes.

She thinks it is one of the team members, so she opens the door; and when she sees his face, scolds herself inwardly for not predicting that it would be Logan.

“I don’t have much time,” she warns him, and it is the truth.

He watches her as she finishes the final preparations on her bag, begins to slip her feet into her shoes. He seems to be trying to calculate something, or figure out something, but she doesn’t look at his face closely enough to tell exactly what. Finally, she does look at him, and sees that his brow is lined with worry.

Unable to keep herself from thinking of Gambit’s words:

The real way. Like anybody to anybody. Simple and stupid.

“So almost a week, huh,” Logan says, trying to hide his anxiety and failing.

“Yup,” she says, zipping her bag closed, trying to sound confident and breezy so the lines in his face will disappear.

“So say hi to Storm and your right hand for me.” She laughs, rethinking. “And Westchester County.”

And the voice seems to work, because the lines do, now, disappear from his face. But now he just looks lonely, tentative; the way he looks after class, as his students run off to find their friends; as he folds up training mats by himself.

She thinks of the way he looked after they had sex in her room, the first time—and his hands had trembled and trembled. Of the uncertainty in his face when he asked her, after the second time, if they could continue doing it.

He says, “Bring me back a souvenir.”

The word cuts through her all her hard-won calm and concentration—and all of a sudden, she thinks of Remy the bull, and Madrid, and Harada, and ghosts, and souvenirs; of the things we bring back, the things we give to others—and what is she going to do in Kyoto, what the hell does she think she’s really going to do—

And in less than a second, his hand is on her arm, too tightly, and he says, so fiercely she can feel his spit on her cheek, “What is that.”

She realizes she must have shown something of her anguish on her face, so she makes an exaggerated show of laughing. All while trying to extricate her arm from his vice-like grip.

“What? You want to have some fun before I leave? I guess I have two minutes—”

But the grip is indeed vice-like, because she can’t budge him; it’s like an adamantium handcuff around her arm. He says, “What the hell is with that look on your face every time someone mentions something related to Japan.”

And fuck. She shuts her entire body down; all motion, all emotion. He can’t know. If he knows even an inkling of what she is thinking, why she is going to Kyoto—she doesn’t even want to know how he will react.

He would stop her, she knows. But she has to do this. Not only for him. For herself: to exorcise the body she is living in, of at least some of the ghosts she has acquired.

“Nothing,” she says only. “Let go.”

“No,” he says, and once again he is looking at her the way he did in Storm’s office, after they had been informed about the Tokyo mission. “Tell me.”

“Logan, let go,” she says, and pulls, using as much of her strength as she dares to, not wanting to hurt him.

But he isn’t budging at all, and he is even closing his fist even harder and harder around her arm. And the fierce look in his eyes looks too similar to the look in Gambit’s when he was asking her what she thought love was—

And she is sixteen again, dead, and Logan’s life is there in her body before her own—

She cries, with the voice of that girl in her throat, “Fucking let go!” and pushes against his chest with nearly the full force of her powers.

Apparently, she is pretty strong, because she sends him through her front door, into the hallway, and through Kurt’s door, into his room. Thank god Kurt is probably already on the jet.

Logan stares back at her, covered in pieces of door.

She looks back at him, breathing hard. She is only distantly aware that her fists are clenched, that her entire body is shaking. And now there is a look on his face that she has never seen; that reminds her of no other look.

But now she has to go; the jet is waiting. She turns away from the look.

Then she steps forward, crossing the debris she has made, and mutters, “Get this fuckin’ mess fixed before we’re back from the mission.” But she is not sure if she is talking to him, or to herself.

AND OPEN UP YOUR EYES



“Romance (noun):

1. a pleasurable feeling of excitement and wonder associated with love.
2. a love affair.
3. a book or film dealing with love in a sentimental or idealized way.
4. a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.
5. a medieval tale dealing with a hero of chivalry, of the kind common in the Romance languages.”


Compact Oxford English Dictionary.


*


“…they needed large numbers of human test subjects. Several such trials were attempted, but they were risky: if word got out that the CIA was testing dangerous drugs on American soil, the entire program could be shut down. Which is where the CIA's interest in Canadian researchers came in…

The stated goal of this research was not for Western powers to start using mind control on prisoners; it was to prepare Western soldiers for whatever coercive techniques they might encounter if they were taken hostage.

The CIA, of course, had other interests. Yet even in closed-door meetings like the one at the Ritz, it would have been impossible, so soon after revelations of Nazi torture had provoked worldwide revulsion, for the agency to openly admit it was interested in developing alternative interrogation methods of its own.”


“The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind,” The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein.



*


“Testimony from Central American torture survivors in the seventies and eighties is littered with references to mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of cells, proposing questions or offering tips. Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was abducted and jailed in Guatemala in 1989, has testified that the men who raped and burned her with cigarettes deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent, whom they referred to as their ‘boss.’”


“The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind,” The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein.



*


“For if we were to begin to accuse ourselves, in asking forgiveness, of all the crimes of the past against humanity, there would no longer be an innocent person on earth – and therefore no one in the position to judge or arbitrate. We are all heir, at least, to persons or events marked, in an essential, interior, ineffaceable fashion, by crimes against humanity…

“In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable … then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear.

“If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm … forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.”


On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Jacques Derrida, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes.


*


“If you really knew about your past—what kind of person you were, the work we did together—”


William Stryker, X2: X-Men United.


*


In the jet, she does not have to concentrate so hard until she begins to see channels, conduits everywhere.

She can see the plasma-magnetic field surrounding Jubilee, especially in her hands; the smoky, almost transparent haze around Kurt, as if his body is always just about to be elsewhere, in another dimension; the hard and brittle arteries of tension weaved throughout Piotr’s skin; the wholly balanced, but massive force coming from Hank’s entire body, down to his fur and nails, like harnessed momentum.

She realizes, for the first time—These are strong people. She is surrounded by strong people.

And she looks down at her own hand: the still flesh, the warm glow she can see radiating from it. Enough power in it to punch a hole in the floor of this jet.

Thinking of Gambit saying: Strong. Strong.


*


During the first day, she and Piotr do an initial reconnaissance of the grounds, while Jubilee and Kurt remain with Hank as he gets settled into his hotel room.

“Bobby tells me you know,” Piotr says lightly.

Inwardly, she rolls her eyes a little at how American Piotr’s accent is already; Bobby even calls him “Pete.” Sometimes even “Petey,” in a low voice filled with meaning, when he thinks no one is listening.

He adds, “About us.”

She replies, “I may have seen a walk of shame or two.” Piotr laughs, then he becomes more thoughtful.

“Walk of shame,” he muses. He sighs and says, “We haven’t told anyone yet.” Frowning. “Bobby is worried about what the others will think.”

“Fuck what they think,” she replies, craning her head to check the height of the drop from the rooftop of the building to the ground.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Piotr says. “Thank you.”


*


At the end of the day, Hank has still not met with any dignitaries, and she has still not caught even a glimpse of Harada or the Japanese ambassador.

She is sharing a room with Jubilee, while Kurt is sharing a room with Hank, and Piotr gets a room to himself.

As they are going to sleep, Jubilee asks her if she wants to fuck, a little bit.

Rogue blinks, says, “Didn’t you have a boyfriend?” Jubilee shrugs and says what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him; they’re pretty relaxed about that sort of thing, anyway.

And then she smirks, says, “I still remember how much fun we had.” She says she has gloves, a couple dental dams.

Rogue does want to fuck her, urgently; wants to close her eyes and let everything she remembers of Jubilee’s exceptionally talented mouth and hands take away everything else she is thinking about, everything else she now knows. But she cannot un-know any of it now, cannot un-live any of it anymore—and the time when she and Jubilee fucked seems like another life entirely. She has already become another person, when she wasn’t watching.

But now Jubilee is lifting her hands, a concerned look on her face, saying, “Whoa, whoa, sorry, hey, it’s cool.” She shrugs. “I didn’t know you had a serious thing going on.”

Rogue looks down at her hands. I don’t, she wants to say. She would have said it, even a month ago.

But she can’t, now. Not here, in Kyoto, looking for Logan’s past, with Gambit’s teachings showing her the shimmering around Jubilee’s fingertips.

Serious things, she thinks.

But she just says, “Sorry. I—want to, but.”

Then she doesn’t know what should come after the “but.”

Jubilee grins. “You look pretty miserable,” she comments. “Must mean something good.”


*


The first and second days of the conference are not only entirely uneventful, but downright boring—Piotr and Jubilee have resorted to rating the physical attributes of all the other bodyguards, on an extremely unforgiving scale; while Kurt remains politely and seriously at Hank’s side.

She has already seen the Japanese ambassador, and his circle of bodyguards—but no sign of Harada. She wonders if he is sitting this one out, perhaps; or maybe, as head of security, he can direct their actions remotely, without having to be there on site. He is old, after all, she thinks to herself. He acts as an advisor, not an actual guard.

And on the third day, when it seems like everything has been a monumentally foolish waste of her time and effort—she sees him.

She is walking next to Hank, escorting him to the pavilion where the dignitaries will be breaking, for a publicly photographed luncheon, when she turns her head to the side—for no reason, for every reason—and sees a tall, older man in a gray suit, stepping out of an armored black town car parked near the entrance of the hotel.


*


Harada does not enter the pavilion; but from where she is standing—close enough to Hank’s table that she can be near him in a flash, but far enough to observe everyone else in the room—she sees the Japanese ambassador excuse himself from his table, stand, and leave.

She moves, about to follow.


*


But then realizes—if she does, she would have to leave her post as Hank’s guard.

She looks around; Kurt, Piotr and Jubilee are all here, at other strategic points in the pavilion; more than enough power to contain a sudden attack.

But then she thinks about Storm’s face when Hank’s house had been first burned down; about Gambit’s newly scarred body and his growing beard in the medbay.

She realizes—if she has to choose between remaining at Hank’s side, and finding out whatever she is going to find out from Harada—then there is no choice, at all.

And she remembers that Logan had been given that choice, too—had been given that choice multiple times; the choice between them, whom he barely knew, and Stryker, who knew everything about him. And every time, he had chosen them.

That night, during the attack on the mansion, he had closed the hidden door on his own name as she shouted it in horror—

And it is the first time she has let herself think of that night; and the long-silenced thought opens up something in her, a wound she didn’t know she had.

That night, that time; what she did, what she took from him. Once again, taking things from him he didn’t even know he had; taking things from him that he had been looking for, without hope.

That night she had been selfish, afraid— she hadn’t hesitated to ask Bobby to put the ice wall between Logan and everything that might take Logan away; watching him touch the wall in despair, grieving the loss of something he had barely even glimpsed—

And she had called out to him, knowing he would not turn away from her voice, knowing he would sacrifice everything, again, to protect them, protect her.

And in the car, she had asked him who Stryker was, hoping he would know that at least; hoping against hope that she hadn’t really just robbed him of a moment that could teach him some part of who he was—

—and he had said, in a voice that broke her, that he couldn’t remember—

—and she realized only then how little he knew; and how much she knew.

Because she had known—not everything, but some things, God, already, she had known some things about Stryker, about Harada Kenichiro, and she could know more if she stopped forcing herself to forget it all—

But she had said nothing, was too afraid to give him anything, afraid of what he would say if he knew she knew.

And then, also—afraid of what he would do if he got everything back. Yanking him back from the first sign of hope for recovering his past, unable to let him walk down a path that would take him away, that would make him more himself and less theirs, hers—

And then, even more, afraid of what he would do if he knew what he was, who he had been, what he had done. As she knows, as she knows, as she has tried every day not to know—

—So she had given him back the dog tags she still slept with, instead.

A tiny part of the past she had stolen. A tiny substitute for everything she still did not have the courage to tell him; a tiny substitute for the answers he longed for, which she could not bring herself to give, or even truly let herself know.

A teenager, selfishly in love.

And then he had chosen them yet again: leaving Stryker to die at Alkali Lake, though he considered him to be the last link to the person he had been and would now never know. He had entered the jet, a resolute and resigned look on his face.

And Jean had asked him if he was okay, and he had looked at her, with all the intimacy they had between them.

And he had said, honestly, “I am now.” Choosing them, again. Choosing them, finally.

Later, after they had left Jean at Alkali Lake, with Scott still in tears and Logan with his arms around him, Xavier had asked her—for reasons she suspects—to be the one to hold the files about Stryker’s mutant experiments. The files which she would later personally hand to the President, in the Oval Office.

And in the jet she had looked inside the folder only once, while everyone else was too distracted, staring at Scott and Logan, thinking about what they had all just lost—

And in one glance she had seen more than enough to confirm everything she knew and half-knew, without wanting to know it or half-know it.

Everything he had decided to abandon, when he chose them. Refusing to betray the present for the past.


*


So now, she looks around the pavilion. She sees Hank’s large form, his profile facing her, as he quietly eats his meal—while across his table, two other ambassadors observe him, utterly amazed that such a savage figure knows how to use eating utensils; and so well, so civilized, just as if he were human.

She can see Hank’s tense face as he tries to give the impression that he does not notice the stares and whispers.

And she turns her head—outside the hotel, the black armored car is still there, and the Japanese ambassador is re-entering the pavilion, flanked only by two young bodyguards. The car is not moving; she could stop it, catch it if she flew—now, now, now.

But she stays where she is, watching over Hank—Hank, who is still being gossiped over by the two dignitaries across from him; still eating his meal with all the dignity and grace inside him.


*


She thinks, I am not going to betray the present for the past.


*


That night, there is a cocktail reception inside the hotel’s banquet room; and once again, Hank seems supremely uncomfortable to be there, with his four conspicuous bodyguards, in their leather jump-suits.

The Japanese ambassador is in attendance, but once again, he is accompanied only by three younger men in black suits. No sign of a tall, silver-haired man.

Hank approaches her. “Good evening, Rogue,” he greets her, handing her a flute of champagne.

She hesitates to take it. “Hey—I probably shouldn’t. I’m on the job.”

Hank exhales heavily. “I’m more than aware, believe me.” He waves a hand at her. “Please, I insist. It’s the least I can offer for the time you’re wasting here. Watching us extremely ineffectual diplomats evade any genuine discussion of the issues at hand.”

He looks tired, frustrated, ready to go home. She doesn’t really know what’s going on at this conference, but if it makes him look like this, it can’t be great.

“Protecting you isn’t wasting time,” she declares.

“I don’t know that I ever asked to be protected,” Hank replies dryly, taking a sip of champagne. “Let alone—”

Then he stops, eyes apologetic. “I’m sorry, Rogue, I don’t mean to disparage your efforts specifically; I do appreciate the concern, I just—” Then he trails off.

She smiles. “Storm’s pretty vigilant,” she says only.

He looks at her, then takes a long sip from his champagne flute again. “Yes,” he murmurs. “Well. At least this damned thing is over, and we can all go home tomorrow morning.”

The Japanese ambassador is standing now, exiting the banquet room and moving towards the hotel lobby—and then he raises his hand in greeting.

And her stomach drops again, when she sees a figure, from behind: gray suit, silver hair, silver walking cane. Then he turns, and she sees his face; the face in her mind, the face of a ghost.

She freezes, feels her breathing accelerate. Here, again. Another chance.

Then she jolts back to herself, looks at Hank. She won’t betray the present for the past—

—but to her dismay, Hank is now looking in the same direction, seeing the Japanese ambassador and his younger bodyguards, still in discussion with Harada.

“Is there some reason,” Hank begins mildly, “that you’ve been taking such an interest in the Japanese ambassador and his bodyguards—particularly his tall friend there—since we arrived here in Kyoto?”

She stares at him, horrified that he would have observed her so closely. “I—no, no, not at all, there’s nothing,” she says hastily.

“It’s hardly nothing if it puts that look on your face,” he replies evenly.

Her fingers tense around the stem of the champagne flute. “It’s nothing, Hank,” she says—and though she thinks of him as Hank in her head, she’s not sure if she’s ever directly addressed him as such, and it makes her feel more adult than being here, in this jump-suit. “Really, it’s nothing.”

He studies her. “If you have something you need to do, Rogue—”

“No,” she cries, though she wants to say the opposite. “This is my duty. I’m staying.” She is making a choice.

Still studying her, Hank is silent. Then he sips from his champagne glass again and says, “You know, on one of the first early missions Ororo and I were sent on, it was so dreadfully boring that we both snuck out midway and went to buy fast food. Well, she did, I stayed in car. We only went back several hours later.”

She stares at him. “What happened?”

Hank chuckles. “Nothing. No one ever found out.”

Without looking at her, he empties his champagne flute. Then he turns to her, pats her on the shoulder, smiles and walks away.

She watches Hank cross the banquet room, towards the hotel lobby. He strikes up a conversation with the Japanese ambassador, with more energy in his words now than he has shown all night. The ambassador looks slightly uncomfortable at the sudden interruption, but politely nods and acquiesces to Hank’s invitation—which seems to be to return to the banquet room, because now Hank and the ambassador are walking back, towards Hank’s table.

And now the ambassador’s bodyguards re-enter the room, positioning themselves in strategic areas, just as she, Kurt, Piotr and Jubilee are still positioned.

But Harada does not enter; he is still in the hotel lobby, talking to one more bodyguard. Then this last bodyguard leaves his side, and Harada is left alone, at the entrance to the banquet room, quietly surveying the figures within it. For a moment, she thinks his gaze may have passed over her, but there is no sign of recognition on his face, and his eyes keep moving.

