***
He was drunk on the feel of her skin. It crackled under his fingertips, more alive, more real than anything he had ever touched, but welcoming now. Yesterday, Marie's mutation had become more and more tractable as they tested her limits late into the Havana night; this morning, she had found him by the pool and practised, and practised, and practised until he came all over her bare hands.
She had licked her fingers thoughtfully, and the gleam in her eye had suggested exactly what she wanted to do next. His conscience chose that moment to object – she wasn't doing this to learn how to give a blowjob! - and he hustled them inside, breaking the moment. Food, he'd thought, desperate to give himself something to do that didn't involve fistfuls of mahogany hair.
He was digging in the fridge when her hand slid into the back of his cutoffs.
“I want to try something new,” she said, warm fingers tickling over his hipbone on a maddening path to the sensitive hollow beneath.
“This time, I want you to touch me.”
Logan growls in his sleep, the weight of the moment pulling him out of his slumber and into a strange sort of consciousness.
“Stop!” he wants to beg. “Don't do this! You're not ready yet!” But he's not really there; he can only watch them propel themselves towards destruction. And judge.
She lays back, a wet dream on white sheets. He tells himself he is doing this for her, because she wants him to. Just one more thing he does for Marie. Even as his tongue breaches every secret place she has, even as he sucks and bites and leaves a chain of bruises to mark his path to her pussy, even as he initiates her to pain and pleasure and the intoxicating territory in between … even then, he tells himself, it's all for her. His girl. His Marie.
“Oh God, stop. Stop!” she begs after she comes, and he forces himself to crawl up beside her.
“Too much?” he asks, stroking her hair, and she nods numbly, breaking into little whimpers as new waves of pleasure crash through her.
“Let me just clean you up,” he volunteers when she begins to quiet, then pushes her legs open again.
This time he ignores her pleas when she starts to come and makes her crash around him, teasing her with a finger or two, in and out, in and out, but never deep or hard enough to bring her the relief she needs.
“Please, please … more,” she mewls, and he smiles. All for her, he thinks as he shucks his cutoffs. For Marie, he tells himself as he slides his hands under her ass to tickle her opening with his cock, back and forth, back and forth until she begins to jerk her hips upwards in a desperate attempt to capture him.
My Marie, he exults as he slams home, rough fingers on her oversensitised clit tipping her over into insensibility as he roars his possession to the oncoming night.
“Mine!”
The room is ringing with sound when he wakes fully, the echo of his shout still bouncing off the walls. The blades are out and his body twitches with the need to slash and tear. But there's no one here but his ghosts - his own misgivings, and the parts of himself that he likes to deny.
His mouth turns up into Logan's sardonic smirk, because Howlett thinks he's so much better than this, so far past this. Well, he ain't. Howlett was lying to himself long before Logan ever did – he had walked away from love and family. Logan had never even known what those things felt like.
Until Marie. And she was young, and female, and beautiful, so his brain went places that maybe it shouldn't. In Logan's world, women were for just one thing, and girls didn't exist. Love didn't exist.
I am Logan, he thinks dazedly. I am Logan, and I fell in love with Marie, but I wronged her first.
Maybe it had been innocent, at first. She had been starving, and alone. Obviously vulnerable. It could have been the predator in him, but he remembers the prick of concern, and disquiet. What he now recognises as protectiveness.
But it was new, and confusing. And when she surprised him, and delighted him, and thrilled him with her ferocity, he'd felt something that he now knows was more a parent's pride than a lover's awe.
But underneath it all, under baths that shouldn't have happened and touches that lingered a moment too long and a man and a girl alone in a cabin together for four months of winter, he had wanted to help her. Wanted to protect her. And he had – until Havana.
One touch and nature had roared so loud, he hadn't been strong enough to protect her from himself.
Their bodies are still curled together in his mind's eye as he catalogues his crimes. Manipulation. Seduction. Lust. Blind arrogance.
Logan groans, shaking his head at all the ways he had found to ignore his own conscience. To drown it out, even - thrilling to her bloodlust, and stoking her infatuation.
