Marie added a sandwich and a bottle of water to the backpack and slung it over her shoulder. She hesitated for a moment, fingers running absently over the cuff on her wrist, before she stepped resolutely out the cabin’s door. She refused to let this man, whoever he was, affect her behavior.
Still, she felt uncomfortable the whole way to the lake, a prickling sensation tickling the back of her neck as if she were being watched. Just your imagination, she told herself with irritation. If you could actually sense being watched wouldn’t you would have felt it before now, when the man actually was watching you? she scolded herself.
She laid out her towel and pulled off her shorts and shirt, kicking out of her socks and boots. Jubilee had talked her into buying this bikini. “It’s your color, chica!” she had screeched as soon as she saw it hanging on the rack. Now Marie felt unbearably exposed, intensely conscious of every inch of skin not covered by the skimpy dark green fabric. She suddenly wished she were back in the scuba suit she had to wear to swim at the mansion.
She clenched her fists in frustration, forcing herself to lie down on her stomach, trying to relax. Awareness of her skin was exactly what she was trying to suppress. She’d be damned if she’d let this man undo all of her progress.
She let the late afternoon sun warm her skin, and finally managed to relax. She ate her sandwich, and read a little. She actually had found a book in the cabin’s library of the poems of Robert Frost, and she was enjoying them. She started to feel a little drowsy even, and sat up to drink more of her water. She wasn’t ready to be quite that off guard. Finally she figured she was warm enough and waded into the lake, shivering at the feeling of weeds wrapping around her ankles until she was deep enough to swim.
The cool water felt amazing against her bare skin, and she no longer regretted being free of that stifling scuba suit. She floated on her back, enjoying the sensation of her skin warming and cooling as clouds passed across the sun. Finally, as dusk approached, she dunked herself one more time and made her way back to the shore.
She was focused on untangling the weeds from her ankles, scrambling onto the shore and pulling the last slimy strands off of her feet. She looked up, and her chest suddenly seized with fear.
A giant cat was a bare few feet away from her, crouching silently, its tail switching back and forth. Mountain lion, some part of her head automatically categorized. It was about four feet tall, massive clawed paws clenched against the scrubby grass as if ready to pounce.
She pushed through her frozen shock, lifting a hand slowly. Fear made her borrowed abilities clumsy, however, and the metal cuff snapped into her raised hand with a suddenness she didn’t intend.
The cat sprang. She saw a blur of movement and the next thing she knew she was flat on the ground, her breath knocked from her. She struggled up to one elbow and saw with horror the deep gashes running across her inner thigh, layers of skin and fat gaping open, exposing the reddish-purple muscle. The pain came shortly after, a blaze of burning agony. She watched as dark red rivers of blood welled up, running out to soak the ground beneath her in a widening pool. So fast.
She managed to raise her eyes to where the cat prowled back and forth, watching her. It screamed, an eerie sound like a woman screaming, and she had the wild thought that the animal was making the sound that she herself was biting back behind her gritted teeth.
She heard a rustle and then saw another blur of motion as a large, heavy shape burst from the trees, hitting the cat straight on, both of them falling to the ground in a tumble. Marie felt hardly able to process this new shock. She looked away from the tumbling shapes, her eyes fixing on her towel. Whimpering in pain she managed to drag herself closer, grabbing the edge of the towel and pressing it to her wounds. She almost screamed again at the spike in pain from the pressure of her hands. The towel darkened almost immediately with blood, hardly seeming to stop the flow at all. Femoral artery, that same distant part of her mind supplied helpfully. She was as good as dead.
She managed to look up at the fight taking place only a few yards away. Another shock, as she realized the other shape was not another animal but a man -- the man, in fact. He was on his hands and knees, the cat swiping viciously at his bare chest, raking it with its claws. She caught a glimpse of something metal and then he was rearing up with a roar, his hands buried deep in the cat’s furry chest and belly as he seemed to lift it several feet up in the air.
The cat fell to the ground in a heap, dead, sliding slowly from his hands. Marie blinked. No, not from his hands, from his knives. She saw the fading sunlight glint off six long metal blades and then with a twitch of his hands they were gone. Where did they go?
