Rogue sighed as gazed out at the sky wondering if Logan was seeing the same stars she saw, why couldn’t he just be here with her now? She understood he needed to know about his past but what if what he found out was something more than he could bare? Rogue knew Logan, knew him on intimate levels after the amount of him she had absorbed, she could see the Logan inside herself and use that to see through him. He wanted to be whole again, he longed to sew up the jagged hole that seared inside of himself, but a part of Logan, a logical part of him, feared what he would use to plug up that gap. Every time he departed it was with a new found sense of self, a noble purpose that told him he wasn’t running from the possibility of building a future, but running towards the prospects of unearthing his hidden past.

She knew that was a lie and she thought on some level he did too.

The truth was Logan had thought more than once that the key to his past was in his future. He knew the right thing to do was to settle down and stop thinking that his past was buried somewhere in the waking world and realize that his past resided inside of him. All Logan needed to unlock his memories was to find peace and contentment within himself, he would never have that as long as he ran from place to place dodging opportunities and trying to lie to himself. She knew, Rogue knew, that Logan’s biggest fear was to discover that he wasn’t a very nice guy before he lost his memories. Rogue knew that Logan was under the constant impression that he had been a man who had done terrible things. He himself could not describe how he knew if you offered him all the money in the world. But he knew, he could feel it, it was a boulder rolling around in the pit of his stomach, weighing him down or an itch in his gut that told him something just wasn’t right. The only thing was that Rogue never had that feeling about Logan until she touched him, until his mind had merged with hers. Rogue knew it wasn’t how she felt about him, but how he felt about himself.

People told Rogue it was foolish of her to dream of Logan finding contentment. Well not in so many words, in reality her classmates told her it was stupid for her to think Logan would ever settle down at Xavier’s. Truth be told Rogue equated Logan settling down as something wholly different then him just moving into the mansion. It meant he would have accepted the idea that he deserved good things in his life. If Logan moved in then it meant that had allowed himself to risk being rejected, because he was risking other people’s opinions. Logan knew that if you never stuck around in one place long enough to build a nest then you never stuck around long enough for other people to scope you out and sniff around. Never staying in one place denied people the opportunity to judge you.

Logan had been judged hard in these past fifteen years, and unfairly, but he had been exposed to some of the darkest realms of peoples fears and paranoia against mutants and as a result he carried around a lot of his own prejudice and resentment, only he aimed it at himself. See Rogue alone knew that Logan believed himself to be a bad guy in general. He didn't deem himself worthy of a good home or a place to hang his hat, he thought he was dirt and other people thinking just made it all the more real.

Rogue alone was the only one to know that he often contemplated what kind of black hearted bastard he must have been to have no one. Granted he didn’t know the details of how he ended up in the lab or how the admantium claws came to be his own, but he knew he had no other links to his past life. He knew no one had ever come or gone looking for him, there was no missing person’s report and no traces of a previous life that even the professor with his vast resources and countless connections could find. What had he done that was terrible that it ultimately banished him to solitude? He wondered if he had been the one to tear himself out of society because he couldn't stand other people or if other people had done the job for him through abandonment. She wished to holy hell that he would realize that she would never abandon him, if he only gave this place a chance, if he only gave her a chance.


My soul,
is as open as the sky.
Often time,
it's just as blue.
People tell me,
I need to keep on dreamin'.
That's just what I'm gonna do.


She eventually went to bed, the untouchable girl who held inside her the memories of powerful people who had seen things so drastic and awful in their lifetime that it had added ages upon ages of terror into her own, spilling up and out of her until she was unable to reign it back in. She'd dreamt of prison camps and laboratories, of dog tags and freshly tattooed flesh branded with numbers, both instances where a person, a man in one and a fourteen year old boy in the other, lost their identity because of the dark deeds of lesser men.

Marie shivered, she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t
decide whose memories were worse, but she knew that Eric had an advantage over Logan, because his nightmare had ended where as Logan’s was still going on day after day.
People at the mansion seemed to hack up Logan’s nightmares as an experience that he would only be purged of once he freed his mind. That was what Jean and the professor had called it.