He'd been too invested in building his perfect warrior to see the truth. She was already perfect. And she was never meant to be his.
The work would have killed her inside; twisted her in a way that even the psychopaths ranting inside her head hadn't managed to do. Sweet Marie died a little with every kill; Rogue had been eating her alive, and he'd sat back to watch it happen.
Nah.
He'd gloried in it, and helped it along, and then thrown her off the cliff altogether in the headlong rush to claim Rogue as his own.
Neither of them had counted on Marie.
*
The chairs still sit in the familiar half circle around the desk, and the window to the left still overlooks the western garden. Marie glances at the Professor's desk, at the messy piles of manila folders and the half-finished correspondence, and fear suddenly chokes her. She needs to get to work, but her feet simply won't allow it yet, so she crosses to the window instead. The view is so familiar, she has to close her eyes to rein in the tears.
Every time she had come to see the Professor, they would end up here. She would admire the serenity of the reflecting pool, and the dizzying beauty of Storm's rose walk, but he – he was drawing his strength from watching the kids play, she realises with a pang.
She had hated the catcalls and the raucous commentary that had drifted over from the basketball court at the far end, but the stillness is obscene in contrast. She hadn't even known the names of the children who made so much noise, but her heart aches for them now, knowing what they've lost.
I'll get them back, she vows fiercely. It'll be downright noisy here again soon. Not this quiet, cold grave of a place.
The responsibility sideswipes her, and she gasps as the realisation presses down.
It's more than just the teams. More than just fighting.
It's a school.
She's stepped into the shoes of the single greatest educator her kind has ever seen, and she hasn't got a fucking chance of being what they need.
The tears refuse to stop this time. Marie wipes them away but allows herself to feel it. Grief and rage and sorrow, and fuck, how stupid was she?
“Find your centre, child,” he had said, the last time they stood here. “Meditate upon your strengths.” Her smile had felt like fangs in her mouth, and it makes her shudder, now, to think of all the wisdom she had just brushed off.
She had been so angry. So damaged, she wasn't even aware of how fractured she was.
Had Professor Xavier seen the other parts of her? Had he somehow known the battle they would face? Maybe, Marie thinks tentatively, he saw Rogue as his champion.
A threat, more likely, Rogue interjects. He needed to keep us sweet, she suggests, and Marie wants to deny it, needs to believe that was never it, but …
It makes no difference, she realises.
She is standing here, now. What's done is done.
The blur beyond the window sharpens into resolve, and she turns towards the desk. She can steal a chair from the computer lab later, but one of the armchairs will do for now. Accounts first, to see who's handling all that, and then she'll tackle the correspondence.
Time to get on with it.
*
“Yes, Wolverine! Your growl is my command,” Kitty mutters as she shuts the door behind the surly feral.
Jubilee snickers with amusement, but they both freeze when a muffled thud from the hallway reminds them the man can hear through walls. He doesn't come crashing back into their room, so maybe he just fell over something, Kitty tells herself.
“Piotr wrecking shit again,” Jubilee says, voice so bored that Kitty laughs out loud. As if Jubi hadn't been wide-eyed with panic at the thought of being keel-hauled by the Wolverine.
“Yeah. Of course,” she retorts, sticking out her tongue as she boots up her laptop.
“Probably doesn't care about a bit of sass – after all, he lurves Rogue,” her roommate teases.
“Are we in middle school or something? Puh-lease. Let's focus on the fact that maybe he didn't kill us because he came to us for a favour.”
“Even if he did bark it like an order.”
Kitty can't disagree with that, so she simply logs on, praying that the Mansion's network survived the armageddon in the sub-levels.
“Annnnnnd … thank goodness. My stuff is still here. And we have wifi.”
“Praise Jesus.”
Kitty rolls her eyes and fires up the the little search program she'd written for herself. It wasn't exactly legal, but that was nothing compared to what he's asked her to do.