And she looks at Hank, who glances at her only once—then gives her the same subtle thumbs-up gesture he did when she was talking to Joshua, at the first gala. Then he turns away and makes a great show of being deeply engrossed in conversation.

She turns her head back to Harada again. He is still gazing at the banquet room. Then he turns around, moving back into the hotel lobby, towards the exit—

And she is moving before she knows what she is doing.

As she walks, she already starts to concentrate, calling forth the attention that Gambit taught has her—and she starts to see the pathways emerging, in the floor of the lobby, its pillars, the giant pots holding decorative trees and orchids, in the hotel porters and other conference attendees, pushing suitcases or carrying drinks.

She can see the jagged, fatigued energy in Harada’s body as he walks, slightly bent over his cane—through the lobby, towards the revolving glass front doors, outside, where she knows his car will be waiting.

And she is already making herself still, ready to pull, to draw him in; but just in case the first kind of pull isn’t enough, she removes her left glove, too.

Now they are already outside the hotel, in the front gardens, and she can see his car waiting. She is now only a few feet behind him.

She hears herself asking, as if it is someone else speaking: “Sumimasen, Harada-san—excuse me, Mr. Harada—”

He turns to her, and for a split second his defenses are down. And she takes it—she holds her still-gloved right hand out for a greeting handshake. And, looking like he doesn’t know what he is doing or why he is doing it, he lifts his hand, too, in an instinctive gesture of courtesy, his face still confused—he does not recognize her, her hair is different now, he had not seen the white streaks in Manhattan, she had been concealing them—and accepts her handshake.

And she brings the entire force of her energy upon him—every wish, every unanswered question, every half-seen, half-known, half-remembered glimpse, every gap in Logan’s past she wants to fill—

Then she says, holding onto his hand, fixing him in the eye, with the firm voice that made Gambit grumble: “Harada-san, I would like to talk to you.”

He looks at her—and the vague and distant look is already there, and she can feel his energy, much weaker than she had expected, bending, bending, bending to her—

And he says, “Yes.”


*


Still holding his hand, she brings him, not far away, to a wooden bench just at the beginning of the hotel’s front gardens. They are now out of view of his waiting car, but still in view of the hotel lobby.

If his bodyguards come, if they see her—she will have no choice but to fight him, and everyone else who comes. She is prepared for that.

Harada’s energy is already dim, muted, his body half-limp and relaxed, despite his size. She realizes, with a start, how old he is. He hadn’t looked that old in Manhattan; he had worn his age with a kind of stately grace; he had been handsome, even powerful-looking.

But now he looks worn, washed-out, and she remembers that he had passed out after only two seconds of kissing her—and it occurs to her that she is most likely the one who has done this to him; that he still has not recovered, even from the little she had taken from him, in Manhattan.

And then it occurs to her for the first time that she is going to be interrogating an old man. That this might be how old Logan actually is; if he isn’t even older. The Harada Kenichiro in her head is young, tall, determined. This one is only tall.

And it is so far from how she had imagined it would be; who she imagined Harada Kenichiro would be. She thinks of an elderly Logan—a Logan who wears his years weakly, feebly; who can be overpowered by a young woman, barely even old enough to drink legally.

Still—still—still. She is already here. She will not back down.


*


She begins, in English, still holding his hand: “Is your name Harada Kenichiro.”

“Yes,” he replies, also in English; and she can hear his accent; she can hear how he would speak the words, in his Kansai dialect, if he were to speak in Japanese.

“Who is James Howlett,” she asks, willing herself to remain still.

His eyes are half-closed, but even so she can see the expression of pain and anger that fills them, the deep crevices that now mar his forehead.

He says, “The American soldier who wanted to marry Mariko during the war.”

“Who is Mariko,” she asks.

He says, “My half-sister. The daughter of Yashida Shingen, the then-head of Yashida-gumi. I was only his illegitimate son, the child of his mistress.”

“Did James Howlett marry Mariko,” she asks.

“No,” he says dully. “He was an American soldier. That he would even think of taking Mariko away from us was an insult. I wanted to please my father; so I challenged him to a duel.”

She takes a deep breath. “What happened during the duel,” she asks.

Harada says, “At first we fought only with swords. I was only fifteen years old. My mutation had manifested, but was still undeveloped, very weak.”

Harada says, “But when I began losing, I wrapped my sword with what little of the tachyon field I could summon, and struck him through with it.”

Harada says, “He fell. I thought I had won the duel. But only minutes later he revived himself, completely healed.”

Some of the words he says in Japanese, his voice relaxing into its natural speech, but she finds she can still mostly understand him, with the Japanese that Logan has given her.

Harada says, “I realized, he, too was a mutant. I began to taunt him.”

Harada says, “I hated him, everything he represented. That he, an American soldier, might have a chance at becoming part of the clan I had never been able to truly enter. That he would take Mariko away, the only person in the clan who had ever treated me kindly. That he was strong, confident, arrogant, where I was weak, awkward, too tall, too skinny.”

Harada says, “All of this was hateful to the fifteen-year-old me.”

She can see him, fifteen years old, the tallest boy in the clan, gazed at with scorn and condescension.

Harada says, “As I was taunting him, he lost control of himself and used his claws to slash my chest, nearly killing me.”

Harada says, “The duel was put to an end, with James Howlett accused of unfair play and revealed as a mutant. No one in the clan knew yet about my mutation, or what I had done to the sword.”

Harada says, “Mariko rejected him; because he was a mutant, because he was an American, because she ultimately chose to side with the clan.”

The information is coming too fast, much faster than she had expected, much more easily than she had expected.

And as he says everything, she sees it, remembers it, now clearly, the way she knows Logan would remember it, if Harada were telling it to him, instead of her.

The pain of being seen for who he was by the woman he had loved; and rejected by her, for it. The pain of being revealed to be, as he had always feared: subhuman, a monster.

Harada says, “Still, our father was not impressed by my loss; soon after the duel, he disowned me.”

She can feel him struggling with every sentence; trying to figure out what he is doing, why he is sitting here, why he is not in his car, going home. Why he is speaking about these things.

But he is weak, he cannot overpower her. This Harada Kenichiro is not the one in her memories. Proud, angry, wielding a sword. This Harada Kenichiro is not that Harada Kenichiro.

But she knows that this is not yet the end of his story with Logan.

Now she asks, “When did you meet James Howlett again.”

Harada closes and opens his eyes, slowly, as if trying to see through a fog.

He says, “I saw him again, fifteen years later, in Canada, where Oyama Kenji was conducting experiments on him, under the direction of the American military.”

“Who is Oyama Kenji,” she asks. She only vaguely knows this name, this person; has only a blurry face to put to it.

Harada says, “My mentor. He was also related to the Yashida family. He took me in shortly after my father expelled me from the clan.”

She asks, “Why was he conducting experiments on James Howlett.”

Harada says, “Oyama-sensei was a scientist for the Imperial Japanese Army, and one of the lieutenants for Unit 731. He had been the first scientist to begin researching the possibility of bonding adamantium to organic and biological matter, such as tissue, keratin, bone. It was first tested on prisoners of war.”

She has to continue to tell herself to keep breathing. To hold onto Harada like a bird; not too tightly, not too gently. Like she is a part of his body.

She asks, “How did Oyama Kenji come to Canada.”

Harada says, “After the bombings, and the U.S. occupation, General MacArthur gave the leaders of Unit 731 total immunity from all prosecution for their war crimes, in exchange for seizing possession of all data and research completed in its laboratories.”

He says, “In 1950 or 1951, Oyama-sensei was asked to come to Canada, to continue to develop his research on adamantium, under the protection of the American government.”

He says, “Oyama-sensei brought me with him as his pupil, as well as his daughter, Yuriko, who was also my fiancée, later my wife.”

He says, “The research Oyama-sensei had begun at Unit 731 became the Weapon X project.”

At the words Weapon X, she feels her breath stop completely.

But she stills herself, calms herself. She can do this. She can do this.

She asks, “How did you meet James Howlett in Canada.”

He says, “Ten years after we had arrived in Canada, he was brought to the facility as a test subject.”

He says, “When I saw him through the glass, I thought it was my imagination. I thought he was a ghost. I couldn’t believe it. He had barely aged at all, in the fifteen years that had passed.”

She asks, “What kind of test subject was James Howlett.”

Harada says, “He had volunteered for the adamantium-bonding process. Oyama said he was part of a private mercenary team of enhanced mutants that the Americans were creating. He was recruited just as the war in Vietnam was starting, after high-ranking army officials had observed his mutation and its abilities.”

He says, “All the members of the team were undergoing improvements; but he was the only one who willingly volunteered for adamantium bonding.”

A private mercenary team—that sounds familiar—but she only has flashes of scenes, through a haze, like a mesh blanket over her eyes.

She thinks she glimpses a warm country, fathers asleep in the same room as their children, bullets to the head.

She asks, “What were the experiments you performed upon James Howlett.”

Harada says, “I did not actively participate in the experiments myself; I was mostly there to observe and document results for Oyama-sensei. My English was better than his, I was able to translate for him.”

Harada says, “His role was to direct the American and Canadian military scientists about the properties of adamantium, and how to bond the metal to organic surfaces. It was just before James Howlett arrived that Oyama-sensei and another military scientist finally perfected the method of heating the adamantium, so it would be workable during bonding.”

She knows the other scientist is Stryker.

He says, “Because of his healing factor, James Howlett could not always be permanently sedated during the process, and occasionally fought against his holders. At the time, the scientists were still trying to perfect a mind-controlling drug; the formula they created worked on other mutants, but not on him. During one of his occasional rages, he killed at least two researchers.”

She swallows, feels her bare hand trembling. She asks, “What happened after the process was finished.”

Harada says, “After the bonding process was complete, they performed further experiments on his body to test the durability of the metal, as well as the scope of his healing factor.”

Harada says, “I personally witnessed only a few. He was shot with multiple types of firepower; he was burned alive; he was electrocuted; then almost completely flayed.”

Harada’s hand in hers is starting to shake; though his face is still vacant.

Harada says, “He survived every experiment.”

She asks, trying to keep the tremor out of her own voice: “What happened to James Howlett after all the experiments were finished.”

Wanting to know, not wanting to know. Knowing she already partly knows. Harada’s words are speaking to things that are already in her mind, awakening memories as strong as her own. As if she was the one shot, burned, flayed.

And that is how she knows that Logan was still awake, conscious, with his memory, during this process, at least. When these things were happening, Logan knew it—even if it was only in flashes of hysteria and struggle. They hadn’t been able to totally drug him, yet.

Harada says, “After the bonding process and all subsequent trials were completed, James Howlett’s memory was erased. His first official order was to kill Oyama Kenji, in order to expunge all evidence of the project’s relation to a Japanese war criminal.”

Harada says, “Then, he was to capture both myself and Yuriko, for future experiments.”

Harada says, “The military scientists had discovered—we did not know they were also observing us—that we were both mutants. My tachyon field, her superhuman strength. They even already had a code name for me. Silver Samurai. They were very simplistic, in those times.”

Harada’s hand is shaking uncontrollably now, and she looks down it. Then she sees that his face is not vacant, exactly, but numb, with remembered shock.

He says, “In the middle of the night, James Howlett came to the area of the facility where the researchers and scientists resided. With his new claws, he killed Oyama-sensei immediately, in his sleep.

He says, “When I woke up to the sound of the door opening, he was already dead. Right before my eyes, before Yuriko’s eyes; before we even realized what was happening.”

From this point of the story, she doesn’t remember anything from Logan’s perspective—or nearly nothing, at least. What little she sees of her own actions, his own actions, is only through a heavy stupor.

Now she knows that every dazed memory, from that point, comes to her drug-assisted. That is why she cannot, could not, see.

She realizes, then, that the reason she does not have clear memories of the events surrounding the private mercenary team part is because Logan must also have been drugged as they were happening.

She asks softly—until she remembers that she has to speak firmly—and then she clears her throat and repeats herself: “Then what did James Howlett do.”

Harada says, “Then he turned to me. I fought him with the only sword I had, brought with me from Japan to Canada. I was older, and stronger; this time I was able to wrap it strongly with my field. I even, at first, did serious harm to his body, though I was not able to injure that skeleton—and his body healed limitlessly.”

Harada says, “As we were fighting, Yuriko tried to come between us, to protect me.”

Now both of Harada’s hands are shaking.

Harada says, “She managed to knock him down with her strength. But as she was trying to subdue him, he stabbed her with his claws, killing her. Again, before my eyes. I was helpless to do anything, it was too late, he was too fast, too strong.”

Now his face is wet, though his face remains blank; and she thinks of herself, in Manhattan after she killed the woman; then at Gambit’s bedside in the medbay. Her body doing the weeping for her.

Harada says, “I see this fight like it is happening right now. I see this fight every day.”

And he sounds like he has forgotten she is there at all; like he is speaking to himself, to a phantom in his head that has come to pay him a visit. As if he is speaking something he has never shared with anyone, never even spoken aloud since the time of the events themselves.

She thinks—Harada doesn’t know that the woman was not dead, then. She had heard that Logan fought a woman named Yuriko, at Alkali Lake; she had seen the document in the files Xavier had given her for safekeeping. The woman had been taken into military custody, given a cybernetic healing factor, given an adamantium skeleton and talons, had been successfully mind-controlled.

She thinks, Yuriko and Logan might even have worked together, later.

She says only, “What happened during your fight with James Howlett.”

Harada says, “It was like fighting a robot: he had no weakness, no hesitation, no reaction, no emotion. Even with the field around my sword, I could only defend from his claws; I was unable to injure him. And I was weakened, frantic, sloppy. I could still see Oyama in bed, Yuriko on the ground.”

He says, “Perhaps, in some way, I wished to die; to die at the hands of the man who had already taken everything from me, and was doing it again, a second time.”

Just now, in front of them, she sees a group of dignitaries in evening dress, coming out of the hotel lobby, and she tenses, thinking they will notice the two of them, sitting here, for no apparent reason.

He says, “Then, with his claws, he was able to severely slash my hand, so I was no longer able to hold the sword properly.”

But the people in the group kiss each other affectionately, laugh at some parting joke, wave their elegant good-byes, and split up into two groups, each into its own black town car. Then those cars drive away, and she relaxes again.

She can feel Harada pulling away from her, trying to take control of himself again during this brief moment of distraction; so she snaps to attention, closes her gloved hand gently around his, again—and his shoulders sag, his eyelids droop. He continues talking.

He says, “I knew I was going to die. So I began to taunt him, as I did the first duel.”

He says, “All my hatred, all my rage—about Mariko, about the duel in Kyoto, about how I always knew he wasn’t human; about what a monster he must have been, to volunteer for this kind of thing, to choose this life for himself—

He says, “It must have triggered some still un-erased memory of his, because he began to break down, mentally.”

He says, “For the first time since we knew each other in Japan, he called me Kenichiro again.”

And then she feels wetness on her face, and realizes her body is doing weeping, for her, too.

He says, “His attacks became erratic and wild. He started a rampage that carried over to the rest of the facility, badly harming many scientists, and killing at least three that I witnessed.”

He says, “I was able to use the commotion to escape the facility, as the armed guards worked to contain him, to repeat the memory erasure.”

He says, “I ran and ran. My hand still bleeding. Only the next day was I was found by a group of campers in the mountain, who brought me to a hospital, where my hand was treated. It never fully recovered. I was never again able to wield a sword without pain. Although I still sometimes fought with one, it would hurt, each time.”

She freezes. Thinking of something else that hurts every time.

Harada says, “I remained in Canada for several months, alone, until I was finally able to make contact with Mariko, in Japan. Our father had long since died. She was now in control of Yashida-gumi. She asked me to come back to Japan, and I did, to rejoin the clan, under her leadership.”

She stares at him. “Do you know what happened to James Howlett after you left the facility,” she asks—

And this, she is afraid to know. The files about Stryker’s experiments that she had glimpsed in the jet, hadn’t covered Logan’s activities after the experiments. She only has memories to go on; and after the events at the facility, all of her memories from Logan are increasingly blacked-out, fragmented.

She had always thought they were blacked-out and fragmented because of the shaky, unreliable translation from his mind to hers. Now she knows that this is the actual look of his memory; this is exactly how he experienced his life, then. Constantly drugged; and she does not want to know how often or how concentrated it must have been, to have that kind of effect on him.

Harada says, “Not completely. I knew that Weapon X was meant to become a private paramilitary organization. Later, there were rumors that the expanding team, under various code names, was involved with much of the C.I.A.’s covert operations abroad: extrajudicial assassinations, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam; instruction and employment of death squads in various Latin American nations; orchestrating military coups; forcefully defending American corporate interests in foreign nations.”

Her body goes cold.

He says, “I only ever met one other woman who was also formerly part of that program, many years later: Carol Danvers. She was my most recent mistress.”

And she nearly drops his hand.

He says, “But her entire memory had been erased; I only knew that she was associated with the program because of a pair of dog tags she possessed, with her name and date of activation.”

And this time she does drop his hand, but quickly takes it back up again, feeling his energy lift in strength when the contact is broken; the thin, instinctive field around him, starting to buzz.

She can feel her hand, through the glove, start to sting; until she can bring her force over him again, and it recedes.