The man moved toward her. She suddenly realized what he intended, her stunned gaze fixing on his bare, blood-covered chest as he came closer.
“Stop,” she gasped. “Don’t touch me!”
She saw him hesitate for the barest moment, his eyes narrowing, his mouth twisting bitterly. He thinks I’m afraid of him, she realized, the irony of it spinning through her hazy brain. And then he was lifting her, one arm under her knees, the other across her back.
“No,” she tried to protest, pushing weakly at his bare chest, absently noting that although she thought she had seen him get clawed he was bloody but unscratched. Her breath was coming in shuddering gasps. Hypovolemia, she thought, an echo of the field medic training Hank had given to them all. She was suffocating -- not from lack of oxygen, but from lack of the blood to transport it. She was already dying, and now she would kill him...
She felt for a moment the unaccustomed warmth of his skin pressed to hers everywhere -- the length of her thigh, across her back -- and then he was rushing into her, a riot of feeling and images more intense than she had ever experienced.
He howled in agony -- or did she? -- and then they were both falling, hitting the ground hard as she struggled against the overwhelming wave of emotion.
Build a wall, build a wall, build a wall...
She was barely aware of her own body, scrambling back through the dirt and grass, ending the contact with his skin. All of her attention was focused inwards, trying to contain him, struggling mightily against the force of his personality.
He was all bright images and scents and sounds, and emotion deeper and stronger than any she had ever felt. She pushed against it, throwing up barrier after barrier, trying to contain it all. The fear and the rage and the loneliness, a swirl of nightmarish images that she didn’t dare look at, and then a blazing spot of brightness that was...thoughts of her, she realized with shock.
She blocked herself off from all of it, building the barrier higher and stronger, until finally she pushed the last of him inside it and opened her eyes, herself again.
The world seemed to come into focus slowly. As the blur of light and shadow resolved itself into shapes, she realized she was looking at the body of the man, sprawled on the ground.
“Oh my god,” she heard her numb voice say as if from a distance.
She shuffled closer to him on her knees. “Please be okay,” she gasped through sobs. “Please.”
The claws of the mountain lion had left deep gashes across his chest. But hadn’t she seen his massive chest, unmarked beneath her palm only moments before? She reached out toward him and then realized she couldn’t touch him -- her hands and arms were completely bare. She pulled her hands back, resting clenched fists against her thighs.
Her thighs. She looked down at where her mortal wound had been. She felt a buzzing in her head, the world tilting dizzily as she saw the muscle and skin knitting itself together, closing up from the edges of the wounds toward the middle until only three streaks of red remained, slowly fading to pink.
She looked at the man again, and like the last piece of a puzzle falling into place a few of the scattered images she had picked up while containing his personality finally made sense. Healing. He heals. He healed me.
As she thought it the man’s eyelids fluttered and then lifted, his wary golden-hazel gaze snapping to hers.
“I’m sorry,” she managed weakly. “I’m so...”
He scrabbled away from her, pushing himself up into a crouch. With a hissing metal sound, six long blades popped out of his hands. She looked at them, stunned. They came from his hands, from his arms, from inside him. That must hurt like hell, she thought dazedly.
Her eyes shifted to his chest, where his own gashes were now healing just as hers had. “I’m -- I can’t control it. My skin. I didn’t mean to...”
Without realizing it she held up a hand imploringly and he growled. She froze in place. She saw his eyes move down to her thigh, saw the surprise and suspicion on his face as he saw her healed wounds.
“I didn’t...”
He growled again, and her words stuttered to a halt.
She watched, unsure what else to do, as he backed away from her. She pulled her hands into her body, feeling stupid senseless tears welling up again.
The man reached down, lifting the body of the mountain lion. It must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, but he slung it over his shoulder as if it were nothing. Then he turned and disappeared back into the forest.
Marie looked around her. The lake was still and silent. Only the pool of blood soaking into the dry dirt and her bloody towel remained as testament to what had happened.
She looked down at her bloody hands, unsurprised to see them shaking.
“Holy fuckin’ hell,” she said to herself.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Chapter End Notes:
Please review! :-D