“Find out what they know about us,” Wolverine had grunted, frowning at her when she needed more details.
“You mean – the government? And by 'what they know' – our codenames? Records? There's really not all that much data they can collect, legally, although there have been some rumours of medical staff supplying information in violation of the privacy regulations,” she had protested.
The derisive curl of his upper lip had let her know exactly what he thought about 'legally'.
“You think they care? Fuck, girl. Just do your computer thing. And when you find all the shit they've got on us, do something to stop it. Figure you're the expert,” he'd shrugged, then stomped out.
Well then.
Kitty bites her lip for a moment, then inputs a string of code words she shouldn't even know. The portal moves around so much that even finding it is a challenge, but for a few hundred dollars (roubles some weeks, rupiah others) you can access the type of programs that governments preferred didn't exist.
She hesitates for a moment, before selecting the three most effective viruses. One to crawl them out. One to eat them up, and another to scurry back. By the time the federal eagle fills her screen, her trepidation has vanished. They really shouldn't make it so easy, Kitty smirks as the mainframe invites her query.
ALL KNOWN MUTANTS, she types, and the data spews up onto the screen, so detailed that her hackles rise in horror.
“Wolverine was right,” she says quietly, and Jubilee gasps as she leans over to check the data.
“Oh my gosh. So many names – Jesus. The names of our parents and brothers and sisters! What's that tab behind?” Jubilee asks, and Kitty clicks.
“The fucking fuckers. My credit card statements! Holy shit – even that Facebook blow up when Pyro left!”
The next screen leaves them silent with horror. Powers. Weaknesses. Genetic vulnerabilities, catalogued over years and years of observation.
“Who needs to know that?” Jubilee rages, then crosses to her desk to find the external hard drive. “We take a copy for proof, then you delete it all,” she says through gritted teeth.
Kitty can only nod, fingers stabbing at the keyboard as she inputs the lines of code to target her attack. She watches with glee as the virus uploads, flashing through through directory after directory, crawling out every mention of those thousands upon thousands of names.
When it's done, she queries it again.
ALL KNOWN MUTANTS
0 FILES FOUND.
“Fuckin A,” Jubilee breathes over her shoulder and they high five, celebrating the success of their mission. “You wanna tell the Wolverine?”
“No – you do it. He scares me,” Kitty confesses, and it's not like it isn't true. But she's an X-man for God's sake, and she's met scarier. But Jubilee needs this victory far more than she does right now.
Kitty was logging on as Shadowcat even before her powers came in. She might not be able to walk through walls anymore but she is still Shadowcat. And this morning, the girl she had never called anything other than Jubilee had flinched when she had said hello. “My name is Jubilation,” she had muttered, and Kitty had flapped helplessly, too shocked to make a decent response.
But give the girl a mission, and sharp-talking, straight-shooting Jubilee was back with a vengeance. They could shut down their X-genes as much as they liked, Kitty thought grimly. That wasn't what made them X-men.
The world had wronged them, yet the Professor had given them the strength to stand up and make it right.
To fight, Kitty thinks. However we know how.
She chews her lip as she mulls over a final salvo, then uploads it in a flurry of commands. It's just a little message for other hackers, she tells herself. Maybe someone will care.
Kitty is washing dishes later when Jubes comes in with her phone.
“Hey. Have you seen this?”
Someone had uploaded her message to twitter, and someone else had coded it to flash up in front of every single torrent. Her words are on tumblr, and on reddit, and forums she's never heard of. Half a dozen memes are going around Facebook. Some even stick with exactly what she wrote.
MUTANT AND PROUD! FIGHT THE CURE. FIND THE ANTIDOTE. WE ARE NOT SICK!
“Do you think they will?” Jubes asks quietly, and Kitty's heart nearly breaks at the longing in her voice.
“I don't know. Maybe. But at least people know to try now. And other people know that no matter what they do to us -we are still mutants,” she says pointedly.