He says, “I recognized those dog tags as the same ones produced by the Weapon X program, and told her what I thought they meant. But I never told her that I had also played a part in the program’s actions.”

She asks, “Did you ever see James Howlett again.”

This, she does not know the answer to.

Harada’s eyes are glassy. “Every day,” his says. “Every day, every day, every day, every day, every day.”

Harada’s hand in hers is still shaking. She stares at him.

An old man with a damaged life. A tiny figure in an unbearable landscape.

Harada says, then, in a voice that sounds the way his hand on the cane looks—gnarled by scars, bent, permanently broken: “We are connected by a strange fate. I think we will meet again.”


*


As if a door has opened within her, she now remembers how Harada’s story continues after Canada, everything he had given her during that kiss, in Manhattan:

He went back to Japan, to join Mariko and the Yashida organization; slowly earned the respect of his fellow clan members through his loyalty to Mariko; was only ever capable of wielding the sword using his tachyon field, never having enough strength in his wrist to wield it normally—even after adding nearly one hundred pounds of muscle to his frame, in an effort to make himself stronger, reinforced, as if to make up for what Logan had cut from him.

Along with everything else Logan had taken—the esteem of a father; a mentor; a wife; a life.

She had come here to confront one of Logan’s foremost ghosts; a face she had seen in her dreams; a face she associated with anger, hatred, pain, loss, betrayal.

She hadn’t thought of the possibility that Logan would also be Harada’s ghost; that Harada would also be haunted, by what he had witnessed, what he had participated in—and by what Logan had eventually done to him, in the end. That Harada would be just as ruined, if not more.

Unlike Logan, Harada still remembered everything. He still saw and lived, each day, these events: his defeat at Logan’s hands, in front of his father’s disdainful eyes; the execution of his mentor; the brutal death of his wife; the lasting injury to his hand.

She sees that, despite the efforts Harada had made towards a semi-livable life—a clan, a sister; a growing respect by his fellow members as he became one of Mariko’s trusted advisors; a semi-legitimate position as a bodyguard, taking advantage of the Yashida clan’s powerful government ties—nothing has healed in him.

He had even taken a mistress who must have reminded him, every day, of Logan, of the program; a mistress who had nearly the same mutation as his murdered wife. Hating to be reminded, hating more to forget.

She had come here to find the person who had been so present at what she thought was the most painful juncture of Logan’s life; to find the person whose face loomed the largest in the memory she has stolen. She had come here to put Harada Kenichiro on trial; to judge, to punish.

Thinking, knowing: this is the one with the answers; this is the man I must take revenge upon.

Not realizing that Harada might be foremost in Logan’s thoughts, not only because of what he had done to Logan, but because of what Logan had done to him. That Harada might persist in Logan’s mind not only as a foe—but because he had been the last man Logan could still remember destroying.

The last remembered name. The last recognizable face, before years of faceless victims.

She knows it, feels it in her head: Harada was the last man Logan had been able to feel guilt over.

Though now, of course, the Logan outside of her head remembers nothing; having had that life, and nearly every life after it, erased, remade.

And now she sees that there is no trial, no judgment, no punishment, no revenge; that there are no answers to be obtained. Nothing that can be forgiven and nothing that can be redeemed.

Only these monstrous facts laid out before her; this collection of monstrous things they did to each other, while Logan was still partially his own person.

She thought she had come here to discover, to avenge what Logan had been turned into, what had been done to Logan.

Now thinking: Who Logan chose to become. What Logan has done to others.


*


And now, with Harada’s help, she is able to make guesses at the meaning of certain blurred images in her head, which she hadn’t ever been able to make sense of, which had been the first to be suppressed, forgotten—

—realizing now that they were blurred because of drugs; and that she must have forgotten them so easily, so desperately because Logan would have wanted to forget them, too:

Warm countries; training grounds to instruct foreign military junta; secret torture centers; rudimentary Spanish; claws in the limbs of kidnapped union leaders, students, peasants, poets, musicians; a young Stryker’s congratulations on his fine work in the service of free market capitalism and democracy; a free Ford vehicle every year.

Hearing male voices declare: “This is Wolverine—he’s the best there is at what he does—but what he does isn’t very nice.”


*


Who Logan has been; what Logan has done.


*


But now Harada is starting to stir, still trying to struggle his way out of her hold, like someone who has awakened in his mind while his body is still asleep—and she closes her hand around him, lowers her energy upon him, and once again he is subdued.

She realizes one of her hands is still ungloved, as a precaution, in case the hypnosis hadn’t worked.

And for a moment she considers what she can still do to him: take his life, take his powers. After everything, she knows—he is not what she can call a ‘good man.’ The pupil and adopted son of a war criminal; a willing observer, if not active participant, in the atrocities that had been performed upon Logan, no matter how willing he might have been. There is no reason she should show mercy to him. There is no reason she should show mercy to him.

But that is exactly why she uses the hand to wipe her own face—then puts it back in her jumpsuit pocket.

She says, “Harada-san, when I say ‘go,’ I want you to count to sixty. When you reach sixty, you will slowly come back to consciousness, with no memory of our conversation.”

She is not sure if that is a cruelty, or a kindness.

Harada says only, “Yes.”

She says, “You stopped here in this garden for a breath of fresh air. You will stand, go to your car, and return home.”

Harada says, “Yes.”

Then she takes a breath. “But I want you to remember what I am now about to tell you,” she adds.

Harada says, “Yes.”

She feels her hidden bare hand shaking.

She says, “James Howlett is dead. You will never meet him again.”

And this, too; she does not know if it is a cruelty or a kindness. She sees something that looks both like relief and regret flicker over Harada’s slack face.

Then she stands, facing him, still keeping in contact with his body, moving her hand up his arm to touch his shoulder.

Looking at him. Old face, haunted eyes, trembling hands, trembling knees. Scarred hand holding a silver cane.

A single life. A single, ordinary, inexplicable and incommensurate life. Like Logan’s. Like all of them.

“Go,” she says, with all the voice she can still muster, and walks away.


*


When she re-enters the banquet room, she is stunned to see that only slightly more than an hour has passed.

Hank is still at his table, talking to the Japanese ambassador, along with one of the dignitaries who had been watching him eat, earlier. He sees her appear, gives her that thumbs-up sign again.

The dance floor filled with people, bodies in gowns and tuxedos; chatter, gossip, laughter. A popular love song, played by a live band.

She stares at everything, seeing nothing.


*


In the hotel room, she and Jubilee pack their bags in preparation for the flight back home, early the next morning. Jubilee talks, without pausing a single time, about a flirtatious Italian bodyguard.

She hears nothing, feels nothing; when she sees her bag packed, before her, it is as someone else has packed it. She doesn’t remember touching it.


*


She had always thought the reason Logan had been unable to remember his past is because it had been taken from him—because Stryker, the scientists, had erased everything, again and again, against his will. That in his mind, the blank spaces, the brief flashes of reminder or recognition; all of this was their handiwork.

And while she knows this is still true, she now has another thought:

That Logan is unable to remember his past because some part of him does not want to remember it—because some part of him, as gnarled and withered as Harada’s hand, does not want to know the truth about what he is responsible for. About the person he had been, the things he had done, during all those clouded years.

She has spent all this time trying to forget Logan’s memories in her head; thinking she was doing it to honor him, to protect him. Thinking she was doing it because she felt guilty for taking it all from him, unwittingly. Thinking she owed it to him to discard something that didn’t belong to her.

Now she thinks she might have been trying to forget everything because that same gnarled part of the Logan in her head wanted to forget everything, too; discard everything, too.

Who Logan had been. What Logan had done.


*


And now what, she thinks, lying in bed. And now what. What can she do, undo.

She looks down at her hands, in their overnight gloves. She removes one glove, then the other, and stares down. Smooth palms, no calluses, no scars, unharmed bones. Two small, living hands.

And then she sees wetness on the hands. She wonders where it is coming from, and realizes that once again, her body is doing her work for her.


*


Thinking of souvenirs: memories, to remember.

Thinking of the things we bring back, the things we give to others.

Thinking of her own voice, saying, Were you in the army? Doesn’t that mean you were in the army?

Thinking of Gambit saying, You never want to know the things you know.

Thinking of reasons, but reason resists her.


*


Early the next morning, having not slept at all, she volunteers to be the one to go down to the lobby and await the arrival of the loaned armored van, which they will use to drive to the hangar, outside central Kyoto, where the jet is currently stationed. Jubilee thanks her for the extra ten minutes of sleep.

She takes her bag and leaves the room. In the lobby, she completes check-out for their two rooms, then inquires as to the whereabouts of the van.

The employee at the reception desk says the van is parked in the private garage, along with the other diplomatic vehicles. Staring at the white streak in her hair, the entire time he is speaking.

Tired, annoyed, she finds a ponytail holder in the pocket of one of her bags, ties her hair up, off of her shoulders.

The garage is not empty; there are other people she had seen the previous night, slipping into vehicles with their bodyguards. She sees their shuttle van, being watched over by a young man in a suit, an employee of the car company.

She approaches, shows her identification card. She tells him, in a Kansai-ben Japanese that belongs to both Logan and Harada, that she would just like to take a look at the vehicle before they drive it. The young man tells her, of course, he understands.

She examines the underside of the van, its interior, its engine, the trunk, the controls. Looking for anything that would resemble a bomb, an explosive, a tampered brake. Anything that would harm even a hair on Hank’s body. But there is nothing.

She thanks the young man, says she will take responsibility of the vehicle now. He hands her the keys, and walks away.

On the opposite side of the garage, she realizes the Japanese ambassador is there, too; shaking the hands of several departing figures, making last-minute jokes. Next to him are two black town cars—one with its doors open. Three bodyguards are leaning against the frame of the car. One smoking a cigarette, all looking bored.

The other with its doors closed, windows tinted. She stares at it, knowing she sees silver hair, a gray suit.

Then the door opens. A silver cane comes down onto the garage floor with a clack. Harada steps out of the car.

He is already looking at her—not in anger, not even in recognition—only in confusion, like an old man bewildered by the appearance of a strange figure from a strange dream.

Then he begins to walk towards her, still leaning heavily on his cane.

She looks around, for another bodyguard, one of his, this time, someone else whom she will have to fight—but there is no one, he is coming to her alone—and she realizes that her hair is up. That she must resemble the way she looked, in Manhattan.

“Who are you,” Harada asks her, in English; still perplexed. “Do I know you.”

She shakes her head. She tries to concentrate, to see the pathways, so she can exert her energy over him as before, but her hands are shaking, her mind is too frantic. She is more afraid now, having heard everything, than she was last night, having heard nothing.

Finally, she can feel his weak but barbed energy bending to her, and she reaches out her hand again, in a handshake, to stabilize it.

“No, we’ve never met before,” she says firmly, still reaching out her hand.

But he does not take it this time, looking at her. “We have,” he murmurs to himself, and that barbed energy is still crackling around him; weak, but not that weak, for an old man. “I have seen your face.”

And across the garage, she can see Kurt, Piotr, and Jubilee appear, escorting Hank towards the shuttle.

She turns back to Harada, reaches forward, and grabs his hand with her gloved one—more tightly than Gambit had taught her was wise.

She can feel Harada struggle against her, staring at her; can feel the field around him forming, erratically, instinctively.

“We have,” he says, still holding her hand, and the field sharpens. “You’re the one—”

And though he has no sword, she knows he can wrap the field around anything—and now, defensively, almost unthinkingly, he is doing it, around her glove, around the bare hand underneath her glove, so that the glove becomes a blade. She can feel the cuts opening, crossing her palms, her fingers—and now microscopic cuts start to appear, even in the glove—

Still, she knows she can stop him, if she wants to—she can throw him across this garage with the other hand, can peel back her other glove and drain him. The strength in his hand is only enough for this, can only wound her this much.

Through the tiny cuts in the leather of her own glove, she can see her own blood, starting to seep.

And she thinks of Logan’s blood seeping through his jump-suit, on the Statue of Liberty, when he had given her everything without hesitation—

And she thinks of the woman she had killed with this hand, whose memory she does not have completely, she realizes, not because Logan’s in her mind was more powerful, but because like Logan’s, it was also erased—

And she looks at Harada, still confused, still trying to figure out who she is and what her presence means; holding her with the hand Logan had slashed—

And she thinks, I can bear this much, at least.

She can feel the wounds going deeper, into her skin, and now it feels as though he is cutting through tendons, nerves, though he is not strong enough to cut through bone.

And it is neither a penance nor a punishment; not a response when she has no response; not a reparation when she can repair nothing, repay nothing. Just the poverty and smallness of this gesture, this trace; like a gift passed between them.

But the others have nearly reached them now, so she swallows the pain, takes a breath, and concentrates her mind again—now succeeding in bringing his energy under her thrall. The live stinging around her hand subsides, though the pain that is left is more than enough to make it difficult for her to speak.

She says, through gritted teeth, again, “We’ve never met before.”

And she can see Harada’s eyes go vacant. He says, “Yes.”

She says, calming herself now, her hand throbbing, “But it was very nice to meet you.”

“Yes,” Harada says.

She finally removes her hand from his, and sees that there are a few tiny smears of her own blood, left on his palm.

He blinks, looks at her, as if he has just awakened. Then he says, in his own voice, again, “It was nice to meet you.”

And he turns around, leaning on his cane once more, and begins to walk back towards the Japanese ambassador, where Hank is saying his good-byes, Piotr standing next to him.

She looks down at her hand. The cuts in the glove are not too noticeable; they are everywhere, but they are so uniform, so tiny, it looks almost like mesh.

Still, she puts the hand in her pocket, knowing that if she is asked for an explanation, she will not be able to give one.

Then she turns around and enters the shuttle van, where Kurt is already sitting in the driver’s seat, chatting with Jubilee in the passenger’s seat.

“Morning,” Jubilee says. “Your friend’s cute. If you like the grandpa type.”

Rogue looks out the window. She can see Harada sliding back into his own towncar. He glances once at the shuttle van. Then he ducks, slowly, back into his car. And now she cannot see him anymore.

Her hand still screaming, she says, “Just started chatting with him while I was waiting.”

Kurt says, “How nice.”


*


And in the jet, they are all mostly quiet; everyone still sleepy, still jet-lagged from the trip to Japan in the first place. She keeps her hand, now numb from the pain, carefully tucked into her jump-suit pocket.

Behind her, she can hear Piotr on his cell phone, saying: “We’re on our way back now. It was pretty boring. Mm. Mmm. Okay. Okay.”

Then a pause, and on her back, even in her pained and weakened state, she can feel the energy around Piotr’s entire frame warm with pleasure and joy.

“I know,” he says to the I love you that she doesn’t have to hear, to recognize. “Me, too.”

ENDING STARTS WITH ANSWERS



“Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. We are at once acted upon and acting, and our 'responsibility' lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? …

In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. But only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled, ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury. What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response that we make?”


“Explanation and Exoneration, Or What We Can Hear,” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler.


*


“The greatest risk is run at the very moment when one does have to try to know. Know what? Not what, but whom; not about what one speaks, but first of all to whom one says, ‘and me, and you.’”


On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, trans. Christine Irizarry.


*


When they arrive at the mansion, her hand has still not left her pocket. It is now so numb she is not entirely sure it is still attached to the rest of her arm. Either that, or now it simply hurts far less than she thought it would; and she thinks that must be part of the woman’s power, too, a sort of extended, though limited, durability.

Not invulnerability, she thinks, trying to move her hand and failing.

Storm greets them, alone—and she is both surprised and relieved not to see the rat. She had somewhat expected that he would be there, waiting for her, wanting to know the results of the mission—waiting to see if she would be brought back on a stretcher.

Then, she is both surprised and relieved not to see Logan; though him, she hadn’t expected to be waiting. He never greets anyone in the hangar after missions.

She is already thinking of how she will have her hand treated—she knows she cannot go to a regular hospital, with her skin, but perhaps if she tells only the people in medbay and asks them to be discreet—and then, by the time some rumor finally does come around the rest of the mansion, she will have enough time to fabricate a story to tell about it—a dog that bit her, a—

But suddenly her hand is already outside of her pocket, being pulled from behind her.

She turns around to see Logan, who must have approached as if he were in hunting mode, because she hadn’t even had an inkling of his presence, not even his energy, which is always unmistakable, un-ignorable—

And before she can fight or even realize what is happening, he is ripping the glove straight off of her wounded hand.

And extended durability or not, the blood between her still-open flesh and the glove has since become like a glue—

So she cannot help herself from shouting, with all the agony she had been silencing on the jet from Kyoto to New York: “MOTHERFUCK!”


*


And as everyone begins to fret and cry out in horror and dismay, she can only see Logan’s face. Logan’s panicked and horrified and uncomprehending face.

The way he looked when he stabbed her the first time, staring at the injury as if looking would erase it. Unable to believe it, unable to understand it; that he could be responsible for such a thing, that he could do such a thing with his hands, to a girl like this, a high school student, an innocent girl—

And then again, utterly believing it, utterly understanding, as if he had always known that his hands could do such a thing; that his hands had been made for it, that they were only biding their time, his voice barely able to moan, “No, no”—

Meanwhile, his grip on her wrist is now actually awakening all the previously-numbed pain in her hand, swiftly and sharply.

She tries desperately to wrench herself away, yelling, “Logan, let go!”

