Author's Chapter Notes:
The night is young.
Wolverine had been asleep for a few hours, restfully in fact. His nightmares were still there, as always, but they were distant, as if he were watching an old movie faded and cracked unspooling in his mind, not reliving them, not feeling again and again how they cut him open and poured molten metal into his body. He could still see it all, the masked doctors leaning over him, the generals toasting over his prone body, the green tinge of the suspension fluid in which he’d lived for months.

But it was no longer something he experienced first-hand; rather he saw it from a distance, removed from both the agony and anger of it all. He could still see his body contort under their knives and needles, but in the nightmare his screams were quiet, muffled by time and distance. He didn’t feel fury or sorrow over what had been done to him, all that had been washed over somehow. The closest thing he felt was pity, and it wasn’t for the carcass that he watched being dissected and tested, but for the people who did this to him, pity for the bastards’ utter lack of humanity that allowed them to do these things. They were the real monsters, not that thing they were tearing apart and rebuilding in that lab.

He woke with a start, jerking up abruptly from the floor in front of the dying fire where he’d been sleeping. When did I start feeling anything for those fuckers except the desire to give them an adamantium prostate exam? But he knew. As much as Rogue had taken from him she’d somehow left in him something of her own…something that wasn’t driven by anger and a desire for revenge, despite everything that life had heaped on her, in spite of the isolation her own mutation had punished her with even though she’d never done anything to deserve it.

Hope. For something more, better, than what had been done to her, to him, to both of them. A glimpse of a time when the spite they felt for abuses that had been heaped on them would be abated.

A thump and a muffled cry came from upstairs.

Rogue.

Shit.

He thundered up the stairs and threw open her bedroom door with a bang. Deep in throes of torturous dreams, Rogue didn’t hear Wolverine’s crashing entrance nor notice him by her bedside. She had thrashed the covers from herself, legs flailing, and she began to scream, long and unearthly, as she fought against the captors in her mind, his memories, as they possessed her.

“Rogue!” he shouted, grabbing her, despite the exposed skin of her arms under one of the t-shirts of his she’d continued to wear to bed even after she’d recovered. There wasn’t even time for the expected greedy suck of her mutation to take him. She shrieked, her voice cracking, and lashed her hand at his face. Too late he saw the bone claws, felt the sickening slash as she tore open his throat.

Wolverine fell face first onto the bed, blood gushing, before his legs gave and he slid to the floor. He could feel it all, the squirt of blood as it jetted from his severed carotid artery, the pain of the open wound, the air whistling brokenly through his exposed windpipe as he struggled to say her name. He saw, through reddened vision, her pale face leaning over the bed side looking down at him, her eyes now open. She was awake and screamed in her own voice as she scrambled down to his side. Her claws withdrew she grabbed his face with her bare hands, then wrenched them back, terrified she would drain his mutation when he needed it most.

Instead, she wound her hands in his blood soaked t-shirt and screamed in his face to not die, to fix himself and do it now god damn it, that she was sorry, so sorry, she didn’t mean to, she didn’t know, she thought she knew what it was like, she was wrong, it was fucked up, she was sorry she hadn’t let him tell her.

He was conscious the whole time, wanted to tell her it was ok, that he knew exactly how she felt because she was him, that it wasn’t her fault, but he couldn’t past the blood pooling in his throat and mouth, pouring from his nose. He raised one hand and gently stroked her hair, tangling in the white on auburn, and stared into her eyes, willing her to see in them everything he was incapable of saying.

He knew he wouldn’t die, but if he could die he knew he must have done at least one good thing in his life for her face to be the last thing he saw.

For the first time he saw her cry and it was heart-wrenching and glorious to his blood dimmed vision. She sobbed as her hands danced around his neck, holding a towel against it to stem the blood. Her tears fell on his face as he let got of her hair and gently trailed his fingertips across her face, too lightly for her mutation to detect. His blood stopped gushing. Rogue panicked for a moment and removed the towel, then wept in relief as she watched his severed arteries stretch towards each other, like in some reverse horror movie, sealing and the muscles begin to knit over the exposed gashes, skin creeping back into place and covering the damage. She ground her face into his shirt when he sat up and she broke down utterly. He put his arms carefully around her, the two of them shredded in a way that had nothing to do with the blood soaking them.
Chapter End Notes:
It's time to learn.
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