Jubilee looks away, but Kitty suspects she's hit target. Suspects, that is, until two hours later, when a new hashtag starts trending on twitter. Fight the cure #morethanmyxgene. Find the antidote #morethanmyxgene.
It's the last one that leaves her drenched with happy tears.
Sorry I'm an idiot#morethanmyxgene
*
Light floods the room, slamming into all of its comforting, dark corners. Scott looks panicked as he scans the room looking for her.
“Jean? Why were you sitting in the dark?”
He sounds so puzzled, poor man. What's left of her heart aches for him.
“No. Not Jean. There's no one here, now. No one at all.”
“That's not true! Everything that made you you is still there, Jean,” he protests. He might even believe it. “All that's gone is your mutation, and the danger it puts you in. Everybody here loves Jean, and they're waiting to see Jean again, after the Phoenix took her away from us,” Scott pleads.
The guilt presses down, rendering her mute. Reason, however, still cackles inside her head - the Phoenix had taken so much, destroyed so much, and everyone understood that it wasn't Jean, hadn't been Jean, but … they still flinched. They still watched her every move, wariness hidden by understanding smiles. The government was still sending a doctor to officially sanction her as harmless, neutered like a dog.
Scott slides her dinner tray onto the bureau nearest her chair, and does a spot check of the room – no pills lying out, no weapons, no long cords to dangle from or ligatures to tie. Hank has briefed him well.
“Come down soon, love. Just to say hello. You can come back up to bed if you feel uncomfortable,” he offers, removing her breakfast and lunch trays. He hovers by the door, obviously seeking an invitation to stay. She looks away.
“Tell me you'll try?”
“All I can do now is try, Scott,” she tells the room when he has gone, biting down on her annoyance at the door left ajar.
“I'll keep trying. And the day it works ...”
She stares at the obstinate door, refusing to bend to her will. Less than an inch between door and sill. Inside her, it's twisting and clenching. The power, so desperate to get free.
Just one more taste, she vows. One more moment of being Jean.
The tiny click resounds through the room as the door snicks into place, seemingly unaided. Jean feels the unfamiliar stretch of her own smile, a heady rush of joy and satisfaction blasting away months of cobwebs.
She rises from her chair, crosses to her bed, and draws the tiny packet of razorblades from out of her pillowcase. It was the only way to be sure. And this time, when they speak of Jean Grey, they will say it was she who defeated the Phoenix.
Jean.
“Dr Jean Grey,” she tells the silent room.
It had always been Jean ...
*
Proud as punch, those two. Not that they shouldn't have been – when Shadowcat had succumbed to a fit of the blushes, Jubilee had explained exactly what the quieter girl had done. Deleting the data was one thing, but the tracker, alerting them to anyone poking around in those files – touch of fucking genius, Logan thought. He had told them so, too.
Dinner had turned into a makeshift celebration when the word had got around – they were ghosts, now, every single one of them, and much safer for it. He had a bunch of other stuff to put in his report – keeping everything centralised, for one, left them vulnerable, and if they all had to be together, then it probably couldn't be here. Convincing the X-men to relocate the whole school, however – that would be hard.
Logan is still contemplating that challenge when he rounds the corner into the guest wing, subconsconsciously bracing himself against the waft of sadness and desperation from Dr Grey's room. It never comes, and he wonders, for a moment, if Scott has been successful in convincing her to visit the library, or the gardens. Then he smells the blood.
He knows what has happened even before he kicks the door open. You can't keep running, she had said. Sooner or later you have to turn and face them.
And this was how Jean Grey had chosen to face down her demons.
“Hope it works out better for you than it did for me, doc,” Logan mutters as he gropes for her pulse, already knowing her heart is too quiet.
Afterwards, after the griefstricken boyfriend and the dumbstruck students and the suspicious government agents and the blithely ignorant human undertaker, he finds himself in Marie's office. More than 24 hours of grim competence have left her white and drained, and he ignores her increasingly sharp commands to just sit and wait.
“What? You want to play secretary, Wolverine? Is that it?” she snaps as she rifles through the desk drawers looking for the key to the filing cabinet.