He barks, “So is this the fuckin’ souvenir you brought back for me?”

At this point, through the pain, she can barely understand speech. She only hears the word souvenir.

She closes her eyes, thinking of the souvenirs she has brought back from Kyoto. Harada’s words, Harada’s creased face, Harada’s shaking hand; and Logan, Logan, Logan—

Logan in the sixties and seventies; Logan in a dark room forcing confessions out of people’s flesh—

And she is not ready to see him yet, not ready to see his face yet, not now, not now, not after—

But he is still squeezing around her wrist, the same way he did before she left, and she thinks she is going to have to push him again. Only this time, with her wounded hand, she won’t be able to break any doors.

So she just bites out, “Yeah, that’s it, now fucking let me—”

But as she speaks, she realizes—

—and why the hell didn’t she realize this from the moment she saw him, why the hell didn’t she realize this from the moment she saw him, she must have been already delirious from the pain—

—that he is going to touch her.

“I’ll take it, then,” he barks, and pushes up her sleeve to grab her bare arm before she can stop him.

She is too weak, too frantic, to control the connection at first, so for a few seconds, until she can rush down to stop it—once again, once again, all over again, before she is ready, before she has even been able to deal with everything she has just learned—he is inside her, giving her yet another portion of his life.

And she had said she would never let this happen again.

She can feel all the cut flesh, the severed nerves and muscles—everything fastening itself, gathering itself, back together, back together. And it hurts more to heal than to be wounded.

Finally, when her hand’s self-made sutures are starting to disappear, she regains just enough strength so she can shove him away, his grip already loosening with his lost strength.

He drops to the ground—and this is now the third time she has seen him fall over before her like that—

She can barely see through her furious tears, as Storm and Hank rush to Logan’s prostate form; she can barely feel Piotr’s hands on her shoulders, pulling her back from the scene.


*


Logan’s anger and confusion and horror in her head; Logan’s warmth in her body—

And she can hear herself shouting, with fury that is not entirely hers, “If he doesn’t die, I’m gonna fucking kill him!”


*


It takes both Hank and Piotr to carry Logan to the medbay. Storm stays behind, in the hangar, looking at Rogue’s perfect, whole hand.

“What happened to you,” Storm says softly.

“None of your business,” Rogue replies, and turns to leave. In her voice she can hear Logan’s terseness, his brusque manner.

“Rogue,” Storm calls out after her, but she doesn’t look back.


*


All this time she has been wrestling with Logan’s memories in her head, she had forgotten what it was like to have him freshly there again; all his recent thoughts—

And once again she sees things she doesn’t want to see, knows things she doesn’t want to know—all his sadness over Jean’s death—and she had wanted so badly to let him keep that, at least—

But now she feels it, feels it as if Jean has died all over again: his guilt, his forlorn and heated longing, his recognition of her hidden fears, doubts; his desire to see her for who she was, and in turn be seen for who he was.

She thinks of Mariko—beautiful and beloved and dutiful—too good for me—

She closes her eyes.

Not me, she tells herself.


*


And then, something else. Something that is not about Jean. Something new, something barely even thought—something that is not a ghost; not sadness, not torment, not violence. Not even, exactly, longing. Something with her face on it, and no words.

Just a flicker. But the feel of it wounds her more than her hand; stuns her more than everything she has learned in Kyoto.


*


Also, inside these new thoughts: the revelation that the current Logan, Logan as he is now, truly doesn’t know; still doesn’t consciously remember what he used to be.

How she would like the current Logan to override the previous Logan in her head—how she would like the current Logan to replace the one who does know. The one who now remembers.


*


Her head a mess, she grabs onto the safest and most familiar part of Logan’s personality—his moodiness and suppressed rage. Only now, she doesn’t suppress it so much. That helps.

Yes—this is easier, this is better—this anger, this rudeness, this overwhelming desire to punch everyone and everything in sight—much better than what she had felt in Kyoto, looking down at her hands, not recognizing her own tears. What she felt, staring at Harada’s aged face and realizing she no longer wanted to look for the answers she had already just found.

Later, at the mission debriefing, everyone speaks but her.

Kurt, Piotr and Jubilee all agree that the mission was entirely successful and entirely uneventful; there were no signs of trouble, at any point.

Everyone carefully looking, and trying not to look, at her newly healed hand, in its changed glove.

Storm says, “Thank you, everyone.”

She stands to leave with the four of them, but, as she expected, Storm says, “Rogue, just a minute.” She turns back around, exhaling.

Storm indicates for her to sit down in the chair across from her desk. Rogue moves forward, but doesn’t sit down.

She can feel herself wanting to tell Storm everything—everything she went to Kyoto to do, everything she has failed to do, all the answers and lack of answers now in her hands—but she only presses her lips together, in an expression of Logan’s scowl. Accessing his reticence, his aversion to telling anyone anything.

“I’m not saying anything,” she says.

Storm’s face is stern. “If it endangers the people in the mansion or the situation with Hank—”

“It doesn’t,” she interrupts. “It’s my own stuff. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. He’s fine.”

Suddenly she is afraid that Hank might have already told Storm what he had witnessed, what he had subtly helped her do.

Storm looks a little relieved, but no less stern. “Well,” she says, exhaling. “That’s what Hank seemed to think, too.”

And she thanks Hank in her mind; though she calls him Furball, despite herself.

Storm continues, “So unless you’re lying to me, I’m just going to have to believe you’re telling the truth.”

Rogue snorts. “Aren’t those the only two options?”

The older woman looks at her. “No,” she says simply.

Rogue looks down at her shoes. Knowing—she should know—that there is, of course, something between lying and telling the truth. Thinking of Gambit saying, You think it’s honest enough to say only part of the truth and keep silent on the rest.

I’m keeping silent on everything this time, rat, she tells him in her head.

“I’m sorry,” she says weakly, in her own voice.

Storm is still seated, still staring up at her. “I know I said you don’t have to tell us anything about Manhattan until you’re ready,” she says.

Rogue’s head snaps to attention at the word Manhattan.

“But do you really think you can keep going like this?”

“Like what,” Rogue snaps, but it is Logan snapping, and she feels terrible, she doesn’t want to be rude to Storm, not to Storm, Storm who has given her kindness she didn’t know could exist in another person, aside from Logan, before meeting Gambit—Storm—

Storm’s lovely and sorrowful face, gazing at her. “You’re the only one carrying everything,” she says.

Rogue whispers—but because Logan is there, too, it comes out instead as a growl: “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Storm smiles slightly. “If it has something to do with you,” she says, “then it has something to do with me.”

She raises her shoulders, a little helplessly. “That’s how it’s supposed to work around here.”

Storm—Storm—Storm—she wants to say—she wants to say—she wants to say—

But Storm, now alarmed at the look on her face, stands up and is in front of her desk before Rogue can say anything, can even open her mouth.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, hey, honey, hey.” She takes Rogue into her arms.

Fighting all of Logan’s instinctive discomfort at being hugged, she lets herself sink into the embrace, wanting it badly; wanting it more than she had wanted to fuck Jubilee in Kyoto, more than she wants to fuck anybody, ever, ever—

And she hasn’t thought of her mother in a long time, but now she longs for her, with all her bigoted religious fundamentalist hateful craziness. She wants the mother who gave her hugs before bed and hugs after school; embraces meant to soothe a child who does not yet understand anything of the world.

How often has she had that since, anyway—just an embrace, with no lust (or not that much; Storm smells amazing, and that opinion could easily be hers as much as Logan’s), no other pretense. Just the embrace and its comfort. Just the poverty and smallness of this gesture. Like the hand she gave to Harada to be wounded.

Then she thinks of Logan on the train, asking her to come back to the mansion. Telling her she would be protected. Holding her, not that carefully at all, around her hooded coat as she wept like a child.

Which is how she weeps now, into Storm’s shoulder, which smells just a touch like Logan, so she knows he has talked to her recently; and then, everywhere, just Storm, only Storm, herself—rose, amber, skin, dust, warmth, warmth.

She can feel Storm breathe on her hair, holding her, just as Logan did on the train, just as Gambit put her tights on for her: without enough concern or safety at all. As if her skin is not only harmless, but hospitable; as if she, too, can and should be touched.

“Try and trust us a little more, honey,” she can hear Storm murmur into her hair. “You don’t have to do everything alone.”


*


She goes to her room, expecting the Cajun to be there, waiting for her, since he wasn’t at the hangar, but then, he would have wanted to meet her alone, anyway, she reasons. But the Cajun—

(not the Cajun, she doesn’t call him the Cajun like that)

—isn’t there. Curiously, she goes to his room, knocks on the door; but he doesn’t answer. And when she puts her ear against it, there is not a single noise. She feels a little annoyed—but no, she is not annoyed; that is Logan, annoyed at everything, annoyed at her for wanting to see Gambit in the first place.

Then she goes back to her room, and when she sees it this second time, she remembers, suddenly.

The door is whole again. It is a new door. And when she turns her head to look at Kurt’s door, that one is new, too. As if nothing had happened.

She touches her door, and with Logan’s senses in her mind now, she can smell him all over it: his hands on the hinges, his hands on the lock, his hands on the paneling. Carefully and gently repairing and renewing everything she had destroyed.

Once again she bursts into tears.


*


She cannot enter her room; not now, when she smells him everywhere, when she hears him everywhere, when, once again, she hasn’t even yet let herself think of the things she has discovered, or rediscovered, in Kyoto. She needs a neutral place, an empty space, somewhere she can be alone.

She walks back down the corridor, enters the elevator. She goes down to the medbay level—hoping Logan will have already left by now.

Luckily, he has, but only just recently; she can still smell a fading trace of him.

She walks down the corridor that is now familiar to her, after a week of practice with Gambit, and enters the meditation room. She lies down on one of the mats, curls up into herself, still in her leather jump-suit.

The room still smells like her; like Gambit, a little more recent, and she thinks he must have come here, while she was away. The comfort of lying down unravels her. Before she can remember that she hadn’t slept at all the night before, or even on the jet—she falls asleep.


*


She dreams of what she now knows:

injections three times a day, two more times than the other members;

standing in front of a group of foreign soldiers, taking homeless people and prostitutes off the street to use them as examples, to show the various methods;

hearing the “ahh” of fear and admiration every time the claws came out for a demonstration;

inside a torture camp located inside an otherwise ordinary hospital, interrogating people who had no answers;

knowing how and where to put the claws in all non-vital points to maximize the pain;

teaching the soldiers how to cut a stomach open before throwing a body into the ocean, so it wouldn’t float;

dreams, dreams, dreams;

waking up and not knowing what time it was, what day it was, what century it was;

waking up, seeing his face, not knowing whose face it was;

just scenes of agony as if cut from a film, but in the film, he is the actor, the film is about him—

And she wakes up screaming, her fist punching through the air, until she looks down at her hand and sees there are no claws there.


*


She starts to vomit on the ground.

Afterwards she has to sneak into the medbay, for paper towels and disinfectant wipes, to wipe it all up.

Then she lies down again, still exhausted—but it is a long time until she can muster up the courage to venture back into sleep.


*


She does not know how long she has been sleeping in the meditation room; it feels like several hours. And indeed, when she finally awakens and goes back into the hall, the medbay is nearly silent, empty, most of the lights already turned off.

She takes the elevator back to her room. Fearing that Logan will be there, waiting for her. Fearing that Gambit will be there, waiting for her.

But neither of them are there, and so she enters her room, trying not to smell the door again.

She takes off her clothes, changes into old and unwashed pajamas. She doesn’t even have the energy to put on a pair of overnight gloves. She climbs into bed, falls asleep again.


*


The same dreams come.

This time she makes it to her bathroom before she begins vomiting.


*


And once again, just as in Manhattan, while she is on the floor of a bathroom, bitter saliva hanging from her mouth, tears and snot covering her lips and chin, the bathroom door opens and Gambit is standing there, staring down at her. But this time he does not have a cheesy line, a clever quip. Just the stare from his black and red eyes, which do not arouse her, now.


*


She stands from the floor, not daring to look at him. She flushes the toilet, moves to the faucet, washes her hands and face. She looks at herself in the mirror, doesn’t recognize her face.

It is still easy to access Logan’s rudeness—Logan, who doesn’t like Gambit anyway, and now she knows for sure, though she realizes that in his feelings there is also unmistakable and uneasy respect, which confuses her—

So she mutters, “What the hell are you doing here.”

Gambit doesn’t seem surprised by the particularly harsh tone in her voice.

“Stormy told me what happened in the hangar,” he says, and that explains it.

She wipes her wet hands on her hand towel, turns to him.

“Well, I didn’t come back on a stretcher,” she retorts, and pushes past him.

As in Manhattan, he blocks the door frame, staring at her. He smells heavily of tobacco, and not only because Logan’s senses have temporarily made her more sensitive to it. He smells as if he has been smoking nearly non-stop since she left.

Then he moves aside, before she can look up into his eyes.

Once she is back in her room, she sees that it is already four o’clock in the morning; she has been sleeping for over twelve hours.

“What’re you doing here,” she says.

Gambit follows her out of the bathroom. He leans where he always leans, against her desk. Gazing at her. He says nothing.

She sits down on her bed, mutters, “You better not make this a habit, breaking in here whenever you want.”

He still says nothing.

Then she suggests, a little desperately, “Well, since you’re already here, let’s fuck.”

Thinking of how she had wanted to fuck Jubilee, in Kyoto. How she hasn’t fucked him, or anyone, in over a week now. How good it would be, right now, to feel only that, only that self-effacing bliss.

“No,” he says, far too quickly.

She is startled. Then she raises an eyebrow at him. “What’s wrong, you going abstinent or something?” she mocks, remembering that he hadn’t wanted to have sex the night before she left, either.

He gazes at her, still saying nothing. She concentrates, looks at him; she can see the tense heat radiating from him, which she knows is lust. He wants to; she can read it in his body, in his face.

“Come on,” she says, her voice softening. Reaching her arm out towards him. “It’s okay—I really want to—”

“No,” he says again.

She notices for the first time that Gambit is dressed the way he does for a mission. Shin guards and kneepads. His light armored vest, his black pants, his trench coat. He is carrying an envelope, which he now places on the desk, his hand on top of it.

He asks, “So he in your head again.”

She jumps back, drops her hand. “Yeah,” she grunts, and the grunting is proof.

The hand on top of the envelope clenches. Gambit doesn’t say anything for a moment. She squeezes her eyes shut; but through her closed eyelids she can feel him looking at her.

“You use the charming,” he asks.

She nods, but says nothing else.

“It work okay,” he asks.

She hesitates, then nods.

He smiles a little. “Good.”

Then he is silent again, studying her. She still says nothing.

“So you find the answers you were looking for,” he asks, finally.

She starts to laugh; if she doesn’t laugh, she’ll start screaming. “Nope,” she replies. “Found something else. More questions.”

The hand on top of the envelope unclenches. “Thought you would,” he murmurs.

She glances at him. “What does that mean?”

Without answering, he asks, “So what did Harada Kenichiro know about Weapon X.”

She stares at him. Why the hell does he want to know about that, she wonders; so she asks him. “Why are you asking.”

He studies her. Then he says, again without answering her, “So do you know now what it was about.”

Still staring at him, not understanding anything, she says, again, “Why are you asking.”

He says, again without answering her, “So do you know now what it was about.”

The hand on the envelope clenches again. He adds, “What he was part of.”

Warm countries, claws to the belly—

“Do you kn—”

“Yes!” she shouts, interrupting him. “I know what it was about.” She puts her head in her hands.

And just as in Manhattan, she feels the tears and vomit coming up; but she swallows it down, blinks it back. She keeps her face in her hands, feeling no wetness; just her own shuddering, just the heat of her own face.

“Okay,” she hears him say. Something falls onto the bed in front of her, and she moves aside two of her fingers, to see what it is. The envelope he had been holding is now next to her knees. She looks up at him.

He looks back at her. “Those might answer some of the new questions,” he says only.

“What the hell is this,” she snaps, picking up the envelope.

He says: “Agent report for James Howlett, code name Wolverine, senior operative for the Weapon X program. Later M-Ultra. Later Sagitta, later Hydra. Now, Nyx.”

She drops the envelope as if it is aflame.

Then when she touches it again, realizes it is, genuinely, warm. She looks at him, sees his entire body vibrating with heat and tension that he is holding inside, and she realizes it is not just lust that is clutching his muscles.

“Why would you have something like this,” she whispers.

He answers, “Stole some of it a long time ago. Some of it I just got from a friend.”

She looks at him, not understanding anything. “Where?”

He says, “Went to Québec on a mission for Storm. Just got back a couple hours ago.”

She stares at him. She remembers him saying he had been in Québec City, during the battle of Alcatraz.

“I don’t get it,” she says. “How could you get hold of something like this.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I didn’t get to Canada from New Orleans ten years ago by accident.”

She notices he is not referring to himself in the third person right now, as he so often does, to put some distance between himself and his speech.

Now there is no distance; he is standing deep inside his words, staring at her.

“There’s a record in there about a Remy Picard, too,” he adds softly.

She stares back at him. “What are you saying.”

He says, “A year and a half after I left New Orleans, I got in a fight in Virginia. I got picked up by two guys from a company called Sagitta. They were interested in my powers. They brought me to northern Québec, near James Bay, by the Eastmain River.”