Rogue had only come to realize this over time, but at night when she would sleep and the night mares would come she would project, loudly in fact. Once she’d woken up to find Jean standing over her bed with a sad look on her face, Jean had been wiping up the beads of sweat that had accumulated on Rogue’s forehead. This had been right after the Statue of Liberty incident and unbeknownst to Rogue she had been projecting her nightmares for some time, actually waking up Jean and the often the professor out of a dead sleep more than once. Apparently when Jean was down, as in asleep, so were her psychic shields. The next day the Professor, Jean and Rogue had all met in the professor’s office to discuss some remedies. Rogue tried to explain how deeply rooted Logan’s dreams were, how they were a part of his life because they weren’t fears or normal recurring nightmares, they were memories he was gripping too as much as he was struggling against.
Even though the Professor was quite and reflective, listening respectfully to Rogue, and Rogue got the distinctive impression that the Professor knew a great deal more about Logan’s past than he was letting on, the way he referred to how Logan had known all along who he really was and that the dreams were just a part of his psyche telling him to pay attention, Rogue still left the meeting feeling frustrated.


Now everybody,
wanna treat me like a house fly.
Turn me around,
and tell me to shoo.
Wanna tell me,
keep on dreamin'.
That's just what I'm gonna do.


~*~*~*~**~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~**~*~*~*~*~*

Logan opened the door of the motel room, too much noise here. His ears were stinging with the sensations of the outside world. Granted, he was grateful for a hotel, but it wasn’t next to the highway, it was on the god damned high way and for a dead hour like 3 am that was a busy little road there. He wanted sleep, he wanted comfort, he wanted the ability to teleport so he could get out of this flea bag motel. He knew he couldn’t have that and he thought it be a fair compromise if he were able to get drunk, healing factor be damned. He couldn’t though and the air in this place, just as dirty as the rest of it made his skin itch and his lungs burn with its pungent odor.

Several things needed to be done all at once. First, Logan took out two things he knew he was going to be needing for the night, his three 12pack cases of Molson’s, which he was going to need if he wanted to sleep soundly and his picture of Marie, which of course, he was going to need if he wanted to sleep soundly.
It wasn’t just a picture of Marie, although he wouldn’t have minded if it had just been her. This picture was of everyone, all the X-men and all the junior X-men to be, it was taken after the first mission to the statue of Liberty, day after Logan woke up. He spent a day there cooling his heels deciding where he wanted to go, he left the next morning, early afternoon after a late brunch. He wanted as much light to travel by as he could afford. Marie was there in the middle, standing in-between a girl that Logan could only remember as obnoxiously loud, dressed all in yellow and next to the boy that Marie liked, popsicle face. He grumbled to himself before falling heavily onto the bed as he began to unlace the ties on his boots.


'Cause every moral,
has a story.
Every hand needs a glow.
Sometimes it's full of glory.
Oh, but mostly, it's for the love.
It's the love
Mmhmmm



One case down and an hour later Logan still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the picture, every time he looked at it he thought he noticed something that he had never seen before.

He could see the wind, the light breeze that had been blowing that day moving loose strands of Marie’s hair away from her face, he could see the sunlight that had been hitting the window behind her glinting off of her face, making her lips shimmer in the light. She was leaning in like the people next to her were, so everyone could fit in the shot, he noticed the curve of her back, and the way her legs bent at the knee and even the way her ass was lightly protruding. Seriously, no one man should be this fascinated by a simple photograph but Logan couldn’t rip his gaze away.

Westchester was a two days drive away from where he was now and he was damn sure going to be there, he had to stop Rogue from joining the X-men after she graduated. He just had to make sure that he stopped himself from doing anything hasty. Logan fell back on the bed with a loud belch, he felt something hard underneath him and wriggled his back against it trying to get comfortable.

“What the hell…”

He reached a hand behind himself to retrieve the foreign object and came back clutching the pay as you go cell phone he’d taken with him in case of emergencies, a devilish glint formed in his eye as he contemplated the phone.

Maybe it was time he gave a certain someone a phone call...? One devious glance at the night stand told him the time and with sudden intent he sat up downed the rest of his beer. He was going to call, he hadn't worked out what the hell he was going to say but hell he had the beer to deal with that.


It's the love.
It's the love that pulls me through.
'Cause when they tell me I’m dreamin
Thats just what I'm, I'm gonna, thats just what I'm gonna do
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