“How, exactly, would you file someone's death certificate? Any thoughts on that?”
“Just put in on the top of the fucking pile and let someone else do it later, kid. Don't expect the Professor did his own filing,” he points out.
“I can't! I can't ask anyone else to do that!” she rages, shaking so hard that the document slips from her fingers and flutters to the floor. She stares at it for a moment, then lifts her eyes to his. “I … just … can't,” she moans as her knees begin to buckle.
He leaps to catch her, scooping her into his arms as they tumble back into the armchair.
“You can. You can! You're the only one who can,” he murmurs into her hair as he wipes away her tears.
“You're so strong, girl. The strongest person I know. You survived your father, and Sabretooth, and me – fuck, anyone else would be utterly insane by now. All these pyschos in your head and you're just amazing. Perfect,” he rambles and shoot him now, but he just can't stop.
“Rogue's a kickass bitch, but it's Marie that's real, darlin'. It's Marie that cares enough to bother. Rogue'd turn tail and run at the first hint of this crap, but Marie's gonna stand strong and say 'get the fuck back here, girl!' There's work to do!”
She snorts at that, half laugh and half sniffle, then twists in his arms to bring her head onto his chest.
“Wouldn't put it exactly like that but she does like a firm hand.”
“Too much time in bad company. Marie knows better.”
She rears up at that, practically kneeling in his lap to look him straight in the eye, hands tugging at his hair to make her point.
“Marie knows no such thing, sugar. It's Rogue who couldn't handle being beholden to you, couldn't handle … what happened. Marie knows she owes everything to you. Marie ...”
His hand clamps over her mouth, desperate to keep the words in. They would change everything. Make it impossible to leave. And his life was out there, waiting.
He needs to go, he thinks as she presses a kiss into his palm. He needs to go, his stubbornness insists, as her tongue darts out to caress the dips and hollows between his fingers, then traverses the expanse of his hand to circumnavigate his thumb. He needs to go, he reminds himself, needs to, but then she begins to suck at the sensitive webbing between thumb and first finger, and he is overtaken by another kind of need altogether.
“Marie!” he begs, but she only sucks harder.
The pressure building behind his knuckles is barely noticeable against the shrieks of his conscience. She's tired and stressed and grieving, he knows. He'd be taking advantage. He's not even the man she wants, not really.
But her free hand is pulling his shirt free of his pants, fingers splayed to touch as much skin as she can reach. His lips have found their way to her neck, and when she uses her teeth, he uses his. She scrambles to press herself up against him, chest to chest, belly to belly, sex to sex, and fuck, if this is going to stop …
“This isn't right!” he grunts, yanking his hands away from her, the strain telling in every muscle. “It's not me that you want, girl. I'm not that man.”
“Which man, Wolverine? These are the hands that taught me Snake-Creeps-Down,” she argues, forcing his hands overhead and holding them there, fingers tangled with his own. He shudders as her mouth drops to his neck, finding a pulsepoint and laving it with her tongue before she bites down. His claws spring free, and it's an orgasm all of its own, that momentary release. He struggles, scared for her, but she refuses to relinquish her hold.
How is she stronger than him? When did this happen, his overtaxed brain demands, before surrending completely to the madness of the way she makes him feel. Five years apart, it reminds him. Five years of mystery and hurts and demons of her own.
“These are the claws that kept me safe. These are the arms that held me when I cried,” she chants into his skin, her mouth travelling higher to pull at his ear as she makes her point. “This is the animal that I knew wanted me right from the beginning, but the man told him 'no'. This is the face that I dreamed about every night you made me wait,” she confesses, and he'd known, but not really. What he'd thought of as restraint, she remembered as torture.
“This is the body that gave me touch,” she whispers, and the reverence in her voice is a revelation. What he'd thought of as failure, she remembered as glory.
She wasn't necessarily right, and he wasn't necessarily wrong, but they're both adults now.
He surrenders.