He looks at her. “They were the ones who taught me to hone it so I could charge things mentally, from far away.”

She does not want to ask, Why would they do that, what are all of these tiny little facts adding up to. Already knowing, already not wanting to know.

He says, “They were training me and a group of other mutants to be assassins.”

She starts to shake. Thinking of Harada’s hands shaking, as he told her his story.

“What,” she whispers.

Gambit looks down at his feet, then swallows, and looks back up, into her eyes again.

He says, “You read that, you’ll know more. Not just about me. The Wolverine, too.”

She stares at him. “What are you talking about,” she says, and she can feel her voice rising in panic. “What are you talking about.”

He folds his hands in front of him. “The reason I went to Madrid wasn’t ‘cause I knew about anti-mutant things going on in Europe,” he states.

“Wait,” she says, holding up her hand. “Wait, wait, wait—”

His hands tighten around each other, and he speaks faster, the way he did when he was telling her about his orphan past; not wanting to give her the chance to silence him.

“I told Stormy I thought that the organization that used me back then—that used the Wolverine back then—was behind Hank’s house. Or at least related to it.”

He adds, tensely, “When I saw the bullets that shot me, in Madrid, I knew I was right.”

Not only is he no longer speaking in the third person, but his accent is also far less pronounced than it typically is. She realizes, he must usually speak like that on purpose, to sound more casual; once again, to put some distance between himself and his speech.

And she comprehends nothing. But Gambit is still talking.

He says, “I didn’t know Harada Kenichiro had anything to do with Weapon X until you told me. And I didn’t know how much you knew about what it was until then, either.”

She shakes her head. “What—what—”

He says, “I went to Québec for Stormy. See if I could dig up old files, and find out who exactly’s after Hank, and why. But.”

He unfolds his hands, lays them flat on his thighs, and exhales, shakily. “But I thought—if you were going all the way to Kyoto for answers, then—maybe I try and give you some, too.”


*


She is horrified—Logan and Gambit—both of them—both of them—

Then he answers a question she hadn’t even thought to ask: “I never met him there or nothing. He was out long before I got in.”


*


She looks down at the envelope again. There is a note on it that says REMY: HERE’S WHAT YOU WANTED. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. JACOB.

He follows her gaze.

“It’s not good,” he warns, softly again. “None of it.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t—”

“You know enough now,” he interrupts. “Time to know everything else.”

She shakes her head, again and again, pushing the envelope away from her, so it falls off the bed, onto the floor. “No—”

“Can’t hide behind your hands no more,” Gambit says, and stands up straight, about to leave.

“This is what we both did,” he says, and his voice is strangled and quiet. “This is what we both were. You don’t wanna know that, don’t look at any of it.”


*


She doesn’t go to class the next day; or the day after that, or the day after that—or all week. She figures Logan can teach judo on his own, and Storm will excuse her for having a mission-related injury, though her hand feels healthier than it was before the mission.

—And then she can’t stop herself from thinking of other things Logan has taught, other people he has trained—why Logan is so naturally good at training—

She stays in her room, mostly; going out only for food, after hours, then sneaking right back. Whenever he sees her, Gambit approaches her, asking if she has looked at the envelope yet—she always shakes her head, unable to meet his eyes.

Logan has an uncanny knack of almost always appearing during these moments. Staring at the two of them in silence.

When Gambit isn’t there to help evade any other accidental run-ins with Logan, she simply resorts to what is easiest—his capacity for irritated rage.

“Somebody get him away from me before I fucking destroy him,” she says, and it is his ferocity in her voice from which she draws.

But then, she thinks—maybe it’s not just his rage. Maybe she is angry at him, herself. Maybe she cannot forgive, or forget, what she now knows.


*


She doesn’t open the envelope.


*


She and Gambit are not fucking for the moment; when they meet in the mansion, he continues to give her tense and discouraged looks, which she answers by turning away. The only time he looks more tense is when he looks at Logan.

Once, he knocks on her door, and when she opens the door and sees him, she grins and says, hoping, “Finally wanna fuck again?”

Gambit stares at her and says, “Not yet, eh,” and it is not an answer to her question.

She freezes, her hand on the doorknob. Then she looks down, says nothing.

He tightens his jaw, turns around, and walks away.


*


She sees the envelope is still half-sticking out from under her bed, on the floor where she had pushed it. She opens the first unused drawer she sees, to stuff it inside, out of sight.

Inside the drawer, she sees Remy the bull, turned onto his side. Proclaiming his love for Madrid. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.


*


The next day, she is eating alone, outside of normal cafeteria hours, when a newspaper drops directly on top of her pasta. “What the fuck!” she shouts, in spite of herself. And when she sees it is Logan, can only continue cursing. “Gross, Logan, fuck!”

It is not quite how she imagined her first actual confrontation with him since arriving from Kyoto. She looks at him—he looks the same as ever. As uneasy and determined and pained as ever. With, perhaps, something else behind it all, or weaved into it all; the look she saw on his face when she punched him through her door, the flicker in her mind that has her face on it, and no words.

He says, “Friday. Seven o’clock. I’ll pick you up in your room.”

She has no idea what any of this means, and the Logan inside her responds before she does: “If you’re setting the date of your own death,” she says coolly, “that sounds perfect.”

Then wonders—why did she phrase it like that, why did she have to say death—but it’s all she can think about, right now, trying not to think about it—

“Movie first,” he says and walks away.

As she walks away, she sees him clench his fists, then unclench them; just as he did after she had thrown Warren across the cafeteria, when he looked at Gambit laughing.

In another world, another life.

What just happened, she thinks to herself.


*


And every night she has the same new dreams; dreams that make her wake up covered in sweat, her fist in mid-air.

Are the dreams coming so clearly because Logan has touched her again, reactivating them; or because now she knows enough to see them for what they are, for what they have always shown? She doesn’t know.

She still doesn’t open the envelope.


*


One late afternoon, a knock comes at her door. She doesn’t open it, terrified that it is Logan; but then she hears Gambit’s voice calling through it, “Gambit know you’re in there, minou.”

She opens the door. He is in his practice clothes, still a little sweaty. He must have just finished his last class of the day and come straight here.

He barges into the room past her, then turns around and looks at her, questioning. Once again, she does not meet his eyes.

“Not yet, eh,” he mutters.

“Here to fuck?” she asks calmly, not answering.

He stares at her. “This old thief getting tired of waiting for you to come by, minou.”

“Sorry,” she says, not sounding sorry at all.

“Gambit’s sorry, too,” he says, staring at her. “Look like you went all the way to Kyoto to get answers, but now you don’t want the answers you got.”

She stares at him. “Either we fuck, or you leave.”

He stares back at her. “So that’s really all you think you can give, huh,” he says harshly. “That’s how far you go, and no more.”

She clenches her jaw. “That’s right.”

He starts to laugh. “So what the hell we do this for?” he asks, throwing his hands in the air. “What the hell I help you for? So you could go sightseeing in Japan?”

“You have no idea what happened in Kyoto,” she hisses.

“I have an idea,” he snaps. “Gambit think you found out something that scared you, and now you back to running away. Maybe you run to Manhattan again.”

“I don’t give a shit what you think,” she barks. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me,” he repeats.

She presses her lips together, crosses her arms. “Either we fuck,” she says. “Or you leave.”

“I bet you didn’t talk to him, neither,” he says. “What happened to giving him back his past? Now you find out you don’t like his past so much, you don’t wanna deal with it no more?”

“Fuck or leave,” she barks.

“You don’t even wanna try to see it?” he asks angrily. “Gambit ain’t asking you to excuse nothing, forgive nothing—I’d never ask that—minou, you don’t even know!” he shouts; and he has never shouted at her like this before.

“You don’t even know, how I regret everything, how I wish, every day, I could take it back—how I hate it, hate myself, what I did—what I was part of—”

He fixes her with his eyes. “And he’s the same—you know he’s the same—if he knew—”

“Stop,” she says. “You don’t have to explain to me.”

His face twists. “I ain’t trying to explain to you,” he says, shouting again. “I told you—I don’t wanna take nothing from you, minou, I don’t wanna—I just—I just—”

And she is not going to let him say it, not now, not now.

“Fuck,” she interrupts, “or leave.”

Crestfallen, he stares at her. “So that’s how it’s gonna go,” he chokes out.

“Fuck or leave,” she repeats. “Your choice. Last time I’m gonna say it.”

His entire body is still as stone. But she can feel the heat radiating from him, and she thinks the ground beneath his feet might catch fire.

“Well,” he says grimly. “I guess we should fuck, then.”

He gives her a small and bitter smile. “That’s all we had going on anyway, right?”

She swallows. “Great,” she says. She turns around and walks to the drawer for her tights.

“It’s okay,” she hears him say behind her. “You be naked. I keep my clothes on.”

She turns back around, then starts removing her clothes, slowly. First her shirt, her pants, her bra and underwear. His black and red eyes watching her every move, making her feel more naked than naked; transparent, rather, like a window.

When she is naked, he approaches her. He spits on his gloved fingers, then reaches between her legs and begins to stroke her, still standing, staring down at her.

After only a few minutes, she comes, fast, sharply, almost painfully, knees buckling slightly; she hasn’t touched herself or been touched since the last time they fucked—

(in her room, after the penultimate hypnosis lesson, Gambit joking about teaching her too well, about her being too good of a student; Gambit pinching her nipples, making her laugh with pride)

—and after she comes the first time, he doesn’t stop stroking her, and she nearly winces, she is still too sensitive, but despite that she comes again, crying out, grabbing onto his arm for balance.

He moves backwards, sits down on her bed. He reaches into her drawer for a condom. Then he opens just the button and zipper of his pants, slipping the condom on. He gestures wordlessly for her to sit on top of him.

Like that, they start to fuck, and it feels like it has been so long, too long, that she can’t help herself from shouting, and then he is shouting, too, loud even for himself, never the quietest of lovers, with his hands too tight on her hips.

She bites her lip and grabs onto his shoulders, closing her eyes—and then his hands are on either side of her face, holding her head in place.

“No,” he grits out. “Look at me, minou—look at me—look at me—”

She opens her eyes, just a fraction, and can see him staring at her, black and red eyes full of anger and hurt and something else she recognizes—

—from when he told her, when he told her, when he told her, before she left for Kyoto, that he didn’t want it to be the last time—

—and she shuts her eyes again.

She feels him lean his head forward, too close to her skin, and she backs away instinctively, opening her eyes just for a second, to look at him, make sure he is a safe distance away.

His eyes are closed now, too, and he rests his forehead on the back of his own hand, wrapped around her shoulder. She can feel the hand, burning hot, even through the glove; his entire body, burning through his clothes. Cigarette smoke and his sweat, penetrating her skin, into her blood.

His breath heats her breast; and she hears him whisper: “You’re cruel—you’re cruel—”


*


Suddenly, a knock comes at the door.

“Hey, kid, time to go,” comes Logan’s voice.

She freezes. What the hell is Logan doing here—but then she realizes, it’s Friday, it’s seven o’clock, and didn’t he say something about going to a movie?

Gambit’s eyes fly open, and he stops moving for just a second. Then, his face tightens, and he resumes his motions; harder, more deeply, and once again she can’t help but shout in pleasure, though she tries to quiet it.

And Gambit’s other hand finds its way into her hair, steadying her, while his forehead falls back against the back of his hand on her shoulder.

Whispering again: “You’re cruel—”

She shakes her head, tries to say No; but she can barely speak.

Then he lifts his head, and the hand in her hair presses against her neck, and she opens her eyes to look at him.

“So you don’t even want to look,” he chokes out, still moving. “Huh—you don’t even want to look—”

She shakes her head again, tries to say No again, but once more it comes out as a moan, and he matches it—

“It’s hateful, right—” he whispers, in between his cries. “What you know he used to be—ah—what I used to be—what we did—then—”

Shaking her head, feeling every word beneath her skin.

“Does it—sicken you—ah—”

The hand in her hair now comes down between them to begin stroking her again, and she starts to yell out, even louder, her eyes still squeezed shut.

“Look at me,” he barks, but she doesn’t open her eyes.

“Look at me—minou—look at me—I want you to see me—I want you to see me—”

She is starting to come around his fingers, so she squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, lets herself fall forward onto his shoulder.

“Don’t wanna know nothing, huh,” he whispers, still moving; so that after the tremors from this orgasm subside, he grinds up against her again and she yells out. “Still—”

She opens her mouth, but she only lets out another cry as his motions become more desperate.

“I was nineteen years old—” he pants out. “You were what, ten—”

She stares down at him. “Stop,” she says, but as her word is cut off by a thrust, it turns into a moan.

“My third mission—they sent me to Lebanon—blow up the French defense minister’s car—” he gasps. “But I didn’t know—they rigged the car with more explosives—”

She tries to cry out, but his fingers are stroking her again, the pleasure is undoing her—

“So when I charged it—it’d blow up the bus behind it, too—so it look like a random terrorist bombing—over thirty people—”

She wants to cover his mouth, but her hands are bare, she can’t touch him. She clutches fistsfuls of his shirt. “Don’t,” she whispers.

“Weapon X was the beginning—so he must’ve been an early one,” he goes on, both his voice and body shuddering. “In the sixties and seventies it was brutal—”

“Please,” she says, but doesn’t know what she is begging.

“They don’t do adamantium bonding no more—too difficult—they got enough humans—to be torture experts—now they lookin’ for assassins—and bombers—”

She winces at the bluntness of that; saying aloud what Logan was, what she already knows: that he had been a torture expert.

And each thrust, each word, hits somewhere deeper in her, near her chest, near her throat. Stopping her breath, stopping her speech.

“I don’t wanna know,” she gasps into his shirt.

She can feel his other hand behind her head again, gripping her hair in his fist. “Yeah, I know you don’t wanna know,” he pants.

He pulls her head back, makes her look him in the eye again. “You don’t wanna know—you don’t wanna know the things that made us—you don’t wanna see—”

She grips his shoulders, closes her eyes again.

“Look at me—” he says. “Look at me—minou—look at me—look at me—“

She closes her eyes more tightly, can feel herself buckling around his fingers.

“Look at me,” she hears him whisper. “I’m begging you—”

She opens her eyes, just a fraction again, and sees him staring at her.

“Minou,” he says, his eyes glassy. “Minou—minou—please—don’t—don’t turn away—”

She is starting to come once more, so her eyes shut as the scream pours from her throat, from somewhere deep in her chest. And then she can feel him coming, too, finally, roaring into her neck.

For a few seconds, they are both panting, wordless. Still gripping each other.

She moves backwards first, taking hold of the condom to keep it in place as she slides him out of herself. All without looking at him, still. He doesn’t move for a moment; then finally he stands, walks toward the bathroom to dispose of the condom in the wastebasket. She crawls back into bed, still naked.

He takes a little longer in the bathroom, and from the bed, she can see his profile, just his hands leaning against the bathroom counter, heavily, his head bowed.

Then he comes back, stands in the doorway, leaning against the frame. The way he did in Manhattan.

He looks at her. At first he is silent, and she stares at him, trying to think of something to say, some joke she can make about his vigorousness.

Then he rasps out, “You think you the only one who’s scared.”

Sitting naked in the bed, she stares at him. She can say nothing. She has never seen him look like this—this desperate, this anguished. He looks more naked than she does.

“Me and him are the same,” he whispers. “Want the same thing.”

He looks down at his fists. “Not just about you.”

She is still staring at him, still silent.

“Say something,” he pleads.

But she can’t think of anything to say.

He looks back up at her, and his eyes are glassy again.

“You really think you can’t give anything,” he says.

She swallows, lowers her eyes.

She can hear him moving and she looks up, just a bit, to see him doing the zipper, then the button of his pants. Arranging his shirt, brushing his hair back out of his eyes, rubbing his eyes and forehead repeatedly.

“Let’s stop this, yeah,” he says quietly.

She stares at him. But she still doesn’t respond. Then she nods, once. He laughs.

“What, not even gonna argue, eh,” he says, approaching the bed. “Cruel woman.”

His smile fades. Gazing down at her, he says again, his voice collapsing to a whisper, “You’re cruel.”

She looks up at him, and he leans forward to kiss her, on the mouth, with no barrier between them—and she pulls back, eyes wide.

He had expected it; so he pulls back, too. She half-expects him to kiss his staff and press it to her mouth. But his hands are empty. He does not have the staff with him.

He gazes at her for another second, then turns around and walks to the door.

She hears him open it; then hesitate. She waits, thinks he might come back inside.

Then she hears him say, loudly, “Later, minou.” She hears the word minou, hears—and the door closes, and there is only silence in the room.


*


She crawls back into bed, still naked, and lies on her back, gazing at the ceiling.

Thinking about the top of Gambit’s head in the meditation room after she touched the bare palm of his hand, hair in his face, hiding his shaking with a joke; of his bare hands sliding her tights up her damp legs. Of the way his face looked, every single time she called him an assassin, and he corrected her, smiling tensely all the time, saying, “Thief.”

Thinking about Logan asking her to go to a movie she didn’t even want to see; of the pure terror in his voice the first time he accidentally scratched her with his claws during sex, and she had defused the situation with a dirty remark; of the look of murderous annoyance on his face during that gala, when he never left Hank’s side, even for an inch, even for a moment.

Thinking, thinking.


