Wolverine was true to his word. Rogue was up and about 2 days later, and it actually wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected. Her tib/fib fracture and tweaked ankle were completely healed and the femur break on the other leg no longer needed a splint, even though it still felt sore when she put too much weight on it. Her ribs had taken the longest and it was only today that she could bend without wincing. All things considered, she was feeling pretty good, energized even, despite the aches. And she was reveling in her sharpened senses, borrowed from Wolverine. She smelled the breakfast he was cooking downstairs on the gas stove, eggs and toast. Through the window she caught the sharp scent of pine outside the open window, the cool lightness of the lake a couple of hundred yards away, the peaty aroma of the land around the cabin, even a faint trace of spoor from some animal nearby. She smoothed her jeans down her legs, relishing his heightened sense of touch too, marveling as the rasp of the denim under her fingertips, the silky glide of her hair as she brushed it, even the tickle of her breath as she puffed experimentally on her arm, smiling as the hairs stood at attention from the sensation. She stroked her hand along the polished wood of the handmade bed frame, enjoying that it felt just a honeyed as it looked under the layers of varnish Wolverine had carefully laid over it as he built it, like he built every stick of furniture in the cabin.
Rogue wondered to herself, "Is this what he feels like every day, every waking moment?" It was surreal, the light, colors, the feel of everything was sharp and crisp, snapping against her senses in a pleasurable way as she experimented with every texture in her bedroom. She lay her head down on the quilt she’d been wrapped in for days on end. Ugh, definitely some downsides to the enhanced sniffer; the sheets absolutely needed to be washed. They smelled like blood, a coppery smell that zinged her nose and made it twitch, and sweat and, urgh, her B.O. from going days without a shower, which she’d remedied as soon as she got up this morning.
No washing machine around here for the linens, no electricity except for the batteries in the radio in the kitchen and the flashlights. Guess Wolverine washed his togs in the lake, made sense. Gas stove, old fashioned cold room under the porch, oil lamps for light, truly roughing it and the washing was going to be a chore for sure. Rouge would ask Wolverine to flog the stink out of her bedding, and she gathered them up. As she stripped the pillowcase she sniffed it, but instead of detecting the rank scent of her recuperation she smelled him, where he’d laid his head occasionally. That earthy smell, like freshly turned soil, cigars of course…and something else, something primitive. She smiled, took another sniff and suddenly had a major hankering for the eggs she smelled wafting up from the kitchen.
Rogue attacked breakfast with gusto and drained a couple of glasses of OJ, which Wolverine kept stashed in the underground cold room along with the oh-so-important beer he refused to grant her on her first real day out of the cabin. He insisted she do some tai-chi with him to limber up after being out of commission for over a week and get the internal energy flowing again. They’d practiced for an hour and she was proud she only needed one break for the ache in her bum leg. He seemed a bit proud too, keeping his criticisms of her form and flow to a minimum, only occasionally indicating with a nod or gesture for her to reposition. She felt more fluid through the exercises that she ever remembered, and she knew it was from his borrowed senses.
The smell of the grass crushed under their feet, the slightly salty tang of their sweat rising as the sun beamed down on them tickled her nose, the feel of the breeze on her skin covered in just another pair of his borrowed shorts and t-shirt. No need to worry about touching right now, he’d told her. It was important she got some vitamin D and fresh air to speed along her recovery.
Despite encouraging her to forgo the usual layers, Wolverine was covertly keeping his distance from her, confident that now that she was on the mend her life draining power would ramp back up to its normal levels…but he couldn’t help but look over her long legs, the smooth whiteness of the skin on the inside of her arms, the turn of her ankle as she slid from one position to another.
He’d touched her more than a dozen times since the accident, when she was unconscious or asleep, each time trying to focus on another injury, uncertain as to why it was taking longer each time. He’d stopped using her hands or face and instead turned his attention to the specific wounds that just weren’t healing at the rate he expected.
Her legs. He’d felt like such an old pervert when he’d rubbed his hands over them, consciously trying to stimulate a more powerful pull from her mutation, trying to focus the healing into the bones. Her ribs, as he fanned his fingers across the span of her torso, losing his focus on what he was trying to accomplish, trying to mentally force her splintered ribs knit faster, the bruises to fade. Instead he was found himself fixating on the feel of her skin under his hands, the softness of it. He banished each of those thoughts as they crept into his mind, worried she’d draw them from him as she pulled his restorative mutation slowly from his body.
When he wasn’t touching her and he was just doing things, chopping what was now enough wood to last through three winters, or puttering around the cabin, those thoughts crept back into his mind, stealthily. One moment he’d be watching her still form on the bed from the chair he’d brought into the room to keep on eye on her as when she was out, then next he was pondering how her lips would feel under his, the gentle swell of her hips under that blanket, the way her breath would feel tickling his cheek. Then he’d shake himself from that unseemly reverie and force his brain back to big-brother mode. This happened a lot while she was recuperating, even after she woke up for good and he no longer needed to heal her, he was tempted to reach over while she slept and cup her chin in his bare palm and experience the velvet of her cheek.
God, he was some new breed of letch, fantasizing over the practically comatose form of the kid.
But she wasn’t a kid anymore. He’d finally accepted that, after years of being deliberately blind to her growing up, both physically and emotionally. It had been easier to keep her tucked into the little-sister box he’d built around her, around the image of her he’d had the since the first time he laid on the scared little slip of 15 year old girl in that grungy bar in Laughlin City. She was still his best friend, but after almost losing her this past week, and the strange turn her mutation had taken that allowed her to hold her tenderly to him as he struggled to repair her, his mind had taken a different turn regarding Rogue.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
New sensations unfold.
Chapter End Notes:
Things get more interesting.