His white flag is a growl, and his submission is to haul them upright and stumble towards her desk. He'd called her mule-headed, earlier, when she insisted on ignoring her grief to work her way through the Professor's piles of paper – now, he's thankful for her diligence as her stapler set flies off the end, and the phone is knocked off the hook.
“Watch that pile of papers on my chair!” she yelps even as she yanks at his zipper and starts to push his jeans down over his hips.
“Wasn't planning on fucking you on the chair,” he smirks, and pushes her backwards onto the glossy wood, hooking his fingers into the top of her panties to remove underwear and outerwear in one quick pull.
“Lo ... Howlett,” she breathes, and it's the first time her mouth has been kind to the name he was born with. Doesn't sound right, though. It doesn't fit the need that's possessing him, or the new awareness filtering in around the edges of this lust.
It's not Howlett who's been in love with her all these years.
He slides his hands up her body, rediscovering half a dozen secret places on his way to framing her face in his hands.
“That who you want, darlin'?” he asks, and she shakes her head wordlessly, and feathers a kiss over his knuckles, right where the blades spring out. He groans and drags their bodies together, the tip of his cock burrowing in between her legs to nestle into her damp folds. She bucks, driving him a little deeper, but not deep enough. Still not quite together.
“Who, darlin? Tell me!” he growls, and she throws it at him, sorrow and loss and need and want tangled together into one long string of sound. His name, over and over.
“Logan. Logan. LoganLoganLogan,” she chants, locking her ankles behind his back and chaining her arms around his neck to make him push into her, to bow his back and sink home in one long, sure slide. The hot, wet clasp of her claims his every neuron, forcing his eyes shut for a long moment until he succumbs to an urgent need to see her face.
They are writing a treaty with their bodies. Making promises. He doesn't know if he can keep them, but he wants to try. He wants nothing more than the feel of her around him – in his soul, in his heart, in his shabby excuse for a life.
Maybe he can trade his for hers, he thinks. Become an X-man. Fight the good fight. Could it be so hard? The cynical part of him scoffs at the idea, but there's too much joy in him to entertain the curmudgeon for long. It vanishes with the press of her around him, with the slam and the slide home, with the knife-edge tension that will never let them be just friends, or even enemies.
They fuck slowly at first, savouring each other, scents and sounds and slippery need building between them until she scrambles backwards to turn over and present him with her ass. She looks over her shoulder in entreaty, and he knows she needs the Wolverine's fury. He's more than willing to give it her, but the look in her eyes is so wild, his claws spring to attention.
He tries to retract them, but his straining muscles are beyond cooperation. Her name rips from his throat in a howl of frustration, but she has impaled herself on him already, slamming backwards to force him deep. She's already rising on him again when the plea comes, she needs more, she needs it harder, and his fingers itch for her, but he can't …
“Invulnerable skin!” she pants. “Please, Logan!” and he takes her at her word, praying she's right. He suspects she is, because any other woman would have bruises by now, the way he's gripping at her hips. Adamantium scrapes across her ribcage, then bounces off her shoulder, but there's no bloody death today, merely fine pink lines that fade within seconds.
Once he would have taken it as proof that she was made for him, he thinks wildly as his balls tighten and his body starts to shake.
Now he just takes it as her gift, and is thankful.
He clings to the thought as she shudders around him, keening with the intensity of her orgasm, undulating up into his hands and grinding herself onto him as he strokes her through it, nudging at her clit with his thumb to trigger a second round of shallow explosions, then fucking her fast and hard to throw her back into bliss a final time.
She's crying by the time he curls himself over her, body spending in long, hot shudders. Her tears fall onto adamantium as he cradles her to him, wrapping her tight in his arms, sending up a prayer of thanks that she still feels able to do this with him.
“Marie. My Marie,” he croons, and in this moment, it's true. In this moment, it's everything, he thinks desperately, but James Howlett is waiting to tell him otherwise.
Immortal freak. One day you'll watch her die, his fears scream. You are the Wolverine. Time is not your friend. This moment means nothing next to all of the others.