*


But she doesn’t get to think for very long, because suddenly the door opens, and she thinks it’s Gambit again, breaking his way back in—but it sounds like a lock in the keyhole.

And Logan is in her room, breathing hard.

Genuinely panicked, she shouts, “What the fuck,” covers herself, then shouts out again, “How the hell did you get in here?”

He has the audacity to say only, “Made myself a key.”

“Jesus Christ,” she says. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Not even safe in my goddamn room, she thinks. She starts to wrap the sheet around her, for coverage, while she hops out of bed and tries to retrieve her sweater off the ground.

But faster than she would have thought him capable, he is next to her, finding his way into her outstretched arms, enclosing himself in an unintended embrace.

“Wha—wh—hey,” she says. He is too close to her skin.

She snaps, “I haven’t forgiven you yet, asshole.”

For what, she wonders. For healing her when she had never wanted him to do something like that again; or for the things she has no right to forgive anyway; things only the dead can forgive. Forgive him for the person he was, back before she was born; back before she knew what a person was. As if she knows what a person is now.

“I don’t care,” he mumbles, his body entirely still.

“Logan—” she says, pulling her arms away and trying to push him back. “Hold on—wait. Just wait.”

“No,” he says, and buries his face in her hair.

She can feel his hands against her body, on top of the sheet, realizes they are totally bare.

“You don’t have any gloves,” she reasons.

“I don’t care,” he mutters.

She cares. He is not going to touch her again. Not again, not again. He is sniffing her hair deeply, again and again, breathing her in.

Then she realizes, with his nose in her hair, he must smell everything—must smell Gambit everywhere, fresh, immediate—and must smell her, too; her arousal, her orgasms; everything, everything.

And if he is still here after he had knocked; then he must have heard everything, too; her cries, Gambit’s cries. Maybe not Gambit’s whispers.

“Just let me get showered, at least,” she says tightly.

“No.”

The sound of his voice is starting to frighten her.

“Come on, Logan.”

“No.” And his body is tight and stiff around her; stiff muscles, metal, unmoving bones.

“Logan,” she says firmly. “Just let me take a shower.”

“No.” And she can feel him inhaling, trying not to inhale, inhaling again.

She closes her eyes in frustration, finally snaps, “I know you can smell him.”

He is still inhaling, trying not to inhale, inhaling again. His face burying itself deeper into her hair, his arms around her, now. She can feel him trembling, even more uncontrollably than he did after they had sex the first time; can feel the anger vibrating from his entire body.

Trying to calm him, she says, more gently, “Come on, Logan. Five minutes.” Jokingly, “Then we can have some fun, too.”

And yet he doesn’t move, doesn’t take the bait. “No,” he says again, like a mantra.

She feels something break inside of her. “Logan, I know you can smell him,” she says finally, frustration clouding her voice. “It makes me feel weird. Just let me take a shower. You must not like it either.”

“Yeah,” he bites out; it seems to choke him to speak. “I fuckin’ hate it.”

That much is obvious. She tries to extricate herself from his grasp, saying, “So let go of—”

“No,” he says, pulling back, only to yank up the bedsheet, cover her mouth with it, kiss her.

And it is the first time he has ever kissed her, and she feels the sixteen-year-old girl inside her split apart.

Then he tugs the sheet down for a moment, so fast she doesn’t realize it, and then his uncovered mouth is on hers—only for a second, not even fast enough for the pull to begin, just long enough for her to feel it, to know that he did it—

And then the bedsheet is on her mouth and he is kissing her through it again.

And every old fantasy, every undreamt dream—Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan, Logan whom she loved as a child, like a child, and now, now—

He breaks free from her mouth and moves down, kissing her through the sheet, her breasts, biting her nipples, doing too many things, far too quickly—

And then she thinks of Logan in a helicopter; Logan throwing a slashed body into the ocean; Logan stabbing Oyama Yuriko in the chest; Logan stabbing her in the chest—

And she says, “Stop, stop, shit. Stop.”

“No.”

“Stop,” she says again.

“That’s not the safe word,” he says, and she feels something else split apart in her.

“Logan, st—”

“That’s not the safe word,” he says again, and now he pulls himself back up to face her, so his eyes are directly across from hers.

She closes them, whispers, “Stop.”

“That’s not the safe word,” he says again, and he lowers himself again to her stomach, and she can feel his mouth, his saliva wetting the sheet, making it transparent. “Say samurai, and I’ll stop.”

“Logan,” she says, but she knows her voice is weak, it is taking up too much energy to keep from crying.

He moves down, settles between her legs. “Say samurai. Or banana. Fuckhead. Sushi. Karaoke.”

She starts to laugh, despite herself. He has remembered all the other words—all the other words.

But none of those words are safe—there are no safe words—there are no safe words—there are no safe words—and the tears are already on her face when she makes one last effort to stop him, saying, “Logan—”

He looks at her; and once again it is that look she didn’t recognize before, a look that matches the flicker in her mind, the flicker with no name, and her face.

“If you want me to stop,” he says simply, “then say any of those words.”

Her face wet, she shakes her head, again and again, over and over, now unable to speak, until she feels his mouth on her, and her head is still shaking, still shaking, over and over, over and over.


*


They fuck silently. She is still sore from Gambit, so she doesn’t come, and he barely even moans. Just his breath against her neck, all his clothes still on, his hands in her hair. Breathing, breathing, breathing.

And this time he is not the only one, shaking and shaking, shaking and shaking.


*


Afterwards, he says, without looking at her, quickly before the words run away from him, “I want to know how you got your powers. And I want to know what you saw in my head.”

And here it is. She goes completely still. The request she hadn’t ever wanted to hear from him. She wants to say No, now, immediately. Wants to say, No, never, never, never.

But she asks, “Which times?”

He looks at her and says, “Every time,” in the same way he told her the claws hurt when they came out, and she feels sixteen again.

But she doesn’t feel sixteen again when she thinks of what she would have to tell him, if she were to do as he asked. How she would have to hold those stories in her mouth; how she would have to say every word.

She breathes out, already ready to refuse, “Jesus, Logan—”

But he interrupts her. “There’s time. I’ll give you time.”

“Time to what,” she asks.

Then he isn’t looking at her anymore, but at his hands. His hands, his hands, what his hands have done, taught—

“Time to not be afraid of whatever you’re gonna tell me,” he says, and she stiffens, hardens.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she says starkly; and wants it to be true.

He still doesn’t look at her. “It’s not just for you,” he says.

And she hears Gambit’s bruised voice telling her, You think you the only one who’s scared.

She closes her eyes. “Logan—”

“Don’t say no,” he says, once again in a voice that breaks her; the way he said I can’t remember, when she asked him in the car who Stryker was; already knowing, herself.

“Don’t say you can’t,” he says, staring at her.

She cannot look at him, so now she looks down at her own hands, feels dread and fear coming over her; it feels like the first time she had his memories, just after he had stabbed her; and she didn’t know what to do with any of them then, either, no more than she knows what to do with them now—

—souvenirs from Japan, Alkali Lake, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, New Orleans, Madrid, northern Québec, Lebanon—

His mouth is on the top of her head so fleetingly she wonders if she has imagined it. Then there is space between them again; but the stare he gives her seems to have a body, seems like flesh between them; flesh that is his, flesh that is hers. Flesh she could touch, if she tried.

“I’ll give you time,” Logan says again, in that same voice. “And then I’ll ask you again.”

HOW I GOT OVER



“The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.”

Ways of Seeing, John Berger.


*


“The root of all pure joy and sadness is that the world is as it is. Joy or sadness that arises because the world is not what it seems or what we want it to be is impure or provisional. But in the highest degree of their purity, in the so be it said to the world when every legitimate cause of doubt and hope has been removed, sadness and joy refer not to negative or positive qualities, but to a pure being-thus without any attributes…

Seeing something simply in its being-thus—irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent—is love.

At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendent.”


“Appendix: The Irreparable,” The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben, trans. Michael Hardt.


*


“Take a word very close to giving, and that is forgiving. Forgiving is also a form of giving. If I forgive only what’s forgivable, I’ve forgiven nothing. Someone has done something wrong, committed an offense or one of those abominable crimes that were evoked earlier—the concentration camps. An immeasurable crime has been committed. I cannot forgive the person for it. If I forgive only what is venial, only what is excusable or pardonable, the slight misdeed, the measured and measurable, the determined and limited wrongdoing, in that case, I’m not forgiving anything. If I forgive because it’s forgivable, because it’s easy to forgive, I’m not forgiving. I can only forgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn’t possible to forgive. In other words, forgiveness, if there is any, must forgive that which is unforgivable otherwise it is not forgiveness. Forgiving, if it is possible, can only come to be as impossible. But this impossibility is not simply negative. This means that the impossible must be done.”


“A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Jacques Derrida, trans. Gila Walker.


*


“I know,
I know and you know, we know,
We did not know, we
Were there, after all, and not there
And at times when
Only the void stood between us we got
All the way to each other.”

“So many constellations,” from Die Niemandsrose, Paul Celan.



*


“Out on the streets
where I grew up (HOW I GOT OVER)
first thing they teach you is:
not to give a fuck. (HOW I GOT OVER)

That type of thinking
can’t get you nowhere.
Someone—has—to—care—”


“How I Got Over,” The Roots.



*


The next day, she is still lying in bed; knowing that Logan is in the Danger Room, teaching bajiquan to ten-year-olds, who will turn on him the second they master a single move; whom he barrages with near-constant insults, wrapped around tiny, treasured fragments of advice or guidance.

And later, she is still lying there; knowing that Gambit is now outside—it’s a sunny day—surrounded by teenagers, putting up a cardboard cut-out of Magneto up in the garden, with specific target points designated on his head, chest and groin. Someone has drawn a mustache and glasses on Magneto’s face.

Some of the things she knows.


*


The day after that, she finally ventures out of her room to make it for the next training session with Logan.

When she arrives in the room, he is already there, standing, addressing the children, who are sitting cross-legged on the floor. From an unseen corner, she watches his back as he speaks.

“We’re gonna start learning something called aikido today,” he is saying. “It’s different from what we were doin’ last week, yeah? This one’s definitely gentler than bajiquan—”

—and some students in the class groan—

“—all right, all right. But it’s gonna show you how to defend yourself from an attacker, without having to hurt your opponent. It’s about redirecting force, instead of coming at it head-on.”

“If someone’s attacking me,” a boy says to one of his friends, “I’m coming at ‘em head-on!” And the kids laugh.

“There’s lots of different ways to fight,” Logan says simply, and she wishes, doesn’t wish, she could see his face.

Finally, she calls out, entering the room: “So you guys bored of this guy yet, or what?”

The kids let out a chorus of surprised cheers. “Rogue!”

Logan whirls around, eyes wide. “Uh, hey—” he says. Then, in a lower voice, “I didn’t know you were coming to class today.”

“Well, I am, after all, a teacher at this dance studio you call a combat class,” she says. The same look of uneasy pleasure is on his face again.

“Yes!” one girl shouts out. “I wanna be in Rogue’s group today! Not learning—aiwhatdo—”

“Aikido,” Logan says, irritated.

“Nah,” Rogue says. “Let’s let Logan lead the class today.” And the kids make faces of disappointment.

Logan is wordless; then he blinks, clears his throat, and nods. “Yeah. Okay. All right. So.” He stands up straight, faces the class again. “Now, the first thing we’re gonna do is fall and roll.”

More groans. Rogue thinks they learned to really back-talk, while she was away.

“How come every week, we always have to start with that,” another girl complains. “I wanna learn new stuff, the really hard stuff!”

“There’s no stuff newer or harder than this, brat,” Logan barks. “Most important thing is knowing how to fall right. Now on your feet.”


*


After class, they are picking up mats together. Logan is doing everything he possibly can to avoid looking at her.

“Thanks for—coming in today,” he says, finally, sounding so uncomfortable it nearly makes her laugh.

“I told you, it’s my job,” she says. “And it’s important to me.”

Logan nods, his gaze darting everywhere. “So—” Then he swallows. “Er, how’s your—hand?”

She blinks, looks down at her hand. “It’s good,” she says. “It’s all fine now.”

“Good,” he says, still not looking at her. “Okay. Uh.” Then he glances at her arms. “Here, gimme those. I’ll take ‘em back to the equipment room.”

And then he takes the mats from her arms, slings them onto his back, and walks away.


*


Over the next few days, she re-establishes a kind of awkward rapport with Logan, as fellow instructors and something like old friends. She thinks she knows how Storm feels, regarding Hank, now. Friendship, that isn’t quite friendship; closeness that isn’t quite closeness.

She almost never sees Gambit; now that the weather is nice, his classes are held in a different area of the mansion, outside.

She doesn’t know how it could be possible, not to see him, when only two weeks ago it seemed like she couldn’t take a step in either direction without finding him grinning at her like a cat. But now he is never in the cafeteria, never in the hallway; he might be in his room, but she doesn’t go to his room.

Now he is nowhere, but it is that nowhere-ness that makes her feel all the more aware of him; knowing that for him to really be nowhere, he would have to know exactly where she was, at all times—in order to avoid being there, too. Everywhere she goes, she thinks he is just there, walking away, slipping out through a door she doesn’t know, turning into a corridor she cannot see.

But isn’t that what was always going to happen anyway, eventually, she thinks to herself. With both of them.

Thinking of Gambit saying in a grieving voice: That’s all we had going on anyway, right?


*


And as the days continue, and she still doesn’t see Gambit at all, she notices that the rapport with Logan isn’t quite as friendly as she had thought. There are times when he answers questions a little too quickly and loudly, looking immediately remorseful and irritated at himself afterwards. Or times when she catches him staring at her, as if he wants to ask her a question, then deciding against it.

Or times like when, in class, she volunteers to demonstrate a grappling move with him, and he says, hurriedly, “No, it’s okay—Jordan here can do it. Come on, pipsqueak.”

She remembers that he’d only said he’d give her time; and that he’d ask again. Until then, they are living in some limbo, some delayed time, in which he can’t seem to bear touching her or looking at her more than he absolutely needs to. And the dread comes back.


*


She is sitting in the cafeteria, long after dinner is over, at a table with Piotr and Bobby, asking lewd questions about their sex life.

Only Piotr is answering, delightedly, while Bobby turns bright red and keeps saying, “Shut up, shut up.” This seems to delight Piotr even more.

And as she is saying, “Yeah, I know, even with me he had a real thing about getting his ass licked when it was in ice form—”

—she sees a flash, nothing more, in one of the cafeteria entrances. She turns her head; but no one is there, and no one is coming in. A flash that could have been anyone; but she knows who it was. No one else wears a coat that long.


*


In bed that night, she remembers something Gambit had said; that he had gone on the mission to Québec for Storm. That means Storm must know—and Storm, she can talk to, she thinks.

She cannot stop thinking about it, so although it is verging on late, she climbs out of bed and makes her way to Storm’s room—she doesn’t want to have this conversation in her office, where anyone might come in; where Logan or Gambit might come in.

When Storm answers the door and sees her standing there, her eyes widen in surprise. “Hey, honey, come in,” she says, and opens the door wider.

It is the first time she has ever been in Storm’s room. It smells profoundly of her; of rose and amber and everything she had smelled in her embrace; wood, paper, rainwater, Storm, Storm.

The room is not as organized as she thought it would be; there are piles of folders and documents on the desk, a leather jacket thrown on an armchair, more shoes than anyone needs, a large bottle of hand cream, at least two different cell phones that she can see.

It reminds her of Gambit’s room; tender, lived-in, a devoted messiness.

“Sorry about the mess,” Storm says. “I never get the chance to tidy up around here.” She grins. “I’m kind of a slob, don’t tell anyone.”

“It’s nice,” Rogue says. “Cozy,” she adds, knowing it will remind her of Logan; not caring because it is the truth. Because Storm reminds her of Logan, too.

“You want a cup of tea or something?” Storm asks, moving towards the small kitchenette across the room. “I can’t really cook in here, but I can make drinks—”

“I wouldn’t mind anything with gin in it,” Rogue jokes.

Storm raises an eyebrow. “Gin and tonic coming up.”

Rogue watches her as she busies herself at the countertop, retrieving ice from a miniature freezer, pouring gin and tonic water into lowball glasses that say HAWAII on them.

She is dressed for bed, though she is wearing her glasses, so she must have been in the middle of doing something, probably work-related. In sweatpants, a sweatshirt. Bare feet, unpainted nails. White hair in a bun haphazardly held together by a butterfly clip.

Storm brings her one of the glasses. “Cheers,” she says.

“Thanks,” Rogue says, and takes a sip; then looks down, peers at the glass. “Hawaii, huh.”

Storm lowers her eyes, and Rogue thinks it must have something to do with Hank; but Storm says nothing.

Instead, she says, a little carefully, “So what’s up.”

Rogue takes another sip from her glass, then another one. She swallows, then says, “A while ago, Gambit told me—about Madrid.”

Storm’s face is still careful. “All right,” she says, waiting for her to say more.

Rogue swallows, and says, “That—that it’s not anti-mutant terrorists that after Hank, but some kind of—military company, or something. And that he went to find out more. Not just because of his—special abilities, or whatever.”

All of this is coming out much clumsier than she had hoped, and she doesn’t know if it is the alcohol, her nervousness at being in Storm’s room, or the fact of talking about this subject at all.

Storm examines her, still waiting to see if that is all she is going to say. It is all she is going to say.

“Well,” Storm begins. “It’s true that he was, as he told me—well-equipped for the mission.”

Still watching her, wanting Rogue to be the one to reveal things.

Rogue swallows, and asks, “Is the other stuff true, too.”

“Like what,” Storm says, gently.

Rogue stares at her glass. “About him—about him being an assassin, before. About that being how he knew what was going on with Hank. About him thinking that the people he used to work for were the ones responsible for it.”

Storm takes a breath. “Yes,” she says. “That’s true.”

Rogue inhales, a little sharply.

Storm continues, “Gambit thinks Hank is the target of a failed assassination attempt—well, two—by a private security contractor that specializes in training and employing mutant enforcers,” she says, as if she is reading the facts aloud, as if she has memorized them because she has been reading documents all day about the topic.

Then she adds, her voice lowered, “And I think he’s right.”

Rogue stares at her. “But—why—just because Hank’s a mutant? They’re using mutants, too—”

“No,” Storm says. “Because he’s campaigning for stricter regulations on international arms trade. And he’s supporting a campaign for a mutant labor union in the automobile industry.”

Rogue doesn’t understand anything. She thinks, a little ashamedly, that she should read the news more often. “What?”

“Hank made enemies,” Storm says simply. “Already when he first entered the Cabinet. And then he was given this U.N. job, as a token, for mutant rights or whatever, to get him out of the way; keep him in endless conferences and meetings. But he’s causing as much trouble for them there as he was as Secretary of Mutant Affairs. If not more.”

She says, “I only found out what was happening when his house burned down, like everyone else.”

Storm’s jaw tenses. She says, “He’d been keeping everything from me.”

Rogue remembers Storm saying that she had been against Hank’s departure for Washington, his decision to take up a life of politics.

“So you—” Rogue shakes her head, struggling to understand. It seems as though in the past few days, everything she knows about her life and the people in it has been turned upside down.

Storm exhales. “After Hank’s house was burned down, Gambit approached me and told me about a company he worked for briefly, called Sagitta. He said they had been using enhanced mutants and humans to carry out corporate and political assassinations. He had concerns that they—or a related company—might actually be the ones behind the arson.”

Rogue stammers, “But I thought it was bigots—you know—the SB10700 thing—”

Storm says, “It’s not uncommon for these agencies to conceal their actions by framing activist or fundamentalist groups that would also have conveniently similar motives.”

She sighs, takes her first sip from her own glass.

“So now you see why I’ve been so serious about the bodyguard thing,” she says. Then she cringes. “Even though Hank hates it.”

“But why,” Rogue says. “If it’s so dangerous—if he’s being targeted—”

Storm sighs again, throws her hands up. “He’s proud. I don’t know. He says it’s hypocritical. Criticizing the arms trade when he’s surrounded by some of the strongest mutants in the world.”

Rogue stares at her. “So and Gambit—this whole time—you guys knew about this—”

Storm gazes at her. “Gambit has been helping me with information from some of his contacts: former Guild friends, or even former employees, discharged or escaped, like him, though I don’t really ask all the details,” she answers, carefully again.

“And you guys kept this to yourselves—” Rogue feels herself getting angry. “You didn’t tell us—we didn’t even know what we were up against, when we were out there—”

“I know,” Storm says, wincing. “And I’m sorry. But—I hope you can imagine why I wouldn’t want too many people to know about this. I don’t need anyone else in the mansion targeted for what they know.”

She frowns and says, “It’s better for us if people think Hank is being guarded against anti-mutant terrorists. Not snooping around trying to find enough evidence to bring a global mercenary agency to justice.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Rogue asks, eyes wide.

Storm smiles again. “Trying,” she says, and she takes another, longer, sip from her glass.

Then she closes her eyes. “If people came to the mansion again—”

Rogue stares at Storm. For the first time, she realizes, truly, that Storm is now the leader of this mansion.

That Storm is standing in the place where Xavier used to be—without telepathy, without Cerebro, without the years of experience and connections and advocacy he had been able to bring to the table. Just herself, and whatever she could do, to protect them. This community they had made with their hands. Everything her lost friends and predecessors had built.

“Who else knows,” Rogue asks suddenly. “Does Logan—”

“No,” Storm replies. “Logan doesn’t know. I was worried about how he’d react to hearing about something so closely connected with Weapon X.”

She pauses. “You know, I’ve never talked to him about all that. I always remembered the professor talking about how delicate and fragile his mind was—and if he, with his telepathy, didn’t think it was a good idea to try and go in there—” She bites her lip. “I didn’t think I had any business trying.”

Then she looks at Rogue. “But you’ve been in there, right,” she murmurs.

Rogue is startled. “How did you—”

Storm chuckles. “It’s not that hard to figure out, seeing what happens to you after he touches you.”

Rogue looks down.

“Does the stuff stay permanently?” Storm asks.

Rogue hesitates, then nods. “The stuff from Liberty Island stayed permanent,” she responds. “Not always coherent.”

“Wow,” Storm says.

“What?” Rogue asks.

The older woman shrugs. “I always thought that was pretty amazing,” she says. “That you could do something like that, even without any kind of telepathy. Just through touch.”

“Amazing,” Rogue repeats in disbelief. “I always thought it was pretty awful.”

Storm looks down. “I don’t know, I always thought that was sort of—moving. In its own way. I don’t know. Maybe I’m too simple-minded.”

Rogue doesn’t say anything here; not knowing what she would say.

“You know, before Alcatraz, I fought with Logan,” Storm adds; and this, Rogue doesn’t know. “I was sure that in the end, he’d betray us for Jean.”

And she thinks of Logan, not betraying them for what Stryker knew.

Storm says, “I thought—I thought he wasn’t really with us. In some way, I guess I’d never really trusted him. I didn’t like him when we first met, either; he was so—angry, so suspicious, so against the whole idea of who we were, what were trying to do, on the team.

“And then I heard, vaguely, about his whole thing with Weapon X, with the experiments and everything. When he fought—he was violent in a way I didn’t always feel too comfortable with.”

Storm laughs, a little nervously. “I wasn’t convinced that he was a good guy, really.”

Rogue remembers the attack on the mansion; seeing Logan leap down from above and stab two soldiers in the back, without hesitation, without a thought. Bobby had told her about how he had seen Logan kill the first soldier, in the kitchen: claws into the chest, up until his knuckles, shouting as if possessed.

Moving through the mansion like a professional, as if he knew intimately and exactly what the soldiers would do, how they would move; as if he had been on their side, before.

Then Storm grins fondly. “But then I thought, if this little girl is hanging around him, there must be something all right, in there.”

Rogue stares at her.

“I think I was right,” Storm says, gazing at her.

Rogue looks down at her glass, takes another sip. “Thank you,” she says quietly.

Storm sips from her glass again. “Is that all you wanted to know?”

Still looking at her glass, Rogue nods. “Thank you,” she says again. “For the drink, too. It’s—it’s late. I’ll get out of your hair.”

Storm smiles and stands. “All right, honey.”

In Storm’s doorframe, just before she leaves, Rogue turns around and asks, suddenly, “So, wait—what are you gonna do now? About Hank, and—everything.”

Storm sighs, and when she does, her face looks younger than Rogue’s and older than Xavier’s.

“Same old, same old,” she says, shrugging. “Keep fighting.”


*


Rogue feels tiny, ignorant, infinitely young. While she was running away from everything, treating everything like a game, they were—working like this, living like this.

And now she thinks about every smile on Gambit’s face, every “honey” from Storm’s mouth—everything now marked by this knowledge, the knowledge of everything they were giving, everything they were doing, in the meantime, in the background. To watch over their lives; her tiny life; their tiny life together.

Once she is back in her room, she goes to the drawer she never opens, where she never looks; opens it, looks in it.

Remy the bull greets her, and once again she does not know whether to laugh or cry.

Thinking of Gambit’s bullet wounds; Logan’s dreams; Storm’s desperate voice on the phone with Hank; Hank’s tense face as he ate his dinner like a gentleman and ignored the mocking across from him.

Thinking of her own hands in Kyoto. Wondering what she could do, undo.


*


She opens the envelope before she can convince herself not to.


*


JAMES HOWLETT
CN: WOLVERINE
ENTRY DATE: 11-01-1961
ACTIVATION: 01-03-1964
CO: WILLIAM STRYKER, ALKALI LAKE

INSTRUCTION, COERCIVE INTERROGATION, DISPLACEMENT, LIQUIDATION
SPECIAL NOTES: TRIPLE-DOSAGE REQUIRED

WEAPON X
INDONESIA: 1965
VIETNAM: 1966-1968

M-ULTRA
BRAZIL: 1969-1983
URUGUAY: 1969-1983
CHILE: 1969-1983
ARGENTINA: 1969-1983
NICARAGUA: 1979-1983
EL SALVADOR: 1979-1983

COMPROMISED: 1983.
TERMINATED: 1984.


REMY PICARD
CN: NEW SON
ENTRY DATE: 06-22-1994
ACTIVATION: 09-31-1994
CO: NATHANIEL ESSEX, EASTMAIN RIVER

INFILTRATION, ESPIONAGE, SNIPING, PROJECTILES, COMBUSTIVES

SAGITTA (CONTRACT, FENRIS INTERNATIONAL)
BELGIUM, 1994

SAGITTA (CONTRACT, HANDER NATIONAL/OLIVER SOUTH)
PORTUGAL, 1994

SAGITTA (CONTRACT, SORTON DEFENSE)
LEBANON, 1995

TERMINATED (MORTALITY): 1995


*


Nothing much, really; less than she had expected. Two pieces of paper, with names, dates, places. It could be anything, could mean anything. If she didn’t already know what they pointed towards, she wouldn’t comprehend it. Only the memories from Logan tell her what is behind the blank facts. Less than she had expected; not less than she had feared.

She notices that Logan’s contract was terminated the year she was born. The perfect silliness of that coincidence now makes her both laugh and cry.


*


That night, she dreams of nothing, or almost nothing; floating in a sea, underwater and yet she can still breathe, moving to and fro without swimming. It feels as though she might be dead, but she isn’t, she isn’t.


*


The next day, Storm calls her, Kurt and Piotr into her office and says that, once again, a last minute mission has come up. They will be escorting Hank to San Francisco, where he will be present for the groundbreaking of the new Mutant History Museum, to be built where Alcatraz used to be.

Storm says in an irritated but dry voice—as if she is used to this sort of thing by now—that Hank failed to inform her that he would be attending the ceremony at all. She had discovered that fact on her own, through a coincidental telephone call with the mayor of Los Angeles, a personal friend of hers.

“Hank said he really thought the ceremony was next week,” Storm says, rolling her eyes.

Rogue says, “I didn’t even know they were building a Mutant History Museum.”

“It’s the first one,” Storm says.

The groundbreaking is taking place the following morning—it is already nearly dinnertime. Storm says they will have to pack immediately and leave on the jet to meet him in Washington, this evening.

“In any case, I’m sorry for the short-notice, guys,” Storm says.

Then she comes around from behind her desk, and nods to Piotr. “So, Piotr, you’ll be in charge of the mansion, in my absence.”

Piotr and Rogue say at the same time: “What?”

Storm replies simply, “I’m putting myself on this mission.”

Piotr’s eyes are wide, but then he nods. “Absolutely,” he says firmly. “I understand, Ms. Monroe.”

Rogue remembers that Piotr was the one who evacuated nearly all of the other children from the mansion, through the secret tunnels—knowing all the pathways as though he had been reading the schematics every night, carrying little girls in his arms, converting into his metal form at the faintest whiff of a soldier. She would feel safe, with him in charge.

Storm grins at Rogue. “So you’ll be the muscle,” she says, and Rogue feels herself flush with pride.

Then Storm looks down at her watch. “I think we’ll have to be packed—well, yesterday,” she mutters. “But in the next half-hour will have to work, instead. I think the three of us should just get down to the jet now, and change in there.”

Rogue smiles to herself, at the thought of Hank’s discomfort at being surrounded by bodyguards in leather jumpsuits.

“What’s so funny?” Storm asks.

Rogue pauses, then says, laughing, “Just thinking about how Hank’s always so annoyed about the outfits, when we’re out together. Especially at functions and ceremonies, like this.”

Storm raises her eyebrows. “Well,” she says. “Hank can screw himself.”


*


Storm wasn’t kidding about the mission being short-notice, because she, Rogue and Kurt go straight from her office to the hangar. Storm says Piotr will notify everyone as to their whereabouts; that they’ll be gone not much longer than twenty-four hours, in any case.

Rogue thinks about Logan watching her pack, before Kyoto, about Gambit asking her if she would masturbate thinking about him, before Madrid.

She is not able to give either of them a similar good-bye before this mission; though she isn’t sure they would want to see her, right now, anyway.

In the jet, after they have changed their clothes, Storm takes command in the cockpit, putting on her headset and opening the hangar ceiling. The jet lifts, and they hover above the basketball court.

Rogue looks down at the mansion from above; its gardens, its rooftops, its tiny and tinier windows. She has seen it like this before, but it looks different, this time; she wonders why.

Because this time it looks like home, she thinks.


*


In Washington, they stop on the roof of an apartment building, where Hank is waiting, guarded by several Secret Service agents; one of whom is bright orange with a tail.

Storm lowers the ramp. Rogue turns around, greets Hank as he enters the jet. He straps himself into one of the seats, with the weary gesture of someone who has done this exact thing, far too many times.

“Good evening, everyone,” Hank says.

Then he peers up at the cockpit. Sharp humor enters his voice. “Ororo.”

The ramp closes again, in response.


*


The entire jet ride to San Francisco passes in near-total silence, and to Rogue it feels more uncomfortable than flying from Kyoto to Salem Center, with a tenderloin steak in the place where her hand used to be. Kurt busies himself by studiously reading his own tattoos, as if discovering for the first time that they exist.

“Should we listen to the radio?” Hank asks, finally.

Wordlessly, Storm presses a button in front of her. Classical music Rogue doesn’t recognize fills the jet.

Hank snorts, then smiles to himself, in spite of himself. Still looking annoyed, behind his smile; still smiling, behind his annoyance.

Rogue thinks of lowball glasses with the word HAWAII on them, of fast food eaten in a car during mission-time.


*


It is nearly midnight when they arrive, landing on a helicopter pad on the roof of their hotel, near Golden Gate Park.

Rogue is astounded by what she sees, even through the foggy night. She has never been to California in the first place: she only vaguely knows what the HOLLYWOOD sign looks like from movies, only vaguely knows what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like, or looked like, also from movies.

Now, before her, there is no more Golden Gate Bridge; a silver and red bridge is under construction, in its place. And there is another, newer bridge, already finished, between what she guesses is Alcatraz, and the mainland. The only San Francisco she will ever know is this one.

She realizes—she has never been here. Not just California, not just San Francisco, but here. Here where they fought; here, where Logan killed and saved a woman he loved; here where he, Storm, and Hank spent a month looking for survivors and clearing away rubble and human ashes. Where Gambit came to Storm, and asked how he could help.

Everything looks clean, fresh, new; and even the things that are still under construction seem whole, somehow; utterly undamaged. In progress, rather than in ruins. If she hadn’t known what had happened here, a little less than a year ago, she wouldn’t have been able to tell. But she does know; so she can tell.

Though that new bridge sure looks pretty, she thinks.


*


In the hotel, she shares a room with Storm, while Kurt rooms with Hank.

She hadn’t expected to be in such close quarters with Storm again, so soon after their last conversation. She remains awkwardly silent; she doesn’t even have a bag to busy herself with, as they had all come on the mission with the clothes on their backs and nothing else. She lies in bed, gazing at the ceiling.

With the mission coming so suddenly, everything she had been thinking about had been put on hold. She thinks about Logan, telling her he would give her time. About the two pieces of paper still lying on her nightstand dresser. About what she thinks she can do, undo.

She thinks about the first mission, when Logan and Gambit went together. She wonders if they shared a room; if they had spoken to each other; and if they had, how they had spoken to each other. Remembers Gambit saying, I don’t like him, he don’t like me. Back in the early days. When she had known almost nothing.

Storm eases into her bed, still in her jump-suit, and reaches to turn off the nightstand lamp. “Good night,” she says.

“Good night,” Rogue says. She still feels wide awake. Thinking, thinking.

They are both silent for a moment, and Rogue can hear Storm tossing and turning in bed, the leather making squeaking noises.

After several minutes, she can hear Storm’s voice, muffled by her pillow:

“If we can’t sleep, we can always start comparing how those two are in bed.”

Rogue laughs—and it feels like a long time since she has done that.

“You mean Hank and Kurt?” she asks. “You get around even more than I do.”

A pillow hits her face.


*


The next morning, they are in the diplomatic shuttle provided by the California governor, on their way across the new bridge between the city and the island of Alcatraz.

Kurt and Hank are sitting next to each other, while Rogue drives, and Storm sits next to her in the front passenger seat. Storm is craning her neck behind her, examining Hank in his deep blue suit.

She is taunting Hank: “So, what, were you half asleep when you did your tie this morning? Because I don’t see any other excuse for that disaster.”

Hank, retorting: “I don’t know that I ought to take fashion advice from a woman with a collection of leather capes.”

Rogue snickers with pleasure; she has never seen the two of them interact like this. Always hearing one half of the conversation, alone with one half of this duo.