So maybe it's time I learn to make it something, Logan vows, and gathers her closer.
*
They bury Jean Grey next to Professor Xavier. Her headstone is stark and simple, as restrained as the ceremony itself. No gushing tributes, no wise words, nothing except her name, and the dates of her birth, and death.
It's not right, Marie finds herself thinking as the coffin is lowered into the lawn. She was as much a part of this place as Xavier. The very first X-man she had met, in fact, if not the most welcoming. She and Jean had never connected, but the others – Storm, Kitty, even Jubilee - had loved her before they feared her. Scott had loved her to the end.
She can't ask Scott to speak. He is barely capable of standing, his eyes glazed with disbelief, refusing to look at anyone. She would ask Storm, but the goddess had seemed almost indifferent when informed of Jean's death. “How very Jean,” she had shrugged, then walked away, leaving Marie to goggle in shock.
It had to be Hank, of course. He could always be depended upon for some wisdom, if only she could catch his eye … it's Logan, though, who sees her. Logan who is watching her the same way she is trying not to watch him.
Logan who rises to his feet and clears his throat.
“I didn't know Jean Grey very well. Or at all, really,” he admits. “But she said something to me a few nights back that I think needs to be remembered.”
“I thought she was raving at first, but it turns out, it was something from Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, apparently.
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
“See, Antony is regretting what they've done to Caesar, not just the personal betrayal, but the fact that it's going to bring war on Rome. He thought he was doing the right thing, but it turned out to be far worse than the alternative. And now, he's got no choice but to deal with the shitstorm.”
“So Dr Grey's telling me this, and I'm thinking – what? Why are you quoting Shakespeare, woman? - and then she just looks at me, and says the most useful thing I've ever heard.”
“Let them go, she told me. If we spend all our time fighting those demons, it'll eat us alive. Sometimes, you've just got to let them go. Let sleeping dogs lie. Let the past stay in the past. Draw a line. Move forward.”
Logan kicked at the ground a little, then lifted his head to address his remarks to Scott and Storm.
“So I guess that's what I'm trying to say. We've all got our demons. You can make peace with them, or you can let 'em tear you apart.”
“This was her way of making peace. Let's respect that.”
Marie tried to push down the astonishment she was feeling – who knew that Logan did speeches – and concentrate on the impact of his words on her colleagues.
Kitty and Jubilee were sobbing openly, now, and Scott had sagged against Storm, who struggled to hold his weight. Gambit shot forward to help her, and in that moment of gratitude, her grief and shock peeped through for the first time.
Storm isn't herself, Marie thinks worriedly. How do I help her? And later, she'll realise that's why she hadn't given her full attention to what Logan was saying.
Because they had been reunited, and she needed him, and it was time – surely it was their time now?
*
He needs to take his own advice.
He needs to make his own peace.
His animal is howling for Marie, and it's not that he doesn't want to bury himself in her sweetness. He could pass entire days in her bed, months and years, and never grow tired of the taste of her, the way she smells or the way he finds himself smiling for no reason at all when he's with her. He could lose himself in that.
That's the problem, he realises. Marie doesn't deserve that. It would only ever be temporary.
Join the team, and he'd be right for a while. Take the job, get a life. Win the girl.
Whose life, though? And for how long?
Logan lets himself sink back down onto the bed, the luxury all around him feeling foreign and unfriendly. Even in the wee hours of the morning there's a distracting buzz to the place; even with just a handful of people in residence, the concentration of sounds and smells in the Mansion is inescapable.
He's not made to live cheek by jowl with other people. It's not the life he wants for himself. He doesn't know what he wants yet - doesn't even know what he's gonna call himself, or who he wants to be.
But he knows where he needs to be to figure it out. And it's not here. Not yet.
She's found her life. Now it's time to find his.
*
Marie finds the report on her desk. On top is a single page with just a few typed sentences, and his signature scrawled beneath. She spends precious moments wondering about his choice of name – James 'Logan' Howlett – before it dawns on her. It's a letter of resignation.