She already likes their barbed affection, the vibrating distance between them. Friendship that is not quite friendship, closeness that is not quite closeness. She looks in the rearview mirror and sees Hank gazing at Storm, with a look she does not need to read, to understand.

Her hands on the wheel, Rogue scans the bridge. Not much traffic, this early in the morning. She looks in the rearview mirror again. Only one city bus behind her. Just a few cars, several morning joggers.

Then she freezes, staring at the bus.

She remembers Gambit’s panting voice—talking about a French defense minister—

—and she doesn’t remember having checked the car this morning—

She says, “Storm, fly out of the car. Kurt, teleport Hank out of the car, now.”

Storm’s head whipping around, saying, “What—”

“Now,” Rogue says, still driving, afraid of what might happen if she stops the car.

The three of them still stare at her—and she reaches up with her non-driving hand and punches straight upwards, so the roof flies back, still attached to the car, in a kind of improvised sunroof.

She says, “Get out of the car now!”

Kurt and Hank disappear in a puff of smoke, and Storm flies straight up into the sky.

Rogue flies upwards, but doesn’t follow Storm. She chases after the car, still in drive, grabbing hold of it with all her strength, using the hole she has made for leverage. Then she throws it—and it is a goddamn lot heavier than Warren was—off the bridge, into the bay—

—where it explodes in a wall of fire, at bridge level, still close enough for the heat and pressure of it to knock her backwards, nearly on her ass, before the burning skeleton of the car crashes into the surface of the water.

Rogue scrambles to her feet and stares at it, frozen; shocked to have been right. To have known what she knew.

She can hear the bus screeching to a halt, just at her side.

Kurt and Hank are on the ground, in the middle of the bridge. Cars are braking, honking all around them. Drivers and joggers alike have stopped, staring at the ring of fire in the sea.

Then she thinks she sees something move, at the top of one of the bridge towers.

She screams, “Kurt!”

Kurt and Hank disappear, and the ground pops with a bullet, at the place they have just left.

Rogue glares up at the tower, starts flying towards it, fast, faster; she sees him already. A man who looks like the men who came to the mansion, aiming his sniper rifle at her, now—

She dodges, but while she is fast, she isn’t quite faster than a bullet, at least not this one, and she can feel one bullet enter her arm, and another one straight through her stomach—too fast, too fast, and she remembers Gambit saying something about these bullets being able to penetrate even his armor, and she is only wearing leather—she cries out, feeling herself starting to fall in mid-air—

—but she isn’t going to stop chasing him. She forces herself to keep flying, through the pain, and she sees him take aim at her again, and she knows, distantly that she must be an easier target now, moving so fucking slowly—

—until a bolt of lightning comes down on him, and he falls backwards, arms raised, gun falling to the ground, firing once or twice into the air.

Storm lowers herself onto the tower, just as Rogue arrives, panting.

“Is he still alive?” she yells out, clutching her stomach, feeling her own blood pouring into her gloved hands.

The way Logan said, So is this the fuckin’ souvenir you brought back for me?

Seeing the blood, Storm cries, “Rogue—”

“He looks alive enough,” Rogue barks, and shoves her forehead against his.

Thinking: I’ll take it, then.


*


Storm is shouting and shouting, tries to pull her away, but she hangs on, long, longer, longer, long enough to get what she needs—and then a little longer than that—and then she yanks her head away.

Everything is moving all around her, the tower is raising, lifting, and she thinks, Fuck, there’s another one, a telekinetic—

—until she realizes it is herself, falling, falling, backwards into Storm’s arms.

Asking Logan in her head, Am I falling right?


*


Hearing Storm say her name, again, again, again, again—

She looks up at Storm and speaks, hoping the words come across. “Nyx—Sorton—”

And then she doesn’t see anything anymore, can’t say anything anymore.


*


She wakes up for a moment, just a moment—sees herself in the jet, with Hank holding an IV bag and staring down at her, looking devastated.

She wants to ask, smiling, teasingly: So what happened in Hawaii?

But then she doesn’t see anything anymore, can’t say anything any more.


*


The next time she awakens, she is in the medbay. Storm is next to the bed, asleep in a chair. A deep blue suit jacket covers her upper body.

How many days has she been unconscious. She doesn’t know. She remembers the fight, though it happened in less than ten minutes; remembers knocking her skin against the man’s head.

He had been a human, she realizes, not a mutant. Or something in-between; some kind of artificially advanced human. Sent there to supervise the timed bomb planted under the car; or, as a last resort, to shoot. They weren’t taking chances anymore.

He had been drugged, too; drugged and erased. There are only facts in her head; very few personal memories, quirks. Technology had improved, she sees; the man he had been given an even more sophisticated version of the treatment Logan got, Carol Danvers got.

Though she has a feeling she will be having a few more bad dreams in the upcoming weeks; the man had been having them, too, despite the improvements.

Had been, she thinks, because she knows she killed him.

Storm awakens; then sees that Rogue, too, is awake. “Hey, honey,” Storm breathes, seeing her.

“Hi,” Rogue says, but finds the words have no sound; her throat is still parched.

Storm says, “You want some ice chips?”

She nods, and Storm disappears for a second, comes back with a glass cup, wearing a pair of latex gloves.

“Open your mouth,” Storm says, and Rogue obeys. The ice chip tastes unbelievably good; she opens her mouth for another, another.

Then she looks around the room, for the two men she knows will probably be here.

But they are nowhere to be seen. She remembers that she hadn’t exactly been on best terms with either of them, so she lowers her eyes again.

“Ah,” Storm says, recognizing the look on Rogue’s face.

Then she says, wryly, “They’ve both been—banned—from the medbay.”

She gestures across the room, outside, where through tired and blurry eyes, Rogue thinks she can see a charred hole where one of the doors used to be; a series of claw marks in a wall.

“For life,” Storm adds curtly.

Rogue starts to laugh, but laughing hurts.

Storm gazes down at her. “You know you saved all of us,” she murmurs.

Rogue tries to smile, but finds that her face seems to be made out of plaster, she can actually hear the skin of her mouth and cheeks cracking.

“How did you know what was going to happen,” Storm asks.

Rogue tries to smile again, but it still hurts too much.

“I was well-equipped,” she whispers, then she thinks she falls asleep again.


*


When she wakes up again, in the middle of the night, the chair next to her bed is empty, but Storm’s jacket is draped over the armrest. She looks more closely; no, not Storm’s jacket.

She can hear Storm talking to someone, just outside her room.

“Hey—stop, stop. It’s not your—”

She can hear Hank replying, “If she hadn’t—if—”

Storm, saying, “Hey. Hey. Hey.”

Hank saying, “Because of me, she—she—just a child—”

Storm saying, “She’s not. She’s strong.”

A long silence.

Then, Hank saying, fiercely, “If—if anything happened to you—”

Another silence.

Then, Storm saying, “Now you know how I feel.”

Rogue falls back asleep.


*


In her dream, she thinks can feel a warm hand on her face; a warm hand in her hair. A whisper of breath against her mouth. Tobacco, leather, sweat, saltwater.


*


When she wakes up, it is daylight, and Storm is in the chair, watching daytime television. When she sees that Rogue is awake, she smiles, says, “Ice chips?”

Rogue nods. Storm reaches over to a cup that is already prepared. She already has gloves on her hands. She feeds her two ice chips.

“I could get—used to this,” Rogue rasps out.

Storm laughs. “Yeah, I think you’re getting spoiled.”

Rogue looks up at the television. A man is taking a woman in his arms, shaking her by the shoulders, desperately—he loves her, only her, and why won’t she believe him? He never slept with Helena!

Storm sees her looking, cringes. “I know. Don’t say anything. I love it.”

Rogue laughs. The pain of laughing feels good.

Then Storm says, “Before you passed out, on the bridge, you were trying to tell me something.”

She gazes at her curiously. “What was it?”

Rogue closes her eyes briefly, then opens them again.

“Name was—Matthew Risman. He worked for—Nyx,” she rasps, trying to get the words out clearly. She hasn’t quite regained enough strength to speak yet, but she has to say this.

“It was a contract—Sorton—Defense. I know who—C.IA. contact is. Where—based. We can go in—get what we need—”

She coughs a little, trying to clear her throat.

Then she says, making a great effort to lift her eyes, to look at Storm: “The evidence—you needed.”

Storm stares down at her, face paling; realizing, realizing. Tears start to slide down her from her eyes.

She chokes out, “Honey—”

“We’re fighting, right,” Rogue says hoarsely.

Storm wipes her face and nods. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

Then her eyes close in pain and regret. “But god, honey, you—”

“Storm,” she interrupts. “I love you.”

The older woman’s eyes widen in shock; and then she starts to tremble, dissolving in tears and laughter.

“I love you,” Rogue says again.

And now Storm is laughing and laughing, and crying and crying, all at the same time, bringing a hand to her mouth, tears and snot mixing together over her chin.

And Rogue knows well what that feels like.

“I love you,” she repeats, her voice still weak; thinking that she has never said this before to anyone but her parents—and even then, not so much. But now she wants to say nothing else but this. She can barely speak; but when she does, she wants every word to be these words.

“Storm, I love you,” she says. “I really—really love you.”

And now Storm has to cover her face with both hands.

“Fuck, you cry loud,” Rogue mumbles.


*


The next time she wakes up, it is in the middle of the night, and Logan is at the foot of her bed, staring at her.

“Hey,” she greets him; and he jumps, startled.

He has been watching her this entire time, so intently, that he must have become frozen like that. He hadn’t even noticed, staring right into her face, that she had already opened her eyes. Or maybe he had been asleep with his eyes open, she doesn’t know.

“Hey,” he says, in a voice she can barely hear.

“Thought you were banned from the medbay,” she says, or tries to say.

“You want ice chips?” Logan asks immediately, his voice rising.

He looks down at a glass in his hands, now full of water. “Just a minute.”

He leaves, then returns with a new glass. He is already wearing his leather gloves.

She opens her mouth, he feeds her a chip. Staring down at her.

“So everyone seems to think you’re some kinda hero,” he remarks. “Kids in class aren’t letting me hear the end of it.”

“I hope not,” she croaks.

He eyes her. “You really throw an exploding car off a bridge?”

She laughs, coughs. “Sorta,” she replies.

He snorts. “Guess you are a certified bad-ass,” he says.

Then he adds, “Though you know I’m gonna have to kick your ass when you get outta here.”

And his joking voice is trembling, slightly.

She thinks of herself, whispering to Gambit in the medbay, I’m gonna kill you.

She says, “I’m surprised you didn’t heal me in my sleep.”

“Thought about it,” he mutters. “Still thinking about it.”

Then he frowns. “But Storm and Hank swore you’d be okay; that your powers made you pretty durable, even if it looked—bad.”

He looks down at the cup he is holding. “And then I thought—about all the stuff you must have in your head because of me. Because of all the times I did that.”

He clenches his fist around the cup with the ice chips. “And I didn’t wanna put you through that again.”

She stares at him. Logan is looking determinedly at the cup now.

Then he lifts his eyes to her, and says, “Look, kid, I’m so—”

“Wait,” she interrupts. “Wait, wait. Don’t say anything yet.”

He looks at her, confused.

She says, “Before the mission—you wanted me to tell you how I got my powers—and all the things I saw in your head—”

Logan raises his hands, starts shaking his head vehemently.

“No, no, no,” he says, his forehead wrinkled. “Don’t worry about any of that, I mean—you can just forget I said any of that. I don’t—I don’t want you to relive shit like that—”

He scratches his head, runs a hand through his hair anxiously. “I mean—this week, while you were out—when Storm told me why you did what you did—about this Nyx thing—or Sagitta, or Weapon X, or whatever—she pretty much told me the gist of what she thought you might know, about my past—and—just—just—just—you don’t have to—”

He is rambling. Logan, who never rambles, who barely speaks, who thinks a dialect of growling and insults serves as a perfectly valid form of communication.

Logan, who touched her dead sixteen-year-old face;

Logan, who on the train hugged her like a beloved child, not five minutes after she had been staring, jealously, at another beloved child being hugged by his mother;

Logan, who gave his body away, to be more perfectly turned into the monster he knew himself to be;

Logan, who has more blood on his hands than can be measured;

Logan, who folds mats by himself after training class and carries them on his shoulders, back to the equipment room;

Logan, who shakes after sex, and during, sometimes, too;

Logan, who has been giving her his entire life, without hesitation, since they first met;

Logan, whom she cannot forgive. But, she thinks—she doesn’t have to be able to, to do it.

She lifts the arm that had not been shot and reaches out to grasp both of his hands in one of hers. She brings the hands up to either side of her bare face, pressing them there, tightly, tightly, tighter. The knuckles resting, just where her temples are.

These hands. Logan’s hands. Logan’s hands and the life inside them.

She presses the knuckles to her temples.

He stares down at her. “Wait, careful—right there—the claws—”

“I’m gonna tell you,” she says. “I’m gonna tell you everything I saw, that you did, that you were, back then.”

Petrified, he stares at her.

She repeats, “I want to tell you.”

He looks like he might start howling, but he closes his eyes, takes a breath, and says, in the same voice that broke her, in the car on the way to Boston:

“Okay.”

The hand against her face is warm. She can feel his knuckles through the gloves. With her bare fingers, she can feel the tip where the claws begin, just beneath the surface of his skin. She traces that place with one finger, again and again.

“I love you,” she says.

The hands around her face freeze. His eyes fly open to stare down at her, in panic and fear and incomprehension. He starts to pull his hands away, so she gazes back up at him, and grabs the hands with all the strength she has recovered; to keep them in place, to keep his hands against her bare face.

“I’ve loved you since I was sixteen,” she says. “In lots of ways. In the same way. From the start.”

He shakes his head, his face full of terror and denial, saying, “Wait—hold on—I thought—you were gonna tell me about—”

“This comes first,” she says. “I want you to know this, before you know everything else.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. She is reminded of herself, in Gambit’s arms: closing her eyes, shutting out the sound of his voice, the words she could not bear to hear.

“I love you,” she says again. “I love you. The dead you. The you now. The things that made you. The you you.”

Logan’s eyes are still closed. The hands on her face start to shake.

“I looked at everything,” she says, and his eyes squeeze shut even more. “Or nearly everything. I saw it. I dreamt it. Everything.”

He makes a noise of pain.

“I love you,” she says. “I’ve loved you since even before you touched me the first time. Since before you even saw me, in that bar in Laughlin City.”

She says, “I’ve been loving you, the same way, all this time.”

The hands are shaking more than ever.

She says, speaking words she has been taught, and has only now learned:

“I love you. In the real way. Like anybody can love anybody. Simple and stupid.”

Logan’s eyes are still squeezed shut. There are deep lines in his forehead, his eyebrows knitted together, so closely they look like a scar on his face.

“Logan,” she says to his closed eyes, still holding his hands. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah,” he chokes out.

“Good,” she says gently. “Keep listening.”

And then she starts over: again, again, again, and again, and again, and again.

The hands on her face never stop shaking.


*


After she has told him everything—Manhattan, Kyoto, Harada; every remembered name, every image, every nightmare, every fact and half-fact—he falls asleep in the chair where Storm was sitting, his head slumped over onto the edge of her bed, his hands on her stomach.

He had wanted to move the hands, to keep them elsewhere, away, just in case—but she hadn’t let him.

Saying, “If something happens, then I’ll touch you.”

And his hands had started shaking all over again.


*


The next morning, he is still there, despite the protests of several medbay workers, some of whom leave to locate Kurt in an effort to teleport him out.

“So you want me to heal you,” he asks.

“Nah,” she says. “It’ll be cool to have scars for a while. Next time.”

Logan looks down. That expression of uneasy, tentative pleasure is on his face again.

She thinks of the way she had once thought that someone could fall in love with him for that face, alone.

She wants to touch it; this face of his. So she does; just on his beard, from the top of his hairline, down his cheek, to his chin. Stroking her bare thumb across the hairs; back and forth, again and again. Sometimes she feels a shimmer of pull; but nothing more. She knows how to be careful.

Logan goes still under her touch; then swallows, blushing slightly. She can feel his skin grow warm beneath his beard, her fingers.

“All right,” he says. “Next time.”

Then they are silent. Her gaze wanders, out the door, to the wall with his claw marks still etched in it; to the door that is now a scorched hole.

He follows her gaze and snorts. “Yeah, that wasn’t great.”

“Looks worse than what happened on the bridge,” she remarks.

He shrugs. “We both wanted in,” he says.

She laughs. “Ever heard of visiting hours?”

Logan doesn’t respond for a long moment, so she glances at him. “What?” she asks.

He says, quietly, “You love him, too.”

She looks at him, smiles faintly, but doesn’t answer.

He scowls. “I’m not gonna like that at all.”

“Nope,” she agrees, her smile widening a little more.


*


And once more then there is silence between them. She can see him clenching and unclenching his left fist, while his right hand holds hers.

Then he looks at her again. He seems to have gathered up courage for something. “Kid—I—I—”

She shakes her head, raises her hand to stop him. Logan stops, blinks.

Then she smiles again, taps her temple twice.

“I already saw,” she says. And Logan lets out an endless, trembling breath, gripping her bare hand in his. He squeezes it once, twice, three times.

She likes it better the way it is—in his head, in her head: something with her face on it, and no words.