She finds him out by their tree, head back against the newly-scored trunk.
“Let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Yeah. Figured Doc Grey needed a proper epitaph.”
“And us? Is that our epitaph too, Logan?”
He tilts his head back to look up at her, and the warmth and love in those sherry-brown eyes makes her gasp.
“No, darlin'. It's a fucking promise.”
She doesn't understand. All she knows is that he's running – again – and she's supposed to be happy about it? Really?
“I'm not an X-man. I'm in no shape for it – up here, I mean,” he says, tapping the side of his head.
“There's just too much … too many memories. Too many bad things. And I look at you, and it hurts.”
He catches her squeak of distress and moves to get up. If he touches her, they'll never get to the bottom of this, so she waves him away. He grimaces and then does the least Logan-like thing possible. He explains.
“I spent so much time hatin' myself for wantin' you, girl. The things we did, things I made you do – they weren't right. But they made you who you are now, and you're fuckin' magnificent, so I just don't know ...” his words dry up, and he looks up into the canopy of the tree, searching for understanding.
“Maybe we are right, but it just wasn't the time. Maybe I was wrong, but we were right. Maybe you weren't right then, but now – you're the person you need to be,” he says, and she can hear the pain and confusion in his voice. And love. She can hear the love.
She relents to drop down next to him, her head pillowed on his chest. His hands immediately move to her hair, fingers sliding through the waves, tugging here and there as he encounters a snarl, mental or physical. She can tell he has more to say, and when she turns to look him in the face, his eyes are sad.
“I need time. Some distance. And you've got a lot on your plate here. But maybe, by September or October ….”
Before the pass became blocked completely with snow. Early in the winter, when you could still get in and out by skidoo. Before the long months of darkness, when the difference between death and bliss was a well-stocked larder, a huge pile of firewood, and a bed piled high with blankets.
“I never did master that last kata, did I?” she says ruefully, eyes misty with the memory for a moment. But things would be different, if she returned to that cabin. Too much had changed for them to step back into the past. “I don't need a teacher, Logan.”
“No. But I think I do,” he admits, and she can see the vulnerability rubbing him raw. “Lot I could learn from you, kid.”
His chest swells underneath her as they teeter on the edge of something extraordinary. Soft, whole things that her lover has never allowed himself to consider before. Forgiveness. Redemption. Something that might even pass as normality.
“I'm needed here,” she says, and his nostrils flare, weighing the yearning in her scent against the finality of her tone.
He gets it now, though. She needs to stay. He needs to go. She hates it, but that doesn't mean she can't accept it.
“This isn't over.”
“I know, darlin'. We never were. Don't think we ever will be,” he says, and the look on his face tells her he's thinking of that first time, and all the times in between.
Soon, she wants to promise. Soon we'll make some better memories.
But she's got a job to do first.
Six months later ...
Rogue dragged in a breath, let out another, and raised her face to the sun. She sighed with pleasure as she let the warmth wash over her, and thought of long Canadian winters, in a small cabin, with a open fireplace and a punching bag. But just one bed.
Just two more weeks, and they'd take her as far as Juneau in the jet, and she'd overland it from there. She'd cleared it with Gil already - he'd run the place for however long she needed to be gone, and Jubes was gonna rock it as his deputy. Gambit had agreed to cover her combat classes, and she'd already handed civics over to Hank. There was the orientation process still to think about, and she really needed to see about the new uniforms before she left, but ...
Everything else could wait for the spring.
fin
Disclaimer: This fanfiction was written for personal enjoyment rather than profit. No infringement on the rights of the intellectual property owners is intended.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Done. Done. Done. Done. Done! A million thanks to Bancainte who is probably the only reason I can do that little happy dance. She poked and prodded and corrected my tenses and questioned my characterisation and genuinely loved this story so much I wasn't about to disappoint her. Thanks also to all the wonderful people who have left me comments to tell me what they think ... you make it so much more fun to hand over your sanity to a fictional couple.